Tales from the Void: A Space Fantasy Anthology

by Chris Fox

  I opened my eyes in time to see a tentacle whip between the bars of the containment vessel. A calcified spike on its tip plunged into the Eldwyr sorcerer’s chest and burst through her spine. Her face froze into a rictus of agony as the creature whipped its tentacle left and right, pulping her impaled body against the hold’s walls.

  The rich, metallic perfume of the blood drying on my face cut through the rotten egg stench of sulfur clawing at my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe, much less think. In a few more seconds the demon would get bored with splattering the sorceress around the shadowship’s hold, and then it was going to break free of its cage and kill the rest of us.

  “Do something,” the shorter of the two remaining hellbinders whimpered at me. “Anything.”

  I seriously considered doing nothing. I’d spent my whole life in the shadow of the Eldwyr, and I was sick of the pointy-eared bastards calling the shots. I was tired of the rules and regulations that they’d wrapped so tightly around humans that it felt like we could only breathe when they allowed it. I was tired of scrabbling for copper pieces to keep my family business from sinking into a sea of red ink, while they regulated us out of business and took all the best jobs for themselves.

  I was just so fucking tired.

  The demon dropped the sorceress at my feet with a meaty thud. Blood splattered my boots, and the stench of ruptured bowels enveloped me in a choking cloud. I realized I wasn’t quite tired enough to lay down and die.

  Not yet.

  The demon’s tentacle began to smoke as the wards pushed back against its infernal presence, forcing the creature to reel its appendage back into the cage. The damned creature would gather its strength and break free of its bonds again, very soon, but I had a few seconds to act before it could take another shot at us.

  I hopped over the shattered corpse of the sorceress and skimmed the binding tome. It was a beautiful book with gold leaf on the edges of the pages, embossed seals on its corners, and flawless Enochian calligraphy on every page. It was also filled with boilerplate bullshit that didn’t matter one bit when an infernal beastie was trying to eat my face. All I really needed was the demon’s name, which was written in big Eldwyr letters right in the middle of the page.

  A slimy tentacle whipped a trio of coils around a surviving hellbinder’s neck. The demon glared at me, flexed its limb, and popped the Eldwyr’s head like a juicy pimple.

  It was so much stronger than it was supposed to be. Class VII, maybe even as high as IX. Being so close to such a powerful infernal filled my head with a chorus of screams backed by an off-key carillon’s erratic chiming. Images of my body, broken and defiled in a hundred dead ways, flashed through my skull and froze me in place.

  The demon’s tentacle slithered around my neck and caressed my forehead with its deadly tip. My pulse pounded in my ears, and a wet fist squeezed my brain in its relentless grasp. My eyes met the demon’s, and it licked its lips with a foot-long tongue.

  “Hey,” I said and choked out the demon’s True Name in a series of syllables so torturous it made my tongue ache. “Get the fuck outta here.”

  All 13 of the demon’s eyes locked on me as a connection sprang to life between us. Using a creature’s True Name is dangerous, and if there’d been any other way to get rid of the monster, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. It knew me now.

  One day, maybe not today, or tomorrow, or next year, but one day, it would come for me.

  With a tortured hiss, the demon faded from view. A cloud of royal purple smoke filled the vessel. When it dissipated, the demon was gone.

  The adrenaline coursing through my bloodstream dragged its claws across my nerves as it crawled back into the folds of the reptilian part of my brain concerned with survival. My hands clutched the pedestal until my knuckles cracked. It hurt, but I wasn’t letting go until I was positive my legs weren’t going to give out on me. This day was shitty enough, what with the wasted time and the not getting paid for almost dying. Collapsing into a pile of Eldwyr guts wasn’t going to make it any better.

  The last surviving hellbinder piped up. “Step away from the tome.”

  My brain couldn’t register what he was telling me. I’d just saved his life, prevented a demon from rampaging loose through the shadowport, and saved his clients’ shadowship from being destroyed in the process.

  What right did he have to order me to do anything?

  “This book?” I asked. I coiled the silver chain that held it to the pedestal around my fingers and snapped it with a vicious tug. The book was thick, but it fit under my left arm well enough. I turned and picked up the Infernal Inhibitor with my right hand and slung its strap over my shoulder.

  “Put it down.” The Eldwyr hellbinder’s voice was high and tight with stress. For once in his life, a human was telling him to shove it up his ass. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “It is the property of the Ulfweth Cabal. Removing it will result in a fine of—”

  He’d moved to intercept me at the hold’s exit door. The Eldwyr are all tall. Most adults stand nearly seven feet tall, closer to eight if counting the tapered points of their ridiculous ears. At five feet tall, I didn’t even reach the bastard’s shoulder.

  My temper adds a couple of feet, though. I stared into the willowy elf’s amethyst eyes and gave the shocked hellbinder my best shark’s grin. “Write me a ticket, if you want, but I’m taking the book. If you want it back, try and take it.”

  He hesitated, just for a moment, and then slid out of my way. “I won’t forget this.”

  “Neither will I,” I snarled as I stormed out of the hold.

  My father didn't even look up when I crashed through the front door of our apartment. He was hunched over his workbench, the elemental scope from an occulizer spread out before him like the body of a gigantic dissected insect. “Dad,” I started, but he cut me off with one raised finger. He fiddled with something for a moment before pushing the heels of his hands against his forehead in frustration. He motioned for me to join him at the workbench.

  “I need to finish this for a customer,” he said, eyes enormous behind his magnifying lenses. “I made some nice adjustments. He should be willing to pay extra for the fine-tuning I’ve done. But I have to deliver it by sundown.”

  “Forget about that,” I said, irritated at my father's pursuit of copper crescents over gold royals. He was an extraordinarily talented occultech wizard who undervalued his services and promised far too much for the paltry fees he charged his deadbeat customers. “Who is this for? One of the scavengers?”

  He glanced down at the binding tome hanging from my hip by its chain and sniffed the air. “You smell of sulfur. Anyway, they find some good stuff out there in the Eragal Ruins. They’ve agreed to cut me in on the next find they make if I sell them the gear at a reduced rate.”

  “They’ll never come back, dad. You’re giving them—”

  He retrieved a heavy metal sighting tube from the workbench and pressed it into my hand. “Hold this steady, please.”

  I braced my elbow against the top of the workbench and cradled the weighty cylinder in my palm. “I’ve got a lead on a job. There’s a Duarg crew that needs help binding their engine. Last crew botched the ritual, and the goats have to be in the wind by tomorrow morning. I figured we could—”

  “Just like that,” he murmured and eased the assembly cage into the cylinder’s mouth. A tiny lightning elemental shivered inside the cage and tried to get my attention with its oversized eyes and pathetic whimpers. It stretched its arms toward me in a reasonable imitation of an infant reaching for its mother, but I ignored the act.

  Elementals aren't even real, not the way you and I are, but sometimes it's hard to remember that. The creature’s puppy dog eyes were almost as distracting as the pile of red-stained billing scrolls cluttering the far corner of my father’s workbench.

  The Eldwyr’s job could have wiped out the debts on those scrolls in one shot. My family would be clear, and the business could afford to advertise. We
could get some flyers up in the shadowport, lure in some offworlders with real coins to spend. For once, we wouldn’t be scrambling to put food on the table and a roof over our heads.

  But because the elves had screwed the pooch and gotten two-thirds of their crew soulnapped, I was grasping at straws and trying to get my father to understand how badly we needed to convince the Duarg to let us bind their engine.

  “Dad, listen. The Duarg need to get their engines bound before midnight, or they’ll have to pay someone to find another demon they can go after tomorrow. They're in a bad spot because the Eldwyr crew they hired screwed everything up. If you come with me, we can get the contract and collect a nice fee for binding a demon into their Infernal Engine.”

  My father said nothing. He kept his head bent low and focused intently on a trio of screws that held the assembly in place. With minute adjustments, he locked the module into its proper position. One revolution of the top screw, one for the left screw, one for the right. The tiny machined screws turned without a sound, their brass threads meshing perfectly with the cylinder's copper body. It took a delicate hand to tighten them enough to keep the sight’s guts from shifting without stripping the soft metal threads in the process.

  My father was the most gifted occultech wizard I’d ever met. Everyone told him that. He had the kind of skills the Eldwyr could never match with their reliance on old-school sorcery. And, yet, here we were, in a rundown tenement apartment in a human slum on the bad side of the Durotan shadowport, without two coins to rub together.

  “Please, we don't have very much time. The Duarg will hire another crew soon.” I took a deep breath and fired off the secret weapon I hoped would sway my father’s opinion. “I even have the demon’s name. It’ll be a cakewalk.”

  My father made one last adjustment before he straightened up to face me. “We're doing fine. We don't need to take binding jobs, and we certainly don't need to be messing around with True Names. That's a good way to end up with your spirit tied to a demon’s tail, you know that.”

  My father was pushing me past the point of simple exasperation. He was too proud to admit how bad our finances were and too arrogant to ever listen to his daughter. In his eyes, I was still his child, not his partner.

  “I banished it,” I said, puffing my chest out with pride. “Chucked it straight back to hell while it was slaughtering Eldwyr all around. I'm stronger than you think, dad. You're stronger, too.”

  My mother puttered through the room, her hand brushing my father's shoulder, her lips brushing my forehead as she passed between us on her way to the kitchen. “Don't fight. It gives me a headache.”

  My father took the sighting tube from my hand and snapped it into place. The detector looked a lot like a telescope, but it was far more powerful than a mere magnifying lens. It could be tuned to locate any number of metals, and in the right hands it could even pick up magical auras.

  The scavengers loved those things. What none of them seem to understand, though, was that the old ruins and dungeons were so picked over there was nothing left for them to find. The tattered carcass of the Eragal Empire had been stripped bare by generations of scavengers and off-world looters. There was nothing left for today’s batch of treasure hunters, which meant there was nothing left for people like my father and me who’d specialized in selling equipment to those treasure hunters.

  We needed this job. “Dad, let's just do this. We can be back before dinner.”

  He stared down the length of the device, focusing it on the space to the left of my head. “I can see it on you, you know. The demon’s name. Like a smudge on a mirror. Not everything has to be about money.”

  “If we do this job, if we do good on it, then they'll bring their business to us, not the Eldwyr. Don't you want that?” His face remained as impassive as stone. My words bounced off his stubbornness, pushing my frustration into the red.

  “Demons and Duarg, what's next?” My father shook his head and glanced at the stolen binding tome on my hip. “Finding donors for the Bloodline?”

  My mother hissed a silent curse from the kitchen, and a heavy pan banged down on the old elemental stove’s cast iron burner. I glared at my father’s insinuation that I was doing business with monsters so vile their very name caused fear.

  The Eldwyr had very strict rules about the kinds of magic occultech witches were allowed to practice. No blood magic, no curses more powerful than a hex, and no skinriding. But they didn’t give a rat’s ass who we sold our skills to. My father, on the other hand, had a list of rules as long as his arm about the kinds of clients we should take, and what we should do for them.

  The Duarg were on my father’s naughty list.

  Which aggravated the hell out of me. Their gold spent the same as anyone else’s. “You know better than that. The Duarg aren’t part of the Bloodline. The beastkin have a ship that needs a demon so they can get the hell off Durotan. What’s evil about helping them with the binding?”

  My father shook his head, and his expression made me feel like I was six years old and just learning that it wasn’t nice to zap the wings off flies with my magic. “If you don't understand why this is a bad idea, there's not much I can do to change your mind.”

  “Come with me.” I paced the warped wooden floorboards of my father’s workshop, which the previous tenants had used as a living room. We’d had to move out of our home a few months back because the Eldwyr had reclaimed the land for their heritage forests. Now, the three of us were trapped in a tiny box of an apartment, with no room to think, much less do any real work, and suddenly it was all too much for me to bear.

  “Nevermind,” I said, and stormed out of the apartment.

  The Duarg smelled like the inside of a kennel. There were two of them, and one of me crammed into a small booth in the best noodle shop in the whole city. I watched them slurp a mixture of egg noodles, spicy fried chicken, soft-boiled eggs, and slivered vegetables while I sat on my hands and pretended my stomach wasn't growling. I vowed to come back and have three bowls of whatever they were eating if I nailed this contract.

  “I can do this,” I said, doing my best to project the same kind of calm assurance that my father exuded when dealing with his customers. Of course, he spent most of his time talking to sun-addled scavengers with peeling mageburns around their eyes and not enormous beastkin who stared at humans like we were tasty treats. “I'm not like the Eldwyr, I have a better plan.”

  The Duarg eyeballed each other over their bowls of soup and muttered to one another in their guttural language of clipped consonants and wheezing vowels. The shorter one eyed me like he was trying to decide whether I’d taste better baked or fried, then shrugged. Though his horns brushed the restaurant’s low-ceiling, he didn’t have to hunch down into his shoulders like his boss.

  The leader adjusted himself in his seat, crushing me against his partner. “500 gold,” he said in thickly accented Common tongue.

  I frowned and chewed on the inside of my lip like he’d offered me far too little. The truth was, I'd showed up expecting half that, and their opening bid had knocked me off balance. It was time for Grace to bluff. “Seems…low.”

  They muttered some more, then the big one rapped his gnarled knuckles on the table hard enough to slosh broth from the bowl of noodles in front of him. “The Eldwyr took most of our funds for the failed attempt. They claim there’s something wrong with the Infernal Engine on our shadowship, threatened to fine us into bankruptcy if we went after the Ulfweth Cabal for a refund. They also claim you might have screwed up the ritual. Five hundred’s all I've got to offer.”

  I pretended to mull his offer over. Eldwyr patrons watched our negotiations with jewel-colored eyes. Their pointed ears twitched as they strained to overhear my conversation with the Duarg. Word must already have spread about what had happened aboard the goats’ shadowship. Word would spread even faster if I took this job.

  People might think I’d botched the first job, only to come back and steal it away from the U
lfweth. The weight of rumor and innuendo would haunt my career for a long, long time. The Eldwyr have extraordinarily long lives.

  They hold grudges for even longer.

  Crushed between the Duarg’s massive shoulders, drowning in their primal stink, hunger gnawing at my belly, I couldn’t tell if this was a good idea any longer. Sure, the money was much better than what the Eldwyr had offered but accepting it was going to tangle me up in the mess of social and business connections that made Eldwyr society so difficult to navigate for puny humans like me.

  Finally, I gave up and bit down on the hook the Duarg had offered. “I'll do it. 500 gold royals, delivered on completion of the binding.”

  The Eldwyr watching me from around the noodle shop frowned at my words. I guess they could hear me after all. Maybe those big old ears weren’t just for looks.

  Fuck you, I thought to myself. I was tired of everyone telling me what to do and what not to do. I needed the money, my family needed the money, and I wasn’t going to let the elves scare me out of taking an honest job.

  The Duarg muttered again, then raised their bowls and drained them in a series of gulping slurps. They banged their clay vessels on the table, tossed a fistful of silver pieces onto its rough, scarred surface, and then shoved back from their chairs. The table wobbled, and I clutched it to keep it from tumbling to the floor. That seemed to amuse the Duarg, and they curled their lips and brayed with laughter.

  “Come on,” the big one said, “let's get this over with.”

  Binding demons is one of those things that doesn't get easier with practice. The problem with infernals is that they're all sneaky little bastards who want nothing more than to get their hooks into your soul so they can take your skin for a joyride around the block. Some of them aren't too bad, they only want to see what it’s like for mortals to eat or fuck or fight. Some of them are serial killing psychos who want to use your body to run riot and see how many scalps they can rack up before a sorcerer with big enough balls shows up to send them back to hell. The only predictable thing about demons is that they’re all uniquely unpredictable.