by M F Sullivan
Upstairs, the storefront remained empty, with the front door still locked from within: but raucous sounds pervaded the room as though a thousand marchers streamed through its aisles— caused, Dominia thought, by the holo-vision. It had been turned on again, and switched from Theodore’s smarmy face to a far more graphic scene. An Arabic broadcaster, safe in his station, spoke with hurried gravity in words Dominia did not understand, but the gruesome models of light did the translating for her. Before her eye, and those of the cameras, a river of joyous runners ran through Kabul’s streets. The first group of “serious” racers had already finished, and now a great mass stumbled through, looking better fit for Halloween than a marathon. Cow costumes, mermaid costumes, bee costumes, djinn and ghost and zombie costumes, naked runners: but, most especially, runners dressed up as parodies of the Hierophant who, in their oversize suits and various states of decomposition, sparked an age-old, ingrained sense of sacrilegious offense until she remembered she could laugh. The Hierophant probably also viewed it with a good sense of humor—superficially, anyway. Every action he took was formulated for its ambiguity, and his doings were so consistently patient, good-natured, and generous that, when it came to complaining about him, no one who knew him could vocalize the distinct root of their mistrust. By the time they had a clear reason, it was too late—as late as it had been for Cassandra. Oh! Opening the door that night: that night after ninety years of love. Ninety years, unable to prevent or expunge one moment’s tragedy.
Yet, the images before her cleared her spell of self-pity, for they were perhaps worse than even that odious discovery. The runners, shots of whom were absent any journalists, smiled, laughed, and were frequently joined by those who stood watching the race on the sidelines: people in casual clothes, sometimes even business clothes, despite the weekend, ran in dozens between their costumed fellows. They ran, and ran, and the camera feed cut to their destination, Hashmat Kahn Lake, where floated the bodies of all those winners who had drowned themselves in waters ankle deep. Smiling followers pursued with merry laughter, floating the bodies of serious runners off to the center of the lake so as to kneel facedown in the shallows. A few intrepid marathoners sprinted through the water, to its center, in search of a deeper patch in which to drown effectively.
Her brain almost failed to comprehend the scene. Then, a racer in a curly blonde wig hefted a rock from the water to crush her own skull in particular savagery. Lavinia’s doing. Dominia turned toward a noise at the door and found Lazarus standing before it.
“We have twenty minutes to sunrise,” said the mystic over the drumbeat of feet amplified hundreds of times by the open door. The marathon’s route (perhaps thanks to Lavinia) included the overpass under which the music store was tucked. “Do you understand? That means we have fifteen minutes to save Kabul from your Family.”
“They’ll be forced inside by the sun, too. Whatever we start can be finished in their hotel.”
“We won’t be going inside when the sun comes today. At least, you won’t.”
“Where will I go?”
“Same place the dog’s going.” The old man stepped out of the store, and once more disappeared when Dominia pursued him onto the noisy street. Cursing, she studied the riotous overpass, then turned around to ask Basil—herself, she supposed—what she’d ought to do—
But the dog, too, was gone.
“Basil,” she called in the silence of the shop. “Here, boy, we don’t have…Lamb.” The title crossed her lips in the wind of a heavy sigh that marked the moment she turned heel and ran as fast as she could in the direction opposite the marathon.
To be fair, marathons were rather less impressive when one was a martyr. Everything from increased reflexes, to improved metabolic efficiency, to simple muscle mass differences, meant that martyr was to man what cougar was to house cat. Consequently, humans tended to favor athletics as a hobby more than martyrs did. It was more impressive and more vital that a human maintain their endurance. As active as she was, Dominia had always resided among that niche of martyrs partial to watching the human Olympics. This made her something of a nerd in her culture, but she had never been ashamed to like what she liked, and she had always been interested to see the physical development of mankind as chronicled in their Olympic statistics. Even in her life, the time it took the best of the best trained human Olympiads to run a mile had shaved off so many seconds that it had begun to approach the three-minute mark, hovering somewhere around 3:34.89, if she recalled the women’s record—men had pushed their number down into the two-minute-something region.
A martyr’s physical capabilities, meanwhile, were in excess of even those top Olympiads (which meant that they were unwelcome at the games, much to the General’s profound dismay as a young girl). Of these, Dominia’s physical capabilities were within the top percentile. Most acknowledged that the only martyrs capable of besting her in a brawl or match of wits were Cicero and, of course, the Holy Father. But a race? The General could outrace them any day. At her absolute physical peak, she could clear a mile in one minute and fifteen seconds; she was forever aggravated that she couldn’t get it down to a clean minute, to render herself good as a low-speed self-driving buggy of the sort in gated communities established by those rare wealthy human families remaining in martyr territories. Granted, when she was running more than one mile, there was a significant drop-off with each subsequent. Add to that the fact that, though she was far from out of shape, neither had her third century of governance left her quite so honed as she’d been in her dual centuries.
This was all to say that she had to hope she was no more than five miles from the start of the race, if Lazarus’s cryptic declaration was to be believed; if she was to have sufficient time to handle her Family and cure the racers before sunrise, it would be best if she had less than five miles. On top of her aggrieved emotional and physical condition, she was forced to run upstream, against that happy crowd so eager for her to join that sometimes they tried to turn her by the shoulders to get her going in the right direction. Well-meaning folks, these hypnotized sorts.
Another problem: she paused at the corner of one block when she recognized a storefront from the broadcast, feeling obligated to destroy a holo-camera set long since abandoned by its infected crew. The more sets she destroyed, the better. The memetic virus was much stronger in person than over a medium like television or radio—so far as the Family’s experiments on the matter had discerned—but that did not mean it was without effect. People rushed down the street to join the race, having seen it on television in their apartments. These infected were obliged to take part in a happy mass suicide, motivated by Lavinia’s fury. The General was ashamed she had failed to predict this result the instant Miki had explained the marathon’s premise. Of course saintly Lavinia would react this way after one look at all these sacrilegious racers: these gross humans mocking her beloved “Daddy” and good uncles and poor, corrupted older sister. Of course this was the result of their presence in Kabul.
Of course this was the result of her running away.
A nearby electronics store, across a panoply of screens and holographic figures, demonstrated that the bodies had begun to pile up. Above her, even the light poisoning of the dense city could not hide the intensifying blue tint of the coming sun. She fancied her skin already burned, for mere knowledge that the blue wavelength of sunlight had such profound effects seemed sufficient to sicken her. It may have seemed silly that the tiny amount of light from electronics—enough to impact a human’s sleep—could do a martyr harm, but that small amount of artificial blue wavelengths were good as shade compared to those belched by the unforgiving sun. Enough to kill a martyr frighteningly quick, especially with UV involved; even these predawn minutes were known to be dangerous. When Dominia had reached the cove in which she was destined to meet Cassandra, she’d already felt the gentle sting of spotty sunburn avoided. Now she was as concerned about her ability to endure the path to the marathon’s origin as she was about h
ow seared she’d be. All Cicero would have to do was slap her in the face, she mused, trying to make herself laugh amid her deep duress, and failing. As she paused to destroy another camera set, Lazarus appeared from the depths of the crowd and grabbed her arm.
“We don’t have time for that.” As he drew her forward, he urged, “Come on,” and flung her through a space that didn’t exist.
What a strange lurch! The world flickered. For a skipped beat, not a racer remained in sight. In the second during which she stumbled, it was through a strange velvet place whose darkness was not so much interrupted or overlaid by light, as it was embossed by vast bands of bent colors that emanated from the slats between her ribs and from elsewhere, too. They tugged her forward by the solar plexus, yet showed her so many other ways that she might go. She only recognized the tug as a sense of direction—and only recognized they weren’t alone—when pulled out of that strange space by Lazarus, who ran, as normal, through the marathoners that made themselves once again present.
“What was that?” cried the General.
“Patience, please.”
Hindsight exhibited hints of what her mind had experienced but not perceived: a carmine waistcoat, and the bitter scent of cigarettes. “I saw a man there.”
“Right,” he said. “My son.”
Dominia could not find words to articulate her questions—concepts to articulate her questions. Her mind now struggled to parse from the ground great obstructions between which the racers were funneled, and she was shocked to recognize the grandstands rising at the head of the race. In that eerie flicker of reality, Lazarus had drawn her steps sufficient to take her several miles. She trembled in his grasp, so overwhelmed by her comprehension and her added confusion that, at best, she half saw the Family. They had assembled themselves to watch the chaos of a race that was now infinite, surpassing the boundaries of its starting line and stretching as far through Kabul as there lived people to be infected. Yet, she paid the tragedy no mind: she asked, voice hoarse, “How powerful are you, Your Holiness?”
“Don’t get weird and religious on me! No titles, please. I’m a fraction as powerful as you. Now, get out there.”
With one, sharp shove, Lazarus pushed her through the crowd and left her exposed beside the grandstand opposite that of her Family. Her eye met Cicero’s; he rose in those same seconds in which she snatched the gun from her waistband. While veiled Lavinia cried out from beneath the Hierophant’s parasol, Dominia expended bullets, but the effort was futile when the Lamb, also, rose from his seat. The first one missed El Sacerdote’s shoe, polished for the occasion and matched to a suit that, still collared, was less garish than the Father’s but by no means one of his typical cumbersome religious uniform; as he stripped off his jacket in preparation for the fist fight, a marathoner, by some stroke of the Lamb’s ill luck, tripped over an untied shoelace and knocked the General’s firing arm askance with such force that she did not just waste the bullet she had been aiming, but also its follower. The next shot, by likewise remarkable luck when she decided to shift her target, ricocheted from the Hierophant’s fat golden ring, and he uttered a noise of distaste audible even over Lavinia’s shriek.
“Are you finished,” called Cicero while the Lamb accepted his jacket and waded with him into the crowd. “Put down that gun! It’s the weapon of the craven and the lazy. Fight me like a real woman and the Lamb won’t need to be involved.”
“I’ll fight you whatever way it takes to kill you if you won’t stop while you’re alive.”
“All for these?” The Family’s priest waved about him, and in so doing, avoided taking a shot to the shoulder. “For these weak-willed fools manipulated into suicide with the words of a livid child in a grown woman’s body? You would abandon your Family for these?”
“This was never about you! This was never about the Family, or treason, or terrorism. It was about Cassandra.”
Sneering, Cicero thrust aside a few racers. While Dominia gritted her teeth and flipped her gun to use as a cudgel, the priest asked, “You would return her to life; is that right? Depend on the madness of pagans to accomplish what you know to be impossible? The protein is the only route by which we may have eternal life in this world. If that is scorned—”
“Cassandra didn’t scorn the protein. She scorned this way of life.” The handle of the pistol was meant to whip across Cicero’s face, but with his most beloved brother there, he was close to unstoppable: he ducked with a full second to spare and tackled Dominia with such force that her head slammed against the metal bleachers. Garnet sparks burst in the eye still there. As she thought, with sympathy, of Kahlil, the priest forced her to the ground and slammed her skull once more—this time, against the concrete.
“Ninety years she lived this life, my sister, without complaint. You mean to say that you are free of sin in this? You don’t think you had the slightest hand in how she died?”
“It was this Family.” The words were hissed through a jaw clenched by Cicero’s hand until he caught her fist. “It was this way of life, this Family, this whole fucking world! It was Father!”
“It was you, Dominia,” snarled Cicero, as his free hand caught her gun in effort to break her fingers against it. “A healthy woman, satisfied with ninety years of marriage—”
“You don’t know anything about our lives.”
“Do you think such a woman would commit suicide?”
The word made Dominia ill. She had succeeded in not thinking on Cassandra’s exact method of death so long that it came on her like it had the first time. That brutal surprise as the sound of the door’s opening gave way to the discharge of her own gun.
All the shame in Cassandra’s regretful eyes, locked forever on hers.
“It was Father.” She had to say it through a layer of misting tears. “What he said to her that night, at Lavinia’s party—I know that it was about.”
“And you know”—he relaxed his grip on her hands—“Father is far from the only one culpable.”
A third voice interrupted from across the clamor of madness. “Maybe not; but he deserves a lot of credit.”
It was not the voice of the Lamb, but the voice of Lazarus. Heads turned to the source; in the distance, the Hierophant’s eyes lit. The holy man stood with his ceremonial dagger poised against the throat of the Lamb.
“Sorry, Elijah,” said Lazarus, tone causal, “but you should be used to this by now, right?”
The Lamb did not speak. Cicero showed his teeth, perfect and white and free of augmentation, but nonetheless sharp enough to elicit a lupine aspect. “So, Father was right. You brought your heretic to play.”
“I brought her. Let the General go, or this dagger goes in his heart, and not his throat.”
“You wouldn’t.” Cicero’s pitch rose to that of uncharacteristic fear, and his body, in instinct’s mistake, lifted toward his brother enough that the thrashing General freed the empty hand that he held by the wrist. As he looked back to her, his face written in layers of rage, the General clenched her teeth and, with the satisfying pop-and-splatter of gore, put out her brother’s right eye.
Cicero’s scream pierced the eardrums of those around, such that a few racers, even through their hypnosis, thrust hands over their ears with deep grimaces. A plethora of cameras formed a perimeter, all intended to capture the race, all transmitting a virus across Kabul, and now, all transmitting more evidence of Dominia’s terrorism to the world at large. The Hierophant, wearing that same look of disgust worn when Dominia had shot Murph McLintock, handed Lavinia the parasol. Lazarus, meanwhile, seemed to have disappeared, leaving the Lamb standing there as calm as—
Well.
With her Father coming down the grandstand stairs, now was hardly the time to think in clichés. But what time was it? When was sunrise? Was this to be the moment of her death? What would it feel like? A thousand thoughts rushed through her mind as the Hierophant blipped out of existence (in a manner identical to Lazarus, it was worth noting) and appeared
before her as if he’d been there the whole time. All those harried questions were laden with terror, and froze in that terror on his appearance; but, rather than tear out Dominia’s remaining eye in return for Cicero’s, or take her gun, or strike her in any way, he picked up his gasping son and slung the man, a few inches shorter than he, over his massive shoulder.
“It’s always the same with you two, isn’t it, Dominia? You and your brother have never gotten along.”
“I always thought of him as more of an uncle.”
“A matter of perspective, I suppose. Uncle, or brother: I will need your help to get him out of peril. And I shall require your help in protecting Lavinia.”
The question was so strange, in this place, in this circumstance, that the General could not understand the words. “My help?”
Before he answered, the blast wrenched a hole through reality and responded for him.
XVII
Saint Valentinian
Until that moment, Dominia was sure she’d heard her life’s loudest sound. A gunshot might not seem that loud. But it could be. One single discharge, looping in her mind in the world’s most painful eternal recursion, blocking out all other noise, blowing out the world. That was loud.
How loud had Cassandra perceived that sound to be? Dominia pondered this when masochistic, and made herself sick in wondering. From within her wife’s mouth, the discharge of the antique barrel’s slender phallus must have sounded as loud as the explosion in Kabul, which, sufficient to rattle the ground for several blocks, shattered the street the way the gun had devastated the back of Cassandra’s skull. But she never imagined what happened after that moment of death—that moment around which her mind swirled ever closer if she drifted too near the vortex of her sorrow. She did not contemplate any notion of eternity, for better or worse. It seemed from the General’s jaded perspective that Cassandra’s entire existence ended in that moment, when Dominia opened the door too late. Always a second too late.
