Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) (32 page)

“See, signore. The Bible is still here,” he said. “If Rebecca had found it, I doubt she would have left it for us.” He reached in and pulled a book from the shelf. It was identical to those around it.

“Heh, I guess nobody ever actually bothers to read the tax laws,” Obi said. “Best hiding place, ever.”

“The Sleeping don’t even see this book,” Dante replied. He held it in his palm, cover up, and placed his other hand over it.
 

“I thought it was a scroll?” I said.

“This book was made by the first angel, Lucifer himself. It is not bound to any single form.” He closed his eyes and whispered foreign words. The Bible caught fire in his hand, though the flames did him no harm. The original binding burned away, revealing a simple black lacquered wood cover beneath. It bore no writing, no markings or indication of what it was, but now that the glamour had been removed I could feel the energy leeching off of it.

Dante opened the book, and then set it in front of him, hanging stationary in the air before us. “Here it is,” he said, pointing at the mark, set in gold on the page. “This is the Book of the Beast.” He began thumbing through the pages. “It is a history of the war.”

We all looked on in amazement. Despite all that I had seen and done as a Divine, the fact that we were looking at text penned by Lucifer himself, before he was cast down to Hell was mind blowing.

He came to the final page, and rested his finger next to the final passage. “Here is the final passage. The servants used these words to encrypt their code.”

Thomas approached, getting close to it and looking down. “I need a piece of paper, and a pen,” he said. “I’ll write a few of the strings, and hopefully you can help me decrypt them.”

“I’ll get it,” Obi said, racing out of the room.

“What does the final paragraph say?” I asked.

Dante cleared his throat. “For in those final days it came to pass that the Beast was thus defied, the might of his essence imprisoned for all time by the will of God and the sanctity of His creation. We hail the honor and glory of our Lord, and we mark this day as a day of Blessing. Let all of Heaven remember. Let all of Heaven remain. Thanks be to God.”
 

He glanced up, the power of the words etched across his face. My limbs tingled in response, and I could tell by Thomas’ and Charis’ expressions that they were sharing the experience.

Obi came back in with a sheet of copier paper and a pen. He handed it to Thomas. “Amen,” he said. “Now let’s find this thing so we can shut him up once and for all.”

Thomas took the paper and pen, and wrote out three strings. One was in angelic scripture, two were demonic.
 

“How are we supposed to decrypt something that’s written in different languages?” I asked.

Obi was staring at them intently, his eyes flicking from the Bible to the paper. “Shh,” he said. “Thomas, write out a few more. Make sure you go in order.”

The former angel complied, writing out a dozen more strings.
 

“They alternate,” Obi said. “One demonic, one angelic. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”

We scanned the strings, we looked at the passage, we scanned the strings again. Thirty minutes passed. An hour.

“This is going to take forever,” I said. “I don’t think the idea was to create a code that could be cracked in minutes, and every minute we spend could be the last minute we have without the Beast in this world.”

“Obi,” Thomas said. “Can you get me more paper? Grab as much as you can find.”
 

“Sure, man,” Obi replied, heading out again.
 

“Thomas, what is it?” I asked.

“A passing thought. There is a room in the Lord’s palace in Heaven. It is a map of the universe, the breadth of His domain. It is a sight to behold, both in its size and scope.”

“I have seen it,” Dante said. He looked at the passages. “Could it be?”

Thomas shrugged. “The map is not a series of dots for planets and stars and the like. With something so large, it would quickly become unreadable. The points would be so close together as to create nothing but a screen of white.” Thomas turned the paper over and wrote the first letter from the Bible in the center. He then carefully etched the first and last word of the first two strings over it, being sure to connect the lines with great care. The result was just a small piece, but it did have a familiarity to it.

Obi came back in, dropping a ream of copier paper on the floor. “Is this enough?” he asked.

Thomas nodded. “I’m sorry to say, this will take some time. Dante, can you put the book on the floor. I’m not comfortable touching it.”

“Of course, signore,” Dante said. The Bible slowly lowered itself to the ground.

“Each letter in Lucifer’s Bible is the center form of a larger shape,” Thomas explained. “The larger shapes together will form an even bigger shape. My feeling is that what we will have is a map.”

“With a big red ‘X’?” Obi asked.

Thomas smiled. “Almost.”

He set himself to the work, starting with the first letter and the first few passages. Obi leaned over his shoulder, observing. When he reached the tenth letter, Obi stopped him.
 

“That’s not right, man,” he said. “The shapes are too out of whack to fit together.”

“Are you sure?” Thomas asked. He examined the papers, then pushed them aside. “I’ll start again.” And he did.

Another hour passed. Charis and I sat against the wall in silence, though at some point she had leaned in and put her head on my shoulder. Dante had hovered over Thomas for a while, but now he came over to us.

“My friends,” he said. Charis lifted her head and gave him another icy welcome, which the poet ignored. “I’m afraid I must return to Purgatory now, or I will lose the way back. My thoughts and prayers go with you, as well as any offer of apology you may choose to accept. I know I have caused much harm with my decisions, and some have been made out of no more than anger, jealousy, and fear, and for that I am eternally sorry. Please, know that I am proud of you, and honored to have met both of you. I believe we will meet again, and I will anxiously await that moment.”

He held out his hand. I looked at Charis. Her expression had softened only slightly. Just because I knew her history, that didn’t make it mine. I took Dante’s offer of peace. “I’ll see you soon,” I said.

Charis got to her feet. She stared into Dante’s eyes, her own flaring red and then fading to a warm brown. It was the first time I had seen their original color. How did she do that?
 

“I can spend eternity hating you for your mistakes, or I can praise you for your sacrifices. Today, I’ll simply accept that you are as a flawed as the rest of us, and call it even.”
 

She took his hand, and pulled him to her, wrapping her arms around him. Dante looked bewildered beneath the embrace. “I too will see you soon,” she said.

Dante reached up and wiped away a tear as he smiled, looking every bit the part of a doting old grandfather. A moment later, he vanished.

“I think we’ve figured it out,” Thomas shouted.

Charis and I went over and leaned in, looking at the scattered mess of shapes written across over a hundred pages.
 

“How do you know?” I asked.

“We just have to arrange them,” Thomas said. He picked up the stack, and began laying them out on the floor. “I’ll need one of you to hold some of these in place.” He placed a sheet at hip level, where it would need to levitate to remain in position.

“I’ve got it,” Charis said. Thomas let go, and the paper didn’t move.
 

The former angel continued to move around the room, sometimes swapping sheets out, sometimes shifting their positions slightly. How he knew where to put them, I couldn’t guess, but he worked with such purpose he had to be onto something.

“Wait,” Charis said suddenly. The hanging pages shivered at her voice. “Landon, doesn’t this look familiar to you at all?”

I looked around at the symbols. “No,” I said. I examined them more closely, my mind picking me up where my eyes were failing. “Oh, crap.”

Charis reached her hand out towards Thomas. “Give me the pages. I know where they go.”
 

She took the remaining stack, and threw them up into the air. They danced around one another, swirling in an invisible wind until they were floating around us.
 

“It isn’t enough to just put them out,” she said. “They need to be tighter. Obi, Thomas, wait over there.”
 

The two of them backed up reluctantly, leaving her and I standing alone in the center of the papers. I could feel her power as she focused, and the ink lifted itself from the pulp, remaining neatly scrawled but floating in midair. She pulled them in, contracting them until they began to overlap. Moving them closer and closer to the two of us.

“Landon,” she said. “I need your help. We have to move them faster.”

“You know what this is going to do?” I said to her, tapping into my power and focusing on adding velocity to the whirlwind.

“Yes.”

“You know I don’t have a good feeling about this?”

“Yes.”

I looked past the ink to where Obi and Thomas were standing. “I’m sorry guys,” I said. “But it looks like this is a one way ticket on a two man train.”

“You get to have all the fun,” Obi said. “Be careful, man. You too sexy lady.”

Thomas held us his hand. “Godspeed,” he said.
 

Charis and I pulled the runes in tighter. I moved closer and put my arms around her, squeezing in so we could both make the journey. I had recognized some of the symbols from the Cave of Christ, and had discerned their purpose based on that.
 

The runes spun faster and faster, rocketing around us as we fed them more power. They started to glow in a soft blue, and then the ink began to melt. I looked out of the spaces between to where Obi and Thomas were standing together, until the spaces were filled in and vanished. Within moments were were surrounded by a solid light, and I could sense the universe around us moving and shifting. Charis looked up at me with tenderness and determination. I returned her gaze with admiration. We held onto one another while we traveled to the unknown.

The blue light was replaced with darkness. We had arrived.

Wherever we were, it was nothing that any mortal eyes had ever come across before, and it was nothing that could be easily explained. A streamer of blue light gave some bit of luminance to the place, running along either side of a crystalline black wall in no specific pattern, branching and coalescing as though it were a river cutting its way through the geography. It snaked around as it travelled, following the sides of the containment downward beyond our feet.

We were on a platform, I could tell, made of the same black, opaque crystal substance and lifted some distance above the ground. The floor was covered in runes, Lucifer’s runes, etched into the material and shimmering slightly against the blue light. Looking up, I got a feel for the immensity of the area. The ceiling was at least another four hundred feet away. Towards its center, there was a bright white light like a miniature star, pulsing in a gentle rhythm.
 

I could feel the power of this place as heat and energy that raised the hairs on my arms. I could probably charge a Tesla by touch alone. It was nothing I had ever experienced before, but rather than foreboding, the sensation was intoxicating.

I focused, attempting to use my Sight to find Sarah or Rebecca, but as soon as a I tried a searing heat and constricting tightness held me in agony until I was able to let go. I looked over at Charis, and knew by her face she had experienced the same.
 

“This can’t be good,” I whispered to her.

“Let’s hope that we aren’t the only ones being cut off,” she replied.

I wasn’t sure if we would even regenerate here. I stepped over to the edge of the platform with extreme caution, getting on my knees and peering down over the edge. The bottom of the room was far enough below as to be invisible, but there was a set of steps off the north edge. What freaked me out was that the steps weren’t attached to anything, each one stuck in the air, spaced evenly apart. What really freaked me out is that the platform wasn’t attached to anything either.
 

“Lucifer always was a show-off, wasn’t he?” I asked Charis, sliding away from the edge and getting to my feet.

“What do you mean?”

“Everything is just floating in the air, like its suspended in ice. The steps are that way.”

“Interesting.” She followed my finger, looking down when she got to the edge. “If we don’t stop them, we’re dead anyway, so there’s no point in being afraid of heights.”
 

She bounced off the platform, and her head quickly disappeared. I could hear her feet tapping on the steps, descending in a hurry. She was right about the heights. I took a deep breath, and started down behind her.

The steps spun in an odd spiral, sometimes closer together, sometimes further apart. The distance between them altered variably as well, and there were a few places where it took a true leap of faith to make it from one to the next. When we got down far enough to finally see the ground below us, we came to a total pause.

The blue light was originating there, all of the tributaries feeding into the center of the floor, where a fountain rose from the ground. It looked as though a huge chunk of the black material had been pulled up from the surface in a single block to be carved out. It was seamless and massive, rising up a dozen feet or so. Chiseled into it was what I took to be the scene of the Beast’s defeat. Two angels, wings spread, dressed in rune covered breastplates, swords held high over a massive, hunched form. I recognized the face of Malize in an instant. The other had to be Lucifer, but the profile looked as though it had never been completed, with only the hint of a contour of eyes and nose and mouth. As for the Beast, it was a true mastery of stonework, for it held nearly no shape, yet elicited so much definition and emotion. To look on the carving was to fear.