The Soul Continuum (19 page)

There is a loud crack from somewhere above, and with my newly sensitized vision, I can see the heat of the stone
slabs on the ceiling. The fire raging above has no doubt become
uncontrollable by now. Here and there, through thin cracks forming above us, molten gold drips down and hisses into the candles. Nitocris looks up. Perhaps she too understands the danger.

“Why did you show me this?” I ask her.

“I needed you to see,” she says. “I had to make you understand
the truth, because I believe you are the only one who can persuade her to stop. If she comes to her senses and stops the bloodshed, she may also be able to put a stop to the corruption that has infected the royal court. It is the chief priest who is at the root of this. He is the one who stirred up the greed in Ninsuni's heart.”

“The chief priest?”

“Yes, he has become far more powerful and dangerous
than any of us could have guessed. Most of the royal court fear that it was he who cursed my father and drove the soul from his mind. The king has been crawling around the grounds like a beast, and nobody can help him. I think he found out about the sacrifices and was about to put a stop to them, but the priest intervened.”

“Who is this priest?” I ask.

A whispery voice creeps like an icy breeze from behind
me. “
Priest
is such an ill-fitting description, do you not think, Diabolis? But I suppose it has served my purpose well enough.”

Nitocris's eyes widen in horror, and she is seemingly oblivious to the sticky blood on the pole as she steps backward, grabbing it for support. I have no need to turn to see who spoke. The eyes probing through the cloth covering the back of my head see his shape well enough, but the chilling voice is all that I need. It is Keitus Vieta. Ninsuni stands beside him, anguish filling her expression.

“My Diabolis, I wish you did not have to see this,” she says before flashing a glance of anger at Nitocris. “I know it
is hard to justify what we have done here, but you must believe
me—I had no choice.”

Nitocris suddenly finds her courage again and takes a step forward, enough to spit in Ninsuni's direction: “You had more choice than either Phalana or Kaliki. You had more choice than—”

Vieta shushes her. It is a long drawn-out hiss, like the warning rattle of a desert snake, and Nitocris drops back again, instantly fearful.

“What would you have me do?” Ninsuni asks her. “If I refused him, what do you think he would have done? You don't know how powerful he is.”

“Whatever it is he would do if you refused to help, at least you would have kept your self-respect.”

“At the expense of hundreds of lives,” Ninsuni cries back.

Vieta lifts his cane and examines the jewel locked into its clawed socket. The soft indigo light pulses like a heartbeat and I am certain I recognize it, and not just because I saw it many years ago when he killed my siblings. “I had hopes for you, Diabolis,” Vieta says. “Dim hopes, but hopes
nonetheless. You were different from your brothers and sisters.
I sensed you had an intelligence, a wisdom and intrinsic knowledge of the cosmos; I hoped it was a product of my careful design, but now I see it is simply the human part that has managed to assert itself more so in you than it did in the others. It is a shame you have not lived up to my expectations, but still, I may yet be able to nurture you. You still have powers I can use.”

More rumblings shudder through the ceiling and I am sure I can hear screaming too. Nitocris's fire has still not been put out, and the cracks above are widening. If we do not leave soon, the room will cave in and we will all be crushed.

Yet now I wonder why I should survive, or why any of us in this macabre room should survive. I thought I had escaped my enemy, but Keitus Vieta has been my shadow all along, watching me from a distance, probably manipulating my meeting with Ninsuni to engineer better circumstances for his plans. Even more desperate than this discovery is the pain of my heart, for it has been flayed by the revelation of his partnership with Ninsuni. If Vieta meets his end here, it will be a good thing. It is only the death of Nitocris I would regret. She only ever offered me her spite, but now I understand her, and she does not deserve to die here.

But there is someone else. A solitary skulking figure has sneaked in behind Ninsuni and Vieta without them noticing. I had almost forgotten Moss. He has escaped the fire, but he has not abandoned us.

“Killers!” he screeches.

Before anyone has time to react, he leaps lithe and aggressive onto Vieta's back. Vieta is a frail figure—he seems to enjoy the oxymoron of immense power contained within an aged body—and crumples at the weight of Moss's dense arboreal physique. Screaming, Moss snatches the cane from Vieta, leaps away from him, and swings it down in a wide arc so that the jewel crashes into the back of Vieta's head. Instantly there is a release of energy, but it feels more like an immense vacuum is suddenly present where the blue jewel once was, and with a violent lurch, the implosion pulls us all to the floor as a tornado of indigo light swirls about us in tangled ribbons.

I have enough time to see Moss scramble out of the room, beckoning me to follow, before the effects of the brief fight take their toll. Chunks of stone slab rain down from above, bringing with them the smoking, fiery remnants of the dungeon chambers onto our heads. Masonry and splintered wood pierce me in several places, and though I cannot move or see through the thick black cloud of debris, I can feel the cells in my body reacting to the threat: trying to heal, trying to adapt. But I do not think it is enough. I am content to die here as long as Vieta dies with me. Whether the others escaped, I cannot say, but I know my time is almost over, not just for Diabolis Evomere, but for the human part that has fought so strongly to survive despite the disadvantages. Soon, if I do survive this, only the alien part of me will remain; the human will be no more and I will not see the world in the same way again. I may not be conscious or even sentient at all.

A
garden. I am in a garden. I think I may actually
be
the garden. The world is a beautiful canopy of wide green leaves dappled by sunlight. I see it all with eyes that would go unnoticed now by casual observation: round knots of bark with a fixed gaze. There is pain, but different than before. It is deeper, wider, but manageable, as if it is spread across a large distance. My only movement is not of my own will, but from the soothing breeze that ruffles my fingers, which are now tall branches reaching skyward, coupling with those of the trees surrounding me like dead ivy. Most of my cells have adapted to the environment and bonded with it. There is peace here. A dreamy river of consciousness along which my human mind is slowly drifting, succumbing to the gentle beckoning of eternal sleep. It is not an unpleasant way to die. But something has woken me to experience these last few hours of life. For that to happen, someone must have died.

I begin my search, feeling through the grass of my landscape, invisibly extending my sensory adaptations through the sap of the trees, into their hungry roots and up into their lofty heights, and it is not long before I find the soul who has chosen to die here. A sadness moves me when I see the craggy body curled up at the trunk of a tree on the outskirts of the garden. Moss is older now, much older. Many years must have passed since I was last conscious at the temple, and the human part of me must have waited for him, content to leave now, knowing at least some level of closure for a friendship that was never truly given the chance to blossom. Moss's fingers are laced as if in prayer, and his lichen-covered face presents a picture of smiling serenity as it rests in the dry soil. A few inches in front of his hands, resting in the center of a wide leaf like an offering, his silver trinket box lies open. Like Moss, I have found a strange symbiosis with the plants. It is no wonder he has chosen to rest here with me at the end.

Any suffering I have lived through would be inconsequential if my last moments of consciousness were to end here with my friend, but someone else approaches. Like a disease, the infestation of evil creeps inside my sphere of awareness, but there is nothing I can do to ward him off, and I cannot escape him. It is not fear of what he could do to me that instills a desire to escape, but revulsion. The sensations of loathing and malice increase as Keitus Vieta steps over Moss's body, pausing to recover the little silver box before walking softly toward my center. My cells are still primed for metamorphosis and I can feel them responding to my desire to leave, adapting, reconfiguring, multiplying.

Vieta's lips stretch wide in an ugly smile to reveal yellowed
teeth as he comes to a stop. He still has his cane, and the jewel is still absent after Moss smashed it. He fingers the empty
socket, staring straight ahead in anticipation. “Yes, Diabolis, yes,” he whispers. “You are ripe now. Ripe and ready.”

He stands before the heart of me. Where once was a human shape, there is now a wide and twisted cage of bone, flesh, and gristle. Veins and capillaries have merged with the bark of an ancient tree, pumping not sap or blood, but a luminescent blue substance more like malleable crystal than fluid. A pulse of indigo light beats out from a nook at the base of what might be a trunk, and it is this for which Vieta has come. He has waited a long time for it, and my desire to leave has encouraged its growth. In skilled hands it is
the means for travel, the raw material of a truth that reaches
even deeper than the quantum trappings of space-time and gravitational law that govern this cosmos. It would have been the blood of my purpose had it not been for the way Keitus Vieta has twisted it to his own flawed designs. Now he will use it again, not only to move to new destinations when he needs to but also to harness the exotic energies embodied in objects abandoned by those who have recently died. He will continually repeat his experiments, breeding creatures stranger even than me in his efforts to reshape the universe into a design that fulfills a purpose he does not remember. But he will always fail.

Vieta lays his cane carefully on the soil and squats down, cupping one hand under the nodule while squeezing it with the other so that the precious fluid oozes into his waiting palm. After examining it for almost a minute, he places his other palm on top of it to enclose it, press it, and mold it. When he is finished he lifts his palm slowly, as if to uncover a fledgling chick, and moves close to the freshly formed jewel so that his face is bathed in its indigo light. Vieta nods in satisfaction and slots the jewel into the socket of his cane.

“A test,” he says, holding Moss's silver box against the
jewel. It glows brighter for a second, then calms. Vieta closes
his eyes as if reveling in a brief pleasure, then opens them, staring around him at the trees. “Success.”

Vieta smiles again. “I see that you grew a gestation chamber as part of one of your many transformations,” he
says. “Curious that you should now have a womb. So, Diabolis,
you must be my new daughter, yes?”

I want to die. I need to die. I cannot serve his purpose.
But I am helpless. I do not know what became of my progenitor—his previous “daughter”—but he is obviously satisfied
that, though I do not fulfill his ultimate goal, I am a convenient evolutionary step in the biological path to success.

He turns, walks slowly away, a sigh of contentment wheezing from his aged throat, and I wait for the blissful darkness of unconsciousness to take me.

T
he dream fades. The sunlight has gone and my roots and branches withdraw, shrinking back into the
core of my being. The pain, that ever-present ache suffusing
what was once bone and tissue, is gone, and I wonder—should death feel like this? Because it feels more like I am transferring into a bigger, wider life. Awareness is greater, and though I see nothing but darkness, sensation is more vibrant, more tuned. I can feel my limbs again. I have wrists and ankles, strength; but something metallic rattles when I try to move them. I am restrained. An odor of dank musk fills my sinuses and the slippery squirm of tendrils—which I sense now are not roots—pull out of my scalp. I am human. I am no longer Diabolis. So what, or who, am I?

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

That voice! “Ninsuni?”

“Who?” The question is salted with laughter.

Confusion keeps me silent for a moment. Not just because
it could not have been Ninsuni, and not because I think I should know this new voice very well, but because my own is different. The chorus from my many mouths I had become accustomed to is reduced to one lonely voice. Salem . . . Salem Ben.

And then memory floods back as the neural flush reconfigures more of my synapses.

“Qod!” I say. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“What, who?”

“No,” I tell her. “I could ask if you found what it was
you
were looking for. Where in the name of Malusiva's Grave did you go to?”

She is silent as the lips of the WOOM part to reveal the stormy gloom of the Sub-human Sphere. I did find what I was looking for, or at least some of it. The life of Diabolis Evomere was every bit as horrendous as I had feared, but every moment of torment was worth it. Answers had been given to questions I did not even know should have been asked, and I know much more about Keitus Vieta now. It would seem that I have much to discuss with Qod.

“Are there any residual effects of this immersion?” I ask her.

“There is a confusing anomalous region in your prefrontal
cortex I am trying to analyze, but other than that, nothing that requires a visit to the genoplant,” she says.

“Anomalous region? What do you mean? Is it dangerous?”