I pulled the door open.
"Ann?" I said.
And fell into darkness.
28
Terra Cognita
I was falling. Falling perpetually, no wind whipping past my flesh, no sound whistling in my ears. I was suspended in a dark place, weightless.
Not quite dark, though.
A candle guttered on the altar. I smelled of sweat and other personal foulnesses. Cramped muscles spasmed into knots of aching strain at the slightest attempt to move. I was wet and soiled and worse. My tongue was a swollen puffer fish in my mouth.
"Ann," I barely croaked.
No reply.
Near the candle, a granule of incense popped and flared for an instant. It was the only sound aside from my breathing. I tried to flex my arms.
The Witch's Cradle still held me fast, in addition to the muscle tension from being in the same position for God only knew how long.
It struck me that God was no longer in a position to know anything.
I shuddered. Where was Ann? Where was Bridget? I glanced over to where Isadora had been tied into the Cradle.
The red and white matrix of yarn was intact. Isadora was gone.
Something floated near me. Ann's athame. Slowly I worked at snaking my fingers free of the twine prison. It seemed as if hours passed before they would even bend. The various drugs I'd taken still seemed to be residually active-everything I did appeared magnified in importance.
My right hand worked through the strings to stroke the blade toward its grasp. It floated lazily closer until I could seize it.
I sawed at the yarn that enclosed my arm, then slashed across. The twang of splitting line resounded like harp music. I bent forward with pained care to cut my legs free.
I floated within the remains of the sundered Cradle, massaging stiff muscles, flexing neglected tendons.
My neck ached from the injections. My head swam in zero-G disorientation. I yanked off the Theta Wave Amplifier helmet.
Canfield.
"Canfield!" I shouted hoarsely. That hurt. Using the Witch's Cradle as a ladder, I dragged myself to the airlock and peered through the observation port.
Canfield floated inside, unmoving.
I punched at the controls to cycle the outer hatch shut, pressurized the lock, and unsealed the inner hatch.
I fumbled for the cargo bay lights, switching them on. He looked to be in worse shape than I was. Of course, I hadn't looked in a mirror yet.
I undid his helmet. The stench was nearly as bad as the Land of Never-Change. He looked up with sunken eyes set in an unshaven, worn face.
"Ammo…" he whispered. "Water nozzle."
I dragged him to where he pointed. We both took careful sips from the spigot.
"Where are they?" I asked as soon as my tongue had sponged up enough to make speech possible.
"You tell me," he muttered. "Someone sabotaged the outside controls. Same for the cockpit airlock. I've been out there for over a week. The supplies that feed through the lifeline ran out on the fourth day."
I added it all together and snorted. "Happy New Year," I said, glancing at the hatch to the cockpit. It had been bent inward as if by an explosion and now hung open, the metal twisted and scarred.
I pulled my way over to the altar. The one lone candle that still burned had grown a long tail of wax that followed the path of the breeze from the ventilator. I blew it out. The smoke curled along the white wax stalactite for a few seconds, then ceased.
"I want to know where the women are," I said.
"Well, they never left the ship."
I nodded. It was beginning to sink into my clouded brain. "Let's wash up and get set for reentry. We'll be leaving this payload section in orbit."
"Fine by me," Canfield said. "But what happened to the women?"
"Maybe they never were," I said, and it tasted like stale brine.
The two of us jury-rigged a hatch for the cockpit and cleaned up the interior where Zack had been. Scraping the sulfur off of everything that it had melted onto was a tough job. In a day or two, though, Canfield and I jettisoned the magical chamber, leaving it in orbit. We took the tug back to low earth orbit, detached from it, and dropped back planetside like a graceful brick.
We landed at Meadowlark Interplanetary, the L.A. offshore runway. No jets escorted us.
Things had changed.
But not much.
The first place I checked was Trismegistos. The windows and doors to the shop had been boarded up. There was a weathered sign stating that leasing information could be obtained from Bautista Corporation.
I spent the following weeks searching hotels throughout L.A. Auberge had been written off as a total loss. I figured the next Underground would be a little tougher to find.
Yes. I checked Auriga in Frisco. No sign of the kid.
Days passed spent in phone booths, calling Information for the numbers of all the Ann Perrines in the world. None of them matched.
One freezing February night, when a cold rain pounded against the sidewalks, I realized that I would never find her anywhere on earth.
The rain slashed like shrapnel against my face as I stared up at an abandoned church. Jehovah was gone. I had assassinated Him in the mind of every living human being. I hadn't actually pulled the trigger-maybe He would have done it eventually without me.
My trenchcoat was soaked through, but I didn't care. Zacharias had told the truth. I was alive and younger than I had been in years.
And I was alone, facing an eternity without my Goddess.
My feet splashed through the dark waters. On the corner of Sixth and Figueroa stood a tiny figure, huddled within a worn coat. I almost expected it to be Isadora. She turned around to face me. Jet black eyes stared glassily up from tangled raven curls.
"Spare a couple grams, mister?"
I gave her what gold I had in my pockets.
"Thank the Lady," she said clumsily, trotting off toward a grocer-I hoped.
It was useless for me to search. Useless to hope. Whatever purpose the three of them had served, their work was done. I'd never see Bridget or Isadora again. Or Ann. The rain fell colder against me, trickling down my neck.
29
Queen of the Angels
It took me a year to cross paths with Randolph Corbin. He had last been seen in command of the Hughes Cayuse that strafed the Vatican the day the Mome attempted to deliver a bull concerning the True Revealed Word of The Lady. No one listened. They knew better, now.
I found Corbin in a bookstore in Hollywood, thumbing through a copy of Theodore Golding's latest effort, Contra-Paganism-The Case Against Goddess.
"Happy New Year" were his first words.
I smiled. "New Year falls on Hallowmas now, Corbin. Don't you read the papers?"
"Sure I do," he grumbled. "And if you did, you'd know I'm organizing the Los Angeles Coven of Black Isis." He shut Golding's book. "My thesis is that the Goddess has a dark side, too, and what could be more blessed than-"
"Save it, Corbin. I heard your line of argument on Praise The Lady last week."
"Yeah, they're all trying to horn in on the act."
I shrugged. "They'll drop it like last week's fashion when their spells fail to produce mountains of money. Like that new fellow that lasted one day on HRILIU House. Performed a banishing ritual live on the air and vanished without a trace."
Corbin sighed. "How does it feel to save the world from religion, Ammo?"
My smile didn't even make it to my lips. "I didn't save anything. I just changed things. People still ache over shattered hopes and wasted lives and lost loves. People still kill and people still die."
Corbin slid a couple of books back into the shelf. "If you check the recent actuary tables, they seem to be killing less and dying later." He pulled out another book-one of an annoying series of mea culpa books by theologians who have Seen The Light. Anything for a gram.