The Big Reap

22.

I found myself in a field of heather. The sun hung bright above, warm against my skin, but not so much so as to make me sweat, and a gentle breeze rustled the trees that dotted the rolling landscape. Wildflowers dusted the distant hilltops with party-bright confetti, sprinkled in among the heather’s soft purple, and filled the air with their sweet perfume. And there was not a soul, nor sign of human habitation, in sight.

I spun around in confusion, a spindle at the center of this swirling, idyllic landscape. Where was I? What was I doing here? What in hell had happened to the temple? To Thomed?

“So many questions,” came a voice from behind me, inhumanly low and rumbling, “and for each an answer, if only you care to listen.” I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Instead, I turned to face the source of the voice.

What I found in a space I knew for sure was empty just moments before were two beings. One was a hulking beast some fifteen feet tall, with an eagle’s head and wings to match, and eyes of flames. Thick-muscled arms, each as large as my own meat-suit and velveted with close-cropped silver gray — fur or feathers, I knew not which — terminated in taloned hands. Haunches as big and powerful as a plow-steed’s stretched from broad torso, feathered black. Its feet were lost to me beneath a sea of undulating heather. Its skin seemed to crackle with electricity, blue-white arcs rippling across its surface and charging the air around us with the ozone scent of a felled power line or recent lightning strike. And as I looked upon it, its face changed, shifting as if in response to my gaze. Now a lion. Now an ox. Now an eagle once more.

The other figure was a child. What kind of child, I had no idea. It seemed at once a boy and a girl; blond-haired, and brown-, and black-; fair-complexioned and dark as fertile soil; a child of four, of eight, of ten, dressed in robes, in jeans and ringer-T, in country tweeds. But unlike the massive beast, whose visage shifted, the child’s appearance didn’t seem to. Instead, it suggested the impression of a thousand children, a million, an entire human history of them, all beautiful, all smiling eerily with unnerving, unnatural knowing, and all occupying the same space.

“My name is Legion, for we are many,” I muttered.

The enormous bird-beast laughed — a bass-filled chuffing that shook the trees and set my meat-suit cowering. “Is that what you think of me?” it asked.

“I was talking about your friend,” I said.

“My friend,” it said, “is who you’re speaking to. This creature is but a trusted servant, which lends its voice to one whose voice you cannot hear.”

“So you’re mute, then, is that it?”

“Not mute,” said the creature. “Merely beyond your capacity to hear.”

“Like a dog-whistle,” I snarked. Blame the nerves.

“If that helps you,” said the beast, now lion-faced once more, the child smirking mischievously beside it. “A dog-whistle that could liquefy your insides.”

“So he’s what, your spokesman?”

The child nodded. “Though perhaps a better term is conduit,” said the beast, its now-ox-mouth awkward around the words, “or, best yet, attenuator.”

“Not much of a looker,” I said. “But on the other hand, he has a lovely singing voice.”

“Your use of humor in the face of fear is peculiar. Reverence is by far the commoner response.”

“Yeah, well, I guess that means I’m no commoner,” I said, “and anyway, it seems to me there’s two likely options as to who you are. One of ’em’s in charge of hell, and the other’s responsible for the platypus. The former deserves no reverence from me, and the latter’s gotta have a sense of humor. Now, you wanna tell me what I’m doing here?”

“A better question would be what it was you were doing in Cambodia.”

“My fucking job, that’s what.”

“Were you, now?”

“You’re damned right I was.”

“But why?”

“I go where they point me. That’s the gig. That’s my forever. You don’t know that, then what the hell are we all doing here?”

“Ah. I see. So you were simply following orders, then.”

“That’s right.”

“It amazes me that your kind was given the greatest gift in all of Creation — free will — and yet you’re all so willing to forsake it at the slightest provocation.”

“The slightest provocation?” I repeated. “Is that what you call being damned to hell for all eternity? Because it ain’t been exactly a basket fulla kittens.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t have been. Still, Samuel, I’m surprised that you, in particular, would succumb to such weakness of character. I would have thought that with all you’ve experienced, particularly given the target of your maiden collection, you’d be reluctant to rely upon that old chestnut. Many a war criminal has pled the same, to no satisfactory result.”

“That’s not a fair comparison,” I said.

“Isn’t it?”

“My orders don’t leave a lot of wiggle room.”

“Don’t they? What of New York? Of young Katherine MacNeil?”

“The order to collect her was based on false pretenses. She was an innocent. Neither can be said of the order to kill the Brethren.”

“Really? What of Thomed, then?”

“Whatever peace he’s come to now, it can’t change who he is or what he’s done. And let’s not forget, the body he’s been fused to since he and his buddies’ little ritual had to belong to someone.”

“Are you certain about that?” the creature asked.

“As certain as I am of anything,” I replied.

“On that, at least,” it said, “we do not disagree.”

The child-thing raised its hands, first finger of each raised, and made a rotating motion with the two of them as if setting an invisible plate spinning. The world seemed to twist beneath my feet, and my vision swam. I took a knee and closed my eyes, my equilibrium lost, my stomach threatening mutiny. When the world steadied, I opened my eyes once more, and found that day had turned to night and that the child, its mouthpiece, and I were not alone.

A bonfire was burning some twenty yards away from where we stood, pushing back the dark. Its flames reached high into the sky, struggling against a cold wind to lash at the crescent moon. Beside — but not around it — stood a group of people huddled in twos and threes. I counted nine — no, ten — all but one of them in simple cloth, undyed and rough, robes and tunics and the like. Some affixed with bits of rope, some wrapped such that they affixed themselves. Feet bare, or sandaled. The lot of them looked as though they’d stepped straight out of the history books.

And not one of them noticed our presence.

“They cannot see us,” rumbled the child’s pet beast, the child once more unnerving me by responding to my unsaid thoughts, “because we are not here.” The child gestured like a maître d’ showing me to my table, and I took his hint, wandering puzzled into the strange gathering.

Beneath my feet, I noticed the heather had been burned back — scorched black plant matter forming a circle maybe twenty feet around. Inside the circle was drawn a pentagram so large its five points touched the outer edge of the burn zone, white ash against the black. Though I shuffled, puzzled, through it, my feet did not disturb the delicate ash line. As I reached the interior of the pentagram to find another, smaller one rendered inverted inside it, realization dawned. I’d seen something like this once before, during Ana’s failed attempt to recreate the Brethren’s freeing ritual.

A ritual that I was about to witness.

I scanned the faces in the crowd, all frightened, expectant, their worry-lines etched deep by the long shadows of the firelight. A blond-haired boy of twenty hugging tight a fresh-faced girl with chestnut hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose, cooing, reassuring. Drustanus and Yseult, I guessed. A brash, muscular young olive-skinned man pacing back and forth on thick, powerful legs as fast and smooth as a shark through water, his face a brittle mask of arrogance. Ricou, I suspected. A pack of three conversing in nervous whispers, one an Indian boy of not more than fourteen, the other two wild Roman-era Scots, or Vikings maybe — a male unkempt and hirsute; a female small and quick, her hair a simple plait. Jain and Lukas and Apollonia. A broad-faced Asian man in monk’s robes sitting cross-legged in meditation was the furthest from the firelight, young Thomed’s knitted brow indicating his thoughts were far from peaceful. And at the center of the double-pentagram, over a small stone altar, stood two men: one young, handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed, at ease; the other older, bird-thin, sharp-angled, and feverishly intense, hands worrying at a small jute bundle in his hands. Grigori and Simon, respectively.

I reminded myself that these physical forms were meat-suits, nothing more. That the entities inside were older, harder, crueler than they appeared. But still, I could not shake the notion that they were but children, goading one another to go and ring the doorbell of the creepy house at the end of the street.

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.

Then the tenth of them stepped into the light, draped despite the chill in a slip dress of parchment-colored silk, and carrying in her delicate hands an ornate, glinting gold skim blade. My borrowed heart damn near stopped. My breath caught in my chest.

The tenth was Lilith.

“Did you bring it?” she asked the older of the two standing at the center of the circle: the one I knew as Simon Magnusson — although her word-sounds did not synch up with the movements of her mouth. But when I thought upon that fact, I realized it was not exactly true. What I’d heard had matched her lips’ movement just fine, but what I understood her to say did not. It seemed my child-companion had done me the courtesy of translating.

“I did,” said Simon, his word-sounds and meanings also decoupled in my mind. He unwrapped the tiny bundle in his hands to reveal a small, dark orb, projecting rays of black across the field that seemed to dim the fire, and proved darker still than night itself: a corrupted human soul.

“Good,” she said, and then glanced up at the sky. “The heavens are aligned, which means it’s time.” She handed the handsome dark-eyed man — Grigori — the skim blade, and then with one open palm caressed his face. He leaned into her touch and smiled, one more in a long line of victims to her otherworldly wiles, I thought. “I trust you understand what must be done?”

“I do,” Grigori replied.

“Then do it, and be free.”

I watched the rest in numb horror, knowing all too well how it was going to play out. They took their places around the altar, Grigori and Simon at the center, the soul in the very middle, their hands raised up above their heads, both of them clasping the skim blade well above it. As one they chanted, and the firelight extinguished. A bitter wind ripped across the meadow, stinging against my skin.

The blade came down.

The soul was shattered.

A shockwave of pure, unfettered evil rippled outward from the circle’s center. The Brethren were each buffeted by it, but stood fast, as if anchored by the ash-lines on which they stood. The world around them was not so lucky. The black shockwave expanded exponentially, gaining speed as it blew past me and disappearing beyond the horizon in all directions. The very earth beneath my feet shuddered violently as if with sudden fright. It left nothing of the landscape standing — leveling trees, withering heather to dead husks, felling small game to burst half-rotten in mere seconds.

I fell to my knees, weeping at the sight. Those inside the circle looked stricken — panicked.

From somewhere distant I heard a roar, like every radio ever built was tuned to static and turned up as far as it would go. A salt wind buffeted my cheeks and tousled my meat-suit’s hair. The distant horizon seemed to rise up before me in the starlight, faintly luminescent.

And grew.

And grew taller still.

In the moment before it reached me, I finally realized what I was looking at: a wall of water five hundred feet high, hurtling toward me like God’s own vengeance.

As it bore down upon me, I closed my eyes. Placed my hands over my head. And prayed.

The water hit. I felt its impossible weight slam me to the ground, and crush my bones to dust.

Then the world shifted.

The wall of water was gone.

I stood once more in a vast field of heather, the child-thing and its mouthpiece at my side.