The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  33

  Undisclosed location

  The old house lay isolated and screened off by dense trees.

  It nestled on the side of the windswept hill, far from the other rural buildings scattered around the edge of the great freshwater lake.

  The locals shunned the place.

  For generations, they had taken the longer road around the hill to avoid passing close by it. Their rural Christianity was strong, and had sustained them for over a thousand years. They knew when something unhallowed was in their midst.

  They rarely spoke of the house, save to whisper to their children that it was cursed—a place beyond God’s law where unholy forces still walked.

  All of them knew the rumours that were passed down from parent to child.

  The old priest told it best.

  A wealthy Englishman had come before the first war. He had shut himself away in its secluded rooms for month after month, poring over magical texts. He had no visitors, and lived as a recluse.

  It was said he built a diabolical oratory lined with mirrors, in which he invoked infernal powers at dawn and dusk. After many months of vigils, abstinence, and study, it is said he succeeded in conjuring up the twelve kings and dukes of Hell.

  Occasional visitors came to the village having heard of the house and its history. But the locals did not encourage their kind of tourism, and most were sent on their way, never having found the house.

  A succession of non-locals had owned the house since the Englishman left. Mainly the owners kept to themselves, and the villagers could only speculate what went on there.

  Tonight, there were lights on inside the house.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  34

  Undisclosed location

  Malchus waited until it was almost totally dark before leaving the secluded house.

  In the valley below, the great lake was still—a vast sheet of smoky black glass.

  Its shores were dotted with trees, and a sizeable wood began just behind the house—dense with birch, fir, larch, and pine.

  Despite the inky darkness, he headed straight for it.

  He had been looking forward to this. But he had forced himself to wait until tonight. Until the time was right. He needed the moon to be waning—in its most destructive phase.

  He liked working unobserved in the isolated woods, just as the Englishman had done nearly a hundred years earlier. It gave him a visceral sense of continuity.

  Even back in Dresden, when he had first come across the life and work of the English adept, he knew that their destinies were somehow indissolubly connected.

  They were both travellers on the same ancient path.

  Ever since, he had sensed the magus’s long-dead hand in things—as if he was somehow guiding him from afar.

  He knew coincidences did not exist. So he did not believe it was an accident when the Englishman’s isolated house came onto the market at a time when he had the means to acquire it.

  He was certain it was part of the Plan

  To his joy, he found the house not only brought him closer to his guide: it also turned out to be perfect for his work—large, spacious, and well away from prying eyes. He thought of it as his spiritual monastery, in the true meaning of the word—a place where he could be monos, alone.

  He headed deeper into the woods. Although they were on his private land, there was no need for high fences or barriers to stop trespassers. He knew how the locals felt about the old house.

  He was never disturbed.

  As he strode along the dark path, the weak moonlight only filtered through occasionally, when a sufficient break in the canopy let a pale glow penetrate the foliage. But he did not need any light. He knew his way by heart. He had been there many times.

  He was looking forward to his work tonight. He had prepared everything that afternoon. All he needed now was inside the leather bag slung over his shoulder.

  As he penetrated further into the heart of the forest, he was aware of the deep silence. There were no animal sounds—just his firm footfalls on the path and the occasional dry snapping twig under his boots. He blended into the darkness and silence—a natural part of the wood’s nocturnal malevolence.

  Approaching the clearing, he could just make out the freshly cut logs he had carefully built into a pyramid, and the makeshift iron frame he had rigged over them, on which he had hung a large cooking pot. He could also see the grey box standing off to the side, almost black in the moonlight.

  Everything was as he had left it.

  Approaching the centre of the clearing, he put the leather bag down on the mossy ground, and bent low under the pot. Striking a match, he lit the layer of kindling beneath the log pyre.

  Fanned by the night breeze, the fire took quickly. In no time, yellow tongues of flame were excitedly licking the bottom of the blackened pot.

  He unbuckled the leather bag, and took out a bundle of soft cloth. Unwrapping it, he revealed the two large brass discs he had collected from the Okkultismus shop in Quedlinburg.

  As he lay them in the cloth spread on the ground, the orangey-gold metal glinted in the flickering light from the fire. He had polished them meticulously, even swabbing them with neat alcohol. They had to be surgically clean—totally free of the cat’s blood and gore he had drenched them in when blessing and dedicating them back in Quedlinburg.

  Now the discs were properly prepared, he could finally use them for their intended purpose.

  Shivering with anticipation, he ran his fingers over the large countersunk depression in each one, feeling the ridges and whorls.

  Ready, he pressed the discs together, hollowed out sides facing inwards, and aligned the teeth and slots so they locked, fusing together to form a shallow sealed cylinder.

  He placed it on its edge, and rotated it like a wheel, stopping when he saw the aperture in the join. It was the thickness of a child’s finger, and opened into a small tunnel bored through to the hollow centre of the discs.

  Returning to his bag, he took out a number of large grey blocks.

  He knew he had surprised the owner of the candle factory when he arrived unannounced and demanded several kilos of pure grey wax. But the factory owner seemed happy for the cash. He had paid a good price, and from the man’s pleased expression, he figured he could do with more customers like him. It must have been easier money than making and selling candles.

  Malchus dropped the wax blocks into the cooking pot. They were unperfumed—he had insisted on that. As they began to melt, the lumpy viscous soup gave off its natural greasy odour.

  Taking two small glass jars from his bag, he poured the thick dark liquid in each into the wax. As he did so, he intoned in a low voice. “Benedícas haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata.”8

  For a moment the air filled with a strong sharp metallic smell, then it was gone.

  Malchus stared at the pot until the blocks were melted and the hot wax was liquid. Then he knelt down by the discs and placed a small black ceramic funnel into the aperture.

  Slipping on a heat-resistant glove, he began scooping the molten wax out of the steaming pot with a ceremonial silver cup, before pouring the hot liquid into the funnel.

  When the mould was full and the wax was running freely over the top of the funnel, he removed it, and wiped the waxy residue from around the aperture. Picking it up, he carried it over to the grey box, which was emitting a faint hum. As he lifted the lid, an icy blast of air escaped.

  Placing the discs carefully inside the camping freezer, he checked the time. He figured an hour should do it—enough to harden the wax.

  After stoking the fire under the pot, he bent down and opened his bag to retrieve another bundle of cloth—smaller this time.

  Inside was a second set of brass discs, about half the size of the ones now in the freezer. They had also been made by the shop in Quedlinburg, but this time from the impressi
on and photos he had taken of Dr Dee’s undamaged smaller seal at the British Museum.

  He had checked the accuracy of the discs the moment they had arrived from Quedlinburg.

  Once again, the artisan had done a flawless job.

  As with the larger mould, he had blessed and dedicated it with the blood and entrails of a sacrificial life. This time it had been a small dog he had caught sniffing around in the woods. Even if somebody missed it, he doubted they would come looking anywhere near his house.

  People were such hypocrites, he mused, remembering the dog’s last frantic convulsions as he sliced open its small throat.

  He especially despised the sanctimonious followers of the ancient biblical texts, who cherry-picked from their own sacred writings—taking what suited them, and ignoring what they did not like.

  Didn’t their God specifically and repeatedly demand animal sacrifices in the Bible? Didn’t he give explicit instructions on how to build the altars and slaughter the animals, which parts to eat and which to burn, and how to splash the animal’s blood over the altars? Didn’t he repeatedly say how pleasing he found the aroma of a living sacrifice’s charring flesh?

  Malchus’s lip curled with derision. And how they fulminated at human sacrifices.

  Hypocrites again!

  It was all in their sacred book—that treasure-house of ancient wisdom. How Jephthah sacrificed his young daughter to Yahweh as a burnt offering, and how Josiah immolated the pagan priests on their own altars as a burnt offering to renew the covenant. And there was more—lots more, in that holy book of theirs that even their priests rarely read with honesty.

  But he had.

  And he had understood it all.

  People were weak. They had turned from the path that had been clearly shown to them.

  Malchus felt an overwhelming contempt for them—all those who failed to see, or chose to ignore, what was clear to anyone who read the texts.

  When the hour was up, he opened the lid of the freezer, and took out the cold brass discs. Prizing them carefully apart with the blade of a wide knife, he lifted the top disc off to reveal a large wax seal nestling inside the mould.

  He gazed down at the perfect recreation of Dr Dee’s Elizabethan Sigillum Dei—his heart beating faster as he sensed the progress he was making in the Work.

  He pulled the seal free and turned it over again and again in his hands, soaking up every intricate detail of the glyphs and symbols enciphered in the oldest language of all—the sacred script known only to initiates.

  His eyes glowed with pleasure as he saw in the moonlight that the grey wax was shot through with pink streaks, stained by the blood he had added—taken from the dying cat and dog as their lives slowly bled out for him. He smiled to himself. That had not been part of Dr Dee’s instructions, but then he had a few other improvements on Dr Dee’s work in mind, too.

  He looked carefully at the intricate designs on the waxy surface, all rendered faithfully on the new seal—the first Sigillum Dei to be cast in four hundred years.

  It was sublime.

  He would trim off the sprue tomorrow, and it would be indistinguishable from Dr Dee’s all-powerful original.

  Turning back to the smaller mould, he aligned the two halves and pressed them together. He needed to make four identical seals with it.

  It would be a long night.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  35

  Gatwick Airport

  Crawley

  West Sussex RH6

  England

  The United Kingdom

  Ava looked around at London Gatwick airport’s depressing immigration hall.

  After Dubai airport’s acres of gleaming marble, touching down at Gatwick felt like arriving in the third world. The Gulf emirate’s terminal had offered a surplus of smiling staff, a forest of sparkly white columns, walls of flowing silver water, indoor palm trees stretching up to the impossibly high roofs, and gentle hints of incense and perfume.

  By contrast, Gatwick featured a stretched skeleton staff, an overheated gloomy immigration hall, a stained dank threadbare carpet held together in places with black masking tape, polystyrene ceiling panels hanging off at angles or missing, and stale air smelling of unwashed bodies.

  Ava was regularly amazed that first time visitors to the UK did not turn back within fifteen minutes of getting off the plane.

  When she eventually reached the front of the queue, the bleary-eyed immigration official surveyed the assortment of Middle-Eastern stamps in her passport with suspicion, before slipping the photo page under the winking red eye of the electronic scanner.

  Glancing at his small screen, he paused, then looked up slowly. When he spoke, his tone was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Dr Curzon. I’m going to have to ask you to step to one side.”

  Before Ava had a chance to register her surprise, two uniformed Border Agency guards arrived at the booth and escorted her away.

  As she walked between them, she could sense hundreds of judging eyes watching her from the snaking lines of tired passengers waiting their turn, and could feel her cheeks burning.

  What did Immigration want with her?

  Thoughts were tumbling around her mind as they marched her through a door marked ‘Private’ and into the non-public part of the building.

  It opened into a shabby lino-floored corridor. As they reached the end, one of the men opened a door to reveal a grotty windowless room.

  Two jaded-looking uniformed policemen were sitting at a bare table drinking tea from beige vending cups. They looked up as the door opened.

  “Dr Curzon?” the one nearest the door asked, rising.

  She nodded.

  He was in his mid-forties, with a physique that suggested he had spent more time in recent years behind a desk than on the beat. “We’ve orders to take you to London, madam.”

  “Whose orders?” Ava asked, not at all happy at the turn of events.

  “We’re just the delivery men,” he answered, pushing his chair out of the way. “Please follow us.” He stepped out into the corridor and indicated for her to follow.

  “Am I under arrest?” Ava asked. After all that had happened, she just wanted to get back home and collect her thoughts in peace.

  “Not by us,” he answered. “Our orders are to escort you into London.” He pressed the button for a lift.

  “Where?” she asked. It had been a long few days, and she was not in the mood to be given the run around.

  He shook his head. “Just follow us, please. Someone wants to talk to you.”

  It was clear she was not going to get any more information. And there was little alternative to accompanying them. She would not get far if she made a run for it. The two Border Agency guards were still behind her.

  Down in the neon-lit car park, she slid into the battered backseat of the fluorescent-striped police car.

  She was pleased to see the two policemen climb into the front, leaving her space to be alone with her thoughts in the rear.

  If she was honest, she was not surprised that someone in the UK was taking an interest in her. Even back at the first meeting at Camp as-Sayliyah in Qatar, she had known there was more going on than Hunter and Prince were telling her. Not because they were obviously concealing anything—but just in her experience, there always was. People rarely revealed the whole picture.

  She knew her priority now was to find out what Malchus was up to. She had no proof, but assumed he had been behind the heist at the Burj al-Arab. At this stage she had no idea why he wanted the Ark, or what was so important he had to kill Yevchenko over it. But instinctively she knew that the voice she had heard over the walkie-talkie quoting the demon from the Bible could only have been Malchus.

  Just as pressing, she needed to get to the bottom of who Saxby was fronting for. It was obviously someone wealthy and discrete, but it was not clear why he was staying in the shadows. Or why he was so interested in the Ark.

  The journey to London pass
ed in silence.

  Turning it all over in her mind, she gazed out of the rain-spattered window at the night around her—watching as the pale moonlit fields and hedgerows gave way to the beginnings of London’s sprawling suburbs, uniformly studded with colourful all-night kebab and chicken shops.

  As the car drove towards the south bank of the Thames, she eventually saw the MI6 building ahead at Vauxhall Cross.

  So that was it.

  She felt her stomach turn.

  She had not been back since she left nine years ago, and she was surprised to find the sight of the building immediately brought back the same feelings of uneasiness she had worked so hard in the intervening years to forget.

  She looked up as it loomed over them out of the London night.

  Affectionately known as ‘Legoland’, the Vauxhall Cross building was a bold statement by the British government that it possessed a world-class foreign spy service. Gone were the days of men in raincoats slipping in and out of Piccadilly offices rented in false names, or the bland and nondescript Century House in London’s down-at-heel borough of Lambeth, where her father had spent much of his career.

  Legoland was one of London’s most easily identifiable buildings, dominating all around it.

  With its bizarre multi-level design of bold ziggurats and turrets, all set off in a striking sand and turquoise colour scheme, it looked as if it had been clicked together using a giant child’s set of vast plastic building blocks.

  As the car pulled up outside the fortified building, the policeman in the front passenger seat got out and opened Ava’s rear door.

  The rain was tipping down now, leaving her a dreary view of the quasi-deserted bleak Victorian railway arches the other side of the road. She turned away from the depressing sight, which always reminded her of the seedy railway arch lockups in London gangster films.

  As she walked around the car towards the bright modern lights of Legoland, right on cue DeVere appeared at the top of the steps, spotlit in the driving rain. He beamed at Ava, and headed down towards her.