Prologue
The Prime Minister of Everything
Even if you just glimpse it for a second, it stays with you forever. That’s what it’s like for people who witness an act of war, a violent crime, a natural disaster, a fatal car crash. The same can be said, I guess, if you’ve seen a sasquatch, lake monster, angel, UFO, et cetera. You’ve got an idea about how the world works, and in the space of a few seconds something chews up that idea and spits it out, and you never see things the same way again. It’s been true for me since the night I sawSorcerer.
It was at the last of the nighttime ceremonies, the “midnight games,” in Ivor Wynne Stadium. The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods had conjured up a continuum threshold strong enough to bring through Yog-Sothoth, the giant extraterrestrial being they worshipped; the alien they called a god. Yog-Sothoth, in fact, was halfway through already, its tentacled bulk billowing up like a thunderhead in the night sky, and if that wasn’t bad enough, all hell was breaking loose in the stadium itself. Creatures called the Hounds of Tindalos had been summoned – to kill my father – and they swarmed the playing field, tearing through anyone who got in their way. Giant centipedes calleddritches, attracted by the energy field generated by the expanding threshold, were digging their way up through the Astroturf.
Then something appeared against the boiling clouds and expanding void of the threshold. A blast of blue flame drove Yog-Sothoth back from the brink, and something else, just as huge and alien, emerged in the sky above the stadium as the continuum threshold shimmered and shredded and faded out of existence.
That “something” was an enormous airship – not one of the new shiny ones I’ve been checking out online, but one as old as theHindenburg. Everything about it looked ancient – the flaking rubber of its mountain-sized gasbag, the yellow incandescence that glowed from the windows of the gondola, the official ID numbers – R102 G-FAAX – painted on its side along with the vessel’s name: SORCERER.
Like I said, this took a matter of seconds. ThenSorcerer flickered into translucency, and vanished altogether into the stormy sky north of the stadium. I remember a few other details – there seemed to be some kind of shiny hood covering the nose and spine of the bag – but a lot of things were happening at once. One of the Hounds had slashed me across the right side, its talons ripping through my shoulder and down my chest, and I was losing blood. In fact, if Mr. Shirazi hadn’t happened along, the Hound’s next blow would have torn me to bits. But Mr. Shirazi, with that device he called a Delphic scythe, sent that Hound back to the pound. What I took away tha