Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  Reaching her wasn’t going to be easy. This intermediary space was the jumbled junk drawer I’d previously encountered, multiplied by a power of ten. It took all of my concentration not to get kicked right back into my ordinary awareness, where my body lingered in the hospital room.

  I skirted the sharp edges of a scintillating trauma only to run face-first into a cluster of emotional imprints from the psychic landscape of the hospital. The misery of the boy who had occupied the bed before her, chemo from his cancer treatments making his blood turn to poison. Father Frank’s adrenaline-drenched flashbacks to a jungle war zone, punctuated by the face of every friend who had died there. Echoes that I recognized as my own thoughts—images of Terael, Lil, and then the heavy, gleaming gold of Neferkariel’s Eye. In its central setting, the rough carnelian gemstone wept tears of blood.

  With a hoarse shout, I reeled away from the looming icon, reasserting the walls inside my own head. The last thing I needed was to spill into her the way Terael had spilled into me—that would spell doom for the both of us. But the image of the Eye stubbornly lingered. Somehow she’d picked up on it through the barriers of the oath.

  I dragged myself away from the uncomfortable reminder of how hard I’d screwed myself last fall, orienting toward the central point once more. A bewildering array of material cluttered the spaces between the more recognizable perceptions, and each time I allowed my attention to be caught by something, it sucked me down as surely as the whirlpool maw of Charybdis.

  Memory, sensation, and emotional content all washed through my mind in an indiscriminate storm. Like a maze without walls, each intense flash of imagery diverted me from my path.

  This was maddening—all the colors were too loud, every flash of emotion struck with abrading intensity. If this was Halley’s experience of the world, I didn’t understand how she managed even the briefest amounts of contact.

  Redoubling my efforts to stay on track, I drew upon the lasered focus that engrossed me in research. Shoving my way past a jagged memory of gold-flecked green beads and the grinding crunch of shattered ceramic, I spied a silken thread drifting in the open space. Slow and hypnotic, it rippled as if stirred by a breeze. At first, I assumed the undulating twist of fiber was yet another distraction. Then I tracked its length with my eye, following it all the way to the gleaming nexus.

  It was Ariadne’s thread—the guideline through the maze. I touched my fingers to the drifting strand, and Halley’s voice grew immediately more present. The ringing notes echoed poignantly with loneliness and loss.

  Guiding my progress with my wings, I focused exclusively on the spiderweb pathway traced through the debris. At times, I used the strand to merely steer my passage. At others, I clung to it like a lifeline. As I progressed, the fine-spun thread I’d first encountered grew larger and larger, until my fingers were knotted round a twisted rope thicker than my forearm.

  After what seemed like a small eternity, I finally reached the core. Before me, the central spindle rose like a great, slitted pupil staring from the heart of a whirling, blinded eye. The gleaming structure was—of all damned things—a huge, ivory tower drawn straight from a fairy story. It had no entrance and no stairs, just a single window near the very top of its fiercely pointed peak.

  The ropy guideline trailed down from the window like—

  “Fuck me running,” I breathed. “Not Ariadne. Rapunzel. Halley likes her Disney Princesses too much.”

  Hopefully I wouldn’t be greeted by a frying pan to the face.

  While I understood the potency of the symbol she’d chosen—and I certainly appreciated the help in navigating the maze—there was no way in hell I was climbing to the top of the tower on a strand of her hair. I had better options.

  I spread my wings and, with a single downstroke, flew to the solitary window. My engineer boots settled heavily upon the sill. Once I ducked through, the window shifted with the malleable physics of dreams, morphing from a narrow, pointed arch to the curtained picture window from Halley’s real-life bedroom. The curtain fluttered shut behind me the moment my feet thudded to the floor.

  Halley stood to one side of her bed. She wore a long, sweeping dress of powder-blue silk with pale yellow accents that shimmered as she moved. It was Disney Princess perfect, and reminded me of the winter sun gleaming high against a cloudless vault of sky. Her dark hair—normally a veiled tangle draped across her eyes—was swept back from her face and plaited into two long and heavy braids. They trailed all the way down her back to spill upon the floor, near-endless loops of them curled around the edges of the room.

  “Rapunzel, hunh?”

  “Let down your long hair,” she answered absently as she stepped to her nightstand. With small, neat fingers, she arranged the prescription bottles so they sat in a perfect semicircle around the base of her Tinker Bell lamp.

  “You know where we are?” I asked.

  “Inside my head.” She uttered the words as if such mental meetings were commonplace. “I learned how to make memory palaces from watching Sherlock.”

  I laughed. “That’s a hell of a moat you’ve got out there.”

  She smiled wanly, offering no more comment than a half-hearted shrug.

  “Not that I mind you throwing me a line to get through that mess,” I said as she continued to fussily perfect the angles in the room. “But why Rapunzel? You could look like anything in here. What about Tinker Bell? You like wings well enough.”

  “Rapunzel,” she answered firmly. “All alone in her high, high tower.” She brushed past me, stepping primly over one of the coils of her hair. “Sometimes, she could invite people up, but she could never climb down on her own.”

  The desolate ache of her isolation killed my sarcasm dead. I tried to think of something to say, but I was used to relating to Halley in the waking world—which amounted to sending smoke signals across that vast expanse of interposing psychic debris. Here on the inside, she was a different person entirely.

  First of all, she looked—well, she looked a hell of a lot older in here. In the flesh-and-blood world, it was easy to forget Halley was a young woman of fourteen. Her words and mannerisms rendered her childlike, and because of her challenges, that was how we treated her, as a vulnerable, fragile thing. But all of those apparently breakable qualities were merely the bricks in the walls of her tower. Inside the solitary prison, she was who she had been born to be.

  “Have you come to rescue me?” she asked. The steady focus of her deep black eyes unnerved me, after having her avoid eye contact so much of the time.

  “I’m no prince, Halley,” I replied, “and you shouldn’t have to wait around for one. That’s the thing about all the fairy stories. The princess always has to wait for someone to come rescue her, but that’s all wrong.”

  “Why?” As with most communications in this space, the question was layered with nuances of meaning and emotion—longing, curiosity, brittle hope. It fretted upon the air. I met the heavy weight of her gaze and refused to flinch from it.

  “A real savior would teach the princess how to rescue herself, don’t you think?”

  Halley made a thoughtful noise as she pushed the curtain aside. The debris-field was gone, replaced by a vision of the darkened hospital room, only reproduced on a cyclopean scale. I saw my own eye, pale as a lake in January and ringed with a darker band of blue. It took up half the window. Talk about an uncanny valley. I focused on the floor as my perspective swayed.

  “I’m not brave like you and Father Frank,” she objected.

  “That word—I don’t think it means what you think it means,” I replied.

  “But you and Father Frank were soldiers together,” she said. “I see it playing in his head, over and over again. You died so he could live. Most days, I can’t even bear to leave my room. How can I be brave?”

  I ventured a step closer to her, careful not to tread on any of the plaited hair spread across the floor.

  “You’ve been fighting Whisper Man for how many weeks no
w? And right after losing your favorite grandfather. Don’t tell me you’re not brave.”

  She turned to face me and—thankfully—dropped the curtain to the outside world. Her dark eyes glittered with a sheen of tears.

  “Whisper Man makes me feel so afraid.”

  “You can be scared and still be brave, Halley,” I answered. “Scared just means you’re smart enough to know what you’re up against—and that it will take real work to survive.”

  “I don’t know…” She hugged herself, chafing her arms fretfully.

  “I think you can get through this,” I said. “If you can do what I teach you here.”

  A single tear spilled over the edge of her lashes, cutting a wet track down her cheek.

  “What is he?” she asked in a strangled whisper.

  I hesitated—but she deserved an answer. If we got through this, I was going to be explaining a lot to her. Given the legacy that she carried, there wasn’t much choice. Out of reflex I tucked my wings tight against my back. At length, I responded.

  “He’s one of my brothers.” I stared doggedly at the floor as I let that revelation sink in.

  “He made me think I could see my Papaw again. He lied just so he could get at me!” she wailed. “Are all your brothers such horrible people?” Emotions tumbled from her every word—anger, hurt, betrayal. That last one crashed against the psychic space with such force, it left me weak in the knees.

  “I’m not sure most of my brothers even qualify as people,” I muttered, but she wasn’t finished.

  “I told him no and no and no, but he said I’d never see Papaw again if I didn’t do what he wanted. So I let him inside—and that was terrible, like being locked in a tiny little box, only worse. So I shoved him away, and then he sent people to hurt my family. They hurt Father Frank. They hurt Sanjeet. They hurt you, Wingy.” Tears flowed freely. The long ropes of her braided hair twitched and undulated in response to her turmoil. “Why would he do those things? I know what I am—I’m broken and useless. How can I be so important?”

  “Broken is not useless.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to hear it.

  “I’m not going to lie and pretend your life could be all puppy dogs and sunshine, if only you believed hard enough. That’s bullshit.” Her eyes snapped open at the forbidden word.

  “Things in your head don’t work the way they should. Your body doesn’t always cooperate. I know how hard that is, Halley,” I insisted. “If you’re broken, then I’m broken, too.” A shiver ran through me as I admitted it, but I plunged forward anyway. Picking this scab was long past due.

  “I barely remember who I am,” I told her. I held my arms open at my sides, dropping the layers of shielding I held tight around that painful truth. “I’ve lived more lives than I could possibly count, and except for bits and pieces, I’ve forgotten them all. I have powers I can use to save or hurt people, and I can’t always tell which is which.”

  A bitter sting rose at the backs of my eyes as I spoke. Hurriedly, I blinked it away—but not before Halley noticed. Renewed tears welled in her own eyes out of sympathy.

  “Wingy!” she objected.

  “I’m not done,” I said. I resettled my wings against my back, self-conscious as she stared at them. “I’m broken, but I’m here—and I’m going to teach you how to kick this asshole out of your head. Because broken just means you have to work harder to get what you want—it doesn’t mean you can’t fucking try.”

  She chewed her lip, considering.

  “But what if I’m still not strong enough?” she asked in a small voice.

  “I ask myself that every day,” I admitted. “When you’re broken, it costs you just to get through the little things everyone else takes for granted—and facing the big challenges takes even more effort. You know you’re strong, because you’ve gotten this far.”

  Hesitantly, she nodded her agreement. The agitated motion of her hair settled as the lines of worry smoothed across her face. She wiped her tears away with the back of one hand.

  “You ready to give this a shot? Things in here are going to get real scary if we do,” I warned.

  Again, she nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “Let me show you a few of the tricks I didn’t forget.”

  I extended my upturned hand, warning her off when she reached to take it. I gestured instead for her to watch. As I called my power, a wild grin spread across my features. Blue-white flames flickered to life across my fingers, coalescing into the shape of a wickedly curved blade. Halley’s eyes echoed my delight.

  “It’s a lightsaber!” she cried.

  Her dad worked at NASA and she was named for a comet—of course she’d seen Star Wars. I threw my head back and laughed.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but I think about them like that, too.” I flexed the fingers of my other hand and called the first dagger’s twin. The gleaming metal danced with the same bluish light that spread throughout my wings.

  “You try,” I said.

  “How?” She balked.

  “Remember when that man was in your room?” I prompted. “He was on the floor, and Whisper Man was trying to come through him. You threw something at him to stop it. Call that up again.”

  “But that’s different from a lightsaber,” she objected.

  “No, it’s just energy. It’s all in how you shape it.” I eased my own lightshow down a notch. Even in this shared mental space, maintaining the blades took a lot of power, and I’d need my reserves if this didn’t play out the way I hoped.

  After a couple of deep breaths, Halley extended her hands exactly the way she’d seen me do. Screwing her eyes shut, she strained to call her power. The long plaits of hair winding through the room shifted restlessly with her effort. Her lips moved as she concentrated, murmuring some private rhyme. After a few tense moments, her features collapsed in a pout.

  “I can’t!” she cried. “He’s going to win. I can’t do it!”

  A sound like distant thunder shuddered through the floor.

  “Halley, don’t panic,” I said. “You did it before. It’s just a matter of focus—”

  The thunder came again, underscored by that same dead-worm scent I’d caught in the hospital room.

  “Wingy?” She gulped.

  “Get behind me.” I spread my wings and raised my blades.

  The whole floor tilted in the next instant, and the space around us shivered with a shriek like tortured metal. Symbols started bleeding through the walls—the three glyphs of Terhuziel’s Name. They repeated over and over again, spreading like ink spilled upon porous paper.

  “I thought breaking my rosary meant he couldn’t get to me,” she quailed. She clung to my side under the cover of one protective wing, her breath coming in huge, hiccupping gulps. The ropes of her braids flailed madly with her panic, like Princess Leia’s hair had gotten gene-spliced with a tentacle monster.

  “He still has ties. Focusing on him brings them out. That’s why they need to be cut away.”

  With a sound like ripping canvas, all the iterations of Terhuziel’s Name tore open on the walls. The ragged edges of the glyphs worked like obscene lips. Beginning with a whisper, they murmured his rhyme, climbing in volume until the whole room shook with the rhythmic roar.

  Hands to take and eyes to see. A mouth to speak—

  “Don’t listen to that,” I warned Halley. “Sing something. Recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’—or anything else. I don’t care. Just don’t focus on that.”

  “I’m trying!”

  I shook out the gathered power that shaped the blade in my right hand. Blue-white fire still limned my fingers.

  “Take my hand,” I said.

  Her little fingers were dwarfed by my own, but she squeezed with desperate ferocity. I squeezed back with all the reassurance I had to offer. Beneath our feet, the floor canted at an awkward angle. The curtains billowed and the plastic fairies dangling from her lampshade swung in a frenzy.

  Gripping the spirit-bl
ade in my left hand, I defiantly bellowed the syllables of my Name. The blue-white fire leapt from me to Halley, licking halfway up her skinny arm. She stared at it, captivated, and as her attention shifted away from the threat of Terhuziel, the invading wind lost some of its bluster.

  “Is that coming from me?” she marveled. She reached tentative fingers toward the dancing spirit-light.

  In between tongues of my diamond-bright flame, another energy softly flickered. Amorphous and subtle, it glimmered with a pale lavender sheen. It held neither the intensity nor brilliance of my own power, but it was undeniably there.

  “See?” I said triumphantly. “You’re not some helpless princess locked up in a tower. You’ve got an arsenal of your own.”

  Halley gazed raptly at the proof of her power. Slowly, she straightened beside me. Her little chin lifted in a gesture of defiance, and her eyes glittered—not with tears, but with determination.

  “Now I hurt you back,” she snarled.

  Still clutching my fingers, she darted forward, her right hand bearing a sliver of lavender light. It glittered like an icicle, shaped less like a blade and more like a wand. She stabbed it into the nearest set of Luwian symbols. The Whisper Man rhyme halted abruptly, and all the impossible mouths shrieked with rage.

  Symbol by symbol, Halley cut them from her space, until only the first grouping remained. These last three leered from above her toy chest, pressing inward so forcefully, they visibly distended the wall. As she approached, they gaped wide and disgorged a voice I knew all too well.

  SHE WILL BE MINE, ANAKIM. YOU CANNOT DELAY MY REBIRTH.

  Her wand still aloft, the lavender light sputtered uncertainly.

  “Last one, Halley, and he knows it. He’ll say anything to get you to stop.” I squeezed the little fingers that had never relinquished my own, holding my blade at the ready. Its light burned steadily.

  The symbols gnashed upon the wall, then spilled forth another voice—deep, with a bit of a rasp. I recognized it immediately from the memories I’d encountered of Halley’s favored grandfather.

  “Halley, child. You have to help me. This monster’s going to swallow my soul.”