“We’re going to die here,” I said, “and everyone in the world is going to die, because you said yes. And I know it’s not your fault, what happened after that. You couldn’t have known exactly what They would do. Maybe it seemed like you’d just live your life rich and famous and respected, and then die young, or whatever. And never see Them again. Never think about Them again. But that’s not what happened. And it doesn’t matter what you meant to happen. I used to think it did. Now I don’t. We’re all going to die no matter what you meant. Aren’t we?”
“No. I’m going to get us out of this.”
“You said that already. You said to trust you. And I did. And now we’re here.”
“We’re here because we were double-crossed. So I don’t trust you either. Happy?”
“Like you’ve ever cared if I was happy.” All the same, she had said something that snagged briefly on my mind like a fishhook. I turned, stared at the cage again as if it had some clue we had missed. Back down at her, pink-and-white with anger. Back up at the cage. Traitor. “Why would they come back to look at this?”
“Maybe they were the ones who did it. What’s it matter?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t.” Sofia and Rutger were still not coming in, as if we’d scared them away. Johnny, I suspected, had not even noticed them standing there. “I thought this place would be crawling with creatures. And it isn’t. Why is it so empty?”
“They’re all going to our place. That’s why. It’s not soldiers in this war, it’s everybody. It’s not like you need a ton of training to kill a human or anything. It’s not like you need grenades and tanks and bayonets. There’s a few to fight. And the rest to move in. I bet. When it’s all redecorated.”
“Packing their bags,” I said. “Headed for the promised land. The lebensraum Their creepy-ass führer said They could have, and everybody there all nice and assimilated already.” God, even the underside of the cage was spiked, where the occupant wouldn’t even feel it. “So maybe this whole city is just… us, and bodies. And those two. Those two. Of all people.”
“What’s your point?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE FIRE BURNED low, with a strange violet-red colour, and I thought that might be due to low oxygen—maybe that was why we all felt so tired and delirious?—well, one of the reasons, anyway—as well as just poor fuel, the scanty handfuls of broken branches and gathered grasses from the clearing in which we sat. Something seemed to be rendering in there, a slow greasy stream flowing out of what should have been ordinary vegetable matter. Vegetable-ish. Cellulose, probably.
Across the fire from me sat Rutger, firmly clasping the prisoner’s neck, nearly encircling it: an ugly contrast, Rutger’s shapely golden fingers on that greasy, corpse-white skin. And next to the prisoner sat Johnny, mild of expression, only her bloodied knuckles suggesting that we had in fact abducted him rather than invited him.
I had to admit that watching her take him down had been the highlight of the disaster so far: a brief and silent and utterly horrifying collision of three or four seconds, like he’d been thrown into a wood chipper. Rutger, who seemed a little taken aback by his employer’s behaviour, had slung him over his shoulder and we’d retreated back into the hills above the city.
“Wow,” Johnny said after a while. “Hard times.”
“No worse than you,” Akhmetov croaked. “No worse than your hard times. None. Not any more. Now that you’re here.”
Johnny smiled, which was worse, far worse, than if she had lost her temper; and for a moment I envied Akhmetov, who couldn’t see it. In the light of our miserable fire, the blood trickling from his mouth looked black as ink. At some point since he had come here, he had lost or hideously wounded one eye, his right, and a rag—crusted stiff with fluids—had been tied across it.
“No?” Her voice was sweet. “Well, maybe you’re right. Since you’re obviously doing pretty well for yourself here.”
He laughed and spat blood into the fire, which flared and strengthened, as if he’d had a mouthful of oil. “We’re the same here. You, little toy doll, with your big thug here, and your head full of stolen brains, oh yes, Master told me...” His laughter gargled into alarmed silence as Rutger, unobtrusively, tightened his fingers.
“Dr. Giehl isn’t a thug,” she said virtuously. “He won the Vilniskis-Lu Medal for Excellence in High-Energy Physics Research last year.”
Rutger nodded.
“And you,” she said, “last time we saw you, you had just given us away to... something, and locked the door on your own library so They could kill us down there. Like rats in a trap. Which is great, I think, since you were the rat.”
“You would have done the same,” he said dully, staring into the fire. “You cannot say you would have done any better. You would have left him, even, if he had slowed you down. Eh? If he got in the way that night.”
Johnny narrowed her eyes for a moment; perhaps, I thought, at the rightness of it. Because she would have, and I knew it, and she knew it; and maybe it was not too late for her to do it again. Make me the useless cog in her plan, so that I could drop right out of the machine if she needed me to. And Sofia too, and Rutger. And everyone.
Well, of course she should pick the world over you. Any of you. The greater good.
And over herself, too.
No. She thinks the world needs her. And will keep needing her. And doesn’t need us.
And neither does she.
No. Seems not.
She doesn’t need you. But there are people back home who do. Focus on them.
Johnny said, “Why are you here?”
Akhmetov fell silent, as if gathering his strength. Rutger, seeing that the man wasn’t going to bolt (and if he did, it would be straight into the darkness: even if he was used to it, I could see for myself how the fire affected him, how he yearned for it), let go, allowing him to slump nearly into the small flames. Around us, night insects began to call, noises like screams of pain in the trees, wary of our fire. The snakes in the trees drew away, so that only their eyes could be seen, small and clustered, like the eyes of spiders.
“My master,” he said, and for a second you could see very clearly whatever excruciating steps had been taken to teach him these words, “is... a being of vision.”
After Akhmetov’s betrayal in Carthage, he went on, his only thought had been to rescue his precious books from the destruction the creatures had caused; and he had been half-buried under shelves and struts when the Anomaly happened, sparing him from the death and madness it had caused those who had stared at it. Smug, he had begun to rebuild, and had nearly completed his new house and library when something appeared.
Johnny started. “In a dream?”
“No.”
“How? All the gates were shut. Locked.”
Akhmetov shrugged: he didn’t know. It had arrived in his mirror, a slithering single-winged hulk without either skin or face, and simply... reached through, and pulled.
He chuckled coarsely, and spat again. “Was that you? Who locked the door? So, so. Should have known. Well, whatever you did... you made it so going to this place was like falling down an escalator. Being bitten by the metal teeth! Master says it was a full round of both moons before I could speak again. When I did, I said... I said, Why me, why was I chosen? And it said... in all my years of watching and waiting, in all my many years of work and service, never has anything like this been allowed to occur.”
Johnny closed her eyes.
“This what?” Sofia said. “Do you mean, choosing a human servant? That isn’t true.”
“Her,” said Akhmetov, coughing and laughing. “Her. The little miracle. She occurred. To all of you. To the world. And to Master.” He shut up when Rutger shifted his weight, and in the silence Johnny opened her eyes again, wet and exhausted.
No one else saw you do what you did, I almost said, but it was too much like the drumbeat of old, the words that went through my head. No one saw but you and… and it.
No one else was there. What did you do? Drozanoth was dead. Dead, and I stepped on its terrible torn wing in the sand; you dismembered it somehow, and I cheered, I felt a moment not of hope but of gleeful and grateful malice at its death.
Akhmetov went on: So it seemed his master had been overcome, as it had not been for millennia—perhaps, it was so hard to tell what time was doing—not merely by frustration and ennui, but by a white-hot rage for revenge, all-consuming, impossible to fathom; for the first time in its existence, it had felt pain. Johnny had somehow caused it to feel pain.
But the master of Drozanoth in turn, its long-time mentor and patron, Azag-thoth, had only mocked the creature’s rage and lust for revenge, laughed at the clumsy solutions it concocted to soothe the novel experience of agony (having only seen it in others, and the stitched-together thralls whose bodies it rearranged and possessed with the remnants of its own so that it could move again, though it would never again fly; that too had been stolen). It had approached death, and that could never be forgiven nor forgotten.
So Drozanoth killed Azag-thoth in a rage, and immolated the last dregs of the old god’s consciousness and physical remains in the heart of a star.
“...And then, it came back for me. It said: I have no master and I wish no master. But I want a servant, and you must serve.”
Akhmetov fell silent, and looked down at his hands, scarred and twisted; I tried to remember what they had looked like when we had seen him in his house in Carthage. The cool house smelling of clay and incense, the hot light in his eyes. Knowing what we were doing, knowing what was coming next. We were too easy to predict, then.
And now. No change.
“I did not know it was you. I did not know it was you that hurt Master. I thought it was a great and powerful spirit. One of the Elders returned somehow. Not until I was told... you. A little girl.” He tried to laugh again, but nothing came out. “You can’t eat here, you know. You can’t drink... probably for the best, a blessing. Because you can still smell. Humans, I mean. Only They can take nourishment here. It’s Their world. Always, everything reminding the lesser that we... where we belong. And that They are our superiors. Even if there is no one around to hear the reminder.
“You know, they say? In the farthest, darkest depths of space, in the reaches where nothing can live, there is a star, and around that star is a stone, and on the stone is a mountain, and on that mountain is carved the true name of Their darkest king, and no one and nothing will ever see it, not even the space dust that might one day become the slime living in oceans.... That is what They mean. Everywhere is Theirs, even if They have not reached it yet, to subjugate who is there... it is still Theirs. Always.”
He began to sob, surprising all of us; Rutger flinched as if one of the bugs had stung him. But no one offered comfort or judgement; we only sat there and listened to the small human sound, muffled below the twisted trees.
“You almost got us killed,” Johnny said. “You let us into your house. Your house. As your guests. And...”
“You almost got everyone killed!” Akhmetov wiped his face, suddenly angry; as angry as I had become, hearing her speak. “You! What have I done that was so terrible? Nothing like that! You compare us? You?”
“All right, stop it,” I said after a second, because someone had to; they both looked up at me. “How do we get out of this place if we can’t do spells?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“I could probably say that Johnny would torture you if you didn’t,” I said, as she nodded vigorously, “but the truth is, you don’t really give a shit about that any more, do you? You’re more afraid of Drozanoth.”
“Master.”
“It’s not my master,” I said. “Look. There are ways out of this place whenever it wants to leave. It found you in a mirror, you said? I bet that wasn’t a mirror any more. I bet something had replaced it and then kind of… sat in there for a while, like a spider in a web. I bet that’s exactly what happened. There are other ways. It craves new places too much to not know the ways. What are they?”
Akhmetov watched me steadily through his unwounded eye, the tissue around it thick with scars that had opened and bled and healed and opened again and bled. “It will kill me if I talk to you.”
“Well, then everybody wins,” Johnny said.
He nodded, and moved his filthy bare feet closer to the fire. The relief of death, I thought; the thought that one day Master would finally tire of hurting him, and end it all. But Akhmetov didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. Or else he’d have figured something out by now. And I knew that, because I had thought the same thing those first few weeks back home after the Anomaly. Hoping only that I would somehow die in the night, like maybe an overlooked shard of bone or glass would travel to my heart and kill me without waking, or that a bus would swerve and hit me on the sidewalk... Better dead, I had thought, than to live unsleeping and with that droning voice in my head, and better to leave the kids and Mom with the memory of me mostly unsullied, instead of whatever pain and fear-crazed monster I would become later on, sickened by the memories of what had happened to me, what I had already started to become. Inevitable, hideous. Live on without their love, or die? It was no choice, it was no contest. If you thought it was inevitable. If you thought you couldn’t avoid it.
“No, I don’t know,” he finally said. “Only Master knows. I could never do it on Earth anyway. Not everybody can, you know. Even if you know the spells, say the words. Here, you can forget it, even the most powerful sorcerer. All the same... there is a way, I know there is, and I know that because...” He hesitated, then seemed to give up, something inside him not breaking but bending. “There are humans here. From Earth. I don’t know where, I don’t know when, they don’t talk to me, they think I am a monster like the others... But they can do spells, I have seen it. They have been given the means.” He hesitated. “The way would come from the great library. They call it Zdaq’s Tomb... it’s not a tomb, though. It is a library. And in it, such things as... as They can write down, or steal from others, are stored.”
“Have you been inside?” Sofia said.
Akhmetov shook his head. “Servants are not allowed. Many of the... the smaller creatures, too, they are not...” He groped for the word. “Whatever you call it inside you, that lets you live, that mixes with magic and sigils and words to run the spells, they do not have enough, they die not even at the threshold of the door, but on the grounds, when they put their claws or wings over it... I would die. Master locks me safely in the keep when it goes to the Tomb. Though I wish to see the books, the many writings...”
“Everything is waiting for you back home,” Johnny said softly. “Your own books, and scrolls, and everything... all the books no one else has. Huxley’s Archive is gone.”
“A myth,” he said. “Like El Dorado. Shangri-La. That they tell to children in the cult.”
“No. It was real. And some of the pages may still be there. Waiting too. For someone to... gather them up. Give them a new home.”
Silence, electric, Johnny’s face canny and feral in the firelight. Had I ever thought she could do anything good without finding a way to hurt someone? I had been wrong, always wrong. Or I had seen, and looked away. And Akhmetov wasn’t even looking at her.
“Tell us where to go,” Johnny said. “And we’ll bring you back with us. And everything will be squared.”
“Squared.”
“Yes. No debt. On your side, on ours. And I will kill your master.” She lowered her voice. “I’ll finish the job I started. The one you dream about when it lets you dream. And it will be painful. I promise.”
Akhmetov finally looked away from the fire. “...You will break that promise.”
“Then what do you want me to promise?”
“That if you fail… you will make sure it cannot come after me.”
“I promise. I promise both.”
RUTGER REFUSED TO turn Akhmetov loose to go rushing back to Master, and Johnny refused t
o leave him alone, so we eventually split up as best we could: Sofia, who could speak some of the local languages and do spells if we managed to restore the ability, to stay with Rutger and Akhmetov; and me to accompany Johnny as a lookout as she tried to get into the library. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than wandering aimlessly, paralyzed by fear. Anything, I thought, was better than that. The not-moving hurt far more than anything we had asked of ourselves so far.
Our grim little clearing, restocked frequently with broken branches, was good enough for a few hours’ broken sleep, curled uncomfortably around the fire that just barely kept the bugs and the grasping snakes at bay. Not that it would make a difference, I thought, day or night... The creatures here came and went in both. But I wanted light, and to see my enemy, and Johnny wearily conceded to one night’s sleep.
We watched each other though, across the flames, for a long time; I had thought after what had happened I would never again be able to look her in the eye, but I did, and so did she, and I thought: Well, if we hate each other now, at least we both know it. The glittering green eyes watchful, sullen, brighter than our miserable campfire, throwing off their own light.
Take it back then, I said without moving a muscle, watching her. What you said. And tell me you’re sorry for what you did to me. I don’t care if you apologize for the rest. But fucking apologize to me. For your crime. I won’t forgive you, but you have to ask for forgiveness. And you have to do it without providing justifications or excuses.
No, she said. No. Never.
I closed my eyes, unable to bear the light in hers any more, the way her hatred made them burn without giving any heat.
IN THE MORNING, or at least in the daylight, we headed back towards the city: a walk through reluctance so heavy it felt like molasses, or as if moving through some sticky, invisible web that snatched at our bare hands and faces, trying to pull us back. The woods weren’t so bad, I wanted to say. We could survive out there. Make four little cabins. Kill bugs and monsters that got too near. Explore the place, maybe draw maps. Try not to imagine the consumption of the Earth by disease.
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