The music Maia played captivated Sabira, made her feel dizzy, spinning into herself.
“On one level your body is purging. The medicine sweeps through you, cleanses you. Like the objective truth of sound waves manifesting as the subjective beauty of music, the same is true with the medicine. As the body purges, so too does the heart and the mind. Surrender to the eon, lost sister, and be cleansed. Be counted among the lost no longer.”
Maia’s voice echoed and stretched. Lingering traces of words already uttered and those currently being spoken swam together among a tide of sounds, intermingling with the clean, ringing voices of the strings and the infinite aural horizon of rainfall. Sound painted color across Sabira’s vision, even with eyes closed. Color became form, form became life, and life was a flower burning like the sunset.
Vast tangled vines sprouted from the burning flower in every direction, forming a living lattice-work dome over her. Where each vine crossed another, a new flower bloomed and blazed. In the deep spaces between the vines, a vast swarm of stars blinked in the darkness. Each star was a living eye, seeing her, knowing her.
Sabira blinked her own eyes open and saw Maia still beside her, the guitar singing in her hands, her face a radiant glow. Sabira let her eyes close and again beheld the celestial dome of fire and flowers, stars and eyes. Under the center of the dome stood a diminutive creature with impossibly soft-looking fur and long, inquisitive ears, a tiny wiggling nose, and eyes twinkling like distant suns in the void. A creature from old hens’ tales, a mythic animal that loved to taunt the Aggies and run off with their crops. A zaicha.
Her zaicha.
“How did you get here, sweet zaicha? Did Trickster bring you? You should be back in the Labyrinth.”
No, wait. Surely, by now Zaicha must be . . .
The furry creature only wriggled its nose and cocked its comically long ear. Sabira stood and walked toward it, wanting to feel the fur in her hands and hold the soft, little creature to her breast. The zaicha’s thick hind legs sprung, and it hopped away.
“No, don’t. It’s not safe.”
With every step she took, the zaicha sprung forward, each hop a ringing note in a melody. Sabira followed him out of the warrens and down, down, down, into the tunnels. The ceramic walls were covered in the graffiti of living, breathing light. She followed into the old vaults of bare, dry stone. Echoes lingered here, always fading but never ending. Sharp pains cramped deep in her belly. Her whole body felt tight.
She followed the zaicha down into the pit. White blasts of light on rubble smeared with old blood. Oh Gods, the stench. Blood and urine and feces and glistening hearts piled high into a pyramid of rotting sacrifice. Screams and tears and rage.
Sanctified fury.
Cutting through it, somehow, a flower, petal unfurling from petal. Outlined in light until the light took on a form of its own. The petals and the shapes of light blossomed wider and higher, creating an expansive geometry of possibilities manifested as color as light as shape as gateway as being.
The gateway of light geometries watched her, waiting.
The zaicha perked up his long, furry ears. “Come,” he said, “join us.”
A blue flicker in the edge of her vision. She turned and saw a palukai in the shape of a double-edged spear sticking straight up from the gravel. Sitting atop the palukai, shimmered a blue yarist gem. The weapon that made her the weapon. It thrummed with a furious energy of violent potential. An invitation to host its power, make it her own. Her stomach clenched tight again.
Sabira turned from stick and gem, back to the zaicha. She stepped toward the living gateway, and she remembered. More than remembered. Became again now who she was then.
She was nameless, unseen, but they would see her. Choking the other girl. Her arm tight under the other girl’s chin, eyes bulging. The girl hanging on the other girl’s back, feeling every desperate straining gasp, the final shudders tight against her chest.
No.
Another girl whose face she vaporized, blasted from across the pit with a plasma gun. And the boy, begging, leg shredded. Spearing his chest. The vleez child panicking at her feet. Face melting like slagged metal.
No, no.
The vleez prisoner she mangled and decapitated in the pit, throwing its head into the light. Vleez shippers she impaled while confiscating their vessel.
No, please, please, no.
All of them. All she killed. Now. At once. Every blood spray and frightened tear. Every final breath and snapped bone. Every scream.
She crawled on her belly. Breast sliced open. Caked with dried blood, red and brown and black. Crawled closer to the geometry of light. Reaching, desperate. Human hands and vleez claws grappled her legs, her arms, her neck. Pulling her away, dragging, suffocating.
A wild bellow erupted from deep beneath the ground. The great blast of sound cracked open the floor, crumbling the bedrock to shards beneath her. Jagged pieces tumbled away into black nothing.
Falling and falling.
Great rolling plains of blue grasses shifting beneath the orange and pink sky. Two suns, one hot and near, another smaller, distant, but still bright.
More bellows. Answered and answered again by more and more. Hundreds more. Thousands. She looked and saw the wild grank herds stretching into the horizon. Wild animals, completely pure, no weapons platforms, no biomech augmentations. Thousands moved as one, bellowing and charging straight for her.
She tried to run, but she couldn’t breathe. Not this air, it felt all wrong in her lungs. Her leg gushed blood. It felt heavy and numb and useless. Nine eyes sizzled through her back like they would burn clear through her torso and out her torn breast. Still she tried to run and still the herd came crashing toward her.
With a deafening, feral chorus, they trampled her. Breaking her. Crushing. Smashing. Killing her. Pounding every remaining bit of her into the churning mud.
A red stain in a vast field of blue.
29.
DEATH WAS NOT as she imagined it to be. No freezing void. No hells. No standing for judgment before the Gates of Heaven.
Death felt, strangely, like much of her life had been. Like an ancient cavern deep below the surface, a mountain of rock between her and the sky, impenetrable blackness, hollow echoes following her every step.
She felt . . . them. In the dark, coming closer. The rank smell of decay preceded their presence. All those humans and vleez, dead by her hands, waiting in the black. She wanted to tell them something—needed to plead with them, as pathetic and useless as it would be—but her throat gripped tight. No words could make it out. Only tears.
They answered with the silence of the dead.
Three synchronous events: the ringing of a chime and its long-fading reverberation, the spark of white fire in the black, the zaicha at her feet.
The furry, little creature stood in his own pool of light, nose wriggling. Ears flopped up and down as it bounced away, illuminating the uneven path over rock and bones. She followed the zaicha through caverns unshaped and unhewn by human hands. By the zaicha’s flickering light, she glimpsed the cavern walls, undulating yet motionless, cold stone yet alive, adorned with paintings of wild, shaggy beasts.
The ghosts reached out for her with long-fingered hands, cold and gray. Urged her to stay in the depths, to remain and weep in the dark with the shadows of the dead. She shivered at their touch, trembled at their anger. Even as she continued forward, their chill lingered on her neck, their pain echoed in the back of her thoughts.
Forever entwined, they whispered. Forever entwined.
The zaicha’s white light shifted to deep oranges and reds. The animal bounced high and twisted in the air. Turned into flame. A yellow torch of fire and smoke in the dark cavern, held forth by an old woman. She led Sabira past moist rock, gleaming with reflected torch-fire, up to the curved lips of the cave mouth.
As they neared the opening, Sabira saw the old woman more clearly. Stooped frame wr
apped in faded animal skins. Long braids of black and gray hair, twisted through with stones and small bones, clicking and clanking with each step. They passed out of the tunnel and into the world, Sabira feeling like she was seeing it for the very first time. To the west, a full, silvery moon sank behind the horizon. To the east, the rising sun, golden, bright, and warm. Wisps of fog drifted up from the trees below, trickled up the cliffs all around her, and melted into the deep blue sky. She felt the soft mist on her cheeks, cool and invigorating.
Between moon and sun, a river snaked along a wide, green valley. At its banks, the tribes had gathered and celebrated. They danced around great fire pits to the music of drums and bellowing horns. They danced for the birth of the sun. They danced for the memories of their dead.
They danced to welcome her home.
“The girl, buried,” the crone told her. “The woman, born.”
Sabira fell to her knees, the open valley stretching before her. “And the dead?” she asked, a great flood of tears surging up behind her eyes.
“The dead,” said the crone, “the dead, remember.”
Sabira wept.
“I know. The dead remember,” she sobbed quietly. “I remember. I’m sorry. Oh Gods, oh Gods, I’m sorry. I killed them. I killed them. I’m sorry.”
Sabira reached out. Maia took her in her arms, held her to her breast.
“I’m sorry. I killed them. I’m sorry. I did. I . . .”
Sabira cried and shuddered. Begged forgiveness. Sobbed until she could weep no more, until she felt wrung out, exhausted, unable to even whisper another confession of guilt. All the while, Maia caressed Sabira’s scalp, beaded with cold sweat.
Sabira remembered the embrace of her hen-mother before she had died, shriveled and used up. Remembered, too, the farewell touch of her brood-sister. Brief moments of tenderness echoing through the ambient brutality of her life.
“I cannot offer absolution,” said Maia, “nor redemption. The sacrament cannot change your past. The brew offers a chance for you to choose freedom, now, in this moment. The Theocrats enslaved not just flesh, Sabira. In order to enslave your mind, they first enslaved the story of who you are and where you come from. If you wish to be free, you must free your story. Tonight's purge is only the first step. But this is when the journey begins.”
Sabira lay there for a long while, Maia embracing her to her bosom, before she remembered the fetters no longer bound her wrists and ankles. She could reach up, if she wanted, and throttle her, choke the life from her as she had fantasized just a few days ago. The thought repulsed her.
I don’t want to tell that story anymore. She didn’t know at all what story she wished to create, but she knew it would never be the same now.
The room still displayed the image of the rooftop and dome. It took Sabira a few moments to realize this sky was not the same as the last, deep blue and golden. In this sky, faint light diffused through the cloudy horizon. Soft rain tapped on the dome. She felt drawn to the wet, glistening vines and open air, but in reality, all around her was dry. Isolated.
“I want to go on the balcony,” she said.
Sabira tried to stand, and her head swam with color and motion. The effects of the eon still played with her perceptions. Her legs felt weak and unsteady beneath her. Coraz and Maia lifted her to her feet. She wrapped an arm around each of their shoulders, and they led her out of the room, down the hallway, and into the common room. The lem followed silently behind.
The common room was silent except for the light pattering of rain on the terrace windows and slow, deep breaths of Cal, asleep on the couch. The eeshl slept curled up in a wrinkly ball on his chest. It was the first time she had ever seen the little mine rat without anger and suspicion boiling in his gaze. For a flash, she imagined seeing through his eyes. The splatter of blood on his face. The wet screams of his brood and hen. The blade of the servant’s palukai clattering to the floor instead of forcing him into the altar.
She bent over and whispered in his ear, “I know.”
The three of them walked to the heavy, translucent curtain, and her legs gradually felt stronger. Wanting to rip aside the curtain and stand in the morning rains, she unwrapped her arm from Coraz’s shoulder and reached for the sliding window. Her vision twirled, streaked with geometries of color spinning in and out of existence.
“Just a moment now,” Coraz said. “The brew will make you dizzy still. And you’ll need a mask to go outside.” Ahn held her steady as Maia affixed the respirator mask to her face, pulled the heavy curtain around them, and slid back the window. They stepped out on the balcony.
The gentle rain was bliss itself, a soothing ecstasy washing over her glyphs, flushing the stale tears from her eyes. She undid her tunic and let it fall to her feet. Rainwater dripped and poured over her, pooled and eddied around her scars, trickled icily down her spine. She swore she could sense every individual plop of rain on her flesh, each a cold, wet, tantalizing kiss.
This must be what Heaven feels like.
To the east, the sun rose bright and hot. Streaks of gold and mauve tinged the horizon. In the open patches of thin, dark clouds, stars faded as the sky transformed from black to purple. The rings encircling the planet sparkled like pink and orange quartz.
Below, the city of Glish fell away before her, its vines and cones gleaming wetly in the dawn’s light. Thick, black columns of smoke drifted up from terraces dotting the hillside. A rank smell of overcooked meat mingled with the scent of morning blooms.
“Good morning, Sabira,” said Gabriel, his full voice unencumbered by a respirator. “It is good to see you free and unbound.” She hadn’t realized he was there on the balcony until he spoke. He came toward her, eyes glittering gold and silver, and embraced her. His wide chest felt firm but comforting against her wet cheek. The urge to melt into his embrace was irresistible. No one, no servant or pillow, had ever held her in such a way. He held her as a free man embracing a free woman beneath the open sky.
His strong hands on her shoulders separated them just enough so he could look into her eyes when he spoke. “I will call you lost sister no longer, Sabira. I see the change in you.”
“I still . . .” The effort of forming words required an unusual amount of focus. “I still don’t really understand what has changed. But I can feel it. I can feel myself. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I fit inside my skin in a new way.”
Maia’s touch on her back felt soothing and electric. “It is fine not to understand. In time you will get closer. But some mysteries will always remain.” The rain straightened her hair into long, onyx ribbons falling over her shoulders.
“Most of the psychotoxins have been purged from you.” Maia took Sabira’s hand in her own. “All your life, every breath, every bite of food, has been tainted. These chemical agents were designed by the Theocrats to trigger instincts of fear and obedience, which they have engineered into your people. Your choices now will be free from their taint, though the inertia of old habits remains. Tonight we continue the eon ritual. We will cleanse your heart of their stories as we cleansed your blood of their poisons.”
“In my dream, I saw a gateway. It was, I don’t know, it was light, and a flower, it was like a glyph in a way, but alive. I wanted to pass through it, but I . . .”
“Many see such a living portal when they drink eon,” Maia said.
“Do they pass through it?” asked Sabira.
“Some do, yes. But not often during the night of the purge.”
“The zaicha led me there. I wanted to go through it, but I fell. What is on the other side? Do you know?”
“That is a mystery you must explore for yourself.”
“I want to, yes. I want the eon again. I need to see the other side.”
“She is a brave one,” said Gabriel. “The portal terrified me when first I drank the sacrament.”
“And Daggeira?” Sabira turned from the view to face them. “She’ll be awake s
oon. Will you give her eon, too?”
“She will need time to adjust to new surroundings, just as you did,” Maia answered. “To be honest, if not for the plague, I would not have given you the sacrament so soon. Eon is trying on the body and mind. It takes strength. If Daggeira is not healed from her injuries first, the purge could kill her.”
“Daggeira is strong.”
“The time will come for Daggeira,” said Gabriel. “But this, now, is the time of your liberation. Now is your time.”
The last mists of rain dissipated as Av ascended higher into the sky. Wisps of fog rose from the wet streets and rooftops and dissolved into the morning air. All the while, the columns of smoke grew thicker, the smell more rank.
“What are those fires all over the city?” asked Coraz.
“Started just before dawn, when the rain let up enough.” Gabriel furrowed his brow. “They’re burning their dead in the streets. They keep bringing out more and more bodies to throw on the pyres.”
“It will not be long before the Vleez decide to burn us next, I think,” said Maia. “We should take you back inside, Sabira, before you are noticed.”
“No, don’t you see?” A sleeping dread awoke in Sabira’s belly. “Don’t you understand? We might be . . . I think . . . We’re running out of time.”
“Be calm, Sabira. You’re safe with us,” said Gabriel. “I will protect us from our hosts. The Vleez will not harm you nor Daggeira.”
“No, no. It’s not the Vleez,” Sabira spoke faster than she seemed to be able to think, fully aware of the betrayal in each word. “Don’t you see? We did it. I did . . . It’s part of the plan. It’s always been part of the plan. They’re coming back, I . . . I think. Soon, maybe.”
“Sabira?” Coraz placed ahns hand on her arm, soft fingers gripping with unexpected strength.
“When all the Vleez are dead, the Warseers are going to come back,” she said. “Back to complete their conquest.”
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Part 3: Eon (Shattered Gates Volume 1 Part 3) Page 6
