The Apocalypse Script (26 page)

Then a toilet flushed, and Ben
awoke to see Lilian stumbling through the blackness toward the
bed.

Part 4 - September
24th

The only saving grace of the
present is that it’s too damned stupid to question the past very
closely.

H.P. Lovecraft,
Pickman’s Model

Hours later, Fiela slid silently
from the bed and retrieved a bag containing her running clothes and
shoes. The culmination of five millennia of breeding
notwithstanding, Fiela recognized that she could not remain in top
form if her only activities at Steepleguard we eating, making love,
and reading poetry. She did not intend to become a pudgy, indulged
serretu, unable to protect Ben and Lilitu. Her uncle had been very
clear that protecting them was her mission, which was why he had
arranged for her to be a member of the marriage
contract.

Not that the girl was unhappy with
her present situation - far from it. She had tired of the war, just
as she had told her new husband. She had come to understand
that
surviving
was not the same thing as
living.
The Peth often felt guilty
about having made the distinction because it went against
everything she had been taught by her superiors, which was that her
life meant nothing if she was not offering it for the protection of
the her kingdom. To live meant to do one’s duty. A member of the
Peth-Allati should expect and desire nothing more.

She moved silent down the stairs.

Yet, she did. In her heart she
desired
much
more. She desired to love, and be loved, and to read poetry,
and maybe to write it, someday. This was plainly scandalous and she
would have never dared to voice her dreams to anyone, at least not
until she entered the life of the former Ardoon. She had told him
because he did not know that such desires were wrong for a Peth and
so would not judge her.

She walked to the main entrance.
To the right of the giant doors were four metallic knobs marked
“EXT. LIGHTS” that would activate the two-dozen electric lampposts
the circled Steepleguard’s giant courtyard. She ignored them and
went outside. The darkness beyond was absolute. There was no moon
and the clouds blocked the stars like a canopy over the earth.
Steepleguard was so utterly remote that even the light pollution of
Denver could not reach it.

It was, to Fiela, magnificent.

The Peth-Allati, like any military
organization, was divided into branches, and the Peth of those
branches were specially bred and trained for specific functions.
Typically, Peth begot Peth, so that the physical attributes and
innate skills of one generation could be improved upon in the next
through the Nisirtu’s selective breeding program. Fiela was a
thirty-second generation
Nocte
Sicarius
, a Night Assassin, bred and
trained to fight in almost absolute darkness without reliance on
the technological gadgets the Ardoon were forced to use, such as
night vision equipment.

She closed the door behind her and
commenced a slow trot toward the grass courtyard. The size of a
polo field, with a large granite fountain and benches at its
center, the courtyard was separated from the main building by the
wide cobblestone drive that led to the hotel’s parking lot.
Waist-high hedges surrounded it, with openings for pedestrians
every ten feet or so. The lampposts were interspersed around the
hedged perimeter at regular intervals, though they were invisible
now. Surrounding the hedges was the dirt path she intended to use
as a track.

The Peth jogged toward it, or
rather, to where she knew it was. One of the first things a Nocte
Sicarius was taught was to always -
always
- count their paces and to
mentally record all their turns and orientations. For the first few
years of Fiela’s life she had found this terrifically difficult and
the punishments for not doing so terrifically painful. But in time,
her subconscious took over the task, efficiently compiling its
record of distances and orientations as her conscious was freed to
do other things.

Consequently, the Peth was able to
navigate areas she was passingly familiar with in complete darkness
just as others could navigate from their kitchen to the bedroom in
middle of the night based solely on their memory of their house’s
layout. She had spent her childhood at Steepleguard and so had a
solid mental map of the entire estate. That alone was sufficient to
allow her to navigate the property without the benefit of vision,
provided there were no unexpected obstacles.

Had there been stars or a sliver
of a moon, she would have used her eyes, which were so finely tuned
that she could differentiate between a hundred shades of black. The
girl’s ancestors had been paired by the Nisirtu in part due to the
unusually low levels of melanin pigment in their choroids - the
middle, vascular coatings of their eyes. This meant that instead of
reflecting light, the eyes of a Nocte Sicarius, like those of
nocturnal animals, absorbed and used it.

This effect was only achieved by
introducing albinism into the gene pool and, while most of the side
effects had been mitigated, she was still highly sensitive to
bright light and so wore sunglasses constantly when outdoors.
Another side effect was that her hair, when not dyed, was as white
as snow. White hair wasn’t exactly a perk for a night assassin, so
she had colored it since she had hit the streets a decade prior.
Someday soon she would have to tell Ben this, but for now she was
hiding the dye, unsure what he would think of her in her natural
state. Her irises, at least, were violet, so she did not have to
wear the colored contacts that some of her white-eyed peers used
when circulating amongst the Ardoon.

Fiela made a turn and jogged faster, her conscious
mind free to roam the events of the past few days as her
subconscious busied itself with navigating her around the dirt
path.

She pondered Ben and her mission.
She held most slaves in contempt for their ignorance and weakness
yet had found her new husband to be the first man, Ardoon or
Nisirtu, that she had ever truly desired. He was handsome in that
unique, random manner that only nature allowed, whereas the
polished good looks of Nisirtu men, though irresistible to Ardoon
women, were too boilerplate and predictable for her.

Too, he knew the terrors, the
shadows that haunted the dreams of warriors who had the audacity to
survive battle as their comrades fell around them. Few things
intimidated the Peth, but the terrors did more than that. They
paralyzed her, stopped her from breathing, ripped apart the flesh
of her friends, and chased her until she woke screaming covered in
cold, humiliating sweats.

The Ardoon fighting overseas were
being treated for the same affliction she suffered from, and there
was no way to breed away demons of the mind, at least not that she
knew of. She had contemplated appropriating some Ardoon medication,
having been told they could deter the terrors, but did not know
what to take, or in what doses, and she was certainly not going to
consult a physician about such a weakness. Fiela had hoped that Ben
had some of the drugs, but he had already abandoned the treatment,
to her disappointment.

Still, she had known instinctively
that the terrors would not attack if she and Ben united against
them, and so had asked (certainly not
pleaded
, though her memory sometimes
played tricks on her) for the man to hold her while she slept. He
understood her demons, had fought in a far-off war, had seen
terrible things, and had the same doubts as her about his role in a
war that did not seem winnable. As they lay together that first
evening, his arm around her, and the demons scuttled away, she knew
she would love him.

True, he had been far easier on
her than she would have liked, as a Peth, but he had also shown
indications of a desirable assertiveness. She smiled remembering
how he had chastised her for correcting Lilitu’s slave driver and
how he had not backed down when she’d confronted him. He had even
threatened not to allow her any fetches, which was absurd,
but
promising.

Fiela assured herself that once
her husband better understood and grew more confident in his new
role in life, he would truly take command of her, which she wanted
very much because the one thing she knew how to do better than
anyone, to include her sister, was
obey.
She was Peth - to obey and
fight was her life. She would become his confidant, his lieutenant,
and his protector. She might even become a
Bad Christian
, though she was
unclear what that entailed. It sounded far easier than being
a
Good Christian,
though that denomination was equally mysterious to
her.

The young woman increased her
speed and began racing through the void at a pace that made unknown
obstacles, like fallen branches or cars or trashcans, a problem.
Her mental map was based on an accurate record of her environment
as it
had been
and could not account for changes that had occurred since.
Her night vision would normally supplement her internal navigation
system but the darkness was so absolute this morning that even hers
was useless.

She began to systematically pull
air in through her teeth and over tongue to make almost
imperceptible clicking sounds, her ears trained to detect the
subsequent echo, however slight. The Ardoon were only now beginning
to understand the benefits of human echolocation. The Peth-Allati
had perfected it centuries ago.

Fiela wondered if Lilitu loved her
selected husband. Probably not, she decided. Her sister had no time
for emotional entanglements, spending almost every minute of her
waking days plotting how she would gain the throne she so
desperately sought. She knew that Lilitu would not be content
merely waiting for the Seven to die off, as she proclaimed was her
plan. Nisirtu were not the kind to go quietly into the night, so
Fiela speculated that the princess’s true plan was to take the war
to them once the Ardoon had been dealt with.

Fiela did not think Ben would have
consented to bear Lilitu’s father’s ring if he knew of the woman’s
cruelties. When she was slighted, or far worse, when her
father
was slighted,
Lilitu would employ her secret henchmen to seek out and brutalize
the offenders in ways that only Moros would deem justifiable.
Worse, Lilitu was old school. She punished not only the offending
parties but also the innocents around them merely for their
association.

The exiled princess had been
trained well by her clandestine supporters and was a master of
disassociation. No one had ever managed to connect her to any of
the ghastly fates that befell her detractors. The woman’s ability
to reach out from the shadows and her cruelty when she did so had
served her well. She was loathed, yes, but she was also feared, so
while many Nisirtu scorned Lilitu in private, none save the royal
families or their Peth lords would ever dare speak against her in
public.

The Peth sprinted for another hour
before finally going to the middle of the courtyard for
calisthenics. By the time she was done, the sky over the eastern
mountains was pink. She lay down on the ground and stared at the
sky, the fresh morning air cooling her skin, and allowed herself to
drift off into sleep. There she might have lain indefinitely if not
for the sound of the approaching engines.

Ben awoke with a start and for a
moment was unsure where he was. A pinkish light streamed through
the room’s white curtains. Lilian lay next to him with an arm
wrapped around his stomach but Fiela was gone. Carefully removing
Lilian’s arm, he rose and put on his pants. He walked to the
window, moved the curtain aside, and saw an approaching semitrailer
straining to climb the steep incline that marked the final approach
to the hotel. Behind it were four other trucks.

The door to the bedroom flew open,
startling Ben. Fiela rushed in wearing a sweaty black tee shirt and
shorts. “Trucks!” she exclaimed excitedly, as if she’d never seen
such vehicles before.

“
Yeah, I saw them. You’re up
already?”

“
Already?” asked the girl.
“Husband, the sun is already rising.”

Only then did he see that she had
towed her uncle to the room by the hand. The unkempt, disoriented
man had clearly been dragged from his bed.

Looking a little out of breath, he
said, “My apologies for the interruption, nephew. Fiela insisted I
come and explain. Some trucks are here carrying surprises for my
two former charges. I thought it would be helpful if I brought some
tailors, jewelers, and other vendors here so that they could
prepare for the reception.”

“
The trucks drove here from
Denver?”

“
No, the trucks are from Los
Angeles. Lilian has particular tastes.”

Los Angeles,
Ben marveled. That must have been arranged days ago, or
weeks. Yet again he felt like a cog in an invisible machine.
Checking the clock next to the bed, he said, “Maybe it’s time I got
up, anyway.”

“
Do as you like,” said the scribe.
“I’m returning to my room, if my niece will allow it. I will tell
the fetches to prepare breakfast.”