The iron codex, p.29
The Iron Codex, page 29
Her wet feet slipped a bit as she stood and put on her robe. She took care to recover her balance as she tied the robe shut, and then she padded in cautious steps to the great stone that barred the chamber’s only path of egress. She knocked on it three times.
Seconds of silence … and then the soft gritty music of stone moving against stone. A sliver of light appeared, and then it grew. The circular rock rolled away to reveal Khalîl, waiting alone in the passage outside the chamber, the flame in his kerosene lantern dim and faltering.
He held up the lantern so he could see Anja’s face. “Did you find what you needed?”
“Yes,” she said, almost breathless before her new world of possibilities.
“Good,” Khalîl said. The old master took her hand and led her out of the chamber to begin their long trek back to the world above. “Now your true work begins.”
28
FEBRUARY 18
There were many things worth hating about the protocols of ceremonial magick, but the one that Anja despised most was fasting.
It was one of the most common prescriptions in the process known within the Art as “the preparation of the operator.” The duration of one’s fast varied from one conjuration to another, but in all cases it was intended as a step in the physical purification of the karcist, one that would enable one’s body to purge itself. Renaissance-era magickal philosophy held that this ritual cleansing was essential to the fostering of a properly reverent state of mind for the magician, but in Anja’s experience the primary effects tended to be light-headedness and irritability.
Another side effect of deliberate starvation, she had found, was a tendency to slip into a waking dream state, one in which the gnawing of one’s empty belly was forgotten, along with many related discomforts. That was where she found herself now, on the third day of her fast.
Halfway there, she reassured herself.
Six days of fasting was one of the preparatory demands of the ritual Khalîl was preparing for her. She had entrusted the Iron Codex to his care so that he could prepare the monastery’s prayer room to host their experiment—one that would be unlike any Anja had ever performed.
It was a proposition that the monks of Key Gompa had opposed with great vigor, for one simple reason: It would mean admitting a demon inside the walls of the monastery. They were not mollified by Khalîl’s promise that any spirits’ powers would be constrained within the walls of the temple. It was the mere notion of letting such monsters inside that offended the monks.
Anja understood their objections. To a degree, she shared them. A demon’s presence would sully consecrated ground inside the monastery, and one of the risks Khalîl would need to take to bring it here involved engineering a temporary ingress through Key Gompa’s wards of defense. All so that Anja could fulfill a prophecy about which none of the monks cared, and expand her repertoire of powers, which they considered diabolical at best.
After a lengthy argument, all of which had been conducted in whispers, Khalîl had taken aside the monastery’s elder lamas to speak in private. When they returned a short time later, the lamas announced that the matter had been decided: the experiment would proceed under Master Khalîl’s supervision, and none of the monastery’s monks or nuns would interfere in any way.
That left Anja’s fast as the only hurdle left to be cleared.
The hardest part is done, she told herself. Soon the fatigue will fade away.…
She closed her eyes and slipped into a daze. Then, drifting as a disembodied psyche in the void of the astral plane, she realized she was not alone. Extending her senses, she reached out and manifested herself in a soul-projection—and then she saw him.
The astral projection of a man in his thirties. His complexion was pale; dark hair showed beneath his trilby. His face had handsome qualities—a strong chin, dramatic cheekbones, a thin mustache—but his overall affect was cheerless and severe. He wore a dark three-piece suit but did not look at ease in it. On him, tailored clothes and bespoke shoes looked like a costume rather than a statement of wealth or class. He waited until she made eye contact.
“Anja Kernova.” His accent was Slavic, with perhaps a touch of German. He lifted his hat in a momentary gesture of courtesy. “Dragan Dalca. I’ve waited so long to meet you.”
Her good mood turned defensive. “The feeling is not mutual.”
He circled her; in the astral plane, her projection sat in a Lotus pose, just as she did inside Key Gompa. She willed her perspective to rotate so that she could keep Dragan fully in her perception. His smile broadened, as if he found their situation funny.
“You’re quite the harridan. Hunting my adepts all over South America. I thought you would tire of it after the first year or two.” His mirth soured. “But you didn’t.”
“I was enjoying myself,” she said.
He studied her with an appraising eye. “I know you took König’s journal. I also know you have the Iron Codex with you at Key Gompa.”
“I do not care what you know,” Anja lied.
Dragan ceased his roaming and faced her. “You should. I have all the manpower, capital, and time that I need to hunt you down.” He shifted his stance to spread his arms, palms up—a supplicant’s pose. “But why should we waste resources on a pointless conflict?”
“I do not find killing Nazis to be pointless.”
“This war of ours has been limited in scope, Miss Kernova, but it can’t remain that way for long, not with the way the world is changing. If our kind are going to survive in the world of tomorrow, we must learn to resolve our conflicts in a more reasonable manner.”
Anja’s hard-won inner peace crumbled as her instinct for violence came to the fore. “There is no reasoning with Nazis. Not then. Not now. Not ever.”
“I would beg to differ,” Dragan said. “You’ve killed dozens of my adepts over the last several years. But I’m willing to put that behind us and forswear revenge—on the condition that you surrender the Iron Codex to me.”
She let slip a derisive snort. “Go fuck a wheat thresher.”
He folded his hands, as if mimicking the act of prayer would make him look or sound more reasonable. “There will be dire consequences if you refuse to cooperate. Not just for you and your friends, but for every soul on earth, and for every living thing on its surface.”
“Scary. Too bad I do not believe you.”
“Miss Kernova, let me be truthful with you. I have urgent need of the Iron Codex, and I have, for some time, done all that I could to take it from you by force or by deception. Clearly, my minions have failed. But my patience is finite, and I have prepared a contingency that will achieve my needs without the codex—but only at a terrible price for the earth and all mankind. I would prefer not to be pushed to such an extreme solution, but that now depends upon you. Unless you give me the codex, I will have no choice but to shatter the foundations of the earth and break open the gates of Hell itself. And when I do, my master LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE and all his legions will be loosed upon the earth without charge or constraint.”
At once Anja recalled the nightmare she had suffered during her first night in Key Gompa: a vision of the world in flames, a rising cloud of fire—and, flowing from it, a seemingly endless river of demons to wreak destruction upon mankind.
It was too horrific a possibility for her to accept. “You lie,” she said to Dragan. “No ritual ever devised in the Art can do that.”
Dragan chortled, his laughter full of malice. “Why would I limit myself to magick when I have access to the horrors of science?” He checked his watch. “You have until precisely six thirty P.M. Key Gompa local time on February twenty-eighth to comply with my request. If you elect to refuse me, your selfishness will condemn humanity to a most gruesome conclusion.” He lifted his hat once again. “Auf wiedersehn, Miss Kernova.”
His astral projection vanished like a sculpture of dust scattered by a gale.
Anja opened her eyes. The confines of her prayer cell in Key Gompa remained quiet and inviolate, but all of her hard-won serenity was now gone, replaced by terror and anxiety.
If Dragan was telling the truth, she realized, I may have no choice but to surrender.
* * *
In a place as sacred as Key Gompa, one demon was all it took to foul the air for miles. Luis lay awake in his prayer cell, preoccupied with the stench of evil that had permeated the monastery, and he simmered with resentment toward whomever had brought it there.
The odor likely emanated from a yoked spirit in the service of a Black Sun amateur karcist lurking just outside the monastery. The presence of such profound evil this close to Key Gompa was like the putrid fumes of decay bedeviling a rose garden, or the miasma of an open sewer wafting through a bathhouse. It was all the more horrid for the contrast.
There was no clock in his cell and he had no watch, but he didn’t need either to guess the time. A glance out his window at the moon, coupled with the Infernal odor that poisoned the local atmosphere, told him that it was sometime between the hours of three and four in the morning: the infamous witching hour, that time of night best suited to magickal operations of malice, cruelty, and violence. It was also the hour most conducive to the yoking of spirits, which suggested to Luis that their enemies were close and far from idle.
No point trying to get back to sleep, Luis decided. Even if he did succeed in returning to slumber, any dreams he might have under these conditions would certainly be unpleasant. He pushed off his bedcovers, sat up, and stretched. Perhaps a walk will clear my head. He stood, put on his cassock, and tied his rope belt loosely around his waist.
The hallway outside his cell was deserted and silent. The stone floors were frigid, but that was a discomfort to which he had adapted during his years of study at Monte Paterno. His ears soon found the sounds within the silence: the faint cries of the wind as it twisted through the monastery’s passages, the rustlings of snowdrifts traversing slanted rooftops, the chaotic harmonies of chimes both wooden and metallic left out as playthings for the elements.…
And tainting it all, the stink of the Fallen, sharp and fetid in the winter air.
Seeking refuge from the cold and the pungency, Luis turned his steps toward the inner paths of the monastery, the protected corridors. They were no warmer and no less effluvial.
I will never understand why the monks permit this offense to continue, he brooded. He felt ready to give up his search for relief and return to his bed.
Then he turned a corner and saw a figure slumped in the shadows of an alcove. For a moment he feared he had stumbled upon a corpse, but then it shifted. He heard a sharp intake of breath, and the cherry-red tip of a cigarette brightened to reveal Cade’s face. Luis recognized the American from a page he had seen in Anja’s dossier—one labeled “known associates.”
Luis stepped closer and saw that Cade held a mostly empty bottle of whiskey in his left hand, and the cigarette in his right. The youthful American exhaled twin plumes of smoke through his nose and grinned. “What’s the matter, Padre? Lost?”
“Sleep eludes me when demons plague the sanctuary.” Luis sat down cross-legged just out of Cade’s reach, so as not to risk making him feel as if his personal space had been intruded upon. The acrid bite of the American’s tobacco smoke almost blocked out the reek of nearby hellspawn. “What is it that troubles you, my son?”
Cade downed a mouthful of whiskey, and then he took a long drag from his cigarette. “Who says I’m troubled, Father?”
“You’re sitting on the floor, in the dark, in the middle of the night, drinking alone from a fifth of whiskey. These don’t appear to be the actions of a man at peace with himself.”
The American mustered a smile that failed to conceal his distress. “You’d be surprised how much peace you can find in a bottle of Tennessee sour mash and a pack of Luckies.”
“I suspect that to be less than the truth,” Luis said.
Cade puffed a smoke ring at Luis. “Here to take my confession, Father?”
“Do you feel the need to confess?”
Cade looked Luis in the eye. “No.”
“That’s just as well. To tell the truth, I’ve never cared for the rituals of absolution.” He extended a hand toward Cade. “Got enough left to share?”
The American wore a curious expression as he handed the whiskey to Luis. “You drink?”
“I took vows of celibacy and poverty.” Luis sipped the whiskey and savored its sweet, smoky burn in his throat. He handed back the bottle. “I never promised anyone temperance.” He watched Cade take another drink, and then he continued, “Forgive me if I’m overstepping the bounds of propriety, but yours seems to be a spirit in turmoil. I can respect that you have no desire to speak to me as a man of the cloth—but perhaps you could speak to me as a fellow student of magick. If you want to, that is.”
Cade snuffed out the end of his cigarette on the floor. “Don’t know what good it would do. Wouldn’t change anything. Wouldn’t fix what’s broken.”
“Is something broken?”
“Everything is broken,” Cade said. “Me. You. Everyone who’s ever lived, the entire world, the whole fucking universe.” He lit a new Lucky. “It’s all fucked.”
The man’s passion and desperation captivated Luis. “Can you be more specific?”
“None of it amounts to anything,” Cade said. “There’s no purpose to it. To us. We’re all just sparks in the night, burning out on our way to nowhere. The whole universe is like this. Everything and everyone that’s ever existed? We were all created just to die.”
Luis thought it odd that a karcist of all people would be plagued by an existential crisis. “Death is nothing to be feared, my son. It’s merely the—”
“Spare me the sermon,” Cade cut in. “I’ve heard it, and you’re wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
“Life, death, Heaven, Hell. You name it.”
“A rather presumptuous assertion.”
Cade sent a smoke ring wobbling toward Luis. “You speak from faith, Father. I speak from experience. And I’m telling you: You’ve got it wrong.”
“Please, enlighten me. About what am I so mistaken?”
A swig and a drag preceded Cade’s question. “What do you think happens when we die?”
“I believe that after our souls leave this life, we stand before God,” Luis said. “If one has accepted the salvation and forgiveness of His son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, then one is welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven. But if one perishes in sin, not having accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, then the eternal punishments of Hell become one’s inheritance.”
“A nice story,” Cade said. “But it’s all crap. Every word of it.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because I’ve been there, Father. I’ve seen Heaven and Hell.”
Luis wondered whether the dark magician was willfully deceiving him for sport. “Is that a fact? You’ve been to the life beyond this one and returned?”
“That’s right. On D-day.”
Driven by an impulse to be charitable, Luis chose to play devil’s advocate. “You had a brush with death on D-day?” He pondered that for a second. “Are you sure you didn’t simply suffer a hallucination? A delusion brought on by injury or fatigue?”
“I’m positive.” Cade squinted at Luis. “Father … do you know what a nikraim is?”
The word jogged Luis’s memory of an ancient grimoire he had read during the early years of his studies at Monte Paterno. “A human soul bonded with the spiritual essence of an angel?” Noting Cade’s nod of confirmation, Luis said, “I thought they were just myths.”
“You’re looking at one, Padre. My bond-spirit is an angel named GESHURIEL.”
Luis searched Cade’s manner for any sign of jest or dissemblance. So far as he could tell, the American was completely serious. “How is that…?”
“Never mind,” Cade said. “What matters is, while my body lay half dead on Pointe du Hoc, GESHURIEL took my soul to Heaven and Hell. Neither was what I expected, but the biggest surprise was what wasn’t there: not a single human soul. Not one. Anywhere.” Cade took a long drag from his cigarette. “I gotta be honest, Father … it’s haunted me every day since I saw it. I lie awake some nights thinking about all the lives I took during the war, and after it. All the people I wish I could’ve saved but didn’t. None of them went on to Heaven’s reward or Hell’s justice. They just vanished. Disappeared forever. And now my best friend is lying in a hospital somewhere. Or maybe he’s already gone. Because I wasn’t strong enough, or fast enough, or smart enough. I got caught off-guard, and a man I love like a brother paid for it.”
“Don’t give up hoping for him, my son. If his fight was just, the Holy Spirit may yet protect him. As for your underlying premise, I find it both chilling and suspect. Just because you saw no human souls in those other realms, that doesn’t mean they are not elsewhere.”
“I had the same thought. Which is why I asked GESHURIEL where the human souls were. And both Above and Below, he told me the same thing—that there were none.”
“That’s not as surprising as it might seem,” Luis said. “When one considers the concepts of Limbo and Purgatory—”
“Both of which GESHURIEL told me are human fictions.”
“Have you considered the possibility that GESHURIEL lied?”
“Why would an angel lie?” Cade asked.
Luis chewed on that and came up short of a satisfying answer. “Regardless, my son, just because you experienced a vision that challenges some of our conceptions of the afterlife—”
“Some of them? It blows them all out of the water. Heaven, Hell, resurrection, reincarnation—none of them make any sense once you realize our souls are mortal.” He pointed his cigarette at Luis. “And that’s the part I can’t get my head around. If the universe is the result of God’s will, why the fuck did He set it up like this? How am I supposed to believe in a loving God who would create intelligent life that has no other purpose than to die? How could a merciful God make a conscious soul whose fate is to be extinguished forever?” He exhaled a long flood of smoke and stared up at the ceiling, as if he could look through it into eternity. “How can I see God as anything but malign, and life as anything but malignantly useless?”
