by Nazri Noor
“Right,” I said, nodding at his instructions. “Here we go.”
The knife’s point didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, a bead of blood welling up where I pressed it against my skin. It hissed as it hit the center of the circle, and a thrum of energy rushed through me. It was working.
Shadowstepping was one thing, but this was another entirely. I was opening a door to another world. I mean, okay, functionally I did that when I shadowstepped too, but hush. This was actual ritual magic. I tucked the knife into my jeans pocket, still transfixed on the smoldering spot on the asphalt that was once a drop of my blood.
“Puppy Yum biscuits are the perfect anytime treat for your furry friends,” I droned, reading off the back of the packet. “Made with only the best organic beef and lamb, Puppy Yum biscuits also contain mutt-friendly grains and fiber, for – ”
Something – I couldn’t tell you what, exactly – shifted in the air around me. Which was strange, because the only physical change I noticed came from the ground. A crack in the center of the circle grew larger and longer, at a speed alarming enough that I stepped back. The pigeon, the raw lamb chop, the biscuits, all of it slipped into the earth as the slit grew bigger, then formed into a shape that was all too familiar, and eerie. A mouth.
Black lips, black teeth, and deeper in the hole, a snaking black tongue. The faint sound of humming faded as the bizarre, oversized ebony human mouth yawned silently, then opened wider. Then it began to scream.
Dozens of voices, all discordant, issued from that same chasm. I whipped around to check, but no one outside the alley seemed attracted to the horrific noise, and from the leaves and debris tumbling in the streets, I saw why. Without warning a storm had whipped up again, ripping through the city once more, the roar of wind and thunder mingling with the black mouth’s screams.
Lei Kung might not have been one of the big guns, as Prudence put it, but the world was prepared to grieve for every entity it lost. It brought the pressure of properly doing this communion bearing down on us even harder: we needed to set things right.
The storm sent one last gentle reminder. Cracking like the end of days, a flash of lightning seared the streets as it struck a utility pole. An explosion to match the thunder rumbled through the block, and the resultant shower of sparks was the last light in the vicinity as the power went out. Yeah. We had to set things right, and fast.
The mouth kept on singing its terrible dirge, voiced by a choir culled from hell itself. One voice sounded like a man being skinned alive, another, a child crying, and another, a woman mourning. They wailed all at once. I grimaced as I turned to Bastion and Prudence, both of them gritting their teeth against the noise. Only we could hear it, then, the shrieking portal, this mouth from hell.
“That’s the doorway?” I shouted over the din.
“Get in,” Prudence yelled back.
“Ladies first.” I’d never seen Bastion afraid. He was still making every effort to look unruffled, of course, but I could tell by the lines in the creases of his eyes that he was at least deeply unsettled.
“Fuck’s sake,” I said. I don’t know what came over me then, but I like to think that it’s part of what makes me such an unpredictable and wildly attractive individual. I soldiered forward and stepped into the portal myself.
I already told you how it feels to shadowstep, how it can be cold, and to a point, somewhat suffocating. And I told you how entering Arachne’s portal was slow, laborious, like swimming through molasses or, quite literally, walking through spiderwebs. This? This was so much worse.
Traveling through Hecate’s portal was like jumping down the spit-slick throat of some colossal beast, sliding further and further down this steep, pulsing tunnel. It felt as if I was smothered in saliva, even though my skin and clothes remained dry. A hot wind blew up and down the tunnel, like something breathing. The worst was the darkness, the total blackness of it all, of not knowing where this infernal gullet began and ended.
Then it came to a stop.
I blinked, and the gloom was lifted. Bastion and Prudence were standing to either side of me, as dazed as I was, but none the worse for wear. We were in a meadow, the tall grass of it rustling in a gentle breeze, under a massive field of stars in a night sky as black as ink. It was so idyllic that it felt all the more unnatural. Wrong.
It didn’t make sense, for example, for us to be surrounded by so many chains dangling from out of the sky, suspended, it seemed, from the stars themselves. They drifted lazily in the breeze, as innocuous as vines, yet clinking ominously as they moved.
Around us, where the sound of the wind should have been, came an unnameable, wordless chattering of so many voices, just loud enough to make out, yet never loud enough to understand. And from far afield, or sometimes, from the sky itself, came the playing of pipes, here discordant, there melodious, alien and distant. And then she stepped out of the darkness.
Statuesque. That was the first word I would have used to describe Hecate, and not just for her height, either, but her sheer majestic presence. Her skin had all the color of a marble statue, pale in the starlight. She wore a cloak as black as the night itself, now shifting in the breeze, but at times moving as if of its own accord. What looked like beads and gemstones sparkled from the folds of her garment, but I blinked again and knew that they were stars.
Small lengths of chain clinked and dangled from her cloak, the end of it hemmed in what looked like emerald green thread, but I recognized it as the grass we were standing on. Her robe was a miniature of our exact surroundings, a microcosm. I squinted and saw the figures stitched onto it, little effigies of myself, and Bastion, and Prudence, and among them, a copy of Hecate herself, wearing her own cloak made of stars and sky.
“Stop looking,” Prudence whispered. “Not the cloak.”
I blinked and looked away, with some grim knowing that if my gaze lingered I’d be staring closer and harder, forever, that it would drive me mad.
Hecate fixed us with glassy eyes, both of them in complete blackness, the whites of them missing. She was beautiful, but there was nothing specific about her that I could remark on, nothing to remember her beauty by. It felt as though her features shifted with every passing second, my mind struggling to keep up with every form her face assumed. Again I wondered how long it would take before one of us went completely insane just from standing there.
“Three of them approach,” she said, one mouth speaking in many voices. “Three, like us.”
They weren’t there before, and then they were, two exact duplicates of the entity, flanking the original. I rubbed at my temple with one hand, as if that could stave off madness.
“They come seeking answers,” said one Hecate.
“Yet they do not know the questions,” said another.
“Dude.” Bastion elbowed me in the ribs. “Say something.”
I cleared my throat, stepped forward, and puffed out my chest. “Hecate. We’ve come to bring justice to your kind. Your brothers have been murdered. Help us, and we will ensure that this will never happen again.”
“Help you. Yes.” The three entities raised hands to their chins, cupping their elbows in the palms of their free hands. “And if we help, we suppose your precious Lorica will be our armor, your assurance that we will be unharmed in future.” Their shadows lengthened against the grass, though they didn’t grow any taller. “But what help,” she said, her voices trembling, “does a god need? What can a fleshling like you possibly offer for our protection?”
I stammered wordlessly, hating that I was intimidated by her display of power. It was just the Wizard of Oz, as far as I could tell, her posturing, with her booming voice and her shadows. But I had to remind myself: that was all from a movie, a book. This creature before me wasn’t a man behind a curtain. It was a deity, a goddess of magic, and without having to be told, I knew she was the most dangerous thing I had ever encountered in my life.
“Hecate, please,” Prudence said, her voice imploring. “We need
to stop the murders. We’ve given you your offerings.”
“Pale substitutions.” Hecate examined her fingers, her facsimiles doing the same. “You are fortunate we allowed you into our domicile all the same.”
Prudence cowed at that, as if even she had to admit that the entity was right. Which she was. We brought Arachne the cookies she wanted, but the base sacrifices we offered Hecate were barely even up to snuff. Something cold trailed along my spine. We didn’t have exactly what Hecate wanted. Did that mean she could demand whatever she wanted of us?
“At the very least,” Hecate said, “you might compensate with entertainment. We haven’t had visitors in so very long.” Out of all her features, I could finally make out her lips. Beautiful, full, and painted black. They quirked in a smile. “Perhaps you could favor us with a game.”
The grass rustled as both Bastion and Prudence shifted their posture around me. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who was uncomfortable with the idea.
“We didn’t come here to bargain with our lives,” Prudence said, her fist clenched. In the starlight, I could see the faint traces of blue energy pulsing across her knuckles.
“Then why have you come to our domicile empty-handed?”
This wasn’t going well. I whirled around, expecting to find the portal there the way Arachne’s gossamer door had been waiting behind us, but I hadn’t seen any gateways since we’d entered Hecate’s realm. We were at the entity’s mercy.
“Then if there are no more objections, we shall play our game. There is only one rule.” All three Hecates lifted their hands to the sky. The ground began to rumble. As one, they spoke.
“Try not to die.” Hecate’s smiles grew wider. “It spoils the fun.”
Chapter 13
The rumbling grew louder with each passing second, the tremors so powerful they nearly threw me off my feet. A crack of thunder emanated from within the very ground itself. Spires of rock exploded from the earth, showering us in a rain of dirt and debris.
The perfect emerald sheen of the meadow tore into ruin as the spires rose higher and higher, tall enough to block each of Hecate’s apparitions from view, then taller still until the tips of them disappeared into the sky.
I looked at Prudence, then at Bastion uncertainly, both of them already drawing closer, backs to each other. Prudence’s hands were close to her chest, her fingers crooked like talons prepared to strike, each of them bathed in pulsing blue fire.
Nearby, Bastion crouched closer to the ground, as if readying himself for another surprise. His power had very subtle physical manifestations, as far as I knew, small flashes of light, which only led the unfamiliar to underestimate him. To all the Lorica, Bastion was a walking engine of destruction, and all our issues aside, I knew he would put up a good fight.
And me, I huddled to join the other two, regretting that I hadn’t begged Thea harder to teach me a spell, something explosive I could use to defend myself. I watched the chains and the shadows that the stars cast across them, readying myself to run.
The spires around us, I realized, weren’t spires at all, but columns of rock engraved with uniform grooves running all along their lengths. They surrounded us like sentinels, keeping us confined in a space no bigger than a baseball field. Encircled and entrapped, I noticed that the arrangement of this all looked dreadfully familiar.
A colosseum. Hecate had erected a colosseum from the earth itself.
Prudence spun around, her head lifted to the sky, face twisted in anger. “Surely you don’t expect us to fight each other,” she cried out. “That will never happen, Hecate.”
The air wavered at the far end of the entity’s makeshift stadium, and each of her three simulacra appeared at once.
All three spoke. “Each other? How droll. You will play with us.”
The apparitions lifted their hands. The chains hanging from the stars reared back and coiled like enormous snakes, clanking with the horrible metal scrape of machinery.
As one, the apparitions spoke. “Let the games begin.”
They raised their hands, opening their palms in a slow, deliberate gesture, and the chains came shrieking out of the night. One of them struck the ground just by us, the ground exploding in tufts of grass and clumps of dirt as the huge metal links ate their way into the earth. The chain shook itself off, as if collecting itself from a momentary daze, then lifted back again, rearing to strike, like a viper.
“Scatter,” Prudence yelled.
We didn’t need to be told twice. We broke into three directions, but even as we ran my heart sank when I saw that there were so many of them, these sentient chains dangling from the sky. What I hadn’t counted on was how methodically my colleagues were working to even the odds.
One of the chains, massive and cumbersome, just barely missed Prudence, and its weight and size drove its bulk into the earth. Without uttering a word, Prudence turned and drove her fist into the nearest link. The metal fell apart in a brilliant burst of blue energy, the link snapping from the tremendous force of her power. The chain went limp.
So there it was: these things were alive, somehow, and breaking off a large enough part of the chains was enough to deactivate them. Each functioned as its own being, and dealing enough damage would be enough to “kill” it. Not that I could help at all in that department.
Bastion demonstrated that on his own, and he didn’t even have to be sly about waiting for the things to embed themselves in the ground before striking. He gauged until they were close enough, then cleaved his open hand in an arc. It looked for all the world like he was making a vain attempt at karate chopping thin air, but the effect was immediate. It was as if a massive, invisible sword had cleaved its way through two of the chains, severing them in half and sending the ruined tangle of links crashing to the ground. Each of those links was the size of a car. The stadium rumbled.
“Stop standing there with your dick hanging out,” Bastion shouted. “Just shadowstep and stay out of danger.” For once I agreed with him completely, and maybe I even heard a trace of concern in his voice.
I stayed out of the way, watching and clinging to the wall behind me as more of the chains crashed to the ground, as my protectors capably disabled and destroyed every threat that approached us. The three Hecates motioned continuously with their hands, sending salvo after shrieking salvo of the chain-beasts after us. I was expecting her to be enraged by how many of her pets had fallen, but she hardly seemed bothered at all. Hecate – all three of her – they were laughing, with all the glee of a child at play.
Then all three turned their heads, fixed me with six wet, black eyes, and smiled.
“Fuck.”
Six hands extended towards me, fingers like talons outstretched, and as one the chains suspended in the sky soared into life, screaming through the air in a groaning frenzy of metal and carnage. From somewhere in the stadium I could hear Prudence and Bastion shouting, warning me to run. I pressed up against the wall, the stone of the columns cold against my back, the sweat like ice on my forehead. I waited.
As the chains drew nearer they coiled into a twisting slurry of living metal, like a giant, writhing spire that came to a point, a gleaming, gray tentacle. Hecate’s laughter danced across the stadium as the chains rushed for me, aiming, I thought, for my heart. Their shadow approached, a spreading pool of darkness beneath this comet of steel. There was only place I knew to go. I stepped.
I rushed through the Dark Room, knowing that my timing had to be precise to make sure this would have even a chance of working. I emerged from the shadows cast against the far wall by Hecate’s apparitions. The three of them looked around the colosseum in synchronized bewilderment, searching for a trace of me. By all appearances, I had simply blinked out of existence. They hadn’t spotted me standing behind them just yet.
But the chains had.
I only had time to look for my destination before the chains hit their mark. As I shadowstepped again I heard Hecate scream in three voices, the noise cut abruptly by the
collision of so much metal against earth, then against stone. I emerged at the far end of the stadium, panting from the effort of both running and taking the shadowsteps, and watched mouth agape as the hulking mass of twisted metal kept scraping across the ground, grinding its way through the side of the colosseum like an airplane skidding across a runway.
The wall didn’t stop its descent, and the stone columns of the colosseum cracked, crumbled, and broke apart under the gargantuan assault. A fresh breeze blew in through the breach made by the tangled mass of chains, all of them rendered still and lifeless now that their master was nowhere to be found. The only trace that Hecate had ever been here was the long smear of blood spattered ungracefully across the ground and the rubble.
Bastion threw his hands up to his temples, clutching at his hair, his eyes huge. “Holy shit, Graves. What did you – holy shit.” I could almost hear what he was really trying to say: “That was awesome.” Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part.
But then Prudence spoke up. “Good going, Dustin, but – she was our contact.” Her hands were at her waist, her face grim as she assessed the situation. “Even if she survived that, I don’t think Hecate’s going to be very happy.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
The voice echoed from around the stadium. The earth began trembling again, a slow tremor, at first, as the stone columns began to crumble, not into dust and rubble, but into shards and fragments of bone. Had this colosseum been built out of the skeletons of those who didn’t win at Hecate’s game? I wrapped one hand around my wrist, feeling for my bones through my skin, and swallowed thickly.
As the columns receded, the broken bones fell into squat piles, until we could finally see the sky around us again. The cool breeze of Hecate’s endless night blew across a meadow left grassless and scarred by her chain-beasts. Then out of nowhere a pale green fire consumed the bones, the flames emanating a faint chill.