Four Hundred Years in the Sky, Aaron Redfern [reading rainbow books TXT] 📗

It came from the south. It spread like oil across the wastes, but as it neared and magnified in his vision he saw that it was not liquid, but a metallic, bristling multitude. A hundred thousand men or demons, all on horseback, each bent forward, clutching black reigns in gauntleted fists, staring ahead with a ravenous intensity. The horses were black and wild-eyed, every one. Spittle flew from their open mouths. The riders were armored in gray iron that cast back no light. They had passed the gray lands and were on the flat red expanse of desert. How they had made it through the twists and spires and ravines of the wastelands ahorse he could not fathom.

Above them spread a shadow-thing, roiling like smoke, pulled forward above the riders by some powerful force...and as he looked into its bodiless form, he realized that the force was its own will.

It came on, faster and faster, and a great maw opened up inside of it, revealing a darkness greater still…

* * *

The Watcher awoke surrounded not by demon riders, but by the soft red cushion that served as his sofa and bed. He lay on his back. The tower ceiling narrowed to a point overhead, the way roads narrowed as they approached a horizon on flat ground. Not that he could remember very clearly what roads had looked like.

He sat up and hobbled south across the stone tile floor. His pace was slow; he was very old. His shadow barely dampened the sheen of the floor as it passed. The immense room was lit brightly and totally by something or other. Not the sun, for there was only one opening in the walls, the one toward which he was now traveling.

It was a long way there. He passed his desk and table, though a hundred paces lay between him and them. Farther away still was the circular wall of the tower, lined all the way around with bookshelves. He could see the colors of the books if he squinted. It was the distance, not poor eyesight, that made them difficult to see. His eyes were the one part of him that had never gone bad.

The Watcher reached the balcony and stared down at the desert, miles below and hundreds of miles before him. There was nothing down there but rock and sand, and yet he felt compelled to look into the spyglass anyway. Through it, he could see all the way to the end of the wastes, where nothing lived and nothing dared to try. There was nothing there either.

He had known he would see nothing. He had been putting up with those dreams for nearly four hundred years. They were always different, but always the same. And there was never anything coming from the south when he woke. Yet the fear was as powerful as it had always been. He could never resist looking into the spyglass, if only to reassure himself and put his mind to rest.

Something would come one day, though. That was what the Book said. It would come from the south.

He was not sure if he believed it. He felt that the thing would never come at all. For so long he had regarded its coming as something far in the distance, an event that may or may not even happen in his long lifetime. Eventually, it had ceased to have real meaning for him. He believed it was nothing more than dreams. He believed just as fervently that the thing was nearly upon him, reaching out toward him with claws or flaming swords or a gaping black maw from only yards away.

He had a task, a single purpose in his life, which was to watch for the coming. He was meant to believe, and so his unbelief worried him. He was not much of a Watcher. He would never have admitted his doubt to anyone, even if there were anyone to admit it to. Yet it did not disturb him greatly. His doubt, too, had become something distant. He had worried about it for so many years that it had begun to seem as meaningless as it was dire, like the belief itself.

Somewhere in this internal struggle, amid the tempest that it had created for itself, his mind had found something else to latch onto.

His feet were moving, he realized. The hallways and doors and cavernous open spaces of lower tower floors passed him by in their fleeting, enchanted way. He walked through walls, dropped through floors, climbed upwards on ladders and reached places that were farther down. He knew all the shortcuts. He knew the long ways too. For any given part of the tower, he knew at least one way of getting there that was mind-bogglingly, unnecessarily long. He knew every inch of the vertical temple by heart. All but one room.

He came to it.

He stood in a very narrow hallway, unlit except for two very dim orange glows that came from near the ceiling at either end, unattached to any light fixtures. Ghosts floated by. In front of him was a door of dark, heavy wood. It was almost black. The door looked very ancient, and yet the wood seemed perfectly, comfortingly sturdy. A hundred barbarians with hammers could not break down that door. But one hand could pull the ring and open it.

The ring was silver, a little more than a hand’s breadth in diameter, and carven with symbols he could not read. It lay very still, as rings of silver must. There was a silence around it. He reached out his hand, hesitantly, and brushed his fingers across the metal. He did not like what he felt there.

The Book did not forbid this room. The Book did not say anything about it at all. He had entered hundreds of other doors in his explorations of the tower. He did not know why this door vexed him. But he dared not open it. For the hundred thousandth time he wondered what could be behind it, and for the hundred thousandth time he pretended to himself that the thought was an idle one, and that it did not concern him much. The door loomed in front of him.

He decided to ask the Connoisseur.

He turned around purposefully, set his foot on the wall, and began to walk up it. His surroundings shifted, and he was on a floor again. It was made of wooden planks. Wrought-iron chandeliers hung from the ceiling, each filled with dozens of short candles, non of which was lit. It looked like an attic, but it was only another floor. He went to a circular hole in the center and dropped through onto the top of a spiral staircase. Down a flight, through a door. He shifted three more times, and reached the Connoisseur’s lair.

It was a rectangular place, low and wide, with passageways branching off in all directions like the legs of a spider…or perhaps an eight-legged dog, for it slept on its stomach. Yes, thought the Watcher, that made more sense. The walls were of a grayish stone, flat but roughly textured, and they were covered in green and brown lichens. The place had the earthy coolness of a cellar, and it was, in fact, below the earth. Directly above them was the first floor, which was comprised of a very tall room with a pool and some ghosts.

Shelves lined every wall, and held an assortment of oddities in jars, trays, flasks, boxes, crates, bags, bowls, and urns. Each was painstakingly marked. The far wall held the catalogs in their cases, in front of which a stepladder had been erected. There was a very short work bench in the center of the room. The Connoisseur bustled about.

It was a small creature, less than three feet high. Its skin was brown, and tightly drawn. The robe it wore was of the same burlap as a large, lumpy sack that sat on the floor within the Watcher’s field of vision. The Connoisseur ambled about on stocky legs. He wondered if its race had a name. Outside of the tower it would have been considered an oddity, but he had seen only it for so many years that he thought nothing of it anymore. It was just one more of the temple-tower’s quirks. He would have been far more surprised to meet a common gremlin or fairy, or another man like himself. It might not even be a man. He recalled that there were women, too. Or at least there had been four hundred years ago. Now, who knew?

This musing took him little time, and he did not let on that it had occurred at all. He glanced around him pleasantly at the shelves and jars, the way someone out on a stroll might look at trees. “Hello, Connoisseur,” he said. It looked up at him. He went on: “I have noticed that there is a room on the seventeenth floor with a silver pull-ring. How odd it is that I have never been through it before. Do you know what lies behind it?”

The Connoisseur was carrying a large and obviously heavy jar in both arms. The jar was at least a third as large as the creature itself, but the Connoisseur did not seem to mind the burden. It shuffled across the floor over to its work bench, step by step, taking the pace it pleased to take. Then it set the jar down atop the work bench, and, its shoulders at last being free, turned to him and shrugged. “No.”

“Do you not think it strange,” said the Watcher, “that there is a room in this tower which neither of us has ever been to?”

“I have not been to a lot of places,” said the Connoisseur. It was standing on a stool beside the work bench and peering down into the jar, which was filled with a preservative liquid in which floated balls of pale pink something. “I like it down here better.”

“Ah,” said the Watcher. “Well. Yes. Very well.”

The Connoisseur removed one of the pink balls, carefully wrapped it in cloth, and placed it in a box.

The Watcher wound his way back up to the top of the tower, visiting every floor as he went and observing the particular kind of silence and solitude unique to each. So his days often went.

* * *

Something moved on the horizon. No. The horizon moved.

It came from the south. It was a bulge, a great rising, lurching landscape. It came to have form, but it was not form enough for the thing to be called manlike. Its surface was the surface of the wasteland—lifeless, labyrinthine, jagged , epically tortuous. It was the sort of landscape through