The Sable City

by M. Edward McNally

  *

  Zeb heard the Devil Lord’s voice coming out of one of the side rooms, and he raised his crossbow toward the open door. Tilda raised her bow at a different doorway, while the others looked around wildly.

  “Madame Nesha-tari,” Balan’s voice addressed the woman as she crouched back against a wall and snarled. “While I had hoped to have a civilized discussion regarding a certain matter, it seems we shall have to do things the easy way.”

  Nesha-tari opened her mouth to speak but she only gasped, and staggered on her feet. Amatesu rushed to her side while Shikashe took up a position in front of them both with his sword raised and eyes darting about. Nesha-tari’s blue eyes fluttered like signal lamps and she swooned against the shukenja.

  “You have promised not to attack us, devil!” Heggenauer shouted. The Jobian acolyte stood with mace and shield raised, the Duchess Claudja behind him in a corner.

  The devil answered Heggenauer, and as Zeb and Tilda both turned to aim at where the voice now seemed to be coming from, they pointed their bows at each other for a moment.

  “Actually, I swore that me and mine would do you no harm. This is not harm, nor is it an attack.”

  Tilda ducked under Zeb’s crossbow and scooted around him, then put her back against his. Zeb noticed to absolutely no purpose that she smelled very nice right now. Balan’s voice continued to speak.

  “There is an aspect to the diabolic presence, I need not deny it, which has a unique effect on simple creatures. Humans among them. With only a little concentration on my part, people can be made to feel very strongly their most fundamental desires. Greed, hatred, envy and lust. And of course, most simply of all, hunger.”

  Nesha-tari shoved Amatesu away from her and sagged against the wall, arms held tight against her stomach and mouth locked in a grimace.

  “She is in pain,” the Duchess Claudja said from behind Heggenauer.

  “True, but pain is not always harm, is it, your Grace? Pain is useful. Pain is honest.”

  The voice had moved again, though Zeb stopped whipping his crossbow toward it every time as he was starting to feel like an idiot. Tilda dropped her bow altogether and drew two matching daggers from the sheaths under her forearms.

  Nesha-tari’s chest hitched and she stumbled forward, shoving Shikashe hard and sending the surprised samurai staggering sideways. She fell forward but caught herself on the edge of the table, and everyone in the room cringed. Nesha-tari’s spread fingers ended in claws that dug deeply into the oak, and there was tawny fur on the back of her hands and forearms. Her brown hair, still damp from washing, hung lankly in front of her face.

  “What the hell?” Tilda asked. Zeb wished she had found a different word.

  “You do not know?” Balan’s voice came from still another part of the room. “That hardly seems sporting. The lovely Nesha-tari never told you people of her lineage as a Lamia?”

  Zeb dropped his jaw, as the last several weeks he had spent in Nesha-tari’s company suddenly made complete sense to him. He knew just enough about the creatures known as lamias, from spook stories told across campfires if nothing else, to give serious consideration to turning his bow on the woman slumped against the end of the table.

  “What is a lamia?” Tilda whispered behind Zeb.

  “Monsters of high deserts and lonely plains,” he answered. “They lure men to their deaths, and eat them.”

  “Lure them how?” Tilda asked.

  “How would you?”

  A deep, resonating growl emerged from Nesha-tari. The table she leaned on toppled to its side as though her weight had suddenly increased, and as she hit the floor on all fours she was no longer wholly a woman, though neither was she fully something else. Her clothing strained at the seams as her limbs and torso elongated. Thick, tawny fur sprang from every inch of her exposed skin. She crouched cat-like on four thick paws, and when she raised her head to release a deafening roar it came out of a muzzle framed by long whiskers. Only her eyes, still of the deepest blue, remained unchanged.

  Even Shikashe and Amatesu sprang away from her and put their backs to the walls, the samurai’s sword and the shukenja’s club warding away the great half-feline beast. A spark flashed on the floor in front of Nesha-tari and suddenly Balan was there, kneeling right in front of her with his red eyes looking into her blue ones.

  “Nesha-tari,” Balan spoke in a soft whisper. “You do not have to fight what you are. Not here, and not with me.”

  The big cat’s ears twitched, and Nesha-tari’s fanged maw hung open. The devil reached out slowly and gently scratched the side of her head.

  “You can not stay with these monkeys, they will not allow it. Not now that they have seen you for what you are. Stay here, with us, Nesha-tari. We are of a kind.”

  Zeb was staring, everyone was staring, with the exception of Kendall Heggenauer. The armored Jobian took several running steps and lunged, dropping his mace to hang from his wrist, bracing both arms and a strong shoulder behind his shield.

  Balan looked up to see Jobe’s holy symbol bearing down on him and before he could move or disappear, Heggenauer crashed into him as though fired from a ballista. The devil lord reeled and slammed into a wall, as Heggenauer leaped to his feet and raised his mace, white light blooming from its head.

  “She is with us, devil,” Heggenauer said calmly. “Sell your lies to another.”

  The great beast that had been Nesha-tari cringed back as Balan’s focus came off her, nails scratching on the floor as the cat reeled back on its hind legs, which were suddenly human legs. She was a woman again, tripping over the overturned table and falling toward the floor. Shikashe and Amatesu came together to catch her by the shoulders. Balan righted himself, and glared at Heggenauer.

  “You godlings are the same everywhere, aren’t you?” the devil sneered. “Nesha-tari, explain to this dolt the way of the world, will you?”

  Nesha-tari shoved herself away from Shikashe and Amatesu, growling again though it was now with a human voice. The blue lightning bloomed in her hands and she threw her tanned arms forward, split sleeves hanging off them in tatters, and unleashed arcs of crackling blue fire across the room, into Balan.

  The devil was lifted off his foot and hoof, and Zeb and Tilda flattened to the ground as the creature was blown across the wall above them, rolling and screeching. Balan slammed into a corner and fell to the ground in a smoking heap. The smell of bad barbeque filled the room so thickly that Zeb nearly gagged.

  “Ouch,” Balan muttered, lying on his neck and shoulders with his legs sticking up against the wall. He groaned and rolled to his side, then pushed himself up to a seat. A hole had been blown in the clothing on his chest and the jagged edge of coat, vest, and shirt were all smoldering. The gray skin beneath was blackened like a piece of meat fallen off a spit into the fire. He coughed, and a puff of smoke came out of his mouth.

  Nesha-tari stood glaring, her own tattered clothes hanging so she had to hold the trousers up with a hand. Blue fire still danced in her other palm.

  “Where is the Wizard?” she hissed.

  “And J-John Deskata,” Tilda added, almost getting it out without stammering.

  One of Balan’s arms hung limp at his side, but the devil pointed back into the tower entryway with the other.

  “First set of double doors on the left. Long hall through the wing, then another set of doors into the central tower. They are both in there.”

  The lightning in Nesha-tari’s hand rose in intensity, and Balan shook his head.

  “You chose badly, Kitty,” he said, then rolled on the floor and disappeared.