“Sure,” I agreed. “It can’t hurt me in my wolf shape . . . not permanently . . . not if I’m careful. But you’re staying put.”
“Ever hear about the oath of my order? Come on.” As we went out the door, I gave Abercrombie a smug look. He had nicked his wrist and sprinkled the Signs; now he was well into the invocation. I felt cold dampness swirl through the room.
Outside, the night remained autumnally sharp, the moon high. Roofs made a saw-toothed silhouette against the leaping red glare at a dozen points around us, and sirens howled in the streets. Overhead, across the small indifferent stars, I saw what looked like a whirl of dry leaves, refugees fleeing on their sticks.
Svartalf jumped to the front end of Ginny’s Cadillac, and I took the saddle behind hers. We whispered skyward.
Below us, blue fire spat and the station lights went out. Water poured into the street, a solid roar of it with President Malzius bobbing like a cork in the torrent.
“Unholy Sathanas!” I choked. “What’s happened now?”
Svartalf ducked the stick low. “That idiot,” groaned Ginny. “He let the Hydro slop clear over the floor ... short circuits—” She made a few rapid passes with her wand. The stream quieted, drew into itself, became a ten-foot-high blob glimmering in the moonlight. Abercrombie scuttled out and started it squelching toward the nearest fire.
I laughed. “Go visit his place and listen to him tell about his vast experience,” I said.
“Don’t kick a man when he’s down,” Ginny snapped. “You’ve pulled your share of boners, Steve Matuchek.”
Svartalf whisked the broom aloft again and we went above the chimney pots. Oof! I thought. Could she, really be falling for that troll? A regular profile, a smooth tongue, and proximity ... I bit back an inward sickness and squinted ahead, trying to find the salamander.
“There!” Ginny yelled over the whistle of cloven air. Svartalf bottled his tail and hissed.
The University district is shabby-genteeclass="underline" old pseudo-Gothic caves of wood which have slipped from mansions to rooming houses, fly-specked with minor business establishments. It had begun burning merrily, a score of red stars flickering in the darkness between street lamps. Rushing near, we saw one on the stars explode in a white puff of steam. The Hydro must have clapped a sucker onto a fireplug and blanketed the place. I had a brief heretical thought that the salamander was doing a public service by eliminating those architectural teratologies. But lives and property were involved—
Tall and terrible, the elemental wavered beside house on which it was feeding. It had doubled in s’ and its core was too bright to look at. Flames whirl about the narrow head.
Svartalf braked and we hovered a few yards off, twenty feet in the air and level with the hungry mouth. Ginny was etched wild against night by that intolerable radiance. She braced herself in the stirrups began the spell, her voice almost lost in the roar as the roof caved in. “O Indra, Abaddon, Lucifer, Moloch, Hephaestos, Loki-”
It heard. The seething eyes swung toward us and it leaped.
Svartalf squalled when his whiskers shriveled—perhaps only hurt vanity—and put the stick through an Immelmann turn and whipped away. The salamander bawled with the voice of a hundred blazing forests. Suddenly the heat scorching my back was gone, and the thing had materialized in front of us.
“That way!” I hollered, pointing. “In there!”
I covered Ginny’s face and buried my own against her back as we went through the plate-glass front of Stub’s Beer Garden. The flame-tongue licked after us, recoiled, and the salamander ramped beyond the door.
We tumbled off the broom and looked around. The tavern was empty, full of a fire-spattered darkness; everyone had fled. I saw a nearly full glass of beer on the counter and tossed it off.
“You might have offered me a drink,” said Ginny. “Alan would have.” Before I could recover enough to decide whether she was taunting or testing me, she went on in a rapid whisper: “It isn’t trying to escape. It’s gained power-confidence-it means to kill us!”
Even then, I wanted to tell her that red elflocks and a soot-smudge across an aristocratic nose were particularly enchanting. But the occasion didn’t seem appropriate. “Can’t get in here,” I panted. “Can’t do much more than ignite the building by thermal radiation, and that’ll take a while. We’re safe for the moment.”
“Why . . . oh, yes, of course. Stub’s is cold-ironed. All these college beer parlors are, I’m told.”
“Yeah.” I peered out the broken window. The salamander peered back, and spots danced before my eyes. “So the clientele won’t go jazzing up the brew above 3.2—Quick, say your spell.”
Ginny shook her head. “It’ll just flicker away out of earshot. Maybe we can talk to it, find out—”
She trod forth to the window. The thing crouched in the street extended its neck and hissed at her. I stood behind my girl, feeling boxed and useless. Svartalf, lapping spilled beer off the counter, looked toward us and sneered.
“Ohe, Child of Light!” she cried.
A ripple went down the salamander’s back. Its tail switched restlessly, and a tree across the way kindled. I can’t describe the voice that answered: crackling, bellowing, sibilant, Fire given a brain and a throat. ; “Daughter of Eve, what have you to say to the likes of Me?”
“I command you by the Most High, return to your a proper bonds and cease from troubling the world.
“Ho—oh, ho, ho, ho!” The thing sat back on its haunches-asphalt bubbled—and shuddered its laughter into the sky. “You command me, combustible one?”
“I have at my beck powers so mighty they could wither your puny spark into the nothingness whence it came. Cease and obey, lest worse befall you than dismissal.”
I think the salamander was, for a moment, honestly, surprised. “Greater than Me?” Then it howled so the tavern shook. “You dare say there are mightier forces than Fire? Than Me, who am going to consume the earth?”
“Mightier and more beautiful, O Ashmaker. Think. You cannot even enter this house. Water will extinguish you. Earth will smother you, Air alone can keep you alive. Best you surrender now—”
I remembered the night of the afreet. Ginny must be pulling the same trick-feeling out the psychology of the thing that raged and flared beyond the door—but what could she hope to gain?
“More beautiful!” The salamander’s tail beat fury, rows in the street. It threw out bursting fireballs and a rain of sparks, red, blue, yellow, a one-being Fourth of July. I thought crazily of a child kicking the floor in a tantrum.
“More beautiful! Stronger) You dare say- Haaaaa—” Teeth of incandescence gleamed in a mouth that was jumping fire. “We shall see how beautiful you are when you lie a choked corpse!” Its head darted to the broken glass front. It could not pass the barrier of cold iron, but it began to suck air, in and out. A furnace wave of heat sent me gasping back.
“My God . . . it’s going to use up our oxygen .... Stay here! I sprang for the door. Ginny shrieked, but I scarcely heard her “No!” as I went through.
Moonlight flooded me, cool and tingling between the unrestful guttering fires. I crouched to the hot sidewalk and felt a shudder when my body changed.
Wolf I was, but a wolf that my enemy could not kill ... I hoped. My abbreviated tail thrust against the seat of my pants, and I remembered that some injuries are beyond the healing powers of even the therio shape.
Pants! Hell and damnation! In the excitement, I’d forgotten. Have you ever tried being a wolf while wrapped in shirt, trousers, underwear, and topcoat designed for a man?
I went flat on my moist black nose. My suspenders slid down and wrapped themselves about my hind legs. My tie tripped me in front and my coat gleefully wrapped everything into a bundle.