Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

The crucified Christ stared down at us, looking uncertain about the whole proceeding.

‘I’d prefer to start with you,’ Fanke said, without animosity. ‘Like Pamela, you’re a little out of place here. In many ways, you’re beneath the dignity of the occasion. But the child’s spirit must be sundered. That won’t wait. To attempt any other sacrifice before the one that raised my lord is concluded would be unwise. So you’ll have to wait your turn, Castor. And you’ll have to watch your efforts and machinations come to nothing before you’re allowed to slink away into death. This isn’t cruelty on my part, you understand. Just . . . logistics.’

‘Well, if it’s just logistics, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I was starting to think you didn’t like me.’ The piano wire tightened fractionally around my throat.

‘Marmarauôth marmarachtha marmarachthaa amarda maribeôth,’ Fanke said, in a sing-song voice. The acolytes came in on the chorus. ‘Satana! Beelzebub! Asmode!’ They threw out their hands, then drew them in and clasped them together in what was clearly a ritual gesture.

‘Iattheoun iatreoun salbiouth aôth aôth sabathiouth iattherath Adônaiai isar suria bibibe bibiouth nattho Sabaoth aianapha amourachthê. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.’ More hand-wringing. An acolyte at Fanke’s left held out a candle, and one on his right lit it with a taper. Fanke took it in his left hand without dropping a syllable. ‘Ablanathanalba, aeêiouô, iaeôbaphrenemoun. Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba.’ Even though most of the room was already steeped in darkness, the area around us seemed to be getting darker still. I made the mistake of looking up, as though the church had some internal sun that was being eclipsed. Something hung above us in the gloom – something like black smoke, except that it was shot through with branching filaments of deeper dark like veins and capillaries. It was spreading out from a point twenty feet above Fanke’s head, and it was descending towards us. Or rather towards Abbie, who saw it coming and struggled like a fly in a web, her thrashing movements buying her no headway at all. ‘Please!’ she whispered. ‘Oh please!’

He looks a lot smaller in the medieval woodcuts, but I knew who it was that we were looking at: Asmodeus, coalescing out of the stone in answer to Fanke’s summons. The cold came with him, concentrating around us with such suddenness and intensity that I felt the skin on my face stretch taut.

Fanke held the locket up in his right hand, on a level with the candle flame. ‘Phôkensepseu earektathou misonktaich,’ he said. ‘Uesemmeigadôn Satana. Uesemmeigadôn Beelzebub. Uesemmeigadôn Asmode, Asmode atheresphilauô.’

He brought his hands together to let the locket meet the flame. Or at least he tried to: but it didn’t come. Abbie dug her heels into nothing and strained backwards against him, and although his hand trembled like a struck lightning rod, for a moment it didn’t move. His right arm was the injured one – the one where Peace had shot him – and I’d seen before that his movements with that hand and arm were stiff and jerky. Maybe that gave the desperate ghost some hint of purchase. Whatever it was, Fanke was startled: he turned to glare at her and pulled harder. His wrist spasmed once, twice, and began to move again.

But before the locket and the flame could touch, I thrust out my own hand and put my ring finger into the candle’s corona. Rafi’s hair, which was still tied there in a tight loop knot, singed and sizzled.

‘Amen,’ I growled, gritting my teeth against the pain so it looked like I was enjoying a private joke.

The piano wire tightened further around my throat, and the church exploded.

The noise was like nothing I can describe. If you could imagine a full brass band had packed their instruments with TNT and blown themselves to Hell on the final bar of the Floral Dance, then you’d be off to a good start. But that was just background noise: the sound of the film canisters being ripped into red-hot gobbets that ricocheted off the walls and scythed over our heads as the ignited film spools gushed out a geyser of flame and gas that expanded too fast for them to get out of its way.

It was Asmodeus’s scream that really made the moment special.

Dennis Peace had tried to describe it to me when he’d told me about what had gone down at the meeting house, but he hadn’t done it justice. It was as though you were hearing it through every inch of your skin, on a pitch that made your internal organs vibrate and scream in sympathy: as though you’d become a taut membrane on which broken glass was showering down, playing notes by tearing random holes in you.

I held my hand in the flame for a second or so longer, until the pain became too great to bear. Then I lurched back, which should have been the end of me – but the woman with the piano wire had lost the plot too, slamming her hands unavailingly to her ears. The wooden chocks on either end of the wire fell free, and their weight made the wire bite a little more deeply into my throat, but the sensation was drowned out in the allover-body migraine effect of Asmodeus’s bellowed pain and rage.

Fanke was still standing his ground on the far side of the circle, and his mouth was open as if he was yelling something. There was no sign of Abbie: I wasn’t sure exactly when she’d winked out, but she was no longer wrapped around his clenched fist. Everyone else was collapsing to their knees or trying to run on suddenly rubberised legs. A gout of oily black smoke erupted up the centre aisle, creeping low along the ground at first but rising and opening out as though it was alive and hungry, flickers of flame winking on and off within it like eyes.

I looked up at Asmodeus – I mean, at the clotted shadow-thing that was condensing over our heads: in a different way, I knew, the whole building was Asmodeus. The thing was spasming arrhythmically, the vein-like tendrils drawn in to the heart and then spat out again in whiplash curves, tightening on themselves with audible cracks. That meant my ears were working again, at least: in the initial shock after the movie canisters blew, I was afraid my eardrums had burst.

First things first. I shrugged off the piano wire, feeling it pull and then give, releasing a shower of blood droplets where it had been partially embedded in the flesh of my throat. Letting it fall, I leaned forward across the magic circle and hauled off with a punch that hit Fanke full in the face. It sent a thrill of agony through my burned fingers, but it also sent him flailing backwards into the altar rail. Jumping over the circle, I followed up with a low blow that doubled him up and made him drop Abbie’s locket. Good enough. I snatched the little golden heart up off the flags, and as I straightened again I brought my knee up into the bridge of Fanke’s nose for good measure. That should give him plenty to think about while I took care of Pen and Juliet, I reckoned.

Of course, how I was going to carry two women out of a burning building was a question that I hadn’t really thought through to any firm conclusions. But turning around with the locket clasped in my injured left hand, I discovered that it was unlikely to become an issue. In spite of the flames billowing up towards the ceiling at the back of the church, and the filaments of smoke crawling forward along the aisles, Fanke’s followers had rallied and were running to the defence of their master. The first one reached me just as I turned, throwing a clumsy punch that I clumsily blocked. I caught him on the rebound with a head-butt that he didn’t see coming. The second had a knife, and he stepped in around his injured colleague so that he could use it. But a couple of other robed figures surging up behind him knocked him off balance, and I was able to do a step-and-roll over the altar rail and back away from the charge.