And then the Lord writ his finger on the city of the infidels, and there was victory, for as it traced behind it, the buildings fell unto ruin, and the land became as water and swallowed the hosts against the faithful.
Behind the writing of the finger of the Lord God, there came a rushing of air, that drew all things into it, man, and building and beast. And these were pulled into the fire, which raged so hot that it reduced wood to ash, metal to powder, and people to pools of burning fat.
“God has judged your city and finished it.”
“God has judged your city and finished it.”
“God has judged your city and finished it.”
Thus was the writing of the lord on the city of the wicked.
2 Acts on Ishtar 21:13-18
Long Count Date: 998.11.95
The night before they had attended a play, at the civic theatre – new plays were part of the festivals, but older plays were performed for entertainment at an ampitheatre carved into the rock away from the bay. It had been a strange choice - Agamemnon and Iphigenia was generally more popular in times when sentiment ran against war, and there had been just the opposite growing in Teloikopolis for some time: indeed, there had been pressure to reactivate a fleet and raise a defense against the privateers that were from the Caliphate of Kentaurus. But obviously the performing troupe felt differently, and the audience had agreed with their choice.
But such intellectual excursions were far behind her, and today, Marchangela stood hanging on the rail, facing away from the coast and feeling the sharp breeze from the sea. It had the taste of salt and sulfur on it, but was otherwise a cleansing from the dust of land.
This little wooden world – no more than 100 feet long – contained several passengers, a great deal of cargo, and some 40 crew men, three officers, and a captain. The other passengers were a diverse lot, with only one catching Marchangela’s attention. He was a slight man, wearing a turban, with a dark beard, but light skin and blue eyes. He had a bird like face, wore a perpetual grin and had those smooth easy movements of someone who is at home in any situation. He was playing dice with some of the off duty crew, and enjoying the game. He did not win or lose too much, and was obviously not a professional gambler out to take them, but merely finding a jovial way to pass a few hours in the brilliant bright blue light.
She had heard the captain mutter that the winds were against them, and it was clear that they were having to race around the wind a great deal. Thus, while they were moving fairly quickly, they were not making a great deal of progress towards Arinth, which was to the west. This ship was only going that far, and from Arinth they could book a better passage, first to Latia, where Marchangela resolved to deliver her message, if such it was, and then to Arcana, where the Magus would do what he had to do. It was carefree, and if she had not slept well – troubled by serpents in vague whirring dreams – she at least had little she had to do but stand around.
By evening it was clear how little progress they had actually made, the were nearing the coast again, and despite having sailed some 8 hours, they were only a few miles up the coast. She recognized the hills having once walked for three days. In fact, now that she thought about it, they were making little more progress than she could have on foot in the same time. Such were the vagaries of the wind, she supposed, and she realized why there was such a temptation, on one hand, to use steam power, despite its dangers, and on the other hand, to load galleys with slaves on oars.
She turned back towards where Teloikopolis was, though now long since over the horizon, and beheld a sight which puzzled her beyond measure. It was a bright glowing orange ring rising upwards, like another sunset, and above it was a dark hemisphere of dark cloud, mounted on a huge trunk, it had plumes of fire streaming down from the ring towards the ground. It resembled a giant tree, or perhaps merely a Cyclops out of legend. It rose higher and higher, she could not get a sense of its proportion,but it had to be of a height similar to the great mountains.
The Magus put his hand on her shoulder, and pulled her down towards the passengers cabin door. She resisted his pressure, because, for reasons she knew it would be hard to explain later, she had to see. But she looked directly at him, and their eyes met – simultaneously they mouthed the words:
“The well of souls.”
At this point there there was the sound of a howling wind, which rushed through as if it were the embodiment of deathly spirits and the hauntings of ages. This, in itself, did not frighten Marchangela – she had read of the results of explosions, and knew that if they were not close to the blast itself, the wind at this distance would be essentially harmless. The historical record showed that there had been large explosions on Ishtar with distressing regularity, as humans had struggled to harness fire, and then grown to careless in its use.
No what ate at the back of her mind was what she had seen in the well itself – the churning how there had been definite faces and shapes. Across the rippling waters, lit by both sun and explosion, she thought she saw scowling faces – glaring eyes, groaning mouths, writhing bodies – writ in the foam across the waves, they must have been the size of the ship itself to see them coming at this distance. She thought she saw them in the billowing giant form itself – ripples seemed to form torsos and legs that stuck out and hideous angles.
The wave of faces on the water approached them rapidly and methodically, and there was a sound like a vast shout, a that then fell to silent, as the front passed over the ship, the entire ship tilted away from the blast, rose up on a wave. Marchangela had to grab for the side and was glad that her reflexes were young and quick. The Magus was standing almost unperturbed, having steady himself as soon as he saw the shockwave coming.
She looked about the ship and found that the crew was hurring about to deal with the effects of the gust, and that the dice game had been knocked over . The green eyed Arab was separating the money back into the piles that had been there before, while the sailors went about rushing to their stations.
Marchangela turned back to look at the now massive Cyclops form, and saw rippling on the waves of finer and finer textures, the faces were assuming more human proportions and began to seem as if they made up the waves, as opposed to being painted on them with foam.
“We must go below.” The Magus assumed the best voice of command he had, but Marchangela ignored it.
“I want to see this.”
“March, the psyches will be released, and thrust out, and the disembodied hate the embodied, we will hear the howling of the dead at any moment – look, thousands must have been taken up in the cloud, and thousand more will be sent howling into the air.”
Marchangela was rooted to the spot, she had known all of this, and her mind had fixated at the whirring tumult that had been the well, at how the faces had seemed to form in the eddies of it, and then were smashed up against the plate of glass. She stared at the cloud, which now seemed to take the form of a writhing serpent that coiled around and around the stem – a as if it had wrapped itself around the truck of a tree. Only instead of a serpents head, there were fangs and a vast mouth full of teeth. The eyes seemed to blaze like fire. It was at this moment that she felt her self tugged into the dream world, but she fought it off.
From the high domed cloud, shards of ash fell back down toward the earth, and a vast ghastly haze surrounded the area. It must have reached out from the center of the conflagration as far as the cloud tops were high. She remembered the stories of the destruction of Latia, and knew, that even if this was not a portent, that most would believe it was, and look to the coming of an even vaster cataclysm. The old histories would be remembered. She recalled from Logos Eupresis how, after Latia, many cities declared any who came from their interdict, lest they bring the terror upon themselves. Many were branded with a “N” for “Nergal” the dark lord to whom the Urakkadians ascribed the coming of sudden death by illness.
It was at this moment that the chattering, murmuring sounds began, and which sounded at first like a plague of locusts. And moments later, there was a ghastly silence as the wind fell completely dead. The sky had become darkened, and a vast black wall snaked out from where Teloikopolis had stood and was reaching for them.
It was at this point that the crew simply stopped whatever they were doing, and looked at it. Marchangela noticed that the arab had begun inching his way to the passenger’s cabin, and the Magus had turned there as well.
Then one of the crew members began to twitch, just a little tick of the head, jerking back and forth. Then another began to pull up his shoulders, or rather had his shoulders pulled up as if someone else was pulling them. Another swung his fist widely.
All at once, tumult broke out, with the crew members almost in unison grabbing for truncheons or clubs. One swatted the captain overboard at an instant – who had remained calm but uncomprehending. Another took a swing at the arab, who produced from nowhere a crescent shaped blade which he used to stab his attacker and then rapidly danced to the passenger’s door. He motioned to Marchangela and the Magus.
In truth, Marchangela had not intended to be brave or heroic – however, she knew she had to cover the Magus – who she realized some time ago was constantly ill, but like many older people who had been ill for a very long time, moved slowly and deliberately to cover it up – she drew both long foil and short dagger and blocked two oncoming figures. Both of whom wore expressions on their faces that resembled, far to closely, the masque like horror which had so recently been painted on the waters.
This, Marchangela thought, is what possession looks like. She made a note that keeping the well was a vastly undervalued profession. She started to wonder what had happened, when one of the two figures went from being lumbering and zombie like, to swift and lethal, taking a deliberate swing at her. She dodged backwards, realized that, obviously, a psyche, once it was used to a body, could wield it very effectively, and decided that killing while they were still lumbering was the best approach.
Do unto others, before they do unto you became her immediate motto.
She first lunged to the slower one with her rapier, taking it by the eye, and recouping quickly, it fell, and she was glad that, as she should have realized, the psyches did not give the bodies new powers, and a soma that did not work, could no longer house a psyche. She felt a rushing out of the wound she had made, but did not watch the soma fall to the ground. Instead she turned towards the more nimble adversary, ducked another wild swing and pressed the club away with her rapier, she then used the dagger to strike a short punch blow to the heart, and felt a disturbing, but satisfying, slide against resisting flesh. It fed her like a lust or a craving, her arm quivered against it, but she felt a thirst on her tongue for a repetition. So this, she thought, is killing.
But then she realized that her purpose was defensive, and she began backing towards the passenger door. At this moment from the other side of the ship, the officer door opened. She saw moving figures, and her heart sank, the men on deck she thought she could hold off, but reinforcements brought despair.
Instead, she saw the very blonde hair of a passenger who had not been seen on deck, he was quite tall, and broad shouldered. She could tell from his red cape that he was a legionnaire of the Latin Republic, he pushed two soma out before him and pushed out on to the deck like a driving wave. He clearly was intent on making some kind of heroic gesture by plowing into several of the possessed from behind, armed with a thick spear or lance which he used to slam two into the water, and then shaft a third before they could turn on him. Fighting her way to him was absolutely out of the question.
But she did not have to, the Kentauri had decided to do so, and he had procured from his luggage a long thin curved blade, which he demonstrated as being clearly sharp enough to cleave heads by the neck.
The centurion was puzzled, but took aid where he could find it, and cried out:
“Back to back. Fight back to back.”
His rescuer heeded the advice and the two of them were making a stand near the mast. Finally the centurion looked towards Marchangela, realized that his only hope was to get in the passenger compartment, and pushed the arab towards the door while he used his spear to swing out enough space. Clearly the psyches were starting to realize that they did not want to be disembodied after only a few moments of this second life, and were giving him more room.
Marchangela, for her part, was parrying a hulking soma that was attempting to use the superior reach of his staff to overwhelm her. Gritting her teeth and hoping that she had could do it, she caught the staff with the crossbar, and began swirling it around and around with a fast circular motion. The soma lost its grip and dropped the staff. It dumly reached down for it, and Marchangela closed the distance in a long step, and stabbed down with her dagger into the back of its neck. The soma fell face downward, and again, she could feel its psyche rush away and into the swirling air.
By this point everything was coloured either in the strange light of twilight or in the swirling reds and oranges of sparks. The cloud and serpent form was tinged with reflected oranges. Marchangela didn’t even want to begin to speculate what was happening in the “wood district”, where houses were built quickly out of canvas and light balsas, framed only with a little of heavier woods.
The attack had let up, and all she needed to do was stab from time to time, while the attackers eyed her, not greedily as if they intended to rob her, but with a kind of righteous anger, as if they were a mob who had caught a pick pocket.
With a vicious bash, the Centurion swept a hole in the crowd. The Kentauri came rushing through, making sure that if it was down, it stayed down, with a short swift stroke of his long blade.
The centurion and the Kentauri then reached her, and she backed into the compartment. Both of the two warriors backed through closed up the door, and bolted it. There was a sudden pitch of the ship and then a roll, and Marchangela fell backwards to the back wall. She felt a bang on her head, and then slid into the ante chamber of dreams. But the shapeless shapes were not as hard to remember – the looked like the shapes that had formed in the cloud, and on the face of the waters. She could distantly feel her back sliding down against the wall.
Her comrades began to see her twitch. The Kentauri took his blade and was about to run her through, when the centurion put his hand in the way. “She has the falling sickness, I have seen her this way before.” The Kentauri nodded, and in a quick voice that almost reeked of cleverness said: “Good! Then you guard her.”
The magus began tracing out a pentagram on the deck. At this both of the warriors stopped and looked, dumfounded. The centurion spoke first, his face set, and his voice used to command.
“What good is that going to do?” It did not come out like a question that was supposed to have an answer. It was more in the tone of asking a sentry: “What good was sleeping at your post supposed to do?”
The Magus turned to look at both of them, with that look that learned men have when asked foolish questions by the uninitiated. The centurion suddenly felt as if he had asked a commander how to pitch a tent, or which way to face when mounting a horse. His face drained of any determination to ask questions. The Kentauri merely shrugged.
“Either none at all, or just enough. Sit, and join hands with me.”
At this point there was a banging sound at the portals, the Centurion and the Sarcen lept to secure the swinging door to the outside – there was no such luxury as glass here – and then gingerly sat down and joined hands in a circle with the Magus. The closed their eyes, and tried to concentrate as they heard the distinct sound of a battering ram against the cabin door.
But before they could begin to concentrate, Marchangela twitched again, and then jerked up to a standing position, arms akimbo, and legs spread to the width of her shoulders. Her eyes opened, and they were blank, like an ancient statue.
“Albertus.”
The Magus suddenly jerked to attention in the way that people do when their name is called.
“Albertus, do not come back to the city.”
The Kentauri interjected, his words rolling quickly from his mouth, with the consonants accented: “It is not something I would usually say about ghostly injunctions from the mouths of raving epileptics, but that sounds like good advice.”
The mage stood, walked closer, and leaned towards Marchangela.
“Who is this.”
“I was Livia.”
And then Marchangela sank to the floor before another word could be exchanged.
The centurion spoke next: “I would assume that Livia was someone you knew.”
The Magus nodded, and then sat back to the circle. The pounding had begun to be punctuated by creaking noises, as if the wood were about to give way. Albertus Magus noted that the two warriors had drawn their weapons close, incase the incantations needed were of a more monosyllabic variety.
They sat in the circle, and he began to chant an ancient ritual. Halfway through, the pounding stopped, and there was that distinct sense that the ship was a drift on the currents. It swayed without direction, and there was no sound of ropes being stretched taught in rhythm that is the immediate sign of a ship being underway.
“Dare we go out?” Was the Kentauri’s question, as he popped open one eye.
“I do.” Was the centurions’ response as he pulled himself to standing. He readied his spear and nodded the Kentauri to open the door, the Albertus Magus took the space behind him, staff at the ready.
The door was unbolted, and slowly swung open. It had gotten dark, but laying about the deck were the soma of the crew, many untouched.
“Are they, dead?”
“I think we were fortunate.”
“The ritual worked?”
“That or the psyches could not cleave to the bodies for long. It is hard to tell.”
The Centurion nodded and methodically began spearing the soma, and tossing them overboard, giving each a small blessing as he did so. If there were any alive and unpossessed, he was truly sorry, but he was not about to leave a host for ghosts, or whatever they were, wandering around.
The Kentauri piped up: “How are we to get out of this.”
“I can sail the long boat.”
Albertus Magus, added “and I can navigate.”
The Centurion looked over his shoulder at the Kentauri, “And you look the sailor type,”
“You have found me out, I am indeed. My name, by the way, is Fareed Anwar Al-quari. And yours?”
“Albertus, Magus Teloikopolis, a title, I think, that is of somewhat less value that it was not long ago.”
“And I am Flavius Maximus Tiberius…” He stopped when he saw that Fareed was mouthing syllables, mocking the seemingly endless names of the Latins. The Centurion was slightly offended, but realized that standing on excessive court dignity, was to court charges of pomposity. “Maximus, call me Maximus.”
“Like all your other boyfriends?” Shot back Fareed.
“Who said you, would be one of them?” The sound had an arch of the eyebrow, even as Maximus methodically dispatched and tossed the remaining soma.
This grisly work done, the settled down to sleep what remained of the night, confident that they would need their wits about them come dawn.
-
For every time there is a season, A time to give, a time to take.
Traditional
“For I am of the miners, buried and brought forth alive.”
“For I am of the fishermen, drowned at sea and awashed safely ashore.”
“For I am of the mothers of this world, who die but live on in their child.”
“And if any of you should touch a thing, and put my mark upon it, it is as of me as if I touched it, and as of my Father in Heavan as if he had made it.”
“In this, go forth, and bear witness.”
These things the Christ did say before he left them to go unto the trial and then to be crucified.
Synoptic Gospel 30:17-22
Long Count Date: 998.11.94
Marchangela now found her self falling and landing on her feet, she felt her self stifling in deep jungle, with overgrowth blocking her sight, and the canopy above dimming the light. This much looked rational, so too did the large buzzing dragon flies which were as long as her arm, she had seen these before. She tried to survey around her self, and realized that to her back were the three others, and they were lunging at some unseen enemy that came at them.
She too turned and looked into the dark, and began thrusting with her rapier, and then with her dagger, trying to hold off what they was circling them. It was only after several lunges that she began to wonder if something was circling them, only on the next lunge to hit something, and feel that slow sensation of a blade entering flesh point first.
At this moment there was a transformation that takes place easily in dreams – what had seemed like broad leaves of the underbrush turned out to be spots on a huge snake, and what had seemed like stems, was really the space between its coils. And she could tell it was constricting in on them. The canopy above became more liquid seeming, and then transformed from a lattice of leaves and branches, into a haze of fire far above them. What she had thought was the sun through the canopy, turned out instead to be something cold and white and dimmer. She thought of the “moon” card and wondered if that, indeed, was the same thing.
Her companions were calling out encouragements to each other by name, from whence she guessed that the Latin was “Maximus” and the Kentauri was “Fareed”.
She lunged several times at the snake, and then realized that it was constricting very slowly. She stabbed deep in, pulled her self up by her dagger, then got her footing on a coil, pushed up and stabbed again. She did this several times, and hauled her self up over the top of the snake. Once there, she found her self coming up out of a dark pit or mine, and was staring out around her on the top of a hill, it was covered with a thin green grass, and it sloped down for some distance to water, but of a distinctly different kind than what she was used to.
She looked behind her and saw no snake, but only her companions climbing up the rock strewn rubble below, she stepped away from the edge and looked outwards. Surveying in all directions, she realized they were on top of a small island, and that there were several others that dotted the water.
In the distance she saw one which had on it a volcano that was spewing ash, and dust, it was menacing, but far away. The dust was not a thin plume, but a large heavy black plume, of the kind she had seen the night before.
She trotted down the side to reach the water, and jumped in, plunging into the water. And, as is often the case, awoke with a sensation of falling, finding herself in the cabin where she had lost consciousness the night before.