Enoch's Device

by Joseph Finley

  Una hurled her spear at one of the black-bearded men, hitting him dead center. The impact knocked him ten yards back, leaving him impaled along with the scores of dead littering the plain. The other men rushed at her like a pack of wild dogs. She whipped a long sword from her scabbard and sounded her own battle cry: a shrill, unearthly sound that chilled Ciarán’s blood and cut through even the booming of the iron beasts . . . and that heralded a slaughter.

  The head of the first man to meet her blade tumbled through the air, hitting the dusty plain while his body rode on for another dozen paces before pitching sideways from the saddle. With merciless precision, Una cut a swath through the raving Franks, cleaving through mail and bone and flesh. Others fell under her charger’s hooves, and soon only a few remained on the fringe of what had been a wedge of attackers.

  Ciarán spurred his mount into the breach Una had formed. Behind him, Alais clung on tightly as the surviving Franks charged. Wild eyed, they foamed at the mouth and cursed in some unknown tongue. But the charger was too fast and too strong for them, and it burst through the ragged wall of men, trampling the first warrior in its path. In another heartbeat, it was again behind Una, racing toward Rosefleur.

  More Franks poured across the red plain, but on foot they moved too slowly to reach the swift chargers. Ciarán’s nerves tensed, however, at the sight of what they now approached. It was a gap, little more than fifty yards wide, between two of the iron beasts and their gigantic carts with massive wheels. The beasts did not move but, rather, kept their gaping iron maws pointed at Rosefleur, and as his mount drew him closer, Ciarán suspected that they were not beasts at all, but monstrous siege engines of some Byzantine design, spewing Greek fire. Yet the iron beasts were not the problem. For in the gap, the Nephilim massed.

  There were ten of them, each at least seven feet tall and garbed in an ancient style of armor, with iron breastplates, broad shields, and helms with crosslike openings for the eyes and mouth, like the images of Ares or Hector that Ciarán had seen decorating the pages of Greek tomes. The Nephilim moved with colossal strides, and what flesh showed beneath their armor was as white as bone. They gripped massive war clubs—all but one, who held a sword long enough to cleave a horse in two. The gap was wide enough, but the speed at which the charger moved caused Ciarán to sit low in the saddle and hug the horse’s sides with his calves. On the back of his neck, he felt Alais’ breath.

  “Follow to my left,” Una called over her shoulder. Then suddenly, she broke left, heading toward the iron beast. Ciarán’s charger veered to follow her. The Nephilim amassed in the center of the gap, but Una raced for the edge.

  The nearest giant moved swiftly to block her path, but Una raised her sword, unleashing another shrill battle cry, and charged. The giant’s blood arced through the air as her sword lopped off its arm. Ciarán never slowed his mount, though his jaw fell in horror as the sword-wielding giant closed on Una and chopped her mare to the ground. She leaped from its saddle, swinging at her nearest attacker and hewing halfway through its neck.

  Ciarán rode on. The iron beast boomed behind him, and his ears throbbed in pain. A fiery blast arced overhead, raining a shower of burning embers from the sky. An ember seared his arm, and Alais brushed another from her shoulder. An instant later, some eighty feet above them, the walls of Rosefleur shuddered, spilling rubble from the smoking divot in the cylindrical wall.

  Then, behind them, Una screamed.

  Alais gasped, and Ciarán glanced over his shoulder. The six remaining giants surrounded where Una had stood, hammering downward with their clubs. Ciarán felt a pang of grief for the brave woman warrior, then looked ahead to a new horror, for the charger was galloping straight toward the walls of Rosefleur. In the urgency of their ride, Ciarán had never thought to look for a gate, trusting that Una knew where to find it. Yet now the mare was running headlong toward a face of sheer red stone. He jerked on the reins, and the charger slowed, but the Nephilim had broken from their kill and now came rushing toward him.

  Alais tugged hard on his shoulder. “Look!” she cried, pointing to the walls. Where the wall had seemed solid an instant before, the outlines of a portal began to define themselves. A seam appeared and slowly parted. Ciarán kicked his mount. The Nephilim were but twenty yards away as the mare charged toward the widening breach. The giants raced toward them, but with a leap, the mare crossed the threshold.

  In that instant, a blinding light engulfed them, as if the mare had leaped straight into the sun. Ciarán dropped the reins to shield his eyes. Then, with a loud slam, the gateway closed behind them.

  *

  For a moment, Ciarán thought that perhaps he had been struck blind. But then the brilliance began to fade, and he perceived the outline of a figure slowly coming into view. As the light continued to wane, the figure’s shape grew clearer. It was a woman, taller than most men, yet slender. A white cloak draped her shoulder, falling onto a mail shirt that seemed sewn of silvery feathers and clung to her lithe torso. The woman gazed at them with piercing eyes in a sculpted face framed by flowing hair the color of platinum.

  Alais stared in awe at the woman. “Orionde?”

  “Yes, child,” the woman said. “You remember me?”

  Alais stammered, “In the field of wheat . . .”

  Ciarán touched Alais’ hand. Could this be the same woman in white Isaac had seen in his dream? Surely it must be. Yet, if this was indeed Orionde, the Fae who instructed Maugis d’Aygremont, she was more than two hundred years old—and even older still, for the Fae were timeless, like the angels themselves.

  Orionde was not alone. A half-dozen Fae, all warrior maidens dressed as Una had been, stood behind her in a vast torch-lit hall encircled by towering archways of reddish stone. Behind the Fae, in the spaces beyond the archways, were horses, all of them pale like Ciarán’s charger. Piles of rubble dotted the floor beneath gaps where portions of the ceiling, thirty feet above, had collapsed into the hall.

  Ciarán regarded the Fae with awe, before realizing that he still sat astride the charger. Quickly, he eased Alais down from the mare’s back and then dismounted from the saddle. He started to bow, when another thunderous boom came, and more reddish debris spilled from the ceiling to the floor.

  Orionde looked to Ciarán and said, “We must hurry. These walls will not hold much longer. The moment of the prime conflict is nearly upon us. You must come with me and take Enoch’s device. It will be safe only in your world.”

  “But I am not the champion,” he said. “I’m not of Charlemagne’s blood.”

  “There is no bloodline,” Orionde replied. “That has long been an error in human understanding. Rather, the mystery of Enoch’s device is revealed only to those who have deciphered its inherent truth and ancient purpose—those who can see the beckoning light. The champion is the one who answers that call.”

  Ciarán stood stunned. For an instant, he struggled to grasp this reality, but then it settled within him like the stillness of a deep lake. Whether Kismet or fate, events had guided him to this point, and, strangely, he felt ready.

  “Then it’s not me?” Alais asked in a relieved tone.

  “You have made your choice and have yet another role to play,” Orionde said. “But not now.” She gestured to Ciarán. “Follow me.”

  He looked at Alais, relieved that she was free of this burden and the danger that he knew would come with it. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Be brave,” she whispered. “And be careful.” He touched her fingers and then turned to follow Orionde.

  The archway she had entered led to a stairway of reddish stone that ascended the curve of the tower. They climbed nearly fifty feet past candle lamps set into narrow sconces along the wall, until they reached an iron-bound door. Orionde pushed it open to reveal a chamber, round like the tower and lit with more candle lamps. The candlelight gleamed off coats of silver mail draped on racks along the room’s perimeter, and behind these hung shields, flanked by spears like the one Una had held. The s
hields were polished to a mirror finish that reflected the candlelight, which blazed through the armory, for that was what this place must be. Orionde moved swiftly toward a tall archway across the chamber, where the stairwell resumed its spiral ascent up the tower.

  “Did you know this attack was coming?” Ciarán asked Orionde as he tried to keep pace with her long strides.

  “We assumed the Nephilim would eventually learn where Maugis had hidden the device, but I had hoped you would arrive here first.”

  “But if you wanted us to come, why didn’t you help us get here?”

  She paused for a moment and looked back at him. “I did what I could. But in the end, you had to find your own path. It was the only way you would be ready.”

  “For what?” Ciarán pressed.

  “To fulfill your purpose,” she said as she marched up the stairwell. “The prophecy in the stars is told through twelve signs in three groups, with each group representing a stage in the life cycle of the prophecy. We are at the birth of this cycle, the time of the prime conflict, when the champion of men must unite with the device—the weapon—and prevail in the initial battle with a champion of the Dragon’s line. Beyond the prime conflict, a great journey lies ahead, like the stage of life after birth. But first, you and the weapon must survive this present battle, or all will be lost.”

  Everything she had said, Ciarán realized, was what Remi had theorized. And now it was happening. As this understanding sank in, a deafening boom split the air, and the stairwell shook like the deck of a ship in a storm.

  “We must hurry!” Orionde demanded. Her pace quickened, and Ciarán found himself struggling to keep up. Every forty steps, the staircase reached a landing with an iron-bound door set into the interior wall, before continuing up Rosefleur. Ciarán counted five doors as he did his best to keep up with Orionde. His legs began to ache, and his heart drummed in his chest. The higher they climbed, the more debris littered the stairwell, and cracks ran down the walls like spidery veins. Ciarán glanced warily at the cracks and then noticed that the stairwell ended about twenty feet up ahead, blocked by one more iron-bound door.

  Just then, another boom shook the walls, and Ciarán stumbled forward, catching himself just before his head could smash against the stone steps. As the quaking subsided, a smoky haze began to seep from under the door ahead, and the stench of brimstone flooded the stairwell. Then a ghastly sound resonated from beyond the door, like a legion of banshees squealing in triumph.

  Orionde looked grave. “The Nephilim engines have breached the tower’s walls,” she said. “The demons have found their way through.”

  “Demons . . . ?” Ciarán’s heart sunk. Behind her, the door began to shake, as if something were trying to batter it down.

  “We counted more than a hundred circling above the tower.”

  “What will we do?” he asked, alarmed.

  Orionde shook her head gently. “I’m afraid the prophecy comes with a few rules. And one of them is that only the champion can take Enoch’s device.”

  Ciarán’s mouth fell open, while the door at the top of the stairwell clattered as if it would burst from its hinges.

  Orionde glanced at the door, then back at Ciarán. “Which means,” she said, “that you must fight your way through them—alone.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  SANCTUM SANCTORUM

  “How will we stop them?” Isaac asked.

  Dónall grimaced. “I’m working on it,” he said.

  They stood at the base of a broad oak festooned with moss and ringed by toadstools, while overhead a canopy of tangled branches blocked out the sky. A curtain of cold mist surrounded the forest’s edge, stopping abruptly where it met the barren red plain. Isaac peeked out of the foliage and looked across the plain to the east, where giant warriors gathered around one of the iron war beasts that spewed fire at the walls of Rosefleur.

  “Look at them,” Isaac said in awe. “Hebrew scholars believe the Israelites killed all the Nephilim that survived the Great Flood—including Goliath, who was among the last. But clearly they were wrong.”

  Dónall rubbed his chin. “Some of them had to survive. It explains the Formorian giants of Irish myth, and the frost giants of the Norse. And if Enoch was right, the Nephilim have angelic blood, so perhaps they’re immortal or live extra-long lives, but for centuries they’ve hidden in the shadows of the Otherworld.”

  “And now they serve the Dragon.”

  “Just as John of Patmos wrote in the book of Revelation,” Dónall said. “When the Dragon is released from his prison, he shall gather the armies of Gog and Magog for battle. It’s all coming true.” Dónall looked up the trunk of the tall oak beside them. He could no longer see Khalil, who was lost in the leafy branches. “Have you reached the top?”

  “Yes,” Khalil called down.

  “What can you see?” Isaac asked.

  “It does not look good,” Khalil said. “Across this plain is a river, where I count five ships lined with oars, and five barges, which they must have used to transport those iron beasts. Between the river and the tower is a huge pit, about four hundred yards from here. It glows as if some great fire burns deep inside it, and that is the source of the smoke that gathers in the sky. Around the pit are black-robed men, twenty or more. But with them are at least three of these pale giants, and one of them looks like a priest performing some type of ritual. There is also a large cattle pen filled with scores of men—Franks, like those on this battlefield. Yet I am afraid that these men are in no shape to fight, for they are being slaughtered one by one and cast into the pit.”

  Isaac’s eyes narrowed. “Human sacrifice, then.”

  Dónall shook his head. My God, Lucien, is this what you’ve become? He called back up to Khalil. “Have they posted sentries around the pit?”

  “None that I can see,” Khalil replied. “They seem intent on this ritual.”

  “How far is the pit from the forest’s edge?” Dónall asked.

  “No more than forty yards, at best.”

  “Good, then they won’t see us coming.” Dónall waited until Khalil climbed down the tree, and then explained his plan. Then, turning toward the smoke billowing from the underworld, he said, “It’s time to end this.”

  *

  Atop the narrow stairwell inside Rosefleur, the iron-bound door shook violently on its hinges, and black smoke seeped under the crack between the door and the stone floor. Ciarán stared slack-jawed at the door, knowing what was behind it. More than a hundred demons, Orionde had said.

  “How am I supposed to fight my way through them?” he asked her.

  “Beyond this door is a circular hall,” she said. “In the center of the hall is our sanctum sanctorum, sealed with another door. You will recognize it. Beyond that door is Enoch’s device. When you see it, remember the form it takes in this millennium, and seize it. As for the demons, there are many of them, but they are incorporeal, so their greatest weapon is possession.”

  A shuddering chill ran down Ciarán’s spine as he recalled the terror in the amphitheater outside Poitiers. “What can I possibly do to prevent that?”

  “Steel your thoughts,” she told him sternly. “Focus your mind on something dear to you—an emotion so deep it will become an iron wall against the demons’ attack.”

  Ciarán thought of Alais, but then a new fear invaded his mind. If I fail, what happens to her? He could not think of her, he decided; the thought felt too fragile. He thought harder and, after a few moments, focused his mind on Derry. On Niall, Murchad and Fintan, and Bran and the twins. On the brothers who fought so bravely to save Dónall and Ciarán from Bishop Adémar.

  From behind the door came the sound of whispers in some dark, alien tongue. The smoke seeping beneath the door began to fill the stairwell. “All this smoke . . . how will I see?”

  “That I can help you with,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Then, go!” Orionde jerked open the door
. Beyond it rose a hissing, whispering wall of black smoke, which began to flood the stairwell. Ciarán drew in a breath as the whispers coalesced into a frightening squeal that sent a shiver of panic up his spine. He could see nothing through the thick smoke, but then he heard Orionde utter a familiar word: “Eoh!”

  From her outstretched hands sprang beams of bluish light that flickered through the chamber before them like an inferno of Saint Elmo’s fire. In the light, the smoke became an opaque gray haze, but it was the other things caught in her light that made Ciarán gasp: scores upon scores of demons, stacked one upon the other, climbing, groping, and clawing their way toward Ciarán like a horde of insects pouring from their nest. Their collective mass filled the chamber beyond, from the stone floor to an arched ceiling a dozen feet above. With eyes smoldering like hot coals, their faces contorted in ghastly screams. Some had hair that writhed like Gorgons’ manes, while others were hairless, with skin stretched over gaunt skeletal forms, and all of them reaching toward Ciarán with spidery fingers and ragged nails. Ciarán stood frozen at the sight. In the doorway, the nearest demon, a childlike imp with a hateful gaze, raked a clawed hand across Ciarán’s face. Ciarán winced, anticipating the biting pain from its jagged claws, but the phantom hand passed right through him, leaving a bone-tingling chill but no physical wound.

  “They cannot harm the flesh,” Orionde insisted. “Guard your mind, and force your way through them!”

  Ciarán nodded. Then, focusing all his thoughts on his fallen friends, he stepped into the bedlam.

  The horde of demons came at him. Incorporeal nails scratched at the edges of his brain, and the smell of smoke and brimstone overwhelmed him as the maniacal howling rose in a deafening crescendo. Though the demons clawed relentlessly at his mind, the more he focused his thoughts on the memories of his brethren, the less he felt their presence. Ciarán took another step and pushed past the demons as if they did not exist. To his surprise, the only resistance was a buffeting wind that blasted through the circular chamber, between the doorway and a wall, a dozen feet away, that curved parallel to the outer wall. Both the outer and inner walls flickered with blue flames from Orionde’s light, but the wind carried smoke, and for an instant Ciarán feared he may run out of breath. In that momentary panic, he felt the demons surge into his thoughts. So he pushed back the fear and concentrated on Derry’s grove and the bravery his friends had shown there.