Hell. 'Quit.'
'Ok.'
'But now I work freelance, making sure everything runs smoothly. But something's gone wrong, hasn't it? So let's talk about what happened when the man came and sold your group the weapons.'
Wipes her nose on her sleeve.
'Ok.'
Forty-One
WARNING:
THE FOLLOWING FILE IS CLASSIFIED CRIMSON GLOVE. IF YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR STATUS: CRIMSON GLOVE, REPLACE THE FILE NOW AND REPORT TO THE SECURITY CLEARANCE OFFICER.
NOTE:
ANOTHER LETTER RETRIEVED FROM CODENAME: BLUEFLY.
Ritual magic effects the world, empty-handed magic effects the mind.
You can do magic anytime. Anywhere. All you need is a will to try it and a few things to help. Help set the mood, more than anything. A word, a gesture. If you've practiced it beforehand, all the better. I have a spell to avoid running into people I know. I get worried, I say the word. Easy. But I could will it, if I could enter gnosis and hope for the best.
But empty-handed techniques only work on people, sometimes, on reality. If you're good or lucky or it's not much of a spell, you can hack into the world itself.
I've won dice games with empty-handed techniques, just needing a bit of cash right then and there. Good example.
If it's a world you want changing, then it's ritual magic you need. High magic, if you want to feel cool.
Let's say there's a dry-cleaner I hate. He fucks up my jackets so I have a desire. A desire to do this guy harm. I draw a picture of his place. Detailed as I can make it. Maybe a photograph, but that's a remove between me and my Intent. I draw it good as I can. Then I make up a chant. I hate my drycleaner. Drycleaner my hate I. Mutate it into a magic word. Trileether Mhite, for example. Then I erase the picture, line by line. Bang. That cleaner is under a hex. If I can restrain my lust for result, something bad is happening to him.
Hiding your lust for result is key. It's another part of why you can read all the books on magic you like and not get it. Magic doesn't live in the conscious mind. It's in the unconscious, the strange parts of your imagination that don't jabber.
Or I can find another ritual someone did. Some of those have been used successfully for thousands of years. Lock yourself into that trip and you bring the juice. You bring the authority. I don't play that way, though. It's all a bit culturally specific for my tastes. I like some of it, I like the structure, but chanting out in cod Hebrew to a God I don't believe in doesn't work out for me. It takes me out of the moment. I just use the magic circles and that because that's what magic feels like to me. I'm smart enough to know that I don't need a pentagram or whatever. I could invoke a protective anything, but those shapes speak to me. Which shows you that while it really helps to be smart to be a magician, sometimes knowing yourself is better.
Short answer: there's no such thing as authentic. It's all up for grabs. At least in magic, which isn't an art in that no brain-dead amateur gets to judge you for yours.
So much of the symbolism from the old stuff is obfuscation to make old medieval guys feel spooky or the equivalent of a lost, pop-culture reference makes you feel embarrassed when someone makes it. Or it's working within paradigms that require certain cosmological world-views. Try and write a book on black magic in 1200, you sort of have to make the Jesus and God scene or they'll fire you up like a biddi. Not only that, you have to play the Catholic game as that's the only one in town back then. All that stuff is great and powerful and it works, but to me, they're the tools of another age. They're transistor radios and vinyl LPs. No. Better analogy: they're your dad's record collection. Some of it is cool, some of it is curiosity, but most of it makes no sense any more and leaves you shuffling the feet while he talks about Herb Alpert or the fucking Beatles.
See rule whatever. I already wrote to you about this.
Any magician around the world will tell you the same thing. Want to get into someone, just go empty-handed. But when you really want to change the world, when you really want to get into sympathetic magic, when you really want to see some action, you're going to have to get to chanting.
Forty-Two
She's talking.
You have to understand, the Bleak Elect are a religious sect. We believe, first and foremost, in the holy sanctity of motherhood. We believe that God gave up all his duties to Sophia, to Shekhina, the divine female presence. Ever since the world was created, either God as Woman or God's mystical companion, his girlfriend, a female demiurge, has controlled the universe.
The Matrieya buddha is not a fat man. It is a woman, round and plump and joyful. Mary, mother of God is just that, an eternal matron-dharma. The primeval female. When on the cross, Christ was pierced by a lance. Doesn't this make sense?
A father is an important man, therefore. He is God writ small. That's what the Elders of the Bleak Electors used to tell us. Writ small. But it is mothers who give birth to divinity. It is in the womb that miracles occur. Within the flesh of the feminine is the chamber that burns with the bright light that creates. It is the greatest of sanctums. The womb, which is moved by moons, by tides and by nothing human.
But if motherhood has such greatness to it, why do we give birth to such little people? Such small creatures? Has there been a holy man born in two thousand years?
(Mahomet?)
Has a God walked our shores in millennia? What have we raised up that was not mortal? Nothing. Nothing at all. Is that a failure of the station of motherhood? No. That lofty institution can no more fail than stars can die. So is there a fault in fathers? Is the stuff of their fatherhood somehow diminished? No. It always was. A teaspoon of stuff that is nothing until it germinates inside that red temple within all women. One does not blame dirt for being dirty.
So no, mothers are to blame. With their babies born mortal, or blind. Or dead, or deformed. It is some fault of women, who are equipped with a miracle in their gut. They are fallen as all the world is fallen.
It is your fault if your children are born dead, or grow to disappoint. If they fail to love, or are removed by the state. That's your fault. But who can blame you for it? How can you be blamed? It is a condition of the world, nowadays. This murky, workaday world.
(Cults love to remove blame and assign meaningless responses to human weakness.)
The female part of God understands. She understands all pain and failure. She is intimate with your loss and inabilities. But.
But.
She is not prepared to allow you to fail forever. There are heretics to crush, who scorn the holy station of motherhood. There are children to be born. But most important of all, most sacred and vital and meaningful of all, an attempt must be made to create a child who can keep ahold of the divinity within his mother. Hold that spark and keep it with him when he passes into the world. Like in the Bible, there is a lady and she is Elected to create something wonderful and strong and not new, but rare.
(Why not a girl baby? Never trust people who tell you they put women on pedestals.)
This is the dogma of the Bleak Electors. To find a way to bring a mother to a kind of apotheosis. To forge a symbol of the perfect mater. To give all those who embrace their wisdom a chance at birthing a God. To give all in their cult magic, which is a weapon, to strike down the opposition, who hate life and birth. But to see if a God can walk the earth again, remade by a Perfect Mother.
The first part is easy. A woman must be made strong.
Her name is Sofe Tosh and she is a cook The most recent Bleak Mother. She cares for no hands on her body, male or female. She cares only for food. Knowing she can never have a child, but longing for a familiar who would have no choice but love her, she is an eager convert to the Order of the Bleak Electors. She gives up her work, her home, her ambitions and swears that she will birth a miracle child so that they can change their name from Bleak to Bright. She is consecrated. Bathed. The Elders, two men, two women, all grieved by dead children, say prayers over her body and put her in the Marian Temple.
(A on
e bedroom apartment.)
Then, they connect up the webcams and set up the websites. For just two hundred dollars a month, you could watch the woman be fed and cleaned. Some of the Electors think this profanity is actually profane, but the Electors explain things gently. They require money for food, for bills, to collect books and fragments of prophecy. And truly, the men and women buying this privilege aren't perverts who lust after gluttony. They are converts and worshippers and people who long after a glimpse of the divine. The Bleak Electors are, in their way, good Christians and should not judge.
So the site goes live and the cameras turn on and in a dark, large room, Sofe Tosh stops becoming the bitter ex-cook and becomes the Gravid Idol. Motherhood requires such strength, such power and, in a gross world, that requires gross power. They feed her. And feed her.
Six times a day, she eats. Whatever she wishes, so long as it is kosher. She eats racks of lamb. She eats loaves of bread and tuna, sparkling like silver, and pails of rice and good black bread and sundaes and fudges and avocados and full-cream smoothies. The first month, she vomits quite a lot, and the websites gain ten thousand more subscribers. The money rolls in. So do the converts. In March, they are twenty-five strong. By September, eighty. Many mothers and fathers and orphan-makers are moved by the images they see.
But by the third month, she is plump as a sausage, and Ms. Tosh has adjusted to her diet. She has gained a craving for cheese of all kinds and eat wheels of it in under an hour. By the sixth month, she is enormous. A year in and she is strangely taut and slippery and huge, so huge. The Electors turn off the cameras and go into the room, three by three, to worship her. They trade turns, cleaning the Mother, removing her waste, rotating her limbs to keep her from bedsores. All an act of worship.
Soon, discussions are undertaken as to how she will be given seed. God above, they need gifts for the child.
Then Everett from the Library comes. He thinks they are endangering a life. They think this flirtation with online infamy will bring down danger. They curse him and throw him out of the Marian Temple. His sickness and disgust was plain to see, face green as he watched the swill removed and placed on plants, which will become a Holy Bower.
(Ace work, dickhead.)
The Library has a way of making those it disagrees with disappear. This is not idle threat. The Library is a constant in the life of the smaller cults. They take what they want and, if they think you overthrow some status quo, they'll smash you. It's a minor panic. And they choose a father to the miracle child. The night of the Chymical Wedding, eight hundred thousand people logged in to watch.
Soon the child will come and this, this the most important: all threats to the Conquering Boy must be eradicated.
The Electors think that any magic is a threat to the perfect child. Any expression of power is spitting in the face of their soon-to-come God. They seethe at the Library. Furious. They reach out, in an idiot crusade, looking for a way to defend themselves against the bully boys.
Then came a man called Ludo.
(Here he is. Hello.)
'You think the Library is your problem?'
'We do.'
'No. They aren't your problem. They just like to walk around telling people what to do. There is much worse.'
'Who?'
'Imagine a cult who worshipped only money, who hoarded the gifts you could give to your miracle baby.'
'They... worship only money? Mammonites!'
'Yes. And worse, they think giving a child artefacts of power is a stupid waste.'
So close to the coming of their Messiah, the Bleak Electorate is furious, looking to relieve tension with holy violence.
(Ludo worked over months. Was he aiming at just this cult or more?)
Gallowglass. They hate your baby and think motherhood is as natural as salivating when you chew. And soon after that, Ludo found them weapons, found them plans and set them against Gallowglass.
I smoke.
'Where's your Madonna?'
'Unattended for three nights, as far as I can tell. I can't see her surviving.'
'Why not?'
'She can't move off the floor. Can't get to water.'
I shudder.
'Why haven't you gone back for her?'
'Mister Lark... without the Electorate, she's just a six-hundred-pound woman in a room.'
Context. Another rule of magic. Make her sacred and she's sacred. Strip away her power and she's like the woman says.
'Ok.'
'So Ludo specifically implicated Gallowglass to you?'
'I guess. I mean, yeah. Not implicated. He just said they were our spiritual enemies. But they were capitalists and they laughed at motherhood. We would have come for them in time. "And a little child shall lead them." Why us? We had a deity to protect and worship. It was coming, a holy war. We had never made war. Is there a better way to make yourself sacred than to shed a little blood?
'So we attacked. Hooked up with Ludo's weapons. We wanted to make these heathens pay. It's funny. Before Ludo arrived, I doubt we would have had these thoughts but, with those weapons in your hand? They gave me a spider sealed in amber, although it still moved. Domingo got a, like, a jaw, like fangs? Metal things, all springy. Someone else got a bone and that was... amazing. And those Gallowglass guys, they seemed ever worse to us. They were obsessed with the cash value of things like this? And they were a major cult while we, us, with an actual goddess to worship, with a messiah on the way, had to pimp Our Lady out to perverts on the internet and allow ourselves to be audited by people like you and your Library?'
She goes on.
'Anger grew. I've never even hit someone and I wanted to punish the Gallowglass.
'Ludo, he went to our Elder and he made them a proposal. If we moved on them, he'd give us more weapons. For free. But. He wanted something. I don't know what it was.
'So we consulted with the Madonna. I was there. We had to knock a wall out of her apartment, but ten of us gathered in, bowing down while she ate. Chicken. I recall it. We had brought her eight chickens, they had smelled great. My husband, he used to, it used to be his favourite. I was thinking about him a lot.
'The Madonna ate, thought about it and said, "Yes, my child will be born into a world without enemies." I think that's what she said. By then, her face was so heavy she had problems moving her jaw. It didn't matter. We took what she said as divine approval of our battle.
'Three nights later, there were maybe fifteen of us, all the fit and healthy ones, clutching our weapons, in vans and cars. Miriam owned second-hand dealership, so we got what we needed. And we all got given an order. Look for a scroll case. The scroll inside it. That's what we're going to reward our ally Ludo with. Old-time magic. Some Muslim thing, by the way he described it. In we went, arriving at Gallowglass house. The weapons worked and, as a mum, I knew we were doing the right thing. These were bad people and babies would be safer from the likes of them.
'Then.'
(Here we go.)
'Then we were done. They were dead or they'd run away. But then Ludo turned up. His guys with guns and more occult weapons. They cut us down. I was ok because, well, I was in the bathroom. I'd seen enough and was feeling sick. I was watching from there. It was a double-cross. I prayed and the Madonna heard my prayers. She's good at hearing you at times like that. In despair. I think she hid me then.
'Ludo and his men killed all my friends and then marched through the house, looking for something. Ludo was angry. So angry. It scared me. He took Joy, and I know they planned to torture her to find out where the scroll was. No one could find it.
'And so I ran away and I've been here ever since. The pastor here, he's my cousin. He thinks I ran away from a cult. Like, a cult you see on the news. He's sweet, but he doesn't know anything.
'My Madonna must be dead by now. No child coming. She can't survive on her own any more. No perfect mother to show us all the way to breed true humans, blessed by God, to overthrow this world of widows.'
She s
obs.
I get up. Go. Leave her there.
So the Old Man and his hound were after a scroll and they couldn't find it.
So, why not?
Where is it?
And what is it?
And why use the Electors?
I spend the rest of the night in a hotel that stinks of stale smoke and wet carpet, finally catching some hours. I awake at twelve.
I text Scarlet's girl Friday that I'd like to make an appointment. He texted back that she had fifteen minutes at quarter to nine in two weeks' time. I'm going to do something about that little prick one day.
Now. I'm working for her. I'm going through official channels. Her not seeing me at all?
That's not stuff between her and me. Way I feel it, I'm actually deniable. A deniable asset. She doesn't want the Library knowing I'm on the case.
Shower, but I need a change of clothes. Back on the street come sundown. I eat. My personal wards go off once when a dog stares too long at me. Is it rabid or is someone riding it, looking for me?
I leave the area quickly, taking a cab to eastside. Take a bus, sitting next to a coughing man.
No books to read.
Fuck this.
My home is my place of power and my respite. All my things are there. My books. I have notes to take on this case. I have to journal the spells I've been casting. Note down what's effective, what's not. My fingers itch to get that done.
Yes, I'm a magician, not a criminal. I put everything on paper. No, you couldn't read it.
I want my house back and to fuck with Ludo.
Forty-Three
WARNING:
THE FOLLOWING FILE IS CLASSIFIED LOW COMFORT. IF YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR STATUS: LOW COMFORT, REPLACE THE FILE NOW AND REPORT TO THE SECURITY CLEARANCE OFFICER.
NOTE:
GRAPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THIS PIECE SUGGESTS THE WRITER WAS UNDER CONSIDERABLE STRESS AND POTENTIALLY INEBRIATED.
Alright. I know I've not been answering your letters for a while. Work is busy and there's some issues developing between me and my boss. Those are boring reasons for being late but that's what I have.
Black City (The Lark Case Files) Page 14