Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes

by Raphael Ordoñez

  I went back down to the room. Seila still hadn’t returned. I was weary and drained from the previous day’s doings and suddenly felt sleepy again. The mattress called to me. I went and lay down upon it.

  * * * * *

  I awoke in a panic. The air had grown stuffy, and the bed clothes were saturated with my sweat. The room was filled with ruddy light.

  I rose and went to the windows and pushed one open. Wind from the west animated the curtains. Through a host of pinnacles, battlements, turrets, and spires I beheld the molten-gold bosom of the sea. The sun was just resting its quaking crown on a cloud-wrack.

  The end of day was announced by a clamor of gongs and trumpets. Sunset collapsed into dusk, orange to blue-green to indigo. Here and there the descending curtain was pricked by a silver-green light, a window behind which some actuary or accountant was concluding a day’s work. I could pick out the minutest details of distant offices. It filled me with a queer melancholy.

  I went and sat cross-legged on the mattress, feeling more alone in the city than I ever had in the desert.

  * * * * *

  When it was quite dark I stood up again. I was uncertain what to do. I was afraid of missing Seila if I went looking for her. But I felt in my heart that something must have happened. Reluctantly, I began to don my armor.

  It was then that I saw something on the floor by the door. It was a piece of parchment. I took it up and carried it to the windows. My footprint was on it: I must have stepped on it when I returned from the pinnacle that morning. There were words on it, written in the characters of Arras.

  A new wind started to stream through the curtains. I put my nose to the paper, straining to read in the dim light. Its message was brief: “Return to the tower where you rescued the woman. Something awaits you there.”

  * * * * *

  The streets were rivers of ink. I stumbled every few steps. I was wearing my armor but walking slowly. I hoped it wouldn’t drain me if I didn’t exert myself. It was heavy on my tired limbs.

  The tower where I’d found Seila was completely deserted now. The Misfit had covered his tracks, and all signs of recent habitation were gone. I crossed the atrium, which glimmered with the ghostly green glow of the skylight, and began climbing from landing to landing. I went all the way to the top and through the broken gate into the corridor. The darkness was almost palpable. It clung to my face like cobwebs. “Hello!” I shouted. The closed space threw my voice back at me.

  Cautiously I felt my way around the square of rooms. The doors were all closed and locked. I dared not batter them down now, afraid I would need my strength later. One door only was open, on the opposite side of the building from the stairs. It led into an apartment overlooking the inside of the square, hardly less dark than the passages. The tube lamps wouldn’t turn on. It had been stripped like the rest of the building, but less thoroughly. The signs that remained—a lingering scent of perfume, a porcelain pot of ointment, a gown in the wardrobe—spoke of Seila.

  I went into the next room. A naked mattress sat in a carved frame with a wooden nightstand beside it. The dresser was full of empty, half-open drawers. Faint light fell through a small window. A box sat on the narrow table below it.

  A barely audible snick drew me back into the main room. The door was closed and the bolt engaged. Someone had changed the mechanism so that the keyhole faced the inside. I was locked in. There were faint noises now. Inhuman voices echoing from beyond the void. Mirthless laughter. Screeches and crashes. Mindless repetition of meaningless phrases. All at the very threshold of audibility, so that I could have supposed it my imagination, had I wanted to.

  The box in the bedroom came to my mind. I had been meant to find it. That was what the message had referred to. I went to examine it again.

  The darkness was now complete. My fingers groped across the table. The box was gone. With mounting dread I felt all over the room. I found it on top of the dresser. My hands explored its contours. It was made of some lightweight metal, ornately molded but rather cheap. My fingers found a catch on the base and slid it sideways.

  It seemed clear now that I had just walked into a trap. It was senseless, as senseless as everything that had happened since my setting foot in Enoch. Life was senseless. Perhaps Seila was right. Perhaps eternity was only a pointless prolonging.

  So now you see, a voice said. There are no songlines.

  “No,” I said. “I found the songlines of Enoch.”

  And what are they? Avenues of horror, haunted by human vermin.

  I had no answer for that. The morning’s sanguinity seemed mere madness now. I was at the end of my story. An obscure end in an empty apartment. A cheap box filled with death. It was too bad.

  I thought of Aine and how she had always believed in me. Now Arras and Sephaura would die with me, and there would be nothing again forever.

  It didn’t seem to matter.

  I opened the box.

  Interlude

  29 The Infested

  The world was a canyon of windy darkness rushing past the windows of my eyes. My feet pounded the pavement; I didn’t know why. I had an impression of having plunged from a great height through a dome of glass, but it was like a dream within a dream. Now I was running, running through the empty streets, fleeing a grinning something that sat on my back. If I stopped running, it would devour me, body and soul.

  An upright bar of darkling luminosity showed where the street ended ahead. It grew larger, sprinkled with stars. I neared the foundation’s edge. Now I saw the gas fields like a trough of darker night strewn with golden pinpoints of light, and the jagged teeth of the mountains aspiring into the black sky.

  I reached the edge and bounded into empty space. I touched down on a viaduct that twisted like an iron ribbon through the night and leaped again. The helots below scattered in fright as I hurtled toward them. I struck the water, plunged deeply into the oozy bottom, and set the surface alive with hissing bubbles.

  The causeway that ran parallel to the city blocked my view of the horsetails. I strode forward through the muck and scrambled up the bank, streaming with filth, tearing out great clods of earth with my hands. The workers fled screaming at the sight of me. Still driven by the oppressor that sat astride me, I gathered myself up and shot off at a sprint, rocketing along the track that ran between two parallel lines of fields, making for the mountains and the desert.

  Soon I reached the outer rim of the marshes. I cleared the moat and went tearing up the rocky bluff beyond, uprooting moss-trees and throwing boulders out of the way, starting small avalanches that went rattling down into the stagnant water.

  Now I was leaping across the rocky plateau that sloped up toward the jagged ridge through which I had guided my flier. Heaps of stones gleamed in the moonlight. Patches of black showed where the tops of moss-trees rose out of winding ravines. My pounding footfalls sent mocking echoes through the waste.

  When dawn backlit the pinnacles of the higher range I was careening through a maze of fins and pillars at the top of the lower. I emerged high above the rift valley. Wreaths of clouds curled over its dusky depths. Terrified at my own recklessness, I went swinging from handhold to handhold down the face of the cliffs. Despair laid a single withering finger on my heart. I knew I was at the end of my strength. Soon I would stumble and fall, and my pursuer would make me its puppet.

  I was down among the pernathim now, pushing my way through the huge undergrowth that hid the splayed roots of the scale-trees. Flowing water spoke in my ears. I was thirsty, desperately thirsty. Pale light showed ahead. I fell on my hands and knees and went crawling through the ferns and mosses like one of the armored amphibians I frightened out of my way.

  The stream was a rippled pane of clear glass. Long, leafy plants swayed back and forth in the current. I put my face in the water to drink. It was then that the parasite took hold of me. I was dimly conscious of a monstrous, inhuman personality overwhelming my own. I went rooting in the mud like a beast, whimpering, soiling
myself and rutting. I started scratching around in the bracken, making a place to lie down. In one last corner of sanity I knew that I would never awake to myself again.

  A figure strode up out of the shadows. It was an old man, the first old man I’d seen since coming to Enoch. His skin was brown and taut, like a mummy’s, but he looked virile, and he had strong white teeth.

  Unable to help myself, I tried to attack him. The old man struck me across the shoulders with his staff, stunning me. Then he went to the edge of the stream and cut a big scouring rush. He dipped it in the water and sprinkled me with droplets. “Come out of him,” he commanded.

  Something convulsed my body and rushed out of me with a blast of arid wind. It shot off laughing among the scale-tree stems. I rolled on my side and dropped into oblivion.

  * * * * *

  There were two incessant sounds. As I struggled up toward the waking world I sought to identify them. At last my desire grew so great that I opened my eyes. Rain pattered on the roof. A clock told time in another room.

  I was in a small, square cell. My mattress lay in an arched alcove built into a whitewashed earthen wall. Dark planks upheld by rafters formed the ceiling. A small window with age-rippled panes admitted damp, sylvan daylight through the wall behind my head. A few glowing nuggets throbbed gently in a corner hearth whose flue formed a continuous curve with the walls. There was a green woven rug on the floor.

  I lay beneath a heavy, colorful counterpane that was old and worn but clean and fresh. There were fragrant herbs in my pillow. I was warm and dry and snug, and the sound of the rain emphasized my comfort. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep to the sound of the ticking clock.

  When I next awoke nothing about the room had changed, except that the old man was now sitting in a wooden chair beside my bed, watching me, with a bowl of white broth cupped in his bony hands. He was quite bald, so that the lines of his skull were clearly visible, and his thin skin was wrapped tightly about his knobby joints. He wore a coarse hempen habit.

  “Back with us at last,” he said, smiling. It was strange to hear such a strong, hearty voice emerge from such old lips.

  “You…drove it out of me,” I said. It was as much a question as a statement.

  “I did.”

  “I—struck at you. I’m sorry. I—I didn’t—”

  “Say no more of it. Are you hungry? It would be good for you to eat at least a bit of this, even if you don’t feel like eating.”

  “I will,” I said. The old man began feeding me a spoonful at a time, as though I were an infant. Between swallows I asked: “What would have happened to me if…?”

  “If I hadn’t come along when I did? The spirit of wind would have possessed you. You would have become its puppet, and the slave of the one who commanded it, if it happened to be a theurge’s familiar.”

  “Who are you?”

  The old man smiled as he offered another spoonful. “No one in particular.”

  “Then how is it that you have the authority to cast out unclean spirits?”

  “Every man has that virtue as his birthright. But a virtue abused or neglected diminishes. The princes of the air are quite perceptive when it comes to sensing who has kept at his exercises and who has not.”

  “What exercises?”

  “Listen,” said the old man. “What do you hear?”

  After a moment, I said: “I hear the beating of raindrops on the roof, and the ticking of one of those machines the Enochites use to keep time.”

  “Correct. Atop that clock there lies a brass key. Once every week I use the key to wind the clock.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s all,” the old man said. “That’s my exercise.”

  I took a spoonful. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “A little.” There was a twinkle in his eye.

  “All the same,” I said, “I’ve just come from Enoch, and while I was there I noticed that the phylites rarely wind their clocks. At the time I wondered why.”

  “Did you?” The old man was smiling, but interest was kindled in his eyes. “And what conclusions did you draw?”

  I fell back on my pillow. “No more for now,” I said. “Thank you. I didn’t draw any conclusions. I just wondered, that’s all. I’m trying to fathom your meaning.”

  “My meaning?”

  “Yes. You remind me of someone. My godmother, who was also a healer. She often teased me, but there was always some deeper meaning hidden behind her humor. I had the same thought about you.”

  “Don’t let’s be thinking too much quite yet,” the old man said, getting to his feet. “Sleep well tonight. Tomorrow you can get up.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Two days.” He set his withered hand on the door latch.

  “What is your name?” I asked.

  “Gaspar.” He opened the door.

  “Gaspar,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “How many days go by between windings?”

  Gaspar observed me long and shrewdly. “Seven,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Gaspar softly closed the door. The rain pattered at the window, and the clock went on telling time.

  * * * * *

  I slept through the night. When I opened my eyes the cell was filled with the warm glow of the hearth. Purple twilight fell through the window. It was dawn.

  I rose and stretched. My muscles were painfully stiff. The floor was chilly. In the corner beside my bed I found a chair with a habit of brown velvety stuff and a pair of slippers. I put them on and opened the door.

  The main room of the cottage lay beyond. A door in the opposite wall gave upon what was presumably Gaspar’s bedroom. The massive front door was in the right-hand wall between two round windows. A big arched fireplace faced it across the room, heaped with glowing nuggets. Ironmongery and earthenware and dried provisions hung from the ceiling and filled alcoves and shelves. My armor sat in a corner.

  The only piece of furniture was a small yet massive wooden table. Its top was scored and shiny from long use. There was a bench on either side of it. I sat down and waited.

  Gaspar came in a moment later, laden with two earthen jugs swinging from a bar across his shoulders. He slung them down to the floor. “Good day to you,” he said. “You found what I set out for you, I see.”

  “Yes. Thank you. What’s this robe made of? I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  “It’s from the cap of a giant mushroom. They grow in a ring in a dark dell farther up the canyon.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Good.” Gaspar went over to the hearth and ladled gruel into bowls from a pot suspended over the coals. Then he lifted a cast-iron oven out of the embers. With a pair of tongs he transferred the steaming contents to a basket lined with cloth. This he set in the middle of the table. A pair of spoons and two ceramic mugs of strong, black tea completed the setting.

  “Now,” he said, “if you will kindly stand.” I rose, and my host bowed his head and asked the auraiads and naiads and dryads that watched over the forest to bless our food. Then we sat and began our meal.

  “Help yourself,” said Gaspar, indicating the basket. I lifted up a corner of the cloth. Curling wisps of steam rose into the air. Heaped in the basket were fruiting bodies, bell-shaped and disk-shaped and ruffled, red and orange and pale gray and brown, with gills gloriously dark and exuding earthy odors. I lifted one out and ate it hungrily, then ate some gruel, and then two more fruits.

  “You are a Recusant,” I said as the edge of my hunger was blunted.

  “You might say that.”

  “I know little more of them than that they live by the seven-day week. Someone in Enoch told me about it.”

  “You must have kept questionable company there,” the old man said.

  I laughed. “We misfits don’t have the luxury of choosing our associates.”

  “You aren’t a misfit, Keftu,” he said. “You’re an alien.”

/>   I suddenly felt cold inside. I ate a few more bites in silence. “How do you know my name?”

  “You raved while you slept,” the old man said gently.

  I stared at my bowl. “I don’t wish to seem ungrateful,” I said. “But I am, as you say, an alien, and I had several unpleasant experiences in Enoch. They taught me to be cautious.”

  “Prudence is the queen of the virtues. But every virtue has its twin vices. Prudence degenerates into heedlessness on one hand and cunning on the other. Be prudent, not cunning.”

  “That is well taken,” I said slowly, “and to me it seems the part of prudence to…”

  “To make inquiries as to my person and purposes,” the old man said mildly. “I am willing. Ask me what you will.”

  “Did you know I would be coming this way?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know?”

  “That is easily asked, but not easily answered. Let us say the forest told me.”

  I nodded slowly. “I had some thought of that,” I said. “Perhaps we’ll return to it in a moment. Are you in fact a Recusant?”

  “As employed by the Cheiropt, that word can mean a number of different things. But this I will tell you. I am a member of the interstitial people that traces its roots back to the vanished kingdom of Eldena, whom the phylites commonly call Recusants.”

  “Eldena! Where have I heard that name?” I searched my mind. “I have it. The race of slaves.” I looked up in surprise. “Then they are one and the same? Recusants and Eldenes?”

  “Strictly speaking, no. The Eldenes are a people. Recusants follow a certain observance. But the words are usually used interchangeably.”