Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “What’s happened?” M. Boyer asked without any apparent affect.

  “She’s fine. Petit mal,” Lilith said, vamping, making it up as she went along. “Missed her meds time, but all will be well now.”

  M. Boyer nodded, lost interest, striding purposefully back to his work. The others followed.

  “Beleth!” she called. “Beleth!” But there came no reply.

  And then the foreign words erupted from between Emma’s lips:

  “Djat had’ar.”

  Emma arched up, almost coming out of Lilith’s embrace. The cords of her neck stood out, a vein in her forehead pulsed, and for a moment Lilith, terrified, was certain the end had, indeed, come. But then came a loosening of Emma’s rock-hard muscles, and a sense came to Lilith as of a stream of clear cool running deep beneath the surface.

  “Et ignis ibi est!” Emma cried.

  And blue flame engulfed them both. M. Boyer and his staff turned to gape in a welter of shouts of surprise and shock. No one moved. No one felt the least bit of heat. The blue flame now seemed to implode, to shoot inward, if that was even possible. Some, at least, suspecting they had taken leave of their senses, became dizzied. Others looked away, frightened of their own shock.

  The smokeless blue flame vanished, perhaps to the same nether regions from which it had come. Lilith was unharmed, and as for Emma, she was stirring in the warm cradle of Lilith’s arms, her face normal at last.

  “Emma,” Lilith whispered. “Emma, I’m here. I love you.”

  Emma opened her eyes. They were as clear as the morning sea. As they regarded Lilith, a smile curled her lips.

  “Lilith.” Her voice was cracked and desert dry.

  “I’m here. I never let you go.”

  “I know. I felt... I knew.”

  Their lips touched, opened. Heat rising off their bodies. M. Boyer, hunched over his task, had his back to them. The staff was slow in recovering their equilibrium, speculating among themselves in hushed voices. They were all scientists of one sort or another. Their expertise was in electronic instruments, the laws of physics, and suchlike. What they had just witnessed went beyond their comprehension—so much so that some of them refused to believe what they had seen and heard, putting it down to mass hallucination. Several of them went to check the ventilation system on the off chance fumes from elsewhere in the building were affecting them.

  At length, Lilith broke away. “You scared the hell out of me. What happened to you?”

  “Where’s Beleth?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t feel it. I don’t...” Maybe it was caught in the doorway when the blue fire slammed it shut, Emma thought, shuddering, closing her eyes for just a moment. When she opened them she saw the expression on her lover’s face. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’m a Shaw.” So much of her history she didn’t know. Bravo had never told her and she had never asked.

  “That’s not an answer. Emma, please tell me. It’s not fair to keep me in the dark.”

  She was right, Emma thought. “I read something I shouldn’t have. Bravo warned me not to, but my curiosity got the better of me. Anyway, the words kind of took me over, drowned me, opened a door to...”

  “A door to... what?”

  “I don’t know. Some place of eerie darkness, of pure evil, some place I had no business being. That door should never have been opened. And it’s because of me, because I couldn’t keep my curiosity in check.”

  “You couldn’t help yourself?”

  “That sounds so weak.”

  “You’re human, Emma. Weak threads exist in all our weaving.” The cleaning crew showed up then, and she slipped her hand into Emma’s. “Let’s get you to a chair.”

  “I’m fine. I’m—”

  Lilith steadied Emma as her knees gave way slightly. Out of the corner of her eye she saw M. Boyer on his way over. He very studiously sidestepped the mess on the floor, indicated to the crew to hurry up. He had a printout clutched in one hand. Lilith got Emma to a task chair as he came up beside her.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “She’s fine,” Lilith said. “With a little bit of water...” She looked expectantly at M. Boyer. Then when he made no move: “Oh, for God’s sake!” She fetched a paper cup of water from the cooler by the wall. No one in the lab would touch tap water, out of paranoia or elite-think she could never tell. Possibly it was the same thing.

  “Look what I have.” He fluttered the printout in front of Lilith’s face after she had handed Emma the water.

  “I can’t make out a thing,” she said. “It’s Mandarin to me.”

  M. Boyer gave a rare laugh. “Oh, well, yes. But what’s of import to you is that I finished my search. I know where the man you’re looking for is right at this moment.”

  “And where would that be?” Emma said, having been refreshed by the cold water.

  “Ah, well, that’s the fascinating part.” M. Boyer looked at her for the first time. “He’s right in the middle of Père Lachaise Cemetery.”

  42

  Paris: Present Day

  OBARTON ARRIVED BACK AT THE KNIGHTS’ PÈRE LACHAISE Reliquary after spending a restless night tossing and turning in his bed. He dreamed he was Julius Caesar, alone in the Forum of Rome. He was searching for something, but all he saw were the blind eyes of the marble statues arrayed around him. He had awoken, amid twisted bedsheets, a question on his lips that he could not recall.

  Now, showered, shaved, and impeccably dressed in a brown linen three-piece suit, he stood for a moment before the Memorial to the Dead, smoking a cigarette. The day was clear, filled with bright sunshine beamed down from a nearly cloudless sky. He hardly ever smoked, except when he was highly agitated. That image or vision of the horned head—better call it a hallucination. Well, whatever it was had unnerved him. He’d seen it twice now, the first time when he was with the cardinal at the Vatican, the second following the explosion that had ended Duchamp’s life. Why always with Duchamp? And why... ? He was not a person prone to nerves—or hallucinations, come to think of it. But, look here, the sky was blue, the grass green. Birds sang as they always did, swooping from tree branch to tree branch. All things bright and beautiful; all things in their accustomed place. He took one more draw on his cigarette, decided he didn’t need the nicotine, and exhaled all the smoke in a single puff.

  By the time he reached the subterranean precincts of the Reliquary, he had put the incident entirely out of his mind and was feeling uncommonly cheerful. Cardinal Felix Duchamp, that vexing thorn in his side, was no more than a carbon cinder. Mission accomplished.

  He noticed the prisoner’s mobile on a side table as he took himself to the room where Hugh Highstreet was under lock, key, and guard. There had been no point in taking it with him, and he liked that it was in plain sight for all to see.

  Being in the presence of this particular prisoner gave a jolt to his endorphin levels, just like, it was said, a good, long run. Obarton wouldn’t know about that. Even as a young man he eschewed all sport, save, of course, fencing, which was a physical endeavor appropriate for a gentleman. Already at the age of twelve he was too large for epée, so he took his instructor’s advice and opted for the sabre. Not as popular as epée, of course, but, in Obarton’s estimation anyway, quite a bit more enjoyable. That the matches stopped short of being fun said far more about Obarton than it did about the sport itself.

  Before he had the guard unlock the room, he gave a food order to Naylor, the only one who knew his tastes enough to be trusted. So full of good feeling was he that he included his prisoner in the order. Why not give the poor devil one good meal? he thought with what he considered was a gentleman’s magnanimity but was in actuality condescension.

  Highstreet was not in good shape. He’d never been an athlete. Accordingly, his incarceration, not to mention what Obarton euphemistically thought of as interrogations, had drained him of what little physical vitality he had once possessed. Sitting in the middle of the
bare room on a straight-backed metal chair, to which he was bound by wrists and ankles, he was whey-faced, spotted and daubed with crusted-over blood, heavily bruised and wounded all over his body and limbs. A comfortable club chair, upholstered in waxed leather, had been placed opposite him, a reminder of what he did not—and could not—have. In one corner was a stainless-steel lav.

  “Hullo there, Hugh,” Obarton said heartily. “How are we today?” He sat on the club chair, wriggling his jelly buttocks into the buttery leather to make himself more comfortable. “Feeling at home yet?”

  Obarton did not, of course, expect an answer to these unreasonable questions, and Highstreet, his eyes half-shut, the surrounding flesh the color of raw meat, no longer rose to the bait. All flippant response had been beaten out of him days ago.

  Obarton leaned forward, his nostrils dilating as he sniffed. “You smell that, Hugh? It’s the odor of decaying flesh, of insects tunneling through desiccated flesh and brittle bone.” He smiled benignly, a favored uncle at Christmastime. “It’s the smell of death, Hugh. That’s what it is. Why, you might as well be dead yourself, seeing where I have put you.”

  Highstreet stared at him as best he could through his slitted eyes. His lips looked flayed; in one corner of his mouth an ugly sore had begun to suppurate a greasy yellow liquid.

  “Oh, Hugh.” Obarton sat back, laced his fingers across his belly, as if they were in a London gentleman’s club instead of in the underbelly of the most famous Parisian cemetery. “I warned you. Now you know what it feels like to back the wrong horse. Tell me, how did that happen, hmm?” He shrugged. “I mean to say, Lilith couldn’t have seduced you—not you. You might as well be a eunuch, for all the interest you have in sex. And how did that happen, I wonder?” He shuddered. “What a diabolical aberration. Poor thing.”

  He cocked his head. There was pitcher of water on the floor, along with a glass. Dust motes danced on the surface of the water, moved along by who knew what form of insects. Obarton made no move to offer Highstreet any. “A tart and a eunuch walk into a bar, bound together by God alone knows what unholy means.” He laughed shortly. It was very much like Charles Laughton’s bray. “What’s the punch line, Hugh? I mean to say, the relationship is something out of the Arabian Nights, isn’t it? Extraordinary, really.”

  There was only the whir of air in the ductwork, circulating through the grill high up on one wall. A bare bulb in a metal cage was screwed into the ceiling, its cruel light centered on Highstreet. Obarton could count precisely how many prisoners had been incarcerated here over his lifetime in the Knights. To his knowledge, Highstreet was the first who was not a Gnostic Observatine.

  “You know, Hugh, this room is like the Roach Motel: guests check in, but they never check out.” His laugh was discordant; there was no humor in it.

  He sighed, as if his favorite pupil had disappointed him. “Well, Hugh, despite it all, today’s your lucky day. I’ve ordered food for the both of us. A four-course meal, the works.” He leaned forward so abruptly that Highstreet flinched. “Now, now, old son, I’m not going to lay a hand on you. No, today we shall share a meal together, as equals, as friends.” He bared his teeth. “A last meal, as such.”

  Suddenly the sound of raised, querulous voices pierced the door. A gunshot.

  Then someone gave out with an unearthly scream.

  *

  “YOU’LL THINK I’m crazy.”

  “And that would be bad, why?” Emma said.

  Lilith laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh, for all that. The two women, for the moment sans Emma’s otherworldly companion, were in a taxi heading toward the 20th arrondissement, one of Paris’s outermost northern districts. Morning had turned into late afternoon, sunlight burnishing the tops of the buildings, gilding the trees lining the wide boulevards. Occasionally the aroma of freshly baked bread for the evening meal came to them, reminding them cruelly of how long it had been since they had last eaten.

  “So tell me,” Emma said.

  “We tell each other everything, right?”

  “You told me you had been in the Knights’ Reliquary with Obarton and how to get in there, so yes, I would say we tell each other everything.”

  “So here’s the thing.” Lilith paused, her unease manifestly present now. “When you were—I don’t know what to call it—under the influence...”

  “That’s as good a description as any,” Emma acknowledged.

  “There were—” Lilith broke off.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, say it already.”

  Lilith licked her lips. “Lean forward.”

  “What?”

  “Just do as I ask. Emma. Please.”

  As Emma leaned forward, Lilith palpated her back in the area between her shoulder blades.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for them. The bumps.”

  All at once, Emma seemed alarmed. “What bumps?”

  “There were three sets of them—right here, and here. I felt them as I held you.”

  “Three sets, you say.”

  “That’s right.”

  Emma saw again the great shadow with the hidden face. It had three pairs of wings. Her face drained of all color.

  “What is it?” Lilith asked. “What did I feel?”

  “Wings.”

  “What?”

  “The stubs of three pairs of wings.” Emma was shaking, and she sought to calm herself through words. “You said that Beleth told you that Verrine, the King of the Four Thrones, was coming.”

  “Yes, but that’s all. I don’t know a thing about the Fallen Four Thrones beyond that they exist, and that Beleth thinks they may be coming—that’s the kind of esoteric knowledge you Gnostic Observatines specialize in.”

  Emma had kept searching for Beleth, shining a revolving beacon into the darkness inside her, ever since she had revived. No sign of it as yet. “The Fallen are ordered in ranks of power,” she began. “Three Spheres, the First being the most powerful. Within the First Sphere are three categories: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. Leviathan, who we both have met, is a Seraph of the First Sphere, Lucifer’s right-hand angel. But the Thrones have a specific place in the hierarchy of the First Sphere. Like Beleth, they are warriors. But unlike Beleth, they are the generals of the Fallen Legion. They are pure evil, hungry for power, and therefore incalculably dangerous. Murmur, Raum, Phenex, Verrine, these are the Four Thrones.”

  “And Verrine was the shadow you saw in the open doorway?”

  “The Four Thrones have three sets of wings, Lilith. Yes, I’m sure.”

  “And the bumps I felt.”

  “He was meant to use me—use my body—to return to our world in the form... well, like Leviathan.”

  “God in Heaven, you would have been gone! And what of Beleth?”

  “Excellent question,” Emma said. Already in the 20th, they were climbing now, heading for the lower reaches of Père Lachaise. “My sense is he’s in hiding. Verrine’s appearance frightened him beyond measure. I sense that if the Throne King had been successful, not only would I have ceased to exist, but Beleth would have, as well.”

  “So, basically, Beleth is a coward.”

  “Well, he’s Second Sphere, so there’s that, but, yes, I’m afraid he is a bit of a coward.”

  “Huh. It would be amusing if the situation wasn’t so dire.”

  The cab pulled over, came to a stop outside the gates to the cemetery. Lilith paid the driver and they got out, stood amid kiosks hawking maps and postcards of the most famous gravestones and crypts. A gaggle of German tourists on one side, neat, martial ranks of Japanese tourists on the other.

  “Well, dammit, we need Beleth now,” Lilith muttered as they strode through the gates and into Père Lachaise proper. “The creature is like the police. In your hair all the time, but where are they when you need them?”

  Emma smiled grimly. She was dealing with so many things her head was spinning: the inexorable march of Lucifer’s Testament, the unspeakable horror of
the open doorway into another realm, and Beleth. Stupid bloody Beleth, where are you! she cried silently.

  Not even an echo answered her back. Wherever the Power was, it was securely hidden against the might of Verrine.

  The door is closed, she whispered in her mind. You’re safe now.

  But for how long? The reply came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  Ah, you’re still alive and well.

  Of course I’m alive. As for well... She could feel Beleth shudder inside her.

  It’s illuminating to know that you fear some things.

  Of course. Leviathan, for instance. But the Fallen Seraph is nothing compared to Verrine.

  The Reaver, yes, I know.

  When it comes to the Four Thrones you know nothing—nothing at all. She felt the Power shudder again. Shall I tell you a story illustrating what I mean?

  By all means, but why don’t we take this vocal so Lilith can hear the story, too.

  Emma’s eyes grew dark as she drew Lilith off the cobbled path they were following up the hill. They stood by a cold slab of marble engraved with cherubs fluttering their small wings. How wrong the traditional depiction of Cherubim were, Emma thought. Or was it Beleth? The two were intermingling now, but unlike before the experience was more of a merging, rather than a hostile takeover.

  Lilith stared into her lover’s altered eyes. “Beleth.”

  “I have returned.” A beat, a hesitation. “But then I never left.”

  “Oh yes, you did. You vacated the premises.”

  “That, as you know, I cannot do. Not without killing Emma.”

  Lilith noted his use of Emma’s name, rather than the usual “my host.” Something significant had occurred. The landscape was now altered. Was the change temporary, she wondered, or permanent? In any event, she had to make the most of this opportunity while it presented itself.