Lamb (17 page)

I took her sleeve and dragged her down the passage toward the girls’ quarters, snatching up two heavy lances that were supporting a tapestry as we passed and handing one to her. As we rounded the curves I could see an orange light ahead and soon I could see that it was fire blazing on the stone walls from broken oil lamps. The screaming was reaching a higher pitch, but every few seconds a voice was removed from the chorus, until there was only one. As we approached the beaded doorway into the concubines’ chamber the screaming stopped and a severed human head rolled in front of us. The creature stepped through the curtain, oblivious to the flames that licked the walls around it, its massive body filling the passageway, the reptilian skin on its shoulders and its tall pointed ears grating against the walls and ceiling. In its talonlike hand it held the bloody torso of one of the girls.

“Hey, kid,” it said, its voice like a sword point dragged across stone, a yellow light coming from behind its dinner-plate-sized cat’s eyes, “it took you long enough.”

As they rode back to the fortress, Balthasar explained to Joshua about the demon: “His name is Catch, and he is a demon of the twenty-seventh order, a destroyer angel before the fall. As far as I could tell, he was first called up to assist Solomon in building the great temple, but something got out of hand and with the help of a djinn, Solomon was able to send the demon back to hell. I found the seal of Solomon and the incantation for raising the demon almost two hundred years ago in the Temple of the Seal.”

“Oh,” Joshua said, “so that’s why they call it that. I thought it had something to do with one of the barky sea animals.”

“I had to become an acolyte and study with the priests there for years before I was allowed access to the seal, but what is a few years against immortality. I was given immortality, but only so long as the demon walks the earth. And as long as he is on earth he must be fed, Joshua. That’s the curse that goes with being this destroyer’s master. He must be fed.”

“I don’t understand, he feeds on your will?”

“No, he feeds on human beings. It is only my will that keeps him in check, or it was until I was able to build the iron room and put golden symbols on the wall that would hold the demon. I’ve been able to keep him in the fortress I made him build for twenty years now, and it has been some respite. Until then he was with me every minute, everywhere I went.”

“Didn’t that attract enemies to you?”

“No. Unless he is in his eating form, I am the only one who can see Catch. In his noneating form he’s small, the size of a child, and he can do little harm (except for being incredibly irritating). When he feeds, however, he’s fully ten cubits tall, and he can tear a man in half with the swipe of his claw. No, enemies are not a problem, Joshua. Why do you think there are no guards at the fortress? In those years before the girls came to live there, some bandits attacked. What happened to them is legend now in Kabul, and no one has tried since. The problem is that if my will were to fail, he would be set loose again on the world as he was in the time of Solomon. I don’t know what could stop him.”

“And you can’t send him back to hell?” Joshua asked.

“I can with the seal and the right incantation, which is why I was going to the Temple of the Seal. Which is why you are here. If you are the Messiah predicted in Isaiah, and on the clay tablets in the temple, then you are the direct descendant of David, and therefore Solomon. I believe that you can send the demon back and keep me from suffering the fate of his return.”

“Why, what happens to you if he is sent back to hell?”

“I will assume the aspect of my true age. Which I would guess, by this time, would be dust. But you have the gift of immortality. You can stop that from happening.”

“So this demon from hell is loose, and we are returning to the fortress without the Seal of Solomon or this incantation to do exactly what?”

“I hope to bring him back under control of my will. The room has always held him before. I didn’t know, I truly didn’t know…”

“Know what?”

“That my will had been broken by my feelings for you.”

“You love me?”

“How was I to know?” The magus sighed.

And Joshua laughed here, despite the dire circumstances. “Of course you do, but it is not me, it’s what I represent. I am not sure yet what I am to do, but I know that I am here in the name of my father. You love life so much that you would brave hell to hold on to it, it’s only natural that you would love the one who gave you that life.”

“Then you can banish the demon and preserve my life?”

“Of course not, I’m just saying that I understand how you feel.”

I don’t know where she found the strength, but the diminutive Joy came from behind me and hurled the heavy lance with as much power as any soldier. (I felt my own knees starting to buckle in the face of the demon.) The bronze tip of the lance seemed to find its way between two of the monster’s armored chest scales and drove itself a span deep under the weight of the heavy shaft. The demon gasped, and roared, opening his massive maw to show rows of saw-edged teeth. He grabbed the shaft of the lance and attempted to pull it out, his huge biceps quivering with the strain. He looked sadly down at the spear, then at Joy, and said, “Oh, foul woe upon you, you have kilt me most dead,” then he fell back and the floor shook with the impact of his huge body.

“What’d he say, what’d he say?” Joy asked, digging her nails into my shoulder. The demon had spoken in Hebrew.

“He said that you killed him.”

“Well, duh,” said the concubine. (Strangely enough, “duh” sounds exactly the same in all languages.)

I had started to inch forward to see if anyone was still alive in the girls’ quarters when the demon sat up. “Just kidding,” he said. “I’m not kilt.” And he plucked the spear from his chest with less effort than it might take to brush away a fly.

I threw my own lance, but didn’t wait to see where it hit. I grabbed Joy and ran.

“Where?” she said.

“Far,” I said.

“No,” she said, grabbing my tunic and jerking me around a corner, causing me to nearly coldcock myself on the wall. “To the cliff passage.” We were in total darkness now, neither one of us having thought to grab a lamp, and I was trusting my life to Joy’s memory of these stone halls.

As we ran we could hear the demon’s scales scraping the walls and the occasional curse in Hebrew as he found a low ceiling. Perhaps he could see in the dark somewhat, but not a lot better than we could.

“Duck,” Joy said, pushing my head down as we entered the narrow passage that led to the cliff above. I crouched in this passage the way the monster had to crouch to move in the normal-sized halls and I suddenly realized the brilliance of Joy’s choice in taking this route. We were just seeing the moonlight breaking in through the opening in the cliff’s face when I heard the monster hit the bottleneck of the passage.

“Fuck! Ouch! You weasels! I’m going to crunch your little heads between my teeth like candied dates.”

“What’d he say?” asked Joy.

“He says that you are a sweet of uncommon delicacy.”

“He did not say that.”

“Believe me, my translation is as close as you want to the truth.”

I heard a horrible scraping noise from inside the passage as we climbed out on the ledge and up the rope ladder to the top of the plateau. Joy helped me up, then pulled the ladder up behind us. We ran to the stable where the camel saddles and other supplies were normally kept. There were only the three camels that Joshua and Balthasar had taken, and no horses, so I couldn’t figure out why we were taking the time to stop until I saw Joy filling two water skins at the cistern behind the stable.

“We’ll never make it to Kabul without water,” Joy said.

“And what happens when we make it to Kabul? Can anyone there help? What in the hell is that thing?”

“If I knew, would I have opened that door?” She was remarkably calm for someone who had just lost her friends to a hideous beast.

“I guess not. But I didn’t see it come out of there. I felt something, but nothing that size.”

“Act, Biff, don’t think. Act.”

She handed me a water skin and I held it in the cistern, trying to listen for the sound of the monster over the bubbles as it filled. All I could hear was the occasional bleating of the goats and the sound of my own pulse in my ears. Joy corked her water skin, then went about opening the pig and goat pens, shooing the animals out onto the plateau.

“Let’s go!” she shouted to me. She took off down the path toward the
hidden road. I pulled the water skin from the cistern and followed as quickly as I could. There was enough moonlight to make traveling fairly easy, but since I hadn’t even seen the road in daylight, I didn’t want to try to negotiate its deadly cutbacks at night without a guide. We had almost made the first leg of the road when we heard a hideous wailing and something heavy landed in the dust in front of us. When I could get my breath again I stepped up to find the bloodied carcass of a goat.

“There,” Joy said, pointing down the mountainside to something moving among the rocks. Then it looked up at us and there was no mistaking the glowing yellow eyes.

“Back,” Joy said, pulling me back from the road.

“Is that the only way down?”

“That or diving off the edge. It’s a fortress, remember—it’s not supposed to be easy to get in and out of.”

We made our way back to the rope ladder, tossed it over the side, and started down. As Joy made it to the ledge and ducked into the cave something heavy hit me on the right shoulder. My arm went numb with the impact and I let go of the ladder. Mercifully, my feet had tangled in the rungs as I fell, and I found myself hanging upside down looking into the cave entrance where Joy stood. I could hear the terrified goat that had hit me screaming as it fell into the abyss, then there was a distant thump and the screaming stopped.

“Hey, kid, you’re a Jew, aren’t you?” said the monster from above.

“None of your business,” I said. Joy grabbed the ladder and pulled me inside the cave, ladder and all, just as another goat came screaming past. I fell on my face in the dust and sputtered, trying to breathe and spit at the same time.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten a Jew. A good Jew sticks to your ribs. That’s the problem with Chinese, you eat six or seven of them and in a half hour you’re hungry again. No offense, miss.”

“What’d he say?” Joy asked.

“He says he likes kosher food. Will that ladder hold him?”

“I made it myself.”

“Swell,” I said. We heard the ropes creak with the strain as the monster climbed onto the ladder.

Joshua and Balthasar rode into Kabul at a time of night when only cutthroats and whores were about (the whores offering the “cutthroat discount” after midnight to promote business). The old wizard had fallen asleep to the rhythm of his camel’s loping gait, an act that nearly baffled Joshua as much as the whole demon business, as he spent most of his time on camelback trying not to upchuck—seasickness of the desert, they call it. Joshua flicked the old man’s leg with the loose end of his camel’s bridle, and the magus came awake snorting.

“What is it? Are we there?”

“Can you control the demon, old man? Are we close enough for you to regain control?”

Balthasar closed his eyes and Joshua thought that he might be going to sleep again, except his hands began to tremble with some unseen effort. After a few seconds he opened his eyes again. “I can’t tell.”

“Well, you could tell that he was out.”

“That was like a wave of pain in my soul. I’m not in intimate contact with the demon at all times. We are probably too far away still.”

“Horses,” Joshua said. “They’ll be faster. Let’s go wake up the stable master.” Joshua led them through the streets to the stable where we had boarded our camels when we came to town to heal the blinded bandit. There were no lamps burning inside, but a half-naked whore posed seductively in the doorway.

“Special for cutthroats,” she said in Latin. “Two for one, but no refunds if the old man can’t do the business.”

It had been so long since he’d heard the language that it took Joshua a second to respond. “Thank you, but we’re not cutthroats,” Joshua said. He stepped past her and pounded on the door. She ran a fingernail down his back as he waited.

“What are you? Maybe there’s another special.”

Joshua didn’t even look back. “He’s a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old wizard and I’m either the Messiah or a hopeless faker.”

“Uh, yeah, I think there is a special rate for fakers, but the wizard has to pay full price.”

Joshua could hear stirring inside of the stable master’s house and a voice calling for him to hold his horses, which is what stable masters always say when they make you wait. Joshua turned to the whore and touched her gently on the forehead.

“Go, and sin no more,” he said in Latin.

“Right, and what do I do for a living then, shovel shit?”

Just then the stable master threw open the door. He was short and bowlegged and wore a long mustache that made him look like a dried-up catfish. “What is so important that my wife couldn’t handle it?”

“Your wife?”

The whore ran her nail across the back of Joshua’s neck as she passed him and stepped into the house. “Missed your chance,” she said.

“Woman, what are you doing out here anyway?” asked the stable master.

Joy scurried out onto the landing and pulled a short, broad-bladed black dagger from the folds of her robe. The ends of the rope ladder were swaying in front of her as the monster descended.

“No, Joy,” I said, reaching out to pull her back into the cave. “You can’t hurt it.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

She turned and grinned at me, then ran the dagger twice over the thick ropes on one side leaving it attached by only a few fibers, then she reached up a few rungs and sliced most of the way through the other side of the ladder. I couldn’t believe how easily she’d cut through the rope.

She stepped back into the passageway and held the blade up so it caught the starlight. “Glass,” she said, “from a volcano. It’s a thousand
times sharper than any edge on an iron blade.” She put the dagger away and pulled me back into the passageway, just far enough so we could see the entrance and the landing.

I could hear the monster coming closer, then a huge clawed foot appeared in silhouette in the entrance, then the other foot. We held our breath as the monster reached the cut section of the ladder. Nearly a whole massive thigh was visible now, and one of his talonlike hands was reaching down for a new hold when the ladder snapped. Suddenly the monster hung sideways, swinging from his hold on a single rope in front of the entrance. He looked right at us, the fury in his yellow eyes replaced for a moment by confusion. His leathery bat ears rose in curiosity, and he said, “Hey?” Then the second rope snapped and he plunged out of our view.

We ran out to the landing and looked over the edge. It was at least a thousand feet to the floor of the valley. We could only see several hundred feet down in the dark, but it was several hundred feet of cliff face that was conspicuously monsterless.

“Nice,” I said to Joy.

“We need to go. Now.”

“You don’t think that did it?”

“Did you hear anything hit bottom?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither did I,” she said. “We had better get going.”

We’d left the water skins at the top of the plateau and Joy wanted to grab some from the kitchen but I dragged her toward the front entrance by the collar. “We need to get as far away from here as we can. Dying of thirst is the least of my worries.” Once we were in the main area of the fortress there was enough light to negotiate the hallways without a lamp, which was good, because I wouldn’t let Joy stop to light one. As we rounded the stairway to the third level Joy jerked me back, almost off my feet, and I turned around as mad as a cat.

“What? Let’s get out of here!” I screamed at her.

“No, this is the last level with windows. I’m not going through the front door not knowing if that thing is outside it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it would take a man on a fast horse a half hour to make it around from the other side.”

“But what if it didn’t fall all the way? What if it climbed back up?”

“That would take hours. Come on, Joy. We could be miles away from here by the time he gets here from the other side.”

“No!” She swept my feet out from under me and I landed flat on my back on the stone floor. By the time I was on my feet again she had run through the front chamber and was hanging out the window. As I approached her she held her finger to her lips. “It’s down there, waiting.”

I pulled her aside and looked down. Sure enough, the beast was looming in front of the iron door, waiting to grab the edge in its claws and rip it open as soon as we threw the bolts.

“Maybe it can’t get in,” I whispered. “It couldn’t get through the other iron door.”

“You didn’t understand the symbols all over that room, did you?”

I shook my head.

“They were containment symbols—to contain a djinn, or a demon. The front door doesn’t have any on it. It won’t hold him back.”

“So why isn’t he coming in?”

“Why chase us when we will come right to him?”

Just then the monster looked up and I threw myself back from the window.

“I don’t think he saw me,” I whispered, spraying Joy with spit.

Then the monster began to whistle. It was a happy tune, lighthearted, something like you might whistle while you were polishing the bleached skull of your latest victim. “I’m not stalking anyone or anything,” the monster said, much louder than would have been required had he been talking to himself. “Nope, not me. Just standing here for a second. Oh well, no one is here, I guess I’ll be on my way.” He began to whistle again and we could hear footsteps getting quieter along with the whistling. They weren’t moving away, they were just getting quieter. Joy and I looked out the window to see the huge beast doing an exaggerated pantomime of walking, just as his whistle fizzled.

“What?” I shouted down, angry now. “Did you think we wouldn’t look?”

The monster shrugged. “It was worth a try. I figured I wasn’t dealing with a genius when you opened the door in the first place.”

“What’d he say? What’d he say?” Joy chanted behind me.

“He said he doesn’t think you’re very smart.”

“Tell him that I’m not the one who has spent all these years locked in the dark playing with myself.”

I pulled back from the window and looked at Joy. “Do you think he could fit though this window?”

She eyed the window. “Yes.”

“Then I’m not going to tell him. It might make him angry.”

Joy pushed me aside, stepped up on the windowsill, turned around and faced me, then pulled up her robe and peed backward out the window. Her balance was amazing. From the growling below, I gathered that her accuracy wasn’t bad either. She finished and jumped down. I looked out the window at the monster, who was shaking urine from its ears like a wet dog.

“Sorry,” I said, “language problem. I didn’t know how to translate.”

The monster growled and the muscles in its shoulders tensed beneath the scales, then it let loose with a punch that sent its fist completely through the iron skin of the door.

“Run,” Joy said.

“Where?”

“The passage to the cliff.”

“You cut the ladder.”

“Just run.” She pulled me along behind her, guiding us through the dark as she had before. “Duck,” she shouted, just a second after I realized that we’d entered the smaller passageway by using the sensitive stone-ceiling-sensing nerves in my forehead. We made it halfway down the passageway to the cliff when I heard the monster hit and curse.

There was a pause, then a horrible grinding noise so intense that we had to shield our ears from the assault. Then came the smell of burning flesh.

Dawn broke just as Joshua and Balthasar rode into the canyon entrance to the fortress.

“How about now?” Joshua asked. “Do you feel the demon now?”

Balthasar shook his head balefully. “We’re too late.” He pointed to where the great round door had once stood. Now it was a pile of bent and broken pieces hanging on what was left of the huge hinges.

“What in the name of Satan have you done?” Joshua said. He jumped off his horse and ran into the fortress, leaving the old man to follow as best he could.

The noise in the narrow passageway was so intense that I cut pieces of cloth from my sleeves with Joy’s dagger and stuffed them in our ears. Then I lit one of the fire sticks to see what the monster was doing. Joy and I stood there, gaped-jawed, watching as the beast worried away at the stone of the passage, his claws moving in a blur of speed, throwing smoke and dust and stone shards into the air as he went, his scales burning from the friction and growing back as fast as they burned away. He hadn’t come far, perhaps five feet toward us, but eventually he would widen the passage enough and pull us out like a badger digging termites out of the nest. I could see now how the fortress had been built without tool marks. The creature moved so quickly—literally wearing away the walls with his claws and scales—that the stone was polished as it was cut.

We had already made two ascents up what was left of the ladder to the top of the plateau, only to have the monster come around and chase us back down it before we could get to the road. The second time he pulled the ladder up, then returned to the interior of the fortress to resume his hellish digging.

“I’ll jump before I’ll let that thing get me,” I said to Joy.

She looked over the edge of the cliff into the endless darkness below. “You do that,” she said. “Let me know how it goes.”

“I will, but first I’ll pray.” And I did. I prayed so hard that beads of sweat popped out on my forehead and ran over my tightly closed eyes. I prayed so hard that even the constant screeching of the monster’s scales against the stone was drowned out. For a moment there, I was sure that it was just me and God. As was his habit with me, God remained quiet, and I suddenly realized how frustrated Joshua must have been, asking always for a path to follow, a course of action, and being answered by nothing but silence.

When I opened my eyes again dawn had broken over the cliff and light was streaming into the passageway. By full daylight the demon was even scarier. There was blood and gore all over him from the massacre of the girls, and even as he relentlessly wore away at the stone, flies buzzed around him, but as each tried to light on him it died instantly and fell to
the floor. The stench of rotting flesh and burning scales was almost overwhelming, and that alone nearly sent me over the side of the cliff. The beast was only three or four cubits out of reach from us, and every few minutes he would rear back, then throw his claw forward to try and grab at us.

Joy and I huddled on the landing over the cliff face, looking for any purchase, any handhold that would get us away from the beast: up, down, or sideways across the cliff face. The fear of heights had suddenly become very minor.

I was beginning to be able to feel the breeze from the monster’s talons as he lunged into the narrow opening at us when I heard Balthasar’s deep bass shout from behind the beast. The monster filled the whole opening so I couldn’t see behind it, but he turned around and his spade-tipped tail whipped around us, nearly lacerating our skin as it passed. Joy drew the glass knife from her robe and slashed at the tail, nicking the scales but apparently not causing the monster enough trouble to turn around.

“Balthasar will tame you, you son of a shit-eating lizard!” Joy screamed.

Just then something came shooting through the opening and we ducked out of the way as it sailed into space and fell out of sight to the canyon floor, screeching like a falcon on the dive.

“What was that?” Joy was trying to squint into infinity to see what the monster had thrown.

“That was Balthasar,” I said.

“Oops,” said Joy.

Joshua yanked the great spade-tipped tail and the demon swung around with a ferocious snarl. Joshua held on to the tail even as the demon’s claws whistled by his face.

“What is your name, demon?” Joshua said.

“You won’t live long enough to say it,” said the demon. He raised his claw again to strike.

Joshua yanked his tail and the demon froze. “No. That’s not right. What is your name?”

“My name is Catch,” said the demon, dropping his arm to his side in surrender. “I know you. You’re the kid, aren’t you? They used to talk about you in the old days.”

“Time for you to go home,” Joshua said.

“Can’t I eat those two outside on the ledge first?”

“No. Satan awaits you.”

“They are really irritating. She peed on me.”