Vellum (25 page)

seven

BLACK LINES OF OUR DOOM

The Angel Metatron

T
o Eridu, the Lady Shubur went, entered the holy shrine, temple of Enki.

“Death silver in the Kur, O father bright Lord Ilil,” she cried out, “your aromatic daughter wood, covered with precious lapis dust of the broken stone in the underworld cut into holy cedar, underworld priestess for the stoneworker put to death, for the woodworker of heaven…”

He taps a couple of keys, reloads the screen; the text scrolls, rolls away, falls back exactly as it was before, more gibberish, the same references to Ilil and Shubur, vaguely familiar but long-forgotten…and to himself, as Enki, not as Enoch or as Metatron—not even as Ea—but as Enki. He stares at the screen, trying to unscramble the text into a tale…maybe some priestly record of a legend handed down from generation to generation? Some lamentation to be sung for a dead child? He taps an arrow key and the text slides sideways.

“What has happened?” Father Enki said. “What has my daughter done? Inanna, queen of all the lands and holy priestess of the heavens. What has happened? I am worried. I am anxious.”

He stares at the glyph now centered on the screen, a sigil that just shouldn't be there, the sign of an unkin buried for as many thousand years as his old name. It shouldn't be there but it is.

Inanna.

Father Enki dug the dirt out from beneath the fingernails of his left hand, and shaped that dirt into a
kurgarra
, a sexless creature. Father Enki dug the dirt out from beneath the fingernails of his right hand, and shaped that dirt into a
galatur,
a sexless creature. To the
kurgarra
he gave the food of life. To the
galatur
he gave the water of life.

He slides his thumb across the trackpad, right-clicks, chooses a translation for the text; the sigils click into overlapping checkerboard patterns, one of which unlocks and folds across the other, snicks into place as a new set of permutations.

Enki, in the wisdom of his heart, created a person. He created a pretty youth, a bright young thing which he called Charm.

It's the same story in a different version. He remembers it now—
Inanna's Descent
in Sumer,
Ishtar's Descent
in later Babylonia. The young, impetuous queen of the heavens decides to try and take the underworld as well. Enki has to send a pretty boy in one version—or a pair of them in another—down to trick Ereshkigal into letting her go. Neither version is an accurate portrayal of what happened in reality. In reality, Inanna was an ambitious little bitch who deserved what she got. She whored her way to the top leaving a trail of discarded lovers behind her. She even tried to steal the
me
from him at one point. He had no sympathy for her whatsoever and when she got herself killed going up against Eresh of Kur he was glad to see her disappear into the margins of reality, remembered only in the odd myth and legend here or there. He was already planning the Covenant by that point, as a way of uniting all the unkin under a single law, to put a stop to all the feuds and rivalries; one less power-hungry girl was just one less problem. Why the hell would he try and drag her back into existence from the Vellum?

He had been tired of all the fighting. He was tired of being vizier to one megalomaniac after another, Enlil, Marduk, Ninurta, Adad, this Baal or that. All he wanted was peace, and there were enough like him that when they signed themselves into the Covenant, it really looked like it was going to work. One by one the unkin all accepted it, saw that their future lay in silent empires, hidden realms. Let the humans build the world for them, let them rule themselves, with just a little guidance here and there, a vision or a voice. They'd actually been quite open at times; when the young Habiru tribesman that he'd chosen to build the new religion asked him his name, Enki had given it to him.
Eyah asher Eyah,
he had said. No mystery, no secret. Ea was what they called him in Babylonia, in the land that the boy's own ancestors had come from. I am that which is called Ea. The fact that it ended up written down as
I am that which is called I am
was just testimony that the plan was working; the old world of gods, of giants among men, was being forgotten, wiped away. In the new world they would be seen as servants, not rulers. They had a fresh start, a new beginning.

So Rapiu became Raphael, Adad became Azazel, Shamash became Sammael, and Enki became Enoch became Metatron, the angel scribe who wrote the book of life, who speaks for God, the only one allowed behind the Veil to look upon the Glory of a deity whose Name could not be spoken, whose Face no one could look upon but his first minister, whose Word was only heard from the mouth of his spokesman. Metatron, the most loyal servant of the One True God. So the stories say and, in a way, it's true. Except that all unkin get to meet Him sooner or later, to step beyond the veil, to look upon His transcendent and ineffable mystery.

“The One True God,” he says to them all, as he points toward the empty throne.

It's the core of the Covenant, the reason that they called themselves unkin in the first place. Not theos or deus, netjer or dingir, aesir or gods. Unkin. Some of the new bloods imagine that it's a coined word, like “undead”—
un-kin,
without kin—because they leave behind their family, their history, their humanities, when whatever it is inside them touches the powers under reality and changes them forever. But actually it's what they called the assemblies of elders who ruled the towns and villages of the neolithic world he was born into. The word
democrat
wasn't around in those days.

For Metatron, for all the unkin, Heaven is the republic that they've spent three thousand years trying to build.

But there are always those who see that empty throne and want to sit in it. Some say the Covenant is unjust, illegitimate, corrupt, made up of old men who don't understand the world changing around them, bureaucrats and intellectuals, a patriarchal elite. There are always militants and radicals, philosophers with grand schemes, politicos with the cunning and the nerve to try and carry them through. Metatron should know; he was one himself once, a long time ago. But mostly they're just convinced of their own destiny and they rationalize it with some revolutionary rhetoric. The old unkin who refused to join the Covenant because they might actually have to do what someone else told them, the newer ones who heroize these dark, romantic rebels—Metatron thinks of them as like those fanatics holed up in the hills of America or Afghanistan, the deserts of Algeria or the jungles of the Congo. White supremacists or Islamic terrorists, whether it's the Second Amendment that they cite or Karl Marx, the purity of the race or shariah law, they all think they're fighting the good fight, the holy jihad, the glorious struggle. The real struggle is the revolution that started millennia ago and is still going on, the struggle to take power out of the hands of killers like them and into the pages of a book, the processes of a court.

But, no. It's their God-given right to bear arms, and all property is theft, and the Aryan race was born to rule, and if a woman cheats on the husband that was chosen for her, stone her. And if the Covenant thinks it has the right to bind a being so obviously born for glory, power, majesty, well then the Covenant is wrong.

Metatron was tired of all the fighting when he first conceived the Covenant. Three thousand years later, he's still tired, because all the demons and devils that would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven are getting organized, gathering their forces. He's tired because there are still idiot new bloods like these Messenger children who think they can just run away and hide, as if either side is going to leave a rogue unkin wandering at will—like a police officer would leave a loaded gun on the table in front of a psychopath and turn away, wait to be shot.

And he's tired because the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together—Thomas and Phreedom Messenger, Seamus Finnan, Inanna—to make a sort of sense.

What has happened?
the screen says.
I am worried. I am anxious.

“What have you been up to, little girl? What have you gotten yourself into?”

Creatures of Earth

“Well, Inanna,” says Madame Iris. “You do—”

“No,” she says.

She brushes flakes of crusted blood off her arm; it's healing quickly as she cants a gentle mantra under her breath. The design covers the whole arm, shoulder to wrist, sleeving it in her tale, Inanna's tale, but as much as it's a part of her now, it is still just a part. She doesn't feel like she can call herself Inanna. Not quite. But on the other hand, the part of her that once was Phreedom is now permanently altered, fundamentally transformed by this…rewiring of her soul.

“Call me…Anna,” she says. A modern name for a modern world.

It's a little disconcerting…more than a little: she has three sets of memories all competing for attention—her as biker chick child of the Information Age, as small-town princess of the New Stone Age, and as…something else. That third existence is a little fuzzy, disjointed, inconsistent; it's the existence of the dead, fleshed-out in dreams and legends, shadows and reflections of reality. Three thousand years of fusion and flux, in the mass unconscious of humanity, in the Vellum. Three millennia, or three days, three eons of being no more than a story told and retold, transformed with each telling, broken up, used and reused, abused. Restored.

But once you're in the Vellum, you're there for good. She only has to close her eyes to see the tattoo parlor as it really is, as it is, and was, and ever will be, a house of the dead. Creatures move in the shadows around her. Ereshkigal, Eresh of the Greater Earth, stands between her and the beaded curtain, the way out.

“Anna, then,” says Madame Iris. “You do understand that you belong to me now?”

The book of gravings lies open on the counter in front of her. In a way, it's as much a contract as the Covenant. She may be here now in the body of an angry young girl, bound into it by the needlework of Madame Iris, but she's as much there in the book, bound into its pages, bound for all eternity in the hands of Iris, who's had three thousand years to study the mark of Inanna, like an anatomist dissecting a corpse, a botanist studying a flower, an archaeologist studying an ancient text. Iris knows her mark now, her secret name, probably better than herself, and, yes, that gives her power over her. Even the humans understand that if you know a creature's secret name—angel or devil, god, unkin—then you can bind it to your will.

She has a sudden image of her own dead body hanging from a hook, of Madame Iris circling it, scrutinizing it, copying the mark still shining on her cold flesh, tracing a finger in the dust, painting pigment on animal hide, making sketches on papyrus, on canvas. It was her job, archivist of the soul. Even the unkin didn't live forever; creatures of earth, carbon and water, even the gods need feet of clay to walk the world, and so they had their bodies brought to her for safekeeping and she would flay them, treat the skins, preserve the mark. In her city of the dead, in the cave in the mountains north of Sumer, north of Akkad, north of Aratta, they could be sure that even if all their teraphim were smashed, their shabtis shattered, their human avatars slaughtered by an enemy, their souls would be kept safe that they could one day live again. It was the one certainty amid all the wars and vendettas, allegiances and betrayals; Kur was beyond those petty squabbles, dealt with all sides evenly, could not be bribed or threatened. Eresh was the ultimate untouchable.

Inanna had known the Covenant would put an end to that. She'd seen Enki's plans, got him so drunk he talked about them openly. No more god-kings. No more idols. No more empires. And she knew if he wanted to make his little heaven work he'd have to turn the city of the dead into a hell, a furnace for the souls of all those old gods who might stand against them. She could hear it in the flux of forces all the unkin were tapped into, in the physical sound of powers realigning, like some vast and ancient power shifting deep beneath her feet, thick muscles flexing under skin. With that synesthetic sense that marked her and the rest of them out from common humanity, she could hear the shape of things to come. And for this little queen of the heavens, this priestess of the earth, that wasn't in her plans.

So she had set out for the Kur. She'd thought Eresh would see it her way. Or, if not, at least she'd get there first, before the angels went in with their swords of fire, the lightning language flashing from their mouths, words blasting the underworld, turning the dark house into a blazing inferno.

But Eresh had her own plans.

The last thing she remembers, as Inanna, is the Annunaki falling on her, tearing at her, their fingers round her heart, and Eresh standing before the throne, her hand reached out, a finger pointing, uttering the word that killed her.