Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4)

by James A. Hunter

  The orb took shape as the monk spoke, thinning, distorting until a semitransparent jungle in a multitude of greens stretched before us. Thick palm trees dotted the impressive illusion. Swatches of bamboo poked through like the bristly whiskers of a man badly in need of a shave. Majestic tualang trees shot up two hundred feet or more, towering over the rest of the lush canopy. All green, pristine. A different world. Almost prehistoric. Almost paradise.

  Then came the nasty clouds. Twisting black things that rolled over the jungle in a flash, beating at the trees with awful wind, dumping torrential rains onto the greenery below.

  I’d seen constructs like this a handful of times before. They were basically amped-up Vis-conjured illusions, but the elegance and sophistication was beyond what I could do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m alright with illusions—though better with glamours, which deceive the mind instead of the eye—but I couldn’t come close to doing what the monk was doing. Not in a million years. I knew only a handful of magi who could manage a working like this, and four out of five sat on the Elder Council.

  The fifth was Ailia.

  The elaborate illusion-trees began to sway and shake as something big, though unseen, wriggled through the forest. The audible -snap-crack of breaking tree branches resounded in the air.

  A second later the head of a cobra broke through the greenery of the canopy, followed shortly by another and another, until seven enormous hooded heads swayed above the tree line. But let’s get one thing straight up front—this thing only had a passing resemblance to a cobra. Instead of the slick, streamlined face of a snake, this reptilian beast had a thick muzzle and powerful tearing jaws positively bristling with teeth. Hundreds of teeth that had to be six inches or more in length. Son of a bitch looked more like some kind of hooded dinosaur than a snake.

  That or a dragon.

  “There he is,” the monk said, staring fondly at the hulking, terrifying doom-lizard, which would’ve left me shrieking like a little girl if I ever saw it coming my way in real life. “Such a sight to behold. This, now, is the day he discovered the Buddha or, at least, the man who would become the Buddha in time—Siddhartha Gautama, prince of the Shakya clan. There he is, Siddhartha, taking shelter beneath a Bodhi tree, trying to weather the storm of a millennia.”

  The picture shifted, diving through the dense leaf cover, until a single giant tree, its trunk a complicated tangle of smaller vines ten feet in diameter, stretched out before us. The tree shook, bent, and bowed from the driving gale-force gusts. A man—slim, young with burnt copper skin, in the same garb as the monk before me—hunkered down beneath the spreading bows of the tree, which sheltered him from the pelting rain.

  “I was still a young serpent then,” the monk said, “fresh from my egg, but I remember well the terrible storm that descended on the valley.”

  The picture shifted once more, drawing back so we could see the great serpent king cut through the foliage with a rustling whisper, before stopping a few feet from the huddled Buddha. The Naga King’s giant, golden eyes warily regarded the man under the tree with a mixture of curiosity and something else …

  Hunger, perhaps.

  The man met the creature’s massive gaze without a hint of fear, however. He looked cold, true, and soaked to the bone from the torrential rains, but he didn’t look scared. Not of the storm, and not of the ginormous serpent only a few feet away, sizing him up for dinner. A small, peaceful smile broke across the man’s lips, and then he dipped his head in acknowledgement to Ong. Well met, the nod seemed to say.

  The scaled creature regarded the man for a moment longer, his gargantuan body stretching and flexing as he breathed, then slithered forward. Slowly, ominously. Instead of attacking, though, the monstrous dragon encircled the tree with his thick body, wrapped around it until his scaled trunk formed a low wall, protecting the man within from the furious wind. Then, without a noise, the serpent raised its great torso high into the air, the hoods on its many heads flaring open, forming a giant living umbrella—a shield against the pounding rain.

  And there the magnificent dragon-creature stayed, offering shelter from the raging storm as it stood vigil against the encroaching night, protecting the oh-so-fragile man below.

  “Such a noble creature, was my friend,” the monk said, the glimmer of a tear escaping, rolling down his cheek. “A protector who held life in the deepest regard. It was not long after Ong saved Siddhartha that an angel of the White King above visited my master. One of the Burning Ones, a Malakim.”

  The Malakim were exalted angels of the highest order who walked among the stars and dwelled in the direct presence of God. And we’re talking God with a capital G.

  “The name of the angel is lost to me now,” the monk said absently, “but he came and entrusted the Fourth Seal to my master, to protect it as my master had protected the young Siddhartha against the deadly storm. Twenty-five hundred years ago, that was, and Ong has stood sentry over the vile demon within the Seal since. Buné the Chloros, Grigori of Old, the Grand Duke of Hell, the Dragon-headed Lord of the Grave.”

  The floating forest blurred and lurched into motion, the illusionary sun rising and setting a thousand times as the forest shifted, changed, the unspoiled paradise giving way to human civilization:

  The sun rose and set as buildings sprang up and toppled.

  The sun rose and set as armies clashed and died, only to be replaced by ever more armies.

  The monk spoke as the sun bobbed and dipped, shining down on the ethereal world below, which zipped through a condensed and bloody history of humanity.

  “My master Ong stood strong,” he said, “but Buné’s power is tied to the grave, to discord and murder and death.”

  The flickering slide show of human atrocity slowed as factories bloomed, cars flooded narrow streets, and planes took to the skies. Then, the whole thing dissolved, exploding in a shower of light, which, in turn, resolved into a fat mushroom cloud of orange and red. The all-too familiar aftereffects of a nuclear blast. That brilliant cloud lingered before us for a beat longer and then the whole illusion fell apart, a mushroom-shaped afterimage temporarily scarring my retinas.

  “The industrial revolution changed the world,” the monk said, staring blankly past us, as though looking into a different day and age. “Changed it in many wonderful ways, but in many terrible ones, too. Mankind’s population grew. When Ong accepted the Seal there were one hundred million human souls in the world.” He said the number, one hundred million, slowly, deliberately, almost fondly. “Not in any one country, but in all countries, on all continents, across the entire face of the globe.

  “By the 1800s that number grew to nine hundred million, and in the past two hundred years, it has exploded to seven billion. Seven billion.” He wagged his head back and forth, an inscrutable look on his lined face. “An ocean of humanity, too vast to consider. Too vast to understand. As numerous as sand on the seashore, or so it seems betimes. Sadly, the human capacity to kill has grown along with your population. The twentieth century was far bloodier than every century before it.”

  He folded his hands as though in prayer and dropped his eyes, refusing to look at us.

  “Nearly one hundred million people—the entire population of the world when Ong took the Seal—perished during your two world wars. Another forty-five million died under Mao Zedong. Mao did that in four years.” The abbot looked up, holding out a hand, thumb down. “Four. Only five thousand people were killed during the Spanish Inquisition, and that lasted three hundred and fifty years. So, so much death. So, so much murder. And that doesn’t account for the countless genocides, the hundreds of other official and unofficial wars, or the never-ending stream of murders.

  “All of that killing, all of that senseless death, took a terrible toll,” he said, voice a sad whisper. “Buné grew impossibly strong. Impossibly powerful, even for one as steadfast and stalwart as Ong. My master fought the demon, of course, but the battle … A hopeless endeavor. Impossible. After twenty-five
hundred years, Ong fell, his mind obliterated, or at least captured, by the demon.

  “Ten years ago, that was. Only ten, though it seems a lifetime to me. I do not know if anything of my old friend remains—often I find myself praying there is nothing left, since he would so abhor what he has become. These days, what was once Ong goes by a different name: Baron Samedi. I have not seen him since his fall, but I know where he last was. Cité Soleil, Haiti. He’s set up shop there, turned it into the seat of his own mini-empire.”

  My eyes widened in surprise, and goosebumps broke out across my skin like someone had just doused me with a bucket of ice water. The air in the room seemed a little too thin, and my stomach ached from the shock.

  Holy shit, this guy was dropping some friggin’ bombs. First, the Savage Prophet, now Haiti. It felt like I’d just been sucker punched in the teeth with a pair of brass knuckles. I cleared my throat and ran a hand through my hair. “Haiti,” I croaked. “Cité Soleil.”

  The monk nodded, solemn.

  “Does it mean something to you?” Ferraro asked, giving me a sidelong glance.

  I dry washed my hands, an anxious frown growing on my face. “It’s. Well, complicated.”

  And it was complicated. The mention of Cité Soleil made me … let’s go with edgy, since that sounds way better than piss-your-bed-terrified.

  I’d been to Haiti once before, back in ’76. One of my earliest missions with the Fist.

  James Sullivan and I went down there to put the kibosh on a group of rogue necromancers looking to carve out their own kingdom in—yep, you guessed it—Cité Soleil. Extortion, dark voodoo, murder, ritual sacrifice. Ugly, ugly business. Still gave me the chills to think about. The guy runnin’ that shit-show was this cat named Pa Beauvoir, everyone called him the Voodoo Daddy. Son of a bitch was powerful, secretive, and charismatic as all get out. He was also nasty, vindictive, and evil. Like really, genuinely evil, which is not a term I sling around all willy-nilly.

  I tend to see things more in shades of gray than black and white, but Beauvoir was black, all the way down to his soul. Assuming that bastard had a soul. He and his network of Bokors—dark, voodoo sorcerers—could do things no mage could do. Dark things I still didn’t understand.

  In the end, I’d buried that hoodoo dickhead, but let’s just say I’m not well-loved in Haiti, nor is Haiti a place I would ever willingly go again.

  Even more disconcerting, though, was something James Sullivan had said to me not so long ago. That arrogant, know-it-all douchenozzle had betrayed me during a deadly knock-down-drag-out with a greater Wendigo. Asshole had stabbed me in the back … Well, not literally, but in principle. But, he’d also said something in that moment: “This makes us even for Haiti, back in ’76.”

  Those had been his words. His exact words.

  It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, could it?

  In my line of work coincidences were few and far between, especially since my boss was Lady Luck. Was it possible he’d been trying to drop me a clue, some tidbit he’d stumbled on that the bad guys didn’t know? I couldn’t be certain, but it stank like a fish market in the noonday sun.

  And, if that was the case, what did that mean about James?

  Maybe he wasn’t a traitor. Maybe he really was working some deep cover angle he couldn’t tell me about.

  Or maybe I was just making connections that didn’t exist because I didn’t want James to be a traitorous buttweasel.

  Still, aside from all of those possible implications … Cité Soleil.

  Shit.

  Holy shit.

  Holy shit on a cracker.

  The monk looked up at the clock, his face tightening. “It is time,” he said, unfolding his crossed legs and smoothly gaining his feet. “I do not know what will happen after this,” he said, holding my eye, “but if you find Ong—or rather, the creature he has become—please help him. Free him. If you can. Release him from the burden of a fate he has fought for twenty-five hundred years. Give him peace.”

  “How?” I whispered in a panic, casting a nervous glance over my shoulder.

  “Take the Seal,” he said calmly.

  I shook my head. “No, there’s got to be some other way. I’ve already got one demon to contend with, I can’t turn my head into a demonic Club Med. There’s got to be another way.”

  “There is no other way. You can hold it. You must hold it—”

  The door at the end of the hall crashed open, banging against the painted walls, cutting off whatever else the monk was going to say. The garish lights of Little Bangkok silhouetted two figures standing in the entryway.

  TWELVE:

  The Savage Prophet

  Two men strode into the room, menace and confidence oozing from them like the reek of bad cologne. And, I shit you not, the temperature plummeted—my breath fogged up, little white wisps escaping through my lips.

  The first man was a young buck of maybe twenty-five who stood over six feet; he had broad shoulders and the thick muscle of a gym rat. Despite his obvious youth, the guy had prematurely gray hair, almost silver, fashioned into a douchey faux hawk on top. He also sported a matching silver beard—a gnarly tangle of hair which lent him a wild look. Honestly, he sorta resembled a young, buff version of Old Saint Nick. Instead of a tacky red snowsuit, however, the kid wore black slacks, a black turtleneck, and a shoulder rig holding a compact Beretta.

  I’d never seen Bond-Villain-Knockoff before—kinda hard to forget a lean, young, super-spy version of Santa Claus—but something about him sorta tickled at the back of my noggin.

  The second guy, lingering behind the cocksure youngster, wore dark brown robes so thick he looked like an amorphous blob covered in a burlap sack. I could tell it was a man—his height and the breadth of his shoulders made that much clear, but that was all I could make out. A heavy hood covered his head, and though the front was open, for some reason I couldn’t make out his face. Just a fuzzy, featureless blur cloaked in thick shadow. In fact, everything about the second guy was blurry and indistinct, which meant he was holding some sort of heavy-duty illusion in place.

  The first guy didn’t care about being ID’ed, but the second did.

  Only one explanation I could think of for that: Bathrobe knew I’d be able to identify him without the illusion in place. Which, in my mind, could only mean one thing. Captain shitnuts in the robe was the Guild traitor—the one calling the shots and pulling the strings. The one responsible for Randy Shelton, for the Wendigo, for attempting to assassinate me. Responsible for this entire shitshow.

  Bathrobe was friggin’ Emperor Palpatine. Darth Bathrobe, then. Shit.

  And that could only mean the bearded youth had to be his diabolic apprentice, Darth Beard, which couldn’t be good news for anyone.

  The kid sauntered forward, a lopsided sneer cutting across his face. “Yancy Lazarus and the A-Team,” he said, his voice rich, deep, and cold. Cold as the Alaskan tundra. “Agent Nicole Ferraro and Darlene Drukiski.” He paced left, then right, black boots click-clacking on the temple floor. “A washed-up thug, past his prime. A Rube cop. And a glorified Guild receptionist. To think you three are Lady Fate’s frontline defense.”

  “Aw shucks, and here I don’t even know your name,” I replied. “How embarrassing.”

  “Oh, I think maybe you’ve heard of me,” he said, eyes narrowing to slits. “Some folks call me the Savage Prophet, and though you might not remember—what with my new body—we have met before.”

  His face distorted, shifted, elongated as his jaw widened to accommodate an impressive set of fangs. His eyes, a pale blue before, solidified into pinpricks of chipped diamond, and his skin took on an icy cast while his epic beard morphed into hoarfrost. Then, in a blink, it was gone, the young man’s features firmly back in place. “Like I said, I’ve found a new host since the last time we tangled. Gained some new skills, too.” He shot a malicious wink at me.

  Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

  I may not have recognized the
young man’s face, but I sure as all hell knew the blue-skinned freak he’d given me a glimpse of. Jack Frost. Old Man Winter. A fae lord. The deposed king of the Winterlands, in point of fact.

  His story was an old one. Not much more than a shadow of a legend; told, retold, and practically forgotten hundreds of years before I was even a glimmer in my pop’s eye.

  Once upon a time, long, long ago—or so the tale went—Winter had a nasty king, a merciless creature more brutal and dastardly than all of his kin and kith combined. He was a tyrant with a terribly heavy hand. Basically, the king of pricks. One cold day the King of Winter ventured out of his icy lands to visit the Black Lodge, home to Arawn the Horned, Protector of the Unfettered Fae.

  While en route, he ran across a gentle and noble spirited hippalectryon—part horse, part rooster, all genetics-experiment-gone-wrong—and slew the beast because he was a colossal dick. But in doing so, he pissed off the wrong fairy: Gyre-Carlin, Mistress of the Unfettered and a violently protective wildlife activist. She didn’t take kindly to the Winter King offing ol’ Horsy McRooster-face, so she swore revenge, orchestrated a massive uprising, and eventually drove the evil king into exile, end of story.

  Except, I knew that wasn’t the end of the story.

  A while back, before Lady Fate had appointed me to be her mortal agent, I’d helped a friend of mine save his kidnapped grandson, who, naturally, had been taken by the deposed fae lord. Old Man Winter had only been the tip of a ginormous iceberg of shit, though, which in many ways—the most important ways—had brought me to this point. To this monastery. To my budding relationship with Ferraro. To having a demon riding shotgun in my head. And now he was back, apparently trucking around in some fresh-faced host.

  Which was bad news bears for me, since things had not exactly ended on a positive note between us. I sorta hacked off his hand, stole his magical stick—the Crook of Winter—and flash-froze him to a chair. Also Ferraro had blasted him in the kneecap with an iron-laced shotgun cartridge, so probably he had a smidgen of a grudge against her as well.