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

which great heroes must walk to at last find the object of a lifelong quest. Now it was a monster, if it had not been before.

It came on, gathering the earth to it as it went. Spires of rock jutted from its earthen skin. Tar dribbled down it where the cankerous pits had been overturned. It rolled forward, smashed against the ground and reformed in one motion. It reformed with a forward motion and came on. It grew.

The black clouds over the wastes were being dragged down in funnels. They were joining it. It was a nexus. It was eating the world…

* * *

The Watcher woke and paid his homage to the spyglass on the south balcony. The wasteland was still and dead as it had always been, except for the slow tumult of the black clouds over it and the occasional spear of lightning. It was really quite a dull view. It did not do wonders for his mood. It was the only open space in the whole tower, the only opening through which he could view the outside…and it faced the deadest land in existence. He found himself wishing that there were even just one other window, facing the north or west or east. He wished to know what was on the other side of the tower.

He ambled back off of the balcony, into the great monolithic space that served him as bedroom, library, watch post, place of contemplation…and throne room, audience chamber, and fortress, he supposed. He could call it whatever he wanted. There was no one to argue with his decrees.

A reflection played ever so slightly across the shine of the floor as he walked. If it were clearer, he would see a slight and ancient man. The reflection’s robes would be largely white, but trimmed and inlaid and filigreed with elaborate designs in colored cloth and in wires of precious metals. Its nose would be bent, its teeth gray and gapped, its hands skeletally thin. The reflected man would appear as delicate as a spiderweb.

His white beard trailed all the way to the floor, and brushed along the stones. He had never thought to cut it, nor seen a need. He looked down and saw beard and robes mingle together into a single sheet and trail between his legs.

He made his way toward the desk and wondered, as he often had, why the furniture was so remote. In the whole room, excepting the hundreds upon hundreds of book-laden shelves along the wall, there was only the table, the desk, and the red bed-cushion. Each was spread hundreds of feet apart from the others, as though some decorator long-past had decided to fill the empty space of the room as best he could. Each small task the Watcher must do required a journey. He often thought that it would have been a good idea to move them closer together centuries ago, when he had still been young and strong. There was no moving them now.

There was an odd gold-and-marble pedestal, as well. A red stone sat on it. He had never figured out what it was for. It too was far away, but he never needed it for anything anyway.

What purpose the sheer size of the tower could serve was a mystery to him, but like all of the mysteries of that place save one, it had long since faded into the back of his mind and become something he accepted as simple truth. The tower was all he really knew; it had been four hundred years since he had been anywhere else. Even in his dreams, he could only hover at the balcony.

He tried to remember what the outside had been like.

Before he had been the Watcher, he had been a little boy in a town. He had had parents, and other little boys had been his friends. He had worked with his father in the fields, in which living green things had grown. He had gathered colored balls from bushes and eaten them, and they had stained his hands. His friends and he had gone to the river, which had been a body of water like the pool on the first floor, except that it had flowed on forever, and by the river they had chased gremlins. Or had the gremlins chased them? Perhaps they had taken turns. It was so very difficult to remember, after all this time.

He had tried. In the strangeness of appearing in the tower and trying to understand his surroundings, he had begun to forget almost immediately what his life before had been like. When he had realized this, he had tried desperately to keep the memories in his head. He had tried to put them in internal catalogs, like the dusty sheafs of paper in the Connoisseur’s cabinets. But the memories could not be easily held, and the tower had presented him with so much information of its own, and he had had to find and memorize the ways through it from floor to floor, and the dreams had come every night and forced themselves into his mind.

The tower’s height, he suspected, could be accounted for by the fact that he needed to be able to see very far from the top of it. But that did not explain anything else about it.

In theory, the Book had the answers to all of his questions. The Book said so itself.

He reached the desk at last, feeling weary. The Book lay open upon it, amid a small sea of papers and writing implements and other tools and oddities he had never used. The answers to all thy questions be found within

, it read.

It was a great tome, a thousand pages or more, and bound in a black material that was something like leather or parchment. On the front, in gold, was written its title: The Book. The script was beautiful and flowing. Closed, it was like a block of stone, massive and almost cubical. When he had first come upon it as a boy, he had not been able to lift it in its entirety. There had been a brief period, in his prime, when he had been able to do so without great effort. He did not know why there were so many pages. Only the first four had writing on them.

He had been appointed to a position of great responsibility, the flowing script told him. That was the reason he had woken in an incomprehensibly vast tower one morning in his tenth year after a night of fitful dreams. He was the Watcher. Something would come from the south. He must watch for it.

What he was to do then, the Book had neglected to say. The more he had read the words over the centuries, the more convinced he had become that whoever had written it had simply taken that detail for granted, and had neglected to write it down. No one was playing a game with his mind, and no sign would be revealed when the day finally came, and the terrible thing showed itself in the wastelands. It had been overlooked. That was all.

He pondered that question rather abstractly now, when he pondered it at all. There was another thing that worried him more—not just puzzled him, but worried him. It nibbled at the edges of every other thought. It had hold of his mind and heart, and would not let them go.

He pored over the text of the Book another time. He knew every word by now, but he hoped as he always did that there would be some subtle hint he had overlooked before. But there was no mention, even indirectly, of the door on the seventeenth floor.

He let the Book lie, and looked up from it. The clear, blue sky was framed in the arched exit onto the balcony. To either side of it were blank stretches of gray stone, and then, on the edges of his vision, the bookshelves began.

He had never read a single one of them, nor laid hands on one, except for the one on his desk. It had purported to be the only one that mattered; was that why? There were alchemic texts on the third floor, decaying storybooks on the twenty-fourth, and the records in the Connoisseur’s cellar. The Watcher had browsed through them all from time to time, to pass the hours and to preserve his recollection of words that did not exist in the Book. But the vast library that surrounded him in the very place where he lived, watched, and slept…he had been intimidated by their numbers, perhaps, or had thought them unimportant, or had feared what he might read. In truth, he could not recall what had kept him from them for so long.

It seemed odd.

He shrugged his papery shoulders as well as he could, feeling the weight of his robes as he did. Then, he began the slow odyssey toward the nearest wall.

Tiles passed underneath his feet. He felt as though days and years passed with them. It took a very long time to reach the bookshelves.

But there came a moment when it occurred to him that he had reached them. Colored spines were arrayed in neat rows an arm’s length from him, hundreds of feet to either side and hundreds of feet up. Never had he felt the height of the room, and the strength of its walls, so much as he did there, at its edge.

He would never be able to reach most of the books. There was no ladder, nor any other way to get to them. But he must begin somewhere. He reached out and took one. It slid out easily, and with a leathery rasp.

He opened it and read: And Ehezeded begat Bashagor and Jedezeded and Zeded; and Bashagor begat Bashagor and Bashago and Bash; and Jedezeded begat Mok and Nok and Ashezhedezar...

He flipped through it. There was only more of the same.

Unperturbed, he placed it back in the gap from which it had come, and selected another.

Jabujez took for his bride a woman of the Magu clan upon the night before he was to go to battle. The next day, he did ride forth with all the men and boys of the Saieites at his back, and the Spirit of the Will was with them…

Another.

And they did construct a wooden bear, ten cubits tall and fourteen and a half cubits long. The length of its nose from nostril to eye was seven tenths of a cubit, and the length of its leg from heel to knee was…

Another.

Thus did King Bozog slay he the dragon…

He thought that the sky darkened outside, and the sun rose again, and fell and rose and fell and rose. It was difficult to tell, intent as he was on his search. The light inside the tower never changed, but it never had. He wondered, one day, if time had ever had meaning for him.

Mahedag did rule over Oboz for eight hundred years,