Entangled

by Graham Hancock

  There were no complaints – although Ligar refused to be tied down in the way that Brindle was, insisting, despite his injury, that he could fend for himself. Oplimar, Grondin, Bont, Vulp and Driff lifted the jaala into the water and held it there against the current to allow first Ligar and Rotas and then all the rest of them to board. The elder’s feet were unsteady and he had to crawl on his hands and knees to his position at the back of the little craft.

  Ria waited until last, scanning the line of shelters two hundred paces behind them, sending out her thought-voice – We are here, Jergat, we are here. She felt a huge wash of fear – his fear – rolling back at her and suddenly, like a wish come true, the lean, short-statured Ugly exploded into view from between the rows of huts, his hands full of salvaged items, and began to sprint towards the river. He raised his head and she saw utter terror in his eyes. Then a thousand Illimani burst forth behind him, screaming bestial war cries, their eyes wide, their teeth bared, their naked bodies painted with blood.

  ‘It’s going to be close,’ Ria told Grondin. She had one foot on the jaala, which was bucking and bumping against the current, and one foot on the bank. She was acutely aware of the moment, which seemed to extend for ever, as Jergat thundered towards them. But the fastest Illimani braves were closing the distance behind him. Putting on a burst of speed one caught up and raised a stabbing spear above his head. ‘Behind you, Jergat!’ Ria sent her thought-voice. ‘Dodge to your left.’ He reacted at once – the spear thrust missed him and the brave stumbled.

  Now there were just ten paces to go. Ria gave the signal to launch the jaala, and at five paces Jergat threw himself into space and landed crouched on the platform amongst his companions as the little craft was wrenched away from the bank. For a moment it juddered and veered as though it might pitch them all into the river, but then returned to balance and began to skim along on its floats. Grondin and Oplimar took control of its direction, using flat wooden slabs like those she’d seen on the other jaalas.

  Amongst the objects Jergat had salvaged from the battlefield were Ligar’s bow and three arrows. ‘Give me those,’ the archer demanded. Mastering his pain, he sat upright, nocked an arrow and drew back the string.

  Ria followed his eyeline and saw he’d taken aim at a young Illimani, naked as they all were, who stood amongst the swelling crowd of braves lining the edge of the riverbank. His body was lean and hard, red-gold hair fell in thick waves to below his waist, and he might have been very beautiful had he not been covered from head to foot in blood.

  The current was sweeping the jaala away, increasing the range. Grimacing, Ligar drew back the string to its maximum extent and took the shot. Ria watched the arrow flying true, a sure kill, but at the last moment the young man sidestepped lightning fast, snatched the shaft from the air and snapped it between his hands.

  Then they were out of arrow range, heading towards mid-river. Ria sensed a peculiar force of personality emanating from the beautiful blood-soaked Illimani, and she knew, with a sudden shiver of certainty, that he was Sulpa.

  Weirdly, in that instant of recognition, it was as though he had also recognised her.

  His eyes followed her, tracking the jaala as it was swept away. With lazy, almost careless movements he unslung a spear-thrower from his back and held out his hand. Ria’s heart fell when she saw another brave reach over and pass him one of the short spears.

  After that things happened very fast. There was a whirl of movement and the spear disappeared up into the sun and shot down again straight towards the jaala. Vulp didn’t even see it coming. He was seated at the front, on the right side, above one of the inflated reindeer-skins. The flint spike took him through the spine, exited at his groin and plunged between his legs where it punched through the skin of the float, releasing the air it contained in a great hiss.

  At once the jaala sagged lower in the water, nose down on the right, ceased its smooth forward movement and began to turn in dizzying circles.

  From the warriors on the bank there came a growl of anticipation.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  For an instant, as she held on to the Blue Angel’s hand, Leoni could imagine she had a mother who loved her, who put her first, whose presence was so reassuring she could vanquish all terrors, whose strength was so great no enemy could defeat her.

  They moved to the middle of the immense granite chamber and a long silver wand appeared in the Angel’s free hand. She touched its point to the flagstones and made Leoni turn slowly anticlockwise with her as she inscribed a circle around them both. Even before it was complete an unearthly glow had began to spill out from its rim and now the floor dropped away beneath them and they tumbled, as Leoni had guessed they must, into another of the familiar tunnels of light.

  She had no sense of up or down. But she was out of body, flying with an angel! What could be cooler than that? Around them she could see the opaque glowing walls of the tunnel shooting by and she realised they were moving fast – much faster than she had ever done before – but she felt no fear.

  Leoni was thinking This is where I want to go, this is who I want to see when the journey ended as suddenly as it had begun. They swirled through the last curves and turns of the tunnel, decelerated, and materialised in a high-ceilinged, spotlessly white circular room, fifty feet across. The room was bare of all furniture, but the floor was carpeted in thick white fleece. Panoramic windows provided an unbroken three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view over a futuristic cityscape very far below.

  In a body again, clad once more in a simple smock, Leoni walked barefoot to the windows and gazed out at the two suns of the land where everything is known. She had recognised the city at once. It straddled the floor of a lush green valley. The Angel had shown her its towers, obelisks, ziggurats and canals just before sending her to Sulpa.

  ‘I feel like I’m in a computer game,’ Leoni confided. ‘Sulpa, Jack, my childhood, my parents, you, Don Apolinar, these tunnels that run between different realms and worlds, monsters, demons … Is this where you finally tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘That is my intention.’ The Angel waved her hand and a row of the floor-to-ceiling windows slid back, giving access to a wide balcony beyond. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Shall we talk outside?’

  Two striped canvas deckchairs stood on the balcony. The Angel settled into one and indicated that Leoni should take the other and for a few moments they looked out, saying nothing, over the strangely empty and silent city that lay far below.

  ‘What do you know about the problem of evil?’ asked the Angel at last.

  ‘I know evil when I see it,’ Leoni retorted. ‘It’s come into my life. It used to come into my bed. I can put a face to evil and it’s the face of my father.’

  ‘Yes. But how would you define this evil? What is it? What’s it all about?’

  ‘Evil takes an innocent child and violates her again and again, and afterwards tries to convince her she imagined the whole thing. Evil takes whatever’s good and tries to turn it into shit. Evil takes whatever wants to fly and tries to tie it down. Evil takes whatever’s beautiful and tries to make it hideous. Evil takes the truth and tries to make it look false. Evil can’t abide love and tries to turn it into hate. That’s what I know about evil.’

  ‘So would it be right to say that evil is a negative force that wants to make things less than they might be?’

  ‘Yes. It’s that. And it’s doing bad, hurtful things to others intentionally. It’s taking pleasure from their pain. And – oh, I don’t know – so much else.’

  ‘A wide spectrum of horror and unpleasantness, in other words? Of kinds that are commonplace on Earth?’

  ‘Yes, I guess so,’ Leoni conceded.

  ‘Hence the so-called problem of evil. Human philosophers deploy the existence of evil as an argument against the existence of God – or, anyway, of an all-powerful and all-good God. You know, either God wants to abolish evil and can’t, in which case he’s impotent, or he can but doesn’t want to, i
n which case he’s evil himself.’

  ‘Neat contradiction.’

  ‘But an irrelevance, like much of what passes for thought amongst humans, because from no world is it possible to banish evil entirely and there exists no benign, all-powerful “god” to do away with it. Rather, in all realms, from the most material to the most ethereal, spiritual powers and principalities are at work, and while some serve the good and seek to spread its light, others magnify evil and seek to become rulers of darkness.’

  ‘So it’s a sort of contest …’

  ‘ … Between spiritual goodness and spiritual wickedness, for the souls of all sentient beings. It has continued since the dimension of time took form. In many worlds good and evil coexist in roughly equal measure. In some worlds good is greatly in the ascendant, and in some worlds it is evil that prevails.’

  ‘And you’re one of those who serves the good?’ Leoni asked.

  ‘Have you ever doubted it?’

  ‘Never! You can be scary, but I’ve always known you’re good through and through. Just like I know Jack is evil – whatever he calls himself. That’s what you wanted me to understand, right, when you showed me Sulpa? That in some sort of schizo way he’s also Jack? He was murdering children – butchering them with a black sword. It was horrendous.’

  ‘You had to see it so you would know the true nature of the creature we confront. The foul sacrifices Sulpa demands, the blood he drinks and bathes in, the fear and suffering he evokes, the joy his followers take in pain – all these things are consecrated to a terrible purpose.’

  ‘You know that he followed me back,’ Leoni interrupted. ‘He possessed the body of a young woman and when he spoke through her mouth he wasn’t Sulpa any more. He was Jack. I’d have been dead on the floor if you hadn’t sent Matt to save me.’

  ‘I regret it came so close. I had failed to anticipate how fast Sulpa’s power has grown. Already he casts his spirit far ahead, contaminating and corrupting all in his path. The sacrament that will allow him to pass through in bodily form nears completion …’

  ‘Pass through in bodily form – what do you mean?’

  The Angel didn’t seem to hear Leoni: ‘One final gigantic act of wickedness remains to be performed, one more colossal holocaust of the innocent, and all hope of stopping him will be lost.’ That unreadable expression – was it grief? – once again troubled the eerie beauty of her face, and she fell silent.

  ‘If he can’t be stopped,’ Leoni prompted, ‘if he … passes through in bodily form. What will he do?’

  ‘He will wrench the last shoots of goodness from the Earth,’ the Angel replied, her voice so quiet it was almost a whisper. ‘It will become a hellworld, for ever beyond salvation. I cannot allow that to happen, Leoni – but neither can I prevent it without your help.’

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  ‘You need my help?’ Leoni was amazed the Blue Angel had suggested such a thing. ‘But you’re a supernatural being. How could I possibly help you?’

  ‘Look around,’ said the Angel. ‘What do you see?’

  Their deckchairs were positioned a few feet back from heavy gold railings that guarded the edge of the balcony. Leoni stood and walked to the railings, placed her hands on the top bar, and gingerly peered over the edge.

  ‘WOW!’ she exclaimed.

  She’d known they were high up from her first views through the windows of the white room behind them. But now she saw the room occupied the top of a dizzyingly tall cylindrical tower, mounted on the apex of a gigantic silver pyramid marking the geometrical centre of the Angel’s city. The pyramid’s square base, as big as six Manhattan blocks, was encircled by a broad canal filled with glistening silver liquid. Arranged in concentric rings around it, separated by gardens and parklands, alternating with zones of elaborate and extravagant architecture, were four further huge canals, respectively of crimson, blue, green and gold, spanned by soaring bridges that hung in the air without visible support. The outermost canal was ringed by a wall of some beautiful copper-coloured metal hundreds of feet high and dozens of feet thick.

  Sensing a trick in the Angel’s question, Leoni took her time looking around.

  Scattered across all the architectural zones were stupendous ziggurats of white crystal arranged in groups of four around rectangular plazas, and giant chateaux of blue crystal embellished with Gothic spires and turrets. There were edifices that might have been cathedrals or temples or mosques of emerald and garnet surmounted by domes and needle-thin minarets capped with gold. There were immense arches and flying buttresses, forests of skyscrapers fashioned entirely from glass with no stone or metal visible, and wide elevated thoroughfares connecting all the zones. Most imposing of all were perhaps a hundred obelisks, each as tall as the Empire State Building, seemingly carved from single immense blocks of jade and positioned to form the outline of a giant five-pointed star encompassing the entire circular city.

  As though responding to Leoni’s attention the obelisks began to glow and discharge bright flashes of lightning straight up into the clear and cloudless sky.

  ‘What do you see?’ the Angel asked again.

  ‘An incredible city! Obviously! I mean, this is utterly amazing! Like something out of The Wizard of Oz.’ Leoni paused and looked around one more time. ‘So what’s the catch? The way the obelisks reacted to me makes me feel it’s not real. Is it some kind of unbelievably convincing projection? Is it – I don’t know – just an illusion? Like a mirage or something?’ She walked back to the deckchair and sat down: ‘Maybe this whole experience is just one big hallucination?’ she muttered. ‘I took some weird drug, now I’m in the Emerald City.’

  The Blue Angel smiled and shook her head: ‘All of this is real.’ She made an expansive, proprietorial gesture. ‘But look.’ Suddenly the small device like a laptop computer that she had used to send Leoni to Sulpa had appeared in her hands and she flipped up its screen.

  ‘WHOA!’ Leoni objected. ‘I’m not doing any more transits until I get some answers.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I only want to show you this.’ As before, the Angel turned a dial on the control panel beneath the screen. ‘Observe,’ she said, pointing to a distant complex of four white-crystal ziggurats. There was a shimmer in the air around them and they disappeared. ‘Or how about this?’ offered the Angel. She turned the dial and the ziggurats were back but their crystal structure was now cobalt blue. ‘I can also do this.’ She turned the dial a third time and the ziggurats morphed into four huge glittering spheres that united into a single larger sphere and rose a hundred feet into the air, spinning rapidly.

  Leoni was puzzled and a little annoyed: ‘Why did you say it was real? You couldn’t do any of that if it was real.’ She leaned over and took a closer look at the instrument the Angel was holding. ‘It has to be a projection. You control it with your laptop-whatever-it-is gizmo like you did the colour of the skies the last time I was here.’

  The Angel shook her head: ‘I know it looks that way, but that’s not what’s happening. Everything around us is real in every meaningful sense of that word. These pyramids and ziggurats and obelisks and towers are made of matter. So is the body you find yourself in. You know it doesn’t suffer from the same constraints as your Earth-body but you also know it feels pain and you’ve probably guessed – rightly – that it can be killed …

  ‘Like you killed Don Apolinar and he killed Don Emmanuel?’

  ‘Yes. A bit like that. Although utterly different in all other respects, the fundamental structure of matter in the realm where Apolinar built his torture chamber is almost identical to its structure in this realm.’

  ‘Fundamental structure of matter? If you mean atoms and such then this is already way over my head.’

  ‘Atoms are child’s play. I’m speaking of much deeper levels.’

  Leoni started to object again but the Angel quieted her with an upheld hand and continued: ‘Dear impatient one, this is not an examination. I don’t expect you to master knowledge
that the greatest human minds have yet to grasp. I simply wish to inform you that my powers to confront Sulpa on the Earth-plane are finite. I am constrained by certain immutable constants, certain limiting conditions of the Totality. Because of these I need your help.’

  ‘Totality, Angel? Immutable constants? You’re losing me again.’

  ‘The Earth is a single planet in a single solar system amongst trillions of solar systems in one universe. This universe, in its turn, is a tiny speck within the Totality – the multiplicity of all possible universes, and all the possible worlds they contain, comprising the whole of reality. Matter is organised and coheres at many different levels, across all these numberless realms – from the lowest, most physical and embodied states to the highest, most ethereal and disembodied states …’

  Leoni pinched her own arm, stamped her foot on the balcony and tugged at the fabric of the deckchair. ‘Feels pretty solid to me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it is. But the fundamental structure of all the wondrously organised matter of this realm lies close to the lowest level at which I can be effective on the physical plane. There are other worlds, where matter resonates at far lower and heavier frequencies, in which physical intervention becomes impossible even for me. The Earth is such a world.’

  ‘That helps to explain something I’ve never understood. You came to me in my dreams, you even comforted me, but you never tried to stop my dad from raping me.’

  A sorrowful expression crossed the Angel’s face. ‘It was beyond my power to prevent him, Leoni. You have no idea how many others there have been – in greater need by far than you, in pain, in difficulty, in fear – whom I have also failed.’