Clan Novel Tremere: Book 12 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Eric Griffin

  “Now we will conduct a simple pragmatic test of your progress. This inkwell will do nicely.” He placed it squarely before her. “You will use your arts to move it across the desk. I must warn you, however, that this piece was a gift and I have grown quite fond of it. I will not abide your damaging it.”

  A look of apprehension crossed the novice’s features. She began to protest.

  “You may begin,” he prompted.

  Jacqueline caught the look on Foley’s face—imperious and spoiling for an argument. She abandoned her objections. Resigning herself, she squared off against the delicate cut-glass antagonist.

  The three feet of the worktable between Foley and herself suddenly seemed a vast distance. She took a desperate grip on the table’s edge, as if to pin it down, to keep it from stretching away further. Her features furrowed in an expression of intense concentration. She muttered what might have been snatches of verse in broken Greek. Everything about her bearing was rigidly upright. She could feel the wooden slat of the chairback pressing against her spine. It kept her grounded, centered. All other impressions were rapidly receding. There was no longer any thought of Foley, nor of failure, nor of humiliation.

  Her austere frame was a fired clay crucible, trembling slightly at the effort of containing the rising energies within. Her eyes glazed, her fixed stare first unfocusing and then turning inward. Even her features seemed to blur, her face growing pale, smooth, brittle—taking on the aspect of cool, implacable porcelain.

  Foley, for his part, did not spare a single glance for the inkwell, the alleged object of this experiment. He was instead occupied in studying the lines of Jacqueline’s face. He could already pick out the fine cracks in her composure. The faults where the novice’s unmastered furies, fears and desires would burst through, shattering the delicate china mask.

  He shook his head at the absurdity of it all. The novice clearly lacked discipline, self-knowledge, formal training. She had not even mastered the mnemonic arts. Did she actually hope to move the inkwell by thinking at it very loudly? It was like watching the first clumsy efforts of an infant. Although most infants, Foley acknowledged, were not allowed such volatile playthings.

  He had just about made up his mind to intervene when he was distracted by a sound. A wet, turgid, pop.

  Glancing down at the inkwell, Foley was just in time to see a second murky bubble rise to the surface and burst, splattering a stray droplet over the lip of the well. The deep red bead clung for a moment, glistening wetly against the crystal. Then the long slow slide.

  “Enough!”

  Jacqueline recoiled as if struck.

  Foley stretched out a hand to snatch away the inkwell, to conceal from her the miscarried results of her efforts. He reconsidered and withdrew.

  “Calmly he asked, “Shall I measure the distance?”

  Jacqueline looked hurriedly to the well. It still rested precisely where Foley had placed it. It had not so much as budged. Her initial disappointment quickly gave way to puzzlement.

  The surface of the ink seethed with activity. Viscous streaks of red twisted their way up through the jet-black ink. They burst the skin of its surface and spread out—gasping, seeping, coagulating. She watched layer upon layer of spilled life climb higher up the sides of the well until the sheer weight of it smothered out the new bubbles trying to form. Within moments, all was still once more.

  “I don’t understand,” Jacqueline whispered. “What happened? What went wrong?”

  “Do you not? Take it. You have desecrated it with your blood. It can be of no further use to me.”

  “But how?”

  Now Foley was angry. “You must think. And you must question before you act. The power is in the blood. The will is the blood’s window into the world. But the mind is the conduit. If the mind is undisciplined, unfocused and untrained, the power of the blood is loosed, but unshaped. It lashes out where it will. The results of such misguided efforts are monstrosities—offenses against not only nature, but against reason.

  “Did you think this was magic? These blind, undirected fumblings of the will? This has more magic in it than your awkward, infantile efforts.” Foley reached out one hand and lifted the inkwell. He held it poised defiantly before her face for a moment before banging it down on the table in front of his own position.

  “Power. Will. Focus. Results,” he raised a finger to forestall her argument. “That’s not magic? Because I lifted the inkwell with something as mundane as muscle, bone, sinew? What precisely do you think magic is? No, spare me further demonstrations of the glaring holes in your understanding. I will tell you. It is reaching out with the will to impose a reflection of that perfect inner order upon the entropy of the external world. From the beginning the earth was without form and void. Magic is the ongoing and continual act of creation.”

  Jacqueline could restrain herself no longer. “But this,” she hefted the inkwell and slammed it down in front of herself once more, “is not magic. Is this what we sacrificed so much for? Our lives, our families, our friends?

  “Or is that too abstract for you? After all these years, you get a little jaded, a little tired. Ideals, principles, they never quite penetrate the thickened hide anymore. Well, how about the things that matter, something concrete, something real? The tug of a child’s sticky hand? The taste of chocolate? The brilliance of sunlight through stained glass? I didn’t give up all of this for you to tell me I could just as easily have picked up the damned inkwell.”

  “You would do well to remember you are addressing a superior.” Foley pushed back his chair and slowly paced around until he was standing precisely behind her. “But, yes, it is far more efficient to move the inkwell with your hand. Nature has provided you with delightfully appropriate tools for the task at hand.”

  A cool touch brushed her cheek. Her first instinct was to flinch away, but she held her ground. She neither jumped nor turned to acknowledge the unwelcome caress.

  “So that’s it? Magic is just taking the easy way out? An energy-saving device? A quaint and archaic mechanism?”

  “I’m not sure why that should make you so angry. If you would move the inkwell with your hand, you must train up your hand. If you would move it with your mind, you must train up your mind.”

  What first registered in Jacqueline’s mind was the sound of the inkwell sliding away from her across the rough wooden surface. The sight, or perhaps the acceptance of the sight, was slower in coming. It lagged just beyond the sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  Foley placed both hands upon her shoulders from behind. It was not a comforting gesture. He leaned down close and whispered into one ear. “Would you learn to move the well with only your mind? I could teach you; you know. Would you like that? For me to teach you?”

  She shivered.

  “Do you think it would be hard? Arduous? The long nights of study. Months, years perhaps? Would you be willing to make the necessary…sacrifices? Or would you mourn over lost sentimentalities—pudgy fingers, melted chocolate, pretty colors?”

  Foley felt her stiffen. He smiled and closed in for the kill. “Would it surprise you, I wonder, to learn that I could teach you to move the inkwell in little more than one hundred hours of concentrated study? Just about the same time it takes to teach a mortal child to read. Would that surprise you? You yourself were a teacher, once. Surely you’ve taught a child to read. What could be simpler? What could be more natural? Would you like that? Would you like for me to teach you?”

  A change had come over Jacqueline. Her voice was hollow. It sounded as if it came from a great distance. Echoing up from the bottom of a deep well.

  “I would…like that.”

  “Good. I was hoping you would say that. I am certain we shall have great fun together. Yes, I am very much looking forward to the coming years.”

  “Years? But you said…”

  “Oh yes, years. Perhaps decades. But do not worry, we are in no hurry. We quite literally have all the time in the wor
ld.”

  “One hundred hours,” she repeated stubbornly. Some of the fire was coming back into her stare. “You said, one hundred hours. Even at only an hour a night, that is scarcely four months.”

  “I fear you misunderstand. I said I could teach you in one hundred hours. Anyone could, really. The power is in you already—in the blood. Despite your enthusiasm, however, I have no intention of loosing that power upon you in such a hurried manner. You would not thank me for it, you may rely upon that.

  “You are ambitious, and that is an advantage. But you must temper your ambition with patience. You would have power, yes. That much is obvious. But you would far rather have shortcuts. It is a lack of discipline. It makes you vulnerable.”

  “But you promised…”

  “I promised you nothing, except that I would teach you. We will not rush through this training. We shall be much more…thorough. The instructing of novices is something in which I take quite an avid interest. Shall we begin with the basics?”

  The unexpected offer to begin immediately undermined Jacqueline’s objections. She still wanted to argue, to confront Foley with his shadow promises, to throw his transparent manipulations back in his face. But none of his insults, his insinuations carried the weight of that one compelling call—the sound of the inkwell sliding, apparently of its own accord, across the worktable.

  “I am ready, Regent Secundus.”

  Foley gave no sign of reveling in his victory. “The problem is precisely that you are not ready. You lack the proper foundation to grasp even the fundamentals of what I will relate to you. You lack the proper discipline to commit my words to memory, for review when you eventually master the basics. I cannot allow you to take written notes for the obvious reasons, so you must muddle through as best you can.

  “There are seven lessons that I teach—the seven great truths of the Tremere pyramid. If you are not prepared to receive them, your efforts here are doomed from the start, relegated to the realm of frustration and failure. The seven lessons of the pyramid are Discontinuity, Hierarchy, Apathy, Favour, Authority, Documentation and Surveillance.

  “You will have forgotten all of them, of course, by the next time we meet. So we will only dwell on the first tonight. The first lesson I teach each of my students is discontinuity.

  “I barrage them with snatches of astrology, Kabbalism, palmistry, the I Ching, conspiracy theories, Greek myths, Catholic rites, the Tarot, crystals, druids, Gehenna, demonology, evolution, alchemy, the Book of the Dead, Lovecraft, Orphic mysteries, UFOs the Grail cycle, Nostradamus, quantum theory, archangels, the Golden Dawn, radical relativism, neopaganism, the Book of Nod, Catharist heresies, etc.

  “Everything I teach is kept uncontaminated by any specific context. Logical progressions—whether they be chronological or conceptual—are harshly suppressed. All theories, even the most tenuously held, are placed on an equal footing. Each is presented as being equally plausible and, in the final reckoning, true.

  “If a student should show signs of a developing enthusiasm, we immediately change tack—preferably taking up a tradition that vilifies or is at least openly dismissive of the previous one. But there are ample other distractions to take the novice’s mind off the drudgery of any one particular subject.

  “The chantry is a symphony of bells and alarms—tolling the hours of study or of service; calling the faithful to meetings or mealtimes; announcing the arrival of emissaries or invaders. In all this frenzied activity, there is an elegant discontinuity—not only of topic, but also of time.

  “The benefits of discontinuity are legion. It discourages overspecialization, attachment and sentimentality. It gives the novice the broadest possible base of knowledge. It develops healthy reserves of sophism, cynicism and intellectualism to carry her through the coming struggles.

  “But most importantly, it reconciles the novice to her new existence. What use is there for continuity, for interconnectedness, for logical cause and consequence in a world where even the inevitable tie between life and death has been utterly and irrevocably severed?”

  Jacqueline listened in growing horror. Surely Foley was just giving vent to a brooding cynicism. Taken at face value, the system he was describing was nothing short of a death sentence. Decades, perhaps centuries, lost for the sake of preserving a crumbling monolithic institution.

  If Foley thought that he could shackle her to such an agenda, she would have to disabuse him of that notion.

  Saturday, 24 July 1999, 9:45 PM

  Anteroom of the Chantry of the Five Boroughs

  New York City, New York

  “Three accomplishments that are well regarded in Ireland,” Talbott began, gathering in the crowd like a mother hen. “A clever verse, music on the harp, the art of shaving faces.

  “Three smiles that are worse than griefs: the smile of snow melting, the smile of your wife when another man has been with her, the smile of a mastiff about to spring.

  “Three scarcities that are better than abundance: a scarcity of fancy talk, a scarcity of cows in a small pasture, a scarcity of friends around the beer.

  “So the Triads tell us…ah, thank you,” Talbott accepted the proffered cup. “And they are as true today as they were in sainted Padraig’s time.”

  The word ‘time’ was muffled in the head of the rich brown beer. He drank deeply and with great deliberation.

  The anteroom of the Chantry of the Five Boroughs usually had something of the aspect of a luxurious private library about it. The floor-to-ceiling bookcases contained a multitude of scholarly texts rendered in the earthy tones of tooled leather broken only by the sharp contrast of gilt edges.

  The arrangement of books was precise if inutile. The volumes were grouped together by the simplest scheme that suggested itself—by color. This approach encouraged a leisurely, disinterested browsing and frustrated any attempts to discover pertinent information. Frequent visitors to the chantry had grown bold enough to remark openly upon the curious and disproportionately heavy representation of the works of a Mr. Z. Grey among the shelves.

  At the far end of the anteroom, beyond the ancient oak-paneled double doors—the two faithful and well-loved retainers leaned noticeably together upon sagging hinges—lay the Grande Foyer and Chantry proper. The anteroom, however, was Talbott’s private domain. He was the brother porter, the keeper of the gate, the guardian of the way. He had served the chantry faithfully for the better part of forty years.

  During his tenure he had been witness to much of the mystery and majesty of the Tremere. Indeed, one could not spend so much time in the close proximity of the tumbledown Great Portal without seeing more than one’s fair share of leaky incidental magics.

  In all that time, however, of ushering supplicants, mystics, dignitaries and the occasional stray puppy across that formidable threshold, Talbott had never once passed through the great doors in their aspect of the Portal of Initiation.

  He had never once tasted of the forbidden fruit. “Never once been tempted,” he could be overheard to boast contentedly to a dumbfounded guest. “No sir, never even been tempted.”

  Tonight, the trappings of the formal waiting room had been rudely shoved aside and relegated to the farthest comers. Talbott held court over an enrapt group of novices, locals, old-timers, and a smattering of the more adventurous students from the college above. All maintained a respectful silence, waiting for Talbott to put down his glass and take up his tale once again.

  A hundred slight sounds, however, betrayed their patient waiting. An earthenware mug scraped across a rough-planked table. A chair creaked back on two legs. A match struck, guttered, caught life.

  The door to the street swung inward. Moonlight diffused in a lazy twisting cone through the omnipresent smoke. A uniform cloud filled the room from the top down, thick enough at eye level to noticeably darken the interior. A sweet smoke, equal parts peat fire and tobacco.

  Smells like moss, Talbott thought. Green, moist, alive.

  The scent ambushed
him with the memory of a favorite hiding spot from his youth—a tiny earthen hollow tucked away beneath the exposed roots of Bent Willow. Gazing out through the tendrilled lattice of root fibers, Talbott had watched afternoons slip downstream pursuing the River of Life as it made its way, in no particular hurry, through the lush green pastures of Meadth. Home.

  Talbott shook his head as if to dislodge the dream-image, but gently. The past was tenacious. It clung fast, drew life, drank youth. He passed a gnarled hand through sparse, silvered hair, raking it back from his eyes. Once golden, he thought. Poor wages indeed for a lifetime of service.

  Voices intruded from the opened door to the street. A laugh three levels too loud for the enclosed space cut off abruptly.

  “Sorry, lads.” Rafferty tried for a whisper, but got hung somewhere midway between his object and a chuckle. He swung the door to, leaning heavily against it as he did so. He descended the three quick steps into the cramped, warmth of the interior.

  “Pissed already,” came an answering mumble. “And what should his dear mother say to hear of it?”

  “She’d say the boy was ever a quick study,” came a distinctly matronly voice from somewhere in the vicinity of the fire. “More’s the pity he never picked up another subject.”

  Rafferty slunk toward the fire; head hunched low as if expecting to be cuffed. He ducked, planting a kiss squarely on the woman’s cheek and then slipped off to fetch her another pint.

  Talbott put down his mug with audible satisfaction and picked up where he had left off as if there had been no intervening pause.

  “And they are as true today as they were in sainted Padraig’s time. You have, no doubt, heard it told how the Blessed Padraig drove the snakes out of Eire.”

  Talbott waited for the nods of recognition to make their way around the room.

  “Oh, come now Talbott. That’s an old saw. Give us something fresh, won’t you?” The voice was familiar and perhaps a bit too loud for the close quarters.

  Talbott smiled. A smile with a sly edge to it. “All right then, you prancing pagan, if you’ll have none of the Blessed Padraig—not that there aren’t some present that could stand a nudge in the right direction, mind you—what will you have? The Wooing of Etain is bit less chaste, but I hardly know if I could bring myself to relate the whole of it without falling to blushing and stammering in the present company.”