The Summoning (9 page)

CHAPTER SIX

T
amara gathered up the cards and folded them back into the deck. She sat shuffling the cards a moment, considering, then asked him, “Can you see so clearly into peoples’ hearts without the cards? Can you see what card I am looking at now?” She turned the top card over and glanced down at it, shielding it with her long fingers. Richard looked quickly at me. I waited to hear what he would say. I wanted to hear this answer, too. Richard shook his head.

“I do what I am told,” he said. “I was asked to read the cards, and I read them.”

Tamara considered him for a moment, and then looked even more searchingly at me.

I said, “So, what can you tell us? About the World Snake, and the Eater of Souls? What should we do next?”

Tamara pushed the cards across the table toward Richard, who, when I nodded, put them away in his pocket. “I must have time,” she said, “to meditate on the meaning of this new alliance. I must take council with my sisters as well.” She said to Richard, “I will pass on your warning, and we will see what we can discover about the path of the Eater of Souls.” She made a warding sign as she said the name. Then she rose, folding her arms. “Come back in a few days. I will have more to tell you then.” When I started for the door, she stopped me. “One thing. You have not had him long, I think?” her gaze flicked to Richard, and back to me.

“That’s right,” I admitted.

She leaned forward, and I saw her grow, as I can grow when I’m angry, until her eyes seemed huge and commanding. “Be careful what you ask of him. Be very careful. And never, never give him a command that has no end to it.”

I don’t react well to other people chi-ing up on me. I was tasting her scent, musky and resonant, and for the first time I wondered if her blood was as sweet. Then she shook her head and sat back down. “Fools have wielded demons before.”

I started walking back toward her, when she raised a conciliatory hand. “Sister, no offence. There is a demon, they say, that has been in a lake in Scotland for centuries, because his master told him to go fishing. He will be there to the world’s end, I believe.” She fixed me with her gaze again, but she didn’t load it this time. “Be careful. You are dealing with more than you understand.”

I shifted my weight. “All I know is, he makes a mean breakfast. Also…” I looked at Richard, waiting impassively by the door, his eyes lowered. “He doesn’t like this Soul Eater thing, or the World Snake, either.” Her fingers curled in a warding sign on each of the names. I almost smiled. “The first time he told me about them, I didn’t believe a word he said, but now—”

She rose again, and for the first time took my hand in hers. “Believe. You may believe. I will discover all that I can for you. Come back in a few days, if you will. I will tell you then what I have learned.”

She walked me to the door of her shop, and I lifted my hand to my nose and mouth surreptitiously and breathed in. She was being straight with me. I decided, for the most part, that I liked her all right.

Outside in the little courtyard, the four bears and their drummer friend were eating ice cream bars very tidily, and talking quietly together. Their heads came up and turned towards me as we emerged. They nodded to me. I nodded in return, and headed for the car. Richard hung back. He wasn’t hard to read. This was not the outcome he’d been hoping for.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

He shook his head, glancing again at the bears. “She will have more information for us in a few days. But we may not have days. We may not have hours. We don’t know.”

“All right. What do you want to do?”

“Talk to… others I couldn’t talk to, when I didn’t have my soul.” His hand still lay protectively over his jacket pocket, where I knew the little bottle glowed safely. “There are scryers, diviners, wizards… ” He looked me in the eyes. “Those who won’t speak to me when I’m alone.” He looked over at the bears again, who had resumed their seats on the patio. “They may know where I can…” He amended,“—where we can find someone called the Rag Man. He used to be on Wilshire, downtown, but he’s been gone these many weeks.”

“What’s with the Rag Man?” I asked him.

“He’s… he’s under a curse. But he’s the best scryer I’ve ever encountered.”

Well, that sounded interesting. “All right,” I agreed. “We’ll go find the Rag Man.”

I felt elation rise in me. We were on the hunt. It wasn’t going to end in blood and fresh meat, but that was all right. Every hunt is practice for the next. I had hunted by myself for a long time, along crowded pavements that were the city’s trails. This was better. I flashed Richard a smile, and caught his look of surprise.

The bears looked up politely when I walked over to them. Richard followed in my wake, close enough to hear, but far enough not to draw their full attention.

“Hey,” I said. “Sorry to bother you again.”

“No bother,” the biggest one said, though he glanced askance back at Richard.

“I was wondering…” I realized then, I didn’t know who the Rag Man was. I asked the first thing I thought of, instead. “Where are the lady bears?”

The four big men burst out laughing. The human looked up from his drum, smiling, but not quite sure what the joke was.

Jacob answered me, the laughter still in his voice. “This time of year, what with the cubs, and getting up so hungry, they really do not want us around.”

The other bears shook their heads in agreement. “Mighty snappish, the ladies are, this time of year,” the smallest of them added.

“Ah,” I said, enlightened. I nodded back at Richard. “He wants to know where he can find a guy called the Rag Man.”

“The Rag Man?” The human guy answered. “Oh, yeah.” He tapped out a measure on his drum as he told us, “I know that guy. He reads the tea leaves, right?” He looked back at Richard, who nodded. “Yeah, they say he can read the stones in the gutter. Hell, I heard he can scry the wind.”

“No one can scry the winds, Brother Ty,” the biggest bear said gently.

“Well,” said Brother Ty, “that’s what I heard.”

“Word is,” Jacob said, “the Rag Man headed for the hills after the earthquake. You remember the earthquake?” He cocked an eye at me.

I nodded. Six point one on the Richter scale. No one forgets their first Los Angeles earthquake. “Nothing broke,” I said, in the proper California style.

“Rag Man passed through here,” the human guy said. “He was going on about something, you know how he gets. Wasn’t till weeks later we realized, he was the first to figure it out.” He looked up at me earnestly, and tapped his drum. “You know. What’s coming?”

I nodded.

“He’s out in the Valley,” Jacob told Richard. “He hangs out at a little park near a car wash, over on Mission. You’ll find him there most days.”

Richard smile was true and sweet. That was new. He must really like the Rag Man, I thought. For a moment, I felt a little bereft.

Richard said, “There’s a taqueria nearby?”

Jacob nodded, smiling back. “I see you know the man. There’s one right across the street.”

“Whereabouts on Mission?” I asked.

Jacob gestured northeast. “It’s in Pomona.”

“In Pomona?” Richard said.

“Yeah. You been there?” asked the bear.

“No,” said Richard. The way he said it made me think he was lying.

We caught the 55 to the 57 and headed up to Pomona. You can’t live happily ever after in L.A. if you don’t like to drive. If the traffic is moving, it takes forty-five minutes to get just about anywhere in the city. If it’s not, well, there’s no point in thinking about it.

“So tell me more about this Rag Man,” I said to Richard. He was staring out the window, looking away from me, but his attention came back at once.

“He’s a scryer, as the little bear said.”

“That wasn’t a bear!” I told him. “The four big guys, they were bears.”

“Pardon me,” he said politely, but there were teeth in the words. I showed him mine.

“Where did you meet this guy?”

Richard’s glance slid away from me. There were things he didn’t want me to know about him. I wondered why. “I was on the streets now and then, in the last year. Before I lost my soul, he was kind to me.” He shook his head. “He has dreams. He sees visions. Sometimes one can read some sense into them. He is the one who told me that to find help, I had to climb the hill. He described it well enough so that, in time—I hope, in time—I found the right hill.”

“He sent you to the Wiccans?”

“He sent me to the sorceress.”

“Who gave you to me.”

“Just so.”

“And I’m supposed to help.”

He smiled wryly. “So I must hope.”

“Me too,” I said, sincerely. “What do you want him to scry now?”

He paused a moment. I tried to decide if he was prevaricating, or thinking about my question. “He may be able to tell us where the greatest danger lies, what to do, what especially not to do.”

“Can he tell us when the W—” I glanced over as he started to wince, “—the Worm is coming?”

He shook his head. “Time is all one thing, from a certain perspective. One can as easily map a single wave in the sea.” He paused, and added, “Unless it’s now. He could tell if it is imminent.”

“And that’s what you want him to scry?”

He shrugged. “He can sense the shifting of forces. He may give us questions, and the answers may lead us where we would not otherwise have gone. He was helpful in the past. After I lost my soul—” Again, he made that protective gesture over his jacket pocket. “I went to see him, and he, well, he sounded crazy. He looked right through me. He saw what I was.”

“What did he say you were?” I asked, curious.

Richard answered unwillingly. “He said I was darkness.”

I had a visceral moment of remembering his scent when the sword touched his head, and the sight of the swirling, unknowable form. He’d been a lot more than just darkness. I tended to forget that, when he was just sitting next to me. His scent, in his human form, had a pleasant tang. I was getting used to it.

Then it occurred to me that he had not given me a straight answer about why he wanted to talk to the Rag Man. That made the meeting we were going to that much more interesting. I decided to leave it at that, and asked him, “Why does Tamara think you’re dangerous?” We fled along the fast lane with the flow of traffic at eight miles over the speed limit. “Why did she want to kill you out of hand? And the sorceress the other night, she thought she should kill you, too.”

He took a moment before he answered, his voice light. “Many of my kind are said to have been able to do great works.”

“Great works like…?”

“Setting the world on fire.”

I took my eyes off the road for a moment. “Literally?”

He nodded, jerking his chin towards the road ahead at the same time. I swerved back between the white lines. Then I said, “And you? Done any great works in your time?”

He stared straight ahead. “I think shoveling shit for a century could qualify as a minor great work. I could probably qualify for the
Guinness Book of World Records
.”

“She was afraid of you,” I said, thinking aloud. “And there were moments when she was afraid of me, and I hadn’t given her reason.” I glanced again at Richard. “When I was leaving, she gave me a warning. Should I be afraid of you?”

He shrank just perceptibly in his seat. “No,” he said. “I’ve told you—”

“Was John Dee?”

“John Dee was so afraid of me he kept me suspended in a cage in his cellar for the first two years of my existence in this world, with bars that he blessed twice a day with holy water.”

I thought about that for a second. “And did that keep you in the cage?”

“No!” his eyes glinted. “What kept me in that cage was that he had told me not to leave it.”

I slowed briefly as an idiot passed me on the right, and cut in front of me. “But he let you out, eventually.”

“Yes. He let me out when he found I couldn’t tell him the formula for turning base metals into gold. He got me those cards, and I did readings for him. But readings were common in those days. When he tired of that trick, he gave me to his daughter. As I told you.”

I’d thought of a more important question. “Can you be killed? Can I kill you?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything.”

“What do you mean?” Did the car swerve just then? Did it seem to be heading straight for the truck that shouldn’t have been in the second lane next to us? He didn’t tense. I straightened us out again.

After a moment, he said with precision, “If you hit that truck, or if that ass in the SUV behind us that’s riding your tail crawls over this car and sends it into the median wall, and I’m killed, I’ll wake up again a little ways down the road a few moments later, with my body as fresh and new as the day John Dee first called me up.” He gave me another glance. “All scars and wear gone.”

“Have you been killed before?” I let the car slow down gradually, until the SUV jerk behind me went nuts, and passed me on the right with a roar and a few rude gestures. He almost didn’t make the gap ahead to pull in front of me.

Richard answered me when the little drama was over, letting his breath out. “I’ve been killed four times that I remember. And I’ve died twice.”

“That you remember?”

“I think,” he said, his voice low, “that I don’t always remember.”

“How did you die?”

“Once of hunger,” he answered. “Once of the plague. That wasn’t bad. It stops hurting as soon as you fall unconscious. Hunger’s worse. It takes forever.”

“And how were you killed?”

“The drayer I worked for beat me over the head with an iron bar one day when he was drunk and things weren’t going well for him. That was the first time I died. I thought, when it happened, that that would set me free. But then I woke up again, in the same stable. He got rid of me quick, after that. He remembered what he’d done, and he couldn’t find the mark. He didn’t like that.”

“And the other times?”

There was a little silence before he answered. When I glanced over at him, he was studying me. I raised an enquiring brow.

“I told one of my masters that killing me made me whole again. He did it twice. He knifed me the first time just to find out. He gave me poison the second time.”