“Please,” he said, gesturing at the leather club chairs opposite the desk. “Sit down. We’ve much to talk about.”
I did as he requested, eyeing awkwardly the desk’s contents while the patchwork man maneuvered his electric wheelchair into place. The breeze generated by the anemometer had shifted the mountain of paper atop the desk, and unearthed treasures that had heretofore been hidden to me. Two in particular caught my eye.
The first was a Maneki Neko figurine — you know, the sort of chintzy ceramic cats that grace the counter of every noodle house and pachinko parlor from here to Hokkaido. They’re meant to bring good fortune to whosoever owns them; I had reason to believe this one did that one better. See, a year or so back, I wound up in a tussle with a demon, a demon I killed with a talisman identical to this one. Far as I knew at the time, that talisman was unique. Now, I suspected, I was looking at another.
The other item that caught my eye, mounted as it was on two narrow arms such that it ran parallel to the far edge of the desk, was an ornate, filigreed skim blade, its beveled cutting edge gleaming in the lamplight. The base on which it was displayed read:
To my beloved brother, Simon.
Until the stars burn out,
A skim blade is demon-forged, and as hard and sharp as the fury of the Adversary himself, but it is no weapon. It’s used in the manufacture of skim, a demon drug of sorts made by shaving fragments of life experience from souls recently collected.
But skim blades have another function, too. They can be used to cleave a human soul entirely, a sacrifice so great and terrible it’s only used to fuel the most violent and desperate of magical rituals. A skim blade is what Ana used when she destroyed Danny’s soul as part of her rite to escape hell’s bonds. A rite she learned of through decades of painstaking research into what I’d thought to be an old wives’ tale — of a group of Collectors some three thousand years ago who called themselves the Brethren, and who, through a ritual in which they tore a soul asunder and brought forth the Great Flood, broke free of hell’s orbit forever.
I was pretty sure I was now in the presence of one of them.
“Quite the collection you’ve got here,” I said, plucking up the Maneki Neko all casual-like, as if I were inspecting it, rather than weighing the odds of bashing it into this dude’s skull if our little tête-à-tête went sideways.
He smiled. “I understand you’re something of a Collector yourself.”
“Cute.”
“It won’t do you any good, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“The lucky cat. I assume that’s why you’re holding it, no? In case this meeting comes to blows. And I’m telling you, it’s no use against the likes of me.”
“You sure about that?” I asked, remembering the havoc the last one wreaked on beings doubtless more powerful than this poor wretch.
“Of course I’m sure,” he snapped. “I made it. Originally, I enchanted a case of twelve, dimestore trinkets bought wholesale from a manufacturer in Taiwan. Stashed them wherever I thought they might prove useful. But objects of such power have a way of walking off. Much as my brazen head once did, when that bastard Pope Sylvester decided he had to have it, and stole it from me.”
I eyed the bust he indicated — bronze, tarnished, and unremarkable. “The fuck’s it do?” I asked.
“It’s an oracle of sorts. It’s said that it can answer any question truthfully, provided that question is phrased such that it may answer yes or no.”
“Does it work?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied the head, damn near causing me to jump out of my chair.
“No,” replied Magnusson.
“B-but it just said–”
“Oh, I didn’t say it couldn’t speak. Just that it no more knows the secrets of the universe than you or I. Well, more you than I. I assure you, the human mind that I encased inside it was quite infirm to begin with, and has only grown madder as the centuries have passed. The only thing keeping it from gibbering like an idiot all day long is it’s mystically forbidden from saying anything but ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”
The old man gave me the stare-down for a moment, and then, more serious now, continued. “Tell me,” he said, “do you know why you are here?”
“I’m starting to get an inkling,” I replied. “You’re Brethren, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you the clever one,” he said. “For over three thousand years we Nine lived unmolested, protected by the same Great Truce that stemmed the tide of war between the heavens and the realms below. And then you and your idiot friends ginned up delusions of grandeur, and decided to recreate our ritual to free yourselves from servitude as we once did.”
“That ain’t exactly how it all went down,” I said, but Magnusson raised his good hand to silence me.
“Spare me your frayed yarns and tired excuses,” he said. “I assure you, I’m interested in neither. Do you know why we Nine were successful in our endeavor?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to enlighten me.”
“Oh, I doubt very much your capacity for enlightenment, though I shall try. We succeeded because we had vision. Creativity. We escaped the bonds of slavery because not a being in the universe but us believed that it could work. You and your friends had no such advantage, which is why you were doomed to fail, and fools to even attempt it.”
“And here I figured you got by on your rakish good looks.”
His face twisted momentarily into a gruesome mask of fury, quickly mastered. “You mock what you cannot understand. When you look upon me, you see something to be reviled, yes? Pitied, perhaps?”
“I wouldn’t expect much of a line at your kissing booth, if that’s what you mean,” I replied.
“Again with the juvenile humor. A pointless act of childish rebellion. But your words hurt me not a bit. You see, when I look upon my own reflection, I see not a monstrous visage worthy of your scorn. I see the culmination of fifty lifetimes spent in the service of science and magic both; the great triumph of human ingenuity — my ingenuity — in besting death. For you see, the eternal life my siblings and I fought so hard for is not without its drawbacks. Unlike you, we cannot simply flit from vessel to vessel. Our flesh and soul are fused. We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence,” he said, eyes swiveling toward the plastic-sheeted surgical suite, where Gareth — still hosing down the effluvia left behind by Magnusson’s procedure — suddenly began to whistle the selfsame Wagner opera Magnusson was whistling upon our entry. A few notes in, he fell silent once more.
“And even then,” Magnusson continued, looking drained, “only temporarily. Since we are condemned to our fleshly prisons for all eternity, we require constant replenishment to push back against the ravages of time. In our early days, we bathed in the blood of innocents — stoking the flames of war and of distrust, even drumming up an Inquisition or two if need be — to ensure our cups ever runneth over. A few of my kind still do, in fact, so entrenched are they in the old ways they refuse to acknowledge the world has moved on without them. Others found the unpleasant necessities of our lifestyle so distasteful, they broke from the pack to form another, taking refuge on a wooded continent as far from civilization as they could manage, so as to not be tempted to feast on the life-sustaining flesh and blood of the living. Their efforts proved shortsighted, as that vast, sparsely populated continent they chose to make their home was discovered not long after by our standards. Turns out the poor, misled bastards starved themselves just long enough, subsisting for centuries on the scant life-force of wild game, to drive themselves quite mad. Now they’re nothing more than feral beasts, feasting on the very species they sought to spare. Through rigorous application of the scientific method to the so-called arcane art of magic, I alone have happened upon our true path, our true future; one to which I hope my dear siblings will one day come around. Thanks to the great strides I’ve made in my own nascent field of molecumancy, muscles, bones, and organs — and yes, even skin — may be replaced as they each in turn fail. Vitality may be replenished through regular transfusions. Immune responses can be managed mystically to avoid rejection, and ensure a perfect join between old and new, regardless of the source. Which means our bodies can even be augmented, transformed into something greater than human; what Nietzsche called the Übermensch. A true self-made man.”