And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (14 page)

Oona couldn't understand what was being said, but she couldn't mistake the witch doctor's expression, his mixture of hatred and pure fear, the kind of expression heretofore found only on his victims. She held up a bowl of crushed leaves and took a lighted bit of tinder she'd just obtained by patient striking of flint. She touched it to the leaves and blew on it until they caught, slowly, a little reddish glowing patch in the middle of the bowl giving off a thin wispy smoke. With sheer enjoyment she thrust it under the demon's nose. He twisted and turned, but Mac's powerful grip held him now.

At the first whiff he recoiled; his voice became a strangled whisper, a whimper almost. "Take it away!" he pleaded. "Take it away! I'll do it! The jewel is yours!"

Walters smiled and gestured to Oona to remove the bowl.

"Five seconds," the man from another world toldhim. "You have five seconds to tell me where the jewel is. Otherwise I walk out of here and leave the two of you alone for the day!"

Balthazar was only too anxious. "There's a pouch-a skin flap, a cavity between my genitals and my ass! It's in there!"

So that was it! Walters spread the demon on the floor and got a good wrestling position on him despite his bonds. He reached down, felt around, and found the pouch. It took a little doing to haul the jewel out, but he managed it.

The jewel looked just like Mogart's.

Mac released the demon.,"One thing I don't understand," he said to him. "If you had it all the time, why didn't you use it?"

"I-I would have," the demon admitted, "but that would have taken some twisting with these bonds, and I didn't see the need. There would be time, later, when I would be alone and would not have to betray the location to you."

Oona looked pleased but confused. Mac turned to face her. "Oona, I wish I could help you, at least tell you what I have to do now-but there's no way."

She couldn't understand a word of what he was say-ing, but something in his tone and expression got through.

"Dend not Dend," he told her. "Dend come back, no remember Oona."

She seemed to understand, although there was a tear or two in her eyes. In her own terms, he was a spirit in Dend's body, an enemy spirit to that of the witch doctor; and now he had won, now he had to go.

He smiled compassionately and kissed her lightly on the forehead, then turned to go.

"Hey! Mogart man! Untie me! I have kept my end of the bargain!" the demon shouted anxiously.

"You can't leave me here with
her!"

Mac Walters turned, and a strange look appeared on his primitive face.

"No break law," he responded in the language of these people. "No law for Dend break."

Dona started laughing, laughing deep and hard, as she reached over to the bowl and glowing ember.

The screams of. the demon and the almost unholy laughter would scare the hell out of any searchers below rather than attract them. And even if they were brave enough to investigate, hell, they'd probably love to watch the bastard squirm.

The sun was just coming up over the canyon wall, and Mac felt its warmth start to bathe the cold canyon walls and glisten off the slow, lazy river below.

He sighed and gripped the jewel tightly in his right hand.

"Take me to Asmodeus Mogart!" he commanded. The bright sun, the warmth, and the canyon vanished.

Main Line +2076

THE BAR APPEARED MUCH AS HE'D LEFT IT. THE PEOPLE had changed position slightly; the bartender was starting to pour a beer that would take a long, long time to reach the glass, but that was about it.

Mac Walters turned but didn't leave the chalk pentagram on the floor. He spotted Mogart at a bar stool nursing a large and barely diluted Scotch.

"Hey! Mogart! I got your damned jewel! he called

Mogart jumped, slightly startled, then turned slowly lifting his head to see the source of the commotion.

"Wa-Waltersh!" he called, suddenly remembering who the man was.

Mac Walters held up the jewel and tossed it to Mogart. Drunk as the demon obviously was, he nonetheless caught it and looked at it wonderingly. "Be damned," Mogart muttered. "That makes three!"

Walters' eyebrows went up. "Three? Then the girl got one?" He should have been elated, but it kind of hurt his male ego to have been beaten to the punch.
Maybe she had a faster time line,
he consoled himself.

Mogart stood up and struggled uncertainly over to the pentagram.

"You shertainly took yer time," he accused.

Walters felt his sense of victory deflate and looked at the clock. They'd left at-what? Six-fifteen or so. It was now almost nine o'clock.

The big man sighed. "Well, let's get me to the next one as fast as we can, huh?"

Mogart stepped into the pentagram. "Up, up, and away!" he shouted.

Both vanished from the bar that had not seen them in the first place. To those inside, less than a tenth of a second had passed from Walters' appearance to his disappearance. Time moved very, very slowly in the bar at Mogart's time rate, the fastest he could exist at and still be able to get the booze and translate it to his time speed.

But time still moved.

Main Line +1302 Makiva

1

"AN EASY ONE THIS TIME, ALTHOUGH DEADLY DANGEROUS," Asmodeus Mogart told Jill McCulloch as they materialized around a city street scene-or, to be more correct, the scene materialized around them. It was chilly and damp, not at all what she'd been used to. She shivered.

"Let's get on with this," she urged him. "I'm freez-ing to death!"

He grinned and motioned her to follow him.

It was another primitive world-non-industrial, any-way-but obviously a lot more culturally advanced and cosmopolitan than the world of the Holy Spirit. Still, the men in robes and cloaks and hoods and the women in similar garb reminded her of her previous experiences. "No gods from the sky punishing sinners around here, are there?" she asked hopefully.

Mogart chuckled. "Oh, no. None of that. Gods and devils and spirits and spells galore, but no all-knowing, all-seeing being or system that I know of. You can lie and cheat and steal-even kill-to your heart's content here, subject only to the same thing we are used to: don't get caught."

She passed on responding to his cynical view of crime and instead pressed him for more concrete in-formation. "Why was this world set up, and what're the details?"

Mogart stopped in the middle of a busy street, allowing pedestrians and occasional horses and oxen-pulled carts to go through him. She was almost as blase as he by this point and didn't let it bother her.

"Makiva is one of about a hundred or so planes set up with differing rules of magic," he told her. "Most of the worlds below the two-thousand mark are basically nontechnological, those above it increasingly more so. Most, like this one, were established to prove this or that social or economic theory or point. To be per-fectly honest, I can't remember what the point was here, but here it is all the same. Expect a lot of real elemental spirits-air spirits, earth spirits, fire spirits, and the like. Spells, curses, witches, warlocks, wizards, and sorcerers, too. If you're told somebody has the evil eye, they probably
do.
And if you disturb a hex sign you'll get hexed." He paused and looked around, sur-veying the busy scene, then continued.

"Since ignorance of magic by the common people is magic's greatest strength-along with belief in magic, of course-most people don't know any more about it than you do. Just take every little piece of super-stitious behavior and belief you see and hear literally, and you have it. Big-time practitioners of magic train for years to do it right. They better, or they're dead!"

Mogart seemed to get some amusement from that. "It's all very mathematical, very logical, and very pre-cise-but don't worry about it. Come."

They walked up the street, continuing to ignore and be ignored by the crowds of the city's streets and mar-ketplaces. Finally they reached the harbor-small but deep and picturesque, filled with exotic-looking sailing ships of all shapes and sizes. Low mountains ringed the harbor, and the city's houses and streets went right up the sides. Mogart stopped by the stone sea wall and the road down to the harbor and pointed up to the highest peak on the other side.

"Look up there," he instructed. She followed his gaze and saw a massive castle of black rock sitting almost on top of the peak; for perhaps fifty meters below it there was a sheer cliff before the land started to taper, and even then it was some distance before there were roads and houses. "

That is Castle Zondar," he told her. "It is the seat of government for the city and surrounding lands, and also the treasury building. Few people live there, though, since it's not very comforta-ble and is guarded by all sorts of spells. The doors and gates, for example, are so well protected that no one not there on proper business may enter. They just can't get through, even if the door is opened for them."

She gulped. "You mean my man is in there?"

He nodded. "Yes, indeed. Asothoth is his name, but that hardly matters. He is there, kept there, because of his unique anatomy. The locals consider him a demon. He's no threat, though. Long ago, to ease his boring exile, he took to powerful drugs as I seized upon alcohol. They supply him with enough to keep him in a permanent stupor. After a couple of hundred years of this they've come to believe that terrible things will happen if they should
not
keep him drugged, and he is a hopeless addict, anyway."

She nodded. "Then what makes you think he still has the jewel?"

Mogart shrugged. "I don't know if he has it or not. But we are drawn to the things like bees to nectar. I feel its magnetism even from here, far away and out of time sync. Indeed, it is only this force that keeps me from just walking in and grabbing it myself. It is keyed to Asothoth, therefore I could not touch it without his permission, unless it were given to me far from him by a third party. A safeguard, you understand."

Jill McCulloch understood. "I'm the third party, then."

The demon nodded. "It is easier to scout this place because of his disability, however. I'm considered sort of a god of drinking here, and so I know the place well. Follow me."

They walked a short way from the harbor and en-tered an inn whose bar and cafe seemed to be doing a fair business. It wasn't to the eating and drinking part of the establishment that they went, though, but up the stairs and down a long, dark hall past numbered rooms. It was a fairly large inn, probably serving seamen and tourists-if there were such things here-equally. Finally they reached a door near the rear, Number 16, and Mogart did the usual act of walking right through the door. Jill was prepared this time and followed.

It was a small room, a single. There was a small nightstand with an oil lamp and a pan half filled with water, a small flowered rug, a shuttered window, and a low, narrow bed that rested on a hardwood frame. The mattress, at least, seemed to be thick and filled with feathers-no straw this trip.

On the bed a woman lay asleep. She was young, lithe, with a fine athletic figure. Her legs were long and well developed; she might have been a dancer or a gymnast. Her hair was cut short, making her face look like that of a young teenage boy, although she was clearly in her early twenties. The fact that her skin had a slightly weathered look and that her hands and feet bore tough calluses indicated that she was not just a demure young woman in town on a holiday-that and the fact that she was in this inn, in a room such as this, alone, and sound asleep at midday.

"This is Yoni," Mogart told Jill. "She's been useful to me once or twice, although the time rate here is such that people come and go too quickly to form lasting attachments. You get a little over four days here to the hour back home, so you have some lee-way."

Jill nodded. "She is an athlete?"

"You might say that," Mogart replied. "She is a thief. A damned good one. If
she
could bring me the jewel I'd hire her, but it's not possible. Only someone from another plane may hold a jewel for long without it shorting and killing them. It has to be that way-otherwise somebody clever could lift one, and then where would the University be? And, of course, with you I know you'll bring the jewel to me, not try it yourself. So into Yoni you go, all your old skills com-ing into play to go steal the jewel."

She hesitated. "Wait a minute, Mogart. First of all, if the gates are hexed closed, how do I get in? Second, where in that Gothic monstrosity is the jewel? And, finally; why did you say this one was easy but dan-gerous?"

Asmodeus Mogart laughed dryly. "All right, all right. First, the jewel just has to be somewhere in the black tower that faces the sea and doubles as a lighthouse. More specific I cannot be. It's easy because you won't have to worry about Asothoth, and danger-ous because the tower and castle are guarded by both human and demonic forces. This inn's a thieves' hang-out after dark.

You're an outsider-a newcomer-so they won't expect you to know much of anything. But you have the Thieves' Guild mark there-see on her left thumb? It's a magical sign, so nobody but other Guild members can see it. Look at it and remember it-so you'll know who's who yourself."

She leaned over and looked. On the woman's thumb was an unmistakable but intricate star pattern, geo-metric and elaborate. She wouldn't have to remember it, though, since it would be there for her to see-she and no one else but a fellow thief. Good enough.

"I'd suggest pumping for information about the cas-tle," Mogart advised. "It's a tempting target because of its great treasury, its gold and precious gems."

Jill turned and looked him squarely in the eye. "If that's so, why aren't they all burgling it?"

Mogart shrugged. "A few have succeeded-those capable of scaling the walls and cliff. Then you have to get past the human and supernatural guardians and raps. I fear you will have to kill on this trip. It's just too dangerous. Most thieves dream of doing it but don't have the guts."

"No guide?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "Recruit your own. Get your information, then act. Get help if you think you need it, or go it alone. But be prepared to show your bravery and agility, even to your fellow thieves. They respect only strength, skill, and a good blade. Now, touch her and let me get a drink."