Light believing in darkness, finding purpose in its own absence, a strange faith in antithesis as great as the faith it has in itself. Finding definition in opposition, struggling to find peace, there is a poison inherent in the very fight to become: a burning venom coursing in rest, finding strength in apathy, growing stronger as becoming gives over to simply being.
"The Broken Archons tried to steal tomorrow while the Princes slept,“ Corr told her as the ancient rail car clacked and shuddered through the dark. ”They wanted to study it, take it apart, understand its configuration and find a way to re-splice themselves back into the base code of reality. “It was the Metro Gnome who sounded the alarm. His sensitivity to the vectors and patterns of the world keyed him in as the first hints of temporal dissonance radiated out from their efforts. He threw open a channel to every king, count, and majordomo connected by him, and his shriek of pained confusion brought the Archons down almost before they'd breached the Linear Escarpment."
"So, what happened to them?" Maggie asked.
"They were rounded up, neutered to destroy any remaining access they had to the creative force, and stuck into the deep holes of the world to be forgotten. Their names have been marked anathema into the Quiddity Sphere, and I honestly don't think even they remember them anymore."
Touching the sky, breathing, moving against the feral intent of gravity. Air and hubris, buoyant animation, pushing and pulling and pressing me to the blue. There are aspects of hope and hate here, of diamonds and soot and the confusing odor of cabbage.
He drew the night from his pocket like an heirloom buck knife, unfolding it with a snap, and presented the edge to a very long day. "I've had just about enough of you. Go find someone else to bother or I'm gonna make tomorrow an only child."
Hearing - Regina Spektor - Bon Idée
We tracked her across the Falcon Arc to the jagged upthrust of granite and quartz known as the Conundrum Spire. It used to have another name, a useful name, back before the Coral Plague wiped out all the Indians, finally letting us forget there'd ever been anyone here but those brave and noble declensions of Europe. The Russians took over most of the casinos, fledgling archeologist abandoned Native American studies in droves, and local tourist boards lobbied to rename landmarks hoping to jump-start economies still suffering from the lingering stench of death.
But that was too long ago to bother with, and is relevant only as it pertains to the peyote camps and mescaline messiahs our quarry seemed to be taking refuge with.
We unpacked two cases of Mobile Reconnaissance And Containment Arrays once we hit the Spire's eastern foothills. The MoRACA hounds came three to a case, and were the size of a Jack Russell terrier when their ceramic and alloy frames were unfolded and assembled.
Each hound was slaved through satellite to the brain of a suspected terrorist held at a secret government prison in western Texas. The prisoners were themselves controlled by a mixture of chemical and electronic stimulus, not the least of which was a manual kill switch.
An early test had seen a hound go rogue when a fuse blew at the prison, taking down the main control system. A Pakistani general known for his inventive methods of interrogation used his temporary freedom to take his mount for a joyride through a suburban mall in Idaho, killing 14 people before a lab tech was able to strangle him to death with a power cable. The kill switches were installed almost before the fuse was replaced.
Tapping my headset, I opened the line to the control facility. "Sigma Station, this is Lisper, I've got six hounds ready to hunt and need a pair of riders."
"Acknowledged, Lisper, queueing up two riders."
"Hey, is Cumonde available?" I asked, trying to catch her before she finished configuring the network.
"Let me check." Then after a pause, "Controller Cumonde is available, would you like him as primary?"
"Perfect," I agreed, "thanks."
The air around me is sentient, whispering constantly in Romani and the Japanese slang of shops and arcades along the Ginza strip. "Si khohaimo may pachivalo sar o chachim," dark velvet strands of vowel and consonant accuse, tickling my ear like an unrelenting gnat.
I wave my hand distractedly, annoyed. A trick of the light, perhaps, or the tonal impetus of days lost to all the ways my world has ended. Wee, private Ragnaroks crying out in temporal dissonance, betrayed by the forward stumbling of weary feet; a widowed unwillingness to lie down.
"Nogitsune!"
Fox-spirit. Old Man Coyote. Loki. I've been called worse more often than better.
The Oracle at Delphi was out of her nut on wine and ethylene when I showed up curious one late spring evening, and she squawked the answer to my impetuous question for the whole crowd to hear.
"You!" she shrilled at the top her slowly dying lungs. "You are your own worst enemy!"
Plutarch was embarrassed by the show and quickly rushed me off to some debauchery or another where we forgot all about it.
The air though, oppressive, bilious, entirely too talkative, has never forgotten.
We faced them down across a field of doggerel and dandelions: the fascist dreams of corporate legions rattling the sharpened bones of children like weeping sabers. We knew the time was near, the angels at hand, and held our ground as an endless wave of principalities broke over our granite courage.
In those final moments of desperate chaos I stood against one of the chieftains of Avarice and knew I would never get to hear Gabriel's brassy charge. The dark beast wielded a twisted naginata stolen from one of Tokugawa Ieyasu's demon monks back in the fall of 1601. I had only a broken basalt rosary and four of my initial three hundred words left (I'd taken most of my artillery from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians and was down to 'hearing', 'uncircumcision', 'grace', and 'law').
You might be surprised what you can accomplish with a bit of igneous stone and a word like 'uncircumcision'.
"I have not, as far as you know, ever killed anyone, and it's my sincere intent to keep it that way." "Making sure you never kill anyone?"
Keeping you ignorant about it."
The emptiness was warm and dark, like waking up wrapped in 600 count sheets at 3:30 on an early spring morning. This is what she was made for; made from. Quietly waiting between space and action, enveloped in sleepy potential, lending no definition to time or motion. Those things wanted her, wanted to sink their barbs deep into her being, but that wasn't what she was made for. She closed her eyes, took something like a deep breath, and pushed through.
Blue Coyote was waiting on the other side. Sitting on a round red leather stool in an Oakland diner playing some strange homebrew on a beat up PSP. He casually thumbed buttons as a cartoon indian chased down hapless cowboys, hogtied them, then threw them in front of a bison stampede. It looked like you got points for both the wrangling and the trampling.
"A kid on the Oklahoma res made it," he chuckled when he noticed her squinting at the screen. "Could use some tweaks in the interface, but the concepts funny as hell, yeah?"
Her brows contracted in a way he was overly familiar with: the body language equivalent of "whatever", so he shrugged his shoulders and pocketed the device. White folk were always too tightly wound, too focused. Their loss.
"I had an interesting conversation with a fed last night. The guy gave me this," pulling out the little baggie with his offering in it, shaking it gently at her. She shook her head, he shrugged again and took one of the little capsules for himself.
"And this means what to me?" she said.
Gordius was never a just a simple farmer, rather he was one of the point men for a Qabbalistic experiment in raising spiritual consciousness. The Gordian Knot was the physical manifestation of a mathematical expression of social harmony, and the challenge to unravel it was meant to expose those who would dare be leaders to the refined, conscious altering arguments for peaceful coexistence. The closer one came to understanding the mystery of the knot and untying it, the more changed they would be by its formula.
Plato knew about the Qabbalists. He'd uncovered information about their existence and intents during some of his earliest research into Atlantis. He did not trust this ancient order of secret keepers, however, and thought them a danger to the way of life he was trying to help create, so he gave his most promising pupil the task of keeping them at bay.
Aristotle worked on the problem for more than fifteen years, even after philosophical disagreements with his mentor kept him from heading up the Academy upon Plato's death. His most promising solution came after leaving Athens when he was asked to tutor the son of Philip II, King of Macedon.
This is how Alexander the Great was set on the path to Gordius' fabled knot, not to unravel it, claiming the secrets of peace and bearing them into the world, but to destroy it, and spread through force of arms the visions of peripatetics, academics, and hemlock drinkers.
Two years later, in 331 BC, Alexander made a dangerous pilgrimage to the Oasis of Siwa to visit the Oracle of Ammon. Alexander had two questions for the Oracle.
"Have any of my father's assassins escaped unpunished?" he asked first.
"Yes," the Oracle responded. "The chief architect of that treachery lives on undetected and undeterred in a land where your name is yet unknown."
Unsettled, Alexander presented his second question. "Shall I conquer the whole of the world?"
"To conquer the whole of the world one need only untangle Gordius' knot," the Oracle replied.
"Ah!" Alexander shouted victorious. "This thing my hand has already done."
"No," the Oracle answered, explaining the nature of the Qabbalist creation and the consequences of his circumventing their intent.
In the few years that followed, Alexander declared himself a god, fell into debauchery, murdered his best friend, lost the respect of his men, and after more than a decade of leading his armies to victory in battle, died from a mosquito bite.