Dark Time: Mortal Path (7 page)

Rabishu, thank you for this gift.

The knife slipped unnoticed from her hand, and she held Constanta to her breast, burying her face against the baby’s warm head, her lips touching her daughter’s black hair. The baby gurgled and settled in contentedly.

Constanta, my baby, my baby…

She rocked in the chair, lost in the moment, humming mother’s tunes to Constanta. Belatedly, she 22 z 138

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thought to perform the mother’s ritual of checking for perfection, of counting fingers and toes, of setting to rest any secret doubts during pregnancy, of finally being able to say
my baby is fine
.

She gently laid the baby across her lap.

Toes…check.

Fingers…

She gently tried to unfold her daughter’s little fist. Under Susannah’s fingers, she felt the girl’s flesh rapidly losing warmth. In the space of two breaths, the baby’s hands were cold. Memories swept into her mind of the night she spent in the village jail, lying next to the pitiful body of her stillborn baby.

The smell of blood in the darkness. Constanta’s soul fleeing the place of its miserable birth, the
heat leaving the small body and the soft and perfect arms and legs taking on the stiffness of death.

It was happening again. Constanta was dying, and this time she could see it, by the light of the lamp.

She could see every detail of her daughter’s slide toward death, and was helpless to stop it.

When Constanta was dead—again—Susannah was holding Candy, the true occupant of this room.

She put the baby back in her crib and picked the knife up from the floor.

She saw her life stretching out ahead of her, the endless years of an Ageless human.

How many times will I hold Constanta only to have her die in my arms?

Bitterness boiled up from inside her as she remembered how she had thanked Rabishu for his gift.

He must have enjoyed that.

She swayed, nearly bursting with the strength of emotion coursing through her. When she was able to walk, she left the home of Ellen and Glenn Morgan and their daughter Candice, who would grow up to be a healer.

Out in the moonlight, she swore that not one more innocent would die by her hand, and she knew exactly what she was going to do to put a stop to it.

T
here were technical difficulties. She couldn’t just phone someone and say, “Would you mind severing my head?”

Susannah lived in a Montana house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909. It was on a ranch of about 250 acres, small by Montana standards but perfect for the privacy she needed. Susannah was the original owner, having worked with the architect, and had “sold” the place twice to herself, as she assumed a new identity every twenty or thirty years.

Rabishu hadn’t responded to her refusal to carry out her last assignment. She hoped he would delay even further, because she was on a mission of her own.

Two of the home’s bedrooms were devoted to her weapons cache, a third to her collection of antiquities she’d accumulated during her world travels. Among the rare items was a blade salvaged from a guillotine at the end of France’s Reign of Terror, a bloody year in which thousands of people were executed. Already 120 years old at the time, Susannah had been busy elsewhere in the world. The French didn’t need any assistance in slaughtering one another during the Terror.

Half a day to get the lumber and supplies delivered, half a day to build the fourteen-foot frame in a clearing behind the house. The blade in her collection weighed almost ninety pounds and was difficult to mount to the crossbeam, but she managed it. She tested the drop by freeing the rope that held the angled blade aloft. It worked.

It was sunset, a fitting time. She sat on her expansive porch and watched the mountains grow darker as shadows climbed their sides. Clad in her killing outfit, she gathered her strength for her last assassination.

Get on with it, before you chicken out.

She crossed the clearing, settled her neck in the hollow of the bottom brace, and yanked the rope.

2009-08-25 02:50

S
he closed her eyes to greet death, but instead Rabishu pulled her into the Midworld.

“No! Let me go!”

His voice thundered in her head, so loud it was a roar without words. That voice, so intimate inside her, was more of a violation than the blade on her neck would have been. The circle between her breasts throbbed wildly. She put her hand to her chest and felt the warmth of blood seeping into her clothing.

Rabishu’s mark. Once it was my future.

Even though her demon master was at a distance, she felt a blast of anger from him that nearly knocked her flat on her back.

It’s gonna be bad. I should’ve slit that baby’s throat from ear to ear.

She yelled at the top of her lungs, pulling bravado from somewhere within her. “Get it over with, you damned stinking pile of burnt dog hide! I’ve had enough of taking your orders! Go find yourself another slave!”

A searing pain burst in her chest. She clawed at the outfit she was wearing and ripped it away from her upper body. A thin stream of blood shot out at least a dozen feet from the wound between her breasts and hung in the air like a horizontal lightning bolt before breaking loose and splashing on the ground. With each beat of her heart, blood flew from the wound and added to the pool that was forming a few steps away.

“You want my blood? Here, let me speed things up!” She fought mightily against the heaviness in her limbs induced by his presence, and broke through it. Tugging a knife from its sheath, she grabbed it with both hands and pointed the tip at her chest. Her hands began the fatal plunge.

The knife froze in the air as Rabishu came into sight, and the bleeding from her chest slowed to dripping that ran down her body and pooled at her feet.

This time he appeared to her in his most horrifying form yet. He was emptiness, a yawning black hole walking on all fours, a hideous parody of a black panther. The fog of Midworld swirled toward him and vanished into the nothingness that was his body. Susannah fastened on the idea that the void was a direct channel to the Underworld where he lived. She felt a slight pull toward him and feared that she would be drawn in like the fog, trapped forever in his foul innards or delivered straight to one of his torture cages.

“Not without a fight.” She said it standing straight, as though Rabishu had politely consulted her.

“I’ve got weapons and the will to use them. All I need is a chance.”

Susannah dismissed the thought that came to her afterward, that her weapons couldn’t damage Rabishu. Whatever was about to happen, she was going to face it with her chin high, and shaking her fist, too.

Eyes the size of eggs floated in his face, bobbing eerily as he walked, and underneath them two rows of teeth were suspended in the blackness. It was a predator’s mouth that could grab her and tear a huge chunk from her body effortlessly. His movement was cat-paw silent except for the occasional
snap!
of his long tail, more whiplike than the tail of the animal he imitated.

Rabishu stopped ten feet away. A tongue emerged from between his teeth and he greedily licked up the blood that had spurted out of her chest. Her stomach turned at the sight, and at the thought that her blood was an appetizer and the rest of her would be the main meal. Then her knife, still frozen in midair, whirled toward him. He caught it with his teeth and crunched down on it, with a sound like the snapping of bones. Her defiance wavered.

Brave words, that “chance to fight” business.

“Go back to your Lord Nergal,” she said, a little shakily, “and tell him he’s an impotent piece of shit, and so are you!”

Rabishu made no indication that he’d heard her, or if he did, he’d brushed her threats off as a human might brush away a buzzing mosquito. Fog rose at her feet and flattened into a wall, and glowing writing appeared on it. She knew now that it was cuneiform; when she first saw it, it looked like sticks tossed on the ground.

Your contract.
Rabishu’s words thundered in her head. The writing scrolled upward at great speed.

Rabishu reached out a large paw, bristling with claws, and touched it to slow the motion.

This section is the way of termination.

A portion of the writing zoomed down and hung in the air before her. Up close, the writing appeared to be made of a complicated system of thin vessels, disturbingly like her own arteries and veins. Liquid the color of pus pulsed through each abstract symbol, and it was shot through with red—her blood, extracted 24 z 138

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centuries ago when Rabishu pulled her from the flames.

She’d been ashamed at the time that she couldn’t write her name, but Susannah had come a long way since then. Reading Sumerian cuneiform was a skill she’d acquired in the late 19th century. Her contract was written in something that preceded Archaic Sumerian, but necessity had a way of elevating her skills.

She studied the contract and read part of it aloud.

“Failure cannot be tolerated. The servant will be given a choice: a painful death and passage to…to oblivion, or a life spent balancing dark acts with those of the light. Success will bring passage to a higher plane. Failure to balance will result in unending torment.”

She paused, considering what she had just read. She wasn’t sure she had it word for word, but close enough. “What does this mean? I don’t understand the choice.”

It means I kill you. It will take you many years to die, as an example to other slaves.

Susannah shook her head. “Don’t lie to me, demon. The last time I saw this contract I was an illiterate girl. That’s no longer true.”

A sudden blast of noise in her mind sent Susannah reeling. Rabishu didn’t like to be challenged. She struggled to keep her feet, and the angry outburst wore down.

It is at the insistence of Anu, Ruler of the Sky, that there is a choice.

“We have spoken of Anu before, and the crystal lens you seek.”

Speak no more of that, traitor. It no longer concerns you.

“Then tell me of the choice, as you are bound by Anu to do.” If Susannah had any cards to play, she was eager to get them on the table.

If you choose to die now, your death will be painful and prolonged—long by my standards, not
yours, and I have served my lord for over four hundred thousand of your years—but at the end you will
have no further consciousness. Your essence will be divided up and fed to the winds. It is a release from
pain, if nothing else.

“And the alternative?”

If you choose to live, you must save lives to balance those you have taken at my behest. You will be
mortal, although you will retain pale versions of the powers that I gave you when you entered my
service. If you die before balance is achieved, you become my plaything—as long as I exist, with no
release.

“If I should succeed in this balancing?”

None of your kind has ever done so. If you are the first, you will join Anu in the third sphere of
existence, an honor granted to very few gods. In your words, it would be paradise.

“I thought Anu was gone from Earth.”

In the third sphere, distance and time mean nothing.

“Then I choose life, as I did when you first pulled me from the fire and made me your servant. I choose to live and I will beat you at your game!”

It is no game. You will never succeed. I will enjoy welcoming you to eternal torment.

“Stop trying to cheer me up.” Having survived the moment, Susannah was feeling better. Anu, wherever he was, was giving her a chance.

She put her hand to the wound on her chest and found that it hurt but had stopped leaking her life’s blood.

An odd sensation gripped her, the reverse of the feeling centuries ago that death was leaving her body. The gray cloud of death entered through Rabishu’s mark and spread out inside her, trying on her body like a coat. She was mortal.

Rabishu leaped at her, knocking her over. This close, his stench was overpowering.

How does a void have weight?

His teeth parted and out came the tongue, red and obscene. It played lazily over her chest, taking up the blood from Rabishu’s mark, then drifting onto her breasts. She felt his agile tail stroking her legs.

She stiffened beneath him, wondering if he was capable of raping her and unwilling to go any further with the thought.

Then tremendous pain stabbed through her middle. She tried to clutch her arms around her stomach, but couldn’t. One paw planted on her left arm kept her pinned down, and her right arm was twisted underneath her. She suddenly felt as though her skin were burning. Panic swept through her as she thought he’d put her back where everything began—the smell of her own roasting flesh obliterating all but her 25 z 138

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frantic pleas for her life.

She was stunned to see Rabishu’s claws tracing a design on her skin between her breasts and arcing down over her belly, a thin trail of fire left in the wake of his claws’ movement. When it was over, she was gasping for breath, lying on her back, her chest heaving.

Take a good look, former slave.

This time Rabishu’s voice was barely audible in her head, taunting her with a singsong whisper. He jumped from her body and stood over her, the panther enjoying the helplessness of its prey.

A towering column of water snapped into existence three feet above her, held back by his paw.

Water dripped through his claws. A twitch of his claws and the incredible volume of water would be released, pouring on her, filling her lungs, pressing her body flat. She could barely draw breath thinking about it.

Instead of drowning her, the surface flattened as though sliced by an invisible blade. Smooth as a mirror, it hovered over her, so that she could see her reflection. Blazoned from just below her navel to between her breasts was a scale similar to the one from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, used to weigh the deceased person’s heart against the feather of truth. The scale’s two suspended pans tipped wildly out of balance. One pan was crowded with small figures, mounded on top of each other, tiny but distinct, weighing that side down. The other pan, empty, was as high up as it could go.