“I wouldn’t be insulted at all,” Peter said. “Can I run?”
“You can,” Rose said. “I don’t know how much good it would do. If she gets me, she gets all the rest of you.”
Peter nodded.
He didn’t budge.
“Charge her?” Ainsley asked.
Rose shook her head.
“Murr,” Ms. Lewis said. “As we agreed, please obey my summons. I summon you to punish others for reneging on a longstanding deal.”
The air seemed to vibrate. Things seemed to cross over, double images, and Murr crawled forth from the gap between images.
It was a mote. The head was reminiscent of a skull, and the lower body looked as though entrails were spilling out, with an excess of bone splinters, and the hands were riddled with bone splinters until they’d become talons, but the general proportions were those of a baby.
Murr unfolded feathered wings and took to flying, a jerking, halting flight.
The images they wear are borne of our fears and thoughts. They rise from the stew of mankind’s psyche, Rose thought, thinking back to the books.
A part of her had hoped the next demon they faced would be a major one. That the lawyers might summon something that owed grandmother a favor. An enemy turned back on the summoner was all the more dangerous.
Faint hope, that. But she’d memorized pages.
“Surbas, as we’ve agreed, you will come to do as I bid,” Ms. Lewis spoke.
Surbas emerged. Another mote, wingless. Moving too fast to be seen, it disappeared into the shadows.
“Hauri,” Ms. Lewis said. “Come.”
Hauri was larger than other motes, with a second head forming at one shoulder. Wet, gruesome, bloody.
My friends present gathered together, stepping carefully over the lines of the diagram that had been outlined in salt, snow shoved back to clear the ground, leaving only driveway. It formed a grid of squares, the lines marked down so some went over, some appearing to go under. Symbols marked smaller spaces at set intervals. The way it unfolded, a greater pattern outlined, the thing formed a kind of flower shape. Maybe fifteen feet across.
Rose –and I– noted that the lines at one side were a little less consistent. Too late to do anything about it.
“Naph,” Lewis said. “Come, join the others.”
Naph was skeletal in a different way. More a slimy skin drawn over a baby’s skeleton, there were no openings. The eye sockets were simply skin sucked into a void, dull and empty, the mouth yawned open, skin straining tight enough to reveal individual teeth, just a hair away from splitting in a hundred ways.
Naph landed on a branch with batlike wings, then crawled along the length of the branch, slowly, each movement eliciting sounds.
The sounds were wet, sucking noises to the ear, but they elicited sympathetic feelings from Rose’s skin, as if each sound was a brush of sandpaper against her flesh, coarse, rough enough to leave her raw.
Rose had drawn on Conquest for strength, for courage, and for focus.
Each mote that appeared was testing even that resolve.
“This diagram,” Rose murmured. “Which choirs does it protect against?”
“Ruin, Chaos, Madness,” Alister said. “Should protect against the choir of Unrest, but-”
“That’s never guaranteed,” Rose finished.
“Obach,” the lawyer announced another name. “Come!”
“Oh god,” Tiff said. “Oh god no.”
The snow swelled, and it bubbled, each bubble lasting just long enough to freeze before the swelling of another bubble pushed past and broke it. It made the snow look like it was ulcerating, some infected, cancerous thing. The oily black sheen to some of the bubbles only helped the illusion, as if it were a cancer in the landscape.
Obach leaped out of the snow, jumping to the nearest tree. Bug eyed, small mouthed, with flesh like that of a toad. Fly wings flapped at its back, almost too fast to be visible, before stopping.
The wood, too, bubbled in an ugly way, only these bubbles were more like cancer. Boils, cysts, manifesting with every second of contact, spreading.
The snow continued to boil, a spreading infection.
Surbas lunged in the shadows. It ate and mid-leap, devoured a small animal that dashed out of cover, disturbed from slumber. A small rabbit, perhaps, or a squirrel.
Bigger, moving faster, bounding just as the rodent had.
It squealed, and Rose was among the people in the circle who raised their hands to their ears.
Surbas disappeared into low foliage. What might have been part of the house’s garden, before the hill inverted, dropping into the Abyss.
Something screamed, a strangely human scream, and Surbas leaped forth, snapping at air.
The imp, twice as large as it had originally been, bounded into a tree, and lunged at a place where the largest branch met the trunk.
It scarfed down a third meal.
Winged, it fluttered over to a larger branch, near Murr. Mottled, sleek, with an infant’s face stretched into an inhuman shape with far too many teeth, a permanent smile. With each blink, it wore a different set of eyes, the left eye not matching the right.
“Shall I devour you?” it whispered, and the sound carried, the sharper sounds too sharp, like nails on blackboards. “You can watch from the inside, while I use the best parts to devour all the rest. Volunteer, throw yourself to me. I’ll eat the first ones quick. The ones later, I’ll eat from the fingers to shoulders, the toes to the crotch, I’ll eat the skin and then the juicier bits, I’ll make it slowwwwww.”
Each word was like a razor blade sliding along a sensitive place.
“The one you eat first has to watch. Maybe it’s better to go later,” Murr spoke, and the voice was more feminine, smoother, out of sorts with the jagged bone appearance.
“Who knows how the mere mortals think?” Hauri asked, bobbing in the air, flapping periodically to stay aloft. The smaller head sniggered.
“These mere mortals are trained in dealing with your kind,” Ms. Lewis said. “You would do well to not give them a chance to think. If I’m reading the diagram right from where I stand, it protects against the choirs of Unrest, Chaos, Madness and Ruin, though I think the mote of Ruin could push through the section to the left, right there.”
Hauri sniggered, both heads, not synchronized. It made for a hard to place, uncomfortable feeling. Hauri dropped out of the air, wings folded, and began to pace around, to just the point in question. It hobbled a little, working to keep it so that both the normal head and the conjoined sub-head could keep the group within the diagram in sight.
“Nothing to stop the choir Feral?” Surbas asked.
“No,” Lewis said. She turned her attention to Rose. “I’ll replace them as they die or get bound. I’m sorry. You would have been better served by sticking to your one-bullet policy.”
“Probably,” Rose said.
There was relatively little cover, beyond the ridge. Some shrubs, some stones, and pieces of the house that had fallen down the hill rather than into the Abyss, before the hill ceased being a hill at all. Chunks of driveway stood out now and again, and there were a few scattered trees.
Now the imps were pacing, moving without rhyme or rhythm, only looking for openings. Some paced clockwise, some counterclockwise, while others hovered.