by Tom Doyle
A priority task for the machines was detecting the level of Roderick’s deception. Chimera had the best lie detector in the world, but Abram and Madeline had to watch it carefully. Oracles had been working the truth for thousands of years. An old artificer, Roderick held his horde of raw truth against his iron will of deceit. Something was inevitably lost in the friction between such cosmic millstones. Those losses worried Madeline more than she would say.
Besides the tank dwellers, another body, a woman’s, sat hunched on the floor, a meat puppet with its strings cut. The former Colonel Hutchinson was too old and bulky to serve as Madeline’s vessel. Abram just needed enough possessive presence to pull the body’s strings for the puppet shows, and wasn’t in the mood for gender-bent antics. Madeline enjoyed having it watch them like a mirror. The woman was a naked patchwork of bruises and bandages. Eyes open, whatever awareness still lived there was forced to watch, not as voyeur, but as victim of violation.
Madeline clawed at Abram’s flesh, and the human marionette twitched.
“We don’t have time,” he said.
“I need you,” Madeline cried, like a small bird pretending a broken wing.
Abram gripped her stalking hands by their wrists. “Chimera says that they will be here soon, and that we can kill young Morton.”
Smiling, she exposed her long neck. “And young Endicott.”
He’d forgotten. Was he supposed to care?
“Where are Morton and Rezvani now?” she asked.
“Chimera can’t see them,” he said.
“Then they’re still in the Sanctuary,” she said. She could discuss her doubts later. “We have time. Talk to me. Help me stick here.” She moaned. “Oh, I’m so young again.”
Young, fragile, beautiful. She always had another body like her original ready, though sometimes she made do with a thin white duke. She had prepared this new body a long time before her spirit had fled the Sanctuary to find it. She had imprinted its brain over many months like a cancer overwriting the synapses. Full transfer was extreme craft, as strenuous and difficult as anything, and imperfect. She lost details in the Xerox, and picked up small bits of the other. This one had been a good little soldier; the residual sparks of horror at the body’s new agenda added frisson to Madeline’s experience.
It was worse than murder. Any ousted spirit like Colonel Hutchinson’s that maintained its integrity was pathetically disoriented. Something further would have to be done to that old marionette’s rebellious soul.
But enough about that woman. “Talk to me,” Madeline insisted. “About me.”
“I tried to kill your brother.”
She kissed him deeply. “Thank you for trying.”
* * *
People thought that the secret of the Left-Hand Morton twins was how much (how often, in what positions) they loved each other. But the true secret was their profound hate. Or at least, how much Madeline wanted to destroy Roderick.
In his obsession with immortality, Roderick used his sister as an experimental animal. The key was either to make the flesh immortal, or allow the spirit to move from body to body. His sister was not his first subject. He captured lone mundanes and craftsmen, and tried through many tortures to encourage their souls to transmigrate. No use—they seemed almost comfortable passing on to their spiritual families. Roderick knew only one person beside himself who would grasp at life with sufficient will and power.
So he buried his sister alive.
He placed an appropriate emptied vessel next to her tomb in the family vault. She struggled for a long time; the noise disturbed his meals and studies. But final necessity forced her to transfer.
When she recovered, she said, “I shall never do that again.”
But Roderick wasn’t done with his experiment, so he found ways to encourage her to switch again, and again. During their love-makings, he’d find a small mark on her skin and say, “This body has a blemish.” And he gave her treats. One time, they possessed two children, and drove a governess mad.
She wanted to be grateful for immortality, but her more primal parts resented these multiple deaths. She fled the House; but first, she caused the crack in its defenses that let the besiegers in. It wasn’t difficult, for the House resented them as monsters, and the very land revolted against their deathless state.
* * *
Surrendering as always to Madeline’s passions, Abram asked, “What story do you want to hear?”
“Do you remember,” said Madeline, “when I first came to you, how weak I was? How vulnerable?”
“I remember.” Even though Abram had jumped bodies fewer times than his beloved, some details of memory still suffered. He remembered every prayer and blow he had aimed at the Mortons in the siege of Roderick’s house. But he couldn’t remember why he had taken Roderick’s head as a trophy.
* * *
After the siege, young Joshua Morton, conscious of Abram’s anger, didn’t try to stop him from taking his prize; he only made big sad eyes at Abram like the whipped puppy he was. Abram brought the head home and placed it in a chair at a safe distance from the fire. No one minded this display—his living children grown, his wife dead along with the youngest.
His actions against the Mortons were righteous, but would the righteous receive any reward? A fear gnawed at his mind. Over the years, he had dispelled his family’s ghosts, the spirits of his children and wife, as demons, but he had known better. Surely his good wife and innocent children had been saved, so how could their souls remain bound to earth? Closer to his end than his beginning, Abram was doubting the promise of eternal reward. Without heaven, what was the point of an upright life?
So Abram watched the head with obsessive theological interest. Already a grotesque thing, how long would the head’s evil craft sustain it against natural decay? Days passed. The head oozed a bit, and became more cadaverous. But it did not rot, and Endicott felt another twinge of doubt.
Then, after a moon’s cycle, the horrible thing’s tongue began to vibrate. “You should not have kept me. You should destroy me immediately.”
“Out demon!” cried Abram, adding a quick “in the name of Jesus” afterwards.
“As I am not a demon, that will not work,” said Roderick. “But something more aggressive might.”
Abram thought a moment. “No.”
“It would not be murder. I am properly, by your beliefs, already dead by your hand.”
“No, I won’t do as you bid,” said Abram.
The continued life of Roderick’s head mocked Abram’s faith. Yet he wouldn’t destroy it. Abram made it tell him all the secrets that the Mortons themselves wanted to forget.
By the time Madeline arrived, Abram was ripe. She came to his door in a midnight storm, drawn by the oozing head. She wore a mix of funeral garb and mourning; whether she was the recently bereaved or the soon departed was uncertain. Her dark clothes failed to conceal a sickly self-starved body, always on the point of death.
Though she had different hair and eyes than the woman in the tomb, Abram recognized her instantly. Against his remaining principles, he did not strike her down on his doorstep. He could have killed a strong woman, but not a weak-seeming one.
Madeline sniffed the air like a Gideon. “He’s here. You should kill him.”
Abram drew his sword. “You’re a witch, and should not be suffered to live.”
She spread out her arms and bowed her head, exposing her long and narrow neck to whatever blow he cared to deliver.
Abram pointed the sword at her heart. But again, he declined to kill a Morton. Abram had the Endicott power of compulsion to the extreme. “You will serve me.”
She smiled, and kneeled before him. Serving him was her plan. Subversive subservience to power came naturally to her. And Abram, like many craftspeople, was fooled most easily by his own power. Such was the insidious way of the Left Hand.
With both of the twins in the house, Abram’s corruption was inevitable, if slow. Madeline had time.
/> Eventually, faith subverted, Abram turned to the craft of transmigration. He lived as long as he could in one body without binding himself so permanently to one flesh as Roderick had. He sat out the Civil War, claiming age and infirmity, though he was actually afraid of dying before perfecting his new skill.
Madeline roamed the battlefields, sometimes disguised as a male soldier, sometimes as a nurse, always a wolf in the butcher shop.
After the war and the sad victory of technology, poisonous mills, and Morton cunning, Abram took a new body while staging his physical death—that was all the Endicotts cared about. His family never looked for spirits, and the warnings of their dead went unheeded.
To hide and be forgotten, Madeline and Abram left the East and the other Families. They drifted through the high plains and lonely deserts of the West. They perfected combat skills against the odd Taoists that roamed with the Chinese workers. They mastered the manipulation of Colt revolvers. Spending more time in each body than Madeline, Abram learned to make his flesh impervious to all pain and most blows. To a lesser extent, he learned to impart this power to the flesh of those he temporarily possessed. In that land of sudden unpunished violence, Abram grew into a new certainty. If craft couldn’t stop the new technology, he would unite the two with more thoroughness than any Morton.
When they went west to learn more of death, each had been as powerful as any magus. Now, one of them could face off against a whole Family (except perhaps their own).
They took new bodies and returned east in time for the war against Spain. They wormed their way back into the craft militant, corrupting it as they guarded their immortality and Roderick, a growing fountainhead of power. The imperial overreach of the Left Hand oozed out into American craft and American might.
Without a permanent home, Roderick was difficult to control. The desperation of World War II opened a new door for the immortals. A massive five-sided building was being built to house all the war departments, including the craft militant in its secret center. Madeline and Abram convinced the Endicotts and others to shut the Mortons out of the planning. Without the Mortons and their experience of the Left-Hand ways, they easily insinuated themselves into the design of H-ring, leaving room at the center for the future Chimera.
After setting up Roderick under the Chimera cover, Abram and Madeline should have been happy ever after. They controlled Roderick, who fed off the living and kept the dead at a distance. They had ensured their own survival. Perhaps they could have remained a subtle poison in the craft militant forever.
Then, a year ago, Roderick cackled with glee and prophesized their doom at the hands of a Morton. This forced them to act. To be certain, they must hunt down the last of the Morton blood. To be safe, they must obliterate the House of Morton and its spiritual Furies. To get away with it, they must manipulate all of American craft.
Dale Morton was the obvious main threat. If young Morton had been killed on a mission, they would have arranged things at the House to simulate a Left-Hand breakout in order to mask their follow-up purge. But, with Dale’s survival and resignation, they changed their plan. When Dale let the Left Hand loose during the fight in the House, they could blame the subsequent craft killings on him.
Somewhere along the line, “mission creep” had set in, perhaps more so for Madeline than Abram. Now, nothing less would suffice for their safety than decapitating American craft by killing those most likely to resist, and seizing absolute control. With American craft united in their hands, the nation would follow.
* * *
They fucked, because Madeline left some memory and other human stuff behind with each copy, and sex helped bring some (not all) of it back. Her tendency to forget kept their passion (let’s call it love!) fresh. They fucked to Goth rock, because sometimes the dark-minded do exactly what you’d expect, even when they’ve been doing it for a couple centuries.
They fucked with the delicious urgency of unacknowledged fear. Madeline often thought of Roderick as she achieved a rolling series of climaxes. His prophecy had been clear: someone was coming who could kill her and Abram, someone was coming who could destroy Roderick and Chimera, killer and destroyer would be of the House of Morton. As a more definite consolation, the old Endicott would slay the younger, and Abram was the oldest Endicott around.
They fucked, and the puppet Hutchinson seemed to stare at them blankly. Or perhaps its eyes were on the monitor screens behind them, which showed the Chimera room and its airlock door. But if the puppet saw anything on those screens, it wasn’t telling.
* * *
Sex had opposite effects on these partners in high treason. The tightly wound soul of Abram relaxed; the thirsty soul of Madeline sobered.
Abram smiled as he efficiently donned his uniform. “This should be the last puppet show for the general. Another few days, and we won’t need him anymore.”
They dressed the marionette without the usual humiliations to its flesh—no time for games. Reports continued to feed in: a storm outside, minimal guards, the Left-Hand assault. Madeline fingered a jacket button. The unusual coincidence that they were both weakened and potentially distracted from Chimera troubled her. Time for uncharacteristic candor.
“Lately, my brother has been … incomplete,” she said. “His intelligence gaps are deliberate holes, just barely short of outright lies. He’s manipulating us toward some end. Some endgame?”
“A few more days and we’ll be safe,” said Abram.
“A few more days, and we’ll rule,” she agreed. “But what about the fledgling?”
“How could she be the threat?” asked Abram. “She wasn’t in the prophecy.”
“I think she was, folded in and unaccounted-for,” said Madeline.
“Chimera might be vulnerable to her talent,” said Abram. But he remembered his dreams of a dark woman offering him pomegranate seeds, signs of his mortality.
“We all might be,” she said. She knew in her borrowed bones that she was vulnerable. “What to do?”
“She has no experience handling large craft forces,” he said.
“So?”
“Burn the forest to hide our torch. She can’t hit what she can’t see.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
We crossed the Beltway and District lines. My craft sight strobed; the force dizzied me with waves of brilliance and absence. We somehow managed not to puke.
On the Metrorail bridge over the Potomac, we saw the hypermassive thunderclouds that had stalled over Arlington, ascending from above the air force monument up into the wild blue yonder. Lightning struck all around the low silhouette of the Pentagon.
“That’s awful purty,” said Roman.
“It’s awfully close,” said Scherie.
“Shit,” I said. “I didn’t do all that. It’s shrunk the craft boundary.” I bent down and untied a shoelace, readying it for its role in the coming mission.
At the Pentagon stop, we exited the train with a mass of Washington commuters bound for the buses, and a smaller number of evening security and utilities workers walking toward the Pentagon entrance. At this hour, more were still leaving than arriving. Perhaps the storm was also having a side benefit. I wanted as few as possible coming to work.
We remained on the platform for a moment. “Wait here for Scherie,” I told my ghosts.
“Good-bye, boy,” said Grandpa. Dad said nothing.
We walked toward the escalator that would take us to the station turnstiles. But before we could exit the platform, I heard a familiar, insistent whisper. “Greetings, once and future head of our House.”
Left-Hand spirits. At least they explained the shrinking craft boundary. I turned back toward the tracks, as if waiting for the next train to arrive. Roman imitated me, but Scherie couldn’t help looking up at the cavernous ceiling, scanning defensively for the source of the evil voices that she could now hear.
I held a cell phone to my ear as cover for my side of the conversation. “What the hell are you doing her
e?”
“We have assisted your storm. We share your purpose.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “You’ve shrunk the defensive perimeter. And you’ve been playing into my enemy’s hands.”
“We have come for Chimera’s keepers. You will give your enemies to us.”
“You’ll do exactly what I say,” I said.
“You have little power and less authority.”
I nodded to my right. “You’ve met my girlfriend.”
The wind went out of their voices. “Threatening family with a nuclear weapon. Real classy.”
“OK,” I said, acknowledging their surrender. I had never heard them so colloquial, so ungothic. “If you’re in here, I can see you’re making progress against the building’s defenses. Hold off on your breakthrough—”
“What?”
“Please let me finish. Timing is everything. Hold off until I call for you. I’ll open the door for you, if I can.”
“Understood. A family reunion. We’ll see you inside.”
A family reunion? My suspicion of Chimera grew.
I turned back toward the escalator, and Scherie and Roman followed through the turnstiles and up out of the station. My senses went into combat mode. The light tap of Scherie’s shoes kept constant time. Roman made no sound distinguishable from the noise of vents, breathing, and silence. If her shoes stop, either she has found Chimera or disaster has found her.
I turned toward the Pentagon entrance, with its outdoor gatehouse and the checkpoint armor plates that looked like giant riot shields with small square windows. Just within the gatehouse and checkpoint, the craft barrier flickered blue like Cherenkov radiation. Beyond the checkpoint, nine ghosts stood guard in groups of three, two groups up front, one in reserve. Most manifested in CENTCOM’s desert BDUs from Cobra II or Enduring Freedom, still coherent with will and memory. They scanned the barrier, no doubt on alert against bits of Left-Hand shadow. I hadn’t counted on them. I hoped they were too occupied keeping out dead Mortons to worry about one live one.
My ID got me past the checkpoint, and I hit the craft barrier with my own power under tight wraps. The blue played across my body but didn’t slow me. Perhaps Roman’s craft or the Left-Hand assault helped. In the distance, I heard the low hum of Chimera’s red magic. Scherie would hear it too.
