Declare

by Tim Powers

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria vanescere.”

Satan’s body was covered with silver scales, and his round torso was a grimacing, pop-eyed face, but it was the figure’s profiled head that howled in the boy’s dreams—it was the round-eyed head of a voracious fish, almost imbecilic in its inhuman ferocity.

Andrew’s mother had instructed him in geography, as well as mathematics and Latin and Greek and history and literature and the tenets of the Catholic faith, but except for the Holy Land she had always dealt cursorily with the Middle East.

He always felt that he should go to Confession after having one of these dreams, though he never did; he was sure that if he could somehow manage to convey to the priest the true nature of these dreams, which he didn’t even know himself, the priest would excommunicate him and call for an exorcist.

“Not all the beasts that were kept out of the Ark had the decency to perish,”

If there was any solace to be derived from the Communist philosophy in the face of death, Hale had not studied Marx deeply enough to find it; but at the same time the feverish Our Fathers and Hail Marys that droned in his head and even twitched his lips from time to time seemed to lack some crucial carrier wave, so that they propagated no farther than the inside of his skull.

end I disappear from time to time, and I see to it that my skills are never indispensable—it is the indispensable agents who are always the first to be purged, because their very existence proves an inadequacy in the Party as a homogenous whole.”

“That’s right,” said Elena slowly, nodding. “If I’m to die for the Party, I would prefer that it be at the Party’s hand. So Lot and I will be obedient but not evident for a while.”

Hale thought of Elena’s friend Maly, who had voluntarily gone to Moscow to be killed, and he wondered fleetingly if Ishmael had also been a religious man, once.

Sin by sensuality, and you sin as a beast; sin by dishonesty, and you sin as a man; sin by pride, and you sin as the angels.