by Unknown
A wide grin broke across Aebos’s face. “My lady,” he said, “we could have saved significant anguish if you had led with the bit about us getting to keep the treasure. We will agree to your terms.”
“As if the two of you reprobates deserve any riches beyond your lives,” snapped Epostian Creeg. “My service to the Lady Iranez has convinced me to trust the guidance of the Orb, but what it sees in you, I cannot tell. I do not believe that the two of you can be trusted.”
“Nor, I confess, do I,” said Iranez, her voice tinged with a hint of regret soon erased by a wan smile. “To ensure that our needs are met, Korm and Aebos will be accompanied by my most trusted agent, Epostian Creeg.”
The alchemist’s face turned as white as his fine leather suit.
Chapter Three: Beyond the Demon Lens
For a long moment Korm Calladan felt only a pleasant warmth. Gone were the fears of starvation, the thrill of combat in the cramped underdeck of the Queen’s Lament, the suspicion of the Lady Iranez and her imposing crew. He knew his cyclops companion Aebos and the preening alchemist Epostian Creeg were somewhere ahead, for they had preceded him through the curved glass lens at the heart of the Relentless, but in the soothing calm he saw only a featureless white haze.
After the rigors of the past weeks, Korm wanted more than anything to linger in this peaceful no-man’s land, but his legs seemed determined to carry him forward despite the wishes of his overworked mind. He counted the steps. Upon the sixth, the haze vanished abruptly, and Korm found himself near the edge of a jagged bluff of rigid red stone, his long black hair and considerable mustache whipped by a stark, ill-smelling wind. A thin white outline in the air behind him marked the way back to safety on the other side of the lens. A cackle of ominous thunder ripped through the inky black clouds cloaking the turbid skies above, shaking the ridge.
“I knew it would be just like this,” he said with a grimace, drawing his slender sword. His companions stood just beyond the reach of his voice in the whipping wind, surveying the land beyond the cliff’s edge. He buttoned his open shirt with his right hand as he approached them.
“What a delightful little world we’ve found,” he said as he reached the rocky ledge, almost yelling over the howling wind. Aebos looked back over his shoulder and smiled at his friend’s arrival.
“Don’t let the club fool you—Aebos is a lot smarter than he looks.”
“Perhaps not so little,” the cyclops shouted in response. He gestured toward a vast expanse of land that spread from the mountain below into a wide plain spotted with violet pools and copses of feeble, dun-colored trees. Jagged mountains hung like curtains in a ring around the arid flatland. The roiling black clouds above cast everything in a pallid gloom, as if the whole of the demon’s realm stood poised at the moment just before the breaking of a terrible storm.
Creeg pointed to a distant glow, perhaps a dozen miles away beyond a wide swath of sickly woods. “Look there, in the distance,” he said. “I think something is burning down there!”
The alchemist removed a large rucksack from his shoulders, placed it upon the ground, and rummaged through its contents, finally producing an elegant spyglass. He held the device to his right eye and glanced at the vista for a moment before furrowing his brow in frustration. “It’s definitely a fire,” he said, “but I can’t make out much detail from here. I think it’s some kind of building.”
“Let me have a look,” said Aebos, snatching the glass from Creeg without waiting for the dandy’s permission. The alchemist sneered. Aebos smiled right back at him, pointing to the center of his forehead. “I’ve got an eye for this sort of work.”
Without aid of magnification, Korm could just make out the bright spot beyond the woods that had captured Creeg’s attention. Aebos glared through the alchemist’s scope and narrated what he saw.
“It’s definitely a structure,” he said. “Looks like some sort of mansion, like you might find in Andoran or Taldor. Human construction. Well made, too, but it’ll be totally consumed within the hour.” The cyclops frowned. “Too bad.”
“There are ruins not too far from the house,” he continued. “Broken stone walls, columns… There are people down there! Hmmmm. No. None of them are moving. Statues. Lots of statues. It seems ancient. Must be the remains of some kind of garden. Looks like the whole place is abandoned.”
“Scan the rest of the land down there,” Creeg ordered. “See if you can make out any other settlements.”
Aebos brought the spyglass across the landscape in a wide, slow arc before shaking his head and handing the implement back to the alchemist. “I see nothing else but pools and trees.”
“Then we will set off toward the garden and the burning building,” said Creeg. “Juval must be found there, and there is no time to waste.” He shouldered his pack and began walking away, seeking a path down from their lofty perch.
“Just wait a second, chef,” countered Korm. He pointed in the direction of the distant glow with his saber, letting his spirit rise slightly with the flinch of the pompous alchemist. “How do we know Juval is down there? That’s miles away, and we haven’t the proper equipment to climb down a sheer mountain. Why would the demon put the entrance to its lair so far away? And how do you fit twenty miles of hellscape inside a glass lens the size of a giant’s shield, anyway?”
“I work in chemicals, Calladan,” said Creeg. “Not planar physics. Even I don’t fully understand how all of this works. But I do understand that Juval has placed the entire kingdom of Nex in danger, and that said danger will not be resolved here on this ledge. We’ve a long walk ahead of us, and we best start off soon. It looks like more than a day’s march to the garden, and I don’t relish sleeping in this place any more than I have to.”
As he turned with a flourish, Creeg slipped on a bit of scree and fell to one knee with a curse. Why the Lady Iranez had chosen this overconfident glorified cook as their companion in this treacherous land made little sense to Korm, but if she wished to risk her trusted agent in this task, it was her own coin to spend. He doubted the alchemist would survive the journey to the foot of the mountain, let alone make it back to the other side of the lens after making a deal with a demon.
Aebos bent down to collect the bag of Iranez’s treasure that lay at his feet, threw an awkward grin at Korm, and set off along the alchemist’s trail. Korm sheathed his sword and set out after them, eyeing the linen sack as it bounced upon the cyclops’s back with each of the creature’s long strides. There was a fortune in there. Surely the demon wouldn’t need all of it. Even a handful from the sack would set him and Aebos up for months in Quantium, if not pay their way to any port on the Inner Sea. But in order to spend their reward they’d have to bargain with Juval. And they would have to survive.
∗ ∗ ∗
Six hours later the trio had reached only halfway down the mountain. Although no sun had been visible in the sky since their arrival, the whole of the demon’s world had become progressively darker as they made their way down the rugged terrain, and in the last hour all three of them had slipped and slid within inches of unseen dropoffs and unexpected ravines. Epostian Creeg’s fine white leather suit bore jagged tears and stains from shoulders to shins from the coarse red dust that covered the mountain. Korm’s left knee still bled from a fall that had shredded the leg of his breeches, and the alchemist’s salve had done little to stop the dull pain. The persistent fire of the burning mansion, still visible just above the treeline of the nearing forest, glowed more brightly in the growing gloom, but did little to light their increasingly dangerous path. All of them suspected that a fatal tragedy lay just ahead.
“All right,” Korm said, throwing up his hands. “I think we’ve got to call it a night and rest here. Any more climbing in this darkness is likely to kill us.”
Aebos frowned—his vision far surpassed that of a human in the dark—but Epostain Creeg’s dust-covered face shone a wave of relief.
“Agreed!” the alchemist said cheerfully
, plopping himself down on a low boulder set against a jagged wall of rock twice the height of Aebos. “This vantage should prove easily defensible for the evening. I shall prepare us a meal, for all of this climbing has aroused a demonic hunger in my guts.”
At the mention of food, Aebos turned away from their makeshift trail and let out a contented sigh. “That is the wisest thing you have uttered since we arrived,” he said. “What provender shall you provide from your satchel?”
Creeg smiled reflexively, his eyebrows high with surprise. “It is nice to be appreciated,” he said, struggling to free his arms from the straps of his oversized rucksack. He set the bag on the ground beside him and withdrew a generous metal pot with an engraved lid. This he uncapped, setting the lid beside him on his rocky seat. He placed the pot between his legs. “Our options are somewhat limited under the present conditions,” he said, his face a mask of genuine regret. “Before we ventured through the lens I returned to the galley and scavenged some mashed tubers that I’d set aside for dinner. There are cubes of hippogriff within, but I’m afraid the lady Iranez enjoyed the tenderloin the day before yesterday, and all that remains are the lesser shoulder cuts.”
Aebos sat himelf upon the ground opposite the pot. “I am sure we will manage,” he said, peering into the stew. “Shall we light a fire?”
“We don’t need to,” Creeg replied. He reached into his bag and retrieved a slender glass tube filled with bright blue liquid. “A little something I cooked up before setting out from Quantium.” With an eager grin he unstoppered the tube and flicked his wrist three times. Three dashes of sapphire splashed into the pot, which immediately issued a small cloud of steam. Korm felt steady heat from within the pot as he sat down next to Aebos. Satisfied, Epostian Creeg re-capped his glass tube and placed it into the bag, from which he withdrew a long metal spoon. This he jabbed into the pot, stirring the slurry with enthusiasm.
After a few moments of slience, Korm spoke up. “So what do we know about this demon?”
Creeg looked up from the stew. “We know that it’s formless in nature. When Nex trapped the demons within his ships he stripped them utterly of their physical forms. They exist now only as a disembodied presence. After a while the demons learned to possess mortals who came into their realms. Over the centuries, Juval has taken hundreds of forms by possession. It shoves aside the consciousness of a body it wants and wears it as long as it wishes. Because Juval is immortal, its fascination with a given body tends to outlast the lives of its physical forms, but this is no problem because it can always claim another.”
As he spoke he drew a small glass cylinder from the bag. Korm recognized the familiar gold flakes—Creeg’s signature flavor—from breakfast. The alchemist unscrewed the top of the canister and dumped a generous clump of the stuff into the pot and stirred. After a few moments, Creeg sniffed the stew with an expert nose, but even Korm could tell it was ready to eat. His mouth began to water. His stomach tightened. He swore to himself he would enjoy the meal, no matter what.
Creeg fished three wooden bowls and three short metal spoons from his bag, filled the bowls one at a time, and handed them to Korm and Aebos before tending to himself. The cyclops ignored his spoon and tipped the entire bowl up to his thin lips, practically gurgling the stuff.
“If the demon doesn’t want Iranez’s treasure, how do we get it to return wind to the seas?” Korm asked, eyeing the beige mess slopped into his bowl. The hippogriff chunks looked like squalid islands in a sea of sludge. Only Creeg’s golden flakes brought a touch of class to the dish, and Korm was quite sure he’d had enough of those. “Can we kill it?”
Creeg chewed a bit of stubborn meat before replying. “I doubt very seriously that either of you is capable of such a feat,” he said, leaving unsaid whether he thought himself capable of the deed. “And besides, slaying its host body won’t do the trick, because Juval can simply reassume its formless nature, in which it is even more difficult to defeat.”
“Anything can be defeated,” said Aebos, scraping remnants of sauce and mush into his tiny spoon. “You’ve just got to punch it hard enough.”
“You cannot punch what is not there,” said Creeg, wiping his bowl clean with a fine linen cloth. “I’m afraid the best way to defeat Juval is to try to best it with words. The Lady Iranez—or rather, her miraculous Orb—seems to think the two of you capable of the job. It’s a testament to your glibness that you have survived this long, so I suppose all hope is not yet lost.”
Korm scooped a spoon of stew to his mouth and was surprised to find it delicious. Perhaps he could put the Queen’s Lament behind him and learn to enjoy food again after all. As he slowly maneuvered his spoon from meat island to meat island, Korm looked out over the horizon to the valley below. Darkness hid the dismal trees and rank puddles, but the flickering light of the burning building at the center of Juval’s world drew his attention like a magnet.
“Up there, on the ledge, Aebos said that the house on fire down in the valley would burn itself out within the hour. I can see it myself now that we’re closer, and it’s definitely still burning. How is that possible?”
Creeg, having finished with dinner, now stood up from the boulder, his rolled sleeping pad tucked under his left arm. He circled Korm and Aebos in a survey of their camp, looking for a bit of flat earth on the jagged mountain ground. “Juval controls everything around us, from the rocks on this mountain to the chill of the air to the sickly grass below our feet. If the building keeps burning, it is because Juval wishes it to be so. We’re sitting on a mountain now because Juval wanted a mountain here. We have to risk a plummeting death as we descend because that’s the way Juval wanted it. No doubt the demon considers the grueling march a fitting expression of its power over visitors.”
Aebos stirred his spoon in the tiny bowl cupped in his hand. “So if Juval controls what this place looks like, what else does it control? Could the demon fold forest and flatland to draw us closer to its lair? What if Juval discovers that we are here?”
Epostian Creeg snorted. “I assume that Juval knew we were here the very moment that we entered its realm.”
The alchemist flicked his wrists and unfurled his sleeping pad with a resolute snap.
Chapter Four: Across the Plain of Pools
Korm woke from fitful dreams at the touch of Aebos’s massive hand upon his shoulder, shaking him gently. “It’s been four hours,” the cyclops said softly. “It’s your turn to stand watch. A good thing, too. I just caught myself dozing off.”
Korm rubbed sleep from his eyes and surveyed his surroundings. Across the small expanse of flat ledge on which they’d camped the alchemist Epostian Creeg lay upon his fine bedroll, snoring softly. Beyond Creeg the mountain fell away into an inky darkness that filled the goblet of the valley, pierced only by the distant glow of the burning building at the center of Juval’s realm. Everything here looked exactly as it had when Korm had finally fallen asleep, and if not for his friend’s testimony he would have sworn less than an hour had passed. He certainly didn’t feel well rested.
As Korm roused himself, Aebos sat beside him and unfurled his sleeping pad. He looked to the roiling skies. “I’ve seen a swarm of shadowy avian creatures pass overhead three times since you and Creeg went to sleep. I couldn’t tell if they were the same creatures or different flocks. As you scan the mountain for danger, don’t forget to look up.”
Korm nodded, casting a casual glance to the sky. Far above, the clouds roiled without sound, but he saw no sign of the creatures. In a way, he almost looked forward to encountering them. If Aebos’s bird-things had been circling for a meal, he’d find out soon enough. And that, in a way, brought comfort. He knew how to fight. That was the same no matter the circumstances. A sword in the hand brought a sense of certainty and control, if nothing else. If he could maintain control, they would stay alive. Deal with the demon. Get back to the ship and the safety of land.
If he did it right, they’d also be rich.
“I’ll
watch out for your birds, but my biggest concern is facing off against the demon with Creeg at our side,” Korm said quietly, his eyes on the sleeping form of the alchemist on the other side of their camp. “If Iranez thought he could have handled Juval alone, she would have sent him alone. She could even put dozens of guards at his back, and yet she didn’t trust him to get the job done. You saw how puffed up and angry he got at breakfast. He’s going to say something that’ll get us killed, I can feel it.”
“He is an exceptional cook,” Aebos offered.
“Perhaps the lady tires of his food, and has sent him here to get rid of him?”
Aebos chuckled. “Too elaborate. Surely she could just have him thrown overboard. It’s Iranez I’m worried about. When this is all over, and we return with the treasure, who’s to say that she’ll simply let us accompany her back to Quantium? She could just as easily have us killed.”
Korm pursed his lips and exhaled a slow blast of air, as if deflating. “That’s tomorrow,” he said. “In order to solve tomorrow’s problem, we’ve got to make it through today.”
Aebos smiled. He pulled his woolen covers over his shoulders, closed his heavy eyelid, and lay still. He began to snore before Korm had finished belting on his sword.
Korm circled the camp with soft steps, casting his eyes into the darkness in search of lurking danger. Finding nothing, he heaved himself upon the boulder near Epostian Creeg and did his best to let his mind wander while at the same time keeping a vigilant eye on the mountain—and the sky. His thoughts turned to the chilling tales he’d heard of demons from pilgrims riding the rivers of his youth, fleeing the crusade lands of the north where a rift in reality allowed the fiends access to the world. They spoke of vile appetites and perverse cruelties. Demons were beings of ineffable evil. They thrived on the sight of their enemies’ blood. And the greatest of demons were legendary beings in their own right. The sages spoke of them in the same breaths that conjured ancient dragons.