They had my fucking cat. My tools. The Wardbreaker. Everything. A tremble started in my fingers. Angrily, I clenched around the bundle of keys until the points bit into my fingers, hissing through my teeth as a jolt of hot pain lanced through my hand. It freed me up to move on, one foot in front of the other.
Ten bucks, one tank of gas, a pack of cigs, and one go-bag hidden in Gravesend. If they weren’t going to let me run, I was going to have to fight.
And once I could see straight? I’d fight them to the death. Sergei didn’t know who the fuck he was dealing with.
Chapter 5
Somehow, I found the go-bag. It was well hidden in the grounds of an old tenement landmark near Sheepshead Bay station, wet from the runoff rain. As I pulled it from the cold fireplace, all I could think about was food. Deliriously, I rifled through the bag, searching for something to eat. I found a couple of protein bars and a small bag of snacks, food intended to see me through a short drive or a day on the run. Whatever flavor they were, I didn’t taste them as they went down.
Still chewing on something, I heaved the bag over my shoulder, staggered back to the car, and drove away to the north, fleeing to the furthest place I could think of within New York’s City limits: The Bronx.
Between the green sprawl of Yonkers and the sterile, gothic beauty of Manhattan lay an ulcerated crescent of poverty. While yuppies turned over millions on Wall Street, the homes of the people they foreclosed, ripped off, conned, and milked were left to rot in The Bronx, Hunt’s Point, and Harlem. Fifty years ago, this had been a nice enough area. Systematic racism – in the form of the government neglecting infrastructure and private interests ruining families – had rotted it from the center out. Gutted apartment buildings studded the scorched land like burned trees. Uncollected trash bags spilled their guts over the sidewalks. Potato chip bags, old clothes, and newspapers gathered like tumbleweeds against chain link fences, which themselves leaned crookedly against piles of concrete rubble. The roads were pockmarked and worn. The violet, chemical stench of industry hung over the Harlem River, while the sour orangeness of human filth blew in from underneath the bridge. The Bronx looked and felt like a warzone, but it was a great place to disappear.
My car was one corpse among many in the dusty lot where it finally perished, coughing to a halt next to a stirring vortex of trash. The air outside was cold and clammy, the wind thick with the smell of burning tires, dust, and hot grease. Dawn was only just beginning to come in from the east. There were lights glittering to the south, but there was nothing to illuminate the old ruined projects save for the crescent moon overhead. When I opened the door and got out into the darkness, the distant white glow shifted and traced. It was impossible to say if it was upir blood or fatigue, but my vision was screwed and getting worse. It was a miracle I’d made it without running myself off the road.
I hefted the go-bag, took it to the nearest patch of loose dirt and dropped it there, where I kicked it around a little, rolling it in the dust and gravel until it was ratty enough that no one would want to steal it. I took it back to the car and opened it up. My head was clearer now, and as I rummaged through, a new sick feeling began to rise in my throat. A number of the things I’d packed in here were missing. The pistol, ammunition, I.D, cash and cards – none of them under my own name, fortunately – were gone. Someone had found it and been through it. They’d left all of the clothing and the things they couldn’t fence: a pearl handled razor, a fixed-blade knife, soap, a calico bag with underwear and other miscellany, and my notebooks.
So that was it, then. No money, no bank cards, no credit cards. Nothing. I took a deep breath and sat back, trying to keep my heart rate under control. Neither fear or anger were my friend, not right now. There was nothing to do except hit the streets, cool off, and hoped that I wasn't important enough for Nic to hold out longer than a week or two. When I was fit enough to start mugging, I could get my hands on some cash. Until then… I wasn’t sure.
Dutifully, I took stock of what I did have. The ten bucks I’d taken from the dockworker could last seven days, if I was careful. The car could be sold if I found the right guy in this part of town. For the time being, though, I tried to stay in the moment and set out clean clothes, the knife, razor and soap. There was an old Coke bottle on the passenger's side half full of water. I drank most of it, used the rest to wash my hands and face and dampen my hair, then hacked at it until I was left with a spiny, tattered mess. I lathered it up, and started shaving.
When I could finally bring myself to glance up at the mirror properly, it was into the iron eyes of a stranger. I’d looked mean enough with hair. Now, I looked like strung-out poster child for the Aryan Front. My face was already thinner, hollowed out. My cheekbones formed sharp points under pallid skin. Sergei’s blood had healed the worst of the injuries I vaguely remembered receiving, but it had taken a toll. My eyes were sunken and bruised, my lips dry. Puffy violet and yellow blotches marred my jaw, neck and arms.
After the shave, my eyebrows sat like dark caterpillars on my brow. It looked strange, so I nicked them off as well. The complete hairlessness made my face even harsher, but that wasn’t a bad thing around these parts. I changed out of the coveralls into jeans and a sweater, drank the rest of the water, lay my head back, and closed my eyes.
When they opened again, the sky was turning gray and spittling ahead of a fresh wave of rain. The car was warm and tempted me to stay longer, but it was going to attract interest from the locals as soon as the sun rose. If I was there when they came, it wouldn’t only be the car that got stripped down and junked.
Reluctantly, I abandoned the vehicle and shuffled across the lot with the bag over one shoulder, picking my way between the piles of rusted hulks. I made it ten steps before my gut twisted nastily and I retched, coughing into my hand as I staggered to one side and hit something. When I pulled my hand away, it was wet… wet, and streaked with dark orange slime. Without the need to escape goading me, I was once again painfully aware of a billion tiny engines writhing on and in my bones.
I stumbled into a narrow alley between an Eee-Zee-Pawn and an empty bodega with looted shelves. The mouth of the alley looked out across another improvised junkyard, its mountains of refuse indiscernible in the morning gloom. There was an empty dumpster here, and alongside it, stacks of bound, flattened cardboard that had turned hard and brittle through the summer. Bone-weary, I dropped the bag and began to separate the sheets. There was no planning, no strategy: I just pulled them out and lay them down. A bed, at least. Maybe a lean-to? I could build a lean-to. If I could make it out here for a week, I could go scope out my apartment. No, actually... nine days. People naturally thought in threes, fives, sevens, tens and fourteens when it came to the passage of time. Nic was likely to watch the house for three days, then run patrols at the five and seven day marks. That meant nine days on the street, minimum, before I went to check in.
Halfway through stamping the cardboard flat, I slowed, then stopped. My vision was thick, like looking at the world through a foot of frosted glass. Thick and distant, everything unreal. Removed. I tried to remember how I had gotten here. What the hell was I doing? Preparing to sleep on some old boxes like a hobo? This wasn't a rest-stop. It wasn't home. It wasn't anything. Bewildered, I looked down at my bare fingertips. My nails were chipped and broken, clogged with old oil. Forty-eight hours ago, I’d been something. Now, I was only dirty, filthy, and cold.
"God, Kutkha." My voice was a rasp. "What the hell am I doing?"
There was no reply, not even a whisper of contact. My Neshamah wasn't there, and neither was the magic. None of it.
My hands shook, and no matter how much I willed it, they didn’t stop. They didn't feel like my hands, my arms. Painful heat pushed up slowly from my chest, and this time, it wasn’t just nauseating hunger. I imagined Nicolai and Vanya and their thugs turning up my house, riffling through my things, ripping up my books, hurting my cat. My blood boiled.
“SHIT!” A ripple ran thro
ugh me, a violent twitch. I felt the veins in my temples throb. The sound of my voice ripped through the air of the alley, and a battered trashcan flew across the pavement and struck the chain-link fence at the end of the road. I knew it was my foot kicking it, crammed into boots that weren't mine, but I couldn’t feel it. All I felt were my joints aching, my cells regenerating, my stomach gnawing at itself. Why couldn't I feel it? “You cock-sucking ginger piece of SHIT!”
I turned, shoulders jerking back, and looked at the sky. It roiled overhead, the clouds thickening even as I watched, paralyzed by... what? Fear? Anger? Grief? I had meant to stop by Vassily's grave on the way to the airport, visit him one last time. That grave would be under surveillance, too. They'd use everything that was mine to try to find me: my house, my books, my familiar. Everything.
I shook, rendered speechless for several long minutes, until I was able to think straight. Then, I spoke. I didn’t really mean to. The words came out unbidden. "You have choice. You have the Wheel of Fortune."
My voice was guttural. It sounded nothing like Kutkha’s rustling hiss, this unseen, hidden inspiration. The Wheel of Fortune, a major arcana card in tarot, has a picture of a snake mounted on a wagon hub, biting its own tail. A beggar hangs from the bottom of the wheel, rising up, and a king holds on to the top of the wheel, riding down. In some decks, a sphinx watches over the scene, symbolic of the mystery. In other decks, it is the face of an androgyne, a unified, transcendental human being lifted above the vicissitudes of fate.
Make the world your castle, and you become king of the world. Make the world your cage, and you become a prisoner. Someone had told me that once, but I couldn’t remember who.
Brimming with petulant, useless rage, I tore one of the boxes in half, and starting notching sheets to fit them together for a roof of sorts before it started to rain. When it was done, the early morning sky was still as dark as night. I crawled into the box, reinforced with a slanted roof, and curled around my aching belly. Sleep rolled me under as soon as my head hit the makeshift pillow of folded coveralls and wool sweater.
The deep black inverted into white.
My mind’s eye was a forest where the trees resembled white coral, their trunks flushed silver and pink. Their leaves were shaped like arrowheads, formed around delicate stems which bent and flexed as if stretching. They were beautiful, their fractalline forms bent as if dancing to a slow melody. The warm air blew, murmuring with a low, soft, feminine voice, but I could not make out the words.
A million fragile beings drifted around me, blowing like plankton through the dense white undergrowth. The bracken – silver leaves dewed with milky stuff that dissolved into the wind before it ever hit the ground – multiplied as I watched. As the trembling, buoyant brittlestars that drifted past brushed their legs against the plants, both creature and plant reproduced from the contact. Droplets formed into tiny glass creatures that were carried away by the breeze. Seeds fell, and new translucent ferns sprung up from the prismatic soil.
Astounded, I lay a hand on the trunk of the nearest tree. It was warm and smooth and fleshy, and it shuddered with pleasure under my casual touch. I drew my hand back, startled, and looked down. I was shirtless, dressed in neat charcoal slacks and black leather gloves. The magic-suppressing sigil was there, burning orange under my skin. My feet did not quite touch the ground.
The White Land. Eden. The place Vincent Manelli had dreamed of… the place that Zarya said she’d come from.
I knew this place, as surely as I knew my own hands. The fragile creatures of the Garden were neither plants nor animals. They were neurons, nerves that were part of an enormous skin that stretched forever in a way that was so literal that it defied imagination. The knowledge was imparted to me. Eden was the skin of GOD itself.
As I stared in awe, the trees lifted their branches and opened up a path between them. I moved forward – floating, not walking – and the murmuring finally began to take a form.
Hound of my Sons and Daughters, sacred whore of Eden, listen. Listen to my story as it is spoken to you:
The Beginning has a Beginning, a middle, and an End.
A Mind, a Body, and a Breath.
The Beginning of the Beginning begins with Nothing.
NO thing.
NO substance.
By its very nature, this NO thing lacks any sort of overarching intelligence, any sense of awareness.
It has no mind.
It has no body.
As a vacuum, it has no breath.
It desiccates and abrades.
The universal solvent, removing and dissolving everything.
Well, almost everything… For you see, the NO thing cannot destroy itself.
However, it being the NO thing, it is driven to destroy itself... and this friction was the cause of Creation.
Under its own impetus, the NO thing would ripple, buckle, fold, and, importantly, bubble.
There within the inverted surface of such bubbles came into existence the conditions for something to form.
Here, where the NO thing inverted, the YESBeast was the inevitable result.
Here, the inversion of Blackness…
Became Light!
The path led uphill. As I drifted through the twitching ferns and delicate sap feeders, the voice – sometimes female, sometimes male, sometimes neither – continued to speak.
Listen while you have the ears to hear.
Life was born beneath a mirrored sky. There was no reason to mark Time... there was no injury, no sickness, no suffering, no death. No creature ate another creature there, save for our sisters, and theirs was ecstatic pleasure in their return to their Mothers and the Light!
The milk-like substance that collected on the leaves beaded on the hair of my forearms as I passed by. The plants breathed across me, their exhalations warm and perfumed, while something fluttered past my face and stuck. I turned my head to follow as more particles blew past. Soft, gray particles, like snow. Or ash.
We had no idea that there lay outside the shell of Eden an endless, hostile Void. That the Mirror of the sky turned back something, that the sky was also a defense. Until the Mirror broke. The sky cracked and something... something horrifying...
…Dripped from the hole onto the White Land.
And as I crested the hill, I smelled it. The blinding white above turned pink… and then red.
Beneath me was an endless spread of lake and forest, marred by a deep red glow. The sky had an exit wound. The glorious reflective dome was cracked, distorted by a red hole with a black center. It bled soldiers, streams of descending beings that boiled down to the forest in a black cloud. Wherever they landed, the white trees screamed. They threw their branches around their trunks like defending arms as the black, red and violet horde scythed through their mass.
The First War was not a war. The voice, distinctly feminine now, turned hard and strangely familiar. It was a slaughter.
I saw DOGs among their midst, the terrifying oily demons that incorporated any and all biomass into their forms and turned them into weapons. I saw things that looked like stingrays, and things that looked like shambling mouths with lances for limbs. There was no chance for the gentle trees, for their delicate inhabitants, for any of them. A rippling swathe of primordial life simply vanished, consumed by fire, tooth, and sword.
The First War was not a war. It was a rout. It came with the first star to ever light the Mirror of the Sky. It came when that star fell, screaming, to the White ground.
Never forget that when the Morphord appears, the skies scream.
Some say that it is GOD screaming as He descends, as once the whole of Eden screamed.
Others say it is the Manyshaped Himself screaming. Screaming from the pain of making the journey from the Out to the In. His road is his bloodstream, his vehicle his bones. Some say He must tunnel through his own heart to reach the inner I, and that this is why, when encountered, He is so cruel.
He and his get fell upon the forest of the Mothe
rs... they fell upon the meadows and the glades... and they murdered us.
Beware the Red Star in the Morning… beware the time when the sky screams…
Since this time, they have begun the Third War, a War as old the ManLands which bore you. You will see the Star, HuMan Hound… he comes for you again.
The black engulfed me at the top of the hill. I woke up with a shout, drawing a sharp, sharp breath. But my feet were still not quite touching the ground.
At a table in a burned forest clearing sat a man with no eyes. He was tall, handsome, his long black hair bound in a silky ponytail down his back. He smiled at me, friendly, even warm. His cheekbones were streaked with black ichor that coagulated in his sockets, as empty and smooth as onyx.
“You look hungry,” he said. He had the voice of a conman, the soft Southern twang I associated with television evangelists or fix-it men. “Come sit down Alexi, my old friend. It’s been a long while since we played together.”
Chapter 6
On the table was a chessboard. The squares were black and white, the pieces white and blue on one side, black and violet on the other. He played black, of course.
“What the hell is this?” Even as I spoke, my bare feet settled to the ground, sinking into the soft wood ash that blew in swirling clouds through the skeletons of the trees that surrounded us. They were not the alien forms of the white trees, the trees of Eden. They were pine and fir, spruce and hemlock, the forest plants of the Siberian taiga. Dotted in the remains of the undergrowth were slim hexagonal columns. I recognized them as thunderstones. Sacred monuments to Perun, the Slavic god of storms, fire, fertility… and sacrifice.
“You sure got given a pretty good whack of vampire’s blood, pardner,” my host replied. “Seemed like a good time to catch you before you left. That blood gives the gift of foresight, you know. Leverage it right, and you’d be a rich man.”
I frowned. “I’m not your ‘pardner’. I’m not your anything. I have no idea who you are, or why we’re here. Who are you?”
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