The Day After Judgement (6 page)

And in fact he was also able to give it what amounted to an entirely new turn; for their Sensitive, the hermit-Father Uccello,
had inevitably found his talents much coarsened and blunted by the proximity of so many other minds, and in consequence the
white monks had only a general idea of what had gone on in Ware’s palazzo since the last convocation – an impression supplemented
by the world news, what of it there was, and by deduction, some of which was in fact wrong. Father Domenico recapitulated
the story of the last conjuration briefly; but his fellows’ appreciation of the gravity of the situation was already such
that the recitation was accompanied by no more than the expectable number of horrified murmurs.

‘All in all,’ he concluded, ‘forty-eight demons were let out of the Pit as a result of this ceremony commanded to return at
dawn. When it became apparent that the operation was completely out of hand, I invoked the Covenant and insisted that Ware
recall them ahead of time, to which he agreed; but when he attempted to summon up L
UCIFUGE
R
OFOCALE
to direct this abrogation, P
UT
S
ATANACHIA
himself answered instead. When I attempted to exorcise this abominable creature, my crucifix burst in my hands, and it was
after that that the monster told us that God was already dead and that the ultimate victory had instead gone to the forces
of Hell. The Goat promised to return for us all – all, that is; except Baines’s other assistant, Doctor Hess, whom Baphomet
had already swallowed when Hess panicked and stepped out of his circle – at dawn, but he failed to do so, and I subsequently
left and came to Monte Albano as soon as it was physically possible for me to do so.’

‘Do you recall the names and offices of all forty-eight?’ said Father Atheling, his tenor voice more sinusy than ever with
apprehension.

‘I think I do – that is, I think I could; after all, I saw them all, and that’s an experience which does not pass lightly
from the memory. In any event, if I’ve blanked out on a few – which isn’t unlikely either – they can doubtless be recovered
under hypnosis. Why does that matter, may I ask, Father Atheling?’

‘Simply because it is always useful to know the natures as well as the numbers, of the forces arrayed against one.’

‘Not after the countryside is already overrun.’ said Father Anson. ‘If the battle and the war have been already lost, we must
have the whole crew to contend with now – not just all seventy-two princes, but every single one of the fallen angels. The
number is closer to seven and a half million than it is to forty-eight.’.

‘Seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand, nine hundred and twenty-six,’ Father Atheling said, ‘to be exact.’

‘Though the wicked may hide, the claws of crabs are dangerous people in bridges,’ Father Selahny intoned abruptly. As was
the case with all his utterances, the group would doubtless find out what this one meant only after sorting out its mixed
mythologies and folklores, and long after it was too late to do
anything about it. Nor did it do any good to ask him to explain; these things simply came to him, and he no more understood
them than did his hearers. If God was indeed dead, Father Domenico wondered suddenly: Who could be dictating them now? But
he put the thought aside as non-contributory.

‘There is a vast concentration of new evil on the other side of the world,’ Father Uccello said in his courtly, hesitant old
man’s voice. ‘The feeling is one of intense oppression, quite different from that which was common in New York, or Moscow,
but one such as I would expect of a massing of demons upon a huge scale. Forgive me, brothers, but I can be no more specific.’

‘We know you are doing the best you can,’ said the director soothingly.

‘I can feel it myself,’ said Father Monteith, who although not a Sensitive had had some experience with the herding of rebellious
spirits. ‘But even supposing that we do not have to cope with so large an advance, as I certainly hope we do not, it seems
to me that forty-eight is too large a sum for us if the Covenant has been voided. It leaves us without even an option.’

Father Domenico saw that Joannes was trying to attract the director’s attention, although too hesitantly to make any impression.
Father Umberto was not yet used to thinking of Joannes as a person at all. Capturing the boy’s eyes. Father Domenico nodded.

‘I never did understand the Covenant,’ the ex-apprentice said, thus encouraged. ‘That is. I didn’t understand why God would
compromise Himself in such a manner. Even with Job. He didn’t make a deal with Satan, but only allowed him to act unchecked
for a certain period of time. And I’ve never found any mention of the Covenant in the grimoires. What are its terms, anyhow?’

Father Domenico thought the question well asked, if a trifle irrelevant, but an embarrassed and slightly pitying silence showed
that his opinion was not shared. In the end it was broken by Father Monteith, whose monumental patience was a byword in the
chapter.

‘I’m certainly not well versed in canon law, let alone in
spiritual compacts,’ he said, with more modesty than exactness. ‘But, in principle, the Covenant is no more than a special
case of the option of free will. The assumption appears to be that even in dealing with devilry, on the one hand, no man shall
be subjected to a temptation beyond his ability to resist, and on the other, no man shall slide into Heaven without having
been tempted up to that point. In situations involving Transcendental or Ceremonial Magic, the Covenant is the line drawn
in between. Where you would find its exact terms. I’m sure I don’t know; I doubt that they have ever been written down. One
thinks of the long struggle to understand the rainbow, the other Covenant; once the explanation was in, it did not explain,
except to show that every man sees his own rainbow, and what seems to stand in the sky is an optical illusion, not a theomorphism.
It is in the nature of the arrangement that the terms would vary in each individual case, and that if you are incapable of
determining where it is drawn for you – the line of demarcation – then, woe betide you, and that is that.’

Dear God, Father Domenico thought, all my life I have been an amateur of Roger Bacon and I never once saw that that was what
he meant to show by focusing his
Perspectiva
on the rainbow. Shall I have any more time to learn? I hope we are never tempted to make Monteith the director, or we shall
lose him to taking things out of the In box and putting them into the Out box, as we did Father Umberto –

‘Furthermore, it may well be still in existence,’ said Father Boucher. ‘As Father Domenico has already pointed out to Theron
Ware himself, we have heard of the alleged death of God only through the testimony of the most unreliable witness imaginable.
And it leaves many inconsistencies to be explained.
When
exactly is God supposed to have died? If it was as long ago as in Nietzsche’s time, why had His angels and ministers of light
seemed to know nothing of it in the interim? It’s unreasonable to suppose that they were simply keeping up a good front until
the battle actually broke out; Heaven simply isn’t that kind of an organisation. One would expect an absolute and perpetual
monarchy to break down upon the death of the monarch quite promptly, yet in point of fact we
saw no signs of any such thing until shortly after Christmas of this year.’

‘But we did see such signs at that time,’ Father Vance said.

‘True, but this only poses another logical dilemma: What happened to the Antichrist? Baphomet’s explanation that he had been
dispensed with as unnecessary to the victors, whose creature he would have been, doesn’t hold water. The Antichrist was to
have appeared
before
the battle, and if the defeat of God is all that recent, the prophecy should have been fulfilled; God still existed to compel
it.’

‘Matthew 11:14,’ Father Selahny said, in an unprecedented burst of intelligibility. The verse of which he was reminding them
referred to John the Baptist, and it said:
And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.

‘Yes,’ Father Domenico said, ‘I suppose it’s possible that the Antichrist might have come unrecognised. One always envisioned
people flocking to his banner openly, but the temptation would have been more subtle and perhaps more dangerous had he crept
past us, say in the guise of some popular philosopher, like that positive-thinking man in the States. Yet the proposal seems
to allow even less room than did the Covenant for the exercise of free will.’

There was a silence. At last, the director said: ‘The Essenes argued that one must think and experience all evil before one
can hope to perceive good.’

‘If this be true doctrine,’ Father Domenico said, ‘then it follows that God is indeed still alive, and that Theron Ware’s
experiment, and World War III, did not constitute Armageddon after all. What we may be confronted with instead is an Earthly
Purgatory, from which Grace, and perhaps even the Earthly Paradise, might be won. Dare we think so?’

‘We dare not think otherwise,’ said Father Vance. ‘The question is, how? Little that is in the New Testament, the teachings
of the Church or the Arcana seem very relevant to the present situation.’

‘No more is our traditional isolation,’ said Father Domenico. ‘Our only recourse now is to abandon it; to abandon our monastery
and our mountain, and go down into the world that we renounced when Charlemagne was but a princeling, to try
to win it back by works and witnessing. And if we may not do this with the sweet aid of Christ, then we must nevertheless
do it in His name. Hope now is all we have.’

‘In sober truth,’ Father Boucher said quietly, ‘that is not so great a change. I think it is all we ever had.’

Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase… Prepare thyself to the search.

Job 8:7, 8

6

Left to his own devices and hence, at last, unobserved, Theron Ware thought that it might be well, after all, if he did essay
a small magic. The possible difficulty lay in that all magic without exception depended upon the control of demons, as he
had explained to Baines on his very first visit. But therein lay the attractiveness of the experiment, too, for what he wanted
was information, and a part of that information was whether he still had any such control.

And it would also be interesting, and possible to find out at the same time, to know whether or not there were any demons
left in Hell. If there were it would imply, though it would not guarantee, that only the forty-eight that he had set loose
were now terrorizing the world. This ruled out using the Mirror of Solomon, for the spirit of that mirror was the angel Anael.
Probably he would not answer anyhow, for Ware was not a white magician, and had carefully refrained from calling upon any
angel ever since he had turned to the practice of the black Art; and besides, it would be a considerable nuisance locating
three white pigeons amidst all this devastation.

Who, then? Among the demon princes he had decided not to call up for Baines’s commission were several that he had ruled out
because of their lesser potentialities for destruction, which would stand him in good stead were it to turn out that he had
lost control; even in Hell there were degrees of malevolence, as of punishment. One of these was P
HOENIX
a poet and teacher with whom Ware had had many dealings in the past, but he probably would not do now; he posed another wildlife
problem – Ware’s familiar Ahktoi had been the demon’s creature, and the cat had of course vanished when the noise had begun,
a disappearance that P
HOENIX
would take none the less ill for its having been 100 per cent expectable. Though the grimoires occasionally characterize
one or another demon as ‘mild’ or ‘good by nature,’, these terms are strictly relative and have no human meaning; all demons
are permanently enraged by the greatest Matter of all, and it does not pay to annoy them even slightly in small matters.

Also, Ware realized, it would have to be a small magic indeed, for most of his instruments were now buried, and those that
were accessible were all contaminated beyond his power to purify them in any useful period of time. Clearly it was time to
consult the book. He crossed to the lectern upon which it rested, pushed dust and potsherds off it with his sleeve, unlocked
the clasp and began to turn the great stiff pages, not without a qualm. Here, signed with his own blood, was half his life;
the other half was down below, in the mud.

He found the name he needed almost at once: V
ASSAGO,
a mighty prince, who in his first estate before the rebellion had belonged to the choir of the Virtues. The
Lemegeton
of the Rabbi Solomon said of him, Ware recalled, that he ‘declares things past, present and future, and discovers what has
been lost or hidden’. Precisely to the purpose. Ware remembered too that his was the name most commonly invoked in ceremonial
crystallomancy, which would be perfect in both scope and limitations for what Ware had in mind, involving no lengthy preparations
of the operator, or even any precautionary diagrams, nor any apparatus except a crystal ball; and even for that he might substitute
a pool of exorcised water, fifty litres of which still reposed in a happily unruptured stainless steel tank embedded in the
wall behind Ware’s workbench.

Furthermore, he was the only demon in Ware’s entire book of pacts who was represented therein by two seals or characters,
so markedly different that without seeing them side by
side, one might never suspect that they belonged to the same entity. Topologically they were closely related, however, and
Ware studied these relationships long and hard, knowing that he had once known what they meant but unable to recall it. These
were the figures: