A long, uneasy silence took the room. Hesha, standing straight and solemn by the window, looked out on Calcutta. Huge drops of rain slammed into the glass. Beyond the falling streaks and the gale-tossed deluge, the city lights were dim. Colored neon, traffic signals, garish signs, and bright street lights, all wavered like fountain lamps. Calcutta seemed a city underwater, and the Setite could not see even so far as the horizon.
“Report.”
Thompson and the Asp weighed in with the news of the last twenty-four hours. Names of strangers buzzed across Elizabeth’s ears: Pauline Miles had lost a man; Das Gupta and Forrest checked in; the team covering the White Town sighted Smith, Jones, and Robinson but had lost track of Tom, Dick, and Harry… Johnson, Jackson, Jameson…Alex, Abigail, and Albert Street. Ramona, Ramana, Ravena, Ravana…. Elizabeth’s attention strayed to her notebook, her hieroglyphs, her pen. The stream of information poured down around her like rain.
“What are you doing, Elizabeth?” Hesha’s voice, curt and angry, broke into her reverie.
“I came to watch the dancers perform,” she replied without thinking. “Tonight they are acting out the Rising of Ravana.”
“Elizabeth!” This time, the Setite’s tone cut through her, and she jumped. Her eyes met his like a cornered animal’s, and she stared. Hesha picked up her papers. The top three sheets were loose, covered in gibberish, shot through with fragments of thoughts in English, and overlaid with line drawings of the three-eyed demon statue. Impulsively, he tore them in half in front of her, then stalked back to the window. “Report, Elizabeth.”
Deliberately, Elizabeth Dimitros closed her notebook. She stood, angry-pale and tightly held together, leaning slightly on the glossy edge of the table.
“I will not.” Her jaw clamped shut. “I will not call you ‘sir,’ either. I am not a secret agent. I am not a decoy. So far, the closest I have come to my own profession is browsing the antique shop downstairs. I don’t know why you brought me here,” she drew a heavy breath, “and by now I cherish no illusions that you will ever tell me the real reason. I was doing what I could on the papyrus from here; I was memorizing Vegel’s transliteration notes. I was doing my best to ignore your illegal, impossible, inexplicable—since you never do explain when I ask—activities. You want to stop that, go ahead. I have work of my own I can do.” She limped around the chairs to her room. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here anymore.”
The door shut behind her, and the lock turned audibly.
Thompson and the Asp kept quiet. They looked briefly at each other, then kept watch—a fleeting, corner-of-the-eye, nervous watch—on Hesha. With control and precision, he folded the torn papers between his hands. He halved, quartered, and tucked them into the breast pocket of his jacket. Finished, he addressed the open phone as if nothing had happened.
“Janet. Report.”
Thursday, 22 July 1999, 4:02 AM
A subterranean grotto
New York City, New York
The dilapidated desk, large as it was, barely accommodated the stacks of books and papers piled all around the old, manual typewriter. The battered lamp nearby performed its duty even less adequately. Darkness threatened to swallow the desk, as well as the misshapen figure behind it.
The occupant, however, seemed to take no notice of its environs other than to prop its sizeable feet on the desk, very nearly shattering the fragile equilibrium of the various stacks. One piece of paper alone—the sheet held by gnarled, grime-encrusted fingers—held the creature’s attention.
Friday, 23 July 1999, 3:43 AM
The Oberoi Grand Hotel
Calcutta, West Bengal
Late and unannounced, Hesha strode into his suite. Thompson and the Asp, waiting, stood to receive him. With a nod, he dismissed the pair. Gratefully, they secured the area and went off to sleep.
“Good night, sir,” said Thompson, leaving.
No, thought Hesha, it was not. He stripped his raincoat of equipment, stowed the tools, and hung the dripping trench to dry. Emptying his suit pockets, he glanced at Elizabeth’s place at the table. Slowly, he set down two handfuls of tiny supplies. Abandoning shoes and jacket, he selected a thin, crooked piece of steel and stepped over to the woman’s door. With an ear and a hand, he listened through the wood, and found no sound but slow, deep breathing and faint, steady heartbeat. The steel drew back the dead bolt, and the Setite opened the door a crack.
Scents spilled out of the room: young woman, old books, ink and new paper, faint fear and anger and tears. Hesha followed the trail; here she had stood in fury, here she had begun to cry, here was terror…. He pulled the darkness safely around him, and crouched by the edge of her bed.
Hesha watched her thoughtfully.
It would be too much to say that he regretted losing his temper with her. His analysis, conducted behind the walls of his self-control, found his own conduct…unsatisfactory. It was unnecessary to bring the woman to the sundown conferences; it might, in fact, be dangerous. She had no need to know the greater picture, even in such limited views as his retainers were given. Elizabeth’s duties could be explained just as easily in private, face-to-face. She now lay farther from his influence than ever, across a rift, put there by his own lack of restraint. He had let the masks slip away over a trifle, over nothing. And he could not even put the blame on the curse. It was his own temper; the Beast had simply laid back and laughed at the show. Michel’s death was no excuse, no surprise. As he had lain last night in the flooded drainpipe, Hesha had known the Assamite child would finish her mission, one way or another, and had come to terms with all the implications, all the difficulties entailed.
Temper. Plain anger had gotten to him, and after the meeting, as he searched Calcutta, he had both carried it with him and found it everywhere. His Nosferatu contact had not appeared. That he—she?—was unavailable was reasonable, yet Hesha’s reaction was unreasoning annoyance. He drifted down to Albert Street and found Subhas holding sway in the coffee-house. The courtesy and deference of the white-haired gentleman slowly disintegrated; Hesha’s own civilized face fell, and the two old allies found themselves on the verge of all-out battle. Only the split-second’s hesitation, the fighting instinct that sized up the enemy before striking, kept them back. In the dead pause, the experienced, careful pair recognized the false feel of the argument. Hostility quickly turned to mystified calculation—something outside their close-guarded psyches pricked them toward war. Subhas laid his hands on the table, Hesha eased his chair away, and they parted without bloodshed.
As the Setite left the coffee-house, he’d noticed the two students coming in, and the sounds of the young Brujah losing their control—the fleeing patrons of the shop, the howls of the rabble-childer caught by Subhas in a fighting mood, the shattered windows and broken bones—followed Hesha’s keen ears down the street.
Seeking more clues, Hesha had waded through the rising water to the bridgeworks. Chaos reigned. The typhoon rained. The gypsy camps were flooding with the rest of the city, but what should have been an accustomed, annual retreat to drier perches was a screaming, surging confusion. A lone Gangrel, furiously calm, turned Hesha back the way he came. The cat-like creature had given out that the tribes were going mad, Bhanjaras and Khana Buddos all together. She blamed the Ravnos, and spat curses on them over her shoulder. Hesha left her before the rage could outweigh her determination to defend her charges.
No longer doubting the influence that pervaded Calcutta, the Setite turned to give the curse its due. He hit Park Street and the old cabarets, hunting as clumsily as a night-old Cainite. In his gut grew a fire such as he could not remember; beyond ordinary hunger, beyond the Beast’s gluttony—an awkward, unfrenzied, foundering desire. It drove him into a bar. He’d come out with a light-skinned, long-haired girl of Elizabeth’s age and build. Hesha pushed her into an alley and drained her dry without remorse. The Beast didn’t take him over, didn’t even try. Why fight for control when they were of one mind already? Complacent and conte
nted, it curled around Hesha’s new anger like a cobra around her eggs. And that made the Setite angrier still. Unnatural, he thought. Something deep and sinister was wrong in Calcutta. Hesha, on his guard now, believed he could fight its effects, but he prayed to Set that whatever it was would end soon. He prayed, too, that the elder denizens of the city knew themselves well enough to resist.
Elizabeth kicked slightly, and rolled onto her shoulder. Hesha stared down at her. Sleep had banished her worries…given her peace. Without consulting him, his hand reached out and stroked the hair away from the placid face. Her eyes twitched behind the lids, and her face began to twist into less happy lines. More nightmares. How does she know? The creature pulled his hand away, reset the locks, and sought oblivion in his own rest.
“Hesha…” said the god in the mask. “Blood of my blood.”
“Lord?” Hesha opened his eyes and sat upright. “What do you want of me?” His traveling casket and hotel room were gone; the blackness of dead dreams surrounded him.
“Look upon me.”
Hesha turned toward the voice, and made out shapes in the darkness. A vast, serpentine creature with a body like tar filled his vision. The night and the monster’s flesh met only at the horizon. Directly beneath him, the figure of a giant with the red mane of a lion, the beak of a bird, and the horns of a ram lay fettered in its coils. As he watched, the god in the mask writhed in his trap, his muscles straining until the veins stood sharply up. The god freed one arm, and the ropy limbs of his opponent flailed about him until they found better purchase on his neck. Freeing his neck, the god sacrificed the arm again, and the fight returned to its starting point.
“My lord,” said Hesha, kneeling. His own legs, he saw, were wrapped with the coal-black tendrils of the beast.
“Stand! You cannot afford to bow to me until I am free! Look, instead, upon my companions.”
On every side of the god in the mask, there were other figures. Some, lying quietly but with their eyes open, were nearly free of the creature. Others, equally still, were so covered by the tarry scales that nothing showed of their own bodies; the monster had conquered all, and only the shape of the victim remained. A few—very few—wrestled as the giant did.
“And look, now, at what stands behind you.” Hesha turned, and found only the empty darkness he had seen on waking. “Look up, blood of my blood, and understand.”
And Hesha followed the god’s commands, and realized that the night in front of him had a shape. It was a twisted pillar formed from the body of the thing below him, and it rose higher than a mountain into the dull sky of the dead. At its peak, wrapped almost entirely in the coils, was a figure the Setite knew well; he possessed a statue carved as its portrait. The demon, four-armed and hung with horrendous weapons, glinted black and blue and dripped red rivers of blood down the column that supported it. Rivers, thought Hesha. The blood of a hundred thousand men…a million…
“Grandfather sets now,” said the god in the mask. Hesha turned back to see his master, and as the dream faded, heard the muffled voice of Set shout from beneath the twining body of Apep: “Remember!”
“Is there something wrong, Thompson?”
Ron’s eyebrows shot skyward, and he swallowed hard. “You don’t remember, sir?” He perched on the edge of the table, and shook his head. “Hell.” He composed himself. “You woke up at sunset, and you shouted something—not in English—so loud the windows rattled. I came in to check on you.” His gaze flickered worriedly over his master’s face. “You don’t remember that? Well…you seemed to be meditating, and you didn’t seem to be under attack of any kind, so I left. That was about half an hour ago.”
The Setite combed through his memory. There was a dream…something important…gone. He picked last night’s suit jacket up off a chair, and sat down. Perhaps if he did meditate, the image would return. He doubted, though, whether the angry influence laid over Calcutta would permit calm, studied reflection, and the hotel, noisy with air conditioning and other people’s conversation, was a poor seat for contemplation at any time. Some woman was carrying on now, close enough to be heard. Hesha folded the coat between his hands and tried to clear his thoughts. Paper crackled under the cloth. He pulled the folded sheets out of the pocket and turned them over.
Elizabeth had drawn the statue—The statue was in my dream. In English, she had written her own name, Hesha’s names, ‘Dances of India, 6:30 Daily,’ rough alphabets, and then ‘the red king’ seven times and ‘the red star’ eleven. The printing, carefully formed, looked like scribe’s practice. Each iteration of the “r” in “red” grew more refined, and the English words trailed off into repetitions of the single letter, which became mixed with a pointed, horizontal oval—the mouth sign that stood for “r” in hieroglyphs.
Hesha looked back to the gibberish Egyptian. Of course…the woman, memorizing the characters, had practiced writing a language she was comfortable with: English. The writing was not nonsense; it was accidental code. He frowned, and started transliteration. “‘Ris’bth” was her own name. “Hsh’” was his, though the symbology chosen was atrocious. “Rwn’” should be “Reauna,” but…there was the same pattern, one letter different, “rfn’” which suggested, in India, “Ravana.” Her consonant shifts tended toward German…with difficulty, he extracted “red star,” “rakshasha,” “king,” ‘Mahabharata,’ and ‘awake.’
The Setite sat for a moment longer, listening to the echoes of the words in his head. Whatever had been sent to him during the day was lost for good, but he knew, without understanding why, that Elizabeth’s notes paralleled the dream.
“Ask Miss Dimitros to step in, if she would.”
Thompson grimaced, and began, painfully, “I…I don’t think she can, sir.” Hesha’s eyes pinned him, and he went on, “She’s delirious. She slept all day, and when you yelled, she woke up and started ranting about demons and ghosts and kings. I think she caught fever when she ran after you the other night.”
The Setite rushed past him and into Elizabeth’s room. She was sitting on the bed, trying to talk around the Asp, who was struggling, rather helplessly, to get her to lie down.
“…And the four travelers came to the City of Dreadful Night, to find the Prince of Ra—stop it. Stop it! Hey! But the King of the—let me go, you snake—but the King of the Rakshash slept under the heart of the mountain, and he heard the—” She broke off her story long enough to bite Raphael’s arm, and the Asp retreated, cursing in Italian. “But the Herald of Ravana sent the Monkey-devil to destroy the accursed wizard….”
“Leave us,” commanded Hesha, turning a cold, hard gaze on his minions. “I’ll see to her.”
Hesha picked his way over to the bed; the woman or the Asp had flung the blankets and sheets to the floor. Elizabeth, left to herself, sat tailor-fashion on the mattress, smoothed down her crooked nightshirt, and began reciting again.
“Once, in the City That Never Slept, there lived a young girl of humble family….”
“Elizabeth.” Hesha sat opposite her, and searched her eyes. There seemed to be nothing behind them. “Who sleeps under the heart of the mountain?”
“Ravana, King of Rakshasa, slept under the heart of the mountain for ten thousand years, but now he slept no longer. The mountain tore open from root to tip, and the King strode forth to meet the Three from the East.”
“Who is the Prince?”
“The Prince of the Rakshasa, Hazimel, who turned against his father and sleeps beneath the City of Dreadful Night.”
“What is the Red Star?”
Her face contorted nearly into tears. “The red star disobeys the Moon, Hesha. I walked on the floor of your ceiling, and the red star bored into the sky.” The empty eyes filled with pain. “Hesha?”
“I’m here with you, Elizabeth, but I can’t see very well.” He took her hands. “You’ll have to tell me where we are.”
“We’re in the fields outside the Prince’s tomb. There’s a storm coming, and it’s getting dark
er. The clouds are blotting out the sky.”
“Good. The red star will not see us. There should be a building very close by; a temple,” suggested the Setite. “It has lotus columns and statues leading to it. You can see the temple, Elizabeth.”
“Yes…” she hesitated. “But it wasn’t there….”
“It was always there, but you had not noticed it. We are going to shelter from the storm inside that temple, Elizabeth. I am walking toward it. Follow me out of the fields.”
Her expression changed. “This is a nightmare,” she said slowly.
“Come out of it, then. Can you see me? Follow me out of the dream.”
Elizabeth came to herself, suddenly, as though she were a rope let loose in a tug-of-war. Hesha kept watching her, wary that the trance would pull her back again. Her eyes cleared completely, and he forgot to look away, wondering what it was that made them light and dark at the same time. Surely, in three hundred years, he had seen eyes like hers before….
“Where have I been?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. Thompson thinks you were fevered; I think you were caught in visions. I had something of the same experience myself today.” Elizabeth looked down at their hands, still joined together. “Let me apologize for my temper last night. No one is quite themselves in Calcutta anymore.” Her gaze rose to his again, and he said, slowly, “I understand you followed me last night, after Michel was attacked. That was very brave of you.” He squeezed her hands. “Don’t ever do it again,” then added, “I want to know that you are safe.”
Hesha rose and opened the connecting door. “Thompson, Elizabeth and I are going out to dinner. You and Mercurio are welcome to do whatever you want,” he said, without turning to face his bodyguard. “Close your mouth. Calcutta is sufficiently dangerous tonight that you would not be able to protect us even if you had an army—and I think that Calcutta is in enough danger that it will leave us alone.”
Clan Novel Setite: Book 4 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 19
