by Mark Teppo
Bernard. The theurgic mirror.
In my heart, there was a spurt of fire. Break their souls.
On the Thomas Guide map, Ravensdale was a tiny community off Kent-Kangley Road, tucked away on the eastern side of the ridge from the larger suburb of Kent. What the map failed to show was how the cone of Mt. Rainier dominated the horizon this far from the urban center of Seattle, a mottled white and gray peak towering over the surrounding bumps of the Cascade Range. The aftermath of Tuesday's storm had fled the valley, leaving only a thin layer of clouds gliding across the pale sky.
A piebald blanket of pine trees blanketed the foothills of the mountains. The verdant growth of trees was broken in irregular intervals by construction. Persistent urban encroachment. The escalation of property values in Seattle proper continued to push people further and further away. As we drove out Maple Valley Highway, Nicols pointed out the creeping edge of the frontier: first Newcastle and Kent, then Maple Valley and Covington, now Ravensdale.
When we reached the police roadblock, we queued up behind three other cars. King County Sheriff's deputies gathered around each vehicle as it rolled up to their four-car barricade. I rolled down the window as we crept forward, listening to the wind and the sounds from the forest. Both were hushed, as if afraid to be the ones to tell me what had happened here.
One of the three cars in the queue was turned away. Two guys-radiating annoyance and anger-glared at us as they rolled past. As if we were somehow responsible for denying them access. Nicols' casual wave didn't improve their mood. "Erickson and Stenhill. From the Times," he explained. "I've never seen them in anything but a foul mood."
When it was our turn, Nicols offered his shield and ID. The young man at his window seemed too young to have been on the force long-first or second year, probably; the Chorus could taste him. He read the details on Nicols' ID carefully, comparing image to face, and then he leaned down further and looked over at me. "Who's this?"
"He's with me," Nicols said.
"I need to log him," the deputy replied.
Two of them spread out on my side of the car, their hands firmly on their pistol butts. The Chorus heard their heartbeats, and showed me silver adrenaline spikes running across their shoulders.
My hands shook as the spectral ghosts moved in my spine. They were so eager, and I realized how unhinged I still was from the expulsion of the poison and the subsequent fight in the Arena. My control was marginal, my own desire for violence too close to the surface. I was too ready to listen to them. Too ready to burn.
"Name's Markham," Nicols said, unaware of my mental struggle. He carefully spelled my last name for the cop. "Special attache to SPD from back east. He's trained for this sort of thing."
A flutter of pale fabric moved in the shadow of the trees along the road. The fourth deputy-the one who remained near their cars-shouted, pointing out the movement. Struggling to pull their guns, the pair on my side spun around. They missed the convulsive shudder that ran through my body as I let the Chorus out, as I let them touch the approaching figure.
An old man scrambled out of the woods, scuttling on all fours like a rabid squirrel. Dressed in flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt so old it had turned gray, he was a strange apparition wildly out of place in the context of the woods. Gnarled and distorted, his face was a melted wax mold. His eyes were gone, black holes in his pinched face and his tongue was a shriveled stick in his mouth. Dark motes drifted from his sagging mouth, a haze of ash.
Before the deputies could decide to fire, the old man scrabbled onto the road, and rammed my passenger-side door with his head. His hands clawed for the open window.
I grabbed his head, evading the snapping trap of his mouth, and the Chorus, wreathing my body like a phantasmal film of silver smoke, collapsed into the point of contact between my flesh and the man's dead skin. With an infernal roar like an industrial boiler lighting, the old man's body ignited. Light into darkness, a sacrament that was anathema to the debasement violating the old man. Qliphotic. Soul dead. A piece of flash paper, he vanished into a greasy smear of smoke, and in a second, there was nothing left but a tiny stain of soot on the road.
Nicols retrieved his badge and ID from the astonished deputy. "Like I said, a professional." He eased the car forward and gently rolled us through the narrow gap between the police cars. As we picked up speed beyond the barricade, I looked back. The one who had spotted the old man first was talking into his radio while the others stared, dumbfounded, at the smear on the road.
"Drive faster," I told Nicols. "He's calling us in. He's got my name."
"What the hell was that?" Nicols' calm facade cracked.
I noticed what was strewn across the back seat of the car. The blanket covering most of it had slipped down. Two file boxes filled with papers and books, and it looked like more books on the floor. Unlike the collection on Doug's shelves, this assortment was a better primer. Nicols had been busy.
"Qliphotic zombie," I explained. "When the soul is gone, all that remains is a hunger. They're drawn to bright lights. Vacuums fill."
He nodded. My examination of his library hadn't gone unnoticed. "Yeah," he said, jerking his head at the books. "It all started with a vacuum. Ain Soph collapses into Ain. I got that far in one of the Kabbalah books back there. But where did this zombie come from?"
"Ravensdale." I heard Bernard's voice in my head. We have a much grander plan in mind. "Yeah," I said, answering his unasked question. "There's going to be more of them." The Chorus quailed at my imagination, sending a line of fear running down my spine. "He's taken them all," I croaked. "Every soul in Ravensdale."
As I said it, as I voiced the terrible enormity of what might have happened, I realized why the old man had charged the car. Wrapped with energy stolen from the nine at the warehouse, I was the brightest light in the valley. A psychic magnet, a lodestone for every empty shell within several miles, and I was heading for ground zero.
XXII
Nicols drove past the single shopping complex on the edge of Ravensdale. Swarming the parking lot were off- and on-duty officers from SPD, in addition to King County deputies, policemen from Kent, Auburn, Bellevue, and other local communities. They were like an unorganized hive, a massive interagency effort that hadn't yet settled on its command structure. All the little workers with no work to do. Nicols passed the confusion-it wasn't a nest we were interested in kicking-and angled down the right-hand split of the road just beyond the swarming police presence. A half-block later we hit a T-intersection.
"Which way?" Nicols asked. The view in either direction offered no hint.
I glanced down at the Thomas Guide page in my lap and realized the road we were on was one side of a triangle-three roads that outlined a section of scrub land. "There," I said, looking over my left shoulder. "That's the closest thing this town has to a focal point."
Nicols pulled over, and we left the car to walk up the slope. At the top, we found an area sectioned off with yellow police tape. Five bodies lay on their backs in a circle-feet pointed out-inside the boundary of the yellow tape. Each wore the gray robe of the Hollow Men, hoods pulled up over their faces. Whorls of red paint, spotted with tiny black letters like a trail of ants, ran along the top of each naked foot. I knelt and peeked under one hood. Similarly adorned concentric circles-three of them-had been painted on the corpse's forehead. Sigils.
"The Anointed," I said.
"Excuse me?" Nicols asked.
"They're Hollow Men, friends of Doug. He called them the Anointed. Five who had completed the ritual of Ascension and been judged suitable for 'Anointment.' Doug didn't know what the term meant; he just knew it afforded them access to secret knowledge. The hidden mysteries of the inner sanctum, or something equally as specious. Doug wanted in, and I had gotten in the way."
Nicols didn't ask what had happened to Doug or how I knew these things. He was looking toward the tight cluster of houses on the other side of the main road from this grassy knoll. Shouts, tossed our way by t
he mercurial breeze, indicated members of the task force were making discoveries. Corpses. Still ambulatory. "They're coming," Nicols said. "The zombies. They're drawn to you, aren't they?"
I nodded and quickly checked the other bodies, looking for a familiar face. Julian wasn't one of them. Kat had said he was Anointed-the first to be so-and Bernard was probably one of the other seven she said she had assisted. With these five, that accounted for all of them. But what was the purpose of being "Anointed"? Was the title just a misleading appellation, a buzzword that disguised their true purpose as sacrificial lambs in an unholy rite?
The area in the center of the circle of dead men was roughly about the size of the mirror's broad base. I shivered involuntarily as I imagined the takwin ibis-hounds assaulting the five as they lay still on the ground. What had they been promised to make them agree to having their souls sucked? Doug's memory was still sharp with outrage. He had wanted that rank; he had sacrificed for the privilege of being one of the special ones. The ones allowed to participate.
The deaths of the Anointed, the deaths in Ravensdale: they were only the beginning.
"Oh shit," Nicols said, his hand suddenly on my shoulder.
There, across the field, a single figure came toward us, walking a straight line from the parking lot and the swarming host. A tall man, dressed in a gray coat that flowed back from his legs like the spread of a heron's wings. Sunlight collected at the end of his right sleeve as if he was holding a mirror, or a star. On the psychic level, he was a shifting apparition, both a hole and not a hole in space.
Antoine.
"Hello, mon ami," he said as he reached the outline of police tape. "It's been a long time." He inclined his head toward Nicols. "Detective." The word was ripe with inflection and subtle echoes. An acknowledgment of a tool's usefulness. You have given your Will to my cause. The Watcher way of making an individual's efforts seem independent of their manipulation and influence.
"Hello, Brother," I said, with a little added gravity of my own. I know what you are doing.
Antoine's smile was the result of generations of breeding and training, perfectly pitched to disarm and charm. His hair, like a lion's mane-full of strawberry and blonde highlights-was combed back from his forehead and flowed gracefully on the collar of his silk shirt. The end of his right arm was covered with a smooth knob of silver.
"You seem well," he said, and the twinkle in his eyes wasn't entirely a trick of the light.
I nodded. "My tragic case of consumption seems to have cleared up." I filled my lungs. "It's the country air."
He gazed at the tall trees and the distant mountain, so close via a trick of the atmosphere. "It certainly does have restorative powers." He inhaled deeply as well. "None of that stink of the city. It is very nice."
"Too bad we're not vacationing."
He shrugged. "Yes, a pity."
"How many, Antoine? How many in Ravensdale?"
"Nearly nine hundred," he said. Nicols made a choking noise, as if the number was caught in his throat. I was cold, through and through, frozen by the magnitude of what had been done. Unprepared for the casual admission of such destruction.
"They're coming back," he continued, a sardonic grin tugging at his lips. "You, so flush with all that blood and life you have taken, are just too bright a lure for them to resist. You, Shiva's dark child, are summoning them with your presence." He scuffed the dirt. "Right here."
They were coming out of the woods now, staggering slowly and awkwardly. Newborns learning to walk. Their ruined eyes and black mouths were holes deep enough to drown in. How many, Lightbreaker? whispered the wind issuing from those holes. Did you not enjoy it?
"This was your Watch," I said, focusing on the bigger issue. "You didn't know what was going on. You let this happen."
"Did I?"
"You were too busy fucking around, leaving me notes and hiding in the shadows. You should have been taking the Hollow Men apart, not wasting your time with our little vendetta. You played right into their hand by being distracted."
"Was I?"
"Son of a bitch." Nicols drew his gun and pointed it at the Protector. "He knew they were going to do this." Antoine stared at me, ignoring the weapon. Watching my expression, Watching me untangle the threads.
Nicols' conclusion certainly seemed like the one Antoine was intimating, but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to See the threads, and make sure there wasn't some subtlety I was missing. Why would he condone such an experiment? Antoine wasn't being smug-he was as inscrutable as ever-and that made me consider the possibility there was some strand not yet revealed. "Bernard's an academic; he's not part of the family. He worked for you."
"Bernard du Guyon was a professor of Medieval Studies at the Sorbonne," Antoine agreed. "But there was a scandal, disputes about his methodology and awkward questions concerning a rare manuscript in the university's possession. He fled to Bonne, and became an alchemist.
"Well, he always had been an alchemist, really. Teaching gave him access to the university's collection of Renaissance and Medieval manuscripts, and the one in question was purported to be the second part of Ficino's Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae. M. du Guyon believed the text was filled with technical marvels, mechanical ways of realizing Ficino's theories."
"But that was his job, wasn't it?" I said. "To find heretical works and magickal grimoires in the archives. He knew you would pay him well for such artifacts."
Antoine shrugged. "Possibly. But we already had a complete catalog of the Sorbonne's collection. We've had it for sixty years. Anything dangerous had already been purged. The claims of both Bernard and the university as to the identity of this pamphlet couldn't be true. No such text exists. Nor has it ever."
"He thinks he's reconstructed The Book of Thoth. The real one. Where did he find the pieces? This second part of Ficino's Theologia. Was that part of it?"
Antoine shook his head. "It doesn't exist."
"A lot of things don't exist," I said. "That doesn't mean he hasn't read it."
Antoine smiled at that, his eyes flickering toward Nicols and the gun. "The mysteries of the occult. Seeing things that aren't there. Reading books that weren't ever written. All very confusing, don't you think, Detective?"
Nicols held the gun steady. "You haven't answered his question," he said. "Where did Bernard find the pieces?"
"Ah, you are going to be tenacious about this." Antoine sighed. "Well then, perhaps he had access to a very private collection. One that had all the right pieces. Maybe a complete copy of the Kitab al-Zuhra, for example."
"Someone tainted by a manuscript scandal isn't going to get access to any private collection," I pointed out.
"One came up for sale recently."
"Where?" I had three or four clients who would have leapt at a chance for Jabir's Kitab al-Zuhra. I should have heard about a copy going on the market.
"Vienna."
"The Van Groteon library?"
Antoine nodded, a glimmer of amusement on his lips.
"The whole library?"
He continued to nod.
"Who bankrolled him?" I couldn't keep the amazement out of my voice.
"Who indeed?"
"Fuck this verbal tap dance," Nicols said. The pistol shook in his hand. "You bankrolled him. You let him perform this experiment. You let this happen." His voice rose. "What the fuck did he do to these people!"
"He seeks the Key to Immortality," Antoine explained patiently.
"The what?" Nicols steadied his arm. His voice cracked on the word, his nerve dangerously close to breaking.
"The Way that allows access to God." Antoine was unmoved. "Given the opportunity, wouldn't you take it? Don't we all have questions we'd like to ask Him? About Sarah, for example?"
"Mother-" Nicols nearly fired his gun. The tendons in his neck were hard, and his face was wound into the spot between his eyes.
Antoine watched him, and nothing changed on the Protector's face. He just watched the other man s
truggle with his demons. Sarah. Don't we all have questions?
"Leave him out of this," I said. "He doesn't deserve to be kicked around." Nicols gasped at the sound of my voice, and realizing what he had almost done, he turned away from Antoine. His arm dropped to his side, and he held on to the gun tightly.
With the barest glimmer of disappointment, Antoine surveyed the tightening circle of zombies, the once-living population of Ravensdale, as they lurched and staggered toward the small hill upon which we stood. The members of the task force had stayed back, avoiding the shuffling soul-dead. "He's part of the Weave, Markham. Just like you and me." He raised his shortened right arm, and waved it to encompass the surrounding zombies. "Just like all of them. I can't cut him out of the pattern any more than you can."
"Stop trying to twist him, then. Let him find his own way."
"And you haven't twisted him? Is it not your interference in the Weave that set him on this path?"
"I've tried to guide him-"
"Like you've guided yourself?"
The flush in my cheeks spread to my neck and made my voice shake. "He's an innocent."
"No one is innocent," Antoine countered. "There is just ignorance and enlightenment."
I nodded toward the approaching line of zombies. "Is this enlightenment, then? You gave Bernard what he needed to build the mirror; you let him activate it. As a result, all these people have been collected. They've been harvested. For what purpose? Making Qliphotic shells? There is no 'Way' here. This is just carnage."
For an instant, Antoine's guard slipped and I saw the abject sorrow hidden beneath. Like a scar on his heart, he would never reveal the true temperament under his impenetrable psychic armor. Not to me. Not now. Even though we shared similar grief about what had happened, we stood on opposite shores, separated by a gulf of our own making. Separated by steel.
"You are summoning them. Like moths to your flame," he said, a grin smoothing over the break in his armor. "I will offer you a deal, mon ami. Divest yourself of your stolen energy and we shall talk about the past. And the future. You will not dissuade me from what must be done, but we can at least end it with some civility."