When the light appears, boy, when the light appears.”
- Allen Ginsberg, When the Light Appears.
For A.D., who went there and came back.
Long shadows crept into the crevices of Al Ahemdat. For hours the crimson light tarried on the eastern side of certain of the tallest monoliths: thousands upon thousands of grey limestone pillars carved not by man, but by rain and wind. At length the darkness pooled in the damp depth of the karsts. Though the peaks of Al Ahemdat still glowed in their crepuscular blaze, the visitors trudging in the narrow, labyrinthine ravines far below fumbled through their packs for torches. They feared the striped thylacines who hunt by night, and they needed the light to decipher the petroglyphs that would reveal the location of the passage to our citadel. It was the last night of Asheleg, the eve of the penultimate day of the week-long festival during which Your Majesty and the Elders of the Oorim open the gates of Nogöth to mortal foreigners, to grant one of them whatever boon he might desire.
They were three. Like all of the women of the Keenioun Pride, Yabo was lithe and fierce; she had come for her lost cub whom she hoped Your Majesty could bring back from the dead. Bilal was huge even for a Kabar; power is what he sought, anything to carve for his House a better place amongst the Triatan Innayil, the Machine Lords of the frigid South. Elred was old, short and fat, with sweat constantly glistening on his bald pate and swarthy face. An erudite antiquarian, Elred did not believe in Nogöth and was only along for the expedition. He was, by far, the happiest of the three.
. . .
Yabo led, scouting silently some ten paces ahead. One clawed hand swung the torch left and right in wide arcs above her thick-maned head. She herself did not need the light – her amber eyes could see through the penumbra – but she still waved it vigorously, signalling her position to her straggling companions. Her other hand gripped a short Aufa lance, the keen ivory tip at all times parallel with her line of sight. The huntress heaved a long growl of exasperation when she came upon yet another dead end. She was about to double back when she spotted some of our carvings on the offending wall, partly eroded and covered by creepers.
“Read!” she told the chattering professor when at last he caught up.
“This will take some time, my fine leonine friend,” Elred’s tone was condescending. “There is much text here and it is damaged. May I suggest we stop the night and make fire to shed some light on the matter?”
“Sixth night,” Yabo snarled. “No time.”
“We can’t walk all night,” Bilal objected. “Tomorrow when the light affords some view of the labyrinths we can climb up and plot a few different courses. It can’t be far. The going is getting harder by the minute. It shouldn’t be too long before we find the mangrove, at which point we will make better progress on a raft.”
“Fine,” Yabo said. “First light: we leave. Climb up, more South. Later. Noon.”
Bilal nodded; they all let their heavy packs fall onto the wet, moss-grown floor. Before long a small fire was burning low, the green twigs giving off more smoke than light. Through foggy spectacles, Elred pored over his numerous codices spread out on a tarp, infrequently glancing up to mouth complicated syllables or scribble notes in a tattered diary. Within minutes he lay asleep, sprawled over the opened tomes.
They did not see us even though the night was moonless and dark. We spied them through the foliage from afar; had they looked in our direction we might have seemed like stars.
. . .
The three of them had met in Kalad Tueeran and left two days behind the last party of explorers. Yabo’s ferry had come late from Strath Samhak; Bilal needed additional time to obtain from the Flamines the blessing which would ward off midges and leeches. Elred, who had stepped down years ago from the Chair of Antiquities at Tueeran University, had given up his lifelong dream of finding companions with whom to brave the Pillars. He was old and slow; the adventurers were young and full of life. He had, however, something which Yabo and Bilal needed – the ability to read our ancient signs – and so when they met fortuitously at the Crane’s Crown the old scholar seized the unhoped-for opportunity. None other would join them, for it is remembered in the lore of Kalad Tueeran that Your Majesty does not receive more than three visitors to His court each year, and so the explorers still venture out in threes to compete fiercely for the prize.
From the very first day, Elred had proved himself worthy of taking part in the expedition: his scholarly eye could easily tell our writing from the haphazard scratches of the horned Katsarim who would discourage adventurers from seeking fabled Nogöth. The journey is hard and Al Ahemdat claims many lives each year: some feed the thylacines, others succumb to swamp fever. Still others are waylaid by Katsar brigands: the clans of the troglodytic race know the territory well and are not always charitably inclined.
In a mere two days they had cleared the dry, brambly, windswept portion of the maze and reached the Katsar settlement of Alalaud, the last outpost of civilisation before the Khali marshes. Elred had hoped to trade the many precious baubles he had brought on his long-necked vicunia mule for a true, detailed map of Al Ahemdat. The adventurers were disappointed to discover the truth of the rumour that no such map exists. The craven Katsarim forbid all cartography out of fear that the location of their cliff-side strongholds might become well-known. Instead of a map, the cargo and woolly mule had bought them a night’s rest at Baytalatsba, the most sumptuous of the cavern homes. We watched from the chandeliers as horned servants brought them platter after platter of Alalaud’s finest delicacies: shallot soup, lacquered pigeons in pear sauce, mint tea, nutty halva cakes served with jasmine-scented honey. It was there also that they discovered kat kamer – the bitter wine with which Katsarim fend off sleep – and packed a few phials for future use.
. . .
Grey dawn cascaded down the precipices at the bottom of which Yabo and Elred trudged knee-deep through the mud; Bilal, whose great boots sank only to their mid-calf, often had to haul his companions out. It was plain to us that a subtle sort of heaviness weighed on them: some hours prior, they had run into opposition while descending from the heights where they had climbed to get their bearings. From the shadowy depths below a foreign party had demanded that they take another route. It had been a hard climb down rough, fissile ledges; abseiling anywhere else would have implied considerable risk. When Bilal had sought to negotiate, the other travellers had bellowed racial slurs and fired harquebuses, very nearly hitting Yabo, who rolled off the ridge. A drawn-out battle thence ensued: from behind the outcropping where he and Elred had taken refuge, Bilal rained down an avalanche of boulders upon the belligerent strangers. While only one of them was left alive, Elred had screamed through tears for Bilal to spare that life, to let the stranger take his place in the party. After a moment of silence, there was heard a final gunshot and then a terrible, inarticulate cry as Yabo slashed the stranger’s neck from behind with a flint knife.
Though this had been the journey’s first skirmish, it was neither its first nor its last encounter with death. Since their second day they had uncovered four corpses. “My idea of Paradise,” Bilal had said on one such occasion, “is a dark alley in which I get to settle all of my scores. I hope that all these corpses are settled scores.” Elred had tittered nervously.
The farther south they went – the farther inland – the more Yabo smelled brine upon the wind; they were headed for the Khali marshes, those salty waters trapped since ancient times beyond the Pillars. By noontime on the fourth day they had to make a raft. Bilal made quick work of a few mangrove trunks with his mechanized machete. Yabo scrubbed away the bloodstains from her tunic in the meantime and, when Bilal was finished, she expertly tied the long logs together with ropes and lianas. As for Elred, he sat on a rock on the edge of the high marsh, chewing samphire and perusing his notes and his ephemerides. “If my interpretations are correct,” the old man said, “we must head toward the rising point of Elgebar, past the sunken ruins of Thinis. Look for remnants of masonry above the water and head south-west.”
. . .
This was easier said than 1done. Though the rifts between the limestone colonnades grew ever wider, at times seeming to open like valleys, the way southwest was often barred by eroded reefs or sheer palisades. Cordgrass clung to the raft, making progress difficult. The scattered megaliths of Thinis were nearly impossible to tell apart from the naturally-occurring features of Al Ahemdat. To verify that they were still on the right course, Elred frequently had to be roused from his nap to ascertain that antediluvian stonework could indeed be found beneath the layers of phragmite. Often the long green branch Bilal used as a pole became stuck and inexplicably sucked into the alluvium, twice leaving them drifting until they happened close enough to a vegetated islet. On the second such instance, Bilal cut several long branches to last the trip.
At dusk they discovered what sort of nuisances tugged at their poles. The slanting rays cast on the wine-red surface a magnified reflection of a youth in distress. The boy clung to the last remaining branch of a rotten mangrove overhanging three capsized coracles; though we longed to help him, we abided by Your Majesty’s code.
As the explorers’ raft drew ineluctably closer to the dilapidated tree, pulled from below by an unseen power, we saw the water begin to foam. A barbed tentacle shot out of the turmoil, wrapping around the branch near the trunk. With great agility, the youth held out a jewel which sent forth a blue arc of electric current. The miry creature released the branch and bobbed lifeless to the surface, an incomprehensible tangle of wiry appendages. Having expended the last of his strength in this desperate effort, the boy dropped unconscious into the dark water below.
We read horror on Elred’s face. “Abominations of Karad!” he exclaimed breathlessly, staring at the misshapen globster. He must have heard tales of such monsters from seafarers and guessed rightly that the tentacled spawn of that idiot god had become stranded beyond the Pillars in ancient times, after the Cataclysm had cast great waves far inland.
Acting on an instinct, perhaps motherly – or else on her indignation at the prospect of intelligent life becoming prey to the brutes of a bygone era – Yabo did not think long before she plunged to the rescue of the young stranger. She quickly sank out of view and emerged moments later, pushing furiously with her legs to keep herself and the boy afloat. She swam for a whole minute before she sank again, a slick black arm dragging her down.
Elred thought fast. The foremost edge of the raft was beginning to dip, evidently pulled by a larger fiend. “Bilal!” he cried out nervously, “Empty your machete oil upon the water!”
“It’s my only weapon!” the Kabar retorted.
“And it’ll be of no use to us if we’re dragged under there, will it?”
Bilal did as he was bidden; the giant had not even finished emptying his machete’s reservoir when Elred struck his firesteel, sending sparks flying over the spreading slick. The oil caught fire, giving meagre light and even less heat. The force which held the raft released it and Yabo emerged aft-side, gasping for air. She had not let go of the boy and did not loosen her grip even while Bilal hoisted her aboard.
. . .
With spare clothes from his pack, Bilal rubbed both the boy and Yabo to remove the noxious, toxic ink that covered them. Elred lit all the torches of their communal stock, planting them as best he could in the spaces between the beams of the raft. “It’s not the fire,” the scholar spoke excitedly, “but the light that scares them. They are beings of the abysmal dark; the torches may or may not keep them at bay. The night is not safe for us to travel by water. We must find the shore. How are Yabo and the boy?”
“Bruised, poisoned. Breathing, though barely...”
“Let me see. You make some light. Shake the torches. Yell. Anything!” The aged scholar uncorked a phial of kat kamer and bent over the woman and the youth, giving them each a draught and sprinkling the rest upon their many scratches. He noticed then the boy’s greenish skin. “Now, either you are severely jaundiced,” Elred said, “or you are a Jilvas, very far from home indeed. Which one is it?”
The boy coughed up his kamer and whimpered something in a language none of them understood. Yabo managed to sit up and remove her ink-stained tunic. Bilal, the handle of a blazing torch stuck between his teeth like a gargantuan cigar, pushed frantically for the nearest shore, bringing the raft halfway up a calanque. Blinded as he was by the flame dancing before his eyes, the giant barely noticed when he drove the vessel over several yards of rubble.
When pushing the raft would take them no further, they disembarked and hurriedly scrambled up the remainder of the calanque: Bilal carrying the boy, Elred and Yabo juggling torches and dragging their opened packs over steps of rugged travertine. The sun had set and their fires were beginning to fail; in the faint amber glow, the rocky scenery seemed menacing, like the jagged teeth of an ogre.
They stopped to rest for a few minutes; we ourselves, tired and dim, looked on from a rocky cornice. Bilal coaxed diminutive fire from brambles, weeds and leftover oil. On his machete file, he carefully spitted the cockles and snails that Yabo had gathered in the marsh before they knew about the Abominations. The giant then stooped over the smoking rubbish to cook the molluscs; the adventurers ate this frugal meal with gratitude.
In many languages, Elred attempted to converse with the Jilvas boy; the latter seemed to regain strength and colour upon ingesting the meagre repast.
“Most fortunate!” the scholar said after some time. “The boy and I both speak Oroglossia; though neither of us is fluent, I have been able to make out his story. His name is Mantas: he is mageborn, bearing the mark of Drakoni, and is seeking Nogöth for some early training in the art of Invocation, for he is a precocious prodigy. Sadly, the two priests of Aud with whom he was travelling were dragged into the depths moments before we saved him.”
“That is most fortunate indeed about Oroglossia,” Bilal rose “for now you will be able to tell him that he is going to have to find some hole to crawl into, and that right soon. The thylacines are coming and we must be getting on.”
“You cannot mean that!” the old man retorted. “The boy is lost here, hundreds of leagues away from the havens of the Serpent People. The eldritch weapon we saw him use was lost in the swamp. Surely you would not abandon a child, without food or water, at the mercy of the wild beasts?”
“I will because I have to,” Bilal replied angrily. “At any rate we must be pressing on. I don’t know how much farther there is to go but it must be somewhere on this rock, and we can’t be dawdling with a kid if we’re going to make it before the passage is closed. People die every year in Al Ahemdat. It will have been in vain if we don’t find the way to Nogöth before dusk tomorrow. Tell him to wait for us by daylight near the raft. If he survives the nights, we will take him as far as Alalaud on our way back.”
“Then you go on without me! I will abide by him – Nogöth be damned! – and we will take the raft tomorrow morning –”
“No,” Yabo interjected. “We no more light. Salt water hurt my eyes. Can’t see in dark no more...” She held back a sob, and added dejectedly: “We all lost.”
Only then did they notice that their fire and torches had died despite Yabo’s best attempt at keeping them going with what twigs could be found growing sparsely on the bald rock. A rainstorm broke out as though to emphasize her point.
. . .
A long moment passed in the blind darkness – a moment of silence but for the pounding of rain upon stone – and then the brutish, strident wail of thylacines echoed in the distance. Bilal was stupefied; Elred was crying. Yabo began to pray in her native Doon Ayday.
There came myriad mocking, beastly cries from as many slavering, trap-like jaws, bouncing off the rocky walls; each strident echo sounding closer than the last. The Jilvas boy was whispering the same syllable over and over, chanting in a language they did not understand. Growing irritated, Bilal finally asked, “What is he saying?”
A sudden flash made it needless for Elred to translate. Mantas was speaking the sacred sound which summarizes our essence: Aur, the Word of Light. The space around the boy filled with a cool, crisp luminescence.
Bilal wasted no time: he swung Mantas on his shoulders and ran up the rocky incline in a southerly direction; Yabo and Elred grabbed their packs and followed as best they could. It was a forced march to escape the thylacines and find the passage to Nogöth before it closed for another 358 days. They drank all of their kamer that night.
Morning had barely broken when Elred, who was lagging far behind, called out, “There is writing here!” and then louder, some minutes later, “This is the arch of Ovimelek! The Stairs of the Oorim rise before us! Take the winding path laid in white cobbles!”
By mid-day the travellers regrouped at the crest of a small caldera. The rain had ended; looking northward from whence they came, Al Ahemdat blazed in the yellow sun, a white multitude of menhirs dispersing in the dark, corrosive waters of the Khali marshes. Before them, in the collapsed crater of an extinct volcano, lay the broken ruins of a cyclopean structure, overgrown with ferns and vines, half-buried under ancient lava flows. A single domed chamber survived, seemingly intact except where hexagonal basalt columns had pierced it, holding it in mid-air like a crow’s nest some twelve cubits above the rubble; the white road meandered between deep puddles and remnants of masonry until it stopped abruptly underneath the stilted edifice.
The adventurers walked through the lush microcosm as though in a dream. Bilal, Yabo and Mantas seemed certain they had found Nogöth; Elred called attention to what fragments of inscriptions could be seen on the walls, though none paid him any heed. “This must have been a very important place in fallen Thinis,” the scholar said, and then, more solicitously, “Bilal! Can you not read this fresco?”
“Why do you bother me, old man? What have these glyphs to do with me?”
“Look carefully!”
Bilal sighed deeply. “The writing is like Cant but the words, so far as I can make them out, are gibberish.”
“Gibberish!” Elred exclaimed. “The writing is Sgreobad Shon, the precursor of the script currently used for Cant, but the words are from a Salafiyan dialect called Hatzeema, the language of the first Kabari. Evidently I have underestimated the decay of Innayil civilisation...”
Bilal grumbled, “So? What do they mean?”
“Nothing, as far as I can tell – or nothing any more. This carving here says ‘going up,’ or perhaps ‘migration.’ The most complete inscription I have seen so far I have not been able to make out: I think it was a list of proper names. All of it was badly damaged by a volcanic eruption, and then centuries of erosion, but the meaning of the writing is besides the point...”
“Then what is point?” It was Yabo who asked now, impatiently. A few paces ahead, Mantas also glared at the scholar, not understanding but evidently exasperated by the delay.
“The – the point is –” Elred stuttered, not sure how to put it, “the point is this cannot be Nogöth! This is the high city of Thinis, or what is left of it: the remains of a fallen Kabar citadel. I haven’t seen Oor writing since the arch of Ovimelek!”
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