“I tell you what, Lilith,” Emma said. “I’m getting fed up with everyone wanting my brother’s head.”
“Well, listen to you.”
“Hey, sister, up until yesterday you were one of them.”
Lilith nodded. “You’ve got me there, sister.” Her expression was sober. “I have to find Hugh and bring him home safe and sound. Believe me, I owe him more than that.” She eyed Emma. “Will you help me?”
She turned to Lilith, took a step closer so their noses were almost touching. “You’re a Knight; I’m a Gnostic Observatine.”
“Emma, has our time together meant nothing?”
“It’s been brief, Lilith. Life is long.” Her eyes did not blink; they were darkening menacingly. “I want a straight answer.”
“Whoever tries to kill you,” Lilith said without hesitation, “will have to kill me first.”
Emma examined Lilith’s face for any sign of perfidy. “Okay, then. I’ll help you.”
A wave of relief swept over Lilith’s face. “Okay, now I’ll get rid of this phone.”
Again, Emma stopped her. “We’ll be out of here soon enough. And, listen, if Obarton can find us via the GPS chip, we can use the one in Highstreet’s mobile to find out where he and Obarton are, right?”
“Right.” There was a new look in Lilith’s eyes. “Sometimes I don’t understand you.”
“Wouldn’t it be boring if you did.”
Lilith laughed softly, her eyes filled with love.
“There’s one more thing.”
Lilith nodded. “Name it.”
“Obarton has compromised Highstreet. So who’s minding the Knights’ IT store?”
Lilith regarded her lover’s face. “You want in on the Knights’ secrets, don’t you?”
Emma smiled, the pain and pressure of her inner struggle entirely hidden. “What d’you think?”
30
Hollow Lands: 1918
WHEN CONRAD’S BLOOD, SPURTING WITH EACH BEAT OF HIS heart, reached the golden apple and the gold rood a blue flame arose. In the space of a human heartbeat it had engulfed both Conrad and Gideon. A terrible wail rose up, from God only knew where, and then abruptly stopped.
Gideon rose, triumphant, confronting his son for the second time, but at that instant Diantha appeared out of a particularly dense copse of shadows. She was barefoot as she ran forward, and before her husband could stop her she pressed her foot down onto the ground between where he stood and the golden apple with its long-sought other half.
At once, the blue flame that engulfed Gideon was snuffed out. At that precise instant, Conrad, his aurora of blue flame glowing ever brighter, arose from the floor. Gideon could not believe what he saw. His son’s neck bore only a scar to remind him that his knife had, indeed, sought Conrad’s death. Not a drop of blood lay on the floor. It had been vaporized, or the blue flame had returned it to its source.
He brandished his knife. The blade still held a scrim of blood along its top edge. “Betrayer! Witch!” he screamed at his wife. “Damned sorceress!”
“On the contrary, it’s you who are damned,” she said evenly. She glided silently toward him without seeming to move a muscle. “You were damned the moment you were conceived, doubly damned when you drew first breath.”
“Mother, stand back!” Conrad said, alarmed. “He’s taken the Throne Verrine inside him.”
“Fool!” Diantha cried. “I did not think that even you would be so utterly stupid.”
“I have its power,” Gideon said. “I don’t need your sorcerous blue flame.”
“You have nothing. A Throne is not yours to command. The power of that thing inside you is beyond your comprehension.”
“But not yours, is that right?” He laughed. “Now my power rivals yours.” He cocked his head. “Oh, wait. What’s that, Verrine? Ah, yes, my Throne informs me its power far exceeds yours, Sorceress. Verrine is even older than your Phoenician magic.”
“But not wiser,” Diantha said, launching herself at him.
Conrad watched, dumbfounded, as his two parents clashed, not as human beings, but as titans, as unimaginable entities, whose carefully lacquered masks had shattered. Blue fire enrobed Diantha, while Gideon’s shape underwent a terrifying transformation as, foretold by his wife, Verrine took total control of him.
Three sets of wings made their appearance first—leathery batwings with small, claw-like hands at the apexes of their upper cartilage. His skin darkened to the color of dried blood, scaled in the manner of armored beasts. His face, the last to go, lost all semblance of humanness, becoming both angelic and demonic, a seemingly impossible combination that nevertheless destroyed whatever remained of Gideon’s humanity. A terrible cry was ripped from the Throne’s throat, a last anguished gasp, as Gideon vanished into the maelstrom of its maw.
*
DESPITE WHAT Diantha had said, W. B. Yeats did not stay long with the Sphinx called Typhos after she vanished. And vanished she had, as if she were a puff of smoke or he had imagined her. One moment they were engaged in conversation as to the age of Typhos; the next he was left speaking echoes into the shadows of the immense space. So he addressed the Sphinx. “Typhos, should I stay or should I go?” But in the absence of the sorcerers, Typhos had returned to stone, unmoving, unresponsive.
Yeats was a poet by both inclination and inspiration; he was a man who embraced enigmas. A mind like his was, by both nature and nurture, an abundantly inquisitive one. And so, setting aside the notebook on which he was composing his epic poem about Typhos and the great evil of the Book of Deathly Things Conrad had brought him here to confront, he lit out down the dark and forbidding tunnel that, like Alice’s rabbit hole, would lead him to Elsewhere, as he now thought of it. Soon enough he would come to know it as the Hollow Lands he and Conrad had set out to find, but at this moment only the unknown lay ahead of him.
Running as fast as he could, driven by the persistent alien heartbeat of some great calamity, he found the walls of the tunnel emitting a feverish glow even as it pitched sharply downward, plowing farther into the bowels of the earth.
How long it took to reach the end, to emerge like Athena from Zeus’s head, into the frightful scene he was never able to calculate, even much later when, in the long nights ahead, there was time, lying on his bed, unable to sleep, let alone dream, to run the impossible events over and over again in his mind like a scene from a motion picture.
And his experience at the time was exactly like viewing a film, alone in a darkened theater, because the nature of his stupendous fright was such that his consciousness leapt from his body, observing the unfolding battle from a secure height, invisible to the gods and monsters below.
*
AS THE Throne inside Gideon went for his mother, Conrad’s stupefaction unraveled. He lunged at Verrine, blue flame spurting from his outstretched hands. But neither Diantha nor Verrine had been exaggerating the extent of its power. Now it brushed Conrad away with an almost casual backhand swipe. He crashed to the floor, landing so hard on one shoulder the pain lanced all the way through him.
Temporarily paralyzed, he saw his mother and Verrine locked in mortal combat. It was like nothing he had ever seen or would ever see again in his natural lifetime. But there would be another lifetime for him, as his grandson was to discover many years later.
In this present time, the movements of the two combatants were so fast, all was a blur, to the point where only constantly shifting veils of color momentarily differentiated one from the other.
This merging terrified him. He could accept what his father had become precisely because he had never liked or trusted him. But for his mother to be so merged with one of the Fallen, even visually, was unthinkable.
It was this terror that made him hesitate after the paralysis had receded, that kept him on the ground a moment too long. And so it was that as Verrine beckoned Death, who waited in the unquiet shadows of the Hollow Lands, to come and take Diantha into his bony embrace, it was left to Yeats,
who was seeing the battle from above, to make a desperate run at the combined golden apple—the same golden apple he had envisioned while writing his poem!—and gold rood, which, it seemed, the principals in their eons-long enmity had forgotten. Scooping up the artifact, Yeats did the only thing he could think of: he threw it at the blur of color and bitterness.
The ensuing explosion was one of blinding light. Soundless, but no less powerful for that, it freed Diantha from the Throne’s grip, sent Verrine flying backward to slam into the thorny left foreleg of the Orus. Three of the thorns caught it, penetrated its spine, pinning it in place.
Now, seeing his mother tended by his friend, Conrad shook off his terror and, gathering up the artifact, shoved it against Verrine’s chest. The Throne’s ruby-red eyes opened wide, its mouth worked soundlessly, as it was forcibly Transpositioned out of Gideon Shaw, as the power of the artifact launched it back into whatever level of Hell it had occupied before Gideon had freed it.
What was left of the creature—never quite human, but neither divine? It was the Nephilim who had his last look at his son, all his dreams shattered, all his plans gone up in flames.
“Conrad—”
But Conrad had already extended his arm. The blue flames, restless, unforgiving, leapt from him to Gideon, annihilating the Nephilim so completely not even a swirl of ash remained.
31
Mediterranean, off the Coast of Malta: Present Time
“WHAT WAS IT LIKE BEING BROUGHT UP A SHAW?”
Bravo, having shipped the oars on the underground river, now slipped them back into the oarlocks and began to row. “Never easy.”
Darkness rimmed the eastern horizon, while in the west a post-sunset bruise made its mark. The darkling water sprayed against the bow of the boat as Bravo fought to turn them from heading south, across the Mediterranean, to the shores of North Africa. Pelagic birds dived and swooped overhead, every so often skimming the surface for a fishy dinner. The coolness of night rippled pell-mell toward them.
“I’ve told you a bit about my father,” Bravo went on, putting his back into his work. “He was livid that he hadn’t inherited any of Conrad’s powers. That’s one of the many reasons he despised him.”
“There was more?” Ayla asked.
“Let me count Conrad’s uncountable sins.”
“An impossible task, clearly.”
“According to my father, anyway.” A light breeze ruffled his hair. “But my father’s perspective was heavily distorted.”
“So you’ve said.” She leaned forward in order to be heard over the gulls’ increasingly raucous cries. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“My father was a bitter man.”
“Because of Conrad.”
“Not only in the way you think. Conrad chose his bride for him.”
The lapping of the waves, the birds’ calling, rushed into the vacuum caused by human silence.
“Are you telling me that you and Emma are products of an arranged marriage?”
He nodded.
“How medieval.”
“I suppose you could say that.”
The oars rose and fell, water purling off their curved blades. Their progress against the tide was slow and, by the look on Bravo’s face, painful.
“My mother had no love for my father,” he said.
“And your father?”
“I think matters would have been simpler if he felt the same way. He loved her, desperately, hopelessly.”
The boat was coming around now, and it was all Bravo could do to keep it parallel to shore. At least they weren’t continuing to head out to sea.
“But why did they agree? Why did they commit to such a thing?”
“My father was a Shaw. He had no choice.”
“He couldn’t just walk away?”
“Not and stay in the Gnostic Observatines, let alone lead them. He had a duty, as all Shaws since Conrad do.”
“Oh, right.” Ayla nodded. “But the Gnostic Observatines were founded in the 1500s. Then they were a strictly religious order.”
“Yes, but over the centuries their interests expanded. They never fully abandoned the teachings of their patron, Saint Francis, and Christ, but because of their wanderings in Constantinople, Jerusalem, and the Levant they became fascinated with the ancient artifacts that pre-dated Christianity and spoke of religions, powers, and spheres invisible and inaccessible to mankind.
“This was why Gideon was drawn to them. His knowledge of the occult fascinated them; his charisma beguiled them. Their leader was infirm. His infirmity became terminal shortly after Gideon joined the Order, and when he passed it was Gideon who ascended.”
“What about your mother?”
“Ah, my mother. She’s a whole different mystery.” Bravo was silent for some time, both because it was now more difficult to get the boat moving back toward shore and because he was thinking of the right way to present Steffi Shaw’s story.
At length, after he’d at last muscled the boat around to the north, he heaved a deep sigh. “My mother’s lineage was such that Conrad knew she and his son would make a perfect match.”
“DNA, you mean.” When Bravo did not respond to that, she added, “What was her lineage?”
“My grandmother Diantha. She had a child out of wedlock before she met Gideon. A daughter. A Safita. My mother’s grandmother. So, yes, the same line. A powerful line.”
“You inherited her powers as well as Conrad’s?”
“So it would seem.”
To their left was a high ridge of jagged headland, to their right the inlet from which the underground river disgorged into the sea. Bravo had been periodically looking over his shoulder to ascertain the most hospitable landing spot on the high rocky shoreline, but now, having sensed something, he stared out at the Mediterranean through the faltering cobalt light.
“What is it?” Ayla asked, turning to follow his gaze.
“Listen.”
She did as he asked. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Right. The birds have all gone still.”
“Meaning?”
They both heard the dim revving of outboard engines moments before the speedboat came arcing around the headland to their west. Bravo judged the craft to be approximately forty-two feet in length. It was sleek and coming at them very fast. He counted five men including the driver, four armed to the teeth with AK-47s.
“Knights?” Ayla asked through a drawn-in breath.
“Worse,” Bravo said. “Much worse.”
“What could be worse?”
He saw the movement of the driver’s left arm. “Do you know how to swim?” He caught the glimmer of chrome.
“Championship caliber. I also scuba—”
Without a second thought, he shoved her hard over the side. She hit the water and, a moment later the pilot of the oncoming speedboat switched on the spotlight, blinding Bravo as it lit up the entire rowboat. Smart as she was, Ayla had swum around to put their boat between her and the speedboat. The armed men saw only Bravo; they were completely unware of Ayla.
They were close now, slowing as they neared. Bravo’s eyes had adjusted to the glare, could see them behind the light preparing to board. He once again shipped the oars, removing them from the oarlocks.
“Stay where you are!” the voice called in heavily accented English.
Recognizing the accent, Bravo said, “As-salāmu alaykum.”
“Waʿalaykumu salām,” came the reply, probably from the leader.
“There’s nothing for you here,” Bravo continued in Arabic. “I’m a friend. I bear you no ill will.”
Their eyes gave him pause. They were filled to overflowing with death.
“Stay where you are!” Same man. South Sudan accent; Juba Arabic. With each word, death leaked out of him like sputum. His eyes, like the others’, were red. His fingernails were long and black. “Stay where you are!” As if his needle was stuck in the same record groove.
He was the leader. This man, t
all, impossibly thin, all ropy muscle and gristle, leaned over, grabbed Bravo by his shirtfront, and dragged him off the rowboat and onto his own vessel. He used a hand-sign and one of his men clambered aboard the rowboat, checking every square inch for anything hidden, anything they could use, sell, or barter. Since there was nothing to find the search was a short one. He looked up at his leader, shook his head. The leader slammed Bravo across the face, as if the lack of booty was his fault.
Bending over, he said, “Who are you, what are you doing here, where did you come from, where are you going?” All in one spewed sentence.
His breath stank of seaweed and fish, as if he and his cadre had been dredged up from the bottom of the Mediterranean. But the South Sudan wasn’t the Mediterranean. It was much more frightening, and these radical pirates had absolutely nothing to lose. Their stairway to Heaven was set in stone. As for him, Bravo knew that death would be the least of his worries. These insurgents knew how to torture a captive to within an inch of his life, over and over again until the mind was shredded into a thousand and one pieces that, like Humpty Dumpty, could never be put back together again. This was why he had had to get Ayla out of harm’s way. She was female. Her fate with these radicals would be worse than his, at least at first. After that, oatmeal was oatmeal, no matter the gender.
The leader stomped on Bravo’s hand. “Speak! Speak or die!”
He was swinging the barrel of his AK-47 around to push into Bravo’s face, when the insurgent stepped back across from the rowboat to the speedboat. Reaching up, Bravo drove a first into his crotch. He screamed, stumbled into his leader, and Bravo made a grab for his weapon.
As he did so, someone out of his range of vision kicked him in the ribs. He grunted, lights spangling behind his eyes. Another kick dislodged his grip on the rifle. He twisted away, received a kick in his side for his efforts.
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