It was hard to believe that it was high summer. It was hard to remember that summer even existed. But when they saw a mile marker for Burgundoi that read forty-five miles to go, and they started seeing the urban sprawl of the satellite cities that surrounded it . . . the weather began to become mild again. “Sea currents,” the young wife suggested, knowledgably, from the rear of the group. “Burgundoi’s seventy degrees all year, every year.” She paused. “Except maybe this year.”
The snow went from frozen drifts that they had to struggle through, to a few inches that covered their toes. And then Drust actually saw small lakes alongside the Imperial Highway that were unfrozen. Hope, an unaccustomed sensation, rose in him, and he told Sadb, very quietly, “This isn’t just the work of a sea current. This is the last bastion of the gods.”
“I don’t care what the reason is,” Sadb told him, unwinding a scarf to let a breeze that felt divinely warm, but was probably only sixty degrees, ruffle her hair. “I feel summer in my heart.”
They had no relatives in this city, but Drust’s generosity to the young couple paid a surprising dividend; they were both native Burgundians, and the young woman still had an aunt in the city, who offered to take them in. So they weren’t forced to huddle in the teeming refugee camps on the southern end of the city’s peninsula. The apartment was cramped, but had functioning, ley-powered radiators, and Sadb burst into tears the first night, as the young couple and their family offered them thin, warm broth and crackers. “There’s probably nothing more than cow DNA in that soup,” their hosts told them, “but it’s warm. And you’ve been on short rations for a while. Let your stomachs fill gently. Get the boots off, so we can check your toes for frostbite.”
The far-viewer in the living room functioned about as well as the heat. It turned on, but they were down to two local stations, which ran old Hellene satires, ten-year-old reruns of gladiatorial fights, and news. News stations had once passed reports to one another by phone, by telegram, or by couriers. Satellite phones still worked, but many phone lines were down. Now, news was passed up the coast, on the weary tongues of refugees. Tales of what they saw in the snow. Hallucinations, hypothermia-induced dreams, and actual reality, all sped on the wings of rumor.
Drust and Sadb had been the froth on the tip of a very large wave; behind them, there were angry, frightened residents of Nimes, racing north ahead of a tide of ghul. The Gallic army, or what had remained of it, was bringing to Burgundoi as many of its tanks, guns, and missiles as possible, but there were rumors of convoys being robbed by refugees who’d slipped into their camps at night and had made off with weapons and supplies. “Not refugees,” Drust said, finding his tongue. “Bandits.”
There were also reports of weapons and supplies having been stolen in the ruins of Nimes by rag-tag militia groups. Refusing to enter Nova Germania, they camped out on the Imperial Highway, and demanded goods from other refugees as a toll to let them past. Extortion of the worst sort. Drust and Sadb had been far enough ahead to miss most of that, fortunately.
That night, Drust looked out the window of the room they were sharing with the young couple. He saw skyscrapers, covered in gargoyles, and a tall spire atop a central building. “What is that?” he asked, pointing.
“That’s the Odinhall,” the young husband told him, peering out the window. “That’s where the gods dwell, when they’re on this side of the world.”
Drust sank back down beside Sadb, and resolved that tomorrow, he’d look for work. If there was any. “It looks like a good city,” he told her, tiredly. “I just hope we’re not bad luck for it.”
Iulius 31, 1999 AC
The Temple Archives had originally been located underneath the Second Temple, tucked down into the cellars for protection against sunlight and fires, but dampness and vermin were also the bane of old papers and parchments. About seventy-five years ago, the Archive Annex had been built behind the temple. It had climate-controlled rooms, electrical lights, and argon-filled vaults for the oldest, and most precious documents. Most Judeans didn’t even realize what the building held; it looked like an administrative facility, and little more. Though one somewhat lacking in windows. Non-Judeans were rarely admitted; even Zaya Lelayn had had difficulty in accessing the facility, largely due to her youth and her affiliation with a Magi family.
Adam had gotten admission thirty years ago after pulling strings with Judean Intelligence. He’d learned Aramaic in order to read the ancient manuscripts, but he hadn’t had the scholarly background to interpret what he read, at first. Trennus and Kanmi hadn’t been experts in Judean history, but they possessed more of the skills needed for serious academic research. So Trennus had gone with Adam to the Archives on many occasions.
Today was dies Solis, and Adam looked around the wooden tables in the reading room, shaking his head. He was the only person here today, besides the custodian at the main desk. He had an overwhelming sensation of futility, but Trennus and Zaya had come to the house last night, with an almost-illegible photostat of a document that Adam hadn’t found in his first trawl of the archives. There were broken lines all through it, indicating that the document had been written on papyrus, centuries ago; this type of paper was made from a reed, cut along the side, dampened and pressed to flatten, before being glued to dozens of other pressed, flattened reeds. Where the reeds had once adhered to each other, they tended to break apart after a few hundred years, and being relatively fragile plant material, they also tended to fracture in various places along the shaft of the reed, too. Which usually left a ceramic container filled with tiny, jumbled pieces of what had once been a carefully-written document. Like a classified document that had been run through a cross-cut shredder. A puzzle. “I see they tried to put it together again,” Adam had commented, frowning at it. “But none of the sentences make sense.”
“It’s from the Essene section of the Temple Archives,” Zaya had told him, sitting at the kitchen table in the big, empty house. “They were pretty anti-Rome, two thousand years ago. But when Caesarion the God-Born made peace and ordered Herod out of Judea, and restored the Temple as the provincial authority at the time, with a Roman governor to oversee imperial interests, they were left without much to protest, other than the fact that they didn’t like the Temple oligarchy, either.” The young woman had wrapped her hands around a mug of herbal tea for the warmth. “They wound up burying hundreds of urns with old, worn copies of the Torah, and other documents that they found important, in some caves near the Dead Sea. This is one of them . . . and if you look right there . . .” she pointed at the lowest section of the photostat, “someone came along, and in later handwriting, and more modern ink, made a notation that this document was in some way related to the nephilim.”
“Here’s the fun part,” Trennus added, his eyes intent. “This document was inside one of the earthenware urns that they used for preserving documents. But inside the urn, was another sealed container, almost like a reliquary. Made of lead, and it had clearly been heated to fuse the edges.” Trennus paused. “The reliquary is incised with ancient Aramaic words that sound very much like a binding ritual to me. And the earthenware covering has Chaldean binding rituals on it. So we’ve got ancient Chaldean Magi helping the ancient Judeans bind something.”
“They must have wanted to be sure of it.” Adam exhaled.
“Yes. Your Temple scholars recognized the binding symbols when the reliquary was found. There’s a written record in the archives describing how they decided to open it.”
“They opened it?”
“Scientific curiosity about a hundred years ago. They got a Chaldean Magi in to put a binding circle down on the ground before they opened it. No efreet. No djinn. No spirits of any kind emerged. But inside the reliquary, was this.” Trennus held up a picture, and Adam frowned, puzzled. “It’s a knucklebone from a human hand,” Trennus explained, and Adam grimaced now. “But since they couldn’t make the scroll make sense, all of the artifacts have been sitting in a vault ever since, un
touched.”
Adam stared at the badly-assembled puzzle in front of him, the words blurred by the reproduction technology. “You think that this is the ritual that bound a nephilim. A godslayer.”
Trennus swallowed. “I think it’s the ritual to summon one.”
Zaya nodded. “It’ll require some study. Obviously, we don’t want to invoke it.” The young woman sounded nervous. “The evidence we have suggests that, summoning a godslayer is like making an Immortal. It requires a human life.”
“All the more reason to hand this to a perfectly normal human,” Trennus said, looking at Adam. “We can’t let a summoner of any sort try to decipher this. We’re all trained not to summon things accidentally, but you don’t have the training to do it, even by accident. But these things might not play by our rules. So for the gods’ sakes, don’t say any of this out loud.”
Adam swallowed. “So what you’re asking me to do, is look at the original, and re-assemble it.”
“Think of it as the world’s best cryptological puzzle,” Trennus told him. “I’ve spoken with the Archives. They’re letting me put a binding circle on the floor of the reading room, to help make sure there are no mishaps. And then yes. Make it make sense. When we’re sure we know what we’re looking at, maybe we can even use it.” He paused. “Prometheus’ stone, the one he woke up holding? We have no idea what it says. Linear A is a locked door. The Phaistos Disc . . . there’s something inside of it—probably a piece of crystal—but I don’t think we want to break it just to look at the toy prize.”
Adam snorted under his breath, and hoped that he didn’t need information from one relic to understand another. “So, if the Phaistos Disc has to do with the one that destroyed Thera, it was the ‘unconquered’ one. The one made of diamond, if Zaya’s vision can be believed. It was found in Hellas, near where the eruption occurred.” Adam was uneasy using a vision as evidence. “The piece of stone Prometheus woke up with, had to do with the fiery one at Troy. Again, it was found in Hellas. No one’s ever found any other information on the rocky one that fought the pazuzu. And this scroll and . . . finger bone . . . somehow wound up in Judea. We never had a godslayer here. I think we’d have recorded it.”
“Your records also indicate that your people spent time in Egypt,” Trennus pointed out. “Maybe this one has to do with the Assassin.”
Adam let the photostat fall to the table for a moment. He’d never told Trennus about Sophia’s prophecy. Trennus might be his best friend. But if the Pict thought for an instant that Adam might come to threaten Saraid or any of his children, Adam thought his friend would end him as quickly as Nith would. Oh, he’d feel bad about it later. But Adam wouldn’t be any less dead. “Is that possible? I mean, a diamond held the ‘unconquered’ one. You once told me that an efreet can be bound into a gemstone, if I recall correctly. But a piece of bone?”
Trennus shook his head. “I think they’re each actually bound to a piece of their last host. The one on Crete was summoned through a diamond focus in Zaya’s vision.”
“And her whole body seemed to be made of it, too. At least the outside. The mirrors she looked in weren’t good enough for me to see through her eyes if her internal organs were visible. I doubt it, though. No one seemed horrified at her appearance, just awed.” Zaya shifted, uncomfortably. “I’d be happier with all this if I’d read it in someone else’s attestation of a vision, not my own.”
Adam snorted a little. “So that crystal that analysis found inside the Phaistos Disc might be another diamond piece.”
“Yes.”
“So, their task done, they leave their host, and the body falls apart?”
“Ariadne didn’t immediately fall apart,” Zaya put in. “At least . . . from what I saw. Which may or may not be valid.” She grimaced a little. “But I doubt many of the hosts survived long after being . . . ridden by these spirits.”
Trennus nodded. “It’s analogous to sympathetic magic, in a way. Using a body part to control someone, in theory. And while early summoners might have thought they were just another form of spirit, and summoned them at will, I suspect that later summoners started to realize that they were different, and started putting safeguards on the summoning.”
“A two-key system with a specific ritual and a housing, to ensure that they can’t be released by oops, I uncorked the bottle, what is this thing taking over my body?” Adam’s tone was sarcastic. “Looks like the people originally summoning the nephilim were smarter than we are.”
Trennus sighed. “Eventually, they probably started splitting apart the summoning ritual and remaining body-parts and storing them separately to ensure that it could never happen again. Or they cached them together, but in locations so secure that they were forgotten, and never rediscovered.”
Adam had moved on. “What else can you tell me about the two vessels’ engravings?”
Trennus shrugged. “The only phrase that stood out to me is the death of man. Though it could also be translated as death in the man, or death in the shape of a man.”
“Very comforting.” Adam had shuddered. The next morning he’d spent at Caesarion’s palace, listening to the reports coming in from the southern front, where Kanmi, Minori, Erida, Zhi, Maccis, Solinus, and Rig had been embedded with units that were in the process of making a big push against the Persians . . . before turning west, to try to reach their targets. No radio contact, just spirits talking to each other over the wind.
At a loss to know what to do with himself in the afternoon, he’d gone to the Archives. He’d removed the pieces from their container, wearing cloth gloves and using tongs. And now, he was painstakingly assembling them again, using a huge magnifying glass to see where pieces matched up against each other, not sure he had the right piece in the right place . . . until two of the pieces fused together. It was like watching flesh heal, right in front of him. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating, or dreaming. Until the next piece he found, that fit, did the same thing. Magic. God, no. This . . . this is wrong. I should tell Trennus immediately . . . harah. He’s back in New Caledonia, in a meeting with his generals and nobles, I think. It can wait.
By the end of the first day, Adam had pieced together fourteen or fifteen lines, and he could read them, clearly, though he had no idea why previous researchers hadn’t been able to put the self-healing document back together properly. He was unsure of his translation; a word in the first line could mean either man or clay. For a moment, he hoped that he was actually looking at a description or a ritual to summon the rocky godslayer, which would have been a relief.
He who is the ideal of [Man/Clay] awoke
in the time of greatest strife. Smoke arose,
and the blood of thousands spilled, to allow
a pharaoh to hold the power of gods,
and cut away the power of the priests.
This would not have stirred the hand of Fate—
heathen gods are abominations,
they draw men to stray from the destined path—
Except that the pharaoh, and his minions,
Worked to kill the gods, and put their power
In vessel mortal, the pharaoh himself.
The pharaoh already possessed the faith
of his people, but he hungered for more.
He wished to rule as the only power,
In the heavens or on the mortal earth.
And all others must die to sate him.
Adam sat back, his neck and shoulders screaming with pain. He’d been sitting in the same position for . . . he checked his watch, and blinked. Eight hours. He’d missed dinner, and the Archives would soon be closing. Half the papyrus remained for him to assemble.
No visions clouded his head. He didn’t see Egypt in its pre-industrial glory. He didn’t smell the shit used to fertilize the fields, he didn’t see the crocodiles and hippos lurking in the Nile, ready to carry off the unwary farmer. He didn’t see Akhenaten, wearing wax female breasts to try to convince his people that he was the p
erfect being, the union of male and female in one flesh. There were just the words, and Adam himself. Just as when he read the Torah.
The next morning, he made his excuses to Caesarion, and went back to the Archives to continue his work. It was an obsession now, and he had to see it through to the end.
He who is [Man/Clay] awakened in the body,
of a scribe who kept the grain tally.
He felt the terrible purpose of fate,
and traveled the green lands beside the Nile.
He strode the sands and leaped over the walls,
implacable as time and death. He slew
the defenders, who broke their spears against
his armor. The pharaoh’s power blunted
itself against his form. The queen appealed
for the lives of her children, and mercy
was granted to them by He who is [Man/Clay],
who let them flee. He pulled down the palace
lest the pharaoh escape, and doomed himself
with the fallen stones. Stranger, if you read
these words, hear now, and understand:
If you would summon He who is [Man/Clay],
Your life must his most surely requite.
Adam paused. The translation of that last line was ominous. Human sacrifice. Confirmation. No matter how much I tend to want to like these creatures . . . they’re a product of ancient times. When someone’s life, as Nith put it, was the only currency they might have.
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