The End of the Magi Read online

  Books by Patrick W. Carr

  The End of the Magi

  THE DARKWATER SAGA

  By Divine Right (e-novella only)

  The Shock of Night

  The Shattered Vigil

  The Wounded Shadow

  THE STAFF AND THE SWORD

  A Cast of Stones

  The Hero’s Lot

  A Draw of Kings

  © 2019 by Patrick W. Carr

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-2155-8

  Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design

  Author is represented by The Steve Laube Agency.

  This book is dedicated to all the wonderful people at ACFW Middle Tennessee, for their encouragement, and to Chuck Missler, whose incredible lessons on the Bible exploded in my head and opened my eyes to wonder.

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Books by Patrick W. Carr

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  CHAPTER 1

  Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven “sevens,” and sixty-two “sevens.”

  Daniel 9:25

  BABYLON—537 BC

  Any day now, Daniel thought, any day now they would be free. He looked out over the brick parapet that could hold ten chariots abreast toward the sluggish flow of the Euphrates. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the vision of his rheumy eyes, his dead countrymen lay buried in the sands of Mesopotamia, doomed to rest in the land of their conquerors.

  Regret whispered from him in a sigh before honesty compelled him to amend that thought. A few of the dead would be disinterred to make the trip back to their homeland, their descendants unwilling to leave any trace of their banishment behind, any evidence of God’s punishment.

  A breeze carrying the scent of water and greenery came upon him, unexpected in the midst of the heat of the day, a reminder that even in this land of conquest, God still granted growth and renewal. He turned and made his way west along the massive wall, past the towering garden with its stone troughs and water chains and sweating slaves, who sang the cadence of their imprisonment, watering the garden Nebuchadnezzar built for his homesick wife.

  After nearly seventy years, the grandeur of Babylon no longer impressed him. Now he wanted nothing more than to journey west and return to the home he hadn’t seen since he was thirteen, a desire he would have to surrender. With the long-suffering patience of his people, he descended the broad stairs toward the opulence of his quarters. Duties awaited him. Like so many before him, Nebuchadnezzar lay dead in the desert, while another king from another people, King Ahasuerus of the Medes, had found no fault with Daniel and would continue to find none.

  Four days later, the quick slap of sandals approached him, lifting his head from the accounts of the satraps, the territorial governors. The urgent steps ceased, and snatches of frantic conversation from across the palatial room came to him. “Ezriel,” he called to his assistant, “this carries the sound of news. See what it is.”

  Ezriel, nearly as old as he, levered himself up from his station and walked, back bent and shoulders rounded, toward the broad arch of the open doorway. A moment later the commotion grew louder, with Ezriel’s voice adding its tremulous disbelief to the cacophony of the small crowd spilling through the door—men and women of every age, their faces lit.

  Out of respect for his age, they let Ezriel lead them into his presence, their legs trembling to cross the space at a run. Tears tracked their way down Ezriel’s cheeks, and he lifted his arms and face to the sky beyond the vaulted ceiling and cried, “It’s done! We’re going home.”

  Their joy no longer held in check, Daniel’s countrymen surged forward to engulf him, embracing him and wetting his face and clothes with tears. “It’s as you said . . .” Ezriel’s voice broke with sobs. “Our exile is finished.”

  “We’re going home, we’re going home,” the group chanted over and over.

  More voices joined in, breathing the name of the city like a prayer: “Jerusalem.”

  He smiled and lifted his hands in thanks. “Never forget,” he said to the gathering of people, “it is the Lord who saves, and His promises are sure.” He caught the eye of Judah, strong and fierce in the prime of his youth, and nodded. But the man before him was too caught up in his relief and joy to heed the warning.

  “Come, Daniel,” Judah said. “Come with us down into the city. There will be a feast tonight such as our people have never seen in Babylon. We will eat and drink and make plans for our return.”

  Daniel kept his smile in place, careful to guard his words and expression. “In a moment.”

  Silence, imposing for the noise it followed, filled his offices after they left. Only Ezriel remained, looking at him with eyes as dark as the tar between the bricks of Babylon.

  “I’ve worked with you for forty years,” Ezriel said.

  He sighed. “You always say that whenever you wish to scold me about something.”

  His assistant held up his hands, his eyes wide with feigned hurt. “Who am I to scold God’s prophet?”

  Daniel laughed despite himself. “You are my assistant and my friend. If not you, then who?”

  Ezriel shrugged. “Several come to mind—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

  “Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah,” Daniel said, but the familiar correction collapsed on itself. Even he often thought of his dead comrades by their Babylonian names. “And they have passed beyond the sphere of this world.” Ezriel continued to look at him with suspicion.
With a nod, Daniel said, “You’ve come to know me too well.”

  “Something troubles you,” Ezriel said. “The others were too lost in their joy to notice.”

  “I’m not troubled. On the contrary, I doubt there is any man in Babylon whose heart is more joyful than mine.”

  “You have a strange way of showing it, old friend. Your heart neglected to inform your face.”

  He almost laughed. Such insights had made Ezriel indispensable for the last forty years. “I won’t be going back.”

  His friend gasped. “Not going back? But you must. We buried Ezekiel in the sands of this accursed country nearly two decades ago. There is no one else to lead us. If you do not return, how shall we find our way?” His voice scaled upward. “Would you doom us by your absence to repeat the mistakes that brought us here? How—?”

  Daniel raised his hand, palm out. “Stop. You exalt me beyond my station. If God desires a prophet for His people, He will provide one. For all we know, He may use you.”

  Ezriel’s snort echoed in the chamber. “Did I interpret the king’s dreams? Did I cast Belshazzar’s blasphemy in his face? Did—?”

  “Does any of that matter to God?” Daniel interrupted. “All of that was His doing, not mine.”

  “The people need a leader,” Ezriel pressed. “They need a face, a name.”

  He knew better than to argue. Despite his protestations of admiration and service to him, Ezriel could be as stubborn as the most ill-tempered ass when he felt he was in the right. “You haven’t asked me why I can’t return,” Daniel said.

  His assistant’s hand waved away his argument before he could offer it. “I’m sure you’re going to give me some nonsense about being too old for the journey, as if there weren’t a thousand men willing to carry you on their backs to Jerusalem.”

  Daniel levered himself from his seat without speaking, motioning Ezriel to follow him. He crossed to the wall of his office where broad cabinets ran its length. Neatly arranged stacks of papyrus and parchment filled the top of the horizontal surface. Locked doors kept records of a more private nature from prying eyes.

  Pulling a key from within his robe, he unlocked the leftmost door and reached in to withdraw a sheet of fresh parchment, the ink hardly dry. “It’s a copy,” he said in answer to the unspoken question, “but this is why I can’t go.”

  Ezriel’s face blanched. “Are we cursed before we can even return?”

  His friend’s despair might well have been the sum of Hebrew existence, a cycle of favor and correction God visited upon His people. “The future belongs to God, but we’ve been given a task and we cannot afford to fail. Read it.”

  Ezriel cleared his throat, brought the top right corner of the parchment closer to his eyes, and began reading. “‘Seventy weeks are determined for your people and for your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy. Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. The street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublesome times.’”

  With Ezriel only halfway through the writing on the parchment, an obscure impulse of compassion or mercy compelled Daniel to pull the sheet from his hands.

  “The Messiah?” Ezriel’s voice wavered between disbelief and awe. “The King? When did this come to you?”

  He shrugged, wishing to keep the rest of the prophecy from Ezriel’s peering gaze. Locking the sheet back into the cabinet, Daniel steeled himself for the barrage of questions. “I will have copies made for you. When you return to Jerusalem, you must choose to whom you will entrust them.”

  But Ezriel refused to be so easily distracted. “What does the rest of it say?”

  “You will know soon enough.”

  Instead of being comforted, his friend’s face crumpled, accentuating the bend of his spine. “Again? Must we disappoint our God again?”

  Daniel shook his head. “Not us, old friend. Don’t take burdens upon yourself that don’t belong to you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ezriel said. “Why does it keep you from coming back to Israel with us? Did God tell you not to go?”

  Daniel turned away, busying himself with pointless reports to give his hands something to do. “God’s leading isn’t always as obvious as having His messenger show up in the middle of your afternoon prayers. Sometimes He whispers so softly to your heart, you scarcely know He’s spoken.” He considered Ezriel’s disbelief and faced his friend again. “Israel is caught between powers. The land of milk and honey is too sweet a prize for the rulers of this world to pass by.”

  “Doesn’t God say He will protect us?” Ezriel said.

  Daniel dipped his head in agreement. “Of course, but how many times in our history have we rejected Him? Do you believe it will be different this time? Have we at last become wise enough so that our children and their children no longer have to learn from their mistakes? Will they learn from ours this time?” He ran a hand over the age-spotted dome of his head. “God will use the nations around Israel to remind His people of himself. It might be Egypt, Persia, the Greeks, or some other power we’ve not yet encountered. To the rulers of this world it will appear as if we are nothing more than another conquest to be made, but God has a plan.”

  “What does it mean, your prophecy?”

  “It is exactly as it sounds, a timetable for the coming Messiah-King. From the day the command is issued to rebuild the city of Jerusalem to the coming of the King is four hundred and eighty-three years.”

  “Why would God tell you this?”

  There, Ezriel asked the question Daniel had buried in his heart since he’d first received the prophecy. The most obvious answer troubled him. “To make sure we don’t miss it.”

  His assistant grew still, the rise and fall of his chest barely visible. His hands trembled, reaching toward him. “That implies we might.”

  “I intend to make certain we don’t.” The intensity of his promise surprised even him.

  “How?”

  Daniel smiled. “By using the power God has placed in my hands while I can. The king’s magi are under my command. The order to rebuild Jerusalem, when it comes, will come from the seat of the power that rules the world. We will keep watch and wait for that day.”

  “And then?” Ezriel asked.

  “We will count the days until the Messiah comes.”

  Ezriel’s brows rose. “For almost five hundred years?”

  Daniel nodded. “The magi will count the days until He comes, and we will be there to help anoint Him.”

  Ezriel turned a slow circle, his eyes searching the ceiling high above them. “And if the power of the world shifts away from Babylon?”

  “Then the magi will follow it, serving whomever God chooses as ruler.” He watched his friend consider this before he swallowed, his throat working against what he was about to say next.

  “If you ask it of me, I will stay here with you and assist you however I may.”

  Daniel reached out and caught his friend in a fierce embrace. “You must return home for the both of us,” he whispered. “There will be those who elect to stay here in the land of the Chaldeans. They won’t know why; they may not even suspect it is God who has called them to remain. But I will find them and bring them into the magi, and they will become the elect within the elect.” He released his friend and stepped back. “Go. I will come down to the city and join you as soon as I can. We should celebrate.”

  Only after Ezriel had left did Daniel retrieve the parchment with Gabriel’s message upon it. As though it held the power to compel him, he found the rest of it, the part he’d kept Ezriel from seeing. Reading aloud but in a whisper, he said, “‘And after the sixty-two weeks, the Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself, and the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city a
nd the sanctuary.’”

  His heart labored as he read until it struggled to keep its rhythm. Finally he wrenched himself from his contemplation. “We can only do what we can do,” he prayed. “The rest, O sovereign God, is up to you.”

  He returned to his parchments and ink. There were preparations to be made. Somewhere in the distant future, the Messiah would be revealed.

  CHAPTER 2

  CTESIPHON—5 BC

  The light hung motionless in the western sky, too large and steady for a star and blazing pure white. Venus perhaps, Myrad thought, calling it by its Roman name. He stood unmoving in the desert, and after a time he noticed the light remained constant. He peered at the mariner’s star hanging some thirty degrees above the horizon. The rest of the stars and planets circled their procession around the star seamen used to find their way, but not this one. It hung in the sky without moving. Curious, he continued to watch it, untiring. The light had no tail, so it didn’t belong to that class of bodies known as harbingers, beacons in the heavens that brought omens of doom or prosperity, depending on the culture. Before long the night slipped away until the sky lightened from pitch to charcoal to slate to blue.

  “What are you?” Myrad mused. “Are you important?”

  A single voice came to him in answer, filling the heavens. “I am.”

  Without transition, he blinked and registered his bed and the walls of his room by the dim light of the candle burning on a small table. Scrambling from beneath his blanket, he grabbed the candle and limped from his father’s apartment within the magi’s quarters to the steps leading up to the city wall. This late, only the guards patrolling the city took note of his passing. Nothing about his dress or his staggered gait appeared to give them enough alarm to stop him for questioning. The magi were a power unto themselves, the practice of their arts inscrutable to others.

  He made his way to the top of the wall while a desperate hope bloomed in his chest and he muttered supplications. “Please,” he whispered.

  Gazing westward, he searched the sky for the light of his dream, but the heavens were as he remembered, the constellations the same as any other night. The hunter, the bull, the hero, the twins, and the rest were all there to greet him as before. He stood waiting for the star or its voice to come to him, whispering his pleas.