She turned to the silver dish, where the single strand of hair floated, and spoke beneath her breath. The hair started to move. Magda Kurtz continued to murmur in the same quick, almost thoughtless manner; but her eyes were slitted with concentration.
Upon the surface of the water, patterns began to appear. Faint lines, dull red and black against the silvery surface. After a minute or so an image emerged. Blots of light and shadow that soon took on the contours of a face: a young man’s face. Magda fell silent. For a long time she stared at the image, her mouth tight. Then she breathed upon the water. The face disappeared into cloudy ripples. From the Hand of Glory came a spattering sound as a drop congealed upon the tip of one finger and burned in a small greasy cloud. Magda glanced aside, finally began speaking again.
Her words sounded no different this time, but the hair moved more slowly in response to her voice. It grew thicker, until it might have been a nematode squirming there, or some bloated larva. The water roiled and churned, and suddenly was still.
Within seconds the second image appeared: the face of a young woman with huge slanted eyes, their color unguessable, but an unmistakably beautiful girl. Magda gazed at the image thoughtfully. Finally she nodded and whispered.
“I thought as much.”
She held her hand above the bowl, touched the water with a finger. The hair writhed like a worm upon a hook, with a soft hiss disappeared into a thread of white smoke.
“So,” said Magda.
So this was what the Sign portended. She almost laughed, thinking of her old friend and mentor Balthazar Warnick. “All for naught…”
For millennia the Benandanti had watched and waited for the awakening of their ancient enemy. For a resurgence of old ways, old deities; half-hoping that when their Sign finally came it might presage not Her return, but the arrival of a Champion, a Hero, a Second Coming of a Great Good Man. Omnia Bona Bonis.
But was this what the loathsome Francis X. Connelly had glimpsed in the Tahor Chapel?
Magda laughed aloud. She had seen for herself who was to come. Not one person, but two. Not a hero of the Benandanti—politician or diplomat, or even a sturdy tenured classics professor—but a couple of kids. A young man and a woman—boy and girl, really—the oldest story in the book, and not at all what the Benandanti had been expecting.
Not quite what Magda herself had been expecting, either.
She frowned. The boy had taken her by surprise. And yet the Sign had been unmistakable. She had scried his face in the basin, as clearly as she had seen that of the girl. Now it only remained for her to learn who they were.
Magda glanced at her watch. Past midnight already. She stretched, then crouched before the Hand of Glory. The flames had burned to the first knuckle of each finger. Melting fat coursed in dark runnels to form a small pool in its withered palm. Magda grimaced. She began to speak in a loud, impatient voice, as though calling an animal to her.
“Eisheth. Eisheth. Eisheth.”
As she spoke she very slowly began to stand, straightening until at last she stood with arms outstretched. Pronouncing the name one final time she took a step backward.
“Eisheth.”
Directly in front of her, a shape like her own shadow rose in the darkness, arms outstretched, its back to her. Only this was a shadow filled with light. As Magda watched it slowly grew brighter, the lineaments and contours of its body so radiant that she had to shade her eyes. Her arms prickled with heat. Just when it seemed its intensity was such that she must burst into flame, the light dimmed. A figure stood there, taller by a foot than Magda. She gasped, as she always did. Its long black hair like marble coils upon its shoulders, the wings like sheaves of knives enfolded upon its back.
“Eisheth,” Magda whispered hoarsely. “Eisheth, look at me.”
The figure turned.
“Ah!—”
Her stomach knotted with rage and frustration at her weakness, but still she could not keep from crying out. The figure nodded. In spite of herself Magda started forward, her hands raised halfway between supplication and an embrace. But then she forced herself to stop. The figure continued to stare at her, its yellow eyes cold and unblinking as a tiger’s. Magda took a few deep breaths.
“Eisheth—thank you—”
The figure inclined its head to her and smiled. It might have been a man, except for some feminine roundness to its mouth, the arch of its cheekbones and the sly way its eyes took her in, appraising her as another woman might. Its skin was golden, not tanned or ruddy but a pure pale gold, the color of fine marble rather than metal. It was naked, and you could see its muscles as clearly as though they had been sketched upon its skin. From its chest two breasts swelled, a young girl’s breasts, tipped with pale roseate nipples. Its groin was hairless, its member engorged and erect; she had never seen it otherwise.
Magda forced a smile and stared boldly back into his eyes. She always thought of Eisheth as him, despite his breasts and coquettish smile, even as some of the other naphaïm she perceived as female despite their obviously masculine attributes, or the absence of genitals altogether.
“Yes?” The naphaïm never addressed her by name. “I have come.”
His voice made her quiver, trapped between stark terror and the most abject desire. It was the voice of a young boy before the change, sweet yet resonant with a man’s power. Magda clasped her hands tightly and indicated the silver basin on the floor.
“A few minutes ago I scried there in the water two faces. A young man and woman. I wish to know their names.”
As she spoke she grew more confident. She glanced down at the Hand of Glory. The smallest digit, a shriveled grey knot, was already burned away, and the flesh of the palm itself had begun to char. She went on quickly, “I—I could not see them clearly. And I do not know their names. I need you to tell me who they are.”
The naphaïm stared at her and smiled. At its back its wings rustled. “Last year, and the year before, and years before that: you who watch are always looking for a Sign, but one never comes.”
A flicker of desperation licked at the woman’s spine. She shook her head. “I am no longer among those who watch, Eisheth. I serve another now. And a Sign has come. I wish to know the names of those whose faces I scried in the water.”
Eisheth’s smile broke into a grin. He had very large, white teeth, and his tongue as it flicked between them was pointed, like an asp’s. “And does not your mistress know their names?”
“My Mistress—my Mistress is—She is not mindful as you are, Eisheth.” Magda’s desperation fanned into panic even as her tone grew more wheedling. “She sleeps, but perhaps this girl is the one who will help me wake Her, if—”
If I can find this girl before the Benandanti do.
Eisheth laughed. At the sound the walls trembled, the candle flames leapt until they formed a fiery ring about the two figures. He stretched out his great hand until it enveloped hers, and took a step forward. Magda shuddered. Willing herself to stare up into his eyes, she choked, “Their names, Eisheth! Or I’ll dismiss you and summon another—”
“Ahhh. A pity,” he murmured, mockingly. Slowly he withdrew his hand. “As you will.”
He stared down at the silver bowl, as though seeing something there beside the rippling reflections of candlelight and shadow. After a moment he spoke a name, and then a second name. He glanced at Magda and tilted his head.