Chapter Text
The three shamans sauntered under the three towers of Herod’s palace - Phasael, massive and square, Hippicus, elegant and domed, Mariamne, a fragile confection of columns and conical roof. All named after friends or relatives, none of whom had died under happy circumstances. An armed escort awaited them at the palace gates, their red shingles sloping down from the fermenting purple of the evening sky. Before they went in, Balthasar pointed to show the guards where the star could already be seen over the hazy shadow of the city’s South wall.
“Ketu,” the Sabaean astrologer named it to Herod inside, pointing at where it hung in the corner of a narrow window. “The first of the two stars announcing the Shaman Fight in Jerusalem. If our calculations are correct,” he added “Rahu should arrive in 33 years.”
“33 years,” grumbled the King of Judea. “I am now 72 years old. Caesar may not even reign by then. Why do you come to tell me of this thing I will not live to see.”
Well… because you asked, as soon as you heard we were coming? Balthasar glanced nervously back and forth at his companions. Among shamans like themselves, power almost always correlated with a certain degree of wisdom, even if it was a wisdom that conflicted with theirs - but powerful humans were unpredictable. They often seemed to live almost entirely in their own delusions - unable to see spirits, equally unable to see things around them. And the King was old, too. Gaspar, the monk from Gandhara, and Melchior, the magus from Persia were more used to dealing with men like him.
“The stars pass far enough apart,” Gaspar offered in his slow, peaceful voice, “for a generation of shamans, like ourselves, to prepare our children.” All three of them would have eagerly participated in the Shaman Fight themselves if it came in their time. They were among the strongest shamans in their respective traditions. But even though Balthazar, at least, might live to see it, it would only be as a spectator. A stronger generation, one that could still see their dreams clearly, would have risen by then, and it would not be his place to oppose them. He was too satisfied by the stars in their fixed orbits to have a dream to fight for anyway.
“Besides, a Shaman Fight in your land should be good news to you, as a Jew,” Melchior whispered, his voice welling up with reverence. “This land is filled with awesome spirits. It is said to be the birthplace of the Angels, and just as many fearsome demons. It has produced some of the most powerful shamans in history - Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Elijah, Daniel - but none of them born at the right time to be a Shaman King, to guide the Great Spirit of the whole world, not just your people.”
“And none will be,” Herod sighed. “Rome wants the power of the Great Spirit, and I have sworn my loyalty to Rome.”
A huddle of four men followed silently behind them, occasionally whispering. They hadn’t identified themselves, but the visitors could tell they, too, were shamans - the real intended audience of this conversation. By their robes, one had to be a Levite priest, and one a Roman augur, but the other two - had there been a fifth, earlier, or was that a spirit, phasing in and out? - were unidentifiable.
“Even Caesar may be dead by then, but he wishes to be divinized. Rome will carry his ghost all the way to the Great Spirit, to reign over the dead and the living for 500 years.”
“That is not their decision,” Gaspar cautioned - or comforted. Balthazar fidgeted with his astrolabe. “Rome is a great empire, and a great empire is always backed by powerful shamans. But as they say in the land of the Tao and Dong families, there are crouching tigers and hidden dragons. Perhaps one of them will awaken the spirits slumbering in your land.”
“Although your laws against sorcery surely make things inconvenient for them,” Melchior added. “If your priesthood wished to train candidates as ours do…”
“Those laws are ours, not Herod’s.” The Jewish priest stepped forward, twining and untwining his tefillin around a flabby arm. “There are those among Pharisees and Essenes and Galilean bush prophets who may join your fight, but the temple takes no side in this. We recognize no Shaman King, only the Lord our God.”
They watched silently for a moment, as the darkness thickened around the star, and its light seemed to send needles through the window directly into their eyes.
“No better,” Herod mumbled, “that a king should be born here, greater even than Caesar, and not of my line.”
Balthazar spoke up hesitantly. “Do any of your children… see spirits?” He didn’t bother to ask if Herod did, though he sensed the king wanted him to. The king wouldn’t know a moment’s peace if he did, with that storm of gory slivers of silhouettes swirling around him, thick as a stench. Screaming in his deaf ears for attention, forgiveness, repentance, revenge. The Sirian dog-spirit at his side cringed and whimpered at the miasma - bloodless fingertips with splinters where their nails had been torn out tugging at the corners of every tapestry.
For a moment Balthazar wondered if the king - if he had shamans following him around, he might have, though they were sure to be flatterers - had ever heard that common saying among shamans: No one who can see spirits is all bad. Followers of Mr. B like Gaspar, or Zoroaster like Melchior, generally glossed this to mean no one was all bad, for anyone could be led to Enlightenment, even Enlightenment to the world of spirits around them, under the right set of conditions. Yet humans, ordinary humans, or extraordinary - those who, like Herod, reached 73 without seeing so much as a glimpse of anything but the flesh and blood and stone and sand around them - Balthazar had seen even in his thirty years more than enough of what they did to each other, even had shamans to invoke the stars to guide them in doing. Shamans who, even if they could call on divine-class spirits or demons, could do nothing against the sword of someone so willingly blinded, and thus had to obey.
“No, and how would they be fit to lead an army into battle if they did? How would they keep their mind on the taxes and budgets? The very idea of a shaman king is… funny. Of course as soon as I became a king I learned that spirits and their mediums were real and feared even by sovereigns, which always struck me as something of a disappointment. But why Caesar Augustus should want to reign as a spirit is beyond me. Our modes of power are too dissimilar.”
He was lying, and eyeing them to see if they would detect the lie. “In India,” Gaspar offered, “there are Brahmin and Kshatriya, two castes determined by reincarnation, who rule in these dissimilar ways and complement each other. Of course, the reigning Shaman King, Mr. B., established our own kingdom without such divisions.”
“Yes, I know about India. I have hosted Indian dignitaries who have called us a nation of Brahmin, and our own God seems to have considered it an improper compromise to appoint Kings at all. Many of my own people think the same of me. They hate me as both a tyrant and a traitor, where I would be honoured as a nation-builder in Armenia or Syria. And yet,” he tapped his finger on one of the acute spikes of his crown and let it rest there, screwing his fingertip against the point as if trying to pierce the thick, translucent skin, “I cannot see what you can. I cannot look at the stars and see if I was right or wrong.”
“Neither can we with any certainty. This is why our King teaches us to put ourselves above the ebb and flow of desire and find peace within ourselves and among our fellows,” Gaspar acknowledged.
“There is a technique,” said Melchior, “that I have used for the sovereigns I have served, that would allow them to borrow - only briefly - the perceptions of a shaman. It is important to us that those who rule us have seen themselves through the fire, into the light of Ahura Mazda.”
Herod’s owl-like eyes were now pinned on Melchior alone. His shaman companions whispered to each other. “Is there a price?” The Temple priest raised a shaking hand, looked about to say something - “No - I am a king, you are guests in my kingdom, you are under my law here. Show me.”
Melchior nodded and reached into the small bag he carried by himself, with or without servants, everywhere on his travels. He drew forth a single peacock feather - and everyone in the hall except Herod and his Roman guards could see the many-coloured flames of thirteen more ghostly feathers springing from the air behind him as his most powerful spirit ally took shape. “Keep your eye on its eye,” he intoned as he waved the feather back and forth in front of the King. A fragment of the Light-Bringer, native to Kurdistan, that had been brought to the court of the fire magi: “Peacock King, Tawûsî Melek… Over Soul: Peacock Spyglass!”
Herod squinted. He probably still couldn’t see the shimmering, translucent structure that now surrounded the peacock feather. An echo of its structure at scale, its fronds now resembled struts of bronze, and where the “eye” marking would be at the feather’s end, a golden-red tinted lens.
“Come closer. Look through.” Herod leaned forward. “Look through what?” He still couldn’t see it. Melchior traced the circle of the spyglass with his other finger, next to his head. “Imagine there is porthole here - in an invisible wall in the air.” As Herod took another stumbling step closer, the fronds on either side of the feather closed around him and dug into his trembling shoulders, golden light pulsing through them and into his body as he stared as if into an invisible mirror. The Jewish priest clutched his tefillin. (The magi hadn’t detected any spirit ally near him, but these garments that even ordinary citizens outside wore were clearly sophisticated spirit media, and the magi could now feel the static charge of significant amounts of mana emanating from them. Melchior had been hoping to see the High Priest in his ephod, which was supposedly even more impressive, but the kohen gadol had declined to even meet with the pagan envoys.)
“Ahh… ahh…” Herod gaped, unable to form words at first. But whatever he was seeing, he didn’t pull away. “Mariamne… Kostobar… have you been here… all this time? And yet you look… you look no different… from all these common corpses… this filth of the street… this throng. What are you all looking at? Get away! I don’t do favours for corpses. I haven’t summoned an audience. Guards!” His voice was suddenly loud, so loud even the guards jumped. “Get these… get this rabble out of my palace. Yes, even you, I said what I said. I was right to send you out there, into the dark, wasn’t I? This is what you always looked like, under that pretty flesh, on the inside…”
“Do you see now…” Melchior whispered sadly. “Why the Great Spirit has chosen to protect you from this power? You can step away now.” But he couldn’t. Herod clutched the air at the invisible sides of the Over Soul, pulled himself closer and closer to the glass as if trying to stick his head through it, his lips flecked with spittle. The Jewish priest was now chanting some verse of their holy text. Behind him, black spirit energy was starting to congeal into towering shadow, like an oil spout flowing upwards. The guards clutched their spears nervously. Gaspar whispered: “He’s already starting to form a demon. Get ready.”
Balthazar scratched at the back of his spirit dog’s neck and felt it dissolve into a cool stream of energy around his hand, which he drew to his astrolabe and held it sideways. “Over Soul: Orion’s Silver Bow.” Meanwhile Gaspar unwrapped the bindings of silk hanging down from his belt around a small bronze figurine of a muscular man in a lion’s skin. “Over Soul: Club of Heracles Vajrapani.”
Armoured in shiny black plates like an insect, its eyes wide reflective circles and its spiralling ram horns scraping the ceiling, it was a demon like Balthazar had never seen before. Melchior dissolved his Over Soul and Herod fell forward in a flat faint - the guards ran toward him as he reformed a second: “Armoured O. S.: Avesta Fire Mantle.” A swipe of the demon’s claws tore a torch out of its bracket, the burning wood spinning across the floor, a frayed edge of tapestry falling nearby, and a soldier’s breastplate deformed as if it had just been struck by a blade straight out of the forge. Balthazar loosed a pattern of three arrows of white light, like Orion’s belt, between the plates of its armour. Black spirit flames flew out where they struck - vanishing in the air as Gaspar chanted sutras or struck them with the purifying mu-lightning dancing around the curving ribs of the giant golden vajra club surrounding Gaspar’s hand. If they flew into Melchior’s Armoured O.S., they were simply consumed.
The demon advanced anyway, catching Gaspar’s undefended side and throwing him into the shields of the guards. Melchior threw himself in front, twelve featherlike blades now extending from the crescent of his arms and shoulders, so bright with fire-type mana that Balthazar could barely focus to aim away from them. They cut a sweeping arc across the demon’s torso, and Balthazar had to pin the escaping spirits midair - this demon had to be made up of hundreds, though so many had forgotten their names and identities their numbers didn’t matter. They were Legion.
Were this land’s demons so powerful only because so much blood had been spilt here already? Balthazar had purified battlefields in the desert, but within years every particle of sand would be rearranged by the whirlwinds and cycles of nature, the ghosts scattered with them. This palace was only a few decades old, but already so thick with memories - nothing forgotten. The Jewish priest was standing still, chanting his Scriptures, staring straight ahead. He had not formed an Over Soul or so much as touched the demon, but it did not seem like the demon would touch him, either.
The demon’s other hand had become a single scythe-like blade and struck in return, exactly where Melchior’s blades left him undefended. The Armour-type O.S. still had a breastplate, he was unhurt but jarred and thrown back, and the demon advancing again - as Gaspar rocketed back up the hall, riding his vajra as it shot an explosion of lightning behind. Its front prongs slammed the demon into the wall, cracking the large white blocks of Herodian marble. Balthazar saw his opportunity and leapt into the air, changing the shape of his Over Soul - “Hound of Sirius close-range form: Crescent Guillotine!”
The hollow skull-helmet of the demon’s head clattered to the floor, draining spirit energy like smoke from a censer. Only now did the priest go over to Herod - the other local shamans following, looking as busily concerned as they could while hanging at least a foot back - and laid hands on him.
The guards stood back, afraid to make a move. Herod looked back groggily, and the magi knew they would be lucky to escape with their lives, even if the King understood they had saved him.
On the way out of the gates of the palace, Balthazar chuckled to his companions: “You know, if the Shaman Fight was in our time, we would make a pretty good team!”
Given everything that had happened at the palace, they were glad they hadn’t told Herod about the other part of their visit.
Ketu circled the entire planet, and the site of the Shaman Fight could be determined by its apogee. But this time its orbit was strange. Jerusalem met all the traditional criteria of a Shaman Fight location; it was a great city and a nexus of the historical contradictions of its time, poised between Rome and the ancient religious empires of the East. The Holy of Holies in its Temple - which Herod had expanded with a vast, empty platform large enough to serve as an arena - was even said to be a location where the Great Spirit itself welled up through the Earth, like the underground Patch village or the ancient “Plant” in the lost city of Mu. The Shaman Fight in Jerusalem had been confirmed already by the Patch Tribe. But its exact apogee was just south of Jerusalem - at a small village called Bethlehem, “the House of Bread”.
Of the three, Balthazar understood the relevant Jewish scriptures and the significance of this location best. Jewish and Arabian shamans had been sharing knowledge with each other, after all, since the days of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. This was the town where David - the first of Israel’s two great shamanic Kings - had been born, and where it was said his true heir would one day appear.
If the Great Spirit had chosen a Shaman Fight in Jerusalem, so it might have chosen a Jewish Shaman King. And if it had chosen a Jewish Shaman King, perhaps it had chosen a successor to David?
But there were no great shamanic families located in Bethlehem today. The line of David had drained into a stagnant estuary of hundreds of pretenders. And when they reached the town, it was crowded, noisy and fetid - not with pilgrims awaiting the birth of a king, but with former residents from every reach of the country that Herod had impulsively called back for a census. “Wasn’t David himself punished with a plague once for calling a census on his people?”
Melchior shrugged. “That story never made sense to me. The God of Light loves order, and a king should know the numbers of his people. Whatever else, I can’t blame Herod for that.”
“Does this look like order, though?” Gaspar gestured around them.
“We’ll watch the stars. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for signs.” Balthazar smiled. “Everything will work out.”
“It’s surprisingly cold here.” It was nearing midnight and midwinter had just passed. The longer they looked up at the comet, which here looked almost as big as the moon, sparkling like a snowball thrown across the sky, the more they felt the weight of its brief, exceptional presence pulling the rest of the wheel of stars with it, the rest of time slipping away, the year almost gone, their own deaths already walking with them insofar as they might separate them from the great event it heralded. It seemed frozen in place here, but in another night it would have undeniably moved again, a little further from the Earth. “And we might have to sleep in our tents.” They had already knocked at the doors of a few inns. Owners had been so impressed by the apparent richness of their caravans they had been willing to turn out their own customers, but the magi knew better than to be a bother to ordinary people, good or bad.
“Well, if we find a good spot in the hills, we can look down over the entire town. That should give us a good view of anything the Great Spirit wants to show us.”
“And maybe it doesn’t.”
“Maybe it doesn’t!” Gaspar laughed. “We’re here to follow destiny, after all, not our desires.”
“Just because we’re important shamans in our own countries,” Melchior concurred, “just because we have the privilege to know what this place is, why would we have more right to witness what happens here than any of these villagers? Yes, let’s go find a hill, and set up our tents and watch that star while it’s still here.”
Inaudibly, the star-dog howled at Balthazar’s side, as if to remind him that yes, no matter what happened, being here would be one of the unforgettable moments of all their lives, one of the memories they took with them to their own communes in the Great Spirit.
When there was nothing to their East but shepherds’ fields, rolling indistinguishably on through the night dotted by torches, they halted their camels and sat down on the dry grass, crunching beneath them with frost. Gaspar munched on some dates they had been given at a particularly insistent door, wondering how many more souls would not have the opportunity. They watched the lights rolling smooth and icy like marbles above, and jostling below - torches, candles, spirit flames. When the hairs began to rise on their arms they knew it wasn’t the cold.
“What is that?”
“So much mana… it’s as if the Holy of Holies itself were here!”
Balthazar pulled his astrolabe out from his sleeve and integrated his spirit. “I’m going to use directional homing to tell where it’s coming from.”
Melchior’s voice, however, had shrunk to a shivering husk, like a leaf clinging to a branch. “Look up, “ he pointed. “Look up at the sky.”
Around Ketu’s hazy white corona, winged silhouettes of light circled as if cut out of the sky - a warm, slightly yellow light more like the sun than the comet itself. The ends of their wings, too, trailed a faint shimmer, not gas or ice but spirit energy. There were seven of them.
“Are those… the archangels?”
Sirius sprang out of the astrolabe and howled again - and this time they could hear harmonies, overtones, in ranges of sound no more audible to the physical ear than ghosts were visible. Balthazar hummed along - an old Sabean melody that the ancient Queen had supposedly set to Solomon’s Song of Songs.
Then Sirius jumped away and led them in the direction of a low, rocky cliff in the distance.
As they remounted and followed, they could see others figures setting off in the same direction as them over the hills. Along a winding gravel path, they passed a group of shepherds, huddled and chattering, leading a leaping dog and a flock of sheep in a precarious queue. The shepherds did not break from their path for five, ten, fifteen minutes, and kept looking up at the sky.
“Are they shamans?” Balthazar whispered.
“Anyone with a shred of spiritual sensitivity must be feeling that,” Gaspar dismissed the question.
It was true - at this point, they could feel their way toward it by themselves, like a loud noise or heat from a fire. It was almost overwhelming- the song of the angels, the light of the star, the glow of mana permeating the air like dissipated sunlight in an eclipse - when they reached a tiny cave in the side of a hill. Oxen stood around the entrance, wandering in and out with hay in their mouths. A small lantern burned on a wooden bench next to a manger. A couple kneeled next to it, rubbing their hands and each other’s shoulders for warmth. A farmhouse stood a way down the slope, and another woman was running up from it, carrying jugs of water. The woman in the cave’s face was red and streaked with tears. Unlike everyone else on that night, she didn’t show the slightest interest in the sky. She stared fixedly down at the manger.
Eventually the three shamans - and behind them, the shepherds, and a small crowd finding their way down the path - got close enough to see what was in the manger: a child. Oxen occasionally lowered their heads and licked him, but he was already laughing and playing with Sirius.
The old man - much older than the woman who must have been his wife - tried to make faltering conversation but always fell back into stammering and looking back at her, in a world with two people in it. Except - at one point she looked straight up at Balthazar and said: “Is that your dog? I guess I should thank you, he completely stopped crying when it got here.”
Balthazar smiled, a sudden lance of warmth unlike the overpowering steam-bath of mana piercing him. “You can see it.”
“Oh, was I,” she blinked - embarrassed in a way that told him this had happened before - “not supposed to?”
The old man was frantically negotiating with the shepherds - they were trying to give him lambs, and he was trying to determine a reasonable amount to accept. Gaspar had already gone over to the camels to unpack some of the gifts they had brought for Herod and not had the chance to offer. They had been determined by a divination, and now in the back of his mind Balthazar was trying to remember what they had carried, if it had any symbolic meaning destined for this encounter and not the intended one -
“Listen to me. That child will be a shaman.” He used the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’. “I cannot say what kind. But in thirty-three years,” he told the frail woman with large eyes and sweat-streaked hair under a threadbare blue veil, “make sure he finds his way to the Shaman Fight in Jerusalem.”
“…the what?”
“Never mind, I’m sure the Great Spirit will either way.” Some huge soul, after all, must have left the Great Spirit. David himself? Or Solomon? Or… he tried to remember the others. The angels had come to see it off, all the way from the Big Heaven, and someday they would guide it back.
They decided to stay for a few days anyway, to piece together any clues about the child’s identity they could, to give the family more gifts and advice. The story was strange and didn’t fit together; Joseph, the old man, was from one of the Davidian bloodlines, but he wasn’t biologically the father or even a shaman. Mary, the mother, had come to him in secret in the first stages of pregnancy, desperate for a marriage to legitimize the birth. Joseph, a widower with no children of his own, had obliged. Mary said an angel had appeared to her at the child’s conception - and given a description of Gabriel that corresponded shockingly well with the memories of Melchior, who had invoked him once - but refused to even hint at anything about the father.
“There’s said to be a particularly brutal Roman overseer around here named Pantera,” Gaspar muttered, “who rapes women and young girls.”
“It’s not our business at this point. That child has a special blessing from somewhere. Maybe we can stay and teach him.”
“You stay, if you have that little to do in your homeland! Melchior has political duties, and I do too.”
But by the fourth day, Gaspar overheard a rumour in the marketplace that Herod himself was descending from Jerusalem at the head of a legion. That he looked and spoke as if he was possessed by rage or madness.
They went back to the inn where they had finally found a place, and the keeper had disappeared along with his children.
They rode out of town in the direction of Jerusalem, and met the slighted king on the road. His eyes were a deep oily black, not the brown-black they had seen in the palace, and rather than red and rheumy, his sclera glowed a faint but impossible purple.
The demon he had created, in only a few moments of confronting his own sins, had possessed him completely. Its thick, bloody, pestilential spirit energy clung to him almost like an armoured Over Soul - even though he had no mana to form one.
How many souls could they have missed when exorcizing it? They had been rushed out of the palace, but could all this demonic energy have been reconstituted from just a few ghosts?
“We know what you were looking for here. A King? A new King? A good King? As if there were such a thing? There will be no King born in Jerusalem but from the Herod line. All of us died for this, for the Herod line. Died and suffered, suffered and still suffer! Suffered even after death, my corpse preserved in honey for my husband’s jealous desires. Children burned in their mothers’ wombs in Nabatea. I betrayed my own mothers to spare my life, and died in turn, but death did not spare me. Mother and daughter twine around each other for ever like twin serpents, rising through the eyeholes of the body of the king. Like so the King you tried to hide from us will die, and will suffer. And no one here on Earth will ever cease to suffer as long as we suffer, and we will suffer as long as a soul on Earth suffers.”
Gaspar clutched his Herakles-statue medium in white knuckles. Melchior drew this time not one feather but seven along a golden chain, his true medium. This time a different coloured spirit flame lit on the tip of each feather, before transforming into mobile coloured blades in the air - “Armoured O. S. Peacock Rainbow - Seven Planetary Emanations!”
“I’m sorry we didn’t have time to exorcize you properly before. This time, we don’t have to worry about ruining your palace.”
“Go ahead! These soldiers are already under marching orders to kill every child born in Bethlehem since the census began. Only a handful of them can see us, or will be affected by anything you do. Even if you beat repentance out of this husk of a king, it’ll be too late.”
Melchior turned to Balthazar. His mouth didn’t move, but the sevenfold voice of the Peacock King spoke directly into his mind. Your Over Soul still isn’t any stronger than last time, and Sirius’ tracking power will help you find them if they’ve already heard and started to run. Go find Mary and Joseph and their child, make sure they get to safety, tell them to run as far as Egypt and not to come back until Herod is dead. Melchior was speaking, at the same time, different words out loud: “I’m sorry, this was my mistake, or my spirit's, but after all, he’s another piece of the King of this World. There are different voices in him, and sometimes I hear the wrong one.”
His guide and teacher didn’t mean Mr. B, the Shaman King. Nor did he mean the Great Spirit. He meant something whose existence Balthazar had only vaguely begun to be initiated in the mysteries to grasp. A star that fell to Earth before the Shaman Fight even began. A piece of it worshipped in a tell he had once visited on pilgrimage, another said to be hidden in the centre of the Earth. A question asking itself.
Had he been led here by it all along? Was telling the family to leave only part of the plan?
Balthazar didn’t have time to think. His spirit ally, the only soul he could trust if not even his friends, was already running to protect that laughing, animal smile, that truth that had not yet been bent by death or hate or the stars or anything of this world.