Rust and a clear, hard elastic substance run down the walls in sheets and covers the doorways; passages are blocked by huge boluses of coagulated rust or massive worms of melted window glass. Fossilized stumps spill out the elevator doors and fill the end of the hall like a petrified wave, tufted with little spurts of roots.
I search for a long time, but I can’t find my way back to the room and the Narrator.
*
I can’t find my way out; I’m blundering around in another wing of the building. Something framed in a window stops me, and the charm strikes against my chest like a door knocker.
Off in the distance a magnetic building looms against a mercury sky; it is the only undamaged building I’ve seen in the city. A huge upright half-circle, its flat diameter turned toward me, stands between two bullet-shaped buttresses on one end of a sweeping, flat foundation structure with windows and vents. The thing reminds me strongly of the Bonant’s sullen gigantism. The diameter of the half-circle is indented, and two deep, narrow grooves stand parallel to each other along its length; the grooves are angled inward, and might perhaps meet inside in a V. Squinting, I can barely make out what might be a pattern on the metal by the grooves; like a sawtooth, uniform row of black soot smudges or scorch marks.
The charm shudders in my pocket, the figure inside is rattling violently against the glass. I pull out the charm and look at it—
... The city is invaded—enemy soldiers in the streets, the buildings shine like new. The citizens have fled or taken refuge in shelters.
Enemy soldiers in the streets. They unwittingly trigger certain machineries.
A group of enemy soldiers, whoever they are, gather at the window of one of the taller buildings—this window—conduct a discussion over a map. One meanwhile surveys the town with field glasses. She sees a light appear in the window of the foundation building.
Moments later, a grating, howling alarm begins to sound from claxons on rooftops. A mottled whiteness spreads in seconds over the entire outer surface of the upright half circle as moisture in the air condenses and freezes on the metal. Flakes of frost break loose from the sides of the structure and fall crashing to the foundation below, where they hiss and bubble, mantling the hooded tower in steam. The two long grooves in its face emit a weak, fitful radiance.
The soldier with the field glasses turns to point this out to the officers, who look up in alarm as the claxons begin rasping—consternation on their faces, they shrink from the soldier, who stares at them in confusion. Rings of blood run down from where she held the field glasses to her eyes. Blood streams from her gums. She takes a step toward them, wavers and falls to her knees, raising her hands to her head. She puts her hands to either side of her head to steady it against the dizziness, and with the lightest pressure of her palms on her scalp, the skin over her cheekbones tears like a wet leaf.
All the soldiers in the room are on the floor now, skin sloughing with the faintest motion, blood streaming from ears, eyes, nose, mouth, smoking pools spreading from their groins. Blood trickles on the floor and boils there.
In the streets, the enemy soldiers sway to the ground slobbering blood. They turn to flee and their skins flap off. They clamber over each other and pull themselves apart, the claxons blaring a long exasperated note again and again.
... I am shown the position of the detectors, most of which aren’t working any more. Those that are, line the streets on the opposite side of the building to me. The traps they are set to trigger were built to last.
*
Glass lobby doors swing apart for me. I swim out into cool rainswept air, fresh smell of rainswept streets, wet pavement ... but there is no rain, only mist ... and that choking feeling still lingers anyway.
I sit on a rustbank. There is no aperture in the rubble, nothing I could have used as a doorway. How did I get in and out? Silence, air moving over fused wreckage. Corrosive, cold fear slides along inside it.
The street is still roughly there, a rust trough through the tossed city bones. I trot down its empty length, looking for the others. I don’t have to look far. I see them walking in orderly files on either side of what once were streets, entering what doorways remain or crossing invisible thresholds pushing open unreal doors. Silichieh darts up a ramp with two-step-at-a-time strides, taking a hasty look at his bare wrist.
The private I once saw stabbing himself with his pen weaves drunkenly to and fro across a broad glass platform to one side of the street, scraping it with the end of his carbine, oblivious to the bloody wound disfiguring one side of his abdomen. He thinks he’s sweeping. As I hurry over, he loses his balance, toppling down hard on the unyielding glass with the snap of a bone breaking somewhere. He’s trying to get up when I reach him, his face bloodless, eyes glazed. His pupils are fixed. I talk to him, put my hands on him to calm him, and he is ice cold. Gradually his struggle to stand erect subsides. Examining his wound, I find it oozing, not bleeding, though it has not clotted. It’s as though he has no blood left. His uniform is soaked with it. I put my ear to his breast, my eyes on his fingers still feebly curling and uncurling around the butt of his gun, but he has no pulse.
Silichieh is looking in my direction as I turn. He comes toward me, seeing me, looking past me to the dead private. Two feet away from me now he is staring into my eyes, and using them—I can tell—to swim back.
“He’s dead,” he says, now looking past me again. “Shot. How shot?” Gives his head a toss—“Who shot him?”
“I don’t know. I heard shooting before, I think ... and I found a blackbird in one of the buildings. He had a bullet in him.”
“They’re here? ... What happened? Was I knocked out?”
“... Let’s see about the others.”
Saskia is in the square, foaming about the enemy to bypassers that aren’t there. One of the asylum soldiers is listening to her intently. Her eyes flick from one spot in space to another, where the faces would be, as she shouts. The others seem to be coming out of it. Nikhinoch strides briskly up to me, but he’s himself again, searching for Makemin.
Not far to look. We find him frenziedly barricading himself inside a sunken building like a roofed basement, all of thick rusted metal. The noise draws us, coming up from behind so that at first the protruding roof, round as a jar-lid, hides from us the bodies littering the ground in front. Most wear Wacagan uniforms, but many wear ours.
Nikhinoch goes cautiously up to the ground-level loophole and calls to Makemin in his high voice a little wavering. The whole structure booms with the report of a gun and I can hear the sharp crack as the shot strikes the inside of the roof. Nikhinoch lunges backward unhurt—Makemin fired right at him, as though the bullet could penetrate such thick metal. Out of the explosion comes a shower of curses.
Rapid footsteps, rattle of armor. Saskia pushes past us, draws Nikhinoch aside by the shoulder, and shouts back, her powerful voice battering through Makemin’s fusillade.
“Wake up Makemin! Wacagan are here! They’ve put us all under their spell and we’ve been cut to ribbons, Makemin!”
She uses his name repeatedly—“Makemin!” she shouts into his silence. Then, as she pauses to listen ... uncoordinated speech, hard to hear, inside.
After a long while, there is a sudden burst of activity as the barricade is pulled apart from the inside. Makemin emerges, slowly and rigidly, his face livid, stony. An ugly wound scars the side of his head above the right ear, and the skin at his right temple, and around his right eye, is scorched red and black.
... Gathered all together, we are less than twenty. Everyone I know is alive. Thrushchurl crept up to join us from a stone-lined culvert. Jil Punkinflake we found sitting on the chest of a dead blackbird, doodling with a stick in the rust. When he saw us, he popped up smiling gaily as a child and scampered over to Saskia; she is the only one he saw. She glares at him, but puts her hand on his head, which he lowers the instant he sees her raise her arm. I’m close enough to see his nostrils tremble.
Makemi
n stands before our assembled number with his head down and his back to us, still silent as a stone. In our search, we found dead Wacagan everywhere. Many still bled from fresh wounds.
Everyone waking-dreamt himself valiant defender of the shining city, repulsing barbarians repulsing the invading kingdom. No one has set off the machine I saw yet, and I have given my warning about it.
Thrushchurl sits on a boulder of broken concrete not far from me, rocking slightly and humming his song. Makemin strides over and tears him from the stone, fistful of jacket in his hand.
“Revive them at once!” he bellows. Makemin is pointing to the bodies. A Yeseg militiaman lying there with his head flung back, his mouth a rigid, fibrous O. Makemin shakes Thrushchurl, who seems stiff and light as a scarecrow, eyeing Makemin back, with crazy fascination.
“You were at the mortuary school—you know how to do it! Bring them back!”
Thrushchurl’s face writhes weirdly around his teeth in an expression of utter bewilderment. Makemin releases him and now he has me, shakes me, face in my face—
“You do it!” Pulls me closer with overpowering strength. “You were there, you saw them do it! You do it!”
I’m not saying anything—his eyes are like black pits and I can only stare at them. They don’t budge even as he shakes me so hard my teeth rattle.
“Listen to me damn you—you do it! What did they teach you medics anyway!?”
What I’m looking into isn’t even a face but a pitted crag the setting sun rusts over.
Silichieh’s voice comes to me from somewhere—“Low, can you do it? Spirits here talk to you—can you talk back, and tell them to go back in?”
“Well can you?!” Makemin nails the words into my face.
“No! I don’t know anything!” I hear my voice and try to put force into it and it only makes my throat knock shut. I strain out the words as though I were being choked—“I only patch wounds up! I don’t know anything! I don’t know why they talk to me it just happens!”
Makemin is gone. I can’t take my eyes off of him. The bit of uniform he held me by is still bunched, slowly uncrumpling, and seems to retain his heat and venom, I want to pull off my tunic to keep it from seeping all over me like a pollution. It’s like a fat spider fastened on me.
Makemin goes to Jil Punkinflake, who leans by a ruined wall, his head and shoulders lost in the deep shadow of the overhang.
“You!” Jil Punkinflake is now driven back against the wall. “You do it!”
I can’t see his face. The voice comes out of the dark under the overhang, resonating in the stone.
“Do what?” It asks, bubbling with a wild derision.
“Bring them back!” Makemin roars, drawing forward and bashing Jil Punkinflake against the wall with one hand, pointing again at the Yeseg body stretched there on the rust.
Jil Punkinflake’s shoulders are shaking. His flung-back head drops down and forward out of the shadows; his eyes shimmer like silver and his face is drawn up in a comedic mask, screaming with laughter. His brows furrowed and knotted, until tears trace arcs along the tops of his cheeks, the laughter the loudest the ugliest erupting out of him with so much force his face should break, as though he were being ripped apart from the inside out.
*
“We go on. Get in formation!”
The voice comes from a far-away projection, bounding back to us from the ruins. Makemin has turned toward the road. We stand there barely breathing; I look from one dirty face to another and every one of them says, “Let’s go back”—but none of us dares to speak, none of us can speak. Makemin has no face.
Saskia shouts, “I suppose you think you can’t be shot just as readily in the back?”
Her voice seems to snap around us like a low swirling wind. I feel a cold splash across the inside of my chest; the circle we had been drawing around us to shut them out, she sets on fire. Cold white flames are consuming it.
“They’ve suffered greater losses than we have—and we’ll find all the help we need ahead!”
She turns to Makemin.
“Won’t we?” she shouts to the back of his head.
Makemin is still waiting for us to obey his order. He doesn’t answer.
Like sleepwalkers something tear loose rattling behind, left there as we leave like a shred of meat glued to a hot griddle we fan out onto the road like sleepwalkers like sleepwalkers. Blankness sleeps again on each staring, leaning face. We go on now like sleepwalkers following the darkness shed by Makemin’s turned back.
A hollow howling noise, like wind sobbing at the mouth of a mine, rises behind us as we near the city’s brink. There are the landmarks I’d seen in the charm, the road to the cemetery curves off to the right, through irregular, soft ridges, and trees bristle pitch black above them. The charm tugs at me and without even bothering to look at it I call to Makemin.
“We have to go into the trees.”
Makemin stops. His head turns slightly, just enough so that I can see the darkness of his profile, his glittering eye.
“The road won’t take us,” I say. My voice is flat, lost. “We’re not wanted here. If you want to get to the cemetery, you’re going to have to detour through the woods.”
With inaudible creak and groan, we leave the road. The trees dart in among us again. Saskia storms back and forth, keeping everyone in formation with rough words, shoves.
Roots flex and trip our feet, and the loose white soil drags our steps like a mire. The gaps in the trees and branches stare at us. Shallow pools of fog dot the ground, now mist floats down from the boughs. Almost immediately it is so thick we can barely see ten feet ahead, sluicing over us in a wet wind like snow flurries, dense in my lungs like water. No one wants to go on, but Makemin seems to draw us forward like an ox dragging many leads.
“Stop!” Silichieh cries, his voice nearly stifled. “We’re crossing our own tracks here! We’ve gone in a circle!”
Now Makemin stops, and we all look at the ground, see footsteps ahead of us and doubled up behind us.
“Those are blackbird tracks,” someone says.
I can’t see Makemin clearly in the fog, but he has turned toward us again; his face sweeps to one side and then the other.
“How many of us?” his words are like trumpet notes, puncturing the air.
Count and count again—one less, one less ... the last of the Yeseg officers.
*
The charm is dragging me to one side. They are following me with their eyes, a dangerous, heavy, slow anger. If I tell them it would have been worse on the road, they won’t believe me.
“There’s a hill there,” I say, pointing. “Let me go up and have a look over this fog.”
A muffled word I take for approval comes forward, and I go cautiously away, catch sight at once of a dark, irregular slope through the trees. They let me go alone.
The fog thins, as though it shrouded only us, and, stepping from the trees to the hillside I come back out into the white daylight of the sunless sky. Being alone doesn’t frighten me; I believe the charm would warn me if there were any danger. I climb the hill covered with black flakes of stone, more like a great heap of rocks than a hill. From the top I see trees all around, and a fog bank smeared over the trees to my right.
There’s the road, slicing toward the cemetery not two miles away—remote, dreamlike. There is something across the road near the forward edge of the fogbank, but I can’t see what it is. There is no blockage on the road past that point.
I kneel down to consult the charm. It points to the path, then swings back toward me again, not quite pointing toward me, again and again. I’m putting the charm away when I feel something move over me and it’s ripped from my grasp. Jil Punkinflake has it—the charm—in his fist; a look of demonic joy mutilates his face, and he laughs at me.
“This is how you knew!”
He brandishes it as I get to my feet.
“I knew you were lying!”
My mouth goes dry, his is gasping.
“What do you know now?!” he cries, and flings the charm down, shattering it against the stones.
His laughter breaks out again when he sees my face; it grows steadily louder and sharper. He steps forward fluting out his lips and punches, hitting my jaw so my neck twists and I drop, his laughter crashing over me like waves—my spine goes cold. I get up trembling, staring, nearly choking with rage, and take a swing at him.
“Jil!” a voice roars.
He scampers out of reach and from him comes the ugliest laughter in the world, a hagging insane laugh—I whip my arm at him but he evades me and capers down the slope, turning back still laughing at me. I lunge, stumble, and, on all fours, I see myself reflected against the sky in the fragments of the charm there in the rocks, my eyes blank.
“Jil! I’m coming!”
He turns when he hears me—steps, cackling, picks up a rock—he pitches it at me with all his might. I raise my arm and bat the rock aside. Now I’m after him. Spinning my way he kicks me high against the ribs, but I bash him across the face and he tumbles. I hit him square in the face as he gets up and send him teakettling down the slope onto his back; he twists as I come to kick him. Drawing back my leg, I lose balance and fall down. He runs.
“Jil!” roars after him. “I’m coming for you Jil!”
Having slip trouble with the rocks. Now I’m on foot and following him down into the trees. I can see his track in the loose soil. A dark shape dodges among the trees ahead, the lighter irregularity of the face appears every few seconds, still laughing.
So he does not see the soldiers up ahead of him rise from cover and begin to swirl in their weightless, swinging formation like a bank of leaves blown up in a wind flurry. He does not understand why I scream his name in a changed voice. Laughing he turns to look where he’s going to. I hear cracks and snaps far off. Their roar races away, spreading rings in space, borne along by the endless trees. His left shoulder whips and he pinwheels forward. Punched against his right side he clops to a halt throwing up his right arm.
The Narrator Page 35