Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,72

encountered what he mistook for a wretched leprous man gnawing on something in a gutter (he wisely did not look too closely at what it was the ghoul gnawed), and he led the wretch back to his abbot. The abbot, being sharper of wit than the monk, was quick to realize that the man from the gutter wasn’t any sort of man at all, and thus did the “Hounds of Cain”—as they were christened—come to the attention of citizens of Christendom. As assimilation is inherent to that system, the abbot (his name and that of the monk are lost to history, and just as well) sent his monastic agents out to evangelize to and convert these misbegotten creatures, regardless of their foul habits and appearance and dubious origins.

The effort was met with somewhat less success than the abbot would have wished.

For, of course, ghouls have their own gods. When humanity had yet to move beyond their australopithecine progenitors, already did the ghouls worship their pantheon of Fifty, the Qqi. Ages before their fateful war with the Djinn, they had come to know the Hands of the Five, the Ten Hands, the fifty fingers. They weren’t about to cast aside their veneration of Great Amylostereum or Mother Paecilomyces, Camponotus the Tireless Maw or eyeless, all-seeing Claviceps, in exchange for one god who’d not even seen fit to send his martyr down to the Lower Dream Lands. Still, there’s always a gullible element in any assemblage, and a tiny but strident number, while not abandoning the Qqi, did engage in a notable act of syncretism. They wove their own rough patchwork of holy entities from the teachings of the monks. They brought into being the Maghor Rostrum (patron of the starving and toothless), Mortifien the Crypt Mason, Mistress Praxedes the Many-Limbed (midwife to the transformed who once were only women and men), bat-winged Pteropidion, and the maimed bride Saint Lilit (invoked for the endurance of exile and pain). These names and many others besides were set down in 1702 for the prying eyes of brave and foolish seekers after mystery by François-Honoré de Balfour in his infamous Cultes des Goules, a volume almost immediately consigned to the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

It is not known precisely how François-Honoré de Balfour learned the names, though his association with a handful of Jesuits would be sagely blamed.

And those ghouls who so cleverly fashioned these new “gods” also fashioned for themselves a new idol, their own Pietà, a Beáta Maria Virgo Perdolens to fit their needs, and among men it became known as the Basalt Madonna, id est Basaltes Maria Virgo.

When Isaac and Isobel Snow have finished their raw meal of the tongue, kidneys, ovaries, and heart of librarian, a woman lately of Providence, Rhode Island, they lick clean each other’s faces and hands before proceeding to the chamber where the priests have erected—to their exacting specifications—an altar of stacked skulls and blocks of volcanic rock mined from the quarries of Thok. The altar rests on a wide dais, and before the dais the priests have lain a bed of mammoth furs and tanned skins peeled from off half a hundred embalmed corpses. The smoky candles that illuminate the room have been made from the fat of both humans and ghouls.

“Are we ready?” asks Isobel. Before Isaac answers her, he examines the brass contraption near the altar. A single shaft of pale moonlight is shining down through a hole in the high domed roof of the chamber, and it falls across the contraption. It looks a bit like a sextant, a bit like a sundial, yet also suggests an elaborate clock.

“We are,” he says, and she smiles. It’s been a long and arduous path to this hour.

What they are about to do cannot ever be undone, which, obviously, is what makes what they are about to do sublime. The twins stand at the hairline threshold of the realization of a prophecy first uttered more than four million years ago, in the days after the end of the war with the Djinn, well in advance of the ghouls’ exposure to the tenets of Christianity and what they made of it. The teachings of the abbot were only—to those who understood—a means to an end. A means to fulfillment of a prophecy that might never have had a chance of fulfillment had not a monk found a ghoul in a gutter and led it back to a monastery. There can be hope, and dreams, and the illusion of