It stood twenty feet tall. He would have called it a woman, because of the pendulous breasts only partially concealed by an eight-foot cascade of flowing black hair. But the face was a demon’s face, wild and inhuman, with brown teeth like chisels and eyes that closed to slits. With each breath, the entire wrinkled face expanded and contracted. Her arms, muscular and wide-spread, were tipped with evil hooked nails longer than the head of Max’s spear.
That wasn’t the worst. Not by a bunch. The creature had only one leg, and that leg came from, well, from the genitalia.
“What do you call someone with no arms and no legs, with a wooden stick up his backside?” Johnny asked quietly.
That thick, obscene leg flexed, and the creature stretched down. Hooked nails curled around a misted stalagmite. A quick convulsion of python muscles, and the great chunk of rock snapped off in its hand, a ten-foot limestone club that coruscated in the darkness like a wet fuse.
Snow Goose backed them up. “Paija!” she said urgently. “We’ve gotta go back to where the path is too narrow for her to follow, and get ready.”
“No argument here,” Max heard Yarnall mutter.
They backed up along the path. The Paija hissed venomously at them, Cerberus at the gates of Hades.
“Your amulets!” she cried.
Where did I put that? Max rooted around in his bag until he found his gift from Martin the Arctic Fox, an owl’s claw petrified almost into a knot. Snow Goose took it. She took Kevin’s leather pouch and poured a thin stream of black powder into the palm of her hand. Her round face crinkled happily. “Strength! Soot is stronger than fire.”
“I should be carrying Ajax cleanser,” Johnny Welsh said. “Stronger than soot.”
Trianna rubbed his shoulder. “Your bird worked when we needed it, Johnny.”
He abandoned his scowl and gave her a quick hug.
Each Adventurer made his contribution in turn, and the little pile grew. The woman-demon grew tired of waiting. She hopped a step closer along the stone bridge. The bridge groaned in distress.
“Hurry!” Snow Goose bit her lip, thinking quickly. “You spoke of the fiber in your backpacks. You said it had power, perhaps more power than the amulets. Quickly, take them off, stack them in a pile.”
Yarnall, Hebert, and Ollie shucked their backpacks and complied. They kept worried eyes on the she-thing and flapped their arms for balance, but moved as quickly as possible.
“The suspense is killing me,” Kevin said to Johnny as they shucked backpacks. “What do you call someone with no arms and no legs, with a wooden stick up the backside?”
“Pop.”
“Groan.”
Hippogryph added his backpack to the pile.
“What is that creature?” Bowles asked.
“Good question,” Max said ruminatively. “Looks like something out of ‘Saucer Sluts Meet Hercules.”
Bowles looked pained. “Please. I was a child. When I signed the contracts they called it ‘Space Maidens on Olympus.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Shh,” Snow Goose said urgently. “It’s called a Paija. It’s a demon, but the Cabal must have brought it here to guard the entrance. This isn’t good.”
Max whispered, “Why would it be?”
“Heh. Yes. But they must have more power than Daddy thought. Hurry.”
She took a leather thong from around her neck, pulled a tiny goose-doll out of her cleavage. She looked around at the others. “Ahh
… Johnny, we don’t want to deplete your charm. Let’s see. Oliver. Frankish Oliver.” Ollie stepped forward, and she opened the bundle that he wore around his neck, and sighed with relief. “Good. You also have a winged Inua. We can lead.” She hunkered down. “Now, the rest of you. All of you have spirit selves. All of you have both flesh and a spirit form. The fleshly form is not strong enough. But perhaps our spirit forms could prevail, If we can trick it, then its magic, its life force, will be ours to command.”
She took her totem, and Oliver’s, a hawk carved from some hard black substance. “I need string, and I need something that was part of a satellite,” she said.
Charlene handed her a pair of gloves. “Put these on.”
“No, it’s for-”
“Put them on, Snow Goose.”
The Inuit maiden shrugged with her eyebrows and pulled the thin gloves over her hands. Delicately, Charlene handed her a spool of thread. “Falling Angel cable. The gloves are made of it too. You don’t want to touch the cable with anything but the gloves.”
She nodded. She wrapped the two totems together with the thread, then looped the spool into the bundle as well. “We need a song,” she said. “A sacred song.”
“We don’t know any,” Max protested.
“No-one of yours will do. Weren’t you singing one earlier that spoke of our land? We must pull our worlds closer together.”
Orson groaned. “Kevin?”
Smiling and buck-toothed, Kevin strode forward. “Let me see… ”
Orson covered his ears as Kevin elaborated on his previous theme, picking up the adventures of Eskimo Nell, Dead-Eye Dick, and Mexican Pete in the midst of the most grueling contest in the annals of song.
Snow Goose was all business, chanting happily over her little bundle. The group chimed along with Kevin as the Ballad of Eskimo Nell progressed to its glorious climax.
“Now!” Snow Goose said. Her eyes rolled up, her lips moved, Dah dee dah dee dah diddity dee- “Inua of my Ancestors! We fight to keep your rite. Inua of my Ancestors, be at our side this night. O Children of the freezing air, come live within me now. Air spirits come, and join in war to shatter Ahk-lut’s dream, ally with us against an evil folk who would blaspheme. Set us free of heavy flesh, set us free from our illusions, set us FREE!”
The air was humming. The bridge beneath their feet vibrated like a plucked guitar string. Max could feel it in his teeth, in his fillings. (Dammit, that hurt! The feeling was like the little chill he’d had on the airplane — what seemed a lifetime ago, but now deeper and stronger, and ouch!)
Snow Goose joined hands with Frankish Oliver. He seemed nervous at first, trying to twist his hand out of her grip, but she held on as the vibration grew stronger and stronger. At last the sound was recognizable as human voices, stripped of euphonics and amplified staggeringly. It was a chant, a ritual chant that was all undertones, a sound like a row of giant gongs ringing beneath three feet of oil.
Snow Goose’s outline was the first to change, followed swiftly by Frankish Oliver’s. They became like fluid metal, running together, peeling apart, and the light expanded until it surrounded the other Gamers as well, bathing them all in a silvery, gloriously fluxing incandescence.
At first Max saw only a blurred glow. It moved, shifted, and he understood: something intangible was pulling itself free from Max. A moment later he could see its shape.
It was himself, in a way. Once, after a debilitating stretch of fever, he had lost enough weight in his face to see the cheekbones that shaped it, and he recognized them now. But that perfect, idyllic shape turned and gave him a nod, smiling as if they shared some great secret. Max couldn’t hear the undertone chanting anymore-it was more like he was a part of it, his body one of the notes. He turned to the other Gamers, and was astonished. From each of them flowed an ectomorphic form, more beautiful than anything they could have aspired to in life. The forms rose above them, hovered there, then joined hands in a circle.
Max stared, trying to absorb what he was seeing. The cave, once the very heart of darkness, glowed with a light which was not of man, or of man’s doing. It was a holy light, a miniature aurora borealis, a light which flowed from within the floating, flaming figures.
The floating “spirit” of Snow Goose rotated slowly in the air, her face a calm oval. “Now,” she said, “we go.”
The spirit forms ranged ahead. Max felt his spear humming with power, and clutched it tightly. It felt warm. The stone bridge they traversed was as narrow, and as frighteningly high over an unfathomable pit, as it had been before; but there was something else. Something new had entered the equation.
