Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Do not let your daughter be slaughtered in the Kur,” mutters the clerk.

  He crouches behind the counter, listening to the sleeping clerk mumble the same thing over and over again, holding one of the man’s earphones in his hand and looking at it like some insect he’s about to squash. Metatron traces the wire down to the datastick clipped to the man’s jacket pocket, beside the name badge, and unclips it, takes the earphone from the man’s other ear and stands up, slowly, tossing his dreadlocks back over his shoulders, slipping the earphones into place, left first, then right, cocking his head to do so, first to the right, then to the left.

  “About fucking time,” the Messenger girl’s voice says in his ears. “What do I have to do to get your attention?”

  “Phreedom Messenger,” he says.

  “Kinda sorta, but not really,” says the voice. “Phreedom’s dead, you know. I’m just her…answering service. You remember answerers, right? You fucking invented them.”

  He looks about for a shabti figure, automatically, unconsciously, even though he knows it’s foolish. That was then and this is now. Times change. Technologies change. Even magic changes.

  “Answerers are against the Covenant, little girl. You should have learned your lesson by now, I would have thought.”

  He feels a little disconcerted, talking to thin air.

  “Fuck you,” she says. “Do I look like I give a fuck?”

  He answers the question with a pointed silence.

  “Oh, put the fucking lenses on as well,” she says. “Get with the fucking twenty-first century.”

  The Lady Cypher, Phreedom’s machine ghost, sits on the edge of the bed, watching him as he studies her. He has to admire the attention to detail; the biker jacket is scuffed and dusty from the road, her red hair shining damp as if just out the shower; every amethyst bead in her necklace catches the light inside, purple and white. It’s a far cry from the handmade, handheld clay shabtis of his youth.

  “I…upgraded myself,” it says. “Thought I’d make myself a little more presentable while I’m holding the fort.”

  Its lips move when it speaks. It bares its teeth in a bitter sort of smile. It blinks.

  He blinks. He’s not used to these VR lenses at all, and even though he washed them well in the little vial of cleaner fluid that the clerk keeps behind the counter, he can’t help but feel like he’s wearing someone else’s underwear, or using their toothbrush, queasy with the thought of it. He likes the dirt, the flesh of the physical world, but not that much.

  He closes the door of the room still hired out in Phreedom Messenger’s name and comes farther in, glancing around at the cheap prints on the wall, the wooden dresser, the door into the shower.

  “Not quite a palace,” he says. “Hardly fit for a queen of heaven.”

  He’s figured it out by now, of course. It’s not the first time an unkin has tried to alter their graving, take on a dead identity in order to evade the gatherers, write themselves out of the book of life, escape into the Vellum. It never works out the way they planned. So the little hatchling got her hands on some forgotten copy of Inanna’s mark, had it carved over her own to splice one story into the other. Her brother probably did the same; that’s why the book can’t focus on them, can’t cross-reference their destinies correctly to pinpoint the meeting that they’re meant to have somewhere, somewhen not far from here. Their destinies themselves are cut up, folded in with someone else’s, some dead unkin soul that the program sees as something undestined, undefined. It’s like a division by zero that makes an equation irresolvable.

  Except it seems the girl is now regretting her mistake; being dead is not much of a life.

  “So where is she now?” he says. “We burned the Kur three thousand years ago. The last doorway into the Vellum was closed and locked soon after.”

  “Time isn’t that simple in the Vellum, you know,” says the replica Phreedom. “Eternity doesn’t pay much mind to clocks and calendars.”

  “Where is she?”

  “All in good time,” she says. “I have a deal for you.”

  “The Covenant doesn’t deal with criminals.”

  “The Covenant doesn’t have to know.”

  A Terrible Innocence

  Enki, in the wisdom of his heart and from the dirt under his fingernails, created a kurgarra, a pretty youth, a bright young thing, glamour its name. Enki, in the wisdom of his heart and from the dirt under his fingernails, created a galatur, a pretty youth, a bright young thing, glamour its name.

  Metatron closes the palmtop, looks at himself in the dresser mirror for a second, wondering if he’s doing the right thing, then turns.

  The two angels stand, like the footsoldiers that they are, their hands behind their backs, feet just apart and faces forward. The phrase at ease has never seemed more ironic, as far as Metatron’s concerned. They’re both young and good-looking and, in their black suits and combed hair—corn-blond, crow-black—they look more like door-to-door evangelists than hunters, killers, rapists. They have the blank, unthinking stare of the idealist, only a little cold passion in their eyes, a flickering gleam of some grand truth they see a thousand yards away, the glamour of glory. Cherubim. Cherubs. Carter and Pechorin. The blue of their eyes is the only thing about them that they share, though in Carter the blue is sky over desert, warm ocean by a beach while in Pechorin it’s antiseptic mouthwash and neon in the night. It’s the similarity that defines their difference.

  Because in both of them there’s a kind of terrible innocence in those eyes, a purity of vision. That’s why he has them wear the shades.

  He gave the food of life to the kurgarra, gave the water of life to the galatur.

  Metatron reaches into one pocket and pulls out two small vials of dark liquid. It looks like ink, or oil, swirling inside the glass, if ink or oil were alive. Wonders of modern technology, he thinks. Nanotech is so much quicker than the old painstaking methods once used in the renaming to bind an unkin to the Covenant. He lays these two vials on the dresser and takes out a third, unscrews the top—he always carries a plentiful supply of the bitmites, as he calls them—and dips a fingernail into the inky black. He remembers his own renaming, at his own hand, back in the days when all they had was the crimson-purple dye brought from the Levantine coast; the color of Roman emperor’s robes, the scarlet and purple of the whores of Babylon, the dyeing industry was so inextricably linked with the coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre and Byblos, that the whole region derived its name from the color—po-ni-ki-jo in Mycenae, kinnahu to the natives, Phoenicia or Canaan. Back then they had to mix it with unkin blood, in a nine-day ceremony to…sanctify it. To invest it with the power to stain not just a person’s garments but their soul.

  Metatron’s fingernail scratches across the blond one’s chest, a simple stroke here, another there, all straight lines like Chinese calligraphy. The angel just stands there, loyal and devoted, even as Metatron carves his soul up into pieces and rearranges it. There’s no questioning of his authority, his reasoning. The angel would fall on his own fiery sword if the Covenant’s scribe merely suggested it. As Metatron works on him, the angel starts to hum quietly, probably not even aware that he’s doing so; he’s like a child with his hand over his ears, singing la la la, I can’t hear you. He starts to twitch.

  For a second, Metatron feels sorry for him, as he draws the black lines of his doom on him, but we all have them, don’t we, he thinks; that’s the nature of the Covenant. And the angel is a gatherer after all. How many lives have been ended by this shining youth, how many murders, or worse? All those scared or stubborn innocents like the hatchling or her brother who don’t even understand why they can’t be allowed to live. There’s a war coming and Metatron cannot allow himself the luxury of sympathy, no more for these creatures than for their victims. The end justifies the means, he tells himself…a lot these days.

  It’s like rewiring a circuitboard, Metatron imagines. The angel’s mark is a fine network of interconnections that the
strokes of his fingernail cut and rebond, crosswiring, confusing. Do this the wrong way and the boy could be left as a driveling imbecile, or as the kind of automaton you see in any psychiatric institute, obsessively, compulsively, endlessly walking to a doorway only to turn around and walk back, knowing that there’s some way out of its trapped state but no longer able to understand the door as anything other than the way in.

  “What was your name?” he asks. “Before you signed up, I mean.”

  “Jack, sir. Jack Carter.”

  His voice is thick, shaky. Fear must be something of an alien experience for him. Metatron looks across at the other. That one is still, quiet as a vacuum.

  “And you?”

  “Pechorin…Joseph Pechorin. Sir.”

  “I have something I need you both to do.”

  The Very Darkest Purple

  “Come,” Enki said to the kurgarra and the galatur. “Look to the gates of Kur. Go to the underworld. The seven gates will open for you, and like flies you’ll enter through the door.”

  “College Street, Asheville,” says Metatron. “That’s where you lost the boy, am I right? Yes, well, this time you’ll know exactly where to go. The girl has left the doors open.”

  He’s working on the dark-haired one now, as he briefs them on their mission. The first part should be easy enough, even for idiots like them. The boy got away, but Phreedom has left a trail as hot and rank as burning rubber. She must have been planning this all along. Find whoever helped her brother escape, then sell them out for her own hide. Full immunity for both her and her brother. That was the deal offered by the answerer, that extension of Phreedom, more Phreedom than Phreedom herself, in fact, after what the hatchling girl let Eresh do to her. He had to take the sprite apart to get at Phreedom’s graving, but he has it now, he has the Messenger girl, this scrap of code, all that is left of her. He could just wipe it out like erasing chalk marks from a blackboard, and the only thing that would be left of her is a lump of meat in a tattoo parlor in Asheville. But there’s something far more valuable that he can buy with it.

  Eresh, thinks Metatron.

  “There you will find her,” Enki said, “the queen of the underworld, Eresh of the Greater Earth, moaning crying like a woman giving birth. No linen shroud will be wound round her body. Both her breasts are bare; she will be naked, naked but for her dark hair that swirls about her head like reeds, queen of the city of the dead.”

  “The target’s name is Eresh,” says Metatron. “She’s dangerous. I’ve seen her kneeling before an angel, naked, tearing at her breasts and sobbing, ripping her hair out by the roots, only to shatter him to dust with a single word when he got close enough.”

  It goes against everything the Covenant stands for, letting the hatchling and her brother stay unsigned, unbound, but Eresh is too great a prize to miss. For all that the unkin of the Covenant call themselves angels and their enemies devils, Metatron doesn’t really believe in good and evil, or at least not Good and Evil. Reality, unlike the stories, unlike those dark stains printed onto bleached paper, is never black and white. In fact even those marks, like the marks he rewrites on the angel’s souls, are made in an ink that’s not truly black but only the very darkest purple.

  But.

  If anything can be described as black that isn’t the true black of an utter unlit void, it’s whatever construct of emptiness passes for the soul of Eresh. If anything in the world can be described as evil, it’s Eresh.

  “When she cries, O, my inside, cry with her, O, your inside,” said Enki to the kurgarra and galatur. “When she cries, O, my outside, cry with her, O, your outside. She will be pleased. Eresh will look at you and she’ll be glad to see you.”

  “But you’re not going to kill her,” says Metatron. “Not right away. You’re going to tell her that you feel the same pain she does, the same hatred, the same rage. You’re going to tell her that you want to join the host of hell.”

  The dark one nods, and there’s the faintest hint of a cruel smile on his lips. He’s well suited to this; even before Metatron started working on him there was precious little empathy in his soul. His graving was already all straight lines, sharp angles, and Metatron only works what is already there into a finer, darker hatch work, sketching the suggestion of shadows into a solid form of menace. The other one was different, fire to Pechorin’s ice, but Metatron, ever the craftsman, knows he’s done a good job there as well. It might not hold, but for the moment the creature that used to be Jack Carter has a feral grin on its face, as wild and crazed as Pechorin is cold and merciless. A kurgarra and a galatur, a shatterling and an impiteous gaze, a psychotic and a psychopath.

  Eresh will love them.

  “When she is relaxed,” said Enki to the kurgarra and galatur, “her mood will lighten. When she offers you a gift, get her to swear the oath by the great gods.”

  Metatron steps back to look at his work. All he’s really done is made them more themselves, for a little while anyway. He doesn’t want to send a pair of permanent recruits hell’s way, after all. No, after a while the binding should wear off and their own gravings reemerge, but this should last long enough to fool her, to make her think that these are every bit the sort of damaged souls she needs to help her bring down the Covenant.

  “Eresh is old school. If you can get her to offer hospitality, there’s nothing she can refuse you if you ask for it.”

  “Raise your head,” said Enki. “Look to the wineskin that hangs from the hook on the wall, saying my lady, let me have the wineskin, that I may drink from it.”

  “You’ll see…well, something that was once the Messenger girl. You ask for that. You tell Eresh the girl is all you want. You’re…thirsty. She understands that sort of thirst.”

  “Ask only for the body of Inanna. Crush the food of life over it. Splash the water of life upon it. And Inanna will arise.”

  “And when she gives it to you…”

  Metatron picks up the vials from the dresser, hands them to the angels, one in each hand, like some father of ancient times giving his sons their swords.

  “That’s when you use these.”

  THE THRONE ROOM OF THE QUEEN OF HELL

  The kurgarra and galatur listened to Enki’s words, and started out toward the underworld. The seven gates opened for them and they slipped in like flies, right through the cracks, entered the throne room of the queen of the underworld, of Eresh of the Greater Earth. They found her moaning, crying like a woman giving birth. No linen shroud was wound around her body. Both her breasts were bare; and she was naked, naked but for her dark hair that swirled about her head like reeds, Eresh, queen of the city of the dead.

  The two fallen angels stand silhouetted in the doorway, the beaded curtain drawn apart by the left hand of one, the right hand of the other, hands of gods, of fate, of destiny, hired hands. Their postures mirror each other exactly, like they’re two parts of the same being and, in a way, that’s exactly what they are. The servants of the Covenant get only limited autonomy. Ask any Catholic priest and he’ll tell you that they’re mere extensions of their master’s will; that’s why they call them angels, after all, from the Greek angelus…messenger. Anna, Inanna, Phreedom Messenger, recognizes them even though she can’t see their faces, feels a cold hatred run down her spine. She had her plan, but she’s not sure whom to betray now, Eresh or Enki. She’d like to bring them all down, in a way. She’d like to make them all pay.

  Eresh looks at the two for a second, then smiles, silently beckons them in.

  The outer door of the tattoo parlor is still swinging slowly shut; it hits the bell as it settles against the doorframe, not quite closing.

  Ting.

  O, my inside, Eresh of the Greater Earth was moaning, and they moaned with her, O, your inside. O, my outside, moaned Eresh, and they moaned with her, O, your outside. O, my stomach, groaned Eresh, and they groaned with her, O, your stomach. O, my back, she groaned, and, O, your back, they groaned with her. Ah, my heart, she sighed, and, Ah,
your heart, they sighed with her. Ah, my liver, sighed Eresh, and, Ah, your liver, sighed Enki’s kurgarra and galatur.

  The blond one rants; he raves like a madman, stalking the room like he’s searching for something, high or low, in the bottles of ink or the designs on the wall. He turns, rails on Eresh. There’s fire in his eyes, flame in his words, as this burning boy tells the queen of the dead of every horror and atrocity he’s carried out in the name of the Covenant, of every soul he’s snuffed out, every trembling infant unkin whose skull he’s smashed, whose bloodstains he can never wash from off his hands. At times he makes no sense, spitting incomplete, incoherent phrases, trying to express a meaning too intense to be articulated in a sentence. He rakes his fingers through his hair till it’s as wild as his words, grinds the palms of his hands against his temples like there’s something in his head he can’t get out. And Anna realizes that it’s sorrow. The other just stands there, head bowed, eyes in shadow. It’s not regret that brought him here, she can tell. He can keep his head down, dark hair hooding him; she still knows that sadist’s face.

  “I’m just—I feel so fucking—everything is—”

  The angel stops, goes quiet.

  “Lost,” he says.

  Eresh eats it up, bathes in the raging torrent of a fallen angel’s grief, so much like her own, like everyone’s.

  The Wineskin on the Hook

  Eresh of the Greater Earth stopped. She looked at them.

  Anna stands at the back of the room, at the wall, like a maidservant waiting for her orders. She’s passive now; there’s nothing that she can do except wait to see if the end game plays out the way she’d planned. She’s a schemer, by nature, as Phreedom or as Inanna; in either life, she was always looking for a way to beat the game of fate, looking for loopholes in time or space as Phreedom, looking for loopholes in the laws set out by Enki as Inanna. That’s why she stole the Tablets of Destiny all those millennia ago; she knew Enki would get them back; she only wanted a little look at them to see if she could find…a way out. She’s waited for three thousand years. So, now, she lets the angels and the queen of the dead play out the moves that are so deeply written into them there’s little else they could do.