“Yes Mistress,” he replied and then he was gone.
“I thought you said no one had basements in this town,” Colin said. I had to admit he was right.
“I recall saying that they mostly didn’t have them. Besides, that sump pump over in the corner looks well used over there for a reason.”
“We have one in our library, but it looks nothing like that.”
I turned to the demon ghost and said, “How long have you served the Brick Brother’s family?”
“Two hundred and seventy four years, eight months, sixteen days, and twenty hours.” He had been bound before Summoning had been outlawed in the Republic.
“But now you are free,” I told him. He needed to know that he was not my slave or guardian for that matter either.
“Yes… I am free,” he repeated in a tone that told me that he had a hard time believing it.
Colin nudged me, and I told him what the ghost had said. Colin asked, “Could you inquire as to the circumstances leading to his original demise?”
“How in the world did you die in the first place and get yourself into this predicament?” More often than not, guardian ghosts usually entered into century long contracts while they were still alive, desperate for money, but this was no ordinary guardian ghost. He was a demon ghost.
He stared at us, unwilling to answer the question, which was not surprising. Why would he tell a Summoner how a demon could die? It was practically telling me how you could kill one, which no Summoner alive knew how to do.
I asked, “I would like to know if you are trustworthy, should we get attacked by a mob of newly born demons.”
The ghost said nothing, not even a mocking moan.
“Oh, you are dead for goodness sake. It’s not as if hordes of Galion demons are going to come after you if you tell me. If you haven’t noticed, we desperately need your help. We are going to be battling things that have no business being in a human body. Can you help us or not?”
Nothing.
I didn’t know if I could encircle a demon ghost or not, but I was willing to threaten him with it to get him to talk. Maybe I could threaten to banish its spirit to the ghost realm for good. Although I seriously doubted that I could do that, it did make me pause and wonder where demons’ spirits went when they died.
“Only Summoners can kill us,” the ghost told me so fast that I almost didn’t hear it. Grandfather had always suspected that we could, but it had been a deeply guarded secret, often called the Summoner’s Quandary. It was good to hear that they could die. It meant that Isis could die too, that I could even be the one to do it.
“Do you know how to kill a demon from any of those books in the Library of Congress?” I asked Colin.
“Not with any certainty. Most descriptions are found in fairytales with no real explanations. Others are just old tomes with extinct herbal ingredients and references to sigils unknown to us.”
Calidum came crawling back on his belly to us, looking the worse for wear. He stood and slowly extracted broken roots and twigs that had stuck and wrapped around his body. Once he finally was free of them, he proclaimed, “This tunnel will be safe to travel through, but there is a thick wooden wall blocking the exit.”
“Whoever built the wall must have known about the old tunnel and didn’t want any uninvited guests in the middle of the night,” Colin murmured. I glared at the ghost.
“Don’t look at me, I only knew about its existence. I’ve never been through it,” the demon ghost said in defense of himself.
“The wooden wall is connected to the wooden beams of the tunnel,” Calidum added. “Once the wall comes down, the rest will follow.”
“Would it bring down the street above it?” Colin asked.
Calidum looked up and down a few times before he finally said, “Equal odds, if I had to guess.” I interpreted that to mean that there would be only one way in, and a different way out.
“We’re going to take it, but if we can’t use one of the bombs I pilfered from the hidden compartment back at Brick’s Securities, then we’ll have to burn our way through this tangle of roots. What do you think of using your demon fire Calidum? Do you think the tunnel will hold until we reached the other end of it?”
He smiled his grisly smile and then said, “Might work, if I burn our way through it.”
“There’s my talented little fire demon,” I said with more than a little optimism. Then I asked Calidum, “It isn’t magically protected, is it?”
“You mean warded? No, the tunnel is not, but the wall at the end of it feels odd.”
“Like a warding?”
“Odder.” I wondered what he meant, and decided that it was time to send in the reinforcements.
I turned to where the demon ghost was and said, “I am going to give you a name so I can address you. Are you agreeable to this?”
“If it makes things easier for you, you can name me,” he snidely replied.
“I shall name you after a famous and honorable naval officer from Britannia. You shall be called Horatio.”
“Horatio?”
“Yes, now be a dear Horatio, and scout out the warding on that wooden wall at the end of the tunnel.”
He looked at Calidum who shrugged his shoulders, and then he asked, “What will you give me for doing this?”
Wily demons. “I have given you a human name, you are in my debt.”
He scowled, but turned around and disappeared down the tunnel all the same. Summoners needed to have even more cunning when dealing with them.
I still needed to know how to kill a demon, so I said in my most beseeching tone, “Now Calidum, how precisely can demons be killed?” He might be offended, or he might not be. Either way I had to know.
He studied me for a moment and then calmly replied, “Sometimes a demon’s soul can be sucked out by ziggots, who like to eat everything, and then everyone knows that the body cannot survive without a soul. Even demons have souls Mistress.” …Even demons have a soul got me thinking.
After thanking my stars twice that there were no ziggots roaming the Earth, I wondered if these infant demons were using the bodies of their human hosts to recreate their own image on this plane. It would be one thing if they were bioengineering monstrosities that were being transplanted in human hosts to feed upon until birth. But it was another thing entirely if the demons were infecting their hosts with their own DNA, thusly creating a new kind of hybrid creature.
Now onto my second observation, which was infinitely more interesting. “You said that if their souls were separated from their bodies, then their bodies would die, thusly freeing their souls, and when demons die, they become ghosts just like we do.” I glanced at Calidum and asked him, “Have I understood this correctly?”
“I am very young Mistress, and I cannot confirm that this is true for all demons.” That was enough confirmation for me.
It had long been known that demons could be summoned or banished, but never killed by Summoners. It was what demon sympathizers claimed to be the check and balance of our profession. If what Calidum and the demon ghost said turned out to be true, then it could be done with nothing more special than one of my modified magchains and a circle.
I sidled up close to Colin and whispered in his ear, “I think I know how to kill a demon.”
The demon ghost returned before Colin could reply and said, “No wards on the wall, but beyond it the wards for the hotel are atypical.” That sounded complicated.
“We’ll have to test out your theory en route,” Colin said.
“All I need is a magchain… or a rope,” I told him. In a pinch, I had adapted a rope with my blood on it in the past. They never lasted very long, but something was better than nothing.
He looked at me and then I saw surprise in his handsome features. “Circles don’t hold a demon’s body at all, do they? It holds their souls.”
I smiled beatifically at him in reply.
He went to one of the wooden crates in the basement that had a
rope wrapped around it. He located the knot, and began untying it. I went to another and did the same. If I had no time to draw a circle, we might need two for my experiment.
I then slipped out an athame and sat down on the floor. I took off a boot and I reopened the cut in my calf. I allowed the blood to pool on my finger, and I then dabbed it across the rope.
While I worked, I asked, “Calidum, are you ready?”
He nodded his head.
“Colin?”
“Always,” he replied.
Once I was done with both ropes, we began walking down the tunnel. I decided that if the tunnel collapsed behind us, then so be it; we had to get into that hotel.
I took out the flint and then told Calidum, “I hope there is a water source on the other side of that wall or we might have more problems to deal with than just an angry goddess.”
“I’ll be just another demon once we are in the hotel. I’ll merely head out the front door and roll around in a puddle outside.”
“They won’t think that odd?” Colin asked.
He leveled him a stare that clearly denoted that he didn’t think it would be a problem.
“Fair enough,” Colin said, backing off.
Then I took out the flint stone and threw a spark on Calidum. He lit up in a blaze of yellow and orange and seemed to grow to three times his normal size in the span of seconds. Then he led us down the tunnel. I watched in quiet amazement how the tendrils of the roots lit up and then singed their path back up to the surface. Orange tips lit up the tunnel better than strings of electric lights found at a Yuletide barn dance.
We followed Calidum under the arches of falling ashes as if he were a beacon light on a lighthouse. In this moment, he was a better friend than most, and I could honestly admit that I was proud to call him just that – my friend. He had helped me through the pain of losing Stephen. Heck, he was helping me now.
I didn’t know how much longer he would stay with me, but even though I hoped it would be a long time, I wouldn’t hold him back should he choose to leave me. I wanted only whatever would bring him solace and happiness so far from his own home.
Even though it seemed like a mile, it was in reality no more than a hundred yards when we finally arrived at the end of the tunnel and met with the wooden wall. It had indeed been constructed so it would tie into the supporting studs and crossbeams in the tunnel.
I was about to tell Calidum to reserve his fire so it wouldn’t catch, when suddenly the entire wall was on aflame. It was only a matter of seconds before the fire would spread uncontrollably to the beams above us.
I looked at Colin and his eyes glowed spookily in the firelight of the tunnel. We listened to the popping sounds of wood breaking for a few more moments, and then several cracking sounds. A section behind us began showering us in dirt and debris.
“Go ahead and finish burning the door down for us,” I told Calidum. “Make haste Calidum,” I whispered to myself.
He asked, “What does make haste mean?”
Colin answered, “It means hurry.”
Calidum turned his attention to the wall again and expelled his demon flames into the wood. After a minute or two, he turned around to face us, his eyes glowing red right along with the rest of him and he said, “Something is wrong with the wood.”
The wooden wall was blackened, but still stood. It must have had a fire retardant spell on the other side of it. Regardless, it was time to crack it open.
Colin told him, “You did well, pet of Basil. Now please stand aside, so I can take care of the rest.”
Calidum looked at me and I nodded my head emphatically.
He shifted to the side and Colin rammed the door with his shoulder. The force of his strike split open the structurally compromised wall and released a shower of dying embers into the air. With the strong force he used to crack it open, his momentum carried him into the room several steps, barely avoiding the momentum of falling down completely into it.
After dropping to the ground, I plastered myself just behind the door. Then I peeked around the opening and noted that there was no one in the basement of the hotel besides Colin. Why should there be? The show was going on in the penthouse, six stories from where we were.
After a few tense moments of Colin breathing deeply, he stood again and turned to me. “You may come in now, but you may not like what you see.”
I’ll be the judge of that, I thought to myself, and then I strode into the room to see what he was looking at.
Even though I was horrified by what I saw, it was the stench that kept me from venturing deeper into the room. As I held up the small lantern, before me was a dumping ground of mangled corpses, of both humans and demons alike. Most were at some varying state of decay, but some were skeletal. The only good thing about this was the fact that since they were so severely deformed, I could not recognize anyone I might have known.
Regardless of our theory of how kill a demon, these people had already figured it out and had been doing it for weeks, if not months. The humans were still clothed in their fancy clothes, although most of them had been ripped asunder, presumably birthing demons.
I brought my coat’s lapel in front of my face and took a hesitant path into the room to Colin. Once I reached him amid the putrefying remains, he swooped me up in his arms, which stole my breath away for a moment. After a few moments, my heart calmed down and I looked more carefully around us. The room wasn’t as big as I thought it should have been, being only about two thousand square feet. This must have been only one part of the basement.
“Calidum?” We both turned back towards the door, and noticed that he was once again gone. I hoped he found that puddle and returned to us in rapid succession.
Horatio, however, was still with us. He said, “He went back to the fish shop.” He surveyed the mess around us and added, “I wouldn’t want to muck around in this mess either.” I told Colin what he had said.
I looked back at the disarray around us and asked Colin, “Do you think they are all experiments gone wrong?”
“I don’t know, but I would like to be gone from this place. It raises my hackles.”
“It is too small to be the entire basement, but hopefully one of the wardstones will be in the portion we’re currently in.”
He set me down in a relatively dry spot, and took out his Strutt meter to measure the black body radiation signatures in the room. Then he brought me round to the left side of the room and said, “There should be one over here.”
We reached the corner of the room and I saw a sigil softly glowing under a thick layer of soot and grime. “Do you see that?” I asked pointing at the exact location of the marking.
“No, but I’m guessing that is where the sigil is.”
I nodded my head and told him, “Set me down.”
He complied and then I took the last couple of squishy steps to the glowing pattern. Basically, it was the standard kind of warding made with blood and iron, but there were some additional peripheral designs that I had never seen until now. They scrolled out, and even though I wasn’t someone who ascribed sigils to stones, I innately knew these had been recently altered. The etchings on the atypical marks were shallower and cleaner than the other ones, which looked blackened by age and mold from the basement.
I came very close to the marking and noticed something embedded in the stone. It was a bone. I reached over to touch it, but Colin grabbed my wrist and pulled it away just before I could touch it.
“There is something wrong with it,” he told me.
“You can see that?”
“I can see something poking out of the wall, and I can see the sigil now too.” I looked at it more closely and had to agree that there was indeed something also sticking out of it near the middle of the markings.
“It appears to be softly glowing blue,” I told him.
“I can see the groove, but I can’t see it glowing.”
“I feel a compulsion to touch it. I want to investigate it more fully.�
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“No, don’t touch it. Dorian warned President Newton that you were fool hardy when it came to potentially lethal sigils. This one is setting off every alarm bell I have.”
My jaw dropped, but I quickly recovered and said, “Don’t you trust me?”
“I trust you, but I don’t trust whoever set that bone into the sigil.”
“I have to do my job Colin. We can’t let Isis win. We can’t let any more of those demons out into our world,” I argued.
“Like Calidum?” That stung.
“Not like Calidum. Like the ones that want to kill all the fathers, mothers, and children of the world,” I snapped back at him.
He huffed out a breath and turned away from me for a moment. I was halfway tempted to go ahead and touch the sigil without him looking, until he finally said, “Listen, I’m only asking you to take minimal precautions.”
I blew a tendril of hair that had fallen onto my face. It landed right back onto it. I batted it away and said, “Take some more readings, maybe find the next sigil, and then in a minute we’ll decide together what I should do.”
He lifted up the device again while I pinched my nose. I watched Horatio approach the sigil. He brought his face very close to the warding, and then he reached out a finger and hesitantly touched the marking. Then he popped out of existence. What the…
I grabbed Colin’s elbow, my eyes wide. I stared at the spot where he had been standing and said, “He’s gone.”
“Who is?”
“Horatio.”
“Maybe it was finally his time to go,” he said as he adjusted the meter.
“He touched the bone and then disappeared. He just vanished, as in poof, gone.”
He lowered his arm and frowned. Then he looked at me intensely, and I felt myself squirm under his scrutiny. Something was about to happen, I just didn’t know what.
“Use me as your anchor.”
I stared at him for a moment, attempting to assemble my thoughts. Then it struck me. He meant for me to anchor myself to him.
“Surely you jest.”
“I wouldn’t suggest it casually.”
It was an archaic practice. One that had been outlawed throughout the world, even in the countries where Summoning was still legal. I recalled the last time I had read about the ancient ritual. It had been written as a footnote in the biography of Julian Volland, who had lived over three hundred years ago. His life had been a tragic one, being passed around between Summoners and given the eternal label of apprentice. His was a life filled with abuse, in both body and mind.
The Summoner's Sigil Page 27