Soloman’s Keep • South of Italy • West Coast

Apollo felt like a donkey. A burro, he thought to himself in silent humor, as he went through the outer city of Soloman’s Keep. Behind him, on his back, the slumped over body of Alestor and next to him, grabbing his arm, Dion and his wounded abdomen.

Soloman’s Keep rested south of Italy, a little ball to the countries boot as Apollo put it. And from outside any normal person, aviator or spectator, would not see a thing but mist but from within, within the magical island, Apollo saw it for what it really was. An island made for Vicars, an island covered and protected and hidden well by that white mist.

He had made it here, lugging these two around, past the golden high castles of the elites of Soloman’s Keep, passed the high-walled towers and pointy buildings of the scientists and mystics, he had passed the glory of Soloman’s Keep and now wandered with these two through the Smog. The comical (nothing funny about it) name given to this lowborn caste of Vicar society, the Smog. An area that encompassed eighty percent of the island, an area that housed most of the weak and dull and stupid Vicars. Those who could not rise, those holy grunts of the church’s military might against the demonic forces.

Apollo wandered the Smog, where the mist collected at his knees, with two injured and broken men at his back and side. Villages scattered across yellow-dry grasslands, trees slumped and heavy with dew, small plazas with poor roads whose brick lined floors did little to stop impeding weeds and mushy ground. The glory, the shame of Soloman’s keep: the Smog lands.

He stopped, at a building with crooked metal bars and slumped over angel-statues, to what looked like a prison but was actually was an asylum. He dropped Alestor there, a nun came rushing out.

“What is this?” She leaned down. Her eyes came up, to the mess that was Apollo and Dion. “Are you two alright?”

“Dark priest,” Apollo muttered the words. Two more men came rushing after the nun, they wore black cloaks and sharp-nosed masks like birds, like crows. They lifted the man and tried at Apollo but he turned them away with a turn of his shoulder. He left. Quickly, with tired feet, knowing why everyone stared and watched him, knowing that the blood and the cuts had not healed and still maintained that greasy gloss of recent suffering. A red, wet hue all across his face. But he could not leave and could not stop and had to see to it that he and only he brought Dion to the hospital. It did not help that everything was so scattered and roundabout.

“Who are they?” Anonymous Vicars said underneath their breaths, weapons in hand for the two men seemed to carry about them that aura of deadly danger.

It did not help that people gawked, with curious and anxious fear, at the two half-dead men wandering like ghosts through the knee-deep mist. Cities full with recent riots, a call of new democratic rites were silenced at the sight of the two. Large crowds of Vicars, tall and mighty, reeling away from the two.

Whatever drama, whatever politics afflicted the city, whatever life little or big dared show itself upon the two phantoms wandering and wailing, all of them were silent. For the two came like a storm, through grey brick abodes and dilapidated grey-bricked homes, reducing all conversation and culture to quick silence.

Apollo stopped. Dion grit his teeth and hushed himself as Apollo hoisted him down. He held his wound as he did so, sprawled out on a white stretcher. Two doctors came to see him through the buildings of the hospital with that giant red cross above its metal twin doors. The doctors urged Apollo, tried to cajole him inside with quick words and with enough patience, had decided to try and grab him and force him on a wheelchair.

Apollo slapped their hands away, he raised his head above the doctors and flashed, only briefly, those red eyes.

They never tried to touch him again and the man continued on, now holding the stump of his left arm, now tasting the metallic blood from the cuts and gashes across his nose bridge and cheeks. He was headed to his final destination, Holden’s Den, a port town at one end of the kidney-shaped island. He could hear the boat rafts hovering over water, lightly tapping against wooden boards. He stepped foot on one such boardwalk, the creak felt oddly soothing as he went along the port. He walked, some ten minutes (time felt longer when you were in pain) and settled for a little grey building. It had no pointed top, it was rather flat and still depended on kerosene. He could tell by the smell that came off the tilting lamp above the black oak door. He knocked. He tasted salt, perhaps it was the ocean. Perhaps it was something else.

His eyes were shutting. That heavy lump above kept them closed and narrow, He leaned against the wall and realized quickly as if all pain had finally caught up, that even standing was its own Olympian task.

He knocked again and looked at the sign to the right of the door. EE LL II. He shook his head, the doubles cleared.

Elijah.

He knocked again,

“Elijah.” He said with his hoarse throat. “Elijah!”

His body wavered, he did not know which way to tilt and spun in place instead. His blood dragged down, what felt like wet claws of blood that stuck to his face and pulled down. He waited, trying to think of things to keep his attention, attention he hoped to keep to stop himself from sleeping. Sleep, which he feared, would end up in a short-winded coma. The footsteps kept at it from behind the door, he could tell the man was on the bottom floor by the depth and pop of sound.

He leaned forward, put his hand against the wall. He looked up, the rusty door hinges crying as the door opened. And he nearly collapsed on the man.

Elijah caught him. Apollo used him to stabilize himself.

“Jesus Christ, what happened?” Elijah asked.

And Apollo, now against a wooden beam, spinning and waddling like a broken boxer. He smiled, a half-toothed grin.

The blood dripped onto the floor and he said, with the seams of his flesh undoing themselves upon his face, “Could I have a glass of water?”

He sat in that little-crooked chair that creaked with each of his turns. To his rear, across the desk, were the busy sheets of a metal curtain and the low diffusion of murky twilight across the black and white colored room. A terrible color scheme, Apollo thought as he coddled his wounded face. Elijah turned to him, an empty glass was set in front of him. An empty pitcher was too the right of the glass, on the square table between the two of them. Apollo kept his eyes away from that seasoned gaze of Elijah. He was his boss, and showing weakness was a kind of embarrassment to his boss.

“What happened?” Elijah asked. He closed the blinds. The blue tinted color of the dark closed off.

“Where do I start?”

And Apollo looked at the man in that chair who listened intently with locked hands, the one with the blonde comb-over and the thick beard with grey-tinted ends, with the tired and red eyes of a veteran who had seen too much in what little time he had been on this planet.

His eyes widened as Apollo told his tale. Then they shriveled and his whole face was bitter. And at last, when Apollo was over, he slammed two hands against the desk.

"Fifty years ago! Just fifty years ago, kid, and we would have cut your head off and burned your body as an apology to the Lord himself, Jesus Christ." He rubbed his nose bridge. “You went to Hell? Are you aware of how much of a crime that is?”

"Well, at least I'm still alive." That sarcastic tone, that half nervous tone that went high pitch. “I’m only telling you this because I trust you. It's a confidence I hope you appreciate because I really need help.

“With what? What the fuck do you need, kid?”

Apollo reached into his coat and unveiled the cup. He slid it across the floor.

“It’s an artefact, I don’t know what kind and I don’t know if it works anymore. I don’t think it does, I think I broke it on my last trip up, with all those corpses and with Alestor and Dion with me. But I’m sure it might be useful to the Canaries.”

He, of course, spoke of the Hospitallers of Elezear, the scientific branch (the second established out of the three) that acted as principal municitaries of all things arcana, holy or otherwise. Which had given them a bad reputation as devil worshippers (though to Apollo, they seemed more like selfish, ambitious scientists which might have been worse), which hade made them obtuse and dismissive of public showings, which of course gave them the name, the Canaries, like a bird trapped in a cage.

“And you don’t want them to know I gave it to you,” Elijah took the cup and inspected its inside. It was cracked, near the base.

“That’s right,”

“What about that Alestor guy then? Why wouldn’t he squeal on you?”

“The Hyena changed him,”

“The talking dog?” Elijah tried to remember the details of Apollo’s story. It had all been so fast, so intense after all.

“Yeah, demon or whatever he was. Well, that Hyena did something to him. Hit him upside the head or something? It’s turned Alestor a bit retarded now. I mean that literally, too. He seems stupefied, been like this since I brought him up too. Stupid sometimes, catatonic others.”

“Convenient.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I do, I just wonder at what cost that convenience comes.” Elijah said.

"Right."

Apollo idled in the brown leather chair he sat on. It was ripped, he felt the hole on his right thigh, the cotton riding up his backside. Most of the room followed this trend of jankiness. The books were on uneven stacks, ripped at the spine. The crosses were held at a slant. That room, he swore was too small and terribly slanted.

“They’re going to hang you two up the fucking wall for this.”

“If they found out.”

“That’s a big if.” Elijah said. “Why shouldn’t I save myself the trouble and let you take the heat instead?”

“Because you know I’m telling you the truth. All of it. About eating Astyanax, about Alestor, about the Hyena.”

“Goddamnit kid,” Elijah looked out the window with renewed fear. He walked with a limp, his eyes looked out towards the horizon and the torches lit across. They looked like small candles, never-ending wicks.

“You chose the worst time to hand me your trouble.” Elijah said.

“Haven’t you seen them?”

“Who?”

“The mobs.” Elijah said. “They look like god damn youth rallies. It’s madness.”

“Yeah, I saw them. They threw me dagger eyes.” A nun came in with a bag of ice. Apollo nodded and took it and placed it against the swell above his eyes. His dried blood flaked off under the condensed water. “I’ve been out so long I can’t afford to give a shit about the petty politics of this place. All the same to me, the very nature of power attracts the worst people. What can you do?”

“This is different,” Elijah said.

“Well, it’s the way we work. Us knights of the rose,” Apollo said sardonically. “The eggheads and the aristocrats do things their own way. Nepotistic oligarchy for one and divine rite for the other, and I can’t imagine either of those being any worse than democracy.” He leaned back. The coolness of his ice bag made him close his eyes and nearly moan in pleasure.

“Don’t get sidetracked, this isn’t about democracy. It’s about what it’s inviting.”

“And what’s that?”

“They call themselves sungazers because they’re the only ones who can tolerate the light of truth. Their words not mine." He expected a laugh from Apollo, but he was too busy enjoying his ice. "And these people want something done. They want the old ways back.”

“Old ways? Like what? Like stoning gays? Burning witches?”

“Crusades. War. The death of heresy, they claim.”

“Crusades?” Apollo laughed. “Tell them they’re off by a couple hundred years.”

“This isn’t funny, Apollo,” Elijah said. “And they should concern you. If they even knew half of what you told me...”

“And you wonder why I never like coming around, why I hate the Vatican and this shit island.” Apollo leaned in, he looked at the ice bag and to the redness of dried blood on it. “I get out of one battle and into another,”

“These people are desperate. If they knew what you did, oh boy, you'd better hope the courts got to you first - Oh boy, oh fucking Hell.”

"Choirboys with swords," Apollo said, calmly.

"If they find out..." Elijah repeated.

“They won’t because you’re not telling anyone and this secret is not leaving this room. You'll get the cup to the Hospitallers, Canaries, whatever the fuck they call themselves and it'll be like nothing ever happened. We'll all be in the clear,”

“I'm surprised. You've come back an optimist?”

“I’m a changed man,” Apollo smiled. He raised his left stump and flashed his toothless gums.

“My prestige - My life! My life is is on the line if I cover for your ass.”

“It's a thrill for all of us, whoop de do,” Apollo said. “Just make sure you get it done, alright?”

"Don't act so calm, boy."

"You can't have excitement without risk," Apollo said.

“Let’s see you say that with a burning stake up your ass.”

Apollo giggled. Elijah didn’t, for there was no joke to it. It was pure sincerity, pure worried fear.

He tapped his pen on his table. His veins protruded from the white collar of his priest's garbs. The fluorescent glow from above making a low humming, like a fly on the wall. Elijah spun the cup a bit with his free hand, it felt weightless.

“You’re still writing that report,” Elijah said. There was some relief to the cadence, to the weightlessness of the words as if he had conceded to something, had signed without the print, had made a deal without the shake. Apollo straightened out.

“As long as I can do it from bed.” Apollo said.

“Don’t get smart dipshit,” Elijah said. “You make sure Dion and you have similar accounts. Don’t you mention the trip, Xanax-”

“Astyanax,” Apollo said.

“Astyanax, Horace, all that stuff. You leave it out or you won’t have to worry about no crusaders knocking on your door, I’ll be the one with the claymore down your throat.”

“Right,” Apollo stood.

“And please. Please, please, please. Stay out of trouble would you?” Elijah asked.

“I can’t promise that,” Apollo kept the ice to his face. “I’ve got answers I want.”

“To what end? What the fuck can’t you let go, you won for god's sake. You won!”

“Well, there’s my first question. Why’d I win? How? Why’d the Hyena help me? What does he want?”

“Don’t think too hard, demons come and go with their fleeting feelings. They’ll help you and destroy you at whims, out of entertainment. Don’t you go around looking for straight answers from fickle people, that’ll get you hurt.”

“Wouldn’t want that.” Apollo looked at his bloody stump. The scar tissue had already formed a coagulated mass of nearly purple-dark blood.

“Alright, get away. Go to the hospital and get checked out.”

“Thanks, Eli.” Apollo started out.

Elijah pushed at him through the front door. “I wish you really were as hurt as you looked, maybe it would have humbled you. You left a silent prick and you’ve come back a loud-mouthed prick.”

“Well, as they say, you either adapt or you die.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck off.”

And he slammed the door behind Apollo. The sunset over the low horizon, over the brilliant gold towers of the Bud, that lay center and upmost, sitting high above the shoreline, beyond any hope for any Vicar of this lowbrow, lowborn civilization. It was a source of contempt for him and of relief, for though he did not belong to those snooty men and women, those aristocratic Vicars, he could at least appreciate their taste. For seeing the reflected light on those bright towers made him smile, even if just for a fraction of a second, on the bit of good flesh still hanging on his busted and torn lips.

What a sight, he thought, they look like hands trying to touch the heavens.

And perhaps they’d burn like them too.