The Showstone

by Glenn Cooper

  As the pieces fell into place, she had been transcribing her own version of the call, translating Cal’s Aramaic phonemes into Enochian letters and words.

  She sat back down and began to read her transcribed document slowly and carefully. During its assembly even the uttering of isolated words and phrases had scared her. Putting voice to the fullness of it was terrifying and when she reached the last section, she was sobbing uncontrollably.

  No af mi od faorgt Telocvovim

  Now I shall enter the dwelling of him that is fallen

  Aboapri Telocvovim adrpan od quasb q ting

  Help me, him that is fallen, cast down and destroy the rotten

  Torzv Zacar od Zamran

  Arise Move and Appear

  Odo cicle qaa od ozazma pla pli Iad na mad

  Open the mysteries of your creation and make us partakers of your dark knowledge

  She staggered from the table and went to the powder room to wash her face. The sink was black with fancy scalloped edges. The flow from the faucet exceeded the balky drain and water began to accumulate. When she turned off the faucet the pool of water was becalmed and she saw her tired reflection in it. But then another face appeared and she reached for the drain stopper.

  It had been a long while since she had scryed without the trappings of Doctor Dee’s table and seals, but she was a strong magician who had experienced visions long before she had learned the first things about Enochian conjuring.

  She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Pothnir,’ she said in Enochian, ‘I did not call you.’

  ‘Perhaps it is I who have called you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are things you need to know.’

  When the vision was over, she slowly climbed the stairs and fumbled in the dark for the knob to Cal’s door. She shed her clothes, felt for the duvet, and once under it, she felt for a sleeping Cal, who was on his side facing her. She scooted her back to him so that he was spooning her, and when he awoke enough to put an arm around her, she quietly cried until sleep came.

  She was up before him the next morning. When he came down there was coffee and a simple breakfast waiting. She wasn’t very talkative and when he asked if she was all right, she repeatedly told him she was fine, just tired. Before he could mention the 49th Call, she asked if she could use his computer. He set her up at the desktop in his office.

  ‘Can you show me how to scan something as an email attachment?’ she asked.

  He gave her a quick in-service on his printer/scanner and went upstairs to take his long-awaited shower. His phone pinged with an email from Osama Nawal, who told him he was a bit shocked that Cal had taken the papyrus from the museum without permission, but given the vague emergency Cal blamed, he said he understood. However, he insisted that it be returned to Cairo at the earliest possible date.

  Eve was still working when he came back down, dressed and refreshed, so he made a call. D’Auria picked up right away.

  ‘Welcome home,’ the agent said. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Safe and sound. Did you find the guy?’

  ‘Nothing to report, I’m afraid. We’ve got international and domestic warrants out for him but there’s no sign of him. He’s on a Customs and Border Protection watch list but there’ve been no hits at Logan or other airports.’

  ‘Maybe he’s still in Egypt.’

  ‘Maybe. We’ll find him. Where are you going to be?’

  ‘In Cambridge for a while. We’ll probably shoot over to the Peabody Museum later.’

  ‘Do you have it? The 49th Call.’

  ‘As matter of fact, we do.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The jury’s out. I’ve got no idea why someone would kill for it.’

  ‘When you know, I want to know. By the way, did you get your pistol?’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’

  ‘Be careful with it.’

  When Eve emerged from his office holding a couple of sheets of paper, he called her into the living room and asked her if she had managed all right.

  She folded the papers and slid them into the back pocket of her jeans.

  ‘I’m not great with technology but everything worked. All good.’

  He didn’t think she sounded good. She sounded flat and wasn’t making eye contact.

  ‘So, here we are,’ he said.

  ‘Here we are,’ she repeated.

  ‘You came up late. Did you spend any time with it?’

  ‘I read through it again.’

  ‘Verdict?’

  ‘It’s ominous. It’s unsettling.’

  ‘I think we need to understand it better, Eve. We need to know why my people are dying. I need to know why my parents died.’

  She said in a monotone that she understood.

  ‘What’s wrong, Eve? You don’t seem yourself.’

  ‘I told you, I’m tired. Really tired.’

  He sat beside her on the couch and she put her head on his shoulder. Her hair spilled onto his chest.

  ‘I hate to say it,’ he said, ‘but I think the only way to understand what the call means and why this man wants it so badly is to use it. Let’s pair it with the showstone and put it to the test. It’s not something I can do. You’d have to do it.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, Eve, but I don’t know how to get answers unless we go there.’

  Her eyes were closed when she said, ‘If you want me to do it, I’ll do it. Is the showstone here?’

  ‘I hid it at the archeology museum on the campus. We can go get it.’

  ‘It’s hard to know if I’ll need the table and the seals to make it work,’ she said.

  ‘If we have to go back to Arizona, I’ll fly back with you.’

  He heard her sigh. ‘I don’t think we’ll be doing that.’

  ‘Why don’t you get yourself ready?’ he said. ‘There’s no rush. It’s a nice day. We’ll walk to the museum.’

  They were in the living room of the presidential suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Hamid’s laptop computer sat on the coffee table, the volume on maximum. Barzani had been listening to the audio feed from his hidden microphone all morning and had called Hamid to listen once he heard Cal and Eve begin their living-room conversation.

  When they were done talking, Hamid looked up, as if the ceiling wasn’t there and he was gazing straight into the heavens.

  ‘Praise God,’ he said. ‘We have the call. We have the showstone. Get the car, Tariq. We are going to a museum this morning.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  London, 1609

  Whitehall Palace was a gloomy and cold place to be on a late winter evening. The endless corridors were even colder than the air outside, and the secretary, making his way through corridors and courtyards, wore a heavy woolen cloak over his padded doublet and warmest leggings.

  When he got to the private chambers of his lord, he threw off his outer garment and warmed himself by the small fire. When he was sufficiently comforted he knocked politely and entered the main office.

  His master was all but hidden behind stacks of books and documents tied in ribbons and piled upon his desk. Robert Cecil had to stand to see who had entered.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, Roger. What news of His Majesty?’

  His secretary saw that Cecil’s fire needed tending and he sprang to it while answering, ‘The Dutch ambassador was exceedingly dull in his exposition and the King did all he could to prevent slipping off his throne in a stupor of boredom.’

  ‘It was good I chose not to attend,’ Cecil said, sitting back down. ‘There was more important work to be done.’

  Cecil was a ferret of a man, not quite five feet tall, with a face smothered by a brown beard that encroached upon his diminutive features. Even his mincing movements were like a furtive rodent, anxiously protecting its morsels of food. When he served the previous monarch, Queen Elizabeth, she mercilessly teased him about his stature, often calling him her pygmy, her dwarf. His new monarch, King James, whom Cecil se
rved as Secretary of State, was publicly kinder to the fellow but taunted him liberally to the gentlemen with whom he drank and gambled.

  Elizabeth had been dead going on six years.

  Cecil’s father, William, Elizabeth’s first Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal, was dead almost twenty years. His father’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, had died the same year as his father and Cecil had not replaced him. He preferred to consolidate the power inherent in operating spy networks in his own offices.

  ‘My lord, I received word today of the death of an illustrious gentleman,’ Roger said.

  ‘Oh yes, who?’

  ‘Doctor John Dee.’

  ‘Goodness, I had almost forgotten about him. He must have been ungodly old.’

  ‘Eighty-two by most accounts.’

  ‘Quite the Methuselah,’ Cecil joked.

  ‘I wonder, my lord, if we ought not to close out his accounts.’

  ‘When was the last time we made note of his activities?’

  ‘I cannot recall. Not for years, I would say. Most of the entries and correspondence are from the Walsingham days.’

  ‘Well, bring me what we have, and I shall review it before I retire.’

  The secretary took considerable time locating the relevant documents in the vast security archive established by William Cecil and Francis Walsingham to keep track of the myriad enemies of the state during Elizabeth’s reign. Every intercepted letter, every scribbled report from their spidery network of agents, every coded missive sent among conspirators, was there, filed and cross-referenced. When the secretary returned he carried multiple bundles of parchments, a stack so high he could hardly see his way.

  ‘My God, man,’ Cecil said. ‘I could not lift such a pile.’ He went to his dining table. ‘Put them here. I tell you this, Roger, the King is not without enemies but Walsingham saw an assassin behind every tree.’

  ‘Part of this trove relates to an associate of Doctor Dee’s, Edward Kelley.’

  ‘Ah yes, I remember him. All right then, I will examine the lot of it.’

  John Dee’s time in eastern Europe came to an end in 1589. The rift with Kelley could not be healed so he reluctantly turned to his eldest son, Arthur, to be his scryer, who employed the black mirror that Laski had returned to Doctor Dee. However, the success of this venture was marred by Arthur’s general lack of ability and his absences to pursue his medical studies in Basel.

  In 1588 the last of Dee’s eight children was born. The boy was baptized Theodorus Trebonianus Dee. He looked nothing like Dee’s other children, but father and mother would not speak of the matter. The boy was raised a Dee and Edward Kelley never once laid eyes upon him.

  Dee’s financial woes would not abate. His sources of Polish income dried up, one by one, Count Laski all but abandoned him, and all his entreaties to Queen Elizabeth to support his alchemical research fell on deaf ears. With the last of his funds he bundled up his family and his possessions, and made the long journey back to England.

  What he found in Mortlake distressed him greatly. His rambling abode was in a sorry state. The house had been vandalized, furnishings removed, precious instruments gone, and most distressing of all, his prized library was decimated. His brother-in-law, Nicholas Fromoundes, who had lent him the 400 pounds for his journey to Poland, insisted he had no hand in the matter, but Dee was led to believe otherwise, and the two men never talked again.

  Finally, the Queen took a modicum of pity upon the old magus, and although she would not release a penny from her treasury in his support, she appointed him warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, a former college for the priesthood that had been repurposed as a Protestant institution by royal charter. The modest stipend attached to the position kept him afloat, but the fellows of the college did not take to the crotchety old scholar and derided him behind his back for his angel work. The arch-conjuror of Mortlake resumed his association with one of his old scryers, Bartholomew Hickman, but little of significance showed itself in Edward Kelley’s black mirror that he had kept as his own.

  Jane Dee died of the plague in Manchester in 1604. Dee returned to Mortlake a year later, in failing health and exhausted. He was decrepit, his house was decrepit, and he spent the remaining years of his life with his daughter, Katherine, who dedicated herself to his care, wandering the stripped and bare rooms, remembering the wonders of the universe that had been revealed to him by the angels.

  Cecil removed his crystal spectacles and rubbed his tired eyes. His secretary had stood by, handing him new documents, bundling and tying ones his master had finished with.

  ‘What a waste.’

  The secretary did not fathom the meaning of the comment. ‘Doctor Dee’s life?’ he asked.

  ‘Not his life, Roger. That was perfectly interesting, I suppose. I mean Walsingham’s efforts to cast the old fool as a traitor and conspirator. I see nothing to merit all these years of machinations and spying. All this parchment could have been put to finer use.’

  ‘Are we done, my lord, or do you wish to look at the Kelley dossier?’

  ‘I suppose I’ll run through it quickly and be finished with the exercise.’

  Kelley fared rather well following his schism with Doctor Dee. At least for a time. His alchemical work began to bear some fruit, or at least so he said, claiming he was on the precipice of being able to produce vast quantities of gold. His assertions so excited the local nobility that he was able to secure rich patronage.

  Count Rožmberk of Bohemia bestowed upon him estates and generous funds to pursue his experiments, and the Emperor Rudolf, who had dismissed his master as an impudent old boor, took a keen interest in Kelley’s work. When he convinced Rudolf he would shortly start producing gold, the monarch knighted him Sir Edward Kelley of Imany and New Lüben.

  Six months after receiving this honor, the worm turned.

  When his laboratories failed to yield any gold, Rudolf had Kelley arrested and jailed in the Křivoklát Castle on the outskirts of Prague. After a lengthy imprisonment, Kelley was once again able to persuade the Emperor’s representatives that he had been able to work out why his previous experiments had failed. If only he could be allowed to return to his alchemical work with his former status restored, molten gold would flow.

  Rudolf had him on a short leash and when he failed again to produce gold, he was re-imprisoned, this time in Hněvín Castle in Most. Kelley saw the future with clarity for the first time in his life. He would not be able to talk himself out of his predicament again and he would die in a cold turret. In desperation, he attempted to escape by climbing down a wall but fell and broke his good leg. The year was 1597. When his long-suffering wife, Jane, visited him in his cell, she was horrified to see bone protruding from his shin. So she obeyed his wishes and the next time she came she brought a vial of antimony powder from his laboratory.

  He swallowed it in front of her and proceeded to die a most horrible, agonizing death. In his final minutes, in near delirium, he uttered the 49th Call and in a puddle of his own urine he saw Satanail sitting on his throne, showing his yellow teeth and taunting him.

  Cecil handed the last of the parchments to his secretary.

  ‘So, Doctor Dee was a fool and Edward Kelley was a charlatan.’

  ‘Was there nothing to the angel magic?’ Roger asked.

  Cecil stood and rubbed at the cramp in his thigh. ‘I have little knowledge of the subject and even less interest. I am off to bed and so should you.’

  ‘What shall I do with these documents, my lord?’

  ‘Do with them? Take them to my bedchamber and throw them onto my hearth so that I might have excellent warmth tonight. Walsingham’s endeavors will finally be put to a good end.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Constantinople, 1095

  Emperor Alexios had wine and food brought to him and shared a meal with the young priest, Thaddeus.

  Thaddeus had returned his showstone, table, and wax seals to Daniel’s red bag. He was still shaken by his enco
unter with the dark lord, Satanail.

  ‘What will happen now?’ Alexios asked.

  ‘I know not, my Emperor,’ Thaddeus said. ‘I am but a humble priest who sees things in the celestial world that I do not always understand.’

  ‘Then there is nothing for us to do but wait and see,’ the Emperor said. ‘In months past I sent a letter to Pope Urban asking for his help against the Turks but I have received nary a reply. Everything now depends on whether Satanail did abide by his promise to enter the heart of the Pope and harden it to our purpose.’

  Pope Urban II was a proud Frenchman, born Odo of Châtillon. The scion of a noble family, he took his early education at a cathedral school in Reims. Owing to his superior intellect and ambition, once he entered the priesthood, he rose through the ranks of the Church to become the Cardinal of Ostia. Eminently papabile, no one was surprised when he was elevated to the papacy in 1088.

  He was refined in mannerisms and appearance, possessed of a close-trimmed beard and an expansive, tonsured dome. He was more finely attuned to political realities than his predecessor, Pope Gregory VII, and he found soon enough that he needed all of his skills to advance his reign. Rome and swathes of southern Italy were off-limits to him, as the city was occupied by the Italian Anti-pope Clement III. Moreover, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, had feuded with him over ecclesiastical appointments and the Emperor, to Urban’s peril, had decided to align himself with the Anti-pope.

  Perhaps the last thing Urban needed was another large conflict and thus, when he received a letter from his comrade in the east, Alexios Komnenos of Constantinople, he balked. How could he provide assistance to his battle against the Turks when he was fighting his own battles close to home?

  The winds blew fierce and cold that November in the French city of Clermont, where Pope Urban had gathered with several hundred clerics and noblemen for a council to debate reforms within the hierarchy of the Church. Urban dressed in his papal regalia and made his way to the cathedral from his temporary accommodation in the abbot house he had been using during his time in the city. It was early in the morning and his intention was to spend a quiet hour alone in prayer and contemplation before the council attendees arrived.