King of Shards

by Matthew Kressel

  He wasn’t ready, but she didn’t pause. And so she began the lesson of lessons. Marul explained that to build a Merkavah one needed immense power. “To sail across the Great Deep safely, one must generate the energy of a small supernova.”

  “But there’s no such thing as a small supernova.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  And the source of this energy? “Besides the Bedu, Azazel is the only one on Gehinnom who wields such power. If he decides to help you, Azazel will give Caleb his power in the form of an object. Look for a necklace, a ring, a belt, an amulet. It will be something physical, I’m certain. You must wrest this object from him.”

  “Wrest it? From a demon?”

  “By any means necessary.”

  This was going to be much harder than he had imagined.

  “You will need ten spellcasters,” she said.

  “Like a minyan?” he said.

  “Like a minyan. A person of basic intelligence will do. It’s the power that’s the most important. You have enough people here.” She gestured at the Bedu and Mikulalim frozen in their circle, while her green eyes peered into his.

  “The spell itself,” she said, “it’s based on the sephirot. Draw the ten divine emanations and their twenty-two lines in the ground.” She demonstrated by drawing the figure in the sawdust, the same one that had been painted on the floor of her prison, the same figure that had hung on Gram’s wall.

  “Write the names of the sephirot inside the circles like so, and label the connecting lines with their proper letters. Place a spellcaster inside each sephirah. You, Daniel, must stand in the lowermost sephirah, in Malchut.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because creating a Merkavah is much like creating a small universe. That’s what Malchut—Kingdom—really means. In order to traverse the Great Deep you’ll be creating a bubble universe to carry you safely through.”

  Daniel took a deep breath and rubbed his temples.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “This is a lot to take in.”

  “Learn fast, Daniel! There will be no second lesson.”

  She instructed him on the words of the spell, variations on the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter the Hebrew name of God. Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey. “The pattern is important. For each sephirah it is subtly different.”

  Over and over, he repeated the spell back to her, and she corrected him many times. As he recited the spell and their ten variations, a strange energy tickled his skin. His senses grew sharp, and he could see the tiny grains of wood deep within Rana’s shavings and he could see the microscopic flecks of brown in Marul’s eyes. The Holy Name, he sensed, was power itself.

  “And now the names. You’ll have to find the surviving Lamed Vav, before another is killed. Thankfully, they can’t all be killed at once.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when a Lamed Vav dies, another is born somewhere in the world, and thus hidden from Mashit again. To kill one permanently, to remove a Lamed Vav from the Earth forever, one has to perform a very complex ritual.”

  “Like the weird stuff Rebekah—Mashit—did at my wedding?”

  “Yes, that weird stuff. Preparing that ritual takes time, hence why we’re still alive.”

  “Marul,” he said. “I saw her, Rebekah. In a dream.”

  She squinted at him. “When?”

  “Twice. Once when we left Yarrow, and again when I was stabbed. She showed me Sheol. She wants me to rule beside her.” He realized he was grasping the wedding boutonniere, the shriveled remnant of it, in his pocket.

  “And are you tempted by her offer?”

  “She told me she wants to help the Shards. But she’s just like Caleb. I see that now. She’ll kill whoever gets in her way. But what I don’t understand is why, if she says she wants to help the Shards, is she bringing death upon everyone, including herself?”

  Marul shook her head. “All I know is that she’s killed three Lamed Vav, and if you don’t stop her from killing again . . . the world vanishes like me.”

  He sighed and nodded.

  “Enough small talk! We’ve only minutes left. I must teach you the names!”

  And it was here, in the palanquin, as the black sands crept forward an inch per hour, where the wind paused and the stars slept, that Marul revealed the secret of secrets, six names of the Hidden Righteous Ones, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the Lamed Vav.

  “They are Paula Baumgarten, Sunil Pranadchandr, Maya Dorje, Pandate Romsaitong, Baaba Lankandia, and you, Daniel Fisher.”

  The palanquin seemed to shudder as she spoke each name.

  “Not all Jewish?” he said. “Not all men?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “The Lamed Vav can be anyone, male or female, of any place, religion, or creed. Now, repeat them back to me.”

  “Paula . . . ?”

  “Baumgarten! You’ll have to do better, Daniel! Again!”

  They rehearsed the names, ten, twenty, fifty times. She had him recite the spell again, and the names, and the spell, over and over. He felt as if he were cramming for the ultimate test, to live or to die! But even after a hundred repetitions he wasn’t sure he had everything memorized.

  “If you disappear,” he said, “will I remember any of this?”

  “For the sake of all, let’s hope you do.” She gazed at her hands, shivered, then looked up at him. Was she contemplating her imminent demise? “You must find the Lamed Vav quickly,” she said. “They could be anywhere, and there might be people with identical names who are not Lamed Vav.”

  “So how will I know if the person I find is a true Lamed Vavnik?”

  “You’ll know, when you meet them. As I knew you.” She stared at him.

  “Marul,” he said. “I was wrong to ask you to die.”

  She shook her head. “No, you were sustaining the universe, as you always have. Daniel, my power is waning. Return to your seat. And one more thing. Call it a personal favor. You may consider it my dying wish. If you do remember me, after I’m dust, and Rana has forgotten, do not remind her. I’ve given her enough grief for one lifetime. Let her forget me.” Her pupils, sharp as needles, gazed at Rana. “It’s funny, you know? I wanted to live forever, and now no one will remember me.”

  “She’ll remember you.”

  “Better if she forgets.”

  He resumed his position, back into the heat of Zimri’s stare.

  “Ready?” she said. “Here goes.”

  First came the wind, a faint whoosh that became a roar. The sands stuttered and slid forward again. The palanquin rocked, and the stars resumed their drunken courses as everyone looked east.

  “What is it?” said Caleb. “What do you see, witch?”

  “I saw a shooting star,” said Marul.

  “I was looking east,” Havig said, eyes on her. “And I saw nothing.”

  The sephirot that Marul had drawn in the sawdust remained at her feet. He stared at her until she looked down and quickly brushed it away. “I saw a light,” she said.

  Havig squinted at her, and his candleflame eyes seemed to brighten.

  “You see the demise of your own mind,” Caleb said. “Keep your observations to yourself, witch. We’ve had enough of them for nine eternities.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

  Rana frowned and went back to work on the floor.

  Everyone fell quiet again, and Daniel felt the weight of his task press upon him. The names, the intricacies of the spell, whirled in his mind. Then he remembered.

  He was still cursed.

  If he went back to Earth, would the curse vanish? Or would he remain half-Mikulal? Marul had said that once he tasted human flesh, the quickening would be complete. He’d be a Mikulal forever.

  But it was Azazel’s curse, the same demon who they were going to see. Maybe Azazel could remove it, because Daniel couldn’t go back to Earth, hungering for dead flesh, shunning the sun, withering like a corpse, and hope to be a Lamed V
avnik too.

  Marul and Rana shared more memories, while Rana carved their words into the floor in an elegant script. Her talent was beyond comparison. And when the floorboards grew crowded with her writing, she began carving on the walls.

  “You defile this holy place,” Elyam said, his eyes bloodshot.

  “No,” said Marul, “she’s making it holy again.”

  Rana’s letters were mesmerizingly beautiful and perfect, as finely crafted as if they had been done by machine and not by hand. They outdid the floral elegance of the Bedu prayers scrawled over the palanquin walls. And this done in haste using a broken gold fixture as an impromptu awl.

  What could she do, Daniel wondered, with proper tools and the freedom of time? But in life one never had the right tools or enough time.

  The palanquin rocked as they flew through turbulence, and his stomach heaved. Rana had worked every available surface of the palanquin. She had carved around their bodies and the decorations on the walls. There was a Daniel-shaped gap behind him, and he shifted to let her fill it in. She wrote a sentence over Caleb’s head as the demon watched, fascinated. “We bought tapestries on Bedubroadstreet from the gold-toothed man.” She carved another around the arc of Daniel’s thigh. “We boiled chickpeas you brought from Ektu El and both got sick.” On the opposite wall, underneath a prayer to Mollai, she wrote, “We climbed the Timnah Tower and watched red-tipped blackbirds circle before the setting sun.”

  She carved on.

  A gust of wind howled through the open door and she paused. She looked up, as if to confirm a memory, then went back to work.

  The stars grew tired and stopped their incessant wandering. The black sands of the Jeen brightened steadily into a sulfur yellow. Stones reached up from the ground like fat black fingers. A scattering of troubled shrubs and wiry trees struggled for life. It was the first sign of vegetation he’d seen outside of Azru.

  “Dudael, at last,” Caleb said. “Soon now.”

  They passed over campfires glowing outside a small stone city, where strange people huddled around feeble flames. In the east, the ruins of some ancient palace rose in silhouette before the stars. A giant bird sat atop one of the crumbling ramparts and watched them pass.

  The palanquin creaked and groaned like a sea galley as they flew. The wood sounded as if it were under great duress. With a sudden loud screech, one of the doors snapped off, tumbling away, taking a piece of the wall with it.

  Shocked by the sound, the circle was broken. Daniel held on as the palanquin hurtled toward the sands.

  “Hands!” Havig screamed. “Close the circle!”

  They quickly joined hands again, and the vessel righted. The wind tore at the opening, jostling them wildly.

  “Did we hit something?” Caleb shouted.

  “No,” Marul said. “The no-things stood on the roof. Everything they touch becomes dust.”

  Rana looked down at her scratchings, at the walls, at Marul. Then she bent over and continued.

  “Just a little farther,” Caleb said. “The Mountains of Darkness are near.”

  Marul ran her fingers over Rana’s letters. “Queen Atepsh’s portrait?”

  Rana said, “A man on Bedubroadstreet tried to sell us a painting he swore was a portrait of Queen Atepsh, painted by her royal artist.”

  Marul squinted. “Did we buy it?”

  Rana squinted. “No, Marul. It was a painting of you. I gave it to Emod, who’d sold it to the street dealer.”

  “Oh.”

  “Remember how the dealer hemmed and hawed as he tried to take back his lies?”

  Marul paused a beat. “Of course.”

  Rana’s eyes glimmered. “Don’t lie to me. You’re forgetting.”

  Marul frowned. “You have to let me go, Rana.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all I’ve done is drag you into darkness, when your nature is light.”

  Rana hung her head. The carving stopped. “All those beautiful moments that we shared, Marul, they weren’t yours alone. They were mine too. They still are.” She bent over and went back to work.

  Daniel let the scratching lull him into a trance. It had been forever since he’d slept. He was dozing off when there came a sudden bang. The roof tore off and flapped away into the wind. A dozen sentences had gone with it. The wind howled, the stars twirled madly above, and sawdust from Rana’s carvings tornadoed out the gaping hole.

  “My lord!” Havig shouted. “We must set down!”

  Caleb got to his feet. “No, the Abyssal is just—”

  The remaining half-door slammed against the frame and bounced away. A portion of the wall went with it too. Rana screamed. The priests uttered prayers to their Goddess, and even the stolid Mikulalim looked terrified. Daniel held the wall, searching for purchase among its arabesques.

  “We need to set down!” Havig said.

  “Not yet,” shouted Caleb. “Just a little farther! We’re almost there.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Havig said through gritted teeth.

  Memories broke off as they sped on. There went a gilded plank with prayers to Mollai. There went a description of Marul’s elephant tattoo. There went a golden sconce and its candle. There went a twilit walk with Marul, when Azru’s sparrows sang their evening song.

  Everyone huddled close to the circle as the palanquin shrunk, until they all rode on a few knife-edged timbers and a scrap of wall held together by will alone. They corkscrewed through the air under a canopy of stars, too many riders on a broken magic carpet.

  From nowhere, huge onyx mountains appeared to the east and west. It was as if the mountains had lain hidden behind thick fog. But the air was sharp and clear.

  “The Mountains of Darkness!” Caleb shouted over the wind. “The Abyssal is close. Keep going!”

  “We won’t make it, my lord!” Havig said.

  “We’ll make it! Just keep us in the air!”

  The mountain peaks were irregular and sharp, like animal teeth, and it seemed as if they were flying right into the mouth of an enormous beast. The cliffs reflected starlight, and the mountains glimmered and writhed as they flew, as if they were made of molten black glass. Dark stones and sulfur-colored sand speckled the wide valley below, and here and there rose crooked skeletons of unhealthy joshua trees.

  Caleb pointed north, where an immense fissure split the earth. At its widest span it was more than a mile across, but its edges walked a jagged course, so that in places it looked as if one could leap to the other side. Its canyon walls were so dark they were practically invisible.

  “There!” Caleb said. “The Abyssal of Lost Hope! My brother lies at the bottom.”

  A gale blew sand off the top of a dune at the fissure’s edge, and the yellow dust tumbled down into the abyss, vanishing into its shadows.

  “My lord,” Havig said, “shall we set down by the edge?”

  “No,” Caleb said. “Take us inside!”

  Havig took a deep breath. “My lord, we’re flying on damned scraps!”

  “Then on damned scraps we fly!”

  The last wall tore away with a loud screech, leaving nothing of their vessel but a few ragged boards. The wind tore at their hair and everyone grabbed onto the circle. Daniel grasped the belt of a Mikulal, holding on for life.

  “Keep going!” Caleb shouted. “Keep going! We’re almost—”

  The floor suddenly disintegrated to dust, and everyone was flung high into the chill air.

  Everything went still and silent as terror consumed him. The others floated around him, astronauts in zero-g. A spray of dust glittered behind them like a comet.

  The priests’ faces were stricken with terror. The Mikulalim flailed, grabbing for each other. Caleb reached for Rana, who stared back at the comet’s tail. Above them all, the stars shined fever bright. The mountains loomed, sublime.

  Marul is saving us! Daniel thought. She cast a time-slowing spell. We won’t die!

  Suddenly came screams and rushing wind. Time had not stopped.
They had merely been in freefall. The ground came rushing toward him. He slammed hard into sand, tumbled, smacked his arm into stone, flew into the air, and crashed onto his back.

  He gasped and could not catch his breath. Then came the pain, evil, foul throbs in his right arm. There was so much adrenaline in his body that he didn’t notice he was throwing up until he had vomited a third time. He slowly became aware of other moans and cries. He heard Caleb’s voice. And Havig was calling for Daniel.

  He sat up as Havig came to him. Havig appeared unharmed. “Are you hurt?”

  Daniel, shuddering, said, “My arm’s broken.” His voice cracked with fear.

  “I’ll be back,” Havig said. He left Daniel and turned over two bodies. The dead priests’s bodies were broken and torn, but they hadn’t bled much. On a crop of nearby stone lay a Mikulal. His dark blood dribbled down the sides.

  Havig approached Caleb, “My lord, are you hurt?”

  Caleb coughed up a volume of blood. He was covered with abrasions. “Fires of Abbadon! Madness of Barsafael!” He spat up blood. “How many hurt? How many dead? Is Rana alive?”

  Everyone turned when they heard Rana’s voice.

  “Marul?” Rana shouted. She ran around the crash site, shouting, “Marul? Marul?”

  “My son, Dranub, is dead,” Havig said. He paused, waiting for Caleb. But the demon said nothing. “And two priests,” Havig said. “Daniel has a broken arm. The others are bruised but otherwise unharmed.”

  “We were lucky most of us landed on sand,” Caleb said.

  Havig glanced at his dead son, Dranub. “Lucky, my lord?”

  A shower of glittering dust snowed down upon them. It smelled of cedar, sawdust, and soot. “Is this ash,” Caleb said, “all that remains of our palanquin?”

  “Marul?” Rana shouted. “Where are you? Where are you?”

  Rana rubbed the ashen snow between her fingers, sniffed it, tasted it. Suddenly something shifted in her aspect. She shuddered, then turned her face up to the snow and closed her eyes.

  Marul is gone, Daniel thought. She’s become dust.

  Columns of winking ash snowed on Rana’s hair, and Rana let the memories fall. As the ash blew into his eyes, Daniel felt sick with pain.