"Faith," Grandmaman said in a mean voice. "Stop that snickering at once."
"Sorry, Grandmaman," she said, and she put both hands over her mouth to try and keep her delighted laughter inside.
"What on Earth has you tickled, child? Share your joke with your uncles. I'm certain they will enjoy it."
"There isn't any joke, Grandmaman. I'm just happy."
"Happy? Of course you are. Coming here to a proper household must be a terrific relief—"
"Not your house," Faith said, giggling. "I'm happy because Daddy's here."
"What?"
"Not here here," Faith explained. "There here. He's with Mommy, now." Her golden eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown. "But Mommy doesn't seem very happy about it ..
10
The touch of Hari's lips brought the goddess back to her own individual thread of melody within the Song of Chambaraya.
Since the instant she had stepped forth from Ankhana, she had buried herself in Chambaraya's supernal harmonies, finding within them the infinite mathematical iteration of her theme: an endless Bach invention upon the semilife of her countervirus. Her sole distraction had been Faith's distress—her own moment of maternal weakness—when she had become once again merely Shanna Michaelson, when she had cast aside her task and stridden at speed toward the nearest transfer point. But Hari had sworn, through Faith, that he would handle Earth; he had reminded the goddess that she had her own job to complete. She trusted him.
She had to.
And so she had surrendered to the Song, and watched a billion generations of her creation wheel across her consciousness like a galaxy in which each star is life itself. She had found her HRVP sample in Kris Hansen, and had cultured it in her own bloodstream; here as well did she create and culture its cure. At the close of a billion generations, its chorus still sang sweet and true: without a single discordant mutation.
But when Hari touched her now—sharp as a needle in the swollen chancre that her headwater had become—she felt his pain and his distress. Across the leagues she touched him with power; she knit his skin and eased his heart, while a pang of pure dread struck her own. This sensation was so alien to her nature that for a time she could not identify it, nor could she guess at its source.
Her daughter's distant counterpoint still chimed-within her melody, happy to be part of her even in the alien place to which her grandmother had confined her. Faith was not afraid; her father had promised he would come, had promised to make everything right yet he had come here, alone, wounded and in pain, leaving Faith in the hands of his enemies.
And perhaps, in this, she had found what poisoned her serenity with dread.
The grace note within Chambaraya's Song that was the physical form of Pallas Ril arose from its place of contemplation—a sun-dappled glade amidst oak and walnut, above a willow-lined stream some three days' ride to the south and east of Ankhana—and sought within the Song a hint of remembered phrase, the echoed theme of a rocky splashing rapids seven leagues away. She caught that phrase within herself, and Sang it as the river did; in joining those notes to the slumberous rhythm of the sunlit glade, she brought them together in space and time.
One single stride carried her from the glade to the rapids.
Another seven leagues away, she found the low susurration of a marsh, rustling with the laughter of cattails and the subterranean rumble of solemn trees; again, she melded the disparate melodies into her Song that she might step from the rapids to the marsh.
In this manner, she strode the length of the river.
As she approached, she felt within him pain far beyond any mere insult of the flesh: terror and cold rage. Horror. Despair.
And yet around him there was no threat, no danger. She could taste the camp at the crest of the pass as though its sewage drained into her mouth; she could faintly hear the cacophony of a thousand lives at the very verge of her watershed. None within the range of her perception meant him ill—their lives were merely the baseline of humanity, the all-too-human blind stumble toward vague dreams of food, sex, and comfort.
What had he to fear?
Thirteen steps brought her to a dawn-shadowed slope below the pass men called Khryl's Saddle: a curve of earth that joined sawtoothed peaks soot-stained to the color of steel. Within the Song, she found the fundamental trickling chime that was a small waterfall tumbling into a rocky cleft, its music now driven by the allegro hammer of Hari's heart. One final reality-warping step brought her to his side, into the rocky cleft with the waterfall tumbling above her head.
He lay on his back at the waterfall's foot, half wedged into a crack in the stone with the spray in his face, his arms bound behind him and a rag tied through his teeth. He moaned thickly through the rag, and his eyes spoke to hers with numb, unreasoning horror.
She knelt beside him, the waterfall's spray cool and welcome across the back of her neck; even its savor of human waste was not unpleasant, because the grasses and algaes downstream fed upon it and burgeoned as they never had before. She laid her hand upon his cheek.
"It's all right, Hari," she said. "I'm here." She could have built a voice of birdsong and tinkling water, of the skitter of marmots and the creak of stones forced open by the roots of grasses and scrub brush, but she spoke instead with the mouth and throat of Pallas Ril, for the same reason that she pulled at the knot of the rag tied into his mouth with her fingers, instead of calling upon her power. Sometimes, even a goddess must use a human touch.
She understood now his distress: someone had dumped him here to die, and he had feared that she would not arrive in time to save him. Within herself, she allowed a gentle, melancholy undernote to enter the harmonies of her Song. After all these years together, she had never been able to make him understand that a human life is only an eddy in the current; when that eddy, beautiful but transitory, unknots itself into the river, nothing is lost. There is nothing that can be lost.
The river is eternal.
Tears streamed down his face, mixing with the greasy film from the waterfall's spray. She twisted the knot open in the dirty rag that bound his mouth, and he shook his head aside from her touch, spitting the rag away into the stream with a convulsive gasp. "Shanna—run," he rasped, his voice jagged as broken glass. "It's a trap; Run!"
She smiled. How could he still understand so little? "There is no threat here, Hari—"
Hari screamed: a wordless shriek of raw overpowering panic.
It shocked her, stopped her mouth like a punch. Suddenly, inconceivably, the vague dread that had troubled her shifted beneath her with a tectonic infrasound rumble. The planet, of which she was a part, was no longer solid. She discovered, awe breaking over her like the growing light of the dawn in the mountains, that she was actually frightened.
Hari thrashed. His shout came out ripped and bloody as though he vomited barbed wire: "Shanna goddamn your eyes for once in your fucking life just do what I say and FUCKING RUN!"
She stood, and started to turn, and she felt a shock at her shoulder, as though she'd been struck on the collarbone, sharply but not hard—a slap from a child, a lick from a switch, nothing more, no real impact, just a cold wave that passed through her almost too swiftly to be felt, icy wire drawing itself from that shoulder down at an angle to her ribs on the opposite side. She tried to finish the turn, to see what had struck her, but now she was falling, sliding sideways and down and she couldn't feel her legs, she couldn't feel her left arm, she reached out for the ground with her right and struck hard on the stone, and flopped faceup--
And standing over her was a woman wearing her clothes, except it wasn't a woman, not all of one—it was only a torso with the left arm attached; where the head and right arm should be was only a gaping wound the size of the whole world, and as the legs buckled and the headless one-armed torso twisted and crumpled toward the ground, the jet of heart's blood from the severed aorta fountained like cabernet spraying from a spinning wine bottle, glittering in the rising sun, a rainbow that took he
r breath away with its beauty.
She thought: That's me. That's my blood.
She tried to speak, to say Hari--Hari, I'm hurt, you have to help me, but most of her lungs had been left behind within her collapsing torso. She could do no more than move her lips and make faint, desperate smacking noises with her tongue.
Hari, she tried to say, Hari, please
Then a man-shaped shadow loomed over her, a huge, powerfully built nude figure in silhouette against the lacy white clouds of the dawnlit sky. The silhouette lifted a long broad-bladed sword and reversed its grip upon it, to drive it downward like a fencepost to be set in hard clay.
Its point came toward her eyes, and then she saw no more.
11
In the midst of the customary Shanks family Sabbath Breakfast, with the morning sun bright through the sheers from the garden outside and the plates still steaming in the liveried servants' hands, Faith leaped upright from her chair, pounded the polished mahogany tabletop with her tiny fists—ripping her antique ivory linen place setting—and shrieked as though rats gnawed her toes.
An instant later, before anyone in the astonished family could so much as enquire what might be wrong, she collapsed. In the shocked silence that followed, Avery clearly, unmistakably heard a plaintive childish whisper from her granddaughter's lips: "Hari Hari, I'm hurt. You have to help me. Hari, Hari, please—"
The servants sprang to her side, and Avery's voice cracked like a whip over their heads. "Back! Don't touch her. Dobson, get Professional Lieberman up here instantly."
Faith was neither choking nor convulsing; while everyone waited for the doctor to arrive from his rooms in the coach house, Avery's teeth clenched until her ears rang.
His name
Bitter, bitter, most impossibly bitter, that in Avery Shanks' own home, her own granddaughter had whispered his name.
12
Right up to the bitter, bloody end, I keep on thinking that there must be some way out of this. We've been here so many times—trapped, no way out, no chance to survive—and we've always done it, we've always pulled it off, against all odds, against all reason, against all hope. We've always found a way to live.
Through every second that I've lain here—on this cliff, with the sewage of the construction camp splashing across my face, with the demon inside Berne's corpse drinking my horrible aching dread—I have straight-armed despair by numbering all the times we somehow came through. All the way to the end, I force myself to believe that Shanna will see the trap, that she'll save me, that together we'll rescue our child, that my father will still be alive, that we can all go home again.
That somehow, I can still get my happy ending.
Then when she comes and the demon still doesn't strike, I try to speak to her with my eyes, to reach her with the language of my horror; I try to bite through the dirty rag that fills my mouth with the taste of dust and human shit.
She could crumble the rag to its component atoms with the merest gesture; instead she fumbles at the knot with her too human, too fallible fingertips, and when I can spit the rag aside and tell her, she still does not believe me, she still tries to soothe me, and all the furious dread explodes from my throat in a scream that shuts her down, shuts her up, and I see in her eyes that she's starting to understand but she's never been fast, that way; it's always taken her time to adjust her paradigm, to see the unexpected, and this is time that no wealth at my command can buy her. I rage at her, howling, cursing, goading her with savage words, anything to get her up, to get her moving, to get her away: and so she stands, and starts to turn
And dies, with my curses as her only farewell.
With a lifeless hand upon its hilt, Kosall gives no rattlesnake buzz of warning. The corpse appears behind her with that invisible speed, and the blade, too, moves too fast for the eye: I see the beginning of the stroke, and the end—the arc of the blade is visible only as a lick of silver flame that tears out her front in a one-blink flash from collarbone to rib, bisecting one breast
And half of her falls away from the other half, and I have no breath left to scream.
The pieces of my wife fall, and her guts splash out across the rock with the wet slaps of handfuls of mud hitting a sidewalk. The demon Berne steps over her headless, one-armed torso, stands over her—her hazel eyes pick up the blue of the dawn sky, and her perfect lips writhe soundlessly, and her hair gleams with burnished-walnut flame, and oh my god how am I gonna live, now?
But, of course, I'm not gonna live for long.
The corpse lifts the sword high over its head and lets the blade swing down to vertical. He drives it down like he's staking a vampire, except her heart's over there somewhere, and the blade with its painted-on runes of silver chops through her eyes, through her skull, through her brain, and into the stone beneath her.
The blade buzzes for one scant second, as though registering the passing of her life. It slides a handbreadth down into the stone below her riven skull and sticks fast; the demon releases it, and its hilt waves a slow goodbye in the breeze alongside the waterfall.
"Yessss," the demon murmurs in its cracked-quartz voice. "Yesss, that'sss it-t-t-t."
It does that fast thing to reach my side before I really see it move, and those glass marble eyes open to swallow me whole.
"Yesss, Cainnnnnne. It'sss allll true."
And I know what it's talking about. I know what is true.
Other men, they might ask, Why?
I know why.
All this—losing my career, the Abbey, Faith, Dad, and now . . . now .. . this unspeakable thing—all this happened for a reason. For one simple, inarguable, inexcusably self-absorbed reason. Because I couldn't sit down and shut up. Because I'm too fucking stupid to know better. Because I had to do something, to feel like a man.
Which are all different ways of saying
I did this, to everyone and everything that I love, because I had to pretend I can still be Caine, one last time.
13
The demon Berne clasps its enormous erection and swings its leg across me, straddling my chest like a nightmare goblin, and its other hand strokes my face.
"I lovvvve youuuu, Cainnnne."
It leans toward me like it might bite. Like it might want a kiss. "I lovvvvve youuuuuu."
And, you know? I think it's telling the truth.
An odd, distracted peace settles over me, a hollow sort of oh never mindedness. The astonishing thing is that in an absent, unexpected way, I'm kind of okay with this. I can guess what's happening; I've seen it dozens of times, in people who take terrible—even mortal—wounds.
The I'm all right syndrome.
No matter what happens to you, once the first shock of uncomprehending disbelief is over, the next thing you think is: Well, it could have been worse. You're always kind of impressed with how well you're handling it, whatever it might be, from a knife in the guts to the death of a child. I wouldn't be surprised if Shanna died thinking, This isn't so bad, really .. .
The demon Berne caresses my face with its cold, unyielding palm, feeding
And maybe that's where the I'm all right thing comes from: a cluster of demons sucking away your despair, your terror, your grief. Maybe that's what people are really saying when they shake their heads sadly and nod at each other and murmur in low tones It just hasn't hit him yet
They're saying: The demons are still feeding.
By indulging their own compulsive hunger, demons are doing us a favor.
Once they get full, though, you better. watch your ass.
That's why I can lie here with jagged stone under my back, with Shanna's blood splashed across my face and her intestines being gently rinsed in the waterfall's mist, with my useless legs and my useless life, and feel nothing but hope that the corpse goes ahead and kills me while it's still hungry.
Because I have an idea what's coming, and I don't want to be here when it arrives.
The demon Berne licks its lips, and a small round hole appears in one cheek w
ith a wet smack and splinters of its teeth blow out through the other cheek, then another hole appears in its temple and one of its glass eyes shatters and its head snaps sideways like a horse that's been stung by a wasp and now, from far away up the mountain, I can hear the mechanical chatter of chemical assault rifles.
Sounds just like it does in the movies.
Fucking great shooting—I keep hoping that one of those bullets will go just a hair astray and plow through my skull, but no such luck. Must be the Social Police doing the shooting; everybody knows that Soapy never misses.
More bullets strike with semirhythmic fleshy slaps like a vaudeville hambone guy warming up, dragging the corpse upright and blowing it spinning away, a herkyjerky dance as it wheels its arms and splays its legs, trying to stay with me on the ledge, but more rifle fire sputters above and now a fire hose blast of slugs blows it right the fuck off the cliff.
It drops away, and I can hear a meaty slap or two as it bounces off the rock face on its way down.
And now, I can feel that it's gone: I can feel it by the thermonuclear fireball that expands within my chest and burns my heart to ashes and roasts my throat and oh my god oh my god oh my god oh ... god . .
...god...
14
Some unimaginable eternity later: adrift, hopelessly becalmed on my vast bitter ocean, shadows dance before my eyes and voices come to me—faintly, filtering in from the unknowable, irrelevant universe beyond the ache that is all I am.
Our agreement is entirely specific, says a voice that seems both human and synthetic: these are sounds a clockwork doll might make, had it a mouth and throat of flesh. He will be delivered to the capital for execution. The sword will be secured.