Vellum (29 page)

Outside the palace gates, the Lady Shubur, dressed in soiled sackcloth, waiting, saw Inanna with the
ugallu
all round her, and she hurled herself into the dust down at Inanna's feet.

“Walk on, Inanna,” the
ugallu
said. “We will take Lady Shubur in your place.”

“No,” cried Inanna. “Lady Shubur is my steadfast support, the
sukkal
who gives wise advice, the soldier who stands at my side. She remembered my commands, sounded a lamentation for me in the ruins. She pounded the drum for me at the assemblies where the unkin gather, and around the houses of the gods. She tore at her eyes, her mouth, her thighs. She wore the beggar's single robe of soiled sackcloth and, alone, she set out for the temple of Lord Ilil in Nippur. She went to the temple of Sin in Ur, to the temple of Enki in Eridu. She saved my life. I'll never give the Lady Shubur to you.”

“Walk on then,” the
ugallu
said. “And we will walk with you to Umma.”

She cracks another beer with the bottle opener on her key ring and sits back down at the dresser, at the book of marks that lies open at Inanna's. It's different from the one tattooed on her arm now, but there are points of congruence, similarities as well as differences, and sometimes they change. She feels herself changing with the graving at those points. Sometimes it's like a fever as she burns with the rage of the girl who once swore she would kill them all, that she would
fucking kill them all,
other times it's like all the heat just drained right out of her and she feels dead again, cold and dead. Sometimes she finds herself looking in the mirror and not knowing who she is under her skin, if anything, seeing herself standing there in a scuffed black leather biker's jacket, seeing herself in soiled sackcloth, tearing her fingernails down one cheek. She's broken a lot of hotel mirrors, screaming at them. She has cigarette burns in her left arm where she's had to remind herself she's still alive. She's not entirely sure the graving downloaded into her by Metatron's bitmites is truly stable, and she's not entirely sure that she is.

But she's sure that it was worth it.

The book is open at the graving of Shamash and she stares at it. Dumuzi's friend who tried so hard to save him and failed. It's Finnan's mark, without a doubt, except it's simpler, cruder, like a…prototype, like the original version of a story that's been told again and again over the centuries, complexifying with each cycle, a story she was fool enough to write herself into.

She flicks the pages of the book until she finds the mark she's looking for, the graving of Inanna's shepherd-boy lover, known to the Sumerians as Dumuzi, known to the Babylonians as Tammuz. She wonders, looking at it, if the mark she remembers seeing on Thomas's chest, when he opened up his shirt to show her in that roadhouse in the mountains, if it always looked like this or if her memory changed as his mark did, under the needle.

A DOOR OUT OF REALITY

At the holy shrine in Umma, Shara, son of proud Inanna, was wearing the soiled sackcloth. He saw Inanna with the
ugallu
all round her, and he hurled himself into the dust down at her feet.

“Walk on to your city, Inanna,” the
ugallu
said. “We will take Shara in your place.”

“No,” cried Inanna. “Not my son, not Shara who sings hymns to me, who clips my nails and slips his fingers through my hair. I'll never give Shara to you.”

“Walk on then,” the
ugallu
said. “And we will walk with you to Badtibira.”

She opens up the throttle on the bike and lets it roar for her the way she wants to roar, to rage against the fucking unkin, angels and devils, all of them, every fucking one of them. She wants to see them all dead. She wants to see their bodies broken and bloody. Let them rip each other apart. Let them tear each other's hearts out. Let the devils burn and the angels fall. Let every motherfucking one of them be crucified as they deserve to be, as every god deserves to be. Phreedom is going to get the fuck out of their world and leave them to it. She swings the bike around the hairpin bend high on the mountainside as if she's hoping, praying that she'll lose control. But she recovers, swings back up and leans the other way to take another curve at the same speed. Scree scatters under her tires.

The black car follows her, close on her tail, but she doesn't see it, blinkered by the helmet and her own thousand-yard stare.

At the holy shrine in Badtibira, Lulal, son of proud Inanna, was wearing the soiled sackcloth. He saw Inanna with the
ugallu
all round her, and he hurled himself into the dust down at her feet.

“Walk on to your city, Inanna,” the
ugallu
said. “We will take Lulal in your place.”

“Not Lulal, my son,” Inanna cried. “He is a king amongst men, my right arm and my left arm. I'll never give Lulal to you.”

“Walk on to your city then, Inanna,” the
ugallu
said. “And we will walk with you to the great apple tree in Uruk.”

They're closing on her as she hits the tunnel, as she swerves to overtake a station wagon, going so fast the driver freaks and shreds the side of his car against the brick wall in a scream of sparks and bounces the lumbering auto right across to make the other side shriek, into the path of the sleek black auto which veers, just clips it, sending chrome bumpers rolling through the air. She can see them in the mirror. She can see the fuckers leaning forward, the one with dark hair behind the wheel, the other in the passenger seat, his bloody hand pressed against the windshield, flames burning in the sockets of his eyes, and she knows that they don't work for Metatron anymore, and they don't work for Eresh; they work for something that's only concern, that's only motivation, is the brutal aesthetic of a proper ending, of a fate written and bound, eternal and unchanging. And she won't fucking give them it.

At the tunnel's end the road twists sharp round to the right, but she doesn't turn the bike; she plows straight through the barrier, over the handlebars and through the air, through leaves and branches and broken bones and torn flesh and through a door out of reality and into the Vellum.

THROUGH THE LONG GRASS

In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves, Tammuz, the lover of Inanna, sat, sheened in his
me
-garments, lounging, still, upon his throne. Inanna fastened on Tammuz the gaze of death, spoke out against him words quiet in wrath, uttered against him cries of shame, of blame:

“Take him! Take Tammuz away! Wash him with pure water and anoint him with sweet oil. Clothe him in a red robe and let the pipes of lapis lazuli play. Let all the party girls raise up a loud lament for him. Take him away.”

She lies there on the ground, looking up at blue sky, at an impossible crescent sun, at the boughs of a tree that dapple the golden light with mottled greens, and at her brother's face. He tries to stop her, but she's already muttering the charms she needs to give her the strength, she's already dragging herself up to him with one arm around his neck and reaching inside her jacket with the other. It's a page torn from the book, the mark of Tammuz, and she shows it to him, hands it
to
him while she pulls her broken arm out of its sleeve. She has to wipe the blood off to show him where her story and his meet, here in the Vellum, the end of her story and the beginning of his. In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves…

She curses him as a fucking idiot, as a fool, as a coward.

He shakes his head. She doesn't understand. It's going to be OK.

She can hear them coming through the long grass, the things that Metatron created, that Eresh destroyed and that the machine souls of a thousand long-dead unkin have sent out to close the door and keep them sealed inside their fates. She has the knife out of her pocket now and she fumbles with it in her left hand as she twists her arm round to find the place, the right combination of signs and sigils. In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves…

All she has to do is cut it off, cut that little part of herself off, and it doesn't have to happen that way. She can rewrite the story, change it. He can too. Doesn't he see?

He shakes his head. She doesn't understand. They
are
the story now. The angels, the demons, none of them matter; it's
their
story now. It's going to be OK.

“You'll always be getting captured,” she says.

“And I'll always be escaping them.”

“They'll kill you, over and over and over again.”

“And all the time I'll still be here,” he says, “under a tree of golden apples and green leaves.”

She holds the shred of skin in her hand now, leaning her broken body back against the tree, blinded by blood and tears. The two creatures stand behind him but the three of them just wait, wait for her to say the word in a moment of sunlight and pain that stretches out for an eternity. He has the knife in his hand but he won't do it to himself. All he has to do is cut that little bit out of himself and they can walk away from this together. That's all he has to fucking do. She bites her bottom lip and tries to pull herself up but she's too weak, too broken and wounded to do anything other than lie there. But she's alive, and she's free and she looks at him and hates him for it, for leaving her alive and free when he is not, when he could be, he fucking could be if he'd just listen to her, just this once, do what she tells him.

He drops the knife.

“Damn you,” she says, and the demons' hands clamp round her brother's arms, start to pull him back away from her into the blur of sunlight and green.

He shakes his head. She doesn't understand. It's going to be OK.

Errata

Under a Tree of Golden Apples

L
ate afternoon sunlight of summer casts its shadows long as I walk through the grass toward the napping, nodding youth with his green hair and scrag of a goatee, and the horns of a kid, of the eternal kid, pinking the air through his scruff of tousle. He lies against the tree, in doze or daze, in a haze of whirlicues of smoke that furl up from a precarious cone of paper wedged between index and forefinger in his hand lain across his lap. A stoned Pan in green combats and layers of beads and necklaces under his lolling head, something of yesteryears, something of modern times, and something of the days lost in between. His face, familiar but unplaced in my memory, displaced by the horns, I approach with puzzlement, eyes peering as if to resolve his identity in a blur that's truer than sharp focus, until ten feet away, my shadow falls across the orchard sprite.

He brings the cone of a joint up languidly to his lips, and with a lick of them first he slips a suck, holds curling pluming smoke in his open grin for a second before deep-drawing down into his lungs, and it's the motion that I recognize, finally in a forgotten face.

“Puck,” I say. “Thomas.”

“Do I know you?” he says, blinking, fluttering his eyes against the low sun. He accepts the name without question, with only a slim curiosity in his half-shut eyes and raised brows, not asking why I call him by these names but who I am to know them.

“Reynard,” I say, but I'm not sure if that means anything to this horned echo of my past. Is this Puck mine, Jack's fairy fuck and Joey's
fucking fairy
? Or is he just some cognate avatar of attitude cut from the same mold in this altered world deep in the Vellum, an apple fallen from the same tree, with the same juicy tartness in his relishing touch of tip of tongue to lips?

“Reynard the Fox?” he says. “The King of Thieves, no less.”

I have no idea if he's being serious here, but then I never did.

“I—”

It's so long since I have practiced speech to anyone other than myself, I find it hard to form my sense into a sentence.

“I am at your service, my fine sir,” he says, twirling his hand and showering hot rocks through the air in a most Puckly gesture. “What can I do you for? You need someone to drive the getaway car? You know how fast I am in flight. Or is it a distraction that you need while you sneak in, in dead of night, to steal the crown jewels of the God of Light? I can be very distracting, you know.”

And even though he's patently not the Puck I knew, he's Puck all right.

“I think,” I say, “we better…start…from the beginning.”

He tells me he was born under a bad signpost, stolen from gypsies as a young child, raised by werewolves in the wilderness, ran away from the circus, bought the devil's soul and sold his arse on the streets of Heaven.

“What's your story?” I ask him, and he says:

“Which one?” he says, “I fought the Law and won. I shot the sheriff
and
his deputy. I—”

I hold up a hand.

There is a gleam of deviousness in his eyes that quite belies the innocence of his smile, and I know it's going to be impossible to separate the fabrication from the facts; looking at him, I'm not even sure that there
are
any facts.

“Do you remember Jack?” I ask. If there is anything to connect this Puck to my long-lost reality it has to be poor, crazy Jack.

“Jack Flash?” he says.

Jack Flash?

I think of Jack with his flame hair and his wild laughing eyes, the passion burning in his soul for Puck and burning in his head after…It has to be the one.

“I thought Jack Flash was dead,” says Puck.

But that's not right; Thomas is dead, I'm dead, if this place, this Vellum, is what I've always thought it is, but I left Jack behind me very much alive. Ten thousand years ago? Ten thousand years ago, long turned to dust. I look at this Puck. Time, in the Vellum, it seems, is not so simple.

“I don't know,” I say.

“Man,” says Puck. “Jack Flash is my fucking hero.”

He flicks the joint away into the air in spirals of sparks.

“If Jack's alive,” he says, “I've got to get him back.”

He licks his lips.

The Broken Seven

The five of them stand there in a row, shiftless, uneasy without Carter and Pechorin to speak for them, unaware of even why they've lost their fire and their ice. The one at the far left keeps glancing at the two pillars with the relevant gravings, unfortunate reminders. It wasn't necessary for the rest of them to be involved, Metatron explains. The sacrifice was required but he could not afford to lose them all, the Covenant could not afford to lose them all. There is no need to worry; Carter and Pechorin will be back shortly.

In truth, of course, from the sheer howling quake that blasted through the Vellum, raking every unkin this side of eternity, with the death cry of Eresh, but more from the burning, blinding sear of light that followed, and the deafening, icy silence in its wake, Metatron can tell those two are never coming back. But the others don't need to know this. When the right two newbloods come along, he'll simply tweak their souls here and there in the renaming and bind them into this seven as their replacements. They won't be called Carter or Pechorin, but those human names are meaningless anyway. One angel of fire is all angels of fire. One angel of ice is all angels of ice. But he gives this broken seven the reassurances they need, patching over the cracks in their gestalt identity.

They're not the only cracks he has to worry about.

The news on the Net is now reporting the discovery of an exciting new cache of cuneiform tablets looted from the ruins of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities back at the start of the Middle East War, where they had lain forgotten and untranslated for half a century under various turbulent or tyrannical regimes, now seized by U.S. troops in a sting on stolen artifacts being used to fund the never-ending cells of terrorists streaming in from Syria, Iran, the Yemen, Saudi Arabia. The first tentative translations, the text scrolling across his lenses tells him, appear to indicate that this is an entirely unknown epic, telling of the conquering of the underworld by the god of war. They've christened it The Death of Ereshkigal. This is only one of the more rational and comprehensible effects. A new cult has appeared in Indian history, according to his cross-referencing search, a group called Thuggees worshipping a goddess of death called Kali, now eradicated, it seems, but still an alteration. Infant mortality rates. Flocking patterns of vultures. And those are just the start.

But it's the other cracks that worry him more. The disruptions in the temporal world from Eresh's death were to be expected, and with her having kept herself hidden in little nooks and crannies over most of humanity's written history, crawling in the dust and darkness, the majority of the changes are minor. Nothing like the shitstorm that happened when Marduk carved up Tiamat into little pieces; they called that the Neolithic Revolution. And Pechorin's death seems to have had all but no effect. But Carter is different. This little angel of fire, this nobody, this mere footsoldier in the war against the Sovereigns, the endless enemies of the Covenant, has left a trail of debris scattered through the Vellum and the world written in lines and solid shapes of certainty upon it that is completely disproportionate to his worthlessness.

Folklore and fairy stories, Jack the Giant-Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk. An urban legend from eighteenth-century London—Spring-heeled Jack—some fire-eyed demon leaping from rooftop to rooftop in impossible bounds. From London again, Victorian era, a killer slaughtering prostitutes in Whitechapel. Calico Jack, a pirate of the Caribbean. A whole new musical movement finding an icon in an obnoxious orange-haired thug in shredded clothing wearing a flag now called the Union Jack. Fifty-two cards in a deck that once held forty-eight. Spring-loaded children's toys and balls in sports that go back centuries. All from this nobody, this nothing. It's like a million little sparks of his shatterling soul have started forest fires everywhere they fell.

Metatron dismisses the five and starts to contemplate the clean-up operation. At least he doesn't have the Messengers to worry about now. Their inevitable story has the boy doomed the next time he sees his sister, and she herself, well, she'll be just another little demon, hating the world for what it's done to her. And revenge is so much more predictable than ambition as a motivation.

But Jack…

In Metatron's earphones, the words of a suddenly famous rock song howl.

I was born in a crossfire hurricane…