Perhaps the rats could triumph over the maze and turn the tables on the experimenters. He had plundered one of their precious amplifiers; the girl, Jill, had also done so at least once. If the lab is burning down and the rats save themselves, what, then, did that say about their relative positions? He wasn't sure, but it must mean something. It just had to mean something!
"Shall we establish the specifics?" Abaddon suggested. When the other two men nodded he continued.
"All right. We'll start right outside the cafe here, in the street. Both of you will begin naked and unarmed, although what you do once the contest is begun is up to you. Seven kilometers down the road will be a life-sized granite statue of me. To make the game more interesting, I'll put the jewel in my outstretched stone palm. There is no time limit. The first man to the jewel will touch it and say the name he must-you, Mr. Walters, will say Asmodeus and so take it to him; you, Boreas, will utter my name. You know the thing will destroy you if you don't, so I have no fear there. I will establish conditions whereby no one but you two or myself can touch the jewel, so no matter what stray souls are around, they can't queer the deal. In addition, there will be no teleporting and no growing wings or levitation flying. You must make it the hard way. If either of you kills the other, the survivor wins, of course; if both of you are killed, then I still win."
That last got to Mac. "And you will not in any way set up anything to kill either of us," he added. "You will not interfere in any way to help or hurt either of us, even to give your man, here, information."
"Fair enough," the demon agreed. "I will be a spectator, nothing more, once the race is under way. But you could still kill each other, you know, or be done in by leftovers on this plane pledged to others, like your little girl ghoul. I can't do much about them."
That sounded fair enough. "Let's do it," Mac said flatly.
The three of them got up and went outside. The ghostly choir was still chanting in the church down the street, and other ghosts seemed to be living it up in the saloon across the way.
Abaddon smiled, snapped his fingers, and they were both naked. Mac's useful side arm was gone as well. It doesn't matter, he told himself. I can wish it back in a second.
"I said I would not interfere in any way once the race began, and I will not," the demon told them. Mac was barely listening. Boreas had the body of a youthful man, reminding him of a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.
"Seven kilometers down the road you are facing," the demon reminded them. "Ready?" Both men tensed visibly.
Abaddon smiled wickedly and snapped his fingers once again.
Suddenly they were no longer in the tiny western town facing a bleak and featureless dirt road. There was traffic and crowds and noise and sky and tall buildings all around.
"That's cheating!" Mac screamed, but it was too late.
"Go!" yelled the demon gleefully.
He was honorable, yes. He would not interfere after they had begun. Before, though- Mac felt he'd been had, and could only console himself that Boreas must be equally confused.
Both men, naked as the day they were born, were standing on a grassy knoll in the warm sunshine under a blue sky. They were in an exact copy of the Battery in New York City, facing uptown-people, traffic, and all-and the little old ladies were already appropriately shocked.
The street they were facing was the foot of Broadway.
3
It was a fair complication. Boreas looked as shocked as he did. The difference was that the sorcerer recovered a split second before Mac, dropped to the grass, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand. He fired.
Mac dropped and rolled as people screamed and scattered in all directions. He poised for a second, sure now that he'd lost at the start and that a second shot would finish him.
It didn't come. He looked up to see a veritable horde of cops, guns drawn, running toward them, then risked a quick glance at where Boreas should be, very near him.
The sorcerer wasn't there. There were people running all around, but no one who looked remotely like the demon's agent. Mac didn't waste any time now; the cops were closing in on him as well and he was still naked and exposed. Clearly Boreas didn't want to risk being shot by the cops and had changed into someone who could blend into the crowd. Mac decided he'd better do the same. No teleporting was one of the rules, and no flying; but, Manhattan or not, this was really still the training ground and he could still influence things.
Suddenly he was up, a pistol in his hand, and running toward an empty spot on the grass near him. The transformation had been instantaneous and was accompanied by a wish that the cops would not notice it.
They didn't. They caught up to him and surrounded the same empty space he'd reached, and they all looked puzzled.
Mac Walters, now just one of the uniformed cops, looked puzzled, too. He glanced around for any sign of his foe but saw none. That was bad. He wondered how familiar the European was with New York-probably very much so, which was why Abaddon had picked it.
As for him, he'd only been in New York for games, and they hadn't been in Manhattan. His business was a western one; he'd just never had occasion to really be in the city any more.
It also took him some time to extricate himself from the masses of cops. He noticed that some were wearing walkie-talkies, added one to his own belt, then wished a call for him to report back to his squad car. It helped.
As he walked across the park he considered the possibilities. Why not a squad car? The street was Broadway and there Broadway was. Just get into the car, turn on the light and siren, and off he'd go.
He saw one by the curb, lights still flashing, and headed toward it. Just a few meters before he reached the car, though, it blew up in a tremendous ball of smoke and flame. The force of the explosion knocked him down, and he got back to his feet unsteadily but growing angry now. Boreas! That son of a bitch was somewhere around and actually toying with him! Apparently the bastard thought the game so easily won, the opponent so poor, that he would play a while before the kill.
And maybe he was right, unless . . . Mac looked around, spotted a steel grate that had a rumbling noise issuing from it, a noise that was almost completely covered by the conflagration-which was also again attracting cops and passersby.
I wish I were made of smoke and sucked right down that grate! he thought angrily.
In a split second, almost before he realized that his wish had come true, he was pulled to and down through the grating.
A young stockbroker type with tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses standing nearby yelled something angrily, turned to smoke, and followed him.
Mac Walters drifted lazily over the crowds waiting for the subway and congratulated himself. By all rights he should have been dead now; sheer luck and Boreas's overconfidence had allowed him to escape. Now he could simply turn into anyone he wanted to, blend with the crowd down there, and make it fairly quickly to Times Square. A map behind some plastic on a post in back of the platform gave him a color-coded guide to the New York subway system. He looked it over, found he had to be on the other side of the platform, and lazily drifted that way.
He knew he should be elated; even if the sorcerer were around here himself, drifting invisibly as Mac was, it would be impossible now for Boreas to get a clear fix on him. And yet something in the back of his mind nagged at him, a certain feeling he couldn't shake that he'd made a mistake somewhere. Not an error in this-he knew that he was free of Boreas unless he did something stupid. Something else. He tried to think, pressured suddenly by the rumbling far off in the tube that told him that a train was coming. It would be easy now; just step on the train, ride to Times Square-perhaps with Boreas himself aboard-and make the final race to the jewel. Simple. Direct.
Or was it? He brought himself up short. He was still alive because Boreas was better at the wizard game than he was. At any time the sorcerer could simply have left him and sped the seven easy kilometers up Broadway, leaving him in his dust, particul
arly after the strange man had vanished as the cops closed in. Boreas hadn't-that was too easy for him. He'd stayed, playing with exploding police cars and the like, enjoying himself and rejoicing in his total superiority over Mac Walters, bumbling amateur.
Boreas would be on that subway only if he knew his opponent was, too-and perhaps not even then. If he lost Mac he'd head straight for the jewel to protect himself. Maybe he was already heading there now!
Mac felt momentary panic. The only way to make sure that Boreas didn't get there before he did was to expose himself, keep the other man intent on playing with him rather than attaining the objective. Boreas's arrogant overconfidence was the only thing Mac had going for himself. With a discorporate sigh, he materialized as himself in the crowd waiting for the subway.
Mac glanced nervously around, aware of his extreme vulnerability as a target and of his opponent's almost total anonymity. He felt more naked and helpless than he had in the primitive world. What was even worse was that he had to pray for an attempt on him to occur; if he peacefully boarded the train and had an uneventful ride, then the odds were he had already lost.
The train stopped and he got on with a group of men and women and grabbed a metal strap. All the seats were taken, and a fair crowd of standees pressed against him. It was uncomfortable, particularly since in every face he seemed to see the sardonic eyes of Boreas.
The experience was unnerving, the feeling that all around you were ready to pounce, to kill you in any one of a thousand different ways, coupled with the fervent prayer that they truly were evil and malevolent and would try to do that very thing.
The train was rolling barely a minute when he got his wish. A little old lady who must have been eighty if she was a day lurched into him, looked up with pure meanness in her eyes, and spat into his face. The action was so unexpected that he didn't recover for a couple of seconds.
"Pooh and fie on you!" she cackled. "You're a bad, bad man!"
Several other standees nodded in agreement, and in a matter of a few seconds more they were all looking at him with pure hatred in their faces and chanting, "Bad man! Bad man!"
Then the little old lady stomped on his foot. Somebody else poked him in the stomach-he was being attacked from all sides. It gave him little chance to think or concentrate, but it added a quick sense of desperation to his moves. He went back to mist again, and the crowd fell into itself, still chanting, kicking, poking, and shoving.
Boreas wouldn't be taken aback for very long, he knew. Suddenly he heard a sound as if someone had switched on a giant vacuum cleaner, and he felt himself being pulled back, out of the train, back toward the Battery. He became solid once again, standing in the darkened tunnel as the lights of the subway train receded rapidly.
The giant suction continued for a minute or so, then abruptly stopped, leaving instead an eerie silence. He looked around, considering what to do next. There seemed to be no openings to the street from wherever he was, making the mist routine suddenly less useful. No teleporting had been the rule; he couldn't just wish himself to the surface. He shrugged and started walking after the now-vanished train, searching for an outlet to the surface.
There was a humming noise and he realized after a moment that it was the third rail that supplied the electrical power for the trains. He shied away from it. Wouldn't do to escape Boreas and do yourself in, he thought nervously.
Suddenly the tunnel ahead of him constricted; the tube was now closed, but centered in the pinched area was a pair of human-looking but gigantic lips. They smiled at him.
He stopped and stared at them, trying to think. Boreas-he must be here, somewhere, in the tunnel with me!
"This has been most entertaining," the giant lips told him in a ghostly parody of the sorcerer's voice that echoed down the subway tunnel. When the mouth opened he could see the rest of the tunnel through its "throat." That should mean something, he told himself, but he couldn't grab onto it.
"Yes, most entertaining indeed," the lips continued. "However, it is time to end this now-you are so incompetent, my dear fellow, that you take the challenge out of it!"
He glanced around for the real Boreas but saw nothing. A rat, probably, skulking in the darkness, smiling at him. Well-why not?
So Mac became a rat. Everything, the giant lips included, loomed huge around him, and he started running at high speed for the dark corner. As he almost reached the deepest part of the shadows a pair of large, luminous yellow eyes leered back at him. He barely had time to cut and run before a huge cat was upon him. He felt a sting in his tail and desperation set in as he was yanked up into the air, held by the cat's sharp, toothy grip on his rat's tail.
He made himself into a Saint Bernard dog. The cat, taken unawares, almost choked on the monstrous, furry tail it grasped, and its smaller jaw was almost wrenched from its socket by the huge thing it now no longer could grip.
Mac's victory was short-lived, however. He barely had time to turn to face his assailant when the cat was replaced by a giant, monstrous spider, a hairy tarantula nearly filling the tunnel, facing him down, holding him between the wall of lips and any kind of escape.
There was silence for a moment as Boreas savored his victory. The giant spider's sting dripped with deadly, paralyzing venom. Mac realized that he could never best the man in a contest like this; experience and confidence in his powers and abilities automatically made the sorcerer his superior. He thought desperately for a solution, a way out, as the lips opened to reveal nasty-looking teeth. The spider began a slow advance. He could still see the intact tunnel through the open mouth of the wall of lips, emergency lights trailing off into the distance. So near and yet so far.
Or was it? He remembered the subway map once again. The line branched off quickly from the other lines that also started at the Battery. But although other lines might join this one and run parallel to it, that tunnel on the other side of the gaping, mocking mouth was a direct line to where he needed to go.
As the first of the spider's huge legs almost touched him and the mandibles of the creature snapped in obvious relish, Mac knew what he had to do. He ran sideways toward the third rail, and as he reached it there was a brilliant white light and he vanished.
The lips vanished as well, as did the spider, leaving an enraged Boreas suddenly puzzled. Where could Walters have gone? Not to mist-he had guarded against that. Not to invisibility-he would hear and sense the breathing. That brilliant flash . . . What could it have meant?
Instantly the answer was clear to him and he cursed himself for a fool. Walters had become a creature of pure energy and was riding the third rail in electrical form!
Damn!
Stalled by his lack of knowledge of just where the tunnel led and unwilling to take a chance on following the man without knowing the byways of the electrical system, Boreas summoned a special subway car and started riding at top speed toward Times Square Station.
Mac Walters cursed as he became himself once again. At the speed electricity traveled, he had traversed the entire line from beginning to end and back again over thirty thousand times in the few seconds he had ridden the rail. He picked a station, materialized, emerged, and found himself across from Central Park.
A quick check told him that he was some sixteen or seventeen blocks north of his goal. He ran from the park into Columbus Circle, willed a police car at the curb and jumped in, following his original plan.
He quickly discovered that a police car with lights and siren going full blast meant absolutely nothing to New York traffic. It took him a precious two minutes to calm down enough to see and be able to use the solution.
He willed the streets clear of all traffic and ordered the lights to obey him. It took less than two more minutes to roar into Times Square.
Emerging on 43rd Street, Boreas realized immediately by the absence of automobile traffic that Walters had already gotten there. As for Mac, he stopped short at 46th Street, staring into the square. There should have been a statue of Abaddon
there, the jewel ready for plucking. There wasn't. Times Square, although bereft of auto traffic, was as it always had been, and there was no sign of a statue of Abaddon anywhere.
Wisely deciding to abandon the police car short of his goal, Mac Walters made his way quickly down Seventh Avenue toward its junction with Broadway that formed Times Square. He was glad he hadn't also banned pedestrians; the crowds gave him some protection without slowing him up very much, since they had the streets as well as the broad sidewalks to use.
If Mac was confused, the confusion was mirrored on the face of Boreas, who looked around at the square from the opposite side, searching for the statue. It had to be there, it just had to be-and Walters hadn't reached it yet, that was clear, since the demon's metropolitan construction was still there.
There were ads all over the place, huge billboards for everything from Broadway shows to coffee, cigarettes, airlines, and the like. He scanned them, hoping that, perhaps, the statue might be concealed within one of the giant displays, or as an ornament on the side of one of the buildings.
And the Devil Will Drag You Under Page 18