Vellum (5 page)

“Wait here, Inanna,” Neti said, “and I will give your message to my queen.”

And Neti, chief keeper of the gates of Kur, turned and entered the palace of Eresh, the Queen of the Underworld, of the Greater Earth.

Mary or Anna, Esther or Diana, Phreedom flicks through the many cards she carries in her wallet, all the identities she travels in. She picks one out almost at random—an Anna, this time—hands it to the clerk behind the counter. He smiles at her and she can't help herself from thinking of the cheap motels she's stayed in where the clerks are all sim sprites, electronic ghosts with just enough AI behind them to take care of check-ins and check-outs. Sim answerers are the cheaper option, now, than the old service sector wage slaves of the past; she's kind of surprised that this place has a flesh receptionist. But maybe they just haven't caught up with the times.

Another town, another Comfort Inn, she thinks. This time it's Marion, but it could be anywhere. She watches as the clerk slashes the card through the machine and turns to watch the screen, waiting for confirmation. And she pauses, pen poised in her hand over the book, flicks her eyes up to the clock on the back wall and sees the second hand tick round, once, twice, then stop. The clerk is still, stopped in his stoop, one hand laid on the monitor, his drumming fingers caught between the beats. She flicks backward through the pages of the book, scanning the names for one that has a different look. She's no idea what name he might have used here, but she knows she'll know it when she sees it, by the little signs, not in the handwriting, in the snake of an
s,
the round mounds of an
m,
but in the imprints that it makes, not in the paper but in reality itself. The unkin can wear whatever names they want, whatever guises, but they still wear their nature in their attitude, in their actions. They leave traces.

And as it turns out, he hasn't even bothered to use a false name.

Thomas Messenger.

It's black ink on white paper but she sees it glowing white with a black aura, like its own afterimage. So her brother was here right enough.

She lets the second hand tick forward on the clock, and the clerk rises from his stoop, turns back to her.

“My queen,” said Neti, “a maid stands at the palace gates. She stands as firm as the foundations of a city wall, tall as the skies and wide as all the lands. She comes prepared, the seven
me
gathered into her hands. Her eyes are shadowed with dark kohl and in her hand she holds a lapis rod and line. Across her forehead fall her fine, dark locks of hair, arranged with care. She wears small lapis beads around her neck, a double strand of beads across her breast. Around her chest a breastplate calls, speaks to all men, says
come, come to me.
On her head she wears the
sugurra,
crown of the steppe, and there's a golden bracelet on her wrist. My queen, she wears the royal robes wrapped round her body.”

And Phreedom swipes the keycard through the lock and opens the door into a room that's just like every other room in this Comfort Inn, in every Comfort Inn, in every cheap hotel in every nowhere town in every state she's been in. She dumps the helmet on the wooden dresser as the door clicks shut behind her, drapes the jacket on the back of a chair. She slips the chicken-bone necklace off over her head, unhooks the choker, slips the watch off of her wrist, and unclips the datastick at her hip, lays them all on the dark wood veneer. She peels the T-shirt off and lets it drop on top of the double bed's thin fitted quilt of green and garish flowers, heads for the bathroom where—

The water from the shower head rains over her hand, hot patterings and trickling trails between her fingers. Her blue jeans lie crumpled on the floor but Phreedom has no memory of taking them off. Fuck, she thinks. Another cut. Another fold in time, a little nick in the Vellum. She's on the threshold here.

She steps into the shower.

BROKEN MINUTES AND BENT HOURS

“She is here, your sister Inanna, who carries the great whipping stick, the
keppu
toy, to stir the
abzu
up as Enki watches.”

When Eresh of the Greater Earth heard this, she slapped her thigh, bit at her bottom lip. When Eresh of the Greater Earth heard this, she raged.

“What have I done to anger her? I eat and drink with the
Anunnaki,
clay for my bread and stagnant water for my beer. What brings her here? I weep for young men and the sweethearts they've abandoned without choice. I weep for girls torn from their lover's laps. I weep for children born before their time to die before they've lived.”

Her face turned scarlet as cut tamarisk, her lips as purple as a
kuninu
-vessel's rim. She took the problem to her heart and brooded on it. After a while she spoke:

“Come, Neti, my chief keeper of the gates of Kur, and listen carefully to what I say: Lock up and bolt the seven gates of Kur, then, one by one, open each gate and let Inanna enter through the crack. Bring her down. But as she enters, take her regal costume from her, take the crown, the necklace and the beads that fall across her breast, the golden breastplate on her chest, the bracelet and the rod and line. Strip her of everything, even the royal robe, and let the holy priestess of the earth, the Queen of Heaven, enter here bowed low.”

Neti listened to his queen's words, locked and bolted all the seven gates of Kur, the city of the dead. Then he opened the outer gate.

“Come, Inanna, enter,” Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the
sugurra,
crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.

“What is this?” asked Inanna.

“Quiet, Inanna,” she was told, “the customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

And: Click. The door of Phreedom's room swings slow upon its spring, snicks shut behind her as she steps out into the corridor, plastic magnetic keycard in her hand in her pocket.

Other unkin, she knows, have other methods for finding those who don't want to be found. Some use the old ways: scrying in mirrors for a vision of their quarry on a corner, standing under a street sign; or sniffing out a psychic scent like bloodhounds, following it on foot across whole continents; or listening, head cocked, for the faintest echo of a unique sound, a voiceprint rippling across the atmosphere, half a world away. The Cant travels far.

Then there's those who use absurd artifacts of their own invention, reinvention, mojo compasses and Geiger counters with their guts rewired to chitter randomly, palmtops with programs compiled into trinary, designed to print onscreen displays of names and assignations written into history before history even existed, the ancient
me
written in modern media. Some just find someone they think might know and rip an address straight out of their head. Phreedom's no stranger to these methods.

“Where's your brother, little girl?” he'd said.

“I don't know.”

“We'll see about that,” he'd said, his fingers curling round her throat.

No. Phreedom's no stranger to these methods, but she works by something more like instinct, intuition. The unkin leave their traces in the times they travel through as much as in the spaces and the things, and Phreedom's following a trail of broken minutes and bent hours that's as…legible to her as Tom's signature in the hotel guest book, even if it is a little…confused. In terms of time, her brother's trail reads like some chain-gang fugitive crashing through bushes, crossing rivers, doubling back to cross again, stealing a car, exchanging clothes with a hobo and riding the railroad in a whole different direction—trying everything, anything, to get the bloodhounds off his trail. Phreedom knows that there's some hounds you just can't shake. She knows she has to find her brother before they do. Scratch that. She knows she has to find her brother before they
did.

A Speck of Dirt Under a Fingernail

As she stepped through the second gate, the small lapis beads were taken from around her neck. And once again Inanna asked, “What is this?”

“Quiet, Inanna,” Neti told her. “The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

Click.
The bar-handle of the door into the stairwell unlatches at the press of her hand, and she steps past the vending and ice machines on the landing, down the stairs toward the exit.

“I've found a way,” he says. “A sort of loophole, a door out of reality…In Ash—”

She cuts him off, fingers across his lips, and shakes her head.

They sit in the roadhouse—it's about a year ago—sipping at their beers and looking across the booth at each other. Their bikes are parked outside and in a little while they'll both go out, they'll give each other one last hug before they kick the stands up, gun the engines and head off in different directions. She's spent the last two years looking for him, praying that he doesn't know what she does, that he isn't like her, like Finnan. But she can see it in his eyes, like fear or fury. And he shows her his mark, on his chest, under his shirt, over his heart. Most people would just see smooth flesh, the beads and the mojo bag, the silver cross and dog tags. She sees his graving, his secret name written in light in the unkin script, like a luminous tattoo. He might as well have a halo, or horns.

“Don't tell me,” she says. “It's too dangerous if I know.”

And all she wants right now is for the world to be the way it was when they were kids, before the simple surface that they knew was stripped away and all the flesh and bones of its metaphysique shown underneath, the rippling sinews of paths twisted out of time and space, the tendons stretching between centuries, the white-bone structures of an eternity jointed, articulated, rebuilt by creatures that had stepped out of the mundane world long before either of them were even born. Creatures like they'd become, not even knowing it, and, in doing so, damned themselves to this insane existence. What do you do if the end of the world is coming and you're an angel who doesn't want to fight? Where do you go?

“The Vellum,” he says.

The Vellum. Like giving it a name makes it any more comprehensible, any more sane. A world under the world—or after it, or beyond it, inside, outside—those ideas don't even fucking apply. Where's the Vellum? Outside the mundane cosmos, as the ancients thought, farther by far than they could possibly imagine in their measures of the heavens dwarfed by actualities of galaxies and clusters? Or buried in a speck of dirt under a fingernail? Where do the gods come from? Where do people go when they die? Where do angels travel in packs for fear of being slaughtered by their own shadows, huddle in fortress heavens against a void they need a fucking God of Gods to conquer? Phreedom's seen a glimpse of it, just once, a plain of bird skulls stretching for as far as she can see, a vision given to her as a threat the day that she herself became one of these inhuman things. It was a warning given to a little girl who knew too much already, a message: this is what you're getting yourself into. As desolate and vast as that vision might have been, she knows it was only a tiny corner of the infinite Vellum.

She looks at him, her brother, Thomas. His eyes are brown flecked with green, as hers are green with flecks of brown; where his hair's brown pushing for auburn, hers is rust red, streaked with ginger. They're both autumn—if you listen to that kind of Eurotrash fashionazi shit on the webworlds—but where he's kicking through the first fall leaves, she's dancing round a Halloween bonfire.

“I'll go into the Vellum,” Thomas says. “The Covenant won't find me. Finnan—”

“Fuck Finnan,” she snarls. “If it wasn't for that fucker, we'd have never…”

Never what? Never touched infinity? Never heard the Cant that resonates in every fiber of their fucking bodies? Never learned to hear that language, read the gravings of it in the world and in themselves, their own secret names? Never become unkin?

But she knows it isn't true, that there was something in her that couldn't help but be attracted to the crazy guy who lived in his castle of junk in the trailer park out in the middle of the desert where they came every winter, year after year, with their mom and dad, a snowbird family of the seminomadic Winnebago tribe. He didn't hunt them out. He didn't come to them and offer them eternity in the sand under their feet. They'd gone to him, first her brother, then herself, because they just knew—in the way he touched the dry wind like a blind man feeling someone's face, in the way he turned his head to watch vortices of cigarette smoke curl in the air—they knew he had some kind of way of reading the secrets hidden in the world around them. If it hadn't been him who showed her—showed them both the world beneath the world—it would have been someone else, some other place, some other time.

But still, she can't help hating him a little for the hell that hunts them both now, both her brother and herself. Or the heaven, rather.

Angels on Your Body

From her breast the double strand of beads was taken at the third gate.

“What is this?” Inanna asked, but, “Quiet, Inanna,” she was told again. “The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

Creak.

“Thanks.” The old guy smiles as he steps past her through the door she's holding open and she nods “You're welcome” and walks out into the car park.

“Angels on your body,” he calls after her, some misplaced Californian craziness of a blessing.

She swings her leg over the bike.