This is what I want you to understand, as you already should. You died in my way, after all — a valid sacrifice, whether ordained or not. And ignorance is no excuse.
Think of it, now, she had ordered him, the black rainbow snapping around her like storm-clouds across a nervish, lowering sky. When the rope tightened around your neck. That moment of flowering, when your skull cracked open, the seed inside you began to bloom. . . .
Her words in his ears, ringing. Followed closely, as dream gave way to memory, by God Almighty’s:
. . . and they four had one likeness: and their appearance . . . was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. . . .
As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful. And their rings were full of eyes . . . and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. . . .
The verses were so familiar through long study — and equally long hours spent quoting them out loud, to prove one point or another — that he could no longer recall if he’d screamed them, moaned them, whispered them, in his hour of ultimate need. Only that they’d been on his lips when the rope finally snapped taut and the trap beneath him opened, plummeting him feet-first into night —
The drop wasn’t long enough: inexperience on his killers’ part, or maybe a sublimated urge to punish him further. So h
e slammed up hard against gravity itself, every inch of him instantly bruised, drowning in air. His heart stuttered, his own body’s weight a millstone, spirits violently pressing upwards ’til they forced their way to his head. Where he saw a glaring light which seemed to vomit from his eyes with a flash so bright, so deep, it scarred the entire universe —
— and then, exactly as sudden, he’d lost all sense of pain. A glacial calm descended.
Rook looked up, saw planks and dust, the gallows’ underside. A square of blue sky through the trap. His former brothers on the field of war looking down, some faces frowning, some blank. Some even, in a bitter way, amused.
Bastards, he thought. You know not the day, nor the hour. . . .
Then over further, to where Chess Pargeter still fought with his captors, next in line for the noose. Which somehow rubbed Rook rawer than the sight of his own death approaching — the idea of Chess pissing himself at the end of some rope, all that energy gone, without a final chance to redeem itself.
Chess, who was burning up with fever ever since he took that ball in the shoulder — probably turning gangrenous, not that that’d matter, in a minute or so. Chess, who snarled, and spat: “You motherless bitches! The Rev’s worth a hundred of you, you slugs! He’s worth ten thousand!”
“Goddamn queerboy camp-follower sure got a mouth on him, dirty as one of Hooker’s gals,” the soldier with Chess’s right arm pinned back told his partner, who had Chess in a headlock. To which the other soldier just grinned, and tightened up his grip.
“He didn’t even do it, either!” Chess screamed, twisting and kicking. “I was the one killed the Lieut, you morons! Good Christ, no wonder we lost the Goddamn war!”
Turned out there really was a bone in the throat, just as Chess had always claimed. Rook felt it go, and felt all the darkness inside him snap shut again, percolating, a stoppered steam-kettle. Heard his thunderous preach-voice shrink and grind, as everything went red.
And thought — prayed, though he no longer quite knew who to — Oh, give me strength. Strength enough. Give me . . .
But nothing answered save himself, or maybe the wind. And then, at last —
— her.
Save him, little king. As you know you can.
Kicking, turning. No voice now to scream.
And the blue sky, shrinking. The clouds, rushing in. Fat grey drops of rain falling, to slick his fevered face. As she spoke on, that impossible voice, only underlined by the thin, gnawing whine issuing from his own throat, endless and terrible and raw.
Saying, gently: Save him, save them. Punish your enemies, reward your friends. Do as your God does. Become as your God is.
Save yourself.
No breath left to speak with, not even to beg. Yet the words flew up anyhow, spilled from his mouth and swam in front of his eyes like sparks from cinder, molten-silver hot, and burned whatever they touched, until the whole world howled out in unison —
Therefore saith the Lord GOD. Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations.
And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations.
Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers. And I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.
The funnel, that moving finger, swept in on a slather of whipped dust, a froth of stones and swirling brick-bats. To either side, the sky remained clear — grey-blue with a messy touch of pink to it, frostbit flesh turned inside-out. But inside the twister was only rain and darkness, so cold it tore skin wherever it touched. And yet the wavering path of its eye swept over Rook’s fellow prisoners entirely, while pivoting to tweeze the rest of Captain Coulson’s company out of Heaven’s reach. They scatter-shot in all directions, spread so far that the only sign that the camp had ever been inhabited was a single torn grey sleeve full of shattered bone and red muck poking up through the debris, its buttons still a-glint, intact.
Then the rope finally snapped, and Rook dropped to his hands and knees as the scaffold broke apart around him, watching through blood-dimmed eyes as the pieces flew up and away, into the whirling sky. Blood and spirits forced themselves into their former channels, a flash flood through a needle’s eye, nerves pin-pricking so intolerably he spent a breathless moment cursing himself, paralyzed with pain — wishing himself hanged again, a thousand times over, for the unforgivable crime of cutting himself down too soon.