by D. J. Butler
Once Qayna and Abil would have played together freely, naked and thoughtless. Now she stayed in the water, trying to keep her body from his eyes and unable to think of anything but the strange and terrible revelations the Messenger had delivered the previous winter about Mother, Father and the First Precept. As if he were thinking of the same thing, Abil couldn’t keep his eyes off her body, and stared at the water in front of her and the rippling, distorted images it bore.
“Am I a beast?” Qayna replied. There was no word for slave in the tongue of her birth, as there was yet no one to enslave. “Am I a mere thing that has no say in its own use? Am I a garment to be worn and cast aside, a tool with which to harrow up the earth, a lamb to be slaughtered?”
“It is the First Precept,” the Messenger intoned. Between the canyon walls that enclosed the spring, his words rolled like the cracking of the heavens. He hesitated. “Do you choose to disobey the will of Heaven?”
“You would not have me choose at all!” Qayna shouted. The heat of the anger warmed her against the water’s cool bite. “You would have me only lower my head and submit! That is not the joy of the Garden, that is not the path of my Mother!”
Abil crouched beside the water, beside the stone on which she had laid her things. Perhaps he meant it as a way not to appear threatening, but it brought him closer to Qayna and that felt like an invasion. Besides, squatting on his heels, he opened his tunic and exposed his body in a way that reminded Qayna uncomfortably of the fact that he, like she, was no longer a child, and that his body, too, had prepared to obey the First Precept.
“Let’s choose to obey together,” Abil said, grinning. “We could choose to do otherwise together, but let’s choose to obey.”
“Obedience is sacrifice,” the Messenger trumpeted. His voice was loud and brassy, but Qayna thought she heard the faintest note of compassion in it. “To obey is to sacrifice the other things you might have done, the other possibilities you might have enjoyed. If those other possibilities were always and in all respects bad, obedience would be painless. Every commandment is a summons to obedience, a call to sacrifice on the altar.”
The horrible, ineluctable tone in which the Messenger spoke, and the tiny trace of warmth in his voice, only made the content of what he said completely unacceptable, even though, Qayna realized, the words were true.
“I’m not ready!” she cried, treading water. “Not now! Can I not wait?”
“It is the First Precept,” the Messenger repeated. “You must choose now.” The gigantic being’s voice softened considerably. “I, too, have no choice.”
“Come on, Qayna,” Abil splashed into the water after her. He was laughing, but Qayna didn’t think there was anything to laugh about, and his mad chuckle did nothing to break the rising wall of tension in her breast.
She backed away from him, towards the edge of the spring.
“You know me. You know the Messenger’s teaching, and the Way, and what Father and Mother have done.” He swam towards her.
She splashed out of the water on the far side, staring down at her brother. He stared up at her, his eyes on her naked body, and now his look truly became the hungry stare of a wild animal. Qayna felt vulnerable and threatened, the more so when she realized that the Messenger was staring at her, too.
And the Messenger’s eyes, always so patient and mechanical and full of rote wisdom, were now full of something else. Something animal, something that burned.
Abil splashed for the bank. He was a fast swimmer, faster than Qayna, and her heart and mind raced in fear. She ran around the edge of the water, brambles and sharp stones cutting into the work-toughened skin of her feet, running for her clothes.
“Stop!” the Messenger roared, but he didn’t move to intervene.
“Stop!” Abil cried, and he sloshed out of the water on her heels.
Qayna scooped up her scant belongings in both hands and kept running. Along the bank of the spring she raced, into thickets of long-spined thorn trees that grew where the stone raced above the water higher and higher in narrow ledges and steep slopes. Abil had longer legs than she did, and heavier muscle, but she thought she was more nimble and might be able to evade him if she could get to where agility would make a difference.
Abil caught her in the trees. She dropped her clothes as her brother slammed her against a stone wall cluttered with dried tree branches. Stray thorns dug into the flesh of her belly and thighs and her blood marred the virgin rock. Though her sandals and tunic fell into the thicket, she kept possession of the knife, and as Abil pounded her against the stone again, she tightened her fingers around it.
“Stop!” the Messenger cried.
“This is the First Precept!” Abil raged, and threw his body against hers. He was awkward and animal and he approached her from behind and butted her, like a ram subdues a recalcitrant ewe.
“I …” the Messenger hesitated.
Qayna fought back with her ankles and elbows, and Abil pushed her harder against the rock.
“Obey!” he snapped wolfishly.
She wiggled around and pushed him away with both feet, feeling the rough stone abrade the skin of her back with the force of the blow. “Abil!” she cried. She was trapped by the thorn trees and the stone, and the knife in her hand seemed both pitiably small and laden with doom. “I am no beast!”
“You must!” Abil snarled. “It is the will of Father and Mother! It is the will of Heaven!”
“It is not my will!” she shouted back.
The Messenger was silent, and Abil threw himself forward—
Qayna swung the knife fiercely, aiming for Abil’s chest, willing the blade to wound and subdue her brother—
but the weapon had darker plans.
The point of the small knife sank into his throat and Abil’s blood gushed over her, surprisingly hot on her water- and wind-chilled body. Abil thrashed and jerked, and pulling himself off the blade only opened the wound and caused his blood to spill faster.
Qayna stared in shock as her brother, and would-be Bond mate, staggered away from her clutching at a gaping hole in his neck, fell backwards into the embrace of a tree of thorns, and crashed to the ground.
Qayna still held the knife, slick and warm. For long seconds, it was all she could do to focus her entire will on not fainting.
Slowly, she looked up at the Messenger, uncertain how he would react. The Messenger looked back at her, and in his clear, translucent eyes she saw deep reserves of will and sudden, terrible insight.
The Messenger drew himself up to his full height, like a mighty oak tree, and suddenly he opened his robe. His glowing body was even more finely-muscled than Abil’s, as if it were the light and the original at the same time, and Abil’s newly-acquired man-body were merely a shadow.
“And now … daughter of Eve?” the Messenger rumbled. He spoke slowly, but as he spoke he picked up speed, as if he were making up his mind. “Now what do you choose, since you have learned the unstoppable power of your own free will? You are a rebel against the First Precept. Will you rebel with me?”
Qayna fled again, scrambling through trees that clutched at her and tore her flesh. She scrambled up the stone and way, staring back at the Messenger behind her. “Who are you?” she demanded. Mother had taught her the First Precept, and though Qayna feared and rejected it, she knew that it didn’t mean that the Messengers were supposed to mingle with the mortals entrusted into their care. “You defy Heaven, too!”
“I am Azazel,” the Messenger called back, smiling brilliantly, “and you teach me that I need not care.”
“I want nothing from you!” she cried at the terrible, naked figure.
“Remember me, mortal!” the Messenger bellowed, his rumbling voice rebounding against the sky itself.
Then Qayna tumbled out of the top of the canyon and left the Messenger Azazel behind.
* * *
She ran naked and bloody, holding nothing but the knife that had killed her brother. That night, she butchered la
mbs from Abil’s herd and hid from the eyes of Father and Shet, who wandered the hills crying her name and Abil’s. She wondered what had happened to the Messenger Azazel, and why he had not reported his own failure, or Qayna’s crimes.
She traveled at night, taking comfort from the rebel moon and nursing the thought that if she was a disobedient child, she had learned from a Mother with a similar streak. By day she lay in the hollows of rocks, ate the flesh of her stolen lambs and chewed on roots she dug out of the ground. When she slept, she dreamed that the stones around her were the grinding, merciless arms of her dead brother, Abil.
On the third day, they found her.
It was Shet who was staring at her, wide-eyed, when she awoke.
“They found Abil,” her younger brother said. “And your clothes.”
She stood, dropping the last of the uneaten carcass and the tiny, guilty blade.
Then came Father, the sternness of his brow trembling in hint of softer feelings behind the facade, and with him a company of Messengers. She expected them to bring Swordbearers, but there were only the blue-white, six-winged giants she had always seen. She searched the faces of the Bearers of the Word—the first time she had ever really done so—wondering whether she might see Azazel and almost hoping that she would. She had witnessed terrible things in his eyes, a rage to possess and to destroy, but at least when she had looked into his eyes she had seen something, and not just the blank tables on which were inscribed the long list of Heaven’s mandates.
But she was disappointed; Azazel was not among them.
“I’m sorry,” Father grunted, grabbing her by her shoulders and throwing her down.
“I deserve it,” she said. She didn’t really mean it, but she hadn’t intended to cause Father grief.
“This world is a hard and fallen one,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “That is not your fault.”
The foremost of the Messengers bore down upon her, a clay pot in his hand. Qayna stared at the Messenger’s face, imprinting it upon her memory. “This dye,” the Messenger thundered, “is the blood of Abil. His blood cried to heaven to witness your guilt, and now it will cry to all your family and their descendants as an eternal witness.”
The Messenger dipped a shard of bone into the pot and scraped its jagged edge across Qayna’s face. She screamed and twisted, and Father held her down.
“This stylus is the bone of Abil,” the Messenger continued. “You would not make an acceptable sacrifice, and instead sacrificed your own brother’s flesh and bone. Now the bone records your sin.”
The Messenger continued scratching her, running curving lines about Qayna’s face and all over her body. Qayna bucked and screamed and stared at each Messenger, memorizing their faces. One day, she swore, it would be her turn to witness, and the Messengers would be the ones screaming in pain.
Father wept, but did not relent.
Shet only stared.
“These words that I write upon your face,” the Messenger finished, “are all the names of Abil. “As you have blotted out his name from among your family, so shall your name be blotted out. As you have taken from him his life, so do I now take from you your death. You shall be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth, until the end of time.”
The Messenger arose and stood away, but the pain did not subside. As Father stood and turned away also, pulling Shet with him and abandoning Qayna to her pain, she rolled over and curled into a ball, sobbing.
She lay a long time. There was no one to find her or to be disturbed.
When she was done weeping, hours had passed and her pain had subsided into a stinging that covered her entire body. She stood gingerly and picked up the bloody knife where she had dropped it. She picked it up because she needed a tool of some kind in the great empty world into which she had been cast, and she picked it up because was hungry to someday, somehow, get her revenge.
And then she saw, perched on an outcropping of stone above her, a large black crow.
***
Chapter Four
Millennia later, Jane leaped through the Wild Turkey mirror behind the bar in Wellman’s.
She landed in the Outer Bounds expecting to hear its usual soft-swishing silence. Instead, the halls and arches echoed to the sounds of shouting.
“Let go of her, damn you!” The voice belonged to the guitar player, Eddie. He sounded like he was just around the corner, but Jane knew that sound could carry a long, long way in the Mirror Queendom. Especially in the Outer Bounds.
“She’s an Outcast in violation of the terms of her exile!” squeaked an excited fairy voice that might have belonged to Foxtail. “You have no right to talk to the Queen’s Rangers like that, and you have no permission to be here!”
“We don’t need permission, cagado!” That would be Mike. “We have guns.”
“And don’t go imagining our bark is worse,” the organ player snarled, “et cetera. We also have fireballs.”
Jane pulled her knives from her own body, carefully wiping each on her duster before sheathing it. The hoof was as long as her forearm and looked like a gigantic toenail clipping, polished and smooth. It was the right size to be Azazel’s. Of course, when she had first known him, he had had feet.
The hooves—and the wings—had been his mark, but they had been his own doing.
“You’ll risk the wrath of Mab and Oberon,” thud! “for this wretch?”
“If Mab and Oberon ain’t pissed off with us already,” the guitar player laughed out loud, “they’re just about the only ones.”
As Jane removed the blade from her heart, a sudden gush of hot fluid spilled out, but she felt the flesh of the pierced organ knit together almost instantly, and then the wound shut and the blood stopped. An ancient ward kept any of her blood from staining the duster, so it dripped onto the floor instead.
She took the shell-rigged-into-a-makeshift-vial from her pocket, removed the wax and poured the blob of quicksilver out into her palm.
BOOM!
The sound of an explosion deafened Jane for a moment, and shock waves knocked her against the wall. When she stood again, moments later, she could hear animal yelps, the scrabbling of paws on stone and a pair of running feet.
“Twitch!” Eddie hollered. “We’re on!”
“You think I care about the show?” Twitch called back. “I’m going to kick that bitch in the forehead!”
The wizard muttered something Jane couldn’t hear.
“Are you sure?” Eddie asked.
“Go!” Adrian yelled.
Then the pair became a crowd of feet, and the rattling hoof beats of a horse.
Jane incanted in Adamic and followed the silver bead in her palm. Its movements were subtle enough that she had to keep an eye on the wiggling drop, and couldn’t rely on her sense of touch alone. Staring into her own cupped hand slowed her, but even worse was the fact that the bead led her backward, straight into the teeth of her pursuit.
Wondering how many fey eyes had already examined her and seen what she was carrying, Jane slid the hoof into the inside pocket of her duster. She pinned it with her elbow against her side to keep it secure, and drew the pistol.
The gun was an FN Model 1910, a mediocre old semi-automatic pistol at best, vintage turn of the twentieth century. This particular pistol, though, was unique. Its serial number was 19074. It had been purchased by the Black Hand and its owner, the Serbian enthusiast Gavrilo Princip, had taken it at midnight, on June 27, 1914, to a shadowy crossroads outside Sarajevo. There a veštica with the face of a young girl but the hands of a crone had anointed the gun with boiled fat extracted from the body of a murdered priest and pronounced over the weapon a dreadful curse.
Jane had been watching from the shadows.
The next day, young Princip had killed the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand with this same pistol, and started World War I. The gun, famous to those who followed it as the Calamity Horn, was a killer of kings; that was its blessing, and the purpose for which Princip had want
ed it. There was no creature its bullets could not wound, Angelic or Infernal, cursed or anointed.
It could even wound Jane. But it couldn’t, as she found out on the third day after the veštica had done her work, kill her. Not even with a bullet through the temple. So all Jane’s tedious labor in training the veštica and in nurturing the nationalistic madness in young Gavrilo had gone to waste. Her scheme to end her life had failed, and instead millions of others had died.
The madness that the gun caused was, apparently, an unintended side effect of the witch’s enchantment.
The quicksilver bead in her palm tugged Jane to the right into a square room several paces across, with a circular shaft in the center of the chamber and a ceiling that was so far away it was invisible. At the same moment that Jane saw the bead, she heard the horse clatter into the room in front of her. She looked up and fired three quick shots.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The echoes were infinite and deafening, a wave of sound that crashed out of the cursed gun and blasted along the passageways in all directions. The horse reared in surprise and went down in a tangle of hooves and wings and bright-splattering blood.
Right behind the horse rushed in the three rock and roll musicians, and the wave of sound struck them full in the face. For a moment, they seemed to hang suspended in mid-air and their faces contorted with sudden insight and anger.
Then Mike turned, raised his pistol—
and fired on his companions.
Eddie ducked, roared and fired back.
Jane veered right, skirting around the pit at her feet. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement within the pit, the rustling, quaking tremble of many-limbed things that were climbing inside, but then she was past it and gone.
“Selenen abiuro!” Adrian shouted, throwing a pocketful of ground and powdered something into the air—
Jane smelled an herb that might have been oregano—
Mike and Eddie dropped their guns, horrified looks on their faces—
