by Andrew Post
“No. Lyle likely never dropped character with them. Probably no need; Aurorineans aren’t exactly renowned deep thinkers. I figure he claimed he was their pastor returned from the burning house, and they went, ‘Gee whiz, okay!’” She leaned over Otis’s slack face. “Idiots. You let him do this to you.”
Otis made no reply, just kept making the foam of bubbles on his lips.
Anoushka noticed the shadowpane was out and propped against the rim of the rickety platform. Avoiding looking directly at it, she asked, “I can only assume Lyle never mentioned where he actually was, correct?”
“From what Otis remembers of his many exchanges with Pastor Keene, no, it never came up.” Lodi stood to stretch, twisting her head, her neck issuing loud pops. “The podunk’s blanked. Think I ruined him for nothing.” Lodi’s lips became a bloodless line at something she may’ve remembered seeing in Otis’s mind. “They really round up the kids and . . . ?”
Each time Anoushka blinked, the ashy cherubs circled. “Yeah.”
Clearing her throat, Lodi regarded Otis Kelly on the floor, shook her head. Nothing to say. Stepping up onto the platform with a grunt, she approached the pastor’s husk and nudged it aside with her bare foot. Under the crates he’d been lying on, she dug out a radio. It’d been droning a soft trickle of static the entire time—one Anoushka would’ve never noticed until Lodi shut it off.
Before the diodes and glass tubes behind the wicker mesh had darkened all the way, Lodi ripped off its side panel. She tore out steaming handfuls of glass tubes and smashed them onto the floor.
Squinting as broken glass flew past her, Anoushka said, “So you were right.”
“Not to brag, but yes.”
“But how?”
“Same gizmos inside, like I said. They work almost like support beams of a bridge, keeping his repeaters’ reach strong from underneath.” With the radio now completely hollow inside, Lodi stepped away, careful of the broken glass everywhere. “When our hero was oh-so-valiantly striking these suns-humping yokels down, was more than one springing back up at a time?” Anoushka nodded. “We’re getting closer. He’s stronger here. One good turn out of all this.”
“Then we should probably pack it up and get moving,” Anoushka said. Inch by inch closer to New Kambleburg we go. Drawing her weapon, she stood over Otis’s burbling face and cocked back.
“Before you do that,” Lodi said, “we could use him.”
Anoushka’s trigger finger uncurled. “How?”
“Do a bait and switch of our own. I’d need your help, though.” Lodi estimated Anoushka—more than what stood in her boots. “You may not’ve ever weaved a spell in your life, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be the grounding element for one.”
“Neophyte, remember?”
“Okay, Otis’s on the edge,” Lodi said. “It’d take only a tiny shove to make him a vacancy for Lyle. If we were in the right place and ready, as he did . . .”
Anoushka holstered, stepped off from over Otis. “Again, Lodi, I still don’t follow.”
“We smoke some mothdream, go nighty-night, and visit Aether Hall. That fuzz coming through was pretty loud. We’re in a soft spot, between here and the Hall.”
“And going to the Hall will help us catch Lyle how? I get what you mean about the radios and repeaters being similar things and possibly dangerous to us, but what do radios and the Hall have to do with each other?”
“How do you think we’re hearing music that’s clearly from somewhere else? The Hall is universal, to all planes, all worlds. It’s the only fixed point among them all. It is outside time, outside everything, set apart in every way a place can be. And really, place isn’t the right term; that suggests it’s of the material, which it isn’t. Not by a long shot.”
“Wait. DJ Cliffy Cohen says he’s broadcasting from Dah-looth.”
“He is. Which, on Gleese, has not a single town with that name.”
“He’s on a different planet?”
“Yes. Radio signals out in space will sail and sail forever. Who knows how long ago he played those songs, how many times he gave away tickets for whatever the fuck a monster truck rally is.”
“Fine,” Anoushka said, still confused. “I’ll take your word for it. If you think this will help, let’s do it. I don’t need to understand how it works to help, do I?”
Lodi was grinning. “No.”
“Great. Let’s do whatever we need to do.”
As Anoushka turned to fetch a second chair, her boot bumped against something soft. A disembodied arm. Frowning, Anoushka glanced at the devastated bodies arrayed about them. It was almost sickening to her how easily she could forget they were there. She and Lodi had been going on and on as if they were at a pub.
Lodi sat, materializing the pinch pouch from her cloak. “Got your pipe?”
“I left it in Joan.”
“It’s fine. We can share. I don’t have cooties.”
Watching the wizardess crumble the brown flakes into her pipe, Anoushka noticed how startlingly ashen and glassy-eyed Lodi was, how much her hands shook. “Is this wise? You don’t look well.”
“Name a time I didn’t look like death warmed over. Relax. Thanks for the concern. Here.” Handing the filled pipe to Anoushka, the wizardess skidded her own chair close so they were positioned on either side of Otis Kelly. “Think of doors opening. Locks unlocking. Shit like that. It’ll help.” She sparked a match and cupped trembling hands around the tiny flame.
Anoushka leaned in and drew. The smoke tore the inside of her chest, wanting out. Sputtering the noxious green cloud, mouth greasy feeling, Anoushka thrust the pipe over Otis Kelly’s gurgling, cross-eyed form for Lodi to take.
Lodi seemed entirely unaffected by the throat-scraping vapor. Appeared to enjoy it, even. “It’s an acquired taste,” she said, blowing smoke rings, “but I need you well anchored. Here.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
Coughing out the second hit, Anoushka watched through the watery veil over her eyes.
Lodi pushed down on Otis Kelly’s chin to part his lips. She poured in an elixir, massaging his throat until his body couldn’t help but swallow. “We have only a minute before it does him in,” she said. “Smoke up.”
“Is he”—cough—“going with us?”
“He’s bait.”
Anoushka blinked slowly. The blood-spattered church walls took on an unfocused, faraway quality. The crickets outside . . . the chatter of the others as they waited . . . became far away.
A vivid image suddenly came to her mind: she stood before an enormous spiralphone. Her hands were stuck, to the wrists, in the wax roll. It clicked on, and she was drawn, bodily, into it. Everything she said got scratched onto her flesh, tattooing her. Then, not simply her words, but her thoughts too. Spat out the other side, anytime she tried to clothe herself, the garments would burn away. She was left to wander, with anyone able to see all of her—what she tried to present as well what was inside, hidden.
There was a great suck of air, as if a house-sized vacuum tube had just popped. And the church fell from around her, dropping Anoushka into a balmy void.
* * *
With a painless slam, Anoushka arrived back into herself already standing.
Shelves reached on and on into the horizon, white. Many books. Some spines were solid, others translucent like a fine tulle veil. The pages inside—glowing text overlapping so many times each seemed to house not words but a white light. The books that were solid looked genuine, bound in leather of widely varying colors. Outside massive windows: spinning cosmos. Stars. Nebulas splashing orange and pink and yellow and green and—
“Don’t stare too hard,” Lodi said, beside Anoushka suddenly, giving her a start. “You’ll wake up with peed pants. And do me a favor: say solid to yourself every couple of minutes—it’ll help.”
“Lodi?”
The wizardess’s hair was full, shining scarlet, hanging in bouncy curls. No longer marked by scabs and bo
ils, her face, bright-eyed, was genuinely radiant. She didn’t need a cane, and when she smiled, her teeth were white, gums pink and healthy. The artist who’d painted the Associated Bards’ caravan had deftly captured Lodi’s former beauty. “One upside of the Hall, I guess.”
“So this is it?” Anoushka said. “We made it?”
“That we did,” Lodi said.
Looking down at herself, Anoushka saw her body was translucent like some of the books here. When she clapped her hands, it made no sound, nor did she feel the impact between her palms. Stamping her feet, the same. She approached a wall to see if she could feel it—and it had surprising give; the pillar yielded, bringing to mind the marshmallow cakes she used to help her parents make. Each soft pat made the pillar quiver and ripple down the length of the cavernous room in long rings.
Lodi grabbed Anoushka’s wrist. “Please don’t do that. We’re barely hanging on by our fingernails. If you need something to do, keep saying the word solid to yourself—it may help.”
Moving away, Lodi walked in a serpentine path as if navigating around obstacles that weren’t there—or that Anoushka couldn’t see. In the central aisle between the rows of high, high shelves, there was only open, empty white marble floor. What did Lodi’s version of the Hall look like?
“Dark-stained wood, lots of brass,” Lodi said. Apparently Anoushka hadn’t merely thought her question. “Little lamps with green glass shades. I suppose yours is all-white and stone?”
“Yes.”
“Elves see it like that.”
If Lodi said more on the subject, Anoushka missed it. Music was playing. Above them, around them. Millions upon millions of songs at once—like the music had woven into a singular braided twist, beats aligning occasionally. DJ Cliffy Cohen introduced hundreds of songs at once, his husky voice a one-man chorus.
The music bent around them, circling, like a cloud of curious birds.
Anoushka recognized a few pieces that, for a half second, presented louder than the rest before getting reabsorbed into the roving harmony strand.
“Every song,” Lodi explained, having a seat on a nonexistent chair, floating. “Those that have been sung and those that haven’t even been written yet.” She smiled, watching it pass. “Think about all the broken hearts still needing to happen.”
An explosion—to Anoushka’s right. It tore in through the side of the Hall, the windows giving no longer a view of the plunging, never-ending cosmos but of a cloud’s vantage over Rammelstaad. Anoushka recognized the southern coast, the Frayed Islands, Delta City like a big gray freckle in the western greens—just not as big as she knew it to be. But before she could ask, the Error was smoking. The continent was rent in two, as it was now and had been for eons, but its brutal dividing was fresh. The sea rushed in to fill the crater, forming the gulf. But the water withdrew . . . the explosion reeled back, the blinding flash of light condensing like air getting trapped in ice. Rammelstaad healed and became whole again. Now a second stone spire rivaled that of the Burned Mountain, right where the stone fingers making up the Error should’ve been. Enormous. New Delta City at its foothills on one side, New Kambleburg on the other. Deep within—piercing up through the mountain’s stone skin—flashes of light. After that, it ripped itself apart again, once again leaving the Error as she knew it.
“No error of any gods,” Lodi said. “Some dumbass wizard who didn’t know what he was doing. Happen to see the Burned Mountain before it was burned? Just a mountain. The Scorch? A forest with trees taller than any wyrm defiance ever built, each as big around as a whole village. Not anymore. Cinder, quick as that.”
“Why doesn’t everybody know this?”
“What you find here can’t always be taken out. I remember I learned it during previous visits only when I’m here. Eventually, once enough of us come here and see it, it’ll gain texture to the point that, someday, it can be held onto long enough to be removed, taken back, and used—or possibly returned, forgotten. That happens sometimes. But, like how the world’s not flat, how Gleese goes round the suns and not the other way around, eventually, one day, a lot of these ideas won’t even need to be taught in school. They’ll be soaking it up from the Hall, direct; they’ll know how Rammelstaad got its shape without needing to be told. Like birds simply know how to fly.”
Anoushka looked at all the translucent books sitting next to the more solid ones, the not-grabby-enough-yet ideas, untapped. “This is why the inclined registry exists, isn’t it? Why possession of mothdream’s a felony.”
Lodi tapped herself on the nose. “Keep the wise well gagged and you’ll have yourself a happy realm.”
“But many things could be settled, once and for all . . .”
Lodi laughed. “True, but people will always find reasons to fight. Or else invent them. Still, if you’re adamant about taking home a souvenir, go look for a new way to hurt somebody. Those, for whatever reason, travel back better than those that’d help fix shit.”
Anoushka, hands out, repeated Solid in her mind. “So we’re here. We made it. What do we do now?”
Lodi nodded to something behind Anoushka.
Anoushka turned, seeing Otis Kelly standing still, blank-eyed and even more unclear than she felt. A red sphere the size of an apple hovered in his translucent chest. With each pulse, it shrank a degree.
“The poison’s working,” Lodi said. “Minute he’s gone, he will be within view of Lyle.”
“That thing in his chest . . .”
“Otis’s humble hillbilly essence. His memories, desires, thoughts, habits, prejudices, passions. Him, concentrate.”
Whenever Anoushka heard of spirits being witnessed leaving a person’s body, they were always described as a figure of white vapor or a buoyant, glowing orb. “Why is it like that? Because of what Lyle made him do?”
“Well, yes, but before we get too comfortable on our high horse . . .”
Anoushka looked down. Her own spirit wasn’t as shrunken; it had many thin strands reaching out, down her arms and legs, stemming off like arteries. Hers wasn’t red, but it certainly wasn’t white. Yellow-brown, coffee-stained.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Lodi said. “Mine’s about as bad off as Otis’s here.” The wizardess moved to a shelf, picked a book, and opened it. After one quick skim, she replaced it for another. “But, pardon the topic shift, since this is about as private a space as you can get: do you trust Rupie?”
Anoushka gathered her thoughts—tough, feeling naked with her soul in clear view of Lodi. “Peter suspects Ruprecht and Lyle are working together but still trusts him too much because of what he can offer.” Anoushka was transfixed on Otis Kelly’s discolored soul ebbing away with each small beat. It was about the size of a pea now, barely holding on. Anoushka told Lodi about the Buckleys and Ruprecht attending Peter’s sentencing. “Looking back now, I know it should’ve been obvious. When Ruprecht asked for Markus to bring out the nemesis files, he picked Lyle from the top, without even glancing at the others. And in Yarnigrad, when Lyle used the sheriff to shoot up the caravan, Ruprecht was conveniently at the moving pictures, far from harm.”
Lodi didn’t seem surprised by this revelation. With the next tome she returned, floating in her invisible chair, flopping through 100 glassy pages at a time. “Playing fool’s defender here—don’t get me wrong, Rupie winding up a turncoat would not surprise me—but if he wanted to protect Lyle, why choose him for a target? Wouldn’t he want to throw you off his trail instead of taking a contract that’d put you smack-dab on top of it? Wouldn’t he, if he truly is a snake, destroy Lyle’s file when it arrived at his office? You know, misplace information via clerical error?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Trying to rake fingers through her hair, Anoushka’s hand passed right through her head. She did not enjoy the sensation.
Lodi paused, scouring a tome. “Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”
“He’s always listening, one way or another. That, and he has something on me
that could get me in trouble.”
“Ooh, do tell.” In Anoushka’s silence, Lodi said, “Look, don’t get wound up over it. Dogs dig. And who can say their hearts are better off than yours or Otis’s here?
“I think Rupie learned to do that with me: to dig and use shit against people. I once told him I didn’t like how I was being portrayed in Thrusting Staffs, like some rummy harlot, and he said if I made the book gain a reputation for inaccuracies, he’d ruin me—as if he could do more damage. I mean, with horses? Really? But I think he didn’t realize working with real people is slightly different from dealing with the characters of those dreadful plays he used to write; that he couldn’t merely use an eraser.” She paused. “I think I found it.”
Lodi slammed a finger onto a page full of text that wouldn’t remain aligned to Anoushka’s eyes. Once she’d repeated it to herself a couple of times, Lodi stood, continuing to mutter the spell to herself as the tome closed, lifted, and fluttered back to its appropriate shelf.
“Have to hand it to Lyle for shaking something out of such an old clunker,” Lodi said.
“So can you stop Lyle?”
“No, but I can help him.”
“What?”
“By strengthening Lyle’s spell, I’ll make him embed deeper.” Lodi thrust open hands toward a dead-eyed Otis Kelly. “He’ll feel pain through Otis if I can hold him, but you won’t have time to be nice about your questions. Be mean, no kid gloves. Get your answers.”
Something about the way Lodi spoke those words sounded final. “Are you gonna be okay?”
“Probably not,” Lodi said over her shoulder and chuckled. “Preferable to overdosed facedown in a gutter somewhere, though, yeah? This is for something—provided my efforts are proven worthwhile.”
“But you’re the only one who knows this magick shit.”
“See, you could’ve said you like having me around. That I’m more than just occasionally handy.”
“Sorry. We do like having you around.”
“Very sweet. And stop with the puppy dogs; I highly doubt I would’ve survived going through the Scorch, if it had come to that. I’m fine with this. It’s my call.”
