Veil of the Goddess (43 page)

A woman next to him tossed flower petals onto the canal's brown waters. Past her, a barefooted Franciscan monk was down on his knees praying.

Children ran, laughing, over the crowded length of the bridge, then up the other side of the canal as Ivy's gondola approached.

Things were going too easily.

While Ivy hadn't been able to penetrate the Agent's warped beliefs, protected as they were by his strong but perverted faith, he had been too weak even to touch the veil.

Which meant he was just a foot soldier in the Foundation's army. But surely they had more senior agents. Ivy wasn't naïve enough to believe the Goddess would assign her an easy job.

Still, she'd caught them off-guard, and the crowds of people and the energized Italian police could slow their reactions and jam their communications with so much chatter that they would find it difficult to react.

It seemed barely possible that she'd be able to pull this off, make it to the Church of Mary of the Sailors, to the Cross before the Foundation brought in their heavy guns.

The whine of a helicopter's turbine engine overhead put a lie to that speculation. The Foundation wasn't going to be fooled again.

The chopper's rotors stirred up murky canal waters and drove a few of the celebrating children, joyous in their escape from school, back under cover.

She couldn't see faces behind the black glass of the helicopter's canopy, but she felt the gunner's eyes on her, sighting on her through a missile rangefinder.

She called up a bit of power from the waters that surrounded her and sent it into the sighting mechanism.

The backwash almost stunned her. She hadn't meant to hurt the man but his eye had been pushed tightly into the sight. His pain rippled through her body. Her newly found resistance to violence and death suddenly made sense not just as a philosophical virtue but as hard-edged reality. She felt every bit of the pain she caused. Although she could draw power from all around her, she was still physically frail from injuries and days without food or much sleep. Fighting physical battles where she suffered when she won as much as she suffered when she lost couldn't be the right answer.

The helicopter banked away, then returned and dropped a rope ladder.

She gestured at it and the ladder fell from the chopper, its Kevlar strands sliced like so much cotton candy.

The wave of anger from above didn't scare her at all. Anger was more destructive for the man holding it than for the woman he assaulted with it.

Her trick with the ladder didn't phase the Foundation agents, though.

A man stepped into the chopper's open door and jumped down toward the water.

He hit the water as if it were solid ground, splaying his legs to take the brunt of the energy, then stood and walked across the canal toward her.

From the crowd, she heard an amazed gasp. If she'd wowed them with a gondola that steered without a gondolier, walking on water was a big step up.

Ivy's surprise though, was less from the manner of his approach than from his identity.

"Smith?"

"Guess it's time to finish what I started."

"We left you dead in Mosul."

His laugh was cutting, nasal, nasty.

"As I left you. But you don't have the Cross with you now. This time, when you die, you stay dead."

She didn't dare close her eyes, but she used her second sight to view the power surrounding him.

As with the other Foundation Agents, it pulsed a deep maroon red. In his case, though, the ugly mustard of yellow crept through, like hotter flames through a glowing bed of coal.

She recognized that horrid yellow from the temple to the bird-god. There, it had been associated with human sacrifice. Without access to the power of the Cross, had the Foundation crossed that line of evil?

"Your leaders must have really wanted you back if they resorted to human sacrifice."

"Liar. You don't know what you're talking about."

It didn't take second sight to hear the hint of doubt in his voice. So, they hadn't told him what they'd done, but he suspected, or feared.

That didn't surprise her.
Need to know
was not limited to government spy organizations.

"Can't you see that your precious Foundation is destroying what it is trying to build? Remember the message of Jesus. He forgave those who offended him. He preached peace even in the face of the warmongers."

"Don't pervert the words of the Lord.” He strode across the water, closing the distance to her gondola. “It is not I who has forgotten the message of the Prince of Peace. You've succumbed to Lilith. Your New-Age interpretations of the Holy Word have no power over me and every word you speak is condemned by the true Church. Even your precious and misguided Catholicism spurns them."

Hatred and rage contorted his features.

Smith drew a knife from his jacket and, despite herself, Ivy's body trembled. That was the same knife he'd used to slit her throat. The laws of magic applied. It had killed her once, it could kill her again. Unwashed, still carrying her life-blood, it held a magical power over her that no ordinary weapon could claim. Against it, the Veil would be useless fabric.

"Killing me will accomplish nothing,” she said. “The powers of the Goddess are not so easily defeated."

"Your so-called Goddess, like all of Satan's demons, has no strength before the Lord. And spare me your misguided reinterpretation of the Trinity. True Christians have rejected that blasphemy from the earliest times."

Although she'd kept the gondola in motion, heading down the river and away from him, Smith was faster, closing the distance.

He reached her boat just as they crossed beneath a bridge.

A blue-tinged figure dropped from the bridge and grappled with Smith.

She had just a moment to recognize her rescuer. It was Zack, of course. He really hadn't gotten it. Like Peter in the Garden, when the soldiers had come to arrest Jesus, Zack thought he could use violence to solve the problems that violence creates.

She just hoped he could survive his error.

All of Smith's attention had been on Ivy and Zack landed feet-first on the Agent's head. Which would have incapacitated any human. But Smith wasn't quite human anymore. Like herself, the man had been transformed by death and resurrection.

Zack's face contorted with pain when his feet smashed into the Agent's head and the Agent simply shrugged, turning his knife casually to slice at Zack as he went by.

Unlike Smith, the water didn't support Zack. Where he splashed, blood turned the water red.

Anger swept over Ivy. Zack was her friend, had sacrificed everything he had built to help her survive. And Smith had swatted him away as casually as he might squash an ant.

With the powers available to her on the water, she could call up a whirlpool to swamp Smith, or hit him with a wave of fire hot enough to melt through even the powerful wards of faith that surrounded him.

She barely fought down the temptation. Smith was trying to make her lose her temper. If she reacted in anger, the Foundation would win, and humanity would lose.

Instead, she changed the texture of the water beneath Smith, making it more slippery, more open, less willing to bear weight.

He'd been expecting something overt and strong, not something sneaky and subtle.

Smith's splash followed Zack's by less than a second.

She reached tentacles of power into the water and yanked Zack out, placing him on the ground near a group of Italian policemen. A flicker of life remained within him. Maybe their first aid could be enough to save him. Unfortunately, she didn't have time to wait and see. She'd never know.

She fought back the urge to cry, putting the energy into the gondola's oar, increasing her speed as she moved through the city toward the Church of Mary of the Sailors.

A few blocks from that church, the crowd must have sensed where she was going because they got louder and thicker. The entire city seemed intent on gathering in one very small area.

Overhead, the Foundation helicopter had been joined by U.S. Navy fighters but then Ivy noticed that the Navy fighters weren't alone. Italian Air Force fighters scrambled. It looked as if they were trying to keep the Navy away from the crowds.

She guessed that made sense. The Foundation had shown it didn't mind civilian casualties, especially if they were Catholic or any other religion that didn't meet the Foundation's exacting standards. But the Italian government wouldn't be so sanguine about the slaughter of their civilians. They would also have been getting word from the local police. And Ivy doubted that the U.S. Government had bothered to ask for official permission for these overflights.

She spared just a bit of power to raise the spirits of the Italian pilots overhead. They were facing the world's most powerful military without clear orders from their government. She didn't want them to fight, but she appreciated them being there, providing just that little extra reason to discourage the Foundation from doing anything truly stupid.

The church of Mary of the Fishermen loomed closer, the stone walls of its sea-gate shiny with slime from the canal.

For the first time since they'd been trapped in the crypt, she let out a small sigh of relief. She was going to make it.

She only blinked for a moment, but when she looked, a hand emerged from the filthy canal and seized the stern of her gondola.

She let out a choked squawk and commanded the wood of the gondola to liquefy, to deny Smith any grip.

Like so much else that was primitive, wood was sacred to the Goddess. It should have obeyed her command. But it didn't react. Smith's physical touch overrode her commands and dissipated her energy like a monolith dissipated waves washing against it.

The Agent hauled himself out of the water with one hand, his other still gripping the knife.

"You didn't think you'd get rid of me that easily, did you?"

Ivy shook her head. She'd hoped Smith might be held by the superslippery water. After all, water was the native element of the Goddess. Just as Air was the element of the Son, and Fire the element of the Father.

She'd hoped, but at some level, she hadn't really believed it could be that easy. If a stitching of submachinegun bullets through his gut hadn't stopped Smith, a dumping into the canals of Venice, no matter how dirty or magically enhanced, wouldn't either.

"I slowed you down. That was enough."

His laughter was too high-pitched for a man his size. “Enough? Enough to let you bring me to the Cross, that's all. I suppose I should thank you, although I would have been a lot more grateful if you'd just died in Mosul where you were supposed to."

Church bells rang, echoing first from the Church of Mary of the Sailors and then from nearby churches until the entire city echoed.

Smith hissed. “Another of your tricks?"

Ivy shrugged. “None of my doing. Why? Does their faith frighten you?"

"It frightens me that so many are damned because of the errors of your so-called Catholic so-called religion. It frightens me that its sins have prevented the return of Christ for centuries. Their puny powers frighten me not at all."

But Ivy wasn't fooled. Smith
was
frightened. The church bells didn't
create
power, but their vibrations
awakened
power from within the waters surrounding and underlying the city and from the ancient stone buildings of Venice.

Venice had survived its share of fanatics. Smith would find plenty of that power available to him. But most of the city's fifteen hundred years had been lived under the guidance of a more practical faith. Venice had been a city of merchants for far longer than it had been a city of conquerors. As the gateway between East and West, it had enjoyed a mix of Orthodox and Catholic heritages and a tolerance for those of the Moslem faith. And in those Catholic and Orthodox practices, even if denied in official doctrine, adoration of the Queen of Heaven remained powerful. The church bells changed the balance of power between herself and Smith, helping him less than they helped her.

Unfortunately, the future wouldn't be decided by a climactic mage-battle, like in the movies. Being filled with the Goddess meant that Ivy was incapable of attacking. She knew from her military training that defending alone is ultimately doomed.

From the waters and the earth below, though, healing and protective powers welled up, comforting her, promising her that they were available to her if she could figure how to use them.

In the clouds over the city, a sense of impending power hung like an electrical charge before a lightning storm. Unlike the gentle and healing power of the Goddess, this power was harsh, hot, and hasty. It was not evil, but its raw strength was still something Smith could draw on in support of his narrow-minded definition of virtue.

The doorway to the Church of Mary of the Sailors flew open and Father Paulo, Father Francis, and more than a dozen other priests carried the two sections of the Cross into the courtyard.

Silence began at the Cross, then spread in concentric circles until only the distant sound of fighter jets overhead remained.

The Cross had always been an object of power. But now Ivy realized how undeveloped her second sight had been before the days and nights she'd spent in the tomb. Where she had seen it as gleaming with a red light, now it shined as bright as the sun.

As she watched, the Priests assembled the two pieces, bringing them together not as two pieces of lumber, but as a traditionally shaped Cross.

The Cross's power blazed even more brightly, so much so that Smith flinched. But then he stood strong, soaking in power like a sponge.

The Cross was whole.

It seemed to Ivy that the world stood still for an eternal moment.

Smith's eyes were drawn to that blazing symbol of power and his knuckles whitened on the knife.

"Finally,” he breathed. “It will be mine."

The church bells resumed chiming, a glorious celebration of the recovery of the very symbol of the Christian faith. The bell's sonic vibrations mingled with the psychic emanations from the Cross. Ivy felt a snap as the universe changed.