The Initiate

by James L. Cambias

Another indeterminate walk down the sidewalk brought them to a large open square, where more than a dozen bird-headed anzu lounged in ones and twos scattered around the edges. Some of them looked up when the two human wizards entered.

  The carpet swatch tugged Sam to the right, and he and Lucas walked toward a pair of anzu sitting together as they passed a copper bowl of beer back and forth. The two creatures looked up as the men approached, but did not stand. All the other anzu around the square were starting to drift toward the humans.

  Sam’s mind was a mix of rage and terror. He knew exactly which of the two anzu before him had been the one that came to his house, and he hated it—but the memory of how it had thrown him aside was strong, and the idea of being surrounded by a dozen of the creatures was like discovering a whole school of sharks circling him in the ocean.

  Lucas showed no sign of anxiety. He raised his voice and spoke a few words, and the approaching anzu stopped. Then he addressed himself to the one which was still drawing the carpet swatch in Sam’s outstretched hand like a magnet. “You. Woman-slayer. We seek the answer to a question.”

  The seated anzu poured the last of the beer from the bowl into its upturned beak before replying. “I have no answers for you, mortal man.” Its voice was harsh and high pitched, almost like a baby’s cry.

  Lucas took the carpet sample from Sam and said something in Sumerian which made the anzu flinch in pain. “Speak the words I require!”

  The creature lunged and snapped at Lucas like a tethered dog, unable to get within a yard of him.

  “Do as I ask and you shall have this token,” said Lucas, brandishing the carpet. “Resist and I shall cast it into everlasting fire.”

  “Ask and I will answer as you command,” it said.

  “Who sent you?” Sam asked, but Lucas put a hand on his chest to restrain him.

  “Leave this to me; I know the proper forms,” he said. “You, woman-slayer—you went to the house of this man and shed the blood of his kin. We wish to know the reason. Speak as I have commanded!”

  “A man bid me do it. One of the Wise. He gave me a flake of paint and told me to seek the house it came from. Slay all within but spare the oldest in years was my charge.”

  “My companion wishes to know who gave the command.”

  “I am bound not to tell. I cannot!”

  Lucas turned to Sam. “This is an unexpected complication. I don’t think I can undo someone else’s binding, not without more time and preparation.” He turned back to the anzu. “Describe the one who bound you.”

  “He used no name and wore a mask of feathers,” the anzu croaked. “He carried the blood of the bargain, as you do, but that is all I can say.”

  “Why? Did he tell you why?” Sam asked.

  “He did not say why. Only bid me obey and then begone.”

  “Where was it done? Where did he stand when he commanded you?”

  “A place of dead men, near the house.”

  Sam thought he knew which cemetery it meant. It didn’t matter; the mystery magician had done a good job of covering his tracks.

  “I charge you to guard us from all harm until we have passed out of this place,” said Lucas. “When we pass the final gate you shall have this token. Not before.”

  “Can’t you get its name?” asked Sam.

  “Not a fair trade,” said Lucas. “That would give us even more power over it than the carpet. Be satisfied with safe passage.”

  “But we haven’t learned anything!”

  “Now is not the time. This wild-goose chase has already cost me the service of a particularly difficult shedu. I have no desire to have to fight our way out.”

  Sam began to protest, but stopped. He had picked out only the most distinct claw marks in the rug. There were others. He could try this again, better prepared now that he knew what to expect.

  The other anzu in the plaza parted to let them by, but they didn’t leave much room for the humans to pass and leaned in menacingly. Their guide led Sam and Lucas down a different street from the one by which they had entered, which made Sam suspicious.

  “What if it’s leading us into a trap?” he murmured to Lucas.

  “Then I shall have to use another bound servant, and you will owe me even more.”

  As they made their way through the dim streets the anzu spoke up in its unhappy-baby voice. “That was a good night,” it said. “I got to leave this place and taste fresh blood. Send me forth again and I will slay all you wish.”

  “Silence!” said Lucas, who actually sounded worried for the first time since they had boarded the subway car.

  Privately Sam resolved to find out how to destroy a being like the anzu. Whoever had sent it against his family would pay, oh yes. But he would not let the demon itself escape punishment, either. Lucas had spoken of casting the carpet piece into everlasting fire. Maybe he could learn to do that. Let this monster burn in agony forever. It would be a start, anyway.

  Chapter 14

  For the next couple of weeks Sam didn’t have any appetite for magical study. Almost by accident he found himself spending more and more time with Ash. He kept telling himself it was a bad idea. Being spotted with him might put her in danger. She might give some enemy a clue about his real identity. Worse yet…he might decide she was more important than his mission to destroy the Apkallu.

  “Why do they make you work Friday nights?” she asked him as he got dressed in her apartment before sunset.

  He didn’t answer, “Because Friday night is astrologically part of Saturday, and Saturn governs the magic of calling and binding spirits, so as soon as I leave I’m going to take a rental car up the Hudson to Bear Mountain State Park and summon an earth elemental.” Instead he just shrugged and said, “Stuff happens when it happens. Sorry.”

  “How long do you have to keep doing whatever it is?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and realized it was true. He didn’t know how long he’d be studying magic and assassinating people for Lucas. “Maybe another couple of years?”

  “And then?”

  “Not sure. This project I’m working on, it’s kind of open-ended. I wish I could give you a firm date but there just isn’t one.”

  “Well, have fun,” she said, and the note of bitterness was impossible to ignore.

  He sat down on the bed next to her and kissed her. “You’ve got your work, I’ve got mine. Are you ready to retire yet?”

  “No,” she said, and sighed. “I shouldn’t be jealous, but I am. I keep wondering what you’re not telling me.”

  “Boring technical stuff, mostly. But it really is secret. If I told you they could send me to jail, and maybe you, too.” He was getting better at lying. He could look directly into her eyes and say that.

  She looked at him and chuckled. “I don’t know if you’re bullshitting me or not, and I guess I don’t care. You’ve gotten a lot sexier in thirty years—you’re in amazing shape, you’ve got just enough gray hair to make you look distinguished, and you’ve got a secret James Bond life you can’t talk about. I can’t resist.”

  “You’re pretty irresistible yourself.”

  She kissed him again and then gave him a playful shove. “Get out of here before I start tearing your clothes off again.”

  He left her apartment and went back up to the Bronx to pick up his rental car and magical equipment. On the drive up Route 9W along the Hudson Sam made a mental inventory of his current assets. Over the past few months he had been accumulating spirits as guardians and weapons. Now he had eight.

  Most of his spirit arsenal were bound into seven rings he had made—one for each of the classical planets. It had been easy enough to make lost-wax castings for the silver, gold, lead, and tin rings. The copper and iron ones he had hammered and welded into shape. Since there was no way to make a ring of mercury, his final ring was a strip of tanned snakeskin.

  Each held a spirit associated with the astrological symbolism of its respective planet. The protective hafaza spirit was in t
he iron ring, symbolic of Mars’s role as defender. The tin ring—Jupiter’s metal—held the sylph. The blindness spirit now resided in a gold ring, symbol of the Sun.

  The snakeskin ring on his right forefinger gave Sam a kind of spiritual “diplomatic immunity.” The enchantments on it couldn’t protect him against deliberate attack, but they did notify all spirits he met that Sam was under the protection of the Apkallu, and not a good target for casual malice.

  On his left hand the silver ring, sacred to the Moon, held a Dactyl, warding off disease and magical assaults on his health. As a bonus it was gradually patching up all the damage he had accumulated in forty-five years on Earth. The copper ring, symbolic of Venus, held the song-spirit making his words more persuasive. When coupled with the spell to bind humans to his will, it made getting people to do his bidding ridiculously easy.

  His left pinky bore the lead ring, holding his heaviest hitter of all, a duppy in the form of a two-headed skinless man. Sam’s Inner Eye had spotted the duppy haunting an alley off 201st Street during his morning jog to the gym. From news reports and a visit to the nearest police station, Sam had identified the duppy as the ghost of one Antoine Leroi, who had been shot by his half-brother Arnaud during what the cops called a “dispute.” Antoine himself had been the primary suspect in the death of another man. As the ghost of a murderer slain by a kinsman the duppy had enormous spiritual power, but it had no trace of any human personality left, just rage and spite. Sam didn’t like carrying it unless he had to.

  The only finger without a ring was the ring finger of his left hand. The indentation made by his wedding ring had mostly faded away, but it still felt like a desecration to put a bound spirit there.

  His only other magical talisman was the enchanted key, which held a bound gremlin that delighted in picking locks.

  Tonight he was trying a new binding ritual, from a text Moreno had recommended. As an agaus, Moreno had access to records of what books of magic had been suppressed or altered—and where to find the un-altered originals. There was a book called Praeceptae de Septentrion at the New York Society Library which contained the unaltered 1583 text of John Dee’s De Heptarchia Mystica. Sam had transcribed the pages on his laptop—copying a text was a great way to help memorize it—and taken pictures of all the diagrams. If he could make it work, the spell would be perfect for binding the anzu to permanent obedience. Tonight’s ritual was a test to see if he could do it.

  Just after sunset Sam left his car parked by the railroad at a spot where some trees screened it from view, and began the climb up Dunderberg Mountain. He had no trouble following the trail in the lingering twilight, but it was a steep climb and the ritual gear in his backpack felt very heavy before he was even halfway up.

  At the top he spent a few minutes catching his breath. Through gaps in the trees he could see the distant skyline of New York above the Palisades. Even twenty miles from Manhattan the stars above were still washed out by city lights.

  He laid out his equipment and studied his notes once more before beginning. Tonight he was trying to call up an earth elemental—and the rocky top of a mountain seemed like an appropriate spot. He had grape leaves and a chunk of quartz crystal as big as a baseball, and it was the eve of Saturn’s day.

  The summoning wasn’t especially hard. He chanted the formula seven times and with a loud rumbling, the thing rose from the ground in the center of the circle before him. Some spirits took more or less human form, but this one was entirely alien in its shape: a bulbous, dark mass of dirt and gravel as big as a car, standing on five thick legs. The air smelled of mold and peat.

  “Tell me your name,” he commanded, and when it resisted he said words to make it churn and shrink in discomfort. “Tell me!”

  “Imi-uru,” the thing croaked in a voice like a landslide. “I speak the truth.”

  Sam speared his finger with the tip of his athame and flung a drop of his blood at the being. “Imi-uru, I bind you to me, to serve until I die. By the power of Ninurta and Hazael the Lord of Gain, I bind you. By your name, Imi-uru, by my blood, and by my own name, Samuel Simon Arquero, I bind you.”

  What happened next took him completely by surprise. The elemental seemed to swell, and surged at him. “Liar! Dust-speaker! A false name cannot bind me!” One of its limbs lashed out at him, smashing into his leg with a fist of stone.

  Sam dropped to the ground as his leg went numb. He shouted the wracking words and the thing hesitated, giving him the chance to restore the temporary binding.

  It raged and rumbled within the sigil of Saturn on the rug while Sam checked his leg. His pants were torn and his knee was already swelling and turning purple. Getting down the mountain was going to be a bitch.

  But for now his problem was what to do with the angry elemental. His lifetime binding hadn’t worked, for some reason. Which meant the thing would soon be free one way or another—even if Sam didn’t release it, the spell holding it would end at the next sunset.

  He finally just had to banish it, using its name and invoking the power of Mars and a big cloud of cigarette smoke to force it away. When it was done Sam collapsed onto the ground and didn’t move, his mind utterly blank after the effort. Only when the pressure in his bladder got too great to ignore did he finally stir. It was past midnight when he got back to his car, and the numbness in his leg had turned to a constant stabbing pain.

  The closest emergency room was in Peekskill, across the river, and driving there was an ordeal since every touch of his foot on the pedals caused a stab of pain in his knee. Sam went slowly, his flashers on, struggling to keep focused. Fortunately the ER wasn’t too busy that night when he staggered in and managed to gasp out a lie about an accident. “I was hiking and fell.”

  They gave him painkillers and kept him until past lunch time the next day, until he was able to magically convince the attending physician to let him go. His kneecap was fractured, but the orthopedist said that six weeks in a neoprene knee brace would probably be better than surgery. Sam hoped the Dactyl could speed that up.

  With nothing to read and nothing on TV worth watching, he had ample time to think. Evidently the binding formula was wrong, or he’d gotten the wrong book by mistake. Or…had Moreno given him a false lead on purpose? It didn’t seem like the sort of thing he would do. If Moreno wanted to get rid of him for some reason, he could overwhelm Sam with magical power and rely on the magic-cancelling power of the Mitum to keep himself safe.

  The logical explanation was Sam’s own lack of experience. He had been studying magic intensely for nearly a year, but that wasn’t enough time to master it. Yes. That was the logical explanation.

  But the paranoid train of thought about Moreno made him realize that right now he didn’t have any way to deal with the man—and his long-term project of destroying the Apkallu would inevitably bring them into conflict. He needed to figure out how to neutralize Moreno.

  “Neutralize” was a good word. The idea of actually killing Moreno made Sam a little uncomfortable. Unlike most of the other Apkallu, Moreno seemed like a genuinely good man. Honorable. Sam considered him a friend. He wanted to find a way to “neutralize” Moreno because he didn’t know if he could bring himself to kill him.

  Three days later, when he could walk without wincing, he took a cab down to Sylvia’s school for a little advice. But when he limped into her classroom—where Shimon and MoonCat had been joined by a boy who looked about twelve—Sylvia looked at him and shook her head. “Get out of here. You’re done. I’ve taught you everything I can.”

  “Really? I mean, I’m still just learning—”

  “Why are you walking funny?”

  “Oh, I just banged my knee.”

  “You sure somebody didn’t bang it for you?”

  “I wanted to ask you about that, actually. I was trying a new binding on an earth elemental, but it didn’t take. I was wondering if you could tell me what I did wrong.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said, and led him into the co
rridor, but didn’t bother lowering her voice at all. “I didn’t teach you any of that. If you’re gonna get spells from Moreno or whoever, don’t come crying back to me when they don’t work right. You’re done here.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing! Look, I’m not mad at you. Hell, I’m kinda proud you’re moving so fast. Good job, keep it up, attaboy. But when I’m teaching, I’ve gotta know what you already know, right? Otherwise I don’t know what I have to teach. It’s like building a house. You gotta know what you’re building on top of. Well, now you’re learning from Moreno—and someone else, I’m guessing—so I can’t teach you any more. You’re on your own, and good luck.”

  He was a bit surprised at how hurt he felt. “Okay,” he said. “You won’t teach me. Will you at least advise me? One Apkal to another?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “It’ll cost you. Remember you already owe me.”

  Sam hesitated. He was piling up obligations to Lucas and Moreno. Could he juggle more magical debts? “Never mind, then. I’ll be seeing you, I guess.” He limped back up the stairs to the sidewalk, and made his way toward the subway stop.

  Halfway there he felt a tug on his jacket. “What happened to your leg?” Isabella asked him, as if she hadn’t just come out of nowhere.

  “I got punched by a gnome. Broke my kneecap. I’ve got a bone spirit working on it but it’ll take another couple of days for it to finish.”

  “Did Sylvia kick you out of school?”

  “Yep. You too?”

  “She gets mad if you learn stuff she didn’t teach you. I don’t care—my friends know more than her anyway.”

  A thought occurred to Sam. “Do you think your friends would be willing to teach me something?”

  “Sure! I’ll take you to see them. We can go tonight!”

  “Wait until my knee quits hurting.”

  “They can fix that, too. They can fix everything!”

  Sam shook his head. “I’m sure they can, but I don’t know if I can afford it.”

  * * *

  His bad knee kept Sam close to his apartment for the next week. He didn’t want to have to explain it to either Moreno or Ash, so he told both of them he was down with stomach flu. Ash recommended green tea and bed rest; Moreno suggested commanding the ghost of a doctor to hunt down the germs responsible.