“Worth a shot. According to Eshe over there, this isn’t your ordinary dumpster fire. It included psychotropic ingredients from a very old recipe that hasn’t been in use for, oh, I don’t know, about two thousand years.”
I stiffened. “Hallucinogens? Was anyone affected?”
Suddenly, Brody’s involvement in this case became a lot easier to understand. I’d worked with the man when I was a kid in Memphis and he was the low man on the police totem pole, assigned to oversee my attempts at finding missing children using psychic means. We’d been successful, but the stigma of paranormal investigations had never left him, and here in Vegas, it had turned into his full-time job.
Now he shook his head. “Not as much as they should’ve been, according to Eshe. Which makes things even weirder.”
At that moment, the High Priestess stepped into our circle. Given that we were on the grounds of Caesars Palace, her toga could initially pass her off as one of the extras on staff, but that illusion only lasted until you looked her in the eyes. Eshe was every ounce the renowned Greek oracle she’d been prior to ascending to the Council at the height of her powers. Tall and slender, with richly bronzed skin, it was her face that was the most surprising. She was gorgeous, of course, with exquisite high cheekbones, green eyes, and a fall of dark glossy black hair that spilled over her shoulders. But there was something about her expression that transcended beauty and toggled right on over into terrifying.
“There is no way this should be possible,” she informed us, and her tone more than anything made me stiffen with concern. Eshe was haughty, condescending, and outright obnoxious as a matter of course. But she was none of those things right now. She legitimately sounded scared.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What’s in the trash can?”
She sent me a withering glance, which, frankly, made me feel better. “It’s not a trash can, it’s an ancient salver that, if you actually carbon dated it, may well have been manufactured in the early two hundreds BCE. When the needs of our supplicants demanded it, we used these containers with initiates to help them walk the bridge to the other side.”
I swung my gaze from her to the, uh, salver. “The other side of what? I thought the deal was that you guys got high, got visions, then shared them with any and all who asked, the crazier the better.”
For once, Eshe didn’t take exception to this jab, but merely nodded. “You would be correct regarding the primary function of the oracle. We listened to anyone who came our way, and offered the advice they so desperately desired. But there was another sect of seers that could only be found deeper in the caverns. Very few were admitted to that sacred space. Those who gained access were willing to pay whatever price to get the answers they sought. To give them the level of information they needed, we had to do more than, as you would say, get high.”
“Which means…?”
“Which means that with the proper application of mind-altering substances, additional abilities would manifest, such as astral travel. Not just astral travel to other parts of this world, but to other realms entirely.”
I stared at her. “Other realms? Like what other realms, specifically?”
She regarded me steadily. “You should know. You’ve been there.”
I didn’t rise to that bait. Granted, the name Atlantis could be spoken aloud in Vegas without anyone paying much attention, but it still was a level of crazy to which I didn’t aspire before coffee. “And where else?”
She shrugged one elegant shoulder. “There are many lenses into the world of humans, many doors that can be opened and stepped through, from which you can see the pageantry of humanity with far greater clarity then you can while living among its people. The herbs used in this salver are a demand for such higher-level clarity. Someone wishes to see the future in a very specific way, using the heights of the oracle’s power. This request hasn’t been made, to my knowledge, in hundreds of years. And I would know. As the oracle, when such a fire is set, I am bound to come and answer the questions put forth.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re telling me in all the time since you’ve ascended to the Council, this has never happened before?”
“Oh, it’s happened, but not in probably fifteen hundred years. The old ways died very quickly when the end came, and the esoteric learnings of our sect were lost and scattered by design. There are some things mortals were not meant to know.”
“Right.” This whole keeping-the-dangerous-magic-from-the-stupid-humans trick was another favorite of the Arcana Council’s. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand it, but it often proved to be more trouble than it was worth. “So what’s the ramification of this fire being set here, then? Is this some history buff gone out of control? Showing off?”
“I don’t think so,” Eshe said. “The setting of this fire is quite deliberate. The question that it asks succinct.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Brody said. “This is news to me. There was nobody on scene when the brush fire started, or at least nobody that the cameras picked up. The place was empty, then a second later, we have this weird bucket thing and flames. Then we got about thirty flattened tourists and the firefighter crews showing up with gas masks to put the thing out. There was no question being asked, and there was nobody standing around to ask the question.”
Eshe waited out Brody’s diatribe with remarkable patience. When he finished, she inclined her head graciously. “There were times when it was not prudent for a querent to reveal his identity to the oracle,” she said as if this was perfectly reasonable. “Nobody knew who the power was behind the smoke. There were legitimate concerns that military action would be brought against anyone asking the wrong question. People had to be careful.”
He made a rolling gesture with his hand. “And? So what was the question?”
“Depending on the specific mixture of herbs and psychotropic drugs, the smoke would change its consistency, color, and scent. With a sensitive-enough reader, you understood the question with remarkable specificity.”
More hand rolling. “And?”
To my surprise, it was not Eshe who answered but Lainie. She remained off to the side, her head canted as if she was using every sense but sight to see the scene in front of her.
“It is a summons,” she said. “An ancient summons for a higher power to act. A beckoning of the star to shine down upon the people and guide them.” Her voice was high and strange, but there was a beauty to it, a resonance that made everyone around us stop and glance over, even if they couldn’t hear what she was saying. In that moment, Lainie appeared as regal as the High Priestess, despite her youth.
“A star?” I shot a look at Eshe. “We don’t have a Star on the Arcana Council, do we? Has that seat been filled without me knowing it?”
She shook her head, appearing genuinely surprised. Apparently, Lainie hadn’t already dropped this part of the message on her.
“There has never been a Star on the Arcana Council, just as there has never been the Sun or the Moon.”
“Yeah?” asked Brody. “Why is that? I mean you people have Death on the Council. How hard would it be to have somebody represent the Star?”