by Brian Keaney
They had been of one mind!
“Where does the music of the flock come from, Kidu?” he asked.
Kidu did not respond at first, and Dante was about to ask the question again when he felt something change within Kidu’s mind, as if a barrier had come down. Instead of hearing the voice of Kidu, he found that he could see Kidu’s thoughts directly, as they appeared to Kidu.
At this deeper level of his mind, Kidu did not think in words, only in pictures. At first there was a tumult of images that moved too fast for Dante to grasp: clouds and lightning, the branches of a tree, a cat thrusting out its paw, a nest crowded with chicks all demanding to be fed. But then all of these gave way and in the center of Kidu’s mind was a picture of a bird with its wings outstretched. The bird was shining as if it were made of light itself, and Dante knew right away that this was an image of Anki, the first bird, from whom all things had sprung.
As the image grew stronger, Dante began to hear Anki’s music. It began as the sound of a bird singing in a hidden garden, a place where there were no predators, no humans, no threats of any kind. But soon it became a celebration of the world of flight, the glory of the wind, its playfulness and its power, the secrets of the paths of the air.
Dante was so completely drawn into the song he failed to notice at first that he was no longer listening to a single strand of music. Other voices had joined the chorus. Or perhaps they had been there all the time, waiting for him to sink deep enough to hear them. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of voices. At last he knew that he had reached the point where Kidu’s mind was joined to the mind of the Great Flock. But could Dante connect the Great Flock to the world of the Odyll? And if he did, would he find Orobas waiting for him?
He had to keep focusing on the image of the shining bird with one part of his mind, to keep listening to the music of Anki’s song, but with another part of himself he began to summon up the gray door into the Odyll. It was like trying to speak two languages at the same time, like being simultaneously asleep and awake. But that was exactly how he had first learned to enter the Odylic realm. So it was not impossible! Ezekiel Semiramis had often told him, “It is not the difficulty of the task that prevents you from succeeding. It is that you keep thinking of the difficulty. Don’t think. Just do!”
The door to the Odylic realm stood open. Still listening to the music of the Great Flock, Dante stepped over the threshold. All around whirled great banks of living clouds, which changed and transformed themselves as the energy of the Odyll flowed through them. In their midst was a tunnel, shining with the same light that had flowed from the image of Anki. He was looking at the Hidden Path, and he knew exactly where it would lead: to the place he had visualized when he had begun to listen to the music of the Great Flock, the secret garden where there were no hunters, where the wind was never cruel and there was always food to eat. It was not somewhere that human beings belonged. Nevertheless, a great yearning arose within him to set out upon that path and find that garden. He knew that if he did so, he could never turn back, never reclaim his humanity. He would leave his friends behind, and they would have to sort out their own problems by themselves. But that no longer troubled him. Everything else had vanished except his desire to follow the Hidden Path.
All around him he felt the Great Flock waiting for him to lead the way, their expectation as urgent as a great river about to burst through a dam, their music swelling to fill his whole being. And he knew that he was going to do it! He would lead them to the world they had been promised. Because he was the one who had been chosen. He was the Zimbir That Is Not Zimbir.
THE BRIDGE OF SOULS
At lunchtime the volunteers were given soup and bread, followed by a mug of black tea, then put to work building more huts like the ones in which they had slept. Security guards stood watching them the whole time, making sure that no one slacked even for a moment. There was no more talk about tracking down Tavorian spies. It was obvious to everyone that they were little more than slaves.
They grumbled as they worked, but no one protested out loud. The memory of the man who had been bludgeoned to the ground with a baton was still fresh in their minds. Only Bea knew that a much worse fate awaited them. She considered trying to organize some sort of breakout. But the guards all carried guns as well as batons.
As the day wore on, individual volunteers’ names were called at regular intervals and they were led away. There was no explanation of where they were going, and those who were left behind muttered nervously, dreading their own summons. Bea was unloading sacks of sand from the back of a truck when her turn came. She jumped down from the truck and followed the young, shaven-headed security guard back to the building in which her father had been conducting the blood tests earlier that morning.
She was led past her father’s office and up a flight of stairs. At the end of the corridor was a set of double doors. Above them was a sign that read, “No entry to unauthorized personnel.” The security guard rang a bell.
As they stood waiting for the door to be opened, Bea began to notice an odd smell. It was only faint but it was disturbing: somehow attractive and sickly at the same time. Clearly, the security guard liked it no more than she did, for he took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his nose and mouth.
A moment later the doors opened, and a nurse stepped out, wearing a face mask. The security guard turned gratefully away as Bea was ushered into a long room with rows of beds on either side. Many of the beds were already filled by her fellow volunteers, who lay on their backs with their eyes closed. Each one of them was attached to a drip filled with a bright purple liquid. The smell was very much stronger in here, so strong in fact that Bea gagged.
“It’s just an initial reaction,” the nurse said, her voice muffled by the mask. “It will pass. Now come this way, please.”
She told Bea to take her shoes off, lie on one of the empty beds and roll up her sleeve.
Briefly Bea considered trying to make a break for it, but the fumes of the purple liquid seemed to be melting her resistance. “What is that stuff?” she asked.
“It’s called Ekktor,” the nurse replied as she rubbed Bea’s arm with antiseptic, then prepared to insert a catheter into a vein.
“Yes, but what does it do?” Bea asked.
“It’s going to replace Ichor eventually. When they’ve got it right. Now hold still.”
“What’s wrong with it now?” Bea asked.
The nurse shook her head impatiently. “I only follow orders,” she replied. With that, she inserted the catheter and connected the drip.
Almost instantly the room full of beds disappeared. Instead, Bea found herself out of doors in a place she did not recognize. She was standing in a long line of people, many of whom were fellow volunteers. From somewhere in the distance came a wailing sound, as though hundreds of people were moaning with pain.
Most of those in front of her were staring blankly ahead as if their spirits had been utterly broken. A few others, like herself, were looking around in confusion, trying to take in their surroundings. But no one dared to speak, for they were being watched intently by a dreadful creature in the shape of a man but with a pair of leathery wings sticking out from its shoulder blades. The creature was covered in slime, and in its hand it carried a long, savage-looking whip. From time to time it brought the end of this whip cracking down on the ground to demonstrate that it meant business.
“Where are we?” Bea whispered to the man in front of her.
He gave not the slightest indication that he had heard her. However, the creature with the leathery wings glared furiously in her direction. “Silence!” it shouted in a voice that was even more hideous than its appearance. The whip bit into the ground only inches from where Bea stood.
The sky above her was a livid purple, lit up by slashes of forked lightning. Beneath her feet the earth was deep red, almost the color of blood, and at her back stood a dense forest in which nothing appeared to move. As the line shuffled slowly forwa
rd, the moaning grew gradually louder.
Other volunteers began to appear in the line behind Bea. One minute there would be no one there; the next another new recruit would be looking around in bewilderment. They would open their mouths to speak, but then, catching sight of the winged creature with the whip, they would decide to hold their tongues.
Bea could see now that the ground upon which they were standing came to a sudden end up ahead and in its place was a chasm so vast she could not make out the other side. Nevertheless, despite the unimaginable distance involved, it was clear that a bridge was being built out into the abyss. Now she realized where she was. This was the scene she had witnessed when she had stood beside Tzavinyah in the Resurrection Fields and gazed through the telescope at the other side of the abyss.
She recalled what Tzavinyah had told her, that this bridge was the work of their enemy and that it must not be allowed to succeed.
But how could she stop it?
There seemed to be no building materials of any kind. Just the volunteers and a handful of the winged creatures standing around brandishing their whips to make sure no one decided to step out of line. The closer she got to where the work was being carried out, the louder the sound of wailing became.
Then suddenly she saw Dante standing beside the bridge. It was clear that he was the one in charge, the one to whom the winged creatures deferred.
But this was not the Dante who had been her friend. This was the one who had tried to strangle her on the cliff top, the one who had declared himself ruler of Gehenna. So who was this person who looked exactly like her friend?
Tzavinyah’s warning came back to her: “The bridge that you see is the work of Orobas. He is our enemy, yours and mine and every living creature’s. His name means hunger and that is all he is—an appetite that can never be satisfied. He must be stopped, and you are the one who must do it.”
One by one the volunteers stepped out onto the bridge and made their way slowly forward, but the moment they reached the edge, they were transformed, becoming merely more stones in the bridge itself. Every stone, she realized, had once been a person. If you looked hard enough, you could see their faces, imprisoned within the masonry and contorted with pain. It was from these stones that the wailing was coming, a testimony to the torment of the volunteers.
Why on earth had Tzavinyah believed she could do anything to prevent this from happening? She had no special powers. She was not even particularly strong. All she had ever possessed was a flickering candle of hope.
As she was thinking this, she became aware that some sort of disturbance was taking place behind her. She turned her head and saw that two people had emerged from the forest. One of them was a youth about her own age. There was an openness about his expression that was completely out of place in this environment. Despite this, he carried a huge knife in one hand. The other was an older man, tall and thin with long white hair and bushy eyebrows. Unlike the volunteers, the two newcomers moved freely, walking briskly in the direction of the bridge, as if they had come to this place by choice.
The winged creatures glanced uncertainly from the newcomers to Dante, waiting for their instructions. Catching sight of Dante, the youth stopped in his tracks.
“Luther!” he cried. Then he shook his head. “No, it can’t be. Luther is a thorn tree now. But if you aren’t Luther, then why do you look so much like him?”
If Bea could do nothing else, she could at least prevent these two new arrivals from sharing the fate of the volunteers. “His name is Orobas,” she called out. “He is the enemy of every living thing! Run!”
But Nyro did not run. Ignoring the sumara running towards him, he took careful aim with the knife and hurled it in the direction of Orobas.
To Nyro’s amazement, the knife found its mark, sinking into Orobas’s left shoulder. Everyone seemed to hold their breath: the long line of beaten-looking individuals, the sumara that supervised them, the girl who had shouted out the warning, Osman standing beside him, even Nyro himself. For something quite inexplicable seemed to be happening to Orobas. Around the wound that the knife had made, a dark stain was beginning to gather, but it was not made by blood. Instead, it was as if the very substance of his body was changing. Within the darkness of the stain, Nyro glimpsed shapes and symbols that moved and changed, like creatures viewed beneath a microscope. Now the stain began to grow, spreading along Orobas’s arm and across his chest so that it seemed likely that it would soon reach out to cover his whole body.
The last part of him to be transformed was his face, but at last this, too, was overtaken until what stood before them no longer resembled anything human except in outline. It still possessed arms, legs, a head and a body, but it was like a living shadow and within its depths the darkness writhed and seethed.
When the knife had first struck home, Nyro had felt a wild surge of triumph. Now, however, he saw that far from wounding his enemy, he had only made it stronger. The creature seemed to have grown in height until it towered above the terrified spectators. Turning to the sumara, it spoke. “Bring them to me! And the girl, too!”
A moment later both Nyro and Osman were seized and dragged towards their enemy, along with Bea. They were taken to the wailing bridge, and Nyro gasped at the vast distance that the bridge was intended to span. Millions upon millions of individuals would be sacrificed before that could be possible.
“Walk!” came the command in a voice that was like stones grinding against each other deep in the bowels of the earth.
Nyro tried with all his strength to resist that order, but despite his best efforts, he found himself placing one foot upon the bridge, and the pain he experienced was unlike anything he had ever known. Yet he still kept walking, for he was no longer in control of what he did. This was the end, he realized. He would never see his parents again. They wouldn’t even know what had happened to him. He would not swim in the sea or feel the sun on his skin or the rain lashing his face. He would never laugh or cry or shout or whisper, never have a sweetheart or a job. Still, he kept walking because he had to. Until he reached the very edge of the bridge.
Bea watched them go—first the boy and then the man. Then the creature pointed in her direction, and she felt her feet begin to take her towards the bridge. The moaning of those imprisoned within its masonry was almost deafening now. One more step and she would join them.
Then suddenly everything changed. The world around her rippled and was gone. She was lying in a bed and someone was calling her name.
“Bea, you have to wake up!”
It was her father’s voice.
“Come on, Bea, concentrate!”
“What’s happening?” she mumbled.
“I disconnected the drip,” her father told her. “I can’t be a part of this anymore.”
She sat up groggily and stared at him in astonishment. “Have you stopped taking Ichor?” she asked.
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Have you stopped taking Ichor?”
“No.”
“And yet you disobeyed orders. That must have been so hard!”
“Bea, we haven’t got time for this,” he told her. “You have to get out of here now. When they find out about this, they’ll try to kill you!”
Bea nodded. She was properly awake now, though she still felt very weak. “What about you?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “I’m finished.”
“No, you’re not,” she told him. “You’re coming with me.”
He looked as if he did not dare to believe this might be possible. “But where would I go?” he demanded.
“Let me worry about that!” she told him, grabbing his hand.
LOOKING AT THE STARS
They began by disconnecting all the patients from the drips. “It’s probably already too late for them,” her father pointed out. But Bea was insistent.
Then her father led the way out of the building. Each time they walked past a security guard, Bea expected to b
e arrested. But no one took any notice of them. They left through a rear exit that gave onto a paved yard. Now that they were in the open air, her father looked around uncertainly, and Bea could see that the meaning of what he had done was beginning to dawn on him. In a moment he would begin having second thoughts.
In one corner of the yard a motorcycle was parked. Incredibly, the key had been left in the ignition. “Have you ever driven a motorbike?” Bea asked.
“I had one when I was at medical school,” her father replied.
“Well then, what are we waiting for?”
Her father looked shocked. “Are you suggesting we steal it?”
“You’d rather stay here and get shot?”
Just then an alarm began ringing inside the medical center. They got on the bike and her father started it up. But then the engine coughed, backfired and died.
Glancing over her shoulder, Bea saw the rear doors to the building opening and a security guard stepping outside.
“It needs more choke,” her father said.
“Hurry!” she urged him.
The security guard had spotted them now. He yelled but at the same time the bike’s engine roared into life and they shot off around the side of the building.
For a brief moment Bea felt exuberant. But they still had to get past the perimeter fence, and there was the exit looming ahead of them. Two guards stood in front of it, barring the way, while two more were getting ready to close the gates. Recalling her father’s earlier doubts, Bea fully expected him to bring the bike to a halt. Instead, he accelerated, driving straight at the guards. They stood there, wide-eyed until the last minute, then leapt aside as Bea and her father hurtled through the gate.