"Where are we going?"
"Up! Up with the ilmoran." He swept his staff toward Ol Doinyo Lengai, which thundered in response.
They followed him out of the kraal at the head of a procession of elders. There were more than twenty of the laibon, each man distinguished by a blanket different in color and pattern from his brothers. They chatted among themselves as they walked, sometimes agreeing, often arguing, never silent for long.
Off on the moon-swept plain that fell away to their left, lines of torches were beginning to form as the ilmoran commenced their advance on the mountain. Like the elders, the warriors moved in single file. Gradually the lines coalesced until it looked as if a solid line of fire were crawling up the mountain. In the still of the African night you could hear men talking to one another, but no shouted orders or barked commands. He remarked to Olkeloki on this apparent lack of unified command.
"The Maasai have leaders but no kings, senior warriors but no generals. We have a hierarchy of wisdom without a parliament or congress."
"Aren't you in charge?" Merry asked him.
"My advice is sought, but I do not give orders. I am only one of the spiritual and temporal leaders of the Maasai." He gestured at the line of old men trudging along behind them. Oak thought he could see right through the tallest of them. A moment later he saw that it was only an illusion caused by torchlight. The man smiled at him as though he knew something Oak didn't know. It made Oak uncomfortable and he turned away from the marchers.
Except for the soft, distant chants of the ilmoran as they climbed and the chatter of the elders, the night was dead quiet. Even the cicadas were silent, their miniature air-raid sirens turned off. Somewhere a single bird chirped, sounding lonely and out of place.
"Events are progressing even faster than I feared," Olkeloki told them without taking his eyes off the thunderstorm that was raging around the crown of the mountain.
"The shetani," whispered Merry, and he nodded.
"The elders know. They say that because this is a place of power, the first thrust will come here, where the mountain weakens the walls of reality. We must try to stop them. If we can, they will hesitate. Here we must buy time until we can seal the main lesion in Ruaha."
This is wild, Oak thought as his fingers tightened around the long knife the young warrior had given him. "What will they be like? The thing that climbed onto our windshield back in Washington?"
"That—and other things. There are many different kinds of shetani, remember. You wanted revenge for what happened to us in the elevator, Joshua Oak. Tonight you will have all the opportunity you could wish for to gain it."
"Fine, but I wish I had my gun with me." Olkeloki did not reply.
They halted at the end of a steep drop-off. From this modest promontory they had a clear view of the mountain and the plains off to the let and below. Shouts of defiance rang against the rocks as the ilmoran yelled encouragement to one another. Ahead of them the gradually increasing slope of the mountain was still deserted; mongoose and fox, hyrax and hyena having long since been driven to their burrows by the tramp of so many feet. Thunder rolled over the Maasai.
"Engai Na-nyokie," declared Olkeloki. "A night of evil. We must be ready for anything. We have to prepare. Excuse me." He left Oak and Merry and made his way back to the line of waiting elders.
"I have to prepare too," said Merry. She turned and headed for a high clump of boulders nearby, searching for a comfortable bush.
Too nervous to stand alone, Oak followed Olkeloki, waited patiently while the old man conversed with his colleagues.
"You once told us that guns aren't much good against these shetani."
Olkeloki looked back at him. "Bravery and determination can often succeed when guns and bombs fail, Joshua Oak. A little magic can also make a difference. Watch, and learn."
Oak wanted to ask more, but the old man turned away from him. Feeling useless as well as foolish, he watched as the line of laibon stepped to the very edge of the promontory and raised their walking sticks, holding them out toward the mountain. They began chanting softly in unison. Oak looked on interestedly, wishing he could make sense of what they were singing. Then he happened to glance back toward the mountain. His breath caught in his throat.
The torches of the ilmoran continued to advance up the mountainside, but now their glow was eclipsed by the pale blue fluorescence that shone from the edges of a thousand spear blades. Each slice of steel had been kissed by something like Saint Elmo's fire. Nor was the blue glow steady and unvarying. Instead, each spear pulsed, the intensity of the light varying according to the volume of its owner's voice.
The thousand warriors began to chant, their heads bobbing forward and back as they climbed. Gradually their grunts and the light of their spears were synchronized. They began to move faster. Oak remembered to breathe.
A muffled noise reached him over the near-hypnotic singsong of the laibon. Shetani—or something ethereal? Olkeloki lowered his staff and moved close.
"What troubles you, Joshua Oak?"
"Thought I heard something. Getting jumpy, I guess."
"Now is the time of jumpiness." Together they gazed out over the sea of torches and glowing spears.
"Merry sure is taking her time."
"It is the nature of women to take time for their insides. Why do you think they live longer than men?"
Instead of offering an answer, he asked the question he'd been unable to ask until now.
"I know I've been something less than a true believer through all this, old man. This looks like something major coming up. Who's going to win?"
Olkeloki shrugged. "The Maasai do not worry about the outcome of a fight. As the ilmoran say, the war will be won by our side, or theirs. It is the fighting they are concerned with."
"Fatalism."
"Determination."
Both men were silent for a long moment, listening to the rhythmic chant of the thousand. Then Oak looked back toward the boulders, frowning. "I don't want to miss anything, but I'd better go see what's keeping her."
"The impatience of the ilmeet. You will embarrass her."
"To hell with embarrassing her. Maybe a snake bit her, or something."
There was amusement in the old man's voice. "If that were so then I think she would be here describing it to us now, no matter how deadly the snake. Go look if you must. I must help my brothers." He raised his own staff and moved to rejoin the line of laibon.
Oak pushed his way through the brush around the rocks. He didn't call out. If Olkeloki was right and Merry was simply taking her own sweet time with her business he wanted to find out without making himself look like an idiot. And if she was in some kind of trouble, cornered or paralyzed with fear by the sight of some poisonous reptile or pack of wild dogs or something, he wanted to approach without startling it lest it react by attacking.
With the ease of long practice he made his way silently through the rocks and small trees until he could see her standing with her back to a low granite arch. She was in trouble, all right, but the threat came not from any native of the African veldt. It was a lot more dangerous than that.
The abomination had a head twice the length of its body. That head was mostly mouth and teeth save for a pair of bulbous eyes which dangled loosely from the tips of long stalks. One short ear clung like a leech to the left side of the skull while the other listening organ flopped about with every move the creature made. Dark drool dripped from the lower jaw as it reached with long, thin arms toward the cowering Merry.
Oak looked at his tiny spear, then bent and picked up the biggest rock he could find and heaved it with all his strength. In school they usually put him on the line in football, but he still had a pretty strong arm. The stone struck the monstrosity in the back of its skull and bounced off. It whirled and he found himself staring into eyes that were not the product of any normal evolution. They did not shock him, did not paralyze him, because he'd seen them before.
He'd seen them throu
gh the hole in the roof of an elevator in an office building in Washington, D.C.
It turned, arms dragging momentarily on the ground, and reached out to draw him into that unholy chasm of a mouth. He readied the knife, wondering where to strike first, when another spear flew out of the trees nearby, a thin shaft of fluorescent blue against the night. It struck the Likutu shetani square in the center of its narrow, bony chest. The shetani uttered a sound halfway between a laugh and a gurgle. A second spear followed close behind the first, then a third, and a fourth. Black goo began dribbling from the shetani's lips and it swayed like a tree in a gale.
A running silhouette appeared atop the rocks behind Merry. It leaped onto the monster's back and Oak saw moonlight flash off a two-foot-long knife as it stabbed again and again at the muscular neck. Other ilmoran began to emerge from the bushes to hack at the tottering Likuto. It reached for one of its tormentors and the Maasai warrior nimbly dodged the groping claws. Then the shetani stumbled and fell. The ilmoran swarmed over it like army ants butchering a caterpillar. As bits and pieces of the creature were sliced from the body they exploded, evaporating like black soda bubbles in the warm night air.
Merry ran to join Oak and he grabbed her shoulders with both hands.
"You okay?" An unearthly stench rose from behind them.
She nodded. "It just jumped out at me. I couldn't even scream. It—it was going to kill me, Josh."
"Maybe it just wanted to say hello, shetani-like."
She took a deep breath. "I think that's the same thing." She looked past him. "We'd better get back to Olkeloki and the others." He nodded. They turned and left the ilmoran to their butchery.
On a rocky outcropping that overlooked the holy mountain the assembled laibon worked at their magic. A warm breeze blew off the flanks of Ol Doinyo Lengai, blowing the blankets the old men wore back against their bodies. Some of them thrust their walking sticks defiantly at the mountain. Others spat into their calabashes and shook the contents at the distant slopes. Olkeloki stood on the highest point of ground, slightly apart from the others. As Oak and Merry emerged from the bushes it struck him that all this chanting and gesticulating was merely a prelude to something of much greater import. He halted, sensing instinctively that now was not the time to bother the old man. Merry leaned against him for support, still weak from her confrontation with the Likuto.
Olkeloki turned toward his brothers and raised his staff over his head as he shouted a command. It was repeated by the other laibon. Calabashes were set aside. Each man raised his own walking stick above his head, clutching it firmly in both hands and holding it parallel to the earth.
Twenty staffs formed a line above twenty rock-steady old figures.
"What's happening?" Merry rubbed at her left eye.
Oak squinted into the wind that blew down off the mountain, trying to penetrate the darkness. "Can't tell for sure, but something's happening. You can feel it."
Three times they uttered a single ululation: three times the words were repeated by the massed warriors on the mountainside. Then the roiling clouds that hid the crest of the sacred mountain split asunder and hell came running down the slope on inhuman feet.
Jumping and rolling, loping and crawling, moving on four arms or four legs or two limbs alone, the horde of shetani poured down on the assembled ilmoran like a mutated zoo. Some of them were thin, gangly giants like the Likuto. Scrabbling around the long legs of the Likuto were stunted monstrosities without arms or legs, all jaws and teeth and long, muscular ears. Oak and Merry could hear them chittering and giggling as they pushed themselves downhill with the bulbous lobes of their hearing organs.
There was something that ran along on yard-high legs attached to an eight-inch body. Swaying atop this minuscule torso was a huge, narrow skull that ended in a flattened, bony blade. It smiled horribly as it ran. Alongside it loped a couple of very human figures that had no faces at all. In place of a head was something like a serrated tuning fork. There were goliaths with skulls in the shape of narrow arrowheads. Tiny round mouths sucked air beneath a single eye.
There were shetani with hollow cheekbones, not hollow from lack of food but truly hollow: you could see clear through the skull behind the arching bridge of the nose. One shetani galloped along on eight-foot legs that were no thicker around than a man's thumb. Two huge ears stood straight up on either side of the head while bright orange eyes glared out from beneath thick ridges of bone. The nose was a long strip down the front of the face. Beneath it a pair of jaws faced each other, flexing horizontal fangs.
Another's teeth protruded upward from its lower lip, while the face of its companion seemed to be falling off in dribs and drabs as it ran, melting into the earth. A few of the shetani carried spears and clubs, but most came racing wildly downhill unarmed.
A thunderous war cry shook the ground as the ilmoran lowered their spears and advanced to meet the alien army. Now the shetani in front could see that the volcanic slope they were tumbling down was already occupied. A few slowed and were nearly run over by those following behind. There were signs of confusion in the shetani ranks.
Some changed the direction of their descent as they tried to find a way around the advancing warriors, but the ilmoran had spread out to form a line across the whole lower slope of the mountain. Nor were there any gaps for the shetani to slip through. The ilmoran marched upward shoulder to shoulder.
"Look!" Merry grabbed excitedly at Oak's arm. "They're confused. They expected to come through untouched, unopposed. They don't know to react."
A few of the shetani started to retreat back up the mountainside, but the momentum of the majority was such that they had no choice but to fling themselves on the line of warriors.
The Maasai plowed into them, stabbing and slashing with their spears, some of which mounted blades a yard long. Such blades were designed to penetrate all the way to a lion's heart. Pulsing with the pale light which was a visible manifestation of the laibon's magic, the warriors dispatched one invader after another. Sizzling and crackling, the cut and pierced abominations exploded into nothingness with each successful spear thrust. The night air began to turn putrid with the stench of evaporating shetani.
Then something happened which proved that the shetani were not blind, mindless entities. A group detached themselves from the main battle, circled around the right end of the line of ilmoran, and began to climb the hill atop which the laibon stood chanting. They had located the source of the warriors' magic and intended to put an end to it. As soon as their intent became clear to the senior warriors who were directing the fight, a platoon of ilmoran was dispatched to intercept the climbing shetani.
Nor did the advance go unnoticed among the laibon themselves. A few put down their staffs and made ready to defend themselves. Someone shoved a glowing spear into Oak's startled hands. The wood and metal lance was cold to the touch.
"Can you use that thing?" Merry asked him. The noise around them now, the chanting of the laibon, the war cries of the ilmoran, the hellish babble of the shetani, was almost deafening and she had to shout to make herself understood.
"I don't know," he yelled back at her, "but I'm sure going to try." A .38 would have felt better in his hands but he was glad of any kind of weapon.
Several of the shetani broke through and reached the line of elders. Belying their age, a trio of the oldsters began swinging their staffs enthusiastically. Each had been a warrior in his youth and eagerly demonstrated that old skills are not necessarily forgotten skills. The shetani inflicted a few bites and bruises, but no serious injuries.
One charged straight at Oak. It stood some four feet high.
Long blades of bone protruded from each elbow and it used these as weapons, swinging them at the human and aiming for his legs, grinning and laughing as it fought. With the long spear Oak was able to fend it off easily.
Then something landed on his back. Merry cursed and searched frantically for something to use as a weapon. The shetani ranged in hue from dark
brown to jet black and it was difficult to see them at night. As Oak went down under the weight he twisted around and found himself inches away from a face of pure petrified ugliness. It grinned at him as it raised its right arm, which was lined with a razor-sharp sliver of bone, and brought it down straight toward his face.
Abruptly the shetani's head was separated from its neck. Gushing black liquid, the body collapsed. As Oak slid out from under it the flesh began to effervesce and vanish.
Standing over his prone form was a figure that appeared to have been carved from solid obsidian, a figure that rose higher and higher into the night sky, until its braided headpiece seemed to brush the moon. It neither smiled nor frowned. Oak rolled over, blinking at the pain that was shooting through his shoulders where the shetani had latched on with clawed feet. As soon as he had satisfied himself that the ilmeet was all right, the moran whirled and rushed back to rejoin the main battle. Oak guessed that his savior had stood just a shade under seven feet tall. The spear he carried was almost as big as its owner.
Someone else was standing next to him then, holding a long blade. "Josh, I found your knife." He smiled at her.
"Looks like you were getting ready to use it."
She studied him closely. "That awful thing was trying to split your head wide open. I—I couldn't find anything to hit it with."
"The Maasai cavalry beat you to it. Don't worry. Some folks never have a bloody nose, some never catch a cold. Me, I've got a thick head."
Another figure joined them. This one was familiar and no less concerned then Merry. "How are you, friend Oak?"
He smiled reassuringly at Olkeloki. "I've felt better. How goes the war?"
"The shetani are not good fighters. They have little stomach for an open battle. Some have no stomach at all. They prefer to overwhelm one or two people at a time, and to attack from hiding or to make trouble and cause people to kill one another. The waiting ilmoran took them by surprise. Now the surprise is wearing off." He looked solemn. "The laibon have discussed the matter. The ilmoran can beat the shetani, but many will die. So the old men have decided to do something else." He put a helpful arm around Oak's shoulders. "We must leave now."
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