Rupert ended the call and sighed heavily. “You just can’t get the staff these days,” he announced as he began to button his shirt.
Eve was out of the loop (and most interestingly so, having left HQ in the company of a bodyguard Rupert didn’t remember authorizing her to hire). This was unusual enough that the Security Desk had discreetly paged him. The Bond was also incommunicado despite having been ordered to report in frequently. Rupe had hoped that a brisk BJ would clear the free-floating anxiety that was fogging his usual analytical brilliance, but in a moment of post-orgasmic clarity he realized that the only thing that would exorcise his personal demons would be the certain knowledge that his chess pieces were still on the board, in play, and on his side.
Hence the helicopter ride.
Cocooned in the Versace-designed luxury cabin of his AgustaWestland AW109E Power Elite, Rupert hunched over his BlackBerry in a black humor. He needed that book, he realized, not like a market acquisition or a hostile takeover or a pretty blonde whore, but like the next hit of heroin, or maybe a life raft after his yacht foundered. This need was no mere desire, it was a matter of raw animal survival. The more he thought about it, the more the Prime Minister’s subliminally encoded message in the Mansion House speech freaked him out. The PM was a benign horror, but a horror nonetheless, and not one inclined to shower mercy on the worshippers of his rivals.
***Rupert***
His vision doubled: his head struck the restraint behind his seat as his jaw clamped shut. An icy sweat drenched the small of his back.
***Rupert***
The voice inside his head was louder than thunder and softer than a silk noose around his throat.
He tugged his headset off hastily. The thunder of the rotors overhead was a whisper on the breeze compared to the call he answered. “Master?” he said aloud, before he remembered to verbalize inwardly. “My Lord?”
***The Book of Dead Names calls to me, Rupert. What have you achieved?***
Rupert squeezed his eyes shut, a gut-loosening fear churning his stomach contents like wavecrests before an onrushing storm. The Mute Poet seldom spoke quite so clearly, and never tried to micromanage his priesthood. Perhaps that’s why it had been the PM’s faction who achieved the first-mover advantage, executing their adroit takeover of the government before any of the rival faith communities—the Red Skull Society, the Cult of the Mute Poet, the Chelsea Flower Show—got their shit sufficiently together to immanentize even a minor eschatological reality excursion. The PM was, unlike most of the other long-absent Gods, forward-looking to the point of almost integrating into human society: he reputedly knew how to use email, which put him light years ahead of Tony Blair. But the Poet had been speaking to Rupert for a couple of years, his demands becoming increasingly urgent and specific. And now this. It was a breakthrough, indicative of the Poet’s awakening into this realm. Previously it took a successful rite of unholy communion to get a peep out of him, using the larynx and auditory nerves of a freshly sacrificed victim as a hotline. A megaphone blast delivered straight into Rupert’s head was new, and also betokened an unaccustomed sense of urgency on the part of a weakly godlike entity whose clock ticks were measured in millennia.
“I have my best people working on obtaining it, My Lord. I expect results very soon.”
Rupert reached for the cocktail cabinet, which was currently stocked with bottles of Fijian spring water and Goldschläger (the latter because everything palatable in this month’s load-out had already been quaffed, and the valet service hadn’t restocked the chopper yet). He twisted the lid off a water bottle and gulped from it, wetting his bone-dry mouth.
“Rivals attempted to intervene, but I put a stop to that,” he added. “However, the Prime Minister…”
***The Black Pharaoh is of no concern. Time is fleeting. The next suitable conjunction for the Rite of Embodiment begins in less than two months. There will be another opportunity a lunar year hence, but the Path of Flowery Death is opening right now and Xipe Totec stirs.***
“I hate those Aztec fuckers,” Rupert complained before he realized he’d spoken aloud. Mortified, he ground his teeth together. The Mute Poet was kind-hearted and enlightened compared to the followers of the Red Skull cult, appropriated and imported into Europe in the sixteenth century by Spanish occult treasure hunters returning from Mesoamerica. If the reign of the Black Pharaoh was bad enough, the return of the Flayed God would be … well, it would not go well for the Mute Poet Fan Club in general and Rupert de Montfort Bigge in particular, given his role as Lord High Adept of the Inner Chamber.
***Your devotion is recognized. Bend every sinew to the recovery of my liturgy, bring it to me immediately and without delay, and I will smile upon you. Otherwise … not.***
And Rupert was suddenly alone in his skull again.
It was not quite one o’clock in the afternoon when Evie and her father crossed the park and stood across the quiet street from the chained-shut gates of the ancestral family manse.
Later she would have plenty of time to regret her lack of foresight. But she’d been coming here with Dad since she was sixteen, not every month but often enough that breaking into someone else’s locked-up property had come to feel almost routine. Indeed, over the past two years Dad
