by Mike Ashley
“Ahhh.” He smiled knowingly.
Then all the centuries of futility and failure, of striving for first a victory and then a peace I knew was not there to be found, collapsed down upon me like a massive barbiturate crash, and I felt the darkness descend to sink its claws in my shoulders. “Merlin, the world is dying.”
He didn’t look concerned. “Oh?”
“Listen, did my people teach you anything about cybernetics? Feedback mechanisms? Well, never mind. The earth—” I gestured as if holding it cupped in my palm—” is like a living creature. Some say that it is a living creature, the only one, and all life, ourselves included, only component parts. Forget I said that. The important thing is that the earth creates and maintains a delicate balance of gases, temperatures and pressures that all life relies on for survival. If this balance were not maintained, the whole system would cycle out of control and . . . well, die. Us along with it.” His eyes were unreadable, dark with fossil prejudices. I needed another drink. “I’m not explaining this very well.”
“I follow you better than you think.”
“Good. Now, you know about pollution? Okay, well now it seems that there’s some that may not be reversible. You see what that means? A delicate little wisp of the atmosphere is being eaten away, and not replaced. Radiation intake increases. Meanwhile, atmospheric pollutants prevent reradiation of greater and greater amounts of infrared; total heat absorption goes up. The forests begin to die. Each bit of damage influences the whole, and leads to more damage. Earth is not balancing the new influences. Everything is cycling out of control, like a cancer.
“Merlin, I’m on the ropes. I’ve tried everything I can think of, and I’ve failed. The political obstacles to getting anything done are beyond belief. The world is dying, and I can’t save it.”
He looked at me as if I were crazy.
I drained my drink. “’Scuse me,” I said. “Got to hit up in the men’s room.”
In the john I got out the snuffbox and fed myself some sense of wonder. I heard a thrill of distant flutes as it iced my head with artificial calm, and I straightened slightly as the vultures on my shoulders stirred and then flapped away. They would be back, I knew. They always were.
I returned, furious with buzzing energy. Merlin was talking quietly to Shikra, a hand on her knee. “Let’s go,” I said. “This place is getting old.”
We took Passayunk Avenue west, deep into the refineries, heading for no place in particular. A kid in an old Trans Am, painted flat black inside and out, rebel flag flying from the antenna, tried to pass me on the right. I floored the accelerator, held my nose ahead of his, and forced him into the exit lane. Brakes screaming, he drifted away. Asshole. We were surrounded by the great tanks and cracking towers now. To one side, I could make out six smoky flames, waste gases being burnt off in gouts a dozen feet long.
“Pull in there!” Merlin said abruptly, gripping my shoulder and pointing. “Up ahead, where the gate is.”
“Getty Gas isn’t going to let us wander around in their refinery farm.”
“Let me take care of that.” The wizard put his forefingers together, twisted his mouth and bit through his tongue; I heard his teeth snap together. He drew his fingertips apart – it seemed to take all his strength – and the air grew tense. Carefully, he folded open his hands, and then spat blood into the palms. The blood glowed of its own light, and began to bubble and boil. Shikra leaned almost into its steam, grimacing with excitement. When the blood was gone, Merlin closed his hands again and said, “It is done.”
The car was suddenly very silent. The traffic about us made no noise; the wheels spun soundlessly on the pavement. The light shifted to a melange of purples and reds, colour dopplering away from the centre of the spectrum. I felt a pervasive queasiness, as if we were moving at enormous speeds in an unperceived direction. My inner ear spun when I turned my head. “This is the wizard’s world,” Merlin said. “It is from here that we draw our power. There’s our turn.”
I had to lock brakes and spin the car about to keep from overshooting the gate. But the guards in their little hut, though they were looking straight at us, didn’t notice. We drove by them, into a busy tangle of streets and accessways servicing the refineries and storage tanks. There was a nineteenth-century factory town hidden at the foot of the structures, brick warehouses and utility buildings ensnarled in metal, as if caught midway in a transformation from City to Machine. Pipes big enough to stand in looped over the road in sets of three or eight, nightmare vines that detoured over and around the worn brick buildings. A fat indigo moon shone through the clouds.
“Left.” We passed an old metre house with gables, arched windows and brickwork ornate enough for a Balkan railroad station. Workmen were unloading reels of electric cable on the loading dock, forklifting them inside. “Right.” Down a narrow granite block road we drove by a gothic-looking storage tank as large as a cathedral and buttressed by exterior struts with diamond-shaped cutouts. These were among the oldest structures in Point Breeze, left over from the early days of massive construction, when the industrialists weren’t quite sure what they had hold of, but suspected it might be God. “Stop,” Merlin commanded, and I pulled over by the earth-and-cinder containment dike. We got out of the car, doors slamming silently behind us. The road was gritty underfoot. The rich smell of hydrocarbons saturated the air. Nothing grew here, not so much as a weed. I nudged a dead pigeon with the toe of my shoe.
“Hey, what’s this shit?” Shikra pointed at a glimmering grey line running down the middle of the road, cool as ice in its feverish surround. I looked at Merlin’s face. The skin was flushed and I could see through it to a manically detailed lacework of tiny veins. When he blinked, his eyes peered madly through translucent flesh.
“It’s the track of the groundstar,” Merlin said. “In China, or so your paperbacks tell me, such lines are called lung mei, the path of the dragon.”
The name he gave the track of slugsilver light reminded me that all of Merlin’s order called themselves Children of the Sky. When I was a child an Ambrosian had told me that such lines interlaced all lands, and that an ancient race had raised stones and cairns on their interstices, each one dedicated to a specific star (and held to stand directly beneath that star) and positioned in perfect scale to one another, so that all of Europe formed a continent-wide map of the sky in reverse.
“Son of lies,” Merlin said. “The time has come for there to be truth between us. We are not natural allies, and your cause is not mine.” He gestured up at the tank to one side, the clusters of cracking towers, bright and phallic to the other. “Here is the triumph of my Collegium. Are you blind to the beauty of such artifice? This is the living and true symbol of Mankind victorious, and Nature lying helpless and broken at his feet – would you give it up? Would you have us again at the mercy of wolves and tempests, slaves to fear and that which walks the night?”
“For the love of pity, Merlin. If the earth dies, then mankind dies too!”
“I am not afraid of death,” Merlin said. “And if I do not fear mine, why should I dread that of others?” I said nothing. “But do you really think there will be no survivors? I believe the race will continue beyond the death of lands and oceans, in closed and perfect cities or on worlds built by art alone. It has taken the wit and skill of billions to create the technologies that can free us from dependence on earth. Let us then thank the billions, not throw away their good work.”
“Very few of those billions would survive,” I said miserably, knowing that this would not move him. “A very small elite, at best.”
The old devil laughed. “So. We understand each other better now. I had dreams too, before you conspired to have me sealed in a cave. But our aims are not incompatible; my ascendancy does not require that the world die. I will save it, if that is what you wish.” He shrugged as he said it as if promising an inconsequential, a trifle.
“And in return?”
His brows met like thunderstorms coming
together; his eyes were glints of frozen lightning beneath. The man was pure theatre. “Mordred, the time has come for you to serve. Arthur served me for the love of righteousness; but you are a patricide and cannot be trusted. You must be bound to me, my will your will, my desires yours, your very thoughts owned and controlled. You must become my familiar.”
I closed my eyes, lowered my head. “Done.”
He owned me now.
We walked the granite block roadway towards the line of cool silver. Under a triple arch of sullen crimson pipes, Merlin abruptly turned to Shikra and asked, “Are you bleeding?”
“Say what?”
“Setting an egg,” I explained. She looked blank. What the hell did the kids say nowadays? “On the rag. That time of month.”
She snorted. “No.” And, “You afraid to say the word menstruation? Carl Jung would’ve had fun with you.”
“Come.” Merlin stepped on the dragon track, and I followed, Shikra after me. The instant my feet touched the silver path, I felt a compulsion to walk, as if the track were moving my legs beneath me. “We must stand in the heart of the groundstar to empower the binding ceremony.” Far, far ahead, I could see a second line cross ours; they met not in a cross but in a circle. “There are requirements: We must approach the place of power on foot, and speaking only the truth. For this reason I ask that you and your bodyguard say as little as possible. Follow, and I will speak of the genesis of kings.
“I remember – listen carefully, for this is important – a stormy night long ago, when a son was born to Uther, then King and bearer of the dragon pennant. The mother was Igraine, wife to the Duke of Tintagel, Uther’s chief rival and a man who, if the truth be told, had a better claim to the crown than Uther himself. Uther begot the child on Igraine while the duke was yet alive, then killed the duke, married the mother, and named that son Arthur. It was a clever piece of statecraft, for Arthur thus had a twofold claim to the throne, that of his true and also his nominal father. He was a good politician, Uther, and no mistake.
“Those were rough and unsteady times, and I convinced the king his son would be safest raised anonymously in a holding distant from the strife of civil war. We agreed he should be raised by Ector, a minor knight and very distant relation. Letters passed back and forth. Oaths were sworn. And on a night, the babe was wrapped in cloth of gold and taken by two lords and two ladies outside of the castle, where I waited disguised as a beggar. I accepted the child, turned and walked into the woods.
“And once out of sight of the castle, I strangled the brat.”
I cried aloud in horror.
“I buried him in the loam, and that was the end of Uther’s line. Some way farther in was a woodcutter’s hut, and there were horses waiting there, and the wetnurse I had hired for my own child.”
“What was the kid’s name?” Shikra asked.
“I called him Arthur,” Merlin said. “It seemed expedient. I took him to a priest who baptized him, and thence to Sir Ector, whose wife suckled him. And in time my son became king, and had a child whose name was Mordred, and in time this child killed his own father. I have told this story to no man or woman before this night. You are my grandson, Mordred, and this is the only reason I have not killed you outright.”
We had arrived. One by one we entered the circle of light.
It was like stepping into a blast furnace. Enormous energies shot up through my body, and filled my lungs with cool, painless flame. My eyes overflowed with light: I looked down and the ground was a devious tangle of silver lines, like a printed circuit multiplied by a kaleidoscope. Shikra and the wizard stood at the other two corners of an equilateral triangle, burning bright as gods. Outside our closed circle, the purples and crimsons had dissolved into a blackness so deep it stirred uneasily, as if great shapes were acrawl in it.
Merlin raised his arms. Was he to my right or left? I could not tell, for his figure shimmered, shifting sometimes into Shikra’s, sometimes into my own, leaving me staring at her breasts, my eyes. He made an extraordinary noise, a groan that rose and fell in strong but unmetred cadence. It wasn’t until he came to the antiphon that I realized he was chanting plainsong. It was a crude form of music – the Gregorian was codified slightly after his day – but one that brought back a rush of memories, of ceremonies performed to the beat of wolfskin drums, and of the last night of boyhood before my mother initiated me into the adult mysteries.
He stopped. “In this ritual, we must each give up a portion of our identities. Are you prepared for that?” He was matter-of-fact, not at all disturbed by our unnatural environment, the consummate technocrat of the occult.
“Yes,” I said.
“Once the bargain is sealed, you will not be able to go against its terms. Your hands will not obey you if you try, your eyes will not see that which offends me, your ears will not hear the words of others, your body will rebel against you. Do you understand?”
“Yes .” Shikra was swaying slightly in the uprushing power, humming to herself. It would be easy to lose oneself in that psychic blast of force.
“You will be more tightly bound than slave ever was. There will be no hope of freedom from your obligation, not ever. Only death will release you. Do you understand?”
“Ye s .”
The old man resumed his chant. I felt as if the back of my skull were melting and my brain softening and yeasting out into the filthy air. Merlin’s words sounded louder now, booming within my bones. I licked my lips, and smelled the rotting flesh of his cynicism permeating my hindbrain. Sweat stung down my sides on millipede feet. He stopped.
“I will need blood,” said Merlin. “Hand me your knife, child.” Shikra looked my way, and I nodded. Her eyes were vague, half-mesmerized. One hand rose. The knife materialized in it. She waved it before her, fascinated by the coloured trails it left behind, the way it pricked sparks from the air, crackling transient energies that rolled along the blade and leapt away to die, then held it out to Merlin.
Numbed by the strength of the man’s will, I was too late realizing what he intended. Merlin stepped forward to accept the knife. Then he took her chin in hand and pushed it back, exposing her long, smooth neck.
“Hey!” I lunged forward, and the light rose up blindingly. Merlin chopped the knife high, swung it down in a flattening curve. Sparks stung through ionized air. The knife giggled and sang.
I was too late. The groundstar fought me, warping up underfoot in a narrowing cone that asymptotically fined down to a slim line yearning infinitely outward toward its unseen patron star. I flung out an arm and saw it foreshorten before me, my body flattening, ribs splaying out in extended fans to either side, stretching tautly vectored membranes made of less than nothing. Lofted up, hesitating, I hung timeless a nanosecond above the conflict and knew it was hopeless, that I could never cross that unreachable centre. Beyond our faint circle of warmth and life, the outer darkness was in motion, mouths opening in the void.
But before the knife could taste Shikra’s throat, she intercepted it with an outhrust hand. The blade transfixed her palm, and she yanked down, jerking it free of Merlin’s grip. Faster than eye could follow, she had the knife in her good hand and – the keen thrill of her smile! – stabbed low into his groin.
The wizard roared in an ecstasy of rage. I felt the skirling agony of the knife as it pierced him. He tried to seize the girl, but she danced back from him. Blood rose like serpents from their wounds, twisting upward and swept away by unseen currents of power. The darkness stooped and banked, air bulging inward, and for an instant I held all the cold formless shapes in my mind and I screamed in terror. Merlin looked up and stumbled backward, breaking the circle.
And all was normal.
We stood in the shadow of an oil tank, under normal evening light, the sound of traffic on Passayunk a gentle background surf. The groundstar had disappeared, and the dragon lines with it. Merlin was clutching his manhood, blood oozing between his fingers. When he straightened, he did so slowly, painfully.
>
Warily, Shikra eased up from her fighter’s crouch. By degrees she relaxed, then hid away her weapon. I took out my handkerchief and bound up her hand. It wasn’t a serious wound; already the flesh was closing.
For a miracle, the snuffbox was intact. I crushed a crumb on the back of a thumbnail, did it up. A muscle in my lower back was trembling. I’d been up days too long. Shikra shook her head when I offered her some, but Merlin extended a hand and I gave him the box. He took a healthy snort and shuddered.
“I wish you’d told me what you intended,” I said. “We could have worked something out. Something else out.”
“I am unmade,” Merlin groaned. “Your hireling has destroyed me as a wizard.”
It was as a politician that he was needed, but I didn’t point that out. “Oh come on, a little wound like that. It’s already stopped bleeding.”
“No,” Shikra said. “You told me that a magician’s power is grounded in his mental somatype, remember? So a wound to his generative organs renders him impotent on symbolic and magical levels as well. That’s why I tried to lop his balls off.” She winced and stuck her injured hand under its opposite arm. “Shit, this sucker stings!”
Merlin stared. He’d caught me out in an evil he’d not thought me capable of “You’ve taught this . . . chit the inner mysteries of my tradition? In the name of all that the amber rose represents, why?”