by N. D. Wilson
“You’re right,” Sam said. “She doesn’t have a stripe.”
Her hair was completely white.
9
Glory Hallelujah
EL BUITRE STORMED OUT OF HEAVY DARKNESS INTO AN uneven ring of orange light cast by an iron lantern dangling from a swaying chain. It was the only light visible in any direction. His watches trailed behind and above him in two wings of three, and his right arm hung limp at his side. The sharp point of an arrow was sticking inches out of the back of his right shoulder.
Wincing, the Vulture reached up and pulled the lantern chain. Metal clattered above him and black iron stairs began to lower out of the darkness like a drawbridge while two more shapes entered the ring of light behind the Vulture.
Women. The first was Mrs. Dervish. Her long black skirt was twisted slightly, her blouse rumpled but still buttoned up all the way to her chin. Her cheeks were flushed and the bun on top of her head was fraying.
The second woman was a head taller than Mrs. Dervish, but half her thickness. She was wrapped like a mummy but with strips of shadow instead of cloth, which made her very little more than a shadow herself. But her long bare feet were visible. As were her long-fingered hands, her collarbones and throat, and her sharp jaw and thin parted lips and pointed nose. Yet a blindfold of shadow had been bound tight across her eyes and brow, creating a gulf of nothingness between the lower half of her face and her uneven nest of perfectly white hair.
As the iron stairs settled into place and the rattling of chains and gears drifted away across the unseen world, the Vulture looked back at the women.
“You lied,” he said. “Tiempo was there. I thought you said he was good as dead.”
“He was not there, William,” Mrs. Dervish said, her voice sounding like a teacher addressing a student she fears. “The priest’s work has begun to unravel on every side. You have seen it yourself. He is gone.”
“Don’t start.” The Vulture spat and raised a foot onto the bottom stair. “Shall I leave you out here with your guide? Miracle was waiting in ambush, sheltered in a faster time—a time much faster than any I have ever walked. He knew I was coming, Dervish, or do you not see this arrow in my flesh?” The Vulture began to climb, stomping his anger with each step. “Tiempo was there!” he shouted. “Or another with his powers. Tell me, which is worse?”
Mrs. Dervish moved toward the stairs, pulled up her skirt, and climbed them briskly.
“The girl,” she said. “His pupil, he gifted her with an hourglass of his making. That is all. She cannot—”
“A pupil! No consequence of his labors should exist! Tiempo and his line should be no more!” The Vulture vanished into upper darkness.
“William, wait! Maybe there’s—”
Mrs. Dervish vanished up the stairs after her master, along with her voice. At the bottom of the stairs, the woman swathed in shadow swayed in place and said nothing. The drawbridge stairs began to rise in front of her. The lamp dimmed and went out above her.
Shadow took her completely.
THE VULTURE STEPPED OUT OF THE SMALL STONE BUILDING that held the iron stairs and crossed his cavernous courtyard paved with cream limestone, pocketing his watches as he went. Damp air nipped his skin as he walked around his large black-bottomed pool with a fountain, heaping up water around the massive sundial in its center and the large levitating golden clock that was chained to it. Thin dagger crystals of ice were visible on the surface of the dark water.
Every square of pavement beneath the Vulture’s feet bore an inscription, but he didn’t look down. Blood spatters marked his steps as he moved past his stone table toward a stone shrine carved into the opposite wall of the courtyard. It looked like a miniature temple, protected by uneven square columns and a large iron gate.
Mrs. Dervish’s quick steps followed close behind him.
“William,” she said. “Let me get that arrow out before they see you. William!”
But the Vulture only lengthened his stride.
“William!” Mrs. Dervish yelled. “Do not show yourself weak!”
El Buitre paused at the gate to the shrine. “Madam,” he said. “I am as you made me.”
Jerking the iron gate open, he stepped inside, letting it swing closed behind him. Mrs. Dervish caught it before it clanged shut, and squeezed herself inside.
El Buitre touched his wounded shoulder and stood in front of a small stone altar beneath a large black carving of a two-headed vulture. Dragging his bloody fingers across the altar, he stepped around it, passed the statue, and faced a heavy black-velvet curtain that served as the shrine’s rear wall.
“Respect!” Mrs. Dervish yelled. “William, show respect!”
The Vulture closed his eyes and quieted his breathing, trying to hear his beating heart, trying to feel the six ticking watches in his vest. Then, leaving his right arm limp, he threw the curtain open with his left.
A wall of liquid time rippled and warped in front of him. Otherworldly light spilled through the liquid into the shrine around him—pale, like the sun, but thrown by one thousand unsteady flames. He stood in the back of a small shrine, but if he took three steps forward he would be standing on a stone balcony high above a massive city square in a cavern.
Behind him, Mrs. Dervish was bowing in front of the altar and rushing through whispered chants of respect and supplication.
With the curtain open, the wall of time began bulging inward, probing the shrine. The Vulture stepped forward, standing so close that the fog of his cold breath misted the living wall. Smooth liquid limbs of time as thick as tree trunks slid in above the Vulture’s head and on either side. They seemed to taste the air around him, to sense him, to consider his worth.
El Buitre waited. He could have stepped forward himself, but he preferred the embrace he knew was coming.
The liquid limbs wrapped around him, sweeping him up. Warmth filled his nostrils and poured down his throat and stung his wound.
The Vulture blinked slowly, and his eyes adjusted. He was through.
In front of him, the stone balcony rail blocked most of his view of the square, but he could see the massive buildings carved into the walls of the underworld city, and he could see the enormous saffron banners hanging down their columns, and the warm breeze on his face made the black two-headed vultures on the banners take gentle flight.
If things had gone correctly, at this moment, he would have been presenting the heart of the Miracle boy over the rail of this high balcony to the grotesque army assembled below. He would have been announcing the death of Tiempo and the end of his influence.
But things had not gone correctly.
Beside him, two women shaped of shadow spoke.
“Your hurt must be avenged.”
“Death is not enough.”
The Vulture looked to his left.
Two women barely larger than children watched him. Both women had sharp, symmetrical features with overly long necks. One had large bright eyes of white, and one of black. Their faces were covered with feathers instead of skin, silver and cream feathers that were so tiny and smooth, they were almost imperceptible from where the Vulture was standing. Both had braids of scaled reptilian hair bound back in motionless bundles with wide bloodred ribbons.
The women were also wearing robes of lightless shadow. They were living doorways into the utter darkness. A man could plunge through them and lose himself in the foulest outskirts of time. Blades, bullets, arrows, fists—nothing would strike flesh beneath those robes. Where their shadow robes were open at the throat, they wore thick necklaces of shrunken hearts and faces and hands encased in bloody water.
Tzitzimime, Mothers of Night, star demons cast down from the light of Heaven to the dim light of Earth and from the light of Earth to the deep prisons in Earth’s belly, devourers of the newly born, spirit slavers of pregnant mothers, consumers of innocent blood. Razpocoatl and Magyamitl—in darker times and darker ages, when they flew free at dusk and dawn, even to speak their names was to
curse the air itself and all to whom the air carried the sounds.
The mothers were guarded by two men dressed all in black except for yellow armbands marked with the two-headed vulture. One of the men was pale and bald. Red scars crisscrossed his scalp, and a short beard covered his wide jaw. The other man had darker skin with thick straight hair that was combed back in a stiff slab. Instead of eyes, both had spheres of clear, shifting water in their sockets.
“The wound did nothing,” El Buitre said finally. “Besides, it’s a reminder that I am a man.”
“No, you are the chosen one,” Magyamitl said, and ghostly tails of steam crawled up from the corners of her black eyes. “The one who has gathered us from the deeps and will set us all free.”
“Who drew the blood?” Razpocoatl, the woman with white eyes, raised a dark skeletal arm from beneath her robe and held out a smooth rod of watery time in her taloned hand. The Vulture’s watches all leapt from his vest and swept up above him, spinning a hazy cloud that held her gaze. “Miracle,” she said, and the watches froze in the air.
“That boy again,” Magyamitl said, and the feathers on her face ruffled. “But the priest’s heart was taken and now hangs in halves around our necks.”
White-eyed Razpocoatl extended her rod, touching the feathered end of the arrow in El Buitre’s shoulder. He shivered as the arrow liquefied, splashing down his chest onto the stones below his feet.
“Our daughter, Dervish, failed you,” she said. “But we will not.”
The Vulture filled his lungs and rolled his shoulder. The pain was gone, replaced with the heat he always felt when the mothers touched him—the heat of anger, of rage, the boiling urge to destroy, to shatter, to grind to dust all times and places and people who resisted him.
Tingling with wrath, El Buitre strode to the balcony rail and looked out over the massive city square. The stairs and balconies of every building were overflowing with hollow-faced men and bent women all dressed in ragged black and rotting furs. A crowd as silent and still as it was enormous filled the square like human cobblestones.
The mothers moved beside the Vulture, one on each side. His golden watch wings of chain and pearl spread above him.
“Are they not beautiful?” Magyamitl asked, her black eyes rolling. “Your furious army? The wronged? The vengeful? We have gathered yee naaldlooshii from the farthest ages of the dead outer darkness into this, your city of light. We have called them. They will give you the world, and no primitive priest or prophesied boy can stop them. They have no lives to lose, no souls to be burdened with fear.”
Razpocoatl and Magyamitl both raised their watery rods. The wind swirled, snapping their robes of shadow and revealing skeletal bodies beneath, and taloned hands where they should have had feet. As one, one hundred crude phalanxes of men and women raised weapons in response—blades and rifles and banners of yellow and black.
“Children!” The mothers spoke in unison, and their sharp voices echoed through the square like the cries of hawks. “What do you desire?”
“Life!” The word erupted from the square, shaking the balcony, rippling the long banners on their columns.
“Who shall give it to you?” the mothers cried.
“The Vulture!” the army shouted, and as one, they stomped the stones and slapped their chests. “The Vulture!” they cried. “The Vulture!” And all over the square, they writhed, taking on animal parts and animal shapes.
The mothers both turned, looking up at the tall outlaw between them, the one who would lead their dead and undying army.
The Vulture watched the beasts chant. He felt the stone rail shake beneath his palms. When Dervish had opened his chest and used the magic of her mothers to chain seven watches to his heart, it had all been for a moment like this. He had thought to release an army into San Francisco long ago, but that moment had been delayed and that city abandoned. It was better this way. He knew that he was being carried by a storm beyond his control. But he was a man who had already awakened volcanoes and quaked the earth. He knew about riding storms. And this one could give him the world.
So long as the bodies of a priest and a Miracle boy were part of the ruin.
“The boy found me here,” he said quietly, but he could have whispered and they would have heard him. “In a dream. Tell me how.”
The white-eyed mother hopped closer to him, looking up into his face.
“He cannot come here,” she said. “The ways are sealed to all but your army.”
“But he did,” the Vulture said. “Perhaps he is more powerful than you.”
The mothers both gargled laughter.
Razpocoatl rolled her black eyes. “And perhaps your fear invented this dream.”
“I am not afraid,” El Buitre said. “I am ready. When shall I open the doors for this army?”
Black and white eyes sparkled.
“Now,” the mothers answered. “The time for doors is always now.”
MRS. DERVISH STOOD BESIDE THE ALTAR, HER COLD BREATH curling in front of her mouth. She had respected the altar of her mothers. But she held back. Instead, she looked through the liquid wall and she watched her mothers raise their rods on either side of the great man she had chosen and created. Not for them. For herself. Not to play with for a time and then cast aside, but to elevate, to mold, to wield over history like a scepter. Time’s arch-outlaw, William Sharon, the man she had crafted into the Vulture—the one for whom she had created seven gardens and whose heart she had chained to the seven watches powered by the tides of the seven seas—that man stood with his back to her, choosing a path that she had not prepared for him. He was being guided by her mothers, and their toys were used only for destruction. They never lasted long.
Mrs. Dervish had always believed in patience. The Vulture had pursued that patience, but Father Tiempo had been patient as well, and stubborn to the point of foolishness. But in the end, his foolishness and his patience and his Miracle boy had won. But not completely.
Now the Vulture had set another course.
Something cold and fine dragged across the skin inside Mrs. Dervish’s left forearm. Flinching, she grabbed her sleeve at the wrist and pulled it up to her elbow. As she watched, crude letters formed beneath her soft pale flesh, inked in blood.
DIDN’T NO HE WAS LOOSE. HAD HIM TRUSSED UP GOOD. U NEVER TOLD ME HE COULD TIMEWALK. IS THE BOSS ANGRY???
“Fool,” Mrs. Dervish said. “Stupid, useless oaf.” She slapped at her skin and the blood letters vanished, absorbed into her blue veins. A moment later, new letters formed.
DEALS STILL A DEAL. DID MY PART. MORE BATTERIES, ICE CREAM, BULLETS AS WE DISGUST PLEASE?
Mrs. Dervish slapped herself even harder. Reaching up into her loose heap of hair, she plucked out an old bone fountain pen, uncapped it with her mouth, twisted the pen in half, and then opened a flap on the left hip of her skirt, revealing dozens of ink capsules, all dark red. She plucked one from the top row—labeled “Levi”—plopped it into the pen, and screwed the ends back together. With the cap still between her lips and her cheeks, she scrawled down the inside of her forearm in a beautiful looping cursive, but the letters were invisible.
She hesitated, and then twisted her wrist around and wrote across her own forehead.
In front of her, the liquid wall warped and rippled, and the roar of a million soulless voices reached her dimly, as faint as a memory, but as certain as a promise.
Mrs. Dervish capped her pen.
LEVIATHAN FINN STOOD IN THE LIVING ROOM OF NEVERLAND, pen in hand. Bull and Dog and two others were with him. Children were trussed up in rows across the floor.
His daughter was gone. Vanished. Swallowed by a ripple in the air. Levi’s heart was pounding.
“You should listen to Sam,” Jude said. “Set us free or he’ll kill you.”
“Shut your gob. It’s already been thirty seconds,” Bull said.
But Levi was staring at his forearm, awaiting his message. When it arrived, it stung with pain like a razor blade, a
nd he knew it was meant to. He gritted his teeth and watched the swooping letters of the woman’s hand.
“I can’t read these,” he grunted. “These aren’t English.”
Bull looked over his shoulder. “It’s cursive, boss. I’ve seen cursive.”
“Then read it,” he said. “Now.”
“Can’t,” Bull said. “But I’ve seen it.”
Levi looked at Dog, but he shrugged his sweatered shoulders and backed away.
“I can,” Jude said.
“So can I,” Millie added. “If you like.”
Leviathan strode over the trussed bodies, stepped over Jude, and crouched beside Millie, extending his bare arm with its bloody letters. Millie arched her back and rolled to her side to get a look.
You are hereby sentenced to death, by the Vulture’s hand or mine, you donkey fool of a man. I will feed you to the mothers. (You had but one job.)
Millie didn’t read it aloud.
“It’s a threat,” Millie said. “She wants to kill you and feed you to the mothers, whatever that means.”
Jude laughed.
“Shut it,” Levi snarled. And then he twisted in pain and slapped a palm to his forehead.
“Boss?” Bull asked.
Dog hurried forward, grabbing Levi’s elbow and helping him upright.
“What’s it say?” Levi lowered his hand, glaring at them both. The one word written in capitals was easy for both of them to read. They even knew what it meant.
CARRION
“I think you need some new friends,” Jude said, craning his face up from the floor. “Why be hunted by both sides?”
“You have to understand,” Levi said. “I never met the Vulture. Never even seen him from a distance. There was just this lady asking me to keep an eye out for a boy with powers. And she gave me things that just weren’t possible.” Leviathan Finn slumped to the floor and put his head in his hands. “And now my Samra’s gone—poof—like that. And all because of that woman.”