by David Mack
Cade sat on the edge of the bed and took his master’s hand. “You finally retired to the tropics, I see.” The master started to laugh, but his chortle devolved into a wet, hacking cough. Troubled, Cade threw a questioning look over his shoulder at Anja.
She frowned. “It was all I could do to keep him alive.” She lifted the sheet to reveal a festering wound on the master’s abdomen. “The spear of SAVNOK. Its wounds never heal.”
“Even worse,” Adair said through gritted teeth, “is the pain. There’s not enough opium on earth to take the sting from this.” He beckoned Cade. “Closer.” After Cade leaned in, he continued. “Don’t blame Anja. Not her fault. I … haven’t been strong enough for magick … since Dresden. She tried all my books. Nothing helped.”
“Master, what are we doing here?”
“Lying low.” Deep, lungsore coughs left Adair wiping bright blood from his lips. “The Allies tried to kill us, lad. We can’t go home, or even to Spain. Soon, no place’ll be safe.”
Memories of Dresden left Cade confused and bitter. “Why did they betray us?”
Anja cut in, “The same reason Salem burned witches: ignorance and fear.”
“She’s right,” Adair said. “You two don’t have the luxury of friends anymore.”
“What about the war? Is it over?”
His question darkened Adair’s already grim mood. The master pointed at a small table in the corner of the room. “Anja…?” She retrieved a newspaper and handed it to Cade. It was a copy of The New York Times dated Tuesday, August 7, 1945. He read its headline:
FIRST ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN; MISSILE IS EQUAL TO 20,000 TONS OF TNT; TRUMAN WARNS FOE OF A ‘RAIN OF RUIN’
He looked up from the front page. “Holy shit. They built it? And actually used it?”
“Welcome to the future,” Adair groused.
“It can’t be as bad as it says, can it?”
Anja’s temper rose. “It is worse. I scried the remains of Hiroshima. The entire city is gone. Nothing but ashes, ruins, and people burned alive.”
“The whole city? Leveled by one bomb?”
“Aye,” Adair said. “A few days later, the Yanks did it again. Turned Nagasaki to fucking charcoal.… Man no longer needs magick to unleash Hell upon the earth.”
Cade dropped the newspaper on the floor. “Jesus Christ.” Staring down at it, he fixated upon another detail. “Hang on. ‘Truman warns foe’? What happened to Roosevelt?”
“Died in April, about a week before Hitler blew his brains out in Berlin.” A vindictive smirk. “I guess they forgot us dirty karcists were the ones safeguarding their lives.” He indulged in a derisive snort, but then he started to wheeze like an asthmatic.
Anja rushed to a bedside table to retrieve a hypodermic needle with a syringe. She loaded it from a vial of clear medicine, then injected the drug into Adair’s arm. His breathing slowed and came more easily.
The master’s voice took on a dulcet smoothness. “My time’s short, lad. And I need to know you’ll carry on my work.”
“I will, Master. I swear it.”
“Remember our trip to the Pentagon? I sent Anja there last month, to have a look inside.”
“I found a silo under the central plaza,” she said. “Hundreds of feet deep. Near the bottom, a platform at the end of a long bridge. Large enough for the grandest magick circles.”
Adair nodded, then interjected, “Tell him the best part.”
She went on, “The walls of the silo were packed with sensing devices. All connected to floor after floor of thinking machines—”
“Computers, they call them,” Adair added.
“—and many observation rooms, manned by scientists and lawyers—”
“Lawyers?” Cade asked.
“For vetting demonic pacts,” Adair said. “They’re trying to reduce the Art to a science so they can outwit Hell and make it do their bidding. The Midnight Front on an industrial scale.”
It was chilling news, not just for its immediate implications, but for the many aspects of it that Cade knew could go disastrously wrong. “What do they mean to do with it?”
“Warfare? Espionage? Something worse?” Adair shook his head in dismay. “All I know is they never spoke to me about it, which means either they built it for nothing … or they found someone else to run it.”
Adair’s vague suspicion left Cade grasping for answers—until the worst-case scenario revealed itself. He felt his face fall as he voiced his worst fear: “Briet.”
“Aye. Sounds like she deserted Kein long before Dresden.”
“But how could she have ended up in America?”
“Operation Paperclip,” Adair said. “A top-secret program the Americans used to recruit Nazi scientists for their aerospace program. It seems they felt Miss Segfrunsdóttir’s talents were vital enough to forgive her for being a fucking fascist.”
Cade felt his anger stir at the mere notion that his country would grant amnesty to any Nazi, never mind one who had helped try to kill him and possibly even destroy the world. “Are we sure she’s the one running the show at the Pentagon?”
“Not yet,” Anja said.
“Wherever she is,” Adair said, his voice degrading to a whisper, “she can’t be trusted.” He struggled to draw another breath, but forced himself to go on: “Keeping her in check … is your problem now.” He clasped Cade’s hand with what little strength he had left, and he raised his other hand, signaling Anja. “Lass … give us a moment.”
If Anja resented being sent away, she hid it well.
After she’d gone, tears welled in Adair’s eyes. “You’re not an apprentice anymore. You’re a master karcist. Find some students, and teach them well.”
“With what? I don’t—”
“I’m leaving you my library. All my books.”
“All except the Iron Codex, you mean.”
Adair nodded. “I wanted you home. Anja wanted the Codex. Seemed a fair trade.” Another cough painted the master’s nightshirt with blood. “It’s up to you now to keep magick alive. If you fall, the Art’s light might go out forever. Don’t let that happen.”
The master’s words struck a dark chord in Cade’s memory. “Kein said almost the same thing to me, three years ago. If he was right about that—”
“A person can be right on the facts and still do the wrong thing. Kein’s cure was far worse than the affliction. He had to be stopped, lad. Never doubt that. Not for a moment.”
Cade nodded, then glanced again at the troubling newspaper headline. “And Briet?”
“Make peace if you can, but—” He suppressed one more hacking cough. “If the past three centuries taught me nothing else, they taught me this: The war never ends.”
* * *
It was raining again the night Adair died. Anja stood with Cade in the downpour and watched the bamboo shack go up in flames.
She and Adair had said their farewells, and she had fulfilled the master’s last request, for a drink laced with all the opium he could stand, to ease him through his final passage into oblivion. Cade had asked if Adair wanted to be alone; to his surprise, the old karcist had asked them to stay. And so they had, until his breathing stopped and his cold hands went slack.
Most of the master’s books and paraphernalia belonged to Cade now. The American had tasked a demonic porter to gather it all for safekeeping, along with his gear and tools of the Art. Anja had been surprised to learn Cade had returned from Hell with yoked spirits at his command, but now she realized it made sense: how else could he have suvived six months in the Abyss?
The master’s tools and grimoire they had left behind to burn; they were of no use now, not to her, Cade, or anyone else.
The house blazed against the tempest, a fiery grave for the man who had been more of a father to Anja than her own sire. She had promised Adair she would not cry; it was a vow she broke now without shame or regret, because she knew the rain would mask her tears.
She and Cade watched the roof fal
l in, followed by the walls.
He asked, “Where will you go?”
“South. I am told many Thule dabblers fled to Argentina after the war. I plan to kill a few of them. Maybe all of them.” She eyed him with grudging respect. “You could come with me.”
“I have other plans.”
As if summoned, the purr of an outboard motor cut through the hiss of the storm. Anja looked to sea and saw a slender boat fight its way ashore against the tide. “Your ride?”
“I believe it is.”
The narrow craft scraped onto the beach. A tall man with handsome features and dark brown skin emerged from the pilothouse and braved the rain to wade ashore. His voice was deep, his accent English. “Cade! Damn your eyes, I knew you’d make it through the war!”
Cade met him with a fraternal embrace. “Good to see you, too, Miles.” They parted, and Cade acknowledged Anja’s curiosity. “Anja, this is Miles Franklin, my brother from Oxford. Miles, this is Anja Kernova, my, um…”
She saw he was at a loss to describe their affiliation.
“Friend,” she said. “And sister-in-arms.”
Miles shook her hand. “A pleasure, Miss Kernova. Will you be joining us?”
She traded a knowing look with Cade. “I have other plans.”
“Splendid.” To Cade, Miles added, “We need to push off, mate. Where’s your gear?”
“It’s just me,” Cade said.
“You’ve finally learned to travel light. Will wonders never cease?” He gestured toward the boat. “Climb aboard, then. Time and tide, old boy.”
“Just a second.” Cade and Anja stood on the beach, facing each other, but neither seemed to know what to say. Anja bid him farewell with a dip of her chin, and he did the same.
Specters in the storm, they turned their backs on each other, and on the dying embers of Adair’s funeral pyre. Cade got on the boat and Anja walked south along the coast, each of them embarking on a journey into a new and darker world.
* * *
The rumrunner skipped like a stone over the sea. Cade huddled with Miles inside the pilot’s cabin as waves crashed over the bow and sprayed the window. Ahead, Cade saw only black clouds and dark water, and barely a distinction between them. He was at a loss to grasp how Miles could navigate by instruments alone through such chaos.
Miles glanced toward their feet. “Brought you a present.”
Cade lifted a ruck from the deck. He rooted through it to find a passport with his photo attached to a new identity. “Nice. Where’d you get it?”
“Perk of my new job. I’m with SIS now.”
“You mean MI-6?”
A self-deprecating shrug and smile. “In some circles.”
“Fancy. Does that mean you have the ten pounds you owe me?”
Miles put on a frown. “Bit short at the moment, old boy. But my vessel is at your service. So … where are we headed?”
“America. I have to return a pistol to a man in Secaucus. After that, there’s someone in D.C. I need to have a word with.”
A wary look. “Stirring up trouble, are we?”
“Yup. And it won’t be the last time. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
“Right!” Miles grinned as he opened up the throttle and sent the boat racing headlong into another storm. “Let’s get to it, then.”
60
SEPTEMBER
Deep under the Pentagon’s central plaza, Cade watched Briet cross the 230-foot-long steel-grate widow’s walk to her conjuring stage—apparently oblivious of his presence at its center, cloaked in a sphere of silence and illusion. Whoever had built the seventy-foot-wide pentagonal platform of whitewashed concrete had demonstrated a keen eye for detail. Its edges were forty-five feet long and paralleled the walls of the five-hundred-foot-wide silo that yawned hundreds of feet into darkness above and dropped away to watery gloom far below. The platform was lit by coal-fed torchères crackling with orange flames, three along each side at regular intervals.
As the copper-haired karcist drew near, Cade saw she toted her tools of the Art over her right shoulder in a leather bag much like the one he had carried during the war. In her left hand was a satchel. He imagined it contained chalks for inscribing circles on the platform.
Three steps off the bridge, Briet passed through the intangible membrane of Cade’s sphere of concealment. She froze at the sight of him standing ready with Kein’s wand in his hand.
“Good morning, Briet.”
She dropped her tools and satchel. “Is that Kein’s wand?”
“He sends his regards. From Hell.”
His implied threat seemed to amuse her. “What do you want?”
“To make sure we understand each other.” He watched her eyes flit toward the silo’s walls. “They can’t see us or hear us. As long as you don’t do anything stupid, there’s no reason this conversation can’t stay private.”
A strange gleam in her eye. “How did you get in here?”
“Your defenses aren’t impregnable. A fact I’d urge you to remember before you agree to whatever commissions the War Department might have in mind.”
“So this isn’t a social call.” She made a slow circuit of the platform. He pivoted to keep himself facing her as she continued. “What, then? A duel? A negotiation?”
“A discussion. For now.” He tried not to be inveigled by her blue eyes; he kept his focus on her hands and mouth, since those would be the likeliest to betray any magickal attack. “The world changed when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb. You understand that, yes?”
A sideways nod. “Better than most. Your point?”
“Peace is fragile. It won’t take much to push the world back to war.”
“War and peace. Life and death. You cling to absolutes. But there are no Platonic ideals, only a spectrum of experience. Wonder and horror, pain and pleasure—”
“Good and evil aren’t a fantasy.”
“Of course they are. They always have been. One man’s villainy is another’s heroism. One tribe’s monster is another’s saint. This has always been the way of the world. And it always will be, no matter how earnestly you wish it were different.”
Cade’s hand tightened around the wand. “Just what I’d expect of a Nazi.”
“Me? A Nazi?” She shook her head. “I was never a party member. I took advantage of them, just as Kein did, but—”
“I know you helped send people to concentration camps.”
She ceased her stroll of the platform’s edge. Her countenance hardened. “I obeyed my master, just as you obeyed yours.”
“My master never asked me to make burnt offerings of millions of lives.”
“But your countrymen did exactly that in Japan. And as I recall, it was the Allies who firebombed the civilians of Dresden.” She stalked toward Cade and joined him at the center of the platform. “I have work to do. If there’s something you want, say it.”
“Just this.” He leaned close and looked her in the eye. “I didn’t beat the Nazis just so they could set up shop in the U.S. of A. And I didn’t spend six months in Hell just to see you start Kein’s war against Science all over again.”
She smirked and turned her eye toward the silo’s walls. “Does it look to you like I have a grudge against Science? As for the Nazis and Kein … good riddance. The War Department pays a generous sum for my loyalty.” A playful shrug. “What can I say? I’m a born capitalist.”
“Sure you are. But know this—” Cade snapped Kein’s wand in half and dropped the pieces at Briet’s feet. “I’ll be watching you.”
As he walked away, her icy reply echoed in the silo around them.
“I’ll be watching you, too.”
TERMINAT HORA DIEM, TERMINAT AUTHOR OPUS
MAJOR LOCATIONS
GLOSSARY
adept—n., an initiate into the Art of ceremonial magick; often used synonymously with “apprentice.” The lowest level of adept in magick is a novice; a journeyman adept is an acolyte; a master-level adep
t is a karcist (see below).
Art, the—n., capitalized, a shorthand term referring to Renaissance-era ceremonial magick.
athamé—n., a black-handled knife with many uses in ceremonial magick.
dabbler—n., karcists’ pejorative for an amateur or a poorly trained adept of ceremonial magick.
demon—n., a fallen angel; demons provide the overwhelming majority of magick in the Art, with the remaining small percentage coming from angels.
Enochian—n., the language of angels; adj., related to or originating from angels or their language.
experiment—n., in ceremonial magick, technical term for a ritual involving the conjuration and control of demons or angels.
familiar—n., a demonic spirit in animal form, sent to aid a karcist and amplify his or her powers.
grimoire—n., a book of magickal contracts between a karcist and the demons with whom he or she has struck pacts in exchange for access to them and the powers they grant.
incubus—n., a low-level (i.e., nameless) demon, a creature of pure meanness and spite, whose function is to seduce mortals or, in some cases, act as their sexual servant; an incubus can take any of a variety of masculine forms. When so desired, it can assume a feminine form; in such an event, it is referred to as a succubus (see below).
Kabbalah—n., a system of esoteric theosophy and theurgy developed by Hebrew rabbis; it is considered a system of “White Magick,” though it has a “Black Magick” component known as Sitra Achra.
karcist—n., a master-level adept in the Art of ceremonial magick.
lamia—n., a low-level (i.e., nameless) demon summoned to act as a domestic servant; though lamiae can be compelled to behave in a manner that seems docile or even friendly, they must be carefully controlled, or else they will turn against those who conjured and commanded them.
Lull Engine—n., a divination tool, often consisting of overlapping wheels made from stiff paper or cardboard, that can be called upon without invoking either demons or angels.