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Hell, wrote the mad man in his lonely tower, is the absence of God’s love not brimstone and sulphur and nightmarish visions. The pains of Hell are metaphorical as well as metaphysical. The tortures, the torments, imagined as perpetual flaying of skin and the application of saltpetre to the wounds, are nothing beside the emptiness where once there was God.

He put down his pen and stared at what he had written, a chill creeping into his heart. It was not as though he could claim ignorance. He knew, on a level bone-deep, exactly what he was doing. He could extrapolate – within reason – the consequences his actions would draw.

He, Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest of them all, was going to Hell.

There was a timid knock on the workshop door, probably one of Giuliano or Lorenzo Medici’s lackeys come to plague him. He left it unanswered. Tired feet shuffled away and he was alone again.

When he had commissioned the workshop in what had been Cosimo’s tower it had been for its proximity to the heavens. Every day he would rise up and work side by side with the angels in the sky, and now, like the brightest of them all, he was doomed to fall.

All for the sake of science.

The quest for understanding.

One page in one of his notebooks. A single drawing but its implications were legion.

The drawing, amid pages of inventions and ideas and studies of motion, even of God’s masterwork – man. Proportional and perfect in every way, even down to the musculature and anatomy. It was a blueprint for creation. Study after study of skulls, the secret geography of the flesh beneath the skin, where man was reduced to tendon, bone and sinew. He had studied the human form in all of its vagaries, examining a multitude of specimens, fat, tall, thin, short, lean, sinewy, muscled, hirsute, hairless, crippled, deformed, malnourished and bloated. He recorded what he saw. Each variant added something to his knowledge, allowing him to modify his blueprint for creation. Amid the sketches were organ system observations, bone and muscle structures and reproductive systems. How many of Florence’s sycophants would have blanched at and renounced his obsession with anatomy had they but known that the cadavers he stripped of flesh layer by layer had been stolen from the local morgue.

It had been an obsession with him. He locked himself away in Cosimo’s tower, a single window and the sliver of Florence’s rooftops that it revealed his only connection to the mundane act of living that went on beneath him.

A small bird flitted across his vision. Da Vinci watched its flight, the frenetic bursts of energy that helped it dart from one wave of air to the next. There was none of the easy grace of one of the bigger avians. This one seemed to be in a constant fight against the forces of heaven and earth – but it was doing it. It was soaring over the city, tasting the kind of freedom he could only dream of. Now if he could somehow transfer that notion into a mechanism, perhaps a rotating air-screw or a coiled spring. The idea had merit, even if it so closely mimicked the vanities of Babel and mankind’s towering ego. He looked at the sky and knew, just knew, that one day men would fly like the birds and the angels.

Occasional sounds filtered through the stone floor from the workshops and forges below where the apprentices slaved away in the glow of thirteen furnaces, striving to enhance their master’s reputation. They worked on alchemy and more mundane miracles like cannons and construction braces for the city’s mighty fortifications. Many a Florentine dream was haunted by the rhythmic hammer blows emanating from the depths of Cosimo’s tower, iron striking iron, and the hellish hissing as the red metal was plunged into vats of water to cool.

A year ago he might have called this non-life Hell, but now he knew better.

Now he understood that Hell was something of man’s making.

The room was cluttered with evidence of his genius – or madness. It was a fine line, the distinction between scientist and heretic. If a delegation from the Vatican ever found their way into his dominion no doubt they would bind him and carry him out to be burned at the stake for profanities against the Lord with his prototypes of devices meant to elevate man to the realm of the angels so that they might fly through the clouds; designs so that the surgeons might open a man’s chest and understand the intricate map life within; and worst of all, the empty clay vessel he called Lucifer, the most beautiful of all.

Da Vinci returned to his desk.

The greatest gift is life, he wrote, each letter meticulously framed. Man without doubt the greatest of all His creations. We can build. We can shape and yet we cannot create. We are not Him. Or so the Church would have us believe with their scriptures and their simplicities. I believe we can create. I believe that in every one of us there is a small piece of Him that gives us that power. That is my sin. That is my damnation. Science and numbers are our key to Godhead. They ARE God. In science and numbers lie the answers to every question we can imagine. That is the genius of His creation. There are answers waiting to be found and questions waiting to be asked. God is not some intangible deity, some ephemeral religion. God is in the details all around us. We need only look to find the code to decipher His true face. The rest is Church fuelled lies and hocus-pocus as they fear their power and influence could wane if ever people knew that they came into contact with the divine every day.

He discarded the pen and went over to the table where Lucifer lay, half-formed in clay waiting for da Vinci to unravel secrets of the threads that bind flesh and soul. The secret, if ever solved, would elevate man from the level of creation to creator. It would – HE would – make men into Gods.

It wasn’t merely ego, he thought, looking at the perfect lines of Lucifer’s face.

It surpassed that. It truly was genius.

Leonardo let his hands gentle over the anatomical perfection of his creation. The clay felt like dead flesh beneath his touch, so exact was the illusion. Lucifer’s body had been constructed around a metal frame that was precisely jointed, just like the countless skeletons he had examined by whickering candlelight come darkness.

The apprentices were downstairs now, labouring over the individual parts that would come together to create the whole, a perfect replica of da Vinci’s own hands, to prepare Lucifer for his last and most precious gift: life.

They hadn’t the slightest comprehension of what it was their insignificant nuts and bolts of alloyed metal would combine to become, but they would, if Lorenzo The Magnificent could not be swayed from his intended public display of da Vinci’s clockwork man. The man was a fool but he was a fool with influence and power and enough sycophants orbiting him to make him believe he truly was magnificent and not merely another tyrant eager to inflict pain and suffering on whosoever threatened to tarnish his pretended magnificence. Leonardo harboured no illusions. If his clockwork man failed to prance and dance like some overblown marionette Lorenzo Medici would exert every ounce of his ‘magnificence’ to ensure that da Vinci’s body would take on the warmth and texture of Lucifer’s pseudo-flesh as it sank, weighted down, to the bottom of the harbour.

“What am I to do?” he asked Lucifer’s empty shell.

The fragrance of vanilla, out of place in the workshop, was the first hint that he was not alone.

“Who you are dictates what you should do.” Da Vinci turned to face the newcomer. “Who are you? Painter; Sculptor; Maker of Men; Architect; Bringer of War; Musician; Engineer; Inventor or scientist?”

The scent of vanilla flared as though in response to the passion driving the newcomer’s words.

“I am all of those, and none of them.” He reasoned, shielding his eyes as the creature came into full and beautiful view. It hurt to look at. Pure white light blazed off it. Light so fierce it was almost impossible to see behind it to the creature with its wings of fire, each feather a miracle of perfection, so different from the last, in all of its naked glory. It was beautiful but not in the way that the romantic artists imagined. The creature’s beauty was savage. “And either I am truly insane, or you, you are an angel of the Lord.”

“Michael,” the creature said.

He carried no sword, yet all the Church talk of Archangel Michael was as God’s sword.

“Have you come down to kill me?”

“Do you deserve to die?”

“How can I answer that? I have sinned, more than most, truth be told, but do I judge myself as worthy of death? No, I do not.”

“Then I shall not kill you.”

“Why are you here? Are you even here? Is it all my thoughts of divinity that have driven my mind feverish enough to conjure angels out of the ether?”

“I am here because Elohim bade me…” the word seemed to stick in the divine one’s craw. “Beg you to give up your folly with this, this creature.” It looked distastefully at the stillborn sculpture of Lucifer. “And give up all dreams of creation. He would have you work with the miracles He gave mankind, not try to breathe life into your toys. Even if you succeed, if you animate that thing – “

“He is called Lucifer.”

“And you think that is amusing, no doubt? Even if you animate your devil it will not be a man, it will be soulless, a golem. A thing of flesh without a soul. Where God’s love should suffuse it with life there will be only emptiness.”

The angel’s words echoed his own writing from just moments before. Emptiness. The absence of the divine. Hell. What this messenger was telling him was that even if he did breathe life into his creation, Lucifer would be a living Hell, not his masterpiece.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yes you do. The artist in you believes me. It knows the beauty of the soul. The painter and the sculptor believe me. They have seen that beauty in every living thing. They have recorded that beauty on canvas and in clay. Even the scientist believes me, despite being desperate not to. It has no empirical evidence of a life existing outside of God’s care. It is conditioned to believe in numbers, in quantifiable results, therefore based on the evidence of its own eyes, even the scientist in you believes me.”

“And if I don’t stop?”

“Then you will have made nothing more than a companion for my lost brethren in Hell. A new Bright One, as far from God’s love as the first.”

Da Vinci realised he was standing over Lucifer’s clay form, a hand placed where its heart would have been had it had one, with almost fatherly propriety.

“Give it up.”

But of course, he couldn’t.

Creation was an addiction. The Archangel feel the hunger in him. The craving for power. To understand. To go beyond understanding.

“If you must create life, follow the cattle down there, procreate. God did give you the power to create life – “

“But it is not good enough! It is on His terms. Find a partner, make the beast with two backs, and if you are lucky, very lucky, you might, just might, conceive. It is not good enough.” His voice had risen almost to the level of a shout, but the angel had already left, its tears solidifying to multi-faceted mutli-hued glass, where they struck the floor, each of the tears resonating with an increasingly more desperate note. The chorus of tears was desolate to hear.

Alone, da Vinci stared at his creation lying there lifelessly. All he could think was that he was doing something right. God himself had sent his sword down because he was frightened.

It would take time but he would give Lorenzo Medici his clockwork man.

It was the most amazing feeling, to know that He Who Doth Create, Knower Of All, was afraid – the feeling faded as fleetingly as it had appeared. He knew. God Knew. Whatever da Vinci could do with Lucifer it was because He allowed it.

“What kind of toy am I?” he asked, but it was a rhetorical question.

Over the coming days and weeks Leonardo da Vinci laboured, outlining the mechanisms of Lucifer, for every joint and cog for his creation to be capable of independent movement. The process of building was no mean feat of engineering, every tooth on every gear and cog required custom grinding and cutting to ensure they bit and held when turned. For Lucifer’s knees and elbows he adopted a simple ball-in-cup arrangement to give the illusion of fluidity but the crowning glory was the contraption that would act as Lucifer’s heart, the pump that would act as a battery once Lucifer was in motion, capturing kinetic energy generated by the rhythmic metronomes that were the clockwork man’s arms and legs.

Once it started moving it would never need to stop or rest. Da Vinci’s clockwork man would be an untiring giant with the strength of iron and the stamina of a legion of bulls.

During the creation da Vinci seldom slept. Fatigue ate at him but he was determined to see his efforts bear fruit. He drove himself to the limits of human tolerance and way, way beyond. Like God, on the seventh day, he rested. Lucifer was by no means complete but what was lacking was merely the aesthetics, the mechanics were in place.

He had two visitors that day, the first, Lorenzo Medici, and the second, holiest of holies, the divine Archangel Michael come to beg, bully and finally plead.

Lorenzo Medici carried himself like a vulture, his hooked nose sniffing out carrion, his eyes roving, never settling in one place and his hands flexing, clasping, coiling. The sight of the mechanical man appeared to put him genuinely at ease, which was a rare occurrence in Da Vinci’s experience, but then he had anticipated as much when he began to shape Lucifer. Who could be at ease around a thing like that? Lucifer was truly beautiful and more worthy of life than so many of God’s creatures, who, next to the Bright One, were pale, pale shadows.

Still, the effect the cold clay had on Medici was unnerving.

“Will it live?” he asked in hushed, almost reverential tones, as though Cosimo’s tower had been transformed into some temple, a holy place. Given what was going on inside, perhaps it had.

“Oh yes, the Devil will walk among us,” da Vinci answered the tyrant.

“Good… good…” then: “When?” and there was desperation in his voice. Need. The fire of hunger burned in Medici’s poisonous eyes. This promised unimaginable wealth. Forget base metal transmogrification the clay and clockwork man on the table verged on the territory of miracles. People would pay to witness its birth.

“A month, perhaps a year? Whenever…”

“No! I will have him brought to life! Now… I know just the place… San Lorenzo.” A vindictive smile played across the tyrant’s lips. Some faces were not meant for smiling. “Five nights from now.”

“But San Lorenzo is a church – I was assuming that Lucifer’s birth would take place somewhere less… holy. A theatre perhaps?”

“No, San Lorenzo is perfect for what I have in mind, believe me. Now, my Florentine god, are you suffering doubts? Frightened that the Lord might not look too kindly upon your foray into His territory? Do this, Da Vinci, do something truly worthy with your life. No more silly weapons,” and the way he said it made a cold shiver writhe down the vertebrae of da Vinci’s back as a new use for his Lucifer and his kind occurred to him. At last he understood the hunger in Medici’s eyes. “And city walls. Think on it. You have in your hands the wherewithal to create life, man.”

Suddenly the steady stream of donations to da Vinci’s coffers made sense. His sponsor was not some benevolent benefactor. His interest was far from altruistic. Medici stood to gain the world from the clockwork man.

This understanding should have given da Vinci the strength to turn back, to destroy his sketches and burn Lucifer or reshape him into a hundred harmless pots, but he knew that he couldn’t. He wanted to see the clockwork man take his first step. He needed to know that he could create life not merely mimic it.

“Leave me alone, Lorenzo.”

Surprisingly, Medici left without a word.

Da Vinci’s second visitor was no less predatory, no less dangerous, but the angel did, at least, fight for what he believed to be right – the glory of God, not the glory of the Medici’s family name.

Again, it was the faint trace of vanilla in the air that gave the heavenly creature’s presence away.

“Think about what it is you are doing,” the angel said without waiting for da Vinci to acknowledge his presence. “Make a man, a golem without a soul, make him live and breathe, What does it prove?”

“That we no longer need Him.” Da Vinci voiced the fear that had been gnawing away at him for months. What would happen then, if God became unnecessary?”

“And a world without God is a good thing in your eyes? Who are you to decide for mankind if they should down their backs on their Father? Think, Scientist, Artist, Sculptor, Fool, what would be the consequence of a Godless world?”

Da Vinci stared hard at the angel, so hard it hurt, the white light searing into his eyeballs, stripping away whatever veil ego and vanity had shrouded them with.

“How does God give you life?” the angel pressed. “You profess to be a clever man: think!”

“The mechanics are known to me, I have studied them.” Da Vinci began, knowing it was not what Michael was looking for.

“Not mechanics! God is spiritual. His creations are spiritual. His greatest gift to them is their…”

“Soul,” da Vinci finished for the angel.

“And without a soul.”

“There can be no heaven.”

“Very good, Scientist, perhaps you can claim the skills of philosopher, too. Without a soul there can be no heaven. Can you comprehend the magnitude of your actions?”

The Archangel turned his back and left him alone in the tower with Lucifer.

Alone.

Gazing at the beautiful face he had shaped with his own bare hands, da Vinci was able to convince himself that the angel was lying to him – or rather following his own agenda and only telling part of the truth. God’s vanity was at risk. His immortal pride. They were trying to scare him away from the completion of his masterpiece. A creation of greater beauty and usefulness than any mere painting or sculpture.

“It will not happen,” he promised Lucifer, wetting his fingers to refine yet again the clockwork man’s features.

Five more nights Michael visited the workshop in the Cosimo tower and yet even his most impassioned arguments could not reach da Vinci.

“Do you think it is an accident that your thing is called Lucifer? Can you not sense the presence of the Prince of Lies in everything that you do? You are being used and manipulated by the minions of Hell. You are a fool to think otherwise.”

Was Satan’s hand directing his own? Was he just a puppet birthing a clockwork Antichrist, that would stride the earth revelling in Medici’s endless wars? Was he a fool? For that question at least, he began to suspect the answer was yes.

The Archangel’s final solution was the sword.

“I challenge you, da Vinci, you and your satanic mechanical thing – to a duel. To the death. My immortal soul against the vacuum of his nothingness. Win and you get what you want, lose and you will take the pieces of your damnable Lucifer to God Himself so that he might unmake the monstrosity, and you will forget forever your vanities of creation.”

And Medici was right, they came in their droves to witness the spectacle of da Vinci’s clockwork man coming to life to duel the angel of the Lord, God’s sword an eternal blackness blazing in his clenched fist. San Lorenzo was packed suffocatingly full of spectators, every one of Lorenzo and Guillermo Medici’s boot-lickers, toadies and hangers-on crowded in to the Medici chapel.

A stage had been erected and the altar removed, so that the scene might unfold beneath the crucifix and the wounded Jesus, and upon the stage two finely crafted bell jars stood, one on either side of the crucifix. Michael had demanded that. They were empty, or so they appeared. One, the Archangel promised, would contain his own angelic essence, his angelus. The other he would fill with da Vinci’s mortal soul. If the clockwork man won Michael’s angelus would simply cease to be. The Archangel would fall from grace. If da Vinci’s monster was defeated by the angel, then Michael would take the would-be creator’s creation and leave him, soul still intact, in the bell jar, a fragile reminder of how close he had come to losing everything.

The inside of the church was cold.

The pilgrims had been locked out. Only Medici’s chosen ones made it through the ranks of armoured soldiers blocking the Church doors. It took over four hours for the lucky ones to find their seats and longer still for the galleries and aisles to fill. Over fifteen thousand Florentines crammed into the San Lorenzo to witness da Vinci’s genius.

Da Vinci moved into the centre of the stage, awed by all of the upturned faces so intently focussed on him. “Behold, Lucifer!” he roared, his voice filling the highest eaves and the lowest ducts. Two of Medici’s hired thugs dragged the lifeless golem out to join da Vinci on centre stage. “And the Angel!” He threw back his head, arms open wide, aping the crucifixion pose of the son of God behind him.

A reverential hush descended over the congregation. No one quiet knew what to make of the revelation. Was it a joke? Some grand elaborate hoax engineered by the Medici’s to show them all how gullible they were? Or were they actually in the presence of the divine?

Michael’s light blazed as he strode across the wooden stage. Wisps of smoke rose from the smouldering timbers as feet scorched them. This time he carried the sword of God. It was a single sliver of darkness in the heart of white light that suffused his body. The sword that stole souls in the name of Elohim, Lord God. It sang in his hands, a slowly building thrum, drawing to it all the power of heaven and earth. The air crackled with lines of power. A sharp crack echoed through the roof of the chapel. Blue lines and sparks chased down the walls of the narthex and through the floor of the Medici chapel.

From his vantage on centre stage da Vinci saw the traces of power encase the room. The hair of the congregation rose, standing on end, brought to life by the soul-sucking power of God’s sword. The greatest transformation though was taking place on the stage itself where in their urgency to reach the Archangel and his harmonic blade the blue lines of force were surging through the twitching form of Lucifer. The Brightest One was being born from the energy of nature. The lightning strike that had hit the roof of the San Lorenzo church at the summons of Michael’s sword was the catalyst that da Vinci had been missing. The irony, even amidst the glory of this inhuman birth, was not lost on him. Even in this, his moment, God had to meddle.

He was livid. He railed at the heavens, challenging Elohim to do his worst or prepare to be vanquished from the mortal realm. Echoes of laughter filled his ears.

Michael levelled the sword, swinging it in a wild overhead arc.

Da Vinci helped Lucifer stand. His creation’s legs were unsteady, but he was alive and as he began to move he began to learn. And Lucifer learned quickly. He looked at his creator and assayed a mocking bow, and then turned to the Archangel and repeated his action, bowing lower than he had to da Vinci.

“Now witness the battle!” Lorenzo Medici roared from the front row, leaping to his feet.

Sickness began to spread through him as he saw the resolute determination of his creation. For all of his glories, the angel did not stand a chance against the clockwork Lucifer. With no weaknesses, nothing to hurt, the clockwork man simply kept on coming, the tempered alloy of its limbs blocking and parrying the angel’s soul-sucking sword. With no soul to lose, the blade was useless against Lucifer.

The faces of the crowd were devoid of expression as the spectacle of the clockwork man had them rapt. Medici himself, in the centre of the first row, appeared to be in the grip of some holy ecstasy, the look of rapture transforming his ugly face with its bliss. But none of them could see what was truly happening. They were caught up in the duel, immune to the crackling bursts of energy that sparked and danced around every inch of the Medici chapel and out through the San Lorenzo church and into Florence itself. They couldn’t see the Archangel’s increasing desperation as its every blow was blocked and it was forced back and back, the clockwork man an undeniable force of nature.

Lucifer forced Michael back into the chapel wall, directly beneath the statue of the crucified Christ.

Nor could they see the malicious look of glee that had settled on the features of the Bright One.

And then it was over.

The Devil, Lucifer, Prince of Lies, Clockwork Man, slammed his steel fist through the spreading ribs of the naked angel and for a second held its beating heart in its mechanical hand, and then it squeezed.

Fifteen thousand screams rent the inside of the San Lorenzo.

The bell jar that held Michael’s angelus imploded, fine slivers of glass showering the faces of those closest to the stage. The bell jar that held da Vinci’s soul imploded. The threads that bound the fifteen thousand souls of the congregation to their mortal flesh, severed abruptly and amid the screams, the fear and sudden desolation, the Brightest One, Prince of Lies, watched the wraiths of light that should have been souls on their way to heaven writhe and twist in the air of the chapel, lost, as they were sucked away into the nothingness that was the absence of divinity.

Stricken, da Vinci cradled the dead angel in his arms. “I didn’t understand… I didn’t understand,” he repeated, over and over. “I didn’t understand.”

“Oh but you did,” Lucifer denied him. “You understood what it meant to banish Him. And still you did it. Where Astopel and Mammon, Azazel and Beelzebub failed, you, da Vinci, succeeded. With your help science killed God.” Lucifer laughed, a laugh that was echoed from the front of the madding crowd where Lorenzo Medici’s awestruck countenance was still being wracked by what could only be pleasure. His lips were moving, forming the words:

“Your temple, Master.”

And the rest, the rest of the fools Medici had dragged in to witness the second coming of Evil in the body of the clockwork man, they screamed on as they were stripped of eternal life as the clockwork took the black sword of God from the dead Archangel and scythed through the lost souls orbiting around his head. Lucifer drank it in, like benediction owed to him. Turning, he pushed da Vinci aside as though he were irrelevant, an irritant to be brushed away, and stopped, bending low over Michael’s corpse.

“Farewell, brother.” The Prince of Lies said. “May God watch over your eternal soul… Oh no, forgive me. Thanks to you, there is no God. How ironic.” And so saying, he stood again and slammed the black sword into the angel’s chest. “So the Devil takes your soul instead.” Michael’s body shuddered once, the black sword singing, the fragrance of vanilla suddenly suffusing the newly ordained church of Satan.

Lucifer walked out of the San Lorenzo, alive with the infinite possibilities of the flesh, free to walk among his new flock as a man eternal, no meddling God to stand in his way.

END

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Steven Savile is currently finishing a trilogy of vampire fantasy novels (Inheritance, Dominion, Retribution) tied in to Games Workshop’s popular Warhammer Fantasy games. Inheritance is due out in February in the UK and March in the US.

Steven is also adapting Pat Mills’ Celtic barbarian Slaine for Black Flame. The first novel, Exile, is due for Christmas 2006.

In the US he has his first hardcover, Elemental (co-edited with Alethea Kontis), coming from Tor in May 2006.

Elemental, like Redbrick Eden before it, is an anthology Steven has put together to raise money for those in need. Where Redbrick Eden raised nearly 10,000 dollars for the homeless charity, Shelter, Elemental is raising money for Save the Children’s Tsunami Relief efforts and includes a veritable who’s who of the global SF&F community including: Brian Aldiss, Kevin J. Anderson, Brian Herbert, Sherrilyn Kenyon (writing as Kinley McGreggor), Stel Pavlou, Martha Wells, David Drake, Joe Haldeman, Larry Niven and a whole host more.

Steven was a runner up in the British Fantasy Awards in 2000, and in 2002 won the “Writers of the Future” award.

He’s also co-edited with John Pelan two collections of Fritz Lieber’s classic horror stories, and published a number of short stories, novellas, and is still working very hard at becoming an overnight success…

Buy Temple: Incarnations by Steven Savile from Apex Publications.