Page 13 of Installment Immortality

“I got that part. What do you need?”

The anima mundi blinked, looking momentarily taken aback. “The one who freed and restored us is one of yours, is she not?”

“Antimony? Yeah, she’s one of mine.”

“We thought she was the most disrespectful, impertinent child this world could ever have created, and while we were impressed by her acts and deeds, we were… less than charmed by her manner of speaking.”

“She’s always been a blunt one, our Annie. I’m sorry if she offended you. I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”

“No, she didn’t. She asked us questions no one else had ever bothered with, and she restored us to our primacy, as we always should have been.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“No problem. We just see now where she gets it.” The anima mundi smiled briefly. “Walk with us, Mary Dunlavy.”

They turned then, and started back into the wheat at a more human pace, one foot in front of the other, the individual stalks swaying behind them with every step they took. I hesitated. Following cosmic figures into fields is rarely a good idea, and this was one that I knew had the power to hurt me. She controlledthe power that kept me stable as a haunting, and all the new limitations I was trying to learn how to live with had been handed down by her.

Still, ignoring the requests of cosmic powers isn’t a good idea either. I trotted after her into the grain, letting her set the pace and lead the way.

For some time, we just walked, silent, through the endless field of wheat. Finally, the anima mundi looked at me.

“What am I going to do with you, Mary Dunlavy?” they asked.

“I thought you’d already figured out what you were going to do with me, when you let me go home,” I said. “I haven’t pushed any boundaries or broken any rules, and you said I’m allowed to go to my family when they call for me.”

“Yes. We didn’t anticipate the mathematician.” They sigh. “Most of them are gone now, but the ones that remain will remain an issue. They don’t draw upon my pneuma, precisely, not as you or the sorcerers do—they pull their power from concepts outside my control, and I have no way to limit them, no means by which to prevent them from running rampant over the way things are meant to be. You’ve broken none of the new rules we set for you, Mary Dunlavy. When your family comes, you may go. You will simply stopexpandingthat family whenever it suits you.”

“Verity’s pregnant,” I objected. “That baby is going to be a part of my family, and I’m going to need to be able to take care of him.”

“Yes,” agreed the anima mundi. “Your family will expand, in the natural ways. Birth and acquisition, bonds of affection. But you won’t go looking for people to add to the family on your own, and you won’t volunteer your services to anyone.”

“As long as I still get to take care of the babies,” I said.

They nodded. “You have a purpose, expensive as you are, and we won’t forbid you to fulfill it. Given time, with you operative in the world, more caretakers may arise. There were so many of them once. They kept the world of the living more forgivingof the lands of the dead, and they served a vital purpose in the health of all things.”

“So we took care of you by taking care of our charges?”

“Something like that.” They kept walking. “We called you here because we have a problem, Mary Dunlavy.”

I was getting a little tired of hearing my full name. “What kind of a problem is that?”

“The Covenant should never have been allowed to flourish as they did. Had we been in our proper place, I would have stopped them long before they could come to such dominance.” The anima mundi looked, briefly, tired. “The part of us that is human rejoices to see our children rising to such heights of power and influence. The rest of us is appalled. Parts of us are missing, spaces that were once filled with voices and ideals, unique and glorious, now silenced forever. This cannot be permitted to endure.”

“Hey, I discorporated myself hauling explosives across the world to make them stop, and my reward was six months of nonexistence and you putting a hard cap on how much power I can draw from you at one time. That was my big attack. I don’t really have a better rock to throw at the Covenant, so if you were going to say that what you need me to do is wipe them out, well, you’re pretty much out of luck there.”

The anima mundi stopped walking and gave me a hard look. “We are the living spirit of this world,” they said. “The afterlife to which you cling is the shadow we cast. Your gods are the fragments of our will made manifest. You should be overjoyed to have us asking anything at all of you.”

I put my hands up, palms toward the anima mundi. “I’m not trying to be a negative Nancy here, I swear. I just know my limits. Or rather, I know what my limitswere,and I know they’re more extensive now than they were before Penton Hall. If you’re going to threaten to discorporate me again if I refuse to do whatever it is you want me to do, then I guess I’m going to double-die afterall. Please just remember that Annie is the reason you get to exist again, and let me go back long enough to say goodbye. My family deserves that much.”

The anima mundi gave me a withering look, then paused and sighed. “You are correct, Mary Dunlavy. We shouldn’t even seem to threaten you; it’s not fair, and you’ve done nothing to earn such treatment from us. But we do need to ask for your help with the Covenant.”

“Okay,” I said. “What help?”

“The blow you helped to deliver hurt them direly, but it didn’t stop them. If anything, it drove them to fight harder, and to find more innovative means of striking back. They aren’t as bold as they were, but they continue to chip away at the parts of me they disapprove of, and it hurts, most dearly and direly.”

“Yeah. We didn’t think it would destroy the Covenant.” Logically, what we’d done—setting up a bomb in the basement of their largest training facility—couldn’t have wiped out a global organization. They were too widespread for that. What we’d been hoping for was slowing them down and breaking some of their pipelines. Penton Hall was where they trained their new recruits, and where they kept the majority of their recordings. Depending on how much of it had been destroyed, we could have set them back years. Not forever.

“They know you were there.” The anima mundi sounded sad about that, almost resigned. “They have sensors and detectors you didn’t anticipate in your scouting, and that may explain some of the weariness which dogged your steps between transits. They know they were the victims of an active haunting.”

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