Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (85 page)

    
What was
that, again? It became apparent to him that
he
was going to die. Yes, that was it. Simple enough. So why did the two pronouns
contained in that thought not seem to refer to the same person? The object was
clearly the man hanging from an iron spike. The subject, to whom this man’s
imminent death was apparent, occupied another country. It wasn’t a Cartesian
split; to oppose mind and matter presumes that both occupy the same pocket of
existence, but separately. What was flickering like a discharged neon sign in
front of Raszer’s eye was the consubstantiality of two worlds.

    
The
feeling couldn’t be caught and held down for examination. Not when pain was
present. When he tried, it went away, and he was left with only a poor
description of it. He knew that it must be related to the inverted vision
he’d
acquired in the grove, and to the sense of
displacement he’d had since Iskenderun. He knew that what
Chrétien
and Dante had told him about the advanced levels
of Gauntlet play somehow described who and where he was. He just had no idea
where to go with it.

    
He
, of course, didn’t need to go
anywhere. Anywhere came to him.
 

    
Raszer
felt warmth and gentle pressure against his midsection. The strain on his arms
was suddenly relieved, and for a time, keeping his heels on the wall required
no effort. He shifted his focus from the rocky slope to the space immediately
in front of him, and found that he was in the embrace of a small but evidently
very sturdy female person wearing a Mongolian herdsman’s wool cap. Her breasts
were against his breast and her hips were against his hips, and as she had come
from nowhere and was managing this feat while holding on to nothing, he figured
her for a phantom.

    
 
Shit
,
he thought.
It’s the angel of death. Has
it happened already
?
So fast
?

    
“Shhh,”
she said. “Don’t talk crazy. I told you you’d see me again.”

    
“Shams?”

    
“Shams I
am.”

    
“Where’d
you come from?”

    
She
looked up at Raszer, and he saw all the beauty of the man in a woman’s face.

    
“Do
something for me,” she said. “Look west, toward home. Just beyond the three
jagged peaks—only, when you see the peaks, see them
on the inside
.”

    
When he did as she had told him, he felt the
pressure and piercing sensation in the iris of his left eye that always
preceded the light. When it broke through, it flared momentarily, and only
after his monocular vision had stabilized did he see the city. Its outline was
familiar, for it was the same one he’d seen at the Kurdish wedding in Ispiria.
Its brightness was as great compared with the day’s as the day’s was with the
night’s.

    
“Na-Koja-Abad,”
he whispered.

    
“Yes.”

    
“Nowhere-Land.”

    
“Yes.”

    
“Am I
going?”

    
“You’re
already there,” the angel said, and slipped from his body like a sheet.

A shadow fell across the face of the rock.
Something large and looming. Raszer looked up, but the glare from the object’s
corona was too intense. A beating of wings. The air made waves against his
eardrums. “Fuck,”
he said out loud.
The bird is back
.
Out of the way, you motherfucker. Just let me see the city again. Let
me see . . .

    
“Hang on,” said a male voice from above. “We’ll
get as close as we can and send a man down for you.”

    
The
helicopter was black as a raven, and its familiar dreadlocked pilot was only a
few shades lighter. In the open bay, holding a megaphone, squatted Rashid al
Khidr, and over his shoulder, Raszer thought he might have spotted the second
Mr. Greenstreet. A third man in a harness was preparing to lower a rescue
cable. In the cabin’s rear and in shadow, Raszer saw the outline of two forms,
one female and one canine. The chopper tipped and veered, its blades slicing
precariously close to the cliffside. A burst of automatic-weapon fire issued
from the fortress wall, forty feet above.

    
A second
flying gunship, as black as the first and similarly unmarked, dropped
down—seemingly from nowhere—and returned the fire, peppering the parapets with
machine-gun bursts and raining stone dust on Raszer’s head. The chopper
carrying Rashid and Francesca dove steeply to evade the barrage.

    
“Give us
a minute!” Rashid called out. “We are expecting help.”

    
There
was a great grinding of steel, and to Raszer’s right, the forward gates of the
fortress began to retract. The guards emerged in pairs, occupying both sides of
the land bridge and immediately directing a volley at the helicopters. The
gunship ascended and returned fire, while the rescue chopper repositioned
itself for a second attempt.

    
Up the
steep sides of the bridge streamed Mam Rahim’s hill fighters, blasting as they
ran, alternatively diving behind small boulders and rising to get off another
round. It was exactly the kind of fight they’d trained a thousand years for.
When he heard fire and shouts from the west side of the slope as well, Raszer
knew that the
pesh merga
must have
come at the gates from both sides.

    
Caught
between the fusillade from above and the Kurdish crossfire from below, El
Mirai’s forces were temporarily neutralized, and the rescue chopper was finally
able to get its harnessed man lowered into place, about forty-eight inches from
Raszer’s limp form. Raszer looked into the face of his rescuer and saw a young
Special Forces officer of twenty-six or twenty-seven, square-jawed and resolute
but worried underneath.

    
He
looped the harness under Raszer’s arms and had begun to thread it between his
legs when a burst of fire came at them from below and chipped away the rock
just overhead. Hurriedly, the young soldier dropped the loose end, removed his
knife, sliced through the leather strap, and pulled Raszer’s body against his,
shouting, “Go!” to the men above. Raszer’s arms remained extended above his
head for a moment, as if unable to accept their release. Then they dropped
limply around the soldier’s neck. The chopper pulled rapidly away from the wall
in an almost perfectly lateral maneuver, and carried its dangling catch to a
gentler slope before attempting to reel it back in.

    
A bullet
passed his right ear.

    
“Shit!”
the soldier shouted. He shook the cable and yelled “C’mon!” to accelerate their
ascent, but Raszer only saw his lips mouth the word.

    
But the
helicopter was under fire, too, and could not orient itself. The pilot began to
pull away from the barrage. A second bullet fired from almost directly below
grazed Raszer’s ribs and buried itself in the soldier’s chest. He saw the
soldier blink twice before a helpless expression covered his paling face and
his grip weakened.

    
The
chopper dropped precariously and veered toward the canyon. Twenty feet below,
in the eye of the melee, the American took aim again. An instant before he
pulled the trigger, Raszer slipped through the half-engaged harness and dropped
to the slope. He heard more than felt his kneecap crack against rock.

    
There
was a cry from above, and Raszer looked up to see the underbelly of the
wolfhound known as Shaykh Adi as he leapt from the open bay. On the dog’s heels
came Francesca, briefly restrained by Rashid until gravity got the better of
his grip on the girl. He did not hear or see either of them land. The chopper
tilted, its engines howling and its runners scraping stone. The sound of
gunfire rose in escalating waves, and the propeller blades beat the air around
Raszer’s ears into a thick foam of noise.

    
Then,
suddenly, the air stilled.

    
The
rescue helicopter withdrew, and the gunship dropped into its place, its fire
pinging the iron gates of the fortress. From the parapets above, a small
antiaircraft missile was launched, and the gunship tilted at what seemed an
impossible angle. Below, the American mercenary took dead aim at its pilot.
Raszer crouched beside a boulder, his damaged kneecap pulled up to his chest.
He was out of the firestorm, but it wouldn’t matter if the chopper crashed. None of
them would get out alive.

    
The
mercenary was eighteen feet up the steep slope from where he hid. Raszer
searched the ground for a rock large enough throw him off his aim but small
enough to hurl with his wracked arms. He had it in hand when his enemy fixed
the target.

    
The
American never got the shot off.

    
From the
far side of the land bridge came a blur of raven-black hair and blue eyes. In
the time it takes to say goodbye, Mam Rahim had cut the mercenary’s throat from
ear to ear.

    
Raszer
rose slowly and painfully to his feet. Not a centimeter of his flesh was free
of pain, but as far as he was able to determine through the screen of shock,
nothing was broken. He looked around for Francesca. The firefight had been
pushed west by the Kurdish forces, who were evidently trying to create a safe
zone for the rescue chopper to make another attempt.

    
That
was—or should be—good news, he reasoned. Could he let himself think so? He
tried to straighten his spine, but his entire frame had been torqued out of
shape. The wisest thing to do under the circumstances was to find Francesca,
seek cover, and wait it out. A small avalanche of stone skittered past his
feet. He looked up.

    
What he
saw robbed him of what little breath he had.

    
Poor
Emmett Parrish had painted a stripe on his bedroom wall to protect him from the
egregore conjured from Henry Lee’s little rock. But Raszer did not have so much
as a piece of chalk. There was a shriek, and then there was only the wind.

    
It
materialized as air and dust in cyclonic motion. A dust devil. But even at
first glance, there was more. Its white-noise roar swallowed all other sounds.
It had a shape, and the shape impelled it to move from side to side, like a
dancer. An electrical storm seemed to rage at its center. It descended the
slope, moving toward Raszer, and enveloped him in a matter of seconds. Just
before that, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Francesca and the dog.
Immediately, they became a memory no more real than myth.

    
He was
in the eye of the twister. It was absolutely quiet, and absolute quiet—like
total darkness—is a terrifying absence filled with the whispers of ghosts and
gods. He looked up toward the mouth of the funnel and saw a face as passive as
that of a sphinx. Lips parted, and lightning flashed. Current streamed down the
cone. After the glare subsided, the lips had become a crack, and through that
crack was the end of the world.

    
Rashid
had called it the nunc—the gap between form and substance.

    
The
place where things get lost and never found.

    
Raszer
felt his feet leave the ground as his body began a slow, spinning ascent. The
interior walls of the vortex became walls of flesh, yielding as he approached
the mouth. He gasped for breath. The cyclone had sucked all the air out of him.

    
“You can
still choose me,” he heard her say from all directions.

    
“Not in
a million years,” he answered. “Let me go so I can kill you.”

    
His feet
suddenly hit the ground, and he fell to his damaged knee. There was a great
weight on him, and no air in his lungs. He staggered to his feet and lurched
left and right, trying to dislodge the parasite from his back. Her arm was at
his throat, a leg coiled around his midsection. He couldn’t see the face, but
he knew from the scent that Layla Faj-Ta’wil had emerged intact from the
vortex. He peeled her fingers from his neck for long enough to swallow a gulp
of air and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

    
“I’m the
one who knows you,” she answered. “I’m the one who
wants
you.”

    
For a
frightening instant, it felt good to be wanted that badly. Then he said, “I’m
not available.”

    
“Then no
one will have you,” she breathed, and slipped from his body like a sheath of
skin, coiling at his feet and flicking an adder’s tongue. The snake drew back
its head and readied its attack. Raszer looked up and saw that the Kurdish
forces had contained the fortress guard, and that the first chopper had landed.

    
“Goddamnit!”
he howled. “Will somebody kill this thing?!”