Fury m-4

by Rebecca Lim

  Mateo overrules Uriel at last, insisting upon a rest break. He hurries back along the paved Incan roadway to fetch Ryan.

  Uriel shrugs off the pack of supplies and studies our surroundings with barely concealed impatience. ‘Ryan’s holding us up,’ he says bluntly. ‘Remind me again how he’s supposed to be useful?’

  ‘He’s committed,’ I say tautly. ‘He can hardly turn around and go back now. Like I said, he’s with me, and you don’t have to like it, you just have to deal with it.’

  Mateo and Ryan stagger into view, and I hurry down the path to meet them, shocked at Ryan’s pallor, how badly he’s shaking.

  ‘He’s hallucinating,’ Mateo says worriedly as I take Ryan’s other arm over my shoulder, curve an arm around his waist. ‘He keeps saying he’s seen the Devil and the Devil looks just like him.’

  ‘I wish he was hallucinating,’ I mutter.

  We spread out the rain ponchos Mateo brought along and lie Ryan on them. I hold him until his core temperature rises and his breathing evens out and his anger returns.

  He sits up finally. ‘I’m fine,’ he snaps hoarsely, trying to fight his way out of my embrace.

  But he’s exhausted, and I just lock my arms more tightly around him, refusing to let him go. Suddenly it’s a battle of wills, an all-out wrestling match on the grassy embankment, and we’re sliding around on mud, getting tangled in the plastic of the rain ponchos, until Uriel drags us off each other, still cursing.

  ‘This is the way you show love towards one another?’ he says incredulously.

  ‘No,’ Ryan rasps, splattered with dirt, his hard expression suddenly dissolving. ‘I usually say it with flowers. But flowers are too subtle for someone as pigheaded as she is.’ He turns to me and says warily, ‘Friends?’

  ‘You know I’d always take a round of Greco-Roman wrestling over flowers, so no hard feelings,’ I shoot back.

  Ryan laughs out loud, and some of that horrible edginess that’s been plaguing me all day, like my own personal black cloud, dissipates at the sound.

  We smile at each other, and Uriel says disgustedly, ‘I don’t understand you.’

  Mateo approaches hesitantly, handing us each a bottle of water and a plastic plate loaded with food from the pack: slices of fresh bread topped with torn pieces of a soft, white cheese, with a side of some colourful-looking salad involving potato and cucumber, sliced onion, beetroot and mayo. I see him take in Ryan’s forlorn appearance, before his eyes slide uncomfortably away from me, from Uri — completely dry and neat as two new pins.

  Uriel and I exchange glances of our own.

  ‘The food looks lovely, Mateo,’ I say casually, ‘but how about you and Ryan take a little more of ours? Uri and I are still working off breakfast.’

  Mateo looks down sharply at what’s left on my plate, on Uri’s, after we’ve redistributed most of our food to the two of them. But though he’s clearly dying to point out that we must have worked up some kind of appetite after hiking for almost three hours straight without stopping, he doesn’t. Perhaps out of a natural sense of tact, or to maintain the growing fiction that there’s nothing remotely screwy about either Uriel or myself.

  When the two men are done eating, Uriel rises immediately and his voice is commanding as he says, ‘When we reach Machu Picchu, Mateo, leave us. Take as many of the other guides and porters and tourists with you as you can. Make directly for the car park you talked of last night, the buses to Aguas Calientes. Do not linger.’ Uriel doesn’t actually add: If you want to live. But it’s in his voice.

  Mateo nods, looking troubled as he stows the remains of our meal in the pack. ‘There will be hardly anyone on the mountain today. It should be easy, what you ask for.’

  ‘A good day, then, for us to pay a visit,’ Uriel replies calmly, hoisting the pack onto his broad shoulders. He turns and looks at Ryan for a moment. ‘As for you, do as your “will” dictates. Just keep yourself alive, or there will be no living with this one,’ he indicates me brusquely, ‘ever again. Got that?’

  Then he turns and walks away swiftly, silently.

  20

  For a time, our route through the forest is meandering, almost easy. But then the paved roadway transforms back into a steep staircase that’s exposed once more to the elements. We find ourselves battling uphill through a curtain of rain upon a slick and infinitely more treacherous surface: Mateo in the lead, followed by Uriel, then Ryan and I, side by side, because to be any other way, we’ve come to realise, feels wrong.

  ‘I don’t even know what day it is today,’ Ryan mutters, his hands balled into fists in his pockets in a vain attempt to keep his fingers warm.

  ‘Friday,’ I say unerringly.

  ‘Friday in Peru,’ he mumbles in disbelief.

  I hear him give a gasp as the forest to our right suddenly falls away into thin air and we’re staring down a huge cliff face into absolute space. Then we enter more ruins — like standing stones situated upon the crest of a ridge — and Mateo calls out from just beyond them, ‘Inti Punku! The Gateway of the Sun!’ and we look left through the gate, and down, and we see it at last.

  A sprawling complex of ruined stone buildings that lies across the saddle between two mountains, a sheer drop on two sides into deep valleys, a towering mountain peak at its back. The city of Machu Picchu.

  As we look down in awe, the rain abruptly stops. The absence of sound is almost disorientating, the silence so intense it feels as if I’ve momentarily lost my hearing. The heavy pall of cloud that hangs low over the mountain peak framing the city seems suddenly lit up from within, as if the sun is trying desperately to break through.

  The cloudy sky is steel grey shot through with silver as we begin our descent down a narrow walkway paved with large flagstones. The zigzagging scar of some modern roadway defaces the steep hillside to our right, a bus — tiny from this distance — travelling back down it. We begin to pass outlying walls and buildings, and it’s around 1 pm when we hit the heart of the city. There are stone structures in almost every direction, situated along wide plazas or separated by a multitude of walkways, fountains, ramparts, lookouts, dividing walls, most open to the sky. It’s impossible to get a feel for things, or to know what we’re even looking at, but I understand what Uriel meant when he said the place reeked of blood and power. The city fell silent centuries ago, but if I listen hard enough, I can almost hear ritual and violence emanating from the stone itself.

  The path seems to end at a great three-sided structure, and as Ryan and I reach Uriel and Mateo, I glimpse a few people moving about the complex. I see flashes of colour, feel shifts in energy eddying around me, but nothing I can really put my finger on. Just a pervading sense of menace.

  ‘Where to now?’ Ryan wheezes.

  Uriel scans the area uneasily. ‘Everywhere. We walk every inch of this place until we feel something, see something. He’s still here, I know he is. They haven’t moved him.’

  ‘That doesn’t strike you as weird?’ I ask quietly.

  He shakes his head. ‘I was always supposed to return, Mercy. It was always a trap. In the end, there will be no hiding what we are. All we’ve done by coming here on foot is to buy ourselves a little more time, some slight advantage. The “gringo” was wiser than I gave him credit for.’

  Behind Uri’s back, Ryan raises his eyebrows and I have to smile.

  ‘Luc’s forces will have to work out who we are before they can deal with us,’ Uriel murmurs. ‘They have to find us first. And while they’re looking, we need to locate Gabriel.’

  ‘It’s a pretty big place,’ Ryan says.

  Uri sighs as he considers the elevated structures to the west of us, then below us to the east. ‘There’s no scientific way to do this. We take as long as it takes to find him.’

  His eyes fall on Mateo, still standing there, listening to us talk.

  ‘Go with our thanks, Mateo,’ Uriel says quietly but commandingly. ‘Find your compatriots, tell them to get their charges back down to the
buses. It is no longer safe for you here.’

  Mateo nods and starts to walk away, before turning and saying hesitantly, ‘The children made me promise to ask what it was that brought “Ayar Awqa” to Machu Picchu. What should I tell them, señor?’

  Uriel and I exchange glances, before Uriel replies softly, ‘Tell the children that he came to seek his brother, upon the mountain.’

  Mateo’s eyes widen in surprise. ‘Lost?’ he exclaims. ‘Here?’

  ‘If someone were to be held here, against his will,’ I say, because it has to be worth a shot, ‘where would he be?’

  ‘How could he know?’ Uriel says exasperatedly. ‘Let us waste no more time, Mercy. What slight advantage we have is slipping away.’

  ‘Held how?’ Mateo asks.

  ‘Bound in some way,’ I reply. ‘Tied up.’

  Mateo’s face clears immediately. ‘But that is easy. It is like a riddle, a puzzle, yes? Like you, like him.’ He indicates Uriel. ‘I will take you there, follow me.’

  The three of us look at each other, scarcely daring to hope.

  Mateo descends quickly through street after street of ruins, until we find ourselves loosely ringed around a strangely configured stone that’s been roped off to prevent people touching it. It’s irregular in shape, with a diameter wider than a man is tall; a broad, stepped area, almost like a bench, cut out of one side; a protuberance of rock — like a blunt finger — pointing up out of it towards the sky. The stone stands above a frightening precipice, framed by cloud.

  Uriel says suspiciously, ‘What is this?’

  ‘Its name is Intiwatana,’ Mateo answers eagerly. ‘You understand our language, señor, so its meaning will be clear to you.’

  ‘But not to me,’ Ryan says apologetically, taking a drink from the bottled water in his pack.

  ‘It means, literally, “sun-tying-place”,’ Uriel murmurs, walking around the curious stone. ‘The instrument to which you tie up, or hitch, the sun.’

  ‘How can you be sure this is the place?’ I ask Mateo, feeling nothing more than that general sense of unease.

  ‘This stone has magical properties,’ he replies. ‘It was built so that on certain days of the year, when the sun stands directly above the stone, it casts no shadow at all. If your brother is like you, then this is the place.’

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ Ryan says. ‘There’s nothing here but this rock.’

  Mateo points at the ground at my feet, at Uriel’s, and I see Ryan’s face change as he works out what Mateo’s trying to tell us.

  Since we left Milan, the sun has barely touched my skin, or has touched it so fleetingly that I never felt its warmth. But here, upon this windswept plateau, its light finally struggles through the cloud. And as its rays move across the face of the stone called Intiwatana, across all of us standing here, I see what Mateo saw before any of us did. There are four people present, but only two cast shadows upon the ground.

  Uriel and I glance at each other sharply.

  ‘The Inca believed this stone held the sun in the sky. If he is your brother,’ Mateo insists, ‘then he, too, is a creature of the sun, bound to this place.’

  ‘Superstition,’ Uriel scoffs, saying out loud exactly what I’m thinking. ‘How could he be here? I don’t feel anything —’

  But then, as if in reply, the earth begins to roar, it begins to tremble, and I hear distant screams, the sound of buckling stone, of thousands of roof tiles falling and shattering in the streets. I hear Mateo’s cries, Ryan’s, as they struggle to remain on their feet in a shifting, rending world.

  There’s something else, too: like the sound of steel on steel, something fleeting, but so discordant and sharp that it resonates painfully within me, makes me want to claw at my head in agony.

  Uriel gasps aloud, similarly afflicted, as the brief sound recurs, then recurs again, and again. Something’s coming, something fast. A whole bunch of somethings, erupting from everywhere, but nowhere, all at once.

  ‘Ryan!’ I yell through the roar of the physical world being torn apart, through the searing pain in my head. ‘Mateo! Lead your people to safety! Find them, get them out.’

  Mateo nods, already turning, but Ryan hesitates, crippled by his loyalty to me.

  ‘Every one of them could be your sister, your mother, your father!’ I cry. ‘Don’t just let the bad stuff happen, Ryan. It’s penalty time. Every action counts. We have to do what we can with the abilities we’ve got, don’t you see?’

  And I see that he gets in an instant what has taken me lifetimes to figure out.

  As Ryan and Mateo stumble back up the stairs, a heavy white fog rolls towards the lip of the plateau that Uriel and I occupy. Even as we watch, it begins to ascend up the terraces of Machu Picchu, blanketing everything in its path, turning the air an unnatural white that has a tinge of grey, like contagion, at its heart.

  Demonsign. Uriel’s voice is like a breath of fire in my mind.

  Then, without warning, out of that fog sweeps a wraith. It leaps onto the plateau, ghostly braids streaming about its skull-like face, a star-shaped stone axe raised high, mouth stretched in an undying scream. I can see the outline of the man it once was, but the face and form are indistinct, shredding and re-forming like the fog that surrounds us.

  Uriel and I are between the wraith and the stone. I see the thing’s head questing from side to side as if it’s deciding which of us to take first with its ghostly axe.

  Uriel puts his arm around me and pulls me close, as if he’s Gerry McEntee from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I’m Estelle Jablonski of Mississauga, Canada, and we’re lost together in the fog.

  Hold your nerve, he roars in my head. Do not shift.

  The creature throws itself at us, through us — like shards of glass, or a handful of nails — and is gone, subsumed forever by our peculiar energy. Daemonium of this kind are no match for us. The ones that wear faces are the ones we fear.

  And then an army of wraiths comes boiling over the edge of the plateau, a legion of the violent, mindless dead. Surrounding us, momentarily, like a milling herd of shredded, shredding energy. Those that touch Uriel or me vanish like ether, but hundreds remain. Each one distinct, each one once a man.

  Suddenly, as if startled, they flow away, as one, into the trembling streets of the city that once was theirs when they yet lived, mouths stretched wide in silent, ravening screams, taking the unnatural fog with them.

  When Uriel releases me from his hold, the roped-off stone lies exposed beneath weak sunlight, and the earth is no longer shaking.

  He and I circle the rock warily, studying it, and I tell him of what was done to Nuriel; the forms of punishment that were visited on Jegudiel and Selaphiel.

  ‘If he’s in there,’ I say, ‘he may be compromised. Don’t touch him until you’re sure he’s clean.’

  Uriel nods grimly, then leaps lightly over the guard rope onto the upper surface of the stone. He places his right hand upon the granite, effortlessly reaching through and into it, before declaring in ringing tones, ‘Libera eum!’

  Nothing. Nothing but storm cloud moving in from the northeast, and the lonely shriek of a hunting bird drifting through the valley below us.

  Uriel withdraws his arm from the stone and I watch his forearm, the fingers of his hand re-form in an instant into apparent solidity.

  ‘I’ll take the western reaches,’ he says finally, ‘including the lower terraces. You take this side, and we’ll meet back in the middle, near that structure where the path of flagstones ended.’

  Uriel — still in his human guise — takes the stairs at a run and is soon lost in the rolling fog above me.

  I enter the fog with reluctance; it seems almost impenetrable, even to my eyes. It sucks and eddies around my ankles like a tide, draws its weblike tendrils across my face. Trapezoidal doorways and windows loom up in front of me without warning. All sound seems deadened in the roiling, cloudy atmosphere. I could be the only thing alive on this mountain.

 
Then the hallucinations start. Snatches of past lives, old demons, stalking me through the streets of the city. I hear Ezra’s husband’s voice calling her slut and whore, the dull sound of fist and open palm meeting flesh, a woman’s scream. A baby cries, the sound weak and thin, high from hunger and withdrawal, and I know that it’s Lucy’s baby. I can’t escape the crying, try to outrun it. But I lose my footing by a gaping building with walls stained red with earth or old blood, and Susannah’s mother roars at me from out of the darkness inside: ‘You ruined my life, you little bitch! I wish you’d never been born.’ But as I pick myself up clumsily, gripped in the cold fear of memory, I hear her sob, ‘Come back, come back! I didn’t mean it, oh, how could I? I’m sick, so sick.’

  Her voice pursues me as I stumble past a row of houses with trapezoidal rooms, scrambling almost on all fours up the staircase beyond them only to hear Lauren say quietly, ‘I’ve been in hell. Am in hell. And now you are, too. You get used to it,’ she calls after me. ‘Used to it.’

  Then I’m lurching uphill, struggling to get away from them all, heading on autopilot towards the place where I’m supposed to meet Uriel, trying to outrun memory. But my own sneering words come back at me in Lela’s gentle voice, and stop me in my tracks. ‘You’ll never get out of here alive, you know,’ I hear myself say.

  And I hear a dead man reply bitterly, ‘I know, and neither will you.’

  Then a single gunshot reverberates upon the peak of Machu Picchu, the sound so real and so immediate that when I’m momentarily hit by a hailstorm of sharp sensation — like needles of ice being flung in my face, hurled at my body — I almost fall to the ground, believing I’ve been shot all over again.

  The fog is thick with wraiths. Another one hits the solid force of me and shreds into fragments, then another, and another. I could be standing in a hurricane of broken glass. I twist and flail, trying to shield myself. They’re like suicidal insects — the ghosts of this place — drawn to my energy, my warmth, dashing themselves against me in a wave.