Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

  Smith's splash followed Zack's by less than a second.

  She reached tentacles of power into the water and yanked Zack out, placing him on the ground near a group of Italian policemen. A flicker of life remained within him. Maybe their first aid could be enough to save him. Unfortunately, she didn't have time to wait and see. She'd never know.

  She fought back the urge to cry, putting the energy into the gondola's oar, increasing her speed as she moved through the city toward the Church of Mary of the Sailors.

  A few blocks from that church, the crowd must have sensed where she was going because they got louder and thicker. The entire city seemed intent on gathering in one very small area.

  Overhead, the Foundation helicopter had been joined by U.S. Navy fighters but then Ivy noticed that the Navy fighters weren't alone. Italian Air Force fighters scrambled. It looked as if they were trying to keep the Navy away from the crowds.

  She guessed that made sense. The Foundation had shown it didn't mind civilian casualties, especially if they were Catholic or any other religion that didn't meet the Foundation's exacting standards. But the Italian government wouldn't be so sanguine about the slaughter of their civilians. They would also have been getting word from the local police. And Ivy doubted that the U.S. Government had bothered to ask for official permission for these overflights.

  She spared just a bit of power to raise the spirits of the Italian pilots overhead. They were facing the world's most powerful military without clear orders from their government. She didn't want them to fight, but she appreciated them being there, providing just that little extra reason to discourage the Foundation from doing anything truly stupid.

  The church of Mary of the Fishermen loomed closer, the stone walls of its sea-gate shiny with slime from the canal.

  For the first time since they'd been trapped in the crypt, she let out a small sigh of relief. She was going to make it.

  She only blinked for a moment, but when she looked, a hand emerged from the filthy canal and seized the stern of her gondola.

  She let out a choked squawk and commanded the wood of the gondola to liquefy, to deny Smith any grip.

  Like so much else that was primitive, wood was sacred to the Goddess. It should have obeyed her command. But it didn't react. Smith's physical touch overrode her commands and dissipated her energy like a monolith dissipated waves washing against it.

  The Agent hauled himself out of the water with one hand, his other still gripping the knife.

  "You didn't think you'd get rid of me that easily, did you?"

  Chapter 25

  Ivy shook her head. She'd hoped Smith might be held by the superslippery water. After all, water was the native element of the Goddess. Just as Air was the element of the Son, and Fire the element of the Father.

  She'd hoped, but at some level, she hadn't really believed it could be that easy. If a stitching of submachinegun bullets through his gut hadn't stopped Smith, a dumping into the canals of Venice, no matter how dirty or magically enhanced, wouldn't either.

  "I slowed you down. That was enough."

  His laughter was too high-pitched for a man his size. “Enough? Enough to let you bring me to the Cross, that's all. I suppose I should thank you, although I would have been a lot more grateful if you'd just died in Mosul where you were supposed to."

  Church bells rang, echoing first from the Church of Mary of the Sailors and then from nearby churches until the entire city echoed.

  Smith hissed. “Another of your tricks?"

  Ivy shrugged. “None of my doing. Why? Does their faith frighten you?"

  "It frightens me that so many are damned because of the errors of your so-called Catholic so-called religion. It frightens me that its sins have prevented the return of Christ for centuries. Their puny powers frighten me not at all."

  But Ivy wasn't fooled. Smith was frightened. The church bells didn't create power, but their vibrations awakened power from within the waters surrounding and underlying the city and from the ancient stone buildings of Venice.

  Venice had survived its share of fanatics. Smith would find plenty of that power available to him. But most of the city's fifteen hundred years had been lived under the guidance of a more practical faith. Venice had been a city of merchants for far longer than it had been a city of conquerors. As the gateway between East and West, it had enjoyed a mix of Orthodox and Catholic heritages and a tolerance for those of the Moslem faith. And in those Catholic and Orthodox practices, even if denied in official doctrine, adoration of the Queen of Heaven remained powerful. The church bells changed the balance of power between herself and Smith, helping him less than they helped her.

  Unfortunately, the future wouldn't be decided by a climactic mage-battle, like in the movies. Being filled with the Goddess meant that Ivy was incapable of attacking. She knew from her military training that defending alone is ultimately doomed.

  From the waters and the earth below, though, healing and protective powers welled up, comforting her, promising her that they were available to her if she could figure how to use them.

  In the clouds over the city, a sense of impending power hung like an electrical charge before a lightning storm. Unlike the gentle and healing power of the Goddess, this power was harsh, hot, and hasty. It was not evil, but its raw strength was still something Smith could draw on in support of his narrow-minded definition of virtue.

  The doorway to the Church of Mary of the Sailors flew open and Father Paulo, Father Francis, and more than a dozen other priests carried the two sections of the Cross into the courtyard.

  Silence began at the Cross, then spread in concentric circles until only the distant sound of fighter jets overhead remained.

  The Cross had always been an object of power. But now Ivy realized how undeveloped her second sight had been before the days and nights she'd spent in the tomb. Where she had seen it as gleaming with a red light, now it shined as bright as the sun.

  As she watched, the Priests assembled the two pieces, bringing them together not as two pieces of lumber, but as a traditionally shaped Cross.

  The Cross's power blazed even more brightly, so much so that Smith flinched. But then he stood strong, soaking in power like a sponge.

  The Cross was whole.

  It seemed to Ivy that the world stood still for an eternal moment.

  Smith's eyes were drawn to that blazing symbol of power and his knuckles whitened on the knife.

  "Finally,” he breathed. “It will be mine."

  The church bells resumed chiming, a glorious celebration of the recovery of the very symbol of the Christian faith. The bell's sonic vibrations mingled with the psychic emanations from the Cross. Ivy felt a snap as the universe changed.

  All through the world, long-buried objects shifted in their places. Artifacts, weapons, forgotten temples, secret lore responded to the key, readied themselves to be called up, sent into battle. They waited only for the power of the Cross to call them out, arm them for the last days, the ultimate battle as described in the Bible—and in the dark legends of the Germanic gods.

  "Under this banner, we shall conquer,” Smith gloated. “We shall redeem the Holy Land at last. We shall prepare the physical throne of the risen Christ on the Holy Mount. With the Cross to lead us, we can cast all who oppose us into death and damnation. And I shall stand at the Lord's right hand."

  "Not yet,” Ivy said. “God's timing is his own, not to be rushed by fanatics."

  "Must you continue to deny us? Your power would be welcomed by The Foundation, Sergeant."

  She was sure. They'd drain her, then kill her. The angry men who had created The Foundation half a century earlier would never accept women in any role other than that as subservient creatures. For all their loud repugnance to the ancient rites of temple prostitution, those men thought of women as vessels for sex, to be used and forgotten.

  Not that Ivy would join them even if they could accept her as an equal. Their faith was real, but it was horribly per
verted from what the Goddess demanded of her people.

  "The Goddess demands balance,” she answered calmly. “Your Foundation strives to overturn that balance."

  Smith snickered. “Balance is overthrown. The Cross is found, is unleashed on the world. Keep it if you're strong enough. It will not matter. The days of Prophesy are at hand and cannot be averted even by your false Goddess's evil power."

  He was deluding himself about the nature of the Goddess's power, but his words rang true. With the Cross unveiled in an anxious and war-torn world, The Foundation would accomplish its goals of hurrying the final cataclysm.

  Smith's mouth was open and his eyes slightly out of focus. Like her, he could see more than the mundane. Perhaps, Ivy thought, it was one effect of coming back from death.

  He stepped toward the Cross, shoving aside the pilgrims who reached to touch it, to affirm their faith with the very real and wholly tangible power of the Cross.

  She moved to block him. If he took the Cross, he'd be too powerful for her to face.

  If he'd been able to keep the corners of his lips still, he would have had her, but that hint of a smirk gave her warning. He still had the knife.

  She shifted her weight, twisted her hips, and let the knife pass by her, then draped the veil over his wrist.

  His look of surprise changed into one of horror and he jerked back, screaming.

  Where the veil touched it, his hand shriveled to bloodstained bones and dried tendons.

  He pulled back, barely holding onto the knife, then transferring it to his left hand.

  "Bitch."

  Interesting. Hurting the soldiers in the helicopter had nearly crippled her. Damaging Smith hadn't hurt her at all.

  She'd thought the vampires the gypsies had feared were mythical. Apparently not. Smith hadn't been brought back to life in the same way she had. Then again, he hadn't had access to the True Cross. Rather than being resurrected, he'd been reanimated, sucking up lives of the sacrifice, or sacrifices, that had been made on his behalf. If she hadn't spent time with the gypsies, she wouldn't have known that, wouldn't have guessed the meaning of what had just happened. The path the Goddess had set them seemed ever-more connected.

  Mary's veil undid the magic that had brought him back. The concerns of the Father and Son were for eternity. The concerns of the Mother, the Great Goddess and Queen of Heaven, were for the living. Smith was not one of those.

  He snarled. “What did you do?"

  "You're still trying to deny it, aren't you? They lied to you if they said they resurrected you. Only the Cross can do that. And they didn't have the Cross."

  "You're lying. Lazarus was resurrected through faith alone. And even if you're not lying, I have the Cross now. It will save me.” He angled around her.

  "Don't let him have it, but don't touch him,” she shouted to the priests holding the Cross.

  The vague orders were a mistake. Their previously coordinated efforts in bringing out the Cross scrambled, each priest pulling in a different direction.

  She stepped to block Smith, but he gestured with the knife and spoke two words in the true language. The first, ‘time,’ she heard clearly. The second came too fast for her to hear.

  The world speeded up around her. She seemed to be moving through an ocean of tar, the very air resisting her movement while Smith moved unhindered.

  "Time,” a voice whispered in her ear. A female voice, speaking the true language. “His God is identified as Chronos, the lord of time."

  She didn't stop to thank the priestess, or Goddess for the information. There'd be time enough for that if she survived the next few minutes.

  She pulled the Veil back, slowly wrapping it around her shoulders, over her head like a hood.

  The instant it covered her, she was free of Smith's curse. Free, but desperately late.

  Smith's eyes gleamed as he reached his shattered, dead, hand to the Cross, touched it, and then grasped the ancient symbol of power, trying to pull it away from the priests.

  Ten priests held onto the Cross, unwilling to let it be taken from them. Decades of prayer strengthened them. These were not ordinary men filled with doubt, but priests filled with the certainty of their faith, strengthened by the presence of the power and solid reality of the Cross itself.

  Smith's eyes widened at the strength with which they resisted. His muscles strained as he attempted to rip it from their grasp.

  Strained and failed.

  Ivy closed the distance. She only needed a few seconds.

  She was only a meter away when one of the priests stumbled and brushed against Smith.

  Like time-lapse footage, the priest withered on himself, aging, turning gray, then collapsing into powdery bones.

  To Ivy's second sight, it looked as if the power of Smith's energy field had been hit with a surge of pure oxygen. As the priest fell, Smith soaked up his faith, gathered the power to himself.

  Smith clenched the fist of his shriveled hand and the priests stood back as it healed, adding flesh and muscle while they watched.

  The remaining nine priests could have held on, continued to resist, but the shock of what they'd seen was too much. First one, then another loosened their grip on the Cross.

  Smith took advantage of their weakness, jerking it free of the others until only ancient Father Francis retained his grasp at the head of the Cross.

  The Agent lifted the massive weight of the heavy wood object over his head and shook it, but the Priest hung on grimly.

  Ivy reached into the waters beneath her to send a line of power to the stubborn Priest. It was little enough, but it was all she could do as she prepared to confront the undead man.

  The gypsies had told her about vampires, but had they prepared her? She wished she'd paid more attention. Certainly the myth that they couldn't stand the sight of a crucifix was mistaken. Smith wasn't bothered by the True Cross at all.

  She knew they hated garlic but didn't think that would help, either, not even in Italy.

  But the thought of garlic reminded her of the burning herbs of the Goddess.

  Flames had almost consumed the last of the herbs but back in the tomb, a few smoldered on.

  Using the power of the Earth, Ivy reached across the kilometers and pulled those burning herbs to her.

  The smoke hit Smith like a fist, dropping him to one knee.

  He released his grip on the Cross, stood, and turned to face her, glowing with the power he'd seized from the Cross and from the priest he'd desiccated.

  "You might have lived if you'd run."

  "If you give up on your insane dreams, you can live forever,” Ivy answered. “Even now, the Queen of Heaven can wash the sin from your soul."

  "The Queen of Heaven is a cursed demon,” Smith screamed. He summoned his powers, then slashed at her, his long knife flaming with fire and hatred.

  * * * *

  It had taken Zack too long to persuade the policemen that he was fine, that the blood was worse than it looked, that Ivy had pretty much heal him and if they'd just bandage up his arm where he'd scraped it trying to get up, he could get on with his day.

  Only the word that the True Cross had been unveiled persuaded them that they had more important things to do. They might be cops, but they were Christians, too.

  He hurried after them, arriving in time to see Smith seize the Cross and destroy one of the Priests who had guarded it.

  With that brutal murder, the crowd eased back a bit. Nobody was in quite as much of a hurry to get close to the Agent, no matter how strong the allure of the Cross. No one Except Zack.

  Zack pushed his way forward.

  "The Queen of Heaven is a cursed demon,” Smith shouted.

  Impossibly, it seemed as if the heavy incense from the Priestess's herbs had followed them, surrounding the Agent.

  The smoke took the shape of dozens of beautiful women clutching at Smith's arms, brushing their hair across his eyes, whispering secrets in his ear.

  The Agent dropped the Cr
oss and turned on Ivy.

  He missed with his first slash, but flipped his wrist and swung it back, moving twice as fast as anything Zack had ever seen.

  Ivy saw it coming and moved.

  For a moment, Zack thought she'd slipped it entirely. Then blood blackened the royal blue of the Veil she wore as a shawl.

  She pressed a hand over her rib where the knife had struck. The Veil wasn't protecting her.

  Smith knew he'd won and pressed the attack.

  Ivy backed away from him, ducked under one slash, then jumped over another.

  Almost. The knife caught her heel, dumping her on the ground.

  It wasn't the opportunity he'd been waiting for, but Zack could wait no longer.

  He leapt at the Agent, throwing punches as quickly as he could.

  He landed one solid shot to Smith's gut and another to his chin—and felt the bones in his hands shatter as if he'd tried to punch out a rock.

  Smith gestured with the knife and Zack was thrown backward.

  If the pilgrims hadn't caught at him, slowed him down, he would have been crushed when he hit the church's stone wall. As it was, he still had the wind knocked out of him.

  He could barely stand, but he forced himself forward. Smith might be unstoppable, but Zack wasn't going to give him a free ride.

  Zack had bought Ivy time to run, but she hadn't taken it.

  "Give up, Smith,” she said. “You cannot win."

  "I have won.” He waved a lance of flame at her.

  Ivy countered with a wave of water, drowning the flame in a roar of steam. But the flame had been a feint. Smith followed it, shrugged off the steam, and struck again.

  Ivy batted the knife away, but Smith twisted the blade as she blocked, slicing deeply into her palm.

  "Good-bye, Sergeant."

  "Good-bye, Smith.” Ivy gave up trying to hold her side and blood spurted from what could only be a cut artery, spraying over the Cross, the Veil, and the courtyard.

  She ignored the blood and her injured hand, pulled the veil off her shoulders and unfolded it again and again until it became flimsy, gauzy, almost nothing.

  Smith edged back for a moment, uncertain about Ivy's plan, then moved forward for his kill.