by Hal Duncan
Alhazred laughed. She held the horse as […] slid down from the saddle, boots thumping heavily into the dust.
“We should,” she said, “have come through the Syrian Desert and out the other side; you are quite correct, my friend. On this latitude … traveling east from Amman … yes, I would think we ought to be in An Najaf by now, my friend. As you can see, we are not.”
[…] call it a tent, but built into and out of the cliff face that rose high behind it like some strange seminomadic Petra, this was a Taj Mahal rebuilt by Gaudi out of leather and bone and clay, with termite hills for towers. She paused before the entrance.
“The Dead Sea Valley is a rift, my friend, a place where the ground has split, slipped apart. In such places, my friend, sometimes one side tilts up, one side tilts down. If you stand on the side that has fallen, you will see what is … underneath the other side.”
She motioned with her hands spread flat in front of her, one raised, the other lowered. She went on, speaking of […] fault lines, and exposed strata of hardened sediment, and fossilized sea creatures miles above sea level, grooves and ledges where softer rock has been eroded underneath, ocher images of aurochs and ibex, a whole scene of Mesolithic fields painted below an overhanging shelf.
“In such places,” she said, “there are paths that have been opened into the worlds that lie beneath our feet. We have been traveling these last few days, my friend, under the skin of the world, to reach another such rift, one that will take us deeper still.”
She flicked back the veil of skins that lay across the entrance then.
“Come. Let me show you.”
The dark inside was punctured, speared by shafts of light which crisscrossed this way, that way, and in which a myriad motes of dust swirled in a trembling dance. Like stars in the night sky, they wheeled in constellations, reflecting and refracting the light, scattering a furious, flickering glow into every corner of the tabernacle. Wherever the light struck on the sandy clay, the stone, the soft stretched skin, it seemed like sparks of fire, the glitter of gold or gems, for gouged into the clay and stone, stained in the leather, everywhere, there were symbols, sigils, shimmering with the unmistakable luster of Siddim ink. Alhazred spoke softly and the light seemed to shatter even more. […] could hear the echo of […] heartbeat in that cave, and see it in the vibrations of the dust. The dust within the light, the light within the darkness, the sound within […] body, in […] chest […] veins […] head—all seemed a part of some singular and omnipresent force.
“The Book,” she said.
[…] followed her deep into this cathedral of skin and bone, past the columns of clay, to where a simple wooden box sat on a low stone altar in an alcove, a narrow crack in the stone that looked for all the world like the space between the palms of some giant with his hands cupped, fingertip to fingertip, in prayer or meditation. She ran her hand across the box.
“But I will show you the Book in time, my friend. I want to show you this first.”
… attention to the back of the alcove where, from a crack in the stone hardly wide enough to slip a hand through, another light emanated, lower and redder than the golden glittering that filled the tabernacle. […] whispers from beyond […] walked closer, drawn to it, and felt her grip strong and sudden on […] arm.
“We walk between the curses of the Lord and his Enemy,” she said. “We do not answer to either, but we do not interfere in their war … or in their punishments.”
Beyond the narrow crack […] could see that a space opened out and […] One of the creatures chained in the cave beyond the cave raised his shaggy head in silence, looked at […] with eyes like rubies in a face of horror. Scarlet, purple, black blood trickled where the ocher clay he wore for skin cracked, dry and brittle, strangely smooth but shattered like the surface of a parched riverbed. A flake fell away from his cheek as he moaned, and the creature hunched down to gather dust in his raw hand, moisten it with blood and spit, to patch the wound. Beyond him there were others, as far back as the eye could see into the gloom of a cavern painted with their blood, fallen angels as far back as the eye could see, flayed and in irons, under the skin of the world.
[…] asked her if her people, then, were the jailers of these angels or their guardians.
She shook her head.
“Understand,” she said, “we are neither jailers nor guardians to these pitiful creatures. But the Book itself might be considered both.”
Errata
—
An Echo of Sunlight on Ice
ou,” says Finnan.
Fookin Enki.
Taped, tacked or hung all round the walls are tracings and blown-up photocopies, pencil studies and what look like … practice runs sketched in ink on stretched canvas. She's been copying from the photostats, Finnan realizes, building up her skill to the point where she was ready to tackle such a project, to carve Enki's graving into new flesh. It makes perfect sense in a crazy sort of way: the Book is part of Enki's story. It's at the heart of Enki's story. Bring back the scribe and you bring back the Book. So some poor fucker who didn't know what he was letting himself in for gets hoodwinked into—Jesus, how could she do this after what happened to Thomas, after what happened to her?
“Eresh would be proud of you,” he says. “The bitch queen of hell would be so fucking proud. So who was he before? Rogue unkin? Scared human? Did you tell him—”
“Nothing,” says Enki.
He lays the tattoo gun down on the table, swabs at the arm he's working on with a ball of cotton wool stained black, smiles at Finnan.
“I was nothing. Nobody.”
Beneath the bitmite gravings, this Enki's skin is the lunar white of a Cold Man, bright as whalebone scrimshaw between the black grooves of his tattoos.
“He came to me,” says Phreedom.
“We all did,” says Harker.
He closes the door behind him, walks round to stand behind Enki's chair, to lean on its back.
“You see, old friend, you're right that all the smoke and mirrors out there is” [he shrugs] “horseshit. None of us ever really had anything of any value… except one thing. Faith.”
Awry smile.
“Old friend, I'm just a shuckster and a salesman, and that's all I've ever been, but somewhere along the way I guess I found a little faith; and when I listened to what it was telling me—in my heart, you know—well what I heard was the lady's call. It rang out loud and true over the Vellum, and it gathered us here, why, even before she arrived herself. We were waiting for her. And it seems to me like you heard that call and came here for the same reason.”
Finnan laughs.
“To join the revolution? Not a fucking chance.”
“Never say never,” says Phree.
“Bollocks. If ye think I'll ever—”
“You already have. A long time ago, Seamus Finnan. We fought side by side once, a long time ago,” says Enki.
“I think I'd remember that.”
“A long time ago for me, Shamash.”
Shamash. An echo of sunlight on ice, a vision: a road running off into the distance across a plain of sand that's hard and white with salt and frost; the valley it becomes gradually buckling into a deep V, a gouge in the Vellum; breath steaming in the air; himself down on one knee with a rupter in his hand, angel armor, synthe wings stretching as he cricks his shoulder blades; Anna on one side of him; Enki on the other.
An army at their backs.
No.
Away, away, at the far end of the road, where the valley walls are sheer, the end of it all just a slender slit of sky, a crescent sun rises in a dawn the color of blood over a wall of ice; and Seamus pushes himself to his feet with the rupter, frozen dust crumbling between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. He stares at that sun and only at that sun, not looking to the left or the right, not looking to the rupters raised every few paces all along the road, like crucifixes, sure, and each of them topped with a skull, and hung with a skin, and supporting skeletons
of bleached bones wired together as exhibits in a museum of massacre. The wind whistles through the bones, and he can hear the Cant in it, the conjuration that twists the Vellum itself into this single path stretching back and down and round through time, into a single path from the end of the world to the dawn of everything.
No.
The angels set this up as they retreated, he knows, slaughtering villages and towns, cities and civilizations, turning whole realities into graveyard dust so they could use dead souls as the sandbags of their magical… entrenchment. He thinks of Russians retreating east in the Napoleonic Wars, leaving scorched earth behind and drawing the French on into frostbite and starvation. He thinks of Spartans making their last stand in a narrow mountain pass, the noble few against a horde.
Once more into the breach, and all that shite.
No.
“Finnan,” says Phree.
He blinks. He's staring at a V-shaped glyph on Enki's chest now, seeing the symbol rather than the swirl of sense, but the vision doesn't fade. The truth of his future doesn't fade. The truth of him marching once more to the drums of fookin war, with a weapon in his hand and the only path ahead of him lined with dead men. Phree stands in front of him, but sure and he can hardly see her face with the tears in his eyes. He blinks again, looks at her and Enki, the stupid, fucking determined fuckers.
“Fuckers,” he says. “Cunts. It doesn't have—”
“Don't say it doesn't have to be that way,” snaps Phree. “Don't you fucking tell me that it doesn't have to be that way. Don't you get it yet? Don't you fucking get it? It's your future. It's my future.”
She points at Enki.
“But it's his fucking past.”
Enki stands, and Finnan finds himself being led to the chair, being sat down with a hand on his shoulder that sure and he can't tell if it's there to comfort or control; and sure and for these bastards maybe there's no difference.
“The war was lost and won before you were even born,” says Enki. “If you're fighting for it all, Finnan, for the whole history of humanity since the first scream of Cant was flung by one chest-beating ape at another in place of stone or shit, if you're fighting for eternity, Finnan, where's the final battlefield? At the end of days or at the dawn of time? You know the way time works in the Vellum, Finnan. Is there any difference?”
At the end of a road, he thinks, stretching back and down and round to the bloody dawn of everything.
“You want to know where all the angels are?” asks Phree. “Walled up in a fucking Fortress of Solitude so far back in the past that you and me, fuck, we're not even a glint in an amoeba's nucleus, Finnan.”
He taps a cigarette out of his pack.
“Heaven,” she says, “is fucking six feet under, forty degrees below and a few billion years back when this world was just a ball of ice. That's the only place they feel safe, Finnan, in a world without life to mess up all their nice, clean order.”
She reaches into his pocket and pulls out his Zippo, sparks it up and holds the flame to his Camel. Her voice becomes softer.
“Shit, Finnan, we're not… it's not… this isn't about us and them, good and evil. Christ, even chaos and order is just” [she adopts her appalling imitation of his accent] “a big bag of shite, sure. It's ice and fire more than anything else.”
Her hand goes to his cheek, her touch warm in so many ways.
“And we all know what side you're on, Seamus Padraig Finnan. And that you'd die for it, as much as you try to tell yourself you won't.”
Stealing Heat
Enki pulls on a black T-shirt, scrapes another chair back from the table and sits across from him. Phree and Harker move round behind him. Christ, but they think they know him better than he knows himself. They're so fucking sure that they know him.
“Shama—”
“Shut it,” he cuts off the scribe. “Just shut it.”
He leans forward over the table to flick through the book of photostats, this little family photo album of archetypes and avatars. Sure and there's Tammuz and Inanna, Marduk and Nergal, all the ancient history, all the fookin weddings and funerals of myth. He flicks back to the copy of Enki's graving and studies it for a second, looks up at the Cold Man now with that same story etched into his skin, the same story but not quite complete. Sure and it's got that feel of half-forgotten familiarity to it, the sort of feel ye have when ye've just woken up and the dream isn't quite faded away but it's lost its… clarity. The wounded part of him that'll always carry a little bit of sun god now, that part of him remembers it, but that part of him… no matter what they think… it's not what's at his heart. Shamash? Sam-mael?
Bollocks to that.
“Ye know,” he says, “ye never did understand why yer fookin sun god, fire-bringer, fookin fount of all fookin wisdom walked away from the Covenant, did you, EnkiV
He lets a little of the Cant into the name this time, and it hangs in the air between them, a haze of menace.
“That was another life, another me,” says the scribe. “A mistake. I'm not that man. I'm what he was before—”
“Before ye fookin screwed it all up, ye mean,Enki?”
A little more power in the word again, a slap across the face. The scribe jerks his head back, blinks. Bitmites scatter and reconfigure on his chest, complexifying his graving, bringing it just that little bit closer to completion. Harker moves back, confused, looks at Phree for some sort of guidance. But she's staring at Finnan, face unreadable.
“D'ye have any idea how the Cant works,” says Seamus, “where the power comes from? I mean, thermodynamics and all that, sure and ye don't get that sorta power for free. Sure and ye've got to steal it from the world around ye.”
Enki looks at him, uncomprehending.
“Ye don't have a fookin clue,” says Seamus. “And ye never fookin did, did ye… Enki?”
And as Finnan shouts, let me tell ye how yer fookin story ends, and bitmites erupt across the scribe's body, in another fold entirely—
—the blizzard howls around them, and the seven of them stagger on, feet sinking in the snow, Enki trailing at the back, sobbing and broken, being dragged between an angel of fire and an angel of ice. Seamus grabs the fookin angel drummer boy—no idea what his name is and it hardly fookin matters now, does it?— hoists him over his shoulder, the poor fooker. Cause sure and now it doesn't matter a fook what side they were fighting for. The whole thing was just one big fookin mistake, just one big pile of shite brought down on them by their own fookin stupidity. And sure and they might have been sworn enemies but, Jesus Christ, what is there to do now but sit down and call a fookin truce. Never again. Ah, Christ, never again.
Behind them the glaciers grind down over the battlefield, all the dead Dukes and slaughtered Sovereigns who gathered for their Armageddon not at the end of history but before it, in a world where humans are still knapping stone in Oldu-vai. Stealing heat from the world with their words, with a language so precise, so intricate, that it can catch an atom in the interference patterns of a sound, snatch the energy thrown off as waste and use it as a weapon, they've leeched and squandered so much power from the very stone beneath their feet that they've made half the planet icy desolation in their war.
Phree is grabbing his arm, trying to pull the angel off him, screaming let the bastard die, let the fucking bastard die, but he pushes her off. Is she fooking insane? It's over now, Phree. It's over. Or is it not over till they're all dead? Is that it? So she still, after all they've seen, can't look across a field of fucking carnage and think, fuck this? She has no mercy for this pitiful boy who'd hidden under a dead body even as their hordes overran his position? She didn't hesitate, not even for just one second, when she looked into the eyes of this poor lad begging for his life?
She didn't hesitate just long enough for Seamus to pull her rupter to one side, maybe because she saw a little of her brother in this angel boy?
She nods slowly and hollowly, and the seven of them stagger on toward the dawn, out of an
age of ice, down from the mountain and into a valley turning green with ferns and fronds, and rivers filled with fish, skies filled with birds, into a forest of apes, of flints and fires, limping through the folds of the Vellum, Jesus Christ Almighty, through millennia it seems, just trying to get away, to live in peace, among the humans in their caves and camps, their huts and houses, not as kings, no, not as gods but just as people, Phreedom, just as people this time.
They make a promise—a Covenant, she jokes—to never use the Cant, to let it die, become a myth, part of a past that might as well never have happened to the people of the land between two rivers. They live among these people, traveling here and there, trading skills for a few nights of shelter, leaving nothing tangible behind; and as they sleep in the tents of strangers they dream a wonderful dream of a world without magic.
But they listen as the echoes of the Cant reverberate in the world. They watch as unkin rise again, new kings and queens, new gods, ready to start the whole bloody holocaust all over again. They try intervening. They try not intervening. They try to erase the future that's graved on their own flesh.
