by A. Sparrow
Urszula nodded to me. “I guess, we are off.” She followed after the Old One, her relative subservience startling to me. As the Duster dignitaries exited, souls emerged from the surrounding chambers to converge on Luther.
But before they could reach him, I sidled over and whispered to him. “Hey … um … ready that place you were gonna show me. Well, I’m ready to go.”
He looked at me like a third eye had sprouted on my forehead. “Place?”
“Yeah. You know. That alternative entry? To the Deeps?”
It took a moment for him to realize what I was talking about. “Oh. Of course. Yes. Certainly. And I’d also love to hear more about your trans-realm weaving experiences. But not right now. Things are a little too. Give me a day or so, perhaps.”
“Another day? But … I might not be here.”
“I am sorry, it’s just … there are so many demands on my time.”
Two men came charging up to Luther, jabbering on about some architectural dispute.
Bern, who had been hovering close enough to overhear, sidled up to me. “So, you still plan to go?”
“Well, yeah. If I can get Luther to take me. He said he would.”
“Good luck with that,” said Bern. “He’s completely obsessed with constructing his new empire. Now that he’s modified my cabin beyond recognition, I have half a mind to take my things and relocate a little farther out into the plains. There’s no privacy here, whatsoever. It’s bloody awful.”
I glanced into the front chamber just in time to see Urszula slip through the door.
“Sorry, Bern. Will you excuse me?” I ran through the chamber and into the muddy yard outside the mansion. I grabbed her arm. She swung her around and brought her scepter up against my head. I was an instant from being blown to bits, and if her eyes alone could channel her will, they would have eviscerated me.
“Never! Never, surprise me like that! Understand? Announce yourself next time!”
“I’m sorry. I saw you leaving, and I was afraid I wouldn’t get a chance to … to … uh.”
“I chance to what?” she said, sneering.
“Can I … can I ask a favor?”
“What kind of favor?”
“That spot, where your people entered this world. Can you take me there?”
Her brow crinkled. “What for?”
“I just … I want to see it.”
“There’s nothing to see. The rift is sealed.”
“Well, yeah, but … maybe … it can be unsealed.”
She shook her head. “Don’t waste my time with your stupid thoughts.”
She pulled away, continuing after Yaqob, who had paused at the head of an alley puncturing the outer cluster of residences.
“Stupid? Why is it stupid? I can do things others can’t. Right? So maybe it’s possible. I’m not bragging. It’s just the truth. I’m … I’m a freak.”
“There’s nothing left to unseal,” she said. “The rift is gone. Not a trace remains.”
“Can you … just show me?”
She kept on walking. “I thought Luther said he would take you to his special place down below.”
“Yeah, but … he can’t right now. He’s too busy.”
“Well, so am I. Yaqob and I need to rejoin our patrols.”
Yaqob looked on, stone-faced. “What does the boy want?”
“He wants to chase his girlfriend to the Deeps. And he thinks he can get there through the old rift.”
“That rift is long gone.”
“I explained that. Maybe he thinks he can unseal it.”
“Show him,” said Yaqob, shrugging. “Take him. Show him where it happened. What can it hurt? He has earned this one favor, at least. No? I’ll look after your patrol. You can rejoin us later.” He stuck his fingers in his mouth and blasted a whistle that his mantid could probably hear from miles away.
***
Urszula heeded Yaqob’s request in silence. She clapped for Lalibela to hover down from her solitary patrol overhead and motioned for me to join her on the saddle. She wouldn’t even look at me as we mounted her dragonfly.
I admired those long, many-celled wings, that intricate mesh work of veins. Raindrops beaded and ran off the waxy, transparent membranes. Her thorax began to vibrate, and with a tap of her scepter, Urszula signaled her mount to transfer the energy to her wings.
We rose and wheeled over Luther’s new domain. From up high, it had the fragility and impermanence of a castle made of cards. A strong enough wind could have blown it all away. We leveled off just below the cloud tops.
I much preferred riding dragonflies than mantids. Seraf was built like a tank, but she flew like one, too, constantly struggling to maintain elevation, lurching left and right. She needed to set down onto the ground every few minutes to rest. And God, what a racket she raised with those tattered wing cases! My ears would thrum for a good hour after a long flight.
Lalibela, in contrast, might be less battle worthy, but she hummed like a sports car and handled like one, too, despite the heavy rain and fidgety winds.
We swept wide around the buttes and into the main valley. The scrub lands below had exploded with greenery with the coming of the monsoon. The braided channels we had once crossed on foot were joined as one into a swollen and turbulent sea, brown with sediment.
Low, hanging mists obscured most of Frelsi, but a few towers and walls peeked through this veil. I saw no evidence of any battle damage. Spell craft, no doubt, had allowed for a swift reconstruction. I hoped that Luther wasn’t being too complacent about his defensive positions.
Urszula steered away from the massif and into the Table Lands, which began as a collection of isolated mesas but transitioned into a deeply corrugated landscape etched with ridges and canyons.
Tiers of angular mountains reared out of the chaos in the distance, their summits faceted like crystals. The tallest of them buried their heads in the clouds, revealing their frosty slopes in the occasional shift of wind.
The plant growth here was of a gargantuan scale, not just trees but vines as thick as telephone poles. Blossoms as wide as kiddie pools. Everywhere fluttered giant leaf hoppers and moths. This was clearly prime hunting grounds for the Dusters’ beasts.
As we passed over a group of mantid riders straddling a knife-edged ridge, another squadron of mounted dragonflies swooped down out of the clouds to investigate us. Urszula waved off her fellow Dusters and we continued on deep into the Table Lands.
Urszula steered us towards a cluster of lower, flatter mesas, arranged like cubes of cheese tossed at random onto a platter. Rivers rushed through the deep clefts separating them, clashing and parting without seeming direction or purpose, though clearly the big valley was the only outlet to this watershed.
Lalibela glided down to a blocky mesa that seemed more devoid of greenery and topsoil than the others. It had been scoured clean, exposing greyish stone that stood out like a leprous lesion in this otherwise verdant land.
At the center of the scar was a perfectly concave bowl about a stone’s throw across and deep enough to keep a gang of skateboarders amused. It would have been a pond if not for the deep crack running through the center, draining it into the mess of ravines below.
As we touched down, Urszula twisted around on the saddle.
“This is it. Happy?”
“This is the portal?”
“There is no portal. Not anymore. I told you that before we came. This is where the rift occurred, where the shaft came down.”
“Shaft? What’s this shaft?”
“The rift. The seam between worlds.”
“But it came down? Really? From the sky? But I thought the Deeps were below us … hence … the name.”
“The name is only a metaphor. You should know that physical position is all relative with realms of existence. Up can be down. Down is up. In is out.”
“So then, where are they … these Deeps?”
“Elsewhere,” she said. “Everywhere. It is a separate realm. But ubiquito
us. It connects to this place and other places in spots and seams.”
“So this hole in the rock is … an interface?”
Urszula rolled her eyes. “No. This is just a hole in the rock. It was made by the shaft … the interface when it came. It came and damaged the land and left … leaving behind this … this footprint.”
“So, there’s like no trace of this shaft anymore?”
Urszula sighed. “No. It’s gone! I keep telling you!”
I climbed off the saddle lowered myself into the bowl. It looked like one of those potholes that form in the stone of a riverbed. Its surface was polished, with a glazed crust that seemed to have formed at high heat.
“This shaft. Was it … like a doorway?”
“It was like a rip … a flap between worlds, like someone had taken a sharp knife to a bed sheet. When the Horus collapsed it was left dangling, naked in the sky. Transparent, but it bent the light like a lens. It wasn’t clear what it was, that it would lead to this place or any place for that matter. But some among us remembered the songs about how the Old Ones passed from the Deeps, and some believed that it was a path to the Singularity. When some of the braver and more foolish among us passed through unharmed, we could see that the story of the Old Ones was true. And that is how we escaped into this place. It persisted for nearly an entire cycle before the Horus returned and wrested it back. But by then, thousands of us made it through. And in those days most of the first generation of renegades—the Old Ones—they were still active and alert, although they were already starting to pass into the Long Sleep.”
“So there were two events? This happened twice?”
“Correct.”
“So that means it can happen again.”
“Possibly, but it is rare the Horus is defeated. Only twice in all the ages has it happened. First for Yaqob’s generation—the Old Ones—and then for us new folk. Never since.”
“How long were you down there? In the Deeps?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? In a place like the Deeps, one does not measure time the usual way. Not everyone there cares, but those who do, share songs, and … it was many song cycles. I still keep them in my head, though … they have faded.”
“Why songs? Why not …. sunsets?”
“Because the sun never sets. There is no darkness, just constant light. There are no days in the Deeps. No seasons. Time has no shape without songs.”
I crouched down and ran my hand along the smooth rim of the bowl that had been scooped out of the stone. This was real stone, not just reconfigured roots.
I wondered if Karla was already singing those Duster songs, if she was already a Duster, down to that coarse, gray skin. How else she might be different now? Was she recognizable as the Karla I knew, or had she become something else entirely? It made me wonder how different Urszula had been in life.
“What year did you die?”
“Year?” Urszula stared down at me, her face blank and bored. “I don’t remember. Years mean nothing to me now. That world is too far removed from my existence.”
“But was it before or after … World War II?” I was trying to get a handle on what era she had lived. It might help explain why she acted the way she did. That hardness.
“I … don’t know. But who cares? The only war I care about is with the Frelsians.”
She clapped for Lalibela, who was skimming the vegetated rim of the mesa, diving into flocks of dove-sized gnats that she caught and devoured on the wing.
“So how did you die?” Was that a rude thing to ask a dead person?
She scrunched her face at me like I was an idiot. “How else do you think? The gloom overtook me. I shed my own blood.”
That, of course, was a no-brainer. Suicidal tendencies are what brought most souls to Root. That was the whole basis of the place—to sort the truly hopeless from those who deserved a second chance. But I was more interested in the details.
Lalibela resisted Urszula’s summoning. The poor creature must have starving hungry. She made another swirling pass at a cluster of gnats before turning to obey her mistress.
“Did you have a … a rough life? A bad family?”
“Not at all. I had a comfortable life, and a wonderful family. The gloom can descend on anyone. The bold. The meek. It plays no favorites. It needs no rationale.”
“Well, I had good reason to be gloomy. I lost both of my parents.”
Urszula shrugged. “Not all orphans are as unhappy as you.” She clapped again for Lalibela, who had started to come, but had been distracted by yet another cloud of gnats. “She’s reverting to the wild, again,” said Urszula. “I haven’t been riding her enough.”
“Where did you live, on the other side? What country?”
“Silesia,” she said. “The hills south of Breslau. A lovely place—back then. Fields and forests. Tidy villages. My father was a cooper. He made barrels.” She took a deep breath and looked up into the mountains. “It has been so long since I thought of him. I remember his hands. So thick. Like a bear’s paw. But gentle.” She blinked and looked startled. “I … I remember the year, now. It was nineteen-nineteen.”
Lalibela flew down beside us and proceeded to munch a collection of gnats she had mushed together in her forelegs. Urszula went up to her and took hold of her reins. She stroked the bristles behind her dragonfly’s bulging eyes. She gazed wistfully into the mists.
“I had a friend. My best friend. Liesel.” Urszula’s voice lost its usual edge. She spoke quietly, wistfully. “Loveliest creature I ever knew. We went everywhere together. Talked about anything and everything. Spent every waking minute of every day together. But … her mother caught us … caught me … kissing her. They sent her away. Forever. I never found out where. I passed a letter to her brother, but he refused to bring it to her.”
“I tried to find her. I only wanted to tell her some things I never had the chance to say, to exchange some last words. I understood that we had to be apart. That was how things were then. My world.”
“Is that how you ended up here?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But, even before Liesel, the gloom already had me in its grip. Roots had visited me. They probably would have taken me even if Liesel had never gone away. It was my fate. But knowing Liesel brought … respite. She helped me feel normal … hopeful … for a time. Gave me reason to get up in the morning. Without Liesel, there was nothing to hold it back. It dug in and took complete control.”
“I took my life behind our school, lying in the snow, making snow angels. Bloody ... snow angels. I had cut my wrists. The cold made it easy. I had no reservations at the time, no reason to regret. I was looking forward to the next place. If I had known it would be a place like the Deeps, I might have … I might have reconsidered.”
“So the Reapers got you?”
Urszula nodded. “Quickly. They wasted little time. I got to know nothing of this world above the roots, or even … within the roots.”
A familiar tingle spread through my fingers. I held up my hand to find my thumb and pinkie already mostly gone.
I sighed. “Looks like I’m on my way out.”
Urszula looked alarmed. “Wait! Not yet. I should return you first to the plains. Otherwise, you will be stuck here, when you return.”
“Sorry, I … I can’t help it. It’s taking me.”
She gritted her jaw and grabbed me around my shoulders in a bear hug, as if she could defy the will of a world that wanted me back and soon.
I expected to vanish under her grip, to leave her clutching air. But as she clung to me, a blotchy translucence spread from my flesh to hers. She was fading, too!
Chapter 12: Northbound
I opened my eyes to Ellen clubbing me in the face with a rolled-up magazine, while a naked girl—a lighter-skinned, slighter-framed version of Urszula—stood atop a bench in the waiting area, buck naked, shrieking at the top of her lungs.
“Noooo! What have you done? Send me back!”
“Where the fuck di
d she come from?” said Ellen, cringing.
“She’s … she’s not supposed to be here.”
“You know her?”
I nodded. People stared. Some clicked pictures with their iPhones. Nobody intervened.
Ellen shook her head. “Listen, we gotta go. I waited as long as I could, but the train is due on Track 5 in two minutes.”
“We’re gonna need a ticket for her, too.”
“You’re kidding. She’s coming with us?”
“Well, we can’t just leave her here.”
Ellen sighed. “There’s no time to get a ticket from the counter. We’ll have to buy one on the train.” She shoved a plastic sack into my sacks. “Get her to shut up and put these on. We have to go. Now!”
I peeked inside. It contained a blue and yellow Drexel T-shirt and a pair of matching sweat pants.
Urszula’s cheeks were all inflamed. It was so odd seeing all that color in her face. It took away from her aura of invincibility, making her look quite mortal.
“What is this place? You had no right to bring me here!”
I held out the T-shirt, which was oversized even for me.
“Put this on and we’ll talk okay?”
Noooo! This is not possible!” She screamed some more.
“Urszula! Just put this on!”
She ignored me. She just stood there, shaking on the bench, her face dripping with tears.
I opened up the bottom of the T-shirt and swung it over her head. She fought back, swinging her elbows, but one arm found its way into an arm-hole, and she got the point and wriggled into it. I handed her the sweat pants, which were blue, adorned with yellow dragons.
“Quick. The train’s coming,” said Ellen, heading to the stairs leading down to the platform. She showed me a Wendy’s bag. “I got us a bite. Hope it’s enough.”
A transit officer came running over from a coffee shop, arms swinging loose at his sides, alert eyes tracking left and right, as he assessed the situation, his hand hovering over the canister of pepper spray on his belt.
“Alright. What’s going on here? Why has she got no pants? She tripping?”
“No … she’s, uh … my cousin. She’s off her meds. We’re taking her home.”
“Take your hand from your weapon!” said Urszula, in a growl that was more nasal than intimidating. “Don’t you look at me like that! I’ll pluck your eyeballs.”
“You shut the fuck up and get down off that bench!”