A Formula For Chaos had the formula for a good read-a strong, page-turning plot with lots of action, unusual and unexpected magical lore, and sympathetic characters with interesting problems....Diana Paxson
Author of The Serpent's Tooth, The
White Raven and theWestria cycle.
I thoroughly enjoyed A Formula For Chaos. Not only do we get solid characters moving within a well-realized world, but unlike most humorous fantasies, the writing displays real wit-a civilized quality and an unfortunately rare one these days.Katharine Kerr
Author of the Deverry series,
Freezeframes and Palace
Author's Note: This is the
prologue and first three sections of an
as-yet-unpublished novel, the first book of a trilogy which I started in high
school and worked on on and off for years between other projects. So far
it's received accademic honors-including a big thumbs up from Frederick
Jameson (one of the world's top literary critics, as well as my professor from a
year of independent studies at UCSC), the Phi Kappa Phi award from USC's Masters in Professional writing
program-as well as rave reviews from readers (including a few major authors)
not to mention a couple strong nibbles from editors, but
as of yet, no firm bites or contracts. And so, with the current
state of publishing, I have decided to put this sample
on the Net, both to solicit feedback, stir-up interest, and, to be blunt,
sell copies if people like what they read here.Admittedly an electronic copy
can't be taken to the beach and dropped in the
sand, but by the same token a paperback can't be pulled up on your computer
screen at work or printed out in some businesslike font and hidden under a
spreadsheet for when the boss comes by. After all, I've done my stint in
corporate hell, and I know that most managers don't care
if you are busy or productive so much as how busy or productive
you look when the top brass and the investors come by. It's a
matter of window dressing, like high heels and power ties, and having
something fun to read saves you the trouble of playing with paperclips when
your real work is done or you're waiting for a call-back.
Plus, if you have trouble with regular books, you can even print out a copy
in a large type face.Also, unlike a paperback, the way I
look at it, the purchase
of an electronic copy should work like a subscription. If, a year down the
road, I decide to revise this novel, people who've already bought a copy
won't have to put down any more money for an electronic copy of the "Author's
preferred edition" or whatever I choose to call the revision. I'll just keep
a list of everyone who's bought one and send them the new one-or,
once they get all the key-encryption business working properly, I'll just set
it up as a "secure document" that anyone with the right permissions can access
whenever they feel like it. Plus, once I sell this to a hard print publisher
(since I very firmly intend for it to come out in a traditional binding as
well), I will send my loyal fans a copy of the first mass market edition,
signed, numbered and everything. The price for this? A mere $7.95, the
same price as a paperback at the supermarket checkout aisle. And not only
will you get the electronic copy now, all the electronic revised and author's
preferred editions to come, and the signed mass market edition
once I sell it to a regular publisher, but I will also put your name and
website on a page for the
"Agents of Chaos",
the official A Formula For Chaos and Calafian Chronicles fan
club and subscriber database. Heck,
once I have a chance to tweak around with Photoshop, I'll even send you your
electronic "Agent of Chaos"
membership badge, suitable for putting on your
web page and displaying to the world at large (and linking back to my website
if you are so inclined).Of course, since you can never be
certain what's up with the world of electronics, publishing and copyright
law, this may change in the future. But for the
time being it should work.
All of the "Agents of Chaos"
will have their names put on the
"Agents of Chaos"
web page with their names hotlinked to their websites and/or e-mail as they
see fit, so everyone who wants to say "I read him first!" or
"I knew him back then!" will have documentable proof that indeed they did.Publishers and editors of course do
not have to pay for a copy, and I'll even
send them a hardcopy if they so desire. After all, even if it may be a dying
medium, I'd still like to see this novel in traditional book form. Two short
stories set in this same world-"Dead
& Gone" and
"The
Croquet Mallet Murders"-have been published in
The Shimmering Door and
I, Vampire anthologies respectively, and while I know this
novel will eventually see print, I also know that everything's going
electronic so I might as well make a few bucks on it right now. After all,
while an editor's interest may warm your heart, only a signed contract and a
check to follow actually warms your bones. At $7.95 each, I only have to sell
about five hundred before I match the average "first novel" advance, and five
hundred copies won't even make a dent in the average publisher's print run.So help me do it. See your name,
e-mail or web page listed on the official
"Agents of Chaos"
list. Get the nifty
"Agent of Chaos"
badge for your website. And if you read my novel back when I had it at UC
Santa Cruz and gave me feedback, c'mon back and read it again and I'll put
your name on the list as one of the a charter members of the
"Agents of Chaos".Michael 'Deathshrike Mike' Feather
stood in the San Francisco International Airport, watching a dragon take off. Its silver
wings beat the air and the glass in front of him shuddered. A dusting of powdered scale
fell as the dragon left the ground, adding to the sparkling faze of magical pollution that
made the City glitter like the jewel of fairyland it was.Mike turned and flexed his own wings
behind him, pinions stretching to their full reach. He knew he struck a classic pose-angel
wings and black leather were made for each other.Furling, he adjusted his cap and
listened to the slink of chain across the brim. Where were those two? Ariel and Griff
were supposed to have met him three hours ago, and there was a job on the line."Excuse me, sir," growled a raspy
voice. Mike looked up at a seemingly endless expanse of brown fur towering over him.
He took a step back and the fur resolved into a nine-foot-tall anthropomorphic grizzly
wearing plaid shorts and a loud, unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt."Sir," the bear began, though Mike
couldn't tell whether it was clearing its throat or growling, "you appear troubled. Many of
us today are troubled by the ever increasing complexities of magic-based society. Indeed,
we may question our reason for being here. We may even have cursed Fate aloud for our
lot in life-Certainly I know I have-but sir, there is no longer any reason to despair! All
things can now be explained!"Mike craned his neck up since the bear
was near double his height, though still managed a smirk. "Really?""Yes! The Church of Magicology has
discovered the true nature of magic and the origin of the universe. Here," A huge paw
swooped down with a clawful of leaflets, "take one of our complimentary
brochures."Mike grimaced and took a pamphlet.
This was the wrong place to deal with this bozo the way he would have liked. "Thanks.
Bye.""Don't you want to know about the
origin of the universe?" The bear blocked his exit. "How in the beginning the One split
into the Two, Yin and Yang? And how Yin and Yang gave way to the Three-Cardinal,
Fixed, Mutable-and then the Two split into the Four, the Four Elements? And after the
Creation of the Eight and the Twelve, the One split itself into the Seven? And the others
grew jealous and-""No, and I've got to use the john.
Bye." Mike tried to step around him."-and sprang upon the Seven, and Yin
and Yang tore the Seven between themselves into the metaphysical and physical realms,
creating the Fourteen, the Fourteen Arts?""Listen, bear, I-""Don't you want to know the true
nature of Power?"He paused. "Power?""Yes, Power!" The bear waved its
claws and leaflets in the air. "The true nature of magical power, as put down in
Dialectics. And not only magical power-also the power of science.
True and real science!"Mike took a deep breath. "Bear, I
don't have the time to believe in science or your religion or anything else made up by a
dead magic-fiction author. So if-""But science exists!" the bear roared.
"True science! Real science! Science that-""How dare you!" screamed a voice
from across the air terminal. Michael glanced over. A dark-haired young man in a red
sweat shirt and white cotton surfer pants marched purposefully towards them, a fortyish
businesswoman attempting to sprint after him in high heels. The young man pointed his
index finger directly at the bear's nose. "How dare you say things like that in public!
Don't you know that-" He broke off as the businesswoman grabbed his arm and regained
her balance. She was dressed in a pink wool suit and pale green blouse, purse and shoes a
matching shade of grey.Mike took in the pink and green pastels
and bit his lip. Either a preppie or a fay, equal likelihood of either. Though of course fays
were a lot more dangerous. "why are you annoying the nice religious fanatic? This is a
public place, dear."He turned to her, wild-eyed. "But Ms.
Hope! Didn't you hear what he was saying? He said-""Jason," she said sweetly, "the Island of
California is a free country. Now-""But it is true!" roared the bear.
"Science does exist!""That's a secret!" screamed Jason in
return. "You're-"Ms. Hope patted him on the arm.
"Jason, don't you mean to say that that's not true?"Jason looked at her, then at Mike and
the bear. "Uh, yeah," he said. "It's not true. Science doesn't exist." He held out a gold-
embossed card. "You can believe me. I'm a certified sortilegist.""You're a prophet?" the bear breathed
in awe. Ms. Hope pressed her fingers to her forehead as if she had a migraine.Mike glanced up at the bear and
grinned. "They can fake those things easy."The bear looked at him in confusion
and so did Jason. "But-" the prophet said, "But it's true. I mean it's true that it's not true.
Science doesn't exist. Really," he said with an earnest look, darting from Mike to Ms.
Hope, "it doesn't.""Got any more ancient secrets to
reveal, sortilegist?" Mike twitched a corner of his mouth.Jason looked to Ms. Hope, who patted
him on the arm again and turned to Mike. "Please excuse him. He took some essence of
ergot and he's been like this ever since."Mike just smiled back.Jason's pupils dilated for a few
seconds, then focused on him. "Ms. Hope!" Jason screamed, pointing. "He's the one!
He's one of the Keys!""Huh?"Ms. Hope turned Jason to face her.
"Jason, I think we've annoyed this poor man and this bear long enough. Now, if-""But he's one of the Keys to Fate!"
Jason screamed. "He was at the start of that dream I had, and-""And now you've met him," Ms. Hope
finished for him, "and your dream's come true and everything's wonderful.""But-""No buts, Jason. Come along." Ms.
Hope tugged at his arm.Jason resisted. "But he's one of the
Keystones! One of the Keys to the Fate I saw in my dream!""Well if it's Fate, dear, then there's very
little we can do about it."Jason looked bewildered, then grabbed
the rock crystal pendant on his neck and looked at Mike through it. He started and
dropped the crystal. "Uh-yeah, I guess we should."Mike grabbed the crystal's cord and
pulled Jason close in a throttle hold, hissing, "Do that again, you nosy seer, and I bet you
can imagine a dozen things I could do to you." He slowly let go of the prophet and
watched him stumble back.Jason stared at him, wide-eyed, then
clutched his hands to his face and ran off, screaming in terror.Ms. Hope looked disconcerted. "Uh-
so nice to meet you. Hope we never see you again. Goodbye," she said and took off.
Jason had tripped and was having a seizure in the middle of a luggage carousel.Mike looked up at the slack-jawed bear
and tried to think of the right closing comment. "Mike!" came a voice off to his
right.He glanced over. There stood Ariel,
red hair windblown, sparkling with the glamour of the faze in the air. Towering up behind
her was Griff, white wings folded back over lion's haunches, the blue feathers on his ears
and the tassel of his tail dyed punk green. Ariel's broom was marked with the Thorn's
bind-rune while Griff had it bleached into the ruby feathers on his chest.Mike stepped around the bear and
confronted them. "I've been waiting three hours for you assholes. We got a job,
remember?"Ariel reached out an caressed his
cheek. "Yeah Mike, we remember."Mike twisted away and contemplated
the brochure the bear had given him, then glanced up at the giant gryphon. "Griff, bear's
giving out free pamphlets. Want one?"Griff took the cue. "Rawk! Free
pamphlets!" he screamed his parrot imitation, bounding forward. In one snap he bit off
half the leaflets in the grizzly's paw. The bear took a step back, looking eye to eye with
the huge gryphon chewing brochures at him.Mike slipped an arm around Ariel.
"C'mon, Griff. We got a job."
Claude drew a ten-pointed star around
the crucible's stand, and the oils in the retort underwent a change, shifting from a clear
pink to a liquid pearl. Opalescent salts forming on the inner walls melted and flowed
down as the heat rose, then shifted again, spreading a fine tracery up the glass while the
color tinged blue. This was a crucial stage. The azure peacock, or gryphon feathers as
he'd called it back at Berkeley despite protests from his stuffier professors.He straightened up and stretched his
neck, shaking a lock of blond hair out of his eyes. Sunlight shone on his diploma on the
wall, glinting off the royal seal of the University of Calafia and the golden Adept's Rose.
Claude grinned slightly. They'd stopped complaining when he'd succeeded in the Great
Work and synthesized the Elixir Vit‘ only a year ago.He'd become an adept at eighteen.
Immortal, for all the good it did him.Claude swung his fist at an empty spot
on the workbench, but stopped short for fear of jostling the alembic. Damn! The muscles
in his forearms knotted and he squeezed his fists and his eyes tight. What good did
immortality do you when you already knew you were doomed?Eight months ago. Mrs. Dunleavy's
office. Charlotte Dunleavy, sortilegist to the stars. She'd reached into her scrabble bag,
pulling out tiles and dooming him with one simple incontrovertible prophecy, painting the
picture blacker with every subsequent divination. Death and family curses and everything
else, death if he tried to break the curse or do any of a dozen different things, and finally a
warning not to try to discover more. He was doomed, and you couldn't cheat Fate.Maybe. There were a few historical
instances where it was thought to have happened, though it had only been sortilegists
who'd done it so far as anyone knew. That was the way they became masters of their own
destinies-everyone else who cheated fate was just damned lucky. But masters were as
rare as adepts, and even if he found one, a consultation would be death.But he was an adept, damn it, and
alchemists could do anything given enough time and ingredients.It was the highest magic of a hex he
needed right now.Claude picked up a small crystal vial
holding the essence of a four-leafed clover he'd found the day before in Golden Gate Park.
He could have just bought one, but for the sympathetic resonances to be most powerful, it
was best if you gathered everything yourself. And he needed this to be at its
strongest.A wishing potion. Of all the myriad
processes, it was the only one that approached the Great Work in difficulty, and surpassed
it in uncertainty and danger. Four-leafed clovers, dandelions, stardust, distilled rainbows,
candles saved from all his birthdays-the wildmagic was without parallel. And
unpredictable. Like all of hexery, you could never tell if a wish would be granted until it
was."I don't want to die. Please, don't let
me die," Claude whispered to the potion, fingertips brushing then glass, then realized he
was crying a moment later. He quickly unstopped the vial and held it to his cheek. An
adept's tears were a powerful totem and might help. Almost anything might help.The tiny vial was full in a matter of
seconds. Claude brushed away the stray tears and steeled himself. He was going to
survive. He was Claude Almont, youngest adept in the history of California. He wasn't
going to go along with the Fates' twisted little schemes, not without a fight.Carefully he added the clover essence
and tears to the crucible, then crossed his eyes, waggled his fingers in several
combinations, and nearly choked as he said a twelve syllable Word of Power that couldn't
have been written without glottal stops, tongue clicks, and at least three umlauts.There, Claude thought as the oils
became tinged with emerald, let the hackers down in Necronomicon Valley try to guess
that one. If this potion failed, it wasn't going to be because someone had
stolen his wish.He took out his watch and flipped it
open. A proper incantation needed to be said just before noon, and then the resulting
potion would have to simmer till midnight of tonight, Walpurgis night, before anything
else could be done.Bing-Bong! came the
sound of the doorbell.Claude looked at his watch again. He
still had fifteen minutes or so before he had to do anything, and a distraction would be
good.Slipping out of his ceremonial yellow
lab coat, he clicked the watch shut and tucked it in his back pocket as he went into the
living room.. . . getting your MCB in
stereo? blared the crystal ball in the wall unit as Claude tossed the coat over a
chair. MCB, Music Crystal Ball, all day, all night. The MCB logo then
shifted to three punk rockers jumping around with enchanted guitars. Claude waved his
hand in an arcane gesture and the crystal ball shut off. He didn't know why he'd
subscribed to the new silver cable service.Bing-Bong!He paused a moment to tuck in his
shirt and rub a fleck of dry potion out of the ivory blond hair on his forearm.Bing-Bong! Bing-
Claude sighed and got the door.Bong! came the
sound as he opened it. Claude saw an angel in black leather, a winged skull tattoo on his
forearm with the motto: Born to Fly. Hanging on the angel's left wing
was a young red-haired woman in tight jeans and a Wands 'n Roses T-
shirt, a high speed hazelwood broomstick slung over her back. Behind them was a wall of
ruby feathers with a bind-rune bleached into it."You Claude Almont?" the angel
asked."Uh, yeah," said Claude, trying to
figure out what was behind the angel's wings and what the bind-rune was. All he could
make out was the top of the eihwaz rune and a bunch of feathers. He
glanced at the sign he had left hanging on his doorknob: Busy Spellcasting-Do
Not Disturb. "Pardon me, but I'm in the middle of a spell.""It can wait." The angel produced a
slender silver wand with a sparkling topaz star on the tip. "Going to let us in?"Claude nodded and moved back,
wishing desperately that he'd made a contribution to the campaign for mandatory wand
registration.The angel and the woman stepped
inside. After them, the biggest gryphon Claude had ever seen squeezed through the
doorway, losing a few feathers in the process. It was then that could fully see the bind-
rune: four thurisaz's supporting each other, crossed by
eihwaz and isa with a variant ing in
the center. Thor's strength four times, focused by yew, fixed by ice, with a seed of
additional power to add to the punch. There were probably nastier bind-runes, but Claude
couldn't think of any off hand.The gryphon swiped a rear paw,
shutting the door, then reached out its talons and grabbed Claude around the chest, lifting
him in the air. As every muscle in his body tensed, Claude forgot about the bind-rune and
was struck with the incredibly inappropriate thought that the potion back in the lab really
had been the same shade of azure as a gryphon's head feathers. Except this one's ears
were punk green.The angel sauntered off into the
apartment, and Claude heard him mumble a word which must have reinstituted his wand's
safety catch. "Nice place you've got here.""Yeah, nice," the gryphon repeated,
turning him around so he could see the angel and the woman. Claude tried to touch the
floor with his toes, but his size-fifteen running shoes didn't reach. Dangling, he looked
down at his own apartment."Put him down, Griff." The angel
motioned with his head.Claude let out a gasp as his feet
touched the carpet. His knees then started to buckle under him. The gryphon
repositioned his talons, one over each shoulder, points pricking into the skin of his chest
and back. Claude's knees immediately stiffened and he glanced straight up."Hi," said Griff, hooked beak as sharp
and black as his claws. Claude swallowed and looked back down. Despite being six feet
six, he felt short.Mike took up perch on one of the
armchairs of the conversation pit, Ariel to one side. He glared at her. "Watch the
feathers."She smoothed them down. "Better,
Mike?"He sneered in reply, but let her keep
stroking his wing. Mike turned his attention to Claude. "Hi. We're the Thorns. We need
an alchemist."Claude recalled the papers. The
Thorns, one of the island's broomstick gangs, involved in a whole slew of illegal activities.
He remembered then-The white thurisaz bind-rune was their insignia.
"Uh, I'm booked for the next three months.""You're going to make time. We need
the Elixir Vitæ.""I don't-""Have it anymore," Mike finished for
him. "I know, you drank it. We need a new batch.""It only gives me immortality. It's just
a youth potion to anyone else."Mike got out a cigarette and lit it from
the fireblossom on the end table. Claude watched the alchemical flower flare bright as the
oil lamp's air intake was opened, then grow dim as it was shut. "You'd be surprised. But
doesn't matter; you're making it anyway." He took a long drag on the cigarette and what
Claude smelled was not tobacco. "Let's talk terms. Ariel?"She reached into her purse and
produced a manila folder, handing it to Mike. He smiled. "This is from Charlotte
Dunleavy's office. Know her?"Claude's eyes went wide."Dull, dull, dull." Mike flipped through
the pages. "Okay, here it is: 'Claude Almont will become a frost giant before his twenty-
first birthday unless he is killed because of this knowledge, and will remain one for the rest
of his life, for the curse can never be lifted.'" The angel looked up. "Kind of a silly
prophecy, huh? Oh well, the good stuff comes later anyway."He flipped to the back of the folder and
took out a few sheets paper-clipped together. "Where do we start? With what happens if
you go to the press for help?" He found the passage. "'. . . yet one week before the
interview, an assassin hired by Japanese gianting interests will . . .' Or would you like to
hear about what happens if you try the government? '. . . will be surreptitiously executed
to preserve harmony with both Japan and fundamentalist Christian groups who wish to
prove the purity of the human race.'" Mike flexed his wings and snorted. "Yeah, right.
And here's my favorite: '. . . will escape on a Greenpeace ship, yet three years after the
prophecy comes to pass, while following the ice wyrm migration, will be harpooned by
Russian border guards and hauled off to be processed into cold sore liniment for smelly
old women in Budapest.'" He put the prophecies away and smiled. "Okay, so I made up
the last part. You'll probably be made into cough drops or something. But you get the
idea."Mike folded the cover slowly shut and
looked up. "All we need to do is drop this folder in the right laps and you can kiss your
adept ass goodbye. Get the picture?" He handed the prophecies back to Ariel. Smiling,
Mike leaned over and opened the air intake of the fireblossom, stubbing out his cigarette.
He pushed the vent shut and Claude watched the delicate flames wither and die. Ash
swirled in the oil of the globe.Claude felt all the blood drain out of
his face and he gasped."Want a cough drop?" Ariel asked and
Claude nearly convulsed as he tried to keep his stomach down."Hey, Ariel, be cool," Mike said, but
there wasn't any feeling behind the words. "For him that would be cannibalism. Right,
Frosty?"Bastards. You sick, sadistic
bastards, Claude thought. I wish I actually were a frost giant so I could
step on you and grind you into the carpet."So are you going to make us the
elixir, Frosty?"Claude looked up and swallowed. He
wanted to wipe his eyes, but Griff's claws still had hold of his shoulders. After a few
ragged breaths he responded. "It's awfully hard. It'd take me a long time to
compound."Mike nodded. "That's why you're
coming with us. Ariel, go pack him some stuff.""Sure, Mike." She breezed past,
pausing to ruffle Claude's wavy hair."Now," said Mike, "we-"Ka-Boom! The
sound reverberated through the walls and Claude screamed as Griff's claws poked into his
skin.Mike pulled out the hand wand. "What
did you just do, alchemist?""I- I-" Claude stammered, wanting to
back away but feeling the points of the gryphon's claws. "I had a potion on the
burner."Ariel poked her head out of his
bedroom. "What happened?"Griff let go of him and shoved Claude
forwards with his talons. "Asshole here left something on the stove.""Oh. Well-"The front door rattled and clicked, and
a thirtyish woman peered in nervously, her hair bleached white and ratted into a sideways
ponytail interwoven with a profusion of polished crystal beads."Francine?" Claude said.She stepped inside, talking in a rapid
stream. "Oh thank goodness you're alright, Claude. I was so worried. I heard the
explosion so I used the key you gave me for emergencies. You really shouldn't make
potions all alone. Jon always has me there when he summons a demon, just in case he
makes a mistake. What happened?""I-" Claude looked. Mike had slipped
the hand wand into his pocket, but Griff's claws and beak were still behind him. "I forgot
something on the burner.""Oh dear, I should have ignored that
sign on your door and knocked earlier, but I hadn't even considered that this batch might
apply to you too." She held out two crumpled slips of paper. "I made some of my fortune
cookies and look what they said."Claude read the fortunes:
There is great danger to one nearby. You will be in a position to stop it;
and Someone very close to you may depart this world before the day is
out."And after that, I told Jon not to do
any demon conjurations or anything like that. It hadn't even occurred to me that my
divinations might apply to you too, but I'm so glad you're alright."She looked at Mike and Ariel, then up
at Griff. "Hi. Not often Claude has someone over who's taller than he is." Francine
smiled and looked around. "So, what are all of you doing?"Mike hopped off the back of the arm
chair and spread his wings to their full span. "We're gonna go flying."Francine cocked her head to one side.
"I thought flying made you broomsick, Claude.""Uh-yeah-I-""I'll be flying. He's going piggyback."
Griff rested a talon on Claude's shoulder. "Real wings are the only way to fly."There was a deprecating noise from
Ariel, and Francine shrugged. "I wouldn't know-except for when I dream I'm a bird,
but-" She looked at Claude. "You okay?""He's just a little shook up," Mike said.
"He was about to go in the lab when the explosion happened.""Oh," Francine said, then paused a
moment. "Oh my goodness, my cookies! They'll be burnt to a crisp!" She grabbed the
doorknob and waved frantically. "Glad everything's alright. Have a nice time.
Bye.""Uh-" Claude began. Griff flexed a
talon on his shoulder. The door clicked shut behind her. Damn! Claude
thought. Sortilegists could be such airheads.Mike smiled. "You got nice
neighbors.""Yeah, nice." Griff chuckled like a
parrot.The angel shrugged and ruffled the
feathers on his wings. "Let's take a look at your lab."The damage wasn't too bad: A large
section of the workbench was blackened and bits of glass and droplets of potion were
scattered about the room. Claude put his finger into a spatter on the paint of the door
frame. The unfinished wishing potion ran down his finger, slick with rainbow and sparkle.
Claude silently cursed the Fates. He'd gotten too close and they'd pulled in the Thorns to
stop him.Mike stepped in front of Claude and
faced him. "The lab we've got has everything for making the elixir, but if there's anything
else you need, tell me what it is.""Uh," Claude said, "that paint set on
the shelf, my lucky cauldron, that knife, those bells, the grimoires-""The what's?" Mike asked."The books," Claude explained. "Um,
the silver kazoo, my fountain pen, that little wooden box-it's my traveling potion kit-and
those prisms. That's it, I think.""Good." Mike dumped everything into
the cauldron.Ariel appeared beside Claude with his
old sportsbag. "Got your stuff, alchemist. Clean underwear, that sort of thing."Mike walked out with the cauldron.
"Here, put this in the bag. I don't have room for it." He shoved the potion kit at
her.Ariel zipped them it in the sportsbag.
"Cool it, Mike."Griff flicked the catch on the sliding
glass door and opened it out onto the balcony. A light breeze ruffled in and the gryphon
sniffed. "Good updraft."Mike twitched his wings. "Seems like
everything's ready."Ariel took out some flying salve and
greased her wrists. A moment later she and the broomstick were levitating an inch above
the carpet.There was a click from the front door
again. "Oh," Francine said, stepping into the apartment. "I'm so glad I caught you before
you left. Here," She put a white paper sack in Claude's hands, "I wanted you to have
some of my fortune cookies."Claude put on the jean jacket Ariel
handed him and slipped the cookies inside. "Uh-Thanks."Mike looked at Francine and smiled.
"We're gonna be gone for a while. Mind locking up?""Oh, of course not."Claude got astride Griff. He couldn't
believe this. Francine sometimes acted dingy, but he'd never thought she could be such an
airhead.The giant gryphon stepped out onto
the balcony, grabbed the railing with his talons, and with a jack rabbit leap from his
hindquarters, vaulted over the edge. His wings unfolded and caught the air. Claude felt
his stomach come up in his mouth and grabbed the black feathers on Griff's back. "Hang
on," the gryphon screamed. "Here we go."Claude squeezed his legs as tight as he
could around Griff's huge girth, crushing feathers in his hands. Ariel sped over them on
the broomstick, making the gryphon say something obscene and unintelligible."Have a nice fly!" called Francine
behind them.It was one of the old robber barons'
keeps at the crest of Nob Hill, an example of budgetless San Francisco Victoriana. If
Claude had played tourist the day before, he might even have remembered some of the
mansion's history. As it was, he wasn't thinking about that just now.The gryphon crouched over him on the
marble steps, beak glinting murderously in the sunlight. "Why'd you have to urp all over
my feathers?""I get broomsick," Claude whispered
feebly.Mike shoved Claude out of the way
and glared up at gryphon. "Cool it, man. You knew the job was dangerous when you
took it."Ariel laughed. "You know the rules,
Griff. Go around back and get cleaned up. See ya." She patted his haunch.Griff switched his tail, red eyes still
fixed on Claude."C'mon." Mike grabbed Claude by the
collar and pushed open the door of the mansion. The air inside was cool and smelled of
mahogany and lemon oil. "Welcome to your new home."Ariel shut the door behind them and
Claude took in the entry hall. It was classic San Francisco mahogany and red velvet, with
lots of grossly expensive antique furniture. That wasn't what he was looking at.Directly over the mantel of the entry
hall fireplace was a portrait, a grinning skeleton in a top hat and purple frock coat. The
skull's eyes glowed dimly red. A white Eoh-Thorne bind-rune was painted on the front of
the hat, a recent addition to a much older painting.Claude wasn't religious, but he knew
his Voudoun, one of the oldest religions on the isle. He also knew which of the loa spirits
you didn't mess with and which cults you avoided.He backed into Mike, pointing a shaky
finger. "That's Baron Samedi."Mike patted him on the shoulder, then
pushed him forward. "That's right. Say hi to your host. That's who you're making the
elixir for."Claude stumbled and caught himself on
a claw-footed high table, the marble top cool beneath his fingers. A Tiffany vase tipped
slightly then rocked circular with a rapid drrrrr as it came to rest."Say hi," Mike ordered."Hi."Mike grabbed Claude's sleeve and
walked on. Claude was taken down a maze of halls and staircases bespeaking a century of
affluence and the desire to display it. Tables, vases, curio cabinets, all were antique, worth
a fortune in and of themselves and holding treasures worth far more. Crystal and gilt
along the way gave the illusion of gold and diamonds-and knowing the reputation of the
Samedi Cult, it might not all be illusion.They came to a set of double doors
carved with the seven illustrations from the book of Abraham the Jew, symbolic
representations of the seven stages of the Great Work. They were faithful reproductions,
down to the annoying inaccuracies, Claude noted."Here we go," Mike said. The angel
turned a gold key in the lock and swung the doors open. Claude stepped inside, taking in
the room.It was the type of alchemy lab he'd
always wanted; big as a gymnasium, with vaulted ceilings and skylights, one end done up
as a huge research library and sitting room with plush oriental rugs and wall hangings, the
other in bare granite with glass cases full of alchemicals and high stone tables for
compounding potions. In the corner, sharing the same end as the library, were a four-
poster and washstand and, very much in the old style, a chamber pot behind a screen and a
bell pull at the bedside.Mike stepped in beside him and leaned
against the left-hand door, taking out a switchblade and gesturing to the room. "This is it.
Genuine adept's lab, though the last one we had disappeared back in the twenties."Claude thought back into his
alchemical history. "Pierce Morgan?""Nah," Mike said. "This guy wasn't in
the books. He was an adept long time before they started taking their names down."Which was a long time ago, Claude
thought. Adepts didn't just disappear without it hitting the papers.Ariel brushed past, going to the stone
tables and placing the cauldron and sportsbag on top.Claude looked over at the angel and
Mike grinned at him, paring his nails with the knife. "You make the elixir, we let you and
your file go. That simple." Mike stabbed the door and sheathed the switchblade with a
nasty snikt. "You get difficult, we get difficult. And we work for Baron
Samedi. That means you get cute and off one of us, it ain't gonna do any good, 'cause we
got necromancy to make sure we stick around as haunts, twice as bad as we are right now.
And whatever you do to us, a thaumaturge can just undo, and we got one." Mike smiled.
"You got that?"Claude nodded in shock and Ariel
tripped by, grabbing Mike by the hand after running her fingers over other portions of his
anatomy. "C'mon, Mike."Mike smiled and let himself be led out
by Ariel, folding a wing around her. "Have fun, alchemist. See ya." He shut the door and
Claude heard the key turn in the lock.Claude went over to the gold velvet
sofa and sat down, the old wood creaking with his weight. He breathed out slowly.
Samedi cultists. The Thorns were linked in with the Samedi cultists. A shiver went up his
spine and he wished he'd been kidnapped by the Satanists instead. Satanists he could cope
with. The Satanic Temple was right there on Powell and Jeffreson, open to the public,
and Claude even had a friend who was a cambion, horns, hooves and all. Of course Piper
had run away and converted to Zen when he was sixteen, and he'd told Claude what a
bunch of whackos the Satanists were; but even so, their practices were public knowledge.
The legal ones, at least.Nobody knew for certain what the cult
of Baron Samedi did. But there were rumors-Zombies, death spells, curses. He'd heard
whisperings of them in college, a voudoun cult chock full of corrupt necromancers and
sorcerers, spiritualism of the nasty sort. The police and their oracles had never come up
with anything conclusive, but the rumors still persisted. And here were the Samedi
cultists. What did they want with the Elixir Vitæ?After a minute of just sitting and
staring, Claude shifted position and heard a crunkle from inside his jean jacket. He pulled
out the bag of fortune cookies Francine had given him and opened it. One of the cookies
had broken. He fished the fortune out of the pieces and read it: Only a silly goose
prepares the sauce for his own cooking.Claude glanced around. Sauce? They
wanted him to make the Elixir Vitæ, but after that they said they were
going to let him go. Right? He cracked another fortune cookie: A well prepared
fowl is usually dead.Claude felt the blood drain out his
knees. What was going on? They wanted him to make them the Elixir
Vitæ. Were they going to kill him after they got it?He clutched the white paper bag. After
all, why wouldn't they kill him? Once they got what they wanted, he'd be a liability to
whatever evil plot they had. But by the same token, he was a public figure, people asked
him for interviews all the time, and a murder investigation or a missing person's report
would cause more problems than an adept staying quiet for fear of his life.Claude couldn't explain it and didn't
bother to try-He smashed another cookie: Kill a man, you get his money. Kill a
bee, you get its honey. Kill a mink and you get a stole. What do you get when you kill a
soul?Claude almost screamed at the sight of
the morbid riddle. Kill a soul? Riddling prophecies could be fun, but not when they
concerned your own doom. He wasn't going to guess and smashed another cookie:
The root of all magic is spiritual.Claude thought a moment. He was an
alchemist, a wizard. There were two types of wizards: Those who had been born with
their magic naturally, a random gift, and those who had gotten their magic from a fay.
Natural wizards were rare and powerful, and he was one. Fey wizards were common, and
their power and spells lasted only as long as the original fay's spells held up, no matter
how skillful they were.Claude knew a lot of fey wizards, and
there was always that jealousy, 'I wish I had your magic.' But it was something you either
had or you didn't. He was born with the golden art as a part of his soul. You couldn't get
it somewhere else.He broke another fortune cookie:
The Golden Apple is desired by all, but no one eats the core.The Golden Apple was the symbol of
chaos. It was also the fruit of immortality. He'd drunk the Elixir Vitæ,
and that had mixed with his own natural magic to give him immortality. Physical
immortality, that is. He didn't age and he didn't get sick, but he'd die the same as anyone
else if he got sacrificed.Claude thought about it. He possessed
the magic of alchemy, the yellow art, the golden art, the Golden Apple. And his soul, the
core of his being, could be taken out or destroyed by the right corrupt necromancer,
leaving him an empty husk. A young, healthy, immortal husk.But destroying his soul would destroy
his magic too . . . unless . . . the necromancer worked with a spellbreaker, twisting the
magic and spinning their spells together to form a wildmagic of greater power. And a
spellbreaker, through the magic of apotropaism, could possibly reverse the nature of the
Elixir Vitæ, making it into the Elixir Mortis, the elixir
of mortality, instant death to any who drank it. Or someone in a apotropaic ceremony
could drink his elixir, the quintessence of his magic, and steal it and his immortality that
way. Or they could do both.Claude theorized a bit more. It was the
most disgusting ritual he'd ever heard of, but it might work, especially with a fay to help.
And with his own unwitting cooperation. But even if they were trying steal his magic,
would they really go so far as to kill him or destroy his soul? Why not just steal the magic
and have done with it? What magical purpose would his death serve?He grabbed out a handful of fortune
cookies and squeezed them into cookie crumbs: Death is the most symbolic of
endings; Virgin wool takes colors best; and Silly, silly, silly goose!
Applesauce is apple juice!Claude dropped the cookie crumbs on
the floor in horror. He didn't need anything more specific. They were going to kill him,
body and soul, stealing his magic and his immortality at the same time, maybe even
drinking his blood. And somehow they'd figured out he was a virgin, which made him all
the better for a sacrifice. How'd they know that?He paused, realizing that was a stupid
thing to worry about given all of his other problems. He hadn't had time to do much more
than study alchemy in college, and he'd gone in early, so it didn't take a sortilegist to guess
that he still hadn't 'lost it.' With lycanthropy and all the other sexually transmitted curses
running around, he'd thought he'd been playing it safe. He'd never thought it would come
to this.Claude stood up and then sat back
down. They were going to kill him, but not until they got the Elixir
Vitæ. So long as they didn't know that he knew, he'd be fine. He hoped.But what was he going to do? Claude
frantically cracked a fortune cookie: Behind the skull lies
enlightenment.Hands shaking as he read the fortune,
Claude looked up. Over the alchemical library's mantel was another portrait of Baron
Samedi, a cucurbit in the skeleton's hands holding a vignette of a graveyard and rotting
corpses, symbolic of the stage of Putrefaction, fourth step in the Great Work.Baron Samedi.
Samedi, Saturday in French. Saturday, Saturn's day. Saturn, the father
who eats his children, the death which consumes life, Time in his darker aspect, the
Reaper who cuts the unripe grain, the early frost.Of all the concepts in alchemical
symbolism, Saturn had frightened him the most as a child. Saturn, Saturn's day, Saturday,
Samedi, Baron Samedi. Like all encrypted magic, it became a gross
etymological pun once deciphered. Behind the skull lies enlightenment.He flung the scrap of paper to the
floor. Death was a path to knowledge, but not one he was going to take.Claude brushed the cookie crumbs off
his pants and got up. He hated that portrait, and knowing this mansion it had probably
been painted by a necromancer and had a little of the loa's spiritual reality behind the paint.
And he didn't like the way it was looking at him. If Samedi cultists were going to spy on
him, they damn well better do it in person.He dragged over an armchair, a fanciful
mahogany affair which belonged in a museum, and propped it against the right wall of the
fireplace. Climbing up on the arms, he took hold of one edge of the portrait's frame and
pulled. It was bolted to the wall. Claude grabbed the elaborate border with both hands
and wrenched, throwing his weight into it. He'd always looked more like a professional
football player or dragon slayer than an alchemist anyway, and for once his strength came
in handy.With a rending shriek, the right edge of
the frame came away from the wall and the portrait swung sideways with Claude still
hanging from it. The wood then buckled and the canvas tore and Claude fell hard to the
hearth rug, half of the frame in his hands.His shoulder ached, but as he sat up
and felt around, he found nothing broken. Claude shook his head. If he was going to
escape a bunch of deranged voodoo cultists intent on sacrificing his body and fileting his
soul, he wasn't going to do it by mindless vandalism of their mansion, satisfying as that
might be.He glanced up at Baron Samedi's
shredded skull. The left half of the portrait dangled perpendicular from its hinges, the
painting hanging in strips.Claude picked up right half of the
broken frame. One rosette of the twined death roses was empty, its center a perfectly
smooth hole, the outer edge grimed with dust and multiple coats of varnish.He got to his feet and looked above the
mantel. Set into the wall was a square of black granite, incised with a hand in a circle
limned in gold. Where the right half of the frame had been, all that was left was a wooden
button, the center of the empty rosette.Claude dropped the broken frame and
got back up on the mantel. Not even quite sure what he was doing, he placed his left hand
palm to palm with the one etched in stone. Violet fox fire flickered around the circle, and
the stone dematerialized.He flexed his hand in the open air and
recognized the trace of sorcery that had guided it. The key to the safe was an adept's
palm, and as an adept he had been judged worthy. Or something like that-wardings could
be so pompous, though he had a feeling that if he hadn't been an adept, he would have
been frizzled like a fritter. Claude shook his head to clear it of the muzziness of
ensorcelment and looked into the safe.Sitting on shelves, neatly labeled and
filmed with dust, were the greatest of alchemicals: the White Elixir, the Red Elixir, the
Powder of Projection, the Yellow Tincture and the Philosophers Stone. Everything but
the Elixir Vitæ and the Panacea. An adept's personal stash, and quite a
bit of it too. Whoever had been here before had been a lot wiser when they went about
the Great Work, or at least had had the foresight to make a large supply of all the
preliminary materials. Potions, like chocolate chip cookies, were best made in large
batches. You could always find something to do with leftovers.Claude smiled. Beyond the
skull lies enlightenment. Off to one side of the safe were a slim journal and a
slightly thicker grimoire.He reached for the notebook first and
flipped through the faded parchment. It was in some Slavic language Claude couldn't
read, but the diagrams were enough to show that someone had indeed succeeded in the
Great Work in 1647. Someone who'd disappeared in the twenties, Mike had said.Claude glanced at the Philosophers'
Stone and the elixirs, not quite believing that the Thorns hadn't known they were here if
they wanted the Elixir Vitæ so badly. And if they hadn't, it was awfully
convenient that he'd stumbled onto them. Too convenient. The whole thing had gone
beyond the long arm of Fate. It was just too weird. There had to be a hex involved.Claude looked at the rainbow stain of
the wishing potion on his finger. That or else wildmagic from the explosion had led to this
chain of events. He sucked at the drop of wishing potion. In either case, the hexery might
save his life if he took advantage of it.Claude replaced the journal, then got
down off the mantel and went back to the bag of fortune cookies. He broke one, pausing
to shove the crumbs in his mouth. The fortune read: The wise man knows that
books hold more answers than he does.He went back to the mantel, but the
granite block with the gold hand had reappeared in his absence. Hesitantly, he placed his
palm on the stone. The fox fire flickered and the stone again dematerialized.Claude took out the grimoire, gold leaf
showing dully under the dust. It was immensely heavy for such a small book. He went
back to the sofa and broke another cookie to make sure that this was the book he was
looking for. The wise man also knows when not to ask stupid
questions.He wasn't going to look a gift pegasus
in the mouth. Claude ran a finger down the leather and felt the cool supple texture, dust
coming away. He then folded back the cover and realized the binding wasn't done in gold
leaf, it was solid gold, leather touched by the Philosophers' Stone.Claude frowned and looked at the title
page, gilt-edged vellum. Scribed in gold ink were the words A Formula for
Chaos. An apple in gold leaf sat below, like an unbitten version of the Apple
Spellcaster logo.Claude paged through the grimoire. It
dealt with a bit of discredited eighteenth century magical theory known as the dimensions.
Actually it made quite a bit of sense; demons always referred to several different hells, so
it was perfectly reasonable that there would be just as many earths-though of course only
a fool would trust the word of a demon. At least ones from hell-demons born and raised
in California were perfectly okay, or at least most of them were.The book gave a formula for an
alchemical gas which could open a random, temporary gateway between worlds. He
pulled out another fortune cookie just to make sure this was it. No time to
prepare. Necessity dictates that you start immediately.Claude slammed the book and looked
up, then quickly found his place again since he hadn't the faintest idea where to start.
Sublimate of fog, tincture of irresolution, and the oil of the unknown. He got up and went
to the other end of the laboratory.Shelves held rows and rows of
alchemicals-in alphabetical order, thankfully. Finding the proper ingredients, he emptied
the prescribed amounts into an Erlenmeyer flask, swirling them gently together. Now
spirits of snow, rose essence, and oil of white. He continued to add to the complex
mixture. Okay. Now- A dram of the Universal Solvent? Claude looked back at the
book. Yep, that's what it called for, to dissolve the barrier between worlds and allow
entrance to the primal chaos.Claude stared nearly cross-eyed at the
book. The primal chaos? He paused and reread that section. The fog created was
supposed to temporarily dissolve the barrier between worlds, opening a gate into the
primal chaos. Supposedly those who used the formula would be shielded from the worst
of the powers of chaos, and would only be hurled into a random, parallel world and time.
There were protections, certainly, but even so . . .Well, he'd used the Universal Solvent
before. The formula needed to be created by the admixture of the White Elixir and the
Red Elixir, naturally, with an infusion of-He paused again. Lotus essence? That
was what kids on the street were getting stoned on, one of the most illegal alchemicals.
Claude could understand the reasoning behind the need for both, but lotus essence and the
Universal Solvent were lethal enough by themselves. Not to mention the primal chaos.
He crushed a fortune cookie: Ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to do-or
die. Well that was a lovely little prophecy. He smashed another one: He
who hesitates is lost!Not one to ignore signs and portents,
let alone Francine's cookie fortunes, Claude looked through the cases. There it was, lotus
essence. There was some consolation to being held prisoner by a broomstick gang.He got a set of the Red and White
Elixirs from the wall safe, then paused to swing the trashed portrait of Baron Samedi back
into place. It didn't look quite right, but would pass casual inspection, or at worst just
seem like he went temporarily nuts and decided to shred the portrait-which was pretty
much what had happened anyway. Claude didn't like the idea of a loa spirit watching him,
but it would be worse if his discovery were discovered. And if the portrait really did a
spell on it, trashing it might have trashed the magic anyway. Then again, it may have just
royally pissed off the loa.He tossed the broken pieces of frame in
the wood bin, then gathered up the stray cookie fortunes and finished the cold mixture of
alchemicals. Claude poured it into ten crystal potion flasks. Makes ten eight-
ounce bottles, he thought incongruously, expecting the Universal Solvent to eat
through the glass at any moment; but its nature must have been warped by the lotus
essence. Hopefully. Now what?Claude paused. The ingredients were
getting rarer and rarer, and even the adept's safe didn't have this one. But he did.He got his ceremonial gold athame out
of the cauldron and pricked his left ring finger. One drop of adept's blood in each to act as
catalyst.The blood welled up on his fingertip,
daffodil yellow. It was the one change the Elixir Vitæ had wrought in
him that he hadn't quite gotten used to yet. But bright yellow blood had seemed a pretty
small price to pay for physical immortality. He hadn't known people would try to kill him
for it.The pale blue potions congealed at the
touch of the yellow blood, swirling into a strange opaque red. Sucking his pricked finger,
blood tasting more of sulfur than salt, he read the concluding part of the recipe and his
eyes got wider in disbelief with each line. "This guy's got to be kidding," he gasped.
"Where in the hell am I supposed to get a stuffed crocodile? And I'll be damned if I recite
this gibberish." Claude glared at the prescribed incantation. He paused, unsure of what to
do, then grabbed for a fortune cookie. Claude stuffed the handful of crumbs in his mouth
as he read the slip of paper: Necessity is the mother of invention. Have an affair
with her. He looked at the fortune. How? Claude smashed one more of the
prophetic cookies. Only a fool asks who's there/When Death comes knocking at
the door.His mouth went so dry that he could
hardly swallow the crumbs. How was he supposed to cast the spell without the necessary
props? He snatched up the grimoire and studied the list of outdated paraphernalia,
wondering where he was going to get any of them.There was a sharp click from the door
and Claude's heart jumped so hard it was painful. He clutched the book to his chest and
looked as the door opened.Ariel stood there, a tray in her hands.
She cocked her head to one side. "Thought you might want something to eat." She
stepped into the lab, kicking the door shut behind her. With a provocative sway to her
hips, Ariel went and set the tray down on one of the spare stone tables. She surveyed the
potion flasks. "Not wasting any time, are you?"Claude lowered the book and tried to
look a little more relaxed while at the same time blocking a clear view of the portrait of
Baron Samedi. "Uh, no. I want to get home."She smiled, a nasty knowing smile and
Claude knew exactly what it meant. His heart pounded.Ariel moved closer to him and picked
up the lotus essence. "Partying, alchemist?"Claude felt the soft gold of the
grimoire denting under his fingernails. "No. I need it as an ingredient.""Oh." She smiled."Listen, you're really disrupting my
concentration. If you want the elixir, you have to leave me alone to work on it.
Okay?""Sure, man. Whatever you say." Ariel
unstopped the lotus essence and dipped in a long fingernail. She placed it in her mouth,
sucking luxuriantly. "Mmm, good shit." She set the bottle on the counter, patted him on
the rear, allowing her fingertips to roam for a second, then wandered to the door,
humming some pop tune. "Just ring if you need anything."She shut the door behind herself and
the lock clicked. Claude stared after her. Almost caught, and he still needed to get ritual
implements. He could ask the Thorns if he could go looking through their attic or prop
room, but they'd probably ask too many questions, and he'd freak out and-He slammed the book shut and grabbed
for another fortune cookie: If you can't make it, fake it.There was no arguing with that logic.
He slipped out of his jean jacket. He should be wearing only his ceremonial color if he
was going to do a spell; it could give the ritual extra power, something that he needed a
lot of right now. Hastily, he kicked off his blue running shoes and got a pair of yellow
jogging shorts out of his sportsbag, though left his jockey shorts where they were.He took a piece of yellow chalk from a
blackboard in the corner and retraced one of the large rings set into the floor. What
should the inner design be? Triangle? Pentagram? Mandala? On impulse, he made the
circle into a smiley face. Why not.Claude set the bottles on the eyes and
mouth, then found a small incense burner, cast in the shape of a grinning imp. He put a
couple of incense cones on its forked tongue, fished his Swiss army knife out of his
pocket, and pulled a small silver tine from among the other tools. The tip glowed red the
minute it was fully unsheathed, and he touched it to the incense. He folded the knife
away, then snapped the burner shut and placed it in the center of the circle. Smoke began
to issue from its ears. Claude studied the figure: It looked just as ridiculous as a stuffed
crocodile. That was probably good.He closed his eyes and exhaled. Now
for the incantation. Claude stood before the figure, lowered his deep voice, and intoned
the rhyme, making it up as he went along:Differences in time and space,
Uh- Meld, unite, and interface,
Juxtapose and then . . . connect,
Interweave and intersect,
One is all and all is one,
And so since time and space begun.
He winced as he pronounced the last
word of the incantation and hoped that his magic wouldn't care that he had gotten the
tense wrong.Like the wrath of a vengeful English
teacher, light flashed from the eyes of the incense burner. The twin beams focused on the
flask of potion at the base of the smile and the glass began to glow pink, the luminescence
spreading to the other nine bottles. The light from the figure soon grew to such intensity
that Claude had to shield his eyes. A sudden bang made him flinch. When he looked, the
light had stopped and the head of the incense burner was open in a somnolent yawn. He
sighed in relief: even though there had been a lot of wildmagic from the makeshift
incantation, the bottles were still intact and the liquid inside had changed to a greyish pink.
It looked as if he had been successful.He smashed another fortune cookie.
Even if not being perfection itself, your work will serve your purposes.
Well, that was nice. But what was wrong with the potions? He crushed another:
Only those of magic and that which is theirs may pass through magic and that
which is its. He wrinkled his forehead in thought. Only creatures of magic could
use the potions? Well, as an adept he certainly qualified.There was a slam of the doors being
thrown open and bouncing off the walls. Claude dropped the bag."Hiya!" Mike stepped into the room,
spreading his wings. The backdraft as he took off slammed the doors closed. Mike did a
somersault in the air, arcing through the vault of the laboratory, and landed in front of
Claude, wings straight up. The angel brought them down carefully and mechanically, like
the furling of antique fans. Claude grabbed for the bottles of elixir so they wouldn't be
knocked over, but he couldn't feel even the slightest wind ruffle his hair.Mike spun on a boot-heel, facing the
workbench. "Great place here. Always liked alchemy. Always wished I could do it." He
glanced back over his shoulder and grinned. Claude knew the thoughts behind that grin
and clutched the half-full bottle of the Red Elixir to his chest. "But I guess it's only for
alchemist's like you," Mike finished, turning back. Claude heard the lie behind the words
and shuddered. Mike was the one who would get the power. They were going to
sacrifice him so Mike could become an alchemist.The angel poked a finger at the cookie
crumbs and the fortunes lying on the workbench. "What you got-"One glance through those fortunes
would tell Mike everything. In panic, Claude swung the bottle down, clubbing him in the
back of the head. The glass shattered and the Red Elixir sprayed everywhere.Claude backed away, knowing the Red
Elixir's power. "You-" Mike swore, spinning, wings sweeping across the workbench.
Potions fell to the floor, including the White Elixir. Glass and droplets flew and the White
Elixir joined the Red in a shimmer of alchemy, forming the Universal Solvent. Tiles, glass,
flesh, and everything else in contact with the alkahest bubbled and hissed. The angel
screamed and collapsed, sinking into the floor as it dissolved along with him."I-" Mike said, but whether his last
words were a statement, a plea, a threat or a curse, Claude couldn't tell. Mike had been
dissolved, and a hole in the floor and the workbench along with him.Claude continued to move away until
his back touched the far wall. He reached out and grabbed a handful of the drapery, using
it to wipe away the Red Elixir on his hands. He'd never meant for anything like that to
have happened. He slid to the floor, clutching the heavy velvet to him. It was cool and
dark and he huddled into the folds. He'd never meant to kill anyone. He'd only meant to
stun him, but the bottle had broken and-Claude let the tears flow free, clutching
the soft darkness of the old velvet to his face, and cursed the Fates or the hex or whoever
was responsible for all this happening. He hadn't wanted any of it. All he'd wanted was a
nice home and a nice alchemy practice and maybe someone who'd . . .A bit later, his tears had subsided
enough that could go and look more closely at the scene of the accident. Except for a
stray feather, Mike was gone and a hole in the floor led down to the floor below and the
floor below that and probably the basement beyond. New tears wet his face, and Claude
let them fall freely.He looked on the floor. Knocked aside
amid the wreckage was one last fortune cookie. He picked it up and broke it open:
If you wish to leave all your troubles behind, it is best they thought you
dead.Claude thought a second, then got his
fountain pen and a piece of paper and wrote:Last Will and Testament and First and Last Suicide Note
Claude Amadeus Almont, A.A.
(Adept Alchemist)
He propped the note up on the shelves
of alchemicals, then went to the adept's safe and took out two more bottles of the White
and Red Elixirs. He poured the entire contents of the Red Elixir into a pool on the tiles
and set the empty flask by the note. He then stood back and threw the White Elixir into
the Red. It shattered and dissolved a second whole in the floor.Claude went and got his sportsbag,
loaded in all but one of the transfer potions from the circle, and zipped it shut. He took a
deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Well, here goes," he said to the silent room and smashed
the potion bottle at his feet. A cloud of greyish-pink fog billowed up and enveloped
him.When it dissipated a second later, he
was gone as well.Nicole wore her mall-attack gear: pale
green cropped cotton blouse, blue denim skirt, white high-tops and a silver neck chain.
Her portable CD player was holstered to her right, headphones in a torc around her neck
with the cord stretched across her chest like a bandolier. An overstuffed Hermes bag hung
blackjack-ready from her left hand, while in her right she held the goods of a dozen
merchants.Me Nicole, brave white
huntress, Nicole thought, dumping her plunder on one of the mall benches.
Eastridge Mall no match for Nicole, greatest huntress in San Jose. Bravest
huntress in all Northern California.She brushed a strand of hair out of her
face and sat down, then began to transfer everything to a rainbow-striped carryall she'd
gotten at Macy's: a pair of jeans, a couple sweaters, a couple CD's, a bag of gold chains
from some unknown-percentage-off sale, two beach towels and something from the
Waldenbooks bargain table titled The Valley Girl Lexicon.Nicole glanced at the book before
stuffing it in next to the towels. God, what dated trash. She didn't even know why she'd
bought it, except that Walden's hadn't had anything new in except for yet-another-
Dragonlance-and/or-Star-Trek novel, and she'd read more than enough of them to know
what the next one would be.She didn't know why she'd bought any
of it. Nicole kicked the carryall up against the bars of the second level railing, then got up
and leaned against it herself, looking down at the reflecting pool of the mall fountain,
which had been turned off to conserve water. Not as if they ever put new water in the
fountain anyway.Her hair fell down two feet straight,
dark brown, and she stared past it at her reflection in the pool below. She had what might
have been called a sculptured face, but by a sculptor who had been more interested in
contours than angles. Her nose wasn't short enough to be called a snub, or turned up
enough to warrant the pug description, and her cheekbones, eyebrows, and chin were even
less remarkable. Her one good feature, she admitted, was clear skin-a rare virtue in a girl
not-quite-yet seventeen. As if to make up for this, she had freckles, a light smattering
across the cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were green, with the little
epicanthic fold in the corner, and she had tinted contacts to make them look greener, but
the blue tiles in the pool made their reflection look muddy black.Nicole straightened up and brushed her
hair back over her shoulders, wondering if she should go see a movie since there wasn't
much more that she wanted to buy. Actually, there hadn't been anything she's wanted to
buy, but there hadn't been any other alternatives. "Well, dear," her mother had said, "your
father and I are going to the Anderson's for the weekend, so it's up to you to amuse
yourself. Go shopping or practice ballet or go to that dugong or
whatever you call it."The word was
dojong, but Nicole wasn't in the mood for tae-kwon-do right now,
though it would be fun to kick someone. She glanced around the mall's upper level,
visualizing ninja sneak attacks on several shoppers. Ballet was also out, if just because she
wasn't in the mood for people who thought 5'7" was awkward and ungainly for a woman.
And the drama club had just struck the sets for the last production, and casting for
"Arsenic and Old Lace" wouldn't begin for a week. Nicole smirked. She'd probably get
one of the old ladies, and right now the idea of poisoning people and burying them in the
basement appealed to her.Unfortunately, her house didn't have a
basement, so all that left was shopping. She got out her wallet and glanced through it.
Almost forty in cash, left from the two twenties her mother had given her for lunch, and
charge cards for the Emporium, Macy's, Nordstrom's and VISA, all of which her mother
had also given her. Nicole took them out and looked at the neat raised gold lettering on
all four. Nicole Elaine Scarborough. Yep, that was her. The cards were
just another part of her mother's control game. At the end of the month, her mother
would look over the statements and know exactly where she'd gone and what she'd done-
far easier than ever asking her daughter about her life. VISA gold card-Big Mother is
watching you.Nicole weighed the cards in her hand.
They weren't shuriken, but they would do. Taking the Emporium card first, she aimed
carefully at the two-and-a-half story metal sculpture rising up out of the fountain and let
fly. A bit light, but the card still made a decent clang against the polished metal pipes
before fluttering down into the water. Nicole followed it with the Nordstrom's card.
"Why doesn't something interesting happen!?!?!?"Several people stopped and stared and
Nicole gave them the mad laugh she'd practiced for Ophelia. She fired off the Macy's
card, hoping she looked completely insane, then finished with the VISA. She'd go
downtown, give all her cash to the first homeless person she found, leave the carryall on a
park bench, and tell her mother she'd been robbed at gun-"What do you think you're-" A hand
landed on her shoulder and Nicole spun, grabbing hold of it and stopping just short of
flipping the owner over the railing onto the level below. She stared up into the startled
brown eyes of a man in his mid-twenties wearing a hooded red sweat shirt and surfer pants
and one of those quartz crystal pendants you find in head shops and New Age book
stores.He pulled his arm away from her.
"What do you think you're doing here? Don't you know that you're weakening the fabric
of the universe?""What?"He went pale. "The Veils! Every time
you rend the veils, it weakens the space-time continuum. Perfectly innocent wardrobes
become dimensional gates-not to mention the cultural contamination."Something in the back of Nicole's mind
told her that she should feel lucky, as this was the first raving lunatic she had ever met.
Though as it was, all she could manage was an incredulous "Huh?""Go back to your own dimension!
You're-""Jason," interrupted an icy voice, of the
type that typically brooks no contradiction, "what are you bothering this girl for?"Nicole looked over at a middle-aged
woman in a pink and green pastel 'dress-for-success' meets Miami Vice
suit, and the guy in the surfer clothes said, "Ms. Hope! She's the one!"Ms. Hope looked over Nicole with a
cool wire-rimmed stare. "Jason, I find that highly unlikely. The man
we're looking for isn't a shapechanger.""No!" he said loudly, making several
more passerby on the mall stop, stare, and quickly walk away. "I had a vision! She's the
one!" He pointed, nearly sticking his finger in Nicole's eye. "The Gate Mistress!"Ms. Hope looked carefully at Nicole
and the frames of her glasses sparkled oddly. "Jason, she's never been out of this
dimension.""But I had a vision!""You had too much cold pizza.
Remember that ridiculous prophecy you spouted last year after you went to the
smorgasbord?""But she was just casting a
spell-"Ms. Hope grabbed his arm. "Enough,
Jason." She turned to Nicole. "Please excuse him. He's suffering from . . ." She paused.
"Uh, jet lag. So sorry to bother you." She dragged him off into the mall. "Jason, I trust
my own glasses more than I trust your deranged visions. I tell you . . ."Nicole watched the two leave. And
she thought she'd been going crazy. Obviously it was something best left to the
professionals.Enveloped by the vapor, Claude fell in
a spiral of vertigo. Multihued shapes swam before his eyes like the afterimages of pixie-
light in the darkness-or darkness in the sun. His skin felt as sensitive as if he were in the
grips of a fever spirit-but there was nothing to feel. An insidious,
maddening, cloying whisper hissed words he couldn't understand, promising everything,
nothing, something, anything-but it couldn't promise, not really, since he couldn't actually
hear it. A strange, tenuous odor dared him to identify it while he was unable to do more
than sense its presence. Snatches of half-remembered aftertastes coursed across his
palate, but were gone before he could put a name to them.Claude drifted through the mist until
suddenly light and sound exploded around him. He groped for something, anything
tangible, found it, leaned over, and retched uncontrollably."What in the hell are you doing?" a
girl's voice shrieked, outraged."Mary Ann, if you have to ask that,
you're stupider than you look," said another girl's voice.Mary Ann shrilled, "But Lynette, he's
barfing all over the clearance table!""I don't blame him. Those dresses
make me want to puke too."Claude tried to stand but an attack of
the dry heaves overcame him. He felt a cool hand on his shoulder and a quiet voice asked
him, "Are you all right?" Claude nodded weakly and opened his eyes to see the interior of
a women's clothing store. Some of the designs were so bizarre that he knew it could be
nothing else.He stood up shakily."Are you sure you're alright?" repeated
a tall, pretty, young black woman with glass beads in her hair and a badge pinned to the
front of her dress, proclaiming, LYNETTE: AST. MANAGER."I think so," Claude said. He rubbed
his eyes. Upon closer inspection of the store, he noticed his additions to the clearance
table. "I'm really sorry about that. How much do I-""Nothing," Lynette interrupted and
added, "Diane, you work the cash register. Mary Ann, get those dresses in a bag and take
them into the janitors' room. There's a big sink in there that you can wash them in. When
you're finished, hang them up on the sprinkler system pipe that runs along the
ceiling."Mary Ann objected. "You're not
thinking of selling them now, are you?""Heck no, girl. We'll send them to the
clearance center. Diane, you make out the transfer form.""What should I put as the reason for
their not selling?""Say that the customers found them
nauseating."Diane giggled."Where am I?" Claude asked softly.
He was shuddering and the ichor seemed to have drained out of his hands and feet."You need some fresh air. Here,"
Claude found something foisted into his hand, "drink this. The entrance to the mall's that
way."Claude took a sip of lukewarm coffee
and wandered into the complexities of an indoor shopping mall, trying to collect his
thoughts. He'd killed someone. The memory hit him like a block of ice and he felt the
coffee slosh and dribble warm down his hand. He'd killed Mike, the angel. It had been an
accident, he hadn't meant to, but he'd panicked and he'd smashed the bottle of the Red
Elixir, then Mike knocked over the White Elixir, and the Universal Solvent had dissolved
him. And Mike had been planning to kill him, body and soul, and steal his magic and-
He sat down heavily on the edge of a
fountain and began to cry again, dimly becoming aware of a tingling in his right hand.
Claude looked and saw the stain of the wishing potion mixed with the Red Elixir and
coffee, his own tears acting as catalyst as the potions began to undergo some sort of
reaction.Quickly he plunged his hands into the
fountain, scrubbing frantically at the stain. There was no telling what the reaction might
be, especially considering his emotional state. The wildmagic could go insane, he drunk
some of the coffee, and . . .Claude scrubbed more, wishing that the
water were moving-that was the simplest way to suspend a runaway reaction or other
uncontrolled spell-but unfortunately the mall's management hadn't seen fit to have an
undine conjured to operate the fountain. Though maybe there was a drought.Opalescent sparkles filtered away from
his fingertips, winking out as they touched the coins on the bottom, and on second
thought Claude was glad that there wasn't an undine-there was no telling what even
dampened wildmagic would do to a water elemental.The worst of the alchemicals were off
in a minute, but Claude knew he should give his hands a proper washing in running water.
He stood up and shook off his hands, then suddenly realized that he was wearing just
socks on his feet when he almost slipped on an especially smooth tile on the mall
floor.Claude got out the running shoes Ariel
had put in his sportsbag and put them on, then finished the last of the coffee, crumpled the
paper cup, and threw it in a nearby garbage can. He looked around, seeing a restaurant
dubbed The Magic Pan. The name was rather silly, advertising the
obvious. Claude shook his head-you could never understand these nouvelle cuisine
places anyway-and entered. He was hungry, they'd have a sink with running water, and
he needed to use the bathroom anyway.The hostess seated him quickly at a
table by the window, and just as quickly he asked for some water, agreed to the special of
the day-whatever it was-and went into the restroom.Claude went to the sink and turned on
both taps. The Red Elixir had stained his hands like blood and the liquid soap fizzed
strangely in reaction with the alchemical. Claude scrubbed at the stain, using more and
more soap and feeling like Lady Macbeth. He'd never meant to kill anyone. It was an
accident. It had just happened. He'd killed Mike, and he'd escaped the Thorns and the
Samedi cultists and his world. Everything he knew was gone.A drop splashed onto his hands
followed by another and another, and Claude realized he was crying again. He knelt down
at the sink, hearing the tap gush like a waterfall as he let the tears come, one after
another.He didn't know how long he knelt
there, crying, asking for forgiveness, telling himself he didn't need any since Mike had
meant to kill him and knowing that that didn't make any difference at all. He had killed
another person. Another thinking, living person. He hadn't meant to, it had been an
accident, but like all crimes of passion, in the heat of the moment he had done something,
and someone had died.No one came in and asked him if
anything was wrong. Or if they did, they didn't stay.Finally, Claude looked up at his tear-
stained face in the mirror, blue eyes ichorshot, puffy and yellow-rimmed. God he looked
awful. He stood up, leaning on the tap and letting his weight shut it. Slowly he wiped
away the tears on his face, then splashed cold water in his eyes and felt better in a
minute.Claude went into a stall and locked the
door behind him. After using the facilities for their intended purpose, he realized that he'd
ordered lunch and didn't have any money on him. And even if he did, it probably wouldn't
be the right currency for wherever he was. A minor emergency, but something he could
deal with.He unzipped his sportsbag and
removed the box of potions. Inside, there were about four dozen small crystal vials, most
of which had eyedropper tops, and a few larger ones. Claude sorted through the vials
until he found one filled with a clear fluid and another containing a dark gold syrup. He
flipped up the lid of the toilet and reached for the flasket of clear fluid. Even though
purity oil was a rare all-purpose antivenin and antitoxin, Claude had no wish to put his
fingers into any sort of curse which might be lurking in the toilet, especially an extra-
dimensional one, so he squeezed a drop of the oil into the water where it quickly
disassociated. Venereal curses, for some reason he didn't understand, had a kind of life to
them which could be destroyed by subjecting them to heat or any of various
alchemicals.He had just screwed the cap back on
the bottle when it occurred to him that he might not have killed anything and just made a
bunch of clean curses, so he got out a vial of smoky black oil marked with a skull and
crossbones. He unstopped it gingerly and let one small drop fall into the toilet. The water
turned a brackish black, then suddenly switched back to clear as the first oil neutralized
the second. Claude put the Oil of Death back with the other bottles and flushed the toilet
twice to make sure that the last of it was gone. He figured he was safe then because any
curse that could survive the Oil of Death would probably have gotten him already.Claude took out the third bottle.
Ethical dilemma, here we come. What was worse, counterfeiting, or
getting arrested for stiffing a restaurant when you'd just been through the most awful
experience of your life and all you wanted to do was eat something and drown your
sorrows in nouvelle cuisine? Claude's stomach growled in answer and he removed the
stopper, then tilted the vial gently over the toilet until a trickle of golden fluid fell in.Faerie gold philtre was almost more
difficult to compound than it was worth-especially with the legal penalties for making and
using it-but once he'd made it on a dare his last year in school, he'd just never gotten
around to throwing it away. While certainly not the Great Work, the philtre was a good
exercise, and he was sure the experience had helped him achieve the Elixir
Vitæ.The honey-colored droplet diffused
slowly in the water, shading it delicate amber. Claude dropped a piece of toilet paper into
the commode. For an instant it shimmered, then a tracery of green lines appeared on its
surface. A second time it blurred and then took on the appearance of a slip of crisp green
and white paper. He fished the note out of the toilet and saw the portrait of a man with
tousled hair named Jackson plus the number twenty in each corner and the words
The United States of America.Claude had been to the United States
once or twice, but didn't remember the currency being anything like this. It was mostly
silver. However, the banknote in his hands was proof that not only was he in an alternate
world, just like the formula for chaos had said, he'd also moved to the mainland. Except
everything looked pretty much the same as before-he was in a perfectly ordinary shopping
mall somewhere in the United States.Claude tore off eleven more sheets of
paper and threw them in the commode. They metamorphosed quickly. He plucked them
out and dried them on some fresh tissue, then threw the toilet paper in the bowl and
flushed what appeared to be a pile of twenty-dollar bills. Claude grinned. He had always
wanted to flush money down the toilet.He put the bills in his wallet and the
box back in the bag, then went and washed his hands again before returning to the
restaurant. A waitress had left a glass of water while he was gone. He took a sip of,
unsure of what he was going to do. He'd not only left California, but the entire world he'd
grown up on. However, most of the important factors in one world were supposed to
remain in its parallel, or at least that's what the Formula for Chaos had said.Then he remembered that in his haste
to get away, he had left behind the grimoire. Damn! Damn!! Damn!!!
Claude thumped the table so hard that he knocked the wine glass over. Self-consciously,
he righted it as most of the restaurant's patrons who had nothing better to do stared at
him. He ignored them, thinking.This was a different world. That meant
that all the prophecies that depended on his old world were meaningless and irrelevant.
The only one that might still hold true was the one about becoming a frost giant.He thought some more. The most
important thing to find out was if this worlds' governments also condoned the genocide of
giants and idolized such depraved historical figures as Jack the Giant-Killer. If it did not,
there was always work for a good alchemist, regardless of size, and if it did, he still had
nine more potions with which to try nine more worlds."Hello," said a woman in a pink pastel
business suit, sitting down in the chair opposite him. Claude sprayed his water across the
table over her, then gulped down what was left in his mouth.She took a spare napkin and wiped
herself off. "Don't worry, it's no trouble. Sit down, Jason." A young man in surfer
clothes sat down next to her. She looked up at Claude and smiled. "My, you startle
easily.""Who are you?" was all that Claude
could manage."Me? I'm Dominique Hope, and this is
Jason. And you're . . .""Claude," said Jason. "You're Claude,
Claude Almont, right?"Claude nodded, then looked at the pair.
"Fay and sortilegist?""Yes," she said, smiling. "Dominique
le Fay and Jason Stargazer."Claude sighed. "I should have known
you would follow me."Jason looked at him curiously. "You
know who we are?"Ms. Hope shrugged. "You should
hardly be surprised, Jason. Alchemists are the Jacks of all trades in the wizardry business,
next to fays, of course."The alchemical reaction in Claude's
mind didn't come out with the proper result. The sortilegist was surprised that he knew
who they were? Except the Thorns had told him who he was dealing with right from the
start. Claude looked up at them. "You're from the Cult of Baron Samedi."Jason looked shocked and bewildered,
a standard expression for sortilegists when they don't understand something, while
Dominique Hope just looked mildly perplexed. "Hardly. Whyever would you think
that?"Claude leaned away. "You want to kill
me and steal my magic," he hissed. "I know all about your plan and I already killed one of
you and I'll do it again." That last was a lie the sortilegist would probably know
immediately, but it was his best bluff now that he was backed into a corner.The fay sucked her lower lip. "Well,
that certainly explains why you skipped dimensions." She put up her hand and signaled a
waitress. "A carafe of your best Chablis, please."The waitress nodded and walked off
and Ms. Hope turned back to Claude. "No, we are not the Cult of Baron Samedi or
anything resembling it. We are the Guardians Of Dimensional Secrets.""The . . ." Claude trailed off.Ms. Hope rolled her eyes. "Yes, I
know the acronym's a little pretentious, but it's less silly than a lot of things they call
dimensional travellers, and people tend to remember it. Anyway, we are a league of
concerned wizards and . . . concerned wizards, and we attempt to regulate the flow of
interdimensional traffic and try to keep it limited to only trained wizards and . . . certain
other researchers.""What she means," Jason said, "is that
we're going to take you back to your own dimension. You don't belong in this world, and
right now anyone who knows the right spells can use the law of sympathy on you to pass
through the veils to this dimension from yours."Claude couldn't believe how stupid the
Samedi cultists must think he was. "I'm not going back."Ms. Hope smiled. "I'm afraid you don't
have any choice in the matter. We're going to take you back. One of our goetians is
going to teleport us home in three hours time, and we're taking you with us."The waitress brought the wine, cocking
her head to one side. "Anything else?""No, not yet, thank you." Ms. Hope
poured glasses for herself and Jason. "If you're worried about some silly little voodoo
cult, we have means to protect you, and we hope and expect you to join us in time.""Actually," said Jason, "the Cult of
Baron Samedi is very powerful, and has franchises in more than one dimension.""Jason!" Ms. Hope looked piqued.
"First of all, don't go telling classified information, and second, religions do
not have franchises.""But they generally operate on the
same socioeconomic basis and in the same manner as-""Jason, no." She turned back to
Claude. "I'm sorry. I realize that the Samedi Cult is a thoroughly unpleasant and
dangerous enemy to have-especially if you've killed one of their members-but you're
going back and that's final." She took a sip of wine. "We've dealt with their kind
before."Jason looked at him. "You really have
to. This world has a lot of knowledge in it your world couldn't handle and vice versa, and
you wouldn't believe how bad the cultural pollution gets in some dimensions where people
continually keep hopping in and out."Ms. Hope poured a glass of wine and
handed it to him. "To your quick and speedy return to our own world, and hopefully swift
membership in the Guardians Of Dimensional Secrets.""In Vino Veritas,"
said Jason.Claude looked at his wine, then raised
his glass, "In Vino Volatilis Quintessentia Alcoholis!" The wine in the
glass foamed and frothed as the quintessential alcohol was sublimated and Claude rapped
Ms. Hope's and Jason's glasses. Their wine effervesced, and Jason slumped forward on
the table."Thatsh naw proper Lathin," Ms. Hope
slurred.Claude grabbed his bag and stood up.
"I meant what I said and I said what I meant," he murmured, "the spell keeps on working
one hundred percent." He nearly bumped into the waitress. "Oh, uh . . ." He grabbed out
his wallet, then remembered that all his money was really just toilet paper anyway.
"They're paying," he said quickly, shoving the wallet back in his pocket and rushing out of
the restaurant."A vision, a vision," he heard Jason
babbling."Shuth up."Claude half ran through the mall and
tried to think. He needed to go somewhere to hide, somewhere where a sortilegist
couldn't trace him. Except sortilegists could trace just about anything, especially with a
fay to hype their power, so there was really no point in it, unless he could find a hex to
tangle the lines of fate so no one could do a divination, except they could use a hex to
predestine that they'd find him and . . .Blind with panic, Claude ran for the
entrance of the mall.Nicole tossed the wrappers from a
Carl's Jr. chicken-something and fries in the trash, then gathered up her purse and carryall
and wandered out towards the entrance of the mall. She held the Valley Girl book with
her left hand, absently sipping down the last of her Coke. The book was pretty dated, but
might be useful for character pieces-she could do a pretty good 'Val' if she wanted
to.Shaking the ice to get the straw down
to the last bit of liquid, Nicole took the final sip, then headed for one of the mall trash
cans, considering her course of action. If she took 101, that would lead to the Julian
Street exit, which led straight to the heart of downtown San Jose. Or was it 280 that-
A wall of human flesh barreled into her.
"Omigod!" Nicole screamed as she tried to step back, the carryall got in the way, and she
and the person crashing into her tumbled into a planter. There was a sound of breaking
glass."Geez! I'm, like real sorry, y'know,"
Nicole apologized, still mentally in Valley Girl mode as she tried to get disentangled."No need, it was my fault," the guy
said, turning slightly yellow as he removed his hand from her chest. A streamer of pink
fog coiled in between them, followed by another and another, obscuring her vision.There was a slam as if reality had been
wrenched from its moorings and a sickening lurch like the sensation at the top of a roller
coaster. A nova of stroboscopic light and color exploded, while a sound spun around her
like The Vienna Boys Choir Sings Don Ho played backwards at 45
RPM, when originally recorded at thirty-three. A taste like the annual Terlingua Chili
Cook-off adding the frozen dessert category, and a smell like perfume designers of Paris
introducing Eau de Iguana, por Homme. Then suddenly an abrupt slam
and nothing but the feel of wood and the smell of dust.Nicole opened her eyes slowly and
found herself pinned, her face pressed flat against sun-bleached floor boards.She struggled and finally slipped out
from under the guy who'd bashed into her. Nicole felt heat on her face. Confused, she
brushed her hair out of her eyes and saw a pillar of fire two feet away. She quickly
scrambled back, only to find another directly behind her. Sheets of flame leapt in time to
strange fiddle music. Nicole closed her eyes: This was not real. This was not happening.
She peeked briefly: It was. She clutched at the floor in a desperate lunge for reality,
paused, and then gave the boards a hesitant pat. They were not the sticky, soft-drink
scummed tiles of the mall. The fiddle music continued to play as she closed her eyes
again, various thoughts coursing through her mind, among which was the predominating
theme of Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. Nicole opened
her eyes again. No, this was not Kansas. It was also not the Eastridge Mall.She closed her eyes again, weighing the
evidence. The last thing she clearly remembered-that made any sense, that is-was being
knocked down. Then came absolute chaos. Then this. Lovely, thought
Nicole, I have a concussion.It wasn't as if that were anything new.
When she was eight years old, her parents had gone to yet another party and left her in the
care of Mary Ellen Sanders, a brain-dead teenager whose concept of baby sitting was
sending kids to bed five hours early so she could talk on the phone to her boyfriend.
Nicole had decided to escape out her bedroom window, slipped on a broken shingle, and
had fallen and brained herself on the driveway.Then came the week and a half in the
hospital with tubes down her nose, during which time she was in a coma having weird
dreams. That's what happened the last time she'd been knocked out, anyway.Nicole tried calming herself, then
opened her eyes to the flames and fiddle music. This was a remarkably static
hallucination, but then again so had been the last one.She tried willing herself awake, but it
didn't work. Nicole then closed her eyes and decided to wait for the paramedics.About five minutes passed, the
paramedics hadn't come (at least as far as she could tell), and the fiddle music was driving
her bats. She opened her eyes to the same scene as before, then glanced over at the blond
guy. He was unconscious. This is projection, Nicole thought,
remembering what rudimentary psychology she knew. He knocked me
unconscious; ergo I'm dreaming of him that way. Nicole peeled back his left
eyelid and saw the pupil of a large blue eye narrow in response to the light. Well, at least
he didn't have a concussion too. She closed her own eyes and paused to think some more.
That deranged guy in the mall had told her not to go to other dimensions. Hmm. That
could explain why her brain had decided on this particular hallucination.Nicole glanced up, but all she saw was
a bit of cobwebby thatch badly in need of repair. She felt as if she were in a doctor's
waiting room, waiting for the doctor.As was usual with waiting rooms, she
began to fidget, then got to her feet.Looking further around her
hallucination, she saw that she was standing inside a circumscribed square traced on the
boards in charcoal. Around her the ring of fire leapt in a meticulously choreographed
pattern, obscuring the rest of the room and almost touching the thatched roof. The
carryall, the Valley Girl book, and the remains of her Carl's Jr. soda lay spilled on the
boards nearby, along with the blond guy and a yellow sportsbag she didn't
recognize.She was about to attempt a look under
the curtain of flames when the fiddle playing increased in tempo and a cracked male voice
sang:
Listen to my serenade,
All elementals promenade!
The eight sections of the wall of fire
paired off and bobbed around the ring perpendicular to Nicole.Ah so, she thought.
Apparently as she paid more attention to it, the hallucination became more
interesting.Nicole looked through the gaps in the
sinister square-dance and saw that the rest of the room was a rickety, one-room shack
built from old boards and driftwood. In one corner of the hovel sat an enormous pile of
gold mixed with silver and jewels. The whole building listed badly towards that end.
Beyond the open doorway was a swamp filled with cattails and dragonflies. A small
rowboat tied to the doorpost floated in the stagnant water.The music stopped.She turned around to view the other
end of the shanty and saw a table, a bed, a chair, a badly dented charcoal brazier holding
the crisped remains of what may have once been a toad, and a middle-aged man standing
in the middle of the room, a violin and bow tucked under his arm. He was dressed in a red
velvet smoking jacket patched in various places, red leather slippers with the toes worn
through, and had a bright crimson fez perched squarely atop his greying hair. His only
other marks of distinction were a small gold seal ring, a waxed moustache, and an
immaculate goatee.Eyes glittering with greed, he walked
around the perimeter of the figure and cackled to himself, "It will hold. Yes, it will hold."
He rubbed his hands in delight."Um, excuse me." Nicole waved as
calmly as anyone could in her situation. "Would you please tell me where I am, who you
are, and what in the hell I'm doing here?"In mid-cackle, the man stopped and
faced her. "Certainly," he replied. "You are trapped within my circle of power, I am a
goetian, and you," he added with zest, "are going to give me three bags of gold." He
glared. "And I'll tell you already that I'm not going to sign for it."Circles of power? Bags of gold? A
goetian, whatever that was? This was some hallucination, but Nicole decided to play
along. "I hate to tell you this, but I don't have three bags of gold." She smiled. "Will you
take a check?""Nonsense!" the man cried. "Every
demon has gold. And as for whatever a check is, no, I will not accept one."Nicole bit her lower lip so she would
not give the obvious comeback; MasterCard and VISA no doubt came under the same
listing as out-of-dimension checks, and anyway, she'd already thrown hers away. She
paused then, realizing that even if she was hallucinating, what she was saying was
probably being said in reality, same as a person talking in her sleep. Which meant that
someone was getting an interesting show.She looked at the man in the bathrobe.
"Listen," she said, deciding he was probably one of the paramedics. "I've got the Kaiser
protection plan. My parents signed me up with Kaiser Permanente.""You cannot call upon your eternal
ruler. He has no power here.""What?""Your Kaiser Permanente, the eternal
ruler of the Hells, has no power here, and all of your threats of his wrath are to me as
naught. It would be best for you if you were to simply give me the gold.""What makes you think I have
gold?""You're a demon!""And you're Santa Claus, right? Come
on! Do I look like a demon?" Nicole asked incredulously."'Demons are masters of disguise and
lies,'" the man recited.Demons were also, if Nicole knew her
demonology lore correctly, unable to leave the circle they were summoned into. When the
next gap in the ring of fire came by, she easily put her foot over the border of the
figure.The goetian's fiddle and bow instantly
came up and he sang:
Allemand left once a-gain
And form into the grand old chain!
A sheet of flame licked around her
outstretched leg, and Nicole shrieked and tumbled backwards into the circle.
Hallucination or no, she was burned. The fires stretched into ribbons, weaving a complex
pattern around her while she desperately applied a hand lotion sample she'd gotten at
Macy's. This guy meant business.The goetian grinned at her through the
intermittent slits in the wall of fire. "I see that my variant on the standard demon summons
is working well."Nicole glanced over at the charcoal
design and winced at the pain from her leg. It was going to blister."No," the demonologist said, "there is
no invisible barrier around you, as I see you have already surmised. You are wholly on
earth. We share the same floor and I am better protected by my elementals than by any
circle of power." He smirked smugly. "I learned of this interesting variant recently and I
am most pleased with the results. Elementals are most tractable, even if I can't control
them like a sorcerer, and anyway, I didn't bother to summon any of the foul humors of
your realm, so regardless of how tough of a demon you are, you'll suffocate if you don't
cough up soon. I know you shapechangers very well."Nicole closed her eyes. This was just
too weird."You should have seen the one I
summoned last week. It was dressed up as a tooth fairy and tried to convince me that all
it had was a bag of dimes and children's teeth. Except," the goetian chuckled, "tooth
fairies have gossamer wings-not bat wings." He laughed merrily and stopped pacing for a
second. "I must compliment you, though, on the incredible detail of your disguise. If I
didn't know better, I would really think you were a young woman.""That's because I am," Nicole huffed in
exasperation, smearing more hand lotion on her calf.The demonologist looked down at the
blond guy from the mall. "By the way, who's that? Your latest victim or your lunch or
both?"Nicole wished that she knew. She
pondered the question for a second and, hitting upon a possible way to make the goetian
release her, exclaimed in her best frightened Valley Girl voice, "Omigod! That's the
demon! Let me out before he eats me!""'Maybe you should let me out' time, is
it?" the man mimicked. "'I'm a tooth fairy. I have to collect teeth.' 'I'm a talking rabbit.
Let me deliver my eggs.' 'I'm just a poor priest, little girl, carpenter, hunter, princess, et
cetera. Won't you please let me go? Won't you release me so I can dismember you as I
sip your blood?' That's your game, isn't it?" The man turned around and paced the
opposite direction. "Well, I'm not going to fall for it. I didn't start summoning demons
yesterday, and I've dealt with enough demons of the shapechanging kind to know all their
tricks."I command you, the demon lord
Niclod, to give me three bags of gold!" the man thundered."My name's Nicole and I told you I
don't have any.""You cannot fool me, Niclod. You will
give me what I desire!"She realized the goetian was absolutely
convinced that she was a demon who was out to get him so she finally conceded, "Okay,
so I'm the demon Gobbledegook or whatever you said. I still don't have three bags of
gold. What are you going to do about it?""I will wait," he stated. "The worst
fault of demons is that they're claustrophobic so I know you will eventually give me what I
want." He pulled up the chair and sat down on it.Nicole glared at him. "What if I try to
escape? What are you going to do then?""Nothing. But you may be assured that
the eight fire elementals I have set as guards will not. And they are more than a match for
any demon." He grinned. "What do you say to that, Niclod?""Bag your face, you skanky melvin,"
Nicole said, giving her worst Valley Girl insult."You cannot confuse me by speaking in
tongues, Niclod. I will have my bags of gold," the man uttered gravely and thumped his
fist in his palm.Nicole flipped him off, then realized
something. "Wait a second: Three bags of gold and you let me out, that's the bargain,
right?""Exactly."Nicole rummaged through her purse
until she found the white paper sack she'd slipped inside for safekeeping. She knew there
was a reason why she'd bought these. "Okay, here we go, three bags of gold." Nicole
held up a neck chain, a bracelet and an ankle bracelet individually wrapped in the little
plastic Ziploc bags used by cheap jewelers to keep chains from tangling.The goetian did not look amused.
"When I said gold I meant hard coinage and when I said bags I meant sacks large enough
to carry flour in.""Oh well. Next time be specific. I
fulfilled my part of the bargain, you fulfill yours."The goetian stuck out his tongue.
"This isn't a bargain; I'm not selling you anything but your freedom. This is called
extortion, and I'm redefining my demands: Three bags of gold weighing at least ten
pounds each."The gold, not the bags," he added.
"The thing I dislike most about you demons is that you're all a bunch of smart
asses."Nicole slipped the chains away and
zipped up her purse. Great. Demonology reduced to cosmic kidnapping. "Why don't you
ask him for gold?" She pointed to the blond guy. "That's the demon Gorgonzola.""Then I will have six bags of gold!" the
demonologist crowed in delight. "Three from Gorgonzola and three from you,
Niclod.""Wake up, Gorgonzola," Nicole said
and shook the big blond. He remained immobile so she lifted one of his eyelids to reveal
the eye rolled back, felt his pulse, and reported, "He's unconscious. When are you going
to let us go?""When I get six bags of gold."Nicole looked the man squarely in the
eye and saw that he was serious. Fanatics, there was no escaping them. She turned her
back on him and reapplied herself to the task of waking the guy from the mall, but in spite
all ploys, he refused to return to her hallucination-or to reality. Whichever it was, Nicole
intended to find out.Barring his finally coming to, she
decided that the best place to find out who he was would be his wallet. She reached down
and pried it out of his shorts, feeling strange because she had never put her hand in a man's
pants before and had not imagined that her first time would be in search of anything quite
so mundane.Nicole withdrew her unprepossessing
prize: a perfectly ordinary, scuffed, dark brown men's leather billfold. As she flipped it
open, a card fell into her lap which she picked up and read: C.W.A. California
Wizards Association. Claude Amadeus Almont: Member in Good Standing. She
scanned the rest of the card and then compared Claude's rough-hewn features to their
image trapped in a funny black-and-white silver hologram. Nicole raise an eyebrow. She
knew hallucinations were supposed to be weird, but this was getting surreal. She next
found his certified alchemist's license, a Greenpeace membership with the Save
the Giants motto, his library card, some damp toilet paper, a ticket stub from a
Marin County concert and wine tasting, and several gold-foil banknotes alchemically
etched with the likenesses of Norton III, Emperor of Northern California, and Calafia,
ruler of La Republica Baja Calafia, starlet of Hollywood, and the Island
of California's reigning beauty queen.After peeking at the back of his
broomstick license, which stated that in the event of his death, his body was to be donated
to necromancy, she decided to pry no further and slipped the wallet back into Claude's
pocket. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Nicole. This hallucination
was all rather like a Zen koen. She liked fantasy, therefore the hallucination was in terms
of fantasy. When she'd hit her head on the floor of the mall, she had been put into a coma.
The magic circle was symbolic of the coma she was in, while the fire elementals were
obviously symbolic of the pain which kept her there.She glanced at the goetian who was
rubbing his hands and leering. He most likely stood for the irrational side of her
subconscious that wished to keep her trapped by pain. That being the case, if she could
just break free of the circle, she would symbolically come out of the coma and wake
up.She then looked over at Claude, the
alchemist from Marin. For the life of her, she couldn't figure out what he symbolized. A
big unconscious alchemist was not one of her fantasies, even if he was cute. Maybe, since
she was a Westerner, some Freudian projection had slipped into her Zen koen and-"Not sure what to eat first?" the
goetian baited.Nicole whirled."There seems to be a lot of meat on the
arms, though if you aren't quite as hungry, I'm sure you could find something more to your
taste."She gave him a withering look."Or are you one of those demons who's
on a special diet? Let me guess-It's the one where you only get to drink the blood of
virgins, right?" He smiled superciliously. "There's a demoness I call Hagatha I summon
quite often. She tells me that diet's all the rage where she comes from-Hell has such a
short supply of virgins that you're bound to lose weight if you go on it." The
demonologist gave a pensive look and remarked, "But you're from a different hell than her
so you probably wouldn't know about that."Nicole stood up and looked at the
goetian through the flickering flames. Alright, thought Nicole,
time to get out of this stupid coma. Smiling demurely, she inquired,
"Excuse me. How do you expect me to get three bags of gold through that?" and
gestured to the square-dancing elementals."You will give them to me now,
then?""Certainly."The man looked at her suspiciously. "I
want to see them first."Nicole rolled her eyes. Her gaze then
lit on the carryall, her purse, and the blond alchemist's sportsbag. She picked them up by
the straps and displayed them to the goetian. "Will this do?""Those don't look like any of the bags
of gold I've gotten from demons before."Nicole looked at the man. He
definitely represented the irrational side of her subconscious. "Picky-picky. First we want
three bags of gold, then we want three big bags of gold, now we're
holding out for matched luggage." Nicole shouldered her purse and patted the side pouch
so her car keys jangled. "Just think: all that lovely gold that could be yours if you just
weren't so choosy about packaging. And just look at the size of these two." She raised
the carryall and the sportsbag. A convenient tinkling came from inside the second and
Nicole smiled her best seductive actress smile. "I bet most demons aren't that
generous."The goetian got to his feet and giggled
madly. "Now this is a little more like it." Hands palsied with greed, he tucked the fiddle
under his chin and began the windup for a call.Nicole was ready:
Entrechat and pirouette
Now let's all do the minuet!
The flames immediately leapt, twirled,
and divided into two columns flanking Nicole, who dropped the sportsbag and carryall and
vaulted down the aisle, swinging the momentum of her landing into a front kick at the
goetian. Thwank-k-k!!! went the sound as the goetian smashed her in
the face with the violin and she rolled away. Nicole grabbed the front of his smoking
jacket and brought her knee up, flipping him. There came a thudding crunch behind her as
he landed and she scrambled to her feet.Nicole stood ready in a fighting stance
as the goetian rolled off his partially crushed violin. He jammed the battered instrument to
his neck and squealed the bow across it off-key, shouting:
Whirl round me in swirlin' balls
And listen only to my calls!
The elementals swiftly complied,
becoming madly spinning fireballs that danced a pyrotechnic ring-around-the-rosie around
him. The goetian tried to continue the tune, but the cracked wood splintered under the
force of the bow and his hysteric clutch and the fiddle soon fell to pieces. The man
gasped. "I had not considered that a demon might know the words of command for the
fire dance.""That's because I'm not a demon,"
Nicole bit out as she felt the blood running down her cheek from catgut scratches.The demonologist looked at her,
appalled. "You shapechangers never know when to quit, do you?" He slumped down on
the floor. "'But I'm not a demon-I'm a'-Oh what's the use," he sighed in exhaustion. "At
least I now have exclusive control over the salamanders and can be safe from your wiles.
Just make it easy on both of us and pay up.""You've already got two of the bags,"
Nicole pointed out.The goetian brightened. "That's right-
the big ones." He pulled the carryall over and dumped it out into his lap. "What is this?
Pants and sweaters?""Yes," said Nicole, "and two towels
from Macy's. I was shopping."The goetian started stuffing the clothes
back into the carryall. "I have heard of demons going through elaborate masquerades, but
this is ridiculous. Magical gold turning into old leaves and so forth is a common enough
ploy, and you get suitable marks for originality for turning it into clothes, but I am not
amused." He set the carryall on the floor in front of him. "Niclod, I demand that you
immediately change the contents of this bag back into the gold I requested.""Listen, jerkface, I told you already I'm
not a demon, and I'm getting pretty sick of this too. So I'd appreciate if you could cut the
bull and let me out of this coma.""Coma," said the goetian. "So that's
what you shapechangers call our world. Interesting." He smiled. "But regardless, the
deal I stated still stands: three ten-pound bags of gold and I banish you. Don't think
you've won anything by our little exchange. I'm just as safe inside the circle as outside, so
long as the elementals stay between us, and I now have exclusive control of them. So you
may wait quietly as long as you like before you pay, but since I have brought none of the
air of your hell-I believe you call it smog-you will suffocate soon enough. And if you try
to leave my house, I will have my elementals put a swift end to you. Do you
understand?""You're nuts." Nicole let the statement
fall. She walked around the circle towards the huge pile of riches in the corner."Stay away from my gold, Niclod," the
goetian said. "Else I'll have the elementals dance around you right now, and circle up
four, and that will put a swift end to you."Nicole looked at the goetian. She'd
never thought that the irrational side of her subconscious could be so thoroughly crazy.
"Yes, sahib. Is there anything else your grace would like?""Stay away from my desk. And my
bed. And the door.""Anything else?""Not off hand, no.""Good." Nicole found a clear spot on
the floor and sat down and opened her purse. "By the way, there isn't any gold in here
either." She showed him the contents, then got out a Tom Petty disk and slipped it in her
CD player. Nicole put on the headphones and smiled at the goetian and followed this by
taking out a pack of miniature Snoopy playing cards and laying herself a solitaire
spread.She began to play, occasionally trying a
rhymed couplet on the elementals with no appreciable effect. Nicole soon established that
any attempts to converse with the goetian would only bring a reply to the effect of "You're
a demon-gimme gold," though slightly more eloquent in phrasing-but not much. She
smiled and put the headphones back into place. If a waiting game is what he wanted, a
waiting game was what he got.After about three hours, Nicole put the
cards back in their box, shoved them in her purse, and repeated, "So are you going to let
me out of this coma?""As soon as I get my gold, I'll banish
you to Hell," the man stated flatly."Jerk." She had never thought her
irrational mind could be this irrational. It was almost enough to make her believe in
Dianetics. She lost a staring match with the goetian, then put a hand to her eyes and
leaned her head down. "Could you turn those damned things off? They're giving me a
headache." She motioned to the square-dancing elementals, then got out a couple of
aspirins and took them without any water, which made her feel worse."No.""Jerk.""Give me my gold."Nicole glowered at him. She should
have known better than to try to out-wait her subconscious. Obviously breaking the circle
had not been the solution to getting out of the coma. That wasn't what was keeping her,
and neither was the pain symbolized by the fire elementals. It was her own irrational mind.
Knock that out and Nicole knew she would wake up.Now how? Nicole reached her hand
into her purse and it closed it around a large bottle of perfume. Bingo. "Oh Mr. Go-ee-
shan," she said sweetly, stressing the syllables of the weird word, "I think I'm ready to give
you some of that gold.""Well it's about time.""Sure is," Nicole said. "Now just close
your eyes . . ."The demonologist pursed his lips.
"Just how stupid do you think I am?"Nicole looked at the goetian and
decided that in some ways she should be glad her subconscious wasn't that stupid.
"Okay," she said, "no tricks. If you'll just open that other bag, you'll find some of that
gold you want."The goetian pulled the alchemist's
sportsbag over and looked at the zipper. "How do you open this?""You grab hold of the little metal tab
and pull."The goetian did as she said, darting her
suspicious glances all the while, as Nicole attempted to smile demurely. The moment he
glanced in the bag, Nicole withdrew the perfume and hurled it straight at the man's skull,
timing her throw to match a gap in the curtain of fire.As the perfume arced through the gap,
the closest elemental reached out a blazing pseudopod, intercepted it, and drew the limb
and its catch back into its body. The other seven elementals performed identical
movements."Oh what is this?" said the goetian
disgustedly. "More clothes and some liqueur?" He pulled out several small crystal
decanters and set them on the floor, glaring at her.A sudden Boom!
rocked the shack as flame exploded outward. When Nicole opened her eyes, there was a
gap in the ring of elementals, and the air reeked of Poison.The demonologist popped up like a
jumping-jack. "What happened to my elemental?""It couldn't read directions. That bottle
was clearly marked Do not expose to direct flame or heat.""What?""Uh, pardon me," Nicole said, covering
herself. "Just speaking in tongues again.""What are you talking about? What's
that smell?""Poison."The goetian screamed, then covered his
mouth and huddled on the floor.Nicole rifled through her purse, hoping
to find another bottle of perfume. She paused then as she saw the cover of one of the
CD's: Def Leppard's Pyromania. Oh how stupid could she be.Nicole slipped Tom Petty out and
replaced him with Pyromania.She leapt up, hit the
play button, and pulled out the headphone cord all in one move.
"Yaah!" Nicole screamed as she threw the Tom Petty CD like a shuriken, jumping across
the room.The CD flew through a fire elemental
and sliced the strings of the battered violin the goetian had raised reflexively, ruining
Nicole's aim for his throat. Catgut and flaming plastic snapped back in the goetian's face
while the fire elementals bobbed indecisively. But when Joe Elliot screamed, "Give me
Py-Ro-Ma-Ni-A!!!" the salamanders apparently decided to disregard the goetian's square
dancing calls and blazed into flaming novas, shooting sparks everywhere in a
choreographed disco inferno."No!" wailed the goetian, running to
the pile of riches in the corner. Nicole, panicked, slammed the CD player off.She reached down and snagged up the
bottles of pink liqueur. If Poison could knock out elementals, this stuff
probably could too. Nicole pitched it to the nearest elemental and the fireball engulfed the
glass. A second later there was a distinct "foop" noise, the salamander's flames were
tinged with pink, and it shrank to a pinpoint spark and disappeared.Nicole began flinging potions at
elementals. She knocked out four more before the goetian screamed, "To me, Fire!
Protect me from the demon!" banging two goblets together like the percussion for a
dwarven drinking song from 'Das Rhinegold.'The two remaining salamanders broke
orbit and spun to the goetian, just avoiding another bottle which flew through the door
and landed in the swamp. Nicole lobbed a second potion and scored a hit. The final
elemental bobbed in the air before the goetian while the man scrabbled insanely backwards
up the pile of gold and jewels.A spark landed in front of Nicole. She
looked up and saw small fires already eating holes in the cobwebby thatch, started by the
fireworks less than thirty seconds before."Holy . . ." Nicole left the thought
unfinished."No! You can't have my gold! It's
mine!" the goetian wailed like a little girl about to lose a doll."What-" Nicole began, then pointed to
Claude and shouted at the wild-eyed demonologist, "Get your ass off those coins and help
me get him out before we're all crisped! This whole place's going to go up in a few
minutes!""You're lying! You want to chew on
my arm after you rip it from my body! I know what you demons do to things!" the man
shrieked and began to cry as the roof above him caught fire. "I know! You're just toying
with me before you banish my last elemental and eat me, and now you're trying to trick me
into coming to you!" He buried his face in his hands and sobbed, "And it's all my fault. I
should have believed that girl when she said she was a hex and that she was going to
throw an instant karma curse on me if I didn't give her her opals back. I should have
known better than to summon a demon lord of your power, one that can banish elementals
and bring another demon lord along with it. Or demon lady. I can never tell with you
damned shapechangers whether you're really a demon lady or a demon lord in drag or
whether you switch back and forth like succubi and incubi whenever the mood suits you.
And I haven't even gotten a chance to summon a succubus yet, and now I never will. And
it's all my fault. . . .""I'm not a demon, you idiot!" Nicole
shouted."That's what they all say! I know
you're going to tear out my throat any second now, and I'm sure there's nothing I can do
to stop a demon of your power, but I'll sure as Hell try!" So saying, he ripped a string of
at least two-dozen firecrackers out of his pocket and threw them beneath the elemental.
"Light, Fire!" he cried, frantically searching his pockets.The salamander flared in a nova of
brilliance and lit the fuses of the crackers as well as more of the thatch. With a rapid salvo
of bangs, the fireworks scattered across the floor, each detonating loudly with a stench of
sulfur and charcoal as it brought a miniature devil into being. Nicole gasped and then
stepped back from the nearest one. They looked like less-cute, nude versions of the
Orange Julius logo, complete with horns, tails, and little red bat wings, and she did not
need a Dantean field guide to know that they were imps."Hey, we've reached Nirvana!"
exclaimed an impette with the name Ressionable tattooed across her
chest."Not Nirvana, Ressionable," said an
imp imprinted with the name Eccable. "This level of perfection is called
Heaven, but all the same, it is a very holy place and we should thank our Lord for having
brought us here to do his bidding." He bowed to the goetian.An impette named
Ious sniffed. "I still don't think he's God."Nicole backed away as several of the
imps eyed her, and a male imp called Rudent stepped towards the
goetian. "Yeah, we think you're a fraud!""You really think so?" asked
Ressionable, wide-eyed. "I sort of believed him.""Nah, he's just a fake." Rudent stuck
out his tongue at the goetian."Do not mock Our Lord or you will
suffer his wrath!" Eccable warned devoutly.Rudent turned to stick his tongue out
at Eccable and mooned the goetian simultaneously. The foretold wrath came in the form
of a handful of coins and jewelry the demonologist hurled at him."Pennies from Heaven!" exclaimed
Ressionable."Beg Our Lord's forgiveness," directed
Eccable.Ious twitched her tail. "I
wouldn't.""Silence!" roared the goetian. "I am
too God and I command you to protect me from that demon- that de- I mean that
demented houri there!" He pointed directly at Nicole."I thought God was supposed to be
omnipotent," remarked Ious.The goetian screamed as if he had lost
what little sanity was left him and flung a cherry bomb into the elemental's flames. Nicole
hurled her last bottle at the same moment."Dodge, Fire!" the hysterical goetian
screamed. The whirling fireball spun aside at the last instant, narrowly missing the potion,
and set the wall of the shack ablaze in the process as the cherry bomb fell to the boards
and sputtered wickedly.The demonologist tried to ward off the
flying bottle, and the flask shattered on the edge of the golden chalice. The potion rapidly
expanded into gas, and Nicole watched in amazement as the vapor billowed out to engulf
the goetian and the entire treasure heap, then faded away, leaving a bare corner.Nicole had no time to wonder where
the goetian had gotten to since at that moment the cherry bomb exploded and she was
standing face to face with a demoness. Or what she took to be a demoness. Nicole had
always pictured she-demons as sultry, erotic creatures with a tantalizing, evilly glamorous
look about them, and this one looked more like a diabolic bag lady. She had sooty black
skin, sharp ebon horns and claws with hangnails, and the labyrinthian rats' maze of her hair
was offset by a hideous little black pillbox hat with a rent veil. A horribly mauled leather
purse dangled from her talons to knock against her knobby knees and their wrinkled
fishnet stockings."Hast thou summoned me, my pretty?"
the hellish hag inquired as she wobbled forward in her ill-fitting high heel shoes.Before Nicole could even gibber, imp
Eccable said, "No, Hagatha, Our Lord and master did.""Except she just destroyed him."
Ressionable pointed a finger at Nicole.Ious rolled her eyes again. "I thought
you couldn't destroy God.""We must have faith," said
Eccable."Shut up," said the hag to all of them.
She wobbled closer to Nicole, her sagging breasts swinging obscenely against the front of
her dingy smock. "So, my pretty, thou hast caused trouble for the master? Then thou
shalt pay!" the hag cackled as she jumped forwards. "He hath summoned me to this
paradise a final time so I may avenge his death!""I don't think it's Paradise," Ious
remarked. "Too much smoke and fire for one.""Hiyaa!" Nicole screamed, doing a
front kick, followed by a spin and rear kick to the hag's stomach.The hag said a choice word and
grabbed Nicole's foot with her talons and slammed her to the floor. "Give thanks,
heavenly vixen, that I am a pious woman and shall make thine end swift and
merciful!"Nicole rolled and sprang back up and
answered with an axe kick. The hag parried with the handbag, and Nicole did another
front kick and disarmed her opponent of the purse, her calf streaming blood from burns
and talon scratches. "Imps!" screamed the hag, "If thou wilt look in my purse, thou wilt
find some acid creme and a set of thumbscrews."The imps caught the leather bag and
dumped it out. "And get some of those hot coals," the hag ordered as a few fell from the
burning roof. "Heavenly flesh is no proof against their-""Yataaa!!!" Nicole screamed, doing a
flying sidekick, knocking the demoness into the fire elemental."Aaaaiiiighhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The demoness thrashed about for a moment, flames coming out of the eye sockets of her
skull like something from a particularly disgusting horror movie. She was then was
completely carbonized by the fire elemental, which evidently even a demon's well
tempered skin was no proof against.An imp named Recating gasped a few
phrases sounding like they came from the bathroom walls of Hell and flew out through the
door, followed by the rest of the cute little devils, all of whom echoed his sentiments, if
not his exact wording.Nicole stared at the blackened spot on
the floor where the bag demoness had been. A crackling sound caught her attention. The
elemental had ceased its wild gyrations and hovered in place.She gazed on as the fireball flared
thrice in succession, spun once on its horizontal axis, and shot out through the roof with
the speed of a hummingbird. The suction whipped Nicole's hair about her head, and bits
of flaming wood fell hissing into the swamp a second later. She gazed up through the hole
and watched the salamander disappear into the twilight sky.This was just too weird. Nicole closed
her eyes for a moment to go through her mental cope list, realized that some things were
beyond rational contemplation-like most of this afternoon-and so opened them just as a
large cinder fell before her. She looked up and saw that the fires on the ends of the beams
were still smoldering, and she knew that it would only be a short time before the thatch
would dry and the whole shack would be ablaze.She tried to revive the alchemist from
Marin but to no avail; he was still as out of it as he had been on their arrival. Nicole
hastily shoveled the spilled contents of the carryall back in, along with the handful of
jewelry the goetian had thrown at the imps, then snatched up the two bags and her purse
and threw them into the rowboat outside the door.Eyes watering from the smoke, Nicole
went back to the alchemist and grabbed him by the foot and pulled and pulled. "C'mon,"
she muttered, straining until finally something shifted."Aigh!" Nicole screamed as she fell
over backwards, Claude's running shoe in one hand.She had never gone into frenzy before,
but this seemed an opportune time for it. The giant running shoe arced into the rowboat,
and the next thing Nicole knew she had flipped, rolled, or otherwise propelled Claude's
massive body to a position by the doorpost just as a small section of the flaming roof
collapsed behind her and scattered coals across the floor to start new fires.She grabbed the rope tied above
Claude's head and reeled the rowboat over, then tried to ease him down the short three-
foot drop into the boat. However, his weight proved too much for her and with a frantic
yelp they both toppled in, landing on the bags.Nicole fumbled desperately with the
knot on the prow. The bowline was old and hardened by years of being steeped in swamp
water. She quickly gave up on disentangling it and climbed back into the blazing shanty.
Frantically she untied the rope and threw it out the door. Coughing from the smoke,
Nicole gripped the doorpost and vaulted out of the shack towards the boat as it began to
drift off.She landed in the water and pulled
herself along by the tow rope which floated beside her. Once she got to the boat, she
heaved herself over the side, bedraggled and wet.After a few quick gasps, Nicole stood
and caught up a long bamboo pole from the bottom of the boat and started poling
feverishly away from the burning shack. A minute later, she decided that she was safe and
stopped the boat in a patch of tules. That same moment, a deafening explosion came from
the shanty and a pillar of fire shot into the sky.Nicole slumped down in the boat on
top of Claude and passed out from exhaustion and smoke inhalation, just as the goetian's
ramshackle driftwood house fell in on itself and collapsed sizzling into the water.