Lightbreaker

XVIII

That's it?" I shrugged, hiding my curiosity beneath a layer of Bohemian disinterest. "You've got me strapped down beneath this medieval Maidenform brassiere just to show me a vaguely Egyptian-looking knockoff of Nebuchadnezzar's statue?"

I heard wordless noises like hyenas chattering behind me-more Hollow Men, out of my line of sight. A thin smile crept across Kat's face. Bernard seemed vaguely disappointed. "Your insouciance is tiring, Mr. Markham."

"It's a reaction to being shot with a Taser," I replied. "Makes me giddy in all the wrong ways."

"Just show him," Julian said. "He's not going to be amenable to conversation until he sees a demonstration."

Bernard shook his head. "That's an untenable option."

"Not on him," Julian said. He tapped a finger against the frame of Kat's chair.

"What?" Kat struggled in her chair, trying to look behind her, straining to see what Julian was doing. I tensed my wrists, and the metal buckles on the thick leather straps rattled.

Julian held my focus as he reached his long index finger toward the top of Kat's head. His nimbus darkened, flickering into an orange and red crown.

"You bastard," Kat hissed, pulling at the straps around her wrists. The Chorus twitched in my head as they felt her gather energy. "Let me go."

Julian pressed his finger into her hair and smoke licked up from the smoldering follicles. "Now why would I want to do that?"

She jerked forward in the chair, trying to evade his burning digit. A tiny orange triangle of fire persisted on her head, eagerly devouring her hair. Julian slapped her head, extinguishing the small flame, and then threaded his fingers in her hair, pulling her against the chair. "Listen," he growled into her ear. "We appreciate what you have done for us. Our Anointed are grateful. But your services are no longer required. There is no place for you here anymore."

She calmed down, still defiant under his hand but no longer reckless. "So I'm to be discarded then," she said. "Tossed out like an old piece of clothing. You think you know all of the ways in which I can be useful?"

Julian looked at me. "Well, baiting the snare was the most useful thing you've done for us. But-" he stroked her hair "-that's all you had left to offer."

Her eyes glittered as she collapsed the energy around her, coalescing her Will. Julian grimaced and stepped back. He signaled to the men standing behind me and I heard the clunk of a heavy switch being thrown.

Current arced across the frame of the chair, coursing through her body in a crackling pop of noise. She screamed, throwing herself against the bindings. Her spell disintegrated into microcosms of personality as the current shook her brain.

The jolt only lasted for a second or two, but it was enough to demolish her resistance. As the current was cut, she collapsed in the chair, smoke drifting from her shoulders and head.

Electrical current was one of the simplest forces to transmute. It was so close to light in many ways-just a stream of charged particles-that converting it through the filter of Will was one of the first elemental transformations a magus learns. The electric chairs would deter us from aggressive action-requiring us to focus our attention on the alchemy of the energy. When our Wills faltered, the current would become an issue.

Bernard stared at the floor, his face flushed. A muscle worked in the hinge of his jaw, flexing again and again. This wasn't his way, yet he hadn't lifted a finger or said a word to stop Julian.

The white-haired magus lifted her chin with a single finger and leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her face was covered with sweat and her eyes were unfocused. Her tongue moved against her lips, seeking moisture but also recoiling from the salty taste of her sweat. "Part of you will be joining us," he said, an uncharacteristic tenderness in his voice. "You brought us this far, and we're going to take the next step with your help. It's not an empty sacrifice."

Bernard moved his head as if he was shaking water off his face. Raising his arms, he turned toward the statue and began to speak a ritual prayer. Hard and sibilant consonants, lots of glossolalia, phrases that went on forever. It wasn't a tongue or a ritual I knew.

Julian knew, and with an expression bordering on animal wariness, he stepped back from Kat's chair.

What did this statue do? Was Bernard summoning something? Letting something loose?

The Chorus gibbered in my head as the energy patterns convulsed in the room. The ley energies twisted from their natural channels. I felt motion against my face, a strong suction toward the strange device, and my stomach recoiled at the distortion of the natural energy flow. It was as if a giant magnetized coil had been switched on and everything ferrous was being pulled toward this energized core. But the attraction wasn't magnetic, it was mystical. The non-reflective mirrors of negative light were pulling at our souls.

Bernard brought his hands together over his head in a single clap, a pop of sound that had no echo in the room. In a sudden rush of motion, the individual panes of glass boiled with white smoke. The direction of the smoke was different in each facet, and the sphere seemed to vibrate in place. With a noticeable gulp, the spectral pull vanished, replaced by an oppressive weight. I found it hard to breathe, difficult to suck in air as if the atmosphere had suddenly become much denser.

Bernard separated his hands and, as he uttered a final guttural word, a pale glow spread between his fingertips. The lettering on the silver band surrounding the sphere fluoresced briefly, reflecting his signal. The swirling smoke within the mirror facets moved faster. Each panel seemed to find some orientation and the whole globe filled with a churning vortex. Red streamers began to fall through the vortex, moving perpendicular to the rotation of the whirlwind. A chaotic smear dripping down.

It didn't stop at the lowest point of the sphere. The mist kept descending, curling out from the base. It widened as it drained, inverting into a mirror image of the tornado spinning within the globe.

Bernard said a few words and the vortex inside the mirror tore itself apart, subsiding into a senseless disturbance. The red mist beneath spun down, threading itself through an invisible point, and turned itself inside out. Like a balloon being inflated, something rubbery and moist unfolded from the inversion of the tornado column.

It was the size of a small dog-a starved animal mostly rib and skull. Its head was a surreal conglomeration. Its skull seemed canine, but it had no ears or eyes and its nose curved outward in a long proboscis. Instead of a mouth, a tiny slit gasped at the end of the hard beak. The creature was furless; its body a taut sack of translucent flesh over a cage of red bones.

The tornado completed its inversion and, with a curving motion of its elongating spine, the creature popped its back legs into place. It shook itself in a sinuous wiggle that started with the head and rippled along the length of its body.

Bernard pointed toward Kat, commanding the creature in the guttural tongue. The beast's long nose quivered as it picked up her scent. Like a hairless insect, it scuttled across the floor and leaped onto her leg.

Kat contorted and twisted in the chair as it clung to her pants like a macabre seed pod. Her feet drummed arrhythmically against the floor. The ibis-hound mounted her lap, crouched against her pelvis for a second as she tried to buck it off. Then, it leaped for her torso.

Like a fat tick, it dug its talons into her shirt and dragged itself onto her chest. It struck at her, its snout spiking through the center of her forehead, and Kat went into epileptic convulsions. The ibis-hound held on. Its thin sides heaving, it began to suck.

The Chorus shouted in my head, an explosion of alarm mirroring what I was already seeing. With each successive pulse of its body, the ibis-hound sucked off a portion of Kat's soul. Its mangy body swelled with glittering sparks.

Julian, anticipating my reaction, gave the signal for the electrical current in my chair to be engaged. Pain exploded across my chest, a thousand points of electric fire burning. My lungs seized as the current ignited my nervous system. My flesh smoldered and burned.

I struggled to protect my brain, to shelter the synaptic currents of my own system from the squirming and sparking fury of the electricity. Shards of white light shredded my vision, daggers piercing my retinas.

I made the current into pain. Pain was tolerable. Pain was transient. Like a violent spring storm that lashed itself against the ground until its strength was broken. Then it faded, subsiding into ambient atmospherics. Particles without focus, energy without purpose. The current became harmless electrons.

The surge stopped and I sagged in the chair. On my chest, the points of the Maiden had pierced and burned me. My limbs felt like ragged stone blocks discarded at the bottom of a quarry, and each breath was physically difficult.

Saturated, the creature returned to the trinity of figures. It scaled the nearest statue, an agile mountain climber who knew all the secret handholds, and danced along the figure's arm to balance on the edge of the silver circle. With a great convulsion, it expelled the soul out its long proboscis. A rain of light fell across the faceted sphere. The extrusion of Kat's soul fell through the mirrored surfaces where it landed, vanishing into the devouring darkness within the glass. The facets grew darker as they drank the offered soul, as if the hunger inside each face increased with the influx of energy.

The creature tight-roped back along the arms and crouched on the golden head nearest Kat, leaning toward her. It had but one purpose, a single desire: to continue its harvest of her soul. It was too small to drain her all at once, and so it would keep returning as long as her light remained.

Bernard bound the ibis-hound in place with a word. "It doesn't require this form to properly function. It mirrors the form of Thrice-blessed Hermes as a matter of symbolic convention-a framework you can visibly comprehend. A full withdrawal of the spirit is far less theatric, but is very much a manifestation of the mystery. ."

I wasn't listening. Kat slumped to one side in her chair, held upright by the manacles about her wrists. Her breathing was so shallow as to be nearly unnoticeable. The Chorus dusted her, finding the outline of her spirit beneath the surface of her flesh, and what I feared was easily visible. She had a hole, a rippling darkness that was already burrowing deeper.

"— Book of Thoth."

That caught my attention. "What?"

"The Book of Thoth, Mr. Markham." A grim smile touched Bernard's lips. "You haven't been paying attention, have you?" He stepped close to my chair and leaned toward me. "I know its secrets."

The Book of Thoth? I was even more stunned than when he had alluded to doing something to Antoine.

"I did it, Mr. Markham. I built his Key." He indicated the statues and the mirrored ball. "I built the theurgic mirror, and I can gather the souls of the living."

I recoiled at his words, the Chorus rising like enraged snakes in my head. I heard Julian shout at the Hollow Man assigned to the power switches and, before I could act further, the switch was thrown again.

Still off-guard from what Bernard had said, my Will was broken by the surge of electricity. I fled the sparking light and hid in the darkness that had been my friend for so long.