“What will happen to me while you are gone?”
She did not know. “I am not sure,” she said. “We know it can be done, for that is the occupation of the necromancer. He has made a career of it these twenty years.”
He finally looked up to meet her eyes. “You worry that I will collapse in fear, release the demon to plague mankind and trap you in the deep astral forever.”
She could not resist a comforting smile. “No…I do not worry.” she lied.
He smiled back. “I can see inside your mind. I assure you, those days of fear are gone, Nadira. The Hermetica took those fears from me. My humors are quite balanced.”
She saw a golden flash in his eyes. Not completely balanced. She saw a touch of the irrational there and started to think she might have to work alone. When a twinge of doubt crept into her mind, the Grimoire spoke to her. He is sincere. He is an admirable partner for this work. His character will be repellant to the demons. Most who hold the portals tempt the denizens with their greed and lust. William is different. Like you, he does not possess the currency of the netherworld.
She released her breath with relief. “Are you ready?”
He stood and pulled her from the bench. “Semper Intrepidus,” he whispered. “Let us call for Corbett and Calvin.”
Chapter Sixteen
They sent Thedra and the servants to Eleusis to buy food. Nadira gave her friend some of Kemal’s coins and suggested she also shop for clothing. The Templars waited in an upstairs room William had prepared by moving the furniture away from the center of the floor. Nadira opened the door. The knights sat in chairs against the plaster wall. Calvin’s eyes gleamed with eagerness, but Corbett seemed subdued. She put a hand out to stop Calvin from standing as she entered.
“Please. Do not stand on that leg. And you,” she turned to Corbett, “Are you certain you are ready to do this today?” The old knight had not recovered from his beating as she had hoped. His bruises had faded to yellow but he still moved stiffly. He never smiled and rarely spoke now. His skin was sallow and he had become very thin. It seemed his world had turned inward.
Corbett nodded. The old Templar leaned heavily on the cane Montrose had made. Calvin refused to use one, though Montrose had spent two days whittling one for him as well. He preferred to drag his leg as he tried to walk. The younger knight looked at Corbett. When he turned his eyes on her Nadira could see that he was worried.
Neither man was ready to hear the truth: that Corbett could become more powerful in the netherworld and be able to accomplish his goals as easily from that realm as he struggled in this one. As above, so below. He has heard the words, but does not believe them. With all his learning he still feared death.
“William will open the portal between the worlds,” she explained. “I will travel there and look for your Grand Master.”
“And you will not need an elixir?” Calvin asked, confused.
“No. With the Grimoire there is no more need for elixirs. William will keep the portal open for me. Tell me how I will call for de Molay.”
Corbett roused himself at these words. He moved to the table and opened a small banded chest where the Templars kept the elixirs and their coins and other precious items. He reached inside and handed her the Mandylion. “Hold this,” he said. “It was de Molay who put it in the reliquary in the Hagia Sophia in 1292.” His voice cracked. “It was to stand at the gateway between the East and West and protect all of Europe from the Saracens.”
Calvin nodded. “And it did until May 29, 1453.”
Nadira caressed the soft cloth. “Yet it did not save Constantinople on that day.” She wondered if its power was gone, or transferred to another icon, or if it had any real power to begin with. She felt only the hopes of many dead men in its folds. She felt the besieged city of Constantinople. She saw the army of Mehmet II, the sultan’s father, and heard the sounds enormous cannon battering the proud walls.
Corbett wiped his eye with a thumb. “No. It did not save the city. Something went wrong. Find out, Nadira. Find out how we failed Our Lord and why he permitted such a horror to befall his people. Find out what we must do now.”
She nodded and turned to William. “Are you ready, Will?” She tucked the soft cloth into her dress between her breasts and felt its warmth surround her like a shield.
William opened the book with one hand and offered her a lump of chalk with the other.
She took the chalk and moved to the center of the room and drew a circle on the floor in front of them. Inside she drew the sigil of the demon’s name. She stood and examined her work. William held the book for her so she could compare the two. She made a slight correction with her finger on the stone. “There it is.” She brushed the chalk from her hands on her dress and stood beside him.
“You will make that sigil in the air and focus your eyes on the circle. We want him to appear there, and nowhere else. When you speak his name, he should appear. Keep him in the circle. We don’t want him loose in the room.”
William practiced swirling a finger in the air in front of him. Nadira was pleased to see faint sparks from his finger that signaled he would be able to summon the energies to materialize the demon. She turned to her own task. She closed her eyes and thought of Constantinople, Templar Grand Masters and the Hagia Sophia. She touched the cloth between her breasts and said, “Jacques de Molay.”
“Nadira,” William’s voice had an urgency to it. She opened her eyes. “Nadira, the demon is here already. He is curious. He peeks out at me from the book.”
“Already?” She had thought there would be more effort involved, dry runs and partial success first.
“He is straining to burst through to the circle. I am asking if you are ready for him.”
She was not. It occurred to her that no one was ever ready for this. “Do it.”
He took a huge breath and filaments of golden light erupted from his hands. He lifted one hand and directed the light across the room to hover over the chalk circle. The strands coalesced into a ball that became a disc. He took a long breath and pronounced the demon’s name in a loud and authoritative voice. They both watched in wonder as the disc dilated in the center with a dark circle. A demon’s head emerged as a child does from a womb. It was curled as a fetus and was squeezed from the disc, birthed to the chalk circle, its umbilicus snaking from its belly. The end of the cord remained inside the disc, pulsing with bright red light.
“Oh God,” William breathed. “It works.”
The Templars murmured behind her. Both men were now on their knees, crossing themselves vigorously.
Nadira turned back to the demon. She tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. She choked a little on the air she drew in. “Is he the right one?” she asked William.
“Oh yes.”
She looked hard at William. His eyes were dilated with concentration. His hand was raised and his fingers played the strands that kept the demon within the circle. The Grimoire showed Nadira how fragile the boundary was. William was the only thing standing between the physical world and the netherworld. If he failed, the portal might remain open and release some of the denizens before it could be closed again. It could close and trap her inside.
“I understand,” she told the book.
The demon unfolded in its circle. It was smaller than either of them, shining red and glistening with the slime of its birth into their world. It grinned at them both with many black pointed teeth. It did not speak, but extended a red cord from its heart to William and thrust it toward the young man’s belly. It entered William where his own umbilicus had been severed when he entered this world through the portal of his mother’s womb. William rocked on his feet as it penetrated, but regained his balance immediately.
“Does it hurt?” she asked him.
He winced. “It is not sweet like your touch, Nadira. It does not fill me with love and thoughts of spiced wine and honey cakes.” He tilted his head so she could see the humor that sparked in one eye. He was enjoying h
is success. “Go.”
His face shone with the energies that shimmered in the room with an increasing intensity. She turned her attention to the demon. It looked at her, now. Its yellow eyes and vertical pupils stared unblinking. When she stood just outside his circle, she cast her own silver cord back to William, and entered his body at his heart. He rocked again, but smiled. “Go,” he said.
She touched the pulsing red umbilicus that wormed through the silver disc. She was snatched with the force of a thousand arrows and blown through the portal into the netherworld of the dead.
She remembered the feeling of floating, and the unpleasant effect that suggested she would fly apart into millions of particles and be dispersed throughout the universe. She held herself together, tested the silver cord that connected her to William, and then turned her eyes outward, looking for Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar.
She found him immediately. He stood before her in his chain mail and white surcoat with the red four armed cross over his heart. Around them both swirled the fog of an unspecified death world
“Jacques de Molay,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes and walked a circle around her. She permitted his scrutiny and as she waited for him to adjust to her presence she filled the background with Andalusia in the spring.
Finally he stopped in front of her. His face was fierce. “You are a Saracen and yet you hold the cloth of God against your body. Against your naked breasts.” He scowled at her and Nadira pitied his confusion. He raised his arm and pointed at her. “Yet you feel like the Madonna.” The conflicting ideas were apparent in his bearded face.
“I am Nadira,” she told him, “I am not a Saracen and I am not the Madonna. I come with a message from those below. She put her hand in the neck of her dress and withdrew the ethereal copy of the Mandylion. “You are drawn to it, and so to me.” She offered it to him and he took it, kissed it, then pressed it against the cross over his heart. His eyes closed and his face relaxed with shimmering ecstasy.
“Master,” she continued, “Constantinople fell in 1453.” He nodded, caressing the cloth. She continued, “The remnants of your order wish to know why the Mandylion failed. They want to know how Christendom can prevent the Turks from taking more of their cities. They are prepared to do anything…” she paused, realizing that by sending her to hell, they were engaging in necromancy, which was forbidden by their religion. The Templars would do anything. Even defy their God.
De Molay was just as surprised. He opened his eyes as she paused and said, “They sent you to ask me?”
“Yes.”
“A woman? A Saracen?”
Nadira felt a wave of annoyance. “I am not a Saracen, but I am a woman. And yes, they sent me because they could not come themselves.”
De Molay thought about this then answered, “They cannot prevent the war.”
She disagreed. “Your knights are good men and sincere. This mission is another crusade for them, but this time they are taking up the cross for peace. Thousands will die. Whole cities will fall again. They want to know how to stop the coming war, not how to win it. Tell them. They wish to find the treasure of the Order. They would use it to stop this war.”
De Molay shook out the Mandylion between widespread hands and gazed at it with love. “I do not know how they can stop war…or famine, or pestilence, or death. We are all meant to die. It is foolish to try to prevent even a single death. Every soul must eventually enter here.” He looked up at her. “Only God determines when a man shall die.”
Nadira made a face. “I did not pierce the veil of heaven and hell to hear this. Yes, all must eventually die, but why be born if not to live?” She felt her anger rising at this stubborn man who had not learned a mote of wisdom, even in death. She said, “Tell me what happened to the money in the treasury. Let your heirs work to bring peace to the world.” The first crusaders had started this enmity; the last ones would stop it. She saw this remorse in the hearts of the Templars. But not in de Molay’s.
He snorted. “Peace! There will never be peace. And the gold is gone, taken away by our fleet before King Philip could seize it.”
“Yes, so where is it now?”
He looked at her over the top of the cloth. “Spent. Some still exists in Scotland. Sinclair holds it. It is not enough to stop a war.”
She sighed. “They were promised a precious treasure that would help them stop the coming doom.” She could see that if the conflict were not stopped, the resulting chaos and disruption would be worse than the scourge of plague. Famine and disease would follow the sword. Both sides would suffer for decades. There would be no winners in this conflagration. She realized now where her visions of this hell had come from. The Hermetica had been warning her from the beginning. Men did not need to open a portal to bring hell upon themselves. They created it with their greed and anger.
“Who promised them a savior?” De Molay folded the ethereal cloth and tucked it inside his mail shirt.
She frowned. She did not know who told the Templars.
He stared hard at her. “Tell them they already possess this treasure.”
De Molay disappeared and Nadira was alone in the Abyss. She felt suddenly drained. She tugged at her silver cord and snapped back to her body, now lying on the floor in the villa in Eleusis. The demon greeted her. “Welcome back, Nadira the Necromancer.”
William waved his hands and snapped the cords that bound him. The demon vanished in a flash of stinking fire and the room was plunged into near darkness, lit only by a single candle on a table near the Templars.
She felt William lifting her from the floor. He said, “The sun is low on the horizon and I hear Thedra and the servants in the foyer. We must recover quickly.”
She was shaking. His arms went around her and he pressed her to his chest. Both Templars limped toward her and touched her hair and arms in wonder. She pulled the Mandylion from between her breasts and extended her hand toward Corbett. The old knight took the cloth. His gray eyes asked her for his answers.
“I spoke to him,” she said. “He was no help at all, Sir Malcolm Corbett.” She turned to Calvin. “And your wound was earned in vain. He says there is no relic that will keep the coming war from your shores and that the treasury was dispersed and spent decades ago. Some went to Scotland and is held by a man named Sinclair. What remains is not enough for what you need.”
Corbett sank to his knees and bent his head to folded hands, the Mandylion pressed between them.
With narrowed eyes Calvin asked her, “He said nothing else? He had no words of hope for us?”
She sighed. “He said you already possess the treasure that will stop the war. Obviously he lies.”
Supper was unpleasant. The Templars kept to their room and dined alone. Thedra grumbled about the greedy shopkeepers in Eleusis, then burst into tears. “They had no good sandals to speak of and the wine is sour.”
“Really?” William touched his bread into the olive oil and salt and bit it. “He will be back before too long,” he said, chewing.
“Who?”
“I was talking about Alisdair,” William said gently.
This brought on a fresh tide of tears from Thedra. Nadira covered her eyes. She felt a great ache as well, missing Montrose, but could not weep for him. He felt hot, like searing metal, and she could not touch him without pain. Alisdair and Garreth were more accessible, but conveyed little information about the baron beyond his general health. That was all they knew. They could not touch his mind or his heart as she was used to doing.
She sighed and tore her pita into bits and tossed them around the platter. Kemal was growing weaker. She had hoped that she would not have to sustain him, but now the necromancer was using him against her, harassing the captain as he knew she would feel the sharp pokes of his staff through him. She sighed again. William shot her a knowing glance but did not speak. He was busy with Thedra and her very audible misery.
She sent Kemal some of her energy th
rough the cord that bound them together and felt the necromancer draw it out again. She felt her lack of experience acutely.
“Nadira?”
She thought about the priestess. She and the necromancer lived in separate worlds, each carved out an earthly realm and lived encircled by a mutual agreement to ignore the other. He would influence the physical and reap the physical benefits: riches, power, pleasure. Fear. She would influence the spiritual: peace, harmony, knowledge and understanding. Love.
The priestess could not attack and destroy the other. Her realm was passive, peaceful. She created massive defenses instead to protect her teachings and her people. The necromancer was active and sought out his power and his armies of the greedy and angry. He had no interest in peace or harmony or love.
“Nadira.”
She flipped the pita pieces at the candles, aiming for the flame. The bits sailed through the air and made the golden flames flicker. The flames burned, they moved and waved, avoiding the floury missiles. The bits of pita would need a direct hit to put them out. She aimed carefully for the base of the flame. A tiny triangle made a slow arc and struck the wick and splashed the melted wax. Darkness came to that side of the table. She turned her eyes to the other candles.
“Nadira.”
A direct hit. Only a direct hit would take the necromancer down. If she fired missiles at him for all eternity he would duck and weave like the flames and be untouched. She could not send a tendril to the necromancer without him feeling it and using it against her. Even touching Kemal to try to feel the magus would alert him through the thin golden line the reis had set in her heart. She touched the place between her breasts.
The Necromancer's Grimoire Page 34