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Trilby should not be doing this.
The book sits on his desk, the red-leather cover almost unassuming in the grey light streaming in from the window. Maybe, if he were anyone else, it wouldn’t feel as though its very presence is somehow tainting the world around it – as though when he lifts it up, he’ll find the wood stained scarlet and bloody where it touched.
There’s nothing to be afraid of: it’s only paper, not cursed, haunted, or even supernatural. It was written by a mortal man, influenced by nothing but a god of pain and deriving prophecy from human sacrifice.
…When he puts it like that, it does sound a little cursed.
All three Books of Chzo sit in front of him, contained within the one scarlet-wrapped volume, title etched in worn silver on the cover and pages worn soft from frequent reading. Dogma, beliefs, prophecies and all. Everything a layman would need to understand the basics of the Order of Blessed Agonies, in only four-thousand words.
It’s strange to have the book at his desk. Forbidden, somehow, like he’s getting away with something. He’s not – for all that part of him had expected the department to have a note forbidding him to take it out, like he knows they have on other books for a few of his colleagues, he’d been allowed to take it out without so much as a single question past typical procedure – but it feels like it all the same.
Ministry policy is typically to prevent people harmed by certain groups from participating in the investigation outside of providing testimony, after all. Targeting a group you had a history with was a conflict of interest, the same as a doctor treating a family member, or a lawyer prosecuting for a friend’s case, and allowing vendettas to be acted on was how you got agents killed. Or worse, had them producing bad work, targeting anyone they even thought was connected, even killing on sight.
He struggles to imagine a more direct injury than being stabbed to death by one of their members, but it seems the Ministry considers it no issue.
One volume. Three books. Four thousand words. It’s hard to believe something so small was what maintained the theology of a centuries-spanning pain cult for all this time, and yet here it is, sitting in front of him like any other document on loan from archival.
(He’s stalling. Something about the scarlet cover turns his stomach, leaves his finger tapping idly against his knee rather than moving to open up the pages.)
The volume’s history is brief and not especially exciting: confiscated from a known member of the Order after he was found at the scene of a ritual sacrifice to Chzo, specifically retrieved from his luggage in the hotel room he had been staying in as opposed to from the scene itself, and then kept in archives as reference for the Order’s belief system. Eighteen loans since retrieval, with his own making nineteen. All for valid reasons, much like his own, not that it helps the prickling discomfort crawling up his spine at the idea of anyone else voluntarily reading its contents.
Said content was written by Jack Frehorn, a nobleman’s son born in the 18th century who founded the religious order of the Friends of Jack Frehorn, well-known by the Ministry to be nothing more than a front for the Order of Blessed Agonies, not that they can or could move against it openly without violating religious freedom laws.
None of the Friends of Jack Frehorn know about this book. At least, not the ones who still call themselves that in private. Only those of the inner circle are allowed to know of its origins, and accessing it requires the kind of sacrifice that binds them to secrecy, the kind of sacrifice that holds them there under threat of its revealing if they try to leave. Trilby himself knows what that sacrifice entails – the wound took months to heal, and the nerves around it will never regain sensation again.
Still, that doesn’t mean the book itself is capable of harm. Its history may be bloody, but the book itself is nothing more than paper, with information that he needs to know. The cult knew things, did things, saw things, and if he ever wants to know them too he needs to open the book up and learn their secrets.
(The feeling he gets when he looks at it is the same sickening, oily sensation he felt whenever he picked up one of Lenkmann’s notes after a vision at the hotel, only a thousand times worse, like a stain clinging to everything around it that it so much as brushes against. The idea of opening the book is nauseating, but the idea of never knowing its contents is somehow worse.)
It’s only paper. When he lifts it to crack open its pages, he does not glance back at his desk to check for anything left behind.
The first book is the Book of the Prince: a telling in full of how the Prince came to find his position. It says little he didn’t already know. Dramatises it, certainly, since he didn’t remember Cabadath saying half as much in the moment as he does in the book, but offers almost nothing in terms of additional information, and Little ends up in his notes besides a few scrawls about its focus on the “unworthiness” of the people of Technology, and its prophesied purification by Chzo, or so Frehorn had believed.
It isn’t especially surprising that a homosexual man in the Georgian era would write about a god in such a biblical way. Jack Frehorn may have been a man who eschewed the norms of his time, but even he couldn’t escape their influence, whether he realised it or not, and his new god’s influence on him starting with killing his lover would’ve left a scar. Especially when writing the god’s prophecies with his hands still wet with his victims’ blood, as he apparently did.
(For a moment, he wonders whether anyone in the Order has ever thought about their books that way, or if they all take it as gospel. The book's pages are soft, well-used: whoever owned it read it frequently, whether they merely interpreted it as written or studied it.)
There isn’t much point to wondering, though – he’s learned little, even if it he’ll need to make sure it’s known to the Ministry that the Hotel is a portal between realms on the twenty-eighth of July – and he moves on to the Book of Victims, which he has, of course, already read. Lenkmann saw to that.
Nothing has changed from the first time he read them, and the only reason he’s certain they aren’t just typed up from the notes enclosed in his report is that the book is confiscated Order property. The only difference is an Embarkation at the start, a short piece rambling about what had just been said in the Book of the Prince, nothing more. The Prince was allowed to move between realms on Chzo’s day to kill whoever had harmed his tree, even if it was only five incidents over the years.
John DeFoe. M’bouta. Wilbur. Owen Somerset. The woodcutter, whatever his name was. The same incidents, written as he first read them.
Whoever Lenkmann’s superiors are, they really were idiots if they thought this alone would be enough to convince him to join them. A show of power, wrapped in their own cult’s framing of divine justice, to convince him to throw his lot in with the side of the power that had dragged him into their mess.
Their god was real, and his servant had wreaked bloody vengeance throughout history. He knew of at least five of those.
The Book of the Bridge should prove more interesting, at least, considering he doesn’t already know the specifics of its contents. He knows the abstract: it’s the prophecy of John DeFoe and how his death, as a being of both the Realm of Technology and the Realm of Magic, would form a bridge between the two realms long enough for Chzo to cross over. He knows the prophecy, and his own supposed role in it as the one who would guide the boy to his ultimate destiny.
He refuses to have an opinion on that. Not yet, at least. Prophecies aren’t specific, unless the seer recognises people involved, and more often than not categorises people by their roles in the prophecy instead. It doesn’t matter if he’s fulfilled enough of the Guide’s role to fill it in Lenkmann’s eyes, because someone eventually would have. That’s how prophecies work. That’s how they’ve always worked, from the time of the oracle of Delphi, because if a prophecy can be read enough ways, it will always come true.
Hell, he told Lenkmann to his face that everything in those papers was nonsense, even when the man had proceeded to stab him for it, and he still thinks so now. What about that changes with the knowledge that he, through inevitability if nothing else, had fulfilled the role of the Guide? Prophecy itself may be real, but nothing said that he was the one they were talking about. Anyone could’ve been the one to burn John DeFoe’s remains. Anyone in the house could’ve read the books in the DeFoe library, and been driven mad enough by captivity, hunger and sheer desperation to give the actions detailed within a shot.
(But that’s the thing about prophecies, or so he’s heard. They’re always avoidable, until suddenly they aren’t, and you were always going to be standing knee-deep in their aftermath.)
None of that matters, ultimately. The book is cracked open to the Book of the Bridge, demanding to be read, whatever claims about fate lie inside.
Trilby makes it through one word before pausing.
Ten-score years – a century, unusually specific for a prophecy. It’s rare for a seer to be able to pinpoint even within a few decades of when an event will happen, let alone to the year itself. Hell, the Ministry has a field operative with both the Sight and the misfortune of it manifesting as nothing more than disjointed images, appearing to them at random. Seen from only their own eyes, of course, which is why they’re a field operative.
Still, he’s taking notes on the contents of the book, not the quality of its foresight. The specificity of its dates are meaningless to his work, meaningless to everything besides the cold, prickling discomfort making its way up his spine.
(He’s come a long way from his time as a thief, but he’ll never forget the sensation of being watched.)
A quick scan of the room reveals nothing and no-one – they’re in the middle of the Ministry and he has every right to be reading this, he has nothing to worry about – and so he returns to the book.
‘Many thieves had come to the house of the Bridgekeeper, which was the mind of the Bridgekeeper, and all had been thrown down, and all had known the name of the King.’ The manor had a history of unexplained deaths and disappearances, tearing through every descendant of the DeFoe line as it passed through their hands. They would be the thieves, then, and “thrown down” like all of the Prince’s victims, ready for the next in the DeFoe line to be executed next.
But the last to hold the DeFoe manor were a couple, a husband and wife killed in a supposed murder-suicide. Not a family, as the next line read, even if the family numbered…five.
The descriptions that followed shouldn’t have been a surprise. A spying thief, a pawn of masters looking for secrets to subvert Chzo’s will. A covetous thief, there for wealth and nothing more. A thief-wife, looking for stories to spread across the Realm of Technology. A thief-son, innocent of all crimes, but who would still not be spared. And a cunning thief, who would not tell of his name or purpose. It isn’t hard to connect the dots.
The Spying Thief – AJ. The Covetous Thief, someone who came to the house solely for wealth – himself, or Philip. The Thief-Wife – Simone was the only woman trapped with them, though referring to her as a whore is uncalled for at best. The Thief-Son would be Jim, and the Cunning Thief, someone who refused to speak of their name or goals… himself. Everyone else gave their names on request, and not even his coworkers at the Ministry have the fortune of knowing his real name. The Covetous Thief would be Philip, then. All of the connections are quickly scrawled down beside his notes on the Book of the Prince, and seeing them outlined on a page fails to make him feel any better about how…specific it all is.
Maybe it’s just how the Order writes things. He hopes that it’s just how the order writes things. He knows they like to dramatise their retellings, add motivations that weren’t there, certainty that wasn’t there, and this could all be nothing more than more of that.
‘And the Prince said, "This Cunning Thief, who sups with most unworthy company, is the one who will guide the Bridgekeeper to his destiny, and so I will have him be spared the wrath of this house."’
He’s started tapping at his knee again. A faster rhythm, this time, staccato and sharp.
The story goes as he knows it – AJ dies first, the Bridgekeeper (John) allowed to kill him to prevent him from subverting the plan. Philip saw the body, panicked, accused, and the rest of them had ignored him when he went off to plan on his own. Not least because he’d thought Trilby himself had been responsible, without proof. Then he’d heard the glass container of the idol break, and then…
‘And the Prince said "I will not allow the Cunning Thief to disregard the message of the King. His importance is far too great to allow to slip away, or be corrupted in the foulness of his fellows, so I will make an example for him."’
An example. He only saw Philip on the way through the dining room, back and forth on the way to banish the wraith for good, and had known better than to linger on the sight. It’s hard to miss a body with its guts pulled out like tangled yarn, piling on the carpet, the metallic, raw smell of it – him staining the air until it almost hurt to breathe in there.
Neither he nor Simone had lingered in there for long, didn’t want to, didn’t dare to. It was easier to skirt the body and ignore everything it meant for later. Jim had needed help, then the exorcism needed to be done, then the house was burning down without time to linger on bodies, and so Philip had stayed in the dining room, turning to ash with the rest of the house.
Simone had been believed for long enough for Philip’s family to be informed. It had been in the newspapers, the scant family of Philip an easier story than the complete absence of one that AJ had, their pale faces denying interviews and demanding answers. They had ended up in the bin a little quicker than the other papers, and they never got answers beyond the simple explanation of locked doors, growing paranoia and a house fire.
No one ever gets answers, if it can be helped.
‘The Cunning Thief wept aloud, "Why have I been made a part of this great evil? To have murdered with my hands, and to be made glad of mindless destruction through my own eyes? I curse this house!"’
He hadn’t cried over Philip – at least, not until the house was months behind him, and the tears had been more out of frustration than anything else. The situation at the time was too pressing to waste time crying, if it had even fully sunk in that Philip was dead at his own hands.
(The sleepwalking hadn’t stopped until the Ministry had recruited him, and sometimes, on the worse nights, he still wonders if he’ll wake up with a knife in hand.)
Focus. Focus. The house is burned to the ground, years behind him. What happened there wasn’t his fault, just like Philip’s possession wasn’t his fault, and neither of them are responsible for what they did when they weren’t themselves. DeFoe’s wraith is no more, and the idol can’t possess anyone else.
The rest of the chapter goes over the rest of what had happened at the house. The exorcism, the defences against the wraith, the fire. John DeFoe’s body was destroyed, and his mind destroyed by half.
‘And the King said, "I see the Bridge, but it is only one-third; it must be complete before I may attend the Land of Technology."’
Only one third. The bridge was only built by a third. That’s what he tells himself, hand stilled to nothing more than a clenched fist.
He couldn’t have known.
He’s smarter than this. He couldn’t have known that his plan – his mad, mad plan, fresh out of a possession, on five days without food, and at the point of all skepticism being discarded – would have contributed to this. It was just an exorcism. The ghost had trapped them all in the house, killed them, made them kill each other. It had made perfect sense to perform the exorcism, and to destroy the bones to destroy the spirit.
It made sense. It was the reasonable course of action, and he couldn’t have known.
More time passes than he’s willing to admit before he turns to the last chapter, both of the Book of the Bridge and the volume as a whole. A fresh ring-shaped stain is working its way into the wood of his desk, the mug that had made it pushed to one side, its contents long since drunk. It’ll need returning to the breakroom at some point, preferably sooner rather than later, not least because he doesn’t know who it belongs to, but…later.
If possible, the book seems even more foreboding than before. When he cracks it open a final time, it feels like his fingers should come away stained black with its contents, or red from the blood some animal part of him keeps thinking it can smell on the air. But the book itself is inert. Harmless. Nothing more than ink and paper, no matter what’s written there.
‘Twice did the twenty-eight day of the seventh month pass, and the Prince gazed with great concern upon the land of Technology as the carving of the Slave passed through the great many ignorant Men of Technology, but the King would not let him take his vengeance.’
He scrawls down a note about the investigation into the trail of the idol’s ownership having no casualties likely being accurate, and moves on before he can think any further.
‘For He said, "the Guide-’ Breathe. Focus. There is no one else in the room. ‘-seeks the carving of the slave, and it is through this desire he shall fulfill his destiny. It will not be long before the Guide learns that his duty has not yet been completed, and then he shall do as I have foreseen."’
‘And as the King said it, so was it so. For the Bridgekeeper did touch one of the Ignorant men, and by their conjoined hands was the Thief-wife-’ Simone, this was how Simone died, ‘-thrown down, and truly did she know the name of the King.’
Simone had been found dead in her flat, killed by a machete to the torso. The autopsy report had said she had been too drunk to fight back, and had bled out in minutes, if she had even been conscious enough to know she was dying. Trilby remembered the bloodied handprints on the floor, the way the body had been on its side with its nails dug into the carpet, wound against the floor, frozen in its dying attempts to drag itself away from the scene of its own murder.
The only thing he writes down is to cross out the note about no casualties on the chain of ownership.
‘And with this act, the Guide said "I see you now, Bridgekeeper; I have found you, and I have not forgotten." and he came to the tree that was the Prince's soul, for it was here that the carving of the slave have been brought.’
Following the reports of the idol to the hotel, and winding his way down to the cellar, where Lenkmann had led him to. Through the Victims’ deaths, through all the years until he saw Cabadath’s own fate at the hands of Chzo, an overconfidence punished by a fate worse than death.
‘At the time another came to the tree that was the Prince' soul, and by this other was of the faith, but blinded by pride, and so he was the Prideful Acolyte. And the Prideful Acolyte threw down the Guide and subjecting the Guide to the Blessed Agony of the Body, he called forth the Prince and the Prince crossed over to the Land of Technology.’
The sacrifice. The offering of the Three Blessed Agonies: himself, stabbed and dying; Lenkmann, a madman; and Siobahn, watching her only link to the supernatural world bleed to death in front of her. If he focussed, he could still hear Lenkmann reciting the ritual as Trilby himself had laid there, letting himself fade with every beat of his heart.
I feed you with pain. His own breath, rasping in the darkening cavern. I call you with madness. Siobahn, sobbing through her gag, already knowing that nothing could convince Lenkmann to stop. I summon you with the greatest loss.
(At the end, it was only that he was less afraid of dying than he was tired of living.)
There had been a few long, lonely moments between his heart ceasing to beat and losing consciousness. His eyes had slipped almost completely closed, but he had still been able to see Lenkmann continuing his chant, continuing to make his way around the ancient stump of the tree. For one last moment he had felt the air go still, cold, and then-
‘And the Prince was much displeased, for the Prideful Acolyte would in his arrogance interfere with the Destiny of the Guide, and so he threw down the Prideful Acolyte, and the Prideful Acolyte become the puppet and knew the name of the king.’
Then the Prince had come out of the portal, and they all could do nothing but sit there as he tore Lenkmann apart.
The understanding hits like another knife to the gut. The Prince hadn’t killed Lenkmann out of an absence of the Agony of the Body. It had been because of his interference – interference with Trilby’s role in the prophecy. In his part to play in the creation of the bridge.
No, no, focus, that all meant nothing. Frehorn was grasping at straws, trying to interpret motivations, reactions, anything at all from his trances, and dramatising what he retrieved into a workable religious text. The Prince could’ve killed Lenkmann for any reason at all, from interfering with the prophecy to simply being the first face he saw when he walked out of the portal.
It means nothing. It means nothing.
‘And with great fear did the Guide take up the Soul of the Bridgekeeper, immune to its influence for the Bridgekeeper was also greatly fearful-’ DeFoe was-? No, focus, ‘-and he hid the soul of the Bridgekeeper away, to a place where it would meet its final destiny.’
A place where it would meet its final destiny.
He had the damn thing launched into space. How would it meet its destiny in Carina III?
Somehow, it would. The destiny could be simply floating in space for the rest of time, but it wouldn’t – Frehorn would’ve dropped the entire book if the bridge was doomed from the start. The idol would be destroyed, somehow, and the rest of the manor would be destroyed. The bridge would be built, third by third.
…They’re doomed. Tomorrow, in a month’s time, in a few centuries: they’re doomed.
(The entire Realm of Technology is doomed, and he was the one who struck the first match.)
Why wasn’t he consulted about this? About any of this? His influence in the case ended with his plan to secure the idol being put into place, and he admits – however reluctantly – that it was the correct course of action to remove him, but this… this is about him, if only partially. The Ministry may have no rules around agents having the right to know information that concerns them, but there was – insight, or something, anything, that he could have provided. Before eighteen other people read it.
The idol – god, the idol. Had they known his plan would fail before it was put into place? No, he knows the book wasn’t recovered until months after the satellite went up, and they would have taken him off the case altogether if they’d known anyway. They must have decided after the prophecy came to light, then. Simply read what had already come to pass, shrugged their shoulders and washed their hands of it. All information is need to know, after all, and he didn’t need to know. That’s how the Ministry works. It didn’t matter whether he knew he’d been… destined to fail, only that it was out of everyone’s hands, now.
It was inevitable to begin with.
That’s the way of prophecies, even to people who don’t know they’re more than stories. Avoidable, until suddenly they aren’t, and all you can do is deal with the consequences.
He shouldn’t have read this. It’s – it’s better that he knows, but he shouldn’t have learned it at all. Knowing he was considered part of the cult’s prophecies was unpleasant (whether he’d realised they were true or not), but knowing just how much they had known was... worse, somehow. Knowing they knew what he would do. Knowing they knew he was doomed to failure.
Breathe. In, hold, out. He couldn’t have known. He didn’t know, and couldn’t have known – nobody knew besides the Order. The actions he took were the best he could with the information he had, or out of his control altogether. He couldn’t have known.
(The mantra is familiar. Only a few words changed from what he told himself after the Manor, day after day, because letting himself think anything else was unbearable.)
Is it better to believe it was inevitable, or that it could have been different if he had known to act differently? For his fate to have been in his own hands, for better or worse, or for any efforts he made to be doomed from the start?
When this all began, he didn’t believe in fate – he had climbed in through the window of DeFoe Manor believing whatever happened was in the hands of luck and his own skill, and nothing more.
This morning, he had only believed in fate as something that only tangled other people, people more important than him.
This morning, one exorcism didn’t send the world halfway to the apocalypse.
A part of him wishes he could go back to this morning.
Wait. He needs to – focus. There’s still one more line left, before he can return this to archival and pretend it never happened, tell his employer that the case that brought him here has too much to do with the Order, and he should stay uninvolved.
‘And the Prince and the Puppet took their message to the Order of Blessed Agonies.’
He slams the book shut with an audible thud.