Occasionally I pass the ruins of settlements abandoned during the civil wars, when Nationalists, Communists, and independent opportunists alike massacred whole villages. Slowly, slowly, nature takes them back, as weathering and mosses claim their due. I have to slow in places to make my way around open waste dumps and spots where iron rebar still pokes up through the dirt that’s drifted in over the decades. At sunset on the sixth day I make my way on the last segment of the journey— on foot now, to keep my destination pure.
I know I’ve turned my steps right when a notch in the mountains lets me see a red glow rising off the far-off desert. On the threshold between this world and the spirit lands there’s a lost civilization out there on the plateau. Nobody’s actually seen its cities for centuries, maybe not for whole ages of the world. Their glow remains, though, when conditions are just right. Its presence now means that I am ever so slightly out of tune with the natural world behind me and further out of tune with the world of demographic analysts and rail yards where I live most of the time. It will be easier now to push the rest of the distance I need to go, and the light of the unseen cities will act as a beacon when it’s time to return. Where this side canyon turns north, there’s a small spring—barely more than a moist spot in the channel at this time of year—and I set up my camp there.
Through the rest of the night, I pace out the boundaries of my ritual space: five steps to a side for the innermost box, and larger and more complex forms around it. Doing this by starlight isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and there’s much opportunity to get it wrong. It all shimmers faintly as the night wears on, reproducing the essential features of the imperial capital’s sacred geometry. There are no obvious points of discord, so just before sunrise I lie down in the center of it for a brief rest before the next step. My sleep is not comfortable, and troubled by dreams of firestorms raining down upon the landscape all around me. I know where these images come from, of course; I’ll confront them in due time. I wake unhappy, but nonetheless ready to continue. I hear neither encouragement nor warning from my ancestors as I stir.
Crossing from the living world to the yin world is easy enough. Everyone does it at least once, when they die. The soul leaves the body and enters the realm where the dark and quiet energies prevail. Difficulties arise only for those who wish to return to life without having to reanimate a dead body, and for those who wish to avoid alerting the forces that watch the threshold between worlds. Both of those apply to me right now. This ritual of mingling with the ghosts is important to me for several reasons, and since the Wu Keng’s ranks include powerful necromancers, I must proceed with great stealth. Thanks to my travels and the preparations I’ve made so far, my body has been largely purged of its associations with the bustling world of human life, and thanks to my meditations on the past and loss, my soul is thinking at least a little like a ghost.
1 break my fast with a blend of poisonous and psychotropic plants, pulped and strained into a sort of lukewarm tea. Numbness quickly spreads through me, and I am no longer directly aware of my body as it leans up against a rock within my improvised temple. My eyes get only a brief glimpse of the breaking dawn before sight fails along with my other senses. I am for a moment altogether alone in the emptiness that the sages say prefigures oblivion. Then the yin world begins to impress itself upon me, starting with the demoniac winds. Back when I was an apprentice, still learning my role as a girl among conspirators, the yin world was mostly calm. Sometimes harsh winds blew out of the voids below the ghost lands, but not very often. Something changed when the Jade Emperor last marched his ghostly armies off to war. A storm began that rages to this day, scouring the ghost lands as a hurricane would blast the living world if it blew without relief for year after year. That wind is the first thing I hear.
My soul is drifting loose of my body now, taking on a purer form without the complications of biology. I pause, drifting within the windswept darkness, and far off I hear the familiar laugh of one of the necromancers who taught me the killer’s craft. They are not expecting me, I think, and if there is some disturbance to distract them... and there is. Something thuds against the wall around the living world between me and the Wu Keng’s strongholds. I don’t know what it is, and it scarcely matters. What matters is that the necromancers all focus on it long enough for me to make my crossing. Only the silver cord now connects me to my body, and I am but one more newly awakened ghost as far as the yin world is concerned. I stand beneath the cloudy muted skies, seeing faint echoes of the sun that shines brightly on my body and feeling the winds plucking at the corpus of nearly pure yin force I now inhabit. Roads of dark soul-metal show me where I must go to keep my rendezvous.
The first blast of the current maelstrom was the worst. I walk through the remains of one of the Emperor’s watchtower. Before the storm, imperial soldiers stayed here. They’d march out in search of newly arrived ghosts and bring their targets back for evaluation, assignment to useful duties, or perhaps simple delivery to the forges that would strip away their identities and make them into the soul jade that is the currency and most common building material of this world. Now tower and soldiers alike have gone, leaving behind only a few nearly mindless husks that cling to some single memory connecting them to life. When that memory fades, they’ll plummet into the hells waiting below. They know this, on some level, and they can sense the power within me, so they choose to make no trouble. The tower is filled with the sounds of scuttling as they get out of my way.
I pass down the dark road to a second tower, also ruined, and to a third which is intact but abandoned. Here several clans of Uygur ghosts dwell together, defending themselves against the spectres and predators of the yin world and doing such service as they can for their living descendants. They know me as the outsider who has been uncommonly kind to their daughters, and while they do not welcome anyone of the Jade Emperor’s race, they at least see me as something other than an enemy. They raise the white jade gates and let me remain on the road as I walk along a bend and down the slope that leads to my particular meeting place. A hard rain begins to fall as I pass out of the tower’s view, the typical soft stuff of the yin world mixed with shards of bone and memory flensed out of unknown targets by the ongoing storm.
This little valley holds a row of graves laid down around the time that Alexander the Great’s armies were stalled in Bactria. Among the men and women laid to rest—on opposite sides of a small ravine, to preserve the proprieties—are some of my ancestors. Their spirits roam widely through the yin world, and of course many of them aren’t intact anymore. Time takes its toll in so many ways. But when I perform the traditional rites, all of them still able do answer the call, even the ones hastening toward dissolution. They offer whatever counsel they can, hoping that if I make wise choices, their lineage will continue. I have my doubts, but I believe or at least hope enough to come here when I’m considering something sufficiently serious.
In the twilight gloom, I begin the sacrifices. I use my own tears, squeezed out one by one, for a libation, and offer up strands of my hair in the constantly smoldering fire pit at the end of the row of graves. One by one, wisps of smoke spread out to circle over the graves, and the mist that looks like passing rain gathers, the first signs of the returning spirits. The moon rises, just short of full, ruddy and large. I’ve lost track of what time it will be when I return to my mortal body, but this doesn’t have anything to do with that, anyway, it’s a manifestation of the gathering lineage. The red tint is a sign of trouble somewhere else not far away, in terms of the heart, in the yin world. It might come from deaths in a forest fire (or a factory fire), or the work of a necromancer, or something like that, and I’ll need to be careful when I head home.
My ancestors take on increasingly solid forms as my prayers continue. Once a few of them gather, the others follow. Peer pressure and the drive to imitate don’t stop with death, after all. But there’s something strange about their manifestation this time. Instead of going through con
ventionally ghost-like stages toward the appearance of vitality, the mist that marks their attention and passion congeals into something heavy and gray. It’s a lot more like stone than anything human. These ancestor-statues rumble faintly, and I can see cracks as though something inside is trying to break out. If this were anything like the forms of revenge I studied, I’d suspect the Wu Keng at work, but this isn’t their style. If they’d found these graves, there’d have been a demon waiting for me, or something even more unpleasant. This unfamiliar prison marks some other influence altogether.
With growing unease turning into outright panic, I step from one statue to the next, trying to claw away the stone to release my ancestors. It doesn’t work. I can peel off outer layers of rock in thin sheets like granite weakened by weathering, but there’s always more underneath ready to rise up. Only the continuing influx of soul-mist tells me that there is anything further down. The ground beneath me grows muddy as I pace around and around. I’m not sure, but I think that the valley basin is closing in a little. Certainly it seems now that I turn around in the midst of a circle of standing stones. It’s pitch black down here at ground level, beyond the little light of my sacrificial fire, and the sky is almost devoid of stars. Only the still-ruddy moon keeps me company, and it’s not much comfort.
The moon rises toward the zenith and pauses there, shining nearly straight down on me. Whatever is to happen next, the moon’s lack of motion signifies, the environment is now set for it. I stop my panicked running and watch and listen.
A dozen statues crack simultaneously, and in precisely the same way. Plugs of rock fall out of their faces, leaving neat round channels right where their eyes should be. I can sense, I’m not quite sure how, that the shafts run back far beyond the back of each statue’s head, into some other layer of the yin world, or perhaps into something stranger yet. Dim light kindles in each one, and more cracks form, allowing the heads to wobble precariously and to turn to follow me. I consider hiding, but decide that this is not the sort of gaze you can just quietly step away from. It will see me, and I might as well make it sooner than later.
1 step up to the nearest of the statues, which has the general proportions of my great-grandfather, and stretch up slightly to peer into its hollow eyes. The eye shafts don’t carry the sort of flickering reflections I’d expect from a distant fire. It’s more like the steady shine of light reflected in a cat’s eyes at night. And then the scarlet turbulence far back there makes sense to me. I realize that I’m looking at the textures in the iris of a single very large eye, suffused with that red illumination. Just as I make to draw back, the eye blinks at me—
And just like that, I’m back in my body, beneath the Xinjiang Uygur skies. I’m sitting cross-legged, not far from my jeep, covered with a little evening dew.
I cannot sense the yin world.
Imagine waking to find that you cannot feel your arms or legs, or that you cannot hear. Once you’ve been awakened to the realities of existence without the vital spark, you feel it with you as intimately as any of your physical senses. This isn’t something that just happens—someone or something must do it to you. I am the victim of an attack from a source I don’t understand, and it’s deprived me of crucial resources just as I know that my enemies are on the move toward me once more. I tremble very slightly as I stand up and get into the jeep. I say small prayers, hoping that perhaps my ancestors can hear me even though I can’t hear them.
* * *
ROBERT
Part of being a good shaman is learning the names, natures, and concerns of many spirits so that you can speak with them directly and build the alliances and partnerships that let you address the needs of your chosen community. Another part is learning who knows the spirits you don’t, so that when a problem beyond your expertise arises, you can go get help. We spend most of our time practicing alone, but in our travels in the spirit world (and sometimes in the material world as well), we do get to know each other, and we do consult on matters of mutual concern. If the worlds’ shamans can be said to form a coherent magical tradition— and we do say so, one we call Dreamspeakers, thank you very much—then it is based almost entirely on those encounters and the tradition of mutual assistance.
If I could travel into the spirit world as I usually do, I could seek out any number of sources myself. There is, for instance, the Beached Whale, a half-dead thing dwelling by a cold pool on a mountain very far from the material world. It speaks of everything that is, and everything I can think of that will be, in the past tense: it seems somehow anchored in the last moments of the universe. No doubt it could tell me something useful... if only I could get there. But the whole point of this tallying is that I can’t.
So now I need a person living on this side of the Gauntlet, someone I can talk to through purely material senses. A name occurs to me: Tareq Omar Belim. Admittedly, Tareq sometimes seems to push the boundaries of “living, ” but then he has an excuse. He and I are part of the same graduating class of new shamans, so to speak. He awoke to his inner nature the same week I did. But for him it was much worse. Up until the start of that week, he’d been a simple tailor living in the town of Benapole, providing a pretty decent living for his family with fine needlework. Seven days later, they were dead, along with a million others, drained of their blood and spirit by an ancient horror, and he’d seen it all. The shock of it tore the lid off his inner eye, and he’s never been able to close it since.
Tareq is unusual among shamans in that he has no power at all to travel in the spirit world or to command any spirits. (He can of course try to persuade them, and he’s gotten quite good at it. ) What he does better than anyone else as new to the calling as we are is see. He sees the spirits of life and death, of organization and decay, of energy and flux and time. Even our revered masters don’t all have such a broad field of vision; we almost all specialize to one degree or another. Tareq sees it all.
After the death of his family and his recovery from the nearly fatal wounds he suffered in the fires the horror started, he sold off his worldly goods and began traveling. He’s driven to make sense of it all, to see patterns behind the apparently random proliferation of individual spirits. We met in Tokyo a couple of years ago, and he made a deep impression on me. All shamans suffer for our power one way or another, but his inner scars were so deep, so thorough, that I was humbled in his presence in a way I seldom am. And I still have his phone number.
I know that he lives on Bangladesh time wherever he can. That’s ten hours ahead of New York, but since it’s nearly midnight now I decide to make the call. It’s been a while since I did any international dialing, but I look it all up and make the call. After four rings, he answers, in that tired but intense voice. “Hello? ”
“Tareq, this is Robert Blanclege. You gave me this number in Tokyo. ”
“Yes, Robert, I remember. You listened with respect and spoke with courtesy. What brings you to me now? ”
"I have a problem, and I need advice. " I pause, but it seems he’s waiting for me to say more. So I explain my encounters and my current inner blindness. He asks insightful questions and quickly grasps the situation.
“Hmm, ” he says at last. “You are encountering things associated with the end. ”
“Yes. Yes, that’s it. The end of the spirits, and the apocalypse of the red star—its lore, reports of its activity, anything like that. ”
"I could speak to you of Krishna and Kali, but I am not sure it would do you much good. ” Tareq never overtly jokes and seldom smiles, at least in my experience, but he sometimes displays that wry wit. “You will I think have an easier time with your own people’s symbols. ” He says it like that, too, all in a breath without any verbal punctuation. “Seek Revelation and Ragnarok. ”
* * *
WILLIAM
I manage to conceal the full extent of my impairment from my colleagues and supervisors. Even with this sudden cybernetic constriction, I’m a clever son of a bitch, better at the games of office po
litics than most of them. One of the most important secrets to deception is knowing how much of the truth to use, since the best lies tend to be matters of false context and implication rather than false denotation.
So I report quite truthfully that the new array seems to be working fine, but that I experienced some discomfort using it, and I recommend some trials with other observers. I add, also truthfully, that it makes sense to build up the ranks of qualified users as quickly as possible so that we don’t have to depend so much on other monitoring teams. That actually earns me a small but significant commendation from the project leader, who’s always on about the importance of unit self-sufficiency as the prerequisite for effective inter-unit collaboration. Then I request and get an assignment to data collation, where they’re constantly having trouble extracting the right kind of useful information from the mounds of raw data and where I can perhaps find some answers for my own predicament.
The first thing I find is that searching with “red star” as a primary term is even more of a waste than I expected. It looks like someone’s seen an ominous red light in the sky pretty much every year since the beginning of recorded astronomy, and often in close proximity to interesting or unusual events. Well, no shit. Interesting and unusual events happen all the time, because we live in a universe that’s big enough and full enough of events that even the improbable ones get to happen more than human intuition would suggest. Our brains are wired to filter out the low-probability interpretations of perception and reasoning. Usually it’s a good thing, but it means that when something comes along that demands attention despite being low probability, observers tend to freak out. Add in the perceived significance attached to anything bright and red against a dark background, and it’s a mess.
At this point I'm interrupted by a real crisis. The Aral Sea is a now-dead sea in what used to be the Soviet Union and is now, depending on how you count it, divided between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, or Kazakhstan and Karakalpakistan, or whatever. Soviet policy of massive irrigation started draining the lake in the fifties, and now it’s about ten percent the size it was in 1960, and getting smaller all the time. The resulting rise in salinity killed off all the sturgeon and assorted other saltwater fish that used to thrive in the Aral. What were once successful fishing villages are now weird ghost towns dozens of miles from any remaining water. We’ve had problems in the past with the desert winds carrying off the salt left behind as the sea evaporates, because it’s loaded with every bit of toxic crap washed down into the sea from factories and pesticide-loving farms upstream and from the Soviet weapons testing and storage facilities on islands in the sea.
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 3
