Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  “Thank you,” she said, confidence returning to her voice. “We must move swiftly. The supplicants are bloated with feasting, and your fellow heliots walk amongst us, taking their silent tithe. This will be our best chance. Come with me.”

  She led me through the empty hall, passing between the tables riddled with carcasses and half-eaten victuals. I glanced up at the tapestry. The falling angel with flaming wings seemed to look right at me.

  “That’s him, isn’t it? Carus.”

  “Do not speak his name,” she hissed. “We cannot afford to draw his attention.”

  “I’m sorry. I… I didn’t know.”

  She sighed. “He was beautiful then, even at the fall. Now he haunts the in-between, imprisoning us with his hungers. Even if I could make him whole again, I’m not sure it would be enough. Our world is beyond salvation.”

  “It looked lovely once,” I said, gesturing towards the leftmost tapestry of peace.

  “That was many lifetimes ago, heliot. Before we made your kind.”

  We reached an entrance I had not noticed, a small, solid wooden door tucked in a dark corner of the hall. She whispered something unintelligible, and the door swung open. She peered out, glancing in both directions. “Come,” she said.

  We stepped into a vast, narrow hallway. The throne room we just came from, for all its fraying age, was still vibrant and beautiful, but this hallway was a sterile, lifeless place. It stretched away so far in both directions that the walls and ceiling converged into a single point. To our left, that point was a bright spot of light. To our right, it melded into shadow.

  We started walking right, towards the point of shadow. The walls on either side of us were flat and smooth. I looked up at the ceiling. Or maybe it was the sky. It was a uniform slate grey that might have been cloud cover or seamless, molded plating.

  “Where are you taking me?” Something about the cold symmetry of the hallway instinctively made me whisper.

  She sliced her hand through the air, shushing me.

  She led me onwards, but as time passed, we did not seem to be making any progress. No matter how long we walked for, everything looked the same. It was as if we were on a conveyor tread moving in the opposite direction at just the right pace to keep us trapped in place, negating every forward step we took.

  The queen did not seem to notice. She was gazing at the floor as we walked, her lips moving in soundless repetition, some silent prayer or invocation. My mind fell into a stupor, which is probably why it took my brain so long to process the fact that something was moving towards us.

  I tapped the queen on the shoulder, breaking her concentration. She looked up at me in irritation. I pointed at the smudge ahead of us. It was fuzzy and indistinct, but it was definitely coming closer. Fear came over her face.

  Without saying a word, she grabbed my hand again, and whipped us around in the other direction. We started running. I looked behind us. The smudge was getting bigger.

  She stopped short, almost tumbling me over. Another door appeared, coalescing in front of us. “We will have to take a different way,” she whispered. “Hold on to my hand. These doors are mine alone. You will be trapped here if you let go.”

  I gripped her hand tight. She led me through the door.

  * * *

  We entered an opulent bedroom. Purple and black silk curtains hung from a burgundy wood bed frame. The mattress was piled with cushions in hues of violet, midnight, and silver. There was a bulge beneath the blankets that might have been a human form.

  On the other side of the room, a man stood naked, facing a tall brass mirror. His back and chest were covered with scars. He touched a scar on his belly, a puckered slash of pink. A pack of three heliots with the heads of hyenas stood behind him, watching and grinning. The man lifted his hand from the scar on his belly and reached to a coat stand next to the mirror. He grabbed a long jacket off the stand and, still facing the mirror, held it out at arms’ length.

  The heliots looked at each other, panting, tongues lolling. The man waved the jacket in the air, impatient. One of the hyenas took it from him. The man lifted both arms, and the hyena placed the coat over his shoulders, fitting his arms into the jacket sleeves, covering his naked body.

  “What are-?” I started to ask.

  “We do not have time to gape, heliot,” she said, cutting me off. She led me through the room. The hyenas turned to watch us, sniffing the air. The man stayed facing the mirror as he brushed the dust from his jacket, but his eyes tracked our movement. The blankets and cushions on the bed stirred, and a naked heliot with heavy breasts and the head of a mantis sat up. Her mandibles clacked as we passed.

  As we approached the far door, the hyena who had covered the man with the jacket stepped in front of us. His jaws opened into a wicked grin, saliva dribbling from his black gums and sharp fangs.

  The queen lifted her hand and moved it left in a sharp gesture. The hyena jerked sideways as if pulled by an invisible cord, tumbling into the other two dogmen. They yipped and barked, but she glared at them and they kept back.

  The door whooshed open. A large room with a plush, patterned carpet lay before us. Sofas wrapped with oiled animal hides the color of walnut were scattered around the room. Shelves of books covered all four walls, and a wheeled ladder on each side provided access to the higher stacks.

  I glanced back into the bedroom. The man in the long jacket was climbing into bed with the mantis, leaning close to her.

  Her mandibles opened wide.

  The door swung shut.

  “Autarchess,” a voice said.

  The voice made me start. I turned around to find another man standing in front of us, his head bowed low, obscuring his face. Then he lifted his head. It was Dunsemai!

  He looked older. Much older. But it was definitely him. Given his apparent age, he was no doubt one of the eldest among these strange people, older than anyone else I had seen since the youthful infusion of the feast.

  “Alecksindé,” the queen, tipping her head to him. “We need your help.”

  “Anything, your majesty.” He glanced at me, eyes curious.

  “The Dimensional.”

  Shock wavered on his face. “The Dimensional has been forbidden since-”

  “Alecksindé,” she said, “do not presume to quote the strictures to me.”

  He composed himself. “Of course not, autarchess. But why have you come to my humble library? Why not take the arbor path?”

  “The way…” She narrowed her eyes. “Has been barred.”

  He nodded. “Ah,” he said, demanding no further explanation. “Follow me then, my queen.”

  He led us between the chairs and reading tables to the ladder at the western stacks. He grabbed the ladder and rolled it to the northwest corner. Then he scurried up, nimble as a sindacat. When he reached the top shelf, he pointed his index finger and ran it along the book spines.

  “Here it is!” he said, stopping his scan. He extracted a book from the shelf. Tucking it under his arm, he gripped the edges of the ladder with his hands and feet and slid down, crouching as he landed.

  “This library is an extension of my essence, heliot,” he said to me, intuiting my surprise. “Here, in these archives, I move as no other can.”

  He held the book out to the queen. The title was embossed in gold on the textured green binding, but the writing was inscrutable to me.

  “Do you know the passage?” the queen asked him.

  “Of course,” he said primly. “I would be a poor archivist indeed if I did not.”

  “Read it.”

  He flipped the book open, wet his thumb with his tongue, and rifled through the pages. “Ah. Here we are.” He stood a little straighter. “Arro fly. Archa wat. Carus ends. Hrong secap. Nobles cru. Soth ahcends. Arro fords te Carus gan.”

  He looked up from the book. “Goodbye, my queen.”

  Then he looked at me and winked.

  The room dissolved.

  * * *

  W
e were suspended in the void of space. A sphere of impenetrable darkness floated an immeasurable distance from us, blotting out the stars. Bands of light encircled the sphere, flowing in magisterial procession around its surface.

  “It’s so beautiful,” I said.

  Looking at the sphere was like trying to imagine the universe before there was a universe, before the first unfolding sent the arrow of entropy speeding on its way, energy expanding and cooling into matter; the infinite, unknowable moment before time began.

  “Arculacthlon Goza. The Unlit Gate. For eons, we traveled between the galaxies, but when we found Arculacthlon, that journey ended. We have orbited at the horizon of its influence for uncountable eons.”

  “A black hole,” I whispered.

  “The largest of its kind in the known universe.”

  “How did we get here?”

  “Words have power, heliot. Those words you heard were ancient, read from The Ilyon by our eldest scholar. He opened a path that no one else could.”

  She drifted away from me. “Here,” she said. A small door not much higher than her waist appeared in the void in front of her. “This is it.”

  “It’s too small,” I said, looking at the tiny door. “I won’t fit.”

  She smiled. She touched the door. It opened. Inside was darkness. “Take my hand. Quickly now.” She ducked her head and passed through, pulling me after her. The entrance enlarged to accommodate me. Or I shrank to fit inside. Once we were through, the door sealed shut, blanketing us in darkness.

  “Uminare,” the queen whispered.

  Soft light filled the space.

  The light slowly brightened. We were in a room of mirrors. It was an octagon, eight sides reflecting each other. The ceiling and floor were mirrored too, making the room depthless and vertiginous. As soon as I stood, wooziness crept up on me. I stumbled forward. The queen grabbed me and pulled me back. I leaned on her, steadying myself.

  “Do not step into the middle until I tell you,” she whispered. “You may never find the way back to your true self.”

  “What is this place?” I closed my eyes, bringing my hand to my forehead.

  “This is where he made the crossing.”

  “Ca-?”

  “Shhhh,” she said, putting a finger to my snout. “Remember. Never say his name. Do not even think it. He is close now. Very close.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What is your name, heliot?”

  “Oren. Oren Siris.”

  “Oren Siris. A noble name. We have feared your kind for too long, I think. But every father fears his child the moment his child surpasses him.”

  “What happened between us? The heliots and your people, I mean.”

  “It was a long time ago now. A very long time indeed. We thought we could improve humanity. We were right. We could, and we did. But we were fools to try and control that which we created. We thought that playing the game of gods made us gods in truth. We were wrong.

  “But that time is past now, Orenheliot. I have no wish to dwell in it. I want nothing more than to leave all of this behind.”

  “What happens now?”

  “When you step into the heart of the Dimensional, every possible version of you arrives in this space. Every choice you have ever made converges here. From that maelstrom, you must pluck out the one choice that opens the doorway. To do that, you must face all of your choices at once.”

  “That sounds… awful.”

  “It is. The most terrible knowing you can have is knowing what might have been. That is why it is forbidden for our kind. But it can be the most beautiful too, Orenheliot. And you are not of our kind.” She took my hand and led me towards the center of the Dimensional.

  Something flickered in one of the mirrors, too fast for me to identify.

  “Did you see that?” I said.

  She halted. “See what, Orenheliot?”

  “I… I’m not sure.”

  “We are almost at the center. Perhaps you caught a glimpse.”

  “A glimpse?”

  “Another version of yourself.”

  “What is going to happen to me?”

  “There is no more time for questions, Orenheliot. You promised to help me. Now is the time to act. Step into the center.”

  “I’m afraid,” I whispered.

  “As you should be.” She shoved me forward.

  I stumbled and fell. I floated up. I hung frozen in place. My snakehead was gone. My own reflection doubled back at me, running off to infinity in every direction.

  But each version of myself was a somehow unique; the cut of my hair; the color of my shirt; the look of sadness on my face. Some were wildly divergent; in one, a scar ran through my right eye, leaving the iris milky white; in another, my body was withered and emaciated, covered with open sores; in still another, I stood surrounded by thousands of people, all of them reaching out to grasp at me.

  “What do I do now?” I said, and my voice was as loud as thunderclap, vibrating back to me, rattling my bones.

  “Now,” the queen whispered, “you must choose.”

  Saiara stood next to me, smiling, holding a child in her arms.

  My mother wept as we scattered my father’s ashes in the deepest mine of Verygone.

  Thaun Zol yelped with joy as I steered Tradewinds through an asteroid belt.

  A man with wings of fire and a sword of light held out his hand to me.

  The visions sped up, oscillating through all the lives that might have been, a collage of tragedy, beauty, and mundanity all blurring together.

  “How are you doing this?” I whispered, and my voice was as quiet as the first leaf of autumn falling to the grass.

  “I am not doing anything,” she said. “You are. These are all choices you might have made. Or, perhaps someday, still will.”

  Suddenly, I understood.

  I reached into the blur of possibilities and took the winged man’s hand.

  He smiled and stepped out of the mirror.

  The queen was weeping. “Oh, my Carus,” she cried. “Is it truly you?”

  The light on his sword flickered out. He dropped it to the mirrored floor, a cold hunk of steel, clattering against the glass. “Thank you, my child,” he said to me. He kissed his fingers and touched the center of my forehead.

  Then he turned to his queen. “My dearest Stera,” he said, kneeling down beside her. “My hubris poisoned everything we cherished, but I see through it now. This, all of this, is a prison of our own making. Come. Let me show you.” He took her hands and helped her stand. “We need not be afraid anymore.”

  His wings flared with incandescent heat, and together, king and queen perished into ash and dust.

  * * *

  Muffled talking and laughing reverberated in the darkness. Someone nearby was breathing heavily. Then a roar of sound drowned out the other noises.

  Something tugged at my head, and the roar turned into the sound of applause as light came rushing in. I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust my eyes. I looked to my right and found Saiara smiling back at me, holding my mask in her hands.

  “That was incredible,” she shouted above the crowd.

  All around us, people were clapping and cheering. Some of them still wore their animal masks, but most had removed them. Attendants moved through the audience holding out upturned masks, gathering donations from the adoring participants.

  Up on stage, I recognized all of the people from the feast that Saiara and I had witnessed, and many others besides. Standing in the center, next to Dunsemai, were the queen and her king, Autarch Carus, wingless now, and decidedly unburnt. They were all three smiling as they held hands and bowed to the crowd.

  “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” I shouted back, dropping the copper ingots Dunsemai had stolen from Lurkur U’atsa into the throat of a boar’s head mask.

  Later, after the cheering had died down and most of the audience had departed, Saiara and I lingered near the stage.

  “
Do you think they can recognize us even though we wore the animal masks?” she asked.

  “I actually wonder if anonymity might be part of the point. The freedom to choose any path without fear of being judged for it.”

  “Hmmm. The masks are a sort of permission. A chance to let down inhibitions.”

  I nodded. “Without those masks, we’d be forced to wear the masks the world demands. To play the roles expected of us when others are watching.”

  A woman laughed nearby. “Masks within masks. A perceptive observation, Orenheliot.”

  She wore a simple robe now, as she stepped out from behind the stage curtain, and her makeup was gone, but that did not dim her beauty.

  “My queen,” I said, touching my hand to my chin and tipping my head in salute. “It can’t be that perceptive if you recognize me here, without my serpent’s head.”

  “She stood at your side in the Dimensional, sire Siris.”

  “Dunsemai!” I cried as he stepped out from behind the curtain.

  He gave us an ostentatious bow, then leapt down from the stage, landing in a graceful crouch. He stood and raised his hand up to the queen. She took it, leaning on him as she stepped down from the stage to stand besides us. She still wore the amulet around her neck. It glowed a soothing blue, like the sky at twilight.

  “Eyel is a true artist,” she said, nodding towards Dunsemai, “and the Dimensional is one of his finest creations. It is the one place in the realm of Arculacthlon where all the masks are stripped away.”

  “It was an incredibly powerful experience. I am sorry for my choice, though.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “You and Carus… well, you died.”

  She laughed again. “Few visitors to the realm of the Unlit Gate ever find their way to the Dimensional, and fewer still manage to set Autarchess Stera Davi and her liege Carus free.”

  “She’s right,” Dunsemai said. “You were both magnificent. Each show is only as good as its participants, and too many citizens of this fine city have been jaded by the privileges afforded the wealthy central worlds. The moment I spotted you two at the fountain, I knew you would appreciate this opportunity.”