Lightbreaker

white fluid began to stream from the corpse's hands, like smoke drifting up from an extinguished fire.

I rose with the white ink of the smoke. The underside of the lake's surface was disturbed, the flickering distortion of a bent mirror. On the other side, these twin lines of smoke became substantial. The marbled stone of alabaster flesh. The pillars leaned together, vanishing beneath a diaphanous drapery.

She was a giant, equal in size to the corpses interred in the lake, standing in the water. As I reached for the surface-a reflection of my touch from a few moments earlier when I had been drawn down into the water-she raised her skirt and showed me where the pillars of her legs met. A single eye-a reflection of the lighthouse that watched over the city-gazed down. An inflamed eye-black fire in its iris, blood leaking from its ducts.

As my fingers breached the threshold, below reaching above, nine drops of blood fell. Nine tears splashed into the lake and floated, whole and round, down on the cherub raping the world. The child laughed, reaching with one hand to smear the blood onto his buttocks and thighs. He reached between his legs to slather the blood of the virgin eye-Nia, the inversion of Ain-onto his hard cock.

I came back, and found myself bound. My hands were numb and locked behind my back. Something covered my eyes, and a hard object was firmly lodged in my mouth. Breathing was difficult as my nose was clogged with dried blood. As the dream vanished, this was what remained: sore, tied, gagged, drugged, and deposited somewhere cold and dark.

I ached all over, as if every muscle had been pulled in the wrong direction. Prickly nettles ground in my joints as I tried to move. My back and feet were cold. Eight points of fire still danced on my skin.

Four Tasers, in the end. The memory came back with more than a little reluctance. Like an archeologist reconstructing the past, I followed the secret history mapped out on my body: four on my chest, two sets of sparking pairs radiating across my upper rib cage like a half-realized constellation; a pair on my right arm like freckles gone bad and cancerous; and a final set on the outward side of my left hip, aching like an old war wound that got stiff when the weather changed.

There was a ninth spot-unlike the others, but still part of this history. On the inside of my right arm, a weeping vacuum nestled in the fleshy valley of the joint. A needle, containing some pharmaceutical cocktail intended to keep me docile and pliable. How docile? I reached for the Chorus and it was like clawing through layers of muslin. But they were there, and I could feel them reaching back. The cocktail was wearing off.

I rolled onto my side, and pressed my face against the floor. I had been stripped down to my pants-no shirt, no shoes, no socks-but my face was the only naked flesh not completely numb. The steel was ridged, and in the valleys I could dimly smell the old taint of blood and oil.

I rocked back and forth, dragging my cheek across the ridge. It wasn't sharp, but it was rough enough to catch the edge of the blindfold. Nausea rolled through me, and I stopped. But it was enough. The blindfold had slipped.

The change in illumination was negligible but I had accomplished something. I had changed the situation in my favor. My Will be Done. A first step. The rest were easier. I scraped my cheek some more, and the cloth slipped off my eyes entirely. Yes, too dark to see anything, but I didn't need the light.

The object in my mouth was held in place by a heavy strap. The same method wasn't going to get that off. Wrists. I bent my fingers toward my bound wrists until they made contact with the bindings. So little feeling. Was that metal or plastic? I strained further, feeling like I was bending hardwood, and one finger managed to pluck at the edge of whatever was binding my hands. It flexed. Plastic, just an industrial-grade zip tie.

Fire. I tried to focus my distorted thoughts on the flame-that incendiary element of change, that alchemical burn. Fire strips away the old, turning the dead into ash and dust-grist for the eventual rebirth of everything. Washed away by fire. Mahapralaya. At the end of the Hindu Kali Yuga-this current Age of Iron-the world would be dissolved in fire. The Greeks called it ekpyrosis, and as it was translated into the Latin by the heretics, it became conflagratio. The World-Fire. When it burned itself out, God would start anew. Yes, fire, come to me.

A lick of orange flame guttered in my mind's eye, a spark catching in those dusty memories not yet thrown away. Nineteen, climbing in the North Cascades. Early fall. Nightfall, the temperature dropping quickly. Building a fire. I remembered nursing it to life, coaxing it with tiny branches and dry sticks, and I nursed that memory now in the same way, teasing it out with my Will. From spark to mental vibration to etheric manifestation. My hands grew warm as I directed the fire through my arms and into the bleak winter of my fingers.

A ghost light bloomed in front of me, an external reaction to my spell. Surprised, my focus broke and the tiny flame died. The ghostly lettering vanished almost immediately like a hibernating serpent returning to its winter slumber. But I had read the words. I had recognized them.

Protection sigil, keyed to the presence of magick. Just like the barn. Any strenuous magickal activity and it would explode. Immolation. Conflagration. It would have been funnier if I wasn't tied up.

The same spell as the one in the barn, though in this case it was meant to keep things in instead of out.

The ghost light hadn't been much, but in its brief glow, I had been able to pick out a few more details about my prison. The letters had been written on a metal plate attached to a wall that was as corrugated as the floor. A shipping container. I had been in enough of them over the years to recognize that ribbed construction. Just never so up close and personal. From the lack of ambient light, this one must be fairly well sealed. A firestorm would last just a few seconds before all the oxygen was consumed. The threat of such an explosion was a pretty effective deterrent: nowhere to hide, and not enough ambient force to raise a shield against the explosion. A cheap and efficient solution for those who wanted to hold a magus, or kill one slowly. Starvation worked as well as a knife, and it had the benefit of being indirect action. Like the way foreign diplomats in ancient Mongolia were wrapped in furs and rugs before being trampled, so that their sacred blood wouldn't touch the earth and allow their curses to take root.

I flexed my shoulders, pulling at the straps around my wrists. My fire had been hot, although brief, and it might have weakened the restraints. I strained, and the ties parted grudgingly like a string of taffy stretched to its elastic limit. As I kneaded cold skin with equally cold fingers, my hands came alive with the prickly resumption of unobstructed blood flow.

When the nerve endings in my fingertips were warm enough to feel something, I investigated the mechanics of the gag. As my finger slid off the rounded rubber hump protruding from my mouth, I realized it was nothing more than a ball gag. Available in any sex shop. I found the buckle in back, and wincing as I had to pull the belt tighter around my head, I undid the restraint and spit the rubber ball out.

I tossed the whole contraption aside. Not a souvenir I wanted to keep. The metal buckle clattered against the ridged floor.

In the death of that echo, I heard other sounds. A body moved and someone inhaled sharply. And then, a human voice. 'Is someone there?'

It had been ten years, but I knew that voice.

Kat.

XIV

The thin film over the magma pool in my heart broke at the sound. The poisonous fire filling me in the hotel was just a minor burp compared to the volcanic upheaval brought about by that voice. The Chorus, shredding the chemical barriers in my head, rode the cresting edge of a venomous Qliphotic exultation. Their soul-sense radiated from my skull, seeking Kat's light.

She heard me coming and scrambled against the door panels, trying to find some way to push them open. Instinctively, she started to pull energy from the ether.

The wall behind her lit up, a white line of words glaring beneath her hips. A whining chatter of metal against stone forced its way through the Chorus' noise. As the illuminated letters revealed my approach, she began to shout