Something else rose within Sabira other than nausea, something she didn’t have a name for. An ever-mounting sensation swelled deep inside her core. The way she experienced her body began to shift. Her own flesh felt peculiar and new. The pitters brew had triggered a rising sensation of energy when she drank it, but what the eon opened up in her felt deeper, stranger, and far more frightening.
After nine pit fights and three battles, Sabira knew the presence of death when it loomed near, as it did now. “Are you . . .” Sabira panted, dizzy. “Did you poison me?”
“Shh. You are safe. You are safe,” Maia said. “We have not poisoned you. Just the opposite. The medicine is purging the poisons from you. Poisons you have carried for a long time.
“When I was younger, for years and years I studied the universe, what things are made of, how they fit together. I wanted to know how life works, how living beings live. Now I search for what these infinite pieces of the universe mean when you put them all together. Like all of us in our own ways, I search for a meaning. What it means to exist and be aware of your existence. That same search led me to this planet, and to you. Just think of all the countless variables that had to align for us both to be here together, now.”
Maia arose, walked over, and picked up the curvy box with the long handle. Every moment of her motion left a visual echo, so that Maia strung a segmented trail of herself across the room. Each echo segment took on a hue of its own, so that an astonishing rainbow of Maia’s movements trailed behind her, filling the room, before each color sprouted wings and flew away into nothing.
Maia sat on the cushion next to Sabira, the box resting in her lap, the long handle grasped in her left hand. Taut strings ran across the front of the box and up its long handle. Hollow echoes bounced out of it with every little adjustment of her position, almost like a drum, but with a more singing resonance.
“I came to realize,” said Maia, “with guidance from the sacrament, that the reality we live in is, in truth, a spectrum of realities, all at once. Each reality with a mystery and meaning of its own. Reality, life, existence as we know it, is both the objective and the subjective. The encoding and the manifestation.
“Take, for instance, music and sound. On one level of reality, sound is no more or less than the vibrations of air. Tone or timbre do not exist, only patterns of motion. But on another level . . .” She brought her hand down across the face of the wooden box. When Maia struck the strings, a chorus sang forth and hung in the air, soft and untouchable as a cloud, bathing Sabira. She felt as though the sounds buoyed her body up and she floated through the air.
“On another level there is music,” Maia continued, picking at the taut strings one by one, letting them sing out long and resonate, each note merging with the one before and after. The melody stretched out and joined with the soft, rattling hiss of the rain striking the dome, as if they were voices of the same song reunited after an ancient separation. Sabira closed her eyes. Nausea gave way to an electrically charged lightness, which gave way to a warm, tingling bliss.
“This is a guitar.” Maia’s fingers plucked cascading notes from its strings. “It is an ancient musical instrument from Tierra. For most people back home, it is too old-fashioned. But I have loved it since the first time I heard one. This has been with me through all my travels, even before I became an Oracle. I was a young student back home when I started playing. Music has always been a part of the Eleusinian mysteries. Some even consider music to be the first mystery.”
The music Maia played captivated Sabira, made her feel dizzy, spinning into herself.
“On one level your body is purging. The medicine sweeps through you, cleanses you. Like the objective truth of sound waves manifesting as the subjective beauty of music, the same is true with the medicine. As the body purges, so too does the heart and the mind. Surrender to the eon, lost sister, and be cleansed. Be counted among the lost no longer.”
Maia’s voice echoed and stretched. Lingering traces of words already uttered and those currently being spoken swam together among a tide of sounds, intermingling with the clean, ringing voices of the strings and the infinite aural horizon of rainfall. Sound painted color across Sabira’s vision, even with eyes closed. Color became form, form became life, and life was a flower burning like the sunset.
Vast tangled vines sprouted from the burning flower in every direction, forming a living lattice-work dome over her. Where each vine crossed another, a new flower bloomed and blazed. In the deep spaces between the vines, a vast swarm of stars blinked in the darkness. Each star was a living eye, seeing her, knowing her.
Sabira blinked her own eyes open and saw Maia still beside her, the guitar singing in her hands, her face a radiant glow. Sabira let her eyes close and again beheld the celestial dome of fire and flowers, stars and eyes. Under the center of the dome stood a diminutive creature with impossibly soft-looking fur and long, inquisitive ears, a tiny wiggling nose, and eyes twinkling like distant suns in the void. A creature from old hens’ tales, a mythic animal that loved to taunt the Aggies and run off with their crops. A zaicha.
Her zaicha.
“How did you get here, sweet zaicha? Did Trickster bring you? You should be back in the Labyrinth.”
No, wait. Surely, by now Zaicha must be . . .
The furry creature only wriggled its nose and cocked its comically long ear. Sabira stood and walked toward it, wanting to feel the fur in her hands and hold the soft, little creature to her breast. The zaicha’s thick hind legs sprung, and it hopped away.
“No, don’t. It’s not safe.”
With every step she took, the zaicha sprung forward, each hop a ringing note in a melody. Sabira followed him out of the warrens and down, down, down, into the tunnels. The ceramic walls were covered in the graffiti of living, breathing light. She followed into the old vaults of bare, dry stone. Echoes lingered here, always fading but never ending. Sharp pains cramped deep in her belly. Her whole body felt tight.
She followed the zaicha down into the pit. White blasts of light on rubble smeared with old blood. Oh Gods, the stench. Blood and urine and feces and glistening hearts piled high into a pyramid of rotting sacrifice. Screams and tears and rage.
Sanctified fury.
Cutting through it, somehow, a flower, petal unfurling from petal. Outlined in light until the light took on a form of its own. The petals and the shapes of light blossomed wider and higher, creating an expansive geometry of possibilities manifested as color as light as shape as gateway as being.
The gateway of light geometries watched her, waiting.
The zaicha perked up his long, furry ears. “Come,” he said, “join us.”
A blue flicker in the edge of her vision. She turned and saw a palukai in the shape of a double-edged spear sticking straight up from the gravel. Sitting atop the palukai, shimmered a blue yarist gem. The weapon that made her the weapon. It thrummed with a furious energy of violent potential. An invitation to host its power, make it her own. Her stomach clenched tight again.
Sabira turned from stick and gem, back to the zaicha. She stepped toward the living gateway, and she remembered. More than remembered. Became again now who she was then.
She was nameless, unseen, but they would see her. Choking the other girl. Her arm tight under the other girl’s chin, eyes bulging. The girl hanging on the other girl’s back, feeling every desperate straining gasp, the final shudders tight against her chest.
No.
Another girl whose face she vaporized, blasted from across the pit with a plasma gun. And the boy, begging, leg shredded. Spearing his chest. The vleez child panicking at her feet. Face melting like slagged metal.
No, no.
The vleez prisoner she mangled and decapitated in the pit, throwing its head into the light. Vleez shippers she impaled while confiscating their vessel.
No, please, please, no.
All of them. All she killed. Now. At once. Every blood spray and frightened
tear. Every final breath and snapped bone. Every scream.
She crawled on her belly. Breast sliced open. Caked with dried blood, red and brown and black. Crawled closer to the geometry of light. Reaching, desperate. Human hands and vleez claws grappled her legs, her arms, her neck. Pulling her away, dragging, suffocating.
A wild bellow erupted from deep beneath the ground. The great blast of sound cracked open the floor, crumbling the bedrock to shards beneath her. Jagged pieces tumbled away into black nothing.
Falling and falling.
Great rolling plains of blue grasses shifting beneath the orange and pink sky. Two suns, one hot and near, another smaller, distant, but still bright.
More bellows. Answered and answered again by more and more. Hundreds more. Thousands. She looked and saw the wild grank herds stretching into the horizon. Wild animals, completely pure, no weapons platforms, no biomech augmentations. Thousands moved as one, bellowing and charging straight for her.
She tried to run, but she couldn’t breathe. Not this air, it felt all wrong in her lungs. Her leg gushed blood. It felt heavy and numb and useless. Nine eyes sizzled through her back like they would burn clear through her torso and out her torn breast. Still she tried to run and still the herd came crashing toward her.
With a deafening, feral chorus, they trampled her. Breaking her. Crushing. Smashing. Killing her. Pounding every remaining bit of her into the churning mud.
A red stain in a vast field of blue.
29.
DEATH WAS NOT as she imagined it to be. No freezing void. No hells. No standing for judgment before the Gates of Heaven.
Death felt, strangely, like much of her life had been. Like an ancient cavern deep below the surface, a mountain of rock between her and the sky, impenetrable blackness, hollow echoes following her every step.
She felt . . . them. In the dark, coming closer. The rank smell of decay preceded their presence. All those humans and vleez, dead by her hands, waiting in the black. She wanted to tell them something—needed to plead with them, as pathetic and useless as it would be—but her throat gripped tight. No words could make it out. Only tears.
They answered with the silence of the dead.
Three synchronous events: the ringing of a chime and its long-fading reverberation, the spark of white fire in the black, the zaicha at her feet.
The furry, little creature stood in his own pool of light, nose wriggling. Ears flopped up and down as it bounced away, illuminating the uneven path over rock and bones. She followed the zaicha through caverns unshaped and unhewn by human hands. By the zaicha’s flickering light, she glimpsed the cavern walls, undulating yet motionless, cold stone yet alive, adorned with paintings of wild, shaggy beasts.
The ghosts reached out for her with long-fingered hands, cold and gray. Urged her to stay in the depths, to remain and weep in the dark with the shadows of the dead. She shivered at their touch, trembled at their anger. Even as she continued forward, their chill lingered on her neck, their pain echoed in the back of her thoughts.
Forever entwined, they whispered. Forever entwined.
The zaicha’s white light shifted to deep oranges and reds. The animal bounced high and twisted in the air. Turned into flame. A yellow torch of fire and smoke in the dark cavern, held forth by an old woman. She led Sabira past moist rock, gleaming with reflected torch-fire, up to the curved lips of the cave mouth.
As they neared the opening, Sabira saw the old woman more clearly. Stooped frame wrapped in faded animal skins. Long braids of black and gray hair, twisted through with stones and small bones, clicking and clanking with each step. They passed out of the tunnel and into the world, Sabira feeling like she was seeing it for the very first time. To the west, a full, silvery moon sank behind the horizon. To the east, the rising sun, golden, bright, and warm. Wisps of fog drifted up from the trees below, trickled up the cliffs all around her, and melted into the deep blue sky. She felt the soft mist on her cheeks, cool and invigorating.
Between moon and sun, a river snaked along a wide, green valley. At its banks, the tribes had gathered and celebrated. They danced around great fire pits to the music of drums and bellowing horns. They danced for the birth of the sun. They danced for the memories of their dead.
They danced to welcome her home.
“The girl, buried,” the crone told her. “The woman, born.”
Sabira fell to her knees, the open valley stretching before her. “And the dead?” she asked, a great flood of tears surging up behind her eyes.
“The dead,” said the crone, “the dead, remember.”
Sabira wept.
“I know. The dead remember,” she sobbed quietly. “I remember. I’m sorry. Oh Gods, oh Gods, I’m sorry. I killed them. I killed them. I’m sorry.”
Sabira reached out. Maia took her in her arms, held her to her breast.
“I’m sorry. I killed them. I’m sorry. I did. I . . .”
Sabira cried and shuddered. Begged forgiveness. Sobbed until she could weep no more, until she felt wrung out, exhausted, unable to even whisper another confession of guilt. All the while, Maia caressed Sabira’s scalp, beaded with cold sweat.
Sabira remembered the embrace of her hen-mother before she had died, shriveled and used up. Remembered, too, the farewell touch of her brood-sister. Brief moments of tenderness echoing through the ambient brutality of her life.
“I cannot offer absolution,” said Maia, “nor redemption. The sacrament cannot change your past. The brew offers a chance for you to choose freedom, now, in this moment. The Theocrats enslaved not just flesh, Sabira. In order to enslave your mind, they first enslaved the story of who you are and where you come from. If you wish to be free, you must free your story. Tonight's purge is only the first step. But this is when the journey begins.”
Sabira lay there for a long while, Maia embracing her to her bosom, before she remembered the fetters no longer bound her wrists and ankles. She could reach up, if she wanted, and throttle her, choke the life from her as she had fantasized just a few days ago. The thought repulsed her.
I don’t want to tell that story anymore. She didn’t know at all what story she wished to create, but she knew it would never be the same now.
The room still displayed the image of the rooftop and dome. It took Sabira a few moments to realize this sky was not the same as the last, deep blue and golden. In this sky, faint light diffused through the cloudy horizon. Soft rain tapped on the dome. She felt drawn to the wet, glistening vines and open air, but in reality, all around her was dry. Isolated.
“I want to go on the balcony,” she said.
Sabira tried to stand, and her head swam with color and motion. The effects of the eon still played with her perceptions. Her legs felt weak and unsteady beneath her. Coraz and Maia lifted her to her feet. She wrapped an arm around each of their shoulders, and they led her out of the room, down the hallway, and into the common room. The lem followed silently behind.
The common room was silent except for the light pattering of rain on the terrace windows and slow, deep breaths of Cal, asleep on the couch. The eeshl slept curled up in a wrinkly ball on his chest. It was the first time she had ever seen the little mine rat without anger and suspicion boiling in his gaze. For a flash, she imagined seeing through his eyes. The splatter of blood on his face. The wet screams of his brood and hen. The blade of the servant’s palukai clattering to the floor instead of forcing him into the altar.
She bent over and whispered in his ear, “I know.”
The three of them walked to the heavy, translucent curtain, and her legs gradually felt stronger. Wanting to rip aside the curtain and stand in the morning rains, she unwrapped her arm from Coraz’s shoulder and reached for the sliding window. Her vision twirled, streaked with geometries of color spinning in and out of existence.
“Just a moment now,” Coraz said. “The brew will make you dizzy still. And you’ll need a mask to go outside.” Ahn held her steady
as Maia affixed the respirator mask to her face, pulled the heavy curtain around them, and slid back the window. They stepped out on the balcony.
The gentle rain was bliss itself, a soothing ecstasy washing over her glyphs, flushing the stale tears from her eyes. She undid her tunic and let it fall to her feet. Rainwater dripped and poured over her, pooled and eddied around her scars, trickled icily down her spine. She swore she could sense every individual plop of rain on her flesh, each a cold, wet, tantalizing kiss.
This must be what Heaven feels like.
To the east, the sun rose bright and hot. Streaks of gold and mauve tinged the horizon. In the open patches of thin, dark clouds, stars faded as the sky transformed from black to purple. The rings encircling the planet sparkled like pink and orange quartz.
Below, the city of Glish fell away before her, its vines and cones gleaming wetly in the dawn’s light. Thick, black columns of smoke drifted up from terraces dotting the hillside. A rank smell of overcooked meat mingled with the scent of morning blooms.
“Good morning, Sabira,” said Gabriel, his full voice unencumbered by a respirator. “It is good to see you free and unbound.” She hadn’t realized he was there on the balcony until he spoke. He came toward her, eyes glittering gold and silver, and embraced her. His wide chest felt firm but comforting against her wet cheek. The urge to melt into his embrace was irresistible. No one, no servant or pillow, had ever held her in such a way. He held her as a free man embracing a free woman beneath the open sky.
His strong hands on her shoulders separated them just enough so he could look into her eyes when he spoke. “I will call you lost sister no longer, Sabira. I see the change in you.”
“I still . . .” The effort of forming words required an unusual amount of focus. “I still don’t really understand what has changed. But I can feel it. I can feel myself. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I fit inside my skin in a new way.”
Maia’s touch on her back felt soothing and electric. “It is fine not to understand. In time you will get closer. But some mysteries will always remain.” The rain straightened her hair into long, onyx ribbons falling over her shoulders.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven: Shattered Gates Volume 1 Boxset Page 19
