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pentagram, and there came a sensation, a feeling, no more, of
unseen powerful forces, forces evil and beyond the understanding of humanity,
descending, closing in, surrounding them on all sides. Despite the
cooling night air she found herself perspir-ing nervously.
O'Malley seemed satisfied rather than scared and switched again, this time to
English, although what he was saying made as little sense as the gibberish.
"The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be," he chanted
as if reciting a litany. "Not in the spaces we know, but between
them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate.
Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the
gate where the spheres meet. Man rules where They ruled once; They
shall rule where man rules now. After summer is winter and after winter,
summer. O great Keeper of the Key, send us thy servant!"
And from the spaces around and outside the penta-gram she sensed life, life of
a sort terribly alien to her, so much so that her mind could not accept this
life as it was and protected her with blurred images. There were many of them,
looking like soap bubbles but ra-diating that feeling of being totally alien
and incom-prehensible, and hidden from her by her own mind as bubble shapes.
And now O'Malley received an answer from the shapes, a shrill piping as if
from thousands of inhuman and nonhuman creatures all shouting, "Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!"
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She had seen and experienced the magic of the University engineers, the
godlike power of the holy world and the rigidly structured wizardry of the
cas-tle, the Thieves' Guild, and the demons and ghosts of the tower. She
had seen the magic of this counterpart world in which elves, gnomes,
and faerie cohabited with man and spells were tests of will-but this was
unlike any of that.
This was alien, so alien as to be incomprehensible; so alien that she knew,
instinc-tively, that no
Department of Probabilities in some far-off time line had dreamed it
up. These were real, not constructs. These were at the root of O'Malley's
powers, why he was the master magician of them all, how he could hold even a
demon from the zero time line completely in thrall, helpless despite his jewel
of power. These were the counterparts of the demons, the alien creatures of
enormous power that lived between the worlds and inhabited the dimensional
spaces be-tween the levels of reality. The former masters of re-ality, perhaps
the creators of the demons themselves, bound and thrown out, if O'Malley's
chant could be accepted, by-what? The jewels, the power ampli-fiers, the means
that some demon slave of these foul creatures had developed by which to break
free, to revolt, to join together so many that they exiled their
former masters to half-planes and insubstantial reali-ties. Pressed back
by the joining of-how many? If six could move a planet, what might six
thousand jewels do, or six million? Locked away until greed and lust for
limitless power by such as O'Malley might pierce the veil and draw them
hither.
"Hear me, O servants of the Mighty and Omni-potent Keeper of the Gates!"
O'Malley called to them, raising his arms in supplication. "Feed me the power
to serve, that I might serve Him Who
Is Not to Be Named through your master and through you! I call the power unto
myself, for I
need His blessing and His power for a mortal task, that my position might be
increased and my service tenfold increased in value! Let the power flow to
me!"
The call agitated the "bubbles" to a fever pitch; they screamed their strange
piping call all the more. And now she could feel it-feel the power flow from
all sides of the pentagram, closing in.
The barrier of the pentagram kept the creatures out, but not the tremendous
surge of force.
The wand came up and again started tracing a sym-bol in the air, a complex
symbol based on
the five-pointed star. Only now, as the light traced the symbol, it remained
in the air in front of
O'Malley like a glow-ing yellow sign without support. She felt the power surge
flow into it, felt the enormous force it absorbed as surely as if she could
see it, yet nothing visibly changed.
Then the sorcerer stepped up to the symbol still hanging in the air, stepped
up to it and placed his head into it. He did not penetrate; it seemed to her
as if his head had vanished and his broad shoulders had acquired the eerie
sign for a head.
"
Jill McCulloch!" his voice came at her. It was recognizably OMalleys,
yet it seemed huge, '
'
deep, and not quite human any more. "Here is the bargain. You shall
accept command of the forces that I shall place at your disposal; you shall
lead them where I direct, and you shall besiege the Citadel that I designate.
Not one human life shall you order spared; you shall order the death of all
humans inside the com-pound, and you shall see that it is carried out. Once it
is, you shall summon me by stating my name three times at the gates. If you do
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this, I will deliver unto you the jewel which you seek to use as you see fit.
Do you agree to this bargain, freely and of your own will do you make it with
me?"
She had no choice, yet she hesitated. This was no bargain with an Asmodeus
Mogart, it was a bargain with the sworn and ancient enemies of all the humans,
demons and her own kind equally.
O'Malley, or the thing that O'Malley had become, sensed her hesitation and a
vision started to appear in her mind-a vision of the great asteroid
filling the skies of Earth, of oceans crashing inland, cities
de-stroyed, millions-no-billions of lives swept away, their faces showing
terror at the destruction, their faces, too, a mirror of her friends and
relatives, those to whom she had been closest in life. With the vision came a
strong thought, an argument.
All this has happened, it seemed to tell her.
All this is the fate of your world. But winter becomes sum-mer
after a while; what seems like permanent desola-tion come December
is reborn in April's warmth and May's sweet rains. What is done may be undone
if you so wish, Jill McCulloch. Without shedding of blood there is no
remission. Blood must flow that blood be saved. It is your choice, Jill [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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