In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  “She was kind,” snaps Privya, without shifting from her position at the stalagmite pool. Ouroboros’s writhing momentarily blocks any view of Privya, Alan, and the little girl, leaving only the column of light extending upward to seemingly black oblivion. “She wanted the best for us all. She wanted truth and clarity. She had the strongest hands I’ve ever known, and she laughed like a bull. Tell me, angel-boy, why you chose so wrongly.”

  It is no surprise to Verity that Santiago is pacing the circle as well, feral in the braided column’s glow. He walks counter-clockwise to the snake. She wishes they would both stop. She almost trips over a rough ledge of stone, but catches herself, trailing after Colin’s flapping ascent.

  “Who would you have saved?” asks the angel, hoarsely. “Knowing neither. The one with the blade in her stomach, or the one with the hilt in her hand?”

  The braid of light is yet incomplete, but Verity feels another strand slide into place; she hears another bell, pure and sparkling. Again, the child laughs.

  Verity chokes, “Don’t.”

  “Keep going, sweetheart.” Alan holds his granddaughter securely; he looks toward Verity over the scales of the sliding snake. His blue eyes are bright. “Is she doing it right? Whatever she’s doing. We can’t tell, you know.”

  “Indeed. Thanks to you, Vee, we’re now gambling everything on a five-year-old playing in a sunbeam. Does what she’s doing make sense to you?” Privya shakes her head. “It was like this before. I remember light, and Alethea’s hands weaving something I couldn’t see. This power is too old. It’s the wrong shape for this time and place. It needs someone who sees both worlds, to balance it out and guide it to being. At least, that’s what she told me. Go on, little one. We’re almost there.”

  “Alan. For Chrissake. What are you doing?” Colin reaches the edge of the sigils, just behind Jihan and outside the river of writhing snake. Ouroboros slows and coils, clearing room.

  The light of the column has turned Alan’s white beard nearly incandescent. He holds Sanna with care. “This seems like a betrayal, doesn’t it? I’m sorry, my boy. I trust you implicitly. But I remember Jihan in San Francisco. She was beautiful when she was real, but just as deadly. They died screaming in those walls.”

  Sanna barely touches one pale pink strand of possibility; Verity hears its tone like a gong. It seems to her that she can hear a cascade of voices beneath it. When she looks behind herself, back into the receding darkness of the cavern, she sees ethereal faces glimmering past the stone formations.

  “What’s that?” Santiago and Ouro have both paused to stare, the snake’s head rearing up and its slitted golden eyes narrowing. Colin turns, frowning. Even Alan and Privya glance briefly over. Only Sanna and Jihan remain focused—the little girl on her braid of translucent brilliance, and the woman still kneeling before the glowing circle on the ground.

  Verity is close enough to study the sigils now; she doesn’t recognize the shapes, but blood is delicately dripped, interspersed with the dried herbs and grains of sand whose sparkling light is now drowned out by the searing column at the cavern’s centre.

  Jihan’s forearms are also wet and black with blood. Verity can’t see Privya’s, but she expects they are the same. She wonders how the girl can ooze so much, then she remembers the slack, staring face of the body far up the tunnel. She shivers.

  “I thought you wanted a different path,” she says to Alan. “Something new.”

  “I do.” The old man smiles at her, a little sadly. The lines that crease his features are fissures trembling. He looks at Colin, then back to the little girl concentrating so hard, her face screwed tight. “I gave everything I had for that dream, years ago. Go on, honey.”

  “Goddamnit! You don’t have to do this!” Colin’s wings spread wide and beat down hard as he propels himself forward toward the circle. Santiago intercepts him. The magician grabs Colin around the waist, forcing him back from the glowing line.

  “Careful,” notes Privya. “Your shadowmancer has the right idea. That line will burn you ... what’s the saying? Something fierce? It’s going to be a minute before Jihan gets through.” She tilts her head, looking at the light. Even she is squinting. “What do you see, Vee? I’m honestly curious. All this power. There’s something very complex in here.”

  Verity advances far enough that one of Ouroboros’s massive coils lies seething at her feet. “I see Sanna’s almost finished,” she says. “There’s a pattern, like a puzzle falling into place. It looks like a rainbow and tastes like poison. I want her to finish. Please stop her.”

  “I expect it’s beautiful. The last legacy of those who came before. I wonder who they were. I bet my father knew. Alan, are we ready?”

  “We’re getting there. You know, I’ve never done this.” Alan studies the distant ghosts over Verity’s shoulder, and he smiles. Taking one hand off Sanna, holding her securely still, he dips his fingers into the pool of light. For the first time, brilliance sparks in the blue of his eyes, like sapphires, or fireflies. The murmur of the phantom crowd grows stronger; it’s marked with wonder and excited anticipation. “Oh, there’s so much power here. I can breathe this air.”

  Sanna smiles brightly and touches a thin strand of red with her fingertip. It snaps into place. Verity can feel the vibration in her chest, the echoes of a rumble too low to perceive.

  “Stop!” Colin lunges again, and Santiago holds him back, but Ouroboros throws itself against the invisible barrier, only to be hurled away once more. The giant snake rears up, white fangs exposed, smelling of singed fur. “Alan. What are you doing?”

  “I told you I was a builder, didn’t I? I carved impossible spaces. I was one of the last. It’s been such a long time since I could touch it.” Alan lifts one hand to adjust a strand of Sanna’s hair, smoothing it down, then wrapping it affectionately just around the tip of his finger. “I didn’t think I ever would again. There’s a specific art to the undoing.” Verity notices that his feet are bare; his toes are pale, the nails long and yellowed, curling into the rock and the dust. He takes his hand from Sanna’s head and sets it at the edge of the broken stalagmite, where the pool of light is glimmering and brilliant with the growing promise of release.

  Jihan’s blood-slicked hands are leaving wet streaks all across Privya’s patterns. Jihan doesn’t stop or look up. She presses her palm to the ground and the grains of sand flare. The marks of the barrier shift, melting into new shapes.

  Ouroboros whips forward and is repelled again. The snake’s mouth goes wide, but Santiago is the one who cries out. The magician is still holding Colin, who would launch himself across the line if he could, but now twists to stare back at the growing pale faces of the murmuring ghosts. His wings, stretched to fullness, heave with each panicked breath he takes.

  The faces in the crowd are gaining solidity as the stalagmites and stalactites of the enormous cavern begin to fade from view, replaced by growing hints of tall curtains. Something flutters above; Verity looks up and sees translucent rafters, and flocking dragons that both are and are not there.

  She shudders with the weight of impossibility and hears the space around her crackle and contract before it blows open. Her skin expands with it, and walls flex around her, heaving. The cavern is not gone—they stand at its centre, at the top of the curving hill—but simultaneously, they stand on a low, flat stage, faced by a crowd of people who are neatly lined up, seated on cheap folding chairs. The crowd is watching and startled; delighted smiles fade in and out of opacity. There comes the sound of applause.

  “There we go,” breathes Alan, and though his knees shake with strain, there is joy in his voice. “Both at once. Here, there, and everywhere. They can see us. I told you—I told you I could. Come on, sweetheart. Grandpa can’t hold this forever.”

  “You’re a smart girl, aren’t you? Come on now.” In the brightness that washes over her features, Privya is older and thinner; grey streaks her hair. The bones of her skull show pale through her cheeks, and the blood
on her arms has started to clot. Her teeth are sharp and shining.

  The applause is louder now, cutting through Verity’s bones. She is torn between staring at Sanna, willing Jihan to greater speed, and turning to look at the audience. She thinks she sees Rick, off to the side, his whiskered face a study in flummoxed surprise. She thinks she catches a glimpse of Jacob’s freckles.

  Colin screams, “Run!” at the phantom audience, and his voice is lost under their rising chant.

  “Be-tween. Be-tween. Be-tween.”

  There is music. Verity is startled—there is no band—but she hears a rising harmony, and tastes it like honey on her skin, only the sweetness is laced with arsenic and the wings of dead flies. She turns, denial on her lips, and sees the rising light of the Chalice wending almost perfectly, strands humming chords that only she and Sanna can hear. Only a single faint buzz remains, bringing with it an off-key hint of diesel. A wisp of yellow drifts slightly outside the pattern.

  Sanna reaches forward and strokes a finger across the sunlight line.

  Privya smiles.

  Jihan slams her fist into the ground, which has become some impenetrable blend of stone and stage that squirms from the eye. She rolls forward, the sigils that blocked her flaring and melting into meaningless smears. Ouroboros rears up and hurtles one more time at the line, fangs bared and golden eyes narrowed. This time, there is no barrier. The black coils of the anaconda block everything as Ouroboros throws itself between the little girl and the stalagmite pool, knocking Alan backward and obliterating any other view.

  But the column of light rises now in a tight, precise braid of colour and sound; Verity, staring at it, can feel it ripple across her skin and knows that its balance is perfect. Tiny dragons launch themselves from half-corporeal rafters, flapping toward the gathered power with ragged, delighted wings.

  They are in the cavern; they are on a stage. Whatever it is the audience sees, there are screams, and gasps of delight.

  Colin roars at them again, a tiny prophet held back solely by the worn determination of the man in black. The angel’s own wings are still spread, his eyes like the ocean on fire.

  The braid of light snaps open like a flower. To Verity, it’s the first notes of a symphony played on electric strings, at first a slide of all-engulfing harmony that fills something hollow and ravenous within her just as it shifts slightly discordantly, each instrument wandering individually out of tune. She tastes it like acid and feels it as tiny razors slicing across the skin of her face; she has to close her eyes so the power won’t cut through her corneas, but she can still see all those tiny individual strands lashing outward. She sees them latch onto the people who are and aren’t present—a teenaged boy wearing a plaid shirt and holding a baby; a laughing girl with red and purple spiked hair; a security guard leaning, arms crossed, against the main door; a man with a long, wiry beard poking with irritation at his presumably malfunctioning phone. She sees those people shiver; the boy almost drops the baby.

  When she opens her eyes again, the pavilion has grown more solid around her, but she can still see the remnants of the poison light roiling. It’s a gleam in the eye of the boy who breathes on the baby; it lingers on the fingers of the bearded man who passes his phone to a friend. The security guard is coughing, a hand to his throat as he chokes. He is not the only one. He sprays spittle on the woman who rushes to his assistance.

  It is a strange thing, standing in an impossible cavern on a stage that isn’t there, watching death spread through people who are just sitting on chairs, some starting to choke and sneeze, others staring open-mouthed, clapping their hands beneath rafters and a blackly infinite sky. Verity doesn’t know who can see the lights. Distantly, though, she can hear individual cries beneath the chanting:

  “Play something!”

  “This is a weird concert.”

  “Shit, are you okay?”

  “Is that snake real?”

  “Can we get some help over here?”

  And behind her, Colin: “Oh Christ oh fuck oh god oh shit—Stefan, let me go.”

  Under it all, she hears Privya laughing.

  When Verity turns, Ouroboros lies in great coils that presumably encircle Alan and Sanna. The snake’s head is reared, its teeth still bared; it has developed a hood reminiscent of a cobra. Below it, Jihan and Privya face each other across the broken stalagmite and the pool of light that is even now fading, leaching to the hollow grey stone of an empty basin. Jihan is taller. She stands empty-handed and bloody; Verity’s scarf flutters stiffly from her upper arm.

  Privya still grips the stalagmite’s broken edge with both gore-covered hands. Her chin is high and she chuckles, shaking her head. “Come at me,” she says to Jihan. “You bitch. It’s done now. Kill me for a month, or a year—hey, forever if you can. It’s the only thing I’d ever be grateful to you for.”

  “Do something!” Colin, released now by Santiago, almost trips in his haste to cross the former barrier, but he catches himself with wings flapping sharply.

  “Oh, that is way cool,” says someone from the crowd.

  Jihan stands perfectly still. Colin is a foot shorter, white as old bone, grabbing at Jihan’s arm. As the light from the column slowly dies, the light from the angel is rising; it spills from his eyes, his hands, the skin beneath his thin white shirt. His glow touches Verity, and she feels her fingers unclench from her palms, the sting of welts fading even as she registers them. Even his frantic desperation brings a warm, clear comfort; she knows it’s wrong. A thousand people have just been doomed in front of her. She can’t help but feel her shoulders relax.

  “Jesus—do something! What the hell are you for?” Colin clutches at Jihan, reaching up for her shoulder; it is as though he is trying to move a statue. Panic makes his eyes blue lightning.

  “She can’t.” Privya smiles; she is worn and skeletal, but somehow the expression is still girlish. “No one can. The Chalice is draining. These people will go home, and kiss their loved ones, and death will spread. Let it go, angel. This is good for our people. We’ll have room to breathe again.”

  “It’s too late.” Santiago is resigned. He would put a hand on Colin’s wing, but the angel jerks feathers away, furious. Ouroboros has turned to regard the increasingly restless crowd; it has lost the cobra hood, and the tilt of its head is despondent. Its coils loosen as it unwinds, revealing the old man standing at the heart of its black loops. Alan is unharmed; he holds Sanna gently. His bare feet are firmly planted on the stage and the light in his eyes is dying.

  “I can’t hold it,” the old man tells Colin. “The cup is emptying and my power with it. These spaces will separate in a few more beats of your heart. Do it now.”

  Colin is so focused on the crowd he barely registers Alan. “What are you talking about?”

  “I did this for you. Take what’s left.” Alan gestures with his free hand, toward the dying light of the braided column. “Before the moment’s gone. You were made for a purpose.”

  A long beat passes before Colin goes rigid. Turning, shining eyes wide, he stares at the old man. “What?” In the perfect comfort of his glow, Verity traces impossibilities—she wonders whether the audience can really see him, or whether the stage is lit by some spotlight that doesn’t pierce the cavern. But she hears chatter—ripples and waves of sound cresting behind her.

  “You’re the other path.” Alan cuddles Sanna against his shoulder; in Colin’s light, the little girl smiles. Alan is smiling, too, but the last sparks of power in his eyes are fading. “I gave everything I was to you, a long time ago. Carved a between of flesh and bone. Carved the impossible. Made the kind of miracle they have words for. Go on, Icarus. Save them. Let them believe again.”

  Colin stares at the man and the girl, then he whirls to look out at the restless crowd. Someone has started booing. A few are getting up, staggering, or dragging choking friends toward the door. Plague drifts with them, a smoky curse already exuding invisibly from their every pore.

  The
angel’s free hand curls, quite slowly, into a fist.

  “Oh, fuck you,” Colin breathes. “You made me a fucking martyr. My whole life.” He stands, leaning one-handed on his cane, his wings spreading. Without the shield of his massive coat, he is only a slim, short figure in a loose-buttoned white shirt and torn, stained jeans. The power of him spills through the thin shirt, illuminating the blue-green-purple highlights of his feathers.

  Santiago has to squint, raising a hand to shield his eyes. “What are you doing?”

  It’s Privya who hisses, “No.” Crimson wells in her eyes; she takes a step toward Colin. Jihan, in one quick and economical motion, elbows her in the throat.

  Privya falls to her knees, Jihan standing over her. Someone in the crowd cheers: “Fight!”

  “Don’t!” barks Colin, not looking. “Don’t make it worse. That’s one more damn thing I have to heal.” He has the audience’s attention. Countless eyes are locked on him, as though suddenly hypnotized. In this space of possible and not possible, Verity sees some people fighting with their mobile phones, but others with their phones raised, cameras directed at the brilliant boy with the graceful wingspan. The boy with the baby has darkness running from his nose, and his mouth is gaping.

  Verity hears screams—immediate as though someone is right next to her; soft as the echoes of the dead. They come in gurgling waves: “He can’t breathe!” “Is there a fire?” “Help!” “She’s bleeding!” Beneath them are the gasps of the ones who can’t take their eyes off Colin.

  “It’ll be okay,” he promises them. His light is reaching out; his glow falls across the faces of the people in the first few rows. Verity sees Rick, unbloodied and weeping; she sees the boy with the baby suddenly take a sharp breath.

  “No,” says Santiago, sounding strangled. Ouroboros hurtles forward, leaving Alan and the girl behind as it interjects its massive form between the angel and the edge of the stage. “You can’t. There are too many.”