Blades of the Demigod King

by James Derry

  Jamal blew air out from his lips in a sound of ostentatious shock. “Split up! Do you know what happens to an alpha-protagonist’s ‘trusty companion’ when he agrees to split up? Nothing good.”

  Pawn stood straight. Jamal’s loud protestations had negated the need for stealth. “I told you: Succubi are non-lethal.”

  “Either way, let’s stick together.”

  Pawn pointed to a curtain at the end of the hall. The hotel’s master suite. “Fine. Then we’ll try the most likely bedroom first.”

  The Demigod King swept aside the curtain to reveal a fairly large room, made smaller by the fact that four thin mattresses were lined up across the floor. An empty water pitcher was set in one corner of the room—turned upside-down, probably to keep spiders out. Two chamber pots sat waiting in the other far corner. There was one window in the room, but it was shuttered by thick planks of wood. The evening sun streamed through in thin slits, suffusing the gloom with a wan light.

  The Demigod King tromped on the mattresses. He began tossing jets of salt particles into the air. “I hate to waste salt, but it acts as a corrosive to most forms of magic. If a vestige of the demon’s presence is in this room, then this might chafe her enough to draw her out.”

  Jamal gripped the makeshift handle of his makeshift weapon. “How do we fight it?”

  Pawn chuckled. “We won’t fight it. It takes more than salt and caveman weapons to vanquish an entity as powerful as this one. I’ll have to work a spell to cast it out of this space for good.”

  “You know spell-work? How did you ever have the time to learn that?”

  “I have my secrets,” Pawn grinned. “But you should know: I’ll have to concentrate on my spell. It will take me at least three minutes. In that time you’ll have to keep the succubus occupied. On your own.”

  “You’re telling me this now?”

  The Demigod King returned to spreading salt. “Don’t worry. The worst the succubus can do to you is sap all of your libidinal energies. But sometimes that can be a good thing. Depending on how pent-up you are.” He winked at Jamal. “I hope you don’t find this offensive, but you seem pretty pent-up, Jamal. When was the last time you were with a lover?”

  “That’s a bit personal.”

  “But relevant, considering our circumstances.”

  “Again, this is something we could have discussed before you started summoning a demon.”

  Pawn sniffed the air. “You smell that? She’s coming.” He lowered himself into a crosslegged position in the center of the room; then he closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the ceiling. “As I said, keep her occupied. In any way you see fit.”

  “Wait. What…”

  The Demigod King began murmuring to himself. His spell-work chantings. Jamal could now smell the change in the air as well—a scent like blood oranges, something acidic and sharp, but also sweet.

  The air in front of him began to thicken with shadows. At first, Jamal thought he might be seeing a trick of perspective in the flat light of the room. He leaned to one side, and then the other, expecting to see that he had been noticing a shadow on the far wall. But no, what he saw was darkness tumbling together like cobwebs in the thin air before him.

  He gripped his jawbone weapon more tightly. Should he swing it now?

  Before he could decide, the shadow winked at him.

  “Ahh-ah!” He stumbled backwards.

  The column of shadow pulled more and more ribbons of darkness into itself, like streamers wrapping around a maypole. It was definitely tinted a purple shade. More purple than gray. The shadows moved faster—a gyre with a bulge in the middle. Then the gyre was a woman, dancing with the forked fabrics of her skirt spinning around her.

  Then the woman was a demon.

  Jamal realized he wasn’t seen fabrics whirling off of a dancer; he was instead seeing tentacles reaching out for him. The lower half of the succubus was all tentacles, too numerous to count. But also too frenetic and too ethereal to hold the creature’s weight. No, the succubus was floating as its lower extremities busied the air and reached for him.

  Pawn cracked one eye and stop chanting for moment. “Wow. She’s a beaut, isn’t she?”

  Jamal couldn’t answer, he was too fixated on staring at the eyes of the demon, which—although they were definitely alien—were also feminine and intelligent. And disturbingly seductive. Again, the succubus winked at him, and Jamal noticed that there was barely any difference at all between the purplish surface of the demon’s eye and the purplish skin of her eyelid. ‘Surface’ might have been the wrong word. ‘Texture’ might have been more apt. The demon’s ephemeral body reminded Jamal of an accumulation of violet particles floating to form a shape that was half-woman, half-squid.

  The particles busily swirled together, effervescent, as they flowed into a new, thicker tentacle that floated gently toward Jamal’s face. Then, with surprising speed, the tendril snapped forward before Jamal could even flinch. The texture of the succubus seem to pass through Jamal’s head and up his sinuses. Past his gritted teeth. Prying its way under his eyelids. Soaking into his pores.

  Jamal dropped his weapon, stumbled backwards, and spit at the ground, trying to get those bits of the succubus out of himself.

  Pawn muttered, “That’s the spirit. Just keep on like that for a few more minutes.”

  Jamal dropped to his knees. Already he could feel the succubus settling like crumbs on his tongue. The motes slid down the back of his throat. The sensation was pleasurable, but overwhelmingly disturbing.

  The demon swooped to Jamal’s side and draped a tentacle around his neck. Jamal lashed out, and his arm passed through the succubus, as if he had tried to punch a sandstorm. Nevertheless, the succubus flinched and backed away. Jamal rolled to what he hoped was a safe distance.

  The succubus hissed at him. There was a flash of anger across the tiny bit of luster that delineated her eyes from the rest of her. Although that anger seemed borne more out of disappointment than hostility. The succubus writhed provocatively and ran her arms across her woman-shaped waist.

  Jamal found the jawbone. He came up in a kneeling position and chucked the heavy bone at the demon. It passed through her head, which shattered like a clot of sand. Jamal roared in triumph.

  “Quiet!” Pawn said. He stopped chanting and stared at the decapitated succubus, suspended in the air. Without her head, the demon’s velveteen body looked like a full-length dress on a hanger. He asked, “What did you do to her?”

  “I… I slayed her.”

  Pawn sighed. “I thought I told you. She’s a lover, not a fighter.”

  Jamal stepped closer to the creature’s lifeless body. At any moment, he expected her to fall apart. After all, she seemed to be nothing more than a suspension of violet-hued powder and crumbs. He wondered: What was she made of? Detritus of the bedrooms that she had haunted? No, upon closer inspection, the texture of the succubus reminded him more of the soft, luxurious mosses that he had seen growing in the misty forests near the Silent Sea. He reached out to touch her…

  …and the succubus thrust her hand through his chest.

  Jamal gasped. It was the wrong thing to do. The succubus had not pierced his chest in some brutal motion; instead she had been an eerie insinuation. Jamal’s sharp intake of breath drew in more of the demon’s particles, spreading them like spores deep into his chest. He was saturated, and the feeling forced Jamal into a sort of ecstatic paralysis.

  The demon’s head oozed back into shape, ‘un-crumbling’ from the stump of her neck. She blinked, her mossy eyes glistening just slightly—a sheen that seemed to convey malicious triumph. She opened her mouth wide.

  Her mouth was five-cornered.

  How had he not noticed that before? The orifice spread into five corners like the underside of a starfish. Somehow, the motes and cilia of the demon’s body had formed tightly enough around the lower half of the succubus’s face to create a complicated, predatory
organ. The ridges of each mandible seemed rigid, strong. Rows of tiny prehensile teeth bristled along the edges. Tiny cilia grasping out for his face as the succubus leaned forward to kiss him. Jamal flinched at the sound of wind sucking through her hideous maw.

  Pawn seemed to be chanting faster than he had been before. The succubus had nearly wrapped her ten lips over Jamal’s grimacing face. Still she had an arm buried elbow-deep in his chest. He saw only one way to prevent what was coming next.

  Jamal wrapped his two hands together and drove them hard into his solar plexus. He’d had the wind knocked out of him enough times to know how to do it, where to hit.

  He doubled over from the blow, the air rushing up and out to his chest. He puffed out bits of the succubus right back into her own face. Then he flung himself backward and landed hard on his back. Luckily, he landed on a soft mattress. Unluckily, he was too breathless to do much of anything else. He lifted his legs to prepare to kick the succubus away. She regarded him imperiously as the arm that he had coughed out rematerialized onto the stump of her shoulder.

  On his back with his legs up, Jamal was sure that he looked as weak and as silly as a kitten wrestling one of his litter mates. Feathers floated on the air. One tickled his cheek. He had landed against the mattress hard enough to rip a hole in it.

  The succubus seemed to snub him. She glided toward Pawn, who was still sitting cross-legged and chanting. He had been watching the fight through the corner of his eye. He unraveled his flail and snapped it at her. The leather whip struck the demon’s shoulder, which exploded in a puff of dust. She recoiled.

  Pawn chided Jamal, “Why are you being so heroic? What are you saving yourself for?”

  Jamal rolled onto his side. His chest was beginning to expand again. He could breathe.

  “Come on,” Pawn said. “You know you would like it.”

  For nearly a decade, since losing Nemeah, Jamal had resisted the urge to be intimate with anyone. Sure, he had faltered here and there—it was all but impossible to remain celibate in a pirate port-of-call. And sure, it might have been a stupid, masochistic compulsion, but he found a bit of nobility in his self-denial. He wasn’t going to throw that away. Especially not now. This did not seem like an enjoyable aside. An adventure. It seemed like a violation. It seemed like a betrayal.

  “That’s not what I want… That’s not me…”

  Who did he want?

  Jamal squeezed the corner of the pallet beneath him. A down mattress, dense with feathers—it was an impressive extravagance on Balazul’s part. Jamal had an idea. Feathers were a ‘faunal material.’ He stood and peeled the mattress up with him. It was pliable, like a very thick blanket.

  Pawn had interrupted his spell-work to bring himself up into a crouch. He swung his flail menacingly, and the succubus circled him. She hadn’t noticed that Jamal stood behind her, holding the feather mattress out like a fisherman holding a net.

  He leaped and wrapped the ethereal creature in the feather mattress. Then he clenched her tight in a bearhug. The demon shrieked, and Jamal tried to pull one corner of the mattress over her head. He flung her to the floor, dropping his weight on top of her. Parts of her started to pour through the open ends of the rolled mattress, like embers and ash through the open end of a flue. Her tentacles wrapped around Jamal’s ankles, and within moments his feet were tingling with a pleasurable paralysis.

  But for the most part, the succubus was trapped.

  Pawn dropped into his mediative position and began chanting again. All the while, Jamal held the succubus tight while she squirmed and bucked. Pawn seemed to go on forever. Jamal wondered if he was repeating himself, working out the spell through trial-and-error.

  All the while Jamal was breathing in the creature’s spores. It was starting to have an effect, like breathing in the smoke in an opium den. An insidious buzz filled his head. Each blink seemed to resonate in a thud. Each tentative breath made his mind swirl with blissful nausea.

  Finally the Demigod King finished his spell, and the succubus dissipated. Jamal’s consciousness had nearly dissipated as well.

  He flopped onto his back, cuddling the empty, rolled up mattress in his arms

  The Demigod King stood over him. He said, “Congratulations. You remain chaste.”

  Jamal’s eyes fluttered closed. He felt himself sinking into a very deep slumber. He smiled, “I… I have to find Sygne.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about Sygne. I have my eyes out for her.”

  With that, Jamal’s world gave in to blackness.

  12 – Introductions

  Jamal awoke into one of Sygne’s memories. He couldn’t see Sygne’s face because he was locked into a perspective inside her head, focused through the ‘windows’ of her eyes. And Sygne’s vision was siphoned through another tunnel—she was staring through some sort of tube that had condensed her vision (and Jamal’s dream world) into a disorienting immensity of black. At the end of the tunnel was a disc of blue light, and a cone of green leaves that formed the top of a cypress tree.

  Sygne backed away from the tube, and Jamal could see that she had been peering through a section of hollow bamboo. Sygne was careful to keep the bamboo still as she moved around it. A perfect semicircle of stiff papyrus had been glued to the bottom of the bamboo tube, and a weighted line of catgut swayed and spun gently against the semicircle. Holding the contraption (tube, semicircle, line) with her rigid left hand, Sygne used a piece of charcoal to notch the hanging string’s position against the upside-down arc of papyrus.

  Sygne had been holding her breath. Now she exhaled and set the contraption on the grass. She snatched up another semicircular tool from the grass. From her countless memories of academic instruments, Jamal had learned that this device was called a protractor. The protractor measured the angle of the mark against the edge of the tube. She quickly wrote numbers on a dusty slate and worked through an equation. The entire process was mysterious—and also mind-numbingly banal. And yet Sygne was obviously intensely excited about the work. Jamal wanted to ask her…

  “What are you doing?”

  Young Sygne jumped, and her perspective swung to show a short, wizened woman in the standard ascetic robe of a Mentor. Or she may have been a Mentor’s assistant or a custodial administrator. For each position, the wardrobe was essentially the same; the administrators of the Academy were not ostentatious about their hierarchies. Only two things made this woman stand out from the rest: She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, and her mouth was twisted into a stern scowl that suggested a fearsome authority. This was a woman who was used to having her orders followed—and her questions answered.

  Sygne stammered for a reply. “This?” She held up the bamboo tube with accoutrements. “This is a device I’m developing… Well, Mentor Oreh had the initial concept… He called it a dioptra.”

  The old academic rolled her eyes. There was a much younger, much taller man standing beside the woman. He stepped forward and asked, “What does it do?”

  Jamal instantly recognized this young man as a teenage version of Pawn. Pawn asked about Sygne’s contraption, but his eyes were locked squarely—aggressively—on Sygne’s face.

  Was this their first ever meeting?

  Sygne quickly flinched away from the young demigod’s stare. She ran her fingers along the rod of bamboo. “I… Well… It’s supposed to measure the angle between two points on a landscape. It uses trigonometry.”

  “‘Trig,’ like the trigger on a catapult?”

  “No,” Sygne chuckled bashfully, “but I suppose it could be used to help aim a catapult.”

  “How so?” Pawn asked.

  From the corner of Sygne’s eye, Jamal studied the old woman. There was something distinctly wrong about her. He could feel Sygne’s pulse bumping uneasily. Had she noticed it too? No, it was more likely that she was too busy intensely ‘noticing’ the way Pawn’s shoulder muscles bulged out from his vest.

  She said, “You see, if you kno
w two angles of a triangle, and the length of the side between them, then you can use trigonometry to calculate the lengths of the other two sides.”

  The academic sighed. The weave of her straw hat was very thick, so that her face was cloaked in its shadows. Despite the shade, she seemed to be hunching from the sun. “Perhaps we should move on, my prince.”

  Sygne’s eyebrows hopped at the title. She straightened her back, although she was still set low with both knees in the dirt. “I’m sorry. You’re a…? It’s a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness.”

  Pawn must have read the surprise and confusion on her face. He knelt so that his eyes were level with hers. “Don’t worry about not recognizing me. I’m a new arrival in my father’s court.”

  “Of course. I’ve heard of you,” Sygne said. “You’re the prince who just arrived from Mizzul.”

  “Yes. And I’m eager to learn as much as I can about my father’s realm.” Pawn nudged his head to Sygne’s dioptra. “Go on. Please. Will you show me how it works?”

  Sygne blinked. “See that tree there? How tall is it?”

  “I’d guess thirty feet?” Prince Pawn said.

  “Well, yes,” Sygne cleared her throat. “That’s actually a fairly good estimate. But how could you verify that your estimate is correct?”

  “I could throw this grappling hook into the top of it,” the demigod patted a coiled rope on his belt. “I hear some people in the West use these to climb, not just grapple people. My aim is pretty good with this thing; I could throw it into the tree and then measure the length of the rope from the ground.”

  “Yes,” Sygne made another tentative, recomposing sound in her throat. “Very good. But you might find this method even easier.”

  Prince Pawn considered this. “Could you use that thing to tell how high the sun is from the ground? So that we could build a ladder and bring it down here?”