Now, as she and her escort arrived at a row of empty crucifixes looming tall over the river’s edge, the Mother of Iisah swore aloud, “Father, save us.” They stood at the feet of one of seven dead sons, this one skewered through the heart and left to bleed on the bank. The other corpses laid farther along where the skirmish had become a massacre. They were headless, most of them, like they’d been brained by the blow of a nephilim’s boulder; yet there were no stones among the patchy grasses of the floodplain, just blood, sand, one last living son, and three foreign devils.
They were not animals. They were monsters: a wild mongrel, half naked, his gaunt frame striated with sinew as he danced like the Gautamans do, his sabre glinting; and beside him, a young Messah whose crown shone gold and whose face was stone even as he ran a man through to the cross of his blood-smeared sword. Then there was the last of them, clad in black and crimson, a heathen priest gleefully working some devilish engine of fire and steel held level at his shoulder, aimed for the north. The roar was deafening, belching sulfur and smoke like from the throat of a dragon. Lilum never saw her escort’s head explode, only felt the hot mist, bits of tissue and skull. The body crumpled—beats of life-blood vanished in the sand.
Like lambs to the slaughter, she thought, disappointed, reposed, a part of her eager. Perhaps these were the foreigners forewarned. She would learn soon enough, watching their approach, spying them observing her—the half-blood fixated, the Messah possessed, and the priest with his arrogant mask of mirth as he fed a cartridge into the smoky muzzle, a stick of incense clenched betwixt his teeth.
Lilum reached into the folds of her robe and gripped a hilt of yellowed bone. “Transgressors,” she started, “infidels, blasphemers. Who are you to dare trample on the Father’s covenant?”
“Bishop Ba’al, envoy of the King—or Father, or whatever you savages call him. We’re here to see the priestess.” He leveled his weapon. “And you’re going to show us the way, unless you want to look like your friends.” A bluff, etched bright as day on the bishop’s blackened heart.
“Was that meant to frighten me? Insolent insect, your posturing has no power here. I have seen the end, and you are not there, even among the risen dead.”
Ba’al’s nostrils flared. Taking incense in hand, he poised ready to jam the burning stick into the breach. Then five bony fingers snared the loaded barrel—the half-blood’s—redirecting the engine toward empty air to the east. What followed was a vociferant ejaculate of curses and damnations as the bishop pleaded with Adam for help. Yet the young Messah hesitated, looked instead to the Mother of old Iisah.
“What was that you said about the dead?”
That they shall rise again, those bones aslumber on the bed of the Vereringeks. That was the promise made to her, but the resolution in this Messah’s eye craved something different—a wish—and it was this which Lilum gave him, “You want to know what the Father has shown me? It is the consummation of our covenant: the rebirth of the faithful, alive and in their graves, to wage war on the false prophets and bring an end to the Traitor’s reign. To bring the coming of His kingdom.”
“The revelation,” finished the pastor’s son—mistaken, taken in, beguiled, her puppet.
Then the mongrel interjected, “Is that how you have Jezebel’s face?”
The question took them all aback, but when they laid eyes on her again, it was with a sudden recognition. The Messah gasped. The bishop cursed. They knew her, and Lilum could see on their very souls that it was true. She answered, “This body, you mean? It was a gift from the Father, and I can see now that He did not choose it by chance. Who was she to you? A lover? Your kin?”
“She was the most beautiful woman in all of Eemah.”
“Eemah? You’re blood of our sister tribe?” A dead snake in the sand, succumbed to its own venom. “What is your name, child? And the man who sired you?”
“Adnihilo,” he replied. “But I never knew my father. Not even his name.”
“He’s the legate’s son,” Ba’al answered for the half-blood, jerking his weapon free, yet his disposition had calmed. “And it seems to me that you must be the priestess. The Mother of old Iisah, Lilum. We’ve come a long way to find you.”
“Yes,” she said, fitting together in her head the pieces of prophecy—that the legate must be the Traitor and that this mongrel must be his seed—he the lion, and this Messah the lamb. A sacrifice. A blooding. Yet the bishop remained a mystery, so she asked, “Why is it you have come?”
“For the fall of the Walls of Barzakh. An old friend told me you might have the key to bring them down.”
I do now. You’ve just handed it to me.
Twentieth Verse
Sylvertre’s quill scratched quickly as a spider’s skittering the Saint’s Cross’s sigil into the rapidly hardening wax. The task was growing easier, done thrice as fast as his last attempt, and for once Ogdon was impressed with the results of his handiwork: forging an ornate seal in the shadowy hull of a rocking boat. He held the letter to a candle removed from its lantern. Dawn should not have yet risen, but the squire would not risk a stray eye spying light beneath the hatch. Looks good, he thought. Not even he could tell the true seal from the fake.
With a wetted thumb and forefinger, Ogdon snuffed out his candle and returned it to its glass cage, listened as sounds emerged from the darkness. The crashing
