by A. Sparrow
The singing ceased. Lady An’s gaze darted to my corner. “You’re back!” She shot to her feet and bustled to my side, peering down at my limp form. “You poor thing. I thought you’d left us for good. I thought ... hoped … the Singularity would have gotten you straightened out and sent you back to where you belong.”
“I can’t be here. Not now. Wendell’s coming.”
“Wendell?”
“He’s from Frelsi. He’s a Hemi … a Facilitator. He works for the Sanctuary.”
Lady An blinked back at me in complete non-comprehension. I might as well have spoken to her in Swedish.
Somehow, I had just assumed she was wiser than me to the workings of the universe. But come to think of it, she had probably never visited some of the places I had seen.
“He’s … from the Liminality—a place connected to here, where suicides go. He kills people to free them from the Core, so their souls become free. Untethered to this place. He was trying to recruit me. To be an assassin. But now … he’s after us.”
“My, you do lead a complicated existence, James. How many worlds are you currently juggling?”
“Too many,” I said, as the last bit of residual warmth was expunged from my flesh and I settled into the latest version of my body. “But they need me there … in Hanover. Because Wendell’s coming, and....”
My senses were seeping back, and with them the realization of what I had come here for. “I … we saw her. Karla. She’s here. And she’s hurt.”
“That woman from the horde? Was that her? Your long-lost friend?”
“Yeah. Did you see? She needs help. And she’s headed for that Horus.”
“They’re all heading for the Horus, dear. That’s the whole point of these hordes.”
“But how can she? Are they forcing her?”
“Once they get marching, it’s like moving with the tide. Most don’t even need the Hashmallim to egg them on. To folllow the Horus becomes the path of least resistance.”
“I can’t believe she’s fallen in with them. That’s not her at all. She’s never been a follower.”
“Put yourself in her shoes. What choice does she have? She doesn’t know about any other possibilities here. She doesn’t even know that dissent is an option. I was in her shoes once, until Old Ned came strutting by on a patrol and showed me there was another path.”
“She’s lost hope. That’s what it is. Once she knows we’re here. She’ll change her mind. She’s a fighter.”
“Do you sense she was aware of our little visit?”
“Yeah. I think she felt me. My presence. But I don’t think she knew I was real. She probably thought I was a dream.”
“Crap. I need to be in both places. Because Wendell’s coming … and Karla … that storm looked awful close … and the way it was bearing down ....”
“Well, that’s not possible,” said Lady An. “You have only the one soul. It can’t be in two places at once. You need to make a choice.”
“But it’s not up to me! The thing just comes and takes me whenever it wants.”
“The thing? What thing?” Lady An narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. “You mean … you are not controlling these appearances?”
“No. I used to be able to … a little bit.”
She sighed. “Well you’re here now. Might as well make the best of it.”
Lady An returned to her friends, who hovered all nervous and shy back at the mat. While they conferred in whispers, I rose and took a wobbly step.
The women all turned and stared.
“I have a proposition for you,” said Lady An.
“Excuse me?”
“We will secure your passage, wherever you wish to go. Though, I presume you intend to go look after your friend.”
“You’re gonna let me go?”
“You’ve always been free to leave. What I am offering is to provide you with a well-armed escort. Your own personal expedition, as it were. But I do have one special request.”
“Shoot.”
“This man we channeled to … this most interesting man … the broken one … Olivier … on the hillock. I would like you to visit him. He is a high order adept … like yourself, perhaps. He’s not safe where he is, despite his ingenuity. I would like to bring him here to Tiamat. For safekeeping.”
“And Karla?”
“Her too, of course. Why not? They’re both roughly in the same sector.”
“Let’s go, then. I don’t want to dilly dally. I’ve got business back home, and who knows when I’ll be dragged back.”
“I have to warn you. Any excursion is risky, but this one is riskier than most. Your presence has already attracted attention, so any party leaving Tiamat will invite scrutiny. Normally, our patrols go unmolested, but in this case I expect to be harassed. So we will need to do something about that pink complexion of yours or we’ll get nowhere. Taro!”
Taro, who had apparently been waiting just outside the chamber, ducked his head inside.
“Assemble some volunteers. Something larger than a regular patrol. We’re going on a little hunt.”
***
Taro bustled off into the catacombs.
“Come,” said Lady An. “Let’s turn you gray.”
She led me across the courtyard to another well-lighted chamber, this one loud with chatter and busy with infidels. Its interior was cavernous and boomy, the floor cluttered with urns and bowls and bins. They brimmed with every hue and texture of powder and grit to be found in the Deeps. The ubiquitous fine, taupe sand. Dusts as yellow as pure sulfur. Pellets of carbon blacker than coal.
People sat together on the floor, working at low tables, shaping lumps of clay that needed no water to bind it, no kiln to cure it. They took pinches of dust, and with a twist and flourish of their fingers, bound the dust to itself, softening and congealing it to the consistency of wax, creating a stone-like ceramic in any shape desired, that they could re-soften and re-harden at will. Their spell craft made all matter and energy malleable and transmutable.
They produced mostly weapons, it seemed—lances and staffs, scepters and clubs. In an existence where no one ever ate or drank, there was little need for much else, apparently—no cooking implements, bottles or storage vessels.
But then Lady An led me to a corner where a couple folks were cutting strips from flat and flaccid sheets of what looked like homemade pasta. She went up and whispered to a woman who had beads in her hair from roots to tips. The woman nodded. She fetched a small bowl of gray powder from a cubby in the corner.
Lady An patted a slab of stone the size of a couch. “Lay down on this block, please. Imelda’s going to cover up some of your pink.”
“Makeup?”
“In a sense. Though this will be a little more permanent.”
I stretched out on this slab of stone. The woman offered me a ceramic neck prop to support my head.
“Thanks!” I said. It felt surprisingly comfortable, lying like that.
The woman leaned over me, beads dangling and clattering and she smiled. “I am Imelda.” Her face was decorated like an Etruscan urn, with raised patterns of chocolate brown paisleys and twining helices, like scars covering her cheeks and brow.
Imelda pressed her hands into a bowl of fine dust the consistency and color of the ash left over from charcoal briquettes. Lifting her hands free, they came away with filigrees of dust clinging to her fingers like iron filings to a magnet. She passed her hands over me and the dust leaped onto my skin, spreading thinly, insinuating itself into my pore.
She repeated the process at least a dozen times, going over my face, my torso, my limbs. When she was done, she held up a dented mirror for me to see.
I was gray like everybody else.
“Now you’re pretty like us,” said Lady An, smirking.
“Don’t worry, darling,” said Imelda. “You are still pink underneath. The dust is only fused to your skin. It will wear off with time. Though, not too quickly, I hope. But from a distance … or even up close …
you will look like one of us.”
“We did this for a Hashmal once,” said Lady An.
“You had a Hashmal … here?”
“For the briefest time. It was a bit tragic. He was such a nice man. He had defected from horde duty. Sadly, he was hunted down. Taken from above, by the Seraphim, we suspect. The powers-that-be have no tolerance for swapped allegiances.” Lady An sighed. “Might as well get your armor done while we’re at it.” She motioned over one of the folks cutting those sheets of pasta-like clay. “What’s more important to you James, mobility or protection?”
“Umm. Both, I guess.”
“Then we’ll compromise. Give him a few large plates but keep his joints flexible.”
Imelda brought over a tray heaped with something that looked like freshly made gnocchi. She scooped up a handful, breathed onto them and sang a brief verse. They sprang to life like leeches and swarmed about in her hand.
“Now this may tickle a bit.” She smeared them against my torso and they organized themselves in neat ranks, overlapping and alternating like scales before solidifying against the contours of my flesh.
The larger slabs were not quite as animated. They just sort of drooped and melted over me. Once they hardened, Imelda rapped them with her knuckles.
“These will protect your more vulnerable points. You don’t want be beheaded or cleaved in two.”
“I … uh … agree.”
Imelda tucked her chin and glowered at me as her beads clattered together.
“This is a serious business,” she said. “Lose your head or too much of your corpus and you’ve lost your anchor. Your soul will be cast adrift.”
“So … uh … where do they go?”
“No one knows for sure,” said Lady An, looking on with something between boredom and amusement. “To the Horus, I suppose.”
“There’s one way to find out,” said Imelda. She tossed me a pair of boots with a wrap of ceramic mesh to protect my ankles and shins.
“No helmet?”
“Pfft!” said Imelda. “It’s not like you have a brain in there worth protecting.”
“Hey!”
“I’m not mocking your intelligence, son. In this existence, any smarts you have are hard-wired into your soul. It’s not about the sweet breads anymore.”
Brian ducked his head in, winked at me and ducked back out.
Imelda carried the empty tray back to the work bench. “We are finished.”
I had scales and plates along my neck, above my hips and lower back and behind my knees, but my chest and abdomen remained fully exposed. Lady An smirked when she saw me patting my ribs.
“Don’t worry about your so-called vitals, because you don’t have any. You have no real heart, no blood. There’s nothing happening inside you that you can’t do without. This isn’t life. All that matters here is that you retain a critical mass for your anchor and we preserve your mobility. Everything else is just for looks.”
“What about his weapon?” said Imelda. “Does he have a preference?”
“That’s okay. I don’t really need one,” I said. “I’ve got this.” I held out the rolled up note from Luther, which was looking quite crinkled these days.
Imelda sneered. “That? But that’s not … you can’t expect to … not with that.”
She looked to Lady An.
“Remember, the boy’s an adept. For some adepts, fingertips, thoughts are enough.”
“Alright, then,” said Imelda. “I suppose he’s ready.”
“Taro? That you lurking in the corridor?”
Brian stepped in, grinning. “Just me, ma’am. Taro’s up top getting the raid organized.”
“Raid? Who said anything about a raid? How many volunteers were you able to muster?”
“Um … about forty-five. Not counting me and Taro.”
Lady An’s eyes popped. “Almost fifty souls? That’s a bloody army!”
“What can I say?” said Brian. “Folks been cooped up too long. Itching to get out and about.”
“I appreciate the enthusiasm, but we need to pare things down. We’ll take fifteen … at the most. Enough to keep the Protectors at bay, but not overly concern the Hashmallim.”
“You know,” I said. “I can do this on my own.”
Lady An made a sour face at me. “You have absolutely no idea what’s out there, do you?”
“Guys with clubs, from the looks of it.”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Brian … on second thought. Don’t turn away any volunteers. Let’s divide them into three groups. Choose your best fighters for the main escort. Keep the rest in reserve, split between the dunes and the skirmish line. It might be nice to have backup if the Seraphim discover the prize we’re hiding.”
***
We joined the main escort already waiting with Taro at the skirmish line, a hundred yards out from the outermost excavations of Tiamat. They were assembled in a circle, as usual, synchronizing their songs.
I hadn’t expected Lady An to accompany us, but I welcomed her presence. It was like having a mom along. A tough one.
In total, nineteen souls set out for the dunes. A second group waited back at the catacombs, ready to tail us into the dunes once we had crossed the plateau. The third group would augment the thin line of skirmishers already on duty in case we were pursued back to Tiamat.
All of this careful strategizing made me leery of what lay ahead. It couldn’t be that bad. Nothing worse, surely, than the mutant Reapers we had tangled with in the Liminality. But clearly, Lady An was prepared for war.
It took no time at all to descend Tiamat’s perforated central mountain, but it seemed to take forever to cross the plateau. Though Tiamat receded steadily behind us, the rim and its dune fields were always a little farther ahead.
My brief taste of the Singularity had spoiled me. After traversing entire landscapes in a blink, travel on foot was such a drudge. We flesh-bound souls were like slugs traversing a garden.
When we finally reached the rim of the plateau, we stopped to reconnoiter before descending through the dunes. The horde from which Taro and Brian had rescued me had moved on, visible as a streak of dust on the distant plain. But the vanguard of a second, shorter column was just now passing through the defile.
These stragglers, ironically, were in a better position to reach the Horus because since I had last seen it, the great dust storm had slashed across the landscape to a point beyond the next plateau. In fact the original group appeared to be curving back towards the valley in futile pursuit of the capricious storm.
“Seems so pointless,” said Lady An. “They’re almost better off settling down and waiting for the Horus to come to them. Because it will. It always does.”
“Maybe they’re not chasing,” I said. “Maybe they’re running away.”
Lady An sighed. “That’s an interesting way of looking at it. But we know better.”
If my mental map from the Singularity was accurate, Karla wasn’t in either horde. She marched with a third column farther on, not visible from where we stood. My ‘four o’clock’ mnemonic meant nothing now that the Horus had shifted. In any case, it was fairly certain we would have to cross the valley to reach her.
Lady An was already plunging over the rim and into the dune fields heaped up along the valley wall. Of course, she had a different goal in mind and seemed pretty certain how attain it. So far, our interests seemed to converge, but I suspected things would get interesting once they didn’t.
We snaked down through the dunes in a loose gaggle, flowing like water down the bottom of every wrinkle, following the path that gravity would have chosen for us, the path of least resistance.
Everyone but me was armed with a long staff or a short scepter. Every weapon was made of that fused dust, apart from one man’s club-like scepter that looked suspiciously like a real human femur.
With the last rank of dunes between us and the shuffling horde, Lady An waved her hand and drew us all together in
a huddle.
“We need to cross this valley quick as cats. I don’t believe this gang is large enough to have an escort of Hashmallim, but I may be wrong. Do not engage anyone. We’re only passing through. Understood?”
People nodded and muttered.
She looked us over. “Everyone ready?”
No one responded in the negative so she took that as a yes. Without another word, she darted up and over a crease between two dunes. The group responded without hesitation.
And suddenly, there they were, at the base of a sandy slope—the second horde—a sparse and sorry lot compared to the first group. We dashed into the mob just behind the leaders. Even their best were a weathered and beaten bunch. People stopped and drew back when they saw us coming, variously cringing, gaping, smiling, glaring. Some couldn’t even bear to look at us.
The ranks parted as we approached and we made for the gap.
But Lady An was wrong. A Hashmal and her squad of Protectors came hauling ass from the front of the mob to intercept us.
“Keep running!” said Lady An. “Do not engage them till we reach the high ground.”
We dodged through the marchers, bowling over whoever got in our way.
“Cheeky buggers,” said one of the women volunteers, running beside me. “Look at them, how they come at us all righteous.”
“Rookies,” said a man with deep set eyes. “They train their new folk on the little mobs.”
I tossed a glance over my shoulder. The Protectors in pursuit were a motley group of males, mostly naked though some wore kilts and loin cloths. I don’t know how they got their hands on cloth in such a place, but maybe it was provided by Hashmallim.
Their lone Hashmal was a lithe and nimble woman fully clothed in leggings and a long smock. She carried a long bow much too large for her petite form. I couldn’t see how someone so slight could even draw its string. The slanting quiver on her back was stuffed with arrows large enough to take down a moose.
None of her mob carried such a weapon. They bore crude clubs and slings. No guns. No blades. Primitive. Like a bunch of stone age tribesmen. If the powers-that-be were truly powerful wouldn’t they have better equipped their faithful agents?
But my escort had not much to brag about either when it came to armaments, which basically consisted of a bunch of sticks, long and short, not to mention the rolled up note from Luther. Spell craft, of course, could potentially make anything, even a finger as potent as a Glock. I could only presume that there was more to these sticks than met the eye.
