“I’ll be sure to tell him you said that,” Mo says snippishly. She takes Cassie’s limp hand and tugs, gently. “Goodbye!”
“Be seeing you!” the Mandate calls lightly as they trudge upstairs to help themselves to the facilities in the suite Schiller and his handmaids reserved for their own use. And Mo is so exhausted and frightened that she neither notices nor pays any heed to the beetle-black Jaguar spinning its tires on the gravel out front, in its driver’s haste to evade the descending flyswatter.
*
Raymond Schiller flees for his life, screaming silently at the emptiness inside his head.
For the past two years he has never been alone within his skull; sleeping or waking, he lives every day in the mindful presence of divinity, of the sleeping god he awakened in the temple on the dead plateau. His first attempt at summoning the Christ-thing was thwarted, but his god is no longer comatose. Deities, like brain-damaged humans, can experience a locked-in state in which they are aware of the passage of time and of people around them. And if you try hard enough to gain such a god’s attention, so hard that you loan them a part of your own brain, they may answer your prayers.
Schiller’s prayers were answered on the third day, kneeling before the wrecked sarcophagus in the crypt beneath the temple—cut off from Earth by the severing of the portal through which he had entered—and his god made its wishes clear. It would take more than a handful of souls to bring the Sleeper to full awakening now—a number closer to fifty million, rather than the five thousand he tried with previously, will surely suffice—but the Sleeper is nothing if not subtle, and in its divine majesty it showed Schiller, through dreams, what tools and stratagems he must employ if he was to gain absolute control over such a cornucopia of sacrificial power.
And it was all going so smoothly, right up until the moment when Anneka, glassy-eyed and panting, lowered herself carefully onto Norman Grove’s eager middle-aged erection and tensed, her pelvic floor muscles contracting around the sheath of scar tissue that surrounds the host that grows inside her in place of her womb and ovaries, and whose open cyclostomal jaws lie just behind her labia—
—bit down hard, then pushed herself up with her arms, gasping from the pain as half her host tore away from her, like the worker bee’s barbed stinger that stays behind in its target—
Schiller felt her moment of transcendent joy, and then the horror as, all of a sudden, the newly spawned host was ripped away from his soul, muted, blinded, deafened by the deadening numb silence that engulfed all his scattered organs. The other hosts, the eaters of tongues, had fallen silent too: What is this? What blanket of mutilation falls across his will? Why can he no longer hear the dreams of god resonating in his mind? Who has stolen his grace?
Chittering vile pests, icy parasites from outside the world, invade his empty vessels, stealing flesh and will and memories. Schiller tears himself away from the communion rite and runs. The newly inducted Inner Temple members—ministers of government one and all—are still functioning, and he sends them to the surface to aid Anneka in hunting down the intruders who have violated the glory of the coming of the Lord. But his beautiful handmaids are half-exhausted by the effort of shedding the new hosts and bringing so many to the faith, and some of them are stunned by the same assault that Schiller was barely able to resist. He flees by the emergency fire stairs at the back, and as he does so he feels a vast and horrifying sense of dread steal over him. It casts a shadow as large as his god, but penumbral and chillingly amused rather than warm and loving. The one who casts the shadow out of space is approaching the front of the house, and Schiller knows, with a flat sense of despair, that if the shadow bearer notices him then that will be all over—
Drenched in chilly sweat, shivering in the night air, Schiller yanks his surplice and vestments over his head and throws them to the ground. He stumbles down a narrow servants’ passage at the back of the house, then through a scullery door and out past the stables yard at the rear. His car is parked there but he senses the presence approaching across the grounds and flees, heading away towards the front of the house. He knows he must escape, knows that any who fail to do so will be taken by the ancient foe. But he’s still human enough to want to save those closest to him; if only Anneka hadn’t—
There is a flare of green-white pain in his mind, a sense of Anneka’s desperation and rage and love of the Lord, then the echo of a terrible voice asking, “Is that the best you can do?” And he blanks for a few minutes. When he comes to himself he’s in the driving seat of an unfamiliar car—a big cat snarling from the hub of the steering wheel—racing through darkness along a narrow road between hedges, overhung by the boughs of ancient trees. “London,” he tells himself. “Got to get to London.” The Falcon is parked at Stansted, and if he goes there he can run for home—but maybe they’ll be waiting for him? First he needs to visit the apartment in Docklands, check in with his people, see if it’s safe to run and, if so, where. The climax of tonight’s communion was to be his holy union with the CFO of a big internet search company in Europe. But he was to induct another new handmaid afterwards, in the apartment, wasn’t he? A temple whore, a missionary, to bring the joy and the light and the host to as many powerful men as possible. He was saving himself for her—well, the part of him he shed and left in the fridge two days ago—but that’s not necessary now. What is necessary is his passport: without it they won’t let him fly home.
He ought to change into a regular suit, he realizes. And groom himself. A disheveled man in evening dress arriving at an airport with blood on his shoes and wild eyes and no papers, such a man will raise questions. Nor does he want to leave the hibernating host where his Lord’s enemies might find it. They might experiment on it. They might try to cure it. They might find the link that binds it to his Lord and send a poison of the mind through it. If the new handmaid is waiting in accordance with his instructions, he’ll take time to convert her before he leaves; but leave he must, before the new day dawns …