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

by Raphael Ordoñez

  “No, of course not,” said Secherim, still gasping for air. “No obstacle at all. Who could be? But their confounded stick-in-the-muddedness makes them uniquely useful. The Cheiropt saw that long ago, oh yes it did. They’re secretive. They refuse to adapt. They’re a living reproach. They’re suspected by all. Most importantly, they will never recognize your rank. You see? Yes! Let them burn like candles upon your accession! Oh, what a delight! Oh, what a feast for the people! Let the smoke of their bonfires rise up to heaven! Let their spilled blood cement the foundation of your reign! The masses will adore you, if they can only be shown that in doing so they’ll have to hate those skulkers in darkness. Trust me! But never will your hands be dirtied with the business, have no fear. Clever mechanisms that sound reasonable but cleave right through the heart of them. That’s the key. The masses will pile the fuel themselves without even asking themselves what they’re doing.”

  Zilla trilled enigmatically.

  “And I say, let the Enochites cling to their petty rites, if they so desire. Just so they adore you as they adore the Cheiropt, before all and over all. And they will adore you. Even as I have adored you, ever since that day.” There was a protracted silence, and then Secherim said in a low, wheedling voice, “Oh, please. Just once. It’s been so long.”

  “So be it. Just this one time before the final unveiling.”

  “Yes, yes. Just this once.”

  There was a pregnant pause. I leaned out a little to look. And then I was running, reckless of the turnings, beating my fists against the walls, running, running.

  I’d been prepared for any amount of deformity. A gorgon wouldn’t have frozen my heart. What I hadn’t expected was unearthly beauty. The shock of it was driving me almost out of my mind.

  For he was beautiful, the veiled one, as lovely to behold as a terrestrial angel, his face inhuman and serene, snowy soft and golden white, with slanting, solid black eyes half-lidded by lavender, long-lashed lids, a gentle swell of a nose sloping smoothly down to the tip of a pointed lip, a small mouth turned up at the corners in a mirthless smirk of beatitude and lofty irony.

  It was the face of the predestined god-emperor of earth.

  51 Womb of Chaos

  I tired myself out running. I halted in a doorway, panting, my mind reeling, and leaned against the wall for support. In my anguish I’d climbed high up the southeastern quarter. The Temple of the Sun, I knew, couldn’t be far off. Zilla was away. Now was the time to reconnoiter. So, striving not to think about what I had seen, I stepped out into the street and continued more slowly, picking my way up the winding stairs and alleys.

  It was midday when I reached the foot of a retaining wall divided from the maze of mud brick by a narrow lane. The temple terrace lay above. I slipped along the wall to a gate, where a tunnel led up to the complex. There was a man reclining in the shadows, cloaked and masked in the Druin fashion. He looked like a vagrant and appeared to be nodding, but I caught a gleam of steel beneath his garments. I crept back out of sight.

  Rounding the corner at the end of the terrace, I found myself in a short alley that ran up against the bare mountain itself. I strode to the last tower and began to climb from floor to floor. The stairwell windows looked out over Moabene, a cataract of white and red shimming in the noontide sun. A storm was sailing aloofly over the flats.

  When I reached the highest floor I crossed a room to survey the terrace. The retaining wall was the flat end of a semicircular platform built into a bay of the mountain that overlooked the city from the southeast. A ziggurat stood at the inner end with palaces and fanes rambling around it. The concourse from the gate to the ziggurat was flanked by two tapering towers that rose in series of square tiers like tottering cakes. There were guards standing around the nearest.

  A flicker of movement caught my eye. I glanced down at the street. The lone watcher was approaching my tower.

  I descended the stairs silently and waited in the doorway. When his shadow darkened the threshold I spun out. For an instant we sized one another up, his golden eyes glinting with fire but not fear. A second later he was down, sword in hand.

  I hauled the body into the tower and covered the blood-soaked dust in the alley. Then I went in and pulled off his mask. It was Perses. A look of supreme surprise was frozen on his face.

  I staggered back a few steps. The still warmth of the afternoon air sickened me, and I went out and vomited in the street. I rinsed my mouth, then returned to the body. I had to resist an urge to shake it, to try to wake it up. Life had been in it so recently. It was still warm and supple. Grief and frustration gnawed at my heart. Madness rose up like a specter.

  Without thinking, I dropped my things and dashed back out into the lane. I went along the wall to the gate and then up into the complex. Steps sounded near at hand, driving me into a cloister that enclosed a desiccated garden. The tapering tower loomed over the far corner. I circled through the maze of palaces to the back of the building.

  The tower’s masonry was rich with ornament, looking to afford an easy ascent. The dusty courtyard was patrolled by a pair of Druin sentries. I waited while they crossed in front of me, then bounded to the tower and swung myself up the first tier. I flattened myself there. After the guards passed by again I scrambled to the next and waited as before. Continuing like this, I soon reached the topmost chamber. I peered inside.

  A young woman sat on a stone bench, her lissome form framed by the russet flats and flashing clouds visible through the opposite window. She had a fierce, eager face with an arched nose, shining golden eyes, and dark hair pulled back in a chaotic knot. Her eyes lit on me like twin suns.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. Her voice was girlish, yet peremptory.

  “I’m Keftu, the Phylarch of Arras,” I said.

  “Why are you at my window, Phylarch?”

  “I seek Althea, the Last Sibyl of At.”

  “I am Althea.”

  “Be ready,” I said, then dropped to the tier below.

  “Wait,” she called. I returned to the window. “What is the inscription on the lintel of Sephaura, Arrasene?”

  I hesitated. “All that is, is good.”

  “Remember it. Go now.”

  I pulled away from the window and lowered myself to the foot of the tower, then dashed across the courtyard and through the complex to the edge of the terrace. Shadow had crept over the city. Huge raindrops were beginning to fall.

  I climbed over the parapet and slid into the alley. The body hadn’t been disturbed. I drew the cloth over its face; there was no time to do more. Then I took up my things, went out, and descended to a lower quarter. I crept into an abandoned building. Thunder rolled over the desert.

  * * * * *

  Stilerich rounded the buttress and was about to enter the gate when he saw me leaning in a corner. “There you are,” he said. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing,” I said, stifling a yawn.

  “You’re not one to overexert yourself, are you, Keftu?” He frowned, missing something, but didn’t mention it. Together we went up to the terrace.

  The wet flagstones mirrored the ziggurat at the end of the concourse, but the storm had passed, leaving a double rainbow in its wake. Slanting sunbeams drifted down over the city as through clear water, gilding the buildings and lining them with hard-edged shadow. The wet, barren crags looked like something precious. A fresh wind coursed through the empty palaces.

  Stilerich conducted me to the tower and up to the second story. There Zilla sat enthroned opposite the western window. He was tall and narrow-shouldered and dressed all in white, with features hidden behind his veil, which was suspended from a high headdress. His hands were thin claws with tendons like steel cables. The mellow light of the declining sun fell full upon him.

  Stilerich prostrated himself and rose. “This is the one I told you about,” he said.

  Someone giggled
in a corner behind me. I turned and saw Secherim sitting on a stool, grinning. Stilerich, making for the stairwell, lashed out without warning as he passed, planting a blow on the side of Secherim’s face and knocking him off his perch. Secherim leaped up and dashed after him, his face distorted with spasms of rage.

  Then, as if none of this had just happened, Zilla said: “What is your name?”

  “I’m Keftu.”

  “Stilerich spoke highly of you.”

  “I trust you won’t be disappointed.”

  “It’s a game we play,” said Zilla. “Stilerich brings me a tool, and I break it. You are not brittle, I hope.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “What is it you need done?”

  “All in good time. Are you ready to begin, then?” I bowed. “Then come with me.”

  He rose and glided past. Together we descended to the courtyard. We crossed to the concourse and turned to approach the ziggurat.

  There was a passageway at the foot of the ramp. Zilla handed me a tube lamp like the one I’d used while delving. I twisted it on, then plunged with him into the heart of the pile. The shaft led us to a necropolis hollowed out of the mountain itself. A hole in the wall of the deepest chamber admitted us to an abandoned mine.

  “You see,” said Zilla, sounding as though on the verge of irrepressible laughter, “the Temple of the Sun is a convenient location for us in more ways than one.”

  “These are the Enochites’ mines?”

  “Begun during the Fifth Chiliad. Abandoned shortly thereafter. They never knew how close they had come to disaster.”

  Another few stades of tunnels led us to an elevator. We boarded the car. “Which way?” I asked.

  “Down,” said Zilla.

  The car screeched into motion, and down we went. By the time we reached the bottom I judged that we were a mile below the desert floor. The air was warm and heavy. We stepped out into a cave like the inside of a giant sponge. Zilla led me from hollow to hollow, climbing through twisted tubes, skirting holes and fissures. We came to an open space in the middle, where a huge black pit gaped at the unseen ceiling. A chain ladder with iron bars for rungs descended into the deep.

  Zilla led the way down. I followed him after hooking the lamp to my harness. We reached the floor of the lower level, half a stade below the mouth of the pit. There a long, low chamber dropped to a wall with a pale vein of chalcedony pursed like a pair of vertical lips.

  My guide produced a white stone shaped like an egg. “Listen carefully,” he said. “This is your task. You must stand guard here, looking after this stone while I’m gone. If anything comes through here, kill it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. But mind that you stay here no matter what. Leave your post at your own peril. Understand?”

  “Will you be taking the lamp?”

  “You keep it,” he said. He glided down to the foot of the slope. There he uttered a quiet word, and the wall opened along the vein with an ear-splitting roar. He stepped through. The pit beyond began to glow faintly. He soon vanished from sight.

  I set the lamp down and bounded to the crack. The walls of the tube were like the inside of a seashell, glimmering with the ghostly glow of abyssal creatures. There was a faint charnel odor in the air.

  Pocketing the stone, I slipped over the lip and went down the tube. The lower end opened upon a heart-shaped pit, the confluence of monstrous aortas. A spire with a level top rose out of the depths, almost kissing a long spike with a bulbous point suspended from the groin overhead.

  Zilla had crossed to the spire somehow. I slipped into a pocket to watch. He was intoning a formula in a monotonous tongue. He lifted his veil as he did so and turned. I clenched my fists at seeing his face again, bloodying the palms of my hands with my nails.

  As if in answer to his incantation, cells behind the pit’s lining began to glow more brightly from within. Silhouetted against each membrane was a suspended form that kicked convulsively like an embryo. The shadows moved with the steady cadence of Zilla’s voice.

  I slid deeper into the pocket and for a while lost track of time. I looked out again as the light started to fade. Zilla’s back was to me, so I took the chance to dash up the tube and over the lip. The lamp was where I had left it.

  Zilla soon followed, veiled as before. His unseen eyes bored holes through me from behind their curtain. “Still here, I see,” he trilled. “Have you stood your post?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you have my stone?”

  I had forgotten it. I fumbled for it and drew it out. It was glowing like the walls of the tube. “It’s telling me a story, Keftu,” Zilla crooned. “What have you been doing? Have you been watching me? Did you hope to find out about the presents I’m taking to Jairus? Don’t you know that I have watchers more swift than any human messenger? I’ve been waiting for you. I don’t know how you escaped my nephel, but this time you’ll not find your way out so easily.”

  My legs carried me down the slope and through the crack. The wall roared shut behind me. The light faded slowly from the walls, leaving me in utter darkness.

  52 Green and Vermilion

  For a long time I sat there, feeling the extent of my disaster. Despair settled about me like a pall. Shifting my weight, I noticed that my sword had grown warm in its scabbard. I drew it. The blade was white-hot and smoking, but illuminated nothing.

  I steadied myself against the floor. At the sound of a flapping footstep I lashed out blindly. My blade clove through some nameless confection of exhalation and decay. A thin wail filled the air. There was a frantic scrabbling, like the dance of a smashed insect. Both eventually died down.

  Giving whatever it was a wide berth, I crept down to my hiding place and curled up inside it. The darkness beat on me from all sides like the water of a subterranean sea. Unmoored by my senses, I began to wander through the profound cockles of Sephaura. I lost track of time’s passage, now dreaming, now waking, never certain which was which.

  My heart opened slowly like a sporangium in darkness, and I found myself singing. It was a song I hadn’t thought of since leaving Arras, a seraphic litany learned at my godmother’s knees. Taking my stand in it, I blessed the sun and the moon, the spirits of wind and of flame, the mosses and mollusks of the entropic earth. My tenor resonated through the aortas as though they were titanic organ pipes.

  When I reached the end of the litany I started again from the beginning. I rose from the pocket as I sang. The darkness, I found, was no longer complete: the bulbous end of the spike had begun to glimmer. It was larger than before, and shifted and stretched with the rise and fall of my voice.

  I began a third time. The bulb continued to distend, ribbed like a giant chrysalis, but larger than a man and still growing. My litany came to an end. I waited in silence to see what would happen.

  The case split open and a winged creature began to struggle out. It was built like a dragonfly but belonged to no order I knew. Its chitinous body was clothed in soft scarlet scales. Its underbelly glowed greenly, like a firefly’s, and a thousand hues scintillated in its hemispherical eyes. The soft whirr of its timpani filled the air.

  It climbed up the spike to spread its diaphanous wings, and once they were dry and stiff it took to the air, looping and dodging through the darkness, weaving trails in my vision.

  The creature alit at the edge of the pit and bent its body to the floor. I didn’t know whether it was there to save me or eat me, but it was the loveliest thing I had ever seen. Impulsively, I slipped my leg over its back and clutched its carapace. As soon as it felt me secure there it sprang into the air.

  We soared up one of the flues into the twilit world of the bolgs, passing through vast hollows left over from wars waged before man was a dream, the goddess’ corpse of the myth, a titanic organism sprung from a spore conceived in the spaces beyond Kronos-El. I shielded my eyes from those visions, but still I exulted.

  My mount seemed to know its way quite well, and I laughed out l
oud as it banked and dropped and pulled upward again, never questioning where we were going. But then at last I felt cool wind on my face, and opened my eyes on a black sky dusted with stars, and the moon encircled by rainbows of ice, and dead mountains reaching up around us on every side. I’d been entombed for a full day, but I was neither hungry nor thirsty.

  Navigating by the constellations, I guided my mount into the west. Afram sparkled in its seat of stone. The viaduct was stretched like a dew-flecked spider strand over the desert. Moabene was a duskier jewel to the south.

  Soon we were spiraling down toward the temple, dropping out of the night sky like a meteor of green and vermilion. The pinnacle of the tower was dark, but the lower stories glowed with torchlight.

  The insect alit on the roof. I slipped off and swung myself into the Sibyl’s room. It was empty. Cool night air wafted through the windows. Camel crickets chirped. Voices drifted up from the base of the tower.

  I went back out and lowered myself from tier to tier as before, stopping at Zilla’s room to peer inside. Stilerich was seated on the throne. Althea stood before him. Druin guards flanked the stairs.

  “Must I endure this night after night?” the Sibyl was saying. “Once again you demand my support, and once again I refuse it.”

  “But it’s such a small thing we’re asking of you,” said Stilerich. “No action is required on your part. Just a pledge to remain silent on one point. And then you’ll be able to go about your calling as before.”

  “As if your requests wouldn’t grow larger once you had my complicity to blackmail me with. But how can I tell At what to say and what not to say? Who are you to tell me what belongs to my office? Garrote me if you will, and bury my bones in the desert, but don’t ask me to do the impossible.”

  “That is precisely what will be arranged,” said Stilerich.