Hammer of Witches (31 page)

“You stay there!” Jinni said. “I’m going to talk to Amir.” She ran off, barefooted, across the rock, toward the scar in the wall she had pointed out earlier. I took a breath and slowly followed her across the field of stone. Amir al-Katib. I had finally made it.

Jinniyah was halfway to the scar now, about forty feet in front of me. She knelt and placed one hand against the floor. “Oh, no!” I heard her cry. Her fearful words echoed through the cave.

Though her tone unnerved me, I reminded myself that Jinniyah was easily excitable, and I kept my own voice calm. “What’s wrong, Jinni?” I called across the hall.

“Don’t you feel it?” she shouted. “The room is shaking! It’s sand, Bal! The ground is turning to sand!”

She was right. I could now feel the ground vibrating beneath my feet, and a fine layer of sand seemed to be forming on the rock floor. I swept some away with my fingertips. More sand grew in its place. Something seemed to be sucking the stale humidity of the cave dry, leaving a harsh, empty heat in its stead.

“What is it?” Catalina shouted to Jinni. “What is he summoning?”

Jinniyah screamed back, “Ghuls! Arabian desert demons! They —”

There wasn’t time for her to continue. As if spit up by a geyser the sand shot up to our knees. Two skeletal hands covered with coarse hair and sickening greenish-black skin ripped through the dunes and grabbed Jinniyah by the heels. She didn’t even have enough time to try to fly out of their way.

“Bal!”

I raced across the sand and threw myself at the dunes. Too late. The sand gave no resistance. Jinni and the ghuls’ hands slipped beneath the earth.

“Jinni!” I dropped my torch, fell to my knees, and raked the sandy mounds aside. Nothing.

A pull at my collar jerked me backward. “Watch out!” Catalina shouted. Rolling waves of earth sent us stumbling off our feet. Inches in front of me, a dozen more claws tore through the sand.

“This way!” Catalina wrenched me off the ground.

“But Jinni —!”

“You won’t be of any use to her dead!”

We flew back the way we came, toward the path that had led us down into the cavern. But the path was gone. As we hurtled forward I saw that the cave had completely transformed. Where the rock wall used to be was now a sandy horizon and a hazy yellow sun. The stalagmites on the floor had disintegrated into more raging sand dunes, and the stalactites were replaced by an infinite red sky.

Amir al-Katib had not just summoned the ghuls. He had summoned the desert.

Claws shot through the shifting sands as we ran. Catalina cried out as one scratched the back of her calf, ripping the hose and flesh right above the top of her boot. “This way!” I exclaimed, pulling her up a tall dune in front of us. “We’ll get the high ground.”

Catalina and I raced up the dune, slipping through the moving sands as we did. At the top we bent over to catch our breaths. Those ghastly green arms hadn’t followed us up here. They stuck out of the sands underneath us, surrounding our dune. Bending awkwardly at the elbow, the ghuls’ arms pressed against the earth. Then with a final push, they hurled themselves out from underneath it.

And finally we saw them in their entirety: dozens of corpse-like women with red cats’ eyes and warped grins on their faces. They crawled on their knuckles with their backs arched so their
coarse black manes jutted farther out of their spines.

Panting, Catalina bent over and pressed her hand against her bloody leg.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I’m fine.” The she-beasts were making a slow circuit around our hill. They were in no hurry. There was nowhere for us to run.

“Should we summon something?” I asked Catalina. “A golem might sink in this sand.” When the girl didn’t answer, I said, “Catalina? What do you think?”

But when I turned back to her, two hands crashed into my throat and threw me onto my back. I screwed my eyes against the pain. Then I noticed who was strangling me.

“Cat . . . ?”

But Catalina’s eyes were now red like the ghulahs’, red as the blood dripping down her leg where the ghulahs had scratched her. She bit her lip as her fingers tightened around my windpipe. With both legs I kicked her off me, and her nails raked against my face.

I held my stinging cheek, then looked down at the lines of blood on my palm. “Damn it,” I said to those lines of blood. The ghulah’s scratch had turned Catalina into one of them. And now Catalina had scratched me.

I knew what would happen next.

I blinked. And when I opened my eyes again, the world changed. Everything was red now. I felt a new strength coursing
through my veins. Suddenly I knew exactly what I needed to do. Amir al-Katib had been a distraction. This woman was my enemy. She had been my enemy all along! Now I knew why she had followed me all of those times before — into the ocean, into the forests of Ayití. She was using me, trying to take my glory! I would show her who was in charge here.

I would kill her.

I pounced at her. Now we were on the ground, wrestling with jaws clenched. Her teeth were gleaming with saliva as she wheezed air between them. I snatched a handful of sand from my side and threw it into her eyes. With a screech she flew off me. I smirked and buried my teeth into her neck.

Catalina threw me off her and summoned her sword Excalibur. With a drunken movement she swung the sword at me. I leaped out of the way. She growled, adjusted her grip on the handle, and came at me again. I managed to dodge the sword just as it swept past. Catalina tripped and went flying into the sand. As she made impact with the ground I stomped on her sword arm and held her head down with my elbow. I twisted the sword out of her grasp with my free hand as she thrashed beneath my shoe.

Now I had her. Slowly I raised the sword over my head. Good-bye, Catalina Terreros.

“Bal!”

My grip loosened around the sword, which wobbled behind my head as my wrist went slack. “Jinni,” I said, remembering
where I was. The world quickly went back to its normal coloring. I swung my head over my shoulder. Below my dune, I could see Jinniyah’s hand and half of her face sticking out of the sand.

“Bal, help me!” she cried. “Get us out of here!
BAL!”

More green hands shot out of the sand around her. They smothered her and dragged her down into the earth.

I pushed Catalina over so I could see her face. Tears were streaming from her eyes — from the sand I’d thrown at her, I guessed. A ring of red teeth marks glared at me from the side of her neck. Trying to ignore them, I shook her. “Catalina, wake up! It’s a mirage! The ghulahs put us under a spell! Please! I need you to get us out of here!”

Catalina kept squirming under me, her eyes inflamed, savage, and red. Oh, how had she broken out of my Eden before? If I could do the same thing, I could break us out of this desert prison.

“How did I break out of your Eden?”
Catalina had said in the forest.
“You just need to figure out why you don’t belong there.
”

And once she’d said, too,
“You’ll find that most female creatures in myths are extremely frightening. Apparently men find us very scary.
”

At once I knew what the story of the ghulahs was about. And I yelled so Amir al-Katib could hear me, “This is a story told by a man who’s afraid of the desert, just like he’s afraid of women.” I looked down sadly at Catalina and said, “Just like
some people are afraid of men. And I can’t blame you for it.”

I went on, much louder, “But it’s a mirage, Amir! And I won’t be afraid of mirages! Maybe this desert is your prison, but it’s not ours! We don’t belong here. It’s only a story! It’s not real! So if you don’t mind, we’re leaving. And next time you want to summon the desert, leave me and my friends the hell out of it!”

A whirlwind of sand spiraled up toward the sky. I covered my head and held Catalina tight. Over the sound of wind, I could hear the ghulahs shrieking. Then the wind stopped, and I fell forward onto my knees as the sand disappeared under my feet.

I stood and looked up. The red sky of the desert had given way to the rocky ceiling of the Cave of the Jagua. We were back in Ayití, in the dark.

The sound of coughing drew my attention back downward. “Catalina!”

I helped her sit. She was shaking wildly, breathing gasping, shivery breaths. “What happened?”

I held her and said, “Nothing. A mirage.”

“Bal!” Jinni yelled from across the room.

“Jinni!” I cried. “You’re okay!”

At the other end of the cave, Jinniyah balled her hands into tight little fists, and her hair cast black light around the room. “Bal, I
hate
ghuls!” she said. “They’re dirty and ugly, and I hate them!”

I helped Catalina stand and said, “Catalina and I didn’t love them, either. But they weren’t too hard to deal with, once we figured out the story . . .”

I trailed off at the tail end of the word. In front of us, by the scar in the cave wall, bits of lightning were shooting out of the ground. A wind from nowhere gushed through the cave, and I felt the floor shuddering like it had when Amir had summoned the ghulahs. Over the deafening rumbles that reverberated out of the floor, I yelled, “What’s he doing now, Jinni?”

The wind swept up a cloud of dust from the cave floor. But through the dust I could see parts of the beast appearing in front of us. Out of its broad, bullish face grew an ivory horn, long and sharp as a jouster’s lance. The beast threw its head back and roared, revealing razor sharp, saliva-wetted teeth. It trained its glowing red eyes on us, kicked up its hooves, and came at us.

Catalina and I dived
in either direction. The monster was pure muscle, and as it barreled past us, the earth shook with the force of a hundred horses. But pure muscle is difficult to stop. The beast plowed into the cave’s back wall. It shook its head against the blow and snorted in frustration.

From my place on the floor I looked up to make sure Jinniyah had escaped being trampled by the beast. I found her about twenty feet above us, hanging onto one of the closer overhanging stalactites, wrapped around it so tightly I guessed she might have dug her toenails into the rock. I ran over while the beast was still in its dazed state.

“Jinni!” I yelled. “What is that thing?”

“It’s a karkadann, Bal!”

A karkadann? Oh, yes. The unicorn with the taste for blood. But this beast looked nothing like any unicorn I’d ever imagined. This karkadann was almost fifteen feet tall with a body more bull than horse. Its fur was a coarse brown, not white, and its
tail whipped against the cave floor so hard that stalagmites cracked apart.

“Is there a way to beat it?” I shouted up to Jinniyah.

Jinni shook her head into the rocky spine. “I don’t know! I heard some warriors killed a karkadann once, but I don’t know how they did it!”

The beast was currently shaking its head and whipping itself with its tail as if to spur itself on. “Look at the wall!” Catalina exclaimed. “This cave is falling apart. One more hit like that and the whole thing will collapse on top of us! We have to summon something and stop it — quickly!”

She was right. Where the karkadann had hit the wall, a thin but ominous fissure had formed. It slowly crawled up the wall toward the ceiling.

“Golems!” I shouted back, and I quickly outlined the story for her. “Jewish protectors made of clay.
Ameth
makes them live,
meth
makes them die. Quick, Cat!”

Catalina muttered something under her breath, and a golem grew out of the earth beside her. In an instant my own golem grew next to hers. Though Catalina’s golem was black and mine was the color of clay, both were thick and angry, with eyes made of burning coals.

Seeing the golems, the karkadann shook out its bull head and snuffed in anger. I climbed onto my golem’s back, and Catalina’s golem raised her onto his. “Careful, Infante,” Catalina said. Giants though they were, our clay protectors were
little more than half the size of the karkadann.

The karkadann lowered its head, trained its beady red eyes on us, and charged at our two golems. At the last second before impact my golem stepped aside, letting the karkadann smash into his clay arm. Catalina’s golem added more buffets on the karkadann’s other flank. One final, mighty blow sent the unicorn sliding across the cave on its side, tossing up stalagmites and stones as it whisked past.

I climbed higher on my golem’s back to peer over its shoulder at the fallen karkadann. “Is it dead?” I asked Catalina.

The karkadann answered the question by letting loose an earth-shaking roar and trotting to its feet. It threw itself at my golem and smashed its horn in the golem’s pottery gut.

“This isn’t working!” I shouted over to Catalina. “I’m going to summon something else!”

“No, wait!” she shouted. Her golem brought down its fists on the karkadann’s skull. “With
two
golems, the fight is a draw. But with three . . .”

My lips parted. “With three . . .”

Our golems barged across the cave. “Jinni!” Catalina and I screamed. “Jinni!”

I reined in my golem right beneath Jinniyah. “You have to summon a golem, Jinni! It’s the only way!”