Duncan had been right. I was sick. It just wasn’t fever and cough sickness. Something more insidious, sneaking up on me.
Fell started the car, pulling out.
When I couldn’t catch my breath fast enough, I coughed, trying to pull more air into my lungs. I waited for Rose’s jab, a reminder that I wasn’t capable of doing what we were talking about.
“Ready?” Rose asked.
No jab. I was genuinely grateful.
“If you are,” I said. “Get us started.”
“Demons and devils fall into choirs. Choir of dark, choir of chaos, choir of ruin, choir of madness, choir of the feral, choir of sin, and choir of unrest, in order. What we’re dealing with… I think it’s a demon of darkness, by all descriptions.”
“Darkness,” I said. “Didn’t we hear something different from somewhere else?”
“Maybe you did. But we don’t know where demons come from, but they exist as a sort of counterpoint to the forces of creation, civilization, growth, and order. The choirs aren’t real things… only an idea that some have clung to, some demons and devils included. They’re a handy way of categorizing.”
“A dangerous way of categorizing,” I said. “Like calling something a goblin, when it could be something else entirely. You prepare to deal with a goblin, and you get surprised.”
“Yes.”
“Or,” I said, glancing down at Evan, “If you’re open minded, you can figure out that the goblin has another weakness you can use against it.”
“It’s the thing I have the hardest part with,” Rose said. “I feel like there’s a science here, a rationale behind it all, and then we run into something like time magic or some other garbage, and it doesn’t fit. I want to figure out the underlying rules, so I keep reading, I keep hitting the books. If we can figure out the internal logic of this world, we can start to nail some things down. I don’t like the Others that straddle or ignore categories. Especially the scary, demon-tier Others.”
“My view on it,” I said, “Is that there aren’t hard and fast rules. This isn’t a science, exactly. It’s not like math, where you can decode it and figure out the system. It’s more like English class. Or art theory. You interpret, you divine the symbols and commonalities, you inject your own voice, views, and apply your own labels and rules, given the chance. Math is just there, waiting to be discovered. With English, with art, you can forge your own way.”
I saw Fell looking at me through the rear view mirror.
“No comment,” he said.
“I hated English class,” Rose said.
“So did I,” I said. “Mrs. Gazo?”
“Fuck Mrs. Gazo,” Rose said.
“I hate a lot of this too, for that matter,” I said.
“Fair point.”
“If figuring stuff out is your strength, then let’s move forward, and you look at things in that light, and I’ll look at them in my own way.”
“But the important bit of what you just said is that you want to get this discussion moving again,” Rose said.
I nodded. “Only so much time.”
“Okay. For our purposes, let’s look at the demon we’re after as a creature of darkness. Virtually every creation myth touches on certain key ideas. Light is the most common. The sun, fire, something in that vein, it’s intrinsically linked to creation in the human consciousness. To the birth of the universe, the planet, society, and other things. Water and earth tend to follow in general popularity, but those aren’t choirs we need to focus on.”
I nodded. “Choir of darkness.”
“The antithesis of creation. You could say it’s the most powerful choir. Entropy distilled.”
“I hear you,” I said. “I’m hard-pressed to think of a good way to ward off something like that, though.”
“I had ideas. My concern is that it isn’t enough. There’s too many questions.”
“We ward off creatures with their antithesis, unless they’re weak enough that related elements can repel them,” I said. “What idea did you have?”
“My idea is that we ward off darkness with fire. Prometheus, Khepri, the sun. Fire keeps figuring into myths. It holds a key place in culture and myth. I mean, mankind survived, back in the day, and Others presumably preyed on us then. Fire was a staple.”
“Lighter fluid, then?” I asked. “A burning circle in the earth.”
“Maybe,” Rose said. “If you stepped into a room with that demon today, it’s what I’d suggest. I don’t know if it would work, but burning to death would be better than anything that demon did.”
It would probably get my soul anyway, I thought. I didn’t volunteer that tidbit.
“You’re thinking fire,” I said. “But?”
“But fires go out, Blake. Fires spread, raising questions of what happens if we burn down the factory. I’m not sure which choir Barbatorem figures into, but he’s an abstract entity, and grandmother bound him with rigid, defined lines.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How do you do rigid, defined lines with fire?”
“That’s a bit of a problem,” I said.
“There’s also another question… and this is more in your camp than mine, if we’re talking distinctions between diabolism as a science and diabolism as an art. Look to the stories, evil creatures of this caliber, and fire tends to be their bailiwick.”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
But this was about finding ideas, not just about shooting them down. “What if I were to create a flaming diagram using glamour? Work around some of the inherent problems? ”
“That’s fine if you’re doing it, Blake, if it’s you alone. Except you’re bringing another individual into the picture, bring the demon into the picture, and maybe it believes in the flame enough to make that flame act like fire.”
“Bringing us back to square one,” I said.
“Or it doesn’t believe the fire, because it’s not exactly in the same realm of experience as we are, and we’re back to square zero,” Rose said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Square zero?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Glamour doesn’t work,” I said. “Okay, something else then. What about… something glowing? I’m picturing a length of chain, red hot.”
“Or fluorescent lighting, to be a little more down to earth?”
“Or that,” I said.
“It’s an option,” Rose said. “I’m not sure how we’d make it work. Your idea and mine both have problems.”
I looked in the rear view mirror, meeting her eyes.
“They’re ideas,” Rose said. “A step forward.”
“What other forms of light exist?” I asked. “Lightning? I don’t know how we’d do it, but lightning is… unpredictability aside, it’s kind of ordered. There are rules electricity follows, and we need something ordered to counteract the being’s abstract nature.”
“Lightning would be… impressive if we could pull it off, but I’m not sure where we could find a Tesla coil at this late hour.”