The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  “It’s over, Tobias.” With the tip of the pole, she nudged the still-whirring, twitching mound of metal and fabric. “This is why you don’t use a prototype for battles.”

  No quip returned. For a hopeful moment, it seemed he was dead. She stepped nearer. “Listen to me: I don’t want to kill you. I will if I have to, but I’d rather you let Lazarus and I go on our own. Where, I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out.”

  Again, no response. Now, with dread where once the General might have felt assured victory, Dominia removed her hat, then knelt to draw the tarp from the oil-oozing ALIF-8.

  It was almost a surprise when Akachi’s seat was empty. Almost, but not quite. Somehow, she had known: been unconsciously tipped off by the sag of the tarp, or the way the machine stopped moving, rather than continuing even a slight struggle. But, no. Without sunlight; without moonlight; without smoke, mirrors, or anything else Dominia had seen, the dentist had vanished into the Ergosphere.

  Blood boiling with fury to find now even he felt justified in leaving her behind as it suited, the martyr snapped the metal pole over her knee and was about to use its point to stab the monstrous thing as though pinning a butterfly to a board. Yet, before penetration, her hand stayed. In the distance, after all, speakers played Mozart’s Requiem. And, with a sudden, openmouthed shock, she understood what to do.

  The attention of the General’s soul mounted the vibrations of the music.

  XVII

  A Thousand Twangling Instruments

  Perhaps, when using music instead of sunlight to manifest in the Ergosphere, she had expected to arrive in the doorway of her Father’s study. Tobias was exactly hypocritical enough to use the Hierophant’s thoughtforms as a nighttime entrance in (and maybe out) of the dangerous Void. But she had somehow forgotten she would appear in her old leather jacket, had not expected to find herself one-eyed. Even with her gun in its holster, to inspire that surge of love-hate!

  And she had certainly not been prepared for the sight of herself engaged on the floor with the tulpa. Farther in the distance, the shrill screams of Jerusalem’s writhing damned rose beneath the Mozart. She had not noticed it before, perhaps because her ears had not been tuned to hear it. Not been prepared, as she had been prepared to see her Father.

  “Why, Dominia”—the Hierophant glanced from where he read in his seat, back to the obvious proceedings—“what an unexpected pleasure!”

  Brow furrowing, the General opened her mouth. Confused as she was, she spoke only with struggle. “Haven’t I already been here?”

  “Part of you has, in a sense. That is the trouble with overindulgence.” Wearing that innocent look, he sipped his own waiting glass of red wine. “Very difficult to become drunk and maintain a firm sense of linear time. The most common mistake of the conscious mind is the delusion that it observes all it does within the expected chronology. One assumes minute to minute we experience just the present. But in dreams, my dear, the past and future are as present as now; even in reality, time is only a suggestion. A mere condition of conscious existence.”

  Perhaps it was that muddying of distinctions in time that so distracted her. Whatever the reason, she lost track of why she’d come. Indeed, to be once more immersed in that boundless space of the Void was treacherous in ways she’d just begun to understand. Separation between then and now—that self on the floor and this self that sat in the empty chair—was impossible. Pleasure yet throbbed, lust yet boiled high in her blood; but no sorrow burned for Cassandra, because she was sure that thing was not Cassandra. Barely, she clung to the sound of the music: to the spinning record she drunkenly pulled off the floor-level shelf.

  “I came here through the music…I didn’t know I could.”

  “You are always welcome in my study, dear girl.”

  “No, I mean—I didn’t know I could travel through music.”

  “There are a thousand secret ways into this place scattered across the world, but none so fine as music. Art lifts the soul as wind, the wings of birds, that we may climb to heights unknown by the paltry body.” With hand adorned by his gold piscatory ring, the Hierophant caressed the record player’s wooden edge. “Mozart, Bach, Rossini, Wagner, Sullivan, Homer, Shakespeare, Waterhouse…do you know what you and Mozart have in common, Dominia?”

  “An early death,” she almost answered; but the question was rhetorical and, given the way he smiled, he might have heard her, anyway. “You are both fine artists.” He answered himself with a joshing wag of his finger. “The art of war is fine as any other: the martial arts that rule the body write poetry in physics. Every fatal battle is a sensual dance between souls who have agreed, without their body’s conscious consent, which one of them shall die.”

  A battle. Yes! That was it—why she’d come. The battle with Tobias. The General’s mouth opened in a frown of distress. To think she could forget! She locked eyes with her own, panting self on the floor beneath the odious thing. “Which one of us agreed to die tonight?”

  “Between yourself, and the Hunter?” The Hierophant’s eyes sparkled like onyx gems set in the pale olive of his face. “I think you both know the answer to that.”

  Outside, the night of the Void had almost completely fallen. In reality, not much time had passed because she had not moved save for the steps it took to reach the empty chair—although even if she walked back to the doorway, the fact that she had come to the Ergosphere for a Planck was now indelible. The Hierophant had seen her. But he also must have observed Tobias, so she asked him straight, “Have you seen him? The dentist? Tonight—my tonight, if you can tell one from the other.”

  “I can, because I pay careful attention. Yes, I have seen the dentist flee into the dark tonight. I have known him to use my study coming and going ever since he stumbled upon it in the daytime and recognized I came and went, for the most part, by way of artworks. I believe he finds the process easier than traveling by sunlight or actually educating himself on higher, spiritual matters, for the man has a poisoned and petty soul, and cannot make himself confront it in the bright eye of day. But, God will force the confrontation at his death. Can you see, my one-eyed child, how he sealed his own fate by condemning others to it? By spreading superficial and incorrect faith among his men? Say what you will of our Church; I practice what I preach. For the most part.” Behind his lifted glass, he winked.

  Too true. Granted, she believed her Father because she wanted to—but the Hierophant had a point that alleviated the last of her doubts about the VLF manifestations of Jerusalem, Mecca, et al. Tobias and the Hunters were just as responsible for those trapped souls as her Father. Every false leader of every false spirituality from the beginning of time was responsible for those souls: any superficial cult that did not provide sufficient frame of reference for its followers to navigate the afterlife. From that perspective, Tobias and the Hierophant were both just as evil—and she knew which manifestation of evil she preferred to deal with long-term. “Will you tell me what I need to do to kill him? How I catch him? What happens if he leaves the Void before I do?”

  With the twitch of a lip longing in palpable way to reveal the answers she sought, the Hierophant seemed bound to refrain. Instead, he allowed his eagerness to be betrayed in the way he leaned forward, hands folded between his knees. “What you and the rest of your fine artist brethren all have in common, my girl—what you and Mozart have in common—is the ability to absorb those universal elements that make your particular art form grand. In all his journeying across the face of Europa, Amadeus consumed every scrap of music he found, and analyzed that spark within that made each piece transcendent. Through those sparks, he built a mighty flame.”

  Above the distant screams of the lost souls, the General heard the rippling trumpet of an enormous beast. An elephant. She lifted her head in the direction of the sound as the Hierophant continued, “The great artist lets nothing come between him and his work, and uses every smallest stimulus as fuel for the fire. Even sexual fantasies are, to the artist, f
uel for inspiration, rather than the millstone they present around the necks of the uninitiated.”

  With a shock of recognition, Dominia’s attention returned to her Father’s mouth, whose remembered words she emulated with her own, with the same timing, cadence—everything—as him. “Sexual fantasies,” the Hierophant and the General spoke together, in proper context, “are a misapplication of the creative libido down into the sexual drive, rather than upward, toward God.”

  At her wonder, her Father smiled, and continued as he had before: though now, his motions were different, and it was she who rose, slowly, from her seat. “The average man is incapable of salvation because he is so wrapped up in the material world that he cannot see his own lust for flesh is truly a lust for a higher power. The average martyr, even, cannot be saved, and the best he can hope for is a close connection with his community in the form of the living Church.”

  Her boot steps echoed across the chessboard floor, a beat to the Hierophant’s words as she crossed to stand over herself and the horrific doppelgänger. Every second, it looked less like a person. “When we find our lover manifested in the flesh, we derive from them a surge of inspiration because the soul is liberated from the surly bonds of lust. Our fantasies are revealed as the poisonous wastes of time they have always been. Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.” He lifted his own, suddenly full, glass in toast to her.

  “That’s why we need art,” agreed Dominia. The distant instrument of that animal spurred her first step off the lighted island of the study, into the black abyss.

  “Yes. Yes, my girl. That is why we need art. That is why we need you.”

  Drawing her gun, the General glanced over her shoulder one last time. Her watching Father rose to see her off to the hunt. “Was it you in the tanque?” she asked him, studying the face that so studied her. “Really you, I mean.”

  Thinly, he smiled. “‘Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.’”

  As expected. Gun in hand, the General plunged into the inky dark, muscles coiled for her kill. If at any time in the future she had even the slightest probability of crossing paths with that which she sought—that beast, Tobias, who led her so astray she stumbled by accident into the Kingdom—then it was already impossible for the dentist to escape alive. And this place was all about probability, right? That he was at all audible seemed evidence of her victory, which pumped her dream-fast muscles into an altogether more uncanny pace. The rush of such running—nearly flying—filled her with delight, and the darkness whipped through and around her, over and under her. She nearly leapt for joy, heart racing, body light as it had been when first she’d learned to love the art of battle. Yes, yes—it was an art, was a joy to her. This, she could never deny. As a girl initiated into the Church, she had disliked the killing of even criminal humans for the Noctisdomin Mass, but had always loved a good boxing match, always thrilled at the satisfaction of a well-implemented strategy. She had been reluctant to free herself from the Hunter’s prison by means of violence, but violence was the oil paint with which she had coated the world’s canvas to produce the painting of her life. Tobias thought a human’s ability to survive without violence set it as a superior species, but, in the dark, the General did not see it that way. Was it not said, after all, that the tiger was superior to the elephant when it came to the food chain?

  When Dominia skidded to a halt and listened above the dreamy silence of her thought-body for the sound of the beast, she feared she was lost. What she wouldn’t have given for her compass! Or for more warning as, with a terrible bellow, the freight train–animal thundered from the darkness to run her down or gore her with tusks not so different from the dentist’s drills. As she had when fighting the exoskeleton with the assault rifle, the General aimed, but realized before the second charge it could do no good against an opponent such as this. In the Void, death meant waking up to reality. Once she killed him here, she’d have to catch him on Earth; and he could just as easily slip right back into the dark night of the Ergosphere. An endless struggle.

  After holstering the gun, the General braced herself to meet the animal head-on, hands against goring tusks, because no matter what that putrid dentist loved to say, an animal was no match for a martyr. A martyr, though not an animal, had an animal within: as the elephant in her grip transformed with an alien shriek and a twisting explosion of particles into an eagle, and her hands were crushed by the piercing grip of the raptor’s golden talons, the General found within herself the claws of that great tiger. Snarling with hunger, the predator leapt to latch fangs in the throat of the screaming prey. This feathery mane soon became a furred one, and the molten blood of a lion filled her mouth, swam up into her brain, became therein the poison of a thrashing serpent that she resisted—that was simplicity itself to resist. Her own knowledge of the Ergosphere far surpassed Tobias’s, if only because she so humbled herself before the experience that she acknowledged she knew nothing. It was the tiger within her that beat back feather-wingéd lizards and lion-headed serpents until Tobias, who had tried to be so many things he had forgotten what he was, crawled across the ground, laughing, mad: half man, half writhing, bloodied beast.

  “Will you kill me, General?” asked the dentist, his bright teeth glowing. “Will you kill me, and send me back where I started? Have you not learned what it is to die here! Nothing, nothing at all—it makes what we have felt here a dream, barely remembered.”

  Being addressed by her title brought her back to herself more clearly than the sensory stimulus of seeing her target as a partial man. The gun had somehow found its way back into her hand, and now, free to have the conscious experiences of a humanoid, Dominia realized there must have been some source of light for his teeth to glow. She turned, and in the distance, there it was: the fountain.

  “Of course,” she said, her focus caught completely. “Be’er Sheva.”

  Before she basked in the glory of the implications, the beast behind her sprang and knocked her face-first upon the dirt. With clenched teeth, the General suffered her face to be slammed into the ground: ground scattered with life from that holy fountain, whose waters Lazarus used to reproduce her eye and teeth. That water—the same water, as all water—that was the Lady. That same water tended by the Bearers, through which one accessed the magician’s Kingdom.

  As Dominia’s head was slammed back down into the ground, something snapped behind her eyebrow and she tried to remember it was only a dream. Still, she felt terrible, and the blood obscured her uncovered eye so that, when he turned her over, she was almost completely blind. His hands were around her neck, and they were attached to human arms, but what was beneath his waist seemed half a lion’s haunch and part of a snake’s long tail, with one eagle’s claw that struggled to find uncanny purchase on the ground. “Maybe I send you back, eh, and am right there waiting when you arrive, ready to crush your skull! Then I get the satisfaction of killing the greatest martyr General twice in one night.”

  “Nice fantasy,” she would have said, but it was hard to speak when choked by hands strong as a martyr’s in the dream-space where so many things were equal it was hard to tell one object from another. But, better than saying it, she thought it. In a snap, the word “fantasy” recalled her Father’s words: “The great artist lets nothing come between him and his work, and uses every smallest stimulus as fuel for the fire. Even sexual fantasies are, to the artist, fuel for inspiration.”

  Of all the tools at her disposal, one had been available since the start of her journey in the Void, but was single-mindedly eschewed. Now it possessed a higher purpose. The General’s eye closed. Cut off from the perception of blood as well as the Ergosphere’s aether, the Higgs field, or whatever it was her brain believed she was breathing, her mind began to fog over just as she reached out for the tulpa. Oh, sweet duplicate of fair Cassandra, so cruelly maligned. Did not the doppelgänger want her love? Could she give it if she were dead?

  Could she give it, still,
if the tulpa shared her body? Was it not better for the nebulous shape-thief to have a body separate from her own? A gateway into the real world, where it could receive all the love Dominia might offer?

  The General must have been seconds from death when the deformed, burned, defenestrated, and bleeding future of the monstrosity erupted from the fountain with a terrible scream. Its ability to hold Cassandra’s shape after its ordeal in the Kingdom had reduced to a horrific series of mouths: each opened to reveal her lover’s face within, mouth after mouth, an infinity attached to arms that stretched forward, all screaming Dominia’s name. This attracted the attention of the dentist just before it leapt on him with such force that both were knocked clear of gasping Dominia by several meters. Scrambling up, the General retrieved her gun, then limped to watch as the unwatchable thing swallowed Dr. Tobias Akachi, starting from the feet.

  “God, help me,” he cried. The mood she was in, the General found no humor in the plea.

  “You said you became a Hunter to escape being a slave to the martyrs, Akachi. But you said it yourself. You’re still a slave; and your master doesn’t give a damn about you.”

  As the doppelgänger reached his neck, his eyes rolled up into his head, and by the time its teeth crunched apart his skull, not only did the thing bear a closer resemblance to Cassandra: it had put the leader of the Hunters out of his misery. The tulpa lurched to its feet, hand wiping its mouth, and smiled warily at the General.

  “Dominia,” it said.

  Amazed her gambit had worked, the General did not speak. She extended her arm. Its face lit in so real a mimicry of Cassandra’s, it elicited the same physical elation in Dominia. As the thing fell into her embrace, near crying for joy, she cradled it, her cheek against the top of its head.