Lightbreaker tcos-1

by Mark Teppo

  She was a giant, equal in size to the corpses interred in the lake, standing in the water. As I reached for the surface-a reflection of my touch from a few moments earlier when I had been drawn down into the water-she raised her skirt and showed me where the pillars of her legs met. A single eye-a reflection of the lighthouse that watched over the city-gazed down. An inflamed eye-black fire in its iris, blood leaking from its ducts.

  As my fingers breached the threshold, below reaching above, nine drops of blood fell. Nine tears splashed into the lake and floated, whole and round, down on the cherub raping the world. The child laughed, reaching with one hand to smear the blood onto his buttocks and thighs. He reached between his legs to slather the blood of the virgin eye-Nia, the inversion of Ain-onto his hard cock.

  I came back, and found myself bound. My hands were numb and locked behind my back. Something covered my eyes, and a hard object was firmly lodged in my mouth. Breathing was difficult as my nose was clogged with dried blood. As the dream vanished, this was what remained: sore, tied, gagged, drugged, and deposited somewhere cold and dark.

  I ached all over, as if every muscle had been pulled in the wrong direction. Prickly nettles ground in my joints as I tried to move. My back and feet were cold. Eight points of fire still danced on my skin.

  Four Tasers, in the end. The memory came back with more than a little reluctance. Like an archeologist reconstructing the past, I followed the secret history mapped out on my body: four on my chest, two sets of sparking pairs radiating across my upper rib cage like a half-realized constellation; a pair on my right arm like freckles gone bad and cancerous; and a final set on the outward side of my left hip, aching like an old war wound that got stiff when the weather changed.

  There was a ninth spot-unlike the others, but still part of this history. On the inside of my right arm, a weeping vacuum nestled in the fleshy valley of the joint. A needle, containing some pharmaceutical cocktail intended to keep me docile and pliable. How docile? I reached for the Chorus and it was like clawing through layers of muslin. But they were there, and I could feel them reaching back. The cocktail was wearing off.

  I rolled onto my side, and pressed my face against the floor. I had been stripped down to my pants-no shirt, no shoes, no socks-but my face was the only naked flesh not completely numb. The steel was ridged, and in the valleys I could dimly smell the old taint of blood and oil.

  I rocked back and forth, dragging my cheek across the ridge. It wasn't sharp, but it was rough enough to catch the edge of the blindfold. Nausea rolled through me, and I stopped. But it was enough. The blindfold had slipped.

  The change in illumination was negligible but I had accomplished something. I had changed the situation in my favor. My Will be Done. A first step. The rest were easier. I scraped my cheek some more, and the cloth slipped off my eyes entirely. Yes, too dark to see anything, but I didn't need the light.

  The object in my mouth was held in place by a heavy strap. The same method wasn't going to get that off. Wrists. I bent my fingers toward my bound wrists until they made contact with the bindings. So little feeling. Was that metal or plastic? I strained further, feeling like I was bending hardwood, and one finger managed to pluck at the edge of whatever was binding my hands. It flexed. Plastic, just an industrial-grade zip tie.

  Fire. I tried to focus my distorted thoughts on the flame-that incendiary element of change, that alchemical burn. Fire strips away the old, turning the dead into ash and dust-grist for the eventual rebirth of everything. Washed away by fire. Mahapralaya. At the end of the Hindu Kali Yuga-this current Age of Iron-the world would be dissolved in fire. The Greeks called it ekpyrosis, and as it was translated into the Latin by the heretics, it became conflagratio. The World-Fire. When it burned itself out, God would start anew. Yes, fire, come to me.

  A lick of orange flame guttered in my mind's eye, a spark catching in those dusty memories not yet thrown away. Nineteen, climbing in the North Cascades. Early fall. Nightfall, the temperature dropping quickly. Building a fire. I remembered nursing it to life, coaxing it with tiny branches and dry sticks, and I nursed that memory now in the same way, teasing it out with my Will. From spark to mental vibration to etheric manifestation. My hands grew warm as I directed the fire through my arms and into the bleak winter of my fingers.

  A ghost light bloomed in front of me, an external reaction to my spell. Surprised, my focus broke and the tiny flame died. The ghostly lettering vanished almost immediately like a hibernating serpent returning to its winter slumber. But I had read the words. I had recognized them.

  Protection sigil, keyed to the presence of magick. Just like the barn. Any strenuous magickal activity and it would explode. Immolation. Conflagration. It would have been funnier if I wasn't tied up.

  The same spell as the one in the barn, though in this case it was meant to keep things in instead of out.

  The ghost light hadn't been much, but in its brief glow, I had been able to pick out a few more details about my prison. The letters had been written on a metal plate attached to a wall that was as corrugated as the floor. A shipping container. I had been in enough of them over the years to recognize that ribbed construction. Just never so up close and personal. From the lack of ambient light, this one must be fairly well sealed. A firestorm would last just a few seconds before all the oxygen was consumed. The threat of such an explosion was a pretty effective deterrent: nowhere to hide, and not enough ambient force to raise a shield against the explosion. A cheap and efficient solution for those who wanted to hold a magus, or kill one slowly. Starvation worked as well as a knife, and it had the benefit of being indirect action. Like the way foreign diplomats in ancient Mongolia were wrapped in furs and rugs before being trampled, so that their sacred blood wouldn't touch the earth and allow their curses to take root.

  I flexed my shoulders, pulling at the straps around my wrists. My fire had been hot, although brief, and it might have weakened the restraints. I strained, and the ties parted grudgingly like a string of taffy stretched to its elastic limit. As I kneaded cold skin with equally cold fingers, my hands came alive with the prickly resumption of unobstructed blood flow.

  When the nerve endings in my fingertips were warm enough to feel something, I investigated the mechanics of the gag. As my finger slid off the rounded rubber hump protruding from my mouth, I realized it was nothing more than a ball gag. Available in any sex shop. I found the buckle in back, and wincing as I had to pull the belt tighter around my head, I undid the restraint and spit the rubber ball out.

  I tossed the whole contraption aside. Not a souvenir I wanted to keep. The metal buckle clattered against the ridged floor.

  In the death of that echo, I heard other sounds. A body moved and someone inhaled sharply. And then, a human voice. "Is someone there?"

  It had been ten years, but I knew that voice.

  Kat.

  XIV

  The thin film over the magma pool in my heart broke at the sound. The poisonous fire filling me in the hotel was just a minor burp compared to the volcanic upheaval brought about by that voice. The Chorus, shredding the chemical barriers in my head, rode the cresting edge of a venomous Qliphotic exultation. Their soul-sense radiated from my skull, seeking Kat's light.

  She heard me coming and scrambled against the door panels, trying to find some way to push them open. Instinctively, she started to pull energy from the ether.

  The wall behind her lit up, a white line of words glaring beneath her hips. A whining chatter of metal against stone forced its way through the Chorus' noise. As the illuminated letters revealed my approach, she began to shout over the pitched shriek of the protection ward, frantically constructing a magickal defense. The shrieking sound rattled my back molars as a firestorm began to coalesce, the floor starting to steam.

  The explosion would kill us both. Didn't she know what it was, what her spell was doing? She couldn't draw enough energy to protect herself from the ward's explosion.

  The Chorus giggl
ed, a chuckle of black humor magnified by the roaring echo of the erupting darkness. Fire, they giggled, she's not trying to protect herself.

  My fingers closed on her throat. I slammed us both against the wall and she groaned from the impact. "Goddess, no," she gasped, her hands fighting against the pressure of my weight. Her spell fled, dying in the collision, and the warning glow of the ward died as well. Back into darkness. Back into the wood.

  My face, so close to hers, was filled with her smell: the memory of charred lilacs, the verdant flush coming off her skin now, tinged with an acrid bite of fear. Her hair was in my mouth and against my cheeks as she struggled beneath my hand.

  I pressed the length of my body against her, pinning her flush to the wall. She turned her head and our cheeks met, her wet face anointing me. "Please," she whispered, her lips straining for my ear. "Please."

  Settle it, the Chorus hissed, their voices issuing from the angry smoke in my lungs. Kill the bitch, they implored, writhing with need. She's asking for it.

  Another echo intruded through the heat haze of the Chorus. A stained memory of Nicols. Standing in the parking lot beside Piotr's trailer. "Guy's going to Walla Walla for ten to fifteen. You think that's going to fix the hole in his heart?"

  My mouth rubbed against her jaw, my lips twitching against the shiver of pain racing through her skin. I felt it in my groin and stomach as well. Her heart, hammering in her rib cage, was a seductive rhythm. Just a handbreadth away. I could reach in and touch it. I didn't even need magick. I could do it the old-fashioned way: by ripping her flesh, by cracking the cage of bone about her precious organ. So close.

  "Please," she whispered again. Her mouth was so dry the word was barely a husk of its letters. "I don't understand. Who are you?"

  The question broke against the black wall of the Qliphotic infection. A phantom voice in my head-my own traumatized innocence-echoed the question. Who? The Chorus screamed, the interfering noise of knives against knives, attempting to drown the question. Drown the tiny creature trying to dig itself out of the muck in my soul.

  The Eight of Swords. The eight blades of interference. My roots, sunk deep in the darkness of Malkuth-the physical world, the realm of the weak flesh. The Chorus had been goading me for years. Their need had perverted my desire. Had led me astray. Take back what was stolen from you, they cried, hurt her in the way she hurt you. Dominate her; break her Will.

  Kat's stomach pressed against my hip, her shirt shaking against my naked skin like a banner blowing in the wind. The scent of her skin and her soul burned into my cortex-just as it had been seared there so long ago. Lilacs. A field of smoldering lilac bushes. Was this my desire?

  I squeezed her throat, the Chorus burning my hands with an urgency of violence. They darted through my skin, tasting her flesh, licking at her fear. She struggled under my hand, twisting in my grip. Her face turned toward me, and I could see the Chorus reflected in her eyes. I could see how she saw me. "Markham?"

  Her hand found my face, her fingers questing for my lips. Touching me as if she couldn't believe I was real. "After all this time." Her voice was barely a whisper, such little air as could be forced past my hand. "Why?"

  She didn't know. The Chorus was in her, invading her mind, caressing her spark with their eager tongues. She couldn't hide from me; I read her pure. She didn't know.

  My memory was false. She had never touched me in the way I had remembered. She had never broken my spirit. Her mind was bereft of the history in my head.

  What world were they trying to force on me?

  The Chorus reacted angrily to my hesitation, flailing against my doubt. Their eruption was a volcanic attempt to take control. Just a little tighter. Just a little more pressure. These scintilla of captive souls fought to drive me to the final resolution of their desires, struggled to make me close my hand. Complete this cycle of fiction.

  Was I just a creature of their illicit design?

  I let go, much like Nicols had dropped the gun instead of fighting for control. I just let go. As I retreated, the loss of her touch-of her presence-sent the souls in my head into full revolt. I fell, unable to stand, and my legs and arms spasmed uncontrollably. My fingers, unable to choke Kat, tried for my own throat instead.

  My lungs were clogged with wet soot. Deep in my belly, the orphic egg-laid those years ago in a moment of panic-cracked, and its tainted alchemy spilled out. It was a poison meant to melt the ravaged splinters of my spirit, meant to melt me down so that I could be reformed as a Qliphotic child.

  If Kat was innocent, then I was not.

  The tear in my soul was my transgression, a symptom of my failure. My fear, festering for years. The Qliphoth, the demons of the dark side of the Tree, made their children through despair and panic. All roads lead through the Abyss, and it is the fearful who are torn off the path. Those who think they are not worthy fulfill that expectation.

  The Star, inverted, was me. I had caused this grief. I laid the seeds of what was exploding now. I was the cause. . I was a fallen star.

  But. . still a star. Still a spark of the Divine Spirit, however gone astray. Even though I was nothing but a vessel filled with betrayal and deceit. . even though I was nothing. . no thing. .

  I rolled onto my side and threw up. From my tailbone on up, flexing everything in one direction, I threw it all out of me in one enormous eructive heave. They wanted violence, blood and gore for their pleasure. Instead, I gave them a violent denial. Nihil non est. My throat and mouth strained to expel the vileness in my gut, an explosive decompression of a decade's worth of entrenched darkness. I vomited a second time and then a third, the wave of cancer lessening to a bitter trickle. By the fourth and fifth spasm, I had nothing left, but my body continued to heave anyway, finding some tortured revelry in this act of expurgation.

  The Qliphoth extrusion hissed in the lightless room, a simmering puddle of viscous acid. It wanted to return to me, to swim inside the warm sanctuary of my flesh and to bathe in the hot nourishment of my blood. It wanted the delicious sweat of my fear.

  But it couldn't have me. Not anymore. I was done with it, done with all that it wanted.

  Still, its desire remained. If I was going to reject its tainted kiss, it would find someone else. The blood on my lips told me as much, the violent desire of the Qliphoth still lingering. It existed to consume. That was its only nature. It had festered in my gut and fueled my flesh's basal desires for that sole reason. These are my roots, sunk deep within the material world of Malkuth.

  I raised my fist, lashed with lightning-the walls going white with shock, screaming and keening with near eruptive force-and brought my hand down in the center of the midnight puddle. I struck its core, touched it where it wanted me to touch Kat. I grabbed the vile heart of the Qliphotic essence-revenge, in its core-and blasted it with light.

  The room hazed with steam, crackling with burning ozone. For an instant, I feared I had gone too far and had triggered the wards but, as the fractured droplets of the Qliphotic essence absorbed and contained my spell, the ward exhaled, losing light and sound. In a few heartbeats, we were in darkness again.

  But it wasn't as black as it had been.

  "Have you hated me that long?" she asked finally, her voice raw and tentative. "Ever since. .?"

  I wiped my chin and spat, clearing my mouth of the nasty taste. Clearing out the last vestiges of that bilious venom. "Part of me," I said. "Yeah, a part of me."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I never meant for anything to happen. I never meant for. ."

  This? I thought. Never meant for me to become what I am? The Chorus was silent and submissive after the explosive purge of their secret taint. Their strength had lain in the hidden egg of the Qliphoth, the psychic child planted in me by the darkness in the woods. They had been influencing me, their continual seduction ensuring that I provided nourishment for the offspring, for the demonic payload I had been tasked to bring to term.

  This was why they had been driving me to find Katarina, why
they filled my head with thoughts of her death. They wanted her blood on my hands, wanted me flush with the exquisite rapture of having taken her. That was the trigger they had sought, the act which would have breached the metaphysical wall that had hidden the black Tree.

  They would have welcomed me then, taken me down into those roots where the egg had been hiding. This, they would have revealed to me, this is the secret of the flesh. They would have let me See what I had done, Willfully, with intent.

  This is the Qliphotic promise of the body-the darkness' hidden, dreadful secret-this is the inheritance of the material passions. This psychic mind-bomb of violence and rage. This is the real promise of mankind, the only true enlightenment our species can ever hope to attain.

  "Yeah," I whispered, responding to Kat's plea for communication. She reached out to me in the dark, reached out to touch someone else, to know she wasn't alone. "It's part of what makes us human, isn't it? The shame and the regret."

  "I tried to find you. I did. But it all fell apart so quickly. We were separated. All of us. I wanted to go after you and bring you back-" She faltered, realizing how empty an excuse her words were. "We were supposed to show you the Way. You should have seen the Tree, seen the Ten and the Path."

  She moved in the dark, slow steps along the wall. I could hear the sound of her palms rubbing against the steel. "Ah, Markham, we opened your eyes to the spirit world, and I am sorry that you had to find out about it in that way. I'm sorry I didn't tell you." She crouched down to find me. "But you survived. You've learned the Arts."

  A hard laugh coughed its way out of me. "Kat, I saw the Tree." Now that the Qliphotic veil was gone, new images were surfacing in my head. The Chorus tried to hide them, but they were buoyed by a forceful insistence. A need to remember, suppressed too long. Yes, the Tree. I had seen the Tree of the Sephiroth.

  But the ceremony had been interrupted at this moment of revelation, and we had been scattered. There, among the shadows of the pines, I had Seen a different Tree, a black reflection. "I touched the nightside. I Saw the Qliphoth."