The Summoning (32 page)

He took the top off a big jar on the counter, reached inside and drew out what looked like a handful of glittering white sand. He murmured some words over it and then he sprinkled the sand over the girl’s body, from her legs to her head. Maryam whimpered as the sand touched her face, but he silenced her with an admonishing finger. Her form began to luminesce with a pale, rose light, as though it were one of his bottles.

Al Hassan brushed off his fingers over her chest. He reached up and took from around his neck a thin, golden chain. He drew it up and over his head. At the end of the chain dangled a tiny pair of golden scissors. He opened his hands and intoned some words in a language I didn’t know. On the table, Maryam began to scream, and then he reached out with the scissors, and seemed to reach into her throat. He made small, delicate cuts from her throat down toward her heart, and in these incisions, which did not bleed, the luminescence of her body began to pool. Where it pooled, it became darker, almost purple. He gathered this light into his free hand, wound it like a cord through his fingers, and then as he cut toward her belly he leaned down and took the tendrils of light into his mouth. Maryam screamed and screamed as her father sucked the light of her soul into his mouth like someone eating a long piece of errant pasta. All the while he continued cutting, across the shoulders, then along the spine, winding the tendrils of light into his hand, and drawing them into his mouth. The luminescence of Maryam’s body faded, and as this light was drawn out of her, her screams changed. He finished with a few cuts at the back of her head, and the sound she made became breathless, and then breathy, and then stopped.

Al Hassan continued sucking and working something in his mouth. He reached out his hand for the bottle and his son offered it at once. Al Hassan put his mouth to it. He worked his mouth again, pushing something out into the mouth of the bottle, and very slowly, the bottle began to glow with a pale pink light that intensified to a fiery purple, and then faded again to a pale rose. Al Hassan continued working his mouth and moved over to where his little daughters were still assiduously bent over the melting wax. He reached into the pan, picked up the globule of wax and wire and rolled it into a ball in his fingers, and then stuck it in the mouth of the jar, which sat in his hand now, glowing as luminously as any of the others.

Maryam lay on the table as limp and quiet as though she were dead, but her eyes were open, and she was breathing calmly.

Al Hassan turned to me, his eyes as kindly as ever. The hair rose on my neck and body. It’s a good thing he wasn’t a dog. He would have smelled my fear.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Y
ou see how easy it is for me? You see what fate awaits you?” He waved a hand at his older daughter. “You may release her, my sons. I am finished with her.”

Maryam’s arms and legs were freed from the restraints and she was lifted off the table. She went and stood beside her brothers with her head bowed. The light was out of her eyes. I guessed she’d be a really good girl now.

“And now,” al Hassan waved the air again. “It is the turn of our honored guest.”

The boys started pulling me toward the table. I pulled back and for a moment, stayed where I was. “I thought you wanted the name of the demon?” I asked. I was pleased to hear my voice sound hard and cold. It’s not, the gods know, what I was feeling at that precise second. But he didn’t need to know that.

“Ah.” Al Hassan lifted his hands, one still holding the small rose bottle, in one of his theatrical gestures that made me want to cut his goddamn hands off. “My memory,” he cried. “What was I thinking? The excitement of possessing the soul of a werewolf—”

“Not yet you don’t.” The sons had begun to pull again, and I was losing ground.

“That I shall soon possess the soul of a werewolf,” al Hassan amended, “has made me forget my purpose.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “You held that demon a hundred and twenty-four years and all of a sudden you forgot that you’re trying to possess it.” I leaned to one side and grabbed the closest guy’s shoulder in my teeth and bit down hard. I felt flesh tear, I tasted blood, but the guy didn’t even slow down. It was depressing.

Al Hassan said, “You may as well release him. They hardly feel pain in that state.”

I had reached the table. I wrapped my leg around one of the corners, trying to hook my chain on something so I couldn’t go any further.

“Tell me.” He waved a hand, and the guys stopped pushing. “How is it that you gained possession of that which I have so long desired? What book, what incantation, whose grymoire did you use to learn the creature’s name and bind it to you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I asked.

He stepped another pace toward me, he met my eyes full on, and this time all the kindliness was gone. The illusion of a middle-aged man slipped for just a second, and I saw him, old, hard as nails, crusted with cruelty and malice, greed and power. He let me see him like that, and he smiled. His hands lifted, and the illusion of the middle-aged, kindly scholar was back in place.

“You do not yet take me seriously,” he said. “But I assure you, you should. Perhaps, if you see a little more of my power, you will be convinced.” He peeled the stopper out of the bottle that he held in his hand. Maryam cried out as he raised it to one eye and pressed it there. His eye lit up with a rosy glow, as though a light had come on inside it. Behind me, Maryam whimpered one more time, as her father stoppered the mouth of the bottle with his thumb, and then moved it to his other eye and held it there, until the light in the bottle was entirely gone.

He turned back to me then, his face illuminated unnaturally from within. He looked younger, vibrant, powerful. Even his beard was black again. He lifted his hands and his sons stepped back. He spoke some words and pointed at me hard—and I felt a concussion as though I’d been hit all over at once with a big stick. I slammed back into the wall. The luminosity died from his face. Maryam, too, was leaning against the wall, crying as though she had just witnessed her own death.

He glared at her for a moment. “I don’t usually let them see that. It’s better to allow them to hope.”

I was still trying to breathe, waiting for the pain to subside. He kept talking. There was a drumming in my ears, far away.

“They understand just enough to know that they could be worse off than they are now. They do have something more to lose. Maryam, unfortunately…” He shook his head sadly. “Now, I’ll have no further use for her. A pity. She was a good girl. One of my favorites. And her mother…” He smiled in reminiscence.

I thought it was time to move on. I took a breath. “So what you’re saying is, you’ll trade me my soul for the name of my demon.”

He looked surprised. “Is that not what I have been saying all along? But now you know you must obey me, that you have, in fact, no choice at all.”

My heart was pounding hard in my ears as the realization reached from my gut to my brain that this guy was going to cut me apart. It sounded like drumbeats. I could call Richard to me now, just by that name, but what would come? The new-made boy who had died in this house at least once already? Or the creature of darkness he’d been the moment before he disappeared? The vision of Richard as I’d last seen him, pulsing with darkness, his eyes as wild and knowing as death, grew in my mind, and with the picture I understood: I’d really had no idea what I was dealing with. But this kindly old fraud in front of me probably would. And this critter was the last thing on Earth that I’d want something like that working for. He already had way too much power. Any more, and he’d probably do for us all.

Between the rock and the hard place, the frying pan and the fire, there is still the choice. There’s the choice of what kind of end you want to make. Do you want to sizzle, or do you want to dance? Do you want to give in, or take your chance?

“Lay her on the table, my children,” al Hassan said gently. He lifted the chain from around his neck and took up the little scissors once again. “I will make the first cut, and we will see if you still remember. I will make the second cut, and I will ask you again. I will make the third cut, and you will call upon your demon to save you.”
I was fighting with the guys as hard as I could. They were falling over themselves, but I had the table between me and some of them, and my foot was still holding onto to the table leg for dear life. But at this I met his eyes. He thought he had me. I saw it in his face. He knew that before I let him cut out my soul, I would call my demon to come and save me. And when I’d pronounced his name, al Hassan would have it, and then he would kill me. I smiled. I guess he didn’t know everything after all. He didn’t know me. I changed.

I had to pay attention, as I never had before, to where my feet were as they changed shape, and as my joints changed their orientation. I didn’t want to get caught up or twisted or broken as my alteration became inevitable. But it still had to be fast, and it was. I unhooked my foot from around the table, stepped out of my manacles, took a huge chomp out of the arm of the guy who was holding me the hardest while shrinking away from the other, and slipped my handcuffs at the same time. And then I leaped at the nearest child of al Hassan, expecting at any moment to find myself at the bottom of a pile of his sons and daughters, attacking me from every direction and holding me down by their sheer weight. I made my way through the press of people, snapping here, tearing there, clawing four ways at once, trying to reach al Hassan, which was the only way, I thought, to prevent my death in that little room. The pile-up I expected didn’t come. A lot of al Hassan’s servants and protectors did not seem to be facing me when I attacked them. There was a banging and a crashing in my ears, and all the shouting and screaming I anticipated—and more—and then through a clear space in the crowd, I saw a bear.

It is said of the bear kind that they are brave and strong, as cunning in battle as they are tenacious, and that it is best, on the whole, not to incur their wrath. All this I know to be true. When I had a moment to notice such things, I saw that the door to the workroom that led to the hallway was torn from its hinges—bears are strong—and that there were two piles of al Hassan’s children, one lying at the feet of the bear to his left, and one to his right, and none of these people were moving. The bear was on his hind legs, batting one way and then another, which accounted for the distribution of his fallen opponents. The door that led to the library was rocking, there was more noise, and another bear fell into the room onto all fours, carrying with him a pile of men who seemed to have been trying to bar his entrance. He rose to his hind legs as well, and began to dispose of all who came in his way.

I decided then that I like bears very much.

Crowds of people poured into the room from both doorways. I continued to tear up anyone who came near me, but more and more I had leisure to look around because no one was coming near me. The people, I realized, were not trying to attack the bears. They were trying to get past the bears, and once past, they did one of two things. They attacked the shelves that held all those luminous bottles, dragged them down and smashed each shining vessel so that the crashing of glass was a constant percussion beneath the screaming, the shouting, the roaring of the bears, and the beat of the drums.

Drums? I could hear them now, pounding away in a fervent heartbeat and riding the upbeat against the cacophony of the riot. More troops were beyond in the hallway then, I realized. That left me with one more task to do. I looked for al Hassan. When I fixed on him as my prey, something broke open inside me with a roar, and I was riding a riot of my own as I tore around the room hunting for a sign of where he had gone. I didn’t have to go far. I found his hand on the floor. There was another pile of the bodies of his children, but this one was writhing and intent and alive, and beneath it lay their father, Ibrahim al Hassan, who had enslaved and devoured them. They had turned on him at last. I saw his hand clawing for purchase. I saw it convulse. I saw it relax, and flap easily one way and another as his burden of children pounded at him with their fists, and tore at him with their fingers and their little teeth.

His two small daughters, their veils askew, were the first to burrow out of the melee. His other children, soulless, were slower to realize that they had accomplished their task. The first little daughter waited for the second, and when that one emerged, stood looking at her speculatively. Tangled in her fingers was a slender golden chain from which still dangled the tiny pair of golden scissors.

That was it. I changed. I walked over to that cute little girl while she was still sizing up her sister, and pulled the scissors and the chain out of her hands. She cried out and turned to me, to find herself facing someone—something—a lot bigger than her, and pretty darn mad. She threw herself backwards in terror against her sister, and then both of them, screaming high and hard, scurried away.

When I turned back, Jacob the bear was standing next to me in the form of a man. He nodded in greeting. “Was that necessary?” he glanced again at the two girls screaming their way out of the crowded room and back at me.

“Yes, it was,” I told him. “It absolutely was.” I twisted the golden scissors in my hand, trying to ensure that they’d never cut anything again. It wasn’t enough. I went to the counter and lit the gas burner to heat up the little ceramic bowl. I held it close to the flame to get it hot as soon as possible. “Don’t let any of them come near me,” I told the bear, “or we may have to do this all over again some day.”

I didn’t notice how many of al Hassan’s more ambitious children had to be batted away. I was intent on my task. I melted down the scissors and the chain until you couldn’t tell one from the other. Then I spilled the gold in droplets over the counter, onto the floor, onto the clothes of those who had finished fighting and were just lying around, until gold mingled with the blood in the room, so you’d think maybe a griffon had been fighting.

“We should make sure all those bottles are smashed,” I told Jacob, while I was making sure the evil little tool could never be made whole again.