Episode Seven: Venice
Part Six: Near Death Experiences
I open my eyes. It's dark. Except... there's a light. Ahead of me. Distant. As distant as a star. At the end of a long tunnel.
I struggle to my feet, stepping forward into the tunnel.
I look down at myself, my hands. I appear to my own eye translucent. Only semicorporeal. I am nude. A silver cord dangles limply from my navel. My eyes follow it to the blackness of the curved tunnel floor, where it snakes along behind me. Across the floor in long, S loops.
It terminates at my feet.
I lie, slumped at the side of the bed, my head tilted back rather than forward.
I watch myself. I'm still. Peitho stirs on the bed. A line of something runs out of my mouth and down my throat. It's frothy. I pull on the cord, and it comes, as lifeless as my body. For a moment, I consider yanking it out of me entirely, but do not.
It is strange.
I know what has happened.
A tunnel to start it all, and a tunnel to finish it.
In that life I discard so easily by turning toward the light and beginning to walk, I was trained in death. I was trained to send the dead, both the recent and lingering, into this Light. I didn't believe in it. When Plato and Plotinus discuss the Light as an a priori fact of Existence, I did not believe. What does that belief matter now?
I could almost laugh. There is a joy, a bliss – a euphoria – in every step forward, like coming home. To the True Home of my Soul. It's like I've been wearing clothing made of stinging wasps. Liberation from the body is freedom from all that pain, present, past, and potential.
I am free.
I emerge into a new darkness. All around me is a rocky, mountainous waste. A cavern, I realize. Everything either is shades of red and black, or the source of the near-dark cast everything in them. Looking into the distance, I see where the next-to-no light is sourced. There is a cliff, ahead. Not far. A moving yellow light from far below illuminates a figure I know immediately in a miasmal glow, like sulfur smoke.
“You didn't come this far just to stop because you see me, did you?” The Yaldabaoth calls to me, his voice as crips and conversational as though we were standing mere feet apart. Because, I realize, we are.
He stands at the edge of the precipice, looking over with his arms crossed behind his back. The yellow and red light dance in oranges like flames, reflected in his obsidian features. His black, leathery wings are gathered behind his back.
“Well?” he asks, rolling his eyes to look at me. “You wished to come here. Are you not going to look?”
I frown at him.
I do not trust this creature – this Being. Why is he here? Where are my relatives? Where are the tearful reunions? I died, and all I got was a chance to be mocked by the Creator of the Material Universe. What a gyp.
Rolling my eyes, I step toward the edge, believing that I know where we are and expecting to find his Pit below. What I see instead is... not that.
We are atop a high mountain right which overlooks a sort of river valley miles below us. The river is made of fire. Lava flows like water, dividing the plain in two. One our side, the ridge on which we stand is split in a narrow canyon.
A steady stream of naked, semitranslucent human people like me emerges from this canyon, tward the river, wehre their paths diverge toward an infinite expanse of infinite boatmen negotiating infinite fares across the fire. The other side is an infinite expanse of lines of people witing to be judged by infinite judges. Many of them I recognize from Afterlife traditions I studied while I was alive.
“Look at them. Desperate to get across only to wait an eternity to be told what they already know: If they were Good, they wouldn't be here. There is no Good Enough. To try is to fail. There is only what you do.”
“And what of do not?” I ask, watching Anubis watch as a man reaches into his chest, pulls out his own still-beating heart, and places it on the empty scale before him. Ma'at observes her feather rise and lowers her eyes in sadness.
Another man listens while a man with great white wings in white robes and with a golden circlet floating above his head reads from a lectern. For as long as I watch, those pearly gates never open. Not once.
One by one, each soul is rejected. And one by one they turn and walk into the river of lava, where they are swept away in immolative agony.
“When will you learn that there is no do not?” The Yaldabaoth turns fully to face me, crossing his arms over his chest. He has two great curved black horns jutting out of his brow. “Every choice is a choice. There can be no void in that place. It's like— Fate, the Weave, Fulcrum, Child – “ His voice is suddenly patient – “is like water. Any space in it which you do not occupy while be filled – because it must – by anything. If you will not make a choice, someone will.”
“I understand, I think, this place.” I say. “But why are the dead sent into the river? What does that mean?”
“The river? You do not understand? Do you expect a Hell? A prison? Some place where their souls are locked away for eternal punishment? No. Nothing like that. Well. That's a lie, isn't it? What greater punishment for existing at all is there than getting all the way to the end, hearing that you will never be good enough, and being sent back to start over?”
I'm looking out over the infinity of the dead. I am wrung, rent, with sorrow for them.
“Have all of these people really been so bad that they need to be punished? Were they really so wicked in life that the fitting reward is to make them live lifes of torment?” I look at the Yaldabaoth. “Am I really meant to be Abraham in this moment? Are you that same God to whom he said, 'Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?'”
Regarding me, the Yaldabaoth arches an eyebrow. “How many times across the eons have you and I had this argument? How many times must we?” He turns and sweeps his hand along the line of the river. “Look at them. None of those Human Souls believes that it will not be sent back to the Fire. All of them know they will be reborn. They line up, they wait their eternity, for a single moment, barely even that, in the Material world we have made for them.”
“Is there really no escape? Not even in death? Am I doomed to live this life for eternity?”
The Yaldabaoth looks over this Valley of Death the same way an overseer watches over those under his charge, nodding to himself from time to time as if confirming that everything is as it should be – as it has always been and will always be.
“Watch them walk into the fire. There is no fear. There is pain. There is agony. But there is no fear. Fear is a mortal emotion. There is, for them, only joy. You....” He sighs a little through his nose, half-closes his eyes, and turns his head to meet my gaze. “You are different. This is not what you would have found if you had made it to the end of the tunnel – this vantage from which you currently see The End. If I had not brought you here. If you were Human, you would have been just like them. You would have seen your ferryman, then your judge. You would not have known there are others. This place would seem an eternity to you. And by the time you were sent back to the Fire, you, too, would run, headlong and glad, into it – knowing full well that you will someday return to this place, this eternity, once more – and for that you would be glad as well.”
By the end of this once more, he is looking back out over the Valley.
“What do you mean, if I were human?”
His body moves as though caught by a sudden chuckle, a single spasm of the diaphram, but there is no sound. He crosses his arms behind his back, beneath his leathery wings.
“You fathom too little of this place – too little of too little. You miscomprehend so much which I cannot teach. It is better to let this discussion die on the vine.”
“What?” I hear the exasperation, the indignation, in my voice, and I am not the least bit embarrassed or anything else to be reacting this way to a god. “No! Why did you bring me here, if not to teach me?”
The Yaldabaoth turns his gaze on me, and his face is that of the furnace which forged reality – terrible in its awesome wrath and rage. Then it is smooth, emotionless – black glass once more. And aimed out over its Domain.
“I am not without compassion. I can not let you die any more than I can answer your idiot questions. You are my son, after all.”
He says this last from the corner of his mouth. His face remains impassive. His eyes do not even flick to gauge my reaction.
My reaction is violent. My whole being is filled with a suddent torrent, an unspeakable combination of horror and terror. The very idea is repellant to me, repugnant and disagreeable in the highest order.
“How can that be true in any sense but the metaphorical?” I began asking with a sort of gasp, but by the end, I am spitting with all the vitriol I can muster. “I have a father. A man of flesh and blood. I am the same sort of accident of destiny as any one of those souls down there.”
The Yaldabaoth's face cracks in a concealed smile, the sort of face a father makes to a child that has said something perhaps stupid, but who also knows the child will figure it out on their own someday.
“My compassion for them is not a metaphor. Those are my Judges, down there, sending them back to their joy.”
“You have crafted for them a Hell!” I exclaim. “How can you call dooming them to live an relive railed lives for eternity compassion? What sort of father damns his children to forever never be good enough?”
Considering me from the corner of his eye, he twists his mouth. “It is not that simple. Life is... the greatest privilege there is for beings such as we: Many gave given evertyhing to live and die as Human Souls. It is one thing to be perfection, at one with the All – and another to experience it as it is, from an imperfect perspective.”
He looks at me, and somehow I know just what to say.
“Are you not at one with The All, then?”
He looks away, his face souring.
“To be human, to be fully alive, is a process of purification.” He gestures to the river. “To these souls, they are not damned to return to live. They are encouraged – hopeful. Each trip through the Fire is meant to burn away the impurity which caused them to deviate from the Source – the All – in the first place. This deviation is not in itself an offense, but it is its own punishment. Life is the consequence to live. You know this. I know you do. You caused it to come into the minds of those who taught it in the Realm of the Living that you might remember it when we gave you Life.”
I did know these things. The Yaldabaoth speaks the Truth. But it's more than that.
Syntactically, I did know these things – as in I knew them in life. But, standing here, in death, in this naked, semi-translucent, incorporeal body-thing that looks so much to me like the body I wore just moments before I stepped into that tunnel and found myself here – and yet it is as unfamiliar to me as wearing someone else's skin. But I also do know these things. And others. Things I don't know how I know, but which I know that I do. Impressions, distant and cloudy, but if I reached for them....
I don't like it.
I don't like any of this.
“Why have you brought me here?” I demand to know. “Was it to show me this? Was it to tell me it's Not My Time?”
“I did not bring you here.” The Yaldabaoth gestures to indicate the whole of this Place. “You did that. You are the one who wished for and was granted Death. If only a taste.”
Suddenly we're in a narrow canyone, more a crevice, really. Rock walls shoot miles above me to either side. There is not enough room for the two of us abreast, here.
“Do you want to see what's on the Other Side?”
He is speaking from ahead. I look to where the canyon opens to reveal a bank of the river of fire. A black-robed skeleton stands beside a skeletal horse. The Ankou, carriageman of Death to my people.
I don't.
But seeing the Ankou makes me think of something I do want to see.
“What is Metus?” I ask it.
The Ankou tilts its head as though confused.
“This place is like the Void, isn't it? You brought me here to teach me to be in love with life, right? Then answer me. You want me to choose? Then show me what I want to see.”
The Ankou shakes its head. The disappointment on its face is profound, for how featureless it is.
“Has no one told you to be careful what you wish for?”
“I want to know what he really is. What I'm dealing with.”
“You aren't always better off for learning secrets not meant for you.” It sighs, a rattly sound of wind through bone. I want to roll my eyes. A skeleton can't talk, let alone sigh. “What am I supposed to do now, Fulcrum? I'm not allowed to interfere. But showing you isn't helping. It's hurting.”
Before I can change my mind and ask something less... stressful to a god – something easy, like how he wants me to decide and to what end – I am falling. And the Yaldabaoth is gone.
Everything is blackness.
I am falling backward, my arms loose at my side, legs relaxed. As I'm getting used to the sensation, a shape casts a shadow in the dark above me. It's circling around, flapping slowly like a bird soaring a thermal, but decidedly rectangular in shape, with defined lines and corners. And then I get a good look at it – because it is swooping right for me. It's a book. A colossal book, its pages at least six pages as tall as I am, and thicker than I am tall.
It's diving for me like a bird of prey. The covers slam together, only just missing smashing me between them, and it flies away. On its spine is a title I recognize: Enneads.
And now there's a flock of them. Books flying all around me, forming a sort of shifting, amorphous vertical shaft down which I am falling. Every once in a while they strike for me, but I am always able to pull my hand or foot out of the way or to twist or contort just enough, just in time. Their covers bear names like Plato and Plotinus, chapters from their works – and, of course, many others I either do not immediately recognize, or which do not resonate quite so loudly with whatever this frequency this aspect of my mind or my soul or my being or my whatever – with me – to the same degree.
I hear talking.
Indistinct, more like whispering. In voices I know without being able to identify – voices as nondescript and accentless as they are certainly false. I can't make out the words. Or is it the language I can't understand? There is only one, at first, then more. It isn't until they are talking over one another, the cadences and rhythms of their voices disonant and cacophonic, that I understand they are chanting.
The books have stopped swooping for me.
I'm buffeted by some sort of wind and turned ninety degrees, so that for all intents and purposes I am upright. Falling still, but my feet are beneath me now. Looking around at this lightless place, I am amazed by what I see next:
A man in a black robe with a black-hole hood in ascending toward me. He is suspended in the dark on a disc of light – a magic circle of dissying complexity, the symbols shining light and color like stained glass. I pass him by, then another. And another. And another. Seven in all I pass this way, each one floating on a magic circle of increasing complexity and power. All of them are chanting in their unknown tongues, the sounds deafening and maddening as they compete to fill this place.
I land, gently, descending as though I were suspended by a string, not freely falling, my toes reaching to find purchase on a blindingly complex magic circle.
Two men stand before me, each apparently oblivious to my presence. I know this because they have their backs to me. They stand with their shoulders close together, looking into something I cannot see and which I dare not approach to try. I can remember the last time I saw these nine men. I can guess who at least one of these two is – and I remember how he somehow knew I was watching last time.
The first voice to speak, I do not know. The second, I do – despite their identical indeterminateness – by the power in it.
“Your Metus is a failure.”
“No. The Metus will not fail.”
“It already has. You forget when I am from. The Rod does not exist as you plan in my time. None of this amounts to anything, and your name is forgotten.”
“This cannot be. The Metus will not fail.”
“Then your Pepin the Great. He may as well not exist.”
“The Plain will not fail. The Fulcrum will be dissuaded and the Daughter will—“
“The Thief will betray him and then you, for your betrayal – of her.”
“Doubtless. But I can control them. Mine is the will of a god.”
“Your god is a liar.”
And I'm falling again. Into dark. But not noplace. I can feel and smell and taste stone – it's all around me. Stone and silence and—“
Suddenly there's a light. It is no larger than the prick of a pin, a hole in the tapestry of the dark, but a room is revealed. It is not large – big enough to house at its center a mansized rectangle of stone carved from the rock and for people to surround it. The whole space, I realize, is carved from the rock.
A hooded being stands before the stone – what, altar? Its robes are black, and hanging from its shoulders is a black chasuble inlayed with a white inverted cross. No eerie metal crucifix hangs from its neck, however.
“Metus,” booms the voice, filled with a power that makes it almost hurt to hear, “I say to thee, rise.”
A moment later and a seam, previously invisible in the stone slab, appears. That's no altar. That's a sarcophagus. And it's opening from the inside!
As a single piece, the lid shifts to the side. When it tilts toward the floor, its slopes and slides down until it comes to rest, like an invisible pair of ginger hands are being careful not to make too much – nay, any – noise.
When Metus sits up out of the flesh-eating stone, I am almost shocked to see him without his hood. Then horrified to recognize him enough to know that many of the burns marring his already marred head and face are new.
“Grand Magus,” he says in his emotionless monotone. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“You are healing. It is good. Do not let failure become a habit and you not need to be further punished.”
Metus inclines his head. “Yes, Grand Magus. Thank you, Grand Magus. We exist only to serve your will.”
“Yes. I know. I made you myself.” The Grand Magus touches Metus's face tenderly, lifting it by the chin and cradling the cheek. The touch is... fond, kind – loving. A father for his favorite daughter, of all things.
I feel a hand on my wrist.
It startles me until I remember that I'm not really here, wherever here is. I am in Venice. And I am dead. I turn to find Wadjet, as the painted Egyptian girl with the Uraeus crown. The girl's other hand holds a finger to her lips. The white holes of her eyes shine no light in the dark of this place.
The Grand Magus are frozen, like a portrait painted from life, in this embrace.
“Don't do this,” the serpent, Wadjet, says. Her voice is emphatic. “You're not ready to see this.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Do not worry yourself with the what and the why of this thing. It will not help you.”
“How not? What is he? If I understand him, I can reason with him. I can convince him—“
My words falter again as I'm falling.
I'm in a space not altogether different from that previous – except many times larger. And almost blindingly lit by a sickly green light which seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Thirteen men are arrayed in a half circle around the sarcophagus at the room's center. They stand just outside the perimeter of the most dizzyingly complex Magic Circle I have ever seen. They all wear the same costume I associate with Metus, including black-hole hoods and gleaming eerie metal crucifixes at their waists. The one at their center is taller than the others by two heads, and his hood is different from the others – jutting tall away from the back of his head as though we were wearing something like a mitre beneath it.
At the center of the room, between the men and me, atop the sarcophagus, lies a wooden crucifix. The hooded men have been chanting something in a language I do not understand – and which fills my very soul with revulsion. They sudden stop. The silence is deafening, broken only by the sound of breathing.
That's when I see her – the girl. She's young. Pretty. And naked, bound with her arms behind her on my side of the sarcophagus and facing it. She holds her head high, proud, despite the dozens of lashing wounds weeping blood all over her body. The leader emerges from his place and enters the circle, walking round behind the girl. He seizes her by the hair and pulls her to her feet. Two more of the hooded figures enter, surrounding her to either side. One of them cuts her bonds with an eerily glowing dagger nearly as long as a sword. The blade passes through the cords as though they were as insubstantial as air, and they fall, forgotten, to the floor. These two take her under her arms and lift her onto the sarcophagus, where she lies on her back.
I can see her face for a moment. If I imagine a resemblance to that blasted wreck which Metus wears on the outside of his skull, it must be my imagination alone. Her cobalt eyes are as bright and clear as glacial ice on a cloudless morning, and they are alight with joy and unafraid. She extends her arms to either side, where the two sieze them, pinning to the arms of the cross. A third and a fourth enter the circle. One of the takes her legs, pinning them to the wood. The other, I realize, is holding a mallet. He hands nails to each of the other three while the mitre-hooded leader watches on, his back to me.
This is when I start wondering what kind of ritual I'm watching.
I start screaming when the mallet is liften high over the hooded figure's head.
“There is no sense crying for her,” Wadjet says at my side. The serpent speaking from the uraeus pitiless and hard. “What will be has already been.”
We watch as she is crucified. The process is neither a quick nor a pleasant one.
The Egyptian girl at my side is impassive. I flinch, cringing and whimpering her bain with each blow of the mallet. Finally, after many minutes, the crucifix is lifted, suspended somehow, above the sarcophagus – upside down. The crucified girl, hardly a teenager if she is yet, has been silent all this time. But now she is not. The agony is too great.
“Do not look away from this,” Wadjet says as I make to do just that. “The cruelty which they employ, making their Order. Look at it. See it.” The Egyptian girl spits phlegm on the stone floor.
The hooded men are chanting again, I realize, now evenly spaced around the Circle. All of them but one.
While the girl hangs from the wood and the chanting around them builds, the Leaders draws in her flesh with a red- hot iron. When he has finished, her torso is a raw and smoking Seal of Solomon. Her agony, the screams which stop only so she can draw breath to wrack her raw throat with more, is too much. Why am I here? Why am I seeing this?
The Leader leaves the Circle.
And it erupts in flame. As though the floor had suddenly opened to reveal the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, the interior of the circle is now a blazing inferno, tongues of flame obscuring the sarcophagus at their center.
Solemnly, still chanting – different, now, but still revolting, agonizing, to my very being, the figures congregate at the edge of the circle, around the Grand Magus. If it is not my imagination, as they reach their spots, they take hold of him by the arms and robes, holding him in place. And when the last arrives, he begins to struggle and fight – enough that the other twelve men genuinely seem to be struggling to keep him from flinging himself headlong into the flames.
Suddenly, as though by an invisible hand, the inverted crucifix and the bleeding, roasting girl nailed to it rise from the sarcophagus. It turns so that the girl is facing directly at me. She is smiling, even as her hair catches fire, burning to her scalp, and her face and shoulders begin to blister. Her lips crack, bleeding, as they shape to form prayers of exultation and praise. Then to my horror and dismay, the suspended, floating crucifix, plunges into the flame.
She stops screaming, eventually – she dies.
The chanting stops. Whatever ritual or ceremony we had just watched, it is over – except for the results. The Egyptian girl watches, as impassive as the painting she is, as the flames are suddenly and entirely quenched.
Like a concerned father, and altogether at odds with what I'd just seen him put that blue-eyed girl through, the Grand Magus runs into the now-lifeless circle, frantically, his arms waving and robes flapping around his feet. I watch, dumbstruck, unable to believe what I am seeing. As though he were shocked and outraged and horrified and – well, maybe actually because he was – insane with grief, he tears at the nails in her forearms and piercing both feet, one at at time, with his bare hands.
The other hooded, cruciformed men watch, stoic.
When did they assume equidistant positions around the circle again?
The third and final nail plinks, a dull and despairing sound in the uncanny silence. The Grand Master, sobbing, his hands, I can see, bloody from newly gained wounds, takes the girl's lifeless body in his arms, holding her so that her head is draped over his shoulder, and heaving great sobs of mourning.
He face, the way she is angled on his shoulder, is facing directly at me, when her eyes open.
Their cobalt blues are now a cold and lifeless grey.
A cold and lifeless grey I know in a scarred face I know all too well.
Then it's just me and Wadjet and the dark of the Void.
“What was that?” I ask, gasping for breath I don't need and which I won't find. “Why did you show me that?”
“You asked to see it.” The girl shrugs. “Nay, child, you demanded. Now. Calm yourself. At least they didn't fuck her.”
I look at the serpent, horrified. “Who's to say they didn't before?”
“I am. The ceremony they performed.... There was no desire to destroy the girl, her mind and spirit – only to separate her soul from the body. If they wished to, there are many, many worse ways men like them could hurt a girl if they wanted to.”
“Then why all of that...?” I swallow hard, deciding I have said enough to get the answer I want. Of course, I don't swallow anything. But old habits die hard.
“To get what they needed,” is her simple answer. “To make a Iustitiarius. A Metus.”
I'm furiously scrubbing at my incorporeal face like I might scrub what I'd seen from my memory.
“Ah,” Wadjet says, as if noticing something for the first time. “You've learned to make a body for yourself here. You are learning. Good. Have you been visiting without me?” The serpent winks, flicking its tonge from its knowing smirt. The Egyptian girl mimicks the smirk, but her eyes remain empty and emotionless. Creepy. “You could manifest clothing, though. No one needs to know you wish your little, er, was that big.”
I ignore her. I have nothing to be ashamed of.
“What do you want? Are you here to tell me to stop Pepin? I already know that's what you want. I'm working on it.”
“Are you? No. You're not. You're dead. And before you were dead, you were so determined not to stop Pepin that you killed yourself like a damned idiot. You didn't even lie with Peitho first. What the hell is wrong with you? All of your posturing and pretense in an effort to get her in a vulnerable position so you could fuck her, and you kill yourself? What the fuck, Rob? You could have, you know? Stopped him. If you'd left immediately after learning of his horse. If you'd gone straight for Turin after meeting Caesar.”
Suddenly the Void is Venice, but seen from the air. Somehow I am able to both see and identify two men at the same time. One of them is me, walking out of an alley and into a building across the plaza from it. Another is a skinny man in ill-fitting rags sneaking through the opposite side of the city. I watch as that second man steals a horse – takes the reins right out of the hands of another man – and runs off with it. I've never seen anything like it. Can't imagine it actually happening. But it does. The horse runs with him. Then he's waiting for a ferry to get off the island. And I'm wandering around the city trying to trap Domitian.
“He hadn't made it off the island. Wouldn't have. You could have caught him. He knew it. That's why he ran.”
The Void changes, focusing on the man in rags, Metus, and dropping from the sky to the street, so that it is as though I am standing only a few feet from what is happening. I see myself emerge from an alley nearby. I see myself see Metus. I'm running. I tackle him before he notices me coming after him. The Rod goes flying from his gasp, landing just inches from my incorporeal feet.
Then it's all black again.
I sigh.
“What happens now?”
“Now?” The Egyptian girl is looking at me. I try not to look at the serpent. “Now, you are dead. You know what happens now. Pepin escapes with the Rod. He uses it.”
The two of us are suddenly floating high in the air above a mountain range. There is a valley below us. Three mountain passes intersect nearby. And in that valley, two armies are arranged. The army on the eastern side has the geographical advantage – they are defending a hill – and have archers. Many, many crossbowman – a rarity in those days. Marking them as northern Italians – maybe even Genoese. Even from this great height I can see the two men on horseback with the western army. I do not need to wonder who the one on the pony, a mount unfit for battle, in the pieced-together armor is.
Not only because I recognize him, I recognize this scene, but because soon we are at his side – and I recognize the rod in his grasp, the green-stone serpent winding itself up the wooden shaft.
Pepin.
The man on the warhorse in expensive armor is berating Pepin, talking to him like he is stupid. Calling him names like stupid and worthless and more. And then the western army is moving, and Wadjet and I are being pulled again toward the sky.
I watch as the arrows begin to fly. As shields are raised. As arrows thud down into them – into flesh. I see the blood, the men falling. I hear the screams – the screams of pain, the shouts of defiance and encouragement. And then the men of the western army smash into the men of the east. The collision of their shields is deafening.
Then the killing really begins.
Spears and swords bite flesh. Men fall. Men are trampled. Men die.
And then, for a moment, everything stops.
There is an explosion of stillness. I see it, the hemispherical shockwave, like a dome of force rippling through reality. I feel it, the energy of it.
Then I see it. Everything in that mountain valley is still. Every man. Every horse. Every living creature lies, unmoving, on the ground. Unalive.
“This is what it feels like,” Wadjet says beside me, as we set down on a distant ridge, beside a road, the valley hidden between two mountain slopes which dominate the scene before me, one close, one far, “for a great number of lives to be suddenly ripped out of the Weave.”
Her voice suggests she's teaching me how to work a loom, and this is my first day on the job. Her face is another story. Tears freely run down the Egyptian girl's face, ruining the Eyes of Horus evidently drawn there.
“This thing that he will do is an abomination. It hurts me. Please, Robert. Stop him. Stop him before it is too late – before there can be more like him, who would use me to—“ She stops herself mid-sentence, regarding me with a tilting of the serpent's head. “The time has come, it seems. I lose you. Don't forget to cough.”
Before I can wonder what the Hell this means, the silver cord attached to my navel is yanked taught. I'm spun around and dragged down like a man caught around the ankle by the anchor line.
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