Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (12 page)

23 Gods of Enoch

I rose to my feet, wishing I hadn’t drunk so much. My eyes were like two fish swimming around the apartment. The music box was winding down. I felt sick to my stomach.

The newcomer advanced into the room. He was like a male version of the girl. Actually, their appearance was less dissimilar even than that. His limbs were soft and rounded and his face was smooth. I recognized him from the elevator.

“Hello, love,” said the girl. “Look what I’ve found!”

“What?” The boy threw a petulant glance at my chest.

“An alien! He saved me from a slug.”

“You should be more careful. You were as high as Narva when I went out.”

“Aren’t you going to thank him?”

The boy looked at my feet. “What does he want? Here.” He proffered a rod. “Thanks.”

I ignored it. “Didn’t I see you running out of here as I ran in?”

The boy flushed. “No, that wasn’t me.”

The girl turned on him. “You mean you were here? Here in the building?” Her voice rose to a shriek. “You were here, and you didn’t do anything? I see it now! You concentrated the hebenum again! You wanted that thing to get me! You’ve been complaining about not getting enough time with your image! This was—”

The boy slapped her on the mouth. Without thinking I drew back and struck. The boy crashed against the washstand, broke the bowl, and fell to the floor. A dribble of blood appeared on his lip.

The girl screamed and flung herself on him. He thrust her away, still avoiding my eyes, but she kept holding on to him. I just stood there, clenching and unclenching my fists.

“Go away,” the girl pled. “I don’t know who you are. But please just go away.”

I stumbled awkwardly out of the room, forgetting my hat.

*          *          *          *          *

I went down into the street. The heaped carcass of the nudibranch was there, twitching feebly. A piercing mechanical wail began to sound. I looked around but couldn’t locate the source. I circled the slug and went on my way.

As I reached a turning I looked back. There were two hoplites running down the street behind me. They wore black armor like the sentry on the Misfit’s wall. “There he is!” the boy shouted from the balcony, pointing at me. “There! An alien disguised as a helot! He tried to kill me!”

One of the hoplites took aim. A disk shot toward me. I leaped past the corner of the building and saw the disk fly by and return. I ran for my life, stripping gauze as I went.

A stairwell yawned before me. I flung myself down the steps. At their foot was a long corridor that went straight ahead into shadow. My footfalls echoed like thunder as I ran along it. A black gulf opened on my right. There was no telling if it led anywhere. Every second, though, I imagined the feeling of a disk slicing through the back of my head. I turned, tumbled down a short flight of steps, got to my feet, and kept running.

For a while I blundered down passages and cross-passages in complete darkness. Flights of stairs carried me lower and lower. But there were no helots. There was no one at all.

I eventually found myself dropping into a pool of oily shadow where reflected daylight showed far ahead—far ahead, and at a lower level. Strange silhouettes stood against it: wheels and metal hulls, unseeing heads and trunkless limbs, figures of men and of beasts.

As I navigated the crowded space, the clutter thinned and the floor inclined gently downward. I was descending a ramp in a great hall. Grimy ornamental tiles paved the floor and the walls. A line of steam-driven cars with metal wheels stood between the two rows of pillars. Each bore an image or a group of images.

“You there!” barked a shrill voice. I froze and turned. A plump man in silk robes came bustling out of a dark side door. “You! We’ve been waiting for you. Thought you could get away from us, did you? Eh?”

“Why, I—”

“Never mind, never mind. You missed the asperges, that’s against you, but of course it’s really only a formality. The point is, the princeps has arrived.”

“The princeps?”

“Yes, the princeps, the princeps. A great honor for your phyle. You
are
the one who won the lottery, aren’t you?”

“Well, I—”

The hierarch clapped his fat, bejeweled hands. “Rubin. Rubin! Where is Rubin?”

People were trickling in through the door behind him now, going to their places along the line of cars. Many of them eyed me curiously. A young man emerged and rushed over. “Yes, Master Balam,” he said.

“Here is our princeps. Get him ready and take him where he’s supposed to be.”

“Yes, Master Balam.”

Almost before I knew it, I was robed in a surcoat of gold tissue, with a wreath of golden leaves on my brow and a jeweled mace in my hand. They led me to my car, which stood midway along the line, and I climbed up to a gold-plated throne in the center of a miniature moss-garden. From there I watched the people go back and forth on their errands, preparing for the procession. I could hear the murmur of crowds from beyond the great gate below.

At last everything was ready. A wavering note sounded in the darkness. The throngs outside fell silent. Down at the gate a corps of pipers swathed and masked in silk marched into the open air and began to play a weird, repetitive euphony. A team of gilt-toed dancers followed them, strewing the pavement with rushes. The cars lurched into motion, moving slowly down the hall, emerging one by one from its mouth. I watched as they rolled into the sunlight. Some bore smoke-blackened hulks of bronze or terra cotta; others carried images of marble and gold.

The view gradually unfolded. The line was emerging at one end of a gigantic urban rift, the seat of an ancient temple complex. The gaps between the old buildings had been filled in and temples of newer gods erected upon them, over and again down through the myriads, accreting in layers like fluvial deposits. The most ancient were little more than dark openings between buttresses; the most recent glittered in the exposed basements of high-rises.

The place was crawling with phylites like a swath cut in a termite nest. Every phyle seemed to be represented. It was like a thousand crowds in one. I picked out a few elusids, but they were only a tiny minority.

The masses cheered when my car emerged, hailing me as the princeps. But then as the din was dying down, one voice rose up above the others: “Amroth! Amroth!” Others took up the cry. Soon it was on every tongue, rippling back and forth along the rift. I raised one hand. The people went mad. Rods of silver and gold began to rain down on the car. Jairus had not exaggerated.

The procession moved slowly. Tired of sitting, I jumped down to the pavement. The officials were too awed by the crowds to stop me. I started pacing back along the line, touching the outstretched hands of the phylites while refusing their gifts. I looked up at the cars I passed as a pretext for studying the towers.

One of the first bore Amartas, bearded and golden, with a single round eye in his forehead. He held a scepter in one hand and a spear in the other. Close in his train was Tessa, the Star of the Sea, and all the Great Ones of Enoch.

After these came a car with a six-armed mechanical image. It smiled serenely and rolled lifelike ivory eyes in their sockets. Its limbs were so subtly jointed that it appeared a giant with flesh of supple bronze. It blessed the crowds as it passed, and they hailed it with screams of fear and adoration.

Then came the image of Ninursa, a gravid woman-form with a vestigial face. In her train was a company of eunuchs. Some joined them as they passed, strewing their bloody offerings over the pavement. They led a series of cars with images of the sun and the moon and the stars in their places. The stars were magnesium torches held aloft by winged spirits of black iron. They sang a sweet tune.

The next cars bore gods of a different stamp. The first held the effigy of a youth reclining on a couch, dead, with a gash in his side and a blush on his cheek, surrounded by mounds of sweetmeats. Around him was a circle of twenty-three nubile girls, all weeping for their lover.

Then came a float bearing a ruddy youth with wild, visionary eyes and an expression of fierce joy. Behind him an orchestra played strident music on horns and cymbals and kettle drums. I had never heard sounds of such sweet vigor. They overpowered me, and I longed somehow to open my heart to the phylites, to sink down with them, united under the intoxicating flow. In the car’s train was a band of wild dancers; I wanted to join them, but I stayed in possession of myself, in spite of myself.

And last of all came the inanimate image of Drungedt, cast in black metal, with inset eyes of enamel. It was something like a man and something like a cephalopod, with the eyes of a cephalopod, saucer-like, lidless, vacuous. It played an idiotic sequence of notes on a pipe hidden somewhere amongst its tentacles.

As it passed, a man leaped over the barricades and threw himself under the wheels. They came inexorably on, snapping his rib cage and skull, pressing his viscera and brains out on the pavement. The masses roared their approbation even as attendants rushed out discreetly to remove the remains and rinse the pavement with fragrant water. Several more such suicides followed.

The rear of the procession was brought up by an automated street-sweeper, a steam-driven engine equipped with huge rotating brushes that scrubbed the pavement and swept everything in its path—rushes, offerings, trash, victims’ remains—up into its hidden maw to be masticated, compacted, and incinerated.

I paced back up toward my place and mounted my chair.

The rift was cross-shaped. The other gash ran downhill from east to west, following the course of an ancient stream. The procession rounded the corner of heaped masonry and proceeded toward the head of the valley. As I neared the bend I eyed the new reach of towers. There was a woman pacing a high terrace, watching the procession. Her auburn hair gleamed like copper in the sun.

A ziggurat stood over the stream’s issue at the head of the canyon, overshadowed and half-smothered by the high-piled city. A pyramid of crystal and steel extended irregularly down its face. The cars were turning at its foot and continuing down the opposite side of the channel.

When my car reached the pile, a signal was sounded and the procession halted. Silence reigned. Two acolytes glided majestically down the escalator. They stepped off at the bottom and came toward my car with hands extended. I got down with my mace. A few shouts of “Amroth!” rang out confusedly, but were quickly hushed.

Now I was riding to the top with an acolyte at each elbow. I began to pass the pyramid’s sloping panes. Each compartment held the enthroned image of a man or a woman. They might almost have been alive. All the phyles appeared to be represented.

A mitered high priest awaited me at the top. There was no victim that I could see. A thousand eyes burned on my back.

24 Hela Again

The priest began reciting a prayer before the masses. I quickly surveyed the apex. The platform was a sweep of metal plates and fixtures, and the mechanical façade at the back was built into the foundation itself. It surrounded a portal filled with a strangely disgusting motion, like a hair-lined sphincter opening and closing, or a curled-up black larva undulating in an orifice. Millions of tiny hooks were continually threshing through one another, with a bulbous probe of iron moving in and out of the center at intervals.

“Great is Enoch,” the priest was chanting, “and great is the Cheiropt, its divine genius. Through its goodness we have this gift to offer, this holy and perfect sacrifice. May it make and preserve our peace.” The people rumbled their assent.

The priest turned to me. “What phyle are you?” he hissed. “I was told we were having a terasid today.”

“I’m an Arrasene,” I said.

“There must be some confusion. I’ve never heard of that phyle.”

“To tell the truth,” I whispered, “I think I’ve been mistaken for someone else.”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter.” Gently, he drew my surcoat aside and began anointing my chest with fragrant oil. “Do not be afraid,” he murmured. “The divine Cheiropt will bear your pain for you. You will feel nothing but the gentlest of tickles.”

“It’s true, though. There was a man named Balan—”

The priest clicked his tongue. “Games at this late stage are rather unseemly, don’t you think? For a year, more or less, you’ve lived in the lap of luxury, your most insignificant outing reported in every bulletin and known by every phyle. And now you’re reluctant to take up your place in the Chambers?”

“I’m no part of your Cheiropt.”

“You forget the Agoge. All Enochites—even those who claim to be misfits and aliens—all are members of the Cheiropt. The Cheiropt is the headless god with a million eyes and a million hands.”

“I won no lottery. I’m not even an Enochite.”

“The lottery is not infallible. There is only one infallible sign that the victim is truly the one chosen by the Cheiropt.”

“What is that?”

“The chrism with which I have just anointed you. If you were not called before, you are now.” The priest signaled with his eyes. I found myself pinioned by the two acolytes. They dragged me toward the mechanical orifice. I fell limp. It cost me a terrific effort, for my insides were coiling and uncoiling in horror as I drew near the machine.

“That’s better,” I heard the priest say. “Now strip him.”

As soon as I felt them loosen their grip I began to struggle. I shoved one toward the bristling menace. The hooks caught on his skin and clothing, and he vanished from sight with hardly a yelp. I spun around and brained the other with the mace.

“Sacrilege!” the priest screamed, rending his robes. He went down an instant later, felled by the mace I flung at his head. That met with a roar of applause. A few people began chanting: “Amroth! Amroth! Amroth!”

Two guards appeared at the head of the escalator. I turned and leaped to the façade. I scrambled up and along it like a lizard on a wall, making for the chaotic masonry of the foundation. A disk struck sparks by my hand. Before a second one could take off my head I reached a crack and swung myself inside.

I stripped off my surcoat and wreath and threw them into the sunlight. They fluttered down out of sight. Then, after one last wave to the masses, I turned and made my way deeper into the crevice. After a few twists and turns I dropped into a brick-lined corridor lit by methane lamps. I was back in Hela.

*          *          *          *          *

For an hour or two I wandered the dusky byways of the under-city, disguised as a helot day-laborer again, asking the way to Sabhenna. A chain of muttered replies led me to my goal.

It was a kind of marketplace, a claustrophobic agora in which the helots liked to gather during their moments of freedom, a bewildering labyrinth of shops and shrines peopled by thaumaturges and extispicers, hawkers and charlatans, pythonesses and pickpockets and prostitutes. The dim, winding passages were crowded despite the hour.

At one meeting of ways I came up against a throng gathered around a preacher, and I paused to listen. He was a thaumaturge. His staff was topped with a maugreth skull and hung with amulets on thongs. Everything about him was long. He had long, pale hair, and drooping eyelids, and earlobes that reached to his shoulders, and teeth like a maugreth’s with long whiskers on either side. His neck was serpentine and his arms arachnine, with small palms and long fingers.

The helots hung on his every word. His shrill voice was alternately coaxing and goading, but there was always an angry edge to it. Obscure grievances were led out to be petted and fed and returned to their stalls. Mysterious cases of sabotage were alluded to.

I stayed there longer than I’d intended to. Just as I was turning to go, the wizard looked straight at me. Our eyes locked, or seemed to, despite my hat and gauze. There was recognition in his face. I melted into the background and slipped away.

At a deeper level I passed an amulet shop. An iron cage was hanging in the middle of the crowded, shadowy space. A haggard maiden crouched inside it. Her eyes opened wide when she saw me.

“It’s you!” she hissed. “I saw the scarlet-leaved scale-tree burst from your brow, and all the efts under heaven crawl into its shadow and drink of its dew.” She gnashed her teeth and tugged at her manacles so that they cut into her skin. The old woman who ran the shop came out of the back room. I hastily went on.

I found the passage I sought at last, at the back of the deepest arm of Sabhenna. Once there I made for the burial chamber, lighting the way with a lantern picked up in the market. I also carried a cloth bag and a roll of coarse sacking.

The tomb had been cleaned out. The only pieces that remained were either too large to move or unlikely to fetch a high price. For the first time I wondered what had become of Granny’s delvers and slayers. The chamber’s emptiness gave me hope that at least one of my friends had escaped.

The vertical tube remained unopened. I ascended it as before and found the armor as I had left it. I looked the chamber over for a better weapon—I still had only my anlace—but there was nothing. A scabbard hung by the side of the cuirass, but it was empty. I took it with the rest of the armor, wrapping each piece in sacking and stowing them away in my bag. It was all lighter than I had expected. I tied the bag around my middle and lowered myself back down the tube.