“That’s why it’s so difficult to find?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“What makes this place so special?”
“Cambodia is a nation of fertile spiritual soil, soil in which many religions took root, and, oddly, intertwined, flourished together as one rather than waging war against each another. Here native animism blends seamlessly with Hinduism and Buddhism, despite their many differences, creating something at once new, and very, very old. Whether this syncretic nature is some aspect of the land imprinting its character upon its people or the other way around, I do not know. But regardless of the cause, the cultures that have sprung up here have an astonishing ability to reconcile the irreconcilable, to hold two contradictory beliefs at once and to find solace in their inherent contradictions. For life itself is contradiction and compromise. Life is reconciling the irreconcilable. As, I’ve spent some time discovering, is death. So this seemed the perfect place for me to try to reconcile with myself and my God what I’d done.”
“Sounds like you’ve been at it a while. A very specific while, to hear you tell it.”
“I count my days of waiting as best I can. It seems important that someone should.”
“Days of waiting. Waiting for what? For me?”
He shook his head, slow, sorrowful. “Waiting for acknowledgement. For absolution.”
“From whom — God?”
His expression showed surprise. “Who else?”
“Look, I hate to tell you pal, but before you and your Brethren buddies staged your little breakout, you were condemned to hell. Seems like when it comes to God’s forgiveness, that ship has sailed.”
“That is but your opinion.”
“Yeah? What’s another?”
Thomed looked me up and down. “One of the many apparent contradictions on which I’ve ruminated is the notion that a loving Maker would condemn Her children to an eternity outside the light of Her good grace for the sins of their infancy. If our souls are, in fact, immortal, why would our Maker confine Her judgment to the first twenty or fifty or one hundred years of life? Put another way, why would a loving parent punish their child for any longer than it took for that child to learn its lesson? And my conclusion, long coming, is that She would not. That absolution lies not beyond our reach, no matter how far gone we seem — at least, so long as we stretch forever toward it.”
“That presumes our Maker is a loving parent,” I said. “Which, I’ve gotta tell you, some days is pretty fucking hard to swallow.”
“True indeed, my friend. But what you describe is the very essence of faith. I have faith in the inherent decency of my Maker. I only hope my Maker has the same faith in me.”
“I’m not your friend, Thomed, I’m your executioner. I’ve been sent by hell to kill you.”
“As I said, Sam, this is a land of contradictions. Here, it is possible that you are both. But I understand your point. You claim my time is nigh, and for your sake I do not wish to belabor the point. As I recall, a certain measure of remove is necessary to retain one’s personhood while functioning as hell’s emissary. So, please, do what you came to do. I will not stop you. Whatever happens is the Maker’s will.”
He closed his eyes and raised his face up to the heavens. His expression was one of peace, not fear. I stepped toward him with purpose, and rested my left hand upon his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “It’s nothing personal.” And then I plunged my hand into his chest, or tried.
Because that’s when Thomed and the temple disappeared.
22.
I found myself in a field of heather. The sun hung bright above, warm against my skin, but not so much so as to make me sweat, and a gentle breeze rustled the trees that dotted the rolling landscape. Wildflowers dusted the distant hilltops with party-bright confetti, sprinkled in among the heather’s soft purple, and filled the air with their sweet perfume. And there was not a soul, nor sign of human habitation, in sight.
I spun around in confusion, a spindle at the center of this swirling, idyllic landscape. Where was I? What was I doing here? What in hell had happened to the temple? To Thomed?
“So many questions,” came a voice from behind me, inhumanly low and rumbling, “and for each an answer, if only you care to listen.” I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Instead, I turned to face the source of the voice.
What I found in a space I knew for sure was empty just moments before were two beings. One was a hulking beast some fifteen feet tall, with an eagle’s head and wings to match, and eyes of flames. Thick-muscled arms, each as large as my own meat-suit and velveted with close-cropped silver gray — fur or feathers, I knew not which — terminated in taloned hands. Haunches as big and powerful as a plow-steed’s stretched from broad torso, feathered black. Its feet were lost to me beneath a sea of undulating heather. Its skin seemed to crackle with electricity, blue-white arcs rippling across its surface and charging the air around us with the ozone scent of a felled power line or recent lightning strike. And as I looked upon it, its face changed, shifting as if in response to my gaze. Now a lion. Now an ox. Now an eagle once more.
The other figure was a child. What kind of child, I had no idea. It seemed at once a boy and a girl; blond-haired, and brown-, and black-; fair-complexioned and dark as fertile soil; a child of four, of eight, of ten, dressed in robes, in jeans and ringer-T, in country tweeds. But unlike the massive beast, whose visage shifted, the child’s appearance didn’t seem to. Instead, it suggested the impression of a thousand children, a million, an entire human history of them, all beautiful, all smiling eerily with unnerving, unnatural knowing, and all occupying the same space.
“My name is Legion, for we are many,” I muttered.
The enormous bird-beast laughed — a bass-filled chuffing that shook the trees and set my meat-suit cowering. “Is that what you think of me?” it asked.
“I was talking about your friend,” I said.
“My friend,” it said, “is who you’re speaking to. This creature is but a trusted servant, which lends its voice to one whose voice you cannot hear.”
“So you’re mute, then, is that it?”
“Not mute,” said the creature. “Merely beyond your capacity to hear.”
“Like a dog-whistle,” I snarked. Blame the nerves.
“If that helps you,” said the beast, now lion-faced once more, the child smirking mischievously beside it. “A dog-whistle that could liquefy your insides.”
“So he’s what, your spokesman?”
The child nodded. “Though perhaps a better term is conduit,” said the beast, its now-ox-mouth awkward around the words, “or, best yet, attenuator.”