Versus my body. Warm living flesh suffused with my light. Patchwork as it may be, it was still me.
It always had been. It always would be.
"You have no power," I whispered to the shadow heart of my soul. I was the Divine Spark-the Godhead-Samael was my khabit, my shadow-the Demiurge who thought the Universe was his. My prison was believing in him. "Not anymore."
He smiled, his red tongue hanging between his burn-blackened lips. "Maybe not." He nodded past my shoulder. "But I have power over them."
This was the signal the soul-dead had been waiting for. In a wave that was all pressure and no presence, they flooded over me. Their hands pulled at my hair, my flesh. Their cracked fingers tore at my skin, trying to rend my shell and reach the bright light of my soul.
I detonated the Chorus, a localized thermobaric exaltation that cremated an open space around me. Everything became white ash, infused with light. The greedy soul-dead became albinos whose flesh flaked off dry bones which, in turn, became pale motes dancing in the air. The ground, wiped clean of soot; the nearby grass turned to translucent ice. The air snapped, a crackling expression of exothermic change.
Samael staggered away from me, his face and hands rimed with twisted frost. His head tipped back and midnight-colored fluid drained from his open skull. The ichor steamed and sizzled as it splashed on the whitened pavement. He tried to stop me as I shouldered past toward the glowing center of the Tower, but his hands cracked as they touched my hot flesh. His fingers fell off like shards of ice, and the stumps of his arms banged my elbow and back like broken branches.
I was bereft of the Chorus. I had detonated their captive light, emptied myself of their influence and outrage. Their explosive burst had destroyed the mob of Qliphotic shells attacking me, but there were still more of them. More empty shells inflamed with hunger.
As the aftermath of the Chorus' immolation faded, another mob rushed across the plaza. But I was beyond their reach. They couldn't enter the wide beam of light within the shell of the Tower. I crossed into the light and gave myself up to its seductive gravity. My purified body ascending. A star, rising.
XXXI
At the top, the light was a physical presence, a globe wrapped around the peak of the building. I floated against it, the pliable surface dimpling at my touch. As more of my body touched the limpid film, the shell became sticky flypaper. I didn't struggle and the gravity within the membrane pulled me flat against the rounded shape. There was a brief sensation of pain-lightning stroking the plane of my skin-and then the world inverted.
Inside, there was neither color nor tint-polar opposition to the gritty darkness of the dead city. Every surface was bleached white. There were no shadows, only dim lines that delineated edges and borders-variations on the play of light.
The soot of the city no longer covered me. It had not come through the barrier. I could almost see the pale history of an outline beneath me, a fading print of my body done in static-charged ash and detritus. My skin was translucent, my blood a series of pale tributaries running through valleys and vales of colorless flesh. The stark tint of my bones was evident beneath the naked flesh. The blue and gray of my clothes had already lightened to the color of early dawn.
As I walked toward the source of light, I became lighter still, my clothes vanishing into nothingness, my skin becoming rice paper wrapped around a clear gelatinous mass. My bones were hardened crystal, sculpted by an Old Master.
My memory of the penthouse was a historical document of its presence. The obstructions of the furniture were gone. The trinity of Thoth figures no longer stood by the window, their metal frames had vanished. Only the mirrored facets of the sphere remained, a glittering diamond of light that was purer and brighter than all the surrounding white.
Lying beneath the floating sphere as if asleep was a two-dimensional line drawing of Nicols, like an Impressionist caricature dashed off on a coffee house napkin. I bent over and tried to touch him and found he really was nothing more than a collection of a few strokes.
"The memories fade until they are nothing but lines and shadows."
I looked to the source of the voice. Bernard was the only color. His robe crawled with motion. The script-once black, now white-wriggled and squirmed with animate mysticism on a blue and sickly orange background. A silver halo lay low enough upon his head that it bisected the crown of his skull. His face was pale like the visage of a man who has not been aboveground for a year, but it was still the color of flesh. Unlike the bleached translucence of my skin. The ruddy color of his neck looked like a birthmark or an allergic rash.
He inclined his crowned head. "The walker between worlds. I thought you might be the one to return." His voice was quiet and sibilant, his throat still new. "Have you come to take Julian's place?"
He looked through me, so easy to do in my current state. "Yes," Bernard continued, "before I did not understand the nature of the haze that hid you from view. It is gone now, but I think I know why it was there. From his reading of The Book of Thoth, Jabir Ibn Hayyan theorized that an alchemist could learn how to actively transform soul energy, that a living harvester was possible. That was his interpretation of Thoth's Master of the Mysteries-the one who understood how to use the Key. Am I right? That's what you are, isn't it?"
Lightbreaker.
"Oh, this petulant resistance of yours is frustrating. There is so much we could teach each other, Mr. Markham. I want to learn about your technique, about how you take a soul. It was Jabir's theory of soul transformation that pointed me toward the mystery of the mirror."
"You know," I said, breaking my silence, "it probably wasn't an accident that The Book of Thoth was destroyed."
"There is a reason for all obscuration, Mr. Markham. Our ignorance must be overcome, we must actively seek to remove the scales from our eyes. The Book wasn't destroyed. It was broken and scattered because it was meant to be found again, reassembled by someone worthy."
"You?"
"It is the crowning achievement of my life, putting together The Book of Thoth," Bernard admitted. "It began with Ficino-"
"His book from the Sorbonne? The one the Watchers say doesn't exist."
He shook his head. "The second part of Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae doesn't exist. But that's not what I found. A student of Ficino's wrote a tiny tract bridging the Theologia Platonica and Jabir's Kitab al-Zuhra. The document was a workbook essentially, a paper charting how his master encoded references to Jabir's work, how the Persian hid parts of TheBook of Thoth within the Kitab al-Zuhra." He laughed. "That was the first lie I told them. 'A lost Ficino.' Only Protector Briande saw through my eager bibliomania."
"He sees a lot of things. I just left him on the far bank. With Pender. Who won't be joining us."
"No? I thought not when you arrived. I am surprised the Protector didn't come in your stead."
"Too busy Witnessing."
"Really? So he does believe the Key will work."
"Or not. He might just not want to be standing at ground zero when dawn arrives. He knows what the Key does, doesn't he? You went to him when you realized you needed a copy of the Kitab."