He sat on a broken tombstone and laid the book on an old tree stump a few feet away. He had been of two minds as to whether he should leave the book at home or take it with him. Didric and his goons might have broken in when he was away, or mugged him if they caught him on the way to the graveyard. In the end he had brought it, if only because he was loathe to let it out of his sight.
The scroll was leathery in his palm, and Fletcher realised with a flash of horror that the symbols must have been carved into the victim’s flesh to scar over, before skinning him alive. He shuddered at the gruesome thought and tried to hold it with as few fingers as possible. The surface was surprisingly dry and dusty.
The words on the scroll were nothing more than a list of syllables, more of a musical do re mi than any kind of orc language. Then again, he wasn’t even sure what language summoning used; perhaps the orcs had translated what he was about to read into their own writings from another language entirely. On top of that, James Baker had written that this demon had already been captured by a shaman and somehow ‘gifted’. Who knew what that entailed? Still, he would read the words and then get back to his warm bed, happy in the knowledge that he had tried.
‘Di rah go mai lo fa lo go rah lo . . .’
He began to speak, feeling slightly ridiculous and glad nobody was watching him, except for, perhaps, the ghosts of people long dead.
The words flowed from his tongue as if he knew them by heart, and he could not stop even if he wanted to, so great was the draw to speak them loud and clear. A heady, drunken feeling suffused his body like a warm cloak, yet instead of the haze that beer brought on, he felt a perfect clarity, like staring into the placid waters of a mountain lake. In Fletcher’s mind, the words were more of a mystic equation, each one repeating, in varying cycles, that were almost melodious in their utterance.
‘Fai lo so nei di roh . . .’
The words droned on and on relentlessly, until at last he came to the endmost line. As the final words were uttered, he felt his mind shift in a way he recognised, that split-second feeling of razor sharpness that he experienced in the moment of his arrow’s release, yet twice what he had ever felt then. It was both familiar and alien to experience the world in such a way. Colours became vivid and almost iridescent. The small winter flowers that grew among the graves seemed to glow with ethereal light, so bright were they in his vision.
As his heart thundered in his chest he felt a tugging at his mind, at first tentative, then insistent and so powerful he fell from his perch to his knees.
When he lifted his head he saw the cover of the book glimmer. His eyes widened as the lines of the pentacle glowed, the star within a circle shimmering with purple radiance. Then, as if it had been there all along, a blue orb of light appeared a few inches above it. It was at first the pinprick of a firefly, then the size of a small boulder in the space of a few seconds. It hovered there, so bright that Fletcher averted his eyes, then covered them with his hands as the radiance intensified to a burning ball as bright as the sun. A roaring like the stoked flames of Berdon’s forge clamoured in his ears, sending waves of pain into his skull.
After what seemed like hours, it stopped. In the sudden darkness and silence, Fletcher thought he was dead. He kneeled with his forehead in the soft earth, breathing in great sobbing breaths of its grassy scent to convince himself he was still there, though the air was now tinged with a sulphurous odour he did not recognise. It was only the sound of a soft chirp that caused him to lift his head.
A demon crouched on a small hillock in the grass two feet from the book, sitting back on its hind legs. Its tail lashed behind it like that of a feral cat, and its claws gripped the remains of something black and shiny, an insect-like imp of some kind from the other world. It gnawed at it like a squirrel on a nut, crunching into the beetle demon’s carapace.
The creature was about the size of a ferret, with a similarly lithe body and limbs long enough that it would be able to lope with the grace of a mountain wolf rather than scuttle like a lizard. Its smooth skin was a deep burgundy, like a fine wine. The eyes were large and round like those of an owl, fiercely intelligent and the colour of raw amber. To Fletcher’s surprise, it had no teeth to speak of, but the snout ended sharply, almost like a river turtle’s beak. It used it to snap up the last of the beetle, before turning the focus of its gaze on to him.