Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

Mo shudders. “Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else’s.”

“You have evidence of this?” Panin leans towards her eagerly.

“I’ve seen it.” Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. “Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point-they had been thoroughly possessed-”

“That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?”

Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. “Yes.”

“Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo-it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer’s own will to violate-”

Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. “I don’t need that lecture right now.”

“All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but-there is a personal connection?”

“What?”

“You appear unduly upset…”

“Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.”

Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes.” She raises her glass and drains it, then puts it back on the table with a hard clack. “You can tell me anything you’re at liberty to say, about why the Free Church attracted your attention. And what you think they’re doing.” She glances round. “Now might be a good time to check your wards.” The bar is filling up, but the other after-hours drinkers are all crowding away from the table Mo and Panin share, as if a glass sphere encloses them.

Panin nods. “The ward is adequate,” he assures her. “As for the Church, I need to tell you a story of the Revolution.

“During our civil war-the war that split families and slew the spirit of a nation, ending with Lenin’s victory in 1922-many factions fought against the Reds; and as the traditional White leadership collapsed, strange opportunists sprang to prominence. In Siberia, there was a very strange, very wicked man, a Baron by birth, of German ancestry: Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, or Ungern Von Sternberg as he styled himself. Sternberg was a monster. An early obsession with Eastern mysticism warped his mind permanently, and then he found something… He was a personal friend of the Bogd Khan, a mass poisoner and coincidentally the Mongolian equivalent of the Dalai Lama. During the civil war, Sternberg ran an extermination camp near Dauria, east of Lake Baikal. The Whites used to send the death trains to Sternberg, and he used their cargo for his own horrible ends. It’s said that there was a hillside in the woods above Dauria where his men used to kill their Red prisoners by tying them to saplings and quartering them alive. In summer, Sternberg used to go to that hill and camp there under the stars, surrounded by the bones and dismembered bloody pieces of his enemies. It was said by his soldiers that it was the only time he was at peace. He was a terrible man, even by the standards of a time of terror.”

Mo is nodding. “Was he a member of the Brotherhood?”

Panin licks his lips. “Sternberg was not a worshiper of lath-Hotep; whenever he found such he slew them, usually by flogging until the living flesh fell from their bones. As a matter of fact, we don’t really know what he was. We know what he did, though. It was one of the great works of pre-computational necromancy, and it took the priests of the Black Buddha to achieve it, fed by the blood and gore of Sternberg’s victims.

“There are places where the wall between the worlds is thin. Many of these are to be found in central Asia. The Bogd Khan’s gruesome midnight rituals-the ones he drank to forget, so heavily that he went blind-there was true seeing there, visions of the ancient plateau on an alien world where the Sleeper in the Pyramid lies sightless and undead. The Bogd was terrified. When his friend Ungern Sternberg offered him the sole currency that would buy relief from these visions-the lives of tens of thousands of victims-the Holy Shining One, eighth incarnation of the Bogd Gegen and Khan of Mongolia, fell upon his shoulder and wept bloody tears as he promised eternal friendship.

“The priests of the Bogd’s court worked with Ungern Sternberg’s torturers to build a wall around the pyramid, sent death squads shambling into the chilly, thin air on the Sleeper’s Plateau to erect a fence of impaled sacrificial victims. No countermeasure to the Sleeper was created on such a scale for many years, not until your Air Force began their occult surveillance program in the 1970s. As for Sternberg”-Panin shrugs-“he went on to back the wrong side in a civil war. But that does not concern us.”

“What an interesting story.”

“Is it?” Panin looks at her sharply.

She shrugs. “I suppose if I say ‘not really’ you’ll tell me why I’m wrong.”

“If you insist.” He snaps his fingers. “Another round, please.” To Mo: “It is important. You see”-he waits for his minder to depart in the direction of the bar-“one of the tools used by the monks was a preta, a hungry ghost; a body in its custody could function on the Sleeper’s Plateau far more effectively than any of Sternberg’s men, who had a tendency to die or go mad after only a few hours. The hungry ghost needed bodies to occupy, though its kind is far more intelligent and powerful than the run-of-the-mill possession case. This particular hungry ghost knows the transitive order in which the Death Fence around the Sleeper’s Pyramid was constructed-by implication, the order in which it must be de-constructed if the Sleeper is ever to be released. It was summoned by a ritual that Sternberg documented and sent west, for translation by the only woman he ever trusted: a trust that was misplaced, as it happens, because the document vanished into your organization’s archives and has never been seen since. If the Black Brotherhood could get their hands on the document-I believe you call it the Fuller Memorandum-they might well imagine they could bind the hungry ghost into a new body, compel it to service, and order it to begin dismantling the Death Fence.”

Mo nods jerkily. “Yes, that’s very interesting,” she says distractedly.

“If someone had convinced them that the time was right now, not in a couple more years, they might be induced to premature action. And if that someone allowed them to obtain a falsified, corrupted version of the Fuller Memorandum, they might well try to use it to release their master-”

Mo focuses. “The Sleeper. You’re not saying it’s N’yar lath-Hotep itself?”

“No, nothing that powerful: there is a hierarchy of horrors here, a ladder that must be climbed. But the thing in the pyramid can set the process in motion, starting a chain of events that will ultimately open the doors of uncreation and release the Black Pharaoh. To do so, they would best wait for the conjunction of chance; but it is in the nature of mortal cultists that they are impatient. And James is of the opinion that they should be encouraged to indulge their fatal impatience.”

“I see.”

“No, I don’t believe you do. The Black Brotherhood are at their most dangerous when they work within an organization that is unaware it has been infiltrated. Your-husband. Has be been missing long?” She shakes her head. “Exactly. Something alerted you?” She nods. “James sent him on an errand, yes?” She nods again. “Imagine you are an initiate of the Brotherhood. You see an agent of a hostile organization, and you have acquired the Sternberg Fragment and are prepared to carry out the ritual of summoning and binding the hungry ghost. Would it not be to your advantage to pick, as a carrier, that hostile agent? So that you can send him back in among them, ridden by your own demon…”