Scenting Hallowed Blood (54 page)

‘Here are your brethren, angel
king,’ Sofia said. ‘Here, where they have always been, within the
abyss. Look into the blue light — see your brother, Penemue.’

The blue sphere glowed dully
before him, and as he looked into it, Shemyaza was hit by an
intense feeling of pride. He had once owned the power to divide
nations, to kill and conquer. All had bowed before him. Was any of
this worthless? No. He had lived and experienced it.

Sofia uttered a soft sound of
approval. ‘You see well, my lord. Now, look into the purple light.
See your brother, Araqiel.’

Proud and imperious, Shemyaza
directed his attention to the next sphere that came to hover before
his perception. A painful feeling shot through his heart. He
thought of Daniel, safe in the world of humanity, ignorant of what
his lord was experiencing. How Shemyaza envied Daniel. He wanted to
be him. He thought of Enniel, with his riches, his vast house, his
network of power. Surely, he should have Enniel’s life? Enniel did
not deserve its comforts, but he, Shemyaza, did. The sick purple
light hovered and spun before him, its rays filling his being with
the spikes of envy. Only Sofia’s voice could break the spell it
cast over him.

‘Now, Azazel, look upon the red
light, for this is your brother, Salamiel.’

Reluctantly, Shemyaza turned
his perception towards the bloody globe of light. He felt the
aching sense of envy conjured by the purple sphere bleed out of
him. In its place came a blinding sword of rage, fiery in its
intensity. He wanted to hit out at all those who had oppressed him.
He wanted to cut out their hearts, scatter their entrails over the
fields of the land. He wanted blood, and the sweet euphony of
agonised screams. In his wrath, he was all-powerful.

‘Yes!’ Sofia cried. ‘Now look,
Azazel, upon the green light, for it is your brother,
Pharmaros.’

Empowered, Shemyaza had no
difficulty in transferring his perception from the light of wrath.
He turned towards the green light, and immediately, his entire
body, from his loins to his heart, was convulsed by an overwhelming
sexual desire. It was mindless, the need to sate his cravings,
whatever the consequences. Pure lust. In comparison to its demands,
all other considerations of life seemed worthless.

‘How beautiful you are,’ Sofia
purred. ‘Turn now. Look upon the silver light, and see your
brother, Baraqijal.’

Resentfully, Shemyaza tore his
perception away from the green light and turned to the next sphere
that came to dance before him. At once, all feelings of desire left
him and he was engulfed by a paralysing sense of lethargy. What was
the point of being here and experiencing this? It was all too
tedious. It made him tired. He didn’t care about it.

‘You crave the light of sloth,’
Sofia said, ‘but turn and behold the orange light as it moves
before you, for it is your brother, Gadreel.’

Shemyaza could hardly summon
the energy to obey her words, but painfully, slowly, moved his
perception away from the dull, silvery light. Immediately, the
numbing feelings of lethargy fled his senses, to be replaced by a
cold realisation. He became aware of the falsehood of existence and
the sense of self-justice in untruth. He understood the complexity
of the reasoning behind all lies. There was no honesty in the
universe.

‘And lastly,’ Sofia said. ‘Look
now upon the yellow sphere, for here is your brother, Kashday.’

Of all the lights, this one hit
Shemyaza the hardest with its assailing sensations. Its aspect
struck at the fibres of his heart and soul with a ravenous feeling
of greed. He knew that he had been hungry for the entirety of his
existence, and it was a hunger that could never be satisfied, a
thirst that could never be quenched. He craved power, adoration,
riches, freedom, and no matter how much he managed to snatch from
the world, it would never be enough.

‘These are your attributes,
your gates to power!’ Sofia cried, and there she was before him,
eclipsing with her dark light all the colours of the spheres.
‘Learn well, angel king, for these are the planets that spin around
your pivot. You are the sun that propels their existence. Take all
of their aspects and reflect them back. Shine for them, son of
light, be the black sun that feeds the life substance of their
nature. And be the perfect sphere. You shall not seek the source,
Azazel, you shall
be
it.’

Shemyaza raised his head to
her, aware once more of corporeality, the flesh around his bones.
‘And what of you, Sofia? Are you to share this power?’

Sofia raised her arms above her
head. The snakes in her hair lifted their gleaming coils and hissed
her words in chorus. ‘I am the first and the last, the honoured and
the despised, the whore and the holy one, wife and virgin, barren
and fertile. And you will make me the queen of your heaven!’

Shemyaza bowed his head to her.
‘I thank you, Sofia, for showing and giving me this knowledge, for
now I am equipped to be a king who rules all the spiritual
realms.’

Sofia threw back her head and
laughed, the snakes twisting crazily around her in a feverish halo.
‘Indeed, my lord. Indeed! Now, fly back to the world of flesh, and
take my strength with you!’

Shemyaza gazed beyond her
gigantic form, out into the void. He gathered his will within him,
and threw out his arms. Filled with a sense of power, he commanded
the sphere of Da’ath to appear before him. It was there, an
eclipsed sun, a ring of white fire around the ultimate dark.

He streaked towards it like an
exploding star.

Shemyaza opened his eyes and
found himself enveloped in a dim red light. He became aware of the
crystal all around him, and the last fading echoes of a howling
wind, the chill of the void. The crystal still held him in stasis,
but he murmured within his mind. ‘Release me. I am ready.’

The light dimmed to a red hue,
and the weight of the stone seemed to lift from his body. A low,
humming sound slyly invaded the silence of the crystal. Shemyaza
tried to move his limbs and found that he could walk forward. It
was like swimming through liquid glass. Something seemed to crack
around him, and he was aware of cold air, and a slow, slithering
sound, as of gigantic coils being dragged across wet stone. He
looked back, and saw that he had passed completely through the
crystal, which had returned to its original translucent state. He
turned away. Now another tunnel lay before him, waiting for his
feet to tread its worn floor. Red light spilled out from it, but it
was not fire.

Shemyaza straightened his spine
and walked forward, into the light. He felt empty of all feeling,
and had become simply a purpose: to wake the serpent. Time no
longer had any meaning. He could have walked for mere seconds or
over an hour, but eventually he emerged into another cavern that
was far greater in size than the crystal chamber. A searing heat
gusted around him, accompanied by a deep, roaring hiss. There could
be no physical serpent here, surely? The Shamir was a symbol of the
giants’ power, nothing more. It would be a crystal, waiting to be
energised, a blue flame to be rekindled. Its shrine would be
decorated with ophidian symbols and talismans, and maybe a nest of
vipers would curl around it, jealously guarding it from harm.

He was wrong.

The Shamir. Its head filled the
cavern before him, the size of a fifteen storey building, while its
body disappeared into the labyrinth of tunnels beyond. It was the
colour of smouldering embers, and its eyes were filmed with a milky
sheath. Around it lay drifts of discarded skin, which still hung
down in rags from its gigantic yet elegant head. It emanated a
musky, reptilian stench. Shemyaza halted before it, in wonder and
terror. How could this creature be real? Its breath was like a hot,
living hurricane against his skin.

Words burst up through
Shemyaza’s body, words that had perhaps been waiting for millennia
to be spoken. ‘Father, I am here.’

Only one eye was visible from
where Shemyaza stood. At his words, it blinked open abruptly, and
golden light flared out to bathe him in a blazing radiance. The eye
was the size of a cathedral, emanating the light of sacred power.
This was no blind snake. Shemyaza knew that it could see him, right
into him, and that it was very much awake. Sluggish, maybe, but
gathering power with every passing moment. Shemyaza felt hypnotised
by its gaze. He was drawn towards the wondrous eye. Looking into it
was like gazing into the sun, but it did not hurt at all.

His head was filled with the
booming yet soundless words of the Shamir. ‘The sun of my eye sees
the sun of thy soul. Our light together, my son, will be whole.
Take thy true form, a serpent, as me, and come forth, for I have
dreamed of thee.’

Shemyaza felt then, the first
stirrings of the inevitable transformation within his body. It
wracked his entire being with feelings he could not describe,
although they seemed weirdly familiar. Gradually, his flesh filled
with a sensation of ecstasy. Golden light streamed from his eyes
and from the pores of his skin. Every fibre, every cell, shifted
and advanced onto a higher genetic level — an evolution that should
take millions of years to achieve. And yet, despite being aware of
this, Shemyaza also knew that the form he was transforming into was
a return to a primal state that transcended the boundaries of earth
history. He could feel his body stretching, his neck elongating,
his face and limbs becoming longer. The desperate ache of yearning,
which had yoked him for twelve thousand years lifted from his soul.
A sense of limitless freedom filled his body, heart and mind as if
he had drunk deeply from a holy grail. All the knowledge ever
guarded by his ancestors flooded into his brain, and his perception
was dominated by a vision of the constellation of Orion, the
heavenly lights of the prison from which Daniel had released him.
Beyond Orion, he beheld the stars of immeasurable galaxies. His new
form possessed the power to cross vast distances and dimensions, to
ride the stars. It had the instinctual ability to fold space and
time to its will. Now, he was a keeper of the universe and a
bestower of evolution. He was pure life force in its most potent
form, sent forth from the source to propagate the schemes and
cycles of whole universes. He was a god.

Shemyaza, serpent man, stood
before the immense, gaping mouth of the Shamir. ‘Father, I come
unto thee, for the black sun is rising and the time of reckoning is
now.’

The Shamir exhaled a hurricane
of breath. ‘Thy shape is as me, the seed of life, from the creator
be, to fertilise this world, the earth through she, a timeless
voyage across morphic sea.’

Shemyaza rose up on his golden
coils and slid like a shaft of light into the waiting mouth of the
Shamir. His destiny was sealed.

On the beach below the Lion’s Head,
Tamara waited at the entrance to the underworld, standing on stiff,
splayed legs, her arms held out above her head. She was the sacred
whore, waiting to ride the seven-headed serpent. She would ride its
power, take it, direct it. Already she could sense its
consciousness waking up below her. The landscape around her was
unnaturally still and silent. No birds sang, even though dawn was
fast approaching. The sea looked turbid, restless, but there were
hardly any waves. Then, the ground began to shake. It was as if an
army of horsemen were galloping up through the earth from a deep
cavern; the sound of thunder. Delmar whimpered in consternation,
and Tamara was hard-pressed to keep her stance upon the rock. ‘Go
down to the beach,’ she said.

Delmar scampered down the stony
incline and crouched behind a large rock, gazing up at her. Tamara
began to utter a monotonous chant, calling the serpent to her. The
sound of the earth-thunder became louder, drowning out her words.
Tamara shrieked her invocation, and then the face of the Lion
exploded outwards. Tamara’s shouted words became a shriek of
horror. For a moment, she saw the gigantic head of the serpent
looking out at her, then its jaws dropped open and it lunged
forward, swallowing her as a horse might swallow a mayfly.

Below, Delmar cringed back
against the rock. He saw the great body of the Shamir coil out of
the cliff-face and shoot towards the sea. Over the troubled ocean,
it became a streak of red-golden light that crashed against the
chapel on St Michael’s Mount. The Mount glowed as if it was on
fire, its chapel had become a ball of radiance, emanating
blistering spears of white light. It was happening! The serpent
power was coming alive! But something was wrong. Where was Tamara?
She was not riding its power as she’d promised. And where was
Shemyaza? Even as Delmar stared out to sea, the sky became black;
the stars, the moon, were all eclipsed. And then the sun reared
above the horizon, but it was not the dawn that Delmar knew. This
was a black sun, ringed with crimson fire. The sea heaved and
shuddered beneath its hellish glow, and the water began to recede
from the beach, faster than Delmar had ever seen it. The sea was
leaving the land. His element! He would die! Delmar shrank back
against the rock as hard as he could and covered his head with his
hands. It had happened all wrong.

Aninka, still with her face
pressed against the panes of the French windows at High Crag, saw
the sky go black. She felt sick, dizzy, yet also full of energy.
She had to smell the air. What would it smell like? She opened the
windows and stepped out into the garden, which was dark, yet lit
with a spectral glow. Aninka was drawn to the cliff edge, as if in
a dream. Part of her was afraid that she’d be unable to resist
throwing herself over, as Shemyaza had done. Yet she could not
fight the impulse to go there.

As she put her hands upon the
crumbling rock wall, the black sun lifted above the horizon. Aninka
stared at it in amazement. She should not be able to see, because
there was no light, yet everything around her stood out in stark
relief, as if releasing light from within. She heard a sound, and
looked down to the beach. A girl was down there, scrabbling around
in the sand, and a male figure with pale hair lay stretched out
beside her. Aninka’s first thought was that the male was Shemyaza.
She ran along the wall and presently found the steep wooden
stairway that led down to the beach. It was very difficult to move
quickly, for the thick air was almost impossible to breathe, yet
she knew she had to reach the girl and her companion quickly.