The Necromancer's Grimoire Read online

  “Ah,” Nadira breathed. “I am strong. I can do this.”

  “Yes. I see there was an afternoon when you were a small child. The sun is warm and the sandalwood gives off a heady scent in the women’s quarters. There is a loud noise…shouting…the slamming of doors and heavy footsteps…” The priestess prompted her. “I can see it. You can see it too. See it. Be there, Nadira.”

  Nadira lay back again on the couch. She realized she struggled against the priestess who forced the images into her mind. She took a long slow breath. This is evil. This is proof that evil exists.

  She opened the eyes within her mind and felt the priestess there with her in the great room of the harem. They were on the second floor sleeping room for their afternoon rest. The men in the courtyard below were not her father’s men. Some of the older women had screamed, the younger ones gathered the children around them and trembled. Nadira the child turned to her mother with questioning eyes.

  “Nadira, quickly. Behind the screen. Here.” She was thrust behind the carved wooden screen near her sleeping pallet. “Under the veils! Quickly! And make no sound. Silence.” Nadira was too frightened to argue, for the loud sounds of many men were coming from outside the door. The shrieks of the women filled her ears. She had no eyes but for her mother, standing straight on the other side of the screen, one hand beckoning for her to lie still.

  The doors to the great room were barred; the dark eunuchs had their curved blades in hand and stood ready on either side. Nadira could peek through the veils that covered her little body and see other mothers hiding their children. She saw the grandmothers on their bellies in prayer. The youngest women pulled their veils closely around their faces and backed against the tiled walls.

  The pounding on the great doors began. The pounding grew louder and more rhythmic. Bits of plaster began to fall from the edges of the doorframe. The screams from the women swelled louder. With a crack, the beam that held the doors closed burst inward, knocking two of the eunuchs to the ground. The other two stepped into the entry and began to swing their swords. Nadira covered her eyes, but only for a moment. She could not hide. She had to know. There was no comfort for her in not knowing.

  Many men entered with swords. More men than can be counted on her hands. They raised their swords and the eunuchs were dead in a splash of red. Nadira looked up through the veils at her mother, still pressed against the screen. Her mother’s silks waved about her ankles. Nadira reached one small hand out to them. Under the screen she could touch the blue and the gold of her mother’s gown. Her blue silk slippers were a handbreadth away. Nadira knew that if she could touch the slipper the men would go away. She wanted them to be magic slippers, like in the stories her mother told her at night. One finger made it under the screen, brushing the hem of her mother’s veils. The slippers disappeared with a sickening thud, as her mother’s body hit the ground beside her. Nadira drew her hand back as if as snake had bit it.

  Her mother lay on her back, the silk veils now in lifeless wads. She peered under the screen and saw that her mother was looking at her under the carved arch that supported the base of the frame. Her eyes were fierce and warned her not to move, not to make a sound. Nadira blinked at her before another movement took her eyes away.

  Above her mother’s prone body a man’s face appeared, making her cringe lower into her nest of veils. He had an ugly mustache and filthy hair. Some of his teeth were missing and he smelled like the cesspit. He held her mother down with one thick arm while the other fumbled with his belt.

  A moment later Nadira watched as his breeches fell low. The man forced her mother’s legs apart and then he fell hard upon her. Nadira heard her mother groan.

  “Ah!” Nadira the woman leaped up and flew from the couch, running for the crevasse in the chamber that leads to the bright sun and the sparkling sea. No more underground darkness. A wood door blocked her way. The priestess got to her feet slowly and made her way to the door as well.

  “This door will not take you away from that memory, Nadira.”

  “How does this train me?” Nadira turned away from the door and wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. This memory had been smothered for years. She could almost make it feel like it happened to another child and another child’s mother…but the pain in her heart told her it was not so.

  “This lesson is not over. You have learned nothing yet. Every person has a painful memory. Reliving yours is no lesson. The lesson comes next.”

  The priestess took her hand and tugged it gently. “Come back to the couch. You will lie down a frightened child, but rise up a powerful sorceress and master of the necromancer’s Grimoire. But you must take this next step. He was unable to master the book and keep it. Now you have to. Lie down.”

  Nadira set her teeth and followed reluctantly. Only a coward is frightened of a memory, she told herself. There is no danger, only pain, and did not Robert tell me that pain reminds you that you are not dead? Nadira prepared herself to take up her vision where she had left off, but the priestess stopped her.

  “Do not follow that memory. I see it now, myself. Many men. All the women, even little girls not ten years old, even grandmothers. I see the soldiers throwing them to the floor. I hear their cries and screams. I hear their prayers to a god who does not save them. I see a little girl with a long black braid. Very small, rolled in veils against a wooden screen. A little girl who lies still as death just as her mother told her to lie, making no sound as the women around her are brutalized. This is indeed a horror to live through, my precious one. Tell me now. Is this evil?”

  Nadira’s throat was too tight to answer. This is exactly what evil is. This is evil alive and rolling through the harem like a wheel of a cart, crushing everything in its path. Any woman who survived this event was scarred by this evil for the rest of her life. “Yes,” she whispered. “This is evil”.

  “What does evil look like?”

  In answer, the image of the ugly man who brutalized her mother stood square before her eyes.

  “How does evil feel?”

  “What?” Nadira blinked hard.

  The priestess touched her in the center of her forehead. Under that fragile finger, Nadira heard a crack. She felt as if her head opened in a line from her nose to her hair and blossomed open as a lotus. The priestess’ voice was faint, but she heard it clearly.

  “Feel the evil. Now.”

  There was a snap and Nadira found herself high above the ground. She was looking through the eyes of another person. She was sharing the body of…of a man. She looked down through the other’s eyes and saw strong legs. She felt a heart beating that was not her own, and she lifted strong arms, one arm held a sword. Between her legs she felt a man’s loins, once limp but now becoming firm with the thought of what lay behind this large wooden door. Nadira realized she was inside one of the soldiers in the courtyard, beating down the door to the women’s chamber.

  All the men were beating the door in rhythm, first one group then the other. No door could stand up to such resolve. Between her legs a desire grew until it stiffened and pulled against her belt. This feeling overwhelmed her so that there was little thought of anything else. Puzzled, Nadira struggled to separate herself from the man. How could she read his thoughts with all that lust clouding his mind?

  As the door gave way to the screaming harem, she saw that there were other thoughts in the man’s mind. She recognized his desperation at being an unwilling soldier. She felt the painful lack of food and comfort that he suffered daily. She felt his humiliation by the officers and noblemen and his shame at not being able to support his mother and younger brothers without selling himself as a soldier. She felt his battle fatigue and then his exhilaration as the looting and raping began. She read his thoughts. If I cannot have what I need, I will take what is the noble lord’s. His eyes flew over the room to rest upon Nadira’s mother.

  He walked to the loveliest woman in the room and pushed her to the ground. Her perfumed silks floated in the
light breeze her body made as it fell to the floor. There was nothing beautiful in this man’s life. Nothing smelled sweet, tasted fresh or felt soft and warm. Nothing. His life was sharp with pain and misery. With a cry of pleasure he undid his belt and freed his loins. Nadira heard her own screams echo in the temple around her.

  She struggled to fly from his body as his excitement poured into her, his joy, his triumph, his absolute focus on the treasure and beauty of this fine woman beneath his moving hips. He felt like a king. When he climaxed, Nadira was thrust from his body.

  She was free of him, but instead of ending up in her own body, she slid sideways into the dark eyes of her mother and was immediately enveloped in Jasmine’s horror.

  An overwhelming feeling of hatred and anger squeezed her heart and pounded her ears. A murderous passion blinded her in a sea of red as she felt twisted into a spiral of vicious malevolence. She forced herself up to the ceiling and rolled in the air above the mayhem below her.

  She saw her mother’s hand fumble in folds of the soldier’s discarded trousers for his curved dagger. It was over quickly. The dagger flashed in her mother’s hand one moment and the next it was buried deep in the soldier’s left kidney. He arched his back once in a repulsive echo of his thrusts and then lay still.

  Nadira looked to the small child behind the screen. The child had never seen this moment. At this point the child’s eyes were screwed shut, her hands over her ears to cover the wailing and screaming. Nadira watched her mother roll the dead man from her body and in the next movement scoop up her veiled child and run for a window. Nadira had not remembered how she and her mother escaped the carnage of the harem. Now she watched as her mother used the veils to lower the child to the flat roof of the covered walkway below and then leap gracefully after her.

  The priestess called her name.

  She opened her eyes in the temple. The great gap in her forehead remained wide open. She felt ideas moving in and out of the crevasse between her eyes. The priestess’ voice was oily soft in her ears.

  “For a brief moment you were your mother’s attacker.”

  “Yes.”

  “You felt his body and heard his mind. Was he evil?”

  Nadira breathed in wonder, “No. He was human.”

  “And your mother. Was she innocent?”

  “She, too, was human. The man did not feel rage or anger as Jasmine had. He had no desire to harm the woman he raped. He thought only of himself and his pleasure. But she…she desired to kill him. She felt…” Nadira could not put into words the murderous intent that had coursed through her mother at that point when she had thrust the dagger into the man’s back. She saw in her mother’s mind that the dagger was sheathed in her enemy’s back exactly as the soldier had sheathed his stiff member in her body. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a thrust for a thrust. Vengeance.

  Nadira turned to look into the priestess’ eyes. “Humanity is selfish. Ignorant. Full of false ideas and animal desires.”

  “Could you love the man who violated your mother? Can you fill yourself with that much compassion? Can you love the mother that murdered a man in vicious rage?”

  “This concept of vengeance…this is what you are talking about, isn’t it?” she asked. She thought about Montrose and Massey.

  The priestess nodded. “I could not release my anger. I made it a part of me, and so it acts as an anchor to this world. I cannot travel where you will go, Nadira. I could not release the evil I experienced, though I learned to understand it. Can you love the man who made your mother so bitter? You have to embrace evil with love to destroy it.”

  Nadira did not answer; she was still swimming in the torrent of images and sounds that coursed through the crack in her forehead. The priestess nodded again. “Are you seeing all the world’s pain?” she whispered.

  “I am.” Nadira was relieved when she felt the edges of her mind come together and seal itself shut. The images stopped. She had no more need of them. She sat up and put her hand to her throat. “Such ideas are harmful to all,” she said.

  “Yes. You see now how thoughts become reality.”

  That moment in the harem had lasted only minutes, but had tainted Jasmine’s life forever after. There was no joy left in her world. The finest gift or most beautiful music could not ease Jasmine’s ever-present melancholy. The night-time tales and poems she told her little child were no longer about the adventures of brave men and the triumphs of clever women, but focused on tales of revenge and the punishment of evil.

  She caught a glimpse of the priestess’ struggle with the idea of evil. Fifty years ago Evren Farshad had been planted inside her…violently…she saw a flash of that horror before the priestess closed her mind.

  Nadira took the priestess’s hand. “Thank you.”

  The priestess nodded. “When you go through the portal you will enter a world that changes with every thought. If you think fearful thoughts you will be surrounded by fearful images. If you think loving thoughts, only the softest of summer breezes will touch you. This is why you must lose the idea of evil, if you do not believe in it, it cannot harm you. You will be able to travel there without harm.”

  “And the necromancer does not believe in evil?” Nadira puzzled over this.

  “What we consider evil, he considers advantageous. You tasted this selfishness in your vision. Do you understand? What we consider evil, he sees as good, like the man who took your mother.”

  “Ah, yes.” Nadira looked up into the priestess’s eyes. “Only the good believe in evil.”

  “Exactly. That is how men can use that power to enslave the world. What can be done to stop it?”

  “I will learn that lesson later,” Nadira answered. “I am eager to practice this one first. Will I be able to open the door safely, or will I have but one chance?”

  The priestess closed her eyes and thought. “There are no rules, Nadira. Your experiences are what you make of them. Most magi have an adept to hold the portal open for their return so they can focus all their energies on their mission.”

  “A foot in the door, so to speak.”

  “Holding the portal open and guarded has cost many a man his life or his sanity.” The priestess’ eyes were sad with an unspoken memory.

  Nadira took her hand. “Is there an adept here who can help me?”

  The priestess’ face fell. “No.”

  “No? Surely there are many here who have moved through enough levels to…”

  “No.”

  Nadira raised her eyebrows. “And you, my Lady?”

  “No. There are no necromancers here in this place.” The priestess led her to the wood door and pushed it open. The bright light entered the cave and cast their shadows on the rough stone. The priestess said, “The demon connects his…life force to the adept with an astral cord as he draws upon the energy of the living to connect the two worlds. The adept must be young enough to retain the earth energies required, yet strong enough to resist what will pump through that cord from the netherworld. None here can do that, nor will I permit those ideas to come here while we live.” She turned away from the sunlight and disappeared back inside the cave, leaving Nadira more than alone. This is why the necromancer is able to amass his power with no resistance.

  William. He would have to hold the door open for her. She retrieved her satchel and made for the path down the bluffs to the sea.

  She stood in the garden of the rented villa and waited for him. He emerged from the house with a welcoming smile that quickly faded.

  “Nadira. I thought you would be there for some days, but you came right back.” He looked at her. “Something is wrong.”

  “No, to the contrary. It appears I am a quick learner.”

  He took her hand and sat with her among the cypress and bougainvillea. “I knew that already.”

  She handed him the Grimoire. “You must help me find the necromancer. He will be outside the reach of tendrils or the realms of elixirs. He will be so far into the inner worlds
that we must create a rift in reality that I can pass through. He is not the only one I must find. Corbett wants me to contact someone there as well.”

  He nodded, his eyes large. “This place is accessible to the dead, but not to the living? Is that what you are saying?”

  “Yes. That is the purpose of this book. It allows those who are still encased in the physical to touch those worlds without dying first. When you die your cord is cut to this world. I want to go there and come back. Once it has been done, I will become a necromancer myself.”

  He thought about this for a long while. She rubbed her ankle where a rock had scraped it. She brushed her skirt where she had fallen to her knees while climbing. She gave him the time.

  She felt his arm around her waist. He leaned into her. He was warm and smelled of cinnamon and cloves. He had taken a liking to the spiced brews he had discovered in Istanbul. He touched his head to hers. He said, “I cannot let you go there alone.”

  She hugged him back. “It will be difficult.”

  “Not too difficult,” he sighed. “I can read a book, after all. It is what I do…”

  She smiled.

  He returned the smile and they sat there, arms around each other’s waists, heads together, thinking. After a while he asked, “Can we practice first? Can we go somewhere without confronting the necromancer?”

  “Sir Corbett has been asking me for days if I am ready to travel for him.” She touched the Grimoire in his lap. “Open it then, see what it says.”

  His hands stroked the soft leather, then let the pages fall open where they would. The book opened to a page with a smaller sigil and a drawing of something dark with many teeth.

  “The demon you will be summoning has a name…” she pointed to the word, but did not pronounce it, “And a symbol.” She looked at him, but he was still studying the page.

  He nodded again but did not look up from the book. He asked, “What do I do with him?”

  Nadira looked inside herself. The Grimoire answered her with a vision. She told William. “He will appear. We do not want him to escape into the physical. This is important. Our work should not harm others.” She waited for the nod that signaled he was following her. “He will extend a tendril to you. You and he together create a link from the physical realm to the deep astral. I will use that link to travel there and back again.”