“Okay, I give up,” Alex said. “How do we get in?”
“We are already inside,” Samnang said, gesturing at the cold interior of the vast stone room they suddenly occupied. “Have you not noticed?”
Alex hurried to an empty corner and was very sick.
“The Church pays very little attention to transitions. Position and direction as well,” Samnang informed him. “Brace yourself.”
“Thanks for warning me,” Alex said, wiping his mouth. “Are we on the right track, at least?”
“We are.”
“I assume she’s at the top of the tower, or going there,” Alex said, turning around in circles. “How do we get up there? Please tell me there’s an elevator.”
“This is not a tower to be climbed,” Samnang said. “Ériu is below, relative to the space we currently occupy, heading toward what she imagines is the heart of the Church.”
“Below?” Alex ran his fingers through his hair. “I mean, there’s a tower, and…”
“There is neither up nor down,” Samnang said, sounding exasperated. “Do try and pay attention. I can at least assure you that there is an elevator.”
“What?” Alex gave her a dumbfounded look. “How is that possible?”
“This is the Church of Sleep as my sister believes it to be,” Samnang said. “Though she made this place to try and avoid dragging you into her conflict with the Church, on some level, secret even to herself, she hopes that you will follow her, and therefore enables you to do so.”
Samnang led him out of the room, and down a featureless hallway.
There were no doors or windows, and the illumination seemed to come from nowhere.
They walked to the end of the hall, though Alex could not have estimated the distance, nor the time it took to do so.
True to Samnang’s word, there was an elevator at the end of the hallway.
There were no call buttons, but the door slid open as they approached.
Alex got in first, and Samnang followed, and the elevator was so tiny that she was practically standing on his feet. The interior was stainless steel, entirely smooth and without feature or blemish.
Alex noticed the lack of floor buttons, or controls of any kind, and started to panic.
The door closed behind Samnang before he could say anything.
He felt a little better when the elevator started to descend, but the uncertainty of their destination, combined with the Yaojing standing nearly face to face with him, staring at him with her gaudy, unnatural eyes, made the trip uncomfortable and nerve-wracking.
Alex practically shoved Samnang out of the elevator when the door opened, so great was his eagerness to be anywhere else.
The hallway they emerged into was identical to the one they had left.
Alex glanced back over his shoulder, and the elevator was gone. There was nothing but blank wall behind them.
“I’ll just include that on the list of things I don’t understand. Which way do we go?”
“Whichever way you feel that we should,” Samnang said, shrugging and looking mildly surprised. “You cannot choose wrongly in this simulation, as long as you intend to go to Ériu’s side.”
Alex looked in each direction, before settling on the corridor to his right.
To his surprise, the corridor was brief, ending in the first door he had seen in the Church of Sleep.
Alex opened it, and then held the door for Samnang.
The door led to a vast space, the interior vaulted like an old church, every surface clad in the pitch-black stone, dull and dusty as a thousand forgotten mirrors. Despite the exterior, the space was not circular, but rather a rough cross, two perpendicular lines extending out in either direction as far as Alex could see in the dim vastness, four long hallways illuminated by the light that snuck through rows of brilliantly stained glass. The windows cast fantastic pools of color across the stone, interlocked fields of brilliant green and red, cerulean and magenta scattered across featureless black, dazzling his eyes.
“Where is that light coming from?” Alex wondered. “There was nothing like that, outside…”
“The Church is not concerned with such niceties as source and origin,” Samnang explained. “Remember, Alex – the Church is neither a place nor a thing. This is the Church as my sister conceives it, a construction of her mind and protocol.”
“Is there a difference?”
“There are an infinite number of differences. The Church of Sleep is not a location that can be visited, nor is it a being or a force to be reckoned with. Ériu had to invest it with those qualities in order to oppose it.”
“This is like when you tortured me, then?” Alex looked grim. “A fake world inside her head?”
“This is nothing so crude, but perhaps it is best that you think of it as such.”
He chose one of the radiating hallways at random, and Samnang fell in beside him. The Yaojing was so short that he could see the windows over her head as they walked.
The stained glass was beautifully worked, the colors impossibly rich. Detail was minimal, and the windows showed a quality of abstraction, but the technique was impeccable.
The first window they passed depicted a bird perched at the edge of a nest occupied by a single egg. The bird was a brilliant yellow with a ruffled head, the egg a mottled brown.
In the following window, the yellow bird was rolling the brown egg out of the nest with its head. Resting in the brown egg’s former place sat a blue-white spotted egg, smaller and more delicate than the one it had replaced.
“The cuckoo,” Samnang said, following his gaze. “A representation, I would assume, of Eerie’s feelings…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex snapped. “Even I got that.”
They passed several windows that were achingly familiar to Alex, but he could not quite decipher the subject matter. They were landscapes and portraits, more of the former than the latter, done in soft colors and lacking discrete lines.
The glass in the next corridor initially seemed to him to be clear, but as he passed the windows, Alex started to suspect something else was going on.
The light coming through the glass was no brighter than before. The stain was simply white, as uniform as an empty field in the grips of a Siberian winter.
“The White Room,” Samnang said, a flash of green light running across the rows of characters inscribed on her face. “Where I was, until I was released to find Ériu. It is not a place any more than the Church of Sleep or the Outer Dark – it is an ineffable concept. An atrocity. The White Room is bathed in the pure white light of an aborted creation, stolen from a murdered universe. We Changelings are confined within it, to be scoured and reduced by those pellucid walls. This is what Ériu fears, and what I also fear.”
It seemed prudent not to reply.
Alex took in a dozen windows and more before he recognized another.
The window depicted an idealized representation of his dorm room at the Academy, through a lens of distortion, the details blurred into a smooth plain of color, only the suggestions of shape and form. He recognized the unmade bed and the desk buried beneath stacks of manga, the unwashed sheets balled at the foot of the bed. The room appeared as it did when he woke in the morning, when he had just opened his eyes.
Alex trotted back to look at the previous window.
It was the main quad at the Academy, the Administration building looming blurrily in the background.
He went back one further and stared until it came together.
The shadowy garden hidden within the Main Library, where old headstones crumbled into humus for the great ferns, the fronds appearing to waver in the green glass.
“Ériu is leaving breadcrumbs for you to follow, though I doubt she knows it herself,” Samnang called out, waiting where he had turned around. “You should be grateful that you are visiting her conception of the Church. Mine is very different. She may think that she wants to resolve the situation herself, but secretly she wants you to follow he
r, but also to understand her motivations. That is considerate of her, don’t you think?”
“You sure this isn’t for you?” Alex said, catching up with Samnang. “You are sisters, after all.”
“We don’t have that sort of relationship,” Samnang said. “This is your benefit.”
He said nothing in reply, because he shared her certainty.
The corridor they walked extended as far as he could see into the distance, and then presumably further, and both walls were lined with panes of garish stained glass, casting contrasting pools of cerulean and magenta and oxblood across the floor.
Samnang walked beside him like they were friends. Alex kept bumping into her accidentally, distracted by the stained-glass imagery.
The evening lights of Mission Street in San Francisco reflecting off the chrome on a robin’s egg blue Chevrolet, restored to the peak of fashion at the time of its creation, complete with white-wall tires and a gleaming white interior.
A nearly empty dancefloor marked in tape on the concrete floor of a decrepit warehouse, a small crowd hugging the walls around it or crowding the DJ booth with a stylish self-consciousness, the familiar shape of a boy sitting atop a speaker stack.
Alex winced and hurried on, but Samnang lingered after him, staring at the window.
He glanced at the next window he passed, and then wished that he had not.
A coffin was being lowered into the uncaring earth, the light dribbling through brown glass like spilled coffee. It took Alex more than a few seconds to identify it as Margot’s, and then he missed the next several windows, horrified and embarrassed.
How many funerals had he attended since he came to Central?
How many more that he had not been invited to, even after seeing the life in question end.
Alex shook his head, and Samnang gave him a curious look as she rejoined him.
“You are troubled,” she suggested.
“No,” Alex said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’m fine. I’m great.”
“You would have to be impossibly stupid not be troubled,” Samnang said. “I don’t believe that you are nearly that stupid.”
“Why does everything you say to me sound like an insult?”
“I don’t mean for it to,” Samnang said. “I am simply expressing my willingness to hear you out.”
“Even if I had problems that I wanted to talk out, why would I talk to you about them?”
Samnang gave him a curious look.
“You don’t like me, do you?”
“Why in the hell would I? You dragged me into the Outer Dark and tortured me!”
“With the best intentions.”
“What the…what do you mean?”
“I intended to test you, and if I did not find you lacking, to prepare you for what you would inevitably face.”
“Right, I get it,” Alex said sourly. “You did me a favor.”
“In my own way. I’m not the same as my sister, Alex. Ériu is a Changeling, a trickster. I’m a Yaojing.”
“Yeah, I never really…ah, what is that, exactly?”
“A demon.” Samnang shrugged, the embroidered designs on her gown rippling with the gesture. “The Fey are many and varied – or they should have been, if not for the Church and the White Room. Count yourself lucky that you fell for one of my kind’s more benign manifestations.”
“You’re a demon,” Alex said dubiously. “Like, from hell?”
“Not at all,” Samnang said. “I was born in Cambodia.”
“Kinda the same thing, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Samnang said. “I remember very little of my past. The White Room has stolen away much of me. As for hell, I have shared some of what I know of it with you already, when I was in your head.”
“Well, thanks for that.”
“It is not in my nature to be pleasant or kind, but I have tried to show proper sisterly concern.”
“That’s real big of you.”
“I also…I did not anticipate the effect you would have on me, though perhaps I should have, since I witnessed firsthand the impact you had on Ériu. Our time together in the Outer Dark changed us both.”
“Yeah?”
“For the better, I think.” Samnang looked away. “There was little of myself left, after so long in the White Room. Your catalyst effect helped me recall some of it. I feel that owe you a debt.”
“For freeing you, or something?”
“Yes.”
“But no apologies for the kidnapping and torture?”
“That was a service. Why should I apologize?”
“You aren’t really doing much to convince me to open up, Samnang.”
“I don’t see why I should have to.”
“Really? Like, not at all?”
“Our relationship is already firmly established. You are dating my sister. She moved heaven and earth to try and retrieve you,” Samnang said, with apparent seriousness. “We are practically family already, aren’t we?”
Alex glanced away from a window depicting a ballet class full of indistinct children in pink and purple leotards to gawk at Samnang in astonishment.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You do love my sister, don’t you?” Samnang demanded, a sickly green glow flickering in her eyes. “Well?”
“None of your business,” Alex huffed. “Don’t act like you and Eerie are tight.”
“Tight?”
“Close,” Alex said. “You know. Like normal sisters.”
“We are not normal sisters,” Samnang agreed. “That said, if your intentions toward Ériu are less than honorable, I will consign you to an endless simulation of the Buddhist Hells, beginning with the hot oil hell.”
“No need,” Alex said, glaring at her. “We’ve already been through that, haven’t we?”
“We hardly got started. There are sixteen Hells, and I subjected you to only five,” Samnang replied, framed by a silver-grey window, the first he had seen since the White Room without design or color differentiation. “I restrained myself for your benefit.”
“Didn’t feel that way,” Alex said. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter to you if I care for Eerie or not.”
“Are you so certain?”
“That sort of thing isn’t a one-way street, you know,” Alex said, with a small grin. “I think I learned a little about you, while you were in my head.”
That seemed to bother her, judging by her frown.
“Since you are avoiding the question,” Samnang said icily, “should I assume that you do not mean to marry my sister?”
“Marry?” Alex looked appalled. “We just started dating!”
Samnang gestured at the next window.
“It seems to me you are quite a bit further along than that,” she said dryly. “Ériu is a very forward girl, wouldn’t you say?”
It took him a moment to work out what he was seeing, the soft lines and two distinct flesh tones, along with the neutral blue of his bedsheets at the Far Shores, and then he blushed and hurried past.
“She’s not like that at all,” Alex said, his cheeks burning, setting a furious pace down the corridor. “And I’m not talking about this with you.”
“Another topic, then,” Samnang said, hurrying to match his longer stride. “What will you do when we find her?”
“That’s easy,” Alex said. “We will send the Church into the Ether, like Gaul said.”
“That is more concrete than I expected,” Samnang said ambiguously. “How do you plan to do that?”
“I’ll see if Eerie has any ideas,” Alex said, with a small shrug. “If not, I’ll just activate the Absolute Protocol until this place breaks, or I do. Work for you?”
Samnang made no response. Alex walked in grateful silence, not really taking in the windows as they passed.
He caught the Yaojing sneaking a look at him out of the corner of her eye a dozen or so windows later. She averted her eyes when she noticed, pretending to study a n
earby window depicting a group of young women sitting around a large table. Alex picked Margot Feld out of the bunch by her red hair and winced.
“You are not as weak as I had feared,” Samnang said softly, not appearing to pay him any attention as they walked. “Very well.”
“Very well what?”
“I have decided to support your relationship with Ériu, subject to further review,” Samnang said. “I will also assist you in your present difficulties. Be properly grateful.”
Alex consider it.
“You know, it’s weird,” he said, “but I guess I am.”
“Good.”
They walked on. Samnang came to a sudden halt in front of a window, studying it seriously. Alex looked it over, mentally sighing.
Spaghetti, splattered across the pattern of an Academy-issue skirt, and beneath that stripes…
“She is far too willing to indulge your worst attributes,” Samnang said. “I suppose you think you got lucky?”
Alex hurried along, doing his best to ignore the Yaojing trotting behind him.
“You did, you know,” she called out. “You really are very fortunate.”
***
Vivik charged into the room, pushing aside the dangling remnants of the broken door. He paused to take in the ruined office, the blackened walls, and the wrecked furniture. Then he noticed her, rolled into a corner with a broken chair lying on top of her.
Vivik hurried over, pushing aside the furniture.
He rolled Katya onto her back, and then cried out.
“No! Oh, fuck, no.” Vivik grabbed her wrist, looking for a pulse, and afraid to touch her bruised and crushed throat. “Please.”
He tried three places on her wrist, choking back his sobs, then he leaned his ear close to her split and bleeding lips. Her face was so bruised and swollen that he could not bring himself to look at it.
He held his breath as he listened.
“Oh, no,” Vivik said, burying his head in his hands. “Not you, too.”
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 83