by M F Sullivan
Knowledge was a tempting thing. Knowledge had been Cassandra’s undoing. Though she strove to forget, Dominia was plagued by the six months of increasingly erratic behavior that crescendoed in the death of her wife. This had all begun during the winter of 1996, during Lavinia’s sixty-sixth Feast Night—a commemoration of the night she awakened at the physical age of twenty-four, rather than the anniversary of her birth, as it was explained to inquiring children. The Governess and her wife had flown into Europa to visit for the first time in ages.
Dominia had thought it all a perfectly lovely time while it happened. Though she was not a party person, even she admitted the fete was grand. Her sister turned ninety that night, all years counted. Therefore, the gala had been a most important and busy occasion, populated by barons, the European governors, journalists, judges and barristers, military men and women. All of them were there with their adorable, spit-shined children, half of whom looked miserable and terrified as one might expect, and half of whom—blossoming sociopaths handpicked for their “charm”—circled a punch bowl kept cold by a few cheerful frozen eyeballs. This latter group required frequent interception by servants, lest their grubby fingers muddle dirt into the pomegranate and blood of the punch. Cassandra studied the former class of frightened squibs with a half-suppressed sigh, and leaned her artfully decorated head against her wife’s besuited shoulder.
Dominia laughed. “You spent an hour on your makeup and hair. Are you going to mess it all up?”
Cassandra’s eyes, lashes tinted with glittering powder and lids more colorful than any parrot, lifted toward Dominia and warmed the Governess’s soul. “I like the way it looks after you’ve been kissing me.”
Oh! Her heart. She kissed her mouth, that chin, the corners of those lips. The taste of makeup sat on her tongue even still, the powder-soft clay recalling a far-off childhood, a mother applying makeup at a mirror, a time of peaceful stasis and safety existing in a separate dimension from all of this. Endless. Dominia would so often be inclined to leave after touching that soft mouth—Cassandra’s safe, reassuring lips—just one time. That night, at Lavinia’s party, she came near to such an abrupt exit. If only she had! If only she had…but she hadn’t. The Hierophant had found them. When Dominia lifted her head, there he was with his warmest smile, having emerged from the profusion of people.
“The most beautiful couple this family has ever produced.” Their Father bent to kiss both their cheeks, Cassandra more accepting and smiling to see him than Dominia, who stiffly presented her cheekbone like a succumbing cat. As she stared out into the crowd, she located Lavinia, who greeted people in the company of the somber Lamb with her blonde hair in elaborate ringlets and white ribbons. Her dress for the night was a furling, white-and-azure assortment of petticoats; the Princess looked more like a woman from the Southern United Front in ancient BL times than European royalty. Not that it wasn’t charming, and not Lavinia didn’t obviously love every second of the silly dress.
“Livy looks like she’s having a nice time,” said Dominia. The pleased Hierophant placed a hand upon Cassandra’s shoulder while he watched the scene.
“I certainly hope so! We’ve put hours of preparation into this party. You wouldn’t believe what trouble we went to, acquiring the centerpiece of this gala!”
The banquet table was decorated with quite a statement-making centerpiece, though why it was such trouble to acquire, Dominia was not sure. A delicate arm had been arranged to hold a quail-egg diamond and a slew of other stones, the slender wrist emerging like one of many exotic flowers that spilled around the offering to the guest of honor. Amid all the floral sprays, sumptuous fruit avalanches, and gaudy cakes, the delicate “centerpiece” was easy to miss. “Was it so hard to get here in Elsinore, of all places? The butchers across North America are fewer and farther between, but they always have plenty of whatever cut I want. I’d think your shops overflow, Father.”
“The perfect pair of arms is impossible to find among humans. How we had to search!” Shaking his head, the Hierophant added, “But, nothing is too good for my girls. And see that smile?” Lavinia noticed her sisters and, beaming, sprang through the crowd.
“Her Father’s smile, no matter whose she was to start.” The Hierophant said this with a broad smile of his own before releasing Cassandra.
Perhaps it was only in memory she recognized, while turning her head, the way her wife’s face fell. She certainly didn’t notice it then, because Lavinia was upon Dominia for a hug, and all was forgotten by the Governess amid the girl’s babbling insistence they come and see the mare Lavinia had been allowed to ride into the ballroom—hadn’t she a lovely mane! Dominia agreed, but the three-hundred-something-year-old curmudgeon in her felt a noose’s tension every time the shod equine brought its metal-lined hooves down upon the lovely marble floor. The floor, the floor!
The floor.
Dominia remembered she was remembering when she remembered the floor, because then she remembered the magician urging her to remember the floor, and then she remembered her body and found herself standing at a concrete fountain amid short weeds. Before her, Valentinian punctuated something with the phrase, “You know what I mean?”
Her mouth open, she glanced, helpless, at Lazarus. She looked, too, at the black sun blazing overhead, and sensed the day had ticked away much of its time. “I’m sorry—” She laughed at herself and then, unable to help the terror contorting the edges of her lips, looked between them. “How did we get here?”
“Oh my God.” Valentinian slapped himself on the forehead. “Were you seriously not listening?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. How far have we walked? Please.” She grasped Lazarus’s arm, and he, usual inscrutable expression softening, held her hand. “I’m so sorry. I got lost in thought.”
“Explains why it’s closer,” said Valentinian, rubbing the bridge of his nose, then stopping her from turning around with a quick, “No! Trust me. It’ll be worse if you see how close it is.”
“That’s not going to help.” With sudden patience, Lazarus looked deep into Dominia’s good eye. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I remember Valentinian arriving. The Hierophant…he’s all I remember. Then I started thinking and I got caught up and I remembered the floor, finally.”
Fingers working over his temples, the magician perched upon the chipped edge of the fountain, which emitted, from the mouths of alternating cherubs and fish, eight streams of glittering water. “We’ve walked half a day already. We just spent an hour explaining the operations of Fortune to you.”
“I’m so sorry.” All she managed was a fluster of apologies, embarrassed to have missed a cosmic lecture for which most mortals might have killed. “I didn’t even realize we were walking. It was like I fell asleep.”
“You’re already asleep here.” Lazarus released her; she seemed steadier, despite her alarm. “The problem is the same as the benefit: you’re dreaming. Your attention got caught up in another dream. Reality is malleable for the observer in a place like this. Speaking of, magician.”
The mystic extended his hand expectantly, and the sighing magus slapped the open palm. As his hand bounced up, a clay sphere manifested between them: a cup with a circular lid that Lazarus unscrewed with care. As he filled it from the nearest fish, Dominia looked around and, tinted by the alarming notion she dreamed, began to see the landscape in an even more menacing light.
Perhaps it was the effect of that landscape’s new feature. Solitary amid a desert of nothing, the sole source of water, the only sign of life they’d seen in this disorienting place with that thing so close, the fountain was no comfort to look upon. It was a man-made fountain; they had seen no people. No one she knew had created the landscape. Who, or what, had made the fountain? She dared not think on it in so unanchored a place as this.
“If I’m dreaming”—her heart pounded in her ears as she sat to take Valentinian’s hands—“can’t you tell me how to wake up?”
“Please, Valentinian. Tell me, just so I know.”
“If you know, you might try it.”
“What would be wrong with that? Couldn’t I come back?” Her eye leapt between the men, Lazarus no longer looking at her but studying the cup. “That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you need training to come back and forth reliably, and to find your way around. At least, you have to come in and out a few times on your own to experiment a little, gauge distances. You could awaken in the middle of some trap, or at a bad time and place. And it’s not possible to get back here when you’re panicking, or when it’s night—not without some creativity.”
“Who said anything about me being panicked? Me, being panicked—can you imagine! Do you know who I am?”
“Buddy,” said the magician, “your hands are shaking.”
Gritting her teeth, Dominia released her grip and shot from her seat. “Fine. Yes, I’m afraid! Nobody tells me a thing, and when they do, it’s conveniently while I’m getting wrapped up in memories of—the past.” A sheen of tears glossed the General’s eye; she covered it while bowing her head. “I’m afraid because I have no idea where I am. I have no control or knowledge of the situation. I’ve lost my life and my Family, and I mean more than one family. I’ve been in accidents. I watched my wife kill herself.” The sentence, which she had never said out loud in quite so many words, solidified the event in a way that curled her lips back from her teeth like wilting flower petals. She sobbed, and because Valentinian stood to put his hand upon her shoulder, she stepped away. “I’ve been a prisoner of war! My own Father…my Father. I’m more afraid of him than I am of anything in the world. But I’ve never—never been afraid like this. That was all on Earth. This—I still don’t understand what this place is. What is it? Where are we?”
“New people always insist a thing has to have a name before they understand it. Call it what you want.” Lazarus screwed the lid upon the cup. “It’s not hell, but it’s not exactly heaven, either. Valentinian called it ‘Nirvana,’ but it’s more like the Bardos. Catholics and martyrs call it ‘purgatory,’ science calls it something else. I like to think of it as similar to the Wyrd.”
“Like the Norse fates,” asked Dominia, hyperconscious of her eye patch while Valentinian nodded and resumed his forgotten lecture.
“In short—to redescribe to you what I’ve been describing—this place is a web of probability in addition to space and time. We are experiencing consciousness from a wave form instead of a particle form, and when we perceive everything else to also be information interpreted as waves, reality is malleable.”
“I don’t see waves, or anything except for our electromagnetic fields. I see a landscape.”
“People who have made it this far while retaining a sense of self and bodily tie to reality tend to experience static images, especially at first. The more time you spend here, the more you’re able to abstract it all. Hell, sometimes when I stop concentrating, all of existence is just a geometrical lattice. Like a kaleidoscope, in dimensions even I can’t explain! But when people experience their final death and have no more ties to physical reality, that’s their first time here if they don’t have some kind of esoteric dream experience or a few drops of Lazarus’s blood. With no context, all bets are off. It could look like anything. A parade of demons, a series of bodily transformations, a vast plane of nothingness. Worse, they might be trapped in the lower frequencies; VLFs and ELFs are like a prison for the crystalized soul that can change no further, can draw no closer to liberation. People who think they hear ghosts on the radio aren’t always wrong. Over time, though, less crystalized people wandering here learn they can do things. Then, they can move on, or look at the data in another way. Some people can abstract all the data of reality down to the experience of a sound. When Elijah manipulates the probability of events to grant prayers—low-grade wishes, but sometimes pretty powerful ones—he’s manipulating this place while remaining present in the physical interpretation.”
“Will we find the Lamb here, too?” She wouldn’t be able to handle both her fathers coming to guilt her night after night. Luckily, Lazarus shook his head and answered for the long-winded magician.
“Cicero keeps too close a lock on the Lamb for him to acquire my blood and physically ascend, which means the position of Elijah’s shade in this place is most often tied to his position in reality. Just like the Hierophant keeps Cicero grounded because he’d lose control of El Sacerdote within five minutes of this discovery, he also keeps the Lamb from utilizing this place to its fullest extent.”
Understandable. The Lamb was never far from Cicero, out of a blend of love and something ancients called “Stockholm syndrome.” Martyrs called this “family ties.” But it was also true the Lamb kept as much of an eye on Cicero as Cicero did on the near-omnipotent Lamb. It was entirely possible the Lamb sacrificed the extent of his powers for two thousand years simply to keep his brother from catching a whiff of this place; no doubt, the Hierophant approved. The mystic, with his own strong opinions on the matter, went on. “Better to keep him trapped in the material world, where he can be corrupted into minor tweaks to reality, than let him come here, where he can make significant changes that might solve the problems his brother caused.” Lazarus slipped the clay canteen into his robe, just over his heart, and turned away. “If it were up to me, I would have given the Lamb my blood a long time ago.”
“What’s stopping you from showing up in his closet?”
“The horns, for one. Electromagnetic effects are warped near him so if you can find him here at all, you can’t drop in on him as closely as you can with somebody else—not if he doesn’t want you to. Also, I hate to admit, but I’m not as talented as Houdini over there when it comes to rearranging how I perceive this place’s information. That means—for me, anyway—it’s hard to find any person’s precise location, here or in reality. It doesn’t help that Cicero and the Lamb are a traveling carnival of sacrilege, going from martyr church to martyr church and taking his false blood along with them. With each day here being about a week in reality, it’s extremely hard to pinpoint and intersect the physical location of a far-off moving person through any means other than chance or elaborate design. The magician, though, or the Lamb, or somebody less set in their ways than I am—they can find their way to specific people or places based on energy patterns like the electromagnetic field of our collective presence. But…even then, it can be hard to sort one person from another.”
Lazarus waved at the colorful bands, which, accommodating as they did the combined space of the trio, faded enough into the edge of Dominia’s visible perception that she had grown accustomed to it. “People give off similar patterns of emotional, physical, or even psychological expression. A magician like Valentinian learns how to read the spark of individuality hidden there. But, for example, the Lamb’s physical brain is a receiver for all prayers of the world, whether human or martyr, and he knows their identities even if they don’t. He’s half in this world and half out of it all the time, so unlike those whose thought-bodies are absent because they’re on Earth, his phantom is always around here somewhere. If his physical body was free of those metal horns, he’d be pretty easy to find on this plane, bodily presence or no. Normally, his spirit is a conglomeration of pleas. That’s one of the reasons your Father has become such a big fan of artificial enhancements. Helping the Lamb deaden the sounds of prayers and disguise his presence here.
“And, frankly”—Lazarus resumed tossing the stones, and Dominia wondered just how many pebbles he had—“the consequences to my capture are far too vast to risk. Elijah is a gentle person in a bad position, but there’s nothing I can do about his situation with things the way they are. Your Father uses all kinds of fail-safes to keep interference on this plane from getting anywhere near him, his castle, and his business.”
“How is he coming an
d going? Why does he only come at night? How does his study move with him?”
“Please, will you drop this,” the magician begged. Dominia was in no mood to relent.
“I’ve agreed to go with you to Cairo. It’s in my best interest to go to Cairo; I want Cassandra back.” She winced at the rattling exhalation of the thing behind her. The General redoubled her will to go without looking over her shoulder. “That means getting the diamond back from Miki, which means I have to stay here. But it would give me—psychological comfort to know the way out of here, even if I never use it.”
“It won’t.”
“It will,” she insisted, with such force that Lazarus stopped, heaved a sigh of disgust, and once more faced her.
“You want to know how to leave this place? You have two easy options. First is, get to where you want to be and let the black sun take you back—just stare into it for long enough and it will be a door for you. You want to try it? Go back now? Huh?” He waved his hand toward the sky, and she, taken aback, sputtered some useless noise while his hand lowered. “That’s what I thought.”
As he turned away, she thought of her Father’s study, and how it—and he—appeared only at night. “What if the sun isn’t out,” she asked in meeker tone.
Lazarus spoke without looking back. “What’s the easiest way to awaken from a dream? Kill yourself.”
The General’s mouth opened and shut in silent horror. Valentinian, realizing she still stood frozen, paused to shrug.
“Or let someone else kill you,” the magician added. “Either way…better to wait for the daytime, right?”
Fair point.
IV
Two Souls, Alas
Death could not be the only means of awakening. That night, as she gazed into the blue heart of the fire, the Hierophant studied her face with a half-suppressed smile.