Though maybe stolen soul energy wasn't the point. It was the act that mattered. In taking part of her soul, the ibis-hound had created a vacuum. The Universe abhorred vacuums, and was wont to give them over to darkness. If Bernard hadn't let the ibis-hound finish its unholy task of breaking her apart, then the Qliphoth would poison Kat. They would fill her, and with a chunk of her soul missing, she wouldn't be able to ground herself enough to resist their influence.
I had been torn by the ritual in the woods, a tiny rip in my spirit, but it had been enough to infect me. I had been lost, an ignorant child wandering in the wilderness, and my fear had consumed me. I let it find purchase in my fractured self. I had let it grow. Kat's injury was massive in comparison. What hope did she have against such spiritual decay? Was it possible to be strong enough-to be aware enough-to fight back against such an invasion?
Was this the question I should have been asking at my reading? How do you resist? How do you fight back? Kat and I were the Lovers-this primary position was the imprint of my subconscious-and the card laid over us was symbolic of the objective world. It had been the Queen of Cups, the watery part of water. She was a reflective card-her own true nature was enigmatic and difficult to ascertain. My Qliphoth-spattered nightmares had given birth to the reading, and the Queen an unconscious clue that I had built my own spiritual prison. My cage was my own, and I would need to gain that perspective-that level of self-awareness in order to understand how I could free myself.
In the penultimate spot of the reading, the position of future awareness, was the Star. Inverted, representing my apprehension, my fear of failure. My perception of what had happened a long time ago-the unsheathed blade of the Prince of Swords-was a false history I hadn't let go. If I released this past, if I welcomed the idea of my prison as my own, then was the Prince of Cups-the final card of the reading-the path for me to follow? Was he what I was to become?
But all efforts to comprehend the Weave, via whatever mechanisms a magus employs, are just guesses. Some more educated than others. All precognition was a game of What If? Piotr's tarot reading was just one possibility, and a lot of its interpretation lay in my attitude, in what I brought to bear on the symbols. Was the cup half full? Half empty? Which way was it going to flow? It would be hard to say until it was too late to do anything about it.
But a hint lay there, floating in this amorphous drift of symbols and signifiers, a suggestion that there was a way out. Paths leading into dark woods also led out. A neophyte could find his way again; he could survive being lost.
Without the natural flame of the storm lantern, there wasn't any way to grow a fire without magick, and magick meant setting off Julian's ward. I crawled every inch of the container in the dark, trying to find some flaw in the ward. Some tiny hesitation in the script that could be exploited. Nothing. Julian's work was too precise.
My stomach knotted itself over and over, and the rest of my insides were equally shriveled. Two days, maybe more, since my last meal. Minnie's? What had I eaten? Details were starting to become vague.
Some time later, when I was too weak to move, I hallucinated. Visions of psychedelic butterflies and phantom lizards with rainbow-striped crests. The tarot dream came back and started to loop in my head, the details getting more surreal and psychotic with each iteration.
An ocean of light poured over me, and the rushing wave came with an overwhelming racket of church bells. I floated off the floor, and gasping like a lungfish coming out of the mud, I gulped at the light. It was transformed-habes aquam vivam-and I choked, unprepared for such a transformation. The light grew firm, shadows intruding in the blankness, and I began to remember what these shapes were. My hands trembled as they reached to hold the bottle against my mouth.
"Let him finish it," a voice said. "He needs to be coherent." I tried to distinguish this shadow from the others.
The water slowed to a trickle and, under the vacuum suction of my infantile need, stopped. My stomach ached from the sudden influx of fluid even as the rest of me sighed in delight. I lowered the plastic bottle and held it out for more.
The light went out: rough fabric over my head, a rope cinched against my neck. I inhaled instinctively, and my lungs choked on a cloying miasma. The cloth was soaked with an anesthetic and, with each breath, I pulled more of it into my lungs. The butterflies came back-more and more of them-and I drifted away, covered by iridescent wings.
I woke under a rounded roof, a cupola of iron girders rising to a capstone of riveted metal. Long shadows crept along the ribs of the roof. Tainted by the scent of dead fish and seawater, the air was damp and cold. Beneath me, a row of rivets pressed into my shoulder blade instead of the flat ridges of the container. My head was a block of wood, and based on the taste in mouth, I had been sucking on dirty wool.
I rolled onto my side and sat up. Metal bleachers from an old high school gymnasium lined up along one wall. On either side, oil drums burned with blue flame. Hollow Men, dressed in gray robes with deep hoods, were scattered across the seats. At the base of the bleachers stood two men-one in the same gray, the other in a black hoodless garment. I recognized him, though Doug was taller and thinner in person. They were standing at the edge of the ceremonial circle in which I lay.
At four equidistant points along the circle-the cardinal directions, probably-there were metal sculptures. Scrap iron fused by blowtorch into skeletal frameworks. Lion, bull, eagle, and angel. Each held a different object: rod, sword, cup, and disk. Tarot suits, held by evangelical symbols.
My first guess was that the circle was something out of Solomon's grimoires, but this was more medieval, more late-period European alchemy in its representation. The statues were the beings seen by Ezekiel in his vision. This was the-
"The Wheel speaks the law of the living and of the dead." Doug's companion spoke the words as liturgy. The phrase rolled around in my head, stirring dull roots. The Wheel of Fortune. The tenth card of the tarot's Major Arcana. The cycle of death and rebirth. The Chorus moved sluggishly, old snakes reluctant to rise from their hibernation.
"Rota taro orat tora ator." Doug said his part of the ritual. He was wearing the sort of shift that went over the head and tied around the waist with a length of old rope. Though Doug hadn't bothered with the rope.
Still unsteady with nausea, I managed to stand. A glob of thick spit was rolling on the back of my tongue and I worked it forward until I could spit it out. My input to the ceremonial rhetoric.
"Kings and princes are equal upon the circle of fate." The priest ignored my commentary. "And their fate is determined by the rotation of the Wheel." A mutter of agreement ran through the rank of Hollow Men. In the wan light of the blue flames, they looked like empty statues.
"You have been challenged by Douglas Rassmussen, Initiate Ascendant in the Order of the Hollow Men. While you have no rank within the Order, a temporary conveyance has been established to allow you to fight upon the Wheel. At the resolution of this combat, this conveyance will be terminated. You will have no recourse to membership or recognition by the Order. Is that clear?"
"Yeah," I said, finally getting my words under control. "I get it." I rolled my shoulders and shook out my arms. The turgid Chorus finally moved out of my belly and into the rest of my frame. I was weak from a lack of food-the water hadn't done much beyond whet my appetite-but I was functional. Functional enough for Doug, apparently.
It had been his voice in the container, when I had been given water. He needs to be coherent. If he wanted me dead, they would have killed me in the box. They wouldn't have bothered with all this pomp and nonsense. This was a sacrament that met some ritual need of Doug's. I couldn't sense Julian, and I doubted Bernard was one of those watching; this was an unsanctioned event. Those two wouldn't have bothered with showing me how the mirror worked if this was where I was going to end up.