world with one well-planned explosion. The news would talk all day about the leader of fifty as easily as it might about the leader of millions.
Enemies were the beneficiaries of the same democratic and competitive scrutiny as victims.
The faces of the Evals-Billy Joel, Doby, and Hayden-rose to the fore, blazing as bright as Esther's on the television screens for brief seconds. Had these men who killed Esther Belkin belonged to a secret movement? People spoke of backwoods "survivalists" with barbed-wire fences and vicious dogs, who suspected all kinds of authority. Conspiracy. It might be anywhere in any form.
And then there were the Apocalyptic Christians, having more cause than ever before to say that Judgment Day was at hand.
Had the Eval brothers come from such organizations?
Gregory Belkin, the stepfather of Esther, spoke in a soft compelling voice of plots to hurt all God-fearing peoples. The innocence of Esther was significant and cried out to heaven. Terrorists, diamonds, fanatics-these words encircled the brief flicker of Esther's face and name.
The news in all forms-printed, broadcast, computerized on internets-was continuous, alarming, prophetic, fatalistic, detailed, ludicrous by intention and by accident in turns.
As I said, any ghost could have grasped these things.
The question with me was why was I thinking of anything. Why wake from my deep sleep, just short of death, always just short of death, and find myself walking amongst Billy Joel, Hayden, and Doby Eval-a sudden horrified witness to their crime?
Whatever the case, I had for the moment lost my taste for merely drifting, for merely existing, for merely hating.
I wanted to pay attention. I wanted to make full use of my mind unfettered by flesh and cast into eternity, a mind that had been gaining strength with each new awakening, taking back into the darkness with it not merely experience but emotion, and possibly a certain resolve.
Inevitably, it was a Master who would put all of this in order through his responses, his reactions, the vitality of his will.
But a very specific question tormented me. Yes, I was back and I wanted to be back. But had not I done things to ensure that I would never be brought back again?
If I wanted to, I think I could remember what I'd done. Forget the world and all its pomp and racket for a moment. I was Azriel. Azriel could remember what he'd done.
I had slain masters.
If I wanted to, I could remember more dead Magi than those I've already described here. I could smell again the camp of the Monguls, leather, elephants, scented oil-flicker of lights beneath the sagging silk, the chessboard overturned and tiny carved figures made of gold and silver rolling on a flowered carpet.
Cries of men. Destroy it, it's a demon, drive it back into the bones!
A series of windows in Baghdad looking out over a battle. Back into the bones! Fiend from Hell. A castle near Prague. A stone-cold room high in the Alps. And maybe even more-even after the vivid enchanting gaslight on the flowered wallpaper of the sorcerer's room in Paris.
This servant serves no more!
Yes, I'd proved to myself and them that I could slay any conjurer. So where was the sly, covert consciousness which had brought me here to this presentation of power?
Oh, I could like to aver that I loathed being conscious again and forswore all life and everything that goes with it, but I couldn't really do that. I couldn't forget Esther's eyes, or the beautiful glass on Fifth Avenue, or the moment when the heat came through the soles of my shoes, and when the man, the kindly unknowing man had put his arm around me!
I was curious and free! In an orbit, I was bound to these bizarre events. But no Lord directed me.
Esther knew me but she hadn't called. Had it been someone on behalf of Esther, someone whom I had already tragically failed?
Two nights passed in real time before I realized I was once again awake, and moving through the air: the angel of might, the angel of evil, who knows?
This is what I saw:
Part III Chapter 17
17
This was a nearby city, in view of the other. The car moving through the rain was the car that had carried Esther to the place where the Evals surrounded her with their picks. Other cars traveled with it, filled with guards whose eyes roved dark and deserted buildings.
The procession was furtive yet full of authority.
Through the rain, I could actually see the shining towers of the street on which she