None of what had just happened made sense. This was hardly a prison cell, but it could also not be called a meeting if she was alone. The darkness, the sudden violence, the separation of her from Rick… none of it was necessary to corral two parties who had arrived willingly.
The only thing self-evident was that there would be no gathering of specialist doctors for a conversation about emerging diseases in the non-human community. Beyond this, she was at a loss.
She wondered if they had hurt Rick.
I promised to protect him.
There was no sense of urgency to the thought. He was either already dead or they were keeping him alive. If it was the former, it didn’t matter how quickly she acted. If it was the latter, it made sense to learn their intentions before any redress.
Whoever they were. That was very much an open question.
One of the television screens blinked to life. It was a still image, a picture of another picture of a fresco, depicting the goddess Demeter.
A second screen lit: Isis in a hieroglyph. Other screens: a modern artistic rendition of Hel, a statuette depicting Shiva, and on it went. Each television had a different goddess from a different culture from one historical epoch or another.
They were all female gods, and they were all Eve.
More accurately, many of the people who believed in these gods had also thought Eve was their god incarnate. Eve held the opinion that, had she not existed, the faithful’s belief in their gods would have been largely unchanged.
“We know who you are.”
It was a man’s voice, but the owner wasn’t in the room. There was a phone in the center of the conference table, but no lights were showing on it, so it wasn’t coming from there either. The voice came from another source.
She chose not to respond. It didn’t seem a good strategy to either confirm or disconfirm their identification, and she had nothing to ask of a man who was unwilling to show his face.
“Why are you here?” was the next question. It came after a lengthy pause in which she circled the table slowly, trying to get a better feel for the space.
There were air vents near the ceiling that were large enough for a pixie.
She thought she might know the voice.
It was incredibly difficult to be certain. There had been so many voices in her life, most of which had been quieted by death centuries ago. It didn’t seem possible for there to be a man alive now for whom it could be said that she knew the timbre of his voice but not the owner. Worse, electronic transmission of voices altered them, sometimes to an extreme, so there was every reason to think her ears were being deceived.
But still: she thought she might know the voice.
The large screen at the back of the room blinked to life. It didn’t have an image of an artist’s attempt to capture the visage of a goddess. It showed another room in the building.
The camera revealed a high ceiling with lights dangling from steel latticework: a warehouse, or an unfinished area. Panning down to ground level, the room was clearly very large.
Rick had been seated in a chair in the center of the room. He looked out of breath, and someone had recently struck him in the face.
Two goblins stood at guard beside him. They were in black battle gear and armed with swords, as was their usual weapon of choice.
Eve thought their presence was as much for effect as anything, there only to assert that no matter how fast she moved, the opposition had someone faster and deadlier. It was only conditionally accurate.
Rick was probably not far.
There were other people in the room with them. She only saw Rick and the goblins, but there were shadows cast from behind the camera: lots of movement.
How many?
“Do you care about this man?” the voice asked. She decided it was coming from a speaker in the ceiling. To respond she had to talk skyward, as penitents might address their gods.
“I do,” she said. “I would prefer you not harm him.”
“Then tell us why you are here.”
“Tell me who I’m speaking to first. Who are you that thinks you know so much about me?”
There was no immediate response. But after the delay, one of the goblins pulled out his sword and held it to Rick’s neck.
“Tell us why you are here,” the voice repeated.
“I’m here because I am curious. And you’re a fool.”
A pause. The sword was lowered.
“Tell us why we are fools.”
“You’re a fool because you’ve told me already you know who I am, and because of this you should know better than to threaten one for whom I’ve declared affection. Look around the room, nameless man, at the exhibits you’ve displayed in my honor, and then understand that you should be terrified right now. I am the goddess of the hunt and the underworld and destruction and death.”
The man on the other end of the speaker laughed, and then she was certain she knew him from somewhere. One can mask a speaking voice, but a laugh is impossible to disguise.
“The gods always were a disappointment in person. We have been watching. We have seen the goddess of the hunt and death and destruction ride buses and cars, and eat, and have intercourse and sleep and shop. You are her. But that alone is no great thing. We know enough of you to not fear.”
She heard a buzzing. Dee had found her way into the conference room, and was flying in a circle above Eve’s head.
Pixie language sounded like the wind. It was nearly impossible to speak in sentences, but words, single words, weren’t difficult.
Where? was all Eve had to ask. To the man on the speaker it would have sounded like Eve performed a half-whistle, but to the pixie it was clear.
Behind wall, Dee said. She landed on the top corner of one of the flat screens to Eve’s right to indicate which wall. Eve nodded.
“Once again. Tell us why you are here.”
“No.”
“We will kill this man, right now, while you watch. And then we will kill you. Tell us why you are here.”
“Neither of those things will happen. What will happen is, he and I will walk out of this building after I have killed everyone in it.”
There was silence. She waited for a goblin to raise his sword to Rick’s throat again, but it didn’t. She suspected whomever she was talking to had deactivated his microphone temporarily for some other reason. Perhaps he was laughing again.
“We disagree,” he said, finally.
Fly home, she said to Dee. We are safe.
I fly home, she said back.
“Please listen carefully,” Eve said to the nameless man. “I watched the birth of this world of yours. The child was violent and blood-soaked and so hungry it consumed the one that came before it. All I have witnessed since has been nothing more than an echo of that first violence. But I am trying to see more. I want to believe the beauty of a kind person’s smile or a child’s laugh won’t eventually be washed away in a river of murder. I want to believe the world this one replaced is still alive inside of it somewhere.
“And so I made a vow to remain here until I found what I wanted, and I am not done looking. If you force me to break this vow, I promise by the end of the night you will know what the people who feared me as a god knew. I have no thirst for violence, but I am fluent in it. Your children with their swords and guns only think they are.”
A pause, as he thought it over. It was his final opportunity to do so.
“Tell us why you are here,” he answered, unswayed, “and what you know, and who else knows. Only then will we release you both. Your threats have no meaning to us.”
It was an interesting response. He was more afraid of what she knew than of who she was. That would change.
“No,” she said.
Then she stepped through the veil.
* * *
The first time she ever crossed, she was not alone. She was taken through by a faery. His name was Unaah, and he was magnificent: head-and-shoulders taller than any human
she’d ever seen, slender and powerful. Clad in only a loincloth, his lithe, pale white body seemed to carry sunlight the same way his coiled muscles carried the promise of force.
Unaah promised to take her away at a time in her life when it had been many thousands of years since she’d known anything like happiness, so of course she went, immediately and without regret.
The other side of the veil was strange at first, and at first she couldn’t stay unless she was at his side. It was also warm, though, and soft, and the world she’d left—when she stayed close to the edge—was a gauzy illusion that couldn’t do her harm.
In time, she learned how to stay in the veil on her own, and later how to step back over into the harsh world of her birth if and when she wanted. This was important, for as much as she adored Unaah’s companionship most times, and valued him as a friend and for rescuing her from a life that might have ended poorly, she didn’t love him.
He very much loved her, and she did love being loved, but it wasn’t enough to compel her to remain. So one day she left him and returned to the regular world, some ten thousand years after having left it. She didn’t stay long, and she didn’t stay often, but from that point forward she followed the events on the plane of her birth more closely.
And whenever Unaah came looking for her, she returned to the veil and disappeared until he abandoned the search. To be found there is to want to be found.
* * *
When she stepped through the veil in the conference room, there was a moment of disorientation as she equilibrated, and then a warm familiarity rushed in, and she felt safe and distant from the ugly world she’d just departed. Her first instinct then was to run, abandon Rick and everyone else and bury herself deep in the recesses of this fuzzy reality.
This was always the danger of returning to this reality: the temptation to stay was too great, and the pain of leaving again too acute.
The conference room was still there. She had just stepped off the edge of the world, but she could still see it. It seemed smaller, but that was an illusion: Eve was larger. This was another strange consequence of the faery land.
As a creature of Earthly origin she could only think of these things in terms of distance. It was wrong to say that the further she traveled from the human plane, the larger she got, but that was what it felt like, and the best her mind could do. The fae had other words and ways of thinking about this that came closer, but while she could use those words in their tongue, she couldn’t grasp their meaning in the same way they did. It was as conceptually alien as the faery land itself.
In addition to finding the world she left had gotten smaller, that world also began to move faster. Time and space had more of a variable relation to one another in the veil in contrast to a much more constant ratio on Earth, and so the further she went from the edge, the faster things appeared to move in the world. So long as she remained near, the time difference would be small, which was important. Too far in the veil and she would jump ahead to a point where it was no longer possible to save Rick.
Rick, she thought. Focus on him.
Dee said he was on the other side of the wall. It looked solid, but the idea of solid was now a far less strict limiting condition. She couldn’t see through it—deeper in the veil and she would have been able to—but it wasn’t an obstacle any longer.
She stood in front of the wall and put her hand against it. It felt solid, and offered resistance, but a gentle push and her hand was going into the stone.
It had the consistency of thick gruel, but went no deeper than the span from her fingertips to the end of her wrist. She took a deep breath and stepped through, and came out on the other side of a much larger space.
There were a dozen people in the room. The image on the television of two goblins holding Rick implied four persons total—including Rick and whoever was operating the camera—but this was no doubt an intentional deception: show enough to make the threat plain, but not enough to reveal the full measure of your resources. Those resources included men in combat gear with military weaponry at various points in the room, with a concentration on the metal doors the other side of which she and Rick had seen from the hallway.
They thought that if she came, it would be through the doors.
The man who spoke to Eve in the conference room made intelligent tactical choices that suggested he had more respect for his opponent than he was confessing. The men in the room had been warned to expect Eve, although clearly they had not been told what to expect, which was unfortunate for them.
The nameless man to wasn’t in the room. She knew this, but couldn’t say for certain how, aside from there being no obvious candidates. She still couldn’t place the voice, but felt certain once she saw the owner, she would be able to.
Margaret appeared to be the closest thing to a person in charge. She was behind the camera, with a cellular telephone in her hand. She was using it in the same peculiar way Rick did when he was employing the speaker function. The face of the device was lit, held at a distance from Margaret’s face.
Listening to the world from the other side of the veil was an odd experience at times, because everything was sped up. The words were still comprehensible, only a slight bit faster than normal conversation.
“If-you’re-in-here,” Margaret said loudly, and rapidly, “surrender-or-we’ll-kill-him!”
Margaret been informed by telephone of Eve’s departure, and now everyone was on alert. As anticipated, their first reaction was not to summarily execute Rick—without him in danger they had no bargaining power.
Rick looked terribly frightened, and supremely confused. He kept looking at Margaret as if ready to say something he couldn’t entirely find words for, or perhaps he’d already attempted to negotiate and failed. Either way he appeared helpless, as Eve imagined anyone in his position would. She wanted to step out of the veil and tell him everything was going to be fine.
“I-know-you-can-hear-me,” Margaret said. Her words piled onto one another.
I said all that needed saying already, Eve thought.
It only took a few long strides to step around Margaret and to a point behind the two goblins. They held flanking positions beside Rick, swords drawn, ready to remove his head at the first indication of violence. As the immediate obvious threats to his wellbeing, they would have to be the first to go.
Arbitrarily, she chose to begin with the goblin to Rick’s right. He held his sword in his left arm, the blade flat across Rick’s chest, his body in a crouch, alert and ready for every kind of attack save for the one that was about to kill him. Goblins had tremendous hearing and vision, but they were just as much creatures trapped on the Earthly plane as anyone. His battle acumen would do no good.
She pushed her right hand through his back and tried to remember where a goblin’s heart was. Anatomically, they were very similar to humans, save for a slightly shorter ribcage. The heart should have been just left-of-center, as it would be in a man, unless her memory was incorrect.
There it is.
She could feel it pulsing through her fingertips.
A hand through living tissue felt only a little different than one through a solid wall, except in an organism there was the fluid motion of life. It was a little like interacting with an erratic water pipe.
She made a fist, and positioned the fist in the center of the heart.
With her left hand she grabbed the blade hilt.
Then she re-entered the world.
Snapping out of the veil was no less disorienting than traveling in the other direction. Everything slowed down and got louder and harsher. There was a smell to this plane, a vague combination of ozone, dirt and iron that was always there and had no apparent origin. Everything felt heavier.
He reappearance killed the goblin instantly. His heart exploded around her fist, and his left hand and arm shattered. The blade fell loosely into her fingers, which gave her something to use to parry the second goblin’s attack. His swing—understandably—was a lit
tle wild, aimed neither precisely at her nor at Rick. She swatted the attack away with the sword, while at the same time lowering her right arm to let the dead body attached to it slide to the floor.
Rick let out a startled scream. He had blood on his face now that wasn’t his, from the detonated sword hand of the goblin, which happened right near his chin. None of the men with guns had responded, though, and Margaret understood just enough to stop speaking. Only the second goblin was fully engaged. That was something one could always count on from a goblin.
He jumped back into a precise defensive stance, the sword forward in his right hand while his left reached around the back for a second blade. He would be presenting a throwing knife momentarily.
Eve knew her way around a swordfight and thought it likely she could overpower the goblin without doing anything special—she might even, if given a moment’s reflection, enjoy it—but Rick’s safety was going to end up being a concern the longer the fight continued, especially once a couple of the men with the guns woke from their stupor.
She charged directly at the goblin, which left him with only one maneuver. It was a powerfully effective and efficient maneuver, however, one that would slice her in half on a diagonal if she were still there to cut. But the second before his blade struck home she crossed the veil again, passed through his attack until she was directly behind him, turned, and brought the sword around at his neck. She exited the veil in mid-swing, and took the head off cleanly.
Rick was still screaming, unless it was a continuation of the same scream. Things were happening very slowly for her, but clearly nobody else was experiencing this.
“Are you tied down?” she asked him. They were at most a couple of steps apart and had only a little time before someone with a gun figured out how to operate it.
“Wh… what?”
He lifted his hands to wipe the blood from his eyes with the side of his sleeve.
“No you are not. Good. Take my hand.”
He was still terrified, and she tried very hard not to be disappointed about this. He did get to his feet, though, and took the hand she was offering.
Immortal Stories: Eve Page 9
