Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  Christine didn’t scream, but she shrank, hands groping at her own bare arms and half-uncovered throat. Alec stepped forward, caught up the soft black mountain of sables, and threw its protective weight around her shoulders. She pressed back against him, staring with straining eyes down the spiderweb of signs toward the darkness of the midway that should have been empty.

  The rush of the roller coaster died. Norah heard the cars rumble up a rise, then down when they could not quite crest the top, decreasing momentum penduluming to futile silence. With a grating moan, the Double Whirl grew still; the Over the Top cars yattered to the bottom of their artificial whirlpool and ground to a halt.

  Silence lay over the pier except for the sigh of the waves and the faint groan of wind searching the stands.

  It had been still a moment earlier. Impossibly, Norah thought she smelled desert dust and the feral, filthy sweetness of rats.

  Then, far off in the dark chasm of the midway, she heard the shrill crashing of broken glass. All three dogs flung themselves against their leashes, barking wildly again. Above the shrill clamor could be made out the grating rip of nails tearing loose from wood, and far back in the darkness Norah thought she saw something pale flicker and move.

  Not human, she thought. Her mind stalled on reality, took refuge, as it had all her life, in the calm practicalities of observation. She was aware, as if in reference to someone else, that she could hardly breathe. Turning her head, she scouted a shadow behind the shuttered peanut stand, but the faint flicker of the lines of light stayed her. She must not break the field of power. Starlight touched something far back in the darkness, something huge that moved with a disjointed, eerie bobbing, a bizarre lattice of dark and light moving in the stygian black like a living swarm of floating sticks.

  Shang Ko stepped to the gateway of the sketched aisle. He had set aside the whip and the necklace of brass cones silently, realizing that there was no need of a summons. His white hair stirred in the offshore wind as he lifted his dragon-carved staff.

  A moment before she saw clearly what the thing in the darkness was, Norah knew.

  It might have been the sound that told her, the faint creak of wires and the hollow clicking, like Christine’s bamboo wind chimes. The scratch of heavy claws on the wood without the creak of weight. It might have been the half-guessed shape of stained ashy gray, only a few shades lighter than the darkness. Empty eyeholes, the tulwar curve of fangs. Huge as it was, it scuttled like a rat—a smooth, steady rush, then stillness, waiting, a silence without breath, and she could see it sitting up, paws together like obscene hands.

  Watching them. Seeing them with eyes blank and white, twins of the jewels in the Moon of Rats.

  Knowing exactly who they were.

  Still with the stillness of a thing that survived at any cost.

  Then, suddenly, it moved, springing with a horrible speed. Norah pressed her fist to her mouth to keep from screaming as Shang swung his staff toward the thing, and in the blazing blue glare of lightning that streamed from the eyes of the carved dragon, Norah saw the nightmare springing out of the dark: the eyeless skull, the eight-foot xylophone of bones, the flashing claws and teeth of what had a hundred thousand years ago been a saber-tooth.

  The skeleton skidded back before the lightning, jaws gaping in a soundless hiss. Shang Ko swung his staff again, the light streaming from it now a cold yellow banner of sparks that splattered through the skeleton and glittered among the naked ribs. The saber-tooth rolled back as from a blow, gathered itself, and sprang again. One hooked fore-paw slashed out, and Shang, barely avoiding the main force of the blow, cried out in pain as the talons raked his back. His staff went skidding; nimble and vicious, the saber-tooth turned and leapt at Alec and Christine.

  Shang shouted some word in Chinese as he caught up the nearest of the flash tripods, and the powder, as he flung it into the bone thing’s face, burst into blinding white flame. The saber-tooth reared, clawing at the flame that seared the ancient film of tar covering the bones, and Shang struck with the tripod as with a clumsy spear. Above the furious barking of the dogs, Norah heard the crack as the metal met bone.

  The skull split, but imbued with the Rat-God’s will, it did not fall to pieces; nor did the robe of flame that now enveloped the skeleton seem to devour it or diminish its dreadful strength. Sheeted with rags of orange, yellow, blue flame like a garment of torn silk, the demon struck at Shang again, sending the tripod spinning from his hands, then whirled to snatch at the other two tripods, hurling them at the wizard even as the powder burst into blinding fire. Shang cried out, striking at his sleeve as it caught, and in that second the saber-tooth was on him, flinging him ten feet with a crushing swat and then leaping after the broken body where it lay among a sudden scatter of flame on the pier’s tar-soaked boards.

  Norah felt the thin leather of the leashes snap in her hands. Chang Ming, Black Jasmine, and Buttercreme threw themselves at the thing, the light of the spreading fire washing over them, blazing in their diamond collars, changing them as they ran.

  Chang Ming changed first, though afterward Norah could not recall how this had happened, only that what had been a flat-faced, sturdy little dog of eleven pounds or so was suddenly huge, nearly hip-high, thick-muscled and sleek—a dog more like a lion, with a lion’s heavy mane and broad, powerful muzzle, a lion’s uncaring rage. By the time Norah realized what was happening, Buttercreme and Black Jasmine had already taken on their other forms, their true forms: fu-dogs, the hunters of demons, as they looked in the presence of the creatures that were their true prey.

  The three lion dogs fell upon the bone thing, seizing ribs and forepaws and the great, spiny column of the neck, eyes reflecting the fire that ran along the creature’s limbs and poured forth in streams from the sockets of the skull. It batted them free, blood streaming from saber gashes in their backs and splattering from their manes, and they sprang on it again, grabbing, holding, slowing its terrible rush toward Alec and Christine. Fire spread everywhere, running in trails down the tar between the pier’s boards and spilling along the railings. Norah bolted across the intervening space to grab Shang, dragging him back toward the gateway to the aisle, where at least there could be some refuge without violating the circle of power. The old man groaned, his hand fumbling for his staff; in the growing glare of the flames the blood on his face looked now ruby, now black as ink.

  Christine screamed as the great skeletal form descended on her, dragged back by the dogs in a whirlwind of flame. The flames caught in the fur of her coat. Alec tore it from her, hurled it away, then ripped the Moon of Rats from her throat and flung it after the coat. Across the holocaust of fire Norah saw him shove Christine toward the railing and the sea. Above the roar she heard him yell, “Dive! Get in the water!”

  White arms and shoulders flashing golden against the blood-colored silk, Christine stumbled toward the rail. The bone ghost turned to follow, and again the dogs dragged it down. Chang Ming’s huge jaws crushed on the nose of that flaming skull; Buttercreme, like a pale moon demon, ripped away the thewless bones of the leg in a snapping tangle of broken wires. With a silent convulsion that was more terrible than any scream, the bone thing heaved, shuddered, and came apart, and from its midst billowed a burning entity of fire-shot smoke more terrible than the skeleton that moments before had been the armature of its greed.

  Flame surrounded it, filled it, though no flame could penetrate its darkness. Norah, kneeling beside Shang Ko in the circle’s gate, gasped at the sudden stench of filth, the musty, sweetish terrible stink of rats. Bigger than a man, though not so big as the saber-tooth, squat, smooth-furred, immeasurably powerful, it seemed no more than half-visible, glittering, terrible, burning, except for its opal eyes. It was the tiling of Hsu Kwan’s drawing, infinitely more hideous, a half-seen shadow of pestilence and greed with eyes like nothing Norah had ever seen before. It opened its mouth and hissed, and Christine, one hand on the part of the railing that was not in flame, turned, body paralyzed
and dark eyes stretched and blind with terror.

  Later Norah realized she must have been moving before the thing made a noise. Even as it fell upon Christine, Norah lunged forward, scooped the Moon of Rats from the flaming boards where it had fallen, and clasped it around her neck. The hot metal burned her flesh; she screamed “HERE!” and the thing swung around. Then it was on her, growing as it reached, black smoke dripping flames that were colorless as moonlight, through which she dimly sensed the springing dogs.

  Light, like a mountain of flash powder, exploded into the air from the Shining Crane’s upflung hand. Blinded, Norah covered her face with her hands, praying dizzily that Alec had guessed what was happening, praying that the next thing that happened wouldn’t be those blue-steel claws tearing her as they had torn Keith Pelletier.

  It was Alec who pulled her to her feet. She had no recollection of falling to her knees, though they were bruised and smarting. She raised her head, disoriented with shock; his face was a wash of sweat, sluiced in a sulfurous glare. The concession stand behind her was burning, the blaze racing along the tarred wood of the pier. To her left she saw the irregular mass of Over the Top, a sweeping torrent of flames that spread to the building opposite and crawled in wormlike trails up the towering, skeletal lattices of the Zip. The heat was suffocating, beating against her face like giant wings, and she was conscious of sweat matting her unwinding mass of hair.

  “The whole pier’s going!” Alec yelled, tearing the necklace from her throat and thrusting her toward the railing. “... dance hall... halfway down the midway...”

  Looking back, Norah saw this was true. Every building from the pier’s end down to the Breakers, on either side of the midway, was ablaze, and the fire had spread across the Zip from end to end, cutting off retreat. Alec pulled Shang Ko to his feet, and Norah put an arm under the old man’s shoulder, dragging him along. “There’s ten feet of water off the end,” Alec shouted above the roaring of the fire. “We’ll never get down the midway.”

  “What about the demon?” Norah shouted back. Christine ran forward to help them through the flaring darkness, stumbling as she kicked off her shoes, gasping for breath in the stifling smoke and heat.

  “I tripped the shutter the minute Shang threw the light.” Alec passed his share of Shang Ko’s sagging weight to Christine, grabbed the handle of the trap, and dragged the heavy black box toward the burning rails. Color hammered around them, blinding hot, searing their lungs, their skin. Sick with shock and anoxia, Norah wondered if she was going to faint. Burning fragments of paper and wood spun through the air, hissed on the water below.

  Alec kicked loose a section of burning rail and pitched the trap over the edge. Then he helped Christine through the open gap and, as she began her gingerly, perilous descent of pilings and struts, helped Norah, following at last himself, with Shang Ko clinging feebly to his back.

  Even down there, in the blackness beneath the pier, the light of the fire had spread, reflected in glaring sheets on the heaving water. Christine saw something struggling in the tide below them and cried out, pointing: the tiny black head of a dog, bobbing and struggling vainly to paddle to shore. The next second Christine released her grip on the struts and threw herself outward, a momentary flash of flame-touched red silk and white arms against the darkness of streaming hair.

  When Norah and Alec, after letting go and falling the last ten feet into the Pacific, managed to get the half-conscious wizard ashore, it was to find Christine sitting in the sand in the vast yellow glare of the fire, cradling three wet, bloody rags of sand-matted fur against her breast and crying while they licked her face.

  TWENTY-THREE

  FIRE OVER HEAVEN

  Sign of great sacrifice.

  You travel in a big carriage,

  safely and in style...

  All undertakings are blessed by heaven...

  PICKERING/LICK PIER burned to the waterline. By noon nothing was left but the charred roof of the Dome Theater and the seaward end of the Big Dipper, and it was only luck that a considerable portion of Ocean Park didn’t go up as well. By the time the demon hunters reached Alec’s car, Ocean Front Walk was a chaos of fire trucks and pajama-clad spectators, the pier itself a mass of fifty- and sixty-foot flames, smoke pouring in a column hundreds of feet high to blot the sky.

  “Will the trap be all right, lying in the water off the end of the pier that way?” Norah asked, as Alec guided the rattletrap Ford out of the traffic jam on Main Street, up the hill to Fourth, and southward to Venice.

  “It’s sealed tight.” Alec glanced back at the Shining Crane, who was slumped unconscious in the backseat, face and hands blackened with soot and blood darkening the rags of his coat. Chang Ming, bleeding terribly and quietly licking his nose in pain, lay in the old man’s lap; every now and then he gently nuzzled the scarred and broken hand. Christine sat beside him, her eyes open, but Norah wondered how much she actually saw. From time to time her hand would move over Black Jasmine’s blood-matted head or Buttercreme’s, but she looked stunned, as if barely conscious of anything but the nightmare through which they all had passed. Norah was aware that her own hands were blistered, her throat smarting from smoke and the burns left by the hot metal of the necklace. She ached in every muscle and felt an overwhelming desire to hide in a corner and cry.

  Alec went on. “I’ll take Shang up to St. Catherine’s Hospital on Ocean Park. Tonight I’ll get Captain Oleson to take me fishing through the wreckage for what we can find. Every businessman and half the bootleggers in Santa Monica’ll be out there as soon as the pilings cool.”

  Through the morning, while Christine held the Pekes for Norah to snip hair and stitch cuts and apply dressings to their wounds, Norah was aware of the sickly yellow cast of the sky, and when she looked out through Alec’s kitchen window, she could see the smoke like a black mountain to the north. When Alec and Shang Ko returned from the hospital just after noon, the flames were out. Recalling her VAD training and the things Sean and Jim had told her about battlefield casualties, Norah gave the dogs first water, then milk and a little beef broth, all of which they drank thankfully, though unable to eat. Shrunken in size now, the claw marks on their sides and backs resembled nothing so much as the wounds inflicted by a gigantic rat.

  “What about Frank Brown?” Norah asked late that afternoon. She and Alec were sitting in the kitchen, their voices low so as not to waken Christine, who slept like the dead on the living room couch. One of Shang Ko’s numerous grandsons had appeared a short while before in a Model T even more elderly and broken-down than Alec’s to remove the old man to the dark safety of the tunnels beneath Chinatown.

  “You mean, will he still have the police out after Shang?” Alec shrugged. “I doubt it. I’d be surprised if they ran down the false name we gave at St. Catherine’s. My guess is, if Brown doesn’t push things with Hsu Kwan, they’ll let him go in a couple of days.”

  “But Brown may very well have known, or guessed, that if he obeyed his dream and had Shang arrested, Christine was going to die.” Norah pushed aside her plate. She’d made French toast, of all things, there being little in Alec’s icebox besides milk and eggs, and had surprised herself by devouring it ravenously. Lost bread, Alec said they called it in the South. “He certainly knew Jesperson was going to die. And he gets off scot-free.”

  “Producers do.” Alec shrugged and stirred his coffee. “That’s Hollywood. My guess is that Chris won’t even quit sleeping with him—not until she’s fulfilled her contract and has Conklin well and truly sewed up. But she’ll take old Frank for everything he’s got in the meantime and drop him like a hot potato when she’s done. With the offer Charlie just got from Lassky, that’ll be comeuppance enough for Brown, especially if he goes ahead and tries to buy out Enterprise on the assumption that he’s going to have a star for the next couple of years. Not to mention the assumption that he’s going to have a cameraman or a scenarist.”

  Norah yawned hugely and worked her shoulders. Both the rus
h of adrenaline and the shock of the aftermath were wearing off. In addition to her multiple aches and pains, she found herself profoundly sleepy. Late golden sunlight streamed comfortingly through the kitchen windows, and she wondered how well she’d sleep that night.

  Not well, she thought. Not until she had seen the trap brought up and the Moon of Rats—which now resided in the center of a chalked protective circle in a corner of the workroom floor—sealed into its own small compartment, and the whole thing taken far out to sea and dropped.

  “By the way...” She looked up from her tea. “I think I stopped saying thank you a long time ago, and I’m not sure I should have. None of this was your fight at all, you know. And without you we would have been lost.”

  He grinned at her and pushed up his glasses with one stubby forefinger. “Well, there were times, walking out onto that pier this morning, when I did think about that. It’s funny, when that... that thing came out of the darkness, a part of my mind was still thinking, There’s got to be a rational explanation for this.”

  He shrugged again. “For the life of me I couldn’t come up with one. But what Shang said was right, you know.”

  “What?”

  His hands turned the coffee cup on the table before him, neat quarter turns, as he had at Enyart’s, keeping the handle pointed precisely, as if the matter absorbed all his attention. Norah noticed as if for the first time, that his hands had been burned and then had been bandaged neatly by the emergency room staff at St. Catherine’s. Scrapes and abrasions marked one side of his face, surrounded with the red stains of Mercurochrome, and his hair was crumpled and filthy with soot.