Lightbreaker tcos-1

by Mark Teppo

  I retrieved his discarded sword. As my hand closed around the hilt, I fell back into memory, and was flush again with the fury that had led me to the bridge in Paris, to the duel with Antoine. Tied to that was the black rage that had nearly pushed my hand through Kat's chest. Blind idealism. Slavish devotion. The crippled Prince. The hubris of a mind so precise in its tunnel vision that it was unable to see beyond the pinprick of its immediate goal. No Will. No Reason. Just unrestrained passion.

  "We are all your princes," I whispered to the sword. Antoine. Doug. Myself. Slaves to the point, fanatics who walk the edge.

  Our hands. What we do. It is all written there.

  My choice, now.

  Doug screamed as he twisted against the horns. I rolled him forward with my calf and put my foot against his tailbone, elevating his right leg. "You're not afraid to lose your body, are you, Doug?" I asked. "You're on the rise. You can deal with this."

  The Chorus sharpened the blade as I brought the sword down on his right leg, just below the knee. The blade went through, slicing off his calf and foot. His leg jerked, showering the deck with blood.

  I swept up the piece of twitching meat and hurled it at the audience of Hollow Men. The severed leg hit the barrier of blades and vaporized into a spray of bone, blood, and flesh. The Hollow Men in the front row recoiled, and those connected to Doug channeled their outrage through the conduits, pumping the pinned man full of energy and adrenaline.

  Doug, full of animalistic howls, was still lucid enough to fight back. His right hand scrabbled on the deck, struggling to reach my foot. I swept the blade down on his wrist. He tried to jerk his hand back, but his arm was pinned beneath the edge of the blade. Almost.

  "This is for Gerald Summers. That old sack of meat you used and threw away." I twisted the blade, feeling it cut through bone and muscle. "Nothing more than a cheap coat, was he? Something to wear once and discard. Nobody cared what happened to it. Right?" The blade sheared through the ligaments at the end of his wrist.

  A contorted mask, Doug's face was a riot of uncontrolled expressions. Neural networks overloaded with pain were being blocked off while the Ego retreated to the core of etheric power still flowing into the damaged flesh. Through this opacity of pain, Doug started to use the conduits to heal himself. To fight his way back into control of his body. Pain is transitory. Eventually, the spirit extracts obedience from the flesh. Flesh can be remade.

  "Show me your magick trick, then." I raised the gory sword. "Let's see what you can do without your flesh." I drove the steel sword through the center of his skull, burying the point in the floor.

  Doug's spirit-a glistening, twisting shape of diaphanous energy-erupted from his corpse. In this pure form, I could See energy pumping along the extruded veins of the conduits, pouring power into the maelstrom of Doug's sparkling spirit.

  I knew what he had to be planning. There was only one viable body on the platform. He had reached the rank of Initiate Ascendant within the group. He knew how to body-jack. He was going to try to possess me. His psychoanimist trick of taking over a body.

  I laughed at him. "You have no idea how fucking stupid a plan that is," I said, and spiked him with the Chorus.

  His spirit convulsed, shrinking to a dense clot of white-tipped will-o'-wisps. The ravenous Chorus tore at this spirit mass, shredding the outer layers. Doug swirled like an emergent galaxy, throwing off spiral arms of gossamer light. I could taste his panic. He knew. Lightbreaker. I was going to devour him.

  I survived the dark night in the forest because I listened to the Qliphoth, because I welcomed the hunger into my heart. I survived because I learned how to break spirits and take their light.

  Doug tried to fend off the Chorus, but they were already inside him, nipping through the veils of his soul. He cried out, but I was the only one who heard him. He started to beg, his voice keening in my head; he whimpered for mercy; I ignored all of it.

  The Chorus devoured Doug and, in an orgiastic rush, I felt his essence pour into me. Faster and faster, the jumbled collection of Doug's sense data and memory associations gushed into my head. Most of it would vanish quickly, chunks and blocks of memory dissolving into random noise and color; but, for this instant, his entire life was mine. All the sensory details of his existence were there: I witnessed what Doug had seen; heard what he heard; tasted the meals he could remember eating; knew the scents that made him think of his mother. I held his doubts, his dreams, and his errors. I knew his dirty little secrets; I knew why he had been left behind. I knew why he had come to my cell and dragged me to this duel. I was Doug.

  This was the promise given and then taken away: Doug had been grudgingly granted the rank of Initiate Ascendant, but he had not been Anointed. The biting betrayal in Doug's heart was that only the Anointed were allowed to participate in the Great Work sponsored by Bernard and Julian.

  Bernard's theurgic mirror had a greater purpose than just storage. The ibis-hounds were takwin, artificial creatures made by the device, but they weren't the sole function of the device. The spirit creatures harvested souls for a purpose, a purpose which Doug had been denied.

  The Chorus rippled and snarled under my skin, rampant chimerae resplendent with fiery halos, in response to the discovery of this knowledge within Doug's fading history. Settle it, they growled. In their teeth, they held the conduit threads, those open pathways feeding Doug. Channels straight into the magickal cores of the other sorcerers. Open fucking doorways. I could barely hold them in check.

  "Gentlemen," I Whispered to the assembled host of Hollow Men, my voice an unavoidable serpentine hiss in their ears. "Doug is gone. His rank was worthless, and I have broken him."

  I stepped away from the blood-spattered corpse, my hands held casually at my sides. "I have no quarrel with any of you. But, should you wish to take umbrage at my departure from this Arena, now is the time." I gave the soul threads a slight tug. Several of the Hollow Men jerked at my touch. "See through me if you can. See through me and know that I will do to you what I did to him. Know that I walk out of here. Now."

  The Chorus poured themselves down one of the threads, fiery lions burning through the mystic wire. They ignited the organs of the Hollow Man on the other end. Setting fire to his heart, his liver, his lungs, his stomach-all of it, burning with phosphorescent heat. A tongue of flame shot out of his mouth as he screamed, setting his hood on fire.

  The others reacted, equal parts panic and incantations. The fire spread; first one, then another soul igniting when touched by the incandescent spark of my Will. The blaze became a conflagration, a pyre of burning flesh and hot metal. The chamber burst finally, unable to hold the light and heat any longer.

  Mahapralaya.

  This is the way the world ends.

  XXI

  THE FOURTH WORK

  ". .ye must understand also that this Multiplicity is itself Unity, and without it Unity could not be. And this is a hard saying against Reason; ye shall comprehend, when, rising above Reason, which is but a manipulation of the Mind, ye come to pure Knowledge by direct perception of the Truth."

  — Aleister Crowley, Liber CL: De Lege Libellum

  From a window seat at Denny's, I watched the firefighters contain the warehouse blaze. Julian's building was an unassuming four-story brick structure with plain windows evenly spaced about the facade. A series of loading docks ran off the southern side, with tall doors of corrugated metal large enough to accommodate easy loading of shipping containers.

  I had found the one used for my prison on the first floor. One of the fleeing Hollow Men had thought he would be safe inside.

  SFD had three engines on-site, and snakes of white hose were strewn about the red trucks. Lines of steaming water soaked the old bricks of the warehouse, playing a game of tag with the red and orange flame in the shattered windows. Yellow-suited figures ran along the raised concrete dock like ants trying to salvage their queen from the inferno inside.

  "Looks like a good-sized fire." The waitress h
ad a double order of sausage and cheese omelets, toast, and home fries. She put the plates down, one of them at the place setting across from me as if someone else was going to join me. I didn't bother to correct her assumption. I was going to wolf down the first plate in short order. The second one wasn't going to have time to cool. "Ketchup?" she asked.

  I shook my head, and with a final glance toward the fire, she wandered off. I focused on the omelet in front of me. While I was filled with etheric energy, taken from the Hollow Men, it wasn't the same as real food. The material body needs material fuel-one of the inescapable rules of the Universe-and it had been four days since I had eaten. The waffle at Minnie's, early Wednesday morning.

  The newspaper in the rack outside the restaurant said it was Saturday. The fire had cut through the morning fog blanketing the industrial district south of downtown Seattle, an early morning glow that must have confused drivers on I-5 as if the sun was rising in the west instead of the east. A single fire engine had responded initially but, after a rapid assessment, the on-site commander had called for backup. The fire was in the walls and floors.

  The Arena had been in a subbasement, several floors below the ground. The conflagration had started there, with the immolation of the first Hollow Man. There were those who had just watched-Witnesses, not participants-and I had let them go. The others, the eight who had given Doug magickal aid, they had been my prey.

  Four died in the subbasement; one in the eastern stairwell; one hid in the shipping container, and I had closed the door a moment before I set off Julian's ward; one tried to fight back, thinking he could ambush me on the second floor; and the last one tried to fly away. Filled with energy stolen from the others, I had given him a boost. He turned into ash, a black smear across the damp rooftop.

  You have to fill the void.

  It had been easy. A bright burning fury encapsulating a decade of pent-up helplessness. Years of fear. All focused through a need for vengeance, to take from them what they had taken from Kat.

  The void in my soul. I poured energy into it because that was the way I reacted to a Universe that made me afraid. Its nihilistic enormity. What were we in this vast emptiness? I killed, not because of the Qliphotic taint, but because it was the only way I knew how to be a Creator.

  "Nice of you to order me something."

  Nicols sat down across from me. He turned over the nearby coffee cup and placed it near the edge of the table where the waitress would spot it. "There any ketchup?" he asked, unrolling the silverware from the paper napkin.

  "I'm sure she can bring some," I said.

  He did a good job of appearing to be noncommittal in looking at me, but I knew there were physical differences from the last time he had seen me. Unlike other scars, I had no desire to keep marks from the last few days. I had wiped away the pattern of burn marks on my chest, fixed the torn ligament in my knee and regrown my burned hair. The body is mutable if the Will is strong. The braid of Reija's hair was a stark white band about my throat. I had also acquired clothing before leaving the warehouse, replacing my blood-stained pants with a nondescript blue track suit I had found in a locker. Nicols noticed the reverse haircut, surely, just as he noticed how rested I looked compared to him.

  The jeans and hooded sweatshirt augmented his exhaustion, failing to disguise the slump of his shoulders and the unhealthy tinge of his skin. The disheveled arrangement of his hair suggested he had been sleeping in his car. Smoking there too. His clothes reeked of musty tobacco.

  He looked out the window at the fire, not unaware of the view afforded this table. "You're very shiny," he said. "I Saw you from the street." I heard his emphasis. In my absence, he had come to believe in his Sight.

  And I was very shiny. Filled with the light of the Hollow Men, I knew I'd be hard not to spot from the street. I wasn't ready to flush all that energy; it was a ready reservoir of useful power. The increased visibility was a trade-off I could live with in the short term. Besides, all the wrong sort of people already knew I was here.

  "You happen to be in the neighborhood or do you have a fetish for fire?" I asked, nodding toward the excitement down the block.

  "Very funny. Thanks for hanging around at the hotel. I appreciate the concern for my well-being. It was just a Taser, after all. I suppose you get shot with that sort of thing every day."

  "Not every day. I'm sorry about that. You were right. It was a trap. But not one of Pender's design."

  "Yeah," he nodded. "I figured that out when he arrived. He was convinced you had orchestrated that mess: shot me, taken the girl, and made a run for the border."

  "What did you tell him?"

  "Nothing. He was eager to have me corroborate his story." He shrugged. "So I did." He leaned forward. "I met your friend."

  "Who?"

  "Antoine."

  He was here. My insight into the Weave had been correct. There was a larger game afoot, and we were being moved about in accordance with a coordinated plan. "So Pender's act was for his benefit."

  "Yeah, that's what I figured. He was trying too hard to sell his story."

  "Did Antoine buy it?"

  Nicols settled back in the seat, exhaling noisily. "He's. . ah, 'inscrutable' is a good word. He's not fucking there when you try to look at him. And forget trying to read his body language. It's like trying to read patterns in running water. He knew I could See and the fact that I couldn't read him at all may have amused him. Or maybe not. I just don't know."

  "Antoine was always good at hiding himself."

  "He's more than good." Nicols shook his head. "Pender wanted to hold me for questioning. 'Observation' was the term he used. But Antoine-Jesus, he barely said anything and Pender was still ready to shit himself-wasn't going to have any of that. He told Pender to leave me alone."

  I smiled. Nicely done. My abduction had been meant to be a distraction, but Antoine had simply brushed the misdirection aside. He left Nicols in play, knowing the detective would look for me.

  "What about Kat?" he asked. "Did you find her?"

  I looked at the fire, at the cloud of black smoke rising from the ruined warehouse, before I nodded.

  The waitress wandered over with the coffee pot. She poured Nicols a cup, and while she refilled mine, he talked her out of the ketchup bottle in the pocket of her apron. He smothered his omelet and I looked away, my stomach churning. Too much like blood.

  "Where is she?" He hacked off the end of his omelet, a clean slice done with an executioner's precision. Like a sword through a limb.

  "I don't know." I hadn't found her body: not in the container, not in the interrogation room, not anywhere else in the building. Kat was gone, and a part of my heart told me-over and over-that she was already dead. She had been broken and the invasive darkness would devour her. Even if I had been able to find her immediately, how was I going to save her? I hadn't been able to save my own soul from a tear more imagined than real. What was I going to do for someone who was actually missing part of their soul? And now, three days on, how much could possibly be left? How much of Kat was left, and how much was turned into something else.

  A Qliphotic echo looped behind those questions, a lingering remnant of the poison. It still sought to influence my Will, to lure me into that immolation of vengeance. That Mahapralaya moment. Find those who killed her. Do to them what you did to the nine. They all deserved to die. They all conspired to take her from you. Every one of them. Break their souls.

  I stabbed my plate so hard the fork stuck into the porcelain. "I don't know." I looked out the window, and my exhalation left ice on the glass. Part of me repeated what the voices were saying; part still liked that empty and cold worldview.

  Cancers linger. They never die quickly. Their hearts can be extracted, but their roots are persistent and they don't die overnight. The rot stops, but the decay can still be infectious. Days, weeks, months-years, even-would have to pass before it was truly gone.

  "What happened?" Nicols prodded me, a gentle nudge to shake me
loose from this cycle of endless recrimination. A simple question, seemingly innocent, but his eyes were hard and he didn't blink.

  "I didn't hurt her, John. I found her and. . everything. . it was all wound around a lie. Some story I told myself so often that. . she wasn't responsible, John. She was just. . a symbol. Just something that reminded me of what I had lost."

  He looked away, and not because of the nakedness of my confession, but because of his own reaction to my words. His own secret. What was it? I grabbed onto this question as a way to escape my own thoughts, and I pieced together the clues he had left me: his empty house, and the clothes still in the closet; his reference to on-going therapy sessions-started before the incident on the ferry; and his mannerisms, deliberate and yet hesitant-a corpus of non-verbal communication that had become a dead language now that the only person who had understood his gestures and affections was no longer here.

  Sarah. He had referred to her in the past tense.

  "I'm sorry, John," I said. "My issues aren't the same. Not at all."

  His jaw paused. "Yeah," he said, putting his fork down. "They aren't."

  A burst of cheap music trilled from the pouch of his sweatshirt. Nicols dug out his cell phone, looked at the display, and his eyebrows pulled together. He flipped it open and raised it tentatively to his ear. "Nicols."

  The conversation was one-sided; his contribution was several noncommittal grunts. I tried to read something in his expression, some indication of what he was hearing. "Yes, Ma'am," he said. He shut the phone and a reaction to what he had just heard crystallized in his eyes: fear.

  "That was my captain. I've been recalled to active duty. I'm supposed to report to a suburb called Ravensdale immediately."

  "What's going on?"

  He shook his head. "She wouldn't tell me. But she did say that the call is going out to everyone. We're all being sent, every cop the city can spare. Something has happened."