II.
Uriel was talking to someone. She could barely see him at this distance. Human-sized, she thought. His voice carried, cool and emotionless, solid like ice.
“Would you like to get this over with and kill me now?” he asked. “Or do we have to do it the hard way?”
“THE HARD WAY,” said Uriel.
Then they both took a step skew to any of the dimensions her normal eyes could see. She felt new senses opening up as she tried to follow their path, senses that inferred their presence from the paths of the colored letters that swirled around the storm. The hurricane abstracted, became a series of perturbations in the seed of the world. She traced them back. SA’AR. Then along another set of threads. TEMPESTAS. Still another. HURRICANE.
The stranger seized the threads, pulled them forward, sheared them to their essence. HRCN. Then he rearranged them, made them dance. CHRN. Then fleshed them out. ACHERON. The river that formed the boundary of Hell. Sohu felt the storm darken, become deathly hot. Somehow the transmutation was affecting reality.
Uriel reached out, his flaming sword now in his hand, and parted the threads. CH. RN. He fleshed them out. Turned the first set into CHAI, meaning “life”. The second into AARON, brother of Moses, progenitor of the priesthood, who bore the Shem HaMephorash upon his forehead. The darkness broke. Waves of holy light rushed forth from where Uriel had made the change.
The stranger snarled, hurt.
“GO AWAY, THAMIEL,” said the archangel.
Sohu froze. Thamiel. The Lord of Demons. Was here. Was fighting Uriel.
Thamiel touched both sets of threads. AARON shifted vowels, became RUIN. From the whistling of the wind he drew an S, added it to CHAI, shifted it into CHAOS. Chaos and ruin. The carefully arranged threads of symbols that made up Uriel’s machine began crumbling, falling apart in the wind.
Uriel drew water from the sea in a great waterspout. The Semitic pictograph for “water” was the origin of the Hebrew letter mem. He turned the water into an M, then grabbed the CH from CHAOS and the n from RUIN, made MACHINE. The remaining letters R and S he stuck together, slashed at the S until it hardened and became a Z. RZ. RAZ. Secrets. Through the angel Raziel, the secrets of kabbalah in particular. A machine of kabbalistic secrets. His machinery stopped crumbling, starting putting itself together, glowing with renewed light.
Thamiel grabbed the Z, held it in the plume of water until it softened back into an S, then used it to make RASHA, “wicked” and NACOM, “punishment”. The punishment of the wicked, the Devil’s task. Thamiel began to grow bigger as the power of the storm drained into his essence.
Then he paused. pointed at the letters. Of their own accord, two dropped away, made a new pattern. MEREA. “Friend”.
“You have a friend here,” he told Uriel.
“NO,” said Uriel.
“The letters don’t lie,” said Thamiel. He pointed to them again. Another two dropped out. SOHU.
“Interesting,” said Thamiel.
They were the scariest four syllables Sohu had ever heard.
The two stepped back into the regular world at the same time, and Thamiel flew right towards her.
She could see him clearly now. He looked like a man. He was dressed in a very black suit. His face evoked a military officer, or a high-level executive, or a serial killer, or a cop who always had rumors of brutality swirling around him but nobody could ever pin anything down. Not the kind of impulsive brutality of the guy who loses his cool every so often, but a very calculated brutality. The cop who knows way too much about how to hurt people without leaving marks, and who has no crime at all in his precinct, and nobody wants to ask why. Gaunt, empty grey eyes, close-cropped hair.
To the right of his head was a second head. It looked like a deformed infant. Its eyes were firmly shut and its mouth was locked into a perpetual silent scream.
“Sohu,” he said, with his normal head. The other one was still screaming. “I’m Thamiel. We meet at last.”
He had two bat wings on his back, no bigger than they would have been on a bat. On him they looked ridiculous, vestigial. They held him aloft nonetheless. In his hand was a bident – like a trident, but with two points instead of three. He looked straight at her. Held out the bident, and the clouds hiding her melted away.
“DO NOT HURT HER,” said Uriel.
“Ah,” said Thamiel. “Perhaps now you’re more interested in killing me?”
Uriel said nothing. Thamiel stared at the girl. Sohu didn’t say anything.
“Your father’s sign is on you.” He pointed to her left hand. To her eyes there was nothing there. It just looked like skin. “If I harm you, it calls him here.” She had known nothing of this; still it made sense. “But,” said the demon, “it thinks of ‘harm’ in very literal terms. I don’t.”
Very very gingerly, he touched the two points of the bident to Sohu’s forehead.
She remembered a poem: “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watch the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues…”
She remembered it because it was the only thing that could describe how it felt. All the light vanished from the world. Everything stable, everything comprehensible. Like a vertiginous nausea of the mind, like every fiber of her being was united in an urge to vomit that would never be satiated. Not like she had cancer; like she was cancer, like there was nothing pure or orderly left within her, like she needed to be excised from the universe, like the universe needed to be excised from the cosmos, or like the whole cosmos needed to be killed with poison to put it out of its own misery. But that doing so wouldn’t help, couldn’t help, there was no poison outside and separate from the cancer, everything was going to be horrible forever and it was all her fault.
“Uriel!” she shouted with her last ounce of strength. “Kill me!”
Thamiel opened one eye a little wider on his first face; the eyes of the second were still glued shut. “I was going for ‘kill him‘,” said the devil, “but your way works too, actually.”
The second head continued to scream. Uriel stood silently as the colors and symbols whirled around him, no emotion on his face.
“You should know,” said Thamiel to her quietly, “that if one were to compare a single water droplet of this cloud to all the oceans of the world, the oceans above that are seen by Man and the greater oceans below in the wellsprings of the earth – that as miniscule are the torments you suffer now to the torments of Hell that are prepared for you and everyone you love. And that even if you escape those torments, as some do, you have friends, and you have a family, and even those who seem most virtuous have secret sins, and so the probability that neither you nor any of those you care about end up in my dominions is impossibly fleeting, a ghost of a ghost of a chance. And that I will be given dominion over the Earth, and that it will be no different, and everything beautiful and lovely and innocent will become no different from what you feel now, only it will last forever. And that I don’t care at all about you, but I wanted to see whether Uriel did. And that he could stop this at any time. And you’re probably blind by this point, but you should know that he’s standing there, watching all of this, and he knows exactly what’s going on, and he hasn’t even changed his expression. And I could do this for an hour, a year, an eternity, and he would still be standing there.”
The second head just kept screaming.
“Still,” said Thamiel, “I’m busy, and duty calls.” He lifted the bident from Sohu’s forehead, and she collapsed onto the cloud. “I’m changing my mind,” he told the archangel. “You don’t need to kill me today. I think it will be more interesting watching you explain yourself to Sohu. We can do the usual death-return thing the next time.”
“GO AWAY, THAMIEL,” said Uriel.
“Of
course,” said the devil, and he dove into the sea and disappeared.
III.
Sohu lay there for a moment. Let the light and fresh air slowly leak back into her sensorium. The horror seemed oddly distant now, like she could barely remember it. A nightmare retreating after break of day. But the words she could not forget.
A rush of air, as Uriel summoned her cloud back beside him at the center of the storm. A bulge in the center gradually took shape and developed, bud-like, into her cottage. The flying kayak was still there, somehow, tethered to the edge of the cloud just as it had been before.
“ARE YOU OKAY?”
She struggled to speak. Finally she just said “What happened?”
“THAMIEL DOES NOT LIKE ME. HE WANTED ME TO DO SOMETHING BAD TO SAVE YOU. I DID NOT. I AM SORRY.”
Sohu turned herself over, so that she was supine on the cloud. She saw the angel’s head leaning over her, filling the sky, his eyes as bright as the sun, and she covered her own eyes to avoid being blinded.
She thought for a second. So many things she wanted to say. She formed the responses, compared them, mulled them over in her mind.
“I…trust you to do the right thing.”
“YOU DO?”
“I…Uriel, it was really bad. You have no idea how scary that was. Please don’t let him hurt me again. Please don’t let me die.”
“UM. I WILL TRY TO KEEP YOU SAFE.”
“I don’t want to be kept safe. I want to…you fought him, Uriel.”
“NOT VERY WELL.”
“But you did. I want to learn how to do that. I want to learn how to fight.”
“I WILL TEACH YOU MANY THINGS. BUT YOUR HOMEWORK FOR TONIGHT IS TO REST AND FEEL BETTER.” He stopped himself. “OR IS THAT ONE OF THE THINGS HUMANS CANNOT DO?”
“I…I’m not sure. But I think I can try.”
Chapter 14: Cruelty Has A Human Heart
Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is power: and who may stand in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is applied. These two rules describe the essence of a computer programmer trainee
— kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com
May 11, 2017
Ione, California
Something was horribly wrong.
Gradually it came back to me. I’d tried to fight UNSONG and failed miserably. They’d seized me and presumably my computer too, driven goodness knows how many hours with me in the back of a black van, then deposited me in a cell somewhere. I had fallen asleep. Now I had woken up. I was still in an UNSONG cell. There were guards outside the window.
This was not what was horribly wrong.
The wrongness was subtler than that. It pierced to the bone. It was like hearing your own heartbeat, pounding in your ears, except that it was off, in some way that you couldn’t explain, and you kept thinking maybe you had some rare heart disease that was going to kill you any moment now.
I tried to get up, and was mildly surprised when I succeeded. Whatever was wrong wasn’t physically wrong. I tried to speak and found that I was gagged. Obvious precaution. You capture a kabbalist, you don’t want them speaking. No chance UNSONG was going to forget that.
The cell was spacious – although to be fair my standards had been set by the sort of rooms I could rent for minimum wage in the Bay Area. It was well-kept, as if advertising that UNSONG didn’t need to deny its prisoners any of their physical needs in order to break them. Or maybe I was reading too much into it, because everything around me still felt horribly wrong.
I cleared my mind as best I could.
[Ana, are you there? Where are you?]
There was nothing. Either Ana was far away, or distracted, or asleep, or – I couldn’t make myself think “dead”. I would have felt it if she died. That, I told myself, is definitely how kabbalistic marriages work.
So I banged on the door of my cell, hoping that the guards would hear me and take me away to whatever awful fate was awaiting me, rather than leave me here where something was horribly wrong.
Both guards looked at me. One of them muttered something I couldn’t hear, probably along the lines of “He’s awake”. I was surprised to see they looked like ordinary people. The one on the left wore a sort of serious expression that reminded me of Eliot Foss for some reason. The one on the right looked a combination of pissed off and scared. I wondered if he, too, could feel that something was horribly wrong.
“Mr. Smith-Teller,” he said. I winced internally. I mean, I suppose if they didn’t know my name now it wouldn’t have taken them too much longer to find it out, but it still hurt. Kabbalists are notoriously fussy about who knows their true name. I’m not sure why. When an angel or demon is hidden in some sort of incarnate form, knowing their true name gives you power over them. Knowing the Shem haMephorash does the same to God, or something. I don’t think there’s anything like this for humans, but there’s still just something that feels very careless about letting your enemies have such an important word.
“You’re awake just in time. We’ll be taking you for debriefing now. Please come peacefully or we will have to take measures to enforce compliance.” He didn’t say it in a nasty way, though. I kind of liked the guy. But something was nevertheless horribly wrong.
I nodded, and let them open the door of my cell and march me down the corridor. This was something else. I knew UNSONG arrested people, I knew that they put you in prison for a long time if you used Names without a license, but I’d always heard they used the normal federal prisons. The idea of a secret UNSONG black site somewhere sounded like it was out of Erica’s paranoid anti-government screeds.
It didn’t fail to register that if no one had ever revealed the existence of this place before, that meant either that they were very good with the Amnestic Name, or else no one had ever gotten out of here before. I tried to remember exactly how effective the Amnestic Name was and ironically came up blank. And what about the Confounding Name? I couldn’t remember.
The facility wasn’t small, either. We walked through poorly-lit corridor after poorly-lit corridor. I tried to look for other prisoners, references to the location, even doors with signs on them, but all I spotted were a couple of locked rooms with the UNSONG seal on the front. An aleph superimposed on the United Nations globe, and around it, the name “United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God” and the motto “I TEGO ARCANA DEI”. Begone, I hide the secrets of God. There were deep kabbalistic depths in that phrase, but I didn’t have the energy to think about them, because something was horribly wrong.
We came to a room. A conference room, it looked like. They motioned me to sit down. The sense that something was horribly wrong got stronger. The guards could feel it too. I could tell.
The door swung open.
“Ma’am,” said one the of the guards, politely yet as quickly as possible, and then both of them walked away just slowly enough not to technically be considered running.
Two other guards entered, both looking like people who were in severe pain but had been dealing with it for long enough that they could sort of crack a nervous smile and say it didn’t bother them anymore – and between them, a five foot tall woman of ambiguous ethnicity wearing a purple dress and a pearl necklace.
And I thought: Huh, I’ve seen this person in the newspaper.
“Mr. Smith-Teller,” she said, and smiled at me. “I’m Malia Ngo.”
Okay. So any hope that they were just annoyed at Erica’s secret meetings was gone. This was Director-General Malia Ngo. The head of UNSONG. If she was involved, they thought this was the most important thing happening in the world at this moment. Which of course it was. They knew all about the Vital Name and everything it could do, and they were going straight to the top. Okay. So I was really, really doomed.
When the President and the Comet King had worked together to convince the United Nations to fund UNSONG, leadership of the fledgling bureaucracy had gone to a elderly Brazilian politician who had taken a hands-off approach. He’d gone after the bigg
est gangs and most blatant serial abusers of Names, talking about “decapitation strikes” against networks of large-scale pirates. The policy was very popular – everyone agreed that having the Mafia in on the Name business was a bad idea – and pretty ineffective, because most unauthorized Name use was by ordinary non-Mafia people who talked to each other online.
He’d died about ten years ago and been replaced by Ms. Ngo, who had joined the organization two years earlier and presided over a famous sting on the medicinal-Name gangs in the Harmonious Jade Dragon Empire. She replaced her predecessor’s cautious balance with a scorched-earth approach that won her dozens of powerful enemies – all of whom were carefully outmanuevered. It didn’t hurt that theonomic profits increased about 300% during the first five years of her tenure. Sure, a lot of people thought that was because of blockbuster discoveries like the Precious Name and Zahlenquadrat-boxing, but pirated Names becoming a hundred times harder to find couldn’t have hurt either. Soon any move against her would have half the theonomics bigwigs in the country at the President’s doorstep within an hour, and UNSONG was her private fiefdom. She scared a lot of people, and I’d always thought it was a deliberate attempt to play the bully in order to compensate for her unthreatening appearance.
Now she seemed just the opposite. She wasn’t trying to look scary. She was doing everything she could not to. And it wasn’t enough.
“Mr. Smith-Teller,” she repeated. “I’m sorry you’re in this situation.” She really did sound sorry. “I understand you are associated with several Unitarian groups who have a dim view of UNSONG, and you’re probably laboring under the misapprehension that I am here to hurt you. As difficult as this may be to believe, we’re potentially on the same side. I’m going to take your gag out. If you start speaking a Name, I’m afraid we’ll have you unconscious before you finish the second syllable, and the gag will go back in. I’m sure you can imagine the reasons we have these precautions. Nod if you understand.”
Unsong Page 17
