Cabal (26 page)

Boone didn’t let it drop. He held it as in a dance, and undid the flesh and bone as he’d undone the mask, clots of Decker’s body striking the walls. There was only the dimmest memory of Decker’s crimes against him in his head now. He tore with a Breed’s zeal, taking monstrous satisfaction in a monstrous act. When he’d done his worst he dropped the wreckage to the earth, and finished the dance with his partner underfoot.

There’d be no rising from the grave for this body. No hope of earthly resurrection. Even in the full flood of his attack Boone had withheld the bite that would have passed life after death into Decker’s system. His flesh belonged only to the flies, and their children; his reputation to the vagaries of those who chose to tell his story. Boone didn’t care. If he never shrugged off the crimes Decker had hung around his neck it scarcely mattered now. He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.

He let the body lie, and went to seek Lori. There was only one place she could have gone: down the slope into Baphomet’s chamber. There was pattern in this, he saw. The Baptiser had
brought
her here, unknitting the ground beneath her feet so as to bring Boone after.

The flame its divided body occupied threw a cold glamour up into his face. He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.

L
ost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light, flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.

A scholar in his youth, he would have known the name Baphomet had somebody whispered it to him, and understood why the light, springing from the deity’s flame, exercised such a claim upon him. He would have known the deity as god and goddess in one body. Would have known too how its worshippers had suffered for their idol, burned as heretics, or for crimes against nature. He might have feared a power that demanded such homage; and wisely.

But there was nobody to tell him. There was only the light, drawing him on.

The Baptiser was not alone in its chamber, Boone found. He counted eleven members of the Breed around the walls, kneeling blindfolded with their backs to the flame. Amongst them, Mister Lylesburg and Rachel.

On the ground to the right of the door lay Lori. There was blood on her arm, and on her face, and her eyes were closed. But even as he went to her aid the thing in the flame set its eyes on him, turning him round with an icy touch. It had business with him, which it was not about to postpone.

‘Approach,’
it said.
‘Of your own free will.’

He was afraid. The flame from the ground was twice the size it had been when last he’d entered, battering the roof of the chamber. Fragments of earth, turned to either ice or ash, fell in a glittering rain and littered the floor. Standing a dozen yards from the flame the assault of its energies was brutal. Yet Baphomet
invited
him closer.

‘You’re safe,’
it said. ‘You
came in the blood of your enemy. It’ll keep you warm.’

He took a step towards the fire. Though he’d suffered bullet and blade in his life since death, and felt none of them, he felt the chill from Baphomet’s flame plainly enough. It pricked his nakedness; made frost patterns on his eyes. But Baphomet’s words were no empty promise. The blood he wore grew hot as the air around him grew colder. He took comfort from it, and braved the last few steps.

The weapon
, Baphomet said.
Discard it
.

He’d forgotten the knife in his neck. He drew it out of his flesh and threw it aside.

Closer still
, the Baptiser said.

The flame’s fury concealed all but glimpses of its freight, but enough to confirm what his first encounter with Baphomet had taught him: that if this deity had made creatures in its own image then he’d never set eyes on them. Even in dreams, nothing that approached the Baptiser. It was one of one.

Suddenly some part of it reached for him, out of the flame. Whether limb, or organ, or both he had no chance to see. It snatched at his neck and hair and pulled him towards the fire. Decker’s blood didn’t shield him now; the ice scorched his face. Yet there was no fighting free. It immersed his head in the flame, holding him fast. He knew what this was the instant the fire closed around his head:
Baptism
.

And to confirm that belief, Baphomet’s voice in his head.

You are Cabal
, it said.

The pain was mellowing. Boone opened his mouth to draw breath, and the fire coursed down his throat and into his belly and lungs, then through his whole system. It carried his new name with it, baptizing him inside out.

He was no longer Boone. He was Cabal. An alliance of many.

From this cleansing on he would be capable of heat and blood and making children: that was in Baphomet’s gift, and the deity gave it. But he would be frail too, or frailer. Not just because he bled, but because he was charged with purpose.

I must be hidden tonight
, Baphomet said.
We all have enemies, but mine have lived longer and learned more cruelty than most. I will be taken from here and hidden from them
.

Now the presence of the Breed made sense. They’d remained behind to take a fraction of the Baptiser with them and conceal it from whatever forces came in pursuit.

This is your doing, Cabal
, Baphomet said.
I don’t accuse you. It was bound to happen. No refuge is forever. But I charge you –

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

Rebuild what you’ve destroyed
.

‘A new Midian?’

No
.

‘What then?’

You must discover for us in the human world
.

‘Help me,’ he said.

I can’t. From here on, it’s you must help me. You’ve undone the world. Now you must re-make it
.

There were shudders in the flame. The Rites of Baptism were almost over.

‘How do I begin?’ Cabal said.

Heal me
, Baphomet replied.
Find me, and heal me. Save me from my enemies
.

The voice that had first addressed him had changed its nature utterly. All trace of demand had gone from it. There was only this prayer to be healed, and kept from harm, delivered softly at his ear. Even the leash on his head had been slipped, leaving him free to look left and right. A call he hadn’t heard had summoned Baphomet’s attendants from the wall. Despite their blindfolds they walked with steady steps to the edge of the flame, which had lost much of its ferocity. They’d raised their arms, over which shrouds were draped, and the flame wall broke as pieces of Baphomet’s body were dropped into the travellers’ waiting arms, to be wrapped up instantly and put from sight.

This parting of piece from piece was agonizing. Cabal felt the pain as his own, filling him up until it was almost beyond enduring. To escape it he began to retreat from the flame.

But as he did so the one piece yet to be claimed tumbled into view in front of his face. Baphomet’s head. It turned to him, vast and white, its symmetry fabulous. His entire body rose to it: gaze, spittle and prick. His heart began to beat, healing its damaged wing with its first throb. His congealed blood liquefied like a saint’s relics, and began to run. His testicles tightened; sperm ran up his cock. He ejaculated into the flame, pearls of semen carried up past his eyes to touch the Baptiser’s face.

Then the rendezvous was over. He stumbled out of the fire as Lylesburg – the last of the adherents in the chamber – received the head from the flames and wrapped it up.

Its tenants departed, the flame’s ferocity redoubled. Cabal stumbled back as it unleashed itself with terrifying vigour –

On the ground above, Ashbery felt the force build, and tried to retreat from it, but his mind was full of what he’d spied upon, and its weight slowed him. The fire caught him, sweeping him up as it hurtled heavenward. He shrieked at its touch, and at the aftertaste of Baphomet that flooded his system. His many masks were burned away. The robes first, then the lace he’d not been able to pass a day of his adult life without wearing. Next the sexual anatomy he’d never much enjoyed. And finally, his flesh, scrubbing him clean. He fell back to earth more naked than he’d been in his mother’s womb, and blind. The impact smashed his legs and arms beyond repair.

Below, Cabal shook himself from the daze of revelation. The fire had blown a hole in the roof of the chamber, and was spreading from it in all directions. It would consume flesh as easily as earth or stone. They had to be out of here before it found them. Lori was awake. From the suspicion in her eyes as he approached it was plain she’d seen the Baptism, and feared him.

‘It’s me,’ he told her. ‘It’s still me.’

He offered her a hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet.

‘I’ll carry you,’ he said.

She shook her head. Her eyes had gone from him to something on the floor behind him. He followed her gaze. Decker’s blade lay close to the fissure, where the man he’d been before the Baptism had cast it aside.

‘You want it?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Shielding his head from the debris he retraced his steps and picked it up.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked, as he came back to her.

‘He’s dead.’

There was no sign of the corpse to verify his claim. The tunnel, collapsing on itself, had already buried him, as it was burying all of Midian. A tomb for the tombs.

With so much already levelled it wasn’t difficult to find their way out to the main gates. They saw no sign of Midian’s inhabitants on their way. Either the fire had consumed their remains, or rubble and earth covered them.

Just outside the gate, left where they could not fail to find it, was a reminder for Lori of one whom she prayed had escaped unharmed. Babette’s doll – woven from grasses, and crowned with spring flowers – lay in a small ring of stones. As Lori’s fingers made contact with the toy it seemed she saw one final time through the child’s eyes – a landscape moving by as somebody speeded her away to safety. The glimpse was all too brief. She had no time to pass a prayer for good fortune along to the child before the vision was startled from her by a noise at her back. She turned to see that the pillars which had supported Midian’s gates were beginning to topple. Cabal snatched her arm as the two stone slabs struck each other, teetered head to head like matched wrestlers, then fell sideways to hit the ground where moments before Lori and Cabal had stood.

Though he had no watch to read the hour, Cabal had a clear sense – Baphomet’s gift, perhaps – of how long they had until daybreak. In his mind’s eye he could see the planet, like a clock face decorated with seas, the magical divide of night from day creeping around it.

He had no fear of the sun’s appearance on the horizon. His Baptism had given him a strength denied his brothers and sisters. The sun wouldn’t kill him. This he knew without question. Undoubtedly it would be a discomfort to him. Moonrise would always be a more welcome sight than daybreak. But his work wouldn’t be confined to the night hours. He wouldn’t need to hide his head from the sun the way his fellow Breed were obliged to. Even now they’d be looking for a place of refuge before morning broke.

He imagined them in the sky over America, or running beside its highways, groups dividing when some amongst them grew tired, or found a likely haven: the rest moving on, more desperate by the moment. Silently he wished them safe journeys and secure harbour.

More: he promised he would find them again with time. Gather them up and unite them as Midian had done. Unwittingly, he’d harmed them. Now, he had to heal that harm, however long it took.

‘I have to start tonight,’ he told Lori. ‘Or their trails will be cold. Then I’ll never find them.’

‘You’re not going without me, Boone.’

‘I’m not Boone any longer,’ he told her.

‘Why?’

They sat on the hill overlooking the necropolis, and he recited to her all he’d learned at the Baptism. Hard lessons, which he had too few words to communicate. She was weary, and shivering, but she wouldn’t let him stop.

‘Go on …’ she’d kept saying, when he’d faltered. ‘Tell me everything.’

She knew most of it. She’d been Baphomet’s instrument as much as he, or more. Part of the prophecy. Without her he’d never have returned to Midian to save it, and to fail. The consequence of that return and that failure was the task before him.

Yet she revolted.

‘You can’t leave me,’ she said. ‘Not after all that’s happened.’

She put her hand on his leg.

‘Remember the cell …’ she murmured.

He looked at her.

‘You told me to forgive myself. And it was good advice. But it doesn’t mean I can turn my back on what happened here. Baphomet; Lylesburg; all of them … I destroyed the only home they ever had.’