When I have Peitho arranged in the carriage, I approach Ted. My voice low enough that only he can hear, I let my eyes scan the apparently sleeping town as I talk.
“I can't thank you enough for what you are doing – but I don't think it's wise for us to sleep in individual rooms any longer.”
“Too expensive, signore? I could—“
“No.” My tone is too sharp; I apologize with my eyes. “And not sir. Robert is fine. Rob, even, if you like. The... the people after us— It would just be better if we were all together – with other people.” My eyebrows raised, eyes emphatically but not insanely wide, I nod slowly until he mirrors my behavior.
“I'm not sure I understand,” he says, his eyes see-sawing with the motion of his head on his neck. "The girl, she—“
I put my hand on his arm reassuringly, but really pulling myself in closer. Conspiratorially I whisper:
“She'll be fine soon enough,” I lie like I know that to be true. I wish I did. “You know where all the best inns are along our route, yeah? All the least crowded, most comfortable places to stop. Right?” Now there's recognition in his eyes. “I don't want you to bring us to those places. If you know about them, others do.”
“But, signore Robert, I pride myself on my discretion. Anyone tracking us—“
“And you should.” I snap my fingers in front of his face as though I'd just remembered something, and his eyes snap to my face. “Listen to me. The people after Peitho and me— If you know it, they know it. Do you understand what I am saying? I appreciate you for what you are, but what you are not is able to elude them. Do you hear me? They are not tracking us. They know where we are – likely they already know the way we are going before you do.”
“But how can that—“
“Don't worry about how. Asking questions only makes this more difficult for both of us. Just believe me - and maybe we'll be safe. All right? So what I need you to do—“ I step away from him, smiling and even smoothing his shirt – and I don't care what the Master would say, that is quite literally an impossible task – letting anyone observing think that I was being a jerk to my carriage driver – like a man whose beauty is suddenly sleeping probably would. I scan the town's basically-empty plaza. When I meet his eyes again, it is with deadly seriousness that I finish: “is make sure that wherever we bed down for the night is an inconvenient place to burgle and kill us – what do you say?”
The fear Ted mentioned is in his eyes, now. He says nothing, only nods – even bows his head in an imitation of a carriageman with his agitated employer. For my part, I think it's to hide the quiver of his lower lip and chin.
Good on him. This can't be an easy thing he's chosen to do.
R – Should ask him why he came back for us.
S – He'll tell me himself if he wants me to know.
Turning at a ninety degree angle that I might watch the plaza around us - I don't know why; I don't feel eyes on us; maybe I want to see them before the see me, whoever them is - I say, “Good man. If we're going to get you back to your grandbaby, Tedoro – and, whether you believe me or not, after getting Peitho safely back to Venice, you and yours are my only other priority – we're going to have to be clever, all right? And that means that you're going to have to trust me. And that I'm trusting you to be unexpected, you understand? Forget what I said about them knowing what you're going to do before you do. You're in control here. I believe that you are in fact the most discrete driver in all of Christendom – maybe even all the world. You hear what I'm saying? Get us back to Venice – get you back to your grandbaby – and I promise—“
“Now,” Ted says, climbing into his seat, “don't go making promises you can't keep.”
I wait, watching him as he gets himself situated, until he looks down at me with a wink that doesn't meet his mouth. “But I hear what you're sayin,” he finishes with a nod. “You can trust Tedoro. Let's get.”
“Just one—“ I say, holding up a finger and remembering the horses – and the Rod hidden beneath my jacket at my side. “How are the horses?” I ask, rounding in front of them.
The beasts are... horses. They look like horses, smell like horses, feel like horses. And they aren't thrilled that I'm between them and moving, but I'm not really paying attention to them. I'm touching them on the shoulder with the Rod and thinking how neat it would be if whatever injuries they've sustained on this trip were healed like Peitho's. Obviously I can't know whether they are – but neither animal seems all that upset I'm touching them. So that's better than being bitten in the face by a horse.
“Aye?” Ted asks, and I emerge from in front of his beasts. “What's that about?”
“Nothing,” I say, waving a guilty hand and barely concealing a stupid smile. "Just... worried about the horses.”
Then I climb into the carriage and Tedoro is, I imagine, glad to be done with me – because we're on our way nearly as soon as I've pulled the door closed at my back.
* * * *
Sitting down in the carriage, I rest my head against the wall. With a sigh, I close my eyes. All the weight of what is against us settles on my shoulders in a weariness not unlike if I hadn't slept properly in days uncounted. Not that I'd know anything about that. This is what irony looks like.
The carriage skips on a rock in the road. Shocks really will be something.
And a voice which does not speak to Peitho is talking to me. “You understand by now that if the Metus wants to catch you up it will simply appear where it wants?”
Opening my eyes and lowering them to the Rod, I glower at the serpent and its ironic, all-knowing grin. “Yes?” Wadjet asks, impatient.
“That is what I said to Tedoro, isn't it?” I ask with a sigh.
“That is not what you said. But you could be implying it to scare a man, a fool, and a peasant all in one being. Do you understand it to be the truth and not just a tale to scare Tedoro into compliance?”
Sighing, I close my eyes again.
S- Does she know his name is Tedoro because I do, because she is actually listening through the Rod at all times, or because she already knew?
R – You can't know the answer to that.
I – You could look for the answer to that.
“Yes,” I say with my mouth. I don't open my eyes. “I know it's the literal truth. It's impossible – but I know that nothing is impossible. Not even sucking the life out of another person to heal the wounds of your body.” I put my hands over sightless eyes, trying to block out the vision of whatever Metus had done to Pepin – trying not to imagine what it was if it wasn't what I'd said. “I don't know how it's possible, but it's possible. Metus has done it once before – they can do it again.”
“Not just once before has the Metus done that. But yes, your reasoning is correct. And before you ask or remark in any way – you do not need to know how it is done.”
“You don't think?” I ask, peeking with one eye down at the serpent. Not entirely sure I'm sure what we're talking about anymore - or whether we're talking about the same thing, at any rate. The Rod is apparently-lifeless stone. Evidently Wadjet wants to waste no more energy on this conversation than I. Why then does she—
“No. I do not,” she suddenly says. “In fact, Fulcrum of Fate, Child of Destiny, and my son, I do not think that you need to know. Not right now.”
I snort through my nose. “It would be convenient. If I could walk through a hole in the air and into Peitho's home or wherever. I could hand the Lamiya this Rod – you – and be done with all of this.”
The voice which speaks next is not that of the Rod's serpent. “Unfortunately for you, that's not possible,” the aforementioned Lamiya says.
Heart racing, my eyes fly open. I don't know what I expected to find, but it wasn't this: Peitho is sitting upright; but the darker green shining from her eyes is decidedly not hers. For starters, it contains within it an ageless wisdom that makes a crying babe of the mystery shining within Peitho.
“You plan, then, to return my Rod to me?” the Lamiya, Peitho's Matere and the supposed highest member of her order or society or whatever she would like to call it – I still do not know – asks of me with Peitho's face, her voice noticeably eager.
“There was never another plan,” is my truthful answer, given with a shrug and a sidelong glance like Wadjet were sitting beside me and I hoped she would tell her. She's not - and I'm not sure she would if she were.
Peitho's brows react with subtle surprise. Because this is the truth or because the Lamiya finds herself believing me?
“You have been remarkably easy to persuade, I must remark,” she says. “I expected much more resistance from you, from the things the Master said of your education. Has Peitho been this tempting a treat to you?” As she asks this, Peitho's hands begin to fondle and caress her body in a way at once most unladylike and most indecent of me to describe.
“What are you going to do with her?” I ask into those hunter's, green eyes.
She goes still again.
“What do you care what I do with my Daughter?” the Lamiya asks me, her spine and shoulders going rigid, hands finding the bench at her sides.
“Am I not due payment?” I ask. “In the ancient world—“
“I know the customs of the ancient world,” the Lamiya snaps at me so sharply and without raising her voice – indeed lowering it – that my own breath is stolen from my throat. “She is not yours to demand as payment. Not from me. Not for this.”
Peitho's tongue is a dagger as the Lamiya says this, stabbing dead any new-conceived notion I might have of “saving” her Daughter.
"And you are no Champion - no Conqueror - no Hero."
"Yeah, well, maybe, but—" Is what I want to say. When I open my mouth to speak, however, Peitho's face and the Lamiya's eyes are as close to mine as they can get without being inside them.
“You cannot have her. You will not have her. That is non-negotiable,” she says in her hissing whisper - her hissper - Peitho's breath cool as Hades' own caves.
And then I'm gasping, sucking in a breath I had not known or realized I was holding – and when I blink, Peitho is lying right where I'd arranged her only... what – minutes before?
Breathing heavily, my hand at my throat, I look around me. The Rod has fallen to the floor, and I'm in no mood to pick it up. My breath comes easier, now. Had I imagined that? That's the only conclusion I can come to and remain confident in my sanity. So I look out the window.
No time has visibly passed.
Taking my hat off, I sit it beside me. Then I wipe furiously at my face with my hands. My eyes itch. My beard itches. How long is it? How long has it been since I've seen my face? Every inch of my face seems to want to climb right off my skeleton and be done with me and my life forever.
I don't know how long I scrub dry hands against my face like this. Then again for at least as long with the rough linen of my shirt. But when the moment has passed and whatever itch I am scratching has been alleviated, my skin is raw and lightly burning, my eyes roll, out of focus, in their sockets, and I accutely desire a hot bath and a Caliph's harem.
Yet I breathe a heavy, but relieved, even grateful sigh.
And then I remember the Rod – because my foot touches it.
I cringe away from it, almost. The skin of the backs of my hands and my forearms crawls, and the light itch of formicatious feet tingles across my palms. Grimacing, I cannot refuse myself the urge to lean down and pick up the Rod of Wadjet. There is more I have to do with it today, more I have to say to Her.
Nearly the moment the tips of my fingers touch the ancient wood, the serpent is already speaking; in mid-sentence, apparently – as though she had never stopped, only my ability to hear had been interrupted. The first thing I can understand is:
“Why do you insist on agitating her?”
Rolling my eyes, I try not to scoff – either at the framing of the question or its contents.
“The Lamiya? I don't even know her. How can I insist on doing things that will agitate her?”
“You cannot believe that she would be willing to give you her favorite daughter, can you? ...Can you? Robert? Did you?” The serpent peers at me with its beady little eyes, leaning in as close to me as it can from its stick; then, before I can say anything – or really even think to understand what it means – the serpent recoils away from me like I'd tried to bite her face off. If she were a woman, she would be putting a gloved hand to a gaping mouth and ashamed eyes. “You did think that. But you did not know Peitho is her— How well did you believe that you knew Peitho – before...?”
I'm squinting at the Rod. Part of me can't believe it's asking me this. Another part of me is grateful someone is. If I were a normal man, I think somewhere deep and unarticulated within my soul, I would have friends and they would ask these questions of my choices and I would not be able to put them down to turn their questions off, and I would not be able to drink or otherwise eat them into oblivion through self-induced overlong sleep. They would insist on better for and from me.
But I am alone.
“I don't know,” is what I say. Then I demand, “Show her to me.”
“Who?” is the serpent's understandable response.
“Metus!” I all but shout – remembering the moment before ejaculation that I am supposed to be alone in here. Talking to myself is one thing; shouting is another. Did Ted hear the Lamiya? When I open my eyes, I am no longer in the carriage.
I am in darkness. Perfect darkness, in fact. The shapes and shadows I see here are possible only because of the magick of the Rod. I know this, though I cannot know how.
That is how I know this place as well, though. I know this man-made cavern, the sarcophagus which dominates it.
Metus is in there.
“This is not what I meant,” I say to the darkness.
I'm sitting in the carriage like I'd never left – largely because I probably actually hadn't, not physically – and the serpent is looking innocently up at me – only barely not batting eyelashes she doesn't have.
“And how would I know that? You blurted it out while I was trying to have a serious conversation about your fut—“
“My future can wait. I want to know what Metus is doing.”
“Your future really shouldn't wait, Robert. Every thought you have—“
“I know, all right?” I snap at the serpent. “Every thought I have determines my reality – my past, my present, and my future. And I'm telling you right now that I'll think about my future when I know what Metus's looks like.”
If the Rod could, its serpent looks as though she's putting a hand to her chin in thought. “Explain. How do you think to divine the Metus's future?”
“I hadn't planned to divine it – but I suppose that's what this is. I want you to show me what Metus is doing.”
“I did. Robert—“ The serpent lifts itself upright a little, adopting an authoritative posture. “I'm not a genie, Fulcrum. I do not grant wishes.”
I quirk an eyebrow. “Maybe not. But what's in my hand is an artifact of power, and I can do things with it that would look an awful lot like granting wishes to the right kind of person. I don't have to ask you whether that's true – but isn't it?”
“Yes, Robert. It is. That is true.” The serpent is getting defiant, and I'm getting annoyed.
“Existing in that sarcophagus cannot be all that they are doing.”
“They?”
“She and her demon. The Metus are not one being, not one intelligence, one personality, but two existing in that body. I won't call what they do living— I know you know this. Now – would you – please – just—“ I feel a curse shaping itself on my tongue and take a deep, steadying breath. When I'm ready, I look at the Rod and find the serpent blinking at me as only a serpent can. “I'm not angry with you. I'm afraid. I'm tired. I don't want to do this. I never—“
“Never?” Wadjet asks. “You never wanted this?”
I'm not in the carriage. I'm in the back of a covered wagon. Alone. It's not moving. It's late in the day. I'm supposed to be reading or studying something. I know that like I know the context of a dream. What I'm supposed to be reading I either don't know or can't remember anymore. Instead, I'm watching al'Shamshir and his men train.
“Someday I'm going to lead armies,” I breathe in the rapt determination of a boy who knows he was born to be more. “I'll reform the whole world, like Qin Shi Huang or Alexander or Chandragupta Maurya. But the whole world – not just some of it – just like the School used to be – only different. My way.”
“Oh?” The Master says, rounding the cart with a smile in his huge white beard and mustaches.
I lift my eyes to him defiantly, sealing my lips together.
“Are you finished with your Plato?
I don't say anything. The honest answer in my throat is that I was done before I started. But he always tells me that the honest answer is less preferable to silence if it is not also the nice answer. What he means is if I'm not going to say something he wants to hear, I should say nothing at all. But saying nothing at all is just as bad just as often as the honest thing – and, really, if I'm in trouble, I'm already in trouble. The best choice is to do what will make the situation least worse.
So I say nothing.
The Master laughs in his throat, his face lighting up in the dim of early evening with some private delight. Laughing at something inconceivable to me, but certainly not at me. Then, because of course he knows he's got my hackles raised, he ruffles my hair like I'm a little boy.
I'm not a little boy anymore.
Then he walks around me to sit at my side and watch with me our armed guard as they do their eleven-man dance.
After some while of silence, long enough that I'm beginning to wonder whether this isn't some sort of lesson – but during which I haven't so much as stolen a glance at him, either for permission or curiously – the Master asks me a question.
“All right, little hero, tell me: How will you conquer the world differently?”
I'm in Tedoro's carriage, staring at Peitho as she sleeps like the dead; but I can remember the conversation like it were still happening to me – without the aid of the Rod, at that.
I look up at him, the Master. He's smiling at me. I've always thought his gray eyes were kind. I've heard other boys – men, too – say they think they're strange. Frightsome. But anyone old enough to have gone gray in the eyes has to be kind. He'd have got himself killed by now if everyone didn't love him.
“Is that what you think?” Wadjet asks, and I look down at her.
“I was a boy,” I say.
“You were, once. In many ways you still are. In some you always will be. But that is not what I asked.”
“I don't know what to think about him anymore. Did he.... Did he do something that day? Something that—“
“I thought you wanted to know about Metus?” The serpent grins its serpent grin.
Sighing through my nose, I close my eyes. I'm letting her get me confused. Whatever inner-ear-like mechanism keeps the multi-dimensional systems of my mind balanced has been tilting with a feeling not dissimilar to vertigo for some time now. It settles back toward normal. I feel like I can, in whatever way, at least, tell up from down again.
“How did you do that? Take me back into that memory?” I ask, shaping a frown and aiming it at the serpent on the Rod – who appears to be lifeless jade once more. But her mouth moves when she responds:
“I did not do anything.”
“Horseshit. You must have. That is not the Master I remember.”
“Is it not?”
“The Master I know didn't smile like that. And he was never affectionate.”
“Are you so sure, Robert? Then why did you call it a memory?”
A blinding array of images of the Master, a million different examples to make a liar of me surround me: His face lit with glee, his hands touching me with pats and firm grips of my arms and around my shoulders – not hugs, not exactly, but in all the myriad images, never once was his frequent affection anything but appropriate for a man his age – whatever that might be – for a boy and adolescent of mine.
“Stop it,” I hear myself plead, and I can feel the wood of the bench beneath me, of the Rod in my hands. But before my eyes I can only see a shifting blur of the Master's smiling face. “Please. Stop the lies.”
“Robert – child – I am doing nothing. These are your memories – not some trick of my magick.”
With no small effort, I place the Rod on the seat beside me. It's not easy to make your hands move in a world your eyes are telling you isn't surrounding you. Nearly the second the wood is free of my fingers, my eyes are free of the Master's smile. My face falls immediately into my palms. Stinging pain fills my eyes and twin rivulets of tears run down my wrists.
S – Why is this happening to me? Please— Please—
W – My son – Robert – please—
“No. No. I— Please. No,” I beg the darkness inside my hands. “Please just leave me alone.”
I feel a warmth settle, like an arm draped across my back, close around me. I want to ignore it – so I do.
W – I pushed you too hard, my child. I'm sor—
I'm in my Mental Library, sitting at one of the infinite tables, near the Help Desk. I unbury my face from my hands, lifting my head and my eyes with something like excitement – something like the elation of escape, the freedom of hope.
The Librarian must read the desperation on my face. Its flat-disk, featureless features are unchanged, but its body is urgent as it makes its way to me. I've relaxed some by the time I notice it hovering before me.
“What is happening to me?” I ask it, holding up trembling hands.
“Sire?” It asks, confused – like it and I have never done this before. To be fair, I have been acquainted with it only – actually – less than a month, so probably we haven't. But, hey – every never is a new learning opportunity.
“Why can't I get him out of my head?”
“Sire, I—“
“That not what I wanted to ask,” I say as much to myself as to it.
“Ah. Good. I am... uncomfortable telling you what you already know,” the Librarian says with its posh, holier-than-thou accent.
“What? Isn't that what you're for?” My voice is filled with righteous incredulity, but my head is wondering if it isn't reasonable, what the Librarian says.
“Yes and no, sire.”
“I thought we agreed you'd call me Rob?”
“I prefer Sire. Sire.”
I stare blankly up at it. It doesn't have a face to blink pleasantly but firmly back down at me – the only subordinate's true power: maintaining strict subordination.
If I were so inclined, I would be dumbfounded that my psyche is choosing to have a strictly professional relationship with me right now. As it is, I'm evaluating whether arguing with my Self is really a better retreat from reality than arguing with a jade serpent on a stick – or a goddess in my head and maybe invisibly all around me.
Picking a piece of imaginary gunk out of my eye, I say, “All right, then. What are you for?”
“You created me to sort and to store, Sire. Not to read. Not to interpret.”
I sigh. So even my mind has been trained not to interpret my behavior anymore. This should be problematic to me. It's not. I'm not here to tinker with improving my Self. I have bigger, more immediate problems.
"There are always bigger problems than self improvement. Sire."
I look from my feet back to the Librarian's featureless face. I'm not sure whether it is reacting to my thoughts - if I am having these thoughts at all - or whether it is reacting too well to the emptiness of my non-reaction. But I am sure that I am unsettled. “Fine. I don't know what I'm feeling. Neither do I know why I feel this way, nor what it means.”
The Librarian nods. “Sire.”
I really don't like that. I also don't like that I feel like if it says it again I might shout, nor how its faceless face makes me want to punch it in the faceless face.
In fact, I hate everything about this whole experience right now.
I sigh.
Looking into the Librarian's faceless face with all the vulnerability in my soul – unafraid that I will see myself reflected in its eyes, in other words – I ask:
“Was she lying? Wadjet? About the Master?”
“Sire, that's—“
We are no longer in the Library. At least, we're no longer in a part of the Library which I recognize, I realize— We're no longer by the Help Desk. We're surrounded by a forest of towering shelves. Everything – from the unfinished floor to the cracked-plaster, too-low ceilings – is covered in dust and cobwebs and all the myriad signs of about seven years of neglect. And before me is a wall all of shining black metal. Set in its face is a gleaming, razor-sharp handle. A door I'd closed once, after making sure it would never be opened again.
S – What's behind it, I wonder?
My hand is reaching, conscious of its own will and free of my awareness, for the door.
“Sire—”
The Librarian calls, its voice sharp with concern.
I see my hand, then, the tips of my fingers mere moments from the handle. Like realizing that my foot has extended itself to step me over a bottomless precipice, I withdraw my hand in a panic. If I'm breathing here at all, I am nearly hyperventilating, my lungs frantic with my great horror and relief. Cradling my hand to my side – or maybe trapping it there – I wordlessly, thoughtlessly stare with paralyzed eyes at that black metal door and its razored handle.
I thought I'd only thought about the urge to touch it. My fingers – indeed every part of me as I exist here – are no more real than that wall, that door, that razor handle. Yet somehow I know, massaging my reached hand with the other as though still exploring it for injury, that the damage which trying to get behind this door could cause me would be all-too and very real.
“Be careful, Sire. You do not want to be careless in this place.”
“What is this place?” I ask, turning to the Librarian.
He gestures with his faceless face back to the door.
I look and see a placard made nearly invisible by grime. Was it there before?
“Do you mind?” I ask.
Apparently it doesn't. It goes right over and wipes the plate clean, then pulls it from the door, like a dog bringing me his handiwork at making legible the two words I had least wanted to find: THE MASTER.
“I see,” I say, clearing a throat that can't get blocked; seeing with my eyes but not understanding at all.
“Sire, if I may?”
“You're just going to open it?” I hear the almost-alarm in my voice. There is no way to know whether the Librarian reacts.
“No, Sire. I do not need to open the door in order to enter, to get out from the Vault for you what you want – and what you need. But you have forbidden me. And when I do—“
Its featureless face looks to the ground.
Great. So I treat my Mental Librarian, whom I have now spoken to only twice, like the Master spoke to me.
How many other people—
I don't have time to think about that.
“There's never time for the questions that matter, Sire.”
A pang – like a bell struck a single time, an alarm silenced before it can go off – rings out distrust within me. Why had he said that? This isn't my Librarian. If it was, it is no longer.
“I don't like that you don't have a face,” I say. “I feel like you're mocking me. Playing games. Why don't you wear a face for me?”
“Because you haven't imagined it one, yet,” a different but familiar voice responds, lashing my lack of imagination with his devil's tongue. "But I—“ Suddenly, like I had never seen anything but, the Librarian's head has the face of the golden-haired, beautiful angel I had watched the Grand Magus's Prometheus become. “I have many faces.”
“Lucifer,” I part say, part groan, part sneer. “I might have known.”
“You might. I have done this before, after all.”
“That was different.”
“Was it?”
“Yes!” I exclaim. “I was—“
“Anyway—“ The Yaldabaoth says with his Lightbringer face. “This seems to be the only place I can reach you, anymore.”
“Anymore? Weren't you in my dream last night?”
“Was I?”
“You're not even allowed to reach me. You're just fucking with my head.”
“Aren't I?” His arch eyebrows are perfect - a smiling Satan.
“Stop it,” I say as calmly – even as bored – as I can; but I want to shout. I want to punch him in the chest. “What do you want?”
Lucifer fidgets with the Librarian uniform like it's binding.
“Do not,” I command, and He stops. Was that a metaphor for trying to resist my question, or of His trying to fully manifest?
“Are you really just looking through the Librarian's... uh, head into my mind?” I ask.
“It's a metaphor!” the Lucifer shouts, stamping and straightening his arms at his sides like fist morningstars; then He composes himself. “I wanted to speak to you.”
“Isn't that against the Rules?” I ask again, arching a brow.
Lucifer scoffs, rolls his eyes dramatically. His blond hair flows around his shoulders in a wind which does not seem to bother me or mine. Dramatic disdain lights his beautiful face and chest.
“The Rules are for those willing to play by them.” shadows play on the almost pre-pubescent baldness of His bold, marble-chiseled-masculine jaw, chin, cheeks, and nose. The shadows of a beautiful stalker and killer.
“But you're Order—!” I'm aghast to hear this. “Chaos is obeying the Rules because she thinks you're....” I meet His eyes.
“Yes. We are aware.” Lucifer looks at His nails as though bored. “We also know that you know that because she broke the Rules to tell it to you. We also know that you know enough of the Rules to know that there are Rules – which means that you know that you are breaking them by communicating with her. Which we know you know we know you have done. Many times.”
My eyes and chin are firm with defiance. “Is that what you came here for?”
“No, actually,” the Lucifer says, tossing His hair behind His neck and stepping closer to me. “We don't care about that in the least.” He flashes the handsomest imaginable smile – the grin of a blond Superman.
“What is my punishment, then?” I want to recoil from him.
“No punishment.” That grin again. He's close enough to me to touch me – to pull me into an embrace.
“What's the penalty?” I'm leaning away, but I can't seem to move.
“No penalty.” He shrugs, tosses His hands.
“How can there be no penalty?” I demand, almost incredulous.
“Because there is no actual Crime.” Shadows darken His face and a stone falls into the pit of my gut.
“I don't understand. Even the most diffuse civilizations have laws, rules with punishments if they're broken.”
“Civilization. Laws,” Lucifer scoffs. “Yes. That is true. The Primal gods, though....” Lucifer looks around as though making sure we're alone.
I'm not sure we are. I'm also not sure He could do anything about it if we're not; and that it's not somehow my fault that or if we're not alone. I'll have to learn what I can do about this sometime. That time is not now.
“The Rules for Order and Chaos are more like verbal agreements – handshake deals – than they are laws, my Son.”
My face flinches. “But how can that be? How is there no judge?”
“Oh. There is.”
I don't say anything. I don't know what to say. Do I ask? Am I that on the edge of my seat?
The Lucifer rolls his eyes. “Oh, don't be dense, Fulcrum. Don't let your mother be right about you - about us. You are the Judge.”
I take a step away from him, raising my arm to my face as though to defend against some blow. Then I trip backward over something, and I'm no longer in that dusty, deserted part of my Mental Library. I'm lying on the grass with my legs across the log over which I tripped. The burly shape of my father partially turns to look over his shoulders down at me.
“Have you ever wondered whether you imagined it all?”
Pulling myself up onto my elbows, I look up at the Demiurge, titanic in his proportion to me of father to child. I cannot remember the face of my father, and his too-long, dirty, dark hair falls over his eyes, framing what little of him I can see in impenetrable shadows. He's poking the fire with a bear's fur forearm exposed. Were his arms that hairy? Were they exposed this night? I can almost remember the song the bard sung.
“Seven summers is awful young to have traveled to London all by yourself,” The Demiurge says to me, looking back into the still tongues and their flickering colors approximating but really only approaching flames. Is that hurt I hear in – is that my father's voice?
“No,” I answer, mustering all my defiance. “I have never thought that.”
“Why can't you remember how you got to London, Awen? Why won't you tell him?”
“Tell whom?" I ask, dragging my legs off the log and dragging myself to my knees. "You don't know what I remember.”
“Ah,” the Demiurge/Lucifer/Yaldabaoth, Janus in his Faceless aspect as Father, corrects me. “But I do. I have spent an extensive amount of time in your Mental Library. More, I daresay, than you of late. And I have been unable to find anything whatever between—“
“Shut up.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said shut up,” I stand, balling fists at my sides and staring down into the facsimile fire - not at the god stirring it.
I sense Him stand beside me, the father's looming, domineering presence.
“Do we need to visit your grand library?” the Demiurge asks.
“No. Please,” I whisper to the fire. Then, to myself: “This isn't real. This is a dream.”
“Why don't you behave like a farmer's son, Awen?”
“This is just a dream.” I try to close my eyes, to dig my nails into my palms, to bite the inside of my cheek, but— “This is only a dream.”
“Why do you act like a broken little boy, Awen?”
Comments
Post a Comment