Chapter #12The Seventh Veil Is Revealed by: imaj   This is a really bad idea, you think as you walk onto the wings of the school auditiorium, the black attaché case that contains al-Muqanna’s soul jar gripped firmly in one hand. The demon – the efreeti as the imam called him – stands in the middle of the stage. It’s almost impossible to think of him as that though, the kindly looking man in the middle of the stage. He smiles, half sadly, at the crowd before him and speaks in a low voice. You can barely hear him yourself, and it must be impossible for the cultists to hear what he says, but they hang on his every word.
The change in the cultists is bewildering as well. Outside they were frantic, violent and dangerous. They threw themselves at you without any regard for their own safety, but now they are passive. They pack the auditorium hall so tightly that the air is almost difficult to breath, but the cultists do nothing other than stand and listen, swaying gently.
You fumble the case open and pull the slender bone from it. “This stops now Hakim,” you say, brandishing the femur at him. “Release these people or I’ll send you back to whatever pit you crawled out from”
al-Muqanna’s droning address to the cultists stops and he turns to face you. That little sad smile bears down on you. His eyes twinkle with amusement as he speaks. “What is it Tariq,” he asks, his voice wry. “Would you destroy such a precious antiquity.”
“I mean it,” you find yourself saying. al-Muqanna’s eyes lock with your own and, unbidden, Tariq al-Issawi’s feelings towards his master pour into your head. Your knees buckle, al-Muqanna is so beautiful and…
You shake your head. You’ve got to clear your thoughts, break the bone and banish this demon, but as you look at al-Muqanna, his eyes brimming with love you realise that you’ve lost. He advances slowly towards you, and try as you might, you cannot help but look right at him.
There’s something maddening about his face. It radiates benevolence, but it seems to flicker and shift. You – and Tariq for that matter – never see it move, but you just can’t pin it down, or recall his features in anything other than the broadest of terms. He reaches out to you with one hand. “Give it to me Tariq,” he says in the tone of a weary parent. His hand closes round the bone and…
It is not a hand.
It is a claw, the skin is hard and covered in yellow scales. Four long, bony fingers wrap about the bone, each finger ending in a hard, black, glittering, curved talon.
You blink hard. Beneath his face you glimpse another. al-Muqanna still looks directly at you, but behind his face is another, larger head, turned sideways to glare malevolently at you from an enormous, ruby-red eye. A horn-like beak, like a parrot's, gapes, showing a thick, grey tongue. The skin, where it is bare, is black, but great plumes of blood-red feathers rise in a ruffle from its neck and crown.
You grasp the bone, even as this thing pulls it from you. It breaks.
But nothing happens, unless it's that the apparition of the bird-lizard vanishes. al-Muqanna smiles at you. "You see, Will," he says. "It was nothing. You've only broken a fossil."
"What did you call me?" You're not so startled by the anticlimactic breaking of the soul jar that you've missed the use of your real name. "No, What are you?" If the imam is wrong, if the thing is not an efreeti, not bound to the earth by a soul jar, what is it then?
"I am the Seventh Veil of God. Through me shines His countenance. Through me He burns away appearances, to reveal the forms beneath."
"But you hide yourself?"
"Man cannot live without appearances, Will. You know this better than most. But soon I shall burn them all away. All shall perish in beautiful fire. All except you Will. You…” His voice trembles with hunger. "You shall be my true form."
You shudder, but cannot tear your eyes from his. His hand closes over your face, and the world fades.
*****
You know this place, it is the space within you, the place you retreat to in order to meditate and consider the imago you have gathered. It is dark, save for the bright group of stars that mark each imago you have gathered over the years. Some are complete personae, others only faces and others still just skills and memories that you can use.
There is something new here though, something beautiful: An imago that you do not remember collecting. You draw it to yourself – or, you worry, is it drawing itself to you – and look at it closely. It unravels and opens up, like a great spiral of plumes…
No that’s odd, you always see the imago as being made up of ghost like wisps.
…like a great spiral of plumes. It is warm and inviting, comfortable looking. You would love to try it on. You are not the least put out by the gem-like eye that stares at you from the centre. You flinch only a little when out of its glittering depths there stretches a great, hard beak. It opens to swallow you…
There is a sharp rattling noise and the new imago fractures and scatters. The constellations in your mind swirl and fade.
*****
al-Muqanna staggers backwards, his immaculate white suit torn. There is another sharp retort – you see now that it is gunfire – and the cult leader staggers further. No blood issues from the ragged holes as al-Muqanna steadies himself. His face flickers one last time and melts away.
“What the fuck is that thing,” says your saviour. It’s Kal, his rifle wavering uncertainly as al-Muqanna’s features fold in on themselves. You have no idea why he disobeyed your instruction to wait outside, but you’re glad he did
You’re trying to work out the answer to Kal’s question for yourself though. al-Muqanna has become something else, an odd creature that is one part lizard, one part bird and two parts chthonian horror. It balances one great claw like foot atop the face of a man – a man who has seemingly appeared out of nowhere. There’s a clue here, in the way the man’s face is almost entirely hidden by the beast’s claw.
More pressing matters assert themselves, as the creature stretches massive leathery wings and rakes forward with its other claw. That baleful red eye stares murder at you and the thing opens its beak and craws violently.
Whatever spell the cultists passive is gone now, but they aren’t rushing to the defence of their master. Screams and shouts fill the auditorium as the cultists wake from whatever dream al-Muqanna held them in. They run in every direction but the stage, leaving you and other Stellae and Akshardham to deal with the thing. Kal tries shooting it again to no effect, Imam el-Bayoumi bears down upon it with the full weight of Lurga and Aizhan circles it warily, looking for an opening in the flashing sweeps of its razor sharp talons.
Then it all clicks into place. The flickering face, the man on the floor. You don’t need to hit it, just touch it. You lunge forward. The creature sends a wing in your direction to buffet you away, but as soon as you land your hand on it, you bring forth the power of the Libra buried within you, the spell that strips away the imago from a person.
You feel, rather than see, the creature disappear, lightning crackling everywhere as it dissipates. All that remains is the man on the floor, the long dead face of the real Hakim al-Muqanna staring up at you.
*****
“It was imago,” you explain to Charles. “Nothing but imago. Once I realised that I could get rid of it just like any other imago.” You refrain from telling him that you had to use one of the later, less pleasant spells from the book though.
He sits on the opposite side of the dining table from you, pouring tea from a pot into a fine china cup. In the next room you can hear Bea watching a cartoon.
“Like a ghost,” he replies, taking a sip of the brown liquid. “Though a far more complete set of imago than is usual, and a very old ghost judging by your description,” he adds wryly.
“Something like that,” you tell him. “It forced itself on Hakim al-Muqanna, nearly forced itself on me too. I’ve never seen anything like that though.”
“You have,” counters Charles. “Since Bea insisted on taking me to the Natural History Museum whilst you were away. She told me you go there a lot.”
“Yeah but…” you pause, suddenly remembering the arrangements of fossilised bones you have seen there. Silence reigns over the table for a full minute. “I don’t understand what the bone was for though, the one in the attaché case.”
Charles thinks on your question for a while. “I can’t say for sure without letting Nash look at it, and that’s unlikely now, but it was likely a sympathetic focus. Dark power that. Think of it like this Siobhan, the bone was a little bit of a person, maybe even old enough to have come from a lot of peoples’ ancestor. What the ghost did to the bone, it did to the people. You must have heard of voodoo dolls girl. You did the right thing in…”
In truth, you aren’t really listening anymore. The answer to a long standing puzzle has just clicked inside your head. You have much to do.
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