“ ‘Do what thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the law. Ordinary morality is for ordinary people, not the Emperor or those who believe in him.”
—From The Teachings of Lord Master Crowley, broadcast weekly via mecha-bear in the cities ruled by Crowley’s Franco-Germanic Empire
Napoleon’s head was complaining again, from the dais Aleister Crowley had created especially for the former Emperor turned gadfly and general expert on everything. The dais lay atop a tall Doric column powered by hydraulics; at the moment, Napoleon’s head resided somewhere near the cathedral’s ceiling, next to a paint-peeled cherub with stupid, unrealistic wings. But the entire assemblage recessed into the floor when Napoleon deigned to come down for a look at how mere mortals were getting on.
Napoleon was a holdover from the French Republic crushed by Crowley just three years before—one of several undead heads kept in jars by the government, a national brain trust. Yet breaking glass in case of emergency had come too late, because Crowley had destroyed the French armies long before Napoleon had had a chance to enter the fray.
Granted, Crowley had had a secret weapon: the ability to strike at the heart of French magic, which gave animals the power of human speech. He had found a way to undo the spells that allowed the French to enlist animals in their cause as familiars. Familiar-less, most of the French magicians had folded like dying flowers, petals falling off, their powers reduced to party tricks, while those animals that escaped Crowley’s power had fled to the dark forests beyond Paris. There to commiserate with far wilder spirits, no doubt, until Crowley found the time to chop all the trees down.
Some days Crowley very much regretted keeping Napoleon alive, for he was very chatty. But on the other hand, Napoleon offered enough useful strategic advice that Crowley could stand the nattering on and the insults and the ongoing pomposity. Nor could Napoleon pass gas like too many of Crowley’s minions, a side effect from absorbing too much magic, and that was a kind of dark blessing.
“Why am I wasting my time giving advice to the uninspired?” Napoleon was muttering in a fake whisper, making sure everyone down below could hear, although it was only Crowley and his familiar for now.
“What use is having a huge brain and a limitless capacity for battle strategy?” Napoleon said, a bit louder, almost a bellow. “What use, indeed.” Concluding in a triumphant tone as if he’d just given a rousing speech instead of a bitter sentence.
Above all else, Crowley now very much regretted learning French. But since he could also reduce Napoleon’s head to a cinder anytime he liked, even as he congratulated himself on his patience, it was, he recognized, a false virtue. Everything in his immediate vicinity could be reduced to a cinder, and thus his patience was just a smugness about his power to delay horrible fates for all. Being self-aware was very important and explained how he was so excellent at everything and kept remaining true to himself and his talents.
“Everything” in this case meant the command-and-control center in the middle of Notre Dame in Paris, the cathedral hollowed out, pews removed, and his minions the demi-mages ensconced, while a catacomb of further offices and war rooms lay below the floor, and outside a maze of fortifications defended against any surprises from insurgents, whether from the Islamic Republic or the damned English Crowley had had to foreswear—like alcohol or opium, his own people had turned out to be very bad for him. That they should wish to betray him, their native son, hurt him to the quick, but also energized him in his war. They had made it personal; they would pay the price as much as the damn Republicans and their “science.”
Not to mention the Czechs and the Russians and the—well, in the end, everyone would pay. But the Czechs sooner than later.
Dominating the central space of the cathedral, oddly temporary-looking surrounded by centuries-old marble and stonework, lay the All-Seeing Eye. A kind of deep bowl made of compressed bloodwood, bound with dark magic so that it lived as if still a tree, and from the sides gnarled branches with tiny green leaves had already begun, in a witching way, to infiltrate and crack the marble, to anchor the bowl such that no one, not even Crowley, could easily remove it. The wooden bowl reminded Crowley of midnight ceremonies of his youth, and this invigorated him even on the worst days.
Crowley stood with Wretch, his familiar, on the platform built beside the All-Seeing Eye, and was bent over the edge, staring into the depths of the dank pool of water that filled it. In the reflectionless water, he could spy on his armies of men and elephants and other beasts in their battles against the forces of the Republic, could reach out to plant a thought in the minds of his generals, some more corporeal and some less corporeal than the living.
Across Western Europe, Crowley’s forces rained down hellfire confusion and it was only the damnable Republicans shoring up his enemies that truly held him in check, slowed his victories and ultimate ambitions. Yet he recognized this as temporary, told himself patience was a virtue, even though he lacked both.
“Better than a public school in Kent!” he roared at the mirror in his imperial bedroom some mornings, slapping his face to restore feeling to it. “Better than beatings. Better than childish pentagrams.”
Better than being on the Earth he’d known before, where he could only pretend his magic worked, even if more and more Crowley woke feeling numb, had to cast any number of spells to restore his good-natured rage.
He always felt better in the cathedral. One day they’d find him sleeping in a hammock slung between the All-Seeing Eye and a supporting column.
“Bavaria is a bitch,” Wretch croaked from beside him. “Bavaria definitely needs to burn.”
It was true—in addition to the betrayals by the English, Bavaria had risen in revolt and he had had to turn some of his attention from the enemy on his eastern flank to attend to the Bavarians. It was unclear if agents of the Republic had instigated the uprising, but no matter what the source, it would be put down.
Reports from his spies in Bavaria of sightings of a mythical being, half hedgehog, half man, riding a giant rooster, stoked his rage. It bespoke drunkenness and dereliction of duty on the part of his magical lieutenants, especially as the All-Seeing Eye could not corroborate their stories.
“I’ll burn some of it,” Crowley said. “I’ll leave some of it unburned so the burning is seared into their memories.”
“Excellent,” Wretch said.
Crowley had found Wretch while exploring the worlds of the three doors. In fact, Crowley had found Wretch in a place existing behind one of the so-called “third doors.” Wretch hadn’t named himself—that was Crowley’s job, since naming formed a kind of binding—but someone else had definitely created him.
Wretch was organic and yet made of some ultrastrong black metal, like obsidian in texture but pliable. Wretch could not be burned. Nor could Wretch be broken by tossing him off a cliff. Nor could Wretch be pulled apart by wild horses. Nor could Wretch be spoiled by dousing him in various vats of flesh-liquefying acids.
Crowley had tried all these things before taking Wretch on as a familiar, and Wretch for his part had been extraordinarily patient with the testing process, and had not held it against Crowley.
Wretch resembled a melding of a rat, a cat, and a bat, and yet also looked like none of those things. Staring at Wretch directly was not recommended, as human beings tended to go mad if they did so.
“What should I do about Prague?” Crowley asked Wretch.
“Burn it, too?”
“No, Wretch. I can’t just burn everything. That’s not the point of this.”
What was the point?
To be the Lord of Everything, to bind all the other worlds to him. That someday, perhaps even soon, there would be no one who would dare to ignore or doubt or defy him. Then he could get down to the serious work and all the experiments on a grand scale that had eluded his ability.
“Of course you can’t,” Wretch said soothingly. “Just parts of it. You can burn parts of it. The bad parts. The parts doing the bad things.”
“Wretch. Please concentrate your thoughts. Prague. What should I do?”
“We will conquer it, but I wouldn’t send elephants again, if you will forgive my presumption. No matter how well they worked against the Italians and the pope.”
“Oh, I’ll send elephants again, Wretch,” Crowley said. “They just won’t be the same elephants.”
The fact was, the magicians of Czechoslovakia were entirely too joyous and unpredictable a group. And he supposed, in the end, it was his fault for splitting up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Because he’d freed Prague in a sense; all the structures and institutions and armies that bound them had fallen away.
The first wave of magically coerced, half-mechanical elephants Crowley had sent to crush their foul little country had been turned into vast, immobile trellises—topiaries that sprouted a startling profusion of wildflowers and drew thousands of bees to them and, over time, vines so dense that now the elephants looked more like overgrown hills. Re-wilding the outskirts of Prague beyond their famous wall, as if Crowley had never even tried to attack the city. While the bees continually and forever hummed a classic Czech lullaby.
His childhood love of gardens meant he recognized that the topiaries were charming. But a lingering nostalgia wouldn’t save the Czechs now, not at all. The Republic and the English had acted up right after his failed attack, and he hadn’t turned his attention back to the Czechs or the obstinate Poles. But soon he would have the time to devote to them—and playfulness and imagination could not trump raw aggression, not when aggression was backed up by overwhelming force.
“Put it on the agenda with my generals,” Crowley told Wretch.
“I will do so, sir. That is very wise, sir,” Wretch said. “What else goes on the agenda?”
Crowley stared at the flickering scenes of warfare in the water and didn’t say what was on his mind.
Instead, he said, “Sacrifice one thousand magpies. And five hundred goats. Also, the earthworms. Don’t forget the earthworms.”
Another reason Crowley appreciated the All-Seeing Eye’s fresh smell; it kept the stench of blood wafting up from below distant enough to remove anything distasteful, just near enough to be refreshing.
“Yes, sir, Lord High Commander,” Wretch said. “Immediately.”
Also in the catacombs lay Crowley’s war factories, where his acolyte magicians the demi-mages labored at creating armies to Crowley’s specifications. Magical elephants that bestrode the Earth in war armor did not just make themselves, could not be conjured up out of thin air. It was hard work, difficult work, and required attention to detail.
Once the scaffolding was in place and the temporary canvas to give them form, followed by the metal latticework, they must be animated by magic, the flesh grown with unnatural speed, and the armor, as if their skin, with it … so that what was a physical reaction became an alchymical reaction—as John Dee might have said, if he existed as other than words on a page. Blood sacrifice was the only way, and it was the meek and small animals of the world that must make that sacrifice for the bold and larger creatures he needed for his army.
“And … is that all I should put on the agenda?” Wretch asked—tentative, as if wanting to tread lightly on Crowley’s moment of contemplation.
“Yes, that is all, Wretch. And more than enough.”
Wretch managed a tortuous half bow, complicated by his many legs and other limbs and which took on the appearance, even with Crowley still unwilling to view Wretch directly, of how an infernal black mantis must look genuflecting.
At the center of Crowley’s thoughts was the Golden Sphere, Johnny Dee’s most famous alchymical creation. Or, at least, Dee had taken credit for creating It. Perhaps instead It had always existed and Dee had merely summoned It and bound It to him for a time—using the ancient knowledge of what Wretch called the Builders, according to the forbidden texts Wretch had brought to him.
The Golden Sphere, Wretch had told him, meant ultimate power for a warlock like Crowley, the sort of energy source that could make him invincible and render issues like what to do about Prague or the English treachery moot.
With Wretch’s help, Crowley had flushed the sphere from a remote location inside the maze of worlds hidden by the third doors, but once It had entered Aurora, trapped by Crowley’s magic, the blasted thing had cloaked itself by arcane means and Crowley felt not a hint of its presence vibrating through any part of the magical realm. No pulse or glow or signal.
All he knew for certain was that the Golden Sphere could not leave the Europe of Aurora without his knowledge, would trigger a trace, put in a hook that could not be taken out, and then Crowley could follow, forever and a day. Only seven doors to escape through and magical lines of force drawn between them like a wall to keep the sphere contained. So surely it was just a matter of time?
Yet Napoleon and Wretch couldn’t help Crowley with locating the Golden Sphere now It was trapped and, apparently, neither could the All-Seeing Eye. Which meant it wasn’t really all-seeing, and even Crowley could see the irony in that.
Crowley pushed a button on the table, and Napoleon’s column began to lower into the floor.
“Aha, aha,” Napoleon hallo’d from above, and then from closer to eye level, “you are in need of my advice again. I knew you would be. You would never have defeated me if not for betrayal from within. Not in a thousand years.”
Once, Crowley had experimented on a cat, to see if it really had nine lives. Most days he wished he could do the same to Napoleon. Just how undead was the head? What kind of pressure or flame or liquid might muffle the head’s enthusiasm but leave that military mind intact?
In truth, Napoleon had not been much prized by France. He had been missing from the official government archives, where the other heads were stored—“on loan,” as Crowley thought of it.
Wretch had discovered him languishing in a dead magician’s attic in Sardinia, in a remote mountain town called Gavoi. Crowley intended to reveal this fact to Napoleon at a point when he most desperately needed the man to be both silent and humble.
“And now you need me. Now you need me to win the war that you cannot otherwise win without my ample help. But if you want me to aid you to the utmost, what you must do first is restore my body and my armies and—”
Mercifully, though, whatever else Napoleon might have said was smothered as the column continued to recede into and past the floor, headed for the catacombs. For the hydraulic column, like an elevator, went all the way down.
Napoleon’s head was required in the war room for the daily briefing, and while the All-Seeing Eye was in the cathedral, the war room was, as ever, in the basement.