Anyway, oracles are rare, but there are still a few around. The ability appears to pass down through generations, but a lot of the ones out there don’t even know what they are.
Prophets are a little different, and a lot more dangerous. They don’t have to alter their mental state to get a glimpse of the future, because for whatever reason they see it all the time. That future isn’t specific to an individual, either; it’s the whole, big picture. As with the oracle’s pronouncements, a prophet doesn’t always understand what he or she is seeing and can’t make it any clearer to themselves or anyone else. But some of them do understand, or claim to. They’re the really dangerous ones.
Prophets deliver an almost-constant stream of scattershot declarations about oncoming events. It makes them really difficult to be around. They are also, almost without exception, batshit crazy. Mercifully—for them—prophets also tend to die young.
There’s a third kind of future-seer, but they’re the rarest of the them all. Some select few people can see about five seconds into the future. Like the prophet’s future-sight, it’s something they can’t turn off, but since it’s only a rolling five seconds—and it’s only the events happening in their own future—they can learn to cope well enough to appear outwardly normal under most circumstances.
This ability makes them perhaps the best warriors on the planet. I’ve only encountered one such person face-to-face, but I’ve kept tabs on his descendants, and at least one or two have the same skill.
Outside of this family, I’ve never seen it. It’s so rare, in fact, nobody has even come up with a name for this type of person. I just call them Corrigans, after the surname of the one I met.
* * *
“We don’t know what she is,” Gordana said quietly, ignoring Bruno’s disapproving stare. “We only know she’s kept us safe this far.”
“It’s not something we talk about,” he said.
“She brought you to an island that was hit by a tsunami fifteen hours ago and you’ve been living in the wilderness for two weeks, hiding from the local police and whatever the hell is making that noise. Seems like she’s put you into a lot more harm than not.”
“That’s only because you don’t know anything about us,” Bruno said. “I can’t speak for this one, but my life was worse before.”
“Why do you say we’re all in trouble?” Gordana asked. “Trouble because of her, you meant.”
“That’s exactly what I meant.”
There are two things that happen a lot around prophets. First, they tend to either attach themselves to religions or create new ones from scratch. (This happens a lot, although generally the person identified by history as the prophet is usually actually the scribe. The Bible is full of mistakes like this.) Modern iterations end up being called cults, but they’re basically the same thing.
Second, prophets leave a trail of bodies.
This isn’t done with any real intent. The problem with prophecy is that the future is inherently amoral, and will happen a certain way without regard for the preservation of life. People following the word of a prophet expecting to find themselves in a better world may not know their death is part of the trade-off for that hypothetical better world. And generally, the prophet doesn’t know it either. All they know is, if they tell scion number one to go somewhere and do something, this other thing—presumably a desirable thing—will happen. Scion number one may have to die for it to pan out, though.
I do everything I can to stay away from prophets. I mean, I know the future is what it is and all that, but the free will vs. fate thing is an argument I’ve been having for probably thirty thousand years and I find it unbelievably tiresome.
“I don’t trust them,” I said. I could have told her all of the rest, but it wouldn’t have done any good. People don’t like being told they’re in a cult, for starters. “You shouldn’t either.”
“She told us to find you,” Bruno said. “If we hadn’t come along, what would you have done?”
“I would have gotten by,” I said. “I’ve lived alone for centuries before now.”
“I don’t think you understand, Adam,” Gordana said. “We didn’t come to the house to save you. We came to the island to save you.”
This was a surprise.
“A warning about the giant wave would have been awesome,” I said. “I think a lot of other people could have benefitted from that too.”
“Specifics were unknown until today,” Bruno said. “If you are familiar with… with prophets, you would know this.”
He said the word prophet like it was the first time he’d considered applying this word to the woman on the other side of the predictions. Maybe it was.
“I do,” I said. “I imagine whatever she was saying about today didn’t make sense until this morning.”
“She called it the decimation,” Gordana said. “We didn’t know what it meant.”
“How many of you are there?”
“More than the two of us and her,” Gordana said. “Beyond that I shouldn’t say.”
“She couldn’t send more people to deal with those things in the woods? I mean, a decent-sized escort would have been good.”
If these were the most combat-ready people in this little cult, I didn’t have any confidence we were heading someplace safer than where we were at that moment. If Mirella were with me I wouldn’t have to worry about these things.
Gordana looked like she was ready to answer, but she was stopped.
“No, enough questions,” Bruno said. “We will all be there tomorrow, and you can see for yourself, and ask what you please, and perform your own head-count if that is something which interests you.”
* * *
I didn’t get a lot of sleep. Under very nearly any other circumstance, my saying I shared a sleeping bag with a succubus would naturally lead to the statement I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, and no further explanation would be necessary. But that wasn’t the reason.
It certainly could have been. Gordana wasn’t like a lot of the succubi I’d met, in that she didn’t seem to carry herself with the same sort of quiet confidence—equal parts intimidating and exciting—most had. It was like she’d turned off that part.
This had less of an effect on her appeal than one might have imagined. The biggest difference was that most of the time, when you’re around a succubus, they make it so clear they’re game, the only lingering questions are when and where and for how long? With Gordana, I felt welcome, but I also felt like I had to ask first.
I didn’t ask. We huddled together under the light sleeping bag, for warmth and only that.
She wasn’t what kept me up. What kept me up was the idea that there was a prophet, somewhere on the island, who saw far enough into the future to come all the way here specifically to save my life.
There was a lot to mull over. For starters, I’m not nearly that important. Sure, I’ve been around for a long time, but if I died overnight, the world would go on just fine, with maybe only a couple of people available for mourning. This is not to say I don’t have a lot of friends, only that the vast, vast majority of them have died of old age. On top of that, a few years ago I severed my current real-world connections by staging my own death. The necessary people know I didn’t actually die, but they also know I may as well have, because the whole point in staging your own death is not reconnecting with the people who knew you when you were alive. The point is, if I died on this island, there would be no way for any of them to know it.
Mirella would know, and would mourn my passing, but that only counted if she was still alive herself, something I was becoming more anxious about the longer I thought about it.
In my admittedly limited direct experience with prophecy, I’ve found predictions tend to revolve around large events, not small ones. Prophets don’t bother to announce things like who is going to have a ham sandwich next week and which celebrity is getting pregnant soon. They deal in sinking continents, extinction-level events, and wars. Acts
of God, if that’s what you’re into.
Coordinating a trip to this secret island for however many people were in this little cult, in order to set up a hidden camp in the hillside specifically to support my rescue could only have meant one thing: I was supposed to do something important in the future.
This was why I hated prophecy so very much. This important thing could be literally anything, including doing something bad which caused a great deal of terrible death and destruction. It could mean I was still going to die but in a different way, elsewhere, for different reasons.
The idea that I was meant to live in order to do a thing wasn’t at all comforting, basically, especially given that this thing was significant enough to endanger the life of the prophet, Gordana and Bruno, and however many other people who were living in that camp in the hills. For all I knew it even had something to do with the tsunami itself, although I couldn’t imagine that as a deliberate act. That seemed only possible if one subscribed to a certain degree of paranoia, along the lines of “the government can control the weather.”
And look, sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—I do something legitimately important. Like save a lot of lives in a fire, or prevent an assassination. But this is almost always an accident of my happening to be someplace at some time. Half the time I don’t even know what I’ve done for a generation or two. If that seems weird, consider how long my life has been and how many “oops, I just saved a baby who turned out to be Hitler” situations it’s possible to end up in over that span of time. (I did not save baby Hitler, he’s just the best current version of this point. A hundred years ago it would have been baby Napoleon, probably. Although you really can’t go wrong with baby Genghis Khan in just about any year from 1200 onward.)
Most of the time, though, I keep my head down and go about my life without worrying about the certifiable Big Things going on in the world. I don’t want the attention, and “big things” are never that big in the larger context of history.
Also bugging me was my apparent rescue from death. I couldn’t tell if that was happening now—perhaps I would have starved to death or been mauled by one of those banshees if left alone—had already happened, or was going to happen later. Worth considering was that by the time the wave hit my life had already been altered by the prophet when the message was written on the wall. Possibly, without that message I’d have been on the lower island in the morning, rather than at home. It seemed like a stretch given the time of day the tsunami made landfall, but it couldn’t be ignored out of hand.
Prophets screw up everything. They don’t just make you re-examine the future, they make you re-examine the past. I have enough trouble with the present.
Anyway, I couldn’t sleep. As a consequence, I was awake when the attack came.
Since we were lying in a depression on the side of the hill, all the sound coming from the uphill side was gone. This is a peculiar sensation, a little like losing the hearing in one ear temporarily. We could still pick up the noises of the forest on the downhill side, but that was about all. I couldn’t hear or smell the ocean any more, which just added to the unfamiliarity of the situation, as if the sleeping bag and the strange companion weren’t enough.
The keening of the banshees came through just fine though. They sounded every half hour, roughly, from different parts of the hillside. None close by, or so it seemed.
Bruno was on the top of the hill, at the lip of the depression, holding the gun he didn’t know how to use.
I couldn’t tell you what time it happened. After Midnight, based on the position of the moon, but beyond that I wasn’t sure, because I stopped wearing watches when I moved to paradise. (I appreciate the importance of timekeeping to the world economy, but that doesn’t mean I think the invention of hours, minutes and seconds was a good idea. I’m not fully sold on calendars either.)
There was a cry of surprise, and then a gunshot, and a scream, all from Bruno.
I rolled over and started to climb out of the sleeping bag. Gordana latched onto my arm.
“No,” she whispered. “You must stay.”
“He’s in trouble.”
“This was foretold.”
I shook free of her grip.
“No kidding. Did anyone tell Bruno?”
Again: this is why I hate prophets.
I scrambled out of the concavity with the help of several conveniently-placed tree roots in time to hear a second gunshot and see… something.
Bruno was grappling with a squat, pale creature. It seemed as if it glowed, but that was only because its skin was so white. I was reminded immediately of the fae, because faeries were just about that pale. But faeries were also seven or eight feet tall, and this creature looked shorter than Bruno, who was in turn shorter than me.
I couldn’t see a lot more than that, both because the canopy of trees blocked out a lot of the moonlight, and because I was at the top of the ridge and on my feet for only a couple of seconds before Gordana grabbed both of my ankles and pulled.
As you might imagine, I was upended rather effectively. I braced for the part where my upper body slammed against the edge of the hillside—my elbows took the brunt—and then down I went.
She was on top of me then, and not in a really cool sexy way. Well, okay, it sort of was, but this wasn’t the time for any of that.
“You must stay here!” she said. Her legs were on both sides of my torso, and my arms were pinned up against them. She was squeezing her thighs to hold me still, which was actually pretty impressive.
“Ow,” I said. There was something hard and lumpy on the forest floor located directly beneath my lower back, just slightly to the left of my tailbone. In hindsight, I was probably lucky I didn’t have a broken back from that maneuver. “It’s going to kill him. You know this.”
“I know this, yes,” she agreed. “It’s preordained.”
“Lots of things are preordained. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to just let them happen. We have to help him.”
“Shhh!”
She sat down on my crotch, her knees still forward and her thighs still pinning my arms. Then she folded her own arms over my chest, covered my mouth, and lowered her chest against mine. I couldn’t move at all, not even to tell her how painful the root sticking into my back was—doubly so with her weight added—or to apologize for the part of my anatomy that thought we were doing something wholly different than what we were actually doing.
She was trying to hide us, and also shield me from whatever was up there.
I could hear it, shuffling along the edge of the concavity, right about where Bruno had been standing watch. Gordana heard it too. Her heaving chest against mine stopped heaving—she was holding her breath, not dying.
I held my breath as well, although in my case it was sort of mandatory, because I couldn’t really breathe anyway.
After about thirty seconds, she sat up and we both took in all the air we could find.
“All right,” she said. “It’s done.”
She released me, and I rolled over to make sure my legs were where I left them and still took orders.
“You were told to let him die,” I said.
“I was told to keep you safe, here, regardless of what was happening above. And that you would resist. I didn’t expect you to be so good at resisting.”
In this, I was pretty sure we were talking about sex, not my interest in rescuing her annoying sort-of sibling.
“I told you I’m spoken for right now.”
She smiled. “That has never been an issue before.”
I got to my feet, slowly.
“An issue with you, or with me?” I asked.
“I don’t know enough about you to know, Adam. I was speaking from my own experience.”
“Well, don’t take it personally,” I said.
I scrambled back up to the top of the ridge. My back was sore, and so was my right knee, which appeared to have gotten twisted when I went down. Other than that, everything was in working o
rder.
This was more than I could say for large portions of Bruno.
Both of his legs were broken, as was his collarbone. It looked like his chest had absorbed a great blow, and his arm—the right arm, which used to have a gun on the end of it—was horribly mangled. The gun was nowhere in sight.
I knelt down next to him, and heard Gordana come up behind us.
“What did this?” I asked her. “Did you see?”
“No. The important question is, did it see us, and I think that answer is also no.”
Bruno gasped, which was a shock, since we were pretty sure he was extremely dead.
“Hey,” I said, because what else was there to say? “Are you still with us?”
He was breathing, but it wasn’t great breathing, not like what you’d anticipate from a healthy person. It sounded like he was only using one of his lungs, for starters.
“Is it gone?” he asked.
“Think so,” I said. “Did you see what it was?”
“No. An eel. No. Foot loose. I can’t feel mine. No.”
“He’s delirious,” Gordana said.
“A little scrambled, yes,” I agreed. “He must have taken a shot to the head.”
“We have to leave him here.”
I took a long look at her. I appreciated that succubi hated incubi, and I knew exactly why that was so, but this particular one had saved our lives.
“No, we certainly don’t.”
“Adam, look at him. He can’t walk. He may be dead by sunrise.”
I stood, and walked us out of Bruno’s earshot.
“Look, I appreciate that you guys have been living off the grid for a couple of weeks. It’s all very life-or-death commando stuff, and sure, okay, but this morning I woke up in an actual bed a couple of miles from a real twenty-first century town with a hospital and modern medicine, and I’m not ready to jump back into kill-or-be-killed right now. I can live off the land if I have to, but let’s keep in mind that we don’t have to. There are probably three estates within a mile of where we’re standing, and I bet at least one of them has electricity and a damn first aid kit.”
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 17
