33.4

 

Widening her scope, she can see the downstairs neighbours. The child is motionless in bed, a full bottle of Lucozade and an untouched glass on the bedside table. The mother has collapsed on the bathroom floor and is surrounded by a miasma o the smoky tendrils while her husband sleeps in the easy chair in front of the television. He’s pulled off his shirt and trousers, kicked off his shoes and has opened both windows to cool his fever, and this has let the tendrils of infection spread further, entering the next house through an air vent. There’s an old woman there, slumped over the kitchen table while her husband sleeps upstairs, a mass of pustules already creeping across his body and face. Next door, on the other side, two twenty-somethings are playing a board game, and she can see the tuberculosis eating away at their lungs while they laugh and swig shop-brand lager from cans. On Dunstall Road, outside their house, a woman is pushing a stroller with a baby inside and dragging an older child along by the wrist, and every time she inhales on her cigarette she is topped up with the toxic pestilence.

It’s namesake, still watching her closely, is free of these tendrils of miasma, but his cloak sucks in tiny fractals of souls from every direction, including a trickle from Paul. Inside his form are thousands of these fractals, whirling and spinning inside a shining matrix like a huge sack of kittens and a very fast mouse. Namaan has a group of fractals like a three dimensional mathematical model; all intersecting planes cobbled together like the stones mortared into a castle wall Astaroth is also watching her, a mountain of calm in a sea of turmoil. He is neither receiving or losing fractal shards, but has one, perfect, crystal soul at the centre of his form, buried deep withing the planes. This is how to change shape, she realises. The angels – and even the fallen ones – keep their soul safe in one particular plane and then manipulate matter from whatever plane they’re in to form the shape they want to be seen in there.

Roisin briefly scans the nearest thousand planes in a circle with herself as the centre and spots more of these perfect soul crystals; not as many as she was expecting, but enough to make her idea a working concept. In which case, a plan begins to form.

She looks at Astaroth and traces a path between his presence in the mortal plane with the location of his perfect soul. The idea that a Fallen can even have a perfect soul invades her, but she pushes it to one side for now. She has enough to worry about right now, and will have to save the burning theological ones for a later time. Assuming she had a later and this whole sixth seal opening didn’t destroy her outright.

And, through some wiggly-windy, planey-waney trickery,  she sees herself. Her crystalline soul reminds her of her of Joni, her old college flatmate’s little sister, who came to stay with them for a long weekend while their mother had a hysterectomy in hospital. Roisin had spent an hour with her on the Saturday morning, watching cartoons while she made plasticene people to amuse the child. When her flatmate had finally got out of bed, Joni had picked up one model and squashed it into each of the other models in turn, the mass of plasticene getting bigger and all the colours getting mashed together. He soul was like that plasticene ball; the fractals all mashed together without regard to form or function, some light, some dark, all jammed in at any old angle. There was no distinction between which of them was human and which were angel, mind, though she suspected the very dark ones were those where she’d felt guilt and shame for some of her actions over her short life.

Around the jumbled fractals is the matrix-like structure of her own mantle. It is less structured than that of Pestilence, which she rightly surmises comes from her manipulation of the perfectly structured Famine mantle into whatever she is now. Not Famine, nor Justice, but this Clarity of which Astaroth spoke.

And at the centre of her of her soul, she can discern the Seal, like a three dimensional puzzle in the centre of a television murder board, where strings connect victims and suspects, motives and opportunities, except the strings attached to the seal, for that’s what her mind interprets these filaments as, are attached to the framework of the whole architecture, and the more the fragments separate, the more the seal is torn open. This is the Truth at the centre of everything: it is all one single soul, and each tiny fractal is a part of it, just like the angels said.

And Hasmed is hammering in new filaments all over the place, trying to keep the structure coherent.

Astaroth touches her shoulder, but she feels it echoing through her whole reality, and one of the fractal parts inside her rings like a bell against a tuning fork. “Roisin… you must break open the Sixth Seal.”

She pulls at the edges of her own shards, breaking some of the seal’s filaments. Around her the flat groans. The air thickens. The light fractures into too many colours.

Pestilence watches her with clinical fascination. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The world without its mask.”

Astaroth grips her shoulders. “Roisin, listen to me. Once the Sixth Seal breaks, Hasmed will feel it. He will come for you.”

She concentrates to exist in just the one plane long enough to whisper. “Can I stop it?”

Astaroth shakes his head. “No. But you can decide what the world sees when the truth comes. You can shape the architecture.”

She doesn’t know if her physical form laughs, but her mental one fins an amusing comparison. “Like a ball of plasticene?”

And the Sixth Seal cracks.