Nightwings Read online

  “Roum,” she gasped. “Roum!”

  “You saw it?”

  “Everything! Thousands of people! Lights! Boulevards! A market! Broken buildings many cycles old! Oh, Watcher, how wonderful Roum is!”

  “Your flight was a good one, then,” I said.

  “A miracle!”

  “Tomorrow we go to dwell in Roum.”

  “No, Watcher, tonight, tonight!” She was girlishly eager, her face bright with excitement. “It’s just a short journey more! Look, it’s just over there!”

  “We should rest first,” I said. “We would not want to arrive weary in Roum.”

  “We can rest when we get there,” Avluela answered. “Come! Pack everything! You’ve done your Watching, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Then let’s go. To Roum! To Roum!”

  I looked in appeal at Gormon. Night had come; it was time to make camp, to have our few hours of sleep.

  For once Gormon sided with me. He said to Avluela, “The Watcher’s right. We can all use some rest. We’ll go on into Roum at dawn.”

  Avluela pouted. She looked more like a child than ever. Her wings drooped; her underdeveloped body slumped. Petulantly she closed her wings until they were mere fist-sized humps on her back, and picked up the garments she had scattered on the road. She dressed while we made camp. I distributed food tablets; we entered our receptacles; I fell into troubled sleep and dreamed of Avluela limned against the crumbling moon, and Gormon flying beside her. Two hours before dawn I arose and performed my first Watch of the new day, while they still slept. Then I aroused them, and we went onward toward the fabled imperial city, onward toward Roum.

  2

  THE morning’s light was bright and harsh, as though this were some young world newly created. The road was all but empty; people do not travel much in these latter days unless, like me, they are wanderers by habit and profession. Occasionally we stepped aside to let a chariot of some member of the guild of Masters go by, drawn by a dozen expressionless neuters harnessed in series. Four such vehicles went by in the first two hours of the day, each shuttered and sealed to hide the Master’s proud features from the gaze of such common folk as we. Several rollerwagons laden with produce passed us, and a number of floaters soared overhead. Generally we had the road to ourselves, however.

  The environs of Roum showed vestiges of antiquity: isolated columns, the fragments of an aqueduct transporting nothing from nowhere to nowhere, the portals of a vanished temple. That was the oldest Roum we saw, but there were accretions of the later Roums of subsequent cycles: the huts of peasants, the domes of power drains, the hulls of dwelling-towers. Infrequently we met with the burned-out shell of some ancient airship. Gormon examined everything, taking samples from time to time. Avluela looked, wide-eyed, saying nothing. We walked on, until the walls of the city loomed before us.

  They were of a blue glossy stone, neatly joined, rising to a height of perhaps eight men. Our road pierced the wall through a corbeled arch; the gate stood open. As we approached the gate, a figure came toward us; he was hooded, masked, a man of extraordinary height wearing the somber garb of the guild of Pilgrims. One does not approach such a person oneself, but one heeds him if he beckons. The Pilgrim beckoned.

  Through his speaking grille he said, “Where from?”

  “The south. I lived in Agupt awhile, then crossed Land Bridge to Talya,” I replied.

  “Where bound?”

  “Roum, awhile.”

  “How goes the Watch?”

  “As customary.”

  “You have a place to stay in Roum?” the Pilgrim asked.

  I shook my head. “We trust to the kindness of the Will.”

  “The Will is not always kind,” said the Pilgrim absently. “Nor is there much need of Watchers in Roum. Why do you travel with a Flier?”

  “For company’s sake. And because she is young and needs protection.”

  “Who is the other one?”

  “He is guildless, a Changeling.”

  “So I can see. But why is he with you?”

  “He is strong and I am old, and so we travel together. Where are you bound, Pilgrim?”

  “Jorslem. Is there another destination for my guild?”

  I conceded the point with a shrug.

  The Pilgrim said, “Why do you not come to Jorslem with me?”

  “My road lies north now. Jorslem is in the south, close by Agupt.”

  “You have been to Agupt and not to Jorslem?” he said, puzzled.

  “Yes. The time was not ready for me to see Jorslem.”

  “Come now. We will walk together on the road, Watcher, and we will talk of the old times and of the times to come, and I will assist you in your Watching, and you will assist me in my communions with the Will. Is it agreed?”

  It was a temptation. Before my eyes flashed the image of Jorslem the Golden, its holy buildings and shrines, its places of renewal where the old are made young, its spires, its tabernacles. Even though I am a man set in his ways, I was willing at the moment to abandon Roum and go with the Pilgrim to Jorslem.

  I said, “And my companions—”

  “Leave them. It is forbidden for me to travel with the guildless, and I do not wish to travel with a female. You and I, Watcher, will go to Jorslem together.”

  Avluela, who had been standing to one side frowning through all this colloquy, shot me a look of sudden terror.

  “I will not abandon them,” I said.

  “Then I go to Jorslem alone,” said the Pilgrim. Out of his robe stretched a bony hand, the fingers long and white and steady. I touched my fingers reverently to the tips of his, and the Pilgrim said, “Let the Will give you mercy, friend Watcher. And when you reach Jorslem, search for me.”

  He moved on down the road without further conversation.

  Gormon said to me, “You would have gone with him, wouldn’t you?”

  “I considered it.”

  “What could you find in Jorslem that isn’t here? That’s a holy city and so is this. Here you can rest awhile. You’re in no shape for more walking now.”

  “You may be right,” I conceded, and with the last of my energy I strode toward the gate of Roum.

  Watchful eyes scanned us from slots in the wall. When we were at midpoint in the gate, a fat, pockmarked Sentinel with sagging jowls halted us and asked our business in Roum. I stated my guild and purpose, and he gave a snort of disgust.

  “Go elsewhere, Watcher! We need only useful men here.”

  “Watching has its uses,” I said mildly.

  “No doubt. No doubt.” He squinted at Avluela. “Who’s this? Watchers are celibates, no?”

  “She is nothing more than a traveling companion.”

  The Sentinel guffawed coarsely. “It’s a route you travel often, I wager! Not that there’s much to her. What is she, thirteen, fourteen? Come here, child. Let me check you for contraband.” He ran his hands quickly over her, scowling as he felt her breasts, then raising an eyebrow as he encountered the mounds of her wings below her shoulders. “What’s this? What’s this? More in back than in front! A Flier, are you? Very dirty business, Fliers consorting with foul old Watchers.” He chuckled and put his hand on Avluela’s body in a way that sent Gormon starting forward in fury, murder in his fire-circled eyes. I caught him in time and grasped his wrist with all my strength, holding him back lest he ruin the three of us by an attack on the Sentinel. He tugged at me, nearly pulling me over; then he grew calm and subsided, icily watching as the fat one finished checking Avluela for “contraband.”

  At length the Sentinel turned in distaste to Gormon and said, “What kind of thing are you?”

  “Guildless, your mercy,” Gormon said in sharp tones. “The humble and worthless product of teratogenesis, and yet nevertheless a free man who desires entry to Roum.”

  “Do we need more monsters here?”

  “I eat little and work hard.”

  “You’d work harder still, if you were
neutered,” said the Sentinel.

  Gormon glowered. I said, “May we have entry?”

  “A moment.” The Sentinel donned his thinking cap and narrowed his eyes as he transmitted a message to the memory tanks. His face tensed with the effort; then it went slack, and moments later came the reply. We could not hear the transaction at all; but from his disappointed look, it appeared evident that no reason had been found to refuse us admission to Roum.

  “Go on in,” he said. “The three of you. Quickly!”

  We passed beyond the gate.

  Gormon said, “I could have split him open with a blow.”

  “And be neutered by nightfall. A little patience, and we’ve come into Roum.”

  “The way he handled her—!”

  “You take a very possessive attitude toward Avluela,” I said. “Remember that she’s a Flier, and not sexually available to the guildless.”

  Gormon ignored my thrust. “She arouses me no more than you do, Watcher. But it pains me to see her treated that way. I would have killed him if you hadn’t held me back.”

  Avluela said, “Where shall we stay, now that we’re in Roum?”

  “First let me find the headquarters of my guild,” I said. “I’ll register at the Watchers’ Inn. After that, perhaps we’ll hunt up the Fliers’ Lodge for a meal.”

  “And then,” said Gormon drily, “we’ll go to the Guildless Gutter and beg for coppers.”

  “I pity you because you are a Changeling,” I told him, “but I find it ungraceful of you to pity yourself. Come.”

  We walked up a cobbled, winding street away from the gate and into Roum itself. We were in the outer ring of the city, a residential section of low, squat houses topped by the unwieldy bulk of defense installations. Within lay the shining towers we had seen from the fields the night before; the remnant of ancient Roum carefully preserved across ten thousand years or more; the market, the factory zone, the communications hump, the temples of the Will, the memory tanks, the sleepers’ refuges, the outworlders’ brothels, the government buildings, the headquarters of the various guilds.

  At the corner, beside a Second Cycle building with walls of rubbery texture, I found a public thinking cap and slipped it on my forehead. At once my thoughts raced down the conduit until they came to the interface that gave them access to one of the storage brains of a memory tank. I pierced the interface and saw the wrinkled brain itself, pale gray against the deep green of its housing. A Rememberer once told me that, in cycles past, men built machines to do their thinking for them, although these machines were hellishly expensive and required vast amounts of space and drank power gluttonously. That was not the worst of our forefathers’ follies; but why build artificial brains when death each day liberates scores of splendid natural ones to hook into the memory tanks? Was it that they lacked the knowledge to use them? I find that hard to believe.

  I gave the brain my guild identification and asked the coordinates of our inn. Instantly I received them, and we set out, Avluela on one side of me, Gormon on the other, myself wheeling, as always, the cart in which my instruments resided.

  The city was crowded. I had not seen such throngs in sleepy, heat-fevered Agupt, nor at any other point on my northward journey. The streets were full of Pilgrims, secretive and masked. Jostling through them went busy Rememberers and glum Merchants and now and then the litter of a Master. Avluela saw a number of Fliers, but was barred by the tenets of her guild from greeting them until she had undergone her ritual purification. I regret to say that I spied many Watchers, all of whom looked upon me disdainfully and without welcome. I noted a good many Defenders and ample representation of such lesser guilds as Vendors, Servitors, Manufactories, Scribes, Communicants, and Transporters. Naturally, a host of neuters went silently about their humble business, and numerous outworlders of all descriptions flocked the streets, most of them probably tourists, some here to do what business could be done with the sullen, poverty-blighted people of Earth. I noticed many Changelings limping furtively through the crowd, not one of them as proud of bearing as Gormon beside me. He was unique among his kind; the others, dappled and piebald and asymmetrical, limbless or overlimbed, deformed in a thousand imaginative and artistic ways, were slinkers, squinters, shufflers, hissers, creepers; they were cutpurses, brain-drainers, organ-peddlers, repentance-mongers, gleam-buyers, but none held himself upright as though he thought he were a man.

  The guidance of the brain was exact, and in less than an hour of walking we arrived at the Watchers’ Inn. I left Gormon and Avluela outside and wheeled my cart within.

  Perhaps a dozen members of my guild lounged in the main hall. I gave them the customary sign, and they returned it languidly. Were these the guardians on whom Earth’s safety depended? Simpletons and weaklings!

  “Where may I register?” I asked.

  “New? Where from?”

  “Agupt was my last place of registry.”

  “Should have stayed there. No need of Watchers here.”

  “Where may I register?” I asked again.

  A foppish youngster indicated a screen in the rear of the great room. I went to it, pressed my fingertips against it, was interrogated, and gave my name, which a Watcher may utter only to another Watcher and only within the precincts of an inn. A panel shot open, and a puffy-eyed man who wore the Watcher emblem on his right cheek and not on the left, signifying his high rank in the guild, spoke my name and said, “You should have known better than to come to Roum. We’re over our quota.”

  “I claim lodging and employment nonetheless.”

  “A man with your sense of humor should have been born into the guild of Clowns,” he said.

  “I see no joke.”

  “Under laws promulgated by our guild in the most recent session, an inn is under no obligation to take new lodgers once it has reached its assigned capacity. We are at our assigned capacity. Farewell, my friend.”

  I was aghast. “I know of no such regulation! This is incredible! For a guild to turn away a member from its own inn—when he arrives footsore and numb! A man of my age, having crossed Land Bridge out of Agupt, here as a stranger and hungry in Roum—”

  “Why did you not check with us first?”

  “I had no idea it would be necessary.”

  “The new regulations—”

  “May the Will shrivel the new regulations!” I shouted. “I demand lodging! To turn away one who has Watched since before you were born—”

  “Easy, brother, easy.”

  “Surely you have some corner where I can sleep—some crumbs to let me eat—”

  Even as my tone had changed from bluster to supplication, his expression softened from indifference to mere disdain. “We have no room. We have no food. These are hard times for our guild, you know. There is talk that we will be disbanded altogether, as a useless luxury, a drain upon the Will’s resources. We are very limited in our abilities. Because Roum has a surplus of Watchers, we all are on short rations as it is, and if we admit you our rations will be all the shorter.”

  “But where will I go? What shall I do?”

  “I advise you,” he said blandly, “to throw yourself upon the mercy of the Prince of Roum.”

  3

  OUTSIDE, I told that to Gormon, and he doubled with laughter, guffawing so furiously that the striations on his lean cheeks blazed like bloody stripes. “The mercy of the Prince of Roum!” he repeated. “The mercy—of the Prince of Roum—”

  “It is customary for the unfortunate to seek the aid of the local ruler,” I said coldly.

  “The Prince of Roum knows no mercy,” Gormon told me. “The Prince of Roum will feed you your own limbs to ease your hunger!”

  “Perhaps,” Avluela put in, “we should try to find the Fliers’ Lodge. They’ll feed us there.”

  “Not Gormon,” I observed. “We have obligations to one another.”

  “We could bring food out to him,” she said.

  “I prefer to visit the court first,” I insiste
d. “Let us make sure of our status. Afterward we can improvise living arrangements, if we must.”

  She yielded, and we made our way to the palace of the Prince of Roum, a massive building fronted by a colossal column-ringed plaza, on the far side of the river that splits the city. In the plaza we were accosted by mendicants of many sorts, some of them not even Earthborn; something with ropy tendrils and a corrugated, noseless face thrust itself at me and jabbered for alms until Gormon pushed it away, and moments later a second creature, equally strange, its skin pocked with luminescent craters and its limbs studded with eyes, embraced my knees and pleaded in the name of the Will for my mercy. “I am only a poor Watcher,” I said, indicating my cart, “and am here to gain mercy myself.” But the being persisted, sobbing out its misfortunes in a blurred, feathery voice, and in the end, to Gormon’s immense disgust, I dropped a few food tablets into the shelf-like pouch on its chest. Then we muscled on toward the doors of the palace. At the portico a more horrid sight presented itself: a maimed Flier, fragile limbs bent and twisted, one wing half-unfolded and severely cropped, the other missing altogether. The Flier rushed upon Avluela, called her by a name not hers, moistened her leggings with tears so copious that the fur of them grew matted and stained. “Sponsor me to the lodge,” he appealed. “They have turned me away because I am crippled, but if you sponsor me—” Avluela explained that she could do nothing, that she was a stranger to this lodge. The broken Flier would not release her, and Gormon with great delicacy lifted him like the bundle of dry bones that he was and set him aside. We stepped up onto the portico and at once were confronted by a trio of soft-faced neuters, who asked our business and admitted us quickly to the next line of barrier, which was manned by a pair of wizened Indexers. Speaking in unison, they queried us.

  “We seek audience,” I said. “A matter of mercy.”

  “The day of audience is four days hence,” said the Indexer on the right. “We will enter your request on the rolls.”

  “We have no place to sleep!” Avluela burst out. “We are hungry! We—”

  I hushed her. Gormon, meanwhile, was groping in the mouth of his overpocket. Bright things glimmered in his hand: pieces of gold, the eternal metal, stamped with hawk-nosed, bearded faces. He had found them grubbing in the ruins. He tossed one coin to the Indexer who had refused us. The man snapped it from the air, rubbed his thumb roughly across its shining obverse, and dropped it instantly into a fold of his garment. The second Indexer waited expectantly. Smiling, Gormon gave him his coin.