by A. Sparrow
“They should know better than to fuck with Tiamat,” said Brian. “We took out half their number before they turned tail. We got them running back to their herd.”
“Were they the ones who followed us?”
“Them … and more. A decent-sized assault force. Three Hashmallim in the lead. They could have done some damage if we hadn’t already mobilized.”
They led me to a chamber that was much like the ones we had passed, its stone floor textured to resemble an oriental rug, furnishings carved straight from the bedrock.
Dominating the center of the room was a litter woven of porcelain strapping. Supported by a pair of stands, it bore a slight and shriveled man wearing only a loin cloth. On the other side, Lady An sat cross-legged on a bed of stone studying a scroll mounted on a pair of ceramic spindles.
She looked up at me, unsmiling.
“You should have told me you wished to channel. I would have arranged a better quality experience.”
“It was an accident," I said. "I had no intention ... no idea that would happen. That guy … the Old One … he grabbed me, and—”
“Rafael? He touched you? Physically?”
“Well, yeah.”
“How odd. You must have a strong aura … for him to have sensed you … and awakened.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
Lady An shrugged and put down the scroll. “No harm done. But … you were trying to evade us. Why?”
“I just wanted to be alone. I needed time to think.”
“If you were looking to escape, there was no need to run from us. You need to understand, you’re not a prisoner. We would have let you walk right out of here unmolested.”
“Would you?”
“Of course. Once we were assured you understood the risks of leaving.”
“The guys told me those Protectors are gone.”
“Yes, but clearly the Hashmallim have been alerted to your presence. And now … due to your channeling … the Seraphim know as well. They’ll be on the lookout.”
“Seraphim? Why Seraphim?”
“Because they monitor the Singularity and they recognize their ilk.”
“What?”
“You’re one of them … or at least their equivalent. But don’t be alarmed. So am I. Though, not all of us elect to follow their path. Old Ned here, was … is … quite the adept. Rafael, bless his heart, was not. Sadly, we are not all created equal. I’ve always found that hard to accept …. to understand. Caste systems just go against my grain. Let’s just say it’s not how I would have made the universe.”
“You’re telling me … I’m an angel … a Seraph?”
“No,” said Lady An. “Not yet, anyways. But we both have … had the potential … perhaps that path is still available to you. You are … alive … as you say. But being here … I don’t understand how that is possible. But … you are an adept. That much is clear.”
“It’s a curse, isn’t it?”
“It can be,” said Lady An, smiling. “It can also be a blessing. Don’t tell me you’ve never benefited from your special skills.”
I shrugged and looked away.
“This person you have come to find … did you happen to find her? When you channeled?”
“No,” I said. “It was all pretty vague. I mean, I had this feeling like she was here. Somewhere. But that’s all it was … just a feeling.”
“Probably because you channeled through Rafael. His bulb doesn’t shine the brightest.”
She narrowed her eyes to a squint.
“Might you be willing to channel again? With me to Guide you? And this time, through Old Ned?”
“What good would that do?”
“I guarantee it would be quite a different experience. It would give me a chance to learn a little more about you. Why and how … you came to be here.”
“I told you why. Because I promised Karla.”
“But … how? This one of the lands of the dead. And you are … not dead … simply out … an impossibility.”
I didn’t know what to tell her.”
“So? What do you say? Shall we?” She slid over to the edge of her stone bed and offered her hand.
“I don’t see what that would accomplish.”
“Trust me. You will accomplish whatever you came here for. With Old Ned as the conduit and me to guide you … I guarantee it.”
“Um, okay ... I guess. I mean, it’s worth a shot.”
“Come, then.” She got up off her bed and walked over to me. Taking me by the hand, she led me to the litter.
Old Ned was a wiry dude. Every fold and creases in his skin was filled with sand and dust. Even the corners of his eyes were packed with grit. It was as if he had become as much a part of this world as the bedrock below our feet.
“Brian, Taro? Would you mind stepping outside. Best we have no distractions.”
“Sure Ma’am,” said Brian, shuffling out of the chamber. “We’ll be right outside in the passage, in case—”
“We’ll be fine. Thank you Brian. Now please, leave us be.”
***
Lady An brushed a strand of ropey hair from Old Ned’s eyes with a sweep of her hand.
“Ned’s been a good friend and a mentor to me. He used to guide this village. Cycles ago he left with a party of colonists to restore some ancient catacombs that had been abandoned. Abzu is smaller than Tiamat, but much older."
"So ... you’re not alone."
“Not at all. Infidels have been settling these caves as long as humans have shed their souls. We have a string of settlements all through these Deeps. We cooperate with defenses and take on each other’s refugees. Nothing’s permanent, I suppose. Settlements fail to take root and peter out. Some achieve glory only to be destroyed. There will come a day when Tiamat will fall and be forgotten, I am sure. Poor Ned has seen it all. He’s been here longer than anyone I know. Twice he witnessed the fall of the Horus, only to have it rise again.”
“One of my best friends helped bring down the Horus. The second time.”
She shook her head. “Those stories seem like myths and legends now. I can’t imagine how they accomplished such a feat. Twice.”
“She’s in Vermont now … with me.”
Lady An looked puzzled. “Who is it you’re speaking of?”
“My friend Urszula. She used to be stuck here in the Deeps. About a hundred years. I don’t know what that is in song cycles.”
“She’s … alive?”
“Well, yeah. She’s not a zombie or anything.”
“Alive, you say?”
“I know. It doesn’t make sense to me, either. I used to think, once you’re dead you’re dead. But … apparently … that’s not necessarily the case.”
“Come,” said Lady An. “I think Old Ned here will be very interested in meeting you.”
I looked at the guy on the litter. He was short and scrawny, but somehow, even through the big sleep, he retained an intensity that made him very imposing. Maybe it was those squinty, deep-set eyes. That permanent frown.
He reminded me of the head groundskeeper who tended Dreamland Park in Fort Pierce. He used to terrorize me and my home-schooled buddies back in the day. The more I thought about communing with Old Ned’s soul, the more nervous I got.
“Can we maybe do this later?” I said. “I’m still kind of unsettled from the first … uh … excursion.”
“No worries. I promise you this will be a very different experience. Rafael is … how can I say it kindly? Well, he’s always been a little bit scatter-brained. It’s unfortunate you received your first glimpse of the matrix through his lens.”
“Actually, it wasn’t that bad. It was still pretty impressive. Got a bit scary towards the end, though.”
“Scary? I can’t imagine what he could have shown you to get you frightened. No matter. This time you’ll be in good hands. Remember, my soul will be right beside yours.”
“The Horus … it can’t get me … throug
h this mind meld … can it?”
She scrunched her eyes at me. “The Horus? What are you talking about? That beastly thing has no connection to the Singularity. None at all.”
I took a deep breath, out of habit more than need, and stepped up to the litter.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Spread your hand,” said An. “Place two fingers on his temple and stretch your thumb under his chin. We’ll try and make contact simultaneously so as to ease the shock and to let Old Ned know I’m accompanying you. I would not advise you ever doing this on your own again. In that way, you were lucky you went through Rafael. Brace yourself. You might feel a slight jolt.”
I spread my hand and brought my hand to his face, hovering until I saw her make first contact. When I touched him, she wasn’t kidding about the jolt. It felt like a horse had smashed a hoof clear through my face to the back of my skull.
Old Ned pounced on me as soon as we connected, clenching my soul tight in his grip like he was holding a frog. He spread his mental tentacles into every corner of my mind, but shared little of himself in return. Unlike Rafael, this guy kept his secrets close.
Once he had plundered everything there was to know about me, he loosened up and let some of his feelings slip, revealing the depth of his personality and intellect. He was an impressive man. Curious. Vivacious, for a dead guy. Clearly fond of Lady An. He made sure I understood that any friend of hers was a friend of his.
Lady An took advantage of the opportunity to rummage through my head. But unlike with Ned, her mind was completely open to me. She wondered how much of what I told her about Urszula and all was actually truthful. She wanted to know why I was really here and what I knew and didn’t know about this place.
She thought for sure I must be hiding something. She didn’t believe I could be such a simpleton. Now she could see exactly how much of a dumb ass I was and how much I regretted coming here.
Old Ned had already absorbed everything there was to know about me. There wasn’t much, compared to him. Satisfied, he released his grip on us and diverted his attention elsewhere in the Singularity.
Me and Lady An were like a couple of ticks hanging onto a big dog.
She gave me a mental nudge.
“We can go now.”
“Okay. But how? Where?”
And them something gave way like the gates above a spillway. We engaged with the Singularity’s particles and began to flow. Picking up speed, we ping-ponged through the souls in the corridors, up through the catacombs to the guards manning the perimeter, the outposts and their skirmishers and out into the dunes and barrens through a wide scattering of lonesome strangers. The sheer velocity of our travel bewildered me.
“Slow down. Relax.”
“It’s not me … doing this.”
“Oh no? Then who? It’s not me … or Ned. We’re not in any hurry to get anywhere.”
“I can’t ... I can’t stop.”
“Just … relax.”
We stopped in the head of a one-legged man just long enough to befuddle him before breaking free of this relay of minds and into the Singularity’s matrix of soul particles.
We cruised across the sands at ground level, courtesy of Ned’s disseminated soul. It was such a relief to be free of people for a change. But this freedom of the open spaces didn’t last very long. We were converging rapidly with one of the closer hordes, perhaps the very one that had ostracized me.
“Should we … go in?”
“That’s up to you.”
A collision seemed inevitable so I did nothing to discourage it. We plunged into the crowd of marchers, ricocheting among them like a supersonic pin ball, sampling psyches in the briefest of flashes, measuring the mood of this mob, zone by zone.
At the leading edge of the column, faith in the idea of the Horus as Heaven burned strong. These elites thought about little else, concentrating every iota of their attention on thrusting their tireless bodies after the dust storm, dreaming only of salvation, not assimilation.
No single faith dominated. Zealots of every stripe marched shoulder to shoulder. Hassids. Hindus. Presbyterians. Rastafarians. I even detected a Sedevacantist or two. Their prayers converged, all focused on the same goal—chasing a freaking dust storm.
Everyone’s messiah came together in those ever changing billows. Whatever face they sought, they saw. Jesus, Jah, whatever.
I couldn’t help myself. As we flitted among these people, like a little demon, I planted seeds of doubt into whatever minds porous enough to allow such ideas to take root. Most resisted. But some succumbed and I immediately felt bad for meddling.
I detected amusement in Lady An. She did nothing to deter me. To her, I was an experiment. A lab rat turned loose in a maze to see what it would do. She just came along to observe.
We worked our way back to the middle of the horde where the souls were just as able-bodied as those in the fore, but were simply less motivated. Pockets of doubt emerged here and there, though most believed, just not fanatically.
The doubters were a sorry lot, with no aspirations, nothing to look forward to ever again. They had how common such feelings were among their neighbors. It was not something they admitted. But if not for the threats of the Hashmallim, they would have already abandoned the chase.
Lady An paid close attention to these would-be infidels. They were prime candidates for recruitment, if only the Hashmallim and their Protectors didn’t find them out.
Behind them, in the long tail of crippled but ambulatory souls bringing up the rear, the level of faith re-surged a bit. This was a self-selecting crowd as few non-believers endured the chase once they had gone lame. They became the damaged loners that haunted the empty spaces of the Deeps.
Here, we bogged down, dwelling too long and gathering way too much information about each individual. Life histories. Networks of relations and relationships. Details of their illnesses, injuries and deaths.
I sensed some annoyance coming from Lady An.
“So is she here?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“Then why are we lingering?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Focus on why you came. Give the Singularity something to work with and it will take you where you need to go.”
Not knowing what else to do, I reviewed the progression of events that had led me to the Deeps, from my promise to Karla to my interrogation of Urszula and finally Luther’s offer to show me that portal at the heart of Root in return for a small favor.
The results were instantaneous. We were swept out of the horde and back into the more fluid and continuous medium of the Singularity. It gave the illusion of flying high in the sky but that was just one possible window out of this existence.
We could see the Horus hunched like an old woman, bending its shaft in the direction of its motion. It had just swept through another column, mischievously sampling the middle this time, perhaps testing the faith of the vanguard. Such a tease, that Horus.
Well over a dozen other winding columns of humanity twisted around it, each hoping to intersect its meandering path. From on high, the whole assemblage looked like a scraggly flower someone had mashed into the ground and twisted, the Horus its shaggy, rotting stem.
I expected us to dive into the next closest horde, but instead we plunged towards an empty place thick with scars of the storm’s prior passages. Amidst the scrubbed bedrock was a patch of ground that had been spared. A repository of dust, a single, sandy hillock dominated the center of this odd terrain.
“Where are you taking us?”
“I don’t know.”
We corkscrewed down around the hill. There was a man on top. A mane of gray fringing a face pink like mine. He reclined atop an intricate platform that looked like carved wood, but was actually made of millions of cemented sand grains. He wore only a loin cloth and had only stumps for limbs. We approached him obliquely, circling like a cautious mosquito.
“Who is this man?”<
br />
“I don’t know him.”
“I thought we were looking for a girl.”
“We were! I mean, I am!”
One moment we were swirling around his little platform and then we were inside his mind, which proved inscrutably baroque and opaque, full of music and math.
And then he was there, manifested in his own mind as a younger version of himself with limbs intact, clad in greasy coveralls. We were in a large room—a studio with a grand piano. He glared at us, holding a shotgun level at his waist.
“Go. Away.”
He pulled the trigger and clouds of blackness swarmed out of both barrels, swirling up and obscuring all like squid ink. The stuff pushed us back out into the matrix of the Singularity.
“His name … I caught it … it’s … Oliver … or Olivier. His name is Olivier.”
“Oh! He’s the guy I was supposed to look for. I promised a friend I would look for him.”
“Nothing to be done. His mind skills are fierce. We’ll need to reach out to him in person.”
“But why did we come to him? I was thinking of Karla.”
“A man of his powers probably has a larger footprint in the Singularity. He was easier to find. And I’m glad we did. This one is as rare a bird as you. Remember the lay of this land. We need to rescue him before his presence is discovered by Seraphim.”
We orbited in lazy circles above the hillock, now obscured in thick, dark clouds.
“So what now?”
“That’s up to you.”
So I buckled and dredged up the thoughts that I least liked to dwell on—those last few moments with Karla at the gates of Frelsi. Just as I thought, they dragged into the hopeless exercise of wandering how differently it could have all gone. There were so many alternative scenarios that would have led to her survival. Like if I had taken the time to neutralize all that Fellstraw with my spell craft, or if I had simply locked the gate behind us. Better yet, if I had not returned to the raid and lured her to come after me, none of this ever had to happen. Her death would have been so easy to avoid.
We broke out of our holding pattern and began again to soar through the ubiquitous but invisible matrix of the Singularity, the ethereal relay of networked souls. It struck me that not all of these souls were bound to flesh. Many had no mortal anchor.
This realization made the claims of the Frelsians who called themselves Freesouls seem naïve and pretentious. Their souls were hardly free compared to these. Yes, they no longer risked delegation to the Deeps, but they were still bound to bodies in the Liminality. They were merely people who had exiled themselves from the land of the living.
