The Hierophant's Daughter

by M F Sullivan

  “You didn’t have to. You told him that your Father had a plan to allow martyrs to walk in the sun. That was all I needed to hear to know his intentions.”

  “Know him that well, do you?”

  “No.” The dentist’s glasses, which had darkened with the rising of the sun, did not hide the way his eyebrows lifted to the top of his glittering bald head. “But I do know Lazarus that well. At least, better than you.”

  Dominia glanced into a cyan sky that her eye, blinded by that glare, collaged with great shards of noncolor. “You mean to say that Lazarus is going to help my Father?” She heard, as she spoke, the echo of her Father’s commandment—declaration, prophecy—that she would bring Lazarus to him during the marathon. It had been the other way around, in the end—but Akachi’s next supposition provided a particle of relief.

  “No, Dominia. I do not proclaim to know the future as does your profane Father, for only God may know that. I do know that Lazarus is not the type to help your Father. You, however, may be.”

  “So why not kill me?”

  His men assembled behind him, awaiting his word to attack or subdue her. “Because without you, there will be no one to kill your Father. If you are not alive, the magician will depart to a world where you yet live, and the martyr stranglehold on this world will never find relief.”

  “‘Magician,’” repeated the baffled General while he ignored her and barreled on. “I cannot seem to discern the exact nature of his role. But he has made it most clear to me—as I have always believed—that this era in which we find ourselves is a tipping point. The mass panic in Kabul today is but a symbol for the state of this world: and when the chaos calms, either martyrs will have closed their stranglehold on the planet, or humans will shrug them off and rise to dominance once more. The cowards of humanity’s past valued an uncertain future in an uncertain world above solving a problem that has grown worse by the year. But we have a duty to this world, Miss Mephitoli. We humans, that is.”

  “I’m a martyr,” she admitted, “but I’m not like the rest.”

  “No: you are not like the rest. You are much more important. If the magician is to be believed, we would all do well to keep you alive. Your death, he has insisted to me, shall mean the end of the human world. Even if you live, you may yet choose to bring it on. A true apocalypse.”

  She tried to laugh in the face of his superstition, but she found she could not when she thought of the Red Market and the Lazarene belief in the cyclical nature of time in the universe. “I would never help my Father with his designs against humanity.” Best to play it dumb. “I’ve changed.”

  “You have not changed, General. Had you changed, you would have apprehended your Father and come with us without spilling human blood. You are the same mass murderer you were before.”

  “You don’t know anything about me. It’s not up to you to say whether I’ve changed.”

  “Until you can admit that you are no better”—Tobias drew his gun, and the General readied hers—“you are a liability. I understand you lost your wife? That she killed herself.” She did not speak, for she could not untense her jaw, and the dentist went on to explain, “She did that because she retained her conscience. If more martyrs would but follow her example! This world would be a safer, holier place.”

  Nostrils flaring, Dominia glanced at the ground, then in the direction of a dog’s short bark. From the shadows of an alley, Basil made eye contact with her, stepped into the sunlight, and appeared to dissolve on its contact. While seeing this, Dominia admitted for the first time in months, “That wasn’t why she killed herself.”

  “You know, do you? Yet here you are, trying to resurrect her—not only against the will of God but also her own will. Do you expect you shall flee to Cairo, reproduce her body, and live happily ever after in your Father’s world? In the human world? If she took her own life and you give it back, will she be anything but resentful?”

  “We’ll make our own world. Wherever we go, whatever we do: it won’t matter, because we’ll be together.”

  “When all this is said and done, Miss Mephitoli, and you have helped us to kill your Father, I promise”—his men moved forward on some subtle signal of his head—“I will see to it that you and your wife are reunited forever.”

  “I’d rather see her right now than look at you another minute,” said the General. As the insurgents closed in, she holstered her gun and dashed, not into battle with the men, but into that one thing that might save her: the risen sun.

  Much as with the Lazarene ceremony, she had not known what to expect—but what she expected was, nevertheless, not quite this. In the instant that her body hit the sun and she expected her skin to burn under the intensity of its unhampered blue light, time appeared to freeze. Tobias and his moving men jolted to a halt, and so did the morning pigeons in the air, and so did the General’s own body, which was frozen for seconds in the act of stepping until it seemed that all of this, like some vast shell, shattered away, then compressed into a pinpoint within her solar plexus that stole her breath and imploded every limb. This implosion, which she thought meant her death that first time, dissolved her body and left her ears ringing. Those great colored bands she had glimpsed during the race presented themselves once more, expanding from her core and meeting others that bent from the cardinal directions. Electromagnetic fields, she somehow knew. Behind her, the world altered: there was no more city but a vast ebony landscape with distant mountains, a sky the violet of a contusion, and a sun that burned like an outraged obsidian. But, most fascinating of all, this strange black sun did not sear her skin.

  Mouth agape, the General touched her chest to find it there yet somehow different: but it was the sway of long hair before her face that shocked her more, perhaps, than even her environment. As she reached up to touch it, feeling in a dream, the ringing in her ears gave way to the sounds of a distant argument in a dialect she recognized as old, old English. She did not recognize the language until picking out her own name led to the picking out of the words “fucking dentist,” although “dentist” was a much flatter and stranger sound than she was used to hearing in English as it was in 1997 AL. Much of the rest of the conversation was lost on her.

  She turned in its direction, amazed to find the fields emanating from her center to be weighted in a direction she presumed north. In the distance, two figures were in the midst of a complex argument. One, she recognized; one, she did not. Not until her steps, uneasy and somehow broader in this echoing place, brought her close enough to make out a red waistcoat amid the starlike magnetic ribbons that flexed and parted for her vision as she drew nearer. This red waistcoat triggered memories of the glimpse she’d gotten before, yes, but more than that. Astonishment struck the General: she was not thrust back to Kronborg with Cassandra while the Hierophant finished his tour of the throne room paintings. Rather, she was thrust to that moment’s diametric opposite. Still at Kronborg, where she had flown for Cassandra’s memorial, her Father called her to his office. As a girl sitting across his great oak desk and wingback chair, amid all those books and portraits, she always felt so small. At that moment as an adult, she felt nonexistent, and had not so much studied the covered painting in the corner as absorbed it, unconsciously, along with the rest of the room.

  “I thought about having your wife’s cremains inurned in the Family catacombs of Rome,” he began. Dominia listened numbly, having wanted nothing to do with the arrangements and having asked him to take care of them, but not to tell her about them until she had been given a year or two of relief. Typical of him to ignore that wish. “But Rome was not her home, even if the name she took from you marked her as Mephitolian. Nor could it be said that San Valentino was ever her home, no matter how many children she taught there, or how many good works the both of you did in the Front.”

  “Did you call me here to remind me I could never make her happy?” Her voice brittle from private weeping, the Governess’s impudent words elicited an expression that, from
the Hierophant, recalled a kind of sympathy. He reached out to hold her hand and pressed something cold into her palm.

  “No, my girl. I mean to say that her real home—the only home that could give her any joy—was in your heart.”

  His hand lifted away, and there she was: a beautiful diamond, lying in the Governess’s palm. Though she had expected to, she did not weep. Not in that moment, although she would often weep over the diamond later, day on day while other martyrs slept, Dominia edging ever closer toward contacting the René Ichigawa who had not yet come to her with promises of resurrection by the time she sat, there, in her Father’s office.

  In that moment, she perceived nothing except a chill in her cheeks, and a brief contemplation as to how much this amounted to desecration of Cassandra’s corpse. But she had left the choice to him. She had to live with it now.

  “Thank you.” Her eyes passed his many books to land on that covered painting. She raised her chin in its direction. “Is that her martyring painting?”

  “She will be the patron saint of childbirth—of grief and suicides.”

  “May I see it.” Not a request, but a resignation.

  “Are you sure?”

  After staring into her exhausted eyes, awaiting some protest, he rose. Centimeter by centimeter, the sheet of burgundy velvet drew away.

  Reproduced in a richness of oil work like few had the privilege of viewing up close, was Cassandra: not with that gun in her mouth and her eyes full of fear, but kneeling down to pray at the bedside of their UF mansion while Dominia’s gun rested upon the nightstand. The red of the painting was not of the blood and brain matter that had shattered, chunked with skull and matted with scalp, across their marriage bed. The red of the painting marked the waistcoat of the fictional saint who, with a most sorrowful expression, touched Cassandra’s shoulder with one hand and, with the other, gestured off frame to indicate the time had come for their departure. It would be some weeks before Dominia awoke from a dead sleep with the epiphany that the painting’s oil medium indicated it must have been commissioned months before the suicide. At the time, she did not think on it.

  At the time, the Governess wept.

  “You’re Saint Valentinian,” marveled the General now, interrupting his argument with Lazarus so that both men turned with a look of relief at the sound of her voice. As her approach ended before them, the bands marking fields that appeared as one with the two of them standing close flexed to accept her like a larger water droplet accepting a smaller one. While she overcame the brief vertigo this inspired, her vision cleared of color to allow both men to be easily seen. “I thought you weren’t real. Am I dead?”

  “Please, just ‘Valentinian.’ And you’re not dead. Not right now. No more than anybody else here, anyway.”

  “Do you know each other?” she asked Lazarus. His taller companion laughed, then searched his waistcoat for a silver cigarette case.

  “Some people! We’ve been halfway around the world together, and you don’t even recognize me.”

  A few beats passed in which the General studied the tall man’s pale-sapphire eyes. Somehow, she did know him. “Basil?” she asked in a tone almost accusatory.

  “Woof.” After bending to light his cigarette, the fictional martyr made to disappear the Tesla coil lighter that had emerged from his palm in sleight-of-hand demonstration. “It’s more complicated than that, of course, but what isn’t?”

  A damn good question. The General’s reeling mind raced through a thousand queries, almost all impossible to articulate. “Where are we, though?”

  “That’s not any less complicated than the dog question,” said the useless saint. Dominia turned her agitated eye to Lazarus.

  “I told you in the ceremony. You are liberated. Your Father’s world? The material world? It’s one way of viewing the information of the universe. And it’s not the most accurate way.”

  “Your blood did this,” she marveled.

  The holy man nodded. “My blood does not deliver pseudo-immortality to the flesh. Rather, it gives the flesh—especially the flesh of martyrs—the opportunity to recognize it is already immortal. All things are already immortal.”

  “Welcome to Nirvana, kid,” summarized Valentinian. “Rest assured, it’s nothing like you dreamed.”

  XVIII

  To Sleep

  Whether Morgan or Dominia, General di Mephitoli had never done well with unanswered questions. Today, as she trudged through a desert dry without heat and visible without light save for colored bands warping her perception, she could not help but wonder how long her many, many questions had gone unanswered. One week? Two? Impossible—though she sensed it would be that long, or longer, before she had any measure of satisfaction. The black sun abuzz in the sky like a great, aching pit had not set during their journey, and not once had she hungered or even tired enough for rest, and never had those distant peaks drawn into greater detail than that of far-off thorns.

  Yet something in her insisted no less than a week had passed since the men began their argument, which had been spurned by Dominia’s simple observation. It had been an observation directed for the man who was, for his fictional nature, a source of exceeding curiosity to the General. To her mind, her observation was fair enough, though when it exited her lips, it sounded something more like an insult.

  “You never seemed like a dog.”

  “I’ve never been a convincing liar,” said Valentinian.

  Lazarus spoke up: “You do it often enough.”

  “Still bent out of shape, are we?” asked the former dog with a bat of his eyes. She wasn’t about to let them slip into a dialogue without her and cut in before Lazarus responded.

  “Now, what’s going on?” She tapped her hand as though a list of questions was written upon it. Of Valentinian, she asked, “Are you a martyr?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Dominia studied the icy-blue eyes he turned upon her single, resolute one. “But you’ve been in the sun.” Old martyrs in particular began to leather in an instant under the sun’s rays. The man arched a brow.

  “Assuming it even matters once you have the blood of Lazarus: Have I been in the sun? Really? Even when you met us at the hotel, we were beneath an overhang.”

  The frowning General tried to sort her memory for an instance of this. She came up with nothing. It was true: the dog had been in the sun no longer than she. Basil had shown an almost exclusive appetite for human flesh, so much so that she had speculated herself that the dog was a martyr—but she had not speculated anything quite along these lines. Now, with a slap upon her own forehead, Dominia remembered, “The train! When René boarded the train and found you already there!”

  “Now that’s the ticket! You’re so smart.” Valentinian moved to pinch her cheek, but Dominia ducked away.

  “You teleported then, the way my Father and Akachi and Lazarus…” Her thoughts trailed off and she pursed her lips. “All this time, you’ve been a man disguised as a dog so as to…what, exactly?”

  “Nothing weird,” promised the thin man, and the bearded nomad snorted from Dominia’s good side.

  “Yes, nothing weird. Not even of his own volition.”

  “It’s a complicated story.” Valentinian ran a hand over the eternal shadow of close stubble across his jaw. “I’ll tell you sometime. At any rate, don’t worry too much about me. We need to keep you focused, here.”

  “Where is ‘here’?” she demanded again. Lazarus answered, beginning to turn away.

  “Nowhere, really. It’s sort of a pre-place. Not another dimension, so much. More a higher manifestation of the same universe. A higher frequency.”

  “So, another dimension,” said Valentinian in a smart-assed way. Lazarus rolled his eyes.

  “Different ways of saying the same thing. Some ways are better than others.” After patting the invisible pockets of his ashen robe, which in this space seemed formless and shifting as everything else upon which Dominia tried to focus, the True Protomartyr w
ithdrew from his pocket a white pebble. He had a whole palmful, and the one loaded in his thumb pinged like a bead from a slingshot into the distance. When she tried peering through the bubble of their collective magnetic field, the concept of depth had not seemed existent: not until the pebble indicated it. As the men began toward it, Dominia followed, and Lazarus carried on.

  “This place is without static shape. It is where mind rules over matter: where imagination holds sway over the environment. Thoughts are information, like any material manifestation of energy. It’s just that here, thought is given prevalence over matter.”

  “This can be a good thing,” said Valentinian, slowing to match the General’s pace. “It can also be a bad thing if you’re, say, distressed, or dying, or if you arrive here without somebody to guide you or knowledge of what’s going on.”

  Lazarus nodded. “In those cases, you’re on a lower frequency instead of a higher one. But you don’t have to worry about that much.”

  “We’re moving within the electromagnetic spectrum,” Dominia at last gathered.

  “That’s the axis along which we’re traveling when we come here from Earth. Time is stripped away at higher and lower frequencies…the edges of matter become indistinct. This can be good or bad. Like Valentinian said, it can be bad if you drop to the lower, sub-radio frequencies. Or, if you’re unfocused.” They had reached the pebble and continued, though it drew Dominia’s attention as they passed it; she was redirected by the sound of the second pebble skittering across the floor. “Focus is important here, because if your mind wanders, you can get lost.”

  “You can disappear,” cautioned the waistcoated man. “But that’s not likely to happen when somebody’s there to observe you. One reason of many why we’re here. Of course, I’m always here. Sort of.”

  The General’s eye narrowed in scrutiny. “So you’re not a dog? Really, all the time, you’re a man?”

  “Yes, and no. I’m here at the same time I’m there, of course—aren’t we all—and this is arguably a higher truth of what I am. But the physical shadow I cast is mangled. I have lost my old one, the earthly one I had when the universe was first set into motion. All physical selves are mangled, in truth. Your physical self is mangled. Have you noticed your hair?”