The Iscariot Sanction by Mark Latham Page B

spiritualist event, reported simultaneously across the world from Edinburgh to Timbuktu, many thousands of people began to unlock hitherto hidden potential, becoming preternaturally excellent in myriad fields of academic, artistic, technical and esoteric expertise. For many, this ‘Awakening’ manifested itself as a brilliant but limited skill—an improved or suddenly prodigious aptitude for music or painting, for example, an uncanny aptitude for any number of academic disciplines, from botany to linguistics, or deep insight into ancient philosophy. But more crucially, the fields of engineering, physics, chemistry, and medicine have been bolstered by an influx of minds now brimming with untapped knowledge, who claim to receive their brilliant insight from, and I quote, ‘beyond the veil’. This uncanny reception of knowledge has led to their collective designation as ‘Intuitionists’.
    The doors of every great society in Britain have been flung open to these brilliant men—and even women—and as a result the very landscape of our great nation is changing. The railways expand at an exponential rate; bridges of unprecedented length span rivers and lakes; the fledgling London Underground is fledgling no more. Even the most impecunious households are now illuminated at night by electric light. The first horseless carriages have taken to our streets. Passenger airships are but a handful of years away from completion, they say. Steamships larger and faster than anything we have ever seen are even now being constructed at Portsmouth. In our hospitals, diseases are being cured that were once thought fatal. Doctors have new apparatus at their disposal so frequently that they barely have time to learn its use before it is outmoded. Truly, even the greatest minds of our time must look at these Intuitionists in awe, for by their hands is humanity set upon a course of unprecedented change.
    Yet for every ounce of potential offered us by the Intuitionists, great danger is presented by their counterparts. Who among us does not know of at least one man or woman cursed by the Awakening? Poor wretches touched by visions of the Rift so powerful that they have been driven irrevocably mad? Some few of these poor souls have maintained a semblance of control over their esoteric abilities, but they represent a dark reflection of Kate Fox’s vision. Spiritualists of unprecedented and unrefined power, telekinetics, chiromancers, psychometrists, and a host of other classifications of psychic that we are still struggling to define. They treat with spirits and read minds, they ply their trade within a twilight realm that they call the ‘Eternal Night’.
    Kate Fox, indeed, calls these people the greatest gift to the world as we know it. She calls them ‘Majestics’.
    I, gentlemen, have seen the danger that they pose to the very fabric of reality.
    I call them the greatest threat to the safety of our world since the bubonic plague.

SIX

    The Awakening was a phenomenon aptly named, as it had certainly awoken something in Sir Arthur, not to mention countless others around the world.
    As a boy, Arthur Furnival had but one ‘talent’ of note, though he himself had thought it a curse. Sometimes, when he held an object close, he would become enraptured by such a violent glimpse into its past as to send him into a fit, and give him night terrors for weeks afterwards. The doctors did not know what to do with him; how could he have explained to their satisfaction that he received visitations from shades of the long dead? He’d become an object of ridicule at Harrow. He’d learned to fight—both physically and politically—at public school. Those talents at least had consistently served him well since.
    The family physician had thought that some time in the seminary would ease Arthur’s troubled mind. He might as well have sent him to Zululand to see a witch doctor. As the youngest of the three Furnival sons, it was his duty to enter the clergy