Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “Does he not know who and what you are?” Ayla said.

  “He knows nothing. He can know nothing.” Kamar’s voice was husky, breathy with the pace she had set. Out in the blazing sunlight they could discern the lines at the corners of her mouth, along the meridians of her forehead. There were mini-starbursts at the outer corners of her upswept eyes. “It is afternoon. At any moment, his ship will appear between the arms of the breakwaters.”

  “Why did you marry someone like that?” Bravo asked.

  “My husband is powerful. No one dares bother me or interfere with what I must do in his absence. No one dares even gossip about me.” She grimaced. “It was a marriage of convenience, I admit that freely and without shame. And look what I got in compensation. I love my little girl with all my heart.”

  “But it must be a strain when he’s home,” Ayla said, “keeping your secret life from him.”

  “Everything is a strain when Ismail is home,” she said, and so concentrated on guiding them was she that she failed to see the meaningful glance exchanged between them.

  “Is Ismail the captain of a fishing fleet?” Bravo asked, after a moment’s silence.

  “Would that he were.” Kamar shook her head. “Ah, no. My husband is a certain kind of Sunni Muslim. From an early age, his mind was steeped in hate. He interprets the Qur’an in a different way than I do, in a strict way I do not approve of.” She shrugged. “But this is his way and there’s no talking him out of it.”

  Bravo and Ayla exchanged another glance. Now they were sure that the Ismail they had encountered was Kamar’s husband. It was difficult to say how either of them felt; the situation was too complex, their time not enough of their own to ruminate about what they had done. Besides, there seemed no love between the two, at least on Kamar’s part.

  Still, Ayla felt it incumbent on her to ask, “What would you do if Ismail failed to return now or in the future?”

  Kamar paused for a moment, turned to them. “I have been on my own most of my life, my darling. I would do what I always do: put one foot in front of the other.” She shrugged. “Ismail’s protection will survive him. I would be his widow. Untouchable, unassailable.” She shrugged. “In any event, he’s served his purpose.”

  She regarded them with her sharp, quick eyes. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Bravo saw no point in lying to her. Besides, she had given them enough information to gauge her reaction. “His ship was set on fire,” he said. “It sank with all hands on board.”

  “Ah, well. That was the life he chose.” She did not look sad, did not seem in any way moved. “He was the kind of Muslim I could not abide. Haya has nothing to fear from him now; she can go to school without him punishing her.”

  She paused. “Did you see him?”

  But Bravo knew she already knew the answer. “He was just as you described him. It was impossible to reason with him.”

  A slow smile that was perhaps half sneer crossed her face quickly. “He met his fate,” she said. “What happened was supposed to happen.” She gave the ghost of a nod. “Haya thanks you, both of you.”

  They had mounted the seawall via a flight of stone steps, crumbling with age and the ceaseless pounding of the sea, and had now crossed over onto the other side. Traversing a steep decline, they found themselves beyond the precincts of the village. Only a scattering of scarecrow houses were to be seen on the hillside beyond. Now they approached the black mouth of a sea cave. Its sandy floor seemed to be the only thing not moving, for the upper reaches were infested with bats. The acrid stink of their guano was so pungent it stung the eyes, made the backs of their throats sore with each inhalation.

  Inside the mouth, she paused, facing them again. Beyond, the long afternoon was on its last legs. There was almost no wind. The water seemed deeply asleep. The heat was almost unbearable. Far out, the coastline of Syria was a fuzzed-out line, wavering in the heat. Every once in a while a war jet could be seen. But its sound never reached them. Arwad was in its own time and place, separate from everywhere else.

  “Listen to me now,” Kamar said. “You must find the third apple. Without all three the sacred instrument is not complete. It will not work—worse, it will work in unintended ways. Chynna found that out. Others too, I have no doubt.” The skin of the apple she handed Bravo was like molten gold in the shadow and the light. “The addition of the gold rood gives you three out of the four sections of the instrument. You must assemble it. The instrument is the only thing with sorcery powerful enough to arrest the coming invasion. Without it, the Four Thrones will destroy you—do to you whatever they choose—and then the path to their incursion into our world will be open. We will be defenseless.”

  “Even you, Kamar?” Ayla asked. She had become very fond of the woman.

  “The fact that I am an immortal like your mother will make me one of their very first targets.”

  “We will stop them,” Ayla said. “That’s a promise.”

  “Look at this one, Bravo. What she lacks in experience she makes up for in bravado.”

  Ayla gave a nervous laugh. “I’m still scared as hell.”

  Kamar replied with a warm smile, “That fear will keep you alive, my darling. Cherish it; keep it close. It will protect you.”

  Ayla took a step toward their host. “I must ask you—”

  “About your powers.” Kamar laughed softly, the bats picking up the vibrations, fluttering and squeaking as if speaking to her. “Don’t look so surprised, my darling. One sorceress recognizes another, just as sorcery knows sorcery.” She took Ayla’s hands in her. She held them loosely, and yet had Ayla wanted to withdraw them she knew she would not be able to. Once, she had swum with dolphins, had felt the gentle tingling of their sonar as they scanned her, getting to know the contours of her body and then the person within. This was now precisely the same sensation passing from Kamar to her. She relaxed completely. Her eyelids grew heavy, and they slid down. She was now inside herself. Kamar was with her. Information passed from mentor to acolyte at such a furious pace Ayla at first became disoriented. Then she relaxed into the flow and, like a diver, allowed it to take her where it would, into a deeper and darker part of an unfathomable ocean.

  Songs came to her from out of the indigo, incantations in Tamazight, in Assyrian, in all the mother languages of the human race. One after the other, they rose and fell like a tide, buoying her up, carrying her along, penetrating through the pores of her skin, circulating through her blood, rushing pell-mell through the millions of corridors of her brain. And then in an instant she went from being conducted along to conducting the inflow herself, guiding this incantation here, that one there, housing them as she saw fit, until they inhabited every room of the memory-mansion she built for them. Then she had to build another one, and another, so on and so forth, until the torrent abruptly ceased, having expended itself on her own private shore.

  *

  BRAVO WATCHED the transfer with a combination of awe and delight. At last Ayla was finding the destiny her mother had seen for her but could never tell her about for fear of changing the future revealed to her by her Farsight. For, as he had discovered, the future was mutable, Farsight a double-edged sword that, used improperly, could actuate a future the exact opposite of what had been seen. The law of unintended consequences was as true for those in the occult world as it was for everyone else.

  At length, it was finished. Kamar’s hands slid slowly from beneath Ayla’s, and the connection was disengaged. Ayla slumped back against the wall of the cave, but when Bravo moved to help her Kamar held him back with a hand on his forearm and a shake of her head.

  “Leave her be now. She needs time to digest, to come to terms with the vast amount of knowledge that is now at her fingertips.” She led Bravo a little away, farther into the realm of the bats, who fluttered and dipped in the space between them, as if wanting to taste, with their echolocation, their visitors. Bravo did not mind; he liked bats, found them fascinating and misunderstood.
/>   “Now,” Kamar said softly, “I must tell you something difficult to relate.”

  Bravo regarded her with an unwavering gaze. There was no sense of foreboding, only a curious numbness at the heart of him that told him he was ready for anything.

  “I knew your father,” Kamar began. “Dexter came here to Arwad, came to see me in particular.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Information. That’s what Dexter always wanted. But then you know that.”

  Bravo said nothing. When it came to his father he was not agnostic. Dexter’s antipathy to his own father—to the Shaw line, in fact—was something Bravo could neither forget nor forgive.

  “What you don’t know,” Kamar continued, “was that he was obsessed with Chynna Shaw. He suspected that Shaw was a family name she gave herself, that she was born a Sikar. He journeyed here for confirmation.”

  “And, of course, you gave it to him.”

  “Was I supposed to lie?”

  “No, but I—”

  “You what?”

  Bravo wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. The bats were getting thicker around him, as if he was a treat they had never tasted before. “My father and I did not get along. He was jealous of Conrad because Conrad had all the power and he had none.”

  “That’s true enough. But he had another reason.”

  Bravo’s heart felt like a bass drum beating against his ribs. “What other reason?”

  “Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. This is a human scientific fact. But it is truer than humans can understand. Your father was angry at Conrad for what he had done. The rash actions of your grandfather had pushed further open the portals that had been unsealed by the Phoenician alchemists when they conjured the occult gold required by Solomon’s foolish son.”

  She gave Bravo a level look. “He forbade you to spend time with your grandfather for fear that he would infect you with his rashness.” She gave him a sad smile. “But it happened in spite of him. Your grandfather never died, at least not in the way we know death. He abides. You know this, Bravo. If I’m any judge of matters you have proof.”

  “Many times over.”

  “And now you and he are united. When I saw the gold crucifix I knew. No power on earth or in any realm, for that matter, can pull you two asunder.”

  “And my father?”

  “Dexter is, alas, dead. He died in the explosion that wrecked his home. He cannot be brought back in any form. So.” She lifted a finger. “You must learn to keep your head, while others all around you are losing theirs.” She gave a short laugh. “Now you must accomplish what your grandfather could not. He was able to retrieve the golden apple that was the Safitas’, but he could not find the stolen one.”

  “But he didn’t have yours, either.”

  “He would have if he had found the third—I made him that promise.” She nodded into the inky depths of the cave. “I sent him in there, just as I’m sending you now. My mistake was in not giving him the apple. Even if he found the missing one he could not have put the instrument together. I’m not making that mistake twice. You have everything you need for when you find the third golden apple.”

  “You put great faith in me.”

  “As Conrad did.” She smiled. “Now you must have faith in yourself.”

  Ayla was coming around. Her eyes focused on them, her breathing normalized, and she pushed herself away from the wall, picked her way over the piles of bat guano to where they stood. She smiled at Bravo to tell him she was all right.

  Including both of them, Kamar gestured. “The farthest reaches of this cave lead to the netherworld—the barrier between our world and the Underworld, where God imprisoned the Fallen. It is called the Hollow Lands, and it is there the portal between the realms lies. It is where Conrad believed Chynna hid the last golden apple.

  “It is there where all the peril lies in wait for you.”

  45

  The Hollow Lands: Present Day

  THERE WAS A TIME WHEN LEVIATHAN STOOD AT THE LEFT hand of God. It is common knowledge who stands at his right hand. But Leviathan was not made for servitude, and even before the rebellion the Seraph chafed under the heavy fist of the so-called Almighty. That they rebelled, that they failed in their rebellion and were cast down, was proof that God was fallible. Or so Lucifer never tired of repeating. But Leviathan was not so certain. It came into the Seraph’s mind that the rebellion, the Fall that mimicked the fall of Adam at the hands of Eve and the serpent, was also part of God’s plan.

  For what? The humans, in their dreadful naiveté, preached that these events occurred to teach them lessons on the nature of good and evil. But Leviathan knew that for a lie. In the first place, God was bored by peace. He relished war. In the second place, God was made more powerful by perpetrating vengeance, either directly or by proxy. “Proxy” meaning “Lucifer.” For it was Leviathan’s belief that even here in the Hollow Lands they were all God’s pawns. In the third place, Eve was not to blame, nor was the serpent who, in any event, did not exist. It was God himself who gifted his creation with an insatiable lust for knowledge—the more forbidden the better. He had created, in effect, a social experiment, set his oh-so-clever inventions to working, and drew pleasure from watching them maim, rape, and kill one another. Who was the real sinner? Leviathan never tired of silently asking, mainly because he knew the answer.

  And there was one other thing that vexed the Seraph mightily. Why were there only male-minds among the angels? Where were the female-minds? To be sure, there were female saints and oh-so-many female sinners. But as for angels, not a one. Why? the Seraph kept asking. Why? It could not be an oversight. It was deliberate. Again, why? And the only answer the Seraph could come up with was this: a female-mind would be too powerful, too clever, for even God to keep under his fist for long. And to seal the deal he caused male humans to keep their females under lock-and-key, real or otherwise.

  It was this injustice—God’s violation of the natural order he himself created—Leviathan some time ago set out to rectify. And who better for a candidate than a direct descendant of a Nephilim? And not just a Nephilim, but a Shaw—or should we say a Sikar?—as well.

  Emma Shaw.

  He thought he had been prepared to see her at the rendezvous at the waterfall, but he hadn’t. Her physical appearance nearly singed his eyes, if such a thing could happen to him. Her beauty was magnificent and forbidden. Too, there was the intense jealousy that raged through him, knowing that Beleth was inside her, part of her. He wanted to exorcise Beleth at once, subject the Power to a long and lingering death. But, of course, that was impossible. To do so would consign Emma to immediate death. And so, showing enormous patience, he gave space for his rage to subside, and when it did no such thing he was obliged to grasp it by the neck, shove it down, down, down into a musty recess of what passed for his soul.

  He. Of course Leviathan thought of himself as he. More than a male-mind. Much more. But that memory was for another day.

  Now as he strode through the never-ending night of the Hollow Lands, Leviathan kept Emma Shaw in the forefront of his thoughts, as he had so many times before. But this time was different. She was near—the Seraph knew it. She was entering the Hollow Lands, the Seraph’s territory, for Leviathan had made this place that stretched all the way around the globe his beachhead, his outpost once the venal Phoenician alchemists had summoned from the Underworld the help they required to forge the tainted gold. That act had unsealed the portal between realms, allowed Leviathan, manifesting his power, to slip through to this netherworld, this Limbo. The waiting room to Hell.

  Now the Seraph’s long-gestating plan was coming to fruition. No one could stop it. Leviathan would be joined by a female-mind angel, and together they would defeat first Lucifer, then God himself. They would fulfill the dream of all the Fallen: they would rule the day as well as the night, together, side by side, as it was always meant to be.

  *

  “YOU’RE GOING to kill s
omeone with those.” Lilith smirked. But there was a sharp edge of terror in her voice that Emma could not fail to pick up on.

  Taking her hands out of her jacket’s deep pockets, she held aloft the black talons. There was a thin thread of dried blood on one of them. For a moment, it turned white in the glaring Mediterranean sun. Due to Beleth, no immigration official, no fellow passengers on their flight to Cypress, made mention or even saw the wickedly sharp implements. The hydrofoil they had hired to speed them to Arwad was private. The crew kept their distance, following the orders of their captain, who had been overpaid handsomely.

  They arrived on the island late in the day. The heat was ferocious. Gulls screamed, wheeling incessantly over the fishing boats. The mineral odor of the shallows, redolent of kelp, barnacles, and dried fish guts, was overpowering. Emma was sweating profusely, but she couldn’t risk taking the jacket off.

  “Obarton’s coordinates were specific down to the minute,” Emma said, not wanting to talk about her transformation, even as a joke. She knew that was Lilith’s way of dealing with fear, and was glad of it. But she had moved beyond that; part of her was already preparing for the inevitable—a fate, she was certain, far worse than death.

  Having picked their way along the docks, they headed west, over the shorter arm of the seawalls, its crumbling steps washed with wavelets, slimy with poison-green seaweed. In the west, the sun, bloated into an oval, seemed to heave a sigh—of fatigue or relief—as it sank toward the horizon.

  “It’s underground; we know that much,” Lilith said, and then pointing ahead, “There! The cave!”

  *

  “IT’S AN odd fact,” Beleth said through Emma’s mouth, “caves give me the shivers.”

  Lilith laughed shortly. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I don’t know how to kid,” the Power said. “I never had much of a sense of humor. That was left for the First Spheres like Leviathan.”