At the marketplace in Baghdad a servant was jostled by a woman. When he turned, he saw it was Death. She made a threatening gesture to the servant, and he begged his master to lend him a horse that he could ride away from that city as quickly as possible. At the end of his road he came to Samarra and promptly dropped dead. When the master saw Death, he asked, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant in Baghdad? And she replied, It was only a start of surprise. For I was astonished to see him in Baghdad when I had an appointment with him that night in Samarra. - W. Somerset Maugham (abr.).
—
The black car glided slowly and softly out of the garage. On the road it sped through some odd hour of night.
If you screamed, I'm sure the cow would come rescue you from me. Orange lights played across Bodhi's grey pallid skin, and the car jumped forward. It was the speed of the lights that told how fast she was going. A speeding bullet—
It was stripped down on the inside, a two-seater without covers on the seats, almost everything in it part of the machines that gave her speed. The dents in the Cockroach suggested it hadn't been without calamities. I looked out the window, shocked, at a goods truck that appeared and as suddenly disappeared in the opposite direction; I fumbled to open the door. It was already gone.
"Road pizza if you fall out this fast," Bodhi said. "Unless I rescue you from cars again."
It ate the silent road like a gust of wind tearing tissue paper. Air rushed past like a typhoon. The ground grew rougher under the tires, but they spun as quickly—old trees and cut hills flashed past as shadows. She switched off her lights and where she travelled barely looked like a road at all. Bodhi blasted through a cragged whistling byway of another world.
"You like this, don't you? You really like this." She clamped down a foot on the accelerator. Her laughter was high and bell-like, rippling like pale rags tossed by a breeze.
Wind escaped through a crack in the top of the windows, free with the cold that woke you up from anything. Winds that danced through the air and ran across your face as if they could take you away reminded you that you were alive; far better than cold stillness. The world vanished and there was only a rough wild speed like flying. It was made real by the harsh rumbling below—in an airplane you could imagine yourself still sometimes but never here, so close to the earth that sped past. She drove over bare ground no man had built on. Silver ghost-light flew across her face one moment and was gone the next, quickly enough for an illusion, and the song in the air was the sound of a storming sea. There was always something wild in her—wild and cruel and unfettered.
And it was something I could understand. Older; writ large; writ long; but even without the tricks she used on prey there was something that could have drawn me.
If I wished to find out what they were and what they could do and the limits of their abilities: then would I try and—
There was a hairpin turn—and a jump over something. The car flew over thin air then shuddered and shook almost enough to break teeth as it hit the ground again. Strange dark shapes flashed by. I hung on.
"What are you driving to get away from?"
The car jerked leftwards more than before—as if in annoyance. She returned it to a somewhat upright position, always juddering on as fast as before. "Who says there's a from?"
"Nobody runs without something to run from. Otherwise you end up in—the same place you started. I know about running."
The car jolted over trying to speak. Parts of the ground sounded small and sharp, like sand or small gravel—dark shook by outside, easily dark enough to see many stars.
"Plenty to run from, if I was the type who ran—" she said, engine drowning both our voices. I thought I saw a dark hill shaped like a clenched fist for a moment, a giant's hand raised above his own grave—then it was gone into waves impossible to decipher. "You know what I've done? A lot of the humans I've told—their first thought is, how many people have you killed.
"Like I run from ghosts." She quickly changed gears; her eyes were set on the way ahead—as she should be. She hurtled up a hill and again her wheels lurched off the ground. She flew—across a ravine, perhaps—and landed with a freewheeling bump, skidding down another hill too steep for all four wheels to be on the ground at once. And she shouted as if she couldn't restrain her joy in it, a yell I heard like a warcry.
"The ash one was different," Bodhi called. "There are no ghosts—the unquiet graves of most people I've killed are lost forever now. If they were ever unquiet, and I heard them go pretty fucking quiet..."
The car squealed; she pushed it always forward at the same ridiculous—spectacular—speed. Then I saw rounded dark shapes rushing fast around it; an obstacle course. Sharp turns—it seemed a challenge even for her. People died like this, going too fast, plummeting and turning and breaking, if they were not made of stone—but I was far less afraid of this than inside the house. She swerved around a shape like a stone globe and it seemed to become a straighter track. Bodhi laughed.
"You think you've seen speed?" she shouted over her engine. She reached for a heavy switch trailing wire. Something opened. "This is speed—"
And I would have sworn that blue fire erupted from the back of her car. She sped so quickly she couldn't turn—it had to be a long trail, running so quickly that the ground looked like dark blue water around us. The wind's whistle was harsh as metal grinding over metal or a hungry crow's never-ending call, blending above the overwhelming explosion from the engines. It stirred with my insides, tossing and playing with stomach and lungs rattling against ribcage. It was what was imagined when driving was equated with freedom.
"This is what it's fucking meant to be!" Bodhi howled, and the river of ground ate itself below her feet in the blink of an eye.
She slowed while the engine began to spurt and complain. "Well, that's over until I can get more rocket fuel," she said. "Fuck." I had no idea if she was joking or not. The world had come to a pale blue while she'd driven so far and so fast. She cranked to a halt with a loud sigh.
"Get out if you want. I've got to look at this."
Run.
It was an alien world: weird, constructed ramps and pits built for giants and corroded, corrupted shapes of toys for inhuman games. It was some sort of old mining site. Few stars were left in the sky, and the soft blue light edged along the shapes on the ground and blurred everything in a blanket of mist. Black tire marks edged over smooth rows of hardened dirt. The world seemed utterly deserted.
Bodhi bent over her open hood and swore at what she saw there. "Toolbox's to the right. Give me a wrench."
Because you'll eat me if I don't?
"Here's the box."
"It'll do." She raised a hand coated with black grease and let her head disappear amongst the tangled pipes and wires of her engine, wet oil and heat and still-pulsing parts making them seem almost like the innards of a person.
Where is this place?
Who else comes here to drive?
What happens if you're stuck here?
"Do you fly as well?" I said.
"Used to." Bodhi raised her head and glared, a challenge in her darkened eyes. "Still got a license in an identity that'll hold. But it was better when you people took to the skies in things made out of rubber bands and tinder. More fun."
I bet a fall would shatter you.
"And this is made of chicken wire and gaffer tape?"
She cursed at a connection she tightened. "You use what's there."
"—Wherever this is, it's different." I stood on the hillside by her car. The distant group of hillocks fogged by the early morning like a cluster of unformed buds was her obstacle course; the dark rift in the landscape like a meteor's strike where she'd jumped; the long straight stretch far beyond where I could see where she'd abandoned all turnings for speed. It made both of us the size and scale of ants—but humans and their machines had dug this place. "You have another world. There are times when it's interesting. Galatea. A statue come to life. Has anyone ever called you that?"
It meant ivory-made, I knew. They had no identifying scars or blemishes or birthmarks to mar their skin. Although by some angles and under electric lights there were brief streaks of paler white along Bodhi's arms, and near her brother's neck. Where she bent into the car her shirt lifted across her back.
"Not that one. I know the myth, and it's boring." She flicked a piece of red wire and parts of the engine came back to life, purring like a contented tomcat. Then she unfolded herself back from the car, blackened in a zebra stripe across her face and both arms from fingertips to elbow. "Tell me more."
"Just that if you read minds you must know more about death than anyone. Do you believe in souls?"
The air was cold and still, the blue light halfway to dawn while the stars faded above. Beyond the fog was no movement, but I did not know if eyes could see figures standing on an old human-made hill. Not necessarily so old.
"It's crap. Helen's stuff is crap." She must be able to stand for months without tiring—but without being bored would be a different question when it came to her. "I've heard multitudes of humans die and gone on to kill more anyway."
She is trying to watch me react to it. She didn't trouble to exaggerate the theatrical gesture by licking her lips.
"What is it like to die?"
She was a preferable fate to her brother or to Adelaide.
"Not very imaginative. No. Please. Mommy. Bright lights. The devil. But there's only me. Funny you should say that when you are one of few things in this world who could kill me."
She walked closer; she was marked with a black half-mask, mapped in the strange light and fog before morning, like a visitor from an unreal grey world.
"I'm not gonna say when I figured it out. You're a black hole that smells like a human. And you would be worse if someone turned you. I'm too used to fighting people I can read. But I wouldn't let it be easy."
I raised my hands. She looked like a seventeen-year-old girl. "I don't fight. Not so much because of some code as I can't. You have powers."
"And skill." She stopped for a moment. "You people invent new fighting styles. I memorize them." A martial arts pose—she leaped like a gymnast. Perhaps she slowed it enough to watch—it was attractive, a dancer's or a ghost's grace. "Newborns are strong while their human blood still courses through their veins. Even Alora was once stronger than me, though she never could beat me. That's what they're not telling you. Superstrength and immunity to my powers and whatever other gift after the transformation? It could be facing my own death."
She brought me here to kill me without bloodshed. No, she didn't; I couldn't nail down the reasons for that idea but it darted silver in my mind.
It was not true, I thought, that I wanted to be nobody's death.
I spoke. "In the past I've worried not so much about what I might do as being caught for it. You've been a monster for a very long time."
"And you're on the cusp of whether you want to be one. Don't wait too long, boy." The bloodstain lingered in her eyes, the color of a bruise over blood vessels, the only spot of color in her black and grey shape. The last time she fed.
"But I'm such a monster—" Bodhi began.
And she had reached me. But rather than pin me to the ground she only forced me down with a hand on my shoulder. She faced me, both sitting on the rough cool ground.
"That for the past two hundred years I kept the vampire population in the Americas to...it can't be more than thirteen now. What is the point of a hunt if the prey cannot fight back? I was always a hunter." She smiled, pale teeth brilliant in her mouth. "But two hundred years is so small..."
I waited for her to say more. And she spoke again in the blue half-light. Her voice was half-whispered but high and strong and piercing. It stopped my breath for a few moments.
"In my time I've been a goddess and a queen. Thrones made of skulls and armies to do my bidding and baths of blood and maidens sacrificed and conquered territories. Oh, the thrones used to break if you sat on them too hard, and the bath got all cold and sticky in a few hours, and the slaves and armies and maidens are long gone—but they worshipped me while it lasted. There are stories that nobody remembers any more. I was a queen of demons feared through the entire known world."
She is old; old as the hills and older; ancient, blood-chilling, horrifying, and the dark in her eyes is a void in time...
"And I've been through high school sixteen times."
"Then tell me what you've done that nobody else has. Tell me how it began."
She answered. "Jon. Jon began it. Jon and I are brother and sister. Perhaps half, I don't remember. He is fair and I'm dark and he was older. We're the only family that we have. Once his eyes were blue. I remember little but I remember that. It was rare for women to be warriors but I hunted with the men with spears and ropes. Jon was something like a scientist, a wise man. Perhaps I helped bring people to Jon to find out what was inside them. And then they all realized that he did things they didn't like; that his secrets were too much for them." Her language changed and lilted as if she spoke an older English, a formal storyteller's tongue. She said her brother's name as if it was Yon, or Ion; old and beyond humans of the wrong time. Sometimes I had heard Boodi in place of Bodhi in his odd accent.
"They were going to execute him. So he made his arrangements while I was imprisoned away from him, and returned and created me," Bodhi said, and paused to boast. "I am Jon's first and his best. We escaped and spent the first few hundred years under the sea. That's what I remember much more than being human. We lived in a deep rift and hunted fish that whitened our eyes. The pressure was almost enough to make us sleep. Jon carved experiments in pictograms on coral. Strange things lie there in the depths—no mermaids or sirens or the stories you ask about, but strange things. Strange even for us. Perhaps that's why we walked back to the surface. And as early as then nobody would speak our native tongue any more.
"No shard of pottery, no fragment of parchment keeps it. Our tongue was never written, only spoken and sung—or pictured in rough lines of ochre long washed away. My brother will not speak it with me, since he sees it as useless in the weight of time passing. I have only myself. No breathing human has heard what we were for millennia."
It fascinated me. Perhaps too much like a cobra was supposed to hypnotise with glistening dark scales. Large amounts of inhuman time are not easy to envision; the time long before some ancient scribe had written that the earth was without form and void in the deeps until a voice spoke in language, Let there be light...
"That's—I've never had the chance to learn an old language. I know that Greek and Latin and Sanskrit are the old ones. The idea of a first language—one that every other word came from—language builds on old bones, I know what words mean and I like to know where they came from—your tongue—"
"Oh, don't get too excited there, monkey-boy," Bodhi said. "It wasn't like the generation before us all swung through trees and forgot to shave. There were other tribes who spoke differently, and when Jon and I left those bastards who tried to kill us we heard a lot more tongues in the big wide world. Actually I couldn't get them out of my head. But now I barely remember them. If I remembered everything I'd go blind and deaf."
"Speak it?" I suggested, distracted, and she voiced words I had never heard before.
Old words from an old monster; human-shaped but not human; inmost thoughts clear as glass to her, and if that was not a goddess—a decadent one of the Roman sort, or a Moloch burning people in altars of red-hot iron—then it was hard to define what was; a girl more than capable of lying. But the words fit together like a language ought even if they had no meaning, and it was akin to nothing I had heard before.
The strange alien words rolled on from Bodhi's dark-edged lips. They had a rhythm like birdsong, and few sounds to them—a lot of liquid vowels, surrounded by humming nasals and fierce stops. A tongue like harsh winds through dense trees, in a time before forests were cut down and cliffs tamed by roads and paths and cities.
"That's what it was like," she said. If she'd spoken in any way like she usually did then I'd just heard a long sequence of ancient swearing...
And this was why she was bored. You see too much and it becomes pointless.
"You aren't worthy of hearing it, but you're the only human to ask. At least I don't have to hear you ruin it in your head." Her grip on my shoulder was still fierce, and she crouched facing me.
"You don't hear me—but I don't think that's because I'm dead. Do you ever hear anything from the ash you set on fire?" Bodhi could know how they died for good—should know—her sister-in-law did not.
"Bees," she said, and I didn't understand her at first. "Ants."
It wasn't hard to grasp. "The dust in the air was close to a hive mind. I thought you only heard mammals..."
Animals with brains more like people—and even her kind must still have a brain. Perhaps even a vulnerable brain behind their softer eyes. But I wouldn't say that to her.
Bodhi impatiently gestured with her left hand. "Yeah, sure. Animals are simpler. Smells and instinct and shape rather than words—the predators are best. Insects buzz. So did she, the bitch. Crawled inside me. I set everyone who tries shit like that on fucking fire—"
"And are the ashes still conscious?" For that was the full horror of what they were; Helen's words that they were given eternal punishment.
And if she were human I would have said that Bodhi shivered.
"I don't walk easy over ash graves. Neither does Killigan. Never mind."
It's your problem, I thought, and tried not to imagine living pressed into dirt and alive and unmoving in a suffocating grave. "I'm impressed. You're surprisingly well-adjusted to this world. Let me tell you—" The words came faster, and she listened for the moment. "I've travelled and there's not a state I haven't been across. I've seen a lot, not the sort of things you see when you've a brother who gives millions to hospitals—I know the other kind of world on the edges. The worlds ordinary people don't think they can see. How to live off lies and favors and jobs off the grid. The black roads boarded off from people and the hidden subway tunnels and the skeletons of factories and apartments falling apart. And I saw other sights with my mother—towers and beaches and parks and strange statues and bridges that few know how to cross. I miss leaving; I've been in this town too long already, and you have too. The small town in the middle of nowhere."
I offered it to her with all the truth I could.
"You don't trust me, so why not run away? We could get by on theft and gambling with your powers. Come and see more of the world. Let's go and be nomads." I raised a hand slowly toward her skin.
And the moment you turn your eyes away I will escape you. You can't track trains or buses and you can't read me. I met her eyes with nothing to fear.
She broke away from me, standing, and finally lifted her hand. She laughed to the skies.
"Sure. Nice try, boy."
I scrambled to my feet the same. I was taller, and this time I laid a hand on her granite shoulder. "Then are you really so much your brother's child?"
She stared. "Hey, you're not total crap at this. I've done it before—run around without my brother—fought with him—met interesting mortals and killed them. Run away with you and the cow stops breathing down my neck and nagging me..." she taunted; teasing if her bloodlust was above her strength. "But I will take you back to Jon."
Behind me, the sun rose. I saw it on her.
—