Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“We’ll never make it to Kabul without water,” Joy said.

“And what happens when we make it to Kabul? Can anyone there help? What in the hell is that thing?”

“If I knew, would I have opened that door?” She was remarkably calm for someone who had just lost her friends to a hideous beast.

“I guess not. But I didn’t see it come out of there. I felt something, but nothing that size.”

“Act, Biff, don’t think. Act.”

She handed me a water skin and I held it in the cistern, trying to listen for the sound of the monster over the bubbles as it filled. All I could hear was the occasional bleating of the goats and the sound of my own pulse in my ears. Joy corked her water skin, then went about opening the pig and goat pens, shooing the animals out onto the plateau.

“Let’s go!” she shouted to me. She took off down the path toward the hidden road. I pulled the water skin from the cistern and followed as quickly as I could. There was enough moonlight to make traveling fairly easy, but since I hadn’t even seen the road in daylight, I didn’t want to try to negotiate its deadly cutbacks at night without a guide. We had almost made the first leg of the road when we heard a hideous wailing and something heavy landed in the dust in front of us. When I could get my breath again I stepped up to find the bloodied carcass of a goat.

“There,” Joy said, pointing down the mountainside to something moving among the rocks. Then it looked up at us and there was no mistaking the glowing yellow eyes.

“Back,” Joy said, pulling me back from the road.

“Is that the only way down?”

“That or diving off the edge. It’s a fortress, remember—it’s not supposed to be easy to get in and out of.”

We made our way back to the rope ladder, tossed it over the side, and started down. As Joy made it to the ledge and ducked into the cave something heavy hit me on the right shoulder. My arm went numb with the impact and I let go of the ladder. Mercifully, my feet had tangled in the rungs as I fell, and I found myself hanging upside down looking into the cave entrance where Joy stood. I could hear the terrified goat that had hit me screaming as it fell into the abyss, then there was a distant thump and the screaming stopped.

“Hey, kid, you’re a Jew, aren’t you?” said the monster from above.

“None of your business,” I said. Joy grabbed the ladder and pulled me inside the cave, ladder and all, just as another goat came screaming past. I fell on my face in the dust and sputtered, trying to breathe and spit at the same time.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten a Jew. A good Jew sticks to your ribs. That’s the problem with Chinese, you eat six or seven of them and in a half hour you’re hungry again. No offense, miss.”

“What’d he say?” Joy asked.

“He says he likes kosher food. Will that ladder hold him?”

“I made it myself.”

“Swell,” I said. We heard the ropes creak with the strain as the monster climbed onto the ladder.

Joshua and Balthasar rode into Kabul at a time of night when only cutthroats and whores were about (the whores offering the “cutthroat discount” after midnight to promote business). The old wizard had fallen asleep to the rhythm of his camel’s loping gait, an act that nearly baffled Joshua as much as the whole demon business, as he spent most of his time on camelback trying not to upchuck—seasickness of the desert, they call it. Joshua flicked the old man’s leg with the loose end of his camel’s bridle, and the magus came awake snorting.

“What is it? Are we there?”

“Can you control the demon, old man? Are we close enough for you to regain control?”

Balthasar closed his eyes and Joshua thought that he might be going to sleep again, except his hands began to tremble with some unseen effort. After a few seconds he opened his eyes again. “I can’t tell.”

“Well, you could tell that he was out.”

“That was like a wave of pain in my soul. I’m not in intimate contact with the demon at all times. We are probably too far away still.”

“Horses,” Joshua said. “They’ll be faster. Let’s go wake up the stable master.” Joshua led them through the streets to the stable where we had boarded our camels when we came to town to heal the blinded bandit. There were no lamps burning inside, but a half-naked whore posed seductively in the doorway.

“Special for cutthroats,” she said in Latin. “Two for one, but no refunds if the old man can’t do the business.”

It had been so long since he’d heard the language that it took Joshua a second to respond. “Thank you, but we’re not cutthroats,” Joshua said. He stepped past her and pounded on the door. She ran a fingernail down his back as he waited.

“What are you? Maybe there’s another special.”

Joshua didn’t even look back. “He’s a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old wizard and I’m either the Messiah or a hopeless faker.”

“Uh, yeah, I think there is a special rate for fakers, but the wizard has to pay full price.”

Joshua could hear stirring inside of the stable master’s house and a voice calling for him to hold his horses, which is what stable masters always say when they make you wait. Joshua turned to the whore and touched her gently on the forehead.

“Go, and sin no more,” he said in Latin.

“Right, and what do I do for a living then, shovel shit?”

Just then the stable master threw open the door. He was short and bowlegged and wore a long mustache that made him look like a dried-up catfish. “What is so important that my wife couldn’t handle it?”

“Your wife?”

The whore ran her nail across the back of Joshua’s neck as she passed him and stepped into the house. “Missed your chance,” she said.

“Woman, what are you doing out here anyway?” asked the stable master.

Joy scurried out onto the landing and pulled a short, broad-bladed black dagger from the folds of her robe. The ends of the rope ladder were swaying in front of her as the monster descended.

“No, Joy,” I said, reaching out to pull her back into the cave. “You can’t hurt it.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

She turned and grinned at me, then ran the dagger twice over the thick ropes on one side leaving it attached by only a few fibers, then she reached up a few rungs and sliced most of the way through the other side of the ladder. I couldn’t believe how easily she’d cut through the rope.

She stepped back into the passageway and held the blade up so it caught the starlight. “Glass,” she said, “from a volcano. It’s a thousand times sharper than any edge on an iron blade.” She put the dagger away and pulled me back into the passageway, just far enough so we could see the entrance and the landing.

I could hear the monster coming closer, then a huge clawed foot appeared in silhouette in the entrance, then the other foot. We held our breath as the monster reached the cut section of the ladder. Nearly a whole massive thigh was visible now, and one of his talonlike hands was reaching down for a new hold when the ladder snapped. Suddenly the monster hung sideways, swinging from his hold on a single rope in front of the entrance. He looked right at us, the fury in his yellow eyes replaced for a moment by confusion. His leathery bat ears rose in curiosity, and he said, “Hey?” Then the second rope snapped and he plunged out of our view.

We ran out to the landing and looked over the edge. It was at least a thousand feet to the floor of the valley. We could only see several hundred feet down in the dark, but it was several hundred feet of cliff face that was conspicuously monsterless.

“Nice,” I said to Joy.