The pall settling over me felt familiar but this was no ordinary depression. I guess I’d have to call it a meta-depression, because it wasn’t the futility of life that was troubling me, but that of existence itself. What good was it coming to the Liminality if feelings of suicide followed you here? That made it just another level of Hell.
I wondered if the Deeps would offer any escape from myself or if it would be the same thing all over, another link in an endless iteration of malaise. Perhaps no escape was possible? Maybe Hell was this whole system of nested worlds, starting with Earth, through the Liminality and the Deeps
But from what little I knew of the Deeps, it couldn’t be that horrible a place. Urszula seemed to have gotten through it okay. Maybe she was a little warped here and there, but most of her humanity had survived the experience intact.
She sure seemed to have made lots of friends there. Dusters seemed to be a heck of a lot more sociable than Frelsians. They had the camaraderie of soldiers.
But what made me thought I could handle the Deeps if the mere thought of being alone in a canyon with the sun going down was enough to trigger a panic attack?
But it turned out I didn’t have to worry about any of these secondary hells, because without any warning, just a flash and a bang, hell number one came a calling. The fading hit like a shock wave, blowing me out of this world and into that basement cell.
***
Crap. This meant I was alive. But from the way I was feeling, death wasn’t very far around the corner. It also meant my soul was far from free.
The church was silent but for the occasional creak of a timber. The blanket had fallen onto the floor and I shivered like a cornered bunny. My elbows were stiff, my range of motion limited when I reached to retrieve it. Spikes shot through my abdomen as I twisted.
I managed to snatch a corner and nudge it back up over me. For once, I didn’t mind the scratch of the wool.
Shafts of light still seeped around the door from the lone bulb in the hall. There was a wrinkled apple on a tray, along with the remnants of two slices of bread. It looked like the mice had been having a field day from all the droppings in and around it. A plastic mug filled with water sat untouched. I needed a drink, badly but I didn’t want to budge.
From the condition of the food, it looked like at least a day had passed since Edmund or Joshua had last come to see me. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with me now that they realized I had no useful information to offer. They couldn’t just turn me loose, could they? Why would they trust me to keep my mouth shut?
So what then? It looked like they had stopped bringing me food. Were they trying to starve me and then dump my emaciated remains in some roadside ditch? Maybe they would say a prayer for my soul before driving off.
Perhaps neglect was less of a sin in their eyes than cold-blooded murder. Edmund himself had never laid hands on me. It was that little bastard with the cricket bat—Mark—who had done all the beating. Perhaps Edmund and Joshua would pray for his absolution and make it all better. This way, their hands stayed clean.
I could hear cars outside. Horns beeping. There were probably people strolling down a sidewalk not ten feet from my bed—contented people, on their way to see a movie, or a supper at the pub with friends.
But there was nothing to be done. Banging on the wall would be useless. No one was going to notice the faint thud of my fists on solid stone. The way my ribs felt, I doubted I could raise my arms above my shoulders.
As I lay there, I noticed how off-kilter the rhythm of my heart had become. It would go along fine a few beats and then stop dead like it had no intentions of ever starting up again, and then boom, there would be a huge wallop in my chest. This pattern repeated over and over again. It couldn’t be healthy. I took it as a sign that my body systems were gearing up for shutdown mode.
Come to think of it, when was the last time I had to pee? My bladder didn’t even feel that full.
I lashed out, slamming my fist against the wall, bloodying my knuckles. It was so damned frustrating and confusing. First, I think I’m dead and I’m fine with it. Then I find out I’m not, and things aren’t so great. Because, though I’m dying, I still have a chance, and that little bit of hope makes it worse because I actually have something to live for now.
It was so fucking unfair. All those times back in Florida when I had felt suicidal, I never came close to offing myself, but now that I had chosen life, here I was, on the brink.
There were too many things I would miss on this side, and not just Karla, but little things. I wanted to eat pizza again in Rome. I wanted another Sonic milkshake and a cheeseburger, like the ones Mom used to get me when she thought I needed a little perking up. I wanted to see the Cairn Gorms on a sunny day.
And as for Karla. I had never gotten to do anything with her in this world. Never. Not even a walk in the park, or a dinner, or a movie. That just didn’t seem fair.
If I died right now, with my soul in those bottom lands, I would not only never get to do any of those things, I would never see Karla on the other side, either. I would be sent to the Deeps.
The Deeps. The idea was still too abstract to frighten me. I understood it to be some sort of Hell, but it couldn’t be all that bad if Urszula came through it intact. It couldn’t be much worse than being locked away and rotting in this freaking church basement. What scared me more was being shut off from Karla, from Bern and Lille, even Urszula.
Frelsi, I could do without. That place seemed more like High School 2.0 than a substitute for Heaven. Free souls were the cool kids; Hemis, the worker bees. As for me? Again, I was the home-schooled dork—ever the outsider.
But who said I had to go to Frelsi? Why not get free and stay free on my own terms? The way things were going, becoming free might be the only way I would ever get to avoid the Deeps and see Karla again.
I needed to get up to those glaciers.
Chapter 32: Lalibela
This time, no roots came entangling to drag me down. Darkness gave way to light. In a blink, I was back at the pond, slumped in the ‘throne’ I had carved into the rim of packed silt surrounding it. Transitions from life to Root had become seamless. My dual existences had become as one.
Streamers of mist spilled down from the hanging valley like the ghosts of some ancient torrent. Fog filled the basin. The bluish disc of the sun struggled to burn through the haze.
Where had the night gone? I couldn’t have been in that basement cell more than an hour.
I kept forgetting how time shifted during these excursions, as if the hours of each world turned on different-sized cogs in the cosmic clock. One minute on Earth was like ten in Root.
A bee came hurtling into the hollow, landing on my hand-crafted weeping willow. It traversed the droopy branches, swinging like a monkey, poring over the modified leaves with its antennae.
When it was satisfied, it detached itself and came winging low across the pond, buzzing close to my head. It made a couple loops and vectored out of sight. The damn thing had come to spy on me. The question was: who had sent it? Yaqob or Urszula?
I got up and brushed myself off. Before that last fade, believing I was both dead and free had been immensely liberating. There was nothing I could do about it. But now, knowing I was neither dead nor free, spikes of panic went shooting through me.
I had to get up to those glaciers. Yaqob’s patrols would be out and about, but I had to chance it. I couldn’t afford to wait for nightfall.
Between the mists and canyon walls I had no chance of glimpsing the mountains from here. But from the plains I remembered seeing shrouds of white nestled in the curves below the sharper peaks. It was going to be a long haul to get up there, so I had to get cracking.
The cliffs walling in the box canyon looked a little too sheer for my abilities so I made my way out and around one of the anvil-shaped bluffs that bracketed its outlet to the plains, heading for the more climbable slopes along the Reapers’ trail.
As I picked my way along the rock fall
s at the base of the cliffs, a shadow passed over me. A mantid, silhouetted in the sun, had pulled up and landed on the bluff across the canyon. I dashed into a cleft in the stone and pressed myself into it as far as it would take me.
Three more mantids arrived and landed beside the first. I wondered at first, if they were Yaqob’s crew, come to haul me back to the pits. They lingered a while, resting their mantids, I supposed; before taking off in unison and converging around a sinkhole. I guessed it was probably a routine patrol, out to round up or scare off any stray soul looking for Frelsi.
I wriggled out of the cleft and picked up my pace, hoping to get around the backside of the bluff before they could spot me. But another movement caught my eye, high overhead—long, tapered body; sunlight glinting off meshed wings, two by two. It was a dragonfly, too high up for me to tell if it had a rider. I paused until it, too, glided off over the plains.
I made my way around the bluff with haste and as soon as its cliffs transitioned to something more walk-able, I charged up the slope. I aimed for a swath of taller grass in a crease just below the ridge crest that would provide a place to rest undetected.
I pounded up the side, huffing and sweating, my thighs burning with acid, muscles turning to jelly, forcing myself onward and upward until I reached the grass. I collapsed, gasping, struggling to catch my breath.
A bee came gliding along and looped around my head, wings whining like a low budget chainsaw. Had the same one been following me?
I waved my sword overhead, trying to shoo it away. That only seemed to agitate it. It swooped in and bumped me, dragging its antennae through my hair, before buzzing off out of sight. These damned bees!
I gazed out over the plains at the hundreds of pits dotting the landscape. Their spacing looked too regular to be natural. These were not some accident of randomness. They had to be put here by some higher intelligence—ventilation ports for a giant soul-crunching machine. I’m pretty sure they were not intended as exits.
Fans of outwash debris spread from the mouth of every canyon and gully. Some of the boulders were of a size that could only have been carried down by massive floods. I wondered where all the water had gone. I hadn’t seemed that wet down below. Did the powers that be flush the tunnels clean every now and then? Why else would the riverbeds stop at the pits?
What kind of sick being would design such an elaborate system for processing suicidal souls? Wouldn’t it have been more humane to just snuff them out and whisk them off to whatever their final destination, even if it was the Deeps?
Or was the purpose of the Liminality to give souls a second chance to accept life. Apparently, the powers that be hadn’t accounted for scofflaws like the Frelsians and the Dusters. Or had they? Was the Core’s weakness at the glaciers yet another loophole they hadn’t accounted for?
The whole arrangement left me feeling more peeved than mystified. This world was a construct, and a sloppy one at that. Who were its makers? Incompetent underlings of the Supreme Being? It wasn’t as if someone all powerful and all knowing would have created such a place. Why would they allow its malleable Core of roots become crusted over with real stone and dirt?
Once my heart wound down and my breath returned, I rose up and pushed to the top of the ridge. Straight on, the land dipped into a vale, before resuming its climb up the main bulk of the massif. To my right, the land dropped abruptly to a ravine that gashed one side of the bluff. The Reaper’s trail angled up the ridge to my left—apparent as a vague, linear disturbance in the vegetation. Above it, parts of Frelsi were visible above the rumpled slopes.
I wondered if Mom was up there on some patio, sipping whatever concoctions Freesouls sipped, gazing down at the foothills. Maybe she even saw me as this insignificant speck on a hilltop, sort of the same I felt standing three feet in front of her.
I wanted nothing to do with this Frelsi place right now. My only viable path was straight ahead, down into that little crease of a vale and up. I would blaze my own trail to the glaciers. The mountainside ahead looked daunting in scale, but certainly do-able. I saw plenty of walkable passages between its cliffs and outcrops.
It was pretty clear, though, that I would at least an entire day to get anywhere near the glaciers. Hopefully, that translated to only a couple hours of Greenwich Mean Time on the other side and only a negligible deterioration of my health.
If felt good to clamber down into that vale and put a hilltop between me and the plains, screening me from Yaqob and his roving patrols. As I descended, the landscape grew lush and thick with tree ferns and fleshy-leaved shrubs bursting with buds about to bloom.
I came to a little stream and stooped down for a drink. It tasted like rust, but not too bad. At least it felt secure beside the stream with an interlocking canopy of fronds sealing off the sky. No mantid or dragonfly would ever spot me down here.
Now, this was the little paradise I had been looking for, never mind that barren hollow with its desolate pond. I could picture me coming back and Weaving myself a little hut here once I was free. Maybe Bern, now and then, would want to sneak away from Lille for a little commiseration. Maybe Karla—if it came down to her getting free—maybe we could settle here.
And then this pounding sound kicked up, repetitive, like someone driving a well. My hackles went up and I crossed the stream, seeking cover in the ferns. The sound was moving closer. I spotted a snatch of something black and glossy.
A block of stone tumbled over a rumple in the land. Two beetles appeared—dung beetles as large as hippos. Together, they were rolling a cuboid block of quarried stone down the stream bed. I watched them pass. They were powerful creatures. That block probably weighed tons more than them, but they kept it moving, never letting its momentum settle, shoving their weight against the most opportune leverage as each face of the cube crunched against the underlying stone.
I had no idea where they were taking that block or what they planned to do with it. Given that they were insects, I could only assume that they were somehow in cahoots with the Dusters. Maybe this activity had something to do with their little conflict with the Frelsians.
I continued on my way, up and out of the vale. Reluctant as I was to pass from the embrace of that forest, I had no choice. Leaving now was my ticket to staying here. Once my soul was free, no one could tell me where to go.
The slope turned dry and scrubby apart from a few huge trees with sprawling limbs that loomed like guardians over the vale. In no time at all, I had climbed even with that first ridge. A little further on and the far plains came into view. I advanced in surges, stopping to rest every hundred paces or so.
The breeze grew stronger, the air noticeably cooler. I was going to have to Weave myself something warmer soon, before Weaving became impossible. For now, the exertion kept me plenty warm.
A dragonfly shot up and over the top of hill I had just climbed. I froze in place. I had read somewhere that insect’s eyes were more sensitive to movement than shape.
All I could think of was that this was that ornery fucker—Yaqob—coming to square off with me one on one, to teach me not to be so insolent.
The creature crossed the vale, darting one way, and then the other, before veering ninety degrees straight at me like a heat-seeking missile. I tore ass back down the slope, heading for the safety of the tree ferns.
Rocks gave way underfoot as I ran, slipping and stumbling, somehow managing to stay upright. That thing was coming at me fast. Another dozen strides and I would reach the edge of the ferns. I kept a firm grip on my sword.
A loop of root snared my foot and hauled me down. The sword caught in the caught and ripped free of my hand. I rolled in the dead grass and grit, coming to rest against the base of a sun-bleached tree.
The dragonfly halted its dive and pulled up as if someone had suddenly yanked its leash. Its wings hummed overhead as it hovered and settled gently on a jutting bough stripped of leaves or bark. The wood groaned under its weight as six sets of claws dug in like ten penny nails.
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It waggled the hinges and joints of its mouthparts. Something viscous dripped from its palps. I stared back at a hundred reflections of my own face in each facet of its compound eyes. I reached slowly back for my sword.
A pale scepter, leaking sap and bearing bits of greenish under-bark, swung towards me.
“Don’t you dare,” said Urszula.
“You! What the fuck? Are you stalking me?”
“Back to the pits with you!” The voice was gruff and female.
“Urszula? No … I’m not going back there. I can’t.”
“I am only joking, you fool. You have left your hole. Why? I thought you were waiting for your woman.”
“Well … circumstances have changed,” I said. “Turns out, I’m not dead.”
“Dead,” she said. “I do not know what this word means. I don’t believe such a thing as death exists. Do you not have a body here along with your soul? Do you not feel alive?”
“Yeah, well. Let’s just say a person gets attached to a world, even if they’ve only lived in it nineteen years. And I’m getting kind of attached to this one too. I’m in no hurry to go to the Deeps.”
Her eyes lasered in on me. “The Deeps would be good for you. The Deeps would make you strong.”
Lalibela buzzed her wings restlessly. Urszula patted her side.
“What happened to your other bug?”
“Seraf is resting. And Lalibela needs to fly with a rider now and then or else she turns feral. I assure you, you don’t want to see her go feral.”
“Let me guess. She gets a little discriminating about her diet?”
“Correct.”
The dragonfly cleaned her palps with a fore claw to emphasize the point. I didn’t like the way these bugs could stare. I could a step back and kept my sword at the ready.
“I see you got yourself a new stick. How’s it working?”
Her arm flung out and she leveled it at the hillside. A glob of energy came looping out. It slapped into the ground. Dirt flew everywhere. An undercut boulder came bouncing down the hill.
“Not bad,” I said.
“Where are you going?” she said. “Frelsi is in the other direction.”