“No, it’s like, I don’t know, like a barrier. I can feel the memories, I just can’t access them. They’re like fish swimming in the shadows. I can’t make out their form or substance.” He rubbed his temples. “Frankly, it’s driving me a little bit crazy.”
“I think that’s the idea.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Emma did this to you.” She took out her mobile. “Whatever happened to you is more serious than any of us can assess here. I’m going to call the medivac personnel in. They’ll take you out to the chopper by stretcher, and then to hospital.”
“Stop!” He put a hand on her mobile. “Think, Ayla. Think what we’re dealing with. Do you really believe any doctor, any hospital, is equipped to understand what happened to me?”
Slowly, carefully, she peeled his hand off her phone.
“Ayla, listen; listen to me. What will we tell them? About the bronze crucifix, the black eyes with an occult sigil in their centers, the blue fire that repels demons but doesn’t burn, the disembodied voice shouting into the wind? Who would even listen to such nonsense?”
“We can go to the other members of the Haut Cour.”
“No, we can’t,” Bravo said firmly. “No one but us knows about the Nihil; no one can know. The knowledge is too dangerous.”
“At some point they need to know the scope of the danger facing us.”
“That day will come,” Bravo said. “But not today, not when my memory has been impaired.”
“Well, at the very least they should know you’re okay.” She hefted the phone. “Can I tell them that?”
He nodded. “That and only that.”
While she made the call, he turned to Elias. “I’m going to need you; you understand that, don’t you?”
“I want to help any way I can.”
Bravo grinned. “You’ve already been a great help. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“The feeling’s mutual, you know.” He fingered the crucifix. “We came into each other’s lives at just the right moment, don’t you think?”
“I do.” Bravo gestured. “So tell me, where did you get that?”
Elias narrowed his eyes a bit. “Hey, d’you remember you asked me that?”
“No. When?”
“Right before your sister saw it and fainted.”
Bravo beat his fists against the sides of his head. “What did she do to me?”
Elias took hold of Bravo’s wrists, gently pulled his hands away from his head. The boy was far stronger than he looked. Another anomaly in what seemed to be a sea of them.
“How will knowing where I got the crucifix help you?” Elias asked. He had the demeanor of the High Lama—an old soul, for certain.
“Did your father give it to you?” Bravo glossed over the boy’s question.
“No. I found it here.”
“And why, precisely, did you decide to live here?”
“I didn’t.”
“What d’you mean?”
“I was kind of, I dunno...” The boy shrugged. “I was I guess drawn here. Don’t know any other way to describe it.”
Something was stirring inside Bravo, but when he tried to see it, it danced away, vanishing into shadows. “Drawn how?”
“Oh, well, that one’s easy, at least. The voice told me to come here.”
“The old man’s voice.”
“Yeah.”
“Creaky with age.”
“Like an old tree, right.”
At this point, Ayla, finished with her call, cut the connection, returned her attention to them.
“What’s going on?”
“Bravo’s trying to remember,” Elias said with an amusing eagerness.
Ayla frowned. “Maybe you’re trying too hard. Maybe the best thing is not to try. Maybe then your subconscious will be able to access the memories for you.”
Bravo sighed. “Yeah, maybe.”
Deciding to take the situation in hand, she said, “Whatever else we need to talk about can wait. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“I told you I’m not—”
“I don’t care what you told me, you need immediate medical attention.” She held up a hand to forestall another objection. “And I promise you we’ll keep the weird aspects to ourselves. You were assaulted; that’s all the docs need to know.” She turned to the boy. “Got that, both of you?”
The boy grinned, nodding.
She punched a number into her mobile. “At the least the doctors can give you a thorough physical workup, patch up anything that needs it.”
They were coming now; Bravo could see their LED torches swinging, hear them crossing the rubble barrier into the castle proper.
*
OBARTON WORE expressions the way other people wore clothes—as both fashion and protection. The expression he wore when he met Lilith at Charles de Gaulle Airport was one of such self-satisfaction that it was all Lilith could do not to bitch-slap him across his fat cheeks. She had rarely loathed someone as profoundly as she loathed Obarton. He was the living embodiment of every authority figure that had ever stood in her way.
She thought of Obarton as a eunuch; he belonged in a sultan’s harem, guarding the sorority of nubile wives and concubines he was unable to touch or even denude with his eyes in the way of real men. She had known a man like Obarton, a self-important gasbag who thought he had all the angles figured, all the ways to extract from life power, prestige, and wealth that did not belong to him. Lilith had had the misfortune to work for him when she was seventeen. Her father had used his contacts to get her the job, and to her father she could never say no. She looked twenty-two and her father claimed that as her age; she did nothing to refute that, seeing as how, at that tender age, it amused her to be thought of as older. It was curious, she would later think, that girls longed to look older, while when they grew into adults they did everything under the sun to appear younger.
She was witness to the ways her boss suckered the suckers, used their money to fund his lifestyle while dazzling them with his charisma and promises of riches. At that time, to ride his coattails, to boast of being part of his empire, to bask in his reflected glory, was all the rage. As may be imagined, this wheeler-dealer had many secrets, but his most secret of secrets was the SEC official he had in his back pocket. This was the man who koshered all his deals, kept the watchdogs from turning their calculating eye on him, and participated in her boss’s obscene profits. Until he didn’t.
Lilith, who’d had it with the male bullshit that kept her firmly under her boss’s, and not coincidentally her father’s, thumb, seduced the SEC official, bringing him to a hotel room she had rigged with camcorders artfully placed out of sight of everyone but herself. Along with the incriminating tape she sent him the day after their inordinately frisky couplings was a photocopy of her birth certificate, incontrovertible proof that he had repeatedly fucked a minor. As Lilith knew they would, these unsavory documents had a profound effect on the SEC official, who was married, with three young children. She had given him but one choice. From it unspooled all of her boss’s dirty tricks, triggering public outrage, a series of nasty lawsuits, bankruptcy, and the eventual incarceration of her former boss. She was out of a job, of course, but that was part of her reward to herself.
Now, as she sat in the First Class lounge, drinking a beer with Obarton, she felt again that righteous anger that had fueled her destruction of the wheeler-dealer. She sensed history repeating itself, another chance to bring a so-called titan down into the mud where she could tread on his fat neck. Safe to say that Lilith held a prodigious grudge against virtually all men with which she had never come to grips.
Now her thoughts scattered like autumn leaves in the wind as Obarton, leaning forward, handed over a manila envelope. “Your tickets, et cetera.”
“Where am I off to?”
“Let me first explain your mission.”
“You said go after the Fallen.”
Obarton offered he
r a rebuke by way of a pained expression. “It’s not that easy.”
“What is?”
Having handed off the packet, Obarton sat back, hands laced in his ample lap, contemplating her in the manner of a professor deciding how best to deal with a thoroughly disappointing student. “I would have thought that the example I provided would make it clear that we cannot go after the Fallen in any direct manner.”
Lilith, smiling sweetly, thought, We’re not going after them, but never mind.
“Your first step, Lilith, is to make contact with Bravo Shaw’s sister, Emma.”
“I thought you told me not to set my sights on the Gnostic Observatines.”
“And I stand by that statement. Emma Shaw is the weak link in the Gnostic Observatine leadership chain; we can get to her far more easily than we can her brother.” He lifted a porky forefinger as if to forestall any dissent. “More important, she has some kind of intimate connection with the Fallen.”
Lilith shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Under specific orders, my spies are more active than ever.”
My spies, Lilith thought. She could already feel the sole of her shoe flattening the cords of his neck.
“Information has come to me that Emma Shaw has had... shall we say direct contact with one of the Fallen. We believe the incident has left her vulnerable. You are to take advantage of that vulnerability, befriend her, discover everything you can about the Fallen. The more you can find out the more quickly we’ll be able to assess their strength and, most important, their own vulnerability. This is how we will fight them.”
Lilith wondered whether Obarton had gone insane. She sincerely hoped not; that kind of impairment would undercut the future for him she foresaw at her own hands.
“I assume your spies have kept track of Emma. That you’re sending me to her last known location.”
“Despite your rather disturbing anti-authoritarian streak, it must be said that you catch on quickly.”
Obarton drank off the rest of his beer, rose, and without another word left her to pass through Immigration and Security.
*
AFTER THE doctors had tested him, worked him over, tended to the wounds’ seepage, forced him to start taking a course of antibiotics, prescribed a specific period of rest he had no intention of taking, Bravo sat in a chair, staring out the window at the Baroque buildings of Valletta. Clouds were building along a front. Once or twice lightning sizzled like a defective high-pressure sodium vapor streetlight. Thunder rumbled through the streets like army tanks.
“There’s something I need to show you,” Ayla said. Elias was down in the cafeteria, eating up a storm.
From her bag, she produced the series of photos she’d taken of the last, seemingly blank page of the manuscript, all extreme close-ups of the peculiar sigil that had subverted the Seal of King Solomon. She said nothing, wanting Bravo to form his own conclusions.
For a long time, he studied the photos with his critical eye. Outside, the sky darkened, the wind rose like the flocks of starlings that fluttered and swooped between rooftops. Then the first spatter of rain fell against the pane like a blow from a fist.
“I see it,” he said at length, “but I can scarcely credit it.”
“It’s there, all right,” she affirmed. “The scope doesn’t lie.”
“No, of course it doesn’t.” He scraped a palm across the stubble that had formed over the week of his convalescence. “I assume we’re talking about the same thing: the crescent moon’s inverted horns.”
“Yes, of course. What else would it be?”
“This,” Bravo said, pointing. “That is to say, these specks. Microscopic granules.”
Ayla leaned forward to get a closer look. “Good Lord, I was so fixated on the seal’s anomaly I didn’t even pick them up.... These are the same specks we noticed on that square of cloth you brought back from the Arizona mountains.”
“I assume Bram put them under the electron scope and the mass spectrometer.”
Ayla nodded. “Neither of them could get a fix on what they were.”
“I’m not surprised,” Bravo said.
Ayla cocked her head. “How d’you mean?”
“Let me answer you by posing a question: What if these specks are residue from some process effected by King Solomon’s cadre of alchemists?”
“You mean they’re a substance—”
“Unknown in atomic makeup to both Bram’s educated eye and the mass spectrometer.”
“What do you think these are the residue of?”
“All I can do is give a guess,” Bravo said. “What if they’re from the gold Solomon’s alchemists conjured up?”
“What?”
“First, the cloth. We thought it was the Veil of Veronica. But it isn’t the Veronica, as you and Bram discovered. It’s much older—as old, your research shows, as the mysterious blank manuscript. So what was the cloth used for? Why was it so valuable?
“Now, recall that the gold was created after Solomon died. It was his son’s doing. Some of the king’s alchemists defected, refusing to be part of the project. Why? Because to do what he wanted the alchemists had to use infernal means. Bringing the alchemical gold into being caused the first crack in the portal between our world and the prison into which Lucifer and the other Fallen had been consigned.”
Ayla was staring at him. “If you’re right, then it’s possible that the cloth was a wrapping for some of the gold. It’s also possible that finding Solomon’s gold could be the key to stopping the Fallen.”
Bravo nodded. “The composition of the gold could be manipulated to reverse the process—send the Fallen back to where they belong, and resealing the portal after them.”
“This is potentially great news!”
“But...”
She frowned. “But what?”
“But I very much fear that if we don’t find the gold and effect the change before Lucifer himself is freed, nothing will be able to put the demons back in their bottle. We’ll all be doomed to living under Satan’s rule.”
13
Lalibela, Ethiopia: 1918
THEY ARRIVED IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS. HAVING TRAVELED by ship from London to Cairo, thence south along the Red Sea via felucca and dhow to Djibouti, and lastly by camel caravan, crossing into Ethiopia, Conrad and WBY finally caught sight of their destination.
It was an arid morning. A colossal red sun was already hanging above the eastern horizon, its light burning everything it touched. Dust and sand, sand and dust—these were the primary impressions they took with them into the interior of the country, as they headed toward Lalibela.
Conrad had been to Ethiopia before, but not this particular area, his previous activities being confined to the district in and around Addis Ababa. Unlike the capital, Lalibela was in northern Ethiopia, almost directly west of the city in which they had disembarked.
Arid, mountainous, and poor, Lalibela was littered with round stone houses capped by cone-shaped thatched roofs, like sad, rumpled party hats. Attached to many of these were small sheds constructed of sheets of mismatched corrugated tin with sloping scavenged board roofs. In many places, these latter also served as living quarters, humans and animals sharing space. Everywhere, sheer mountains loomed up, like fingers pointed to Heaven, in between which were the excavated sites of the curious buried stone churches that conferred holiness onto the town.
Yeats was ecstatic. He had never even seen photos of Ethiopia, let alone Lalibela. To him, the entire country was a fantastically exotic place, the back of beyond, as he called it, and nothing they encountered on their visit ever disabused him of that impression.
“This is just what my artistic muse ordered,” he enthused when they were ensconced in a rickety café adjacent to their even more rickety hotel. A flattish bowl of keiy wat, a local fiery stew, ruddy with mitmita, had been set before them, along with a plate stacked with injera, flatbread made of teff flour. Conrad had instructed Yeats to eat only with his r
ight hand as, in these parts, the left hand, used for washing oneself during the toilet, was considered unclean. Yeats tore off a piece of bread, followed Conrad’s example, shoveling the stew onto it. “After the recent fiasco in Dublin debating the merits of psychic inquiry with learned professors of the scientific community, I am very happy to be here.” He chewed a bit, then swallowed. “To be truthful, my family believes me to be in New York. In any event, I am quite certain they are for the moment relieved that I am out of the country, out of further controversy’s way. Know-nothings and clowns are publishing parodies of my work, making fun of what I hold dear to my heart.” He shook his head. “The world is changing, and not for the better, I fear. This industrialization, the armada of machine jobs, is crushing the humanity out of us. The gentleman of yore has no place in the crassness of modern life.”
He tore off another piece of injera, dipped it again. Clearly, he was enjoying the food’s exotic spices. “And there’s another low point. I must confess that the demonstration of Madame Garnet’s perfidy has thoroughly unnerved me. In point of fact, it has forced me to reassess my theories of paranormal interventions in our world.”
Conrad smiled. “I had surmised as much. But all is not lost, my friend. Now that you have recognized the lie for what it is, it’s time for you to bear witness to the truth.” He served his guest some lentils. “Another reason for you to be here with me.”
Yeats’s eyes were suddenly alight again. “Is there magic here, Conrad? Magic as truth? Is that what you are telling me?”
“What will transpire on this journey,” Conrad said, “is that you will observe, perhaps even participate in, discoveries of wonder. But you will make up your own mind. And when you have—either yea or nay—then we shall speak again on this subject that, quite frankly, is near and dear to both our hearts.”
He looked up, smiling. “Now, just on cue, comes our fellow seeker and guide. WBY, please meet my old friend, Ibrahim Saleh. Ibrahim, here is my friend Mr. Yeats, a famous poet and philosopher from the other side of the world.”
For Yeats’s benefit, Conrad spoke in English, but the poet would find that the two men would sometimes lapse into Amharic, Ibrahim’s native language.
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