by M F Sullivan
“There may be no magician to help you find the easy way out, General,” continued Akachi, tightening his grip on the shoulder of the Lady. A low hiss rose from one of Her nearest Bearers. “But I am happy to offer a trade. These ladies up to their knees in bloody water may have their mistress—may abscond with Her far and away down that tunnel, if you and Lazarus come along without a fight.”
“Come along to…?”
“Jerusalem,” answered that ever-smiling leader of the Hunters, a man more openly jolly, and perhaps consequently less trustworthy, than even the Hierophant. “You and me and Lazarus and my men.”
“For what?”
“Don’t you, who have been forced by circumstance and love into flight from your oppressive country, wish to see your Father overthrown?”
“Not by the Hunters.”
“That is a decision based on emotion, and not on logic. What does it matter to you who eliminates the Hierophant, so long as he is eliminated? I would think that, particularly to a martyr, it is all the same. Are we humans not insects to your kind? Or perhaps cows are the better analogy.”
Though mere moments before, the General had thought of the scene as one between bees and ants, she could not help but find one insect preferable. The Lady and Her servants appeared concerned with eliminating the Hierophant because he and the martyrs presented a long-term threat to humanity, the planet, and, frankly, the universe at large. Her concern was with the balance of things, and the idea that consciousness should be given an opportunity to develop without oppression by its many enemies.
The motives of the Hunters were totally different. Although they spoke of religious liberty and piety, they were violent hate-mongers, and enslavers of women. To them, the Hierophant was an obstacle in the way of their own power. They were envious little men. He had wealth unending, whereas they had what they pillaged; he had stockpiles of weapons, as opposed to those secondhand guns Hunters acquired via back channels; he had the adoration of his people, crowds chasing his Void-black cars down the street and shoving their own family members out of the way for a chance to kiss his ring. The Hunters had been reviled since before the Hierophant had even come to power. They would have received much from her Father’s death, and everything on that list was something no one wanted to see them touch.
Akachi’s willingness to bargain for the life of the Lady (a valuable commodity, arguably a kind of superweapon, and, if nothing else, a bargaining chip for the Hierophant, who wished Her dead) was miraculous, though the General suspected this was motivated by the three most notorious Hunter disdains: women, religions not their own, and Red Market prostitutes. To be sure, there was some relief on the dentist’s face when the General consented she would go, and he was no longer required to touch the goddess; but that might also have arisen from instinctual fear to lay hands upon the radioactive container of the Void. No matter how the blood of Lazarus altered the body’s genes to make them less sensitive to its effects, even Dominia had hesitated: if nothing else, she had to give Akachi, a mere human, credit for his courage.
“Very good, Miss Mephitoli. I appreciate your level head. Most would have made a much stupider decision!” Chuckling, Tobias stepped back from the throne and allowed the Water Bearers to rush up. They slung their Lady in their arms with little more than a glance for Dominia on their way toward that back tunnel: Gethsemane, who led the way in this effort, let out a cry of surprise and the word, “Why?” to someone discovered in the shadows.
With reluctance, Kahlil edged into view. Dominia, her expression (and even her vision) darkening, understood how Tobias had managed his private tour. “Did you really think this was the right thing?” the General asked him, her tone as pitch as the world around. The boy evaded her gaze and tacked on an irritating shrug.
“Kahlil has been a Hunter since he was a child! He told me during our brief chat in Kabul that his father was one of us; isn’t that right?” Laughing, Tobias meandered to the young man and clapped a hand upon his shoulder. “Though I imagine his father would have acted faster than he did… It took him such a long time to contact me. I was starting to get worried. But, one must trust the human soul in the end. He has a moral obligation to help the human race shake loose the blight of the Hierophant, and he knows it.”
“Did you know about Miki?” Dominia demanded of the dentist. “Before you positioned yourself with Kahlil?”
“Hunters only use specific medical-care providers… It was not difficult to have the boy assigned to me. He is far from our only source of information about the goings-on of your Father’s world, and the Red Market. Our intelligence indicates Miki has been groomed to sell her soul to these harpies for half a decade. Documentation regarding the search for the Lady’s new avatar goes back further, almost a century. Your Father may claim to be psychic, or have his sacrilegious Lamb, or demonstrate immortality beyond the lifetime of even God’s universe: but all I need is a cup of coffee and a morning to review some printouts, and I know the plans of all my enemies by the time the sun is up.”
“And you?” Again, Dominia stared down Kahlil; now she got him to speak.
“I wanted to save Miki,” the young man said, his tone miserable. “But they came too late.”
“On the contrary. Just in time. But, you have always had a bad habit of putting women above the cause, eh? God’s coincidence brought her in to me, rather than forcing me to do backflips to get her number out of you”—Dominia’s mind cycled through all the background coincidences that had occurred in Basil’s presence and, perhaps due to his absence in her time of need, blamed the magician for the broken tooth that had brought Miki to this hateful dentist—“but I suspect you, Kahlil, were a pawn in the Red Market’s game from the start! She began using you the second you met, in hopes of becoming the leader of a cult! That same cult assigned her to you long after the first time you engaged their services, didn’t they? Because they learned your value.”
At the boy’s speechless expression, the man ranted on. “They intended to use you to get to me. They knew who I was and wanted to see me killed—wanted to use Miki Soto to gain intelligence on my security, or blackmail me. But they did not understand that I know their ways. They are not some innocent ring of prostitutes, whose morals are already of question. They are sacrilegious cultists—heretics, Kahlil, who wish me dead. In fact, seeing this carnage now, I suspect they meant to kill me this very night. But”—Tobias grinned—“they failed, because I had you.”
“I just—” Humiliated to speak before the room on this strange web of conspiracy, Kahlil turned pleading eyes to the one person capable of understanding him: Dominia. “I tried to be her friend.”
For once, Akachi’s voice was solemn. “And now she is dead.”
“Yes,” said the boy, softer, his head turning in the direction of the escape tunnel through which the Lady was carried. “Now she’s dead.”
Tobias nodded sadly and, from his cloak, once more withdrew his gun. “I think it’s kindest for me to send you with her.”
Though, at the first flash of black metal, the General charged, a martyr was not faster than a bullet without entering the Void. Over the next year, hardly a twenty-four-hour cycle would pass in which, like the tragedy at McLintock Farm, Kahlil’s death would not replay itself. In those moments, she would demand to know of herself why she had not learned enough by then to slip into the Void in a wink and cross that room in the second it might take to save his life. Why had she not already two thousand years, infinite years’, experience of the sort had by her Father, which taught him to slip in and out of the Ergosphere like it was a coat? Somehow, it seemed her fault, that gap, though she knew this false every time she remembered the shock in the boy’s exhausted eyes—as if death had woken him up, right before putting him out forever. Hail, Saint Valentinian. The shock on Kahlil’s face would never leave it, much as that image would never leave her mind: it clicked into place next to Benedict’s savaged body, where it lay with the McLintocks and sweet Cassandra in
the section of her brain devoted to only its most haunting traumas. While the General froze with her hands in the air at the pointing of a hundred guns, Akachi shook his head.
“I despise traitors to the cause of humankind.” The dentist holstered his gun. “And I cannot stand the thought of an organization of men who do not know what they want.”
“You’re a real bastard.” Tears filled Dominia’s eyes to see that same blood that coated her now oozed from Kahlil’s dark curls. “He was a kid.”
“The most dangerous kind of kid: one with information about us! As readily as he sold out the Lady, I do not think he can be trusted; at any rate, he has made it clear his loyalty is not with me, but with a dead woman.”
“Miki lives. She lives in eternity. And Kahlil—” She had not seen him there, but, blinking rapidly, she insisted, “He’s there, too. I don’t care if he wasn’t a Lazarene. I’m sure he had to be there. He was just some kid—oh, you bastard.”
“Then perhaps you can come along with me, Miss Mephitoli, and tell me about it.”
A pair of Hunters restrained her arms while a third attached one of the silver shock collars that were, in her native lands, a capital offense for humans to possess. The dentist made his way down the stairs to smile into Lazarus’s face even as the mystic experienced the same treatment. “I think, more than any secret resentment or love, Kahlil came to me because he saw this was inevitable—because the good Lord chose to work through him, to give his soul a chance at redemption. The state of the world is not a sustainable one. Your kind have seen to that.”
“Then why not join forces with the Lady?” asked the General. Behind them, men shouted for the women to clear away from the doors.
“Because the moral element is the only thing that elevates humans above martyrs.” She had been taught similar things about martyrs, but did not respond as the windbag carried on. “The Whore’s Market demands of its women a relinquishment of morals that is irreconcilable with the state of humanity. At best, they require reeducation. At worst, they are unsalvageable objects.”
“What happened to all that garbage about the burden of sin being on the John, not on the prostitute?”
The cherry-picking dentist chuckled, his tone dark. “The sale of a body is one thing, but the worship of a golden calf is another. The Market would see this world turned into a global Sodom and Gomorrah; She speaks of balance, but we are those who wish to maintain the balance set in place by God.”
“I’ve heard Hunters keep sex slaves.” Her lip curled. “At least martyrs don’t rape their property. Not in a way that’s socially or legally acceptable, anyway—your kind seems to love it. Is that part of your balance?”
Infuriatingly, Tobias spread his hands. “It is the nature of the Abrahamian religions, and of God, to allow the keeping of slaves. We are all God’s slaves, General. That is a point on which your people and I can agree.”
“Then what distinguishes humans from martyrs?”
“God did not allow the existence of martyrs. That was a mistake made by man, for which we are rightly punished: but as we caused the problem, so, too, is it ours to solve.”
She would have liked to argue all night, but the General was pulled down the hall to see, with a streak of pain, that men defaced with chisels those elaborate tableaux lining the halls. Where was the magician, for God’s sake!
“Is this honestly necessary?” She related more to her Father every second, felt him bubble up inside her like tar as the slumping effects of the drug tightened her skin so her anger was quicker to rise. “Do you need to destroy beautiful things while taking innocent lives?”
“There is nothing beautiful here, General. Only sacrilegious icons of a false god that must, for the spiritual sake of humanity, be destroyed. Though, if you are going to react so strongly to mere carvings, it is a good thing we got your collar on before we reached the garden!”
Pale with indignity, the General turned helpless eyes toward Lazarus, who did not say a word. As they were dragged outside by their captors, bile rose in her throat. One at a methodical time, Hunters shattered the garden’s statues to acquire the encrypted drives that, as Miki must have (stupidly, stupidly, oh-so stupidly) spilled to Kahlil, contained data on all of the Red Market women at a global scale. “In all fairness,” the dentist said, “your teeth were beautiful works of art that were nothing to destroy. They were not even given a chance to do their jobs! But a blip on my radar and a few moments of chatter to mark your arrival to Cairo was all I needed. Good thing Miss Soto felt so comfortable with Kahlil. Or feels, rather—one had ought not encourage children to play pretend, so far as I’m concerned. ‘The Lady.’” Tobias laughed, as did one of his men. It was this man who the General murdered by snapping his neck, a hollow kill to vent her fury for the annihilation of all this beauty that left her feeling worse. The dentist tightened his hand, and the switch secreted in his palm shocked not just Dominia but Lazarus.
“Behave yourself, please, General. Tranquilizers don’t grow on trees, and it is not a short drive to Jerusalem.”
If she clenched her jaw any harder, she might have bitten off her own tongue. After the statues were brutalized and the stocks of the palace pillaged with nary a police officer or military official in sight (“Because they understand we do them a service,” the vile dentist explained), the martyrs were dragged through the front entrance and to the assortment of waiting T1-63 Rs. Dominia and Lazarus were pushed into the back of one along with three of their armed captors; Tobias remained outside with a mocking salute.
“How I would love to stay and chat, General—but that would be asking for trouble! Never fear. I’ll be right behind you.”
The vehicle’s doors slammed shut, its engine roared to life, and, in a profusion of smoke and disappointment, the tanque set off on a course for Jerusalem. As good as alone for all the English the remaining three Hunters chose to speak, Dominia addressed the mystic.
“Why didn’t you say something about this?”
“Are you going to ask me that when you stub your toe from now on, too?”
She managed a scoff to communicate but a molecule of her thundering astonishment at his attitude. “People died, Lazarus. I’d think that would bother you.”
“And of all the people in that room, who killed the most? You, no question. If I had a problem with death, I’d have a problem with you.”
Fair enough. Still, she couldn’t take responsibility, lest her thoughts writhe into that sorrowful anxiety that, vibrating across her mind, almost paralyzed her now that her expertise in battle was restrained by the collar. Without that expertise available, the drug had nothing on which to focus her consciousness. Its effects were now free-floating and unpleasant. Far better to find someone else to blame. Far easier—and more relieving—to rail against the absent magician.
“Where is Valentinian? He was here, right?”
“Yes.” An approving smile lifted the edge of Lazarus’s mouth. “Yes, he was here. Thank you.”
Though that settled her a bit, it didn’t stop her. “Well—where the hell is he? You mean he just buzzed off when things got hot? What good is a magician if he disappears during battle?”
“What good is a magician if he’s been stabbed to death?”
“Oh, he’s not going to be stabbed to death; he’s a martyr.” With a wave of furious dismissal, Dominia crossed her arms and pushed herself farther into the corner to distance herself from their captors. “Not only that, but he’s supposed to be a great magician! A bona fide Saint! Why couldn’t he have stuck around and magicked us some armor, or a weapon, or—oh, no!”
The memory of her gun arose with that same bitter disappointment that always spawned on the recognition of a lost object. In it lay echoes of that horror, that shame, when she found it absent along with her wife. Now, Cassandra was with her, a cold crystal at rest upon her heart; and the gun, a priceless treasure many centuries older than its owner, and a tool on which the General relied for ages, was lost. But, i
t had been lost before. Anything was possible, some hopeful part of her reminded the rest.
That rest, bleak and annoyed, shouted the optimistic sliver down until it was no longer clear whether it existed. Despite the Lady’s speech, things lost never seemed to return. Those who absented themselves tended to remain absent.
“Look”—the mystic rested against the black headrest of the vehicle—“I know it’s a tough day for you.”
“Excuse me?”
“An understatement, I know. But someday you’ll feel about these memories the way I do about them now, so try to hang on to that. It’s not as long of a drive as Akachi thinks, you’ll come to agree. And, we’re not actually having to drive it. Or walk. Again.”
Speaking of walking. “The minute they let us into the sun, we’d ought to make ourselves scarce.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice? But these things auto-shock if they lose contact with the skin before they’re shut down. That means when you start to disappear, it shocks you into staying. Even if that weren’t true, there’s no point to our vanishing, because Akachi will follow us. Hell, he’s already there. Consider this. Subjective time here is best measured by steps taken in that other place; as we already discussed, different directions lead to different…fates, effectively. Like, imagine each fate’s juncture point as an invisible peg. You trail a string behind you—”
“I fucking get it,” snapped the General, sick of having things explained to her by the magician, let alone anyone who wasn’t the magician.
“Sorry. I know, I just need to make sure you’re with me, because it’s important to understand that, as soon as our position is observed, there’s no going back. Until then, you can alter the weaving by backtracking to your starting point, or returning to a previous juncture and taking a different route. When you get to reality again, it’s like nothing happened—no time passed—or what happened was something different than what would have otherwise occurred—alternative time passed. This is even true if you travel in a group. But during this period of alternative time in reality, if another soul enters the Ergosphere with his own string attached to him from his own starting point, there is the possibility that he will meet another, or a group of others, along his journey. Then, the strings get tangled. Observation means that the positions of our…molecular souls, say, are now locked in. You know, like a waveform collapse… Sorry, I don’t mean to overexplain.” He saw the look on her face, though, in fairness, its tension arose largely from the simple act of trying to conceptualize this business in a firsthand way. The LSD helped her understand it in an emotional, visceral manner, but trying to intellectually recount and understand it felt like trying to retain a thought in the Ergosphere. It grew easier as Lazarus continued. “Anyway, from that point on, going backward in the Void to your apparent starting point will only take you back to your geographical starting point; it’s all forward in linear time, unless you return to the initial point of observation.”