Nightwings Read online

  “Fly, Avluela, fly,” Gormon growled. “Escape while you can!”

  She disappeared into a side entrance of the palace.

  The Changeling looked at me. “She has sold herself to the Prince to provide lodging for us.”

  “So it seems.”

  “I could smash down that palace!”

  “You love her?”

  “It should be obvious.”

  “Cure yourself,” I advised. “You are an unusual man, but still a Flier is not for you. Particularly a Flier who has shared the bed of the Prince of Roum.”

  “She goes from my arms to his.”

  I was staggered. “You’ve known her?”

  “More than once,” he said, smiling sadly. “At the moment of ecstasy her wings thrash like leaves in a storm.”

  I gripped the railing of the ramp so that I would not tumble into the courtyard. The stars whirled overhead; the old moon and its two blank-faced consorts leaped and bobbed. I was shaken without fully understanding the cause of my emotion. Was it wrath that Gormon had dared to violate a canon of the law? Was it a manifestation of those pseudo-parental feelings I had toward Avluela? Or was it mere envy of Gormon for daring to commit a sin beyond my capacity, though not beyond my desires?

  I said, “They could burn your brain for that. They could mince your soul. And now you make me an accessory.”

  “What of it? That Prince commands, and he gets—but others have been there before him. I had to tell someone.”

  “Enough. Enough.”

  “Will we see her again?”

  “Princes tire quickly of their women. A few days, perhaps a single night—then he will throw her back to us. And perhaps then we shall have to leave this hostelry.” I sighed. “At least we’ll have known it a few nights more than we deserved.”

  “Where will you go then?” Gorman asked.

  “I will stay in Roum awhile.”

  “Even if you sleep in the streets? There does not seem to be much demand for Watchers here.”

  “I’ll manage,” I said. “Then I may go toward Perris.”

  “To learn from the Rememberers?”

  “To see Perris. What of you? What do you want in Roum?”

  “Avluela.”

  “Stop that talk!”

  “Very well,” he said, and his smile was bitter. “But I will stay here until the Prince is through with her. Then she will be mine, and we’ll find ways to survive. The guildless are resourceful. They have to be. Maybe we’ll scrounge lodgings in Roum awhile, and then follow you to Perris. If you’re willing to travel with monsters and faithless Fliers.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll see about that when the time comes.”

  “Have you ever been in the company of a Changeling before?”

  “Not often. Not for long.”

  “I’m honored.” He drummed on the parapet. “Don’t cast me off, Watcher. I have a reason for wanting to stay with you.”

  “Which is?”

  “To see your face on the day your machines tell you that the invasion of Earth has begun.”

  I let myself sag forward, shoulders drooping. “You’ll stay with me a long time, then.”

  “Don’t you believe the invasion is coming?”

  “Some day. Not soon.”

  Gormon chuckled. “You’re wrong. It’s almost here.”

  “You don’t amuse me.”

  “What is it, Watcher? Have you lost your faith? It’s been known for a thousand years: another race covets Earth and owns it by treaty, and will some day come to collect. That much was decided at the end of the Second Cycle.”

  “I know all that, and I am no Rememberer.” Then I turned to him and spoke words I never thought I would say aloud. “For twice your lifetime, Changeling, I’ve listened to the stars and done my Watching. Something done that often loses meaning. Say your own name ten thousand times and it will be an empty sound. I have Watched, and Watched well, and in the dark hours of the night I sometimes think I Watch for nothing, that I have wasted my life. There is a pleasure in Watching, but perhaps there is no real purpose.”

  His hand encircled my wrist. “Your confession is as shocking as mine. Keep your faith, Watcher. The invasion comes!”

  “How could you possibly know?”

  “The guildless also have their skills.”

  The conversation troubled me. I said, “Is it painful to be guildless?”

  “One grows reconciled. And there are certain freedoms to compensate for the lack of status. I may speak freely to all.”

  “I notice.”

  “I move freely. I am always sure of food and lodging, though the food may be rotten and the lodging poor. Women are attracted to me despite all prohibitions. Because of them, perhaps. I am untroubled by ambitions.”

  “Never desire to rise above your rank?”

  “Never.”

  “You might have been happier as a Rememberer.”

  “I am happy now. I can have a Rememberer’s pleasures without his responsibility.”

  “How smug you are!” I cried. “To make a virtue of guildlessness!”

  “How else does one endure the weight of the Will?” He looked toward the palace. “The humble rise. The mighty fall. Take this as prophecy, Watcher: that lusty Prince in there will know more of life before summer comes. I’ll rip out his eyes for taking Avluela!”

  “Strong words. You bubble with treason tonight.”

  “Take it as prophecy.”

  “You can’t get close to him,” I said. Then, irritated for taking his foolishness seriously, I added, “And why blame him? He only does as princes do. Blame the girl for going to him. She might have refused.”

  “And lost her wings. Or died. No, she had no choice. I do!” In a sudden, terrible gesture the Changeling held out thumb and forefinger, double-jointed, long-nailed, and plunged them forward into imagined eyes. “Wait,” he said. “You’ll see!”

  In the courtyard two Chronomancers appeared, set up the apparatus of their guild, and lit tapers by which to read the shape of tomorrow. A sickly odor of pallid smoke rose to my nostrils. I had now lost further desire to speak with the Changeling.

  “It grows late,” I said. “I need rest, and soon I must do my Watching.”

  “Watch carefully,” Gormon told me.

  5

  AT night in my chamber I performed my fourth and last Watch of that long day, and for the first time in my life I detected an anomaly. I could not interpret it. It was an obscure sensation, a mingling of tastes and sounds, a feeling of being in contact with some colossal mass. Worried, I clung to my instruments far longer than usual, but perceived no more clearly at the end of my seance than at its commencement.

  Afterward I wondered about my obligations.

  Watchers are trained from childhood to be swift to sound the alarm; and the alarm must be sounded when the Watcher judges the world in peril. Was I now obliged to notify the Defenders? Four times in my life the alarm had been given, on each occasion in error; and each Watcher who had thus touched off a false mobilization had suffered a fearful loss of status. One had contributed his brain to the memory banks; one had become a neuter out of shame; one had smashed his instruments and gone to live among the guildless; and one, vainly attempting to continue in his profession, had discovered himself mocked by all his comrades. I saw no virtue in scorning one who had delivered a false alarm, for was it not preferable for a Watcher to cry out too soon than not at all? But those were the customs of our guild, and I was constrained by them.

  I evaluated my position and decided that I did not have valid grounds for an alarm.

  I reflected that Gormon had placed suggestive ideas in my mind that evening. I might possibly be reacting only to his jeering talk of imminent invasion.

  I could not act. I dared not jeopardize my standing by hasty outcry. I mistrusted my own emotional state.

  I gave no alarm.

  Seething, confused, my soul roiling, I closed my cart and let myself sink into a drugg
ed sleep.

  At dawn I woke and rushed to the window, expecting to find invaders in the streets. But all was still; a winter grayness hung over the courtyard, and sleepy Servitors pushed passive neuters about. Uneasily I did my first Watching of the day, and to my relief the strangenesses of the night before did not return, although I had it in mind that my sensitivity is always greater at night than upon arising.

  I ate and went to the courtyard. Gormon and Avluela were already there. She looked fatigued and downcast, depleted by her night with the Prince of Roum, but I said nothing to her about it. Gormon, slouching disdainfully against a wall embellished with the shells of radiant mollusks, said to me, “Did your Watching go well?”

  “Well enough.”

  “What of the day?”

  “Out to roam Roum,” I said. “Will you come? Avluela? Gormon?”

  “Surely,” he said, and she gave a faint nod; and, like the tourists we were, we set off to inspect the splendid city of Roum.

  Gormon acted as our guide to the jumbled pasts of Roum, belying his claim never to have been here before. As well as any Rememberer he described the things we saw as we walked the winding streets. All the scattered levels of thousands of years were exposed. We saw the power domes of the Second Cycle, and the Colosseum where at an unimaginably early date man and beast contended like jungle creatures. In the broken hull of that building of horrors Gormon told us of the savagery of that unimaginably ancient time. “They fought,” he said, “naked before huge throngs. With bare hands men challenged beasts called lions, great hairy cats with swollen heads; and when the lion lay in its gore, the victor turned to the Prince of Roum and asked to be pardoned for whatever crime it was that had cast him into the arena. And if he had fought well, the Prince made a gesture with his hand, and the man was freed.” Gormon made the gesture for us: a thumb upraised and jerked backward over the right shoulder several times. “But if the man had shown cowardice, or if the lion had distinguished itself in the manner of its dying, the Prince made another gesture, and the man was condemned to be slain by a second beast.” Gormon showed us that gesture too: the middle finger jutting upward from a clenched fist and lifted in a short sharp thrust.

  “How are these things known?” Avluela asked, but Gormon pretended not to hear her.

  We saw the line of fusion-pylons built early in the Third Cycle to draw energy from the world’s core; they were still functioning, although stained and corroded. We saw the shattered stump of a Second Cycle weather machine, still a mighty column at least twenty men high. We saw a hill on which white marble relics of First Cycle Roum sprouted like pale clumps of winter deathflowers. Penetrating toward the inner part of the city, we came upon the embankment of defensive amplifiers waiting in readiness to hurl the full impact of the Will against invaders. We viewed a market where visitors from the stars haggled with peasants for excavated fragments of antiquity. Gormon strode into the crowd and made several purchases. We came to a flesh-house for travelers from afar, where one could buy anything from quasi-life to mounds of passion-ice. We ate at a small restaurant by the edge of the River Tver, where guildless ones were served without ceremony, and at Gormon’s insistence we dined on mounds of a soft doughy substance and drank a tart yellow wine, local specialties.

  Afterward we passed through a covered arcade in whose many aisles plump Vendors peddled star-goods, costly trinkets from Afreek, and the flimsy constructs of the local Manufactories. Just beyond we emerged in a plaza that contained a fountain in the shape of a boat, and to the rear of this rose a flight of cracked and battered stone-stairs ascending to a zone of rubble and weeds. Gormon beckoned, and we scrambled into this dismal area, then passed rapidly through it to a place where a sumptuous palace, by its looks early Second Cycle or even First, brooded over a sloping vegetated hill.

  “They say this is the center of the world,” Gormon declared. “In Jorslem one finds another place that also claims the honor. They mark the spot here by a map.”

  “How can the world have one center,” Avluela asked, “when it is round?”

  Gormon laughed. We went in. Within, in wintry darkness, there stood a colossal jeweled globe lit by some inner glow.

  “Here is your world,” said Gormon, gesturing grandly.

  “Oh!” Avluela gasped. “Everything! Everything is here!”

  The map was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It showed natural contours and elevations, its seas seemed deep liquid pools, its deserts were so parched as to make thirst spring in one’s mouth, its cities swirled with vigor and life. I beheld the continents, Eyrop, Afreek, Ais, Stralya. I saw the vastness of Earth Ocean. I traversed the golden span of Land Bridge, which I had crossed so toilfully on foot not long before. Avluela rushed forward and pointed to Roum, to Agupt, to Jorslem, to Perris. She tapped the globe at the high mountains north of Hind and said softly, “This is where I was born, where the ice lives, where the mountains touch the moons. Here is where the Fliers have their kingdom.” She ran a finger westward toward Fars and beyond it into the terrible Arban Desert, and on to Agupt. “This is where I flew. By night, when I left my girlhood. We all must fly, and I flew here. A hundred times I thought I would die. Here, here in the desert, sand in my throat as I flew, sand beating against my wings—I was forced down, I lay naked on the hot sand for days, and another Flier saw me, he came down to me and pitied me, and lifted me up, and when I was aloft my strength returned, and we flew on toward Agupt. And he died over the sea, his life stopped though he was young and strong, and he fell down into the sea, and I flew down to be with him, and the water was hot even at night. I drifted, and morning came, and I saw the living stones growing like trees in the water, and the fish of many colors, and they came to him and pecked at his flesh as he floated with his wings outspread on the water, and I left him, I thrust him down to rest there, and I rose, and I flew on to Agupt, alone, frightened, and there I met you, Watcher.” Timidly she smiled to me. “Show us the place where you were young, Watcher.”

  Painfully, for I was suddenly stiff at the knees, I hobbled to the far side of the globe. Avluela followed me; Gormon hung back, as though not interested at all. I pointed to the scattered islands rising in two long strips from Earth Ocean—the remnants of the Lost Continents.

  “Here,” I said, indicating my native island in the west. “I was born here.”

  “So far away!” Avluela cried.

  “And so long ago,” I said. “In the middle of the Second Cycle, it sometimes seems to me.”

  “No! That is not possible!” But she looked at me as though it might just be true that I was thousands of years old.

  I smiled and touched her satiny cheek. “It only seems that way to me,” I said.

  “When did you leave your home?”

  “When I was twice your age,” I said. “I came first to here—” I indicated the eastern group of islands. “I spent a dozen years as a Watcher on Palash. Then the Will moved me to cross Earth Ocean to Afreek. I came. I lived awhile in the hot countries. I went on to Agupt. I met a certain small Flier.” Falling silent, I looked a long while at the islands that had been my home, and within my mind my image changed from the gaunt and eroded thing I now had become, and I saw myself young and well-fleshed, climbing the green mountains and swimming in the chill sea, doing my Watching at the rim of a white beach hammered by surf.

  While I brooded Avluela turned away from me to Gormon and said, “Now you. Show us where you came from, Changeling!”

  Gormon shrugged. “The place does not appear to be on this globe.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “Is it?” he asked.

  She pressed him, but he evaded her, and we passed through a side exit and into the streets of Roum.

  I was growing tired, but Avluela hungered for this city and wished to devour it all in an afternoon, and so we went on through a maze of interlocking streets, through a zone of sparkling mansions of Masters and Merchants, and through a foul den of Servitors and Vendors that e
xtended into subterranean catacombs, and to a place where Clowns and Musicians resorted, and to another where the guild of Somnambulists offered its doubtful wares. A bloated female Somnambulist begged us to come inside and buy the truth that comes with trances, and Avluela urged us to go, but Gormon shook his head and I smiled, and we moved on. Now we were at the edge of a park close to the city’s core. Here the citizens of Roum promenaded with an energy rarely seen in hot Agupt, and we joined the parade.

  “Look there!” Avluela said. “How bright it is!”

  She pointed toward the shining arc of a dimensional sphere enclosing some relic of the ancient city; shading my eyes, I could make out a weathered stone wall within, and a knot of people. Gormon said, “It is the Mouth of Truth.”

  “What is that?” Avluela asked.

  “Come. See.”

  A line progressed into the sphere. We joined it and soon were at the lip of the interior, peering at the timeless region just across the threshold. Why this relic and so few others had been accorded such special protection I did not know, and I asked Gormon, whose knowledge was so unaccountably as profound as any Rememberer’s, and he replied, “Because this is the realm of certainty, where what one says is absolutely congruent with what actually is the case.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Avluela.

  “It is impossible to lie in this place,” Gormon told her. “Can you imagine any relic more worthy of protection?” He stepped across the entry duct, blurring as he did so, and I followed him quickly within. Avluela hesitated. It was a long moment before she entered; pausing a moment on the very threshold, she seemed buffeted by the wind that blew along the line of demarcation between the outer world and the pocket universe in which we stood.