The Summoning (34 page)

“I remembered,” Richard told me. He looked at me from under his brows to see what I understood from that.

He was afraid of me. Of what I might know, or learn, or understand. The more I knew, I thought, the more power I’d have over him. And that was odd. Didn’t I already have all the power over him I could possibly imagine?

“What did you remember?”

He paused, and I thought he was trying to find a way to phrase his answer to explain as little as possible, while telling the exact truth. And when he answered, I was pretty sure I was right. “What I was.”

Tamara had warned me to be careful. So I took her warning. Some wolves are so proud they don’t listen to advice. A wolf alone must be wiser than that, if she’s going to survive. So I didn’t ask the question he wanted me to ask, “What were you?” I thought for a moment, and asked instead, “What did you remember about what you were?”

He drew in a breath, and he dared to say, “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Richard. Tell me so that I do understand.”

His eyes began to empty of hope. He drew another breath, lifted his hands again and let them drop. “I remembered what John Dee caused me to forget. What I am, where I come from, and… what I can do.”

“Ah,” I said, and sat back on my hands. I saved up the next question, and asked a different one. “And how did he do that? How did John Dee make you forget?”

“He was terrified of me. He spent years and years of his life trying to raise a demon, and when he finally succeeded—by accident, and with help—and I would never have been caught in their flimsy, ridiculous wisp of an invocation if they hadn’t happened to have done it on a day at an hour that was propitious to a certain bend in the roof of the Halls of Air, and if I hadn’t just happened to be passing by at just that exact particular—”

“All right,” I said. His voice had changed, drawing on a new timbre. He might look like the Richard I remembered, but all the rest of him was still there, just out of my sight. At times I caught a whiff of it, and my hair stood on end. “So he caught you—”

“By accident,” he muttered, like a schoolboy who was going to have the last word.

“Right. How did he make you forget?”

He looked at me then with his eyes so full of pain, human pain, that I almost put up a hand to ward him off. “Please—” he began.

I wondered if he’d try to fool me, or tell me in a way that was so garbled I couldn’t make sense of it. I wondered long enough that he stopped trying for a reprieve and answered my question as I had asked. It really seemed to be completely true, that he had to obey me. Like it or not.

“He began by using every spell of ward he could find, against every part of me that looked frightening to him. He commanded that I may not do this, and I may not do that, and I may not go here and I may not think that, and then he said I may not remember…” He looked at me for a long moment. I almost thought his passion would break through his human form, and he would cry, or rush at me, or yell or something. But he just took another deep breath and then continued. “And I obeyed him. As you know I must. And I no longer remembered.” He gave a slight shrug. “The trouble was, by the time he finished there was so little I could do for him, within all those strictures that he spent two years laying down—”

“While he kept you in a cage?”

He nodded, looking at the ground. “All I was good for in the end was housework. Stable work. Servant’s work. Card tricks.”

“And sex,” I added. I couldn’t help my smile.

He nodded again, his head lowered still more. “And sex, of course.”

“And he had you without term or limit, even beyond the end of his life.”

He didn’t reply to that, I guess because I’d said it all. But he raised his head then and gave me a look. I got what he meant.

I shifted my legs in front of me and made myself more comfortable. It was chilly up there on the hill. The clouds crossed the moon again and again. The ground under me was wet, but what the hell. There was no way I was bringing this conversation indoors.

“You played me,” I stated.

He didn’t deny it. “Slaves do,” he said bitterly.

“You used me.”

“I did. And a good thing, too.”

“Why?”

“Imagine a world where al Hassan has a demon at his command,” he suggested. “I needed a shield from that fate. He would have had me at once, if I hadn’t already been in your service. He’d learned enough since he last had hold of me to bind me. He would have me now, if you hadn’t come after me.”

I grinned. We had been a team. And we’d done that much. I’d thought, once in awhile, that we were friends, companions, as well as lovers. I’d been playing at love. I’d known it wasn’t real. Richard wasn’t real. I just hadn’t always remembered it. “It wasn’t real, then. Our… friendship.”

“Of course it was real!” he said, with that look in his eyes that I remembered, and his sweetest smile.

I smiled back. I knew he was lying, and the light faded from his eyes when he saw that I knew. “I have something I want you to do for me,” I told him.

Miserable, sullen, and rebellious, Richard bowed his head and awaited my commands.

“The Eater of Souls. The real one. You know who I mean?”

“I know what you mean, Mistress,” he answered, putting a bite into his words. I don’t know if he meant that he wasn’t stupid, or just that he didn’t want to be here, which I already knew. I let it go. I’d be pretty pissed, too, in his place.

“Can you get rid of her? It? Whatever it is? Can you make it that she never comes here?”

“Never?” he asked, like a lawyer fingering a loophole.

“I’ll tell you what I want, and you tell me if you can make it happen. All right?”

He bowed his head again.

“All right,” I continued. “I want that thing that is known as the Eater of Souls to be gone from this place and never threaten a human again.”

“That’s two things,” he pointed out.

“Yeah?” I was starting to get pissed myself. I didn’t ask for this attitude. “And are you telling me that you can’t do two things?”

“No, Mistress.” He bowed again.

Funny, I was beginning to like the sound of that word. I shook myself. This wasn’t supposed to be fun. “All right,” I said. “Can you do that? What I asked?”

“Make the Eater of Souls be gone from the Earth and never threaten one of your kind again.” He raised his head.

“Okay,” I said. “No, wait. How long will it take you?”

He raised his eyes to me, laughing, and lifted a hand. “Mistress,” he said grandly, but still with that hint of a bite in his voice, “it is already done.”

Well, that was a little hard to swallow. “Are you kidding?”

He didn’t answer that one. He just looked at me.

“Really? She’s gone, and won’t come again.”

He bowed.

“How did you do that?” I said. “You didn’t do anything.”

His smile reminded me of the Richard I’d known. It wasn’t an easy smile, and there was mockery in it, at him and at me. He might be enslaved all right, but he sure didn’t have to like it.

“I live in many worlds at once,” he said. “You don’t wish to see that, and I no longer allow that in your sight. Thus, I can serve you here, and in another place, and never seem to leave you.” He added, after a second’s pause, “This is one of the things that John Dee forced me to forget.”

“Well then,” I said, “All right. Thank you.”

He gave me that small twisted smile again, and bent his head.

“Next thing,” I said. “The World Snake.”

“Yes, Mistress?”

“I want it to go away. I want it harmless. I want there never to be a human city that is swallowed by the World Snake again.” I leaned forward and asked him, “Can you do that?”

“Mistress, I cannot.”

I couldn’t believe how pissed that made me. I thought I’d figured it all out. “What do you mean?”

“You have asked me to do three contradictory things.”

“I did not!”

“May I explain?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said impatiently. “Explain.”

“The World Snake is bound to the sinews of the life of this world. She is a part of them. The tracks she makes through the fires of the Earth, the trails she follows beneath the crust, are part of the lines of power of your world, like the veins of a leaf, or the blood veins in a human. To send away the World Snake will destroy those courses of energy. This world would die soon after.”

“So, she can’t be stopped?”

“She cannot stop,” he amended.

“But she could turn,” I realized.

“She could turn.”

I almost smiled. He had offered me the answer on a plate. “Ah. Can you make it so she never swallows a human city again, without doing any other harm to the world? Of any kind?”

He almost smiled back. “Mistress, I can.”

“Okay.” I thought a second. “Tell me first: have I phrased it right? I don’t want anything to go wrong with this. I want the World Snake not to bring destruction on habitation of any kind again. Do you understand? Should I say it to you any differently, so that I get what I want?”

“No, Mistress.” He met my eyes appreciatively that time. “I understand your wishes, and I will obey them.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Do that.”

He bowed and lifted his hands.

“That’s it?” I asked. “It’s done?”

“Wait for it,” he said.

From the top of the hill, I could see the lights of the greater Los Angeles area, all the way to where they blurred into the distant haze. The traffic roared, the pale stars shone, a pair of skunks waddled along the path below.

My arms began to tingle, the hair on the back of my neck rose, and I smelled ozone, as though the wind had blown in from the sea. The roar began in the distance. I put my hands on the ground and felt the earth tremble and then shake. I hunkered down as the hillside rocked in a series of sharp jerks. I looked up and saw Richard kneeling there unmoving in his circle, as though he really was in another world, while mine rocked and rolled, on and on. He grinned at me. He liked the big stuff. He really did.

Finally the rumble faded away, the shaking stopped, and the earth was still under my hands. Below the hill, we saw transformers spark and flame, and all across the city the lights went out. Down at the college people were shouting, horns blared, car alarms went off. In the darkened valley, pinpoints of light flared as generators started up here. In the distance, I heard the song of sirens.

“It is done,” said the demon. “Your city is saved. The World Snake has turned. She will not come here.” My city. Hm. Had a nice sound to it.

“That’s it?” I asked.

He looked up. “Not entirely. She’ll leave her mark for a while.”

I followed his gaze. The stars were brighter now, and more numerous. To the west, a strange glow rose in the sky. As we watched, lines of greenish yellow light spread out like spider legs, then drew back, then drifted out again. The shapes grew brighter, then faded, turned, and grew larger. An aurora borealis. I’d only heard about them. I’d never seen one before.

“It’s beautiful.”

His eyes were untroubled now. He was smiling fiercely. The big things were more his size, I saw. They were what he was for. Mucking out stables must have been hard on him, all those years.

“Okay,” I said. “The Eater of Souls is gone, the World Snake is no problem. You’re absolutely certain? No fooling?”

“I swear to you,” he said, and his voice filled again with other voices I could only partly hear. “By my name.”

“Good enough.” I rubbed my hands, and then my shoulders. It was cold. “Okay. Ibrahim al Hassan. You remember him?”

“Always.”

“Could you check that he’s really going to stay dead this time? And that scissor thing that he used to cut souls out is totally destroyed? And all traces of how to make it again? And the set of diviner’s tools he had, those need to disappear. And could you check that his children are scattered and none of them is going to, I don’t know, take up where dad left off?”

Richard’s eyes shadowed for a moment. “It is done.”

That startled me. I thought we were going to discuss the ramifications of what I was asking, first. I thought hard about what I had said, and wondered if he could have interpreted my words as some kind of command, a command he wanted to hear, and had since carried out. He met my gaze passively. I decided I didn’t want to ask, and I didn’t want to know. After all, a hundred and twenty-four years. I didn’t blame him.

Richard knelt, waiting for my next command. His eyes held an unfamiliar glint of power and mischief. More than just mischief. And I thought, for a moment, what it would be like to walk in the door of my mom’s house with this Richard in tow. And how the heads would turn. And they would smell him, but by then it would be too late. I was arrested by the realization that with Richard by my side, I could scour the world of evil. I could weigh the souls of the righteous. Forests would grow from one end of the continent to the other. Buffalo would roam the plains. Elk and deer would fatten in the grasslands. Goats would leap upon the mountains. The wolf kind would rule this world. And… I would be old enough, and strong enough, to rule the wolf kind.

Richard was gazing at me, and his eyes were bleak. I held my vision close for one moment more, picturing my stepdad and his sons running at the head of the pack, the pack led by me and Richard that was after their blood, and gaining. I let his yelp, and their screams, ring in my ears one more time. Then I reached in my pocket and drew out the little glass bottle that glowed in my hands like a candle. I set it on the ground between us. Richard looked at it, and then he looked at me. I saw hope rise in his face like the dawn coming.

“You told me—Richard, my Richard—told me he needed this in order to go free.”

Mutely, he shook his head. “He—I—was mistaken. I didn’t remember. All I need to go free,” and his voice became a plea, dragging with centuries of loss and pain, carefully contained, “is your word. Nothing else. But nothing else will do.”

“You don’t need this?” I was dumbfounded. After the trouble I’d gone to, and the long walk up the hill that I could have loped up a lot more easily—I didn’t want to take the smallest chance, not likely, but not impossible, that I might lose it out of my pocket if I changed, so I’d carried the bottle every step of the way, for the gods’ sake. “What do I do with this, then?”