Marco was awestruck. The Zombie’s enthusiasm for the Apostate and the end of the London cult was infectious. To the Zombie, all the world was a spectacle, and all these great and terrible things were stories to entertain—and the world deeply entertained him.
One could sense a love for life in him.
“Shit,” Marco said. “London was crazy.”
“Good riddance,” the Baron said.
“There was a lot of secular momentum then,” the Zombie explained. “The British Empire continued to expand until the end of the century, but the high water mark hit soon after. Without wishes for knowledge, they couldn’t maintain their holdings like they used to.”
“The world was a foul place before the Fall of Truth,” the Baron said. “No privacy in occult circles, and no escape. The largest cults had too much power.”
“It wasn’t always that bad,” Phyllis said. “London was something new, right? Knowledge was usually too expensive unless you were colonizing an empire.”
“The Fall of Trust made a big difference too,” the Zombie added. “Without conditional wishes, there was less to spend prestige on. Knowledge became the best route to power.”
“I was glad when it ended,” the Baron said. “My life got easier.”
Marco only had one question. “She really shot a guy and hacked his head off?”
“Yeah!” The word practically burst out of the Zombie. “Imagine this little woman in a fancy dress, and she grabbed this elephant gun some duke gave her after a safari and stoved in an assassin’s face! She didn’t even know about the Cat. She just saw the body kicking around and figured supernatural bullshit, better take his head, so she used a ceremonial machete to lop it off. Thock! She would’ve had his artifacts too, but the other assassins found her fast.”
“Jesus,” Marco said.
“Everyone used to treat her like a passive figure,” the Baron said, “but apparently she’d been studying up on previous London bankers and preparing for the inevitable breach of security. Very smart stuff. She understood her importance.”
“Think about all the colonies they lost,” the Zombie said gleefully. “She wished to answer one of the old, deep questions, and without her prestige, their intelligence was blind. She chose to give them up, to fuck every awful part of their empire, and that was before she knew that the gods would take their ball and go home. She wanted all that prestige to mean something.”
“It ended up changing the world,” the Baron said. “I hope she wanted it this way.”
The Zombie laughed. “I think she did. You’ve read Apostasy. She wanted change.”
“I’m glad she did it.” Phyllis was contemplative, eyes up on the tunnel ceiling. “I wouldn’t be a cultist otherwise. Soon, I’ll be able to wish for the afterlife.”
The Baron glanced back at her. “You have that much prestige?”
“For one purpose only,” she said.
“The afterlife,” the Baron replied. “Good. Don’t spend it on my behalf.”
“I won’t. It’s the only reason I became a cultist. I think it’s the only reason anyone who reads Apostasy becomes a cultist.” She smiled slightly. “If the Apostate knows the nature of the gods, and she believes the wish is good, I’ll trust her. Wouldn’t you?”
“I would.” Even though the Baron hadn’t met Elizabeth, he already trusted her. Her book evinced her benevolence. Her philosophy of prestige was one of personal cultivation.
The very last chapter of Apostasy was titled with a question. Why?
What was the point of prestige? What should people do with wishes?
She suggested two possible paths. The first was temporal health, wealth, and extended life. This mortal coil was a good place, she said. We shouldn’t rush to leave it, even if we sometimes couldn’t see beyond the veils of our misery. The second was the guarantee of eternity. She had nothing to say about the nature of death, but there was no greater comfort in life than the knowledge that you would survive its end. If a cultist desired nothing in this world, then they should labor for a seat in the next. Better that than selling your prestige for money.
Marco asked only a couple more questions on the walk through the New York underground. He wanted to know how long it took to save for the afterlife.
“A lifetime,” Phyllis answered, “and even then, it usually takes a little debt to meet your price. It’s a little different for everyone. Nobody knows why. Maybe the cost is arbitrary. Being good or bad doesn’t seem to make a difference.”
“I’ll get it someday,” Marco said. “I’ll meet dad there.”
Nobody reminded Marco that Federico Barilla hadn’t been assured the afterlife, that only some of the cultists in every generation went to the gods. There wasn’t enough prestige to go around otherwise, and while most cults had an informal insurance policy for veteran members, sometimes a person died alone or too quickly, before anyone could or would help.
Even if most people worked for the afterlife, it was a sad truth that only some of them would be guaranteed a place in the fortress of forever. It was fundamentally unfair, and the Baron suspected it was largely illusory, a kind of spiritual busywork.
He thought every “soul” was saved somewhere, but those who wished to go to the gods were allowed to participate in shaping this world after they died. For whatever reason, it wasn’t a lasting motivation for the dead, but it was still something sacred and strange.
To be dead and touch the world was almost holy. Almost.
The tunnel rose on the approach to the tidal strait. The actual subways crossing over into Manhattan were in the layer above. If they weren’t trying to avoid more CPUSA watchers, they would’ve just taken the 2 all the way back to Grand Central, but this line, the Biltmore, and Grand Central Station would be under heavy surveillance. Switching to the C train was still their best chance.
Around four-thirty, the Baron spotted a change in the tunnel. “End of the road.”
Someone had painted a white, five pointed star by a ladder leading up. Maybe twenty feet further down, at the edge of the lamplight, the paved tunnel walls ended. The bricks stopped in a jagged edge, and the dark bedrock, sucked into the shadows, appeared formless and void. It was as if the world ended there, a tube jutting into the abyss. This was the last stop on the smuggler’s path out of Crown Heights. All that lay beyond was raw stone, the bones of the Earth.
The Baron had Marco turn around for one more check up. The fatal wound was closing, becoming a pit of blood-red granulation tissue. He was growing back as fast as bamboo, about an inch of flesh an hour. Once the wound was filled, it’d be covered by a fresh lump of swollen, stringy scar tissue, and the bullet would dissipate. Only the most delicate organs would be fully restored, for the Cat paid no heed to beauty, only function. It left marks on the body like a reminder—here the bearer died once. Don’t forget it.
The Baron took off his nice fifty dollar jacket and gave it to Marco to cover his bloody clothes. The forest green wool would be ruined, and a nobleman’s vanity pestered him even as he reasoned that this was for Marco’s safety and for the success of their journey. Another suit could be bought, but it still pained him to willingly soil the work of a fine tailor.
Marco didn’t fill out the suit jacket. The shoulders slumped, and he was too skinny despite his athletic build. The Baron was a stronger, broader man. Anyone could tell at a glance that Marco was wearing a costume, but it was better than visible bloodstains.
The Baron set his lamp at the bottom of the ladder. The Zombie climbed ahead, carrying his handle in his teeth, mostly for fun. Once he was at the top, he shouted down for everyone to follow. The maintenance room the shaft ended in was empty and unlocked.
They climbed out and up, extinguishing the lamps and leaving them beside a locker, and they ascended into the station for the 2 and 3 lines at Clark Street. A couple of people saw them pass through a maintenance gate, but no alarms were raised, no questions were asked.
The Clark Street station was dimly soaked in orange light, shining weakly from older incandescent bulbs with carbon filaments. The place felt aged, even where tiling and paint had recently been replaced. It was as if the environment had a kind of visual inertia, holding back the advancement of technology and materials in order to remain as consistently bleak and dreary as an underexposed, sepia-toned photograph. Crime fit its darkness. The spirit of corruption lurked in the corners, and their inconsistent, ill-worn dress and haggard expressions matched the mood. Instinctually, onlookers knew trouble when they saw it and turned away. If they dared to look up, they saw the Baron’s searching eyes and the Zombie’s eager, almost bloodthirsty stare. They saw Marco looking down into memories of death.
Only Phyllis tried to smile and acknowledge others, as if nothing were wrong.
In the middle of the stairwell to the surface, she whispered to the rest, “We’re standing out. If the heat is on, we’ll be spotted immediately.”
“You think the cops will have someone watching the station?” the Baron asked.
“Absolutely.” She tapped the walkie-talkie, still hooked onto her waistline. “Malik was on here. You were right about the fifth column. They’ve got a real force, even in the NYPD.”
“Is that radio on?”
“I had it off because we were underground.”
“Switch it on low.”
She clicked the knob. “Done.”
“Zombie, how close do you think Malik had to be to talk to Red Hook?”
“Five miles. Ten maybe. Assuming he didn’t come in that car we saw. Or use prestige.”
“He might be in Brooklyn, maybe Manhattan then. It’s difficult to say.” The Baron pointed to Marco. “Stay near the Zombie. If they’ve got a watcher, they might try something.”
“Why aren’t they down here?” Marco asked.
“What’s that?”
“We were just at the train platform. We could’ve taken a train.”
“They aren’t watching then,” the Zombie guessed.
“I hope so. New York might’ve shut down any police response,” the Baron said.
They passed over a landing, halfway up the steps. There was a reflection of a reflection of blue light from the world above. The exit wasn’t in view, but they were two turns from spiraling up to the surface. The Baron was at the front of their group. He came around the corner and saw a pair of police officers at a Y-junction, where the stairs split left and right to reach the street. The cops’ bored gazes were cast up at the afternoon sky. Someone was yelling instructions down to them.
The Baron paused calmly, and the rest stopped behind him. He checked his watch and made a dramatic sigh. Then he turned around, arms dropping to his sides in submission to make-believe responsibilities, and he walked back around the corner. “Careful,” he whispered as he passed the others.
They followed him down into the station again.
They stopped on the nearest platform, recently vacated by the 3 train going back to Manhattan. “Police,” he told them quietly, once they were seated on benches. “They’re being directed to cover the station somehow. I don’t think they noticed me.”
“That’s why you were acting weird?” Phyllis asked.
“That’s why he was acting well,” the Zombie corrected.
The Baron grunted. “We need information. Are they here for us? If so, what do they know?”
“Does it matter?” Phyllis asked.
“They might not know enough to recognize us if we split up a bit.”
“I don’t like splitting up.” The Zombie always objected to leaving the Baron alone except under controlled circumstances.
“I understand, but it may be the best plan. Phyllis, which of us is least recognizable?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can any of us safely question the officers on the stairs?”
“I can,” she answered. “You know I can.”
The Baron smiled briefly. “If you’re sure, then I leave the decision to you.”
“Do you have a better plan?”
“We can’t make good plans without good intel.”
“Fine then, but I want the Zombie to follow me. I won’t be arrested. I’m too young to dodge on an afterlife wish, and I refuse to die today.”
“Fine. I’ll wait here with Marco,” the Baron said.
Phyllis got up, and the Zombie followed her. She dropped the radio by Marco, and they took the hall back to the stairwell. The Baron reached over and turned up the radio’s volume.
“If they come running,” the Baron said to the teen, “then we’ll head for the underground and double back for another station. Are you okay to run?”
Marco tipped his head to one side. “I’m feeling a lot better.”
“The Cat is a powerful artifact. You understand why we need to get it back to Orthodox hands. If they have this, they can’t be beaten by Stalin’s men.”
“The Russians are really fighting with each other?”
“It’s a civil cold war. The Bolshevik faction has been using the secular government to purge the Orthodox Church and threaten their secular leadership, but they haven’t been able to target their occult members directly. It’s mutually assured destruction that holds them back, like an occult nuclear standoff. While the secular government could annihilate the church, an assassin armed with the Cat, the Whistle, and a single Apple could probably eliminate the Communist Party’s inner circle in a single night. For a long time, Nagy was that assassin.”
“Nagy was the guy who died with the Cat last?”
“That’s right. He helped the Bolsheviks in exchange for the power to destroy them. It was a good balance of power until Nagy died on that ship in the harbor.”
“Why did Nagy die, anyways?”
“A man named Jacono killed him. I don’t know why he was trying to snipe a New York task though.”
Marco had a blank expression.
“Nevermind, you’ll have time to learn about this stuff some other day. If I ever figure it out.” The Baron had put a little thought towards it, but without asking Nagy’s boss or finding something like a shipping manifest for the SS John G Paines, he’d probably never know why Nagy had come to New York. He reached over and picked up the radio. “Not even a casual check-in on this channel,” the Baron added. “They must’ve switched away.”
Marco adjusted the Baron’s jacket, tightening it around himself for a bit of warmth. “Could you look for the channel they’re on?”
“If I had some prestige left, I could wish to set the channel.”
“You don’t have any?”
“I spent it. Had to survive. Everything else is just details.” He looked up at the dim carbon-filament lighting. “What a bleak place.”
“Yeah,” Marco muttered, adjusting the jacket again. “Cold too.”
After a couple more minutes, Phyllis came down with the Zombie close behind her. Her broad frown spoke volumes. “They’re covering all the stations,” she said. “They’re looking for an Asian man.”
“The Zombie?” the Baron asked.
“He’s a cop killer. Murdered a police captain by shooting him in the head.”
“That man was alive when we last saw him. They could’ve helped—” The Baron felt a cold lump tightening up in his gut. “Of course, they kill their own. They killed their own.”
“They’re trying to get the Zombie arrested,” she said. “Maybe they want to separate us.”
The Baron clenched his knees with his hands, thinking hard about the strategy. “They just want to find us. Removing the Zombie helps, but finding us is what matters, and the Zombie is the easiest to find. They wouldn’t have any pictures, but there’d be no missing a tall Asian man in ruined clothing.”
“So this is about using secular authority to pinpoint us?” Phyllis asked.
“Yeah, and CPUSA is probably fighting to keep Tammany Hall out of this as well. If the fight in Crown Heights was reported to New York, they might identify Cat from the story alone. This is about corralling us, then separating Marco from us. We both know that we can’t let New York find out, or the Cat is lost, an occult army takes to the streets, and Langley—”
“Oh, I don’t even want to think about the CIA getting involved,” Phyllis said.
“They already are. We had an agent pestering us yesterday. They definitely don’t know about the Cat though, or there’d be more than police looking for us.”
“It’d be interesting to fight the National Guard,” the Zombie said, “but today isn’t the day.”
“What did it look like up there?” the Baron asked Phyllis.
“They knew what you looked like, they knew what the Zombie looked like. Thank God he knew to stay out of view. I thought he was going to come around the corner and scare them.”
The Zombie grinned.
“They said you had two companions,” Phyllis continued, “and they were telling everyone there was a reward for any information leading to your capture and arrest. There were several other officers in view. I went up to the street for a moment, borrowed a cigarette, said I was going to smoke. There are squad cars everywhere. Ten men just at this station.”
“They’re sticking to the surface?” the Baron asked. “Why?”
“Mobility probably,” the Zombie answered, “and open terrain. It’d be hard to attack them, and they could respond if we showed up at another station nearby.”
“I agree,” Phyllis said. “They were a bit confused when I came back down so soon, but they didn’t stop me. We can’t stay here long though. They might come searching.”
The Baron nodded. “Nobody has noticed anyone strange down here?”
“Nothing suspicious,” Phyllis agreed. She took the radio back from the Baron. “Hear anything on this?”
“They aren’t on that channel anymore. Keep it for now though. If I get some spare prestige later, we can tune it to Malik’s frequency.”
“Right.” She turned it off with a click.
The Baron looked over the other three, thinking out loud. “They assume we’re going to head to the surface. Why? What do they expect?”
“Getting on the train is a bad idea. If they sight us, we’re trapped,” Phyllis said.
“Right. So, our best option is to get out of the tunnels, break out in a random direction, and find a cab. Once we’re in a car, we’re almost impossible to track.”
“So they’re watching for us before we break out,” the Zombie said. “Smart.”
The Baron hummed thoughtfully. “Malik doesn’t have infinite manpower. How many places could he cover?”
“Just the stuff around here?” Marco guessed.
“What’s your call?” Phyllis asked the Baron. “We can’t stay here.”
The Baron patted his knees, then stood up. “We get on the train and ride far. I’m talking to the terminal, past Grand Central. Then we hole up in a car and keep going. Even if they sight us at a stop in Manhattan, they can’t actually outrace us from station to station, and they can’t assault a train with the Zombie on it. That’d be suicide. We simply outride them to Upper Manhattan, then get out when we’re clear and take a cab.”
Phyllis looked vaguely upset by the simple plan, but there really weren’t any better ideas. They stood up and took the stairs down to the lowest platform. Many of the people who’d seen them rise from the depths were still waiting for an afternoon train, scheduled to arrive at ten to the hour. A yellowed wax-paper sign was printed with the schedule and hung high on the back wall. The row of old bulbs behind it vigilantly drove away moisture and cast an orange glow over the ticket counter. The Baron paid for four tickets in cash, sliding the money through a metal pit under a foggy sheet of glass. There were only a few minutes left before the train arrived.
They waited in calm silence. Moments like these were defined by fortune, and prayer seemed like the least appropriate response. The Baron watched the stairwell, remaining alert. If their fate was to face a fight here and now, he would see it coming and react in the moment. Otherwise, his sleeve was pulled back and his watch was ticking.
The train came on time. Two brief blasts of the horn signalled the stop. It rumbled into station, air brakes squealing, then hissing as brake valves opened.
The Baron stepped into the rear car, which stank of body odor and cigarettes, and took a seat on a puke-green plastic bench, patterned with carved initials. Marco joined him, followed by Phyllis. The Zombie entered and stood beside them, holding onto a standing bar in the center of the car.
On a late Sunday afternoon, the subway was nearly empty, and most of the people went towards the front, congregating to avoid casual crime like pickpocketing and verbal harassment. They were left alone with each other, and when the doors slid shut, it sounded like a sigh of relief.
Once the train was underway, dipping underneath the East River, the Baron said aloud, “The worst is yet to come. Tomorrow will be far more difficult.”
“We’re going to break into the UN,” the Zombie said dreamily.
“Mm. We’ll scout it first.”
“Shh!” Phyllis hissed. “Someone’s coming.”
Sure enough, someone was coming through the connectors. He was a fare checker, with a moderate, slightly saggy build that’d once been much thicker. His clothes were oversized, built for a man ten percent larger. His pants were held in place almost entirely with a belt cinched up to his belly button, and he was walking stiffly, like he had one unbending knee.
The checker stopped amidst them. “Lady, gentlemen, your tickets please.”
The Baron handed over the stack of four.
The fare checker ran through the set and nicked them each with a hole punch. He was heavily bearded and very tired, sweating a little despite the cool underground temperature. He rubbed the bags under his eyes, then handed the tickets back. “Thank you.”
The Baron watched the checker carefully.
The fare checker smiled and very carefully lowered himself into a seat across from them, keeping one leg half-straight. “Old injury,” he said by way of explanation. “You’re the last bunch.”
There was a small radio clipped over his chest pocket. He reached up and pressed a call button. “All passengers checked in. Over.”
“Roger. All passengers. Over and out,” the radio replied.
“The conductor,” the checker said. “I hope you don’t mind me sitting here.”
“We do,” Phyllis said.
The fare checker grinned broadly. “I’m afraid my knee isn’t good enough to stand that long. If you’ll indulge me for a bit—”
Phyllis stood. “I’ll help you up.”
The checker closed his eyes and shook his head wearily. “You know I’m not standing up.”
“We’ll go then,” Phyllis decided. “Everyone up. We’re moving.”
“Why would that do any good?” the checker asked.
The Baron scowled. So CPUSA had tracked them here. “How?” he asked.
“How what?” the checker queried.
The Zombie punched the standing bar with his fist. The screws on the floor plate popped out with a metal crack, and the bent bar rattled loosely from its mooring on the ceiling.
“I’m not playing coy,” the checker said. “Calm down you freak.”
Phyllis started pacing. “Fuck me.”
“How did you get on the same car as us?” the Baron asked the checker. “You weren’t on the platform. You must’ve already been on the train.”
“Does it matter if you know how?” the checker asked.
“It does.”
“Then I won’t tell you.”
“I’ll force your jaw closed over my fingers,” the Zombie said. “Your teeth will pop like corn in a kettle.”
The checker rolled his eyes and relaxed further, slouching. “They spotted the lady there on the surface. When she went back down, they figured you’d take one of the trains and radioed us at Borough Hall station. I got on the 2, the other man got on the 3. If you didn’t get on here at Clark Street, we’d get off and look for you.”
“So you found us,” the Baron said.
“Sure have.” The checker tapped the radio. “And we know where you are.” He shuddered and shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m glad this’ll be over soon.”
“What do you mean?” Phyllis asked.
“You ain’t going to kill me, right?”
Phyllis refused to answer. Nobody else spoke up. Marco stared only at his feet, unwilling to engage with the scenario that was unfolding around him.
The checker continued. “You don’t need to add any more bodies to the tally. You’re finished. There’ll be plenty of time for the rest of the old pinko party to get their ducks in a row. When you reach Wall Street, you’ll be surrounded. They’ll stop the train, break it if they have to, and then you’ll either have to make a mess right in Greenwich’s back yard or give up.”
“Alert New York and lose the Cat, or lose the Cat to you?” the Baron asked.
The checker shrugged. “Can you really afford to make another scene like the one you made off Sterling? You’re cop killers now. New York might sweep that up in a day or two, but they can’t hide the mess if it’s too big. Maybe Langley could—but do you want them to have the Cat?”
“You sound like you know what’s happening.”
“Eh. Only what scuttlebutt you pick up from old drinking buddies,” the checker said. “I’m almost done with this crap. I’ve been out of the party for years. All that’s left is for you to give it up, give that Russian bastard his artifact, and then we can go home.”
“You’re inducted,” the Baron guessed.
“Lots of us are cultists. The KGB trained us when we fought the Pinkertons.”
“You mean you fought with Langley-trained operatives.”
“Not the Langley folks themselves, but yeah. You fight fire with fire.” The checker scratched his beard, then straightened it with his palm. “Are you going to surrender?”
“Not to you,” the Baron said.
The checker shrugged. “That kid has the Cat, right? If he wants to live, you’ll need to hand him over and get him to surgery. You’ll have to surrender. We’re talking fifty men there. They won’t touch you, but they’ll just murder the boy and drag his corpse off.”
“I’m a man,” Marco said, finally looking up.
“That’s great,” the checker said wryly. He loosened his belt and relaxed a little more, squirming in his seat. “If you want to be an old man, tell the Baron you want to give up.”
“I can’t,” Marco said. “I won’t.”
“Suit yourself,” the checker said. “There’s a reason we wanted you on a train.”
Author’s Note:
So ends arc 11, wherein we learn some of the great myths that define the secret world. I really hope you enjoyed them.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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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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At the turn of the century, the savage competition of the rail companies, bold city planning, and the abundant optimism of investors all combined into a single, volatile mix. Enriched by new money and sparked with vision, their plans exploded across proposals and blueprints, imagining New York’s subways as a unified network stretching across all five boroughs. Distant terminals would’ve ended in farmland, in neighboring cities, and at ports for both air and sea.
Dreams of an eastern seaboard megalopolis cast mirages over these far flung destinations. Someday, the builders imagined, businesses and homeowners would thrive among high-rises of staggering complexity and beauty, a gleaming utopia of mechanism, science, and industrial design. With arteries of power and water wrapped like veins around their subway tunnels, developers would pay richly for the utilities served through the earth itself.
Yes, that was the key—money spent now would be worth ten times as much later, so hundreds of miles of tunnels were planned and dug well in advance of demand. This was in the teens, the twenties, even in the stubborn denial of the early thirties. Then the Great Depression became undeniable, and the expansion and prosperity they’d predicted became the shadows of regret. So many places were closed, written off as losses and struck from the public consciousness as an embarrassment, better forgotten than reminding mankind of their frailty and stupidity and their blind, desperate faith in simple models. How many tunnels were born from the deliberately cultivated belief that growth lasted forever in a finite world?
About twice as many as were currently in use, the Baron judged.
There were many side tunnels and niches cut into the stone and lined with brick, shortcuts built by the workers who’d spent their youths toiling underground. After scouting the rail tunnels near the platform, they discovered a maintenance shaft with a cut padlock, which led down to a lower level track. That was the known sign of a smuggler’s road, a well-tread tunnel which otherwise hadn’t been on city maps for decades.
At the edge of the train platform, the Zombie awkwardly bent his fingers against the latch of a maintenance locker until it broke open. Then they stole two oil lanterns, which they lit using the Baron’s lighter, and they climbed down a short access ladder, one at a time, entering that lower tunnel—the smuggler’s road itself.
The Baron held one lantern; the Zombie carried the other. Warm orange light cast about the rust-red brickwork, shaped by shutters into two searching beams. Carefully, they traced the lines of brick arches, picked out support beams, and illuminated the path ahead.
Most of it was clear beyond a thin layer of grit, but maybe twenty or thirty meters away, they could see shallows of exposed bedrock filled with pools of stagnant water. Sheets of tarred plywood had been set across cinder-block trestles, a bridge laid by some industrious criminal with spare time and unfettered access.
The Baron laid out his plan for their escape. “We’ll follow this path north, at least as far as the smugglers built it up. We should be underneath the 2 the entire way.”
“You sure?” Phyllis asked.
The Baron held the lantern close to one wall, where oil-crusted braces were bolted to the bricks. Optimistically, cables would’ve run there, just in reach yet untouched by the slow accumulation of water. “They dug a lot of these secondary tunnels for utilities—power, water, even steam. They’re meant to trace the train lines, but I doubt this goes under the East River.”
“If it does, I bet it’s full of water,” Phyllis said ruefully.
“Yeah. Not everything gets pumped anymore. When we’re close, we’ll head back to the surface and make for a C-line station. That’ll take us to Lower Manhattan, and we’ll figure out our way from there. Do you know roughly where we started?”
“Sterling and Nostrand,” Phyllis answered. “We’re underneath the Sterling Station.”
“Any idea how many miles that puts us from the East River?”
“Four and a half, maybe five?”
“Even if we walk fast, it might take a couple of hours.” The Baron held the lamp out towards Marco. “Good news. You’ll be healed by the time we’re out of this tomb.”
Marco was gently touching the stains on his back. “I’m covered in blood.”
“Once your wounds close, we’ll toss the shirt,” the Zombie suggested.
“When do you think we’ll arrive?” Phyllis asked the Baron.
”Mm. It’ll be sometime after five when we reach the C-train.”
“That’s a long hike,” Phyllis muttered. “Do you want to go up and risk taking the subway? It’d be a lot faster. We could get out of here while the sun is still up.”
The Baron sighed. “They’ll probably watch all the stations along the 2.” He cast an apologetic frown towards Phyllis. “The convenience isn’t worth the risk.”
Phyllis echoed his sigh. “I suppose you’re right.”
The Zombie grinned. “Are we going to stay up past the Baron’s bedtime?”
The Baron chuckled wryly. “We might have to look for a place to shelter overnight. It depends.” He glanced at Marco, explaining himself before any questions were asked. “Night favors the assailant, not the defender. Malik has decided that secrecy is no longer important, so we’ll hide tonight, if we have to.”
“Do you think the gods will assign a task with his name on it?” Phyllis asked.
“Who, Malik?” the Baron replied.
“Yeah. That frozen air was a spectacle. People will pass it off as a freak freeze, but that must’ve threatened the secrecy of the occult.”
The Baron started across the wooden plywood bridges, carefully arranging his steps along the middle of each span. The cinderblock trestles were set stably on their sides, rising just a few centimeters over the waters. Once he was certain that their footing would be stable, he turned his thoughts to Phyllis’s question. “That’s a terrifying possibility,” he said, thinking aloud, “but it’s unlikely. You gave the secular explanation yourself. It’s spring. Sometimes, there’s cold air.”
“What’s terrifying?” Marco asked.
“Look, there’s a reason the occult is a secret,” the Baron explained. “What people believe about the world sets a baseline, which the whole system of prestige is measured against. That has knock-on effects. Three of them, which are all well-documented at this point.”
“People get scared!” the Zombie said cheerily.
“That’s the first one,” the Baron continued. “People have a powerful anxiety about the world not being normal. When they encounter the occult, they don’t see what we see. They have an emotional buoyancy, pushing them up towards their normal. They need a lot of evidence to weigh them down—to help them sink into things and really see what’s happening. Otherwise, they explain it away, and go back to their lives. That’s why we’ve been teaching you, Marco. To show you overwhelming proof.”
“If you can’t find enough proof, you can swim.” Phyllis glanced down at the pooled water around them, just before they crossed a final span of tarred wood and returned to the safety of brick roads.
“That’s from Apostasy!” the Zombie said, recognizing the metaphor.
The Baron snapped his fingers and pointed back at them. “That’s right. The Apostate wrote that you have to fight your buoyancy and swim down to find the truth. If you want to believe, you can. She actually begs women to try.”
Phyllis looked up towards the arched bricks above, then beyond them, towards the darkness that suffused the earth itself. “That was me, when I found Apostasy. I read it, I believed in it, and it was amazing. And it still is—it’s real miracles—but sometimes, through all the stress, I forget why I started.”
“Why’d you start?” Marco asked.
“This world is full of magic,” Phyllis replied. “It’s hidden in the margins, but it’s there.”
“Shit,” Marco muttered, glancing down at his bloody shirt. “I guess I have to believe it too. I should be dead.” The boy paused a moment before asking, “So why don’t more people believe?”
“It has to be hidden,” the Baron continued. “The second effect is very strict. The cost of a wish depends on how much of a miracle it’d be in the eyes of the world. A wish made in secret by unknown cultists? That’s cheap, practically subsidized. A wish made in front of a TV camera, by a famous politician? It’d take all the prestige of the world.”
“Huh. Is there a magic politician?” Marco asked.
“Yeah. Consider Stalin. He’s a cultist. When he was young, he could afford wishes, but now he’s too famous. His prices are oceanic, so he delegates all the occult power to others. He can’t participate anymore, not even in secret. People would notice.”
“The eyes of the world have tremendous weight!” the Zombie cried.
“Do you think Stalin wants to… to wish?” Marco asked.
“No,” the Baron replied firmly. “He would have to give up his secular power. He’d have to fake his death. If he doesn’t, he’ll live and die like a regular man, and frankly, most of them do—the powerful. They choose power over magic. They die important. It’s what they live for, and then they go to the afterlife.”
Phyllis spoke up. “It wasn’t always this way. Few hundred years ago, everyone believed in magic. Wishes could be public, and famous mystics could afford them.”
“What changed?” Marco asked her.
“The Enlightenment,” the Baron said quickly.
Phyllis laughed. “Yeah. Science got better, way better. Reason won over the world. Ever since then, if the public can see it, your wish has to look like a coincidence, or speculative science, or it’ll cost too much. Real magic has to look believable.”
“Exactly right,” the Baron said. “That price structure keeps a lot of secrets. Most of the big wishes must be excusable with a moment’s thought. Miracles aren’t obvious anymore.”
“Ehhh…” Marco let out a sound of confusion. “What about the Cat?”
“Grandfathered in from a mythic age,” the Baron answered. “Old miracles can look as big as they are. The ancient standard holds for them. That’s why the Cat is so valuable. There’s nothing else like it. Still, there are limits. If you walked on camera with the Cat and survived a beheading, or something else that’s hard to explain—”
“There’d be a task,” Phyllis finished for the Baron. “That’s what I was worrying about with Malik. If all else fails and you’re threatening the mysteries, then the gods will set a task on your head. All the other cultists will come to kill you.”
“But that won’t happen to me?” Marco asked.
“I wouldn’t worry,” the Baron answered. “You died, but people have survived some bad injuries. The public will excuse it. The Zombie would be the real problem, if he weren’t a special case. His invincibility stretches all the way across the system. No tasks are ever about him. The so-called gods ignore him in the hope that he’ll just go away.”
Marco tried rubbing his lower back again. “So I really did die up there?”
“You did,” the Baron said.
“Shit. I thought I was alive the whole time.”
“Why so?” the Zombie asked curiously.
“Well, it hurt,” Marco said. “I heard on the radio, death doesn’t hurt.”
The Zombie stepped up close behind Marco and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “The dead don’t feel anything, sure, but I know how the dying feel.”
Marco quivered and picked up the pace to open some space between them, then cast the Zombie a worried look.
The Zombie grinned even wider. “Nothing hurts more than dying, boy. Those who don’t hurt, don’t fight, and once upon a time, your ancestors fought and survived against all odds. Escaping death was the only way to end their pain without succumbing to the world.”
“Jesus,” Marco said.
“Speaking of death,” the Baron interrupted, “you’ve died at least twice, up to five times. Those gunshot wounds were fatal, and I think the injection was their test for the Cat o’ Nine Lives. I need you to think back though—how long were you not breathing?”
“I don’t know,” Marco said.
“You were out for several minutes. If you took a breath somewhere in the middle, you might have survived. If you didn’t, you’ve died another time.”
“I don’t remember. When they stuck the needle in the back of my head, the world got really dark and dry. I felt like I was shriveling up.”
“Baked under a black sun,” the Zombie whispered.
“Stop hassling him,” Phyllis griped.
The Zombie laughed.
The Baron ignored their bantering. “We’ll err on the side of caution and assume it’s been five deaths. Three from the bullets, one from the injection, one from asphyxiation.” He gestured at Marco with the lamp. “If you die again, remember that you don’t stop living. Act like you’re alive. Will it, and the body will work.”
“Like these wounds in my back,” Marco said. “I’m dead right now?”
“That’s right. If we cut the Cat out of you, you’d bleed to death. You need to hold onto it for at least a couple of hours, preferably overnight. Then we can take it out.”
“That also gives us time to hide from the police,” Phyllis said thoughtfully. “That’s not even considering our long-term arrangements. We’ll have to keep off the radar for at least a month, if not longer. The Zombie may have murdered a police captain.”
The Baron kept pacing forward. The road was long and the days were all too short. Nevertheless, he couldn’t share Phyllis’s pessimism. “A day will be enough. Tammany Hall will work to keep the Zombie a secret, and he’s the only part that matters. He’s the spectacle.”
Phyllis stopped walking and frowned. “Baron, you need to take this seriously.”
d’Holbach stopped as well, and everyone paused in their march. “I am serious. They won’t want another Rasputin on their hands, so they’ll protect us. They’ll hide us.”
“Who is Rasputin?” Marco asked.
“A Russian monk who held the Cat during most of the Great War. He was using prestige to convince the Tsarina he was a miracle-worker, and he wanted Russia to drop out of the conflict. The Orthodox cult was slow to stop him, and the gods didn’t like that, so a great task came out of Berlin to murder him before the end of the year. It was a mess.”
“Tell him in a minute,” Phyllis said. “Listen to me. Baron, you must take this seriously.”
“I said…” The Baron paused. “Why do you think I’m not?”
“Mr. Barilla may have been ignorant, but he wasn’t a fool. You’re in a special position. You have that man—” She pointed at the Zombie. “—and New York has to protect you because of him. That’s just good business on their part. But they don’t have to protect me. They don’t have to protect Marco. I’m supposed to be running the docks tomorrow, but if I show up in connection with a stevedore getting pinned for murder, they’ll string me up for the disaster you made in the streets. New York won’t protect me. Once they figured I was with you, they’d probably kill me in the county lockup themselves. One more Artemisian, dead.”
“They’ll be looking for the Zombie—”
“That’s bullshit. He drove his fingers into a man’s skull, and there were a lot of witnesses. They’ll want all of us, and they’ll know my face and Marco’s.” She pointed directly at the Baron. “Don’t tell me that we’re just going to hide for a day and the heat will be off. Our lives just went to hell back there, and we don’t have the same privileges. We won’t be safe for years.”
The Baron’s face burned a little. “You volunteered.”
“Because you asked me, and said I’d be safer with you. I expected nothing like this though. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t belly aching. I accept our situation, which is currently really bad if you aren’t a mythological figure, so you need to think seriously on what happens next before it happens to us. Okay?”
“Fine, you’re right.”
“I’m here for the same reason you’re here. I want to keep power out of Stalin’s hands. This is the whole world we’re talking about. Just play it smart.”
The Baron raised his hands in surrender. “As I said, you’re right. When we get to Manhattan, we’ll find a hideout from one of the local mafioso. Is that a plan?”
“If we get to Manhattan, I know a place,” Phyllis said.
“Perfect. Thank you, Phyllis.”
“We shouldn’t stand around here,” the Zombie interjected. He picked idly at a brick in the wall, chipped off a shard with his fingernail and put it in his mouth. The sound of grinding stone reminded the Baron of popcorn at a theater, distracting and out of place.
Phyllis nodded to the Baron, and he nodded back. An understanding was reached. She then said to the Zombie, “I’m good now. We can go.”
“Good.” The Zombie chewed until the chip of brick turned to sand, then to mud, and by the time he was wiping ruddy silt from his lips, they were all walking again.
The tunnel varied little. Most of it had been excavated, supported, and lined with bricks. Where the ceiling had collapsed into piles, a path was cleared. Where the floor hadn’t been laid, plywood ramps and surfaces abounded. This road had almost certainly been used to smuggle something by volume, likely on a small cart or wheelbarrow. Marijuana bales? Opium? Cocaine? Heroin? Morphine and codeine? Maybe even an occasional bag full of mixed gems, diamonds, or stolen art from the war. None of it would’ve surprised the Baron. One end of the tunnel was near the docks or trucks coming over the Brooklyn Bridge. The other end was in Crown Heights, where new wealth could afford expensive, addictive habits.
Marco spoke up after several minutes of quiet marching. “I think you bruised my ribs with your shoulder,” he said to the Zombie.
The invincible man was following the teen closely. “Be glad that’s the worst that happened,” he replied curtly.
“You weren’t hitting me very hard. You just felt like a rock.”
“You were lucky,” the Baron opined. “He’s inconsistent.”
Marco grunted. “I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s an element of luck,” the Zombie explained. “d’Holbach has a good theory about this. The gods themselves can’t make an invincible thing, because invincibility is nonsense.”
“I didn’t say that,” the Baron corrected. “I said that invincibility as a property is nonsense. If you want to interact with the world, then it must have some impact on you. That impact changes you, and that change violates the core tenet of invincibility.”
“That I cannot be changed,” the Zombie said.
“Exactly. Invincibility can’t be a property, but it can be a description of outcomes. If something happens, the gods can alter it so the Zombie doesn’t change. Understand? It’s a mediated invincibility, like one endless divine intervention.”
“The gods never preserve me the same way twice,” the Zombie said.
“This makes him invincible in the only way the word has any meaning. It also means that the gods use a different technique for every interaction, and the results are unpredictable. If you hit him, it’d be a coin flip whether or not your fist stopped dead or shattered your bones.”
“There are too many possibilities to count,” the Zombie corrected.
“Could I have died while riding on your shoulder?” Marco asked.
“Absolutely,” the Baron said. “It was a calculated risk, I’m sure.”
“I didn’t want the Baron to wait on you,” the Zombie said.
The Baron snickered. “That’ll give him a boost of confidence.”
“He can be confident I’m telling the truth. His life shouldn’t inconvenience yours.”
Phyllis added her two cents: “Just don’t touch the Zombie unless you have to. It’s for your own safety. He’s a steel man in a glass world. It’s too easy to break against him.”
“Nobody can touch you?” Marco asked.
“Very carefully,” the Zombie said, “they can.”
Marco lapsed into silence for nearly a full minute. They felt in their chests the rumble of a subway train passing somewhere overhead. Before it was gone, he’d found the question he wanted to ask. “Isn’t that lonely?”
“No,” the Zombie said, “that’s not the reason it’s lonely.”
“So you are lonely?”
“Not anymore,” the Zombie said, his grin slowly vanishing. “But you don’t have to worry about me. Even if I was lonely, it wouldn’t hurt.” He tapped his sternum. “Do you know that feeling in your chest? That twisting up little knot in your stomach that hurts when you’re unhappy?”
“Yes,” Marco said.
“I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. I don’t have a soul.”
“Did you ever have one?”
“If I was ever human.”
“What do you mean? You’re a person—”
“I don’t remember being a person,” the Zombie interrupted. “I don’t have a given name. I can’t remember any faces of any family. You tell me, where’s the proof I was a person?”
Marco was looking back at the Zombie quickly, glance after glance. “You don’t remember your dad? Your mom?”
“Did I even have them?” the Zombie asked.
“I—uh… You really weren’t a person?”
The Zombie stopped and asked sharply, “Do I look like a person?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s reason enough to believe the myth. Congratulations, you’ve dug up the truth. I’m the body of a disassembled man.” He gestured forward. “Move.”
“Sorry,” Marco began.
“Don’t apologize to assholes,” Phyllis said.
“Yeah, okay, I just didn’t mean to offend him.”
“You didn’t offend me,” the Zombie said, “but you asked some stupid questions.”
“Leave him be. He doesn’t know the myths.” Phyllis was picking at the corners of her eyes with her pinky. “I don’t think his father knew them well either, honestly.”
“Ha!” The Zombie began to grin again. “Ignorance is a good excuse.”
“What? That’s backwards.”
“Is it?” the Zombie asked. “What’s the opposite? Ignorance is no excuse? Sounds like something only assholes would say to punish people.”
The Baron laughed.
“You really don’t remember anything?” Marco asked.
“I remember a little,” the Zombie said. “I was born a farmer by the Euphrates, but I became a hero. I slew a tyrant king, and the priests taught me a forbidden rite.”
“He’s lying,” the Baron said.
“Yes, that one was a lie,” the Zombie continued. “I was actually a bandit in Central Asia. When I was captured, they tried executing me by the southern mountains, but I escaped and lived in the ruins of a cliff-dwelling people. In their caves, I found an artifact of great power.”
“He’s just playing with you. He doesn’t know his origins.”
“No, no, I definitely remember. I was the chief of a tribe in the jungles of Laos. My people were dying of disease, and they blamed our rivals for placing a curse on us. They sacrificed themselves to give me power, and I exacted their revenge on our innocent foes.”
“Why don’t you tell him one of the real myths about you?” Phyllis asked.
“Because they aren’t my myths. I’d rather tell one of my stories.”
“He prefers it,” the Baron said, “even if his stories are lies.”
“How do you know they’re lies?” the Zombie asked.
“Because you never tell the same story twice.”
The Zombie wagged his finger. “That means only most are lies.”
“Marco, listen,” Phyllis said, “the Zombie is extremely old. Probably older than writing.”
“How old is that?” Marco asked.
The Baron fielded that question: “The oldest written tablets come from the 26th century BC, more than four and a half thousand years ago.”
“Don’t swamp him with facts,” Phyllis chided.
“The Akkadians wrote about the Zombie first—” the Baron started deliberately.
“Shush! Marco, there are a lot of myths out there, and every cult on the planet has their own take on the nature of the gods, the Falls, and the occult. Everything you can think of, someone has probably believed it somewhere—but what’s really interesting is what they all believe together. These are mostly oral traditions, but they all agree on some stories.”
Marco was following Phyllis in the middle of their march. He glanced back at the trailing light. “The Zombie?” he asked.
“They give him a different name and different motivations depending on their traditions, but the cults all agree he exists. Some of them think he was the cause of the first Fall. Others think he was the cause of the second or third. But again, there’s something they all agree on. The Fall of Prestige was the first Fall in recorded history.”
It was incredible what a half hour and five attempts on someone’s life had done to fix an uncouth attitude. The boy with the vulgar mouth had vanished. A young man had taken his place, and he was listening closely, hanging on every word Phyllis had to say. “The Fall of Prestige…” Marco tried reasoning it out, remembering what the Baron had told him back in the Imperial Apartments. “So there was something the Zombie did that made the gods change the rules about what you could wish for?”
“You’re paying attention. That’s good,” Phyllis said, “but it’s a little more complicated than that. The Apostate wrote down the London cult’s version of the myth.”
This was what the Apostate wrote.
Compare all the myths you can find. Collect your books, your notes, and tally up the powers of legend. There’s a pattern shared across everything I’ve ever read—Christian, Classical, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Welsh, Slavic, and Oriental.
The older a myth is, the more powerful the magic it portrays.
This isn’t a coincidence. After creation, after many falls from grace and original sins, there comes a point where myths align with history, and it is this point where our impact begins. For as long as there have been people, there have been cults. For as long as there have been cults, there have been cultists. Our wishes have changed the world, and the myths reflect our influence. Before the Falls diminished our strength, we were powerful. How sad it didn’t last.
Over time, the rules closed around us, we weakened, and the stories changed.
Look back again. There have been many Falls both great and small, but none seem more important than the Fall of Prestige. Our system was born out of this era, and all of civilization was built in the shadow of one man’s sin. We could no longer rely wholly on the gods, and we were forced to rely on each other. Food, health, and wisdom—all became scarce.
Before the Fall, there was a golden age when wishes were granted for sacrifices, and three kinds were known. Prestige was the sacrifice of effort. Life was the sacrifice of time. Wealth was the sacrifice of possessions. The gods accepted all three freely, and the wishes granted were powerful and numerous. Consider all the ways wealth could’ve aided primitive man. A hungry mother could’ve destroyed her favorite necklace for a fortnight of warm food. A healer could’ve burned the fat of a goat to cure disease and plague. Powers could’ve been bought by selling away strength, valor, and cunning—for even intangible qualities were possessions of a kind.
Before the Fall of Prestige, we could’ve given up our wealth for a wish.
In this time, there was an unnamed city in the furthest land, and the people of that city called it the Land of Fire. There was no name for the city, for there was no other city in the land. Their arts were few. Their wealth was scant. Their time was spent in the fields and forests.
As all cities have a god, there too was a god for the Land of Fire. She was a young god, and she loved her people. Whenever she could, she fulfilled their greatest wishes for the smallest sacrifices, asking only token tributes for her intervention.
In the Land of Fire, it was a time of grace, though grace goeth before a Fall.
There was a very clever man in the city. We don’t know his profession, nor his name, nor the rank of his birth. We only know his cunning. With the vigor a farmer lended to his crops or the hunter to his hunt, he searched for flaws in everything. In human love, he found weakness and the force to divide houses. In generosity, he found foolish trust and undeserved charity. He was by all accounts an evil man, and he set his eye on finding the flaws of their god.
Here the accounts vary. Some say he cheated and schemed and stole until he had enough wealth to sacrifice for knowledge. Others say he meditated on the problem and discovered the answer through simple reason. I favor the stories demonstrating a little of both.
This clever man wished to know, “What is man’s most valuable possession?”
He already had an idea, and the god confirmed it. Man’s most valuable possession was his soul. It carried his will and self. He perceived only because the soul formed a locus for perception. Without it, a man was nothing but meat and bones.
He wished to know, “Can a soul be sold?”
Not forever, the knowledge came. It can only be exchanged for a time.
The clever man rested upon this truth. He considered it for many years, turning it about in his mind to examine every angle and detail. He felt the grain of the notion, the warp of its wood. He knew the concept through and through before he acted.
He would be more clever than the gods themselves.
He cleaned himself, dressed in a simple style, and went to the temple. There he sacrificed everything he owned in the world, and he wished for great health and youth, so that for a day he wouldn’t suffer from human frailty, its hungers or its thirsts. His home burned with his animals and tools. He had no plans for shelter or sustenance. It was success or death.
He wished to make an exchange. “My soul to you,” he offered, “for absolute and true invincibility until I choose to exchange it back.”
The gods are fallible. The god of the Land of Fire accepted the terms, for she couldn’t imagine anything more terrible than the emptiness of a soulless body. The mind, separated from the soul, would have no inner life. It would live and breathe and talk and dream, but it’d be perception and intelligence passing through an empty theater, a shadow play put on for nobody. Such a state would be unbearable. The soul would yearn to return to the world.
She ripped the man’s soul from his body and left his flesh an invincible vessel, immortal and enduring. What he did next isn’t clear. Some say he used his new power to overthrow the Land of Fire. Others say he smashed the temple with his bare hands. All accounts agree on one thing. With the perfect liberty of absolute invulnerability, his first impulse was to destroy.
The god grew upset beyond all measure. She called upon the pantheon of the globe, and together they held the man in place and demanded that he choose to regain his soul. The people of the land demanded justice. She threatened to withhold the afterlife itself from him. If he remained invincible, he would be damned to this world, and his soul would be set in darkness beyond paradise, where no joy would ever be felt again. To earn eternity, he would have to accept their punishment freely. Choose, they demanded, and choose now.
It is said that he grinned then, for without a soul, there was nobody to suffer the misery of soullessness. There was only the intelligence of the body, which argued his case.
“I can’t choose to take back my soul,” the man said. “I can’t choose anything. Without a soul, I have no will. I’m not free. I can’t choose any more than the rain chooses to fall or the flowers to bloom. Whatever I do now is inevitable like the rising of the sun.”
The god fumed. She told him that men had exchanged their souls before and taken them back. Why should he be an exception? Why should he be unable to choose?
“The gods were wrong,” he said. “I’m not human anymore. I can’t choose. It’s the wish I wanted and what you granted. Or would the gods refuse a fair exchange, with fair conditions?”
The gods would not refuse to grant a valid wish. To do so would not be generous.
“Then by reason, this body will remain invincible forever.”
And it has remained, appearing on every continent in every occult tradition since the records began. His current name is the Golem, though he has gone by many others: the Body, the Immortal, the Sin that Walked, the Falling Mountain, and a thousand more.
The gods saw the logic of the Golem’s exchange, and they feared it. If one man could find absolute invincibility through the exchange of wealth, what else could be lost for eternal gain? What other holes would they find in contracts made with sacrifices?
How could they trust themselves to never allow another Golem to be born?
There was no great task given. No man could oppose the Golem.
After they released him upon the world, the gods turned to their Oracles and whispered in their ears. “We’ll no longer accept sacrifices of wealth. You may pay only in life and prestige.” Then they were told the story of the Golem, and they all knew why the world was changing.
The new rule destroyed the world before civilization. Disease ran rampant. Famine chased people to the grave, where they were buried with riches they would’ve offered for food.
Contributing to this chaos, the Golem was rampant and cruel.
Each cult that met him has feared him. He is a murderer, a trickster, and a monster, depending on the state of his sanity and his tenuous connections to the rest of the world. He will be among us forever, and nothing we can do will be rid of him.
Children of Artemis, my beautiful girls, avoid this man. You will know him by the ruin he brings and the joy he seeks through annihilation of good and wonderful things. He can only be approached under a single circumstance. There is a philosopher whose story precedes mine by fifty years. In his presence, the Golem is docile, even charming. If he still lives when you read this book, you will recognize him as well. He is the Golem’s pet and the Golem’s master at once.
You may approach the Golem if he is with Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach.
Author’s Note:
This is one of my favorite chapters in this entire chunk of the book. It’s a foundational myth, finally revealed. I hope you enjoyed it~
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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