Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 21 / Chapter 1 –>

He races through the city at night, down streets and alleys all but deserted, encountering only rare clusters of celebrants, listless and confused, abandoned by the presence of the mhuruk-a. Always forward, guided by the light tipped spire of the Whelemat complex. He chases its image against the cliffs and the night sky like a beacon. When he arrives, he skirts the steel and glass structures of the new buildings, plunging through decorative gardens, along concrete walkways, scaling chain link fences until he reaches the old industrial park. There’s little light here, and he slows his pace. He’s surrounded by the raw bones of New Holyoke here, the resurrected past. Cold, sterile stone and utilitarian roads grated from building to building, rutted and potholed. Mountains of gray slag and gravel, pits delved into the rock with walls that plunge off at right angles into pools of black and brackish water.

Searching, scanning, peering. He approaches the flat outer wall of the abandoned main mining station. It towers above him, half the height of the cliffs, like a medieval turret. Except there’s a door at the base, light aluminum that reflects the moon, that squawks on unoiled hinges as it’s pushed by the breeze.

He goes inside, where it’s completely dark. Dark and silent and crowded with menace, with flanged steel and great cogwheels, whirling blades and crunching rollers spiked with stone rending teeth. He can sense the weight and density of the massive ore extracting machines hanging above him, idle and hungry.

He’s been here before, this virtual space at least, chasing hostile shed through an industrial night.

This time, at least, he remembered to bring a flashlight.

Ray advances quickly now, down a broad corridor between the curve of dusted and dingy hoppers, great holding tanks for fresh ore trundled along conveyer belts that emerge from a darkness at the far end and branch off at sharp angles, then slope upward to hang from the ceiling like spiderwebs. At the mouth of the mine shaft, he stops briefly to collect his gun.

Echoes of language, garbled chants, rise up to him, faint like the buzz of insect wings against his ears.

And screams. Sharp, bitter, suddenly truncated.

In fear, they would bid us do great evil.

He plunges in, down the shaft worn flat and even by a thousand miners’ feet tramping back and forth to work, to labor, to the glorious future of their colonial home. He ducks his head beneath the suspended track of the conveyer belt, beneath shadows that leap out at him from the odd contours of the walls, specters raised by the wild and skittering beam of his flashlight. The odor of damp stone and sweat and past explosives linger in the air. And beneath that is something else, coppery, viscous, gagging.

As he draws near, he can hear their chants and the stomp and slap of their feet above the sound of his own footfalls and his own panting. He has to pause at a junction of tunnels, craning his neck, casting for echoes. Right turn, and he’s off again, always wending downward. A hundred meters, another junction, down again, until he seems to feel the entire weight of the planet hanging over his head.

The tunnel ceases to descend, runs straight and narrow for a short space, and at the end is light, bright and yellow, and the stone carved doorway into a chamber. Ray charges toward it, pursued by screams that hang fresh and murderous in the thick, subterranean air.

He races to the light.

To the light, and through, it seems, some wormhole in space and time. Into the past. Into the desert. Back to the place where it all began.

Ba’dai.

He scuds to a halt on the lip of a chamber lit by guttering torches, shaped into a circle, vaulted like a dome. The lectern of bedrock, the ranks of worshippers kneeling; the full score of them slapping their hands against the floor in staccato rhythm, counterpoint to the chant; the bound victims laid out in troughs next to the great stone ring. The narrow trenches descending from trough to ring, stained dark with blood.

Just like Ba’dai.

Only this time, the sacrifices are orphans, children of the Trust.

This time, they shriek and struggle as they are laid beneath the knife.

This time, the ones wielding the blades have held their sacrifices down, and grinning with savagery, plunged their trowels, cast their offerings, then called for fresh meat. The blood is everywhere, and the eviscerated bodies, used and cast aside, are a charnel heap of limbs and crimson cloth, empty, glistening eyes and wide, rictus-frozen mouths.

And this time, Ray is alone.

He grips the butt of his pistol, but there aren’t enough bullets in the world to cleanse this chamber of its horror. And not nearly enough for the Dag Maoudi gathered here. All the aged and ancient ones who have served the Whistons for decades, who have cleaved to the old ways and grown weary of subservience, are here. Fulfilling their destiny.

Too many.

From the lectern, Amah cries the chant to summon the shed, and to peel back the binding force of the ring.

Sha-oa con kiri ton! Mhuruk-a tala miri-ya! Kiri-ya!

She is ecstatic with sacrifice, transcendent with the shedding of blood, her head thrown back and arms cast wide, palms splayed above her head. The Dag Maoudi answer with voice and slap. The knives flash, rise and fall, as efficient as a grain thresher. And distant, like the rumble of far-off thunder, the shed called by blood answer. Not one, but legions without number.

A legion who rise, and as they ascend, think nothing about communion. Only about blood.

And between lectern and ring is Emma, mhuruk-a and vessel, glassy, rigid, silent.

Beside her, inside the ring, the shimmering, quicksilver swirls, the fundamental essence of the shed accelerate to a dizzying pace. The swirl becomes a haze of opalescence, and in the haze, another universe opens up like a blank and staring eye, a vortex of impenetrable stellar emptiness that gusts with alien winds and ravaging physical forces beyond knowledge, from which emerges a hand, an arm–teeth and mouth and throat shouting with a ferocity of lust that shivers the stone walls.

In this maelstrom of chant and roar, resounding echo and emerging chaos, Ray weighs options that do not exist, not when each passing moment is a cry and a flash of knives. There are no adequate plans for situations like this; no choices but bad ones.

He just acts, aims and fires, curses as he squeezes the trigger again and again. Because he’s ruining everything, because with the first blast and recoil, the Dag Maoudi start to move and scatter, and it takes too many shots to drop his targets as they flee. And because responsibility has bound him as cruelly and efficiently as a Solomonic ring to kill the child murderers first, all seven of them, though there are willing hands waiting to take their place. A dozen willing hands. But them first, if only to stop the slaughter for a little while, while he works out something better.

He watches Amah, matriarch, root of the Dag Maoudi on New Holyoke, duck behind the lectern, unassailable.

He counts down the shots in his magazine until only two shells remain, and then he stops.

Most of him, the sane part, could go on killing them forever. But he has no other choice, because the shed continue to rise.

In the howling and confusion, the scrambling away and rush for cover by the Dag Maoudi, the screams of the bound and terrorized children who remain, Ray sprints across the open floor of the chamber, over the troughs slick with blood, past the corpses of Trust children. To Emma, who he has promised to protect. Emma who has known what the Dag Maoudi intended all along. Emma who carries within her the seed of his child and the glowering presence of the mhuruk-a.

Emma, who has lied to him, manipulated him, betrayed him from the start.

Amah, exultant, growls through the din. “You are too late, Mr. Marlowe. Already, the host of the mhuruk-a rise. A host beyond number who will lay waste to all our enemies, who will return to us the glory that was stolen from us. This is might of the Dag Maoudi! This is the power we bore in ancient times, when those who spoke of us trembled for fear of the mhuruk-a! We are revived! We are restored!”

As she speaks, the first shed leaps free of the ring, thunders at the heavens, shaking its mighty fists. It laughs, then springs into the air, concusses its being against solid rock, vanishes.

In its wake is an image planted like a bomb inside Ray’s skull. A thought, instruction, mission bearing the weight of inevitability: a frozen tableau of Townshend Wright, Director of Whelemat, plotting betrayal, with flames leaping from his naked chest, terror stamped on his face, the odor of his immolating flesh thick in the air.

The visceral impact is stunning. For an instant, it stops him from breathing, quiets the raging chaos of his thoughts.

In that silence, there is another sensation, frail, whispered, urgent. Just a voice inside his head, counterpoint to so much impending violence.

Commune with me.

Madness. What did he think he was going to do? Just grab Emma by the hand and run off into the night, to some illusion of safety? Did he believe that would change anything?

Assess and evaluate, Jack said, and if it is a threat, eliminate the principals.

He’s understood nothing, not until this moment, not until confronted with the limitless might of an inexhaustible supply of shed. The wrath and fury of the Dag Maoudi; the willingness to destroy everything to create a world they would own. A world born in blood, ruled by terror. And it was only the beginning.

This was the future Frederick Whiston had foreseen; the vision he had destroyed Paraclete to prevent. Frederick was the only one who had truly understood.

Only Frederick.

Ray wants to close his eyes. He wants to curl himself into a ball in a dark place and hide until the end of time.

Because Frederick had also known what must be done. With is last breath, with a heart full of twisted love and grieving and hatred, he had attempted to show Ray as well. The Dag Maoudi could not be allowed to possess the shed forever. Whatever the cost.

They could not be permitted to possess the child who could control the shed without blood. They would all of human space into a hell of their own devising.

So he lifts his hand a final time and directs the gun not at Amah, not at the Dag Maoudi, but presses the barrel against Emma’s forehead.

He looks into her eyes, still longing for her even now. What choice do I have? It has to stop here.

Into his mind, the mhuruk-a speaks, pleading and urgent. Commune with me.

Another shed ascends from the ring, its ululations cavernous, bounding. Primed to lay waste to EED, Colonel Ritchie, the wicked hands of the FSA. Except for the shed no one moves. They’re all transfixed by the gun, estimating his sanity.

“Stop it,” Ray shouts. “Stop it now.”

Amah lifts herself up from behind the lectern, exposing herself. She is seething, her dark eyes narrowed to slits and the muscles of her jaws bulging so that the blackened scars of her tattoos pulsate like living things. “What would you do? Kill the mother; kill the child. It accomplishes nothing.”

“It keeps them out of your hands. It keeps you from controlling them, just like you controlled me.”

But Amah dismisses him with a disgusted jerk of her head. “As long as the Dag Maoudi endure, there will be vessels, there will be the mhuruk-a, and there will be hope. You would kill her, this woman you love, who would bear the child of your loins, the child of promise, and all you would gain is time. And still, the mhuruk-a will serve us.”

Another shed flung from the ring, greedy for destruction.

Again, the mhuruk-a, flooding his thoughts. You were made to commune, as she was made to commune.

“You can’t go on killing in secret anymore. I’ve shown the people of Blackheath Grange the truth about the Dao. They’ve seen the mhuruk-a and finally understood what you’ve been doing all these years.” At least he hopes so. He hopes they grasped the meaning of the shed. “They believe, and believing, they won’t be cattle for you any longer.”

“Then they, too, will be destroyed. And we will begin again. The Dag Maoudi endure; we bear with us the old ways, and they sustain us. As the Whistons have sustained us, as our own people did before, we always survive. And where we go, there are always men greedy for the touch and the power of the mhuruk-a.”

“Not this way,” Ray spits back. “Not with blood and sacrifice and murdered children. I won’t allow it.”

Amah barks at him, laughing. “Not this way, indeed. No longer are we bound to one mhuruk-a. One who has served with diligence, but whose strength wanes. Now they are a multitude. Now there will be more vessels, and none will stand before us. And one day, there will be another child.”

Ray tugs the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb. “Not in your lifetime.”

She stares at him, weighs his intent, frowns. “Do not do this, Mr. Marlowe. Do not steal from us this child.”

“I won’t allow you to kill any more people. Any more children, just so you can rule the world.”

“Is that what you have been told?” Amah says quietly. “That all we desire is power? The Dag Maoudi have remembered and tended to the mhuruk-a when all others forgot, learning from them. We have kept the old ways while the rest of mankind chased after science and technology. Humanity has given itself over to cowardice and weakness, hiding behind its machines, its devices. Turning its back on what it has always meant to be human. We have not possessed out universe, but merely inhabited it. This is what the mhuruk-i would teach us if we allow them.”

Faint, almost beyond sense, the shed inside Emma whispers. Commune and know.

Amah frowns at him, at his stupidity. “The future we have offered you is a treasure beyond estimation. This is the purpose of your child. To make us rise. To open the gates that bar us from true communion with the mhuruk-i. We who have been faithful, the Dag Maoudi. We will rise, and we will be remade into a true humanity, a new breed of man who walk with the mhuruk-i as equals. We will be as gods over an old humanity, usurpers of the name, whose time has passed.”

He could kill her now, this shriveled and hideous ape. “Enough of my friends have already died for your vision of a new humanity.”

But Amah sighs as though overtaken by a great weariness. “In ancient times, there were men of wonder. Men of might and renown. Daed Faala, who could calm the seas with a brush of his arm, was such a man. Ruach Shin. Your King Solomon. Mohammed, Moses, Jesus. We call them wise, wondrous, workers of miracles. Into their hands was given the power of creation, the power to bend to their will the very structures of reality. And it was Daed Faala who bound the mhuruk-a in the Stone. It was Solomon who placed his shed in this ring. Why, I ask you?”

Why?

She doesn’t wait for his answer. “Because they saw that we would wane, that men are wicked. That our knowledge would falter, and our blood would grow weak. And as we failed, we would not retain our place as brothers and sisters of the mhuruk-i, but would become their servants and slaves, lesser beings. There are no more mighty men among us. Instead, we must rely on tools and ritual, rites of blood to do what great men once did with will alone. And what they did, what they have always done, is to harness the power of the mhuruk-i and learn from them. Learn to become more than what we have been.

“There is no joy in the shedding of blood, and we know that the things we have done are terrible. But they must be done. We cannot lose the touch and wisdom of the mhuruk-a. It is our last hope of preserving what humanity has been, and what it was meant to become. Not to plunge ourselves into technology, into blindness, into the rituals of science, the mere manipulation of matter, but to truly inherit our birthright among the sentient universe. To craft an indelible niche for humanity. The Dag Maoudi would do this, but we must have a place free from the control of men where we can gather strength, where we can build fortresses against our own decline. Where we can bind the spirits and learn from them, and learning, recapture the greatness that was lost. It is the child of your union, the vessel and the one, who will accomplish this. A child that would be perfect, the progenitor of a new race, and a new humanity.

“We would create mighty men once again, able to wield the power of the mhuruk-i. Glorious and free and godlike. It is the destiny of our species, Mr. Marlowe, and to achieve it, we would crush all who stand in our way. For all that we have done, all the innocents struck down, we are not monsters. We would preserve all of mankind.”

This is what Emma has believed, Ray realizes, what she’s believed her whole life, over all the years in which Amah has prepared her to be the vessel. Endure this, because the alternative is failure and suffering, the decline of the entire species. But through you, we can produce offspring with the power to bind up the essential stuff of the cosmos, defend humanity against decline and destruction.

Emma had spent her entire life believing she was sacrificing herself to save the world.

And if he let her live, let their child be born, she would go on believing it as the Dag Maoudi lied to her, twisted what she perceived, carved out a kingdom for themselves through manipulation and violence and exploitation of the mhuruk-a.

She believed she was saving them all. It was the only way she could make sense of the Dao.

Understanding descends on him like a weight, a stone as heavy as the universe itself. Emma, sweet Emma, what have they done to you?

Emma lifts her eyes to him, as though sensing his thoughts. No, not Emma, but the mhuruk-a, the shed. It drowns him in her gaze, searches and embraces and penetrates.

“Commune with me,” it says. “Commune and know.”

And not just the mhuruk-a, it seems to him, but somehow Emma, too. Emma and the shed entwined, so closely knit as to be the same being, both hungry, both wanting. Both pleading with him to commune at this moment.

The shed from the ring ascend more quickly now. He can see them in his peripheral vision, sense their emergence, their leaping and shouting and vanishing to chores of destruction. A score in the last minute, frenzied with purpose and frenzied to sate their lust for blood. They cast the glimpses of their victims into the ether like visions. Officers from the Port Authority, civic leaders, Whelemat board members, social luminaries. Anyone who would oppose the will of the Dag Maoudi.

Thomas Malcolm. Ray catches this image with the striking clarity of a hammer blow. Thomas Malcolm, crushed and mangled, his building imploded. For passing secrets, the shed seems to say.

Focus. Into Emma’s gaze, burying himself.

“What? What do you want me to know?”

“Come and see.” Come and see.

He hears Jack Holcomb, Emma already knows, Ray. She is the vessel. She has already been changed. She was genetically constructed to emulate neural patterns with which and through which the shed could communicate. Just like you.

Emma, who believes she is saving the world, who has shown always, forever, pure and blazing outrage at those who would betray her, who has willingly accepted the burden of the Dao. Not because she has been deceived, but because she is the vessel. She can commune with the shed. She knows them and is known by them in ways he can only imagine.

And from her depth of knowledge, she asks him to trust her, the only other human being in the universe in a position to know the truth. Come and see.

IftheshedaretrueIftheywishusharmIftheywouldsaveordamnIftheylieIftheywouldbetheallinalltheancientofdaysthekeepersofpromiseIftheywillcommuneandinstructIftheyriseIftheyriseIftheyriseandifwemightrisewiththemComeandseeComeandseeifwewillriseRayRisewewillrisewewillri

“Believe,” the shed whispers. “There is nothing to fear. Believe, and you will rise.”

He wavers for a time that seems infinite, beyond measurement, staring into the vast and placid depths of Emma’s gaze, open to him beneath the relentless barrel of his gun. He hangs between ring and shed, Amah’s dour and capable threat, the re-gathering community of the Dag Maoudi in the chamber, the wailing of children undefended–everything for which he is responsible. Everything she is asking him to release.

To commune.

To embrace his own being, his own revelation.

To rise.

At the last, to trust Emma, and with her to rise.

Assess and evaluate, Jack said.

He says, “I am and your are, and we are one.”

He speaks, and he falls into her.

***

He falls, and as he plunges into a world of darkness, he also rises. A universe of stars without space, unformed, absent of distance, all of creation jammed into a pinpoint that is dense with potential. And yet immense in scope. It is everything and nothing, matter and void. It is all things and all places and outside of time. Beyond perception and understanding, the raw material of gods.

And he is formless consciousness, unbound being. He is everywhere at once, possessing all that has been made inside himself, and still he expands.

Where he expands, there are others like him, feathery, tickling awareness that brushes against his filigreed fringes of amorphous self. Where they touch him, he is known and they are known to him. Their being whispers tales of age beyond reckoning, of years measured in the radioactive decay of isotopes the way a tree counts the seasons in its rings. Their roots plunge deep into the fabric of space, into a bottomless well of dark matter and liquid, plastic chaos.

And he is aware that these consciousnesses are not shed. They are not anything known to him or the exploration and history of man. They name them themselves in signs and symbols that express sprawling concepts of being, culture, definition, and he grasps it all and holds them in his mind. He embraces them, and they trickle, laughing, through his hands like water from spring. Their number is beyond counting, but he also touches them one and all, individually, each one unique and particulated. He accepts that they are, and he is not overwhelmed.

He glides into a nursery of stars, the superheated depths of compressing matter, of rending gravity, and it smells to him of musk and strawberries. He watches the gathering of cosmic dust and thermonuclear detonation, and there is joy in the binding and the forming and the creation. There is joy in the frigid loneliness of the gulf between stars flung from the cradle. There is joy in being, like a song woven into the dance of element and energy. A song that is purpose. A song that rises.

He knows things no man has ever known. He clutches an awareness of the basic engines of creation, of the manner for knitting quarks and electrons, molecules and atoms. Anything he can envision, he can perform. Anything he chooses, he can do. Anything he seeks, he can find. Knowledge expands within him, and there is no want, no lack, no worry. The bones of the universe are there to be laid bare at his command. But he also feels its harmony. He pulses with its song, and what he conceives is not just his will, but his will as reflected within a consciousness of the will of everything else.

He is, and they are, and all of them are one. They are not alone, and they are cognizant of one another, always in harmony, one grand and encompassing will and being.

It’s all here. Everything that ever was, is and will be. If he chose, he could page through each discrete instant of human history, experience it from every possible perspective, within the perception of every mind, all at once. He could share the glory of the foundation of timeless Rome. He could scale the heights of Kilimajaro with the wandering Australopithecus africanus. He could count the hordes of the Khans as they swept across the Mongol plains. Or taste the nectar of primordial soup at the instant life emerged. But he doesn’t need to, because he knows it all. He becomes all. Everything is fluid, changeable, unmoored, unlinear. And if he wanted, he could cast it all down. He could blot it from existence. Destroy it, but it would still be, a memory with the substance of reality. Both truths existing together, equally true, equally eternal.

A state of pure potentiality, this is the reality. This is what it is to rise.

The height is dizzying, beyond him, a twisting spiral of vertigo.

So the shed comes to him, speaks directly to his being. Not the shed as he has known it before, in the form of a man or even in its own body of tentacle and flipper and cool, black eyes, but as itself, as consciousness separated from biology. Just as he is.

You see as we see, know as we know, are as we are. In communion, all things are possible. In communion, you may perceive with the mind of God.

Yes.

You see what a frail creature is man? Bound to the substance of flesh, unwilling to rise, isolated within husks. Each one a universe unto himself, without cognizance of one another, each entity alone, alien, without reference and communication.

Yes.

This is true freedom. From want, from lack, from isolation. This is the community of being where all things may be known and all things exist. Whatever you imagine can be. Here, all things are just, all things are possible, all things are immortal. This is where we would lead your kind to be. It is the inheritance reserved for your seed.

To rise. To become gods and control the universe. Not just to manipulate, but to create. It’s right there in front of him, unlimited possibility, and what he has touched is only the fringes of the truth. Imperfect knowledge. His child, Emma’s child, and all who came after would know perfectly.

This is what Jack Holcomb perceived in the shed. The next logical step in human evolution.

It’s also what the Dag Maoudi have foreseen. A future for which they would shatter everyone and everything around them. A glory they would possess at any cost.

And Frederick Whiston, he saw it as well, but only in terms of Dag Maoudi exploitation.

All of it, imperfect knowledge. Symbols without context.

And Emma? All she wanted was to rise.

Ray, he would rise with her. He and Emma and their child of promise together.

I am and you are, and we are one.

Turning their backs on everything mankind has built to become something new and limitless, something in harmony with the consciousness of the shed. Rejecting the inheritance of mud and violence and contempt, of exploitation. Joining the celestial chorus. Perfect being, unfettered.

In his vastness, he reaches out. He extends himself to the limit of his perceptual horizon, and finds multiple billion sentient beings, all of them singing in harmony with the universe, all of them reaching out to him with knowledge and wisdom, all of them with wonders to share. Deeper, farther, stretching to the extremes of his awareness, and he senses her at last. She is joy, and pleasure, glorious. He approaches her, circling, and she’s not alone. Inside her is the burgeoning consciousness of their child, a being of pure light, growing, pulsating, living. And the thrumming of life emanating from the child is the rhythm and the song of the universe itself.

He reaches for her, then, and knows her. Everything that she is, has ever been. All that she’s seen and thought and experienced. Ray holds her essence inside himself like the remembered scent of the first flowers of spring.

He touches her, and she touches him in turn, and they are one.

Touching her, he chooses.

“One,” he says. “We are one.”

And choosing, he finds others of the shed, not as he has perceived them, but as they are, rank upon rank, stunning in their thousands and tens of thousands. Conscious, singing, the hidden soul of a distant world, cast adrift, pursued by disaster and chaos. Weary they came to an infant planet, the bones of matter, the essence of earth. Their thoughts became dreams of men, strange and wild. Their flesh slumbers in the deep, in chasms of night, in frozen seas. Through cold space and strange eons they came; when man was young they were already ancient, and aged and filled with grim loneliness. And from their bodies sprang life, and they became entities of consciousness, form without substance.

Ghosts of themselves.

And men dreamed of them. Some believed and rose. Some believed, and believing, fashioned visions of power.

All that time, the shed bid them only to rise.

We seek only habitation; a space in which to live free. In harmony with mankind.

Some believed and made themselves vessels of light, mighty men capable of fashioning great things. Others believed, but rejected harmony and learned to bind the spirits of the shed in labyrinths of stone and ring.

Rest and habitation after long travail. Coexistence. And in return, we will teach you all the secrets of the universe so that you want for nothing.

In return.

In return for coexistence.

And Ray remembers what Emma said to him, that night in the garden. She comes. And when she’s here, she’s everything. Nothing of me remains, only mhuruk-a. And I am her vessel. It’s what I was born to become, what all the Whiston daughters have been bred to become–summoners and channels for the spirit of the place. Spirit made flesh. Because it’s the flesh that makes us human, animals, beings bound to land and cycle and rhythm. Rutting like pigs makes us human, and it’s the only way the mhuruk-a can touch them. The two made one, spirit made flesh. They fuck the vessel and join themselves with the spirit of the place, bind themselves to the essential rhythm.

The two made one, spirit made flesh.

Jack Holcomb saying, obedience changes us…and it is only through this change that we are able to commune.

And, the shed are Ialdabaoth’s attempt to supplant humans as the pinnacle of creation.

Finally, at Ba’dai, the shed had said to him, poor of vigilance is this creature, man. Your kind cannot help but stumble.

It’s there, all of it, all of the answers, waiting to be touched.

To become like the shed, to commune, to gain complete knowledge is to choose coexistence.

Man, formed from the dust of the cosmos, isolated in flesh, individualized.

The deathless shed, spirit, form without substance except for that which they create.

We seek only habitation. Vessels of light.

Vessels of mud. It’s the flesh that makes us human.

The truth washes over him like a flood, devastating everything in its path.

***

He breathes, plunges, drops back into his physical form. His own body, cells singing, a matrix of symbiotic organisms feeding and growing and yearning. The heart pushing blood, the muscles contracting, the lungs expanding, all in harmony.

He blinks, and the world springs into being, created new, illuminated.

He looks into Emma’s eyes, and he remembers.

He is conscious of all things, of his own synaptic flurry, of the frenetic storm of his expansion. He inhales, and tastes blood, but also dust and sweat…and knowledge. Awareness of the activity of those who call themselves brothers, the shed, constrained by the will and the desire of the Dag Maoudi. He sees with their collective vision, the city in chaos, the airfield in flames, great columns of fire and twisted steel, conflagrations burning out of control. The fluttering wings of death, the wonders they have wrought, wailing.

The wonders they have wrought. With blood. With sharpening the minds of men like knives. With whispering to those who would listen that there was power and knowledge in communion. Teaching them to deceive themselves.

They have carried devastation to Blackheath Grange and called it joy.

Jack was wrong, believing that the shed were exploited. The Dag Maoudi were wrong, believing the shed would bear them into a grand future. Even Emma was wrong, because she was the vessel, believing the lie that the shed would lead them all to rise.

Only Frederick Whiston had truly understood. Poor, broken, defeated Frederick Whiston. Your seed will open the door to chaos through which the mhuruk-a and all her kind will enter and devour us all.

And for understanding, the shed had killed him.

To rise is to sell all of mankind into bondage. That was the legacy his child was to bear.

Once, Amah said to him, You cannot have Emma and anything else. It is Emma or those other things. To love her, to cling to her, is to accept the destruction of all else that has made you who you are.

In this, at least, she had it right.

Emma would always be the vessel, always the keeper and key to the door through which the shed would come. She was the pivot upon which the future of humanity turned, the most perilous being in human space, in the history of mankind.

Conscious of the complete universe, of all that he could grasp, all the promises of the shed, all that he loves, he returns to this place of flickering lights and children’s blood and bleak stone walls, where he stands in his own flesh with a gun in his hand, staring into the eyes of the woman who believes she would save the world.

His heart beats. He exhales. He tastes her on his lips. He hears her in his thoughts. He is one with her for a perfect, eternal instant.

It is a terrible burden to bear, he thinks, to save or damn. Terrible beyond imagining.

Then he pulls the trigger and blots her from existence.

From New Holyoke and Terra and uncharted, cavernous skies beyond the knowledge of man, the shed sense and know and shriek in fury.

And hurtling from all their wild and distant lands, their bleak suns and darkling caverns, they come for him, greedy for blood.

***

Amah shrieks at him, too. Amah and the ancient Dag Maoudi, here in their secret temple, stunned by consternation and anger and failure. Can they feel it, Ray wonders. Can they feel the thunderous approach of this storm of shed?

“What have you done?” Amah cries, and there is real grief in her voice. “What have you done?”

Is it grief for Emma, who she has raised almost from birth? Or for the collapse of her schemes, all of their schemes?

Ray doesn’t care, really. It’s not in him to care. He can hardly think. His bones have transubstantiated into lead, his muscles to sand. His head is a stone, thick and solid and heavy as the world Atlas bears on his shoulders. And he’s not strong enough to bear so much weight.

He falls to his knees, head bowed, hands in his lap. Blood. There’s blood everywhere. Spilling up from the troughs where the Dag Maoudi have killed the children, where he in turn struck down the Dag Maoudi, radiating toward him in a wide and viscous pool, red as a vein of deep mountain rubies, from Emma’s body. It soaks her gown, blackens the thick and velvet fabric. She is so pale next to this darkness of blood, her skin white and marbled with veins. Her legs jumbled at unnatural angles and her arms stopped in the act of flailing, her mouth and eyes open wide in an expression like surprise. The top of her skull sheared completely away. Just splinters of bone and blood and her wondrous, shattered hair.

And somehow, impossibly, horribly, he can still hear her breathing–a wet, fatal rattling in her chest. He couldn’t even make it quick for her in the end.

He is weak, so unbearably weak. He can’t stand to look at her.

So he contemplates the gun in his hand, its ferocious solidity and lethal weight, as grim as an accusation of murder.

One bullet remains. Just one. Always save the last one for yourself–that’s what he used to tell his bright and anxious troops on the morning of battle, with the blistering New Mes sun just tipping the hills and the desert bathed red with portent in its early light.

He’s done his part, more than that. Let the rest of human space just go to hell. He’s earned that much, hasn’t he? The right to stop caring? And it’s really just a moot point. He can do it himself, right now, the same way he did Emma, then fall beside her. Or he can wait for the boundless shed to do it for him. Not much of a choice, that.

But there’s a child crying, whose terror and confusion rings off the walls, desperate, maddening. A survivor of so much blood and cacophony, lies and betrayals. And unthinking, instinctually, Ray turns his head toward the sound of the meek, warbling sobs. The child is there, naked to the waist, without shoes, feet stained crimson almost to the ankles from marching through gore, his hands bound behind his back.

Run pirates, run pirates, run pirates, hey!

John Robert Rose, the boy from Paraclete.

Where, Ray thinks, is Captain Shadow when you need him?

And the shed come, plummeting through frozen space and dense New Holyoke rock, wrenching themselves from tasks of Dag Maoudi vengeance. They drop from the apex of the dome like arrows of fire, raging with shouts and virulence. A dozen, a score, a hundred. They crowd the space of the temple from floor to groining and still they flood in, standing outside of time, beyond dimension. Greedy and hungry and brimming with dark lust.

They reap a harvest of blood from the wise and ancient Dag Maoudi.

Amah watches, her eyes bulging, and throws her hands over her face. Because the shed, the shed in fury, they rend. They tear. They gnaw. Without the blood to sate them, they feed like predators. Only sacrifice makes them pliable.

And Ray hears them inside his mind. Their rumble and echo, their savage thirst and howling. Betrayer! Mahnach-ta! Liar!

“Ray.”

Emma. A whispered exhalation, no more than that.

“No,” he says. Shakes his head. It’s too much to bear.

Torturous, gasping breath, stumble of words. “I am the vessel. Still.”

He hears her above the clangor and wrath of the shed, and he lifts his eyes to her. He looks because he has to, because she demands it of him, because even with her waning life, she would tell him this one last thing.

“Emma?”

He looks, and he sees. Around her neck, the fine, golden chain, pulled taut like a pendulum’s wire. He remembers so much, too much, everything at once. Dinner at Frankie V’s, his clumsy scattering of rings. The flight in the podship and his sudden, barking terror when he realized it wasn’t on her finger. I told you to wear it. Amah wouldn’t let me. She said it wasn’t proper, that I should give it back to you.

I am the vessel, and the vessel is myself. To touch the infinite of contemplation is to lose us both, vessel and being.

The two made one, spirit made flesh.

Still. I am the vessel. Still.

Emma, risen and glorified and heir to all the knowledge of the shed, shows him what it is he must do. Because she trusts him, she believes in him. He has murdered her, and still she believes.

In horror, he understands. Even now, she would save all of mankind.

The shed finish with the Dag Maoudi, spend centuries of their collective rage at rings and rites and steles, of men who would dare to place themselves beyond vengeance. As one, they advance. They cast off their human likenesses, and sprawl their thought-form, matterless substance from wall to wall. They drip memories of chilled and stagnant waters, of the thin bones of blinded fish, of mud and the weight of countless billion hectares of ocean. They radiate gusts of furnace heat and cruel, relentless suns, trickles of fine, windbourne sand and storm scored rock. They steam with the fetid humidity of noisome jungles and lost and lonely mountain paths. Gray and rubber-skinned, amorphous, staring with lidless, ebon eyes.

They come, growling.

Betrayer! Mahnach-ta!

Ray moves, scrambling to her side, tearing open the blood soaked gown. Ring and chain, worn like a keepsake, a treasure clutched and admired and pondered like love. He snatches it up, snaps the chain, holds the ring between thumb and forefinger. Then her hand, held tight, like a groom and his bride.

“You were always beyond my comprehension,” he says to her, and hearing, she smiles.

Ray shoves the ring onto her finger.

Emma inhales, sharp and gasping. Her eyes spring wide–shock, dismay, despair–her chest fills with breath like the sudden inflation of a liferaft. It arches her body at an angle so severe, the tendons in her neck creak. And her rushing, blood-clotted exhalation is the howl and fury of the mhuruk-a imprisoned in living flesh.

The two made one.

No, not two. Vessel and shed and the genetic blueprint of the child of promise. A perfect trinity.

And the shed, the shed in their congregation of hundreds blanch, mutter, lash out in dire and virulent frenzy. They drown him in elemental fire, assault his bones with spectral acid, melt and desiccate and pulp the rag of his flesh. They excoriate his nerves with bitter, rasping curses. They spike their collective will into his soul. To destroy, to unmake, to erase him from the remembering of man and shed and god alike.

And what Ray feels is nothing. It passes over him like a wave. Because he is the one, was born the one. He is shed in consciousness. He has risen, and rising, he is beyond the grasp of their power.

He rises now, taking up Emma’s body. He bears her to the great ring crafted in the time of Solomon, buried beneath the sands of New Mes as years rolled on in their unending thousands, as men lived and married, spilled blood, bore sons, withered beneath the blistering sun and forgot the ancient and sacred ways. They forgot, and the death of knowledge was good.

Only the shed, lurking, spinning, shimmering like mercury, scheming all the time–only they remembered the truth.

To them, Ray says, “You can all fucking go to hell.”

Speaks it and wills it and releases his sacrifice, his beloved, into the gateway of chaos, the void of dreamless night, the living death of the mhuruk-i.

From first to last, the shed raise up a cry to rend the heavens, and vanish into the ring.

For a time that Ray measures in eons, there is silence. Then he turns, and behind him is Amah, matriarch and last of the Dag Maoudi. Stiff and stern and hideous, she stands and considers him.

She bows low to him. She prostrates herself at his feet, as though he’s become an idol.

“You were not the one as we deemed it,” she says. “But you are wise, Mr. Marlowe. Mighty and wise.”

It takes everything within him, all his grief and aching and weariness, not to kick her in the head. Maybe he’ll get to that later, after he’s located the explosives hut, after he’s carefully placed the necessary charges, after he has crashed the cliff honeycombed with mine shafts and dark, evil places in upon temple, ring, shed, so that no one will ever discover what is hidden here. Perhaps not for eternity, but until long after men have forgotten the lore of Ahriman and the Dag Maoudi, when the shed have passed entirely from human memory.

But he has other responsibilities right now.

Empty, he walks away from Amah and across the floor to John Robert Rose and the remaining children of the Trust. He gathers them together, six or seven, and embraces them one at a time, offers them comfort. He whispers promises of safety, of protection, of an end to suffering. He unbinds their hands and covers them as best he can, but John Robert he holds to his chest as though he’ll never let him go.

In his ear, the John Robert says: “You came for me. I knew you would.”

Ray bows his head, grips the boy as tightly as he dares.

And when the children are able, he leads them home.

END

<– Chapter 21 / Chapter 1 –>