We ran.
This was not the way I had envisioned returning down this hill. I had not envisioned returning down this hill. But if I had, it would never have occurred to me that it might be like this: with some kind of Sith Lord wielding unnameable and inconceivable magicks at my back, a badly-injured snake-woman at my side, the fading screams of one Pepin the Great and Terrible the only suggestion that we're putting any distance at all between us and unquestionable dread.
I was right about one thing, though. There is no hope that we will survive these mountains.
My foot splashes into the shallow river, slips on a dead man's armor. I'm going down. I don't fight it. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter. Not against - not against that.
Can't run anymore. Can't breathe. Can't—
Peitho catches me by the collar of my jacket and carries me across the river. She sets me down – but doesn't slow – just enough that my feet will drag if I do not run.
We run some more. Uphill, now.
I don't so much hear that Pepin has stopped screaming – I can't hear anything but my own labored breathing, the thuds of my hands and feet and the Rod as I am occasionally reduced to all fours before Peitho slows to drag me upright again and again and again and the muffled woman's laughter, chanting, Run, little rabbit. Run! in my mind – as I do sense that Pepin is forever silence once the road is again in sight.
We stop running, eventually, at its side. Immediately, I turn, every muscle, every fiber of my being, screaming at me that one more step and we will surely die, and look down the hill into that accursed valley. And do not see a black-robed form descending into it.
“They could – they could be anywhere,” I pant.
Peitho looks at me. “Why do you call him they? Because of their convention of referring to themselves as we?” I regard her to try to answer, and see the thought hit her face like a fly between the eyes. “Did you know that priest was capable of....”
Her eyes drift to the horizon we'd fled, evidently as unable to come up with words to describe what had happened and might still be happening out there as I.
“I don't think—“
“Shut up, Robert.”
Her tone is sharp, but before I can more than open my mouth to spit some invective at her – I hear it too.
Hooves. And a carriage.
Racing east.
Toward us.
That couldn't be—
It is.
Tedoro rounds a bend in the road, and I'll be damned.
Then he's screeching to a halt. If that's how you can describe two horses suddenly doing everything within their capability to stop the careening forward momentum of a two-person carriage while not also being crushed beneath it or throwing Tedoro from his seat. Somehow they manage it right in front of Peitho and me, like they'd planned it - or this all was scripted.
I hear a serpent's hissing chuckle and I want very much to have a word with Wadjet. But now is not the time.
“Don't just stand there with your damn jaws around your damn ankles!” Tedoro shouts, waving his arm. “I don't know what kind of trouble your two are in, but—“
Peitho is running, completely naked, toward him. I find myself marveling at her ass, for once not for my own sake, but it's mere presence. That wasn't there a second ago – was it?
Then I see the gaping wound in her side, the way she pins her arm to it, and the river of blood flowing down her leg.
I'm running. The driver is yelling. I suddenly can't remember his name, and I can't tell what he's saying – and I don't know that I care. I'm deafened and stupefied by all the alarms screaming in my own mind and body. Blinded to anything but the hot lifesblood slickening Peitho's beautiful skin.
Skin that's a lie.
The next thing I know, I'm in the carriage, and we're escaping these mountains in a two-horsepower cart.
We rock and pitch and I'm nearly thrown out the door. Then I'm on my knees in the floor before Peitho – as much because I mean to be as because that's what was happening either way. Managing to balance myself so that I'm not touching her, I meet Peitho's eyes.
They're too wide, showing too much of the white. She's scared. Maybe fore the first time in her life.
“It hurts... worse... like this... than I... anticipated... it would,” Peitho efforts through gritted teeth.
I realize I am and have been holding my breath and her gaze – The emeralds of her eyes are dim. Too dim – for too long. I make myself look at her side.
Her arm is pinned to it, the other hand doing as much to hold her insides inside as it is stymieing the gouts of blood her heart is pumping into the carriage floor. That is to say very little.
She's been hacked nearly in half.
She's going to die.
And I can't do—
“Robert... don't just.... Give me the Rod.” Peitho reaches for it.
I recoil from her, clutching the artifact to my chest. I hear her sighed, pained, frustrated impatience with me.
She's going to die.
W – Well, fool man, don't just let her die.
I look down at the serpent. “You don't have to give me to her to save her,” it says - with its little snake mouth – not into my mind.
And I know that I have lost my mind.
And that no one has to know if I just let Peitho die right now and disappear with the Rod.
L – I will know, fool boy. Bring my daughter home to me safe, or I will personally see to it that you spend Eternity in unthinkable agony.
S – I'm already in unthinkable agony.
But my hands reach out the Rod to Peitho. I watch as she moves her hand and arm limply from her side – as her head lolls on her neck one way and her insides slide out the other. I touch her with it. Then I can only watch, helpless and astonished as the little snake slithers from the Rod to the wound.
She lies still across Peitho's belly.
A pregnant moment later and – I would say I don't believe my eyes, but that would be a lie and we're both tired of my using the trope, so – she's fine. Peitho is suddenly whole and evidently hale.
A miracle.
The snake lifts its head as she makes her way back to her perch.
“Yes. A miracle.”
Or an illusion.
She regards me a moment, then dips her head in silent and uncharacteristic acquiescence. “If you like.”
Then she's climbing back onto the Rod in a way that will look like a film played backward in 1000 years – and I will think of her and this moment the first time I see it.
I look at Peitho. She's breathing, evidently deep asleep.
“She is well. She will need to rest. And you—“
What of me? I'm frowning at the Rod, my eyes having already darted to the wall of the carriage between me and the driver and decided to keep this one in my head – pulling myself onto my bench.
“You should rest as well.”
I blink at the word, rest. I am neither soul-weary, nor aching anywhere in my body, I realize, more than a little astonished. It's like we never got out of the carriage.
What is happening with me?
“I healed you as well.” The serpent looks at me, head tilted, perplexed. “You did not think I would— Robert.” Her tone transmutes instantly to I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. “When was the last time you did anything that strenuous in your life? And if you say the last time you fucked Peitho, I'll drop you dead right where you sit.”
If I had been thinking to say that, I swallow the apple suddenly in my throat instead.
“I am disappointed you could not feel that I was replenishing your energy reserves as you ran, that you did not sense that I cleansed your muscles of all their aches and pains as you sat here. You cannot think—“ She laughs, then – the bitter laugh of the mother once again, habitually and forever, taken for granted. Then the little serpent's face hardens. “You accepted my help.”
Yes, I agree, sitting up straight, squaring my shoulders, and looking archly down at the Rod, held like I'm strangling it between my knees. I did. And you don't think you're done, do you?
She recoils from me, mouth opening with a gasp.
Don't even, I think, tightening my grasp on the Rod and really feeling the jade sinews of the serpent for the first time. So lifelike.
She settles back into a mocking position close to where she is supposed to be, eyes narrowed.
You are a tool – and you're in my hands, now. Not the other way around.
If a serpent can cross its arms and slump its shoulders, this one does, even going so far as to cast her face to the side in a portrait of petulance.
I thought you were 50,000 years old. Haven't you outgrown this behavior by now?
She looks at me with only her one eye and I can see therein the smirk she conceals in the occulted cheek. “Older than that, actually.”
That's impossible.
“Robert—“
M – Nothing is impossible, my son. Only improbable.
“Hasn't anyone ever told you it's impolite to discuss with a woman her age?”
You're just fucking with my head.
I realize my knuckles are white and my forearms are starting to shake – refusing the urge either to smash the Rod into the floor until one of the two is shattered or to hold my head in my hands and scream.
R – All of this has been to fuck with your head
I – All of it.
“Robert—“
S – No. I'm done. You say it's against your Rules to talk to me at all, and here you are in my hand, my head. No doubt I look like a madman for talking to a damn gemstone snake that was never alive.
W – Don't be so sure about never.
I glare stupidly at the Rod. Which one of them is which? Does she live literally in my head and on this Rod? Am I imagining this snake talking to me? What has she done to me?
If you weren't in my hands right now, I could convince myself none of this happened.
That I didn't kill a man with a boy's face.
The realization of what I'd done hits me like a sucker punch. Suddenly my legs and arms are too heavy.
The Rod hits the wood floor.
My hands are suddenly shaking and tears wildly overflow my vision.
What is happening with me?
I killed a man.
L – Oh, stop this. You didn't kill a man.
I killed a boy.
L – You killed a monster. Stop it.
I jerk, startled, like I'd been slapped across the face; but manage not to cry out. I put my hand to my cheek and the skin is hot and stings.
I look at Peitho's sleeping body - half expecting Lamiya to have possessed it again - but it's not her I'm frowning at.
You. Lamiya. How are you—?
L – Magick, Robert. You're really going to need to adapt to this quickly. The time remaining to you is finite, now that you have my Rod.
What do you know?
L – Everything. Nothing is what I'm telling you. You do not have time to feel guilt or anything else for killed that... thing. It is no longer human – freely. Of its own volition.
S – I wonder about that.
L – Robert, there is—
I don't know how, exactly, but I push Lamiya all the way out of my mind. Bending slowly to pick the Rod of Wadjet off the floor, I'm not sure what I'm thinking, but there is the tell-tale pressure behind my forehead, like a sinus infection or an elusive orgasm, of a hunch – a knowing I don't know I know yet.
I don't know that I've described this feeling to you in this incarnation. I know that V got frustrated with me during our first pass through the story because that – the pressure behind the eyes, in the sinuses, is how I described to him originally what all of this experience was like – all these thoughts, all these emotions, all the conversations had with voices in my mind – they were all so much pressure behind my eyes. None of it feels real. Maybe none of it is real. Maybe that pressure is the only thing that is real and it's the only sensation that proves I'm actually alive.
I don't know.
We trained ourselves not to talk about it. But here— Here it's the only thing that makes sense.
W – What the Hell was that for?
What is Metus?
W – You have seen what the Metus is.
Don't do that.
W – Do what?
Do not. I am in control, now. You have to do as I say.
W – Do I, now?
Maybe you don't. I'll admit I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with this thing. But I also know you want something from me. And that gives me leverage. Enough leverage that if you don't do as I say and behave in a way I like, things could go very wrong for you, indeed.
W – You know what I want. I want you to return—
No. I don't know what you want. Lamiya wants that. Matere wants that. You, you want something else. Something much more subtil, by dimensions I can only pretend to understand. You need me to do something else. Maybe it lines up with taking you – taking this Rod – I'm not sure of the difference or whether the difference matters— Maybe you do want me to do that. Maybe that gets you everything else you want. But you want significantly more from me than for me to just obey.
Wadjet says nothing. The serpent is stone, once more.
I sigh.
It is in your best interests to tell me what I want to know.
W – Is it, fool man? What do you know of my “interests”? You just admitted to not even knowing what I want! What can you know of in what I am interested?
Admittedly nothing. But if you want me to keep you out of Metus's hands – to say nothing of the bottom of the ocean—
W – You would not dare.
I would. And you know it.
You would, she declares like she believed otherwise a moment before. Why?
What difference to me how you are lost once more forever from the world when I am through with you?
W – You have become just like your father.
I don't even know who my father really is. But if you mean the Yaldabaoth— I'd been bluffing, but I don't like that Wadjet doesn't react in any perceptible way. Maybe I am. And maybe he's been right to deal so roughly with you these last 50,000 years.
W – You don't know what you are saying.
And you are not a victim.
The serpent on the Rod of Wadjet loudly sniffs her disapproval of my tone and my word choice. Then Wadjet changes the subject.
You cannot reason with her. She is ruined.
I don't know who she's talking about. But I can guess. You can't know that.
W – The thing about me, Fulcrum of Fate, is that I can. It is what I am, what I do – what I was meant to do. It is why I exist. Why I have always existed and why I will always exist.
Then show me.
W – You won't believe, will you? No counsel is good enough for you, is it? You must learn for yourself. I don't respond. I do frown. I don't like to hear this; I like less knowing it's true. That is the longest, loneliest route up the Mountain, my Son. Are you sure this is the way you would take?
I look into the serpent's beady, onyx eyes, working my lips with the questions I won't allow to fill my mind.
Does she call me her son literally or metaphorically, and does it matter?
You are... Chaos, right?
The serpent nods her head. “In a manner of speaking, yes. She and I are of one mind, if not one being.”
My mind feels ripped in half when she does this – speaks inside and outside my skull – like my faceplate and eyes are being removed from the rest of my head.
Metus said that. That it and their angel were one mind, one being.
W – Indeed. And they are. Their unity is what makes them Metus.
I see. Can you... not keep doing that?
The serpent tilts its head.
W – You do not see. But you do not need to if you wish to see – to make your choice.
What the hell does that mean?
What choice?
W – The Fate of the Human Being, Fulcrum of the Human Fate. Now – close your eyes.
I do as I am told.
And I am somewhere I do not know.
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