Penumbra - Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Dreams! I thought I was rid of them.” Anjh sat upright in bed, blinking as he tried to focus on the room around him. He groped for the spectacles on the table at his side and, hooking the frames over his ears, carefully slid from beneath the covers, making an effort not to disturb his companion. His robe and cane were at a convenient distance so he was able to manage by himself and reach the sitting room without waking Jaithlym.
“Dreams! Again, dreams, nightmares. Perhaps I should go back to Ban Khatour for a while and relearn to control this part of my mind. I can’t go into the Pit of Archaos distracted like this.” He acknowledged that he was conflicted in his aims. The Warrior he had been knew that he must complete the mission he had accepted - the destruction of the mysterious being in the cave in the Feneralia; the Thanamant he had become wanted to find his ending in that same cave. Logically, he realized that the one might well include the other - that he might easily die completing the mission; that was, after all, his intention. However logic holds little sway in the backwash of dreams during the smallest hours. His plan had been to disarm himself when he was sufficiently deep inside the cave and go to the meeting with whatever lurked there offering no resistance, looking to die. Now, he was not sure if he could subdue his instincts so completely. He thought he might fight back in spite of himself and with the mechart hand he was almost as lethal barehanded as with a weapon, particularly in close combat.
And now, this troubling dream cast more doubts on his resolve. In it he had been back on his island home, a boy learning to be human. He was standing in front of a high desk, stretching as tall as a seven-year-old could in order to see the stern faces of those who sat behind - the heroic Prydain of history, those revered exemplars who personified the ideals of his people.
“Choose!” they had thundered at him in chorus. “Choose at once!”
The boy saw the various choices circle him like loose tags caught up in a whirlwind, dizzying him with their motion. He couldn’t make out which was which and frantically thrust out a hand to seize any of the swirling scraps. He caught one; it burned his fingers - he dropped it and reached for another. They were all burning to the touch. With a sort of desperate courage, he threw himself into the eddy and trapped the papers - now become flaming moths - under his body. At once half of his body was consumed by the fires and he suddenly saw that all the choices were the same - Warrior. It was at that moment, Anjh had been jolted from sleep.
He was not unfamiliar with the working of the subconscious and it was obvious what thoughts had created the dream that had disturbed his sleep. The dilemma of life or death - of Warrior or Thanamant that had obsessed his waking mind had thrust its tendrils into his sleep and taken root there as well. When he had actually been seven years old, he had been introduced to the idea of choosing which lay at the heart of the Prydain way of life. Although all of his race were expected to function as Warriors beginning at their seventeenth year and continuing for about a decade after that, they were also encouraged to begin weighing their eventual careers as soon as they were competent to do so. Anjh had been drawn to teaching with government as the logical end because he had the gift of inspiring loyalty and a talent for persuasion in spite of his reticence. However he had postponed declaring any actual decision again and again. Then had come his time with his father and a future became too unlikely to consider. He had wondered if it was choice or inertia that had kept him a Warrior for so long. The dream suggested another answer, one he was reluctant to accept - that there had never been a chance for a real choice, that he had been fated to be a Seeker after Death from the time of his birth, that it was in his blood. He was forced to entertain the thought that his father, Biyonne, had also possessed the flaw that cursed him, the taint of fatalist despair. There was a sour comfort in the possibility that he had come by his nihilistic state of mind naturally and that it was not simply his personal failing that had deposited him on this barren rock.
His decision to reject the offer from Naufrage, not just after a week’s thought but immediately, was a part of this motif as was his refusal to accept the nearly universal opinion that his time on the battlefield had passed after the events on Mount Nothscar. It all made a pattern now.
The divan beckoned and he sank into its yielding pillows, wincing as the pain that never entirely ceased bloomed in the missing arm and leg. ‘Phantom limbs’- what a misnomer, he thought. They were usually more real than the replacements, at least to his senses. The surgeons had said that the sensations would eventually stop but that time seemed nowhere near; the constant aches and worse continued to trouble him mentally as well as physically. He was accustomed to being able to control this - as a Prydain, he had early learned to override pain, to make it irrelevant and sometimes his techniques seemed to work for a while but the cost of the mental discipline was high - he became short-tempered and irrational with exhaustion. Although he loathed and distrusted drugs, he had tried them in as a final resort and found them of no help whatsoever. As he shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt, it occurred to him that this very problem that so interfered with the clarity of his reasoning, that formed an unrelenting backdrop to his life, might well be the cause of his increasingly fantastic nightmares.
He gazed out at the false dawn that brightened the horizon over the city. “Were I not Prydain, I could claim this endless irritant as an excuse to die, but we’re supposed to be able to control this and surmount it. We don’t die for little reasons,” he lectured himself. “And we don’t die by our own hands - we have to earn death and seek it out. When the morning comes, I’ll be able to see things more clearly, be less influenced by dreams and aches. It isn’t long until I go probe that cave, surely that will be sufficient distraction.”
Anjh missed the presence of his kinsman, Harad, in the townhouse. The trainer had been a valuable resource, someone to bounce ideas off, and who, because he was also Prydain, could understand the difficulties involved. What, he wondered, would he be saying to Harad were he here? He thought they would discuss the concept of duty - whether his first duty was to his mission oath or to his sworn pursuit of death. These were the questions circling in his head like the scraps in his dream - the questions that, contradicting themselves, offered no satisfactory answer. His increasingly futile thoughts were interrupted by the whisper of bare feet crossing the room.
“Why didn’t you wake me if you couldn’t rest?” Jaithlym was squinting at him through sleep-blurred eyes.
“No reason to disturb you. What did wake you up?”
“I reached over for you and there was nobody there so I concluded you had gotten up. I waited and when you didn’t come back, I decided to find you.”
“An impeccable chain of logical reasoning,” he smiled at her and held out a hand. “Join me and let’s watch the dawn come.”
She crept into his circling arm and, laying her head against his chest, looked up into his face. “Was it another bad dream, love? Care to tell me about it?”
“Not really, I was just wakeful and came in here so as not to bother you,” he dissembled. “Look, it’s going to be a stormy day and you don’t have to go out in it. There are some advantages to being a prisoner.”
“Never sweeter a prison” she murmured drowsily and, nestling closely against him, fell asleep.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Harad's messages from the Feneralia were, of a necessity, short and less informative than Anjh might have wished. He most urgently needed to know all that was known about the mysterious creature in the Pit of Archaos. Rarely was the very nature of an enemy so total a secret. Although he was inclined to think the worst of most of the Lamasoni and all of the Laimak, he found himself believing that they really didn’t know what they had on their plates this time.
Rispa had volunteered to take Harad's place as trainer until another qualified person could be sent for. He had no business in Ban Khatour of particular urgency at the moment and had been renowned for his martial skills during his days as a Warrior, so that problem at least was resolved. The Brisevant sat cross-legged on a mat and sighted down the length of a sword.
“This one is a little unbalanced. Send it down to the forge,” he said as he handed the weapon to a passing trainee and turned his attention to his primary concern. “Does Harad give us any details at all about this cave-thing?”
“Just that it seems to be more deadly than anything short of Archaos,” Anjh answered sourly.
“Are they sure it isn’t Archaos? After all, that creature can shape itself into anything it wants to be. It might have dodged in there and dug in.”
“It’s not Archaos - that they’re finally sure of unless Archaos can be in two places at once. Also, the bodies they’ve recovered show no signs of alien wounds; they are just empty for no visible reason or killed by their own comrades.”
“What? I hadn’t heard that,” the older man looked up sharply. “You tell me that they’re killing their own troops in that cave? What sort of Laimak trick are they pulling now?”
“I don’t think it’s a trick. I think something in there is corrupting the minds of its opponents and turning them on each other or on themselves.”
“Ridiculous, there’s nothing on this planet that fights like that!”
“And there were no people except those we knew until the Mazoid turned up. Rispa, I’m convinced that we don’t know half of what there is to be known about our world. As for this situation in the Feneralia, we need to concentrate my training on the use of mental defense techniques. It will do me no good to get in the cave if I succumb immediately to long-range mind attacks.”
Rispa nodded, “You’re right. I’m glad you’re going to fight back. What specific mental defenses did you train in?”
“The usual; I’ll go though them with you later. In the meantime, I want to continue to gather and analyze what information we can about this unknown. Have you discussed it with Naufrage? He seems supportive of your aims.”
“My dear boy, Naufrage is supportive of the Laimak and, since they control it, the Lamasoni. He’ll do whatever it takes to stay in power. And since it will be to the advantage of the Lamasoni for you to stay alive, he’s likely to be more than eager to tell me anything he knows about what you’ll face in that infamous cave. I just wonder how much he really knows, himself. Since I suspect he would give me any secrets he has that might keep you safe, I’m inclined to agree that his brain should be tapped again. I’ll call on him as soon as I can... Is there anything you want me to keep from his ears? He’s more likely to be indiscreet if he thinks I’m being the same.”
“With his network of agents, I’m sure he already knows most of what is going on not only in this house but in the entire city. Just don’t mention that Jaithlym is carrying two embryos; I don’t want any more speculation running around this gossip-obsessed town... Otherwise, use your own judgment.”
Rispa paused again, “Naufrage did charge me with an query the last time I was with him. If I can give him an answer, it might help him decide to trust me.”
“And what is the query?”
“He is convinced that during the time you spent dead to all purposes, you learned something that will either confirm or obliterate his beliefs about Aleo and the Afterlife. Is he right?”
Anjh laughed shortly, “Is he still going on about that? I told him as clearly as I could while I was still in the hospital that nothing of the sort had happened. So far as I am concerned, one moment I saw myself die on Mount Nothscar, the next I was opening my eyes in that room with all the observers. I have no knowledge that he doesn’t about what goes on when the heart and breathing stop. He’s been nagging everyone who knows me about that for months. Tell him nothing has changed in my memory of the time.”
“That’s what I thought the answer would be and why I haven’t mentioned it earlier. Have patience with him; he’s an old man and it’s not pleasant questioning the faith you’ve lived with for almost a century when the time of your ending approaches.”
“I suppose not. But you still seem a little preoccupied, Elder, was there something else on your mind?”
“Yes,” Rispa nodded crisply. “I need to know another thing before I can start preparing you for the Pit of Archaos - Anjh, are you in physical pain?”
“Why do you ask?” his former pupil scowled.
“Some time ago, Jaithlym told me you were having problems with... well, painful sensations in the missing arm and leg. Are you still bothered by that?”
“That’s my affair,” the answer was uncompromising. “She had no right to tell you something that was private between us. Jaithlym has become far too ready to engage in her own schemes with the people in this house; I shall remind her of her obligations. As to my physical condition, the only thing that you - as trainer - should concern yourself with is readying me for my mission and my death.”