Martin felt dizzy. The second letter? This soon? Teresa looked differentially at him. “Did you see who it was?” she asked the manager.
“Watching TV—I didn’t look up. Nice voice. They had a good voice.”
Teresa gently took the envelope.
“Tall or short?” Martin asked. “Man or woman?”
Something lit in the manager’s eyes and then instantly failed. He shrugged as though in response to a more trivial question.
Outside rain sprinkled and every color looked crippled with black. They took up their necessaries and waited to get settled in their shabby little room before opening the second letter. Everybody had a vague story about who left the letters that controlled their destiny every year. Each story contradicted the next. And as always, the Messenger remained unknown.
For the last twenty minutes, images of the Nomads decayed in the Priestess’s mind. Once they reached
Colton
, Martin and Teresa guttered like torchlight, and then they dimmed to translucence, which made the Priestess labor so hard that she had to abandon all other visions, including her homeland. The Nomads were ghosts now. They were concepts. And once they had reached some locus in the city, they evaporated.
This was the Messenger’s doing.
She looked for the answer outside the tinted window. Storm clouds could muddle her sight but not dissect it into a million pieces. The clouds over Colton were not weather. They rested across her eyes like a sleep shade. The Archbishop of Morning had fermented and drank of his own wife. All for this failure! Now his sacrifice had been spoiled. He would blame the Priestess. It would be painful, but not sweet.
There had to be a way to get them back.
The Priestess had the Nomads. If she focused, maybe she could reassemble all of those drifting solids in space. Just dissipate those clouds! Through lesser storms she had restored her sight. Patience. The Messenger did not have unlimited power. He could not hold those clouds forever. Could he? She?
The Priestess’s inner eye twisted and strained and searched and groped and aborted...
She
should
have killed the Nomads back in that abandoned bar. Caution.
Calm.
No, she had played it the only way she knew, and now it had all gone to salted dirt. She no longer felt worthy. The Church of Morning should have sent someone else to this world.
Her eyes pushed open to their mental limit and saw only falling raindrops, fast as steel darts from the skies. Her servant
Eggert
and Archbishop Pager sat there in the limo, both scrutinizing her, both sharing a painful restraint.
Her voice trembled. “I’ve lost them.”
“Well, get them back!”
Sandeus
’ painted eyes sharpened to daggers.
“I can’t yet.”
“You must!”
“I’ve tried! The storm over the city—those clouds shouldn’t be there.”
“Where did you last see the Nomads?”
Eggert
calmly asked, though his beard had flattened from nervous stroking.
“Just outside the city.”
“Fuck!”
Sandeus
leaned back against the leather seat and clasped his arms together. “What good does that do us? We already know what city they’re going to! Come on, damn you. I’m not waiting another year.”
“She’s trying.”
Eggert’s
eyes turned. The Priestess had seen those eyes spin into rage before. Never an amusing prospect from an
Ekkian
barbarian. But, to give
Eggert
credit, in the past she’d usually been the one to put that rage there.
“Cloth will rip out our spines for this.”
Sandeus
grasped his bald dome to work out the stress there. “I trusted you Priestess. I trusted
Kennen
.”
Eggert’s
lips trembled more than hers now.
“Don’t be foolish.”
Sandeus
looked up at him. “I’m not ruining this suit over the likes of you.”
“I have pledged nothing to the Church of Midnight.”
Eggert
patted his knife under his coat. “Are you quick enough?”
Sandeus
leaned in, startling the big man. The odd she-male face hardened in the muted light. “I know a quick and easy way to send you back to the Old Domain, big guy. So stop fucking around.”
The Priestess sensed a bluff, but she didn’t intend to prove anything. “
Eggert
, be calm.”
Eggert
deflated a bit. But only a bit.
Sandeus
was scarlet with annoyance. “Just keep trying.”
The Priestess of Morning shut her eyes and opened her other, keener pair to the burning boundaries of her mind.
The last needles of light retracted as the sun was dragged under the foothills. Teresa stood at the window of the room and fought another coughing fit. Keeping her lungs calm reminded her of building mantles in a way; concentration could not be broken or there was inevitable collapse. She swallowed the itchiness and focused outside. The
raining
world looked so different at dusk; vibrancy had left tint, clarity had become murkiness, people had slowed down, night beasts had awoken.
“So evil-looking out there.”
Martin sat on the bed, re-reading the Messenger’s latest letter. The black envelope lay in fragments at his side like a shattered crow. “What I don’t understand,” he said, scratching his jaw, “is why
four
this time? Don’t we have enough on our hands protecting one Heart of the Harvest? What the hell are they trying to prove?”
“Who?”
“Whoever’s behind this sick game.”
“I told you already. The Hearts on the list all have the same last name. They’re related.”
“But only one person grows the fruit—just one—that’s how it’s always been. What the hell? We go out to Flagstaff, so we get less time for planning and, and, and,” Martin stammered, “and more people to look after now. Why doesn’t the Messenger step in and help? Doesn’t he know you’re sick?”
Teresa wanted to slap Martin. She wondered if she did, if he’d stop bringing up the obvious. It was driving her nuts. She’d bitten her fingernails down to sorry nubs. One of them actually throbbed because the nail had been shorn down too far.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he demanded.
“Sometimes I can really appreciate your age Martin. I can.”
“I’m nearly forty years old. I’m no damned child and—”
“No!” she snapped. “If the messenger needs us to protect four, ten, or a thousand Hearts, so be it! If one billion of Cloth’s children hatch this year, we have to deal with them and Cloth and the rest of the Church! Like grinning, grateful idiots we have to endure. As always Martin! Stop asking useless questions!”
Teresa fell on the bed beside him and stared up at the moldy ceiling. Martin said nothing and after a moment she felt bad and playfully slapped his thigh. He didn’t respond to this though and she stopped. “When I was in fourth grade I used to help the lunch ladies in the cafeteria.”
His head did not turn to her. “Yeah?”
A coughing fit sneak-attacked. It sounded awful, like bones roiling in snot. She grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and wiped her mouth, steadied, tried to will away the next series. It worked after a minute.
Martin turned now. “You okay?”
She began to mindlessly fold the wet tissue into halves. “So I worked at the cafeteria in fifth grade and one of the lunch ladies had cancer. Lucky her. She came to school missing a breast. I didn’t even really have boobs yet, so I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to lose one, but I remember the woman’s face. It looked so distant, like she was missing more than just her breast—I never thought I’d understand that face. It was too old, too miserable and hopeless.
But I understand now. You can be surrounded by a million people and still be absolutely lonely.” She paused. “Which is to say, I don’t want to go yet. I don’t want to leave you. But things happen.”
Teresa wasn’t crying but she could feel tears dropping inside her mind. Martin took her hand and clutched it. He didn’t seem to care if it hurt her. Maybe the hurt would heal her, maintain her
lifeforce
. “I’ll keep you safe. If I can protect a Heart, I can protect you.”
“You can’t do both.”
“Don’t put a challenge out there, girlie.”
“Chaplain Cloth is already in this world, Martin. That can only explain why we need to hide in this room. You were right. We shouldn’t have gone to my mother’s. Somehow, I think the church got a bead on us somewhere.”
Martin was silent for a minute and softened his grip on her hand. “So what are we going to do?”
“Follow the letter, go out tomorrow to see the Heart Bearer and then get back here, just like it says. We follow our orders, like always.”
“In the meantime, we practice building?”
“I’m as good at that as I’ll ever get,” she answered, then drew up her pant leg to a knotty scar from knee to ankle. It was puckered pink and red and looked like second degree burns had melted the perimeter. “Don’t want to get another of these to match last year’s. I would better use the time exercising these old legs. You can practice building mantles though. If you want.”
“Maybe they have a workout room here.” His hopeful smile spread and it made her feel bad for ever losing her temper with him. “I should get my knee ready for the big day too.”
She bit her lower lip and threw a soft play punch to his jaw. Martin brushed his fingertips over her cheek and to her lips. “I won’t let them through again. I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Our purpose is the Heart of the Harvest.”
“Remember it’s plural this time,” he corrected. “Heart
s
. I’d like to say double trouble, but it’s really more like double-double trouble.”
The next logical question about Cloth having the opportunity to harvest four this year made them mute. Teresa just hoped these four Hearts were faster than poor Tony Nguyen.
Martin reached past his semi-auto and tapped on the power from the TV remote mounted on the nightstand. Teresa twisted off the lamp and the light bulb flickered and burnt out for good. The dingy room sunk into shadows, became blue-washed in the TV’s glow.
She could tell how Martin sidled up to her that he wanted to make love, but he never asked anymore, possibly because of the malignant third party involved. Instead, she held him tight and they watched the news. The world wasn’t doing so well. Teresa wanted to care about the war and the hunger and the environment and the power-playing politicians, but she knew these were largely symptoms of a sickness trickling into the world every October. And they’d never be able to cure it completely.
Paul felt like he was going to throw up. He hadn’t had time to settle down with the rest of the church at the hotel. No shower. No lunch. With the marrow seeds sprouting through Paul’s lungs to other internals, with the panic of sitting next to a three hundred pound cuckold (Paul’s cock still filmy from Melissa’s hand-jive), and with the dizzy impression of meeting the Priestess of Morning tonight, he found no room left in his heart for a boogeyman.
Chaplain Cloth had always just been a symbol to Paul, not an actuality. He knew that every big organization had its symbols, whether they were religious in nature or just emotive. Any story told about an October hunt featured Chaplain Cloth and Paul always took him as a metaphor for the Eternal Church, a united church—these were romantic, sentimental stories that anchored the weak-minded and helped grow the Church of Midnight through fear.
But—Paul’s rationalizations were beginning to stretch too thin. As much as he wanted to continue to disbelieve the precepts of his affiliation, the matter remained. The seeds had changed him. Even the world moved differently. Paul saw things on another scale, his analog eyes switched digital. And not just his eyes... his
soul
felt high-definition and this change would be ongoing. He would continue past high-definition and into something better. Then a breath later, even his memories would be obsolete and he would charge forward into an unending state of improvement, and his mind would brim over—he would feel safe, for a moment—but then everything would splash down into a newer, better, larger mind, which was already conceiving another replacement that would outdo the rest.
“You look like you’re about to shit a roll of barbwire,” Cole remarked. “You did well this morning with that girl. Are you still practicing those exercises?”
“Trying,” Paul replied. The shutter to the Old Domain was still sealed in his mind. He felt the quartz in his pocket, but let it go, too nauseated.
Cole swung the limo around a strangely configured intersection, half fork and half roundabout, and let a pickup truck go ahead of them. “You’re afraid of meeting Cloth, I take it?”
I shouldn’t have made Melissa do that. It was overkill,
thought Paul.
But her crestfallen expression had been so priceless when I came up through her fist.
“I’m not so afraid, just filthy, famished and worn-out.”
“Good,” Cole put simply. His bandage had been removed and left behind a sour red crater in his jaw. It no longer bled. Now it just looked like someone had taken out a flesh divot with a golf club. “There’s really no need to be frightened of Chaplain Cloth. He’s here for the Heart of the Harvest, not anything else.”