Mo is nodding. “Was he a member of the Brotherhood?”
Panin licks his lips. “Sternberg was not a worshiper of lath-Hotep; whenever he found such he slew them, usually by flogging until the living flesh fell from their bones. As a matter of fact, we don’t really know what he was. We know what he did, though. It was one of the great works of pre-computational necromancy, and it took the priests of the Black Buddha to achieve it, fed by the blood and gore of Sternberg’s victims.
“There are places where the wall between the worlds is thin. Many of these are to be found in central Asia. The Bogd Khan’s gruesome midnight rituals-the ones he drank to forget, so heavily that he went blind-there was true seeing there, visions of the ancient plateau on an alien world where the Sleeper in the Pyramid lies sightless and undead. The Bogd was terrified. When his friend Ungern Sternberg offered him the sole currency that would buy relief from these visions-the lives of tens of thousands of victims-the Holy Shining One, eighth incarnation of the Bogd Gegen and Khan of Mongolia, fell upon his shoulder and wept bloody tears as he promised eternal friendship.
“The priests of the Bogd’s court worked with Ungern Sternberg’s torturers to build a wall around the pyramid, sent death squads shambling into the chilly, thin air on the Sleeper’s Plateau to erect a fence of impaled sacrificial victims. No countermeasure to the Sleeper was created on such a scale for many years, not until your Air Force began their occult surveillance program in the 1970s. As for Sternberg”-Panin shrugs-“he went on to back the wrong side in a civil war. But that does not concern us.”
“What an interesting story.”
“Is it?” Panin looks at her sharply.
She shrugs. “I suppose if I say ‘not really’ you’ll tell me why I’m wrong.”
“If you insist.” He snaps his fingers. “Another round, please.” To Mo: “It is important. You see”-he waits for his minder to depart in the direction of the bar-“one of the tools used by the monks was a preta, a hungry ghost; a body in its custody could function on the Sleeper’s Plateau far more effectively than any of Sternberg’s men, who had a tendency to die or go mad after only a few hours. The hungry ghost needed bodies to occupy, though its kind is far more intelligent and powerful than the run-of-the-mill possession case. This particular hungry ghost knows the transitive order in which the Death Fence around the Sleeper’s Pyramid was constructed-by implication, the order in which it must be de-constructed if the Sleeper is ever to be released. It was summoned by a ritual that Sternberg documented and sent west, for translation by the only woman he ever trusted: a trust that was misplaced, as it happens, because the document vanished into your organization’s archives and has never been seen since. If the Black Brotherhood could get their hands on the document-I believe you call it the Fuller Memorandum-they might well imagine they could bind the hungry ghost into a new body, compel it to service, and order it to begin dismantling the Death Fence.”
Mo nods jerkily. “Yes, that’s very interesting,” she says distractedly.
“If someone had convinced them that the time was right now, not in a couple more years, they might be induced to premature action. And if that someone allowed them to obtain a falsified, corrupted version of the Fuller Memorandum, they might well try to use it to release their master-”
Mo focuses. “The Sleeper. You’re not saying it’s N’yar lath-Hotep itself?”
“No, nothing that powerful: there is a hierarchy of horrors here, a ladder that must be climbed. But the thing in the pyramid can set the process in motion, starting a chain of events that will ultimately open the doors of uncreation and release the Black Pharaoh. To do so, they would best wait for the conjunction of chance; but it is in the nature of mortal cultists that they are impatient. And James is of the opinion that they should be encouraged to indulge their fatal impatience.”
“I see.”
“No, I don’t believe you do. The Black Brotherhood are at their most dangerous when they work within an organization that is unaware it has been infiltrated. Your-husband. Has be been missing long?” She shakes her head. “Exactly. Something alerted you?” She nods. “James sent him on an errand, yes?” She nods again. “Imagine you are an initiate of the Brotherhood. You see an agent of a hostile organization, and you have acquired the Sternberg Fragment and are prepared to carry out the ritual of summoning and binding the hungry ghost. Would it not be to your advantage to pick, as a carrier, that hostile agent? So that you can send him back in among them, ridden by your own demon…”
Mo’s pupils dilate. Her face is pale. “You think they’re going to try to possess Bob.”
Panin spreads his hands palm-down on the table. “It is a logical supposition, nothing more.” He meets her gaze. “He is tapped for rapid advancement, is he not? James’s personal secretary, I gather. Years ago, he established a reputation as a casual layabout, a bit of a bumbler. It served him well in his field days. We see reports, you know. A very talented man, with a very beautiful, very talented wife. He will go far, if he is not eaten by a hungry ghost. Or worse.”
“What could be worse?” Mo says bitterly.
Panin shrugs. “Firstly, they have a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. Whatever James saw fit to concoct, I suppose, not expecting them to perform it on his personal secretary. Secondly-the preta they wish to summon has already been summoned: it is, in fact, already walking around in flesh. Who knows what the ritual might dredge up, given a dangling pointer into the demon-haunted void? And thirdly…”
“Thirdly?” Her voice begins to rise dangerously.
“We have merely been assuming that the copy of the Fuller Memorandum that James gave your husband contains a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. But James did not intend the situation to spin this far from his control. The worst possible case is that they have the real thing, the Sternberg Fragment and the document describing the binding of the Eater of Souls, and that they know what to do with it.”
JONQUIL THE PSYCHOPATHIC SLOANE RANGER HACKS AWAY AT my arm for what feels like a year and is probably a bit less than a minute. Then she gets annoyed. “Julian, do something about the screaming, will you? It’s giving me a headache.”
Julian Headless-Shotgun pulls a leather glove out of one of his pockets and tries to stuff it in my mouth. I clamp my jaw shut, shivering and hyperventilating, but he responds by squeezing my nostrils painfully. After a few seconds I surrender to the inevitable. The glove fingers taste of sweat and sour, dead leather. Chewing on them helps.
Did I mention I’ve got a low pain threshold?
Jonquil goes back to hacking on my arm. The pain is excruciating. If you’ve ever been bitten by a dog-this is worse. The scalpel makes a clean incision, but I can still feel blood welling up and dripping along my arm. The pain isn’t sharp-it’s a widespread violent ache. After a while it feels as if my arm has been clubbed repeatedly with a meat tenderizer. She hacks and saws and tugs-the tugging is the worst, it’s so bad my vision blurs and I feel light-headed-and then it stops.
But not the pain.
“He’s bleeding. Gareth, fetch a sock and a bandage at once. And a plate.”
I can’t see very well: my eyes are blurring. I can’t seem to get enough air through my nose, even when I blow out around the saliva-sticky glove. My heart is hammering and I feel sick with pain. There’s a hole in my arm and it feels like it’s about half a meter long and goes right down to the bone. I’m dying, I think dizzily, even though I know better. Jonquil and her muscle wouldn’t want to risk their precious All-Highest’s ire. I lie there moaning quietly for a while, then Gareth returns. “You, lie still,” Jonquil says, and shoves what feels like a cast-iron cannonball into the hole in my arm. I try not to scream as she roughly winds a gauze bandage around the wadded-up sock, then stands up to inspect her work.