Angelopolis(54)

the Nephilim. That is why the Jubilees passage is something we take very seriously.”

“Disarms?” Vera asked. “How exactly does one disarm them?”

“It’s my supposition that the medicines mentioned in Jubilees would produce the effect of human

vulnerability in Nephilim. They would lose their angelic powers. They would be prone to human

illness and human mortality. And they would die as human beings die.”

“That sounds more like a poison than a medicine to me,” Vera said.

“The formula given to Noah was of divine origin,” Sveti said. “The logic involved is not one we

would recognize.”

“And you’ve made this text the basis of a lifetime of research?” Vera said, unable to mask her





incredulity.

“It’s true,” Azov said, smiling slightly, “that the information in Jubilees is obscure at best. The

Book of Medicines is—for all intents and purposes—an angelological Holy Grail.”

“There have been many angelologists who abandoned important work for this,” Sveti said. “If

one’s motives are not kept in check, pursuing the writings of Noah—the Book of Medicines

mentioned in Jubilees—can result in pure madness. In this respect, chasing after Noah’s formula can

be as dangerous as our enemy. This is why the pursuit is officially discouraged at the academy.”

“So the truth was deliberately hidden to keep scholars away from Jubilees?” Vera asked.

“In a word, yes,” Azov replied. “The academy once sent scholars to the great libraries in search of

Noah’s writings. They offered rewards for information. This alone guaranteed a deluge of quite

convincing fakes. Raphael Valko once told me he saw dozens of them passing through the academy in

his days as a student. There’s a long tradition of this cycle. In the Middle Ages there was an

abundance of copies and, eventually, fakes coming out of convents and monasteries. So the council

halted the practice of pursuing it, and Jubilees was ignored for centuries. Then, in the sixteenth

century, the occultist John Dee claimed he had a copy. He’d always believed that Enochian would be

the medium for the Book of Medicines, and he conveniently claimed to have had the language dictated

to him by angels. Whether he actually discovered the Book of Medicines or forged it is open to

debate. Consensus has tended to rest on the latter, though the debate is moot because no copies from

Dee’s library—fake or otherwise—have turned up.”

“The search was revived in the late nineteenth century after the Book of Enoch was rediscovered,”

Sveti added. “Scholars believed that if Enoch could be rehabilitated, there was a chance that we

could re-create the Book of Medicines—whether by revisiting Jubilees or by excavating a copy of the

work itself.”

“There is one thing all who see the Book of Jubilees can agree upon,” Azov said. “That the passage

Angela Valko slipped into the album is one of the most tantalizing in all of our ancient sources on the

Nephilim. Whereas human beings were susceptible to sickness and disease, and human beings died

before their one hundredth year, the Nephilim were not prone to sickness. Human women died in

childbirth while the Nephilim reproduced without pain and lived to be five hundred years old. The

advantages of angels over humans were legion. The Book of Medicines was meant to level the

playing field.”

“And now I have brought you the volume that Angela Valko considered to be the real McCoy,”

Vera said. “Tell me, am I correct in deducing that the symbols written on these pages by Rasputin are

of the same alphabet as the script on Noah’s tablets?”

“You are correct,” Sveti said, smiling. “How an uneducated, drunken charlatan like Rasputin came

to discover Enochian is a mystery I can’t even begin to solve. But I believe it is worth considering

this volume to be a possible iteration of Noah’s Book of Medicines.”

“You believe it’s authentic, then?” Vera asked, feeling her ambition grow by the second.

“Come with me,” Azov said, gesturing for Vera to follow him. “We’ll answer that question

together.”



• • •

They made their way down the lighthouse, following the twisting stairway of the tower. At the bottom

of the stairwell, they took a rocky path down the slope of the island, descending between two hills.

On the left sat the crumbling stone structure, perhaps of the Roman temple Sveti had mentioned

earlier. Vera looked over a crest of rock to the dock and saw that the motorboat was gone. She

glanced across the bay, taking in a vista of the dusky blue water, searching for the boat. It wasn’t