The Tattooed Heart

  Then the floor tilted sharply downward. Nicolet pushed her feet against the legs of the seat in front of her and the shaking was so violent I heard the sickening crack of breaking bone.

  We punched through the clouds and out the window I saw the ground, a patchwork quilt of fields crisscrossed by snaking roads and a shimmering river.

  Nicolet no longer used words, only grunts and cries and screams came from her. She had in some ways ceased to be human, ceased to be a thinking, reasoning creature. She was nothing but terror. Terror made flesh.

  The engines suddenly fell silent.

  I heard the harsh atonal song of metal tearing, of rivets popping, and the shaky sound of the pilot yelling, “Brace! Brace! Brace for impact!”

  The fields and roads and river were nearer, nearer, leaping up toward us to smash us, to kill us, and the wing that partly obstructed my view began to disintegrate and shed aluminum panels. Hydraulic fluid sprayed. An engine detached and was sucked away in the slipstream.

  No hope now. None.

  I could see individual cars.

  I could see the shadows cast by telephone poles.

  I could see the plowed rows of dirt.

  And what happened next, though I knew in some part of my mind that it was not real, not really real, would never leave me.

  Everything slowed.

  The nose of the jet hit the ground and threw shards of metal and glass past the window.

  Down the aisle the cockpit door burst outward. The doors of the bathrooms exploded. And inch by inch, foot by foot, the plane plowed into the dirt as it was turned to splinters.

  The last seconds, as the destruction reached Nicolet, seemed to drag on for an eternity.

  And Nicolet lay on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

  The sounds that came from her were nothing like her beautiful singing voice.

  Daniel was with us.

  He nodded at Messenger, and at me. I had no capacity to respond. Had he decided that I myself needed to be taken away to the Shoals, I would scarcely have been able to object. I closed my eyes, unwilling to see them or anything at all.

  Perhaps they had seen that I was almost as destroyed as Nicolet, for when I opened my eyes again, I was in my abode and in my bed.

  The book of Isthil lay beside me where I had left it.

  With shaking hands I opened it and began to tear out the pages.

  19

  WHEN I WOKE, AFTER HOW LONG I CANNOT GUESS, the pages of Isthil’s book were not crumpled around me. The book, whole and intact, lay beside me.

  I walked like a zombie to the bathroom, and then to the kitchen. I stared blankly at the coffee machine.

  “I’ll make a pot,” Messenger said.

  “Screw you.”

  Unperturbed, he began adding spoonfuls of coffee and then water. Neither of us spoke until the blessed juice had drained down and then filled our cups and mouths.

  “Sorry,” I managed to say.

  “I’ve heard worse,” Messenger said. “And said far worse, and far more frequently, to my own master when I was an apprentice.”

  Okay, that softened my anger just a little.

  I made some scrambled eggs and toast for both of us.

  “I was tempted,” I confessed around a mouthful of food. “By Oriax.”

  “It’s what she does. She’s very good at it.” Was that the hint of a rueful smile? Maybe a hint of a hint.

  “What of Haarm? And Oliver?”

  “They are not our concern. Not now. Though they may be in the future.”

  “And Graciella?”

  “I have not been given permission to see her future,” he said. “But it is possible that she has learned that the contract she signed is not valid. And from that . . .” He shrugged.

  I often talk too much, and I’m sure Messenger thinks I ask too many questions. But for once I had the good sense not to ask.

  I did not ask how Graciella could have come to learn that she might still have a way to find her own path in life. I’d seen what happened to Chandra.

  I was not all better. I would never be all better. It would take more than sleep and scrambled eggs to repair me. I had made my choice when I rejected Oriax. I knew she would try again, but for now at least, I had made my choice. But another temptation had taken root in my mind, was growing: I would go to the Shoals. I would search there for Ariadne. I would no longer be haunted by her unknown fate.

  Whether Messenger liked it or not, I would discover the truth of his lost love. Because only then would he, or I, have any peace.

  “Messenger, I . . . I don’t suppose we ever get to call in sick,” I asked.

  He frowned and looked me up and down, searching for some visible explanation.

  “Just cramps,” I said.

  “Did you eat something bad?”

  “No, Messenger. Female cramps. You know . . . I’m fine, but if I could take a day . . .”

  Messenger was no more fond of discussing menstruation than any other male, and I almost laughed at the fleeting look of panic that appeared and was quickly concealed. “Of course,” he said. “Take a day. Do you have, um . . . whatever you need?”

  I resisted the perverse urge to panic him entirely by launching into a discussion of tampons and maxi pads and contented myself with a simple, “Yes.”

  He left me alone then with a promise of twenty-four hours free. I had the odd thought that I needed to get my mother to call the school attendance line and excuse my absence, but that was another life. That was a life without Messenger, without Daniel or Oriax.

  Or the Shoals.

  I went first to the book of Isthil, and scanned page after page, looking for any reference to the place that even Messenger referred to only in hushed tones. I quickly became frustrated with the limitations of paper—if only the book was searchable! Can Isthil not release the Kindle version? But at last I found a few couplets on the topic of something called the Temple of Regret.

  The brave who pass shall go forth free.

  The weak, the fearful, evil, we,

  True freedom’s comfort never see,

  Till gathered up in misery,

  And to the dread temple crawl,

  The temple built of pain and gall,

  There by regret learn, as we all,

  That life misled leads us to fall.

  And in our silent torment see,

  Existence hangs on such as we,

  And thus from sin and evil flee,

  So man and all his world may be.

  It seemed a silly bit of doggerel to describe a place I had been taught to dread. But it was the only reference I could find that even seemed to refer to the Shoals, if indeed this poetic “dread temple” was that selfsame place. Unfortunately Isthil’s rhymes did not tell me much, though it implied, as I’d already inferred from Messenger’s hints, that it need not be a final destination.

  Could I go there? I suspected that I could. Indeed, I believed from things that Messenger and Daniel had said, that such a pilgrimage would be a necessary part of my training as a Messenger of Fear.

  So, Mara, I asked myself, if you have to go eventually, why not now?

  Because, I answered sensibly, I would be going alone, without Messenger as my guide and protector.

  Yet, Messenger dreaded the Shoals for what he might find there. He feared finding Ariadne. I believe he feared he would find her hopelessly, helplessly trapped in whatever purgatory that place presented. The hope of finding his lost love was all that kept Messenger strong. I now knew that it was he who had subjected her to the torments of the Master of the Game. It was he who performed the Piercing that surfaced her darkest fear. And it was he who would have stood by helpless as she endured. It was all his duty as a Messenger, inescapable, but that knowledge would not blunt the jagged edge of his guilt.

  The decision was made without me consciously making it. It had been made when I lied to Messenger in order to buy myself time. I’d wasted hours of that time searching the book of Isthil,
only to find meaningless gibberish that told me nothing new and did not in any way prepare me. And now, having stalled and gained nothing, I was left still with the same decision: I must go to the Shoals.

  I did not need to know its location, I needed only to know that it existed, and then form the clear will to be there. But I was afraid; I have no reluctance to admit that. I was afraid. I searched the room around me for something to carry as a weapon, but what weapon could possibly defend me from what the book called a place of pain and gall? I had seen the Master of the Game. I had seen the Hooded Wraiths. I had felt the malevolent rage of the incubus, and the ever-so-enticing force of Oriax. What weapon could I carry to defend myself from powers such as those?

  The Shoals.

  I felt myself standing at one of those divergent paths, one coasting along passively with my training. The other path was the one not given but taken as an act of will. In deciding to take that path I was perhaps committing a grave error. I was perhaps altering my own fate in ways that might prove disastrous.

  I had played along, gone along, occasionally cried out against unfairness, but mostly I had acquiesced and played the obedient apprentice. Had Haarm’s example somehow inspired me to rebel? That didn’t feel true, but it might be. I believed he had made a very bad decision, but he had at least made a decision. He had grabbed his fate and given it a good shake.

  The Shoals.

  Yes. It all led there. I had seen the rest of the process from confronting the accused to the recitation of evils to the summoning of the Master of the Game, and beyond that to the Piercing and the punishment. I had seen some destroyed and some reborn and one escape. But I had not yet seen what happened to those who were crushed by Messengers of Fear.

  I would see. I would see whether Messenger’s lost love was there.

  I would go to the Shoals.

  I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again I was enveloped in the vile yellow mist that had from the first been my unwelcome companion. I heard nothing, touched nothing, saw nothing but that swirling, somehow aware mist. I felt its curiosity. I felt its contempt.

  “I will see the Shoals,” I said in a reedy voice, and with a silent sneer the mist withdrew from me.

  I don’t know what I expected, perhaps some Dante’s pit, perhaps some slasher movie’s dungeon, but what I saw as the mist cleared was like nothing I had imagined, at once more terrible by far, and yet, more beautiful.

  I stood on a featureless desert plain of cracked, parched mud, like a drought-emptied reservoir. But this plain had no boundaries that I could see, but rather seemed to extend forever in every direction at once, as if it covered the entire earth—if any of this even was the earth that mortals know. My eyes were drawn irresistibly away from that soul-crushing emptiness to a singular feature that rose from the dry mud ocean.

  A temple? Perhaps, but unlike anything built by human hands. A mountain rose from the plain, ten thousand feet of basalt so massive it seemed impossible that it did not sink of its own gigantic weight into the plain of cracked mud. The black mountain might almost have been a massive meteorite plopped down from orbit, so unlikely was its location. No rule of earthly geography could account for its overwhelming size in that otherwise featureless emptiness.

  Atop this mountain sat a pyramid. It seemed to grow organically from the black rock, without clear boundaries, but as it rose it grew lighter in color, as though altitude had bleached away the black. Black faded to gray, which faded to white, and at the very point glittered like a jewel. The totality of it, the mountain and its pyramid, looked like all the coal ever mined, compressed with increasing heat and pressure until it formed a diamond at the top.

  It was impossible for me to judge the distance with no point of reference; it might be a mile away, it might be a hundred, but however far the distance, I felt crushed by the size of that terrible edifice. Gazing at it I found breath a strain to draw, and my heart thudded with ominous heaviness in my chest. My every instinct warned me away from it, and yet, where else was I to go? I could return to my abode, or I could approach.

  “I am not condemned to this place,” I reminded myself. “I come freely, as a Messenger’s apprentice, to see what I must eventually see.” I said it aloud, as if whatever malign power that watched over this place would hear and be bound by my logic and good intentions.

  I began to walk, but soon intuited that walking at normal speed would take a very long time. I had to reach the place and still search out Ariadne, all before Messenger realized I had gone. I felt like I was skipping school, but skipping school only to take the day off in a place even worse than high school.

  I accelerated my pace, something I now do with ease, and soon the parched earth was flying by beneath feet that still seemed to be walking normally, as if each step was a hundred feet long while never requiring a stretch. As fast as I was moving, the basalt mountain and its diamond peak still grew but slowly. And so I hurried still faster, steps that covered hundreds of feet, then thousands of feet, a half mile at a time.

  As I approached, the mountain filled more and more of my field of view, spreading left and right, towering ever higher over me, blotting out the cloudless, wanly blue sky, pushing the horizon aside, and still it grew. After what felt like a long time I began to see details of the rock, creases and bulges, boulders that barely resisted gravity’s pull and stone pillars like defensive towers placed here and there in a mad and irrational scheme. And then, closer still, I made out a meandering ribbon of red that began in the mud and rose, appearing and disappearing in the texture of the basalt. At first I imagined it to be volcanic, a red stream of molten lava, but no, the red color lacked the light of heat. It was a cold red, a dark red, a red like dried blood.

  Someone had come into view, a solitary figure, and I knew who it was. I slowed but did not stop or turn away, and in time came to Daniel. And there, I stopped.

  “Mara,” Daniel said.

  “Daniel.”

  “You should turn back, apprentice. This is a terrible place.”

  I nodded. “I know.” I noted his choice of verb: should, not must. It was my choice.

  He looked at me, not unkindly, but perhaps a bit puzzled or maybe merely amused. He had not asked me why I was there.

  “Are you not afraid?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Then why?”

  I took a while to answer. I thought I knew what I would say, I thought I knew what I felt, but I wanted to choose the words carefully, to eschew anything false or unnecessary. In doing this I forced myself to see clearly my own motivations.

  “I love him,” I said at last.

  “No,” Daniel said. “You wish to love him, and you wish him to love you. And there is an impediment.”

  How I longed to sit down, for I was suddenly weary. Hearing the truth spoken so directly had drained the energy from me. I had convinced myself that I was on a mission of mercy, that I was going to learn the truth about Ariadne and with that truth I would stop Messenger from continuing his doomed search for her. This, I had told myself, would free him. Putting his agonies of doubt to rest would be my act of devotion and his liberation and then . . .

  And then he would tell me everything about himself. I would learn his true name. I would learn what kind of person he had been and might be again. And then, yes, somehow that would make the beautiful boy in black love me, and I would love him, and Ariadne would be forgotten.

  And my own loneliness and emptiness would be gone. I would have my own love to sustain me as Messenger’s love for Ariadne sustained him.

  “It’s not just selfishness,” I said to Daniel. “Not every motive is so clear.”

  “Of course not,” he allowed. “Life is complicated, humans are complicated. You do genuinely care for Messenger, and in time that could even become love. But you are here today to find a way to remove an impediment to your own happiness.”

  “I just want to understand.”

  Daniel sighed. “Do as you will. Travel t
he red path. But I wonder whether what is good and strong in you will outweigh the weakness and selfishness.”

  “I don’t know what—” But he was gone, and my final two words were said to the air. “—you mean.”

  The red path. I was at once at its base. Above me I could no longer see the diamond-topped temple for the massive bulk of the mountain that stretched from the far left of my view to the far right, so that to see anything else I had to turn my back on the mountain. And yet, when I did, I no longer saw the endless sea of desiccated mud. I saw only the yellow mist, mocking me, denying me even the sense that I had come to this place of my own free will. Had that whole long walk been an illusion? Was this black and sinister mountain the same?

  The path was a darker, deeper red upon closer inspection, and made of rectangular flagstones six feet long and half as wide. They were each translucent, with suggestions of shapes and forms I could only glimpse buried down within them, like flies caught forever in amber. I peered closely, but the shapes within only suggested and never revealed. Yet I felt certain that something that had once been human was within each of those terrible stones.

  I stepped onto the path, and at once I felt a rush of grief and sadness. There was loss and pain and guilt. And though I saw no face, still less any human action, I felt there was something specific about the stone, something individual.

  The next stone was similar but not identical. Here the emotion that seemed to rise through my feet and legs to touch my heart was darker, less of grief than of rage.

  I knew at a glance that I could not climb this entire path encountering such disorientating feelings with each of the thousands of steps it would require, so I called again on the power that messengers—and their apprentices—can control, and propelled myself more quickly along. Even then I felt a seething sea of emotion vying for the attention of my heart, like a tide dragging at a weary swimmer.

  I rushed up that path and passed a woman. She did not see me, moving in a trance like a sleepwalker, crying softly to herself. I passed a man, and later a child, and later still a very old man, and each person looked through me, and each sighed or cried or moaned. I stopped once to look back down the path, and saw that the mist, my faithful if unwelcome companion, was swallowing the path behind me. I seemed now to be on a peak that rose from cloud. Above me I saw the pyramid and indeed it did seem to have been carved or blasted or compressed out of the very mountain itself.