by D. J. Butler
To hell with him, Adrian thought grimly. He’d never underestimate Adrian again.
He shook himself back to the present. He needed both his hands to climb. Adrian looked at the tawny eye in his palm, then down into the coruscating void beneath him. His face throbbed, but he couldn’t risk dropping the eye—without it, he didn’t think he could perform any magic in this strange place.
With a whimper of pain, Adrian jammed the eye back into his own eye socket. Immediately, even with his head tucked down into his chest, he again saw the umbilical cord of light sprouting from his own body. It pulsed crimson and gold, matching the colors of the maelstrom below.
Just as Adrian looked up again, Elaine Canning poked her head and shoulders out of the “window” above him, her hair wet and plastered to her head under the wire in which it was bound. “Zounds!” she gasped.
“Grab onto the … vines!” Adrian called.
She heard him and followed his instruction, climbing out onto the wall with surprising agility for a woman in a hoop skirt. The chains wrapped around her looked red-hot and gave off smoke, but they didn’t seem to slow her down.
With both hands free, Adrian began dragging himself up to join her. He was cold and wet, and he hoped he didn’t have to climb too far this way, but the hair-vines were surprisingly easy to cling to. They were hard to flex, but they were rough, and his fingers found good purchase.
“You’re pretty nimble,” Adrian grunted, trying to take his mind off the madness around and below him.
Mike’s thick black hair and leather jacket punched out of the opening next.
“I can ride a horse and shoot a gun,” she snorted, “as well as play the thirteen-course lute. And I can keep accounts in accordance with Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica.”
“Yeah?” Adrian grabbed Mike by the collar and helped him steady himself as he climbed out. It was good to see Mike out of jammies and back in his cracked brown jacket again, but Adrian knew he was only seeing it that way because of the tawny eye, and the eye made his head hurt. “You ought to join the band.”
“The band of hell?” she asked, as they both climbed slowly up.
“Seems like it sometimes, doesn’t it?” Adrian muttered.
“Jeez,” Mike grunted, righting himself and clambering after them. “I’m sure glad this went somewhere. We were afraid we might have shoved you into a bottomless gut or something.”
“Yeah,” Adrian agreed, “that would have been a lot worse.”
Twitch pulled herself out of the hole quickly. “Oberon!” she shouted, but grabbed a handful of hair without missing a beat and then waited. The sphincter looked more relaxed, and Adrian tried not to think about that. He felt sick to his stomach.
Eddie launched through the opening like a bullet from a gun, missing his catch.
“Dammit!” the guitarist yelled, slapping for a grip—
he pitched forward, tumbling into the void—
and Twitch caught him by the ankle.
Eddie swung out, limbs splayed like he was ready for a cosmic belly flop into the grinding lights below. Twitch grunted—
slid down several feet—
but held on. Eddie reached the end of his arc and fell back against the side of the house, head-down and shouting curses.
“Come on!” Adrian yelled. The void about him spun like the park around a carousel ride and he tried not to look at it. It made him want to let go, fall asleep, and just drift down into the light. Whatever the light was.
He was pretty sure it couldn’t be good.
The wall—he forced himself not to think about what it really was, but the slightly quivering surface under all the hair—sloped sharply in now, and he dragged himself onto an almost flat shelf. The rain hit him full force, cold and hard, and he squinted up into it. He could see no cloud, nor anything else resembling an ordinary sky. He saw darkness, streaks of light, a shining cord of light rising into the black, and rain hitting him in the eye.
Adrian grabbed Elaine Canning by her outstretched hand and dragged her up onto the roof with him. “Don’t let go,” he urged her. “It’s moving.” In New York, this would have been a shingled stretch of roof beneath a window opening into the upstairs hallway. Here … well, the building was covered in hair and twitching, and he hadn’t yet dared look at the spot where the window should be.
What was this place, and how had they got here? He remembered the wards on the Silver Eel in Kansas City, how he had tried to tap into them and failed. The wards had been a trap, set by the Fallen. The Fallen had seized Jim. Adrian remembered the frantic moments of spellcasting—it had seemed to him that his shadow, the wolf-shaped uncle of his nightmares, had held Jim in his grip, rather than Semyaz the Fallen.
Maybe Adrian hadn’t failed, it occurred to him. Maybe he had bungled it spectacularly. Maybe he had reshaped the wards of restraining and had drawn them all down into his shadow.
It was bizarre, but it held together with a certain logic, in the dream-like analysis of sympathetic magic. Adrian had redrawn the lines of the trap, so that now they were all stuck inside Adrian.
So what had happened to Jim?
Or maybe Adrian had drawn his own shadow up into the club, and made the old warehouse look like the inside of his own psyche.
Was there a difference? He wasn’t sure. In the one case, they might all be running around in the Silver Eel, only not seeing it. In the other, maybe they were all lying face down on the club floor and drowning in flood water.
But, in either case, who was Elaine Canning? Where had she come from? And what was her connection with Jim?
It probably didn’t matter, anyway. Whatever the exact nature of the trap they were in, the only way out seemed to be the way up, and Adrian’s connection to the golden cord. Could he cast a spell to raise them all out of this trap now? It would be easier if he could touch the rest of the band.
He stretched himself out flat and looked back into the abyss. Mike was the slowest, but had had a head start on the others, and as Adrian looked, he reached the edge and started dragging himself over it. Something golden flashed on his chest, and he and Adrian both shivered from the rain. The others were ascending fast, but Eddie had started from below the exit and had just risen above it when their pursuers emerged.
The sphincter spat out light, and then a burning being.
Adrian nearly jumped back in fright. He’d expected something with a bull’s head, or a boar’s, but instead what crawled out of the passage, grabbing for Eddie’s ankles and narrowly missing, looked like an angel.
“Watch out!” he yelled. Angels could fly, and that would make them hard to fight, especially without guns.
Only the angel didn’t fly. It lunged, jumping upward, and when it narrowly missed Eddie, it buried its hands in the wall of hair and caught itself. Adrian shook his head in disbelief. The angel had no wings.
And then he realized what he was looking at. This was one of the Fallen, but detached from his body and ka. This wasn’t physical space, Adrian reminded himself. This was all … astral … spiritual … karmic … shadowy. A flicker of hope tickled the inside of his chest.
And then a second Fallen crawled from the sphincter. That seemed so appropriate that Adrian would have chuckled, if he hadn’t been frightened and off-balance.
“I have hoped for rescuers for centuries,” he heard Elaine Canning say beside him. “But now that I see the angels that are sent, I think I prefer my torments.”
“Good call,” Mike told her. “You wanna hold out for a better offer than that.”
Adrian felt a twinge of sympathy for the sphincter, imagining what it would feel like to have multiple people crawl through his own body. He burned with vague shame and reminded himself not to get distracted.
Twitch scrambled up to the ledge and threw herself over.
“What have you got, big boy?” she leered at him. “A bit of Vulcan’s Kiss at least, surely?”
“Better than that,” Adrian cheered himself on. “I
’m getting us out of here, as soon as I can touch Eddie.” As he said it, he wondered if he was doing them any favors, or if getting them all out of his shadow just put them back into the power of the Fallen in the physical world. There, after all, they had a huge size advantage and could use sorcery. And Adrian had screwed this up before.
He wondered if he could somehow leave the Fallen behind.
“Come on, Eddie!” Mike shouted. “Kick that pendejo!”
The nearest Fallen on Eddie’s tail grabbed for him again, and Eddie took Mike’s tactical advice, slamming the heel of a combat boot into the former angel’s shining forehead. The Fallen grunted and slipped, sliding down several feet.
“Everyone touch my body somewhere,” Adrian told his friends on the shelf with him, and felt hands anchor onto his back and legs. He willed himself not to be uncomfortable with the fact that people were crowding around and touching him, and mostly succeeded.
What if he didn’t have the tawny eye in his head? Adrian thought, feeling the eye’s presence like a painful, invasive foreign body. Like a kidney stone in the urethra of his skull. Eddie would appear to have bare feet, then. Would it affect how hard he kicked?
If they were all inside Adrian’s shadow, his perception might be defining the world for all of them, and not just providing the lens through which he himself saw things.
He batted away the thought as abstract and a detour. They needed to get out of this place. He reached out and started muttering incantations.
“Grab the wizard’s hand!” Twitch called down to Eddie.
Adrian looked Eddie in the eye and Eddie stared back, concentrating on covering the last feet to Adrian, throwing himself up at a reckless pace, hand over hand and foot over foot. Dangling from Eddie’s chest and bouncing around inside the hairs carpeting the wall, Adrian again noticed a tag. It was like a dog tag, only the size of a tea saucer and golden. They all had them, he realized. He hadn’t noticed them in the climb because they’d all been covered in the vine-like growth of hair.
The plate bore Eddie’s true name.
Adrian didn’t need that, but suddenly he wondered about the Fallen. The Fallen had true names, didn’t they?
He tore his eyes away from Eddie. The three Fallen dragged themselves up the side of the wall, moving as fast as Eddie moved and maybe even a little bit faster. In New York, this wall had been twelve feet tall, if that. Here it seemed to be thirty, but that was no comfort. They were all bearing down—bearing up—on Adrian with alarming speed.
Gold saucers bounced on the chests of the Fallen, too.
Adrian’s heart leaped to attention. If he could see those names, he could end this, right here and now. Knowing the true names of his enemies and being the only one—he hoped—with access to ka-power should give him the ability to command them, bend them to his will. Maybe he could force them to help him and the band escape. Or he could escape, forcing them to stay behind. Their ba-less bodies in the physical world would be inert and useless. The band could collect their gear, walk past the Fallen like so many tons of sleeping elephant, and hail a cab.
Okay, a cab wasn’t quite their style. But they could steal a car.
“Semyaz!” Adrian yelled, trying to get the Fallen’s attention. The two former angels kept climbing and ignored him. “Yamayol!” he tried again, and this time one of them looked up.
Adrian got a glimpse of the Fallen’s name-plate and his heart sank. There was writing on it, all right, but it was in one of the Primals. Infernal, probably, if Adrian had to guess. Adrian had been born after the Tower of Babel and the Confusion of the Tongues—a long time after—and he could recognize Infernal, but he couldn’t read it. Much less speak it out loud, which is what he’d have to do.
So much for that hope. Adrian focused on the spell he was weaving. He didn’t know exactly what he was doing, so he improvised. He started with incantations he used in setting wards of obfuscation and he reversed them, imagining them as spells of pathfinding, and envisioning the golden umbilical cord as a path.
A path that went straight up into the sky.
He tried to remember the wards inside the Silver Eel’s restaurant, shaping his incantations to leave them intact, but let him and his friends—those touching him—pass through.
Without warning, the third Fallen emerged from the sphincter, nearly leaping out, the portal was so worn now. Maybe that one was Semyaz, Adrian thought, and then he saw that the last of the Fallen carried a prisoner in his arms.
It was Jim.
He was as tall and heroic-looking as ever, with his sculpted face and long hair, and he wore his prairie shirt, jeans and rider’s boots with flair. But Semyaz carried him tucked under one arm easily, like a small child. Jim snapped his head back and forth, but to no effect. Tendrils of darkness wrapped around his chest like chains, pinning him and leaving him unable to free himself. Adrian felt his chest constrict and his breathing become shallow.
Jim was trapped. Adrian had reshaped the wards of restraint and imprisonment, and in this twisted house of flesh that was Adrian’s shadow, he had trapped Jim in the role of dream-Ade, the helpless little boy.
Holy crap.
Eddie lurched forward, his hand slapping into Adrian’s. “Go!” the guitar player yelled. He didn’t see Jim.
Adrian didn’t want to leave Jim, but he didn’t know how to save him, either. It didn’t matter—at this point, his body and mind marched down the path he had already set for them, and it was too late to make them turn.
He felt like he was watching his own lips mumble from the outside, and he heard his own voice as if from far away. “Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque semitam sequitor,” the far-away-Adrian said, just as Adrian had planned.
And then far-away-Adrian disappeared, and so did everything else.
***
Chapter Seven
Wet flesh rasped his face, like the tongue of a dog. Like the tongue of a dog so big that Adrian could fit inside its mouth. Adrian tasted bile in the back of his throat.
He opened his eyes. They hurt like needles had been shoved into both of them, but he saw just fine. He was in the long upstairs hallway of the house. Not the real one, the horrible dream-shadow house made of body parts. He saw Mike’s and Eddie’s backs as they rammed the wardrobe up against the hallway’s lone window. The wardrobe snarled and snapped at them, but they kept out of reach of its grinding jaws.
They were wearing jammies.
“Son of a bitch,” he groaned. “It didn’t work.”
“Oh, it worked just fine,” he heard Twitch say. Swiveling his head, he found the fairy, standing at the top of the stairs and looking down them with a sturdy meat club in her hands. It might be the shower curtain rod, he thought idly. “You got to miss the nasty part. Again. Well done, Adrian.”
Wham!
Eddie and Mike slammed the wardrobe against the wall again. White light shone around the edges, and Adrian thought he saw white fingers slammed under the woody flesh.
Wararargh! chomped the wardrobe, throwing a rain of warm spittle on all of them.
“Adrian!” Eddie barked. He dug his heels into the moist red floor and threw his shoulder into the wardrobe. “A fireball’d be nice about now!”
Adrian patted around on the floor and found the tawny eye. He picked it up and hesitated.
“That’s going to smart,” Twitch warned him.
“I look that good, huh?” He tried a devil-may-care grin.
“Even better,” the fairy said. “You’re bleeding out both eyes.”
“Nothing ventured,” Adrian bluffed. “You know.”
He touched his own face. He felt like tenderized steak all over so he hadn’t noticed, but Twitch was right. He had blood under both eyes, as well as on his upper lip and trickling down his neck. “Ugh,” he groaned.
Wham!
Eddie tumbled to the ground as the Fallen on the other side of the wardrobe hammered against it. Mike jammed his fists into the red rubbery walls of the window well and leane
d back hard. Elaine Canning, again looking like Mouser in rose-spotted pajamas, jumped forward to throw herself against the wardrobe with the bass player.
“Mierda!”
Adrian pushed the tawny eye into his eye socket. The searing pain was so intense and so immediate that his whole body contracted in a spasm, and the eye promptly plopped back out again. It stared at him from a puddle of wet fluid on the floor, smeared in guilty, inadequate blood.
Adrian shuddered, almost crying. “I can’t do it!”
He grabbed the eye and stood, and his lungs filled instantly with smoke. From the floor he hadn’t noticed it, but colored fumes billowed up the stairwell. They stank of sulfur, tobacco smoke, and rotting flesh. The sudden influx burned his lungs and he staggered against the sagging wall, knocking his head against the hanging uvula-light in the process. It swung back and forth, sending all the room’s shadows dancing in circles.
“Uh oh,” Twitch warned them all. “Stairs.”
“Adrian!” Eddie yelled again, and jumped to the top of the staircase. “Now would be good!”
Adrian nodded. Eddie was right; now would be very good indeed. He leaned both shoulder blades against the spongy, resilient wall, ignoring the trickles of warm water that snaked down his back, and braced himself.
To hell with the firebolt. To hell with trying to bar the path to the Fallen. He needed to get them all back to Kansas City, and pronto. They’d have to come back for Jim, if they could. And if they couldn’t, well, Jim’s body had the clipping of Azazel’s hoof in Kansas City. Adrian coughed, crouched to get down into cleaner air, took a deep breath and jammed the tawny eye over his own eyeball.
He felt blood spurt out onto his face and winced. A tun-tun-tun-tun-tun machine gun pulsing exploded inside his head and his vision blurred and skewed sideways. Adrian grabbed his temples and dropped onto his knees and elbows.
“Aaagh!” his mouth filled with hot fluid and he coughed and spat as much of it as he could onto the floor. He forced his eyes open and found himself staring into a puddle of yellow-gray slime, like bile, or worse.