Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  “We’re not getting paid, if it did.” She stooped, hanging onto the window’s edge with her fingertips, staring for what seemed like too long. The plane kicked like we were driving fast down a gravel road, back wheels about to slide out from under us. I put a hand over my mouth.

  She sat back down, gave me a sympathetic look, and said, “You’ve probably already figured it out, but part of my covenant with Them, what I hammered out, was that They cannot kill me. That’s stealing time and that’s not part of the agreement. I have to live exactly as long as I would have lived, except for what I pay to use the powers.”

  “Then why are they—?”

  “Loopholes. They’re dumb and evil and single-minded and ravenous, but They’re also old, very old, and even the slowest of Them has got a kind of cunning that takes millions of years to develop. They don’t sleep the way we sleep. So They find loopholes. They can’t kill me—but They can slow me down. They could batter me into beef tartare and I wouldn’t die. Not till I was supposed to. I’d just... linger, alive, in pain, till the right time.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I know. Disgusting. The other big loophole, of course, is that They could get someone else to do it. That’s not part of the deal, technically.”

  “You just said you couldn’t die until you were supposed to.”

  “I said They couldn’t kill me. I can die, no problem.”

  “Holy shit.” I felt cold despite the close heat of the plane, and gave in to an all-body shiver, nausea gone, replaced by a kind of frozen heaviness, an extra weight pressing me into immobility.

  “What if They, what if... what if They cheated somehow? If one of Them…”

  “The universe isn’t set up that way.”

  “...Exsqueeze me?”

  “The conditions of a spell... okay, let me use an example,” she said, using her finger to draw in the dust of the floor—just a circle. I looked up when it seemed as if she wouldn’t do anything else. “The universe exists under certain conditions, can we agree on that?”

  “No. What the hell?”

  “First premises, Nicky. It has to run a certain way or it won’t run at all. Now, when They came to our universe, They set up a new one and destroyed the old one.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what any spell does,” she said. “My covenant included, the little warding spells included. It’s always the same, even something as small as the old songs to make milk sour or cure a flock of sick sheep, to travel long distances in a single night, to call up the wind to get you back to Valparaiso, to move a coin a couple of inches on a countertop. A blink, a change. The old world gone, the new one in place, with the spell running and all its associated conditions.”

  “Wow.”

  “So, for example, once upon a time, the universe was set up so that iron could defeat any magic. If you drove an iron knife, even a nail, into a magic circle, that would be the end of the spell—and, sometimes, the end of the person casting the spell. No one knows who created that condition, but it was unbreakable; it was simply the way the world worked, like gravity. And then a very, very powerful wizard in about 1100—some scholars think it might even have been Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s sister—did manage to break it. Some say she got hold of secret scrolls looted from the Holy Land during the Crusades. Anyway, the universe changed, and iron lost its power. Now you could drive a steel I-beam into a magic circle and it would crumple like tinfoil before the spell failed.”

  “So what we’re trying to do,” I said slowly, “is... create a universe... where the gates are closed and They’re gone?”

  “To be honest, I think that’s why we got a head start,” she said. “Because They didn’t think we could. At least for a little while it wouldn’t have occurred to Drozanoth at all.”

  “But the universe that’s currently set up has your covenant in it,” I said. “Could you change that?”

  “I can’t break that. Only They could. All I can do is work with the parameters of the spell I’m doing.”

  “Shit.” I chewed on that for a while, rubbing my back, which had begun to ache against the sack from lack of support. “Listen, I hate to say it, but what if we... what if we can’t? Or we’re too late? Or the cost is too high for us to pay? I mean, I know you’re thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What’s our backup plan?”

  “What do you think it should be?”

  “Nuke ’em from orbit,” I said promptly. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

  She laughed.

  “No, seriously,” I said. “Is that a thing? Could we do that?”

  “All joking aside, I could pull some strings to get a nuclear strike,” she said.

  “No. Fuck off,” I said, forcing my jaw back up. “You can’t, though.”

  “Yeah, I can. I’m in Bilderberg—”

  “Which is what?”

  “…Not important. Let’s say a group of mostly very nice people who aren’t necessarily seen running things. They asked me to join in 1994, and I’ve got some favours to call in, if I needed to. If.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I pushed down an enormous wave of nausea and tried to think clearly. Thinking of her making a phone call and then that Ray Bradbury story, with the silhouettes burned on the walls. The photos from Japan in 1945. The one thing we had all agreed, worldwide, that we would never do again, no matter what. How in the hell did a seventeen year-old get into that position, prodigy or not? “But that would be a last-ditch effort.”

  “Yeah. A nuke might not even have an effect on the Ancient Ones themselves. There’s a chance it could kill some of the smaller ones, what They call the Lesser Angels. But the old records, of course, can’t show what a modern weapon would do to them, because they weren’t invented yet.”

  “But we know what it does to people.” I closed my eyes, picturing it: the mushroom clouds, people blurring, vanishing, like in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah Connor’s hands vanishing from the fence. Some favour. “What else could we do?”

  “How do you kill something magical? Something that could come from the sky, or from the ocean, or from right next to you? Something bigger than your field of vision can take in? Something that could destroy a whole city in minutes? That could drive people to riot and murder, that could control minds, get into dreams, poison the water and the air before we could instigate a plan B? I mean, assuming that a nuke can’t do it, let’s say.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither. Nukes are the best we’ve got, the best the human race has. To be honest, maybe weaponizing the reactor against Them would have worked. But that ran the risk of it falling into Their hands. Claws. Tentacles. Whatever. And that’s a risk I wouldn’t take. I’d kill myself first.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I’d kill myself first,” she repeated. “Believe it.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, just listening to the words bounce around us. I wondered what power even saying something like that might have. Finally I said, “Hey, John?”

  “Yeah?”

  I pointed behind me. “Nut sack.”

  “Nicholas.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DESPITE THE JOLTING, the noise, and the stench of the smoke and fumes, I managed to sleep briefly on the elderly turboprop, waking to screaming wheels and a half-remembered vision of something dark reaching for me, something with eyes and claws. When we finally stopped, it was sudden enough that I was thrown forward almost to the cockpit, and had to crawl back to my bag. “How is it, exactly, that you didn’t throw up your lungs on that plane ride?”

  “I’m doped to the gills on scopolamine,” she said. “Didn’t you see me putting it in your bag at the drugstore?”

  “Oh man, I can’t even answer ‘yes’ to ‘Did you pack this luggage yourself?’”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take the rap.”

  “Damn right. You could have offered me some, by the way.”

  “You were asleep!”


  We had to get out on all fours, I was so cramped up and Johnny was so woozy from the Gravol; Hamid waited at the bottom, perkily, his post-flight cigarette already down to the filter. “What I tell you?” he said, delighted. “Fast like hell.”

  “Amazing,” she said.

  “Hold on,” he added, as she began to stagger off; we both turned to look at him. Another bribe, I thought. Of course. Not worded as such.

  “I know you,” he said slowly, stretching out each word, staring at Johnny. “I do. Where do I know you from? You’re not a student, hey? Traveling with local boy?”

  “Sure I am.”

  She sounded innocently dismissive; I felt my skin prickle though. Had he seen something? A wanted poster (did people still do those in this day and age, with the Internet?), a news spot about missing children, a police alert in the airport?

  “The singer,” he said, delighted. “Her! The girl in the short skirt. What did you cut your hair for?”

  “Britney?” I said, and flinched from the blast furnace of her glare. I gave him a half-hearted wave and dragged her off before she killed him.

  “Uh huh,” Johnny said, staggering off. I exchanged a look with Hamid, we shrugged, and I walked after her.

  WE GOT A cab at the airport, Johnny switching languages easily when the cabbie struggled to understand her and tried to get better directions from me. In a combination of English and French, he vented about the sinkholes opening up all over the city, the ineffectiveness of the city government at fixing them, how one had eaten his friend’s car, his livelihood, five children, how will that man live now? Perhaps if the rich tourists felt like sending some money his way, not for the friend, you understand, but for the children, until a new car could be—

  I half-listened and stared wildly around myself, trying to get my bearings. At home I prided myself on having a good sense of direction and a better one of time, often able to guess only a few minutes off from true, but here I felt untethered, actually unmoored, as if something were flapping loose behind me. The buildings passing on either side of us were low and brown-grey, like something left too long in the oven till it dried out, punctuated here and there by stubby grey-green trees and the occasional vigorous-looking palm. People watered potted plants—cactuses, palms, spiky aloes—on the open rooftop courtyards, partly shaded by soft white netting. All the plants looked like tiny monsters under their white canopies. The crisscrossing transmission lines looked as perfectly organized and purposeful as a spiderweb. I wondered if I had culture shock, if it was finally kicking in.

  “We can do this,” Johnny said. “Stay cool.”

  She sounded very sure of herself. I nodded and watched the cars passing us, the hungry-looking succulent gardens, razor-sharp green leaves and grey thorns reaching for the sky, the sunlight the one thing they had a surfeit of, tall green hedges hiding main roads, a car dealership filled with new things and junky things, some bigger than Hamid’s plane. Then a familiar, flapping flag: the US Embassy? Where was the Canadian one? And everywhere small mosques, clay-brick walls that I realized I was already assessing for their jumpability, climbability—could we escape, if we were trapped in one of those courtyards? Nothing is paranoia, she’d said. Nothing is, to two people trying to save the world, two people with a fear of enclosed spaces and loud noises that we couldn’t get rid of. Two people whose brains had been busted when we were kids, when no part of the world could be kept out.

  The university, when we reached it, stopped me in my tracks, it looked so much like a bank. And not even a real bank like back home, the low CIBCs and TD Canada Trusts I knew, but a movie bank—blindingly white, with fluted pillars and a triangular roof. Johnny laughed at my shock as we walked into the main entrance.

  At the library—refreshingly normal-smelling, brightly lit, nothing weird hiding in the corners—she didn’t even make it to the reference desk before people began vaulting it to get to her, talking excitedly. I looked up, seeing—not much to my surprise—a portrait of her on the wall, soft luminous oils rather than a photograph, and below that a discreet plaque with the word ENDOWMENT. Oops. Caught.

  “Please don’t tell anyone I’m here,” she began, raising her voice over the din. “I’m just here to do a few minutes of research. I need access to the rare book collection, and a computer with Internet, please.” The staff scattered at once, some of the younger ones shouting ahead of themselves to clear the way, running rather than walking.

  “What was all that?” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Do you think they’re rushing to tell somebody first?”

  “I don’t think so. You can always trust librarians. They want to help, and…” She rubbed her raw, red eyes. “Memory-keepers are the pulse of humanity no matter where you go, no matter when you go. That’s half the difference between us and Them. We trust our librarians.”

  “Uh, okay. I’ll remember that. Are you okay?”

  “Just my eyes. I’ll be back in a minute.” She vanished, reappearing—as I had predicted—with her face washed, in a clean shirt, her hair wet and slicked back.

  “You know what just occurred to me?” I said. “You keep saying you like Madonna’s music, but really I think what you want is to look like her. Like right now. The ‘La Isla Bonita’ video. That literally is what your hair looks like right now.”

  “As if!”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong!”

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,” she retorted, “and furthermore, if you are trying to channel the hot guitar player from that video, you are failing spectacularly.”

  “Says you. The ladies, they love me, they all come to listen to me play the guitar.”

  “If I was a president, I’d be Baberaham Lincoln.”

  “If I was a prime minister, I’d be John Babe McDonald,” I retorted in turn. “Anyway, incoming.”

  Books piled up, old stuff, edged in pictures or gold, smelling sweetly of leather and age. There were even a few scrolls, some treated with some kind of plastic, others still curled up, bulky and smelling faintly of something sweet and ancient. A younger man beckoned us—or just Johnny, I supposed—into a back room containing a couple of computers and some office supplies. Johnny immediately pocketed a black Sharpie, then winked at me. I gave her a crisp nod. Prepare for war, general.

  After studying the scrolls for perhaps an hour, she hauled out her laptop and started drawing on the back, an astonishingly complex design that started with two circles and got more and more crowded until I found I couldn’t look at it any more. When she stopped, it shone for a second, not the purple-red colour of tilted Sharpie ink, but something else, an oily white light like the surface of an opal. Or had I imagined it?

  Shading my eyes with my hands, I said, “Is that it? The protection spell? I can’t believe that’s going to work.”

  “Oof. That’s because you can’t feel it working.”

  I glanced at her, alarmed; she had gone pale, her eyes half-glazed, blinking rapidly. “Holy shit,” I said. “Is it...? Are you...? Is it taking your...?” I fumbled for words, and gave up. “Anything?”

  “Something. Yeah. Feel tired. Like I was just running, or I had an asthma attack. But if that’s what it takes to keep the spell going, that’s what it takes.” She sighed and rubbed a hand hard across her eyes. “Jesus.”

  “What’s it... doing?”

  “If I did it right, which it feels like I did, then fudging where we are, and hiding when I’m using prodigy-mode. It should make us harder to track. I still need to find some spells for personal warding, though.”

  “Can I help? With any of it?”

  “Not the research,” she said. “The spells, maybe; there’s a way to share the load, but it was so common that all the ancients just assumed everyone knew how to do it; it would have been like writing down the rules for tag. But I don’t know how yet, and not just anyone can actually access the magic.”

  “Okay. Stay tough, John. I’ll go stand watch. C
an I have some gum?”

  “Here. Thanks, Nicky.”

  I wandered off, not attracting too many stares from the few students at the study carrels—were they still in session here?—since I was dressed virtually identically, except that they had neat, short haircuts and mine under the scarf was decidedly shaggy; I’d been procrastinating on a haircut for months. If I could keep it up I’d be well on my way to becoming the guitar guy from the video. Some looked at me inscrutably as I passed, their calm, dark eyes following me. Were they... agents? Minions? What was the word Johnny had used? Maybe not. They still looked possessed of all their life forces, their vital juices, not like the man from the airport.

  I glugged from a drinking fountain in the hallway, deliciously metallic, like the mineral water Johnny had given me a taste for back home, and cleaned up in their spotless bathroom. Everything had a curious smell to it, hot and dusty, like the dry smell of the sand at Elk Island in the summer, with an edge of toasted bread and seaweed. The smell of a new place, a city detectably at the edge of a desert as well as a sea, detectably different from the smell of Casablanca and Fes. I wondered what home would smell like when I eventually went home, my nose desensitized to familiar things. If I ever went home.

  I did a few laps around the library, drinking every time I passed the fountain, then wandered outside, into what initially felt like the inside of an oven, full of pale brick and sidewalks, but was tolerable after a minute thanks to a constant, stiff breeze. Tiny sparrows that looked exactly like the ones at home flickered around my head. Away from the library, the university buildings were scattered amongst a veritable forest, dense trees planted everywhere except the pathways, which were lined in white concrete pots filled with succulents. I had gotten so used to the heat that it actually felt cool in the shade. There were more students here, dispersed amongst the trees or napping in the lawns. Despite the heat, the grass was green and lush. Tuition dollars, I thought without humour. You pay your bucks, you get the receipt with the word Degree across the top, you get the green, thick grass.