by Mark Teppo
Images from the Arena swam in my head: the ragged edge of the sword severed the ligaments in Doug's wrist; the blood, black in the shadow-spawning firelight, hot on my legs and bare feet; the first Hollow Man to burn, his blood bubbling out from his mouth and ears as it tried to flee the inferno of his combusting organs. And the others, the Hollow Men who had Seen through him and found me staring back at them.
Paved with good intentions, slick with blood: the road to the Tower.
"If we face the Tower with fear, it will be us who fall from its crown," I said. "That's what the Three of Swords is telling you. The Two of Wands-the card right before the Tower-is your fear, John. I'm not an idiot; I've got my own terror to get a hold of before we find Bernard. That's what the Two of Wands represents: you have every reason to be scared shitless. But the Three of Swords says the pain has a limit. The fear can be conquered; the obstacles can be overcome. You just have to be ready for the course to be difficult."
I flipped back through to the page with the Four of Disks on it. "You've got the Watchtowers at your back," I said. "You started with the Ace of Disks, one of the most powerful cards in the deck. These two cards say your walls are strong; you have the means to build a sanctuary from the pain. This is a reading of transformation, John. It's a destruction of the old flesh and a rebirth into the realm of the light.
"As an adept, this would be a very good fortune to get." I was trying to spin this in as positive a light as possible. A focused Will opened many doors for a magus, and such focus required a belief in the possibility of success. "The path to enlightenment is hard and painful. It is supposed to be. It's not for everyone; the obstacles can seem impossible." I tapped the page. "But this reading? You can do it. You can reach the other side."
"Okay, Deepok, enough with the cheerleading. I get the picture." He looked at the open folder in my lap. "Well," he added. "I don't, entirely. But I get the message. I do have one question, though: How? How are we supposed to find Bernard? It's a big fucking city, and you and I don't know it well enough to turn over the right rocks before we run out of time."
"No," I said. "We don't." I realized what the Princess of Cups represented, what my own Priestess meant. "We need to find someone who can tell us. We need to find a local oracle. We need to find someone like Piotr who knows the city well enough to guide us."
"People who know the flow of a city," he said, echoing what I had told him days ago and layering in his own knowledge of city informants. "Cab drivers, bartenders, drug dealers, doormen."
I nodded. "Yeah, someone on the ground. Someone who would hear a whisper as soon as it started." I struggled to find the right concept. "The Princess is a feminine principle. She's not the Goddess figure like the Empress, but she's of the same ilk." I thought of what Kat had said about her relationship with the Hollow Men. I am their Whore-Goddess; I am the fertile earth in which they bury themselves so that their spirits may be freed.
"Strip clubs," Nicols said. "We need to hit the strip clubs."
XXV
When we reached Portland, I let Nicols guide us through the mirrored rooms of the clubs. A professional courtesy call to the Portland Police Department let them know he was in town. A low-key canvas of some of the strip clubs in the city. Part of an early intel reconnaissance for an SPD case was the story. Mollified by his contact and always eager to maintain ties with fellow officers, the detective he spoke with gave him a list of hot spots.
After the first few, the clubs became a blur to me: the architecture became variations on an already tired temple floorplan; neon signs became obscure bursts of hieroglyphics; the bored and laconic expressions of the dancers morphed into Grecian masks stamped from rust-stained copper.
And the names. Characters who stoked the imagination with their multi-syllabic exoticism: the Middle Eastern mystique of Saffron and Esmeralda, the Oriental inscrutability of Yukiko and Aniko, the European decadence of Chaumineux and Antoinette, and the Egyptian mystery of Cleopatra and Isis.
Too many of them had brittle shells, their shiny war paint translucent to our mystic eyes. We Saw their submerged personalities, their hidden rage at the dull pawing and heavy breathing. We knew their hidden sadness. While their eyes were brilliant reflections of the mirrors and their mouths rich fruit ripe for plucking, the motion of their hands-toward my thigh, toward a watered down drink which they barely touched, toward a cigarette-betrayed their exhaustion.
Part of me understood Bernard's goal with the mirror, what he and the Anointed wished to do with the souls of the world. How many of these people-dancers and patrons alike-would leap at the chance for a new Aeon? For a tabula rasa moment when all their sins were wiped away? How many eager souls were there in this city-in any city-who were waiting for a chance to make a break from their torrid existences?
I started seeing Bernard's mirror in every disco ball; the play of reflected light mocking me with the promise of a new world, a better world built from the darkness of this one.
Our plan was a bust, made worse by the emotional toll it took on us. The few who had an instinctive sense of the city's energy flow weren't self-aware enough of their intuition to focus it to our inquiries. We had our faces stroked, our crotches teased, and our wallets emptied, but found no oracular prescience to guide us.
We stank of arousal, fetid air, and cigarette smoke as we wandered out of a club shoved into the front end of an old warehouse down in the industrial district. The sky was a burial shroud stretched tight.
Nicols started to shake out a cigarette from his nearly empty pack and stopped, his tongue touching the edge of his lips. "I think I'll wait awhile before the next one." He tipped it back into the pack. The color had been leached from his face by the dead sky. "We're not going to find anything."
I agreed. "It's not the right approach. Maybe if we had a few days, we could find one who could articulate her understanding of the city's energy flow, but which one? Which club? There are too many choices and we don't have that kind of time."
"We're going to have the same problem with bartenders and cab drivers." He shrugged. "And getting anything useful out of the local drug dealers is going to be impossible, even if I could find them. They'd never talk to me." He barked out a short laugh. "Especially when I explained what I wanted to know."
"We could try the fortune tellers, but. ." I raised my shoulders in an empty shrug.". .how many and how spread out they are is going to be an issue again. It's already too late to start."
He looked toward the blocky line of downtown visible beyond the row of low industrial buildings that surrounded the club. The lighted windows of the skyscrapers were tiny beacons, small dots arrayed in a chaotic pattern against the backdrop of stone and steel. "Which one are they in?" he wondered.
The Chorus had been no help. As we had drifted across Portland-crossing and recrossing the river that split the city in two-they had looked for an abnormal energy signature. The concentration of souls in the device should have been a bright star, should have been obvious to anyone who could read urban flow patterns, but I detected nothing. Portland's grid was tainted, I could read that much, but the source of the disturbance was hidden. I could feel the ripples on the surface of the river but, try as I might, I couldn't locate the stone beneath the surface that was the cause.
"Are you sure about the card?" he asked. "The Princess of Cups. Are you sure of your interpretation?"
"Pretty sure. I don't know them as well as Piotr, but I know them well enough."
"Maybe we should focus on something more concrete. What about Thoth? Didn't I see a Book of Thoth at the bookstore? Why aren't we just reading that?"
"Because it's the wrong book. Crowley liked to pretend his book was the formative realization of the secrets of Thoth. It's an in-joke. One of the myths is that the copy in the Library of Alexandria was rescued, and its pages became the first tarot deck. But it's a story."
"A library would help, though. Something like Van Groteon's collection?"
"Something l
ike. Thoth-and Hermes Trismegistus, his manifestation in the flesh-is credited with writing forty-two books. The whole range of human knowledge. Nearly all of them have been lost. The two that are most complete make up TheCorpus Hermeticum, and are philosophical discussions about the soul. There are references to the other books, oblique mentions in early alchemy tracts, and even a few extracts, but nothing complete. Not enough to re-create the originals."
"But if you were going to piece one together, it would be TheBook of Thoth."
I nodded. "Yes, that'd be the one."
"You can't rule out the possibility that he really did it, can you?"
I shook my head.
Nicols' gaze wandered across the line of warehouses and buildings. "There's a bookstore downtown. Powell's. It's an entire city block of books. I know we're the backwater and all out here, but maybe they've got something in their rare book room that can help us." He shrugged. "Hell, they've probably got a decent tarot section. We can get a second opinion on the Princess of Cups."
"Even if they had the books," I said, "The clues aren't going to be labeled in the table of contents. It'll take me hours to decipher anything of use. You've read the Emerald Tablet. On a literal level, there's nothing practical in those eighteen lines. Yet it was the core instruction manual for centuries of alchemical research."
He sighed. "We need a good librarian."
An idea struck me, a sudden blossoming in my head as if a flower had just erupted from rich loam. "A librarian," I said. "That's it. The scholars at the Library of Alexandria were the keepers of secret knowledge; they were the oracles of their age. Booksellers aren't the same, but they are kin to librarians. With the right influence, we might be able to get one to speak for us. To See something that will help us."
Her name was Devorah and she worked in the Red Room at Powell's, surrounded by tarot cards and metaphysical books. Her mousy brown hair was pulled back from her heart-shaped face by butterfly barrettes, and her eyelids were painted like stylized abalone shells. The logo on her maroon t-shirt was for a local punk band who had downloaded graphics from the Key of Solomon to use as a background texture. I wondered if she knew the source of their symbolism; if she knew they had been so perverted from their actual intent that they were useless as magickal seals.
T-shirts are the unconscious nametags of the psyche. In symbols and shorthand, they identify their wearers to like-minded souls: eye contact in a crowded room, conversation starters at the punch bowl, warning signs by which certain types are told to steer clear. Vestments as personality shortcuts.
Whether she knew it or not, her shirt told me she was going to be our oracle.
"Can I help you?" she asked as we approached her counter. She was reading a worn paperback of Milton's Paradise Lost. Up close, I noticed her eyes were green and she had a honeyed smell like her namesake. Just a hint, floating amid the scent of paper and glue that permeated the building. Curled around the arc of her left wrist was a tattoo of flowers and honey bees.
"I'm looking for a copy of Crowley's Thoth deck," I said. Crowley believed in the connection between Thoth and the tarot. Not quite the same thing that Bernard had supposedly found, but the symbolism was close enough.
She nodded, placing a bookmark in her book and setting it on the counter. "Large or small," she asked.
"Large."
Nicols, standing next to me, nodded like he was thinking the same thing. He wasn't. He had no idea what I was about to do and, if I had told him, he would have tried to stop me.
We were out of options. I had to See the Weave; I had to find the threads. My Will would open the Way.
She walked over to the nearby display case, and unlocked the cabinet. From the stock of tarot decks, she plucked out one of the larger boxes-the purple set-and returned to the counter. "There you go." She put it on the counter. "Anything else?"
"Do you know much about the tarot, Devorah?"
Her eyes narrowed for a second as I used her name. It was on her nametag, but I could tell the store policy rankled her. It bred familiarity, a level of personal intimacy that bugged her. It was a chink in her armor, and she didn't like it when people were able to reach inside and touch her so easily.
I'm so sorry, Devorah. I wish there was another way.
"Have you ever had your fortune told?" I slit the plastic on the box with a fingernail, and dumped the sealed deck and the instruction booklet onto the counter.
"Once or twice," she said cautiously, a non-answer that kept the conversation alive yet didn't invite me any closer.
The plastic around the deck was tight and there was no easy flap to get a fingernail under. I snapped a line from the Chorus to the end of my fingertip, starting a tiny spark, and melted the corner of the plastic wrap. The spell was quick and faint, not enough to catch her attention, though I felt Nicols shift at my side.
Devorah was watching me with a mingled light of curiosity and annoyance in her eyes. I was unwrapping the merchandise at her station and, while it wasn't an overt attempt at shoplifting, it was a violation of store policy. The tarot decks were under lock and key for this very reason-patrons would get their grubby fingers all over the cards otherwise-and I was flagrantly ignoring the rule.
However, reading the symbols on her shirt, I knew there was rebellion in her, an anarchistic flutter keeping curiosity alive in her heart. As brutish as I was being about the rules, part of her still wanted to see what I was going to do.
I scattered the deck on the table and the Chorus rippled through my hands. I touched and stroked the cards with Willful fingers. "Do you know this card?" I asked, feeling the psychic imprint of the one I wanted. I showed it to her. "Do you know what it means?"
She looked at it, curiosity beating annoyance. "Princess of Cups." She shrugged. "Sorry, I don't know anything about it. Look-"
"We need an oracle," I interrupted. "We need for you to scry for us."
"Excuse me?"
I leaned across the counter, and the serpents of the Chorus wrapped themselves around her arm. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward me. The Chorus licked the edge of the card in my other hand, and I slashed the Princess of Cups across her open palm, cutting a shallow line along the course of her lifeline. Laying the card aside, I grabbed her paperback and fingered it open to a random page. I spread the book out on the scattered backs of the Crowley cards-a sea of rosy crosses floating beneath our hands-and dragged her bleeding palm across the open page.
She struggled in my grip, crying out from the pain I had inflicted. "Vide," I said, inflicting a different sort of pain entirely on her. The electric charge of the Chorus lit the word as it left my mouth. Her body spasmed, a live-wire reaction that ran from the crown of her head to the root of her feet. I smeared her now limp hand twice more across the book. "I need you to See for me, Devorah. I need you to Read the page."
The Chorus surged into the quiescent part of her psyche, looking for the door she instinctively advertised that she had. When I found it, I broke the seal and forced awake her precognitive talent.
The justification for the spiritual rape was already being written in my head. History writ by those who survive the cataclysms. If we succeeded in finding the others, in stopping Bernard's Great Work, then my actions were justified-a Machiavellian excuse for the fruit it was to bear. If we failed, then no one would ever know. We would all be dead-Nicols, Devorah, me, most of Portland-and my metaphysical assault on this girl would be a minor transgression in the great scheme of the Universe. My sin was small.
Still, so was Kat's action; so was the promise I made in the woods. Tiny acts which, like the chaotic ripple of the butterfly's wings, caused interference waves in the Universe. It was in this seemingly infinite space that a multitude of incremental errors spawned an immense blot.
Devorah's cheeks quivered as I held up the bloody book, and the pupils of her eyes shrunk to minute dots. Her voice, when she spoke, was lusterless; the bright innocence of her throat marred by a scratchy fever. The Chorus swirl
ed in my belly like sun-warmed snakes at the sound, and I grimaced at the pleasure they found in what I had done to her. "As one great furnace flamed," she intoned. "Yet from those flames no light; but rather darkness visible." Her voice grew more agitated with every word.
"I need to stop the darkness, Devorah," I said, trying to sooth her with the sound of my voice. "I need you to tell me where the light is going. How does it all start?"
She shook her head and her eyes twitched in their sockets as if she were fleeing from a vision, a spectral image fixed in front of her face. "Down they fell," she moaned, "driven headlong from the pitch of Heaven, down into this Deep; and in the general fall I also."
I spread the pages open even further. Her prophecies were finding their voice in the text. A drop of blood fell from the book and spattered on the card beneath, the bright blood staining the jeweled center of one of the multicolored crosses on the back of the card. "I need to know, Devorah. I can't stop it if I don't know where it begins."
"But torture without end still urges," she said, her voice growling. "And a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur unconsumed."
Nicols-who, surprisingly, hadn't said anything so far-swore loudly at my side. "What the hell is she saying?"
I was trying to keep up and didn't have time to explain it to him. Milton was as dense as English literature got, and attempting to decipher his verse when it was being couched as a precognitive offering demanded a lot of my attention.
"Where does the fire start?" I asked.
She looked at me, a bloody tear starting in the corner of her left eye. "There stood a hill not far, whose grisly top belched fire and rolling smoke," she said. "The rest entire shone with a glossy scurf-undoubted sign that in his womb was hid metallic ore."
The bloody eye. The shadow woman in my dream who stood as tall as Heaven. Under her skirts, she had shown me her eye and it had rained bloody tears.
I closed the book and put it down. The Tower. Nicols' reading also held a physical component. "A metal hill?" I asked. "Is that where I can find him?"
