Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

but never for very long. I’ve gotten better at healing over the years, but my back-from-the-dead stuff still needs work. I need to learn more.”
    “Which is why I have taught you, and why I am taking you to the temple now, so you may read the tablets yourself, but you must have the power of immortality within you.”
    “No, really, I haven’t a clue.”
    “I am two hundred and sixty years old, Joshua.”
    “I’ve heard that, but I still can’t help you. You look good though, I mean for two hundred and sixty.”
    At this point Balthasar started to sound desperate. “Joshua, I know that you have power over evil. Biff has told me of you banishing demons in Antioch.”
    “Little ones,” Joshua said modestly.
    “You must have power over death as well or it does me no good.”
    “What I am able to do comes through my father, I didn’t bargain for it.”
    “Joshua, I am preserved by a pact with a demon. If you do not have the powers foretold in the prophecy I will never be free, I will never have peace, I will never have love. Every minute of my life I must have my will focused on controlling the demon. Should my will fail, the destruction would be unlike anything the world has ever seen.”
    “I know how it is. I’m not allowed to know a woman,” Joshua said. “Although it was an angel that told me, not a demon. But still, you know, it’s hard sometimes. I really like your concubines. The other night Pillows was giving me a back rub after a long day of studying, and I started getting this massive—”
    “By the Golden Tenderloin of the Calf!” Balthasar exclaimed, leaping to his feet, his eyes wide with terror. The old man began loading his camel, thrashing around in the darkness like a madman. Joshua was following him, trying to calm him down, fearing he might have a fit any second.
    “What? What?”
    “It is out!” the magus said. “Help me pack up. We must go back. The demon is out.”

    I stood cringing in the dark, waiting for disaster to fall, for mayhem to reign, for pain and pestilence and no good to manifest, then Joy struck a fire stick and lit our lamps. We were alone. The iron door hung open into a very small room, it too lined with iron. The entire room was just big enough to contain a small bed and a chair. Every span of the black iron walls was inlaid with golden symbols: pentagrams and hex symbols and a dozen others I had never seen before. Joy held her lamp close to the wall.
    “These are symbols of containment,” Joy said.
    “I used to hear voices coming from in here.”
    “There was nothing in here when I opened the door. I could see in the second before the lamp blew out.”
    “Then what blew it out?”
    “The wind?”
    “I don’t think so. I felt something brush me as it passed.”
    Just then someone in the girls’ quarters screamed, then a chorus of screams joined in, primal screams of absolute terror and pain. Instantly Joy’s eyes filled with tears. “What have I done?”
    I took her sleeve and dragged her down the passage toward the girls’ quarters, snatching up two heavy lances that were supporting a tapestry as we passed and handing one to her. As we rounded the curves I could see an orange light ahead and soon I could see that it was fire blazing on the stone walls from broken oil lamps. The screaming was reaching a higher pitch, but every few seconds a voice was removed from the chorus, until there was only one. As we approached the beaded doorway into the concubines’ chamber the screaming stopped and a severed human head rolled in front of us. The creature stepped through the curtain, oblivious to the flames that licked the walls around it, its massive body filling the passageway, the reptilian skin on its shoulders and its tall pointed ears grating against the walls and ceiling. In its talonlike hand it held the bloody torso of one of the girls.
    “Hey, kid,” it said, its voice like a sword point dragged across stone, a yellow light coming from behind its dinner-plate-sized cat’s eyes, “it took you long enough.”

    As they rode back to the fortress, Balthasar explained to Joshua about the demon: “His name is Catch, and he is a demon of the twenty-seventh order, a destroyer angel before the fall. As far as I could tell, he was first called up to assist Solomon in building the great temple, but something got out of hand and with the help of a djinn, Solomon was able to send the demon back to hell. I found the seal of Solomon and the