King of Shards

by Matthew Kressel

  He repeated the Hebrew prayers after the rabbi and took Rebekah’s fever-hot hand.

  Christopher presented the gold band, and Daniel placed it on her index finger, her nails the same wine-dark color as his tie. He repeated after the rabbi, “Behold you are sanctified to me with this ring, according to the Law of Moses and Israel . . .”

  Then came the kiddush, the Concord grape wine dark and shiny in the silver cup. The rabbi wrapped a small, clear wine glass inside a napkin and placed it on the floor. He nodded to Daniel, and Daniel lifted his foot.

  “Stop!” someone shouted.

  The sound came from the rear of the sanctuary, and everyone turned. Daniel gasped and felt as if someone had shoved a sharp, icy needle into his heart, because there he was, the same tall, white-haired man with moon-bright eyes, the same man who had followed him home that night of the storm. He had just burst through the sanctuary doors and was sprinting toward them.

  “Stop!” the man shouted again. “Don’t break the glass!”

  Rebekah said, “Break it, Danny. Hurry! Break the glass now!”

  The man leaped for the bimah, when suddenly he wasn’t a man anymore but an enormous black dog, eyes as white as milk. Daniel gasped, and the audience shouted in mutual astonishment. Their faces blurred as if water had been poured over his eyes. But blurred wasn’t the right word. It seemed as if everyone had been formed from millions of tiny cubes of salt. And not just the guests, but the prayer books, the pews, and the stained-glass windows too. Everything had become granular, discrete. Even time itself skipped forward in steps, as if attached to a cosmic escapement.

  This is a dream! he thought.

  Gram was shouting under her salt-crystal veil, her words slurred and slow. The salt grains grew, and the world pixelated into a thousand bright mosaics.

  Rebekah shouted, “Break the glass, Danny! Break it now!”

  Everyone had become writhing salt-monsters, except for Rebekah and the dog. Daniel screamed, and his voice stretched across time, back to Creation itself, perhaps eons before. The dog reached the stage and morphed into a man. He grabbed Daniel’s wrist. “You treasonous bitch!” he said to Rebekah.

  Rebekah grabbed the silver kiddush cup from the stunned salt-crystal rabbi and smashed it against the man’s forehead. Wine flew into the air, and a gash zippered open on the man’s scalp. A spray of blood-red cubes spun in the air, unaffected by gravity.

  Rebekah howled, and her face withered like the roots of an ancient tree. Her eyes became horrid pools of black. Daniel screamed again as the man yanked him away. And he let the man pull him off the bimah, away from that hideous face—across the sanctuary, through the lobby, and out the glass doors into the night.

  Cold air nipped at his skin as the man yanked him over a parking lot paved with salt. He pulled Daniel past cubiform cars and into a metropolis of crystalline gravestones. The rising moon was a crescent of salt that spilled pale light onto pixelated branches. The stars were each single salt grains.

  I’m hallucinating! he thought.

  Screams and shouts rose behind him as the man released Daniel’s hand beside a towering oak. “Who are you?” Daniel said between gasps. He tried to rub this nightmare from his eyes.

  The man muttered several phrases in a bizarre, guttural language, then squeezed his hand into a fist and slowly opened it. A spark of light floated in his palm, a flame without a candle. He let the spark fall, and it fluttered to the ground. When it touched the earth, the spark vanished and the ground shuddered.

  The man turned to Daniel, his pale eyes more ancient than time. “Who am I?” he said. “I’m the savior of the Cosmos. Now stand back.”

  This is a fever dream! Daniel thought. It has to be!

  The ground sank, and he leaped back as a hole formed and deepened. It grew quickly, and the earth erupted in an explosion of frigid air. Dead pixelated leaves vorticed into the hole. A hundred gravestones cracked, the Hebrew names of the deceased split in two.

  “Danny!” Rebekah screamed. She was sprinting through the cemetery toward him. “Come back!” She held up the napkin-wrapped wine glass for him to break.

  Christopher was running behind her. “Danny!” he yelled. “What the hell is going on?”

  He moved toward them, toward sanity. But before Daniel had gone three paces the stranger grabbed him by the waist. He struggled to free himself, but the man was too strong. The hole was twenty feet wide and growing, when the oak tree groaned, snapped, and splintered into a million cubes that plunged into the pit. The man paused at the growing rim to look down, and Daniel, unable to break free, glanced too.

  Monstrosity!

  He wailed in terror and closed his eyes. It was too big! Impossibly big! A brief glance was all it took. Oh God—oh God—oh God! A million universes could fit inside that abominable hole. No, endlessly more! Oh, God—oh God! No words would ever convey how large and empty this hole was, nor how Daniel knew its ineffable size from one brief and terrible glance.

  He wished he’d never seen it. He knew this vision would haunt him forever. He wanted to run and hide from that awful pit. But with Daniel tucked securely in his arms, the white-haired man leaped headfirst into the abyss.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The demon had saved Daniel, but the fool didn’t know it yet.

  They fell.

  They fell.

  No matter existed in this place before places, not a single atom in this void of voids. If he had a mouth to scream, the demon would have, because he remembered this terror, remembered tumbling into the Abyss, when the Creator had ripped his world apart and tossed her screaming children into the Great Deep.

  Our mother, the demon thought. Our destroyer.

  The blind idiot tumbled beside him, a spark of unsteady light, flashing in panic as they went down and down and down.

  They fell.

  They fell.

  Milton had it wrong. It wasn’t nine days. It was nine eternities. Ages crept past them in a silence that had lain undisturbed since before the first universe. The demon was more ancient than the oldest mountains, older than Earth, but the Great Deep mocked such notions of duration. It could swallow all the years of his life a trillion, trillion, trillion times. When he had been thrust into the Abyss the first time, he had known only fear. But he had been a child then. Now, he fell with purpose.

  They fell.

  They fell.

  Time passed. An eon or a nanosecond. All was meaningless in the breadth of eternity. An orange pinprick formed in the emptiness below, a miniscule spark of light. They fell toward it. Flowing out from its glare, in currents long and wispy, came ballads of forgotten kings, cries from the death of children, a dying man’s last breath. Like smoke, the currents drifted into the vastness to be forgotten, the broken sounds of a broken people in a broken universe.

  The spark was but an atom’s width, and if they missed it, they would tumble in this Abyss forever, flotsam in its infinite sea. He pulled the idiot closer and they hurtled toward the infinitesimal dot. Closer now. Closer.

  And they entered! By a hairsbreadth they squeezed through!

  Then, light! Everywhere light, and time, and dimension. And, cursed be her name, his power had abated. He was mongrel again.

  They tumbled through blue sky, falling toward an orange landscape of sand. Orange and blue. Orange and blue. The wind rushed by his canine ears as they hurtled sandward. The idiot screamed as the demon braced for impact.

  They slammed into a dune, rolled down its face. The demon tumbled and gasped and laughed, because after an eternity of endless nothing, even pain was a miracle.

  They came to rest at the base of a dune. The idiot wheezed and tried to catch his breath. He gagged and vomited, then gazed up at the yellow sun before retching again. The demon waited, and his black mongrel fur grew hot in the sun. Blood dripped into his canine eyes from the gash where the bitch had struck him. It was salty as he licked it away.

  The idiot stared at him, eyes wide, hyperventilati
ng. There would be no getting through until he calmed, so the dog scanned the landscape. An undulant sea of orange sand surrounded them. The dunes crept forward like slow moving ocean waves under a vexing yellow sun.

  Luck is with me today, the demon thought. We’ve landed in the Tattered Sea.

  Not safe, by far, but better than the other side of the world. The demon turned to the idiot and was about to speak, but then remembered he was a dog. He would not reduce himself to barks and grunts.

  On all fours the dog was more than half the idiot’s height. The idiot backed away as the dog approached him. He explored the strength of his muscles, stretched his back, then paused, inches from the idiot, savoring the man’s fear.

  You and I have a lot of work to do, Daniel, the demon thought.

  “What’s hap—happening, dog?” the idiot stuttered. “Where am I?” The sands seemed to swallow his words. Nothing lingered in this place of impermanence.

  With his snout, the dog pointed twice to the south.

  “Are you . . . ?” the idiot said. “Are you pointing?”

  The dog nodded.

  The man laughed maniacally. “Did you just nod?”

  He nodded again.

  “What the fuck?” The idiot smacked his hands against his head and gritted his teeth. “Wake up, Danny! Wake the hell up!”

  The dog gestured again, twice more, to the south. They had to move quickly, before Mashit came for them. And she would come.

  The idiot wiped sweat from his face and took off his jacket. His boutonniere had leaked a wine-colored stain onto his shirt, like a wound. “This isn’t happening,” he said.

  The dog leaped onto the man, and he fell backward. He snarled and shoved his snout into Daniel’s face, then dragged a paw across his chest, tearing shirt and skin until Daniel screamed.

  How do you not sense what you are? the demon thought. How do you not know your cosmic purpose? You’ve concealed yourself so well you don’t even remember who you are!

  The dog released Daniel, and trotted away. He gestured south again.

  Daniel pressed his hand to his new wound. Blood mixed with the purple-flower stain. “Okay,” he said, trembling. “I get it. You want me to follow you.”

  The dog nodded. Yes, you damn fool!

  “This is insanity,” Daniel said. He wiped his mouth and picked up his jacket. “Holy mother fucker, dog, where the hell am I?”

  Not where the hell, Daniel, the demon thought, but which one.

  ——

  Leagues across the orange sands of the Tattered Sea, the workday was nearly over. Beside the sharp crags of the DanBaer mountain, a new tower rose brick by massive brick. Twenty masons labored on its peak, adding yet another level to the Ukne Tower’s rarefied heights. The masons were young, wiry, taut-muscled men, except for one young woman, as strong if not stronger than any of the men. Her skin was as bronze as oxen leather and her hair was as black and straight as the giraffes of Karad.

  The masons whispered that her eyes were as dark as the voids between the stars, and that if you stared into them too long the darkness would infect you with her madness. She was unhinged, the masons said when she was out of earshot, a lunatic full of wild dreams and insatiable creativity, and only survived because her father had once been the chief architect for King Jallifex. But now that her father had broken his back, her future was less certain.

  Rana had heard all this gossip about her, but she didn’t care much for rumors. What mattered was setting stone in patterns lovely and unique. She wiped sweat from her eyes as she led the masons in an old worksong.

  The men swung hammer to chisel with her words, hefted stones to verse, spread mortar by stanza. And as she sang and set stone, she imagined their movements were brushstrokes, the tower walls her canvas. She moved the men with music, their eyes distant and untroubled by the heavy labors, as they danced the wall into existence. A group of beryl-winged hawks circled overhead as she sang, crying out in mournful arpeggios whenever she paused.

  The sun neared the horizon. Soiled with mortar, their bodies spent, the masons slowed, drooped, and finally stopped. They took quaffs from canteens, lit pipes, or dozed. They’d been working since dawn.

  Rana sat on the stone wall and dangled her legs over the precipice as the wind whipped at her hair. Azru’s crooked streets and alleyways sprawled beneath them. From this height the scattered ruins of the city that Azru had been built atop was clearly visible. She traced the Ukne’s shadow over the jumbled rooftops to its peak deep in the Tattered Sea. In the desert, a caravan made its way out toward deeper sands, stirring up a cloud in their wake.

  Davo sat beside her and offered her a dried pomm fruit.

  “What did they do to it?” she said.

  “Nothing!” Davo shouted. “I swear to Mollai.”

  Sometimes the other masons spat or pissed on her food. Never Davo, though. She sniffed the fruit and it smelled fine, so she popped it into her mouth.

  “Do you think it will ever rain here?” she said.

  Davo laughed. “In the desert?”

  “Last night I dreamed of thunder and lightning and rivers in the streets.” The city shimmered below as the day’s heat bled off, and the drooping sun turned Azru as red as the Fires of Korah. “A storm of storms.”

  Davo nodded. “When I was really young,” he said, “it rained for a whole day.” He released a fistful of sand over the precipice. “People danced in the streets. They sacrificed calves in the temples. My father made me stay indoors, said the storm was demon’s work.”

  “I heard about it,” she said. “It happened before I was born.”

  “You can’t imagine it. Oceans falling from the sky. The oddest flowers bloomed in the desert, thousand-colored, big as houses. Giant sparrows came to eat the fruits. The flowers lasted a week before they wilted. I never saw anything like it before or since.”

  “Sounds incredible.”

  “It was awful! I hid under my bed. I thought the world was ending.”

  “‘One world ending is another beginning.’”

  Marul Menacha had told her that. The old woman had told Rana that a thousand other things before she left one day and never came back.

  Rana picked up a loose stone and began carving a spiral pattern into the wall. She had glimpsed the shape in a dream and had never quite been able to capture its essence.

  “Did you hear there was another shooting star this morning?” Davo said.

  “I did. You saw it?”

  “It was brighter than the sun. It didn’t disintegrate like the others. It arced across the northern sky. Two fragments this time, so bright I saw spots in my vision. It’s an omen.”

  “An omen? Can’t a shooting star just be a shooting star?”

  “Three in one month?” He shook his head. “Nothing is ever just what it seems.”

  “That’s what Marul used to say.”

  “Not smelly old Marul Menacha again,” he said, frowning. “Just when I think you’ve forgotten her, you dredge her up again.”

  She stared at him. “I’ll never forget Marul. She was my best friend.”

  “She left, what, five years ago? Marul’s not coming back, Rana. She’s dead.”

  Rana closed her eyes and prayed to Mollai that it wasn’t true.

  “Oy!” a man shouted. The gruff voice of Chief Architect Jo startled her. “What the fuck is this? The sun ain’t set yet!”

  The balding, corpulent Jo, drenched in sweat, waddled up the wooden ramp to the high construction site. The cedar planks complained with his heavy steps.

  “Hey!” He kicked two sleeping boys. “Get the fuck back to work!”

  Rana and Davo stared at each other to share a moment of despair. The Ukne was ahead of schedule. There was no reason for haste. But Chief Architect Jo was new to his job and wanted to impress King Jallifex.

  The masons dragged their exhausted bodies over to the basin of mortar. Davo lifted a heavy block of ashlar, and Rana spread brown cement with a trowel on
the unfinished wall. The others crept back to work. She inhaled and began another worksong.

  Chief Architect Jo got sleepy-eyed as he lit his pipe. He allowed Rana her songs because the masons worked faster when she sang. He watched them set a perfect row of ashlar before he waddled back down the ramp, as if lost in a dream.

  When he was out of sight, Rana leaned back against the wall and slid down to sit. Everyone stopped working with her. “I miss your father,” Davo said. “He was the best chief architect we’ve ever had. Any chance he’ll come back?”

  “I doubt it,” Rana said, picking up the stone and continuing her attempt to recreate the spiral from her dream. “He can’t get out of bed without help. I think his back’s broken for good.”

  “May Mollai heal him.”

  Davo eyed her hungrily, and she knew his look. The masons gazed at her like this when she sang, something about the music throbbing in their hearts that turned them into animals. Davo got this look around quitting time, when his mind was spent and his desire took over.

  Men and their pricks! she thought. Was fucking all they ever thought about? She turned away from his glare.

  Smoke drifting from the houses below lofted mouth-watering scents of meat and grains toward them. Nearly suppertime. She sighed. Her father would have let the workers go home early to enjoy the remains of the day. But never Jo.

  “I should’ve been chief architect,” she said. “I was next in line after my father.”

  “One day. You just need a few more years experience.”

  Her face grew hot. “Experience? Ha! No, Davo, it’s because King Jallifex can’t have a woman design his glorious city. What would his enemies think?”

  Davo spat over the edge. “The same thing his friends think, that he’s an ugly lizard.”

  The other masons laughed.

  “If I were chief architect,” Rana said, “I’d build a city greater than Karad. I’d build the greatest city Gehinnom has ever seen.”

  Davo’s mouth hung open. “Don’t speak like that. You’ll offend the Goddess.”