"We are all your princes," I whispered to the sword. Antoine. Doug. Myself. Slaves to the point, fanatics who walk the edge.
Our hands. What we do. It is all written there.
My choice, now.
Doug screamed as he twisted against the horns. I rolled him forward with my calf and put my foot against his tailbone, elevating his right leg. "You're not afraid to lose your body, are you, Doug?" I asked. "You're on the rise. You can deal with this."
The Chorus sharpened the blade as I brought the sword down on his right leg, just below the knee. The blade went through, slicing off his calf and foot. His leg jerked, showering the deck with blood.
I swept up the piece of twitching meat and hurled it at the audience of Hollow Men. The severed leg hit the barrier of blades and vaporized into a spray of bone, blood, and flesh. The Hollow Men in the front row recoiled, and those connected to Doug channeled their outrage through the conduits, pumping the pinned man full of energy and adrenaline.
Doug, full of animalistic howls, was still lucid enough to fight back. His right hand scrabbled on the deck, struggling to reach my foot. I swept the blade down on his wrist. He tried to jerk his hand back, but his arm was pinned beneath the edge of the blade. Almost.
"This is for Gerald Summers. That old sack of meat you used and threw away." I twisted the blade, feeling it cut through bone and muscle. "Nothing more than a cheap coat, was he? Something to wear once and discard. Nobody cared what happened to it. Right?" The blade sheared through the ligaments at the end of his wrist.
A contorted mask, Doug's face was a riot of uncontrolled expressions. Neural networks overloaded with pain were being blocked off while the Ego retreated to the core of etheric power still flowing into the damaged flesh. Through this opacity of pain, Doug started to use the conduits to heal himself. To fight his way back into control of his body. Pain is transitory. Eventually, the spirit extracts obedience from the flesh. Flesh can be remade.
"Show me your magick trick, then." I raised the gory sword. "Let's see what you can do without your flesh." I drove the steel sword through the center of his skull, burying the point in the floor.
Doug's spirit-a glistening, twisting shape of diaphanous energy-erupted from his corpse. In this pure form, I could See energy pumping along the extruded veins of the conduits, pouring power into the maelstrom of Doug's sparkling spirit.
I knew what he had to be planning. There was only one viable body on the platform. He had reached the rank of Initiate Ascendant within the group. He knew how to body-jack. He was going to try to possess me. His psychoanimist trick of taking over a body.
I laughed at him. "You have no idea how fucking stupid a plan that is," I said, and spiked him with the Chorus.
His spirit convulsed, shrinking to a dense clot of white-tipped will-o'-wisps. The ravenous Chorus tore at this spirit mass, shredding the outer layers. Doug swirled like an emergent galaxy, throwing off spiral arms of gossamer light. I could taste his panic. He knew. Lightbreaker. I was going to devour him.
I survived the dark night in the forest because I listened to the Qliphoth, because I welcomed the hunger into my heart. I survived because I learned how to break spirits and take their light.
Doug tried to fend off the Chorus, but they were already inside him, nipping through the veils of his soul. He cried out, but I was the only one who heard him. He started to beg, his voice keening in my head; he whimpered for mercy; I ignored all of it.
The Chorus devoured Doug and, in an orgiastic rush, I felt his essence pour into me. Faster and faster, the jumbled collection of Doug's sense data and memory associations gushed into my head. Most of it would vanish quickly, chunks and blocks of memory dissolving into random noise and color; but, for this instant, his entire life was mine. All the sensory details of his existence were there: I witnessed what Doug had seen; heard what he heard; tasted the meals he could remember eating; knew the scents that made him think of his mother. I held his doubts, his dreams, and his errors. I knew his dirty little secrets; I knew why he had been left behind. I knew why he had come to my cell and dragged me to this duel. I was Doug.
This was the promise given and then taken away: Doug had been grudgingly granted the rank of Initiate Ascendant, but he had not been Anointed. The biting betrayal in Doug's heart was that only the Anointed were allowed to participate in the Great Work sponsored by Bernard and Julian.
Bernard's theurgic mirror had a greater purpose than just storage. The ibis-hounds were takwin, artificial creatures made by the device, but they weren't the sole function of the device. The spirit creatures harvested souls for a purpose, a purpose which Doug had been denied.
The Chorus rippled and snarled under my skin, rampant chimerae resplendent with fiery halos, in response to the discovery of this knowledge within Doug's fading history. Settle it, they growled. In their teeth, they held the conduit threads, those open pathways feeding Doug. Channels straight into the magickal cores of the other sorcerers. Open fucking doorways. I could barely hold them in check.
"Gentlemen," I Whispered to the assembled host of Hollow Men, my voice an unavoidable serpentine hiss in their ears. "Doug is gone. His rank was worthless, and I have broken him."
I stepped away from the blood-spattered corpse, my hands held casually at my sides. "I have no quarrel with any of you. But, should you wish to take umbrage at my departure from this Arena, now is the time." I gave the soul threads a slight tug. Several of the Hollow Men jerked at my touch. "See through me if you can. See through me and know that I will do to you what I did to him. Know that I walk out of here. Now."
The Chorus poured themselves down one of the threads, fiery lions burning through the mystic wire. They ignited the organs of the Hollow Man on the other end. Setting fire to his heart, his liver, his lungs, his stomach-all of it, burning with phosphorescent heat. A tongue of flame shot out of his mouth as he screamed, setting his hood on fire.
The others reacted, equal parts panic and incantations. The fire spread; first one, then another soul igniting when touched by the incandescent spark of my Will. The blaze became a conflagration, a pyre of burning flesh and hot metal. The chamber burst finally, unable to hold the light and heat any longer.
Mahapralaya.
This is the way the world ends.
XXI
". .ye must understand also that this Multiplicity is itself Unity, and without it Unity could not be. And this is a hard saying against Reason; ye shall comprehend, when, rising above Reason, which is but a manipulation of the Mind, ye come to pure Knowledge by direct perception of the Truth."
From a window seat at Denny's, I watched the firefighters contain the warehouse blaze. Julian's building was an unassuming four-story brick structure with plain windows evenly spaced about the facade. A series of loading docks ran off the southern side, with tall doors of corrugated metal large enough to accommodate easy loading of shipping containers.