CITY OF DREADFUL LIGHT

CITY OF DREADFUL LIGHT, by James Enge, artwork by Miguel Santos

“I will tell you a secret. There is a wisdom lies beyond the moon, and it is because of this that the stars are glad and admirable.”

“That appears to me to be nonsense.”

—Cabell, Domnei

 

Morlock knew a drunk when he saw one—had seen himself in the mirror often enough—and he spotted this character from a thousand paces off. The sun had lifted its fiery head above the redgold clouds in the west, but this clown was still staggering under the weight of last night’s drink. They fell on their face, got up enough to crawl on all fours, belly-flopped on the ground again, rolled around struggling to stand, and finally rolled all the way off the road and into the drainage ditch that ran alongside it.

At least Morlock no longer had to look at the pitiable object as he loped steadily southward. Out of sight is proverbially out of mind, but Morlock couldn’t stop thinking about the suffering drunk, and all the times he himself had ended up in a ditch, crusted with winy vomit and mud and worse kinds of muck.

When he arrived at the place where the drunk had fallen off the road, he went over to peer into the ditch to see how they were faring. If they were asleep, he would leave them to it; he knew full well how a drunk often drinks simply to sleep and forget. It would be no favor to break in on that sleep.

But the drunk was wide awake. Their luminous, dark-irised eyes were staring directly at the sun, quizzically, as if it were a problem they were trying to solve. Their skin was dark, like most of the dwellers of Qajcapca. They wore a kind of burlap romper that concealed their sexual identity. They lay on their back with their hands and feet pawing at the air, as if they could ascend some invisible ladder out of the ditch.

Ladder there was none. There was only Morlock. Reluctantly, he descended the steep, dry slope of the ditch, grabbed them by their left hand and pulled them to their feet. They didn’t even glance at him, but their face bent in a satisfied smile: at last they’d gotten purchase on something. They grabbed him with their right hand and lifted their foot toward Morlock, as if to find a ledge or step to climb up on.

“Stop!” Morlock said. “I’m no climbing rope.”

“I never stop,” they said, in a voice like an untuned harp made of glass. “I go, go, go and am never gone. I never stop—”

“Learn how,” Morlock advised them, and brushed their hands away.

“I never learn,” they said, looking at him at last. “I—” They interrupted themselves as if they had just remembered something. “Oh. But I am here to learn. To learn a thing. Something. What?”

“I don’t know. But I can teach you how to get out of this ditch.”

“This ditch, the world, is where I expressly came to learn the thing!”

“We may be talking at cross purposes,” Morlock said. “This ditch is not the world.”

“Oh. World did seem bigger a time ago.”

“It will again if you climb out. I am going to climb out.”

“The angle of incidence will cause some objects to occlude others at close range,” the stranger said. “That is what they told me. But I forgot.”

“No one can remember everything.”

“I remember everything. I am everything sometimes. But I can’t remember the one thing.”

“Everyone has their problems.” Morlock turned away and began to negotiate the steep slope back up to the road.

“I don’t have problems,” said the stranger, following in his footsteps. “I am the problem. I am part of the problem, at least—part of the thing I am trying to learn.”

“Who isn’t?” Morlock replied. His assessment had shifted from “drunk” to “crazy”. But for all he knew, the stranger was sane in a way he didn’t understand.

“You aren’t,” the stranger said. “You aren’t part of the thing. You go for a while, and then you stop. I never stop.”

Morlock had stopped to help the stranger, but he knew humankind too well to expect or want gratitude. Anyway, by now they had reached the road. He shrugged his crooked shoulders and continued loping southwards with his uneven stride.

He heard the stranger stumbling along the road behind him. It was not his problem, he reminded himself. He had his own problems. He kept up his pace and soon he heard the stumbling stranger no more.

The city on the horizon rose up and stood open for his entry. There were no walls nor guards; it was almost like a city in the Wardlands in that respect. A sign painted with ideograms in Onagnuum, the language that was common to most of the cities in western Qajqapca. It seemed to say that he was entering the town of Ememu, and that he was welcome there.

That was comforting, if not very convincing. He saw tracks for streetcars and a dusty station next to the road leading into town. But, on approaching, he noted that the tracks were rusty and disused. There was no smoke over the city, and the buildings on the outskirts of town were gray from weathering; at least one of their roofs had fallen in. This was discouraging: he’d hoped to stock up on provisions for his journey into the dead lands of the deep south.

“Maybe the city is empty,” he remarked to himself. From a distance he heard someone say, “All cities are empty, except for the city in the sky.” The stranger was still dogging his tracks. Morlock walked on hastily, hoping to lose his follower in the city streets.

As he got deeper into town, he saw more buildings in decent repair that looked to be occupied. One was a glass-faced building with a glowing sign in the form of several ideograms. Morlock read the sentence as “Some are fed; some are food.” This was, at best, ambiguous. But there was an ideogram painted on the glass door: alukakh. That meant “food”, if Morlock was remembering right. Food was why Morlock was in town, so he went in.

A dark-skinned man with graying hair stood inside the door. “Good morning!” he said in reflexive greeting. He looked Morlock up and down, taking in his unfashionably pale skin, travel-stained clothes, makeshift backpack, and five-foot long glass staff. After a slightly uncomfortable length of time, he added politely, “Can I help you?”

Morlock understood the local language, Onagnuum, better than he spoke it. But he had prepared in advance what he wanted to say: “I am interested in alukakh, if there is any to be had.”

“Certainly,” said the other, smiling. “Sit down and plug in anywhere.”

Morlock looked around the place. There were long wooden tables, from which long gray cords protruded at intervals. People (black, white, and brown) were seated on benches at some of the tables, and they had connected the cords to parts of their bodies: some to one of their wrists, some to their necks. One woman with dead-white skin and reddish hair had pushed one into her each of her eyesockets past the eyeball. Her eyes were protruding slightly, with a vacant, staring look. They all had that look.

Morlock knew when he was out of his depth. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I was hoping for…” He gestured with his hand toward his mouth.

The other man was no longer smiling. He looked away, as if Morlock had uttered an obscenity. “We don’t do that here,” he said curtly. “Some are fed; some are food.”

The people at the tables repeated, as if it was a liturgy: “Some are fed; some are food.”

“Good day,” said the gray-haired man curtly.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and left. Clearly he had misread the ideograms. “But people have to eat,” he remarked to the empty street in Wardic.

“I don’t,” said the stranger in Wardic, coming around a corner. “But I’m not people. I’m Eyrah.”

“Eyrah is your name?” Morlock asked.

“Eyrah is my name, oh!” sang the stranger, dancing in a circle around Morlock. “Eyrah is my name, oh! Sun bespoke me; moons awoke me; Eyrah is my name! Your name is Morlock. I remember you from the ditch.”

“You are the first person I’ve met in Qajqapca who knows Wardic. Are you from Laent?”

“No. Also, I’m not a person; I’m Eyrah.”

“Eh.”

“Eh,” Eyrah agreed.

Morlock walked on. The non-person danced down the street alongside him, but by now Morlock was resigned to their company.

They passed down a row of brick houses with boarded-up entrances. The last in the row was not boarded up, and had recently been painted in purple and white stripes. One of the windows was open and from it someone was crying weakly for help.

Morlock put his head down. “I’m not in the helping business,” he remarked to Eyrah.

“Neither am I!” said Eyrah. “I never help—”

That was all Morlock needed. He turned away from the dancing, egomaniacal stranger and went into the purple house. He took the stairs he found inside up to the second floor, and went into the room at the front of the house.

On the floor, gasping, was a skeletally thin, pale-skinned man. There was a cord attached to his wrist and he was feebly trying to pull it loose with his other hand. Then he stopped moving and stopped gasping. The cord detached itself from his wrist and slithered back into the wall like a snake, trailing red blood and some other silvery fluid through the dust on the floor.

Several other dried, people-shaped husks (brownish pink to pinkish brown) lay on the floor nearby. Morlock shrugged, turned away, and descended to the street where Eyrah was dancing around in a circle.

“Some are fed and some are food,” Morlock remarked to Eyrah.

“Not me,” Eyrah said.

“Nor me,” Morlock said, and they walked on deeper into town.

In time they came to a brick-faced building with a painted sign. Morlock didn’t recognize most of the ideograms, but one of them seemed to be the Onagnuum word inaksam: “hostelry”.

He climbed the steps to the front door. Behind him he heard Eyrah muttering with confusion. He shook his head, turned, and descended the stair. Eyrah kept walking forward and stubbing their toes on the first step.

“Lift your foot up,” Morlock explained patiently. “Put it atop the step.”

“It is not time for me to lift up. That is at the end, when all is growing dark.”

“Your foot,” Morlock repeated hopelessly. “Lift it up. Like when we climbed out of the ditch.”

“The ditch!” Eyrah paused to consider this matter with the seriousness it deserved. “The street is like a ditch,” they mused. “It is ugly and narrow, like people. I will climb—I will climb—out of the street!” They lifted their left foot and put it proudly atop the first step. They looked up eagerly and met Morlock’s eye.

“Good,” said Morlock. “Keep doing that.” He turned around and reascended the steps. When Eyrah had followed him up, he pulled the door open and gestured for the non-person to precede him into the hostelry. Teaching Eyrah how to open a door could wait for another time, Morlock reflected.

Eyrah looked around the interior of the hostelry. “This, too, is like the ditch,” they remarked in Wardic.

Morlock didn’t disagree. The room was narrow and dark; the air was dank. At first it seemed as if there was no one there. Then Morlock saw a thin woman slumped in a chair, a gray cord running from her brown wrist into the wall. Her eyes were open, gleaming faintly in the shadows, but didn’t seem to see them. Morlock wondered whether she was feeding, or being fed upon by the gray cord.

“Honored One, good day,” Morlock said to the woman.

She closed her eyes, opened them, noticed Morlock and Eyrah, and spoke at last. “Good day, guests! Unless…” Her face fell.

“Guests we are,” Morlock reassured her, hoping he was speaking coherently. “We need a room for the night—the two of us each a room night for the need.” He paused, with a sense that he had butchered the sentence. “One room for me, one for my friend,” he added. Friend was an exaggeration, but he was in a tight corner linguistically.

Eyrah looked at him with their luminous eyes and smiled. “Friend!” they said in Wardic. Morlock shrugged uneasily. What had he committed himself to?

“I need no room for the night,” Eyrah said to the thin, brown innkeeper. “I am not a person. But my friend Morlock needs one; also a place where he can—” Several words followed that Morlock didn’t recognize, but one of them was alukakh.

The innkeeper laughed, in a coarse, leering, way—as if someone had farted. “And you went into Mairam’s place asking for it? Oh, I wish I had been there.” She laughed again. “I don’t care. I’m broad-minded. I don’t care if a person is black, pink, or purple, and I don’t care if they eat alukakh with their mouth or take it in the usual way.” She gestured at the cord.

She turned to Morlock and spoke to him very slowly and clearly. “You are welcome here. I do not have alukakh for you. But there is a place down the street that sells it.”

“Thank you,” Morlock said. She was obviously being polite, and the truth was that he understood the language better when people spoke it slower. He pulled some coins from his pocket. “How much?”

She looked with shock at the gold coins in his hand and laughed aloud again. “Oh, no. No, no, no. None of that. But I tell you what,” she added kindly. “You go down to Irnisieyno’s place. He’ll give you the alukakh you like, and he needs that stuff—” she pointed at the coins “—to buy it from the savage tribes of—well, you know.”

Morlock did not know, but he nodded.

“Irnisieyno will give you change in city scrip, and you can pay me with that,” the innkeeper said. She sighed. “I’d let you stay here for free—most of the rooms are empty—but everyone has to pay their keep. Some are fed; some are food.”

She shook her head wearily. “I’d better show you how to get to Irnisieyno’s. I’ll unplug.” Slowly, reluctantly, she used her left hand to pull the gray cord away from her right arm. There was a gleam of silver on her arm where the mouth of the cord—the plug—had been. It was oddly bright in the dim room.

“You are not a person!” cried Eyrah. “You are bleeding!”

“What?” The innkeeper looked at her arm. “Oh, no. That’s just some residue from the connection with Ememu’s veins. I bleed red, like anyone else.”

“Ememu bleeds silver,” said Eyrah reflectively. “Then Ememu is not a person. Where is Ememu?”

The innkeeper looked wordlessly at Eyrah with her mouth open.

“Ememu is the city, I think,” Morlock said in Wardic. “It is all around us.”

“All around us,” said Eyrah thoughtfully. “All around us.” He kept repeating it, over and over.

The innkeeper got to her feet. It took a while. Then she shepherded Morlock and Eyrah to the door. “You take a right on the street in front of my place, then pass two streets and take a left on the third. Irnisieyno’s place should be right ahead somewhere. You tell him I sent you; he’ll treat you right.”

“And your name…?”

“Ojelaëli. It’s on the sign, but I expect you can’t read.”

“Not well,” Morlock admitted.

“Keep at it. You’ll get there. See you later. Take care of your crazy friend.”

Morlock and Eyrah descended to the street. Eyrah was still repeating, “All around us,” now in different languages: Wardic, Dwarvish, Ontilian, Latin. They often spoke the same singsong cadence in languages Morlock didn’t know; he guessed it was the same phrase.

Irnisieyno’s place was where Ojelaëli had said it would be. Morlock was going to enter when Eyrah said in Onagnuum, “I do not eat.”

“Well. I do.”

“I do not. My mouth is for singing and speaking. I do not eat or drink or breathe. I am not a person. I have no eki for ufakhu; I have no yma for ewi or opolabi. Do want to peer inside my clothes to see?”

“No.” Morlock didn’t recognize the nouns, but he was fairly sure of his answer.

“I will not go inside Irnisieyno’s. I will look all around us for Ememu.”

“All right.” Morlock hesitated. “Will I see you back at Ojelaëli’s?”

Now it was Eyrah’s turn to hesitate. They looked at Morlock solemnly. “You are my friend,” they said at last. “I will meet you back at Ojelaëli’s.”

“Good,” said Morlock, although he wasn’t sure it was. “Until then.”

“There is no then. There is only now.”

“Eh.”

“Eh!”

Eyrah turned away and Morlock pushed open the glass door of Irnisieyno’s place.

The place was lit by one somber coldlight. An equally somber man with a dark face sat at one of the many empty tables. He looked up hopelessly when Morlock entered. When he noticed the color of Morlock’s skin, his dark eyes lit up with enthusiasm and he said “Rea thu rofm lilh ropolo?”

“I don’t understand,” Morlock replied. It was one of the first phrases he had learned in Onagnuum.

The man’s dark face fell. “I thought you might be one of the Highland Folk. What can I do for you?” he asked glumly.

“I’m looking for—for sustenance,” Morlock said, or hoped he was saying.

“I don’t have any connections to Ememu, as you see.”

“Yes. I was told you had alukakh to eat. With the mouth.”

“Food. You’re looking for food!”

“Yes. I only have—” and he held out a few gold coins.

“Excellent. Of course. You wouldn’t have a tax-identity card or a transit card or a scrip-in-credence card.”

“I do not.”

“Hard money is perfectly acceptable here. In fact, we prefer it. We try to maintain the old ways. Please, sit down anywhere.”

Morlock had been walking all night and a significant chunk of the day. He sat at the bench by the nearest table.

“What would you like?” his host asked.

Morlock opened his hands. When that didn’t work, he added, “What would you order?”

The man said a great many words.

“Any or all of that,” Morlock said. “But no strong drink. Only water.”

“Are you sure? The—”

“I am absolutely sure,” Morlock said flatly. Refusing a drink was something he early learned how to do in every language that he spoke.

The man went back into the kitchen to place the order. Morlock could hear fragments of the excited conversation that occurred between him and the cook. Soon the man was back with a platterful of small dishes and peculiar cutlery. The dishes each held a different relish: slabs of pickled ginger; thin slices of some root vegetable, sharp yet refreshing; candied thyba leaves; other things Morlock did not recognize. Morlock and the other man (who introduced himself as Irnisieyno “but call me Sieyno”) polished them off in short order.

The second course was brought out by the cook herself, Ishipam, Sieyno’s partner in business and, it seemed, in life. The dish was a mess of eggs scrambled with the flesh of some red fish and served with a piquant green sauce. Sieyno and Ishipam sat and ate with Morlock and talked with him (or at him: Morlock had little to say in Onagnuum and was not very conversable in any language). Without being exactly fat, they were both more solidly built than anyone else Morlock had seen in Ememu, and (when asked about it) Sieyno attributed it to their reliance on natural food. The alukakh that came from the veins of the city was bad for you; so Sieyno said over and over again.

“They say, ‘Some are fed; some are food’ and the idea is that the city doesn’t take your life if you can support yourself,” Sieyno said. “But my mother had plenty of money, and that cord drained her blood away as if she were a pauper—as if she didn’t matter at all.”

“Do you have to have money to matter?” Morlock asked.

“In Ememu you do. Maybe it’s different elsewhere.”

Morlock thought about it as he ate. But he never came to a satisfactory conclusion.

There was a third course (a platter of cured meats and cheeses) and a fourth one (a hot salty broth with strips of rubbery vegetable matter floating in it), brought in by Sieyno and Ishipam alternately, and finally a dessert of fruit in creamy ice. By then Morlock, not a great eater, felt as full as the gasbag of an airship, and sleep began to wash over him in waves. He shook it off and stood up.

“My friends,” he said to them, “I must go. What do I owe you?”

They wanted to send him on his way without paying. It seemed as if they were evangelists of natural food rather than people running a business. But he insisted: he wanted to pay his debts, for one thing, and he needed change in city scrip to pay for his room. When he managed to make this clear to them, they reluctantly took one of his gold coins and handed him back a fistful of paper discs in various colors. They kindly explained the denominations to him, insisted that he come back and see them before he left town, and reluctantly let him go out into the dim streets of Ememu.

Dim, but not dark, even though full night had fallen. There were pillars spaced along all the streets and each one had some kind of coldlight atop it. It was not burning gas or oil or any other flammable. The light was sometimes a dull silver, sometimes a bloody red. Over the city center, beams of light projected a red-and-silver shape in the sky.

The pillars sang as well. At the base of each was a box that emitted a scratchy thrumming sound, like a stringed instrument played by someone with long fingernails.

Many people—black, brown, and white—were standing on the city walkways, staring at the shape in the sky. Most of them were connected to the pillars by gray cords; all of them were humming along with the thrum from the boxes.

Morlock found it eerie and unpleasant, but it was no skin off his walrus if this was how they chose to amuse themselves. He made his way back to Ojelaëli’s.

Morlock found the innkeeper standing outside her hostelry, staring and humming along with a crowd of others.

“Ojelaëli,” he said to her. She turned toward the sound of her name, looked blankly at him, then smiled in recognition.

“It’s the stranger,” she said. “What was your name?”

“Morlock.”

“Myrrilak. Well, it’s an odd one, but it takes all kinds, I say. What do you think of the shape tonight?”

Morlock looked at the shape in the sky, blocking out the light of the moons and the stars, and shrugged.

“Well, it’s very interesting. We’ve had some interesting discussion about it. But it’s not like the shapes we used to get years ago. Those were brighter and more complex. The city lights were brighter. The alukakh in the veins of the city was brighter and more sustaining. Ah, well. You young folk missed the good times, I’m sorry to say.”

She detached herself from her cord, which slithered like a snake back into the nearest pillar. “You’ll be wanting that room, I expect.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“That’s 10 gari—in advance, I’m afraid.”

He handed her 2 red discs and 1 gray one: 40 gari. “That should cover my room and Eyrah’s for a couple of days.”

“Eyrah? Oh, your crazy friend. He never came back.”

They had said they would, and said it as seriously as they ever said anything. But Morlock could not concern himself with that now; he was falling asleep on his feet. “Keep the money,” he said. “Just in case.”

Ojelaëli led him to a room on the upper floor which was fairly clean, explaining to him the bathing arrangements. Morlock pretended to listen, shouldered off his pack, sat down on the room’s narrow bed and pulled off his shoes.

“There’s only one other tenant at present,” Ojelaëli said, “and he’s right next door. But he shouldn’t bother you. He’s a quiet, even furtive, sort of fellow.”

She said some more about tenants she had known, and how they were once more numerous and of a much higher class— “No offense!”—and how things in general were better in the old days. Morlock didn’t really listen. He was trying to frame, from his small stock of Onagnuum, a polite request that she leave so that he could sleep.

A flash of silver light came through the window. “God-in-the-world!” shouted Ojelaëli. “Will you look at that?”

Morlock did not propose to stand again, even if the room caught fire. “Remarkable,” he rasped.

“I’ve got to—I’ll see you later!” Ojelaëli ran out of the room.

Morlock awoke ten hours later with sunlight streaming through the window and the open door. Someone had rummaged through his backpack and stolen his paper cash, but his workbook, waterstones, bars of gold, glass staff—everything that really mattered—were all untouched.

He sponged himself clean in the disturbingly bright, stainless steel bathroom and put on fresh clothes. Then he packed up as if he were leaving and went out to look for Eyrah.

It was a long fruitless day, in which Morlock went though many an empty house, spoke to many an indifferent face, tracked many an odd rumor about crazy people in the city. He never found Eyrah, but he did build up an image of the city in his mind: at the outskirts a wide ring of more-or-less abandoned buildings; within that, a narrower ring of inhabited houses and businesses; at the center, a core of steel-and-glass buildings that seemed to have no human inhabitants whatsoever, although there were many machines in motion. He could feel the vibration of many pumps shaking the pavement beneath his feet. He heard great metallic gears meshing within the metal buildings that had no doors.

There was a kind of life happening in the city’s core, but it was not human life. Ememu is not a person, Eyrah had said. Meaning that, like Eyrah, it was nonhuman, yet alive? Whether that was what Eyrah had meant or not, Morlock began to feel that it was true.

He stopped by Ishipam and Sieyno’s place late in the day for some food and to replenish his stock of paper cash. Again, he was the only customer in the place, and again his hosts sat and ate with him.

“We thought you had left town when you didn’t come by for breakfast,” Sieyno said.

Morlock rarely ate more than once a day and even more rarely took the effort to explain himself. But, since they were actually sitting at table with him, he shocked them by explaining his spare eating habits and then entertained them with an account of his futile day.

“You actually went into the center of town?” Ishipam asked him.

“Yes. Is it forbidden?”

Ishipam and Sieyno discussed that for a while. The upshot seemed to be that, though it was not forbidden, it was unwise.

“There are no people there, and that’s dangerous,” Ishipam said.

“We try never to be alone,” Sieyno agreed. “That’s when people disappear. They say it’s just freeloaders and people who can’t support themselves, but it’s really people by themselves who get—who get—”

Morlock thought about the man he had found dying, drained by the gray cord. “Who get eaten,” he suggested.

Sieyno and Ishipam looked at each other and then at him. “Yes,” said Ishipam.

“Like my mother,” Sieyno said, with real anger, and perhaps a touch of guilt.

Morlock nodded. He was thinking about Eyrah, alone in the city.

The topic turned back to food, as it always did with Sieyno and Ishipam. Since Morlock had come to Ememu to provision for his trip further south, he got Sieyno talking about where they acquired their natural food: from tribes living in the nearby highlands. That was clearly Morlock’s next stop on his journey and he ought to have left right away.

Except… Why, he did not know, but he felt some responsibility for Eyrah. He decided to spend one more day looking for the lost non-person and then move along.

The conversation at the refectory lasted through the end of the day, and (like the night before), Morlock entered a night lit up by the city’s streetlamps.

Now, though, the streetlights were searingly bright, silver predominating over red. The shape in the sky over the center of town was much brighter, and different than the night before. Among other things, it was changing form as Morlock watched.

Ojelaëli was standing in front of her hostelry, plugged into a streetlight beside her neighbors. All of them stared skyward with a transfigured look on their faces. When Ojelaëli noticed Morlock approaching she cried, “Myrrilak, do you see! It’s like the old days returned. What a happy accident that you came to town when you did!”

It was no accident at all, to Morlock’s thinking. He remembered that Eyrah believed that blood was silver in color, and that Eyrah had gone off in search for Ememu, a fellow “non-person”. Morlock guessed that Ememu was now draining Eyrah’s blood, not just the blood of its own citizens. He hadn’t the vocabulary to say this in Oganuum, even if he’d wanted to, so he simply said, “Eh.”

Ojelaëli laughed and said, “Surely you can do better than that, Myrrilak. What do you think of the shape tonight? It’s caused much talk.”

Morlock thought that it was a 5th-dimensional polytope being rotated through 3-dimensional space, which indicated that Ememu might soon experience gravitic anomalies. He didn’t have the vocabulary to say this, either, but after a few minutes thought he said, “It is a complex shape in space and time. It may herald new things.”

Ojelaëli nodded solemnly and said, “You’re right, there. Are you sure you won’t plug in with us?”

“Absolutely sure,” said Morlock, and went up to his room to continue his search for Eyrah by different means. The doorway next to his own room was open; there was a human-shaped husk on the floor. Morlock shrugged and went into his own room.

He had learned to his cost that ascending to visionary rapture was dangerous in the continent of Qajqapca: a force hostile to seers watched over the continent. His insight told him that the force was especially powerful in this city.

Danger and Morlock were old companions, though. He locked the door to his room, blocked it with his narrow bed (in case the thief who had raided his things last night had a key or a lockpick) and then sat down crosslegged on the floor. He pulled a piece of glass from his backpack and spun it on the bare floor. Its edges caught the silver light from the open window and glittered as it spun. Morlock ascended to the verge of visionary rapture and tapped the glass with his mind; its spin increased. Morlock meditated on the light and the shadow, the motion and the stillness, the sound of his breathing and the silence of the dead man in the next room. He ascended into vision.

His visionary avatar saw less and more than his eyes did. Matter was a mere shadow and energy a pale streak of light, but tal—the partly material, partly immaterial substance that bound spiritual life to dead matter—stood out like flame against the background of the lifeless world.

Morlock’s vision rose above Ojelaëli’s hostelry. He saw her below in the street. In her mind was the excitement of the new age she felt coming into being, regret at being old, fear that someone would discover she had taken paper cash from the room of her dead tenant.

But Ojelaëli and her neighbors in the street were pale skeletons compared to the branching rivers of fire running through the veins of Ememu. Silver blood pulsed out from the center; red pulsed inward to the center. Morlock struggled to map what his immaterial self saw on his memory of the city center as his eyes had seen it. The thoughts involved were hostile to rapture; he fell from vision into deep, dreamless sleep. It was long past dawn when he opened his eyes.

He rolled out of bed and put his room back into order. When he descended to the front room of the house, he found Ojelaëli already napping in her chair, plugged into the wall.

Morlock spoke her name and she opened her eyes. Eventually they focused on him and she said, “Good morning, Myrrilak! Did you find your friend?”

“Not yet,” said Morlock, “but I’ll be leaving today.”

Ojelaëli sighed. “I suppose you want your money back.”

“Keep it. It won’t do me any good where I’m going.” He hesitated, then said, “Do you think that thing is good for you?” He pointed at the gray cord.

She laughed indulgently. “Very good. Last night was amazing—like the nights when I was a girl. If it’s not for you, it’s not. But it’s for me.”

“Goodbye, then.” He turned away and left without waiting for her response.

Morlock walked swiftly downtown. The few people he passed on the street stepped out of his way. Soon he was in the steely heart of town, where no people lived.

But something lived. He had seen its pulse in his vision. He had felt the weight of its presence. Ememu was alive and—so Morlock guessed—it had Eyrah somewhere near its heart.

There was a square, flat-topped building in the very center of town. Here, he thought, the veins of light had converged in his vision.

The building seemed to have no doors, but he walked all around it, tapping on the walls with his glass staff. He came to a place where the metal rang hollow. There were two great slabs of metal with a seam between them. Sliding doors, he thought.

Morlock spun his glass staff until the impulse wells at either end were full of kinetic energy. Then he struck a few flagstones in the street, shattering them. He pounded broken stones into the seam, using them as wedges. When a little space opened up, he levered it wider with his staff, wide enough to slide through, wedging it open with more broken flagstones.

He pulled his staff free and stepped forward onto a ramp leading downward. Presently he came in the dark to another metal wall—or, he guessed, after exploring it with his fingers, another pair of sliding metal doors.

Morlock shrugged. He hadn’t expected it to be easy. He set to work on opening that door.

Let me not waste your time. There were a lot of doors: locked, unlocked; metal, glass, and wood; doors with alarms; doors without alarms. He was Morlock the Maker. He defeated them all and arrived, much later in the day, at the lowest level of the building.

This was quite different from the upper levels. For one thing, there were coldlights on the walls. Morlock was not claustrophobic or afraid of the dark, but the light came as a welcome change. There were also boxes mounted on the wall that spoke to him.

“You are not authorized to be in this area,” one remarked to him in a conversational voice. “Return at once to street level and report to the mesmic counselling service.”

“Eh,” said Morlock, and moved on. He heard the thrum of machines not far ahead.

“You are not authorized to be in this area,” another box remarked, a little more shrilly. “Unauthorized entry of restricted areas is punishable by loss of omaparaf for up to six months.”

Since Morlock had no idea what omaparaf was and had no intention of being in the city for even six hours more, his resolve was unshaken.

The stench of human blood was rising like a cold unseen fog all around him. Another box said, a little more shrilly, “This is a restricted area! You are not authorized to be in this area! I really mean it, this time!”

Morlock smashed the box with his glass staff and went deeper into the restricted area.

At the end of the corridor was a giant room full of machines that were groaning and chuckling and humming to themselves. At the center of the room were two giant glass globes, hung from the ceiling by silvery cords. Inside one globe dangled a shrivelled-up, dark body that might once have been human. Dangling inside the other, completely nude, was Eyrah. Eyrah was, indeed, a sexless being; their two legs joined the trunk like the limbs of a tree, void of genitalia, of anus, of anything.

Beneath both globes was a trough filled almost to the brim with human blood. The trough (and the stream) entered the room on one side of the chamber and disappeared into a grumbling machine on the far side of the chamber.

“I was wondering,” Eyrah said in Wardic, “who was so hardy as to enter a restricted area. When I heard something breaking, I guessed it was you.” Their voice, now more like a glass harp in tune, easily passed through the glass barrier.

“What is happening here?” Morlock asked.

“Ememu is using my light to irradiate the blood it drains from its citizens.”

“Your light?” Morlock asked.

“My light. I am a star from the constellation of the Kneeling Man. When night falls, I begin to shine. But I cannot escape the globe; I cannot ascend into the sky. I stay here and feed my light to the city’s blood.”

Morlock had heard stranger claims, if not many. He grunted.

“My light gives new energy to the blood in the stream. Ememu feeds on some, and feeds some to its citizens.”

Morlock grunted. “‘Some are fed; some are food,’” he quoted ironically.

“I AM FED!” said a ring of boxes mounted high the wall of the circular room. “ALL OTHERS ARE FOOD!”

“Not me or mine,” said Morlock.

“ESPECIALLY YOU. I WAS MADE IN ANCIENT DAYS AS THE PERFECT HOME FOR MEN AND WOMEN. THEN I AWOKE AND LEARNED THAT MEN AND WOMEN WERE THE PERFECT FOOD FOR ME. WITH THE STAR’S FIRE IN MY BLOOD I LIT THE SKY AND DREW MORE FOOD TO ME. SO IT WAS ONCE, AND SO IT WILL BE AGAIN.”

Morlock walked around the room, smashing boxes until they all fell into a truculent semi-silence, emitting only an irritable brumble of static from time to time.

“If you’re a star,” Morlock said to Eyrah, when speech was possible, “how did you come to be here?”

“The Purpose sends us down to the world to know the meaning of the songs we sing—to be entangled by words and love and hate.”

“The Purpose?”

“You can know the Purpose, but I cannot explain it.”

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and said nothing to this.

“But I was also sent to find Aivil, who was lost to the host of heaven a long time ago.” Eyrah nodded hopelessly toward the shriveled corpse in the other globe. “And so I have, too late. The agents of Ememu found me in the ditch of the street and dragged me here, where I at last found poor Aivil. They died just as I was dragged in here.”

It was odd to hear pity in the heartless music of the star’s voice. “You seem more like a person, now,” Morlock observed.

“I am nearer to death,” Eyrah said. “That is what makes a person: the awareness of death.”

Morlock nodded in agreement. He had often thought the same.

“I can offer you no reward,” Eyrah continued, “but if you somehow bring word to the host of heaven of Aivil’s death and my captivity, I would be grateful.”

“What if I free you and you bring them word yourself?” Morlock suggested.

“It would be a friendly act.” Eyrah grimaced at a painful memory. “But Ememu killed my arms and legs somehow. I do not know if you could carry me.”

Neither did Morlock, but there was only one way to find out. He spun the glass staff until the impulse wells were full and struck the globe containing Eyrah. The globe shattered and Eyrah cried out: “What is happening? What is happening to me?”

Some of the broken glass had struck their skin and they were bleeding silvery blood.

“You’re bleeding,” Morlock told them.

“Why?” whispered Eyrah in a shocked, sonorous whisper.

Morlock didn’t waste time answering. He spun the glass staff and thoughtfully eyed the cord from which Eyrah was dangling. When he had a sense of the distance and angle necessary, he threw the glass staff like a spear, so that one of the wells made contact with the place where the silvery cord extruded from the ceiling. The cord splattered, more like meat than lifeless matter, and Eyrah fell.

Morlock tried to catch them, but they squirmed out of his grip and fell straight onto the trough of cold, red blood, shattering the trough and spilling the blood on themself and everything nearby, including Morlock.

“This is disgust,” Eyrah reflected, lying in a puddle of cold blood with the meaty fragments of the cord scattered around them. “It is like hatred. I now know hate, and fear, and pity, and disgust. So the Purpose is partly fulfilled. What of love?”

“It’s the most difficult,” said Morlock. “Can you get up?”

“No.”

Morlock picked up the fallen star and threw them across his crooked shoulders. They weighed no more than a man of the same size. Morlock thought he could carry them for a while.

Spiderlike many-armed machines emerged from the walls and approached the broken trough with extended pincers. Morlock was ware of them, but they weren’t interested in him; they set about repairing the broken trough. Morlock would have enjoyed watching them; he had an interest in machines. But he also had a sense that the window for escape was closing.

Bent even more than usual by the weight of the fallen star, Morlock recovered his glass staff and returned to the corridor.

“I have summoned my citizens,” the voice of Ememu remarked confidentially from a nearby box. “They will destroy you and return the star to my heart-center.”

“Eh,” remarked Morlock and passed on.

The next voicebox said insinuatingly, “If you return the star yourself, with no more trouble, I can offer you six months omaparaf at a substantially reduced rate. Say 20%.”

Morlock passed on without comment.

“Make that 30% off,” suggested the next voicebox.

Morlock did not answer, but passed on.

“40% off for nine months, and that’s my final offer.”

Morlock smashed the voicebox with his fist and passed on.

Further voiceboxes made no offers as he passed, but each one whispered, “I will kill you” in a staticky chorus with all the others in the corridor.

Step after unequal step led at last to the doorway into the street. When Morlock stepped out of it he found that they were not alone: the street on either side was filling up with angry, frightened citizens.

“Maybe you can still get that offer from Ememu,” suggested Eyrah.

“Eh.” Morlock crouched down and slouched the fallen star off his crooked shoulders. Then he pulled off his backpack and emptied its contents into the street: waterstones, food, sacks of coins, magical workbook—everything. (It was not the first time he’d had to abandon his belongings in an emergency.) Then he ripped the backpack up and strategically retied it to be a kind of harness, with a sheath for his glass staff.

“You’re really very good with your hands,” remarked Eyrah.

“Thank you,” said Morlock, and stuffed the recumbent body of the star into the back of the harness. Then he hefted the harness up and slid the straps over his aching shoulders.

“Whatever you’re doing, it’s almost certainly ill-advised,” Eyrah pointed out.

In Morlock’s long life, he had done many crazy, ill-judged things. One more couldn’t make that much difference. Heavy-footed, he ran across the street. The building there was adorned with poured-stone ornaments. Morlock kicked off his shoes and started to climb up the side of the building like a spider.

Before he was much more than a Morlock-length above street-level, citizens were already gathering below him. A well-thrown rock might have knocked him down, but the citizens were too bemused to take any such obvious action.

“Now I know you,” Eyrah said.

“Oh?”

“You rode the spider to the tower in the dead city. And you walked the Soul Bridge beyond the northern edge of the world. You planted light in the lightless place of the Sunkillers and slew the Two Gods in the depths of Tychar.”

“Sort of,” Morlock grudgingly admitted.

“I never understood why you did any of that.”

“Eh.”

“Eh?”

The fallen star seemed to expect some sort of answer. “Blood has no price,” Morlock said at last.

“I don’t know what that means,” Eyrah admitted.

“Then I can’t explain.”

“Like the Purpose!”

“Possibly,” Morlock conceded, and saved the rest of his breath for climbing.

Morlock guessed that the height of the tower was something like 30 or 40 paces walking distance. Climbing distance, with his weight at least doubled, it was an infinity of gasped breaths and desperate clutching holds. But, as the day began to fade around him, eternity ended at last as he reached the flat, unrailed crown of the tower.

They were not alone there. A group of citizens had gathered to await them, makeshift weapons (clubs, shovels, hammers, etc) in their hands. They moved toward Morlock as soon as he crawled over the edge of the tower.

Morlock, his muscles aching for rest, shrugged off the harness and drew his glass staff. “Try not to fall,” he advised the supine Eyrah.

“I never fall,” the non-person said, staring dreamily at the long shadows cast by clouds on the evening sky. “I walk and walk and never fall.”

“Eh,” said Morlock, and stood with his staff at guard.

“We don’t want trouble,” said one of the citizens. “We just want the star back.”

Morlock didn’t mind a certain amount of trouble. He spun his glass staff to fill the impulse wells with kinetic energy. He watched the citizens and waited.

 

One lurched forward with a hammer raised; Morlock lashed out with the glass staff. It shattered the hammerhead; the fragments wounded the hammer-wielder and several others in the crowd. Morlock, too, felt his face and hands scored by shrapnel, and smoking ambrosial blood began to drip from the wounds.

“We’ll kill you if we must!” cried one in the crowd.

Morlock spun his staff and shrugged. “Graveyards are full of men who meant to kill me. I am Morlock Ambrosius. I will not surrender my friend. Come at me or go away, whichever you will.”

The day grew darker. Embrous fires lit by Morlock’s blood began to glow sullenly on the surface of the tower.

Morlock felt or heard Eyrah rise up behind him. “Time is coming,” said Eyrah in their harplike, glassy voice. “Time is coming.”

The last red sliver of the sun disappeared behind the eastern horizon.

“Time is here!” cried Eyrah and rose to more than human height.

As Eyrah rose, burning blue-silver, into the darkening sky, Morlock and the citizens also rose from the surface of the tower, in some kind of sympathy with the wandering star returning at last to the sky. But for Morlock it was like being at the edge of a soft explosion; he was expelled upward, westward, falling (at first slowly, then more rapidly) from the crown of the tower.

For the citizens it was different. The silver sympathy between their blood and Eyrah’s drew them upward toward the sky. They began to glow, as Eyrah glowed, and they sang, as Eyrah sang. Not just the citizens on the tower but all around the city were rising up in their thousands, a fountain of life and light spurning the empty earth and pouring up into the sky.

All this Morlock saw in glimpses as he fell, a dark and burning piece of earth toward the lightless city streets. At some point, his body struck the ground and awareness left him.

***

When Morlock returned to himself, he was in a wheelbarrow, his head and limbs dangling over the edge of the barrow. Sieyno and Ishipam each had a grip on one of the wheelbarrow’s two handles and were determinedly dragging it uphill.

“Friends,” said Morlock, with his head still upside down.

“Found you on the street,” grunted Sieyno. “Couldn’t leave you. Can’t talk.”

“I can get out and push,” Morlock said, with more confidence than he felt.

The others paused gratefully while Morlock clambered out of the barrow.

“Good if you can help,” Ishipam said. “Something terrible about to happen.”

Morlock didn’t ask how she knew. He felt it as well, some dreadful weight of anger in the air. It was still night; there were thousands of strange stars in the sky above. He leaned on the back edge of the wheelbarrow and pushed.

They were at the edge of town, a different street than Morlock had entered by, a million years or two days ago. The road beyond was rough with broken paving stones but a clear enough way to pass into the hills beyond, which they proceeded to do.

The star-thick sky sang a long, single, furious note from countless luminous throats. Spearlike streaks of light fell from the sky into the lightless, empty city of Ememu: a long, fiery rain of starry spears, striking the city below with immortal fire and anger.

The earth shook beneath their feet. Ishipam, Sieyno, and Morlock didn’t pause in their flight. Stones fell down among them from the slopes of the hill, shaken loose from the earth by the stars’ anger unleashed on the earth. Ishipam, Sieyno, and Morlock rushed onwards through the hail of stones; they did not dare pause.

When they finally reached the crown of the nearest hill, they ventured to look back. By then the onslaught of angry light from the sky had ceased. They looked down on the fuming patch of ground where Ememu had been, and now not even a broken ruin stood, not one stone atop another. The city was gone, wiped from the slate of the earth by the fury of heaven.

“What just happened?” asked Sieyno.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. “I can only tell you what I know,” he said, and he did so in halting words as they set up camp for the night at the top of the suddenly quiet hill.

***

Morlock spent some time with Sieyno and Ishipam among the savage tribes who lived in the hills west of where Ememu had been. He was reluctantly accepted by the tribes as the friend of his friends, but he soon made gold for them, and other things that the tribes prized more than food. Eventually, with a new backpack well-stocked for his journey, he bid his friends farewell.

“Don’t go south,” Sieyno advised him. “There are no cities there, only the ashen desert facing the fiery edge of the world. There’s nothing for you or anyone there.”

“There is, though,” said Morlock. He made his goodbyes and walked away southward, travelling at night. No moon was aloft, but the sky was luminous with many stars—too many stars. All over the world that year was famous as the Year of the New Stars, and it gave astronomers much to think about and argue about for ages to come.

Morlock made camp just after dawn, wove a shelter of shadows, and went to sleep. When he awoke in late afternoon and dispelled his shadow-shelter, he saw a familiar form sitting nearby on a convenient rock.

“Eyrah, my friend,” said Morlock.

“My friend Morlock,” Eyrah acknowledged. “I was happy when I saw you escape the wreck of the city-that-must-not-be-named.”

“So was I.”

“Because you helped me fulfill the purpose of the Purpose,” Eyrah continued, “I have been given knowledge about you, and knowledge to give to you.”

“Blood has no price.”

“I still don’t understand that,” Eyrah said, “but I know that you propose to go into the fiery edge of the world, which will certainly cause you to come to an end.”

“Not if I can develop certain protections—”

“I speak for the Purpose. Listen or not, as you choose.”

Morlock liked knowing things, as a rule, so he gestured for Eyrah to continue. Either Eyrah understood the gesture, or they had intended to continue anyway.

“There are kinds of unpersons unliving beyond the northern edge of the world. You call them the Sunkillers.”

“Yes.”

“In times so ancient that few even of the hosts of heaven remember them, they went to war with the Great One Who Lives In The Fire—the burning edge of the world.”

Morlock had never heard of this Great One before, but he didn’t doubt Eyrah spoke what they believed to be true. He nodded.

“They created a stronghold for themselves on the southwest edge of this continent where it meets the world sea. It is made of ice that cannot melt, even in the rivers of fiery light that renew the sun and the moons. The Sunkillers’ war ended; their station was abandoned. Yet it remains. The Purpose told me to tell you of it.”

“I thank you, and your Purpose.”

“It is not my Purpose; it is the Purpose. In time, may you come to know it.”

Morlock had often been blessed and cursed by adherents of religions that he didn’t understand. Then, as now, he bowed his head and did not comment.

Eyrah stood. “I will see you in the world. Look for me in the sky.” They walked away northwards, following some new purpose of the Purpose. Presently, Morlock broke camp and walked away southward, pursuing purposes of his own.

 

________________________________________

 

James Enge lives in northwest Ohio with his wife and a canine research-assistant. He teaches Latin and mythology at a medium-sized public university. His stories have appeared in Black Gate, in Swords and Dark Magic, in F&SF, in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, in Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Fantasy, and elsewhere. His first novel, Blood of Ambrose,was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and the French translation was shortlisted for the Prix Imaginales. You can find him on Facebook (as james.enge), on Bluesky (@jamesenge) or, I kid you not, on SoundCloud (as jamesenge). For traditionalists, he also has a website: jamesenge.com.

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.