At the Behest of the Dead (27 page)

“The body is of a female, but I am closer to a male. Remember that.”

“Christ. I have a possessed Pomeranian with gender issues.”

Frank sat back down and laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks.

Chapter
Fourteen

L
eaving the realm of men is easy, if you know the trick.

I went hours before nightfall
, because I didn’t want to waste the day. I’d sat on the couch thinking of the night before. Ashley. Her smile, pert little nose, auburn curls, and cuteness piled on top of cuteness. The way she stood and shifted her feet. How she was confident at times and then unsure at others, the hints of which always quirked the corners of her mouth.  I thought of the way she had folded into my arms, her chin near my chest, breath on my neck. I thought of our love making and considered calling off the entire trip to the underworld.

Later
, the little demon dog wandered in and found a spot right in the middle of the floor, rolled onto her back, and stuck her legs straight up in the air. A few hours after, she hadn’t moved. When I stepped over her to visit the bathroom, she jumped up and followed me in. I held it a minute longer and took her into the backyard.

Peaches looked around for a few moments then found a nice rhododendron and pissed all over it. The plant immediately wilted.

I should’ve really gone back to the guild and gotten my chest piece, but that would be dangerous, not to mention stupid. I also pondered calling Glenda to meet me somewhere with it, but I didn’t want her to know my plans. The key was no longer at the school, so no one could get into the secret room, and I wanted to keep it that way. I’d had enough of demon’s trying to kill me.

I flew to the east and scanned the skies. The
clouds were an unholy bitch but there were always cracks and slivers, and that’s all I needed. At last, I spotted a break and headed toward it.

It’s
easier at night. When a star’s light hits the atmosphere, it’s easy to pick out because the glimmer becomes diffused. There are a lot of ways to find the right size shimmer, but I’d picked up a few tricks over the years. Daylight made the trip harder, so I took the device out of my pocket and blew on the lens to clear away any specks of dust. I had to hold it by the ends for a few minutes so the brass and glass could cool to the outside temperature.

Fog gathered on the first lens
, but I wiped it away on the inquisitor’s robe. Then I held the device, which looked like a pair of optometrist lenses, up to my eyes until I found a ray of starlight that was pure. What is a pure beam, you ask? I couldn’t explain it if you put a gun to my head. All I knew was that when one fell into my view all I had to do was veer right through it – and that’s just what I did.

One moment in this worl
d, then with a soul sucking pop I was accelerated into the next. I was near the cusp. But making the crossing was never easy and there was a price. I’d glyphed myself against the tug, but it wasn’t enough and nearly all of my power was drawn from my body. It was more a rending, like someone had taken me out of my skin (something I was intimately familiar with thanks to the battle with Balkir a few days ago), bashed me against the side of a building, then poured my remains back inside the sack that had been me.

I had to hold the link with my fork as I made the jump. Had to hold on
, even though every fiber of my being begged me to let go and surrender even that trickle.

Something rushed into me.
A feeling of dread and then elation. Then there was an expanding consciousness, a link to the ground below. It bloomed, and for a few seconds I filled with power. So much power that I could do anything. I could raise or destroy a mountain. I could summon a third or forth ward demon and maintain control. I could fly an entire skyscraper around the planet.

Then it was gone
, and I was left feeling like I’d woken from a three day drunk.

**

You’ve probably seen pictures, artist’s interpretations, of the place, but I assure you it needs to be experienced. The cusp was designed to keep the hells separated from the real world. Over time the cusp grew and the wards were drawn farther and farther apart. What was once a nearly imaginary line in the sand had become miles of barren land.

But you just don’t have a big-ass place like the cusp without some enterprising men and women to commercialize it. It’s also where the first major guilds sprouted.

This wasn’t hell but it was the next best thing. Most of the time it was hot, but like the seasons above it tended to change based on some immeasurable timetable. At the time of this visit, it was closer to Seattle cold than Sahara hot.

There were endless trees below but they looked like skeletons. A road traversed the ground and even branched off on occasion to lead to a home or shop of some kind. I could spend a week graphing the place then come back in a year and it would have changed, stretched, become a whole new world. Maybe a river of lava would have escaped from the other side and turned huge
rafts of desert into a giant parking lot, or a new mountain may have sprung up where once a pit existed.

I sped across the blasted landscape, marking South of Heaven as I passed
, and made a mental note of its current location in case I wanted to stop on my way out and get that drink.

There was a shimmer to the e
ast, but it was miles away. That was the curtain that hung over the hells and kept it separate. Who or what built it? I couldn’t say. Salazar once told me he knew how it had been created, but I was half convinced he was full of crap.

I swept toward the ground
, but not in an involuntary manner. Trees even older and more decrepit than something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale stood at attention, looking like burned kindling. A hill rose but it looked uprooted, like an asteroid had tried to burst through from the other side. The crest was covered in soot, while the other side was slimed like a giant Godzilla sneezed there.

I steered clea
r of the mess. There was no telling what bizarre creature might burst out. Not that it wouldn’t make a dramatic end to this story: ‘Warlock devoured near the cusp. Film at eleven.’

**

The necropolis rose bitter and decrepit. The squat structure sat like a knuckled fist, surrounded on all sides by hoary towers. Decay and rot hung from those, emphasizing just how badly the place had fallen into disrepair. It was said that the home of the necromancers had once been a beacon near the cusp, a place of great men that made an art of death. Now it looked like it belonged in some lost village in Eastern Europe.

It was truly the epitome of bad taste.

I would like to say that it was great to be back home, but it wasn’t.

There was a moat
, but it wasn’t the kind with shallow water and spikes in the mud. When I studied here it had been a nightmare of discarded corpses, body parts, internal organs, and countless empty heads. Not to be confused with a self-absorbed teenage boy, we are talking brainless craniums unattached to bodies.

I didn’t have enough energy to do a controlled landing
, so I swept low then circled a few times in a spiral until I was about ten feet off the ground. I tore away my concentration and severed the thread connecting me to my fork, then took the rest like a paratrooper, feet pumping as I made contact with the gravelly surface. I hit a half exposed branch and went flying, tucking my chin as I did my best to somersault in a mildly professional roll. I puffed as dust rose around me. Then I tried to cover my mouth, but still managed to get a throatful of soot. I didn’t even want to consider what it was comprised of.

I dusted my robe and was surprised to see dirt and detritus fall away
, leaving the silky material just like they day Collin presented it. The inquisitors got all the cool toys.

It was a hell of a lot warmer than Seattle, pun intended of course.

The sun was there, but its light was wan as it did its best to break through a miasma of half finished clouds and rising condensation. The water hung around as it tried to decide if it wanted to be a fog or just evaporate. A curious effect of the cusp. Did the lamentations of the newly dead depress the atmosphere around purgatory?

I cr
unched over rock, some exposed but dry dirt. Over white chips that looked like old wood, but were more than likely crushed and broken bone. There was always the soot because they ran a crematory on the other side of the old towers.

A series of bone white tree
s stood along the path, with massive branches hanging over the walkway. I half expected to see corpses dangling from them, but to my relief the only hangers-on were scrawny ravens that dropped like birds of war as I strode the path. Some called out and others just fled, but at least none of them used me as target practice. Something that Frank seemed to relish.

The underbrush was every variation of dead or dying you could imagine. The ground here looked parched, like it hadn’t seen a hint of moisture in decades. And that’s about how long it’d been since I was last here. I thought I saw a hand creep out, fingers tentative as they scratched at the ground, then, as if it sensed me, the hand sped back under the bushes.

A figure stood before the door. It was dressed in a tattered robe that looked like something I might have worn over the last few days. The ends of the robe swirled as if a wind had suddenly picked up, but I didn’t think that was the case. His face lay in shadow, but so did mine.

I shifted the fork onto my other shoulder, annoyed at how the groove along the wood dug into my skin. I started to work out the
warlock version of a pillow spell then decided it would be easier to just bring a shoulder pad.

The dirt pathway gave way to crushed brambles and desiccated branches. These gave way to white chunks that crunched when I stepped on them. Then it was all ash as I made my way to the ancient wooden br
idge leading to the front door.

The necropolis was old, older than just about anything this close to the cusp
, and it certainly did have a history of manipulating the dead, but we weren’t really into the whole undead thing. That’s just plain gross.

I did know one
necro that enjoyed getting his hands dirty, er, so to speak. His name was Doctor West and he was about as close to being dead himself as any man I knew. Some said he had been here since the place was built. Others claimed he had worked with corpses for so long that the dead had rubbed off on him.

I moved across the rampart a
nd approached the front door. The figure still stood to the side of the entrance, eyes fixed on me. His robe was torn to strips along the bottom and the warlock was using some kind of spell to make the ends swirl, as if a breeze were constantly blowing under him.

“Chet?” I
asked as I grew closer.

“Eh.”

Stupid robe. I lowered my hood.

“Phineas? An inquisitor? Fuck me six ways from Sunday. Look, man, I didn’t have anything to do with that vial of narcosis. That shit wasn’t even mine.”

Chet was at least fifty. He looked closer to eighteen and talked like he was still in the nineteen sixties. If there was a Tommy Chong of the necropolis, this was him. He shifted his feet side to side and the spell stopped blowing the ends of his robe.

“I’m in disguise,” I said and put my fingers to my lips.

“Ohhhhh.” He let the word hang in the air then gazed toward the cusp.

“Still hitting the juice?”

“Nah, man. The juice just hit me,” he said and wandered down the stairs.

“Where’re you going?”

“Just going to wander a little. If anyone comes along, I’ll hustle back and look scary.” Chet grinned.

The entry way was much as I remembered it. Hundreds of candles dripped wax on the floor, sending clouds of black smoke
up to cover the ceiling with soot. It was arched low and might have provided a decent series of murder holes if this was indeed a fortification.

The gothic interior was all high ceilings and arched supports. Mostly stone, some of it had been replaced by concrete an
d rebar in the 80s, thanks to the ever shifting cusps effect on the millennia’s old architecture.

My time with Salazar had occupied a great deal of my early life
, but when I showed a propensity for the dead (not that kind, perverts) he sent me to study with the best. They accepted me, after locking me in a room with half a dozen corpses.

Later t
hat night they came with sledgehammers, preparing to kill whatever kind of zombies I might have created, because no one, and I mean NO ONE, wants those idiots around. It wasn’t hard to start a zombie outbreak, but it was a pain in the ass to put one down.

After they found out I had been creating the noise, accompanied by throwing a couple of severed arms at the door for realistic crunchy sound effects, they decided I was a
ll right and let me study with them.

Weirdest. Initiation. Ever.

I left my hood down and moved through passages as quickly as I could. No point in hanging out and doing the whole “how are you brother. Any news from the dead?” routine.