Nebsuel broke into Sidrus’s house after the execution, being absolutely sure that the monster would have fled. After thoroughly examining the small house, he made himself at home. He found all the booby traps and deactivated all the locks in minutes. Nobody was a match for his cunning instinct and experienced logic. Here, he was waiting for Ishmael, but time was waning. “No more than two days,” he had warned the cyclops. He wanted to be gone and free of the growing oppression here. He looked around the stark interior and felt the loneliness and mania that saturated the walls. He would wait another few hours and then leave alone.
Nebsuel was still amazed at the total success of his plan. He sprang into action the moment he heard the sickening news of Sholeh’s death. He knew Sidrus was the only man capable of such an atrocity. It certainly wasn’t Ishmael, and when news broke that Ishmael was sentenced to death, Nebsuel made his way towards Essenwald. He found a rat hole in the Scyles where he spied on the monks, following them each day to watch their work with the executioner and jailers. He found the loophole quickly and knew that the key to their undoing would be fashioned in speed and brutality, not cunning and finesse. No one would expect a friendless misfit like Ishmael to have a saviour lurking in the cells under the scaffold. It was clear from Ishmael’s trial that everyone despised him, even the women whom he trusted and had been maimed into normality for. When Nebsuel stepped out of the shadow bristling with knives and drugs, none of the slow-witted jailers had a chance.
The most difficult part had not been the slaying and chloroforming of the guards and the executioner, or even peeling off their clothes and forcing the dazed body of one of them into the pale wooden suit of death. It had been trying to raise Ishmael from his torpid lethargy. He sat motionless on a low wooden stool, blood dripping from his face onto the straw that lined the stinking cell.
“Help me, boy,” demanded Nebsuel as he manipulated the dead weight of the unconscious man. Ishmael did nothing. The old man dropped the body and spun round, taking a handful of Ishmael’s jacket and dragging him abruptly to his feet. Staring into the good eye for traces of medication and finding none. The old man was disappointed to see Ishmael’s face so damaged, shocked when he realised that it was self-inflicted. Upset to see his fine handiwork torn out. Especially when he had tried to persuade Ishmael against the operation in the first place. He was a cyclops again. But best not to think about that now. He had come a long way to save his young friend from the woeful miscarriage of justice. He pulled the executioner’s mask up onto his forehead so that Ishmael could see his furious need.
“Wake up,” he bellowed at him and then cuffed him squarely across the mouth. “I need your help, quickly.”
Ishmael fell back into reality and the disbelief of what was happening around him. The executioner’s black costume now wore another head under its leather mask. A face that meant everything to him.
“Take his arm.”
Ishmael bolted into action, the sting of the blow making him forget about his drooling eye. They worked together and closed the wooden suit of execution about the dim naked body of one of the guards. Nebsuel filled the still-unconscious man’s mouth with pieces of torn blanket, to remove any coherent speech. He then clamped the mask into place and they dragged the new victim behind the canvas screen and strapped him into the waiting guillotine. The old man pulled his mask down and stepped from behind the screen into the audience’s waiting applause. With theatrical deliberation he released the brake. Adam Longfellar came awake, his fingers twitching, his wooden eyes slyly following them as they fled the scaffold and the square, Ishmael leaning on the wiry arm of Nebsuel while the old man grinned at the mildness of the wind.
The cyclops had all he needed, Nebsuel had seen to that. He had visited the Lohr house during the hours of the execution, inserted gas into the kitchen, and chloroformed the sluggish butler. He had collected Ishmael’s satchel with his desired possessions and met him in the nest of alleys outside of Kühler Brunnen, where Ishmael said he had unfinished business. Nebsuel had tried to dissuade him, saying that every second spent here after his apparent death would expand jeopardy and infuriate the Fates. But the bitter youth would have none of it. Deaf to all but his need to punish those who had betrayed him, even while the remnant of his savaged eye still dripped.
There was a spectral, paternal bond between them, and after saving the young man’s life it strengthened for Nebsuel. He had enjoyed meeting the strange otherworldly youth again and only wished that Ishmael had stayed intact and savoured his uniqueness instead of being constructed into the normality that he so desired—the very condition that so earnestly wanted to destroy him. They had only had a short time to talk, while the old man tended to his face and Ishmael regained his strength and sanity, and his desire for revenge.
“And after all this business is over, meet me at this address,” Nebsuel said, handing him a piece of paper.
“I will, after I have been back to the Vorrh.”
“I can take you. What do you still seek there?” said Nebsuel, genuinely surprised.
“Origins.”
“Whose?” snuffled the old man in distaste.
“Mine, and I think everybody else’s. That is what the old tales say, isn’t it?”
“And you believe that and still find it important?”
“I have not yet met all the occupants,” said Ishmael, deflecting the question. “There still might be a voice with an answer there.”
“The Erstwhile,” said Nebsuel.
Ishmael nodded and turned his head away from the daubings and stitchings.
“We have spoken of them before.”
“We did, but you never really told me anything.” Ishmael’s tone had changed. Hurt and a whisper of anger was rising in him.
“I told you nothing because you were incapable of understanding back then.”
“And now will you tell me? Tell me how I might get to their wisdom and knowledge?”
“Wisdom,” chortled the old man, and the cyclops became tense at the jest, wearing the word like a hand in a boisterous glove puppet.
“Yes, wisdom. Are they not the servants of God? Celestial beings?”
“They were,” said Nebsuel, all of his glee suddenly drained. “But that was a long time ago and they have been forsaken and alone in their lost garden for thousands of years.”
“All that time making them wiser.”
“Making them insane, becoming lost and mad.”
“How can you know that?” yapped the distraught cyclops, hearing his last vestige of hope being discarded by the only human being he trusted.
“One hears things.”
“You can know nothing about them from lies.” His anger was shifting colours. “What have you heard to make you speak of them so badly?”
Nebsuel emptied his hands of needles and gauze and washed them in a simple copper bowl. “They are…disconnected.” He said the word carefully. “Separated from the power that commanded them by their failure. They dare not even look at that failure in the eyes of their own kind. They dwell alone, seeking death, perpetual sleep, or dissolution in the Vorrh—or under it. Hiding from the very time that you think makes them wise.”
“Why would they do that?” Ishmael frowned.
“Because it’s not the time that we live in. If it were, they might gain the sediments of knowledge that we all acquire bit by bit to build some kind of foundation of understanding. They exist in all time at once. All the flows and tides of before and after washing away at any grain of gathered memory. That is the nature of immortality. Everything at once. All directions equally meaningless. Especially if you have botched the only task that you were ever entrusted.”
The cyclops was confused and disturbed.
“Their wretched temporal disconnection adds to the predatory amnesia that shelters in the forest and keeps them imprisoned forever.”
“Not all,” said Ishmael, his eye locked on his miserable friend. “Some have left and entered the world of men.”
“Oh, you have heard that one, have you? Those that got away.”
“Is it true?”
“So many stories.”
“Is it true?”
“Calm yourself, you should be dead and your ghost knows it. This is not the time to be shouting and becoming deranged.”
Some part of Ishmael wanted to lunge out and hurt the man who had saved him. But the rest held him back and saw the sense in the old magician’s words.
“I just want to know,” he said dejectedly.
“And you will in time. The only thing I can tell you is that you must heal. Shock has separated your ghost from you and it must melt back before you even consider entering the forest and seeking those forlorn rejects.”
“They are all the same, then?”
Nebsuel looked long and hard into the young man’s despair. “Very well. The last thing I will say on this: No. They are not all the same and some have escaped and gone into the world, but they are crazier than those who stay behind. It is said that they have given up grief and immortality and attached themselves to a single time. They think they understand the world of men, because they know that this world was never made for them, never made for them to dominate and reconfigure.”
Ishmael’s face flushed with pain just before another layer of drugs settled in.
Nebsuel waited and then continued.
“The men who walk and build all over the world are an aberration. They were never meant to be anything more than all the other animals who know their place. It is believed that God gave them clever thumbs and a few folds in their brains so they might tend the gardens and be skilful servants to all the things that would eventually grow there. The Erstwhile were made to contain and train them, but they failed and men tasted knowledge that rippled through their brains and made them grow sideways into the opposite meaning of all other beasts. Our so-called intelligence might just be a wild cell. An abnormal growth that reshaped the entire species once it escaped the confines of its intended enclosure.”
“Do you believe this? That men are not God’s chosen ones, just another animal?”
“What I believe is for me. I tell you these things because you insist on subjecting yourself to the company of those desperate creatures.”
Ishmael ignored this and wanted another answer. “Men must be the prime species—look at all they achieved.”
“Yes, for themselves. What value are their inventions and ideas to any other living thing? Are they not a totally selfish life-form? Are they not totally alone in the arrogance of everything they believe and think they own?”
Ishmael was without words.
“Don’t be like them, you might be something else. Don’t be like us, like me locked in a spiral of deceptive awareness. And don’t be like them, insane and envious, living an eternal exile of sham. I tried to explain before that you are something different, something unique. When you made me operate on you and add that cosmetic eye, I had to move your real one slightly, to nudge its cradle of muscles and nerves to one side. I could not resist examining your optic nerve and its tight passage into your skull. It was then that I was certain that you are not made in the same way as us. I have opened many men’s skulls and seen brains of all shapes and sizes, of all dimensions and numbers of folds, but one thing they all have in common is that they are divided. Split down the middle, only a thin joining holding them together—twin halves snuggling in a nest of bone. Men’s eyes have two optic nerves that cross over before they mate with the brain. Left eye to the right side of the brain and right eye to the left. This slingshot draws an X in the brain and some men think it marks the seat of the soul. But you are different, I believe your fine brain is undivided, uncloven and whole, and that your single optic nerve is a straight, untwisted line into its core. Unique!”
Ishmael was shaking his head. “I don’t want to be that. I want to be dissolved in the many.” There was a pause of gagged silence and then the cyclops said, “And I don’t care of what. Everything I have met so far has tried to hurt or kill me. Only the Erstwhile and the Kin remain.”
Nebsuel changed the position of his listening. “You have said much about those machines, their care and their teaching. But never explained their origins.”
“I have no idea where they come from, all I know is that they came for me.”
Cautiously Nebsuel asked, “Would you give me permission to seek them out and try to discover who or what made them do this?”
Ishmael snorted and trickled a sneer. “Since when did you need my permission to do anything? I never gave you sanction to rummage about in my brain. When did I ever ask for that?”
“When you forced me to butcher the perfection of your originality, under the threat of that malign bow.”
The silence was now made of lead and flour.
Ishmael stood up shakily and looked about the room as if for his possessions and the closest door. Nebsuel held out his hands to support the hesitation.
“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that, I want to know about those other ones. They must have something for us, for me, a way of explaining men and my place among them.”
“O my son, don’t you see they have nothing to give to you or anybody else? And some of them use human contact as another way to hide, to bury themselves in the imaginations of men. It is said that some actually think they can become them. Do not go near such beings. They will ensnare you in their glamour. Their mesmeric wrongness must be overwhelming.” Nebsuel looked into Ishmael’s face and saw in its straight light of his single eye that he would not listen. So he turned away and gathered his anatomical herbs, curved needles, and surgical charms and started to end the conversation, but in his manner, he could not help adding one last stitch to seal his argument.
“Do you know what the Erstwhile call humans?”
Ishmael shook his head and prepared to be told.
“Rumours,” said the old man, his smirk knotted behind careful eyes. “Rumours.”
Ishmael was looking at his hands when he spoke again. “It’s not just the words written by men, there is proof. I have seen the garden where they say God walked on earth, seen the remains of paradise where the great tree of knowledge grew, waiting to explain all things, so that man would know his natural place.”
“Why do you imagine that the tree of knowledge was for men?” said Nebsuel in a jarring, amused breath.
“Because the Bible says so.”
“Which Bible?”
Before Ishmael could answer the old shaman continued.
“It does not say that in any Bible. Because it does not dare, you have to look elsewhere for a truth that you will understand. The tree was made for trees. Its leaves and branches semaphored the first language, constructed of the spaces made in time and shape, the vivid utterance running between shade and light, wind and rain. And that was only the surface conversation. Deep below, the white roots worked hard to expand their territory and drink from the waters that are so full with the memories of futures and pasts. The root tree is twice the size of its surface self and its contours follow the twigs and branches of those above, forcing the crust of the earth and the forest floor to be the dividing plane. Man was told to keep clear and ignore it. But instead he bit into its fruit. An act of blasphemous stupidity. The first crime between the kingdoms.”
“But Satan caused that crime.”
“Satan caused nothing, he was nothing then, just another kind of Erstwhile, a mistaken failure.”
“But now he is a god and abroad in the world.”
“What makes you say that? What makes you think he ever left the Vorrh?”
“Because he is everywhere now, the cause of evil all over the world.”
Nebsuel spluttered and laughed out loud and then said, “This is why I have separated myself from humanity. Why do you think the Erstwhile call them Rumours? It is they that carried evil out of the forest and have evolved its huge spectrum and power. Satan could never have done that. He is no more or less than gravity, a weak force that is constant in all things. There are worse things to fear than his slender dimension. Have you heard of the Black Man of Many Faces?”
“Yes, but not in detail. I assumed it to be a tribal myth about one of their lost gods.”
“It is not that,” said Nebsuel, an uncomfortable weariness meeting a dread in his voice that seemed to blunt all the previous cut and trust of his diatribe.
“This is a new entity on this earth. A man unwound and remade in the knowledge and likeness of the tree. Something to step forward when the Rumours have gone. The Black Man of the Forest will write the new Bible, and not a trace of wood will be found in its paper nor in its ink. If it has physical form at all, then it can be made only of human skin inscribed with human blood. And it will be buried in the deepest, driest earth, so that its passing will never touch an atom of water and the great memory of the sea will forget everything about the moment of the Rumours.”
Now Nebsuel sat alone. On the other side of Essenwald the cathedral bell sounded the hour. It was hours past the agreed time of Ishmael’s return. Their conversation had dried up before the old wizard had time to explain more about water and its properties of memory and how one of the great unspoken prophesies told about a world without men; all the Rumours obliterated to leave a future where the forest stretched and was imagining in endless time and the oceans, seas, and rivers reinforced all in the distance and depth of its memory.
Ishmael was not coming; he had given up on Nebsuel.
“You must be getting old,” he said out loud to himself and started to prepare to leave. A sadness rumbled inside him as he stretched his bones in the house of his sworn enemy, ready for departure. He looked about the tight rooms as he stood up. This was truly a horrible place, he thought, and he would take nothing from here.
He left the house silently, trying to disperse the clinging image of Ishmael by his side. He had so much more to tell him.