The Undead Spider # đŻ
"Only the grimoire?" Jake said. "You don't want me to take anything else while I'm in there?"
Constantine's mouth moved before his better judgement caught up with it. "Well. Since you're asking. Jason does have a rather -- he's an avid collector. Couple of interesting pieces that have been sitting in that study gathering dust since before the Norman Conquest and not doing anyone any good, if you happened to wander past them and your arms happened to be free--"
Jake stared at him.
"There might also be," Constantine continued, at a slightly lower volume, "a pocket watch that technically belongs to a friend of mine and only ended up in Jason's possession because of a misunderstanding involving a sĂŠance and a very badly translated contract, but that's a separate conversation for a separate evening and--"
"The grimoire is what you were after, isn't it?" Jake asked. "You want it for yourself."
Constantine stopped.
The street held its quiet around them. The lamp with the flicker did its work above their heads. Constantine stood with his coat on his shoulders and his hands in his pockets and looked at the black door of the building across the street, and the breath he let out was slow and deliberate and told Jake everything it was meant not to.
"You've been crystal clear," Constantine said, "on your skepticism of me."
"You don't make it hard."
"Then I'll be frank." He turned his head and looked at Jake with the expression of a man who has decided that honesty is the fastest route to what he wants and has therefore decided to deploy it. "I need the Chronos Temporis to wipe the last three weeks from my own record. Every piece of bad luck I've drawn since I--"
He stopped himself.
"The demons, the hunters, Nergal -- all trace back to something I participated in around that time, and the interest has only been doubling since." He paused. "If I cast the right spell from that book, I can fold the memory of those weeks out of the ledger. Permanently."
"And explain to me again how it solves my problem."
"The Chronos Temporis doesn't bend time the way people say when they mean something dramatic. What it does is--" He stopped. Searched for the words and found the right ones with the look of a man who had been carrying them for a while. "It contains a spell that can withhold a moment from Time itself. Not change it. Withhold it. Hold it outside the current, where the river can't reach it."
Jake thought about it. " Death is bound by Time. If it isn't within, she can't find it."
Constantine's mouth closed. "Exactly."
"Something that powerful burns through a lot to cast," Jake said. "One spell might drain it. Two would take everything it had."
"That," Constantine said, and the corner of his mouth moved, "is the trick of it, isn't it."
Jake held the man's gaze for a moment. "The grimoire first," he said. "Then we talk about the rest."
Constantine looked at the building. "Right." He turned up his collar against the cold and crossed the street, and Jake fell into step beside him.
They stopped at the foot of the steps.
"The layout," Jake said.
"Entry hall, staircase on the left, study on the first floor -- second door on the right." Constantine's eyes moved over the facade, reading the window frames, the line of the curtain on the first floor. "Three weeks ago the library was through the study, and the grimoire wouldn't have been far from where Jason works. He's the type who keeps his most-used things close. But he's had time to move it." He exhaled. "Could be anywhere in there now."
"Useful," Jake said.
"He also said he'd updated the wards since last time." Constantine's jaw shifted. "Last time nearly cost me a hand, so take that as the context it deserves."
"How do I get through them?"
"That's the part," Constantine said, "where I've had to do some creative thinking." He turned from the building and looked at Jake with the careful expression of a man about to say something he knows will land badly. "I can create a gap in the barrier. Something large enough for a living body to move through without triggering the alarm layer underneath."
He turned the coin over in his fingers, its edges catching the lamplight and moving wrong. "The barrier reads for human-sized intent. If I could get the size of the intent down -- say, to something on the order of a spider--"
"No."
"I haven't finished."
"I'm not turning into a spider."
Constantine's expression flickered between surprise and respect. "Temporarily."
"No."
"It's very brief. Remarkably painless. I've done it to myself on several occasions and the worst part is the aftertaste, which fades within--"
"No."
Constantine closed his mouth. He looked at the coin. He looked at the building. He looked at the axe across Jake's back and something moved in his expression, a calculation completing itself, and he held out his hand. "Give me the axe."
Jake looked at him.
"The power in that blade," Constantine said, "is residual demonic energy and it's still warm from Nergal. If I channel it through the coin, I can force the barrier wide enough for a human body -- wide enough, mind, not clean. It'll hold for about a second before the wards close back on themselves." He kept his hand out. "You go through in that window or you don't go through at all."
Jake unshouldered the axe and set the haft into Constantine's hand.
"A second," Constantine said again, his fingers curling around the haft, the copper light from the coin already threading up along the blade and pulling the dark residue in the metal toward the surface. "You understand what that means."
"I've got experience with a tight clock," Jake said, and moved to the base of the window. "Open it."
Constantine pressed the coin flat against the wall below the window frame. The copper light built and the dark energy in the axe blade fed into it and the barrier above the window seam folded outward like a door forced from its hinges. The gap was a meter wide and narrowing already.
Jake went through it with his feet finding the ledge and his hands carrying him over the sill in one motion, and the barrier closed behind him without a sound.
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The hall inside was dark. The floorboards were old and dense and the weight of the shelves lining the walls sat in them. The shelves held books and objects whose arrangement logic was legible to no one else but the organizer.
Jake moved through the entry hall without touching the floor any more than he needed to, his hands finding the wall, a shelf edge, the door frame. The surfaces read back to him. No one was moving on this floor.
The staircase on the left had two steps that creaked under different pressures and he found both of them before they found him and took the banister side instead.
The first floor corridor had the same dense shelving, running to the ceiling in both directions, and the smell of old leather and older paper.
Second door on the right. Jake put his hand against the wood and felt nothing behind it move.
He opened it.
The study was a room that had been used hard for a very long time. The desk at its center bore the evidence of a man who worked the same surface for decades and had no interest in changing.
Jake read the settled-in marks of pen and elbow, and the distribution of objects that meant each one was where it was for a reason. Shelves ran floor to ceiling on three walls, not as display but as storage for a man who had filled multiple lifetimes with things worth keeping.
Maps overlapped each other on one stretch of wall, some on paper and some on materials Jake didn't have a word for. A glass cabinet in the corner held objects whose nature he couldn't comprehend.
No grimoire on the desk. None on the shelf closest to the desk, where the most-used books would sit.
Jake moved to the shelves and began at eye level. The spines were in multiple languages and several alphabets and some carried symbols rather than text. He read what he could read and skipped what he couldn't and moved along the rows.
He went to the next shelf. Then the one behind the desk.
Then he heard the creak of a floorboard in the corridor and turned.
Jason Blood stood in the door of the study with a book in one hand, one finger holding his place. He looked at Jake with the expression of a man who had come back to his study expecting exactly this and was therefore not surprised and was therefore also not pleased.
"Looking for this?" he said.
The book in his hand was flat and wide and its cover was a dark material that was not leather and not wood and had no obvious seam along the spine, as if it had grown rather than been bound.
The text across its front was in a script that had not been in common use for a thousand years, but its meaning arrived in the mind before the eye fully processed the letters -- not a title so much as a declaration: what is written here I wrote, and what I wrote holds.
At its center, pressed into the cover material rather than applied to it, was a face in profile that did not quite resolve into anything recognisable and seemed to shift its angle depending on where the light was coming from. The book had weight that the room could feel.
"Hope you don't mind me borrowing it," Jake said.
Jason's expression didn't change. "Is that what Constantine is calling it." He stepped into the study and set the book on the desk's corner, not releasing it, just setting it down with his hand remaining on the cover. "Borrowing? Do you understand what kind of man he is? What he does with people he finds useful."
"He was frank with me about it."
Jason's mouth moved, a short sound without warmth. "Was he? Did he tell you to come in here because he believed the grimoire would be in my study, or because he knew I'd be sitting with it in my hands when you arrived?" He held Jake's eyes. "Because there are two different answers to that question, and only one of them means he was telling you the truth."
Jake looked at the desk. At the book. At the axe in his hand, its blade still carrying the faint residue of the copper light from the barrier outside. "He did say I'd need the axe," he said.
Jason's mouth closed. His eyes went to the axe and their quality of attention shifted.
And he rhymed.
"Gone! Gone! O' form of man. Seven minutes is all you can. Rise the demon Etrigan!"
The temperature rose, fast and climbing. The light from the desk lamp bent the wrong sideways, and Jason Blood's frame exploded into flames.
The man folded and what replaced him was enormous in a room that had been sized for a man, and yellow-skinned and wide through the chest, and the smile on the demon's face was not the smile of something that found things amusing.
Etrigan the Demon rolled his shoulders and looked at Jake with eyes that held more yellow than the lamp and picked up the sword that had not been in the room until it was.
Jake's attention was elsewhere.
The navigation thread in the corner of his vision had gone white and then reloaded and turned gold, pointing at Etrigan with the unmistaken certainty of what he was.
Not the sword. Etrigan, and Jake was the hungriest he'd ever felt.
He looked at the thread. He looked at the demon.
He remained unsure of the possibility.
Etrigan raised the sword. He set the grimoire down on the shelf behind him -- not casually, with care, the care of something that intends to return to it -- and then he came forward and the room seemed to shrink to fit the fight.
He swung.
Jake went up, hands finding the shelf above his head, feet going to the wall, the axe in his right hand coming around to meet the sword's follow-through and the clang of it moving through the floorboards and down into the stone of the building.
The impact ran from Jake's wrist to his shoulder and held there, and he pushed off the wall and let the next swing pass under him and came down on the far side of the desk.
Etrigan laughed. It was a sound the room wasn't made for.
"Something lives in you, small warrior," the demon said. "A tiny spark before thy certain fall."
He vaulted the desk in one motion and Jake was already moving, swinging up to the shelving on the opposite wall, his feet finding the third shelf and the fourth, his hands on the case above, buying height in a room where height was the only variable he had.
The sword came after him, point-first, and he dropped before it reached him and landed on the far side and drove the axe into the carpet and used the haft to redirect the momentum of the next horizontal cut, sending it sideways, letting the blade's path take it into the cabinet in the corner.
The glass went and the objects inside it scattered across the floor, some rolling, one cracking cleanly in two.
Jake looked at the damage.
"Jason's not going to love that," he said.
Etrigan's eyes moved to the broken cabinet and the pieces across the floor and his expression shifted in a direction that was not regret. "Jason's thoughts I do not prize," he said, and the rhyme returned for that sentence, the cadence of something speaking from a very old grievance. "Beneath the weight of ancient lies."
"Sounds like you want to be freed," Jake said.
The sword swung wider.
Jake ducked under it and came inside the arc and drove the axe-head up into the flat of the blade, forcing the point toward the ceiling, and for one held moment they were close enough that the heat coming off the demon's skin was real and substantial. Then Jake stepped back and the space opened again.
Etrigan pressed forward and the room gave no ground to either of them so they made their own geometry -- Jake working the vertical, the walls, the shelving that rained books when the sword came too close to it, and Etrigan working the horizontal, the wide swings that reduced the space available by sheer presence.
They exchanged four blows where the axe met the sword and each one sent both of them back a step and shook the room. On the fifth Jake went sideways instead of back and stepped off the desk and came around and caught Etrigan across the shoulder with the axe's flat, and the demon staggered, which was the first time the demon had staggered, and the grin that came across his face in response was not the grin of something annoyed.
It was the grin of something that was genuinely enjoying itself.
"There's a twist in your rhyme," Jake said, between one swing and the next. "Seven minutes, was it? Before Jason comes back?"
The sword swung wider and the horizontal cut took out the top three inches of a shelf and the books from it fell across both their feet.
Etrigan's voice came louder and the yellow in his eyes was brighter. "Seconds will do for you, small warrior," he said, the words coming as the sword rose again, "To face your fate and meet your quarry."
He thrust forward.
Jake took it on the axe, both hands, the full force of it pushing him back into the shelf behind him and the shelf groaning against his spine. He held it there, the demon's sword against his axe and the demon's face close enough that he could see every line in the ancient skin.
Then he pushed -- redirecting the force, angling the axe so the sword rode off it to the left -- and the moment the contact broke he moved right and the sword buried itself in the shelf instead of him.
Etrigan pulled it free and turned and stopped.
His head came level. His breathing, which had been the breathing of something that did not need to breathe and had been doing it for the drama of it, came down to nothing.
"Your worth is proven, your spirit true," he said. "Until the day I meet with you."
"I'm sure we'll make a great team then," Jake said.
The demon looked at him. The yellow eyes went to the axe and back to Jake's face and the something behind them that had registered the axe at the door registered it again, differently.
Then the fire came.
It rose from Etrigan's feet and moved upward and the demon did not change so much as recede, the enormous yellow-skinned figure going backward into the fire like a tide going out, and Jason Blood came forward through it, older looking than he had in the corridor and already turning toward the shelf behind him.
Jake's web was already in the air.
It crossed the room ahead of Jason's hand and the grimoire came off the shelf and into Jake's palm and he was at the window before Jason had finished turning.
"No--" Jason's voice carried exhaustion. "You don't understand what he's going to do with--"
Jake went through the window.
The glass gave and the cold air of the street hit him and he was three floors up and falling. The web line found purchase on the building opposite and the swing carried him over the street and up.
He let it take him, the grimoire in one hand and the axe across his back, and behind him the lit window of Jason Blood's study held its warmth for a moment longer before it went dark.
~MimicLord
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