Salt, Sand, and Blood

by MarQuese Liddle

  And if she’s wrong? The Messah thought every time these doubts reared their ugly heads, Then Magdalynn’s gone, and Father too. And every time, the same conclusion: faith was the only thing left to hold on to. Fact was immaterial. He would see his loved ones again, one way or the other. This was truth. So when they arrived four day’s ride from the west-most outpost, Najmah Alshrq, and into the shadow of the evil twin mountains, Adam traversed the valley without fear of death.

  “This is the mouth of Crusader’s Canyon,” Zachariah explained as they approached a clay fortress. Goods-laden traders were lined at its gate, waiting for sanction; and it looked to the pastor’s son that they’d be waiting too. There was no way but through the gate. The fort itself was not overly large—only a single floor structure built into the mountain side—but between it and the opposite mountain ran a wall of lime, thrice as tall, pearl smooth, and sculpted. The apostle scholar must have seen the awe on Adam’s face. “And that is Solomon’s Boot, built after the rebuke during the First Crusade.” He arced with his pen from one peak to the other. “Stretches the whole length from Black Sodom to Red Gehenna. No other way to Mephisto but through there or the sea.”

  “Then we’re almost to the city?” asked Adnihilo eagerly.

  “Another hour, maybe. But that’s assuming he has enough tax for entry.”

  The two Tsaazaari men, Maqsood and Rahir, spat at the sound of the word “tax.”

  “Forgive them,” Jordan said faster than the spittle could sizzle on the sand. “They are holy men, but unfortunately unwise in the necessary order of the world. And what else could one expect from a pair of bush hunters. To them, taxes and tithes are no different than theft.”

  “And what difference is that?” scoffed Ba’al.

  Jordan left the question unanswered.

  “So what about the tax? We could hardly afford supplies,” Adnihilo asked with an edge in his voice. He was hoping for a fight, but what he got was disappointment.

  “Worry not, fallen friend. Our late, brave companion gave me a key into the city.”

  The bishop snorted, “A key?”

  Jordan leveled his brow with Ba’al’s, and the Messiah’s eyes darkened where prior they never seemed to shadow. “A name, actually. Vexillifer Mephistopheles.”

  The name sounded familiar, but Adam could not place where he’d hear it before, nor, it appeared, could anyone else but the grumbling bishop. “I could have told you that,” he muttered as the rest pressed onward to the foot of Solomon’s Boot—Red Gehenna in the distance, Black Sodom looming over, ever threatening to engulf them in a slide of liquid rock so smooth and strange was its surface. Staring at the mountain made the pastor’s son more nervous than waiting on the gate guards’ judgement. Jordan and Zach had gone to parley with them and were gone several minutes inside the fort before coming out again. And as the self-proclaimed Messiah spoke, they were allowed to pass along the valley road to Mephisto.

  This was no longer the Tsaazaari desert, no longer the barren boneyard where water was gold and men prey to beast. This was the kingdom Pareo was meant to be—but never was—never could be this legendary. The black tower in Babylon, Gautama’s unearthly mountains and sprawling palaces, Iisah’s ancient temple scrawled in millennia of hieroglyphs—not one of these was worth a pittance compared to Mephisto. Its walls alone were a thing ungraspable, smooth and white as polished ivory, blinding in the sun, and twice as high as Hassan’s hostel. They stretched left and right beyond the horizon, even into the ocean, according to Zachariah. Six ports allowed access to the city, each flanked by a pair of gold-capped spires: north, northeast, and east-south by land; the others mirrored on the side of the sea. Respectively, the Mephistine called these the Tarshir and Ophir Gates, though no doors nor portcullises remained.

  “Not for at least a thousand years,” explained the apostle scholar as they clopped to a halt in sight of the north-eastern Tarshir. There was a line, other travelers awaiting examination and taxation. Zachariah continued, “Though the Mephistine claim longer. Legend is that there have never been proper gates, that King Solomon closes them with smoke that turns to glass stronger than stone.”

  “Sounds like superstitious horse shit,” Adam expected from Ba’al, yet it was Adnihilo who spoke. “Sounds like home,” he said, but the former scribe had already moved on.

  The man was bewitched in his element, paging through notes like a magic tome, every name an evocation, his ink pen a wand with which he directed the young men’s attention. “See the mural there?” It was impossible to miss. On either side it covered twice the wall’s surface as the northeastern Tarshir gate. “They’re painted at every entrance. It’s the story of how King Solomon came into power.”

  “Shepherd’s skin,” whispered Lilum into Adam’s ear—a shortened version of a phrase made common during their journey. Riding double as they had since they departed old Iisah, the priestess never missed an opportunity. Every time either Jordan or one of his apostles spoke, her nose would nuzzle in his hair and her breath tickle his neck. “They are the wolves who wear the shepherd’s skin,” she would say to him; and he would nod, compliant, while in his heart there spread his skepticism. But not this time.

  The pastor’s son caught Zachariah’s eye and cut him off mid-tale. “Liar,” he said, no hint of jest in his voice. “You don’t have to be a Brother Scribe to know the stories of Solomon. Back in our parish in Babylon, I taught those scriptures myself, and they definitely don’t say anything about that.” He pointed to the wall, to the image of a man no older than himself bearing in one hand an oil lamp and in the other a signet ring—on its face a six pointed star, inverted triangles intersecting. And from the lamp there leapt a shadow, its head antlered, its hands laden by some kind of book or tablet.

  “Don’t they, though?” the former scribe asked, smiling. He looked to Jordan who was bringing his camel around. “Should I tell them, my Lord, of the true gnosis?” The Messiah nodded, and Zachariah returned to the conversation. “Why don’t you tell me what you see and what you believe you should see?”

  Adam glared. This felt like a trap, but he was curious, so he agreed and started, “King Solomon was the fourth of the Tsaazaari kings. He inherited his rule young—that much of the painting is correct—but there were no stars or demons. It was God who came to Solomon to see if he would prove worthier than his spoiled brothers. And he did. When God offered him whatever his heart desired, Solomon asked for the wisdom to become a virtuous ruler.”

  “And both wisdom and rule were bestowed upon him,” Zachariah finished for the pastor’s son, “but then I must ask, is that not what you see there in the mural?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Tell me, Adam, how does one commune with divine but through symbols and invocations? You don’t recognize the ring—though I suppose that’s not your fault; it’s been made blasphemous to mention the form of the old covenant—but the lamp should be familiar. The burning of oil remains part of the Messai faith. It is the creating of light from darkness, of fire from the abyssal deep as God did with his kingdom of Heaven. Something from nothing. Something from anything.”

  A fury swelled in Adam’s chest. “Sure. And next you’re going to suggest that that shadow is supposed to be God.”

  “No, only that God is what that demon was called by the Scribes who recorded the histories. Before then, there were but the mysteries, wisdom passed down from demiurgic beings, those evil and good alike.” He looked again to Jordan—another nod of approval—then Zachariah sighed as if a tremendous burden had been placed upon him. He said, “Adam, it is you who has confused God and demon kind, as have so many others. Look there,” he pointed his pen at the opposite side of the gate, the second half of the mural. There was the King as before, but older and holding different treasures: an antlered crown, a miniature temple borne in his left hand, and a serpent coiled in his right palm. “There are many devils within the deep: those who have fallen and those who creep up from the primordia
l sea. The latter are more ancient, more dangerous. We believe it was one of these that gulled our poor friend Kashim, just as King Solomon was tempted by the power of his own leviathan—that serpent painted there, the Shamir.”

  “It’s a terrible thing to look upon the face of God.”

  Then is it not the face of the Devil? He thought it through; three images cycled. The serpent god of the Impii, Kashim’s blind leviathan, and now King Solomon’s Shamir. The snake appeared in every instance. He looked to Adnihilo’s neck. The skin there had darkened, but the brand was yet visible. Was that not a serpent coiling about the symbol of Ba’al’s god’s crown? Another devil—was he surrounded? The only unmarred were Lilum and the apostles. Adam scoured his memories for glyphs studied inside the Father’s Temple. To the Iisah, the serpent was the tyrant, the Traitor. Was I wrong to doubt her? Just then, a pair of pale arms wrapped the young Messah. Lilum’s lips nuzzled against his ear. “Shepherd’s skin,” she said, embracing him. Until then, he hadn’t realized he’d been shaking.

  It was a long while after before he could calm himself, and wading through Mephisto customs didn’t help. Entry into the city was overseen by Solomon’s Royal Swordsmen—The King’s Sons, the locals called them. With dark, rough hands they searched each man and camel. It reminded Adam of Venicci and of Hassan’s Hostel: chatter in the Tsaazaari tongue, hard dark eyes and black wiry beards, and even their clothes. They wore dyed linen coats, topaz blue or green peridot, with large bronze discs on breast and back. Smaller plates covered their thighs as well as their shoulders—on every one a mirror polish—their helmets as well. Even the maille aventails masking their faces and necks shined bright as the sunlight. The pastor’s son could not help but notice the contrast between such vibrant clothes and what hid within. Men burned as dark as their souls, men accustomed to murder—peacekeepers, soldiers, killers. The swords hanging from their belts were those of executioners: long, broad, straight, and flat at the tip; great cleavers with short sabre grips, a tail of tang in place of a pummel—a bit of extra leverage for chopping clothes, skin, sinew, and bone.

  Adam was thankful when they were finally gone. A word from Jordan was all it took, “Vexillifer Mephistopheles,” and the King’s Sons granted them entry into the sea of commerce southwest the Tarshir gate. At a glance, the Mephistine bazaar made even the vast Gautaman markets look to be less than a Babylonian slum. There was no aspect of gradation. Where on one side of the walls stretched a flat valley of sand, immediately inside sprung gardens atop apartments atop taverns and shopfronts, streets and alleys like veins and arteries through which human beings flowed as far as the eye could see. And the scent of them was sweet as perfume: spiced musk, roses, lavender, and honey. Their clothes, their bodies, their roads immaculate like porcelain dolls: sculpted, painted, jeweled with rings of silver and gold, robed in silks bright as gemstones. They turned away their noses; riders, palanquins, and pedestrians all the same gave a wide berth to the motely companions and their fetid camels. Muckrakers glared at them from the shade of alleyways. Leaning on their shovels like soldiers do with spears, the boy toilers fermented memories in Adam worse than the Royal Swordsmen. Clean, kempt captives—slaves in everything save appearance—like Magdalynn.

  The pastor’s son forced his eyes forward. He couldn’t see much farther ahead than the street was wide—too many twists in the roads and arcaded bridges between the tops of buildings. But looking above, their destination rose clear. King Solomon’s Temple, the seat of his power, stood at the city’s center an ashen hexahedron toothed with gilded merlons and ribbed with white columns. But the closer the companions drew, the thicker became the crowd and narrower the streets so that they had to pass in single file through a labyrinth of alleys. More than once, Adam worried that they’d lost their way. They’d circled the Temple’s outskirts twice, and it wasn’t obvious that they were gaining ground. If anything, it seemed to him that they were blindly following the flow foot traffic, and these were no longer pristine porcelain dolls. These people were smeared and broken. Every one of them walked as if on a cliff’s edge, despondent or vigilant. They made Adam nervous, made him notice the dearth of Royal Swordsmen and the dark nooks under arcades and the dead-end alleys each tenanted by grotesque bronze statues half man and half beast. Compared to these, the glare of muckraking child-slaves seemed a happy sight.

  Suddenly, the line stopped. Adam rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, called out, “What’s wrong? Why did we stop?”

  The answer came from ahead in the column. “We’ve reached the end of the line,” said Zachariah. “Looks like we’ve come at a bad time. I don’t think it was ever this long when I was here on mission.”

  “Line for what?” asked Adnihilo. “I thought we were going to see the king.”

  Ba’al yawned and stretched his arms. “That’s what the line is for, Imp. All that studying in Iisah didn’t make you any quicker, did it?”

  “Quick enough to knock you off this camel.”

  The bishop scoffed, and they went back and forth prodding one another with petty threats and insults until the hour could no longer bear their boredom. They’d advanced perhaps twenty paces—another hour, twenty more—yet still the doors of the temple remained obscured from the tight winding streets. Hunger was starting to set in, and sickness at the odor of their camels’ excrement left to putrefy in the alley without muckrakers to clean it. And the Mephistine in line did not fail to notice. They grumbled openly in bitter Tsaazaari; some even spat and turned to leave, squeezing passed the stubborn lingerers so that, as day slipped into evening, Adam and Lilum became the last two in line.

  Last in line yet farther ahead. By the end of that third hour they’d more than tripled their pace and were coming to a corner around which Adam was sure they’d be able to see the temple directly. One step at a time, one step per minute, they approached the bend with mounting tension—then relief! A group of sixteen Mephistine abandoned their places somewhere down the line, and with their passing the whole serpentine thing lurched. The companions turned the corner and beheld before them a garden enshrined by crenulated walls: white slabs and gilded merlons like atop the temple proper. Only now that they stood close, Adam saw they weren’t merlons at all but statues like those of bronze inside the alley. Abominations. This garden was tainted, the pastor’s son felt so horribly that he was glad to see that the line, though diminished, yet ran longer than could possibly be attenuated in a single day. They—the tail: Adam, Adnihilo, Lilum, Ba’al and the apostles—lay a ways outside the doorless garden gates; within, the body coiled a dozen times over; the head chopped off one man at a time by a company of King’s Sons with arbalests at the ready. Behind them, the doors to King Solomon’s Temple hung open—but not to them.

  In the end, it was agreed they would try again the following morning. The Mephistine were not known for early rising, and so they’d share for the final time a camp together—or perhaps it’s better said for the first time they would share a roof. Jordan was the one who invited them to join him and his apostles. They were to take refuge at the sole Messai chapel allowed to stand inside the city. A decrepit thing, Zachariah warned as he led them away from the temple, toward the southwestern Ophir gates. The chapel had been built centuries after the last crusade to replace the one scuttled before it. “Better to offer the house up to God than to let the pagans have it,” went the church’s story. The scholar had his doubts. It was a strange relationship between Nuw Gard and King Solomon. Like unrequited love, Pareo would denounce and declare war, and Mephisto would refuse both feud and grudge.

  “Then why is the chapel in such bad shape?” asked Adam. They’d arrived onto the waterfront, and he could see in the distance the structure in question. It looked smaller even than where they stayed in Gautama, more shrine than a church, but at least it seemed of solid construction. Whatever it was made of appeared to be the same substance used to fashion the walls and temple, though dulled, like a great gray tooth in a slobbery wooden maw.
And it only grew shabbier as they passed by peddlers, taverns, and titanic merchant ships with colored sails and colored sailors—perhaps pirates or else privateers. These men did not turn away their noses but called after them with breath heavy with brandy and rum, opium and hash. That caught the bishop’s attention, and for a fist of drakes—and a pocket of drug—they sold their camels and finished the trek on foot.

  “What desecration is this?” muttered Jordan at the foot of the chapel stairs. At first, Adam thought he meant the unusual construction. The architecture was queer: an open rotunda, seven pillars, and a dome; no pews or lamps or braziers. Then he took stock of the occupants. The pastor’s son would recognize converts, and these men were not. They dressed like merchants, though they had no wares about them, just ledgers and scales and boxes brimming with coins of a dozen kind.

  Ba’al laughed, “Looks like your chapel’s been commandeered. Good riddance, it’s probably a rat nest anyway.”

  The Messiah leaned heavily upon his spear.

  Zachariah sighed. “I was afraid of this. Someone must have made an appeal.” He sighed again, then spoke briefly with the Tsaazaari apostles, then to Jordan whose gaze was fixed. “Do not be angry with the heathens, my Lord. This is my sin. When I left, I left this place without an envoy. The missionary with whom I served warned me that he would return to Pareo if I abandoned him, and so it seems he did. This is my fault.”