The Semaphore

Hummel’s study was a cavernous room lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. There was no ladder to be seen and the shelves were so high that Pontis wondered how the small old man managed to reach any books more than a third of the way up. An enormous chandelier hung overhead, assembled with lacquered branches and spotted with the same unflickering flames—lightbulbs, Pontis now recalled from school—that were everywhere in the house.

When the three entered, Hummel was busy moving stacks of books and papers from a long oak table on to the floor. “Put the girl here,” he said, patting the table’s surface.

Varia placed the black satchel down gently. Hummel studied it, absentmindedly tracing his thumbnail along a wrinkle from his eye to his chin before setting about unfolding the cloth. His bulbous fingers moved deftly, drawing each layer back with care until the girl was exposed.

Her wounds had worsened since the morning, when Varia had last given her water. Now the lacerations across her skin were starting to open, exposing the swollen muscle beneath and, in the case of the deepest cuts on her chest—I BORE WITNESS TO THE FREEING OF NONK’NON—the pale gray of her sternum. Her mouth was snarled back from her withered gums, and clumps of hair had fallen from her head and clung to the open cloth beneath her. She seemed also to have shrunk, appearing no larger in mass than a toddler. She was perfectly still, and for a moment Pontis hoped that maybe she had finally passed on, and was free.

Laszlo lowered his eyes. Varia took Pontis’s hand.

Hummel tapped his glasses and leaned over the girl. His huge eyes probed the lacerations. He opened Doctor Inoue’s letter and set it on the table, referencing it against her condition, accounting for every listed detail.

He produced a small metal tool from his robe and tapped its side. A beam of light shone from its tip and he directed the light into the girl’s empty eye sockets. He opened her mouth and inserted a finger, then brought the finger to his nose. He recoiled and wiped it on his sleeve.

“Alef,” he said, shuffling to a cabinet against the wall. “Take the subject’s weight. Draw three milliliters of blood—be careful not to rupture her veins—and run a standard panel plus a culture. Then perform a positron emission tomography scan and a magnetic resonance angiogram. Send all of it to monitor one.”

Something clicked below the oak table and an arm appeared from underneath it. The arm was thin and metallic and sectioned by numerous joints. It rose up toward the girl like a snake from a burrow.

Pontis, Varia and Laszlo stepped back from the table. They watched as the tip of the metal arm—a rounded stub like the butt of a pen—touched the girl’s concave belly, her hip, and then her thigh. It paused there for a moment, poised, before a needle protruded from it and into the girl’s sallow flesh. It was motionless for several seconds. Then the needle withdrew and the arm disappeared under the table.

There is nothing not of this world.

Hummel opened a cabinet to reveal a dark mirror. He fiddled with something on its edge, and the mirror flashed with light. Images appeared in it: an outline of a human body and sequences of numbers and letters that ran from left to right. The three’s attention ricocheted between it and the table, on which a bar of light glowed along its surface, moving slowly from one side to the other, tracing the girl’s length. As it did, a new image appeared on the mirror. For a moment, Pontis couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing there. Then it dawned on him that he was looking at the inside of the girl’s body. Her veins and bones, her organs and muscles, all displayed in bright neon. He looked down, embarrassed.

The table produced a series of loud bangs—which sent the three’s hands once again grasping for each other’s shoulder—and an additional set of images appeared alongside the first, these of folds and gullies that Pontis could not make sense of.

Hummel studied the images on the mirror, tapping his spectacles to zoom in and out. A list of numbers flashed along the mirror’s side. Pontis had spent quite a bit of time in Lowood Den’s hospital with his Ma. They had nothing like this there. He wondered if she would understand what was happening.

The girl’s empty eyes gaped at the ceiling.

Hummel issued a smattering of disappointed noises and touched the edge of the mirror, fading it to black. He shuffled to the table and carefully laid the cloth back over the girl’s body. For a moment he stood over her, staring off at some great distance. Then he turned to face the three, removing his glasses and revealing his eyes, which were no more than slits beneath the layers and creases of his ancient skin.

“I’m sorry you wasted your time,” he said softly. “But I don’t know how to help.”

#

“What do you know?” Varia asked.

They had relocated to the sitting room. Alef built them a fire in the stone hearth—metal arms extended from slats in its perimeter and arranged wood with the same surgical precision they’d drawn blood—and provided a bottle of proof and four glasses. Laszlo busied himself drinking at once. Varia drank one glass quickly, and then ignored the second. Pontis was not used to it, and after just one sip his vision fogged. He left his remaining proof untouched for the rest of the night.

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They sat in high-backed leather armchairs. Hummel’s feet barely reached the floor. He’d laid a quilt over his lap that made him seem even smaller than he already was. He consumed glass after glass of proof, but remained perceptibly unaffected. His glasses reflected the flames dancing in the mantle.

Varia leaned over the arm of her chair toward Hummel. “Can you tell anything at all about what happened to her?”

Hummel took a slow breath. “I can tell you what it appears happened to her. Or what someone seems to want us to think happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do they teach you in Lowood Den about Hemmick invocation?”

The three looked at one another. Pontis shrugged. Laszlo shook his head.

“What’s that?” Varia asked.

“What about the Plangent Age? Do they teach about the War on the Mountain? About Malory and the Semaphore?”

“Yes,” said Varia. “And we follow what’s cut in the girl’s skin make mention to all that. But it doesn’t explain her condition. Doesn’t explain why she can’t die.”

Hummel took a long swig of proof. “The so-called Boy God Malory’s acolytes believed humanity’s purpose was to die at Malory’s hands, and they did what they could to abet that end. Not that he needed any help.

“In reward for their sycophancy, Malory endowed some of them with marginal access to his apparatus. This skillset they called Hemmick. I have read a few history books on the subject. Very little was understood—even, it would seem, by its practitioners. They were religious, you see. They modeled it as magic, and considered its practice art—though how you can call something so ugly art is beyond me…”

Varia leaned even further over the arm of her chair. “What’s any of that to do with what’s happening to this girl? She’s in the other room, right now, full suffering. She exists. But Hemmick doesn’t exist. Malory doesn’t exist.”

“Hm?” Hummel grunted, tapped his glasses, and looked from Varia to Laszlo to Pontis. “Is that what they teach you?” He jounced a leg under his blanket for a moment, then grunted again. “Malory exists,” he said. “Asleep in Osseon for nearly four hundred years. Three hundred and ninety six, according to the Osseonic calendars. Though I’ve heard figures as low as three hundred and forty. Either way, I’ve seen him with my eyes. You can tour his palace. It’s amusing. And I’ve seen the geological and ecological record of the War on the Mountain. The radiation in the soil of Senescence. The crater salt lakes along the coast.” He gestured toward a shelf-lined wall of the study. “There used to be a pine forest here, boulders and waterfalls. But the shockwaves from the War—seven hundred miles to the northeast—turned everything to sand.” He lifted his glass of proof to his lips and then lowered it without drinking. “The Lowoods, your home, are only two hundred years old. That’s how long it took the earth to repair itself. Here on the plains, nothing has grown back but the grass. A bit further north there is only barren soil. There are mountains in Chavanuck that were turned to glass. I have seen them.”

One of Alef’s thin metallic arms protruded from behind a painting and wiped gently at its frame with a feather duster.

Varia frowned at her lap. “Even so,” she said, “what’s it have to do with anything? It all happened hundreds of years ago—if it happened at all.” She looked at Hummel. “So what’re you saying? That Malory’s awake?”

“If Malory was awake, we would all know it.” Hummel waved a cormous hand in front of his face as if to disperse an odor. “No. I am saying that it is possible—or that someone wants it to appear possible—that this poor girl has been afflicted with a Hemmick invocation. That her world is now of endless darkness and pain. And by extension, that the practitioners of Hemmick have returned.”

“Why?” Laszlo asked. “Whether it’s them or not, why would a one want to do this?”

“I cannot speak to motive,” Hummel said. “People grow beliefs over time. But… I do not know how to explain the girl’s condition otherwise. And this, I’m afraid to say, prevents us from dismissing the possibility that we are dealing with an authentic acolyte. That they did not, in fact, go extinct after the War.”

Varia scoffed. “After four hundred years?”

“The girl on the table in my study may well live four hundred years,” Hummel said. “She may well live four hundred thousand. Malory’s apparatus, and by extension the Hemmick craft, is one of tricks and obfuscations. The girl’s body has been fooled. The atoms that compose her body have been fooled. We could burn her to ash, scatter the ash across the earth, and we would merely be expanding the area of her suffering. She will not accept the option of death. Now I imagine that this same invocation can be applied in various ways. It is not impossible that a group of Hemmick practitioners did something similar themselves—though I assume without the added needless brutality. This group—even a single practitioner—could well have been alive and in hiding since the end of the War. A dangerous, lurking relic.”

The fire snapped.

“Or it could be something else entirely.” Hummel tossed his blanket aside and tried to stand.

Pontis jumped up and helped him.

Hummel grumbled. “It’s late—or at least it feels so. I am going to sleep, and I suggest you three do the same. There are two spare bedrooms upstairs.” He shuffled out of the room, pausing in the doorway only when Varia called out to him.

“Doctor,” she said. “What is Nonk’non?”

Hummel half-turned, shook his head, and then disappeared into the hallway.

The three sat in silence for some time. The fire ate away at its logs until it was nothing more than a heap of embers.

Finally, Varia rose. “Pontis and I’ll share a room,” she said. “Laszlo, you get a whole room to yourself.”

Laszlo refilled his glass of proof.

Varia took Pontis’s arm and led him away. When they were in an upstairs bedroom she locked the door behind them.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Pontis shook his head, then pointed to her and shrugged.

“I think it’s all full crazy,” she said.

They laid down on top of the sheets. The thick curtains over the window stifled any indication of whether it was day or night. Pontis felt that if he closed his eyes he would immediately fall asleep.

“I think Laszlo hates me,” Varia whispered.

Pontis felt along the sheets until he found Varia’s hand.

“We’ve a lot to talk about,” she said, pulling back the sheets and sliding her legs beneath. “We’re going to have decisions.”

But a moment later she was asleep.

Pontis did not even notice; he was asleep just as fast.