‘He’s a great magician!’ Zek cried. She hung dangling in Gustan’s arms.
‘Indeed?’ Shaithis glanced at her. ‘And what, pray, is his talent? For I sense nothing of magic in him.’
‘I … I read the future,’ Jazz gasped from a crushed, O-shaped mouth.
Shaithis smiled a terrible smile. ‘Good, for I have certainly read yours.’ And he nodded to the man who held Jazz aloft.
‘Wait!’ Zek cried. ‘It’s true, I tell you! You’ll lose a powerful ally if you kill him.’
‘An ally?’ Shaithis seemed amused. ‘A servant, perhaps.’ He stroked his chin. ‘But very well, let us test this talent. Put him down.’ Jazz was lowered until he stood on straining tip-toes.
Shaithis studied him closely, cocked his head on one side, thought of a suitable test. ‘Now tell me,’ he finally said, ‘what you read in my future, hell-lander?’
Jazz knew he was finished, but there was still Zek to consider. ‘I’ll tell you this much,’ he answered. ‘Harm this woman in any way – one hair of her head – and you’ll burn in hell. The sun shall surely rise on you, Shaithis of the Wamphyri!’
‘That is not fortune-telling but wishful thinking!’ Shaithis snapped. ‘Do you think to lay a curse on me? What, I am not to harm a hair of her head? This head, do you mean?’ He reached out and grasped Zek’s blonde hair, bunched it in a knot, tightened his grip until she cried out.
And the sun at once rose in the pass through the mountains, and lit the place with its burning, lancing rays!
Before the man who held Jazz screamed in terror and hurled him away like a rag doll, the Englishman thought an entirely frivolous thought: ‘Now that’s what I call magic!’
13
Lardis Lidesci
Thrown down, Jazz at once scrambled toward his gun, and no one made the least effort to stop him. The reason was simple: Shaithis and his two were moving back toward their mounts, scuttling like upright cockroaches where they threaded their way through scattered rocks and boulders, always seeking shade and refuge from the fatal, blazing light. And where and whenever that light fell upon them, then they screamed aloud as if scalded, covering their heads in their near-blind, blundering panic flight.
But one of them, Gustan, still carried Zek, who writhed like a snake in his grasp, beating at his head with her tiny hands. Gustan was Jazz’s first target.
He snatched up his SMG from the hard ground, tilted its barrel downward and shook it. A few tiny pebbles and a trickle of dust fell from the barrel and Jazz prayed there was nothing bigger lodged in there. Then he was down on one knee, seeking out Gustan’s fleeting, double-silhouette, finding it and aiming, and at last squeezing the trigger. The gun responded with a chattering diatribe of loud, lead obscenities, all hurled at Gustan’s lower legs. Shaithis’s lieutenant went down as if pole-axed, raising a cloud of dust where he screamed and flopped in the shadows of a low pile of rocks, and in the next moment Zek came scrambling free of him.
Jazz couldn’t fire again for fear of hitting her. ‘Keep to one side!’ he hoarsely yelled. ‘Give me a clear line of fire!’ She heard him, threw herself to one side. A target at once presented itself, moving frantically in a sweeping beam of light. Jazz fixed the vampire in the sights of his mind even as the light swept on, and again he fired. Screams and curses came echoing back. Jazz hoped it was Shaithis himself he’d hit but doubted it: the silhouette hadn’t had his bulk. On the other hand, he could still feel the bruises on his face where Shaithis’s second man had picked him up. That one would do nicely, thank you. The thing these creatures would have to learn was this: don’t mess with magicians from the hell-lands!
Zek came creeping from the shadows at the base of the cliffs. ‘It’s me!’ she cried as he jerked his body in her direction. ‘Don’t shoot!’ Wolf had met her half-way, was whining and prancing about her like a great puppy.
‘Get behind me,’ Jazz warned, waving the girl and the wolf aside. ‘Get me another magazine from my packs, quick!’