Emmett seemed to consider. He rifled through the tangle of papers and extracted a particularly grease-smeared specimen. Wiping it off on his pants leg, he held it out for Talbott to take. He gave the gatekeeper a conspiratorial nod.
To his credit, Talbott accepted the scrap unflinchingly. Glancing down at the paper, he saw it bore a crude, childlike drawing—a single, lidless yellow eye.
“I will return shortly. You may take your ease near the central fountain. There is refreshment to be had there as well. Please feel at home. The shadow of the pyramid is long; there is room enough for one more to shelter beneath it.”
Emmett, looking more than slightly exasperated by these polite formalities, grunted, turned, and skulked off in the direction of the fountain.
“You must be Emmett.” Aisling Sturbridge took her guest by both hands in welcome. Emmett stood, casting a helpless glance back at his parcel of papers still lying open and exposed on the bench near the fountain. Presiding over the scene, the severe Aztec faces carved into the fountain’s step pyramid seemed to regard the clutter with mild distaste.
“You’re Sturbridge.” Emmett stared at her for an interval far too long to be considered polite. “He said I could trust you. Donatello, I mean. He said you helped him out of a jam, that you said he was…” Emmett broke off in discomfort.
Sturbridge suppressed a smile. “Beautiful, perhaps? Yes, I did tell him that. The first time we met. He is very dear to me, Emmett.”
“He’s an ugly little bugger,” Emmett replied gruffly. “But he’s all right. And he said you’re all right. And that you’d know if anyone would. Calebros said you were the one at the council in Baltimore. And that you brought the sketch—the one with Leopold in it. And the Eye.”
Sturbridge let him talk himself out, but she was no more enlightened than when he had begun. “I’ll help you if I can. What is it you’re trying to find out?”
A look of frustration flitted across his face. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. Leopold, the Eye, the sculpture. I’ve got the pictures right here.” He pointed back at the parcel.
“All right, then. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Emmett held the packet out proudly at arm’s length, as if presenting a trophy. Sturbridge took it carefully. The knotted twine unraveled at her touch. Cautiously, she pulled back the fish paper. The photo staring back at her from the top of the pile showed an unhewn cave wall, smeared in an unintelligible jumble of words, symbols and pictograms—all of them drawn in blood.
The photographer had been very thorough. Along the right-hand side of the picture, a yardstick stood to give the viewer a clear indication of scale. The macabre scrawl covered the wall to the height of about ten feet, as well as much of the ceiling above. Sturbridge whistled low, thumbing through the first dozen or so photos. More of the same. One would hardly believe so much blood was in a body.
“What am I looking at here, Emmett?” Sturbridge spread the photographs out upon the floor, slapping them down one at a time, like playing cards. There was a note of alarm in her voice that was picked up and echoed in the sharp flip of each new photo. Two dozen. Three dozen. She had hardly made a dent in the pile.
“That’s the cave. The Gangrel, they are calling it the Cave of Lamentations. It’s where… What’s wrong?”
Sturbridge cursed, her arm checked abruptly midway through its downward swoop. The photo hung in the air like an accusation. She stared at the picture intently as if unable to let it drop. “That’s them. This is where Xaviar’s warband was massacred. But this? Christ, look at what he’s done to them.” She set the photo down tentatively, as if further rough handling might heap some new sufferings upon the unfortunates depicted there.
Emmett did not have to look to know which photo she had come across. “Number forty-three. Leopold’s masterpiece. Catalog number, time and coordinates are listed on the reverse. That’s not the worst of them, I’m afraid. That one’s only the first of the long perspective shots on the sculpture. There’s some close-ups of the detail work a little later on.”
Sturbridge’s tone was distant. “It’s so vivid. It’s as if they were still…”
“Alive? I don’t know that I’d call that living. But some of them did stir. And moan. And some of them turned instinctively to the smell of fresh blood. Like sunflowers. You’ll see. It’s almost as if they’re mugging for the camera.”
Sturbridge’s mind barely registered his words. She had fallen victim to the steady rhythm of the ghastly parade of images, mesmerized. Slide, flip, slap. Slide, flip, slap. She had no choice but to carry the operation through to its inevitable conclusion.
By the time she had finished, there were hundreds of photographs spread out around her like a protective circle. She crouched at the very center of the diagramma, studying each card before her, its placement, its relationship to its neighbors, as if she were attempting some audaciously elaborate Tarot reading.
She sighed, coming back to herself. “Okay, this monstrosity, it’s definitely the remains of the Gangrel warband. Someone, presumably this Leopold, arranged them there. Within the sculpture. I don’t know what to make of this bloody scrawl. It’s all nonsense. No, literally. Linguistics isn’t my specialty, but you’ve got at least six distinct alphabets here. Maybe two dozen different languages all jumbled together. And that’s not counting the pictographic, numeric and purely abstract elements. I’d say whatever else this Leopold might be, we are dealing with a sharp intellect that has become dangerously, murderously insane.”
Emmett nodded, muttering under his breath. “And he’s not the only one. But can you decipher it? Any of it? I was kind of hoping that it might be, well, thaumaturgical. I mean, with all the blood, and the sacrificial victims, and the occult symbols…”
Sturbridge shook her head, her fingertips trailing across the rows of photographs. “That’s no blood ritual that I’ve ever seen before. And I do have more than a passing familiarity with that particular field of study.”
Emmett was deflated at having the ground cut out from under his pet theory so swiftly. “Nobody’s questioning your credentials, lady. If you say it ain’t blood magic, that’s good enough for me. It ain’t blood magic. Any chance it could be Koldunic?”
She took her time about answering. “No, I don’t think so. That’s one of the things that’s been bothering me, though, the whole time I’ve been flipping through these pictures. This entire macabre scene feels very ‘Tzimisce’. At first I thought it was just that damned sculpture. But it’s more than that.”
She searched out a particular photograph and handed it to Emmett. “This dragon motif, it’s repeated over and over again, as if it were chasing its own tail around the cavern. It is depicted several times in the crude drawings. And the word ‘dragon’ itself appears in at least five or six languages. And it’s one of the three major movements in the arrangement of this scrawl.”
“What do you mean, ‘movements’?”
“As I see it, there are three distinct movements here, like in a musical composition. The dragon is the second of the three patterns running throughout the scrawl. But these patterns are difficult to pick out, much less to keep your grip upon. Look, here.” She indicated a photo at her right hand and then proceeded to trace out the writhings of a great wyrm as it coiled its way through the litter of photographs.
“But what does it mean? And what are these other two movements you mentioned?”
“What does it mean? I certainly would not like to hazard anything so precise as a translation. The linguistic elements are a complete jumble. Offhand, I’d say you would be better off approaching these ramblings by way of the drawings. Although I must admit that there seems little enough of substance to go on there either. Let’s see what we can piece together.”
Emmett noted that she ignored his latter question. Sturbridge stretched and began to gather examples of the crude, fingerpainted artwork. “You’ve got all your standard apocalyptic trappings—your dragons, lions, eagles,
angels, demons, etc. So I would be surprised if your ‘text’ did not turn out to contain some prophetic announcement heralding the end of times. But then again, the imagistic content is diluted with rather typical cultist elements—your pentagrams, borrowed Tarot imagery, and band logos. It’s hard to tell what, if anything, may be significant. Did you think to bring me a sample of the blood? That might take some of the guesswork out of it. The blood harbors very few secrets from us.”
Emmett’s hand strayed unconsciously to the pocket of his shabby overcoat, as if to reassure himself that the vial he carried was still secure. But he did not produce it for her inspection. “Would it surprise you to learn,” he replied, “that the blood—all of it, so far as we can determine—is from a Malkavian?”
Sturbridge looked skeptical. “You’re saying this Leopold is a Malkavian? How does a Malkavian do that? It’s hard to credit. At the council meeting in Baltimore, Victoria Ash claimed that Leopold was a Toreador of her acquaintance from Atlanta.”
Emmett snorted. “How does a Toreador do that? So where does that leave us? It looks like we’re right back at square one. You’ve already shot down my best guess—that he was a Tremere. No offense. What about these other two patterns? These movements?”
Again, Sturbridge looked distracted. “None taken,” she muttered after a while. “Actually, that was one of the other things that was bothering me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I told you this wasn’t a thaumaturgical ritual. But just because it’s not blood magic does not mean that it has nothing to do with the Tremere. It’s those three movements again. The first one is the Eye. That’s what started all this. Musically, the Eye is the prelude to the entire composition. It’s what empowers Leopold to massacre the Gangrel. The Eye is what pushes Xaviar over the edge and nudges the Gangrel out of the Camarilla. It may well be generations before we see the full consequences of all that the Eye has set in motion.”
“Assuming we’ve got generations,” Emmett interjected.
Sturbridge let the pause stretch a bit too long for comfort. “In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the great god Horus is represented by a single unblinking eye. They say the universe exists only by the grace of Horus gazing upon it. Very soon now, he must surely blink and, when that all-seeing eye closes, all of creation will be snuffed out.”
“But you said the Eye was only the first movement, the prelude. The end of the universe is going to be a tough act to follow.”
Sturbridge smiled, a gesture without warmth. “The second movement is the dragon. It is a continuation of the initial energy, but a variation upon it, a complication. The Eye is devoured by the dragon, but it is not destroyed. Its influence over Leopold has become usurped, corrupted. Now we see the creation of Leopold’s masterwork, his altar of living flesh. It is a perversion of the natural rhythms of both life and death. The music here is the stirring of something deep, something ominous, something forbidden.”
Emmett was already making connections of his own, drawing out further meanings Sturbridge could not have intended. “But the serpent can’t hold onto the Eye, can he?” he said excitedly. “It nearly kills him. It goes back to Leopold. And then Leopold disappears.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“That’s okay. You just keep on doing what you’re doing. Movement the third?”
Sturbridge looked uncomfortable. “That’s where the Tremere come in. I don’t know how much I can expound upon this. The third movement is the Malum. The apple. The forbidden fruit. It’s the symbol of our temptation and fall from grace—of the price my people had to pay for their immortality. And, in particular, it is the symbol of the one who laid this double-edged gift before the founders. Goratrix.”
“Are you telling me that the final theme of this bizarre composition has something to do with the Tremere renegades, the antitribu?”
“Look, Emmett. All I’m saying is that I’ve been to enclaves where the Fallen Ones had performed their dangerous travesty of the initiation rites. And those places didn’t have half the ritual trappings of House Goratrix that these cave paintings of yours have.”
“Shit. I thought those bastards were all…gone.”
Sturbridge regarded him levelly. “So did I.”
Emmett was talking to himself now. “So the worm devours the Eye and the apple devours the worm. Well, what could they do with it? I mean, if House Goratrix got hold of the Eye, or if they got some hold over Leopold, what could they do?”
Sturbridge didn’t answer. “We need to find Leopold.”
Wednesday, 3 November 1999, 1:30 AM
Morehead Park, Brooklyn
New York City, New York
Hesha found Ramona on the park bench—the same park bench where Pauline had waited for the Gangrel just over two months ago. He noted that she was wearing the boots he and Calebros had insisted upon.
Smart girl.
She was defiant at times—most times—but not so much as to be stupid. She could be reasoned with, and she had proven quite useful thus far. Hesha doubted that he would ever have been likely to wring the correct knowledge of how to cure the Eye wounds from her former Ravnos companion. Ramona seemed to have some second sight where the Eye was involved, as well. She’d been reluctant to describe or explain it to him, but she had found the cave. She’d seen it from the helicopter when Hesha hadn’t, despite the fact that he’d been there before and they’d been following his own directions, which should have been completely reliable.
“Any luck?” she asked when she saw him.
“With the gem? No. Still no sign.”
“What about in Baltimore?”
“My meeting with the Malkavians was…interesting, but they were not able to tell me anything conclusive about the pictures.” My dealings with Lucinde were far more fruitful, he thought, but there was no need to burden Ramona with such details.
“So we just keep doing nothing,” Ramona grumbled. Her index finger, a long and lethal claw, was digging troughs into the park bench.
“We keep waiting,” Hesha said. “The last we know of the Eye it was in the city—”
“Man!” Ramona slapped her legs. “If you coulda just held onto the damn thing…”
“Indeed. I would have preferred that myself. It would have saved me a great deal of discomfort.”
“No shit.”
“As you say. At any rate, here is where I can be reached.” He handed her a card. “Since you are less easily contacted on short notice, I suggest you check in with me regularly. A phone call will suffice. And if you do not mind…” he produced a pager from his overcoat pocket and handed the device to her.
Ramona took it. “Probably a good idea.” She glanced again at his card. “You not staying down below anymore?”
“I have made other arrangements, though I am in constant contact with Calebros as well,” he said. The creature knows too much to abandon. He, too, is useful.
Thursday, 4 November 1999, 3:51 AM
A subterranean grotto
New York City, New York
The storm is coming, he tells me, Calebros thought. Although this city has roiled for years with clashes of Sabbat and Camarilla under cover of darkness, all this has been as nothing compared to the firestorm that approaches. The remaining power of the East Coast Camarilla, rather than drowning, would fling itself against the rocks. Pieterzoon and Bell would attempt to capture this greatest of cities, which both sects claimed. Generally the Sabbat held sway above ground, except in the heart of Manhattan, home to the Ventrue elite. The streets and most of the city however were Sabbat, if anything. Though the war to the south had drawn much of the riffraff, and the city was safer now than it had long been.
That is how they might win, Calebros’s guest had said. Pieterzoon and Bell might carry the night. It would be a close thing. And soon. That much Cock Robin knew for certain.
Exactly how the Nosferatu justicar knew, Calebros could not say, and it was not his place to ask. But Cock Robin�
�s news was not so different from rumblings Calebros had been receiving from sources both in Baltimore and here. Where his reports had produced merely guesstimates and possibilities, however, Cock Robin spoke of firm dates and times. The justicar brought other news as well.
He leaned close to Calebros and spoke, hardly above a whisper. “Vitel…gk-girik…destroyed.” Cock Robin’s head was stretched and twisted, his pale lips irreversibly puckered and broken by clefts. He uttered words only with self-conscious difficulty, and that he chose to speak to Calebros at all was a badge of honor for the warren chief.
Vitel. Destroyed. Calebros nodded. He knew better than to look the justicar in the eye. Cock Robin was intensely sensitive, even among his own, and prone to violence. Calebros had seen what became of those who angered him, and did not wish to follow in those footsteps.
They had sniffed out the rat, and it was Vitel. Calebros knew many of the details—Colchester had been instrumental in discovering the traitor; Colchester was also a prolific source of information for Calebros—but he had not known that the deed had been done. “Last night?” It had to have been, or he would have known already. Cock Robin nodded. “Who?”
“Bell. Piet-gk-gk-zoon.”
Bell and Pieterzoon. Mostly Bell, no doubt. He was a bruiser, but not just a brute. If Colchester had ferreted Vitel out and Pieterzoon set him up, it would have been Bell who’d pulled the trigger.
Despite the wealth of information the justicar brought with him, he was not there as a messenger. It was news of Calebros’s that had brought Cock Robin to the city, coincidentally with the Camarilla-Sabbat conflagration that was soon to erupt. “Pet-gk-gk-don?”
“Yes,” Calebros said. “We have learned of three Kindred that were involved. One has been dealt with. A Giovanni. He will spread word among his clan and serve as a warning. We believe him to have been but a dupe. The second, Leopold, is more complicated. We are watching for him. He should lead us to the third, a Tremere. It seems this Leopold may have been kine still at the time. He was deceived as well, but he cannot be suffered to survive at this point; he’s drawn too much attention.”
Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga Page 16
