"Spyder!" screamed Shrike.

He fell back against the cage. The Clerks walked silently toward him. Trying to stand, Spyder grabbed the book with his bloody hands.

"That's not permitted," said the Clerk.

An icy white shock ripped through Spyder's body and he fell to the floor.

Fifty-Three

Threnody 23

The long-extinct scorpion people of Anu sang songs for their dead. Each song was designed to teach a new spirit some skill or valuable lesson for the Afterlife.

Of all the Anu songs set down on tablets and scrolls, only a handful were for those on their way to Heaven. The vast majority of the songs were for those on their way to Hell.

A translated excerpt:

To whom shall I cry to as I go into the depths?

My God who, if she should appear, would destroy me

With her terrible beauty?

God's Enemy, who would consume me in his resplendent terror?

At the bare edge of the abyss, beauty and terror are less than

A burning step apart, each worthy of worship, graced, pure, demanding.

God burns us. The Enemy burns us.

They will light my way through the long dark

And fire me in a sublime pyre, until I am only ash.

Only ash, I enter the abyss to behold

My shadow

My sins

My world laid bare

Surrounded by souls, dust and ash, I go alone.

Dust and ash, I know that we all venture alone, but that we all venture.

And it is only dust and ash that passes through the abyss,

Only dust and ash.

The sublimely consumed. The radiantly destroyed.

Only dust and ash passes through.

Fifty-Four

More than Heaven

He was falling for a very long time. Hours. Years. Eons. He was in the book. He was the book.

Stars twinkled in and out of existence. Dust became planets and cooled into mountains, then became dust again. Life appeared, flourished and died. He felt the immense emptiness of an entire universe devoid of any living, thinking thing. The universe died soon after. He absorbed its passing into every atom of his body.

He saw, felt and tasted nothingness, or as much of nothingness as his mortal mind could fathom. But even in nothingness was life. It passed through him and moved on, immense beyond belief. So large, it didn't notice his microscopic presence. He was at the end of time and the beginning. Some immense wheel was turning somewhere. Existence was done, but not over. Life was too powerful for that. It was beyond time or space or god or death. He couldn't quite get hold of it. The image of life, the idea was too big for his flea-size brain, but he caught a glimpse, as he floated high, so high above the universe (Is this Heaven? Or something more?) that he could look down and see it all laid out below him-clusters of galaxies like strands of pearls. But stars were things. And what he'd glimpsed wasn't a thing, but a force. Something he couldn't quite grasp, like light shining through a prism. He could put his hand into it, touch it, but never really hold it.

It was beautiful and sad where he was. So lonely. He was the oldest living thing in the universe. Or was with it. Or it passed through him, like air moving in and out of his lungs, leaving a little of itself behind-just a few molecules. Each molecule grew into pictures and words. The pictures and words flowed together to form a structure. It had doors and windows and a seemingly endless number of rooms. It was a cathedral. A memory cathedral, the kind monks used to memorize whole sections of the Bible. Spyder had read about them in Jenny's books. But the rooms in this cathedral were filled with something else. Some immensely older knowledge. Each image he touched, each word he mouthed filled him with power and dread. For a long time, he thought he was dead. Then he tripped over an uneven door frame. He caught himself before he fell, but tore the palm of his hand on the frame. His blood dripped onto the floor of the cathedral. This body is alive, he thought. I'm alive.

I'm alive.

And then he was falling again.

Fifty-Five

Table Scraps

He awoke on the floor of Lucifer's palace. Someone was standing over him. His eyes fluttered fully open and he recognized a woman's face. Tears were flowing from her empty sockets.

A name floated by and he said, "Lulu." She reached down and pulled the knife from his chest. He groaned.

"Alive?" said one of the Clerks.

"He is surprising," said the head Clerk.

Spyder leaned shakily against the cage that housed the book. Lulu spun on her heels and blasted the Black Clerks with round after round from the four-ten.

"Don't," said Spyder, reaching for her.

Each of Lulu's shots hit, but it was like shooting at scarecrows. The rounds went through the Clerks, as if there was nothing but straw to absorb the blasts.

The head Clerk snatched the shotgun from Lulu's hands and tossed it across the hall. "Your debt is past due. We will collect now. Your heart, I think?" he said.

"No," said Spyder. He got to his feet and stretched. "Damn. Sometimes dying is like a week in Vegas."

"Perhaps your head was hurt in your fall?" said the head Clerk. "We move from Earth to Heaven to Hell. Nowhere is closed to us. We swallow life and spit out creation. And you say we will not take this child's tiny life?"

Spyder went and stood close to the head Clerk, close enough to smell the rot in his borrowed flesh. "I know what you are. You aren't gods. You aren't even demons. Come on out of the closet, boys."

"We don't believe you."

"I know, but that doesn't mean dingo's balls. You're hollow. Puppets. I don't even think you're really alive."

"Are you mad? I think so."

"Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain, that's the best you can come up with? It didn't work on the girl in the ruby slippers and it doesn't mean shit to me."

"Enough," said the Clerk with the ledger. He opened the book and withdrew something that looked like a thick, ragged tree limb. Dropping the ledger, he twisted the limb until a dozen ragged blades sprang from the shaft: killing thorns. The Clerk lunged, but Spyder side-stepped the blow, slipping behind his attacker. Slamming his arm around the Clerk's throat, Spyder held him so that the others could watch, as he whispered a single word into the Clerk's ear. When Spyder released him, the Clerk remained frozen in place, his deformed weapon still in the air.

"A trick? Yes," said the head Clerk.

The frozen Clerk began to shake. His mouth came open and he made a sound that was part wonder and part howl of pain. He shook until he was a blur, and the stitches holding his pale body together began to split. The wan internal light the Clerks always gave off burst through his seams as he flew to pieces. As each broken part of him hit the floor, it vanished.

The two remaining Clerks looked at Spyder.

"I said the true name of time and decay," he told them. "Do you even know what you are? You're the boy-toys of the Old Gods, the Dominions. You need used-up organs because you're trash on two legs. Golems. Animated table scraps. A word made you walk and a word can make you stop. I saw into the book. I learned the words."

"We are the engines of creation and destruction," said the head Clerk. "We balance the Spheres. We prune dead branches, taking life where it is not appreciated, such as in this sorry child?" The Clerk nodded at Lulu. "We pass her breath back into the universe for new souls."

"That was your burden. That's what you used to be. You balanced order and chaos, but something happened. The Dominions got inside of you. Instead of serving the universe, you started serving the Old Gods. You're their delivery boys. You grant wishes to the weak, the wounded and lost, getting your hooks in their souls so the Dominions can feed on them. There's nothing left of your old selves, when you balanced the universe. You're empty shells. This book was made to bring the Dominions back, but I'm not going to let you do that."