Four Dominions
Page 1
FOUR DOMINIONS
Eric Van Lustbader
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
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About Four Dominions
The End of Days has been predicted for the last two thousand years, but now it is upon us.
A secret war has raged for millennia, a bitter conflict as old as time itself: the battle between Good and Evil. Brother and sister Emma and Bravo Shaw now stand at the epicentre of the confrontation, for they possess the only copy of The Book of Deathly Things – the fallen Archangel Lucifer’s first and last Testament.
While Emma and Bravo struggle to decipher the book’s dreadful secrets, Lucifer’s advance guard, the Fallen, are awakening. Should they reclaim the Testament, humankind will be irrevocably enslaved by the forces of evil. Time is running out, leviathan is coming, the apocalypse is nigh.
Contents
Welcome Page
About Four Dominions
Dedication
Shaw Family Tree
Prologue: One Year Ago
Part 1: The Apple
Chapter 1: Paris: Present Day
Chapter 2: Malta: Present Day
Chapter 3: London: 1918
Chapter 4: Addis Ababa: Present Day
Chapter 5: London: 1918
Chapter 6: Malta: Present Day
Chapter 7: Paris: Present Day
Chapter 8: Leith Hill, Surrey: 1918
Chapter 9: Malta: Present Day
Chapter 10: Paris: Present Day
Chapter 11: Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day
Chapter 12: Malta / Paris: Present Day
Chapter 13: Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918
Chapter 14: Malta: Present Day
Chapter 15: Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918
Part 2: The Rood
Chapter 16: Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day
Chapter 17: Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918
Chapter 18: Valletta, Malta: Present Day
Chapter 19: Paris / Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day
Chapter 20: Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918
Chapter 21: Malta: Present Day
Chapter 22: Vatican City: Present Day
Chapter 23: Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day
Chapter 24: Lalibela, Ethiopia / Hollow Lands: 1918
Chapter 25: Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day
Chapter 26: Hollow Lands, Malta: Present Day
Chapter 27: Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918
Chapter 28: Paris / Hollow Lands: Present Day
Chapter 29: Istanbul, Turkey: Present Day
Chapter 30: Hollow Lands: 1918
Chapter 31: Mediterranean, off the Coast of Malta: Present Time
Part 3: The Four Thrones
Chapter 32: Eight Miles High, En Route to Paris: Present Day
Chapter 33: Hollow Lands / Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1919
Chapter 34: Mediterranean, off the Coast of Malta: Present Day
Chapter 35: Red Sea, off the Coast of Eritrea: 1919
Chapter 36: Paris: Present Day
Chapter 37: Paris: Present Day
Chapter 38: Mediterranean, off the Coast of Malta: Present Day
Chapter 39: Red Sea, off the Coast of Eritrea / Cairo, Egypt: 1919
Chapter 40: Lat: 32°49′1.32″N, Long: 18°6′38.05″E: Present Day
Chapter 41: Paris: Present Day
Chapter 42: Paris: Present Day
Part 4: The Hollow Lands
Chapter 43: Arwad, Syria: Present Day
Chapter 44: Western Mediterranean / Arwad, Syria: Present Day
Chapter 45: The Hollow Lands: Present Day
Chapter 46: The Hollow Lands: Present Day
Chapter 47: The Hollow Lands: Present Day
Chapter 48: The Hollow Lands: 1919
Chapter 49: The Hollow Lands: Present Day
Chapter 50: The Hollow Lands: Present Day
Epilogue
The History Behind the Fiction
Further Reading
About Eric Van Lustbader
The Testament Series
The Jack McClure Series
The Shadow Warrior Series
The Sunset Warrior Cycle
The Jason Bourne Series
Also by Eric Van Lustbader
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For Linda & Dan,
who help keep me sane in an increasingly insane world
Shaw Family Tree
Last Five Generations
Prologue
One Year Ago
BRAVO SHAW SAID, “AFTER SEEING YOUR VISION RESTORED, after Fra Leoni told me what had happened to you, I—”
“Bravo, Bravo, my brother.” Emma Shaw, in his embrace, pulled her head back so their eyes locked. “I told you. I’m fine.” A hand gentling his cheek. “Please believe me.”
“I do, Sis. It’s just that... I missed you more than words can explain.”
She beamed. “We’re always in each other’s hearts. What more is there to say?”
Bravo and Emma Shaw, along with the newly orphaned Ayla Tusik, were aboard one of the Observatines’ private planes, twenty thousand feet above the Mediterranean, starting the first leg of their journey back to New York City. Bravo, as he’d promised his sister, had no more use for Istanbul. They’d been away for two years, since the explosion in the Greenwich Village town house that had killed their father and blinded Emma. They both missed home far too much to stay away any longer.
Ayla was sitting back in her seat, an ice pack on her throat. She was completely recovered from the fire and the thing that had crawled out of it; no mark remained on her forearm. It was as if the shadow-serpent’s coiling had never happened. She had tried to talk as Bravo and Emma were taking her out of the library, but all that had come out was a dry croak and an awful clicking sound painful enough to cause her to stop trying.
“You’re good,” Emma had said to her, over and over in the private ambulance. “You’re not going to die.”
Ayla had looked up at her and smiled, but it was Bravo’s hand she clutched tightly all the way to the airfield, while a doctor who worked with Bravo’s Order of Gnostic Observatines tended to her neck, injected her with a mild sedative, before checking Emma’s head bruise, cleaning and dressing Bravo’s wound. When the ambulance arrived at the airfield it had been met by the three-person flight crew. They didn’t blink an eye at the physical state of the trio. It seemed they were getting used to helping their passengers board.
The moment Bravo and Emma had seen to Ayla, made sure she was resting comfortably, they had fallen into each other’s arms. The return of Emma’s sight was a miracle. For Bravo, it was as if the clock had been reset to a time before the explosion. There would be a right moment for exploring the reasons and mechanisms behind the miracle, but now was not it. They were spent physically and emotionally. Now all they wanted to do was hug each other, drink the lemonade made with fresh Egyptian lemons that Lida brought them, and slide into a well-earned sleep.
Bravo went out like a light, as had Ayla. As for Emma, her sleep was fitful, shallow, stalked by creatures that were no more than shadows. She awoke with a start, her hair and brow slick with sweat. Her armpits felt swampy. She rose, went to the lav, and, after voiding, threw cold water on her face. Though it had only been three years in real time, the face in the mirror staring back at her seemed so strange. She had aged since last she had seen herself. She had to remind herself that everything had shifted while she had been sightless, the world had moved on, rolling from day to day without her. Looking back upon those years, she realized that she had felt marooned in a land of perpetual night, darker even than t
he dark side of the moon. And yet here she was now on the other side of it—fantastic luck or something else altogether, she couldn’t say. A surge of gratitude flushed her cheeks and neck, but soon enough the strangeness of it all began again to overwhelm her. She didn’t look the same—this was to be expected, she supposed—but not to feel the same was a mystery that, deep down, frightened her. Who was she now? Exhausted, she felt inadequate to the monumental task of finding out.
When she returned down the aisle Lida was refilling her glass. Bravo’s mouth was partly open, his features at rest. She felt such love for him. Everything they had been through in the last days had been worth it for this... for them to feel closer to each other than ever.
He had fallen asleep while looking at the Nihilus Inusitatus. On the seat beside him was the rolled manuscript that was supposed to have been the Book of Deathly Things, The Testament of the First One to Fall, Brother of Michael, the Seraph Lucifer, King of Kings. But Aither, the curator of the library at Alexandria in Egypt, had claimed that it was blank. In a way, she was glad that it was blank, that the real Testament remained hidden. The manuscript was terribly dangerous. It was even dangerous for the reader, for, as Fra Leoni had told them, anything to do with Lucifer, with that ultimate evil, was seductive. It could drag you into the abyss before you knew what was happening.
Even if the manuscript was blank, it did appear very old, but who knew if it was. She had read about numerous archeological finds purported to stand ancient history or the foundations of religion on their head, only to be revealed as fakes, ingeniously doctored by clever scam artists wanting to make a quick buck or be spotlit by their fifteen days of fame.
Idly, she reached over, took it up, settled back in her seat. Before she’d been blinded, and following her brother’s lead, she’d become an expert in the identification of artifacts. Within thirty minutes or so, she’d be able to tell whether its apparent age was real or fake.
The manuscript was covered in what seemed to be calfskin, or something like it, the sickly yellowish hue of an onion’s skin. A strip of some unidentifiable black cloth wrapped it tight, held it in a roll. That was enough to set off alarms inside her head. No cloth she knew of would have survived the centuries intact.
Unrolling the manuscript, she studied the first page. The paper was undeniably ancient—just how old she couldn’t tell without a laboratory. A conundrum, then. She leafed through page after page. Aither hadn’t been lying; not a single letter, character, or rune was to be seen; the pages were blank. She sighed. Now the whole thing seemed worthless. Who cared how old it was?
Her gaze drifted to the window. She watched the clouds, fascinated by their changing shapes, their seeming contradiction, so solid in their weightlessness. She was like a child again, remembering how it had been the first time her parents had taken her and Bravo on a plane. How her face had been plastered to the window, nose mashed nearly to the cartilage, her breath fogging up the Perspex. She could not get enough of the clouds and what wonders lay spread out beneath her, shifting with every breath she took.
The drone of the plane’s engines lulled her back to sleep, into a dream where a creature of immense size—not man, not lion, but a combination of both—was speaking to her with its tawny, final gaze. The light was dense, filthy, as if shining underwater or in a deep cave, its source some other place Emma could not imagine.
The beast crouched on a vast plinth made up of naked humans bent over double—thousands of them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, all bowed down in obeisance. It stirred its heavy thighs, half-rising, launching itself toward her.
At that moment, the plane hit an air pocket, and she awoke with a cry lodged in her throat like a bone. As the turbulence accelerated, everything around her trembled and resonated, as if in a wind tunnel. Her ears popped as the plane was momentarily sucked downward. Her shivering glass began to tip over. She reached out, caught it, but some of the lemonade slopped over onto the manuscript.
She cursed wildly, unsure what to do. Bravo would kill her. But then everything changed. The moment seemed to go on forever as secret writing slowly appeared on the ancient paper, invisible until sprayed with lemon juice. Something in the acid reacted with the kind of ink used to hide the text. It was an ancient method of keeping secrets—no one really knew how old. But the fact was before her: a text that had not been visible moments before.
Slowly, with infinite care, she spread more lemon juice on the pages until all of the text had been revealed. She knew she should stop, put this thing aside, wake Bravo, and tell him what she had discovered. But there was something pulling on her, a pinprick of envy, dark and heavy, that had caught her, a fishhook dragging her down to another place.
Why was it Bravo who found everything first? Why was it Bravo who got the special training? Why was it Bravo who received all the credit, all the accolades from the Order? Who had been elected Magister Regens? All because of their father, when she had been the one taking care of Dexter ever since their mother had died? She was as smart, she was as clever, but it was never her. Never her. Where was the fairness in that? And now, now, when they were becoming even closer, there was Ayla, insinuating herself into their lives. She saw how Ayla had hung on to Bravo all through the hectic, dreamlike drive to the airfield, clutched his hand like the two of them were bonded somehow, like she, Emma, was the outsider.
No, no, no. The fishhook was tugging, tugging, tugging at her. Not this time. This time was different. This time there would be an alternate ending.
Without a second thought, she flipped to the first page, where the first words had by fateful accident come alive, and started to read the mixture of High Latin and Old Greek, two languages in which she was fluent:
HEREIN THE TESTAMENT OF THE FIRST ONE TO FALL,
BROTHER OF MICHAEL,
THE SERAPH LUCIFER, KING OF KINGS
Part 1
The Apple
1
Paris: Present Day
UNDER A PORCELAIN-BLUE SKY, STRIPED WITH WHIPPED-cream clouds, Lilith Swan strode along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. She was tall, lissome, athletic. Dressed in a flowing ankle-length oyster-gray coat over a charcoal pencil skirt and a lacy blouse buttoned to her throat, she cut a stylish figure even among the chic Parisian, Japanese, and Arabic women entering and exiting the ateliers of the Faubourg’s high-end couturiers. The only curious note was the pink ballet flats on her feet, which were certainly not made for walking the sidewalks of any city. Her thick hair, the color of midnight, reflected both light and shadow. A raven’s wing dipped down from her sharp widow’s peak partially obscuring one eye. Her gait was both provocative and artless, as can be typical with athletes of a certain type. It obscured an inner tension, which was, perhaps, simply nerves.
She turned into a narrow storefront between Bottega Veneta and Prada, its only sign a discreet brass plaque that unknowing tourists passed by without even noticing. Inside all was cool, dim, perfumed. One wall held three shelves of meticulously handmade shoes, below which was a large mirror. On the opposite wall, above two leather chairs, hung a chart of the thirty-five steps taken by the shop’s master craftsman in assembling his made-to-measure footwear.
The master himself emerged from his workshop in the rear to greet Mlle. Swan. In one hand he held a pair of black suede shoes with five-inch heels.
“Finished,” he said with a huge smile, after they had exchanged familiar greetings. He held the shoes aloft. “Every detail precisely to your specifications.” He gestured. “Sit, sit. Please.”
Lilith lowered herself into one of the chairs, slipped off her ballet shoes, offered the shoemaker her right foot. The shoe fit like a glove, felt exquisitely cushioned, and yet when she tried both on, rising and walking toward the mirror, they felt sturdy, not even a hint of a balancing wobble from the stiletto heels.
“Magnificent, Albrecht,” she said, for the shoemaker had been born in the north of Italy, grew up speaking German and eating Alsatian schnitzel.<
br />
Albrecht beamed. He lived for his shoes. “Shall I wrap them for you, Mademoiselle Swan?”
“Oh no, I’m going to show them off, Albrecht.”
The shoemaker blushed. “Then I’ll just pack up your ballet slippers.”
Across the boulevard, hard by Moncler, was a small establishment, its plate-glass window revealing a spare number of exquisite pieces of jewelry—one each of a necklace and ring with a pair of ruby-and-diamond earrings artfully hung between them.
Inside, Lilith slipped on the platinum bracelet she had designed and had made for her. Two twining branches encircled her left wrist. She walked out with it on, feeling it against the bones at the base of her hand.
Her third stop was a block beyond, across rue Royale, where the Faubourg ended and rue Saint-Honoré began. There she picked up a pair of long hairpins made to her specifications, allowing the salesperson to push them through the dense gathered hair at the back of her head, so just the teardrop-shaped green jade ends were visible.
Just next door she popped into Ladurée Royale, entering the gilt-and-cream nineteenth-century Empire interior. She took a small marble-topped table, ordered a hot chocolate, thick and rich as a melted chocolate bar. She sat straight backed, with a flinty, determined air that often flustered those attending her, waitpersons, front desk personnel, salespeople. It was not so much that she disdained convention as she willfully had no knowledge of it.
While she slowly drank, she allowed herself to experience the pleasure of her new purchases. The caffeine and sugar helped clear her mind for the morning ahead. She felt calm and strong, the blood rushing through her, rich as the Ladurée hot chocolate. She felt ready for anything.
When she was finished, she paid and left, walked two blocks farther east, entered a large deep-cream-colored building on the corner of rue Duphot. The old-fashioned vestibule lit up at the press of a button; the light would go off after sixty seconds. Bypassing the claustrophobic elevator, she walked up the wide marble stairs, pressing the light button at each landing. On the fourth floor, as Europeans counted, she went down the shadowed hallway to the end, fished a key out of her handbag, and opened the door. It was a special key to fit a special lock that was guaranteed by the manufacturer to be pickproof. This was a legitimate claim, she knew, as the manufacturer was owned by the Knights of St. Clement, the order of which she was a newly elected member.