I thought then that Kalaman had not too long to live. He sweated as though from fever, and I never saw him eat or drink—though that was not unusual; many people do not feel comfortable eating during an elÿon voyage. But Ratnayaka too seemed consumed by something—illness or desire or perhaps that madness that stalks the elÿon’s rubeous hallways.
“As you will, brother,” Ratnayaka hissed at him. He turned to walk a little unsteadily toward where the other energumens had gathered upon the viewing deck.
“He is ill,” I said to Kalaman.
“It is his heart that eats him,” Kalaman replied. Sorrow seemed to vie with pride in his voice. “He does not like it that I am master now; but he will not turn against me.” He looked at me with glowing black eyes and said, “You must understand, I have only a few more days left of my thousand. But it is enough, that I will look upon our father and this Oracle before I die; although it may be that our father will not let this happen to me. The Oracle has said there is a means now for us to outlive our destinies, that there is a way for us to grow old and bear young as humans do. Perhaps I will live long enough to see Ratnayaka harrowed by my children,” he ended, and his eyes glittered cold as Ratnayaka’s own.
Just then a cry rang out from the viewing area.
“O my brother, but look!”
Kalaman strode to where the others pointed, and I followed slowly, my metal boots striking the floor and sending sharp echoes across the chamber. A great foreboding hung about me, a cloud of fear that made me wish I had Nefertity by my side, or even Valeska Novus. Twice before I have felt this sense of brooding horror. Once as I stood upon a high place in the Archipelago, and looked down upon my troops as they walked into a tide of liquid flame and writhed in silent agony amid the waves of gold and black, like maggots dropped in burning oil; and again when I first gained a sort of half-consciousness within the regeneration vats of Araboth and realized I had lost forever the last traces of my humanity.
But this was a different sort of fear. It encompassed not only myself, but also all those I had ever held within my heart with either love or hatred. At the window I stopped and looked to where the energumens stood in a long line, some forty-odd creatures more monstrous even than myself, each reflecting the face and manner of the one next to it so that I seemed to look upon some ancient frieze showing a more ancient race than humanity, gazing out upon the stars.
“What is that, O brother? Can you see it?”
A few feet from where I stood, Kalaman’s brothers and sisters moved aside to let him press himself against the window, staring out with those obsidian eyes. A moment later his voice came to me softly, filled with wonder.
“I do not know what this is. Perhaps he does—” He glanced over his shoulder and gestured for me to come closer. “Imperator—?”
I joined him at the window. On the other side of the thick glass the universe loomed, a darkness so vast that even the million stars pricked upon it seemed nothing but stray motes of light, put there perhaps by nothing but the will of myriad creatures that refused to acknowledge the void. At the rim of my vision I could just see the first sweet curve of Earth showing as we approached, and I knew that somewhere out of sight the moon waited, a hole in the sky through which we might escape that endless night. And then I saw what Kalaman and all the others were pointing at.
Had I still been mortal, my heart might not have been able to bear the sight. I felt a small gratitude that Captain Novus was safely drugged within her chamber. Slowly I drew my hands up before me and rested them upon the glass, my metal hand beside my human one, and stared between them at what was there.
In the formless void there grew a point of still greater darkness. In mass and color it was like one of those bursts of neutronic power favored by the Air Corps of the Habilis Emirate, which turn the deserts to black glass where they fall. As I watched, this celestial object grew deeper in color, showing within its heart shafts of blue and violet and crimson. All around it the atmosphere glowed —though that is too weak a word for it; it was as though it somehow swallowed the light of all those other pallid stars, then gave it forth again a thousandfold. In all my years I had never seen anything like it. Not in the shining azure skies above the Archipelago, nor in the desert’s stark and frozen nights, or even during my tenure on the great glittering weapondecks of NASNA Prime.
All around me I could hear the energumens murmuring, their clear high voices bright with amazement and childish wonder. None of them seemed to be afraid.
“Imperator?” Kalaman’s voice came again at my elbow, and when I glanced up at him, I saw that his face was lit with curiosity but no fear. “My brothers say they have been watching it for some time now. Some admit they first saw it days ago, but never spoke of it to me.”
I drew back from the window, but then that word watching stung me like a thornfly. I recalled the thing Captain Wyeth had written of in the Astralaga: the mysterious star traveler, the Watcher in the Skies. He had described it as an object that his entranced crew had observed for over eighteen hours before it disappeared. A freakish black aurora, most had believed; some kind of solar flare that had come and gone within a matter of hours. But now Kalaman’s crew claimed to have watched it for several days.
“Who has seen this thing?” I cried out. Several of the energumens turned to me, their beautiful faces calm, their colorless eyes holding within them the reflected flare of the Watcher’s gaze.
“I have,” one said in his lilting voice. “Many days ago. As the orbit of Helena Aulis shifted, I glimpsed it, like a violet lumiere flickering in the darkness. It is far bigger now than it was then.”
Indeed, even as I stared, I could see that it was growing larger. Whatever it was, it still must be untold miles from where the Izanagi made its stately passage through the Ether. But it was moving. And it was headed toward the Earth.
“Imperator?” Kalaman laid his great hand upon my shoulder and gently turned me to face him. “What is this thing? Can you tell us?”
“I do not know,” I said, my voice sounding hollow and disgustingly weak. “But I will find out.” And I left them and headed for the library.
In the skies above the dreaming Blue Ridge Mountains hung a pinkish glow, a brilliance that faded only slightly during that long afternoon. By nightfall the aurora had grown to a splendent luminous sheet, rippling and coruscating so that the stars were swallowed by it and showed as tiny puckered flaws in the fabric of the night, if they showed at all. For the last few weeks this roseate glow had been glowing slowly brighter, as each day more and more of the Alliance’s captured elÿon were brought here to join the fleet that now numbered nearly forty.
Had there been anyone to glimpse that fleet billowing across the haze of the Blue Ridge, they might have imagined the mountains were afire; but in Cassandra hardly anyone remained above ground. Those few energumen sentries guarding the entrance to Paradise Caverns were inured to the wonder of the elÿon. If they had had any say in the matter, they might have wished to be with their brothers and sisters, gathered deep within the mountain’s granite heart, and there await the Coming they had so long awaited.
It was an evening in late summer. The fields that a few days ago had been bright and green and golden were now stripped to a dull viridian, laced with red where the raw clay had been exposed by the passage of agricultural machines. Once there would have been much celebration in Cassandra, for it had been a good harvest; but there were no humans left to rejoice. They had all gone underground, or else had been slain when they fought to keep their lands from being given as fodder for the geneslaves. Now the fields lay barren, and the scraped earth steamed in the dying light as the sun fell behind the glowing hills and the harvest moon began to creep above the shattered plain to the east.