Chapter 39
Light exploded through the chamber as the amber gold of divine honey flowed around them, just as it had from a cave in the earth where truth had lived with its oracles for centuries. It spiraled outward from Dario's open palm in another wave that moved through stone and air and bone.
It passed through Frederica, and she stumbled to keep upright. Agrippa shied back, covering his face from the brightness.
"See the truth, you fuckers," Frederica snarled.
Around them, the people who had been standing in the glazed-eyed stillness of Agrippa's spell all inhaled at once.
The sound that came out of them wasn't screaming.
It was a gasping cry of lungs filling for the first time in a long time, the involuntary intake of people whose bodies had just remembered they were their own. Then the screaming started.
The nearest woman in her mid-forties looked at Agrippa across the chamber, and her expression dissolved from devotion into a grief and betrayal that had no bottom to it. She understood. They all did.
The truth landed in them like the light had, total and without mercy. There was no god ascending. No salvation. Only a hungry mouth, waiting to swallow them whole.
The gūl stumbled into action. They poured in from around the perimeter, and the chamber dissolved into pandemonium.
Screaming disciples scrambled backward, the gūl cutting through them with blades to get to Frederica and Dario.
The north door of the chamber blew off its hinges, and Kon came through first, Athena half a step behind him with her sword already in motion. Beyond them, Rodrigo's voice on the comms cut through everything, saying he was closing in.
Frederica put down two of the gūl with her short sword before they threaded through the panicked disciples to get to her mother.
Despina finished cutting her bonds and pulled Frederica's knife free. She was standing behind the Roman throne, surveying the chamber with the face of a killer about to cut loose.
Frederica fought off a gūl and slid a gun across the stone floor toward her. Despina caught it against her foot, scooped it up, checked the chamber in one motion, and shot the other gūl in the face.
"You took your time," Despina said, and aimed at the next one. "Where is my Tore?"
"Baba's outside waiting for you to finish having your fun and join him," Frederica replied. She passed her mother two extra magazines as she shot at another gūl creeping up behind Dario.
"Good." Despina's smile was wide and feral and exactly like her daughter's. She turned back to the fight. "Let's end this and go home."
Frederica moved, and the world became the blade in her hand. She had been doing this since she was old enough to hold a knife, and her mother's hands had taught her everything she knew about staying alive. In this space, she wasn't afraid of anything.
She turned to find where Dario had gotten to, and golden light filled her eyes again.
The Thriae Bee's magic was still pulsing in waves through the chamber, burning off the accumulated weight of five centuries of illusion.
It didn't distinguish between Agrippa's fake theology and any other lie.
Truth was truth. The bee had been made by oracles who saw through everything and had no patience for false bullshit of any kind, including what people told themselves.
The light cleared from Frederica's eyes, and she saw that Dario was looking at her. The world slowed as if they were really stuck in thick amber honey.
He was twenty feet away, and there was a fight happening between them and around them, but he was looking at her with the full weight of something that had been contained for too long and was finally free.
Frederica had spent a great deal of her adult life making sure she understood her own motivations. She knew when she was attracted to someone, when she was using someone, and when she was being used. She knew her own patterns the way she knew every part of her favorite rifle.
She hadn't dared to let herself see what was in Dario's eyes, and now, she couldn't look away.
Dario loves me. It was in his face, unguarded, the bee having stripped away every mask from his face.
He loved her with everything he was. The Charmer.
The mercenary. The one who cooked when he was worried, who kept Saint Expedito on his shelf for years, and who had washed blood from her hair in the dark and not made it into anything.
The realization was so shocking that it almost made her laugh.
She had been running from this feeling since she first saw him through a sniper scope in Rome.
The reason she had fought against it wasn't that she didn't want him.
It was that she wanted him more than anything in the world, and that had been terrifying.
It was still terrifying, but in the middle of a blood bath with an ancient sorcerer, she had never been so certain.
Her chest was full of something that felt stupidly like joy that he felt the same.
"Oh," she said across the space between them. "You too?"
His mouth curved into a smile. "Hopelessly and completely, Spartana mia."
Time started again, and the gūl Frederica had been tracking in her peripheral vision reached her. She put it down in two seconds and kept moving. The joy stayed glowing in her chest, and she didn't try to shut it away. There was no rule that said you couldn't fight better for it.
The screaming started up again, but differently this time. The disciples who could still move were being gathered by Rodrigo and Giana at the far end of the chamber while Kon and Athena handled the gūl who were still upright with bloody efficiency.
"Down!" Altun's voice came from the east entry, and Frederica dropped to the floor.
The power that came from Agrippa moved over her head like a compression of air, and the force of it burned like a bomb blast. It hit the far wall, and the Roman stonework cracked.
Serapis was already between them and Agrippa. He had come out of nowhere and was standing with both arms raised, his body and whatever remained of his restored magic absorbing what Agrippa was trying to do.
At his back, Altun placed both hands between his shoulder blades and added her own magic to his, the two of them forming a barrier together.
"What have you done to me, Lucius!" Agrippa's voice was almost hysterical. He was looking at his hands in horror. The skin moved, sinking toward the bone. The color changed from gray to brown, with a deep papery texture like something that had been dried for a very long time.
"What the bee strips can't be rebuilt," Serapis said, his voice cracking.
"You were never immortal, Cornelius. None of us were.
You were borrowing time and belief. You believed it hard enough that the universe accommodated you.
Now you know exactly what you are. Look upon your works and despair, master. "
"No." Agrippa's voice cracked. "No, this is… I am ascending, I am... the alignment..."
"It's still happening," Serapis replied. "But it doesn't care about you anymore."
Agrippa stumbled as decades disappeared in seconds, the flesh of his face drawing back from the bones beneath, his hands twisting into claws as they scratched at his neck.
He screamed in rage and denial, but not pain.
He had built his entire existence on the certainty of his own exceptional nature and couldn't face that he had been ordinary all along.
The centuries and his magic hadn't made him transcendent.
He had simply been very good at refusing to die, and now the refusal had run out.
His body began to crumble as five hundred years of accumulated time and false belief folded down to nothing but dust.
His last sound was an enraged cry of defeat that echoed off the Roman columns, the vaulted ceiling, and the stones of the lararium niche with its faded ochre plaster.
The body settled on its knees on the planetary inlay in the floor, and didn't move again.
Around Frederica, people were still breathing, but all in shock. The disciples were huddled at the far end. The gūl had stopped when Agrippa stopped, dropping where they stood. The obsidian mirror between the columns shattered and fell to the floor in shards.
Frederica raised her gun, sighted on the crumbled matter that had been Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and shot it. The skull exploded into a spray of ash across the planetary inlay. Every head in the chamber turned toward her.
"What?" she said, looking back at them all. "This mother fucker has necromancy magic, and I wanted to make sure."
Across the chamber, Dario caught her eye, and they both started laughing.
"Idioti," Despina said before she started laughing too.