So he had done what he had for a reason. He had stopped the clock. But it was more than just that, it was murder. He had torn the divine from the machine and trapped it within what he called the book of the world. It was all in there, every secret. And every page was inked with Suti’s blood as though finally bled dry she might record the truth she was named after.
The murder had needed stealth, of course, and cunning. He was equipped for both. First he gave the chronophage plans for adjustments to his Grand Mechanism. The man had been resistant until Suli had explained that these few changes would give God a voice. That had sold him on them. It was one thing to find God but if you couldn’t communicate with him then what use was it?
The man made the changes. The clock ticked on.
Suli had sent word via one of the wives that the Sultan would see his first wife beneath the great pendulum of the Grand Mechanism for he had a miraculous truth he would share with her. It was about the absence of divinity. No more, no less. Enough to capture Suti’s attention and spark her imagination, and maybe just maybe fire her greed, but not so much that she would hear the lie. Then he had sent word to the chronophage to meet him beneath the God Bell at the same time. Next he bade the raveller meet him betwixt and between the Grand Cogs and requested a scribe be there to record every word. Explicitly, he was to bring his quills and parchment but no ink. The ink would be provided. His final missive went to the Sultan himself. While the old man would never dirty his hands he did like to watch his will be done.
All of these separate threads came together in a careful pattern, each triggered when it was needed and not a second before. He had the time measured out in huge booming ticks and backwards tocks. He could not hide from it.
Suli had hidden himself away and watched as the liar paced back and forth beneath the pendulum and seen her perturbed frown as the scribe hustled up with his carefully wrapped quills. She did not like being made to wait. It showed. He looked up to see the Sultan in place, obscured from Suti’s position by the swing of the pendulum’s mechanism, and the raveller beneath the bell. The only one missing was the chronophage. Without him none of it would work. He gritted his teeth. He hated waiting every bit as much as the Sultan’s wife. Having eternity at his disposal only made him despise it all the more. Finally the little man shuffled into the chamber. As ever his eyes lit up at the sight of his great folly. Folly, Suli thought, because no matter what he might have hoped to achieve all he had actually built was one single enormous timepiece. The miracle of it was that it did not require a timekeeper to run constantly from mechanism to mechanism to keep all the springs wound tight. But in a few minutes his machine would be miraculous in so many more ways.
Suli gave the signal. He hadn’t known then how it had coincided so perfectly with the hammering on the door outside and the arrival of the girl child who lay withered and old on her bed beside him now waiting to die.
The raveller whispered his invocation, and touched the metal plate that anchored the huge pendulum. Mid swing it began to buckle and twist becoming a serpent. As it passed over the head of the liar it struck, sinking its huge fangs into her face. She screamed but Suli had expected that. No amount of screaming would save her. The scribe darted forward, dipping his quills in her torn flesh and began to transcribe the words that babbled out in agony, writing each one down on her body as it bucked and writhed, trying to shake free of the fangs. He turned her into a book of flesh and blood. Her last words becoming the testament of her body. The chronophage played his part perfectly. He fed her to the machine. He had added a metal harness, a cage that could be assembled by pulling various mechanisms and twisting certain cogs. He shackled the cage around her. Then the bell sounded, a single deep chime and the cage retreated back into the machine, taking her body back into it piece by piece until she became a part of the Great Mechanism. This was the worst of it, Suli knew, because if he was right, she couldn’t die. So piece by piece she was consumed by the cogs and the wheels, she greased the axles and kept the pendulum smooth.
The scribe crawled on his hands and knees collecting the shreds of his manuscript. Later Suli would have them bound in to the living book. For now it was enough to retrieve them from the machine.
He remembered the day as vividly as if it was yesterday. He emerged from hiding and found the tatters of her face. He held it in his hands wanting to believe he saw some signs of life in the ruin. She wasn’t beautiful anymore.
As the doors opened and the baby was brought in Suli gave the second signal and the chronophage started the Grand Mechanism again. It lasted for three hundred and twenty seven full pendulum swings. In that time the chronophage’s alterations spat out the book of the world page by page, the words of God, for want of a better description. Suti’s flesh pulped and mangled until every last ounce of color was squeezed from it onto the pages the scribe fed into the machine. He didn’t know if she was dead. He didn’t care. He had exacted his revenge. She would not cuckold the Sultan with a string of lovers or scheme against his wives. Instead she had become what she was born to be: the truth.
He had given the pages to the scribe and bade him to stitch and bind them. Instead the man put out his own eyes and died weeping tears of blood. None of the Sultan’s other scribes would touch the cursed pages so Suli took them to an aged leather worker on the outskirts of the city. One of the wives had told him about the old man. It had been her grandfather. He had been blinded in a tragic accident in the tannery and never worked again. Suli convinced him to take up his needle and braddle and all the other tools of his old trade and work one last piece of magic, turning the pages into a book.
When he held it in his hands he knew it was a work of art, worthy of holding the truth of the world and all of the petty things of existence. He had carried it carefully back into the city. It felt strange in his hands. Alive. Hungry. He felt it pulsing. The pulse made his skin crawl. Despite that he couldn’t help himself, he wanted to turn the page, to read the first truth of Suti … but it wasn’t his place. This was a gift fit only for the Sultan, not for some lowly eunuch in his service.
The Sultan had rewarded him well when presented with the book. Holding the thing with a mixture of reverence and trepidation the old man had opened the book. His eyes roved hungrily down the first page but after reading it he closed the book and said he had no wish to read more. The old man looked visibly shaken. “Take it, hide it. Never let this fall into the wrong hands, my friend. Do you understand?” Suli had nodded. “The living book can never be opened. Some truths the world does not need to know,” the Sultan had told him.
It was the same book that rested on the nightstand beside Immaculada’s death bed.
He had wanted to tell her so much before she left him. He had wanted to confess his love—but of course he did not need to. Some things never needed to be said. They were known. He looked at the clock on the wall. The shadow had moved on. It was deep in the night now. Long past the moment yesterday when she was alive and into today when she was dead. “One last story,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Make it a short one, my love.” It was as close as she came to admitting she was slipping into darkness.
Which one should he tell her? Should he take her back to the day she went from whore to wife? It was a beautiful day. The old Sultan had died and his first son took his place. He knew the story of the woman and the clock, as did everyone in the palace, and he decided that this miraculous girl should be his wife. What more auspicious omen could there be than marrying the child who stopped the hands of time itself? She had been seventeen. They had taken her out of the children’s palace three years earlier and with no one to shelter her she had been welcomed by Farusi the harlot. But she had always been different. The others in Farusi’s house were whores, Immaculada was never a whore, she was only ever the Odalisque. She lay with a single man during her three years in the house, the old Sultan himself. That was another reason the son wanted her, to possess something his father had only ever ‘borr
owed.’
It didn’t seem like a fitting death bed story.
Then he wondered about the birth of her own son, but that was a tale that ended in tragedy so he did not want her dwelling upon it as she left this world.
Instead he told her a story she had never heard before, a love story of sorts. His mother had told him the story of the stone. She had been given it by his father. She had told him it was enchanted. He had never really believed that. He just liked the story. “Have I told you about my father’s last gift?” he asked. He knew he hadn’t but he wanted to keep her involved, to make her interact because it would keep her alive a little moment longer.
She said, “No,” and smiled. He loved her smile. “Is it a sad story?”
“No,” he promised. “My grandmother was blind. My grandfather would come to her day after day and sit with her, telling her all about the world she couldn’t see. Words were his last gift.”
“I can’t imagine anything more intimate,” Immaculada said. He knew she was imagining it. He had heard his grandmother talk about those days before he was born so often, but he was so young he couldn’t appreciate what she meant. The tenderness in her voice as she lived in those memories hurt him in some most basic of ways. Now he did. Now he knew what she was feeling was loss. His grandfather, Lukas, had died long before her, leaving her but she wasn’t alone anymore, his mother, their baby girl, Poli was with her. The one story of hers he remembered was about those few weeks when she could see and how she hated the blandness of the world, and how after his grandfather’s death she had left Aksandria and moved across the great sea to the Komark where she knew no one but at least she wasn’t surrounded by the smells and sounds that she would forever associate with her hopeless romantic of a husband. Breathing in the fragrance of Immaculada he finally understood. These corridors would never be the same again without her fragrance clinging to them. They would be forever empty.
“I am so tired, Suli. I think I will sleep now.”
He looked at her and knew instinctively that her eyes would not reopen. He moved around the bed and took the book from the nightstand. “I always wanted to grow up like my grandfather, though I never knew him,” Suli said. His smile was tender. “I can’t imagine a more precious gift than words,” he handed her the book. “I might never have been able to touch you in the way a lover could, not with my body, but if my grandmother’s story taught me anything it was that lovers didn’t merely touch with hands and fingers and lips, they touched with something much more intimate.”
“Words,” she said, still with him. Just. He realized he was crying.
He opened the book for her. He wished he could see whatever it was she saw, but instead he contented himself with watching it come alive in her eyes. He saw the blue first, the shape of the world slowly spinning in the dark pupil, then all of the other colors, so rich and vibrant. Her lips parted, not quite the death-breath. “What can you see?” he asked. He couldn’t help himself.
“Everything,” she said to him. “All of it. I never knew … I never … look,” she demanded, tilting the book toward him but he reached up to stop her.
“Not yet. I don’t want to know everything. When it is my time, perhaps, but for now I need my curiosity. Without it I might as well …” he stopped himself from saying ‘be dead.’
“You have to see,” she said. “This can’t die with me.”
He didn’t understand. She pushed the book down so that it lay flat on the bed covers, rising and falling with the last shaky breaths of her chest. He couldn’t help himself. He looked down at the page. It took him a moment but then he understood. The words had come alive. They rippled and twisted, lifting from the page so that instead of seeing Suti’s prophecies and promises he saw the shape of the world, everything, all of it, as Immaculada had said. Only there were gaps now. Little dark shadows where she had already absorbed the truth. It could never be replaced because there was only one truth. He saw it like God. If he focused he could see closer, down to the hills and the cities, and closer down to the streets. But as his attention closed in he started to hear them. At first it was just a constant wash of noise, but it began to break up slowly, fracturing into individual voices—and he could hear them, every last one of them. Not the words from their mouths. The ones inside, the secrets they never shared with the world.
Somehow the raveller’s magic and the chronophage’s machine had combined to open up the world to him. He understood why the Sultan had closed the book. Suli’s attention was naturally drawn toward himself in this world. He could feel his consciousness rushing toward Komark, toward the Sultan’s palace, and inside it, the Odalisque’s chamber.
And then he could hear her.
She looked at him across the pages of the book of truths and all he could hear was her voice inside his head saying “I am frightened. I don’t want to go there without you.”
He knew where there was. And he didn’t want her to go there alone, either.
And then, the more frightened whisper, “Oh god, there’s nothing …”
He looked down at the woman lying on the bed and realized she was gone. He reached down and felt her throat for the flutter of blood still pumping through her body. There was none. But he could still hear her inside his head.
“I can’t see,” she said. “Suli? Suli, my sweet, where are you? I don’t want to be alone.”
“You’re not alone,” he said, but he had no idea if his words reached her, wherever she was.
He didn’t understand how the book’s magic worked, what part of it was Suti, what was the raveller manipulating the threads of the world and what was the God the chronophage had found and harnessed with his endless machine. He didn’t need to understand. For once he only needed to experience.
“Suli? I can’t see you.”
The book contained everything. It contained the world. The world was God. It was all in there. Every thought, every joy and every sorrow. They all came together into the body and mind of God. That was the truth. God did not make the world. God was the world. There was no heaven above, no hell below. The world was all.
She was a part of it, she always would be. He was a part of it and always would be. They were both parts of God, aspects of divinity.
“Talk to me,” he said, urging her to keep that link between them.
“Suli? I can hear you, my sweet, sweet man, but I can’t see you. Hold my hand. I am frightened.”
He took her hand in his. It was cold. He felt every deep crease the clock had worn into it over the years. “I am here,” he soothed. “I will never leave you.” It was that kind of rash lover’s promise he could never hope to keep. Everyone leaves. That was the truth. But as he said it he knew it was true in ways he had never understood before. He would never leave her, just as she would never leave the world, because they were a vital part of everything. They didn’t simply cease to be.
She was gone as much as she would ever be gone, and here as little as she would ever be here again.
He realized then that Suti had robbed him of far more than his cock. She had taken his place within the great mechanism of the world from him. He would only ever be Suli. He would never be anything more. Now his tears were for himself.
When he looked down at the book he saw that the pages were empty. The bloody words gone, the vision of the world gone. In its place were blank pages. She had absorbed it all. She had taken everything inside her. It wasn’t gone. It couldn’t be. He was still alive. Still standing in the same room, holding her hand, listening to her voice inside his head. It wasn’t gone.
“Immaculada,” he said, calling out her name.
She must have heard the panic in his voice because suddenly it was her that soothed and reassured him. “Shhhh, I know,” she said, over and over. “I know. Don’t cry for me, my love. I can feel it all. I can hear everything. It is all here in the darkness. I am not alone.”
But he couldn’t help himself.
He cradled the dead woman in his arm
s and carried her through the corridors of the Sultan’s palace for one last time, breaking his heart as he turned every corner with her for the last time. He didn’t know where he was going until he was there, standing beneath the pendulum of the Grand Mechanism.
Suli didn’t realize what he heard at first, the tick-tock and whirr of the gears in the guts of the machine, then the bell chimed, struck by the huge hammer just once, and he saw the body in his arms and the smile on her dead face, and it all started to make sense. He knew it had to be something to do with the book, that in reading it the Odalisque had somehow let time’s divinity back into the world. He didn’t understand how or why, and yet again it wasn’t something he needed to understand. He was nothing more than her eunuch, why should it be important that he understand anything? He wasn’t a raveller. He wasn’t the chronophage who had found the truth. He wasn’t even Suti, the woman who had given her blood and bones to be the voice of God. He was nothing more than a man. A craven coward of a man, a schemer, a survivor. He wasn’t even a hero with a magical blade or a destiny to fulfill, he was just a man.
He stood there beneath the huge pendulum curiously comforted by the slow regular tick tock tick tock as it moved from extreme to extreme over his head. Time had begun again after all of these years.
It was time.
The chronophage had been right all those years ago, he had discovered God. Now it was time for Suli to give her back to the clock just as all those years ago he had given another woman he loved to it.
He laid her down gently. He couldn’t see for the tears streaming down his face but he found the lever that released the cage.
She didn’t scream.
Why would she? The clock had been kind to her. It always was.
***
METAmorphosis
“You left us to burn,” the first man said.
“Or rot. Or melt. Or fester. Or just f-f-fade away. It doesn’t matter what word you use for it. You abandoned us, Steve,” his partner said, shaking his head sadly. “You let us down.” He spread his hands wide. He had no lifeline on his palm. Indeed he had none of the crags and creases that marked my own hands. My mother—God rest her soul—would have said it looked as though he had never done a hard day’s work in his life—but then, she said that about me all the time and my own hands were leathery with age and pitted by the thousand cuts that had been simple art of living my life. The arthritis didn’t help. It turned them into bird’s claws that curled in on themselves. Gone were the days I could stride continents and slay dragons or punch out villains with a single left hook. I was no longer the hero of my own story.
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