Lightbreaker, p.26
Lightbreaker, page 26
Was I any different? How had I found direction? Even now, freed from the Qliphotic taint, how was I being driven?
I shook the bottle, flushing the Chorus into the water. They made a cheap theatrical flourish of light as they energized the sanctified water—a visible marking that would further give credence to what Nicols believed I could do for him. I spun off the top of the bottle and shook water on him.
He closed his eyes and raised his face to receive the blessing. I took a mouthful of the holy water, changed it to fire in my mouth and spit it over him. He didn't flinch as the fiery spume changed to steam when it struck his water-dappled face. I leaned over and carefully kissed him on either eyelid, the Chorus leaving glittering imprints that sank into his skin. "See True, my son," I whispered.
Like a punctuation mark to the blessing, a pleasant voice suddenly spoke the number of the top floor: "52." The car slowed.
"Drink the rest." I gave him the half-empty bottle.
He looked at the bottle for an instant, delight shining in his face, and then tipped it in my direction. "Thanks."
I turned away from him so that he couldn't see my expression. The void in my gut was an emptiness with presence and weight. These holes are filled by faith, by the things we choose to believe. I heard Nicols sigh as he finished the water.
We believe our faith makes us strong. But that is the Fallacious Illusion of our existence. What assurance do we have that our faith is correctly given? Is it just the fact that we have given it that makes us think it is right? I believed the whispers of the Qliphoth. John believed I would keep him safe.
If the only vice of the soul was ignorance, then the only virtue was faith. Like good and evil, black and white, light and dark: this was the dichotomy of our existence. How close one was to the other. How dependent.
And how much a vacuum was left when one was bereft of ignorance and of faith.
The elevator opened onto a marble-floored foyer. Three panel-back chairs were lined up against the wall on the left like tired sentries. Flanking the middle chair were two narrow stands crowned with peace lilies in fat Grecian-style amphoras. A large pair of white doors was the only other exit.
The psychic vacuum of the mirror was palpable. A heavy static laced the air, a taste of burnt wire at the back of my throat. The suction was a wave pattern that had an amplitude of a few seconds, a rhythm that throbbed at the base of my skull. The Chorus groaned like an old building settling.
Nicols tapped the conquistador helmet three times with the handle of the shotgun, shoving the metal cap even lower on his head. "You ready?" A vein throbbed in his neck, an unconscious physical echo mirroring the drag of the psychic currents.
I grunted noncommittally in reply as I shoved the two remaining bottles of holy water in the front pockets of my pants. Julian had a predilection for fire. The holy water in and of itself wouldn't have any more effect on him than using a garden hose to put out a house fire, but its sanctified state made it more malleable—more readily changeable.
I couldn't fault Nicols for the desire to weigh himself down with the hardware, but it all failed the primal rule of magickal combat: any physical object brought to battle could be used against you. Guns were too easily turned against their wielder. Water, on the other hand, was just a liquid state of hydrogen and oxygen. Useless without the application of Will. Julian could take the water away from me, but he couldn't abscond with my Will.
The penthouse doors were unlocked. We crossed the threshold, the gravity well of the mirror pulling us into the room beyond.
The central living space of the penthouse was a long L-shape, and beyond an Architectural Digest-style spread of furniture and accessories, stood the theurgic mirror. The tall windows behind it looked out over the Willamette River and the lit arc of the Hawthorne Bridge, gleaming like a handful of fresh-water pearls. The furniture was Italian Industrial Futurist—straight lines and right angles, chrome edging, dead animal hide dyed in grays and burgundies—and the art on the walls was more of the Impressionist Pacific Northwest school that adorned the mall level of the building. Diamond-shaped wall sconces bled weak illumination as if the light was afraid of the smoky darkness of the mirrored sphere.
Two hallways split off at the midsection of the room like the transept of a church. The leg of the L was the dining room, from which issued the steady sound of chanting, a repetitious litany of that guttural language Bernard used to commune with his artifact.
Julian stepped around the corner of the dining room wall. He was wearing a gray and yellow robe, covered with lines and whorls of black script. Floating over his head was a cascade of bright stars. Silver cobwebs stretched from the stars to his head, a crown of filigreed strands.
"Markham." A brief flash of surprise on his face, quickly subsumed into bored disappointment.
"Expecting someone else?"
"I assume you met him on the path." He shook his head. "Not that it matters. This Aeon is almost finished."
I walked through the contortions of the furniture, intent on the far wall and the statue. Julian made no attempt to stop me, his expression slightly bemused and distracted. He didn't seem terribly concerned about our presence. If the crown of light was what I thought it was, I could certainly understand his lack of apprehension. It was probably akin to the conduits Doug had worn in the Arena. Julian was connected to the mirror's storehouse of souls, as was Bernard, who was seated in a meditative pose on the dining room table. The Anointed, in pure energy states, were channeling energy to the magus and the academic.
An involuntary chill ran up my spine. All those souls, keening and whispering in their heads. I remembered the constant buzz of the Chorus when I had first made it a part of me, how that incessant sound had nearly driven me insane. In their case, the noise was magnified a hundred times. Soul-speak. The chatter of the bodiless.
"You've brought your friend." Julian snickered at the sight of the shotgun in Nicols' hands. "He's got better weapons this time. Not that silly pop gun."
"The man's adaptable." Walking toward the mirrored sphere was uncomfortably easy, my feet nearly tripping over themselves in delight. The psychic pull of its hunger became more and more difficult to resist. Like the insistent voice of the Chorus, the stroke of its wave was a seductive lure. Feel the collapsed weight of a thousand souls. Right here. Close enough to touch.
I dragged myself to a stop just short of an arm's length from the statue. The Chorus, split between hunger and dread, were a whirlwind of chaos in my skull. Touch/fear it. I declined both options, and stayed a safe distance.
The facets of the sphere seemed to twist at right angles, a tesseract movement that made the globe appear to be on the verge of implosion. It exerted such a psychic pull that ambient energy was being drawn into the facets of the mirror. I wondered what its gravity would do to magick. If spells would be misdirected due to its influence.
I looked over at Julian standing near the dining room. I was probably going to find out. Sooner or later. In which case, I didn't want to be the one closest to the mirror.
Nicols drifted toward the center of the room, putting the large leather sofa between himself and Julian. It would have been a good defensive position were it not for the gas fireplace behind him. "Julian likes fire," I Whispered to the detective, spiriting my words directly into his ear. Nicols had the presence of mind not to twitch or look; he just kept moving, circling one of the armchairs and gliding toward the right-hand hallway that led to the rest of the penthouse.
Bernard ignored all of us. His litany was an endless loop, each phrase precisely enunciated with no sign of strain or exhaustion. How long had he been chanting? His eyes were fixed on the mirrored sphere and his hands were cupped in his lap. Like Julian, a crown of stars floated above his head. A magick circle surrounded him, drawn with white powder. Salt, maybe. Held in place by the activation of the incantation. I wondered what the circle did; certainly not protection because Julian wasn't inside it. A focus, maybe.
"Nice little party." With some difficulty, I moved away from the artifact. "Are we the only ones coming?"
"Far from it," Julian said. He tapped the side of his head. "There's room for many more yet."
"What happens next?"
"The world ends."
"I was hoping for something a little less dramatic," I said. "What would happen if I tried to break your toy?"
"Most likely, it would break you." Julian glanced at Nicols, noting the detective's position near the hallway. The magus' left hand twitched, flexing about an invisible shape, and the lights in his crown twinkled. Reaching for fire.
Nicols noticed the motion as well, and the barrel of his shotgun dipped to cover the twitching hand. "What's it supposed to do?" he asked, keeping Julian's attention.
I drifted closer to the dining room, a hand resting on the edge of my pocket. My fingers touched plastic.
"You know nothing of alchemy, do you?" Julian asked Nicols. "It's the final step of the Great Work. Solve et coagula. First you dissolve, then you recombine."
"Is that what you call what you did to the people in Ravensdale?" Nicols spat. "Dissolving?"
"Yes. Their souls were poured out of their bodies. The flesh is just a shell, a mold in which the soul is kept. It wasn't necessary."
"A shell? You left a town full of shells!"
A lascivious smile spread across Julian's lips. I was near enough to him now to see how tiny his pupils were, how a tiny black webbing infected the sclera of his eyes.
"He knows," I said. Goose bumps danced along the underside of my arms. I had driven psychic spikes through his soul when I had pinned him to the wall in the hotel. The darkness beneath the Chorus, the vile spit that had been rising in me, had infected him through that contact. "Qliphotic," I said, pronouncing the word like the curse that it was.
Julian nodded. "They're filled with appetite. The flesh is always receptive to hunger, always ready to accept a purpose."
"Solve," I said. "How does killing a thousand people bring about the realization of the Work?"
"Killing? We didn't kill anyone. We simply separated them. Purified them for a higher purpose."
"Your purpose."
"Absolutely."
"Not God's purpose."
He raised his hands in a lackadaisical gesture. "We are all God's children. How can any purpose we have not be His?"
"These souls can't be put back. They are dead, regardless of how you define 'killing.' How is that part of God's purpose?"
"Nothing can be destroyed, Markham. This is the truth of alchemy." Julian's distracted expression of bemusement crept back onto his face. He turned halfway in my direction. "You know this is an unassailable truth: transformation is the only freedom available to us. Destruction is beyond our comprehension and ability. God exists throughout us, throughout everything, and everything is Him. We can't strip Him out."
"If you can't remove Him, then how do you hope to perceive Him? Isn't that one of the paradoxes inherent to this whole conversation? I don't recall Hermes Trismegistus having any better answer to that question."
"The Creator is His first shadow, and we are the second. We are a rank removed from the Infinite and All-Encompassing. We are caught within the shadow of the Creator, unable to see beyond."
Julian's left hand was still moving, the fingers crawling in an intricate dance. I pretended to ignore the movement, casually pulling one of the water bottles out of my pocket. I was a few steps from him, standing to his right. Bernard was straight in front of me.
"So you want to get out of that shadow, do you?" I asked, unscrewing the bottle. I took a small sip from the water, positioning my hand around the base of the container.
"How marvelous would it be to look upon God? To be free of the illusions of the shadow?" Julian's fingers stilled their movement and the Chorus felt fire bloom within his body. It raced through his blood and began to collect in his palm.
I shrugged. "What makes you think He wants to be Seen?"
His pupils changed, distending to flat black coins. "We are ready," he said, the levity disappearing from his voice. "When the time comes, we will be deemed suitable."
I nodded toward Bernard. "He will be, sure. He's the one doing all the work. You? You're just standing around congratulating yourself for doing, eh, a whole fuckload of nothing."
The Qliphotic influence was in him. It was attached to his flesh and it would be singing to him right now, singing him a song of violence and hatred. I knew how that tune went.
"His hand," I Whispered to Nicols who hadn't moved from his position by the arch. "Watch his hand."
"I mean, you 'separated' those people in Ravensdale," I said to Julian. "What sort of spinelessness is that? Could you even look one of them in the face when you took their soul? Shit, Julian, I killed nine of your boys before breakfast this morning. Sucked and burned every one of them." I took one more sip of water, cool trickle down my throat. "Hell, I even torched your warehouse."
"My warehouse?" The question ground its way out of him, tinged with black anger. His fire quivered.
Focus splitting.
I nodded, a smug grin on my lips as I casually flipped the water bottle at the dining room table. It hit the tabletop, bounced once and rolled against Bernard. Holy water gurgled and flowed out of the open mouth, spilling onto the wood.
Holy water wouldn't do much to Julian, but it would react with the salt on the table, transforming the solid into a liquid. An old alchemist's trick.
XXVII
Split by the material passion raging inside, Julian was distracted by the flight of the plastic container. His gaze drifted, and the orientation of his body changed as well. I came across the intervening space and hit him with a Chorus-hardened hand. The blow staggered him, and he took several steps back.
Flush with fire, he raised his left hand to hurl a spell at me. Nicols' shotgun roared, a deafening sound that shook the walls, and Julian's hand exploded in a geyser of smoke and flame.
The theurgic mirror inhaled and the rising spray of fire and smoke was sucked across the room, elongated tendrils of magick and flesh streaming from Julian's hand.
Nicols pumped another shell into the gun and shot the magus a second time. The shotgun blast spun him around, and the rain of stars over his head twinkled.
Bernard's crown glittered as well, and he hiccupped in the middle of a word, his head going back like he couldn't breathe. The water was compromising his circle. His body froze, all but the muscles in his neck, which worked and worked like they were trying to move an obstruction.
I ran to the table and smeared my hand through the water and salt mixture. "Solve this." I slapped my palm against his throat, leaving salt, holy water, and the hot imprint of my Will on his skin. The flesh bubbled and melted, a chemical reaction from the magicked mixture of hydrogen and chloride. His choking noises became more strident and whatever paralysis holding him vanished. He collapsed on the table, eyes wide and protruding, hands scrabbling at the bubbling mass of his neck.
Behind me, the theurgic mirror inhaled. Its hunger was still immense, but lessening. More diffuse. As if without Bernard's chant, it was directionless.
I distantly heard the boom of Nicols' shotgun, a reverberating echo rather than a local thunder. In its wake came a howl of fire and, through the door on the far side of the dining area, I saw the reflected red glow of flame. A smoke detector went off in the hallway, an alert that passed to the other alarms scattered throughout the penthouse.
I hesitated for a second, torn between going to help Nicols and dealing with Bernard. Julian was going to catch the detective. It was only a matter of time and, at that point, the fight would go badly for Nicols. Bernard was still dealing with his melting trachea. He wouldn't be an issue for a little while yet.
A second later the decision was made for me as Nicols came barreling through the dining room. Flames wreathed the dome of his helmet, chewing at the synthetic material of the bandana. Smoke leaked off the back of his tactical vest and ash darkened his face.
"Shit!" He jerked his gun to the side and dodged toward the living room, avoiding me. He didn't slow down as he reached the leather sofa, tumbling over the back like he was diving for the end zone.
Smoke billowed out of the doorway and flame licked the edges of the arch, darkening the walls. Julian, red fire fluttering along his frame like he was standing in front of an industrial fan, stood in the kitchen like a burning efreet. Smoke poured off the wreckage of his left hand, a black plume that was sucked into the dining room by the gravity well of the artifact.
I was between Julian and the device.
He released his flame as I went to the left, diving for the carpet. A phoenix with bright wings and hot talons manifested through his Will and streaked across the living room. It came apart—crackling fingers of fire—as its magick was shredded by the influence of the theurgic mirror. The firebird scorched the atmosphere, leaving an acrid taint of ozone in its wake, and collapsed into a fiery funnel about the three statues. The windows behind them shattered as the fire was explosively decompressed and absorbed by the facets of the mirror. The light of the fire went from ruddy to pink to pale in the span of a heartbeat.
