by Mark Teppo
Nicols had gone back to Piotr and had his own reading. The last card had been the Tower. Destructive change. This was the future Piotr had shown him.
"I'm sorry, John-" I started.
"Are you?" he interrupted. He didn't so much as drop the page as throw it at me. "Hasn't this all been about you, about your obsessive quest for this woman? When haven't you been focused on your own fucking redemption?"
I didn't have an answer for him.
He stepped back, raising the pistol and resting the barrel against his head. "Every one of them matters, Markham. So you don't care about nine or even nine hundred. One more shouldn't faze you a bit."
I shook my head. "Don't do this."
"Stop me," he said. "Show me altruistic occultism. Show me that I'm wrong. Isn't this how you cross the Abyss, Markham? By being selfless?" The hammer on his pistol was still cocked. It wouldn't take more than a tiny squeeze for him to pull the trigger, and I knew he would do it. He hadn't been able to shoot Antoine. Not then. But now, when all of the last few hours had had a chance to sink in, when he had realized he had Seen too much. Lost too much. He was on the edge of the Abyss, and the Monster there-Choronzon-was coming to tear him apart. He wasn't ready to leap the gap, no more so than I had been a decade ago.
Was I any more ready now? Or was I inured to the pain? Had I become such a hollowed-out shell that I wasn't yet aware of how much I had truly lost? If it were me that Choronzon sought, was I any more prepared?
How long are you willing to run?
I closed my eyes, falling inward to find the boiling storm of the Chorus. They unfolded, arranging themselves into an icy fractal pattern. They came at my bidding, subdued by what I had seen at Ravensdale, but they still came at my command.
"Open 'em, you piece of shit." Nicols' voice quivered. "Look at me or I will-swear to God-put one in your belly before I shoot myself. Look at me, you son of a bitch."
I did, and the frigid snowflake expression of the Chorus froze him in place. Another burst of their magick, guided by my Will-convertant in fraxina-and the handcuffs dissolved into white ash. I stood, shaking the metallic dust from my wrists, and took his gun from his stiff fingers.
How long?
I pointed the gun across the road, over the trees, and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked, and the roar of the shot echoed for a long time. I stood there, and listened to it until I couldn't hear it anymore. And, after a little while, the wind came back and the trees started whispering again.
How long would you run?
I sighed, and-libertas-released my hold on Nicols. He jerked wildly for a second, and then caught up in time.
"One isn't the same as many," I said, offering him the gun. "It's a far cry from making a true difference."
"It's a start," he conceded. He clicked the safety on with his thumb as he took the gun. He holstered his weapon and offered me a crooked smile, a wan expression filled with both trepidation and relief.
"I don't know what to do," I said, answering the question in his eyes. "I can't save everyone. I'm doing a shit poor job of saving myself." Fill the void.
"You and everyone else." His grin straightened out. "Just don't run away on me, Markham. That's all I'm asking."
XXIV
I knelt at the side of the road, and gathered the scattered pages. Numbered in the upper right corner, each page was a photocopy of a single tarot card-Crowley's deck-with extensive notes. Nicols' re-creation of his precognitive visit to Piotr's. I put them in order as I retrieved them, the wind making me chase a few. I saw the Prince of Swords and the Three as well, their blades slicing through a ruby heart; he had drawn cups too, the Nine and the Princess; a single wand (the Two, inverted); the Ace, Four, and Five of Disks; and, in addition to the Tower, he had received the Hanged Man, the only other Major Arcana card in his reading. "What were you trying to figure out?"
He shrugged. "I asked how to find you. Though, the more I read up on this stuff, the more it seemed like I had asked the wrong question."
I nodded. "The reading gave you a glimpse of a broader worldview, something higher level than your simple query."
"Yeah. It's like checking the weather report to see if you're going to need an umbrella today and having the meteorologist tell you the entire coast is preparing for landfall of a Force 5 hurricane. There's a sense of scale that creeps in, makes you feel pretty insignificant. My petty needs are pretty fucking irrelevant when compared to the motion of human existence, aren't they?"
"And yet, here we are." I offered him the folder. "Trying to make sense of it all."
He waved it off. "I've stared at it too much-know it by heart now-it needs a new pair of eyes."
I glanced up and down the empty road. We hadn't seen another car the entire time we had been pulled over. "Know where we are?"
"Somewhere near Enumclaw, I think."
The name meant very little to me. "What do you want, John?" Peace; I heard an echo in my head.
"They killed nearly a thousand people, Markham. I want to stop them from killing any more."
"We probably won't be able to."
He shrugged. "I've got to try. I can't take the idea of walking away. It's failure on such an astronomical scale that, if I start to think about it, I'm going to lose my nerve. I've just got to do something."
"Okay. We can't do anything here. We need a destination. An idea of where they have gone."
"What are they going to do?" He corrected me. "If you figure out the why or the what, the where becomes easier."
"Okay. So, the 'what.' Bernard is a Hermeticist, and Antoine said he's an old-school alchemist. Which follows, because a lot of alchemy rose from efforts to decipher Hermes Trismegistus' Emerald Tablet. I would have thought he'd be fascinated with the idea of transmuting himself instead of what he's done with this mirror device."
"The Great Work is an attempt to remake your Image." Nicols nodded. "I know about the Emerald Tablet."
I raised an eyebrow. "You've been busy. Getting yourself educated." I glanced at the two boxes in the back seat of the car, my professional curiosity piqued. What library had he raided?
He shrugged. "Trying to understand the way you and your nutbag friends think. After the way things went at the hotel, I figured if I was going to find you, I had to stop thinking like an old homicide detective and start thinking like an insane occultist, trapped in his own personal symbolic hell."
"Symbolic?" I said, fighting a tiny smile. The last few days certainly had felt about as "symbolic" as getting hit on the head with a brick.
"It's all symbolism and creative mythology with you guys," he said. "Anyway, I've been skimming, mostly. Not enough time to really absorb anything. Just picking up keywords and wrapping my head around the general landscape. I've had some practice at this sort of thing; we do it all the time when we're prepping for an interview. If you can talk about things that interest the person you're interviewing, in language they understand, they tend to relax. They tend to say things they hadn't planned on saying."
"Like what Antoine said about distractions. He had no time for them."
Nicols nodded. "Because he's on a schedule."
"Yes, but because he's chasing a timetable that's already in motion," I mused. "Say Bernard and Julian are hiding themselves from a Protector. Where are they going to hide? How long do they think they'll be safe?"
"But if they're going to do something else with the mirror, they don't have to hide that long."
"But they do have to remain hidden."
"Okay. That means they're probably not in Seattle."
"How you figure that?"
"Because Pender would know. The other Hollow Men would have an idea. Piotr might even be able to find them. Antoine would have no compunction about tearing the answer out of any of them. Even if they didn't consciously know. Going back there would be a risk I think Bernard and Julian would be idiots to take. They're on their own."
I sucked on a tooth, feeling the Chorus churn in my stomach. Nic
ols was right: they were unshackled from the eye of the Watchers, free to conduct whatever final experiment they had in mind. But it was a small window of opportunity. They knew Antoine would be coming, that he would restore his Watch. They had to move fast, and Antoine knew they were on a forced march as well.
They had stolen the souls of nearly a thousand people. They couldn't (or wouldn't) return them, so they had some other plan. Some other use for all that energy. The only one I could think of was the one I knew best: making the energy their own and using it for an Act of magick.
The Anointed. The five Hollow Men who had been sacrificed to the device. They were soul-walkers, men who could leave their bodies. Men whose souls remained inviolate outside their bodies. Could they retain their ego consciousness within the mirror? Were they agents who would direct the force when the time came to utilize it? Much like the Hollow Men in the Arena had channeled power to Doug, could these soul-walkers send energy to Bernard and Julian?
Maybe Antoine's suggestion was right: maybe they were trying to talk to God. If they were going to assault Heaven, try to knock on the Gates of God's House and force an audience, they would need that raw power. But, more importantly, they'd need some sort of access point. They'd need an-
"Axis mundi," I breathed.
"Excuse me?" Nicols asked.
"It's Latin for 'pillar of the world.' The point about which the planet rotates. In a magico-religious sense, it's the point where God has reached down and touched the world, where primitive people think the Divine Spirit has manifested itself in their profane world.
"Cultures that believe in a cyclical rebirth of the world also believe in a point around which the world is reborn. Sacred sites allow the religiously devout the opportunity to not only remake the world, but to influence the next iteration, by standing at the spot around which the world turns.
"Look, in Hinduism, this current age is called the Kali Yuga. It's the Age of Iron and it ends in fire. It's called 'Mahapralaya.' " Ekpyrosis. Conflagratio. The World-Fire. "It's the macrocosmic version of individual redemption: everything is forgiven in fire; all sins are burned away and everything is possible again."
"This thing can do that? It can bring about Mahapralaya?"
"What other reason is there to steal the souls of a thousand? Think about it in terms of conventional weaponry. Why would you buy guns? Because your enemy had arrows. Why would you buy a cannon? Because your enemy had single-shot rifles."
"Why would you build a nuclear bomb?" Nicols followed the progression. "Because the guy who made one first got to rewrite the rules."
"Thoth was the Demiurge in the Egyptian tradition, the Being who fabricated the World from the Word. Ptah built it, but Thoth imagined it. He was still within the shell of the Divine, but he was closest to God. His Key to Immortality is a means of remaking the World."
"Slow down," Nicols said. "This is exactly what I was talking about. You just go off into your own world with all this myth and symbol crap. I can't keep up."
"They're going to kill more people." I spelled it out. "They're going to gather as much energy as possible and try to force God into re-creating the world."
Nicols snapped his mouth shut, swallowing his objections. "They're going somewhere urban," he ground out. "And, if they're not going back to Seattle, then the closest place is Portland. In Oregon."
Nicols drove south and west, the mountain off his left shoulder. The roads were narrow and twisted, contorted tracks through the wilderness, but each curve, each bend, brought more signs of civilization. I was useless as a navigator as he worked his way back to the main highway, so I studied his chart and his notes. Seeking an understanding of the Weave around him, of how our threads were tangled together. Piotr had done the Celtic Cross for Nicols. Ten cards: six to show where he had been, four to point to the future.
The first was the Ace of Disks, a strong foundation that prepared the initiate for his expulsion from the garden of innocence. Laid across this card were more disks, five of them. Nicols' notes indicated this card had been reversed, inverting the standard definition of sanctuary into a chaotic representation of being cast out of safety. The expulsion from Eden again, the loss of innocence. Naked in the world.
Third-the card placed above the first pair-was the Hanged Man, the agent that sought to guide him. An enlightening inversion, a suspension reversing the magus' worldview. The Fisher King, the mad visionary of the land. The future hanging on the cusp of tomorrow, waiting to be revealed.
I thought about the card that had been my crown-the World. Also known as the Aeon, it was the promised fruition of the enlightened effort, a new world order brought about by philosophers and mystics. In my dream, however, it was a sexually rapacious cherub who was changing the world.
And, just like that, the symbolism became clear. The little fucker's cock was a staff, a pole, an axis mundi, and he had been planting his seed-his magickal nature-into the miniature planet. It was a perversion of the old agrarian rituals, but it made sense. The cherub was Bernard, raping the world in order to remake it in his own image.
In an intuitive flash, I knew I was the Fisher King in Nicols' reading. I was the inverted magus in Nicols' worldview-my feet suspended, my head pointed down to the earth. I was the adept who had vanished into the tunnels of despair on the back side of the Tree in order to find enlightenment.
Wait for the light.
I shivered, beginning to understand the collision of our threads. The flash of enlightenment that had come to me in the Arena about the Wheel of Fortune rode heavily in my head. The cycle of death and rebirth, kings buried and born again. It was Crowley, following Waite's lead of adding Christian and Kabbalistic imagery to the Wheel, who connected the cycle of death and rebirth to Thoth. The ibis-headed guide who waited to carry us up from the burial of the flesh.
What about the takwin, the ibis-hounds? Were they angelic guides then, and not spirit thieves? Was part of the road to Immortality a vanquishment of the flesh?
Nine hundred sparks. The number made my tongue numb. All those souls, cast upon an unknown path. Was it the road to Dissolution or Immortality?
The fourth card in Nicols' query was the inverted Nine of Cups. The root, Malkuth, where the soil is black and our unconscious grows unexpected passions. The inverted Nine was an affirmation of his entry into the world of the Mysteries. The start of his path.
Where does it lead?
Fifth was the Prince of Swords. Across the top of the page, he had written "MARKHAM."
We are all your princes.
I grimaced. My brain was already linking my recollections of Doug on the Wheel-blood-drenched and broken-to his neurological pain memory. I witnessed and experienced his death as the Chorus mapped all the memories into one composite. The Prince of Swords had been in my future and, now, as part of Nicols' future, it was behind us. A bottleneck passed, nothing more than a distorted legacy that I would imperfectly remember. Part of me. Broken, but still part of me.
Nicols' immediate future was the Three of Swords, Crowley's "Sorrow," the pain that shouldn't be denied. The hurt subsumed into the magus in order for him to ascend. The betrayal inherent in this sacrifice was tempered by love, but that didn't make the pain go away. It just made it tolerable. That was the failing of Milton's Morningstar. He couldn't understand that God never stopped loving him. Even as he fell.
The last four cards were a precognitive glimpse into the ruddy water of possibilities and permutations, and for the first, I was heartened to see that Nicols had drawn the Four of Disks. These were the Four Watchtowers, the Enochian citadels that held the keys to the elemental magicks, and they were the heart of the magus' empire. The card hinted at an attainable gnosis in spite of Nicols' larval state.
I've tried to guide him. .
The next card was the Princess of Cups, and I tried to recall Crowley's interpretation. He deviated with the Cups. Is she like the Prince? No, the earthy part of water, the grounded source of inspiration. The artesian sprin
g of Mind. What was the connection?
My eighth card had been the Priestess. An equally obtuse reference; it hadn't been Kat, after all. Was the Princess another thread we couldn't fathom?
I sighed, and moved on to the next card. Secrets still hidden. Nicols' penultimate card was the inverted Two of Wands, and I smiled. This one I knew. Who wasn't afraid of new experiences?
But those new experiences led to the last page: the Tower. A lightning bolt blows off the crown-this was Kether, after all, the pure Wisdom of the Sephirotic Tree-and kings tumble out of the ruined building. Falling into the sea of darkness that surrounds the tower.
Nicols glanced over. "Yeah, I'm fucked, aren't I? That one is never good."
"It's all relative," I admitted. "You've got it written right here. 'Nothing is ever lost; it is simply transformed.' "
"It was moderately entertaining when Piotr tried to make me feel better about pulling it," he said with a tight smile, "but in light of what I've seen today, it's sort of lost its charm."
"The Tower isn't about physical destruction," I explained. "Nor does it mean complete annihilation. It's all relative to the situation you are in. It is a destructive resolution-yes, no bullshit there-but that doesn't equate to your death or my death or the destruction of the Universe as we know it. It just means things are going to be resolved, and the resolution is going to be painful."
"The Three of Swords," he said. "That's a physical hurt, isn't it? I've got that one coming, don't I?"
That looks like it hurts. I shook off the image of Doug's face, his single eye livid against the burned outline of the pentacle. Scarred by the sign of the earth. "Yeah. The road to the Tower is bloody."
"Wonderful," he muttered.
