Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven

by Bryan S. Glosemeyer

  “See me now. Remember this. Just as Star Father could see the sinful Old Masters, he can see a lowly human. Even Humans have their place in the Divine Will. That means you have your place too. Keep your hearts pure and faithful, and if you pass your trials, Star Father will see you and raise you up from the ruins of the past.”

  Sabira woke up hot, drenched in sweat, parched throat gasping for air. Thuds and booms echoed from afar, a ceaseless, off-beat rumbling. Through blurred eyes, she saw a pale amethyst sky, streaked and clotted with towers of black smoke. The invasion of Target Planet Thirteen-Nine-Seven-dash-Four had begun, but the nearest battles were many kilometers away. By the time the Servants reached this old hive city, she would already be standing before the Shattered Gates.

  She wondered if the Gods might finally see her then, but stopped herself, afraid she already knew the answer. Even as Sabira gasped and wheezed every breath, she slipped into a somber calmness. With weary detachment, she felt her chest convulsing, lungs desperate for proper air. She wondered if she would see her crew when it was done. Or if the ones she killed in the pits awaited her instead. And as black smoke blotted out the horizon, she remembered a deeper black, one filled with uncountable shimmering lights.

  At least I saw the stars.

  Something smacked the roof nearby. She thought it must be the clack of a grenade landing. Her impulse was to find cover from the blast, but she was too weak to move, so she just closed her eyes and awaited incineration. A few long, tense moments passed, and she still hadn’t been vaporized. Sabira opened her eyes, and through the unfocused blur, she caught movement on the rooftop. She wasn’t alone. Was it the Servants, she wondered, just in time to be too late to reclaim her? Or was it the Vleez, determined to make sure she really was dead?

  By the time she saw a human face looming over hers, the boy had already pressed the blade to her neck. He was young, thirteen years at the most. She couldn’t make out his glyphs, only dark blurs across his scalp.

  Another face emerged into her foggy vision. A young vleez, immature sense tendrils curving curiously toward her. Was it one of the young vleez she slaughtered in the park? No, they were dead. Was this real or was she hallucinating? She struggled to assemble the pieces and make sense of what was happening. A young vleez and a human boy, together. Invasion. Unity. The captured nameless. She had found them. No. They found her.

  The knife at her throat.

  She reached for her palukai. The boy was quicker. He kicked the stick out of reach and pressed the blade harder before she barely moved her hand. The edge felt rough, not razor sharp like her palukai, but pressed hard enough it would slice skin and bleed her out.

  Killed by a child, she thought. Maybe Trickster sees me after all.

  She waited for the last pinch, to see a spray of red before falling into black. Instead, she felt the blade lift away from her throat. Two of the vleez’s four hands pulled the human’s arm back. It spoke in a warbling drone, a whisper among the echoes of bombs and sonic booms.

  “She’s dangerous,” the boy said in an accent strange to Sabira. “She’ll kill all of us. This kind kills Humans just like they kill Vleez. She kills for them.”

  The vleez responded in a soft drone.

  “I know what you were shown. But this can’t be it. She’s too dangerous,” the human boy insisted.

  The vleez child again answered in a soft drone and made a pacifying gesture with its two free claw-hands. Sabira thought about slowly repositioning her arm to aim a dose of poison spray at the infidel. Decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Better to fade back into the darkness swelling up around her.

  “Then you have to help me tie her,” the boy said. “Go cut some vines. I’ll watch her. We’ll get the other one next. She’s not going anywhere.” The boy wore a small, clear mask over his mouth and nose. It reminded her of the respirators grafted onto the vleez she had faced in the pit, though much less brutal-looking.

  Soon the two children were tying her in coils of vines. She tried to push them off, but all her strength was gone, depleted by the gem and the strain of every breath. The boy put the knife back at her throat until the vleez child bound her wrists and ankles together. Once she was secured, the boy pulled off his backpack and pulled out a second breathing mask. He positioned it over her mouth and nose, and it sealed itself airtight to her face.

  Sabira breathed in hard and deep, again and again, savoring each inhalation, eager for the next, exhausted but greedy for every lungful of breathable air. Even though she could breathe normally at last, the blackness continued its relentless creep up and over her. She barely saw the boy now, pulling something else out of his backpack and attaching it to her knees, hips, shoulders.

  The underside of the dome slid toward her. No, she drifted up, away from the dirt covered roof. Away from Daggeira. The boy had strapped little hover pods to her. He led her floating body forward, between the pillars, until she was under the purple sky bruised with black and gray. Then down through a hatch in the roof, into the building, into the creeping black nothingness, as the weapons of Divine Will fell burning from the sky.

  Part 3: Eon

  22.

  SABIRA AWOKE, GREEDY lungs gulping air. She had dreamed of drowning, flailing in black water as fire fell from the sky. But now she could breathe. Though her heart raced and her chest burned, she could breathe.

  The air smelled like flowers.

  Her sight gradually came into focus. She lay in a small room. The walls and ceiling were painted in soft oranges and yellows. To her left, a machine blinked multicolored light patterns she didn’t understand. It reminded her of something the Medics might use, but this room wasn’t like any medical chamber she recognized. In the middle of the ceiling, a semi-opaque, hexagonal window glowed with warm, golden light. An unoccupied stool was the only other furniture in the room. In the far corner stood a tall, blue-green plant covered in white flowers.

  She didn’t understand where she was. She didn’t understand anything at all. Blurry fragments of memory drifted together, trying to reassemble into the right sequence that would explain . . .

  “Daggeira!”

  Sabira lurched forward, throbbing panic pushing her to full wakefulness. Soft but uncompromising tethers bound her wrists and ankles to the bed frame. Her hips bucked forward in an awkward twist before she collapsed back on the mattress. A hot, desperate tightness broiled in her gut.

  The godsdamned vermin must have captured her instead of just letting her die on that rooftop. But why would they?

  In her struggle to free herself, the bed sheet slipped to the floor. She lay naked, and though the air was warm, she trembled. She craned her neck to see her leg, hoping her wound wasn’t swollen and oozing. There was no trace of the bullet hole or surrounding acid melt, not even a scar, only a pinkish discoloration where the damage had been.

  A small click came from the wall to her right. A door slipped partially open. Several sense tendrils curled in through the narrow opening. The tendrils were immature; the spade-shaped tips hadn’t developed yet. Sabira yelled for him to get away as she strained at her bonds. The tendrils darted back but the door remained cracked open. She pulled at her wrist restraints, wiggling and twisting her arms to yank free. As if responding to her movements, the material gripped tighter.

  The door slid the rest of the way open to reveal a human boy. The one from the roof. He stepped forward and immediately froze. He stared, wide-eyed, at her exposed breast and the long, pale scar where the other should have been. Sabira stared back, just as confounded.

  The vleez child came around from behind him and entered the room. He nudged the boy in the ribs with one of his four elbows. The boy’s face turned red, and they came forward, picked up the fallen sheet, and draped it back over her. Sabira tried to pull away, repulsed by the vermin touching her legs. A clear breathing mask covered his two mandibles, but his inquisitive tendrils wiggled freely.

  “Don’t. Get back. Don’t to
uch me.” Her voice was dry and raspy, not at all as threatening as she hoped to sound.

  The human tucked the sheet over her shoulders, his hands moving with a cautious precision, as if expecting her to bite his fingers if he got too close. Sabira thought maybe she would have. Her vision was still bleary, but the boy was near enough now that she could see his glyphs. Ownership and bloodline tattoos lay beneath an obscuring fuzz of stark white hair growing from his scalp. What had the Vleez done to him?

  “Boy, listen,” she said. “When the Servants come for me, they’re going to call you traitor. They’ll say Trickster’s seed has taken root in you. Let me go, and maybe you can be forgiven.”

  The boy gave her a queer, sidelong look as he stepped away. The vleez said something, a muffled drone from beneath the mask, and the boy rolled his eyes.

  “Are they going to eat me?” asked Sabira.

  The vleez elbowed his ribs again. “I know. I know,” he said to the alien.

  “You better let me go. Do you see me? When the Servants conquer this planet for the Unity—if you don’t let me go right now—instead of taking you back to Nahgohn-Za, I’m feeding you to the granks. See me? Now let me go.”

  The boy turned to his companion. “See what I was telling you? Just like I said. Just like I’ve been telling everyone. The ones with all those glyphs can’t be helped. You should’ve let me take care of it.”

  The vleez responded with a complex but silent hand gesture using all four arms.

  “Free me, godsdammit,” Sabira demanded.

  “That, my young servant, is precisely what we intend to do,” said a male voice from the doorway.

  He was the oldest man Sabira had ever seen. Older even than Grandfather Spear. He seemed to be as tall as Grandfather but much thinner, with long, skinny arms and legs. The Staff glyph tattooed on his right cheek, below a crosshatch of deep lines around his eyes, had faded to gray. He must have been over sixty, if that age was even possible. Like the boy, he was dressed in a tunic and pants of light purples and blues.

  “I can see by your markings your name is Sabira and that you are an unranked servant. Still fresh from the pits, I’d wager. It’s good to see you feeling better, Sabira. My name is Rain.”

  “You have a name?”

  “I do now, yes.”

  “That’s blasphemy.”

  “Back in the Unity, sure, but not here, girl.”

  “Let me go.”

  “We will, in time. But we can’t now, not just yet. I’m sorry. Now, girl—Sabira—I want you to see me. Hear me closely. There are people you need to meet. You’ll meet the Oracle first. When it’s time to set you free, it’ll be her that does it. She will look, ah, strange to you at first.” He patted her gently on the hand. She noticed the old man also had a faint tuft of fuzzy white hairs obscuring his scalp glyphs. “They were strange to all of us at first, truth be told. Listen to what the Oracle says. Trust in her. When she sees that you are ready, she will free you, just as she did with me and with all of us here.”

  “The servant won’t listen, and you know it,” said the boy. “She’d rather kill us all.”

  Rain turned to the boy, lips parting as if ready to reply, but stopped, his thin, pale eyebrows knitted in thought, before turning back to Sabira.

  “I hope the boy’s not right about you, for all our sakes.” He stepped across the small room to stand beside the door. “Maia, why don’t you come on in?”

  A woman emerged from the hall and stood in the doorway. She looked human, yet . . . not. Sabira had never seen human hair so long or so dark. Thick, ornamental twists of hair blossomed around her head like flower petals, black as onyx. The woman’s flesh was like gold and copper, not the stark alabaster of the Labyrinth-dwelling humans.

  What was she?

  “Thank you, Rain.” She spoke in precise, careful tones and an unusual accent. “Hello, my lost sister, I am so happy we finally get to speak.”

  “These little vleez rooms do get cramped quickly,” said Rain. “I’ll step out. Please, call if you need any assistance.”

  He looked over to the boy and nodded toward the door. The boy shook his head, pressed his back against the wall. The vleez child stood beside him, unmoving, tendrils curved with curiosity.

  “Mind what Maia says, now,” said Rain, leaving. “All of you.”

  “I know that I look strange to you. Cal had the same reaction at first.” The woman indicated the boy. “But I assure you, I am a human being. You, Cal, and I, we are the same, but different. Like different branches on the same tree.”

  “Why do you call him that?” asked Sabira. “That name. He’s unseen. Nameless by Divine Will.”

  “I told you,” the boy interjected.

  “Cal is a person,” said Maia. “And that is no sin. Having a name is his forgotten birthright. Yours too. A birthright I want to help you remember, someday. But first . . .” She reached for something behind the door and pulled a cart into the room. “First, you need some breakfast.”

  She brought the cart to Sabira’s bedside. Fragrant steam wafted from several bowls and platters, offering peculiar scents of unfamiliar foods. No glyph tattoos marked the woman’s face or her scalp seen between the tightly twisted blossoms of hair.

  Maia pulled the stool over and took a seat. “I am sorry, but until you have been purged and liberated, we will keep you bound. It is not pleasant, but it is needed. We have to know that we can trust you not to hurt yourself.” Maia’s eyes darted to Cal and the vleez child. “Or anyone else.”

  “That’s going to be a deep long wait,” said Cal.

  “Maybe you and Edlashuul can go help clean the kitchen.” She spoke firmly, but slowly, taking odd pauses between words.

  “I’m telling you, you can’t trust her. I’m staying.”

  “Please, Cal, and take Ed with you. She is not going to hurt me. I am safe. I will leave the door open if that makes you feel better.”

  The boy stood, silent and unmoving, until finally Ed tugged him through the door with three of his four arms.

  “I was hoping to have Cal stay, help translate some of the trickier bits—I am still getting used to your language if you cannot tell—but I think it will be nicer if it is just us girls.”

  Sabira couldn’t understand how an adult could just now be learning language. But everything about this woman was not like it was supposed to be. It wasn’t just her hair or dark eyes or the shimmering cloths she wrapped around herself. But the way she stood, held her head, the small gestures her hands made when she spoke, and a thousand smaller aspects that she couldn’t name. Everything. All of it was so odd, so off-putting.

  “Who are you? What is this place?” asked Sabira. “Where am I?”

  “I apologize, I should have introduced myself sooner. My name is Maia del Seta va Tierra, Oracle of the Eleusis Neos. That is a bit too much, I know. Please, call me Maia. And you are on the Vleez world of Dlamakuuz, City of Glish, in the Constellation Embassy.”

  Sabira didn’t understand most of what Maia had just told her. Hunger, meanwhile, drew her attention to the food. Once Sabira caught the warm, teasing aromas, her belly felt obliged to inform her how empty it was.

  “Since you will be bound for a while, I will have to feed you. Trust me when I say it will be better for us both if we can—what is it?—if we can cooperate on this. I have got clean, warm food for you. I know you need it. You must be starving. So let us get you fed, and we can talk about names some more if you like.”

  What Sabira would have liked was to strangle this bizarre woman, so she wouldn’t have to hear that accent, that odd cadence.

  Sabira wanted unbound. She wanted clothes. And she wanted out of there. She was ready to kill anyone or anything that kept her from doing just that. But she also wanted food. Since there was no way to slip her bonds yet, better to wait for an opening. Better to eat, regain her strength, and plan. She would find an opportunity to get away. When it came, she woul
d be ready.

  “You look like you want to kill me.” Maia removed the lids and scooped portions from three different dishes onto a plate. “Maybe you think I want to hurt you, too? Even though we have you bound, we do want to set you free. I know this is hard to understand, but Sabira, you are safe now. Safer than you have ever been.”

  Safe as cug to the slaughter.

  Maia poured a cup of water. “Listen. Do you hear?”

  Sabira listened but heard only silence. She squinted at the woman, confused.

  “Nothing to hear, is there? No bombs, no weaponized animals, no attack ships. The battle is over. The Theocracy lost and are long gone.”

  The booms that had echoed across the horizon as Sabira slipped into blackness had been replaced by deep, unrelenting silence. The quiet that screamed of her abandonment.

  “Daggeira. Where’s Daggeira? Have they eaten her?”

  “Daggeira. That was the name of the other soldier the boys found you with? No, nobody is eating anybody. We are taking care of her too. But she is still—what is your word?—she is still sleeping. Hurt worse than you. We are trying to save her. Do not worry. She will live, and when she wakes we will liberate her too. But now she must rest. Still very weak.”

  Daggeira was alive! Maybe the Gods saw them after all. Now Sabira needed to find a way to free them both. But she would have to wait until Daggeira healed, at least enough to walk and hold a weapon. No way this stranger could stop both of them, not once they were strong again.

  “Rain told me that the tattoo on your left cheek is your name. He also told me what you had to do to earn it. You have two marks on your cheek. Does that mean you have two names?”

  “One for a victory. One for a name.” Sabira stared into Maia’s dark brown eyes. “My name is Sabira.” The word felt small in comparison, over too soon. “Servant Sabira.”

  “Sabira. That is lovely. It is a very old name.”

  “It means saber.”

  “So even your name is a weapon?”