Nightfall Read online

  There wasn’t much in the way of weather on the Sagikan Peninsula, normally: the whole place was unthinkably arid, with measurable rainfall no more often than every ten or twenty years. The only unusual climatic event that ever occurred there was a shift in the prevailing pattern of air currents that set cyclonic forces in motion and brought about a sandstorm, and even that didn’t happen more than a few times a century.

  Was Balik’s despondent expression a hint of the guilt he must feel for having failed to foresee the coming of the storm? Or did he look so horrified because he was able now to calculate the full extent of the fury that was about to descend?

  Everything might have been different, Siferra told herself, if they’d had a little more time to prepare for the onslaught. In hindsight, she could see that all the telltale signs had been there for those with the wit to notice them—the burst of fierce dry heat, excruciating even by the standards of the Sagikan Peninsula, and the sudden dead calm that replaced the usual steady breeze from the north, and then the strange moist wind that began to blow from the south. The khalla-birds, those weird scrawny scavengers that haunted the area like ghouls, had all taken wing when that wind started blowing, vanishing into the dune-choked western desert as though demons were on their tails.

  That should have been the clue, Siferra thought. When the khalla-birds took off and went screaming into the dune country.

  But they had all been too busy working at the dig to pay attention to what was going on. Sheer denial, most likely. Pretend that you don’t notice the signs of an approaching sandstorm and maybe the sandstorm will go somewhere else.

  And then that little gray cloud appearing out of nowhere in the far north, that dull stain on the fierce shield of the desert sky, which ordinarily was always as clear as glass—

  Cloud? Do you see a cloud? I don’t see any clouds.

  Denial again.

  Now the cloud was an immense black monster filling half the sky. The wind still blew from the south, but it was no longer moist—a searing furnace-blast was what it was, now—and there was another wind, an even stronger one, bearing down from the opposite direction. One wind fed the other. And when they met—

  “Siferra!” Balik yelled. “Here it comes! Take cover!”

  “I will! I will!”

  She didn’t want to. What she wanted to do was run from one zone of the dig to another, looking after everything at once, holding the flaps of the tents down, wrapping her arms around the bundles of precious photographic plates, throwing herself against the face of the newly excavated Octagon House to protect the stunning mosaics that they had discovered the month before. But Balik was right. Siferra had done all she could, this frantic morning, to batten down the site. Now the thing to do was to huddle in, down there below the cliff that loomed at the upper edge of the site, and hope that it would be a bulwark for them against the fullest force of the storm.

  She ran for it. Her sturdy, powerful legs carried her easily over the parched, crackling sand. Siferra was not quite forty years old, a tall, strong woman in the prime of her physical strength, and until this moment she had never felt anything but optimism about any aspect of her existence. But suddenly everything was imperiled now: her academic career, her robust good health, maybe even her life itself.

  The others were crowded together at the base of the cliff, behind a hastily improvised screen of bare wooden poles with tarpaulins lashed to them. “Move over,” Siferra said, pushing her way in among them.

  “Lady,” Thuvvik moaned. “Lady, make the storm turn back!” As though she were some sort of goddess with magical powers. Siferra laughed harshly. The foreman made some kind of gesture at her—a holy sign, she imagined.

  The other workers, all of them men of the little village just east of the ruins, made the same sign and began to mutter at her. Prayers? To her? It was a spooky moment. These men, like their fathers and grandfathers, had been digging at Beklimot all their lives in the employ of one archaeologist or another, patiently uncovering the ancient buildings and sifting through the sand for tiny artifacts. Presumably they had been through bad sandstorms before. Were they always this terrified? Or was this some kind of super storm?

  “Here it is,” Balik said. “This is it.” And he covered his face with his hands.

  The full power of the sandstorm broke over them.

  Siferra remained standing at first, staring through an opening in the tarpaulins at the monumental cyclopean city wall across the way, as though simply by keeping her gaze fixed on the site she would be able to spare it from harm. But after a moment that became impossible. Gusts of incredible heat came sweeping down, so ferocious that she thought her hair and even her eyebrows would burst into flame. She turned away, raising one arm to shield her face.

  Then came the sand, and all vision was blotted out.

  It was like a rainstorm, a downpour of all too solid rain. There was a tremendous thundering sound, not thunder at all but only the drumming of a myriad tiny sand particles against the ground. Within that great sound were other ones, a slithery whispering sound, a jagged scraping sound, a delicate drumming sound. And a terrible howling. Siferra imagined tons of sand cascading down, burying the walls, burying the temples, burying the vast sprawling foundations of the residential zone, burying the camp.

  And burying all of them.

  She turned away, face to the wall of the cliff, and waited for the end to come. A little to her surprise and chagrin, she found herself sobbing hysterically, sudden deep wails rising from the core of her body. She didn’t want to die. Of course not: who did? But she had never realized until this moment that there might be something worse than dying.

  Beklimot, the most famous archaeological site in the world, the oldest known city of mankind, the foundation of civilization, was going to be destroyed—purely as a result of her negligence. Generations of Kalgash’s great archaeologists had worked here in the century and a half since Beklimot’s discovery: first Galdo 221, the greatest of them all, and then Marpin, Stinnupad, Shelbik, Numoin, the whole glorious roster—and now Siferra, who had foolishly left the whole place uncovered while a sandstorm was approaching.

  So long as Beklimot had been buried beneath the sands, the ruins had slumbered peacefully for thousands of years, preserved as they had been on the day when its last inhabitants finally yielded to the harshness of the changing climate and abandoned the place. Each archaeologist who had worked there since Galdo’s day had taken care to expose just a small section of the site, and to put up screens and sand-fences to guard against the unlikely but serious danger of a sandstorm. Until now.

  She had put up the usual screens and fences too, of course. But not in front of the new digs, not in the sanctuary area where she had focused her investigations. Some of Beklimot’s oldest and finest buildings were there. And she, impatient to begin excavating, carried away by her perpetual buoyant urge to go on and on, had failed to take the most elementary precautions. It hadn’t seemed that way to her at the time, naturally. But now, with the demonic roaring of the sandstorm in her ears, and the sky black with destruction—

  Just as well, Siferra thought, that I won’t survive this. And therefore won’t have to read what they’re going to say about me in every book on archaeology that gets published in the next fifty years. “The great site of Beklimot, which yielded unparalleled data about the early development of civilization on Kalgash until its unfortunate destruction as a result of the slipshod excavation practices employed by the young, ambitious Siferra 89 of Saro University—”

  “I think it’s ending,” Balik whispered.

  “What is?” she said.

  “The storm. Listen! It’s getting quiet out there.”

  “We must be buried in so much sand that we can’t hear anything, that’s all.”

  “No. We aren’t buried, Siferra!” Balik tugged at the tarpaulin in front of them and managed to lift it a little way. Siferra peered out into the open area between the cliff and the wall of the city.


  She couldn’t believe her eyes.

  What she saw was the clear deep blue of the sky. And the gleam of sunlight. It was only the bleak, chilly white glow of the double suns Tano and Sitha, but just now it was the most beautiful light she ever wanted to see.

  The storm had passed through. Everything was calm again.

  And where was the sand? Why wasn’t everything entombed in sand?

  The city was still visible: the great blocks of the stone wall, the shimmering glitter of the mosaics, the peaked stone roof of the Temple of the Suns. Even most of their tents were still standing, including nearly all of the important ones. Only the camp where the workers lived had been badly damaged, and that could be repaired in a few hours.

  Astounded, still not daring to believe it, Siferra stepped out of the shelter and looked around. The ground was clear of loose sand. The hard-baked, tight-packed dark stratum that had formed the surface of the land in the excavation zone could still be seen. It looked different now, abraded in a curious scrubbed way, but it was clear of any deposit the storm might have brought.

  Balik said wonderingly, “First came the sand, and then came wind behind it. And the wind picked up all the sand that got dropped on us, picked it up as fast as it fell, and scooped it right on along to the south. A miracle, Siferra. That’s the only thing we can call it. Look—you can see where the ground’s been scraped, where the whole shallow upper layer of ground sand’s been cleaned away by the wind, maybe fifty years’ worth of erosion in five minutes, but—”

  Siferra was scarcely listening. She caught Balik by the arm and turned him to the side, away from the main sector of their excavation site.

  “Look there,” she said.

  “Where? What?”

  She pointed. “The Hill of Thombo.”

  The broad-shouldered stratigrapher stared. “Gods! It’s been slit right up the middle!”

  The Hill of Thombo was an irregular middling-high mound some fifteen minutes’ walk south of the main part of the city. No one had worked it in well over a hundred years, not since the second expedition of the great pioneer Galdo 221, and Galdo hadn’t found anything of significance in it. It was generally considered to be nothing but a midden-heap on which the citizens of old Beklimot had tossed their kitchen garbage—interesting enough of itself, yes, but trivial in comparison with the wonders that abounded everywhere else in the site.

  Apparently, though, the Hill of Thombo had taken the fullest brunt of the storm: and what generations of archaeologists had not bothered to do, the violence of the sandstorm had achieved in only a moment. An erratic zigzagging strip had been ripped from the face of the hill, like some terrible wound laying bare much of the interior of its upper slope. And experienced field workers like Siferra and Balik needed only a single glance to understand the importance of what was now exposed.

  “A town site under the midden,” Balik murmured.

  “More than one, I think. Possibly a series,” Siferra said.

  “You think?”

  “Look. Look there, on the left.”

  Balik whistled. “Isn’t that a wall in crosshatch style, under the corner of that cyclopean foundation?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  A shiver ran down Siferra’s spine. She turned to Balik and saw that he was as astounded as she was. His eyes were wide, his face was pale.

  “In the name of Darkness!” he muttered huskily. “What do we have here, Siferra?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’m going to start finding out right this minute.” She looked back at the shelter under the cliff, where Thuvvik and his men still crouched in terror, making holy signs and babbling prayers in low stunned voices as if unable to comprehend that they were safe from the power of the storm. “Thuvvik!” Siferra yelled, gesturing vigorously, almost angrily, at him. “Come on out of there, you and your men! We’ve got work to do!”

  [3]

  Harrim 682 was a big beefy man of about fifty, with great slabs of muscle bulging on his arms and chest, and a good thick insulating layer of fat over that. Sheerin, studying him through the window of the hospital room, knew right away that he and Harrim were going to get along.

  “I’ve always been partial to people who are, well, oversized,” the psychologist explained to Kelaritan and Cubello. “Having been one myself for most of my life, you understand. Not that I’ve ever been a muscleman like this one.” Sheerin laughed pleasantly. “I’m blubber through and through. Except for here, of course,” he added, tapping the side of his head. —“What kind of work does this Harrim do?”

  “Longshoreman,” Kelaritan said. “Thirty-five years on the Jonglor docks. He won a ticket to the opening day of the Tunnel of Mystery in a lottery. Took his whole family. They were all affected to some degree, but he was the worst. That’s very embarrassing to him, that a great strong man like him should have such a total breakdown.”

  “I can imagine,” Sheerin said. “I’ll take that into account. Let’s talk with him, shall we?”

  They entered the room.

  Harrim was sitting up, staring without interest at a spinner cube that was casting light in half a dozen colors on the wall opposite his bed. He smiled affably enough when he saw Kelaritan, but seemed to stiffen when he noticed the lawyer Cubello walking behind the hospital director, and his face turned completely glacial at the sight of Sheerin.

  “Who’s he?” he asked Kelaritan. “Another lawyer?”

  “Not at all. This is Sheerin 501, from Saro University. He’s here to help you get well.”

  “Huh,” Harrim snorted. “Another double-brain! What good have any of you done for me?”

  “Absolutely right,” Sheerin said. “The only one who can really help Harrim get well is Harrim, eh? You know that and I know that, and maybe I can persuade the hospital people here to see that too.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. It creaked beneath the psychologist’s bulk. “At least they have decent beds in this place, though. They must be pretty good if they can hold the two of us at the same time. —Don’t like lawyers, I gather? You and me both, friend.”

  “Miserable troublemakers is all they are,” Harrim said. “Full of tricks, they are. They make you say things you don’t mean, telling you that they can help you if you say such-and-such, and then they end up using your own words against you. That’s the way it seems to me, anyway.”

  Sheerin looked up at Kelaritan. “Is it absolutely necessary that Cubello be here for this interview? I think it might go a little more smoothly without him.”

  “I am authorized to take part in any—” Cubello began stiffly.

  “Please,” Kelaritan said, and the word had more force than politeness behind it. “Sheerin’s right. Three visitors at once may be too many for Harrim—today, anyway. And you’ve already heard his story.”

  “Well—” Cubello said, his face dark. But after a moment he turned and went out of the room.

  Sheerin surreptitiously signaled to Kelaritan that he should take a seat in the far corner.

  Then, turning to the man in the bed, he smiled his most agreeable smile and said, “It’s been pretty rough, hasn’t it?”

  “You said it.”

  “How long have you been in here?”

  Harrim shrugged. “I guess a week, two weeks. Or maybe a little more. I don’t know, I guess. Ever since—”

  He fell silent.

  “The Jonglor Exposition?” Sheerin prompted.

  “Since I took that ride, yes.”

  “It’s been a little more than just a week or two,” Sheerin said.

  “Has it?” Harrim’s eyes took on a glazed look. He didn’t want to hear about how long he’d been in the hospital.

  Changing tack, Sheerin said, “I bet you never dreamed a day would come when you’d tell yourself you’d be glad to get back to the docks, eh?”

  With a grin, Harrim said, “You can say that again! Boy, what I wouldn’t give to be slinging those crates around tomorrow.” He looked at his hands. Big, powerful hands, t
he fingers thick, flattened at the tips, one of them crooked from some injury long ago. “I’m getting soft, laying here all this time. By the time I get back to work I won’t be any good any more.”

  “What’s keeping you here, then? Why don’t you just get up and put your street clothes on and get out of here?”

  Kelaritan, from the corner, made a warning sound. Sheerin gestured at him to keep quiet.

  Harrim gave Sheerin a startled look. “Just get up and walk out?”

  “Why not? You aren’t a prisoner.”

  “But if I did that—if I did that—”

  The dockworker’s voice trailed off.

  “If you did that, what?” Sheerin asked.

  For a long while Harrim was silent, face downcast, brow heavily knitted. Several times he began to speak but cut himself off. The psychologist waited patiently. Finally Harrim said, in a tight, husky, half-strangled tone, “I can’t go out there. Because of the—because—because of the—” He struggled with himself. “The Darkness,” he said.

  “The Darkness,” said Sheerin.

  The word hung there between them like a tangible thing.

  Harrim looked troubled by it, even abashed. Sheerin remembered that among people of Harrim’s class it was a word that was rarely used in polite company. To Harrim it was, if not actually obscene, then in some sense sacrilegious. No one on Kalgash liked to think about Darkness; but the less education one had, the more threatening it was to let one’s mind dwell on the possibility that the six friendly suns might somehow totally disappear from the sky all at once, that utter blackness might reign. The idea was unthinkable—literally unthinkable.

  “The Darkness, yes,” Harrim said. “What I’m afraid of is that—that if I go outside I’ll find myself in the Darkness again. That’s what it is. The Dark, all over again.”

  “Complete symptom reversal in the last few weeks,” Kelaritan said in a low voice. “At first it was just the opposite. You couldn’t get him to go indoors unless you sedated him. A powerful case of claustrophobia first, that is, and then after some time the total switch to claustrophilia. We think it’s a sign that he’s healing.”