Leoncaro's upper lip had been scarred during a brief pro career in boxing after World War II. The scar glowed whitely when his lips compressed in an expression of shock and concern.
"Sorry to disturb you, Sebastiano," his visitor said deferentially, in his familiar North Georgia drawl.
"So it's happened to you," Leoncaro replied, looking at the hideously torn throat, the bled-out, slightly evanescent body.
"'Fraid so."
"I'm deeply sorry."
"It appears he's on a rampage," the Shade of Pledger Lee Skeldon observed. Vocal cords had been destroyed, so the Shade's lips didn't move. But the form of communication they were using was older than spoken language. And they shaped their thoughts colloquially, not in formally rhymed voice.
"Again."
"Yes, again."
Leoncaro didn't feel uncomfortable conversing with a corpse. He'd seen far worse examples of inhuman butchery. He fingered the plain rosewood crucifix on his breast with two stubby fingers, considering the significance of Mordaunt's message to them.
Rampage
. Well, they'd had it good for too long. And perhaps become complacent in their stewardship of the human race.
Leoncaro had a broad workingman's hand. Knuckles broken and rebroken, now swollen, inflamed by arthritis. He was paying for the long-extinguished need to put another man down, in the ring or brawls wherever he'd chanced to find them. He had become a scholar, a theologian, a world leader, but he was peasant stock and had grown up during a war that devastated his country. He understood the despair and rage of the majority of his vast flock born to low fortune and doomed to hard times. For every audience he held at the Vatican he held six for the suffering in their barrios, the depleted, scavenged places. Consequently Leoncaro was the most popular Pontiff—with the people, if not the leaders of the Curia—since the death of Roncalli, John the Twenty-third, forty years ago.
And Pledger Lee at the moment of his death had been the best-known evangelist of the twentieth century, an inspiration to millions of Protestants, a confidant of U.S. presidents. His passing would be mourned around the world.
While the nature of his death caused great fear.
Both souls were among the heirs of those who preceded human ken, myth, and fable, the original Caretakers of Terra. And obviously they had a problem.
"The question remains," Leoncaro mused, "what does Mordaunt have to gain this time? He can only kill or order to have killed that which is temporal. The immortal is beyond his range. Confusion, deceit, and beguilement are his only weapons. The Trickster has turned human beings against themselves countless times. But we manage to put things right after each convulsion."
"I believe something's made him bolder this go-round," the Shade of Pledger Lee responded. "The latest economic depression is deepening. It's already destroyed all of the social optimism and positive energy generated in the past—well, since the last Great Depression ran its course in '49. Now,
this
depression is shaping up to be a humdinger, Sebastiano. Serious economic depressions result in mindless rage and the madness of crowds. And, inevitably, as if the recent crimes of Islamic terrorists are not enough, we get another world war, raising the consequences to chaos and nuclear holocaust. 'A wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world's ruin,'" he concluded, quoting from the Norse epic of Ragnarok. "Conditions Mordaunt needs for his ascendancy to—it just makes me want to puke to say it—
spiritual leader
of what is left of mankind."
"Not a pretty prospect," remarked another stellar Presence, who had slipped quietly into the Pontiff's study and was leaning against the wall near the windows.
Leoncaro turned in his creaking chair.
"Don Raimundo," he said with a stiff nod to the plasmic representation of the revered Brazilian sorcerer. "Is this going to become a Consistory? I don't remember calling one."
"No, no, Sebastiano. Vibrationally I happened to be in the neighborhood, so—" Raimundo gazed sorrowfully at the evangelist's throat. "It happens, no?"
The Shade of Pledger Lee gave a shrug.
"Was it as unpleasant as being burnt at the stake?" the plasmic image of the Buddhist nun Ling Qi asked quietly. She still retained vivid memories of events in fifteenth-century France.
"Also in the neighborhood?" Leoncaro inquired with a smile. His study was becoming a trifle crowded.
Ling Qi, a living saint to millions in Southeast Asia, bowed politely.
"If it is all right with you, Sebastiano."
"Well, as long as you're here," Leoncaro said graciously. Ling Qi was a favorite of his among the Twelve.
He paused for a few moments to allow the representative from Ocean Parkway to slip in under the wire, his frothy white beard sprinkled with points of light. Then, on a sterner note, raising his eyes, Leoncaro said, "No more, please. We have enough for an informal colloquium; let us keep it that way for now."
The slowly diminishing Shade of Pledger Lee made room on the divan for the petite form of Ling Qi, her shaved head radiant as a crystal ball. The Rebbe from Brooklyn, a venerable eighty-six-year-old, eased into the only chair in the study. Don Raimundo of Brazil continued to lean against the wall, arms folded, a brown hard crust of a man with a pencil-line mustache.
They all looked at Leoncaro, who prepared his thoughts carefully, moving objects around on his desk in an absentminded ritual. A bronze replica of the Eiffel Tower that served as a paperweight; a couple of framed photographs, one of Leoncaro's mother, the other a Polaroid snapshot of a pickup truck with a Texas license plate and a bumper sticker that read CONGRATULATIONS, GOD, IT'S A BOY.
"As for Mordaunt's long-cherished hope for Ascendancy, which we have thwarted every time:
Mordaunt lacks the power. It is permanently beyond his reach." Leoncaro paused as if expecting a reaction, but they were all in agreement, for now. "True enough, he will benefit from a social crisis, waxing on the despair and doubt of the multitudes in our conservatorship. His atrocities—the savage destruction of Pledger Lee hours ago and of Sai Rampa last year, and the attempt on the life of our number seven, the Dalai Lama, that fortunately only wounded him—may serve to temporarily weaken the restraint we have on Mordaunt. And, speaking of the atrocity that so recently occurred—" Leoncaro looked at Pledger Lee Skeldon's waning Shade. "You won't have the down time you're accustomed to before establishing another human persona. Not with Mordaunt this aggressive."
"Figures," the Shade replied with an understanding nod.
"I'm afraid another takeover will be necessary to increase our strength."
"Ohhh," Ling Qi said in a faint voice. "Those can be rough."
"Begging your pardon, Sebastiano, but there's no one around in my—I mean—the late Reverend Skeldon's league as a religious leader. You know what television evangelists are like—old whores in new paint. The medium expands avarice exponentially. The pious con games. The cynical false promises. All that purely awful rococo gold furniture. Healing cloths, miracle water, it's a theological bazaar, tacky to the max."
"Religion has always been a strong consumer item," the Rebbe commented. He was taking his pulse. Like Leoncaro, the Rebbe was an elder of the Caretakers, and given to ramblings about his pending retirement. In mortal form, at an advanced age, he'd been suffering the expectable hardenings of this, malfunctions of that.
"I wasn't thinking of another career in Protestant evangelism" Leoncaro said to the tattered Shade of Skeldon.
"That's a relief. I almost lost Pledger Lee when I stepped in ten years ago. A good mind, but shallow perceptions. And I surely did underestimate the strength of his ticker?"
"Sometimes the best and strongest horses cannot be ridden" Raimundo observed. "There was a time when I was reading entrails for a Magyar chieftain named Trul—"
Leoncaro looked pained and silenced the sorcerer with a raised finger. Don Raimundo was one of the younger Caretakers, and not always as focused as he needed to be.
Ling Qi looked thoughtfully at the high ceiling of the study, where cunningly sculpted cherubs with stubby wings lolled about.
"If I may make a suggestion, Holiness. With Mordaunt on the offensive again, could it be that we haven't kept him busy enough?"
"Or is it possible that we are simply not all that we used to be?" the Rebbe speculated. "And Mordaunt senses it is so."
"Historically we've had our down times," Leoncaro acknowledged. "Those periods of apocalypse and human suffering Pledger Lee anticipates for the immediate future." He nodded to the Shade of the late evangelist. "You'll pardon me if I continue to refer to you as if you remained in your temporal aspect."
"Go right ahead," the Shade replied amiably. "After a long stretch cooped up in a human persona, I tend to forget who I am myself."
"Tell me about it," Ling Qi said softly and a little sadly. "But the Rebbe has made an excellent point. Mordaunt could have something we've overlooked, to our detriment. A means, perhaps, of reuniting the Trickster's halves of his soul."
"We split his black soul and it will stay split," the Shade of Pledger Lee scoffed, and then, upon reflection, "which is a good thing. Don't think it could be done again, without sacrificing the core energy of all the Caretakers. Three of us gone already, burnt out, nothing left but cinders floating derelict somewhere beyond the Lights."
"I suspect Ling Qi and the Rebbe are right," the sorcerer Don Raimundo interrupted. "But I could only be sure of what Mordaunt is up to by settling in his neighborhood for a while."
"We will take no unnecessary risks," Leoncaro objected. "And what can Mordaunt know that is beyond the scope of our knowledge?"
"Not beyond our knowledge," the sorcerer persisted.
"A growing power we perhaps have been neglectful in not bringing under our control."
"Please explain."
Don Raimundo spread his hands. "I'm speaking of the Avatar. The, uh, most recent incarnation."
"Oh, come now!" the Rebbe protested. "Of course we all know her, but Eden Waring is a child."
"More woman than child now. Don't be too quick to dismiss her" Leoncaro said. "True, she was chosen in haste by her predecessor, but that choice was partly dictated by dire circumstances. Mmm, yes. Eden Waring. She does have one impressive talent that none of the other Psi-actives possess."
"The left-handed Art" the Brazilian sorcerer said.
"Exactly."
"Meaning?" Ling Qi inquired.
"Like the late Kelane Cheng" Leoncaro said, "Eden Waring can produce her doppelganger."
After a few moments of contemplative silence in the Prelate's study, the Rebbe said, "I don't understand how Mordaunt would find that useful."
But the sorcerer chuckled. Leoncaro looked around at him with a nod of approval. Then he smiled indulgently at the other elder of their company.
"I still don't—"
"Rebbe, where do doppelgangers come from?"
"The parallel universe that most closely resembles this one. Dpg's are, in every vital respect, the mirror images of their homebodies."
"Yes; and are there any limits to the ability of the dpg to travel from one universe to the next, or back and forth in time?"
"Aha! Of course?"
But the Shade of Pledger Lee Skeldon observed, "That doesn't help Mordaunt. He's earthbound, and he lacks the left-handed Art. We split his soul, took the feminine half away, and that reduced his power by half."
"The only way we could handle him," Ling Qi said.
"He doesn't know where his other half is. Although he might appreciate the irony if he did. And she doesn't know who she is, or where she came from."
Ling Qi shuddered slightly, as if in sympathy, and looked away from Leoncaro's reproving glance.
"What if Mordaunt does know where we stashed his, let us say, his better half?" Don Raimundo wondered.
"He didn't get it from me," the Shade of Pledger Lee Skeldon replied. "And I'm pretty sure old Sal Rampa didn't spill the beans, either."
"Both of your personas were dying, and violently," Leoncaro reminded him. "Can you be sure of what was going through your mind during those terrible moments?"
"Pledger Lee's mind. I never make it a practice to store trade secrets in obvious places. And it wasn't Mordaunt himself, Sebastiano; an emissary the Trickster beguiled. So I'm certain that my—Pledger Lee's—assassin didn't learn a thing. Wouldn't matter anyway. He's brain-dead from the beating he took. He was just there to kill. But—now that you've raised the point—maybe next time it will be Mordaunt himself at the throat of one of you."
"He cannot assume another human shape," the Brazilian sorcerer said. "He may only become. . . the beast. That is more of a danger to him than to us. Each time he shifts, it drains and ages Mordaunt's persona."
"We are accustomed to being on our guard; we will now take precautions to assure the safety of our mortal selves," Leoncaro advised them.
"I would like to send Mordaunt a message," Don Raimundo said, fire in his dark eyes. "A flood, perhaps, raging down from that desert mountain, with accompanying thunderbolts—"
"Unacceptable risk to innocent humans," the Rebbe said. "Does the term
Caretaker
mean anything to you?"