Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

  “No,” Nügua said. “I serve none of your tiny gods, and I know maat to be a much more complex force than any of you could realize.”

  She left him angry, muttering among the other priests about sacrilege and the rising threat of the Kushites.

  Anat was still shaking as she cleaned the altars that night. Her fear was nothing to do with Hannu’s grip—he could have set her on fire and still done no worse than she’d survived. Nügua had been gone for hours, but Anat’s mind was filled with those red lips.

  Nügua had seen Inanna.

  “How?” Anat asked.

  Inanna was seated upon the altar of Maat, legs folded underneath her. She did not appear dressed today. Anat could see little more than her face, an exposed breast, a muscular arm. “There was a world before this one, and I come from that world. There, I was a leader. I was a god.”

  Anat had already known Inanna’s nature in her heart. “You are a god no more?”

  “I am an echo. The woman I used to be is dead, surviving only as scraps within my chosen ones. I can no longer walk the world myself. That is because Nügua murdered me.”

  When Inanna spoke, Anat could almost see it all. The sweeping armies that Inanna once commanded, the descent into a gray land of death, and the confrontation with a woman who was halfway to serpent. Nügua had bitten Inanna to infect her with venom, a shadow that had turned her veins to obsidian.

  And then the world had ended.

  “She supplanted me,” Inanna said. “The creature you met is not the god herself, but an avatar of her. Killing her will not kill the god.”

  “It is a beginning,” Anat said.

  Inanna smiled.

  At the close of evening, Anat returned to her shack—a construction of reeds on the back of the estate. She shared it with several other girls and was surprised to find none of them were present. It was growing late. They all should have been asleep. Perhaps it was fortune that they were preoccupied elsewhere. Anat could light her lantern and spend time practicing the knife forms Inanna taught her.

  She had barely gotten out her flint when feet shuffled behind her. Someone was moving near the shack.

  The steps sounded too heavy to belong to a girl.

  Anat slid to the side of the door and peered out through shadows. A male figure was trudging across the dirt toward her. It was no coincidence that her companions weren’t in the shack—Hannu must have been planning to catch her alone. There was no other escape but the door he was currently staring at.

  When tribes clashed, it was common for rival leaders to take prizes of war. Anat had been among them. The herd had been taken, the grazing lands set on fire, and she had been thrown to the soldiers. Her body had been used for nights on end. She had been left for dead in the desert.

  She needed to remember that this priest could do nothing to her that had not been done worse. And if she was left again in the desert, her wounds cleaned by maggots, she would again drag herself to whatever relative safety she could find. She would persist. She was all that remained of a warrior god. “Inanna, be with me tonight,” Anat whispered, scooping the lightless clay pot of her lantern into her arms.

  When Hannu grew close, she swung.

  The lantern shattered against his skull. Hannu collapsed without a sound except for the thump of body against ground.

  She thought she might have killed him.

  Anat didn’t dare think of the trouble she would be in once he was found. She would need to leave the House of Maat forever—begin a new life downriver. She had little money to afford running, though.

  A high priest’s robes would fetch a nice price if offered to the right person.

  Anat kneeled to strip him.

  His eyes flashed open.

  Hannu flipped her over, slammed her back into the dirt. It only took one blow from the hilt of his dagger to take the fight from Anat’s limbs. Dazed, bruised, she could not even shove his elbow off of her breast where it pinned her down.

  His hands bunched in her dress and shoved it to her waist. Inanna screamed hopeless words of damnation at him, swinging her fists into his back without making contact. There was nothing for a dead god to do but watch and rage. “You’ll die for this!” His blade bit under the line of her jaw.

  “Inanna!” she roared.

  Hannu’s spine went rigid. His hands released her.

  He barely had time to let out a shout before it was silenced by bubbling blood. A stiletto had opened the gaping red smile underneath his jawline, held by the strong hand of a man behind him.

  Hannu crumpled atop Anat. She screamed and tried to get him off. He was so heavy.

  The killer kicked him away. Then he lifted Anat into his arms.

  Where his hands had been death for Hannu, they were gentle for Anat. He was smooth in adjusting her gown so that it would fall modestly over her body. He kept an arm around her once she was on her feet, as if to ensure she would not fall, and Anat wasn’t sure why the contact made her heart slow.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  His voice was silken, with an accent that sounded neither local nor foreign. His words shivered over her spine.

  Anat instantly knew love.

  The instant after that, she knew horror.

  Because she had remembered why she knew this ochre-skinned man with the charcoal hair. He had been with a woman servant who looked to be his twin, tending to the needs of Inanna’s murderer.

  “It can’t be,” Inanna whispered. She never attempted to interact with anyone but Anat, but now she spoke directly to the manservant. “Utu…is that really you?”

  III

  The Herald

  5

  B efore Sophie even awakened, she heard flowing water. The sound had been chasing her through strangely detailed dreams of Kemet, so she hadn’t realized that it was water, at first; she thought that it might have been wind over restless desert, whistling through the legs of ancient, towering stone statues. The water didn’t sound right to her, even once she realized it was water. Nile waters slopping against the side of a boat sounded nothing like that.

  Sophie rolled over and hugged an overstuffed pillow to her chest, letting the comfort of her bed chase away the miserable, sticky feelings from watching Anat at the House of Maat.

  Her dreams had always been detailed. She was the Historian, after all. Her brain was a thing of power. She knew details harkening further back than the Eleventh Dynasty—including Nügua’s travels—and it was typical for her subconscious to fill in settings, dialogue, and drama. Of course, it often involved normal, silly dream nonsense too, like having all her teeth fall out of her head or trying to run but melting through the floor instead.

  This dream had been so real .

  “Because of the Traveler,” Sophie whispered to herself. The words came before she had time to process the thought and what it meant.

  This was because of the Traveler.

  Memories slid over the surface of her fading dreams. Being seized by the Traveler at the bus station. Hours in captivity, afraid and lonely. Lincoln’s arrival with the gargoyles. The relief in his eyes when he saw her, and how he’d snarled at the Traveler for even suggesting Sophie should pay a price for her sins.

  And then...

  “We traveled,” she said, flopping onto her back.

  Her eyes opened. Light rippled across a stone ceiling, reflected off of the water flowing loudly around her. The color patterns resembled the Northern Lights, though in warmer tones of candy pink and tangerine.

  She recognized that ceiling, that light pattern.

  Her heart could not beat.

  “No,” Sophie said.

  They should have gone to the year 5509 BCE, when the world had been birthed anew in the previous genesis. But it seemed that the Traveler had somehow taken them to a year much sooner.

  This was Sophie’s childhood bedroom.

  She sat up, reflexively grabbing at her sheets so they wouldn’t spill off the side of the bed. Her bed was on
a platform in the center of an oversized pond, lit from underneath by the complex wards that protected her as she slept. They hadn’t stopped burning since she’d been nestled in a bassinet at the center of the pool so that the waterfalls rimming it could rock her. The paving stones that bridged bed and shore had been warded too. They always glowed faintly turquoise so that Sophie could see well enough to keep her footing, even when she was sleepy.

  These details didn’t help her place the exact year she had arrived. Nor did the thick greenery growing beyond the rim of stones, or the lantern-lit wooden gazebo that stood beyond. The entire garden was inside a secure stone room, tinted to look like nighttime, and it had changed little during her life at the farm.

  It was not the room that helped her pin down the year, but her body.

  Sophie looked down to find that she had traveled into a younger form of herself. Her breasts were swollen inside of her nightgown, straining the seams. Her skin was unblemished. Her arms were thin, as were her legs. Sophie had not gotten most of her curves yet. And her belly...

  “Two thousand and six,” Sophie said. “The year is two thousand and six. I was born in nineteen ninety-one, so I am Sophie Keyes, a fourteen-year-old Historian.” Saying the words aloud brought reality slamming into her even more than waking up in her floating bed.

  It’s 2006, and I’m fourteen years old.

  The Traveler could not have picked a worse year.

  Sophie carefully kicked the sheets to the foot of the bed and rose. The platform was suspended by ropes, allowing it to sway gently with every movement. She carefully walked barefoot across the bridge and took a path across the grass. She had taken her first steps in that gazebo, toddling into the hands of the first guardians to raise her. She had taught herself to weave baskets using the reeds flourishing in the channel beyond. She’d cast the witchlights that dotted the ceiling, and would cast many more later, creating patterns that looked like clockwork dragons.

  The archway leading to the rest of the farm was elaborate, carved by previous generations of Historians. Sophie ran her hands down the beaded curtain that swung in the frame. The beads were irregular—some small as her thumbnail, most the size of a knuckle, a few much larger. They were the first beads carved by one guardian. Later he would carve beads for her hair too.

  Sophie smelled pap cooking, and her stomach turned. She pressed a hand to her gut. Shut her eyes. Breathed deep. “I can do this,” she said. “I have to do this.”

  She followed the hallway to the farm.

  The rest of the house was not as grand as her bedroom, but it was comfortable in its humility. The dark wood was cozy. The furniture was old but well-kept; to be a Historian was to be bored, and she’d learned to reupholster chairs when she was twelve. Faded tapestries told the story of her predecessors: her grandfather, a friendly-faced character that Lincoln would have surely described as a nerd; some great-aunt who had been a beautiful brunette Swede, also a nerd; and backward on through many centuries of nerds that shared some scraps of genetics with Sophie.

  Cooking smells grew stronger as she traversed the conservatory, passed windows looking into a greenhouse, and entered the kitchen. The equipment here was enormous antique stuff, iron and scorched. Cast iron pans hung from racks in the ceiling. The shelves overflowed with canned goods, most of which Sophie had personally produced over weeks of autumn boredom.

  A man was cooking at the range.

  She knew those wide shoulders, the long neck, his skin the color of oak over muscles strong as a mountain. She had personally etched the tattoo of an iris that unfolded at the nape of his neck, using a tattoo gun he’d smuggled into the farm without Tristan’s permission.

  The cook turned from the stove at the sound of her footsteps, and it was him. It was really him. He had locs and chiseled cheekbones and those lips she’d kissed a thousand times. “Omar,” she said hoarsely. He was so young, so beautiful. She hadn’t seen him for too long.

  “How is my baby?” Omar asked, sweeping around her. His warmth, his smell, settled upon Sophie’s shoulders like a cloak she’d worn her entire life.

  One large hand spread over her belly. Its growing swell was nearly invisible under her formless nightgown, but Omar knew where his baby was growing, and the baby kicked his hand in reply.

  Because in the year 2006, the fourteen-year-old Historian was pregnant.

  It was a tale as old as time, really. Sophie had grown up in isolation, cared for by adult men like Tristan, who had been her fathers. They had also taught her nothing about a woman’s body and the urges that came with adolescence. She’d asked for more guidance upon approaching puberty, but Tristan had provided books on the matter and said, “You can figure it out. You’re smart.”

  When Omar, just sixteen years old, arrived to fill out the ranks of her guardians, she had never seen a boy so close to her age. She had never seen anyone she didn’t love as a father. And she had never met a man who didn’t treat her like family.

  Things had fallen out in a predictable pattern from there. Their minds had been in the same place, and once they managed to isolate themselves in her wondrous bedroom—hidden away from the likes of Tristan—everything had happened as expected. They had explored their bodies together, and the things those bodies could do, and Sophie had learned pleasure almost as great as that of a good book. A lot of it had been awkward and embarrassing. Some of it had been amazing. All of it had been fun.

  At the time, Sophie had been about to turn fourteen. She had thought she was perfectly grown. Mature, responsible, etcetera. All the self-deluding lies that teenage girls across the world foisted upon themselves, like Atlas holding up an increasingly crushing sky.

  When her menses didn’t arrive as she’d expected, she assumed it was another irregular cycle. She hadn’t considered alternate reasons until her breasts began growing and aching, until she no longer had the stomach for krummelpap in the mornings, and she wanted to sleep more than four hours a night—something she had never done.

  Omar and Sophie, overexcited teenagers with inadequate supervision, had produced a child.

  The magic that allowed the Historians to carry arcane knowledge through the millennia only permitted for one Historian at a time. Formal rituals were performed to smoothly transition the knowledge from grandfather to granddaughter, or from aunt to nephew. The Historian was never to produce a child of their own, since it would break the Historian’s legacy of knowledge in half between them.

  But Sophie had gotten pregnant.

  Just like that, with a single passionate night of surrender, Sophie had broken the universe.

  “Try not to worry,” Omar said after a quiet breakfast, “but we had an unusual attack last night.”

  There were few phrases guaranteed to make Sophie panic faster than “try not to worry.” Omar was not a particularly verbose young man; the fact that he had mustered the drive to initiate a conversation was worrying enough on its own. “What was unusual about it?”

  “I’ll show you,” Omar said.

  Sophie was grateful for an opportunity to set down her spoon. Food had tasted terrible through her entire pregnancy, and she’d almost forgotten that lurching nausea that chased her for the full nine months whenever she ate.

  She followed him out of the kitchen into the depths of the farm.

  There was enough square footage within the fortress of her childhood that Sophie had never felt claustrophobic being contained within its walls. Their lengthy walk gave her adequate time to stare at Omar’s back in despair, wondering how in the world she was going to tell him the awful truth.

  How could she tell him that her mind was a decade older than the body she lived in? That she had lived through the future, and she needed help to return?

  Omar took her below ground to sublevels where the guardians kept quarters. He passed an armory, which contained melee and ranged weapons that Sophie was not familiar with using, and a room filled with long-term supplies. Tanks of treated water stood against one wall
, and she glimpsed crates of dehydrated rations as well before they passed.

  There was a jail cell at the end of the hall. She’d never seen it before. It wasn’t that she was banned from this part of the farm—she just never had cause to visit. “Has this ever been used?” Sophie asked, surprised to find the door barred, locked, and warded. Magic teemed around its boundary.

  “It hasn’t been needed in your lifetime,” Omar said.

  He slid the window open so that she could see inside.

  Their attacker was the Traveler.

  The white-clad witch was bloodied, crumpled against the wall. Its white hair fell over its colorless face. It didn’t react to the sound of the window opening. Sophie would not try to guess if the ill-fated trip to the previous genesis had caused that condition or if it had been Omar’s fault. Her guardians did what they needed to protect the Historian’s legacy. She had never been inclined to criticize.

  “How are you keeping it in there?” Sophie asked. “That’s a very powerful witch. It shouldn’t be possible to contain it.”

  “It?”

  “The witch,” she said.

  Omar’s brow drew low over his eyes. “The wards on the farm severely limit magic. Only a few authorized people can cast anything.”

  “Was anyone else with it? A man, perhaps?”

  “‘It’ was alone.”

  Lincoln hadn’t been with the Traveler, and the idea made her stomach twist up in knots. There was no telling where he might have landed. Hopefully he was in the same year that they were. If the three of them had been separated...

  “I want to see where you found it,” Sophie said.

  “You can’t,” Omar said. “It was outside the wards.”

  “Take me outside the wards, then.”