Lightbreaker

XXXI

At the top, the light was a physical presence, a globe wrapped around the peak of the building. I floated against it, the pliable surface dimpling at my touch. As more of my body touched the limpid film, the shell became sticky flypaper. I didn't struggle and the gravity within the membrane pulled me flat against the rounded shape. There was a brief sensation of pain-lightning stroking the plane of my skin-and then the world inverted.

Inside, there was neither color nor tint-polar opposition to the gritty darkness of the dead city. Every surface was bleached white. There were no shadows, only dim lines that delineated edges and borders-variations on the play of light.

The soot of the city no longer covered me. It had not come through the barrier. I could almost see the pale history of an outline beneath me, a fading print of my body done in static-charged ash and detritus. My skin was translucent, my blood a series of pale tributaries running through valleys and vales of colorless flesh. The stark tint of my bones was evident beneath the naked flesh. The blue and gray of my clothes had already lightened to the color of early dawn.

As I walked toward the source of light, I became lighter still, my clothes vanishing into nothingness, my skin becoming rice paper wrapped around a clear gelatinous mass. My bones were hardened crystal, sculpted by an Old Master.

My memory of the penthouse was a historical document of its presence. The obstructions of the furniture were gone. The trinity of Thoth figures no longer stood by the window, their metal frames had vanished. Only the mirrored facets of the sphere remained, a glittering diamond of light that was purer and brighter than all the surrounding white.

Lying beneath the floating sphere as if asleep was a two-dimensional line drawing of Nicols, like an Impressionist caricature dashed off on a coffee house napkin. I bent over and tried to touch him and found he really was nothing more than a collection of a few strokes.

"The memories fade until they are nothing but lines and shadows."

I looked to the source of the voice. Bernard was the only color. His robe crawled with motion. The script-once black, now white-wriggled and squirmed with animate mysticism on a blue and sickly orange background. A silver halo lay low enough upon his head that it bisected the crown of his skull. His face was pale like the visage of a man who has not been aboveground for a year, but it was still the color of flesh. Unlike the bleached translucence of my skin. The ruddy color of his neck looked like a birthmark or an allergic rash.

He inclined his crowned head. "The walker between worlds. I thought you might be the one to return." His voice was quiet and sibilant, his throat still new. "Have you come to take Julian's place?"

He looked through me, so easy to do in my current state. "Yes," Bernard continued, "before I did not understand the nature of the haze that hid you from view. It is gone now, but I think I know why it was there. From his reading of The Book of Thoth, Jabir Ibn Hayyan theorized that an alchemist could learn how to actively transform soul energy, that a living harvester was possible. That was his interpretation of Thoth's Master of the Mysteries-the one who understood how to use the Key. Am I right? That's what you are, isn't it?"

Lightbreaker.

"Oh, this petulant resistance of yours is frustrating. There is so much we could teach each other, Mr. Markham. I want to learn about your technique, about how you take a soul. It was Jabir's theory of soul transformation that pointed me toward the mystery of the mirror."

"You know," I said, breaking my silence, "it probably wasn't an accident that The Book of Thoth was destroyed."

"There is a reason for all obscuration, Mr. Markham. Our ignorance must be overcome, we must actively seek to remove the scales from our eyes. The Book wasn't destroyed. It was broken and scattered because it was meant to be found again, reassembled by someone worthy."

"You?"

"It is the crowning achievement of my life, putting together The Book of Thoth," Bernard admitted. "It began with Ficino-"

"His book from the Sorbonne? The one the Watchers say doesn't exist."

He shook his head. "The second part of Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae doesn't exist. But that's not what I found. A student of Ficino's wrote a tiny tract bridging the Theologia Platonica and Jabir's Kitab al-Zuhra. The document was a workbook essentially, a paper charting how his master encoded references to Jabir's work, how the Persian hid parts of TheBook of Thoth within the Kitab al-Zuhra." He laughed. "That was the first lie I told them. 'A lost Ficino.' Only Protector Briande saw through my eager bibliomania."

"He sees a lot of things. I just left him on the far bank. With Pender. Who won't be joining us."

"No? I thought not when you arrived. I am surprised the Protector didn't come in your stead."

"Too busy Witnessing."

"Really? So he does believe the Key will work."

"Or not. He might just not want to be standing at ground zero when dawn arrives. He knows what the Key does, doesn't he? You went to him when you realized you needed a copy of the Kitab."

"Not just the Kitab. There were so many hints strewn across the history of alchemy and Hermetic thought. Roger Bacon laid out the foundation of the mirror in his Opus Tertium-oh, how the Catholic Church wanted knowledge of that volume censored, but John Dee managed to find a copy. But it was in Bacon's Liber de Intellectu et Intelligibili where the alchemical formulas were hidden. And Llull's De Quinta Essentia held hints on how to preserve the energy once it had been extracted. A German writer named Monach wrote an epistle about the pros and cons of conquering nature. Most of it was a retread of Flamel's theories, but his work contained a passage about the conversion of the soul, which proved useful in the fabrication of the ritual that manifests the ibis-hounds. And, from the hounds, came an understanding of scale. How I might collect many."

He sighed like a proud father. "So many pieces to put together, but I did it. I managed to decipher the clues left by our alchemical forefathers and build Thoth's Key." His hands came together, in an old comfortable way that spoke of his familiarity with lecturing. Of being in front of an audience. "Do you know what the hardest part was?"

"Killing?"

"It is a damnation of our souls, isn't it?" His forehead creased slightly, lines forming beneath the stars on his brow. "But it is my moral upbringing that gives me that guilt-a hard lesson scored into my flesh. We have to eat the energy of others in order to become closer to God. Isn't that right, Mr. Markham? This feasting means a dissolution of their self, a subjugation of their spirit beneath us. But God is everything, and do we not become everything by devouring others?"

I didn't dignify the question with an answer. What was I going to tell him that he wasn't going to realize was a lie? And what would the truth give him-that I killed in order to make myself whole-wasn't that just the validation he wanted?

"We are such a strange creation," he said when it was clear I wasn't going to say anything, "so fiercely independent-tiny islands, ferociously guarded-and yet we crave company. Is that not one of the funny little circumstances of being human? We are distinct personalities-unique patterns of light-and yet all we really want is to be with someone else. Our lovers, our families, the communities that welcome us, the embrace of the Divine. Do you think we'll ever consciously realize that all of this clinging to one another is just a manifestation of our fear that God doesn't love us, that He has abandoned us?"

"Is that what you offered all of them? Companionship?"

He shook his head. "No, Mr. Markham. I offered them something stronger."

"And what is that?"

"Unity. A purpose."

"What? Death? Not a very grand purpose." I felt a tickle on the back of my neck, and I looked over my shoulder. I wasn't sure if it was an afterimage on my fading eyes from Bernard's robe or if there was indeed a fine line of orange light creasing the purity of this space. "Trismegistus believed that the evolution of the soul was an individual activity," I continued, "a deeply personal quest that required a soul to reason its way out of the cage of the flesh. Yes, sure, we all want to get back to God, but Trismegistus thought we needed to do it on our own. Not in a mass exodus like you've planned."

"The trouble with Trismegistus, in the end," Bernard admitted, "is that his lessons in TheCorpus Hermeticum were of a solitary path. A solo voyage into the arms of the enlightenment."

"So he made the Key because he got lonely. Being the only guy who knew the Way. Is that it?"

"No, he realized the world was filled with too much flesh, too many distractions. Did he not argue that the only vice of the soul was ignorance? Did he not argue that the Reasoned Man has every right-no, a duty-to bring those who refuse Reason into the greater consciousness of God? Those whose minds are too weak and shallow, did he not believe they should be guided?" Bernard gestured at the pure light of Key behind me. "If all of those who have been harvested wanted nothing of God, if they were unwilling to partake of Reason and become enlightened on their own, then are they not failing to fulfill the very beauty of their existence? Is what we do evil if we bring them to fruition?"

"I'm not willing to make that call."

"Why not?"

"Because it is playing at being God."

"Exactly." He smiled as if he had just tricked me into a corner from which I could not escape.

I sighed. "I should have put my hand in your brain instead of your throat. Not that you're getting any blood up there anymore."

His cheek twitched. "Your interference-" his hands unconsciously moved toward his mottled throat "-forced me to engage the Key early, before all the energy it held was fully transformed. As a result, it was unable to completely fill itself."

"And I'm real sorry to have fucked up your plans like that."

He laughed, even though the action appeared to hurt his throat. "What do you think your language will gain you here, Mr. Markham? I am at the culmination of a life's work. Do you think your barbed comments will deter me from finishing this? Do you think your weak flesh can stop me?" He waved a hand at my body. "You're already fading. The Key is taking your soul by increments and you don't even know it."

I smiled. "Oh, I'm fully aware of what it is doing."

My body had become a frail phantom, a diaphanous veil barely containing the sparking surge of my spirit. Standing in the presence of Thoth's Key was destroying my flesh. The mirror dissolved my skin so as to free my soul.

That was the reason I was here, after all.

My awareness seemed to shake him slightly, just a small tremor in his tongue as he wet his lips.

A thin crease of orange light drew itself across his face, a widening gleam of warmth. His apprehension vanishing, Bernard looked toward the source of the glow. I didn't look behind me. I knew what he saw. That sweet hour of prime. Dawn.

"Nunc," he said. "It is time. I am ready, Mr. Markham. I believe in what I am about to accomplish. What do you have to offer?"

"An observation, I suppose," I said. "For a very long time, I believed in the Devil. I believed that, in illo tempore, I met him in the woods. And, actually, I believe I met him again a short while ago."

"And now? This is the final moment of your existence, Mr. Markham. Is that all you believe? That you've seen the face of evil. Have you driven him out then? Is that the basis for your newfound religion?"

"No, I believe he's part of me. Like God."

Bernard smiled. "Ah, the old Hermetic truism. Do you feel His presence, then?" The band of light filled his eyes.

"I don't have to 'feel' Him, Bernard. I am God."

His attention snapped back to me, even though I was almost gone, almost invisible against the burning light.

"Just like you, Bernard. Just like every soul you took last night. We are all God. Separate and distinct."

"No," he said. "God has been hidden from us. We must free ourselves in order to perceive him."

"Free ourselves from what?" I asked. I held up an arm, the orange light of dawn outlining my skin. Such a faint line, such a thin film holding my soul in. "You don't even understand the nature of your prison, Bernard. Because if you did, then you would know that the truest thing that can be done has nothing to do with Will. The greatest change is not external. It is within you. It is the act of giving up being God."

The act of sacrifice.

The penthouse room filled with color, orange and red and yellow and rose, a series of expanding circles of light. Sunflowers bloomed in a dizzying mass of texture and tint, a sea of petals that swept over Bernard and the mirror and my tiny spark of a spirit.

Nunc.

The mirrored sphere in the sculpture broke, the individual facets drifting apart as if released from the adhesive that held them together. The light of the sun danced on the drifting mirrors, splitting into refractions and reflections. The one became ten, round circles of light arranging themselves in a known pattern.

Now.

I released my self, embracing the many, and took hold of the Tree.