Asmodeus and the Wicked Wizard of the East

By Fred Pruitt

Asmodeus J-for John Jones is Summoned by Nevianne the Witch to combat the evil Palegos, who's oppressing the countryside. She's expecting someone nine feet tall, with fangs, and she gets him. He not only doesn't believe in magic, he suppresses its use for a mile in any direction. There's no way she can send him back. He's capable of slipping between reality streams, but he's far away he can't find his way back.

How far away? Nevianne and her coven live in the Really Later Roman Empire. There was no battle at the Milvian Gate, no "In Hoc Signo Vinces." Emperor Julian reigned for thirty two years, not three, and he declared parity among religions, establishing a Ministry of Religion, to enforce it. Nevy and her coven are pagans. Athaulf the Visigoth king wasn't murdered in his bath. He reigned with Galla Placidia as Emperor Athaulf I. There was also an Emperor Genseric. There's a synagogue in Flumen Martii, the capital of Agus, which covers Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and part of New York. Asmodeus learns magic from the Archbishop of the Church of Saint Simon Magus.

Under Roman rule North America was settled around 1000 A.D. The population of Agus is about a third native, a third Saxon (and Celtic Briton and some Dane), and a third Latin. The official language is Latin. I don't mention it in the text, but there's also an official Latin Academy and an official Latin language, so there's no official French or Italian or Romanian; there are just different accents. The natives in Nevy's area speak Lenape, and there are Iroquois living to the north. The Susquahannocks aren't extinct. Nor are passenger pigeons.

Nevianne and Asmodeus fall for each other immediately, and hard. She first saw him as her future husband in her first vision when she was nine. Demons can be summoned only by maidens. Once they complete the task, the maiden is theirs forever. Nevy expected to be a human sacrifice to the demon. She and Asmodeus get to mess around a lot, but she has to remain a maiden at least until the wizard is vanquished.

As soon as Asmodeus (he prefers Jack) is Summoned, Palegos sends Nannakussi, his Lenape minion, and his men to kill the entire coven. Blaeda, Nevy's best friend and a member of the coven, who's a Seeress, warns them. Jack constructs an IED from the witches' gunpowder and flour, with rocks for shrapnel, and kills all of Nannakussi's men, burning Nevy's house down in the process. He conks Nannakussi in the head with a chunk of cord wood, defeating him in personal combat. Nannakussi and his wife and five-year-old daughter become Jack's slaves by law. They were Palegos' slaves before.

Besides the witches and the archbishop, there are flying monkeys, monkey-faced bears, a precocious five-year-old witch, a fire-farting imp, and a fight to the death between Asmodeus and a real demon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fred Pruitt
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005553197

Fred Pruitt

Fred Pruitt is somebody's grampaw. He's retired from both the Army and from a second career. He has lived in many, though not all, parts of the world. He read Robert Heinlein from about the time he was twelve, starting with his boys' books, through Stranger in a Strange Land. He has read The Virginian three times, and enjoys Raphael Sabatini. He's enjoying retirement by writing his own books about people he's known, putting them in situations they were never in in real life.

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Asmodeus and the Wicked Wizard of the East

Copyright 2020 Fred Pruitt

Published by Fred Pruitt at Smashwords

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#Chapter 1: Summoned

#Chapter 2: Nevy

#Chapter 3: The Village of Sandy Isle

#Chapter 4: The Sachem Nannakussi

#Chapter 5: The Fiery Wrath of Asmodeus

#Chapter 6: The Beach Bums

#Chapter 7: The Isle of Assateague

#Chapter 8: In the Longhouse of Nannakussi

#Chapter 9: Apollonia Minor

#Chapter 10: Flumen Martii

#Chapter 11: The Theory of Magic

#Chapter 12: The Archbishop’s Wife

#Chapter 13: Great Balls of Fire

#Chapter 14: Nevianne versus the Evil Imp of Vegesela

#Chapter 15: Kidnapped!

#Chapter 16: Asmodeus and the Flying Monkeys

#Chapter 17: Bird Meets Bear on Bear Mountain

#Chapter 18: Along the Great River

#Chapter 19: A Deer for Tekoni

#Chapter 20: The Search for Eggs and Castra Taurorum

#Chapter 21: Stalking the Wicked Wizard of the East

#Chapter 22: The Crowd at the Wizard’s House

#Chapter 23: Stalking Castra Taurorum

#Chapter 24: The Greater Evil

#Chapter 25: Attack of the Flying Lizards

#Chapter 26: The Demon Within Comes Out

#Chapter 27: Nevy at Home

Chapter 1: Summoned

It was raining outside. It does that periodically in coastal Delaware, often at night. This one was a doozy, taking it to extremes. It was coming down in buckets, tubs, and sometimes troughs. I usually don’t mind a little rain now and then. It’s good for the farmers, and I have a soft spot for farmers. My first job, at thirteen, was on a farm, and my first (unconsummated) love was the farmer’s daughter. She was one of my first (unconsummated) loves, anyway. There was also Carol Dawson, but she was an entirely different story. Pleasant memories both of them!

Rather than cook for myself, on the way home I stopped at The Cove, in Bayside. It’s kind of on the tony side, but I was passing by and I felt like having a beer. The Cove is probably your typical golf club watering hole. There’s a bar in the middle, tables around it, and an undersized dance floor with a stage for a band that’s always nose-bleed loud. It’s clean and well-lit, and the burgers aren’t bad. I didn’t feel like fast food or pizza, there was no band tonight, so a burger was top of the list.

I’d had a long Sunday at the shop. It was Senior Week. All the kids who had just graduated from high school swarmed to Ocean City, Maryland, looking for fun and finding each other. Fenwick Island is like a dwindling extension of Ocean City, driving north on Coastal Highway. You pass 146th Street and the street name logic changes. There’s no 147th Street. You barely notice leaving Maryland and entering Delaware until you don’t get socked for sales tax. I tell people that I sell sea shells by the seashore, which actually covered my shop pretty accurately. I also sold bathing suits and tee shirts, flip flops and caps, sun glasses, sun block and souvenirs, that kind of stuff. I’d never get rich, but I only had to work from April Fools’ Day through the end of September. The rest of the time I could be a beach bum if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I much preferred traveling, though in my own way. The tourist trade was plentiful enough to allow me to do that fairly comfortably. My horizons were broader than the usual horizons.

I had my burger and beer, sitting at one of the tables. A friend of mine, Sarah O’Donnell, was at the bar holding court. She also sold sea shells by the seashore, just further down the highway and closer to the Boardwalk. For every customer I got she had three or four. She had a house in Bayside with the water on one side and the golf course on the other, which wasn’t cheap. She could afford it easily. She had a comparable place in Florida. She was about forty, blondish, and fairly good-looking overall. She was tanned and toned, and she was often seen on a tennis court. Her cleavage and her long legs were her very best feature and she liked showing them off. Bar stools are made for that sort of thing.

Sarah liked men a lot and she didn’t keep it a secret. She was pretty frank about it, in fact. She favored paunchy and balding and filthy rich, with lots of investment suggestions. She wasn’t firm on the paunchy and balding part. She was in good form that night; a couple of those fellows were thinking seriously of fighting each other for her attention. It would have made a good show.

I watched it all from a distance, mildly interested but not involved. Not my circus, not my monkeys. I was filthy enough for Sarah, but not rich enough. Nor was she my type. I prefer my women a little less calculating.

I had a second beer to unwind a little. I’d had a couple of shoplifters that day, a domestic altercation, and three screaming children; I didn’t sell ice cream and the brats wanted it, demanded it, required it, immediately, on the spot, and at that very moment. Two of them took it to the lay-on-the-floor-kicking-the-feet level. It was pretty much a typical twelve hour work day in a tourist town. I was looking forward to getting home, having a shower, and hitting my bed, to do it all again the next day so I could make another trip to the bank. I really liked making trips to the bank.

My waitress was a pretty, cheerful slip of a girl with maroon hair, or maybe it was vermilion, in an unbecoming but trendy cut. She was half my size, which would have put her around ninety or a hundred pounds. She looked like she was about half my age, which would have made her fifteen. She had to be at least three years older than that to work in a place where they sold liquor, but she didn’t look it. Her name tag said she was Wilma, which she pronounced Vilma in an East European accent. She pushed dessert like she got a commission on it, so I had a piece of pie and coffee. The pie was good, the coffee a little weak. I made sure to leave her a nice tip when I left. Cute always gets me.

Outside it was still raining enthusiastically. There was a stiff breeze blowing the rain sideways every now and then. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt, tourist town garb. They absorbed water like sponges. I was soggy by the time I finally made it the thirty feet to the car. I dropped my phone and keys into a puddle, naturally, as I was trying to unlock the door with rain splashing into the back of my head. I bent over to pick them up.

That was when I was Summoned.

* * *

Approximately thirty years ago a handsome young man named John Jones met a pretty young woman named Mary Smith. Honest to God, that was what they were named. They fell in love, or maybe it was just lust. They married in haste, and six months later they had a child. That was me. Shortly after that Johnny and Mary repented at leisure and divorced. My biofather ran off to find himself, mainly because Mary was a self-centered weirdo hippy chick who drove the people around her nuts. He was a different kind of self-centered weirdo hippy guy, at least so they told me. He required intensive self-medication. I was raised, if you could call it that, in rural Delaware by a single mom who moved from dramatic crisis to dramatic crisis. Her last crisis was an early but undramatic heart attack that came to her one night while I was off in the Army in Afghanistan.

My Mom had gone through phase after phase in a never-ending quest to be Different. One week she was big on fairies and angels. The next she was an astrologer. She wanted to discover the Secrets of the Pyramids, but never went to actually look at them; she did read a book by Erich von Dänikin. She started writing a book featuring knights and damsels but she dropped it because she didn’t actually know anything about the fourteenth century, horses, or sword fighting. She tried Theosophy, which has some goofy names and epochs to keep straight. Then she tried to be a Rosicrucian. I’m actually not sure how that worked out, since I don’t know what a Rosicrucian is. When I was born she was going through her occult phase. That was how I came to be named Asmodeus John Jones.

It was kind of a Boy Named Sue situation for me. I got into a lot of fist fights growing up, despite my retiring, rather bookish nature. Just try being named after a demon sometime. Unless you can actually breathe fire (I learned how; it’s not that hard but it’s dangerous) or you have bat wings or something like that, the other kids will pick on you. I usually went by my middle name, which sounded like an alias or a Martian Manhunter. Between being Asmodeus Jones or Johnny Jones it’s a tossup. I did hear a lot of Little Johnny Jones jokes.

The fights tapered off as I grew older and more mature. Approaching my full growth might have had something to do with it. I’m six feet four and I go to the gym every other day to keep in shape. Unless it was a mob or a burglary, I didn’t have to call the police very often. Actually, I hadn’t had to call them at all to date; who the hell burgles tee shirts anyway? We seldom see mobs on Fenwick Island. I’m not sure we’ve ever had one.

The other thing I have, besides the name of a demon, is an awareness of the texture of Reality. I’m sure I’m not the only person who does, but I know there aren’t that many of us; otherwise we’d be tripping over each other.

Current thinking in the world of mathematics and physics is that reality is eight dimensional, of which we see three dimensions. The idea of The Creature from the Ninth Dimension is bunkum. The equivalent Creature from the First Dimension would be The Creature from Length.

My current thinking on the subject, without actually being smart enough to develop the math to back it up, is that reality is sixty four dimensional or more. We’re physically aware of four: Length, width, depth, and mass. I know. Mass isn’t strictly a dimension, but try ignoring it when you’re building something. Velocity might be too. It’s part of the structure of reality. That would mean we live in a five-dimensional world, but when you think on the subject at all, direction of velocity (what we call movement) makes six, seven, and eight – the old x, y, and z coordinates – how fast you’re going plus those other three silly things pilots have to worry about. That makes eight easily observable dimensions. All we have to do is look around and define them. So, yeah. It’s that much of an eight dimensional world.

Then there’s time, where it gets really interesting. We’ve been thinking of time as the fourth dimension, but it has its own subset. It’s made up of past, present, and future, plus duration. Einstein’s math says that all of time exists at the the same time, just like all of space does. Duration would be what ties past, present, and future together. So that’s at least twelve dimensions, none of them very remarkable, all easy to document.

There’s also direction to time, just like the physical dimensions. That adds another four. We expect time to go from past to future, one second at a time, but it’s more complicated than that. Hang a 180 and you’re traveling backward in time. That’s pretty obvious, even if it does make for an unusual accomplishment. Travel backward in time one second at a time and you’re standing still. You’d have to travel at least two seconds per second to get anywhere… anywhen. It does happen. Traveling through time actually takes jumps, not a steady two seconds per second pace, but we do it. Most of us have had incidents of dejà vu.

It’s actually more complicated than than just turning around and hopping; think of it as hanging an 1800, which is finer grained than a 180, but still small enough to comprehend. 18,000 would be better, but still understating by lots of zeroes. Nor is it a two-dimensional trip, just forward and backward. There are x, y, and z axes, plus d for distance. That adds up to the final four of a verifiable sixteen dimensions. I’m pretty sure there are many, many more beyond those, but they’re also beyond my comprehension, things like gravity, that we kind of know about, and other things we don’t have a handle on yet, like space warpage; or things we’ve never even considered, like cosmic moods or intergalactic digestion, plus interdimensional metadata to keep it all straight. Just inertia’s probably good for at least another four.

Hanging an 1800 would be pretty hard for most people. You have to have the knack. But what if you hung a 1200? Or a 2700? Or a 2714.62? You’d be off on an entirely different temporal tangent, barging into an alternate reality. Think of the Big Bang Theory, with a constantly expanding physical universe. Time started at the same moment, and it’s expanding too, second by second.

Strangely enough, the proof of this little bit of speculation is in the pudding. Most of us have had occasions where we’ve encountered things that were true last week but aren’t, or aren’t quite, this week – the spelling of a word, an address, the name of a public figure, that sort of thing. Think of going from Rutherford B. Hayes to Rutherford C. Hayes, or from Louisiana to Louisianna. Either we’re having memory glitches or we’ve slipped into an alternate reality. Tack a handful of zeros onto the end of the 3600 temporal degrees we were looking at and we’re closer to the way it actually works. The idea in theory is that alternate universes are just a Planck’s Length apart. Planck’s Length is one ten to the thirty fifth of a meter — ten followed by thirty five zeroes — and it’s considered the smallest possible length above nothing at all. There’s no such thing as a half Planck’s Length.

My experience says that reality streams are often less than a Planck’s Unit apart in some places, that they actually overlap, which is how most of us end up someplace that’s the same, but different in some teeny-tiny aspect. Or not different locally. If the split is in response to something that happened a couple galaxies over, how will we ever notice? There’s an awful lot of galaxies out there, each with an awful lot of stars.

So what’s all this got to do with me? I’ve got the mental bump to tell when that happens. I can mentally hear the change. Once I figured what it was, I also figured how to get back to the reality stream I had come from – or how to explore further afield. Going from one stream to another is kind of like a flinch; it bumps you over a few Planck’s Lengths to the right or left or up or down. Once I learned to flinch, I learned how to aim, using the trusty x, y, z, and d idea. There’s also -x, -y, -z, and -d. Or you could mix and match, like -x, +y, +z, -d, which would be back in time, north of your timeline, left declination, and d number of seconds into the past, or something like that; the terminology doesn’t really fit what’s actually going on and I’m not a mathematician. That’s the best I can explain it.

That was about what happened to me there in The Cove’s parking lot in the driving rain. X was zero, d was zero. Y and z both had a dizzying number of digits to them. I’d never had an external force applied to me to slip reality streams. It was a new experience.

I really, really didn’t like it.

Chapter 2: Nevianne

The wet asphalt of the parking lot disappeared, to be replaced by dusty, rustic-looking, gray plank flooring. The chill rain was gone, to be replaced by warmth halfheartedly cast by a gray stone fireplace. There were distinct barnyard odors: Cows, horses, chickens, and a few other animals that I couldn’t quite identify by sense of poop smell. They still had outdoor plumbing in these parts. I found myself standing in the middle of a carefully-inscribed red pentagram, surrounded by three concentric nine-foot circles. There were Mystical Symbols in each of the five open spaces. It was a fairly conventional Devil’s Trap, though the symbols were different from ones I’d ever seen before. Outside there was thunder, contributing to the spooky atmosphere.

I was staring at a very scared-looking naked blonde. She was a real beauty, definitely worth staring at, even if that wasn’t the reason I was staring. She was maybe twenty at the outside, somewhere on the slim side of the line between slim and skinny. She had a chest that could compete favorably with Sarah O’Donnell’s, and without the push up bra. There were a half dozen women seated cross-legged on the floor around the wall, none of them naked. They looked scared too. Maybe horrified is a better description.

The babe stood and raised her hands, crooking her fingers at me in the prescribed manner. Asmodeus, King of Demons, Lord of Lust, Prince of Wrath, Wielder of the Bloody Mace, Ic binden thee tæ mine villen! she said, or maybe chanted, in a soprano voice that sounded like it wanted to squeak. The language was a heavily and peculiarly accented kind-of English, with German overtones. I could understand it, but just barely, after thinking on what the sounds could be ungarbled into.

Like I say, I’d been Summoned, with a capital S. And I didn’t believe in magic, never had. My mother had inoculated me against it when she signed my birth certificate. Someone waving his hands and hollering might work in politics, but it’s not going to make it rain. If you shoot lightning from your fingers, they’ll scorch. Ask any electric welding torch.

My phone hadn’t come with me, but it didn’t look like I’d be needing it. Same with my keys. I stood up and stomped out of the pentagram, where I was supposed to be magically confined. The cutie pie stepped back quickly, trying to jump out of her creamy skin in the process. You’ve got the wrong Asmodeus, I told her. I’m not a demon. Sorry.

It was like I’d let the air out of the room.

Thou’rt not? she asked in a teeny tiny voice. The question mark was audible. Not sounded like naught. The tiny voice sounded somehow both disbelieving and relieved and it got tinier from the start of her two and a half word statement to the end.

Nope. Sorry, I reassured her. What’s going on, that you need the services of a demon? And how’d you happen to grab me, in particular?

She suddenly became aware that she was naked as an egg, probably because I was so obviously noticing parts of her here and there. They were all worth noticing, and it was hard to be subtle about my ogling. It wasn’t that she was wiggling and simpering and looking sexy; quite the opposite, in fact. I confined myself to looking at only the pretty parts. She was just pretty from head to toe, inclusive.

To my disappointment, one of the other women handed her a thin dress that she shrugged into, tying a woven belt around her waist. The dress reached all the way from her pale, elegant neck to her bare, slightly dirty feet, obscuring all the other cute parts. I stifled the urge to tell her to take it back off.

Ic… Ic callèd upon ye demon, she explained, which told me nothing. Ic bœn en witch.

I was definitely a large number of digits away from where I’d started. I guessed that, I said, sorting through the distorted vowels and accents. Past tense accents were on the last syllable: Called was pronounced call-èd. The Ic sounded like æc, with the æ pronounced ay, as in eye and the c barely there, almost a g. The y in ye was more of a th than a y, not like in the but almost to the th in thorn, which is actually what that letter (Þ) is called. There was the hint of a breathy h before the witch. Language has always been kind of a hobby of mine because I like to travel. I speak parts of a dozen or so, all of them really badly. I was trying to communicate with some sort of Saxon or Olde English.

I’d been to lots of reality lines, even to different times, in the past or the future (don’t go there, unless you need new teeth.) I’d never been to one where people really, seriously believed in witchcraft, at least not past about the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and I didn’t go there often either.

How I got here is my question, I told the sweetie bird. I don’t want to go getting tugged all over the multiverse every time someone gets the urge to call my name.

Thy nahme ist Asmodeus? she asked, coming out in goosebumps and visibly shivering.

Asmodeus J. Jones, at your service, I introduced myself gallantly. You can call me Jack. And you are…?

Nevianne of Sandy Isle. That would be Fenwick Island in my own reality stream, I guessed, probably including Ocean City. Fenwick happens to be very sandy, so that’s an adequate name, even though not very imaginative. I was still in the same place, sort of, that I had been. You don’t move around in space when you flinch unless you walk. The lady’s speech was Anglo-Saxon, but her name sounded more Celtic.

Pleased to meet you, Nevianne, I told her, ignoring our audience. So tell me, how did I get here? Usually I go places under my own power.

Ye spell wæs… It’st very complicætèd.

And you’re thinking you screwed some part of it up? I suggested helpfully.

She hadn’t heard the expression before, but she guessed its meaning quickly enough. Aye. Ic musst hæbbe.

I didn’t tell her what I thought she was full of, since we’d just met. She might not have a sense of humor. Lots of people are like that, especially the ones who try to summon demons and expect to control them. That still left the question of how I got there. Her magical opinions probably wouldn’t be able to clarify it in terms that I’d be able to understand or believe.

I tried mentally to see where I was. Just looking around, I could see there was a dizzying number of digits leading into the mists from whence I’d been tugged. Nothing at all looked familiar. I didn’t even know from which direction I’d come. If you think of Reality as a sixteen dimensional