Vellum (21 page)

And when they walked out into the world, they walked out as one of seven.

The seven standing before him now, in their bloodied, muddy armor, all have the panting look of guilty dogs that have had more fun with some innocent creature than they're sure they are allowed. Two of them stand at the front, the bloodiest and the muddiest by far, just a little more arrogant than the others, standing out with just that little bit more individuality. But then any team has its star players, and this one is no exception. It has its Gabriel and its Michael, the ones you send in if you want to lay waste to a city.

“It's done,” says the one called Carter. “He's dead.”

“You're sure? And the girl?”

“She's out of the game,” says Pechorin. “Little birdy got her wings broke. End of story.”

He nods and dismisses them, the Hall of Records shimmering out of his vision. It is only a sim after all, this conference room he uses to keep these latter-day sebitti (they're not the originals so they don't get a capital) dutifully impressed. Sometimes he uses it as a retreat when he wants peace to study the gravings of his book, look for the next newblood reckoning that's due, but on the whole it's a little too showy for his liking. He looks out the window of his lounge, over the rooftops to the distant, delicate, black iron of the Eiffel Tower, just visible behind a chimney stack; he prefers reality and always has.

So the boy is dead and the girl broken, he thinks. But somehow Metatron isn't so sure. He's thinking maybe he should check this out himself, pay a little visit to his North Carolina sebitti. The boy's would be the first unkin execution in…a long time. There should have been ripples in the Vellum, an aftershock. These foot soldiers are too young to know it but Metatron was there when Tiamat was cut into pieces and he knows. The Covenant is more than a simple pact, the graving of an unkin more than just a graving, because these things are written in the Vellum itself, and one little scratching in the Vellum can stain the whole of history with blood and ink.

It's not like time is just a straight line from the past to the future.

In the Silvery Steel of a Cigarette Lighter

Carter holds the Zippo open and lit, his other hand spread out, palm down, above it, lowering it to touch the flame, then pulling it up again as he feels the burning. He does this repeatedly. He does it for a while. And eventually he's just holding his hand over the flame, smelling the burning flesh. It reminds him of some other time and place, some other identity, already slipping from his mind. He used to be glad of the debriefings. He used to feel cleansed afterward, his binding to the Covenant reinforced by the anointment, by being washed clean in the blood of the lamb, surrendering his memory to his superiors, in absolute submission to the glory. After each mission he felt fresh, remade, walking away from whatever hotel room or empty office space their superior was using as his base of operations, purged of the burden of his sins and in a state of grace, knowing only that whatever he had done had been successful and that it was for the greatest good, for the Covenant. He used to feel that way, and he doesn't know why he doesn't now.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Pechorin slaps his hand away from the flame.

“Jesus Fucking Christ. What do you think you're doing?”

Carter clicks the lighter closed.

“Where did I get this?” he says. “I can't remember where I got this.”

Pechorin shrugs.

“What does it matter? Fucking get a grip. Get in the car.”

Pechorin walks round to the driver's side, beeps the central-lock open and climbs in. Carter slides down off the hood and pulls his own door open. He stops to look at the burnt palm of his hand, the skin red raw and sore, but healing already; it's not quite visible, not quite that fast, but even now the pain is subsiding. That's what it is, to be unkin, after all. They're healers, at the heart of it, whether it's their own flesh being healed or the torn skin of reality, of the Vellum. It's one of the ancient names the humans gave them, so he's told—
rephaim
…healers.

As he climbs into the passenger seat, though, the black, padded leather of it hot from the sun, something at the back of his brain is almost—but not quite—conscious of the underlying source of his discomfort. He's not aware of the fact that the burning was only an attempt to make concrete this vague sense of hurt, of wounding or sickness, that still lingers even after the whispered word of Metatron cleared his head of all remembrance of his own atrocities. He doesn't remember staring down in horror at the girl lying in the puddle of black ichor, his hands shaking at the thought of what they'd done. He doesn't remember that even as his fist punched time and time again into the coward's face, he couldn't help but see his own blue eyes and fair hair in the man's, like he was trying to smash his own reflection. He doesn't remember picking up the Zippo in the faint hope that the boy would recognize it through the shimmering glamour placed on them by Metatron, recognize it and know whose it was and how he had to run. No. However deep the wound is in his soul, Metatron has cleaned it thoroughly. And the Cant is still echoing in his head, the cleaning still going on, slowly, methodically. But not perfectly.

Pechorin has a hold of his hand, looking at it to see the damage done, but Carter just stares at his own reflection in the silvery steel of a cigarette lighter, trying to figure out what it is he feels, why the fuck he doesn't feel the way he should. Pechorin starts the engine, pulls out from the curb and into traffic. Behind them, in an unmarked van, the other five follow at a distance, visible in the rearview mirror. He can see them laughing, one of them cracking open a beer, sliding gently back into the blank and malleable personas that they live their daily lives in, until next time the call comes. Carter leans back into the seat and closes his eyes, the sun shining through his eyelids, a red and orange blur of spots and veins, an abstract canvas of blood and fire.

He remembers the boy's eyes, deep hazelnut brown with flecks of green, of emerald and jade; he remembers them cruising him in the bar and the lick of a lip, the snub of a nose, and shoulder-length auburn hair, and lighting a cigarette for him. He should have asked him to the party.

“You look fucked, man,” says Joey.

Jack looks at him, sitting there in his black leather jacket. For some reason—God knows why—he has an image of him in a suit. Shit, Joey wouldn't wear a suit if you paid him.

“I feel fucked,” says Jack.

THE RIVER OF CROWS AND KINGS

Down the river thick with the mire of war, thicker—with all the blood and the bodies of the storm—than the tar that it resembled, floated the torn clothes and the broken furniture, the opened suitcases and scattered, sodden papers, oil-soaked rags wound round and plastic bags tied tight to make small bundles for some unknown artifact; oil paintings in their frames, and dolls and teddy bears, and black-and-white photographs of wives and sweethearts, and father's watches and grandfather clocks, and grand pianos and children's tricycles and decks of cards with nudie women on them, and clay pots from Hacilar, Hassuna or Samarra, with all their patterning of birds and fishes, animals and humans, all the bull's heads, double axes and Maltese crosses of Tell Halaf; and the clay-covered skulls of the dead, enshrined once with seashells for eyes, that were the source of all that ancient pottery in protoneolithic Jericho; and all the accumulated artifacts of history came, turning over and over in the rolling, roiling muck of it all, and amongst these things and carried on them, rolling over them and under them, limp and lolling, came the dead, pouring along the river that once ran clear and sweet through all eternity toward a distant city on the edge of everything. And the river of voices and visions that once rushed sparkling, roaring, babbling down into the deep—the river of life, and the river of the dead crossed by all those who sought to enter into eternity out of the time and place of their existence—was now a slow snake of filth where crows fed on the corpses of kings.

And Thomas stumbles as he tries to leap a twisted tree root, falls to his knees, hands out in front of him, splatting into the mud and falling forward, twisting his wrist and yowling, cursing himself for the noise. Not far behind—not far
enough
behind—the shouts are wild, drunken with vicious delight, and they come crashing through the trees and bushes and grass toward him. Slupping and staggering up out of the ditch of trickling marsh, he runs. He runs out of the woods, running from Jerry, from the rednecks, from the hellhounds, from the angels, from the lion, and from the doom of thunder and lightning that crackrashes into a tree beside him—tall tree illuminated, eerie, eldritch in the sick light. He runs out of the woods and over a field, grass whipping his face, and into more woods, slipping, skiting, down a slope and falling, splashing into the raging river, black, brown, red with all the earth washed down into it by the storm, and turning, churning it drags him down into its grip to drown.

It is a dry, hot and sun-bleached day in the savannah, and a lion slouches slowly through the tall grass. A slender buck, a young Thomson's gazelle, twitches nostrils at the scent of predator in the air, and looks at us, and blinks long lashes over deep dark eyes. Angels wheel lazily overhead. Turning to look around us, we see a herd of aurochs grazing on the open skies and, superimposed like ghost forms over this vision of a veldt, young men in olive and khaki smoke cigarettes, play cards and drink. A dog lies curled up beside (beyond? behind?) a strange figure wearing animal skins, a beaked mask and what might be perhaps a feathered cloak or wings. Everything is still, poised in the moment.

And though we know that when this moment ends there will, without a shadow of doubt—for in the fierce light of this summer noon there are no shadows, or at least only the smallest ones under our padding feet—although we know that there will come a
doom
to shatter this tranquillity—because this is the way it happens, always in existence, or forever in eternity—we know also that somewhere, somewhen, Tammuz escapes. From every time, from every tomb, Tammuz escapes. But still we weep for him; we weep for the lost deus of Sumer as we weep for all the lost days of our summers.

And still he runs, he leaps, he bounds, still, caught in the moment and unbound in the myth, through the fields of lost days, far from the road of all dust, and down the river of crows and kings, the river of the voices and the visions of the living and the dead, and all around him grow the buds and the rushes, and the grass and the bushes and the trees, and the poppies.

Errata

The Strazza Ce La Daedalii

I
step out of the hostelry into the late-morning light of the Strazza Ce La Daedalii—as I've taken to calling it, shamelessly cobbling together the morphemes of three or four different languages that I have learned in my travels, christening it with this hybrid, invented phrase simply because I find it descriptive in a pleasantly Latin manner, with cadences more liquid, more suited to this waterfall civilization. I step out onto the marble flagstones of a plaza of kafe and restoranti with four sets of grand stairs: two run downward from the balustraded outer edge, from the northeast and the northwest corners, running parallel to the precipitous wall and meeting at a small landing down below only to turn and part again, and carry on down to the southeast and the southwest corners of another plaza; the other two sets of stairs echo the plaza on the lower level, running upward along the stone that backs the plaza at its southern wall, to a small landing where they turn and carry on up. The Strazza Ce La Daedalii goes on in this manner, down and up, for quite some way, plaza upon plaza upon plaza, its upper heights and lower depths hidden in mist or in the simple haze of atmosphere diffusing the light in watery blue until eventually, in the distance, even with binoculars, it is impossible to distinguish start or end. A street in strata, plaza after plaza, I christen it a strazza. I have no idea what the natives would have called it, unable as I am to read their alphabet of squicks and wheedles.

Laying my espresso down on the red-and-white checkwork of waxed tablecloth, on one of the tables of the rustic little kafe that I have chosen to make my room in, while I try to get my latest project off the ground, so to speak, I wander out onto the flagstones to examine my finished handiwork.

It seems I am working in a long tradition here; from what I can gather from the glossy pictures in the tourist shops, I'm not the first by any means to choose this Jacob's Ladder staircase street as launching ground. Old black-and-white photographs, glossy color snapshots, charcoal sketches, oil paintings, blueprints—the tourist books show centuries of fantastic contraptions designed by some would-be Daedalus in his doodling mind and built with defiant gusto. I imagine the crowds gathering at the sides of the plazas, thronging the steps above and below, peering from balconies and shuttered windows, old men smoking pipes and shaking their heads, young girls swooning over the dashing, daring, death-defying and clearly demented aviator, a young lad declaring to his mother that one day he too will try—no matter what the whole of history tells them—at least
try
to touch the sky.

As bounded as they were, these people, by the geography of the Rift, they must have dreamed of flight since the first day a caveman watched an eagle soaring down below, spiraling upward on the currents of air or swooping down to catch its prey. How could they not look at the birds and realize that if they themselves could just step out of the slanted plane of their existence it would be a revolution more momentous in an instant, more encompassing, than the discovery of fire? Freedom to travel in the vertical, to soar past all those towns and villages between their own backwater and the fabled, distant cities, to laugh at the tollbooths and the taxes taken by gatekeeper hamlets with no industry of their own, only the good fortune to be in the path of trade. Freedom to see for themselves what they had only heard of on the grapevine chain of word of mouth, tales told by travelers to travelers in a game of Chinese Whispers, rumors of the Edge, so far above, or of the Vale below, mythologized by their distance and by their difference, these legendary, fantastic lands, impossibly, unbelievably…flat.

And so, Daedalus after Daedalus, in this small area of the Rift, at least, they all came here, romantic fools funded by merchants with a vision of a liberated world, and tried to fly.

The plaza above has a monument to them all, a great, twisted bronze of vanes and gears, batwing-like things projecting upward from the impacted mass of harness, with a human form thrown out and up, arms reaching up toward the sky as if ejecting from the wreckage, as if even in the implosion of the machine collapsing, crushing itself into the stone beneath him, the soul of the pilot is exploding out of it, a butterfly born from a chrysalis of confused copper and iron. As in my own far-distant world, most of the flawed designs of flying machines seem to have taken their form from features in the animal world, feathered and flapping, articulated artifices of thin tissue and extending joints, things pedaled with hands or feet, hydraulic pistons amplifying muscle movements over wingspans of twenty feet or more, dead weights that must have plummeted or tender things that could have glided out into the air to gasps and cheers until, quite suddenly, some terrible tear would open in it and the screams and tears would start as the grand dream of the latest Daedalus fell apart.

There are a few pictures in the books of men or women who took off and soared and swooped, those in the simplest, gliding airfoils who sailed out into the skies and circled down until they disappeared beneath the clouds, unable to capture, somehow, the same secret currents of air used by the birds to lift them back up to their homes. One or two returned on foot, after a decade or so; you see their gray-haired, grizzled forms in pictures beside their grinning, younger selves, gripping not gears but walking sticks. They at least fared better than the ballooners who, to a man, drifted away on some inexorable current never to be seen again; even the most powerful dirigibles, if my interpretation of the pictures is correct, were unable to overcome the powerful downdrafts and cross-streams diagrammed by aged aviators, aeronauticists and meteorologists alike. Had it been otherwise, my own flying machine might well have taken a more sensible form.

Leonardo's Laughter

I slip my feet into the stirrups, buckle the straps and pull them tight, clamp metal clasps and click my legs into the light, limbed frame of exoskeleton. It's made of a material—synthe, they called it, in the books of the world where it belongs—unknown in all the Rift—in all the Rift I've visited, at least—and I'm not even sure if it's a plastic or a metal. It shines like chrome, and is as sleekly solid, shining silvery in the early-morning sun, but the whole complex artifact weighs less than a handful of sand and it would blow away in the wind as easily if it weren't tethered to the iron grids of manhole covers that dot the marble flagstones of the strazza here and there. It makes aluminum seem leaden and, if it's a metal at all, I think, then it's an alloy, of adamantium and cavorite, as strong as one, as gravity-defying as the other. It took me centuries to learn to work the stuff, and I'm lucky that I brought a salvaged store of this synthe with me, on my long, diagonal journey down into the Rift, as much as the trundling rig could carry.

As I pull up the folded pinions to slip my arms into the harness, I glance over at my last vehicle, parked on the road that leads out of the strazza, to the east, the hulking flatbed loaded, on which the ancient Winnebago sits engulfed in the canopies of its tent extensions, the wooden porch I built myself, the lean-to. And the huge five-fingered waldo-device yoked to it like an infant giant's hand playing the role of oxen. If there'd been anybody in this world to see it when I rolled into town, this crazy gypsy nomad whose very caravan was a circus freak, I wonder what they would have made of me. I have to admit there is a part of me that's grown to revel in the very outlandishness of the machinery I've accreted in my journey on the road of all dust, salvaged from this world or that and retrofitted to my own ends. I'll be a little sad to leave the rig and the absurd crawling contraption that's pulled it down three centuries of mountain road and track; but the endless zigzag of my journey into the Rift is drawing me further and further from the path I want to go, I'm far enough off course as is, and if I want to carry on along the road mapped out for me in the Book, I'm going to have to sacrifice the comforts of my lumbering mobile home for something more…spectacular.

I snap the buckle of the flying machine's belt around my waist and release the bolts that hold the chest-grapple open; it swings slowly shut around my sides, soft and padded like a child's fingers closing round a baseball, but as solid as an extra set of ribs. The support latches swing out from under my armpits and lock into place above my shoulders, in the pack of metal muscle, processing power and air tanks out of which the wings extend above my head, still folded. I swivel the breastplate down from above and clip it, strap it, latch it at my waist—I couldn't resist the urge to mold it in a shape of shining pectorals, like the armor of an ancient Greek or Roman, or of an angel in the images of my homeworld. It sits out from my chest a little—giving the whole exoskeletal suit an even more seraphic look—because I've built a small compartment into it; I crouch down to pick up the Book, slip it into the opening at the right-hand side and clip the door closed. This is the only thing I'm taking with me. I bring the goggles down over my eyes, the oxygen mask up over my mouth. I have no idea of the environment out there in the blue skies beyond the Rift—I am probably already far enough down that the sheer weight of the air above should crush me, so the laws of physics clearly are little more than rules of thumb in this world, but I'm not taking any chances.

Lastly, finally, I slip my hands into the wired and articulated gauntlets hanging from the belt, unhook them and tighten them round the wrists, make sure that all the jacks and plugs are tight and firm, then flick the on switch at my belt that tells this mad contraption that I'm ready, to transmit the motions of my fingers along the long wires that run up to my shoulders where, as I step forward, spreading my arms in an unnecessary but unconscious gesture, and splaying my fingers wide and open, palm-down, thirty feet of silvery wings spread out above me and behind me and I feel the air moving under them, the way the motion of every finger catches it, the lift, and all I have to do is bat my fingers and the pinions of the waldo wings bat with them, and my feet lift from the ground, and I kick the release and all my tethers fall away and suddenly I'm rising.

And the Strazza Ce La Daedalii rings with my laughter as I rise into the skies of the Vellum, with my laughter and the laughter of every demented dreamer of the Rift, all those failed and falling aviators whose names I'll never know, those Leonardos of this corner of eternity. I could have called this place the Strazza Ce La Icarii, for all those failures, but that would have been…a paucity of commitment that insulted every one of them. Daedalus flew and so did every one of them who laughed in the face of old men with their pipes, shaking their heads.

I rise on their laughter, their whooping joy the air beneath the fingers of my wings. I don't care who's watching me, the ghosts of this abandoned world from their balconies, or angels from their windows in the sky.

I fly.