by D. J. Butler
The other three men shrugged.
“Ten numbered cards to a suit,” Luman said. “Ten rooms in the palace of life.”
“What’s a palace of life?” Nathaniel asked.
“A Cahokian library,” Luman explained. “They traditionally follow a standard architectural plan of ten rooms in a distinctive pattern. Sarah taught me this. I think she intuited that the libraries—which are called palaces of life—had something to do with her planned ascent.”
“Are you saying that the ascent should really take place in a library?” Isaiah asked.
Luman pondered the question. “I don’t think so. I think a literal ascent of the throne is intended, and that implies a location in the Temple of the Sun. But perhaps the purpose of the palace of life’s structure is as a didactic tool. Perhaps students are taught subliminally through some course of instruction in the palace, prepared without their own awareness for a future initiation. Or perhaps the subjects of volumes stored in each room of the library is determined by the initiatic schema.”
“Or the writing system,” Jacob Hop said.
The wizard narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that each of the Major Arcana is bordered with a letter of the Cahokian writing system. Also, each room of a palace of life contains books determined by both the Adam and the Eve form of the letter.”
Isaiah took the Major Arcana from Jake and thumbed through them, pointing at the patterns around the borders. “These knots, you mean.”
Jake nodded.
“Each room of the palace of life is associated with two letters, two cards of the Major Arcana, and we think a card of the Minor Arcana?” Luman asked. “Or maybe as many as four numbered cards, one from each suit?”
“A Philadelphia physician once told me that assigning meaning to all things was a sign of madness.” Isaiah laughed. “He called it over-determination. This conversation would give the poor fellow the vapors.”
“Which of us speaks Cahokian?” Nathaniel asked.
Each of the other three shook his head no.
“Pity.” Luman examined the cards, laying them out in numerical order. “Is it possible that we have here two separate journeys, two separate liturgies? Or rather four, two for a female initiate and two for a man?”
“We are attempting to reconstruct a throne ascension rite, and already we are making wild guesses,” Isaiah said.
“Say rather intuitive leaps,” Luman suggested.
“What would this other liturgy be for?” Isaiah asked.
“Was there a liturgy when my sister became the Beloved of the Goddess?” Nathaniel asked.
“Let me ask.” Luman looked out into space. “Your Majesty, was there a liturgy you followed when the goddess chose you?”
“I don’t expect there was,” Isaiah murmured. “Christ was chosen as the Beloved, and as far as the gospels record, he was baptized, at most. I see no baptism card here.”
“King David’s name means Beloved,” Jake said. “And he was merely anointed by Samuel.”
Luman nodded. “She says she knelt and there was an angel choir.”
“Could it be that the cups and shields represent a journey in and a journey out?” Nathaniel asked. “A circle, like you were saying?”
“It’s certainly possible.” Luman considered. “But the throne stands in the apse, elevated, at the back of a long nave. Conceptually, that makes it the center of the universe, the sacred mountain of the gods. It seems more likely to me that the liturgy we are looking for progresses from the outside to the center and stops. Consider Exodus twenty-four.”
“I was raised by followers of the old gods,” Nathaniel said. “What happens in Exodus twenty-four?”
“Moses, Joshua, and the elders of Israel start at the bottom of the sacred mountain. That’s the first level. They ascend one level, and God comes down to meet them halfway. That’s level two. They see God, they eat a meal with Him, but on them God ‘laid not his hand.’ Moses and Joshua alone then are invited to go up once more, to level three, or as Exodus says, ‘into the mount.’”
“And did God lay His hand on Moses and Joshua in the mount?” Isaiah asked.
“Maybe.” Luman nodded. “A cloud covered the mount when Moses went up, perhaps telling us we shouldn’t ask too many questions.”
“What are we here for, if not to ask questions?” Isaiah pointed out.
Luman nodded again. “But scripture never says Moses came down. It does say he spent forty days and nights up there, under the cloud. A straight liturgy. Whereas a circular liturgy might go the other way—from the village into the wilderness, and then back. Or think of Christian Rosenkreutz, whose straight-line journey of ascent also passed through three levels: the outside world, the castle, and then the tower.”
“Forty days and nights is a provocative number,” Isaiah said.
“Everything is provocative,” Nathaniel said. “Everything corresponds.”
“You have touched on an entire world view,” Luman said.
“But we don’t need everything to correspond,” Nathaniel said. “We need to know what to do to help Sarah ascend the throne. And we need it now.”
“We need to know the drama,” Isaiah said, “to be able to perform it for an audience of one.”
“Could we access a Cahokian palace of life?” Luman asked. “If the letters are indicated on the spines of the books, maybe that would help us lay out the cards in the right order.”
“You don’t think the numerical order is the performative order?” Isaiah asked.
“Maybe, for the Minor Arcana,” Luman said. “But if each stage of the journey also corresponds to one of the Major Arcana, I don’t know how to identify that correspondence. There are hints here and there—is that a horse-headed staff? is that blond face with no apparent body attached Simon Sword?—but some cards in the Minor Arcana don’t appear to have any hints of the Major Arcana in them.”
“There is a palace of life in Irra-Zostim by the river.” Jacob Hop turned to Nathaniel. “That’s a sort of country home, owned by your family. If I direct you, could you take us there?”
Nathaniel shrugged. “I can try.”
Jake swept the cards into his pocket. Nathaniel thumped the skin of his drum with a ragged pattern and it exploded into four horses. The four men mounted up, and then Jake pointed westward. “Irra-Zostim lies close to the Mississippi, south of Cahokia.”
The ride was short and Isaiah marveled again that this shadow of the world seemed to be completely elastic, sensitive to the presence of Nathaniel Penn. When they reached a grassy rise above a broad, slow, green river, Nathaniel reined in his beast and all four horses stopped. “What does Irra-Zostim look like?”
“It is a conical mount with thirteen standing stones at its peak,” Jake said. “Maybe what you would call Eve Stones.”
“I don’t know what an Eve Stone is.” Nathaniel shrugged.
Jake closed his eyes as if to visualize the place. “It stands in an enclosure at the edge of a forest. Within the enclosure are two buildings: a residence and the library. West of the enclosure are farmed fields leading down to the river.”
“I don’t think all of that exists in this place,” Nathaniel said. “But I see the mound.”
They rode again. When they stopped they were in a clearing shielded from the river by tall nut-bearing trees, with broad avenues leading between their smooth trunks. From the center of the clearing rose a tall tower with sheer walls. In the bottom of the tower was an open doorway.
“Is this it?” Nathaniel asked.
Jake hesitated. “I think maybe it is,” he agreed. “Follow me.”
They dismounted and entered the door.
Isaiah had never been in a Cahokian library, and he didn’t feel he was in one now. He stood in a roughly circular room. One passage led forward, one led leftward at a forty-five degree angle, and at a forty-five degree angle on the right side was a third exit.
“No books,” he said.
“But look at the floor.” Luman pointed.
Two of the knot-like patterns were written on the floor in glowing light.
“I don’t know this realm,” Isaiah said. “Doesn’t it seem unlikely that a mere library would have such glyphs?”
“Everything here is a shadow of the physical world,” Jake said.
“Or the other way around,” Nathaniel added.
“I think the mere fact that this place exists tends to suggest we’re following a good trail,” Jake suggested. “Also, I’m encouraged by the fact that the palace of life manifests here as a tower.”
Luman took two steps up the leftward passage to look along the series of rooms that lay beyond it, then up the rightward passage to do the same. “The letters on the floor of each room are different. This may be the guide we are looking for.”
“Except that we still have a problem,” Jake said. “What order do we walk the rooms? Up the left, then right, then center?”
“Sarah,” Luman asked. “We’re at the palace of life in Irra-Zostim, looking for guidance as to the order of the rite. Do you have any advice?”
Moments later, he shook his head no.
They all thought in silence. “We believe we seek a journey to the mountain of the gods, at the center of the universe,” Isaiah said.
“Eden,” Nathaniel added.
“Can the palace of life be walked in a spiral fashion, ending in the center?” he asked.
“Aha!” Luman snapped his fingers and leaped forward. At a brisk walk, he tested the question. They walked up the right side of the structure, turned left, then coiled around and into the building’s center. They could walk the room in an elongated spiral pattern, passing through each room exactly one time.
When they stood in the central room, staring at each other, Isaiah felt exhilaration.
“That’s it, then,” Nathaniel said.
Luman addressed Sarah. “We think we should walk it in a spiral,” he said. Then he turned to face the others. “She reminds me that the spiral is an ancient symbol of the goddess. I admit I feel a little bit the fool.”
“But which way?” Isaiah asked. “Do we turn left from the start, or right?”
“Surely, we must take the right-hand path,” Luman said. “A child in his first Latin lessons can tell you that the left hand is sinister.”
They were all nodding their agreement when Luman began to laugh. “You are of course right, Your Majesty.”
“Well?” Isaiah felt a pang of envy at Luman Walters’s connection with the witch-queen of Cahokia, and the words she was whispering into his ear.
“Her Majesty suggests that the question isn’t left or right,” Luman said.
Jake frowned. “It felt like left or right to me. Does she suggest we should go straight from the beginning?”
Luman shook his head. “She points out that the choice is whether we follow the sun, or go widdershins.”
Jake laughed. “We follow the sun.”
“Left it is,” Isaiah said. “It’s good mystery-logic. We take the path that would seem forbidden to the uninitiated, because they do not know the deeper truth.”
“But how do we know which cards to lay out? Which of the Minor Arcana, I mean?” Nathaniel asked.
Jake held up the tens of cups and shields. “The ten of cups shows a hand emerging from behind a cloud, reaching out to the traveler. The ten of shields shows a woman flying over a city.”
“Is she flying because she is on the sacred mountain?” Jake asked.
“Remember Exodus twenty-four,” Luman said. “The cloud over the mountain. Could it be the veil that covers the Serpent Throne?”
“It could,” Isaiah agreed. “Look at the floor in the tenth room. What are the two possible Major Arcana in the room?”
“The Serpent Throne and the City,” Jake said.
“Clearly our path, however eclectic and surprising, leads somewhere.” Isaiah tried to contain his excitement. Was this how he would fulfill his duty as the Franklin? Not raising the Alliance of the Three Brothers, but raising Sarah Elytharias Penn to the Serpent Throne?
“I think the journey of the shields must end somehow with the city,” Luman said. “Which means that the journey of the cups ends with a hand coming out of the cloud, and the Major Arcanum of the Serpent Throne. Also, I believe the cup, being the symbol of a vessel that needs to be filled, is appropriate as the suit of supplication.”
They cut directly back to the first room, and Jake dropped the one of cups face-up in the center of the floor. “The road begins. We know where it ends. Our job is to help our queen survive the journey. But how will we know which of the Major Arcana to play in each room?” Jake asked. “In each case, we have a choice of two.”
Isaiah scratched his chin.
“That’s a good question,” Luman agreed. “Your Majesty, how do you think we should choose which Major Arcanum to play in each room? Wait…stop. Your Majesty, have you considered this carefully? Sarah?”
“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel looked alarmed.
Luman’s face was pale. “She says she can’t wait on us slow-pokes. She’s going in.”
* * *
The Treewall broke, and Montse nearly fell off.
While dawn was gray in the east, it became clear that all twelve Imperial guns were firing. It also became clear that Cahokia’s magicians were tiring. The city’s defenders were being struck by bullets and falling from the wall. The black ring of fire was growing and constricting, threatening to block entirely the imminent sunrise. Every Cahokian death gave its defenders a jolt of energy, but the jolts were smaller and smaller as they became more and more frequent.
Several of the mages themselves were dead.
Once the undead beastkind and the Imperial soldiers advanced in wide enough ranks out of their trenches, Jaleta Zorales and her guns began to fire at them. When a gun crew near Montse lost one of its members, Montse stepped in. She knew how to lay a gun, sight accurately on a target, fire, swab, and load. The shouted commands the Cahokian Pitchers used were slightly different than the Catalan cries aboard La Verge, but she knew the rhythms and quickly mastered the syllables.
She and her crew fired shot after shot into the densest masses of enemy bodies they could reach, massing at what they judged to be the edges of the defenders’ guns’ reach. When the crew’s captain fell, Montse took over, shouting the orders and also aiming.
The attackers rushed forward with oil and torches and lit the base of the Treewall on fire. For a time, the spells of the Cahokian gramarists dampened the fire. But as the wizards fell one by one, this fire also grew.
Montse and others defended the wall with small arms, firing onto the Imperials who charged with oil and fire. Where attackers fell, here and there across the field, small fires grew.
Once all the Imperial guns were in operation and the wall shook at every blow, the undead emerged. Shuffling, hopping, and dragging themselves forward, they emitted a piteous collective racket that was part roar and part wail of the damned. It was at this moment that Montse and her crew, following the bellowed orders of Jaleta Zorales, fired the last of their shot, though not the last of their powder. The balls tore through the ranks of the dead. Where it struck the front ranks, it shattered men and beastkind and hurled their skulls and ribs further into the massed ranks as shrapnel. Each hit tore a cone of devastation through the ranks of the attackers.
But those who weren’t hit continued forward.
So did those who had lost limbs, now dragging themselves or lurching, but moving with no less speed or determination.
So did some of the detached limbs.
When the undead reached the wall, they briefly scrabbled there, as if thwarted in their plan and unable to change direction. Montse and the defenders threw oil down on the assailants. It added to the fire, but as long as the Treewall held, the fires could be put out.
Two minutes later, the Treewall broke and the shuffling dead climbed through.
&
nbsp; “The gun!” Zorales shouted. “Throw it!”
Throw the gun? Montse looked down inside the wall and saw what the Pitcher commander saw—that directly in the path of the walking dead was a field of wounded. A hospital. Cathy Filmer, the former Harvite, held a lit torch in her hand, and Gazelem Zomas, the outlander Ophidian, gripped a spear; they stood between the undead and the wounded.
“The powder!” Montse shouted to her crew. She wasn’t disobeying an instruction so much as carrying it out with creativity. “Put a fuse to it!”
Her gun had a single barrel of powder left. The barrels were packed tight and sealed against water—if she introduced a spark into it, it should explode. One of the survivors of her crew, a thin Ophidian woman with large hands and nose and the mouth of a child, gouged a quick hole in the wood and worked in a fuse.
Montse waved her arms at Cathy and Gazelem until the Ophidian looked up. “Get back!” she shouted. “Move the wounded! Run!”
Beside the gun stood a small coal fire with pitch-infused torches for lighting fuses. She lit the fuse attached to the barrel. The cord threw sparks against her face as she hefted the cask.
A cart rolled up, pulled by a horse that looked as thin as a ten-year-old boy and no stronger. Gazelem and Cathy, with the aid of other healers, began shifting the wounded from the ground into the cart.
And then she saw that one of the healers aiding them was Miquel. The boy limped, but he sang cheerfully as he hoisted wounded men into the cart.
The first of the walking dead shuffled through the hole in the wall. They were beastkind with misshapen limbs, animal heads, and mismatched body parts. Ichor oozed from their white flesh, and a confused animal din groaned from their beast-lips.
When the third one dragged itself into view, Montse dropped the cask. A beastman with the head of an antelope caught it and looked at it, confused.
“Cut out the stops!” she shouted at her crew. “Prepare to drop the gun in front of that hole, inside the wall!”
BOOM!
The hot wind from the explosion scorched the skin of Montse’s face and ruffled her hair. The beastman holding the cask was blown to bits, as were the two in front of him. His body shielded those behind him from the worst of the blast. Montse drew her saber, grabbed the fire and torches in her free hand, and ran down the nearest steps.