Chapter 57: Those Who Live Under Shadow Can Still Fear the Dark

The lamp on the wall gave out. When I lit it, it sputtered, and often it would make a sound that grew in agitation till it seemed the bulb would explode. So I'm not surprised it died, rather that it lasted as long as it did. I can see the tablet on which I'm writing with my dark adaptation, a term I've settled on for my ability to see in lightless environs (though at times true sight seems more ideal). I was surprised to learn from Qatar that luciens cannot see in the dark, at least not better than other kindreds. They emit light, they do not draw it in. I will write the final stretch of this onerous portion of my life in this dark room. The device I write with is luminous, but painfully bright to view in the dark for long. The Painted Lady simply called it the Stylus. I will write here in the dark for as long as I can, and then leave this comforting place to face the sonder awaiting me in the many rooms where there once was life and cheer.

The attack happened thus: Blitzkrieg needed to believe the Cataphracts were still on their own, and that he had nothing to fear from Regis, that Turk relied solely on the intelligence provided by the two traitors and the forces he brought to bear would be ultimately inferior, and that we were throwing ourselves at the Devils in a last act of desperation. Turk had done so enough times that it would be plausible, and his most recent hail mary proved to be troublesome, and with my presence, along with information Patches and Abdiel were privy to, there was cause for Blitzkrieg to be concerned, yet not overly so. So we were to drive them to the surface, where the Angels would descend upon them, along with others who rallied to their banner, and the Devils would be purged by the combined fury of Heaven and Earth. Under no circumstances were any of us to enter Pandemonium. Blitzkrieg's roving fortress was a deathtrap for the mind and spirit as much as the body, and was to be destroyed from outside. Of all things, that was paramount.

While the strategy was formed, Tyriel, one of Regis's finest warriors, led a few lesser angels to destroy any scrying eyes that may have hovered in the midsky haze. Tomorrow Gives Her Hope helped me secure a pair of binoculars from a tyfloch quartermaster and we watched their dance. We shouted when we saw them find an observer and rip it to shreds. The quartermaster joined us, and the urge struck me to know how this tyfloch viewed Abdiel.

"He can fly without harm, but he doesn't, so many hate him. But I think he is trying to show us how to avoid the rot."

I nodded, and told the quartermaster my theory, that Abdiel did not wish to lord over the other tyflochs that he could do what they could not. It was a mystery, to be sure, how he had avoided the rot. I would ask him one day, and he would tell me that he did not, at least, he did not avoid the rot any more than I avoided death.

We rode into the maw where the Dolomites once reigned. When standing on its rim, I had thought of the hole as nothing more, but when traversing its depths I began to marvel at Pandemonium, for the tunnel it left, though vast, wound and wove in many tight turns, some even hairpin, and where Northwind's lanterns shone (I kindled them for the benefit of others) the ground was gouged in tremendous spirals. It seemed we were on the trail of many worms.

A contingent of metatherians came with us. They were of that simian tribe most hounded by surface folk, whom Turk showed deference to, and would be a boon in the strange topography we faced. They rode on mechanized caterpillars the size of many elephants, and it comforted me to have a hundred soldiers of such size with us. Giants of either tribe were always formidable, especially armored as these were, and while the simians are smaller than human-likes, their heightened agility makes them terrible in a fight. Most importantly, an alliance with them was likely, and would not be seen as suspicious, rather it served to give our attack more weight, as even the Devils would not relish the idea of a troop of armored giants breaching their hull.

There was an oppressiveness to Pandemonium's wake that could not get accustomed to. There seemed to be a fog in the tunnels, and with my special sight I observed that it manifested there more potently, in the spectrums that most cannot see. I called out to one of my fellows, a follower of Saxon's, who flew his pegasus into a natural tunnel instead of the one we were meant to traverse. A caterpillar diverted, and while the pegasus was lost, the rider was saved, as I saw him clinging to a giant's back when they came out a hole in the rock they blasted with their own weapons. Another of ours took a sharp turn when there was no need and both horse and rider were smashed against the tunnel wall. When looking away from the wreck I saw a wall coming straight toward me and fought the reflex to turn, for I could see that the wall was transparent, an image.

I spurred Northwind forward and came to Patches's flank. His pegasus was large enough to fit three normal men, and its thick barding weighed it down even further, so I was able to catch up to him with ease.

"You're out of formation," came Qatar's voice over the comms. She was close behind, where I should have been. I leaned to the left and came close to Patches, looking through my windscreen and his. He smiled and waved, then made a gesture like he was observing a timepiece, and when his hand had counted down from three a wave of energy came from his pegasus. There was an antenna array on his mount which I wondered about, especially since the saddle had to be adjusted from a form to sit three smaller riders and replaced with a single, large one for him. It seemed he chose his horse for other reasons, as the array disabled the hallucinatory effect of the tunnel.

"It takes time," he told me.

"We lost a man," I replied.

"Could have lost more," Abdiel chimed in.

"We were not briefed," I argued.

"My people use many traps. We couldn't know which one they'd be using, I can only be ready to disable them once they're discovered."

"Quiet!" shouted Goth.

It was my fault for disturbing the silence, and I was careful not to do so again. Several times a captain spoke, but softly and in a practiced code, and we avoided many pitfalls and other traps, though eventually another was lost. I worried that our numbers might dwindle too low by the time we closed with the roving city. So I did what I could, and saved the life within my power, my own, or rather, my horse's, as mine was already lost long ago. A thing no outsider could understand, and a thing that we who know are tightly knit by, is that to be a Boy of the Batch is to be quite literally born into a grave. So death holds no terrors for me, but I did and still do fear the passage of time, as I am constantly impelled by an ongoing reveille deep beneath hearing, but very close to knowing, and the thought of being slain is intolerable because a sufficient mangling has always caused me an indeterminable delay, and I am in a constant race against the choking of all things in the skybound brambles that have grown thick in these modern days.

I saw the brambles when their roots first clustered among our clouds. The term billowing describes the first thing I saw, the thing my mother refused to acknowledge, prattling on about Cassandra and her new bathing suit, and how I'd loved her since I was fourteen, and how she came all the way to Thirty-Third Day just to see me, and how she clearly wanted me to see her, and that this was my one chance to be with her, and all I could think of was the dark army riding across the sky, and I couldn't bring myself to look away, to the shore, where Cassandra stood on the small pier outside our beach house, standing over the corsair's approach, a shifting thing that warned me with her worried stare, a dying woman who, like me, was born into a grave, waiting for a consuming sickness to outrun the leeches, hoping to catch a sweet breath before she choked on poison, but not feeling worthy, and running just a little faster than the swarm, we slowed our mounts after the pulse from Hyperion's array took the life from Pandemonium's latest leavings. We'd been riding for hours, and both mount and rider were growing tired. Turk called us to a halt and we made a camp in that terrible place.

I sat among those who I had not offended. Tomorrow Gives Her hope was there, with several other tarrasquin. Tall Mountains Call, an old man who rarely looked one in the eye, but stared intently in the direction we were heading, sat by me around our pile of dim torches. The glow was white, soft, deluded by a low turned dial, and more than their feeble light, I cleaved to the warmth of their steel handles. Bloodytooth was a young brute of conspicuous size. He sat farthest, in a sort of binary aphelion between us and another fire, and there were two scrappy young girls who'd had their wombs removed by the good doctor. They were drawn to me when Tomorrow Gives Her Hope told them I had put the good doctor to rest.

"He needed to die," said Lost Among The Reeds, the younger of the two. She was more serpentine than Bloodytooth and Tall Mountains Call, and even more than Tomorrow Gives Her Hope. Seeing their two sexes in close proximity for the first time, I assumed that saurian women retained more of the pollywog shape of their youth.

"I'm happy to have obliged," I said. "How do you receive your names? Are they given at birth? They seem to say something about you."

You are reading story Erebus at novel35.com

"We have three names," said Tall Mountains Call. "Our first is given at birth, and we keep it forever, though it stops being used when we begin to walk on two legs. Then we're given our childhood name, which is forgotten when we first shed our skin. Then we are who we are, and named accordingly by those who we are with at the time."

"So you parents might not be the ones to give you your final name?" I was wondering who had named me Victor.

"Our parents are always with us," said What the Sand Is Hiding, the older of the two girls, who were sisters. "We shed our first skin alone, as it is embarrassing to us the first time, like when human girls have their moon."

"So you choose your own name, but you ask yourself what others might have named you?"

Tall Mountains Call nodded thoughtfully. "That's a fair assessment. My son, Omen Brought, came to me and said 'Father, when my skin was shed, I saw the strong muscles in my limbs for the first time and knew instantly that I was born to be a fighter, and that I will die fighting. You always remind me that you warn me of things, and that fighting will bring me trouble, so I heard your voice when I chose my name'."

"Can I tell you an incredible thing?" I asked Tall Mountains Call.

"I imagine most things you have to say are incredible, being a traveler between worlds."

"I knew your son."

He turned and looked at me then, asking me how with his moistening eyes. He was a tall, guant, grizzled man, like many are by such a venerable age, as Tarthas is not kind to those who refuse to succumb to the ticking of its pendulum. But hard as he was, I could see him softening at the promise of a tale of his precious boy.

"I only had him. His mother died before she could lay any more, and I ran with him in my arms."

"Who took your family from you?" I was horrified, "Was it some beast? A nimravus?"

"The doctor's men," he replied.

"It good he dead," said Tomorrow Gives Her Hope. The others nodded.

"My boy," said Tall Mountains Call.

"I lived among the Dolomites as a child. They employed a company of your kindred to patrol their borders. The Dolomites were very old, and were losing their wits. When they had all but gone completely mad, the mercenaries they employed turned on them, using cloaking collars to hide themselves when they attacked. A small number of them remained loyal to their commission and helped us escape. Your son was their leader. He died bravely. May I ask how you came to know of his death?"

"I tracked him down." I then understood his name. "That's how I encountered Turk. He was investigating a possible Devil attack. They were poisoning the surface back then, any way they could."

It made sense, as I had always wondered at the death I saw that day. Forgive me for telling you so little of my childhood; I will likely add a prologue to the beginning of this to detail those things, as this composition is healing me in ways I could not anticipate, but for now I'll say that I saw the extinction of a noble species while I fled from the sanctum, and had always thought its death strange, as it had somehow gathered nearly half its weight in the most voracious parasites our world can boast, many of them rare and never seen again in our lands. I was not shocked by the thought that the Devils may have kept those parasites in cages, or even bred them in the first place, and lured the poor transcendent bovine to them, using it as a vehicle to distribute the worst of nature's demons. Sometimes, though rarely, I think of that animal and its slow, agonizing death, which I played a part in expediting, and I think of Tarthus, and how I wish to hasten its demise as well.

Our pursuit went on for days, and did much to unify us as an army. Twice I used my dark adaptation, or even my curse of resilience, to save wayward soldiers from being lost or killed, and even Goth began to warm up to me. The thieves earned my respect on numerous occasions, refusing to turn back and going through great lengths to help our stragglers, and they had engineers who helped us suss out a number of Pandemonium's traps. One Lucca Ishtaer, a lean, tough old woman with an anachronistic youthful gleam in her eye, even manufactured on the spot counter measures for the holographic walls and magnetic swarms. Qatar ordered us to ride close to her squadron, as my truesight (what I will call my dark adaptation from here on, for I saw things by that gift with their coatings peeled away and so learned much of the hidden fabric of being) proved invaluable to her, in both detecting and understanding the various traps and how to pass them by unscathed. Goth frequently called on me to scout, when I wasn't assisting Lucca or recovering strays, and I found myself on a difficult outriding with Goth, Zulu, Abdiel and Turk, and felt the love of brothers, or at least a sub-satisfying portrayal of it.

As we neared Pandemonium, the air became severely hot, and we were forced to hug the walls, which too were hot, but only if touched. I was constantly disturbed by the ribbed texture of the tunnel walls, as I could see that the gouges made by the worm-city's passing were not only large, but many were alarmingly small, as if the city's walls were made of every size and shape of hook or claw. I pictured a long, undulant mass of long-nailed fingers groping its way through the earth, scooping what it could into a deformed mouth and excreting a miasma of deathtraps. Soon those ribbed gouges began to glow. Not the orange glow of heat, but the white glow of superheat, beaming eerily in luminous trophs in the grey rock surrounding us, so that I felt as if someone had mechanized a hollowed out bone and expanded it to monumental size, to be used as an intravenous tube by which we entered our enemy's body like a viral strain.

Our last push was the most difficult, as when we stopped to rest, we were unable to dismount due to the stench of Pandemonium's exhaust. So we halted around the edges and dozed in silence, waiting with growing anxiety for the final call to arms. When it came, my eyes opened, and as if they were acting on their own, my hands shook the reins and I leaned forward in the stirrups. Northwind reared as we rose, and though I did not hesitate even an instant, dozens had risen before me. The caterpillars surprised me by scaling the walls, finding purchase in the gouges despite their heat. So we sallied forth, a torrent of rage at the abuse of tormentors who refused to accept their masters' defeat. We rode hard, and we howled under our windscreens, keeping the comms clear, letting our own echoes stand in for the chorus of our fellows. But each howl grew fainter; as the roving fortress grew closer, the lights along the ribbed walls grew dim, until there was no sight at all, not even within our windscreens. Pandemonium had saved its most devastating trap for last, and it was one that none of us knew of. It blinded us. I alone could see, and even my truesight was struggling through murk, showing me only a pinpoint of white light that grew in the dark, and I watched with horror as the same parasites that brought down the last of the archons were now swarming toward us

You can find story with these keywords: Erebus, Read Erebus, Erebus novel, Erebus book, Erebus story, Erebus full, Erebus Latest Chapter