Thoth, the Atlantean

by Brendan Carroll

  They walked along the broad walls of the bastion overlooking the forest and steep cliffs below. The afternoon breeze blew his long black hair back and caused the silver ornaments he had entwined in it to jingle and jangle. His golden earring sparkled in the last rays of the setting sun.

  He stopped on the very edge of the stone wall and shaded his eyes against the orange-red glare of the sun.

  “These mortal creatures have accomplished great feats, Abaddon,” he spoke with reverence of the imposing ruin on which he stood. “The King who built this structure was a man of great power in his short reign of glory. I have learned much in studying the history embedded in these stones.” He turned about and waved one hand toward the keep before running his golden palm across the rough surface of the wall. “Here is where he would demonstrate for his constituents the loyalty of his army. He would line them up on this parapet and then order them to walk over the side to their deaths.”

  “Really?” Schweikert looked over the edge of the parapet at the rough terrain below. “And they did this willingly?”

  “Yes. Imagine it, Abaddon! Here the King would walk with his entourage.” Jozsef leaped onto the top of the wall and strutted along the battlement in dramatic caricature of the long dead King of Haiti.

  “You there!” He pointed to an imaginary soldier. “Jean Pierre! Walk for your King!”

  He spun about and pointed to his chest.

  “Who me, your Eminence?” He turned again and put his hands on his hips, puffing out his chest and scowling darkly.

  “Yes, you, Jean Pierre! Show my good friends who’s your daddy!” Jozsef burst into a round of insane laughter and Schweikert cringed. There was much left still of the grandson of Adar in the creature’s mind, but his behavior was extremely bizarre under the circumstances. He sometimes reminded Abaddon of the younger Konrad von Hetz that Ernst Schweikert had known as a boy. Just as Abaddon had retained Schweikert’s memories, so had this foul creature retained vestiges of what had once been Jozsef Daniel Sinclair-Ramsay.

  “You have been spending too much time in the village, Master.” Schweikert shook his head.

  “Have I?” Jozsef stopped laughing. “I don’t think so. It was all right here in my head. This little one who inhabited this shell watched too much television. Who's your daddy, Abaddon?” He lowered his head and smiled wickedly at the dark angel momentarily and then began to laugh again.

  “He owned a wealth of trivial information along with a great deal more important knowledge. Do you realize that he actually helped his grandfather seal the breach in the Seventh Gate? Oh, he was a good little grandson. His mother was the lovely queen Ereshkigal, no less. What a whore that one!” He laughed again. “And his father? Ahhhh. His father was what they would call a real prize. A prophet. A genius. An enigma. Did you know that enigmas run in the Ramsay family?” Jozsef smiled at him and brushed back his hair. “Enigmas. Alchemists. Angels. Watchers. Elves. A little of this. A little of that. A bit more of this. A bit more of that.” Jozsef danced around plucking imaginary things from the air above his head. “Do you realize that Adar has managed to integrate almost every form of intelligent life on this miserable little rock into his ‘family’?” Jozsef held up his fingers indicating quotes for the word family.

  “I didn’t know that, Master.” Abaddon followed him as he headed back toward the bastion.

  “Yes.” He held up his golden hand again and the sun flashed off the surface, almost blinding the Lord of Scorpions. “And what a lovely family. Such wonderful loving children and grandchildren and so very loving… loving and… and… loyal. That is how the little one came by the injury that left him with this golden skin… helping grandfather with a project. How cozy. And it was through this golden skin made of magick that I was able to enter his bloodstream and then his mind! A strange trick of fate, don’t you think? His grandfather in saving him gave him over to me and made him a perfect receptacle. One man’s grief is another man’s glory.”

  “And one man's trash is another man's treasure,” Abaddon muttered under his breath.

  “It will be good to have humans here, Abaddon. They are such amusing diversions, don’t you think?”

  “I am pleased by whatever pleases you, Master.” Abaddon bowed his head slightly.

  “A good answer! I like that, Abaddon. I like that. It makes me feel all warm and cozy… cozy? No, fuzzy. Yes, fuzzy fuzzy. That's it!”

  ((((((((((((()))))))))))))

  Mark Andrew entered the trees and began to shout the boy’s name from time to time. Vanni! Vanni? Vanni. Vannistephetti. He thought of his own small son, the mighty King of the Center. Il Dolce Mio. Such a grand innocence and yet not innocent. He could no longer hear Lucio’s voice behind him even though the branches were not yet covered with leaves and the moon light shown bright enough to illuminate the ground quite clearly. Mark thought they had very little hope of finding the boy if he did not want to be found, but he was appreciative of the rare clear weather, but Vanni had lived too long with the elves, masters of disappearing completely in the blink of an eye. The searchers were most likely wasting their time. He felt sure that Vanni would turn up again in the morning. Mark had blocked the passage to the underworld himself. Vanni did not possess the power to open the passage, at least, not yet. They would either find him asleep in the barn tomorrow or somewhere in the meadow curled about his drum.

  Mark felt sorry for the boy. He completely understood how he must feel, losing the only family he had ever known and his wonderful home so and being thrust into this alien world. Vanni was homesick. Another sickness that Mark suffered quite often. Homesick for a place that no longer existed for him in reality. He slowed his pace and looked back and forth under the trees for any sign of movement as he walked along silently as nothing more than a shadow. He saw a number of the animals that populated the forest. A fox. Two skunks. Several rabbits. A buck and a doe. Several roosting birds startled him as he frightened them from their nests in the undergrowth. Very soon he came upon the banks of the small tributary of the river Tweed that crossed his property. The moon glinted on the gentle brown and green waters bringing back even more long forgotten, fleeting memories of a very brief, but very wonderful childhood spent wandering the lowlands with Luke Matthew before they had come here. Before his father had sent him packing.

  The lazy stream flowed past grassy banks overhung with ferns and mosses interspersed with smoothly polished boulders. It had been ages since he had come this way. The path along the bank had been one of his favorite trails for many long, uneventful years spent in quiet solitude. How he pined to return to that time! The time before Meredith. The time before cars and planes and electric toasters. The time before Elizabeth and Ian. The time before Lucio and Edgard. The time before Semiramis and the Seventh Gate….

  He turned north on his way to meet again with the Italian. As he walked along the bank, calling the boy’s name from time to time, he never expected or received an answer. If worse came to worse, he would use his scrying dish to find the boy in the morning simply to keep Lucio from losing his mind. He had sworn off of magick in his agreement with Edgard d’Brouchart, but he did not have time for this. The boy could be lost for days. He did not want to miss yet another plane. His mind wandered to thoughts of the upcoming trip to America and he wondered what Simon had thought of Levi’s request to accompany them. Probably not much good and he would not blame the Healer if he protested loudly. If Levi were his son, he wouldn’t want him running about the world with the likes of Mark Ramsay and Konrad von Hetz, but he felt sure that God had sent Levi to him. Edgard d’Brouchart’s words kept ringing in his mind: ‘You’ve forgotten much, du Morte.’

  He remembered the Emerald Tablets. He remembered placing them in the stone box with the golden book, but he did not remember the other things that Levi said were there. If Levi was right, then the priest’s presence would be most beneficial to the expedition. The son of Simon of Grenoble would know how to handle these things that he had f
orgotten. If he had forgotten them altogether, then surely he had forgotten how to handle them. He slipped, unexpectedly on the mossy stones and caught himself on a downed tree trunk.

  “Dammit!” he cursed and pushed himself back up. He stood looking at a strange thing. The night was gone and the sun’s rays slanted through the branches of an ancient, twisted tree further up the cut bank. He did not recognize the species of this tree, but the sudden appearance of the sun just after midnight did not bode well. He held onto the rotting tree trunk and began to slip and slide up the bank. The bank had been eroded into broad natural steps by the endless cycle of floods. At the next step in the multiple layers of the bank, he could see the roots of the enormous old tree. The soft earth had been gradually washed away from the roots, exposing them as a maze of fantastic shapes, resembling countless intertwined snakes frozen in time. Beneath the tangle of roots was a cavern of sorts, not so deep as to cause the tree to fall and not so tall as to allow a grown man to stand upright, but it was wide. The odd formation seemed to call to him with the voices of many children ‘John! John! Come and play with us!’ Mark frowned. He had been this way many, many times in the past, but never had he seen this tree or this place. He recognized these voices! Whispers from the past, long dead, long ago.

  “Vanni?!” he called hesitantly, thinking perhaps that some of the elves had come up to meet with the lonely boy in this enchanted spot. It was just the sort of place that elves would visit, or in this case, create for a full moon gathering. Meredith would have called it enchanted. He called it foreboding. The elves who regularly visited the overworld were not the friendly creatures they were used to.

  “John! John Mark! Come and see what we have found!”

  He started up the bank again. The soft, crumbling soil slipped under his boots and skittered away in mini-landslides toward the stream bank. Twice he fell and almost joined the pebbles and dirt in their hurry to reach the water below. His gloves slipped on the moss-covered rocks, but his persistence paid off and he dropped into the cushion of fine, new grass on the relatively level ground directly in front of the opening, glad not to have fallen back down the bank. The light shining through the branches was not the sun, but the amplified rays of the full moon.

  The Knight of Death lay on his back, breathing hard, with his black mantle spread beneath him and out on either side like the black wings of a fallen angel. The mysterious rays of the pseudo-sun slanted through the branches above his head. Millions of tiny fluffs floated on the beams like minuscule ships sailing the currents of a moonlit ocean. The voices of the children were softer now and they sang an eerie song in one of the ancient tongues long lost to men, accompanied by the ring of cymbals and dulcimers. Mark spread his arms on either side of his body and crossed his feet at the ankles, closing his eyes, giving in to the overwhelming urge to sleep in this peaceful place. His thoughts of finding Vanni were gone. He only wanted to sleep here and dream of ages past when he had been happy. Here, the otherworld and the overworld were very close. Even moreso than the once beautiful rath he had enjoyed on his property before the red serpent had blasted it with her foul breath.

  When he opened his eyes again, the anomalous moonbeams were gone. They had been replaced with the softer, silver glow of ordinary moonlight. The voices were gone. The fuzzy flower petals had been exchanged for infinitesimal green lights that danced and swirled through the limbs of the tree. Only the calls of nightingales and whippoorwills and the chirps and croaks of frogs and insects common to the riverbank disturbed the peace of this marvelous place. But there was still more light here than the full moon should have provided. He turned his face slowly to the right and saw that the fresh green grass in which he lay fluoresced with a light of its own. He flexed his right hand and saw the moonlight glint on the silver ring on his little finger. He pushed his head back and looked at the shallow cavern under the roots up-side-down. A pale green light shown under the tree, silhouetting the dark tangle of roots in black relief. Shadows that should not have been there, flitted back and forth and he knew he was not alone here, but he was not alarmed. He turned his head slowly to the left and drew in a sharp breath.

  A figure dressed in a shining white robe sat next to him on the outspread cloth of his black mantle. A ring or halo of golden light encircled the figure’s head, casting the facial features in dark shadows. Long, soft waves of golden hair spilled over the shoulders of the enigmatic personage.

  “Meredith?” he whispered and thought he must be dreaming.

  “No,” the voice was too deep. A bare whisper, it could have been male or female. Not Meredith.

  “Semiramis?” he asked a bit louder and felt slow panic enveloping him.

  “Uriel. Do you not remember me?” Definitely not female, but not quite male either. Familiar, but not. Like the voices of the children.

  “Ashmedai, Ashmodai.” Mark closed his eyes and heard his own voice repeating these words. “Asmodeus, Chammaday…” He snapped his eyes open and tried to sit up, but the angel pressed one hand against his forehead. The effect was astonishing, electric and he fell back in the grass, unable and unwilling to move again. “The Great Philosopher! The messenger of God!” he heard his own voice and wondered if he was talking or if the creature next to him was using his voice.

  The angel kept his hand on the Knight’s forehead as he leaned forward, kissing him on both cheeks and then lightly on the lips in the Templar fashion.

  “Do you remember, my brother, when we danced and sang among the rings of our planet? Do you remember when Azaziel abducted the woman and Raguel took her and brought her to us? Do you remember how surprised we were and how odd was the granddaughter of Cain and how his father, Adam, mourned for her? Do you remember how we wondered at her beauty and her form and saw for the first time the daughters of the sons of men?” The angel’s face was very close to him now. His voice or hers… it was impossible to tell which… was soft and melodic like the voice of the mighty Djinni.

  “I remember,” Mark Andrew whispered and it was true. He did remember.

  “And do you remember how we tried to console her tears and she deceived us? We were such fools, Uriel! Do you remember how we sorrowed for her and wept with her? Do you remember how we brought her back to her father and her grandfathers? How we tried to make her happy?”

  “I remember,” Mark Andrew answered.

  “And do you remember the thanks we received for our troubles? I, Ashmodel, was accused of the great deceit in the garden and you were stoned and cursed. Have you seen the despotic representation of me in the church at Rennes-le-Chateau?”

  “I have. They were wrong to do what they did, my brother,” Mark Andrew told him.

  “Why do you love these creatures so, Uriel? They have wronged you, killed you and tormented you. They have brought naught but ruin and pain upon you. Not since the time of Noah have any of them been worthwhile. Come away with me to Egypt! Leave them.”

  “No! What message do you bring?” Mark Andrew brushed away the hand that held him in place and sat up.

  “Ahhh. You are as stubborn as always.” Ashmodel sat back on his heels. His eyes were clearest blue, glowing in the dim light on the stream bank. His hair also seemed to capture the moonlight and hold it, obscuring his fine features in shadow. “It is one of the reasons I love you so. What you seek is under the great tree. This place has changed, Uriel. You should keep up with your treasures more carefully. Find what you seek, my brother.” The angel leaned forward again and hugged him tightly. “Uriel! Uriel! You have lost sight of your covenant with God. The covenant made for your redemption and that of Raguel, Nebo. The covenant was broken with the birth of the twins! You cannot go back.”

  “And Raguel! The father of Naboplasser and Simon of Grenoble. You have lived too long among men in oblivion. The one called Meredith was taken from you and given to Sarakiel. The one you know as Nanna. Your greatest sin lies in the seduction of your mother. You must beg her forgiveness and set her soul free. Uriel! Uriel! Set
her free and come back to me. We will fly again into the firmament of Heaven and sing the praises of the Most High, giving glory and adoration to His name. Adonai. Adonai.”

  “I cannot! I have to put this right.” Mark Andrew shook his head and stood up. “If I must fulfill my covenant, I cannot go with you. I wish it were otherwise, Ashmodel. But what am I? What have I become?”

  “You are tired and weary, my brother.” The angel backed away from him. “When you have completed your work, we will meet again.”

  “Wait!” Mark Andrew reached for him, but he was gone. He spun about and saw that the great tree was gone as well and the eerie cavern of green light along with it. He was again in the wholly familiar woods near the river on his own land in Lothian. He fell to his knees, covered his face with his hands and felt tears welling up in his eyes. “It will never be over. It will never be over, Asmodai,” he muttered and picked up two handfuls of dead leaves. He crumbled them and rubbed them into his hair and onto his face. “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly! O, my Lord, my Lord! Why have I abandoned thee? Never didst thou abandon me even when I fell into the depths of darkness! Take me back, O Lord! Take me back!” He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the cold earth. “I want to go home. I want to go home,” he muttered this last plea and then almost shrieked as someone grabbed his arms.

  “Santa Maria!” Lucio looked into his face. “What is wrong with you, Brother? What happened? Did you fall down the bank? Did you find anything? What language was that?”