Authors: Elizabeth Hand
But he could not do that, even if it meant that his brother would destroy him. At the thought Kalaman groaned softly, his great hand closing upon the toy-sized
kris
at his side. Ratnayaka was the one he loved best. He too had been born in Cluster 579 and had journeyed in that same crowded hold with Kalaman to HORUS. With Ratnayaka, there was little effort lost in speaking—their thoughts flowed together, a warmth running through Kalaman’s veins, a taste in his mouth like honey. He could not take Ratnayaka, not yet at least; but the notion warmed him so that he turned to his brother and smiled.
Ratnayaka,
he beckoned him.
Ratnayaka gazed down upon his brother, tilting his head so that the gold-and-crimson patch above his cheek glowed like fine brocade.
Yes?
Come to me.
Slowly Kalaman drew his brother onto his chest. He kissed him, let his open mouth fall upon Ratnayaka’s brow, probed the line of little gold rings with his tongue while his brother moved atop him. Then his hands grew rougher, clawing at Ratnayaka’s back even as the other’s hands raked his own. His teeth pierced the flesh on Ratnayaka’s shoulder—brutally, not with the razored softness of an animal’s teeth, but with enough force to cruelly bruise him. Blood spurted onto his lips and spread across Ratnayaka’s shoulder, marbling the smooth ivory skin with crimson and black. Still Ratnayaka made no sound. Kalaman’s will was stronger than his,
was
his, in a way that their Ascendant Masters had never understood—and that, of course, had been their undoing.
A minute passed, and Kalaman’s face grew rosy with his brother’s blood. His great long-fingered hands splayed across his brother’s chest, moved to brush his forehead and left the gold rings there hanging each with its ruby pendant. He was too tired; he needed another, now.
“Choose one,” he murmured.
Ratnayaka pushed up on his strong arms, so that he hung above his brother in his blood-spattered hammock. He closed his eyes, gently tugged his thoughts from Kalaman and let them wander the softly lit corridors and vast dark chambers of Helena Aulis until he found another there.
Sindhi.
Ratnayaka summoned him: an energumen with brick-colored skin like Kalaman’s, Kalaman’s eyes, Kalaman’s hands. And from where he slept, in the bedchamber that had belonged to the station’s Tertiary Architect, Sindhi answered: a thought that would have been a sigh if it had been given breath. A few minutes later he appeared in the doorway of the stim chamber, passing through the generated image of falling water and entering, miraculously untouched. Nearly invisible tendrils from the oneiric canopy descended to brush against his neck, a sensation like walking into a mist.
“Brothers,” Sindhi whispered. The tendrils sent their visionary fragments coursing through his brain. The impression of sunlight was so intense that he blinked, shading his eyes. He smiled as he stood and waited for Kalaman to welcome him. His bare feet left no impression upon the white sand he felt burning beneath his soles.
Come to me,
Kalaman beckoned. Sindhi nodded and crossed to where Kalaman and Ratnayaka were tangled in the hammock. Without speaking, Kalaman slid from the fragile-seeming web. Ratnayaka followed, filaments from the canopy brushing against his face and chest and leaving a tracery of blood upon his arms. Kalaman embraced his brothers. The three of them sank to the floor, Sindhi between the other two.
Kalaman sighed, feeling Sindhi’s hands upon his thighs. It should not have been like this, with only the three of them savoring each other. He should have summoned all of his brothers, the seventeen of them who had survived the rebellion and then Kalaman’s depredations. One by one all the rest had been chosen, and shared, until only these few were left, much stronger than they had been before. But always Kalaman was the strongest, Kalaman was the first; Kalaman was the Chosen of the Oracle. It was an honor for Sindhi to have been summoned like this, a greater honor in a way since there were only three of them.
Kalaman drew away from the other two, his eyes narrowed, and after a moment Ratnayaka drew back as well. Sindhi knelt between his brothers with head bowed. For an instant, the shimmering impression of sand and lapping waves that surrounded them looked less solid, like a poorly transmitted ’file image; but then the likeness of a tropical beach grew strong once more, its heat and dampness seeping into their veins, though none of them cast a shadow. Sindhi laughed, his filed teeth flashing. His hair was very long and black, with a reddish, almost violet tinge. He wore it pulled through a small copper ring atop his skull. Ratnayaka sat behind him, nearly straddling him, and took the end of Sindhi’s hair and pulled gently until Sindhi’s neck arched. Beside them Kalaman watched. Without moving, he reached beneath the hammock, until his hand found the little raised panel there. His fingers brushed across the rows of tiny buttons, finally stopped when they touched one that felt more worn than the rest. He pressed it gently. A moment later a lenitive essence filled the air, an invisible mist that would stimulate neural centers in their minds to release a flood of opiates that would dull any pain. Kalaman took a few shallow breaths and focused on keeping the endorphins from clouding his will. Across from him Ratnayaka did the same. But Sindhi only shut his eyes. His blood traced a pulse point like a fluttering petal on his throat as he turned to Kalaman, his chin tilted so that the number of his birth-cluster could be seen tattooed there. Cluster 401: a brood whose members were as acquiescent as puppies.
“Thank you, O my brother,” Kalaman whispered as he leaned over Sindhi. With one hand he touched the
kris
within its worn leather sheath. Sindhi’s eyes fluttered open. He gazed up at Kalaman fearlessly and smiled.
“My brother,” he whispered, as Kalaman took his head between his huge hands. Kalaman drew Sindhi’s face toward him, as though he would hug it to his breast. Across from him Ratnayaka watched, his single eye slitted to an ebony tear.
Silently, Kalaman slid the
kris
from its scabbard. It was not the proper instrument for the harrowing. Its curved blade gave it an ungainly balance. But it would do; had done, many times before.
He held the
kris
up. It glowed turquoise, reflecting the false sea lapping nearby. Long ago there had been those among their Ascendant Masters who harrowed their own people as Kalaman had his brothers. The Oracle had told him about them. He had even shown Kalaman cinemafiles of their rites, simulated of course on film, but stirring nonetheless. Kalaman had been entranced: such magnificent people, with their stone pyramids and feathered capes! Since the insurrection Kalaman had read of them in talking books, and seen ’files of their artifacts, among them knives of turquoise stone, no clumsier than his sword. He pressed its tip against Sindhi’s skull, at the soft spot where maxilla and mandible joined beneath his temple. Sindhi grimaced as the point of the weapon punctured his skin. Sweat welled from the corners of his eyes, the ligaments of his face strained until they assumed the same grinning rictus they would show in death. Before fear could halt him, Kalaman drew the
kris
from jaw to jaw, slicing through Sindhi’s lips and cheeks and then running the blade across the back of his neck where Ratnayaka still held the hair in a taut black sheaf. Blood poured down Sindhi’s jaw, like the yolk from a cracked egg. More blood pattered to the floor, giving the lie to the sun-bleached sand. Kalaman set his hands upon the top of Sindhi’s skull.
“O my brother!” he cried, and felt Sindhi’s will yielding to his, a clear untrammeled ecstasy bubbling from beneath the pain. Kalaman tightened his grip, his hands trembling from the effort, until he could feel the plates of Sindhi’s skull begin to separate between his fingers. And still Sindhi smiled at his brother, his lips drawn back now to show blood-filled gums above his filed teeth, his ebony eyes bulging. Across from him Kalaman could hear Ratnayaka’s calm breathing and smell the sandalwood essence he wore mingling with the smell of the sea, fainter now as the coppery scent of blood filled the air.
“Sindhi.”
Kalaman’s heavy eyelids fluttered shut for a moment as he whispered his brother’s name for the last time. Their Ascendant Masters would have done it differently. They would have invoked a god, gods—finned Chac-Xib-Chac with his ax, the gaping maw of Xibalba, and the jawless head of Tlaloc. But the energumens did not believe in gods. They
were
gods. Soon those upon the Element would learn to worship them.
The
kris
fell, clattering loudly on the tiled floor that lay beneath the hazy vision of golden sand. Kalaman drew his hands to his breast, blood flecking his face with deeper red. He could feel Ratnayaka watching him, that single eye like an awl boring through his forehead.
Now!
he thought.
Quickly, so that no pain would have the chance to pierce the shield of opiates and mindlessness slipping over the brother in his arms, Kalaman cracked Sindhi’s skull open. The plates of bone and skin he moved apart as though prying the meat from a nut.
And there it was, their jewel, pale gray and pink like a stony coral, and like a coral trembling ever so slightly, as though in an ocean current. It was surprisingly bloodless, striated here and there where Kalaman’s fingers left ruddy smears, but heavy, much heavier than the brains of their masters had been. He lifted it gently, another medusa tethered by medulla and vertebrae to its stony shadow, and let Sindhi’s lifeless body fall away.
Kalaman!
—
The name hung in the air, a whisper, the sound of a serpent flicking across the sands. Then only silence, as Kalaman and Ratnayaka fed.
“W
ENDY. WE ARE WAKING
now….”
There is a face in the darkness above me. At first I cannot see whose it is, but I am certain it is Justice, my beloved Justice. I start to cry out for joy; but then somehow it comes back to me that Justice is dead, and that this must be that other Boy, the godling whose eyes followed me through dreams to my waking life, and seemingly beyond. And so I reach for
him,
thinking that somehow he knows where Justice lies now; but before my hands touch his, he is gone. As surely as Justice is dead, so is that other one, to me at least. Only in dreams now will he come to me, as he comes to all of us soon enough. My fingers graze the icy walls of the crude shelter where we have taken shelter, and weeping I start to wakefulness.
Miss Scarlet told me once of a man who said, “I never knew that grief felt so much like fear.” He wrote those words more than six hundred years ago. I wonder sometimes if grief itself has changed as the world has; if this man, were he alive today, would recognize grief, or fear, or love, any more than he would recognize the geneslaves for their humanity, or myself for whatever it is I am, for what I have become.
Almost nine months have passed since Justice died. It is only now, in the unearthly calm and darkness of this somber place, that I have found the strength or the desire to set down what has happened to me in that time. Three seasons have passed since then; perhaps the last bitter seasons the world will know. From Winterlong to a cheerless spring, and thence to summer and the verge of autumn: but an autumn that will bring no harvest to the world, no reapers save only that immense fiery scythe that is poised above us in the violet sky. I do not know if anyone will ever hear these words, or understand them; if anyone will remember me, Wendy Wanders, or understand why it is that I am compelled to leave my history here, when so many others have chosen silence or death. But I have survived madness and the prison of my own mind at HEL, rape and radiant ecstasy in the shadow of the Engulfed Cathedral. I will speak now, and tell of what befell myself and my friends after the carnage of the feast of Winterlong, and of those new terrors that have brought us here where the world waits to end.
The uncanny night of Winterlong gave over to a quick dawn, and then a long and cheerless winter’s day. For several hours we had walked in silence. Behind us Saint Alaban’s Hill fell into darkness, although we could still mark where flames touched the bright winter sky with red and black. That strange rapture that had overtaken me in the shadow of the Engulfed Cathedral stayed with me a long while. About us winter birds chirped—chickadees, juncos, cardinals igniting in fir trees—and sunlight glittered where ice had locked the empty branches of birch and oak. In my arms I carried Miss Scarlet, the talking chimpanzee who had been my friend and guide during the months since I had fled the Human Engineering Laboratory. From her slender black fingers trailed the ruined streamers of her festival finery. Every now and then I heard her whisper something—bits of verse, tag ends of her speech as Medea, the names of companions we had left dead in the City of Trees—but to me she said nothing. At my side strode the Zoologist Jane Alopex—brave Jane!—who had left behind her beloved animal charges, pacing within their ancient prisons in the shadow of Saint Alaban’s Hill. She was stooped with fatigue; her tall figure cast a longer shadow upon the frozen ground, and her straight brown hair was matted and stuck with twigs and dirt. She still fingered the pistol with which she had slain the Mad Aviator, and lifted her broad ruddy face to the cold sun as though its phantom warmth had brought that strange glow to her eyes; but I knew it was not so. We were enchanted, enthralled by the vision of a dark god dethroned back there upon Saint Alaban’s Hill; but even such wonders wither before freezing cold and hunger and grief.
It was Jane who spoke first.
“Wendy. Look.”
She took my arm and pointed behind us. In the near distance rose several hills, here and there streaked where light snow had gathered in dells and ravines. From the dark blur of trees that was the Narrow Forest rose the stained gray finger of the Obelisk, and behind it on Library Hill glinted the Capitol’s dome. Nearer to us was Saint Alaban’s Hill. In the fine clear light of morning the Cathedral seemed a stain upon it, and the smoke rising from its burning smutted the few clouds to umber.