Fists of Iron_An Urban Fantasy Novel

by J. A. Cipriano

  Gabby’s hand squeezed mine harder and stayed that way. “What do you mean, oracle? I need my son to be safe, and I want to know where he is so I can keep him that way. How are those not the same thing?”

  I really didn’t see the difference myself. It was like listening to a fortune cookie, to be honest, but the important point was we were dealing with some next level magic mojo. “I dunno, Doc, but I doubt we’re going to get a straight answer.”

  The smoke, now a multicolored affair, began to churn, first blowing one way and then the next an instant later. “The mists of time do not carry in the straight path of my master’s arrow and neither does the heart of man. The words I bring are always true but never clear.” The wind wasn’t enough to be more than annoying, but it was growing in intensity as the Pythia’s voice started to boom, “Now your time shortens, the hunter approaches, the paths entwine! Speak your choice or leave my eyes!”

  Shit was getting serious and the smoke felt like it was filling my head up to the point I couldn’t think straight. Best to give the divine being what she wanted before we were thrown off the mountain or some shit. I tried to find Gabriela’s eyes in the swirling smoke but all I could manage was to look in her general head region. “Okay, Doc. Need or want?”

  She pulled me in by our linked hands, stepping right up to me at the same time. I could just make out those green eyes, half-glazed from all the crazy shit we were inhaling. “Need. I need–”

  Before Gabby could finish, the braziers exploded into the full glory of a high-noon sun. For a moment, I was sure as hell I had gone straight to Daredevil blind, do not pass ‘Go,’ do not collect two-hundred dollars. The whole time, I kept that grip on Gabriela’s hand, swearing under my breath I would never let go.

  It passed, though, even if the spots stayed in my eyes for seconds after, and as my vision returned, the smoke had been cleared from the chamber as well. Still huddled together, we were covered in a thin layer of ash and soot. The room was now lit in the bright, even warmth of the midday sun.

  More than that, the architecture of the shrine seemed to have changed too. I had thought this chamber had a ceiling, but it was now open to the sunny, cloudless sky. The columns, pillars, and braziers were now pristine and polished, gilded with gold decorations that glinted in the sun.

  In the center of the circular room, settled on an elegant, open-backed couch with plush cushions, was a handsome older lady, in her mid to late fifties if I was any kind of judge, dressed in a pale golden toga-style dress. Other than some jeweled hair pins and a simple golden amulet around her neck, she was surprisingly plain for an oracular figure of mythology.

  “Need is what you ask, thus need is what you will have,” the Pythia said in that same melodic voice. It sounded more focused, less rambling than before.

  Gabby gave me a sidelong glance before she gave the oracle a brief nod. “We’re ready.”

  I reluctantly untangled from her as I shook ash out of my hair. I knew we needed to stop the touching. It was only going to make things worse in the end, but easier said than done, ya know?

  “Sure, I guess so. Lay it on us.” I tried to smile as I spoke, but it was harder than it should have been.

  The oracle had strikingly classical features, something I noticed as she smiled softly. “Very well. Listen closely and remember that, while these words can leave this chamber, what you have seen can never be heard by other ears.”

  Not bothering to wait for a response, she continued, “We stood together for thousands of turns, woven together by nature’s vines. T'was by hubris unbound and for peace unfounded that man’s shears cut clear. Now all is to be corrupted and worm-eaten, presided over by bishop and warden, lest the center thread left in heaven be brought to tie all back together in sweet embrace. But to tie the knot, one must make this self-same choice.”

  We stood there in silence for a moment, expecting to hear some more verses. I sure as hell knew I didn’t know what to make of what we’d already heard. Unfortunately, nothing came.

  After maybe a minute, Gabriela broke the silence. “I don’t understand.” I sure felt a lot better knowing it was over her head too, but it was an empty kind of relief.

  “At least I’m not the only one.” I looked the Pythia up and down. “I hate to sound like an ass but … is that it?”

  The prophetess let out a deep sigh. “What light Apollo has shone upon me has been spent. What has been said is all there is to say. This is what you need to know to see the end of your quest.” Her eyes narrowed and her gaze shifted to the shrine’s door.

  That moment, three hard knocks rapped on the wood. The hair on the back of my neck stood up like we had just entered a thunderstorm. Gabriela took a step or two away as her fingers started to twist, prepping a spell, which seemed to be a good idea to me. I mimicked that idea by digging into my dusty coat for my Beretta.

  The Pythia frowned, but I don’t know if she was upset by us or by having someone knock unannounced. “All who have walked the steps of the consultant may enter.”

  The door swung open quietly and our unexpected guest was revealed, though I had to look down to meet his eyes.

  It was our “old friend,” Rabbi Joseph Krakowski, all five feet of him, looking as if he’d just finished a nice stroll through the hills. Oh, and he wasn’t alone.

  9

  Flanking the Littlest Rabbi on both sides were things that could best be described as floating, spinning wheels. I’m talking ancient chariot wheels, not your modern steel-belt radials, with brilliantly polished brass rims and spokes of brushed gold. Oh, and they had eyes on the outside of the rim. Lots of eyes. Each eye was different, of every shape and color imaginable.

  Despite the blatant insanity of the things, they were strangely perfect to me. Instead of the mind-blowing insanity of the chaos beasts and Monster Trucks, the wheels made my golden heart swell with overwhelming peace and order. It was strikingly similar to the aura Abner shed during our trip through the Cube.

  Now I’m not a religious scholar, but I’ve read my Bible. You know that old chestnut: There’s no atheists in a foxhole? Well, it’s no universal truth, but it was for me. My faith’s lapsed plenty of times, but I never completely forgot what I’d read. What I’m getting to is I was pretty sure I knew what I was looking at.

  Honest-to-God angels. Well, a kind of angel. Yeah, there is some Biblical shit that is awfully weird, and these wheel-things were in there, in Ezekiel and David and a few other places.

  The Pythia didn’t raise a hand against our new visitors, and Joseph himself had his hands raised in a gesture of peace. “I’m sorry I didn’t have an appointment, but I’m neither here for a prophecy or for a fight.” He smiled in that open, honest way he had before, not that I was buying it anymore. “I’m only here to talk.”

  Now, to be fair, I had the burning temptation to take a shot while I had it, but even if the freakin’ angels in the room didn’t stop me, what would it solve? Killing Joseph wouldn’t produce a signed road map to Max’s location.

  Gabriela's eyes were flashing with fury, but she must have been thinking the same as me because she lowered her weaving hands. “Most people don’t come to talk with two extra-dimensional beings at their beck and call, but I don’t see as we have much choice.”

  “The Ophanim are servants of the same divinity as I.” Joe shrugged. “They aren’t bound to me. We’re bound together by our common cause.”

  The oracle pulled her knees up onto her couch. “What has come of the hosioi? None of the servants of the One are allowed here in the shadow of Olympus.”

  The wheels spun and chimed like the finest crystal bells. It wasn’t a voice, that was for sure, but those chimes meant things to me. Images sprang into my mind, and I could see the holy women below in my mind’s eye, blissed out by overwhelming feelings of calm and submission.

  I lowered my pistol and smirked. “Talk about a good trip.” I really wanted to holster my gun, sit down with Joseph, and chill out for a bit, but each
beat of la Corazon pushed away the good vibrations the wheels were putting off before they could make me do anything stupid. “So what do you have to say? Hopefully it’s something like ‘Hey, sorry for what happened. I just wanted to drop the kid off and be on my way.’”

  Unfortunately, the doc didn’t have an ancient Aztec artifact in her chest. She actually did sit down, fold her legs Indian style, and put her hands in her lap. “I know what’s going on here, but whatever influence your friends have won’t make me stop asking for my son.” She let out a laugh. “So basically ditto what Frank said.”

  Joe let out a pained sigh and folded his arms behind his back, the Ophanim spinning slowly around him. “I really am sorry about that, Gabriela. You’re a wonderful lady and a caring mother. Believe you me, I know the pain of being separated from your kinder.” His clean-shaven, boyish face settled into a distant, thoughtful look. “It won’t be for much longer, though.”

  “Yeah, because it looks like things are going to shit out there.” I took a deep breath, deciding to lay it all on the shoulders of the littlest rabbi. Maybe then he’d see how much he’d fucked up. “I’ve seen the tapestry now. That chaos stuff you let out is eating threads away. I’m pretty sure insanity-inducing nothingness is a bad thing.”

  Gabby’s eyes widened, no matter the calming spell put over us. “Seven shades! What can you possibly say to justify this?”

  “Yes, I do need to explain things a bit.” The rabbi walked up to us and plopped right down beside us while the wheels kept their slow orbit. “Now, Frank, you’ve got an open mind, I know, but Doctor, you’ve been trained and educated in the traditions of the cults. White, Ender, or Peacekeeper, it’s really all just the same.

  “What I’m getting at is this is going to be hard for you to accept, but I do ask that you give it a try. Will you do that for me, Gabriela?”

  Before she could answer, the Pythia cut in. “Would it be true that you would be so brazen, to sit here and make counsel as a servant of the One, breaker of concords, and threaten the scorching sun?” The words were strong, but she seemed as perfectly calm as before.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, prophetess. This is likely going to be the only chance I’ll have to chat with these two, so I have to risk it.” Joe nodded respectfully. “Thank you for the warning.”

  Gabriela glanced between the two divine agents and ended up on Joseph. “I’m listening, and it sounds like you better not waste time.”

  “Yeah, Rabbi, you’d better get on with it.” I gestured toward the peak looming in the distance. Dark clouds were gathering and lightning was starting to arc through the air. “Looks like a storm is brewing.”

  Joseph smiled. “Always so much to do and so little time. Well, to assuage your collective fears, I promise once again no harm will come to Max. He’s a good kid, and he’s been behaving very well. Very sharp too, I can see why you think so highly of him.”

  Despite the calming influence of the spinning wheels, Gabriela's hands clenched, gripping the edges of her lab coat like claws. If the angels hadn't been there, well, I think, training or not, Gabby would have blown the good rabbi into his component atoms.

  “Now the black threads. I know that’s very troubling, but you have to understand how things are supposed to work. On a metaphysical level, I mean.” He looked up at the Pythia again. “Oracles can’t lie, so she can back me up on this. What your cults have taught you, Doctor, are half-truths.”

  Gabby was impatient and honestly I couldn’t blame her. My “Shit About To Go Bad” sense was tingling. “Taught about what? The tapestry of magic, the place of extra-dimensional spirits, what?”

  “Please, this will go faster without interruptions.” Even though we were both at least a decade older than young Joseph, he addressed us like, well, a rabbi teaching rowdy children. “Almost everything you know about the nature of magic and the universe is heavily edited.” He let out a long sigh before continuing.

  “It could take days to go over all the inconsistencies, to educate you to every truth. We obviously don’t have time for that, judging by the growing storm and the other complications, so I’ll stick to what is most important: why I unleashed the Great Old Ones.”

  At their mention, my hairs stood on end. Even if it hadn’t been that long in the sum total of my life, I had stared too long into that chaotic mess and it had left its impression. “Yeah, this had better be a good one.”

  “It will be.” Joseph nodded to Gabriela. “So, Doctor, tell me how long the clans have been in existence?”

  Gabby’s brow wrinkled. “Well, by the texts, a little over fourteen-hundred years. Most historians tack a few centuries on to that to account for a birthing period, where the clans had formed in philosophy if not organization.”

  “Very good! Now it was the work of all three clans, led by the Peacekeepers, that exempted the divinities from acting directly on Earth, turned down the magic faucet in a manner of speaking, and sealed up the Great Old Ones. Lauded as the great saviors of humanity in the esoteric circles, the Peacekeepers have not only regulated the great clans, but been the masters of the roads, so to speak.” Joe flashed a jovial smile at me. “The Highway Patrol of the dimensions, eh, Frank?”

  “What are you getting at, Joe?” I said. The ever-spinning wheels, always staring, were making me more and more on edge. Between the angels, the oracle, and being stuck out in the open, I was feeling like a little fish in a shark tank.

  “Doesn’t that all seem a little strange to the both of you?” His eyes darted between the two of us. “Mankind has been around for a lot longer than a millennium and a half, while the divine has existed for even longer. The Great Old Ones, well, they’re not called that for nothing! Any arcane scholar worth a shekel considers them to predate almost every other being ever known.

  “So, if the Peacekeepers ‘saved the universe,’ how did anything ever exist before them? Why didn’t the Great Old Ones eat the universe or the divinities destroy humanity in their wars and bickering?”

  It wasn’t any surprise that it clicked for me before it did for Gabby. After all, as Joe had said, I hadn’t been raised and educated with the clans’ histories as the truth. In fact, I didn’t really like any of them and they never gave me a good reason to trust them.

  “The winners write the history books, right?” My thinking feet wanted to move and so I did, heavenly chiming or not. “And everybody’s got an agenda. The Peacekeepers wanted a nice, peaceful world, so they made it that way. Is that what you’re saying, Joe? That their nefarious plan was to bring peace, cause let me tell you, that doesn’t sound too bad from where I’m standing, especially if the alternative is getting eaten by tentacled slime monsters.”

  Maybe it was my anti-authority streak that pushed me that way. Maybe I was still a bit antagonistic toward how damned perfect John seemed to me. Maybe what the rabbi was laying out just made sense. The universe had been trucking along fine for billions of years before we came along, after all.

  “More or less, Frank.” I thought he was going to give me a gold star for a moment. “There is a natural order to things, order enforced through divinity, first the old gods,” – he gestured upward, at both the Pythia and the glowing peaks above us – “then by Yahweh in his guises. Call him Allah or God or Jesus Christ, it doesn’t matter. What the Peacekeepers did, with the help of both the White and the Enders, was to enforce man’s will on nature.” Joe laughed, that sad laugh that a comedian might make after telling a particularly dark joke. “We know how that always works out, don’t we?”

  I was nodding even as Gabriela shook her head, shaking out a shower of ashes from her hair instead of clearing the cobwebs. “But that can’t be. Or at least that can’t be the whole story.” She rubbed her temples with her index fingers. “What about all the magical disasters the Peacekeepers have kept under control? The ethical excesses they’ve put an end to? Why would they change a fundamental system if it was working?”

  “Oh, don’t misunderstand me,
Doctor. I’m not saying the Peacekeepers are evil, just as I wouldn’t say any of the other clans is wholly wrong, but why wouldn’t they want to control the divinities and change the order of things?” Joseph opened his palms as the Ophanim returned to a place on either side of him. “Most people fear a lack of control and once the sorcerous world understood just how precarious humanity is in the cosmic scheme of things, I doubt it took much to rally them behind the cause of control.

  “Instead of putting their faith in the divine, the clans would rather put their faith into themselves. I only seek to bring things back to their proper, natural order before one of them actually succeeds at their ultimate plans. Don’t think for a moment that the Peacekeepers don’t have an endgame as grandiose and misguided as the Whites or the Enders.”

  To my surprise, the Pythia answered before either Gabby or I could open our mouths. “As you say, the order was broken, but not only by man’s pride. It is not only mortals who have ill or misguided intentions.”

  So now the gods or whatever were up to no good too? I’d heard enough. We’d been getting dicked around by people and their agendas right or wrong, for a while now. The last thing I needed was more divine intervention.

  “Look, I don’t pretend to know jack shit about gods or spirits or divine bull.” I gave the spinny-eye-wheel-angels an apologetic nod. “No offense, your angelships.” I looked back at Joe. “If this natural order allows chaos slime monsters to roam free to eat people and fuck up the tapestry, something I know to be a really bad idea, is your plan is any better than the Peacekeepers’ or anyone else’s?”

  Gabriela’s teeth clenched and those green eyes blazed. She might have been eating the full force of all that angelic peace crap, but she was still getting mighty worked up. “And what does my son have to do with any of this? You don’t need him as insurance. From where I’m sitting, it looks like you can do whatever you like, Joe, so give me back Max.”