by A. Sparrow
“Cowards,” said Brian, picking himself up out of the dust from where he had dived. “Didn’t have the balls to do it in range of Olivier’s mana.”
I nodded towards the Seraph’s remains. “So is he the one who—?”
“Sure did. Knocked him right out of the sky. He took a bad hit, though.”
“Is he okay?”
“Still kicking … so to speak. Missing a few more parts, though.”
“Dang. I missed quite a show.”
“Missed. Weren’t you—?”
“Nah. I went back … to Vermont … er … New Hampshire. Just got back a little while ago.”
“New Hampshire, really? Fuck, I’m jealous.”
“What happened to the Protectors? Was this all Olivier’s doing?”
“Mr. Olivier had his hands full with the Seraphs. But it let us kick some ass and then some. Helped to have the cavalry come. Reserves saw what was up and came to help. Good thing.”
“James?”
Lady An spotted me and came bustling over. One of her arms hung limp. It wobbled disconcertingly as she walked, flexing in places where there should have been no joints. She leaned into me and gave me a light hug. “I thought you had gone.”
“Well … that was the plan,” I admitted.
Those who had evacuated the hillock returned now to gather the remains of the fallen, their bodies ravaged and still, devoid of souls. Seemed unfair, to be forced to undergo a second death. As if one were not enough to endure.
And these victims were not merely dead, they were shredded, ripped open, decapitated and eviscerated. There wasn’t much left of them to contain a soul anymore. I guess that was the point.
One body being dragged back, I was shocked to see, was Taro. His head trailed behind as if tethered, attached to his torso by only a twisted strand of skin. The rest of his body had been shattered and torn. Brian stood right next to me, certainly aware, but he never once glanced at his friend.
“He’s in another place now,” Lady An whispered, patting Brian with her one good arm. “Can’t say it’s any better, but I’m fairly sure it’s different.”
One of the corpses was set apart from the rest, propped on a fancy stretcher-like contraption even though the man looked well beyond saving. He was armless, legless, missing everything in fact, from his pelvis on down. All that he had left was a head and a ribcage. The corpse twisted around and looked at me.
“Figures, the deserter would get away without a scratch.” It was Olivier.
“Please don’t call him that,” said Lady An. “He was never bound to us. I’m sure he had his reasons for leaving … and he’s not exactly unscathed.”
I couldn’t help but gawk with horror at Olivier’s injuries. He looked worse off than some of the dead. It hadn’t affected his swagger one bit. He shouted orders and insults to some of the volunteers searching the rubble.
Lady An sighed. “Be nice,” she said. “They’re doing their best.”
“What are they looking for?” I whispered.
“His egg, he calls it. He insists we stay until we find it.”
“And he ain’t coming back to Tiamat with us,” said Brian. “He refuses.”
“What’s he gonna do? Rebuild?”
“No point in that,” said Lady An, lowering her voice. “There isn’t enough left of him to persist for very long in this realm. His situation is precarious and he realizes it. He wants to meet the Horus. But not without this egg thing of his. So we’re honoring his wish. And then we’ll then return to Tiamat to lick our wounds. You’re welcome to join us.”
“No thanks. I need to find Karla … and quick.”
“I figured as much,” said Lady An. “Since you’re interests seem to have converged, I suggest you accompany Olivier. We’ll provide an escort, of course.”
Olivier overhearing, turned to me and grinned. “Glad to have the company. As long as you’re aware of the risks. Because this is my last hurrah. I want the Horus to take me. I once wished to destroy it, but no longer. I wish to learn what is on the other side.” He chuckled. “Look at me. I never thought I would become one of the fools who chase it.”
“I don’t care about any risks,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the oily exudate creeping out of Olivier’s skin.
“Fatalism! Now, that’s the spirit!”
“What’s that stuff all over you?”
Olivier shuddered like a dog shaking its fur and the dark material seeped back in. “What you see is the substance of our souls. The same resides in you, usually compressed and obscured by our flesh. But there is little mooring left of me. Another reason why it is time to move on.” A lobe of darkness was already oozing back out of his shoulder.
“Why is it black?”
“No reflection on my character. Simply the nature of all souls. You’re all just as black as me inside, I assure you.”
A cry rang out. A bunch of volunteers rush over to a debris field strewn with the remains of Olivier’s fortifications. A creature was crawling across the rubble, towards us. It looked like a cross between a watermelon and a legless armadillo. It used its scales for locomotion, reaching and scraping its way along the hillside.
Brian leveled his staff at the creature, ready to blast it.
“Put that damned stick away you fool! This is the egg we’ve been looking for. My precious repository.”
“Of … what?”
“You might call them spells. Liberated fragments of id. Ego. Willpower. Whatever you want to call them. It is an infinite resource, the human will. Endlessly generated and regenerating. When you accumulate enough bits … you can fit an enormous amount in a very small space … and when you do, you have something very powerful. How else does one knock a Seraph out of the sky?” He winked and grinned. “Alright Miss An, load it up and I’m ready to go.”
Brian and Lady An looked at each other.
“Brian, you’re sure you want to do this?”
Brian kicked at the ground. “Yeah. Whatever.”
Lady An looked to me. “He’s going to need some help carrying the palanquin. Are you … able? And willing? We can’t have you slinking off again, you understand?”
“I didn’t … I mean—”
“And no disappearing.”
“That, I can’t promise. I don’t control that.”
“You don’t?”
“No. If I had my druthers I never would have went back. Honest.”
“Do your best, is all I ask.”
They all looked at me expectantly. Did they really think I was going to say no?
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
Chapter 41: Pilgrims
From our original host of fifteen volunteers, only ten souls remained. Of the survivors, only six remained capable of transporting themselves back to Tiamat. Thus, Lady An solicited volunteers from the reserve group that had suffered the least damage in the fighting. It was a much smaller group this time.
She led the stalwart group of seven to where Brian sat chatting with me and Olivier. Olivier had managed to dampen the oscillations of his dark material so that it stayed within its bounds, showing its shadowy fringes only occasionally.
“Here is your escort,” she said. “They will get you in close. Once you reach the horde, though, you’re on your own. They’ll wait for you, Brian but I don’t want any in the horde to see them. Fanatics can be dangerous.”
“Appreciate it, ma’am. With two adepts along, I’m not so worried.”
“Yes. You should be fine,” she said, although her face belied her worry. “I don’t expect much trouble from Protectors. When we routed them, they mostly fled in the other direction.”
We rose up and lifted the open palanquin, basically a tray with handles. It wasn’t heavy at all. Olivier retained only a third at most of his original body mass. Not that we couldn’t have carried his full weight without issue. Muscle fatigue simply wasn’t a factor with these bodies. There were limits to strength, but not endurance. We could have
carried an intact Olivier and his brother to kingdom come.
“Take care now,” said Lady An. “And Brian … I want to emphasize … I’ve instructed the escort to wait for you to re-emerge from the horde. Make sure you link up with them. I don’t want you traveling alone.”
“Will do, ma’am.”
“And James … will we see you again? In this realm?”
“I expect not, ma’am.”
“Then Godspeed you, for whatever that’s worth.”
***
It took a while to find our rhythm. Brian had longer legs and a bouncier gait. But once we hit our stride, we covered ground quickly across the back side of the plateau. Our escort shadowed us, keeping about a hundred yards behind our left flank to perhaps divert some of the attention we might have attracted had we traveled together. That was the idea, anyhow.
We had the hardest time keeping Olivier upright. He kept sliding down and flopping over on his face. He tried his best to help prevent that by shifting his weight and wriggling back up, but he didn’t have much to work with anymore. There was only so much he could do with two stubs for arms.
His egg, however, had no trouble hanging on. It shifted its shape, becoming one with the palanquin, sinking hooks into the porous ceramic. It served its master as backrest and restraint, and once it managed to wrap an amoeboid appendage or two around Olivier’s chest to stabilize his ride.
I couldn’t look at that creature without thinking about my Billy. I wondered how much the shape of these ‘familiars’ had to do with one’s personality. I sure as hell couldn’t imagine conjuring something abstract and alien as this ‘egg.’ Cute bugs and fuzzy creatures were more my style.
Brian walked in front, his eyes constantly on the terrain ahead or the sky. As a consequence he kept stepping into crevices or stumbled over ledges. One stumble nearly sent Olivier tumbling off the palanquin. His precious egg thrust out a lobe to keep him on the platform but he ended up wheeling around, facing back.
He looked me in the eye, completely unfazed, as if he had intended to face me.
“So how is it you came to know my friend Arthur?”
“Same as you, I guess. I met him in Root.”
He crinkled his eyes. “Odd. You don’t seem his type. He likes his boyfriends more muscle-bound.”
“Oh. God no! I wasn’t his boyfriend. It wasn’t anything like that. I knew his grand-daughter. I mean, I didn’t even know they were related at the time. But—”
“Grand-daughter? You mean that man sired children?”
“Apparently. Though his son … Karla’s dad … he’s kind of screwy in the head. He’s a Sedevacantist.”
“Is it any wonder?”
“But I met Luther … Arthur … in real life. He was just an old man in a wheelchair. Hard to believe it was the same person.”
“In … real … life?” He cocked one eye at me.
“Yeah. In Switzerland.”
“What makes you think things are any more real there than here?”
“I don’t know. The Flesh and blood for one thing. Not this mummified crap we have for bodies here. There’s a reason it’s called life, right? I mean, we only get one.”
“Do we? Seems to me these Seraphim have gone back for seconds, no? They seem pretty lively to me.”
He had a point. The Seraph had bled and had needed that bubble of air for life support.
“I was in France at the time and would have looked up Arthur myself had I not been so ill. My Parkinson’s made it impossible for me to travel. Nasty disease. I don’t know how or why I hung on as long as I did.”
“So you’re … dead?”
“Quite.”
“Suicide?”
“Oh no. That would have been the easy way to get here, I suppose. But I came here, I suspect, the same way you did, through the Core. I was pink like you, when I arrived. Hunted down relentlessly until I passed away on the other side. That’s what turned me gray. I suspect the same will happen to you once you’re here long enough. There’s no going back.”
“Actually—”
“Stop! It is a hopeless, pointless pursuit. I know. I have explored every avenue, every wrinkle, every possibility. You will only drive yourself insane with hope.”
“But I go back and forth all the time. Others … millions of souls … returned to the Liminality from here.”
Olivier looked at me as if I were delusional. “Yes, I am aware of these legends.”
“They’re not legends. They really happened. Have you ever heard of the Dusters? They came from here. They were rebels. Infidels.”
“I don’t see how that is possible,” said Olivier. “The realms of the afterlands feed into each other like a ratchet. One flows into the next through a series on one way transitions. There’s no going back.”
“But that’s not true. Like I said, I go back and forth.”
“Because you are alive.”
“But I brought a girl … a Duster named Urszula … back to life.”
“She must have still been alive as well. Oscillating.”
“She wasn’t. I mean, she is now, but she’d been dead over a hundred years.”
Olivier’s face pinched with annoyance. “Denial is only natural. Part of the cycle of mourning.”
I sighed and kept mum. Let him be stubborn. I didn’t need to pick an argument.
“I know the legends,” said Olivier. “Those that tell of a brilliant shaft of light that lies within the center of the Horus. Seems much too convenient to me. Of course the Hashmallim would want their sheep to believe that crap. What better way to keep them motivated?”
I returned a weak smile. If he insisted on being skeptical, so be it. I didn’t intend to follow him down the rat hole. I changed the subject. “So how did you manage to find your way here?”
He shrugged. “I was an explorer from the moment I left my pod. Dodging Reapers. Cataloging every cavern and lake. Finding the portal was simply a matter of deduction. The Core is where the Reapers go to evacuate their bowels … and release the dark material … souls … contained within. I figured it had to be a portal to another place. I took the risk that it would be someplace tolerable and preferable to Root. And I was correct.”
“Tolerable? Maybe. Preferable? I don’t think so.”
Olivier looked a bit pensive. “Well, remember. Back then all we knew of Root were the tunnels. I had no idea there was anything above the surface. I didn’t even know there was a surface. And I still find that … hard to believe.”
There was a commotion ahead. A skirmish had broken out near the far rim of the plateau. Our escort had reached it before us and flushed a small group of Protectors who had retreated there. No Hashmallim seemed to accompany them.
“Hypocrites,” said Olivier. “They profess to guide these flocks into the glory that is the Horus. But I suspect they only do it to delay their own demise.”
The Horus remained fixed in place on the next plateau, beyond a rumpled depression too shallow to be called a valley. Our proximity the revealed intricate details of its brown vortices and feeder bands. Up close, the thing looked solid, more a whirling mountain than some gathering of clouds and dust. For the first time, I could hear its voice, a blend of thunder and cat screech with something muffled in the mid-ranges that sounded almost like congregation praying in unison.
As we approached the waiting escort, some of them began to sing. It was a new song. The cycle had moved on. Brian joined in.
“Stop that bloody awful singing!” said Olivier, squeezing his eyes shut. “If only I had fingers I would plug my ears.”
“S-sorry,” said Brian. “It’s Meadowsong … just starting.”
“Well don’t do it around me. It assaults my sensibilities. I never could stand that wandering microtonal pap.”
Our escort let us pass but remained at the rim to watch over our descent. The Protectors they had flushed fled for cover towards a rugged patch of fells that sprouted like warts from the otherwise smooth pla
in.
We made our way down through a notch in the shattered rim, descending a gentle slope towards a horde much larger than any other I had seen outside the Singularity.
Each horde had a distinctive girth and density corresponding to the abundance and fanaticism of its followers. This shape was its signature. The crowd before us was front-loaded, with an eager majority bulging out the vanguard, trailed by a sparse and ragged tail of stragglers. It was this tail, unfortunately or fortunately, where I hoped to find Karla.
Naturally, they were turning towards the Horus, to where it perched, churning over a dune-rich plateau, turning the vast deposits of sand collected there into extra vortices that bolstered its width, grinding its main vortex into the bedrock like a gargantuan drill press.
The denser mob at the head now marched at right angles to the tail, the crippled and less hopeful less responsive to the latest changes in the trajectory of the Horus. Not that it mattered, from what I had seen. Chance had as big a part as human will in determining who got to converge with it, not to mention the discretion of the Horus and its masters.
“Look at that thing lurk,” said Olivier. “Teasing, daring them to come close before it darts away. The beast is almost coy, playful … cruel in its whims. I wonder if it senses me coming. Is that why it hesitates? Is it sensitive enough to detect the identity of a single human soul? Or does it respond to the collective consciousness?”
I wasn’t paying much attention to Olivier. I was studying the mob, trying to remember where exactly I had seen Karla. She was certainly in the tail, but how far back?
A bright spot appeared in the sky alongside the dark columns of the Horus. And then another appeared, and then a cluster of five more. Seven in total, they swung around the Horus and crossed over the depression.
“Something’s going on,” I said.
“Out to revenge their fallen friend, I imagine.”
“Crap. Any chance Lady An and her gang made it back to Tiamat by now?”
“Doubtful,” said Olivier.
“Crap!”
“Guys, uh … this is about as far as I’m wanting to go,” said Brian, with a bit of quaver in his voice.
“Please. Just a little closer,” said Olivier. “I promise you have nothing to worry about. The storm is not even moving at the moment. And no one will bother us. I guarantee.”
“I’ll take you into the main flow but I’m sorry, that’s as far as I go,” said Brian.