Black Easter (8 page)

‘That’s better,’ Ware said. ‘Now I charge thee, by those Names I have named and on pain of those torments thou hast known, to regard the likeness and demesne of that mortal whose eidolon I hold in my hand, and that when I release thee, thou shalt straightaway go unto him, not making thyself known unto him, but revealing, as it were to come from his own intellectual soul, a vision and understanding of that great and ultimate Nothingness which lurks behind those signs he
calls matter and energy, as thou wilt see it in his private forebodings, and that thou remainest with him and deepen his despair without remittal, until such time as he shall despise his soul for its endeavours, and destroy the life of his body.’

‘I cannot give thee,’ the crowned figure said, in a voice deep but somehow lacking all resonance, ‘what thou requirest.’

‘Refusal will not avail thee,’ Ware said, ‘for either shalt thou go incontinently and perform what I comand, or I shall in no wise dismiss thee, but shall keep thee here unto my life’s end, and torment thee daily, as thy father permitteth.’

‘Thy life itself, though it last seven hundred years, is but a day to me,’ said the crowned figure. Sparks issued from its nostrils as it spoke. ‘And thy torments but a farthing of those I have endured since ere the cosmic egg was hatched, and Eve invented.’

For answer, Ware again stabbed the rod into the fire, which, Baines noted numbly, failed even to scorch it. But the crowned figure threw back its bearded head and howled desolately. Ware withdrew the rod, but only by a hand’s breadth.

‘I shall go as thou commandest,’ the creature said sullenly. Hatred oozed from it like lava.

‘Be it not performed exactly, I shall call thee up again,’ Ware said. ‘But be it executed, for thy pay thou shalt carry off the immortal part of the subject thou shalt tempt, which is as yet spotless in the sight of Heaven, and a great prize.’

‘But not yet enough,’ said the demon. ‘For thou must give me also somewhat of thine hoard, as it is written in the pact.’

‘Thou art slow to remember the pact,’ Ware said. ‘But I would deal fairly with thee, knowing marquis. Here.’

He reached into his robe and drew out something minute and colourless, which flashed in the candlelight. At first, Baines took it to be a diamond, but as Ware held it out, he recognized it as an opalescent, crystal tear vase, the smallest he had ever seen, stopper, contents and all. This Ware tossed, underhand, out of the circle to the fuming figure, which to Baines’s new astonishment – for he had forgotten that what he was really looking at had first exhibited as a beast – caught it skilfully in its mouth and swallowed it.

‘Thou dost only tantalize M
ARCHOSIAS
,’ the Presence said.
‘When I have thee in Hell, magician, then shall I drink thee dry, though thy tears flow never so copiously.’

Thy threats are empty. I am not marked for thee, shouldst thou see me in Hell forever,’ Ware said. ‘Enough, ungrateful monster. Cease thy witless plaudering and discharge thine errand. I dismiss thee.’

The crowned figure snarled, and then, suddenly, reverted to the form in which it had first showed itself. It vomited a great gout of fire, but the surge failed to pass the wall of the triangle; instead, it collected in a ball around the demon itself. Nevertheless, Baines could feel the heat against his face. Ware raised his wand.

The floor inside the small circle vanished. The apparition clashed its brazen wings and dropped like a stone. With a rending thunderclap, the floor healed seamlessly.

Then there was silence. As the ringing in Baines’s ears died away, he became aware of a distant thrumming sound as though someone had left a car idling in the street in front of the palazzo. Then he realized what it was: the great cat was purring. It had watched the entire proceedings with nothing more than grave interest. So, apparently, had Hess. Ginsberg seemed to be jittering, but he was standing his ground. Although he had never seen Jack rattled before, Baines could hardly blame him; he himself felt sick and giddy, as though just the effort of looking at M
ARCHOSIAS
had been equivalent to having scrambled for days up some Himalayan glacier.

‘It is over,’ Ware said in a grey whisper. He looked very old. Taking up his sword, he cut the diagram with it, ‘Now we must wait. I will be in seclusion for two weeks. Then we will consult again. The circle is open. You may leave.’

Father Domenico heard the thunderclap, distant and muffled, and knew that the sending had been made – and that he was forbidden, now as before, even to pray for the soul of the victim (or the patient, in Ware’s antiseptic Aristotelian terminology). Sitting up and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, breathing with difficulty in the musky, detumescent air, he walked unsteadily to his satchel and opened it.

Why – that was the question – did God so tie his hands, why
did He allow such a compromise as the Covenant at all? It suggested, at least, some limitation in His power unallowable by the firm dogma of Omnipotence, which it was a sin even to question; or, at worst, some ambiguity in His relationship with Hell, one quite outside the revealed answers to the Problem of Evil.

That last was a concept too terrible to bear thinking about. Probably it was attributable purely to the atmosphere here; in any event, Father Domenico knew that he was in no spiritual or emotional condition to examine it now.

He could, however, examine with possible profit a minor but related question: Was the evil just done the evil Father Domenico had been sent to oversee? There was every immediate reason to suppose that it was – and if it was, then Father Domenico could go home tomorrow, ravaged but convalescent.

On the other hand it was possible – dreadful but in a way also hopeful – that Father Domenico had been commanded to Hell-mouth to await the emission of something worse. That would resolve the puzzling anomaly that Ware’s latest undertaking, abominable though they all were, was for Ware not unusual. Much more important, it would explain at least in part, why the Covenant existed at all: in Tolstoy’s words, ‘God sees the truth, but waits.’

And this question, at least, Father Domenico need not simply ponder, but could actively submit to the Divine guidance, even here, even now, provided that he call upon no Presences. That restriction was not prohibitive; what was he a magician for, if not to be as subtle in his works as in his praise?

Inkhorn, quill, straightedge, three different discs of different sizes cut from virgin cardboard – not an easy thing to come by – and the wrapped burin came out of the satchel and were arranged on top of his dresser, which would serve well enough for a desk. On the cardboard discs he carefully inscribed three different scales: the A camerae of sixteen divine attributes, from
bonitas
to
patientia;
the T camerae of thirty attributes of things, from
temporis
to
negatio;
and the E camerae of the nine questions, from whether to how
great
. He centrepunched all three discs with the burin, pinned them together with a cuff
link and finally asperged the assembled Lull Engine with holy water from the satchel. Over it he said:

‘I conjure thee, O form of this instrument, by the authority of God the Father Almighty, by the virtue of Heaven and the stars, by that of the elements, by that of stones and herbs, and in like manner by the virtue of snowstorms, thunder and winds, and belike also by the virtue of the
Ars magna
in whose figure thou art drawn, that thou receive all power unto the performance of those things in the perfection of which we are concerned, the whole without trickery, falsehood or deception, by the command of God, Creator of the Angels and Emperor of the Ages. D
AMAHII
, L
UMECH
, G
ADAL
, P
ANCIA
, V
ELOAS
, M
EOROD
, L
AMIDOCH
, B
ALDACH
, A
NERETHON
, M
ITRATON
, most holy angels, be ye wardens of this instrument.
Domine, Deusmeus, in te speravi. … Confitebor tibi, Domine, in toto corde meo. … Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum
. … Amen.’

This said, Father Domenico took up the engine and turned the circles against each other. Lull’s great art was not easy to use; most of the possible combinations of any group of wheels were trivial, and it took reason to see which were important, and faith to see which were inspired. Nevertheless, it had one advantage over all other forms of scrying: it was not in any strict sense, a form of magic.

He turned the wheels at random the required number of times, and then, taking the outermost by its edge, shook it to the four quarters of the sky. He was almost afraid to look at the result.

But on that very first essay, the engine had generated:

PATIENCE/BECOMING/REALITY

It was the answer he had both feared and hoped for. And it was, he realized with a subdued shock, the only answer he could have expected on Christmas Eve.

He put the engine and the tools back in his satchel, and crept away into the bed. In his state of over-exhaustion and alarm, he did not expect to sleep … but within two turns of the glass he was no longer in the phenomenal world, but was dreaming instead that, like Gerbert the magician-Pope, he was fleeing the Holy Office down the wind astride a devil.

Ware’s period of recovery did not last quite as long as he had prophesied. He was visibly up and about by Twelfth Night. By that time, Baines – though only Jack Ginsberg could see and read the signs – was chafing at the inaction. Jack had to remind him that in any event at least two months were supposed to pass before the suicide of Dr Stockhausen could even be expected, and suggested that in the interim they all go back to Rome and to work.

Baines shrugged the suggestion off. Whatever else was on his mind, it did not seem to involve Consolidated Warfare Service’s interests more than marginally … or, at least, the thought of business could not distract him beyond the making of a small number of daily telephone calls.

The priest or monk or whatever he was, Father Domenico, was still in attendance too. Evidently he had not been taken in by the show. Well, that was Ware’s problem, presumably. All the same, Jack stayed out of sight of the cleric as much as possible; having him around, Jack recalled in a rare burst of association with his Bronx childhood, was a little like being visited by a lunatic Orthodox relative during a crucial marriage brokerage.

Not so lunatic at that, though; for if magic really worked – as Jack had had to see that it did – then the whole tissue of metaphysical assumptions Father Domenico stood for, from Moses through the Kabbalah to the New Testament, had to follow, as a matter of logic. After this occurred to Jack, he not only hated to see Father Domenico, but had nightmares in which he felt that Father Domenico was looking back at him.

Ware himself, however, did not emerge officially, to be talked to, until his predicted fourteenth day. Then, to Jack’s several-sides disquietude, the first person he called into his office was Jack Ginsberg.

Jack wanted to talk to Ware only slightly more than he wanted to talk to the barefooted, silently courteous Father Domenico; and the effect upon Baines of Ware’s singling Jack out for the first post-conjuration interview, though under
ordinary circumstances it could have been discounted as minor, could not even be conjectured in Baines’s present odd state of mind. After a troubled hour, Jack took the problem to Baines, not even sure any more of his own delicacy in juggling such an egg.

‘Go ahead,’ was all Baines said. He continued to give Jack the impression of a man whose mind was not to be turned more than momentarily from some all-important thought. That was alarming, too, but there seemed to be nothing to be done about it. Setting his face into its business mould of pleasant attentiveness, over slightly clenched teeth, Jack marched up to Ware’s office.

The sunlight there was just as bright and innocent as ever, pouring directly in from the sea-sky on top of the cliff. Jack felt slightly more in contact with what he had used to think of as real life. In some hope of taking the initiative away from Ware and keeping it, he asked the magician, even before sitting down, ‘Is there some news already?’

‘None at all,’ Ware said. ‘Sitdown, please. Dr Stockhausen is a tough patient, as I warned you all at the beginning. It’s possible that he won’t fall at all, in which case a far more strenuous endeavour will be required. But in the meantime I’m assuming that he will, and that I therefore ought to be preparing for Dr Baines’s next commission. That’s why I wanted to see you first.’

‘I haven’t any idea what Dr Baines’s next commission is,’ Jack said, ‘and if I did I wouldn’t tell you before he did.’

‘You have a remorselessly literal mind, Mr Ginsberg. I’m not trying to pump you. I already know, and it’s enough for the time being, that Mr Baines’s next commission will be something major – perhaps even a unique experiment in the history of the Art. Father Domenico’s continued presence here suggests the same sort of thing. Very well, if I’m to tackle such a project, I’ll need assistants – and I have no remaining apprentices. They become ambitious very early and either make stupid technical mistakes or have to be dismissed for disobedience. Laymen, even sympathetic laymen, are equally mischancy, simply because of their eagerness and ignorance. but if they’re highly intelligent, it’s sometimes safe to use
them. Sometimes. Given those disclaimers, that explains why I allowed you
and
Dr Hess to watch the Christmas Eve affair, not just Dr Hess, whom Dr Baines had asked for, and why I want to talk to you now.’

‘I see,’ Jack said. ‘I suppose I should be flattered.’

Ware sat back in his chair and raised his hands as if exasperated. ‘Not at all. I see that I’d better be blunt. I was quite satisfied with Dr Hess’s potentialities and so don’t need to talk to him any more, except to instruct him. But I am none too happy with yours. You strike me as a weak reed.’

‘I’m no magician,’ Jack said, holding on to his temper. ‘If there’s some hostility between us, it’s only fair to recognize that I’m not its sole cause. You went out of your way to insult me at our very first interview, only because I was normally suspicious of your pretensions, as I was supposed to be, on behalf of my job. I’m not easily offended, Dr Ware, but I’m more cooperative if people are reasonably polite to me.’