Marching through the diffuse orange sweeps of lantern light, Phyllis finished reciting the myth of the Zombie and the system of prestige.
A silence fell about them, interrupted only by the soft crunches of tunnel grit beneath shoes. The echoes of shuddering pipes, rumbling rails, and groaning machinery emanated low and soft from the walls. The earth seemed alive around them, breathing in mechanisms while reflecting upon the foundational legend of the whole damn world.
For the Baron, this felt almost religious. He didn’t believe in gods or the divine, but he believed that occasionally the whole sweep of history bundled itself up, stacking cause upon cause, riding higher and higher like energy piling up into the peak of a wave. Then, and only then, someone riding the swell might nudge it this way or that before it crested over and crashed into a long future. Someone could choose the beginning of otherwise inevitable, world-making change.
The Baron had once ridden the wave of science and philosophy, enjoying the Enlightenment. The Apostate had crested the wave of the occult, undoing empires. The Zombie had ridden that highest wave of ancient magic, and all of mundane history had followed his sins.
Even Marco, the initiate, was hushed in awe of that terrible influence.
Then Phyllis chuckled, breaking the reverent moment. She glanced back at the Zombie. “No offense meant to you, of course.”
“None taken!” The invincible man was grinning broadly, teeth reflecting warmly in the lamplight. “I’m always flattered by her version of the story. I’m not so clever, and it’s hard to imagine I outsmarted the gods, but here I am. The Apostate’s explanation is as good as any. She leaves out my favorite detail though.”
“What’s that?” Phyllis asked.
“Among the cults of the Plains, they sang that for my sin, the Land of Fire sunk beneath the waves.” He clicked his tongue. “Not that I blame her for not knowing it. I didn’t know about it until a Mormon Oracle lectured me about Native American cultic myth.”
“You really don’t care about all that stuff?” Marco asked.
“What stuff?” the Zombie asked.
“About being a murderer and a trickster.”
“Why deny my nature?”
“Because!” Marco whined. He didn’t have the skill to articulate his feelings, but the Baron understood. It was a common notion—being called something was worse than actually being it.
“It’s like cheating,” the Baron said. “Nobody wants to be named a cheater.”
“Even if they cheat?” the Zombie asked.
“That’s human nature.”
The Zombie shook his head. “The labels are useless. I can only remember so long ago, and once I’ve forgotten something, it’s no longer a part of me. We know the stories. I’ve been insane. I’ve been feral. I’ve been a priest. I’ve been a king. It doesn’t matter.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know what you’ve done?” Marco asked.
The Zombie shrugged. “It’s not my choice to forget. The past is buried by all those years. The last three centuries are all that’s real to me.”
The Baron said nothing, but the implication was there. Near the end of this century, the last memories of a lonely Golem would begin to disappear. All that would remain would be the Baron’s friend. He wouldn’t be the same creature he was when they met.
“Are you like this because you don’t have a soul?” Marco asked.
The Zombie sighed, openly mocking the teen.
“Sorry. I know you don’t know,” Marco said.
“Stop apologizing,” Phyllis insisted.
Marco waved away her complaints. “What’s it like without a soul?” he asked.
The Zombie laughed. “It’s not like anything.”
The Baron held his lamp up high. “What color is the fire, Marco?”
“Orange.”
“Good. Why is it orange?”
“Cause I see it.”
“Because you can see it’s orange?”
“Yes. It’s got a color.”
“You have an image inside your head. You can experience the orangeness of orange.”
“I guess so.”
“The Zombie cannot. He reacts as if he can see the orange. To us, he is completely alive and can tell us exactly how he should be feeling. He can talk about an inner life, he can even understand our notion of orangeness, but without the alleged soul, he can’t experience it.”
“What does he experience then?”
“Nothing,” the Zombie answered. “When I look inside, there’s nothing. I don’t know why I can talk about what I’m seeing or hearing or thinking. I just do, and it’s correct.”
“I think the soul theory is wrong,” the Baron said, “but that’s neither here nor there. It’s interesting enough on its own. If there were souls, he’d prove the human mind was identical to the human brain. A soul would just be a place for reflecting the activity of the mind, like a mirror.”
Marco looked at the tunnel walls and shivered. “Sounds a little scary to me.”
“It is,” the Zombie said happily.
“It really isn’t,” the Baron said.
“Only as long as you’re around,” Phyllis said to the Baron. “The Apostate was afraid of him for a reason. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you were still alive.”
The Baron felt a pang of anxiety, as if he were embarrassed because the imaginary Elizabeth in his head cared about him. It was absurd, of course. She was just a figure, someone far away from another cult and another time. She couldn’t care about his mere survival. He didn’t really matter—no more than any celebrity would.
Maybe she’d feel like he mattered though. “Maybe she’d be happy because she finally met the other immortals,” the Baron said with a smile. “People who understand endless life.”
“Is that why you call her Elizabeth?” Phyllis asked.
“What’s that?” The Baron’s thoughts dissipated into the darkness.
“Do you like her?” she asked.
The Baron laughed. That was the common interpretation, easy to dismiss. “I don’t know her, young lady. I don’t know what kind of woman she is, what kind of thinker. I don’t know what she looks like, and I don’t care. It’s not the promise of her that entices me. It’s the mystery. She chose to live forever. Why? What does she live for? Her book doesn’t tell us. She barely even talks about herself, but I want to know. She’s the only other ageless person in the world, and she remembers why she wanted it. Nobody else has that perspective.”
“You want to sit down over coffee and chat about immortality?”
“I want to know what’s in her head. This was thrust upon me, but she demanded it at metaphorical gunpoint. I honestly don’t know what she’d tell me. It’s fascinating.”
“Why call her Elizabeth then?”
“Why not?”
“There must’ve been a reason.”
“That title is an insult. She doesn’t deserve it. That’s all.”
Phyllis smirked. “I don’t believe that.”
“What else would my reason be?”
“You like her. Or you like the idea of her.”
He scoffed. “You think that I’m being familiar?”
“Sounds like it to me.”
“You can’t be familiar with someone you’ve never met.”
“Ah, yes,” Phyllis said brightly, “that’d be crazy.”
“Ha!” The insult put a spring in the Baron’s step. “I’m wounded.”
“Marco is wounded,” the Zombie said cheerily. “You’re just a wimp.”
They reached a low in the tunnel. It’d gradually dipped over the last few hundred yards, passing underneath some conduit of utilities boring through the rock overhead. At the bottom, there was an unusually deep pool of water that nobody bothered to drain, but debris had been heaped into an isthmus of gravel and paved over with more wood. This raised the path near the ceiling of the tunnel, and someone had hammered a hook into the roof at the nadir of the curve.
The Baron stopped there, reached up and touched the ceiling. It was damp. At his feet, cinder blocks were set together to hold down separate parts of the plywood platform. “How are you feeling Marco?” He hung his oil lantern off the hook and checked the radium dials of his watch. “It’s been almost an hour since you were shot in the back.”
Marco stopped beside the Baron. “It just feels really hot all the time. Like someone is washing the holes with steaming water.” He turned around, showing his back to the Baron. “How do they look?”
d’Holbach looked over the wounds. Phyllis stepped around to join him. The Zombie stood patiently, having no reason to rest his hand or set down the lantern. There was a great deal of obscenely thick blood jiggling in the bullet holes like black puddings. The back of Marco’s shirt was caked to his skin with a thick layer of heavy clotting like drying paint, and it must’ve bled for most of the walk. There was a dark wave of bloodstains traveling all the way down his back to his pants. By its sheer volume, the Baron guessed that the Cat must do something to replace the blood.
“You’re closed up, but don’t touch the clots,” the Baron judged. “Don’t pick at your shirt.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“It doesn’t itch or hurt?” Phyllis asked.
“It does, but then the heat kinda scratches it. Like when your foot itches and you put it on a hot sidewalk. It’s like that.”
“Good,” the Baron said. “The Cat is pulling you together.”
“I’m getting pretty hungry,” Marco added.
“We can’t do anything about that yet.”
“My feet are starting to hurt too.”
“I can imagine. Take a seat for a minute. We can’t spare much time though.”
Marco squatted down onto a cinderblock and groaned like an old man. “Jesus.”
“Burns?” the Baron asked.
Marco nodded.
“Your nerves are growing back,” the Baron guessed.
“I guess,” Marco said. “Dying hurts really bad.”
“I told you earlier,” the Zombie said, “it has to.”
“Bet that’s why the Apostate chose to live forever,” Phyllis added idly. “Fear of dying.”
“It’s why people want the Cat,” the Baron said. “You can take big risks when you have a few lives to lose. It’s what made Nagy so terrifying.”
“Nagy?” Phyllis asked.
“The Soviet assassin who died on the SS John G. Paines. He was famous for having zero fear.”
“Was he crazy or something?”
“No. It was the practice that made him so dangerous. Most people die or retire after taking a few lives, but Nagy had the Cat in him. He couldn’t die and didn’t have to retire. That gave him an edge. Then he got good at killing, and that made him almost unbeatable.” The Baron shrugged. “He almost single handedly wiped out the Thule Society.”
“Who?” Phyllis asked.
“The Nazi cult,” the Zombie said.
“Ah.”
“Langley killed the last Thule member in South America a few years back,” the Baron said. “We found him actually. His death was inevitable after that.”
“Do you do this stuff all the time?” Marco asked.
“Not exactly like this, but the Zombie and I are always doing something.”
“I wouldn’t protect you if you sat around all day and drank wine,” the Zombie said.
“See? My safety depends on risking my life. I have the smartest friends.”
“Better than being bored.” The Zombie’s tone was ambiguous. It was hard to tell if he’d really meant it or if he was cracking wise. The Baron often felt it must be both.
d’Holbach preferred to never plan for his own demise, but the Zombie couldn’t stand to be bored. His lust for excitement sometimes led them to places and circumstances where the Baron’s life was at risk anyway, and the Zombie became very, very upset over it. This contradiction was a dry joke between them, though it was rarely discussed. It was also a terrible precipice upon which they often ran, inches from disaster.
Marco looked up at them. “Have you tried looking for that lady before?”
“No, I can’t go back to Europe,” the Baron said. “Not since the Napoleonic Wars. I was already facing death threats after the Fall of Trust. By the time Elizabeth came around, we were already off the continent and heading across the Atlantic after Napoleon himself.”
Phyllis asked, “Was Napoleon a cultist?”
“No, but he had several major French cultists in his entourage, and many of them were sympathetic to my plight. It’s a long story though.” To Marco, he said, “Even if I could go back to Europe, it wouldn’t matter. If she’s alive, she’s very, very well hidden or she’s fled the region. People hate her far more than me, and she doesn’t have the Zombie to protect her.”
“What did she do?” Marco asked. “What’s the big deal?”
“There are two answers. One, she’s a woman. Two, she knows the most important secret in the world. That’s why she can live forever.”
For once, Marco’s blank expression cracked into a slight smile. “What’s the secret?”
The Zombie answered first: “It wouldn’t be a secret if she told anyone.”
“That’s not what he meant,” the Baron chided.
“Sounded like it to me. He’s not too bright.”
“Ignore him,” the Baron said to Marco. “You want to know what the secret is about, right?”
“Yeah,” Marco said.
“She knows what the Baron wants to know,” the Zombie interrupted.
“She knows the nature of the gods,” Phyllis said.
“Thank you both for answering for me,” the Baron said wryly.
“Did she step on your toes?” the Zombie asked.
The Baron felt the playful barb. “Are my toes broken? No?”
The Zombie laughed. “You tell me!”
“The last time they were broken was the last time you stepped on them.”
“Children,” Phyllis said lightly, “we can’t sit around forever.”
The Baron checked his radium dials. “Okay,” he said, “break is up.” He helped Marco to his feet—the teen made a noise like a creaking log. Then d’Holbach picked the lantern off the hook, and he led them onwards.
The tunnel rose for a brief time, then flattened out and began to track a broad, otherwise unnecessary curve. Either there was an existing underground structure almost eighty feet below the soil, or more likely, the quality of the rock changed, and they were circling around a geological dike of softer material. The curve was disorienting, but the tunnel could only lead to one place. Out and onto the surface sooner than later, and out of the safety of the underground. They’d already spent an hour down here. He worried about what might be happening overhead, especially if the police captain were dead. New York would be involved, Langley would be involved, Malik would be making plans—it wasn’t as if they could respond to any of it, but they couldn’t even observe it from down here. Things would change soon.
Marco seemed the least aware of this. The entire walk was turning into a kind of lesson for him, the progression of his induction into the occult tradition. The system of prestige wasn’t a kind of hidden magic waiting to be unlocked. You couldn’t announce it on the nightly news and have people making wishes before bed. Even showing them a wish wouldn’t give them access to power. That’s why the system never spread out of control; it’s why becoming a cultist required a lot of time and energy. The gods themselves judged when you were ready to participate, and they usually required their cultists to believe without any doubts, to have a low-level connection with the idea of prestige even if they were horribly misinformed about its applications.
Leaks and conspiracies about the system of prestige were harmless. Most people flat out wouldn’t believe, even if they were hardcore believers in religious miracles, witchcraft, or other forms of magic. The Baron thought they were inherently too reasonable, only accepting their personal fantasies without question. Modern religion even acknowledged this careful disbelief by placing all power in hands beyond their own. Miracles and magic happened to people, according to them. It never came from people.
This was a pervasive attitude in the West, and it made induction a real chore. One needed to cultivate a great deal of credulity to participate. Otherwise, they couldn’t muster the intent necessary to make a wish occur. Just saying the words out loud wasn’t enough—being shown the system was real wasn’t enough. To become a cultist, one had to become part of the occult world through and through—to swim down in Phyllis’s metaphor or to be weighed down until you drowned in the truth. The Baron judged that it wouldn’t be the Cat’s presence that would induct Marco, though the Cat would’ve functioned regardless of belief. It was Marco’s interest in their stories which would make him a permanent part of this secret world.
The Baron had to do his part to cure Marco’s ignorance. “Listen,” he said, “I want you to promise me something.”
“Yes, sir?” Marco asked.
“When we get out of here, I’m going to pick up a little prestige wherever I can. After that, I might teach you how to make a very specific kind of wish called a dodge.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If it works, that’ll mean you’ve become a cultist. You could participate in the New York cult. You could earn the afterlife for yourself, or any other wish you had for that matter.” He glanced back. Marco was rubbing his dirt stache with a finger, a thoughtful expression. “The thing you have to promise me is that you won’t persecute women cultists.”
“Okay,” Marco said with a little confusion.
“The cults in the West don’t allow women to become cultists. It’s a foul tradition from the Vatican cult going back almost a thousand years. The early fathers were already steeped in a misogynistic church tradition. They picked some ammunition out of Saint Augustine’s works, justified the men’s only club with quotes about original sin, and kept the power for themselves.”
Marco looked at Phyllis.
“That’s right. They wouldn’t have allowed her to become a cultist. They still won’t. The only reason she’s here is because of Elizabeth. She wrote a handbook in strict violation of the requirement that only record books may be kept. It teaches women how to recruit other women. If you went to Tammany Hall tomorrow and told them about Phyllis, they’d drive her out.”
“Or kill me,” Phyllis added darkly.
“You can’t tell anyone about Phyllis, and if you meet other women cultists, you have to help them. Be at their disposal.”
“Dad helped you?” Marco asked Phyllis.
“He did,” she said, lying only by omission. “He believed in women.”
“My dad was a good man,” Marco said, testing the words and finally finding them agreeable. It was revisionist thinking, a way to further obscure his grief for this journey. The Baron had seen it often enough in young soldiers at war, calm even around camp, only letting themselves fall to pieces after they sailed home and saw all the reminders that things would never be the same again. “I think I get it, Baron.”
“Tell me,” the Baron suggested.
“They hate the Apostate because she was a woman, and she made other women into cultists.” Thoughts were connecting in Marco’s head. “Who made her a cultist though?”
“A clever question.” The Baron smiled. “London did, before they fell.”
“Oh, it’s a great story!” the Zombie cried. “I couldn’t aspire to half the things she did. She put one over on the gods, shamed them—like me! She ruined an empire. Nations fell because of what she did. The whole purpose of prestige changed. It was a, uh—Baron?” He snapped his fingers, pointing at his friend.
“Paradigm shift,” the Baron said.
“Yes!” the Zombie said proudly. “I’m not in the story of course, but not all stories are perfect, and it’s one of my favorites, the Fall of Truth. People are still angry about it, even today!”
“What happened?” Marco asked.
“I’ll tell you the story,” the Zombie said. “It’s great. Lots of people died.”
The Fall of Curses happened in the early 14th century. There was a big disaster—a huge famine for two years. Literally decimated, a tenth of the population had died. Bodies were stacked waist high, and the major occult powers were shaken up, alliances were disappearing. Everyone knew that you couldn’t make permanent artifacts anymore. The big powers, the churches, the guilds—they spent two centuries scrapping over any artifacts that’d survived the conflicts. Lots of wars, even the Crusades—they all had secular roots, but the cults used them as cover to ransack each other, to slaughter their leadership and their bankers.
Bankers became a big deal then. You couldn’t make an artifact to hold your prestige anymore. It used to be that you blessed something with value, and then whoever broke it in the right way would earn the prestige back. Great, right? But now someone had to hold onto the prestige at all times, and it couldn’t be your leader—he had to show his face. If he died banking up the prestige of your cult, pow! Your power base would be destroyed in one shot.
The only option was to get someone tough, someone loyal and secret, and have them hold onto the prestige. You covered them in guards, you gave them artifacts if you had any—you put all your eggs in one basket, because it was easier to protect one man than many, and most schemes with multiple bankers ended up with one of them turning traitor for profit.
Of course, it wasn’t as risky as it sounds. At the first sign of danger, a banker generally had an assigned second, third, and fourth. These redundant trustees could accept the prestige at the drop of a hat, and all a banker had to do was say the magic words and whoosh—the prestige was gone, put in safe hands.
Now, this wasn’t perfect. Transmitting prestige over even a short distance had a steep cost, so your seconds and thirds had to be in the same buildings as you. If they were in the next county over or whatever, all prestige would be lost in transmission.
Contrariwise, the only way to transfer prestige for free was to touch someone directly, exchange it hand-to-hand. That’s part of why handshakes are popular, you know?
Anyways, most of these bankers even had conditional wishes—which were available at the time—saying that if they were fatally wounded, the prestige would be moved. I’m saying, everyone tried as hard as possible to make this work, to collect power and keep it.
Of course, people still tried to take it, and sometimes, they succeeded. Lots of really nasty murders happened. Threats and blackmail sometimes worked. Even torture.
I’m saying, people were coerced into handing over their prestige. We’re talking poisons that made you expel your intestines out of your ass, whipping people to death, dipping their heads in hot oil, crucifixions, all that Inquisition torture dungeon crap. It was common to frame people and seek public executions, hangings mostly, but sometimes they were drawn and quartered like a slaughtered lamb.
Being a banker was generally considered a death sentence. You were set up in a nice place with all the luxuries of the late Middle Ages, even a complimentary wish for the afterlife, and then you tried to tough it out for as many years as you could manage.
Truth be told, bankers were just too easy to find. Most were holed up in the only castle or church for miles, like fucking fish in a barrel. Second, most were too obvious—the wishes to identify them or their location were far too cheap.
You could still wish for knowledge back then, and the gods were straight shooters. You got everything you asked for and then some. The only reason the cultists weren’t asking about the deep secrets or the Philosopher’s Stone or whatever was because people were ignorant, and the bigger the gap of ignorance between your current beliefs and the truth, the more prestige it cost you to learn how wrong you were. This made almost everything of any importance impossibly expensive to learn, but it made it easy to take half-assed intel and transform it into a rock solid dossier on everything and everyone you wanted to kill.
So imagine that most of the fighting happened in Northern Europe, the British Isles, and the Middle East. They sank two hundred years deep into this cloak and dagger business, dropping corpses all over the continent, using big wishes to pick each other out of the populace. They got skilled at it. They murdered straight through the Black Death, practically doubling their efforts in the middle of a biblical apocalypse because it was easy to manipulate circumstances and spread the disease to their targets.
Out of this mess, one cult started to gain a lot of influence over in Britain. They rode the Protestant Reformation to power, ripped the entire British isles out of Vatican hands, and started working hard on exploiting untapped resources—I’m talking colonies in the Americas, in Africa, and in the Orient. They built a base out of Westminster, recruiting manpower out of neighboring London. You see where this was going?
The Vatican cult tried to burn London to the ground in the 17th century, but it was too late to stop their momentum. The London power base was spread too wide, with all the heavy investment in North America and the Indian subcontinent. They rebuilt the city and got madder than a pack of rabid dogs. They fought proxy wars through their colonies, conquering other places and vassal cults through superior force and espionage, and they enslaved the local cultists at secular gunpoint, pushing them to farm tasks for prestige. That prestige was dumped right back into British intel, and the London cult soon learned everything they needed to know.
After a few decades, they became an indispensable part of the colonial companies that were tied back to the crown. They were right there in the middle of the British Admiralty, they held positions of leadership in the Royal Marines. Almost every British spy either was a cultist or reported back to one. They had so many places farming tasks, so much prestige—there wasn’t a wish for knowledge they couldn’t make.
London was big, real big, bigger than anything the world had ever seen. By the time the Fall of Trust came around, most of Europe was afraid of them. If you crossed them, they wished up a complete rundown of your operation, identified the weak links, and picked it to pieces within the month. Lots of allied states fell in cultic circles, becoming vassals to the London cult. The Londoners started dreaming as big as their secular empire—they set their sights on the whole world under the crown, maybe even taking the Ark of the Covenant from Ethiopia. That was like planning to steal Russia’s nuclear arsenal. It was madness, but they were serious.
Their only weaknesses were their bankers. The opposition was fierce in many regions, and the backup bankers would be assassinated literally moments before the primaries were slain. This would blow the collected prestige of a nation for a year or two, really set the cult back in one colony or another. The London cult spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to protect their distributed wealth. Their answer was the Apostate.
It was 1841. The leadership of the London cult decided that they were too important to pay tradition any heed. They even called it a sin, but they didn’t care. They picked a teenage girl out of prison, pardoned her hanging. She was a commoner who’d run a small-time crime ring, and she was savvy—she was game. When she saw a way to slip the noose, she swore her fealty to the London cult and meant it. They inducted her twice over—both into the cult and into the British nobility—and they said, welcome, you’re our new banker.
The trick was actually kind of clever. At the time, there wasn’t such a thing as a female cultist. If people even courted with the idea, they treated it like Pope Joan, like it was a disaster. Women were considered bad luck, consorts of the Devil, purveyors of cursed tasks—you name any stupid belief you can think of, and women were blamed for it.
So imagine when the enemies of the London cult saw the local bankers throwing their pools of prestige back to London proper. They put their mind to the problem. If London was centralizing, they wanted to identify the new London banker and eliminate them. Prestige was scrounged up. Ancient banking artifacts were dug up and broken. These pools of prestige had been kept for just such an emergency, and they only had to make one wish.
Who was the new London banker?
Funny thing was, not a single goddamn cult could afford the answer. It was the “who” in the question that mattered most. Every last one of them assumed that “who” was also a “he,” and in their minds’ eyes, they were wishing to fill the mold of an important and powerful man. Because they couldn’t conceive of London daring to induct a woman cultist, their gap of ignorance ended up being a chasm. They were so damn stubborn, they couldn’t figure it out for nearly a decade.
In the end, it was the Russians who put two and two together. They’d been fighting the Great Game in Central Asia, an extended non-conflict with Britain. The Russians were afraid of deploying soldiers they didn’t have, and the British were afraid of having to defend the nebulous claims they’d made north of Pakistan. As a sign of peace, the London cult held out an olive branch and pulled strings to invite the Russians to attend the Crystal Palace Exhibition, a gaudy display of progress and wealth that the British had built on the back of their prestige-fueled empire. The Russians accepted, not because they wanted to participate, but because they thought it would be an opportunity to walk into the enemy’s home without a fight. They planned to bring the Apples of Perun and Solovei’s Whistle—some of the big Slavic artifacts they’d collected after the Fall of Curses and kept under wraps for just such an occasion.
Then they started the sacrifices. The Russians didn’t have a lot of prestige—nobody but London did at the time—but they had a lot of peasants that they could induct, so they played a killer game of twenty questions. An inducted peasant would be blackmailed into wishing for a feature about the London banker—was the banker tall, was the banker short, did the banker wear glasses? Because the gap of ignorance was so steep, most of these people spent a minimum of fifty to seventy years in the sanctuary, aging away a human lifetime for a single answer. Hell, those were the survivors—many corpses were found in the sanctuaries of Russian temples, mummified and easy to throw away.
Over the course of several weeks, they wasted more than a thousand lives for a list of features about the banker. They were willing to brute force the result in a way that nobody else had considered realistic. They assembled pictures of the banker, dossiers—they still assumed the London banker was a man, but just to be thorough, they had one drawing made of a woman.
That was the breakthrough. A peasant who knew almost nothing had no preconceptions to fight against. He saw the picture of the woman, wished to know the truth, and came out of the temple an old man with a name, Elizabeth of Westminster. No surname. She’d never had one.
That was the beginning of the end. The Russians came with some of the world’s most powerful weapons in the hands of a man who’d swallowed the Cat o’ Nine Lives, and they attacked London’s occult headquarters in the middle of the night in March.
They’d collected the names of the Apostate’s trustees; they already knew the names of the British leadership. They flattened an estate just outside the city, leveling six buildings in the fighting and starting several large fires. We’re talking an elite suicide squad of seven or eight Russian cultists, killing while dying, taking the Cat from their fallen comrades and swallowing it to extend their own suicidal assault. Only one man had to survive after all was said and done, even if he had to blast his way to the port, laying waste to London’s secular populace with Solovei’s Whistle between his lips.
The Apostate wasn’t prepared for the attack. Nobody had a chance to warn her.
The Russians interrogated survivors of the fallen leadership, finished them off to the man, and made their way to the Apostate’s hideout. Her guards were eliminated quickly. Many of London’s artifacts were blasted with an Apple of Perun. It should’ve been a coup de grace.
Ultimately, she was her own best defense. They underestimated her. She hadn’t spent a decade just sitting around. She’d been reading, exercising, practicing marksmanship. She ambushed one of the assassins herself, shot the Russian carrier of the Cat in the head, then hacked it off with a machete. If there’d been a little more time, she would’ve stolen the Cat and an Apple for herself, but the last two assassins managed to drive her into a corner in her personal library.
This was the turning point. She tried to pass on the prestige of the London cult. Once it was gone, she planned to dodge to the local temple and escape into the London streets.
But she couldn’t. The people she targeted were already dead, and she didn’t know anybody else. For the sake of secrecy, she’d been kept away from the rest of the London cult leadership.
She couldn’t pass on the wealth, she couldn’t dodge, and she was going to die once they decided to throw an Apple. At this point, they were keeping her alive just because they thought they could convince a woman to give up—as if she were weak-willed.
She was sitting on the largest pool of prestige in recorded history. It was probably the largest pool of prestige ever. London had been farming more than half of the world’s cults for nearly one hundred and fifty years. While they’d spent a lot of prestige, they’d earned far more, and it was all at the Apostate’s disposal. Tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years of prestige, unimaginable power. Millions of years? I don’t know. Screw it, say it was billions. It’s more than we can imagine. It was so much, she couldn’t think of a single thing to spend it on.
The Apostate was clever though. This was where she got the better of the gods. She whispered to herself under a desk, mere seconds away from death, “I wish to know what wish could I afford, something which mankind has always wanted. I want to go into debt, but I don’t want to waste the world’s prestige.”
The gods put the knowledge in her head.
There was one wish whose debt had long been considered effectively infinite. Everyone who had attempted it was lost. All that came out of their sanctuaries were shards of bone amidst piles of dust. But the cost wasn’t truly infinite. Some say the debt for the average wisher would’ve been ten times the age of human civilization, but it wasn’t forever.
That wish was to know the nature of the gods.
And after telling her that the world, through her, could finally learn the nature of the gods, those very gods spoke with her directly. They told her that she shouldn’t make the wish. They asked her to die under the writing desk and fly to paradise with them.
She refused to die. Without hesitation, she asked the gods, “What is your nature?”
The wish was granted. The prestige of the London cult, the source of its power, vanished instantly. Its leadership was dead and burned. Its banker was gone. The Russian assassins fled successfully, but they took the story of what they heard with them.
Her debt was three days long, but the scrutiny of the gods was too intense to ignore. She couldn’t remain in torpor. She spent those three days in isolation, arguing with the divine. We know nothing about their deliberations. We only know the conclusion.
The moment she emerged from her sanctuary, the gods began the Fall of Truth. All wishes for knowledge were immediately banned, and a great task was assigned to bring her dead or alive to the temple in London. The reward would be all the prestige she had spent. There wasn’t an Oracle on Earth who didn’t hear the new rule and task. Every available cultist would’ve swarmed over London. Their terrible war would’ve been for the fate of the globe and the secret of the gods. It would’ve made the fighting from the Fall of Curses look like friendly sport.
The Apostate thought the stakes were too high. Whatever she knew, it was enough to demand the gods’ personal attention. She spoke to them again. She stepped outside the system of prestige, rejecting the confines of barter and exchange for wishes. She offered the gods a service from her. In exchange for immortality, she would never tell another living soul about the nature of the gods, and she would die if she tried.
They agreed to her terms on two conditions. First, that her immortality be no stronger than that of the Baron, for all other forms had been banned. Second, that she would become physically incapable of even hinting at the truth. The knowledge of the nature of the gods would be locked away in her absolutely and forever.
The deal was struck. For the first and only time in history, a task was revoked. There was no need to kill her, for there would be no reward. The Apostate fled London, then disappeared entirely from the eyes of the world. They christened her new title because she rejected the faith inherent in the system—they called her a second Eve, having dared to bite from the apple of knowledge. She’d brought further sin into the world.
Without wishes for knowledge, the London cult effectively dissolved. Thousands of loyal London agents were killed across twelve bloody nights. The power that had dominated the world was beheaded, exsanguinated, and pummeled into dust. The Apostate’s wish killed London and barred us forever from divine revelation and all occult paths to truth.
Author’s Note:
We’ve learned about the Apostate, that strange woman Elizabeth.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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