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.
XIX
Like lightning splitting the night sky, consciousness returned in a rush. My body convulsed, and finding no restraints, a series of spasms ran through my arms and legs-sympathetic memories of the electroshock. I cracked an elbow against cold metal. I wasn't in the interrogation room any longer; this was the familiar womb of the shipping container.
I reached out and there wasn't any other presence. I was alone.
Kat.
My chest seized, and the pinpricks of the Maiden's touch burned. Not all of the ache in my joints and muscles was from the chair. Not all of it.
I could run from many things, but not my brain; it resurrected ghost memories: Kat, struggling to avoid the ibis-hound, her face stretching as her soul was sucked from her body; the ibis-hound's fat ticklike body rippling and flexing as it took her energy; the expression on Bernard's face as he watched-he wanted what he saw as much as he hated it.
My hands drummed against the cold floor, knuckles banging against the ridged metal. As if I could beat my way through. As if naked, wanton rage was enough.
You have to fill the void.
Kat. In the core of my heart, in the absence of the black root of Qliphotic obsession, there was a twisted knot of responsibility. My fault: her sacrifice, her death. She was inextricably tied to my soul, and the connection didn't blind me to her complicity with the Hollow Men, but I knew what the touch of the ibis-hound meant. I knew that hurt, that sensation of light being sucked away. I knew what flooded into the emptiness.
The floor wasn't going to yield. My knuckles were just being mauled by the metal floor. I curled up on my side, and tucked my sore hands against my bare stomach. It wasn't enough to be filled with rage. There had to be direction. Focus. The Will needed to be focused. Be smarter. See beyond the confines of this box. Anticipate the motion of the threads in the Weave.
When a magus understands the flow of forces, when he attenuates himself to the ley energies, he can discern patterns and structure. The Watchers call it the "Weave," the Akashic Record of humanity viewed as interwoven threads and patchwork designs of cultural movements. They see themselves as modern-day Fates, cutters and knitters of the Weave's individual threads.
We are patterns of energy-Ego and Identity-bound into shape by the Divine Spark. The Universe is a closed system that recycles itself, and we are agents that perpetuate that cycle-energy in, energy out. While a magus cannot violate the basic laws of the Universe-nothing is ever destroyed, it is simply transformed-he can direct forces in accordance with his desires. He learns how to read the Weave, and how to anticipate the course of its threads.
The art of prescience-of glimpsing the shape of the Weave and seeing how threads are woven together-is the inner secret of the final ranks of the Watchers. This Fateful Precognition allows Protectors to subtly engage the Weave, but it is the Architects who are expected to shape the world. The lesser ranks could only achieve brief glimpses, random flashes of clarity. Nostradamus was afflicted with persistent glimpses of the Weave, a precognitive fever he tried to articulate through his portentous poetry.
The tarot is a shortcut, a tool that lets us intuit the intersections of threads. Skilled readers are savants of pattern recognition. They don't see the future; their experience gives them the insight to understand how the threads are knotted together. One of the hardest tasks in reading the cards isn't gathering the threads but understanding the twist of the strands.
More often than not, you're asking the wrong question. The trick is to realize what the right question is before the brief glimpse you've been afforded vanishes.
I thought about the shortcomings of my question. I had tried to give it enough specificity that a small patch would have been revealed, but instead, Piotr had shown me a large spread of the canvas. Yes, at the center had been the intersection of mine and Kat's threads, but I hadn't bothered to take in the surrounding threads. I hadn't paid attention to their intersections.
It had been the same way when I had been a Watcher: the lack of being able to see the big picture. You think too narrowly, Michael, too focused on what you want. It distracts you.
I had thought it was luck, or a miserable oversight on their part, that the Maiden's electroshock therapy hadn't killed me. But, as I tried to discern the Weave, I realized there was another reason why I hadn't been the test case. Why they hadn't used me to demonstrate the ibis-hound.
Bernard's device harvested souls. In his dementia, he thought he had discovered the lost Book of Thoth. He had found the secret of the Egyptian Demiurge: the One Way, the Key of Immortality.
The Book of Thoth, however, was more fiction than fact. One of those legendary books that pervade our occult history, the Book is said to have been torn apart, and the pages became the first tarot deck. Its secrets were encoded in the mysteries of the cards. Another legend has it that the knowledge of those pages was too luminous for the unskilled human mind. The Library in Alexandria burned down because an unsuspecting acolyte tried to read the Book. He burst into flames and took everything with him.
Regardless of the Book's existence, there was evidence in TheCorpus Hermeticum that Hermes Trismegistus wasn't interested in mechanical aids. Much less a device that would harvest souls. Hermeticism-and later, Gnosticism-was an individual practice, an internalized revolution that allowed the practitioner access to Heaven.
What, then, was the device for? It was some kind of theurgic mirror. But did it reflect energy or was it meant to absorb energy? If it was a container-if it only took energy in-what was the use of that stolen power?