Penult

by A. Sparrow

  “That's what they're expecting,” said the pretty boy Frelsian officer. “They retreated to the first barricade but clearly from the disposition of their forces, if we try to take it back, they're ready to pounce.”

  “Alright then, what else can we do?” said Zhang. “I am open to suggestions.”

  “Retreat? While we can?” said A Duster—a woman—I did not recognize. “Our marshlands are ringed with defensible hills. And they can accommodate a much larger population than what is already there.”

  The look on Zhang's face sufficed to rule that option out, at least for the Frelsian contingent.

  An Old One coughed and rose to his feet. He held up one finger and raked it across the attendees. “The city will not fall,” he croaked.

  Yaqob and Hailay looked at each other.

  “You can stay. Axum … will not … fall.” His eyes panned the council with a defiant glare before he settled back down to his seat and seemed to drift off to sleep.

  Zhang and Yaqob looked at each other.

  Urszula pushed forward to the table. “Why wait for them to come to us? I say we take the fight to them.”

  Hailay shook his head. “Ridiculous. We can't attack them head on. We've all seen what happens. They turtle up, absorb the blow, and then swarm out and counterattack. And we don't have enough air capacity to transport a force of any significance around their flanks.”

  “I do not mean for attacking their front. I mean for attack their rear.”

  “You mean … the beaches? Same problem. We can't transport a large enough force fast enough.”

  “No. I mean attack their home. We go to Penult. They think is untouchable. If we touch it, maybe they think again what they do, how smart. How stupid.”

  “How? And with what? None of us has ever seen it.”

  “We know they come from across the water. We know some come by boat. It cannot be so far. With wings, no problem. And we need no big army. Just for raid. And it will make them think.”

  “Crackers,” said Olivier. “We hit them with their own crackers.”

  “That would be well and good,” said Zhang. “If we had more than one. And if we knew how to deploy the one we have.”

  “Just touching them is enough,” said Urszula. “A small raid. These Lords believe Penult is untouchable. This will make them think how smart it is to make mess with us.”

  “Interesting,” said Zhang. “You will need mantids and dragonflies for such a raid. Do you have them to spare?”

  “Not mantids,” said Hailay. “They don't have the range. Not if we're to cross a sea.”

  “We have some dragonfly nymphs coming of age soon,” said the Duster woman who had advocated a retreat to the marshes.

  “And wings,” said Olivier. “James and I can make more.”

  Zhang looked at his advisers. “It seems our only choice, other than an active defense of New Axum. How do you suppose the Lords would respond to an attack on their shores?”

  Urszula grinned. “They will not be happy.”

  “A commando raid using crackers. I like it,” said Hailay. “It might make them question the wisdom of this whole campaign.”

  “Sounds like Mr. Moody has some work to do,” said Zhang. “I suggest we adjourn and begin to make our preparations.”

  Chapter 36: The Pillars

  Natural ledges blended seamlessly with engineered walls to form the rocky knoll harboring the council chamber and bunkers. Most of the upper terrace was visible from this vantage, but I could only see one small corner of the warren. The walls obscured the rest. Oliver and I left the council chamber together and made our way down a series of steep ramps.

  “So how are you feeling?” said Olivier.

  “Fine,” I said, thinking it a funny question to ask. I was pretty much healed up from my battle wounds. Bodies mended quickly in the Liminality.

  “You’re not gonna go and fade on us, are you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not that I can tell for sure. Seems like I’ve been sticking around a lot longer these days.”

  “Because … Karla?”

  “Not sure what she has to do with it.”

  “Because you know she’s here. Your soul is attracted.”

  “Yeah, but … I don’t even know for sure it was her I saw.”

  “But if she’s as committed to this place as you say, I’m sure she gets here often.”

  “I guess.”

  We paused at the base of the knoll and stood blinking at each other. I wasn’t in the mood to think about Karla.

  “Think you can find your way back to the grotto without me?”

  “Sure. It’d be a lot quicker with a pair of wings. Any idea what happened to ours?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ve been tucked away for safekeeping.”

  “Guess I’m just spoiled.”

  “I’ll join you later,” said Olivier. “I’m going down into the ravine and check on our refugees. See what’s up.”

  “Did Bern and Lille ever make it up here?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Olivier.

  “They still fade, those two. And when one goes the other usually waits until they come back.”

  “But I haven’t seen any of the other folks who came with us on foot. I’m not sure what the holdup is, but I plan to find out.”

  We parted ways at a fork in a broad cobbled avenue that divided the city all the way down to the rim. Olivier took a short cut through a mass of temporary structures of re-fabricated root. Some of the newer residents were building homes in a section of ruins too obliterated to repair.

  As I strode down the steep avenue I was startled by an Old One sequestered in a stone nook near a fountain that had long gone dry. That I had stumbled upon an Old One was not so surprising. They were strewn all over this damned city. For every one that waddled about there were ten captured by the long sleep. But this guy was different. This guy I knew. This guy was Mr. O

  ***

  I took care not to disturb him. As much as I wanted to pat his back or give him a hug, I didn’t dare touch him. I sat down on a low shelf of stone and sat with him for a bit.

  Mr. O was special to me. Though I felt bad at the time for waking him, the raid on Frelsi would never have happened without him and his buddies being awakened. Of course, Karla would never have been infested with the Fellstraw that killed her, but that wasn’t Mr. O’s fault. It was just a matter of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  These awakenings proved valuable to the Old Ones as well, saving them from abuse by those who thought they were dead. I had heard that the Singularity also benefitted, allowing it to interact with the realms in ways that had been lost, offering a sensual and physical conduit for this vast sea of interconnected souls.

  Mr. O didn’t look quite as ancient now as when I first saw him. The lichen that had crusted his face had flaked and crumbled off. His skin was more supple, his muscles less withered.

  I wondered how long he slumbered these days. Had his naps become permanent? Some Old Ones, I heard, became immune to reawakening, those who had become too connected to and dispersed through the Singularity to ever leave it.

  I got up off the bench, resisting the urge to pat him on the back.

  “Take care,” I said.

  Who knows, maybe he would have enjoyed coming out of his sleep to greet me, but I wasn’t going to take the chance. Maybe he had heard me from the Singularity. Maybe he was right there with me, hovering over my soul.

  I continued on down the avenue, heading for the promenade and the main stairway in the center of the rim.

  ***

  I was alone in the grotto, apart from a few guards who wandered in now and then. I spent the rest of the day communing with those pillars, meditating on the intact column, study every square inch of its surface searching for clues on how to operate the damned thing.

  I studied the shattered ones too, piecing chunks together, pulling them apart to reveal their inner stru
cture. In some ways I felt like a Model T Ford mechanic brought in to troubleshoot a Tesla. I wasn’t anywhere close to understanding these things. The nap I tried to take to tempt the Singularity to come and help me brought me nowhere near the sea of souls.

  Instead, as I lay in the pup tent they had set up just for me, I dreamt of home, or what used to be home. Fort Pierce. Disney World. Alligators. Mosquitoes. My mom’s mac and cheese.

  At one point a work party of Frelsians and Dusters interrupted my reverie to deliver several sacks full of undifferentiated roots that were meant to be raw material for some copied columns.

  The stuff they brought me was the best grade of root the Liminality had to offer. Pure and malleable. Never modified. Half-inch diameter strands all squirmy and itching to escape.

  It was simple enough to shape them into pillars and get their surfaces to mimic the finely crystalline stone that made up the cracker columns, but in the end it was all a sham. My columns were nothing more than fancy pissing posts. The insides were smooth and blank. I doubt they could have held up a roof never mind take down a mountain.

  When the shadow of the upper terrace began to spread over the forest, I said goodbye to guards and made my way back up to the upper terrace. I entered the warren at dusk, fearing I would never find the quarters they had originally assigned me, just hoping I would find some vacant place to crash.

  But then I remembered the layout of the place from my overflight in search of Karla, and it helped me navigate to the general area where my quarters had been. And then it was just a matter of trial and error, ducking my head into random spaces until I found it.

  While I was gone, someone had fixed it up good, replacing the musty bedding with something fresher. The floors had been swept, the walls scrubbed, and a dewy metal pitcher full of spring water sat on the table next to an empty glass and a bowl of manna.

  I collapsed onto mats now thicker and softer, pulled the covers over me. I was beat. I didn’t care where my soul took me this time as long as I could sleep.

  ***

  Un-summoned, the Singularity chose to visit me that night.

  Typical.

  This time it was Mr. O, or at least some facsimile of him, that served as my wordless tour guide, drifting through the nether spaces of the realms beside me. He reduced us to the size of gnats’ pimples and we flew through the microscopic ductwork of a cracker, a network as intricate as the tunnels of Root.

  And this time I could detect a pattern to all the twining and diverging even though I could not discern how it all worked. With the wing joints, pattern was all that mattered. Build it and it sprung like a spring. But there was a lot more going on with this thing. How it was supposed to interact with the matrix of roots completely eluded me. The more Mr. O tried to show me, the more befuddled I became.

  He eventually recognized my confusion and frustration and backed off, letting me drift away from the model of a cracker column they had erected to instruct me and let me satisfy my more selfish desires.

  I flitted from soul to soul on the terraces and valleys, searching for Karla or for those who had seen her. And while I sensed there were some here who knew her, and even a few who had interacted with her recently, I did not get the impression that she was here at this moment in the Liminality.

  So I went beyond, blowing through the boundaries, piercing the interface between the worlds, gliding through and between cities, searching among the millions of souls for the one that resonated so uniquely with mine.

  The Singularity could not help me this time. It was almost as if Karla no longer existed, though I knew that could not be true. Souls might be mutable but they could not be destroyed. She existed in some realm, somewhere. Someday I would find her.

  ***

  I awoke in the dark and drowsed, basking in the night sounds. Wind whistling through the ruins. Giant insects croaking and singing on the lower terrace, the distance muting them, disguising their size.

  For hours I lay back on the mats, drifting in and out of wakefulness. The Singularity kept its distance, as if it knew it had saturated my capacity for new information.

  Something large thumped hard onto my roof. A shower of loose slate cascaded across my window. A shadowy figure leaped down onto my little patio, intruding into my quarters without a knock or greeting. Urszula reached down, grabbed my ankle and gave it a shake.

  “We go,” she said.

  “Now? Where?”

  “To the bogs. It is time for you for have your own wings.”

  “But I already got wings.”

  “Real wings,” said Urszula. “It is time for you for have dragonfly.”

  “You’re giving me a bug?”

  “Yaqob is making gift of one nymph for you. It is special honor. We have not so many dragonflies these days. The war has been hard.”

  “Holy cow. But … I don’t know how to take care of those things.”

  “They take care of self. No worries. You just need for train it to listen. To behave.”

  “Sheesh. I never really had a pet, other than a hamster. Mom wouldn’t let us have a dog.”

  “This is no dog. This is dragonfly. You come. We go now. We eat breakfast at the bog. She sniffed at me and wrinkled her nose. You can wash there too. Come. We ride together. Lalibela waiting on roof.”

  Chapter 37: The Bog

  I wore the same sweaty clothes I had on for the last two days. I suppose I should have woven myself a new set of clothes at some point and let the stinky ones revert back to roots. That was way easier than trying to wash them.

  The weird gummy bandage that Urszula had stuck on me had crusted and darkened so it looked like a scab. It smelled funny, too—sour and rank like spoiled salami. I was tempted to peel it off but it was stuck tight to my skin. At least it seemed to wearing away on its own.

  “I hope you are not fading soon?” said Urszula, those intense eyes of hers boring in on me.

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t want to fade while flying in air. When you come back. There is no dragonfly.”

  “Aren’t you a Hemisoul too, these days?”

  “Yes. But I can feel when I am about to leave.”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said. “Usually, I get this tingling.”

  Urszula locked her fingers together and gave me a boost up onto the roof where Lalibela stood preening her antennae. The remains of a half-eaten Cherub lay in a heap before her.

  “Oh my God! You’re letting her eat one? What the fuck?”

  “Why not?” said Urszula, nonchalantly.

  “This is … was … a person, Urszula. What kind of habits are you teaching your bug?”

  “She was hungry. It would be cruel now to take it away from her.”

  “Cruel.”

  Urszula’s eyes hardened.

  “Do not cry for this one. He has no soul. He is no longer human. Only meat, shape like man.”

  I held my tongue and took my usual spot in front of Urszula on the saddle. Before I could even settle in and grab on Lalibela took off, soaring away with the headless corpse of the Cherub gripped in her claws. Bits of flesh flew off as she chomped away. It was ghastly.

  We flew away from the basin this time, rising over low but jagged spires that rose up abruptly behind the plateau that held the city, providing an effective natural bulwark. Behind them stretched an area of badlands with of deeply dissected gorges separated by hogback ridges. This rumpled territory ended abruptly at a broad expanse of flat desert.

  Distant wings patrolled the badlands. I couldn’t tell if they were Seraphs or our own folks. I hadn’t seen Tyler or Kitt since the day we had arrived.

  When we reached the desert, Lalibela dove down to the flats, leveling off just above the tallest shrubs. The close proximity of all those boulders and thorny shrubs exaggerated our rate of speed. I clung tight to the saddle.

  The dryness of the landscape made me wonder where we would find a bog deep enough to harbor giant dragonfly nymphs. But this was a
land of extremes. The desert, stuck in a rain shadow, gave way to mountains and hills clothed in mist and cloud forest.

  Lalibela soared over the range, speckled with gleaming tarns and quicksilver springs. Breaks in the cloud revealed a massive body of water in the distance. Could that be an ocean?

  A range of mountains with blunt and knobby peaks surrounded a basin similar to the one near New Axum, except this one collected the runoff with no outlet. The terrain was verdant and moist, with very little open water but many swamps ringed with forests of giant reeds.

  Lalibela circled down to a lonely cluster of habitations build atop floating mats of vegetation—a tiny village of huts with roofs thatched with bundled ferns and walls of lashed-together reeds as thick as bamboo.

  She settled down on a huge, almost perfectly round lily pad large enough to land a helicopter. The corrugated rim came up to her first set of knees. I hopped down to a waxy green surface that yielded underfoot like an extra stiff water bed.

  Honeybees buzzed among the water lily blossoms. Water striders as big as deer skimmed the water on hydrophobic feet. Large, shadowy things beneath the water rippled the surface as they swam.

  People streamed out of their huts to greet us. All had the greyish skin of Dusters typical of all escapees from the Deeps. For some reason I had assumed that all Dusters lived on top of mesas. I had guessed wrong.

  “This is Dilmun,” said Urszula. “The Old Ones settle here first. Back when Penult does not know or does not care who shares the surface with them.”

  A woman made her way over to us, hopping from pad to pad, squinting and gaping at Urszula. Her expression grew only more puzzled as she joined us on the pad. She shook her head, rattling the shells and seed pods that adorned her braids.

  “Urszula? Is that you?”

  She reached and touched Urszula’s tanned and rosy face.

  “Yes Dahlia. You know it is,” said Urszula, looking annoyed.

  “Hah! What happened?” The woman grinned broadly, exposing teeth as grey as her skin and eyes.