But there was nothing we could do about it; I followed her into a brick-lined conduit that led up to a trapdoor, which we both had to pry at with the shovels to get open. I heard it flop onto the sand and weeds outside, and then Johnny:
“Shit.”
“Considering that your ass is directly in my face, yes. What are we dealing with up there?”
“Uh... can you pass me a shovel?” she said, beginning to climb again; I could see her hand in the bright sunlight, and handed one up. I had to push everything else up through the square opening to get out myself, or I would have gotten tangled, and emerged into light so bright I couldn’t see at all for a minute, just—through slitted lids—a kind of blur hitting something with the shovel, something I couldn’t see.
I scrambled up out of the tomb, letting the trapdoor shut again, and stumbled to help her, still half-blind. More of the allu, the skinless dog-things, more like jackals in the daylight, long-snouted, eyeless, crusted with sand. She whirled and connected, sending one howling, actually airborne. The ground was crawling—rats, scorpions, spiders, snakes, tangled together, many attacking each other. I stood back to back with her, careful not to let our backs touch, lest I get hit with a shovel too. The smaller vermin was too terrified of the lunging, snapping predators to be much harm; I stamped and kicked, clearing a circle.
It was good to have a weapon, get some reach. They screamed and snarled, trying to get inside my swing, but I’d seen that before and was watching for it now. One managed to latch onto the wooden handle, but I got a foot up and kicked it in the chest, dislodging it enough that I could back up and get a clean hit. At least with these you didn’t feel bad about hitting them, hearing them shriek in pain; at least you didn’t feel like you were hitting a human. Johnny blasted a few of them with green fire, sending them scurrying.
When it all seemed to be over, we stood catching our breaths in the low sunlight, reaching at once for our bags and the precious water bottles still left. The corpses of the skinless things had already begun to bubble and melt into the sand, sending runnels of black liquid down the slope. The surviving creatures, wounded and maimed, were slowly retreating for the most part, teeth bared in their skull faces. I looked away.
The sky was filling with tall, liquid-looking, greenish-grey towers, too regular to be clouds.
“Please tell me that’s totally normal,” I said, gesturing with my bottle.
“Wish I could.”
“Hey, we’re the opposite of grave robbers now,” I said. “We left something in there. We’re grave gifters.”
“At least I have an excuse for all the missed calls now.”
“SO, WHAT ARE we looking for now?” I said, looking around at the quiet site; ten yards away, a jawless, bleeding allu sulked under a bush. I shook the shovel at it.
“We have almost everything we need,” she said. “Just the very last part of the spell to go, and I know that’s not here in the compound. The hua-shinoth is basically an amplifier—something that would let us shut the Great Gate. You wouldn’t need it for anything else, not even the big one in Nazca.”
“I thought you said Nazca was... was a magic circle, not a gate.”
“It’s both. Most things are more than one thing. Anyway, without an amplifier, we don’t have the reach. It’s an artifact that contains the concentrated remnants of Their magic, Their darkness, and it’ll act as a megaphone. No, don’t give me that look, I know what a red herring is. This isn’t one. You always use what They are to destroy Them. Evil to destroy evil.”
“I thought good was supposed to destroy evil.”
“Not when there’s more evil in the world,” she said. “Not when it’s got all the power. In a way, we humans are lucky; we happen to live in a universe where there are specific things we can use—circles, colours, words of power, places, idols, life forces—that could help create the universe we want. One where the doors and gates are securely locked. Or have enough bars to keep Them from getting in even when They have the key.”
“And we can do that.”
“Us? I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“We’ve drawn a lot of attention to ourselves trying to find everything; things are probably converging here, knowing that. And