Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Who are you moaning groaning sighing at me?” she asked. “If you are gods, I will give you a blessing. If you are mortals, I will give you a gift, the liquid gift of the full-flowing river.”

  “That is not what we wish,” answered the kurgarra and galatur.

  “I will give you the grain gift,” said Eresh, “of the fields ready to reap.”

  “Will you take us in as your own?” asks the dark angel.

  He’s been silent up till now, letting the other do the prep work, convince Eresh that they’re both well and truly fallen. Anna doubts that the other one would be able to carry off this part. He sits on the chair where she got her tattoo now, head forward, in his hands. She wonders if he’ll ever recover from the damage done to him.

  “Oh, yes, little one. You’re mine now,” Eresh says. “You belong here as much as anyone.”

  “That is not what we wish,” the kurgarra and galatur said.

  “Speak, then! What is it you wish?”

  “We ask for the ancient right of sanctuary.”

  “And I give you hospitality,” she says. “I offer you a river of blood to quench your rage. I offer you a harvest of souls to feed your grief. What do you want?”

  It’s the old deal offered by every devil to the souls that turn up at the doors of hell. The absolute power in the damnation of death, freedom from life, from sorrow, from suffering for your own pain, or from empathy, suffering from the pain of others. To transform remorse into a passion, a power that can win you—

  “Anything you want,” she says. Anything.

  “Only the wineskin hanging from the hook upon the wall,” they answered.

  “The body is owned by Inanna,” said Eresh of the Greater Earth.

  “Whether it is owned by queen or king, that is the only thing we wish.”

  And the dark-haired one raises his head, slowly, turning it, to meet her gaze, and raises his hand, slowly, turning it, to point across the room at Anna where she stands against the wall.

  “You have rich tastes,” says Eresh. “A pair of lackeys who would feast upon a queen.”

  She has a wry, amused smile on her face as she turns and looks Anna up and down appraisingly, estimating worth or worthlessness, the degradation that these fallen angels would wreak on her and that she, in turn, would wreak on others with the vicious power of the violated. The dark angel walks across the room toward her, stops in front of her and reaches up to run his long, thin fingers over her cheek.

  “She’s all yours,” says Eresh.

  The dark angel nods, closes his eyes with the satisfaction of the moment, of things sealed perfectly with a few simple words.

  “I can do anything I want with her?” he says.

  “Anything,” says Eresh.

  And the dark angel reaches into the inside pocket of his black suit jacket.

  “Jack,” he says—the blond one starts, looks up—“Show my lady how grateful we are.”

  She gave the body of Inanna to them. The kurgarra crushed the food of life over the corpse. The galatur splashed the water of life upon the corpse.

  Inanna Rose

  The blond angel—Jack—leaps like a mountain lion, a flash of lightning, one arm slashing downward, cutting not with claw though but with splash of crimson, purple, almost black ink, with a Jackson Pollock splatter across the unveiled face of Eresh, in her eyes, her mouth. She staggers back like she’s been struck with acid, blinded, clutching at her face and howling.

  Every bottle in the place shatters. The glass beads of the curtain shatter, raining out as dust into the outer room. The glass door of the shop blows out. The vial in the dark angel’s hand explodes but he’s already slapping his open hand across Anna’s face, splattering his master’s modern medicine across her cheek, dark ink and blood, hers and the angel’s mixing where the shards of glass cut into her soft flesh and his, caught between his open palm and her cheek. And the pain burns in her face, on her cheekbone, on her temple, a searing migraine splitting her skull, drilling her brain. The whole left side of her goes numb, and like the victim of a stroke she loses balance, falls. The pain splits her in two. And it makes her feel alive.

  And even as the fair-haired angel clamps his hand across Eresh’s mouth, his other arm locking around her neck as he slams her against the wall, using all his weight to keep her from uttering another sound, the wordless howl of the queen of the dead still rings in Anna’s ears, reverberates around the room, shattering glass in the framed prints of dragon designs and celtic knotwork, all the tribal or traditional tattoos that decorate the walls. Glass dust rains down on Anna on the floor.

  “Get up,” the dark-haired one is saying to her.

  The other is shouting in the unkin tongue, trying to drown the muffled keen of Eresh, to bind her with words just as he binds her with his hand. Eresh pushes from the wall, forces the angel back and round, slams him against the door frame, and Anna can see the angel’s hand, the back of it bulging; she can hear the crack of bone. Even with the bitmites blinding the bitch queen of the underworld—and they must be burning in her brain the way they burn in Anna’s, in Inanna’s, in Phreedom’s—even senseless with the chaos running riot on her, in her, Eresh’s animal noise drives through the angel’s hand like a nail, cracking it, splintering it.

  “Get up.”

  Black ink pours from the shattered bottles on the shelves and countertop, running in rivulets down cabinet doors and walls, like rain on a window, trickling to this side or to that, in diagonal drunkard’s trails of black dribblings that crisscross, making signs and sigils that she recognizes. Droplets run upward, defying the laws of physics to answer to their own internal laws. Drips hit the ground and vaporize to hissing steam, tendrils of gas that curl through the air, around the angel’s legs, reaching and groping.

  “Get up.”

  Skittering drops like insects run across her hands as she pushes herself up from the floor. The pain has moved round to the front of her head now, to the center of her forehead, where it’s hot, white. Her vision flickers between the world as it is and a photographic negative where black is white and white is black. The black suits of the angels glow, her knights in shining armor come to rescue her. The daylight world beyond the door is dark as night, a pitch-black pit. She pushes herself up to her knees.

  “Get up.”

  The noise of Eresh’s fury is all round them now, reverberating in the walls, the floor, the ceiling; the room is alive with it, and alive with the black ink that crawls and scrawls, arcane and anarchic, everywhere she looks. It threatens to swallow them, this room alive with liquid language, but even in the chaos of it—the dark angel crouching before her like a drill sergeant, roaring at her to stand, the other locked with Eresh as they throw each other this way and that, crashing against the walls, the counter, knocking the chair over toward them—and the dark angel swats it away without even looking, and keeps on yelling at her without even stopping to take a breath—she feels it locking into order in her head, into a simple logical imperative.

  She has to get up.

  The living shadows of the room writhe in the air, acrid and choking, but they flow across her as they flow across the walls, some spreading out to fill the place with their mad rage, but others wrapping themselves around the fair-haired angel, lashing at him. She sees phrases forming on his flesh, a curse—an unforgotten fate—eat bread plowed from earth—no food but dirt—no drink but from the drains—no seat but threshold steps—the drunk and thirsty strike your cheek.

  She has to get up before Eresh breaks through the angel’s binding hand and binding words, before she breaks through the angel.

  “Get up,” the dark angel shouts at her. He could just drag her to her feet but she knows that that would be no good. She has to do this for herself. She lays her right hand on the counter at her side and brings her left leg up to get her foot beneath her so she’s only on one knee. The world flickers—black, white, black, white—in time with the pounding of her heart. She feels the c
ounter, solid beneath her hand, and she uses it, not the mass of it, not the structure, but the certainty, the physical reality.

  And she drags herself back into the land of the living.

  Inanna rose.

  Frozen Between Eternity and Now

  Inanna rose.

  The room is silent. She stands there, feet apart—not as steady as she could be, but steady enough—her tattooed arm extended forward, palm outward, fingers spread to halt the world. On her arm the flesh engraving of the tattoo moves, black tracers running under her skin, flashing crimson, purple, as the scribe of the Covenant’s bitmites deconstructs and reconstructs the story of her life—one of her lives, rather. Inanna’s tale is still a part of her, as is Phreedom’s, but like any tale retold it’s changed in the telling. She’s given her flesh and bone to a once-dead unkin, but she has her own soul back. The graving that is Phreedom emerges in the morphing pattern, clear and central—slightly changed, she notices, embellished with a little touch of something else, but still her in its essence—as the bitmites rewire her flesh, her scarred, stained soul, downloading what was coded into them by Metatron. She studies the alterations as they emerge, worried at first that the Covenant’s scribe has put a little binding spell in there to tie her to him. But, no, she recognizes her own handiwork. And just as she once created the sprite with a gloved hand wired into virtual reality, the AI ghost of Phreedom’s cypher lady re-creates her through a sleeve of bitmites wired into the Vellum.

  The Anunnaki, judges of the underworld, snatched at Inanna as she was about to rise up from the underworld.

  The room is still. She stands there with her arm outstretched, buried up to the shoulder in the Vellum, holding the moment. The dark-haired angel still crouches on the floor; the other angel is locked with Eresh, blood running down the back of his hand, a splinter of bone protruding through the skin. Like a simworld paused by the flick of a finger, she holds it there.

  It’s not easy. The black ink of Madame Iris, of Eresh of the Greater Earth—the black blood of their ancestors, lords of heaven and earth, anu and ki, the liquid memory of the Anunnaki themselves—hangs in the air, frozen between eternity and now, but it takes everything she’s got to keep her focus on the word in her head that holds the stuff frozen in time. These wisps of shadow are the shreds of unkin who died long before the Covenant was even thought of, before Enki, or Inanna, or even Eresh herself, were even born. They’re powerful, as old as the first ivory spearthrower, older maybe, and it’s only their cold detachment from their long-forgotten dreams of life that makes them answer to her will…because they have none of their own.

  She holds the word in her head, like an equation on a mathematician’s blackboard, or a mandala in a Buddhist monk’s mind’s eye, a mantra in his mouth; and she holds it in the pattern on her arm, the interface between the Vellum and her body that’s as much the servant Lady Shubur as it is goddess Inanna, as much the sim sprite Cypher Lady as it is the coder Phreedom Messenger.

  “No one rises up out of the underworld unmarked,” they said.

  The room is shadowed. The stuff is everywhere, on the walls, in the air, all over the four of them, and she can feel the intelligence in it, fed back in the sensations that creep across her skin. She’s used to dealing with AI, with models of psychology defined in modular chunks or abstract networks, articulating them through visual or linguistic symbols, umpteenth generation metacode that’s as far removed from the underlying bits and bytes as an architect’s plans are from the atomic structure of the materials that will be used to build his house. And she’s used to dealing with the unkin Cant, the language that makes machine code look like…an architect’s plans drawn with a crayon held in a straitjacketed lunatic’s teeth.

  This is something that she’s never dealt with. It’s more sentient than any AI, but more locked into its own abstracted logic than the most mechanical of programs. It’s aware, it knows—she can feel it probing her, analyzing her—but what it’s aware of, what it knows, is only the certainty of its authority over reality. The ink, the blood of long-dead unkin, is so steeped in the Cant that it’s become it, a living liquid language. And with her hand up to her shoulder in the Vellum, manipulating it, the stuff reacts automatically to her action, seeking a coherent resolution; it’s like it needs to balance two sides of a complex equation in which she is just a variable.

  “If Inanna wishes to return, she must provide someone to take her place here in the underworld.”

  The room is solid. She has to push herself through the thick structured space and time that fills it like she’s wading through quicksand, and as she does so she still has to keep her focus on the word that keeps it that way. All she has to do is get out before the others break loose. She has her deal; the moment that she’s out that door, she’s free. The Covenant won’t touch her. And they’ll deal with the queen of the dead. At least she hopes so. She backs slowly away from Eresh and the angel who still holds the woman…only just, it looks like. But there’s the other angel—she nearly trips over him where he crouches on the floor, and for a moment, the air quivers with life, a breath, a blink of an eye, before she catches the moment again—and she can see the hunch of his shoulders, the turn of his head toward Eresh, the hand coming out of his pocket with a knife. She looks back at the other angel, his splintering hand, the pain of the curse written on his face. She doubts that he’ll survive, but he only has to hold on long enough for the other one to reach them with the knife; he only has to hold on for this moment that she’s holding and the moment that will follow it, inexorably, as soon as she lets go. All she has to do is get what she came here for and get out the door.

  The black stuff starts to move, crawling through the cracks in her will as liquid trickles through fingers. It doesn’t like the…logic of this ending. It thinks she ought to stay dead, stay the scarred and violated hollow creature that she was. She doesn’t agree. Her right hand still held out in front of her like some crazed king ordering back the sea, she reaches behind her with the other hand, onto the counter, and feels it come to rest upon the book of gravings, still lying where Madame Iris left it.

  And then she’s running, and the dark angel is turning, pouncing, and Eresh’s word is piercing through the hand across her mouth, and the black stuff is pouring toward her, and the angel with the corn-blond hair is falling from the queen of the dead and screaming words of fire, even as the knife sinks into the woman’s throat and Anna, Inanna, Phreedom, bursts through the curtain and dives through the wooden frame of the shattered door and out of this little pocket of hell and back into reality, the blood and flame behind her, blossoming like crenellations of a black carnation.

  DRESSED IN SOILED SACKCLOTH

  As Inanna rose up from the underworld, the ugallu, the demons of the underworld, stuck to her side, like reeds around her, small and large, like picket fences all around her. In front of her walked one who held a scepter, though he was no minister. At her back walked one who held a mace, although he was no warrior. The ugallu were demons who knew no food, who knew no drink, who ate no offerings, drank no libations, took no gifts. They had no love for sex, no children to kiss. They lived to tear a wife from her husband’s arms, to tear a child from its father’s knees, to steal the bride from her marriage bed.

  The demons stuck to her.

  Anna runs a single finger over the copy of the graving of Inanna, tracing the story in its pattern toward the conclusion. It’s not her story anymore, not completely, but it’s still close enough to worry her. She’s not just Phreedom Messenger anymore; she has the Cypher Lady’s memories of laying out the deal to Metatron in a hotel room, not a visual memory but the strange Cubist mechanical awareness of the sim; and there’s a little bit of her that will be forever Inanna, scheming, ambitious Inanna, so it takes a lot for her to only use the book for what she needs. Some nights she flicks through it, studying the marks of dead gods printed in there, and knowing that she has a power in her hands that Metatron would kill her for, immun
ity or no immunity. She knows she has the skill required to bind these marks into new flesh; she could build a fucking army of VR gods and send them out to take the Covenant apart from the inside out. But she also wonders how many more of these lost souls Madame Iris has already restored to new flesh, where they are now, what they might think of the girl who sold their mistress out for her own hide. They might be grateful for their liberation, but they might just as easily hate her for it.

  She stands up from the dresser and walks over to the window of the motel room again. There’s no sign of anything out there, just the low, wooden fence across the parking lot, the highway on the other side of it with cars humming up and down, north and south, and the fields across the road, tall grasses blowing in the winds, but she’s still sure they’re there. Whatever they are, she’s sure they’re there.

  The part of her that is the Cypher Lady, the sim, a sentience in virtual flesh, can hear them in the crackle of the Vellum.

  Outside the palace gates, the Lady Shubur, dressed in soiled sackcloth, waiting, saw Inanna with the ugallu all round her, and she hurled herself into the dust down at Inanna’s feet.

  “Walk on, Inanna,” the ugallu said. “We will take Lady Shubur in your place.”

  “No,” cried Inanna. “Lady Shubur is my steadfast support, the sukkal who gives wise advice, the soldier who stands at my side. She remembered my commands, sounded a lamentation for me in the ruins. She pounded the drum for me at the assemblies where the unkin gather, and around the houses of the gods. She tore at her eyes, her mouth, her thighs. She wore the beggar’s single robe of soiled sackcloth and, alone, she set out for the temple of Lord Ilil in Nippur. She went to the temple of Sin in Ur, to the temple of Enki in Eridu. She saved my life. I’ll never give the Lady Shubur to you.”