The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (46 page)

Ahriman
.

“Could you recognize his voice in a court of law?” Viktor said thickly. “Did he say anything you can remember?”

“He said to tell Viktor Radek he will always be a step behind.”

Viktor’s mouth opened, but then his face flushed and he clenched his jaw, an almost unbearable rage rising within him. Father Angelo replaced the bedsheet. “He’s changed since you knew him, hasn’t he?”

“Sorry?” Viktor said.

“Does he win the hearts and minds of men, has he mastered the art of the flesh, does he move about the world unseen? I’ve heard about the murders, even here.”

“There’s a plausible explanation, of that I assure you. Darius is a master magician, an illusionist.”

“Do you understand the reason for the last power? It’s a perversion of Jesus’s appearance to his disciples after the resurrection. True bilocation. Are you familiar with the case of Padre Pio?”

“An Italian priest who witnesses claimed could bilocate,” Viktor said. He looked at the priest’s wrists and said quietly, “He also had wounds such as yours.”

“Yes, he was united with the passion of Christ. Allowed to share in the tiniest portion of His pain.”

“As do you, I presume,” Viktor said.

“One never presumes such a thing. Christ would never
give
such a power, or
cause
an affliction such as the stigmata. They are gained through intimacy with Him, a physical manifestation of empathy with our Lord and Savior.”

“What do you know about Ahriman, and about Darius’s beliefs in this being? How do I find him?”

“Ahriman corrupts. He has defiled this man, and you cannot hope to overcome him now. His own faith alone can defeat him.”

“This is about justice, not faith,” Viktor said grimly.

“Faith is what connects us to God, drives the miracles of the saints. So, too, it allows Ahriman to work through this man. You must sever the tie.”

Viktor tried to keep the impatience from his voice. “You mean the grimoire.”

“The grimoire is an empty vessel, a tool used by Ahriman to strengthen the faith of his followers. A manipulation of the mind of man.”

“You’ve read it?” Viktor said.

“How can we defend against that which we do not know?”

“Surely there’s something inside that can help me. Is there a ritual he must perform, perhaps at a certain place?”

“Of course there’s a ritual,” the priest said. “Ritual is the first step towards faith, though ultimately unnecessary. True faith is rare in the extreme, and thus Ahriman must convince his servants that they are able to
gain
his favor. Terrible, terrible things are proffered within the grimoire, wicked deeds to be performed, unholy consumptions to be made.”

“You’re saying you believe anyone could gain these abilities if one’s faith were strong enough?” Viktor said.

“‘I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there” and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.’”

Viktor stared in frustration at the sightless priest.

“But there is a limit, a constraint,” the priest said. “To strengthen the faith of the servant, the grimoire claims there can be but a single favored disciple at any one time. Only one granting of the three powers.”

“Forgive me, Father, but none of this helps me find Darius. I need something concrete. Do you have something his followers would fear? Perhaps another relic, from the days of the original heresy?”

“I told you, the relics mean nothing. It’s not the letter of the law that concerns God but the faith it imparts. You must use faith as a weapon.”

“And I told you that I’m not a man of faith,” Viktor said.

“Not yours,” he whispered, “his. Ahriman cannot be defeated, but his servant can.
Sever the tie
.”

“You’d make a good religious phenomenologist.”

The monk’s eyelids closed, and he folded his hands across his chest. Viktor had to move closer to hear his murmurings. “‘And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns as a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven
in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast… and his number is six hundred threescore and six.’”

“Revelations Thirteen,” Viktor said. “With all due respect, Father, quoting Revelations doesn’t make sense. Darius is a Diabolist, a follower of Ahriman because he believes this being grants him power. Ahriman and Zoroastrianism have nothing to do with Christianity, except for a commonality of myth.”

A convulsion lifted the priest’s body off the cot, and it took him a moment to recover. “Do not be deceived. There is a singular evil force in this world, in this universe, and its name is irrelevant. Satan, Baal, Iblis, Mara, Kali, Tiamat, Ahriman: These denominations are human constructs. I quote the word of God as I know it to be, with the tools God has given me to humbly understand a portion of His design. Others do the same.”

“I don’t dispute the existence of evil,” Viktor said. “What I dispute is the existence of a Devil with horns and a red pitchfork, tossing human beings into the nine circles of Hell. Or a mythological entity from Persian legend named Ahriman, who created a book that allows one of his worshippers to flit about the world causing murder and mayhem.”

“Who knows why the Evil One chooses to act as he does?” the priest said softly. “Who knows why our Lord chose a Jewish carpenter to die on a cross for our sins? Why he created a universe as complex as the one we have? You may not be a man of faith, but I know that you search. I sense you at least allow for the possibility of a Creator God to whom you attribute the impossibility of existence, of a deity or life force or entity so apart from humanity, so
above
, that He is outside our ability to ever fully comprehend?”

Viktor didn’t respond, and the priest said, “We can never hope to understand the mind of God. Of course He is not a white-bearded patriarch from the Middle East, enthroned in the firmament above. He is outside the scope of human imagination, he is God. But don’t you see?
It is the same with the Evil One
.”

He let this statement sink in. In all of Viktor’s years studying religions and cults, with their various beliefs and rationale concerning the presence of
evil, he had never heard it put quite that way. It caused his skin to prickle, before he pushed away the priest’s words as just another, albeit more complicated, superstition.

“I find these statements odd coming from a Catholic priest,” Viktor said.

“Piety is not an absence of honest thought. To attempt to understand God is to attempt an impossible task, and to understand there might be other avenues to comprehension.”

“Then why not attribute evil to God, rather than a second entity?” Viktor said. “Didn’t Isaiah say, ‘I am the Lord and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe’?”

“I’m Christian, not Zoroastrian. I do not believe in a separate but equal entity, but rather a Satan whose purpose as created by God I shall never understand. Then again, I also allow for the possibility that I might be wrong, or that the intertwining of the two is beyond my comprehension. Despite what some within the Church claim, the ontology of the Devil has never been resolved. I believe there is no striving towards the light without the dark, no love and free will without pain and suffering. But it’s not our task to contemplate how evil sprang from God. It’s our task to struggle against the Devil.”

The priest beckoned Viktor closer. “Take my rosary.”

Viktor hesitated, and the priest said, “Those of us at the extreme end of faith… such as myself and my visitor from Ahriman… we see this realm more clearly than do you. This rosary is the embodiment of
my
faith, my blood and spirit intertwined with that of my Savior.”

He lifted his head ever so gently, removing the rosary from his neck. The movement seemed to take a lifetime, and Viktor stood there dumbly, a man always in control who was somehow indecisive in the presence of this priest. Though he had no desire to take the rosary, he couldn’t bring himself to refuse.

Viktor bent to receive it, almost gagging at the putrescence of the priest’s wounds. After slipping the rosary around Viktor’s neck, Father Angelo lay back as if he had expended his last ounce of energy.

“Do you know where he is?” Viktor said.

“I do not.”

“Do you have any idea what he plans to do?” Viktor said.

“He has renewed the heresy.” His enfeebled fingers made the sign of the cross. “Go with God, my son.” Then his hands returned to his chest, his eyelids sagging with the heaviness of sleep.

Viktor waited beside Father Angelo for a long moment, feeling as if this entire foolish journey had been in vain. He had learned nothing more about Darius except the knowledge that he had slipped further into madness than Viktor thought possible, that he had destroyed the body of this gentle man of God. For that alone there was no penalty too harsh.

He stepped out of the room and eased the door closed. He would leave for London in the morning, his appointment with Darius little more than twenty-four hours away.

Brother Pietro approached with a lantern. “You’ll stay the night?”

“Thank you, but no.”

He nodded as if expecting Viktor’s answer. “Come with me.”

“Has there been any sign of my pursuer?” Viktor said.

“No,” he said, and Viktor didn’t have time to worry about it further.

The monk led him across the summit to the iron gate surrounding the ancient chapel. Charcoal clouds smothered the top of the mountain, the valley below invisible in the darkness.

Pietro inserted a six-inch key into the gate, and it creaked open. Viktor saw no door, and the monk led him to the left of the chapel, putting his hands on a section of the wall that appeared as smooth and inaccessible as the rest of the granite mass. He pushed on the wall, and a block of stone swung inward.

“This is where you kept the grimoire,” Viktor said.

“Yes.”

The lantern illuminated a stone passage, which they followed deep into the church. They came to a three-way intersection, but instead of choosing another passage, Pietro again went to an indistinguishable section of the wall,
pushing on another stone. This time Viktor heard a groaning sound, and the two-foot square block next to Pietro fell away, revealing a staircase descending into blackness.

Pietro shone the lantern down the staircase. Huge oak casks lined the passage. At the bottom of the staircase was an old motorcycle with knobby tires. The monk handed Viktor a set of keys.

“You didn’t actually think we climbed down the path every time we left? This tunnel will take you through the mountain. When you exit, follow the dirt trail for the better part of an hour. Be careful, it is steep. This will merge into a road, which you will take to a village. After the village is a bridge, and a house with a flat roof just after the bridge. The man who lives there will recognize the motorcycle. He will take you where you wish to go, at any time of night.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Viktor said.

He grasped Viktor by the arm. “You can thank me by avenging my brother.”

Viktor sped through the night, and everything was as Pietro had said: the drive through the tunnel with nothing but stone and silence and the mental image of Father Angelo’s ruined eyes, riding for miles under a bloated moon beside cacti bent at fantastical angles, and the surreal rendezvous with Pietro’s man in the village, who took Viktor to Cefalù without so much as a word or a backwards glance.

He dropped Viktor at Piazza Garibaldi. After another futile attempt to call Grey, which worried him immensely, Viktor began the climb to his villa, weary beyond belief, shaking from the need for absinthe.

His driver’s villa lay just below his. When Viktor exited the mountain tunnel, he had called and told the driver to be ready to leave at first light, a mere three hours away.