by A. W. Hill
“I was waitressing at a café in Bodrum. Waiting . . . and waiting. You do a lot of that in The Gauntlet. Day after day, I looked for my next guide. Finally, I realized I’d been looking right at him for weeks. There was a little man who came in every morning for espresso. Bald, plump, totally ordinary. One day, for a laugh, I asked him if he could make use of a keen mind and a steady heart. He was a trader, and I became his assistant. Three months later, I was in the back of a truck full of girls—mostly Kazakh and Ukrainian—being transported through the Caucasus to the Old Man’s harem. All of us doped up. The truck stopped in a mountain pass. There was a melee. Shouting in Farsi and Kurdish. I thought for sure we were going to be gang-raped and left in a ditch with our throats cut. In a certain way—terrified as I was—I didn’t care. I was over. Finished. Then the flap opened and let in this hard blue light, and standing with the sun at their backs were Chrétien and Dante and four Kurds with AK-47s.”
After a pause to refuel the fire, Raszer turned to Dante.
“What about you, Dante? How’d you and Chrétien hook up?”
“I’d only been on the circuit six months from a POE in Glasgow. But I was fast. I’d been a gamer practically from the cradle. Got started with the MMORGs when I was a wee bugger, ’n got so good at it that me dad took me to California when I was eleven to see if the big game developers wanted to pick my agile little mind.”
“Anyway, I found m’self in Berlin and heard through the chatroom that an anarkunst cell had formed around this crazy Dutch engineering student in Sarajevo. Anarchist art. Six or seven guys who plotted victimless terrorism, blowing up statues and symbols of the new world order and such. I thought, That sounds cool.
“We pulled a few off, and then things got hot and we had to split. Passage was arranged through Hazid. That’s the crossover, mate. We all thought Hazid was just a moniker for the GamesMasters—a synecdoche, if you know what I mean—but it’s the feckin’ wormhole to El Mirai. It’s where the Old Man gets you. A small plane to Albania and then trucks to Aleppo. This mercenary pronounced himself our new guide and said he was taking us to the Lord of Time, the mother of all poetic terrorists. I thought he was talking about bin Laden, and at the time, I thought, Why not?
“We drove the Black Sea coast and down through the Caucasus into the Iranian borderlands and finally to Hakkâri. When we got to the crossroads, we were starved and hallucinating. They took us up this long, steep path. We kept catchin’ glimpses of this unbelievable castle, built right into the cliff, and every time we stopped to rest we passed around a pipe of hashish laced with opium. By the time we got to the gates, we had to be carried in on litters. We were stone out of it. We woke up in the Garden. We were fed and treated like kings. We had more women in a week than most men have in a life. It was a dream, paradise. Aye—a sham paradise.
“One morning, after a night of screwing and cocktails of opium, E, and GABA, I woke up in total darkness. I mean, total. Imagine that: openin’ your eyes and seein’ nothin’. The air was stale and still and I couldn’t move me legs . . . ’cause I was in a feckin’ box. A coffin. I started to scream, and I screamed until I screamed out the contents of my mind. Finally, the lid was opened and this sheikh in black robes told me I was dead, and now my Qiyami could begin. My resurrection.”
“They took me and Chrétien and trained us for six months in the art of taqiyya and the guilt-free kill. We learned how to get in close enough to smell the pee in our targets’ trousers and still get away clean. And we learned how to be invisible, how to be so inside the game that we could work at the feckin’ FBI for twenty years and nobody’d be the wiser. We couldn’t be killed, ya see, because we were already gone.
“But one day—out in the courtyard during exercises—Chrétien told me he’d seen the flaw in the whole scheme. ‘The crack in the world where the light gets in,’ he called it.”
“What was it?” Raszer asked.
“The night before, he’d been doin’ this new girl in the Garden. In the middle of it, she started callin’ him by a name nobody’d called him since he was a kid. ‘Please, Nilfi . . . please, Nilfi.’ That’s what she said. Only, he was hearin’ it like from a very long way away, through another pair of ears. His given name was Nils, but his friends and family called him Nilfi when he was little. He looked at the girl, and went, ‘Oh my fucking God!” ‘cause he realized that some missing part of him knew her from before, and that if he felt something like that, he couldn’t be dead. He was in a borrowed self. So the motherfuckers had lied to us. Ergo, nothing they’d told him was true, and everything we could do to escape was permitted.”
“How did you get out?”
“We decided to be the perfect fidais until the time was right—until they judged us ready for an assignment. Months went by. Finally, it came. Our target was a Yarsani chieftain in the neighboring valley who’d refused to pay tribute to the Old Man. We snuck into his camp with a trading party, but instead of killing him, we became his pupils. He taught us piracy and he taught us about the Bab—the prophet of the Baha’i faith. We started intercepting the Old Man’s cargo shipments. That’s how we met Francesca: She was part of the cargo. We brought ’er back with us, and for a while the three of us ran guns to the Kurds in Hakkâri. Then we formed the Fedeli. It was Francesca’s idea—a good one. To fight bad faith with good faith.”
“Yes, it was,” said Raszer, and gave the dark-eyed girl a nod through the woodsmoke. “So none of you ever came face to face with the great Lord of Time . . . ”
“Only the ninth level fidai ever see him. And even they can only look at him in a mirror . . . so they say, anyway.”
“Good way to maintain mystique,” Raszer commented. “Or a fraud.”
“They also say,” added Dante, “that to get to him, you have to pass through as many doors as there are rooms in heaven, and that ordinary men are old by the time they reach his threshold. But he can travel the same distance in the blink of an eye.”
“Keep in mind,” said Francesca, “that none of this is ‘real’ in the way that a market stall in Istanbul is real.”
Raszer sighed. “Right. It reminds me of how you can make the moon disappear from the sky by putting a hand over one eye.”
Ruthie, who might have been expected to snort in the face of all the obscurity, was again silent. Raszer’s gaze settled on her and stayed until she felt it.
“You killed that guy,” she said. “That soldier. He couldn’t fight you. You shot a guy with no arms or legs to fight you off with.”
“Chill, Ruthie,” said Dante. “He was seconds away from an agonizing death. We couldn’t leave him and we couldn’t take him. What would you have done?”
She ignored him. “How’s it feel to blow someone’s brains out, mister?”
Something was going on. It was as if she were looking for a good reason to hate him.
“It feels . . . ” Raszer replied slowly, “like a fist closing around your heart, Ruthie. Because in the end, a human soul isn’t private ground, really; it’s common ground. So when you kill someone, it’s like ripping them out of the same soil your own roots are in. And you feel that. If you’re human, you feel it. Does that answer your question?”
A dog howled from a canyon that might have been miles away, and was answered by one nearer. There were drums after that, rumbling like thunder, and finally, voices on the wind, raised in sung lamentation.
“What are we hearing?” Raszer asked, his ear turned into the current.
“Kurdish hill fighters,” said Francesca. “They must have a camp up in those peaks. When one of their men is killed, they keep vigil through the night. They dance and sing. They want their enemy to know that nothing can kill their thirst for freedom.”
“I’d like to have them on my side in a fight. If you’ll all excuse me, I think I’ll turn in.”
The scream came first inside Raszer’s dream, but within some fraction of a second pierced the membrane of sleep and brought him to his knees. There was an i
nstant when he thought it might be an animal, so alien was the sound of a full-grown woman’s shriek. It was Ruthie. He fumbled for the pistol and rolled through the tent flap. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees, and the chill conspired with her second scream to stiffen the hair on his neck. Dante and Shaykh Adi, who had been taking their turn at sentry duty, were now racing down from the crest of the butte, the dog leaping in and out of the flashlight beam.
“Slow down!” Raszer said in an urgent whisper. “Keep it quiet and circle around to the right side of the tent. Back me up. Do you have your knife?” Dante nodded mutely. “Good.” Raszer dropped to one knee and addressed the animal, already bristling with instinctive alarm. “And you . . . ” He stroked its back firmly. “Be cool.”
It occurred to Raszer as he padded toward the tent, the dog at his side, that if there were indeed another human being in there, he probably would have stifled Ruthie’s second scream. The thought that he might be about to corner some nonhuman predator was, in a way, more unsettling. These mountains had once been home to tigers, and there were many varieties of wildcat still in the region. He’d had experience with men, but little with animals.
A flashlight had been turned on in the women’s tent. He saw Ruthie’s stiff-backed silhouette against the canvas. There were no other forms. Francesca must still be flat. Stay that way, Raszer said to himself. Stay that way. He wondered if it could be a scorpion, a big spider. Or something more fantastic—a djinn. A servitor.
There wasn’t a third scream. Some signal from Ruthie’s brain stem must have told her to play dead. The silhouette was as motionless as a mannequin and all the weirder for that. Raszer crept up to the flap and took hold of the hem, then turned to order Shaykh Adi to sit and stay well back from the tent. For whatever it might be worth, he delivered the instruction in Arabic. He knew that whatever kind of creature might squat behind the flap needed to be given a clear exit route. Hearing neither movement nor the rapid breathing of an animal, and smelling nothing but the mineral wind, he began to wonder if she’d merely spooked herself, but he called out anyway: “I have a gun aimed at your head. Back away from the girl. Drop your weapon and crawl out of the tent, or your brains will be on the canvas.”
He heard a tiny voice, at first unrecognizable. It came only from the throat.
“Stephan . . . it’s . . . it’s a . . . ”
It was Francesca.
“ . . . Ss . . . ss . . . ”
“Oh, fuck,” he said under his breath, and drew back the flap gingerly. Coiled at the foot of Ruthie’s sleeping bag was a mature puff adder, its jeweled skin glistening. If it struck, she would likely die; they could not get her to an antidote in time.
“Okay, Ruthie,” he said softly. “That’s good. Keep still. Shallow breaths. Very slowly, slip your hands inside the sleeping bag . . . ” He opened the flap as far as it would go and laid its corner on the damp canvas of the tent’s roof. For the moment, it held. He set the pistol on the ground and checked to see that his knife was still in its ankle sheath. “If your sleeping bag is like mine, it has both outside and inside zipper pulls. See if you can feel for it with your right hand. Easy. Don’t let him see any movement. When you’ve got hold of it . . . blink.” She did as she was told. A few seconds later, her eyelids came down. “All right, good. Now unzip it as far as you can go without moving your upper body.”
He watched her forearm sink into the bag and stop just above the elbow.
Shit.
“That’s not enough,” he said. “Go a few more inches; let your right shoulder follow your arm . . . like a nice, easy stretch . . . Keep your left shoulder and your head still. That’s it. Just a couple more. Easy.”
He took a breath. “Okay. Good. Now breathe. Pull the air into your lungs, steady and slow . . . a little at a time, like a balloon.”
Raszer dropped to a squat, unsnapped the straps of his ankle sheath, and slipped out the seven-inch blade, setting it on the ground just outside the door. He heard Shaykh Adi growling and turned to see the fur along the dog’s spine standing erect.
“Easy, old man,” he said.
He pivoted back to Ruthie. “Hold that breath in,” he said in a soft monotone. “Now bring both hands back to where your knees are. Palms up. Fingers straight and together.”
She blinked once.
“Good. When I say, ‘Now,’ you throw that sleeping bag over the snake as completely as you can. Don’t stop to check your work. Roll right across the tent to the farthest corner, where Francesca is. And then don’t make a move.”
The adder had taken all this in without comment. Only a reptile could have maintained such composure. Any mammal would have turned at least once to observe the threat from its rear.
Raszer inched closer, “Now!” he said.
She did as instructed—albeit stiffly--but almost immediately the snake sensed its entrapment and began to move. A bad situation, but Raszer was in it now, so he threw himself on top of the sleeping bag and felt frantically for the snake’s bulk beneath the fabric. The sensation of taut, sinuous movement under his belly made him shudder. This was a formidable creature.
Once he had both hands around its middle, he began instantly to feel for the head, for he knew he had to have a grip on it before attempting to take the snake outside. He felt a narrowing and finally a slight yielding at the glands and clamped down. The sleeping bag’s slippery nylon lining gave him dubious grip, but there was no time to waste, so he pushed back from the balls of his feet and shot out backward through the flap, bringing the bag and its flailing contents with him.
“The knife, Dante!” he shouted. “Give me the knife!” He rolled over on top of the writhing serpent, only barely able to maintain a hold on its gullet. He felt the knife’s leather grip slap against the palm of his right hand.
“I need light,” he called to Dante, who was momentarily rooted in a paralysis he couldn’t free himself from. “Light!” Raszer shouted again, the snake’s tail whipping, its entire body convulsing in the effort to break his grip.
An agonizing instant later, the light flicked on and Dante and held the beam shakily on the edge of the bag, where only the tongue could be seen, still flicking maniacally in and out of the nylon cocoon.
“Thanks,” Raszer said, then glanced at Dante. “Are you all right?”
“I will be,” came the answer. Dante dropped to his knees. “I’ll grab hold of the tail and try to stop him wriggling. When you cut, cut high . . . just below the skull. If you hit the right notch, the knife will go through like butter.”
Raszer flattened out his body and squeezed hard. He’d have to slip his hand down to expose the head and access the soft spot. That would mean momentarily loosening his grip. The spill from the flashlight caught the gold glint in Shaykh Adi’s eyes. The dog had moved in close and was watching the snake’s tail whip. His growl was feral, his attention rapt.
Raszer rested the knife’s edge alongside his knuckle and used the blade to lever his hand out of the way. He found the notch behind the skull and put all his weight into the slice. The reptile’s reaction was electric: As soon as it felt the blade’s bite, it summoned all its strength into its midsection and writhed violently, shaking its head free in one massive convulsion. Raszer felt the head slide from his palm and his life slip into thin air.
He sprung back and waited for the attack.
But it didn’t come. In the instant of the adder’s escape from Raszer’s grip, Shaykh Adi’s powerful canine jaws had found its tender neck and clamped down hard.
Dante swung around and turned the flashlight on him. The dog had carried the writhing animal to the remains of the fire and was now shaking all four feet of it violently over the still-warm coals. The snake arched and recoiled and whipped help-lessly for a while and then, finally, went limp. Adi held it in his jaws for a few moments longer to be sure, then flung it onto the coals. A conclusive hiss rose from the embers.
Dante came to Raszer’s side. “I’m sorry,” he said. �
��I was slow on the uptake.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Raszer replied. “Snakes scare the best of us.” He gave Dante’s shoulder a squeeze, but his confidence in the boy’s reflexes was shaken and Dante must have felt it.
“God, I hate those motherfuckers,” said Ruthie, emerging cautiously from the tent with a blanket wrapped about her shoulders. She cast a glance at the fire, then a wary look at Dante. “Are there a lot of them around here?”
“The adders are rare in high country,” he said. “You find ’em mostly on the Syrian plain and down through Arabia. But there’re plenty of others. And tomorrow, we’ll pass through the Valley of Serpents in the late afternoon. The valley’s a natural heat-reflecting dish, and the brown snakes slither doon from the rocks at sunset to keep warm through the night. We just have to make it through before the sun goes down.”
“Goddamn right we will,” said Ruthie, shivering.