(That the woman must die had been clear from the beginning; she was peculiarly necessary to the monsters, and killing her would send a lovely ripple effect of not only fear but despair through the city’s undead, which the entity has been looking forward to a great deal. The young man who had stolen the books was much less important, and merely frightening him had seemed sufficient expenditure of effort at the time.)
The rich and heady anger of its chief servant at the initial failure to dispose of the woman had gone some way toward distracting the entity from its hunger—but not for long. Thinking, now, it reaches out for the servant’s mind—a red welter of intense and fervent belief that, to the entity, is beautiful—and gives a little tug. It does not have to wait long before the man appears in its chamber, in the chamber of the peculiar talisman it has chosen to inhabit, and falls on his knees in the glare of its light. In his rough-spun habit and cowl he could have been kneeling before any number of altars in the centuries gone by. This chamber is as much a sanctuary as any cathedral of stone and gold and jewel-colored glass.
Come closer, it says inside his head. The servant’s scarred face and blank, unblinded eyes are turned up to it, worshipful. I have a new task for you.
“Yes, Lord,” he says, a whisper, barely audible under the endless hum. “I will not fail You again.”
I know. Its voice is gentle. I have made you the minister of God, a revenger to execute My wrath. Your heart is true, and in your mouth are the names of God, and in your hand the great and strong sword.
Speaking in the forms and cadences its tools expect has always been easy. It has an ear for language; taking on the role of these people’s very specific image of God had posed no challenge whatsoever. It has been many gods, over the millennia. Many.
The servant bows lower before it. Tears gleam on his blue-lit face. “Yes, Lord, thank You, Lord, what would You command me?” In his voice is such joy.
Let them be burned with fire, says the voice inside the light. Kindle a fire in their company, and the flame shall burn up the wicked, the blood-leeches and their servants, the thief and the Devil’s whore and the demon-creature and the excommunicant. Let them be burned with fire. There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.
He is nodding, eagerly. “Will the fire not spread, Lord?”
Let it. Now the thing allows some of its pleasure and amusement into its voice. Oh, it has been so long since the last time it razed a city, such a long while since the last time it fed anywhere near so well; this will be even more delicious than it had foreseen. Its tools’ devotion to their code of purifying this world of evil is both lovely and peculiarly useful for its own purposes. I have set my face against this city for evil, and not for good, and give it into your hand, it tells him, in the words of the book he has spent his life studying. You shall destroy it utterly, and burn the towers of this place with fire, and all that are therein. Let it spread. Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into Hell, for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.
“When shall it be done?”
It considers. First call your brothers back from their work, and let them make ready with prayer and meditation. When the time is right I will set your new tasks upon you. Now the voice is warmer than ever, genuinely pleased, anticipatory. By the end of the seventh day, which is the Lord’s day, My will shall be done, and you shall—all—know peace.
CHAPTER 11
When Greta woke up, fully clothed but shoeless, there was a note leaning against the glass of water on the bedside table. Forgive the presumption. R.
She sat up, the movement accompanied by a fusillade of cracks from her spine, and winced. Being carried off to bed like a kid who’d stayed up past her bedtime was admittedly to be preferred over spending the night sleeping where she’d dozed off at the dinner table, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t embarrassing. At least she’d managed to outlast Cranswell, who had drifted off in the middle of an increasingly incoherent conversation with Fass about what did and did not rate as part of the binary Heaven–Hell balance.
Six hours of sleep was not even near enough to make up for the past several days, but it at least made her able to think a little straighter, pushing away some of the fatigue poisons and the dull, formless dread.
She swung her legs off the bed and got up stiffly, padding over to the window to notice that it wasn’t raining and that a weak, watery sun was even trying to poke its way through the clouds, for the first time all week. Slightly cheered up, Greta went to check on her latest patient and found Ruthven sitting by the burned monk’s bed reading, yesterday’s tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Some of his hair had even escaped its usual aerodynamic styling process and drooped over his forehead. Absurdly and suddenly she wished she could draw, wanting to catch the scene on paper: Casual Dracula.
“I’ve been watching since about three in the morning,” he said, not looking up at her until he’d marked his page in the book he was reading. “No change for the worse. He woke up twice and asked for water, mumbled a lot of stuff about damnation and the reprobate and eternal suffering, and went right back to sleep. If that’s what this is. Unconsciousness, sleep, I don’t know.”
Greta came over to put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. After a moment he covered her hand with his own, and smiled up at her. The smile was only a little worn round the edges. He had color in his face; his lips were faintly pink. “You’re being wonderful about all of this, Ruthven. Thanks for looking after him, despite—”
“Despite everything,” Ruthven finished for her. “Yes, well. One tries, you know. One does one’s best. I went out to eat after you’d conked out, so Fass took the first watch, but I took over and sent him to bed when I got home. Varney, I think, didn’t quite trust himself not to come over all murderous in the middle of the night, and sensibly stayed far away.”
Something was kicking her brain. “Where did we even get to last night? I remember them talking about entities that don’t belong to either God or the Devil, and you were trying to explain electronics to me and Sir Francis and it wasn’t working.”
“More or less. Fass was telling me a bit about his version of magic after you’d dozed off. He says it works very much the same way as electromagnetism. Similarly enough that there are—oh, laws, and equations and things describing its behavior, which under other circumstances I’d want to learn a great deal more about.” He shrugged. “The point is that there’s a lot of overlap between physics and magic, and that suggests to me that perhaps whatever’s turned this poor bastard into what he is now is using the rectifier and the radiation it puts out to transmit its power. The same way a radio transmitter works.”
Greta raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s using the UV light to … what, control them?”