by Dan Abnett
"There's a surprise," said Triumff. "And every witchboard operator in the City's taken the night off."
"Precisely. So it was a right to-do. Then the gentleman came in. He seemed to know his business, and was most keen. I showed him to the Chamber, and then retired to the canteen on his advice. He said I would be safer there, circumstances as given."
"He was lying," said de Quincey.
"What gentleman?" asked Triumff urgently. "What bloody gentleman?"
"An Eye-talian fellow," said Natterjack. "Most proper and polite, he was. Rendered me this lovely speech about the welfare of the Queen and Country, and the Fate of the Free World. And the Unity, I think he mentioned. Yes, certainly he did."
"Where is he now?" asked Mother Grundy.
"At the doors of the Chamber, as I left him," said Natterjack. "I'll show you, shall I?"
Natterjack led them off down the long hallway.
"Just out of interest," said de Quincey as they hurried along, "what did you mean when you said it wasn't the Church?"
"Well, they had no knowledge of the Wiltshire affair. My Union was called in to mop it all up, decontaminate and so on. God's bread, but it was a mess."
"Then who did it?" asked de Quincey.
"That great arse Lord Salisbury," said Natterjack. "He was trying to win favour at Court by igniting the old power. He got a slap on the knuckles and no mistake, but they decided to keep it all shtum."
"Hockrake," murmured Triumff. "He fails in his ambitious little plot and so lends his weight to this conspiracy instead. It all begins to mesh together, doesn't it? In a horrible sort of way."
They had reached the end of the passageway. The doors to the Cantrip Chamber were brand new: vast, interlocking plates of reinforced iron. They had been fused together, melted into one solid sheet.
"We only had them put in the other day," remarked Natterjack bitterly. "Look at them now. Look at them!"
Triumff looked. Strange chalk markings had been inscribed around the seized lock mechanism.
"What's this?" he asked.
"Please do not touch that," said a man emerging from the door of a side chamber with a lamp held aloft. He was a goodlooking fellow in his thirties, but he showed the signs of extensive wear and tear. His fashionable clothes were soiled and ruined. He looked as if he had been dragged across Europe behind a refuse cart.
"I am Giuseppe Giuseppo," he announced, bowing low.
"Oh good," said Triumff, his grip on the rapier tight.
"Giuseppe Giuseppo?" said de Quincey. "The Giuseppe Giuseppo?"
"I believe so," said Giuseppe, bowing again. "I come from La Spezia, Italy. On urgent business. This business." He gestured towards the doors.
"You know him?" asked Triumff.
"He's the greatest inventor of the age," said de Quincey
with undisguised admiration. "I've read about his work in Scientific Italian. This is an honour indeed, sir!"
De Quincey shook hands with the Italian.
"I'm de Quincey, of the Royal Militia," said de Quincey. "This is Mother Grundy and Sir Rupert Triumff. Natterjack you've met."
"The Sir Rupert Triumff?" asked Giuseppe, raising his eyebrows. "The discoverer of Australia?"
"Yes. Yes. Yes," Triumff said, clapping his hand to his brow. "Look, I really hate to be brusque, but the Fate of the Free World and all that? I'm sure we can have a jolly good time getting to know each other over a bottle or ten of musket, later, but that really hinges on there being a later, doesn't it?"
"Indeed," said Giuseppe. "I was attempting to open these doors when you arrived. It is a difficult process. My guidebook is not altogether useful." He produced the Most Important Book In The World from his pocket and tapped its water-stained cover.
"What's wrong with it?" de Quincey asked.
"It fell in a pond. No, I fell in a pond, and it was with me. The ink has run. Certain passages are very indistinct."
"May I?" asked Mother Grundy, holding out her hand.
Giuseppe looked to de Quincey, who nodded meaningfully.
He handed the book to Mother Grundy. She flipped the pages, her eyes widening slightly.
"This is-" she began.
"Yes," said Giuseppe curtly.
Mother Grundy composed herself, and carefully studied the smudged pages in the half-light.
"I see from your chalk inscriptions that you were preparing the Charm of Access."
"Indeed," said Giuseppe, moving around to look over her shoulder at the book. "But as you can see, the notes here are all but washed away. Should it be a Ward of Forgiving? Or a simple Paracelsian sigil? And this arrangement here: is it a runic matrix or a congress of Sephirotic harmonies?"
"Chalk?" said Mother Grundy.
Giuseppe handed her the chalk.
She stepped forward and began to mark out signs on the door next to the ones he had already made.
"An Enochian key! Of course!" Giuseppe said, clapping his hands. "How is it you are versed in Leonardo's Arte, Mistress?"
"I'm not," said Mother Grundy. "I'm versed in Old Miriam's Wicca, for that was my training. The principles are related." She licked her finger and scrubbed out some lines, correcting the inscription.
"There," she said. "Let us withdraw."
They backed away. Smoke began to ooze from the area of the lock, and the iron doors began to shiver like sailcloth in a changeable wind.
"Ready?" asked Mother Grundy. Ready or not
THE TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER.
The End of all these things.
Even in this modern and enlightened year of two thousand and ten, painfully little is really known about the workings of the Arte, or of its relationship to the material world we inhabit. As yet, mankind knows too little of the parameters of the Supernatural to begin to adduce its governing laws, and, furthermore, mankind is still in some doubt as to exactly what is supernatural and what isn't. Though the scientifical knowledge of our race has been furthered and enhanced by the works of Great Men like Newton, Dee, Rutherford, Beronza, Chaney and Hawkinge, mankind still has a tendency to class anything he does not readily understand as part of the machinations of the Invisible World. This may sound difficult to credit, but consider that, until Beronza published his work on the nature of applied gravity, people believed that falling over was caused by malevolent spirits.
Another hindrance to our understanding of the Arte was described by Doctor John Dee, when he remarked that Magick is not only more complex than we imagine, but it is also more complex than we should imagine. It is a popularly held axiom that mortal man simply hasn't the breadth of mind to comprehend the profound principles of Magick. To quote Dee's other famous aphorism, "Any sufficiently advanced jinx is likely to baffle the tits off a coypu."
This is not true, well, not entirely. Once in every century or so, an individual comes along who is actually capable of getting his enviable mind around the matter of the Arte. Or if not actually around it, then close enough to draw alongside and exchange pleasantries.
One such man, one such singular man, was Leonardo of Vinci, the often-lauded and seldom-understood progenitor of the Re-Awakening, whose scholarly endeavours broadened our understanding of Magick more than any other, and who made possible the everyday use of the Arte that we rely on today. It was he who first introduced the distinction between the prudent application of Magick, and the wanton abuse of its darker extremes, which we call Goety.
History records Leonardo as a fine, spirited man, tall and lean of limb, often given to flashes of inspiration. He spoke a number of languages, although never more than three at once, and was particularly partial to chicken, be they fried, braised or launched off the local battlements, pedalling furiously in experimental flying machines that looked for all the world like giant sycamore pods, until they hit the ground. Then they looked like messy servings of chicken in a basket. An accomplished artist, sculptor, designer and poker-player, Leonardo wrote many books on the subject of the Arte. As we have previously noted, one of
those is now the Most Important Book In The World, and rather hard to come by.
Leonardo's most truly brilliant vision must surely have been his conviction that the Arte was but a natural manifestation of a greater, unfathomed Universe around us. History, who, again, was there at the time, recounts this as having taken place just after the Yule of fourteen eighty-four. Leonardo was at home, spiritually famished by the ennui that overtakes us all after the great seasonal revelries, and was toying with the various gifts he had been given over the Christmastide period. These were of the usual fare: personalised retort stands and alembics from fellow scholars, and some vulgar paisley-patterned hose from a distant aunt.
Musing distractedly over the garish hose, the Master suddenly noted how the pattern resembled the so-called Sign of Mandelbrot, an emblem of the esoteric Zoroastrian belief that every tiny-most speck in the cosmos acted upon each other in a way that imperceptibly defined the structure and behaviour of our universe as a whole. Many called this Theoretical Chaos, even the Mandelbrotian Zoroastrians, though it is held they had a different connotation for the term.
All at once, and in a state of some excitement, the Master pulled on his new hose, and paraded around, theorising that, contrary to the popularly held belief that Magick was a latent, potential resource waiting for mankind to tap it, the Supernatural was in fact a not-yet-understood aspect of the Natural. He reasoned that the Universe was held together and operated by all its components, and that as Magick was one of those components, it was surely part of that process too. Further, he concluded, the Magick mankind encounters is but a symptom, a sign of some greater, universal machinery that binds the world together, and without which we wouldn't be.
In short, when man dabbles in the Arte, or in Goety, he is playing with the truest, most sublime forces of God's Creation. Once mankind had understood that Magick was not a dark and secret toy, but actually the visible processes of the Universe's great, unseen engine, Leonardo was sure that life in general would become a great deal more comprehensible, not to mention safer.
Shortly thereafter, he caught sight of himself in a mirror, and hurried to remove the hose before shame overcame him utterly. The incisive notion, however, never left him.
I trust my readers will tolerate this digression when I explain that I mention all this now for four reasons, the first being, it is high time someone set the record straight and snapped us out of our blinkered, superstitious attitudes. Secondly, it should reinforce, for us all, the infamy of what the Divine Jaspers is about in the Powerdrome's Cantriptic chamber. Misuse of a dangerous toy is bad enough. Wanton abuse of the mechanism of the Universe is the very darkest shade of evil.
Thirdly, it seemed the moment to do it. You deserved to know these facts, gentle reader, and there may not be time for them later.
Fourthly, and finally, it helps us to understand that when misguided mankind fiddles with the Arte - let's say some ancient, potent aspect of it like the Great Henge near Salisbury - it cannot but help affect the physical nature of the surroundings: bending, warping and refashioning to counterbalance its upset. All of which, I hope, goes some way to explaining the fact that when Uptil and Agnew arrived at the Powerdrome, they did so in the company of a six-foot cat in doublet and breeches.
The fireworks had not abated in the slightest, but Uptil and Agnew didn't notice them. The stonework of the Powerdrome, up whose entrance steps they were running, throbbed with deep-seated power, a vibration that seemed to shudder from the valves of Hell.
The air was dark, and charged with a thick soot that clogged the tongue and throat, and made them both gag. There was a scent to the air too, rich and sickening, and an ozone charge. Bump-bump, bump-bump went the stones around them, shaking to a seismic heartbeat.
Uptil was naked, and clutched his come-back so tightly that the bevelled edge bit into his finger-pads. Agnew had discarded his cloak in the thick air, and held a dirk he had been lent by the lighterman whose wherry they had commandeered. Already, the bright blade had been tarnished by the airborne soot.
"This is bad, isn't it?" muttered Uptil as they took the last few steps. Agnew nodded, but was too choked to talk. The entrance hall of the Powerdrome was a long, black cave, lit at the far end by a red, infernal glow. Just like the mouths of fire-breathing dragons are wont to do in fairy stories.
The third member of the trio sprang past them. Having dropped to all fours, he was pounding away in a manner unseemly for one in so finely tailored a pied-ŕ-montaire ruff and cloth-of-gold peascod doublet.
"Wait, my friend! Caution!" called Agnew after the speeding quadruped. The Cat turned and fixed him with glinting yellow-agate eyes, each slit with a slender black-diamond pupil. It hissed something deep and feline back at him.
"Together!" rejoined Agnew as he and Uptil hurried to catch up with their unlikely ally. "In numbers there is strength."
The Cat nodded, a disconcerting mannerism in a cat, however large, and only prowled forward again when they were with him.
Uptil, as we have already recognised, was no expert on cats, but he found himself liking this one. Its eyes were bright and intelligent, its tail swished like a coachman's whip, and its fur was the most exquisite marmalade. For the first time in his noble life, Uptil had yearnings to keep a pet, but when the pet had a head bigger than his, teeth longer than his come-back and a bodyweight in excess of three hundred pounds, just who would end up keeping whom was a moot point.
"Come on," said Agnew, and led them down the grim hallway towards the hellish glow.
The metal doors of the Cantriptic chamber lay just ahead. They overlapped one another, like the broken wings of a dead bird or the covers of a violently discarded book. They were smoking gently, and seemed limp and flaccid like wet paper.
Beyond them, the inferno burned.
An elderly man, in singed robes, was sprawled, coughing, in the threshold beyond the fallen doors. He looked up as they approached.
"Peace ho!" he challenged, coughing up gobs of viscous spittle. "I am Natterjack of the Union. Don't cross this threshold, friends, I implore thee."
He stopped short as the Cat reached him, and fixed him in a stare, eye to eye.
"Kiss my blind cheeks!" Natterjack observed, his gaze wide in amazement.
Agnew knelt by him.
"We are after Sir Rupert Triumff's party!" he said. "Are they within?"
"God save 'em, they must be!" answered the old man. "When the old dam and the Eye-talian melted down the door, they rushed in there. I followed them, but the smoke The smoke"
"Rest there, sir," said Agnew, getting up. "We'll deal with this."
"It wasn't just the smoke, you understand," added Natterjack. The trio paused and looked back at him. The Cat mewed softly.
"The whole world has come apart in there," said Natterjack in an empty, abyssal voice. They didn't ask him what he meant by it. They didn't want to know.
They plunged into the Cantriptic chamber. I just want to remind you here about my digression upon the nature of the Arte. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
They plunged into the Cantriptic chamber. Reality plummeted away.
Space and dimension seemed to have been stretched out by the weird effects of the overloading Cantrips. Perspective and depth were wrenched out to snapping point, and curled around, as if drawn up by Escher, or Ucello on acid. The nearby walls seemed to press down on their faces, while the furthest reach of the vast chamber seemed to lag out a mile or more away, bent through ninety degrees. Every line of architecture was straight and true, and yet the whole was warped beyond the fathoms of mortal eyes. The floor ahead sloped away steeply, yet they sensed no downhill slant as they moved forward. Red fire gouted up at them from the deep distance.
