The Fuller Memorandum (33 page)

“You are briefing—” Panin’s eyes unconsciously flicker towards her violin case. “Oh, I see.” He eyes her warily. “What do you know of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh?”

“As much as anybody on the outside—not enough. Let’s see: the current group first surfaced in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the establishment of the monarchy there, but their roots diverge: White Russian émigré radicals, freemasons from Trieste, Austrian banking families with secrets buried in their family chapels. All extreme conservatives, reactionaries even, with a basket of odd beliefs. They’re the ones who reorganized the Brotherhood and got it back in operation after the hammering it took in the late nineteenth century. They’re not based in Serbia anymore, of course, but many of them fled to the United States immediately before the outbreak of war; that’s the trouble with these cults, they fragment and grow back when you hit them.”

“Let me jog your memory. In America, they infiltrated—some say, founded—the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom as a local cover organization. They do that everywhere, taking over a splinter of a larger, more respectable organization; in Egypt they use some of the more extreme mosques of the Muslim Brotherhood. In America . . . the Free Church is a small, exclusionary brethren who are so far out of the mainstream that even the Assembly of Quiverful Providentialist Ministries, from whom they originally sprang, have denounced them for heretical practices. Some of the Church elders are in fact initiates of the first order of the Black Brotherhood; the followers are a mixture of Christian believers, who they see as dupes, and dependents and postulants of the Brotherhood. The Church is mostly based in the United States—it is very hard to move against a church over there, even if it is suspected of fronting for another organization, they take their religious freedom too seriously—but it has missions in many countries. Not Russia, I hasten to add. The nature of the Church doctrine makes the personal cost of membership very high—they tend to be poor, with large families—and discourages defection from the ranks; additionally, the Brotherhood may use low-level glamours to keep the sheep centered in the flock. We hear little more than rumors about the Brotherhood itself; despite fifty years of attempted insertions, we’ve been unable to penetrate them. Their discipline is terrifying. We have heard stories about ritual murder, incest, and cannibalism. I would normally discount these—the blood libel is very old and very ugly—but complicity in war crimes has been repeatedly used to bind child soldiers into armies in the Congo, and I have some evidence that
those
practices were originally suggested by a Brotherhood missionary ...”

Mo shudders. “Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else’s.”

“You have evidence of this?” Panin leans towards her eagerly.

“I’ve
seen
it.” Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. “Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point—they had been thoroughly possessed—”

“That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?”

Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. “Yes.”

“Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo—it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer’s own will to violate—”

Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. “I don’t need that lecture right now.”

“All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but—there is a personal connection?”

“What?”

“You appear unduly upset ...”

“Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.”

Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes.” She raises her glass and drains it, then puts it back on the table with a hard
clack
. “You can tell me anything you’re at liberty to say, about why the Free Church attracted your attention. And what you think they’re doing.” She glances round. “Now might be a good time to check your wards.” The bar is filling up, but the other after-hours drinkers are all crowding away from the table Mo and Panin share, as if a glass sphere encloses them.

Panin nods. “The ward is adequate,” he assures her. “As for the Church, I need to tell you a story of the Revolution.

“During our civil war—the war that split families and slew the spirit of a nation, ending with Lenin’s victory in 1922—many factions fought against the Reds; and as the traditional White leadership collapsed, strange opportunists sprang to prominence. In Siberia, there was a very strange, very wicked man, a Baron by birth, of German ancestry: Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, or Ungern Von Sternberg as he styled himself. Sternberg was a monster. An early obsession with Eastern mysticism warped his mind permanently, and then he found something . . . He was a personal friend of the Bogd Khan, a mass poisoner and coincidentally the Mongolian equivalent of the Dalai Lama. During the civil war, Sternberg ran an extermination camp near Dauria, east of Lake Baikal. The Whites used to send the death trains to Sternberg, and he used their cargo for his own horrible ends. It’s said that there was a hillside in the woods above Dauria where his men used to kill their Red prisoners by tying them to saplings and quartering them alive. In summer, Sternberg used to go to that hill and camp there under the stars, surrounded by the bones and dismembered bloody pieces of his enemies. It was said by his soldiers that it was the only time he was at peace. He was a
terrible
man, even by the standards of a time of terror.”

Mo is nodding. “Was he a member of the Brotherhood?”

Panin licks his lips. “Sternberg was not a worshiper of lath-Hotep; whenever he found such he slew them, usually by flogging until the living flesh fell from their bones. As a matter of fact, we don’t really know
what
he was. We know what he did, though. It was one of the great works of pre-computational necromancy, and it took the priests of the Black Buddha to achieve it, fed by the blood and gore of Sternberg’s victims.

“There are places where the wall between the worlds is thin. Many of these are to be found in central Asia. The Bogd Khan’s gruesome midnight rituals—the ones he drank to forget, so heavily that he went blind—there was true seeing there, visions of the ancient plateau on an alien world where the Sleeper in the Pyramid lies sightless and undead. The Bogd was
terrified
. When his friend Ungern Sternberg offered him the sole currency that would buy relief from these visions—the lives of tens of thousands of victims—the Holy Shining One, eighth incarnation of the Bogd Gegen and Khan of Mongolia, fell upon his shoulder and wept bloody tears as he promised eternal friendship.

“The priests of the Bogd’s court worked with Ungern Sternberg’s torturers to build a wall around the pyramid, sent death squads shambling into the chilly, thin air on the Sleeper’s Plateau to erect a fence of impaled sacrificial victims. No countermeasure to the Sleeper was created on such a scale for many years, not until your Air Force began their occult surveillance program in the 1970s. As for Sternberg”—Panin shrugs—“he went on to back the wrong side in a civil war. But that does not concern us.”

“What an interesting story.”

“Is it?” Panin looks at her sharply.

She shrugs. “I suppose if I say ‘not really’ you’ll tell me why I’m wrong.”

“If you insist.” He snaps his fingers. “Another round, please.” To Mo: “It
is
important. You see”—he waits for his minder to depart in the direction of the bar—“one of the tools used by the monks was a
preta
, a hungry ghost; a body in its custody could function on the Sleeper’s Plateau far more effectively than any of Sternberg’s men, who had a tendency to die or go mad after only a few hours. The hungry ghost needed bodies to occupy, though its kind is far more intelligent and powerful than the run-of-the-mill possession case. This particular hungry ghost knows the transitive order in which the Death Fence around the Sleeper’s Pyramid was constructed—by implication, the order in which it must be
de
-constructed if the Sleeper is ever to be released. It was summoned by a ritual that Sternberg documented and sent west, for translation by the only woman he ever trusted: a trust that was misplaced, as it happens, because the document vanished into your organization’s archives and has never been seen since. If the Black Brotherhood could get their hands on the document—I believe you call it the Fuller Memorandum—they might well imagine they could bind the hungry ghost into a new body, compel it to service, and order it to begin dismantling the Death Fence.”

Mo nods jerkily. “Yes, that’s very interesting,” she says distractedly.

“If someone had convinced them that the time was right
now
, not in a couple more years, they might be induced to premature action. And if that someone allowed them to obtain a falsified, corrupted version of the Fuller Memorandum, they might well try to use it to release their master—”

Mo focuses. “The Sleeper. You’re not saying it’s N’yar lath-Hotep itself?”

“No, nothing that powerful: there is a hierarchy of horrors here, a ladder that must be climbed. But the thing in the pyramid can set the process in motion, starting a chain of events that will ultimately open the doors of uncreation and release the Black Pharaoh. To do so, they would best wait for the conjunction of chance; but it is in the nature of mortal cultists that they are impatient. And James is of the opinion that they should be encouraged to indulge their fatal impatience.”

“I see.”

“No, I don’t believe you do. The Black Brotherhood are at their most dangerous when they work
within
an organization that is unaware it has been infiltrated. Your—husband. Has be been missing long?” She shakes her head. “Exactly. Something alerted you?” She nods. “James sent him on an errand, yes?” She nods again. “Imagine you are an initiate of the Brotherhood. You see an agent of a hostile organization, and you have acquired the Sternberg Fragment and are prepared to carry out the ritual of summoning and binding the hungry ghost. Would it not be to your advantage to pick, as a carrier, that hostile agent? So that you can send him back in among them, ridden by your own demon ...”

Mo’s pupils dilate. Her face is pale. “You think they’re going to try to possess Bob.”

Panin spreads his hands palm-down on the table. “It is a logical supposition, nothing more.” He meets her gaze. “He is tapped for rapid advancement, is he not? James’s personal secretary, I gather. Years ago, he established a reputation as a casual layabout, a bit of a bumbler. It served him well in his field days. We see reports, you know. A very talented man, with a very beautiful, very talented wife. He will go far, if he is not eaten by a hungry ghost. Or worse.”

“What could be
worse
?” Mo says bitterly.

Panin shrugs. “Firstly, they have a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. Whatever James saw fit to concoct, I suppose, not expecting them to perform it on his personal secretary. Secondly—the
preta
they wish to summon has already been summoned: it is, in fact, already walking around in flesh. Who knows what the ritual might dredge up, given a dangling pointer into the demon-haunted void? And thirdly ...”

“Thirdly?”
Her voice begins to rise dangerously.

“We have merely been assuming that the copy of the Fuller Memorandum that James gave your husband contains a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. But James did not intend the situation to spin this far from his control. The
worst
possible case is that they have the real thing, the Sternberg Fragment
and
the document describing the binding of the Eater of Souls, and that they know what to do with it.”

JONQUIL THE PSYCHOPATHIC SLOANE RANGER HACKS AWAY AT
my arm for what feels like a year and is probably a bit less than a minute. Then she gets annoyed. “Julian, do something about the screaming, will you? It’s giving me a headache.”

Julian Headless-Shotgun pulls a leather glove out of one of his pockets and tries to stuff it in my mouth. I clamp my jaw shut, shivering and hyperventilating, but he responds by squeezing my nostrils painfully. After a few seconds I surrender to the inevitable. The glove fingers taste of sweat and sour, dead leather. Chewing on them helps.

Did I mention I’ve got a low pain threshold?

Jonquil goes back to hacking on my arm. The pain is excruciating. If you’ve ever been bitten by a dog—this is worse. The scalpel makes a clean incision, but I can still feel blood welling up and dripping along my arm. The pain isn’t sharp—it’s a widespread violent ache. After a while it feels as if my arm has been clubbed repeatedly with a meat tenderizer. She hacks and saws and tugs—the tugging is the worst, it’s so bad my vision blurs and I feel light-headed—and then it stops.