by Paula Guran
(A sigil, the same tiny voice corrected. And Goss felt the hairs on his back ruffle, sudden-slick with cold, foul sweat.)
It took a few minutes more for ’Lij to give up on the sat-phone, tossing it aside so hard it bounced. “Try the radio mikes,” Goss heard him tell himself, “see what kinda bandwidth we can . . . back to Gebel, might be somebody listening. But not the border, nope, gotta keep off that squawk-channel, for sure. Don’t want the military gettin’ wind, on either side . . . ”
By then, Camberwell had been gone for almost ten minutes, so Goss felt free to leave Hynde in Journee’s care and follow, at his own pace—through the passage and into the tunnel, feeling along the wall, trying to be quiet. But two painful stumbles later, halfway down the tunnel’s curve, he had to flip open his phone just to see; the stone-bone walls gave off a faint, ill light, vaguely slick, a dead jellyfish luminescence.
He drew within just enough range to hear Camberwell’s boots rasp on the downward slope, then pause—saw her glance over one shoulder, eyes weirdly bright through a dim fall of hair gust-popped from her severe, sweat-soaked working gal’s braid. Asking, as she did: “Want me to wait while you catch up?”
Boss, other people might’ve appended, almost automatically, but never her. Then again, Goss had to admit, he wouldn’t have really believed that shit coming from Camberwell, even if she had.
He straightened up, sighing, and joined her—standing pretty much exactly where he thought she’d’ve ended up, right next to the well, though keeping a careful distance between herself and its creepy-coated sides. “Try sending down a cup yet, or what?”
“Why? Oh, right . . . no, no point; that’s why I volunteered, so those dumbasses wouldn’t try. Don’t want to be drinking any of the shit comes out of there, believe you me.”
“Oh, I do, and that’s—kinda interesting, given. Rings a bit like you obviously know more about this than you’re letting on.”
She arched a brow, denial reflex-quick, though not particularly convincing. “Hey, who was it sent Lao and what’s-his-name down here, in the first place? I’m motor pool, man. Cryptoarchaeology is you and coma-boy’s gig.”
“Says the chick who knows the correct terminology.”
“Look who I work for.”
Goss sighed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s in the well?”
“What’s on the well? Should give you some idea. Or, better yet—”
She held out her hand for his phone, the little glowing screen, with its pathetic rectangular light. After a moment, he gave it over and watched her cast it ’round, outlining the chamber’s canted, circular floor: seen face on, those ridges he’d felt under his feet when Hynde first brought him in here and dismissed without a first glance, let alone a second, proved to be in-spiraling channels stained black from centuries of use: run-off ditches once used for drainage, aimed at drawing some sort of liquid—layered and faded now into muck and dust, a resinous stew clogged with dead insects—away from (what else) seven separate niches set into the surrounding walls, inset so sharply they only became apparent when you observed them at an angle.
In front of each niche, one of the mosaicked figures, with a funneling spout set at ditch-level under the creature in question’s feet, or lack thereof. Inside each niche, meanwhile, a quartet of hooked spikes set vertically, maybe five feet apart: two up top, possibly for hands or wrists, depending if you were doing things Roman- or Renaissance-style; two down below, suitable for lashing somebody’s ankles to. And now Goss looked closer, something else as well, in each of those upright stone coffins . . .
(Ivory scraps, shattered yellow-brown shards, broken down by time and gravity alike, and painted to match their surroundings by lack of light. Bones, piled where they fell.)
“What the fuck was this place?” Goss asked, out loud. But mainly because he wanted confirmation, more than anything else.
Camberwell shrugged, yet again—her default setting, he guessed. “A trap,” she answered. “And you fell in it, but don’t feel bad—you weren’t to know, right?”
“We found it, though. Hynde, and me . . . ”
“If not you, somebody else. Some places are already empty, already ruined—they just wait, long as it takes. They don’t ever go away. ’Cause they want to be found.”
Goss felt his stomach roil, fresh sweat springing up even colder, so rank he could smell it. “A trap,” he repeated, biting down, as Camberwell nodded. Then: “For us?”
But here she shook her head, pointing back at the well, with its seven watchful guardians. Saying, as she did—
“Naw, man. For them.”
She laid her hand on his, half its size but twice as strong, and walked him through it—puppeted his numb and clumsy finger-pads bodily over the clumps of fossil chunks in turn, allowing him time to recognize what was hidden inside the mosaic’s design more by touch than by sight: a symbol (sigil) for every figure, tumor-blooming and weirdly organic, each one just ever-so-slightly different from the next. He found the thing Hynde’s rash most reminded him of on number four, and stopped dead; Camberwell’s gaze flicked down to confirm, her mouth moving slightly, shaping words. Ah, one looked like—ah, I see. Or maybe I see you.
“What?” he demanded, for what seemed like the tenth time in quick succession. Thinking: I sound like a damn parrot.
Camberwell didn’t seem to mind, though. “Ashreel,” she replied, not looking up. “That’s what I said. The Terrible Ashreel, who wears us like clothing.”
“Allatu, you mean. The wicked, who covers man like a garment—”
“Whatever, Mister G. If you prefer.”
“It’s just—I mean, that’s nothing like what Hynde said, up there—”
“Yeah sure, ’cause that shit was what the Sumerians and Babylonians called ’em, from that book Hynde was quoting.” She knocked knuckles against Hynde’s brand, then the ones on either side—three sharp little raps, invisible cross-nails. “These are their actual names. Like . . . what they call themselves.”
“How the fuck would you know that? Camberwell, what the hell.”
Straightening, shrugging yet again, like she was throwing off flies. “There’s a book, okay? The Liber Carne—‘Book of Meat.’ And all’s it has is just a list of names with these symbols carved alongside, so you’ll know which one you’re looking at, when they’re—embodied. In the flesh.”
“In the—you mean bodies, like possession? Like that’s what’s happening to Hynde?” At her nod: “Well . . . makes sense, I guess, in context; he already said they were demons.”
“Oh, that’s a misnomer, actually. ‘Terrible’ used to mean ‘awe-inspiring, more whatever than any other whatever,’ like Tsar Ivan of all the Russias. So the Seven, the Terrible Seven, what they really are is angels, just like you thought.”
“Fallen angels.”
“Nope, those are Goetim, like you call the ones who stayed up top Elohim—these are Maskim, same as the Chant. Arralu-Allatu, Namtaru, Asakku, Utukku, Gallu-Alu, Ekimmu, Lammyatu; Ashreel, Yphemaal, Zemyel, Eshphoriel, Immoel, Coiab, Ushephekad. Angel of Confusion, the Mender Angel, Angel of Severance, Angel of Whispers, Angel of Translation, Angel of Ripening, Angel of the Empty . . . ”
All these half-foreign words spilling from her mouth, impossibly glib, ringing in Goss’s head like popped blood vessels. But: “Wait,” he threw back, struggling. “A ‘trap’ . . . I thought this place was supposed to be a temple. Like the people who built it worshipped these things.”
“Okay, then play that out. Given how Hynde described ’em, what sort of people would worship the Seven, you think?”
“ . . . terrible people?”
“You got it. Sad people, weird people, crazy people. People who get off on power, good, bad, or indifferent. People who hate the world they got so damn bad they don’t really care what they swap it for, as long as it’s something else.”
“And they expect—the Seven—to do that for them.”
“It’s what they were made for.”
Straight through cryptoarchaeology and out the other side, into a version of the Creation so literally Apocryphal it would’ve gotten them both burnt at the stake just a few hundred years earlier. Because to hear Camberwell tell it, sometimes, when a Creator got very, verrry lonely, It decided to make Itself some friends—after which, needing someplace to put them, It contracted the making of such a place out to creatures themselves made to order: fragments of its own reflected glory haphazardly hammered into vaguely humanesque form, perfectly suited to this one colossal task, and almost nothing else.
“They made the world, in other words,” Goss said. “All seven of them.”
“Yeah. ’Cept back then they were still one angel in seven parts—the Voltron angel, I call it. Splitting apart came later on, after the schism.”
“Lucifer, war in heaven, cast down into hell and yadda yadda. All that. So this is all, what . . . some sort of metaphysical labor dispute?”
“They wouldn’t think of it that way.”
“How do they think of it?”
“Differently, like every other thing. Look, once the shit hit the cosmic fan, the Seven didn’t stay with God, but they didn’t go with the devil, either—they just went, forced themselves from outside space and time into the universe they’d made, and never looked back. And that was because they wanted something angels are uniquely unqualified for: free will. They wanted to be us.”
Back to the fast-forward, then, the bend and the warp, till her ridiculously plausible-seeming exposition-dump seemed to come at him from everywhere at once, a perfect storm. Because: misery’s their meat, see—the honey that draws flies, by-product of every worst moment of all our brief lives, when people will cry out for anything who’ll listen. That’s when one of the Seven usually shows up, offering help—except the kind of help they come up with is usually nothing very helpful at all, considering how they just don’t really get the way things work for us, even now. And it’s always just one of them at first, ’cause they each blame the other for having made the decision to run, stranding themselves in the here and now, so they don’t want to be anywhere near each other . . . but if you can get ’em all in one place—someplace like here, say, with seven bleeding, suffering vessels left all ready and waiting for ’em—then they’ll be automatically drawn back together, like gravity, a black hole event horizon. They’ll form a vector, and at the middle of that cyclone they’ll become a single angel once again, ready to tear everything they built up right the fuck on back down.
Words words words, every one more painful than the last. Goss looked at Camberwell as she spoke, straight on, the way he didn’t think he’d ever actually done, previously. She was short and stacked, skin tanned and plentiful, eyes darkish brown shot with a sort of creamier shade, like petrified wood. A barely visible scar quirked through one eyebrow, threading down over the cheekbone beneath to intersect with another at the corner of her mouth, keloid raised in their wake like a negative-image beauty mark, a reversed dimple.
Examined this way, at close quarters, he found he liked the look of her, suddenly and sharply—and for some reason, that mainly made him angry.
“This is a fairy tale,” he heard himself tell her, with what seemed like over-the-top emphasis. “I’m sitting here in the dark, letting you spout some . . . Catholic campfire story about angel-traps, free will, fuckin’ misery vectors . . . ” A quick head-shake, firm enough to hurt. “None of it’s true.”
“Yeah, okay, you want to play it that way.”
“If I want—?”
Here she turned on him, abruptly equal-fierce, clearing her throat to hork a contemptuous wad out on the ground between them, like she was making a point. “Look, you think I give a runny jackshit if you believe me or not? I know what I know. It’s just that things are gonna start to move fast from now on, so you need to know that; somebody in this crap-pit does, aside from me. And I guess—” Stopping and hissing, annoyed with herself, before adding, quieter: “I guess I wanted to just say it, too—out loud, for once. For all the good it’ll probably do either of us.”
They stood there a second, listening, Goss didn’t know for what—nothing but muffled wind, people murmuring scared out beyond the passage, a general scrape and drip. Till he asked: “What about Hynde? Can we, like, do anything?”
“Not much. Why? You guys friends?”
Yes, dammit, Goss wanted to snap, but he was pretty sure she had lie-dar to go with her Seven-dar. “There’s . . . not really a show, without him,” was all he said, finally.
“All right, well—he’s pretty good and got, at this point, so I’d keep him sedated, restrained if I could, and wait, see who else shows up: there’s six more to go, after all.”
“What happens if they all show up?”
“All Seven? Then we’re fucked, basically, as a species. Stuck back together, the Maskim are a load-bearing boss the likes of which this world was not designed to contain, and the vector they form in proximity, well—it’s like putting too much weight on a sheet of . . . something. Do it long enough, it rips wide open.”
“What rips?”
“The crap you think? Everything.”
There was a sort of a jump-cut, and Goss found himself tagging along beside her as Camberwell strode back up the passageway, listening to her tell him: “Important point about Hynde, as of right now, is to make sure he doesn’t start doin’ stuff to himself.”
“ . . . like?”
“Well—”
As she said it, though, there came a scream-led general uproar up in front, making them both break into a run. They tumbled back into the light-sticks’ circular glow to find Journee contorted on the ground with her heels drumming, chewing at her own lips—everybody else had already shrunk back, eyes and mouths covered like it was catching, save for big, stupid ’Lij, who was trying his level best to pry her jaws apart and thrust his folding pocket spork in between. Goss darted forward to grab one arm, Camberwell the other, but Journee used the leverage to flip back up onto her feet, throwing them both off against the walls.
She looked straight at Camberwell, spit blood and grinned wide, as though she recognized her: Oh, it’s you. How do, buddy? Welcome to the main event.
Then reached back into her own sides, fingers plunging straight down through flesh to grip bone—ripped her red ribs wide, whole back opening up like that meat-book Camberwell had mentioned and both lungs flopping out, way too large for comfort: two dirty gray-pink balloons breathing and growing, already disgustingly over-swollen yet inflating even further, like mammoth water wings.
The pain of it made her roar and jackknife, vomiting on her own feet. And when Journee looked up once more, horrid grin trailing yellow sick-strings, Goss saw she now had a sigil of her own embossed on her forehead, fresh as some stomped-in bone-bruise.
“Asakku, the Terrible Zemyel,” Camberwell said, to no one in particular. “Who desecrates the faithful.”
And: “God!” Somebody else—Lao?—could be heard to sob, behind them.
“Fuck Him,” Journee rasped back, throwing the tarp pinned ’cross the permanently open doorway wide and taking impossibly off up into the storm with a single flap, blood splattering everywhere, a foul red spindrift.
’Lij slapped both hands up to seal his mouth, retching loudly; Katz fell on his ass, skull colliding with the wall’s sharp surface, so hard he knocked himself out. Lao continued to sob-pray on, mindless, while everybody else just stared. And Goss found himself looking over at Camberwell, automatically, only to catch her nodding—just once, like she’d seen it coming.
“—like that, basically,” she concluded, without a shred of surprise.
Five minutes at most, but it felt like an hour: things narrowed, got treacly, in that accident-in-progress way. Outside, the dust had thickened into its own artificial night; they could hear the thing inside Journee swooping high above it, laughing like a loon, yelling raucous insults at the sky. The other two drivers had never come back inside, lost in the s
torm. Katz stayed slumped where he’d fallen; Lao wept and wept. ’Lij came feeling towards Camberwell and Goss as the glow-sticks dimmed, almost clambering over Hynde, whose breathing had sunk so low his chest barely seemed to move. “Gotta do something, man,” he told them, like he was the first one ever to have that particular thought. “Something. Y’know? Before it’s too late.”
“It was too late when we got here,” Goss heard himself reply—again, not what he’d thought he was going to say, when he’d opened his mouth. His tongue felt suddenly hot, inside of his mouth gone all itchy, swollen tight; strep? Tonsillitis? Jesus, if he could only reach back in there and scratch . . .
And Camberwell was looking at him sidelong now, with interest, though ’Lij just continued on blissfully unaware of anything, aside from his own worries. “Look, fuck that shit,” he said, before asking her: “Can we get to the trucks?”
She shook her head. “No driving in this weather, even if we did. You ever raise anybody, or did the mikes crap out too?”
“Uh, I don’t think so; caught somebody talkin’ in Arabic one time, close-ish, but it sounded military, so I rung off real quick. Something about containment protocol.”
Goss: “What?”
“Well, I thought maybe that was ’cause they were doing minefield sweeps, or whatever—”
“When was this?”
“ . . . fifteen minutes ago, when you guys were still down there, ’bout the time the storm went mega. Why?”
Goss opened his mouth again, but Camberwell was already bolting up, grabbing both Katz and Hynde at once by their shirt-collars, ready to heave and drag. The wind’s whistle had taken on a weird, sharp edge, an atonal descending keen, so loud Goss could barely hear her—though he sure as hell saw her lips move, read them with widening, horrified eyes, at almost the same split-second he found himself turning, already in mid-leap towards the descending passage—