The sum of all shadows, p.8
The Sum of All Shadows, page 8
Lilith paused for a moment to catch her breath and also to take stock of what she was reading. A moment later, she resumed:
“‘Leviathan, a Seraph of the First Sphere—the second most powerful of the Fallen—became a Grigori to seduce Bravo and Emma’s great-great-grandmother, Chynna. Chynna named their child Gideon—a Nephilim. Gideon married the great and powerful Diantha, Conrad Shaw’s mother.’”
Lilith looked up from her reading. “So,” she whispered to herself, “if their great-grandfather was a Nephilim—progeny of a Fallen angel and a human woman—that must mean that Emma and Bravo are Nephilim, too.”
But according to the Shaw history, they were not. Nephilim only pertained to the one generation following. Emma and Bravo were something altogether different. But if Conrad Shaw knew what that was, he kept that knowledge to himself. Perhaps even he didn’t know, Lilith mused.
Here the history seemed to end. But when Lilith turned the page she discovered more writing, and in Emma’s own hand, accompanied by bits of what appeared to be an ancient text affixed to the page. The text was in the form of primitive runes so odd they almost seemed like an alien language.
Lilith frowned in concentration.
Almost. The runes were Tamazight, arguably the oldest known written language and one of the precursors of Arabic, Greek, Phoenician, and Farsi. Lilith’s forefinger hovered over the runes one by one. Here the runes referenced “The Protectors.” And here, “The chosen of God’s warriors against the Darkness-to-Come.” And here, “The-Sum-of-All-Shadows.”
She kept coming back to the one rune that Emma had copied in her own hand.
Aqqibar, Emma had written. If I’m reading this correctly, that’s who I am, who Bravo is, who Ayla is. That’s why everything we do seems fated to happen. We’re Aqqibari: the Protectors against the Darkness to Come. God’s defense against the Sum of All Shadows.”
“Aqqibari.” Lilith tried the word out on her tongue. “Aqqibari.”
She put her head down, continued to read: That word sounds vaguely Arabic, and so it should. I know that you’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune, Lilith.
Lilith sucked in her breath. Emma not only left this history for her, she had written it for her.
You remember that Paul Atreides came to be called Muad’Dib. Well, I believe that Herbert appropriated that word from the Arabic “al-mu’aqqibat,” the singular of which is “mu’aqqib”—literally “one who follows.” But the actual meaning is a form of angel who provides protection for every human in life, sleep, and death. Even in resurrection. In other words, an Aqqibari.
* * *
THE HOUSE was so large, its hallways so winding, its chambers so incomprehensible that Haya could not stop herself from exploring, despite admonitions to the contrary. In truth, the forbidden, clandestine nature of her forays, penetrating deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, was one of the major attractions for Haya. Which was curious, as she had never been a disobedient child; if anything, just the opposite. But something irreversible had happened to her when Leviathan had appeared in the night to take them off their small watercraft to this place of no sun-no moon-no stars, this Elsewhere, as Haya thought of it.
She invariably began her forays a half hour after breakfast, by her reckoning, anyway, since the house had no clocks, watches, or timers, even in the expansive kitchen. Here, time was as immobile as a stele of granite, carved with her name upon its sleek surface.
By her count at the thirty-minute mark following breakfast, during which Leviathan stood, arms crossed over his massive chest, watching them eat with indifferent eyes like a bored headmaster observing test-takers, her mother and Leviathan departed without a word to her. Where they went she had no idea. Once, she’d had a notion to shadow them, but she hadn’t followed that up with action, and now discovered that she didn’t much care where they went or dwell on what they did there.
Besides, ever since the advent of Leviathan she had come to look forward to her time alone with a bittersweet ache. She missed everything about her world—sun, sand, wind, birds, the sea tides, the scents of sea wrack, the laughter of the boatbuilders, the bawdy stories of the fishermen and seafarers upon their return home. On the other hand, neither Leviathan nor her mother were around to keep track of her. These periods when she was left on her own were all too short and, therefore, became precious.
The problem was that her wanderings produced nothing at all. Despite the house’s enormous size, its rooms, so far as she had explored, contained nothing: no furniture, no rugs or carpets, no fixtures or electrical outlets, and, certainly, no living thing. After seven cycles of breakfasts (counting them being her only method of marking the passing of days) she had visited more than a score of chambers without finding even a speck of dust. It was as if the rest of the house, apart from the chambers where they lived, ate, and slept, did not actually exist, but was a mere sketch, there for appearance and nothing more.
Until the morning when she discovered—well, at first she didn’t quite know what it was. Then, as she moved cautiously into the chamber, her path describing a shallow arc from the door to the object, she saw that it was a chair—but one unlike any she had seen before, or even imagined. For one thing, it was colossal; its back rose a good eight feet from the base of the seat. For another, the back itself was oddly shaped: two vertical spindles rising in tandem from the center of the seat only inches apart, they curved at the apex, making an attenuated U.
Haya stepped around it, constantly glancing over her shoulder at the open doorway, her keen ears attuned for the slightest ghost of a footfall. To be caught exploring by Leviathan would trigger a terrible consequence, the mere thought of which turned her marrow to jelly.
And yet she continued on, could not help herself, her curiosity growing exponentially the more she saw. For beyond the strange chair was a wooden table—old, scarred, stained black by countless layers of a substance she could not name. It looked to her like nothing so much as a butcher’s table, on which animal carcasses were hacked apart. Blood turned wood black over time, she knew that, had seen it on her father’s ship, the decks dark “with fish blood,” he’d told her, but she was very clever; she’d guessed the truth—that the “fish blood” was actually the blood of humans.
So, this table: what was its purpose, set so close to the chair? And then, because she kept moving in that arc she had begun, she came upon the metal bucket, as outsized in its way as the chair. The bucket was stuffed to overflowing.
Her heart hammered hard inside her chest, her breathing came quick and fast. As she moved closer, she recognized the contents of the bucket: bones. And not just any bones—human bones. Her mother had taught her human anatomy as part of her homeschool education. And now that she was side-on to the chair and table, she saw what lay underneath the table: bones cracked open, gnawed through, the marrow sucked out, before parts of the bones themselves were crunched into slender shards.
She stared at this tableau for what, later, seemed a very long time. At the moment however, the seconds raced by her, chasing each other, as if they could no longer bear to remain in this chamber.
And abruptly, neither could she. Awakened suddenly from her trancelike stasis, she turned and bolted through the door. The moment she did so, she heard voices—her mother’s and Leviathan’s—raised in querulous argument. The acoustics of the house were such that she could not tell whether the two were near her or far off. Dread suffused her. Clinging to one wall, she crept along, knees bent to reduce her presence further. The voices rose and fell tidally as emotions ebbed and flowed, but they did not seem to grow closer, or grow more distant, for that matter. What were they fighting about? she wondered. It seemed that lately they were always at each other’s throats, like a pair of wild animals. She no longer recognized her mother. It was as if Leviathan had drawn something out of her, a personality long hidden, which she didn’t like, which made her afraid. To be afraid of your own mother was a hellish thing. It violated some cosmic balance she sensed but did not understand. But there could be no doubt of the wrongness of her current situation; it was absolute.
She kept going, silently placing one foot in front of the other, while she told herself over and over that she was safe, that no one would discover where she had been or what she had stumbled upon. The way back stretched out before her interminably, and yet her steps were unerring. She possessed an uncanny sense of direction. Even in the dark, a path once taken was indelibly etched in her mind. Even in this bewildering labyrinth of twisting halls and chambers, the one virtually indistinguishable from the next, she never lost her way.
Once, thinking she heard a sound, she paused to listen. She was beside a window, and peering through it the sky looked brittle, like the inside of an eggshell after all the nutrition had been sucked out of it.
Silence lapped at her ears, so complete it almost hurt. Like a pressure against her skull.
She kept going. Down the last hallway that debouched onto the bedrooms she crept, until she was no longer in terra vetitum—forbidden territory. Her narrow shoulders, which had been up around her ears in tension, relaxed, and her heartbeat slowly returned to a semblance of normality as the adrenaline leached out of her system. Her eyelids grew heavy.
Turning in to her room, she flung herself onto the bed. She could no longer hear the voices, but it didn’t matter much, for two breaths later she was deeply asleep.
13
“The beach has widened,” Ayla said. “This is what the chimera, Oq Ajdar, told us.”
“And to close it we must find your grandfather Conrad,” Molly added. “Only correct me if I’m wrong, but Conrad Shaw died some years ago.”
Bravo, Ayla, and Molly were back in Malta, sitting at the table in the main building’s vast kitchen eating breakfast. It was just past dawn. None of them had slept well following their time with the chimera. Apparently, she had that effect on humans. Ayla had dreamed of the time her mother had taken her into the red tent of shadows, reliving her terror, and the fire she had somehow manifested in order to protect them both from the thing that reigned there. Molly had found herself in that place she had glimpsed behind Oq Ajdar, sylvan yet at the same time malevolent: the house on the hill, the shivering water below it, and, what drew her most of all, the small figure running down the slope to join the snaking river, as if they were best friends. As for Bravo, he dreamed not at all. Instead, his unconscious mind, freed of the restraints the waking world put on it, had gone searching, searching for Bravo’s beloved grandfather Conrad. But every time he sensed that he was getting close he felt a vault door slam in his face.
“His body expired,” Ayla replied, “but when you get to know this family better you’ll understand that they have a different concept of death than you do.”
Molly cocked her head quizzically, and Ayla said: “Bravo, I think you should do the honors.”
But Bravo was lost in thought. Emma and Lilith were due back in Malta by day’s end. He was looking forward to that. He hadn’t cared for how he and Emma had parted and he wanted to apologize. Also, he was holding out hope that since she had acquired the cold fire, she might succeed at contacting Conrad where he had failed. He had heard Conrad speak Et ignis ibi est! If he had communicated with her in this way, perhaps she could speak with him using the cold fire.
Ayla reached for a slice of fresh-baked bread, slathered it with strawberry preserves, then dipped it in her thick, bitter, Turkish coffee. She took a bite, chewed thoughtfully as she watched Bravo not responding. “The Last Supper we took from the reliquary on Arwad began to bleed,” she said slowly and carefully, as if speaking to someone hard of hearing. “Apparently, that was the sign that the breach is widening.”
“Which means more of the Fallen will be entering our realm,” Molly said.
The mention of the Fallen appeared to rouse Bravo from his ruminations. “Precisely so.” He pushed his plate away without having eaten much of anything. Molly plucked a strip of bacon off his plate and, ignoring Ayla’s glare, put it in her mouth in a way that seemed, as she leaned toward Bravo, salacious.
Ayla’s brows knit in a frown. “But who sent the warning? Who would have that kind of power?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Molly said, popping the last bit of bacon into her mouth and chewing contentedly. When she had swallowed, she added: “It was the chimera herself.”
“Excellent point.” Bravo nodded his approval.
“But this breach…” Molly began.
Bravo said: “If it is allowed to widen or, God help us, crack open entirely, Lucifer and his infernal army of Fallen angels will pour through into our realm. He and his army will conquer and enslave us, to assist in his assault on Heaven.”
“Hell on earth,” Ayla said. Molly stared openmouthed.
Bravo nodded again. “Quite literally.”
“But if the chimera is so powerful, why doesn’t she know where Conrad is?” Molly said pointedly.
“You heard her,” Ayla said. “She is a Medius. It’s her fate to remain neutral.”
“But Oq Ajdar said she had already helped you,” Molly said. “And I don’t understand that. I didn’t catch any hint of help in anything she said.”
“Allies,” Ayla told her. “She said we have allies.”
“But she didn’t tell us where to find them,” Molly protested.
“That’s because you have no experience with her,” Bravo said. “The chimera likes visual puzzles—it’s a key component of her nature, being a shape-shifter. And in that regard, recall the creature she became when she told me that she had already helped me.”
“A bird of prey,” Ayla said.
“But how does that help us?” Molly asked.
“I believe I know who the chimera was referring to,” Bravo told them. “To find out for certain we’ll journey back to the Library at Alexandria.”
Molly’s face lit up. “Egypt!” She was so excited by this prospect that she forgot to flirt with Bravo. “When do we leave?”
“This evening. As soon as Emma and Lilith get back. I want Emma with us,” he said. “In the meantime, I have some research to dig into.”
“Then I’ve got plenty of time to get ready,” Molly said.
Bravo rose. “Molly, you’ll stay behind with your sister.”
“What?” Molly looked like she was going to jump out of her skin. “But you can’t … I mean, this is too important. I don’t want to miss—”
“What’s most important right now,” Bravo said levelly, “is for you and Lilith to get to know each other all over again. You’re both different people now. You will find a way to love each other again.”
Molly crossed her arms over her chest. “This isn’t fair.”
“Fair has nothing to do with it,” Bravo told her. “It’s what’s necessary.”
She pulled an unhappy face. “Is that an order, Boss?”
Bravo laughed. “What do you think?”
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON, an exhausted Bravo fell asleep the moment he lay down—just for a moment, or so he told himself. During that time, he was subjected to an unhappy and enigmatic dream. He is adrift in a boat, a dinghy, a lifeboat without either sail or oars. He has the distinct impression that he is the sole survivor of a horrific catastrophe, all hands lost. The sky is obscured by clouds, the horizon by a fog bank. The sea is gray-green, opaque. The boat lifts and falls dangerously as it is tossed from crest to trough.
He becomes aware that he is barefoot, standing in liquid. It occurs to him that he should begin bailing, but it’s not water in the bottom of the boat; it’s blood. The blood of a man lying at his feet. The man’s face is obscured by a decorative, hand-painted skull mask like the ones used in the Mexican Day of the Dead.
As Bravo stares down at him, the man says quite clearly, “Misericordia.” Mercy.
And Bravo awoke thinking of the bleeding of The Last Supper.
14
For the next several sleep cycles Haya did nothing untoward. She kept close to the house, not even venturing down to her beloved river, though she often stood at one of the windows overlooking the snaking water. From time to time she would be racked with shivers, as if she had a high fever. She spoke little, and only when she was spoken to. As a symptom of her mother’s new personality, Kamar never inquired of Haya whether something was wrong. She appeared oblivious, treating Haya as if she were another piece of furniture. She only had eyes for Leviathan.
And it was not lost on Haya that she, herself, had changed since the advent of he who purported to be her father (she did not believe it; she refused to believe it). When she and her mother had set sail from the shore of Arwad that fateful night she had been a little girl, clinging wide-eyed to her mother’s hip. But since then something strange—some alchemical process—had worked its magic on her. She leapfrogged childhood, sped past prepubescence, engaging with adolescence without many of the requisite tools time provided. Time had ceased to exist for her. For better or for worse, she was now as different a person as her mother.
During this period Haya slept fitfully or not at all. When she did sleep she found herself back in the Bone Chamber, staring at the colossal chair that in her dream was made of human bones, slimed with human marrow. She would startle awake, her body drenched in sweat, which, in the terror-hangover from her nightmare, she at first took to be the same marrow that dripped off the chair. Unable to tolerate her bed a moment longer, she would throw off the covers and catapult out, only to find herself roaming the hallway between her room and that of the adults at odd hours. From behind the wide door to their bedroom she’d hear grunts and groans that both drew her and repelled her. She’d sit, back against the door, knees drawn up to her bony chest, listening, hating herself, but hating them more. Images of the chair and table, the bucket of bones, and the discarded waste pulsed in her head. A pressure continued to build inside her, roiling her insides.
