by James Blish
Father Domenico thought the question well asked, if a trifle irrelevant, but an embarrassed and slightly pitying silence showed that his opinion was not shared. In the end it was broken by Father Monteith, whose monumental patience was a byword in the chapter.
‘I’m certainly not well versed in canon law, let alone in spiritual compacts,’ he said, with more modesty than exactness. ‘But, in principle, the Covenant is no more than a special case of the option of free will. The assumption appears to be that even in dealing with devilry, on the one hand, no man shall be subjected to a temptation beyond his ability to resist, and on the other, no man shall slide into Heaven without having been tempted up to that point. In situations involving Transcendental or Ceremonial Magic, the Covenant is the line drawn in between. Where you would find its exact terms. I’m sure I don’t know; I doubt that they have ever been written down. One thinks of the long struggle to understand the rainbow, the other Covenant; once the explanation was in, it did not explain, except to show that every man sees his own rainbow, and what seems to stand in the sky is an optical illusion, not a theomorphism. It is in the nature of the arrangement that the terms would vary in each individual case, and that if you are incapable of determining where it is drawn for you – the line of demarcation – then, woe betide you, and that is that.’
Dear God, Father Domenico thought, all my life I have been an amateur of Roger Bacon and I never once saw that that was what he meant to show by focusing his Perspectiva on the rainbow. Shall I have any more time to learn? I hope we are never tempted to make Monteith the director, or we shall lose him to taking things out of the In box and putting them into the Out box, as we did Father Umberto –
‘Furthermore, it may well be still in existence,’ said Father Boucher. ‘As Father Domenico has already pointed out to Theron Ware himself, we have heard of the alleged death of God only through the testimony of the most unreliable witness imaginable. And it leaves many inconsistencies to be explained. When exactly is God supposed to have died? If it was as long ago as in Nietzsche’s time, why had His angels and ministers of light seemed to know nothing of it in the interim? It’s unreasonable to suppose that they were simply keeping up a good front until the battle actually broke out; Heaven simply isn’t that kind of an organisation. One would expect an absolute and perpetual monarchy to break down upon the death of the monarch quite promptly, yet in point of fact we saw no signs of any such thing until shortly after Christmas of this year.’
‘But we did see such signs at that time,’ Father Vance said.
‘True, but this only poses another logical dilemma: What happened to the Antichrist? Baphomet’s explanation that he had been dispensed with as unnecessary to the victors, whose creature he would have been, doesn’t hold water. The Antichrist was to have appeared before the battle, and if the defeat of God is all that recent, the prophecy should have been fulfilled; God still existed to compel it.’
‘Matthew 11:14,’ Father Selahny said, in an unprecedented burst of intelligibility. The verse of which he was reminding them referred to John the Baptist, and it said: And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.
‘Yes,’ Father Domenico said, ‘I suppose it’s possible that the Antichrist might have come unrecognised. One always envisioned people flocking to his banner openly, but the temptation would have been more subtle and perhaps more dangerous had he crept past us, say in the guise of some popular philosopher, like that positive-thinking man in the States. Yet the proposal seems to allow even less room than did the Covenant for the exercise of free will.’
There was a silence. At last, the director said: ‘The Essenes argued that one must think and experience all evil before one can hope to perceive good.’
‘If this be true doctrine,’ Father Domenico said, ‘then it follows that God is indeed still alive, and that Theron Ware’s experiment, and World War III, did not constitute Armageddon after all. What we may be confronted with instead is an Earthly Purgatory, from which Grace, and perhaps even the Earthly Paradise, might be won. Dare we think so?’
‘We dare not think otherwise,’ said Father Vance. ‘The question is, how? Little that is in the New Testament, the teachings of the Church or the Arcana seem very relevant to the present situation.’
‘No more is our traditional isolation,’ said Father Domenico. ‘Our only recourse now is to abandon it; to abandon our monastery and our mountain, and go down into the world that we renounced when Charlemagne was but a princeling, to try to win it back by works and witnessing. And if we may not do this with the sweet aid of Christ, then we must nevertheless do it in His name. Hope now is all we have.’
‘In sober truth,’ Father Boucher said quietly, ‘that is not so great a change. I think it is all we ever had.’
Come to Middle Hell
Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase… Prepare thyself to the search.
Job 8:7, 8
6
Left to his own devices and hence, at last, unobserved, Theron Ware thought that it might be well, after all, if he did essay a small magic. The possible difficulty lay in that all magic without exception depended upon the control of demons, as he had explained to Baines on his very first visit. But therein lay the attractiveness of the experiment, too, for what he wanted was information, and a part of that information was whether he still had any such control.
And it would also be interesting, and possible to find out at the same time, to know whether or not there were any demons left in Hell. If there were it would imply, though it would not guarantee, that only the forty-eight that he had set loose were now terrorizing the world. This ruled out using the Mirror of Solomon, for the spirit of that mirror was the angel Anael. Probably he would not answer anyhow, for Ware was not a white magician, and had carefully refrained from calling upon any angel ever since he had turned to the practice of the black Art; and besides, it would be a considerable nuisance locating three white pigeons amidst all this devastation.
Who, then? Among the demon princes he had decided not to call up for Baines’s commission were several that he had ruled out because of their lesser potentialities for destruction, which would stand him in good stead were it to turn out that he had lost control; even in Hell there were degrees of malevolence, as of punishment. One of these was PHOENIX a poet and teacher with whom Ware had had many dealings in the past, but he probably would not do now; he posed another wildlife problem – Ware’s familiar Ahktoi had been the demon’s creature, and the cat had of course vanished when the noise had begun, a disappearance that PHOENIX would take none the less ill for its having been 100 per cent expectable. Though the grimoires occasionally characterize one or another demon as ‘mild’ or ‘good by nature,’, these terms are strictly relative and have no human meaning; all demons are permanently enraged by the greatest Matter of all, and it does not pay to annoy them even slightly in small matters.
Also, Ware realized, it would have to be a small magic indeed, for most of his instruments were now buried, and those that were accessible were all contaminated beyond his power to purify them in any useful period of time. Clearly it was time to consult the book. He crossed to the lectern upon which it rested, pushed dust and potsherds off it with his sleeve, unlocked the clasp and began to turn the great stiff pages, not without a qualm. Here, signed with his own blood, was half his life; the other half was down below, in the mud.
He found the name he needed almost at once: VASSAGO, a mighty prince, who in his first estate before the rebellion had belonged to the choir of the Virtues. The Lemegeton of the Rabbi Solomon said of him, Ware recalled, that he ‘declares things past, present and future, and discovers what has been lost or hidden’. Precisely to the purpose. Ware remembered too that his was the name most commonly invoked in ceremonial crystallomancy, which would be perfect in both scope and limitations for what Ware had in mind, involving no lengthy preparations of the operator, or even any precautionary diagrams, nor any
apparatus except a crystal ball; and even for that he might substitute a pool of exorcised water, fifty litres of which still reposed in a happily unruptured stainless steel tank embedded in the wall behind Ware’s workbench.
Furthermore, he was the only demon in Ware’s entire book of pacts who was represented therein by two seals or characters, so markedly different that without seeing them side by side, one might never suspect that they belonged to the same entity. Topologically they were closely related, however, and Ware studied these relationships long and hard, knowing that he had once known what they meant but unable to recall it. These were the figures:
Ah, now he had it. The left-hand figure was VASSAGOS ordinary infernal sign, but the second was the seal under which, it was said, he could be called by white magicians. Ware had never used it, nor had needed to – the infernal seal had worked very well – and he had always doubted its efficacy, for by definition no commerce with a demon is white magic; however, it would be well to try it now. It might prove an additional factor of safety, if it worked at all.
Into what should he draw the water? Everything was filthy. Eventually he decided simply to make a puddle on the workbench; it had been decades since he had studied oneirology, which he had scorned as a recourse for mere hedge wizards, but to the best of his recollection it called for nothing more extraordinary than an earthenware vessel, and could even be practised successfully in an ordinary, natural forest pool, providing that there was sufficient shade.
Well, then, to work.
Standing insecurely before the workbench, the little weight of his spare upper body resting upon his elbows and his hands beside his ears, Theron Ware stared steadfastly down into the little puddle of mud, his own bushy head – he had neglected his tonsure since the disaster – shading it from the even light of the overcast sky. He had already stared so long since the first invocation that he felt himself on the verge of self-hypnosis, but now, he thought, there was a faint stirring down there in those miniature carboniferous depths, like a bubble or a highlight created by some non-existent sun. Yes, a faint spark was there, and it was growing.
‘Eka dva, tri, chatur pancha, shas, sapta, ashta, nava, dasha, ekadasha,’ Ware counted. ‘Per vota nostra ipse nunc surtat nobis dicatus VASSAGO!’
The spark continued to grow until it was nearly the size of a ten-lire piece, stabilized and gradually began to develop features Despite its apparent diameter, the thing did not look small; the effect rather was one of great distance, as though Ware were seeing a reflection of the Moon.
The features were quite beautiful and wholly horrible. Superficially the shining face resembled a human skull, but it was longer, thinner, more triangular, and it had no cheekbones. The eyes were huge, and slanted almost all the way up to where a human hairline would have been; the nose extremely long in the bridge; the mouth as pink and tiny as that of an infant. The colour and texture of the face were old ivory, like netsuke. No body was visible, but Ware had not expected one; this was not, after all, a full manifestation, but only an apparition.
The rosebud mouth moved damply, and a pure soprano voice like that of a choirboy, murmured gently and soundlessly deep in Ware’s mind.
WHO IS IT CALLS VASSAGO FROM STUDYING OF THE DAMNED? BEWARE!
‘Thou knowest me, demon of the Pit,’ Ware thought, ‘for to a pact hast thou subscribed with me, and written into my book thine Infernal name. Thereby, and by thy seal which I do here exhibit, do I compel thee. My questions shalt thou answer, and give true knowledge.’
SPEAK AND BE DONE.
‘Art still in Hell with thy brothers, or are all abroad about the Earth?’
SOME DO GO TO AND FRO. BUT WE ABIDE HERE. NEVERTHELESS, WE BE ON EARTH, ALBEIT NOT ABROAD.
‘In what wise?’
THOUGH WE MAY NOT YET LEAVE NETHER HELL, WE BE AMONG YE: FOR THE PIT HATH BEEN RAISED UP. AND THE CITY OF DIS NOW STANDING UPON THE EARTH.
Ware made no attempt to disguise his shock; after all, the creature could see into his mind. ‘How situate?’ he demanded.
WHERE SHE STOOD FROM ETERNITY; IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH.
Ware suspected at once that the apparently allegorical form of his utterance concealed a literal meaning, but it would do no good to ask for exact topographical particulars; demons paid little attention to Earthly political geography unless they were fomenting strife about boundaries or enclaves, which was not one of VASSAGO’S roles. Could the reference be literary? That would be in accordance with the demon’s nature. Nothing prevents devils from quoting scripture to their own advantage? so why not Tennyson?
‘Be this valley under the ambassadorship of RIMMON?’
NAY.
‘Then what officers inhabit the region wherein it lies? Divulge their names, great prince, to my express command!’
THEY ARE THE INFERIORS OF ASTAROTH WHO ARE CALLED SARGATANAS AND NEBIROS.
‘But which hath his asylum where Dis now stands?’
THERE RULETH NEBIROS.
These were the demons of post-Columbian magic; they announced forth to the subjects all things which their lord hath commanded, according to the Grimorium Verum, in America, and the asylum of NEBIROS was further specified to be in the West. Of course: Death Valley. And NEBIROS. as it was said in the Grand Grimoire was the field marshal of Infernus, and a great necromancer, ‘who goeth to and fro everywhere and inspects the hordes of perdition.’ The raising of the fortress of Dis in the domain of this great general most strongly suggested that the war was not over yet. Ware knew better, however, than to ask the demon whether God was in fact dead; for were He not, the mere sounding of the Holy Name would so offend this minor prince as to terminate the apparition at once, if not render further ones impossible. Well, the question was probably unnecessary anyhow; he already had most of the information that he needed.
‘Thou art discharged.’
The shining face vanished with a flash of opalescence, exactly as though a soap bubble had broken, leaving Ware staring down at nothing but a puddle of mud, now already filming and cracking – except in the centre where the face had been; that had evaporated completely. Straightening his aching back, he considered carefully the implications of what he had learned.
The military organization of the Descending Hierachy was peculiar, and as usual the authorities differed somewhat on its details. This was hardly surprising, for any attempt to relate the offices of the evil spirits to Earthly analogues was bound to be only an approximation, if not sometimes actively misleading. Ware was presently in the domain of HUTGIN, ambassador in Italy, and had never before Black Easter had any need to invoke ASTAROTH or any of his inferior Intelligences. He was characterized by the Grimorium Verum as the Grand Duke of Hell, whereas Weirus referred to him as Grand Treasurer; while the Grand Grimoire did not mention him at all, assigning NEBIROS instead to an almost equivalent place. Nevertheless it seemed clear enough in general that while the domain of ASTAROTH might technically be in America, his principality was not confined thereto, but might make itself known anywhere in the world. HUTGIN in comparison was a considerably lesser figure.
And the war was not yet over, and Ware might indeed find some way to make himself useful; Baines had been right about that, too. But in what way remained unclear.
Very probably, he would have to go to Dis to find out. It was a terrifying thought, but Ware could see no way around it. That was where the centre of power was now, where the war would henceforth be directed; and there, if Baines actually succeeded in reaching the SAC in Denver, Ware conceivably might succeed in arranging some sort of a detente. Certainly he would be of no use squatting here in ruined Italy, with all the superior spirits half a world away.
But how to get there? He did not have Baines’s power to commandeer an aircraft, and though he was fully as wealthy as the industrialist – in fact most of the money had once been Baines’s – it seemed wholly unlikely that any airline was selling tickets these days. A sea and overland journey would be too slow.
Would
it be possible to compel ASTAROTH to provide him with some kind of an apport? This too was a terrifying thought. To the best of Ware’s knowledge; the last magician to have ridden astride a devil had been Gerbert, back in the tenth century. He had resorted to it only to save his life from a predecessor of the Inquisition, whose attention he had amply earned; and, moreover, had lived through the ordeal to become Pope Sylvester II.
Gerbert had been a great man, and though Ware rather doubted that he had been any better a magician than Ware was, he did not feel prepared to try that conclusion just now. In any event, the process was probably unnecessarily drastic; transvection might serve the purpose just as well, or better. Though he had never been to a sabbat, he knew the theory and the particulars well enough. Included in the steel cabinets which held his magical pharmacopoeia were all the ingredients necessary for the flying ointment, and the compounding of it required no special time or ritual. As for piloting and navigation, that was to be sure a little alarming to anticipate, but if thousands upon thousands of ignorant old women had been able to fly a cleft stick, a distaff, a besom or even a shovel upon the first try, then so could Theron Ware.
First, however, he drew from the cabinet a flat slab of synthetic ruby, about the size and shape of an opened match folder; and from his cabinet of instruments, a burin. Upon the ruby, on the day of Mars, which is Tuesday, and in the hour of Mars, which is 0600. 1300, 2000 or 0300 on hat day, he would engrave the following seal and characters:
This he would henceforth carry in his right shirt pocket, like a reliquary. Though he would accept no help from ASTAROTH if he could possibly avoid it, it would be well since he was going to be travelling in that fiend’s domains, to be wearing his colours. As a purist, it bothered him a little that the ruby was synthetic, but his disturbance, he knew, was only an aesthetic one. ASTAROTH was a solar spirit, and the ancients, all the way through Albertus Magnus, had believed that rubies were engendered in the Earth by the influence of the Sun – but since they were not in fact formed that way, the persistence of the ruby in the ritual was only another example of one of the primary processes of magic, superstiiion, the gradual supremacy of the sign over the thing, so that so far as efficacy was concerned it did not matter a bit whether the ruby was synthetic or natural. Nature, too, obstinately refused to form rubies the size and shape of opened match folders.