Tom Piccirilli - A Lower Deep

He'd raped dozens of women and a number of them had survived. Those who were not witches made pacts with the Infernal and became so in order to have justice. His own children had bound him to their lineage and flayed his ghost, and he'd been passed on from generation to generation like the ashes he should have been.

My second self unfurled from around my neck and leaped. Pierre, my man, how things been? Self gave him a wet kiss on the cheek, then sauntered into the hallway. He stared back at me over his shoulder appraising my expression.

I couldn't read exactly what had gone on with his mother and Arioch, or just whose side he would be on when the taking of sides would again be in question. He fidgeted with ecstasy, all those fangs on view in his looming smile, as the cathedrals of the world opened before us. He ran down the corridor squealing. I wondered what I would be without him, if anything at all.

Pierre held his arm out to take my satchel and coat but I waved him off. Jebediah kept the dead like house pets. He enjoyed staring into their eyes and sending them off on meaningless tasks. He dressed them in jesters' costumes and French maid outfits, orangutans and conquistadors, and then invited the wealthy and affluent of the city to masques and costume balls. How he used to laugh when the witches and the murdered danced with the mayor and councilmen and the debutante sixteen-year-old daughters of celebrities.

There was a time Jebediah had sent my own father for me, my dad's shoes on the wrong feet.

Pierre stared at me without expression and said, "Welcome home, most gifted Master Summoner." Even Arioch's voice sounded more human. Pierre DeLancre's hatred of witches had been fanatical in life, and it had grown even worse in the impotence and despair of his resentful, feeble existence. Not many demons had eyes so virulent and ruthless as those of bitter men.

I brushed by him. "Never address me that way again."

"As you wish."

"Where is he?"

"Master DeLancre is in the library."

I walked for ten minutes before realizing that the djinn had moved the library intact to a different section of the manor. This proved to be another game, allowing me to wander lost in Jebediah's sanctum. It showed how much things had changed, and how substantially they remained fixed in a separate hell.

I passed arched and vaulted ceilings, immense stairwells, and open banquet tables where a century ago sovereign rulers licked the convulsing feet of their servants. Self said, This is getting a tad annoying . He licked my finger and drew his bottom teeth down against my wrist hard enough to draw a few drops of blood. I held my palm out and recited a passage from the Nis Kati. Suddenly there was a heavy charge in the air as a draft moved against my face. I looked at my hand and rivulets of my blood flowed upward into my palm in a series of lines, laying out a map for me to follow to the library.

Spirits walked at all hours down the gnarled passages and stairwells. Occasionally one of the Basque women tortured to death by Pierre would drift into the edge of my peripheral vision only to vanish when I glanced over. Other dead sat under furniture and wept or laughed as I moved against the wheels of the labyrinth, passing from one cathedral to the next. Various ancient gods stretched out on the walls. A short corpse dressed in the rags of a tuxedo clambered up the chains of a chandelier and peered down. It took me a moment to recognize him as a former governor who'd died without signing a proposed cut in Jebediah's tax bracket. The frivolity of necromancy.

Depending on which chamber we passed, Self grinned, frowned, or hugged my knee and trembled. We've forgotten too much about this place. There are more puzzles and enigmas now.

Yeah.

No music here the way it was, no real fun, not a hell of a lot left to make a good impression.

It was never any fun .

Black puddles and bone splinters ran beneath doors. Must be the reincarnate maid's day off . Not all hexes soothed. Some prayers could still carry weight long after the devoted had made their pacts. Above, distant shrieks echoed across time and place. Perhaps someone was being sacrificed at this hour or decades in the future or centuries ago, here or in another country where the brutalities of the world moved against anyone who went bare-chested or spread poultices on wounds instead of leeches.

Eventually we stood before the library door. Self tongued the doorknob, tasting the ages of arcane knowledge within. Filaments of protective spells had been woven across the portal, more like a bell than any Measure against intruders.

Self said, Luc-eee, I'm hooo-ome and snapped the charm. He kicked out and the door swung open.

I had to stamp down the old excitement. My breath hitched as I looked about the large room and saw just how much the DeLancres' collection of artifacts and lore had grown. The djinn had done a good job at expanding the library. It was three times its previous size and still didn't have quite enough room to fit all the occult tomes the family had amassed in nearly four hundred years.

Thousands of volumes and acquisitions filled the shelves and tables: talismans, amulets, fetishes, dolls, athames, and other blades, chalices, white, red, and black candles, bone carvings, instruments of torture, and devices I couldn't quite fathom. Pierre's lute rested on a hickory stand beside a fist-sized rock taken off the corpse of Giles Corey, who'd been crushed beneath stones by his Salem neighbors for refusing to plead innocent or guilty to witchery. When ordered to confess Corey had simply shouted, "Add another stone." He'd been a personal hero of both Jebediah and me, for different but not quite opposite reasons.

More souls had been sold in the procuring of this horde of arcane goods than there were words on all the pages.

Papyrus and codex from the great library of King Assurbanipal, emperor of Assyria, lined the walls in glass cases. Jebediah's strongest conjurings had gone into the guarding and defenses of these chambers. Mystic shields defended all this history, wisdom, and doctrine.

Locked in iron sheaths remained Babylonian books such as Maklu , the burning; UtukkiLimbuti , these evil spirits; Labartu , the hag demon; and Nis Kati , the raising of the hand. Resting side by side with flesh-bound grimoires were the original missing books of the Bible, including the War of the Lord and the 114 Sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. Here lay Solomon's Theurgia Goetica, which he'd used to annoy Arioch. In one corner rested a replica, or perhaps the original, copper cauldron in which King Solomon had imprisoned the djinn. And beside it was the Torah as it was meant to be read, the five books without breaks of paragraph, sentence, or even words-comprising the one true name of God.

The knowledge, pleasure, and power here could drive any man insane.

And in the center of it all sat Jebediah DeLancre.

His hair had grown back salted with white, and his lips had mended imperfectly. The upper lip tugged hard to the left so that a shard of his yellow canine would always be partially exposed in a delighted sneer. One eyebrow was mostly missing, a dark stretch of burn scar replacing it. He looked twenty pounds thinner, nearly gaunt, with his cheeks covered in blue shadow and his chin now a bony point with the barest smidgen of a goatee. He'd always had a nervous habit of plucking at it while he talked to men he was about to kill.

If he knew I was here, then he paid no attention. At his desk, he pored over a small pile of dirt, inspecting and combing through it with a letter opener. He divided the earth into lines-first horizontal, then vertical, and diagonal, realigning them over and over. His familiar, Peck in the Crown, had been purified and accepted to heaven by one of the lowest Sephiroth angels minutes before Dani had died. Peck in the Crown could never be replaced after its redemption. Now Jebediah, despite the awesome amount of arcana at his service, seemed less than half the man he'd once been, betrayed by his beloved familiar. His glare forever held righteous hatred and incredible overconfidence, but loss and transgression tinged his eyes as well.