Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Aye, so you hope,” says Henderson. “You really think that anyone will ever rule the Dukes?”

  “I hope?” laughs Finnan. “No. I say what will be done. They’ll suffer even more than me.”

  “Why are you not afraid,” the bitmites hiss, “hurling such words about?”

  Henderson hears it and steps back, a new look on his face replacing the contempt. He looks closer at the pattern of the black technology of blood and ink scrawling all over Finnan’s battered body, peering at it until his look resolves into a recognizable expression. Fear.

  Finnan answers the bitmites, but he’s looking straight at Henderson.

  “What have I got to fear when death has not been fated, not for me?”

  “They might inflict worse suffering than this,” the bitmites hiss.

  “Let them do their worst; it’s what I would expect.”

  “It would be wise to pay respect. A drastic—”

  “Worship and pray,” says Finnan. “Flatter yer rulers, each of them in turn. These Dukes don’t frighten me. Let them do anything they want to me. Sure, let them have their triumph this short time. They’ll not be ruling long.”

  He flicks his head—what’s this I see?

  “Well, if it isn’t the Dukes’ errand boy, the tyrant’s lackey. Sure and he’s got some grand new message for us, I suppose. How goes the war against reality?”

  A shape of leathery black against the white of frozen carcasses and frosted metal, plastic strips swinging behind him, the scribe of the Covenant, architect of what was meant to be heaven on earth.

  Metatron.

  A MINISTER OF THE GODS

  No. 1 Company and No. 2 Company had already been beat back from Suicide Hill, as they called it, but Finnan and the lads had held it for another day. It was only when No. 4 Company broke under the shrapnel of antiaircraft fire—sure and without sending word to them—it was only then that the fascists managed to get round them, and even then they might have held out if it hadn’t been for the fookers that rose up out of the dead zone in front of them, their hands raised in clenched-fist salute and calling Kamerad, Kamerad, singing “The Internationale” as they came forward.

  “Keep firing,” Seamus had shouted, voice hoarse with the smoke and all the shouting over gunfire of the last day. “Fire, for fook’s sake. Fire!”

  And some of them did, but some of them didn’t in the chaos and confusion and then it was just too late, sure and the fascists were on them, overrunning them, and all hell broke loose. At the end of it there were twenty-nine left out of a hundred and twenty, herded together, and Harry Fry, the Company commander, wounded with a fookin dum-dum in the arm. Sure and the Geneva Convention means fook all to these fascists. Seamus watched the second-in-command, the Aussie, Ted Dickinson, march up to a tree and about-face when they found his papers on him, told him he had to fight for fascism now or die.

  “Salute, comrades,” he said, as the gunfire cracked.

  They march now, for Navalcarnero, twenty miles southwest of Madrid, the Moorish cavalry in their long robes and fezzes forcing them on with the slap of a saber on head or shoulders, their thumbs tied together with wire. One man reaches to his pocket for a cigarette and he’s shot dead there and then. Phil Elias, his name was.

  And finally they arrive, get shoved into cells, nine men in each of three small, barren rooms.

  The interrogator has an Oxford accent.

  “By Jove,” he says, “jolly fine mess you’ve got yourselves into, what what?”

  “You schemer, bitter as bitterness itself, who gave such honor to these momentary mortals that live for a day, you thief of fire.”

  Metatron steps into the circle as he intones the words. It’s ritual, invocation, and Finnan feels the identity stirring, straining inside him.

  “The Covenant demands you name this union which you brag will throw us from our throne.”

  He raises a hand as if to stroke the air and involutions of black smoke, vapor or dust, rise through the air toward it, circling, shrouding. It’s his show of power, of control.

  “Do it clearly,” he says. “Without riddles. In exact detail. And, Prometheus, do not make me make a second journey, or you will see that we are not amused by such—”

  “How pompous and puffed-up with arrogance,” spits Finnan, “in yer Cant. Sure and how fookin fitting for a minister of the gods. New, new are you to power, and think your hold is fast, eh?”

  The angel twitches. Finnan scrutinizes him, reading the set of his jaw, the furrow of his brows. Shoulders stiff with the weight of war upon his shoulders. He looks tired, worried. Things aren’t going well. Finnan can see the fucking tension niggling at the angel’s twitching fingertips, the unconscious fidget of someone trying to hold on to control. If ye’ve seen shell shock, if ye’ve seen the way the mind plays with the body, then ye know that sometimes in those subtle actions that another man might not even notice, sometimes there’s a truth that’s trying to be told. Trouble in the ranks? Deeper than that, he thinks. Trouble at the top?

  “Well,” he says, “I’ll tell ye this, man. I’ve already seen two powers thrown from those same heights, and soon shall see the third, your present master, hurled headlong in shame.”

  At the word master, Metatron blinks and Finnan feels a certainty in what he’s saying; it’s like looking at a sonar screen and seeing that first blip. The Voice of God, the scribe of the Covenant has…doubts. Sure and Seamus has known enough crises of faith his self to recognize one in another person’s pursed lips.

  “Esta tarde todos muertos,” they say. This afternoon you all die.

  And the death wagon rolls away.

  They put the prisoners to work at a railway terminal on the Lisbon–Madrid line, a distribution center where they can see the stuff that’s coming in from Portugal, from Britain, sure, from fookin Britain, tins of sardines, Lewis guns, you name it. It’s designed to break them, make them see that everything they do is futile, everything they’re fighting for is pointless, they can’t win, not with their own homeland caring not a jot for Spain’s Republic, leaving it to fend for itself against Franco and his Falangists backed by all the power of Rome and the Third Reich.

  After the death wagon leaves, another thirty or so bodies on it, the guards smile.

  “Esta noche todos muertos,” they say. Tonight you all die.

  They parade the prisoners out in two lines in the camp’s yard, each of them given a single cigarette as men with cameras click to capture the fine treatment they’re being given, show the world the way these noble knights of the black shirt behave with honor and integrity. For sure and isn’t that what this Fascism’s all about? Going back to the old ways of ancient Rome and the Teutonic knights and Spanish chivalry, tradition and the spirit of the warrior. The photographs don’t show the lice crawling across their bodies. A cigarette each, but not one of them is given a match.

  “Mañana por a la mañana,” the guards say in the evening, promising that tomorrow morning it won’t be just another thirty on the death wagon, though it is of course, only another thirty, in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening.

  Ninety men a day.

  “You think that your new lords will make me quake in fear,” says Finnan. “Far from it. Go on. Crawl back the way you came. You’ll get nothing out of me.”

  Metatron has to fight to keep his rage from showing. It’s a luxury he can’t afford, unlike this blind fool rebel with his fire inside, this Prometheus who’d give humanity the power to burn the world, who doesn’t understand, who will not understand, that what he rails against is reason, order. O, but no. He sees the shining light of reason as tyrant, sees the nameless and faceless deus on the empty throne as wicked king, not as the one true king of every soul, the one legitimate power of all the primal archetypes the unkin wear, of all the warriors, poets, hunters, scribes. It’s men like this that make the Covenant necessary in the first place. Revolutionaries. How many revolutions end in blood and bodies and in fire
, the fire that they love so much they want the world to know its terrible beauty? And Metatron should know. He remembers Gabriel, streaked with blood and soot after Sodom and Gomorrah.

  But that was different. It had to be done, he thinks. Desperate times call for desperate measures and now…He tries not to think of Gabriel sitting on a throne that should be empty.

  “It was this insolence,” he says, “brought down upon you everything you suffer.”

  “And I wouldn’t swap my chains for yours,” says Finnan. “Better, I think, to serve this rock than be a lapdog leashed to Dukes. This insolence is only right to such an insult of a god.”

  Metatron crouches down so that his eyes are on a level with the bound man’s. He’s surprised to hear the sadness in his own quiet voice.

  “Are you so happy to stay here, then?”

  “Happy? I could wish such happiness upon my dearest enemies. And don’t leave yerself out of my blessings.”

  Metatron lays his hand on the meat hook in Finnan’s chest and whether it’s to pull it out or to twist it deeper he himself doesn’t know. He feels the prickle of bitmites whispering over his hand.

  “You blame me for your pains?” he says.

  “I blame all those that I once served, that have betrayed me.”

  Metatron looks deep into the eyes of Seamus Finnan and at what’s behind them. The link is established now, the graving complete. It doesn’t matter that this little Irish unkin was born only a hundred and something years ago in some Dublin slum or country bog, that the man in front of him he met for the first time in a trailer park in the middle of the Mojave only a few years ago; that’s only the physical truth and it’s the metaphysical that counts here. Metatron looks into his eyes and feels a tear in his own because he recognizes an old friend, an old comrade, buried so deep in the Vellum these last millennia that he’s there under everything, in everything, in everyone. And he always was an idealist. A glorious foolish idealist that Metatron could never truly hate. No, he could never hate him. Not Seamus. Not Shamash. Not Sammael.

  Let Them Come

  “You rant and rave like any madman,” says Metatron, “sick in the head.”

  “Aye, sick and mad,” says Seamus. “Sick with hatred, mad with rage. Sure and ye maybe have a cure for me, old friend, eh?”

  Metatron shakes his head. The same as ever. The once-shining unkin avatar of sunlight, Seamus Shamash, god of Sumer’s summer, now so poisoned and so bitter.

  “If you weren’t suffering, you’d be insufferable.”

  “Have mercy,” Seamus snarls. “Or does the Covenant not know that word? In time you’ll learn it well, I promise you.”

  “You still can’t keep your mouth shut.”

  “True, or I’d have never spoken to a slave. Who’s running the show now, Enoch? ’Cause it’s sure as hell not the same man who loved justice so much, aye, and the whole idea of it, of justice and wisdom and mercy—fookin mercy too—that he carved it into his own soul, took his self apart and put it back together again so’s he could try, just try and do the same to the world. What happened to you, Enoch? What happened to the Covenant? Sure and isn’t it exactly as I said?”

  “No!”

  Metatron realizes that he’s shaking. He always knew this was a risky enterprise, and that in some ways it was fated not to work. They can’t help but be the archetypes graved into them, the new selves that he shaped for them the same as all the unkin of the Covenant. From the lowest sebitti to the highest seraphim. And Metatron and Sammael were never any different, so he knew from the start that he would never get an answer to his questions, not from the Covenant’s first sworn enemy, the one who took the word shaitan and gave it a whole new meaning. Enemy. Satan.

  It’s just that…he’s a man of logic, of reason, of intellect, and he’s never understood why Sammael turned, and if he doesn’t understand it, if he can’t grasp that, can’t fit it into place in his systematic model of reality and humanity, then…

  “So you’ll not give us, then, what we are asking of you?”

  “I will repay you everything I owe. You can be sure of that.”

  “Don’t talk to me as if I was a child.”

  “O, and yer not a child?” says Seamus, his voice rising. “And more fookin naïve than a child if ye expect to learn the things I know like this?”

  He twists in the wire, grimacing with pain, pushing up and out at Metatron so that the meat hook digs in deeper—and Metatron snatches his hand away from it in horror.

  “There is no torture or torment,” Seamus says, “that any deus can devise to force me to show what will be until ye break me free of these. Send Gabriel. Let him hurl his flaming fire. Or send Michael, Uriel, Azazel as well. Let them come, with their white furled clouds of hail, and thunders in the earth, make chaos and confusion of the world. But none of ye will twist me to yer will, and none of ye will loosen up my tongue to tell by whom yer bound by fate itself to fall from power.”

  Metatron whirls and stalks out of the circle, stands with one hand up and resting on a frozen carcass. The bitmites crawl across it and he looks at them. He should get on with it. They should have everything he needs now; all he has to do now is…download it, as they used to say. But if he could hear it from the horse’s mouth. If he could only bring the rebel back into the fold.

  He walks slowly back toward the chair, steps into the circle of salt.

  “Consider carefully,” he says, “if this improves your fate.”

  The bound man actually smiles, a sudden gentleness in his voice.

  “Enoch,” he says, “my fate was considered and resolved a long, long time ago.”

  Metatron’s exasperation spills into a wordless gaaah that’s made through gritted teeth.

  “Just try. You stubborn. Proud. Fool. Just try, for once, to look at your present pain and be even just a little wise.”

  Seamus snorts.

  “Ye urge and aggravate me pointlessly, old man. Don’t think for a second that I’m going to become all girlish in the face of anger; don’t think that I will ever beg the fookers that I hate, down on me knees with hands held up and clasped together sure like a wee girl praying to a god of wrath, O, let me loose of this terrible punishment, please. Far from it. Yer just another wave, sure, washing over me and away, away.”

  “It seems like all I say to you means nothing.”

  Metatron looks at the fallen angel, still champing at the bit like an unbroken horse, still struggling against the reins, fighting at every turn. If anyone’s a god of wrath, he thinks, it’s this one. It’s him that can’t be softened or appeased with prayers.

  “But, believe me, your anger is misdirected and that makes it…unwise, weak. Pride on its own, without wisdom, isn’t strong, it’s…less than nothing. Think. If my words cannot persuade you, if you won’t let me help you…think of the storm and trials upon trials upon trials that will break over you.”

  He doesn’t mean it as a threat. Truly, he doesn’t. But he can hear the menace in his own voice. Standing back at the doorway, Henderson, trying not to look as if he’s listening, gives a noticeable approving nod. A miniature Michael, an angel of ice like the one now standing behind Gabriel in his seat at the head of the table, supporting him in his every act. They moved into China yesterday, taking out the nukes and bioweapons not with a bang but with the whisper of a thousand sebitti, canting in the night, scattered all across the country, from a tourist standing on the Great Wall to a businessman in Beijing, all to clear the way for a search-and-destroy mission on a dribbling fool who used to be Jade Emperor, once, long ago. It’s not that it wasn’t necessary—a senile unkin with four thousand years of the Cant inside him is more dangerous than any hatchling—but the humans are in utter panic now, as the unkin rip their whole reality apart. And the Michaels, the Gabriels, the Hendersons are not the kind of strong arms that you need in the rebuilding.

  Metatron lowers his voice.

  “No shelter, no escape,” he says. “The…gods you hat
e will rip this face of rock with thunder and with lightning, rake your body with their flames, and they will bury you. You’d spend eternity like this, before you ever see the light?”

  “Ah, send yer winged dogs of the Dukes—bloodthirsty eagles, every fookin one of them. Let them tear my body into rags and feast on it, ’cause sure and they can banquet on me liver, cut me heart out and I’ll grow a new one every fookin day. I’d rather suffer in the sunless depths of terraces of tar and hates. I don’t expect an end to any of this suffering until some god—as if there’s any that deserve the name—until one cocky fooker comes along to finish what I’ve started.”

  “Who?”

  “Ask yer wee beasties,” Seamus says. “That’s what ye fookin put them on me for, isn’t it? So ask away, old friend. See what they have to say.”

  “I’m giving you a chance. Just think about it. This is not…it’s not an idle threat. Just listen to me, understand that I’m speaking with sincerity. The voice of God does not know how to lie. No, every word I ever gave I kept—”

  “I told ye. Ask yer bitmites.”

  There’s a strange look on his face, something that Metatron can’t read.

  “Look about you, and consider…do you really think it’s better to be proud than to be prudent?”

  “Ask them.”

  “To us indeed,” the bitmites hiss in black words made of sound and vision furling up like smoke in air, “the things the hermit seems to say are not unfair.”

  Metatron steps back out of the circle and they follow him. They rise from the bound unkin like tendrils of seaweed underwater. Or more guided, more purposeful, like tentacles. He takes another step back, looking around for the access route, whatever vent or duct or sewer these damned mycelia of infected bitmites used to get here, but there’s nothing. He looks at the circle of salt that should have held them out as much as it holds the rebel’s power within. The tendrils drift across it as if it’s not even there.

  “He advises you to seek wise words,” they say, “to put aside your willful pride. You should obey. It would be foolish for a man as wise as Foresight not to listen to the voice of God.”