Great. Encouraging attitude there. We’d better make sure our depressive cycles stay out of sync.
Which supposes that we’re stuck with each other for long enough that it matters.
She took a deep breath and scowled. “Something you’d better know. I said that my winds weren’t happy in there. Trapped.” Pause. “That means
I
won’t be happy in there. I don’t like closed spaces. Claustrophobia. Probably comes with the territory,
if
Bilqis has my territory right.” Another pause. “That’s why I spent so much time staring at the gate. Not meditating—
scared.
I don’t
want
to go in there. To put it in crude American terms, it scares the shit out of me.” She held up her left hand, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the shotgun with her right. Her fingers trembled. “You can laugh now. Kali
scared.
Go ahead.”
As if he dared.
Closed spaces didn’t bother him. Underground didn’t bother him. He actually felt more comfortable, protected, there, as if he had been raised in a cave. Maybe he
was
a Nibelung, after all. He thought for a moment.
“You have any rope in that pack?” He nodded toward where he’d left it propped against the gallery rail when he went back downstairs. Light rope is good for lots of things in emergencies, he kept some in
his
kit . . .
“Two hundred feet of nylon parachute cord, about an eighth of an inch, woven sheath around a core. Holds a quarter-ton, more or less. Why?”
“I’ll tie one end around my waist, you hold the other, I go through the door and scout. I can hold my breath for a couple of minutes. If I haven’t come back by then, pull on the rope.”
She stared at him. She stared some more. A minute passed. Then, “You . . . are trusting . . . me.”
With my so-called life? No. Yes. Maybe. Probably better not discuss it.
He didn’t want to plunder her pack—God, whichever God, only knew what he’d find in there and whether it would bite. “Where’s the rope?”
“Upper left side pocket. Under the bug net and bug repellant and toilet paper and soap bar and towelettes.”
He leaned his cane against the marble railing and started to unzip the pocket cover.
“No.
Other
left. I was mapping it for reaching back over my shoulder, not for facing it.”
Pack had at least five outside pockets, two on each side and one on the back face, plus a puffy top flap that probably contained another pocket. He switched side pockets and dug down through the precise inventory she’d listed. Rope. Tightly-wound hank of heavy green cord in a plastic bag to keep it from tangling with anything. The other equipment had been tied off in separate bags, as well. He remembered her kitchen, everything stowed with fanatical neatness. The spare openness of her whole apartment, just three large rooms and a bathroom, which probably tied into her fear of closed-in spaces.
If she could reach into that pocket while the pack stayed on her back, she was incredibly flexible. Probably a version of a yoga
asana.
Anyway, he stowed everything as close to exactly how he found it as possible. Same reason he’d reloaded her pistol exactly the way she carried it.
Never give offense without intending it.
He wrapped several loops of the cord around his waist, tied them off with a standing bowline, not that he could remember where he had learned the knot or its name, and handed the loose end to her. “Surely those who say, Our Lord is Allah, then they continue on the right way, they shall have no fear nor shall they grieve.”
She accepted the rope with a small nod. “Not that the Surah offers any hope to either of us unbelievers . . . Surah 46, The Sandhills, verse 13. Although others are similar.”
Just to muddy the theological waters further, he offered her a
namaste,
which she returned. He then drew his knife, going with the weapon he knew best, faced the gray blank entry, hoped he
was
continuing on the right way, and stepped through, leading with his blade.
He felt tingling dislocation move up his leg and arm, as if his hand and foot knew they weren’t in the same world as his head. Then blackness. Warmth. Why the
hell
hadn’t he asked her if she had a flashlight in her kit? An enclosed space like a cave or cellar, whatever her winds had told her, even a half-wit might anticipate it would be dark in there, even blind
drunk
he should have had more sense.
Dots sparkled before his eyes. Hazy pinpricks of orange light, like charcoal sparking in the air-blast of his forge. Only these danced up and down and sideways, rather than rising in the heat. And they didn’t die away. He tried sniffing. Not smoke—fog in cave-damp air. Air, yes, seemed to be safe to breathe.
He’d had a dream or vision of this place . . .
The sparks flowed toward him, he felt their focus, angry or hungry or both, growing brighter and larger. One brushed the back of his left hand and pain flashed and he cut at it and it exploded in sparks, branching firework sparks like his hammer threw from forge-welding, and then another and another, seemed like dozens of them, looming out of the fog, clouds of mosquitoes drawn to him from the bogs and ponds of the Finnish woods, frantic for blood, and he backed away and slashed at them as they closed with him and cut more into sparking death.
And then he was back in the gallery, had stepped backwards through the door or gate or whatever without thinking, and had proved that it worked both ways. He blinked at the sudden light.
His left hand throbbed. He held it up, saw a bloody welt there. That floating glowing something had bitten out a chunk of meat. The bleeding stopped and healing started, even as he watched. It still hurt.
Like with her broken bones, being a god didn’t mean you were immune to pain. He shook his hand in the air, trying to throw off the blazing hornet’s-sting of it. At least he’d killed the bastard. Whatever it was.
He remembered a smell of wet ash and charred wood. He remembered where he’d seen that cave, those hungry angry sparks. The synagogue. The Seal had given him that vision when he’d held it. Connections clicked in his head.
“The Seal doesn’t just suck our memories and powers. It keeps other things from coming through that gate. It stops leaks between the worlds. I wonder if Mother didn’t know that, or just didn’t care.”
She was staring at him. Not Mother—Mel, he’d forgotten about her waiting in the gallery, her holding the other end of the rope tied around his waist in her left hand, shotgun in her right still pointed at the “door.” Being scared, being focused on surviving did that sort of thing to him. One-track mind.
“They can’t come through. Yet. Not until the Seal weakens more, or dies. Otherwise they would have followed me. I felt like the first meal they’d seen in centuries.”
He saw her relax a shade. Not more than a shade, a hair, a pinch. He took a couple of slow deep breaths to calm himself, and sorted through the confusion in his head.
She needed a report on his scouting expedition. “We can breathe in there. It’s dark. Floating sparks that bite, you saw the wound, it wasn’t a burn.” He held his left hand up again. “I could kill them with my knife.” He paused. “I
think
I could kill them. They broke apart and vanished, anyway. Mean things. A lot of them.”
Another bit sorted late out of the confusion although he’d noticed it as soon as he’d stepped into the doorway: “I felt the Seal out beyond the darkness. It’s a little stronger there. That
is
the right path to reach it. I don’t know how far, but that’s the way to go.”
He held his knife up close in front of his eyes, checking the edge after battle. Soot smeared the blade in several places. He touched it and it came off on his fingers, fine-grained and slippery, like lampblack or powdered graphite. So the sparks had something organic to them. They weren’t
just
energy. But the steel told him they hadn’t damaged it, whatever they were, edge still keen and temper good.
“You willing to go in there? Closed space and all?”
She thought about it. “Willing. Not happy.” Her face echoed the last bit.
He pulled the knife’s sheath out of its sleeve behind his back, sheathed the blade, and offered it to her, hilt first in a formal gesture, one hand over the other wrist. She started to reach for it and then stopped.
“I’d rather use the shotgun. Really.”
Albert grimaced. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“I’d rather you used this. It
will
work against those things. It doesn’t run out of ammunition. I’m scared of you blasting away at things in the darkness with the shotgun or your pistols. Tight space. Felt like stone around me.”
“Shotgun pellets, bullets, most of them will just mush against rough stone and drop,” she said. “I use hollow-points in the pistols, they’re more likely to blow apart in fragments than ricochet.”
He shook his head. “Most and more likely aren’t the kind of odds I want. And I don’t want to have to stand still in a fight. I’ve never seen anyone check
beyond
their target in a melee . . . ”
“So-called friendly fire.” She took a deep breath, slung the shotgun over her shoulder, and then accepted the knife. With obvious reluctance. “What are
you
going to use?”
He untied the rope and rewound it into a tight hank, stowed it exactly as he had found it, shouldered the pack, and picked up his cane in both hands. Applied that little mental twist to unlock the blade. Drew it.
“This. I’m used to it. You’d have to learn the balance. That knife—don’t try to tell me that a hill-woman doesn’t know how to handle a knife.”
She balanced it, palm, fingers, different grips again, tossing it from hand to hand and back. She nodded.
He remembered.
This
time. “Flashlights. But I think we should go in with them off. Makes the targets easier, bright against darkness.”
Drive off those hungry sparks and
then
worry about what hid in the shadows.
Again his hand and foot knew they had moved into a different world than his head and body, and telegraphed an SOS to the rest of the nerves. Particularly those up and down his spine. He told the prickles and the instant cold sweat to go to hell, and followed his hand and blade through the gray portal and stepped to the left in the darkness, clearing the way for her to step to the right. A quick poke and ping from the barrel of his cane told him that stone lurked in the darkness over there, about another three feet. Stone over there made him happy. A reliable guard. Stone rarely stabbed you in the back.
Assuming the
things
couldn’t get at him through stone, that is. He didn’t know their rules. Didn’t know
anything
about them except that they were dangerous, and that added to the cold sweat.
Again, the
things
floated in the darkness, unblinking dull orange fireflies. They noticed him. They flowed toward him, again, and he cut one in half with a slash from the sword-cane blade. Sparks scattered and faded into darkness. More scattered off to his right, a shadow fighting her own fight. One of the flies tried to sneak by on his left, away from the blade, a move that implied too much knowledge of tactics. He blocked it with the barrel of his cane, and
that
one exploded and faded, leaving an afterimage of rough stone and a low arched ceiling overhead.
Apparently they didn’t like iron or steel. A blade wasn’t necessary. Or maybe he’d twisted and folded some bane into the metal without knowing it, that part of his own soul that he donated to all his work. He’d forged the cane as a weapon, after all. Intent matters.
One came at him high, as if aiming for his throat, and he stabbed it with the point. Two more firework-flashes sputtered off to his right, also about throat-level. And then the other sparks retreated, at least a dozen, he couldn’t count with them dancing around like that. He’d only killed three. Maybe another three for her.
He’d thought they’d have to kill them all. The things knew fear. They knew how to fight, where to find a weakness. That meant they had some kind of thought, some kind of sense of self. Kill a hundred mosquitoes, the others kept on coming. Kill a wolf or two, the rest of the pack would back off and think things over. They might decide to follow you through wind and snow and ice for the next week, looking for a better chance. Late in a hard winter, losing two pack members to bring down a few hundred pounds of reindeer meat started to become a decent price. The pack would survive. Wolves were smart enough to weigh that balance. Get in a bite or two on the hindquarters here, wait for the wounds to stiffen up . . .
That wasn’t a good thought.
Three of them dodged forward, faster than before, flying in a staggered formation so he couldn’t slash two of them at once, and still aimed at his throat. Then they jinked up, down, sideways, just out of reach of his blade. They
knew
that reach. Fencers. Feints, trying to draw him into a move they could exploit. Three others tested
her
in the darkness, not any closer, shorter blade but longer arms, equal reach. She nicked one with the point in a quick stretching slash and it trailed sparks as it fell to the floor of the cave like a wounded fighter aircraft going down in flames. A final burst of sparks and it died.
The survivors retreated again.
He heard a dull scrape to his right, her boots sliding over the rough stone, testing the footing as she moved. The sounds edged closer. Tighten up
their
position, protecting her unarmed left side, the hand that held the flashlight.
“Close one eye. I’m going to try the light, just get an idea of what we’ve jumped into.”
Her voice sounded . . . tight. He wondered if one of the things had gotten through to bite her. They’d worked this out ahead of time, just like deciding which way each would step once through the door. As soon as they had time to breathe and quit dancing around just staying alive, she’d turn on the flashlight for a count of five, pan it from right to left, and then turn it off again, keeping one eye closed to protect night vision.