Penult

by A. Sparrow

“Me too,” said Tyler.

  “Hold on,” said Zhang. “I have been having second thoughts. I am wondering, is this really wise? After all, Penult is a place we all should aspire to … someday. No? There are some among us who believe it might be … actually Heaven. Do we really want to bring harm to such a place?”

  “None of you are meant for Penult,” said Yaqob. “The Lords would never allow you. They see all who pass from the underground as unworthy. They would never accept us. Any of us.”

  “Unless … we take it for ourselves,” said Olivier.

  “Steal Heaven?” said Zhang, raising an eyebrow.

  “Bah! Why you think we need Penult?” said Urszula, sputtering. “This land is good enough. Yes, they ruin much, but there is still plenty they don’t damage.”

  “And what is destroyed can be restored,” said Yaqob. “The Old Ones shape and mend stone. They are creators, too. Not only Penult. You think the surface has always looked like this? They made this land what you see. They can raise mountains.”

  Faint smiles appeared on the women representing the Old Ones.

  “We hit the hard,” said Olivier. “They might think twice about what they’re doing here?”

  “Is a single cracker gonna be enough?” said Kitt.

  “Maybe,” said Olivier. “If we find the right place to deploy one, and if it was powerful enough.”

  Olivier looked at me as if I could do something about the situation.

  “Comrade Zhang, do you concur with this plan?” said Yaqob.

  Zhang was looking troubled. He said nothing.

  “We need to act quickly,” said the Duster scout. “There is another wave of vessels coming in off shore.”

  “Zhang?” said Olivier. “Are you cool with this? You onboard with us?”

  The Frelsian leader hesitated. His eyes met Olivier’s directly. “I … suppose. If it’s only to be a limited raid. A single column. It would show them we are serious.”

  Olivier turned to the Old Ones. “What about you ladies?”

  Both women nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Good! It’s a go then,” said Olivier.

  “How many fighters do we send?” said Yaqob.

  “Only Freesouls,” shouted a Frelsian on the periphery. “We can’t afford to lose any faders.”

  Urszula pushed her way to the table.

  “Fuck that sheet,” she said. “I am a Hemisoul. I go and so will James.”

  “Oh, I don’t see the value in sending James,” said Zhang. “It’s a simple task. And we need him here. Penult will be well defended. He can show someone how to initiate the column.”

  “No. James will come too. We will need him.”

  Urszula sought me with her eyes. I wouldn’t have minded staying behind, but the fire in her gaze made me assent.

  “Yeah. I’ll go.”

  “I’m there too, fella,” said Olivier.

  “We keep the raiding party small,” said Urszula. “A small party we can sneak. But we will make sure they feel us.”

  “I too will go,” said Yaqob.

  “No, Yaqob!” said Zhang. “Your people need you. We need you here.”

  “I shall go!” roared Yaqob. “I am sick of watching and waiting while the Pennies peck away at us. No worries, Zhang. I will designate a capable steward. Our warriors will continue defend New Axum.”

  Zhang looked a little unsettled, but I could tell he had crossed a threshold. “Whatever weapons or provisions you need from us, they are yours. I am afraid we can’t support you with fliers. Our winged Reapers are too few and they do not have the range. But we can provide an escort to the shore.”

  Yaqob huddled with his lieutenants. A pair of them peeled off and bustled out of the grotto.

  “This meeting is done,” said Yaqob. “All who wish to participate in the raid must convene in the main plaza at noon.”

  I was about to walk away when Zhang waved me over. I made my way over to his side.

  “Before you leave, I am going to need your help.”

  “What kind of help?” I said, startled.

  “Victoria. Can you undo whatever it is that you did to her?

  “Are you sure you want that? I mean … she’s dangerous.”

  “She is my dearest companion. We were Hemisouls together in Root. We were among the first parties of refugees that broke through to the surface. We helped settle Frelsi. She tamed the first Reaper. She was even one of the first Freesouls.”

  “Mr. Zhang, the person they sent back to us. She may look like Victoria … but she’s not. The real Victoria is gone.”

  “Nonsense. I know my friend. I’ve spoken with her. Yesterday, she was fine. A little under the weather, maybe.

  “You need to keep her confined,” I said. “She’s too strong. Too dangerous to be set free.”

  “Not to mention, pissed,” said Olivier, inspecting the socket the cracker had made in the floor of the grotto. “If looks could vaporize, we’d be mist.”

  The glare his comment induced from Zhang glare was almost as potent.

  “I will have my best flesh weavers look after her. All weaving can be unwoven.”

  Chapter 44: Lessons

  Olivier helped me lug the dusty saddle up the stairs to the upper terrace. We found the rim promenade bustling with a contingent of Frelsian defenders fresh from the side valley they had abandoned to the Cherubim. A heavily-scarred Reaper, its wounds still weeping, lumbered along beside them, guided by handlers wielding multiple tethers.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask … what do they plan to feed that thing up here?”

  “No shortage of Cherubs down below,” said Olivier.

  I shuddered at the thought. We were standing at the base of the steep, cobbled lane that separated the warren from the more heavily damaged eastern sector of New Axum.

  “How about we meet up on the main plaza after your lesson?” said Olivier. “Got some shit I need to do. Get a new staff for one thing. He held up the shattered stub he was still hanging onto.

  We shook hands and he disappeared into the warren. I trudged up the hill and found Urszula waiting in the upper meadow with Lalibela while Tigger buzzed about overhead. Another bunch of Frelsians were digging wide trenches in the turf.

  “Those look awful big for fox holes.”

  “They are for Reaper pens,” said Urszula, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

  “Wow. That’s gonna really stink up the place.”

  “Those beasts were not allowed up here before, but now we have no choice. The western valley is no more ours.”

  I watched as Tigger zoomed back and forth over head, diving down to buzz some workers repairing a rooftop, veering away abruptly at the last second.

  “If he flies like that with me on him, I’m gonna have a hard time staying in the saddle.”

  “That is why we train,” she said. “But … small problem.” She rolled her eyes. “I cannot get him to come down.”

  “I thought you were the dragonfly whisperer.”

  She shrugged. “Young bugs. They not listen so well sometimes. They no behave.”

  “Okay. So what the hell do we do?” I plunked the saddle down onto the grass and used it as a stool.

  “We have some time. We sit and wait. He likes to be near Lalibela. Eventually he will land. Worse comes to worse….”

  “What?”

  “You ride with me.” She smirked.

  Tigger to cruise overhead, challenging any mantis or beetle that entered his air space, perfectly happy to remain aloft, as if he knew there was a saddle and a hundred fifty pounds of clumsy rider waiting for him on the ground.

  Below the meadow, the main plaza brimmed with Dusters and Frelsians organizing battle groups, accumulating stores, getting all kinds of things done. As we watched, a procession made its way up the central lane. A dozen or so Dusters bearing slings had carried the cracker column up from the grotto.

  “Why’d they bring it here?”

  “The terrace is under thr
eat,” said Urszula. “Too many attacks come now from Cherub. We don’t want them to take it back, no?

  A mob had formed near the main council chambers. A group of Dusters came out of the building bearing Victoria’s litter. Several frantic and shouting Frelsians. Soldiers rushed to the scene.

  “What the hell? Where are they taking her? Is that Yaqob?”

  Yaqob and several Old Ones led the way down to the plaza. His guard shoved aside any Frelsian who attempted to bar their way.

  “What the fuck is going on there?”

  Urszula showed no surprise or concern.

  One of Yaqob’s people scanned the meadow as if he were looking for someone. Urszula stood up and waved, pointing down at me.

  “What the hell?”

  “They want you to come with them,” said Urszula.

  “What for?”

  “You go and you will see. Meanwhile I will get Tigger to come down. Maybe you make him scared.”

  “Him? Scared of me?”

  “You’d better go. Yaqob does not like to wait.”

  ***

  I made my way down between the ditches and onto the plaza where the Dusters and Frelsians continued to squabble over Victoria. In full armor, brandishing weapons, some of the Frelsians seemed on the verge of going to battle with the more lightly armed Dusters.

  “Get Zhang!” shouted one of the Frelsians. A pair of runners ran off across the plaza.

  Yaqob stayed calm. He kept his eyes on me as I approached. He was standing between Victoria’s litter and the cracker column that had been in the armory. The two women currently representing the Old Ones stood with him, their faces blank as mannequins. A cordon of Dusters and Old Ones kept a group of agitated Frelsians at bay, including the well-dressed flesh weaver who had been working on her.

  “What’s going on here?” I said,

  “We need your help,” said Yaqob. “We are attempting interrogation.”

  “You want my help?”

  “You have communed with the Singularity? No?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess that’s what you’d call it. Why?”

  “We need to search this one’s soul.” His eyes flicked down to Victoria, stiff and prostrate on the litter. She was looking a bit trimmer and less vine-cluttered thanks to some nifty flesh weaving. Still, she bore a striking resemblance to a mangrove tree.

  “What for?”

  “One column is not enough. If we lose it. We are lost. We need more.” He rapped his calloused knuckles against her side. “This one. She knows cracker columns. Come. Join us.”

  The two lady Old Ones had already tucked their hands into the woody grooves striating Victoria’s chest. Yaqob placed one hand over Victoria’s rough and flaky brow and the other on the cracker column that had just been hauled up from the grotto.

  “Now you put your hand on me,” said the old Duster who, for some reason, was wearing only a breech cloth, displaying his centuries of battle wounds accumulated in two realms.

  “Uh … okay.” My hand hesitated over his scarred and scabrous skin as I searched for a patch I was willing to touch that would gross me out the least. I finally cupped my palm and clapped it against one of Yaqob’s massive and bony shoulders. He was a head taller than me and outweighed me by at least fifty pounds.

  Olivier arrived on the scene all breathless, escorted by another pair of well-armed Dusters.

  He seemed puzzled at first, but needed only a glance to assess what was happening and join in without questions or needing to be asked. He placed his palm flat against the small of Yaqob’s back and winked at me.

  “Now … carefully … put your other hand on Victoria,” said Yaqob. “But be careful. She bites.”

  “Bites?”

  I took him literally, but as I reached out, the back of my hand brushed Victoria’s woody flesh and in an instant I understood his warning. Victoria’s consciousness surged into mine and she lashed out. Now I heard the scream in her eyes that she could not physically voice. Her mind remained frozen in the moment I struck turned her body into wood.

  “Man,” said Olivier, though he didn’t need to speak. ”You really did a job on her. Nice work.” He must have seen or felt my anxiety. He looked at me directly. “Don’t worry. She can’t hurt you. She’s all boxed up in there.”

  Bits of Yaqob, the ladies and Olivier swirled around my own thoughts. In milliseconds, I came to learn more about Yaqob, Olivier and the Old Ones than I had ever known about my own parents. I absorbed every fragment of their histories, hopes and heartbreaks.

  Yaqob was a simple man from a simpler time, not exactly the leader I would have presumed, but nevertheless a well-read and highly respected farmer from an Eritrean village where he raised teff and oxen. He was fluent in English and Italian along with his native Amharic. He had attended college in Asmara but had returned to the semi-arid highlands near the border with Tigray to manage his family farm.

  One by one, various calamities had conspired to claim his wife, two sons and three daughters in turn until he had no reason to persevere. He had ended up claiming his own life with a bowl of cyanide-laced maize porridge.

  The Old Ones—Hoda and Yaris—were both Turks. Hoda was a city girl from Istanbul, Yaris, a Kurd whose family had fled Iraq when it was still under British rule. Hoda, lovelorn and ill-fated, never made it out of her teens. Yaris had a full life but simply grown weary of growing ever older.

  Olivier was French Canadian, a tinkerer and electrician from Trois Rivieres, Quebec. His American-born wife was lost in an accident between a ferry and a barge in the St. Lawrence Seaway. That one incident was the source of his despair but Olivier’s labyrinthine mind remained more opaque to me than the others. His baffling patterns of thought were so abstract and intricate and circuitous that they almost seemed encrypted. He was way more brilliant than I ever imagined.

  I thought for sure they were learning as much or more about me. The Singularity strips all souls down to their essence that way, peeling away all pretension and show, revealing one’s soul in all its naked glory.

  But no. None reciprocated. They stayed within themselves. They were waiting for me, interested only in keeping the portal open for me to act. They were mere vessels. They wanted me to do the interrogation and they were growing impatient.

  Startled as I was to find myself as the centerpiece, I didn’t want to disappoint my friends. I dug down and did my job. I surrendered myself to the Singularity. It surged and swept me deep into the mind of Victoria.

  There was a power to the flow that far exceeded that which I had tapped into during my recent dream excursions. This was no back eddy. This was the real thing. The experience felt more like the channeling I did while communing with Old Ones in the long sleep.

  Victoria’s mind had been consumed with reconfiguring the cracker when my spell struck and froze her. Her mind remained suspended in that state. She revealed to me every minute detail of the cracker and how she had intended to expand its power.

  Like Alice in Wonderland, the Singularity downsized me much as it had done to me with the sixwings of the Seraphim. It carried me deep into the design, blasting me through a patterned cityscape of atoms and molecules, spaced with random and chaotic hinterlands interlaced with angular networks of grooved canals only nanometers across. Baffling tangles of hollow channels hexagonal, heptagonal and octagonal in cross-section filled the interior, emanating from clusters of crystalline seeds that the Singularity dwelled on in particular, hinting to me that they were key to the functionality of the weapon.

  When my free hand brushed my blackened sword, the forces of the Singularity surged down my arm and through my fingers and into the metal, exploring, revealing and explaining its molecular structure to me.

  I was stunned to see that my interior of my sword had an internal structure mirroring the interior of the cracker column. Was the Singularity confused? Was I misinterpreting things? How was that possible?

  Victoria had been engaged with modifying the actual column whe
n she struck my sword away with her spell. Perhaps her intention to modify the column had become entangled with her desire to disarm me and she had transferred the molecular rearrangements to my sword. That might explain its odd finish and texture.

  But the details continued to baffle me. My mind simply could not grasp the full complexity of a cracker column. Parts of it made sense to me. The fractal nesting of its patterns served to amplify forces in a similar way as the wing joints. I understood how natural vibrations in the crust were made to grow into monstrous earthquakes but there was just too much complexity for me to handle. I didn’t have a mind capable of replicating such structures.

  It made me appreciate Victoria’s genius if nothing else. But I was just James. I might be special in some ways, but even special people have limitations. I felt bad for disappointing my friends. Yaqob, Olivier and the Old Ones all felt what I was feeling. They were here and knew my failure.

  But it was okay. They didn’t hate me. And that was a revelation. They had my back. They understood. They were glad I tried.

  I pulled my consciousness free of Victoria and I could feel the tension deflate. But I wasn’t ready to leave the Singularity just yet. The power of its main flow was too intoxicating not to subvert a little of it to my own selfish desires. Just a peek was all I wanted. Olivier left us but Yaqob and the Old Ones remained engaged. They let me explore.

  My mind tore away from our group and into the crowd of onlookers. I went head hopping across the terrace until I found a Hemisoul in the midst of fading and used her consciousness to cross over into the living realm. Relaying through minds in scattered houses I crossed a rural landscape to the nameless city where I had previously visited Karla in my dreams.

  The Singularity knew exactly who she was and where to find her, leading me like a bloodhound straight to a treed raccoon. It bounced me from motorist to motorist, down one street and around a corner to a row of warehouses that all looked exactly alike. It drove me through a wall of corrugated steel into the chilly interior of a pallet-filled shipping bay.

  Karla slept not on a bed but on a pile of quilted movers’ blankets. They smelled musty and were tainted with engine oil. She lay in a dimly lit corner, alone but for a night watchman who sat on a stool by the entrance. I could hear her snuffling breaths as she slept.