The Soul Continuum (17 page)

The heaving of bodies and the volume of their singing and shouting grows more intense when we round the next corner, and the guards push back with their pikes. Faces squash against each other while desperate worshippers push to reach the figurine of Marduk, craving small blessings. But one figure remains aloof, not harassed by the tempestuous nature of the crowd, and the burning of my blood turns to ice when our eyes meet. This is the moment I feared more than anything. It is the reason I did not want to be part of the festival. I am discovered.

Keitus Vieta is watching me. His night-blue eyes bulge
from beneath his hood, unblinking. A calm smile stretches
his dry lips and he still has his deadly cane, the jewel clutched in the gnarly claw of its handle, pulsing with its eerie indigo glow. Nobody else is concerned with him, and it seems that he is concerned with nobody else but me. I struggle against my cushions, trying to free my strapped arm so that I can escape, but to my right, Nitocris waves a hand at a guard and then points at me.

“No!” I cry. “You must let me go. Now!”

Ninsuni, who has been following the festival, sees me struggling. “Diabolis?”

“You must let me leave. He is coming for me, and he will—”

“Guards,” Nitocris says, motioning to two burly men a few paces behind me. “Protect him.”

The two men oblige, picking up speed to create more space between me and the people surrounding my chariot, but they will be no match for Vieta when he chooses to act.

“Nobody will harm you here,” Nitocris says. “No one would dare profane the festival.”

I gaze at Vieta. His smile has widened as if he's accepting the challenge with relish, but instead, he simply turns and disappears into the crowd. I am safe for the moment, as is everyone else, but it does not matter now. He knows where I am, and sooner or later he will come for me.

I
don't remember when I fell asleep. I remember the clamor of the festival, and I recall the dread of meeting Keitus Vieta's staring eyes, but soon after, everything became a blur, and I have no recollection of being returned to the Chambers of Veneration. My human part must have been conscious, whilst I was not. But now I am waking again, and passing into consciousness is not a gentle transition. My return is another violent episode in which my hands crunch and pop to extend even farther with my legs and feet following suit. My fingers and toes now resemble the fractal spread of bloody tree branches. More eyes push out from my head and torso in various sizes, and more mouths with crooked teeth and fangs yawn open, their combined voices groaning in pained chorus. I feel like a fusion of many bodies, each struggling to break free from its neighbors, but all sensing through one tormented mind.

I am back in my alcove again, and it is as if the old routine has not been broken. The light is muted, replicating dusk just after the setting of the desert sun, and it would be a peaceful atmosphere were it not for my transformation; the ebb of flame from the candles exaggerates my unearthly shape with creeping shadows, but the Blessed Ones seem not to be afraid. They wait patiently for my delirium to pass, regarding me with rapt fascination. Ninsuni is closest. She sits cross-legged before me like a troubled student worried for her teacher, her warm and sympathetic smile soothing me in the final moments of my change. She offers me a goblet, and shaking, I take it, bringing the cool liquid to my lips. The sensation of drinking is strange now. The wine travels down my throat and weaves through multiple avenues to fill more than one stomach.

“Are you hungry too?” Ninsuni asks.

I lift a hand to say no.

“Has the pain gone now?”

I want to tell her that the pain never goes, but I am exhausted. The strain of twisted bone and the bloating of organs
are like a simmering fire within, but it is a torment of mind also. I want to be human. I want that part of me to fight this ugly mutation that is out of control, but I know there is nothing anyone can do for me. Moss watches me in his usual crouch a little farther back, rocking in place, munching on one of the bugs from his silver trinket box.
Though he struggles to communicate with people, I see recognition and empathy in his tiny eyes. The only other person
I recognize is Phalana. She is seated in the same alcove in which I first saw her, withdrawn, her arms braced around her legs, so that her knees are drawn up against her chin.
She looks even paler than usual and distant, her expression blank.

I look toward the door and see a replacement guard posted there, younger than Jabari.

“Where is Kaliki?” I ask when I have tempered my breathing. The collective voices from my new mouths hum together in a deep resonance that causes everyone to adopt
a momentary startled expression, except Phalana. She lowers
her head.

Ninsuni's smile drops a little when she answers. “We do not know. Both he and Jabari are missing. They disappeared not long before you joined us at the festival. Have you seen them?”

Though Kaliki's disappearance is a mystery to me, the guard's is not, and I do not know how much I should tell her.

“And Nitocris?” I ask. “Where is she?”

“She is with her father, King Nebuchadnezzar. He—” Ninsuni catches her breath slightly before a frown takes over. “The king is . . . not well.”

“Not well?”

She looks down, confused as if searching for an answer. “He is like a beast of the field. This morning, I am told that he took off his clothes and began crawling on all fours in the gardens, sobbing continually, but his eyes are”—she looks up at me again—“blank. It is as if he is no longer in his own body. None of the physicians understand what has happened. The diviners and seers are perplexed.”

“Can anything be done?” I ask.

“The chief priest thinks the affliction will pass,” she says. “But do not worry about the king—he is being looked after. My concern now is for you.” She observes my deformities, lingering on
each gnarled joint and corrupted nodule of flesh. “I wish there was something I could do to ease your suffering.”

I hesitate before answering. “My suffering will pass. How long has it been since the festival?”

“A day. Your demon was with us. He too was distressed, but he could not speak, so I am glad you are back with us, Diabolis. We were hoping you might know something about the disappearance of Kaliki and Jabari—are you sure you remember nothing? Phalana believes you were the last person to see him, because he stayed behind to help you get to the baths before Jabari came looking.”

Phalana looks at me hopefully, and Ninsuni's eyes search mine for a few seconds as her smile falters, but then she nods in resignation when I fail to answer. She waits a few more moments before opening her mouth to speak but then looks down again.

“What is it?” I ask.

Ninsuni avoids my gaze. “I should tell you that word of your wisdom has spread among the priesthood, and they want to know more. I have forbidden them to come here because there are too many of them, but they are content that I share your words with them if you teach us.” Without moving her head, she looks up at me, as if knowing that I would not welcome this news.

“People are asking about me?”

Ninsuni nods contritely and looks down again. “I am sorry.”

“I told you I did not want this. I have placed you all in very great danger. I saw Keitus Vieta in the crowd. If he—”

Ninsuni shakes her head and looks up again, this time holding my gaze, more assertive. “But you are safe here. I promise he will not harm you.”

“No, I told you before, he is too powerful. He—”

“He has done nothing for a whole day. Surely if he really
did intend to attack us and is as powerful as you say, he would have done so by now.”

I am silenced by her logic, but it still worries me.

“If it concerns you so, I will try to get more guards placed outside the chambers,” she says. “But if the threat is as real as you say, then surely you must teach all of us as much as you can as soon as you can, is that not so?” She gestures toward the others in the room, and even Phalana, her eyes now damp with tears, looks up at me, and I sense something is wrong. There is an urgency in the air. I have been awake for only a few minutes, my alarming metamorphosis barely complete, and although Ninsuni is as kind as she always is, it seems that I already have an audience awaiting enlightenment, as if this has been planned, and I am the last guest to arrive.

“Now? At such a delicate time?” I ask.

“You are a god,” says Phalana. “We want to hear your words.” The playfulness has gone from her tone.

“I am no god,” I tell her, though the sternness in my voice and the eerie tones invoked by my many vocal cords
almost serve to encourage her conviction. “And surely you are too concerned for Kaliki to hear anything I might teach you.”

Phalana glances nervously at Ninsuni, passes her palms slowly across her tear-stained cheeks to dry them, then drags her fingers through her red hair to pull at the roots. “Kaliki is dead.”

Moss, who had been fidgeting absently, ceases moving and regards Phalana with wide-eyed sorrow. “No!”

“Dead?” Ninsuni says, almost accusingly. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I feel it,” Phalana says softly. “I just know.”
She looks up at me again. “Even if you say you are not a god, you must see into the realm of Irkalla and be able to speak to the souls of the dead. After all, you say you only speak when
death is near.”

Irkalla, the Babylonian underworld. A place not of punishment or reward, but a place where the dead must pass through seven gates and seven guardians to reach their eventual permanent residence—a realm where they must endure all the mundane drudgery of their living days exaggerated to even greater levels of monotony. There are far worse versions of this place described by the multitude of beliefs propagated through the endless human ages: the Lake of Fire, Tartarus, Yomi, the Quantum Abyss. But Irkalla is more like an un-life where freedom is removed. Seers and prophets sometimes claim they can communicate with the dead, but this is fallacy. If they truly understood what happens beyond the veil, and knew what lurks there,
they would shrink away in terror and never pry into the unseen
realms again.

“The dead are not what you think they are,” I tell them.

“Then what are they?” Phalana asks.

Her eyes are burning with pain, but there is also a curiosity she is trying hard to disguise, her thirst to understand a pleasure in which she should not indulge while her lover is missing.

Ninsuni folds her arms slowly around herself as if a chill breeze has entered the dungeon. “I would like to know how it is that you have such knowledge. We have many
people claiming to be seers, to have been blessed with arcane
knowledge, but you . . . you have a surpassing wisdom.” She studies me thoughtfully, almost nervously. “Is it this knowledge that twists your body so? Will your knowledge do the same to us? I do not want to ascend corrupted . . . I mean no offense.”

I cannot help but smile, but not out of ridicule; it is fondness I feel. Ninsuni's beliefs remind me of my mother's. My first moment of sentience was a mental reflex to absorb the static knowledge from her dying brain. Her last thoughts were of hopeful ascension into the air—an uncommon thought for a Chaldean slave girl—but it was my first experience of internal conflict. I wanted to trust my mother, but the inhuman part of me knew that her beliefs about the afterlife and how the universe works were wrong. And now, looking at Ninsuni, I long for that same bonding I had to deny at my birth, knowing the same conflict between truth and belief has come again.

Ninsuni sees my smile. “I am sorry. I am mistaken. Forgive me.”

And this is my error: to assume that she will not yield in her own beliefs. She wants to learn.

“My condition has nothing to do with knowledge. It has to do with nature. I am . . . built differently than you. As are the dead. They are also of a different form.”

“What do you mean?” Phalana draws closer. She sits down cross-legged, as close to me as she dares.

“To explain this to you, I must tell you about the inner
workings of the elements, and this will not be easy. I will have to misrepresent much of the truth to help you understand.”

“We know this by now,” says Ninsuni with a smile of encouragement. “We will listen. You will teach.”

“I will try.” An answer to the challenge eludes me for several moments, but they are all silent, waiting patiently. “Do you remember when I told you that there are planets and stars, and that they are all part of a galaxy that is one of many, and that this in turn is one of countless others inside a cluster?”

“Yes,” Moss cuts in eagerly. “It's big out there. Very, very big, and more and more and bigger and bigger. As big as the great wheel of the gods.”

“Yes, but now imagine that scale in the opposite direction.”
I lift a hand and splay my numerous fingers, unfurling them like the fronds of an alien plant. “Within our flesh are cells, tiny pieces of life able to multiply and replicate themselves. It is how you grow and heal, but my cells are very different. Most of them are not made of the same things that yours are, and this is why mine are out of control.”

“We are made of small pieces of . . . life?” Ninsuni squints.

“Yes. But the life in your cells is not capable of thought like you are. It is alive in a different way.”

“Like me!” says Moss. “Like a plant.” He plucks a piece of gnarled, yellowing root from his elbow and offers it to Phalana. She refuses it, and after a look of mild offense, Moss eats it.

“Something like a plant, yes.”

“What does this have to do with the dead?” Phalana asks. “Do people die because the cells stop living?”