Out of the Mouth of the Dragon

Book 71: Gateway Essentials

by Mark S. Geston

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Amon VanRoark heard the prophet speaking in the market place of the decaying city. He called men to the wars, to the fabled Meadows where the armies of Good would meet the forces of Evil in one final Armageddon that would decide the fate of a world already doomed and dying. VanRoark followed the prophet to the Meadows and there he witnessed the last cataclysmic battle between humanity and the dark powers of Salasar.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 151

Sample

“And then I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.

“For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.

“And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue, Armageddon.”

—REVELATIONS 16: 13, 14, 16

“And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army.

“And the beast was taken and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshiped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.

“And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth; and the fowls were filled with their flesh.”

—REVELATIONS 19: 19, 20, 21

“And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

—REVELATIONS 20: 9

“And all that was written was accomplished in the fullness of his wisdom and majesty: the captains, their armies, and all of the nations of the earth were encircled with the fire and consumed, even unto ashes and dust.

“But among the ashes and the heaps of dust there lived men that had pledged neither loyalty nor had worshiped him upon the horse or the beast. And in time these men raised upon the land their own nations and appointed their own captains and began to worship, each unto the dictates of his own mind.

“But they were men of ash as were their nations, and little grew upon the land save hatred and frustration. So all lived with the hope of yet another final battle, one where the fire would consume all, and the chasm between the worlds would divide and swallow all, even the ash.”

—SURVIVORS 17: 6, 7, 8

“But again mankind was divided and set upon the plain of Armageddon, although it was called Tynemorgan by the men of Salassar, and again the battle was joined and darkness overthrown by light, and yet again the ashes of battle and the men of ash still lived. And at the sight of them strange wailings were heard beyond the sun; a great sadness swept out of the heart of God and into the soul of the ashen nations. Again, though, the hope of yet another ending helped to turn the ash into flesh and blood.”

—BOOK OF ERIC 2: 37

“‘Who are these men?’ he asked me, his face twisted with anxiety. ‘They come into our towns and homes and our own brothers become like them, like madmen possessed by ideas which I cannot even begin to fathom. Who are they?’ he asked again.

“‘I don’t know.’

“‘My own brother!’ He railed on, ‘He takes one look at that beggar and then it seems like he, he … And then that fleet, those ships come and he leaves without a word to me or to his family. God! With ships like those one could rule nations, ransom any throne on earth! But no, he and the others who betrayed us just got on and left. Men who I thought I had known all my life, they turned on me and left. Who are they?’

“‘I don’t know.’”

—DIALOGUES OF MORETH, Chapter IV

“The battles continue, the last being in memory of my grandfather, breaking and crushing the land into dust compounded; all the Books are erased and many of man’s arts have fled his mind.

“There is a thing, a strange melancholy that grows on this world and makes the efforts of men as barren as the soil they are founded upon. Now even the armies that are raised by men to defeat evil fall apart and disintegrate before the battle plain is reached.

“The cancer seems to have invaded more than earth and the hearts of mere men. The clockworks of creation have shorn their gears; stars do not appear at their appointed times; the seasons fail to conform to their immortal standards; and even the surety of a death of pain and damnation begins to seem favorable to the bleeding perversity of earth.”

—Inscription on a ruined gate at theBlack Library at Iriam, chronologyunknown

The ship had been badly hurt at the Meadows, and her wounds showed pale yellow and rust in the afternoon sun. Almost a year to the day, she had steamed proudly out of the Goerlin Estuary, eighty of her sisters at either side. There had been battleships afloat on that day, an aircraft carrier, cruisers like herself, and fast destroyers. Now only she remained alive.

All the fading might and wealth and tradition of the Maritime Republics had sailed with that fleet; their flags and the arms of their great houses, all committed to fight on what they judged to be the proper side at the Meadows. By rights, not one should have returned, or even have had a place to return to.

So they had fought, valiantly in many cases, and those empty souls who had chosen to remain behind had seen the night sky burning and felt the ground ripple imperceptibly, even though the Meadows were over two thousand miles away. Surely, if anything could end time and creation, the battle that had erupted upon the Meadows would have done it.

They, the empty people, had found a curious comfort in those days, while the western highlands were edged with red and their china rattled impolitely at teatime. They had even begun to pride themselves in being able to view the situation impartially, free from the passions of those who had embroiled themselves in the struggle. “The plan of creation,” wrote Moreth in one of his last Dialogues—how easily he handled such terms, “naturally contains form, content, and a goal at which the first two qualities are aimed. It is further natural that the goal should remain permanently aloof from mortal comprehension; the content is, simply, history; the form, one may safely conclude on the most elementary level, is time. Time is, ultimately, a finite quantity, for if it is divorced from limits, then it ceases to be time and becomes eternity, regardless of how many changes may be contained within it.

“The beginning of time went unrecorded because of the simple absence of observers; but now, at the end, there are observers, men such as myself who feel relief and awe in seeing creation so neatly trimmed off.

“We find relief in that this capstone to time and the universe and all the accompanying phenomena serve finally to illuminate the hand of a true Creator, lying beyond time and mere physical presence. All the brilliant sophistries of dead atheists have fallen before the fulfillment of Revelations, Survivors, and the Book of Eric. True, these Books have spoken of other battles that were supposed to have ended time, but one can only ascribe poor judgment to their writers, most probably brought on by a feeling of weariness and a disgust with the state of the world.

“But now, we are sure, the final battle is joined, and I have every confidence that those who have committed themselves to the Creator shall carry the day and thus ensure their and their ancestors’ salvation.

“I, myself, have not gone to the Meadows. I have, instead, chosen to await the end in my own house, surrounded by my writings and my thoughts. Strange, though I can apparently view the situation with gratifying coolness and objectivity, I could not bring myself to swear allegiance to either side; it could well be that this apathy (that is the wrong word) will be rewarded with eternal damnation. Or it could be that my eldest son, a turret captain on the battleship Eringold, may save me (and what of my other two sons? I suspect that they have joined the enemy, but I must not think of that). I have no idea of what shall become of me or of this thing called my soul, and, in the end, I really do not care. Like the authors of Survivors and Eric, I am tired; I feel that I have long overstayed my time on earth, just as I feel that earth has itself overstayed its proper time.”

When the bleeding ship entered the harbor, Moreth drove his sword hilt into the ground and fell upon the blade. Forty percent of the city’s original population had stayed behind, immobilized by confusion or the hopeful emptiness such as had afflicted Moreth. Most of those who had not taken their own lives by that time slowly made their way down to the harbor to see the ship, not to greet her, for they knew that her survival meant that time was to continue and the grinding agony of previous ages would once again be multiplied.

She was named the Havengore, after another cruiser which had fought at a previous false-Armageddon; now she was as tragic as her namesake must once have been for they were both, in their time, the lone surviving great ship of once-powerful fleets.

The first Havengore had finally contrived to die an honorable death in a battle which, if it did not accomplish all that it was intended to, at least offered an appropriate death to all who fought there. Yet, so disorganized had the battles become that now there were survivors, men and ships even more confused than those who had never gone to the Meadows; they were the ash-men spoken of in Survivors and Eric. They had heard voices which had instilled in them an absolutely unshakable conviction that this, finally, was to be the last act of mankind. They had seen things after which a man had almost no choice but to die. They had fought alongside angels, against demons and devils; and when the noise and smoke had settled, they found themselves alone on the Meadows. The armies had vanished as one would have thought, leaving only their equipment behind to show the survivors there had indeed been a battle. They also left behind pain and despair and hopelessness that was beyond words.

It had taken eight months for the battered cruiser to sail home, dropping off men along the coast, stopping now and then to jury-rig some particularly desperate repairs. She brought five hundred of the Republics’ men with her, men who were still trying to decide if they had in some way failed to act in the manner which had been expected of them, or if they had been deserted by their commanders.

She slid past the breakwater at three knots, her twisted and mutilated hull leaving a multitude of small wakes in the quiet water. “B” turret was gone and the bridge immediately behind it had been caved in. The wing of the aircraft which had rammed the ship at that point jutted out over “A” turret, bent and warped from the fires which had welded it to the decks. Three holes of varying diameter could be seen at the waterline; the crane at the stern was bent down until its tip trailed in the water. She was scorched in many places from fires and most of her secondary armament appeared to be out of commission. Two of the seven Republics’ flags hung uncertainly at three-quarters mast.

It was very quiet. Not even the sea gulls called any welcome to her; most of them had left with the fleet, a year before. Only silent people, who looked as if they had not slept for months, stared out at the ship and at men who looked distressingly like themselves. The loudest noise was the falling of water as the Havengore’s pumps tried to limit the ship’s portside list to five degrees.

They all wondered what they should do now. Cry, suicide, accuse someone, anyone? But men could be seen working aboard the cruiser, caring for her, trying to ease her spin; they brought her through the harbor, heading for the shallow water which flanked the mouth of the Goerlin River. The engines were stopped and the remaining anchor let down. By dusk the Havengore had settled into the sand on a roughly even keel, the water about ten feet above the waterline.

By noon of the next day they had taken the dead off the cruiser and most of the living; some of her original crew had elected to stay with her, for a while at least.

The shock over the failure of the Meadow War lingered over the city and its reduced population for more than a year. Then, quoting reassuring verses from Scripture or just swearing, the people began to reorganize, giving the city some semblance of its former life.

Aside from the stunted renewal of trade and farming, two great projects came to occupy the city. The first of these was the building of a great cathedral. The predictable reactions to the War’s failure would have hardly seemed to have pointed in such a direction, but, with time, as people became accustomed to the world which they were now forced to live in, as they heard even more clearly the wind howling through empty houses and across the lonely earth, they were thrown back upon their initial faith. Perhaps the War would have ended time if they all had gone to the Meadows? Perhaps there were undetected flaws in those who went which prevented a successful conclusion to time?

Besides, when you could bury your life under a slowly growing mosaic proclaiming the glories of the Creator, the taste of your hopes seemed a little less bitter. Eventually some of the men who had seen things which they were sure would cause madness came to look upon those memories as miracles, divine gifts to be treasured for their splendor. The speculations on a failure on the part of the deity grew progressively weaker as the cathedral became a symbol of continuing heavenly favor.

The church was built on top of a small hill, to the west of the city walls. From its steps a road of marble slabs was laid, through the Artillery Gate, where it met the Avenue of Victories with its columns and monuments to ancient battles; then straight down to the harbor and the Sea past the breakwater.

It was quite a splendid road and found a great deal of favor with what still remained of the commercial and landed aristocracy. It became something of a ritual to take one’s family out of the city oil summer evenings, up to the cathedral to inspect its glacial progress, to comment on some particularly beautiful piece of stained glass which had just arrived from Ihetah-Incalam or wrought iron from New Svald. They stayed there talking with their friends because it was cool and the smells of the inner city could not reach their nostrils. But mostly, they waited for it to get dark, so on walking home, they could not see the dirty, deserted city and harbor.

They seldom visited the harbor anymore and even the briefly revived sea trade soon began to wither. The city became more insulated from the rest of the world, carrying on its chief business within itself, venturing outside only to secure certain luxuries it could not manufacture domestically. The last steel merchantmen had vanished long before the fleet had sailed to the Meadows, but even then a sizable collection of wooden steam and sailing ships had helped to tie the city with such distant points as the Dresau Islands and the crumbling petro-chemical establishments of Cynibal on Blackwoods Bay. Now most of these were gone too, partly because the city’s great men no longer saw much reason to journey abroad, and also because the War had effectively removed the old technologies and wealths which had made trade worthwhile. Everywhere in the world, only the merest shadow of what had been remained; and what had been was precious little in the first place.

Aside from the cathedral, the only real activity to be found was at the Old Navy Dock. From there a feeble but steady stream of small boats and rafts sailed the short distance to where the old cruiser was still aground. The reconstruction of the ship was looked upon with a good deal less sympathy than was the cathedral by most of t. . .