Unholy Night (31 page)

…all of them left untended.

A
young girl came running out of Herod’s throne room, sobbing and soaked in blood. Some of it was hers. Most of it wasn’t. She pushed her way past the Roman and Judean soldiers who packed the hallways.

“The king!” she cried. “The king has gone mad!”

The soldiers had come running only moments before, summoned by the sounds of a melee. They’d expected to find the Antioch Ghost battling it out with their comrades, trying to get his hands on Herod. But on arriving, they’d been shocked to see that it was
Herod himself
wielding a blade, using it to dispose of his courtesans and advisors, his wise men and women. The soldiers could only stand and watch as he hacked them to pieces, screaming all the while. None of them dared defy the will of a king, madman or not.

It was something out of a nightmare. A grisly scene that forced even the most cast-iron of soldiers to look away, lest they be sick. The throne room was littered with headless and limbless victims. Shards of smashed pottery and splinters of broken furniture. And in the middle of it all, Herod himself, kneeling over one of the bodies, a sword by his side…his face almost completely obscured by blood.

Minutes before this madness began, Herod sat impatiently on his throne, awaiting an update on the escape. The magus sat next to him, meditating silently.
Searching for the fugitives,
Herod hoped.
Hunting them with his mind.

Minutes after the first shouts of alarm echoed through the palace, Pontius Pilate appeared with his lieutenants, ready to give the king his report. It would be nearly an hour before the Romans discovered one of the smaller ships in their fleet was missing.

“It seems,” said Pilate, “that the Ghost and the other fugitives were able to slip out of the palace, Your Highness.”

Herod involuntarily balled his fists.
The Hebrew God…

“At present,” Pilate continued, “we have no clue as to where they went, but I have some of my men searching the grounds in case they’ve hidden close by.”

“SOME of your men? Send ALL of them, you idiot! Send them all into the desert! Into the mountains! Send them up and down the coast!”

Pilate hesitated, sharing a look with some of his officers. “Your Highness,” he said, “in light of the admiral’s death, I’ve…decided to recall my men to Rome.”

It took Herod a moment to register this.

“What did you say?”

“The emperor has already sacrificed enough of his men for this folly. I won’t risk losing any more or endangering his magus. Not until I’m able to make a full report.”

Herod lifted his body off the throne, his anger rising to its full height.

“‘His’ magus?” He walked slowly down the steps, a smile spreading across his lips. “You can tell Augustus that
his
magus won’t be coming back to Rome.”

Pilate glared back at him.
What is this?

“You can tell him,” Herod continued, “that his power belongs to Judea now. As you can see, he’s already used some of it to restore my health. Or did you think I’d miraculously healed on my own?”

Now it was the magus who rose, emerging from his trance and taking in what had just become a very tricky situation.

Pilate was confused. So were Herod’s courtesans and advisors, his wise men and women. All of them exchanged looks behind Herod’s back.

Is this some kind of joke?

“Tell Augustus,” Herod continued, “that I’m not his puppet any longer.”

“Are you mad?” asked Pilate. “Augustus is the master of the world! What are you but a sickly little joke of a king?”

“INSOLENCE! I should have you cut down where you stand!”

The mere suggestion made Pilate’s lieutenants draw their swords, which made Herod’s Judean guards draw theirs. Pilate raised a hand in the air—
easy
…

“Do you have any idea what he’ll do to you?” asked Pilate.

“Let him try!” said Herod with a laugh. “The magus has sworn his loyalty to me! His powers are my powers!”

Pilate looked past Herod and locked onto the magus’s black eyes. He wanted to know if any of this was true.

The magus, for his part, knew he had a decision to make.

Yes, Augustus didn’t appreciate him. Yes, the magus wanted to strike out on his own, use his powers to rebuild a lost faith. But he was also the last of his kind. And this made self-preservation all the more important. Herod had seemed like the perfect catalyst for his transformation—a powerful man who could be controlled, used up, and thrown away. But he was clearly coming unhinged. Declaring war on the empire in the blink of an eye. That wasn’t someone you wanted in your corner. One didn’t need to read the tea leaves to see how it would end. He would live to fight another day.

The magus indicated something to Pilate with a nod of his head. When Pilate saw what it was, he understood.

“Go ahead,” said Pilate to Herod, indicating the full-length mirror. “Look for yourself. Look at what the magus has done to you.”

Herod laughed and turned back to see if the magus was just as amused as he was. But instead of the slight smirk he’d hoped for, he found the magus stone-faced, and felt a sliver of dread scrape against the inside of his stomach.

“Very well,” said Herod, turning back to Pilate.

And so Herod approached the mirror, ready to admire the full cheeks and smooth skin that had greeted him these two glorious days. But when he looked this time…

“No…,” he whispered.

The illusion was gone. His sickly pallor and yellowed eyes had returned. His sunken cheeks and lesions oozing their foul milk.

“NO! It can’t be!”

“You’re not a king,” said Pilate, looking over Herod’s shoulder. “You’re not even a man. You’re
nothing
.”

Looking back on it, the survivors would agree that this was the moment when Herod’s mind left him for good. The moment he realized that everything he believed was a lie. That his vision had finally and completely failed him. He’d gone mad before, but the clouds had always parted at the end of the storm. There would be no going back from this madness.

Herod screamed and grabbed a sword from the hand of one of his guards. Pilate’s men yanked their imperator back, convinced that Herod meant to strike at him. But Herod wasn’t interested in Pilate. He ran clear across the throne room, defying the weakness that was the reality of his body, raising the sword high in the air, screaming all the while, “TRAITOR!”

Herod ran up the steps to his throne and in one swing chopped off the magus’s head. It tumbled to the stone floor, followed by the magus’s body. Blood poured out of his neck and onto the stone floor in buckets—and with it, the last of man’s mastery over an ancient darkness.

Screams filled the throne room as Herod kept swinging his sword at anyone in his path, crying out, “DEATH! Death to all of you!”

Pilate looked at the headless magus a moment longer, then turned and exited, followed by his lieutenants. There was nothing more to do here. He would’ve killed Herod himself if he’d had the authority. The only thing to do was speed back to Rome and tell his emperor what had happened. To beg his forgiveness and let the wrath of a living god come down on Judea’s puppet king.

“DEATH!” cried Herod as he swung away at courtesans and advisors alike. “Death!” he cried as he hacked off the heads and limbs of the wise men and women who dared not fight back.

“Death to all of you!”

And so it continued, until the last of his subjects had either fallen or fled, and Herod collapsed in a heap near the magus’s headless body—his chest rising and falling rapidly, his tired lungs and feeble muscles burning from the effort.

The Hebrew God had made a fool of him. Herod turned his eyes toward the ceiling and shouted at the top of his gravelly voice, “Is this my reward for defending your Jews? For building them great cities? Is this how you repay me?”

The magus was gone. And with him the promise of eternal life, the chance to build an empire. And hope. Worst of all, hope—the wine of the weak.

It was all gone. And in the space of a few brief minutes, it was all over.

Here was Herod the Great, kneeling on the stone floor beside the magus’s headless body…holding his cupped hands beneath the blood that still trickled from his neck…collecting it and drinking it in mouthfuls.

Maybe…maybe if he could just drink enough of it…maybe he could be whole again.

Maybe he could live forever.

Joseph stood on the bow of a thirty-foot Roman trireme, holding the sleeping baby while Mary searched the ship’s depleted stores for food. He looked down at the tiny creature sleeping peacefully in his arms—full and loved and safe. Not yet two weeks old and already the survivor of more peril than most men would ever know in their lives.

The storm had blown itself out, leaving a flat, calm sea and a sky of broken, brilliant red clouds in its wake. The sun had dipped its toes in the western waters and was slowly sliding its way into Neptune’s kingdom for the night. It was glorious, and peaceful, and unbearably sad. For as Joseph looked down at the sleeping child, he knew he would leave him one day.

And sooner than your heart will be able to bear, Joseph.

He would leave and go off into the world, because the world is who he belonged to. His beautiful, sleeping boy.

It’s okay if I call him my son, isn’t it? Surely God will forgive me for that, for I cannot bear to think of him as anything else.

Joseph hoped he would be able to teach the child something about being a man. Teach him the Torah and how to take a piece of wood and craft it into something useful with his mind and his hands. But all that in good time. Right now there was nothing but blessed peace. The sea hadn’t parted for them as it had their ancestors, but it had delivered them all the same.

He wasn’t alone in admiring the evening sky. Balthazar stood at the helm, one hand on the rudder, the other hand clasped in Sela’s. She rested her head softly against his shoulder, both of them in quiet reverence of nature’s power and beauty. In reverence of the moment and the miracles it had taken to get them to it.

Balthazar’s mind was only just beginning to sort through everything that had happened in recent days. Flipping through the unfiltered images of blood and betrayal, of walking corpses and dying kings. But he stopped when he remembered one moment in particular: something the old man in his dream had said when he’d asked how long he had to stay with the infant:

“Until you let him go.”

It was funny—at the time, Balthazar had assumed that the old man was talking about Joseph and Mary’s baby. But now he knew…he’d been talking about Abdi. And when the full weight of that realization hit him, the tears returned to Balthazar’s eyes, prompting Sela to ask, “Balthazar? Are you all right?”

He turned to her and smiled, admiring her beauty, which neither dirt nor dried blood had succeeded in diminishing, and answered honestly, “Yes.”

There was nothing ahead but the flat, calm sea, the whole of the heavens reflected in its shimmering surface. Balthazar didn’t know when they would see land or if that land would be Egypt, or Judea, or even Rome itself. Nothing could surprise him anymore, nor could anything discourage his faith that no matter what storms there were ahead, God, or whatever you wanted to call it, would deliver them.