The person thumbing the bell looked seventy-ish, short, chunky, white-haired, tanned, wearing chinos, a checked shirt, and a troubled expression. When I cracked the door, she said, "Neils wouldn't be here, would he, dearie? But whether he is or not, I've got to show this to somebody!"
I protested. She shrugged me off and talked her way into the foyer where she spread the contents of her portfolio out on the only available table while she continued her monologue.
"Neils has known me for donkey's years. He's the one got me started on this fool hobby. Helped me build my first eye. Pretty good eye, too, not as good as the one I've got now. No gimmicks on it. No computer. Good for finding comets, though. I've found four, one of them named after me. Taught high school science and math for forty years; made me a masochist. Name's Selma, by the way. Selma Ornowsky. Where did you say Neils is?"
"Australia," I murmured, staring in fascination at the photographs piling up on the table before her. Each one had an area of space circled in white, seemingly the same area of space on each of them. "He's helping to design some kind of wide array they're putting up in the outback."
"Well, if they finish it in a hurry, maybe he can tell me what this is. There!" One stumpy finger pointed at the center of the marked circle. "That's the first one. Then these, on subsequent nights."
"I don't see anything," I said flatly, hoping discouragement might work where excuses hadn't.
"Of course you don't. You ought to see a cluster of five faint stars." She tossed down another photograph with five stars in the marked circle, then went back to the other ones. "You do see the three that border the cluster." She flipped down another photo. "And in this subsequent one, you see only one of the three. Then..." She flipped rapidly. "You don't see that one, and you don't see the two very faint little ones to the left, and as we come up to the present date, you don't see even more."
I scrunched up my face, trying to convey what was still a lukewarm interest at best. "Something occluding them?"
"That would be my supposition, yes. And since it's getting bigger and bigger, I would assume it's moving in this direction."
That got my attention, and I bent over the photographs, flipping them as she had done. It could be either something huge far out or something not so huge closer in. Of course, the area of sky included in the circle was tiny.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked her.
"Do what you're supposed to," she commanded. "I presume you're more than a mere receptionist? Yes? Got some experience in the field? There's a protocol to cover discoveries, isn't there? Get some confirmation! Get something bigger looking at it! I brought you everything I have..."
"How did you find it?" I asked, regarding the tiny patch of blackness in amazement.
"As I said. Masochism. I enjoy sitting there flipping sheets while I have my coffee, seeing what flickers at me. Usually it's some speck of light. This time it was some speck of dark. Thought for a minute I had something wrong with my eyes, but it's there, all right."
"I can get a message to Neils," I told her. "Since he knows you personally, he probably would want to know."
"Fine. You do that. My phone number's right there. When you get it figured out, call me. I'm not going to tell anybody about it. Tell Neils that. Tell him the news junkies won't find out from me..."
And she was out the door. Gone. A few moments later, I saw an aged red pickup truck headed down the mountain as I stood there puzzling over Selma's last words. Why would it matter if she told anyone? Then the implication kicked in, and I shook my head, trying to dislodge the idea. The thing is headed in our direction. At this point, the only interesting thing about this darkness is that it's headed toward us.
3
general gregor gowl turnaway
Of the three tribes which had settled Bastion—Comadors, Praisers, and Turnaways—the strongest leaders were found among the Turnaways. General Gregor Gowl, Perpetual Chair of the Regimic Council, was a Turnaway. He'd been a leader since his youth, born to dominance and to mischief, a stocky, strong boy well able to intimidate others. He often remarked that nobody could tell him what to do, which was true. Not a day went by without Gowl doing something he'd been told not to.
A crucial point in Gowl's development came at age ten, when he heard of a parade to be held at the nearby garrison, a dress rehearsal for the annual Muster of Bastion. He told his lackeys that no boy of spirit could hold his head up unless he witnessed this event and if they weren't weak baaing ewe sheep, they could see it if they skipped school and came with him.
No Bastion boy could bear to be called a ewe sheep, for reasons to do with ovine anatomy of which they were largely ignorant, so four of them, Banner, Skiffle, Brant, and little lopsided Fortrees—whom Gowl called the sand bur because he never gave up sticking to them, no matter how they pounded him—went on their bellies under the school back fence and cross country to the parade ground.
Gowl had already reconnoitered the garrison fence, finding a convenient hole behind a set of bleachers where someone had haphazardly stacked a pile of straw bales for the archery butts, which Gowl, who always had an eye toward his own safety, had already identified as usable cover. He did not, however, mention the possibility of being caught to the others. Instead, Gowl led them through the hole and lined them up under the bleachers with little Fortrees nearest the parade ground and himself nearest the stray bales, lying at his ease as the event began.
Prancing from the barracks ground at the far end of the field came a white horse bearing a white-clad officer with enough gold braid on him to sink a dinghy. His aides to either side bore his battle flags, unfaded and unmarred, for the previous general had made a non-aggression pact with the demons, and there'd been no forays or wars since.
The leader was followed by gray-clad officers on black horses, then by brown-clad, brown-horsed subordinate officers, then bowmen in black leather, bows across their shoulders, quivers at their backs, then lancemen with red sleeves and spear tips glittering; then blade fighters laden with swords and daggers. Last of all came the blue-clad engineers, sappers and builders, creators of bridges and siege engines, with their support wagons behind. The buglers let loose with a great blat of brass that made all the horses go on tiptoe until the drummers came in with a steady blam, blam, blam that settled the marchers into a clockwork pace and sent echoes caroming off the nearest mountains.
Staring at the commander on the white horse, Gowl said to nobody in particular, "I'm going to be like him!"
"Yeah, right," said Skiffle. "Not with your record at school you're not."
Gowl turned to aim a punch at his detractor, catching a glimpse as he did so of some functionary or other bearing down on them from the far side. "Look there," he whispered, pointing. The moment their heads were turned away from him, he moved between two large bales of straw and then sideways between two more that supported several overhead, becoming invisible in the instant.
The functionary was swift, and he had help arriving from another direction. Within moments they had four boys by whatever part was uppermost, and were marching them away toward the command post, where the four captives found that Gowl wasn't with them. Boyish honor, admirable, certainly, though quite often misguided, required they keep quiet about this. None of them bothered to consider what Gowl would have done if he were in their place. Gowl, as was his habit, was not in their place, which he considered only right. By the time the school director was notified of the charges against the captives, trespass being the least among them, Gowl had sneaked back to school and was sitting innocently in class.
A good deal of nefarious nonsense had taken place at the school recently (the largest part of it Gowl's doing), and the school director thought it time to make an example of malefactors. Skiffle, Banner, and Brant were given twenty stripes each in the school forecourt with the student body counting the lashes aloud, and little sand bur Fortrees (who had no mother, and whose father didn't consider him worth saving) was sent away for bottling. His w
ords to the demon who came to bottle him were, "Tell Gowl I didn't cry." The demon, though he chose not to deliver the message, took it upon himself to inquire into the matter, with results which surprised Gowl, though not until many years later.
This particular event gave Gowl his lifetime ambition. From that time on, his schoolwork improved because he kept one or two good students doing his work under threats of extreme injury. He also became increasingly adept at keeping layers of people between himself and any possible blame. He was going to be that man on the white horse, and he kept that purpose before him for three decades of his life as he rose to the rank of Over Colonel in charge of the Division of Defense. He postponed marriage until he could do so advantageously, at thirty-five, to Scilla, the twenty-year-old daughter of the Comador Clan Chief, on whom he thereafter begat a seemingly endless stream of daughters.
The general cultivated influential supporters, and it was one of these, the then-Warden of the College of Sorcery in Apocanew, who told Gowl of Hetman Gohdan Gone. An invaluable resource, the warden said, in helping others achieve their ambitions.
"Hetman Gone?" Gowl queried, brow furrowed, slightly annoyed at hearing a name he knew nothing of. "I've never heard of him!"
"Well, no reason you should, he's a lone, strange fellow," said the warden. "I wouldn't know of him except he invited me to his place. Not a well man, I'd say. Seldom goes out. Gout, maybe. Keeps his place hot as a furnace. I met him when he had some sorcerous materials that he wanted to donate to the college. It's the most extraordinary material, spells that really work, old grimoires, biographies of mages. Let me tell you, General, he had more of The Art in his hands than in all of Faience Museum! Eh!
"He told me to let him know if he could ever be of help to the Regime, eh? Now, putting you in charge of affairs would be of help to the Regime, wouldn't it?"
"Now how would he do that?" snarled Over Colonel Gowl. "The current general, my kinsman Thulger Turnaway, is still in good health and strong as an ox."
"Can't say," and the warden shrugged, laying a finger aside his nose and winking, reminding Gowl of Uncle Thulger's stinginess with funding for the College of Sorcery.
Gowl, via the warden, sent a letter of introduction to Hetman Gone, and later met with the gentleman in the sub-basement of some half derelict building not far from the Fortress. It was, as the warden had said, a strange place and the Hetman was a strange man, confined to an easy-chair in his overheated room, surrounded by artifacts of the most unusual and expensive kind, and served by a group of deformed and dwarfish men who should have been bottled at birth in the ordinary course of events.
Gowl was offered some savory tidbits of food and a glass of delicious drink. He and the Hetman talked about things in Bastion, and about Gowl's ambitions, though Gowl was not thereafter able to remember just how the subject had come up. He did remember, however, the lividity of the Hetman's skin, the intensity of his eyes reflecting the red glow of the fire, the peculiar liquidity with which Gone moved his arms coupled with the odd stiffness of his legs. Most of all, however, he remembered the charm of the man's voice and the silken offers that were made.
The Hetman offered magic. Magic that worked. If Gowl wished to take his uncles place, he had only to accomplish a certain rite, the directions for which were written out for him on an ancient sheet of parchment, and the Hetman could guarantee that Gowl would rise to the position of preeminence. Gowl took the parchment with eager fingers, glanced at it, then read it, trembling slightly. For a time he put it on his knees for his fingers seemed to have gone dead. In a moment more, however, he picked it up again, and when he left the Hetman's place, the parchment went with him.
Obtaining the necessary materials for the rite took some time. One does not walk out of one's house and find the left leg of a blind knife sharpener on any given corner. That item came via traders, from far off Mungria. When Gowl confessed this particular difficulty to the warden, that gentleman had some trouble keeping his face straight.
"You're laughing," Gowl had objected. "At what?"
"Well, you did it the hard way," the warden remarked. "It would have been easier to have the doctors blind a man here in Bastion, wouldn't it? Either a man who is now a knife sharpener, or one you would have assigned to be a knife sharpener before or after he was blinded."
Gowl hadn't thought of that. There were several other items on the list which he saw immediately could be expedited through similarly pro- or retroactive measures. Though a few surgeons declined to be helpful (unwisely, in terms of life expectancy), others were less difficult, and within two spans Gowl had the rest of the material needed, including the one item which should have been the most difficult but was actually closest at hand.
The rite was properly accomplished, and Gowl found its accomplishment strangely satisfying. There was a moment during it when he had felt a surge of power in his veins, an ecstacy of vigor that made him feel omnipotent. A few days later the feeling returned when General Thulger Turnaway fell dead in the marketplace. The feeling continued through all the subsequent machinations through which General Gregor Gowl Turnaway ascended to the post of General of the Regime.
Gowl's association with Hetman Gohdan Gone, begun with such felicity, continued. Many impediments to Gowl's ambitions were removed through spells provided by Gohdan Gone. Since the warden of the college, who had introduced Gowl to Gone, had been bottled immediately after Gowl had assumed power, the general believed no one else knew about the Hetman. In this belief Gowl was mistaken.
4
the cooper
Far north of Bastion, across mountain and desert and over the Yellowstone Sea, lay the pleasant land of Everday. Its capital city, Ginkerle-Pale, had been named for Henery Ginkerle and Nylan Pale, twenty-first century west-coast ship-builders who had been on a ship when the Happening occurred, a ship that had been washed up, along with many others, on what had previously been a landlocked highland, perhaps in Idaho or Montana. Though the world lay mostly in darkness at this time, a hole in the cloud blanket hung above this particular spit of ocean and its adjacent coast. The opening allowed the daylight to penetrate and at night admitted reflected light from an orbiting ring of ejecta, which led the refugees to name it Everday.
Though the climate had chilled considerably, the area was largely untouched by flood, fire, ashes, plague, or monsters, and the resident population, which was tiny, scattered, and very confused, found comfort and strength in the arrival of new people. Both residents and the accidental arrivals eagerly joined in doing whatever needed doing to guarantee their survival over the terrible years that followed when the hole in the cloud cover closed.
The country around had been agricultural. As the silos had been full of grain when the Happening occurred, as an enormous food repository from the former age lay nearby, and as a seemingly bottomless abyss had opened between this repository and any neighboring population to the east, the people of Everday were able to preserve themselves and their breeding stock throughout the dark years. Rarely totally covered, the skies in Everday were among the earliest to clear, and when the sun reemerged, the people began building their stocks of fertile seed and tilling their fallow fields. Throughout this time, almost all the new arrivals had continued to live on their ships.
When the skies had cleared more generally, the shipwrights set to sea with their sons and grandsons to explore the ruins of the great cities they had known before the Happening. Though the boats returned laden with salvage, those who manned them said the original monsters had grown great and were everywhere among the ruins. No culvert was empty of them, no pipe but contained a foully crusted rootiness that emerged squirming and oozing to grasp at whatever person might be near. Those who returned from the expedition recommended that their voyage be the last. To make sure that no future generation ignored this advice, all the ships not suitable for coastal fishing were sailed up-river as far as was possible and there dragged ashore to be converted into housing for the new hamlet of Shiplea.
r /> The people early adopted a township council system of governance for most matters, but they added the frippery of a king simply because they liked the idea of having one. There was little entertainment in Ever-day, and some of the settlers felt that a prolific royal family would guarantee a fountain of continuous merriment. Thereafter, the Everdayans concentrated on building, fanning, and enjoying the luxury of slow time and long sagacity spent in joyful celebration of living.
It was to this mellowed land that the sign of the Guardians came to Camwar Vestavrees, an unlikely recipient for any such distinction. If one named any forceful attribute, there were a myriad others who had more of it than Camwar. He was a simple, slender, brownish man with an easy walk and plain clothes. His eyes were his most noticeable feature, for when he felt wonder or delight, they glowed with an astonishing luminosity. Camwar earned his livelihood as a cooper. He loved wood: the slip of the plane along its surface, the mute curl of the shavings, the pure arc of a stave that knew itself to be perfect and needed no puffery. He had from time to time, under unique circumstances, loved one woman or another for similar attributes of quiet perfection, begetting upon several of them children of remarkable beauty. He was unaware of this, as his partners had in each case been married to men who quite properly considered that such beautiful children had to be their own.
Camwar had been born to a couple who managed a goat dairy and nut orchard some miles north of Ginkerle-Pale. During his second year of life, a sudden storm brought down a large nut tree directly upon the Vestavrees couple who had been working beneath it. Camwar's fathers body was found beneath the trunk, and it was assumed his mothers body had been washed into the river and away by the storm. After the crematory fires had died down, Camwar was adopted by his father's brother, a cooper well known for his fine kegs, barrels, watering troughs, and bathtubs.