George Martin: Aces High

"And you," she said. He could feel her voice echoing in her chest. "Are you all right?"

He drifted back to his own body. "Weak," he said. "But I'll be okay."

"Should I… call somebody for you?"

He knew what she was offering, knew he should agree to it. Caroline, or one of the others, would be the fastest way to get his power back. But it would also weaken his bond to Eileen. "No," he said.

She finished dressing and bent over to kiss him lingeringly. "Thank you," she said.

"Don't," he said. "Don't thank me."

"I'd better go." Her impatience, her strength and vitality, were a physical force in the room. He was too distant from it to be jealous of her. Then she was gone, and he slept again.

He watched through Eileen's eyes as she stood by the front door of the bookstore, waiting for Clarke to close up. He could have moved all the way into her mind, but it would have used up what little strength he was slowly getting back. Besides, he was warm and comfortable where he was. Until the hands grabbed him and shook him awake and he was looking into a pair of gold shields. "Get your clothes on," a voice said. "You're under arrest."

They gave him a holding cell to himself. It had a gray tile floor and gray-painted cement walls. He squatted in the corner and shivered, too weak to stand. On the wall next to him somebody had scratched a stick figure with a giant dripping prick and balls.

For an hour he'd been unable to concentrate long enough to make contact with Eileen. He was sure Balsam's Masons had killed her.

He shut his eyes. A cell door banged closed down the hall and brought him back. Concentrate, goddamn it, he thought. He was in a long room with a high ceiling. Yellow light flickered off the distant walls from banks of candles. The floor was black-and-white-checkered tile. At the front of the, room stood two Doric columns, one on either side, that didn't quite reach the ceiling. They stood for Solomon's temple; they were named Boaz and Joachim, the first two Masonic Words.

He didn't want to take control of Eileen's body, though he could if it came to that. From what he could tell she was all right. He could feel her excitement, but she wasn't in pain or even especially afraid.

A man matching Eileen's description of Balsam stood at the front of the room, on the dais reserved for the Worshipful Master of the Temple. Over his dark suit he wore a white Masonic apron with bright red trim. He wore a tabard like an oversized bib around his neck. It was white too, with a red looped cross in the center. An ankh.

"Who speaks for this woman?" Balsam asked.

There were a dozen or more others in the room, both sexes, all of them in aprons and tabards. They made a curving line along the left side of the room. Most of them seemed normal enough. One man had bright red skin and no hair at all, an obvious joker. Another seemed terribly frail, with thick glasses and a dazed expression. He was the only one not wearing street clothes under his apron. Instead he was wrapped in a white robe a couple sizes too large for him, with a hood and sleeves that hung down over his hands.

Clarke moved out of line and said, "I speak for her." Balsam handed him an intricate mask, covered in what seemed to be gold foil. It was a hawk's head, and it completely covered Clarke's face.

"Who opposes?" Balsam said.

A young oriental woman, rather plain, but with an undefinable sexual quality, stepped forward. "I oppose." Balsam gave her a mask with long, pointed ears and a sharp face. When she put it on, it gave her a cold, disdainful look. Fortunato felt Eileen's pulse begin to pick up.

"Who claims her?"

"I claim her." Another man came forward and took a mask with the jackal face of Anubis.

The air behind Balsam rippled and started to glow. The candles flickered out. Slowly a golden man took shape, lighting the room. He was as tall as the ceiling, with canine features and hot yellow eyes. He stood with folded arms and looked down at Eileen. Her pulse leapt and stuttered and she dug her fingernails into her palms. No one else seemed to notice that he was there.

The woman wearing the pointed mask stood in front of Eileen. "Osiris," the woman said. "I am Set, of the company of Annu, son of Seb and Nut."

He felt Eileen open her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything the woman's right hand exploded against her face. She fell over backward and slid three feet across the tiles. "Behold," the woman said. She touched her fingers to Eileen's eyes and they came away wet. "The fertilizing rain."

"Osiris," said the jackal-headed man, stepping up to take the woman's place. "I am Anubis, son of Ra, Opener of the Ways. Mine is the Funeral Mountain." He moved behind Eileen and held her against the floor.

Now Clarke was kneeling next to her, the golden man looming behind him. "Osiris," he said. Light glittered from the tiny eyes of the hawk mask. "I am Horus, thy son and the son of Isis." He pressed two fingers against Eileen's lips, forcing her mouth open. "I have come to embrace thee, I am thy son Horus, I have pressed thy mouth; I am thy son, I love thee. Thy mouth was closed, but I have set in order for thee thy mouth and thy teeth. I open for thee thy two eyes. I have opened for thee thy mouth with the instrument of Anubis. Horus hath opened the mouth of the dead, as he in times of old opened thy mouth, with the iron which came forth from Set. The deceased shall walk and shall speak, and her body shall be with the great company of the gods in the Great House of the Aged One in Annu, and she shall receive there the ureret crown from Horus, the lord of mankind."

Clarke took something that looked like a wooden snake from Balsam. Eileen tried to pull away, but the jackal-headed man had too tight a grip on her. Clarke swung the snake back and then gently touched Eileen's mouth and eyes with it four times. "O Osiris, I have established for thee the two jawbones in thy face, and they are now separated."

He stood aside. Balsam bent over her until his face was only inches away and said, "Now I give to thee the hekau, the word of power. Horus hath given thee the use of thy mouth and thou canst say it. The word is TIAMAT "

"TIAMAT," Eileen whispered.

Fortunato, numb with fear, pushed himself into Balsam's mind.

The trick was to keep moving, not to get overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. If he kept triggering associations he would end up in the part of Balsam's memory that he wanted.

At the moment Balsam was near ecstasy. Fortunato followed the images and totems of Egyptian magic until he found the earliest ones, and from there made his way to Balsam's father, and back through seven generations to Black John himself.

Everything Balsam had ever heard or read or imagined about his ancestor was here. His first swindle, when he took the goldsmith Marano for sixty ounces of fine gold. His escape from Palermo. Meeting the Greek, Altotas, and learning alchemy. Egypt, Turkey, Malta, and finally Rome at age twenty-six, handsome, clever, carrying letters of introduction to the cream of society.

Where he met Lorenza. Fortunato saw her as Cagliostro had, naked before him for the first time, only fourteen years old but dizzyingly beautiful: slim, elegant, olive-skinned, With jet-black wavy hair spread out around her, tiny perfect breasts, smelling of wild coastal flowers, her throaty voice screaming his name as she wrapped her legs around him.

Traveling through Europe in coaches lined in deep green velvet, Lorenza's beauty opening society to them without reservation, living on what they begged in the halls of nobility and handing out the rest as alms.

And finally England.

Fortunato watched as Cagliostro rode into the forest on the back of a blooded ebony hunter. He'd gotten separated, not quite by accident, from Lorenza and the young English lord who was so taken with her. Doubtless His Lordship was having his way with her even now in some ditch beside the road, and doubtless Lorenza had already found a way to turn it to their advantage.