The Demon Code

Prologue

The participants had been prepared.

Their captors had bound their hands and their feet, lined them up in the prescribed order and forced them to kneel on the cold stone floor, in the small room at the back of the old building. The room was really too narrow for the ritual that was to take place there. There were others that would have been much more suitable, but this one had been chosen by the prophet for esoteric reasons that few of them understood.

It was a warm night, the sun hiding just below the horizon, but the flagstones were still cold. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for other reasons that were equally valid, the men and women trembled as they waited on their knees.

Ber Lusim sent one of his men to tell the prophet that they were ready to proceed.

The man returned almost immediately, walking respectfully behind the holy one. Shekolni had attired himself in red robes hemmed with black — red for blood, black for mourning. Red braids were woven into the black of his beard, and on the slender palms of his hands, which were like the hands of a violinist or a doctor, the Aramaic words for life and death had been painted in red ink with black cartouches — signifying that God had deputed to him both the power to preserve and the power to destroy.

The prophet held the holy book open in his hands, his head lowered as though he were reading from it. But his eyes were closed. The other men standing in the room knew better than to speak at such a time, but they swapped glances, unnerved and awed by this small sign of the prophet’s otherness.

Ber Lusim bowed to the holy man — a low, prolonged obeisance — and the others all followed suit. Shekolni opened his eyes then and smiled at his old friend, an unaffected smile of warmth and shared joy.

‘You’ve worked so long for this,’ he said, in the language of their homeland. ‘And now, here it is at last.’

‘We all have,’ Ber Lusim replied. ‘May the One Name speed you, Avra. May the Host give strength to your hand.’

‘Please! Tell us what you’re going to do to us!’

It was one of the captives, a man, who had spoken. He was clearly terrified and trying desperately hard not to let that show. Ber Lusim respected the man’s courage: he must already know a good part of the answer.

Although he ignored the question, Shekolni stared at the row of kneeling men and women long and thoughtfully. Ber Lusim stood by and waited, sparing speech: now that they were here, and every possible preparation made, he would take his cue from the prophet.

‘I think their mouths should be stopped,’ Shekolni said at last. ‘There will be a great deal of noise otherwise. Indecent and extraneous noise. I think it will detract from the solemnity of the occasion.’

Ber Lusim nodded curtly to the nearest of his people. ‘Do it.’

Two of his followers made their way down the line, fixing gags of wadded linen in the mouth of each of the sacrifices in turn. They were soon done. When the last of the twelve was effectively silenced, they saluted their chief with a clenched fist and the prophet with the sign of the noose. Then they withdrew to the doorway.

‘Where is the blade?’ Shekolni said. He knew where it was, of course: the question had the force of ritual.

So Ber Lusim answered it in a ritual fashion. He opened his jacket to show the multi-pocketed scabbard of woven hemp affixed to its lining and drew out one of his knives. In many places they would be called shanks, since they had no separate handle, only a slightly thickened stem that could safely be held, and a slender asymmetrical blade, rounded on one side close to the tip and sharp enough to part a hair.

‘Here is the blade.’ He reversed it in his hand and offered it to Shekolni.

The prophet took it and nodded his thanks. He turned to the kneeling men and women.

‘Out of your sin will come a great goodness,’ he told them, lapsing into their own language so that they would understand and be comforted. ‘Out of your pain, a blessing beyond telling. And out of your deaths, life everlasting.’

He had been right about the noise. Even with the gags, and with Shekolni working as quickly as he could, the next twenty minutes were harrowing and exhausting. None of the onlookers were strangers to death, but death of this kind, with the victim helpless and full of panic because he can see it coming, is not a pleasant thing to watch.

But they did watch. Because they knew what the killing was for, and what hung on it.

The prophet rose at last, his hand shaking with tiredness. His robes were no longer red. In the shadowed room, the blood that saturated them had dyed them a uniform black. Ber Lusim stepped forward to support Shekolni, taking some of that blood onto himself — literally, as it was already on him symbolically.

‘The wheels begin to turn,’ Shekolni said.

‘And the wings to beat,’ Ber Lusim replied.

‘Amen.’

Ber Lusim signalled for the fire to be lit.

When they drove away, the old house was blazing. Not like a torch, but like a beacon in olden times, set on a hill to warn the sleeping citizenry of some impending crisis.

But no one would read it like that, Ber Lusim knew. The warning would go unheeded, until it was too late.

At that auspicious moment, a thought occurred to him. In his younger days, when his zeal had sometimes got the better of his discretion, he had earned the nickname the Demon. He was so more than that now.

But when the lid was torn from hell, and all the demons rose at once, perhaps the irony would be remembered.