by Max Anthony
Less than an hour later, Meugh found himself capable of summoning two more demons, which he sent after the first.
Seventeen
Having left Lula Grindy’s safe house, Skulks and wizards were seven miles out of Casks and making good progress along the King’s Road. The road had a grand title, but it was only partially paved and in many places was in a state of disrepair. In spite of this it was much easier underfoot than woodland or scree. The surrounding countryside was rough and only partially farmed, suggestive of the non-agrarian history of Casks.
Though they had the bodies of ten-year-old children, the Warp and the Weft were much hardier than normal children. They could drink ale with the best of them, swear like a field soldier and walk all day without complaining about sore feet or needing a wee every twenty minutes. They were discussing fees with Skulks.
“So then,” said Skulks. “When I was in Hardened not two weeks ago, a clockwork monkey stole my dagger-swords. A wizard by the name of Humpy Wagglehorn had created it to steal the most precious possessions of her chosen target. I have no idea how she came to choose me, for I had not met her before.”
“A random spell of selection, perhaps,” said the Warp.
“Or a selection spell that targeted thieves specifically,” said the Weft.
“However she came to choose me as the target for her monkey, it was successful in taking advantage of my slumber to pilfer that which was mine. When I tracked her down in order to confront her with her misdeeds, the monkey continued its attack upon me.”
“Presumably this Wagglehorn had yet to choose a new target for it.”
“I had assumed that was the case, but when it resumed its attempts to steal from me I was able to redirect it to attack its master, whereupon it fell into pieces.”
The Warp and Weft looked at each other. “It sounds to me like you’ve used magic!” exclaimed the Weft triumphantly, knowing that it would cut Skulks to the quick. He was disappointed by Skulks’ response.
“This is the conclusion I have come to,” he said. “Somehow my exposure to wizards has unlocked a hidden magic in me.”
“I think it’s more likely that in your alarm your Wielding has leapt to your aid and assisted you in a way it has not done so before.”
“He liked it!” said the Warp to the Weft. “I can tell.”
“I think you might be right,” said the Weft to the Warp. “Our favourite thief has secret desires to be a wizard!”
“That’s not so!” said Skulks defensively. “It’s just that wizards recently have been getting harder for me to beat. If it’s not a conjured baboon, it’s a ball of flame or an invisible net.”
“But you are a thief,” the Warp said to him. “You are meant to remain unseen and to defeat your foes without them noticing you.”
“If only it were so easy!” said Skulks, in full flow. “Every wizard nowadays seems to have a spell to see me, or another way to even the odds. Even the weak ones.”
“What is it you want us to do then?”
“I want you to teach me some magic,” said Skulks, though it was no surprise to them for he’d clearly been building up to it. “All Wielders should be equal, but I’m feeling less equal than most!”
Thinking to themselves that there might be something in his words, the Warp and the Weft agreed to give the matter some consideration. Though they had accepted his price for rescuing them, they needed to convince themselves in order to commit to the cause. They warned Skulks that he might have no aptitude for magic, yet they both knew this wasn’t true.
As evening arrived, they continued their travels. Sleep was an optional requirement for Wielders - something they enjoyed but didn’t necessarily indulge in every night. Skulks was a rarity for he partook of sleep almost every night and often needed to kick himself out of bed to deal with important matters of the day. At about mid-way through this particular night, both Warp and Weft stopped suddenly, causing Skulks to stumble over them for his brain was elsewhere.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A thief-demon! It is pursuing us and it is close!”
“And getting rapidly closer!”
“Shall we stop and kill it?” asked Skulks, eager to test his mettle against the creature.
“No! We should make haste to Burden!”
“There are others close behind it!”
“If you are overcome, we might not yet have the capability to defeat them!”
“We’d like to face them on safer ground,” the Weft told Skulks.
Though he didn’t agree with them, least of all because it implied a lack of confidence in his ability to defeat these thief-demons, Skulks decided to go along with their plan of escape. They picked up the pace, breaking into an outright run in which Skulks found he was having to slow his own pace to allow for the shorter legs of his companions, even with the nagging pain from his partially-healed ribs.
“They’re gaining on us!” said the Warp in dismay.
“Not for long!” said Skulks, tipping out the contents of their travelling sack onto the ground.
“If you think we’re going in there...,” spluttered the Weft.
“….you’ve got another thing coming!” continued the Warp.
Their objections were ignored as Skulks popped them both into the large sack, which he slung over his shoulder. Setting off at a much-increased pace, he talked to the sack as he ran.
“Don’t forget that escaping to Burden was your plan!” he advised.
“Cease this at once!” wailed the sack in response.
“I would hate for you to have your magic sucked out before you could teach me any of your secrets,” replied Skulks with the sack bouncing up and down behind him.
“My arm! My poor arm!” continued the sack.
“Get your elbow out of my mouth!”
Stretching his legs, Skulks found that he was enjoying the run. It was a long time since he’d been able to exert himself in this manner and he breathed deeply as his Wielding-strengthened body churned up the miles, allowing him to maintain a fast sprint. The sack had fallen more or less quiet now, for the Warp and the Weft had cast a minor levitation spell upon it which softened the worst of the bumps and thumps conferred upon it by Skulks’ travel.
At this time of night, the road wasn’t home to many travellers. They passed three camps, set off to the side of the road with tents pitched and the occasional horse and cart. Suspicious eyes looked out, stark white against the moonlight as Skulks and sack sped by.
“Good journey!” hailed Skulks as he passed one camp, alarming the occupants and waking up a three-month old baby. The man and woman of the camp had no time to respond and had just managed to settle the baby when they saw three gangly black shapes streak by, heading in the same direction as the man who had recently greeted them so generously.
“Ack, it’s a bad road tonight,” spat the man, speaking one of the platitudes his wife hated.
A second camp was similarly hailed, this one comprising a lonely tinker dozing fitfully next to his faithful mule Trotter. The tinker felt it had been somewhat unnecessary to wake him up merely to say hello and it took him a considerable amount of time to fall back asleep. Just as he felt his brain drifting and his dreaming mind opening up into a world of nubile young ladies, Trotter snorted and tugged at his reins as if spooked by something. It dragged the tinker unwillingly back into the world of the awake and by the time he fell asleep again, the nubile young ladies were gone, replaced by a stack of broken pots and pans which would take him an entire night of dreaming to fix. It wasn’t just the nubile young ladies who were gone, but also several items from the tinker’s camp, which he would notice missing when he reached Casks.
The thief-demons were excellent trackers, using sight, scent and other, less worldly powers to track their prey. They weren’t often seen abroad in Rhult for their summoning required a wizard of great power, or in this case, another demon of greater power than they. On the few occasions they were brought forth, they
performed their tasks quickly and efficiently, before they were returned to their own realm to feast on their reward of blood, organs and an occasional bag of chicken drumsticks.
Because of its excellent tracking abilities, the lead thief-demon wasn’t fooled when its prey left the road and headed up a grassed incline and into a copse of trees. In fact, it was pleased, for it liked the hunt and preferred its quarry to put up a fight before it inevitably fell to claw and tooth. The trail weaved left and right through the trees in a zig-zag pattern and the thief-demon was not fooled. Its target followed the course of a shallow river for a distance before emerging on the other side. Still the thief-demon was not fooled. Knowing itself to be almost within sight of Skulks and wizards, it increased its pace, claws scrabbling at fallen tree trunks and gouging at the turf.
As the demon darted through a narrow gap between two trees, it heard a sound that could only be described as a fwit. The thief-demon had time to be puzzled as it watched its body continue ahead of it. Puzzlement turned into concern as it noted that its body lacked a head and that, without instructions being delivered from this missing head, its body stumbled into a tree and rolled over. With its vision fading, the thief-demon’s detached head spun lazily in the air and it had time to see a length of thin, strong wire connected to the two trunks it had just run between. This wire was stretched at head-height, almost as if it had been placed there with the express aim of catching out an over-eager thief-demon.
The remaining two demons drew to a halt as they saw the body of their colleague. Sneering at it for its foolishness, they left its body for the worms as they renewed their chase, not that any self-respecting worm would have gone near it.
After its brief foray into the trees, the trail re-joined the road, with two thief-demons hot on it. Night became day and day become night, but still their quarry remained ahead of them. This was most unexpected, for the demons would usually have run down their prey after only a mile or two. Sometimes five or six miles if this prey were very fit or very motivated. In fact, the thief-demons were forced to confront the fact that they weren’t gaining on Skulks. He wasn’t getting further away, but nor were they getting any closer.
Meanwhile, Skulks was thinking this to be quite a splendid trip, though the Warp and the Weft were arguing in their sack again.
“No I DON’T like peas,” came the voice of the Warp.
“Pea-face! Pea-face!” chanted the Weft.
“Shut up or I’ll turn YOU into a pea!”
“You can’t turn me into a pea without turning yourself into a pea as well!”
“I can too!”
“Can’t!”
Skulks shook his head in wonderment. Here were two of the most powerful wizards in the whole of the known world and they were arguing about peas. Then he thought to himself that they might be bored after a thousand or so years of life and needed to argue to keep themselves distracted. It was better that they argue amongst themselves than argue with someone else. If they started arguing with all and sundry, things might get burned to the ground. Or worse.
Skulks felt that he had a varied life, even though he often made his crimes more elaborate than they needed to be. What could be more boring than breaking into a house, stealing some coins and then leaving with no-one the wiser? Far better to leave a trail of feathers behind him which ended at a solid wall. Or instigate a series of break-ins where the only crime committed was the shaving of the family dog. He smiled as he remembered this last one. “The Ironsburg Razor” he’d been known as for a time, with a small reward out for his arrest.
As the pea argument continued to rage behind him, Skulks ran down the single street of a small village surrounding the road. “Welcome to Flutes” announced a sign. Ten seconds later, Skulks ran past another sign, this one reading “You are now leaving Flutes”. He stopped after the sign and looked behind him. The road had been flat and straight for some distance now, affording a good view back where he’d travelled. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could just make out two dark shapes in the distance, running off the road rather than on it. In the sack, peas were no longer the order of the day.
“Why have we stopped?”
“They’re gaining on us. I can feel it.”
“Yes of course they’re gaining on us,” said Skulks. “For I am stopped and they are running at us full pelt.”
“Run, then. Run now!”
And with that, Skulks set off again, the road outside of Flutes winding up into a series of low foothills, which were nevertheless quite steep in places. The road here was rougher than elsewhere and treacherous in parts, for it had been difficult and expensive to build it through these hills.
“Are we nearly at Burden yet?” asked a voice.
“No!” said Skulks.
“What about now?”
Though steep and rough, the road did not significantly affect Skulks’ pace. It had been at least a hundred years since he’d had to run so far, having once bet Jake the Headcracker that he could run between Corpus and Ironsburg the quickest of the two. In the end Skulks had lost, for he had a very short attention span and had stopped for a number of hours to play a game of Tee-Hee with a farmer in a field. Though the name was suggestive of a game which might be enjoyed by children, Tee-Hee was a board game which demanded great strategy and forward planning, neither of which Skulks was known to excel at. Eventually the farmer had won fifteen Ironsburg Reals and Skulks had lost the race.
As he ran through a rocky pass, with scree to either side, Skulks paused once more and set down the sack. The Warp’s head popped out.
“Could you use magic to seal off the road here?” asked Skulks.
The Warp squinted at the angle of the scree. “Yes, we could bring all of this down easily enough and it would seal off the road. But I don’t think it would slow down a thief-demon much. It would certainly slow Lula Grindy down.”
Skulks had to concede this point immediately. Grindy was far behind them now, but he didn’t recall passing her. It was likely she’d had to escape Casks by a quieter road, but she’d definitely have to come this way to reach Trags.
“Bah!” exclaimed Skulks. “Can’t I just stop and have done with these thief-demons?”
“We are still working on our defences against them,” said the muffled voice of the Weft. “But we aren’t quite ready yet.”
Sure enough, Skulks had heard much mumbling and whispering from the sack behind him as the wizards within plotted and schemed against this opponent which had humbled them so comprehensively. Still, he was determined to make some use of this narrow section of road, so left behind a gift for the chasing demons, in the form of stolen tacks and nails, scattered liberally and arranged neatly to ensure that their sharp ends were pointing upwards.
Ten minutes later, the demons hurtled through this pass, their eyes watching carefully for cheese-wire, but not so carefully for nails. One of the thief-demons was unlucky enough to stand upon an upturned nail, with three inches of it penetrating directly through its hard footpads, glancing off the bone and cutting into some important connective tissue.
Gritting its teeth, for even demons felt pain, it tugged the nail free, before standing on another. Angry now, it kicked out petulantly, scattering the other tacks and nails across the road, significantly reducing the chance of the next passing horse being lamed.
Off it set again, its speed unhindered, but each step bringing forth a shooting agony to remind it to watch where it put its feet. Even with the discomfort, the demon was still satisfied for the scent had started to become slightly, almost imperceptibly, stronger. They were gaining.
Come the following morning, Skulks had left the hills and was making good time along the King’s Road. Unfortunately, the thief-demons were making slightly better time and when Skulks looked back he could make out their blurred outlines in the distance. He’d hoped to make it to Trags where he could take advantage of crowded spaces to set a trap for the demons, but it didn’t seem like he was going to get there
in time. The sack was quiet now, with only the odd mumble and the occasional giggle to betray the contents.
All pursuits must come to an end one way or another, and so it was with the thief-demons’ pursuit of Skulks and wizards. At a place where the road was joined by woodland on one side, the scent grew rapidly stronger and the thief-demons grinned silently to themselves as they slowed to a more cautious walk, graceful and fluid despite their gangly appearance.
A sack was discarded on the road, almost carelessly. Two children were sitting on a fallen tree trunk, as a man in black urinated enthusiastically at the edge of the road.
“Aaaaah!” he exclaimed in satisfaction at the reduced pressure on his bladder.
The thief-demons had been tricked before, so they blended themselves into the darkness in a manner similar to that used by Skulks, in order to conceal their approach. The demon with the injured foot made its way quietly behind the two children, hoping to suck them dry of their magics before they could alert Skulks, not that the demon was particularly concerned about him. Undetected, it touched each child lightly upon the shoulder, using its powers to render them unconscious. The two bodies slumped against each other, with one sliding off the log. The thief-demon looked up, to see its colleague nearly at the man in black. He was still urinating, though the stream of fluid was petering out as his bladder emptied.
Still with time, the thief-demon placed its clawed hands onto the heads of the unconscious children and drew their essence from them, storing it in its own body. Later, it would transfer it to another black gem for King Meugh to investigate and try to make use of. For now, it turned its attention to the dark-clothed man, who was buttoning up his pants and turning in preparation to leave. It had time to watch its fellow demon lash out with a claw and see the man roll to one side. As it watched, this first thief-demon felt an irresistible force overwhelm its body, flowing from the reservoirs where it had stored the essence of the children. Its mind railed ineffectually when it found its body was no longer under its control and it lurched forward a pace or two and spun around, as if a puppet master was trying to work out how to control this new puppet.
