A Lower Deep

A maelstrom of baying and shrieks immediately crammed the basement. Arioch's many faces and fingers and teeth pointed at me. 'I'll have the maimed female child now, for further disfigurement, or you condemn and forfeit ten others to me.'

Do it, do it, Self urged from the window. It'll all work out . . . don't put yourself through this anymore. This isn't your burden or trial.

Its mine and yours too.

Will you trust me for once?

Like hell.

'Sorry,' I said to a prince of hell. 'Still no good.'

Arioch's three heads opened in frustration, mandibles and pincers snapping as loudly as clashing swords. It straggled forward and cried, 'Your damnable kind does not deny me!'

I pulled back my arms and drove hexes straight into its middle face, black and fiery spells pouring off its cheeks in splashes of flame and embers. The weight of history is always upon us. Words ran roughly over my lips in the same way the Knights Templar sang during the Crusades, before the Bishop of Worms orchestrated King Philip IV of France's condemnation of the order. Hundreds of the knights took their mystical secrets to the stake. That voice of screams split apart, and among the separate screeches I heard my dead enemies, inhumanly thin whispers, and Grand Master Templar Jacques de Molay's curses as he burned.

Malevolence slithered in there pretending to be Danielle.

She said, 'Come for me. Find me, love.'

I lunged as jagged green and blue charges of arcana flashed between us. Those incredibly sharp wings whizzed over my head, hunting to slash through my neck. Its blazing arms caught me flush in the chest and my teeth slammed together on my tongue.

Arioch said, 'You've much to learn.'

'Don't I know it.' I coughed, grimacing, and trying to put my burning shirt out.

Its hands dimmed, the unknown incantations skittering about the room, cold and impenetrable. Those arms grabbed me and changed beyond color to the distorted silver of a mirror. Prince Arioch hauled me into the air, hungry to add my flesh to its transient body, but I managed to frantically kick free.

I flew backward into the corner and felt something crack hideously in my lower back. I drew breath to scream and the Bishop of Worms yanked Walt out of his stroller and pressed the child's mouth over mine.

Get over here, damn you!

Shhh, I am, Self said.

Visions clashed with memories and my brain came apart in shreds.

She was there, my love, alive in my arms-in the past, where we swung out of the parking lot at the prom and headed for the pond, and impossibly in the near future. The coven circled us as always, acting on their own delights in the old covenstead, lost in common depravity, with the priests shivering behind their pews again. Breath of God filled my lungs and launched into my mind. Eyes rolling back into my skull, the pure yet hazy breach of the future tinged my laughter with shrieks. Walt dropped off my face like a bloated spider.

I rolled, trying not to think, pressing the visions away as the skeletons of the Rumsey's clattered together in a bedlam of ancient unholy tunes. Flopping forward, I rolled into the Baphomet pentagram tasting blood and chalk as Arioch laughed a thousand snickers and guffaws, not all of which were disgusting. The Bishop of Worms lifted its bulk to smash my spine, that stolen toad meat returning to color and hopping high against the ceiling to shatter timber.

Snow wafted in through the broken window, dappling the dead. I rose to my knees, thinking, She'll be with me again somehow, and I felt bones in my chest grating horribly. Flickering arcana swirled about the cellar like leaves in the wind. I called, I could use a little help and heard echoes of Persian oaths and chewing sounds. My vision swam and I couldn't find Self. Faces of Arioch made tsking noises like a disappointed father needing to punish a child further. Others tsked within it as well, Danielle's cries ringing through clearly.

'Stop it!' I shouted. My hexes whirled and picked up speed slinging through the air, winding in faster and faster until they struck with a burst of putrid yellow liquid and hissed steam, igniting that skin.

Graveyard musk spilled from the Bishop of Worms, an intoxicating mix of jasmine, fried hair, and souls frying. Arioch bellowed, the wing and arms on its left side torn off. Unable to stand, I finally focused on Self and saw him nibbling something, with ropes of fat trailing down his chin. He gave one last crunching champ of his fangs, smiled beatifically, and scrambled to me.

Scorching and sinewy, Arioch's fury was palpable, the oppressive fetor of carnage thickening around us until Self bopped in front of the prince of sixty regions and said, Hey, Chief, got a minute to spare?

Now a few puzzled gasps gurgled up within that dreaded voice. Arioch responded with a string of damnations. Danielle wept, 'Come for me, love,' and my throat closed. Eventually Arioch's three sets of pincers drew into repulsive displays of humor. Self spoke quietly, doubled over giggling at times, and clasped a reassuring arm around the grotesque toad. His claws caressed the Bishop of Worms' oozing flesh, and he occasionally licked the wounds I'd inflicted.

I could see the sweat fall from my second self's upper lip, those curved fangs beaming but ready to rip if necessary. At least I hoped so. Arioch nodded gravely, and moaned when Self's tongue touched a particularly sensitive area. It snorted in my direction and said, 'You've strained my armistice with mortality further this night, Necromancer. Many will eventually perish in your stead. Think upon that with your human conscience, at what you've seen and have yet to live and suffer. I will take ten lives presently, and mention your name to their ghosts so that they might find you.'

Mouths still frozen open in that threat, its chitinous heads dissolved from the top to the bottom, those blended organs and tissues now discarded and melting as Arioch's essence fled. Stretched but nearly whole, the Rumsey's' skins draped sideways across their skeletons before liquefying into a puddle of viscous ooze.

You two are friends? I asked. The pain had me trembling badly.

It owed me from the Goblin Market, and has learned to pay its debts. It had a fling with my mother and I didn't tell its wife.

Why not?

He didn't answer. Certain secrets continued to be kept, boundaries uncrossed, although I could never be sure which were his and which could be mine.

Self uttered a low chuckle that drove deep, making me squirm even more as the agony in my back corkscrewed up through my brain and skewered it. He sprang and caught Walt's body by the neck, claws spearing that chubby belly, tearing as he ate, and then climbed inside the shell. Relax, the kid was already long dead. Walt unwound layer by layer like his parents, the child's corpse leaking dark goblin ichor. The dead baby had actually been used as a disguise. For a djinn.

No wonder the breath of God had been upon me. Djinn learn the future by eavesdropping on the angels, but why had Arioch damned me in this fashion?

Why was I destined to meet my brethren once more?

'So,' I hissed. 'It's been a game the whole time.'

This stinks big time. We've been set up to take the heat. He said it as if he was enraged, but I could tell the fun and excitement was there too.

Crawling, I tried to grab hold of the wall and haul myself up, but I couldn't make it to my feet and slid facedown against the cold stone floor, groaning. I'd bitten through my tongue and my mouth filled with blood. Self wouldn't budge, continuing to maul and wash himself in the boy's remains, until I couldn't fight the pain anymore and was forced to ask.

Please help me, I begged.

But of course.

It had come to this before, the acknowledgment of need. I always hated seeing that grandiose look in his eyes, the arrogant smile so similar to my own. Is this what my love had seen in me? Self said, I'm here. He climbed out of Walt's chest and clambered across my shoulders, tore open my shirt, and lovingly licked and kissed my shattered back, claws prodding away the agony like acupuncture.

His invocations were in different archaic languages every time, as if he didn't want me to learn them. I