"That doesn't matter."
"Whose fires am I putting out if I utter these words?" Richard said. "Leh was put down by Christ himself. Whose flames will I be extinguishing?"
"If the fire can be extinguished, then surely there's a reason for that?" Gal said.
Richard did not know. Slowly, without taking his eyes from the demon, he slipped the rucksack from his shoulder and pulled out the Book of Ways. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and cast a spell of course, dizzied with the effort. Then he opened his eyes again and started reading de Lainree's words.
The flames flickered, touched with a breath for the first time in almost two thousand years.
* * *
Richard fell back exhausted, and Gal took over. He used his pocketknife to chip off a portion of the carbonized demon, hissing as he burned himself. He blew on his fingers and stared at them for a few seconds, as if expecting something to sprout from his skin.
Richard held his breath, then sighed again as his brother continued.
He knelt close to the firepit — a firepit no longer — and drew the required shapes on the ground with a lump of chalk from his rucksack. He glanced back at Richard, expression unreadable, and then started a quiet chanting. The echoes of his words stumbled over each other.
The air in the chamber began to move, and Richard hoped it was because of an evening breeze in the Jerusalem streets above them.
Gal's chanting grew louder, and he swayed on his knees, leaning down to the left, the right, then forward over the chunk of burned demon he was trying to send. His clothes, loose on his thin frame, shivered as his muscles tensed and untensed, and Richard could see sweat dripping from his brother's nose and chin.
"It's going," Gal said.
Richard crawled back against the wall of the circular chamber. He heard a sigh — his brother, or a breeze coming along the tunnel from the drainage ditch, or something else entirely. A wavering white flame sprang up on Gal's right shoulder, smoke rising from his jacket as the fire ate into it, and Richard almost shouted a warning to his brother. Almost. Because then the shape Gal was hunkered within was scoured from the floor of the chamber by a blast of air, and the blackened shard of demon disappeared.
"It's gone," Gal said, and he fell onto his face.
Richard stood and hurried to his brother, terrified of what he would see, certain that the white flame would have found a new home in Gals fresh flesh and that he would lie there burning for a thousand years. But the flame had disappeared, and though Gals eyes had closed, he was still breathing, fast but regular.
A blackened patch on the floor was all that remained of the portion of Leh which Gal had sent through to their father.
"I hope you know what you're doing," Richard said, talking to the man he had not seen for fifteen years. "I really hope you know."
* * *
They stayed down there until morning, and then Richard helped Gal hobble up out of the tunnel. The Jerusalem sun felt good. On Gals shoulder, beneath his singed jacket, was a wound that would never heal.
* * *
American Embassy, London — 1997
"HEY, JIM. A BEER would be really good about now."
"I happen to have a few bottles of Abbot Ale in my office. You two wait here, and I'll be right back. Liz? Drink?"
"Whiskey?"
Sugg smiled. "Glenlivet." He left the room, and the door swung shut behind him. Fray had already gone to try to set up a meeting with the British minister of defense.