“No more…” he said, and let the beast come from him everywhere.
Decker raised his machete to undo the enemy before the change had been completed. But Boone didn’t wait. Still transforming, he tore at the butcher’s face, taking off the mask buttons, zipper and all to uncover the infirmities beneath.
Decker howled at being revealed, putting his hand up to his face to half cover it against the beast’s stare.
Boone snatched the mask up from the ground, and began to tear it apart, his claws shredding the linen. Decker’s howls mounted. Dropping his hand from his face he began to swipe at Boone with insane abandon. The blade caught Boone’s chest, slicing it open, but as it returned for a second cut Boone dropped the rags and blocked the blow, carrying Decker’s arm against the wall with such force he broke the bones. The machete fell to the ground, and Boone reached out for Decker’s face.
The steep howl stopped as the claws came at him. The mouth closed. The features slackened. For an instant Boone was looking at a face he’d studied for hours, hanging on its every word. At that thought his hand went from face to neck and he seized Decker’s windpipe, which had funded so many lies. He closed his fist, his claws piercing the meat of Decker’s throat. Then he pulled. The machinery came out in a wash of blood. Decker’s eyes widened, fixed on his silencer. Boone pulled again, and again. The eyes glazed. The body jerked, and jerked, then started to sag.
Boone didn’t let it drop. He held it as in a dance, and undid the flesh and bone as he’d undone the mask, clots of Decker’s body striking the walls. There was only the dimmest memory of Decker’s crimes against him in his head now. He tore with a Breed’s zeal, taking monstrous satisfaction in a monstrous act. When he’d done his worst he dropped the wreckage to the earth, and finished the dance with his partner underfoot.
There’d be no rising from the grave for this body. No hope of earthly resurrection. Even in the full flood of his attack Boone had withheld the bite that would have passed life after death into Decker’s system. His flesh belonged only to the flies, and their children; his reputation to the vagaries of those who chose to tell his story. Boone didn’t care. If he never shrugged off the crimes Decker had hung around his neck it scarcely mattered now. He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.
He let the body lie, and went to seek Lori. There was only one place she could have gone: down the slope into Baphomet’s chamber. There was pattern in this, he saw. The Baptiser had brought her here, unknitting the ground beneath her feet so as to bring Boone after.
The flame its divided body occupied threw a cold glamour up into his face. He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.
CABAL
Out in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light, flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.
A scholar in his youth, he would have known the name Baphomet had somebody whispered it to him, and understood why the light, springing from the deity’s flame, exercised such a claim upon him. He would have known the deity as god and goddess in one body. Would have known too how its worshippers had suffered for their idol, burned as heretics, or for crimes against nature. He might have feared a power that demanded such homage; and wisely.
But there was nobody to tell him. There was only the light, drawing him on.
The Baptiser was not alone in its chamber, Boone found. He counted eleven members of the Breed around the walls, kneeling blindfolded with their backs to the flame. Amongst them, Mister Lylesburg and Rachel.
On the ground to the right of the door lay Lori. There was blood on her arm, and on her face, and her eyes were closed. But even as he went to her aid the thing in the flame set its eyes on him, turning him round with an icy touch. It had business with him, which it was not about to postpone.
“Approach,” it said. “Of your own free will.”
He was afraid. The flame from the ground was twice the size it had been when last he’d entered, battering the roof of the chamber. Fragments of earth, turned to either ice or ash, fell in a glittering rain and littered the floor. Standing a dozen yards from the flame the assault of its energies was brutal. Yet Baphomet invited him closer.
“You’re safe,” it said. “You came in the blood of your enemy. It’ll keep you warm.”
He took a step towards the fire. Though he’d suffered bullet and blade in his life since death, and felt none of them, he felt the chill from Baphomet’s flame plainly enough. It pricked his nakedness, made frost patterns on his eyes. But Baphomet’s words were no empty promise. The blood he wore grew hot as the air around him grew colder. He took comfort from it, and braved the last few steps.
The weapon, Baphomet said. Discard it.
He’d forgotten the knife in his neck. He drew it out of his flesh and threw it aside.
Closer still, the Baptiser said.
The flame’s fury concealed all but glimpses of its freight, but enough to confirm what his first encounter with Baphomet had taught him: that if this deity had made creatures in its own image then he’d never set eyes on them. Even in dreams, nothing that approached the Baptiser. It was one of one.
Suddenly some part of it reached for him, out of the flame. Whether limb, or organ, or both he had no chance to see. It snatched at his neck and hair and pulled him towards the fire. Decker’s blood didn’t shield him now; the ice scorched his face. Yet there was no fighting free. It immersed his head in the flame, holding him fast. He knew what this was the instant the fire closed around his head: Baptism.
And to confirm that belief, Baphomet’s voice in his head.
You are Cabal, it said.
The pain was mellowing. Boone opened his mouth to draw breath, and the fire coursed down his throat and into his belly and lungs, then through his whole system. It carried his new name with it, baptizing him inside out.
He was no longer Boone. He was Cabal. An alliance of many.
From this cleansing on he would be capable of heat and blood and making children: that was in Baphomet’s gift, and the deity gave it. But he would be frail too, or frailer. Not just because he bled, but because he was charged with purpose.
I must be hidden tonight, Baphomet said. We all have enemies, but mine have lived longer and learned more cruelty than most. I will be taken from here and hidden from them.
Now the presence of the Breed made sense. They’d remained behind to take a fraction of the Baptiser with them and conceal it from whatever forces came in pursuit.
This is your doing, Cabal, Baphomet said. I don’t accuse you. It was bound to happen. No refuge is forever. But I charge you “Yes?” he said. “Tell me.”
Rebuild what you’ve destroyed.
“A new Midian?”
No.
“What then?”
You must discover for us in the human world.
“Help me,” he said.
I can’t. From here on, it’s you must help me. You have undone the world. Now you must re-make it.
There were shudders in the flame. The Rites of Baptism were almost over.
“How do I begin?” Cabal said.
Heal me, Baphomet replied. Find me, and heal me. Save me from my enemies.