The Big Reap (36 page)

“Which is what, exactly?”

“I assume you noted the strange silence that fell over the jungle as you approached this place?”

I did, and said as much.

“That's because this is a special place, one of beauty, of reverence, of reflection. It has been since long before I happened by. Since long before humankind discovered it and sought to honor it with their temples. The trees know it. The animals know it.
I
know it. In the centuries that followed my kind's abhorrent ritual, I found myself lost, despondent, rudderless. I had not foreseen our ritual resulting in such senseless devastation; I blamed myself and my fellow Brethren for the resultant loss of life, and felt truly crushed beneath the weight of it. And so, ashamed of what we'd done – what we'd become – I struck out on my own into the wilderness. Perhaps it was an act of self-flagellation on account of the terrible, consuming hunger I experienced, or the destruction we Nine caused. Perhaps a cowardly flight from all that reminded me of what we'd done. Whatever it was, it somehow – across my decades of ceaseless wandering – led me here. I was so taken with this spot, so certain it was where I was supposed to be, I never left. And now I expend no small amount of effort to protect it, to dissuade those who might wish to desecrate it, to ensure it remains unspoiled.”

“That's why it's so difficult to find?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“What makes this place so special?”

“Cambodia is a nation of fertile spiritual soil, soil in which many religions took root, and, oddly, intertwined, flourished together as one rather than waging war against each another. Here native animism blends seamlessly with Hinduism and Buddhism, despite their many differences, creating something at once new, and very, very old. Whether this syncretic nature is some aspect of the land imprinting its character upon its people or the other way around, I do not know. But regardless of the cause, the cultures that have sprung up here have an astonishing ability to reconcile the irreconcilable, to hold two contradictory beliefs at once and to find solace in their inherent contradictions. For life itself is contradiction and compromise. Life is reconciling the irreconcilable. As, I've spent some time discovering, is death. So this seemed the perfect place for me to try to reconcile with myself and my God what I'd done.”

“Sounds like you've been at it a while. A very
specific
while, to hear you tell it.”

“I count my days of waiting as best I can. It seems important that someone should.”

“Days of waiting. Waiting for what? For me?”

He shook his head, slow, sorrowful. “Waiting for acknowledgement. For absolution.”

“From whom – God?”

His expression showed surprise. “Who else?”

“Look, I hate to tell you pal, but before you and your Brethren buddies staged your little breakout, you were condemned to hell. Seems like when it comes to God's forgiveness, that ship has sailed.”

“That is but your opinion.”

“Yeah? What's another?”

Thomed looked me up and down. “One of the many apparent contradictions on which I've ruminated is the notion that a loving Maker would condemn Her children to an eternity outside the light of Her good grace for the sins of their infancy. If our souls are, in fact, immortal, why would our Maker confine Her judgment to the first twenty or fifty or one hundred years of life? Put another way, why would a loving parent punish their child for any longer than it took for that child to learn its lesson? And my conclusion, long coming, is that She would not. That absolution lies not beyond our reach, no matter how far gone we seem – at least, so long as we stretch forever toward it.”

“That presumes our Maker is a loving parent,” I said. “Which, I've gotta tell you, some days is pretty fucking hard to swallow.”

“True indeed, my friend. But what you describe is the very essence of faith. I have faith in the inherent decency of my Maker. I only hope my Maker has the same faith in me.”

“I'm not your friend, Thomed, I'm your executioner. I've been sent by hell to kill you.”

“As I said, Sam, this is a land of contradictions. Here, it is possible that you are both. But I understand your point. You claim my time is nigh, and for your sake I do not wish to belabor the point. As I recall, a certain measure of remove is necessary to retain one's personhood while functioning as hell's emissary. So, please, do what you came to do. I will not stop you. Whatever happens is the Maker's will.”

He closed his eyes and raised his face up to the heavens. His expression was one of peace, not fear. I stepped toward him with purpose, and rested my left hand upon his shoulder. “I'm sorry,” I told him. “It's nothing personal.” And then I plunged my hand into his chest, or tried.

Because that's when Thomed and the temple disappeared.

 

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.