Illustrated fic, part 2 of 4
THE PHOENIX AND THE TURTLE
Pt II of IV
Story by vulgarweed; Illustrations by quantum_witch
For General Summary, Notes, Warnings, Etc., see Part 1
Rating: PG-13, this part (NC-17 overall)
Warnings: Angst, of both the sulky and well-justified varieties. Allusions to violence. Rather cruel place to end it.
Pt II: In which Crowley tests the limits of sulking and meets problematic mortals of his own; Aziraphale dodges an awkward proposition; and both get an eyeful through the looking-glass.
Paris, France, 1578
Crowley lay watching his curtains sway in the breeze. It hadn’t got any more interesting in the last four hours. Time to move on, he most certainly thought, and not only because Paris was dreary. Pestilence had come through once again, insisting on taking Crowley out for a few rounds-mostly to see if he had any good gossip, which he didn’t. The Apocalyptic Manifestation was getting a bit of a swelled head, in Crowley’s opinion (to go with all of his other unattractive swellings); yes, yes, the plagues were very impressive and persistent, and the new look suited him (leprosy was so retro; bubonic plague was all the rage in Europe and smallpox stocks were rising in the New World). But Azrael still got more iconic representation, and that was a sore spot.
Well, of all the Manifestations one could run into, DEATH himself was hard to avoid in Paris, and busy as he was he always seemed to find more time to piss and moan about that Flamel character blowing him off yet again. Really, Crowley thought, one can only leave a flaming bag of brimstone on the alchemist’s doorstep so many times in a century before the joke starts to get old. But Azrael’s sense of vengeance, often indistinguishable from his sense of humour, remained eternally unchanged.
The humans were worse. Nowhere near as complicated as Italian sinners on the whole, French sinners were inclined to repetitions of more mundane variations on sins of the flesh and the pocketbook (often combining the two in vaguely clever ways), and their Black Artes seemed to involve an interminable number of nighttime trips to Les Innocents with shovels. Come to think of it, that might explain their obsession with seduction talismans. It wasn’t as if anyone were going to willingly come near them after one of those little expeditions made them smell ten times worse than the average Parisian, which was saying something.
Crowley was having the sulk of a decade, and lo, it was good. He had a jug of wine balanced unsteadily on his bare stomach, he was alone in his bed (a much more common occurrence than he led a certain angel to believe), and to punctuate certain moments in his pouting that he thought were particularly impressive bits of broodwork, he weakly threw another spike at the wall. Some fixed-eyed student of Ye Artes Arcane had given him a rather lopsided Tree of Life diagram once, and he’d been using it as a dartboard for years. (He almost never managed to hit anything above Geburah, but once he had completely by accident bullseyed the spot where Da’ath should have been and heard an indignant yelp from some being he hadn’t dared to try to identify. The Fabric of the Universe rippled only a bit in annoyance.)
He’d spent twenty years being conspicuously (to himself at least) almost everywhere except Italy or England, his third choice for non-appearance being Spain. The Eastern Mediterranean had been an exciting place a hundred years ago, and in those days he’d even managed to convince Aziraphale that maybe that pretty, mountainous Wallachia wasn’t such a great place to take his refreshing missionary-work-disguised-as-holiday-or-was-it-vice-versa just then, after that exhausting fall of Constantinople business. (The Prince at the time in that province was quite nasty, though effective.)
Aziraphale. As if that weren’t a name that could shoot his brooding levels up by a hundred angstpules.
Every time he got one of those commendations he didn’t deserve-and the Son of the Dragon himself had been another one, Crowley barely even met him-it was half flinch, half relief, and the ineffable third half was a sort of secret smile. He had a real secret, after all: surely having seduced an angel must count for something. But it was none of their bloody business. The very idea of exposing that to beings designed by nature not to appreciate it…
Well, then why can I appreciate it? At least I think I do.
All too well, he thought, which is why he was avoiding England again. Bless it, Aziraphale cared, and Crowley felt as helpless as a newly-manifested imp in the light of such nuanced and fussy attention.
How exactly had they got from Point A to Point Gimel or Gamma or wherever they were, anyhow? Oh, Crowley had tried to pass it off to himself as some kind of tempting challenge, but really, that hill on Iona with the rocks and what happened there? Honestly? He’d been trying to show someone he was already almost starting to think of as a friend (despite the vestigial clumsy use of weaponry) something fun. As in, hey, I enjoy this a lot, maybe you’ll like it too and we can do it together. Like chess. Like fishing. Or something.
Well, not exactly like that. He remembered when chess was invented, and he was pretty blessed sure he hadn’t spent centuries waking up sticky from fevered dreams that involved capturing Aziraphale’s rook. Hadn’t stared helplessly at those poufy hands and got all restless in the pants thinking about what they’d feel like moving a pawn those first two virgin squares. And he suspected it wasn’t normal to see one’s fishing buddy’s face last of all in the final moments of a particularly unpleasant discorporation.
It might be time to move on again, he thought. Maybe Venice isn’t so bad these days. He resolved to do so, after the last of the wine, a desultory wank, and a few months’ more of napping.
***
He didn’t yet anticipate meeting a philosopher who could actually say something interesting.
“So that if in bodies, matter, and entities there were not mutation, variety, and vicissitude, there would be nothing agreeable, nothing good, nothing pleasurable. So…because justice has no act except where there is error, harmony is not effectuated except where there is contrariety,” said the young ex-monk from Nola-near-Naples, writing a dense allegory about a great career change of the gods.
Well, Crowley thought, here at least is someone who knows a good deal about vicissitude and transitions, hardly able to set down his hat in a house before some church stiff rushes to denounce it and its suspicious lack of lice.
Giordano Bruno was, if nothing else, a natural-born troublemaker--and wherever trouble was made, Crowley could keep boredom at bay and embellish some distracting reports. Reports that distracted him from England at any rate. Crowley watched him from a distance for years-until Bruno decided he should try his luck in England, which Crowley thought was just his luck.
When he found out that Aziraphale was still keeping far, far too much company with that bookish occultnik who nurtured pretensions to holiness even while he whispered in Elizabeth’s ear about Empire Britannia, Crowley thought he was being admirably restrained in not smashing anything in his jealous pique. But far away in an abandoned Paris garret, a piece of parchment on a wall with its dart-riddled Sephiroth went up in flames and took the entire block with it.
Mortlake, England, 1581
“Oh…” said Aziraphale in a whisper of ecstatic shock. “I’ve never seen…you have…oh, John, it’s…” The angel clapped his fist to his mouth to keep from embarrassing himself further.
“So long it took me to get you here,” John said with a rueful little smile. “Her Majesty Herself is easier to persuade than you are.”
Aziraphale was consumed with a rather blasphemous intensity of reverence and a smattering of something he feared was at least Covetousness, if not actual Lust, for John’s library.
The house had once been a rather unremarkable cottage, but it was beginning to grow ungainly appendages at an alarming rate, all of them crammed ever fuller and fuller with brittle parchments and dry papers and, unnervingly close to them, the alembics and vessels and burners and pipes and tubes and grinders and filers and measuring instruments that suggested the manufacturing of strong spirits to the uneducated (and the summoning of them to the paranoid). There was no space on the wall that was free of maps and charts and nattered scrawl of sigils; even the windows were occupied with astrolabes and sextants and strange arrangements of mirrors and lenses, poking out at the veiled stars.
“Does it meet whatever your expectations may have been?” John asked, grinning.
“Expectations?’ Aziraphale said, “No, I couldn’t have imagined this. I should have, I know you’ve been collecting for thirty years, but…”
“A goodly amount of it has passed through your own shop.”
“I have to confess, I don’t like letting them go.”
“Nor do I. I want them all to come to me and stay here, to land on my hand like tame doves. I have found a worthy rival in you.”
That was probably what it was that Aziraphale had responded to when he’d first met John in that library at Cambridge all those years ago-the sense that he was a gentle soul, a scholar and mystic, a prayerful seeker after the true knowledge of the Mysteries who might poison his own mother for the right book but would make certain it was completely painless. It wasn’t so much a friendship as a reflection; Aziraphale thought that if he were a human, John Dee was exactly the kind of human he might have wanted to be. But he knew he could never have got away with a beard like that.
“Why do you ever leave?” Aziraphale finally asked.
“To acquire more, of course.”
“Bit of Her Majesty’s business too, they say,” Aziraphale insinuated. He wasn’t born yesterday-or indeed, at all.
“So the rumourmongers say,” John shrugged. “For my part, I think I can do my Lady’s work far better from here. But I go wherever I might be of use.”
“Of course,” Aziraphale said distractedly, because he was. There was nowhere he could put his eyes that wouldn’t lead to some bottomless fascination. If only there were some polite way of getting rid of the man himself for a few years. Finally he settled on a bit of handwritten scrawl that lay beside a crystal glass, a few sigils and calculations and some things that could only be doodles, a half-page in several languages that was completely incomprehensible in all of them, and one that made all the fine hairs on the back of Aziraphale’s neck stand completely on end.
Oh no. He can’t be serious.
“W-What is this?”
“Codework, mostly,” said John dismissively, as obviously baiting as possible. “Dead-ends, alas. Some scratchwork for a star chart.”
Aziraphale shook his head sternly. “You knew I was coming. You wouldn’t have left it out if you didn’t want me to ask about it.”
John smiled wryly. “You have my measure as always. This is what it is: sometimes I worry I have come to the limits of my library.”
“I doubt that.”
John rolled his eyes. “Yes, it’s possible. At any rate, I have come to believe that our Creator would not have put this complicated Glory into such systems and processes, and given us the desire to understand it all, were there not ways for a righteous petitioner to know. And I have devoted my life to collecting and understanding the works of all those who had glimpses and insights, and I do believe a pathway has been laid for us to ask…”
“Well, I would certainly never discourage prayer…” Aziraphale said, a bit woodenly.
“Yes, that’s what I mean - but a more scientific and properly focused prayer, using methods I think I’ve-“
“Beware,” Aziraphale said wearily, unable to keep a certain tone from creeping automatically into his voice.
“Risky, yes, but we would never know the New World were it not for brave sailors and wise mapmakers-“
“Yes, your friend Mercator did wonderful work with the-“ Aziraphale flailed
“I’m making an analogy.” John sighed, obviously thinking that for all his learning, his fellow bibliophile could be rather dense.
“I’m trying to change the subject!” Aziraphale snapped.
“And I won’t have it changed!” John shouted. “This is important to me.”
Aziraphale crossed his fingers behind his back in the last-ditch hope that John wasn’t going to say what he knew perfectly well John was going to say.
“I seek to ask my questions more directly,” John finally did say. “I have learned of a book, from the Ethiopians, on what little is known of the lost language before Babel. I believe it is possible to make sure I contact only the messengers of God and not less wholesome spirits.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes and prayed for strength. For all his learning, his fellow bibliophile could be awfully dense. “You want to talk with angels.”
“It sounds preposterous, I know…even blasphemous. But-“
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s impossible…” Aziraphale sighed.
“But I need help,” John said sadly. “I am no medium. The conversation of spirits almost always eludes me - perhaps I am too much a creature of the intellect and not enough of the soul. I know there are those through whom they come more easily, and I must say, as long as I’ve known you, I have on occasion thought-“
“What?” blurted Aziraphale.
“That there is something about you…”
“You want me to be your medium? Have them speak through me?”
“I was thinking of proposing that, yes. Have you a gift of skrying?”
Aziraphale pinched his nose. “No. I really, really don’t think I do.”
The Cock and Bull Tavern, 1582
What did it take for a body to be able to hear himself think in such a place? (Answer: for the body, there was no help for it-the twenty-seventh stanza of a vaguely musical pornographic epic involving divers Catholic nobility and a stunning array of farm animals, some long extinct and some newly discovered, was equipped to drown out even thoughts involving sex, food, and/or shelter for most mortals, much less anything more rarified.)
But this particular body did not in fact need any part of said physical body to hear, which is why he was able to eavesdrop on the ratty-looking young man three tables over, who bundled his black cowl closer around his head to hide the sight of his cropped ears, which everyone paying attention had already glimpsed.
“The jewels, no, that I had nothing to do with. And even so, had I the means to recompense the lady out of the goodness of my heart, I would do so, for it pains me to see such distress.”
“But the way I heard the tale, Mr. ‘Talbot,’” said Crowley, insinuating himself, “is that you do have the means, for you made the coins by your very own hand.”
The other man at the table giggled, but he was so drunk he would have giggled at Azrael himself doing a poledance on his scythe just before he brought it down.
“Lies, all damned lies,” said the affronted cosener, affronted as only a true cosener can be.
“Well, yes,” Crowley shrugged. “Technically.”
“And who are you who claims to know my business so well?”
“Just another cunning man on the road, seeking some generous patron who needs to hear from the spirits, that’s all,” Crowley said with a rueful little sneer. The type was common enough these days-in more ways than one.
“I make deals with no demons,” said “Talbot,” looking around the grim little inn warily. “Only wholesome spirits. As do you, I’m sure.”
“Quite,” Crowley smirked. “Now, listen, my good fellow,” he said leaning in close as an irresistibly wicked idea-his first genuine one in a good long time and he was going to make it count-took hold of him. “If it’s work you’re seeking, I have it on good authority there is a gentleman not far from here very interested in the services of a medium. Not an especially well-to-do man, but by all accounts very high in the Queen’s favour. They say she consults with him often. No doubt this could stand you in some…safety, should you need it.”
The young man raised one wily eyebrow. “And if this job is so fine, why did you not pursue it yourself?”
“Oh, I would be very unsuited. My specialty is not what he’s seeking. You though…you strike me as a true tabula rasa.”
“Thank you, I suppose,” the young man said, eyes darting. “And this gentleman would be…”
“A Dr. Dee, that’s his name,” Crowley said, pretending to be absorbed in remembering this information so as not to grin too hard when “Talbot” started at the name. “His house is at Mortlake, and remember, he wants only the conversation of angels. You’d do well to wash your face at least, Mr. Kelley.”
The man blanched. “How do you - you…”
“I’m good at what I do as well. Please credit our profession,” said the demon with a cosener’s offense.
London-to-Mortlake or Somewhere Between, Spring 1583
Crowley didn’t particularly like doing this sort of thing-which of course he could do-for in all his millennia it never done him any spectacular amount of good, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that, in addition to being unnecessarily risky, it was, well…trite.
But the open gateway kept buzzing in the back of his mind-it would be rather like a telephone ringing constantly if he had a frame of reference for that simile yet-and all he had to do really was close his eyes and get a glimpse of the frightened and hapless Kelley sprawled out on the floor and clutching at phantom pains. Kelley was an open channel for an endless pageant of self-replicating, kaleidoscopic and incomprehensible symbolism. Being after being, introducing themselves with improbable names and spouting grandiose claims to sit at this Hand and that Hand of Glory, showing vision after vision and reciting combinations of number after number.
Dee’s cool, unflappable scientific interest in it all was scarier than anything the angels could come up with, even when they laid claim to catching all sorts of evil miscreants getting loose of the stones and helping themselves to Dee’s records.
As pantomimes went, Crowley thought it could have benefited from a great deal of editing.
And yet a few things at least were clear - the spirits were no longer limited to the crystals. And they were no longer restricted to the known and honest angels.
And somewhere in the shadows of that crowded room, watching it all, a fidgeting streak of silver wringing his metaphorical hands and sneaking peeks at Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica for more clues to the human’s hope for a sort of Grand Unification Theory of the Spirit World, was Aziraphale.
Crowley gave a long-suffering sigh, and finished the sigils and circles of chalk on his rented floor, and left his physical body behind to crash the party.
Dimly disguised in a raiment of cloud and a pattern of numbers that added up to shadow, he took cover in a background of the stone where the occasional entity even less reputable than himself swam up and away again, waving something that might have been a wing and might have been a tentacle in the maelstrom of dark aether. He couldn’t see terribly well, because the light of the angelic presences elsewhere made the darkness he swam through that much deeper, but he had enough of a vantage point to know where it was too dangerous to go.
Peering out from here at the nervous faces of Dee and Kelley in another dimension was like being deep under water and staring up at the sunlit surface, where the material world was rippling and unreal.
There were so many beings crowded in the astral soup around the entrance through the stone that Crowley was starting to worry he wouldn’t be able to see anything at all without sticking his head right up under Uriel’s wingpit, which would be a bad idea indeed. But then, the veil parted as a streak of light came up through the depths, all blinding in green and gold.
From the general psychic murmur all around, Crowley was clearly not the only one surprised as the ball of light breached the surface of the stone, and as if through a long glass tunnel he could clearly see the light take shape in front of Dee and Kelley, right there in their parlour.
“Am I not a fine little maiden?” said the spirit coquettishly, and indeed she was; wearing the form of a golden-haired girl-child in green with a crown of sunlight on her head and a crystal ball in her hand. “I am Madimi.”
Madimi left a gateway open in her wake; there was no angel stepping in to close it behind her, nor were there any demons rushing to take advantage of the lapse.
With calculating eyes, Crowley watched Kelley recoil and Dee lean forward, and behind them, among the book stacks, a silver shadow all but rest its head on its hand contemplatively, unseen by anyone but Crowley, for only he knew what to look for.
They always tried to be so scrupulous about guarding against wickedness, those humans with their prayers and their sigils and their little rules about who could and who couldn’t speak which Name, ad great nauseam. It made Crowley want to reach through the glass and pull Aziraphale in and give them an eyeful of just how wicked an angel could be. But all eyes were on Madimi, who had a light of heaven in her hand and a glint of hell in her eye, and to all appearances seemed to be, impossibly enough, something utterly new under the Sun.
She didn’t even have to extend her little finger for Crowley to know she already had Dee wrapped around it.
Mortlake, 1583
Aziraphale was not proud of himself for this. It was the sort of thing that of course he could do, and some strains of thought Upstairs held that it was perfectly fine to keep an eye out for potential error, yet there were others who (more quietly) held that Free Will meant exactly that, and the power to go skulking about like this was one easily abused.
After all, a whole generation of angels had pretty thoroughly abused the power of invisibility and inaudibility and the whole rest of the confusing array of unmanifesting to spy on the fair daughters of Men in the bath, and no good had come of that.
Aziraphale just thought it was rude. He wouldn’t appreciate it being done to him, after all. (And of course it had been, but mostly by a certain demon it was certainly within his power to smite for it).
Still, he hadn’t liked the looks of that medium, and surely it was within his purview to make certain that a devout man wasn’t led astray.
Once he’d started, it was bloody hard to stop anyway. Uriel?! What are you drinking, er, I mean, thinking?!
John was frantically scribbling down every piece of babble that came out of Talbot’s mouth while the latter stared fixedly into a crystal ball. Talbot wasn’t speaking any language known on Earth to very many beings besides the two others in the room: John and Aziraphale.
It was, in fact, a detailed lecture on the rules of grammar of the language. If nothing else, folks Upstairs knew how to appeal to a Cambridge man.
It was slightly preferable to Michael’s holding forth on the proper construction of a ritual table for seven hours, though - Aziraphale had never realised the Archangel took such a personal interest in carpentry and interior design.
Aziraphale had given up on trying to understand his colleagues long ago, (“ineffable” in his vocabulary translating roughly to a sentiment that would be expressed more concisely half a millennium later as “WTF?”). He found himself rifling through John’s effects and books again, hoping to get another good look at that Corpus Hermeticum, or at the very least a limited-edition Trithemius.
Amid John’s tempting papers, Aziraphale passed the shewstones not being used at the moment: crystal balls and skryers’ paint-lined bowls and astrologers’ lenses, and among them the convex mirror of obsidian from the New World, that exquisite circle of heavy black glass from the belly of the volcano. John had told him how it misted over when one of the priesthood of the savages studied it in a particular way, and that was how that bloodthirsty god (patron of sorcerers, no, don’t see it that way, it’s not as if John means to…) had got his name, Smoking Mirror.
It had a particular psychic clang all its own that Aziraphale found rather disturbing, and as he studied it, that particular visionary grey haze began to rise.
Among the gods of that faraway land, Smoking Mirror had a rival, and his name was Feathered Serpent. It wouldn’t do to read too much into that.
But when Aziraphale let his eyes go and really see what was amid the smoke, he wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t enough of it right where he was not so long ago, all the time; the stench of burning flesh, the screams, the glee of the crowd with their accursed snacks and ale and cheering as human fat melted and sizzled among the faggots.
He envied the Enochian conjugation lecture terribly at that moment, for as much as he tried to shake his head clear, the horrible deaths in the glass weren’t stopping. Aziraphale had a horrible sensation he was seeing them all. He was sure he’d recognised that poor girl after all, the one who’d put on men’s armour (Michael, what were you drinking, er, I mean, thinking?!?)
Amid the centuries of screams, there were too many he knew--including one he’d never heard before quite that way, which was familiar nonetheless, with its own particular timbre…
Not possible. Simply not possible. Surely he could have…
Aziraphale was having trouble believing the evidence of his own senses; after all, no reason to think this skrying glass of such sinister origin would tell the truth. He suspected that was why John rarely used it, after all. No reason at all--except that as far as he knew, it had no reason to lie.
It just made his mortal blood run colder than he could ever remember it being, and even his immortal aether chilled.
[~end part 2; TBC~]
Part 3
thanks to waxbean for the excellent beta!
Pt II of IV
Story by vulgarweed; Illustrations by quantum_witch
For General Summary, Notes, Warnings, Etc., see Part 1
Rating: PG-13, this part (NC-17 overall)
Warnings: Angst, of both the sulky and well-justified varieties. Allusions to violence. Rather cruel place to end it.
Pt II: In which Crowley tests the limits of sulking and meets problematic mortals of his own; Aziraphale dodges an awkward proposition; and both get an eyeful through the looking-glass.
Paris, France, 1578
Crowley lay watching his curtains sway in the breeze. It hadn’t got any more interesting in the last four hours. Time to move on, he most certainly thought, and not only because Paris was dreary. Pestilence had come through once again, insisting on taking Crowley out for a few rounds-mostly to see if he had any good gossip, which he didn’t. The Apocalyptic Manifestation was getting a bit of a swelled head, in Crowley’s opinion (to go with all of his other unattractive swellings); yes, yes, the plagues were very impressive and persistent, and the new look suited him (leprosy was so retro; bubonic plague was all the rage in Europe and smallpox stocks were rising in the New World). But Azrael still got more iconic representation, and that was a sore spot.
Well, of all the Manifestations one could run into, DEATH himself was hard to avoid in Paris, and busy as he was he always seemed to find more time to piss and moan about that Flamel character blowing him off yet again. Really, Crowley thought, one can only leave a flaming bag of brimstone on the alchemist’s doorstep so many times in a century before the joke starts to get old. But Azrael’s sense of vengeance, often indistinguishable from his sense of humour, remained eternally unchanged.
The humans were worse. Nowhere near as complicated as Italian sinners on the whole, French sinners were inclined to repetitions of more mundane variations on sins of the flesh and the pocketbook (often combining the two in vaguely clever ways), and their Black Artes seemed to involve an interminable number of nighttime trips to Les Innocents with shovels. Come to think of it, that might explain their obsession with seduction talismans. It wasn’t as if anyone were going to willingly come near them after one of those little expeditions made them smell ten times worse than the average Parisian, which was saying something.
Crowley was having the sulk of a decade, and lo, it was good. He had a jug of wine balanced unsteadily on his bare stomach, he was alone in his bed (a much more common occurrence than he led a certain angel to believe), and to punctuate certain moments in his pouting that he thought were particularly impressive bits of broodwork, he weakly threw another spike at the wall. Some fixed-eyed student of Ye Artes Arcane had given him a rather lopsided Tree of Life diagram once, and he’d been using it as a dartboard for years. (He almost never managed to hit anything above Geburah, but once he had completely by accident bullseyed the spot where Da’ath should have been and heard an indignant yelp from some being he hadn’t dared to try to identify. The Fabric of the Universe rippled only a bit in annoyance.)
He’d spent twenty years being conspicuously (to himself at least) almost everywhere except Italy or England, his third choice for non-appearance being Spain. The Eastern Mediterranean had been an exciting place a hundred years ago, and in those days he’d even managed to convince Aziraphale that maybe that pretty, mountainous Wallachia wasn’t such a great place to take his refreshing missionary-work-disguised-as-holiday-or-was-it-vice-versa just then, after that exhausting fall of Constantinople business. (The Prince at the time in that province was quite nasty, though effective.)
Aziraphale. As if that weren’t a name that could shoot his brooding levels up by a hundred angstpules.
Every time he got one of those commendations he didn’t deserve-and the Son of the Dragon himself had been another one, Crowley barely even met him-it was half flinch, half relief, and the ineffable third half was a sort of secret smile. He had a real secret, after all: surely having seduced an angel must count for something. But it was none of their bloody business. The very idea of exposing that to beings designed by nature not to appreciate it…
Well, then why can I appreciate it? At least I think I do.
All too well, he thought, which is why he was avoiding England again. Bless it, Aziraphale cared, and Crowley felt as helpless as a newly-manifested imp in the light of such nuanced and fussy attention.
How exactly had they got from Point A to Point Gimel or Gamma or wherever they were, anyhow? Oh, Crowley had tried to pass it off to himself as some kind of tempting challenge, but really, that hill on Iona with the rocks and what happened there? Honestly? He’d been trying to show someone he was already almost starting to think of as a friend (despite the vestigial clumsy use of weaponry) something fun. As in, hey, I enjoy this a lot, maybe you’ll like it too and we can do it together. Like chess. Like fishing. Or something.
Well, not exactly like that. He remembered when chess was invented, and he was pretty blessed sure he hadn’t spent centuries waking up sticky from fevered dreams that involved capturing Aziraphale’s rook. Hadn’t stared helplessly at those poufy hands and got all restless in the pants thinking about what they’d feel like moving a pawn those first two virgin squares. And he suspected it wasn’t normal to see one’s fishing buddy’s face last of all in the final moments of a particularly unpleasant discorporation.
It might be time to move on again, he thought. Maybe Venice isn’t so bad these days. He resolved to do so, after the last of the wine, a desultory wank, and a few months’ more of napping.
***
He didn’t yet anticipate meeting a philosopher who could actually say something interesting.
“So that if in bodies, matter, and entities there were not mutation, variety, and vicissitude, there would be nothing agreeable, nothing good, nothing pleasurable. So…because justice has no act except where there is error, harmony is not effectuated except where there is contrariety,” said the young ex-monk from Nola-near-Naples, writing a dense allegory about a great career change of the gods.
Well, Crowley thought, here at least is someone who knows a good deal about vicissitude and transitions, hardly able to set down his hat in a house before some church stiff rushes to denounce it and its suspicious lack of lice.
Giordano Bruno was, if nothing else, a natural-born troublemaker--and wherever trouble was made, Crowley could keep boredom at bay and embellish some distracting reports. Reports that distracted him from England at any rate. Crowley watched him from a distance for years-until Bruno decided he should try his luck in England, which Crowley thought was just his luck.
When he found out that Aziraphale was still keeping far, far too much company with that bookish occultnik who nurtured pretensions to holiness even while he whispered in Elizabeth’s ear about Empire Britannia, Crowley thought he was being admirably restrained in not smashing anything in his jealous pique. But far away in an abandoned Paris garret, a piece of parchment on a wall with its dart-riddled Sephiroth went up in flames and took the entire block with it.
Mortlake, England, 1581
“Oh…” said Aziraphale in a whisper of ecstatic shock. “I’ve never seen…you have…oh, John, it’s…” The angel clapped his fist to his mouth to keep from embarrassing himself further.
“So long it took me to get you here,” John said with a rueful little smile. “Her Majesty Herself is easier to persuade than you are.”
Aziraphale was consumed with a rather blasphemous intensity of reverence and a smattering of something he feared was at least Covetousness, if not actual Lust, for John’s library.
The house had once been a rather unremarkable cottage, but it was beginning to grow ungainly appendages at an alarming rate, all of them crammed ever fuller and fuller with brittle parchments and dry papers and, unnervingly close to them, the alembics and vessels and burners and pipes and tubes and grinders and filers and measuring instruments that suggested the manufacturing of strong spirits to the uneducated (and the summoning of them to the paranoid). There was no space on the wall that was free of maps and charts and nattered scrawl of sigils; even the windows were occupied with astrolabes and sextants and strange arrangements of mirrors and lenses, poking out at the veiled stars.
“Does it meet whatever your expectations may have been?” John asked, grinning.
“Expectations?’ Aziraphale said, “No, I couldn’t have imagined this. I should have, I know you’ve been collecting for thirty years, but…”
“A goodly amount of it has passed through your own shop.”
“I have to confess, I don’t like letting them go.”
“Nor do I. I want them all to come to me and stay here, to land on my hand like tame doves. I have found a worthy rival in you.”
That was probably what it was that Aziraphale had responded to when he’d first met John in that library at Cambridge all those years ago-the sense that he was a gentle soul, a scholar and mystic, a prayerful seeker after the true knowledge of the Mysteries who might poison his own mother for the right book but would make certain it was completely painless. It wasn’t so much a friendship as a reflection; Aziraphale thought that if he were a human, John Dee was exactly the kind of human he might have wanted to be. But he knew he could never have got away with a beard like that.
“Why do you ever leave?” Aziraphale finally asked.
“To acquire more, of course.”
“Bit of Her Majesty’s business too, they say,” Aziraphale insinuated. He wasn’t born yesterday-or indeed, at all.
“So the rumourmongers say,” John shrugged. “For my part, I think I can do my Lady’s work far better from here. But I go wherever I might be of use.”
“Of course,” Aziraphale said distractedly, because he was. There was nowhere he could put his eyes that wouldn’t lead to some bottomless fascination. If only there were some polite way of getting rid of the man himself for a few years. Finally he settled on a bit of handwritten scrawl that lay beside a crystal glass, a few sigils and calculations and some things that could only be doodles, a half-page in several languages that was completely incomprehensible in all of them, and one that made all the fine hairs on the back of Aziraphale’s neck stand completely on end.
Oh no. He can’t be serious.
“W-What is this?”
“Codework, mostly,” said John dismissively, as obviously baiting as possible. “Dead-ends, alas. Some scratchwork for a star chart.”
Aziraphale shook his head sternly. “You knew I was coming. You wouldn’t have left it out if you didn’t want me to ask about it.”
John smiled wryly. “You have my measure as always. This is what it is: sometimes I worry I have come to the limits of my library.”
“I doubt that.”
John rolled his eyes. “Yes, it’s possible. At any rate, I have come to believe that our Creator would not have put this complicated Glory into such systems and processes, and given us the desire to understand it all, were there not ways for a righteous petitioner to know. And I have devoted my life to collecting and understanding the works of all those who had glimpses and insights, and I do believe a pathway has been laid for us to ask…”
“Well, I would certainly never discourage prayer…” Aziraphale said, a bit woodenly.
“Yes, that’s what I mean - but a more scientific and properly focused prayer, using methods I think I’ve-“
“Beware,” Aziraphale said wearily, unable to keep a certain tone from creeping automatically into his voice.
“Risky, yes, but we would never know the New World were it not for brave sailors and wise mapmakers-“
“Yes, your friend Mercator did wonderful work with the-“ Aziraphale flailed
“I’m making an analogy.” John sighed, obviously thinking that for all his learning, his fellow bibliophile could be rather dense.
“I’m trying to change the subject!” Aziraphale snapped.
“And I won’t have it changed!” John shouted. “This is important to me.”
Aziraphale crossed his fingers behind his back in the last-ditch hope that John wasn’t going to say what he knew perfectly well John was going to say.
“I seek to ask my questions more directly,” John finally did say. “I have learned of a book, from the Ethiopians, on what little is known of the lost language before Babel. I believe it is possible to make sure I contact only the messengers of God and not less wholesome spirits.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes and prayed for strength. For all his learning, his fellow bibliophile could be awfully dense. “You want to talk with angels.”
“It sounds preposterous, I know…even blasphemous. But-“
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s impossible…” Aziraphale sighed.
“But I need help,” John said sadly. “I am no medium. The conversation of spirits almost always eludes me - perhaps I am too much a creature of the intellect and not enough of the soul. I know there are those through whom they come more easily, and I must say, as long as I’ve known you, I have on occasion thought-“
“What?” blurted Aziraphale.
“That there is something about you…”
“You want me to be your medium? Have them speak through me?”
“I was thinking of proposing that, yes. Have you a gift of skrying?”
Aziraphale pinched his nose. “No. I really, really don’t think I do.”
The Cock and Bull Tavern, 1582
What did it take for a body to be able to hear himself think in such a place? (Answer: for the body, there was no help for it-the twenty-seventh stanza of a vaguely musical pornographic epic involving divers Catholic nobility and a stunning array of farm animals, some long extinct and some newly discovered, was equipped to drown out even thoughts involving sex, food, and/or shelter for most mortals, much less anything more rarified.)
But this particular body did not in fact need any part of said physical body to hear, which is why he was able to eavesdrop on the ratty-looking young man three tables over, who bundled his black cowl closer around his head to hide the sight of his cropped ears, which everyone paying attention had already glimpsed.
“The jewels, no, that I had nothing to do with. And even so, had I the means to recompense the lady out of the goodness of my heart, I would do so, for it pains me to see such distress.”
“But the way I heard the tale, Mr. ‘Talbot,’” said Crowley, insinuating himself, “is that you do have the means, for you made the coins by your very own hand.”
The other man at the table giggled, but he was so drunk he would have giggled at Azrael himself doing a poledance on his scythe just before he brought it down.
“Lies, all damned lies,” said the affronted cosener, affronted as only a true cosener can be.
“Well, yes,” Crowley shrugged. “Technically.”
“And who are you who claims to know my business so well?”
“Just another cunning man on the road, seeking some generous patron who needs to hear from the spirits, that’s all,” Crowley said with a rueful little sneer. The type was common enough these days-in more ways than one.
“I make deals with no demons,” said “Talbot,” looking around the grim little inn warily. “Only wholesome spirits. As do you, I’m sure.”
“Quite,” Crowley smirked. “Now, listen, my good fellow,” he said leaning in close as an irresistibly wicked idea-his first genuine one in a good long time and he was going to make it count-took hold of him. “If it’s work you’re seeking, I have it on good authority there is a gentleman not far from here very interested in the services of a medium. Not an especially well-to-do man, but by all accounts very high in the Queen’s favour. They say she consults with him often. No doubt this could stand you in some…safety, should you need it.”
The young man raised one wily eyebrow. “And if this job is so fine, why did you not pursue it yourself?”
“Oh, I would be very unsuited. My specialty is not what he’s seeking. You though…you strike me as a true tabula rasa.”
“Thank you, I suppose,” the young man said, eyes darting. “And this gentleman would be…”
“A Dr. Dee, that’s his name,” Crowley said, pretending to be absorbed in remembering this information so as not to grin too hard when “Talbot” started at the name. “His house is at Mortlake, and remember, he wants only the conversation of angels. You’d do well to wash your face at least, Mr. Kelley.”
The man blanched. “How do you - you…”
“I’m good at what I do as well. Please credit our profession,” said the demon with a cosener’s offense.
London-to-Mortlake or Somewhere Between, Spring 1583
Crowley didn’t particularly like doing this sort of thing-which of course he could do-for in all his millennia it never done him any spectacular amount of good, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that, in addition to being unnecessarily risky, it was, well…trite.
But the open gateway kept buzzing in the back of his mind-it would be rather like a telephone ringing constantly if he had a frame of reference for that simile yet-and all he had to do really was close his eyes and get a glimpse of the frightened and hapless Kelley sprawled out on the floor and clutching at phantom pains. Kelley was an open channel for an endless pageant of self-replicating, kaleidoscopic and incomprehensible symbolism. Being after being, introducing themselves with improbable names and spouting grandiose claims to sit at this Hand and that Hand of Glory, showing vision after vision and reciting combinations of number after number.
Dee’s cool, unflappable scientific interest in it all was scarier than anything the angels could come up with, even when they laid claim to catching all sorts of evil miscreants getting loose of the stones and helping themselves to Dee’s records.
As pantomimes went, Crowley thought it could have benefited from a great deal of editing.
And yet a few things at least were clear - the spirits were no longer limited to the crystals. And they were no longer restricted to the known and honest angels.
And somewhere in the shadows of that crowded room, watching it all, a fidgeting streak of silver wringing his metaphorical hands and sneaking peeks at Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica for more clues to the human’s hope for a sort of Grand Unification Theory of the Spirit World, was Aziraphale.
Crowley gave a long-suffering sigh, and finished the sigils and circles of chalk on his rented floor, and left his physical body behind to crash the party.
Dimly disguised in a raiment of cloud and a pattern of numbers that added up to shadow, he took cover in a background of the stone where the occasional entity even less reputable than himself swam up and away again, waving something that might have been a wing and might have been a tentacle in the maelstrom of dark aether. He couldn’t see terribly well, because the light of the angelic presences elsewhere made the darkness he swam through that much deeper, but he had enough of a vantage point to know where it was too dangerous to go.
Peering out from here at the nervous faces of Dee and Kelley in another dimension was like being deep under water and staring up at the sunlit surface, where the material world was rippling and unreal.
There were so many beings crowded in the astral soup around the entrance through the stone that Crowley was starting to worry he wouldn’t be able to see anything at all without sticking his head right up under Uriel’s wingpit, which would be a bad idea indeed. But then, the veil parted as a streak of light came up through the depths, all blinding in green and gold.
From the general psychic murmur all around, Crowley was clearly not the only one surprised as the ball of light breached the surface of the stone, and as if through a long glass tunnel he could clearly see the light take shape in front of Dee and Kelley, right there in their parlour.
“Am I not a fine little maiden?” said the spirit coquettishly, and indeed she was; wearing the form of a golden-haired girl-child in green with a crown of sunlight on her head and a crystal ball in her hand. “I am Madimi.”
Madimi left a gateway open in her wake; there was no angel stepping in to close it behind her, nor were there any demons rushing to take advantage of the lapse.
With calculating eyes, Crowley watched Kelley recoil and Dee lean forward, and behind them, among the book stacks, a silver shadow all but rest its head on its hand contemplatively, unseen by anyone but Crowley, for only he knew what to look for.
They always tried to be so scrupulous about guarding against wickedness, those humans with their prayers and their sigils and their little rules about who could and who couldn’t speak which Name, ad great nauseam. It made Crowley want to reach through the glass and pull Aziraphale in and give them an eyeful of just how wicked an angel could be. But all eyes were on Madimi, who had a light of heaven in her hand and a glint of hell in her eye, and to all appearances seemed to be, impossibly enough, something utterly new under the Sun.
She didn’t even have to extend her little finger for Crowley to know she already had Dee wrapped around it.
Mortlake, 1583
Aziraphale was not proud of himself for this. It was the sort of thing that of course he could do, and some strains of thought Upstairs held that it was perfectly fine to keep an eye out for potential error, yet there were others who (more quietly) held that Free Will meant exactly that, and the power to go skulking about like this was one easily abused.
After all, a whole generation of angels had pretty thoroughly abused the power of invisibility and inaudibility and the whole rest of the confusing array of unmanifesting to spy on the fair daughters of Men in the bath, and no good had come of that.
Aziraphale just thought it was rude. He wouldn’t appreciate it being done to him, after all. (And of course it had been, but mostly by a certain demon it was certainly within his power to smite for it).
Still, he hadn’t liked the looks of that medium, and surely it was within his purview to make certain that a devout man wasn’t led astray.
Once he’d started, it was bloody hard to stop anyway. Uriel?! What are you drinking, er, I mean, thinking?!
John was frantically scribbling down every piece of babble that came out of Talbot’s mouth while the latter stared fixedly into a crystal ball. Talbot wasn’t speaking any language known on Earth to very many beings besides the two others in the room: John and Aziraphale.
It was, in fact, a detailed lecture on the rules of grammar of the language. If nothing else, folks Upstairs knew how to appeal to a Cambridge man.
It was slightly preferable to Michael’s holding forth on the proper construction of a ritual table for seven hours, though - Aziraphale had never realised the Archangel took such a personal interest in carpentry and interior design.
Aziraphale had given up on trying to understand his colleagues long ago, (“ineffable” in his vocabulary translating roughly to a sentiment that would be expressed more concisely half a millennium later as “WTF?”). He found himself rifling through John’s effects and books again, hoping to get another good look at that Corpus Hermeticum, or at the very least a limited-edition Trithemius.
Amid John’s tempting papers, Aziraphale passed the shewstones not being used at the moment: crystal balls and skryers’ paint-lined bowls and astrologers’ lenses, and among them the convex mirror of obsidian from the New World, that exquisite circle of heavy black glass from the belly of the volcano. John had told him how it misted over when one of the priesthood of the savages studied it in a particular way, and that was how that bloodthirsty god (patron of sorcerers, no, don’t see it that way, it’s not as if John means to…) had got his name, Smoking Mirror.
It had a particular psychic clang all its own that Aziraphale found rather disturbing, and as he studied it, that particular visionary grey haze began to rise.
Among the gods of that faraway land, Smoking Mirror had a rival, and his name was Feathered Serpent. It wouldn’t do to read too much into that.
But when Aziraphale let his eyes go and really see what was amid the smoke, he wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t enough of it right where he was not so long ago, all the time; the stench of burning flesh, the screams, the glee of the crowd with their accursed snacks and ale and cheering as human fat melted and sizzled among the faggots.
He envied the Enochian conjugation lecture terribly at that moment, for as much as he tried to shake his head clear, the horrible deaths in the glass weren’t stopping. Aziraphale had a horrible sensation he was seeing them all. He was sure he’d recognised that poor girl after all, the one who’d put on men’s armour (Michael, what were you drinking, er, I mean, thinking?!?)
Amid the centuries of screams, there were too many he knew--including one he’d never heard before quite that way, which was familiar nonetheless, with its own particular timbre…
Not possible. Simply not possible. Surely he could have…
Aziraphale was having trouble believing the evidence of his own senses; after all, no reason to think this skrying glass of such sinister origin would tell the truth. He suspected that was why John rarely used it, after all. No reason at all--except that as far as he knew, it had no reason to lie.
It just made his mortal blood run colder than he could ever remember it being, and even his immortal aether chilled.
[~end part 2; TBC~]
Part 3
thanks to waxbean for the excellent beta!