carried along like a sack of meal.
Behind him came eleven more griffins, each carrying a dwarf dangling from
its talons.
Still, there are advantages, he admitted. It would be hard to hold on
riding griffin-back.
Craig looked at the stuff laid out on the coffee table dubiously. Some of
it, like the sheets of typing paper with the spell written on them, was
perfectly ordinary. Others, like the hibachi full of glowing coals, were
ordinary but out of place. Still others, like the roots and powders he and
Mikey had scoured Chinatown to find, were just plain odd. The table had
been shoved to the center of the room and a circle drawn around it in blue
marking chalk.
Mikey had just finished placing the black, white and red candles at the
points of an invisible star outside the circle. He used the tape measure
to check the distances between them and then did a quick calculation on
his HP calculator.
“That should do it,” he said, carefully stepping over the chalk mark to
join Craig at the coffee table.
“Give me your hand.”
“What do you want that for?”
Mikey picked up the Exacto knife lying next to the hibachi. “I don’t, I
want some of your blood.”
Craig winced as Mikey drove the point into his fingertip. “Hey! Not so
rough, okay?”
But the blood flowed freely and Mikey held Craig’s hand over the hibachi,
letting the dark red drops drip onto the glowing coals.
Craig wrinkled his nose at the odor, but Mike didn’t seem to notice. He
reached into the coffee cup, picked up a four-finger pinch of the powder
there and cast it onto the coals where Craig’s blood still sizzled. The
powder sparkled as it hit the charcoal and heavy sweet-smelling smoke
boiled up out of the hibachi.
Craig coughed and his eyes watered, but he grabbed Mike’s outstretched
hands in his across the glowing coals. Then he looked down at the notes to
the side of the hibachi and both of them began to chant, reading the words
in unison.
The smoke got thicker and thicker until Craig could hardly see the paper
and the sweetish, pungent odor made his head swim. He shut out the
discomfort and chanted for all he was worth as the room began to shimmer
and dissolve around him.
Eight: THE OLD ONES
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
-Old Arab proverb
So with friends like these, who needs enemies?
-Old Jewish proverb
Smoke and fire and candlelight . . .
At first Craig thought the place was on fire. There was smoke or fog
everywhere and a dim red light coming from the wrong angle. Between the
smoke and the dim red light, Craig couldn’t see very well and somehow he
was very glad for that. What he could see was wrong, like an optical
illusion.
They were in a cave, or maybe on a mountain crag. The ground under them
was rough rock, kind of, and it sloped away so steeply that Craig was
afraid to take a step. The air was thin and hard to breathe, or maybe just
so full of smoke there wasn’t much oxygen in it. His chest heaved as he
sucked great, unsatisfying lungs full. He clutched Mikey’s hands tight in
his own. Mikey squeezed back so hard Craig’s hands hurt.
Craig was scared. For the first time in his life he was so afraid the very
marrow of his bones chilled. He didn’t care about treasure, or
adventuring, or magic. This place played on dark half-realized places in
his psyche in ways that were horrible. He just wanted out.
Then he realized they were being watched.
It loomed above them in the fog, tall and manlike. There was a hint of
distance about it as if it was enormous, but there was no way to tell. In
the smoky red haze Craig could make out the outline, including the pointed
ears. There was a suggestion of body hair, or maybe fur. Worst of all, it
seemed to twist and flicker like an image in a mirage. Looking at the
thing made Craig’s eyes hurt, but he couldn’t make himself look away.