Den of Thieves

by David Chandler

  “Father?” he said aloud. “He’s your—”

  “I did not say you could speak!” Hazoth screamed, and Malden’s voice was lost.

  It didn’t matter. His own thoughts were louder than anything he might have said.

  The demon is his child, she had said. It is not his first.

  He had assumed she meant he’d sired other demons.

  Not all of his protections are magical, she had said.

  He’d assumed that meant the very human retainers he kept to guard his gate. But perhaps she’d meant, instead, that he had a hold on her that was more complex than a mere contract of employment. She had betrayed him, Malden, and now he knew why.

  In truth, he had never trusted her completely. Even when he’d kissed her, he half expected her to destroy him with her stockpile of curses. He had made sure she only knew half of his scheme. Now he understood that he could not expect her aid any longer. That she was not going to rescue him at the last minute.

  He had, in a way, expected this.

  It still hurt. It still cut him to the core.

  “I will do as I please,” Hazoth said, as cool as an autumn day. “As for you, rodent, I’m afraid you have to die. I know your simple brain will have trouble accepting this fact. You’ll think there must be some way you can defeat me, no matter how desperate it may seem. I can assure you you’re wrong. Please try to think of it philosophically. You had, what, a few decades left to live anyway? Eyeblinks, compared to my life span. The tragedy of your death will last as long as it takes a single tear to roll down Cythera’s cheek.”

  “Very well,” Malden said, thinking, Not quite yet. “And how shall I die? Are you going to curse me to death, or open up a crack in the earth and send me down to the pit?”

  “Wasteful, and quite beneath me,” Hazoth said. “I’m going to give your existence a purpose, albeit a small one. I’m going to feed you to my son.” He reached up and slapped the iron egg with the flat of his palm. It rang like a bell.

  And then it began to crack.

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  “Glorious! When it is finally born, there will be no power in this world that can stand against me,” Hazoth said.

  Red lines of infernal fire appeared on the surface of the iron sphere as a cascade of rust fell to the floor. The egg rocked slightly on its stand as the demon inside hammered again and again at its shell, trying to break out.

  “The Ancient Blades will stop you,” Malden insisted, more for his own benefit than to intimidate Hazoth. “They know how to slay demons.”

  “Luckily for me I have one of their number on my side,” Hazoth pointed out. “Bikker will gladly slay all his old comrades, if I pay him well enough. It’s important, rodent, to consider every angle of a problem. That’s where you failed. You made a clever try of things, but you just didn’t think them through deeply enough.”

  “And you have? This is madness,” Malden said. “To release a demon on the world . . .” He thought of the beast that nearly killed him in the palace tower. Unless it was kept wet it grew at a furious rate and would never stop. “It is a creature not natural to this world,” Malden said. “What will it do, once released? Will it eat every man and woman in the city? Or will it burn us all with hellfire?”

  “Nothing so dramatic,” Hazoth said. “Perhaps, when he is fully grown, he will have the power to do as you say. But my son is not ready to be born. When he emerges he will know nothing but pain—and there is only one way to quench that agony. He must devour the first living thing he encounters. Please, don’t get any foolish notions. Cythera and I will be perfectly safe, as the demon will know his own blood. But he will swallow you whole, and that will give him strength to return to his egg and resume his gestation.”

  A thin shard of iron slid free from the shell and clattered to the floor. Red light shot out of the gap thus made.

  “He will not rest until he has devoured you,” Hazoth went on. “Night and day he will chase you. He could follow your trail for hundreds of miles, even if you do manage to escape this room. I don’t think there’s any reason why Cythera should have to watch you die. She seems quite taken with you. So I’ll leave you to your fate.”

  Malden shrank back from the egg as it rattled and shook and more shards of iron fell away. “Hazoth!” he shouted. “You said that after eight hundred years, magic had corrupted the Burgrave, yes?”

  The sorcerer frowned. “I suppose.”

  “What of the enchantments on your own self? After so many centuries, what have they done to your soul?”

  Hazoth lifted his hand in the gesture that would transport him and Cythera out of the room. “An interesting question, but one that seems quite moot. You’ll never learn the answer, I’m afraid.”

  Malden threw his arm across his eyes as light burst all around him. When it faded he was alone in the great hall.

  Though not for long.

  The egg continued to hatch as he watched, horrified. For a moment he couldn’t move, so transfixed was he by the spectacle of the demon’s birth. Then the thing inside the egg howled in utter pain, and he found his feet once more.

  Many doors led away from the great hall. The obvious choice was the massive portal that opened onto the front lawn. If he could get out there he could get a head start before the demon came in pursuit.

  That would, of course, only delay his doom. Besides, he had another scheme in mind.

  He hurried to a door on one side wall, between two statues. It was the door that led eventually to the library, the same way he’d been taken on his first visit to the house. The door was locked but the mechanism was quite simple and perfectly ordinary. Malden hurriedly unwrapped his picks and wrenches from the hilt of his bodkin.

  Behind him a clawed hand emerged from the egg and stretched raw flesh in the cold air. The demon started hauling itself out of its prison.

  Hands shaking in fear, Malden stared at the rakes and hooks he held. Then he dropped them and kicked at the door until the flimsy lock shattered. When the door swung free he turned and glanced once more at the cracking egg, for a spare fraction of a moment.

  What he saw made him yelp in terror.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Bikker was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back of one hand.

  That was the extent of what Croy’s best efforts to kill him had achieved. His tunic was cut in a number of places, but that only showed that the mail shirt he wore underneath it was unbroken. Croy’s arm hadn’t been strong enough to pierce the chain mail, even with the good dwarven steel of the shortsword.

  “Get up,” Bikker spat. “Come, now. I trained you to put up a better fight than this.”

  It was all Croy could do to keep his eyes open.

  “Damn you, a good stiff breeze could kill you right now,” Bikker insisted. His voice was not so hard as his words. “Croy, you don’t have a chance. I could have cut you down a dozen times just now. Don’t you want to live? Don’t you want to win?”

  Somehow Croy managed to find a little breath, which he used for forming words. “I’ve already won, Bikker. I kept my faith. I kept to my beliefs. You can slay me now, certainly. Doing so won’t make you more of a man.”

  “And letting you live will?” Bikker snarled.

  “No. There’s nothing you can do to regain your honor. I understand that now. I had hoped to heal the wound on your soul. But it’s too late.”

  Bikker growled then, or perhaps he shouted. It was an inchoate, wordless noise that came out of him as he clawed at the air with his free hand. He stamped his foot in rage. And then, little by little, he regained his composure. He came back to Croy and stood over him and looked down on him with something approaching calm.

  “Draw Ghostcutter. Do me the honor of dying on your feet. Come!” Bikker seized Croy roughly under the armpits and hauled him upright. He held Croy there until the knight had his feet underneath him. He could stand, if he braced himself perfectly. But he couldn’t lift his arms. The mere effort of stan
ding took all his wind.

  “This is folly,” Bikker said. “You should learn from it, Croy. Sir Croy. You need to be woken up from your dreams of nobility and honor. Did I not teach you that even a mighty lord dies the same way as a humble villein? Apparently you weren’t paying attention that day. A shame—if I kill you now you’ll never learn. You’ll go and sit by the Lady’s side still thinking that heroes bleed a different color than the rest of us.”

  “I kept my faith,” Croy whispered. “I lived that dream. I do not fear death.”

  A mischievous light crept into Bikker’s eyes. “Interesting. Because it absolutely terrifies me. That’s why I trained so hard, learned to be so strong. Because I knew that the only thing standing between me and the pit is my right arm and whatever iron I hold. But perhaps—perhaps there is something more to life.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps,” Bikker went on, “it’s all true. All those pathetic slogans and vows of sacrifice you made, perhaps they mean something after all. Shall we see?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bikker leaned very close until his face was only inches from Croy’s. “Let’s perform an experiment, like Hazoth in his laboratory. You’ll be my test subject. I’ll give you a simple choice and we’ll see how much you believe your own fancies. Hmm?”

  Croy was too tired to reply.

  “I’ll make you a promise. You can go free, and I won’t chase you. After all, killing a weakling like you isn’t going to be any fun. I’ll let you live the rest of your life unmolested. All you have to do is turn around and walk away from me, without another word.”

  Croy frowned. This seemed unlikely.

  “There is one proviso, however,” Bikker said. “You must leave Ghostcutter here.”

  He looked very satisfied with himself for having devised this bargain. Croy’s lips drew back from his teeth and he snarled.

  “ ‘My sword is my soul,’ ” he quoted. “You taught me that.”

  “Exactly,” Bikker said. “So choose. Give up your soul, or forfeit your life.”

  He said no more.

  Croy shook his head, disbelieving. Bikker was an Ancient Blade, same as himself. How could he make such an infernal demand? It was counter to everything Croy had ever believed, everything he’d ever learned. A Blade died with his sword in his hand, or only after passing it on to someone who could make better use of it in the endless war against demonkind. That was the law of their existence. The most important rule of their order.

  But of course, that was the point. Croy had called Bikker a faithless coward. That oath only meant something if Croy could prove he, himself, was otherwise. If he accepted the bargain, he would make his insult meaningless. But he would live.

  Croy could never accept such a fate. Except—

  If he died now, he would never see Cythera again. She and her mother would remain in bondage under Hazoth’s rule, forever. If he surrendered now, there would be another chance. Someday. Another possibility of rescue.

  Croy made his choice. He lifted an arm that felt like a bar of lead and placed his hand around Ghostcutter’s hilt. Inch by inch he began to draw it from its scabbard.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  The demon howled in agony, and Malden had to hang on to the door frame not to be knocked down. It was a hideous thing to look upon, but he could only imagine its pain. It—Malden could not bring himself to think of the thing as a “he”—must have experienced every instant of its new life as an eternity of suffering.

  As Hazoth had said, it was not ready to be born. It had no skin on its stringy muscles and it oozed pus every time it stretched. Steam lifted from its back in great white coils, and where its feet touched the marble floor, the stone grew slick with its blood. In shape it was not unlike a horribly deformed hound, though it had seven legs—none of them the same length or shape. Sprouting from its shoulders on long thick necks were a row of human skulls with wicked fanged jaws. The eye sockets were filled with wet red membranes that throbbed and sucked at the air. Malden assumed that was how it scented, and that this was the only sense it possessed.

  When it screamed, the sound issued not from the clacking jaws of the skulls but from a gaping mouth in its chest filled with round half-formed teeth.

  It pawed at the floor, stumbling like a newborn foal. Every footfall made the entire house shake. Its skull heads wove through the air at the end of the clumsy necks, and its nostrils squeezed shut, then shot open again. One by one the skulls turned to point directly at Malden. How it could smell anything through the thick reek of brimstone in the air was an open question, but he had no doubt it was quite aware of him.

  Malden shrank back as far as he could, yet it was as if he were transfixed, so horrified by the thing’s appearance he couldn’t move.

  The demon took a tottering step forward, its multitude of claws clacking on the floor.

  Time to run.

  The paralysis of horror left him in a rush of blood to his legs. Malden slammed the door behind him, only to hear it splinter and crack as the demon rammed its way through. By that point he was well down the hall beyond, nearly at the door of the library. The demon squeezed into the hallway and came galloping toward him, no longer so awkward or graceless. It was fast—far faster than he was—and it would be on him in a second if he didn’t move. He flung himself at the door to the library and, thank the Bloodgod, it flew open.

  Inside the library he leapt over a divan just as the demon smashed through the doorway, shattering the door frame with its odd number of shoulders. It reared up and swung two of its legs through the air, an instant away from crushing Malden beneath one foot that looked like a hoof and another like the paw of a wolf.

  Malden threw his arms across his face, knowing that if the thing struck him even once, it would be his end. He rolled back and away from the beast as it came lurching forward—

  —and then stopped in mid-attack.

  Kemper, I hope you made it this far, Malden thought. He’d given the card sharp strict instructions to include the library on his itinerary as he made his way around the house, but Malden also knew that if there had been any danger of being caught, Kemper might have cut his circuit short.

  Yet now the demon sniffed and sucked at the air, and its skull heads craned around the room, searching something out. Malden edged away slowly, crawling backward on his hands so as not to make any noise, in case the thing had ears hidden somewhere on its body.

  One of the skull heads fixated on a particular glass-fronted bookcase. It brought a second head around to sniff as well, as if making sure it had the right scent. Then it threw all of its considerable mass at the case, pulverizing the glass, sending the books flying, smashing through the thick wooden shelves. It savaged the case with its jaws and its huge wet mouth, striking again and again with its claws and hooves and talons until it battered through the wall behind the case as well.

  A lone playing card, the six of acorns, floated out of the wreckage and drifted to the floor. The demon stamped on it, tore it to shreds with its teeth, and swallowed the bits of paper that remained.

  By the time it was finished, Malden had already broken for the next door, and the next hallway.

  Chapter Ninety

  Croy gritted his teeth.

  For my lord the Burgrave, he thought. For honor. For the code of the Ancient Blades. For the sake of my immortal soul.

  For Cythera.

  Every fiber of his being was in agreement. He would not surrender his sword. He would not turn and walk away. If he died in the next moment, he would die as he had lived. The sacrifice was acceptable.

  But he didn’t intend to die.

  As he drew Ghostcutter free of its scabbard, warmth flowed down his arm. His heart was giving up the last of its strength, all in the service of one final battle.

  Bikker smiled, as if this was exactly what he wanted. “You’ll fall quickly enough. But you’ll die on your feet,” he said. “Do you see what honor is, now? Honor is somethin
g that exists between men like us. Strong men! The weak of this world, the peasants, the little people—they know nothing of it.”

  Croy thought of Malden and Kemper affirming that there was no honor among thieves. Maybe Bikker was right.

  But—no. Malden had risked everything to help Cythera. Malden had gone into Hazoth’s villa, uncertain of what he could achieve, but willing to try.

  “You were wrong earlier,” Croy said.

  “What? What are you prattling about?” Bikker demanded.

  “Earlier. You said I thought my blood was a different color from yours. You were wrong.”

  “I think you’re feverish, Croy. Your wounds would certainly warrant it. Speak clearly, man, or just be quiet and let us finish what we’ve started.”

  “I don’t think I bleed a different color than you,” Croy said. “Blood is the same in every man’s veins. But there is something in me you can’t match.”

  He thought back to when Bikker had trained him, to one day in particular. They’d been going through postures for hours, Croy learning every way there was to hold a sword. They’d practiced hundreds of parries, thousands of lunges. Bikker called a halt when neither of them could see for the sweat in their eyes. Then, when Croy put Ghostcutter away for the day, Bikker picked up a wooden practice sword and knocked him into a pigpen with one solid whack to the back of his knees.

  “Fencing is something gentle folk do,” Bikker had said. “You can train a lifetime to master it. But never forget—anyone, even a peasant, can bring you down with a single, solid blow. It only takes one cut to kill a man.”

  So now he faced Bikker with Ghostcutter gripped in both hands, the point aimed directly at Bikker’s heart. Bikker took his own stance, with Acidtongue at an angle across the front of his body.

  If he was focused and committed enough, Croy thought, he might strike one more blow before his body gave out completely. He would have to make it the one that brought Bikker down.