I checked the higher planes, where colours are more muted and less distracting, and gave a cawk of triumph. Away to the south, distant luminosities moved upon the ground. The lights – evidently those of several spirits – were closing in on where the spice road passed among some barren hills.
Without a word the eagles banked their wings. Side by side, we shot south towards the road.
1 You could tell this by the little evil looks he flashed, and his overall froideur when I passed by. Subtle clues, yes, but I’m a sensitive sort and I spotted them. The regular occasions when he shook his fists and cursed my name by all the death gods of Egypt only served to back up my theory.
2Battle of Qadesh: major engagement between the Egyptians under Rameses the Great and the Hittites under King Muwatallis back in 1274 BC. Faquarl and I had fought in separate divisions of the pharaoh’s armies, and helped carry out the final pincer movement that drove the enemy utukku from the field. Many great deeds were done that day, not all of them by me. Two centuries later, the battlefield was still a blackened waste, a field of bones.
3 He was.
4Ghul: a lowly class of djinni, a frequenter of cemeteries, a devourer of unburied morsels.
5Skriker: an unpleasant sub-type of imp, with large flat feet and creeping tread. Follows travellers in lonely places, whispering and calling, and drives them to their death.
15
Soon afterwards two bearded travellers could be seen trudging forth upon King Solomon’s highway. One was young and handsome, the other thick-set and dishevelled; both were stained with the sand of many miles. Each wore a dyed wool robe and had a heavy pack slung across his shoulders. They supported their steps with staffs of oak.
Trudge, trudge, hobble, hobble – that was Faquarl and me doing our best to project an aura of human vulnerability. To cloak our actual potency, we’d made the change on five planes, and used Glamours to shield our true natures on the other two.
Shoulders drooping with weariness, the men scuffed southwards through the dust and watched the dark hills draw in on either side. Here, as we’d judged while still aloft, were cliffs and overhangs that offered opportunity for ambush, if you were that way inclined.
Faquarl and I had decided on an ambush of our own. Somewhere above were the hidden djinn we’d glimpsed from afar, but for the present we saw no sign of them. Everything was still, save for two vultures drifting slowly in and out of view against the sky. I snatched a look at them. Genuine, as far as I could tell. I lowered my gaze; on we went, step by weary step.
In the middle of the range of hills, the cliffs receded a little and the road entered a wider defile, surrounded by scree slopes topped with jagged spurs of basalt.
For the first time, the lonely and ever so vulnerable travellers stopped. Faquarl made a pretence of fiddling with his pack. I pulled at my beard, looked all around me with narrowed eyes.
Quietness.
Grasping our staffs more tightly, we set off again along the way.
From behind, somewhere remote among the cliffs, came a tiny rattling of stones. Neither of us turned our head.
At our backs sounded a skittering of pebbles, louder, halfway down the scree. Faquarl scratched his bulbous nose. I whistled tunelessly as I walked along.
A heavy thud sounded on the road, the click of claws on rock. Still we trudged on, weariness itself.
And now came the rasp of scales. The stench of sulphur. A sudden swathe of darkness filling the ravine. A cackle of demonic—
All right, now was probably the time.
Faquarl and I spun round, beards jutting, staffs raised, ready to attack – and saw nothing.
We looked down.
There at our feet stood the smallest, most rubbish foliot we’d ever set eyes on, frozen guiltily mid-path with one foot raised. It wore the terrifying guise of a shrew in a baggy tunic. In one furry paw it carried a weapon that resembled a toasting fork.
I lowered my staff and gazed at it. It goggled back with its big brown eyes.
On all seven planes the shrew looked the same, though to be fair on the seventh it did have a set of fangs. I shook my head in wonder. Could this be the hideous monster that had carried out such rapine on the desert road?
‘Hand over your valuables and prepare for death!’ squeaked the shrew, flourishing its fork. ‘Make haste, if you please. There is a camel train approaching the other way, and I wish to dispose of your bodies and join my fellows.’
Faquarl and I glanced at one another. I held up a hand. ‘Please, if I may: one question. In whose name do you act? Who summoned you?’
The shrew’s chest swelled. ‘My master is employed by the king of the Edomites. Now hand over your goods. I don’t want blood all over them.’
‘But Edom is a friend to Israel,’ Faquarl persisted. ‘Why should its king seek to rebel against great Solomon?’
‘This would be the same Solomon who demands a vast yearly tribute from the king, so that his treasury is emptied and his people groan beneath the burden of their taxes?’ The shrew gave a shrug. ‘Were it not for the Ring he wears, Solomon would find Edom rising against him in war. As it is, we must be content with simple banditry. Well, so much for international relations; we come now to your sad demise …’
I smiled negligently. ‘First, a detail. Check out the planes.’ So saying, I made a subtle change. On the first plane I was still a dusty traveller leaning on his staff. On the higher planes, however, the man was gone, and I was something other. Faquarl had done likewise. All at once the shrew’s fur went grey and bristled stiff and upright on its body. It shivered so violently that its fork began to hum.
The shrew sidled backwards. ‘Let’s talk about this …’
My grin broadened. ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ I made a gesture; my staff was gone. From my outstretched hand a Detonation roared. The shrew sprang sideways; the earth at its feet exploded in crimson fire. Mid-leap, the shrew jabbed its fork; from the tip came a frail green shaft of light that raked across the ground, stabbing Faquarl’s toe unpleasantly. He hopped and cursed, threw up a Shield. The shrew hit the ground with a squeak and darted away. I peppered its wake with a string of Convulsions that sent avalanches tumbling up and down the gorge.
The shrew sprang behind a boulder, from where its paw protruded at intervals, wielding the toasting fork. Further green bolts rained down on us, hissing and spitting against the edges of our Shields. Faquarl sent a Spasm whirling; the boulder shattered, became a heap of gravel. The shrew was blown backwards, fur smouldering. It dropped its fork. With a high-pitched oath, it leaped for the scree and began to climb.
Faquarl gave a cry. ‘You go after it – I’ll cut it off on the other side.’
Hands smoking, robe and beard whipping around me, I vaulted onto a tumbled slab, jumped to an adjacent ledge, bounded up the slope from stone to stone. With my feet hardly touching the rocks, I quickly homed in on the desperate blur of brown that zigzagged ahead of me up the scree. Lightning crackled from my fingers; it drove down into the earth, propelling me upwards even faster.
The shrew reached the top of the slope, and for a moment was outlined furrily against the sky. At the last instant it ducked away; my Detonation missed it by a whisker.
From my back I sprouted wings – each feathered, pure white, divided in two like those of a butterfly.1 They flexed into life; over the crest of the dust-dry hill I soared, so the sun’s warmth burst upon my essence. Down below me was the shrew, stumbling, plunging down an undulating ridge of ground. Not far beyond I saw a rough encampment of tents, four of them set in a little hollow, surrounded by store-piles, the blackened remnants of a fire, three bored camels tethered to an iron post and many other spoors and scatterings.
The owners of all this were three men (presumably the Edomite magicians, though to be honest all the tribes of the region looked the same to me), clad in robes of brown and caramel, with walking staffs in hand and dusty sandals on their feet. They stood in the shadow of the tents, as still as st
atues, in postures of calm attention, looking away from us towards the opposite side of the ridge, which abutted another curve of the desert road.
The shrew’s yelps alerted them: spinning round, they saw its tumbling approach and, further off, my implacable, avenging form hurtling from the heavens.
The men cried out; they scattered. One cried out a spirit’s name. From the ravine beyond came an answering call, deep and urgent.
Now things were getting interesting.
Down from above I plunged, giving vent to all the pent-up fury of my slavery. From my fingers a succession of fiery bolts strafed left and right into the ground. Stone shattered, dirt and sand burst against the bright blue sky. The shrew was finally hit in the centre of its furry back, blasting into a thousand plaintive motes of light.
Two hulking shapes rose from the gorge beyond. Both, like me, were winged in the bifurcated Assyrian style; both, like me, wore human bodies. Unlike me, they had chosen rather more exotic heads, the better to spread terror to their victims on the road.
The nearest, an utukku with a lion’s face, carried a bloodied spear.2 His comrade, whose head resembled that of an unpleasantly jowly, loose-skinned monitor lizard, preferred a scimitar; with horrid cries and feathered wings beating at the air, they flew towards me at speed.
I would kill them if I had to, but I preferred to kill their masters.3
The Edomite magicians had each acted according to his nature. The first had panicked, spinning this way, then that, before finally tripping over his trailing robe and falling into the side of the nearest tent. Before he could regain his balance my Detonation expunged him in a ball of flame. The second stood his ground: from a bag beside the fire he drew a long, thin tube of glass. As I swooped towards him, he broke the tube against a rock and pointed the broken end at me. A cord of oily black substance emerged, swung lazily back, then darted out like a fisherman’s cast in my direction. I projected a Dark Node, which caught the centre of the smoky cord and, with a rude sucking noise, pulled it inwards into nothing. After the cord came the glass tube and the magician who held it: in the blink of an eye they too were sucked into the Node, which promptly ingested itself and so vanished.
Upon the death of the Edomite, which came a few short moments after his disappearance into the Node,4 the lion-headed utukku gave a joyous cry, became a resinous vapour and dissipated on the wind. The lizard-headed utukku, clearly the servant of the third magician, still remained; flourishing his scimitar, he interrupted my flight-path with a series of violent hacks and thrusts that I struggled to avoid.
‘Why couldn’t you have killed my one?’ the utukku said, slashing at my midriff.
I spun aside, darted, rolled over in mid-air. ‘I’m doing my best. Would you mind not trying to impale me in the meantime?’
The utukku dodged my Spasm; slashed with the scimitar. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’
‘I know.’
Evading the next attack by inches, I careened to the left and banked close to Earth; shooting between two tents, I rose again, scanning the ridge for the third magician, and was just in time to catch a flash of brown and caramel beginning a hurried descent into the ravine.
With murderous intent, and the utukku labouring behind, I followed the Edomite over the lip of the ridge, drifting like a hawk or other raptor following its mouse.
There he was, slipping and scrabbling down among the rocks, his robe hitched up about his knees, his sandals torn away. His face was tilted downwards, fixed in concentration on the slope. Not once did he look over his shoulder: he knew his death followed hard behind him on bright, white wings.
Beyond and below him, on the road, I glimpsed several other things: the sturdy form of Faquarl wrestling with a third utukku (this one with the head of a long-horned goat), two others lying dead beside him; and all around the remains of slaughter – camels and humans scattered like discarded rags across the blackened ground.
A buffet of air; I twisted sideways just too late, and felt a burst of pain as the utukku’s scimitar cut through one wingtip, sheared off a few primary feathers and utterly ruined my delightful symmetry. My balance went; my aero-dynamism likewise. I tumbled to the scree below, landed inelegantly on my back and began to roll down-slope.
The utukku came in fast, ready to commit the coup de grâce. To delay him (and this is not easily done when rolling at speed – try it yourself if you don’t believe me) I fired an Enervation over my shoulder. It hit him straight on, sapping his energies and making his movements treacly and sluggish. He dropped the scimitar. Wings drooping, limbs working listlessly, he fell to the ground and began tumbling in my wake.
We rolled downhill amid an avalanche of stones.
We fell onto the packed earth of the desert road.
We struggled into sitting positions.
We looked at each other, we each raised a hand. I was the quicker. I blew him apart with a Detonation.
Pieces of his essence fell to Earth, spattering the death-dry rocks and stones like refreshing rain. I struggled to my feet in the centre of the road, brushing dust from my bumps and bruises, letting my wings uncrumple, my battle-lust subside.
Over to my left Faquarl, having finally disposed of his goat-headed antagonist, was slowly, painfully doing likewise. Essence glistened brightly from a deep cut across his midriff, but he seemed otherwise unharmed.
Not bad going. Between us, we had dealt with five utukku and two of the three Edomite magicians.5 The bandit danger on Solomon’s roads was decisively dealt with for now.
Which reminded me. That third magician … Where—?
A voice, high and imperious, spoke close by. ‘Demons, do not move or speak but by our command, save only to prostrate yourself in abasement before the High Priestess of the Sun in the blessed land of Himyar. I am my queen’s representative and speak for her and all of Himyar, and I demand of you your names, identities and nature, on pain of our extreme displeasure.’
Is it just me, or would a simple ‘Hello’ have been enough?
1 Bit of a contemporary look, this: it was the latest thing in Nimrud that century. The white feathers were a drag during combat – they didn’t half show up stains – but made you resemble a celestial being: fearsome, beautiful, cold, aloof. This was particularly useful when out hunting humans, who were often so busy gawping at you they quite forgot to run.
2 Clearly the shrew, whatever its many faults, had not lied to us. Other travellers were currently being waylaid below.
3 This is a generally sound principle. When forced into sudden battle with another spirit, you have no way of assessing their character. They may be repugnant and loathsome, or genial and pleasant, or any combination in between. The only certain fact is that they would not be fighting you were it not for the charge put upon them, and thus it makes sense to expunge the master and spare the puppet. In the case of the utukku, of course, it was safe to assume they had the morals of two ferrets fighting in a bag, but even so, the principle remained.
4 This curious time delay always occurs in such cases. I sometimes wonder what, in those fleeting seconds, the victim’s consciousness sees or experiences inside the Node, alone in that infinity of nothing.
5 Plus the shrew. But I’m not really sure you can count him.
16
It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed we had company. It was just that I hadn’t cared. When you’re in the middle of a fight, you stick to the basics, namely trying to disembowel your enemy while stopping him tearing off your arm and beating you around the head with it. If you’ve any energy left over, you use it for swearing. Prostrating yourself before watching strangers doesn’t feature highly in the programme. Particularly when it’s them you’re saving.
So I took my time here, flicking the desert dust off my limbs and inspecting remote regions of my essence, before turning to see who’d spoken.
Not twelve inches away, a face regarded me with an expression that mingled arrogance, derision and the hope of obtaining grassy foodstuff
s. This was a camel. Following its neck upwards, I discovered a couch of red and yellow silks set upon its saddle. Tasselled drapes hung below it; above, slumped on broken poles, there swung a canopy, now sadly burned and torn.
On the couch sat a young woman, little more than a girl. Her black hair was drawn back and mostly hidden by a silken headscarf, but her eyebrows were elegant and quizzical, her eyes as black as onyx. Her face was slim, its structure graceful, her skin-tone dark and even. A human might have accounted her beautiful. My expert eye also detected signs of wilfulness, high intelligence and stern resolve, though whether these qualities added to her beauty or detracted from it is not for me to say.
This girl sat straight-backed upon her camel-couch, one hand resting on the forward pommel of acacia wood, the other loosely holding the beast’s reins. She wore a hempen riding cloak, stained ochre from the desert storms, and singed in places by utukku fire; also a long woollen garment, woven with geometric designs in yellow and red. This was wrapped tight about her torso and more loosely about her legs. She rode side-saddle, her feet neatly encased in little leather shoes. Bronze bangles hung upon her slim, bare wrists. Around her neck she had a silver pendant, shaped like a sun.
Her hair was slightly disordered – a few strands had fallen across her face – and she had a small fresh cut beneath one eye; otherwise, she seemed none the worse for her ordeal.
This all takes a lot longer to recount than it did to observe. I stared at her for a moment. ‘Who spoke,’ I said, ‘you or the camel?’
The girl frowned. ‘It was I.’
‘Well, you have a camel’s manners.’ I turned aside. ‘We’ve just killed the utukku who were attacking you. By rights you should be on your knees thanking us for your deliverance. Wouldn’t you say so, Faquarl?’
My associate had at last drawn close, tentatively prodding at his gaping chest wound. ‘That goat!’ he grumbled. ‘Gored me with a horn just as I was strangling the other two. I ask you. Three against one! Some djinn haven’t the slightest conception of common courtesy …’ He noticed the girl for the first time. ‘Who’s this?’
The Ring of Solomon Page 13
