Paul Quintana reflected on the recent past, and not fondly. It was a change from dwelling on the nightmare of his distant past: the smell of his mother, her bright eyes when he flipped the lamp on, the sound of her startled cry, the heat in her skin from the pleasure she thought her boyfriend Freddy had given her—that whole sequence of events was a hateful ambrosia Paul drank daily. But today he couldn’t taste it; things had been reconfigured and he couldn’t decide if that was good or not.
He thought perhaps it wasn’t black and white. Or orange.
The rectory sentinels had draped him over a granite coffin. Paul wagered it belonged to some old witch who wrote a Tome or two in her day. The catacombs beneath Mojave chapel had the distinction of housing thousands of Church members, all in hand-sculpted tombs. The brisk winds from lower corridors blew through them in wild trajectories, sounding like wraiths maiming each other.
Paul’s eyes flicked to turning, bleeding shapes that wound around helixes of darkness. The smell of liquefying meat, a death-reminder smell, hovered around him. If the power of the marrow seeds did not wear thin soon, his heart would not last against the intensity.
You know why we’re here? sang a dissident chorus. Don’t you?
The black feast.
“Hello?” he cried into empty space.
The song crept back into his ears: Everyone knows why we’re here. Thanksgiving to the black feast.
A fetid thing leaned over him now and extended what looked like a set of dangling keys. As they poked through the darkness, closer to the soft surface of his eyes, he distinguished bladed fingernails atop dark orange fingers. Paul turned away. His jaw chilled against the stone coffin. The claw-tips grazed his scalp and down his neck before lifting. Instinctively, he pulled his knees up to his chest and clutched them there.
Thanksgiving to the black feast.
The food. The salt of old times.
Thanksgiving to the bleeding feast.
He tried to disregard the chorus. In the morning he would be alive and well, maybe resting among cadavers, but still breathing air and living and needing. This torment was no longer for the mother he’d fooled in the soft, wet darkness. This torment was a purer kind. He didn’t have to pretend he was someone else with the Priestess of Morning. She could change him. He knew she could.
Paul’s mind ripped him backwards, back to the meeting with the Archbishop. Both Archbishops…
Raymond Traven’s dead lips were syncing with a man’s from the Old Domain.
“We have a new Bishop, brother,” the Archbishop of Midnight said into the cone.
The Archbishop from the other world gasped with delight. “Another Bishop, already brother? Slippery business, so, so slippery there. I smell red.”
“His name is Paul Quintana.”
Raymond’s lips bubbled with each syllable and his dead eyes moved to Paul. “Welcome Bishop. The Church of Morning recognizes you.” The eyes went back to Sandeus Pager. “Have you dispersed the seeds amongst any others?”
Sandeus took a moment and then said, “The other contingencies haven’t any members worthy of accepting their wisdom, brother.”
Raymond’s eyes went gray. A string of bloody snot coursed from his nose and swung into the crook of his mouth. “You must prepare, brother. Chaplain Cloth is already on his way.”
Sandeus’s posture changed. “But... it’s not yet the 31st.”
“The world has changed. The seasons have little power to hold him any longer. The gateway is ready to burst wide and the pillars are at ready. Give thanksgiving to the blood! Drink it from the brain carafe. Drink and drink, brother. The Tomes are read as such. This is our time. The Time of Opening. The Time of Arrival. The time of Tomes with wet script. Thanksgiving to it all.”
Paul shot up as the memory left him. The snorts and grizzly chuckles slid down his mind in oily black clots.
A door opened then and a shimmering red glow of torchlight wiggled into the grooves of the distant coffins, illuminating the runes scrolled into stone. Paul’s eyelashes fluttered. The symbols began to make sense, not that he ever learned their complexities, but there were thousands of other little brains growing in his lungs, and they understood the runes—they understood much about the Churches of Midnight and Morning—and the Church Eternal, the house of Chaplain Cloth.
The marrow seeds grew inside his lungs (slippery black blossoms sprung forth among others boiling orange in color). Paul became sidetracked with the horrible growth, which amplified in a frenzy. He remembered a door in the catacomb opening. Footsteps echoed off the cavernous planes. He thrashed like a snared rabbit and his bladder quivered uneasily.
Black feast: let us taste the night.
Orange feast: let us taste the dawn.
Everlasting: let us taste it all!
A real voice floated into him and he clenched the sides of the coffin. He wasn’t bound, and though he had full knowledge of this, his other brains would not allow him to slip off the side, gain his feet and run like hell. He was staying. The marrow blossoms said to remain and he would.
Paul, we’ll set your soul out to rot and slip apart. Paul, when it’s gone she will be the only thing.
“Who are you?” The bustling wind through the tomb stopped. Silence drove a spike of doubt through him. Was the damage from the seeds permanent? Would this never end? “This is bullshit! Who are you?”
A hand caught his sweaty, cold, ruined suit. Snaps of light danced across his vision. His head must have struck the stone.
“You know who I am.”
“Cole?” Paul sighed with relief. The ugly visage bobbed above him.
“How are things, Paul?”
Two thick fingers pressed down on Paul’s lips before he could yell something caustic. After a moment Cole slid his fingers off and leaned against an adjacent coffin.
“They killed Traven,” said Paul.
“Pricks, I’ll have someone call Val.” Cole sniffed, as though idle conversation had already worn on him.
“What the hell are those seeds?”
“The blossoms are now a part of you, like a thousand new organs. You’ve been blessed.”
“How long do they last?” Paul’s muscles were still confused by general numbness and the retardation of nerve impulses. “Do the blossoms make us... like the Nomads?”
The Bishop scratched his scarred jaw. “The Nomads have the blood of the Old Domain in their veins. Marrow seeds open doors for us the Nomads already had open at birth. Theirs is a power wasted and unappreciated—the Nomads cannot do what we do, nor can we possess their ability. We are converse to them. Only the Chaplain has full control of the Old Domain’s power. I thought you read the Tomes of Eternal Harvest, Quintana.”
“Don’t chastise me! I’ve got voices singing in my mind!”
Cole’s eyes ignited. It startled Paul because there was no light to make them well up with gold, and they managed not only to conjure the sparkling hue, but to hold it. “The children have already called to you?”
“Who?”
“You have a natural connection. This is better than I could have hoped for.” Cole tasted something in the air and savored it for several moments. The flavor almost put him into a trance. “Have you any idea what happens every 31st?”
“The Heralding, the Hunt and the Harvest.”
“Yes, you know the simple version, the child’s story. You know that Chaplain Cloth comes to visit once a year with his children, to hunt and kill someone special, but you have no clue of the significance of the act itself. Every time the Nomads fail to protect the Heart, like last year, things move more quickly—that gateway to the Old Domain may be large enough now to open permanently. Finding this year’s Heart is essential to our future. And I’m not just talking about the Church of Midnight. I’m talking about you and me, Paul. Our futures. So you need to listen.”
“Whatever you say, Bishop.”
Paul’s throat constricted under Cole’s forearm and everything lapsed into pain and suffocation. “I have no time for flippancy.”
Paul gulped for air.
“Will you backtalk to the future Archbishop of Midnight. Will you?”
He couldn’t shake his head but Paul did so with his eyes. Cole released and he gagged as his Adam’s Apple righted itself.
“Just keep listening to the children’s call and we will be fine at the Heralding. Take this obligation seriously and you’ll get your Priestess.”
Paul’s voice was burning and hoarse. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Cole drifted back and the darkness ate his hulking form. “After the Heralding, everything will make sense. Just keep listening to Cloth’s children.”
Paul waited in the dark, with the cold and with the ghosts, hoped for morning. Everything drained from his old life and filled into his new life. When things had finally been righted he opened himself up again. Listened for the call.