Jade Sky

by Patrick Freivald

  Dawkins chuckled. "No. In ancient Judaism, most people weren't allowed to say or write the name of God, not even the Tetragrammaton, which early Christians bastardized into Yahweh or Jehovah, while the Jews usually used Adonai, which means 'Lord.' Punishments ranged from death to less pleasant things." He looked at Janet and then Matt. "They're fighting God."

  "Doesn't sound like a winning battle," Matt said.

  "Have you watched TV lately?" Janet asked.

  Dawkins opened the front cover and examined the first page, then flipped through several more thick vellum pages, handwritten and illuminated with devils and angels in faded, ancient colors that had flaked and torn where the writing had not. Rubbery fibers, maybe sinew, bound the pages to the wooden spine. The style reminded Matt of manuscripts from the middle ages like he’d seen in movies or museums. On closer inspection, the script had faded much more than the drawings, and the writing didn't look like anything he'd ever seen before. Only that wasn't quite true. The almost Arabic, almost Hebrew script matched one of Conor Flynn's tattoos.

  "More Aramaic?" Matt asked.

  "Phoenician," Dawkins said without looking up. "Easy mistake. Aramaic uses the Phoenician alphabet, and they share some vocabulary, but the grammar's different." He ran his fingers over the page. "The letters were carved into the leather—let's hope it's calf—with a stylus, then filled with some kind of sticky powder, probably charcoal mixed with resin or pitch. Call this a couple millennia or so BC. I have no idea what they used to glue the paper to the parchment, but judging by the style of the art, that came maybe thirteen hundred AD."

  "What's it say?" Janet asked.

  Dawkins looked down to the manuscript and Matt turned so that Janet couldn't see his hands. He signed to Blossom: Track his eyes. Make sure he's reading and not making stuff up.

  He just caught her curt nod.

  Dawkins sighed. "It's an excerpt from the Book of Enoch. Sort of. 'In defiance of YHW'—that'd be God, folks—'the seraph Semjaza led two hundred angels from paradise to Mount Hermon, where in their lust these egregoroi, the watchers, lay with human women and sired abominations, the Nephilim. Jealous that the egregoroi would take form and thus steal from Him His most precious creation, YHW cast them into the pit of eternal darkness, called Tartarus. By the time their angelic fathers had been cast down, the Nephilim had spread throughout the world, fearsome giants who sought to twist and corrupt His creation into kingdoms of their own.'"

  He turned the page, revealing an illumination of what could only be Noah's Ark, complete with a pair of unicorns. The image had once been in color, but had faded and flaked away so much that it almost looked black-and-white. "'In His unjust, petty rage at these poor children, YHW brought forth great waters to destroy what He couldn't control, drowning the Nephilim and their human mothers alike, and countless other innocents. But the Nephilim were crafty, and many hid in the dark corners of the world, to emerge again as spirits and take their place as the rulers of man.'"

  Matt interrupted him when he reached the bottom of the page. "That's not what I read. The Book of Jubilees says that God allowed a fraction of a fraction of the Nephilim to remain as incorporeal spirits, to lead man astray before the Final Judgment."

  Dawkins shrugged. "I said, 'sort of.'" He turned the page. The faded illumination depicted a bunch of swirling curlicues which could have been clouds or smoke. "Huh," Dawkins said. "This is Hebrew, and it's a lot newer, maybe fourth or fifth century." Dawkins's voice dropped. "'Like their fathers the egregoroi, the Nephilim grew jealous of what was not theirs. In their quest for dominion of man, the surviving Nephilim conspired to destroy one another. Of sixty times two hundred, only one stayed true, only one stayed righteous, only one loved and sought to free her fathers.

  "'Join us, righteous men, and serve the daughter of shadow, the triumphant sister, the dark mother, she who dares defy HaShem'—that means 'the Name,' so that's God again—'and free her holy fathers from the unending darkness. Join us, righteous men, and drink of the true blood, not of everlasting life but everlasting youth. Join us, righteous men, to free the angelic fathers and rule with them the all . . . .'" He licked his lips and sat back in frustration. "I'm not sure how to translate this next phrase. It's something like 'eternal lands taken by the mighty.' I don't know what it means. Earth, maybe?"

  Matt shrugged. Janet sipped at her coffee. Blossom scowled out the window.

  He turned the page, scanned it, then flipped through the next several. The pages looked newer, crisper, the text darker and more pronounced as he flipped through. "These are interesting. Each page shows a victory of this Nephilim over another. According to this cult, she's responsible for the destruction of everyone from Osiris and the pharaohs to the Cabal of Thirteen in ancient Babylon, the Medici dynasty, even Tezcatlipoca in the New World."

  He stopped a third of his way through the book, on a page written in German with no embellishment but two symbols in black and white: Matt recognized the first as the double-lightning bolt of the Nazi SS, but not the second, a diamond with an SD in it. Blossom stepped around him to read it.

  "It's a patient dossier for Edith Gerstner. Born 30 April 1879 in a Munich hospital, was arrested for violation of Jewish quarantine in 1942 and sent to the Vernichtungslager—Death Camp—at Sobibor. It says she went with seventy-two other women into the petrol exhaust shower, and after all had succumbed to diesel fumes, she walked out, unharmed but docile.

  "Healthy for her age, she agreed to every treatment and test and even cooperated in designing experiments to test the limits of her body. She made no attempt to escape with the others on 14 October 1943. You see here," she pointed at a box Matt couldn't read, "it’s an order of transfer to the Sicherheitsdienst Reichsbunkersystem at Dresden on 15 October 1943, signed by Phillip Lenard himself. They closed Sobibor just after."

  She turned the page and frowned. "This is something different."

  The next page, and the rest after it, had more similarity to the first few pages than to those that came later. Dawkins frowned in frustration at the faded, almost invisible runes.

  Matt frowned with him. "Is that 'Uruk Proto-Cuneiform'?"

  Dawkins raised an eyebrow. "How did you know that?"

  "It looks like the tattoo from Flynn's body. And yours, for that matter. Care to explain them?"

  Dawkins looked up from the book and out the window. "I don't have an explanation. I don't. I had a compulsion to create them, something I couldn't resist, but with a lot of meditation I avoided using other people’s blood, though I really wanted to." His smile held not the slightest trace of warmth. "The whispers didn't like that much, and oh how they shrieked when, after each, Janet would deface them with crosses."

  "Are you a Christian?" Matt asked.

  Dawkins shrugged. "I don't know what I am, but I know power when I feel it." He tapped the book. "Like this. You can almost feel it hum."

  Matt touched the vellum. The parchment felt like parchment, the grooves cut to make the runes felt like cut grooves. "I don't feel anything."

  Dawkins looked back down at the book.

  "What's it say?" Matt asked.

  Dawkins chuckled. "I have no idea."

  "How do we find out?"

  Blossom rolled her eyes. "This is a waste of time. So now we believe that this old woman is a child of angels? That she is an ancient killer of gods?"

  Dawkins chuckled again, a tired rasp devoid of joy. "I don't care what you believe, Sakura Isuji. If it makes you feel better, there is no God, and when you were breaking me out those guys brought that body back to life through alien parthenogenesis or voodoo or unchecked stem-cell research or global fucking warming. I don't care where you believe she came from or what she is, but unlike that thing back there, Gerstner has fed and grown for thousands of years, and she is a thousand times more powerful."

  Blossom grunted and looked out the window. "But removing her from this machine will stop the augs."

  "Yes," Dawkins said.

  "You'
re certain."

  "Yes."

  She glared at him. "And this will stop the madness? This will keep the survivors sane?"

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. "I think so."

  She scowled. "I want to believe you."

  "I'm telling the truth."

  She shot an annoyed glance at Matt before turning back to Dawkins. "I believe that you believe you. I am less sure that what you believe is true."

  Matt tapped the book and repeated his question. "So how do we find out?"

  Dawkins looked at his sister.

  Janet leaned back in her chair. "Don't look at me, D. I can't read that shit." Matt wondered if Dawkins had a first name. She wheeled over to her laptop and pulled up a browser. After a few minutes she clucked her tongue. "But something doesn't add up. The Uruk culture dates to 4000 BC, and they wrote on clay. Parchment scrolls, writing on rawhide, didn't exist for another fifteen hundred years. That we know of."

  "Fair enough," Dawkins said. "Can you access the linguistics files they pulled up during Conor Flynn's autopsy? If you get us those files, we might be able to piece together what this says."

  Matt raised an eyebrow. "You expect us to learn a language in an afternoon?"

  He shook his head. "Not really. Grammar takes a lot longer than that, but we can learn the vocabulary and at least get a sense of what this says. Uruk is grammatically similar to Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew, so I can help with that if you can help translate on a word for word basis."

  Instead of replying, Matt looked at Janet. "So can you get them?"

  She stopped mid-chew, gum trapped between her incisors, then sucked it back into her mouth. "Yeah, but not from here. I'll have to go to work."

  "They won't get suspicious?" Matt asked.

  She bobbed her head back and forth. "Um, I can't access the files without it getting flagged, and my own access doesn't send the flag to me. I'd need to generate a request from someone, and when they follow up it won't check out."

  "Careful, sis," Dawkins said.

  She held up a hand. "Maybe you don't get it. This ain't about careful. I don't do this right, it'll burn me. They've got their heads so far up their asses that it'll take them a week or three to get around to vetting the document request, but when they do, if it gets back to me, I'm done."

  "I don't think it'll take near that long," Matt said. "When I poked around the servers, Jeff called me before I'd finished, asking me what I was up to. I guarantee he wasn't watching for me, so they must have some kind of spy program working in the background."

  Janet walked over to her brother and rested a hand on his shoulder. "So how do we play this?"

  Dawkins closed his eyes as she rubbed his temples. His face twitched, then his whole body shuddered. Blossom opened her mouth to speak and Janet stopped her with an upraised finger that returned to his temples as soon as Blossom had closed her mouth. After a few minutes, his eyes snapped open.

  Janet stepped back. "Consequences?"

  He cleared his throat. "We burn Tufts. He requests the file, then goes dark. It's the only way we get it without killing an asset."

  Matt raised an eyebrow. "Avery Tufts is one of yours?" The fifty-something former Scotland Yard bureaucrat had the looks and personality of a herring. Matt knew nothing about him except that his name appeared on a lot of reports and that none of his coworkers paid him much attention.

  Dawkins's smile didn't reach his eyes. "As far as Tufts knows, he's working for the CIA. Still a traitor, of course, but at least it's not Islamists."

  Matt wanted to ask how many agents Dawkins had in ICAP, but knew he wouldn't get an answer. Instead he said, "So that's the plan?"

  "Yes," Dawkins said. "He'll request the file along with a bunch of others, we'll intercept, and he'll retire in Aruba on a comfortable government payday to a Swiss bank account, blissfully unaware that he's living off of drug money." He smiled at Janet. "But first we need to get you to work."

  He used a prepaid cell phone to report his red mustang stolen from the Hill Country Motel and Pool Spa, and gave Jeff's description to the policeman on the line. In that time, she'd rubbed under her eyes enough to create vicious bags, scrubbed off all her makeup, and completed a quick workout that gave her a flushed, sweaty glow. "Do I look sick enough?" she asked as he hung up.

  "Sis, you look like absolute shit."

  She'd thrown on a George Mason University sweatshirt and sweatpants, slipped on a pair of pink crocs, and left her purse by the door. Twenty minutes later Janet's phone rang. She let the phone ring a half-dozen times before picking it up with a groggy, "Hello?" She let out a deep sigh, muttered an okay, and hung up.

  She kissed Dawkins on the cheek. "Back soon."

  "I know."

  She disappeared out the door.

  An hour later, Dawkins pulled up the file. Forty thousand lines of text had been scanned from photographs of clay tablets, analyzed, and converted into an incomplete and all-too-short dictionary. Most of the words pertained to professions and money, construction, and religion. Matt found that to his surprise, Dawkins's trick of using the eidetic enhancers made learning the vocabulary a trivial exercise, and while it took a lot of time, they could for the most part read the parchment.

  "It's an instruction manual," Matt said for Blossom's benefit. They read a while longer, and with each new revelation his dread grew. "It talks about the angelic fathers of the Nephilim, in the present tense. Names them and the women with whom they had children, and the order in which God cast them into the darkness."

  "Instructions for what?" Blossom asked.

  "Mass human sacrifice of possessed men," Matt said.

  "How to free them," Dawkins added. "She's setting the egregoroi free to enslave mankind and take their vengeance on God's creation."

  Blossom exhaled, an abrupt blast of air brimming with annoyance.

  "Amazing," Matt said. "This mentions camps for killing—death camps—and bronze birds that kill from the sky. Look here," he said, running his finger under a sentence. "'Twin suns will destroy the, um, something, cities in the land of dawn.' It's talking about World War Two."

  She froze. "I thought this part was thousands of years old."

  "It is," Matt said.

  "Then it's forgery."

  "It isn't," Dawkins said. "The book is real, and the writing is that old."

  "Impossible."

  Matt brushed aside her skepticism and turned back to the book. At some point Janet returned, and Dawkins briefed her on what they'd learned so far. Matt read a sentence, re-read it, then read it again. He pushed the book over to Dawkins. "Does this say what I think it says?"

  Dawkins bent down. "In the ninth age, the jade slaves will give themselves in pleasure to the Servant, and as her multitude of voices enslave and consume them, the ladder will descend into the dark pit." Matt grunted in agreement, and Dawkins continued, silently. At last he sat back.

  "Holy shit. The whispers. We're not going crazy. She's possessing us." He looked up at Janet. "She's going to kill every aug, every Jade user on the planet. We're the possessed men whose souls she'll use to free her fathers from the pit."

  "When?" Blossom asked. Matt wondered if she'd started to believe.

  They read further, then Matt said, "The first just before the sun 'inverts as the wise men see,' and then it looks like one a season until the last, their leader, is freed. 'When Semjaza returns from his exile, the rule of man will turn to unending slavery for the glory of the Watchers under the jade sky.' The Bible says there were two hundred egregoroi who followed Semjaza, so if we know what that last line means—"

  Janet cut him off. "The sun's magnetic field reverses every eleven years, but we've only had the technology to detect it for a couple of decades. Would that fit the bill?"

  "I think it would," Dawkins said. "Hard to be sure, though."

  Matt raised an eyebrow. "So if that's right, we've got, what, twenty or thirty years before Semjaza and the apocalypse, give or take?"<
br />
  "No," Blossom said. "Only a couple years before we go crazy."

  "We've got to think long-term," Dawkins said.

  Blossom slammed her hand down on the table. "We don't have long-term. We have years. Months. That's it."

  Janet plucked the gum from her mouth. "I've got another fifty, give or take. Barring any accidents." She popped the gum back into her mouth and gnawed it back down.

  Matt ignored Janet to agree with Blossom. "I'd rather not become a casualty. Still," he put his hand atop Blossom’s, "this is bigger than us. Even if we don't live through—"

  She yanked her hand away and stormed to the window, where she stared out at a tractor trundling toward the turkey farm down the road.

  "Just hold on," Dawkins muttered. He closed his eyes and his face went slack.

  Matt turned back to the book while Dawkins twitched and jittered, Janet rubbing his temples. The whispers tittered as he read of their true nature, the infusion of the last surviving Nephilim into his spirit. They laughed as he read of the golden ladder, his soul but a rung for the egregoroi to climb to escape their divine punishment. He shook it off and slammed the book shut, then waited for Dawkins.

  Minutes went by, then Dawkins stopped jerking, his breathing calmed, and he opened his eyes. He hugged his sister, then turned to Matt. "You're not going to like this."

  Matt held up his hands. "Hit me." Blossom appeared at his side, frowning.

  "Well," Dawkins said, "our best chance of success is to recruit more people to our cause, undermine ICAP's true masters wherever we can, and build a resistance movement that survives us. I can't see what I can't live, so I don't know if it will work, but everything premature I see leads to disaster."

  "Unacceptable," Blossom said. "I won't go mad if I can stop it. I won't."

  "You don't have a choice—"

  She cut Dawkins off. "There is always—"

  "WE CAN'T WIN." Dawkins sat back, took a deep breath, and continued. "Yes, you can choose to do something else, but if you do, you're going to die and solve nothing. We go in ourselves, Gerstner destroys us, and we're looking at an apocalypse. A real, honest end of the world apocalypse."