He held me by the shoulders, the puffed sleeves of my nightgown rucked up beneath his restrained yet passionate hands. ‘It is your soul that is black, Miss Fell. You are a witch, a succubus. You are the Queen of Sheba.’ He placed the tip of a finger beneath my chin and raised my head so that he might look directly into my eyes. ‘Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor. Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.’
‘You know the Song of Solomon!’
‘I am acquainted with all your sacred texts.’ He bestowed a chaste kiss upon my forehead. ‘And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab. And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel. And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a javelin in his hand. And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly.’
‘Numbers,’ I said, trying to stop myself from trembling. ‘You’re reciting from the Book of Numbers—the passage that tells how the plague was stayed from the children of Israel!’ The Midianitish woman was called Cozbi, a name that means ‘deceitful’. She was the only woman in the Bible of whom it is written that a javelin was thrust ‘through her belly’. If Lord Azrael was reciting from Numbers he was also, of course, reciting the modus operandi of Jack the Ripper.
‘But Moses said unto them,’ he continued, ‘Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.’
‘But all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him,’ I quoted, and more fervently than I ever had before, whether from family Bible, or at Sunday school, ‘keep alive for yourselves.’
He smiled.
‘There is only one text that I truly wish to become better acquainted with,’ he said, ‘and that is the necronomicon I suspect is sealed within your heart.’
Without further ado, he led me through the archway. It was adorned with brightly coloured friezes in enamelled brick. And its fascia displayed the words: ‘Hierarchy, Fraternity, Liberty’.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let me show you my quarters.’
‘But Cliticia,’ I said, looking over my shoulder. ‘What about Cliticia?’
He said nothing. He did not need to. We had entered into some kind of untranslatable contract—one, moreover, that I did not think I could get out of. Never mind the small print. Never mind the alien grammar and vocabulary. Whatever the lawyers might argue, this was certain: I had long ago put my mark to paper and signed away my soul.
But for what?
We passed into the next courtyard, and then into the one that followed, and the one that followed that, each quad of stark, bleached stone demarcated by high walls, and each a reservoir of silence. So much, in fact, did each successive courtyard resemble its predecessor that my sense of déjà vu soon translated itself into an eerie apprehension that I was about to return to my starting point. The courtyards, of course—or so I was informed—eventually led to the Throne Room, a replica of the room in which Belshazzar had hosted his calamitous feast. The silence deepened. For a few seconds, a bluebottle’s erratic flight lent the dead air a sudden fit of vitality. Then all sign of life absented itself, with even the shadows seemingly holding their breath and turning their faces to the wall at our approach.
The courtyards possessed an opposing ingress and egress, but were otherwise open only to the moonlit sky. By now, the silence was at full tide; I began to gasp, so real was the sense of suffocation. When we at last passed into a courtyard whose walls—far from barren—were riddled with a multitude of black, lacquered doors, it was all that I could do to prevent myself from consigning dignity to the winds and emitting a long, protracted squeal of relief.
My relief was short-lived. The doors—and there must have been over one hundred of them—were all exactly alike. My head reeled. It seemed that I had merely traded in one hall of mirrors for another. For a moment, Lord Azrael hesitated, as if he shared my confusion. And then he propelled me towards a door. And if I at first thought he had chosen it completely at random, I soon came to understood that he was acting as he always did: as a man for whom purpose was all.
We came to a halt. I watched him place his hand on a strangely commonplace brass doorknob. The door opened, almost by itself.
I stood on the threshold of a dark, airless passage that might have been a Roman catacomb, or—to admit to an even more morbid apprehension—the entrance to the hanging shed at Newgate. Dignity, in such circumstances, was, I decided, perhaps not worth the having, and I squealed, long and loud.
‘Why, Miss Fell! Whatever is the matter?’
‘Where on earth,’ I said, gulping in a big lungful of air, ‘are you taking me?’
‘To my quarters, of course, just as I have said.’ He gestured towards the stairwell at the bottom of the passage. ‘Please, there is no cause for alarm.’
‘But you hear such stories,’ I said.
‘Stories?’ he said, brushing a few cobwebs from our path and moving me along, if with less urgency than before. ‘Ah yes, of course. The stories. There are so many, Miss Fell. And not all bad, I hope?’
I said nothing, concentrating, instead, on regaining my breath.
I cast my gaze upwards. We had reached the stairs. They rose in a grim iron volute through several landings until they seemed to terminate beneath a domed skylight that, if Babylon’s night sky had only boasted a panoply of stars, would have resembled a miniature planetarium.
We began to ascend.
‘Do you mind if I ask you something, Miss Fell?’
‘Please feel free,’ I said, still panting a little, but eager to show that I possessed something like Jane Eyre’s independence of spirit.
He nodded, in thankful acknowledgement. ‘Then I ask you this: Have you ever been subjected to the Harrow?’
‘The Harrow?’
‘It has, in recent years, become quite the fashion, I believe, to interrogate a postulant with the aid of infernal machinery, such as the Harrow.’
‘Oh dear. Yes, I see,’ I said, flustered. ‘I didn’t know its name.’ I knew its power, of course. The memory of being strapped inside the steel hemisphere and having my dreams and intimate thoughts wrenched brutally into the light of day was still horribly fresh.
‘You have your own infernal devices, I expect,’ I added, wishing against hope that he would contradict me.
‘It has been some years, now, since we took the Citadel and made it our own. And during that time we have learnt much about Babylonian science.’
‘I have seen the effects of vril. That music that you conjured out of the air... ’
‘That is nothing. But it is true to say that, without our researches into the infernal machinery we discovered languishing in the Citadel, we would never have been able to isolate Prima Materia and thus access its supermasculine essence. Our work, of course, is still in its early stages. So much has been lost, so much forgotten. However, the fact that we have not merely revived ancient Babylonian science but actually succeeded in turning it against Babylon itself, is, of course, immensely gratifying.’
We reached the first landing and stopped.
‘This way, Miss Fell,’ he said, bowing a little and gesturing towards the corridor that stretched out before us. It was, in many ways, a counterpart to the corridors that riddled the decaying bowels of Ereshkigal: perfectly straight, absurdly extensive, and lined, on the one side, by windows that gave onto a courtyard, and on the other, with yet more black, lacquered doors. But unlike Ereshkigal, each door here had had its nameplate removed, with only an oblong of unvarnished wood with four holes at each corner to remin
d the visitor that the Citadel had once been dedicated to Ishtar.
We had only walked a few paces when Lord Azrael stopped, opened a door, and guided me into a room so big that it must surely have once served as living quarters for two, three, or even four temple-maidens.
‘Ever since the Middle Ages the Illuminati have used Babylonian science to influence world history: poisons that turn men into Golems, scrying crystals that reveal the secrets of their hearts, and the sex-magic that enslaves, maddens, and kills.’ The room’s furnishings had been removed and its walls stripped of paper and whitewashed. It now acted as a storehouse for what might well have been the innards of thousands of vivisected clockwork toys. ‘It is strange to think that a current of intellectual history parallel, but quite separate, from our own, survived the fall of the earthly Babylon and flourished off-world. It is even stranger to think that it developed into something we can only marvel at and try desperately to understand.’ Ruefully, he shook his head. ‘If we had only been more mindful of preserving our own intellectual traditions! To have to rediscover the secrets of Sumi-Er in grimoires passed down by Babylonian whores, descendants of the lesser races of Sumi-An ... ’ His eyes misted and he turned away. ‘I will say only this: If it has been an intellectual adventure, a genuinely thrilling voyage of discovery, then it has been humiliating, too.’
I walked over to a pile of rusting gears, wheels, and ratchets, and plucked out a half-submerged doll. I held it before me, studying it. It was much like the dolls I had seen on Earth Prime, but—to go by its elegantly moulded bisque head and porcelain limbs—far beyond anything I might have reasonably expected to find in my Christmas stocking. As I tipped it to one side, to better evaluate the artistry of its design, I heard it whirr and clank. And then, as I again held it right way up, it quite astonished me by starting to talk.
‘My name is Jezebel. I am a Babylonian talking doll. Would you like to play with me?’ The thing’s eyes opened. ‘I want to be your friend. I want to teach you how a temple-maiden may accept sattuku and still retain her honour ...’A scrap of pink leather protruded from between rows of tiny white teeth.
I gasped. The doll fell from my hands and its head shattered against a small mountain of copper and tin. I took a step backwards, my arms folded across my chest as if I had just ventured out on a freezing winter’s night, to be struck dumb by the cold.
‘It is one of the last surviving mechanical gynunculi,’ said Lord Azrael, ‘a fifteenth-century educational tool developed by Babylonians who subscribed to the spermatist school of preformation. In those days I believe the High Priestesses were seriously considering the possibility of breeding a race of homunculi to replace the men of Earth Prime.’ He walked towards a connecting door. ‘And perhaps they succeeded, eh? Perhaps the Illuminati really are no more than the bred slaves of your quattrocento ancestors who simply got out of hand?’ He laughed then opened the door and walked into an adjoining room. ‘But that is too fanciful,’ he continued as I followed him. ‘Even in the fifteenth century, Babylonian science was in decline, as is evidenced by a belief in such an exploded theory as preformation.’
The room we now stood in was almost identical to the one we had just left and similarly filled with junk—what might have been the flotsam and jetsam of a great, clockwork ship that had sailed too far from its home port and foundered on the rocks of Time. He came to a halt and drew me close to his side, the encircling lumber creating a little amphitheatre of fragmented machinery. ‘We must, I suppose, give old Adam Weishaupt his due. More than anyone, before or since, he knew Babylon’s strengths and weaknesses. He knew, for instance, that 1788 was the year Babylon would have to reveal itself. Indeed, if the Illuminati had left things any later, Babylon’s superiority in both covert and overt warfare would have disappeared, and their culture may well have been subsumed by Earth Prime. As it was, not so much as a shot had to be fired. Almost overnight, everything that had hitherto been Earthly became dominated by the Babylonian.’
‘Weishaupt wasn’t the only one to declare the existence of a secret cult,’ I said. ‘The Black Order made its presence known at the same time, did it not?’
‘That is true,’ he said. ‘And there are some who have gone so far as to postulate that neither Modern Babylon, nor the Black Order, existed prior to that time, that our history is, if you like, retroactive. But of course, one has only to examine phenomena such as the Inquisition and the witch-craze to understand that we have always existed, even if we have not always known, acknowledged, or fully understood ourselves. Indeed, what sense does history make without reference to the Modern Babylon and the Black Order? Very little, I think you will find. Very little indeed.’
‘It would explain certain matters,’ I said, trying to remain cool. ‘It would explain, for instance, how both Babylon and the Black Order had managed to remain secret for over two thousand years.’ No mean achievement, I thought, with so many young women inexplicably disappearing off-world, some perhaps never to return. ‘People had their witches, heretics, and witch-finders. They had their Catherine Howards and Charlotte Cordays. It was almost as if no one could quite bear to admit the truth.’
He nodded. ‘But by the late eighteenth century history’s subterranean forces were ready to erupt. Europe was undergoing a convulsion of thought and feeling, a revolution that would eventually give birth to the modern world. Humanity prepared to acknowledge its own nature.’ He turned to me and smiled. ‘Yes, Weishaupt knew the time was right, as did we. The Shulamites longed to realize the darkness that had been gestating in their collective soul ever since the new Babylon had been founded. They longed for the Black Order!’
And perhaps even brought them into being, I thought. But if the Black Order were a Shulamite fantasy, wouldn’t it follow that we Shulamites were a fantasy, too, and not only of the Men, but of all mankind? Giddy, I drew back from further speculation, seeing before me only a prospect of wheels within wheels, and certain only of this: that we were a tragic race. We despised our earthly masters, the Illuminati, and sought fulfilment in their enemies, men who, if similarly obsessed by us, sought only our complete annihilation.
We walked on, exiting by way of the doorway opposite, and then passed through several more rooms, many of which served as book depositories for the medieval Babylonian grimoires that Lord Azrael had earlier spoken of. Soon, we came upon a series of laboratories. These were equipped with machines that had a devilish aspect that would have provoked the envy of Dr Frankenstein, so much did they seem suited to the work of a modern Prometheus. Like the courtyards outside, and the entirety of the wing that I had so far traversed, the laboratories were devoid of human life, or indeed, life of any kind. Cobwebs shrouded arrays of alembics, test tubes, retorts, and burners, and the air was motionless and stale. I reminded myself that the Black Order was few in number, and that their off-world presence was thought to constitute no more than three hundred souls. Today, those that were resident in the Citadel, and not scattered in encampments across the vastness of the city, were doubtless attending to the needs of my Shulamite sisters in the reception centre.
One laboratory, however, showed signs of having been quite recently used. A gleaming steam engine stood at its centre, surrounded by generators, dynamos, turbines, and other, more mysterious devices for which I had no name. These in turn were surrounded by five big, glass specimen jars, each one of which— to judge by the smell—contained some mixture of alcohol and ether. Two of the jars were empty; but the three that stood closest to the steam engine harboured the kind of crystal with which Lord Azrael had opened the interdimensional portal in Spitalfields and which Cliticia and I had used to bring down Ereshkigal’s force-field.
As we left the laboratories behind us I cast a glance over my shoulder, fascinated, and at the same time unaccountably appalled, by what the jars displayed. Oh God, I thought, struck by that vision that had ambushed me during my travels on The Empress Faustina: a strangeness of line and dimension belonging to another, weirder, m
ore frightening world, that was somehow both real and dreamlike. Unable to bear the sight, I looked away.
Eventually, after negotiating a few similarly unoccupied ateliers and workshops, we came to Lord Azrael’s private apartment.
Above the door was a cartouche decorated with the letter ‘A’ and a coat of arms. To either side hung tapestries, the one to the left depicting Alexander the Great, the one to the right, Julius Caesar.
He opened the door and led me in.
The room declared itself the office of a prospective Lord of the Universe. A huge map table made of a single piece of marble stood centre stage. Along the farther wall was ranged an even larger table laden with pens, blotters, and ornamental lamps, its front sporting a design in marquetry that represented Mars, the god of war. The ceiling was cross-beamed with cypress-wood. The doors had massive bronze hinges and were covered with the gilded leaves for which the word in Babel is mismakanna. And the furnishings—sofas, chairs, ottomans, card tables, and other chattels—were of cedar and ivory inlaid with copper and gold. Across the walls there were garlands of palmettes, elaborately carved pilasters surmounted by double capitals, and a number of edged weapons, including the ancient, scimitar-like harpesh. The windows and balcony gave onto one of the deserted courtyards through which we had recently passed, and beyond was the unhindered expanse of an alien Mesopotamia’s blue-black sky.
The table was strewn, not only with maps, but with antiquities: a stele of the Hittite god Teshup, bearer of the North Wind; a cylinder of lapis-lazuli; little serpent-headed dragons and winged bulls; statues from Mari; and fragments of bas-reliefs blackened by fire. Lord Azrael, it seemed, was a collector. And not only of bric-à-brac. As I continued to inspect the room, I saw, halfhidden in the shadows that swarmed about its recesses, several distinct human forms. Slouched in heavy armchairs, their heads lolling forward, backward, or to one side, perched on windowseats, or else laid out on sofas and chaise-longues, were more than a dozen life-size dolls.
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