by A. W. Hill
“What do you know about me?” Raszer asked. “Besides the fact that my cover is a French-Canadian monk.”
“That you’re a private eye.”
“And who’d you hear that from? Rashid? Or Philby Greenstreet?”
“Neither. We heard it from Shams.”
Raszer recalled Shams’ late-night emailing from the cyber café in Taos.
“So you know—you knew—Shams. Did he live here for a while, too?”
“He passed through. Stayed for a bit. He was righteous folk. A real baba.”
“A baba?”
“A guide. A gate. Comes from bdb. A portal to gnosis.”
“Yes, he was that. Do you know . . . what happened? Back in Taos.”
“Word got through. We held a vigil. But Shams will abide. It isn’t the first time he’s died. Won’t be the last. That was just a meat puppet they killed in Taos. Bastards. They’re big on display, big on the horror show, they are.”
“Who are they trying to scare?” Raszer asked.
“Right now, you.”
The dolmus pulled under a makeshift carport next to a filling station and squealed to a stop. Dante gestured to a waiting Toyota pickup. “There’s our ride.”
“How many of you are there?” Raszer asked.
“You’ll see soon enough. Let’s grab your gear and go. We’re staked out in Suayb, about twenty kilometers north of here. We’ve gone, uh, underground.”
The driver, who introduced himself as Chrétien, wore a red bandana over silky hair as long and unkempt as Dante’s. He was taller, a few years older, and had the look of a natural leader, but Raszer saw no overt acknowledgment of rank. Chrétien, despite his name, was not French, but spoke English with the elongated vowels of a Dutchman. He was shirtless and skinny and baked the color of bread crusts by the sun, and he goosed the speedometer to sixty on roads that weren’t meant for more than forty.
He glanced at Raszer’s pack, then at his boots, and nodded what seemed to be his approval. “When they said you were from L.A.,” said Chrétien, “I thought you might show up wearing Gucci loafers. Are you equipped to pack in for a week?”
“I may need a few more things,” Raszer replied, “depending on what sort of country we’re going to be crossing. I was told you guys could help me with that.”
“As long as you don’t ask for porters and a five-star chef.”
“Not everyone from L.A.’s a slave to luxury,” said Raszer. “Although I’ll admit I could use a massage and a hot bath.”
“Well, there’s a hamam outside of town if you like it rough. They’ll scrub the scales right off your hide.”
“Maybe when this is finished,” Raszer said. “Speaking of porters, though, can you steer me toward a couple of reliable guides, guys who can keep me clear of combat zones? I’m told I need to get to Hâkkari.”
Chrétien shot Dante a grin and kept it on for Raszer. “Will we do?” he asked.
“You’ll more than do,” said Raszer. “If you’re up for it.”
“The question is, are you? Ever been that deep into eastern Turkey?”
“I’ve never been deep into Turkey at all. But I take it you have.”
“The twelve of us, we’ve all played the Urfa route to Hâkkari and the crossroads. But only Dante and I have seen what happens if you take the wrong fork.”
“And lived to tell the tale,” Dante added.
“And lived to tell the tale,” Chrétien repeated, and punctuated it with a fist pump. “Dante was in debt bondage to that motherfucker for nearly two years.”
“I got out when he sent me to blow up a resort hotel in Mersin. People would have died. That’s where I drew the line. That’s where I started to rewrite the rules. Bad things happen when you ask the wrong people how you can serve them.”
“Doesn’t that sort of moral judgment violate the rules of The Gauntlet?” Raszer asked. “Aren’t you supposed to rely on God and the puppet masters to pull you out?”
“The way we came to see it,” Chrétien replied. “The way the Fedeli see it, God makes the rules until you’ve played long enough to know that God’s the eye of the heart. That’s the epiphany. God sees us with the same eye that we see God. The whole point of The Gauntlet is to become your avatar, to leave your old shell at the side of the road and take on the spiritual body. Then you can be a baba for other pilgrims.”
“And what happens to your old shell?”
“Wind drift. Carrion. Buzzards peck at it. Sun bakes it. Bullets rip through it. Doesn’t matter. You’re dead to it. That much, the Old Man has right. He just has fucking everything else wrong.”
“So you—you and Dante—were in service to the Old Man. Did you meet him?”
“Never stood closer than twenty-five meters. He won’t allow it. But the guy has presence, I will tell you that. From any distance, you know he’s there. You’ll see it when you get there . . . if you’re able to get in. He’s got those kids under some heavy rain. He’s shown them the black gnosis, and when you see that, all the curtains come down and you don’t know there’s any light out there. Your girl, she’s in a dark place.”
“I was told she was in a garden—”
“It’s a garden, all right, but it’s a garden of ignorance. Like fucking Disney World on DMT. A garden ruled over by a very jealous god. You know what he calls himself?”
“The Lord of Time?”
“When he’s not calling himself Melek Ta’us. The Peacock Angel.”
“Melek Ta’us,” said Raszer. “That’s Lucifer, right? In the Yezidi sect. The angel who wouldn’t bow to the demiurge.”
“Yeah, but the Yezidi wise men—you’ll meet some of them on our way—they’re not buying it. They know it’s a scam. The people in the villages around there, they buy it. And the fighters and tribesmen—enough of them—swallow it, too.”
“Totally,” Dante added. “That’s how he got forty warlords and ten thousand tribal Kurds and Persians to pay him tribute.”
“And my lost girl—Katy—how does she serve him?” Raszer asked.
“You’ve heard the stories. The Old Man took those Marco Polo legends about Hassan-i-Sabah building a paradise on Earth for his assassins and built a theme park for nihilists.” He paused, sobered. “And the girls—American. Uzbeki. Azerbaijani. And especially Iraqi girls, blown out of their homes by the war. They pour across the border into Syria with nothing but the clothes on their backs and nowhere to turn but the sex trade. The Old Man’s agents scoop them up and put them to work. And the Syrians look the other way because the Old Man is helping to solve their refugee problem.”
“So,” Raszer said softly, “it is a trafficking operation.”
“Yeah,” Dante replied. “Girls. Opium. Guns. But it’s a shitload more than that.”
“His belief system sounds like a real mixed bag. Yezidi dualism. Ismaili antinomianism. Postmodern nihilism.”
“All and none of the above,” said Chrétien. “This guy’s a warlord for the new age. He pulls threads from a dozen different local traditions and knits them into a Persian rug of lies. There’s only one thing the Old Man really believes in.”
“What’s that?”
“Annihilation,” answered Dante.
“Tell me something else,“ said Raszer. “The Fedeli d’Amore—”
“All will be told,” said Chrétien, “in the right set and setting.” He pulled the truck to a halt in front of what looked like a fallen house of cards built from two-ton slabs of white granite.
Raszer got out and turned a circle. The impression was of limitless whiteness. It was a vista drained of all primary color but for the hard blue of the arching sky. In the distant hills, there were patches of state-irrigated land, but few and far between, like pieces of a quilt that would never be finished. In the foreground, masked by the uniform color of the soil, were dozens of outcroppings—carved blocks of bleached stone eight to ten feet high, fallen in upon themselves and concealing chambers beneath. Raszer realized he must
be standing in an ancient graveyard, final resting place of chieftains and kings, and that below him must lie a vast underground mausoleum.
“Who’s buried here?”
“It goes back at least to the Hittites,” said Chrétien. “Maybe farther. But the herders and peasants moved in centuries ago and have squatted ever since. No one bothers them, and so far, no one bothers us. It’s sacred ground. There are hundreds of underground chambers, cool in the summer, warm in the winter. All you have to do is keep to your own turf and respect everyone else’s. And you can’t beat the rent.”
“And the outfitting business keeps you going?”
“Mostly, yeah,” Chrétien answered. “At least a hundred trekkers come through here every season, headed to Nemrut Dagi or other places on the pilgrim’s map. And then there are the Gauntlet players. They can’t pay, but we put them on the road anyway. Pro bono.”
“And we fix things,” added Dante. “The people from the villages, they’re crazy about junk electronics: portable TV’s, cell phones, MP3 players . . . anything that runs on batteries. But they’re not much good with soldering irons and integrated circuits.”
“And you are.”
“We’ve got some world-class geeks in our band of merry men. Guys who might be running companies in Silicon Valley if they hadn’t taken up The Gauntlet.”
Raszer turned to Dante. “Want to show me around?” he asked.
“Sure,” the boy said. “Follow me down. The others should be making it back from their morning rounds pretty soon.”
Now that the sun had reached full morning, Raszer gauged the outside temperature at around eighty-two, but as soon as they stepped over the threshold of the burial chamber, it plummeted ten degrees, and grew cooler still as they penetrated the vault. A narrow entrance passage broadened after about ten feet, and he felt, more than saw, the chamber expand on all sides, for his eyes had not yet adjusted to the darkness.
It was as quiet as any place of the dead ought to be, yet the air was pregnant with echoes. Every footfall, every click of the tongue, left two, three mimetic replicas behind. This led to a host of odd sensations, and only increased Raszer’s feeling of displacement. Whoever had built the tomb had made room for a lot of tenants, because it was clear from the multiple air currents in the crypt that it continued for hundreds of subterranean yards, maybe farther.
Raszer’s nose picked up damp canvas, sweet Turkish tobacco, kerosene, and fresh mint, and through the soles of his boots he felt the floor change from stone to thin carpet. Dante took his elbow and led him to sit on the rug beside a hookah and a pile of blankets. Gradually, his pupils dilated, and before long he realized that there were more than just the three of them.
A shaft of sunlight penetrated the entry passage and spilled onto what Raszer now saw was a very faded Persian rug. Directly across from him sat a young woman flanked protectively by two boys Dante’s age. She wasn’t classically beautiful, except at the forehead. The face was long and bony, the eyes deep set beneath heavy brows, a generous mouth pierced by a silver ring. But the more he looked at her and she at him, the more impressed he was. She was formidable.
“Will you take some mint tea?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” said Raszer.
“Father Deleuze,” said Chrétien, “this is Francesca. She’s the only mother we’ve got. She speaks sixteen languages, including all the major Kurdish dialects. And we’re all madly in love with her. The dude on her left is Mikail. And this is Jean.”
“Glad to meet you all,” said Raszer. “And now that I have, it begs a question. None of you look more than twenty-five, but for you to have been here when Shams was doing his tour, you’d have to have begun playing when—”
“If you try to count years,” said Chrétien, “you’ll make yourself crazy. There’s a little trick you learn when you get to the Ninth Circle of Gauntlet play. It’s called stopping time. Time—chronological time—flows over normal people like a river because they’re not in synch with the flux, with the now, the immediate. They fight the river, and the river leaves the sediment of years on them. They get left behind, and they get old. But if you’re in synch with the river, you don’t collect sediment. You just float.”
Raszer’s eye widened. “Are you saying you’ll never grow up, as long as you stay in play?”
“Think of it,” said Chrétien, “as being like an astronaut in suspended animation on a ship approaching an event horizon at something near the speed of light. We’ll get older, but slowly. If we return to the world, though, it catches up with us.”
“Now that,” said Raszer, “is quite a trick. Maybe the greatest trick of all.”
“No. There’s better. Dante, why don’t you begin with our blessing?”
Dante extended his hand to Chrétien, who in turn linked his with Raszer’s, and then, like fog creeping in from seven separate passages leading off this central chamber, the rest of the group materialized, until twelve of them—thirteen, counting Raszer—were joined in a circle, hand to hand.
Dante recited:
To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,
And unto which these words may now be brought
For true interpretation and kind thought,
Be greeting in our Lord’s name, which is Love.
“I know that,” Raszer said. “From somewhere . . . ”
“The original Dante’s message to the original Fedeli d’Amore,” said Francesca.
“It was his bid for membership in their secret society,” added the present-day Dante. “And it worked.”
“We welcome to our number,” announced Chrétien, “Father Gilles Deleuze of Taize, who wishes to be escorted to Na-Koja-Abad, the eighth climate. In the shadow of Na-Koja-Abad, in the place called El Mirai, he hopes to find the one who goes by the world-name of Katy Endicott, and deliver her safely into our care. We pledge to him our protection, insofar as it is in our power to grant it, and ask now that the Green Man, al Khezr, guide us beyond the crossroads. In the name of the creator, Khawandagar, and of the uncreated, Haq, let it be so.”
“Let it be so,” chanted the group.
“We ask also that our actions take place in the eternally created present, that there be no thought of past or future, and that we be guided only by the truth as first shown to us by our beloved baba. The world begins now.”
“The world begins now,” they all repeated.
“And from alam-al-mithal, the middle world, we call a servitor, spirit of Shams of Taos.”
“For every beginning, there is an end,“ said Francesca, initiating a litany.
“For every lord, a vassal,” said Dante.
“For every angel, a devil,” followed Mikail.
“For every life, a death,” said Jean.
“For every height, an equal depth,” said the fifth.
“For every joy, an equal sorrow.”
“For every kindness, an equal cruelty,” said the seventh.
“For every pleasure, an equal pain.”
“For every good, an equal evil.”
“For every truth, an equal lie.”
“For every soul in the other world, a soul embodied.”
“For every heaven, an abyss,” said Francesca, closing the circle.
“So taught our baba,” said Chrétien. “Peace be unto him.”
“Peace be unto him,” they all said.
“Woof!” came an echo.
At some point during the recitation, a new member had joined the circle, its presence evidenced only by a soft panting. The dog, which Raszer guessed to be some kind of Irish wolfhound, had appeared Francesca’s right and was now resting its muzzle on her skirts.
“Father Deleuze,” she announced, “we would like you to meet our baba, Shaykh Adi, master and protector of our circle.”
“Shaykh Adi . . . ” Raszer repeated.
“He returned from the Eighth Climate to be our guide and guardian.”
“The hardest kind of evil for people to see,�
�� said Dante, “is the evil that looks like good. But Shaykh Adi sniffs that shit right out. He finds the snake under the rock.”
“He chose the form of a dog because the dog is sacred to our faith. You see,” she said, rising from the circle and indicating the crypt wall. “Here he is.”
Painted in natural pigments that might have been millennia old were a series of figures, among them what was clearly a canine holding a wriggling snake in its jaws.