by James Blish
He slid under the water, crown to toes – but not for long, for the ounce of exorcised water he had added still had a trace of quicklime in it from the tanning of the lambskin, which made his eyes sting. He surfaced, blowing like a whale, and added quickly to the steamy air, ‘Dixit insipiens in corde suo – Will you kindly get out of the way, Ahktoi? – who has formed me in thine image and in thy likeness, design to bless and sanctify this water, so that it may become unto me the fruition of my soul and body and purpose. Amen.’
Hein?
Someone knocked on the door. His eyes squeezed closed still, Ware groped his way out. He was met at the threshold by Gretchen, who sponged his hands and face ritually with an asperged white cloth, and retreated before him as he advanced into the bedroom. Now that his eyes were cleared, he could see that she was naked, but, knowing what she was, that could scarcely interest him, and, besides, he had been devoted to celibacy since his earliest love of magic, like anyone in orders. Her nakedness was only another rule of the rite of lustration. Waving her aside, he took three steps towards the bed, where she had laid out his vestments, and said to all corners of the phenomenal and epiphenomenal world:
‘ASTROSCHIO, ASATH, à Sacra BEDRIMUBAL, FELUT, ANABOTOS, SERABILIM, SERGEN, GEMEN, DOMOS, who art seated above the heavens, who beholdest the depths, grant me, I pray thee, that those things which I conceive in my mind may also be executed by me through thee, who appear clean before thee! Amen.’
Gretchen went out, flexing her scabby buttocks, and Ware began the rite of vesting. Hein? Ahktoi said plaintively, but Ware did not hear. His triduum was launched, devoutly, in water, and would be observed, strictly, until the end in blood; wherein would be required to the slaughter a lamb, a dog, a hen and a cat.
The Last Conjuration
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence, the other is to believe, and to feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. …
We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least not yet. … If once we can produce our perfect work – the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’ – then the end of the war will be in sight.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Father Domenico found getting north to Monte Albano a relatively easy journey despite all the snow; he was able to take the rapido most of the way. Absurdly, he found himself worrying about the snow; if it lasted, there would be devastating floods in the spring, but that was not the only affliction the spring had in store.
After the journey, nothing seemed to go right. Only about half of the world’s white magicians, a small number in any case, who had been summoned to the convocation had been able to make it, or had thought it worth the trip. One of the greatest, the aged archivist Father Bonfiglioli, had come all the way from Cambridge only to find the rigours of being portaged up the Mount too much for him. He was now in the hospital at the base of the Mount with a coronary infarct, and the prognosis was said to be poor.
Luckily, Father Uccello had been able to come. So had Father Monteith, a venerable master of a great horde of creative (though often ineffectual) spirits of the cislunar sphere; Father Boucher, who had commerce with some intellect of the recent past that was neither a mortal nor a Power, a commerce bearing all the earmarks of necromancy and yet was not; Father Vance, in whose mind floated visions of magics that would not be comprehensible, let alone practicable, for millions of years to come; Father Anson, a brusque engineer type who specialized in unclouding the minds of politicians; Father Selahny, a terrifying kabbalist who spoke in parables and of whom it was said that no one since Leviathan had understood his counsel; Father Rosenblum, a dour, bear-like man who tersely predicted disasters and was always right about them; Father Atheling, a wall-eyed grimoiran who saw portents in parts of speech and lectured everyone in a tense nasal voice until the Director had to exile him to the library except when business was being conducted; and a gaggle of lesser men, and their apprentices.
These and the Brothers of the Order gathered in the chapel of the monastery to discuss what might be done. There was no agreement from the outset. Father Boucher was of the firm opinion that Ware would not be permitted to work any such conjuration on Easter, and that hence only minor precautions were necessary. Father Domenico had to point out that Ware’s previous sending – a comparatively minor one to be sure, but what was that saying about the fall of the sparrow? – had been made without a sign of Divine intervention upon Christmas Eve.
Then there was the problem of whether or not to try to mobilize the Celestial Princes and their subordinates. Father Atheling would have it that merely putting these Princes on notice might provoke action against Ware, since there was no predicting what They might do, and hence would be in violation of the Covenant. He was finally outshouted by Fathers Anson and Vance, with the obvious but not necessarily valid argument that the Princes must know all about the matter anyhow.
How shaky that assumption was was revealed that night, when those bright angels were summoned one by one before the convocation for a council of war. Bright, terrible and enigmatic They were at any time, but at this calling They were in a state of spirit beyond the understanding of any of the masters present in the chapel. ARATRON, chiefest of Them all, appeared to be indeed unaware of the forthcoming unleashing, and disappeared with a roar when it was described. PHALEG, most military of spirits, seemed to know of Ware’s plans, but would not discuss them, and also vanished when pressed. OPHEIL the mercurial, too, was preoccupied, as though Ware’s plotting were only a negligible distraction from some immensely greater thought; His answers grew shorter and shorter, and He finally lapsed into what, in a mortal, Father Domenico would have unhesitatingly called surliness. Finally – although not intended as final, for the convocation had meant to consult all seven of the Olympians – the water-spirit PHUL when called up appeared fearsomely without a head, rendering converse impossible and throwing the chapel into a perilous uproar.
These are not good omens,’ Father Atheling said; and for the first time in his life, everyone agreed with him. It was agreed, also, that everyone except Father Domenico would remain at the Mount through the target day, to take whatever steps then appeared to be necessary; but there was precious little hope that they would be effective. Whatever was going on in Heaven, it appeared to leave small concern to spare for pleas from Monte Albano.
Father Domenico went south again far earlier than he had planned, unable to think of anything but the mystery of that final, decapitate apparition. The leaden skies returned him no answer.
On that penultimate morning, Theron Ware faced the final choice of which demons to call up, and for this he needed to repair to his laboratory, to check the book of pacts. Otherwise his preparations were all made. He had performed the blood sacrifices the previous evening, and then had completely rearranged the furniture in the workroom to accommodate the Grand Circle – the first time he had had need of it in twenty years – the Lesser Circles and the Gateway. There were even special preparations for Father Domenico – who had returned early and with a gratifyingly troubled countenance – should it become necessary to ask the monk to call for Divine intervention; but Ware was tolerably sure it would not be. Though he had never attempted anything of this magnitude before, he felt the work in his fingertips, like a well-practised sonata.
He was, however, both astonished and disquieted to find Dr Hess already in the laboratory – not only because of the potentialities for contamination, but at the inevitable conclusion that Hess had worked out how to placate the Guardian of the door. This
man evidently was even more dangerous than Ware had guessed.
‘Do you want to ruin us all?’ Ware demanded.
Hess turned away from the circle he had been inspecting and looked at Ware frankly. He was pale and hollow-eyed; not only had the fasting been hard on his spare frame – that was a hazard every neophyte had to come to terms with – but apparently he had not been sleeping much either. He said at once:
‘No indeed. My apologies, Dr Ware. My curiosity overcame me, I’m afraid.’
‘You didn’t touch anything, I hope?
‘Certainly not. I took your warnings about that with great seriousness, I assure you.’
‘Well … probably no harm done then. I can sympathize with your interest, and even approve it, in part. But I’ll be instructing you all in detail a little later in the day, and then you’ll have ample time to inspect the arrangements. I do want you to know them intimately. But right now I still have some additional work to do, so if you don’t mind
‘Quite.’ Hess moved obediently towards the door. As he was about to touch the handle, Ware added:
‘By the way, Dr Hess, how did you deceive the Guardian?’
Hess made no pretence of being puzzled by the question. ‘With a white pigeon, and a pocket mirror I got from Jack.’
‘Hmm. Do you know, that would never have occurred to me. These pagan survivals are mostly a waste of effort. Let’s talk about it more, later. You may have something to teach me.’
Hess made a small bow and finished his departure. Forgetting him instantly, Ware stared at the Grand Circle for a moment, and then walked around it clockwise to the lectern and unlocked the book of pacts. The stiff pages bent reassuringly in his hands. Each leaf was headed by the character or sign of a demon; below, in the special ink reserved for such high matters – gall, copperas, gum arabic – was the text of Theron Ware’s agreement with that entity, signed at the bottom by Ware in his own blood, and by the character of the demon repeated in its own hand. Leading all the rest was the seal, and also the characters, of LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, which also appeared on the book’s cover:
There then followed eighty-nine others. It was Ware’s sober belief, backed by infernal assurances he had reason to trust, that no previous magician had held so many spirits in thrall. After forty years, true, all the names would change, and Ware would have to force the re-execution of each pact, and so, again and again through the five hundred years of life he had bought from HAGITH in his salad days as a white magician. Nevertheless it could be said that, in the possession of this book. Ware was at least potentially the wealthiest mortal in all of history, though to anyone else in the world the book would be worth nothing except as a curiosum.
These spirits, not counting LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, comprised the seventeen infernal archangels of the Grand Grimoire, and the seventy-two demons of the Descending Hierarchy once confined in the brazen vessel of Solomon the King: a fabulous haul indeed, and each captive commanding troops and armies of lesser spirits, and damned souls by the thousands of millions, more of them every minute. (For these days, virtually everyone was damned; it had been this discovery that had first convinced Ware that the Rebellion was in fact going to succeed, probably by the year A.D. 2000; the many plain symptoms of chiliastic panic already being manifested amongst the laity were almost certainly due to be vindicated, for everyone was rushing incontinently into Hell-mouth without even the excuse of an Antichrist to mislead him. As matters stood now, Christ Himself would have to creep stealthily, hoping to be ignored, even into a cathedral to conduct a Mass, as in that panel of Hieronymus Bosch; the number of people who could not pronouce the Divine name without a betraying stammer – or their own names, for that matter – had grown from a torrent to a deluge, and, ridiculously, hardly any of them were claiming any fraction of the possible profits in this world. They did not even know that they were on the winning side, or even that there was more than one side. No wonder that Ware had found so much fat in the cauldron, waiting to be skimmed.)
But as Ware had already warned Baines, not all of the spirits in the book were suitable for the experiment at hand. There were some, like MARCHOSIAS, who hoped after an interval to be returned to the Celestial choirs. In this hope, Ware was grimly certain, they were mistaken, and the only reward they would receive would be from the Emperor of the Pit, that kind of reward customarily given to fair-weather friends and summer soldiers. In the meantime, the evils they could be persuaded or compelled to do were minor and hardly worth the effort of invoking them. One, whom Ware had already mentioned to Baines, VASSAGO, was even said in the Lesser Key and elsewhere to be ‘good by nature’ – not too trustworthy an ascription – and indeed was sometimes called upon by white magicians. Others in the hierarchy, like PHOENIX, controlled aspects of reality that were of little relevance to Baines’s commission.
Taking up the pen of the Art, Ware made a list. When he was finished, he had written down forty-eight names. Considering the number of the Fallen, that was not a large muster; but he thought it would serve the purpose. He closed and locked the book, and after a pause to rebuke and torment the Guardian of his door, went out into the Easter morning to rehearse his Tanists.
No day, it seemed, had ever gone so slowly for Baines as this Easter, despite the diversion of the rehearsal; but at last it was night and over, and Ware pronounced himself ready to begin.
The Grand Circle now on the parquetry of the refectory bore a generic resemblance to the circle Ware had composed on Christmas Eve, but it was a great deal bigger, and much different in detail. The circle proper was made of strips of the skin of the sacrificial kid, with the hair still on it, fastened to the floor at the cardinal points with four nails that, Ware explained, had been drawn from the coffin of a child. On the northeast arc, under the word BERKAIAL, there rested on the strips the body of a male bat that had been drowned in blood; on the northwest, under the word AMASARAC, the skull of a parricide; on the southeast, under the word ASARADEL, the horns of a goat; and on the southwest, under the word ARIBECL, sat Ware’s cat, to the secret of whose diet they were now all privy. (Indeed, there had not been much of moment to the rehearsal, and Baines had inferred that its chief object had been to impart to the rest of them such items of unpleasant knowledge as this.)
The triangle had been drawn inside the circle with a lump of haematite or lodestone. Under its base was drawn a figure consisting of a chi and a rho superimposed, resting on the line, with a cross to each side of it. Flanking the other two sides were the great candles of virgin wax, each stick sitting in the centre of a crown of vervain. Three circles for the operators – Ware, Baines and Hess (Jack Ginsberg and Father Domenico would stand outside, in separate pentacles) – were inside the triangle, connected by a cross; the northern circle had horns drawn on it. At the pinnacle of the triangle sat a new brazier, loaded with newly consecrated charcoal. To the left side of the horned circle, which was to be Ware’s, of course, was the lectern and the book of pacts, within easy reach.
At the rear of the room, before the curtained door to the kitchen, was another circle, quite as big as the first, in the centre of which was a covered altar. That had been empty this afternoon; but there now lay upon it the nude body of the girl Ware had used to address as Gretchen. Her skin was paper-white except for its markings, and to Baines gave every appearance of being dead. A small twist of violet silk, nearly transparent and with some crumpled thing like a wad of tissue or a broken matzoh inside it, rested upon her navel. Her body appeared to have been extensively written upon with red and yellow grease paint; some of the characters might have been astrological, others more like ideograms or cartouches. In default of knowing their meaning or even their provenance, they simply made her look more naked.
The main door closed. Everyone was now in place.
Ware lit the candles, and then the fire in the brazier. It was a task of Baines and Hess to feed the fire periodically, as the time wore on, the one with brandy, the other with camphor, taking care not to stumble ov
er their swords or leave their circles in the process. As before, they had been enjoined to the strictest silence, especially should any spirit speak to them or threaten them.
Ware now reached out to the lectern and opened his book. This time there were no preliminary gestures, and no portents; he simply began to recite in a gravid voice:
‘I conjure and command thee, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, by all the names wherewith thou mayst be constrained and bound, SATAN, RANTAN, PALLANTRE, LUTIAS, CORICACOEM, SCIRCIGREUR. per sedem Baldarey et per gratiam et diligentiamtuam habuisti ab eo hanc nalatimanamilam, as I command thee, usor, dilapidatore, tentatore, seminatore, soignatore, devoratore, concitore, et seductore, where art thou? Thou who imposeth hatred and propagateth enmities, I conjure thee by him who hath created thee for this ministry, to fulfil my work! I cite thee, COLRIZIANA, OFFINA, ALTA, NESTERA, FUARD, MENUET, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, arise, arise, arise!’
There was no sound; but suddenly there was standing in the other circle a dim steaming figure, perhaps eight or nine feet tall. It was difficult to be sure what it looked like, partly because some of the altar could still be seen through it. To Baines it resembled a man with a shaven head bearing three long, twisted horns, eyes like a spectral tarsier’s, a gaping mouth, a pointed chin. It was wearing a sort of jerkin, coppery in colour, with a tattered ruff and a fringed skirt; below the skirt protruded two bandy, hooved legs, and a fat, hairy tail, which twitched restlessly.