Black Light

11. Beyond the Green Door

BALTHAZAR WARNICK STOOD IN the hall at Bolerium and stared at the closed door in front of him. It was of wood stained a rich deep green, the color of moss in the darkest part of the forest; through seams and chinks in the paneling he could feel a fine cold breeze. His hand clasped its polished brass knob as he leaned against the portal. An observer might have thought he was striving to hear something on the other side of the door. Frightened whispers, urgent cries, the soft thunder of a heaving bed.

But Balthazar was not listening. Or rather, what he was listening for was not beyond the door but in the hall behind him. His heart was beating so hard that he thought, absurdly, that someone might hear it and take him by surprise.

And that is very nearly what happened.

“Professor Warnick.”

Balthazar whirled. When he saw Ralph Casson he stared at him in silence for a long time, at last drew a long breath.

“You found her. How did you find her?” he asked.

Ralph Casson smiled. “You’re really surprised, eh, Professor? You really never thought I was very good, did you?” His tone was light, bantering even, but his blue eyes clouded as he leaned against the wall, angling himself so that he could look down upon Balthazar and have a clear view of the corridor beyond him. “Man, you really blew me off last time I saw you—you know that? When we were at that cocktail party with all your tight-assed friends —”

Balthazar shook his head, his expression pained. “Not my friends, Ralph. The Conclave. You knew when we started—”

“I knew fuck-all!” Ralph cried. “I joined you in good faith, Balthazar—good faith! I spent six years at the Divine—I worked for you, I went to Herculaneum when you told me to, I never even questioned what you did to Corey Lesser there, I typed your fucking index cards!”

His finger stabbed at the air between them as Balthazar watched, unblinking. “And how did you repay me? Exile, man—fucking exile, like I was some neophyte!”

“You betrayed us, Ralph,” Balthazar murmured. He moved ever so slightly, so that his hand remained on the doorknob but was hidden by a drape of black tuxedo jacket. “The day you joined Kern in Malta, it was over.” He shook his head regretfully. For the first time his eyes met the other man’s. “I warned you. I went to the airport—”

“Fuck that,” Ralph spat. “When the hell did you ever use an airport—did you fly here, Balthazar? Did you?”

“The choice was yours, Ralph. It was always yours. You went with the Malandanti. You’re here now—”

“So are you!” Ralph crowed, banging his palm against the wall. “You’re here, too, Balthazar—so what does that make you? Why are you here? Where’s your invitation?”

Balthazar forced himself to keep his tone even. “I came because of Giulietta, Ralph. You know that. You called me—”

“That’s right!” Ralph said with vicious triumph. “I called, and you came—just like that! What did the Conclave have to say about that, Balthazar? Do they even know? Did you tell them—”

“They know.” Balthazar broke in quickly: it was not precisely true. “Verrill knew even before I did. There was a disturbance at the temple of Dionysos Limnaios. Trees moving; a voice crying out that Pan is free—”

He hesitated before going on. “If I had not been remiss in my responsibilities at the Orphic Lodge—”

“You could have done nothing. You understand? Nothing,” Ralph said. “They’re moving, Balthazar—all your old enemies are waking. Here; in Penwith and Akrotiri and Rajputana— everywhere!”

He took a step closer to the other man, his hand sliding down the wall until it was only inches from where Balthazar clasped the doorknob. “How does that feel, Professor Warnick? Knowing that all your vigilance is for nothing? Knowing that your whole world is going under”— Ralph snapped his fingers and drew back, laughing. —“just like that.”

“Oh, I think the world has a few revolutions left in it, before it all spins out of control. And the—events—at West Penwith were not unexpected,” Balthazar said lightly. He smiled, was rewarded by Ralph showing an instant of discomfiture before the older man continued, “But you and I both know that’s not why you went to all the trouble to get me here. Where is she, Ralph? Where is Giulietta?”

“Lit.” Ralph drew the word out. “Got that, Balthazar? At least for this particular turn of the karmic wheel, her name is Lit. Kind of a funny name, considering all that bad stuff that came down back in Moruzzo—”

“Stop it.” Balthazar’s voice broke. His face grew pale. “Stop it.”

“—and I mean, it’s kind of ironic, don’t you think it’s sort of funny, here you’ve spent, like, what? Five thousand years? Ten thousand years? Anyway, a really, really long time, battling these Malandanti—and there you were back in Moruzzo, in love with a girl who was actually one of them. Your own masters were the ones who burned her at the stake and where the hell were you, Balthazar? What were you thinking, why didn’t you—”

“Stop.”

Between them the air crackled, flickers of electric blue and gold like iron filings swirling around a magnet. One of the sparks flew dangerously close to Ralph’s face; he cried out, slapping a hand over his eye.

“You bastard! You blinded me—!”

With a groan Ralph fell back against the wall. His fingers splayed across his cheek, blood seeping between them. Balthazar stared, remorse welling up in him like panic; then turned and flung the door open.

“No!” shouted Ralph.

Framed within the door’s opening was the landscape of a dream: a corrugated expanse of hills bare of any trees, their summits crowned by stone ruins and overgrown with yellow-blooming gorse and tiny, thorn-spun roses. Overhead the sky was dark gray, swept with clouds that scudded toward the western horizon, showing gashes of soft blue between them. Then the clouds dispersed and all melted into an endless vista of indigo ocean, its surface scarred by white cresting waves. Birds wheeled overhead, and there were bees in the flowering gorse; but the scene was utterly silent, a vivid film with the sound turned off. From where he stood in the doorway, Balthazar gazed upon it as though poised on a neighboring hilltop.

“In nubibis,” he whispered, and stepped through the portal.

A sickening instant in which he seemed to plunge, his head roaring and the wind raking his face. Dimly he was aware of a voice shouting, the dulled sensation of something tugging at his hand as at an anaesthetized limb. Then there was a smell of salt and wet granite, the pounding of waves against the cliffs and the unbearably sweet, high-pitched cry of a linnet. Balthazar stumbled upon the rocky ground, caught himself, and straightened.

He stood upon one of the tor-capped hills crowding the westernmost point of Cornwall. Maps showed the place as West Penwith, the peninsula that toed into the Atlantic at Land’s End. But the Benandanti had another name for it: Affon, the land between. Affon stretched here but also at myriad other spots across the globe. Places that existed both within and without of time, places that the Good Walkers had created and stood guard over for countless millennia; places where they watched, and waited, and prepared for the great conflict that had been building over the entire history of their world, and others.

Penwith was one such place. The Orphic Lodge in West Virginia was another, and the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine a third. The rest were scattered throughout the world that the Benandanti and their enemies had shaped: in the Aegean and Anatolia, across the subcontinent and the vast Eurasian steppes; in London and Rome, amidst the ruins of the ancient Dravidian cities of India and Pompeii. Any place