Three weeks after the Arabs arrived, he made plans to return to Paris.
"Make it London," Saladin said in response to his decision. "It would be more convenient for me."
Aubrey closed his eyes with exasperation. "Difficult to believe as this may be, Saladin, my main concern is not with your convenience. If you must know, your friends..."
Saladin laughed. "They are not my friends, darling boy, and I know they aren't yours. Let's call them relatives." He turned his hands palms up. "A necessary evil, eh? Besides, they may be of some use to you in the future."
"To me? What on earth would I want with them?"
Saladin shrugged. "What does one do with a virtual army of men who will obey one's every command?" He placed his hand on Aubrey's shoulder. "I have designated you as my heir. After I'm gone, their fealty will be to you and you alone."
Despite the fact that he could think of no circumstance whatever in which he would require the services of Saladin's noisy relatives, Aubrey felt oddly touched. "Why have you chosen me?" he asked.
Saladin laughed. "If I'd chosen one of them, the poor devil would have his throat cut within the week!"
Aubrey swallowed. "In that case, I may have to decline the honor."
"Oh, they wouldn't kill you." Saladin smiled. "Unless you let them." He cracked his knuckles. "You need to learn about power."
"Power? I hope you're not suggesting I become a politician."
"Real power, Aubrey. The power to manipulate not only men, but the universe itself. To master the laws of nature and defy them. To live, perhaps, forever."
Aubrey's eyebrows knitted together in an amused grimace. "Are you saying that's what it will take to control your relations?"
"I am not joking!" Saladin roared, his whole being transformed in an instant into something terrifying. Aubrey reeled backward involuntarily. "I am talking about magic," the older man said between clenched teeth.
"Magic... I see." Inwardly, Aubrey made a note to leave the house for the airport as soon as humanly possible. He would buy whatever clothing he needed in Paris: "If you'll excuse me for a moment—"
Like the talons of a great bird of prey, Saladin's hands snaked out with lightning-fast speed to grab Aubrey's shirt collar. The young man emitted a brief, horrified cry.
Saladin laughed uproariously. "What did you think I would do? Stalk you through the boutiques of Paris?"
"I... what... I..." Aubrey cleared his throat and straightened his shirt. "Stalk me where?"
"You were thinking of clothes shopping, weren't you? Of fleeing this place because I am obviously mad, and probably dangerous?"
The young man's mouth fell open. "You knew what I was thinking?"
Saladin sniffed. "That was nothing."
"It wasn't nothing. You may have guessed that I wanted to leave, but there was no way you could have known about the clothes.” He frowned. “What else can you do?"
The tall man smiled, seductively as a woman. "My boy, you have no idea," he said. "Sit down."
Aubrey eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then complied with a sigh. Saladin was no doubt going to try to talk him into keeping his dreadful relatives while he pranced off to London. "You know, I'd rather not—"
Saladin waved him down gently. "Tell me, Aubrey, what do you wish for most?"
"I beg your pardon?" Aubrey asked wearily.
"It was a simple enough question. What do you want out of life?"
It took a moment for him to answer. "I don't know, really. To paint, I suppose."
"You suppose?"
Aubrey made a noncommittal gesture.
"Come now. Surely even a spoiled princeling like you has dreams. Isn't there anything—anything in the entire spectrum of human achievement—that you truly desire?"
Aubrey felt the carpet with the toe of his shoe.
"To be a famous artist?" Saladin prodded. "A celebrity? A genius, perhaps?"
Aubrey looked up and smiled shyly, scratching the end of his nose. "That sounds awfully pompous."
Saladin shrugged. "It doesn't matter how it sounds. I only asked what you wanted."
"Just what are you getting at?"
"Is that your wish?" Saladin pressed. "To be a genius artist of great renown?"
"All right, damn it, yes!"
"Ah."
"I do hope there's some point to this line of—"
"Would you sell your soul for it?"
Aubrey laughed. "What?"
Saladin gazed into his eyes. "I asked if you would sell your soul to get your wish," he repeated slowly.
"Sell my soul? You mean to the devil?"
"Devils. There are more than one. But you would sell it to me."
Aubrey laughed again. "How bizarre."
"Is it?"
"What would you want with my soul, anyway? Provided I had one, that is."
"Oh, you have one. I would make an offering of it."
"To this vast array of demons you speak of."
"Yes." He grinned. "It would increase my own power. And it would initiate you."
"Initiate. As an artist and a devil."
"Umm. Do you agree?"
Aubrey rolled his eyes. "Why not," he said, rising. "You hereby have my soul. Now, about your relatives . . ."
"You won't ever have to worry about them again," Saladin said cryptically. "Go clean yourself up." Saladin placed a long bony hand on the young man's back. "I'm going to bring you into my life."
Aubrey hadn't thought much about where they were going—to dinner, perhaps, or to one of Tangier's famous if clandestine pleasure houses, though it was difficult to imagine Saladin taking pleasure in any mundane way. He refused to operate a telephone or drive a car. He never flushed a toilet, leaving the servants in the villa to follow, grumbling, after him. He expected them to bathe him as well, and dress him each morning. Aubrey could only imagine what a woman would think of his troublesome mentor.
And so he was dismayed when they entered not an elegant nightspot surrounded by bouganvillea and open to the stars, but a seamy dive in the old section of the city, where a one-eyed man opened the door to them and led them to a dirty table in a smoke-filled room.
The waiter brought them whiskeys. Aubrey's glass had some crusty substance dried onto its rim. He pushed it away in distaste. "I hadn't thought this would be the sort of place you liked to frequent," he said grimly.
Saladin only smiled. The two whiskeys sat silently unattended as Saladin looked slowly over the room. After a few minutes, the one-eyed man nodded from a faraway corner. Saladin rose.
"We've been announced," he said.
"To whom?" Aubrey was thinking that there was no one in the room he would even remotely like to meet.
"You'll see."
He led the way through the crowd of thieves and smugglers to a narrow door beneath a stairwell. As they passed through it into the darkness, Aubrey hadn't a clue what to expect—a Middle Eastern speakeasy, perhaps, or an opium den complete with wizened Chinese men smoking hookahs. But he was not prepared for what he saw.
The room was a cavern, with thousands of candles burning from tiny clefts of rock, dotting the dark chamber with eerie, wavering flames. In the center stood twelve men dressed in long black robes with hoods pulled over their faces. They were still as statues, and utterly silent.
Aubrey fell back while Saladin strode forward in measured steps. As he approached the men, one of them produced a black robe similar to the others and held it out for Saladin, who raised his arms and allowed himself to be dressed. The final touch was a large silver pentagram suspended on a chain. As this was placed over Saladin's head, the monks—which was how Aubrey had come to think of them—took up a chant.
The music was droning, like the buzzing of bees, its cadences rising and falling in rhythm almost like the Gregorian chants or those of the Russian Orthodox Church, yet this music held none of the serenity of any sacred liturgy Aubrey had ever heard. These sounds were disturbing in the same way Saladin's paintings were dist
urbing—dissonant, angular, frightening, irresistibly compelling. They sang in a language Aubrey had never heard, a mellifluous tongue with neither the harsh gutturals of Arabic nor the explosive tongued sounds of the Romance languages. Just listening to the unknown words chanted in their musical singsong brought to mind visions of ancient and secret rituals. As the chant grew in intensity and volume, Saladin took his place, not with the group, but standing in front of it. The others parted to form a vee with him at its apex.
He positioned himself directly in front of Aubrey and offered his hand. Smiling nervously, thinking that this must be some extravagant joke, Aubrey took it.
Saladin led him toward a low dais made of black onyx on which rested a large silver chalice. Two of the monks knelt before the chalice and lifted it toward the initiate.
"Drink it," Saladin said.
After a moment's hesitation, Aubrey accepted the vessel and drained its contents. It was wine, of a high quality, but with an aftertaste of bitterness.
"You've put something in it," he said. To his astonishment, his words were already sounding garbled, thick as bubbles made of honey, while the chant continued in the background. "What are you..."
He swooned. Several of the monks caught him before he fell. As his eyes struggled to open, they undressed him, then stood him naked upon the dais.
The chant felt like a tangible presence, enveloping him, holding him upright. In his narrowed vision Aubrey saw the music weave like silk scarves among the candles and the covered, faceless heads of the monks. The music and its words, the perfect, indecipherable yet oddly familiar words rose steadily, again and again, dancing like dark creatures. And then, more prominent than anything else in the cavern, were Saladin's eyes.
You are soulless, they said to him.
Despite his drugged state, Aubrey felt a small frisson of fear roll up his spine.
Don't resist the darkness. Embrace it. Swallow it whole. It will comfort you.
Sweat trickled down the side of Aubrey's face.
Now you must become death. Saladin's eyes grew to fill up Aubrey's entire vista. They were hypnotic, luminous. They spoke to a part of his mind that had never before been used, opening it like a maidenhead. To harness the powers of the dark gods, you must make them submit to your will. You must become Thanatos, bringer of chaos, who breathes fear and fire and snuffs out life with a touch of his hands. Thanatos, supreme god of death.
"Thanatos," Aubrey repeated slowly. "I am... Thanatos."
Yes.
"Yes," Aubrey groaned.
I am death.
"I am death," he breathed.
I am the power.
"The power..." He felt the surrounding darkness enter him with an almost sexual penetration, and with it came the realization that he had been longing for this darkness all his life.
It was why he had loved Saladin's art from the time he first saw those terrifying canvasses. Saladin had known the great hidden truth, that somewhere within the horror of death was the power of the universe. Ordinary people avoided the power, feared it, and thus were at its mercy. Only by grasping death with one's whole spirit could a man overcome his fear. And once that fear was overcome, the power of death entered into his own body like the spirits of the dark gods themselves.
"I am death," he said, this time of his own accord. He became aware of his nakedness, and reveled in it. The sinews of his body stood out like ropes in the flickering light. His organ swelled, erect.
"Thanatos," Saladin said aloud.
Rising out of, the monks' chant came the word again: "Thanatos."
In the newly opened corner of his mind, Aubrey realized with absolute certainty what he wanted above all other things. Not to be an artist or a celebrity, although those things would come to him. What he truly wanted was this. To be here, wallowing in the thick power of the dark, to live in the forbidden zone of existence.
"Thanatos," he repeated.
One of the monks approached the initiate holding a spitting black cat. Another presented him with a curved dagger. Aubrey picked up the cold blade slowly, clutching it so hard that it drew his own blood. Then, with one quick stroke, he disemboweled the creature, screaming as he struck so that his voice and the agonized wail of the dying animal melded into one sound, feeling its blood caress him with the touch of a lover.
And the chant droned on. "Thanatos," Saladin whispered.
"Thanatos," sang the monks.
Aubrey's eyes rolled back in his head. "Thanatos!" he shouted, and he felt the power surge through him like molten metal.
"Yes," Saladin answered softly. "You understand." With the cat's blood he traced a pentacle on Aubrey's forehead, and the young man fell to his knees in ecstasy.
When the ritual was ended, the monks parted again. A slab of rock covering a hole in the far wall was removed, and Aubrey walked out into an alley in the back of the building. He was alone in the night, and reborn. He found a woman among the lowest ranks of beggars, and had her for twenty dirham in the darkened doorway of a tumbledown building.
She was young, perhaps fifteen, although her teeth were already sparse. Her hair had been uncombed for days, and her arms were crusted with dirt. When Aubrey finished with her, she pulled herself up off the ground, clutching the coins in one hand, and loped down the alleyway, looking back once at the handsome young man who obviously had enough money for the high-priced bordellos.
She should not have looked back. For in that single glance Aubrey saw the girl's true heart, her longing for a better life, her hope. The hope sparked a fire in him that caused him to gasp aloud. In the instant of that glance, Aubrey was transported back to the stone chamber thick with the smell of the dead cat's blood. He heard the animal's wails as it struggled to hold onto the precious life that was leaving it with each beat of its heart. The girl's eyes held hope, and Thanatos had the power to take every last shred of it away.
With a spurt of energy he had not known he possessed, Aubrey sprang away from the stone wall and with two strides caught the girl by the arm. She turned toward him, smiling nervously at him through her mottled teeth while she hid the coins she'd earned behind her back. Aubrey grasped her by her hair. Then, hearing the chant of the black magicians drumming in his ears, he coiled the long black strands of hair into his fist and, as the girl began to scream, yanked her toward him with a violent tug that snapped the girl's neck.
At the moment of her death, Aubrey felt a satisfaction he had never imagined. He was Thanatos. He was death incarnate.
At dawn he walked back to the villa and began to paint.
Chapter Seven
The effect of the power on his work was immediate and startling. For the first time, his paintings were no longer a talented imitation of Saladin's, but branched into a direction that was his alone. Aubrey's lines were harder than Saladin's, his colors more vivid; and in the trapped, enclosed spaces between the tortured lines was the essence of the fear he had embraced with such love and awe on the night of his initiation into the dark world.
He painted all day and into the night without food or rest. In the evening, Saladin came into his studio wearing his customary robe and holding a glass of wine. "You smell like a woman," he said, sniffing with distaste. He flicked a finger at the oils Aubrey had finished. "These are better."
Aubrey put down his brush. His hands were shaking. "Saladin, I . . ." He swallowed. "Last night I killed someone."
Saladin looked up from the painting for a moment, then down again, smiling. "Have you developed a taste for murder, after all?" he asked.
Aubrey sat on the floor against a wall. "Is that all you can say?"
Saladin raised his eyebrows. "Should I say something else? You were the one who did the killing."
"Yes, you're right," Aubrey said numbly.
"Do you feel remorseful? Is that the problem?"
"Well, naturally..." He slumped forward, resting his chin on his arms. "Actually I don't. That's just it. I don't feel anything at all. I barely remember any
thing, except perhaps..." He swallowed. "... how enjoyable it was."
Saladin grinned. "Indeed. An uncommon pleasure." He lowered himself into a chair and sipped his wine.
"Even when I broke her neck, all I could think of was the chanting from last night, that strange music."
"Lovely, wasn't it? Egyptian, Nineteenth Dynasty."
"What did you do to me?" Aubrey wailed miserably.
"I? My dear boy—"
"I feel as if, between one day and the next, my life has changed completely. As if I've suddenly become this monstrous, amoral creature."
"And so you have," Saladin said, picking up a magazine and leafing through it. "You've given up your soul."
Aubrey sat in stunned silence. "You were serious."
"Of course I was. And so were you. Otherwise, you wouldn't be painting now."
"Then my wish—"
"You'll become a great artist, Aubrey," he said reassuringly. "And a famous one."
Aubrey stared ahead sullenly. "I might have done that anyway."
"It's rather late to have second thoughts about that, isn't it?" He laid the magazine on his lap. "Put some yellow in the upper right quadrant," he said, gesturing impatiently toward the abstract oil on the easel. "The balance is off."
Aubrey tapped his fingers to his lips, thinking. "Exactly what does it mean to lose one's soul?"
"Not much," Saladin answered. "Until you die."
"What happens then?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"According to the magicians with whom I studied, one forfeits any life after this one, and therefore the opportunity to perfect oneself." He shrugged.
"That doesn't seem like a very high price to pay," Aubrey said, feeling better.
"My sentiments exactly. No choirs of angels with harps, no fellows with pitchforks, no coming back as a snake or a tree or a one-armed beggar. Just one jolly, self-indulgent life, and then..." He held out his empty hands. "Nothing."
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