Exeunt Demon King (4 page)

The
characters were easy to make out, all the more so as I’d been
expecting them ever since I’d seen that hoop with its
characteristic sheen of the metal of Leng. It’s a difficult metal
to lay hands on. No forge in this world can make it. You have to
go… elsewhere. It is very necessary for some effects that, even by
a necromancer’s standards, are unsavoury. The metal hoop
constituted something called the Maw of the Clathik. A clathik, for
your information, is an ugly beast with the body of a bull, the
face of a boll weevil and a hide that can only be described as
rugose. It eats spiritual energy, quite literally draining souls
through its tubular mouth. The hoop used the name only partially
figuratively; its function was essentially the same. Once every
2300 days, the hoop would become active, looking for a soul to
devour. Standing on it was as deadly as travelling through it.
Setting it under a stage was an inspired touch. These things always
work better with an audience, usually of cultists. It’s to do with
empathic resonance, the more observers you have the better. Having
a poor hapless theatre audience to generate an empathic wave was
ingenious, I’ll grant him that.

Oh yes,
Maleficarus had certainly picked up a few new tricks on his
travels. Conjurors getting ideas above their station is far more
common than you might think. They usually start young, performing
minor vanishes and transmutations in the parlour to the wonderment
of their families. There’s something in the bafflement of an
audience that is intoxicating. It is the faintest scent of power. A
few go further – the illusions become grander, the audience becomes
larger. Finally, they’re being paid to perform, but the real reward
is the gasps and the sighs of disbelief, the slightly nervous
laughter of people seeing things that cannot be. But smoke and
mirrors can only take a man so far and he gets to thinking, if an
audience will respect this fakery, then what might be possible with
true magic? How much larger the audience, how much deeper the
respect?

It is a
madness, of course. To meddle with such profound and dangerous
forces simply for personal gratification is pure folly, worse than
suicidal. But vanity can do it to a man and Maleficarus was such a
man, it seemed. He had pulled too many rabbits from too many hats;
insanity had claimed him.

Show me
a stage magician who values the writings of Dee over Houdin, the
works of Simon Magus over John Maskelyne, and I shall show you a
disaster in the making. In this case, alas, the disaster had
already occurred two decades before.

The
dressing room door swung open and there was nobody beyond it. It
appeared the late magician was summoning me for another interview.
Late in a very loose sense if my suspicions were correct. I folded
up the piece of paper and pushed it in my pantaloons for
safekeeping before walking outside. The door to the prop store was
already opening as I picked up the electric torch by the star trap
mechanism and walked into the darkness. The torch was almost no
use, its tired yellow beam seeming to grow weaker by the second as
the batteries exhausted themselves.

The
magician’s spirit didn’t waste any time with pleasantries. “You
were warned,” it whispered harshly in my ear.

“
Yes. I believe I was.”

“
You will die.”

“
We all do, Maleficarus. Even you, despite your best efforts.”
It seemed that this wasn’t going to be one of those chinwag sorts
of séances. I decided to leave and walked unhurriedly to the
door.

I had
just reached the door when a massive blow caught me between the
shoulder blades, picking me up and carrying me ten feet or more
before dumping me to the floor. It’s difficult to describe the
nature of the force that struck me. Although it carried the force
of a bull’s charge, it didn’t strike me quite instantaneously.
There was a sense of being borne aloft as if picked up by a high
wind. I felt more like a kite than a victim right until I crashed
into the floor and was sent sprawling. I was on my feet again in a
second, whirling to face the open door to the prop store. But there
was nothing there.

“
You were warned,” the voice repeated, its anger grating over
my bones. It seemed foolish to argue the point. Instead I ran for
the stairs. I didn’t even get close.

The
force of Maleficarus’ wrath entwined around my legs like a
quicksilver cat and I fell again. This time it held me and I was
dragged back across the floor. As I tried vainly to stop myself, I
noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Can you imagine a
sandbag walking, Parkin? That’s what it looked like. Like rats in
sacks, sandbags were processing from their pile in the corner and
into the pile on the cradle of the star trap. It took me a moment
to understand Maleficarus’ intention, but when I did, I redoubled
my efforts to escape. The weight in the cradle had been carefully
calculated to impel me with just enough force to make a dramatic
entrance through the trap and no more. Too much weight meant too
much acceleration. If I hit the star trap too quickly, my skull
would crumple faster than the leaves could move aside. Maleficarus
was engineering another accident. This one wouldn’t be on his
schedule and would doubtless be less efficacious than the previous
sacrifices to his ambition, but I don’t think that really concerned
him very much by that point. Almost below the limit of hearing, I
became aware of a throbbing of syllables; an incantation delivered
with the sheer melodrama only a stage artiste would feel necessary.
He was awakening the Maw. Not only did he intend to kill me, he
also meant to burn my soul for his greater glory.

I am a
necromancer. At that point in my life I was a necrothologist. The
difference is largely technical to the layman and I won’t bore you
with definitions. I was already aware of many different methods of
“raising the dead” to use a vulgar term and also very aware of
their shortcomings. Maleficarus had lighted upon a technique of
granting immortality and decided that the great cost was acceptable
to him. In a real sense, after all, he wasn’t paying it himself.
Usually, the sorcerer wishing to use the Maw is dependent on having
reliable servants who will carry out the rituals and sacrifices
over an extended period to give him his second life. History has
shown that the servants are far more likely to take the money and
run rather than get involved in a drawn out series of murders. Very
wise of them, too. Maleficarus had undoubtedly shown great
ingenuity in dispensing with the servants in favour of a machine
placed in such a place that the sacrifices would willingly line up
to die on his behalf.

I wasn’t
familiar with every nuance of the ritual he was using, but taking a
soul once every 2300 days seemed to increase its effectiveness. If
he’d decided to kill me a thousand days into the cycle, I doubt he
would have been so keen to use the Maw to finish me. As it was only
a few days, he didn’t seem to mind using it and then starting
again. Just my luck.

I was
abruptly pulled into the air and hung windmilling ridiculously in
that silly costume for a moment before I was thrown headlong into
the star trap’s frame. I managed to twist so that I didn’t crack my
head against the supports and took the blow on my upper back
instead. There was a fierce pain and a sense that something had
given way; my scapula as it turned out. Pensey’s electric torch
fell from my hand – I’d utterly forgotten I was holding it – and
rolled across the platform. It was strange that, at the moment
before my utter extinction, even as I saw the safety case around
the trap’s lever swing open with no hand upon it, it was strange
that I should be thinking of Mr Pensey’s torch and its remarkably
rugged construction. As Maleficarus pulled the lever, I moved my
foot and kicked the torch so it rolled up against the support at
the edge of the platform. The catches disengaged and the platform
shot upwards.

Very
nearly five inches it got before the torch hit the underside of the
lowest horizontal strut and the whole thing stopped
dead.

I lay,
silent but for my laboured breath, bundled in the frame of the
trap. Maleficarus was silent, his fury scenting the air like ozone.
Above me I could hear the pattering of the actors’ feet, the
laughter of the crowd. Behind me, I could hear the faint buzzing of
the cue warning from my dressing room. Then, in front of me, from
the open door to the prop store, I heard knocking.

It
shouldn’t have surprised me. This whole rigmarole – I almost said
pantomime – had been in the pursuit of immortality. Immortality as
a creature of flesh and blood, not a ghost. It made sense that he
was keeping his body somewhere near. I felt his presence fading
from the air as his wretched excuse for a soul condensed and
curdled back into the body he’d abandoned a generation before. I
suspect he’d been planning a more triumphant return to his mortal
coil than the hasty one I’d forced upon him, but needs must when
the devil – or at least a demon king – drives.

I tried
to get to my feet but the pain from my shoulder was agonising and I
slumped back down while it stopped battering me. I had come close
to fainting from it and that – given an imminent visit from a mad
revenant – would have been inconvenient. In the prop store, the
knocking became a pounding. It only served to confirm my
suspicions, although I might have preferred a less threatening form
of endorsement. I determined to get up and out of there, injury or
not, and cautiously started to get out of the trap cage. I’d hardly
begun when the pounding terminated with the sound of, somewhere in
the darkest recesses of the store, a theatrical chest being thrown
upon. It seemed that Maleficarus had finally managed to get out of
bed. I redoubled my efforts to escape.

I could
hear everything through that door: the clumsy staggering fall as he
clambered out, his body not nearly as responsive as he remembered
it; the slow, scraping advance as he half walked and half dragged
himself towards the door; his hissing voice as he heaved air in and
out of lungs as dry as coral on a museum shelf. “You were warned!
You were warned!”

Well,
yes, I had been. The irony of it was that I’d had no intention of
halting his experiment. I just wanted to understand what he’d been
up to, observe his progress and then leave him to it, perhaps with
the occasional follow up visit. His current exertions and my broken
shoulder blade were all the result of a misunderstanding and
Maleficarus jumping to the conclusion that I’d wanted to stop him.
Silly man.

A
tattered, semi-mummified hand gripped the doorframe of the prop
store, yellowed bone showing through the parched skin. I didn’t
entirely understand how any further sacrifices were going to repair
the damages of time, but I guessed Maleficarus hadn’t really
thought that part through in any great detail. Perhaps he wanted to
look like a scarecrow. People are strange, after all.

I had
the strongest feeling that things were going to become very
unpleasant very quickly. I managed to get onto all fours in the
bottom of the cage – all threes, that is – and started to crawl
out. I was very conscious of getting too close to the Maw; it
glistened and lights swam beneath the iridescent surface of the
metal. It also seemed to be salivating, but that could have been an
illusion of the light. I looked up as I got halfway out and saw
Maleficarus bearing down on me. He was a terrible mess; at some
early point of his voluntary death, parts of him had liquefied in
the way that putrescent flesh does and made awful stains on his
clothes. He’d decided to entomb himself in his stage clothes,
naturally. I was glad the top hat was missing, but the dinner suit
suitable for a minor dignitary at an ambassadorial function and the
opera cloak with silver clasp were in evidence. Not in evidence
were swathes of skin, muscle tissue, his lips and his eyes. He
didn’t seem to need any of them but if he was expecting immortality
to get him an indefinite season at the Palladium looking like that,
he’d been wasting everybody’s time and a few people’s lives for no
good reason.

Despite being dead, he still had a good turn of speed and I
realised that I could not hope to outrun him while injured like
that. Instead, I held my position and waited to see what he
intended to do. If he’d just brought something heavy or pointed
from the store, he could have killed me then and there but, as was
apparent from his whole scheme, he was prone to the
idée fixe
. He’d awakened
the Maw, and that was how I was to die. He ran at me and I raised
myself to a sitting position better to meet his charge. Then I
changed my mind and ducked.

Maleficarus hit me at a dead run and his shin caught my
shoulder. That wasn’t pleasant. Despite the sensation of having two
disparate slabs of bone that were theoretically meant to one and
the same grate against each other in my upper back, I heaved myself
forward and out of the cage, slapping Pensey’s torch clear with a
harsh blow as I passed. My feet were still on the platform as it
started its ascent, but my chest was on the floor and I felt the
platform scrape up my instep and clear.

Of
course, Maleficarus was aboard. Of course, he weighed less than me
being semi-skeletal and all and the platform had been
counterweighted for my mass. Of course, he’d been adding more
sandbags still so the platform rose like a shell from a mortar. Of
course, the Maw was waiting.

Maleficarus had a deal with the Maw. He would feed it once
every now and then, it would supply him with much of the energy it
harvested and keep some back for itself as a retainer. This
arrangement had never been drawn up with the possibility of
Maleficarus himself being fed to the Maw. The Maw devoured his
spirit and then, as per the deal, gave most of it back. It then
took it again and gave most back. And again and again and again.
It’s a small miracle, I’ve always thought, that calculus allows an
infinite number of operations in a finite period of time, that
Achilles
can
catch
the tortoise after all, just in time for them to shin up the
asymptote together. Being devoured by a Maw is reputedly agonising
beyond belief. You can draw your own conclusions as to what it
feels to be devoured an infinite number of times in perhaps a
quarter of a second. And good riddance.