Demon of the Black Gate

Rovinkar was nearly finished. He had rested between each quadrant, and was now etching the patterns and signs for the center piece. The quadrants would become the walls, and the center medallion the platform to bind the demon. The elaborate gaol would only last a matter of days, given the power of the demon he meant to contain. But it would serve long enough to hold it captive until he was ready to lead it back into the prison of obsidian. He had to concentrate on his work. His lapses had caused the demon to escape his control in the first place. The demon’s power was exceptional, it had no apparent measure. His own power had limits, and he was pouring much of it into the magic that penetrated the stone. He prayed it would be enough, for if the demon could break through before he was ready to lead it into the stone, he was a good as dead.

The etchings would be ready tonight. When the sun rose again in the east, the first quadrant could be energized. From there it would take moments. Wherever the demon was, he would find himself here, torn from the fabric of one place and assembled within the magic of the cage. The energy came from the sun itself, and the first light on the magics was the power to bind. When evening fell, the energy would subside little, held in reserve by the weave. It would feed on the power of the demon if need be. The subsequent light of dawn would renew it again, but less so each day, until the shield would be too weak. A human would be unable to escape for years. But the raw power of the demon was far above that of mortals. He hoped for days at most.

He was at the center of the design. The last piece was ready for his work. He began etching the chain that tied them all together.

Cerra sat on the deck of the felucca as it pointed south in a slow rolling sea. She was wedged between the mast pulpit and a couple soft bales of cloth goods that Shevrin had arranged for her comfort. She had the hood of her robe pulled up to shade her fair complexion, though after the days on the prairie a ferocious crop of freckles had already spread across her cheeks. She was mesmerized and not all together sure of the new sensations: the rolling of the boat as it coursed through the water, the near-silent surging of the wind caught by the sails, the gurgling of the water passing along the hull. At first she felt her stomach reaching the apex of the roll before she did. It was most uncomfortable. But before long she sensed the nature of the swells, and felt them much earlier. She wasn’t entirely convinced she liked this environment.

‘The sailor’s life is not for me’ she sang to herself. She smiled with little conviction as she let the motion play with the images in her mind. She had never seen an ocean. The small lake she had seen as a child was the master painting in so many of the scenes she had witnessed. The amount of water and empty horizon defeated her, much like the ride across the desert. In some ways, that flat featureless plane became a mobile one. A gull flew overhead, and the humming song of the ropes that held the mast: ‘rigging’ she recalled the term. The mast was like a tree and the lines held it secure. She imaged the great sail, flying like laundered linens. She did not smell the same freshness she thought and chuckled to herself. Kamir was tucked somewhere down in the hold. He was reluctant to venture out on deck, though on his second trip, he brought a tail out as a trophy.

“This must be a little like flying.” she cast her thoughts out. “I’m being carried by wind and water. It feels like that is all there is.”

“Here in this ocean, that is all there is. She is I ... I am her.”

She thought about that. He was saying he was the ocean, and the living waters were him. The demon never spoke more than a few words, and then reluctantly. He caused gaps in her thinking that she had to cross. The demon was tied to the elements. He had not just found life, he was a avatar of that life. Is fire alive? The earth? The water itself? The air?

She had stood at the rail at first when she wasn’t quite sure which way her stomach was going. Walking on the moving deck was a challenge, but when looking out over the rail she had reveled in the demon’s energy spread out thin. His form was scattered like stars over the heavens, grains of sugar floating on the swelling waters. Seeing the fogged light of the surface of the sea had helped settle her mind and her stomach. She had seen the nature of the waves, the way they rolled towards them. She thought of the way she heard music sometimes. Music had life.

She lay back against the bushel and closed her eyes, letting the swaying rock her. The tempo sent her back to a memory long forgotten. It drifted across her as she slipped into a dream, her mother’s arms, the infant in her gazing up as she rocked slowly, carried along. She slept.

Sinjin kept his eyes on the felucca as it headed south. By the end of the first day, it had eclipsed the fleet of fishermen that kept to the near shores and soon stood alone on the horizon. A dogged chase would truly alert the other boat that it was being followed, so Sinjin directed his captain to lay a course slightly to windward. He wanted to approach and pass the felucca by night. There was still a chance the felucca might make for Maabi on the delta of the great Chained Lakes river. He doubted that, for the caravan route from the plains would have been the better path. No, she was destined for Abyssin, and he was determined to reach it first.

Rovinkar tapped the last mark, a sign of binding at the center. The form was done. He stood in the center of the design, with the pommel of his staff resting on the binding rune and began to chant. He had been preparing for this moment, and the rigors of etching the design aided in focusing his intention. Slowly the etched patterns filled, as he let his dark energies drain into the chiseled maze. The black fires that started to burn in the tracery would become the magnet for the sun and with first light the entrapment would begin.

The equatorial dawn is nearly the same every morning. The eastern quadrant of Rovinkar’s design was towards the western side of the patterns, for the dawn light would strike there first. The West quadrant likewise was on the eastern portion. The sun was nearly overhead at zenith, so the South and North quadrants could have held their positions, but Rovinkar knew that he would need the optimal protections from these magical prison walls, and so positioned the South quadrant North. The North quadrant must retain a shadow. The dark energy could not be lost in the transit of the sun.

Rovinkar watched as the line of dusk and light crept down the wall, approaching the floor, and the tracing of the pattern. The first glare struck the tracings, filled with the dark matter of Rovinkar’s magic. The rays ignited the field and sent the energy coursing through the lattice of sigils and signs, lighting the symbols as they had been written, tracing just ahead of the dawn light. Rovinkar’s work was being redrawn in fire, and he examined the progress as though checking his work. He knew any mistake would be too late in fixing. The East quadrant filled, and the energy leaked and flared to the Western side. They snaked along, writhing and firing his work. It was when the west was completed that the energies spread from them into the North and South chambers at once and the tiles quickly ran with the dark energy.

When they were filled, the center medallion received a rush of energy from each quarter, and helices of light started weaving up. Gold, ruby, and cobalt tendrils curled in an orderly weave within each other, braiding together in a continuous loom. The fabric of light became denser until a glowing shift in the center of the woven light turned white.

Rovinkar didn’t need the flash of platinum white to know that the snare was complete.

#

The demon was immersed in the ocean, keeping his consciousness close to the boat that bore Cerra. By the passing of the sun that warmed him, two days had passed. In such a watery state time felt different, and he had to consider for a moment the passage that the woman felt. Water was a fluid and lived with a pace that had little in common with the linear time of man, beating instead to a pulse of oxygen and currents that heated at the surface and sank to the depths in cycloidal drifts.

The waters of the seas had fallen still with the first light of their third day. One of the crewmen grumbled about the unseasonable storms. The typhoon was not unheard of, and the sudden thunderous downpour just before they left port was still fresh in their minds. The clear azure skies of morning, still shedding brilliant pink and golds on the horizon, showed no sign of a tempest yet the seas were unnaturally calm, as though oiled. The wind stayed away from a calm like this. All of the sailors felt the change. So did Cerra. She had slept out on the deck in a cushion by the mast. The evening and night had been balmy. She had dreamt, she thought, or perhaps she had been awake. Sometimes in the darkness of her sight, she could drift between the two and not know if she slept or not. The stars had been out, and in the soft swaying of the boat, she had painted them in her mind, drifting among them, and they gained brightness and gaseous character. Her demon was among them. Surely it must have been a dream.

But there was no swaying to the boat now. A calm still had encumbered the boat, and it seemed neither the boat nor water moved. The air was lifeless. Cerra thought of the salt desert, and saw the two as the same.

When everything reached the deadest of calms, the boat started being carried along by a current that tugged at its hulls, and the captain of the felucca could see that it bore off to his port side. It took no time to gather momentum and the experience of the captain told him he was being drawn by the beginnings of a maelstrom.

“Hold yer rudder to the larboard,” he shouted. “Keep us moving away from this current.”

Cerra could feel the water gripping the hull as surely as if it had been a hand.

The sun was just starting to warm the surface when the demon felt the motion of his extremities begin to stiffen. That he could feel his extremities at all was the first indication of something wrong, but the constriction continued. The water carried a charge that was corralling him, containing him. His mass began to gather, solidifying from the grains and metals in the waters. He strained and pushed at the weaving net that closed in on him, drawing him away.

“I am captured … snared!”

“What is this?” Concern raced through her mind.

Snared? What?

“It draws me away. I cannot escape!”

Cerra stood and gripped her way to the port rail, grabbing where she could until the next hold presented itself. She had learned a pattern, but it changed on the boat, as ropes and parcels were moved and lines let go. The wind began increasing. At first she thought it was the speed of the boat, drawn by the current in the still air, but now the breeze began to freshen, pulling itself into the same vortex the the water was churning into. The sails filled and the captain urged their trim, as the helmsman keep the rudder pointed to the edges of the increasing eddy current. Moisture collected in a sudden rush as steam and vapour and a waterspout grew from the flowing circular sea.

Cerra gripped the rail, her hood blown free. She saw the fluid blues of the demon being drawn in, a number of coils drawing him away and upward. They continued to compress, wrapping like a woven fingerpuzzle, pulling ever tighter.

The wind howled in fury, screeching through the rigging and threatened to shred the beleagured sail. And then the blue of the demon was gone, the net fragmented, and the shards were lost. The sky crackled like dry pine needles in a fire.

“No. No. NOOO!” she shouted into the coiled tempest that tore open the sky. “NO!” Her words may have stretched into a scream as she held up her hands. She saw the demon compress into a flash. The felucca shook as it fought its way over the roiling churning sea that circled, threatening to draw them in. The deck plunged, and she fell forward, grabbing at the rail.

She felt an incredible darkness, as if her own internal vision had left her. The void passed her thoughts and her knees threated buckle. She held the railing as it rose and fell in the turbulent waves. For a moment she could not tell up from down. Water slashed at the rail, the decks awash. She wasn’t even sure she was on the right side of the rail, she was so lost in the cacophony of the moment. The boat was the world and the deck moved and turned. The wind howled in fury. She held a hand to the heavens, as if it could draw the demon back, but the darkness remained.

“Come back.” she cried out over the din.

She pitched forward and a lanyard slapping the mast gave her a target to reach for. She missed it and would have fallen, perhaps even overboard if the deck were to slew with the wildness of the sea, when strong hands caught her and guided her back to the cushions.

“Get her below.” came an order shouted through the din of sea and rigging.

The skies that had torn at the sails were now shrieking, as the waterspout gathered itself tighter and tighter, spewing lightning, The men would swear later that they heard the cries of a thousand banshees before the spout disappeared, and not one would forget that there was a red-haired woman calling into the storm at the height of the tempest.

She was half carried as she could only manage to stumble on the pitching deck to her cabin. There was no relief to her ears until the door to her small space was shut, reducing the roar to shuttered chaos. Cerra drew her knees to her head and wedged herself into a corner.

“I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.” She felt bereft. Alone.

Outside, the seas gradually slid to a restive state. The turmoil in Cerra followed even slower into the calm. She finally was able to stretch her legs away from the protective cocoon she had assumed. Only then could Kamir find his way into her lap and burrow up into her bosom. She scratched Kamir behind his ears.

“What now?” she said. Somehow a sniffling laugh cut through what could have been a sob. “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know.”

The cat purred as if that were answer enough.

“Now I know how Marli Cook feels. Her husband is always off on some fool errand.”

Kamir pushed his way to her face, licking at the tears on her cheeks. His raspy tongue made her wince and she forced a laugh.

“You’re right.” she said in reply. “Dry your tears. Oh I don’t know what to do” That came out like one of her childhood pouts. It made her laugh. “But again ... just like before ... we can’t stay here.”

#

Rovinkar watched as the helices rising from the dark energy began glowing fiery red, then flashed argent. He fought the impulse to avert his eyes to the pulse of light. When the wave passed, the coiling light had returned to the dark cobalts of energy, and in their midst stood the demon. The figure seethed with fire, a loose almagam of burning coal, steaming vapours floated about him, and the dark flaming orbs of its eyes glared as it searched its surroundings. It struggled with the bonds of light which quickly constricted with its efforts and relaxed when the demon ceased its attempts to break free. The demon seethed with murderous intent, but there was little he could see or hear outside of the waves of energy that surrounded him. He knew he was no longer water borne in the sea. The woman. The blind one. He had changed place. He did not know if he was in the same realm.

The wizard. Though the demon was caged by the weaving helices, he realized it was not the void. He was caged but not entombed. He knew eternity. This was not it. Through the coiling energies he saw the face of his tormentor.

“Wizard!” He cast out his voiceless shout with menace. “I am here.”

The demon’s thought hit Rovinkar like a blow. He dared not answer and kept his guard wisely up. The etched medallion would contain the demon. He had much to do preparing the black onyx to receive the demon into its core. And he had much to do to prepare himself.

The demon felt the rage drain from him. He was not in the void. He was still his elemental self. As before, when he had first wakened to this world, and drained his rage, he let himself sink into a stupor, as only one who had witnessed nothing can do. He was not in the void. Somewhere, he would be able to see, discover the link in the chain that was weak. The one that would free him. He let his mind go dark. The lack of struggle, or even heated intent relaxed the coiling helix even more. The demon felt that even as he let himself settle. The magics woven in the stone defeated him. The stone, however, would not.

Rovinkar watched as the fluid shape of the demon began compacting, voids exhausted and gases escaping with dying flames. In a moment, the roiling figure with burning eyes was little more than a statue. Unmoving. The chiseled and glazed stonework revealed a naked man, carved in ebony, tall and lean, muscled like a warrior of the ages. The figure unmoving and lifeless. Only the eyes burned.

Rovinkar was not fooled by the transformation into believing the demon had weakened, for the waves of probing menace still encircled him. He cared not. If the demon didn’t struggle, the medallion would work longer. He had word that the woman, the red-haired one, was coming to Abyssin. He wanted that woman here. She may be the means he was looking for. She had controlled the demon. The prison that would keep her was far less elaborate than the one that caged the demon.