Sal kept digging, and the creature roared again. It tried to lift Asanti up once more, but this time Sal had dug too far. The arm shuddered and slid off the side of the thing, disintegrated when it hit the ground. It took Asanti down with it, though now when Asanti pressed against the fingers, they crumbled and gave way. She burst from their grip and got back to her feet. And saw the kind of trouble her team was in.
Sal was still riding the thing’s back, pulling clumps of dirt out of its head. Another creature crawled out of the ground behind her, looking like a giant beetle with a ridged shell. Dust hung in the air, and through the pink gloom, Asanti could see Liam, Frances, and Menchú wrestling with two other creatures. Grace had taken on the biggest one herself. It was the size of a small truck. She flitted around it like an insect, tearing off pieces of it and flinging them behind her, but the creature wasn’t slowing down.
Now the ground beneath them rose all at once, fell again, began to erupt around them. Something much bigger was rising out of it. The smaller creatures fell back to form a wide circle around Asanti, Sal, Grace, Frances, Liam, and Menchú, and though they said nothing, Asanti felt like the team was being taunted, prepared for a sacrifice. The creatures were there for a spectacle.
A long arm ending in a two-fingered hand exploded from the earth with an awful slowness. It arced over all their heads as if it was a missile that had been launched from miles away and was targeted to land right where they were standing. Only Grace would be able to move fast enough to get out of its way. For the rest of them, there was only raw inevitability, and too much time to think about it. Asanti thought of her family. Her husband, her children, her grandchildren. All her cousins and her cousins’ children. They made weddings and funerals into parties, a better time than she’d ever had with friends. She did not want to leave them.
A chorus of notes scoured the air. Asanti turned toward their source. From the faraway sphere, a phalanx of seven knights had issued, clad in armor and riding beasts with leathery wings and long necks that ended in faces that looked like owls. Three of the knights had long bugles that they swapped out for pikes to match the other four. They moved as if this place were filled with only air, less than air. They moved like falcons. The giant hand stopped its descent and began to turn toward them, but they had already arrived. They swarmed around the hand, using their pikes to tear off chunks that they hurled away. As Asanti watched, the hand disintegrated above her, and it rained fine sand that coated her face and shoulders. She began to laugh. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so free.
The smaller creatures scattered back into the earth as the knights finished their work. After the hand was gone, they started in on the arm itself, circling around it, working their pikes, until the entire appendage was unraveled and the knights had come to earth, landing around Team Three.
“You are from the Vatican?” one of them said. Menchú opened his mouth to speak, then just nodded.
“Come with us,” another knight said. “We can speak inside.”
They each climbed up behind one of the knights and were borne aloft. They rode through the pink sky toward the sphere, and Asanti at last saw just how large it was—large enough to hold a stadium, several city blocks. Enough for quite a few people to make a home there, for a long time. As long as they weren’t too concerned about leaving.
5.
In the sphere was a village, built all along the inside of its shell, a curving maze of houses and cobblestone alleyways. Here and there, the needle of a steeple. All the roofs pointed inward, a sea urchin in reverse. In the middle was a warm orange sun. Thin clouds orbited it in gauzy rings.
As soon as the knights entered through a door that opened onto a small square, they righted themselves and landed on the pavement. Asanti could move again like she could in her own world. She got off the knight’s mount and looked around. Grace hopped off and dusted her clothes. Liam crackled his knuckles. Menchú rubbed the top of his head with his left hand. Sal gave them all a smile, then she and Grace helped Frances dismount. Asanti’s assistant was still moving slowly. She’d taken the worst beating.
There was a small chapel in front of them. The knights escorted them in without a word. Inside, a small group of men in vestments was seated at a long table, waiting for them. They all looked young, though with gray hair and pale eyes, as if the color had been drained from them. They motioned to chairs on the other side of the table from them and the visitors sat down. The men in vestments waited. Everyone in Team Three did, too. For a moment, no one seemed to know what to say.
“I’m Father Menchú,” said Menchú finally. “These are the members of my team.” He introduced each of them. There was a long pause. “Thank you for saving us out there.”
“Yes,” said one of the men. There was another pause while Asanti waited for some sort of welcome, or explanation of what just happened. It never arrived.
“Are you from the Vatican too?” Asanti said.
One of the men squinted. “Yes,” he said. “Well. Yes.”
“It’s not a word we use much,” said another of them.
“Were you from the Vatican?” Menchú said.
The squinting man cocked his head. “What’s the difference?” he said.
Another one of them interjected. “Let me see if I can clear this up. We know Rome. But we made this place.”
“We are always making it,” the first man said.
“Fuck this,” Liam said under his breath, but just loud enough for Grace, sitting next to him, to hear. Grace’s eyebrows rose and she nodded. Asanti gave them a dirty look, then turned back toward the men in vestments.
“When did you come here?” Asanti said.
“Here?” the first one said. “We are here.”
“We’ve been here a long time,” the second one said. “We start to lose track of time. For some of us, like our leader, we lose track of it in a more fundamental way than you might have thought possible.”
Asanti was starting to figure that out. “How is it you get to stay here?”
“The same way you do,” the first man said. He pointed to the Orb, which one of the knights had placed on the table. “We have a device like that.”
“I imagine you do,” Asanti said. “I think you built it.”
“We did build it,” the second man said.
“We are always building it,” the first man said.
“I see,” Asanti said.
“Do you?” the second man said. “Do you see? Like we see?”
Asanti thought about that for a moment.
“No,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
“You want answers,” the first man said.
“Yes,” Asanti said.
“To what questions?”
“I have a lot of questions.”
“We have a lot of time.”
“Yeah, well we don’t,” Grace said.
The men in vestments gave her an appraising look.
“You,” one of them said, “have had a lot of time, in fact.”
“What?” Frances said. “What does he mean by that?”
Menchú said nothing. Asanti decided to change tack.
“What’s your name?” she asked the second man.
“Giancarlo.”
“And where were you born, Giancarlo?”
“Cremona.”
“And you became a priest.”
“We are all priests here,” the first man said.
“And what is your name?” Asanti said.
“Frediano.”
“Where were you born, Frediano?”
“I am always being born. And always dying.”
Got it, Asanti thought. She turned back to Giancarlo.
“Are you the priests who had to leave the Vatican for using magic?”
Giancarlo smiled. “We don’t think of ourselves as having had to leave, so much as deciding to.”
“The records suggest you were driven out,” Menchú said.
Fred
iano smiled. “That is not the way we see it.”
“Let me guess,” said Grace. “You are always leaving the Vatican.”
“No,” Frediano said. “We are never there. And we never left.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Liam said. Sal couldn’t hold back a chuckle.
Frediano laughed, too. “I like this one,” he said, pointing to Liam.
“Giancarlo,” Asanti said. “We’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find you and we have a lot of questions.”
“We are happy to answer them,” Giancarlo said.
“Why did you start learning more about magic at the Vatican?”
“There came a time when we thought we needed it to combat the magic we were fighting against.”
“You only thought you needed it?”
“Yes,” Giancarlo said. “Then we understood that there was no need to fight it.”
“Once you understand that,” said Frediano, “there is no need for anything.”
“But why did you feel you needed it?” Asanti asked. “Was it that you thought more magic was coming into the world?”
“We thought there was going to be more,” Giancarlo said.
“But you were wrong,” Liam said.
“Only about how long it would take. We had much, much more time than we thought.”
“We see that now,” Frediano said. The rest of the men in vestments nodded.
“When is it coming, then?”
“That depends on how much you mean,” Giancarlo said. “First something small happens. A village. No. A town, maybe. It is hard to see.”
Menchú leaned forward. “What happens to the town?”
“Everything,” Frediano said. He cupped his hands over his mouth. Then he blew a puff of breath and flung his hands out, like he was conducting a carnival trick, making something disappear.
“Where does this happen?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Frediano said.
“How can it not matter?”
“Because,” Frediano said, “in time, it happens everywhere.”
The members of Team Three all looked at each other.
“When?” Liam said.
Frediano gave them all a huge, beatific smile. “It is always happening.”
“I can’t listen to this,” Sal said.
Giancarlo looked at her with surprise.
“How can you know what you know and not act on it?” Sal said.
“We say the opposite,” Frediano said. “Because we know, we know it is pointless to act.”
“Then why even tell us?” Sal said. “Why save us at all?”
“We didn’t,” Giancarlo said. He pointed to the end of the table. “Vito did.”
The last man in the row looked half again as old as the rest of them, but the color hadn’t drained out of him yet.
“I’m sorry it took us so long to rescue you,” Vito said. “Our sense of time is not as precise as it should be.”
“Yeah, we noticed,” Liam said.
“Why did you save us?” Sal said to Vito.
“Because,” he said, “I like the world the way it is. I don’t want to live in it. But I love to visit. And I want to keep visiting.”
Asanti had a thought. “Did you save some people lost in the mountains once?” she asked.
Vito smiled. “Many years ago, yes. A couple times. It was so easy to get lost here before there was a town. Now that there is a town, I sometimes visit to prevent accidents. Small ones. I save who I can.”
“Including us.”
Vito shrugged. “You have important work to do. I want to see if you can do it.”
“Are you saying you saved us so we can save the world?” Liam said.
“No,” Vito said. “I’m saying that visiting the world makes me see the point of saving you.”
“And the world?” Sal said.
Vito was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Did you get what you came here for?”
“Do you have straighter answers than they do?” Asanti said.
“Straighter, yes.” Vito said. “But not better. I can’t see like they do. I think it’s because I can’t think like they do, either. There’s a connection here. The more you think of time as an infinite present, the more you can see it that way. But you have to really think it. Not just as a thought. As a reality. I’m not there yet.”
“Thank God,” Liam said.
“Can you get us back?” Sal said.
“Yes,” Vito said. “Almost at the same time you left. We don’t time travel. But we do, in a way, stop time. Disconnect ourselves from it. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Grace said. “I do.”
Vito peered at her. “Yes, you do.”
“One last thing, then,” she said. “This disconnection. Can you reverse it?”
“Why would you want to?”
“But can you?”
“Yes,” Vito said. “If you figured out how to come here, you can figure that out, too.”
Grace turned to Menchú, a hopeful expression on her face. Menchú didn’t return the favor.
“Please take us home,” he said.
Vito escorted them back outside, where the knights and the Orb were waiting.
“You don’t have to leave this place to use the device you have,” Vito said. “You’ll come back just down the road from the parking lot. You’ll be able to walk back to where you came in.” He turned to Asanti.
“I’d like to help you sometime, if I can,” he said.
Asanti blinked. “You know, that surprises me.”
“Why?”
Liam laughed. “Are you serious? I mean, thanks for not just standing around and letting us be crushed into the ground earlier. But begging your pardon, you all come across as far too fatalistic to care about helping us more than you have.”
“Fatalistic?” Vito said. “Hm. I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it, then?” Sal said.
“Accepting?” Vito said.
Grace frowned.
“No, that’s not it. We just are, and it all just is,” Vito said. “Acceptance is itself an action that seems unnecessary, because things have a way of happening whether we accept them or not.”
“So you can see the point I’m trying to make,” Liam said.
“I see it,” Vito said. “But please tell me you understand a little about where we are now, too. We don’t have death wishes, for ourselves or for anything or anyone else. It’s simply that those of us who are further along, who see this infinite present—”
“Infinite present?” Grace said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t like the phrase.
“—who see all of it … I hope I can express this right,” Vito said. “We see where everything you know has come from, and we see where it all is going, all at once. We see how fleeting it is, and at the same time, see that there’s nothing to be afraid of in that, and that there is much to be embraced. To see time collapsed into a single, dense point like that is, in its way, beautiful to us. In a sense, to us, it is God.”
Vito had cupped his hands together, as if he was holding a ball that was warming his fingers.
Asanti peered at him. “The sphere that you’ve made,” she said. “It’s not for protection.”
“No,” Vito said.
“You built the town in God’s image,” Asanti said.
Vito nodded, pointing upward toward the glowing center. “And we, here on the shell, have the privilege of living close to it. Close to, not in. We came to the Church as religious people. A religious order, dedicated to creating religious order. Though we may have left the Vatican behind, we have only continued on that mission. And it has sustained us, you understand, in more ways than I can begin to tell you.”
“How did you build this?” Asanti said.
Vito laughed, nodding toward Grace. “She doesn’t have time for me to explain.”
“At last you understand me,” Grace said. “We need to go.”
“O
h, just one thing,” Vito said. He gave one of the dials on the Orb a quarter turn.
“What was that for?” Frances said.
“Just to make sure you don’t take anything with you that you didn’t intend.”
“I knew that’s what it was for,” Frances said. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Liam said. “You can’t get me out of here fast enough.”
• • •
Asanti had Sal shoo the rest of the acolytes out of the Black Archives, so only Team Three and Frances remained, gathered around the rug in front of Asanti’s desk. The Orb was back to its position there. Everyone’s where they’re supposed to be, Sal thought.
“It would have been nice to spend more time with them,” Frances said. “There’s so much to learn.”
“Yes,” Grace said. “If it didn’t take a hundred years to get one piece of information out of them.”
Frances chuckled. “There’s that.”
“Do the rest of you think the expedition was worth it?” Menchú said.
“I take it you don’t,” Sal said.
“No,” Menchú said. “We were almost killed. All of us.”
“Not to be cavalier about this, but we’re all almost killed on almost every mission we go on,” Liam said.
“This was different,” Menchú said. “In each mission I assign, there is a clear objective, a way to know if the risks we always take are worth it. Every book, every artifact that we put away here is, to me, validation for putting myself and all of you in harm’s way. But I don’t see what we gained from this mission.”
“How about understanding?” Asanti said.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Liam said, “but I agree with Asanti. Now we have a real sense of the importance of figuring out what the Network is doing. Through all that white noise that came out of Vito and company’s mouths, I got the sense that if there’s some sort of magical apocalypse coming, they’re doing their best to hasten it. Am I right?”
“I heard the same thing,” Sal said. “They’re planning something—something is going to happen soon. Maybe sooner than we thought.”
“But we are in no better a position to stop it,” Menchú said. “We’re not more prepared. We’re just more afraid.”
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 31