Under Cover of Darkness (10 page)

“You there, Guardian!” the Fangel growled, reaching out a plump, pink hand the size of a Buick. “Come to me, mortal fool!”

Yeah, right
. Yanking back the arming bolt, I rode the bucking machine gun and stitched the Fangel from knees to nose. Sagging into nonexistence, it puffed into vapor and disappeared.

But then another Fangel appeared at the hole in the wall. I killed it before the Fallen One could get inside the lodge. But another was right behind, and another . . . and a fifth . . . tenth . . . twentieth . . . The hammering sound of nonstop machine gun fire and unholy screaming seemed to last forever. The assorted brothers on the few remaining monitors shouted advice, but I couldn't hear a word over the deafening fusillade of the yammering machine gun.

As the last Fangel vanished in a puff of smoke, I dropped the hot M60 and flexed my aching hands. Okay, that bought me some time. Now all I had to do was . . .

Suddenly, a policeman walked out of the swirling clouds of pungent smoke. Incredibly, it was the old cop from the street!

“What in Hades is going on here?” the officer demanded, looking about in shocked confusion.

I started to reply, but that was when I saw he wasn't wearing his Masonic ring anymore.
So how did he get past the automatic defenses of the lodge?
In a surge of cold adrenaline, I pulled the HK 9 mm from inside my coat and shot him twice in the face.

Staggering backward, the cop hit the cracked wall and his outer layer of chitin, or whatever it was, broke off to reveal the most amazingly beautiful woman I had ever seen. Er, no, she was a man. No, a woman . . .

“May the Great Architect of the Universe protect us!” Luxembourg called from the smoky ruin of the control room. “That's the Dark Lord!”

That caught me by surprise. This was The Morning Star, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Big “S,” his-own-damn-unholy-hairy-ass self?
Oh, crap
.

Holding a tiny golden Key in his pearlescent hands, Satan turned toward the flickering bank of video monitors, smiling with indescribable beauty.

“Guardian!” London screamed hysterically. “Use the Emergency—”

“Be still,” Satan interrupted, rising a hand. All of the monitors exploded, throwing the entire lodge into a Stygian gloom.

Knowing who was next on the hit parade, I turned on a heel and pelted back into the arsenal to ram my fist through the glass of Emergency Alarm. I sure hoped this was what the Brother had meant, because if not I was about to have a close encounter of the 666th kind.

I tried not to hold my breath, but did anyway. However, nothing seemed to happen for a very long second. Then the concrete floor broke apart, and a smooth jade obelisk lifted into view. Lying on top was a tiny crystal dagger. That made my stomach lurch. I knew this blade. It was shown prominently in our most secret book. This was one of the Weapons of Heaven.

When Satan and his angels had rebelled, they used crystalline weapons to attack the guardians of Heaven. Special weapons designed to kill Angels. Maybe even God. Who knows? As the thousands of Fangels and Angels died in combat, their weapons fell gently upon the Earth. A rain of flaming swords.

Famous for not being a moron, King Solomon quickly figured out what was happening and sent out his army to gather the weapons, and hide them away from Satan and his minions. Then he built a temple to protect the weapons, a really mucking huge temple that took every skilled mason in the world to complete. And thus, the Freemasons were born, guardians of the Key to the Door of the Arsenal of Heaven and Hell.

Just then, a magnificent golden light flooded the armory and Satan glided into view, his/her face taking the breath away from me. I started to weep with joy at the sheer magnificence of his smile, and got an erection at the same time from the womanly curves. His beauty was indescribable! Yet there was something sinister about the Dark One that gave me the impression of absolute insanity.
Bedbugs had nothing on this guy!

“Henry, please take me to the Door,” Satan asked sweetly, the words hitting me like velvet fists.

He knew my name
? I wanted to tell him to get stuffed. But incredibly, I started to obey. With a sheer effort of will, I managed to shake off the compulsion, snatch the dagger and whip it toward the Dark One with all of my strength!

The knife turned over twice and slammed into His shoulder like an avenging thunderbolt. Gushing a torrent of golden blood, Satan screamed in pain as he was driven backward to crash into the wall, the impact shattering the resilient stonework for yards in every direction.

As the Great Traitor weakly clawed at the crystal blade embedded in his perfect flesh, I stumbled closer to grab the handle, ready to pull it out and strike again.

“Wait,” Satan whispered, his breath sweet as a spring breeze on my face.

As a Master Mason, I knew better than to look the Father of All Lies directly in the eyes, but still I paused, damning my own weakness. I could feel his presence, the warmth from his body, and it made me giddy, almost drunk. I wanted to obey him, to serve, to yield, to
pull out the blade and kill this asshole. Pull it! Pullitpullit
! But my hands refused to move; they were numb, locked in a tempest of conflicting urges.

“You do not dare kill me,” Satan chuckled softly, a hand gently touching my arm. It was icy cold and electric pleasure at the same time. “God bade me to live after losing the war, so there must be a reason for my existence. Who are you to deny the will of Him, the Creator?”

That was a mighty good question. “You rebelled against Him once,” I retorted through clenched teeth.

“Ah, but I was given free will,” Satan answered, a flood of glorious promises cascading into my mind and soul.

Ignoring everything I had ever been taught, I looked the Dark One directly in the eyes. “Yeah? Guess what, asshole. Me, too!” And I yanked the blade free to plunge it directly into his hairless chest.

At the blow, Satan went stiff, and screamed for only a second before I went stone deaf. In silence, I leaned inward, putting my weight and strength against the dagger as I moved it about trying to find whatever a fallen angel had in place of a heart. Golden light erupted from the wound, and He beat against me, but the blows fell without impact, and I seemed to grow stronger as He became weaker. A hundred thousand voices cried out inside my head, promising me anything,
everything
! Grimly determined, I ignored them all, concentrating on the task. Let hellfire burn me, or demons eat my soul, I didn't care. But this pretty little sombitch was going down for the count, here and now!

Suddenly going limp, Satan whispered something too low for me to hear, and then crumbled into a silvery ash.

As I stepped away from the disintegrating form, the entire planet seemed to shudder and the ceiling cracked apart, admitting the cold blue moonlight. Then the sun rose over the horizon, filling the world with a clean clear light that banished every shadow of Darkness. And then, the darkness of every Shadow.

Dumbstruck, I gazed in awe and wonder at the quite unexpected sight of dawn occurring in the middle of the night. Then the sun appeared to tremble, and for the first time in recorded history the burning lid raised and the Great Flaming Eye of God looked down upon the world, oddly appearing exactly as it did on the back of the American one dollar bill.

“I'll be damned,” I whispered, almost dropping the dagger.

As if in reply, the Eye looked through the millions of miles of space and directly into my upturned face.
No, you will not
.

Instantly, I felt refreshed and renewed, young and healthy and full of beans. My hearing returned, as did a tooth missing from childhood. “Thank you,” I shouted.

But the Eye had already moved onward, healing, fixing, finding, repairing. Now images of the world poured into my mind, and I could actually “see” a million demons vanish into smoke, and ten thousand Fangels crumble into sheer nothingness. Then the floor of the lodge cracked open and the crystal weapons faded away from sight. Gone back to wherever they originally came from.

Now, His gaze moved on, the pollution disappeared from the land, sea, and air. An endless bounty of fish returned to the barren oceans, extinct species sprang back to life, and every nuke turned to solid stone.

As the new dawn swept the globe, cripples began to dance, the blind suddenly could see, the deaf could hear, and every disease vanished: cancer, AIDS, rabies, acne . . . along with killer bees, army ants, and almost every other blood-sucking parasite, including TV evangelists, telemarketers, and used car salesmen.

The Age of Miracles had returned, and once more God was in our everyday lives, watching benignly down from above. Satan and his hellish minions were gone forever! Which would mean an end to war, and most of the other brutalities that we did to each other on a regular basis. However, this was also the end of the Freemasons, our millennia-old trust finally fulfilled in dirty old . . . er, in beautiful, glistening, downtown Chicago.

Unfortunately, this meant that I was out of a job, and I had really enjoyed being the covert guardian of a divine mystery for an all-powerful, world wide secret society.

Hmm, I wonder if the Elks have anything special that needs protecting?

Tanya Huff

 

 

“
B
UTI'MAthief.”

“Why, so you are. It's interesting that never occurred to us, what with this being the Thieves Guild and all.”

Terizan's lip curled in spite of all efforts to keep her expression neutral. Tribune One's lip curled in return. Tribunes Two and Three shuffled their seats out of the direct line of fire as surreptitiously as only master thieves could shuffle. Gaze locked on One's face, Terizan's right brow flicked up.

One laughed.

When that was it for confrontation, Two and Three exchanged nearly identical expressions of chagrin.

What they'd missed, and what One hadn't, was that Terizan had no intention of becoming part of the Thieves Guild Tribunal, at least, not yet. Granted, she'd been taking reading lessons on the Street of Tales, but she wasn't ready to make an irreversible challenge to the Tribunal's authority. Besides, the thought of spending any significant amount of time in close proximity to Tribune Three and the scent of sandalwood oil he'd recently started rubbing all over his not inconsiderable bulk, turned her stomach.

Terizan hoped he was doing the rubbing himself because the alternative just didn't bear considering.

“The job you're talking about,” she continued, scratching her nose to keep from sneezing, “is a job for a spy.”

“And what is a thief but one who steals in and then steals out again holding something belonging to another. In this instance, the something is information. Otherwise, there is no difference.” Tribune Two sounded more emotionless than usual—probably in an effort to make up for the earlier reaction.

“It's simple,” Tribune One sighed, lacing ringless fingers together. “If the rumors are true and there actually is a conspiracy to overthrow the Council, you steal into one of their meetings, then you steal out with the names of those involved.”

“If,” Tribune Three snorted.

“The Council is convinced . . .” Two began.

“The Council has its collective head so far up its collective ass that it's run out of air,” Three interrupted.

“Tribune Three has a point,” Terizan noted. “What if the Council's wrong? What if there is no conspiracy?”

“Then bring them proof of that.”

“Proof of nothing?”

“That should be no problem for a thief of your skills,” One said, not bothering to hide her smirk. “Unless your failure at the wizard's tower has shaken your confidence.”

Oh, yeah. She was never going to live
that
down. That she'd succeeded at the wizard's tower was beside the point since no one could know of it. “I'm not questioning my skills; I'm questioning the Council's requirements.”

Two's pale eyes narrowed. “Rumors of conspiracy make the Council understandably paranoid. If this matter isn't settled conclusively, they will begin making random arrests. They've already hired another two dozen constables.”

“We don't need to tell you that increased security will adversely affect our membership,” One added. “Of course, you may refuse the job . . .”

Terizan held up a hand and slid off the pile of stolen carpets that seemed to be a permanent fixture in the Sanctum. “If I turn down the job, you'll offer it to a thief with lesser skills who'll get caught and probably killed and I'll be responsible and blah blah blah. We've been through this all before.”

“If you turn down the job,” Two told her, voice cold, “we'll offer it to a thief who might be less than scrupulous about the names he or she offers the Council. Who might add names to the list for personal reasons.”

The pause after this declaration was triumphant.

“Did the Council give you any idea where I should start looking for this conspiracy?” she sighed.

“They've heard rumors of meetings in the Necropolis. You have three days.”

 

The Necropolis was haunted. Everyone knew that. From all reports, the winding paths that led from the gate to the top of the hill were as busy with the restless dead as Butcher's Row was with the living on market day. Only the lowest plateau down by the river where the very poor were buried in trenched graves remained untouched by ghostly activity.