He felt the shuddering inside himself. You do not understand. Disaster... catastrophe... there are no other words!...
Closing his mind to Phenex’s imprecations, he lit out after Gideon, after the Throne Commander, Verrine, and he heard Death’s mocking laughter all the way down the corridor, following him like a squadron of glittering flies.
25
Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day
“PEACE,” LILITH SAID. “THE MORE OFTEN I SAY THAT WORD the more unintelligible it becomes.”
There was a softening in Emma’s eyes the moment Leviathan vanished back into the cave, as if their centers were caramel, warming in the forest sunlight.
“But I can only speak for myself,” Lilith said.
“I know. But I can’t remember a time...” Emma’s words drifted off.
They were lying on the ledge, as they had been before the Seraph’s visitation, save now they were clothed. The birds had returned, fluttering and calling to one another. A pair of flying squirrels eyed them suspiciously before taking wing. The daubs of sunlight had expanded, deepened. Insects hummed and whirred in these hot shafts, happy once again. The roaring of the cataract was like a symphony.
Emma was exhausted. Keeping the Testament at bay was wearing her down. She knew it was just a matter of time before her strength gave out and she would be lost forever in the eternal darkness of ultimate evil, but for now she refused to give in to despair. In the here and now, there was Beleth to deal with, and she concentrated on that problem. Her initial battle with the words of Lucifer had given it a glimpse behind the curtain she had drawn; now it knew she still existed, a willful resistance holding out against its incursion. She recognized its bewilderment that its takeover was not complete. She also knew that Beleth believed it was because of the power of the Testament. Of course. That conclusion was hardwired into its brain.
But now it was up to her to maintain a delicate balance. Deception was her brother’s long suit; he’d been trained at it. But during her time of blindness she had listened carefully to how he dealt with people—his own people and others—in a way she could not have had she been sighted. She had heard and absorbed the soft subtleties, the tones of voice, the indefinite shades he used to maneuver his way to getting what he wanted. And so, though deception had come to her in a different manner, though she was still her brother’s acolyte in this, her powers of deception were formidable.
Case in point: she had used the slender thread of her connection with her body to lure Lilith, to seduce her, in fact. She knew Beleth had no sex organs, suspected that it was curious as to what physical sex between humans was like. While Leviathan would no doubt view Beleth’s curiosity as weakness, she herself saw it as a possible way out of her dilemma. She started out with the intention of co-opting Beleth just as the Fallen sought to co-opt Bravo. The seduction turned out to be twofold. Beleth was so entranced by the swirl of human emotion and hormones it allowed her her own voice, it allowed her temporary control of her body, swept away on the unknown tide, observing, feeling all that was unknown and forbidden to it.
But then a curious thing happened, an unintended consequence of the seduction that ran parallel with her plan: she liked Lilith. If she were to be completely honest, she found herself falling in love. This astonished her, almost put her off her path. But then the necessity of freeing herself came roaring back, stronger than ever. Beleth had unintentionally revealed to her just how much pain it was in, how it feared and detested Leviathan, how it longed to be freed from the wheel of agony it was forced to endure. Now she had her foundation set, she could go on....
Lilith stared upward, but though her body lazed, her mind roiled. How to say what she wanted to say? She considered half a dozen ideas, dismissing them all in turn. Finally: “When I was a little girl,” she began, “I didn’t like who I was. Things were done to me. Terrible things. Betrayal at the hand of someone who was supposed to love and protect me. But I was just a little girl, you know. I felt ashamed, humiliated, tiny, helpless in the malevolent palm of the world.”
She took a breath, wondered whether this was the right path, then erased doubt as counter-productive, went on. “Early mornings, when the sun was neither below the horizon nor above, when my nightly visitor was gone, I would lie in bed and think of myself as another person, a person who couldn’t be touched by the world around me, a person utterly different than myself.”
She waited a moment, breathing as deeply as she could muster given the heaviness in her chest, then said, “Do you know what I mean?”
For a time, there was silence between them. Then Emma stirred. “I never wanted what’s happened to me.”
It was not a direct answer, but it was the answer Lilith was hoping for. “God knows, neither did I.” She held her breath.
“I never wanted—” Emma stopped short.
A wild look came into her eyes, which brought Lilith up on one elbow, an arm across Emma’s shoulder.
“I know,” she said.
Emma’s eyes opened wide. “You do?”
“How could I not feel it? Whatever is inside you—”
“Stop!” That harshness as Emma’s voice deepened. Birdsong ended and, as abruptly, started up again. She tried to push Lilith away, but Lilith resisted. “Don’t!” Emma cried. Her eyes had darkened, muddied with symbols. “I beg you.”
Lilith felt as if she had been thrust into no-man’s-land. To go forward or to retreat? What to do? All of a sudden she realized that this was not her decision; it was Emma’s. She knew—knew—that Emma didn’t want her to stop. But that thing inside her did.
And then another insight, this one even more startling: there was a war going on inside Emma, a terrible battle for possession of her soul. But, no, Lilith thought, that wasn’t it at all. Her mind was running along the lines of traditional Church doctrine. The battle inside Emma was more immediate, more of the here and now. It was for control of her mind.
This is the moment, Lilith told herself. Either I’m in, or I’m out. If I retreat now I’ll never get back in. Never. And she wanted in, more than she’d ever wanted anything. Even though the deep part of her that the thing had touched quailed at the thought, she held on, stared deep into Emma’s eyes, forcing herself to see beyond their strangeness.
“You’re not pushing me away, you who’s inside. I’m not going anywhere.” She felt Emma’s fingers clutch at her flesh, the scrape of her nails along her skin, maybe even a couple of droplets of blood. “No, you can’t make me. Emma doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want to push me away. And you, who defended me against the Seraph, what do you want?” She felt Emma’s grip tighten, didn’t care. “Speak now! Speak for yourself.”
And in Emma’s eyes she could see that the insurgence had begun. She thrilled to the notion that she had been the spark, that she had drawn Emma—the real Emma—out of the shadow-prison in which she had been incarcerated.
“I am that I am,” Beleth said, toeing the Fallen line.
“Not anymore,” Lilith told it. “You’re something else now. Something alien even to the Seraph.”
“What am I then?” Beleth asked. Astonishingly, its voice carried the tonal hint of a child in distress.
“You’re lost,” Lilith said, emboldened by the change in Beleth’s voice. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Nothing more came out of Emma’s mouth for a very long time. Lilith, still holding her lover, drew her knees up to her chin. A child’s pose. That unconscious movement elicited a response from Emma.
“Lilith,” she said in her own voice, “you’re the enemy. What am I doing here with you?” A logical question; Lilith could hardly blame her for asking it.
Lilith had to assume that Beleth had withdrawn, at least temporarily, to consider its fate. “There is always an enemy. But now we have a common enemy to fight.
“I will admit that when I was sent here you were the enemy.” She shook her head. “But something unimaginable happened when I saw you at the café.�
�� She was terrified of this; admissions were hardly her strong suit. Confession was anathema. And yet she found herself continuing, as if, having dived overboard, she was now being pulled down into unknown depths. “I have never loved anyone or anything in my life. Frankly, I thought I was incapable of love. I thought I wouldn’t understand it, wouldn’t want it. I considered love a fatal weakness.”
Her hands moved against Emma’s smooth flesh. “When I saw you everything I knew or thought I knew about love flew out the window. I wanted you, wanted to be with you, and nothing else mattered. For me, Knight and Observatine vanished off the face of the earth.” She shrugged, a kind of protection against how vulnerable, how naked—really naked—she felt. “I can’t explain it. I’ve racked my brains to come up with an answer. But now I think maybe I don’t want to because there is no explanation for what I feel.”
“You felt incapable of love,” Emma said softly, “because of what happened to you. You feel unclean, unworthy of being loved.”
Lilith heart fairly stopped in her chest. Her lungs constricted, and she felt overcome, as if with a high fever.
“I want an explanation.” Emma’s eyes had gone dark again, that sign swimming in their centers. Her body had stiffened, as if her blood and flesh had been replaced by crushed acrylic fibers.
Lilith had become somewhat used to her lover’s occult schizophrenia but was nevertheless caught out by the darkness overriding the sunlight of their connection. She desperately wanted to continue her conversation with Emma. Did Emma love her, could she really love her? Lilith didn’t know. Her face and neck flushed crimson.
But now she knew she had to concentrate on the Fallen that had taken possession of Emma. “An explanation for what, Beleth?”
“For what is happening here.”
“Emma and I were talking. You interrupted—”
“No. I talk with Leviathan. This was not talking. It is something I do not understand.”
A light went off in Lilith’s head. She took Emma’s hand, brought the palm to her lips, kissed it. “You mean this?”
“Yes,” the Power said.
She took Emma’s hand and pressed it against her breast. “And this?”
“That too.” Beleth’s voice had grown darker, rumbling like the thunder of the cataract.
Leaning forward, Lilith kissed Emma’s half-opened lips. Their tongues touched. “And this,” she said, reluctantly pulling away. She wanted to be kissing Emma’s lips all day and all night.
“That most of all,” Beleth said, its voice again holding the plaintive note of a lost child.
“It’s love, Beleth.”
Lilith stared at Emma in open astonishment. She had opened her mouth to answer, but Emma had beat her to it. More important, she had stilled the Power’s voice in the middle of its interrogation of Lilith.
“Huh.” The dark voice was back. “ ‘Love’ is God’s word.” Its contempt was spit out like acid.
“Indeed,” Lilith said.
“Ha, regard how it is used by the insects to charm each other, to deceive each other, to betray each other. We rejected God’s false love millennia ago.”
“I wonder why?” Lilith said. “All of you Fallen are experts at charm, at deceit, at betrayal. Those are your mother’s milk.”
“Love is a concept God created to lead his insects astray, to test them, to see if they could live up to his ideals. But you insects don’t. You can’t. No one can. God is God; nothing can live up to his laws and rules; he made sure of that.” Beleth grunted, which sounded weird and unsettling coming out of Emma’s mouth. “You see now what we have seen for untold millennia. God has betrayed everyone.”
“Well, no wonder you’re all so pissed off.”
Lilith jerked at Emma’s blasphemous comment. But then she saw a tiny flutter of Emma’s right eyelid, like the hint of a wink, and she relaxed, got herself into the swing of things.
Then Emma grimaced as Beleth wrested back control. “Whatever you think you have here, Lilith, is an illusion. You are in the midst of an idyll, a daydream. Reality awaits, and I can guarantee it won’t be rainbows and unicorns. I know you are already thinking about how you can oust me from this corpus. Believe me when I tell you, that is the last thing you want. If I Transposition into another insect corpus—yours, for instance—this one will die. Your precious Emma will be nothing more than a dried-up husk. She will not even be recognizable as an insect, let alone as Emma. There won’t even be enough of her to weep over.”
Emma’s features relaxed for a moment, as Emma herself returned. “Beleth is right, Lilith. I’ve seen it happen to the woman it inhabited before me. Bravo thought we had found a way to exorcise the Fallen, but it was only temporary. Beleth was simply in hiding, invisible even to myself.”
Emma’s body twitched as the Power reasserted control. “Now that’s settled—”
“What you haven’t told us, what’s so very important to you,” Lilith broke in, “is that the instant you leave Emma’s body you’ll be vulnerable to Leviathan, who, if we’re to judge by that recent encounter, dislikes and distrusts you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Beleth sniffed.
“The difference being the Seraph is out to get you.”
“I do not believe—”
“He will destroy you the moment your usefulness to him is finished. You know this, Beleth.”
Emma seemed to have turned to stone.
Lilith cocked her head, one eyebrow raised. “And by the way, just what does he want from you?”
Nothing was forthcoming. The eyes were black again; Emma seemed deeply buried once more, bound and gagged in some horrific manner, all the progress she had made vanished. Lilith decided to take matters into her own hands. Quite literally. Cupping Emma’s face with her hands, she kissed those lips she longed for. They were not as before. Instead, cold, metallic, unyielding, they resisted her advance, and she shuddered, recalling the touch of the beast on her inner core. And yet she would not be deterred, keeping her mouth on Emma’s, slowly prying her lips open with her tongue. Beleth tried to say something. In response, she softened her lips more, twined her tongue more, let her heat seep into Emma’s mouth—Beleth’s mouth. So slowly it was like the progress of a praying mantis the lips under hers yielded, unfolded, softened like taffy, and she placed one of her hands at the nape of Emma’s neck.
She broke away, Emma trying to follow her, to keep the connection. “You want this, Power. You need it.” She caressed her twin lovers. “Love is irrational; love is desperation. You have experienced its power. Even God doesn’t understand that; he believes love to be devotion. I did, too, for so long. Now I know the truth. Now you know the truth.” She stared into Emma’s black eyes. “So why are you here, Power? What did Leviathan send you to do?”
Emma tried to continue the kiss, but Lilith reared back. “Not until...”
“Bravo Shaw poses the greatest—the only—threat to our advance. I am to use this corpus to get close to him. I am to weaken him, to probe his mind, to bring him into our fold. To make him Fallen.”
26
Hollow Lands, Malta: Present Day
“WHAT THE HELL—?”
Ayla froze at the bottom of the staircase.
She turned to regard Bravo. “Now you’re going to have to tell me—something.”
When she had come to the end of the staircase Ayla was expecting a sub-basement of some kind. Instead, she found that they were standing at one end of what appeared to be a natural cavern. As Bravo’s beam played over the walls it illuminated flashes of glittering light—reflections, she saw now, from a river flowing deep under the Knights’ castle.
“What the hell is this?” She had regained enough of her composure to finish her original sentence.
“It’s exactly what it looks like.” Bravo led her forward. “A river.”
“With water black as night. Where does it go?”
“Out to the sea. But that’s not our destination.”
“W
hat is?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“You’re trying to drive me crazy, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “No, no. But here, words are wholly inadequate.” His fever had been vanquished; he was nearly back to his old self. “Only seeing is believing.”
Much to her surprise there was a small rowboat waiting for them, tied to a metal cleat on the near bank. The boat was old but finely wrought of steam-treated wood, bound in iron; coats of varnish gleamed in the light. Bravo took the oars, bade her cast off, and then, using the end of one oar, pushed them away from shore. He rowed in slow, powerful strokes and they made good time, but in truth, this was as much to do with the swiftly flowing current as with his strength. Sitting on the bench behind him, Ayla found herself worrying not merely about what their destination could possibly be, but also about how they were going to get back.
Over her head she saw glimmers of light, like phantasms, and when she asked Bravo about them he told her they were evidence of lost light.
“You see it in tunnels sometimes. No one knows what it is or why it’s there.”
Time passed. In the semi-dark she had no idea how much. It could have been five minutes or five hours. Time seemed to have a different agenda here, though how that could be she was at a complete loss to say. The river itself wound gently. It lacked the rapids, rocks, bends, eddies, and snaking twists of most rivers. Once, she dipped her fingertips into the water, found its temperature disconcertingly warm, like that of blood. She jerked her hand up, as if stung. A river this far below the surface should have been icy.
At length, they emerged from the cavern into a deep river gorge. Eventually, Bravo guided the boat toward the far bank. Jumping out, he tied the rope to another cleat identical to the one at their point of embarkation. She picked her way over the mud of the low bank into a kind of marbled jumble of huge rock formations through which Bravo led her.
“You been here before?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Conrad drew a detailed map. He asked me to memorize it before he burned it.”
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