The Demon Code

Начало книги

The participants had been prepared.

Their captors had bound their hands and their feet, lined them up in the prescribed order and forced them to kneel on the cold stone floor, in the small room at the back of the old building. The room was really too narrow for the ritual that was to take place there. There were others that would have been much more suitable, but this one had been chosen by the prophet for esoteric reasons that few of them understood.

It was a warm night, the sun hiding just below the horizon, but the flagstones were still cold. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for other reasons that were equally valid, the men and women trembled as they waited on their knees.

Ber Lusim sent one of his men to tell the prophet that they were ready to proceed.

The man returned almost immediately, walking respectfully behind the holy one. Shekolni had attired himself in red robes hemmed with black — red for blood, black for mourning. Red braids were woven into the black of his beard, and on the slender palms of his hands, which were like the hands of a violinist or a doctor, the Aramaic words for life and death had been painted in red ink with black cartouches — signifying that God had deputed to him both the power to preserve and the power to destroy.

Читать дальше →