Lightbreaker tcos-1

by Mark Teppo

  Bernard stared at the floor, his face flushed. A muscle worked in the hinge of his jaw, flexing again and again. This wasn't his way, yet he hadn't lifted a finger or said a word to stop Julian.

  The white-haired magus lifted her chin with a single finger and leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her face was covered with sweat and her eyes were unfocused. Her tongue moved against her lips, seeking moisture but also recoiling from the salty taste of her sweat. "Part of you will be joining us," he said, an uncharacteristic tenderness in his voice. "You brought us this far, and we're going to take the next step with your help. It's not an empty sacrifice."

  Bernard moved his head as if he was shaking water off his face. Raising his arms, he turned toward the statue and began to speak a ritual prayer. Hard and sibilant consonants, lots of glossolalia, phrases that went on forever. It wasn't a tongue or a ritual I knew.

  Julian knew, and with an expression bordering on animal wariness, he stepped back from Kat's chair.

  What did this statue do? Was Bernard summoning something? Letting something loose?

  The Chorus gibbered in my head as the energy patterns convulsed in the room. The ley energies twisted from their natural channels. I felt motion against my face, a strong suction toward the strange device, and my stomach recoiled at the distortion of the natural energy flow. It was as if a giant magnetized coil had been switched on and everything ferrous was being pulled toward this energized core. But the attraction wasn't magnetic, it was mystical. The non-reflective mirrors of negative light were pulling at our souls.

  Bernard brought his hands together over his head in a single clap, a pop of sound that had no echo in the room. In a sudden rush of motion, the individual panes of glass boiled with white smoke. The direction of the smoke was different in each facet, and the sphere seemed to vibrate in place. With a noticeable gulp, the spectral pull vanished, replaced by an oppressive weight. I found it hard to breathe, difficult to suck in air as if the atmosphere had suddenly become much denser.

  Bernard separated his hands and, as he uttered a final guttural word, a pale glow spread between his fingertips. The lettering on the silver band surrounding the sphere fluoresced briefly, reflecting his signal. The swirling smoke within the mirror facets moved faster. Each panel seemed to find some orientation and the whole globe filled with a churning vortex. Red streamers began to fall through the vortex, moving perpendicular to the rotation of the whirlwind. A chaotic smear dripping down.

  It didn't stop at the lowest point of the sphere. The mist kept descending, curling out from the base. It widened as it drained, inverting into a mirror image of the tornado spinning within the globe.

  Bernard said a few words and the vortex inside the mirror tore itself apart, subsiding into a senseless disturbance. The red mist beneath spun down, threading itself through an invisible point, and turned itself inside out. Like a balloon being inflated, something rubbery and moist unfolded from the inversion of the tornado column.

  It was the size of a small dog-a starved animal mostly rib and skull. Its head was a surreal conglomeration. Its skull seemed canine, but it had no ears or eyes and its nose curved outward in a long proboscis. Instead of a mouth, a tiny slit gasped at the end of the hard beak. The creature was furless; its body a taut sack of translucent flesh over a cage of red bones.

  The tornado completed its inversion and, with a curving motion of its elongating spine, the creature popped its back legs into place. It shook itself in a sinuous wiggle that started with the head and rippled along the length of its body.

  Bernard pointed toward Kat, commanding the creature in the guttural tongue. The beast's long nose quivered as it picked up her scent. Like a hairless insect, it scuttled across the floor and leaped onto her leg.

  Kat contorted and twisted in the chair as it clung to her pants like a macabre seed pod. Her feet drummed arrhythmically against the floor. The ibis-hound mounted her lap, crouched against her pelvis for a second as she tried to buck it off. Then, it leaped for her torso.

  Like a fat tick, it dug its talons into her shirt and dragged itself onto her chest. It struck at her, its snout spiking through the center of her forehead, and Kat went into epileptic convulsions. The ibis-hound held on. Its thin sides heaving, it began to suck.

  The Chorus shouted in my head, an explosion of alarm mirroring what I was already seeing. With each successive pulse of its body, the ibis-hound sucked off a portion of Kat's soul. Its mangy body swelled with glittering sparks.

  Julian, anticipating my reaction, gave the signal for the electrical current in my chair to be engaged. Pain exploded across my chest, a thousand points of electric fire burning. My lungs seized as the current ignited my nervous system. My flesh smoldered and burned.

  I struggled to protect my brain, to shelter the synaptic currents of my own system from the squirming and sparking fury of the electricity. Shards of white light shredded my vision, daggers piercing my retinas.

  I made the current into pain. Pain was tolerable. Pain was transient. Like a violent spring storm that lashed itself against the ground until its strength was broken. Then it faded, subsiding into ambient atmospherics. Particles without focus, energy without purpose. The current became harmless electrons.

  The surge stopped and I sagged in the chair. On my chest, the points of the Maiden had pierced and burned me. My limbs felt like ragged stone blocks discarded at the bottom of a quarry, and each breath was physically difficult.

  Saturated, the creature returned to the trinity of figures. It scaled the nearest statue, an agile mountain climber who knew all the secret handholds, and danced along the figure's arm to balance on the edge of the silver circle. With a great convulsion, it expelled the soul out its long proboscis. A rain of light fell across the faceted sphere. The extrusion of Kat's soul fell through the mirrored surfaces where it landed, vanishing into the devouring darkness within the glass. The facets grew darker as they drank the offered soul, as if the hunger inside each face increased with the influx of energy.

  The creature tight-roped back along the arms and crouched on the golden head nearest Kat, leaning toward her. It had but one purpose, a single desire: to continue its harvest of her soul. It was too small to drain her all at once, and so it would keep returning as long as her light remained.

  Bernard bound the ibis-hound in place with a word. "It doesn't require this form to properly function. It mirrors the form of Thrice-blessed Hermes as a matter of symbolic convention-a framework you can visibly comprehend. A full withdrawal of the spirit is far less theatric, but is very much a manifestation of the mystery. ."

  I wasn't listening. Kat slumped to one side in her chair, held upright by the manacles about her wrists. Her breathing was so shallow as to be nearly unnoticeable. The Chorus dusted her, finding the outline of her spirit beneath the surface of her flesh, and what I feared was easily visible. She had a hole, a rippling darkness that was already burrowing deeper.

  "— Book of Thoth."

  That caught my attention. "What?"

  "The Book of Thoth, Mr. Markham." A grim smile touched Bernard's lips. "You haven't been paying attention, have you?" He stepped close to my chair and leaned toward me. "I know its secrets."

  The Book of Thoth? I was even more stunned than when he had alluded to doing something to Antoine.

  "I did it, Mr. Markham. I built his Key." He indicated the statues and the mirrored ball. "I built the theurgic mirror, and I can gather the souls of the living."

  I recoiled at his words, the Chorus rising like enraged snakes in my head. I heard Julian shout at the Hollow Man assigned to the power switches and, before I could act further, the switch was thrown again.

  Still off-guard from what Bernard had said, my Will was broken by the surge of electricity. I fled the sparking light and hid in the darkness that had been my friend for so long.

  XIX

  Like lightning splitting the night sky, consciousness returned in a rush. My body convulsed, and finding no r
estraints, a series of spasms ran through my arms and legs-sympathetic memories of the electroshock. I cracked an elbow against cold metal. I wasn't in the interrogation room any longer; this was the familiar womb of the shipping container.

  I reached out and there wasn't any other presence. I was alone.

  Kat.

  My chest seized, and the pinpricks of the Maiden's touch burned. Not all of the ache in my joints and muscles was from the chair. Not all of it.

  I could run from many things, but not my brain; it resurrected ghost memories: Kat, struggling to avoid the ibis-hound, her face stretching as her soul was sucked from her body; the ibis-hound's fat ticklike body rippling and flexing as it took her energy; the expression on Bernard's face as he watched-he wanted what he saw as much as he hated it.

  My hands drummed against the cold floor, knuckles banging against the ridged metal. As if I could beat my way through. As if naked, wanton rage was enough.

  You have to fill the void.

  Kat. In the core of my heart, in the absence of the black root of Qliphotic obsession, there was a twisted knot of responsibility. My fault: her sacrifice, her death. She was inextricably tied to my soul, and the connection didn't blind me to her complicity with the Hollow Men, but I knew what the touch of the ibis-hound meant. I knew that hurt, that sensation of light being sucked away. I knew what flooded into the emptiness.

  The floor wasn't going to yield. My knuckles were just being mauled by the metal floor. I curled up on my side, and tucked my sore hands against my bare stomach. It wasn't enough to be filled with rage. There had to be direction. Focus. The Will needed to be focused. Be smarter. See beyond the confines of this box. Anticipate the motion of the threads in the Weave.

  When a magus understands the flow of forces, when he attenuates himself to the ley energies, he can discern patterns and structure. The Watchers call it the "Weave," the Akashic Record of humanity viewed as interwoven threads and patchwork designs of cultural movements. They see themselves as modern-day Fates, cutters and knitters of the Weave's individual threads.

  We are patterns of energy-Ego and Identity-bound into shape by the Divine Spark. The Universe is a closed system that recycles itself, and we are agents that perpetuate that cycle-energy in, energy out. While a magus cannot violate the basic laws of the Universe-nothing is ever destroyed, it is simply transformed-he can direct forces in accordance with his desires. He learns how to read the Weave, and how to anticipate the course of its threads.

  The art of prescience-of glimpsing the shape of the Weave and seeing how threads are woven together-is the inner secret of the final ranks of the Watchers. This Fateful Precognition allows Protectors to subtly engage the Weave, but it is the Architects who are expected to shape the world. The lesser ranks could only achieve brief glimpses, random flashes of clarity. Nostradamus was afflicted with persistent glimpses of the Weave, a precognitive fever he tried to articulate through his portentous poetry.

  The tarot is a shortcut, a tool that lets us intuit the intersections of threads. Skilled readers are savants of pattern recognition. They don't see the future; their experience gives them the insight to understand how the threads are knotted together. One of the hardest tasks in reading the cards isn't gathering the threads but understanding the twist of the strands.

  More often than not, you're asking the wrong question. The trick is to realize what the right question is before the brief glimpse you've been afforded vanishes.

  I thought about the shortcomings of my question. I had tried to give it enough specificity that a small patch would have been revealed, but instead, Piotr had shown me a large spread of the canvas. Yes, at the center had been the intersection of mine and Kat's threads, but I hadn't bothered to take in the surrounding threads. I hadn't paid attention to their intersections.

  It had been the same way when I had been a Watcher: the lack of being able to see the big picture. You think too narrowly, Michael, too focused on what you want. It distracts you.

  I had thought it was luck, or a miserable oversight on their part, that the Maiden's electroshock therapy hadn't killed me. But, as I tried to discern the Weave, I realized there was another reason why I hadn't been the test case. Why they hadn't used me to demonstrate the ibis-hound.

  Bernard's device harvested souls. In his dementia, he thought he had discovered the lost Book of Thoth. He had found the secret of the Egyptian Demiurge: the One Way, the Key of Immortality.

  The Book of Thoth, however, was more fiction than fact. One of those legendary books that pervade our occult history, the Book is said to have been torn apart, and the pages became the first tarot deck. Its secrets were encoded in the mysteries of the cards. Another legend has it that the knowledge of those pages was too luminous for the unskilled human mind. The Library in Alexandria burned down because an unsuspecting acolyte tried to read the Book. He burst into flames and took everything with him.

  Regardless of the Book's existence, there was evidence in TheCorpus Hermeticum that Hermes Trismegistus wasn't interested in mechanical aids. Much less a device that would harvest souls. Hermeticism-and later, Gnosticism-was an individual practice, an internalized revolution that allowed the practitioner access to Heaven.

  What, then, was the device for? It was some kind of theurgic mirror. But did it reflect energy or was it meant to absorb energy? If it was a container-if it only took energy in-what was the use of that stolen power?

  Though maybe stolen soul energy wasn't the point. It was the act that mattered. In taking part of her soul, the ibis-hound had created a vacuum. The Universe abhorred vacuums, and was wont to give them over to darkness. If Bernard hadn't let the ibis-hound finish its unholy task of breaking her apart, then the Qliphoth would poison Kat. They would fill her, and with a chunk of her soul missing, she wouldn't be able to ground herself enough to resist their influence.

  I had been torn by the ritual in the woods, a tiny rip in my spirit, but it had been enough to infect me. I had been lost, an ignorant child wandering in the wilderness, and my fear had consumed me. I let it find purchase in my fractured self. I had let it grow. Kat's injury was massive in comparison. What hope did she have against such spiritual decay? Was it possible to be strong enough-to be aware enough-to fight back against such an invasion?

  Was this the question I should have been asking at my reading? How do you resist? How do you fight back? Kat and I were the Lovers-this primary position was the imprint of my subconscious-and the card laid over us was symbolic of the objective world. It had been the Queen of Cups, the watery part of water. She was a reflective card-her own true nature was enigmatic and difficult to ascertain. My Qliphoth-spattered nightmares had given birth to the reading, and the Queen an unconscious clue that I had built my own spiritual prison. My cage was my own, and I would need to gain that perspective-that level of self-awareness in order to understand how I could free myself.

  In the penultimate spot of the reading, the position of future awareness, was the Star. Inverted, representing my apprehension, my fear of failure. My perception of what had happened a long time ago-the unsheathed blade of the Prince of Swords-was a false history I hadn't let go. If I released this past, if I welcomed the idea of my prison as my own, then was the Prince of Cups-the final card of the reading-the path for me to follow? Was he what I was to become?

  But all efforts to comprehend the Weave, via whatever mechanisms a magus employs, are just guesses. Some more educated than others. All precognition was a game of What If? Piotr's tarot reading was just one possibility, and a lot of its interpretation lay in my attitude, in what I brought to bear on the symbols. Was the cup half full? Half empty? Which way was it going to flow? It would be hard to say until it was too late to do anything about it.

  But a hint lay there, floating in this amorphous drift of symbols and signifiers, a suggestion that there was a way out. Paths leading into dark woods also led out. A neophyte could find his way again; he could survive being lost.

  Without the
natural flame of the storm lantern, there wasn't any way to grow a fire without magick, and magick meant setting off Julian's ward. I crawled every inch of the container in the dark, trying to find some flaw in the ward. Some tiny hesitation in the script that could be exploited. Nothing. Julian's work was too precise.

  My stomach knotted itself over and over, and the rest of my insides were equally shriveled. Two days, maybe more, since my last meal. Minnie's? What had I eaten? Details were starting to become vague.

  Some time later, when I was too weak to move, I hallucinated. Visions of psychedelic butterflies and phantom lizards with rainbow-striped crests. The tarot dream came back and started to loop in my head, the details getting more surreal and psychotic with each iteration.

  An ocean of light poured over me, and the rushing wave came with an overwhelming racket of church bells. I floated off the floor, and gasping like a lungfish coming out of the mud, I gulped at the light. It was transformed-habes aquam vivam-and I choked, unprepared for such a transformation. The light grew firm, shadows intruding in the blankness, and I began to remember what these shapes were. My hands trembled as they reached to hold the bottle against my mouth.

  "Let him finish it," a voice said. "He needs to be coherent." I tried to distinguish this shadow from the others.

  The water slowed to a trickle and, under the vacuum suction of my infantile need, stopped. My stomach ached from the sudden influx of fluid even as the rest of me sighed in delight. I lowered the plastic bottle and held it out for more.

  The light went out: rough fabric over my head, a rope cinched against my neck. I inhaled instinctively, and my lungs choked on a cloying miasma. The cloth was soaked with an anesthetic and, with each breath, I pulled more of it into my lungs. The butterflies came back-more and more of them-and I drifted away, covered by iridescent wings.