Four Dominions Read online

  “Mr. Yeats will do.”

  “Until we know each other better, one hopes.”

  “Without memory, hope is as ephemeral as mist. But if it pleases us both, of course.”

  “Just to be clear,” Conrad said, “your name is inaccurate. It should be the demon is an angel inverted.”

  “I don’t believe in angels,” Yeats said at once. “Faeries, yes, and dhouls, magicians, surely, High Kings, without question.”

  Now Conrad knew from which perspective Yeats observed the world—that of Celtic folklore and myth. He shouldn’t be surprised, but he felt a twinge of doubt. Had he made a mistake in choosing Yeats for this foray to the East—the most important and perilous of his career? And yet he had to trust his initial judgment; there was no going back now.

  It being the hour before luncheon was to be served, the library was now more occupied than was Conrad’s preference, for there were matters he needed to discuss with Yeats to which even his own Haut Cour wasn’t privy.

  Side by side, the two men strolled the inner courtyard, which Conrad had remodeled as a cloister. On the floor above the stone columns were the sleeping quarters of the members who rested between missions, plus the permanent flats of the Haut Cour. The early afternoon was unseasonably warm. The sun batted around the clouds closest to it, chasing shadows with its flat white light. The walls ensured there was virtually no wind.

  The center of the cloister was planted in typical English garden fashion, ranks of roses vying with tulips and pansies. In the center was a low stone well, of no use now save for decoration.

  “I propose you and I travel to the Levant,” Conrad said.

  The blood seemed to drain out of Yeats’s face. “Where in the Levant?”

  “Until you agree to join me that must remain a secret.”

  “Hmm.” Yeats locked his hands behind his back, fingers intertwined. “I am exceedingly wary of the Spanish influenza.”

  “Which, since January of this year, has touched every corner of the globe. An unfortunate consequence of the war—troop movements, repatriations, the compromised physical conditions of so many soldiers.”

  “Many have died in the Levant.”

  “People are dying all over, Mr. Yeats. Here—even in your beloved Ireland.”

  Conrad contemplated him for a moment. “Tell me, where shall we hide? In our beds with the cover pulled over our heads?”

  The poet-philosopher considered this argument for some time. “And the time frame?”

  “As soon as the final arrangements are made.”

  “And these are?”

  “The only one that concerns you is your decision.”

  “Ha! You give me very little to chew on.”

  They had begun their second circuit of the cloister. Shadows seemed to follow their route, only steps behind them. Conrad smiled. “I imagine that would be to your liking.”

  Yeats stopped turned to Conrad. “Look here, how much do you know about me?”

  “As much as I need to,” Conrad said, looking the other man straight in the eye.

  “My soon-to-be wife.”

  “If you gather the courage to propose.” Conrad’s smile was nonconfrontational. “I’m entirely convinced that you are the man I need to bring with me.”

  Yeats seemed a bit taken aback. “What on earth would give you such an idea?”

  Conrad was ready for that question. “Your induction into the Golden Dawn, your exposure to the teachings of Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, your interest in séances, your writing of Celtic myths all are indications of your certainty that what we experience with our five human senses is inadequate to what exists in the universe, what we might erroneously describe as magic, the occult, the paranormal, because we lack the language for that which is unimaginable.”

  Yeats considered this for a moment. “And the purpose of the voyage to somewhere in the Levant?”

  “Discovery,” Conrad said. He was positioned in such a way that sunlight sparked in his eyes, lighting them with celestial fire. “Specifically, to determine the possibility of life beyond death.”

  4

  Addis Ababa: Present Day

  FOR A WEEK NO ONE INSIDE THE GNOSTIC OBSERVATINES heard from either Bravo or Emma. After three days of communication silence the Haut Cour, the Order’s ruling body, convened to discuss the urgent matter of the Magister Regens’s disappearance. Of course, the Knights were the first to be blamed—the prevailing theory that they had taken revenge against Bravo for almost single-handedly exterminating the extramuros team sent into the mountains of Arizona after the Veil of Veronica. No one in the Haut Cour knew where the brother-sister team were. This was not, in itself, unusual, but in the year since the attacks on the Order’s Istanbul operation and the destruction of their sacred Reliquary all members of the Order, especially those who comprised the Haut Cour, were on war footing, and expecting the worst.

  Nature—and man—abhors a vacuum. In the absence of any solid leads, let alone hard evidence, theories morphed into rumors that spread like wildfire, becoming more and more outlandish as the days passed. So it was that by day six these rumors reached the ear of Ayla Tusik, who had been working with Bram Stokley, the Order’s best archeological technician, on the so-called Veil of Veronica Bravo had brought back from its centuries-old hiding place in the bleak Arizona highlands.

  Ayla was the daughter of Dilara and Omar Tusik. Omar had been one of Bravo’s key informants in Istanbul up to the moment he had been burned alive in an attack on the Tusiks’ apartment. Dilara had been caught on the stairs by one of the Fallen and summarily beheaded before Bravo had been able to get to the demonic angel. Omar, it turned out, was not Ayla’s biological father—that would be, against all odds, Conrad Shaw. Which, strictly speaking, made her Bravo and Emma’s aunt, though all three were more or less the same age. Like Bravo, Ayla possessed extraordinary powers, derived from Conrad. But she was also of her mother’s bloodline and Dilara was immortal in the same way as Fra Leoni. As with the Fallen, the only way to kill them was to separate their heads from their bodies.

  Ayla, like her mother, possessed the gift of Farsight. It was not yet clear to either her or Bravo whether or not she was an immortal, as Dilara was. What was clear, however, was that her mother had never enumerated Ayla’s powers, probably as a form of protection against those enemies who would seek her out if they knew how special she was. She begged Bravo not to go to Malta, but he was convinced that in the ruins of the Knights’ blasted castle he would find a clue to the Fallen’s powers. Before leaving with Emma he had entrusted Ayla with the safekeeping of the so-called Book of Deathly Things, The Testament of Lucifer, the disappointingly blank manuscript that had so interested Emma. No one else in the Haut Cour knew of its existence.

  He had also assigned Ayla to supervise the testing of what was purported to be the Veil of Veronica. For the past week, she and Stokley had pored over the findings from every conceivable cutting-edge technological test made on the bit of cloth. The conclusions so far were startling. First, the cloth was centuries older than they had expected. While this proved that the cloth wasn’t the one Saint Veronica used to wipe the sweat off Christ’s brow on his way to be crucified, it led to some even more exciting conclusions, at least as far as Bravo and the Gnostic Observatines were concerned.

  The small sigil in the bottom right-hand corner had been authenticated as belonging to King Solomon. This jibed with the age of the cloth, but it raised some interesting questions, the first of which was, what was this cloth used for? The second was, why was it preserved in a bronze quiver-like watertight container? Stokley’s expensive toys: his mass spectrometer, electron microscope, X-ray and CT scans, ultraviolet and infrared beams, could perform many magic tricks, but answering these questions wasn’t one of them. Electronic microscopy did, however, reveal a residue on the cloth, but it was so minute and scattered that the mass spectrometer failed to identify it. So they were left with multiple mysteries. Stokley, hunkered down in the lab
, concentrated on finding a method of identifying the residue.

  As for Ayla, once she had gotten the hang of Stokley’s toys she stole back into the lab at night, long after Stokley had staggered off to bed. In the LED glow of the otherwise-darkened lab, she subjected the manuscript to the X-ray and CT scans, the ultraviolet and infrared beams, the mass spectrometer, without finding anything at all. This was more than curious to her; it seemed frankly impossible. Confronted with this imponderable, she set up the electron microscope. That was when she discovered the same scattered residue that was on the cloth. Now she knew that the two artifacts were contemporaneous. This, she felt, was a huge step forward. But it wasn’t until she trained the all-seeing lens on the last leaf of the manuscript that she discovered something even more startling: the sacred seal of Solomon was stamped on the handmade paper, so minuscule it had evaded the naked eye. And then, the manuscript gave up its final revelation: the crescent moon on the end of one of the six spokes inside the double circle was upside down, its horns pointing toward the center, toward the crux of the six spokes, the Nihilus.

  As if struck by a cattle prod, Ayla leapt back, stood shaking in front of the manuscript. What did it mean, this inverted horned moon? She had never before seen its like on any rendition of the sigil of King Solomon. A certain fear crept into her bones, and it was only through force of will that she didn’t cry out. Instead, she clutched her throat. She knew there would be a dozen people swarming into the lab in a moment if she raised an outcry.

  Her mind was reeling; she felt sick in the pit of her stomach. She stared at the manuscript as if it were the very incarnation of a sulfurous demon. Forcing herself to step back to the microscope, she took a series of rapid-fire photos, downloaded them to her mobile, then erased any trace of them from the microscope’s memory. With infinite care, she returned the manuscript to its case. It was only after it was tightly locked away that she felt safe.

  Replacing the manuscript under the microscope with the swatch of ancient cloth, she looked more carefully at the seal in the bottom right corner. And there it was: the horned moon was inverted just as it had been on the manuscript. Jesus Christ, she thought, what are we dealing with here? The more she thought about it, the more certain she became that only one person could answer these questions.

  *

  THE NEXT morning, when she had returned to the lab after failing to reach Bravo on his mobile, the first of the rumors of his disappearance reached them via one of Stokley’s assistants. At once, Ayla rose and, telling Stokley he’d have to carry on without her, strode out of the lab.

  “Wait,” the technician called after her, “where are you going?”

  Ayla heard him, but there was no answer she could give. She was the only one who knew where Bravo and Emma had been heading. As soon as Bravo had told her what he was planning she’d experienced an acute sense of foreboding, a feeling she’d conveyed to Bravo, with the full knowledge that nothing she or anyone else could say would stop him from going to Malta. Curiously, it had seemed to her that Emma was almost more eager to go than her brother. Her fervor had only deepened Ayla’s sense of misgiving.

  Ayla had spent more time than anyone else with Emma following last year’s terrifying conflagration, when they’d fought off the first attack by the advance guard of the Fallen. She could not help feeling concerned now. Emma had been assaulted by one of the demonic angels, which was how she had regained her sight. Bravo was certain that in the battle that followed she had been freed of the creature, but Ayla was not so sure. Ever since they had arrived back in New York a year ago, she had noticed changes so subtle that she was loath to bring them up to Bravo, who was clearly reveling in having his sister returned to him as she had been in their youth. Ayla did not for a moment question her observations. She had inherited what her mother called her seventh sense about people. She had kept her eye on Emma, but at some point Emma or—as Ayla’s thinking went—something inside Emma had taken note of the unwanted attention. Subsequently, Emma’s odd behavior and speech patterns subsided, then disappeared altogether. This only made Ayla more suspicious of her, but again, there was no one with whom to share her concern, least of all Bravo himself. As an inevitable result, a rift had developed between Ayla and Bravo, a kind of wariness that, it seemed clear to Ayla, if not to Bravo, Emma was quite happy to exploit. And yet he had entrusted her with the manuscript. Was it simply because he now believed that it was useless to them? If so, he was wrong. She had clear evidence that the manuscript was demonic in origin. Emma had had possession of it during the entire plane ride. What if it wasn’t blank? What if the text was protected somehow, but there was a way to read it? And what if Emma had discovered how to do just that and been affected by what she’d read?

  The terrifying possibilities unspooled through her mind as she stuffed an overnight bag with clothes and toiletries, grabbed the case with the manuscript and her passport, and headed for the airport. She bought a ticket to Malta via Rome. She booked a car, which, almost thirteen hours after she departed Bole International Airport, she picked up, and, following a quick stop for lunch, was on her way to her destination.

  She sped southeast past rocky hills covered with dusty olive-green brush and Roman-columned hotels drenched in dazzling sunlight. She had slept only fitfully on the two legs of her flight. Her dreams were filled with eerie images of colossal serpents that spoke to her as they slithered across veined marble floors, disembodied heads with sightless pure-white eyes or empty black sockets. Worst of all were the dire warnings from the apparition of her mother. Always something of a Cassandra, Dilara made grave pronouncements that had seemed more like criticisms to the teenage Ayla. It was only much later, in adulthood, that she came to understand that both she and her mother possessed Farsight—though hers was much diminished, perhaps being a generation removed from the source—and that visions of the future were infallible.

  Beware, Dilara’s shade had whispered to her dreaming daughter. Nothing is what it appears to be.

  Now, as she traveled almost due south toward the forbidding cliffs on which the castle lay, like a victim of Vesuvius, Ayla found herself missing her mother with such force that tears spilled onto her cheeks. Her mother would know precisely what to do in this situation, while the best she could muster was to know in her heart that being here was the right thing. She bolstered herself with the knowledge that her mother had brought her home to Istanbul from London to accompany Bravo on his mission to the dangerous Lebanese mountains of Tannourine and she had been right.

  The past is littered with regret, the future bound by anxiety. The time is always now. And yet ever since her mother had been murdered Ayla’s mind kept reaching back to incidents in their shared past, as if in this way she could keep Dilara alive. Her mind kept being drawn back to the first time she had been in Tannourine. Her mother had taken her there for a reason that had only become clear afterward. It was a kind of rite of passage, an interview with evil that accurately measured Ayla’s powers. Confronting the evil in the red tent of shadows had unsealed Ayla’s latent talents but had also sealed her mother’s fate. Dilara had alerted her to the Fallen’s first excursion into the realm of mortals. According to Fra Leoni, the red tent of shadows had been conjured by a sect of King Solomon’s alchemists who remained to serve the son and successor, Rehoboam, after the king’s death. In so doing, their fate—and that of mankind’s—had been set, for the dreadful secret of the red tent of shadows was that it was the portal to the prison to which Lucifer and the other Fallen had been exiled for time out of mind. The new king’s hubris, his terror at being weak, of losing the land his father had so ably secured, had caused him to order his alchemists to make contact with the dark powers his father had warned him against. And centuries later, it was the first of the escaped demonic angels that Dilara had brought Ayla to Tannourine to confront. Thus the war for the souls of mankind had been born.

  Her mother had taught her ironclad discipline at an early age, a stringent regimen that
, with a child’s ignorance of the world, she had resented. The core tenet that Dilara drummed into her was to avoid anticipation at all costs. Anticipation, she would say, locks you into a mind-set, which, whether you realize it or not, dictates your actions, even though they may be the wrong ones. If you don’t anticipate, your mind is clear, your actions develop as the situation unfolds.

  Ayla, crossing the border into Malta, was never more beholden to her mother’s teaching than she was at that moment.

  5

  London: 1918

  “I FIND THE WORLD AROUND ME BOTH MARRED AND CLUMSY, lacking in grace, brutal,” Yeats said. “Therefore, I create. I seek out the interstices between this world and another—beautiful, pleasant, serene in every way. But to do that I need to delve deep into the supernatural.”

  “One thing I can guarantee,” Conrad said. “A séance is not the way.”

  When, as now, Yeats sat up straight, his demeanor reminded Conrad of Toby. That was, he felt, unfortunate.

  “I take offense at that,” Yeats said.

  “Why don’t you take me to one?”

  They were speaking over the noise in The White Stag, a workingman’s hangout whose boozy bonhomie held immense appeal for Conrad after the unstinting rectitude of the Antaeus Club. Outside, London was suffocating in the industrial fug of coal-fired night; fly ash, soot, and dust, made all the more noxious by the stink of vehicular exhaust fumes and human waste, clung to the back of their throats and coated the roof of their mouths.

  When Yeats did not answer, Conrad said, “The mutton here is exceptional, as is the shepherd’s pie.” He called over a waitress before glancing up at his companion. The waitress, Mary, whom he knew perhaps a bit too well, was pretty, rosy cheeked, and buxom. She stood at his side, blowing wisps of her tangled hair off her face out of the corner of her mouth.