Jones opened an empty hand. The stick thudded on the stone and the darkness took him too.
"A woman here?" Kali's voice cut through the silence. "It has been so long... since I tasted a woman..."
The shadow reached for Sophie.
Death. Kali. It snapped together. No logic, only instinct. A desperate lunge before the end.
"Kali, my wife..." he spoke clearly, each word ringing through the ancient vaults.
The unfinished contract. A summoning formula with no conditions. The shadow froze an inch from Sophie's throat.
"Uncle, no!" Terror flooded his niece's face, but she grasped his plan in the same breath. Her lips trembled. "Kali, my wife..."
"...come to me and take me," they finished together.
The temple exploded with light.
Blazing script raced across the walls. Thousands of lines in languages living and dead. The pact-formula wove itself into an impossible pattern while Jean's mind tore through every line.
This isn't a demonic contract. What are these primordial terms?
The script bore down on the world with all its weight, and cracks went racing through it. The pattern burned clean through reality until it shattered into a thousand shards and fell away beneath his feet.
Jean stood on a field without end, heaped with bodies to the horizon. Smoke crawled over ground pitted with craters, wound around the hulks of siege towers and crushed catapults, and reached toward engines he did not know and did not care to know. The stench of rotting flesh and the reek of burning choked him. Out of the east, in a cloud of dust, an army came on.
Sophie knelt nearby, staring past his shoulder.
"I'LL DEVOUR YOU BOTH!" Thunder out of the sky hammered the dust and smoke to the ground.
Jean turned. Only now did he understand why the plain had seemed impossible. Right up into the thunderheads over him reared a six-armed colossus. At an unthinkable height burned two green suns, the only light in this world but for the fires.
A vast curved blade, fit to cleave mountains, came down on him out of the sky, and Jean did the first thing that came to mind. He whipped up his rapier and turned the blow aside. The shock drove him to one knee and rolled through every bone. Parried it? How was that even possible?
The blade glanced off and sheared away part of the hill to his left.
"Union of bound in blood," he heard his own voice say.
For an instant he stood in the temple again, watching the script as he sealed the new wording. The lines raced faster than he could follow, and any one of them was ready to snap shut like a trap.
"SERVE FOREVER! KILL MY ENEMIES!" The stones around him swam with the heat.
A trident whose point could level a castle came rushing in. Jean sprang aside, scooped up the weightless Sophie, and shot upward. I can do that too?
"You'll have three equals or none."
And again he saw the formula. He worked it swiftly and surely, as he had worked hundreds of other pacts before, and "Eternal servitude to the Mistress of Slaughter" transformed under his will into "mutual partnership of three equals."
"DO YOU TAKE DEATH TO WIFE?!" Was that astonishment, or had he only imagined it?
"I do!"
"PROVE YOURSELF WORTHY!" He nearly went down as the monstrous weight of the colossus's presence vanished all at once.
The nagging drone from the east broke into a savage howl. Jean turned just in time to see a black cloud of arrows flying at him and at the colossus. The monster's great yataghan was already sweeping toward the vanguard of the demon host bearing down on them.
"Cover her."
"I cover a husband."
"We are your new husband!"
The colossus drove a huge chalice into the ground, and its stone shadow covered Sophie from the arrows. Jean set her down behind it and shot upward again.
"DRINK BLOOD! DANCE AND REVEL!"
Rapier levelled, Jean tore into the avalanche. He thrust, he cut, he slipped clear of fangs and horns, and soon his arms turned to lead and his breath began to tear at his chest. A fang laid open his shoulder, a horn grazed his ribs, and still he kept his feet. How long has this been going on? Where do they all come from?
Now and then the temple walls bled through the field, and the script running across them, "Union of passion," "marriage bonds consecrated across millennia." What in the world was this. There was no time to think, only to thrust, to cut, to duck the blows. He had lost all sense of himself when the wave of enemies suddenly gave out and the cold temple floor, strewn with bones, was under him once more. Wholly unharmed, he watched the last words of the pact he had just written gutter out. Sophie murmured in a daze a couple of paces away, surfacing from her dream.
"So be it," they breathed together, sealing the ritual.
From the depths of the darkness a figure took shape. The embodiment of demonic splendor. Jean and Sophie went still in the same instant of terrified awe.
Kali was perfect in her infernal majesty. Her skin was the colour of milk chocolate; every curve of her body commanded the eye and set the blood to boil. Black hair cascaded to her thighs, framing the face for which wars had once flared and continents had been laid waste.
Her eyes burned with the green fire of lust and hunger, banked through a thousand years in chains. Horns curved from her temples like the crown of a forgotten empress, and the tips of her fangs glinted each time her lips parted.
Scraps of dark fabric served less to clothe her than to tease the eye with the promise of forbidden pleasures. But it was not her demonic presence that struck the deepest. It was the voracious, engulfing hunger that radiated from her.
Her beauty was a caged beast. Every movement held a coiled tension ready to snap. Look at her too long and the heart stumbled between the urge to step closer and the instinct to back away.
Her arrival filled the ancient temple with the pressure of a power that had slept in oblivion and now demanded what it was owed.
Kali drew close to Sophie, who had sunk to her knees, and brushed her cheek with a fingertip. The cold that seared Sophie blazed through Jean in the same instant. They were bound now. Forever.
"Forgive me, Sophie..." he breathed, already understanding what the goddess craved, and a tear rolled down his cheek. "I never wanted to cross this line."
"And I was always afraid to admit..." She tried to smile, holding his gaze. "If the goddess is taking my choice away... at least she left me you."