Daniel inhaled sharply. What would they do to him for betraying their king?
The Gu Rana was right, Havig said. Lord Ashmedai uses us as his tools. But he doesn’t wait until we dull before he throws us away. Havig glanced at the dead Mikulal. Dranub was my only child, heir to the throne of Yarrow. Daniel’s mind filled with a vision of a Mikulal woman holding a shriveled babe, wet and bloody from birth, and an overwhelming sense of melancholy as Havig, the father, contemplated the horrid life his child would lead as a Cursed Man.
My son, Havig continued, was born with Azazel’s Curse. And he died with it. Never was he a whole man. But Dranub to Lord Ashmedai was nothing more than an unlucky fool.
But you are different, Havig said. We’ve watched you. You mourn every death. You loathe his ways. If our will was our own, we would serve you.
Chills ran down Daniel’s spine as he remembered Rebekah’s promise to make him king over Sheol and all the Shards. And now the Mikulalim wanted him to rule them too? No, he said. I’ll be no one’s king.
You are a king who wears no crown, who demands no subjects. Therefore you are the only one worthy of ruling.
I don’t want to rule, Daniel said. I just want to get back to Earth. He paused. Aloud he said, “Without your king.”
The Mikulalim glanced at each other.
When we saw the mark on the floor, Havig said, we guessed your plan. We have discussed it amongst ourselves. We will help you return to Earth, without Lord Ashmedai. But know this. We cannot openly defy him. If he demands it, we must act. We have no choice. Our will is not our own.
Your chains are invisible, Daniel said, but strong. Once I’m sure the Lamed Vav are safe, I’ll return to Gehinnom to free you from your curse. All of you. I promise.
Make no promises you cannot keep, but do what you must to save the Earth, Lord Fisher.
Please. I’m no one’s lord.
On the contrary. The Cosmos owes its existence to you.
Daniel sighed. Why was everyone so obsessed with rulers and kings? Why did everyone need a master to bow down to? Kings and queens were the cause of most of the world’s problems. But how else could he get these people to work together if not by leading them?
The Mikulalim would help him now. But what about the Bedu? His arm throbbed as he said, “Elyam, let me help you bury the bodies.”
“Bury?” Elyam said, his voice cracking with emotion. “Tell me, Pillar, to whom shall our prayers go?”
“To the Goddess,” Daniel said.
“And where is our Great Mollai today? Our families have been slaughtered, our holy relics defiled. She has forsaken us.”
“So why were you just praying to her?”
He paused. “An old habit.”
“Let’s at least give your honored fallen a proper burial.”
“Would the Pillar have us bury our brothers beside the Betrayer himself?” He gestured at the Abyssal. “They will have no rest in the world to come. Beasts will disturb their bodies here.”
“We’ll burn them,” said Havig. “And their ashes will scatter in the winds.”
Elyam looked repulsed by Havig’s every gesture. “With what fire? We’ve no kindling.”
“We can weave fire from air,” Havig said.
Elyam paused to consider this. “Through demonsong, no doubt.”
“Let’s cremate the bodies,” Daniel said. “All three of them.” What better way, he thought, to unite two peoples than with a shared ritual.
“What do you mean, three?” said Zimri, Elyam’s son.
“The Mikulal and two Bedu,” Daniel said. “Together as one.”
Elyam nodded. “This is fitting. Let the high be brought low. Let the holy burn beside abominations. Nothing matters anymore.”
“Father,” Zimri said. “Have you lost your mind? They are servants of demons. They would defile these holy men.”
“But don’t you share a common ancestor?” Daniel said. “A long time ago, weren’t the Bedu and Mikulalim one people?”
Zimri approached Daniel. His eyes—blue as an autumn sky—sparked with rage. “I heard the demon Caleb. Of course you would side with abominations. You are one.”
“I have been given the curse,” Daniel said. “That’s true. But I’m not fully a Mikulal yet. I’m half-human. In a way, I’m both of you.”
“You’re nothing like us,” Zimri said.
“Son,” Elyam said, stepping in front of Zimri. “This wretched day has shown us that all things end. Let our enemies burn together with our friends. Perhaps their ashes will forge a new friendship in the corridors of eternity. I’ve had enough of battles.”
“You’re mad, father,” Zimri said.
“Perhaps. But on the other side of madness lies clarity.”
The fuming Zimri stepped aside to let the Mikulalim carry Dranub’s body over. They laid him beside the priests, then spoke their spell, a sequence of harsh words. The bodies quickly ignited. Red flames leaped from their skin. Everyone stepped back as a column of smoke twirled toward the stars.
Havig hung his head, his eyes glistening. “Farewell, my son.”
“He was your son?” Zimri said.
Havig nodded. “I was given a choice. Eat the cursed flesh and become a Mikulal, or die on the battlefield with ten thousand of my brethren. I took the coward’s path, and so suffered this fate. But Dranub had no such choice. He was born with our curse. And all his life he remained a slave to a demon, with no taste of what it was like to be free.”
“You mean you don’t want to be . . . as you are?”
Havig turned to Zimri. “I would give my right eye to remove this curse.”
“So why didn’t you go down with Caleb?”
“Because neither Lords Azazel nor Ashmedai allows us to. It’s part of our curse. They prefer us as their playthings, their puppets. This is who we are and who we ever shall be.”
A light glimmered in Zimri’s eyes as he heard these words. “I always thought your kind chose to be the way you are. That you chose to live in shadows and eat men.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to think so, nor will you be the last. Sometimes, we are just given a foul lot.”
As they watched the bodies burn, Daniel said, “What were their names? These men?”
“Abner ben Zamir,” said Elyam. “He knew the Books of Tobai by heart, every stanza and verse, and ever since his wife died in childbirth he wrote hundreds of poems about her.”
Another priest, his white sideburns overgrown, said, “He is—he was Shallam ben Ori. He didn’t speak much. But when he did, everyone listened. With one sentence he could silence the House. He was the wisest man I ever knew. I’ll miss him dearly.” The priest hung his head.
“Tell me your names,” Daniel said. “I want to know you all.”
The Mikulalim introduced themselves. There was Havig, King of Yarrow, and Dnoma, with his harelip. And there was Prelg, with cheekbones as high as mountains. And there was Lamu with a missing eye. Krieg was short and stooped.
And of the priests, there was the boy, Zimri, and Elyam, his father. And Ahazia, who was stocky and wheezy. And Baasha, who had one brown and one green eye.
Daniel said, “Their deaths weren’t meaningless. Listen to me, we don’t have much time. Caleb and Rana will return soon, and I need your help. Every one of you.”
In the east, the sky had begun to brighten, as they all turned to face him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
What could I build, Rana wondered, if the only limits were my imagination? Perhaps a world where rains came at dawn to swathe a thousand rainbows across the sky. Or one where every tree bore gigantic star-shaped fruits, and every field brought forth ten thousand bushels of grain. Or a world where she and Liu spent their days making art instead of breaking their backs for fat kings, where famine, war, drought, plague, earthquake, fire—all things to fear had been erased like that woman . . . what was her name?
Marul, The Witch Who . . . The witch? Who?
In t
his new world, Rana thought, I’ll rule with a kind hand. I’ll make every day a holiday and every night a feast. I’ll turn every sorrow into joy.
But she couldn’t have Caleb controlling everyone like he controlled the Mikulalim. When I create this new world, she thought, I’ll make it so that neither Caleb nor Azazel, nor any demon, has more power than anyone else. They can thrash and roar all they want, but they will be as impotent as lambs.
“I want to see you with my own eyes,” Azazel said. His voice was soothing and tender, so that when he spoke she longed to move closer to him. “The Sefer Yetzirah, the Codex of Formation, sits behind you, Rana,” he said. “That red hypercube. Place your hands gently, gently inside it.”
She stared into its shifting visage, where a thousand unnamable structures flickered across its oddly angled surface. “What will happen?”
“You will receive a precious gift.”
The cube was translucent, ruby-red. A rectangular brick floated in its center, roughly hewn. It seemed as if this was the first brick ever excised from stone. She felt a kinship with it, as if the brick co-existed deep within her heart, the foundation of all her creativity. She took a steadying breath and reached for its surface. It was pliant, like viscous oil, and comfortably warm. As her hands vanished into the cube, a river of thoughts flooded her mind.
She stood in a smith’s forge. Hammers pealed against metal. Sparks flew. The air smelled of molten iron. Heat from the furnace blasted her skin as men poured glowing metal into molds. They hammered the cooling shapes into tools, unaware of her presence as they worked, as if she were a ghost. Her perception was acute. She noticed every hammer stroke, every curve of mold, every subtlety of technique, until she felt as if she were no longer learning from them, but directing them, a spirit whispering instructions in their ears.
Then she found herself on a long, narrow boat, sailing up a river. A dozen rows of dark-skinned oarsmen propelled the boat forward as sweat dripped down their backs. A taskmaster rode them severely with a whip. Huge blocks of limestone rested on the deck, dusty from a recent quarry.
The boat docked on a sandy shore, and with skeins of ropes and tangles of pulleys, the oarsmen heaved the stones onto logs of wood, which they used as wheels. In this fashion they rolled the limestone blocks a great distance across a desert. On the horizon a huge ziggurat was being built. Using a webwork of kites and pulleys to augment their strength, the slaves hauled the stones up its steep banks. They placed the new stones at the top, one of hundreds, and hundreds more to go.
From the summit she gazed across the magnificent city. Its stony walls were etched with curious glyphs and figures of gods and beasts painted in bright colors. Tall trees with huge feather-like leaves sprouted in the streets. To the east and west loomed two giant pyramids, and she suddenly realized that this was not a ziggurat, but the unfinished third and largest pyramid. A sarcophagus for a king still a boy. She watched them build until she knew their well-guarded secrets, like how to cut stone using fire, wood, and water, and how to calculate the angle of the sun, so that, at a certain time of year, it penetrated the stone layers into the central chamber, where the boy king would one day spend eternity.
Then she found herself in an underground tunnel, the air cool and damp. Pale-skinned men with large, curving noses tunneled into white rock. As they moved forward, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, they set stones in arches over their heads. They dug the tunnel toward a distant river. And when they were done, flows of human excrement washed into the tunnels from the city above, a city decorated with immense, ornate columns and limestone statues of muscled gods, a city of fanfare and trade, while underneath them their filth flowed out to sea.
Then she was high above a great city, higher even than the DanBaer, standing on a mammoth metal skeleton. Men with yellow hats directed giant metal arms strung with wires. The wires hauled heavy bars of metal into the sky. The power of lightning itself was conducted through thin metal filaments and called to action with the push of a lever. They used locking rods and a tool that spit fire to melt the metal into place. She watched the tower rise, week by week, story by story, on an island with so many towers that at night their glowing windows outshone the stars. People flew above the city inside winged metal cylinders that rumbled louder than thunder, moving faster than the tides of the Tattered Sea.
Then she hung below an enormous and resplendent aqua ball that filled three-quarters of the sky. The ball was blinding against the sea of all-consuming black beneath her. She drifted beside three people who floated inside white, bulky suits, their faces hidden behind curved mirror plates. They positioned a mammoth metal cylinder into place against the superstructure. Flat gold panels reflected sunlight, storing its energy for later. Gray tubes and spikes of metal bristled from the superstructure like spines on a cactus.
The cylinder they positioned weighed more than a house, but with the barest touch they moved it left and right. A shadow swallowed the orb above her as the sun set behind its curved horizon. White lamps on the superstructure cast stark shadows as the people worked. A spray of lights on the orb spun into view, the lights of a city a great distance away.
The black expanse yawned beneath her. Or was it above? Up and down had lost meaning. The sky was filled with innumerable stars. True stars.
This blue orb is a world, she thought, and its people know how to build houses in the sky. Now I know, too.
Her mind filled with complex tables of numbers that these folk stored in machines using bits of static and lightning. The machines could think faster than any person, but were stupider than a goat. And she knew that even though they floated as if they were in a womb, they were falling, forever falling toward the great blue world that kept leaping out of their way.
Then she was reclining beside a group of purple-skinned beings. Not demons, nor humans, but of another race. They resembled large, wingless birds, and they used a machine that made matter forget itself and collapse to birth a new sun from an ancient cloud of gas. She listened to the secrets their machine whispered to matter, when the beings sensed her presence and invited her on a billion-year journey across the universe to the oldest star, where their god dwelled in a castle made of light. But before she could answer she was whisked away.
In a vessel shaped like a mirrored ball, she and silent white beings, as skinny as twigs and with a thousand long limbs, moved through immense gulfs of space without moving at all. She learned from them that space was pliant, like clay, that it had no intrinsic substance, but was formed by relationships between strings of energy that danced within it.
Then she was in a room full of children—human boys and girls—who were playing with toys on a floor as girders of sunlight split the room. A girl who resembled Liu stacked toy bricks into a widening spiral structure. Rana had dreamt this dream many times, but she could never build this shape without failure, except that one time on the DanBaer, beside Daniel and the demon dog, where it had stood without falling.
The girl smiled and offered Rana her toy tools. A hammer, small, orange, and soft. The other a chisel, thin, green, and hollow. A hammer and a chisel, the most basic of tools. But with them she could build a whole universe.
The dreams ended. She was back in Azazel’s lair. She gasped and withdrew her hands from the Codex. In one hand she held a chisel, a real chisel, it’s blade mirror sharp. In the other, a large iron hammer, heavy, covered in rust. Her body shook. She had just absorbed lifetimes of knowledge. All of it was still fresh in her mind. She could now write out the mathematical representation of a satellite in an elliptical orbit around a planet or build a bridge that could support a stampede of elephants. But much of it, like the secret the purple beings had whispered to matter, and the substance of space itself would take time to process. Some things, she knew, she would never remember.
“Astounding,” Azazel said. “Isn’t it?”
Her mouth was dry. “What did I just see?”
“History,” he said. “Everything you
have just witnessed has happened, somewhere in the Cosmos. These colorful shapes are my Seforim Daat, my Codices of Knowledge. For millennia, the knowledge contained here has brought back countless civilizations from ruin. Every time a world crumbles to ashes, I am here to help it rise again. But there will be no more worlds but the one you create, Rana. The others will wither like dead leaves in autumn.”
Rana examined the tools in her hands. “What are these for?”
“Bring them to me,” he said.
She wished she had chalk and a board, a canvas to scribble down her ideas; they were coming so fast. She saw a thousand cities swimming in the skies above a planet. And a doorway one entered in one place and exited a thousand planets away. The ideas would not stop. She paused before his sea of gray hair. It spilled in a waterfall from his face.
“Don’t be afraid, Rana. Come closer.”
She took a tentative step onto his hair. It was soft, cotton-like, and she resisted the urge to fall to the ground and wrap herself in its warm blanket. From where had this feeling come? She checked herself. Her heart thrummed. Her breathing was heavy. Her cheeks were flush. She was in love, but with whom? She let slip a laugh as she realized the truth. She was in love with creation itself.
“Laugh, my dear. For knowledge is joyous. Now, push aside this ancient hair from my face.”
She paused before his body. Even upside down he looked taller than Caleb. Stronger too. Curly hair spread over his chest like wild, dark grasses. His flaccid penis hung to his belly. He had no navel. As she stared at him, her arousal grew. She felt energized, like the metal filaments in her dream. Every motion made her ache for caress. With a shaking hand, she parted the canopy of Azazel’s hair.
It was softer than wool. Underneath its shadow rested a young, beautiful face, with rosy cheeks and plump lips. His eyes were the color of new leaves sprouting in King Jallifex’s gardens. Almost the same color of her eyes, what was her name, that woman, who used to come and visit. Marie something . . .
She had a sudden urge to bend down and kiss his plump lips.
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