Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [93]
Below on the field, the ancillary sacrifices continued, to keep the Electrocity Generators roaring and the Hell-Flux well charged. The boiled corpses of sacrifants were wheeled away in barrows by slug-skinned Ushers, only to be replaced by more. A wonderful sight, yes, but then Curwen gazed upward at the colossal form of the Demonculus.
Nothing can jeopardize my creation. Nothing.
Footsteps could be heard winding up the minaret’s spiral steps, and, next, a figure rose into the small open-windowed chamber: the project’s official Psychic Security Minister, a Kathari-grade Diviner.
“Master Builder Curwen,” the man-thing’s voice etched, and then it bowed. “It is my honor to be in your presence.”
Yet not mine to be in yours, Curwen thought. Curwen was Human, and therefore distrustful of all that was not, especially creatures like this, things that could supposedly see the future. Additionally, the Satanic Visionary was hideous to behold: it was bald, emaciated, and brazenly naked. The sucked-in skin and stringlike muscles were repulsive enough, but even more repulsive was the Clairvoyant’s skin tone, a bruising blue beneath which maroon arteries throbbed. Even more unsettling was the psychic being’s eye—not eyes, eye, for it possessed but only one, set hugely in the middle of its gaunt face. An eye the size of an apple. The Diviner’s bald head shined, tracked by various suture scars from multiple telethesic surgeries; its ears were holes, and its genitals . . .
. . . were best left undescribed.
“What tidings do you bring me, Seer?”
The Diviner’s voice keened like nails across slate. “Great Master Builder, I know that the distant Sputum Storm rests gravely on your mind, but it is with the joy of serving the Morning Star that I tell you to put your fears aside. I foresaw this very storm, and I have foreseen, too, that it shall not venture here.”
The aftereffects of hearing the Diviner’s awful voice left Curwen’s skin crawling, yet it was with relief that he sat down in his jeweled seat. “Praise the Dark Lord.”
“Yes.”
“But I pity those now in its midst. Is it the Great Emptiness Quarter?”
The visionary’s bald head nodded. Scarlet veins beat beneath the shining skin.
Curwen began, “I’ve heard—”
“So have we all—that something of grievous import is taking place there, but what it is, I’m not privy to, via my training and indoctrination.” Then the massive eye blinked once, clicking like the snap of a twig.
Curwen squinted out again, in the vicinity of the storm. What a ghastly thing to happen, even in Hell. A deluge of snot . . . But he must not worry over projects not his own.
Only the Demonculus and the success of its animation were his personal concern.
I must succeed.
Curwen’s gaze turned to his guest. “Diviner—”
The cadaverous figure smiled, showing black teeth. “Is there something you wish for me to divine, Master Builder?”
Of course, it could read his mind. But now that the very Human question had occurred to him . . . he was afraid to ask.
The Diviner’s voice screeched as the thing went slowly back down the spiral steps. “The answer to your question . . . is yes—”
The Diviner continued to descend.
“—and of this you can be sure, for I have foreseen it . . .”
Curwen sat semiparalyzed for some time—paralyzed by euphoria. He stared at the Demonculus’s immobile form through the master window, and the question he’d thought but dared not ask was this: Will the Demonculus be successfully animated?
(II)
The wind gusted from multiple directions, each gust resounding like the caterwauls of ravening beasts; and it was a pall of a diseased green that seemed to have lowered in churning layers over the entirety of the Vandermast Reservoir as well as a sizable portion of the Great Emptiness Quarter itself. The Sputum Storm raged, just short of breaking. Since the alert all lower-echelon Conscripts were ordered to tie themselves to the security lugs along the ramparts, while the Golems (much heavier and therefore less likely to be blown over the