The two men stood like the statues. Then the tall man extended his arms. The bearded man accepted them and the two men linked forearms, lightly, the shorter man seemingly fearful of a tighter embrace.
“We loved, once,” Pao said. “Was that not a bond greater than the flesh?”
“You know it was,” Vol replied. “But the body was a part of that, an important part.”
“That is an understatement,” his companion replied.
Vol smiled. “True enough. Now we must know if that flesh can be shed.”
“Votah! Inevitably we will lose our bodies, death will see to that,” Pao said. “Why be impatient?”
“To learn,” Vol said. “To see if we can become Candescent.”
Pao’s face twisted unhappily and he released the arms of the other. “That is Rensat’s influence, my friend. She still lives on the myths of the past. Legend will not save you . . . but the Source might.”
“So might the ritual that you yourself composed,” Vol said.
Just then, at the command of one of the women, half of the people in robes and carrying parchment moved through the room and filed through the door. The others appeared to be trying to see over their shoulders but were not allowed beyond the entrance.
“Pao, Pao!” an older woman called as she passed through the doorway.
Pao looked up to find her, but a moment later she was barely visible as the other parchment bearers swept into the room beyond.
Vol tilted his head at his bearded friend with blatant judgment. “We said no physical attachments before this test. You know this, Pao. The connection must be solely of the spirit. When we achieve that, without distraction, then the body can be trained to move aside at will.”
“I tried to create distance,” Pao said, “but she comes to me—”
“And your focus changes to the physical.”
“Of course.”
Vol gripped Pao’s arms. “I cannot blame her, or you,” he continued sadly. “It tortures me not to have a physical connection with my lovers. A complete connection, to accompany the spiritual.”
“Then make that connection with whomever you wish,” Pao said, urging him. “But give this up, at least for now.”
Vol deflated. He released his friend and turned away. Then he stopped and looked back.
“Pao,” the librarian said, pressing him, “you once had more faith than any of us. Yet now you want to put your trust there?” He pointed toward the door.
“Not trust,” Pao said. “Hope? Optimism? The point is, we don’t have to decide that now, which is why I ask you to wait.”
Vol eyed his friend carefully. “Tell me. Do you truly believe in what the Technologists are attempting to do? Or is it that you lack faith in the alternative, in us?”
“Both,” Pao admitted. “More study is required on both sides.”
Vol regarded his friend silently. The door was shut and the remaining dozen people had now gathered loosely around the two men. Vol turned from Pao and began to walk around the basalt arm of the spiral.
“Pao,” a woman called and took several steps toward him. “Do not let Technologist propaganda cloud your eyes.”
Pao regarded her with fondness. “You have no fear about what we do?”
The woman’s eyes grew stern. “I am afraid, yes. To die, to ascend, but not to transcend—eternity on earth, immaterial and alone? That frightens me more. But there are other views, even among the Technologists. The earth is restless, the ice moves, the animals are fearful. We may not have time to explore alternative rituals as much as we would like.”
“Certainly not if we continue to debate the topic,” Vol pointed out, turning to Pao.
Everyone was silent.
Vol walked toward the woman and took her arms as he had taken Pao’s. “I will be honored to go forth with you, Rensat, but I do not want to take you from him whom you love.”
“I love you both,” Rensat told him. “Ultimately, however, I love the Candescents above all. If I cannot have that, no life, no love, is worth possessing.”
Her words had an impact on Pao. He moved closer to the other two, and Mikel could feel their energy shift. “I have spent my adult life looking at existence from many viewpoints,” Pao told her. “That is why I have written—not just to share ideas but to see them as if they belong to someone else, to consider them impartially. And I have come to believe some of what we believe but also aspects of what the Technologists believe.” He faced the other members of the Priesthood. “There are basic questions that remain to be answered. I say wait.”
“What questions?” Rensat asked.
“The question of infusing ourselves into the cosmic plane.”
Vol released Rensat and waved with disgust. “The Technologists are not planning an ‘infusion,’ ” he said. “They are planning to break into the highest plane, like thieves. Never mind the animal violence inherent in that—by what logic can anyone think of overpowering limitless power? No.” He shook his head. “Our souls must bond. Together we must present ourselves to the infinite. We must merge with the cosmos. That is how the Candescents survived their obliteration.”
“You think that is what they did,” Pao said. “You believe that based on stories passed down since the world was young.”
Vol stood strong, wordlessly defending his faith.
“And you are wrong about the Technologists,” Pao said, correcting him. “They look to target a point in the cosmos, not to crack it or assault it.” Pao looked out at the others. “My friends, think about your approach. Even bonded souls may bounce from the cosmic plane like light from polished metal. One soul, a dozen, a thousand—it may not matter.”
“The Candescents proved it does,” Rensat retorted.
“And you suggest that rising like a geyser-powered stone on molten rock will achieve that goal?” Vol asked.
“I don’t know!” Pao confessed. “I don’t. That is why I say we must wait. The Technologists have built a device that may give us the opportunity to ascend. Even the legends tell us the Candescents rode into the cosmic plane on an inferno.”
“The word is haydonai and no one is sure what it meant,” Vol reminded him. “The ancient Galderkhaani may have meant ‘great glow,’ not ‘fire.’ The great glow may have come from luminous souls working together, not a column of fire. It may be figurative, not literal.”
Pao smiled thinly. “All I am asking is that we save, for later, the one option that might kill everyone here—and then prove too weak to allow us to reach any of the planes beyond death.”
“And I say again, there are risks inherent in all things,” Vol said. “Your thoughts and words and poetry were instrumental in creating the cazh. Do not abandon us now.”
Vol studied Pao’s reluctant face. Then he made a little open-handed gesture, as if to say, Join us.
“I do not wish to,” Pao said at last. But then he looked long and openly at his two former lovers. Their faces were so familiar, so dear, that the thought of living without them was unthinkable. “And yet I cannot abandon you,” he said.
With an encouraging look from Rensat, Pao finally nodded. Vol clapped the man’s shoulders joyously, then turned and pulled a parchment from its display on a wall and followed Pao as he strode without another word around the spiral toward its center. The other dozen arranged themselves along the basalt path so that they were evenly spaced, close to the fires floating on the water. Pao sat cross-legged in the center. Vol placed the parchment in Pao’s lap, then stood behind him.
The bearded man looked around. He still seemed uncertain.
“These are your words,” Rensat reminded him.
Pao looked at the parchment. It was a gesture, no more, but he placed his name on the document. Then he took a dramatic breath and bowed over his knees, exposing the nape of his neck.
Vol stood before him with his feet shoulder-width apart and closed his eyes. His breath became tremulous. The others held a respectful silence. Vol opened his eyes and
extended the first two fingers of his right hand to point exactly at Pao’s neck. He raised his left hand above him and pointed those first two fingers at the lattice dome. Then he looked directly into Mikel’s eyes and smiled.
“Welcome, all,” he said. “In the name of the Candescents, we commit our spirits to wherever the ritual takes us!”
Almost at once, an invisible surge began to manifest itself, a shock wave that grew in power until it was no longer rippling but forcefully expanding—
• • •
Mikel jerked back in terror. His hands recoiled from the mosaic and the vision ripped away from his mind. Almost simultaneously, a massive fireball exploded nearby.
• • •
Three hours by plane, northeast of Halley VI, on the north coast of Antarctica, the commander of the Norwegian Troll base pushed his way through a huddle of scientists to get a full view of the jagged lines on the computer screen they were all staring at. He had NORSAR, a geoscience research foundation, on the phone and the phone to his ear.
“We’ve never seen seismic activity like this,” he said in awe.
“And no aftershocks?” asked the seismologist on the phone.
“Just that brief burst,” the commander said. An inveterate fidgeter, he began to drum with his fingers on the desk. As if he were reading music, he tapped the long and short lines from the Antarctic bedrock’s seismometer, but the resulting beat was far too arrhythmic to be music.
There were two people in the world who would have recognized the sound.
A psychiatrist seven and a half thousand miles away and her ten-year-old son.
CHAPTER 11
A cat woke from a nap on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and lightly descended from the couch to the floor. He stretched his shoulders, then stood for a moment, still half-asleep. Then he ran at full speed out of the room, down the hall, out of sight.
Caitlin and Jacob O’Hara sat at the table having breakfast, watching Arfa’s impromptu sprint. Caitlin was tempted to go find him but Jacob was in the middle of a dramatic reenactment of what it must have been like to be the chef on the Nautilus and refused to be distracted. He was so fired up he’d been holding a glass of almond milk for at least five minutes despite occasionally sloshing it onto his hand.
Suddenly, Jacob dropped the glass on the table. Raising both fists in the air, he threw his head back, eyes squeezed tight, a picture of frustration.
“Jake, honey?”
Caitlin knelt by his chair, suddenly worried that perhaps Jacob’s recovery from the episode at the cooking school was really just the eye of a storm.
“En . . . do . . . ,” he said, as though he were struggling to form words. “En . . . dovi . . .”
Caitlin reached out and touched him lightly on his face. Jacob reared back as though repulsed by human contact.
Then he brought both fists down on the table. It was a tense but controlled movement—not in a rage, not aimed at anything, more like trying to gather himself—except that the table met his fists with a massive thump. The impact startled him, as if he’d forgotten the table was there. His eyes jerked open and Caitlin, horrified at what she was seeing, realized that Jacob was suddenly himself again. Which meant, even more terrifying, that for those few seconds he had not been himself.
Jacob looked at his hands, looked at the table covered in milk, looked at his mother, and began to cry.
For more than ten minutes, Jacob continued to writhe in Caitlin’s arms.
First he would twist away so he could sign with both hands, then he would turn to his mother to clutch at her neck. Signing was his default, emergency mode, and though he was wearing his hearing aid, he wasn’t responding to anything Caitlin was saying. She didn’t want to break the embrace to face him and sign herself. He was only signing one thing.
“I want to go to bed . . . I want to go to bed.”
Caitlin stood, hoisted his legs around her waist, and carried him. Any other time she would have felt the burn in her legs under the weight of a growing ten-year-old, but not now. She walked quickly down the hall, feeling Jacob’s wrists move against her back as he continued to sign, clutch, sign.
But as much as he wanted to go to bed, he was not quite ready to be left alone. As if he were three years old, Jacob wanted the comfort of the full bedtime routine, including help from Caitlin taking out his hearing aid and changing into his pajamas. He even demanded to floss and brush his teeth, something he typically disliked. Finally, with his head on the pillow and the sheets and two blankets pulled up to his chin and perfectly smoothed over his chest, his stuffed, fraying whale from the Museum of Natural History under his left arm, he sobbed his last sob and calmed. Caitlin slipped her left hand under his right hand and he slapped her hand away.
“No talking, Mommy,” he signed. “Hug.”
She curled over and hugged him tight. Then, sitting back, seeing that he was still gazing at her, she finally signed, “What happened?”
“It didn’t work,” he signed back, his eyes downcast.
“What didn’t work?”
“There was sky and then there was ice and water that was on fire.”
The mention of fire sent a shiver up Caitlin’s back. This was the second time he’d had a vision that included fire. Her whole experience of Galderkhaan involved fire, and then there was Maanik and Atash, the latter of whom had died from it.
“What are we talking about?” she asked with slow, patient gestures. “Can you tell me that?”
He shook his head, then signed, “I have to sleep now.”
She wanted to ask if he was alone, if he had seen people, heard them talking, felt something, but she didn’t want to put any ideas in his head.
“All right, honey,” she signed. “You sleep.”
Caitlin was reluctant to leave it at that but knew that Jacob didn’t do his best when pressed. She kissed his forehead.
“Sleep,” she signed.
“Sleep, Mommy,” he said in agreement.
He turned over, curled in the fetal position, and put his forefingers in his mouth. He hadn’t done that in six years.
Caitlin closed his door behind her and stood for a moment with her hand on the doorknob. Have I brought this on my son?
She stalked back down the hall to the sunny living room, awash with an anger and guilt she had never felt in her life. She couldn’t keep her thoughts straight, couldn’t sit, couldn’t control her breaths and didn’t want to. The memories were battering into her brain—Maanik screaming, squirming in bed, barely making sense before descending into gibberish, then screaming again. Was Jacob taking his first steps into that same cycle? If so, why? She had stopped the assault, over a week ago. Those souls were gone.
Caitlin whipped back and forth across her living room cursing.
Her phone rang. She let it go for a couple of seconds, then crossed the room to grab it from her purse. The screen said it was her father and she thought, Not now! as if she were yelling at him. She flung the phone onto the table and returned to the living room.
What if those Galderkhaan souls are back, somehow? If they didn’t die before, I’m going to make sure they do this time. And where the hell is the cat?
Had Arfa sensed something in the apartment again? Was that why he ran out of the room before Jacob fell apart?
Caitlin felt something rising inside of her, something dark and ugly that wasn’t just a protective parent, wasn’t simply outrage. It rose up her back like molten rock, turning every nerve to fire. She had to fight to keep from breaking something.
At that moment the cat entered from the hallway, ambling at his usual pace. He walked straight to his food dish by the archway to the kitchen and settled on his haunches for a long chow down. Still frustrated and wanting to scream it out, Caitlin got close to him to test his responsiveness. He didn’t even twitch an ear. Nothing amiss there.
So this isn’t the same as Maanik and her dog, Caitlin thought. This is something different.
Because l
ife wasn’t strange enough, it had to get stranger. And endanger her son.
She jumped when the phone rang again. On autopilot, she grabbed it from the table. This time it was Anita. She rejected the call, dropped the phone on the table, and hurried back into the living room. She needed the wider space around her, needed to think, but she couldn’t. Nor was there any reason to think: she knew what she had to do.
She had to get back to Galderkhaan to see what, if anything, might be causing this. But then she remembered the horrible white ice trap she’d traveled to last time she tried, where she’d heard an invisible Jacob knocking for her and she couldn’t reach him.
Stark fear saturated her anger. Was there a connection? Had she done this to him?
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What if she tried to go back there and only caused things to deteriorate further?
You left me without a bloody guidebook! she screamed at everyone who had brought her to this moment—herself above all. She wished she could take a week off and pick the brains of Vahin, the Hindu cleric she’d met in Iran, and Madame Langlois, whose Haitian Vodou world was as vivid as it was foreign. They had provided such strong insight with Maanik’s case.
But this was Jacob. She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t take him with her. She didn’t even know if she could get back into Tehran now.
She paced to the hall and listened for anything from Jacob’s room, but all was silent. For a second she sank onto her heels and put her forehead in her hands. Almost instantly she stood again, unable to be still. Staying there by the hallway, she closed her eyes and ground her left heel into the floor. She stretched her left hand toward the chair Jacob had been sitting in and extended her right hand toward the floor, willing herself back, back, back, to Galderkhaan, to any place that wasn’t here—
Nothing happened.
Damn it!
She opened her eyes, shook out the stance, then looked at the nearest piece of curved metal, her coffeepot on the table. Again, she willed herself into the alternate mind stream or whatever the hell it was—and again, nothing happened. She cupped her right hand under her left palm, not touching, but she didn’t even feel the centering that had been occurring regularly for weeks.
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