I’m going to dissolve your camouflage and hope the sight of you helps. You have to stop her, Oberon.
I dissolved his spell and then triggered camouflage for myself, which would allow me to slip past the imp at the door.
However, nothing happened.
“Oh, no, not now, Amber,” I said, and then reached through my tattoos to speak directly to the elemental of the central Great Plains. Speaking was a relative term; elementals don’t speak any human language but rather communicate via emotions and images. My recollections of such conversations are always approximations.
//Demons on earth / Druid requires aid//
Amber replied immediately, not even pretending that she didn’t know I was around. //Query: Demon location? / None sensed//
//Demons here// I replied. //My location / Demons using wood to mask presence//
The bloody barker hadn’t been insecure about his height; he needed the stilts to make sure the earth never twigged to his presence.
Demons on the loose were usually the responsibility of their angelic opposites, but I’ve run into them more often than I would care to. The problem with them from a Druidic perspective was that they kept trying to hijack the earth’s power to open and maintain portals to hell, draining life in the process and endangering the elementals. Aenghus óg’s giant suckhole to the fifth circle, for example, had destroyed fifty square miles in Arizona. If there was a gateway underground here, Amber should have felt it.
//Query: Power drain in this area?// I asked.
//Yes / Intermittent//
//Demons responsible// I said.
Amber’s judgment and sentence took no time at all. Her anger boiled through me as she said, //Slay them / Full power restored//
//Gratitude / Harmony//
//Harmony// Had I the time, I might have shed a tear at that—or celebrated with a shot of whiskey. It had been far too long since I’d shared a sense of harmony with Amber—because these were feelings, after all, not mere translated words, and it was impossible for either Amber or me to lie about feeling harmony. But I had an apprentice and a hound in danger of going through a mysterious unholy orifice, as well as another mystery to solve: Since the demons obviously had some kind of portal down there, how were they hiding it?
<Okay, Atticus, she’s down, but she’s hitting me and yelling, and that hurts.>
You’re a good hound. We are totally getting you some gourmet sausages for this. Keep her down. She’ll apologize later.
I cast camouflage successfully this time and melted from view. It didn’t make me completely invisible when I moved, but it was good enough; no one would be able to see me in time to react well.
Except perhaps the demon barker.
“You, sir! What do you think you’re doing?” He was staring right at me, even though I was camouflaged and still. Damn it. I didn’t have a weapon either. Since stealth didn’t seem to be an option, my only hope lay in speed and some martial arts. I bolted for the entrance and the barker shouted, “Gobnob—I mean George! Stop that man!”
The imp’s name was Gobnob?
“What man?” the hulk said as I whisked past him. Apparently only the demon could pierce my camouflage. Advantage: Druid.
Indiscreet shoving was necessary to get past the line of people and down the stairs. I heard lots of “heys” and “what the (bleep)s” as I endangered ankles and hips.
“Sorry,” I called. “It’s an emergency.”
<Aughh! Atticus, she got away from me! She’s heading for the second thingie!>
Grab her pants leg in your teeth and pull back hard. Don’t let her get traction!
<Fail! She’s through!>
Go after her and protect her!
The first bizarre “orifice” was ahead. An imp in a human suit was stationed there and charming people much the way the little girl imp was at the exit on the heaven side, except that this fellow was telling people, “You can’t wait to get through the next doorway after this one.” That’s why Granuaile and the rest of them kept going even when they heard and smelled something awful ahead.
It was time to put a stick in their spokes.
There wasn’t any need to think about it: Amber had ordered me to slay the demons, so I was going to do it. These weren’t living bodies the demons had possessed but rather fresh corpses they were inhabiting, like hermit crabs squeezed into shells. But while dwelling in human form, the imps were subject to at least some human limitations. Before I passed through the gross doorway, I placed one hand on top of the imp’s head and the other underneath his chin and jerked it violently to the side, snapping his neck. He might get out of his shell soon, but he wouldn’t be charming anyone else until he did.
As he crumpled I yelled, “Go back! They’re killing people in here!” The “what the (bleep)s” multiplied, and I hoped that their sense of self-preservation would win out over curiosity. The carnival goers were quite confused, because they hadn’t precisely seen me kill the imp, but they did know that something had gone horribly wrong and someone had been severely injured. Some of them pulled out cell phones and dialed 911, and at least a couple expressed a loud desire to get out of there and headed back up the stairs.
The orifice was wet and smelled fishy and I had to sort of slither through it, since it was a slit cut into a quivering wall of protoplasm; I felt as if I’d been squeezed out through a pastry chef’s frosting gun. Dubbing it the Anchovy Gate due to its odor, I decided, for my own sanity, not to dwell on whether its substance had been secreted or shat or otherwise spawned from unsavory origins. It was a kind of gelatinous, semi-translucent slab of dead lavender sludge that filled the space completely from floor to ceiling, a tight sphincter sealing one environment off from another. Its function was clear: Without the protections it provided against smells and sound, nobody would want to continue onward, for the stench on the other side of it made me gag and the howls of people dying ahead filled me with fear for Granuaile and Oberon.
What’s happening? I asked my hound.
<Atticus, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.>
Nonsense. I can still hear you.
<They are killing people in here. Granuaile kind of woke up and figured out we’re in trouble. But so did everybody else.>
Almost there.
<Hurry!>
Everyone ahead of me had been charmed. Their need to get through that next gate was the call of a siren. If the first one had been the Anchovy Gate, this was the Needle Gate, I suppose. It was designed like those tire-shredding devices: You were fine to go through it one way, but try to back up and you’d be punctured with slivers of steel.