The Stars Were Right

by Alexander, K. M.

  I must have perked up at this because Sam laughed, the noise sending tingles down my spine.

  "That sounds like too much to ask," I said.

  "Being polite will get you nowhere, Mister Bell. We have open beds in the rectory. You and Hagen are welcome to them. I'll take you to the showers and have the brothers bring you a change of clothes. They won't be stylish, but they'll be clean."

  I was overwhelmed by the generosity.

  "Thanks," I stammered.

  "You're a guest of the Reunified Church, think nothing of it. We'll hit the books tomorrow."

  * * *

  The shower was incredible. I felt like I was reborn as the hot water steamed pleasantly against my skin. I was careful to wash and clean my wounds; the bullet hole had torn open in my struggle in Hagen's shop, but it looked clean enough.

  Suds from the lye soap sloshed the sweat and filth from nights spent in pitch dens and cheap hostels off my skin. When I finished, I stood before a mirror in the bathroom and shaved the stubble from my jaw. Then I redressed my wounds with the clean bandages the brothers of Saint Mark's had generously provided.

  A stone-colored outfit of simple linen trousers and matching shirt was laid out for me. I watched as two monks took my clothes away to be washed. It felt silly to wear the monks' uniform, but it'd be a lie if I told you it wasn't nice to feel clean clothes against clean skin.

  After we were refreshed, we ate in the dining hall in some lower level of the cathedral. The food tasted phenomenal. Rich roast with brown gravy and potatoes, whitefish poached with butter, and freshly baked bread still steaming as it was torn open. I felt as if I was walking on clouds.

  I ate leisurely, laughing as I got to know both Hagen and Samantha. They spun stories about their childhood. How Samantha always got in trouble and Hagen was always spending time with his nose in a book. How disappointed their father had been with Hagen's decision and how he had grown to accept both his children's callings. They spoke kindly about their father, who was recently appointed Cardinal for a large parish in Destiny.

  When neither Hagen nor I could eat anymore, Samantha led us to the dormitory for the monks. Row after row of single beds outfitted with white sheets and thick comforters covered the room. A few brothers snoozed lazily.

  "Women aren't allowed inside," she explained. "Sheets are changed daily, so take whatever bed is open. Come find me in the morning."

  Hagen kissed his sister on the cheek and disappeared into the gloom inside with a thank you.

  Samantha and I were left alone in the hallway.

  I smiled at her. "Thanks for all this. I mean it. I felt so lost these last two days. You and your brother's help has been—" I choked on the words.

  "Don't mention it, Wal," she said, looking up at me with those dark eyes.

  I felt like leaning down and kissing her, but fought off the urge. I had just met her, and she didn't seem to regard me as anything more than a charity case. It was probably just the stress making me feel infatuated over a little kindness.

  Besides, she was a Reunified Priestess, and this was her cathedral. I was no scholar, but kissing her here felt improper, if not outright sinful.

  "G-Goodnight," I stammered stupidly. What had I been thinking?

  "See you in the morning."

  I wondered if I heard a bit of disappointment in her voice, and that thought made it more than difficult to fall asleep. When I did fall asleep, I slept like the dead.

  * * *

  Both Hagen and I woke around mid-morning. We ate the last of the breakfast in the dining hall and walked the bustling corridors to Samantha's office. Students whispered to one another, monks strode by silently, and the Sisters of the Cross huddled in groups around foyers. Saint Mark's felt alive and vibrant despite its age.

  Samantha was wearing her vestments as we entered. Apparently we had slept through the morning's services, but she had taken the time afterward to gather a seemingly endless number of texts, tomes, scrolls, and prophecies from her own and Saint Mark's libraries.

  They stood in a pile on her desk, a model of Lovat's skyline formed from ancient texts.

  "Good morning," she said in that intoxicating voice. "If I didn't know better, Wal, I'd have passed you off as one of my students."

  I looked down at my stone-colored outfit, then back up at Sam, smiling awkwardly.

  "What are all these?" asked Hagen, staring lustily at the books.

  "Tomes, dear brother, old tomes. You'll love them."

  "Pre-Aligning?" he asked, reaching for a small book the color of mud and the size of a sandwich.

  "Almost all of them. I did a bit of research last night and pulled any references I could find on your Children, the Black Goat, and Pan. I figured we could spend the morning researching and seeing if we could come up with anything more. There's a lot here, as you can see, so we have our work cut out for us."

  "I'll say," I said.

  Sam smiled at me. It was everything I could do not to melt into my seat.

  "You take this book," she said, handing me a yellowing book entitled The Alabaster Realm. "That one's a long shot, but it's a good starting point."

  Hagen picked up another and Sam a third.

  "So what do we do?" I asked.

  "We read," said Hagen, tossing me a pad of paper and a pen. "If we find anything, we tell one another. Keep notes. Any mention of the keywords: the Children, Black Goat, Baphomet, Baal, Pan, Puck—write it down."

  I rolled my eyes.

  "None of that, caravan boy," said Samantha playfully. "We don't win the race by slacking off."

  We dove into our studies, and I found it to be tedious and boring work. Page after page, chapter after chapter, word after word, I slogged through until my eyes felt like they would fall out of their sockets.

  We had food brought to us and left it sitting untouched until it was cold. We drank buckets of coffee and continued to pour over tomes. We returned to the dormitory for a few hours of sleep, only to wake and head back to Samantha's office to crack open a new volume of Alhazred's Treatise of Sana or another of the Nineteen Verses of Roland.

  We read, we took notes, we discussed until our eyes were red and our throats raw. This went on for three days. Three long days of tedious, neck-stiffening research. I'm not a researcher. I'm a caravaneer, a roader. I'm not keen on books in general; I'd rather learn what I need to learn from the trail. I found the process hard and I was growing more and more exhausted.

  It wasn't until late the third day that we finally broke through our wall.

  "I think I found something," Samantha said abruptly. She had been deep in an old leather-bound book with a bizarre twisted star shape on its worn spine. It jolted me out of some paragraph in a bestiary that was doing its best to put me to sleep. "I think I found a link to the Children." She paused and stared down at the pages before her. "...I...think."

  She didn't sound too sure, but looked stunned. I rose and stood behind her. By my count it was probably two or three in the morning. I yawned.

  "What's the book?" asked Hagen.

  "Heredity & Lineage of the Firsts, written by a Doctor Howard Softly in some previous age. According to Softly this is the most comprehensive listing of the family trees extending from the Firsts since the time of Alignment."

  I looked down at a page of oddly twisted shapes. There didn't seem to be any order—no common lines of characters I was used to seeing in language. It wasn't anything I could read. "Looks like a bunch of scribbles."

  "This is Aklo. An ancient language, long dead. I haven't seen it used in years."

  "You can read it?"

  "I wouldn't call my skills fluent, but I can translate some of it. Aklo is a bizarre language, no strict set of rules, so I find myself sorta bumbling around. It's not the easiest to read, and it's even harder to translate."

  Hagen came around the desk and leaned over her shoulder.

  "Aklo?" he said intrigued. "By the Firsts, I haven't seen an Aklo text in years. That's got to b
e worth a fortune."

  "It's the church's. Came from the library," She explained, reading his mind. "Don't think about offering to buy it. It's the only copy we have, so I doubt the elders would be keen to part with it."

  Hagen gave a sheepish smile.

  "What's it say?" I asked, getting us back to the topic of our research. "What's the link?"

  "Well, if my translation is correct, the Children are mentioned as direct descendants of a creature called Cybele—Cybill in Strutten. At their birth, according to this, there were a thousand of them. All their names are listed, and their sons and daughters, fourteen generations' worth. Goes on for pages and pages."

  "So there're thousands of them?" I groaned.

  "Well, this book is several hundred years old," Samantha said. "There could be far more than that or there could be far fewer. We have no idea."

  "None of the Children I have seen look related. They've been everything from humans, to maero, to kresh—usually a family is of the same species. Carter's cross, the guys I saw outside of Coming & Goings were as good a mix as any."

  "It's possible they have distant blood links to Cybill," said Hagen. "We know the races of earth all came from humans. Mostly."

  "So if they are the sons and daughters—even metaphorically—of Cybill, why the connection to Pan? Why wear Pan's symbol when you're the Children of something else?"

  Samantha chewed on the end of her little finger, turned back a few pages, and studied the Aklo script. I went back to my chair and left her to her translating.

  After a few moments she jabbed a finger down on the page. "The father!"

  Hagen jumped and looked up at me.

  "What?" I said.

  "The father! There are two characters here. One is the father and Cybill is the mother. I switched two of the marks around an—"

  "I don't understand? Spell it out for me." I was back on my feet, leaning forward across her desk. From my vantage point I could see down her shirt. I fought to keep from staring at the round tops of her breasts.

  She looked up, caught my wandering eyes, and rolled her own. I felt stupid again. Reading into that kindness of hers as some sort of sexual attraction. My head was a mess.

  Hagen was oblivious. "The text is confusing. I thought it was just a mistake. Sometimes Softly refers to Cybill with the feminine pronoun, and other times he uses the masculine form. I wonder if in his own way Softly was describing both the mother and the father."

  "I'm even more confused," I said, abandoning my breast-watching perch for the comfort of my chair.

  "Yeah," said Samantha. She looked down at the page again and read, "So all the generations of Cybill who came to earth after the Aligning of the stars were brought forth, united by he with the thousand young—"

  "Thousand young," said Hagen. Interrupting her, he snapped his fingers as if remembering something. "I knew that sounded familiar. That's what the attacker in my shop had chanted. Thousand young, Children of Pan."

  "But these aren't Pan's children. These are Cybill's. Are you sure there's a connection?" I asked.

  "The text is very specific: the thousand young. The Children," said Samantha.

  "Is Pan in that book?" I asked.

  She shrugged and flipped through the pages. "I didn't see him, wait...ah yeah here he is, sort of."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, he's not labeled as Pan; instead he's labeled as Puck."

  "The name is interchangeable," said Hagen. "I saw that in my own research. You may also see him listed as a bunch of other things. Baphomet. The Black Goat."

  Samantha flipped back in the old tome. "Yeah, the goat thing. Cybill is also referred to as a goat. Yes, right here, the Black Goat who bore a thousand young. Wait, here she's referred to as a ram. That's the mother and father thing I was talking about. Softly isn't clear."

  "Black goat," I repeated. Letting the word hang on my tongue.

  "I'd wager my entire shop that's a reference to Pan," said Hagen, a smile breaking through his beard.

  "So Cybill is the lover of Pan, maybe this Black Goat, and the Mother of the Children. The Children who seem very devoted to their father," I began. "I still don't understand how it ties into these murders or ties into me."

  Samantha flipped between the pages listing Cybill's children and the pages of Pan's. "There're some divergences but they are minor: names misspelled, missing family members, that sort of thing, but both lists are pretty much the same. I'm going to go out on a limb, but I think Pan might be our father and Cybill the mother. Both are called goats, and Pan is definitely male."

  "Hagen had dug up a lot of information on that after I left his shop." I looked up at him.

  "Yeah, it wasn't much," he admitted.

  "When you first told me about the whole Black Goat thing my former employer, Wilem, Black & Bright, was the only connection I could make."

  "I remember you mentioning them." Samantha said. "Do you think there's a connection? Black is a common enough surname."

  "It's all I have. August told me both Wilem and Bright were dead. That leaves Black. Only Black." A thought struck me, "You know what? I'm wrong. It doesn't leave only Black. When I ran into August's tenant, Mrs. Sardini, I asked her about a group of guys I could swear were part of the Children. She mentioned a Robby Wilem. Said they looked like a bunch of Robby's friends."

  "A Robby Wilem, you hadn't mentioned a Robby Wilem," said Samantha.

  "I forgot," I said, feeling like I was onto something. "Does the church keep any city records here? Births, obits, that sort of thing?"

  She shook her head, "No. You'd need to go to the library for that sort of stuff."

  I frowned. I was still spooked by my close call on the monorail platform a few days earlier. Stepping outside Saint Mark's wasn't the safest decision I could make right now.

  "It's probably best you don't poke your head out," Hagen said. "Not right now."

  "I agree with Hagen," said Sam, "I can go. What is it you think we should be looking for?"

  "Robby's father. I want to know if there is a Wilem family connection to the Children."

  "Wal, what makes you think there will be a connection?"

  I shrugged, "I don't know. It just feels like this is too much of a coincidence. Robby Wilem hanging out with the Children, August's connection to Wilem, Black, and Bright, and somehow all this starting after I finished a run for that particular organization."

  "I'll pull what I can," said Samantha, rising from her chair and pulling a coat off a wall hook. "You two stretch your legs and we'll meet back here in a few hours."

  * * *

  "Dr. Raymond Wilem, forty-eight, Lovat, died at his home last night from complications relating to thrombosis. Dr. Wilem was one of the three founding partners of the import and export firm Wilem, Black & Bright where he has worked for sixteen years. He was a member of Carcosa Grove Hasturian Church and the Lovatine Rotary Club. He enjoyed gardening, cribbage, and liked to think of himself as an amateur historian. He is survived by his son, his wife Helen Machen-Wilem, and his business partner Peter Black. Funeral services will be held… blah, blah, blah, blah." I stopped reading and looked up from the obituary. "Is this it?"

  "I did a cross check on Wilem, Black, & Bright," said Samantha, "It didn't turn up anything much. Any searches I did on the Rotary Club only returned a boring list of public minutes."

  "Any lead on the name of the son?" I asked.

  She shook her head. "Not from the obit."

  "What about Carcosa Grove?" asked Hagen.

  She pulled out a single sheet of paper. "That turned up something."

  "Oh?" I asked.

  She laid out a clipping of a photograph taken from what looked to be a church newsletter on her desk. I picked it up, squinting at the poorly copied clipping. It showed two blurry men, a portly human and what I guessed was a handsome dimanian standing side by side in a park, arms around each other's shoulders. In his other arm, the dimanian held what appeared to be a baby. Below th
e photograph, the caption read, "New father Ray Wilem, son Robby, and Peter Black, godfather, enjoy the lamp light of mid afternoon at the Carcosa Grove church picnic."

  Robby.

  We were getting close. I could feel it. Robby Wilem had to be near thirty now, but he still had a father figure in his life, his godfather Peter Black. Was Black really our Black Goat? Was he the leader of the Children pulling his godson's strings, or was Robby acting alone? Either way there was something here, some connection. Coincidences can only be ignored when they are random. All these little coincidences were knotted together. Something was going on, something that tied into these murders. The ritual of it all. The timing.

  What had I brought back with me from Syringa? What was in that crate? Why had that delivery started a chain reaction of murders throughout Lovat?

  We had a trail, but it left us with as many questions as it had answers.

  I knew what I needed to do.

  "I need to go have a talk with Mister Black."

  FIFTEEN

  The doorman stood before the Hotel Arcadia like a gargoyle in a white calf-length jacket. I had forgotten about the doorman. There would be no way I could get around him. No way I could slip past his stern gaze and the iron hand that wrapped around the handle of the hotel's entrance.

  It had only been my letter that had gotten me past him on my last visit. Fresh from the trail, covered in the dust of the road, it was clear without the letter he would have never let me past. Looking down at the clothes I was wearing now, it was obvious to me that he would have the same reaction. My old jeans were washed but still faded and stained. The shirt I had borrowed from the rectory was too large and too plain to belong to a tenant of the Hotel Arcadia. The jacket I had picked up in West Lovat had started to fray, and the edge of my ball cap was stained from sweat. It was ratty attire that wouldn't help get me past the front door, let alone higher into the building.