Chương 25: The First Phrase

There were a lot of gun muzzles. That was the first fact Kichan counted. He did not know the exact number, but between the police cars parked at angles across the far end of the narrow square, the shields sealing off the space below the church steps, and the faint shadows moving behind the upper windows, one thing was clear. There were a lot of them. He could not tell whether the eyes fixed on him were snipers, camera rigs, or both. The square in front of the church had been cleared out.

Tourists had been shoved behind yellow tape, and somebody's dropped ice cream was melting on the stone. Shop doors were half closed, and people behind the windows were watching through gaps in their curtains. For a moment it felt as if every window, lens, and gun barrel in Rome had opened toward him. The sky was clear, and the outer wall of the church glowed warmly in the afternoon sun. Kichan tightened his grip on the wake-up rod. Could he do it? Maybe.

He had already put too many people on the ground in London and New York. He knew by now that his body had gone well past ordinary standards. If he read the direction of the metal in the gun barrels through the Rohonc copy, and twisted the conditions of their equipment through the Book of Soyga, maybe he could force open one path out. The problem was what came after. Gunshots and screams. Korean subtitles rolling beneath a news broadcast. His father lowering the remote while watching it.

His mother frozen in front of the television. The image was so vivid that Kichan nearly lost his breath. He hated that more than death. Lee Seoyoon stepped out through the rear door. She had one hand raised. He could not tell whether it was meant for the armed people not to shoot or for Kichan not to move.

"Mr. Han Kichan." She spoke in Korean.

"You really do need to stop now." Kichan looked at her.

"Wasn't this your side's doing in the first place?"

"We did not escalate this directly."

"Oh. So you outsourced it?" Lee Seoyoon closed her mouth for a second. Kichan did not laugh. He was tired of that joke now too.

"The local authorities moved on their own. This is because of the document you're carrying."

"After you told them."

"Even if we had said nothing, it would have reached this point eventually. Loagaeth is not something a state can simply ignore."

"I never showed it to a state."

"Possessing it is enough." Kichan could feel the two folded fragments of Loagaeth inside his coat. Thin paper. And yet the air around them bent very slightly. Whether the others could feel that too or not, the fingertips of the armed men had all gone a little stiff. Fear, orders, and hostility toward something they did not understand had hardened into a thin layer across their faces. Most of them probably were not Golden Dawn. Just people who had been given orders.

People who had probably sat through a briefing, seen a photo of an old manuscript and a dangerous East Asian man, and been told one thing: do not approach. If he put every one of them on the ground, there would be no going back. Kichan lowered the wake-up rod slightly. Lee Seoyoon's eyes shook, just a little.

"Good. Then place the document down and—""Not that." Kichan cut in immediately. Lee Seoyoon's expression hardened.

"Then what exactly are you planning to do?" Kichan could not answer. He truly did not know. If he fought, everything got worse. If he put it down, it would be taken. If he ran, they would chase him. And if he simply stood there, his parents would see this on the news. He disliked every option. Just then, his phone rang. Kichan almost laughed on reflex. A phone call, at a time like this. The sound was too ordinary. He looked at the screen. Mom.

The inside of his throat closed for reasons that had nothing to do with Loagaeth. He could not answer. He should not answer. But he could not decline it either. The phone rang a few times and stopped. A message came in right after. I saw the photos. You did eat properly, right? Kichan stared at the sentence for a long time. Gun muzzles in front of him. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Golden Dawn behind him. Loagaeth inside his coat.

And his mother was asking whether he had eaten. It was funny, sad, and something close to gratitude all at once. Then suddenly it made him angry. Why did all of this have to be dragged outside the dinner table? Why did he have to read a message asking whether he had eaten in a place like this? He put the phone back in his pocket. The inside of his throat throbbed, and a line from Loagaeth rose up there. Not sound itself, but the shape immediately before sound became sound. The opening phrase.

He was certain he should not read it. Beside that certainty, a very small second thought attached itself. What if he did anyway? The moment the thought occurred to him, Kichan cursed himself. Are you insane? Then one of the gun muzzles moved. An order was shouted from somewhere. Kichan could not understand the words, but he saw people's shoulders and wrists change all at once. The force shifting toward the trigger, the brief pause just before firing, all of it showed at the wrist together.

Whichever side fired first, the square would be over. Dust trembled on his shoulder. Its tiny wire legs touched the back of his neck. Kichan drew in a breath. The way he would before beginning a song. Very low. Hold the air in the belly, don't close the throat too hard, don't let the lips move first. Lee Seoyoon shouted.

"Don't!" Kichan looked at her. For the first time, her face showed panic. Real fear. That only made him more certain. So this really was something he should not do. And right now it was the only thing left that he could do. Kichan shifted the wake-up rod into his left hand. With his right, he unfolded the two overlapping fragments of Loagaeth. The blank spaces on the paper opened. Silence waited for him like a sentence. Kichan muttered under his breath.

"Ah, seriously." The gun muzzles moved. Kichan began to read the opening phrase. The first sound was neither speech nor song. What came out of his mouth was something very close to a low breath. But that breath did not vanish into the air right away. It skimmed over the stone square, brushed the windows of the police cars, and hesitated at the tips of the gun muzzles. People froze. Someone shouted an order. It sounded far away. Kichan saw the next note of the opening phrase. At least he thought he saw it.

In truth he heard it, touched it with his fingertips, and felt its direction inside his throat all at once. That was how the sentences of Loagaeth worked. Before the eyes could read them, the body followed them. Before the body followed them, space responded first. Kichan grew afraid. This was not an iron bar. This was not changing metal, covering wounds, or moving a tiny wire creature. As the sound went out, the pressure inside his ears changed violently. For a moment Kichan nearly shut his mouth.

But he also knew he could not stop. Once a sentence had begun, it had to be carried through to the end. That part was like singing. If you cut the breath wrong in the middle, the next note dies. Kichan remembered the small bar stages from years ago. The squeaking microphone, the noisy speakers, the guitar strings biting into his fingertips, and the moment several loud tables had gone quiet when he pushed out the first line. Seoyoon had been smiling then. You look all right when you play guitar. When you sing too.

The memory came in painfully, but this time the pain did not get in the way. How to control the breath. How to keep the throat open. How not to shove the sound too far forward. Kichan knew those things. What he did not know was the pronunciation. At the third syllable of the opening phrase, there was a tiny difference. Should the tip of the tongue touch higher or lower? Should the breath be drawn half a beat longer, or cut immediately? The blank space on the page leaned toward stretching it out.

But the sensation inside his throat told him to cut it short. Kichan hesitated for one brief instant between the two. In that instant, strange things came into view. The plant diagrams of the Voynich Manuscript, the metallic grain of the Rohonc copy, the figures and conditions of the Book of Soyga, and the blank spaces of Loagaeth all connected into a single line. What he had thought were separate books had all been pointing to the same place.

The line that began at his fingertips rose through his wrist, arm, shoulder, and throat. Far too late, Kichan realized that everything he had read so far had been the same language. Far too late. He chose the pronunciation. Or rather, he thought he chose it. The sound left his mouth. At that moment, Lee Seoyoon's face went white. Kichan saw it and understood. He had gotten it wrong. Only by a very little. But wrong. Then Rome stopped. The radios died first.

The static crackling from all around the square cut off at once, then immediately returned as something like a low moan. One police officer clapped a hand to his ear. Someone else tore the device from around his neck. The emergency lights came next. The red glow spinning atop the police cars stretched out instead. Rather than sweeping over the walls, it clung to the outer wall of the church as a long red line. As if someone had painted blood there with a brush. Then came the bell.

It was absolutely not time for the bell to ring. And yet, deep inside the church, a single low toll sounded. It did not spread through the air. It moved through the stone walls instead. It struck the square underfoot, the church steps, the wall of the bookseller's shop, the wheels of the police cars, and the inside of people's ribs in turn. The tourists could not even scream at first. Their mouths opened, but the sound came late. A child lost hold of the balloon in his hand. It did not float upward.

It slid sideways through the air and then flattened, as if pressed against an invisible wall. The police with shields stepped back. Not because of any order. The way a person steps back from fire, their bodies retreated first. Lee Seoyoon looked at Kichan. She was no longer looking at him as if trying to persuade him. She was looking at a disaster. Someone pulled a trigger. A gunshot rang out. But the sound folded before it reached Kichan. More precisely, space folded first.

The air in the street crumpled like paper. The red light from the police cars gathered into a single point and then tore out long again. People's faces lurched far away and then suddenly close. The lines in the stone pavement rippled. Kichan tried to stop the opening phrase. Too late. The sentence of Loagaeth had already seized the inside of his throat. The way the Voynich Manuscript had once seized his fingertips. Only this time it was not his fingertips.

Breath and throat, sound and space all twisted together at once. Kichan understood what he had done wrong. Far too late.

"Ah." The moment he tried to speak, the sound slipped again. The square in front of him split open. Light showed through the tear. No, calling it light felt wrong. Green light, the smell of wet earth, and a cold wind from somewhere all rushed in together and overlaid themselves on top of the stone square of Rome. Kichan tried to brace his feet. The pavement vanished from under him, then came back. The wake-up rod held heavy in his hand. That weight alone still felt real. One bullet lost speed in front of him.

It stopped as if embedded in midair, then drifted slowly aside. The grain of the metal on the bullet's surface touched Kichan's fingertips. The Rohonc sensation pushed it away. The sight gave him no satisfaction. The bullet was not the important thing right now. Space was tearing. And everyone was watching. The people behind the windows. The tourists behind the tape. The police with the shields. Lee Seoyoon. No one could mistake this for a simple explosion or some kind of trick.

The red light stretched along the outer wall of the church was sucked toward the tear. Dust rose backward from the cracks in the stone. The little fountain at the edge of the square failed to let its water fall and instead held the stream hanging in the air, trembling. Lee Seoyoon shouted something. Kichan could not hear it. Dust gripped his shirt with its wire legs, trying not to fall from his shoulder. Its small body was shaking. Kichan reached out to grab it.

At that moment, the outer one of the two overlapping pages slipped free from inside his coat. The paper fluttered like a leaf torn loose in the wind. Kichan caught it on reflex. The sprout mark at his fingertips turned hot. All four branches spread open at once. The last one swelled suddenly like a flower bud, then split back into a thin line. Kichan swallowed with pain. The swallowed breath became sound again. The wrong sound. The wound in space tore wider. This time the whole square shook.

The church bell rang again. No one had struck it. Still it rang. Once. Twice. Three times. On the third toll, the shadow of the cross before the church stretched the wrong way. The sunlight stayed as it was, but the shadow alone was dragged toward the tear. Only then did Kichan feel his mouth go dry. The thought of escaping vanished from his head. The police, the tourists, Lee Seoyoon, all of them were staring at the same tear. Someone dropped to their knees.

Someone else kept crying with a phone still raised in hand. This afternoon would remain on those faces for the rest of their lives. His phone vibrated in his pocket. Even in the middle of all that, he felt it. It made no sense. Space was folding, Rome was being torn open, and he was being dragged toward a gap he could not understand, and in the middle of it all his phone was vibrating. But the vibration was unmistakable. Once, then twice. Probably his mother. Kichan tried to reach for it. He could not.

His arm was too far away. No, his pocket was too far away. The distance inside his own body had gone strange. He clenched his teeth.

"I'll answer later." He did not know who he was saying it to. His mother. Himself. Or maybe Rome, which was already disappearing. The ground gave way beneath him. His body was dragged in a direction that was not down, sideways, or up, and the word gravity abruptly lost all meaning. Kichan closed his hand around Dust. The one remaining fragment of Loagaeth was trapped between his fingers. His final thought was simple. This is bad. No, this time it was really bad. And Rome's afternoon closed like paper.