“Gran wanted me to do it,” Maude said, “and it may be the only way I get the answers I need to keep Constance safe. You’d do it for your children, Isaiah.”
“I’d do this for you if I could,” he said and she leaned forward and hugged him tight.
Maude held up the small ruby between her thumb and forefinger. “This part is the true mystery,” she said. “I have no idea why it was hidden and what it means. Gran called it a ‘blood stone’ in the message. I examined it microscopically, and examined its refractive index properties as well. It seems to be a normal small ruby. Beautiful, but ordinary.”
Maude looked up and saw concern line the old man’s face.
“I’ll be okay,” she said. She placed the ruby on her tongue as if it were a pill, uncorked the vial and drained it. The drug tasted bitter and left a metallic, burning sensation in her mouth. The ruby felt as though it were a bubble of liquid now, on her tongue. She swallowed all of it.
“There is a fine line with Datura stramonium between hallucination and delirium,” Maude said. “I may start running a bit of a fever. Try to keep water in me, as best you can. If you think I’ve gone as far as I can go, administer this.” She handed him another corked vial. “It should start neutralizing it pretty quickly. Otherwise I should return to my senses just before dawn.”
Isaiah began to sit but Maude smiled and shook her head. “I’ll be fine. You go. I’m going to meditate. I will call if I need anything.”
“Good hunting,” Isaiah said. “I’ll check in on you in a quarter of an hour.” He stepped out of the room, reluctantly.
Maude began her cleansing breathing as she stared into the flames in the fireplace, and began to feel herself slipping into a trance. Her breathing was deep and even her body was feeling lighter, and her mind began to feel less attached to her body. She felt herself becoming divorced from time as she felt an alien heat, churning, growing, like a furnace of potential and chaos, at the core of her, spreading out through her. White-hot starlight pierced every pore of her body.
She tasted bitter light on her tongue, and the illumination moved through all of her, pulling her sense of self apart like taffy. Maude’s will was immutable cold stone, anchoring part of her mind back to her body, spiking it there. The wildfire running through her, through the crumbling playhouse of her thoughts and memories, left no walls, no polite partitions between present action and halcyon memory.
Maude felt like her body was made of warm wax. She felt cool, silver comfort dribble across her lips and down into her throat and change to steam in the crucible of the sun.
“Please, Miss Maude, drink some more, please, and sit down. It’s been hours, and you’re burning up.” It was Isaiah’s voice, her father’s voice. She was staring into the conflagration at the center of her, scorching her every nerve, her every cell.
The realization came as the inferno roared out of her, a nova exploding, branding her soul, her mind, all that remained of her. Her wax body was melting, going, going, gone. Maude had felt something like this before, but not this intense, this pure, never this degree of sensation, of power. It was the blood, the Blood of Lilith. It was like the initiation ritual from so long ago … or maybe she was still in the initiation ritual, her twenty-one-year-old self looking through the burning light to regard her forty-year-old self.
A powerful feeling of déjà vu, of split perceptions filled Maude. She was her younger self in this moment of frozen, searing time, and she was her present self, and she was … her … hundred-and-fifty? Two-hundred? year-old self, looking back, waving her off.
Old Maude was inside some kind of horseless coach, a car? The word felt odd to her present self, her young self. A young man in a cowboy hat sat beside her, controlling the strange vehicle. It was cool inside the compartment. Music was playing in the air. They were driving through the painfully bright, hot Nevada desert, and she “remembered” they were headed back to Golgotha to stop the humming thing with killing eyes, a thing named Odom Sodd, the manufactured monster that had killed someone so dear to Maude …
“Too far, too soon,” future Maude said, turning toward present Maude while sitting in the car, calling along the pulsing, thrumming line that connected them. “You always did try to overachieve too damn much!”
“I do no such thing, thank you!” present Maude said. “And a woman your age still having those kinds of lascivious feelings and desires is…”
“… the best,” old Maude finished, and reached over to caress the cheek of the handsome young cowboy with sand-colored hair. The cowboy looked over and smiled sweetly at her, and her, and her. It was Jim Negrey, Mutt’s fellow deputy in Golgotha. Older, maybe in his late twenties, with a scruff of three-day beard, but it was Jim.
“Stop your gawking,” future Maude said. “You’re getting lost in your own damn skein. This might never be exactly this way anyway, you pull them too tight and they snap, and leave them too loose, they droop and tangle. Go back. Find the Record. God, was I always so thick?” There was a shout, echoing and muffled like down a tunnel behind her. It sounded like Gran.
“This way, you little wagtail! This way! Follow the blood, follow the line!”
Cool water on her lips, down her throat. A gentle hand brushing the hair out of her eyes and off her hot skin. She looked up and saw Isaiah putting a cool compress to her forehead. She tried to talk but her tongue was too thick.
There was a brilliant white afterimage when Maude closed her eyes. The radiance lessened and detail began to bleed into the light. She was in a library, was it Grande Folly’s? A few yards from the fireplace? It seemed much, much farther away than that. All the books, all the scrolls and papers were connected by strands of milky white light, almost like cobwebs in moonlight. Maude ran her fingers along the threads; they were so soft, silky and fragile, but they did not break when she touched them, stronger than they seemed.
Each strand she touched held a voice, an idea, a thought, and by running her fingers over them, the knowledge and the stories sang to her. It was beautiful, all that history, all those concepts—feelings, failures, lives, loves, misunderstandings, joys, hatreds, unions, wars, triumphs, laughter, disappointments, tears, births—all of the human mosaic trembling in every subtle color of thought. Maude wept as she strummed the threads and listened to humanity sing their songs.
She was in the library just off from the study, she was hot and her body felt thick and odd. The tears on her face were drying on her fevered cheeks. Isaiah was trying to tell her something. He looked so worried, his skin was like crumbling dust before her eyes. He was offering her a glass of water and she drank it down, feeling it spill across her chin and hiss as it hit the cooking flesh of her breasts.
Isaiah offered her a small glass vial, but she looked away for a moment … a year … an eon … and she saw all the threads of the library tangled together, still running through her fingers. They led to a knotted strand of incalculable knowledge and subtle hues that drifted out of the library and down the hall to the front door.
Maude followed the strand. She pushed on the front door and the world broke in a rain of angry, shouting splinters. She held on to the thread and felt the cool grass of the lawn under her feet, damp with dew. The thread thinned, fluttered, and dissolved under her fingertips on the night wind.
She was on the lawn of Grande Folly. Somehow, she had lost her shoes, or had she ever had them? There were fireflies burning, drifting all across the lawn. The last gossamer threads from the library were sailing on the moonlight, falling into the tiny yellow suns that blazed and diminished like the heartbeat, the breath, of creation.
Maude walked into the cold darkness between the stars and stood at the core of the flitting, golden lights. She was walking on the cold black marble of space. She was at the core of the galaxy, the seat of self and other.
“This is the Record,” Gran said. Her buccaneer boots echoing on the cold marble floor, she came into view out of the shadows cast by the chorus of tiny lights. This
version of Gran looked to be Maude’s age, not as young as she had been when she saw her staring before the mirror, nor as old as she had been when Maude met her as a child. “There are very few that can access it. They have different names for it—the Akasha, the Astral, the Smoking Mirror, the Collective Unconsciousness, the Race Memory … the Cloud.” Anne paused. “That last one’s a joke, but you won’t get it for a very long time, lass. We are part of the few that can access the Record, Maude. It is something unique to our bloodline, I think, in part because we have tasted the purest blood of the Mother, far purer than the blood you drank from the Grail.”
“The Blood of Lilith?” Maude said. Circling the room, moving between the pulsing lights.
“The blood gives us access,” Anne said, “but it is dangerous to wander too far into the Record, or your own skein, your own time line. You can get lost here, and then you are lost to the physical world. Your body will wither and die without the mind and soul. The blood is your anchor as well as your passport; even now you can feel it tugging you back to your little island of self.”
“Yes. How can this be, Gran?” Maude asked.
“This is the second initiation,” Gran said. “Most Daughters never learn of it, let alone reach it. You will be able to tap into the Record while still in your skin, access knowledge, learn techniques instantly, not as well as someone who’s mastered them, mind you, but this realm can be an invaluable asset, a treasure trove of discovery. It will take meditation and practice to reach it, remain connected to it. Sometimes, I was able to reach here in desperation, when my life was in danger, but don’t count on that, don’t make it a crutch, it’s fickle. Some traditions of the Daughters focus more on the Record, the mystic, the powers of the mind that the blood can unlock, than others.”
“This is how that Daughter was able to control the butterflies,” Maude said, “and make that Son think she was somewhere else and miss her.”
“Yes,” Anne said. “Her name is Itzel, and her skein is here, as is mine, as is yours. Every Daughter of Lilith is connected here, bound by the blood inside us.”
“This is how one Daughter just ‘knows’ what another one has learned how to do,” Maude said, placing her hand close to one of the tiny glowing lights. “We’re all connected here.”
“It’s a very dodgy connection,” Anne said, “and most of the Daughters only access it without even being aware they are doing so. Just a feeling, an instinct, just knowing something.”
Anne saw a look cross Maude’s face. “Don’t spend all your time trying to get in here, girl! This library is too big even for you, little bookworm.” Anne smiled at Maude. “This place is a memorial, and a tool, but it’s not a home, nor a place to dwell all the time with the dead. Remember, Maudie, life is for living.”
“Is this what’s been harming Constance?” Maude asked. “Do those dreams she’s been having come from here?”
“In part,” Anne said. “She’s of our bloodline, so the connection is stronger for her, and she’s been infected with its blood too. That’s what’s slowly driving the poor girl mad.”
“Whose blood?” Maude asked. “The Great Wurm, that thing in the mines back in Golgotha?”
Maude was in the silver-floored well room in the Argent Mine now. Reliving the rumbling of the unfathomable beast shaking the world apart as it awoke, as it freed itself. Constance lying before her, with eyes of bleeding ink. Maude put the ancient iron flask to her daughter’s lips and fed her the same burning, powerful, alien blood that Maude had drunk long ago, the moon blood of the first woman, the first rebel, Lilith.
“Focus.” Gran’s voice was almost like a slap. Maude was back in the Record, the floor of cold space, the drifting lights.
“You did the right thing, giving her a drink from the Grail,” Anne said. “It was the only thing that could save her. The two bloods are constantly at war inside of her, poor child. The only way she can have peace is to surrender to one of them, the Mother or the Wurm. Either one would mean she’d lose herself in the process, forever.”
“I’m so sorry I destroyed the flask, the Grail, Gran,” Maude said. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“You trusted your gut and your gut did right by you,” Anne said. “What you did, giving the last of the Mother’s blood to seal the breach and heal the world of the Wurm’s poison, it was meant to be—Lilith’s will sent to you through the Record. You did good, lass. I always knew you would, Maude.”
“Lilith?” Maude said. “The real Lilith is in here?”
“That’s a simple question with a complicated answer,” Anne said. “Is the ocean in every drop of water?” The tiny lights of the Record drifted, darkened and then pulsed back to life again. Something was wrong, somewhere. Maude felt something distracting her.
“Those men who tried to take Constance, the Sons,” Maude said, “they said she was the Grail, now. What does that mean?”
Anne sighed. “That’s … a bit more complicated, too, luv. Games within games, lies to hide other lies to reach a truth. Schemes and plots, traps and counter-traps. I wish it weren’t this way, but it is. It’s the Mother’s will being worked in her own design. Constance’s blood is … changing. In a way, she is becoming the Mother, just as the Wurm wants to use her body as its agency in the world. Those of the Blood of the Wurm cannot enter the city of monsters, they are held in check by powerful wards, old magic, first magic. There’s more to it than that, and so much trickery. I’m truly sorry your girl is at the center of all of it, Maude. Constance is the king in this game of chess—the endgame—but you, you, Maudie, you’re the queen, the spoiler, the one they won’t see coming.”
There was a strong tug in the center of Maude’s being, along the cord of fire that led back to her mortal shell. Maude tried to ignore it.
“Who are the Sons, Gran?” Maude asked.
The tug was stronger, more insistent. Her body wanted something, needed something, desperately. Maude ignored it again.
“I told you that’s not good for you, lass,” Anne said. “You can’t stay in here and lose yourself in the process.”
“Who are they?” Maude said. “Why didn’t you tell me about them, prepare me?” The sensations, the details of the Record, were beginning to wash out, into directionless light. She focused on Gran, even as the sound was being washed out in the radiance. She tasted coppery acid in her mouth, burning her throat. She was feeling her body again. It felt horrid.
“The Sons!” Maude screamed. “They want to hurt my girl. Please, Gran!”
“It was my fool pride, girl.” Anne’s fading voice said. “I thought I had dealt with the old bastard forever, that no one would ever have to fear him again. I was wrong. I’m sorry, luv. I failed you there. Remember your way back here,” Anne shouted. It sounded like a whisper. “They are the Sons of Typhon, his children, as we are Lilith’s.”
“Typhon,” Maude muttered.
“Typhon,” Anne said. “Birthed of the Great Olde Wurm, nightmare given flesh…” Maude was feeling her face against something wet that was poking it, her body was a lead weight dragging her down, back to a much less simple place, a much less ordered place. “… Tulpa,” Anne said, her fading voice drowned out by the thudding of blood in Maude’s ears. “… Father of Monsters, enemy of all life, husband to Lilith…”
“What?” Maude said.
Her eyes fluttered open. She was on the lawn of Grande Folly. It was still dark. Her whole body felt as though it were made of liquid lead, especially her skull. There was a horrible, bitter taste in her mouth. All she wanted to do was drink a lake full of cold water and sleep in a soft bed for a week. Irregular flashbacks from the drug were still making time and space seem jerky and loose. Maude felt like she was not fully fitted back into the regular continuity of the universe. It was a disjointed, broken feeling. She hoped real sleep would dispel it.
She staggered up the front steps to the shattered oak front door. Had she done that? She vaguely recalled wanting outside, but
she couldn’t hang on to the memory; it was slippery. She stepped into the hall, and shuffled toward the study.
Isaiah was lying on the floor, his blood soaking into the expensive rug. There were men, many men standing in the shadows of the room; the drug’s aftershocks made them seem like they were born of shadow themselves. A tall, lanky man in a threadbare and unstylish cut of suit stood before the hearth. The fire was out; only dying, orange embers remained.
The man turned. His face was … wrong. His green eyes, his mouth … just not right entirely. For a shuddering second, the drug tore away his veneer, his body, as if a magician were ripping a cloth off a covered box with a flourish. What Maude saw in that second was an endless thing, an ocean of writhing, twisting tentacles, a legion of hungry mouths, a hulking obscenity. Then the man façade was back, reality was back, but Maude knew that what she had seen was this thing’s true face.
“The door was open,” Typhon said. “I let myself in.”
23
The Five of Wands
Charleston, South Carolina
May 23, 1871
Martin heard the shout from his bedroom. It was Greene, his butler, and then he heard Miss Applewhite screaming. He climbed out of bed, groaning a bit from the exertion, and retrieved his revolver out of his bedside table drawer. He made his way to the stairs and then down.
“Whoever you are, you won’t get away with this!” Miss Applewhite said. She was being held by a masked man, who was actually a bit shorter than the governess, one of a group of five masked intruders in the parlor. Greene was on the floor, unmoving, a rolling pin in the butler’s hand, obviously a hastily grabbed weapon. Miss Anhorn was still on the loveseat, breathing but unconscious. Constance was nowhere to be seen. Martin stepped into view and cocked the short barreled .32 revolver as he aimed at the tallest of the masked men.
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