Penult (Book Four of The Liminality)

  We shook hands and he disappeared into the warren. I trudged up the hill and found Urszula waiting in the upper meadow with Lalibela while Tigger buzzed about overhead. Another bunch of Frelsians were digging wide trenches in the turf.

  “Those look awful big for fox holes.”

  “They are for Reaper pens,” said Urszula, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

  “Wow. That’s gonna really stink up the place.”

  “Those beasts were not allowed up here before, but now we have no choice. The western valley is no more ours.”

  I watched as Tigger zoomed back and forth over head, diving down to buzz some workers repairing a rooftop, veering away abruptly at the last second.

  “If he flies like that with me on him, I’m gonna have a hard time staying in the saddle.”

  “That is why we train,” she said. “But … small problem.” She rolled her eyes. “I cannot get him to come down.”

  “I thought you were the dragonfly whisperer.”

  She shrugged. “Young bugs. They not listen so well sometimes. They no behave.”

  “Okay. So what the hell do we do?” I plunked the saddle down onto the grass and used it as a stool.

  “We have some time. We sit and wait. He likes to be near Lalibela. Eventually he will land. Worse comes to worse….”

  “What?”

  “You ride with me.” She smirked.

  Tigger to cruise overhead, challenging any mantis or beetle that entered his air space, perfectly happy to remain aloft, as if he knew there was a saddle and a hundred fifty pounds of clumsy rider waiting for him on the ground.

  Below the meadow, the main plaza brimmed with Dusters and Frelsians organizing battle groups, accumulating stores, getting all kinds of things done. As we watched, a procession made its way up the central lane. A dozen or so Dusters bearing slings had carried the cracker column up from the grotto.

  “Why’d they bring it here?”

  “The terrace is under threat,” said Urszula. “Too many attacks come now from Cherub. We don’t want them to take it back, no?

  A mob had formed near the main council chambers. A group of Dusters came out of the building bearing Victoria’s litter. Several frantic and shouting Frelsians. Soldiers rushed to the scene.

  “What the hell? Where are they taking her? Is that Yaqob?”

  Yaqob and several Old Ones led the way down to the plaza. His guard shoved aside any Frelsian who attempted to bar their way.

  “What the fuck is going on there?”

  Urszula showed no surprise or concern.

  One of Yaqob’s people scanned the meadow as if he were looking for someone. Urszula stood up and waved, pointing down at me.

  “What the hell?”

  “They want you to come with them,” said Urszula.

  “What for?”

  “You go and you will see. Meanwhile I will get Tigger to come down. Maybe you make him scared.”

  “Him? Scared of me?”

  “You’d better go. Yaqob does not like to wait.”

  ***

  I made my way down between the ditches and onto the plaza where the Dusters and Frelsians continued to squabble over Victoria. In full armor, brandishing weapons, some of the Frelsians seemed on the verge of going to battle with the more lightly armed Dusters.

  “Get Zhang!” shouted one of the Frelsians. A pair of runners ran off across the plaza.

  Yaqob stayed calm. He kept his eyes on me as I approached. He was standing between Victoria’s litter and the cracker column that had been in the armory. The two women currently representing the Old Ones stood with him, their faces blank as mannequins. A cordon of Dusters and Old Ones kept a group of agitated Frelsians at bay, including the well-dressed flesh weaver who had been working on her.

  “What’s going on here?” I said,

  “We need your help,” said Yaqob. “We are attempting interrogation.”

  “You want my help?”

  “You have communed with the Singularity? No?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess that’s what you’d call it. Why?”

  “We need to search this one’s soul.” His eyes flicked down to Victoria, stiff and prostrate on the litter. She was looking a bit trimmer and less vine-cluttered thanks to some nifty flesh weaving. Still, she bore a striking resemblance to a mangrove tree.

  “What for?”

  “One column is not enough. If we lose it. We are lost. We need more.” He rapped his calloused knuckles against her side. “This one. She knows cracker columns. Come. Join us.”

  The two lady Old Ones had already tucked their hands into the woody grooves striating Victoria’s chest. Yaqob placed one hand over Victoria’s rough and flaky brow and the other on the cracker column that had just been hauled up from the grotto.

  “Now you put your hand on me,” said the old Duster who, for some reason, was wearing only a breech cloth, displaying his centuries of battle wounds accumulated in two realms.

  “Uh … okay.” My hand hesitated over his scarred and scabrous skin as I searched for a patch I was willing to touch that would gross me out the least. I finally cupped my palm and clapped it against one of Yaqob’s massive and bony shoulders. He was a head taller than me and outweighed me by at least fifty pounds.

  Olivier arrived on the scene all breathless, escorted by another pair of well-armed Dusters.

  He seemed puzzled at first, but needed only a glance to assess what was happening and join in without questions or needing to be asked. He placed his palm flat against the small of Yaqob’s back and winked at me.

  “Now … carefully … put your other hand on Victoria,” said Yaqob. “But be careful. She bites.”

  “Bites?”

  I took him literally, but as I reached out, the back of my hand brushed Victoria’s woody flesh and in an instant I understood his warning. Victoria’s consciousness surged into mine and she lashed out. Now I heard the scream in her eyes that she could not physically voice. Her mind remained frozen in the moment I struck turned her body into wood.

  “Man,” said Olivier, though he didn’t need to speak. ”You really did a job on her. Nice work.” He must have seen or felt my anxiety. He looked at me directly. “Don’t worry. She can’t hurt you. She’s all boxed up in there.”

  Bits of Yaqob, the ladies and Olivier swirled around my own thoughts. In milliseconds, I came to learn more about Yaqob, Olivier and the Old Ones than I had ever known about my own parents. I absorbed every fragment of their histories, hopes and heartbreaks.

  Yaqob was a simple man from a simpler time, not exactly the leader I would have presumed, but nevertheless a well-read and highly respected farmer from an Eritrean village where he raised teff and oxen. He was fluent in English and Italian along with his native Amharic. He had attended college in Asmara but had returned to the semi-arid highlands near the border with Tigray to manage his family farm.

  One by one, various calamities had conspired to claim his wife, two sons and three daughters in turn until he had no reason to persevere. He had ended up claiming his own life with a bowl of cyanide-laced maize porridge.

  The Old Ones—Hoda and Yaris—were both Turks. Hoda was a city girl from Istanbul, Yaris, a Kurd whose family had fled Iraq when it was still under British rule. Hoda, lovelorn and ill-fated, never made it out of her teens. Yaris had a full life but simply grown weary of growing ever older.

  Olivier was French Canadian, a tinkerer and electrician from Trois Rivieres, Quebec. His American-born wife was lost in an accident between a ferry and a barge in the St. Lawrence Seaway. That one incident was the source of his despair but Olivier’s labyrinthine mind remained more opaque to me than the others. His baffling patterns of thought were so abstract and intricate and circuitous that they almost seemed encrypted. He was way more brilliant than I ever imagined.

  I thought for sure they were learning as much or more about me. The Singularity strips all souls down to their essence that way, peeling away all pretension and show,
revealing one’s soul in all its naked glory.

  But no. None reciprocated. They stayed within themselves. They were waiting for me, interested only in keeping the portal open for me to act. They were mere vessels. They wanted me to do the interrogation and they were growing impatient.

  Startled as I was to find myself as the centerpiece, I didn’t want to disappoint my friends. I dug down and did my job. I surrendered myself to the Singularity. It surged and swept me deep into the mind of Victoria.

  There was a power to the flow that far exceeded that which I had tapped into during my recent dream excursions. This was no back eddy. This was the real thing. The experience felt more like the channeling I did while communing with Old Ones in the long sleep.

  Victoria’s mind had been consumed with reconfiguring the cracker when my spell struck and froze her. Her mind remained suspended in that state. She revealed to me every minute detail of the cracker and how she had intended to expand its power.

  Like Alice in Wonderland, the Singularity downsized me much as it had done to me with the sixwings of the Seraphim. It carried me deep into the design, blasting me through a patterned cityscape of atoms and molecules, spaced with random and chaotic hinterlands interlaced with angular networks of grooved canals only nanometers across. Baffling tangles of hollow channels hexagonal, heptagonal and octagonal in cross-section filled the interior, emanating from clusters of crystalline seeds that the Singularity dwelled on in particular, hinting to me that they were key to the functionality of the weapon.

  When my free hand brushed my blackened sword, the forces of the Singularity surged down my arm and through my fingers and into the metal, exploring, revealing and explaining its molecular structure to me.

  I was stunned to see that my interior of my sword had an internal structure mirroring the interior of the cracker column. Was the Singularity confused? Was I misinterpreting things? How was that possible?

  Victoria had been engaged with modifying the actual column when she struck my sword away with her spell. Perhaps her intention to modify the column had become entangled with her desire to disarm me and she had transferred the molecular rearrangements to my sword. That might explain its odd finish and texture.

  But the details continued to baffle me. My mind simply could not grasp the full complexity of a cracker column. Parts of it made sense to me. The fractal nesting of its patterns served to amplify forces in a similar way as the wing joints. I understood how natural vibrations in the crust were made to grow into monstrous earthquakes but there was just too much complexity for me to handle. I didn’t have a mind capable of replicating such structures.

  It made me appreciate Victoria’s genius if nothing else. But I was just James. I might be special in some ways, but even special people have limitations. I felt bad for disappointing my friends. Yaqob, Olivier and the Old Ones all felt what I was feeling. They were here and knew my failure.

  But it was okay. They didn’t hate me. And that was a revelation. They had my back. They understood. They were glad I tried.

  I pulled my consciousness free of Victoria and I could feel the tension deflate. But I wasn’t ready to leave the Singularity just yet. The power of its main flow was too intoxicating not to subvert a little of it to my own selfish desires. Just a peek was all I wanted. Olivier left us but Yaqob and the Old Ones remained engaged. They let me explore.

  My mind tore away from our group and into the crowd of onlookers. I went head hopping across the terrace until I found a Hemisoul in the midst of fading and used her consciousness to cross over into the living realm. Relaying through minds in scattered houses I crossed a rural landscape to the nameless city where I had previously visited Karla in my dreams.

  The Singularity knew exactly who she was and where to find her, leading me like a bloodhound straight to a treed raccoon. It bounced me from motorist to motorist, down one street and around a corner to a row of warehouses that all looked exactly alike. It drove me through a wall of corrugated steel into the chilly interior of a pallet-filled shipping bay.

  Karla slept not on a bed but on a pile of quilted movers’ blankets. They smelled musty and were tainted with engine oil. She lay in a dimly lit corner, alone but for a night watchman who sat on a stool by the entrance. I could hear her snuffling breaths as she slept.

  Unlike my other excursions, this was no fuzzy, ambiguous impression this time. My senses were fully engaged, her presence much more vivid than my feeble dreams would ever allow. It was like I was really there and standing over her.

  This time I had no doubt. I could confirm that it was really her and she was really alive. Relief washed over me, only to be replaced by a backwash of doubt. What was she doing in this warehouse? Had she escaped from her father? Was she on the run? Why hadn’t she gotten word to us? We would have rushed across continents to gather her up and protect her.

  The Singularity was kind enough to let me linger a while to sample Karla’s jumbled dreams and assess her disposition. Asleep, she provided few clues, certainly nothing about her present location. But her heart was calm. She bore no injuries, felt no distress other than a diffuse ennui and mild hunger. She missed me, and that was good. I could confirm that she was not being held against her will, and that too was good. Or was it?

  The Singularity began to nudge at me. My hosts were growing impatient. But I was not done looking at Karla. I missed her so much. I resisted its tug for now but its power was too great. When it wanted me to go it would take me.

  Without warning, Karla cried out and sat upright, heaving the moving blankets off of her.

  She squinted into the dimness. There was nothing there for her to see.

  “James?”

  She sensed my presence.

  Chapter 45: Never

  Karla’s hair was mussed and flecked with bits of sawdust. Stray strands screened her puffy eyes.

  “Is that you, James?”

  I struggled against the Singularity’s pull. It tore at me, ripping off shreds of my consciousness and whisking them away.

  “Where are you?” I said, voicing it to the crowd surrounding Victoria on the main plaza. But Kara heard or understood as well.

  “Where are you? Are you inside my head? How?”

  “The Singularity.”

  Her eyes widened. She stood up and brushed herself off.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re there right now? In the Liminality? Is it over? The war?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you, Karla?”

  She started to speak, but she paused. I could see that she wanted to tell me. “I can’t say.”

  “Come back. We’ll meet you … back in Brynmawr.”

  “I … can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. That will make you … happy.”

  “So why can’t I be happy?”

  “Because we need you … there … in the Liminality. The resistance … they need you. And you get … too happy, when you’re with me. And so you get stuck here. But there’s nothing for me here. I’m done with this place. My future … our future … is in the Liminality. But only if we can stop Penult from ruining everything. Drive them back, James. Get them to stop. I know you can do it. I believe in you.”

  “What if I don’t care? I don’t care if I ever come back here. What if I just want to be with you?”

  She frowned.

  “We can’t be together here … in life. It doesn’t work … for me. I told you. I’m done with this place. I’m just waiting for you … to finish what you’ve started. I’m proud of you, James. You’ve done very well so far.”

  “You’ve been here? In New Axum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come see me. Find me.”

  “Not now. When you finish. If I see you now, it will make you fade. They need you … present … and focused on the war. And you need to stop doing this. You need to stop using the Singularity to come after me.”

  “But
I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. But you need to go, James. Go and do your job.”

  “Where are you? What city? What country?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “I need to know that you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. Surviving. Don’t worry about me right now. Just … do your job.”

  “It’s Wendell. Wendell is helping you.”

  She scrunched her eyes in my direction. “No. I’m doing this on my own.”

  The strength of the Singularity inched up like I had taken a step deeper into the main current of a river.

  “But he said … he threatened … that we would never see each other again. Will I? Will I see you? Ever?”

  “I … I can’t say.”

  “Tell me! I need to know.”

  Her face stilled. Her eyes grew cold and calculating.

  “No,” she said. “Not in this world. Not here. Never.”

  “Karla … what are you talking about?”

  And then whatever leverage I had against the Singularity crumbled and I was at the mercy of the flow. It ripped my consciousness out of that warehouse and a flitted between souls in the night, some wakeful, some sleeping, with a randomness that made sense only to the Singularity.

  For a few short moments I paused in the bedroom of a country house in the middle of a forest. I could smell the evergreens. The man whose mind I shared wanted only death. The roots were coming to take him. But while they did, I had a chance to ruminate on my encounter with Karla, and the despair I shared with this despondent man combined to blow us both through the barrier between the realms, him to a pod deep in the darkest tunnels of Root, and me flitting through souls to the surface, skipping through the hearts of refugees braving the Cherub-infested valleys to the terraces of New Axum.

  My hand slipped off Yaqob’s shoulder and I collapsed onto the cobbles. Olivier lunged and caught me before my head struck the pavers.

  ***

  Zhang had arrived with a detachment of Frelsian warriors who bulled their way through the crowd and took Victoria back into their custody.

  “Yaqob! I warned you to stay away from her.”

  “This had to be done. Someone had to do this.”

  “And what did it get you? Did you manage decipher the cracker?”

  Yaqob looked at me. He knew I had failed. He was in there with me.