Gambling Heart

by Thom Lane

  Which reminded me how I’d be safer, we all would, if I were hiding better. Before I could choose to move, though, Master Jensen chose for me, tugging me back into the shadow of the ridge. I was happy to stay right where I was, down by his feet; I hugged his leg tighter as that appalling whip cracked again, and was glad not to see it fall even on demon hide. Out of sight is never out of mind when it’s a whip, when your skin already knows the kiss of leather.

  “I thought you said no gold had left the camp?” my master murmured.

  “So I did.”

  “Well, it has now. They’ve got it all down there, looks like.”

  “No. It’s the same gold, yes, still in its sealed chests—but it stands still where you saw it. It’s already torn a hole between that world and this, which is why you can see it here too.”

  “You mean it’s in two places at once?”

  “No. Only that it can be seen from either side now. Step through that arch, you wouldn’t be in hell still, you’d be keeping company with your banker and his mages. My mages, though they don’t know it yet.” Master Lucan’s voice was bitter harsh; I shivered just at the sound of it, and couldn’t quite feel sorry for the mages even so. Demon slaves, yes, but not free and powerful men of my own world, not when they threatened my master.

  “So if I stood in their tent, would I be looking into hell?”

  “Not yet, I’d guess. They must have worked a magic on this side—a blood magic, most likely, to open that gate and hold it so—and they’ll need to do the same the other side to open it there too. At the moment, it only goes one way. At a guess, they’ll wait until the arch is finished here and their sponsor demons are prepared.”

  I thought again about the flying monstrosity. Checking on the state of readiness, was it? Coming to see how much longer it had to wait, before it could come and go at will between our world and this? Now I could feel sorry for my whole world, or most of it. All but those few who were working to achieve this, to spill the demons of hell out like ink on parchment, to stain and ruin and destroy.

  Just reconnaissance, Master Luke had said. I wanted to say, Can we go home now? but of course it wasn’t my place. I was a wise boy, and said nothing at all; and didn’t even nudge my master, let alone lean on him, so that he would do it for me. I thought he was working up to it anyway—they’d seen what they came for, after all, our free folk; and Tam looked as ready as me to leave, as soon as they gave the word—only just then we were interrupted.

  Discovered.

  Betrayed, or nearly so.

  It was one of the demon slaves that came loping along the ridge, iron chain swinging loose from one wrist to the other. Now, too late, I realized where they had gathered those giant rocks to make their arch, and why the ridge looked nibbled bare in places, where loose rocks had already been hauled away. It must have been sent to bring another, but instead it had found us.

  And stood still, staring at us, towering over us, those chained hands already half reaching towards us. It could hold all four of us, I thought, by the neck, two in each hand, and drag us away with no trouble: down to its whip master for judgment, interrogation or swift death, however the winged creature might decide.

  Or Master Lucan might slay it, I supposed, drop it dead where it stood. A master mage is a power in the land, in any land. I didn’t know just where his particular powers lay, but surely he must have some kind of magic he could use as a weapon.

  Or…

  It was demon, true—but it was slave too. It hadn’t chosen to be here; whips and chains all but guaranteed that. Some of us would follow our masters regardless, but we’re the lucky ones, the lucky few perhaps. It knew its duty, but it was hesitant, I thought unwilling; and that gave me a moment, a brief fragment of time before fear overcame doubt in its mind, and before Master Lucan could summon whatever gift he had to kill the thing.

  It didn’t deserve to die; neither did we. I snatched at the third possibility.

  Run, I said silently, trying to drill the idea deep into its demon brain. If demons had brains, if they kept them in their ugly skulls, if it could even hear me, let alone understand my language. All the other choices led to death; I had nothing to offer but hope and effort. Run, while your cruel master isn’t looking. It won’t expect that; we’ll see it doesn’t come after you. We’ll keep it well distracted. Run, seize your chance, seize your freedom. Break your chains with rocks, run far and far, go home…

  It stood still, swaying as it struggled with the troubles in its mind. Ideas I was seeding, I was sure. To prove how sure I was—to myself, mostly—I stepped out in front of my master and Master Luke too, to prevent him slaughtering it in its puzzlement.

  Go, run, freedom beckons. Break your chains and run, run, run…

  After a long agonizing pause, it turned away: away from us, and away from the valley below. Slowly, it started to run.

  And stopped, and stooped, and lifted up a rock the size of my head, plenty big enough to break the fetters on its wrists when it took the time to stop and smash. For now, it only had the one idea in its head; it lifted its eyes to the far horizon, and ran.

  “You did that, boy. Jay, is it?”

  “Yes, Master.” Yes, I did that; yes, my master calls me Jay.

  “Well done. I take it the creature won’t stop running anytime soon?”

  “Not till it gets home, I think.” I didn’t know where home was, but far enough.

  “Good.”

  “Master?”

  “Well?”

  “I, um, I told it we wouldn’t let the overseer go after it.” It could, no question, with those wings. Those wings and that whip. “I said we’d distract it…”

  “Did you so?” Master Luke let the words hang for a moment in the air between us, while behind his shoulder his boy Tam rolled his eyes at me expressively, and I nearly choked on a giggle despite the tension. Maybe because of the tension. “Jensen, have you not trained your boy better than this, making promises for free folk to keep?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” my master said softly, but his hand on the small of my back offered more comfort than warning. I sagged a little against his strength, watched the mage, tried to remember how to breathe.

  “Well,” he said. “There is a thing that I can do, perhaps. That I would like to do, as we’re here. As I would rather not come back. It would be easier if I were closer, but…”

  “Master?”

  This time it was Tam interrupting him, attracting his ferocious glare and a snapped, “Well?”

  “I saw a way that we could get down close, if you should want to. There’s a gully that would hide us all, if we keep low.”

  The rest of us had been focused on the demons and their doings; he’d thought to look at the land and be ready, in case his master had a change of mind. I thought this probably wasn’t the first time that a quick in and out, a reconnaissance had turned into something else altogether.

  I also thought both Tam and I would have a hard time tonight, getting dust and muck out of our masters’ clothes and raising a shine on their boots. That gully had us wriggling on our bellies most of the way, which didn’t much matter to him and me but oh, our free folk were not happy. Especially as they went first, as was only proper, and so all the stones that Tam and I knocked loose as we squirmed behind went clattering down on top of our poor owners. Our seething, spitting owners: I’ve never heard so much foul language hissed so quietly. Certainly I’ve never heard so much aimed at me without a beating to follow.

  Luckily, they could neither of them see my grin, and I had time to school my face into a mask before we reached the bottom.

  Master Jensen clouted me anyway, but it was just a love tap. His arm came round my shoulders, ostensibly to hold me still and down and out of sight, but really I thought just to hold me. I nestled close against his hot filthy sweating body, and peeped when he did above the bank that hid us.

  If it never rains honest water in hell there must be something else, some liquid that
falls from the sky and runs downhill; that blessed gully was just like a dried-up streambed, and it had brought us almost to the heart of things, right where the work was happening. The overseer’s whip was terrifyingly loud now, and the spark of it seemed to light the whole valley. We still hadn’t been seen, though, and maybe wouldn’t be so long as we kept our heads down. One quick glance was enough for me: overseer, slaves, arch, gold, check. All scary close now. I ducked back down and settled my head instead against my master’s thigh, just where his hand could play conveniently with my hair, and hoped that none of those demons had an acute sense of smell or they’d sniff us out for sure.

  “Tam.” Even Master Luke’s whispers came out crisp and compelling.

  “Master?”

  “You see on the topmost chest there, there’s a sheet of parchment skewered to it by that athame?”

  I couldn’t help it, I peeped again; so did my master, so that we nearly knocked heads. Just for a moment, I think both of us were poised on the edge of a giggle, as our eyes met; then he remembered which of us was master here, and scowled momentously, and tugged me back down and knocked my poor head sharply with his fist. Somewhere else, anywhere else, I might have yelped or whimpered; here I just submitted silently to his knuckles, then nuzzled his hand like a puppy until he relented, until he opened his fingers and caressed me roughly to rub the soreness away.

  We’d both seen what we were looking for, what Master Luke was talking about. He called it an athame, but it looked like a knife to me: a particularly nasty little knife, sharp on all its edges and bloodstained all up its blade, from the buried tip to the carved black hilt.

  “Yes, Master.” It’s hard to tell in a murmur, but I thought Tam sounded wary. I didn’t blame him in the least; I think we all knew what was coming.

  “I want that parchment. Bring the knife too, if you can, but speed matters more. If it won’t shift, just rip the parchment loose. I don’t mind if it’s torn, so long as it’s in my hands.”

  “Y-yes, Master.” I hoped that none of the demons had supernatural hearing; Tam’s fear sounded loud enough to me that even normal ears might have picked it up. I guess a gulp’s like a sniff or a cough, you just can’t whisper it.

  Tam shifted into a crouch, ready to leap up and make a dash for it, though it looked suicidal to all of us; as his muscles tensed to spring, his master’s hand shot out to grab him by the scruff just in time.

  “Not yet, fool of a boy! Wait for my word; I can at least offer something to distract the demon. Don’t let it distract you—and be quick. Above all, be quick.”

  His hand on Tam’s neck might have been saying something else, something more. I watched his boy relax beneath his touch; then I watched Master Lucan lift his other hand, I heard him mutter underneath his breath, I saw him work a dreadful magic.

  I hadn’t understood him, until that moment. I knew he was a powerful man, and probably a powerful mage; until I saw, I didn’t know that he was a necromancer.

  If there’s any magic darker than dealing with the dead, I don’t want to know about it. My own ability to twist people’s minds—and demons’ minds too, apparently—had always seemed dark and dangerous enough to me. This, though: this was worse. So much, so very much worse.

  My hand found Master Jensen’s in the ditch there, all by itself. This time he didn’t cuff me away, my kind master. He let me link my fingers in with his and grip tight; and he returned the grip too, tighter than I ever would have dared.

  It didn’t seem so much at first, what we were seeing. A wisp of smoke in that smoky air, what was that? But this wisp rose from the blade of that ritual knife, and hung unmoving in the air above; it built and thickened, and formed itself into a figure.

  Spirits don’t often linger long where their bodies died, but sacrificial victims must be a special case. Blood magic, Master Luke had called it; and the blood was still there, and the blade that drew it, and the girl’s ghost too. He must have known. He called her forth, and forth she came; and we weren’t the only ones to see her.

  One by one, the demon slaves caught sight of her, and faltered in their work. Their overseer snarled, and raised his whip—and then he saw it himself, as they pointed and gibbered.

  They wouldn’t have been frightened of a living girl at all—they’d have no reason to be—but demons don’t have souls or spirits, so they don’t leave ghosts behind them when they die. A summoned apparition, a necromancer’s work is terrifying to them. Also harmless, but even if they know it, that seems to make no difference.

  The slaves might simply have dropped their rocks and tools and run away, if they weren’t still more frightened of their whip master. It might have spread its wings and flown away if it hadn’t had duties, responsibilities, oversight here, and presumably some demon above it—maybe literally above, maybe that great terror that had flown over just before we came—that it feared in its turn. Instead it herded all its slaves together with mighty snaps of the whip, while keeping a wary eye on the ghost, its wings half-spread in alarm.

  When the ghost drifted away from the heaped chests, when it moved towards the throng of demons, they just kept backing, farther and farther from the arch. The slaves really didn’t need the overseer’s whip to encourage them. Soon enough the long blade of it was trailing in the dirt, all but forgotten; the overseer itself was one among the pack of slaves, only distinguished by its wings and size.

  “Now, Tam. Like the wind.”

  “Yes, Master…”

  That was pure instinct, the bone-deep response of a trained slave; Tam was already moving, leaping out from the cover of the gully and sprinting for what his master wanted.

  He was always going to be spotted, of course he was; the demons might be distracted, but they were neither blind nor stupid. It was only a second or two before the overseer roared its fury and pushed its way out of the throng, flicking its whip up from the dirt as it came.

  Tam wasn’t halfway to the gold yet. He didn’t stand a chance of getting there, grabbing the parchment, and getting back to whatever safety Master Lucan could provide: not before the demon or at least its whip could reach him.

  Unless…

  I had no orders; they’d given me no thought at all, except for my master keeping a watchful eye on me, trying to keep me safe. Right now he was more distracted than the demons, watching Tam run, not watching over me.

  Just as well. I’d risen up high onto my knees to see better, and I’d be completely visible to all the demons if any of them actually looked in our direction. Right now they weren’t, they too were all focused on Tam, but I was trying to change that. To shift the focus of the slaves.

  Now, seize your chance while you can, while its back is turned. So many of you, you can overwhelm one whip master. Those long heavy chains on your wrists, those are weapons. Use them. Use them now, use them swiftly and seize your freedom; run and be free…

  Master Lucan was doing his best with his summoned spirit, moving it like a game piece, to stand between the demon and his boy; that was good enough to make the demon falter, but it wasn’t good enough. Even if the creature itself couldn’t get by the ghost, its whip surely could. I thought Tam was doomed, unless…

  I’d never tried to control more than one mind at once; until today, I hadn’t known that I could touch demons’ minds at all. Everything was new, and hard, and scary. I strained and sweated, forgetful of those around me, forgetful of everything except Tam’s danger and the chance that I could help.

  Now, do it now. Swing those chains, strike out, strike hard. For your freedom, do it now…

  One by one, the demon slaves stepped up, chains swinging. They seemed to catch the idea from one another; you could almost see it spread like fire, each to each.

  Chains whirled behind the overseer’s back; at last—and just in time, just as Tam reached his target, just as it flicked that long, long whip towards his legs—the first slammed brutally into its skull.

  I wanted to cheer, but I was too busy urgin
g the others on. More, you’ll need more; once won’t be enough…

  I needn’t have worried. Once wasn’t on the table. That first blow was swiftly followed by more and more, making the demon rock on its clawed feet; then it stumbled and fell, and suddenly the slaves were swarming all over it, pounding at it with chains and stones and whatever tools they had.

  Tam stood exposed by the chests of gold, staring, transfixed; it took his master’s sudden shrill whistle to recall him to his duty. He yanked the knife out of the wood with one hard tug, rolled up the parchment, and came racing back. None of us seemed to care anymore, about being seen; Master Luke stepped up out of the gully to take his treasures, and then stood still to examine them. I was on my feet already; when I looked around, so was my own master, standing protectively behind my shoulder. Thinking back, I realized he’d been there for a while, ever since I’d moved myself.

  I wanted to frown at him, to tell him to be more careful, to learn from Master Luke and let his slave take the risks on his behalf. It’s what I was for, after all. But I was exhausted suddenly, or just infinitely relieved; at any rate, I slumped unexpectedly, and felt his strong arms receive me.

  “Easy, lad,” he murmured, half laughing, into my ear. “Rest if you want to, you’ve done enough. I assume that was you that set them all on each other?”

  I nodded happily against his chest, but didn’t take advantage else of what he offered. Mostly I think a slave’s a fool who doesn’t take any chance he gets to rest, to kneel, to lean against his master’s legs and doze until wanted; but we were still in hell, and how could I relax until we weren’t? I needed to keep an eye on my master, to make sure he didn’t get into any more trouble with any more passing demons—and besides, I wanted to see what happened next. What Master Lucan meant to do…

  What he did first was read through whatever was written on the parchment. That took a while, so I divided my attention between him and the demon swarm, the slaves who were ignoring us entirely. I barely needed to keep a fraction of my mind still whispering to them about freedom; they were doing it all themselves, finding rocks and breaking open one another’s shackles, loping off in twos and threes into the dusty distance.