“The principle is well established!” he proclaimed. “I refer you to Chandrasekhar Sfondrati-Piccolomini’s magisterial pandects, in which the limit of irredeemable moral collapse is set precisely at 1.4 times the mass of preexisting wickedness from which, however—take note, ethereal ignoramus!—must be subtracted the degree of coercion involved in attempting to force said collapse, the which—attend, spectral wretch!—must in turn be calculated—and calculated only—by use of—”
Hrundig and Benny and I raced into the opening at the center of the Evil Horizon, passing Zulkeh in a flash.
“—not forgetting, of course, to factor out all manner of sins which are not germane—”
And emerged back in the outer cavern just in time to see the fallen angel and the fallen saints rise shakily from the state of scholarly stupor in which Zulkeh must have sent them before he started his pedant’s charge into the Horizon.
I almost felt sorry for them. Not quite.
Zulkeh came out himself a moment later. Behind him, what was left of the Evil Horizon seemed to tighten into a ball. Like a whipped cur.
The mage glowered down at the angel and the saints. “Shocking!” he pronounced. “To see such incompetence in official authorities!”
“We were just following the rules,” whined one of the fallen saints. “Decreed by the Old Geister Himself!”
Zulkeh sniffed. “A sad state of affairs, when God Almighty fails to stay abreast of the literature.” Then, sighing: “But—’tis well said. Mathematics is properly the province of the youthful scholar. I fear me the Lord is past His Prime.”
The fallen saints glowered and the fallen angel seemed about to make some kind of protest, but Zulkeh’s glare cowed them into silence.
“Bah!” He turned to the rest of us. “Come, my fellow adventurers—let us be off. For even as I correct divine error, time wanes!”
Zulkeh began striding toward the door leading back into the Infernal Regions. “We may still make good our escape before the equinox of galactic oscillation!”
* * *
And—we did.
Just by the skin of our teeth, mind you, and we probably wouldn’t have made it at all if Zulkeh hadn’t decided to gamble with the Osirian Detour. Which was no fun at all, what with having to fend off a giant serpent in pitch darkness riding the most primitive damned boat you ever saw with only a ragpatch doll of a so-called deity to steer the blasted thing. But at least we were able to circumvent all the Joe relics and the Nun and the Beast From Below and the deadly Worm of the Deep—the other Worm of the Deep, the really nasty one; not Apep, who’s just a glorified snake—and the Slathering Sanguine Skulker and the Creeper from the Crevasse and the Undulant Umbellant from Under and the It and the Thing and the Them and the They.
We did have a moment’s unpleasantness with the Torrid Terror. And the Flaying Crutchman. But the Minions of the Minotaur were pretty small potatoes and the Minotaur himself never made a showing. And now that I’ve had a bit of a set-to with troglodytes I can assure you that their reputation is grossly exaggerated.
The Mesozoic ones might have been a bit of a handful, true. But with Greyboar along that encounter was pretty much a picnic. Actually, it was a picnic. The troglodytes mistook Greyboar for a distant cousin and insisted we stay for lunch. Don’t ask me what we ate. The less said about Mesozoic troglodyte cuisine the better.
But at least we didn’t run into any poetry, except for when Hrundig got tipsy at the picnic—on what? don’t ask—and he started matching lays with the Mesozoic troglodytes and got adopted into the clan himself.
In fact, when we finally got back into our house we discovered that only thirty-six hours had elapsed. At least, according to the grandfather clock which Jenny and Angela had bought at an auction and installed into what they called our “foyer.”
Zulkeh was ecstatic. “Proof positive!” he exclaimed. “For this alone, the expedition was worth it! Irrefutable evidence that time passes in the netherworld at a rate precisely”—a bunch of incomprehensible twaddle here—”and that Greenwich Laebmauntsforscynneweëld is every bit the dunce that I have named him in treatises too numerous to detail. To which,” he added, stalking toward the library, “I shall now add yet another.”