Silver Nitrate(43)
“Why would you want a bracelet against the evil eye? You didn’t say that would be necessary,” he said and extended his hand, holding out the envelope.
Urueta took it, peering into its interior. He set it down on the bar cart and continued mixing his drink, his brow furrowed.
“It’s not. What’s wrong?” Urueta asked.
“Tristán saw something,” Montserrat said.
“Can you be more specific?”
Tristán was a bit of a coward, always had been, and he was not ashamed to admit it. That was why, when they were kids, he’d depended on Montserrat. Even with her limp and her small stature she’d had no qualms about standing up to the other kids or engaging in mischief. She was the one who invited him to run past the train tracks and break into the grain storage facilities. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that he merely stared at Abel, not wishing to say it out loud.
“Tell him,” Montserrat whispered.
Tristán licked his lips. “I saw my girlfriend standing in my apartment. She passed away ten years ago. And now that thing came in an envelope for you. Abel, what’s happening?”
“Your girlfriend?”
“Yeah. She was in my apartment.”
Rather than laughing at them or calling Tristán crazy, Abel put his bottle and glass down. “The permutation of water and the water bearer,” the old man muttered.
“That’s something from The House of Infinite Wisdom,” Montserrat said. “What does it mean?”
“It’s the levels of magic Ewers talked about.”
“Could you explain it to us?” Montserrat asked.
“Well, yes, but I’m sorry, it’s nothing to worry about, to be a necromancer you’d need years of—”
“Please explain,” Montserrat said, cutting him off, her voice cold and sharp.
Abel looked like he was going to protest, but it was Tristán’s turn to glare at him. The director sat down on the couch across from them and clasped his hands together.
“I don’t know where to start. Ewers left Germany and originally went to South America looking for extinct magic. He believed, like others did, including Himmler, that there had been an ancient Aryan civilization that preceded all other civilizations. While men evolved from monkeys, the Aryan people were part of this superhuman race.
“Ewers knew an author and amateur archeologist named Edmund Kiss who made a trip to the Andes, where he claimed to have found a sculpture with Aryan features. He also claimed the ruins at Tiwanaku were of Aryan origin. Ewers ran with this idea. He thought the Aryan superhumans had founded great cities, but needing workers, they had created the perfect vassals themselves. This explained the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya empires, even the legend of Atlantis. All these people were made by the Aryans, but then they revolted and overthrew their masters. Eventually they forgot most of the magical practices of their ancestors, although they retained snatches of rudimentary knowledge. Ewers went to South America and made his way up to Mexico because he was trying to gather those fragments of knowledge.”
Tristán had heard similar bullshit in shows like Enigma. It was always aliens who had built the pyramids. Nobody could conceive of any Indigenous group erecting anything more complex than a hut.
“When Ewers began organizing his magic circle, he said people like him, people of Aryan descent, were naturally suited for magic practices, seeing as it was they who had essentially come up with this technology millennia before. Then there were Indigenous people who had preserved their culture and bloodline, the Mayas for example. And then you had everyone who had basically evolved from monkeys. Therefore hierophants needed to have some of that pure Aryan or Indigenous strain to wield the higher forms of magic. Other people could cleanse themselves of the harmful Christian ideology that had stamped out Aryan magic practices and handle the lower forms of magic. They could be adepts, but not hierophants.”
“All right, you’re saying that what, Montserrat and I are monkeys?” Tristán asked, gripping his hands tighter together.
“No, that’s what Ewers would have said. I thought…well, look it doesn’t matter, the point is he created a magic system, and he designated a level of high magic that could be wielded by the hierophants, the leaders of the congregation. This high level of magic included the ability to know the past by speaking to the dead, to know the secrets of the present, and to glimpse the future. He associated this with certain elements. Water was for necromancers. But you couldn’t be one. When Ewers picked us to be his hierophants he looked at our birth dates, our family histories, our—”
“Maybe he was bullshitting you,” Montserrat said. She had an expression like she had caught sight of a loose thread and was about to pull it.
“I’m not—”
“He said you were special, didn’t he,” she continued. “He couldn’t have said you were a Maya prince by looking at you. He must have said you were the descendant of a great Aryan lord. Yeah, you couldn’t be a monkey, not with those light eyes.”
Tristán had grown up knowing that there were skin color scales. The whiter you were, the better. Even his “exotic” looks were only allowed on television because he had the correct mix of facial features, height, and skin tone. Yet he still stared at Montserrat in surprise and then at Urueta.