Hegatonic

Hegatonic is what they called the language of the Eidolons.  There was an ancient book, its stitching rotted away and its pages yellowed and crumbling, that was kept in a small box filled with inert gas that was the original dictionary.  The front-page contained one word: Hegaton, and so the language had been given its name.  There were scholars, a small minority, who argued that a Hegaton was actually a measurement, the amount of explosive required to kill an Eidolon.  Since no-one had ever succeeded in killing an Eidolon though this theory was largely ignored.

The classroom where Hegatonic was taught was dark and hot.  The room itself was a cube, four metres to a side, buried inside a grain silo and accessed from an underground tunnel.  There was a single electric light bulb that contributed to the heat, an elaborate ventilation system that sourced air from three different directions in case any were blocked, and a pneumatic tube down which incriminating material could be flushed in the event of discovery.  The walls were plain steel, though there was a chart of basic letters taped up on one of them.  The chart was made from tissue paper and there was a bucket of water nearby to dissolve it in if needed.  There were four desks and seven chairs, and several solid-state sonjeu with white earphone cords.  Three people occupied some of the chairs, and a fourth, Milady Beth-Rachel was standing at the chart, her fingers pressed against her throat as she practised making the sounds that the letters represented.

Serjeant Thomas removed earphones from his ears and touched the sonjeu, a palm-sized black plastic device.  The front of it lit up, showing icons for recording, playback, pause and stop at the bottom, and a list of audio tracks above them.  He pressed stop and the screen went black again.

“I hakegh gha,” he said, and stopped and coughed.  His fingers massages his throat before he tried again.  “I hate this language,” he said, his voice a little scratchy from repeating sentences in Hegatonic.

“We all do,” said Milady Beth-Rachel.  “But we have to learn it, Tom.  You have to learn it.  There’s no other way for us to know what the Eidolons are up to.”

“They tell us what they’re up to.  That’s what Court is for, that’s what the newspapers report!”

“Hah.”  There was no amusement there, just a strong sarcasm.  “No, Tom.  Court and the newspapers tell us what the Eidolons want us to believe and do.  They are instruments of the state.  The Eidolonic state.  What the Eidolons say to their instars is what they are actually thinking and doing, what they say to each other when they talk is what they are thinking and doing.  That is why we learn their language.”

“Instars?”

Milady Beth-Rachel looked at him now, her hand falling from her throat to her side.  “You don’t know what an Instar is?”

“Never heard of them.”  Serjeant Thomas shook his head to emphasise his words.  He’s dark hair tousled up immediately and Milady Beth-Rachel thought he looked like he’d just got out of bed.

“They’re related to the Eidolon, I think,” she said, suddenly realising that there was a lot she took for granted about the Instars but didn’t actually have any supporting evidence for.  “They’re not children exactly, but they kind of fill that role.  If an Eidolon dies then an Instar will grow into a new Eidolon.  I think.”

“When has an Eidolon ever died?  And what happens if an Instar starts to grow before an Eidolon dies?”

“I don’t know, and Eidolons die occasionally.  There was a war, decades ago, because an Eidolon died and another Eidolon tried to take over from it.  There’s a book somewhere that tells about it.”  Milady Beth-Rachel wiped her forehead, feeling the heat of the room intently.  She didn’t like talking about things she wasn’t complete certain of.  Serjeant Thomas looked interested now though and had put the sonjeu down on the table while he talked to her.

“There was an Eidolon war?  Then we know how to kill an Eidolon?”

“I don’t know, really Thomas.  I only know what I read, and that was a few years ago.”

“Oh.”  He looked downcast, and his fingers started tugging at a little scab on his wrist.  Then he looked up again.  “Have you still got the book?”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“Oh.”  He worried at the scab again.  “I suppose I’d better get back to practising then,” he said.

“Well… look, I think I remember who I borrowed the book from.  I can ask them if they’ve still got it,” she said.  She wiped her forehead again; she thought she knew who had had the book, but she didn’t like the risk involved in asking for it.  Learning Hegatonic was illegal enough, and there were always people who preferred the rule of the Eidolons, but actively seeking out ways to kill Eidolons was probably the highest treason.

“That’d be fantastic!”  Serjeant Thomas was smiling broadly at her, and she could see the gaps where he’d lost teeth.  It was ridiculous that they had had all this medical technology and science, and now the Eidolons made them suppress it and live like it was the Middle Ages.  Thomas definitely wasn’t her type, but even she could see how stupid it was that he had to lose teeth when they could be regrown; why they had to worry about every cut and scratch when they could have applied healpax.  Why they had to do everything the Eidolons said instead of living their own lives for themselves.

Prime Minister Hegaton

Prime Minister Hegaton, elected to the job by the people mostly because no-one had been willing to stand for it, strode into the Eidolon’s throne room with confidence.  Despite his age he had now been Prime Minister for nearly thirteen years.  The next election was due this year, in about four months time, and he was worrying constantly if he should step down, having reached a Fibonacci number of years in power, or if he should stand again and pray he could get another eight out to reach the next Fibonacci number.  Assuming, that was, that the Eidolon didn’t kill him in the meantime – or worse.

“Your Majesty,” he said, stopping half-way across the stone-flagged floor of the throne room and kneeling.  He knew that the Eidolon had been aware of him by various senses, several non-human, since he entered the room, but she was affecting certain odd traits from reading about medieval history, and announcing his presence in a suitably respectful manner was one of them, as was walking backwards when leaving her presence so that she was never out of his sight.  She turned her head – another affectation, as her head consisted of two rings of eyes, eight in the upper ring and seven in the lower – and pretended to have only just noticed him.

“Hegaton,” she clicked.  Her mouth was embedded in her long, graceful neck, and was hard to see unless you were looking directly at it.  When she spoke though, a dark red split opened up and stringy things, glistening wetly, moved inside there.  She had difficulty with most human languages as her voice seemed designed to make clicks, whistles and susurrations, but over the decades she had learned how to overlay susurrations as harmonies and punctuate them with clicks that humans could understand as words in their own languages.  Hegaton had made some progress in the other direction, constructing a small aural dictionary of Eidolonic sounds and what they meant, but it was a very secret project as he was sure the Eidolon would not be pleased.  “Report.”

“Your Majesty,” he said, adding the throat-click at the end that the Eidolon insisted on.  “Current trade projections suggest that there may be an issue between us and France.”  He spoke for nearly half-an-hour, running through the most pressing matters of governance.  He brought to her everything that he could reasonably expect input for, and a couple of things he knew she’d be disinterested in so that she could believe she’d heard everything.  He continually found it ridiculous that she would believe that a daily half-hour report could possibly keep her current on everything, but it allowed him more freedom to run the country on human terms.

“France’s Eidolon is dying,” clicked the Eidolon, her voice like the sighing of the wind in the trees.  “There are reasons for its erratic behaviour at this time.”

Hegaton looked at her, thinking hard.  That this Eidolon might die was always topmost in his thoughts, but he’d not actually considered what might happen if the Eidolon of another country died.  “What would that entail?” he asked.

“A period of transition,” said the Eidolon.  “And then a new Eidolon.”  She said something else, clicking and whistling in her own tongue, but didn’t translate it.  Hegaton pretended he’d not heard it.  “However,” she said abruptly.  “There is another option it would seem.”

Hegaton, who had been considering applying trade sanctions and other options open to governments bickering amongst themselves, widened his eyes slightly, wondering what she meant.

“What is that, please, Your Majesty?” he asked.

“We invade France while their Eidolon is weak, and conquer,” said the Eidolon.  “This is normally what you would do, isn’t it?”

The history books, thought Hegaton miserably.  She’s still reading the damn history books.  How can we fight a war now when we’ve no idea what weapons to use?  If our weapons were any good against the Eidolon you’d not be in power now!

“Historically, that is something we’ve done,” said Hegaton, hoping his diplomatic words might buy him some time.  “We haven’t had a war in decades though, in fact, I’m not at all sure we still have anything we could call a standing army.”

There was no army.  It had never been rebuilt after the Eidolon invasion, and the remnants of it had been all too glad to slip away back home and find other things to do.

“Then we will conscript!” The Eidolon’s voice seemed to almost hiss the words at him.  “Go away and ready us for war.  The Eidolon of France will be dead in a month, and we must be ready in half that time.”

Hegaton started backing away, his pace slow and measured, his feet shuffling to avoid hitting anything he couldn’t see and falling over.  Two weeks to raise an army was ridiculously short, and then there were the logistics of equipping it, shipping it overseas, and the still insoluable problem of what weapons to use against an insectile overlord that had shrugged off all their previous technologies.

“Hurry!” hissed the Eidolon.

Jasreen and Hegaton

The Eidolon had insectile eyes.  There were fifteen of them, arrayed around her head in two circles, one just below the other.  Some poets had described them as being like a double-tiara, a crowning vision when the doggerel was seriously upon them; other poets had been more sensible and run away screaming.  Some of them had even got away too.  The others had been eaten, for the Eidolon had learned to hunger.
Scientists were more curious.  There were, they opined, entirely the wrong number of eyes.  There should be thirteen or twenty-one, a Fibonacci number.  And two rows of eight and seven were wrong as well, it should be eight and five or eight and thirteen.  The Eidolon declined to comment.
If you ignored her eyes, which it was hard to do, the Eidolon was attractive.  She had a firm, nubile body, and her hips swayed very gently as she walked.  Her hands were golden brown and long-fingered, delicate like a pianist's.  Her feet were petite, and her legs were long enough for an old-fashioned noir-mystery writer to bite through his pencil in electrified frustration.  But, and it was a significant but, her head was mostly eyes.

*

Jasreen bowed his head and walked backwards.  The Eidolon had lately been reading about medieval courts and had decided that the notion that her subjects should always have her in their sight when they were in her presence appealed to her.  Jasreen could see why, as anyone in her presence was always in her sight.  He'd done some very subtle and not entirely conclusive experiments that made him think that she had no blind spots at all; the cumulative vision overlapped enough that no matter where anything was she could always see it.  With, he noted, the obvious exception of things directly above her head.

He reached the door without incident and then stumbled over the threshhold, which was a treacherous centimetre or two higher than the floors on either side.  He put his hands out to steady himself, catching the doorframe and struggling to override the instinct to look away from the Eidolon and see what he was doing.  He felt his neck begin to turn, but he managed to hold it in check, and backed further through the room until he could sidestep and be out of her sight.

"She grows more human every day," said a voice next to him, and now for a moment he couldn't bring himself to turn his head to see who was talking.  How had medieval courtiers managed this insanity?  Then he freed himself of the mental block and looked to his left.

The antechamber was wooden-panelled and furnished with ornate metal chairs that the Instars made.  The Eidolon had kept the Instars hidden for decades before they were discovered, and exactly what they did and how they made the furniture – or what they made the furniture for – was still unknown.  Most of the people in the antechamber were standing, close to the walls and away from the furniture.  The speaker though, was sat on one of the chairs, looking slightly uncomfortable with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, but he was smiling beneath a brown, bushy beard.

"How do you mean?" Jasreen recognised the speaker as the Eidolon's Prime Minister, Hegaton Yearnchap.

"She immerses herself in our culture and tries it out, repeatedly.  She never really grasps why we did these things, or what they were intended to achieve, but she tries anyway, and slowly, she becomes human.  It's ridiculous to make you walk backwards like a medieval courtier, because she's far too well protected to be at risk of attack from you, and she doesn't care enough about you to be insulted if you're not awed by her presence.  She makes you walk backwards because it humiliates you and establishes a pecking order that she wants to keep in place.  She's becoming human."

"Is that a good thing?" Jasreen sounded cautious, unsure if these words he was listening to counted as sedition or not.

"No.  She's not human, and she doesn't have human perceptions or powers.  When she acts like she's human, she puts us all at risk."

"Risk from what?"

Hegaton smiled through his beard again and stood up.  Jasreen's eyes were automatically drawn to little pinpricks of blood on Hegaton's suit and neck, the dark red seeming to pulse rhythmically.  He knew that almost no-one else would have spotted any of them, and he tried to push down the sudden hunger that he felt.

"Risk from the Instars," said Hegaton.  "The Eidolon is a known quantity, but her offspring are not.  Why should we risk having her replaced, with something crueler?  Or just more disinterested?"

"The Instars can hardly be found," said Jasreen.  His voice sounded distant in his own ears, and there was an iron taste in his mouth.  His fingers flexed, on both hands, straightening and contracting back into claws.

"That's not true," said Hegaton.  "It's just not common knowledge where they can be found, because they are a danger in their own right.  By the way, I know what you are, you don't have to fight down your urges so firmly."

Jasreen managed a half-smile, but it felt as stiff as a grimace.

"But still," said Hegaton.  "I must go and present myself to her, and see what her regality wants next.  This will be fun, don't you think?"  He walked through the antechamber door into the Eidolon's throne-room, and Jasreen sat down on the floor with a thump, his legs suddenly unwilling to support him.  He saw, and listened.

The Seven Riders

The librarian who hated me lifted the Letters of the Eidolon Queen from its bed of crushed velvet with great care, and carried it over to my desk as though he were carrying a sleeping child.  He set it down, placing it precisely and squaring the corners.  Then he moved some lever or armature set into the back of the desk and the book's far end lifted up to an angle of thirty degrees or so, an ideal pitch for reading.  He regarded me for long seconds, his hazel eyes seeming faintly luminous in the shadows of his eye sockets, and then laid a hand very gently on the cover of the book.
"Be very wary with her, Mr. Debraun," he said.  "The gentleman on the wall brought her here, and she is... restless still."
With that he left, taking slow, measured steps across the thick golden carpet, opening the door silently and closing it behind him equally quietly.  I looked up at the portrait on the wall once more, the reason why this was called the Derleth reading room, and shuddered.  The implication of the librarian's words was clear to me.


*
Later than evening, as I sat in the Bar of the Seven Riders, I had two glasses in front of me: one of Psaltrum and one of Deinore.  Psaltrum was a fortified wine made two hundred miles south of Crécy and usually brought up via mule train, across inhospitable desert scrublands and broken hills that occasionally hid salt-basins and ghost-mines.  Deinore, served in a much smaller glass, was made from pressing the must of the local grapes and fermenting what was left with a botrytis yeast.  The yield was small, hence the serving size, and was something of an acquired taste.  Both were more expensive that I could normally afford, but I needed my nerves settling.
"Debraun!"  Henrix was the first of our crew after me to arrive, and as he did so he spied the glasses in front of me.  His eyebrows rose fractionally, and he hove to the bar without saying another word.  Only when he'd returned with a glass of port for us both did he sit down and look around him, checking habitually that no-one was listening in.
"You were admitted?"
I nodded.  I hadn't spoken since I'd thanked the librarian and left.
"You saw... well, you saw why it's called the Derleth reading room."
I nodded, and couldn't help but shudder a little, no matter that I tried hard to suppress it.  Henrix nodded, and I realised he'd been looking for just that reaction.
"What did you think of the egg?" he asked next, and he looked hungry.  Finally I had reason to speak again.
"I never saw an egg," I said.  "There was very little ornamentation in there."
"Well done," he breathed.  "You have been admitted.  Damn, but you're doing well."
"What do you mean?" I said.  Now that I was speaking again it felt like I'd spent a lifetime in silence.  I needed to hear voices around me.
"I... well, I was crying when I came out; took me two days to dry up and talk to normal people again.  Constant, he's the one with the obsession with the Librum Nox, he was shaking like an Aspen tree and wouldn't see anyone for a week.  You look like you've been on a date with the Lords of Hell, but you're talking, you're drinking... you're doing well."
"I don't feel like I'm doing well," I said.  "The book was–"


*
The book was haunted.  It was probably the wrong word for it, but there was something about the book that there isn't about ordinary books.  When I touched its cover it was warm, and if I left my fingers there I began to feel a pulse.  It wasn't mine, I checked, holding two fingers firmly at my wrist and feeling my pulse there completely out of time with the one from the book.  I almost stood up then and left.  But I only needed a few references to complete my paper and so I told myself that this was a trick of library, a mean-spirited little antic played by the librarians to keep up the reputation of the place.  I opened the book.
I would have been happier if it had howled, or if blood had spilled from its pages and flooded across the desk, or even if demons had leapt down from secret hiding places in the walls and stabbed me with pins and tridents.  All of those things would have made sense, in a way, they'd all be easier to deal with.  Instead.  Instead a voice started reading the letters to me, a soft, feminine voice that sounded as though it had been trained to read.  There were stress and intonation patterns that suggested the owner of the voice was used to giving orders, to being understood.  And the things it was saying... they were just the words on the page.
At first.
When I turned the first page the voice paused, and then said 'Wait.  There is text missing.'  I froze, my fingers still holding the corner of the page, feeling that dreadful pulse begin anew at my fingertips.  'Curse Aloysius,' said the voice.  'I shall have him skinned when I find him, and his skin shall be used to record the missing text.'  Then it started reading words that weren't present on the page, words that fit with everything I'd read previously and added a whole new dimension to what had been recorded.  I let the page fall at last and scrambled for the paper and pens in the drawer so that I could write down what was being said.


*
"She spoke to you?" Henrix's voice was awed.  "The Eidolon Queen?"
"Someone, someone spoke to me," I said.  I gestured to the barman, and held up the glass of port.  I really wanted more Psaltrum, but I knew I couldn't afford to keep drinking it.  "Someone who knew what was missing from the book."
"Do you believe her?"  Henrix gripped the table so hard that his fingers were turning white.
"I think I have to," I said.  "She told me who the Seven Riders are."
The barman laid the port down on the table; I noticed he'd doubled the measure for both of us.
"No-one knows who the Seven Riders are," he said.  "It's just a name, one of those historical things.  Nothing special."
I let him go before I looked at Henrix and toasted him with the new glass of port.  "Eight people know who the Seven Riders are," I said.  "And I don't know why she told me."