Nightwings Read online

  An inner compartment held the Mouth of Truth itself. The line extended toward it, and a solemn Indexer was controlling the flow of entry to the tabernacle. It was a while before we three were permitted to go in. We found ourselves before the ferocious head of a monster in high relief, affixed to an ancient wall pockmarked by time. The monster’s jaws gaped; the open mouth was a dark and sinister hole. Gormon nodded, inspecting it, as though he seemed pleased to find it exactly as he had thought it would be.

  “What do we do?” Avluela asked.

  Gormon said, “Watcher, put your right hand into the Mouth of Truth.”

  Frowning, I complied.

  “Now,” said Gormon, “one of us asks a question. You must answer it. If you speak anything but the truth, the mouth will close and sever your hand.”

  “No!” Avluela cried.

  I stared uneasily at the stone jaws rimming my wrist. A Watcher without both his hands is a man without a craft; in Second Cycle days one might have obtained a prosthesis more artful than one’s original hand, but the Second Cycle had long ago been concluded, and such niceties were not to be purchased on Earth nowadays.

  “How is such a thing possible?” I asked.

  “The Will is unusually strong in these precincts,” Gormon replied. “It distinguishes sternly between truth and untruth. To the rear of this wall sleeps a trio of Somnambulists through whom the Will speaks, and they control the Mouth. Do you fear the Will, Watcher?”

  “I fear my own tongue.”

  “Be brave. Never has a lie been told before this wall. Never has a hand been lost.”

  “Go ahead, then,” I said. “Who will ask me a question?”

  “I,” said Gormon. “Tell me, Watcher: all pretense aside, would you say that a life spent in Watching has been a life spent wisely?”

  I was silent a long moment, rotating my thoughts, eyeing the jaws.

  At length I said, “To devote oneself to vigilance on behalf of one’s fellow man is perhaps the noblest purpose one can serve.”

  “Careful!” Gormon cried in alarm.

  “I am not finished,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  “But to devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.”

  The jaws of the Mouth of Truth did not quiver.

  I removed my hand. I stared at it as though it had newly sprouted from my wrist. I felt suddenly several cycles old. Avluela, her eyes wide, her hands to her lips, seemed shocked by what I had said. My own words appeared to hang congealed in the air before the hideous idol.

  “Spoken honestly,” said Gormon, “although without much mercy for yourself. You judge yourself too harshly, Watcher.”

  “I spoke to save my hand,” I said. “Would you have had me lie?”

  He smiled. To Avluela the Changeling said, “Now it’s your turn.”

  Visibly frightened, the little Flier approached the Mouth. Her dainty hand trembled as she inserted it between the slabs of cold stone. I fought back an urge to rush toward her and pull her free of that devilish grimacing head.

  “Who will question her?” I asked.

  “I,” said Gormon.

  Avluela’s wings stirred faintly beneath her garments. Her face grew pale; her nostrils flickered; her upper lip slid over the lower one. She stood slouched against the wall and stared in horror at the termination of her arm. Outside the chamber vague faces peered at us; lips moved in what no doubt were expressions of impatience over our lengthy visit to the Mouth; but we heard nothing. The atmosphere around us was warm and clammy, with a musty tang like that which would come from a well that was driven through the structure of Time.

  Gormon said slowly, “This night past you allowed your body to be possessed by the Prince of Roum. Before that, you granted yourself to the Changeling Gormon, although such liaisons are forbidden by custom and law. Much prior to that you were the mate of a Flier, now deceased. You may have had other men, but I know nothing of them, and for the purposes of my question they are not relevant. Tell me this, Avluela: which of the three gave you the most intense physical pleasure, which of the three aroused your deepest emotions, and which of the three would you choose as a mate, if you were choosing a mate?”

  I wanted to protest that the Changeling had asked her three questions, not one, and so had taken unfair advantage. But I had no chance to speak, because Avluela replied unfalteringly, hand wedged deep into the Mouth of Truth, “The Prince of Roum gave me greater pleasure of the body than I had ever known before, but he is cold and cruel, and I despise him. My dead Flier I loved more deeply than any person before or since, but he was weak, and I would not have wanted a weakling as a mate. You, Gormon, seem almost a stranger to me even now, and I feel that I know neither your body nor your soul, and yet, though the gulf between us is so wide, it is you with whom I would spend my days to come.”

  She drew her hand from the Mouth of Truth.

  “Well spoken!” said Gormon, though the accuracy of her words had clearly wounded as well as pleased him. “Suddenly you find eloquence, eh, when the circumstances demand it. And now the turn is mine to risk my hand.”

  He neared the Mouth. I said, “You have asked the first two questions. Do you wish to finish the job and ask the third as well?”

  “Hardly,” he said. He made a negligent gesture with his free hand. “Put your heads together and agree on a joint question.”

  Avluela and I conferred. With uncharacteristic forwardness she proposed a question; and since it was the one I would have asked, I accepted it and told her to ask it.

  She said, “When we stood before the globe of the world, Gormon, I asked you to show me the place where you were born, and you said you were unable to find it on the map. That seemed most strange. Tell me now: are you what you say you are, a Changeling who wanders the world?”

  He replied, “I am not.”

  In a sense he had satisfied the question as Avluela had phrased it; but it went without saying that his reply was inadequate, and he kept his hand in the Mouth of Truth as he continued, “I did not show my birthplace to you on the globe because I was born nowhere on this globe, but on a world of a star I must not name. I am no Changeling in your meaning of the word, though by some definitions I am, for my body is somewhat disguised, and on my own world I wear a different flesh. I have lived here ten years.”

  “What was your purpose in coming to Earth?” I asked.

  “I am obliged only to answer one question,” said Gormon. Then he smiled. “But I give you an answer anyway: I was sent to Earth in the capacity of a military observer, to prepare the way for the invasion for which you have Watched so long and in which you have ceased to believe, and which will be upon you in a matter now of some hours.”

  “Lies!” I bellowed. “Lies!”

  Gormon laughed. And drew his hand from the Mouth of Truth, intact, unharmed.

  6

  NUMB with confusion, I fled with my cart of instruments from that gleaming sphere and emerged into a street suddenly cold and dark. Night had come with winter’s swiftness; it was almost the ninth hour, and almost the time for me to Watch once more.

  Gormon’s mockery thundered in my brain. He had arranged everything: he had maneuvered us in to the Mouth of Truth; he had wrung a confession of lost faith from me and a confession of a different sort from Avluela; he had mercilessly volunteered information he need not have revealed, spoken words calculated to split me to the core.

  Was the Mouth of Truth a fraud? Could Gormon lie and emerge unscathed?

  Never since I first took up my tasks had I Watched at anything but my appointed hours. This was a time of crumbling realities; I could not wait for the ninth hour to come round; crouching in the windy street, I opened my cart, readied my equipment, and sank like a diver into Watchfulness.

  My amplified consciousness roared toward the stars.

  God
like I roamed infinity. I felt the rush of the solar wind, but I was no Flier to be hurled to destruction by that pressure, and I soared past it, beyond the reach of those angry particles of light, into the blackness at the edge of the sun’s dominion. Down upon me there beat a different pressure.

  Starships coming near.

  Not the tourist lines that bring hordes of sightseers to gape at our diminished world. Not the registered mercantile transport vessels, nor the scoopships that collect the interstellar vapors, nor the resort craft on their hyperbolic orbits.

  These were military craft, dark, alien, menacing. I could not tell their number; I knew only that they sped Earthward at many lights, nudging a cone of deflected energies before them; and it was that cone that I had sensed, that I had felt also the night before, booming into my mind through my instruments, engulfing me like a cube of crystal through which stress patterns play and shine.

  All my life I had watched for this.

  I had been trained to sense it. I had prayed that I never would sense it, and then in my emptiness I had prayed that I would sense it, and then I had ceased to believe in it. And then by grace of the Changeling Gormon, I had sensed it after all, Watching ahead of my hour, crouching in a cold Roumish street just outside the Mouth of Truth.

  In his training, a Watcher is instructed to break from his Watchfulness as soon as his observations are confirmed by a careful check, so that he can sound the alarm. Obediently I made my check by shifting from one channel to another to another, triangulating and still picking up that foreboding sensation of titanic force rushing upon Earth at unimaginable speed.

  Either I was deceived, or the invasion was come. But I could not shake from my trance to give the alarm.

  Lingeringly, lovingly, I drank in the sensory data for what seemed like hours. I fondled my equipment; I drained from it the total affirmation of faith that my readings gave me. Dimly I warned myself that I was wasting vital time, that it was my duty to leave this lewd caressing of destiny to summon the Defenders.

  And at last I burst free of Watchfulness and returned to the world I was guarding.

  Avluela was beside me; she was dazed, terrified, her knuckles to her teeth, her eyes blank.

  “Watcher! Watcher, do you hear me? What’s happening? What’s going to happen?”

  “The invasion,” I said. “How long was I under?”

  “About half a minute. I don’t know. Your eyes were closed. I thought you were dead.”

  “Gormon was speaking the truth! The invasion is almost here. Where is he? Where did he go?”

  “He vanished as we came away from that place with the Mouth,” Avluela whispered. “Watcher, I’m frightened. I feel everything collapsing. I have to fly—I can’t stay down here now!”

  “Wait,” I said, clutching at her and missing her arm. “Don’t go now. First I have to give the alarm, and then—”

  But she was already stripping off her clothing. Bare to the waist, her pale body gleamed in the evening light, while about us people were rushing to and fro in ignorance of all that was about to occur. I wanted to keep Avluela beside me, but I could delay no longer in giving the alarm, and I turned away from her, back to my cart.

  As though caught up in a dream born of overripe longings I reached for the node that I had never used, the one that would send forth a planetwide alert to the Defenders.

  Had the alarm already been given? Had some other Watcher sensed what I had sensed, and, less paralyzed by bewilderment and doubt, performed a Watcher’s final task?

  No. No. For then I would be hearing the sirens’ shriek reverberating from the orbiting loudspeakers above the city.

  I touched the node. From the corner of my eye I saw Avluela, free of her encumbrances now, kneeling to say her words, filling her tender wings with strength. In a moment she would be in the air, beyond my grasp.

  With a single swift tug I activated the alarm.

  In that instant I became aware of a burly figure striding toward us. Gormon, I thought; and as I rose from my equipment I reached out to him; I wanted to seize him and hold him fast. But he who approached was not Gormon but some officious dough-faced Servitor who said to Avluela, “Go easy, Flier, let your wings drop. The Prince of Roum sends me to bring you to his presence.”

  He grappled with her. Her little breasts heaved; her eyes flashed anger at him.

  “Let go of me! I’m going to fly!”

  “The Prince of Roum summons you,” the Servitor said, enclosing her in his heavy arms.

  “The Prince of Roum will have other distractions tonight,” I said. “He’ll have no need of her.”

  As I spoke, the sirens began to sing from the skies.

  The Servitor released her. His mouth worked noiselessly for an instant; he made one of the protective gestures of the Will; he looked skyward and grunted, “The alarm! Who gave the alarm? You, old Watcher?”

  Figures rushed about insanely in the streets.

  Avluela, freed, sped past me—on foot, her wings but half-furled—and was swallowed up in the surging throng. Over the terrifying sound of the sirens came booming messages from the public annunciators, giving instructions for defense and safety. A lanky man with the mark of the guild of Defenders upon his cheek rushed up to me, shouted words too incoherent to be understood, and sped on down the street. The world seemed to have gone mad.

  Only I remained calm. I looked to the skies, half-expecting to see the invaders’ black ships already hovering above the towers of Roum. But I saw nothing except the hovering nightlights and the other objects one might expect overhead.

  “Gormon?” I called. “Avluela?”

  I was alone.

  A strange emptiness swept over me. I had given the alarm; the invaders were on their way; I had lost my occupation. There was no need of Watchers now. Almost lovingly I touched the worn cart that had been my companion for so many years. I ran my fingers over its stained and pitted instruments; and then I looked away, abandoning it, and went down the dark streets cartless, burdenless, a man whose life had found and lost meaning in the same instant. And about me raged chaos.

  7

  IT was understood that when the moment of Earth’s final battle arrived, all guilds would be mobilized, the Watchers alone exempted. We who had manned the perimeter of defense for so long had no part in the strategy of combat; we were discharged by the giving of a true alarm. Now it was the time of the guild of Defenders to show its capabilities. They had planned for half a cycle what they would do in time of war. What plans would they call forth now? What deeds would they direct?

  My only concern was to return to the royal hostelry and wait out the crisis. It was hopeless to think of finding Avluela, and I pummeled myself savagely for having let her slip away, naked and without a protector, in that confused moment. Where would she go? Who would shield her?

  A fellow Watcher, pulling his cart madly along, nearly collided with me. “Careful!” I snapped. He looked up, breathless, stunned. “Is it true?” he asked. “The alarm?”

  “Can’t you hear?”

  “But is it real?”

  I pointed to his cart. “You know how to find that out.”

  “They say the man who gave the alarm was drunk, an old fool who was turned away from the inn yesterday.”

  “It could be so,” I admitted.

  “But if the alarm is real—!”

  Smiling, I said, “If it is, now we all may rest. Good day to you, Watcher.”

  “Your cart! Where’s your cart?” he shouted at me.

  But I had moved past him, toward the mighty carven stone pillar of some relic of Imperial Roum.

  Ancient images were carved on that pillar: battles and victories, foreign monarchs marched in the chains of disgrace through the streets of Roum, triumphant eagles celebrating imperial grandeur. In my strange new calmness I stood awhile before the column of stone and admired its elegant engravings. Toward me rushed a frenzied figure whom I recognized as the Rememberer Basil; I hailed him, saying, �
�How timely you come! Do me the kindness of explaining these images, Rememberer. They fascinate me, and my curiosity is aroused.”

  “Are you insane? Can’t you hear the alarm?”

  “I gave the alarm, Rememberer.”

  “Flee, then! Invaders come! We must fight!”

  “Not I, Basil. Now my time is over. Tell me of these images. These beaten kings, these broken emperors. Surely a man of your years will not be doing battle.”

  “All are mobilized now!”

  “All but Watchers,” I said. “Take a moment. Yearning for the past is born in me. Gormon has vanished; be my guide to these lost cycles.”

  The Rememberer shook his head wildly, circled around me, and tried to get away. Hoping to seize his skinny arm and pin him to the spot, I made a lunge at him; but he eluded me and I caught only his dark shawl, which pulled free and came loose in my hands. Then he was gone, his spindly limbs pumping madly as he fled down the street and left my view. I shrugged and examined the shawl I had so unexpectedly acquired. It was shot through with glimmering threads of metal arranged in intricate patterns that teased the eye: it seemed to me that each strand disappeared into the weave of the fabric, only to reappear at some improbable point, like the lineage of dynasties unexpectedly revived in distant cities. The workmanship was superb. Idly I draped the shawl about my shoulders.

  I walked on.

  My legs, which had been on the verge of failing me earlier in the day, now served me well. With renewed youthfulness I made my way through the chaotic city, finding no difficulties in choosing my route. I headed for the river, then crossed it and, on the Tver’s far side, sought the palace of the Prince. The night had deepened, for most lights were extinguished under the mobilization orders; and from time to time a dull boom signaled the explosion of a screening bomb overhead, liberating clouds of murk that shielded the city from most forms of long-range scrutiny. There were fewer pedestrians in the streets. The sirens still cried out. Atop the buildings the defensive installations were going into action; I heard the bleeping sounds of repellors warming up, and I saw the long spidery arms of amplification booms swinging from tower to tower as they linked for maximum output. I had no doubt now that the invasion actually was coming. My own instruments might have been fouled by inner confusion, but they would not have proceeded thus far with the mobilization if the initial report had not been confirmed by the findings of hundreds of other members of my guild.