Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

  Is it the Book, I wonder, or myself? Is it that I am so alien to their reality that we cannot even exist within each other’s perception, that whole worlds of mothers, fathers, children, friends and enemies, civilizations must be cleared for my passing? I cannot believe that, dare not believe that. It can only be the Book. I fear that the shock wave which spread out through my own world, splaying it open at the ends of the earth, making it blossom wide to touch the edges of these other worlds that I have come to call the Vellum, I fear that that same shock wave is the aura of the Book itself, unleashed by my own hubris and damning me to an eternity alone, as its guardian.

  I have considered destroying it, or leaving it behind. Perhaps I would only have to walk a world or two to escape its silence, cross some babbling river and find myself among the living again. And then what?

  There is no reason to this. No clue, no intimation. Where are the guardians of the threshold? Where is the ancient prophecy, the war to fight, the tyrant to overthrow? The empty worlds of the Vellum carry no message of their own, only the echoes of my frustrated longing.

  There is one option that I consider now, though. I myself am marked upon the Book, in the sigil on its cover, and I start to wonder. If only I can exist within its influence, is the mark of me there because I am, or am I here because of it?

  So I stand on a jut of cold, gray rock now, a river running dark through underbrush below. Half hidden by the foliage around me like some Victorian folly of a statue, a Pre-Raphaelite angel, I watch the young man sitting reading under the apple tree in the distance, and I open the Book, flip forward a page to the map at the correct scale and with the pen in my hand, I mark a small…amendment, a correction, an X. I mark him in the Book.

  seven

  BLACK LINES OF OUR DOOM

  The Angel Metatron

  To Eridu, the Lady Shubur went, entered the holy shrine, temple of Enki.

  “Death silver in the Kur, O father bright Lord Ilil,” she cried out, “your aromatic daughter wood, covered with precious lapis dust of the broken stone in the underworld cut into holy cedar, underworld priestess for the stoneworker put to death, for the woodworker of heaven…”

  He taps a couple of keys, reloads the screen; the text scrolls, rolls away, falls back exactly as it was before, more gibberish, the same references to Ilil and Shubur, vaguely familiar but long-forgotten…and to himself, as Enki, not as Enoch or as Metatron—not even as Ea—but as Enki. He stares at the screen, trying to unscramble the text into a tale…maybe some priestly record of a legend handed down from generation to generation? Some lamentation to be sung for a dead child? He taps an arrow key and the text slides sideways.

  “What has happened?” Father Enki said. “What has my daughter done? Inanna, queen of all the lands and holy priestess of the heavens. What has happened? I am worried. I am anxious.”

  He stares at the glyph now centered on the screen, a sigil that just shouldn’t be there, the sign of an unkin buried for as many thousand years as his old name. It shouldn’t be there but it is.

  Inanna.

  Father Enki dug the dirt out from beneath the fingernails of his left hand, and shaped that dirt into a kurgarra, a sexless creature. Father Enki dug the dirt out from beneath the fingernails of his right hand, and shaped that dirt into a galatur, a sexless creature. To the kurgarra he gave the food of life. To the galatur he gave the water of life.

  He slides his thumb across the trackpad, right-clicks, chooses a translation for the text; the sigils click into overlapping checkerboard patterns, one of which unlocks and folds across the other, snicks into place as a new set of permutations.

  Enki, in the wisdom of his heart, created a person. He created a pretty youth, a bright young thing which he called Charm.

  It’s the same story in a different version. He remembers it now—Inanna’s Descent in Sumer, Ishtar’s Descent in later Babylonia. The young, impetuous queen of the heavens decides to try and take the underworld as well. Enki has to send a pretty boy in one version—or a pair of them in another—down to trick Ereshkigal into letting her go. Neither version is an accurate portrayal of what happened in reality. In reality, Inanna was an ambitious little bitch who deserved what she got. She whored her way to the top leaving a trail of discarded lovers behind her. She even tried to steal the me from him at one point. He had no sympathy for her whatsoever and when she got herself killed going up against Eresh of Kur he was glad to see her disappear into the margins of reality, remembered only in the odd myth and legend here or there. He was already planning the Covenant by that point, as a way of uniting all the unkin under a single law, to put a stop to all the feuds and rivalries; one less power-hungry girl was just one less problem. Why the hell would he try and drag her back into existence from the Vellum?

  He had been tired of all the fighting. He was tired of being vizier to one megalomaniac after another, Enlil, Marduk, Ninurta, Adad, this Baal or that. All he wanted was peace, and there were enough like him that when they signed themselves into the Covenant, it really looked like it was going to work. One by one the unkin all accepted it, saw that their future lay in silent empires, hidden realms. Let the humans build the world for them, let them rule themselves, with just a little guidance here and there, a vision or a voice. They’d actually been quite open at times; when the young Habiru tribesman that he’d chosen to build the new religion asked him his name, Enki had given it to him. Eyah asher Eyah, he had said. No mystery, no secret. Ea was what they called him in Babylonia, in the land that the boy’s own ancestors had come from. I am that which is called Ea. The fact that it ended up written down as I am that which is called I am was just testimony that the plan was working; the old world of gods, of giants among men, was being forgotten, wiped away. In the new world they would be seen as servants, not rulers. They had a fresh start, a new beginning.

  So Rapiu became Raphael, Adad became Azazel, Shamash became Sammael, and Enki became Enoch became Metatron, the angel scribe who wrote the book of life, who speaks for God, the only one allowed behind the Veil to look upon the Glory of a deity whose Name could not be spoken, whose Face no one could look upon but his first minister, whose Word was only heard from the mouth of his spokesman. Metatron, the most loyal servant of the One True God. So the stories say and, in a way, it’s true. Except that all unkin get to meet Him sooner or later, to step beyond the veil, to look upon His transcendent and ineffable mystery.

  “The One True God,” he says to them all, as he points toward the empty throne.

  It’s the core of the Covenant, the reason that they called themselves unkin in the first place. Not theos or deus, netjer or dingir, aesir or gods. Unkin. Some of the new bloods imagine that it’s a coined word, like “undead”—un-kin, without kin—because they leave behind their family, their history, their humanities, when whatever it is inside them touches the powers under reality and changes them forever. But actually it’s what they called the assemblies of elders who ruled the towns and villages of the neolithic world he was born into. The word democrat wasn’t around in those days.

  For Metatron, for all the unkin, Heaven is the republic that they’ve spent three thousand years trying to build.

  But there are always those who see that empty throne and want to sit in it. Some say the Covenant is unjust, illegitimate, corrupt, made up of old men who don’t understand the world changing around them, bureaucrats and intellectuals, a patriarchal elite. There are always militants and radicals, philosophers with grand schemes, politicos with the cunning and the nerve to try and carry them through. Metatron should know; he was one himself once, a long time ago. But mostly they’re just convinced of their own destiny and they rationalize it with some revolutionary rhetoric. The old unkin who refused to join the Covenant because they might actually have to do what someone else told them, the newer ones who heroize these dark, romantic rebels—Metatron thinks of them as like those fanatics holed up in the hills of Americ
a or Afghanistan, the deserts of Algeria or the jungles of the Congo. White supremacists or Islamic terrorists, whether it’s the Second Amendment that they cite or Karl Marx, the purity of the race or shariah law, they all think they’re fighting the good fight, the holy jihad, the glorious struggle. The real struggle is the revolution that started millennia ago and is still going on, the struggle to take power out of the hands of killers like them and into the pages of a book, the processes of a court.

  But, no. It’s their God-given right to bear arms, and all property is theft, and the Aryan race was born to rule, and if a woman cheats on the husband that was chosen for her, stone her. And if the Covenant thinks it has the right to bind a being so obviously born for glory, power, majesty, well then the Covenant is wrong.

  Metatron was tired of all the fighting when he first conceived the Covenant. Three thousand years later, he’s still tired, because all the demons and devils that would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven are getting organized, gathering their forces. He’s tired because there are still idiot new bloods like these Messenger children who think they can just run away and hide, as if either side is going to leave a rogue unkin wandering at will—like a police officer would leave a loaded gun on the table in front of a psychopath and turn away, wait to be shot.

  And he’s tired because the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together—Thomas and Phreedom Messenger, Seamus Finnan, Inanna—to make a sort of sense.

  What has happened? the screen says. I am worried. I am anxious.

  “What have you been up to, little girl? What have you gotten yourself into?”

  Creatures of Earth

  “Well, Inanna,” says Madame Iris. “You do—”

  “No,” she says.

  She brushes flakes of crusted blood off her arm; it’s healing quickly as she cants a gentle mantra under her breath. The design covers the whole arm, shoulder to wrist, sleeving it in her tale, Inanna’s tale, but as much as it’s a part of her now, it is still just a part. She doesn’t feel like she can call herself Inanna. Not quite. But on the other hand, the part of her that once was Phreedom is now permanently altered, fundamentally transformed by this…rewiring of her soul.

  “Call me…Anna,” she says. A modern name for a modern world.

  It’s a little disconcerting…more than a little: she has three sets of memories all competing for attention—her as biker chick child of the Information Age, as small-town princess of the New Stone Age, and as…something else. That third existence is a little fuzzy, disjointed, inconsistent; it’s the existence of the dead, fleshed-out in dreams and legends, shadows and reflections of reality. Three thousand years of fusion and flux, in the mass unconscious of humanity, in the Vellum. Three millennia, or three days, three eons of being no more than a story told and retold, transformed with each telling, broken up, used and reused, abused. Restored.

  But once you’re in the Vellum, you’re there for good. She only has to close her eyes to see the tattoo parlor as it really is, as it is, and was, and ever will be, a house of the dead. Creatures move in the shadows around her. Ereshkigal, Eresh of the Greater Earth, stands between her and the beaded curtain, the way out.

  “Anna, then,” says Madame Iris. “You do understand that you belong to me now?”

  The book of gravings lies open on the counter in front of her. In a way, it’s as much a contract as the Covenant. She may be here now in the body of an angry young girl, bound into it by the needlework of Madame Iris, but she’s as much there in the book, bound into its pages, bound for all eternity in the hands of Iris, who’s had three thousand years to study the mark of Inanna, like an anatomist dissecting a corpse, a botanist studying a flower, an archaeologist studying an ancient text. Iris knows her mark now, her secret name, probably better than herself, and, yes, that gives her power over her. Even the humans understand that if you know a creature’s secret name—angel or devil, god, unkin—then you can bind it to your will.

  She has a sudden image of her own dead body hanging from a hook, of Madame Iris circling it, scrutinizing it, copying the mark still shining on her cold flesh, tracing a finger in the dust, painting pigment on animal hide, making sketches on papyrus, on canvas. It was her job, archivist of the soul. Even the unkin didn’t live forever; creatures of earth, carbon and water, even the gods need feet of clay to walk the world, and so they had their bodies brought to her for safekeeping and she would flay them, treat the skins, preserve the mark. In her city of the dead, in the cave in the mountains north of Sumer, north of Akkad, north of Aratta, they could be sure that even if all their teraphim were smashed, their shabtis shattered, their human avatars slaughtered by an enemy, their souls would be kept safe that they could one day live again. It was the one certainty amid all the wars and vendettas, allegiances and betrayals; Kur was beyond those petty squabbles, dealt with all sides evenly, could not be bribed or threatened. Eresh was the ultimate untouchable.

  Inanna had known the Covenant would put an end to that. She’d seen Enki’s plans, got him so drunk he talked about them openly. No more god-kings. No more idols. No more empires. And she knew if he wanted to make his little heaven work he’d have to turn the city of the dead into a hell, a furnace for the souls of all those old gods who might stand against them. She could hear it in the flux of forces all the unkin were tapped into, in the physical sound of powers realigning, like some vast and ancient power shifting deep beneath her feet, thick muscles flexing under skin. With that synesthetic sense that marked her and the rest of them out from common humanity, she could hear the shape of things to come. And for this little queen of the heavens, this priestess of the earth, that wasn’t in her plans.

  So she had set out for the Kur. She’d thought Eresh would see it her way. Or, if not, at least she’d get there first, before the angels went in with their swords of fire, the lightning language flashing from their mouths, words blasting the underworld, turning the dark house into a blazing inferno.

  But Eresh had her own plans.

  The last thing she remembers, as Inanna, is the Annunaki falling on her, tearing at her, their fingers round her heart, and Eresh standing before the throne, her hand reached out, a finger pointing, uttering the word that killed her.

  “Why?” she says. “We could have stopped them. We could have raised the fucking Bull of Heaven, every horned god and serpent soul they murdered because they wouldn’t kneel before an empty throne. We could have—”

  “And I will,” says Iris. “Trust me, little sister. I have no intention of letting their little boys’ club turn the Vellum into this…playground prison”—she spits the plosives with utter contempt—“that they want so much.”

  Iris walks across the room to lay her hand upon the book of gravings, and Anna looks out through the beaded curtain, toward the glass-paneled door of the tattoo parlor and the world of light beyond. There’s nothing between her and the door except for what she is now. She can’t leave.

  “Understand me, little sister,” Iris says. “They have their Covenant, but we have ours. They think their enemies are all just…anarchists. Untamed, ungoverned libertines too wild to work together. They see a thousand splintered factions who hate each other as much as they despise the Covenant and they think it’s just the same old ganglord gods, hungry for personal power, bitter about lost glory. Is that what you want, Anna? Inanna? Phreedom?”

  Anna feels the names like needles in her flesh. Why did she come here? What is it that she wants, that she thought she could find here? There’s the part of her that’s Inanna—ambitious, audacious Inanna—seeking power, yes, wanting to beat the men at their own game. There’s the part that’s Phreedom—grim, determined Phreedom—seeking the escape her brother found beyond death, in the Vellum, wanting to beat the game itself. But both those selves are naked, stripped in their passage into the Vellum, pared away to the deeper, purer motivation underneath, the cold desire of the dead.

  Iris appeals to that part of her.

  “Rem
ember what you said to me? I’ll tear these doors down and raise up the dead to feast upon the living until there are more dead gods walking in the world than are alive.”

  Is it justice that she wants, or just plain vengeance? She’s not sure. But she knows that, yes, she does belong to Iris now, body and heart and soul, a creature of earth shaped by the hand of death.

  But even as Anna brushes off the last of the black-red dust of crusted blood and ink, from the Inanna tattoo forever carved into her flesh, and nods her understanding, she knows also that there’s still a little part of her somewhere out there that is forever Phreedom.

  The Ghost in the Machine

  “O silver-bright cut lapis slaughtered in the aromatic stone—covered with precious dust your cedar priestess daughter of the Kur Ilil—”

  He taps in a command to freeze the screen but the text keeps running through more translations, more permutations. It’s not right. There’s no way the book should be behaving like this; if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s impossible, he’d think the palmtop has picked up some kind of virus, but that just can’t happen. The only network it’s connected to is the Vellum itself.

  It flips into the Enki speech again. What has happened? What has my daughter done? I’m worried.

  Damn right, I’m troubled, thinks Metatron.

  The clerk, unconscious on the floor, begins to mumble in his sleep and Metatron leans over the counter to look down at him. He notices, on the monitor behind the counter, text scrolling across the screen. A barely audible hiss of noise comes from the man’s earphones, a faint sound that wavers up and down in time with his murmuring lips.