The sum of all shadows, p.2
The Sum of All Shadows, page 2
“So we’re Safita, Ahirom.”
“And Sikar. Three of the four great families of ancient Phoenicia.”
“And that makes us Shaws. All names are created by ancestors; ours is no exception.” He looked at her levelly. “Grandfather Conrad somehow foresaw this outcome; Leviathan didn’t.”
“Sweet Jesus, I’m through arguing with you.” Emma breathed. “Why wait for tomorrow? I’m taking the plane to Addis now, and that’s the end of it.”
Fat chance, she thought in the deepest fiery level of her mind. I am the only one of us who has a chance to recruit another Fallen, the way I did Beleth. And I’m fairly certain I know where to start. She smiled winningly at her brother. Whether Bravo believes it or not.
2
Long after his sister had departed, Bravo remained sunk in unsettling contemplation. He knew she was strong-willed, just as he knew that she did not yet understand the potential power locked deep inside her. The cold fire had unlocked the first door, but there were many more. And what wonders and terrors lay behind those doors Bravo couldn’t impart to her, much as he would wish to in order that her maturation be accelerated. She was required to discover them on her own. Until that time, she needed protection, from herself, it now seemed, as well as from their enemies. He was convinced that something had happened to her while Beleth controlled her, something that had outlived the Fallen’s demise. As soon as she returned with Lilith from Addis he resolved to keep a closer eye on her.
Turning his thoughts from Emma, he saw Molly. As usual, she was standing apart, and he went down to speak with her. She was smaller than her older sister, fair where Lilith was dark, but they had the same lurking intelligence. In the three months since he had recruited her Bravo had never seen Molly smile. She spoke very little. He meant to change that today.
She turned as she sensed his approach. Her gaze slid over him as if he were part of the landscape. She turned back to contemplating the platoons of workers swarming over the building, putting on the finishing touches to the outside and inside. The trucks filled with furniture were lined up, standing by.
“Everything going to your satisfaction?” Bravo asked.
“I imagine you find that amusing,” she replied without altering the direction of her attention. “Seeing as how you’ve given me no sway here.”
“Have a bit of patience,” he told her. “Have you observed anything amiss?”
When she refused to respond to this, he decided to take another tack. “Why did you decide to join the Knights?”
“Didn’t we go over this during my intake interrogation?”
“It wasn’t an interrogation, Molly,” Bravo said as quietly as he could over the noise of the various work crews.
“Call a turd a rose, if it assuages your conscience.”
Bravo waited a moment before he said, “You’re free to leave anytime you wish.” He paused a beat to better drive home what he said next: “And yet you’re still here.”
Molly watched the progress with uncanny concentration. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the skin-tight jeans, which, along with black boots with thick soles, sleeveless shirts that limned her braless breasts, and a curious octagonal medallion she always wore around her neck, was basically her signature outfit. Bravo had asked her about it once, but her face had turned stony, and he had left the matter alone. Though her moods were mercurial, with him, she often played the flirt, but she came off as immature instead of sexy.
Her thin shoulders lifted and fell. “I’ve nowhere else to go.”
“You have a home here,” he said. “You know that.”
She turned to him at last, looked up into his face with her intense, questing gaze. “Do you like me?”
And in that instant, Bravo got her, saw her underlying problem in a nutshell: Lilith was the accomplished one, the successful one, the mated one. Always measuring herself against her older sister, where did that leave her? Wanting on every front. Out in the cold. A homeless child, always acting out, never taken seriously.
“I might,” he said, “if you allowed me to get to know you.”
She gave him what seemed to him a dolphin smile or, because it was her, perhaps it wasn’t a smile at all, but an expression he could not identify. “You might not like what you see.”
“That would be up to me, wouldn’t it?”
She appeared to consider this for a moment. “My father—Lilith’s dad’s brother—he and I lived with Lilith’s family from the time I was a baby. Her mom was the only mom I ever knew. One day my father disappeared, and the next day, Lilith disappeared. Just like that, never came back.”
“Without a word?”
“Without a word she abandoned us.”
“Like your father, she abandoned you.”
Molly’s eyes slid away. “She did that, yes.”
“Did you try to contact her?”
“I was eight.” Molly glanced at him before gazing off into the hazy distance of memory. “It was a long time ago.”
“So, what, you’re still punishing her?”
“In that sense, I’m still eight,” Molly said with startling self-insight. She looked up at Bravo. “That’s what you’d say, isn’t it?”
“What I’d say—or think—isn’t important. It’s not even relevant.”
“Well, aren’t you the charmer.” She walked away, but soon enough returned. “I can be quite the shit, can’t I? Well, I’ve been practicing almost my whole life.”
“I think you need a new hobby.” Bravo began to pick his way toward the series of driveways and gardens that had been marked out and were now being filled in. Somewhat to his surprise, Molly matched him step for step. “Have you ever asked Lilith why she left?”
Molly shook her head. “I don’t want to know.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It might be too painful. I mean, what if it was because of me?”
He stopped so abruptly, she nearly stumbled over his feet, and it was only then that he realized how close she was. “Why would it be because of you?”
Molly shrugged. “I can think of a million different reasons.”
“I wonder if she’s aware of any of them.”
“She’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to be.”
When he made no reply, she blurted out: “She left me!”
“And yet,” Bravo said as gently as he could, “you joined the organization she was the head of.”
“I—”
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” she said, and this time when she stalked off she did not turn back.
* * *
“WHAT WAS that all about?” Ayla asked sometime later when she met up with Bravo in the building’s entryway. The floors were in, the tile work finished, but the painting had yet to commence.
Bravo had met Ayla in Istanbul at the behest of her mother, who was an Ahirom, one of the founding Phoenician families of the Syrian island of Arwad. She had lost both parents to the Fallen. Together, they had traveled to Tannourine, in Lebanon, to the cave behind the Baatara Gorge falls. As a result of going through crucible after crucible against the Fallen. They were very close, and became even closer when she told Bravo that her mother had had an affair with Conrad Shaw, Bravo’s grandfather. Conrad was her birth father. Like her mother before her, she was a Farsighter, someone who could often see future events.
“Molly being Molly.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know why you put up with her.”
He sighed. “Sometimes, I don’t either. But she’s smart and she’s detail-oriented: she often notices things others miss.”
“But can she be trusted?”
His brow furrowed. “What are you really saying?”
“I think she’s trying to play you. I think she wants to turn you against Lilith.”
“If so, she’s doing a remarkably poor job of it.”
“Maybe she’s still clumsy, feeling her way. She’s still wet behind the ears.”
“In many things, yes,” Bravo said. But in others, she’s highly advanced, he thought.
They moved farther into the building, into the two-story library, vast as a ballroom.
“As for whether she can be trusted,” Bravo continued, “we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“That’s likely to be a dangerous game.”
He nodded. “I imagine it will be.”
* * *
FOR THE Principal Resident, jealousy was the favorite of all transgressions. Jealousy had about it that delectable poisonous edge of schadenfreude—the desire to take pleasure in the misfortune of others—the Principal Resident found irresistible, basically because she found it in herself.
For at this moment, standing at the crystal window high up in the island tower where she had been imprisoned ever since the Fall, the Principal Resident had decided to be female. There was a certain flexibility of thinking that came as such a relief she became momentarily lost in giddiness. After all, Evil was a monolithic structure, with no option to retrace your steps or even branch off from the trunk. The inflexible solidity of the trunk was, in fact, its singular strength, the source of Evil’s implacable power.
Though she stood at the window observing the masses of the army going through their last preparations for the final invasion of the realm of human beings, on their way to the assault of Heaven, her mind’s eye was fixed firmly and lovingly on Emma.
She watched Emma boarding the Order’s jet. Because of Beleth, Emma had a weak spot. Using the pathway that Beleth had created when he invaded Emma’s mind, she again inserted the slenderest of poisonous threads into Emma’s system to heighten her resentment. Seeing her twitch, she smiled, hugely satisfied with herself. The first strike of the wedge that would split the Shaws apart had been pounded home.
3
As Bravo and Ayla moved through the rooms, redolent of exotic wood, stone, and plaster, Bravo was again lost in thought. It was Conrad whose echo lived on inside him, who had coached Emma, guided the blue flame conjured with a wave of her hand. Conrad did what no other human being had done and lived to tell about it: he made a deal with Lucifer, and then outfoxed him. But in so doing, the seam created by King Solomon’s alchemists when they made his hoard of gold widened into a true breach between the realms of humans and the prison into which the Fallen had been cast down. The alchemists accomplished their otherwise impossible feat by siphoning dark sorcery through the seam. It took a long time, perhaps as much as eighteen months, for the seam was minuscule, the most their combined efforts could manage. It was certainly not wide enough to allow even a single Fallen angel to slip through, though some dispatched by Lucifer had tried. The breach expanded further when Ayla’s mother, Dilara, brought her into the red tent of shadows in Tannourine, Lebanon, in order to trigger her child’s extraordinary powers. Very possibly her Farsight had showed her the consequences of her actions. If so, it didn’t matter; she knew what she was fated to do.
Ayla said, “I’m still unclear as to how Conrad is still alive.”
“His friend, the poet Yeats, prophesied that I would be murdered before my time. Conrad did everything in his power to keep that from happening, but nothing worked. In desperation, he begged my grandmother, Tanis Ahirom, to summon Lucifer. Quite a power, Tanis was, in her time. In due course, Conrad struck a bargain with the Fallen Seraph: my father, Dexter, would be stripped of his powers and I—and by extension, Emma—would live.”
Bravo chuckled. “What Conrad knew and Lucifer didn’t was that my father would turn out to be useless to the Order. It was me—and Emma—who would be needed in the war to come.”
“Conrad foresaw all this?” Ayla asked.
“With Yeats’s help, yes.”
“Go on.”
“After his ruse became known to Lucifer, Grandfather was targeted. There was only one way he could escape the kind of death Lucifer had in mind for him. He secreted himself … well, even I don’t know where.”
“And so he survived, over the decades.” She shook her head. “But in what form exactly?”
They were moving on, down a long winding hallway, which Bravo had had created, odd in any building of architecturally dictated right angles. For now, the walls were bare, but that would change soon enough. The custom lighting had been installed, soft, indirect, mimicking the flicker of rush torches from within stone niches.
“The ancient texts have a word for it: disincarnate.”
“Conrad disincarnated himself? Am I using it correctly?”
“In our world, yes. Just before his corpus died, Conrad disincarnated himself.”
They had come to a halt in front of a closed door. It looked like any other door in the building. In fact, it was anything but. Beneath the thin veneer of wood was three inches of reinforced steel. There was no lock visible, no knob either, just a titanium and polycarbonate iris-reader set into the wall to the right of the door frame.
Stepping up to the reader, Bravo looked directly into the glass-covered lens. A moment later the door popped open with a distinctive double click. As they entered the room, the lights came on automatically. The door closed silently behind them. The place felt like a vault, which, in many ways, it was. Windowless, set in the center of the building like a medieval castle keep, it nevertheless held the aspect of a monks’ athenaeum with its weathered wooden desks, each with its own banker’s lamp with a glass shade the color of a fly’s thorax. The one concession to the modern world were the Aeron chairs set before each desk.
Here was housed the most precious of the Order’s artifacts. Ayla was now familiar with all of them, save one: hanging on the rear wall was the painting they had found in the Knights’ reliquary in a cave within the island of Arwad.
On first inspection, the painting seemed to be a study of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Unlike all depictions painted before the fifteenth century, which portrayed the thirteen crowned with halos, this one, like da Vinci’s, did not. It also showed those surrounding Christ in groups of three. In addition, unlike the earlier paintings, which presented the Last Supper from different perspectives, the placement and attitudes of the participants were identical to da Vinci’s. However, the great artist’s was a mural, while this one was smaller, residing inside a wooden frame as plain as the coffin of an indigent. Hence, the impression that it was a study. On closer inspection, though, it became clear that the painting wasn’t by da Vinci at all, that it was far older than his or, for that matter, all of the earlier known paintings. The style was both cruder and more alive than da Vinci’s, but it seemed clear that the master had had this in his possession at the time he was working on his own, because, as in da Vinci’s masterwork, this Christ, these people surrounding him on either side of the long, food-laden table, appeared more like regular people than apostles and soon-to-be saints. They looked like they ate, drank, shat, and fucked just like everyone else.
In that respect, as well as others, it was a curious piece of work, more like an ancient tabloid illustration than a work of art that sought to commemorate for all time a holy and celestial moment.
They had brought it first to the Order’s labs in Addis Ababa, but it had stubbornly refused to give up its secrets, including when, precisely, it was painted, and by whose hand. Neither the old-school forms of art identification nor—far more disturbingly—the most cutting-edge techniques, including X-ray analysis, microscopy, light refractography, infrared reflectography, and IR spectroscopic analysis yielded any answers at all. It was as if the painting had been locked away, as if it was completely resistant to any method of probing beneath the top layer of paint. And even the paint itself defied analysis. It was nothing any of the techs had ever encountered before, and they were experts at unraveling even the thorniest mysteries of the wide range of ancient texts that landed in their lab.
“A conundrum,” they said, hands on hips.
“An enigma,” they said, shaking their heads.
“Impossible,” they said, throwing in the proverbial towel.
That was when Bravo knew. This was no ordinary artifact from the distant past. This was something exceptional. It had not been made by the hand of man. Or if perchance it had, it had been sealed by either an alchemist of the highest rank or, terrifyingly, something far worse.
* * *
MOLLY, HER palm and spread fingers pressed firmly against the reinforced steel door, listened intently to the dialogue between Bravo and Ayla via the vibrations transmitted through the air of the vaulted room, thence to the metal. These vibrations, though incredibly subtle, nevertheless came to her as if amplified by her splayed extremity, so that it was as if the room’s occupants were standing beside her.
Ayla said, “So what are we looking at?”
“Exactly,” Bravo answered.
Molly’s lips curled upward in what could have been a smile. Or it could have been something else altogether.
4
It was an ill wind that blew no one good. Almost no one. This vagabond wind raced across a barren sea, where red-eyed angels—foot soldiers of the Fallen—prepared for the final resurrection—day and night. Except that in this realm into which they had been hurled by an almighty hand there was no day—neither was there night. Only darkness, eternal and pitiless. This was as it should be, for these red-eyed angels required no pity. But rather scorned it as being beneath them. Which was, in its macabre way, amusing, since there was nothing and no one beneath them.
The liquid that was once held within the barren sea had burned away in an era before Time, before the Fall. The sole island, equally barren, equally bleak, had been waiting for the Principal Resident. The island stretched away from the barren sea, ending abruptly amid a jumble of steep, rocky cliffs at another ocean, so dark, so deep, so tempest-ridden even the Fallen were loath to set sail upon it. Over these inimical expanses dry gales blew almost constantly, each one taking to its bosom the shadow-webs it encountered, the vile emotions, the rancorous fulminations, until it arrived on the obsidian shores of what was the solitary island in this realm of ultimate desolation. On one side of this mass rose what might be termed a citadel, though it bore no resemblance to a human-made citadel. But then why should it? It was not made by the hand of woman or man; it was not made by any hand at all. Rather, it was a structure of what might be termed sorcery, but again, that was not quite correct. It was the product of its Principal Resident’s will, made instantly manifest as he formed it in his mind. It sprang full-blown, as the goddess Pallas Athena was said to have sprung from the mind of Zeus. It looked like spun black-steel threads, or an incredibly intricate spider’s web, and in some ethereal way it was alive, breathing to the beat of his invisible heart. There were three stories. The first was where the elite of the Fallen—the First Sphere Seraphs and Thrones, highest in the infernal hierarchy—dwelled, scheming and drinking Lucifer alone knew what foul ichor. The middle tier was where the Principal Resident held his periodic meetings. It was at these gatherings that the plans for the final insurrection, centuries in the making, were chewed over, endlessly debated, and, until recently, rejected by the Principal Resident. It was also from this one great room that the Principal Resident issued orders to members of his advance guard to venture up into the world of the humans, a place highly coveted by the Principal Resident, not only because it was, for now at least, forbidden to him, but also for being the first and last stepping stone to victory. This was prophesied by the Regent, the demon of fate, the Lord of Limbo, who, existing in his own world, answered to no one. It is said that he is the saddest of demons and the most bloody-minded, although no one, not even the Principal Resident, knows why. The Principal Resident had committed the Regent’s prophecy to memory: Only when the realm of men and women is conquered, when all humans are subjugated to Lucifer’s will and eternal darkness everywhere falls, can the last stage of the assault on Heaven be launched. This was his mantra, the daily curse he uttered, his singular goal.
