Ariel (26 page)

 
"I summon thee,
O Dweller in the Darkness,
O Spirit of the Pit.
I command thee
To make thy
Most evil appearance."
 

It took a moment for the shock of recognition to wear off, and when it did I began struggling against the ropes cutting into my wrists and ankles, renewed strength flowing from my pounding heart, but the ropes were tied too tight.

 
"In the name of
Our mutual benefactor,
In the name of
Lucifer the Fallen
I conjure thee."
 

"No!"
It was Ariel, eyes smoldering. She sent one of her guards sprawling with a toss of her head. The necromancer looked to the rider, who came forward, drawing his broadsword. Ariel stepped purposefully toward him, almost casually batting aside the spear that was aimed for her side. The rider kept me between himself and Ariel. He brought the broadsword up and held it poised over my head, staring evenly at Ariel.

 
"By his blood-lettered sacraments,
By Hell and by Earth,
To come to me now,
In your own guise
To do your will."
 

Coldness began spreading deep within me, as if I'd swallowed an ice cube whole. I felt isolated within the pentagram. A hurricane's-eye stillness settled around the table. I struggled harder but the bonds held. I jerked my right wrist; it had been burned by candle flame.

Candle flame?

I looked around quickly. Nobody was paying any attention to me, not even Ariel. She and the rider were absorbed in each other, a test of will. One guard was unconscious or dead, a second was picking himself up from the floor with the help of one of his mates, and the last watched the silent game of cat and mouse played by the rider and Ariel. The necromancer was immersed in the conjuration.

 
"I adjure thee In the name of
The foulest of masters  .  .  .  ."
 

I looked at the candle ahead of my bound right hand. A steady, even glow. My stomach was numb with cold. My lungs breathed Arctic air. The space a foot above my midsection pulsated, and a swirling gray mist slowly took form. I strained my hand past the candle flame. It seared my wrist. I turned my arm so that the rope was against the flame.

 
"  .  .  .By his loins,
By his blood,
By his damned soul,
To come forth."
 

Burn, damn you, burn! The skin began to blister along the inside of my wrist. I smelled burning hemp. Disturbing movements began coalescing within the stormy gray above me. Once the spell was complete the pentagram would be sealed and the demon would appear.

 
"I order thee
By all the unholy names:
Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub—"
 

The mist began to solidify into something resembling ink in water. The rope was burned through! I pulled it but the twists of the knot held fast. I worked my hand quickly from side to side and finally it pulled free. My fingers trembled as I untied the knot from around my left hand. A glance up at the rider. He still eyed Ariel, waiting for her to make her move. She had to have noticed me untying myself, but would have been careful not to register it.

"Belial, Shai-tan, Mephistopheles—"

The air was freezing. I twisted beneath the inky mass and began untying my ankle bonds. My movement caught the eye of both the rider and the necromancer. The latter looked quickly back to the black book and intoned evenly:

 
"Thy hair, thy heart,
Thy lungs, thy blood,
To be here
To work your will
Upon me."
 

With the last word the temperature plummeted. I breathed mist and trembled from more than the cold as I untied the last rope. The thing in the pentagram with me began to assume a smoky, humanoid shape, massive and dark.

The stand-off between Ariel and the rider reached a head when I leaned forward to free my legs. I saw him about to swing the sword for my head and jumped away. I should have landed on the floor. Instead I ran into an invisible wall. The conjuration was finished; the pentagram was sealed.

* * *

I must have seemed to defy gravity as I leaned at an impossible angle with my back against the edge of the pentagram. The rider's sword stopped jarringly midway through its arc. A flash of sparks screaming from grating metals illuminated the room, and suddenly I was falling backward to the floor. The sword had breached the integrity of the pentagram, and I landed at the necromancer's feet. Before he could react I knocked the book from his hands and sent him flying over his desk.

An enraged bellow came from within the pentagram, then faded away.

Ariel had bolted for the rider the instant he began to swing. Through the haze of smoke I saw the rider jerk the sword from the wooden edge of the pentagram. He pulled back and swung, and sword met horn.

I stumbled over something in front of the office desk. Fred! I drew the sword from its sheath and intercepted a guard heading toward Ariel with his blade held ready to thrust. I deflected it, reversed my blade, and slashed, cutting through half his neck.

Ariel backed toward the door. She used her horn as a counterpart to the rider's sword: block, slash, thrust. She must have already started to grow weak; she was much slower than usual. I had to help her.

I grabbed the edge of the office desk and lifted. It toppled over onto the necromancer. I had to keep him too distracted, enraged, and busy to be able to cast a spell, or we were lost. Ignoring the curses—profane rather than arcane—from beneath the desk, I turned and ran to Ariel. The three remaining guards were behind the rider, trying to fan out and outflank Ariel but having a hard time of it because of the large table in the middle of the floor.

Fuck honorable combat. I dove to the floor beneath Ariel, rolled onto my back, and slashed straight up. The rider stopped in mid-swing, gasping as my sword brushed his thigh. Blood flowed down his leg. I'd been aiming for his groin. I thrust up and back, toward the soft part beneath his chin, but he jumped clear. Blood spattered my face. I rolled out from beneath Ariel and stood. The rider stepped toward me, skidded in his own blood, and fell. I stepped forward to deliver the
coup de grace
and stopped. Three guards were on us and the necromancer was struggling to stand upright.

Ariel twitched her head. A deflected spear scraped along the wall. I risked a glance and saw the necromancer standing, arms raised above his head. Using her body as a shield against the guards, Ariel backed up quickly, crowding me against the door. It flew open as the doorguards burst in, and I fell backward, rolled, and came up slashing, catching the right-hand guard in the stomach. Fred cut through his mail and he dropped his cutlass.

Ariel kicked straight back while engaging the remaining guards ahead of her. She caught the left-hand door guard in the ribs. Bone snapped and blood ran out of his mouth.

"Run, Pete!"

I had time to glimpse the rider, on his feet again, eye blazing, sword swinging, and Ariel's horn coming up to meet it, when the necromancer spoke a foreign word and the door slammed shut.

* * *

I was on the eighty-fifth floor. The elevator shafts and stairs were my only way down. No alarm had been spread and I made it to the elevator doors with no trouble. I pried open the doors with Fred, silently apologizing to Malachi Lee for demeaning the blade. I felt sure he'd understand.

The shaft was dark. Looking up, I could barely make out the bottom of the elevator, forever stuck on the eighty-sixth floor. A narrow peg ladder ran the length of the shaft; I grabbed it and swung inside. The door proved difficult to re-close but I managed somehow, holding onto the peg ladder with one arm. I'd slung Fred through the familiar and worn belt-loop.

I descended in total darkness. I found it was easier if I closed my eyes. The shaft only went down to the eightieth floor, so I climbed up to eighty-one, open the doors just wide enough to pass through, and stepped into the corridor.

Nothing.

I walked to the stairs, trying not to appear hurried. Women's voices came down the corridor as I reached the stairs. I opened the door quickly and stepped into the stairwell. The voices passed. I counted to thirty, then began walking down flights of stairs slowly to keep my footsteps from echoing in the stairwell. I expected at any moment to hear them thundering down on me from above. Surely they'd be scouring the elevator shafts and stairwells by now. Maybe word hadn't got around yet and there hadn't been time to send parties into elevator shafts and stairwells.

I crept on cat feet—maybe frightened mouse feet is closer—when I passed the eightieth floor. Men's voices came from the corridor beyond the stairwell door. I hugged the wall and went slowly down the stairs, expecting the door to open at any second. Nothing happened. I'd made it all the way down to the sixty-fifth floor when I heard voices and footsteps above me. They were perhaps four floors up and descending fast. I couldn't afford a confrontation. I was fatigued, had been beat up twice within the last twelve hours, and didn't want the sound of a fight tipping off others in any case, so I pushed open the door that led to the sixty-fifth floor and closed it quietly behind me. The floor was deserted. I kept my right hand firmly on Fred as I walked past office doors. Ignoring the first set of elevator doors, I walked around a bit instead, eyes peeled for movement among the dark shapes. There was none. I found another elevator on the opposite side of the building. I shook my head wearily and used Fred to pry open the elevator doors, sheathed the blade, and stepped in.

Forty-seventh floor. It had taken me over an hour to descend less than twenty floors. My fingers were hopelessly cramped, palms blistered and on fire. My legs were holding up relatively well. All that walking.

I had just stopped for a breather when something struck me hard on the shoulder. It felt like a brick and probably was. I stifled a cry behind clenched teeth and saw searing white bands. I lost my grip and fell.

I landed on my back almost immediately. Moist things lay all around me. The stench was terrible. Voices came from a long way above me, echoing along the shaft. One spoke something loudly and all fell silent. Three seconds passed, then something smacked into the metal by my foot. Another brick. I stood quickly. It hurt. I stepped over the junk around me and pressed myself against the wall opposite the peg ladder. Another brick slammed next to the first. I felt it through my feet when it hit.

The voices reverberated again, and then they were gone.

I'd landed on the elevator. I bent and groped around in the muck until I found what I was looking for: the emergency exit. I smiled to myself. It made me wince.

I picked Fred up from the shit. The fall had broken my belt loop. The sword seemed in good shape but the scabbard was cracked. I lowered it into the square hole on the roof of the elevator until it touched bottom, then let go. It fell over and landed with a hollow clank. I lowered myself into the elevator with one arm. The other didn't want to work.

Using Fred again, I opened the two sets of doors—the elevator was only a foot above being even with the forty-sixth floor—and stepped into the corridor. Again, no one was there. I was having a hard time understanding this. A contingent of possibly five thousand people, and I'd seen no more than—what? Fifty, sixty, something like that. A hundred, tops. I realized the building was big, but they should have been concentrating on the elevators and stairways to find me. I should have been running into them everywhere.

Unless they were nowhere near five thousand strong. One thousand? It began to sound more and more likely. Yeah, great, Garey, now the odds are only one thousand to one instead of five. Whoop-te-doo.

* * *

I made it out by cutting long lengths of phone wire, tying them together, and lowering myself out a window from the fourth floor as soon as it got dark. It wasn't easy, but it was just about my only workable option. My left arm still tried to convince me that it was on strike; I had to force it to reconsider. I dared not go any lower than the third floor; there were bound to be guards at all possible methods of egress from there down. I had been mildly surprised that the fourth floor was unguarded. Either they figured I'd have to descend farther to get out of the building, or my revised estimate of one thousand men divided between top and bottom floors was accurate. Either way, I wasn't about to stick around to find out which speculation was correct. I wanted out of there. So I could come back. And get Ariel. And head west, and go anywhere, nowhere. And the entire rest of the world could go even further to hell and I wouldn't care.

It seemed a long time before my feet finally touched the sidewalk. Then I was on the ground and couldn't help but breathe a sigh. Voices were headed my way. I walked away from the phone wire climbing the wall like straight plastic ivy. I deliberately walked so that I came close to the two men coming toward me, both armed. They nodded a greeting to me and I returned it, heart pounding, trusting the darkness to hide my beat-up face.

It isn't like in the movies: lone man in enemy territory is sighted by soldiers, recognized instantly, and pursued. These people were loners, as I was a loner. And, while they were part of what I suppose you could call an "army," there were no uniforms to distinguish me from them. I did nothing to invite suspicion, so I wasn't suspected. I kept walking past them, trying to keep my pace slow and deliberate, a curious, cold feeling between my shoulder blades.

So, after an inglorious arrival and an impotent confrontation, I walked straight out of enemy hands. But I vowed I would be back.