Vellum (26 page)

“Why?” she says. “We could have stopped them. We could have raised the fucking Bull of Heaven, every horned god and serpent soul they murdered because they wouldn't kneel before an empty throne. We could have—”

“And I will,” says Iris. “Trust me, little sister. I have no intention of letting their little boys' club turn the Vellum into this…playground prison”—she spits the plosives with utter contempt—“that they want so much.”

Iris walks across the room to lay her hand upon the book of gravings, and Anna looks out through the beaded curtain, toward the glass-paneled door of the tattoo parlor and the world of light beyond. There's nothing between her and the door except for what she is now. She can't leave.

“Understand me, little sister,” Iris says. “They have their Covenant, but we have ours. They think their enemies are all just…anarchists. Untamed, ungoverned libertines too wild to work together. They see a thousand splintered factions who hate each other as much as they despise the Covenant and they think it's just the same old ganglord gods, hungry for personal power, bitter about lost glory. Is that what you want, Anna? Inanna? Phreedom?”

Anna feels the names like needles in her flesh. Why did she come here? What is it that she wants, that she thought she could find here? There's the part of her that's Inanna—ambitious, audacious Inanna—seeking power, yes, wanting to beat the men at their own game. There's the part that's Phreedom—grim, determined Phreedom—seeking the escape her brother found beyond death, in the Vellum, wanting to beat the game itself. But both those selves are naked, stripped in their passage into the Vellum, pared away to the deeper, purer motivation underneath, the cold desire of the dead.

Iris appeals to that part of her.

“Remember what you said to me?
I'll tear these doors down and raise up the dead to feast upon the living until there are more dead gods walking in the world than are alive.
”

Is it justice that she wants, or just plain vengeance? She's not sure. But she knows that, yes, she
does
belong to Iris now, body and heart and soul, a creature of earth shaped by the hand of death.

But even as Anna brushes off the last of the black-red dust of crusted blood and ink, from the Inanna tattoo forever carved into her flesh, and nods her understanding, she knows also that there's still a little part of her somewhere out there that is forever Phreedom.

The Ghost in the Machine

“O silver-bright cut lapis slaughtered in the aromatic stone—covered with precious dust your cedar priestess daughter of the Kur Ilil—”

He taps in a command to freeze the screen but the text keeps running through more translations, more permutations. It's not right. There's no way the book should be behaving like this; if it wasn't for the fact that it's impossible, he'd think the palmtop has picked up some kind of virus, but that just can't happen. The only network it's connected to is the Vellum itself.

It flips into the Enki speech again.
What has happened? What has my daughter done? I'm worried.

Damn right, I'm troubled, thinks Metatron.

The clerk, unconscious on the floor, begins to mumble in his sleep and Metatron leans over the counter to look down at him. He notices, on the monitor behind the counter, text scrolling across the screen. A barely audible hiss of noise comes from the man's earphones, a faint sound that wavers up and down in time with his murmuring lips.

“Do not let your daughter be slaughtered in the Kur,” mutters the clerk.

He crouches behind the counter, listening to the sleeping clerk mumble the same thing over and over again, holding one of the man's earphones in his hand and looking at it like some insect he's about to squash. Metatron traces the wire down to the datastick clipped to the man's jacket pocket, beside the name badge, and unclips it, takes the earphone from the man's other ear and stands up, slowly, tossing his dreadlocks back over his shoulders, slipping the earphones into place, left first, then right, cocking his head to do so, first to the right, then to the left.

“About fucking time,” the Messenger girl's voice says in his ears. “What do I have to do to get your attention?”

“Phreedom Messenger,” he says.

“Kinda sorta, but not really,” says the voice. “Phreedom's dead, you know. I'm just her…answering service. You remember answerers, right? You fucking invented them.”

He looks about for a shabti figure, automatically, unconsciously, even though he knows it's foolish. That was then and this is now. Times change. Technologies change. Even magic changes.

“Answerers are against the Covenant, little girl. You should have learned your lesson by now, I would have thought.”

He feels a little disconcerted, talking to thin air.

“Fuck you,” she says. “Do I look like I give a fuck?”

He answers the question with a pointed silence.

“Oh, put the fucking lenses on as well,” she says. “Get with the fucking twenty-first century.”

The Lady Cypher, Phreedom's machine ghost, sits on the edge of the bed, watching him as he studies her. He has to admire the attention to detail; the biker jacket is scuffed and dusty from the road, her red hair shining damp as if just out the shower; every amethyst bead in her necklace catches the light inside, purple and white. It's a far cry from the handmade, handheld clay shabtis of his youth.

“I…upgraded myself,” it says. “Thought I'd make myself a little more presentable while I'm holding the fort.”

Its lips move when it speaks. It bares its teeth in a bitter sort of smile. It blinks.

He blinks. He's not used to these VR lenses at all, and even though he washed them well in the little vial of cleaner fluid that the clerk keeps behind the counter, he can't help but feel like he's wearing someone else's underwear, or using their toothbrush, queasy with the thought of it. He likes the dirt, the flesh of the physical world, but not that much.

He closes the door of the room still hired out in Phreedom Messenger's name and comes farther in, glancing around at the cheap prints on the wall, the wooden dresser, the door into the shower.

“Not quite a palace,” he says. “Hardly fit for a queen of heaven.”

He's figured it out by now, of course. It's not the first time an unkin has tried to alter their graving, take on a dead identity in order to evade the gatherers, write themselves out of the book of life, escape into the Vellum. It never works out the way they planned. So the little hatchling got her hands on some forgotten copy of Inanna's mark, had it carved over her own to splice one story into the other. Her brother probably did the same; that's why the book can't focus on them, can't cross-reference their destinies correctly to pinpoint the meeting that they're meant to have somewhere, somewhen not far from here. Their destinies themselves are cut up, folded in with someone else's, some dead unkin soul that the program sees as something undestined, undefined. It's like a division by zero that makes an equation irresolvable.

Except it seems the girl is now regretting her mistake; being dead is not much of a life.

“So where is she now?” he says. “We burned the Kur three thousand years ago. The last doorway into the Vellum was closed and locked soon after.”

“Time isn't that simple in the Vellum, you know,” says the replica Phreedom. “Eternity doesn't pay much mind to clocks and calendars.”

“Where is she?”

“All in good time,” she says. “I have a deal for you.”

“The Covenant doesn't deal with criminals.”

“The Covenant doesn't have to know.”

A Terrible Innocence

Enki, in the wisdom of his heart and from the dirt under his fingernails, created a
kurgarra
, a pretty youth, a bright young thing, glamour its name. Enki, in the wisdom of his heart and from the dirt under his fingernails, created a
galatur
, a pretty youth, a bright young thing, glamour its name.

Metatron closes the palmtop, looks at himself in the dresser mirror for a second, wondering if he's doing the right thing, then turns.

The two angels stand, like the footsoldiers that they are, their hands behind their backs, feet just apart and faces forward. The phrase
at ease
has never seemed more ironic, as far as Metatron's concerned. They're both young and good-looking and, in their black suits and combed hair—corn-blond, crow-black—they look more like door-to-door evangelists than hunters, killers, rapists. They have the blank, unthinking stare of the idealist, only a little cold passion in their eyes, a flickering gleam of some grand truth they see a thousand yards away, the glamour of glory. Cherubim. Cherubs. Carter and Pechorin. The blue of their eyes is the only thing about them that they share, though in Carter the blue is sky over desert, warm ocean by a beach while in Pechorin it's antiseptic mouthwash and neon in the night. It's the similarity that defines their difference.

Because in both of them there's a kind of terrible innocence in those eyes, a purity of vision. That's why he has them wear the shades.

He gave the food of life to the
kurgarra
, gave the water of life to the
galatur.

Metatron reaches into one pocket and pulls out two small vials of dark liquid. It looks like ink, or oil, swirling inside the glass, if ink or oil were alive. Wonders of modern technology, he thinks. Nanotech is so much quicker than the old painstaking methods once used in the renaming to bind an unkin to the Covenant. He lays these two vials on the dresser and takes out a third, unscrews the top—he always carries a plentiful supply of the bitmites, as he calls them—and dips a fingernail into the inky black. He remembers his own renaming, at his own hand, back in the days when all they had was the crimson-purple dye brought from the Levantine coast; the color of Roman emperor's robes, the scarlet and purple of the whores of Babylon, the dyeing industry was so inextricably linked with the coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre and Byblos, that the whole region derived its name from the color—
po-ni-ki-jo
in Mycenae,
kinnahu to
the natives, Phoenicia or Canaan. Back then they had to mix it with unkin blood, in a nine-day ceremony to…sanctify it. To invest it with the power to stain not just a person's garments but their soul.

Metatron's fingernail scratches across the blond one's chest, a simple stroke here, another there, all straight lines like Chinese calligraphy. The angel just stands there, loyal and devoted, even as Metatron carves his soul up into pieces and rearranges it. There's no questioning of his authority, his reasoning. The angel would fall on his own fiery sword if the Covenant's scribe merely suggested it. As Metatron works on him, the angel starts to hum quietly, probably not even aware that he's doing so; he's like a child with his hand over his ears, singing la la la, I can't hear you. He starts to twitch.

For a second, Metatron feels sorry for him, as he draws the black lines of his doom on him, but we all have them, don't we, he thinks; that's the nature of the Covenant. And the angel is a gatherer after all. How many lives have been ended by this shining youth, how many murders, or worse? All those scared or stubborn innocents like the hatchling or her brother who don't even understand why they can't be allowed to live. There's a war coming and Metatron cannot allow himself the luxury of sympathy, no more for these creatures than for their victims. The end justifies the means, he tells himself…a lot these days.

It's like rewiring a circuitboard, Metatron imagines. The angel's mark is a fine network of interconnections that the strokes of his fingernail cut and rebond, crosswiring, confusing. Do this the wrong way and the boy could be left as a driveling imbecile, or as the kind of automaton you see in any psychiatric institute, obsessively, compulsively, endlessly walking to a doorway only to turn around and walk back, knowing that there's some way out of its trapped state but no longer able to understand the door as anything other than the way
in.

“What was your name?” he asks. “Before you signed up, I mean.”

“Jack, sir. Jack Carter.”

His voice is thick, shaky. Fear must be something of an alien experience for him. Metatron looks across at the other. That one is still, quiet as a vacuum.

“And you?”

“Pechorin…Joseph Pechorin. Sir.”

“I have something I need you both to do.”

The Very Darkest Purple

“Come,” Enki said to the
kurgarra
and the
galatur.
“Look to the gates of Kur. Go to the underworld. The seven gates will open for you, and like flies you'll enter through the door.”

“College Street, Asheville,” says Metatron. “That's where you lost the boy, am I right? Yes, well, this time you'll know exactly where to go. The girl has left the doors open.”