Would he become immune to the foul morbidity of the city, given time and increased exposure? Did he want to be immune?
If you stand still, waiting for a halo, you get eaten, Kybele had said. Nothing is fixed, and there are no deep truths.
A statue stood on the tree's far side, as promised. It was seven metres tall, with a wide, square base. A giant copper Queen Victoria sat atop the base, her broad, regal face staring dispassionately at the locus of so much death. Over the usual metallic finish of such statues, her face and shoulders had been daubed with reddish paste. Thin streamers lay draped across her head and upper body, as though a miniature ticker-tape parade had recently passed her by. The violence and incongruity of the colours gave the queen's usual stoic demeanour a slightly deranged, disgruntled air.
Kybele stood at the statue's base, running her fingers over a time-stained plaque. Her fingernails were square and neat, unpolished.
“Pattern is the key,” she said. “Pattern, shape, form—even humans understand the value of this. Know the shape of something, the way it is, and you can control it. I'm not just talking about things; you can know the shape of a sound, a movement, a person. If you capture it, hold it, you have power over the way it changes—and that, my friend, is what you call magic.”
Kybele looked up almost respectfully at the face of the long-dead monarch and put her hands in her pockets. “Nature allows such change, under the right circumstances. When the First and Second Realms are in conjunction, pattern and will combine to allow all manner of works that would not be possible in either realm alone. Since the last Cataclysm, when the realms were separated, such works have been difficult. Humans tell stories of the fading of magic—a distant memory of times when wonder leached out of the world. Willpower alone isn't enough without the laws of the Second Realm to back it up. We've had to make do with things like electricity, magnetism, and entanglement instead.
“But now, at last, the new laws are fading and the old laws are returning. Because of you.”
“Because of me and Seth,” he said, his mind reeling from the thought that something as simple as the death of his brother had wrought such a change. “Because we're twins.”
She nodded. “The pattern you make is unique. You are reflections, perfectly mirrored. Your symmetry has been broken, and nature abhors such a fracture. The realms collide in order to repair the breach. You know what happens when your eyes lose focus: you get overlapping images until you focus properly again. This is what reality is trying to do, and by bringing you together it brings magic back to the world.”
“But—” He frowned. There were so many points to quibble over, and the smell of death was curdling his thoughts. “But there are lots of identical twins. Why doesn't this happen every time one of them dies?”
“Who says it doesn't? Most such reflections are imperfect, flawed in some way. But identical twins are inevitably connected by the patterns they almost share. When such dyads are broken by death, weird things happen. UFO sightings, poltergeist hauntings, strange visitations, time shifts—the incidence of such paranormal events always increases. Empires have been founded or fallen around the fate of such twins. Rome is just one example of many. Every time a twin dies,” she concluded, “magic reappears briefly in the world—then fades again, for without absolutely perfect mirror twins and the will to drive them together, the realms will always bounce back to where they were. Yod, this time, will ensure that this does not happen.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“That depends on your viewpoint,” Kybele said. “Some genomoi, like myself, exist quite happily in the First Realm, although we'll use magic if it's available. Just as we'll use technology. Beggars, as they say, can't be choosers.
“But with the arrival of the Second Realm comes increased competition—for territory, for resources, for power. That I don't like at all.”
She turned to face the statue and pressed her left palm against the plaque.
“Come here and put your hand next to mine.”
Hadrian hesitated, and she looked at him with her hard, grey eyes. Her spiky white hair and flawless brown skin couldn't have been more different to that of the statue of the queen looming over them, but she possessed some of the same austere authority.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked. “Me, or what you might be capable of?”
He shook his head, unsure of what lay at the heart of his confusion.
“Understand that I'm trying to help both of us,” she said. “You want this Ellis of yours, and I can help you find her. But I can't do it without you. You're my lodestone, my magical battery.” The analogy was bizarre, but she didn't smile. “You're the anode to Seth's diode. Why not see how much current we can draw before someone else gets their hands on you, eh?”
He was tempted; he had to admit it. The idea that magic was both real and at his fingertips was a powerful lure, but at the same time he was afraid of it. If everything Kybele said was true, then he was partly responsible for all the death and mayhem visited on the world by a soul-hungry god. What if she was just leading him on with vague promises of finding Ellis, using him although she had no intention of delivering what he wanted?
Your brother is dead.
He stepped forwards and put his hand resolutely next to hers. He wasn't responsible for what had been done, but he was responsible for what he did with the chances he now had. If even part of what she said was true, he told himself sternly, then this was his best chance to find Ellis, if nothing else.
They stood side by side, their shoulders touching. The tips of her light brown fingers dipped into the indented copper letters like claws.
“Hold on tight,” she said. “You'll need to.”
He clutched the cool metal plaque as—with a wrenching as violent as though the tree had reached down from behind him and snatched him off his feet—the world snuffed out and he was flung into the web of the city.
They called it a ship. That was the word Seth heard, through Hekau. Shaped like half a walnut twenty metres long, the ship was propelled by a dozen elongated paddles that trailed, wriggling like snakes, in its wake. A yellow-clad crew member stood where each tentacle terminated in a ridged bump as large as a sleeping bear on the inside of the shell. They guided the tentacles by means of long, bony staffs protruding from the bumps. The staffs swayed and tilted in time with the thin, crooning song of a pilot riding high at the prow, watching the ship's progress over the edge of the shell.
The interior of the ship was hollow except for a tapering scaffolding in the centre on which the captain and her guests stood. Seth clung to a rail halfway up and tried not to worry that he could see neither ahead nor behind. The only sense that he was moving came from the surging rhythm of the shell beneath him and the gradual progress of the pipe's ceiling above. He couldn't decide whether the ship as a whole was alive, or if the tentacles had been added to an inert shell. Either way, the captain called it Hantu Penyardin, prefacing orders to her crew with a cry of “Hantu!” and using the full name in conversation. Her name was Nehelennia, and she could have been Agatha's much older sister, with pale green eyes and golden hair that sat close to her scalp. Where Agatha wore orange, however, Nehelennia's uniform was a deep blue-black and bound about with wide belts and silver buckles. She reminded him of a pirate.
“Human, eh?” she had said on meeting him, speaking to Agatha while scrutinising him minutely. “They're thin on the ground these days. This one's particularly fresh, if I'm any judge. His stigmata are only just beginning to show.”
“My what?”
“Your true skin, boy. Humans turn inside out when they come to the realm. There's no hiding the inner face here.”
Seth remembered Barbelo talking about one's true self bursting out, and looked down at his body to see what was showing. He saw no scales or fangs like Xol, or any of the oddities he had seen in Bethel. His body looked the same as it always had. Even the scratches he had earned during the fight with the
egrigor had faded.
“Don't bother looking,” said Nehelennia. “You won't see it from within. I think that's the point, in your case.”
“Great,” he said, “do you have a mirror?”
“There are no mirrors in the Second Realm,” said Xol. “False faces are defused automatically by Hekau and stigmata. Outright lies are uncommon as a result: it takes great presence of mind to deceive when the heart of anything is open for all to see. Most who try succeed only in confusing, not convincing.”
Like being a twin, he thought. It had been almost impossible to keep a secret from Hadrian—although that hadn't stopped him from trying.
“Truth is a dangerous thing,” said Nehelennia. She frowned suddenly. “It does not like to be hidden.”
She turned to Agatha, her voice rising in tone and pitch. “I see him for who he is, now. How dare you bring him here?”
“Because I need your help,” the tall woman replied.
The captain's expression was one of deep outrage. “He is our undoing, our nemesis! We should destroy him, not aid him! Is your mind bent to Yod's will? Are you its instrument too?”
“I aid the realm,” Agatha insisted, bristling. “I am loyal. It is Barbelo's will that we come this way. I would not call on you if I had another choice.”
“I still have choices, and I say that I will not carry him. Get him off Hantu Penyardin. Begone, and good riddance!”
Agatha took the older woman aside and talked to her in hurried, urgent tones. Nehelennia's replies were angry and insistent. Their words were clouded by the flipside of Hekau—they were not intended for Seth's ears—but he had heard enough already to know what they were saying. Nehelennia didn't want him aboard her ship because he was marked as an instrument of Yod. Agatha was insisting that she should reconsider—but not because she felt differently about it from Nehelennia. Agatha had called him a liability in Bethel. She would have abandoned him at the slightest opportunity if Barbelo hadn't insisted she help him. She was bound by a sense of duty to look after him, even though it galled her to do so.
“Nehelennia will see reason,” said Xol. “You are as much a victim of the Nail as the rest of us.”
Seth kept a tight lid on his thoughts, not wanting anyone to witness the hurt and shame the argument awoke in him. He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was just trying to stay afloat. It certainly wasn't his fault that Yod was using him to destroy the world. He was the victim as much as anyone else.
Xol was the only one, it seemed, who understood.
Eventually, Nehelennia had capitulated. With poor grace she had turned away from Agatha and begun yelling at her crew. Hantu Penyardin had become a hive of activity as it pulled away from the ladders allowing access to its cuplike interior and the pier to which it was moored. Agatha came back to stand with Xol as their journey began. She looked bone-weary and sad. No words were spoken. When the others weren't looking, Seth checked his body again for marks that hadn't been there before, but found none.
Hantu Penyardin rode neither an ocean nor a river, such as the one through which Seth had arrived in the Second Realm, but the contents of an enormous black pipe that led deep underground to the heart of Abaddon. On their departure, before entering the pipe, Sheol had been partly obscured by dark shapes analogous to storm clouds that had swept across the sky from many directions simultaneously. A dark mist trailed in their wakes, curling and entwining when their paths crossed. As Sheol dimmed, a pall had fallen across the land, an almost physical chill.
The afterlife had weather. That Seth had never expected.
Bony staffs twirled and dipped as the pilot sang the ship's tentacles into the correct rhythm. Xol explained that Nehelennia would take them to Abaddon via the relatively safe route of the city's underground waste disposal tunnels. The journey wasn't expected to take long. Seth waited nervously in his spot on the ship's scaffolding, at a safe distance from the disgruntled captain.
There was another passenger on the ship, a solidly built black man to whom Seth hadn't been introduced. He had joined them just as the ship was about to cast off, scaling the ladders and leaping aboard with smooth grace. Bald and dressed in loose-fitting white shirt and pants, he greeted Nehelennia with a brisk nod and said that he had been sent by Barbelo to convey messages from her to the group of travellers. Xol explained that Barbelo had several such agents in the Second Realm, individuals she had nurtured to ensure communications utterly impervious to Yod via a variation of the egrigor principle. Agatha acknowledged him with a brisk hello, and he had remained at the base of the scaffold since then.
Seth didn't think of him again until they were well and truly on their way. His mind was heavy with all the talk of stigmata and Yod. Restless, he climbed down from his perch to stretch his legs. His muscles weren't sore, and he was pretty sure that the need for exercise had vanished in the Second Realm along with the need for food, but the habit remained. He felt penned in by strangeness, unable to relax. Like a tiger pacing a cage, he couldn't get his mind off places he would rather be, things he would rather be doing. He wondered what Hadrian was doing, and where Ellis was. Was she dead too, unmourned by anyone other than himself?
“Unfinished business?” asked the man as he lowered himself to the base of the ship and tested its coral-coloured surface beneath his feet.
Seth looked up. The man straightened from a crouching position and watched him warily. Seth returned the compliment. The man's clothes were almost too pure, their whiteness unblemished by the slightest scuff or stain, a stark contrast to the deep brown of his skin. His nose was broad and strong, his mouth wide and masculine. If he'd had hair, he would have looked like a salesperson.
“What do you mean?” asked Seth in return. Two levels up, Xol kept a close eye on their interaction.
“We all have unfinished business. There's always something we left behind or didn't complete. What was yours?”
Seth hesitated, flustered by the man's directness. There was no doubt that he meant “left behind” in the First Realm sense, as someone might talk about a deceased's debts or grieving family. I'm the deceased, Seth thought numbly. The nearly departed.
“I left a friend,” he said. “She could be in a great deal of trouble.”
“Because of you.” It wasn't a question, and Seth bristled at the man's tone. Nothing that had happened was his fault. Being a mirror twin was out of his control, as was Yod's insane plan to reunite the realms by killing him.
“Not because of me,” he snapped. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We all were. We're innocent.”
“Everyone says that.” The boat rocked beneath them, and the man put out a hand to steady himself. Seth noticed only then that his hands and wrists were heavily bandaged. “Yet we are all steeped in guilt.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“There's no shame in guilt,” said the man. “Guilt is a form of purity. Acknowledging it makes you free. ‘How we are ruined! We are utterly shamed because we have left the land, because they have cast down our dwellings!’”
Seth stared at the man for a long moment, unsure what to say, deciding in the end to be blunt in return. “What are you? An egrigor or something?”
“Neither. I'm human. My name is Ron Synett. I killed a man, before Jesus washed me clean. You might have heard of me. There was an appeal against the death sentence, a campaign.”
Seth kept his hands at his sides, slightly afraid that he would be offered a bandaged hand to shake. “I've never heard of you.” Feeling something more was required, he added, “Did you get your pardon?”
Synett glanced around, his mouth a sardonic knot. “Does it look like it?”
Seth felt a rush of embarrassment. “I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. That was the Book of Jeremiah I was quoting before. Old Jerry was full of fire and brimstone, but me, I'm not much for that any more. There aren't many of us lost types around here. We're mostly picked off in the underworld. Lucky for the elohim, or they'd be up to their har
ps in our regret.” Synett studied him closely. “‘But where are your gods that you made for yourself? Let them arise, if they can save you, in your time of trouble; for as many as your cities are your gods, O Judah.’” He nodded. “Unfinished business, for sure. I reckon you know a thing or two about regret, my boy.”
What's he seeing? Seth asked himself, unnerved by the man's scrutiny. What can he and Nehelennia see in me that I can't?
“Hantu!” came the captain's brisk cry from atop the scaffolding. A string of urgent commands followed. The pilot's song took on an imperative edge, and the bone-staffs circled and swayed like tree trunks in a violent storm. The ship listed suddenly to the left, and Seth became aware of a distant roaring.
Xol dropped heavily down beside him. “Something is coming.”
“More egrigor?”
“I don't think so. This feels different.”
The dimane's golden eyes danced nervously across the ceiling of the pipe. The roaring noise grew louder. Synett clung to the base of the scaffolding, wrapped both arms around the nearest pole, and looked fearfully over his shoulder.
“Do you know what this is?” Xol asked him.
The man shook his head. The roar was already loud enough to make speaking difficult and showed no signs of abating. To Seth it sounded like a giant flood bearing along the pipe towards the ship, threatening to capsize it.
“Hang on!” shouted Xol, indicating that Seth should imitate Synett. “We will ride it out, whatever it is!”
Seth clutched the pole next to Synett. The dimane placed his feet wide apart on the deck and did the same. The air around them seemed to shake as the noise reached a painful crescendo, blasting the ship and all its contents with a single sustained note.
The ship rocked beneath him, riding a rolling surge. Then the prow suddenly dipped, and a heavy wave surged over it. Seth had barely enough time to grip the pole tightly when something very much like water rushed into him and tried to snatch him off the deck. He shouted in alarm, and heard Xol doing the same. The fluid pummelled him, grasped at his legs, tried to carry him off. He willed his hands to remain locked around the pole with all his strength, and they held firm even as something crashed heavily into him then vanished with a wail into the torrent.
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