The Convent of the Pure

by Sara M. Harvey

  Portia began to cry, but the sounds echoed only through the confines of her mind.

  When the attendant came for her, she had no idea how long she’d been standing in her glass case among all the others, blind, mute, paralyzed, and bathed in blue light that was the very color of a perfect summer sky. The hands that reached into her little glassed-in world were gentle when they removed her, but she was far gone from her own skin. There was a very distant tug and pinch as each one gave way.

  The same able hands laid her down and rolled her away on a squeaky wheeled gurney. They turned right, out of the room and along what felt like an open corridor. The rickety elevator felt almost familiar now, something she knew, something she recognized. Down it took her. The disorientation made Portia dizzy, but the deadly calm of her body truly distressed her. Portia’s mind panicked, racing and sputtering. She wanted to scream and tear at her hair, she felt frightened enough to kick and thrash, but her flesh and bones lay still and unperturbed.

  The scent tipped her off. Heady beeswax candles and balsamic, spicy incense overlaid the earlier smell of lye and the nearly indecipherable tang of blood. It set her senses roiling like a storm surge in the vast sea inside her head. The chapel.

  Dread reverberated through her body and her muscles seized. She flexed her fingers, but too soon they drifted away from her once more. A moan of frustration escaped her and someone tapped her mouth gently.

  “Shhhh.”

  The straps around her were released and her body drank in a deep breath of its own accord. Hands brought her up from the gurney and put her onto bare wood. Her feet and arms dangled off the sides of the altar. Portia had never felt so exposed in her life.

  And then someone removed the silk bandages from her face.

  She gazed up into the small steeple of the chapel. Something was suspended there, dangling from a set of copper chains. It looked like a reliquary, but Portia could not force her eyes to focus onto it. She was aware of people moving around her, but could not turn her head to look.

  “Don’t you worry,” said that same genderless voice she had heard before. “She’s got it right this time, and you are like none other.”

  A face leaned over her, as androgynous as the voice. Silver hair curled around sharply angled green eyes and beautifully planed cheekbones.

  “Hhhhhuurrrryuuu?” It was a battle to speak, to force her tongue to obey the command that came so clearly into her mind.

  “Are you asking me who I am? Ah, you are such the strong one. I am called Katriel.” Katriel produced an ivory comb and showed it to Portia before beginning to comb out her pale hair. “So strong and so beautiful. There is no small wonder why Imogen loves you so much.”

  “Immmennnn?”

  “Yes, Imogen. Unfortunately, she could not be here to see this. The Lady Analise does not trust her not to interfere, sadly. So Master Nigel is keeping care of her.”

  Portia could only manage to vocalize a whimper of the torrent of anger, fear, and fierce protectiveness of Imogen.

  “There now, Master Nigel means only the best.” Katriel nodded emphatically. “He is a true gentleman.”

  A true gentleman who murdered our foster mother! You cannot leave him alone with Imogen!

  “Ah, my Lady.” Katriel turned Portia’s head with gentle hands.

  The door that led in from the sacristy opened, and for the first time Portia saw her captor. Lady Analise was tall and willowy and might have been beautiful once, but her honey-gold hair was pulled back into a severe bun that flattened the features of her face. Her eyes were as grey as the streaks in her hair, and she did not smile. Portia recognized the sound of her clipped steps at once. They were at such odds with the musical lilt of her voice.

  “Katriel, will you stop wasting time? The apex of the new moon is but minutes away. If you cause us to miss this chance, I’ll be quite cross with you. Now, get to work!”

  “Yes, m’lady.” The androgynous assistant vanished from Portia’s view and began laying out instruments beyond the edges of her sight.

  Analise came to stand before Portia, regarding her with eyes as cold as steel. Over her crisp brown taffeta gown, she tied the sash of a stiff white apron, the heavy and gore-proof kind that butchers wore.

  “Poor, ignorant child. You have lived your whole life not knowing who and what you were, haven’t you? Such a pity. Had we not recognized Nigel’s exceptional prowess, he might have languished for years as an ordinary little mongrel Grigori thug, just like you. House Gyony,” she rolled her eyes. “Useless ruffians. They had you by all honest rights and never knew what you were, can you believe it? One of the few living Nephilim born directly of a union between celestial and mortal, and able to bear the weight of the power of an angel’s soul. All those years, and no one guessed at what you were.” She stroked Portia’s silver hair, letting it slide through narrow fingers tipped with long, claw-shaped nails painted a poisonous red. “But not any longer, no. I know what you are, my dear girl, and I am going to see to it that you fulfill the destiny for which you were born.”

  Katriel took hold of first each wrist and then each ankle and buckled them tightly into a leather strap before shackling all four of Portia’s limbs to the altar. Then, with exquisite care, the androgyne took a pair of sewing shears and cut away the shift Portia wore, leaving her trembling and entirely exposed. Katriel tilted her head into position, resting it on a mealy pillow that smelled of myrrh and amber and sulphur. Portia gazed wide-eyed up into the cupola, unable to blink or look anywhere but at the reliquary that hung ominously above her, so gleaming and clean amongst the tattered sheets of cobwebs. An involuntary shudder passed through her, rattling the chains that snaked down off the altar to thick eyebolts in the floor. A web of copper wires connected to the reliquary, fanned out from it, suspended by tiny steel hooks set into the joists of the cupola before each strand twisted into a single bunch and attached to the contact point of an engine. The simple turbine machine sat lashed inelegantly to a tea cart someone had wheeled into the chapel. Two figures worked the crank handle on the back side of the contraption, bobbing up and down in opposition as the turbine began to hum.

  All around the altar, ribbons of smoke curled up from incense braziers. A low chanting chorus began as, one by one, the beeswax pillar candles were snuffed out to be replaced by oily, guttering flames of small votives held in earthenware cups. The grimy black smoke stank like burnt hair.

  The chanting increased in volume and urgency, reverberating through the chapel. “Bene 'elim! We claim our birthright! As Bene ‘elim, we sing praises to the Most High! Amen! Amen! Amen!” The voices floated in the dark, buoyed by those leaping orange flames.

  Analise had donned a pair of round glass goggles bound in brass frames. In them, Portia could see her own face, pale and impassive with pupils so wide in unblinking eyes that she would not have known their color. She could also see the scalpel that Analise raised.

  She felt the sensation of her flesh being parted from a great distance. There was no pain, only the cold rush of air against warm blood and the scrape of the blade’s tip against her breastbone. With a face blank of emotion, Analise cleaved through skin and muscle, exposing Portia’s ribs and beating heart. She then took a gold stylus and scraped some sigil into the stark white sternum. Next came a handful of herbs and ashes that landed across Portia’s body like some mockery of snow printed in negative, black flecks across pale bone.

  Lady Analise stepped away and looked up into the cupola. The chanting around them grew louder and more intense. The wires became incandescent as the turbine’s hum grew stronger and higher in pitch. Something in the reliquary gleamed with a fitful reddish light, part electrical surge, part something else. Analise cleared her throat, and the chanting faded into silence but the turbine continued to sing. She raised her voice along with it, rising up into the rafters of the chapel that was now filled with a dusky glow.

  “Can the wings of the winds understand your voices of wonder, O you, the second
of the first, whom the burning flames have framed within the depth of my Laws; whom I have prepared as Cups for a Wedding, or as the flowers in their beauty for the Chamber of Righteousness?” The words were in a strange dialect, the lost language of Enoch. She had never heard it spoken before. “Stronger are your feet than the barren stone, and mightier are your voices than the manifold winds. For you are become a building such as is not, but in the mind of the All Powerful. Arise, sayeth the First; move therefore unto His servants; show your selves in power; and make me a strong Seething; for I am of Him that liveth forever.”

  Somewhere a bell chimed several times.

  “Come, come into this child of the Most High. Sever your ties to the celestial plane and cleave to her half-soul, making it whole. I claim my birthright to call upon you, I bind you with my words and with my blood, I sacrifice to you the very flesh of your children.”

  Analise raised one of the small votive candles and held it aloft in her left hand. Her right hand bled from a cut across her palm and she let several drops of her garnet blood splash into the candle’s flame.

  “O you, the sons of fury, the daughters of the lust, vexing all creatures of the earth with age, behold the Voice of God, the promise of Him, which is called amongst you Fury or Extreme Justice. Move and show your selves; open the Mysteries of your creation; be friendly unto me, for I am the servant of the same your God, the true worshipper of the Highest!” She moved again from Portia’s view as the blood-soaked smoke wafted around the reliquary. “I command you! I command you! I command you!”

  The lurid glow around the reliquary exploded into a starburst of flame and sparks. Portia could not blink or look away as tears filled her eyes to cool them. The corona elongated into a single thick pillar of fire that struck her breastbone. Her spine stiffened and her arms and legs made every attempt to rend themselves from her body. The otherworldly scream reverberating through the chapel was issuing from her own throat, she realized. The distance and numbness that had been separating her mind from her flesh stretched and snapped in an instant. Every cell was afire and shrieking. Pressure mounted within her, crushing the breath from her painfully exposed lungs. Portia could tilt her head just enough to see her skin begin to smolder like embers. As the last tongues of flame penetrated her sternum, she saw the spectral image of a person hovering above her. Great golden wings stretched across the whole of her field of vision. Eyes as deep and dark as the eternity of night sky regarded her with sorrow, confusion, and fear. Its mouth stretched wide in a rictus of pain, and it would have howled as mightily as the winter wind if it had the power to scream.

  Analise’s slender, long-nailed hand shot out between them, a golden seal clenched in her fist. She pressed it into the chest of the spirit with a flash of white light. The form of a sigil appeared there, and it drew ever nearer to the matching one carved into Portia’s breastbone. The celestial being fought valiantly, but the moment the two signs touched, an eruption of light obliterated the sight of everything around Portia. The roar of the spirit shook her bones to the marrow. The swinging reliquary above her head shattered, sending bits of glass and melted copper and what looked like charred bone raining down onto the altar and the hardwood floor.

  And then all was silent.

  Portia closed her eyes and drew a shaking breath. Tremors raced through her body as she tugged on the restraints. The empty, ruined reliquary swung in the cupola, dragging sparking wires in its wake. Nothing else moved. The room swam in blackness, but Portia could see perfectly. The two figures who had turned the turbine crank were seated in the pew beside the tea cart, panting from exertion. Katriel stood beside a metal tray full of medical implements. Portia saw his true form easily in the small, battered body he currently wore. Although the elohim were, in essence, genderless, they did sway to one side or the other, masculine or feminine, and Katriel had been a being of near-divinity once. Not born, but made. A heavenly creature lured or dragged from his place in the heavens, now forced to serve his earth-bound cousins, the Nephilim of the Grigori. Somewhere in her memory, she thought she remembered his face from long ago, but the thought distorted then vanished like ripples on the miller’s pond back in Penemue.

  She smiled, however, and licked her parched lips. In a voice that was hers, yet not her own, she said to the androgynous angel beside her, “Greetings, Brother.”

  Katriel’s nod was curt. “Greetings, Sister.”

  His voice was carefully bland as he came to the edge of the altar with Analise at his heels. His face was impassive, but hers was ecstatic. “Please forgive me,” he whispered as he handed the lady a copper-bound hypodermic needle.

  Portia nodded and noticed the gaping wound that was her chest. She felt neither pain nor panic as Katriel held her shoulders firmly and Analise injected unconsciousness into her arm once more.

  Chapter Six

  The corridor was long and narrow and oppressively dark. Shadows seemed almost tangible as they writhed around Portia in a frightening, lurching sort of dance. What little light there was seemed to emanate softly from her body. She held up a hand and saw that indeed her flesh glowed gently with a pale, golden light. She tried in vain to pierce the heavy dark that clouded the corridor in either direction.

  “Which way do I go?” Her voice reverberated away from her, became lost in the shadows, and returned to her ears in a feeble, thready echo. Go? Go? Go? Go? Go?

  “Fine! If you’re not going to help me--”

  Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me!

  Portia took a step away to the left, thinking that she would explore one side of the hallway to its end and then double back. She had nothing with which to mark her passage, so she plucked a few of her own silver hairs, tied them into a knot, and hung the glimmering bundle on a tiny outcropping of stone or plaster or whatever it was that the corridor was made from. The hair hung there, twisting a little, looking like a bit of broken spider’s web. Satisfied, she set off into the black ahead of her.

  After a few yards, Portia had a most disturbing sense of having chosen the wrong path. She could not place the sensation, only that something was happening behind her and she needed to investigate. Turning on her heel, she made a few quick strides back, only to find the passage blocked by an imposing and moldering brick wall. At the very corner where the wall met the passageway hung her little knot of hair. It hung perfectly still now, mocking the fact that moments before there had been no wall there.

  “What’s going on?”

  Portia expected the echo, but not this one. Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! thundered down on her from behind the old bricks. She bolted.

  She ran, on and on down the empty corridor. It had no crossings and no curves. It sloped neither up nor down. There were no decorations of any kind along the endless walls; it was simply an eternity of grey stone that appeared and vanished in the dark. And somehow, Portia knew that if she turned back, she would encounter that mildewed brick wall just a few yards behind her and inches away would hang that damned little knot of hair. But on she ran, terror fueling her legs and echoing in the muffled slap of her bare feet on the stone floor.

  She ran until her lungs ached and her heart pounded every sensible thought out of her head, but on and on the corridor stretched. She stumbled to a halt and panted until she caught her breath. And as if she needed such assurances, she summoned her courage, turned, and calmly walked back the way she’d come.

  Of course the wall was there. Just a few feet behind her, as if she had been running in place. The little knot of hair hung still as a windless summer day. Turning her back on the unavoidable brick, she walked away as serenely as she could manage.

  “What am I doing here?” she challenged her echo.

  Here? Here? Here?

  “Yes. Why is that wall perpetually behind me?”

  Here… Behind… Here… Behind…

  “Behind. You are behind me? Who are you?”

  You. You. You. You.

  “You are not me!”

  Not
me! You? Not me! You?

  “This is ridiculous! What am I doing here? What is the meaning of this?”

  Meaning! Meaning! Meaning! You! You! You! The eerie reflection of her own voice faded only for a moment before it returned and urged her once more, Go!

  But Portia was too tired to run. She trudged on ahead, every now and again sensing the looming presence of the wall behind her, making it seem as if she had not moved more than a few inches in what seemed like hours.

  “Perhaps I am not asking the right questions.”

  Perhaps… questions. Perhaps… questions.

  “You told me to go. Go where?”

  Where? Where? Where?

  “Yes! Where? This corridor has no end!”

  End! End! End! Here… behind. Here… behind.

  She turned back toward the wall. It was the end of the corridor. Behind her, the passage continued into infinity with no intersections, no slope, and no turns. But before her was the wall, grey-green lichen and moss growing across its surface. She touched it, and it felt damp, brittle, weak.

  “Is this correct?”

  Correct… Correct… Correct…

  “You are here? Behind the wall?”

  Here… Behind the wall… Here… Behind the wall…

  “How can I know if you are just repeating everything back to me?”

  Repeating everything? Repeating everything?

  “Are you just repeating everything I say back to me?”

  No.

  Portia stepped back. “Well, all right, then. What do I do now?”

  Now… Now… Now…

  She ran her fingers along the grainy mortar between the bricks. She could feel a fissure running through the wall from nearly as high as she was able to reach down to the floor. A parallel one ran down a few feet away.

  “Do I push?”