Vellum (20 page)

Thomas has been watching the news recently and he wonders if the new recruits, bright-eyed and bitter, have any idea at all what they're in for. There are stories, weird stories, coming out of Jerusalem and Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran, and to Thomas all those stories say one thing. Whether it's an army base in Jericho surrounded in the night by singing children, evacuated the next day with every GI in the place gone crazy, or “suicide bombers” staggering naked and deranged into a cafe, bleeding from the writing cut into their flesh and exploding in a blossom of white light even though survivors swear they had no explosives strapped to them, no sir, not a single thing but that weird writing on them—whatever the story is, to Thomas it says that the unkin war has started now for real. He's still not sure if President Freemont and his coalition allies know they're on the side of the angels, or if the handful of demons behind this whole chaotic cocktail of warring terrorist groups and factions are actually allied or as opposed to each other as to the Western forces; somehow that seems too obvious, too simple to be true. It's just as likely that there are Covenant unkin and their Sovereign enemies on all sides, using the collapse into anarchy and atrocity to mask a different war. But Thomas isn't going to stick around and find out.

He slips the card for Madame Iris Tattoos into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, takes out a smoke.

The dark-haired friend is up at the bar getting another couple of beers and leonine Jack is sitting there, staring off into the distance. He looks just the square-jawed type to sign up in a war of ideals, and Thomas can't help but want him. He slides out of the booth and wanders over slowly to ask for a light. There's nothing going to happen right now, with his friend still here, but he can make a contact, an unspoken sign of possibility opening. Draw out just enough of the suppressed desire to maybe bring him back here later.

He looks uncomfortable but he nods at the request—
sure, yeah—
and fumbles in his pocket. He brings out a Zippo, flicks it open and sparks it. Thomas holds the guy's hand steady as he lights the cigarette, and holds the guy's gaze steady with a smile.

“Thanks…eh?”

“Jack,” the guy says. “Jack Carter.”

No More Gods

They wore the gray synthe armor of all angels but around their gaunt bodies it looked skeletal, and the black slanted eyeshades on the mask only added to the unnatural appearance, reminding Thomas of carvings he had seen dug up in Predionica, strange heads with almond eyes, straight noses, sharp faces, stylized to an elven alien catlike grace. Like the bird figurines carved out of paleolithic mammoth ivory, designs of wave, spiral and swastika filigreed their forms; and the tall, steely, silvered weapons that they carried—something between a crossbow and a lance—seemed, like the great and graceful giant axes of the graves and the caves—surely too large for any use but ritual.

Thomas huddled his arms around his knees, naked and shivering.

“Why?”

“No more gods,” the creature said “he, she or it—no more alliances and vendettas, no more royal houses, dynasties…no more pantheons.”

The creature crouched down for a second to test the shackles around Thomas's hands, gathering the chains like reins in two hands, testing their strength. It shoved his head to the side, inspecting the collar round his neck, and nodded to itself, satisfied.

It ran its gauntleted fingers across his chest, tracing the graving branded upon his skin, the mark of the unkin, his name, his story, written in the language of the gods. There almost seemed to be desire in the tenderness of its touch.

The creature reached up to take its helmet off, and look at him with crystal blue eyes from beneath a shock of ruffled blond hair.

“Dumuzi…Tammuz…Thomas,” he said.

“You can't escape your nature,” he said. “You're like me, like all of us. You might think you're a human being, you might dream that you are, but you're really just a tool…a weapon.”

He whispered a word and with a shiver, Thomas felt reality shift around them, saw the angel crouching before him in a black suit instead of gray armor, in a gray military uniform with golden epaulets, in a checked shirt.

“That's what it is to be unkin,” said the angel. “Do you really think we could leave you running loose?”

Thomas turned away from him, looking to the west where, across the fields, a river ran and, on the other side, the grass was green and gold, in an Elysian haze of sunlight so close it hurt. He'd run through all of time, trying to escape into eternity, only to be captured at the end of history, at the end of his story.

He turned to gaze up past the unkin, over his shoulder and up, at the blue sky beyond. In the distance, dark clouds glowered on the horizon—clouds of storm or clouds of battle, he wasn't sure. In this place, in this world beyond the world, out here in the fields of illusion, on the road of all dust, sometimes, there wasn't any difference. If there was a storm gathering, then there was a war gathering as well. The beating wings of shining metal thunderbirds would soon be heard across the land, drowning all song, all laughter in their rain of fire and blood and hail and light and water and clods of mud and stone thrown up from blasts, and Thomas knew, he knew, that it would be as if the heavens themselves were falling on them. There was a storm coming. There was a war coming. And the river of souls would be thick with the bodies of the dead, shepherds and kings alike, and the crows that flew over the fields would feast among them. They had made the whole of history a sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff, a mill to grind the coarsest grain into soft, white flour.

“One last great war, and then we'll have eternal peace,” the angel said.

“Great war,” echoed Thomas, bitterly.

THE LOST DEUS OF SUMER

The
ugallu
leaped the reed fence. The first
ugallu
scratched Dumuzi on the cheek with a sharp nail. The second
ugallu
smacked Dumuzi on the other cheek with his own shepherd's crook. The third
ugallu
smashed the bottom of the churn. The fourth
ugallu
threw the drinking cup down from its peg. The fifth
ugallu
shattered the churn. The sixth
ugallu
shattered the cup. The seventh
ugallu
cried:

“Rise, Dumuzi! Sirtur's son, Inanna's husband, Geshtinanna's brother! Wake up from your dream! Your ewes are taken and your lambs are grabbed! Your goats are captured and your kids are in our trap! Now take the sacred crown off of your head! Strip those
me
-garments from your body! Drop your royal scepter to the ground! Remove the holy sandals from your feet! You come with us naked!”

The
ugallu
grabbed Dumuzi. They surrounded him, all round him, and they bound his hands, they bound his neck.

And they lead him out, Dumuzi, Tammuz,
Thomas, and the slave collar cuts into his neck, except it's not a slave collar, it's a rough rope noose that they gonna hang this fucking nigger by, yeah, boy, and they're pulling it over the tree as they strip the epaulets off his jacket and the sergeant brushes dust off his wide-brimmed hat and turns away, not looking at him there on the tips of his toes and straining upward against the ropes tying him to the wooden fence in a crucifix in the cold snow, hands behind his back, the wooden post hurting the whipscars on his back but one of them, it's Carter, is putting a cigarette in his mouth and asking him if he wants the blindfold and they'll make it quick, like, sure they will and he's sorry, God he's sorry, and Tommy cries out to Seamus but Seamus is looking away, he is, sure, 'cause he's sickened by the whole thing, sure he is, and he swears to himself, he does, that this is the end of it all, this is the end of Seamus Finnan's service in a fookin war he has no fookin business in and Thomas—

And Thomas feels the ropes around his wrist as they drag him out of reality, this runaway god, back to the eternity where he belongs, to the eternal moment of his death.

He looks to his side, toward the river so close now.

The churn lies quiet, and no milk is poured into a shattered cup. Dumuzi is no more; the shepherd's fold, like dust, is given to the winds.

The Sebitti

When Heaven, king of the gods, made the Earth pregnant, a myth from Sumer tells us, she bore for him the seven gods he named the Sebitti. When they stood before him, he decreed their destiny. He summoned the first and gave him orders: “Wherever you march out together as a pack, there will be none to rival you”; spoke to the second, “Burn like the god of fire himself, blaze like a flame”; said to the third, “You, walk among them, stalk them with the fierce face of a lion, and all who see you will fall to the ground in terror”; spoke to the fourth, “Mountains will flee before the one who bears your furious weapons”; ordered the fifth, “Blow like the wind, out to the ends of the earth”; commanded the sixth, “Go through above and below, spare nothing in your path.” The seventh he filled with dragon's venom, saying only this: “Lay low the living things.”

Metatron looks around him at the seven marble pillars of his Hall of Records—just an empty blank plateau stretching out to the horizon on all sides. Each of the pillars has its own individual graving, a sigil etched into the stone.

There were seven of the Sebitti and there were seven of the
ugallu,
just as there were seven planets, seven days. There were seven sages who came out of the river into Sumer, bringing knowledge and civilization from some distant world of strange divinities, from the mountains where Enlil, lord of the winds, dwelt, or from the abyss—the
abzu
—the great watery deep where Enki, lord of the earth, dwelt, at the source of all the rivers of the world, so it was said. There were seven
Anunnaki,
seven judges in the underworld, and there were the seven weapons of the deity Nergal, known as Irra in later myths, and known as Ares to the Greeks, the god of war himself, weapons that walked and spoke like men. Their very name meant simply the Seven. The Sebitti.

Seven Against Thebes, thinks Metatron. Seven Samurai. Magnificent Seven.

In Egyptian mythology, human beings don't have one soul; they have seven, seven facets, seven archetypes, that only make one individual in combination.

It had been seven of them, then, who came together in Ur of the Chaldeas to sign themselves into the Covenant: Rapiu was a healer in Akkad while Mika came from Syria; Adad was up near Haran at the time, among the Hittites. Raphael, Michael, Azazel. The rest were from all over the Middle East. Uriel, Gabriel, and Sammael, before he had to be…replaced. And Metatron, of course. Metatron who used to be a god called Enki, who used to be a man called Enoch before he cut out that part of him that was still human.

Seven archangels. Seven guns for hire. A good team. They were always good to have on your side in a war.

He had always believed that they could work behind the scenes, set up treaties and law codes, pacts and contracts, create a sort of hidden empire, building…justice. Justice, mercy and wisdom. And one by one, their masters began to realize who was really in control, where things were going, and either took the long walk out into the Vellum, out into an existence made of only dreams and memories, or they took the oath themselves. They kneeled before the throne and let him remake their gravings, binding them to an archetype, a
me,
a new identity with a new destiny. And Metatron carefully adjusted them, pushing their personality this way or that, sculpting their souls so they were no longer gods of personal glory, individual power, but servants of a greater authority, angels of the heavenly host.