Empire of the East (45 page)

“Again, follow the lights. Watch and listen for a little while and then there will be time for food and rest.”

This time they were led along yet another branching of the passageways, and to a still lower level. With every minute the buried complex housing Ardneh was revealed as larger, and there was no reason to think they had seen it all as yet.

In a room that must have been far below the level of the outside ground, but where the air was fresh and dry and comfortably warm, were couches covered in some leather-like substance that creaked and crackled with age when Rolf and Catherine lay down, but did not crumble. Above each couch and pointed at its head were clustered metal rods, suspended from somewhere in the obscurity above the lights.

The lights dimmed. “Now you will sleep,” said Ardneh. And so it was.

To Rolf there soon came a dream, so clear and methodical a dream that he knew it was not natural. Although he knew he was dreaming, he did not waken. He was drifting, no more than a disembodied viewpoint, watching people who he somehow knew were of the Old World. They were strangely dressed, and spoke to one another in a tongue unknown to Rolf, as they went about tasks that he at first found completely incomprehensible. Then he saw that they were pouring lakes into buried caverns, lakes not of water but seemingly of sparkling, coruscating liquid light.

Ardneh's voice, also bodiless, said: “Rolf, those lakes were one attempt to prevent the Old World from destroying itself, by strengthening the powers of life. I was another attempt.”

“I know what those lakes of life were like, Ardneh, for I saw one spilled in the Black Mountains. Is there one that Duncan can make use of, to restore his men fallen in battle?”

“I think there are no more such lakes left in the whole world, Rolf. Watch, now. This dream that you see is something made by some leaders of the Old World, to show other folk of that time how well they were to be protected against war.”

And Rolf, in the strange embrace of the bed which he no longer felt, settled himself to watch the dream. With only partial comprehension, despite Ardneh's occasionally interjected words of explanation, he watched as in scene after scene strangely-uniformed men and women built, armed, tested and concealed long finned cylinders, which Ardneh explained were rocket-driven missiles. Missiles were carried in strange craft moving hidden under the seas, were secreted in underground silos, were hung soaring in patient readiness so high above the ground that great earth itself became nothing but a ball. Small missiles intended to destroy large missiles were made in great numbers also, and one scene showed racks of these defensive weapons that swung out quickly from an artificial hillside.

Next, interspersed with views of men and women laboring at tasks even harder to understand, Rolf watched workers assembling the multitudinous cabinets of Ardneh in his cave. Or at least in some deep shelter. Rolf could not really recognize the uninhabited shelter in which he knew his sleeping body lay. Nor did the countryside around the site in the Old World much resemble that of Rolf's time, except that there were very few people in either.

“What are those things, Ardneh?”

“They are called heat-exchangers. They are sunk deep into the earth and draw power from it. Through the ages when all atomic devices were inoperative, I drew power from the heat-exchangers, and I draw it still. And now, Rolf, Catherine, behold the last days of the Old World, and its changing. First, what those who made me foresaw might happen; next, what actually did happen, as I later pieced it together.”

Now the dream unrolling before Rolf with vivid precision no longer showed perfectly lifelike people and events, but instead what seemed to be a series of drawings that moved and spoke in close imitation of life. They were marvelous drawings, such as no artist known to Rolf could have fashioned. But they were lifeless nonetheless.

Rolf saw in this bloodless world of moving drawings how the huge missiles were fired in sudden salvos, taking flight from their many places of concealment. In swarms and clouds they leaped up high, ranged around the globe of earth, and fell again. As their blunt heads detached and multiplied themselves, down-curving toward their targets, the small missiles sprang up to meet them, shooting like darts from hidden defensive nests. When an offensive missile passed in killing range of a defender, a blast seared the upper air, and both were gone.

But the attack was too heavy; destructive devices from halfway around the world were falling upon the helpless-looking cities of Ardneh's builders. Only seconds remained before disaster. At once, the Ardneh portrayed in the moving drawings was shown fully alerted. To him—to it, rather, there was no sign that this Ardneh was intended to be, or thought to be, alive—was passed control of the ultimate defense.

With the help of Ardneh and the Old World dream machine Rolf was able to comprehend that this defense was in the nature of an experiment, involving the use of forces that must engulf the entire planet once they were unleashed, that were feared by some to be irreversible. They were newly-discovered forces that had never been tested and would not be tested now if destruction were not certain otherwise. The ultimate defense against atomic attack worked by robbing certain types of energy from certain atomic and subatomic configurations of matter, making the fusion or fission of nuclei enormously less likely.

A quick flicker in the drawings showed a subtle wave of change spreading out from the Ardneh-machine's emplacement, passing over the threatened cities of the homeland moments before the enemy's missiles struck within them. No murderous blasts erupted; the impacting warheads did no more damage than so many catapulted rocks.

What had happened to the enemy country was not apparent, but suddenly things at home were tranquil once again. A stylized drawing-man reached to touch one of Ardneh's control panels, and with the neatness of a folding parasol the protective change that Ardneh had thrown out was folded up, withdrawn, undone.

“So much for the plan,” said Ardneh's voice, in present time. “And now behold what truly happened, at the changing of the world.”

The visionary narrative of attack and defense began over again, with little change at first in the substance of the story. Again the offensive missiles came from around the world, launched in greater numbers and with more deceptive aids than could be dealt with by the conventional defense of short-range countermissiles. The Ardneh-machine was alerted in the first minutes of the great war, while the enemy attack was still no more than a network of trajectories in space, perceived and plotted by the defenders. While destruction was still minutes away, the counterattack was launched; whether Ardneh succeeded or failed, it seemed that the enemy must die.

Now disaster was only seconds away from most of the major cities of the land. The part of Ardneh that had been built to change the world was empowered to act, and it functioned as it had been made to do. It laid hold upon the matter within itself and pulled its energies into a new shape, beginning a Change that spread through the substance of the earth like cracks through shattering glass. A round wave-front of Change sprang out with the speed of light from Ardneh's buried site. But the setting in motion of the ultimate defense had taken a few seconds longer than anticipated. One enemy missile fell just before the wave-front reached it and exploded with full force beside a populous city, ending uncountable lives in the blinking of an eye. Other intercontinental weapons, falling like hail a few seconds later, failed to explode.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, surprise; the enemy was employing the same kind of an ultimate defense. But theirs was not controlled by any device as sophisticated as Ardneh, and their simpler mechanisms were never to become alive. This Rolf understood as in a dream, knowing it was so without knowing how he knew. But the enemy defenses also worked. A wave of Change springing from the other side of the world met that generated by Ardneh, and the fabric of the planet was altered more powerfully than anyone had expected.

Those few missiles that fell before the Change exploded, and the vast number that fell afterward were rendered practically harmless. One missile, however, to which Rolf's attention was now silently directed, was caught precisely in mid-explosion by the wavefront emanating from Ardneh. The fireball, the blooming nuclear blast, had just been born and it was not extinguished but neither did it follow the normal course of the explosions that had preceded it. It did not fade, but changed in shape, ran through a spectrum of colors and back again, and writhed up toward the sky as if with agonizing effort. Rolf knew that he was watching a kind of birth, and one of terrible importance.

With the passing of the wave of Change, Ardneh himself immediately began his first stirrings toward life, as did many other formerly inert components of the world.

But neither Ardneh nor any of the others accepted life as savagely, exultantly, as this.

That writhing into a furious life, begun amid a violence beyond the capability of any human being to understand, was the earliest memory of the being who would later be named Orcus, later called Lord of Lords and Emperor of all the East. His earliest memory was recorded thousands of years before John Ominor was born, thousands of years before humanity lay divided into the two camps called East and West.

For a few thousand years after his violent birth, the being who would later be known as Orcus wandered in the desert places of the earth, avoiding humans, avoiding distraction as much as possible while he groped his way toward full sentience. Child of the awesome old technology and the marvelous new magic that had begun with the Change, his substance was only partially subject to the laws of matter.

There were others more or less like him now in the world, though none so terrible of birth or power. Quickly men began to forget their technology, maimed as it was by the Change; almost from the moment of the Change they were speaking of the Old World and the New, and taking up the newly opened possibilities of magic to help them finish their aborted war. Since the Change it could scarcely be said that anything was lifeless; powers that before had been only potentialities now responded readily to the wish, the incantation, were motivated and controlled by the dream-like logic of the wizard's world.

Humans grew aware of the existence of the being who would be Orcus, and in their dogged search for magical power they tried to devise means to control him. These efforts were annoying to him, in his growing self-awareness; to avoid them, when they became persistent, he wandered away from earth. Half-immune to the laws of physics and chemistry as the Old World had known them, he drifted without sustenance and almost without effort outward to the moon, where what had been human colonies were now dead and deserted, casualties of war and the failure of technology. Above the cratered surface Orcus drifted, watching, beginning to think, as the strange bubble-houses that had sheltered the humans decayed and burst in silence. All around, soft-looking mountains two thousand thousand times as old as humankind looked down, unchanging and indifferent.

Orcus was beginning to think, and to feel sharp emotions, and to be intensely aware of the world and of himself. He began also to fear the empty moon, and the soft deep beyond, that by its immensity made him feel that he was shrinking steadily. Slowly through the solar winds of space he turned, willing himself to begin the long drift back to earth. He realized now that there, and perhaps nowhere else, he was a giant.

Now as he approached the earth again he saw humanity clearly, and began to understand and loathe them. A new generation of sorcerers had developed in his absence, men and women of greater magical skill and greater arrogance. These became aware of the demon who would be Orcus, and when they glimpsed his power they tried with fear and greed to summon him and master him. But their nets of magic burst and tore around him as he moved.

Long and slow and difficult was the groping of the demon to his full sentience and identity. Despite his hatred of the wizards' race his own development followed the same general direction as theirs, under requirements imposed by the mental potentialities of the home planet they shared. The thoughts of Orcus were not unlike those of the men he hated, not when compared to others that he had dimly sensed in the great deeps beyond the frightening moon. (Never would he leave earth's air again.)

Orcus moved over the earth and looked at the life upon it, with a hate and pointless envy that no man or woman could match. In himself he was the East, before the East had come to be. Men were building new civilizations now; most of the Old World and its technology lay buried and forgotten (unknown to men and demons, Ardneh too was now living, thinking, waiting.) And he who would be Orcus became aware now of others who were somewhat like himself, though smaller. These were demons and protodemons born from sunlike fires as he had been, but from comparatively minor acts of violence crossed by the wave of change. None of these others could begin to match his strength, and he cowed them when he met them, never questioning his own urge to dominate. Two other demons, who might in time have grown great enough to challenge him successfully, he met separately and slew. His struggle with one of these lasted for nearly a thousand years, and nearly depopulated one of the earth's smaller continents of human and animal life, before he-who-would-be-Orcus managed to reach and snuff out the hidden life of his opponent.

Shortly after that age-long struggle he received his name. When he had made himself undisputed king of the demonic powers of the world, and therefore the chief enemy of most of the human race, magicians began to call him Orcus, after some demon-lord of ancient Old World legend. (Had there in fact been Old World demons, too? And was this Changing from whence he came nothing new, after all, beneath the ancient moon? The questions occurred to Orcus, but he made no attempt to answer them. He really did not care, one way or the other.)

Not only evil powers had been brought into objective reality by the Change. From earth and sea and sky there welled into existence other forms of inhuman but intelligent life. The Change that had damped the energies of nuclear fire had at the same time freed the energies of life. The nameless force that lay behind both kinds of energy could not, ultimately, be repressed; that which was inherent in ever atom could not be destroyed.

Gradually the elemental powers of earth and sea and air came to be looked on as allies by that portion of humanity who chose the West, against the men and women who had elected to associate themselves with demons, and who with the demons had formed that society of essential selfishness called the East. How the name of East and West had come to be used rather than, say, North and South, or Red and Green, was no longer remembered in Rolf's day. Nor would such a question ever have had any significance for Orcus.

Dominating the other quasimaterial powers of the East, and leading them in slowly intensifying war against the West, Orcus the Demon-Patriarch sought slaves and allies among the beasts of the planet as well as among the men. A race of intelligent flying reptiles had evolved in the mere thousands of years that had passed since the Change, so life-rich had the substance of the world become. These reptiles became close allies of the demonic powers, just as a species of huge, intelligent, nocturnal birds, the reptiles' natural enemies, came into being and joined the West.

Still, humanity was at the heart of the struggle. Only humans were capable of dealing with both beasts and spirits on their own terms. People had largely deserted the technology that had enabled them to Change the world. But before their forgetfulness could become complete, the pressure of the new war made them try to recall and rebuild what they had lost. Thus it was that the technology of the Old World had never entirely died.

Orcus grasped how vitally important human beings were to the struggle, but when he began to train and organize his human slave-allies he underestimated their true potential. There was among the first generation of his recruits a man so consistently successful in his assigned tasks, and at the same time so apparently common and predictable in his motives (therefore as trustworthy as anyone in the East could be) that Orcus promoted him time and again. The human did well in each succeeding job, and accomplished each without giving the appearance of more ambition than a human being (in Orcus' view) should have. Eventually the man was given command not only of other humans, but of lesser demons as well. So John Ominor advanced, using skillfully the centuries of extra life with which his demon-master was pleased to reward him.

Perhaps Orcus, who had never fully understood men, never understood himself either. He may have come gradually to think himself omnipotent, and so grew careless. Whatever the explanation, without a hint of warning, he was tricked and overthrown by the man Ominor. John Ominor, with the men and demons he had suborned to aid him, cast down the demon-emperor Orcus and bound him in perpetual slumber. Orcus was not slain, could not be slain, because his life could not be found. Nor could he be made to reveal where it was. It was as if he did not know. The victorious new lords of the East were puzzled; the circumstances of Orcus' birth, that would have explained much, were unknown to them.

As was the existence of Ardneh.

Still the war against the West went on, as bitter as ever, and now more slowly, for Orcus' power was sorely missed by the East. But to awaken him enough to use him properly would be very dangerous. He was kept bound with certain other untrustworthy powers, under the world, in darkness and tormented sleep. The fitful flashes of consciousness that came amid his dreams he spent constructing scenarios of revenge.

 

Riding a griffin-like, demonic steed that galloped in midair across the demon-haunted night, the gnarled sorcerer known as Wood flew northwest among the clouds. He had been Ominor's accomplice in the overthrow of Orcus, and he was Ominor's chief wizard still. He and his mount had risen from the vast encampment of the army of the East, and he was flying to seek out the Constable's small force where it was resting in its frustrated pursuit of Rolf of the Broken Lands.

Wood's mount flew faster than any beast or man could travel or ever had, unless it were some Old World master of the technologies of speed. The tall clouds of a midsummer storm glowed with muffled lightning to right and left as Wood flashed between them. The demon-beast, whose shaggy back he rested on, ran silently on air. Its griffin's hooked-beak eagle-head bobbed and swayed at the end of the long neck, along which feather and scale commingled. Its wings spread and sailed, seemingly no more than banners or balances as it ran on wind and nothingness with driving, pounding legs. This steed would carry no other human not even Ominor himself.

In the flicker of lightning, Wood's face was grim. Out here in the northern hinterland something was going very dangerously wrong. When the Constable had sent his first appeal for magical help of the highest order it had seemed likely he was trying to cover up some blunder made by his own wizard, or by himself. But now in Wood's own auguries the ominous portents had grown too grave and numerous to ignore. Some of the very highest powers of the West must be fighting hard to foil Abner's efforts in this obscure place.

Now already the demon-griffin's course was slanting down, angling steeply toward the gently rolling land dimly visible below. The prairie came clearer now, where the scudding cloud-shadows let the moonlight fall. Down the griffin flew toward one particular grove on the tree-sprinkled expanse, a grove where torches burned, protecting huddled reptiles against marauding birds. The arrival of Wood and his demon-steed under those trees opened all the reptiles' eyes and made of them glittering beads in the flaring torchlight. With a mixture of wariness and relief Abner's handful of human soldiers watched Wood dismount.

With a single, secret word Wood hobbled his baleful mount. Leaving it standing in the middle of the camp, he strode toward the door of the tent where the Constable's banner hung limply from a staff. Before the magician reached the tent Abner emerged from it, looking weary and on guard, to greet him with the gestures appropriate for welcoming an equal.

Entering the large tent, Wood caught just a glimpse of loveliness, of a golden, impossibly graceful body rising hastily from a couch and vanishing behind a hanging partition of rich silk, trailing unbelievable blond hair. He had to think that the timing was deliberate, that he was meant to see what he had seen.

Wood was not noticeably perturbed. Without further preamble, he demanded of Abner: “What is delaying matters here?”

Abner spread his massive hands. “Western magic. Why else should I call upon you? The so-called magician you have furnished me seems utterly unable to cope with what is being done to us.”

His suspicions confirmed, Wood nodded gravely and closed his eyes. He let himself be thoroughly aware of the thin tent-floor just beneath his feet, of the grass pressed down under that, of tree-branches not very far overhead (and of the golden woman somewhere nearby, getting dressed; had she been distracting Abner from business? most men's effectiveness would have been impaired with her around), and of the soldiers and the sleepy reptiles and of his own most savage mount outside. Wood was adapting, submerging himself into the psychic climate of the place, letting its energy patterns inform his mind. At first, nothing seemed much out of the ordinary. But he persisted, and, in a little while, sighed and opened his eyes.

“Ardneh has taken the field against you,” he said then to the Constable. “He is exceedingly subtle, and it is little wonder that your wizard has been unaware of what is setting all his work at naught. I could perhaps have been deceived myself had I not met Ardneh the day we summoned him to our capital. I will always know him now.”

Abner nodded slowly. “Then what do you advise? Does it make any sense for me to press on with forty men against him?”

“You must press on, with whatever men you have, and gather more as fast as you can bring them here. Our whole future is turning on what is going to happen, somewhere not far from here to the northwest.”

“And Ardneh? Can you clear him from my path?”

“I can,” Wood said brusquely, “with the powers I shall soon invoke to help me with the job. Within a day or two, if not tonight…I mean to make a trial of it tonight.”

He made a short gesture of farewell and strode out of the tent. When he had swung himself astride his steed, Wood cast about him by his arts until he was able to sense the location of the two fugitive humans whose capture had so far been beyond the powers of the East. They were resting now, it appeared, not many kilometers distant.

“One of them labors under some kind of minor curse,” Wood commented, to the Nameless One, who had appeared from somewhere and was now standing motionless a little distance off. “Your doing, I suppose?”