The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3)

by Green, Layton

  The priest on the platform bent to dip his goblet into the silver bowl beneath the girl, bringing it up streaked with crimson. The chanting from the crowd continued, the same monotone words issuing forth in that guttural language, causing Grey to scream to himself in silence.

  Stop chanting, you depraved lunatics, stop chanting and take your knives, your cloaks, and your bloodstained hands and go watch a horror movie or role-play in a nightclub. Do not, do not, do not do what it looks like you’re about to do.

  The priest raised the goblet and drank, lips stained red with blood. Grey swallowed. He could not, would not, stand and watch in dismay while this girl’s life drained away, blood and spirit quenched by these animals.

  There were too many, and he knew his chances of survival were almost nil, hers even lower. He had no idea how he was going to get her out of the catacombs, he had no idea about much of anything, save for one thing: The people in this room were about to find out what it was like to go to war.

  You think you have a taste for violence? Let’s see just how deep that appetite runs.

  After slipping his knife inside his cloak, he grabbed the two lanterns off the ledges beside him. He broke the glass on the bottoms, with the butt of his torch. Each lantern was filled with a deep basin of highly flammable lamp oil, which Grey splashed on the backs of the robes of the men next to him. As heads turned he tossed the remaining oil as far as he could into the crowd, in a path towards the platform, and then in a circular spray.

  Shouts and confused cries interrupted the chanting, but Grey had already brushed his torch against the backs of the thin polyester cloaks of the men next to him, causing a leaping flame that ignited the cloaks like living torches and spread quickly in the crowded space. Grey then broke the glass on the top half of the lanterns, still burning from the residual fuel on the wicks, and threw these firebombs-in-waiting into the crowd. They met with the burning robes and exploded in sharp cracks.

  Dozens were on fire or trying to shrug out of their cloaks, the entire cavern in chaos. Grey burst through the first line, knife in one hand and torch in the other, setting more worshippers alight as he waded towards the center of the room and sprang onto the platform. One man in the room had been aware enough, from his heightened vantage point, to notice the source of the confusion, and Grey’s blood curdled when he saw what the priest on the platform was doing: standing beside the girl, looking right at Grey with a maniacal grin, curved knife pressing into her throat.

  Her eyes bulged in fear, but before Grey could move, before he could plead or bargain for her life, the priest ran his knife across her throat, and the girl’s head jerked. Grey knew it had been a death stroke.

  The priest came at Grey, knife raised and eyes burning. He died on his third step, blow parried and insides gutted before he even knew what was happening. Grey took him by his hair and slung him off the platform, then went to the girl and lifted her chin. She was already limp, eyes lifeless.

  Grey overturned the basin of blood in a rage, then killed the first six men who climbed onto the platform, wielding the knife as an extension of his own prodigiously talented hands, stalking and feinting and slicing from all angles, a whirlwind of violence and terror.

  The men below hesitated, no one wanting to be the next to step onto the platform. Grey stood alone above the fray, shivering with rage, covered in blood.

  “Dominic Grey!”

  The shout came from his left, from the middle of the crowd. The stench of burning flesh filled the room, and greasy smoke filled the cavern, giving the air a surreal glow.

  “Dominic Grey,” a powerfully built man in the middle called out again, a lit torch in his raised hand. “You can’t fight us all.” He swept his arms in a circle, roaring, “Lui brûler!”

  Burn him.

  Torches ignited around the room, knives appeared in the hands of the worshippers not rolling on the ground. There were still dozens, if not hundreds, on their feet. They surged towards the platform, shrieking and thrusting with their torches and knives.

  Grey had already spun into motion, knowing his death was imminent if he didn’t get off the platform in the next few seconds. He picked up the first lantern and made a path of fire.

  He did the same thing as before, this time with all four lanterns on the ledge, smashing them and spreading the lamp oil. He concentrated on the area leading towards his chosen exit, the entrance opposite the passage by which he had entered.

  Most of the worshippers still hadn’t had the sense to shuck their cloaks, and when Grey ran his torch in a line along the front row, and threw the top halves of the larger lanterns into the fray, it seemed as if the whole room had burst into flame. Now that the main light source had been extinguished, the burning cloaks and sputtering torches illuminated the room with a truly hellish glow.

  Grey sprang off the ledge, slicing his way through the panicked crowd, torching more oil-soaked cloaks as he went. He killed those few who confronted him, but he knew once they regrouped, the sheer numbers would overwhelm him.

  He barely made it to the passageway, feeling the crush of people surging towards his back. Torch aloft, he sprinted into the darkened passage, praying he had chosen correctly. Since he had seen so few people enter the same way he had come in, he was guessing it was a back route. But he had no idea, and the passage he had chosen might lead to a locked gate, or an impenetrable maze, or worse. His fears were realized when he came to an intersection of four identical tunnels, breath ragged from the fight, his pursuers just behind him.

  He gritted his teeth and went right, hoping for sheer luck. His spirits rose when he came to another intersection and found a passage branching off without bones set into the walls. His hope slithered away at the next intersection. Bones riddled the other three passages, shards of the damnable things covering the floor and set into the walls.

  He had gone deeper into the catacombs.

  If he had to, he would find a narrow tunnel and make his stand, taking out as many of them as he could. He could hear them shouting just behind them, and he knew that eventually he was going to make a wrong turn, or double back on himself, or be cut off from the front.

  His luck ran out even sooner than expected. He blew through the next crossroads, choosing one of five tunnels, and thirty feet later he saw torches bobbing in the darkness ahead. Someone noticed him, cried out, and ran towards him. Grey fled back to the intersection, chose another passage, and a few seconds later the same thing happened. This time he plowed forward, thinking he might be able to break through enemy lines. He met four of the worshippers head-on. The tunnel was only wide enough for them to fight two abreast, and Grey dropped the torch to free his other hand.

  He killed the first so fast he never knew what happened, then used his sagging body as a shield while he parried and sliced through the second. The third stepped forward, and Grey ducked behind his overhead slash, cutting through an Achilles’ tendon and then stabbing him in the back. The fourth, a woman who moved with some actual skill, stabbed Grey in his knife arm before he could maneuver in the narrow tunnel. He dropped the knife and went right back at her, sliding just to the left as she thrust at his midsection. He latched on to her wrist as it came past, and his other forearm came forward like a whip, snapping her extended arm at the elbow. She screamed and dropped to the floor.

  The fight had cost him. He picked up the knife in his right hand, his left hand throbbing from the triceps wound. The adrenaline drowned the pain for now, but he had lost a fighting arm and knew it was a matter of time before he lost too much blood.

  More torches appeared behind him, this time a dozen instead of four. He sprinted to the next intersection and could already see lights down two of the four exit tunnels. He was running out of options. He peered down the two clear tunnels, trying in vain to discern which one might be better.

  “This way.”

  He flung his body away from the voice. It had come from his left, down one of the unlit tunnels. The voice had been a whispe
r, yet he saw no one around him. And it had been a woman’s voice.

  A familiar woman’s voice.

  He had no reason to trust the voice, but neither did he have a choice. He ran down the tunnel to the left, cursing when he came to the next intersection. Torches appeared behind him, and in all three of the other directions, drawing nearer. He’d been tricked, and he had nowhere to go.

  He spun, trying to decide what to do, and then he saw her, ten feet ahead of him down the tunnel to his right, blond hair spilling to her chest, the same woman from the plane. She was dressed in dark clothing, but she wasn’t wearing a cloak. He could only assume she had been present at the ceremony and was leading him straight to the enemy.

  “Come, before he sees us,” she said.

  “Who?” Grey said.

  “Hurry.”

  She stepped into the darkness to her left. He was out of time and options. He approached with his knife raised, on edge for an ambush. When he came to the spot where she had disappeared, his mouth dropped.

  It was a narrow side passage, barely large enough to squeeze through, free both of bones and of telltale torchlight in the distance.

  The girl was nowhere in sight.

  Grey grimaced and raced down the passage. A hundred feet later the tunnel widened and showed no sign of ending, though he now heard shouts behind him.

  He ran until his legs cramped, exhausted to the point of delirium. He guessed he had covered at least two more miles down the passage, as fast as he could, with a knife wound on top of everything else that had happened. But the shouts fell farther and farther behind, and his new fear was that this was a dead end, or a passage to their home base, a last ruse before the slaughter.

  A light appeared in the distance, not the golden glow of torchlight but a stronger, steadier flood of light. Grey knew he was about to discover his fate.

  Darius lay on his back on the cushion-strewn floor, flesh melting into the creamy Persian carpet while he gasped for breath, tingling from the currents of sexual energy coursing through him. The woman beside him was near catatonic, halfway to the ethereal plane, her pale body covered in a sheen of sweat from the ritual. He dipped a finger through the sweat pooling on her stomach and ran it across his tongue, the taste a heady mixture of salt and perfumed oils.

  The woman’s supple curves glinted in the candlelight. Darius felt himself hardening again. His own stamina continued to surprise him, and one partner alone could rarely satisfy. Often availing himself of multiple partners of both sexes, as well as pleasure-enhancing narcotics, he had sampled everything in his pursuit to unlock the spiritual power of orgasm, from sadomasochism to bestiality to consumption of the semen and menses.

  Tonight’s session had been ritualistic, though it had not been carried out for the purpose of a specific spell. Darius was performing sex magic on a nightly basis now and would continue to do so until the night of the Unveiling, to keep the magical currents as potent as possible.

  He shuddered and moved outside of the diagrammed pyramid, rising for a glass of water. He would let her sleep. They had combined their physical and cosmic energies for three hours without interruption.

  After pouring a glass of water he sat in front of the computer in the next room, scanning the Internet for relevant hits. As he did so, his mind drifted to the same place it always did after sex, no matter who his partner or partners had been.

  It drifted to Eve.

  Darius was self-aware enough to understand two defining facts about his life: Ahriman had changed him, made him someone new and better. And he was still in love with Eve.

  He could accept both of those things.

  Unfortunately, thinking of Eve also made him think of Viktor, which inevitably made him think of the night he had once tried everything to forget.

  It had been All Hallows’ Eve, their senior year at Oxford. Darius, Viktor, and Eve had attended a costume party. Eve had left shortly after midnight. After another beer with Darius, Viktor left to study for a midterm.

  An hour later Darius also left the party, deciding to pass by Eve’s flat. It was a few blocks out of his way, but he was restless and thought he might see if she was still awake and wanted to share a nightcap.

  Darius saw how Eve looked at Viktor, but Viktor swore they were just friends. Besides, Viktor was leaving England after graduation, and Darius, well, he planned to go wherever Eve was going. He knew Eve enjoyed his company, and with time, once his body matured and he proved to her how much he loved her, her defenses would crumble. He had never known he could love someone as much as this, so much so that separation, even for half a day, was a physical pain.

  Darius constructed his entire existence around opportunities to be near Eve. He rescheduled his classes to align with hers, he made sure he ran into her when she stopped for morning coffee at her favorite French bakery, he memorized every facet of her daily routine. Every other girl had become an inferior version of Eve, every choice Darius made—from the clothes he wore to the things he said to the internal thoughts he pursued—was predicated on Eve’s tastes.

  When he neared her ground-floor flat he noticed a dim light in the bedroom. The view inside was hidden by a hedge. Darius went to ring the doorbell, then stopped, making a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He slipped behind the hedge and peered around the corner of the blinds into the bedroom, reasoning that if Eve had fallen asleep while studying, he didn’t want to wake her.

  In the candlelight he saw Eve sitting astride Viktor, both of them naked, Eve’s eyes rolled towards the ceiling, mouth open in a soft oval of pleasure, hips rocking back and forth in a luxurious rhythm.

  Darius’s feet became twin blocks of cement. He stood as what felt like his entire youth slipped away, both titillated and appalled, watching in silence as his beloved made love to another man, his best friend, right before his eyes.

  When they finished, covered in sweat and laughing in each other’s arms, Darius slunk away from the hedge, abhorring himself and his pathetic frail body, feeling pain in places he never knew existed, unable to blame Eve but cursing the universe for allowing such a thing to happen. He cursed Viktor even more, and, most of all, he vowed never to be impotent again.

  Darius forced himself to focus on the articles on-screen. He had long ago decided to embrace that memory, as a reminder of his former weakness. Yet he knew he could never truly embrace it until Viktor Radek was rotting beneath the earth.

  He was pleased to find a short profile in The New Yorker discussing the Order of New Enlightenment. This was the best press he had received so far, and he read the best parts twice.

  THE INTELLIGENT RELIGION: A NEW AGE OF ORDER

  If there is one thing to expect from Simon Azar’s burgeoning new religious movement, it is the unexpected. Though the baseline humanistic message is a familiar one, everything else about the Order of New Enlightenment feels as fresh and necessary as the Arab Spring. A religion a thinking person can grasp on to, it is a backlash against needless ritual, as well as against the watery agenda and vague promises of the New Age movement.

  Mr. Azar’s theology embraces, rather than denies, the human condition. It is an admission that we do not have all the answers and should conduct our search with science, reason, and self-awareness, rather than with fantastical claims and anachronistic ideals that serve only to retard the progress of the human race.

  Exhibiting a rare adeptness with social media for a religious leader, he attracts followers from a cross-section of humanity. From Christians to Jews, agnostics to atheists, biker gangs to boardrooms, scientists to Scientologists, it seems half the world is listening to Mr. Azar and shaking their heads in agreement. Human nature is not evil, but complicated and evolutionary? Sexuality should be glorified rather than vilified? A church should have no puerile, dogmatic requirements of ritual?

  More, please.

  The only flaw is the all-too-familiar condition in cults—and Ponzi schemes—that adherents pass through certain “stages”
before reaching the “inner circle” of “enlightenment.” Yet Mr. Azar even has a clever explanation for this: Like any other form of knowledge, he says, religious or scientific or otherwise, comprehension comes in stages. A medical student would never perform brain surgery on day one, just as an attorney would never argue before the Supreme Court without years of training. Though it brings to mind unfortunate comparisons with the sort of veiled, cloak-and-dagger elitism found in Mormon hierarchy, the occluded halls of Scientology, or even the Catholic Church, Mr. Azar’s gifted rhetoric softens the comparisons. Whether he is sincere remains to be seen.

  His detractors have called him a greedy demagogue, a charlatan, even the Antichrist. Yet the exodus in recent years from traditional Western religions, combined with the unprecedented growth of the Order of New Enlightenment, is a wake-up call to religious leaders.

  No longer are we cavemen huddled beneath the stars, peering in awe at the passage of the moon through the night sky. Nor are we medieval peasants purchasing indulgences for salvation, or New World pilgrims imposing puritanical mores on a delicate village ecosystem. The existential questions of mankind have not changed, and they likely never will. What has changed is our perspective.

  As Mr. Azar preaches, we need a new religion for a new age, and at least for the moment, the Order of New Enlightenment is doing a better job than its more venerable counterparts at plugging that gaping and inexplicable hole in the human psyche—the one that must ask why.

  Darius browsed the comments, then scanned a recent mention of the murders on a weird-crime news blog called Shep’s 911.

  Has anyone else noticed that major Satanists are being offed like deer in Alabama? I don’t know about you people, but this is the sort of thing that gives me the cold sweats at night. Either we’ve got Captain America of the fundamentalist world on our hands, or else we’ve got a power struggle going on that makes the Mafia wars seem like a game of blind dodgeball.