by M. R. Carey
I couldn’t lie to him twice. I didn’t even try. “Koli Faceless,” I said.
He give that same smile again. “Yes. Yes, indeed. You did well, Sky, to bring Koli Faceless to me. You brung him in good time too, for I see now he was meant to be the one. Sender provides like he always does. And you was his messenger.”
Sky tucked her head down into her chest and give a kind of a bow. “Praise be to the sender,” she muttered. “And the sent.”
Standing right beside her, Cup clasped her hands together and swung them up and down like she was wrestling with herself. Her warm feelings for the blue man would not be contained. “Praise them!” she said, and her voice was kind of wrenched up out of her throat with the fierceness of her love. “Praise them both, the sender and the sent!”
Senlas seen that, and he smiled.
“Who was sent first, my Cup, my precious goblet?” he asked her.
“The dead god,” says Cup, loud and clear like she was telling back her lessons and was proud of what she knowed.
“Who was sent second?”
“Dandrake.”
“Who was sent last?”
“You. You was!”
“Sent last,” the hand people chanted. “Sent last. Sent last. Sent last.” Sky and Mole and Cup was saying it too, and then the sound carried to the people nearest to us and they picked it up and they passed it on until the whole cave was full of nothing but them two words. Until they became one word.
Senlas lifted up his hands with the fingers spread and the eyes in his palms wide open. Everyone fell silent all at once.
“Sent last,” he said. “And called home soon. This is my altar boy, and he’s got my blessing. His name is Koli. Koli Faceless. Speak it.”
“Koli Faceless,” all them hundreds of people chanted. “Koli Faceless. Koli Faceless. Koli Faceless.”
The sound rolled on and rolled on for a great long time. My head was filled with it, and then my body was too, it seemed like. I sunk down on the ground, the hand woman letting my head slip out of her grip at last.
They picked me up and carried me when they was all done with saying my name. I didn’t see who done it, nor where they took me to. I was in a faint, I think. There was blood in my mouth, though I wasn’t sure where it come from. My splinted leg hurt from the way they was carrying me, but it was like the memory of a pain that used to be.
They set me down in a space that was small and narrow and dark. They went away, and I heard a door shut.
“Well, I’m surprised to see you, Koli,” a quiet voice said. “But not as surprised as I might have been, for they were kind enough to announce you in advance.”
I knowed that voice. I lifted up my head and blinked the dark and the dullness out of my eyes. I could not tell what kind of place I was in, except that the walls was stone and the floor was dirt. It didn’t have no door, I was wrong about that. There was just an iron grating that they had put in place behind me. Some light come in between the bars of it. Not very much.
But enough to see Ursala, sitting a few feet away. There was dried blood crusted on her face, and a lot more of it all down the front of her. One of her eyes was gone.
45
“Messianic,” Ursala said again. “From the word messiah. It’s a kind of religion built around a man or a woman who claims to have been sent down from heaven to save the rest of us from our own sin.”
“But why do they believe him?” I asked. I felt like I already knowed part of the answer. “I guess it’s because he can see what’s inside their minds.”
“No. He can’t,” Ursala said like she was scolding me. “That’s impossible.” She had untied the rope from around my hands and was rubbing the wrists to get some life back into them. “Did you never look at someone’s face and know for sure, just from their expression, that they were telling you a lie? Or know that they were unhappy, say, even though they were trying to hide it?”
“Yeah, I did,” I said. “Of course I did. Lots of times.”
“That’s all he’s doing, Koli. He’s very good at reading people. He tricks you into telling him things, then makes it look as though he’s told you. There’s no magic there. But there is a very active and a very cunning mind. He’s dangerous. He’s also completely mad, but unfortunately that doesn’t help us very much. Lie down now. I want to look at that leg.”
I lay down on my back, and Ursala untied the splint. It wasn’t easy, for we was in a very narrow place like I told you before. It was a kind of a hollow set in the wall of the cave, with an arched roof over it of the same stone that was everywhere else. The space went back about ten strides, but almost half of it was taken up with old timber and rocks and sheets of rusty metal, and one iron pole about as long as I was tall. That didn’t leave much room for the two of us, if we was minded to stand up straight or lie down full.
I stiffened a few times while Ursala was untying Sky’s knots. My leg was all on fire as the feeling come back into it, but she was careful and got the splints off of me without giving me no pain. After that though, she run her hands up and down my leg, pressing in all kinds of places and asking me if it hurt, which now it did. I was hard put to it not to yell out loud when her fingers went into some of them places.
“Well, the good news is there’s nothing broken,” she said when she was done. “I winced when I saw all that swelling, but I think most of it is because you were made to walk on the leg after it was injured. If you just keep it from bearing any weight for a few days, it should start to heal.”
She retied the splint, doing a better job than Sky had done. The ropes had been cutting into my stones before, and now they was not. She sighed. “If I had my diagnostic unit here, I could give you something that would bring the swelling down a lot more quickly.”
“Where is the drudge?” I asked her. “How come he isn’t with you?”
She made a sour face. “I have to put him on recharge every few weeks. It’s because some of the medicines he manufactures have to be kept cold. He has a separate battery for the refrigeration unit, and since that can’t be compromised it sometimes borrows charge from his other systems. When he slows down, I take him offline for a few hours to let him top off his tank.”
I didn’t see what tanks had got to do with anything, but I knowed from what happened with Monono what offline was. Knowing that, it was easy to guess what must of happened. “They catched you when he was asleep,” I said.
“Yes, they did. And I was stupid enough to fight back.” She touched her hand to her cheek where the blood was and where the hollow of her eye was filled up with scab and crust. “There were three of them, so I never had much of a chance.”
“Was there one of them that had a sun and a moon on her face?” I asked.
“Why, yes there was. You met her too?”
I nodded. “Her name’s Sky. Them others that was with her are Cup and Mole. How did she…?” I touched a finger to my eye, instead of saying the words.
“Oh, it wasn’t her who did this,” Ursala said. “I dealt with her first, since she was obviously the biggest threat. I had a hand-stunner – a little one-shot weapon that fitted into my palm. I let her get close to me, then gave her a full charge on the side of the head and put her down. The big lummox – the man that was with her, I mean – was too scared to close with me after that. I needed to get to the drudge and I was working my way towards it, shooing him out of my way by pretending the stunner had another shot in it.
“But I’d forgotten the little girl. She jumped up on my back and dug her fingers into my eyes. Then while I was wrestling with her, the lummox found his courage again. So here I am. I don’t even know if they took the drudge. I’m guessing they didn’t. They would have had to send out another team with ropes and harness to drag it back.”
“Ursala,” I said, “they’re shunned men. They’re like to eat us if we don’t get out.”
She looked at me for a long time. “That’s one possibility,” she said. “There are others.”
<
br /> She’d been there for three days already, she told me. Three days that she knowed of anyway. Mole had brained her good when they took her, so she was not awake when she come. She had waked up lying here, in the place behind the grating, and she didn’t know how long she might of been there.
Then they brung her in front of Senlas, and he asked her a lot of questions the same as he asked me. Was she pure from this sin, and that sin, and on and on, until in the end he said that she would do if he couldn’t get no better.
“Do for what though?” I asked her.
“To serve at his altar in some capacity that’s less than clear.”
“What’s his altar anyway?”
“Oh, you didn’t see it? I’ll show you.” She helped me up on my feet and brung me across to the grating. There was two men that was standing just on the other side of it, that I guess was set to watch us. They looked round as we come up close, but they didn’t say nothing or try to stop us looking.
The first thing I seen was that big thing that was a house and a wagon too. It was a way off, up against the wall of the cave, and I was seeing it from the other side than I seen before. It was bigger than I thought, and it had got another door set right at the end of it as well as the two doors that was open in the side. The end of it was the place where it was most clearly tech, for there was metal rods and bars sticking out of it there as well as the signs that was messages in the old times.
Then I seen the curtains that was over Senlas’s bed, but I couldn’t see the bed or him in it. We was off behind in the darker place beyond where the last of the lanterns was set. So when I looked the other way, further into the cave, I couldn’t see nothing at all but black.
Well, I could see one thing. There was a kind of a raised-up space there that reminded me somewhat of the tabernac in Mythen Rood. It wasn’t built from wood though. It was stone piled on stone, not in a heap but done with care so the stones was level. And then on top of the stones there was a bonfire, like we used to make on the Salt Feast out of uncut wood and green branches – the only thing green wood ever was good for.
Around the platform, in a loose kind of a pile, there was black sticks that I thought at first was some sort of kindling. Then I seen the skulls in among them, and I knowed they was bones of people that had been burned there.
If that platform was the altar, then I guess they was all Senlas’s altar boys before that name come down to me.
46
We slept, and then we woke.
We was fed twice, but one time it was a kind of a stew with meat in it, which I didn’t touch in case the meat was from people that was took in the forest the same way we was. The other time was bread, and I et every scrap they give me.
After that second meal, I was bored with just sitting and set about to explore the little narrow space we had been put in. It was well I did, for I found something there that lifted my spirits. We was right up against the side of the great cave, and though there was not anything there like a window or a door, high above us there was a kind of a channel that had been sunk through the stone when it first was built, maybe to let in light or air or else for some other reason I could not guess at now. It was very narrow, and it went up on a shallow angle. I had good hope the sun might look down through it either just after it come up or just before it lay down again. If it did, I could set the DreamSleeve underneath it and give it some power.
I sit and watched awhile, trying to guess what time of day it was in the outside and whether it was clear enough out there for the sun to shine down through the hole. Before that happened though, two of the hand women and two of the hand men come and took me out of our prison, lifting the grating away to do it. I seen as I come through it that the grating was set in metal grooves that was bolted to the stone somehow. It wasn’t locked or nothing, but you couldn’t knock the grating down or slide it away when it was set in place. You had got to raise it up, and you needed to be real strong to do it. It took the four hand people and the two men that had been watching us, working all together, to lift it off.
I thought the hand people was going to put me up on that bonfire, and I was so scared I couldn’t hardly walk. But they took me the other way, towards the wagon-house and then further on again. I seen as we went by the wagon-house that it was set on them long metal bands that we followed when we come into the cave. It was like the wheels was balanced right on top of the metal bands somehow.
There was lots of people coming and going there. I thought at first they was going in and out of the wagon-house, but they wasn’t. They was going to a big tub that was kind of like the water tanks we had in Mythen Rood to hold the rain when it come so it could be boiled and sieved and, by and by, used for drinking. Maybe it was water, for they all brung cups and bowls to it, dipped them in and brung them away again, balancing them most careful. I looked for my brother in among them, but I wasn’t sure I would even know him after all the years that had passed since he was took. If Jud was here, he would have a new name now, and marks on his face to match them. We would be strangers, each to other.
The hand people took me to the bed where Senlas was lying when I first seen him. He was lying there again now, on his back with all of his hundreds of eyes staring up at the hanging lanterns and the dark between them.
“Is that my altar boy?” he said when they brung me to him.
“It’s your altar boy, Senlas,” one of the hand women said. “Come at your command.”
“That’s good. That’s meet. Kneel by me, altar boy, kneel by me here.”
I did not want to do it. I couldn’t anyway, no more than I could the last time, for my leg was splinted up like before. The best I could do was to go on one knee and stick the other leg out straight. The hand men stood by with their spears all pointed at me, I guess in case I got up or run away, or maybe in case I tried to do some harm to Senlas. The hand women went and stood all in a line between us and the rest of the cave.
Senlas set his hand on the top of my head. He smiled like he was sitting on a secret, as they say, which was not a cheering thing to look at. Now that I was this close to him, I seen he was older than I thought at first. His skin was all covered over in close-set wrinkles, like ripples on water when the smallest breath of wind hits it. The eyes that was drawed on his body was not all the same. Some of them looked so real you was waiting to see them blink, but others was kind of botched and not so good.
None of this, I got to say, made him any less frightening to me. I kneeled there, with his hand on me, and my heart bounced against my ribs like a drunk man hammering on a door.
“Koli,” Senlas says. And then nothing for a while. And then he said it again. “Koli. Koli Faceless.”
“Koli Faceless,” the hand men all muttered. But this time, the rest of the people in the cave didn’t take it up. I guess Senlas pitched his voice too low for them to hear. I couldn’t see them, for my back was to them, but the sound of all their moving and talking and the echoes of it was like a curtain that was hanging over and all round us.
“Koli Faceless, do you know about the world that was lost?” Senlas says to me.
“I heard stories about it,” I said.
“Call me Senlas, or holy one. You got to show me reverence, Koli, is what it is.”
“I heard stories, Senlas.”
“Tell me what you heard then, and I’ll tell you where you’re right and where you’re wrong. It matters to me that you know, for your life’s bound up with it now. All your life, and all your death, and the narrow strand you walk in between them, that’s holy in its own self.”
I did not like the sound of that at all. It set my mind all on its edge. I babbled out some nonsense, I don’t remember what. Mostly that men and women was giants back then, and tech was everywhere, so they could make the world be what they wanted it to be.
“That’s just exactly how it was,” Senlas said. “I was there, Koli. I was one of them that lived in that time, and knowed that blessing.”
“I…
I thought it was a long time ago though,” I said.
“Oh, it was a terrible long time ago. I lived a hundred lifetimes since then. A hundred lifetimes for an ordinary man, I mean. It’s different for me. Death can’t claim me, Koli. Death doesn’t even know who I am, nor never will. Him that sent me, he watches over me, and he will not ever let the grave swallow me up.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I just nodded, which seemed to do well enough. Leastways, Senlas never stopped smiling.
“I’m going to tell you a secret about the old world, Koli,” he said. “It’s hard to understand, and it may not make no sense to you at first. But hold it in your mind and let it take root there, because it’s important. It’s the most important thing there is.”
Once again, I didn’t give no answer, not having none that I thought would serve. Senlas pressed his hand down harder on the top of my head, like he was trying to drive the truth of what he was saying right into me.
“The old world didn’t end, Koli. We say it was lost, and so it was. Lost to us, that is. No, it didn’t end. It was just locked away from them of human kind. They wasn’t worthy, so the one who give us that paradise in the first place, he up and took it back again. He give it to the angels, that was better deserving of it.
“But then he decided to give the human kind one more chance. He already give them two. The first was the dead god, who they killed on account of they was afraid of what he told. The second was Dandrake, that they worshipped but only part-way understood and in the end betrayed.
“And the third is me. What’s more, there ain’t nobody after me. I’m only come to collect up them that’s able to believe. They’ll be turned into angels and live with angels, for aye and ever. The rest will be left to rot. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Koli Faceless?”