The Visitor

  We returned to Bastion by way of Trayford. The town had escaped any serious depredations by the army, which had pretty well scattered to the points of the compass, along with most of their leaders, including the bishop. Alan was there waiting for me, along with Hussara, Volian, and Wogalkish. I’ve forgotten the names they had before, though they told me, and when the huge, hairy bulk of Hussara hugged me to his chest and called me Mother, I was…a little put out. I cannot yet think of them as my children. Hussara is a very big man, wide-shouldered, with great muscled arms and legs. Wogalkish is built like a swimmer, very lean and fit and androgynic, and Volian is a graceful woman with white hair and light blue eyes, slender but tremendously strong. We stayed in Trayford just long enough to tell several demons what was intended and ask them to spread the word to the people of Bastion and the surrounding area.

  From Trayford, we went north by wagon. Dismé and I traveled in the same small wagon, spending most of the time in talk. Of them all, I think she will be closest to me for she feels like a daughter whereas the others feel like…creatures out of myth, too strange to humanize. Oh, except for Arnole. And Michael. And the doctor, sometimes. I told Dismé a lot about the world before the Happening, and after we had established a friendly relationship, Dismé told me what the small god had told her at the end of our audience. The god said none of the Guardians had any deleterious genes, and therefore any cultural taboo against brother-–sister sexual alliances had no meaning. The small god had taken my embryos, yes, but she had made sure they carried nothing hurtful.

  I spoke supportingly to Dismé about this, telling her that what is is no doubt more important than what people think. She replied, rather pettishly, I thought, that Arnole had told her that years ago. Nonetheless, believing that Dismé might be too shy to mention this to Michael—she seems to be totally inexperienced in such matters—I told the doctor and I presume he spoke to Michael about it, for on several occasions, I’ve seen Michael talking quietly to Dismé, and no one could mistake the message in his eyes. Or hers.

  The trip over the mountains was uneventful, except that on the third day, we began to encounter refugees streaming out of Bastion. Most of them were on foot because the horsemen had taken their stock out of Bastion earlier, about the time Dismé and the others came out. Throughout the fourth and fifth days, the exodus continued, but by dawn of the sixth day we crossed the pass on virtually empty roads. At that point, Bertral, Galenor, Hussara, and Wogalkish went into conference, that silent sharing of views the inhabitants do when they take us over.

  We camped at the pass, for we arrived there late in the day, not far from the great black scar on the meadow of Ogre’s Gap, where the pyre had burned the bodies of the dead. There was a scatter of bones, pulled from the ashes by small beasts. When we woke in the morning, Tamlar had arrived amid a good bit of smoke, and the bones were gone. I imagine her fires burn a good deal hotter than any the demons could set. Besides Tamlar, there was a wan and wistful-looking man sitting on a log, waiting like a patient hound, and Tamlar said he had come to tell us something.

  Since several of us were in conference, Bobly and Bab had gone down to the stream for water, Michael and Dismé were “picking wild strawberries” (an unseasonable excuse, at best), and I was less threatening than Tamlar, I summoned him over with a gesture and offered him morning tea, which he accepted.

  “My name is Mace Marchant,” he said. “I used to be head of the Apocanew office of Inexplicable Arts.”

  “What does ‘used to be’ mean?” I asked him, in as gentle a voice as I could manage.

  “It means I don’t want to be connected to it anymore, not to any of it. It’s because I loved this woman. Rashel…”

  My ears pricked up at that, for during our long drive, Dismé had told me everything she could remember about Rashel, including her end.

  “…but she wasn’t in love with me. I think she put a spell on me, or someone did, so I would love her. And because I knew her, the Warden of the College of Sorcery dragged me along to meet this…this sorcerer. Gohdan Gone? Do you know that name?”

  I told him we knew the name and we knew where, in Apocanew, he had resided.

  “Apocanew? Really? The warden took me to a place in Hold. He, Gone, told me I could go, but he kept the warden there, and Gone killed the warden. I heard some of it, through the grates in the streets. It was…” He had to set his cup down, for he was shaking. Galenor glanced at me from his position with the group, and I beckoned. He came to stand behind the wretched man, laying a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “Is that what you wanted to tell us?” I asked.

  The shaking stopped, and he said, “No. Not all. When I was there, before they told me to go, I saw a book. I noticed it because it moved, as though it had something alive inside it. On the cover it said, ‘The Book of Fell.’ And when I heard the Guardians had come, when I heard that Bastion would be cleansed of all that, well, I thought you should know about the book…” He picked up the cup and sipped at it. “Such books…grimoires, are like collections of evil spells, aren’t they? Sources of dark power, and this one looked very, very old.”

  As he set his cup down, he glanced up at the person behind him, and rose, crying, “Jens Ladislav?”

  “Galenor the Guardian,” came the reply, in such tones of awful power that the poor man was quite stricken, a state made even worse when Dismé came out of the trees.

  “That’s Rashel’s sister,” he whispered. “They killed Rashel.”

  I gave Galenor a forbidding look and told Marchant that indeed, Rashel was dead. I saw no reason to upset him with the details when he would need his wits about him in telling Arnole and the others what he had seen. They gathered around and began to question him, at which point Elnith joined the group, and we soon had his life’s story among us. When we had drained him quite dry of useful information (including the location in Hold of Gone’s place and Mace’s destruction of the warden’s documents, which quite frankly surprised me, for he didn’t look capable of stepping on a stinkbug), we fed him and suggested he join a nearby demon encampment in case we needed him for anything further.

  Bertral said firmly, “He’s right about the book of Fell. There is now a reference to it in my Book. The only way we’ll know we’ve destroyed it is to see it done.”

  “Let Aarond and Ialond go as children,” Tamlar suggested. “Gohdan Gone slaughtered many children. Let them say to the servants of this necromancer that they have been summoned. I will follow them into the lair, and together we will find the book.”

  Hussara nodded. “That may gain you entrance, but let Volian and Wogalkish walk with me to the street where this entry is, to wait there for the book to emerge or for Aarond’s call. It may be a more difficult task than you imagine.”

  “All of us,” said Tamlar, her voice crackling. “If it is to be a difficult task, then we will all be needed.”

  Elnith decided to go with the small ones, and if Elnith went, I had to go along. The journey was made more quickly than I could have imagined, quite as though we giants were striding in the magical seven-league boots I had read of in fairy tales as a child. Giants did not knock upon the gate, however. It was just Bobly and Bab and Nell who knocked upon the gate, in our own unthreatening guises. The street was empty, but the gate was just as Mace Marchant had described it, as was the dwarfish, hairy person who came to greet us. I felt a spasm of pure revulsion when I saw it, an instinctive loathing. The creature tittered and pranced, but after a bit of this it decided to admit us, though he said his Master was away.

  Below, at the end of long corridors, we found another gate, guarded by another such, who said Master wasn’t home, to which we replied as before. We had been summoned. We would await the Master. This creature led us to another door which a third monster opened, letting us into the room Merchant had told us of. Despite the smoldering fire that burned, the room was in virtual darkness. It smelled…oh, how can I describe that smell. To me it was wet ashes, hot metal, rot,
decay, blood, sewers, a stench the color of bruises. The chair stood beside the fire, heavy legs, arms, back, but the seat was only an empty frame over a precipitous hole that went endlessly down into darkness.

  The three of us just stood there, trying to breathe, hideously aware that the pit before us was not empty. Each of us knew it was occupied. Gohdan Gone had departed, but the power that had moved him was still here. Elnith had taken over once we entered, but she didn’t insulate me from her fear, which I felt for the first time. She was suddenly, terribly afraid, taking a long moment to gain mastery of herself and reach out toward the book. It was on the table next to the chair, and I saw my own hand go out to grip it. It was like touching the base of a great cliff, immovable as mountains. My hand fumbled with it, unable even to open the cover.

  Outside the door, the creatures who had let us in were peeking at us, tittering. In the vast hole beneath us, something turned its attention toward us. Elnith felt it. So did Bobly and Bab, for Ialond and Aarond were suddenly there, laying their hands upon the book, struggling with it, unable to open it any more than Elnith had done. Elnith called, and from elsewhere Hussara and Volian and Wogalkish answered.

  We felt the cavern begin to shake. The floor shuddered beneath our feet, things fell from the shelves; we three moved against the outer walls just before the roof of the cavern came down, narrowly missing us. Light flooded in. It was noon, and the sunlight streamed downward into the abyss beneath the chair. We heard something from below uttering words we did not know, had never heard, strange words that went to our hearts and chilled them. Hussara leaned above us, with Volian, whose wind came down in a great vortex and scooped everything in that room away, upward, burning as it went, for Tamlar was there to burn it as it came. A sharper gust pulled out those small, tittering creatures who had served their master, and they too were burned as they swept up into the sunshine. With the earth riven wide, as it was, there was enough light in the place to see the book was not a separate thing. It was part of the stone beneath it, part of the bedrock beneath that, rooted into the substance of the planet.

  I felt Elnith summoning. We all stood as we were, without moving, hearing that movement from below, listening to it climb from the pit that held it. Then, suddenly, Dezmai and Jiralk came sliding down the sides of the pit that Hussara had made, she with her drums that Camwar had made for her, and he with Camwar’s instrument. They stood tight against the wall, not to throw any shade into the pit, and Dezmai drummed, Jiralk strummed, and the two of them began to sing. Their voices twined like snakes mating, turning and twisting and lacing themselves together, pure purpose untroubled by thought or need, and we saw the cover of the book rise, only a tiny bit.

  Oh, from that book came such sounds and smells and tastes. The clangor of bars and gates, the rattle of chains. The shriek of imprisoned and tortured beings. The taste of blood on our lips. Dezmai drummed, Jiralk played, they sang, the cover opened, and the first page of the book rose up as Volian leaned above it and ripped it from its binding with her breath. It came loose with a sound of ripped metal, fluttering upward like a living thing, only to fold itself into a deadly arrow shape and plunge toward Volian’s breast.

  Tamlar caught it with one fiery hand and melted it with her breath, and the next, and the one after that.

  The book was thick. It held hundreds of pages, every page a history of some bestial cruelty mankind had committed against his own kind or other kinds. The first few were only sticks and stones used by one kind of proto man against another. Then came spears and slings, used to more purpose. Then horsemen, with bows and swords of bronze. I saw pyramids of skulls left in the lands conquered by marauding hordes; I saw living children thrown screaming into the flames of Moloch; I saw impalements without number, and crucifixions and burials alive; I saw blood poured upon high altars until the pyramids ran red to their bottoms. I saw wars of religion against religion and people against people. Every page was one such; every one had to be raised separately, separately ripped away, separately melted into a tiny blob of metal that writhed on the broken stone like mercury, crawling toward the dark. None escaped. Bobly and Bab caught them all, scooping them into a pitcher they had found among the wreckage.

  The farther we went into the book, the more recent the pages became. I saw despots releasing poison gas upon their people and others; I saw torture raised to an art form in the dungeons of police states; I saw hordes starved by their rulers; I saw the ovens, the gibbets, the laboratories, the suicide bombers, the blowers-up of busses, the terrorists, the nihilists, and I heard the lip-smacking of that being in the pit that fed on it, all of it, including the souls of those who had committed the acts.

  And near the end of the book I saw the Spared Ones repeating every evil man had ever invented. One by one the pages opened with cries and shrieks and howls and an outpouring of terrible spirits that stank of hatred. One by one they were silenced and the page was ripped away. One by one the pages rose on the wind like fallen leaves and were burned to the accompaniment of a far off sound, as of chains broken or walls fallen, or great cages rent wide.

  We did not know what or where the captives were that held that book in place, but when the last page was burned, there was only silence in that place and the scritching feet of a small, skittering black thing that tried to escape from between the book covers and flee. I brushed it to the floor; Ialond hit it with his hammer; and Tamlar burned the place where it was squashed. She also took the pitcher of crawling evil that Bobly and Bab had collected.

  “I will put it in the earthfires,” she said. “Where it may stay forever, or as near as makes no difference.”

  Then we left the place, quickly, for Hussara, Volian, Wogalkish, and Tamlar told us they intended to clean all the valleys of Bastion from their center at Hold to the Walls of the Mountains, collapsing every cavern upon itself and flooding it until it was clean, and opening every cave at either end so Volian and Tamlar could blow through it and burn every musty corner clean and bare.

  Then dust rose in monstrous clouds that shut out the sun. Flames ran across the valleys. They found Gone’s habitation in Apocanew, and others like it elsewhere, but there was no other book. Span after span, the world shook and fires burned mightily, smoke and dust filling the air, until at last the wind came to blow it away and the rain poured down to settle it and put out the fires. When they were finished, the three valleys lay stricken before us, like vast open pit mines from the days before the Happening, all destroyed except for the fortress at the center of Hold, for it stood upon Tamlar’s mound where the Guardians took up residence.

  Only then, my other children arrived. The doctor soon found a new friend in Geshlin, the Gardener. She is very lovely and she knows a great deal about the use of herbs in medicine. She arrived almost immediately after the cleansing of Bastion along with Tchandbur of the Trees (whom we had seen briefly at the Battle of the Plain), and with Ushel, the dweller of the Wilderness, whose charge is the creation and maintenance of variety, botanical and zoological and, for all I know, viral and bacterial as well. With Tchandbur’s arrival, trees sprang up as though by…well, as though by the power of the small god. We would go to sleep seeing a barren one night and awaken to find it a forest the next morning. We have flowers and fruits everywhere.

  Befun, the Guardian of Animals, dropped by with Pierees and Falasti, beautiful women both, with voices like singing birds and falling water, Pierees to fill the trees with birds and Falasti to fill the streams with fishes. With the arrival of Rankivian, Shadua, and Yun, all twenty-one of us were together for the first time, and we celebrated the occasion with a feast. Shortly thereafter, Bastion was entered by a group of anchorites who, it seems, have been followers of Elnith for several generations. Ben, a student of the doctor’s, brought them to meet her, bringing a petition to build an abbey of the Silences on a forested hill in Praise. The anchorites take vows of silence, and even their meetings are silent. When Elnith attends their gatherings, I usually sleep through them.
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  With the rooting out of the devil Fell, and the restoring of Bastion to a natural and beautiful place to live, we were ready to start separating sheep and goats, which, with the not-quite-willing cooperation of the demons, seems to be going well. Whenever the demons try to tell us that there is no small god (much less any Real One) Dezmai and Michael sing them into stupefication and I, Elnith, silence them for hours at a time. They go on working with us, nonetheless, because they are intent upon finding out how we do this. We continually find them searching places we have been for signs of the device we have supposedly used, though they as consistently refuse to believe our explanations. To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn’t that sound familiar?

  After Alan rounded up the survivors from the redoubt, the Chasmites sent a group to meet with the fifty of us sleepers who are left. The Chasmites are indeed, direct descendants of pre-Happening survivor scientists who managed to keep track of the years since it happened. Strangely enough, they have kept themselves separate from the rest of humanity for almost the same reasons the small god gave us for separating the race. Their initial reasoning was that if science had been pushed, hard, in the century prior to the Happening, mankind would have had some way to avoid the catastrophe. I mentioned that the small god said she brought the asteroid because of what man had become, and they retorted that man might not have become that if we had been relentless in our education of our young people and had not perpetuated ignorance under the guise of cultural sensitivity and the politically correct.

  I warned the people from Chasm to be careful in their research and behavior, for any cruelty to people or animals might be met with violence from the Guardians. When I speak about the Guardians to the Chasmites, however, they tend to turn off and swing their eyes over my shoulder to focus on infinity. They have the same reaction to mention of the small god or the Real One. They have consistently refused to have a god contest, and I fear they will have to encounter the godlet rather forcibly before they believe there is anything there at all.