Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

  He bent over, changed some of the burn dressings, which had become saturated with a clear yellow liquid.

  “That firefight,” he continued, “was a result of a raid by the Gnostic Observatines.” He stuffed the soiled dressings in a plastic bag, sealed it tight with a twist tie. “Knight or GO, I wonder which you are.” He shrugged his one-shoulder shrug. “Not that it matters to me; I never understood either. Never wanted to. I just wanted out, but children of the Knights are sworn to a blood oath never to leave as soon as they are able to speak.” He lifted up his shirt, revealing a patchwork of long scars, pale against his fatless sunburnt flesh. “Left his marks on me, he did.” Pushed the shirt right back down. “Well, I disobeyed him constantly, so maybe I deserved—”

  He broke off as Bravo groaned, eyelids fluttering. But his eyes didn’t open.

  “Dreaming again,” Elias said, nodding. “That’s a good thing, I guess.” He looked off into the distance for some time, as if he could see through the darkness to something in the farthest reaches beyond his ken. After some time, he returned to himself. He rose, went to take a piss, then hurried back.

  “Time for bed,” he said as he lay down beside Bravo, pulled a thin blanket over his bony shoulders, and fell fast asleep.

  7

  Paris: Present Day

  “ALL RIGHT, FINE,” OBARTON SAID, “YOU’VE MADE YOUR POINT, bloody though it may have been—”

  “With men like these,” Lilith said pointedly, “blood is the only way to make an impression.”

  The two of them were seated in a dingy bistro near Oberkampf, in the 11th arrondissement, far away from the luxe properties and high-fashion silhouettes of the Faubourg.

  Obarton brushed imaginary bread crumbs off his ample lap. “Well, at least you came sans your young shadow.”

  “You were quite persuasive.” Lilith tapped the side of her fork against her plate of indifferent frisée salad and duck gizzards. It was becoming harder and harder to find decent food walking in off the Parisian streets. She blamed the EU, the influx of other Euro cultures, with the Americans overtaking everyone else. “In any event, Highstreet has more than enough work to keep him busy.”

  Obarton lifted a glass of white wine to his lips, made a face as he sipped it. “Listening in on our enemies, one can only suppose.”

  Lilith nodded, put her fork down. She would have dearly loved a piece of strudel with whipped cream, but what were the chances it would be of any use to her palate in this mediocre place?

  “Which brings up an important point.” Obarton slathered another cutting of baguette with deep-yellow butter. “These days.” He took a bite of the buttered bread, chewed slowly, then swallowed. “Just who do you see as our enemies?”

  Lilith reacted to the accented word, as he expected. “Not this again.”

  “Yes,” he said, leaning forward, “precisely this again.” His eyes locked with hers. “This obsession with the Gnostic Observatines has to stop. They are not our only enemies. They are not the ones who burned our castle to the ground and incinerated everyone in it.”

  “The fire this time.” Lilith closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes, I know.”

  “That fire wasn’t natural.”

  “Come on, Obarton. That’s only speculation.”

  “Listen to me now, because I have listened to you. Very carefully, as it happens. When we abducted Maura Kite from Istanbul we did the Gnostic Observatines an enormous favor. She would have done to them what she did to us. She was no longer Maura Kite. Something had taken her over, something terrible, something powerful, something beyond our ken.”

  “All of this was conveyed to Cardinal Duchamp. He summarily dismissed this story line as hysteria. What you’re proposing happened goes against Church orthodoxy. Therefore, it cannot exist.”

  Obarton stared at her, his disbelief turning to open hostility. “You’ve been in direct contact with the cardinal?”

  “I was at the Vatican last month, yes.”

  “That was Newell’s—”

  “Newell was an idiot,” Lilith said as if pointing out an obvious fact to a child. “Someone had to step up.”

  “Someone like you.”

  She smiled with her teeth. “I’m the best candidate. By far.”

  “You are indeed,” Obarton said. “At least as far as Felix Duchamp is concerned. You swallowed his cant hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? He speaks for the pontiff.”

  “No, Lilith. Duchamp speaks for himself. His self-interest is off the charts. He speaks the Gospel no more than does Braverman Shaw.” He steepled his fingers. “And speaking of Shaw, it’s my opinion that you need to seek out his sister.”

  “You want me to use her as bait to get to Bravo.”

  Now it was Obarton’s turn to smile; it was no more pleasant than Lilith’s. “Something like that.”

  Lilith smirked. “Is this your idea of compromise?”

  “If you prefer to see it that way.”

  “If you continue to play the Delphic Oracle, I’ll kill you right where you sit.”

  “Listen, you.” Obarton’s voice got low and chill as a winter draft. “You can intimidate the others, but don’t fuck with me.”

  She laughed.

  “You have no idea.”

  “I’m sure you’ll die telling me.”

  His smile flattened out, seeming to come at her full force. “I have people who can squash you like a roach. You don’t want to go to war with me.”

  “Short war.”

  “Shorter than you can imagine.”

  They glared at each other for a moment before Obarton threw some euros onto the table. “Come with me.”

  Lilith regarded him with suspicion. “Where?”

  “You’ll want to see this,” he said as he rose.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Obarton grunted. “How many mistakes are you willing to make today.”

  *

  A CAR drove them farther outside the center of Paris, into the 20th arrondissement, let them off at the base of the famous hill. The cemetery, whose carved granite gates they strode through, was named by Napoléon after the seventeenth-century confessor to Louis XIV, Père François de la Chaise. It was the first garden cemetery, and the first municipal one.

  Père Lachaise served as the final resting place to a veritable who’s who of titans of the arts, from Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Molière, Georges Bizet, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, and Frédéric Chopin to Jim Morrison. A wide cobbled walkway wound through the cemetery, rising up the hill as it went, bringing them deeper and deeper, it seemed, into the embrace of history.

  They passed tourists with maps provided by the touts outside, taking selfies with the monuments to the famous. A young man had set up a tripod before the elaborate arched headstone at Camille Pissarro’s grave. A crush of Japanese, some with cotton masks protecting their noses and mouths, others with long gloves over hands and forearms, were being escorted at speed by a grim-looking young woman, intent on making all the requisite stops in the time allotted to her charges.

  Gathering clouds scudded by overhead, obscuring the sunlight, lowering the sky. The scent of rain pervaded the gusting wind that stirred the air. The bottom of Obarton’s capacious trench coat flared out like bat wings, and he wrapped the coat closer around him. Lilith noted that despite his age and girth Obarton appeared to have no difficulty with the climb.

  Farther on, they came upon Aux Morts, the Memorial to the Dead. Obarton led her off the path, through underbrush and fallen leaves, around to the rear, where a small building—the ossuary—squatted ugly as a toad.

  “Some years ago,” Obarton said, “the ossuary became so crowded that the bones were cremated, then returned here.” He pointed. “As you see, it’s locked. No one comes here. Tourists don’t even know of its existence.”

  Producing a key, he opened the lock. The thick metal door creaked from disuse as he pushed it.

 
; “The sacred and the profane,” he said as they crossed the threshold.

  From another pocket, he drew out an LED flashlight, and switched it on. In the sudden illumination Lilith saw tier after tier of olive-green metal boxes the approximate size and shape of coffins stacked from floor to ceiling. The scent of burnt offerings came to her, of dust mixed with earth and candle wax. It was as chill as a winter twilight. As they moved forward, Obarton played the beam of the flash along the rear wall. At first, all Lilith saw was a knife-edged shadow. Then, as they neared it, she discerned a gap between the crematory boxes, narrow enough that Obarton was obliged to squeeze through sideways.

  He unlocked another door and as it swung open said, “Careful now. The steps are steep and very old.” The light played over a granite staircase as narrow as it was steep. The smooth indentations in the center of each tread attested to their age.

  The stairway wound down and down as if into the bowels of the earth itself. The air became stale, with an unpleasant sweet-sharp tang she associated with ether or formaldehyde. The dead air was chillier, too, sluggish with age.

  When they reached the bottom, Obarton said, “Just as the Gnostic Observatines have—or I should say had—their secret Reliquary, so do we.”

  “The GO purportedly had relics from the four Apostles.”

  Obarton nodded. “True.”

  “Then what do we have?”

  “Things we have never shown Cardinal Duchamp, nor would we ever. Regard.” He directed the beam at a plinth of metamorphic rock on which rested a sealed cylindrical tank.

  “What the hell... !” Lilith took a step forward. “I knew I smelled formaldehyde.” Another step. “But is that... Good Christ, is that a baby floating in there?”

  “Yes,” Obarton said. “And no.”

  She could sense him grinning as he stood beside her. He had assumed the air of a conjuror, and this made her uneasy. She did not like being alone with him. She especially didn’t like being alone with him in this place that, so far as she could discern, had the aspect not of a Reliquary, but of a sideshow.

  Now he moved the slider on the flashlight to a second position and the LED switched from white to red. In an instant the baby’s eyes flew open, its head expanded, a horn pushed through the flesh in the center of its forehead. Its mouth gaped open to reveal several rows of razor-sharp teeth, and then it lunged at Lilith with both its teeth and the talon-like nails that curved cruelly from its fingertips.

  8

  Leith Hill, Surrey: 1918

  “MY CLOSE FRIENDS, FEW THOUGH THEY BE, CALL ME WBY,” Yeats said with a self-deprecating smile. He shot his cuffs in a vaguely nervous gesture. “Though Ezra Pound, bless him, calls me the Eagle.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick with WBY,” Conrad said.

  The two men sat at their ease, a rough wood-plank table between them, beneath the spreading branches of a fragrant apple tree. On the table was a tray set with a tea service, small plates of lemon slices, scones, biscuits, butter as yellow as a summer sun, clotted cream from Devon, and marmalade made from bitter Seville oranges. A more quintessentially British scene could not be imagined, or wished for. Behind them was the immense stone manor house belonging to Conrad’s family. At the moment, his parents were in India or Nepal or Tibet or who knew where, learning the esoteric arts that, his father was certain, could be useful to the Gnostic Observatines in their ongoing war with the Knights of St. Clement, cat’s-paw to the popes down through the ages.

  Conrad had taken his new friend to Sussex for the weekend. On the following Tuesday he planned to leave on his voyage.

  “It is a tenet of the human condition,” Conrad said, “that in order to appreciate the truth one must first learn to recognize and unmask deceit in all its forms.”

  “How does one achieve that?” Yeats asked.

  “Join me on this expedition and you will find out.”

  “I would have to leave the just cause of my Ireland.”

  “I understand your dedication to your homeland’s independence,” Conrad said. “But it must be said that you have endured a rising tide of derision both here and, increasingly, in Ireland. Perhaps it’s time to step away for a month or so. A new perspective.”

  Yeats’s eyes narrowed. “Do you expect this voyage of yours to cause me to turn my back on the independence movement?”

  “Not at all.” Conrad poured them both tea. “Cream or lemon?”

  “Neither, thank you.”

  When Yeats accepted the tea, Conrad slid a slice of lemon into his cup and continued. “A new perspective is just that. Perhaps with distance you may find a new path to your avowed dream.”

  With a rattle, Yeats set his cup into its saucer. “A dream with a long memory is a powerful motivation, Conrad.”

  “Unquestionably.” Conrad broke off a piece of scone. “Having said that, a dream, no matter how long its memory, must be forged into purpose in order to succeed.”

  Yeats thought about this for an extraordinarily long time as he gazed off into the hazy distance beyond the apple tree: the gently rolling hills, the copses of oak and beech trees, the nesting of chaffinches and long-tailed tits, the small lake on which ducks serenely paddled, all part of the Shaws’ vast estate. For all his seeking out the supernatural, he was a supremely rational human being. Whether it be poetry or politics, he pondered with great precision and deliberation. He was not a man to thoughtlessly jump into any proposition. For this reason, Conrad understood that the unmasking of Mme. Garnet’s fraud had hit him hard. He was someone who took his belief systems most seriously. To have one of them upended had come as quite a shock.

  At last, his eyes cleared and he looked directly at Conrad. “It seems to make sense for me to learn to separate truth from falsehood.”

  Conrad could feel his heartbeat accelerate. “Then you’ll join me.”

  “If you’ll only tell me why you have chosen me. Clearly, it wasn’t chance.”

  “Indeed not.” Conrad sat back, hands folded over his stomach. He stared up at the twining branches, the dappling of sunlight, glimpsed the moving clouds passing shadows over them. He opened his mouth and began to recite this poem:

  “Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.”

  He smiled as his gaze returned to Yeats. “It was this poem, your poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus,’ that brought me to contact you, to convince you to make this journey with me.” He paused to pour more tea for them both, broke a biscuit in half. WBY accepted both with obvious pleasure. Like all men of letters he had a weak spot for flattery.

  “I saw in those words a visionary, a man who saw beyond the gray veil of the everyday world, to the reality beneath.” Conrad cocked his head. “Was I wrong?”

  Though he was not prone to expansive gestures, Yeats nevertheless threw his head back and laughed. “Not in the least.” Then he sobered a bit. “At least I hope not.”

  Again, the great poet seemed lost in thought. “My boy, you appear to have gathered about you a great deal of wisdom for one of only twenty years.”

  “I was born old,” Conrad said, more truthfully than Yeats could know.

  Another laugh. A shake of the head.

  “Then you will join me.”

  The great poet nodded. “That I will.”

  “Splendid!”

  “But you must tell me what we are looking for.”

  Conrad’s eyes twinkled. “A place you have already been.”

  “What?”

  “In your mind. A place known to the Shaws as the Hollow Lands.”

  Yeats started. “My poem.”

  Conrad nodded. “I believe a part of you ha
s already been to the Hollow Lands, WBY. Perhaps while you write, perhaps in your dreams.”

  “And what will we find there in these Hollow Lands? Golden apples of the sun?”

  “Mayhap,” Conrad said, taking in the poet’s ironic tone. “But what we will be searching for is something darker, something far more dangerous: the Book of Deathly Things.”

  “I have never heard of it.”

  “I am unsurprised. Even among your coterie of occultists it is likely not known, or, if it is, it is certainly not spoken of. Book of Deathly Things is another name for The Testament of Lucifer.”

  “Good Lord, man, you cannot be serious.”

  “I could not be more so.”

  Yeats took a breath, let it out slowly. “Have you, by chance, anything stronger than this delicious tea?”

  Conrad produced a silver hip flask, handed it over. Yeats unscrewed the cap, took a long draught. He snorted, raised his spectacles to his forehead, thumbing tears out of his eyes. He took a second, shorter drink. Only then did he hand the flask back.

  “From the moment we met at your club,” he said, “I had a feeling about you. You are exactly right. I have this sense sometimes. Call it a form of déjà vu, call it what you will, it is exceptionally strong. On occasion, it shakes me to my core.” Blood rose into his neck, turning his cheeks roseate. “This secret I share with you. Not even my friend Ezra knows.”

  “Then why did you wait so long to agree?”

  “I wanted to gain the measure of you, sir. I am not always truly at home with this sixth sense of mine. I do not always trust it.”

  “Forgive me, but I believe you are afraid of it.”

  Yeats considered this. “Perhaps so. In any event, I required the confirmation of my other senses as to your character.”

  Conrad took up a leather cylinder he’d had at his side. “Well, then, now that we both have been proved correct in our senses, I judge it high time to proceed to the next phase.”

  Yeats looked eager. Opening the cylinder, Conrad slid out a roll of thick paper, handmade, with the texture of vellum. Clearing away the tea service, he spread the sheet, using four of the small plates to hold down each corner. As he did so, Yeats brought his chair around to sit side by side with Conrad.