His sword whirled, but Sam was already there. His hands moved in a blur, and the silver blade was up as he ducked below Michael’s blow. Expertly he swivelled, swinging his blade up and across as he exclaimed, ‘These many years on Earth and you learn how to survive, old friend.’ A thrust, a parry, an easy spin in which he stuck out an ankle to trip his opponent, who fell, then rolled clumsily out of the way of a tauntingly leisured downstroke.
‘I studied survival in China, in Africa, in France and now here and, you know, I feel really confident with myself,’ Sam went on as Michael got to his feet. ‘Did I tell you about the latest developments in Hell? I’ve actually managed to convince them of the wonders of plumbing. The fact that the temperature is always below freezing is a minor difficulty, but, as we say, Time conquers all.’
He ducked another thrust, danced nimbly away from a counter-stroke and in the riposte brought his sword swinging round and down in an elegant arc that pinned Michael’s sword to the ground and locked them each inches from the other’s face.
‘You don’t want to be a Son of Time, Michael,’ he warned softly. ‘It’s not worth it.’
Michael broke free, jabbing with his knee at Sam’s gut. But Sam was already spinning away, and used Michael’s off-balance to deliver a ringing sideways blow with the flat of his blade.
‘Archangels have it so much easier,’ explained Sam in a louder voice as they whirled and thrust across the path and between the trees. ‘Being created to serve somehow gives purpose to your life. When I was created to serve, things were so much easier. There was none of this self-doubt, none of this agonising over what it’s all about. It’s so simple to have your loyalties, faith, belief and hope grounded in one fairly safe bet. But we still gamble with our souls – every day, Michael. And for every day we lose, a little more of our soul is stolen from us. After a few thousand years of gambling, that’s a lot of debts to pay.’
Sam had only one hand on his sword now. Too late Michael tried to scramble for cover while, palm out, Sam’s free hand came across and up. As it rose, so Michael rose until he was pinned, helpless and motionless in air, his wild eyes and fast breathing the only proof that he was alive.
Below, supporting his involuntary flight, Sam wasn’t smiling at all now.
‘They tried to burn me,’ he murmured again. ‘Do not seek to be a Son of Time. Do not seek to see everything you hold dear pass away, to be replaced by new hope that, again, passes away. Do not seek to see as clearly as Time makes his Children see. If you had seen the things that I have seen, or the things that I must see before I die… well, no more of that. You see what you want to see and, while it lasts, that is a marvellous blessing. If we saw what was really there, who would be able to face Time with a steady eye?’
He released Michael from the spell, and the archangel fell to the ground with a heavy thump. Sam brought his free hand slicing through the air, and the effect was like a iron fist to Michael’s face, who slumped, hands opening around his blade and voice giving no cry.
‘They tried to burn me,’ Sam whispered.
It was the squeaking of rats that woke him, or possibly the sound of claws scrabbling on plastic bags. The sun was high in the sky, but his only way of telling this was by the stifling heat and the glimmer of light that shone through a small window at the far end of the room.
He was lying in a basement, unbound, on a pile of garbage bags heaped into a large plastic container beneath a rubbish chute. There was no bullet in his back, but there was also no sign of his sword, nor of Andrew, Peter, or Whisperer. He wondered where the bullet had gone, then as he rolled over he felt his stomach churn. Oh, hell…
Falling hard out of the container of rubbish, he managed to crawl several feet before he stopped and emptied the contents of his stomach. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he retched and went on retching. There was a warm wetness around his nose and when he wiped a hand across his face a clear liquid came off on it, tainted slightly with blood.
Now he knew what had happened to the bullet. His body had broken it down, dissolved it into the bloodstream. He wondered how long he’d been in the cellar. For his body to have metabolised lead, probably days.
He managed to stand upright, and watched blearily as the world rocked back and forth. The dagger against his ankle was gone, but a gleam of silver among the rubbish marked where it had broken free of its strings, rather than been taken. He raised one hand and it flew into his grasp, as fouled and smelly as he was.
Sam staggered towards the single metal door. His hand blindly found its way to the handle, but the door was locked. He started hammering, tears streaking his face and the trickle from his nose turning into proper blood. Metabolising lead was something he hadn’t done in a long time. He went on hammering, yelling futile imprecations. No one answered.
Falling back and wiping his eyes with his filthy sleeve, Sam finally gave an animal snarl of rage and levelled both hands at the door. It exploded outwards with the force of his anger and he rushed through it, howling like a wounded creature. Hearing him, a janitor appeared, gaping in surprise. Sam rushed straight up to him, a madman with a knife, and shouted into his face, ‘What’s the date? How long was I down there?’
‘March the third!’ stammered the man. ‘March the third!’
A week! Sam snarled at him, ‘Have you got a car?’
The janitor took in Sam’s wild appearance and the furious way he waved the knife, and quickly said yes.
‘Then you’re going to drive me!’
The man was utterly mad. But he was a madman with a knife. Having waved his blade at Ivan the janitor, sent on his weekly round to empty the rubbish bins, the madman had growled, ‘Get the car!’
And now he was sitting in Ivan’s front passenger seat, one hand flung across the car so that the knife could rest near the janitor’s belly, a blanket pulled up to his chin, tears mingling with blood all down his face, and muttering. And smelling. That was what Ivan noticed above all.
‘Turn left,’ the man snapped.
‘Where are we going?’
‘The Portal. I was beaten.’
‘What Portal?’
‘Just drive!’
The man fell silent again. He kept writhing about, pressing his back into the seat and then recoiling as though stung from touching his back to anything. Finally he found a position that seemed bearable and regarded Ivan with strangely sane eyes. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked finally.
‘Ivan.’
‘Married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Children?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then rest assured I’ll do my best not to cut your throat.’ The madman gave a faint sigh. ‘I thought I’d outwitted them, but I was wrong. Still, they won’t be able to destroy the sword or the crown.’
Ivan took what to his mind was a terrible risk. ‘Look,’ he said, as kindly as possible, ‘you need help, that’s fine! I’ll take you to the hospital; they’ll look after you.’
‘I don’t need help! At least, not that kind.’
‘What do you do?’ asked Ivan nervously. Be friends with him. Maybe then he won’t kill you.
‘Me? I get caught up in other people’s stupid, stupid wars and think I can out-manoeuvre them, that’s what.’ But I did tag her.
Ivan thought better of asking anything more. He drove. The man gave strange directions. His lefts and rights and keep goings didn’t seem to have any knowledge behind them, and he gave his orders as though compensating for the shape of the land itself. A right here because we couldn’t turn where I wanted. A left here because we have no choice. It was as if he had an internal radar and was trying to reach the centre of an unseen positioning system.
Abruptly, the madman told Ivan to stop. They had long left Kaluga and were in the middle of an empty road in a rural nowhere. Ivan stopped, not bothering to pull over. Perhaps someone would notice his plight.
The man was staring fixedly at a small copse of trees in a field. He wrenched the doo
r open and half climbed, half fell from the car. Ivan felt his stomach turn through three hundred and sixty degrees and his heart clamber into his throat. The man’s back was soaked with blood, along with a black substance he couldn’t begin to guess at. Sam heard the car roar away into the distance, and fancied he heard Ivan’s relieved and terrified exclamations fading with the engine. Warm wetness trickled down his spine, and he knew that his body was still trying to discharge the poisonous lead. He began to stagger across the field towards the Way of Hell. It would be a dangerous Waywalk, in his condition. But he was resolved. As he never had been before, he was determined now. Now things were different. Now he was alone. And alone, there was no one save him to make mistakes. Alone, he could weave his spells and be sure that nothing endangered them save his own foolery. Was he not master of magics? Time’s necessary Child?
The message that came to Beelzebub was confused, to say the least. He was in his room, stretched across the bed and staring at the ceiling with wide, sleepless eyes. Sleep was a luxury that had long ago been denied him, but demon pride dictated that he didn’t complain. So it was fortunate that he would lose none tonight, when the guards hammered on his door.
‘Sir! Lucifer!’
‘Sir’ and ‘Lucifer’? he thought. What have these two to do with each other?
But he got up, pulling on a warm robe and following the incoherent guards to Lucifer’s room. He knocked warily on the door, wondering what it was that could have brought Sam back – and in a state desperate enough to have the usually level-headed guards go frantic.
‘It’s open!’
Stepping inside, he closed the door to the rest of the world and stared, dumbfounded. Sam was standing before the fire pulling on a large shirt – pale as a sheet, his hair wet from a bath, no sword or crown to be seen, and a bandage wound round him several times to catch the black discharge from an unseen wound in his back.
He grinned weakly on seeing Beelzebub, but though there was effort in his smile, there was little joy.
‘I lost.’
It took Sam half an hour to tell his story. He described everything, through the quest to find who, in addition to Odin and Jehovah, might want the Pandora keys, right up to his defeat in Kaluga.
‘What will you do now?’ asked Bubble.
He shrugged. ‘It’s not as bad as it seems; I will regenerate. Then there are several things I can do. Firstly I’m going to get back my sword and crown. They can’t destroy them, and they know that I can find them anywhere. So if they’re clever they’ll have thrown them away. But I will have them back.’
‘And then?’
Again, a wan smile. ‘They made a mistake. To convince me of my own safety they summoned fog, as Whisperer would have done. Then they sent a jinniyah to pick me up, with some story about trouble. I tagged the jinniyah’s car, and before I left Earth I probed for it. The tag is still there.’
‘So. You will continue in this battle, even though you are outnumbered and outgunned.’
‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘For Freya, for Whisperer and for my own small-minded little pride, I will go on.’
‘When will you return to Earth?’
‘As soon as my back stops hurting.’
‘When is that?’
‘A few days? Regeneration is almost complete, and I’ve been using a few spells. Most of the work was done in trance.’ He wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘A week in a rubbish tip.’
Beelzebub was silent again. Finally he stood up. ‘Can you walk?’
‘I got here, didn’t I?’
‘Can you walk comfortably?’ he demanded, exasperation only slightly tainting his voice.
Mostly there was concern, and Sam was duly flattered. ‘Yes.’
‘I’d like to show you something.’
Sam wrapped himself in a warm cloak, attempting to stand tall despite the twinges that shot through his back.
Bubble was unreadable, but the firelight revealed the weariness in his eyes, and at the door his groping hand failed several times to catch the handle.
Sam caught his arm and opened the door. ‘You’re not well,’ he said.
‘I am old. It’s something you wouldn’t understand, Lucifer. Not physically, at least. Come. This is important.’
Sam followed Bubble up the corridor. His mind was already wheeling with possibilities as to what this ‘important’ sight might be. And with concern for his oldest demon friend. It hadn’t occurred to him until that minute to consider exactly how old Bubble was. When Bubble dies, then demonkind really is nothing more than a collection of savages.
Moving with an old man’s stately gait, Bubble led the way up a flight of stairs. Sam trailed behind with the youngster’s shuffle that cries out for more speed. To look at them, no one would have thought Sam the elder, for all the injuries that time or war had inflicted on the pair. We are wounded soldiers, coming to observe the battlefield, Sam thought, and then chided himself. We are who we are; don’t try to romanticise a bullet in the back or the weight of age.
At the summit of a long twisting stair, they made their way out on to a tower. A guard saluted sharply, but was waved away by Bubble, saying they didn’t wish to be disturbed.
It was bitterly cold. Ice was already forming on Sam’s wet hair, giving it the appearance of a strange helmet. The city of Gehenna was laid out below them, with every street corner marked by a burning fire. In the hills beyond, a pack of hunters riding their huge, shaggy beasts were returning from a kill, and watchfires burnt on the horizon.
‘What is there to see?’ asked Sam, peering over the battlements and shivering.
‘There.’ Bubble pointed. Sam followed his finger until his eyes settled on the castle’s small forge. Through the darkness his eyes picked out a heaving mass of soldiers, talking loudly. Outside the smithy a clerk was handing out heavy shields and long swords. And now that Sam had detected this, his gaze automatically flew over the second curtain wall to the space between the gatehouses and the keep. Even at this late hour, now that he was listening for it, he could hear the clash of weapons. The deep roar of shaggy beasts being fitted with harness. The yells of instructors relentlessly drilling their men.
‘Asmodeus is recruiting all across the land. A thousand men enrolled in the first week, two in the second. A raiding party captured a border soldier, who was tortured for information and publicly executed. Belial is screaming for blood. War has been as good as declared.’
‘He’s a fool,’ growled Sam.
‘There’s more. The council tried to resist him. He’s had two members arrested and the rest sent home. He told me you weren’t coming back; seemed very confident of the fact.’
Sam turned on Bubble. ‘His words. Give me his exact words.’
‘“I am not as ignorant of the affairs of Earth as you think. Lucifer is never coming back.”’
Sam realised he was trembling. He turned several times like a caged animal, staring down at the castle he had built so long ago, then looking beyond to the snow-covered horizon. ‘Bubble, I want you to get out of here,’ he said finally. ‘You know the safest places to hide.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Have a little word with Asmodeus. Or even a big one.’
Beelzebub nodded. ‘I know where you can find him tonight.’
Sam’s back was throbbing alarmingly by now, but he ignored it. Striding through darkened corridors, fire in his eyes and his face clenched with anger and suspicion, he gave no sign that, only hours ago, he’d woken from a long trance.
The doors to the soldiers’ hall slammed back with a suitably dramatic boom of wood on wood. The centre of the floor had been cleared and there was Asmodeus, cheering on a pair of demons stripped to the waist as they wrestled for a prize. The prize was a girl, from the desert judging by the patches of red scale across her neck and face, huddled in a blanket by the roaring fire and shivering in the unaccustomed cold. At Sam’s appearance, everything came to a stop. The wrestlers disentangled themselves, the ro
aring of appreciative demons fell to a hush and the thumping of mugs ceased.
‘Everyone get out!’ roared Sam, sparks flashing from his fingers and his hair. In the grate, the fire leapt up in sympathy for his magic. As the soldiers scuttled past Sam, Asmodeus stayed seated, insolent in his chair. When the last soldier had gone and only the slave-girl, Asmodeus and Sam were left, Sam raised one hand and the doors slammed shut behind him on the watching faces outside.
‘How kind of you to join us,’ said Asmodeus, cool as only a frost demon could be. ‘Care for a drink?’
In a few paces Sam had crossed the floor, strode to the table where Asmodeus sat and seized him savagely by the collar, pulling him bodily over the tabletop. ‘Tell me what you know and what you’re doing,’ he whispered, ‘and there’s just a chance I won’t kill you here and now.’
Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series Page 18