They took one look at the black robe, listening to the voice whispering out of the seemingly empty hood, and capitulated. One of them even gave a mad little laugh of relief, a strong sense of vindication flooding his mind.
The High Magus was taking a bath when Quinn strode into his quarters. It could have been the penthouse of some multistellar corporation president, certainly there was little evidence of idolatrous worship amongst the opulence. Much to Wener’s disappointment he didn’t even have naked servant girls to wash him. Slimline domestic mechanoids stood quietly among the white and blue furnishings. His one concession to turpitude appeared to be the goblet he was drinking a seventeen-year-old red wine out of, its vulvic influences impossible to ignore. Islands of lime-green bubbles drifted round his round frame, giving off a scent of sweet pine.
He was already frowning as Quinn glided over the gold-flecked marble to the sunken bath, presumably forewarned by the failure of his neural nanonics. His eyes widened at the invasion, then narrowed as the eccentric delegation stared down at him.
“You’re a possessed,” he said directly to Quinn.
There was no panic in the mind of the High Magus, which surprised Quinn, if anything the old man appeared curious. “No, I am the Messiah of our Lord.”
“Really?”
The mocking irony of the tone caused the hem of Quinn’s robe to stir. “You will obey me, or I will have your fat shit body possessed by someone more worthy.”
“More compliant, you mean.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“I have no intention of fucking with you or anyone else.”
Quinn was puzzled by this whole exchange. The original calmness he could sense in the High Magus was slowly replaced by weariness. The High Magus took another sip of the wine.
“I’m here to bring Night to the Earth as Our Lord bids,” Quinn said.
“He bids nothing of the sort, you pathetic little prick.”
Quinn’s ashen face materialized to thrust out of his hood.
The High Magus laughed out loud at the shock and anger he saw there, and committed suicide. Without any noise or hysterics, his body froze, then slowly slithered down the side of the bath. It rolled to one side, and floated inertly on the surface, white bloated rims of fat bobbing among the green bubbles. The wine goblet sank, a red stain marking where it had vanished.
“What are you doing?” Quinn shouted at the departing soul. He sensed a final sneer as the retreating wisps of energy evaporated amid dimensional folds. His claw hands shot out of the voluminous sleeves, as if to pull the essence of the High Magus back to face judgement. “Shit!” he gasped. The magus must have been demented. Nobody. Nobody went into the beyond, not now they knew for sure what awaited them there.
“Asshole,” Wener grunted. Along with the other acolytes, he was perturbed by the death. Trying not to show it.
Quinn knelt down at the side of the bath, searching the corpse with eyes and eldritch senses for the mechanism of its demise. There were the usual weapons implants, he could perceive those all right, hard splinters among the softer grain of organic matter, even the neural nanonics were discernible. But Quinn’s energistic power had nullified them. What then? What instrument could effect an instantaneous and painless suicide? And more curiously, why was the High Magus equipped with it?
He straightened slowly, retracting his head and arms back within his cloak’s veil of night. “It doesn’t matter,” he told his agitated followers. “God’s Brother knows how to deal with traitors, the beyond is not a refuge for those who fail Him.”
A dozen heads nodded in eager acceptance before him. “Now go and bring them to me,” he said.
The acolytes scattered to do his bidding. They rounded up everyone in the headquarters, and herded them into the temple. It was a vaulting chamber nestled at the core of the Leicester, a baroque fabrication of gilded pillars and crude cut stone blocks. Six giant pentagons were etched on the curving ceiling, emitting a dull crimson glow. The grumble of the storm was just audible, a bass reverberation sneaking through the Leicester to give the floor a faint vibration.
Quinn stood beside the altar as the captives were ushered up to him one at a time. Every time, he repeated the simple choice of futures: follow me, or be possessed. Merely claiming you would submit was no use. Quinn interrogated their innermost beliefs and fears before passing his final decree. He wasn’t surprised by how many failed. Inevitably, this far up the sect hierarchy, they had grown soft. Still evil, still exploiting the soldiers below them, but not for the right reasons. Maintaining their own status and comforts had evolved into their dominant urge, not a willingness to further the cause of the Light Bringer. Traitors.
He made them suffer for their crime. Over thirty were chained to the altar and vanquished. By now he had become proficient in opening a fissure back into the beyond; but more importantly he’d learned how to impose his own presence around the opening, valiantly guarding the gateway from the unworthy. Even in their utter desperation for escape, many souls turned aside from such a custodian. Those who did emerge conformed to Quinn’s ideal. Nearly all of them had been sect members while they were alive.
He gathered them together after the ceremony, explaining what God’s Brother had decided for them. “We need more than one arcology to bring Night to this world,” he told them. “So I’m leaving you this one for yourselves. Don’t piss this opportunity away. I want you to take it over, but carefully, not like the way the possessed do on other planets, even Capone. Those dickheads just rush up and head butt every town they come across. And each time, the cops swoop down and pick them off. This time it’s gonna be different. You’ve got the acolytes worshipping the ground you shit on. Use them. Moving around is what lets those fucking AIs sniff you out. You mess with processors and power cables just by being near them. So don’t go near them. Stay in the sect centres and get the acolytes to bring people to you.”
“Which people?” Dobbie asked. “I understand how we don’t gotta move about. But, shit, Quinn, there’s over three hundred million people in New York. The acolytes can’t bring them all to us.”
“They can bring the ones that count, the police captains and technical guys, the ones gonna cause you grief. Or at least knock them out, stop them from reporting that you’ve arrived in town. That’s all I want from you right now. Get yourselves established. There’s a sect centre in every dome, take them over and hole up there for a while. Live like a fucking king, I’m not saying don’t enjoy yourself. But I want you ready, I want you to build up a coven of possessed in each dome. Loyal ones, you all know how fucking important discipline is. We’re going strategic. Learn where the major fusion generators are, hunt down the fresh water stations, and the sewage plants, see which intersections the transport system depends on, track down critical nodes in the communication net. The acolytes will know all this crap, or they can find out. Then when I give the word, you smash each of those sites into lava. You paralyse the whole fucking arcology with terrorism, bring it to its knees. That way the cops won’t be able to organize any resistance when we emerge to claim glory for Him. You come out into the open and start possessing others, and you turn them loose. Nobody can run, there’s nowhere to go, no outside. Possessed always win on asteroids, this is no different, just bigger, is all.”
“The new possessed, they won’t worship God’s Brother,” someone said. “We can choose a few who will to start with, but if we turn them loose, there’s no way millions of them is going to do like we say.”
“Of course not,” Quinn said. “Not at first, anyway. They have to be forced into this, like I did to Nyvan. Haven’t you worked it out yet? What’s going to happen to an arcology with three hundred million possessed living in it?”