Chapter 5
Several weeks later, I was in the back office of the shop while Henri manned the front desk and dealt with customers.
Johannes had sent me a letter before our showdown in Logan Square, which I’d received a couple days later. Among other things, it said that if I were alive to read it, I must have been victorious, and therefore everything he’d owned was now mine. I’d visited his old brownstone in Brooklyn a half-dozen times since then, trying to decide what of his was worth keeping. Much of it was; he’d been alive for longer than the entire human race, and had collected many interesting and valuable artifacts in that time. But on the last trip, I’d discovered a hidden room in the cellar that I’d never known about in the years I’d lived with Johannes, back when he was still acting as my friend and mentor, instructing me in ancient secrets and forgotten magic.
It was a treasure trove, the walls lined with thousands of years’ worth of an immortal being’s personal journals, progressing from clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform to papyrus scrolls in Egyptian hieroglyphs and demotic script, then ancient Greek, then classical Latin. He had eventually upgraded from scrolls to bound codices, and the material switched from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment and vellum, then eventually paper books written in Old French, then Old English, which gradually progressed through centuries of linguistic evolution to modern English.
I’d shipped the journals to Philadelphia immediately, and had spent at least part of almost every day since poring through them. It was slow going: while I spoke the various languages in question as well as any human alive, it’s still quite tricky to translate ancient vernacular to phrasing which makes sense to a modern ear, especially given the context-dependent meaning of many words and phrases. And I had to be careful with the fragile clay tablets and papyrus scrolls; even with the use of magic to preserve them from the ravages of time, they were still quite easy to break or tear accidentally. But in the past two months, I’d learned a great deal about how Johannes and his fellow Immortals had interacted with the rest of humanity in the ancient world.
They had already been alive for thousands of years before humanity invented written language; by the time the first primitive civilizations began to develop in the Fertile Crescent, they were worshipped as gods. After all, what else is a pagan god but an undying being with wondrous magical powers?
To the Sumerians, he’d been Enki, the god of water, knowledge, mischief, magic, and creation, worshipped and honored in the city of Eridu, where he lived on their offerings while advising their priest-kings and instructing their sorcerers in the magical arts. Later, when that civilization had faded, he’d moved on to Egypt and reinvented himself as Thoth, a god of knowledge and writing. Eventually he’d partnered with the Olympians as their influence spread around the Mediterranean, calling himself Janus and helping them guide the tribes of Rome to power and glory in his quest to perfect humanity. That part of the story I already knew, but it was still interesting reading of his adventures along the way.
But none of that was why I pored through the journals every day. I was looking for information on two subjects: the surviving Immortals, and anything I could learn about the wellspring, the beating heart of magic Johannes had taught me to access almost a century ago.
From what he’d taught me, I already knew the wellspring was the primordial source of magic in this universe, from which flowed the ley-lines of energy through the Earth and the veil which bound it to the Otherworld. And I knew that accessing it directly gave the few beings able to channel its power the ability to do things beyond the limits of ordinary magic: works of creation, transformation, and destruction of which most mages could only dream. It was this power that had made the Immortals gods among men, rather than mere sorcerers.
Johannes hadn’t actually taught me much of how to use that power. He’d instructed me in accessing it, and I could pull its power forth into the world, but I couldn’t control it with the precision needed to do anything but destroy things. I’d used it twice: once to burn the armies of alien creatures called the Shadows and their demon allies at the Fields of Fire, and once to kill Johannes when he revealed who he really was.
But I knew there was so much more: I’d seen him use its power to create life itself, to form raw stone into the finest works of art, to shift the features of his own face as he desired, and to peer into the mists of time and space. I’d left at the start of the Shadow War, before he could teach me the control to wield it properly, to direct its primordial energy to reshape the world to my wishes. Of course, I’d now realized he never intended to teach me any such thing; he’d been priming me as a weapon, putting a nuclear bomb in the hands of a child who knew nothing of what he carried. He’d wanted me to unleash my rage at the Fields of Fire, though at the time—and for decades after—I’d been ashamed of what I’d done with the beautiful gift he’d given me.
I knew I couldn’t remain ignorant of my own power. It was too dangerous; I needed to learn to use it properly and responsibly, for my sake and that of everyone in both worlds. The voice at the back of my mind that had whispered for decades, urging me to draw the fire forth once again, had fallen silent since Logan Square. But that didn’t mean I would never hear it again. I needed the strength of knowledge, or I’d forever be a time bomb.
The simplest solution was to have a teacher. When I’d first visited Johannes’s brownstone in Brooklyn after Logan’s Square, one of the four remaining Immortals had shown up on the front step and introduced herself, wearing the face of an elderly Chinese woman and calling herself He Xiangu. I knew the name—it was straight out of Taoist mythology. I had no idea if she were really the inspiration for one of the Eight Immortals or had just appropriated her name after the fact. In fact, I knew nothing about her except that she and her remaining siblings didn’t hold a grudge against me for killing their brother. But she’d proposed to teach me to master the wellspring and its Great Cycle, and told me how to contact her if I decided to take her up on the offer.
I hadn’t yet decided. I didn’t trust her, despite Johannes suggesting that his fellow Immortals hadn’t been involved in his plans for the Tamesis. Just because she hadn’t been party to his plots didn’t mean her intentions were any purer. I had no idea what she wanted. So I’d been carefully reading through her brother’s journals to glean what I could about her and, while I was at it, try to figure out who the other three surviving Immortals actually were.
I’d found something promising. There was no discernible pattern to his journal entries, with some periods of near-weekly or even daily accounts of ongoing adventures and musings on life, followed by decades of silence until the next one, then annual accounts, then a few in a single month, then another long gap, and so on. But every so often I’d come across a standalone entry with nothing but a date and a name or two: “Ninhursag,” “Horus,” “Rama,” “Oduduwa,” “Supay and Kón.” It first struck me as odd that these entries had no context or details, but I eventually concluded that he had been recording the deaths of his brothers and sisters. The entries needed no context for him to understand.
Johannes had told me that there had originally been a few thousand Immortals, created by a magical cataclysm around 70,000 years ago. Their aging had stopped, and it became practically impossible for them to be killed naturally, as their lives were tied to the flow of magic throughout the world. But with effort, the bond could be broken, and they could die. And over the tens of thousands of years since the cataclysm, under the unending weight of living countless eons, most of his fellows had eventually chosen to commit suicide.
I’d drawn up two lists. The first recorded the name of every Immortal mentioned in Johannes’s regular journal entries, annotated with Johannes’s comments on their character and anything else that might be relevant. The second were the standalone names. As I added names to the second list, I crossed them off the first. I was now up to the early 16th century, and as I crossed off “Supay” and “Kón,” I reviewed the list and realized that of the hundreds of Immortals named in the journals, there were only five I hadn’t struck through: He Xiangu, Sita, Rashnu, Orunus, and Johannes himself. Presumably the rest of the Immortals had died at some point in the tens of thousands of years before he’d begun writing.
After a moment’s consideration, I crossed Johannes’s name off my list, and considered the four names remaining, and the notes I’d made about them.
Johannes had apparently considered He Xiangu kind but tough; he seemed to respect her more than many of the others, but they hadn’t interacted much between the start of the journals and the point I’d gotten to. With so few of them left, I hoped they’d spent more time together and I’d be able to find more useful insights.
Sita, who I believed was the same person he’d sometimes called Janaki and Maithili—most of the Immortals had worn various names through the millennia—had apparently been in India for several thousand years, living among the Deva. It seemed Johannes hadn’t much cared for her, seeing her as a goody-two-shoes, too honorable and pure-hearted for the cruelties of the world. She hadn’t even merited a brief mention since the eighth century.
Rashnu had earned more admiration; Johannes described him as a man who would always do what he saw as necessary. But he was straitlaced and unbending, honest to a fault and unwilling to tolerate any concept of moral ambiguity. He’d set himself up in central Asia as the local god of justice, allied with the Yazata, the small Fae tribe who came to be worshipped by the ancient Persians. Johannes had resented Rashnu for looking down on his efforts to guide humanity as mere scheming, unworthy of beings such as they, but he’d clearly respected his brother and I got the sense he wished they’d been closer. They’d evidently lost touch at some point after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; he hadn’t appeared in the journals since then.
And then there was Orunus, who had barely merited a couple of comments in the centuries when Rome had controlled the northern regions of the African continent. He’d evidently been a major player in the sub-Saharan regions, with Johannes describing the Romans of Lepcis trading slaves, salt, gold, and ivory with “dark-skinned worshippers of Orunus from across the desert.” I wasn’t as familiar with African mythology as I wished, but it seemed likely that he was same person as Orunla, one of the principle gods of Orisa, the traditional religion of the Yoruba people. Unfortunately, beyond those quick references, Johannes hadn’t mentioned him again, so I had no insight into their relationship.
Having finally found one of the answers I was looking for, I pushed myself away from the desk and rubbed my eyes; I’d been at it for hours already and needed a break. A few months ago, I’d have poured myself a large glass of Scotch. But the clock only read 3:15.
When Henri had been lying in his hospital bed recovering from the loss of his arm, I’d expressed surprise at his positive outlook on life after everything he’d been through. It wasn’t about strength, he’d explained; it was about choices. The choices we make every day about how we interact with the world and the people around us, that’s what defines who we are. Not how we feel deep down, but what we actually do.
With a reluctant sigh, I grabbed a bottle of water from the case in the corner and headed out front to check on him, leaving the whisky for later. Choices. Baby steps.