by Rink Wester
What fresh Council bullshit is it now, he scoffed, his good time shot, drinking the last of his caipirinha in one gulp and waking his screen.
23
Detective Tony Mozee paced back and forth in his small third floor precinct office beating his palms against his forehead. He rubbed his eyes over and over hoping that force alone was enough to rewrite what remained of his sanity.
Two hours and twenty seven minutes ago he had left the Küqålä Corporation and that mågÿckal horror show and driven back to the precinct head in a complete fog. He ran three red lights and clipped the handle of a courier delivery cycle, sending the pock faced delivery boy into fits of hyperventilation and blowing his entire high. His mind kept clicking and resetting itself like a rusty printer with too little paper. His rational self rolled its eyes and couldn’t believe that he was even thinking words like “mågÿck”or “teleportation”.
What...in...the...holy...hell ?!?! Detective handbooks never covered...whatever the fuck this is! This is some Lord of the Rings Wizard of Oz fucking Teen Wölf bullshit!
He had seen the electric sparks playing in the silent man’s lapels but his mind had written it off as aggressive static or some new interactive spinner. But there was no easy rational explanation for those three beings appearing out of thin air right there in the middle of that conference room. And then Gærüt disappearing. Right in front of him.
I don’t believe in witchcraft or sorcery but that shit was...I don’t know...I don’t know. Pull yourself together man! Get your shit together and think this through!
Tony took three quick breaths and held them for five seconds each. It was a calming technique he had learned in basic training and it usually did whatever trick he needed it for. He stopped pacing and reminded himself to do what he did best.
Be a detective.
He needed to get FISA warrants for surveillance and for deep dive background checks. For someone as powerful as Gærüt Lång, one of the largest private contributors to the State Works and corporate responsibility social program system, there would be a lot of pushback, he knew.
This is going to piss a lot of people off real quick. Merry Trist-mas to me.
He pressed a button on his intercom phone and asked his assistant Arshan Mills to step into his office.
Arshan, get me EVERYTHING you can find on Gærüt Stanley Lång, CEO of Küqålä Corporation! Get me Judge Elizabeth on the horn. We are going to need a fuckload of FISA warrants for him and his whole Board. I want to know where he’s from, where he goes, who he knows, what he eats and drinks, who he works with and who he fucks! I want to know if his dick is straight or curved or if he sits or stands when he takes a shit! EVERYTHING! Double time!
Arshan pursed his lips, nodded his head silently and ran out of the office to get done what Tony asked of him. Tony knew his assistant hated him but as long as rent needed paying and paychecks remained sacrosanct, he also knew he would have his warrants and a preliminary dossier in his hands within the hour. Then the real fun would begin.
If I’ve mågÿckally stepped into a show on The CW, Detective Mozee laughed, applying chapstick as he turned on his computer and scrolled through his list of contacts, I’m going to write the script myself. Audience be damned.
24
Vickie sat up in the infirmary of the Pörø Society disoriented and with a dry mouth. Her side ached and her hands tingled and burned as if she had grabbed and held onto an electric security fence for hours.
She looked down and around at all the starkly medicinal linen whiteness of that room and wondered how long she had been there. The last thing she remembered was stalking that creature that looked like a grossly overgrown lion with insect parts. She had actually used mågÿck to cripple him and send him teleporting away and had conjured her own mågÿckal totem. Real mågÿck. Her mågÿck. She was beginning to remember now. Remember everything. She needed to get out of there.
She dressed quickly and slid her feet in a pair of down hospital slippers that were remarkably just her size. How uncanny. The mågÿckal-war-with-a-mythical-lion-bug fåîrÿ must have known I was coming. She slowly crept out of bed like a thief hoping not to disturb who, she had no idea, but when you’re creeping around someone else’s mulberry bush, she thought, best to play the part.
She stepped out into a long corridor that ended in a flourish of rich plants and an atrium that seemed whale like in its rounded and bloated height. She stepped into that hollow empty space and kept running until she reached a passageway paved with pink and white marble and walls of greenish tinted hurricane glass. She kept walking until she arrived at a nondescript door with runic markings and a hand scanner. The door itself lay open and a slow hum emanated from within beckoning her. Vickie stepped over the threshold of that runic room into a sparsely lit antechamber whose walls and ceiling were living and breathing. Literally. There was actual vegetation growing from floor to ceiling on each and every wall. The ceiling was overgrown as well, like a great inverted garden of floating blossoms and buds and wild roaming weeds. The floor was stone and what furniture there was looked like it had been carved at a renaissance fair. The air tasted thick and tropical but sweet like licorice and chlorophyll.
And there surrounding a stone altar that looked like it had been torn from some once upon a time quarry and dumped there in that room, Excalibur only moments ago having been wrung from it, stood Grynn Xanthopoulos and 10 velvety robed wizards and mages, faces covered in golden crowned masks, purple eyes blazing, pinning her where she stood. She closed her eyes and felt that deep swell of amaranthine mågÿck inside her shift and awaken as her eyes crackled and her powers readied themselves to wage war again.
But just as suddenly as she had felt that niggling taste of threat on her tongue, It dissipated as all gathered there in that mossy wooded room suddenly and without the slightest invitation went down on one knee. They all bowed their heads like she was royalty or some debutante finally coming into her majority, left arm balancing long wooden staffs lifted with fists drawn together in supplication. Even Grynn.
Vickie was thunderstruck. Grynn’s gray and rose gold robes spread out around her, as mågÿck played in her eyes and tousled her brown locks. Her face flashed for the briefest of seconds making her look like the snapshot negative of herself, as she rose and walked slowly over to Vickie. Vickie thought she didn’t need to walk, she should have glided over, riding the air like she had seen her do during battle.
Why walk when you can fly? I would have flown over but I guess everyone’s an armchair sorcerer these days, huh?
Grynn smiled and soundly chuckled as if she had heard every word of Vickie’s mental commentary. She stopped a few feet away from Vickie, placing her right hand over her heart and with her left hand she ever so gently caressed Vickie’s face as she pronounced,
Welcome home Mantis. Welcome back I should say. You’ve finally returned to the Pörø. You were lost to us for hundreds of years, but now you’re back. Now take a seat dear heart. We have so much to discuss.
25
Gærüt screamed and bellowed until his voice was hoarse and that great well of anger, want and trepidation was spent. He grabbed great handfuls of darkness, balling them up like wads of tar paper and telekinetically ripped them apart. He stood alone and sulking in the realm that he had created for one purpose and that purpose alone. Vast soiled darkness spread out around him. Taunting him. Great sheets of midnight chipping like glass fell from its heavens and crashed into nothingness. Someone somehow had blasted and broken the Sihiosian locks and wards on his realm and allowed “It” to escape. Allowed “Him” to escape.
He reeled in his Sihiosian power and stepped back into our world. He walked around his ornately decorated parlor with books by Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda and Paulo Freire filling shelves and a collection of African artwork, much of which he had donated to the Musée d’Ethnographie de Trocadéro filling its space. He had always loved works by Cheri Samba, El Anatsui, Peju Alatise, Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarr
assouba, William Joseph Kentridge, Nnenna Okore, Gonçalo Mabunda, Ransone Stanley and Abdoulaye Konaté. Artists who worked with defunct weapons, transforming obsolete AK-47s and soldiers’ boots into elaborate thrones and evocative masks, others using local textiles to explore the slippery ground between figuration and abstraction. And still others folding self-portraits into vibrant commentaries on current social and geoglobal events. They conjured for him worlds that even a göd could appreciate.
He turned preparing to summon his Ájøgün to the chase. Come to think of it, Divåd Nërrip, the captain of his overlords, had yet to check in. That was unlike him. Divåd was merciless and painstakingly slavish to protocol in all things. If he had found the woman he would have alerted Gærüt. Something was wrong. He definitely needed to summon the Ájøgün now.
Just then he heard it. A voice whispering a broken litany of words so soft and translucent he had almost missed it.
They grazed his mind as if their target was not him but something or someone slightly off center. The words came to him sudden and unkind, interrupting his thoughts. Words in the deep growling voice of a little boy speaking mentally to the ether. A malevolent lullaby, words repeating and stuttering, breaking like waves against his own mind,
“...slaughter...children...of...iniquity...fathers...do not...rise...”
Like a beacon he knew how to pull that thread and follow it back to its source. The boy.
His mågÿck flexed as he manifested star-silk robes and his gold and diamond breastplate of old. He was the göd Ôlörûn. The Sky Father. The Gröötslâng Lord. Someone had come into his house and pissed in his porridge. He would now answer that lullaby and the iniquity of slaughtered children.
The boy would be found and his realm would once again know its purpose.
26
Sphelix had taken Åpsät and fled after he regained consciousness. Åpsät had served his purpose as bait and cipher for the AndroSphinx and still her brother had been no help at all. Sphelix had always been far too overprotective of Åpsät and she had used that affection against him. She knew that if she had dangled a bruised and maimed Åpsät he would cry out and Sphelix would come to lick his wounds. They had always had this incestuous homoerotic thing between them. That was however neither here nor there at this point. Gærüt had found a way to block Sphelix’s time siphoning powers and blot out what he had done to her. There were however oh so many ways to skin a feline Nänå laughed, teleporting once again to the slowly chilling streets of a bustling early evening midtown Atlanta.
How I’d love to skin you brother. But no. That would be too civilized an ending for you. When you die there will be gnashing and grinding and fire in the city.
She opened her psychic powers and searched for the one mind, the one voice in all of creation that she knew better than any other save her own. That voice that had spoken and whose mind had gathered and pulled her into creation. Brute force should never have been the tact. It was crude and against Gærüt always destined to fail. Rounding the corner, zipping up her THE ROW “Anasta” bonded leather jacket, its jewel neckline hiding the turquoise, gold and blood red Pendant of Ëhiå she’d use when the time came, she felt Gærüt only moments before he shouted in their shared mindscape,
It was you wasn’t it! You freed him didn’t you! Now you have him! So what’s your next move? The curse?
Perplexed at the strange words coming from her brother about curses and freeing some boy she knew not and of her secret “moves” she knew he knew nothing about, Nänå sidestepped,
Brother I know not of what you speak. I would like to meet face to face. Will you grant me this audience? A momentary detente to discuss...things.
Nänå, the moment for any civil discussion between you and I died 4000 years ago when I killed you. Death was our great tiebreaker.
Death. Let’s talk of death then dear brother. Would you like to know about death, Gærüt? In death what one misses most is the noise. A soul, even that of a göddess, gets used to it. The noise of hurt laughter and of loving and being loved over the din of family and friendship. You brother, you were beautiful to me and you made beautiful noise. Exquisite. And then you snatched it all away. Suddenly it was gone. Without my permission. Gone forever. That one act hurt the most, Gærüt. It broke me and now I must break you. I simply must. It is a different noise I now crave.
Tears staining her cheeks, sadness and anger and a deeply profound hurt staining her words, she slammed the psychic connection between them and said in an almost whisper, And I will have my due.
*****************************************************
“...slaughter...children...of...iniquity...fathers...do not...rise...”
She had snatched those words from Gærüt’s mind, secretly pocketing that stray thought before shutting down their mindspeak. Something else stalked him it seemed. Something he actually...feared. Gærüt feared nothing, she cackled into the night.
How delicious. How delicious indeed.
27
Prepare slaughter for his children because of the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.
Isaiah 12:41
*****************************************************
From Alesia’s mind he had seen the Book. Full of fables and myths and cautionary tales. Quirks and stories of a great being with powers and of paths and purpose. This “Bible” of the humans. This Book of the connected occult. Those following this demigöd Christ of antiquity. He had immediately taken to it. He knew this Book somehow. It reached out from Alesia’s mind, from the minds of millions he could now hear. He drank from their psychic founts and smiled at the mågÿcks in the Book he saw there. He smiled hungrily, a low growl punctuating his joy, as he siphoned from their minds those stories that were as old as him.
They blazed to life in his mind. The Canaanite wizard Moses. Jezebel, the Enchantress.
The mågÿcks of Manasseh the Hebrew Seer. Balaam the Prophet. Paul the Exiler. The Delphic Oracles. He now saw that mågÿck, his mågÿck, was pervasive in the human world. The pagan wisdoms of necromancy, sorceries, mågÿckians, wise men and the charm wearing women that Isaiah, the proclaimer, condemned. All of it his.
Over time, while he slept, trapped in that dark realm by The One, his mågÿck had become an act of rebellion. The grand mågÿckal courts of the Urim and Thummin spoken of in the book of Numbers. The Magi. The men of the Pörø, Wielders of clothing, mågÿck staffs, hands, mandrakes, instruments, hair, whispering, spells, belomancy, hydromancy, blessings, curses, and dreams.
He was King David, dancing in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. Wearing the Ephod, the elaborate robe of the mystic wizards, upon which the Hoshen, or breastplate containing the power of Urim and Thummim, rested.
He was there as the rulers of Judah, King Herod and Herodotus, marveled at that demigöd’s birth. His birth. Jesus, The great hypocrite, who opposed the mågÿckal truths of the Göds, but who himself was a child of the pneuma, the python of divination. He was in Jesus. He was Jesus. Jesus’ name was actually Abdourakhmane, and he was the first of the Pörø sorcerers.
The boy had consulted the teraphim and drank from the divining cup of Joseph. He was both Saul and the witch of Endor.
Wizards and mågÿckians and the mågÿcks of his great design were there for all to see. The boy beamed at this. And so standing on that Centennial Park corner, a slow drizzle of rain beginning to mar the day, the revelation of millennia hit him. Clarity finally came to him.
The Bible was a lost book of war. His war. An open declaration of arms against mågÿckal beings. Against him. He was each of those beings. His mågÿck was the mågÿck of the ages. Generation after generation he had battled them all. Somehow The One had trapped him and made him forget his Book. The One had held him captive, kept him blinded and alone. For what purpose he would soon find out. Like Moses and Jesus and all the other tales of his biblical wizardry and damnation. He was the b
ush that burned but wasn’t consumed. He was the issue of blood and the thorn in Paul’s flesh.
A nail was meant for the hammer. A crown made for rule and all un-göds born to subjugation.
He had awakened and now a new Bible would be written. It was time to reset the ambush.
So saith I. The Redeemer cometh
28
Vickie hugged Tony so hard he almost tapped her to let him go. But he loved it. She was the one thing that kept him grounded and refit his mind’s mood. They kissed deep and frantic, each wanting to tether themselves and their sanity to that kiss. So much had happened in the last two days neither knew where to start with the other.
Vickie had always trusted Tony. From the first moment he had taken her hand and she had felt comfortable sharing her transgender status with him.
Here’s my T, my truth, Tony. Umm...You know how most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And, winners of the gender lottery, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside of our society's two party sexuality system, making them gender-queer? Well...umm...I’m the former.