Robert Asprin - Wings of Omen

He blinked and read the words again. It wasn't hard; they were beautifully written in an Old Ilsig hieratic script. "... of the Lost, that is to say, an infallible spell for finding the lost and strayed and stolen. The spell needeth first the hand of a brave and living man, the same to be offered up in the spell's working by the celebrant; and it needeth also a mandrake root, called by some peristupe, dug of a night without moon or star, and treated according to the disciplines, also to be so offered; and needeth as well some small deal of salt and wheat and wine, and a knife for blood to propitiate the Ones Below; and lastly those instruments by which the boundary for the spell shall be made.

"First dig your mandrake..."

Harran scrambled to his feet in the dust and the dark, sneezing wildly and not caring. Up the stairs, back into the circle-cutting the knot to let himself in, sealing it shut again behind him. He sat down on the vacant pediment amid the rubble and began to read. It was all here, much as he remembered it, with the little thumbnail sketch of the diagram to be drawn inside the circle, and the rite itself. Part in a very old Ilsig indeed, part in the vernacular. Simple words, but oh, the power in them. Harran's heart began to hammer.

Something moaned, and Harran started-then realized it was only the wind, building now to such a crescendo that he could hear it even inside the temple's thick stone. Good, he thought, picking up the piece of bitumen again and rising to his feet, let it storm. Let them think that something's about to happen. For it is!

He set to work. The diagram was complex, seemingly a picture of some kind of geometrical solid, though one in which the number of sides seemed to change each time one counted them. The finished diagram made an uneasy flickering in the mind, a feeling that got worse as Harran started setting the necessary runes and words into the pattern's angles. Then came the salt, cast to the cardinal points with the usual purifacatory rhyme; and the wheat-two grains at the primary point, four at the next, eight at the one after that, and so on around the seven. Harran chuckled a little, light-headed with excitement. That particular symbol of plenitude had always been a joke among the student priests; a sixty -four point pattern would have emptied every granary in the world. Nothing left now but the wine, the knife, the mandrake, the hand....

The wind was whining through the pillars outside like a dog that wanted in. Harran shivered. It's the cold, he thought, and then swallowed again and silently took it back; to lie during a spell could be fatal. He went to the diagram's heart, feeling as he went the small uncomfortable jolts of power that came of passing over it. Forces besides his were moving tonight, lending what he did abnormal power. Just as well, he thought. Harran opened the wine-flask and set it beside the center-point, then put the hand in one of his pockets and the mandrake in the other. In his left hand he held the book-roll, open to the right spot. With the right he drew his knife.

It was his best, Mriga's favorite. He had set her at it that afternoon, and not stopped her for a long while. Now its edge caught the dim lantern-light with a flicker as live as an eye's. He held it up in salute to the four directions and their Guardians above and below, faced northward, and began to pronounce the spell's first passage.

Resistance began immediately; it became an effort to push the words out of his throat. His tongue went leaden. Still Harran spoke the words, though more and more slowly; stopping in mid-spell could be as fatal as lying. The wind outside rose to a malevolent scream, drowning him out. He was reduced to struggling one word out, drawing several rasping breaths, then starting another. Harran had never thought that just fifty words, a few sentences, would seem long. They did now. Ten words remained, every one of them looking as long as a whole codex and as heavy as stone. At the fifth one he stammered, and outside the screaming wind scaled up into an insane yell of triumph. In a burst of fear he choked out two words very fast, one after another. Then the second -to-last, more slowly, with a wrenching effort like passing a stone. And the last, that went out of him like life leaving and smote him down to the floor.

With his falling came the light, blazing in through the temple's high narrow windows like the sky splitting; and the thundercrack, one deafening bolt that reverberated over the roofs of Sanctuary-breaking what glass remained unbroken in the temple's windows, and jolting loose what was already shattered, raining it all down on the marble floor in a storm of razory chimings. Then stillness again. Harran lay on his face, tasting marble and bitumen against his tongue and blood in his mouth, smelling ozone, hearing the last few drops of the glass rain.

I think it's working....

Harran got to his knees, felt around with shaking hands until he found the knife which he had dropped, and then took the skeletal hand out of his pocket. He put it down exactly at the diagram's center-point, palm-up; the outstretched index and middle fingers pointing northward, the others curled in toward the palm, the thumb angled toward the east. Then Harran began the second passage of the spell.

As he read-slowly, being careful of the pronunciation-he became aware of being watched. At first, though he could see nothing, the sensation was as if just one set of eyes dwelt on him-curious eyes, faintly angry, faintly hungry, willing to wait for something. But the number of eyes grew. Harran's words seemed loud as thunder, and his hurrying breath louder than any wind; and the eyes grew more and more numerous. It was not as if he could see them. He could not. But he could feel them, a hungry crowd, a hostile multitude, growing greater by the second, waiting, watching him. And when the silence became so total that he could no longer stand it, then came the sound; a faint rustling, a jostling and creaking and gibbering at the edge of hearing-a sound like the wings and cries of bats in their thousands, their millions, a benighted flock hanging, waiting, hungry for blood.

The sound, rather than frightening Harran worse, reassured him somewhat; for it told him who they were. The spell was working indeed. The shades of the nameless dead were about him, those who had been dead so long that they of all things made were most truly lost. All they remembered of life was what an unthinking, newbom child remembers- heat, warmth, pulsebeats, blood. Harran began to sweat as he picked up the wine-flask and made his way around to the edge of the circle. At the pattern's northern point he took Mriga's favorite knife and cut the heel of his left hand with it, wide but not deep, for the best bleeding. The horror of cutting himself left him weak and shaking. But there was no time to waste. On the northern point, and on all the others, he shed his blood in a fat dollop on the grain, and poured wine over it all, then retreated to the center of the circle and said the word that would let the shades past the fringes of the pattern, though no further.

They came flocking in, crowding to the blood, eyes that he could not see squeezed shut in pleasure, tiny cries withering the silence. They drank their fill, slowly-tiny bat-sips were all they could manage through those parched soul-mouths. And then, satisfied, they milled about gibbering for a little while, forgot why they had come, and faded away. Harran felt slightly sorry for them-the poor strengthless dead, reduced to a shadowy eternity of wistful hunger-but he wasn't sorry to see them go. They would not trouble the spell again; he could get on with the real business now.

He paused just long enough to wipe the cold sweat out of his eyes, then put the book-roll aside, took the mandrake out of his pocket, and started undoing its bindings. When they were off he laid the mandrake carefully in the palm of the skeleton hand, "head" up toward the fingers, and then paused again; the next maneuver was tricky, and he briefly wished for three hands. There was a way to manage it, though. He squatted down, pinned both hand and mandrake securely in place on the floor with the toe of one boot. Then with one hand he plucked the silvered pin out of the mandrake's torso; with the other he squeezed his blood out onto the root's pinprick wound.