He shrugged. "Trying to understand the way you and your nutbag friends think. After the way things went at the hotel, I figured if I was going to find you, I had to stop thinking like an old homicide detective and start thinking like an insane occultist, trapped in his own personal symbolic hell."
"Symbolic?" I said, fighting a tiny smile. The last few days certainly had felt about as "symbolic" as getting hit on the head with a brick.
"It's all symbolism and creative mythology with you guys," he said. "Anyway, I've been skimming, mostly. Not enough time to really absorb anything. Just picking up keywords and wrapping my head around the general landscape. I've had some practice at this sort of thing; we do it all the time when we're prepping for an interview. If you can talk about things that interest the person you're interviewing, in language they understand, they tend to relax. They tend to say things they hadn't planned on saying."
"Like what Antoine said about distractions. He had no time for them."
Nicols nodded. "Because he's on a schedule."
"Yes, but because he's chasing a timetable that's already in motion," I mused. "Say Bernard and Julian are hiding themselves from a Protector. Where are they going to hide? How long do they think they'll be safe?"
"But if they're going to do something else with the mirror, they don't have to hide that long."
"But they do have to remain hidden."
"Okay. That means they're probably not in Seattle."
"How you figure that?"
"Because Pender would know. The other Hollow Men would have an idea. Piotr might even be able to find them. Antoine would have no compunction about tearing the answer out of any of them. Even if they didn't consciously know. Going back there would be a risk I think Bernard and Julian would be idiots to take. They're on their own."
I sucked on a tooth, feeling the Chorus churn in my stomach. Nicols was right: they were unshackled from the eye of the Watchers, free to conduct whatever final experiment they had in mind. But it was a small window of opportunity. They knew Antoine would be coming, that he would restore his Watch. They had to move fast, and Antoine knew they were on a forced march as well.
They had stolen the souls of nearly a thousand people. They couldn't (or wouldn't) return them, so they had some other plan. Some other use for all that energy. The only one I could think of was the one I knew best: making the energy their own and using it for an Act of magick.
The Anointed. The five Hollow Men who had been sacrificed to the device. They were soul-walkers, men who could leave their bodies. Men whose souls remained inviolate outside their bodies. Could they retain their ego consciousness within the mirror? Were they agents who would direct the force when the time came to utilize it? Much like the Hollow Men in the Arena had channeled power to Doug, could these soul-walkers send energy to Bernard and Julian?
Maybe Antoine's suggestion was right: maybe they were trying to talk to God. If they were going to assault Heaven, try to knock on the Gates of God's House and force an audience, they would need that raw power. But, more importantly, they'd need some sort of access point. They'd need an-
"Axis mundi," I breathed.
"Excuse me?" Nicols asked.
"It's Latin for 'pillar of the world.' The point about which the planet rotates. In a magico-religious sense, it's the point where God has reached down and touched the world, where primitive people think the Divine Spirit has manifested itself in their profane world.
"Cultures that believe in a cyclical rebirth of the world also believe in a point around which the world is reborn. Sacred sites allow the religiously devout the opportunity to not only remake the world, but to influence the next iteration, by standing at the spot around which the world turns.
"Look, in Hinduism, this current age is called the Kali Yuga. It's the Age of Iron and it ends in fire. It's called 'Mahapralaya.' " Ekpyrosis. Conflagratio. The World-Fire. "It's the macrocosmic version of individual redemption: everything is forgiven in fire; all sins are burned away and everything is possible again."
"This thing can do that? It can bring about Mahapralaya?"
"What other reason is there to steal the souls of a thousand? Think about it in terms of conventional weaponry. Why would you buy guns? Because your enemy had arrows. Why would you buy a cannon? Because your enemy had single-shot rifles."
"Why would you build a nuclear bomb?" Nicols followed the progression. "Because the guy who made one first got to rewrite the rules."
"Thoth was the Demiurge in the Egyptian tradition, the Being who fabricated the World from the Word. Ptah built it, but Thoth imagined it. He was still within the shell of the Divine, but he was closest to God. His Key to Immortality is a means of remaking the World."
"Slow down," Nicols said. "This is exactly what I was talking about. You just go off into your own world with all this myth and symbol crap. I can't keep up."
"They're going to kill more people." I spelled it out. "They're going to gather as much energy as possible and try to force God into re-creating the world."
Nicols snapped his mouth shut, swallowing his objections. "They're going somewhere urban," he ground out. "And, if they're not going back to Seattle, then the closest place is Portland. In Oregon."
Nicols drove south and west, the mountain off his left shoulder. The roads were narrow and twisted, contorted tracks through the wilderness, but each curve, each bend, brought more signs of civilization. I was useless as a navigator as he worked his way back to the main highway, so I studied his chart and his notes. Seeking an understanding of the Weave around him, of how our threads were tangled together. Piotr had done the Celtic Cross for Nicols. Ten cards: six to show where he had been, four to point to the future.
The first was the Ace of Disks, a strong foundation that prepared the initiate for his expulsion from the garden of innocence. Laid across this card were more disks, five of them. Nicols' notes indicated this card had been reversed, inverting the standard definition of sanctuary into a chaotic representation of being cast out of safety. The expulsion from Eden again, the loss of innocence. Naked in the world.
Third-the card placed above the first pair-was the Hanged Man, the agent that sought to guide him. An enlightening inversion, a suspension reversing the magus' worldview. The Fisher King, the mad visionary of the land. The future hanging on the cusp of tomorrow, waiting to be revealed.
I thought about the card that had been my crown-the World. Also known as the Aeon, it was the promised fruition of the enlightened effort, a new world order brought about by philosophers and mystics. In my dream, however, it was a sexually rapacious cherub who was changing the world.
And, just like that, the symbolism became clear. The little fucker's cock was a staff, a pole, an axis mundi, and he had been planting his seed-his magickal nature-into the miniature planet. It was a perversion of the old agrarian rituals, but it made sense. The cherub was Bernard, raping the world in order to remake it in his own image.
In an intuitive flash, I knew I was the Fisher King in Nicols' reading. I was the inverted magus in Nicols' worldview-my feet suspended, my head pointed down to the earth. I was the adept who had vanished into the tunnels of despair on the back side of the Tree in order to find enlightenment.
Wait for the light.
I shivered, beginning to understand the collision of our threads. The flash of enlightenment that had come to me in the Arena about the Wheel of Fortune rode heavily in my head. The cycle of death and rebirth, kings buried and born again. It was Crowley, following Waite's lead of adding Christian and Kabbalistic imagery to the Wheel, who connected the cycle of death and rebirth to Thoth. The ibis-headed guide who waited to carry us up from the burial of the flesh.