by John Shirley
With his heightened sensitivity, Bleak could see the fire-energy drawn down from above; he could see the atmosphere warping around the man's head as he drew energy and spirit-forms from the Hidden; could see the fire imps themselves coming down from overhead somewhere, in their more ghostly forms: like perverse, transparent cupids, descending this shimmering column, diving into the man, rippling out along his arms, emerging more substantially in his hands, without burning his skin.
Hideous, maliciously grinning, little, purple-black homunculi coated in red fire...dancing in his hands, and on top of his head, as the man had done on the street.
“Put those things down!” the cop with the Taser shouted. To him it would look like fireballs in the man's hands. He'd be thinking it was some kind of bomb. The cop brandished the Taser...
And the long-haired man flung a fire imp like a gas-soaked softball at the cop. The living fireball spun as it hissed through the air, trailing black smoke, to smack into the cop's chest. It stuck...then sank into him. He opened his mouth to scream—and burst into flames from within, shrieking and running, flailing his arms.
The man who'd thrown the fire imp turned and saw the waitress. She was weeping, backing away. He raised an imp that seemed to widen its grin and laugh happily when it realized it was about to be thrown at someone.
The cop with the gun shouted for people to get out of the line of fire—firemen were trying to put out the flames on the sprawled, burning policeman.
The waitress screamed and ran—scurried randomly toward Shoella.
Bleak pulled Oliver and Shoella out of the path of the waitress as the man with the fire imps flungs his living fireball after her—which missed the waitress, flashed past them, and struck the small tree where Yorena perched, sinking into its trunk...and making the elm explode a split second later, like a grenade of burning splinters. Yorena flapped into the air, to circle overhead screeching angrily. All that remained of the tree was a smoking stump.
If the cops don't do something, Bleak thought, I'm going to have to try. He reached into the Hidden.
But the cop with the pistol fired. Two times, three times, the reports ear-ringingly loud; the bullets cracked into the man's head and into his back...and the man pitched forward onto his face, the back of his head shot away. Quite dead. And the imps sucked away into nothingness.
Bleak stared at the corpse. A fact he had known for a long time: the supernatural wasn't likely to save you from a gunshot in the head.
He had seen too many good men shot dead in Afghanistan to care when a self-indulgent, murderous neurotic was cut down. But as he hustled away with Shoella and Oliver, he thought, Shoella was right, that guy was new to this. You could feel it. If it came to him as an adult—how many more like him are out there?
***
SHOELLA SAID IT, AS she drove them back to her house. “There's been a change. For a big while, the wall let through just enough for us. Now it's breaking open, opening more, and certain people are being powered up with especialities. From what Yorena and the spirits and Scribbler tell me, it's all bad people. Dangerous people. Crazy, vicious.”
“You got to wonder how that happened,” Oliver said, sitting beside her, the ferret scuttling agitatedly on his shoulders. “Who's directing the new power that way? Toward people with no real sense of...of guidance.”
“Maybe they've got guidance,” Bleak said. “Maybe it's just the wrong one.”
“So,” Oliver said, scratching the ferret under its chin to calm it, “that still suggests that someone's deliberately targeting those kind of people.”
“So who?” Shoella asked.
Maybe, Bleak thought, that's something this Coster would know.
But when they got to Shoella's place, Coster was gone. The yard's gate was left open. No trace of Coster remained but an empty rum bottle.
CHAPTER NINE
Eighteen hours later, in a Humvee—in the Arctic.
“It was under the permafrost,” Dr. Helman said simply. “But the permafrost melted—you know, global warming.” He emphasized global warming wearily. He was up front, beside the driver. That was Morris, the contract engineer, a round-faced Inuit in brown coveralls, sleeves rolled. Morris had a master's in archaeological engineering from the University of Toronto. It seemed to Loraine, when she watched him driving bumpily along, that the Eskimo engineer was having to work at not laughing at them.
Loraine sat behind Helman next to a young U.S. marine holding a carbine across his lap. The marine's expression, she thought, was a clear question: What the hell am I doing here?
I don't know much more than he does, Loraine thought. What was she doing here, in the Arctic, almost within spitting distance of the magnetic north pole?
She thought about asking them to open the Humvee's windows—the smell of everyone's insect repellent, deployed against the notorious arctic mosquitoes, was sickeningly strong. Her own repellent itched under the collar of her work shirt and at the cuffs of her heavy general-issue military trousers. The bumpy ride didn't help.
The Humvee bumped and fishtailed over the twisty dirt road, between rolling hills covered with low green and purple scrub. To the northwest, the sea off Ellesmere Island was startlingly blue, the kind of nearly black blueness you got when you dumped india ink in water; ice floes littered the horizon like broken Styrofoam.
She looked south, up the lower slopes of Mount Eugene, multicolored and green with lichen and short grasses; up higher, granite outcroppings glittered with ice. “It's on this mountain somewhere?” she asked.
“The dig site, yes, it is,” Morris said, nodding, though she'd been talking to Dr. Helman. “Yuh, but not far up it; it's just around the curve a dozen klicks, ay? Was under a glacier but she melted away. Biggest mountain on the United States Range, this one, but we won't be going high up. Just above the lake, there. Still in Quttinirpaaq Park.”
“You're keeping the park tourists out, Morris?” Helman asked.
Morris looked surprised. “Tourists? We never had many, almost none now, with the seas rising up, ay? You people south heat up the world, and...” He shook his head, knowing better than to risk his paycheck grousing over what couldn't be helped now. “Even the Inuit only come here a few times a year. Ritual ground is underwater, we had to make a new holy place on the slopes above!” After a moment, as he jerked the wheel to fishtail around a curve, he remembered to add, “But if we see any tourists, we'll keep them away from the site. With most of the wildlife gone these days, people mostly came to see where Peary had his camp, and that's all underwater now.”
“The whole island will need to be thoroughly secured,” Helman said, looking at Loraine in the rearview mirror.
She nodded, because he seemed to expect some response.
They jounced on again for another two miles, following the beveled outline of the mountain, finally coming out of its shadow into eye-bashing sunlight, some of it reflected brightly off a translucent-blue lake a quarter mile below. The lake looked to Loraine like a piece of smirched glass set into a hollow of the mountain, one end streaked with newly disturbed red and brown clay. The cause of the streaky murk was the dig site above the lake, a compound of concrete bunkers encircled by earthworks and hurricane fences topped by antipersonnel wire that glittered with a just-installed brightness.
The road descended two switchback curves, and a few minutes later they passed through the gate in the fence and pulled up in the graveled area near the bunkers. They climbed gratefully out of the Humvee, blinking in the pale sunlight. Arctic mosquitoes dove at them, some of them looking big as dragonflies.
“You put on the insect repellent, I hope, ay?” Morris said to her. “They'll take a bite out of you, fer sure. I use a seal-fat grease but I didn't bring any for you.”
It was a little too warm, even for summer in the Arctic. Loraine felt sweat break out on her forehead and, at the same moment, became aware of hungry stares from the two young marines who'd let them in the front gate.
How
long have those wen been stationed here without a break? she wondered, walking over to the bank of dirt above the lake. She looked down at the lake about sixty feet below; terns circled over it, squawking, their bodies perfectly reflected in the glassy water.
“Right this way, Loraine,” said Dr. Helman. “We'll head directly to the dig.” He turned toward the marine who'd accompanied them. “Oh—Corporal? We're inside the compound, all is quite secure.
You can go into the...what do you call the cafeteria here? Get yourself some coffee or...whatever you like.”
The jug-eared marine nodded briskly. Taking a break was something he understood. “Yes, sir.”
When he'd gone, Helman murmured to her, “We'll soon transfer the marines out—we'll have only our own elite black berets here.”
Loraine followed Helman and Morris over to the dig site, a shallow pit between the bunkerlike buildings and the drop-off to the lake. Morris talking proudly about the retaining walls, how the archaeologists asked his advice, couldn't get along without him. Not at all snooty, that Dr. Pierce, but that Dr. Koeffel, now, he was a bit of a...
They descended a dirt path. Loraine looked down at the dig, estimated it was about a hundred feet across, the artifact just seven feet below the surrounding surface. Just above the dig was a flattened-out dirt terrace supporting four tents. A man in long sleeves and straw sun hat sat at a table in front of the largest tent, looking into a microscope. “That's Dr. Pierce over there, at the microscope,” Helman said. “Koeffel is probably in one of the tents poring over the diagrams. Difficult sometimes to drag him away from them.”
She only just glanced at the man across the pit; she was drawn to gaze raptly down at the artifact.
“It's been there over three hundred years,” Helman was saying. “Using the documents, and other indications, we estimate it was placed here in the year 1709.”
The artifact looked to her almost like a miniature Chinese pagoda, undecorated and composed of metal. It seemed made of brass—or was that copper? Could it be copper and still have new-copper sheen, after all this time?
“Did you polish it?”
“No!” Helman seemed delighted with the question. “It looks it though, yes? When I first saw it, I thought it must be a hoax, it can't be ancient, looking like that. But it is.”
“How'd they get down through the permafrost, when they buried it here?” she asked, as they trudged closer to the artifact, a little ahead of Morris.
“An intelligent question,” Helman said, patronizing as always. “We've found charcoal in the dig, and the broken heads of iron picks. We believe they brought fuel, melted the frost a layer at a time, used a work gang to dig down a ways, then melted the permafrost some more—quite an elaborate process, with a large crew. There are indications that the crew never made it back. There are bones under rocks in a gulley, nearby. We think they were killed to keep them quiet.”
She winced at that. To cross half a world, only to be murdered in this barren place—so far from home. “The artifact...it's not very big,” Loraine remarked, as they took a switchback on the path, ever closer.
“And what I did, you see,” Morris interposed rather loudly, “was I used a particular tool that moves dirt but at the same time never really risks the artifact. It's very precise—” “Morris!” Helman interrupted, coming to a stop and turning to him. The engineer seemed startled. “Yuh?”
“That'll be enough—why don't you go consult with Dr. Pierce on the other side of the site. I understand he wants to set up some kind of weather shelter for the artifact.”
“A weather shelter for the...Yuh, okay, I was just...” Morris stumped off toward the tents, muttering, shaking his head.
Helman gestured for Loraine to follow him, and they descended another loop in the path till they stood just thirty feet above the artifact on a graveled embankment. Helman made a gesture taking in the dig. “There was a nice pocket of clay and primeval sand here, so they didn't have to cut into the stone of the mountain. They wanted the artifact buried, and they wanted it up on the mountain, and they wanted this side of the mountain—the artifact had to be within a certain distance of the magnetic north pole.”
“But the magnetic north pole shifts around over time, doesn't it?” Loraine asked, staring at the object. Aware of her heart thumping; a thick feeling in her throat, like a difficulty swallowing. And another sensation—a feeling of loss. As if she'd just been cut off from something she hadn't known she was connected to. Things around her seemed unreal; missing some sheen of life that had been thenar before.
“The magnetic north pole does indeed shift a certain amount, yes, very good, Loraine,” Helman said, with his bobblehead nod. “But the magnetic pole stays within a certain elliptical zone, up here, otherwise compasses would never have been of much use, eh? You see?”
“The artifact is only four feet high?”
“Oh, that's just the top of it. We think its center column goes down another thirty-eight feet! It's shaped rather like a wand, with a ziggurat-style top. They probably brought it here in sections.” “How did you know it was here?”
“Newton's Cryptojournal, partly. We'd already known there was something anomalous going on in the area—satellite readings of magnetic fields, the unusual charged particles coming up out of the ground here. I'll tell you what has Dr. Koeffel excited, Loraine. Shall I tell you?”
Hadn't he just said he would? “Sure. Please.” She swiped at a mosquito buzzing too close to her eyes. That odd feeling of disconnection nudged her again. And another feeling like a hand pressing heavily on top of her head.
“Metal analysis suggests that the core of the artifact is from a much earlier era. Perhaps as far back as thirteen thousand years ago. Yes, the Lodge had found a more ancient artifact than what you see here—an artifact within the artifact. And that most ancient artifact is within this shell. Koeffel sneers, 'Some would call it Atlantean.' He doesn't want to admit that it is from Atlantis. If it wasn't from Atlantis—what civilization was it? There are no markings of known pre-Columbian societies on it. Nothing Native American or First Nations. Nothing Chinese. Nothing Viking. The object is too internally sophisticated for those cultures. No, nor could Newton's Lodge build it, except for some
detailing. No. All he did was repair it, set it up.... And clearly it's Earth-make—not from some...” Helman gestured toward the sky. “You know. Aliens.” He chuckled. “No.” “So Isaac Newton brought it here? Personally?”
“Not personally—but he was involved. His people brought it here from Norway, in the early 1700s. Newton—and a faction of the original Rosicrucians, the Lodge of Ten. They learned about it through a series of Sarmoung scrolls found in Athens—which directed them to a remote site in Norway. Magnetic north shifts from time to time, and it had drifted from Norway. There were dark things afoot in the world, in Newton's time—and they thought that if they could repair this artifact, activate it once more, it would protect them. Protect all of humanity, yes? So they brought it here, set it up, and activated it...and as a direct result, nearly all magic receded from the world! The artifact you see before you radically changed human history. It's one of the keys to history—and yet it's unknown to all but a handful of historians! Who are not permitted to speak of it.”
“And...it's still working? As a device?”
“It is what creates the 'dam'—the wall in the north, as the ShadowComms say. Yes, it is still working. And thank God for that. It is all that stands between humanity and chaos. It is the great magic-suppressor. The small ones we have at Central Containment are based on it. We've learned to amplify its signal, to intensify it in a small way—though we don't entirely understand it. There are particles emitted by the device we can barely detect and certainly can't quite identify.”
“If it's a working machine—what powers it?”
“It appears to take power from the fluctuation of the earth's magnetic field. The artifact transmits its suppression signal uniformly over the world, from here.
It uses the magnetic field of the planet as a kind of carrier wave. It continues to put out its signal—but...lately, that signal is going out erratically. It is faltering—more. Has been erratic, we suspect, for thirty years. This has created some interesting effects, which we have taken advantage of. But it also creates a great danger—” Helman broke off to slap at a mosquito.
“Faltering more lately—because it was exposed by the dig?”
“That doesn't seem to have affected it—just made it possible for us to get a good look. We assume simple corrosion is reducing its output. We must know—we're trying, working feverishly to understand the artifact without taking it apart. So that we can repair it. Because if it stops working entirely...” He took a deep breath. “If it stops working, it just might be that the human world will spini° out of control.”
She looked at him, startled. “You're just...guessing that. It couldn't be that bad.”
“It's a calculated guess. Newton, and the ancients before him—they knew what they were doing! Newton and the Lodge of Ten discovered that a shift in the poles of the earth would open it up to new planetary influences...magic would flood over the earth! Civilization would have descended into chaos! But... there is a use for magic. If properly controlled.” Helman looked at the sky. “The air out here is really quite bracing. Strange smells.” He looked at her, pursing his lips. “Can you feel the energy from the artifact, by the way? Some can.”
“I think so. I do feel...something out of the ordinary. I'm not such an intuitive person, but...” She shook her head, unable to express it.
“You're sensing Newton's Wall of Force itself! We wanted you to get a sense of the”—he waved a hand at the artifact—”the importance of what's going on here. The mission of the Lodge of Ten goes on: the suppression of those forces that cripple science, or at least challenge it; forces that threaten to overwhelm reason with the chaos of the so-called supernatural. The mission that made the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason possible. You have an important role to play. You're to be our interface person, our liaison. A bit later. For now, I wanted you to look at this artifact and feel the awe, the sense of /ju/posethat...” Helman broke off, seeing Koeffel striding urgently toward them: a shaggy-haired, hyper-energetic man in a dirty white shirt, thick, dusty glasses. He waved a small archaeological brush, scowling. “Oh, I say, Helman! I want a word with you!”