Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  “Right,” he said, opening his eyes again; they were back to being brilliant blue. “What you’ve just seen is the sort of thing we try very hard not to have happen, for obvious reasons. I’m terribly sorry you had to deal with this on your own, although I am frankly impressed by your resourcefulness, and I am also sorry that so many people have died. It may come as some small consolation that you have undoubtedly saved a much larger number of lives by stopping it when you did—as far as I can tell, it was planning to burn the city down, which is not only atrocious but unoriginal. We would, of course, at that point have realized what was going on and taken steps to address the situation, but my London surface op has been away from his post and I’m afraid this sort of thing doesn’t ping on our radar until a fairly significant death toll has accumulated. London owes all of you rather a large debt of gratitude—which, of course, it must never be permitted to know about.”

  He sounded genuinely rueful. “I can at least reassure you that the entity responsible for this whole mess is now controlled and will not be allowed to make a nuisance of itself again on this or any other plane. Obviously you’d worked out that it was using that glass thing to project its influence over its followers, because you went to what must have been considerable personal peril to smash said glass thing, thus releasing said followers. I’m afraid none of them seem to have survived the experience.”

  Cranswell watched him tap ash; it vanished in faint sparkles before it hit the floor. “I’m here for two reasons: to see to Fastitocalon, and to tidy up this nasty little mess. The entity is … what we call a remnant, something left over from the beginnings of the universe that does not fit anywhere within it. Mostly the remnants are inert, do nothing, cause nothing to happen, but this one must have been a leftover from the creation of something intelligent and aware, because it developed its own awareness over an eon or so. Enough to be capable of identifying its own hunger, and acting upon that.”

  Ruthven looked up at this latest intelligence. His eyes were puffed almost shut, like a man in the middle of a nasty allergic reaction. “Then it’s as old as creation itself?” he asked.

  “Yes. And this isn’t even close to the first time it’s been active in this world, either; it had developed a particular and specific taste for fear—and hate, and anger. It’s been very busy over the past couple of millennia.”

  Samael glanced at the hovering ball of light above his right shoulder. “Haven’t you?” he added, and lassoed it with a smoke ring; the light pulsed briefly, resentfully, and Cranswell realized what exactly it was they’d been looking at all this time. “You needn’t worry,” Samael went on, still looking up at the light. “I’ve got it firmly under control. I happened to have been inadvertently summoned here by Fastitocalon, not that he intended to bother me, and when I showed up I thought it expedient first to simply catch the thing and stop it scuttling off to infect any other minds, and then see to Fass.”

  “I’m still a bit unclear on how all this works,” said Ruthven, a little unsteadily, but only a little. “Fastitocalon told us about the … balance, between the sides, and that both sides are actively engaged in maintaining this balance. Neither of you knew about this business until now?”

  Samael exhaled smoke again. “I’m afraid not. It’s been very good at hiding its tracks and at the moment things are a little fraught in terms of infernocelestial politics; this couldn’t have come at a less opportune time. The angels aren’t at their best, either.”

  “Angels,” said Ruthven.

  “Mm. It’s somewhat sensitive,” Samael said, and lit another cigarette, this one pale pink. Cranswell thought he recognized them as Sobranie Cocktails, and wondered half-hysterically if Sobranie of London was aware of this particular celebrity patron. “I think this time I am going to have to request a meeting with Gabriel in person, which is going to be immensely tiresome. He won’t like it one little bit, but then Gabriel never likes anything I do. I really am sorry you had to sort out this wretched business on your own, it’s unconscionable, but you did do a remarkably good job and prevented a lot more deaths, and it cannot ever happen again.”

  Beside Cranswell, Ruthven sighed. “One other thing, though. I thought ‘Samael’ was the name of the Angel of Death, not the Devil himself.”

  “Well, technically I am an angel,” Samael said, “or an ex-archangel, anyway, and the lovely thing about human scripture is its varied and extremely versatile potential for interpretation. You lot are so endlessly creative. As it happens I’m in charge of a group of archdemons who run various aspects of Hell, which I’m afraid I really ought to be getting back to, if you don’t mind; Fass needs looking after properly and I’ve got to shout at Asmodeus about his Monitoring and Evaluation protocols.”

  Cranswell looked up at the golden hair, the peacock-blue eyes. He thought he could make out Samael’s wings, even though they weren’t being completely visible: a sort of faint shimmer in the air, a change in refraction, like looking at the edges of ice under moving water. He was aware of something not unlike thrall lapping at his perceptions, numbing him from feeling the kind of awe that might ordinarily strike an observer dumb and breathless—or maybe his capacity for wonder had just been saturated by the night’s events.

  “I have a question,” he said, raising a finger.

  “Yes?” said Samael.

  “I quit a couple years ago, but … can I bum a cigarette?”

  Fastitocalon’s suit was, in fact, a lost cause. “Even if I could get the blood out,” he said, looking dolefully at the ruined jacket in his hands, “which I can’t, there’s no way the hole could be repaired. I really am cross about that. It’s fifty-six years old and completely irreplaceable.”

  He was sitting on the floor of the tunnel, stripped to the waist, while Greta examined his back. Once she’d cleaned away the blood, there was only a minor reddish bruise marking where the knife had gone in: no sign of scarring, no intimation that the skin had ever been broken at all. She ran her fingers over it: almost no swelling. And the ever-present rustle in his breathing seemed to have stopped. When she put her ear to his back to listen, he sounded clearer than she had ever heard him.

  “I mean,” he went on, wiggling a disconsolate finger through the hole torn in the back of the jacket, “they could have been more considerate.” His shirt was also beyond repair, but apparently he minded less about that.

  “What, would you have rather they let you take your jacket off before they stabbed you?” Greta asked, sitting back on her heels. She was still furious, but the clinical fascination with what had just happened was currently eclipsing the need to shout at him. “‘One moment please, Mr. Violent Lunatic, I don’t want to get blood on my nice suit’?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, as if this were an obvious and rational statement. “I can be repaired, but good tailoring is very difficult to find.”

  “Repaired,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me you could … what, come back to life? That … person … said you summoned him.”

  “Mm,” said Fastitocalon, wincing. “I really am sorry. I thought you knew. I didn’t realize you’d be so worried.”

  “You thought I knew? How the hell would I have known?”

  “I assumed Wilfert had told you,” he said. “And I don’t remember summoning anybody, but the sparrow thing is apparently actually true. Sam must have sensed I was in trouble and decided to come and lend a hand.”

  “The sparrow thing,” Greta repeated, and just stopped herself in time from tucking her hair behind her ears; her hands were still sticky with Fastitocalon’s blood. Her father had known about this? And hadn’t bothered to tell her?

  “Mm,” he said again. “He knows where all his demons are, all the time. I think he feels ever so slightly guilty about the whole business with Asmodeus, when I was first exiled; every now and then he tries to get me to come back to Hell permanently.”

  “And you don’t want to go?” Greta asked.

  “It’s not a question of wanting,�
�� he said, bleakly. There was a little color in his face, but to Greta he still looked unwell. “I’m not the same thing as I used to be. It’s not home anymore; I don’t fit there, much as I miss it. I don’t fit here, either, but I’ve been here so long it’s difficult to imagine being anywhere else.”

  Greta looked at him—grey, shirtless, disheveled, covered in blood, his perfectly combed hair a tangled mess—and her tears brimmed over. He stifled a curse and reached for her, and Greta let him steady her with a thin hand on her shoulder. She closed her eyes for a long moment, fighting for calm, for control.

  When she could trust her voice, she said, “We have to get you out of here. And the others. Ruthven and Varney looked terrible. I need to see to them, and we all have to get the hell out of this goddamn tunnel before anybody else shows up. I—Oh fuck.”

  “What?” said Fastitocalon, letting her go. “What is it?”

  “Ruthven’s house,” she said. “They set it on fire. The monks. I just hope Kree-akh and the others got out safe, but, Fass, he left me in charge of it and it burned to the fucking ground. He’s going to be devastated.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said, but he had gone noticeably paler. “It might be destroyed; it might just be damaged, there’s no way to know until we get up there and see. Don’t go borrowing trouble. But I agree that we ought to vacate the current premises; if you’ll help me up I think I can probably manage independent ambulation.”

  Greta nodded and pushed herself to her feet, offering him her hands. She had to take quite a lot of his weight, but once he was upright he seemed relatively stable. Still, she was very glad to see Fastitocalon’s improbable boss leading the others around the corner. She had no idea what he’d done with that whole light-show business, but it had worked, and if Fass happened to experience a sudden relapse she wanted Samael nearby, freaky eyes and all.

  She turned her attention to the rest of them, and winced. Ruthven looked dreadful, worse than she’d ever seen him. His face was bright scarlet, puffy, blistered all over, his big silver eyes red and glittering with tears. She thought of the rectifier, of how much UV it must have been putting out, and how much damage it would do to someone with his level of severe sensitivity: That was a clear case of sun poisoning if she had ever seen one. He was leaning on Varney, who also looked bad, but significantly less so.

  Before she could say anything, Samael had crossed the chamber to them and was looking critically at Fastitocalon, the point of light still bobbing along a few feet above his shoulder. At close range the gold and white gorgeousness was really kind of overwhelming, especially since he seemed to be glowing faintly. Greta narrowed her eyes, unwilling to let go of Fass despite being loomed at. She had a horrible feeling that he might simply vanish.

  Samael took Fastitocalon’s chin in his hand, tilted his face slightly, peering into his eyes. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him and he gave a little nod. “You’ll do,” he said. “I’m taking you home; I want Faust to look at you properly, and you’re going to spend at least a week at the Spa doing absolutely nothing.”

  “I’m all right,” Fastitocalon protested.

  “You will be. Come along and don’t argue. I am not even slightly in the mood.”

  “But—” he said, and then his shoulders slumped. “If you insist.”

  “You’re taking him to get proper medical attention?” she asked Samael, looking up at the brilliant blue eyes with some difficulty. They narrowed for a moment, and she had the strong and unpleasant conviction that he could read every single thought in her head. It felt a little bit like being thralled without the pleasant pink fog or the cool mirrors; this was not in the least gentle, a glaring searchlight inside her skull.

  Then it cut off, and the Devil smiled a little. “I am,” he said. “Dr. Faust is my personal physician, as well as being medical director of the Erebus Health System. Is that good enough for you, Greta Helena Magdalena Helsing?”

  “Greta,” said Fastitocalon in a warning tone.

  She held Samael’s gaze for a moment longer, and then nodded. “Yes, of course. I would love to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Faust at some point, if that would be at all possible.”

  “I expect that can be arranged,” said Samael. “And now we really must be going. Fass?”

  Fastitocalon gave her a look Greta couldn’t read clearly—there was apology in there, and affection, and not a little worry—and then just sighed and closed his eyes. Samael put an arm around him, pulled him close, and made a small sharp gesture with his other hand. There was a brilliant flash and then a small thunderclap as the air collapsed in on itself, and Samael, Fastitocalon, and the captive ball of light were gone.

  “Didn’t he have nice manners,” said Ruthven into the subsequent silence, sounding slightly hysterical, and fainted dead away.

  CHAPTER 16

  Ruthven came around fairly quickly, in time to catch Greta telling the others about the house fire, whereupon he promptly fainted again. Kneeling beside him, she felt the pulse in his throat and looked up at the others grimly. “We need to get him out of here. Sooner rather than later.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Cranswell asked.

  “Other than the burns—shock, dehydration, UV poisoning. He shouldn’t have come down here in the first place. Fass was right.”

  “He and Varney were fighting off the monks together,” Cranswell said. “Without both of them here I’m pretty sure we’d all be dead right about now, or at least permanently insane. Can you fix him?”

  “He needs blood,” she said. “And not to be here. There’s—I think there’s some of that poisonous stuff in the air. It’s almost certainly contaminated most of the surfaces; it’s not doing him any good at all. How did you get down here?”

  “We took the stairs,” said Varney, and looked at her, blinking. “How did you get in? For that matter, why are you here in the first place? I thought it had been agreed that you were to stay on the surface.”

  “The ghouls brought me,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “I had this idea based on something Mewleep had said that it might be possible to turn off the goddamn rectifier the easy way, by flipping a switch, but it doesn’t matter now. You killed it.”

  The quality of the sudden silence struck Greta as strange. “What?”

  “You turned off the power somewhere? Down here? Just now?” Cranswell demanded.

  “I turned it off and then right back on again, because, well, that was when Fass kind of vanished from my head,” she said, looking up at them. He was still there, in her mind: very faint now and far, but present. “And the obvious mental linkage was that I’d fucked up somehow by flipping that switch, logic or no logic, so I turned it back on. Why?”

  He and Varney were staring at one another. “When—” Varney began. “Just at the end, for that one moment—”

  “—it dropped out,” Cranswell finished for him, and then returned his gaze to Greta. “We didn’t know why, but the power just kind of flickered out briefly, and we could actually kind of think again without that voice yelling in our heads, and more importantly we could move, and before it could grab us again I got close enough to hit it with my sword.”

  “Which I doubt he would have been able to do,” Varney said, “without the momentary flicker in its attention. It was … strong. Stronger than we anticipated. I think we all owe you rather a large debt of gratitude.”

  “It worked?” said Greta, blinking.

  “It sure as hell did,” Cranswell told her. “That probably saved everybody’s collective ass, right there. ‘Thank you’ sounds puerile, doesn’t it? Samael said a whole bunch more people would have died if we hadn’t stopped the thing, so, that’s kind of on you, I think. Well done.”

  “Thank Mewleep, not me,” Greta said. “He was the one who knew about the switch panel and also not only where it was but which one of the goddamn switches I needed to pull. Look, never mind that for the moment. We really do have to get Edmund out of here.”
>
  She tucked her hair back, feeling about four thousand years old, and tried to consider logistics. “We’ll have to carry him up the stairs—shit, there won’t be any light; this is going to be impossible—”

  “Allow me,” said Varney, kneeling down beside her. He gently nudged her aside, and she proceeded to watch in astonishment as he hoisted Ruthven’s limp form over his shoulder as if the vampire weighed nothing at all.

  Greta and Cranswell exchanged looks. “Lead on,” she said to Varney, pushing herself to her feet, and took a last look around the tunnel: the heaps of feathers, the black bloodstain on the floor, the bodies of the two Gladius Sancti monks Fastitocalon had been trying to free. “It’s over, isn’t it? It’s over.”

  “It is,” said Varney, and as she turned to follow him out of the shelter, Greta thought, slightly to her own surprise, that she believed him.

  The journey up the spiral staircase in the dark was not something Greta wanted to recall with any clarity afterward. It was not completely dark, but the light thrown by Varney’s eyes was barely enough for them to make out the stairs, and Cranswell and Greta had to move slowly, feeling their way. It took what felt like hours, every muscle in her body aching as she forced herself up one more step, and one more, and one more.

  Cranswell’s watch was broken; she had no idea how long they had been down there, underneath the city. It might be midday in the world above. It might be the next night. She was so tired she could not think in straight lines, and it did not help that the staircase was a twisting spiral, dizzying and endless. Nor did she have any idea what kind of state the world might be in when they emerged, though she could not seem to muster the strength to care so terribly much.