Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Silence reigned between them while people came and went with their trays of food and plastic containers of coffee or water. No one so much as glanced at them; it was as if they were invisible or weren’t present at all. The soft clatter of dishes, trays, and cutlery came to them as if from another room.

  “I think Elias is right,” Bravo said at last.

  “What?” Ayla clutched the cylinder as tightly as Elias was clutching the crucifix. “No, you can’t mean it.”

  “Ayla, you know what reading the manuscript did to Emma.”

  “But we don’t know for sure—”

  “Yes, we do. You and I both know it.”

  “So do I!” Elias popped up, and they both laughed, his pronouncement cutting the tension.

  Yet still Ayla insisted on pursuing an argument that Bravo felt sure she did not believe in. “You can’t deny the value of the manuscript. For just the Solomon sigil alone, it’s worth being studied by a group of our best scholars.”

  “Ayla, that sigil isn’t Solomon’s.”

  “But it’s so close; it’s almost the same.”

  “But it isn’t. I think it’s the sigil of Rehoboam, Solomon’s son.”

  Ayla clutched the cylinder to her breast as if it were her baby. “We’ve never before come across a sigil for him—no one has. What makes you believe—?”

  “Think, Ayla! It was Rehoboam’s clique of sorcerous alchemists—the ones he bribed and coerced to do his infernal bidding—who conjured the magical gold that was meant to save the king and what was left of Solomon’s empire. Instead, it brought Rehoboam and his regime crashing down. We’ve found traces of that gold—”

  “You don’t know those specks are gold. Even the mass spectrometer couldn’t identify them. What makes you so sure you know what they are?”

  It was right about now that Bravo understood what was happening. A quick glance at Elias confirmed that the boy, so quick on the uptake, had figured it out himself.

  “It’s getting crowded in here,” Bravo said. And indeed the cafeteria was starting to fill up. And getting to his feet, “Let’s continue this discussion outside.”

  “You don’t have permission to go outside yet,” Ayla said with the craftiness of monomania. “We have to stay here. We have to protect the manuscript at all costs.”

  “Of course,” Bravo said with a barely perceptible tilt of his head toward Elias. “We all realize that.” He sighed. “Okay, you win; I’ll go back to my room and lie down.”

  Just as Ayla nodded, Elias darted forward, snatched the manuscript case out of her relaxed grip. As he sped out of the cafeteria, Ayla started after him, but Bravo, grabbing her elbow, halted her forward motion.

  “What—?”

  He swung her around to face him.

  “Bravo, have you gone crazy? That little sonofabitch is getting away with—”

  “It’s you who’s gone crazy.”

  She tried to pull away, but his grip was like iron. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The manuscript. Did you handle it?”

  “What? Don’t you see—?”

  He took a step toward her so the tips of their noses were almost touching. “Ayla,” he said, “did you touch the manuscript?”

  “Yes.” She blinked hard; her eyes were cloudy, a deathly grayish. “Yes, of course. I paged through it. That’s how I found the strange sigil.”

  “That’s it, then. The manuscript infected you. Not as deeply as it has Emma; but then she read it.” He shook her until her eyes started to clear. “Ayla, listen to me. That’s why you’re fighting so hard to keep it from being destroyed.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “Oh, Bravo.” She shook her head, then smiled thinly. “This is so, I don’t know, so J. R. R. Tolkien.”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  He nodded, smiling back at her. But the instant he released her, she juked, darted away, sprinted full tilt after Elias. Heads turned, questioning voices rose above the usual murmur as Bravo ran after her. Obviously the effect of the manuscript ran deeper than he had imagined.

  Outside, a steady drizzle had developed, warm as blood. They sky was hooded and glowering. He saw Ayla to his left. She was halfway to where Elias was sheltering, under a date palm whose fronds dipped and swayed above the boy’s head. He sprinted off after her, ignoring the painful stitch in his side that developed as he ran. His entire side began to throb and he felt a spot of wetness spreading from where he supposed a wound had reopened.

  She took Elias by surprise; he hardly expected her to come flying out of the hospital toward him. Before he had a chance to run she was upon him, grabbing for the manuscript case, which he had the presence of mind to swing away from her, interposing his body between it and her.

  “I want it!” she cried. “Give it to me!”

  Bravo caught her around the waist. When he tried to swing her around, she resisted him, trying to fight him and Elias at the same time. She seemed like a madwoman. The escalating ruckus caused the hurrying passersby to stop and stare.

  As Bravo ripped her away from him, Elias put on his most ingratiating grin, said to the people closest, “My birthday. My mom and dad never can agree on what to get me.” He laughed. “This is nothing. They fight all the time.”

  His quick-witted response had the desired effect; beneath opened umbrellas people shook their heads knowingly, turned away, and went about their business, leaving Bravo and Ayla to their strange altercation. And yet to Bravo it wasn’t strange at all—disturbing, yes; worrying, most certainly. Ayla fought him like a tigress protecting her cub, but at last he got her into position to use her own momentum against her. Employing a circular Aikido move, he brought her around and down so that they were face-to-face on the ground. She was so startled that he was able to pull her up, back her against the trunk of the date palm, and keep a tight hold on her as they spoke. He could sense Elias peering over his right shoulder.

  “Ayla, Ayla, listen to me.”

  “What are you doing? You can’t let that kid keep possession of—”

  “Calm down, and listen.”

  “I can’t. I—”

  He slapped her, then, hard across the face. Her hands came up to strike back, but at that moment her eyes cleared she shook her whole body and looked up at him. “Where am I? What happened?”

  “The manuscript infected you,” Bravo said. “When you examined it back in Addis Ababa you handled it. It’s pure poison, Ayla.”

  She began to tremble. “Poor Emma. She actually read it! We need to find out what’s in the manuscript so we can help her.”

  Bravo shook his head. “That’s just what we won’t do. That thing needs to be burned, destroyed completely.”

  She thought about this for some time while her body shuddered, working through the trauma it had received. “We can’t burn it while it’s inside the case. Who’s going to take it out?”

  “I will,” Bravo said. “I seem to be immune to its effects.”

  “That’s right! You paged through it thoroughly when we first found it, and nothing’s happened to you. Why?”

  “Excellent question. I’ve been considering a number of possibilities, but I’m not prepared to share them until I get further along.” He held out a hand and Elias plopped the case into it. “In any event, the sooner we burn this thing the better.” He stared at her challengingly. “Agreed?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Absolutely yes.”

  15

  Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918

  THE THREE MEN STARED DOWN AT A STONE CHURCH BUILT in the shape of a cross with two crosspieces. It was not well-known, certainly far less than the oft-photographed church in the shape of a simple cross. This one was farther out from the town, set amid a ragged copse of dusty shade trees barely holding on to life, casting their shadows into the pit in which the holy structure was set. It was more than twenty-five feet down. Around it, like a dry moat, was a wooden walkway of perhaps eight feet in width before the sheer walls of the ex
cavation itself rose up to meet the gritty ground.

  The day woke from its fitful slumber in a wicked mood. A wind had picked up, hurling dust and sand into their faces, coating them in grit. Ibrahim, with the prescience of one who had lived here all his life, had provided each of them a shawl to wrap around the lower half of his face, covering both nose and mouth. But such was the ferocity and deviousness of the wind that it found even the tiniest crevice to thrust its detritus through.

  Above them, the sun was a distant disc, bone white and hallucinatory. Birds circled in the uncertain thermals, crying as the sand beat against their breasts and wings.

  Yeats, looking around, said, “How on earth are we expected to get down there? I don’t see any stairs.”

  “Stairs,” Ibrahim echoed, laughing and shaking his head. “I like you, WBY; I really do.” He pointed as he led them forward. “We descend here.”

  What he indicated was a doorway cut into the stone, so small that the three of them were obliged to bend over double in order to enter the gloom single file. At least they were out of the flagellating wind.

  A steep set of hand-carved stone stairs descended to an opening that Yeats assumed would lead them out onto the floor of the excavation. Imagine his surprise, then, when he discovered they were only two-thirds of the way down.

  “What is this?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  Ibrahim grabbed a stout hemp rope dangling off to one side. “This is what will take us the rest of the way down.”

  A clear look of alarm crossed the poet’s face as Ibrahim, ankles gripping the rope to control his speed, slid down to the ground. “Is this some form of jest?”

  “Stiff upper lip, old boy,” Conrad said as he clapped his friend on the shoulder. “We traveled all this way for a bit of an adventure, what?”

  “Adventure, yes,” Yeats said. “But this—”

  He gave a cry as Conrad pushed him out onto the rope. White-knuckled, he slid down, rather too fast, his palms reddened and rope burned before Ibrahim could catch him. Conrad followed the two to the floor of the excavation.

  From this perspective the stone church was even more imposing, its slightly sloping walls looming up on their left. Scents of the earth billowed up to envelop them, as if History itself, alive and eager, were pulling them to its breast.

  Ibrahim led them into the interior of the church, which was even more Spartan than his matrimonial bedroom had been. Dust lay everywhere, and the sharp pungency of mineral stone.

  “No tourists come here,” Ibrahim said as they stood in the center. Far above them, a small oculus allowed a shaft of sandy daylight to descend like a sword whose point was buried in the ground. “No one would dare take them.”

  “Why not?” Yeats asked.

  Ibrahim’s teeth shone in reflection from the sword of daylight. “Because of the dead. The dead are here, WBY.” He lifted his arms, swung around in a complete circle. “They are all around us. Crouched in the shadows, they watch and chitter with terrified eyes and terrified mouths.”

  “Why are they here?” Yeats asked. “Why congregate here? Is it the church itself? A holy place.”

  “Well, it’s up for debate whether this is a holy place,” Conrad said, “right, Ibrahim?”

  The Ethiopian shuddered, made the sign of the cross. “Actually, it’s what’s beneath the church that keeps these souls shackled.”

  Yeats was looking around with great interest as if he could spot the ghosts of the dead huddled in the shadows of the cruciform interior. “And what would that be?”

  “I think we must find out,” Conrad said with a wry smile. “It’s why we’ve come all this way.” He produced his battery-powered torch, something Ibrahim had never before seen. He started with a little squeak as Conrad thumbed it on and a beam of light jumped out like a monster from a closet. Balancing it in the palm of his hand, he let Ibrahim study the contraption. “And it’s why Ibrahim has agreed to lead us here.”

  Ibrahim took the torch in his hands as gingerly as if it were one of his children at the moment of their birth.

  “Yes, Ibrahim’s grandfather is here. Ibrahim talks to him from afar, never from inside the church. In fact, it was Ibrahim’s father who called out to him to search beneath the church. He and I discussed this the last time I was here. At that time, I could not persuade him to come inside with me.”

  “Ibrahim, what changed your mind?” Yeats said.

  The guide looked up. Handing the torch back to Conrad, he said, “I discovered that my grandfather—that all the souls here—are in torment. They are bound here, so my grandfather tells me, by the thing beneath the church. A thing that predates even this church, which is very old, indeed.”

  “And with that intriguing introduction,” Conrad said, “we shall proceed.”

  Ibrahim, having clearly screwed up his courage, nodded his assent. He led them into the left-hand cross section, which did not in any way correspond to the usual Church design or designation. There were no paintings or statues of any kind. Perhaps they had been looted long ago, or just as likely they never existed, not in this country at, as Yeats had said, the back of beyond.

  Clearly, there was nothing here, and Yeats was just about to query their leader when Ibrahim pressed his palm against a certain stone on the back wall. With a noise like fingernails dragged across roughhewn stone a doorway appeared.

  Ibrahim lit a taper and, with the aid of Conrad’s torch, they began their descent. Unlike the staircase down to the pit, this one contained shallow, broad steps of some kind of igneous rock unknown to the Westerners. The treads curled around like the tail of a colossal beast. Even with Conrad’s battery-powered beam of light it was impossible to make out anything below them until they had reached the bottom.

  The taper’s flames cast dancing shadows along the floor, which was composed of stone blocks so precisely set they needed no grout to hold them in place. They reminded Conrad of the Great Pyramids of Egypt he had explored some years ago, when he was in his teens.

  “This is the place my grandfather spoke of.” Ibrahim’s voice had risen into a fluttery terror, which he was holding in check with an enormous effort.

  “What did he say was down here?” Conrad asked. “What had trapped the souls in this prison?”

  “That.” Lifting his torch on high, Ibrahim pointing a trembling forefinger at the massive statue crouching in the center of the space.

  “What is it?” Yeats said, leaning forward, eyes wide in an attempt to pierce the gloom.

  Then Conrad trained his beam on the statue and they saw what it was. An enormous crouching lion with the head of a human, carved out of night-black basalt.

  “Good Christ!” Yeats exclaimed.

  “Meet the jailor of souls,” Conrad stepped forward, closed the distance to the statue. “If my eyes don’t deceive me, it’s a Sphinx.”

  The hooded eyes gazed out at them; the ears, more leonine than human, were flattened to its skull. Tufts of hair at its elbows, each claw larger than a man’s fully extended hand.

  “Egyptian,” Yeats breathed.

  “No. By the tufted legs, the size and shape of its claws, the details of the cloth along its spine, I can say without fear of contradiction that this idol predates Pharaonic Egypt.” He began to walk around the Sphinx, Yeats at his heels. As for Ibrahim, he hadn’t moved so much as a muscle since the beam of light had lit up the strange and disturbing Sphinx. It did not escape Conrad’s fiercely concentrated attention that the Sphinx’s talons were the same exact shape as those on Murmur. Indeed, he suspected that the visitation coming on the very morning he would confront this great basalt carving was no coincidence.

  The Throne had been trying to tell him something. But what?

  “If I may ask,” Yeats said, breaking Conrad free of these agitating thoughts, “how is this thing keeping souls imprisoned here? If, indeed, there are any members of the dead here. I mean to say, curious as it is, it’s nothing more than a stone statue. As you have learned, C
onrad, skepticism and I are not precisely on speaking terms. However, I have yet to discern even a scintilla of phenomenological activity on the premises of this church. Old it may be, but numinous?” He shook his head. “I must tell you that I harbor doubts.”

  “My grandfather is here. I can feel him,” Ibrahim said, shaking off his paralysis. Still, he kept his gaze averted from the Sphinx. Terror remained entrenched in the corners of his eyes.

  “Dawit Gebereal,” he called, his head slightly raised and tipped to one side like a seeking bird’s, “wund ayat!” He turned and turned again, wheeling in a circle. “Grandfather! It is I, Ibrahim. I have come, as you begged. Please tell me what I need to do.”

  This was spoken in Amharic, obliging Conrad to translate for Yeats.

  “Wund ayat, what can I do to help you?”

  For some time there was nothing. But then, so gradually it was impossible to say when it had begun, a keening arose, so knife-like it made the hairs at the back of Yeats’s neck stir. Instinctively, he rubbed his neck, as if he needed to restore circulation to that area.

  The keening continued to rise, the tone changing as if a great sound were being forced through a narrow tube. The sound was inchoate, and yet it held them in a vise-like grip. In the way clouds emulate recognizable shapes the keening, which was now more of a howl, seemed to contain words, lost and then found, only to be lost again in the violent turbulence.

  “What... what is happening?” Yeats called through the ululation.

  “You wanted proof of phenomenological activity!” Conrad called back. “Now you have it.”

  He was right, for even now the words were forming, like letters written in sand, appearing for a moment, only to be erased as if they had never existed in the first place.

  There... is... a... force... that... holds... us... here.

  “Yes, Grandfather,” Ibrahim said, eyes closed to slits in concentration as much as against the howling. “This thing... this Sphinx.”

  No... A... force controls... this... unholy creature.... As... it... roots him... to... the... earth here... it... chains... us. He may be... our guard... but... he... is not... our... jailor.