Prom Knight

by Ben Reeder

  All too soon, we were pulling off the side of the road. Steve got off his bike as I got out of the car, and he slung the sword across his back. We walked across the road in silence, and stopped in front of the door to the ruined building.

  “This place doesn’t feel right,” Steve said.

  “That’s why I chose it. What we’re about to do isn’t exactly against the rules, but it isn’t something they teach most apprentices, or even mages.”

  “So we’re walking in a gray area?”

  “Dark gray,” I said. “Let’s put it this way. Do you know the best way to fuck up a demon’s day?”

  “Make it drink holy water?” Steve asked.

  “Get another demon to do it for you,” I said. “No one gets along with anyone else in the Nine Hells. They make deals and betray each other all the time.”

  “How do you know the demon you hire won’t betray you?” Steve asked.

  “You know who you’re dealing with, you make the deal too good to screw up...and you count on him doing it anyway. That’s the thing about demons. They might stab you in the back at the drop of a dime, but they’ll always stay true to their nature and at least try to stab you in the back.”

  “You think you’re good enough to pull a Xanatos Gambit on a demon?” Steve asked. He shook his head. “You’re good, but this is a demon we’re talking about here. In case you forgot, a demon taught you everything you know about this kind of deal, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t teach you all he knew about it.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” I said. “But I know this demon better than anyone. I spent eight years watching him, after all.”

  “Dulka? You’re making a deal with Dulka? You know he wants to get his hands on you in the worst way.”

  “The trick here is to keep him from joining the other side of the fight. So I’m not so much making a deal with him as giving him a better alternative.”

  “What’s the alternative?” Steve asked.

  “It would take all night to explain,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Just trust me. The most important part is that you’re not doing anything wrong. And for once, I’m actually a step ahead of things.”

  “Famous last words. If I’m not doing anything wrong, why are we sneaking around to do this?”

  “Because the Conclave is all about absolutes. White or black, there is no gray. Kind of like when we got the Maxilla. If I’d done what the Conclave thought was ‘right,’ Wanda would be dead, along with the rest of New Essex. Sometimes, you have to break some rules to do the right thing.”

  Donovan nodded, his lips tightening to a thin line. “What do you need me here for? I’m not summoning a demon.”

  “Neither am I. Dulka’s not coming here. I’m going there. I need you to be my anchor.”

  “If you’re there, won’t he try to summon the Maxilla through you like he did before?”

  “I’m counting on it. Now, draw the sword.” The whole building went white as the Maxilla came free of its scabbard, glowing with sacred light in response to the profaned area it was in. “Cross taught you the Progressions of the Five Rings. Show me Stand Your Ground.” His response was immediate. He brought the blade up horizontally, then reversed it before spinning it and bringing it down across his body to point out behind him. From there, he brought it up so the blade was pointing down slightly and forward. He finished the maneuver by bringing the sword forward slowly to grip it with both hands. As the blade moved, the tip left a glowing trail in the air, and I traced a glyph in front of myself. A few seconds after his left hand closed on the grip, the ground at his feet cracked, leaving a web work of lines that stopped five feet from his center of gravity.

  “What the…?” Steve yelped.

  “Put the point down, touching the earth,” I said. He did it, and the cracks got deeper. “Nothing can move you from this world right now,” I told him.

  “How am I doing this?” he asked.

  “The Progressions of the Five Rings are intent made manifest through motion. The movements are a sort of spell, a statement to the Universe that you Will yourself to stand in this spot against all Forces. If Dulka tries to pull the sword through me to him, it’s going to go...badly.”

  “Now I’m hoping he tries it,” Steve said with a wolfish grin.

  “There is no if, only when,” I said. “Now, stay right there, and whatever you do, don’t let go of that blade until I come back...or until sunrise, whichever happens first.”

  “Sunrise? Why sunrise?”

  “Because if I don’t make it back by then, I won’t make it back at all.” I turned away and grabbed my backpack in my right hand and drew my wand with my left.

  The slender length of hawthorn glowed as I moved it, leaving wispy trail of smoke in its wake. After a few passes, I uttered a word in Lemurian, the ancient language of Mu. Suddenly, all sound and almost all the light in the area was gone. Everything in front of me took on a sort of fish-eye effect as light bent toward the thing that had just showed up. Most people know about the four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Many spiritual paths also taught a fifth element of Void. Like the other four elements, Void has many aspects to it. One of those aspects is that it exists between everything. It is the distance between your hand and the alarm clock in the morning, between two atoms, or between your lips and your girlfriend’s when you want to kiss her. It is what separates everything from everything else. And in separating the Universe, it connects it. Because right at the edge of your fingertips? That’s where Void begins and ends. If you can touch the Void, you can touch anything, go anywhere, or make anywhere else become right where you are. Of course that was the trick, touching something that was, by its very nature, nothing. Physically, it isn’t possible. Unless you’re a Void Elemental. Then you’re made of nothing, and you exist pretty much everywhere at once.

  Off to my right, two broken bricks fused together, and near the edge of the circle Steve stood in, the cracks in the ground closed up.

  Hear you call, I did, I heard in my head. The sound I associated with those words was as if they had been sucked out of the silence, leaving little word shaped holes in reality. What does the almost mage want?

  “I need to travel between realms. From here to the middle of the Abyss.”

  Pay, the Elemental sucked out of the air.

  “Of course,” I said, pulling out some of the things I had brought along for just this purpose. An empty soda bottle, a broken glass and a wire frame sculpture landed on the ground in front of me. Just what an embodiment of empty space liked most: things defined by their emptiness.

  Where? it pulled. Many places in Abyss. Places there that are...not. The bottle rolled toward it, and I could feel it yearning for it. But it couldn’t take it. Neither of us had agreed to the deal yet. The glass fused together as the Void Elemental’s mere presence defied existence, a reflection of its desire for something that had been unmade, where distance had been created in something once whole. Only the wireframe sculpture stayed intact, its beauty defined by the empty space it encompassed.

  “The edge of the places that are Dulka’s,” I said.

  Agreed. Take you there I will.

  “And back,” I added. Now that it had agreed, it was locked into at least part of the bargain. Then again, so was I. This was the most perilous part of the deal. It had agreed to take me to the Abyss. One way or the other, I was going. Now I just had to negotiate the return trip.

  More you will need than this, it drew out of the silence. Easy to visit the Maw. Harder to come back. Perilous to venture for too long. Or too often. Much more you will need.

  “I have just the thing,” I said, pulling out a colorful, spiky plastic ball. Just the appearance of the thing made the Elemental stretch toward it, warping light and sound toward the vacuum of its being. It couldn’t tell what it was, just that it wanted the thing more than anything else I’d shown it.

  What? Why does it pull? Want….waaaant. Show. Show!

 
I grabbed the ball by both sides and pulled. The scissor joints moved and the colorful rings expanded, creating more and more space inside it. It was an isokinetic structure call a Hoberman sphere, and for an entity like a Void Elemental, it was the ultimate expression of negative space. By the time I had it fully opened, it had gone from six inches to almost a yard across.

  “Bring me from Dulka’s realms to this spot when my business is done, and this is yours upon my return here.,” I said.

  Yesyesyesyes. Done and done! Give!

  “After my return, not a moment sooner.” I closed the sphere and placed it within the circle of Steve’s influence, and the Elemental drew in on itself.

  Agreed, it sucked out of reality with a sharp hiss.

  “And agreed.” Suddenly, a hole in space was just there as the Elemental simply willed the two places to touch. I grabbed my backpack and hustled to the opening between worlds. Then I stepped across.

  Imagine taking a step that is both only a couple of feet long and yet takes you to a place that you can’t actually get to from anywhere in the place you left. A world spanning jump of only a few feet, as you cross two realities and an infinite distance in less time than it takes to cross the street. Now, imagine the feeling of not only crossing that distance, but also being stretched between those two impossibly distant points at the same time. Compress in the feeling of jet lag after taking a twenty-eight hour flight and the bone jarring experience of a couple of high speed car crashes. That’s what stepping through that gate felt like.

  Now imagine that infinitely stretched you snapping back into shape across all that and hitting the tarmac with a jet on top of you after all of that, and you pretty much have what it felt like when my foot hit the ground in Hell.

  The Abyss is not a pretty place. It’s loud, it stinks, and it’s just plain uncomfortable for anything with a soul. And it’s cold. Not in a frostbite inducing way. More of an I’m-never-going-to-get-warm-again feeling. You can walk around naked in the Maw and never go numb or succumb to exposure. You can also sit by a blazing fire and sear the flesh from your bones while bundled in eight layers of furs and wool, and still never feel warm.

  The things that live there call it the Maw. I stood there at the edge of Dulka’s domain and stared into the black emptiness of the Abyss for a moment before turning away. Looking too long at the blackness below could draw a human to jump into it. Rumor was, you would never hit the bottom, and just fall for eternity. The further down you went, the stronger the urge became. Instead, I brought my gaze to level. In the distance, I could see more blackness, with maybe a few glimmers of distant light. The Maw itself was supposed to be bigger than some countries. Some very big countries. As I turned back toward the side of it that I was on, more and more lights came into view in the middle distance. It was like being on a plane at night and looking down at the lights of distant cities, only sideways. The curve inward was gradual, and only those faraway lights really gave the impression of the actual shape of the whole place. Even that was hard to tell, because the sides weren’t smooth. In fact, my destination was a wedge of black and yellow rock that jutted out for about a mile into the dark void. Red lights glimmered from inside the windows and doorways, and screams issued from inside. Some sounded pained. Others, more like the sounds of ecstasy. It was hard to say which were more disturbing.

  I slipped the battle gauntlet on and pulled my wand. Then I pulled my nuclear option out of my backpack: a thick, square amulet made of pure gold. The symbols on it flared as I got closer to Dulka’s palace, and a series of wards flared to life a few feet in front of me. I shifted my Sight and saw a curse bounce off the wards. The defenses flickered as they drew power from somewhere inside the palace. Moments later, another curse bounced off the shields, and I stepped forward. The defenses flickered again, once as they powered up and again as my amulet temporarily negated them. I had spent almost a year working on that amulet, and it had been instrumental in breaking free of him. Walking back into his palace again hadn’t been on my list of things to ever do again, but this was the kind of thing I held onto contingencies like this for. With the amulet on, none of Dulka’s magick worked against me.

  I slipped into a small doorway, one I knew from past visits was almost never used except by rebellious servants and the occasional enslaved apprentice. The cramped passage led to a long, rectangular room with rough blankets and straw pallets scattered on the floor, most occupied. It looked like I had arrived as late in the evening here as in New Essex. A few lamps cast fitful light near the door and candles burned low in wall sconces further back. I picked my way through the sleeping beings until I found the lone human in the room. I knelt by him and touched his shoulder.

  “Huh?” the older man mumbled as he rolled to face me. A lined and grimy face turned toward me, with disheveled white hair covering the lower half of his scalp. The top of his head only had a few wispy white strands across it, and he was missing most of his teeth. Scars crisscrossed his arms, and I knew from bitter experience that the rest of his body was covered in them as well.

  “Watkins, it’s Chance,” I said. His eyes went wide as he looked at me, then a broad smile split his face.

  “Oh, thrash me, is it really you?” he asked, his voice high and reedy. He reached out and grabbed my arm, and his smile grew even bigger. A thin cackle rose into the dark room as he sat up and gripped my arm with his other hand.

  “It’s me alright,” I said. Around me, several of the other servants stirred. Most of them were some form of demon or non-human. Watkins was the only other human I ever saw here. “I need you to take me to the boss.”

  “Are you sure, boy?” he asked, his eyes going wide. “There’s them as see you as the way out of here. Everyone knows you were too smart for ‘im. An’ if you ever came back, all of us knows you’d never come without a way back to home.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Take me to him.”

  “If you say so,” Watkins said. His knees cracked and popped as he got up. Standing at his full height, or as tall as his stopped and crooked frame could manage, he barely came up to my shoulder. I’d put on several inches over the past couple of years, and looking down at Watkins made me realize how much bigger I had gotten as well. As affectionate as he was being, I remembered being on the wrong end of a lot of beating at his hand. He was a master with his fists and with a whip, and he’d been a terror to me as a younger kid. Now I doubted he’d be able to knock me across the room any more. He pulled me through the sleeping servants, taking the opportunity to land a well-placed kick if any of them protested too loudly.

  Once out in the halls, he led me toward Dulka’s private chambers, stopping once to avoid a patrol of redcaps.

  “When did the Red Count start hiring mercenaries?” I asked while the sound of iron boots faded.

  “Oh, ‘long about the time he came back home with that gash in his hand,” Watkins said, giggling. “His nibs won’t say nothin’ of it, but I suspect they’re to protect him from you. Powers only know when you might show up, eh?” He nudged me and winked, giggling anew.

  The Red Count’s palace was still the worst exercise in planning and decorating I’d ever seen. The walls were black with veins of red running through them, lit by candles that burned with a low, guttering flame. Thick webs draped in the higher parts of the halls and rooms, and the sound of distant screams still reached my ears. I’d long since gotten used to the stench of brimstone, but it had been almost two years, and it was an uncomfortable presence against my senses again. The hallways didn’t run in a straight line, at best weaving back and forth visibly with a fairly straight path down the middle. Most, however, curved hard enough that it was almost impossible to see who was coming up in front of you or if someone was behind you. Watkins walked a few feet in front of me, giving me enough room to stop and duck back if he ran into anyone. He avoided all but a couple more servants, each time sending them back the way they came with a slap or a kick and a few curses in Infernal.

&nbs
p; Finally, we stood at the doors to Dulka’s private chambers. Demons don’t sleep, but they do need do restore their reserves of magick. All of them had some powers just because they were demons. But there is only so much you can do as a fallen angel, and they don’t naturally have the energy to manipulate magick. So, they get it from somewhere else. Some did it through artifacts, some preferred cult worship, and a few did it through tapping natural sources of magick. But most gathered it from the souls of mortals.

  Humans can do magick because of their souls’ connection to the Universe. The theory is that they were created in the image of the Maker, whatever name they might hang on said Creator, and with that came the ability to exert their will on Reality, just like Whoever made it. No one knows for sure, but it sounds cool. What demons do know is that if you can get a mortal to give you their soul, you can harvest the quintessence, the fundamental ability to change What Is. So, when the rest of his staff was sleeping, Dulka would be in his chambers harvesting power from the souls he ‘owned.’ I’d spent too much time in that chamber, both when he was harvesting energy and when he was entertaining important guests and showing off.

  Watkins went to a small door a little ways away from the doors and pulled out a pair of manacles. I tilted my head and raised one eyebrow. “Seriously, Watkins?” I said.

  “You know the Master will flog me his own self if I bring you in without these on,” he said, holding the manacles out at the same time. “Besides, if I bring you in without making it look like I tried to protect him, he’ll know something’s up.”

  “Those are spellbinders. I’m not letting you put them on me.”

  “Oh, no, lad, no. You can take ‘em and put them on your own self. That way I can’t activate ‘em!” He held them out to me again, and I took them by the chain in the middle. I removed the battle gauntlet and put it in my backpack. As I was zipping it up, Watkins stepped up and reached for the shoulder strap.

  “Appearances, eh?” I said. He nodded and I let go of the pack. He took it and backed away a step, then pointed to the spellbinders.