The Summoning (24 page)

Her dad watched her go, too. He waved at her back with one graceful hand. “Ah, my daughter. I sent her on this small errand, she hoped to execute it perfectly, and now she has embarrassed us both.” He put his hand on his heart. “I am Ibrahim al Hassan. I am honored to receive you beneath the hospitality of my roof. My daughter tells me you have been expecting to hear from me.”

It must be Darius, I thought, who’d sent me to this guy. I didn’t have to like him.

“Please,” he said. “Be seated. We will have tea together, and you will tell me how I may serve you.”

Not being able to smell him properly really had me on edge. How was I supposed to know what he was feeling or thinking? How was I supposed to know if he was lying or not, or even if someone else came into the room? He motioned me once more to be seated. I sat down when he did, but with my feet still under me so I could get up in a hurry if I had to

He raised his hand, the door I had come in through opened, and another man, dressed in the same turban and long buttoned coat, came in wheeling a silver cart. On it was a curlicued silver teapot, two tiny tea cups, and three little covered plates. The man—and this was a different man, I could tell because he was definitely younger and shorter than the other two—poured the tea, distributed plates, and then handed around the covered plates, which contained little sandwiches and sweetmeats. My host loaded his plate. I took one of each and set them, together with my teacup, on the table beside my chair.

I couldn’t smell the new guy either. People who go blind must feel like this. I started planning my way out of this house. I’d lost my sense of smell when I came inside the door of this house. I wanted to get out and be sure that I’d get it back as soon as I was outside again.

“Thank you,” Ibrahim al Hassan said to the servant and waved him away. “We will serve ourselves now.”

“How many servants do you have?” I asked. I wondered if there was one guy whose only job it was to brush Ibrahim’s teeth each night.

“Oh, no servants,” he said genially. He held up a tiny pair of silver tongs and proceeded to add lump after lump of sugar to his cup, until it overflowed. He slurped it with relish and added two more lumps. “Sugar?” He offered me the bowl with one hand while he slurped away again at his tea. I shook my head. He drank more tea and put one of the pastries in his mouth, tasting it with obvious enjoyment. “What was I saying? Of course. Not servants. These are my children. My sons and my daughters. They serve me far more faithfully than any servant ever would. And how many, you would ask me,” he went on, waving away my next query as he poured himself a second cup of tea and filled it with sugar as before. “And I am ashamed to answer I do not know, exactly. I have had many wives. In my culture, it is expected that a man such as myself, an important man, would have many wives, and concubines also, by which to have many children. It is good—how do you put it here in America? It is good for the race. I can only tell you that I have completely fulfilled my obligations in that regard.” He waved one hand gently in the air as he spoke, while drinking tea or eating with the other. He exuded kindly geniality. He seemed like a really nice guy.

He went on, “Children make much better attendants than servants, I have found. For one thing, they are completely loyal, even unto death. And they have good reason to offer me their service. Each one of them, you see, is hoping to become my heir. In our tradition, you must understand, only one will inherit. And he or she will inherit everything.” He waved a hand around the room, still clutching a little pastry. “It gives them—what is your lovely name for it?” He looked up, reaching for the word, then smiled benignly as he found it. “Motivation. Yes. It gives them motivation. My smallest wishes, instantly obeyed. They are good children, I tell you.”

I didn’t sip the tea, and I didn’t eat the food. I don’t eat things I can’t smell. Ever. That’s something we learn when we’re pups. And if nothing else, I
should
have been able to smell the food.

“So a girl could inherit too?”

He nodded while he finished chewing. “Oh, yes, I have told them so. I care not the gender of my heir. I care only that he—or she—has the necessary qualifications. The necessary craft. What is your name?” He asked me then, and reached out as he said it, and described a little shape in the air.

The air tightened. There was definitely something going on here. Something I couldn’t—smell. I thought about my answer for a moment, and then looked past his hand, still stretched out towards me, at his face. Suddenly, it seemed as though his face was old, lined, his beard gray, his mouth misshapen by missing teeth, and his body shrunken in his chair. I blinked. No, same middle-aged guy, same benign smile, same kindly eyes.

I said, “You’re a magician, aren’t you?”

He looked annoyed for an instant, and then his face smoothed again. As though as an afterthought, he added a laugh and a wave. “Of course. But you knew that. How else could I help you?”

There was a fly in the room. It buzzed around his head for a moment, and then went to land on one of the plates of cakes. I saw his eyes follow it for a moment. Then the fly came and buzzed around my head. I shook it away from my eyes.

“Have you studied demons?” I asked, partly distracted by the fly that seemed to want to land on my ear. I don’t like flies.

He opened his hands. “Yes, of course you would ask me that. It is my life’s work,” he said. “The study of summoning and directing the demon-kind. My library—” He gestured to the books all around us. “—you will find is the greatest collection that exists today on Earth of demon lore. Yes, if you seek to know about the demon kind, I am the one to ask.”

I sat considering him for a moment. If he knew all about demons, I should ask him a hundred questions, just to see what he said. But if I couldn’t tell his truth from his lies, his answers weren’t going to tell me anything.

I got up to go and look at the books. I took a swipe at the fly as I went. I struck it with my hand and it sped away, buzzing. Funny that in a house so big, so well-kept, with so many servants—all right, children—he couldn’t keep out one persistent and obnoxious fly.

The books were obviously going to be no use to me. I couldn’t even read the names on the spines. I didn’t know what languages they were in. They might have been in every language, because I saw lots of kinds of alphabets. Bunches of the books were actually scrolls kept in boxes and labeled with what may have been Arabic or something like that. He got up and accompanied me as I looked at the backs of books. Occasionally he pulled one out and opened it, offering a continuous commentary.

“The Magus Apollonius,” he said, taking a thick ancient volume out of my hand, “claimed to have had thirteen demons in his direct control. He claims also to have used them to destroy the city of Abuchiya in 760 A.D., when the Caliph of that city offended him.”

“Where’s Abuchiya?” I asked.

He waved his hands gently. “No one knows. No one has ever heard of it. Of course, Apollonius did claim to have destroyed the city for all time, but it’s probably just a story.”

I reached out and turned the pages of the book he still held open in his hands. It was huge, so large you couldn’t hold it with just one hand. Paper is a really good source of trace scents, since it absorbs the oils of peoples’ hands really well. The book was centuries old, the pages dog-eared and stained where people had studied them for extended periods of time. I wanted to put it right against my face and breathe in deeply, but thought I’d better not in front of him. As it was, I couldn’t smell a thing. The words were written in a language and a script I didn’t know. There were diagrams, one or two of which reminded me of things I’d seen in Darius’s room. Then I turned a page and found a picture.

A magician in a robe was summoning—staff in one hand, book in the other—a creature in the shape of a lizard or crocodile but with a human head that had appeared within a pentagram inside a circle, crawling out of a hole of darkness.

“Have you ever called up a demon?” I asked Ibrahim al Hassan.

He looked down at the picture, and then closed the book. “Those of us schooled in the science of the demon-kind often call up the unholy ones to do our will. It is a great endeavor and full of danger. It takes an unusual talent, boundless concentration and skill. It is an ability so rare that, unfortunately for me, not one of my children has it. In fact,” he said, looking at me with his wide eager eyes down his long nose, “were I to discover someone who had that power, so rare and so great, to call a demon to his will—or hers—I would be tempted to make her my heir. My one heir. Heir to my library, my knowledge, my craft, and of course…,” he waved his hand around the room, “the other riches and treasures I have accumulated in the service of knowledge throughout my life.” He waited expectantly, watching me, one hand still in the air.

“What would happen to your children?” I asked. I wandered along the shelf, running my fingers across the spines of books so old that pieces of them disintegrated as I touched them. In the corner of my eye I saw him watching me. He lifted one hand magnanimously.

“My children know well that when one is bound to the service of a great craft, as I am, personal considerations may not get in the way of the furthering of knowledge. No, my heir must be the right person, whether he—or she—is of my own blood, or not.”

“I’ll bet your kids would be awfully mad,” I surmised, “after working for you for all those years and all. I bet they’ll go to court.” I was thinking aloud, just riffing to keep the conversation from settling anywhere serious. “I’ll bet they tie up everything for years and years, since they are your kids, and after all they did for you.”

“Oh no,” he said simply. “We have another custom, where I come from.” He closed the large book and put it back gently in exactly the space I’d taken it from. “No matter how many the children, there is only one heir. One heir.” He held up a single long finger, to help me count. And he smiled that benign smile again that was beginning to chill me on the inside, as well as put the hairs up on my skin. “It is the first duty of the appointed heir to assure that she—or he—is the only heir after all. Of course, the chosen one, the one skilled in the craft, and able to call demons to her will, shall have no difficulties in this regard. No difficulties whatsoever.”

I got it. I wondered if any of his devoted children were listening right now. What a great dad.

“That’s something I always wondered,” I said suddenly. “I mean, I’ve heard of people calling up demons and controlling them and making them do your will and all, but what do you do after that?”

“After that?” he asked.

The fly came back. It had buzzed around the room somewhere, probably laying millions of eggs on the sandwiches and pastry that still lay on the little plate by my chair. It buzzed around Ibrahim al Hassan’s clean white turban. He took no notice. I waved a hand as it buzzed by my head.

“Yeah. After that. When you’re done with it. How do you make it go away? I mean, you don’t want a demon around all the time. You don’t want it coming around and bothering you when you didn’t have anything more for it to do. How do you send it back where it came from?”

Ibrahim al Hassan stared down his nose at me, and one of his long-fingered hands crept up to stroke his beard while he considered me gravely. With his other hand he suddenly batted at the fly. “But you don’t simply send it back,” he told me. “No one of any conscience would do that. Demons come from the darkest realms of Hell. We who have the power and the craft call them to do our bidding, but when we are finished with them, as you say, we destroy them. Thus we commit a righteous act.” He lifted a hand and, with the other, he pointed at the fly, which was crawling along the bookshelf. It stopped crawling.

Behind him two of his children came into the room. Each of them carried a fly whisk. One was a man and the other was the same young woman who’d come and picked me up, or it was her sister who wore the same clothes. They advanced to where their father was pointing, and the girl brought down the whisk with sudden ferocity on the book where the fly seemed to be pinned. She examined the whisk for traces of what she’d killed, and then the two of them went out of the room without a word, and without a glance from their father.

They weren’t like any kids I’d ever seen.

“Of course,” Ibrahim al Hassan continued, as though nothing had happened, “it is not unheard of for a young adept who has succeeded, beyond all hope and desires, in calling a demon into her service, to give the creature over to a master of the craft to be bestowed wisely. That is often the best course of action, in such a case.”

He put out a hand as though he were going to put an arm around my shoulders, and I moved on smoothly before he could reach me.

“Well, that sounds like a great idea,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, following me. “An excellent idea, and so easily done, since all the adept requires to make the problem go away is the demon’s name, correctly pronounced.” He shot me another look, and his hands curled in a gesture towards me. I thought about chewing on those hands. If you do it thoroughly you can separate out all the little bones. It takes a while.

Al Hassan went on talking. “Ancients of the craft, such as I, consider ourselves to be at the service of young adepts, to guide their footsteps and answer their queries, and help them in their trials. It is one of our most sacred responsibilities.” He put both his hands on his heart, and smiled his beneficent smile at me. I smiled back. He sounded so sweet. So healthy and kind. I wanted to eat him for dinner. I couldn’t imagine what he might have up his sleeve, though, so I didn’t try. I bet he was poisonous, anyway.

“Are there any books in here about the Eater of Souls?” I asked, gazing around at the huge collection.

“The—?” For a moment it seemed like he didn’t know what I was talking about. He lost his focus and looked around the room. “The Eater of Souls, ah, yes. I should not wonder at your question. This region is expecting…” He smiled a different smile then, one that showed his teeth. I answered with a toothy smile in my turn; I couldn’t help it. It was all I could do to keep from putting my head down and growling as well. He reached for the right word, and found it, “…visitation, am I correct? Yes, from the World Snake. The Eater of Souls would of course take the opportunity—but you and I cannot be disturbed by these little occurrences. The pursuit of knowledge and the understanding of the many layers of truth is a greater calling, one might even truthfully say a holy calling, and we of its faith must not allow ourselves to be distracted. Now come, let me show you my work place.” He held out his arms, beneficent, generous, to conduct me to a doorway across the room.