Part 38 (2/2)
”My father was a serpent. My father was an old snake in a tree with apples and candy and razor-blade Bible pages to cut my hands.”
”He was only your father. And he's dead now. He isn't the Dragon. Not this dragon.”
”You've been listening to old Pikabo. I knew you had.”
And Niki realizes that she's feeling pulled, caught in the 352 competing, evenly matched gravities of Spyder and the reality holes. They'll rip me in half like a theater ticket, she thinks and wonders if it will hurt as much as she imagines.
”With the Nesmidians, we could have killed him. We could have killed him here, and none of this would have been necessary. She sees nothing but balance, Niki, balance at any cost.”
”You would set the Dragon loose in our world?”
”This is our world. What is there back there worth saving? Tell me that, why don't you? Name just one thing.”
And Niki doesn't have to think. ”Daria,” she says immediately, and there are other things, more than she could list in a lifetime, but she can see from Spyder's expression and the way the strings are winking out around her that there's no point in continuing.
”She has betrayed you. You know she has. You know she doesn't want you around anymore.”
”But that doesn't mean that I don't still love her,” Niki says, words that cut her tongue, her lips, the deepest parts of her soul, but they're true words, and she clings to them.
”It doesn't matter if she doesn't love me.”
”Then you're a fool.”
”Let me go, Spyder. I won't do this for you. I won't fight the Dragon for you.”
Galaxies swirl in the irises of Spyder's angry, pale eyes, supernovae and blue giants, and Niki knows that the holes, which have now become a single hole, {horizon} (tidal gravity) are winning the tug-of-war. And she wishes that Scarborough had hit her just a little harder.
”Without the Dragon, this world would be perfect,” Spyder says.
”There's no dragon where we came from, and it's not 353.
perfect,” Niki replies, and now the things in Spyder's eyes are unrecognizable.
”There are dragons everywhere. There are serpents and dragons and devils.”
”I won't do it,” Niki tells her again, and then she's falling, which means there must be direction, after all, maybe direction that's only just come into being. Not so very different than the fall from the bridge and she watches Spyder d i m i n i s h falling the other way, until she's become only a bright speck, a particularly white star all but lost among the infinity of twinkling worldlines.
I'm near the edge now.
she thinks, but isn't at all sure what she means.
And then Niki slips through the breach, dropped back 354 into her body so hard that her teeth clack together and she bites her tongue. The salty, metallic taste of blood, iron molecules torn from hemoglobin and dissolving like Communion wafers on her tongue.
My mother was Catholic, my father was an old serpent, but no, that last part was Spyder, not her, and she has to remember that if she's to do this one last thing.
The temple at Nesmia Shar, that enormous, somber room of gray stone, flashes before her eyes like an epilep-tic slideshow. Images flickering lightspeed across her reti-nas, engulfed by her shrinking-swelling-shrinking-swelling pupils, and now oblivion seems very, very distant.
The red witches, a.s.sembled before the towering, graven image of Dezyin, their glowering griffin, gryphon, gryphus, grypgryps that isn't, neither half lion nor half eagle. The air of the chamber clouded with incense and the vocal press of chanting. The idol's eyes blaze almost as bright as Spyder's did.
Pikabo Kenzia, solemn and fearful and beautiful in her sage-colored skullcap, and all her sisters and daughters spread out around her like fallen autumn leaves set afire, smoldering, bleeding the smothering fumes of herbs and dung and amber.
And there I am, Niki thinks, spotting her naked self stretched out on the stone table set at Dezyin's taloned feet. One of the women with a white bandana tied around her hair stands on the table near her, and the sight fills Niki with something worse than helplessness or sorrow. She would slither right back into the place of strings, if she knew the way.
”We ask nothing of you, daughter, that you have not already pledged,” Pikabo Kenzia says, and the woman standing beside Niki takes off her crimson robes, and they fall to the floor, revealing skin as white as bone. ”You are brave, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture. By your sacrifice might worlds be saved.”
No! Niki screams, but her lips are as still as the lips of the dead. Not for me, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! Don't let her die for me!
355.
The flicker across her eyes, and she raises a hand to cover them, the hand that the Dragon opened and curled up inside so long ago now that it seems like lifetimes pa.s.sed and pa.s.sed again, and now she can see that there are things growing in there. Not maggots, but the things that maggots wors.h.i.+p, and they are eating her, one tiny mouthful at a time.
And she can see through her hand, as well, as though it were only gla.s.s or plastic that no maggot-G.o.d would ever want to taste. The flat-world globe has been replaced by the fire pit, and the naked woman in the white bandana stands at the top of the long iron trough. An old woman is painting Niki's skin with elaborate runes or ideograms, blood to ink, and for just a second, Niki thinks the characters might be Vietnamese.
Pikabo Kenzia draws a great, curved knife from her own robes, and the firelight glints brightly off its blade.
”The body of woman is like a flash of lightning,” she chants, ”existing only to return to nothingness. Like the summer growth that shrivels in winter. Waste thee no thought on the process, for it has no purpose, coming and going like dew.”
f.u.c.k this! Niki screams at the red witch. f.u.c.k you all!
but even she can't hear herself. The old woman has finished dabbing the runes across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stomach and thighs, and she lays the dried corpse of a small turquoise lizard across Niki's forehead.
”Like a wall, a woman's body constantly stands on the verge of collapse,” Pikabo continues, ”and still, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?”
Neither awake nor dreaming, Niki Ky stands before Dezyin, and blood drips from its sickle, raptor beak. Its wings give birth to typhoons. ”I am not your daughter,” she screams, ”and you don't get anything in my name!” but the G.o.d ignores her, as G.o.ds do, and leers hungrily down at the offering standing at its feet.
And Pikabo Kenzia's arm swings round in an arc, draw-356 ing a vicious quarter circle, as her silver blade cuts the thick and smoky air.
And the G.o.d thing smiles, satisfied, ready to grant Pikabo's wish.
Obsidian against skin, and the woman's belly opens wide, spraying blood and releasing her intestines. And her scream wriggles up through the miasma of holy scents and the smoke and the swooping tapestry shreds suspended overhead. Not mute like Niki, this woman, and she screams again as the red witch's knife continues to take her apart.
Her blood rushes down the trough and sizzles loudly in the fire pit.
And Niki feels herself slipping again.
Her mind anch.o.r.ed nowhere firm, no tether to her sleeping body, and this time it's Dezyin, the old grifter whom the witches call Dezyin, who moves her like a wooden marionette.
The fish augur's spells, and Spyder's angels.
Dr. Dalby's pills and books.
The Dragon's jackals.
The witches' flimflam man.
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