The Soul Continuum (18 page)

“In a sense, but only in a collective way. When enough of them go wrong and cannot function properly, the organs shut down and you die. But something happens in those cells when people die, something that humans have never understood and never will understand well enough.”

“But you know,” Ninsuni says quietly. “You understand death, don't you, Diabolis?”

There is something in her gaze that makes me uneasy. “Mostly.”

“What happens in the cells?” Phalana asks.

“To explain, I have to take you deeper inside them. Cells are made of elements, and elements are made of things
much smaller, called atoms. And just as there is a great Phoradian
gulf between the stars in the sky, so there is the same design within each atom, and those gulfs are as small as the gulfs between galaxies are vast.”

“What is the smallest thing?” Moss asks.

“There is no smallest thing,” I tell him. “If you look deep enough, beyond things that will one day be called quarks and gluons and demi-praxons and antiporyons, you will eventually travel full circle to find a gulf so vast it is unimaginable, but beyond that”—I allow all the digits of my hands to unfurl to their maximum length, extending my arms so that it almost looks like the canopy of a tree—“you will find the galaxies and clusters in the skies directly above you again.”

They gaze at me in awe for a few seconds, and I close my hands.

“But that's impossible,” Phalana says. “How could you go smaller and smaller until you become huge?”

“It is not exactly as I explain,” I tell them. “It is an illustration to help you understand. If you were to set off on a long journey from here and keep walking in the same direction, you would eventually walk around the circle of the Earth to arrive where you started. It is like that with size.”

Phalana balks at this, tipping her head forward with a snort, her red hair falling across her eyes. “I don't understand you. Everyone knows that if you walk far enough, you will fall off the edge of the world.”

“No,” Ninsuni says. “Remember the Mizraimites? Some of their astrologers believed the world to be a giant ball, spat out from a giant snake.”

“Yes. Almost.” Excitement surges within me as the urge to enhance their understanding takes hold. “Remember the lesson with Kaliki's ring? Many things in nature work in cycles such that the beginning becomes the end and the end
becomes the beginning. Time, distance, depth, life, consciousness—all of these are locked into infinite spheres of travel.”

Their eyes have a blank look about them now. I have taken them too far too soon, and I also realize I should have been more thoughtful with my example; my reference to Kaliki's ring was a mistake. Phalana's thoughts must now be back with her lost love. But it is not just about them. As my thoughts turn to the deep things of the universe, one name presents itself again. The name of the man who can change all things: Salem Ben. He needs to understand, even if the Blessed Ones do not. He, more than anyone, needs to have this knowledge unlocked. He himself—or one of his many lives—is locked into an eternal cycle from which there is no escape, but not so for all of his kind. There is hope for the others if they can survive the danger that lies in that other place, beyond what even I am able to comprehend. Keitus Vieta is nothing compared to what may yet come through.

“Why are there gulfs?” Moss asks suddenly. “What is in them?”

I observe him for a few moments, warmed by the innocence
in his query and the lack of prejudice in his eyes. Like the others in these chambers with me, he does not see me as a monster to be feared. “Your question is more profound than you know, Moss,” I tell him. “Many would laugh at your question, saying that there is nothing but void in these gulfs. They would say that you and I are mostly made of void because of the vast space inside the atoms, but they could not be more wrong.
Space
should not be in human vocabulary, for never has a word been so inaccurately used. If you were to . . .”

My train of thought suddenly eludes me. Something cools inside my body, starting from the mass of organs where a stomach once was, then spreading outward to my extremities, and onward to the top of my head. Several of my eyes close, confusing my vision until I am able to adjust, and then I start to see bands of light, texture, and detail I have never seen before. I can see heat and gravity and hormonal fluctuations in the bodies of the Blessed Ones sitting around me, things I should not be able to see, and now I am convinced of what my nonhuman cells are doing. They are reacting. They are anticipating my needs and wants, and creating fleshly tools to meet them. More arms and fingers when I need to reach out, new lungs when I need to breathe, new eyes when I need to see.

“Diabolis?” Ninsuni unfolds her arms and glances at the others.

“It is nothing,” I say. “My body is . . . still changing.”

“The gulf!” Moss scratches his cheek, and I now see the subtle growth of new spores inside his skin cells. “What's in it? What's inside the gulf?”

“Leave Diabolis alone,” Phalana says. “He needs to rest. As much as I want to hear what he has to say, I think it is cruel the way we expect him to teach us the moment he wakes up.”

Moss blinks nervously and cocks his head, scolded.

Ninsuni shakes her head. “He wants to speak.”

She is right, of course, but it surprises me that she does not think the same as Phalana, and again I worry about her need to hear me teach. My concern does not stop there, however. This inexplicable fusion of human DNA and reconfigured matter should not exist, and I can feel my human part fading away as the structure of my brain begins to change. I do not know how much longer I will be able to speak to them.

“The gulfs are simply areas full of things that you are unable to see or interact with,” I tell them. “A deaf person cannot hear, but it does not mean there is no such thing as sound. Blindness does not mean light does not exist, and substances in the spaces between matter still exist even though we do not have senses or tools to perceive them. The universe—”

Again the sensations return, stronger this time and irresistible. It is as if I had been bathing in a deep pool of tepid water, gradually sinking, until sudden realization dawns that I have touched the bed of its murky depths where the cold currents have dulled my senses. I am slipping away again, ready for the human in me to take over. I cannot think. I cannot . . .

I
wake to more agony. The pain is not brought just by the newest transformation but by the burning heat of a raging fire. The Chambers of Veneration are an inferno, and I am being moved. Several guards cough as they struggle to support me, and I reach out to steady myself. A body writhes on the floor to my right, floundering to reach the pool at the center of the room, but I think he is already dead before his body slides limply into the water. Oily smoke churns across the ceiling and the air in the room thickens with noxious fog.

Someone else is in the room, barking commands at the guards. “Quickly! Move, you imbeciles!” It is Nitocris.

She tosses a seven-branched candelabra behind her so that the candles fly from their holders into the bath, and I guess instantly that she is the one who started the fire, but I do not know if she expected it to spread so violently. She gathers up her scarlet robes and swings a fist into the lower back of the closest guard before covering her nose and mouth. “I said move, before we all burn.” Her muffled voice through her palm is now a high-pitched, strangled screech. “Get them out of here now!”

As flames lick the bottom of my own robes, she stamps them out but immediately steps back aghast when a row of pustules squeeze through the straps on my back and burst like bags of rancid water, spraying thick fluid behind me over two of the guards and into the flames, sizzling like acid. The guards almost drop me, but driven by the heat, smoke, and Nitocris's shrieks, they double their efforts to drag me toward the door and up the spiral staircase.

There are no people outside when we reach the relief of the passage. A glance above us through the open roof reveals that we are in the depths of night; only the fire burning behind us provides light. The guards collapse, coughing up bile and wiping themselves as they fight to catch their breath, but Nitocris is not concerned with them. Blinking away tears from the smoke, she finds one of my hands and grips a frond tightly, pulling me, but I resist, dropping down to concentrate on managing my pain.

She shows her small teeth in irritation and looks me over with her catlike green eyes. “Are you able to walk?”

“I don't know.”

“You have to.”

My strangely jointed legs tremble as I push myself up. “Where are you taking me? Why did you burn everything?”

She squeezes her eyes shut and purses her blackened lips for several seconds, as if my questions cause her physical pain. “Just come with me.”

“Where is everyone else? Where is Ninsuni?”

“Stop asking questions and come,” she snaps. “I'm taking
you to her.”

With a grimace, one of the guards gets to his feet. “What do we do now? Should we put out the fire?”

“No, you fool! I just started the fire. Why would I want it put out?”

The guard, young and uncertain, falters. “But . . . the palace!”

Nitocris scowls. “Let the wretched thing burn.”

“But . . .”

Nitocris pulls at me again, leaving the guards to their own devices. “If you do not come now, you will never know the truth about your beloved Ninsuni.”

Shocked into silence, I shamble beside her, trying to ignore the new growing pains of a fetus-sized cavity swelling below my abdomen. She leads me quickly to a second passage and down three flights of stone steps so that we are doubling back but underneath the first passage.

“Where are we going?” I ask her. “Is there a room underneath the Chambers of Veneration?”

“Yes.”

“Why are we going there? What is this about?”

“It is best that you see for yourself.”

We continue along the passage until we reach the open door of a long room lit by the flickering glow of many can
dles. Nitocris steps through first but cups her huge face in her hands when she sees inside. “No!” she cries. “I am too late. They have gone, and they have taken the body with them.”

I fall in behind her to a room that resembles the central area of the chambers from which I have just been rescued. Other than the small tables supporting the candelabra, there is no decoration and no furniture, save one horrific thing—the low-roofed chambers have been stripped of everything so as not to distract from its sordid centerpiece. Where the customary bathing pool should be, a sandstone slab covers the bricked rim. A thick wooden pole, with leather restraining straps nailed to its top and bottom, stands proud from it. The realization that I am looking at an instrument of sacrifice spreads cold, writhing tentacles of nausea through my stomachs. Naively, I had come to believe that the limits of Babylonian cruelty were to keep undesirables belowground in dungeons. I thought them incapable of human sacrifice to their gods, but I was wrong. Blood coats the pole and the plinth, still sickeningly fresh, and I want to weep for whoever was cut apart for a god that is no more than a statue.

“Whose body?” I whisper. “Who was killed here?”

Nitocris takes a deep breath and looks at the pole. “Phalana.”

“Phalana! But why?”

“She asked too many questions. Probed too deeply about Kaliki. He was the previous victim.”

“Kaliki too?” The sickness rises in me. I can scarcely think as I try to process her confession and the weight of my own guilty contribution to Kaliki's death. “Why did you bring me here, Nitocris? Am I to be next?”

“What?” She is outraged. “You, a sacrifice? You are a creature that is supposedly limitless in wisdom and understanding,
with more eyes than Azraeil—how is it that you are unable
to
see something so plain and so simple?” She marches over to the
closest table, pulls the cloth from its surface, and kneels to scrub with vigorous futility at the blood on the plinth.

“I am not blind,” I tell her, and tearfully, I try to put the image of Phalana's sleek frame struggling on the pole from my mind. “What god would demand such a terrible act? What purpose could such a thing serve to anyone?”

Nitocris stops scrubbing, lifts the soaked rag, and turns to me, furious. “This!” She squeezes the rag so hard that her charred fist trembles with the effort as drops of blood slap the stone floor. “This has nothing to do with Marduk or
any
of the gods. It's you! Don't you see? It's all for you.” Nitocris lowers her voice a little and pauses, as if realizing that she might draw unwanted attention, from however far away. “Ninsuni cared for us for so long, and she has gained great respect in the royal court, but your arrival has blackened her heart. You and the chief priest. She has become a seeker of knowledge, obsessed by the need to know more, but she knows that you will only reveal the secrets of the heavens when you are awake, and you only ever wake up
when there is death nearby.
This
is why she sacrifices people,
and she believes every word you tell us.” Nitocris draws closer to me. “Ninsuni is careful, though. Devious. She has taken great advantage of my father's weakness for those who are malformed, and she kills those who would never be missed. Outcasts and freaks.”

She releases the cloth, and it splashes at my feet. I cannot describe my shock and I cannot accept what Nitocris says, and yet I know that it must all be true. Since my integration into the Blessed Ones, my tortured awakenings have always been followed by Ninsuni's sudden visitation and expectation for teaching, and I too have been blinded by obsession: my own desire to please her and to share my knowledge. I never seriously questioned how it was that I could have been stirred back into consciousness and how it was that she knew when to come and see me.