Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

As if his fears created their own reality, the main doors to the church burst open and four grim-faced Americans strode in, accompanied by perhaps a dozen Uzi-equipped Italian policemen.

  "This woman is a known terrorist threat,” the lead agent announced in English, then in Italian little better than what Zack could have mustered. “Please stand clear, people. No one needs to get hurt."

  Ivy's laughter was the sharp tinkle of breaking glass. “Those who seek God using the tools of the deceiver will deceive and mislead themselves,” Ivy said. “Do you truly believe that the Kingdom of God can be built on your lies?"

  "Get her."

  Zack moved to intercept the killers. Ivy was a fighter, but he feared she wouldn't fight now. He wasn't going to let them create a new martyr here in Venice. Not while he could still move.

  Ivy laughed again, then swirled Mary's Veil like a matador waving his cape before a bull.

  The small plastic bags of herbs they'd left smoldering in the crypt should have burned out long before. Impossibly, though, they hadn't. A rich cloud of smoke swirled around the Agents and they stumbled into one another, blinded by the acrid fumes.

  "Shoot her down,” the lead Agent commanded.

  Seconds later, a flurry of shots rang out. Unaimed bullets sprayed from the cloud of smoke, ricocheting from stone walls.

  Ivy shook the veil like a maid shaking out a dustcloth and a score of bullets tumbled from the sheer silk fabric to the floor.

  One of the altar boys stumbled forward, blood turning his white robes bright red, his screams filling the church.

  "Antonio, some day you will be a Cardinal. But that time is not yet. Better to keep the white of innocence for a while,” Ivy said. She placed the veil over the wound, then drew it back.

  The boy fingered the hole in his robe, then pulled the robe off, exposing his pale and unbroken skin. “It doesn't hurt."

  "The Queen of Heaven accepts only sacrifices that are freely given, only that whose ripeness is full."

  The smoke had cleared and the Agents still had their guns out, but they were clearly having second thoughts about another round of firing.

  "Didn't you hear what she said?” the lead Agent demanded of the priest. “She's not a Christian. She's a New-Age follower of some made-up Goddess. Queen of Heaven, indeed."

  "While you may scorn Mary, Mother of God, we do not.” The priest squared his shoulders and looked straight at those guns. “The Virgin has come to us with a message of mercy and goodness, and you welcome her with violence and gunshot. You are not welcome in this house of the Lord. Leave."

  "These guns are all the welcome we need,” the Agent blustered.

  "You will put your weapons away.” The Italian police lieutenant pushed his way between the Americans and Ivy. “We've seen a great miracle today. We won't let you continue."

  "You're forgetting who's in charge here."

  "Am I? We are in Italy, not America."

  "I'll get you fired."

  The cop laughed. “You threaten me? Even if your threat had any weight, I would still stop you. Now, lady, what are your intentions?"

  * * * *

  "What are your intentions?"

  She'd preached the message of the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, as the priestess had asked her to do. But the Foundation was still there. The locals were impressed with what they had seen, but Ivy knew it wouldn't be long before they started selling cheap china figurines of the messenger and forgot the message.

  And the Foundation was still out there. They seemed immune to the message, separated from the truth by the twisted power of their sanctimonious beliefs. High on the Priestess's promise and on the vast power that she suddenly could access, Ivy had believed it would be possible to reach them. That she could remind even Foundation Agents of their shared faith, show them how their actions were taking them away from Grace, were based on a wholly misguided view of the divine. Horribly, the very certainty of their faith shielded them from the truth.

  She could mobilize the entire city to come to her aid. Water is at the secret heart of the female principle. And Venice was the city of water, a city of the Goddess as were few others in the world. This, then, was the true reason they'd been sent to this city. In Venice as much anywhere in the world, she could draw on the power of the Goddess, use it to perform little miracles like the healing she'd done on the altar boy, or even greater miracles. But the human mind, especially a mind protected by the shields of fanaticism, remained beyond reach of her powers. She could destroy one easily enough, but she couldn't heal those who clung to their illness.

  She tried to remember everything the priestess had told her, everything she'd learned in studying for her Confirmation. But no easy lessons jumped out at her. She'd have to figure what to do on her own.

  She had access to all of the power in the world. She could destroy anything. She could kill or heal. She could declare herself the Goddess Incarnate, and rule Venice with a velvet fist. She could reach around the world and crush anyone who made war.

  But she followed the logic of each of those choices. Each led to the same result—a world ever-more crippled by religious violence and religious hatred. And that world was the world of The Foundation.

  She hadn't lied when she'd told the congregation that a City of God based on hatred and violence could never stand, but if she used the power of the Veil, the Cross, and the City, she could only become like them.

  With the power in her, she could peer into the origins of the Foundation—to that group of frightened men who had gathered to celebrate their faith and work together to create a better world. They'd been then like she was now, seeking only good.

  To succeed in the face of all the obstacles, they'd needed power. And seeking power, they'd discovered its allure, been perverted by it, until power became their unspoken goal.

  Now, she had the power. But the only way she could see to use it would lead to that same result.

  Realizing that, seeing those frightened men in her mind, brought the answer to her.

  She headed toward the Church's open doors.

  As she stepped past them, parishioners reached for her, their hands brushing against the Veil but unable to hold it.

  "The Virgin,” she heard whispered again and again. “We've seen the Virgin."

  She smiled at them. She could joyfully do what needed to be done now.

  "Come with me,” she said. “Follow.” The words rolled from her, spreading out like the ripples spreading from a stone thrown in a still pond, reverberating through the church and beyond where a still-growing crowd stood and waited. Some of them, she saw, had knelt in silent prayer. Others looked thoughtful, or angry, or filled with greed.

  "Come,” she repeated, knowing as she said it that her words made it an imperative, that they could no more resist the compulsion than they could talk a tornado into changing its path.

  * * * *

  The people parted around Ivy like water yielding to a ship. They clutched at her, but their hands didn't stick. Yet, even as their hands slid from her, their lips turned upward into smiles, or opened into prayer.

  Zack was blind to the colors of power that Ivy spoke of so often, but even he could sense the electrical nimbus that surrounded her.

  She brushed near the Agents and for a moment, hunger lit the lead Agent's face.

  His thoughts were completely transparent, and they weren't about Ivy being a saint, either. He wanted to grab her, snap her neck, kill her once and for all, and then rape her body. With Ivy dead, the compulsion would end. Even if the Italian cops reacted instantly, killing the Agent, it would be too late to save Ivy. And the Agent would welcome martyrdom.

  "Watch out,” he called to Ivy. He pushed himself forward but the mob didn't respond to him as it did to Ivy. People shoved back, jealous of their closeness to their vision of the Virgin.

  "Come, Zack,” Ivy said, laughter in her voice. “You were with me from the beginning. Try to stay with me to the end."

  "Watch the Agen
t."

  His warning came too late. The Agent threw himself at Ivy, a knife clutched in one hand while the other reached for her neck.

  Zack shoved forward, desperate to reach her in time, knowing he would be too late.

  Ivy must have heard his warning, though, because she turned toward the Agent.

  Rather than stepping into a defensive stance, she simply held the veil in front of her.

  The Agent hit the thin layer of silk—and bounced off as if he'd rammed a brick wall.

  "Do not harm him,” Ivy said to a couple of Italian policemen who had drawn saps and were heading toward the Agent with serious faces.

  "But make sure he can't get away,” Zack added. Ivy might have converted to pacifism, but that didn't mean they couldn't take reasonable precautions. Not if he had anything to say about it.

  Outside the church was a stone courtyard filled with a growing crowd.

  An eerie hush descended as Ivy stepped into their midst.

  "Follow me,” Ivy repeated.

  She walked through the crowd and stepped onto a gondola that couldn't have been waiting for her, but seemed to be.

  "Need me to row?” Zack asked.

  She smiled at him, then reached out and brushed a hand across his cheek.

  "Call ahead to Father Paulo. We need the Cross to finish this. But this part, I have to do on my own. As we used to say when I was little, ‘no boys allowed.’”

  Okay, Ivy had a plan. Zack felt a little better with that realization.

  He borrowed a cell from the bald priest at Santa Lucia and put through a call to the Church of Mary of the Sailors.

  To his surprise, Father Francis answered. Zack told the older priest that Ivy was coming and to have the item ready. On an open channel, that was all he dared say. Even that was probably too much.

  "The Saint is exultant in the power that flows through her, but not all those whom she faces will be powerless,” Father Francis warned him.

  Those weren't the most encouraging words for Zack to hear. He handed the cell back to the bald priest and took off to share the warning with Ivy.

  She stood in the center of a Gondola as it moved down the canal. Although there appeared to be no oarsman, the gondola's single oar cut through the water, moving her at a steady pace that the joyful crowds could just follow.

  Each time they passed a building, more people flooded into the streets and walkways along the canal, their voices a babble of Italian and other languages as they demanded to know what was going on, who that woman was, whether she was breaking city code by sailing a gondola without a gondolier, what holiday had been declared.

  Zack spotted a bridge ahead and hurried toward it. He needed to get Father Francis's warning to Ivy and there was no way he could make himself overheard over the hubbub from the increasingly huge crowd.

  By the time he got to the bridge, it was already filling but he was able to secure the last front row location.

  A woman next to him tossed flower petals onto the canal's brown waters. Past her, a barefooted Franciscan monk was down on his knees praying.

  Children ran, laughing, over the crowded length of the bridge, then up the other side of the canal as Ivy's gondola approached.

  * * * *

  Things were going too easily.

  While Ivy hadn't been able to penetrate the Agent's warped beliefs, protected as they were by his strong but perverted faith, he had been too weak even to touch the veil.

  Which meant he was just a foot soldier in the Foundation's army. But surely they had more senior agents. Ivy wasn't naïve enough to believe the Goddess would assign her an easy job.

  Still, she'd caught them off-guard, and the crowds of people and the energized Italian police could slow their reactions and jam their communications with so much chatter that they would find it difficult to react.

  It seemed barely possible that she'd be able to pull this off, make it to the Church of Mary of the Sailors, to the Cross before the Foundation brought in their heavy guns.

  The whine of a helicopter's turbine engine overhead put a lie to that speculation. The Foundation wasn't going to be fooled again.

  The chopper's rotors stirred up murky canal waters and drove a few of the celebrating children, joyous in their escape from school, back under cover.

  She couldn't see faces behind the black glass of the helicopter's canopy, but she felt the gunner's eyes on her, sighting on her through a missile rangefinder.

  She called up a bit of power from the waters that surrounded her and sent it into the sighting mechanism.

  The backwash almost stunned her. She hadn't meant to hurt the man but his eye had been pushed tightly into the sight. His pain rippled through her body. Her newly found resistance to violence and death suddenly made sense not just as a philosophical virtue but as hard-edged reality. She felt every bit of the pain she caused. Although she could draw power from all around her, she was still physically frail from injuries and days without food or much sleep. Fighting physical battles where she suffered when she won as much as she suffered when she lost couldn't be the right answer.

  The helicopter banked away, then returned and dropped a rope ladder.

  She gestured at it and the ladder fell from the chopper, its Kevlar strands sliced like so much cotton candy.

  The wave of anger from above didn't scare her at all. Anger was more destructive for the man holding it than for the woman he assaulted with it.

  Her trick with the ladder didn't phase the Foundation agents, though.

  A man stepped into the chopper's open door and jumped down toward the water.

  He hit the water as if it were solid ground, splaying his legs to take the brunt of the energy, then stood and walked across the canal toward her.

  From the crowd, she heard an amazed gasp. If she'd wowed them with a gondola that steered without a gondolier, walking on water was a big step up.

  Ivy's surprise though, was less from the manner of his approach than from his identity.

  "Smith?"

  "Guess it's time to finish what I started."

  "We left you dead in Mosul."

  His laugh was cutting, nasal, nasty.

  "As I left you. But you don't have the Cross with you now. This time, when you die, you stay dead."

  She didn't dare close her eyes, but she used her second sight to view the power surrounding him.

  As with the other Foundation Agents, it pulsed a deep maroon red. In his case, though, the ugly mustard of yellow crept through, like hotter flames through a glowing bed of coal.

  She recognized that horrid yellow from the temple to the bird-god. There, it had been associated with human sacrifice. Without access to the power of the Cross, had the Foundation crossed that line of evil?

  "Your leaders must have really wanted you back if they resorted to human sacrifice."

  "Liar. You don't know what you're talking about."

  It didn't take second sight to hear the hint of doubt in his voice. So, they hadn't told him what they'd done, but he suspected, or feared.

  That didn't surprise her. Need to know was not limited to government spy organizations.

  "Can't you see that your precious Foundation is destroying what it is trying to build? Remember the message of Jesus. He forgave those who offended him. He preached peace even in the face of the warmongers."

  "Don't pervert the words of the Lord.” He strode across the water, closing the distance to her gondola. “It is not I who has forgotten the message of the Prince of Peace. You've succumbed to Lilith. Your New-Age interpretations of the Holy Word have no power over me and every word you speak is condemned by the true Church. Even your precious and misguided Catholicism spurns them."

  Hatred and rage contorted his features.

  Smith drew a knife from his jacket and, despite herself, Ivy's body trembled. That was the same knife he'd used to slit her throat. The laws of magic applied. It had killed her once, it could kill her again. Unwashed, still carrying her life-blood, i
t held a magical power over her that no ordinary weapon could claim. Against it, the Veil would be useless fabric.

  "Killing me will accomplish nothing,” she said. “The powers of the Goddess are not so easily defeated."

  "Your so-called Goddess, like all of Satan's demons, has no strength before the Lord. And spare me your misguided reinterpretation of the Trinity. True Christians have rejected that blasphemy from the earliest times."

  Although she'd kept the gondola in motion, heading down the river and away from him, Smith was faster, closing the distance.

  He reached her boat just as they crossed beneath a bridge.

  A blue-tinged figure dropped from the bridge and grappled with Smith.

  She had just a moment to recognize her rescuer. It was Zack, of course. He really hadn't gotten it. Like Peter in the Garden, when the soldiers had come to arrest Jesus, Zack thought he could use violence to solve the problems that violence creates.

  She just hoped he could survive his error.

  All of Smith's attention had been on Ivy and Zack landed feet-first on the Agent's head. Which would have incapacitated any human. But Smith wasn't quite human anymore. Like herself, the man had been transformed by death and resurrection.

  Zack's face contorted with pain when his feet smashed into the Agent's head and the Agent simply shrugged, turning his knife casually to slice at Zack as he went by.

  Unlike Smith, the water didn't support Zack. Where he splashed, blood turned the water red.

  Anger swept over Ivy. Zack was her friend, had sacrificed everything he had built to help her survive. And Smith had swatted him away as casually as he might squash an ant.

  With the powers available to her on the water, she could call up a whirlpool to swamp Smith, or hit him with a wave of fire hot enough to melt through even the powerful wards of faith that surrounded him.

  She barely fought down the temptation. Smith was trying to make her lose her temper. If she reacted in anger, the Foundation would win, and humanity would lose.

  Instead, she changed the texture of the water beneath Smith, making it more slippery, more open, less willing to bear weight.

  He'd been expecting something overt and strong, not something sneaky and subtle.