And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (28 page)

"You have the jewel with you?" she probed.

Constanza chuckled. "No, of course not. As you yourself must be aware, it would kill any of us."

"Then what assurance do I have that you will give it to me when I have completed this-this massacre?"

"Mine, Miss McCulloch," O'Malley's low, uncharac-teristically operatic voice intoned.

"Theritus is held by a spell of my own device. He
must
obey me. For my spell we shall work a bargain-you had a similar pledge with Asmodeus, did you not, where he swore you to service?"

She nodded and he continued.

"A bargain's a bargain. You will agree to liberate the land and I shall agree to turn over the stone in payment. It will be handed to you at the gates of the Citadel. I must honor that part or the Dark Ones will claim my soul on the spot, and Don Constanza must allow me to do so because he requires my service to make the Citadel secure once again."

She glanced over at Constanza and saw he was try-ing to conceal his irritation at that remark. It irked him to be in need of someone he could not buy, threaten, or control.

The train rolled on.

A day and a half later they were in Dodge City, Kansas, a town that looked very much like it must have looked when the West was being tamed and legends like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson ran it. They wasted no time there, though, heading west almost immediately in a wagon train and luxury coach.

There was only a sign at the border, which they reached an hour or so after sunset. She was surprised at that. International borders were not normally so lightly guarded, even in her own North America.

"There's no need," O'Malley explained. "The spells are far more effective than any fence and network of guards. Smugglers and illegals will find it difficult if not lethal to cross. We have the proper seals from Mexico; we can pass."

And pass they did. Jill felt a slight tingling as they moved by the border sign, as if she'd just gone through an enormous spider web, but it quickly evaporated. Clearly there
was
some sort of barrier there, and she was thankful that they hadn't had to fight their way across.

Constanza set up camp-a large tent village for himself, his bodyguards, and his cooking staff-and offered a last dinner. But O'Malley refused all food and drink, as he had all day, and forbade Jill to take anything, either.

"Now we will go," he told them. She looked ner-vously around; the stars were incredibly bright, so bright that their numbers defied any rational attempt to count them, but otherwise it was
very,
very dark, almost absolute darkness.

Still, Constanza did not protest and snapped his fin-gers. A bodyguard brought up two good-looking horses and a pack mule loaded with two sacks of something indistinguishable.

"You know how to ride, I hope?" O'Malley asked her.

She nodded. Once having exchanged her Victorian dress for a shirt and jeans, she felt more normal and more human. "May as well get this over with," she mumbled in reply and mounted.

Constanza came up to her. "God be with you," he said sincerely, and offered his hand.

She looked at him strangely.
He can't be serious,
she thought. But he
was
serious-his own private world saw no contradictions.

She spurned his hand. "I'll do your killing for you," she told him, "but not in the name of God, nor in your name, either, but only for the sake of my people." She looked up at O'Malley. "Let's get out of here before I get sick."

Constanza seemed not at all offended. He shrugged and walked off. O'Malley kicked his horse into action and pulled on the rope in his free hand that was at-tached to the mule's harness. "Stick close and to the road," the sorcerer warned.

In minutes the glow from Constanza's camp was gone, leaving them alone with the brilliant Milky Way and the darkness, yet she could swear that she heard, somewhere behind her, Constanza laughing, laughing hard at some sort of self-satisfying joke.

The joke on her.

They rode for what seemed like hours. Her legs quickly became very sore, and she felt muscles start to ache that she'd forgotten she had. Jill knew how to ride, yes, but it had been two years or more since she'd had to do so and she'd gone soft in all the wrong places. Also, she was becoming increasingly hungry and thirsty.

She had just about reached the point of total surrender when she was going to stop in the middle of the darkness and tell O'Malley that she could travel no farther until food, drink, and rest were provided, when he stopped all by himself.

"This is a good enough spot," he said, more to himself than to her, and dismounted. She followed, wea-riness mixed with blessed relief from the pain flowing into her. She sat down on the ground, fording the dirt road preferable to the almost impossibly tall grass that seemed to line it, and waited. She heard O'Malley fumbling with the packs on the mule and then heard him doing something in the dark over to one side, just off the road in the grass. She wondered how he could see to do anything at all.

Finally he was ready and walked unerringly up to her, his strange eyes oddly reflective of any stray bits of light, almost like a cat's eyes yet with some kind of internal luminescence as well. He had changed clothes, she saw as he drew to within a meter of her. Gone were the tailored shirt and pants and the fancy, polished riding boots; now he wore a garment that looked more like a dark blue robe and a matching blue skullcap.

"It is time, Miss McCulloch," he said softly. "Please rise and come with me."

Jill looked at him but didn't move immediately. She was bone-tired.

"Please. It must be done now," he urged softly.

"All right, all right," she grumbled, and got up, tak-ing his extended hand for support.

She followed the man in the darkness, wondering what was going to come next.

As they walked to one side of the road she saw that here the grass was gone, the ground barren, hard dirt. As she took her fifth or sixth step on the flat area, braziers suddenly flared into life, illuminating the place in an eerie blend of colors-blue, red, yellow, orange, and green, all bright and sparkling and reach-ing upward into the night. Five colors, five flaring bra-ziers, arranged in a five-pointed shape. A border had been drawn in the dirt, she saw, and the braziers had come to life as she had stepped over that boundary. A pentagram.

O'Malley also walked into the pentagram and over to a small table in its center. Motioning Jill to stand in front of the little folding table with a box on it, he stood behind, reached into the box, and pulled out a wand of some sort. It started to glow in his right hand, and he seemed to check it out to see if it was working properly. Then he looked up at her.

"Remove all your clothing, please," he instructed.

She flinched. Even Constanza hadn't taken any sex-ual advantage of her. "I'll do no such thing,"

she told him.

He sighed. "Please, Miss McCulloch! We must remove all foreign objects. Remember, please, that I am not casting a spell over you, simply striking a bargain. The spell is for the work that has to be done. I assure you your virtue is safe with me."

She didn't like the way he had said that. Not as if he were merely disinterested in her, but as if the idea-and she-were of no consequence to him.

"Miss McCulloch, if I were so inclined I could turn you in a matter of seconds into a panting love-slave or anything else I chose. That is not the job here, nor my interest, nor the interest of my employer. Now, for the last time, will you please disrobe and throw all your clothing outside the pentagram without leaving it yourself?"

She sighed. The trouble was, she could believe everything he was saying was true. She did as in-structed and saw him nod approval, not of her but only of her action. He was preoccupied with other matters.

Although it was mid-September, the air was not chilly; either the climate was warmer in this world or there was a strong snap of Indian summer in the air. Soon O'Malley was ready. He closed the box lid and faced her, holding the wand in his hand. It resembled a thin version of an aircraft wand, a flashlight with a long plastic tube of yellow. Yet she knew they had no flashlights here, nor batteries to store energy.

"From this point, just stand there facing me," he instructed. "Say or do nothing until and unless I spe-cifically ask you for a response. Clear?"

She nodded.

O'Malley began. At first it was a prayerful chant, then it rose in pitch, becoming a call, almost a sum-mons. The language was vaguely Latin-sounding, yet the words made no kind of sense to her at all.

"Siruptis vergobum una toma maculum Tobit!"
he chanted, and the wand waved all over the place. He chanted the same phrase again, and yet again, and continued making odd motions with the wand.

For a moment there seemed to be no effect at all, just a silly-looking man standing in front of a table in the middle of nowhere chanting mumbo jumbo. But, quite abruptly, things started to happen.

The braziers, for one thing, already flaring to two or three meters, all shot up to tremendous heights-ten, twenty meters high like sparkling fountains. Eerie shadows played against the inside of the pentagram, over both her and the wizard. For the first time she noticed that only the area, inside the borders was illumi-nated. There was nothing but darkness beyond.

The wand began to glow fiercely as well, and O'Malley changed his chant to an even more impossi-ble language and an even eerier sound.

"Id!
la! Yog-Sothoth! Upschar pfagn!"
he repeated again and again. The air seemed to swirl and thicken within the pentagram, and there came a sensation, a feeling, no more, of unseen powerful forces, forces evil and beyond the understanding of humanity, descending, closing in, surrounding them on all sides. Despite the cooling night air she found herself perspir-ing nervously.

O'Malley seemed satisfied rather than scared and switched again, this time to English, although what he was saying made as little sense as the gibberish.

"The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be," he chanted as if reciting a litany. "Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate.

Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate where the spheres meet. Man rules where They ruled once; They shall rule where man rules now. After summer is winter and after winter, summer. O great Keeper of the Key, send us thy servant!"

And from the spaces around and outside the penta-gram she sensed life, life of a sort terribly alien to her, so much so that her mind could not accept this life as it was and protected her with blurred images. There were many of them, looking like soap bubbles but ra-diating that feeling of being totally alien and incom-prehensible, and hidden from her by her own mind as bubble shapes.

And now O'Malley received an answer from the shapes, a shrill piping as if from thousands of inhuman and nonhuman creatures all shouting,
"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

She had seen and experienced the magic of the University engineers, the godlike power of the holy world and the rigidly structured wizardry of the cas-tle, the Thieves' Guild, and the demons and ghosts of the tower. She had seen the magic of this counterpart world in which elves, gnomes, and faerie cohabited with man and spells were tests of will-but this was unlike any of that.

This was alien, so alien as to be incomprehensible; so alien that she knew, instinc-tively, that no Department of Probabilities in some far-off time line had dreamed it up. These were
real,
not constructs. These were at the root of O'Malley's powers, why he was the master magician of them all, how he could hold even a demon from the zero time line completely in thrall, helpless despite his jewel of power. These were the counterparts of the demons, the alien creatures of enormous power that lived between the worlds and inhabited the dimensional spaces be-tween the levels of reality. The former masters of re-ality, perhaps the creators of the demons themselves, bound and thrown out, if O'Malley's chant could be accepted, by-what? The jewels, the power ampli-fiers, the means that some demon slave of these foul creatures had developed by which to break free, to revolt, to join together so many that they exiled their former masters to half-planes and insubstantial reali-ties. Pressed back by the joining of-how many? If six could move a planet, what might six thousand jewels do, or six million? Locked away until greed and lust for limitless power by such as O'Malley might pierce the veil and draw them hither.

"Hear me, O servants of the Mighty and Omni-potent Keeper of the Gates!" O'Malley called to them, raising his arms in supplication. "Feed me the power to serve, that I might serve Him Who Is Not to Be Named through your master and through you! I call the power unto myself, for I need His blessing and His power for a mortal task, that my position might be increased and my service tenfold increased in value! Let the power flow to me!"

The call agitated the "bubbles" to a fever pitch; they screamed their strange piping call all the more. And now she could feel it-feel the power flow from all sides of the pentagram, closing in.

The barrier of the pentagram kept the creatures out, but not the tremendous surge of force.

The wand came up and again started tracing a sym-bol in the air, a complex symbol based on the five-pointed star. Only now, as the light traced the symbol, it remained in the air in front of O'Malley like a glow-ing yellow sign without support. She felt the power surge flow into it, felt the enormous force it absorbed as surely as if she could see it, yet nothing visibly changed.

Then the sorcerer stepped up to the symbol still hanging in the air, stepped up to it and placed his head into it. He did not penetrate; it seemed to her as if his head had vanished and his broad shoulders had acquired the eerie sign for a head.

"Jill McCulloch!" his voice came at her. It was recognizably O'Malley's, yet it seemed huge, deep, and not quite human
any
more. "Here is the bargain. You shall accept command of the forces that I shall place at your disposal; you shall lead them where I direct, and you shall besiege the Citadel that I designate. Not one human life shall you order spared; you shall order the death of all humans inside the com-pound, and you shall see that it is carried out. Once it is, you shall summon me by stating my name three times at the gates. If you do this, I will deliver unto you the jewel which you seek to use as you see fit. Do you agree to this bargain, freely and of your own will do you make it with me?"