Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “You wanted me to, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  That small, inscrutable half smile. “Also, I wanted you with me.”

  “But why?”

  Emma stepped from the twilight of the cave mouth into the sun-and water-sparkled air. As if it were a python, she slid her arm around Lilith’s waist. “You know why.” Her fingertips settled on the small of Lilith’s back. “It was clear the moment you sat down at my table at the café.”

  Lilith felt the pressure of those fingers, that hand, the strong muscles of that arm drawing her close enough to feel Emma’s body heat.

  “Don’t you?” Emma’s smile broadened. “Don’t you know why?”

  Her lips brushing Lilith’s cheek was like an electric shock, and with a tiny whimper Lilith’s body clove to hers. When their mouths came together, Lilith was sure she tasted blood on Emma’s tongue, a scrim on her canines. But instead of repelling her, the taste ignited her lust. Her mind felt as if it were expanding, exploding as it became one with her body’s needs.

  Together they stumbled backward, then fell one atop the other amid the slippery rock and the rainbow spray of the cataract. There was no sound but one sound; there was no taste but one taste, no smell but one smell; there was no sensation but one sensation. There was no God but the one that existed at the point of their mutual dissolution.

  And yet, in the midst of her ecstasy, a tiny part of Lilith’s mind experienced a pain such as she had never before encountered. Instinctively, she knew that if that pain spread to the rest of her mind it would kill her. And so, deep in her lover’s warm, moist embrace, she felt a malign presence invade her, as if something she could not quite sense, let alone see, was raiding her thoughts, scraping away at her mind.

  And then in the span of one terrible heartbeat, Emma’s tongue reached the core of her and she was drowning in a flood of bliss.

  Heartbeat like the ticktock of a cosmic clock. Pulse beating a tattoo behind her eyes. Lips, nipples, genitals swollen and slightly sore: a magnificent agony.

  She sighed into Emma’s mouth and so quickly afterward she could not be sure it actually happened her awareness irised open and she sensed the duality inside Emma. She felt Emma, but she also felt the source of the thing that had begun to tear at her. And for that micro-instant her magnificent agony morphed into real pain.

  She cried out, and, pulling away from her lover, looked at her as if she had never seen her before.

  “What is it?” Emma breathed. “What’s happened?”

  “You know.” Lilith shook her head from side to side, confused and, abruptly, afraid. “Both of you know.”

  At that moment, an unnatural silence fell upon them as if from a great height. Neither birds nor insects could be heard calling or whirring. No flying squirrels leapt from branch to branch in the forest beyond the cataract. And, strangest of all, the roar of the waterfall seemed greatly diminished, as if they had been removed from proximity to it, even though its crystalline spray continued to moisten their flesh, mingling with their own sweat.

  Emma’s head rose, then held still as a hunting dog on point. “Put your clothes back on,” she said in a hushed, throaty voice, deeper than before—far deeper. Was it Emma’s voice at all? “Hurry! Quickly now!”

  Hearing the barely throttled fear in her voice, Lilith said, “I’m not afraid.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” Emma drew on her shorts, slipped into her shirt. “You don’t know. Do as I say now.”

  Lilith complied, dragging on her clothes as quickly as she could. No sooner had the two women finished dressing than a stirring came to them from inside the cave.

  “Behind me.” Emma grabbed Lilith, pushed her into position. “Whatever happens stay behind me.”

  Lilith tried to peer over Emma’s shoulder. “What’s going to happen?”

  “Hush, now, beloved. Hush!”

  That one word “beloved” drove to Lilith’s core, turned her knees weak so that for a moment she was obliged to hold on to Emma’s waist to keep herself from sliding to the glistening rock face.

  Now it was coming. Whatever it was. A stirring of the shadows within the cave, as if the atmosphere had become a turbulent sea, muddied with detritus, bottom feeders, diminutive nighttime predators tossed this way and that by the passage of a colossal and terrifying presence.

  The squadron of flies appeared first, like outriders, then the horn, curved and pointed, like a herald. And then Leviathan appeared, in all his hideous glory: red as the dying sun, great cloven hooves crawling with things best left to the darkness. One set of wings unfurled like sails, the other two folded closely around his torso like the winter cloak of an Englishman of the 1800s.

  “So.” Voice like a rasp over metal. “What have we here?”

  “The human Lilith Swan,” Emma said in that voice both deeper and rougher than that of Lilith’s lover.

  “I have eyes, do I not?” Leviathan fairly bellowed. “Beleth, you are a Power, a warrior of the Second Sphere. What are you doing with this female human?”

  The thing said these last two words as if they were anathema to him, as if Lilith were a creature so far beneath him he could not fathom what Emma was doing in her company.

  “Leviathan,” Emma said in that same strange voice, “this female human is a member of the Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Land.”

  “Impossible!” Leviathan roared. “The Knights do not allow females in their midst. Quite rightly, I might add.”

  “A new wrinkle,” Emma said. “Call it an experiment, if you like.”

  When Leviathan laughed, even the small awful things squirming around his hooves cowered and tried to burrow into the cave floor. “I don’t like you, Beleth, and I like even less your proximity to a female human.”

  “Ah, but not just any female human. This one will give Emma Shaw access to the inner workings of the Knights’ Circle Council.”

  Lilith felt as if she were losing her grip on her sanity. Struggling to make sense of the conversation, which was almost as bizarre as the scene itself, she racked her memory. Wasn’t Leviathan a Seraph, allegedly one of Lucifer’s Fallen? And if that was, indeed, Leviathan filling the cave mouth then what Obarton had told her about the Fallen was the truth: they did exist; they did have designs on humans. But none of this could really be happening, could it? Emma had fed her water from her canteen on the way up. What if that water contained a powerful psychedelic, a hallucinogen that Emma was using to break her down? What if nothing since she had taken that drink was real? What if they were both still down below, what if she was on the point of death?

  “Why should we care about either the Knights or the Circle Council?”

  But, then again, she was close enough to Emma to feel her trembling, and putting her palm against Emma, could feel the racing of her pulse. Was that also part of the hallucination?

  And then she heard Emma say in that odd voice she had adopted, “The moment the Knights become aware of us they will move Heaven and earth to stop us.”

  “Heh! But they can’t, the insects,” Leviathan said. “They have no Shaws among their midst. It’s only the Shaws who hold any danger for us.”

  And Lilith found herself thinking, Why? What’s so special about the Shaws that the Fallen should fear them? And in that moment she realized that she wasn’t insane, that she was facing a new reality, that the Fallen did, indeed, exist, that she was in the presence of one of them—a very powerful one, a Fallen Seraph, if the literature on this arcane and, to most in the Church, shunned topic, was accurate. It occurred to her, parenthetically, that the Gnostic Observatines were in a far better position to judge the truth about the existence and nature of the Fallen.

  Without conscious control, her hands went to either side of her head, as if to keep her exploding thoughts under control. But of course that was a fool’s errand. Emma had led her to the far side of the world, and now they had taken that last step. No compasses here, no GPS coordinates. To paraphrase Ca
ptain Barbossa, You’re off the edge of the map, girl. Here there be the Fallen.

  Leviathan took a step toward them. “This female human is of no use to either of us. She will not further our cause. Quite the opposite, I may state without fear of contradiction. Toss her. Let the cataract break her bones. Let the carrion eaters feast on what’s left.”

  “No,” Emma said.

  “What?” Leviathan blinked heavily; flies buzzed around his lips, affected by his sudden agitation. “What did you say?”

  “Lilith is under my protection.”

  Leviathan drew himself up to his full towering height. “Who gave you, a Power, permission to gainsay a Seraph of the First Sphere?”

  “The assignment you yourself gave me,” Emma said. “I risked everything, almost being destroyed by the blue fire. Have you ever come so close to the blue fire of Heaven, Leviathan? No, I thought not. Now here I am in Emma Shaw’s corpus. You need her; we need her.”

  Leviathan was livid with rage. “I’ll suck you out of there, Beleth, and down into the deepest pits of Hell, there to rot while we execute our long-awaited revolution, while we free Heaven from the tyranny of God.”

  “No, you won’t.” Emma stood her ground. “The moment you extract me Emma Shaw will die, and then where will we be. She is the one and only key to finding and turning her brother to our cause. Think of it, Leviathan! A Shaw moving with us! And not just any Shaw! No, even with all your power, you will not move against me. You will not jeopardize the revolution because of petty jealousy.”

  “Jealousy?” Leviathan laughed again, and now even the flies kept their distance, shuddering. “Seraphs don’t feel jealousy; that is a human emotion.”

  “With all due respect, Seraph. Jealousy is a sin, and what are we made of if not a patchwork of sins? Without sin would we even exist?”

  Leviathan’s fangs gleamed darkly. “Without sin you can be sure that humans wouldn’t exist, Power.”

  “By your logic, that makes us closer to humans than to angels, Leviathan. Are you sure you want to continue down that path?”

  “Bah! Whatever path you think you’re on, stick to it. Fuck the female human then. If that is the price I must pay in order to have Braverman Shaw then so be it.” His claw bit through the thick air. “But understand—this hasn’t ended. Between you and me there will come a reckoning.”

  “I look forward to it, Seraph. In the meantime, allow me to do my job. Leave us in peace.”

  “Ah, Beleth, you are a fool.” Leviathan snapped his jaws shut, terrifying the squadron of flies that circled him like a halo. “Peace is something we are destined never to know.”

  24

  Lalibela, Ethiopia / Hollow Lands: 1918

  WHEN DIANTHA RETURNED TO THE CHAMBER ABOVE, WHERE the Sphinx crouched in stony silence, she saw her son’s friend the great poet W. B. Yeats, whom she knew both by reputation and from reading his stirring works.

  Yeats was perched on the edge of a plinth, writing in a calfskin notebook with a pencil. Around him, he had lit a number of tapers, used in secret liturgy in decades past. Every so often he would pause, gaze up at the great Sphinx as if for inspiration. As for the creature itself, it looked for all the world as if it was a willing subject posing for a master artist.

  Perhaps that was precisely what it was, for as she approached Yeats she asked him what he was writing. He told her it was an epic poem that had come to him by being in close proximity to the Sphinx, an occult being who had at one time moved against Gideon, at her son’s bidding, but which seemed to neither frighten nor intimidate the intrepid poet.

  “I’ve named the work ‘The Second Coming,’ ” Yeats said. “It incorporates a number of my philosophical and occult theories, which had never come together until I was in the presence of this Sphinx.”

  “Where is Conrad’s other friend, Ibrahim?” The one my husband shot to death.

  “He was taken,” Yeats said, crossing out a line, then inserting a replacement.

  “Taken? By whom?”

  “Well, that would depend.” Yeats paused in his writing, looked at her fully for the first time.

  “On what, precisely?”

  “On who you are. My name is William Butler Yeats.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve enjoyed many of your poems.”

  “Thank you, madam. And you are?”

  “Diantha Safita. I’m Conrad’s mother.”

  Now Yeats appeared puzzled. “Your surname isn’t Shaw?”

  “Safita is a Phoenician name,” she said by way of answer. “Please tell me what happened to Ibrahim.”

  “Ah, yes. Poor fellow. It seems his grandfather took him.”

  “Ibrahim’s grandfather is dead,” Diantha said.

  “Ibrahim, as well,” Yeats said, putting the notebook with the partly written “The Second Coming” aside. “Diantha, I want to help.”

  Diantha closed with him. “Keep writing, poet; there’s work for everyone here. That is yours; no one else can do it.” She took his notebook and pencil, laid them on his lap. “My son brought you here for a reason. We are all of us about to step onto the knife-edge.”

  *

  IT MIGHT have been a horse, but only in some twisted nightmare. The Orus seemed destined for war. Moreover, it looked to be the work of a lunatic. And perhaps it was, for incised into its muscular chest was the Nihil, the sigil of the Unholy Trinity.

  Conrad knew that he had this one last moment to turn back, to save himself. But what would that say about him? How could he allow Gideon to continue to gain power? He was Nephilim, the child of the unholy miscegenation between a human female—Conrad’s grandmother Chynna Shaw—and a Fallen Archangel. Could there be anything more horrific? Chynna was put under a spell, and therefore raped. She had no will, no say in what happened after the Fallen one chose her. She opened her heart and her legs to it and was destroyed in the process. Though outwardly she was as strong and clever and sane as ever, her soul—her innermost core—had been hollowed out. She was never the same again, never the person she had been before the advent of the Fallen.

  No. There was no question of turning back, no question of not opposing his father, for if he didn’t no one could, not even Diantha. Her powers were of a different genus and species altogether. Just like the Orus, holding him in its sightless gaze.

  He knew what the sigil meant; he knew what was waiting for him, though not the order of magnitude. But this was the only chance to stop Gideon from gaining enough dark power to bring the rest of the Fallen—the Legion—through the portal into this world. Gideon wanted nothing less than to stand at Lucifer’s right hand when he reclaimed all that God had taken from him.

  Approaching the Orus, Conrad reached out his left hand and, with only a slight faintness to herald his action, pressed his palm to the sigil. At once, he felt the metal melt, and he pushed into it, through the skin and metal flesh of the Orus. Past nonexistent bones, into the hollow core of it.

  Except that it wasn’t hollow—not entirely. The inside was a prison for a cadre of Fallen—an advance guard that had been trapped, set in place by a higher order of power than even Gideon, though he had been here before, could not name.

  Four Thrones: Murmur, Raum, Phenex, Verrine, all of the First Sphere. All evil, all hungry for power, and therefore incalculably dangerous. Anticipating what awaited him, Conrad felt an electric jolt, and, with that, the Transposition began.

  It wasn’t until the Throne was completely inside him that he knew its name. Phenex, he said in his mind, welcome to the world of humans.

  What is this? Phenex cried. To go from one prison to another is no life for a Throne!

  Your life was over before it began, Throne. You’ve picked the wrong side.

  Being in a human’s body was not my doing. It revolts me.

  Who else was taken, Phenex? My father came here; my father took one of you Thrones. You all have different powers.

  How do you know that, insect?

  You are Scryer. If you try hard
enough, you can see minutes into the future. Which one of the Thrones is missing?

  Thus began the internal war between Conrad and the Throne Phenex for supremacy. On the one hand, Diantha Safita had trained him hard and long, out of Gideon’s sight and hearing, for just this possibility. On the other, this was real life, and Phenex proved slippery and dangerous as an electric eel. Each time Conrad, on the offensive, was sure he’d gotten ahold of the Throne, it would slither from his grasp and deal him a terrible psychic blow that rattled him so badly it was often difficult to string two thoughts together, let alone form and re-form his strategy, as the dimensions of the battlefield shifted from one world to another.

  Conrad felt himself being beaten down, until even his reserves of energy were hemorrhaging badly. It was then he realized that his palm was still pressed against the Nihil. That this was why the worlds kept changing, why Phenex had had the upper hand from the beginning.

  With a violent motion he stepped out of the Orus’s chest and just like that the field of battle cleared, the mists in retreat, revealing his foe and, simultaneously, revealing his path to victory.

  Without hesitation he took it, using every incantation his mother had made him memorize. And there they were: the bronze chains forming around Phenex keeping him controlled and quiescent.

  “Now,” Conrad said out loud. “Which one of you Thrones did Gideon take?”

  The insect took Verrine.

  Dear God, Conrad thought, he would take the worst one. Verrine was the leader of the Four Thrones of the First Sphere, and therefore the most powerful. His power was Bestiality. He was a notorious reaver.

  “Where is he, Phenex? Where is Verrine?”

  The Throne inside him moaned. Too far away.

  Which direction then? Switching to the interior dialogue.

  Around the far side of the Orus, along its flank. That way. But you do not want to go that way.

  I have no other choice.

  I warn you, insect. Once you enter the Hollow Lands you can never escape.

  Then we’ll be prisoners together.