Penult (Book Four of The Liminality)

  A contingent of heavily-armed Hashmallim, some riding on large, armored carts, others jogging on foot, had fanned out across the meadows and were making their way down to us. Above them, a lone winged Seraph, guided their assault.

  “We fight,” said Ubaldo.

  Chapter 65: Replica

  Karla shut her eyes, pinched her face and shrieked in a pitch almost beyond the range of human hearing, a talent most humans lose by the age of three.

  “You are calling your insect,” said Ubaldo, crimping his brow.

  “Yes! Of course,” said Karla. “We can’t fight this many. They will destroy us.”

  “Go, if you want,” said Ubaldo, shrugging and turning away. “I will stay.”

  “Yeah. Me too,” said Olivier, sighing.

  “And me, as well,” said Solomon, running his hand along the shaft of his scepter.

  “That is sheer foolishness,” said Karla. “Everyone, call your bugs! We live to fight another day.”

  Her agitated eyes sought and demanded my support.

  “Come, James. You will ride with me. We will go find your Tigger.”

  I looked away, unable to endure her beckoning stare.

  “I’m thinking … I might stay … too.”

  “What? Don’t be so ridiculous! Come with me. We can still get away.”

  I didn’t really want to stay. It felt wrong, though, to run off and leave our friends to be massacred. It wasn’t bravery or stupidity operating here. It was loyalty. Besides, we had come a long way to get here. I just didn’t see the point of running away, particularly since I was already dying in the only place that mattered to me.

  Karla’s burly robber fly came hurtling up over the top of the hill skimming its tarsi against the tall grass as it kept low across the sloping meadows. The creature, well over a hundred pounds, pulled up on a dime, alighting beside her as gently as a leaf.

  “I’m staying.”

  Karla shot me a pissed grimace and glanced away, but then she directed another darting glance at me, this one infused with a speck more worry and guilt. I did not engage her directly, watching out of the corner of my eye while she hopped into the saddle and rapped her heels against her fly’s back.

  “Fools!”

  Her robber fly burst away, back from whence it had come. I snuck a peek at her zooming off, but I had no regrets.

  Several falcons that had emerged from the city broke off to intercept her, while the rest kept pace with the Hashmallim and Cherubim on foot below, providing air cover. The Pennies took their time in getting us surrounded. They were being ultra-cautious.

  They must have found it suspicious to come across such a tiny force of invaders. They probably have thought this was a trap; that a larger force of raiders lay in wait somewhere out of sight. I could only wish.

  Three Seraphim now hovered above each line of advance, while two contingents of chariot-like scooters swooped around behind us, converging to cut off our escape route across the causeway.

  “Okay fellas, this is it,” said Olivier, as he attempted to rise but collapsed again to his knees, his head drooping. “Fuck! I think I lost a bunch of blood. I can feel it in my head.”

  From behind the gleaming towers of Loomis, a parade of other winged devices emerged—slow, frilly, pastel-colored contraptions, built more for comfort than combat.

  “The Lords,” said Solomon.

  Olivier crouched, panting. “Oh, they’ve come out to watch the slaughter. How special.”

  Several long trains of carts pulled up on the ring road just above us and disgorged their sluggish Cherubim cargo, standing stiff and tall. Hashmallin marched into chevrons on the slopes.

  A peculiar, heavily armored cart arrived and a pair of Hashmallim dismounted, unloading from the back a huge device with a long shaft and strings connected to bulbous outgrowths. It looked more musical instrument than weapon—an unholy three-way cross between sitar, harp and bazooka.

  The ranks of Cherubim halted about a hundred meters out. A lone Hashmal emerged and strolled down to a point in the meadow about halfway between us and the sitar wielders on the ring road. He was sheathed in a sparse and satiny armor that padded and protected only the most vulnerable parts of his body, including a half helm with flanges that covered his neck.

  He called down to us in that strange language of theirs. When we did not respond, he cycled through French, Spanish and German before he made it to English.

  “Why are you here?”

  Solomon and I just looked each other. Ubaldo just glared and caressed one of the huge arrow shafts he had liberated from the Hashmal on the boat.

  “We’re returning one of your poles,” said Olivier.

  “Poles?”

  Olivier gestured towards the shattered remains of the cracker column heaped in the road.

  “Yeah. Thought you might like it back.”

  The Hashmal stared straight at Olivier, his expression flat.

  “This realm is off limits to you and your kind. The surface is forbidden to you. Place your weapons down and give yourselves to us. We will process you appropriately and humanely. Otherwise, you shall be dispatched without mercy.”

  “Yeah, well how about you dispatch this!” said Olivier, brandishing his middle finger.

  Ubaldo, his arrow already strung, raised his bow, but the Hashmallim with the sitar-like device were quicker. One aimed while the other plucked its one thick strand. The space before it grew as blurry as the air above a flame.

  None of us took cover. We saw no projectile. We didn’t know what was happening. But when the wings of the device whipped forward, a shock wave came hurtling towards us, refracting the air before it in concentric waves like ripples propagating across a pond. It wafted harmlessly through the ranks of Cherubim, but the wave gained power and solidity the farther it flew.

  Ubaldo shot his giant arrow at the thing. It stuck as if had hit a wall of mud and tumbled back at us. Just before the wave hit, Olivier and Solomon each managed to unleash a pair of stout pulses from their scepters, but the blasts simply vanished, their energy consumed and incorporated into the oncoming force.

  The wave slammed into me with the force of a speeding truck, bludgeoning my ribs and my head. My sword went flying from my grip and I fell backward, clutching my middle, struggling to breathe as it sucked the air right out of my lungs. The wave lingered over us and swirled like a tornado, scouring away what remained of our already shredded clothes.

  Ubaldo and Solomon dove to the ground. Their weapons crumbled like unfired clay. Stubborn Olivier took the full brunt of the blow and was summarily slammed to the ground. I rolled into a shallow gully and covered my face until the wave and its vicious little back eddies had dissipated.

  The air cleared to reveal Cherubim advancing in close formation from three directions, followed closely by their overseers. Olivier lay writhing and coughing in the tall grass beside me.

  I spotted my blackened, swollen sword lying on the ground. It had somehow survived the blow. I reached for it and groaned. The broken ends of my ribs crunched and stabbed at me when I moved. With great difficulty, still woozy from the blow to my head, I rose to my feet.

  Solomon knelt on the ground, looking hopeless and beaten, but Ubaldo was crouched, trying to pry a rock out of the turf. I stuck my sword out at the Cherubim and tried to summon a pulse. More often than not, my will failed me when I needed it most.

  “That’s it people. I’m done,” said Olivier, rolling over onto his back. “What the heck? They can’t say we didn’t try.”

  I stood glaring at the sword in my hand, begging it funnel my will against the plodding Cherubim. The bumps and etchings in its textured surface wavered in and out of focus.

  Within that mental and visual haze, a strange clarity came to me. A faint echo of the Singularity reached out to me. The intricate patterning on the now swollen and blackened blade suddenly made sense. It looked just like the cracker—a scale model faithful to every nub and groove in the full-siz
ed column. Victoria had been in the process of modifying and activating one of the captured columns in the grotto when she turned her aggressions to me. While fighting me, perhaps she inadvertently transferred its structure to my sword. Could that really be true?

  I stabbed the dull point of my sword into the ground and pried at the lowermost nubs with my fingernails. A ring of spines popped free. I folded them flat. The segment was then free to rotate, just like the original cracker. I rotated it and worked my way up the shaft. The sword grew hot and began to hiss and vibrate and lengthen and swell.

  The Cherubim paused, halted by their Hashmallim. The sword began to vibrate. I worried that this model column, while functional, would ultimately project only a tiny fraction of the force of the real ones. But as I freed the topmost ring of spines and turned, the ground began to shake vigorously beyond an island of calm demarcated by a ten meter radius around the sword point.

  Ubaldo dropped his stone and dragged Olivier into the circle of calm. Solomon, re-energized and heartened by hope, found his legs and came over to help. The harp wielders hustled closer with their apparatus and fired off another blast.

  “Down low!” said Ubaldo.

  I dove down flat, pressing my cheek against the soft and fragrant meadow as the pressure wave stomped and scraped over my back. When it had moved on, I looked up to see the sword still vertical. Moreover, the blade had swollen into a perfect cylinder and had doubled in length. The rod kept growing until it was taller than my head. It showed no signs of stopping there. Soon it was a huge pillar, as big and stout as a pine tree, much larger than the cracker that had served as its template.

  One of the Hashmallim overseers abandoned all caution and sent his contingent of Cherubim storming after us. Slashers all, their psychic muzzles released, they came bounding after us now, bladed limbs raised and ready to strike.

  A series of waves ripped through the ground, tearing trenches, heaping earth, tossing the Cherubim off their feet and dumping them into newly opened ditches. The neat formations of troops so carefully and artfully arrayed around us were twisted apart and upended. The ring road burst with the crack of bone. White shards flew through the air like shrapnel.

  A shrieking falcon dive-bombed us, its forward cannon disgorging a sheet of stretchy plasma that came flapping and twirling at the now gigantic pillar that had been my sword. The substance came apart in clots and clumps that burned like acid wherever it touched. It slapped wetly against the column and dribbled off in gooey strands, cleaning off the grime, leaving it not only unscathed but gleaming, its full luster restored.

  The root quake had now reached the outskirts of the city, cracking facades, peeling walls and heaving roofs. The color bleached out of the front-most rank of crystalline towers. They stood like dead teeth among their companions as they tossed about like unmoored skiffs in a gale, oscillating out of synch until some broke at their bases and crashed into their neighbors.

  Towers went dark and toppled. The lower buildings crumbled and dropped into vast chalky crevasses. Clouds of white dust billowed everywhere and smothered everything. The cityscape had become a nightmare of jagged spires erupting with fireballs.

  Chapter 66: The Parting

  With awe and disbelief, I watched the cataclysm unfold and evolve from our weird, little bubble of quietude at the base of the column. The cracker roared and shook like a rocket booster, generating clashing waves that pulverized the landscape in every direction.

  Apart from a high frequency vibration that buzzed my teeth like a dentist’s drill, the ground within twenty meters of the column remained unaffected. I suppose it made sense that the creators of an earthquake generator would design measures that prevented the device from destroying itself and its operators.

  But beyond our refuge, thunderous explosions punctuated the rumble as the bedrock split and ripped apart. Walls of stone ground together like gnashing teeth, crumbling and churning boulders into grit. Here and there, clouds of dust billowed up as the land collapsed and filled the caverns and tunnels beneath.

  What once had been a section of gently sloping meadow above a lake had become an isolated, steep-walled bluff. The lake was gone, drained through a ravine that now cut through the low range of hills separating us from the sea. Fresh water clashed with sea water flooding in from the new fissures splitting the headlands. Shaggy swaths of severed root squeezed into the newly created rifts.

  The surviving Hashmallin had lost all control over whatever psychic reins they held over their assigned Cherubim. Now master-less and aimless, the slave soldiers meandered about the still heaving terrain, experiencing a freedom they had not experienced since the theft of their souls, yet had no will to lead them.

  The Lords and privileged spectators of Penult in their cushy aero-lounges retreated with haste. Their flying machines, some bulbous, some sleek, herded back to safety under the close escort of a growing swarm of falcons. The ruins of Loomis no longer offered refuge. They were forced to seek safety in the hills of the interior.

  A flurry of wing beats punched through the clouds of chalky dust wafting over us. I shrank away, expecting it some last ditch, spiteful and vengeful assault by the Pennies on their falcons. But the familiar glint of compound eyes reassured me. These were our insects! In quick succession, Karla’s robber fly, Olivier’s scorpion fly and Ubaldo’s wasp landed on our little refuge.

  Blood streamed down Karla’s face and one of her eyes was blackened.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Just get on!”

  She didn’t need to ask me twice this time around. Wincing with every move, I staggered over and climbed onto on the back of her fly, hauling myself up between its gangly and bristly hind legs. Karla grabbed my wrist to help me aboard, surprising me with her wiry strength.

  Olivier was in no shape to walk or fly on his own. Ubaldo lifted him up and carried him over to his wasp, lashing him into place on his saddle. Olivier was so weak that he was barely able to raise his head. Solomon was already in the saddle of Yaqob’s trusty scorpion fly.

  Karla twisted around, her eyes aglow with awe.

  “You knew. You planned this thing all along. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have stayed.”

  “What? You mean my sword? No. I had no idea.”

  “Stop with the pretend modesty. We both know, this was you.”

  “No. Really. I had no clue any of this would happen.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised, given my experience with ‘miracles’ in desperate times, but I was still in a state of shock over what we had just witnessed. I was too dazed to feel happy or victorious, though from the size of their grins, Ubaldo and Solomon did not share my inhibitions.

  “Hold on!” said Karla. She stomped twice and the robber fly jetted off the hillock, rising in a wide, banking arc back towards the ocean, giving us a sweeping view of the damage below.

  The land was torn apart for miles beyond Loomis. Further inland, yet another city skyline looming over the horizon also showed signs of disruption, with towers leaning or toppled, their formerly shining facades dulled.

  Deep, gorge-like rifts had spread in all directions like the rays of a terrestrial supernova. Thick swaths of roots surged up through the gaps, like stuffing poking out of a battered teddy bear.

  Several of the newer, quicker falcons shadowed us from afar, too shy to take us on, perhaps wondering what other tricks we had up our sleeves, though in truth, we were unarmed and defenseless.

  Karla leaned back and kissed my cheek. Her lips lingered close to mine, expecting to be kissed in return, but I was too discombobulated to reciprocate even if I had wanted.

  She hissed into my ear.

  “You. Are. Amazing! See? This is why we needed you. No one else could have done this.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing. This really wasn’t my doing. Sure, it was my sword that had been turned into a doomsday weapon, and I was the one who had activated it, but all of the art and craft
that had gone into making it what it was had come solely from the mind of Victoria.

  I had caught Victoria in the act of applying her enormous skill to modify the captured column, converting a simple utilitarian cracker into a superior weapon of mass destruction. Its power would have gone far beyond those that had laid waste to the pitted plains, the mesas and Frelsi. When she had turned her attentions to go after me, the intentions of her subconscious will, in all its complexity, had been misdirected to the sword I had pointed at her, trying to summon one of my own feeble and reluctant emissions of will.

  And then, while the defensive avatars of Loomis had destroyed the original column, they were unable to detect the presence of its miniaturized but just as potent replica—my humble sword.

  I had to wonder if Victoria had been on our side the whole time, acting as a double agent. Somehow, that didn’t seem likely. She gave every indication she was committed to the enemy’s cause when I had tussled with her in the grotto. Perhaps, she was just a good actress?

  ***

  We landed just beyond the zone of the most serious root quake damage, on a windswept stretch of white sand beach littered with wave-sculpted bits of what looked like bone.

  Olivier was still bleeding badly. We laid him out on the sand and Solomon tightened his tourniquet, while Karla attempted to re-wrap the horrific gash in his calf with scraps of scraggly cloth.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Olivier, through gritted teeth. “It had to be my leg, it’s always the legs!”

  “Fate,” said Ubaldo, his eyes raised to the sky.

  We were the sorriest looking bunch of raiders now. None of us carried a weapon of any sort and all of us but Karla were naked beyond the few shreds of partially unwoven cloth dangling from our collars and waists, exposing every bruise and scrape and contusion.

  Solomon kept looking up at me. I stood with my arms held out at an odd angle, and I kept shifting my weight and grimacing.

  “Are you uncomfortable?”

  I bit my lip and nodded.

  “Took a hit to my middle. My ribs got a little messed up.”

  “I am thinking there is something wrong with your eyes,” said Solomon.