The crimson witch

the kingdom, dark and light stuff as sweet as honey, as smooth as water. Even a whore was brought to him, a wondrous woman with enormous breasts, and he was encouraged to indulge himself to his full extent. Being some time without a woman, Golgoth indulged in the whore several times before dawn. Only then did the nature of this treatment begin to have its effect upon him. He grew weary and fell into heavy sleep. And when he awoke, there was fear in him like a cold stone in his stomach. He had come to realize, whether through his dreams or his waking thoughts or an amalgam of both, that the treatment he was receiving was much the same treatment a condemned man might expect on the evening before his execution.”
        Jake coughed, watched the lightning flash as the storm passed on to the west and the rain began to slow in its fall. “No trappings, please. Just the bare story.”
        Lightning flashed dully.
        Thunder boomed like baby giants laughing.
        The rain was cold and good.
        Kaliglia snorted but went on: “Golgoth was brought before King Lelar that same morning, though the meeting had none of the airs of a royal audience. Golgoth was brought into the royal chamber by three guards who held him at sword point as if he might turn and scamper if they dropped their attention for an instant. Lelar sat in the background with several white-robed officials, much as an observer. Golgoth was tied firmly to two thick ropes, one on each ankle. When he asked what was to happen, he was clouted and told to remain quiet in the presence of Lelar. Then, with little ceremony and no warning, too fast for the poor man to get his wits about him, he was thrust into a circular blue aperture in the wall beside the king's throne.”
        “Thrust into the wall?”
        “Yes.”
        “Is this the portal to my own world that Kell has told me about?”
        “Yes again.”
        “Go on.”
        “Inside the wall, Golgoth was weightless. He seemed not to amount to a single gram as he floated about in the gloom there. And that is just what it was. Impenetrable gloom. Only one spot of light shone, the portal through which he had been shoved. Beyond this, King Lelar and his advisers stood hunched together, peering in at him. Then, just as he was getting a hold on his fear, great gusts of wind clutched at him almost with the sensitivity of fingers, bending around him, molding to him, spinning him away in the gloom. The portal dimmed to a mere spot of light, a pinprick, fainter, fainter, fainter. The rope unraveled and unraveled, his only hold on the real world.
        Kaliglia paused to catch his breath.
        “And?”
        “And then came the smoke ghosts.”
        The harshest part of the storm was gone now, blasting between the towering peaks of the Twin Towers, its black trail still darkening the sky, the faint tint of the setting sun tracing gold behind it.
        “Smoke ghosts?” Jake asked.
        “That's what Golgoth called them. They were creatures composed of smoke. They were bilious and unreal, yet they maintained some mockery of form. They were mists, yet he could feel their hands upon him, more solidly than the eerie hands of the winds, ice hands that drove needles of cold sleep through him, deep into him.
        Jake shivered a chilly ache that was not altogether new. The only other times he had felt it were burned brilliantly into his memory. The first time had been when they had buried his mother. They had taken her to the cemetery in the oblong box and had left her there beneath the earth, left her alone. They had come back to the skeleton house, come back to the rooms like hollowed out ice cubes where her presence had held the fire that burned no longer. He had been taken up the long set of winding stairs to the bathroom. They had cajoled him into showering-his aunts had -and had shoe-horned him into his pajamas. But on the way to the bedroom, he had stepped on something cold. He had looked down, and he had seen one of his mother's hair pins still twined through with a strand of blond hair. A shiver ran through him then, flooded into a scream that lasted an hour until the doctor could get there and give him a sedative. That first time, that first cold ache was a knife plunge through his bone marrow, a thing he would always remember. The second time had been when he had stepped through the dimensions and found himself in this world-and had realized that the old