design, but it’s the accidents of history propel history, for history is no more than innumerable tangled strands of happenstance.
Isobel spares a glance at the well that opens just a couple of feet behind the bed that has been prepared for her and her brother. Even a mind as gleefully, unapologetically wicked as her own feels a slight shiver at the sight of the well, hewn from the native rock and eight feet across, the candlelight making no dint whatsoever in its implacable darkness. A mouth like that needs no teeth to be taken seriously. It was here long before this chamber was built, long before the city of Zin.
“Better, sister, that we don’t look at it.” He is thinking of basilisks and the gorgon Medusa, but he doesn’t tell her that.
“Yes,” she says, turning her face away from the well. “But—”
“It’s better,” he says again.
She undresses, and he follows her example. Their robes of yellow silk and wool damask form pretty puddles at their feet.
It is a shame, she thinks, this could not have been our wedding bed.
“It’s a shame,” says Isaac, “that this couldn’t have been our wedding bed,” and she smiles and nods. Isobel smiles far more than Isaac; she sometimes thinks him far too serious for their own good. In all matters, it seems to her, a little levity is advisable.
The Basalt Madonna has been placed on the altar.
Half hidden in the ten arms of Mother Hydra rests the slain body of the messiah. Not the one that the monks of Constantinople hoped the Ghul would come, in time, to venerate. This is a messiah fit for the Lower Dream Lands. It might be the graven image of almost any ghoul, from its vaguely canine face to its hooves. Which is the point. It might be any ghoul, were any ghoul made perfect. There is no describing perfection; it is seen and it is understood. Or it isn’t. Over the centuries, many forgeries of the Basalt Madonna have surfaced. Some arose from within the blasphemous sect sometimes referred to (as in Balfour’s book) as the “Byzantine Ghul.” Others were created by charlatans and also by occultists hoping a copy might prove as powerful as the lost (or only hidden) original. They were wrong, for without the blessings bestowed upon the first, the true Basaltes Maria Virgo, these counterfeits were no more than unnerving chunks of igneous stone. Here, in this place, at this appointed time, Isobel Snow lies in her twin’s embrace, watching as the candlelight plays over the angles and curves of the idol. The pyritized nautiloid crowning Mother Hydra, her golden gloriole, only the geometry of its spiral are wholly an expression of any known mathematics. That organic manifestation of the golden curve, circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34. That lone Paleozoic shell, pried from Turkish shale, is a comfort to any eye that lingers on the idol. Only it is not somehow alien to the sight of one born in the World Above or in the Dream Lands. For the hands of those who exist Outside had too great a hand in the conception and sculpting of the Madonna.
In their defeat and humiliation, a hierophant of the Ghul foretold of the coming of a mighty warrior priest who would lead them in a second war against their ancient foes and fully restore them to the waking world. The father and mother of this savior would be twins born of a mongrel bitch. And now the tribulations are ending, passing with the sacrifice of Hera Snow, grandmother of God. With the birth of Isobel and Isaac Snow.
In the shadow of the altar, he enters her, and she wraps her legs tightly about him. A distant piping music rises from the well, and the candles burn the sickly blue of the giant phosphorescent mushrooms in the garden beyond the city walls. There are no other words passed between the twins. There never will be. Once he’s come and is asleep beneath her, she gazes at the obsidian dagger waiting on the altar. It will cut her hands when she wields it, that her own blood will mingle with her brother’s when she slices his throat from ear to ear. She’ll be alone when their child is born, but Isaac always understood that he’d never live to see the exodus from Zin and the deliverance of his people and the Age