“Bear me across the water,” he said, trying to sound as confident as if he were telling a cabbie where to go. The giant turtle made no answer, so Sam decided to brazen it out. If this was the wrong choice he would probably bleed to death before he drowned. He hopped over the monster’s head to its great slimy shell, and struggled up to the top. The turtle began to swim as soon as he was aboard, rotating in place and then scooting toward the opposite doorway. As they arrived, but before Sam could disembark, a man stepped in front of the doors from an opening in the side of the little vestibule. He was dressed in an Army combat uniform with a standard Gentex helmet, but carried a sword instead of a rifle.
“Welcome, stranger,” he said, with a pure Texas accent.
“I want to pass the gate.”
“Cast away your ash-wood rod.”
“Why should I cast away my rod?”
“It is our way, and our ways are perfect,” the soldier answered.
Sam stepped off the turtle and handed over the rod to the soldier, who sheathed his sword and pushed open the green-painted iron doors behind him. Sam walked through and down another flight of stairs.
The floor of the octagonal room at the bottom of the stairs was not stone but packed bare dirt. In the center, impossibly, stood an ancient-looking apple tree. Its trunk was thick and gnarled, and its branches reached up only about fifteen feet to the stone ceiling. Half a dozen golden-yellow apples hung from its boughs—and a snake with scales like polished coal was coiled around the trunk, watching him with golden eyes.
On the far side of the room the jolly old fat man called Mr. Stone stood holding a golden sickle. Behind him a pair of bronze doors were decorated with astrological symbols. He said nothing.
What to do? Was he supposed to pick the apple? Or…was he supposed to not pick the apple? If this was a religious initiation, knowing how to avoid temptation would be important. Sam fell back on the useful question: What would a wizard do?
A wizard would pick the apple. No question.
Of course, the snake in the Bible had encouraged Eve to eat the fruit of the tree. Maybe this snake wasn’t a guardian, just window dressing.
Not much of a test, though. Unless the apple was actually poisoned…No, he had already decided to bite it. No second-guessing himself.
Which meant he was back to thinking like an engineer. How to get one of the apples without being bitten by the snake? He thought about trying to stab the snake with the copper knife, but he wasn’t at all sure he could kill it, and he suspected the outfit he had put on was entirely symbolic, not to be used. This wasn’t an old Infocom computer game where having the right item was the way to solve every problem.
How did people in myths defeat serpents? If he was a hero like Heracles or Gilgamesh he could just kill it. But the Apkallu weren’t a secret conspiracy of heroes, they were wizards. How did wizards defeat serpents? Well, they got heroes to kill them, mostly. Or…they knew a trick. Medea had helped Jason defeat the snake guarding the Golden Fleece by putting it to sleep.
Sam tried to command the snake as he had called up the giant turtle, but it gave no sign of obeying him. He closed his eyes and tried to sense what manner of spirit it was, but he couldn’t feel it at all. No, wait, he did feel something—a very faint presence, a feeling of hunger and wariness and not much else.
The snake was just a snake.
He moved slowly, circling the tree to where an apple dangled as far from the trunk as possible. He counted to sixty twice, giving the snake time to forget he was there. Then he leaped up, snatched the apple, and ran toward Stone. The snake made a dart at where he had been, but that was all.
A test of daring, not power. Sam looked down at the apple in his hand, then at Stone, who was absolutely poker-faced. That told Sam all he needed to know. He took a big bite of the apple. It tasted like apple. He didn’t feel any different when he finished eating it, except for a stickiness about the mouth.
He walked up to Stone and held up the core of the apple. This time the old man chuckled and took it from him. “Welcome, stranger,” said Stone.
“I want to pass the gate.”
“Cast away your silken girdle.”
“Why should I cast away my girdle?”
“It is our way, and our ways are perfect,” Stone answered.
Sam handed him the silk belt, and Stone opened the bronze doors. Another flight of stairs led down. How deep was he by now? Sam tried to remember if Chinatown was one of the parts of Manhattan with solid bedrock underneath it.
The stairs ended in another very dark room. The only light came from four open jars standing in the center of the room. As his eyes adjusted, Sam could see that the room was a perfect sphere about sixty yards across, with a walkway to a circular platform in the center where the shining jars stood.
Sam walked out to the platform and examined the jars. One held a shining gold disk, the second a shining silver one, the third had five brilliant little spheres, and the fourth a swarm of white dots. He looked up at the dark sphere, then back at the jars. As he looked into the jars he could feel faint presences, barely more complex than the snake in the other room. There was a sensation of willingness to these beings. They wanted to serve; he just had to figure out what to do with them.
Definitely engineer-thinking time. Should he try to command them into an accurate picture of the sky? Or choose a particular date?
He needed to cross the room. What powers would he invoke for that? Nithaya, the Lady of Swiftness, was the tutelary spirit of motion and transportation. She ruled the ten degrees of the Zodiac just east of Antares.
Sam put his hands into the jar of swarming white flecks, and commanded them to become the stars of the sky. With an almost joyous feeling the little flecks surged out of the jar and scattered across the dark spherical room. He found Polaris about halfway up the dome of the ceiling, and the Big Dipper almost directly overhead. The sphere of stars matched the sky he had seen a couple of nights earlier.
But he didn’t want tonight’s sky. He wanted the sky five months earlier, when the Sun had entered Sagittarius. Sam concentrated, willing the little shining flecks to rotate, shifting the room to December.
Next the planets. Since he began his magical studies Sam had paid a lot more attention to where the planets were in the sky. He put Mars into Capricorn, clustered Venus, Mercury—excellent!—and Saturn in Sagittarius, and set Jupiter in Virgo. The shining gold Sun disk he put just past the red speck of Antares, and the new Moon slightly to the left of the Sun. The silver disk dimmed to a charcoal gray as he placed it.
With no fanfare, the missing section of walkway now stretched from where Sam stood to the doors on the far side of the room. He wondered idly if the walkway had really appeared out of nowhere or if it had simply been hidden from his senses.
At the doors, which were silver and decorated with dragons and griffins, a tall bearded man in blue said, “Welcome, stranger.”
“I want to pass the gate.”
“Cast away your linen gown.”
“Why should I cast away my gown?”
“It is our way, and our ways are perfect,” the tall man answered.
By this point Sam didn’t even hesitate. He slipped off his robe, handed it to the man, and passed down the stairs wearing only a golden crown and carrying a copper knife.
By his count he had gone down at least six flights of stairs from the basement saloon. How deep could one go in Manhattan?
At the foot of the stairs was a small, dingy-looking stone room with a vaulted ceiling. The few remaining bits of plaster clinging to the damp stones were decorated with paintings of animals. A waist-high stone block stood in the center of the room and beyond it was a silver door decorated with images of men and women. Moreno stood in front of the door, and gestured silently at the table, which held a small glass bottle and a lit candle.
This was the moment Lucas had warned him about. The blood sample. His secret preparations had held up so far, but Sam didn’t li
ke the way Moreno kept watch on him. He stepped up to the stone, held his left thumb over the mouth of the bottle and remembered to wince as he stabbed the ball of his thumb with the copper knife.
The latex fake thumb covering his real thumb was only slightly bigger than the flesh inside it, and the material was pretty thick, so there wasn’t space for a large amount of blood between his skin and the inside of the fake. Sam squeezed the false thumb repeatedly, milking every drop. Fortunately it was a small bottle, no more than a couple of milliliters. Sam capped it, set down the knife, and stood back.
Moreno sealed the bottle with wax from the candle, then carefully stuck an adhesive label onto it and put the bottle in his pocket.
“Welcome, stranger,” said Moreno.
“I want to pass the gate.”
“Cast away your copper knife.”
“Why should I cast away my knife?”
“It is our way, and our ways are perfect,” Moreno answered, and he sounded more sincere than anyone else Sam had spoken to since descending the stairs. Since the knife was already lying on the table, Sam just waited for the doors to open, then went down what he hoped was the final flight of stairs.
He allowed himself one shaky sigh of relief. The worst was done. Moreno hadn’t spotted the fake. But someone else might! Sam paused on the stairs, wondering if anyone was watching. The gash he had cut in his fake thumb made it easy to tear the whole thing off. He couldn’t just drop it, though—someone might find it and realize what he had done. No place to hide it. Finally Sam put the rubber thumb which tasted of animal blood into his mouth and forced himself to swallow it.
At the bottom of the stairs Sam found a large five-sided room, lit by fancy stained-glass lamps on the walls.
A dog was chained to a ring in the floor. It looked like a husky mix, and wagged its tail when he came in. Hei Feng entered through the golden doors on the other side, carrying some kind of wooden mace. His free hand held a lit cigarette. He walked up to Sam.
“What is your true name?” Hei Feng asked him.
“William Phillips Hunter,” said Sam.
“Now we find out how true that is. Eresikin William Phillips Hunter iginudug Ruax. I command you to take this and beat the dog to death,” said Hei Feng. He extended the wooden club, which Sam could now see was a regulation Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
He had to obey unquestioningly, just as the old woman on the street had obeyed him. If he didn’t, Feng would know his name was false, and Sam would die. Sam accepted the bat and turned to the dog. It looked up at him, still wagging its tail. Its eyes were green.
“Sorry,” Sam whispered before he swung the bat.
Killing the dog took nearly fifteen minutes. By the end Sam was taking out his own anger at Hei Feng and disgust with himself on the bloody, screaming animal. His ears were ringing, his eyes stung with salt tears, and when he finished he dropped to his knees and threw up.
Feng knelt next to the lumpy, motionless mass of matted fur, carefully picking a patch of floor which wasn’t spattered with blood. He unfastened the tag shaped like a stylized bone from the dog’s collar, and murmured invocations to Mercury and Marduk. Sam recognized it as a binding spell, and could sense something filled with rage and pain attached to the tag.
“Here.” Feng handed Sam a warm damp towel. “Get yourself cleaned up. You passed. It’s time for your secret oath, and then we have to get the room ready for Shimon.”
Sam wiped himself down, and did not look at the dog he had killed.
“Now you will bind yourself to the Apkallu by your own blood and name. Repeat after me.” Feng led Sam through a long recitation in Sumerian. He had no idea what he was swearing to, but he knew that when he was done William Phillips Hunter was bound by magical oaths that did not apply to Samuel Simon Arquero.
As soon as he was finished, Feng pointed to a basket by the door, then turned wordlessly and left. Sam put his clothes back on, and took off the golden crown. Feng hadn’t bothered to ask him for it, but he knew the old myth. He left it in the basket and walked through the golden doors.
Beyond them was…the basement bar room where he had started. Somehow instead of going a hundred feet down he had come full circle. It was more crowded now, but the whole group turned and clapped as Sam entered.
“Welcome, brother,” said Hei Feng, and clasped Sam’s right wrist in a forearm-to-forearm shake. “You may now learn the secrets known to initiates. From this hour, no man or god rules you. Fear only the brotherhood which has accepted you: the Apkallu, those who are wise.”
Sam didn’t know of any appropriate response, so he just mumbled his thanks. Feng clapped him on the back and leaned close. “You’re part of my Circle now. I know your name and I’ve got your blood. It’s me you need to fear. Nobody else. Remember that.”
Chapter 7
A few people in the crowd introduced themselves, but Sam was still so horror-struck by what he had done that the names and faces passed right out of his memory. He did wind up at the bar, and was handed a weird kind of eggnog concoction, like runny Cream of Wheat mixed with yogurt, strong wine, and honey. What he wanted was a shot of vodka, but he took a sip just to be polite.
“Drink up,” said a familiar voice behind Sam. “I don’t know what name test Feng devised for you, but you look as if you could use something sustaining.” It was Lucas, looking amused. For the first time since he had turned up on Sam’s doorstep, he wasn’t wearing dark glasses, sporting instead a pair of black Buddy Holly horn-rims.
“Is this—is this kykeon?” Sam asked, remembering something he’d read about in an account of the Eleusinian mysteries.
“The original recipe, handed down for two hundred generations. I expect the wine is fruitier and the cheese less rank than when it was first mixed in bowls on the slopes above Shanidar. I’m called Lucas, by the way. Congratulations.” He extended a hand for Sam to shake.
To his left Sam noticed Isabella perched on a bar stool, two empty cups of kykeon in front of her, chatting energetically with an elegant-looking older woman.
Isabella saw Sam and waved. “You did it! I wasn’t a bit scared. Mr. Feng is really mean. Nobody’s ever going to boss me around with magic again.” She sounded cheerful, but Sam’s parental ear could detect the note in her voice of a child very near tears. He wondered what Feng might have ordered her to do, and then forced himself to stop thinking about it.
He finished his kykeon and switched to Bloody Marys. Thankfully this wasn’t the kind of bar that tried to stuff a whole salad into the glass, though the bartender did put a slice of pickled lotus root into the drink instead of celery, as a nod to the neighborhood.
MoonCat was with her mother—Feng had gone back to complete Shimon’s initiation. He noticed she was wearing a new bracelet, a sturdy bronze chain, and dangling from it was a dog tag shaped like a stylized bone. She sensed him looking and shot him a glare of pure hatred.
Shimon finished about fifteen minutes after Sam did, stumbling through the same pair of doors looking pale and disoriented. His parents took charge of him and made sure he drank his kykeon. He was still finishing when Feng called for everyone’s attention from the little stage at the end of the room.
“Now that we are all one blood, sworn and acknowledged, it is time for the secrets to be told. Tonight we are honored to have our grand Master Roger, the Sage of the West, to reveal that which is allowed.”
The extremely handsome young man who had opened the door for Sam stepped up to the stage and thanked Hei Feng, then began to speak. His voice was clear, but his accent was odd, neither quite English nor familiar American. He almost sounded like a West Virginia mountaineer Sam had known in the Air Force, and Sam remembered the man bragging that the Appalachian accent was the way the earliest English settlers of America had sounded.
The young-looking man with the old-fashioned voice told of Pramathas, the thief of fire and knowledge. Then he spoke of the son of Pramathas, Atra-Hasis, he who was wise, who survived a grea
t flood and became immortal. On the slopes of Mount Qardu, as the waters receded, Atra-Hasis struck a bargain—Roger didn’t say who he made the bargain with, which made the hair on Sam’s neck prickle. Atra-Hasis could not pass along the gift of immortality to his sons, but he was allowed to choose a boon for each of them.
Atra-Hasis gave his eldest son the gift of kingship, and sent him forth to people the land and rule it. His second son received the gift of priesthood, and went forth to build temples and honor the gods. But to his youngest son Atra-Hasis transmitted a secret legacy: instead of eternal life he could guarantee eternal death. His youngest son, and all who came after him who were wise in the secret knowledge, could ensure that his soul would truly die and vanish.
“That is the inward sense of the oaths ye have sworn and the blood ye have given,” said Roger, who sounded more and more archaic as he went on. “As the flesh of the body dies, so shall the ghost within. None shall raise ye up, and none shall pass judgement upon ye. That is the bargain of the Apkallu.”
Sam wasn’t sure how literally to take any of this. His father had been a Catholic who never went to Mass, his mother had bounced around among various Protestant churches with occasional forays into New Age “spirituality.” Was there such a thing as a soul? Did he have one? Did it survive after death? He didn’t know and he wasn’t sure who he would trust enough to ask.
When Roger finished, the party resumed, although Moreno did make a point of stopping to see each newly minted Apkal to explain the bylaws in plain language.
“It boils down to two main rules. First, keep the secret. That means not doing showy stuff in public, and it also means helping to cover up when the subs see something they shouldn’t.”
“Subs?”
“Subur. Men of clay. Ordinary people. The second rule is that any harm to an Apkal must be avenged—I only get involved when someone can’t do it himself. Themself. Whatever. If you have a dispute with another member, it gets resolved by the Master of your Circle. In your case that would be Mr. Feng.”
The Initiate Page 7