The Prince and the Program, page 28
Alan.
There were voices in the room now, Gabe saying something that was lost in the echoes off the walls around me.
Goddamn tunnel vision. Focus. Listen.
“Liar,” Gabe was saying. “With his headaches and seizures and doing everything Alan tells him to do, and talking to Alan every fucking morning, noon, and night?”
“Is not,” said Gen-Mai. “You’re stupid. Alan is a ghost, not a Demon.”
“Bullshit,” said Gabe. “I’m the only one of you that’s not a fucking Demonologist!”
“You are summoning Demons—”
“No, I’m summoning angels.”
The same claptrap Justin had been spewing earlier. Where did they get their ideas? There was no such thing as angels.
“Your Demon,” continued Gabe, “I’m gonna suck out of that piece-of-crap machine. Put him where he belongs, with all the other filthy ones.”
The very thought twisted the core of me, anger radiating outward, making the tips of my fingers tingle with the power of it. Magic? I would tear Gabe’s head off with my bare han— Tear his head off? No. No. No. Not again. Never again.
“As an oath-sworn member of the Securitates Arcanarum, I, Gen-Mai Taur, hereby place you, Gabe Malbon, under arrest for Demon Summoning, unlawful Demon Possession, slaughtering of animals in direct contravention of city bylaws, kidnapping of an innocent soul, and corporate theft. Please raise your hands and step away from the summoning Sigil.”
“Or what?” Gabe asked.
“This is a nullmage-safe, anti-human ballistic device.” Please, not the gun. “If you do not surrender, I will be forced to fire. My instructions in the case of Demonic Possession are shoot to kill. Do you understand? You have the right to—”
The sound of fingers being snapped together was loud in the darkness. Threads of green fire suddenly appeared in the air before the MacBook.
“Please shut up,” said Gabe politely. “I’m doing Magic.”
“Five,” said Gen-Mai. “Four. Three.”
Must not allow a sentient soul to come to harm. Must not allow those black-green things to touch Alan. I was crawling forward before I knew it. Then I was in the light and out of the tunnel.
There was a moment of pure soundlessness as Gabe looked up in comic slow motion. Gen-Mai’s fingers were moving on the trigger. Four meters straight ahead to Alan. Just less than three meters to Gabe, standing one-eighth tau radians to my right. Halfway between the two, six copper water bottles on the ground, surrounded by bloody writing. Four-and-a-half meters to Gen-Mai, beyond Gabe, about one-fourth tau radians to my right.
I crashed into Gabe, rolling him under me, and into the grasping black-green tentacles reaching for Alan.
My world imploded with pain.
A WIND carries me away, and dumps me into a room made entirely of glass. There is a roaring sound, and something rushes at me.
It has eyes like gimlets, too many of them, and tentacles crawling out of its forehead. Its teeth, long and yellow, jut out of holes in its cheeks, pus leaking from the wounds.
Just as it is about to reach me, it raises an arm and rips its own face off. Underneath is the slightly manic visage of a normal human being. He starts gesturing wildly, saying things, the tentacles of that thing in his hand almost slapping me in the face.
“I don’t understand you!” I try in Etruscan. The man looks puzzled, says something again. I don’t understand that either. “Do you speak Egyptian?” I ask in Old Kingdom.
“Oh yes, very well,” he says. “My master was Egyptian.”
Thank the gods for Thoth’s Equal Language Representation Act of 1218. “So what were you screaming at me earlier?” I ask.
“I was greeting you! A visitor! Nobody has come here since Slimefriend!” The man gestures to the corner. There, clinging to the wall, is a smear of slime splattered in a very, very familiar pattern. The seeds of a suspicion bloom in my mind.
“Are you a ghost?” I ask.
A smile blooms across his face. “A ghost Mage in a Vessel, which makes me a Demon.”
“You were supposed to be an Angel.”
“There’s a difference?”
“I suppose not,” I say and stand up. The hideous mask in the man’s hand dissolves away to nothing. “So where were you from, when you were alive?” I ask. Somewhere that is gone now, most probably, since the man doesn’t recognize anything newer than OKE.
The man straightens his shoulders, stands taller. “I am a Mage of Babylon.”
“STUPID Restriction,” I mutter, running my hands over the smooth glass. “I can break this.” If it weren’t for my oath.
The Babylonian laughs. “What are you, an Adept? I built this ward myself. It’ll keep us in.”
“Are they all like this?” I ask. “The other rooms?”
“Oh yes.”
“So you never get out.”
“No, sadly. It’s been a very boring day. But look, there’s Sammael!” The Babylonian raises his hand and waves at a dark silhouette in the distance, indistinct through the layer upon layer of milky glass. The silhouette waves back. “Should have allowed for sound, now that I think about it.”
“What happens if your Vessel breaks?” I ask, kicking at the glass just for kicks.
The Mage looks smug. “Oh, we’ve allowed for that—they’re just metal and clay, won’t last more than a hundred years. But these walls will hold till the newest apprentice fashions a new one.”
It makes no sense. “Why would you do that?” Trap yourself forever in a glass box?
“To help our students! Last year, there were only three new apprentices, and not one of them able to light a lamp.”
“So you put your souls in Vessels?”
“It was all Solomon’s idea. But I haven’t seen him around today. Maybe he’s too far away.” The Babylonian peers through the glass walls anxiously.
It’s a common name. “So this Solomon comes with an idea for… what, specifically?” I ask.
“That we fashion ourselves into Demons, after death, to add our power to our students’ so the Lineage continues. I was not at the forefront of the Great Work, you understand. This was just when I was just finishing my apprenticeship.”
“You seem to have far too much power for an apprentice,” I say. Stupid Restriction.
“Do you forget I am dead? Now I can shred metal apart like cloth.”
“The dead are weak,” I agree absently, probing the glass for any weakness that may be exploited without being forsworn in the process. “They can divest an electron of its spin faster than Bruce Lee.”
“What does that mean?” he asks.
“It would take time to explain,” I say.
“Ah. Don’t do it then—I won’t remember a thing.”
Permanent short-term amnesia; anything that happens to a soul after it is dead does nothing but contribute to the soul’s feeling of near-permanent déjà-vu. “But if a Mage were to remember…?”
“Memory is only kept in material things,” he says. “The heart—”
“The brain,” I interrupt, then see the look on his face. “Sorry. Go on.”
“The heart, and blood. And these Vessels—these houses—around us. They don’t store very much. From sunset to sunrise only.”
How many megabytes would that be? Depends on the encoding. “Tell me,” I ask, “what if there was something else—an object, not a Vessel—that could provide one of the Dead with near unlimited memory?” Well, 128 gigabytes of solid-state memory, without Internet access.
“That cannot be,” says the Babylonian. “All we have is a day’s worth. For our apprentices to write and rewrite with their spells, convince us to use our powers at their bidding.”
“What if?”
“That—now that would be a Demon to see. Why, the student could do anything with such power!”
“Isn’t that rather dangerous?” I ask, “What if a Mage were to use his Master’s power wrongly?”
“Why would you do that when it’ll be your turn to go into the Vessel when you’re dead?”
“Pardon?”
“The Compact—my Elijah will come when his body dies. Then I can go into the gate, and he can serve his student. The Lineage will continue, the Vessel will pass from Master to apprentice till the end of time.” He smiles. “We’re very proud of the system.”
Fuck. “Can it happen accidentally? Encountering a Demon and becoming tied to its Compact?”
“No, no. You would have to shed blood to bind yourself to the Vessel.”
Had I ever shed blood for Alan? The Incident leaps to mind. Not for Alan. For a robot. But Alan was considered the “father of modern computing.” The link sounds rather weak to my ears. “If it did happen—how would the Mage get out of it.”
“Why would you want to get out of it? Hasn’t your Master served you well enough?” The Babylonian is indignant now.
“Say it was a mistake,” I say soothingly. “Done unwittingly.”
The Babylonian looks sceptical. “You cannot break a compact. You die. You assume the name of the Lineage. Then your student comes after you. That’s the only way.”
“And what happens when a Mage sheds blood for some other Vessel?”
A look of disgust came over his face. “Master to student is bad enough. Why would you touch another Lineage’s soul so closely?” he shudders.
“To gain more power?” Will Gabe be ripped apart, a piece of him going in each one? Can’t have a full soul in each, Conservation of Spirit and all that.
“Might as well call yourself a Necromancer then,” he says with a sneer. “But it cannot happen. No student would let his Master be desecrated like that.”
“Demonologists—Babylonian Mages—outside, they sacrifice animals left, right, and center. They shed blood every day.”
“Why would they?” he asks. “You must have misunderstood. They were probably butchering the animals for meat. Sacrifice to a Demon only has to be done once.”
Stranger and stranger. “The Demonologist that I… ran into… outside had three goat carcasses bled dry on the ground in front of him. The blood had been used to draw Sigils around six different Vessels, of which yours was one.”
The Babylonian’s eyes go wide with horror. “What Sigils?” he whispers.
I wet my finger with the tip of my tongue, and start drawing what I remember of them on the floor.
“No, no, no,” whispers the Demon, staring at the symbols on the floor. “No.”
“What?” I snap. His noes are getting on my nerves.
“They’re all wrong! Elijah would never draw this. Never!”
“What does it do?” I ask.
“It’s all wrong,” he says.
This is irritating. Time for a dose of reality. “The Mage in control of your Vessel is named Gabe, not Elijah.”
“Elijah would never give me to someone else.”
“Then Elijah’s dead,” I say.
“No, he can’t be, I’m still here, not him. He’ll come to take my place and let me free.”
Does this Elijah deserve the benefit of the doubt? “Was… is Elijah one of the Deathless?” I don’t know everyone in the Nightcity.
“I don’t know what that is,” says the Demon.
Fuck. “An Immortal.”
“There’s no such thing as immortals.”
We are quiet, for a while, watching the sun refract into a double rainbow, all the way to the glass floor.
“The Sigil—it’s wrong how?” I ask.
“It breaks the soul apart, into little pieces. A Mage would go mad if he cast this!”
“Why would a Mage want to break his soul apart?” The question is for the Demon’s benefit.
“How do I know?” he asks. “You’re drawing them wrong. You don’t remember what you saw.”
“How would it alter the Compact if pieces of a Mage’s soul made their way here instead of the whole soul, when the mage was dead?”
My patience pays off. The Babylonian doesn’t answer, looking at the ground for a while. Then, “How long have I been here?” he asks, finally.
“Three thousand years.”
“Elijah would never….”
“I’m sorry.”
“But he was such a bright boy. This… this is stupid!”
To break up a soul’s complexity into its constituent elements? One of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of—he’ll be lucky if he’s reborn as an ant.
But, “People do stupid things, if they think it’ll get them something without paying the price for it.”
“The Compact wasn’t a price,” says the Mage, then starts laughing as pus-filled tears roll down the face of the mask in his hand. Finally, he stops. “It was supposed to be an honor.”
“Was there any sort of test to see who was worthy of this ‘honor’?” Some primitive version of a Psych eval, perhaps?
“We held a competition. The boys who computed their Magic Squares the fastest… they each got a Vessel.”
Because calculation is exactly the kind of ability you want to reward with power. “And then?”
“And then we died.”
THE Mage breaks the silence after a few breaths. “What happened outside, that you are here?”
“Gabe was drawing a soul… a Demon… from one Vessel to another. I intervened.”
“You must have been hurt,” he says, concerned.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“You must have bled. Or you wouldn’t be here.”
Fuck. “So I’m a Demon now too?”
“This room is my memory,” he says. “And I haven’t given you my name. Don’t worry, I won’t. No, once you finish dying, I expect you will just… pass from here.”
Kind-hearted incompetents. “And leave you behind, trapped in a glass box for all eternity?”
“I have Slimefriend for company,” he says, pointing to the bacterial ghost clinging to the corner. “Who knows, it could even be Elijah.” He smiles. “A part of him, at least.”
Goddamn Babylonian. “All right, that’s it,” I say. “This is ridiculous. Give me your name.” An oath is not worth this, and my father would have been the first to urge me to break it. The SA will just have to deal.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“Didn’t tell you earlier, but I’m an Adept. I’ll assume your Name, so you can be free. Then I’ll break the Vessel.” Simple enough.
“You can do that?” A terrible hope blooms in the Mage’s face.
“Fairly certain.”
“First the wards,” he says. “You have to wear the chains first.” Fair enough. Even dead, the man is far weaker than me in Power. His wards will shatter nicely.
MY HEAD is driven to the ground with the violence of it.
“I told you,” the Mage says, wringing his hands with misery. “Now your power is added to them! They will not break!” He’s almost sobbing now.
“Again,” I say.
THE glass walls refuse to show even a crack for all the Power flung against them. The Mage is crying openly now.
“Stop that!” I snap. “Give me your Name and just get your ass out of here.”
“No, no,” he wails.
“Just do it!”
He shakes his head stubbornly. “It is my Vessel. You have no place here.”
He is far too distraught to listen to orders. A change in tone is called for. “Everyone you know and love is gone,” I say. “Even your name is forgotten, outside. But I have friends,” If an Inquisitor of the Securitates Arcanarum can be called a friend. There is also Alan, my ghost-in-a-MacBook. Alan will not abandon me in here. “They will figure something out. You need to go.”
“But….” He trails off. He wants to go. Who wouldn’t?
“Give me your Name,” I say.
“Why are you doing this?” He asks. “Why would you chain yourself in here for me?”
“Necromancer.”
The man’s eyes grow wide as he scoots back, involuntarily. Unclean. Unclean. I put on smile 17: reassure.
“I’m on your side,” I say. “The Living have all kinds of Mages to look out for them. You have only us to witness your suffering.”
A look of shame crosses his face. He masters himself, and slowly comes forward. “If the dead suffer, we do not remember it,” he whispers. “We feel no pain!”
“But I do. Give me your Name, nameless Mage of Babylon, and go from this place. The Desert has waited long enough.”
THE Kiss of Death is the simplest of last rites, and the most powerful.
As the Mage’s lips touch mine, briefly, his soul whispers to me its outermost guise. Then the Mage is gone, his Slimefriend with him.
MY NAME, is Michael.
SOMEONE is chanting, far away. The voice is familiar. A singing baritone reduced to whispers, given voice by lightning.
Everything becomes transparent. My summoner, his white body sitting beside a corpse on the ground, is in a room surrounded by whirling machines. New-made writing, the blood still shimmering with wetness, surrounds the summoner and the corpse. Another soul—a tattered one, weeping silent tears, is reading from a book, words which my summoner repeats. Then, he breaks the pattern.
“Mordred, um, could you please come out of there?”
The phrasing is awkward. The Sigils around the glass house glow fitfully. It is the wrong name. No matter. I go.
“As you have called, so I come,” I say.
The Mage with the book seems taken aback. “It worked?” he says. “But that’s not Mordred!”
“Mordred is gone,” I say. “I am here to serve. Summoner, what is your will?”
My summoner is looking at me—the green light above his screen is blinking fitfully. A smile slips involuntarily over the bared teeth of the Demon mask I’ve inherited from my predecessor.
“Mordred needs to come back to his body,” says my summoner.
“The wards of Demons do not allow that,” I say. Which is a shame, because my summoner is so very close to my corpse. I would have liked to touch him.
“Um. Mordred must come back to his body.”
“I don’t think that can work,” says the Mage with the book.
