offering no answer.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” I grumbled, just relieved to have something other than my fantasies, my alleged fantasies, as the main focus of conversation.
He sighed and relented. “Not all of us who live in this world beyond the normal have the same abilities and gifts,” Messenger said. “Oriax’s kind sometimes sees further than we are able.”
“Further? As in deeper into? Or as in further away?”
He shook his head very slightly. “Further ahead. Time, not space.”
In my mind I heard Pop Pop Pop. I saw brain and bone and blood. I sucked in air but seemed to be suffocating, as though the air held no oxygen. I realized I was trembling.
I realized as well that the murder of Aimal, and the girls, and their teacher, was yet to come. It was in the future, still. Right now, across the world, Aimal was alive.
Somehow this led to that, though the how of it was not yet clear to me. What was the Isthil gospel that Messenger had quoted to Oriax? ‘If you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn say not that you are innocent when the heart dies.’ Was this the pricked finger?
I did not want to show Messenger any more weakness, which is how I thought of my fainting at the school yard. If I was to be Watson to his Holmes, then I had to be able to hold my own. Keep up. I clenched my fists together behind my back and squeezed until deep crescents were pushed into my palms and my forearms ached. But I hid it. I pushed the murder sickness down inside.
“Well,” I said, “where are we off to next?”
He stood silent in deep thought, ignoring me. Finally he must have reached some kind of conclusion because he said, “That’s enough for now. You’ll be wanting food and rest.”
He was quite right, but I wondered whether he had gleaned that from an unwanted intrusion into my mind—he was certainly capable of that—or whether he was just noticing the sag of my shoulders and the unconcealable agitation on my face. Either way I found myself alone in my . . . I must find something to call the place where I ate and slept and showered. It seemed absurd to call it home, but it was all the home I had for now.
As always there was food in the kitchen: fresh fruit, cereal and milk, Flake bars—a habit I’d picked up during a childhood visit to the UK—and even a frozen pizza. All things I would ordinarily eat.
I made myself a dinner-breakfast of an egg, cheese, and English muffin sandwich and wished this place had come with internet, or at least TV. But this place existed outside of normal space and time, so the cable company did not exactly have its lines here.
There were books, however. Some were the sorts of books I normally read for pleasure, but there were some heavy, leather-bound tomes as well, that could not have been placed there by accident. There was a shelf of these just to the side of the fireplace.
Someone or something had arranged kindling, logs, and matches, and I took that as an invitation. Before there was computer-plus-internet to shine a light on our faces there was fire. I built a decent little blaze that crackled impressively and threw off the odd spark. I pulled cushions off the sofa and sat there within range of the comforting heat with a small pile of obscure books.
“Thesis and Antithesis: The Search for Balance,” I read aloud. “Wow, that sounds like the dullest book ever written.” As did a book simply titled Justice that weighed about as much as one might expect so portentously titled a book to weigh.
In the end I opened a large but not terribly thick book with a magnificently embossed blue leather cover.
“Isthil,” I read aloud.
Messenger had taken me to Shamanvold, that awe-inspiring pit where the names of all Messengers are inscribed alongside bas-reliefs of the Heptarchy, the Seven Gods, of which Isthil was one.
I opened the book and read.
In the beginning was the void.
Into the void came existence.
But existence was precarious,
Suspended above the void,
Surrounded by the void.
A guppy at the shark’s mouth.
A feather floating before the waterfall.
A pebble wobbling at the lip of a bottomless pit.
Ours is not the first existence.
Existence has occurred before.
And existence has failed.
It has fallen into the shark’s teeth.
It has been swept down into the rushing water.
It has tipped and fallen into the pit.
Existence blinks into being,
And in a blink is gone.
“Well, that’s cheerful,” I muttered to the fireplace.
Into existence came the Seven.
Summoned by the will of existence itself.
Summoned to serve existence.
Summoned to ensure that this time,
Existence should not fail.
Summoned to maintain the balance,
Of the guppy, the feather, and the pebble.
Summoned to extend the length of that blink.
And thus was Isthil born . . .
I read on, skimming past the long origin story, looking for the passage Messenger had quoted. And there, at last, amid a series of homilies and parables, I found it, though Messenger had slightly misquoted.
“The fool says, ‘I never intended to kill, I meant only to wound.’ But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that to hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet will love triumph.”
The message came from a strange god, not my God, but it was no different than the lesson of my own faith, and perhaps many other faiths as well. Whatever Isthil really was, divine or mortal, god or pretender, I thought her words wise.
I decided I must read further, but the warmth of the fire and the lingering horror of seeing children shot down as I watched helplessly took their toll.
I did not dream of Isthil or of the balance of the world. I dreamed of places I had known, and people: a mother. A father now lying in his honored grave. Teachers. Friends. All of them in my dream seemed to be on the other side of a pane of thick glass. I could hear their voices only as unintelligible murmurs. I saw their faces, but distorted by distance and the eternal yellow mist that in some way separated me from ordinary life.
And then, yes, I dreamed of Messenger. I saw him in my mind without his long black coat. Without the symbols of his office, the ring of horror and the ring of Isthil.
To my unfettered subconscious imagination he was the boy he was before becoming the Messenger of Fear, or at least how I imagined he must have been. Tall and beautiful as he was still, but sitting on a rock at the edge of the ocean, laughing as waves sent cold, salt spray to dampen his chest and shoulders, and the rope-gathered linen pants I had dressed him in.
Yes,