Chapter #74The London Blitz by: Seuzz   Frank and Joe tell you about this Hal Swann character, and you're intrigued. He is a Kenandandran, like you, but he has Catilindria as his other ousiarch. Your essentia collection is complete, so he wouldn't add anything. But turning another Stellae into an ally—or at least neutralizing him—is an attraction, and because he specializes in watching and torturing Fane, he would be a good asset.
Frank and Joe acknowledge Hal's usefulness, but they are also wary. "He's a nut," Frank says, and Joe cautions, "He'll be hard to catch."
"Harder than Rick?" you ask, for you're still pleased at the way you handled that very dangerous man.
"Harder, maybe," Joe says. "He's a Catilindrian. Rick had skill, but Hal has luck. You could predict what Rick could do, counter it. Hal specializes in fucking up attacks and making unpredictable attacks of his own. It's hard to guard against that."
"Also, he's going to be hard to find," Frank adds. "He keeps underground, and he's even more paranoid than Rick."
You appreciate the cautions. But the idea of adding to your arsenal someone as good and as dangerous as Rick (but without his psychological wounds) is too enticing to pass up.
You and your partners spend a whole day sketching out and refining your plans.
* * * * *
It's Saturday when you leave Saratoga Falls for the United Kingdom, which is where Swann, who is English, has his base. You take Curt Straussler's private Gulfstream, and enjoy an inflight dinner of steak and lobster before retiring to sleeping cabins in the rear. It's Sunday morning when you land in London, and there are two cars waiting for you. One is to transport you and your friends; into the other—the largest SUV that can be found—you wrestle your "operating table" along with the second, similarly sized metal plate that you and Liu bought in Saratoga Falls.
Your trio could travel under your own faces, as both the flight and the transportation into London were arranged by a very compliant Curt Straussler. Once you are at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, however, Joe retires into a private changing room and re-emerges as Curt Straussler himself in order to claim the reservation that is waiting for you. All your things—including the operating tables—are deposited in the best suite in the place. You have it to yourself for the rest of the day, for Frank goes out to Oxford and Joe to Cambridge to look for Swann.
Meanwhile, you unpack your occult tools and get to work. You take your time, for there is something very soothing about working through the sigils and fitting the designs together.
* * * * *
"It's all there," you announce as you gesture at the metal table with a broad sweep of your arm. "I think," you have to add, for nothing in life can be certain.
It's Saturday night, well after dark, and Frank and Joe have returned from their expeditions. As you talk them through it, they follow your explanation of the sigils with roving eyes.
Even with all its intricacies and overlaps you can scarcely believe that you got it all to fit inside those sixty-four square feet of sheet metal. And even then, in order to fit it all onto one piece of metal, you had to inscribe some useful sigils on the other side.
Four circles—seven feet across, and overlapping because they have different center points—dominate the metal sheet. Sigils are inscribed on their outer and inner surfaces. These are the most important, for they inscribe or remove imago, essentia and anima from underlying substrate, so that you can add these constituents to a golem, or remove them from human beings so as to create a golem. (To make a golem without sacrificing a human being, you must use the sigils on the other side.)
Intersecting the imago circle are sigils for the making of masks and mind-bands; for sealing these; and for merging them into complete disguises. Other sigils allow for modifying imago, either inside a mask or for remotely modifying the imago of an actual person. One arc, connecting one of the imago sigils to an anima sigil lets you attach the shadowy "mental imago" to anima, the way you've merged the memories and personalities of Joe and Frank Durras into the underlying anima of Will Prescott that now guides them.
A tangential sigil off the essentia sigil lets you split and combine essentia, and other sigils let you modify certain kinds of essentia directly. The anima sigil is unadorned, but the "extras" sigil contains intersecting and tangenting sigils for the creation of remote and control sigils.
You point all these out to Frank and Joe with quiet pride. "Too bad we can't fold it up and carry it in our pockets," Joe says. Frank says, "Don't give Will any ideas."
You're able to spend time with them talking about your new operating table because they did not return with any leads on Swann. Not that they were expecting to get any, even though they traveled around Oxford and Cambridge under their own faces. They didn't go down to find him; they went to lay a trail for Swann himself to follow.
You still have the original flyer that your trio designed and ran off in hundreds of copies for Joe and Frank to plaster the universities with. Hal is, by personal and political affinity, a hard-core Marxist, and the flyer is designed to catch his attention and draw him in: A red-bordered sheet with hammer-and-sickles at the corners and labeled on three edges with symbols that look like decorative scribbles but which are actually pairs of occult symbols for the planets: Uranus-Pluto, which are Hal's ousiarchs, and Sun-Mercury and Mars-Saturn, which are Joe's and Frank's. The bold, black headline—"LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT FANE, EXXONMOBIL, UNILEVER"—is also meant to attract his eye, but the socialist gibberish that makes up the rest is only there to distract the oblivious. The cell phone number belongs to Jonathan Straussler: Joe has brought it with him.
The message conveyed is designed to be irresistible: Frank and Joe are trying to locate Hal, and he should call them at the number. "Biggest risk is that he'll call in some of the heavy guns," Frank said about the ad. "Frank and Joe are missing, and so are Rick and Aparjita. They all might be so spooked by now that Hal feels like he has to call in the big brigades."
"But Hal's a free spirit," Joe said, "and there's a good chance he'll sniff around on his own."
* * * * *
The other risk is that you'll attract a lot of crackpots. And that's exactly what happens. They were already pestering Joe before he'd left Cambridge, and you spend Sunday deflecting inquiries by setting up phony appointments with those callers who are not Hal Swann.
But come Monday morning at eleven o'clock, Joe gets one such call that takes a dramatic turn.
He's selling the caller the usual line about an upcoming meeting when he sits bolt upright and the bored sneer falls from his face. "Actually, we do have an early planning session," he says, and catches your eye, and Frank's. "If you and your friend want to show up early. This afternoon? One o'clock is fine," he says, and shuts down the phone.
"A nibble?" Frank says.
"Guy named Jacob Darrow. He said the magic word, though. Said him and his friend 'Swann' couldn't make the regular meet. So I told them to come 'round at one today instead." He glances at you, and you lunge for the suitcase containing the blank masks and mind bands.
As the hour of the appointment approaches, Joe puts himself into Huojin Liu's face and parks himself outside the main entrance to the Savoy with a disposable cell phone. Frank, in his own face, mans the elevator lobby outside the suite. At a little after one he sticks his head in long enough to say that Joe's picked up no sign of Swann. But five minutes later you hear Frank's voice outside the door, and you pick up both masks that you have waiting.
But Frank only lifts one finger as he ushers your guest in. You've just time to see the man's beard and trilby before mashing him in the face with the mask. "Is this him?" you ask as Frank catches the slumping figure.
"No, this is the guy that Joe talked to. He says his friend couldn't make it."
"Fuck."
"No, it might be better this way." Frank doesn't so much as grunt as he hurls your victim onto a sofa. "Hal's playing it cautious, sending this guy up to look around." He smiles mirthlessly. "We can send him back to give the all clear."
It makes sense. But instead of using the operating table, which is very noisy and which might spook Swann, you do it the old-fashioned way, and after the mask reemerges from Darrow you paste it up with a bubbly mix that includes your own hair.
Frank talks as you work. "Joe and I were wondering. What are we going to do with Swann?"
The question puzzles you. "Turn him into one of us."
"But how? Put your anima in him, like you did me and Joe?"
"Is there an alternative?"
"Joe's carrying four different sets of essentia. One of us could take Hal's essentia, and we could replace him."
You pause in your work. "You like it just being the three of us?"
"There's that. But maybe you want to save your anima for when we put Rick's and Aparijita's essentia back in play."
"So which of us gets to be Hal?" you ask.
Frank doesn't reply.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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