Penult (Book Four of The Liminality)

  “Don’t think so,” said Olivier.

  “They still fade, those two. And when one goes the other usually waits until they come back.”

  “But I haven’t seen any of the other folks who came with us on foot. I’m not sure what the holdup is, but I plan to find out.”

  We parted ways at a fork in a broad cobbled avenue that divided the city all the way down to the rim. Olivier took a short cut through a mass of temporary structures of re-fabricated root. Some of the newer residents were building homes in a section of ruins too obliterated to repair.

  As I strode down the steep avenue I was startled by an Old One sequestered in a stone nook near a fountain that had long gone dry. That I had stumbled upon an Old One was not so surprising. They were strewn all over this damned city. For every one that waddled about there were ten captured by the long sleep. But this guy was different. This guy I knew. This guy was Mr. O

  ***

  I took care not to disturb him. As much as I wanted to pat his back or give him a hug, I didn’t dare touch him. I sat down on a low shelf of stone and sat with him for a bit.

  Mr. O was special to me. Though I felt bad at the time for waking him, the raid on Frelsi would never have happened without him and his buddies being awakened. Of course, Karla would never have been infested with the Fellstraw that killed her, but that wasn’t Mr. O’s fault. It was just a matter of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  These awakenings proved valuable to the Old Ones as well, saving them from abuse by those who thought they were dead. I had heard that the Singularity also benefitted, allowing it to interact with the realms in ways that had been lost, offering a sensual and physical conduit for this vast sea of interconnected souls.

  Mr. O didn’t look quite as ancient now as when I first saw him. The lichen that had crusted his face had flaked and crumbled off. His skin was more supple, his muscles less withered.

  I wondered how long he slumbered these days. Had his naps become permanent? Some Old Ones, I heard, became immune to reawakening, those who had become too connected to and dispersed through the Singularity to ever leave it.

  I got up off the bench, resisting the urge to pat him on the back.

  “Take care,” I said.

  Who knows, maybe he would have enjoyed coming out of his sleep to greet me, but I wasn’t going to take the chance. Maybe he had heard me from the Singularity. Maybe he was right there with me, hovering over my soul.

  I continued on down the avenue, heading for the promenade and the main stairway in the center of the rim.

  ***

  I was alone in the grotto, apart from a few guards who wandered in now and then. I spent the rest of the day communing with those pillars, meditating on the intact column, study every square inch of its surface searching for clues on how to operate the damned thing.

  I studied the shattered ones too, piecing chunks together, pulling them apart to reveal their inner structure. In some ways I felt like a Model T Ford mechanic brought in to troubleshoot a Tesla. I wasn’t anywhere close to understanding these things. The nap I tried to take to tempt the Singularity to come and help me brought me nowhere near the sea of souls.

  Instead, as I lay in the pup tent they had set up just for me, I dreamt of home, or what used to be home. Fort Pierce. Disney World. Alligators. Mosquitoes. My mom’s mac and cheese.

  At one point a work party of Frelsians and Dusters interrupted my reverie to deliver several sacks full of undifferentiated roots that were meant to be raw material for some copied columns.

  The stuff they brought me was the best grade of root the Liminality had to offer. Pure and malleable. Never modified. Half-inch diameter strands all squirmy and itching to escape.

  It was simple enough to shape them into pillars and get their surfaces to mimic the finely crystalline stone that made up the cracker columns, but in the end it was all a sham. My columns were nothing more than fancy pissing posts. The insides were smooth and blank. I doubt they could have held up a roof never mind take down a mountain.

  When the shadow of the upper terrace began to spread over the forest, I said goodbye to guards and made my way back up to the upper terrace. I entered the warren at dusk, fearing I would never find the quarters they had originally assigned me, just hoping I would find some vacant place to crash.

  But then I remembered the layout of the place from my overflight in search of Karla, and it helped me navigate to the general area where my quarters had been. And then it was just a matter of trial and error, ducking my head into random spaces until I found it.

  While I was gone, someone had fixed it up good, replacing the musty bedding with something fresher. The floors had been swept, the walls scrubbed, and a dewy metal pitcher full of spring water sat on the table next to an empty glass and a bowl of manna.

  I collapsed onto mats now thicker and softer, pulled the covers over me. I was beat. I didn’t care where my soul took me this time as long as I could sleep.

  ***

  Un-summoned, the Singularity chose to visit me that night.

  Typical.

  This time it was Mr. O, or at least some facsimile of him, that served as my wordless tour guide, drifting through the nether spaces of the realms beside me. He reduced us to the size of gnats’ pimples and we flew through the microscopic ductwork of a cracker, a network as intricate as the tunnels of Root.

  And this time I could detect a pattern to all the twining and diverging even though I could not discern how it all worked. With the wing joints, pattern was all that mattered. Build it and it sprung like a spring. But there was a lot more going on with this thing. How it was supposed to interact with the matrix of roots completely eluded me. The more Mr. O tried to show me, the more befuddled I became.

  He eventually recognized my confusion and frustration and backed off, letting me drift away from the model of a cracker column they had erected to instruct me and let me satisfy my more selfish desires.

  I flitted from soul to soul on the terraces and valleys, searching for Karla or for those who had seen her. And while I sensed there were some here who knew her, and even a few who had interacted with her recently, I did not get the impression that she was here at this moment in the Liminality.

  So I went beyond, blowing through the boundaries, piercing the interface between the worlds, gliding through and between cities, searching among the millions of souls for the one that resonated so uniquely with mine.

  The Singularity could not help me this time. It was almost as if Karla no longer existed, though I knew that could not be true. Souls might be mutable but they could not be destroyed. She existed in some realm, somewhere. Someday I would find her.

  ***

  I awoke in the dark and drowsed, basking in the night sounds. Wind whistling through the ruins. Giant insects croaking and singing on the lower terrace, the distance muting them, disguising their size.

  For hours I lay back on the mats, drifting in and out of wakefulness. The Singularity kept its distance, as if it knew it had saturated my capacity for new information.

  Something large thumped hard onto my roof. A shower of loose slate cascaded across my window. A shadowy figure leaped down onto my little patio, intruding into my quarters without a knock or greeting. Urszula reached down, grabbed my ankle and gave it a shake.

  “We go,” she said.

  “Now? Where?”

  “To the bogs. It is time for you for have your own wings.”

  “But I already got wings.”

  “Real wings,” said Urszula. “It is time for you for have dragonfly.”

  “You’re giving me a bug?”

  “Yaqob is making gift of one nymph for you. It is special honor. We have not so many dragonflies these days. The war has been hard.”

  “Holy cow. But … I don’t know how to take care of those things.”

  “They take care of self. No worries. You just need for train it to listen. To behave.”

  “Sheesh. I ne
ver really had a pet, other than a hamster. Mom wouldn’t let us have a dog.”

  “This is no dog. This is dragonfly. You come. We go now. We eat breakfast at the bog. She sniffed at me and wrinkled her nose. You can wash there too. Come. We ride together. Lalibela waiting on roof.”

  Chapter 37: The Bog

  I wore the same sweaty clothes I had on for the last two days. I suppose I should have woven myself a new set of clothes at some point and let the stinky ones revert back to roots. That was way easier than trying to wash them.

  The weird gummy bandage that Urszula had stuck on me had crusted and darkened so it looked like a scab. It smelled funny, too—sour and rank like spoiled salami. I was tempted to peel it off but it was stuck tight to my skin. At least it seemed to wearing away on its own.

  “I hope you are not fading soon?” said Urszula, those intense eyes of hers boring in on me.

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t want to fade while flying in air. When you come back. There is no dragonfly.”

  “Aren’t you a Hemisoul too, these days?”

  “Yes. But I can feel when I am about to leave.”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said. “Usually, I get this tingling.”

  Urszula locked her fingers together and gave me a boost up onto the roof where Lalibela stood preening her antennae. The remains of a half-eaten Cherub lay in a heap before her.

  “Oh my God! You’re letting her eat one? What the fuck?”

  “Why not?” said Urszula, nonchalantly.

  “This is … was … a person, Urszula. What kind of habits are you teaching your bug?”

  “She was hungry. It would be cruel now to take it away from her.”

  “Cruel.”

  Urszula’s eyes hardened.

  “Do not cry for this one. He has no soul. He is no longer human. Only meat, shape like man.”

  I held my tongue and took my usual spot in front of Urszula on the saddle. Before I could even settle in and grab on Lalibela took off, soaring away with the headless corpse of the Cherub gripped in her claws. Bits of flesh flew off as she chomped away. It was ghastly.

  We flew away from the basin this time, rising over low but jagged spires that rose up abruptly behind the plateau that held the city, providing an effective natural bulwark. Behind them stretched an area of badlands with of deeply dissected gorges separated by hogback ridges. This rumpled territory ended abruptly at a broad expanse of flat desert.

  Distant wings patrolled the badlands. I couldn’t tell if they were Seraphs or our own folks. I hadn’t seen Tyler or Kitt since the day we had arrived.

  When we reached the desert, Lalibela dove down to the flats, leveling off just above the tallest shrubs. The close proximity of all those boulders and thorny shrubs exaggerated our rate of speed. I clung tight to the saddle.

  The dryness of the landscape made me wonder where we would find a bog deep enough to harbor giant dragonfly nymphs. But this was a land of extremes. The desert, stuck in a rain shadow, gave way to mountains and hills clothed in mist and cloud forest.

  Lalibela soared over the range, speckled with gleaming tarns and quicksilver springs. Breaks in the cloud revealed a massive body of water in the distance. Could that be an ocean?

  A range of mountains with blunt and knobby peaks surrounded a basin similar to the one near New Axum, except this one collected the runoff with no outlet. The terrain was verdant and moist, with very little open water but many swamps ringed with forests of giant reeds.

  Lalibela circled down to a lonely cluster of habitations build atop floating mats of vegetation—a tiny village of huts with roofs thatched with bundled ferns and walls of lashed-together reeds as thick as bamboo.

  She settled down on a huge, almost perfectly round lily pad large enough to land a helicopter. The corrugated rim came up to her first set of knees. I hopped down to a waxy green surface that yielded underfoot like an extra stiff water bed.

  Honeybees buzzed among the water lily blossoms. Water striders as big as deer skimmed the water on hydrophobic feet. Large, shadowy things beneath the water rippled the surface as they swam.

  People streamed out of their huts to greet us. All had the greyish skin of Dusters typical of all escapees from the Deeps. For some reason I had assumed that all Dusters lived on top of mesas. I had guessed wrong.

  “This is Dilmun,” said Urszula. “The Old Ones settle here first. Back when Penult does not know or does not care who shares the surface with them.”

  A woman made her way over to us, hopping from pad to pad, squinting and gaping at Urszula. Her expression grew only more puzzled as she joined us on the pad. She shook her head, rattling the shells and seed pods that adorned her braids.

  “Urszula? Is that you?”

  She reached and touched Urszula’s tanned and rosy face.

  “Yes Dahlia. You know it is,” said Urszula, looking annoyed.

  “Hah! What happened?” The woman grinned broadly, exposing teeth as grey as her skin and eyes.

  “This man happened, that’s what. This is the one maybe you hear about.”

  “Ahah! The James.” The woman turned and called back to some other curious residents who were gathering on the adjacent mats. She spoke the tongue of the Deeps, a language that sounded unlike any I had ever heard on Earth.

  “Sorry,” I said, softly and somewhat passively aggressive.

  “Sorry for what?” said Urszula. “For giving me life?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, if it brings you trouble. I recall you weren’t so thrilled about it when it happened.”

  “Shut up. I was stupid. You bring me gift. I should have appreciate.

  “Really? Do you really feel that way? I mean … you’re here all the time it seems. You never fade. Things can’t be so great back—”

  “Things are fine! And I do go back sometime. When I do, I treasure my time there … at home. Unlike some. Unlike … your woman.”

  I sighed with some annoyance. “Listen, Karla had a hard life. I can’t blame her for wanting—”

  “You think my life is not difficult? I have no house, no family. Yet, it is a treasure what you give me. I have no regret. None. So shut up!”

  Her eyes demanded mine. Tears bulged but refused to drip. She leaned over and gave me a quick kiss.

  “Where is Viktor?” Urszula asked the woman and the onlookers who continued to gather.

  “He comes,” said a man.

  Across the bog, another man was bounding from mat to mat making his way around one of the few open areas of water to reach us. He wore a wide-brimmed hat of ragged straw that he had to clasp to his head with one hand as he ran.

  When he reached out pad he pulled up in front of Urszula and beamed, all eager and excited. His grey complexion could not disguise his youth. He gave Urszula an awkward but gentle hug.

  “Viktor, this one needs a mount,” said Urszula.

  “I have two nymphs ready to molt. One male and one female.”

  “Give him the boy,” she said. “Easier to handle.”

  He threw off his hat, peeled off a shirt and dove into the water disappearing beneath the mats. He bobbed back up a minute later with a thick rope, slimy with algae, in his teeth. He tossed the line to me. I caught it reflexively.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Give it a tug,” said Urszula.

  I yanked the rope and whatever was at the other end of it yanked it back out of my hands.

  Urszula lurched after it but Viktor held up both palms as the loose end slithered back into the bog.

  “It is okay. The nymph will come. It is ready. It has been waiting.”

  The water began to churn. Two dripping sickle-sized claws emerged, latching onto the edge of the giant lily pad. Urszula clapped and Lalibela flew off, leaving behind the bloody thigh bone of a Cherub.

  The creature that emerged had a face like a frog’s but with a hard shell and bulging, compound, wide-set eyes. A pair of sharp and stubby antennae projected for
ward like Triceratops horns. Multiple jointed appendages adorned its mouthparts. I backed away as it clambered onto the pad, sending tremors through the thick leaf.

  It stood there, abdomen pulsing, hissing from holes in its side. Viktor went up to it and stroked its back, murmuring something softly.

  He back turned to us. “This one we have been holding back. The change will go fast. Be ready to fly with him as soon as he is able. Penult has been raiding us. They try to kill them all before they can molt.

  “Fly?” I said, staring at the stubby, flattened fins on the creature’s back where the wings should be. “How is this thing gonna fly?”

  “Prepare to be surprised,” said Urszula, sitting down cross-legged on the lily pad.

  The creature latched onto a reed stalk and began to climb. There was a ripping sound as the shell of the nymph burst apart. A second head appeared behind the original. Something hideous pushed out of the shell, arching backwards, pulsing. It just hung there, with its shriveled, deformed wings dangling and I thought for sure something had gone wrong. This creature had none of the elegance of Lalibela.

  After a time, it reached out its claws and grasped its own shell, extracting the rest of itself from the nymphal abdomen. It clambered off beside its former exoskeleton. Now the wing buds began to pulse and expand slowly.

  Someone shouted and pointed into the sky. A Seraph had appeared over the bog. On the horizon several dark objects were winging over the hills. A flight of falcons were bearing down on us.

  “Shit!” said Urszula, hopping to her feet. She popped a device into her mouth that had been dangling from a cord around her neck. I had thought it was just some strange decorative pendant, but it made a loud clicking sound as she blew.

  Lalibela came zooming over the reed forest, dropping down to the water’s surface, stopping abruptly but delicately on the rim of the pad.

  Urszula yanked a sword—my sword?—from a sheath in her saddle and tossed to me. I mishandled it and the point went down into the leaf, piercing it and springing a leak.

  “You protect him! He needs more time. And he cannot go back into water.”

  She hopped on Lalibela’s saddle and buzzed off, joining a flight of three other dragonfly riders who were soaring off to intercept the falcons.

  Chapter 38: Dive Bombed