The General's Bride Read online

  Behind him, the standing thing had shambled forth a few steps. One hand kept its balance against the General’s empty seat. Still ill at the mere sight, she insisted of her Father, “That thing is a lie. A false creation proceeding from my hopes, my memories, my feelings. It’s a predator. Fake.”

  “She can be real. And she is far less a lie than those Lazarus and his friend tell you.”

  Though her ears burned with fury, and denial boiled on the tip of her tongue, Dominia still nursed doubt enough to withhold comment. Her Father insisted, “Those nonsense stories of resurrection, of the stream of consciousness you knew as ‘Cassandra’ finding bodily resurrection in this world—they are lies.”

  “The only liar here is you.”

  “My poor, sweet angel! So trusting of your friends you will not listen to your own Father’s words. I tell you, they lie. Lazarus will not help you.”

  “There’s someone,” she began, stopping because he said, “They will lead you to Cairo, and you will be disappointed.”

  Her stomach tightened. She stepped away, toward a fire that emitted no warmth. “How do you know about Cairo?”

  “Do you think Lazarus and Valentinian are the only ones who have been through all this bad business before?” The Hierophant returned to his seat while smoothing the fabric of his suit. “‘I do not know everything, but I am aware of much,’ as a great devil once said; and I am aware Cassandra will not be resurrected in the way you hope. But I can give you Cassandra.”

  “You can give me a lie.”

  “A lie becomes the truth if told enough. Cassandra’s love for you was, in the first place, a lie that became the truth. Why would it be different were it to happen again, this way?”

  Somehow, the question staggered her more than any he’d posited. The simpering doppelgänger gazed through tear-matted eyelashes, lower lip trembling, as the stalwart General nonetheless insisted, “She’s not real.”

  At her Father’s smile, the General bore her teeth to realize she’d slipped by calling the thing “she.” As if it were a person! It even responded. Brightened around the eyes. Dominia shuddered and folded her arms, more eerily afloat than ever in her life. Every word she spoke seemed more futile than the last. Horribly, sooner or later, she would have to acknowledge this thing in a way not dismissive.

  But then—praise God, or damn Him—they were interrupted by a knock. The General held her breath.

  II

  The Magician and the General

  “Entrez,” called the Hierophant, his tone reminiscent of teatime conversation. (Though it did always seem such with him, didn’t it?) When the broad oak door through which she’d entered swung wide, Dominia exhaled. Relief mingled with anxiety in the way it had when, in too deep at a party as a too-young girl turning toward substances and trying to pretend she wasn’t a Holy Family member, she had urgently called for a driver. Instead, her Father had knocked at the party’s door. Though she was all of fourteen and much, much too high, and he’d found it all ill-advised, he had arrived to save her—and embarrass her. Now, salvation and embarrassment arose to find the doorway filled not by her Father but the lithe frame of Valentinian, who leaned with his elbow propped against the jamb.

  “Leave her alone.” The General studied her Father’s reaction to the saint’s impudent tone and found His Holiness illegible as ever. “We’ve got a long way to go. She doesn’t need you distracting her.”

  “I’m connecting with my daughter the only way I can! Every time I see her in real life, she runs away.” A merry twinkle lit the Hierophant’s eyes as he picked up his decanter. “May I pour you a drink?”

  “No, thanks.” Valentinian strolled over the threshold, hands in his pockets and eyes sliding around the room until he noticed Dominia’s empty glass. With his scoff of annoyance, bold eyebrows lifted high and his hands flew once more into sight. “Don’t tell me you drank his wine. Fairyland rules! Do they mean nothing to you?”

  She was assailed by a thousand myths, fables, and legends about stupid people eating stupid things and facing stupid consequences. Oh, no. “I don’t have to stay here forever now, do I?”

  “What? No—I don’t mean that level of fairyland rules. I just mean, don’t eat or drink things you’re given here unless we clear it. For one thing, when you’re drinking his wine, you’re reinforcing his reality and his power in this place even more than I could. This is new to you. You’ve got an impressionable mind at this phase; he could convince you of anything, no matter how levelheaded you usually are. And when you’re drinking his wine, you’re…connecting with him. Accepting him into you. You’re drinking his thoughts, after all.”

  Dominia wasn’t sure of the concrete harm, aside from the abstract sense of violation, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to learn. It was bad enough knowing his blood flowed through her veins. His influence was inseparable from her present self, even if that self felt so removed from the woman who had been, among other things, architect and tool of genocide. As she edged toward the door, Valentinian extended his hand, and she took it without second thought. A childish impulse, she considered after. Perhaps he was right about how impressionable she was in this place, this early in her exposure. Perhaps it was his perception of that same trait that made him say, with a nod toward the melancholic replica of Cassandra, “You didn’t touch it, did you?”

  “Only to slap its ‘gift’ out of its hands,” she admitted. The mage nodded.

  “Good. The surest way to strengthen a thoughtform is by touch.”

  Though he began to lead her away, Valentinian stopped short when Dominia refused to move. “What would happen,” she asked in the absent way of forced innocence, “if it did manifest in reality?”

  “We’d lose,” he said with a cold glance at the Hierophant. “If it manifested, Cassandra would have no hope of coming back—you would be willing to settle.” Her lip twitched in an untenable defense that went unspoken; he continued in a gentler tone, “But that won’t happen. This is the time we win.”

  “I love your optimism,” said the Hierophant, black eyes curled with nasty levity. “Every time.”

  “Cute.” The magician half laughed in his own nasty way, showing his teeth, then let the mirth drop when his expression was visible only to Dominia. “If it weren’t for this place, somebody would have murdered him long ago. And I’m not talking about me; there’d be a line.”

  Too true. No wonder no bullet hit him, and why his speed was in excess of even martyr dexterity. Now she understood how it was he and Lazarus and Tobias had flickered in and out of existence like hallucinations. Much as this place accounted for the legend of Lazarus—that those martyrs who partook of his blood would never again need to eat human flesh and would, in exchange, never burn in the sun—so, too, did it explain her Father. Many traits, however, remained unaccounted for, and Dominia could not wrap her head around the mechanics of reality’s oscillations. The idea of someone like Valentinian or the Hierophant moving between high amplitudes, rather than dwelling within them…

  “I hope you will visit me again, Dominia.” Her Father smiled such that perhaps he had his own form of telepathy here. Mere paranoia. “We still have much to discuss. Thank you for picking her up, Valentinian.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” The magician was now successful in his efforts to shepherd her through the threshold; she took but a quick glance at the duplicate as the door shut, and her friend told the Hierophant, “See you tomorrow.”

  Valentinian did not look back, but Dominia was hung up on the Hierophant’s phrasing. Like divorced parents, exchanging a daughter.

  “You knew I’d go to him?”

  The magician released her hand. “I had to sleep sometime, and Lazarus has been up for days… He’s more bothered than I am—that you go to see the Hierophant while we’re here—but, hell, I visit him all the time, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Look around. Who else is there to talk to? I mean, sure, there are—people, some places, depending where you
look. But nobody on my level. I don’t have a choice. If I want to have a conversation with somebody without constantly explaining myself, my options are limited. No offense. Anyway, there’s no real damage capable of being done here—not to one another’s bodies—so I swing by to play cards. He’s got a chess set. You have no idea how sick I am of chess.”

  “I can’t imagine.” With every step, the richness of the dark anti-landscape paled into what passed for dawn, and it was not long before those electromagnetic bands of color began to once more twist into relief. “You must be lonely. How long have you spent here, stuck as a dog on Earth with only Lazarus and thoughtforms in this place to keep you company?”

  “Only about two thousand reality years,” he said with cheer before adding to a flabbergasted Dominia, “this cycle.”

  “Two thousand years?”

  “Yeah, well, time moves differently here. It’s flown by like four hundred years to me, as much time as I spend hanging out between dimensions. See? Only a bit older than you. If you’re talking the real total, though, I’m not even sure I know. How many times have I watched the world go around? How many times has the game been played in this particular fashion, with these pieces, with this set? I can’t rightly say, but I can tell you this—we will win this time. Because he may be aware of much: but I know everything.”

  For whatever reason, Dominia believed that. She was willing to believe it, at any rate. Whether it was truth, she wasn’t sure, but she was desperate to think that the magician who was also a dog had answers. That was why she was glad when he stopped and turned to speak seriously to her. The black sun, on the verge of creating the peaked horizon by breaking it, paused with them.

  “He’s a deceiver, Dominia. He’s easy to like, and the things he does are superficially good, and it’s a fact he wants you to know the truth. But he wants you to know the truth in a way that perverts it, and makes it good as a lie.”

  From the corner of her eye, Dominia noticed two things with a distinct chill of terror: the path of torches disappeared behind them, one at a time, two back from the one beneath which they stood; and the doppelgänger, having stalked them, was now still as one of those torches. It stood in the darkness, from which it observed in eerie silence through owlish eyes that had grown. As if the thing had learned how to hold its expression to emulate its forebear but naively exaggerated certain features to make itself more attractive. The effect failed spectacularly, into total uncanny horror. Valentinian gazed also at the silent creature, whose violet dress and long black hair—not Cassandra’s at all, bearing so slim resemblance it enraged the eye—hung motionless. Dominia realized only when the magus spoke that the thing drew no breath.

  “No matter how well you tell a lie,” said the magician, “it can never be the truth.”

  “I know.” Miserable, she turned from that ugly thing founded on beautiful memory.

  Valentinian clapped the General upon the shoulder, then resumed his brisk pace to their camp. The sun, to their right, resumed rising. “You know better than anybody, kid. The man can spin the truth the way athletes spin their balls.”

  “Then why are you letting me see him?”

  “Complicated answer; save my pride by boiling it down to, ‘I can’t stop you.’” At her silence, he noted her expression of skepticism and touched his chest. “Look, kiddo, I’m not the miracle person. I mean—I am in the end, but somebody else is in charge of making big, profound, Earth-moving miracles manifest in reality.”

  “Is that Lazarus?” asked Dominia. Valentinian did not answer.

  “What I’m trying to say is, short of producing a miracle of some kind, I can’t stop you from going to him during the night. That’s just the way it is. Fish gotta swim; birds gotta fly; your Father’s gotta be a huge pain in my ass. Excuse me for a second.”

  He ignored her to pat around the pockets of his waistcoat. As if he needed to find things, rather than manifest them like a walking Higgs boson! After a few pats, he withdrew a pack of cigarettes that couldn’t have fit into his waistcoat without disrupting its silhouette. Yet, as he stuck one in his mouth and put the rest away, no sign of a box-shaped outline remained visible against the man’s ribs. He didn’t bother to hide that he lit it with an electrical spark cresting between his fingers, rather than his lighter.

  “Smoking’s bad, kids,” said the fictional martyr while lifting his head. The puff of smoke he exhaled formed a bisected circle of nonentry. “But Lazarus has his stones, and I’m not exactly going to get imaginary cancer in my astral body. Not that somebody couldn’t if they believed they could.” He regarded the cigarette before resuming it with a shrug. “Anyway, it sticks in your dad’s craw he can’t reason me into quitting, so you’ll have to pardon my smoke.”

  “How do you know each other, exactly?”

  “He’s the asshole who’s got me stuck as a dog, among other things. I mean, really ‘other’ things. Basil is just one of many. This one incarnation many centuries ago, I somehow got hooked into an aquarium of sea monkeys.” The magician shuddered. “That family’s cat had it in for us. Stuff like that’s why I spend so much time here until you show up.”

  “But how is it you know each other?” The General tried to study his face, but it was difficult with the both of them moving and the black sun warping all it revealed. This space seemed different from where they’d been yesterday; distant mountains were replaced by the elevated planes of mesas, and a vast gorge now split the distant world, east (if she correctly read the fields) of where far-off Lazarus smote the night’s flames. There was resemblance between the men, between Lazarus and Valentinian, as though they were of the same stock; but it was not so strong a resemblance as, say, between the Hierophant and Cicero. If anything, such resemblance elevated to a kind of twinship on seeing her Father with so young and spry a form. Valentinian and Lazarus shared features: shapes echoed in noses and eyes and the magician’s high-cut cheekbones, the likes of which were hidden in Lazarus by agéd beard and tangled old-man eyebrows. Yet, overall differences of stock and build—the broad old mystic looked as if he had a background of pit fighting and had nothing of the lean, middle-aged magician’s wiry frame—indicated they were not so closely related as the Hierophant and his Eternal Son. “Who are you?”

  With a coy smile, the man answered, “I’m nobody.”

  Dominia tried to shake off what seemed not so much a lie as a reference to the Odyssey: as though he teased her with knowledge of the books she had studied. Her face burning to wonder if this was how it felt to be schizophrenic, the General cleared her throat.

  “Why won’t you tell me anything?”

  His look grew somewhat stern. “Because if I tell you the truth about anything, you won’t believe me. You’ll decide I’m lying, you’ll go into the future with unnecessary predispositions, or you’ll try to test me.”

  “More than I’m testing your patience?” she asked, brow arched.

  The magician, who had been gesturing with his cigarette, coughed himself into a laughing smirk. “All right, wise guy. Let’s hurry up. The old man looks impatient.”

  So he did: Lazarus stood in the distance, hands on his hips. As they approached, Dominia made out the tapping of his foot—and the clouds of dust puffing around his foot, as if some dirt, some real ground, had developed overnight.

  “Well,” the old man barked when they were within range, “did she touch it?”

  “Not tonight,” answered the magician. The mystic nodded as the General tried to avoid distraction from her initial question—one she cemented in the depths of her mind so as to never forget: Who was Valentinian?

  “Then we still have a chance, though it’s going to follow us.” The thing at which she had deliberately not looked was now quite a distance away, perhaps as distant from them as Lazarus was when first she’d noticed his figure; yet, because she knew Cassandra’s features so well, she saw every false freckle upon the doppelgänger’s sallow cheek. With a sigh of disgust for the thing, the mystic re
ached into his pocket for his rocks. “Let’s move this train along, folks.” The day’s first pebble pinged along the growing gorge. “Still thirty-three more real days to pass, and a lot of ground to cover.”

  “But, wait.” The men ignored her, walking on, which blistered her entire being. “Hey! If you know me so well, you know I hate being ignored.”

  “We’ve never tried ignoring you before,” admitted Valentinian.

  “Military ego,” explained the mystic without looking back. That military ego flared in real indignation while she made no move to march. They kept walking; like a pair of bubbles splitting off, the greater compass shared by the men parted from that of the General and left her with not only a poorer sense of confidence but the nauseating discovery her compass pointed back in the direction of her Father’s study. In time, she would find his study always manifested north of her location: in those irritating seconds of scorn at the hands of her so-called comrades, however, the glowing tori that swept in his direction provided a suggestion, rather than an objective marker of magnetic (or other) poles.

  “Have I ever refused to go on before?”

  With a sigh of irritation, Valentinian paused to do her the decency of looking at her. “Once or twice. Under similar conditions.”

  “What conditions are those?”

  “Our refusal to tell you anything. But if I tell you anything now, like I keep saying—”

  “Dominia.” Lazarus, who had also stopped, drew her hostile attention and watched it melt away, for the old man had a kind of infinite patience about his face and being. It was difficult here to maintain indignation before him; or perhaps being in this place clarified the pointlessness of indignation. “This same free will that lets you stand in place and stop all three of us is the same free will that makes you such a valuable treasure. You like to think on a decision before you make it, and make it with care. I understand it’s frustrating to know so little. We’ve already told you almost everything; we’ll keep telling you. But all you have to know is that you are going to save the world, and kill your Father.”