The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [135]
“Sexuality, of course, is the central element in many of these Black celebrations, doubtless because the Church has aligned itself so definitively against free sexual expression. You've read the Marquis de Sade?”
“Er,” I replied. I felt a bit like the bespectacled undergraduate.
“Well, then you'll remember how often his corrupt sexuality contains reference to elements of the Church—the Host, the Mass, monks, priests.”
“What about blood?” I asked, a bit desperately.
Professor Ledger's bright eyes came to rest on my face. “My dear, why don't you tell me what you're after? Is this academic? Or one of your little investigations?”
I took the boat to the side opposite the footpath and worked the pole into the muck below, trapping us against the tree-lined bank. Once secure, I stepped over to the centre and settled onto cushions, retrieving the champagne and topping up our glasses.
“It's a case,” I answered, and told her about it, my voice just loud enough for her aged ears. I did not tell her all: not Holmes' personal stake in it, nor the identity of the dead woman found ten miles from my home. I think she guessed that I was leaving out a large part of it, but she did not comment.
“So,” I concluded some quarter hour later, “when there were objects that resemble quill trimmings at the murder sites, stained by what appears to be dried blood, and bits of black candle-wax as well, we had to wonder.”
“Necromancy,” she pronounced, her old voice quivering with distaste. “From nekros and manteid: ‘dead divination.’ Blood spells and invocations. Sealing a covenant. The darkest of the dark arts. And to use fresh blood, in situ …” She shook her head. “You must stop this person, Mary.”
I forbore to make reference to her deprecating “little investigations” comment, but dug the rucksack I had brought from London out from under half a dozen rugs, and handed her the Adlers' copy of Testimony. “It might help, if you were to look at this and tell me what you see.”
“Of course,” she said, although her hand hesitated, just a moment, before closing on the book's cover.
“I have to take it back to London with me,” I said in apology.
She patted her pockets until she found a pair of reading glasses, and opened the book.
I extricated the pole from the sucking mud without swamping the boat, and continued idly downstream to the Isis proper, then looped back up the Cherwell. We passed under Magdalen Bridge and were nearly to Mesopotamia when the aged academic closed the book and removed her spectacles.
I continued to punt in silence, though my muscles burned and my back ached.
“He writes as if in conversation with himself,” she mused. “No explanation, no attempt at a reasoned argument, no discursus at all, except to enjoy the sound of his own voice. And yes, it is a he, most definitely.”
“Yet this is not a journal, it is a printed book, of which there are at least two in existence,” I said.
“If there are two, there will be more. This is an esoteric document to be presented only to True Believers. I should imagine he may have another, either in existence or in preparation, to set his beliefs before the outer world.”
“The Text of Lights,” I said. “That was what one of his disciples called it.”
“Light indeed seems to be the basis of his cosmology—or rather, as you say, lights of various sorts: sun, moon, comets. Which reminds me, which comet do you imagine he was born under?”
“We think that of September 1882. There were no meteors then, as far as I can find, but he seems more than a little flexible when it comes to chronology. And to astronomy and geography, for that matter.”
“Hare-brained thinking at its best,” she said in disapproval.
“Madness being no excuse for sloppy ratiocination?” I asked, half joking.
She was not amused. “When one encounters a mystical system based upon the physical universe, it is generally manifested by a tight, even obsessive internal logic.”
“However,” I replied, “internal