Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (34 page)

  
“Where are the people of this city?”

  
The brigadier snorted and started to snigger.

  
“Where are they?” he demanded again.

  
“You didn’t see it?  It was pretty hard to miss.”

  
“…See what?”

  
The brigadier looked momentarily out the door, as though he were considering
something.  Then he looked back.

  
“It
is
close by,” he said.  “We’ll get a better vantage point up top.”  
He marched out of the room, treading over the trails of blood from the
corpses. 

  
He followed the brigadier up the flights of stairs until the very top from
whence they attained a full view of the ruined city.  They stopped outside a
large, warehouse double-door and the brigadier slipped the butt of his gun in
the narrow gap and levered on the frame like a crowbar to pry the door wider. 

  
“This way,” said the brigadier, slipping through the gap. 

  
He followed the brigadier’s light through a long, dark tunnel, at the end of
which the red, red sky blazed through the black like the mouth of an
incinerator.  He emerged, and the wind whipped against his face. 

  
The brigadier stood waiting at the edge of a precipice, overlooking the city
limits.

  
“Worth a thousand words,” he said, gesturing out over the scene.

  
As Saul drew nearer to the edge of the precipice, his pace slowed and his eyes
flared again with a vision of fresh hell.  He was standing at the head of the
same black dune he had seen as they’d entered the city.  Now, in proximity, he
beheld what he had previously thought a long stretch of jagged ridges and saw
that it was formed not of sand or stone… but a hundred thousand mortared,
blackened, burned and decomposed corpses.

  
The cycles of the sun had scorched the bodies black.  A mist of ash blew off
the crest of carcasses like snow off a mountain peak and the spray ignited red
as Saharan sands, carrying the smell of purification into the city.  He stared
into the hell.  His heart beat the fire through his body.

  
“The orders were to purge eighty percent of the populace,” said the brigadier. 
“Send a clear message out to all the other cities in the region supporting the
uprising. No mercy for revolutionaries.”

  
“Dead,” he muttered, breathless. “They are – all – dead.” 

  
The cries of the past began to swirl in his mind again as the memories came
flooding back.  Suddenly, it all became clear: why he had wanted the past to be
dead – that scalding he felt every time he looked into Naomi’s eyes.  He had
taken everything from her before he ever knew her.  He was the one who killed
her parents.

  
“All the other cities surrendered a few days later,” said the brigadier.  “Saved
a lot of blood in the long run.  Pity … All that good blood gone to waste.”  
The brigadier began to snigger. 

  
Brief though it was, the snigger resounded and rose into a laugh through the
tumult in his mind.  The laugh became a demonic screech and cackle getting
louder and louder, flaring up his blood until every muscle in his body juddered
and, finally, it all broke. 

  
That fire-filled sky rising off the dead was all he could see as he turned with
a savage roar and hurled himself forward, driving the edge of blade straight in
the side of the brigadier’s neck, pulled out and stabbed again, and again, and
again, and again.  With each gore of the blade through flesh and bone he bawled
and hollered and sobbed and gnashed his teeth, even as he tasted the slimes of
blood dash against his face, even as the body was dead and limp beneath him; he
slashed, yelled, hacked, wept, dashed, until the corpse was split down the
middle and the blood drenched him from the face down so that his shouts blew
blood drops into the flaming sky and echoed across the land and to the ends of
the earth. 

  
He stood up and came to the edge of the precipice.

  
The candle on the bedside snuffed out.  Naomi started and fell against the
bedstead with a gasp.  Her large eyes gaped with fear and brimmed with
frightened tears, shimmering.  At that moment, the door opened.  She looked up. 
The hermit stopped with his hand on the door, staring at her, pressed up
against the bedstead with the tears streaming down her frightened face.

  
“What’s wrong, child?”

  
“S-s-something h-happened,” she stuttered, sobbing in spams. “S-something bad …
Saul!”

  
She buried her eyes in her hands and wept. 

  
The hermit slowly lowered onto the bed beside her. 

  
“You are thinking too much,” he said.  “You should rest now.”

  
“No.  No, I can feel it.  I can feel it,” she wept. 

  
“What do you feel?”

  
“I don’t know.” She shook away the horrid vision.  “I don’t know … It hurts,”
she said.  “It hurts.”

The
hermit kept his gaze on her and waited for her cries to quell before he wiped
away the tears with his sleeve. 

  
“I…” the girl faltered.  “I don’t think he’s coming back,.”

  
“He promised you he would come back.”

  
The little head sniffled, gulped and nodded.

  
“To wait is not enough.  You must believe.  Even when we are utterly powerless,
we will always have the power to believe.  I have watched you kneel in this
room every day, believing.”

  
“But…” she sobbed.  “It… doesn’t…”

  
“You’re wrong,” the hermit rumbled.  “If you feel his pain, it means he is
still fighting.  His faith in you keeps him alive, but
your
faith – that
is the only thing that will bring him back.”

  
She sniffled and wiped away her tears. 

 
“You must have faith, for his sake and ours,” the hermit whispered.  “Without it,
we…”

  
They were interrupted by a knocking at the door at the bottom of the stairs. 
The hermit turned to face the source and Naomi raised her head at once. 

  
A pause.

  
“Is it…”

  
“No,” the hermit interrupted immediately. 

  
The knocks came in a straight sequence of four. 

 
 “You wait here,” he said to the girl. 

  
He descended the candlelit stairs and slowly approached the door and the knocks
came again as he approached.  

  
He opened. 

  
In the dark doorway, there stood a black-suited, synthetic-faced man – a man
whom the hermit knew well, and countenance hardened fearfully.

  
“Martial…”

  
“Never say that name,” the hermit rumbled.

  
The dark coat over Eastman’s suit was drizzled with fresh snow as he stood before
the threshold.  The hermit’s omniscient eyes lowered to the floor and rose
again.  Once he appeared to have fully measured the commissioner, he drew the
door open and led the way down the narrow corridor without a word and not a
word was uttered until the two dark figures were seated across from one
another.

 
 The candlelight illumined their interlocking gazes.  The shadows were over the
hermit’s deep-set eyes.  Eastman sat upright, his briefcase laid flat on the
table before him.  In the midst of the long and austere silence, a soundless
dialogue seemed to be going on between them. 

 
 “Where is Vartanian?”  The hermit’s voice was something between a rumble and a
whisper. 

  
The elusive flickers of conceit in Eastman’s dark, beady eyes could not hide
themselves from the hermit any more than his thoughts.  He delayed.  Then, in
the next moment, with almost mechanical deliberation, the commissioner’s hands
rose off the armrests, and when his eight fingertips settled on the top of the
thin briefcase, the locks clicked open. 

  
He took out a large, black envelope.  On the front, the martial insignia – the
three-horned, three-headed beast – was marked in platinum.  The briefcase
closed and Eastman placed the black envelope lightly beside the candle on the
table-top.  The hermit’s grave eyes roamed from the commissioner to the thin
file lying on the table between them.  After a momentary delay, the vascular
white hand emerged.

 
 “A decree from the Martial High Court,” Eastman answered.  “Approved by the
First Region Senior Commissioner of the Martial Bureau himself.”

  
The hermit slipped the fold out of the throat and removed two secured sheets of
paper.  True to the commissioner’s words, he pinpointed the platinum seal of
the Senior Commission of the regions at the bottom, along with a number of
other marks and autographs. 

 
“It is the first of its kind,” said the commissioner, as he scanned the first
page.  “Given your exceptional circumstances I imagine it will also be the
last.”

    
A brief reading of the first page yielded its purpose, summed up in the three
bold words at the end of the first line:

“
DECREE OF EMANCIPATION
”

  
The hermit’s eyes rose and peered over the top of the page at the commissioner.

  
“The arrangements for your retransfer to civil jurisdiction have already been
made.  After twenty-five long years, your wish has finally come true…”

  
“You did not answer my question,” the hermit interrupted with a stern glare.

  
The commissioner tilted his gaze slightly to one side. 

  
“I assumed it was no longer relevant,” he said.

  
“The fact that you’re here attests that it is.”  The hermit laid the decree on
the table and sat back, laying down his arms and fastening his grip on the
rests like a monarch.  “You don’t expect me to believe you went through the
trouble of lobbying for all this just to gratify the lost hope of an old dreg?”

  
He hummed and contemplated.  “…Why are you here?”

  
The beginnings of a synthetic smile flashed upon the commissioner’s face.

  
“Again, the question is not relevant.” 

  
“Ah, but it is,” the hermit remarked with a drone.  The flaming wick stirred
with his breath. “You are here now for the same reason you were here the first
time, when you gave the girl to me.  Now, you must tell me what that reason is.”

  
“Our reasons stem only from our purpose.  At present, our purpose is Martial
Vartanian.”

  
“You are trying to break him.”

  
“NO.” 

  
Eastman’s voice suddenly and aberrantly deepened to a frightening baritone. 
There was a long silence, and when he spoke again, his voice softened back to
its former pitch: “We are trying to
cure
him.”

  
“Of course,” nodded the hermit.  “A matter of perspective… Why is he so
valuable to you?”

  
“Martial Vartanian’s value extends as far as his caste, no different than
anyone else,” the commissioner replied, frankly.  “We take as much trouble with
our martials as their value merits. No more.  No less.  We all have our
purpose.  We are all elements in the pattern.”

  
“You see nothing wrong with the pattern?”

  
“
Wrong
…” At this Eastman paused.  “I am not sure I understand your
question…”