The Way Back: Chapters 11–15

"I'd reconsider if I were you. Lord High General Dumah of the Army of the Dead is always very grateful for useful information."
"Your general is a cadaverous hooligan bastard, and the Sisterhood of the Lileen want nothing that he has to offer."

At even this innocuous mention of a Holy Name, Mammon flinched.

There he was, the great evil one, swaddled in blankets, his ears stopped up with wadded cotton, bouncing along over the snowy cobbles.
He was just about the right size for the pram, too.

As the Dark One lay moaning in the grave, the dusting of snow filling the folds of its black, black raiment, flashes of memory came swimming back...

But something else, too: a feeling of dread, of foreboding.

Last night’s snow had been trampled into the cobbles by many people, but rumors of angry soldiers had torn through the town, and, fearing a violent pogrom, the Jews of Zubinsk had taken shelter.

This is my will: You shall conduct my injured Sister back to our Haven for succor and healing.

And after an interminable age of pushing through the suspended bodies of the dead, Yehuda Leib saw a glimmer of light ahead.

The hulking shapes of burned-out houses on the outskirts of the Dead City had given quick way to larger buildings—tenements, apartment blocks.

Overhead, the slack laundry lines were hung with clothes that had long since gone to abject tatters in the wind, and snow and refuse blew through street and room indiscriminately.

Through the broken bay windows, once-fine sitting rooms could be seen to molder, sofas and settees disemboweled of their stuffing, oil paintings worn away to filmy nothingness.

All there was within the little sanctum was an empty doorway—battered posts and a lintel—that framed Nothing at All.

Yehuda Leib had never visited a proper yeshiva before, but he had seen the men of Tupik learning in the little study house back home many times.

Rising high up into obscurity on every wall were cases and cases crammed with ancient books: parchment and paper and vellum and bark—even clay and stone.

The Daas HaGanuz, however, brings a rumor that there was a discrepancy in punctuation between the original Ten Commandments destroyed by Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai and the replacements issued by the Holy One, Blessed Be He.

The Daas HaGanuz contends that it is this discrepancy, known only by Moses, that is the beginning of the Dantalion....

“Very well,” said the man, sitting up officiously. “Tell me a secret.”

If you were to tell the first door guard a secret as he requested—any secret at all—then you would be divulging it. This would render it no longer secret, which, in turn, would invalidate your answer.

“...before I admit you to the third chamber,” repeated the ancient door guard, “I must ask you this: In all of your learning and all of your study here, in all the commentaries you’ve studied, the treatises you’ve read, what is the number of secrets that you have learned?”

There were no chairs here, no benches—only a single, battered book sitting open on the table, illuminated in the paltry, flickering candlelight.

Unlike the two preceding door guards, the man beside the candle at the end of the hallway looked young and hale, with only a smattering of patchy brown beard on his cheeks.

It seemed incontrovertible.
The spoon. The answer must be the spoon.

The book was opened, the pen proffered, before Yehuda Leib had a chance to explain.

The large room into which Bluma and Mammon had gone lurked palpably on the other side of the doorway.

The halls were huge, round, identical, and imposing.

The books themselves, in accordance with Dantalion’s aesthetic, were scrupulously uniform, neatly organized, and entirely inscrutable to the unguided, each covered in an identical binding of unmarked brown leather.

The books themselves, in accordance with Dantalion’s aesthetic, were scrupulously uniform, neatly organized, and entirely inscrutable to the unguided, each covered in an identical binding of unmarked brown leather.

There, in the binding, between pages 390 and 391, was a ragged zigzag of torn paper pennants: clear testament to a page ripped out of the book.

To Yehuda Leib, the endless halls of Dantalion were not a massive repository of knowledge—they were simply structures, scrupulously regular terrain.

And why would anyone want to break the window if they were concerned enough to keep the glass from falling? Yehuda Leib could think of only two reasons: that the sound of falling glass might raise an alarm, and that broken glass underfoot could present a dangerous obstacle.
Both of these reasons suggested an intentional incursion.

Every moment stretched to five times its normal length as he strained to glean any usable information from the noise, the shuffle all around him.

The tip of each stake was honed to a treacherously keen point, the outer perimeter of the camp jutting forth like the lower jaw of some needle-toothed predator.

There were no campfires here, no braziers or lanterns or even candles to give light or warmth to the cold soldiers, and as a consequence, the men did not gather, did not huddle together and talk—they stewed and paced and chewed their cheeks, polished and double-checked their weapons, in anticipation of orders that could come at any moment, to fight, fight, fight for their lost lives.

Plinths and pedestals on all sides held up great weapons and trophies of war: Durendal, the sword of Roland; the spear of Lugh; Zulfiqar, the split-bladed scimitar of Ali ibn Abi Talib; even the sling stone that felled the giant Goliath.

...and if you manage to avoid the scavengers, the demons like Lilith who try to divert you from what you ought to be doing, eventually you find yourself bored. Listless.

The rat-faced demon made an ostentatious show of brushing the dust from Yehuda Leib’s coat.

I am Undergeneral Behemoth, chief steward, adjutant, and aide-de-camp to the lord high general.

Firstly, he is called Dumah, which means ‘Silence’ and it is not an arbitrary name. His is the jealous silence, the silence that consumes.

For this reason, I am often called upon to interpret his meaning for those unused to his methods of communication. This fact notwithstanding, it is very important that, while in the lord high general’s presence, you address him directly, and not, as some mistakenly do, me.

As the leader of the Army of the Dead, he is rightly concerned with issues of hierarchy and rank, and he will brook no diminution of his rightful status.