by Chris Fox
All that is a fancy way of saying that binding demons isn't a great case study for the awesome power of occultech. Sure, I can build a gun that will shoot the same bolt of ice every time you pull the trigger. My dad can put together awesome detecting scopes that can help you find anything. Occultech works flawlessly and repeatedly, performing magical tasks for those who can't cast spells themselves.
But when it comes to demons, occultech witches really only have two options.
The first option is to build a special cage with the binding ritual built into it. If my father had come along for this trip, we’d have spent a few hours building a cage so tough even a Class VI demon would have a hard time busting loose. That was what I wanted to do because it carried the least risk to my life, limbs, and sanity.
But, since my dad was busy building a detector for a scavenger who wanted to pay him in proceeds from a treasure hunt, that option was off the table.
The second option, the one that really kind of sucks, is using True Name magic to bind the demon. In terms of demonic contact, banishing a demon with its True Name is like a quick peck on the cheek. Quick, clean, almost no risk of picking up a nasty soul infection or getting your aura tainted.
But if you’re going to bind a demon, you have to really get personal. Using its True Name to do that is the equivalent of unprotected sex with a one-night stand sporting a nasty fever blister. It’s risky, and there’s almost no way to pull it off without getting a little dirty in the process.
I tried to scrub that image out of my head as the Duarg led me back into the engine vault of their ship, the Naglfar. Now that I was running the whole show on my own, I took a few seconds to get a better idea of what I was dealing with.
The shadowship’s engine vault was as old-school and chunky as the exterior of the ship was sleek and polished. The Duarg had settled on a rustic dungeon theme, with plenty of un-worked stone, wood timbers, and the all-important braziers filled with magical coals that always smoldered, but never quite burst into flame. It was hot, cramped, and had the thick, musty scent of an animal’s cage.
“Going to need some space,” I told the Duarg, gesturing for them to back away from me so I could get to work. The beastkin have a tendency to crowd in when something intrigues them, and I didn't need to be pushing back against a thousand pounds of curious muscle at the same time that I was trying to bind the most powerful demon I'd ever seen.
A demon, by the way, that really, really wanted to kill me because I’d banished it back to hell just when it was ready to make a break for it.
On the plus side of this equation, the engine vault was sturdy. Whoever had constructed the infernal engine knew what they were doing, even if the Eldwyr had screwed up the binding ritual and almost gotten everyone killed. As long as I stuck to basic principles, I’d be fine.
I hoped.
Occultech witches and wizards do a lot of binding rituals. Because our tools are used by those without any magical mojo of their own, they require arcane power sources. We typically bind tiny elementals for that purpose. The process is simple: call something up, tie it up in a box, and bingo bango bongo, you have a slave forever.
Elementals don't mind eternal captivity so much, because they have tiny little brains that have a hard time with any concept more complex than “Oooh, shiny!”
Demons, on the other hand, are assholes who are every bit as smart as the mortals who summon them. They also hold grudges for as long as they live, which, as you may know, is essentially forever.
I took one more look at the binding vessel in the center of the engine vault to make sure I understood how it worked and where I needed to direct my attention, and then I started doing the dumbest thing I'd ever done.
The chanting began as a low rumble in my chest that worked its way up to the sound of rattling bones in my throat, before bursting from my mouth like an avalanche of icy boulders. The demon's True Name bounced off my tongue and hung in the air like the shivering aura of a high-voltage electric line in a thunderstorm. The binding vessel rattled in its mounts, and the thaumaturgical circuitry surrounding it sizzled with unwholesome life. A small spiral of smoke churned across the binding vessel's floor. Through the silver bars, I could just make out a pair of eyes growing wider as the smoke spiral lengthened and stretched toward the ceiling. The demon’s attention fell on me, and I felt a chill of recognition pass between us. It knew what I'd done, and it knew who it was that was calling it.
And it hated me for what I’d done and what I was doing.
“You can't deny the summons, Mr. Peepers,” I intoned, shortening the demon’s true name to something more conversational. “Delaying your appearance will only make the inevitable more painful for you.”
The demon's voice rattled with a sound like crunching bones, which I realized was its idea of laughter. “Are you sure this is what you want, child? This binding vessel wasn't enough to hold me for the Eldwyr, what makes you think it will be any different now?”
“You might as well come on through, Mr. Peepers, because I'm not going to stop ringing your bell until you get here.” I tapped the binding tome on my hip. “And I’ve got your name, so dicking me around won’t change anything.”
Another trio of eyes appeared above the first pair, followed by five more above them, and then three more on top of those. Those thirteen eyes told me that my new friend wasn’t just a power source; he had the Vision to see through the shadowpaths, which made him a very valuable combination of turbo-charged engine and universal navigator.
No wonder the Duarg were so pissed the Eldwyr had botched the summoning. Mr. Peepers was a rare prize, indeed.
The demon materialized through a cloud of purple smoke that drained down its legs and coiled on the floor around its clawed feet. All thirteen of its eyes glared at me, and a blistered tongue lapped across its lips. “Do you feel it? Do you feel the mistake the pale ones made?”
The part that sucks is I did feel it. There was an infinitesimal gap in the binding circuit, a tiny hole invisible to the naked eye and all but undetectable until something started pressing on it from inside the barrier. A faint whiff of sulfur leaked through the gap and tickled my nostrils.
Even with its True Name burned into my thoughts, the demon might be too powerful for the flawed vessel. I’d screwed up. There was only one way I knew to complete the binding, now, and it was really going to suck.
“You don't want me to do this,” I said to the demon. “It won’t be good for either of us.”
Mr. Peepers chuckled, his voice low and guttural. “What makes you think I care about you, mortal?”
It slammed its body into the binding bars so hard the whole ship rocked on its support struts. The Duarg threw a flurry of superstitious hand gestures in my direction and bailed out of the engine vault so fast it was a miracle they didn’t trip over each other. They’d seen what happened to the Eldwyr when the last ritual went off the rails and didn’t want any part of this new problem.
The flaw in the binding vessel ached in my mind like a broken bone. I could feel it throbbing through the binding ritual, and the distraction was starting to get to me. I needed to convince the demon to play nice, or I’d have to try and mend the vessel on the fly. The results of that kind of work would be nasty, to say the least.
“I'm serious. If I do this, the binding is gonna suck much worse for you than if you just swear an oath to behave.”
“You're the one who doesn't want to do this, mortal.” The demon threw its head back and laughed at my predicament. “I'm already angry. Let me go, now, and I’ll end your life quickly. But if you go through with your ill-considered plan, you will suffer in ways you cannot even imagine. I'll kill you, your family, everyone you've ever cared for or who’s cared for you. I will cart all of your souls to Hell and pass you around like party favors to the most depraved demons of the shadowed depths. When we're through with your souls, there won't be enough left —”
“Okay, Mr. Peepers, that's enough of your bulls
hit for today.” I was losing my nerve, and the demon's threats were working better than I wanted to admit. “I command you by the sign and the seal. I command you by the powers that were, and that will be. I command you by your given name,” I said, then spat out the whole collection of damned painful syllables with such force that they split my lips and bloodied my nose on their way out. “I bind you to this plane, I bind you to this vessel, and I bind you to the shadowship in which you now stand. Until you are released by me or mine, this is your home, and you will do as you are bidden.”
“There is a flaw,” the demon howled, triumphantly. “You fool!”
I drew the ritual knife from the worn scabbard on my right hip and slashed it across my left palm. Blood drooled from the splayed lips of the new wound, thick and ruby red against the weathered skin of my hand. “I seal this vessel with my blood and soul.”
I slapped my hand down on the vessel’s foundations, and a jolt of raw, cold power raced through my body. The tiny gap in the pattern vanished with a sizzle.
The demon screamed, and its eyes burned into me with a terrifying ferocity. Using my blood broke all kinds of Eldwyr rules about human magic use, but I didn’t care.
What I did care about was how my blood had trapped part of the demon in the sigils surrounding the vessel. It would spend the rest of its time in the plane of mortals with a supernatural bear trap locked around its ankle. I’d turned what would have been an unpleasant term of service into decades of torture.
I had no doubt the demon would one day make good on its promise to drag me and mine to hell.
One day, it might get a chance.
But not that day.
My legs were shaking, and my stomach felt like someone had filled it with a carton of rusty razor blades, but I’d done it. Mr. Peepers was tied up tight, and he wasn't going anywhere unless someone was stupid enough to release him or the ship met an unfortunate end at the hands of powers greater than mine. I turned away from the cage, took a deep breath, and headed for the door. It was time to see the Duarg about my hard-earned sack of gold coins.
But the door to the engine vault was closed. Unable to comprehend what I was seeing, I took a step forward and grabbed the handle.
It didn’t budge. The handle wouldn’t turn, and the heavy wood didn’t even shift when I threw my weight against it.
The beastkin bastards had locked me inside their engine vault with a demon.
A demon I’d just bound using a combination of its True Name and my blood, a fact which was still sinking in for both of us. The creature glared at me as it screamed, and its tortured voice pried at the hardened scales around my heart. He was a demon, sure, but it had feelings. Mr. Peepers understood what I'd done to him, and he hated me for it.
Can't say that I blamed it, really. I’d just turned an immortal lord of hell into the supernatural equivalent of a jet motor and a navigation system.
No wonder he was pissed.
“You're an idiot,” it rasped through clenched teeth. “What made you think the Duarg would pay you after you'd bound me?”
When he put it like that, I did sound like kind of a dumbass. A twenty-something-year-old witch operating on the shady side of the local law goes off with a pair of beastkin to complete a binding ritual. What could go wrong?
It was exactly the kind of story that ended with, “And then she was kidnapped and sold into slavery on the other side of the universe.”
But I wasn't going to let Mr. Peepers see that he’d rattled me by pointing out the obvious. “Shut up. I’m trying to figure out how to get out of here.” In addition to being quite serviceable as a container for the demon and its binding vessel, the Naglfar’s engine vault was a hell of a makeshift prison.
The demon coiled its tentacles around the bars of its prison and leaned its face through a gap between them. “Break the binding. I'll kill them after I kill you. I promise you I will see you avenged. I won’t even claim your soul.”
For a moment, I considered the demon's offer. Dying was the easiest way for me to get out of the mess of a life I was trapped in. Sure, Mr. Peepers was going to kill me, but at least the Duarg would get what they'd earned, and I wouldn’t have to listen to my father’s interminable lecture about why binding rituals using True Names and blood magic were very, very bad. If I were lucky, I’d spend an eternity in the cold black nothing, waiting for the wheel to turn and a new cycle of life to begin.
Tempting as the easy way out was, it didn't solve any of my real problems. I'd be dead. The Eldwyr would still be making human life miserable. My parents would still be caught in an endless struggle to make ends meet. Without me around, they’d probably get screwed by the Eldwyr again and end up out on the streets. I couldn’t let that happen.
“I’ve got a better idea. How about you shut the fuck up and let me figure out how to solve this problem.”
Mr. Peepers laughed, a chilling sound in its own right made even more terrifying by the agonizing pain pinching its every breath. Maybe it was just the blood magic talking, but I could feel a shadow of the demon’s agony.
A flicker of guilt crossed my thoughts. Was every binding this painful?
The ship rattled around me and then swayed side to side. The Duarg had what they needed, and now they were leaving Durotan. Taking me with them.
“I'm going to kill every beastkin I find when I get out of here,” I vowed. “I'm going to peel their hairy asses like grapes—”
“Sounds familiar.” The demon chortled and scrubbed its tentacles together. It shivered as another wave of pain passed through the simian torso. “I’d be more imaginative, though.”
I grumbled at that and then leaned back against the wall. “It's just a job,” I said.
“That's what we all say,” the demon responded with a shrug. “I mean, it's whatever, right?”
“You're still going to kill me if you get a chance?”
The demon smiled, and its thirteen eyes showed me a glimpse into the tortures waiting for me in Hell. “It's just business. You know what a binder's soul is worth down there?”
I tried not to imagine. Summoning demons into servitude had been going on for thousands of years. The Eldwyr were the undisputed masters of trafficking in demons, but occultech had caught on quick in the human colonies over the last century or two. Now there were small demons chained up in most wealthy estates, and every shadowship had at least one infernal engine with a demon locked up in its belly. The old magic might be more powerful, but occultech had revolutionized the universe.
“You started it,” I said reminding the demon that humans hadn't begun torturing his kind until millennia after we'd been on the other end of the pitchfork.
“Killing the Duarg won't solve your problem, anyway,” the demon mused. It seemed to have gotten a better handle on the pain coursing through his body, but it wasn't comfortable by any stretch of the imagination. “Think about it, and you'll see that I'm right.”
I didn't have to think about it for very long. If I killed my treacherous employers and went back home, someone would eventually come looking for the shadowship. It was too nice, too new, and far too expensive for the goats to have paid for it on their own. Which meant they were glorified delivery boys and someone was going to come looking for this ship if it didn’t show up on time. Bringing the ship back to Durotan would lead some very bad people right to my doorstep.
So, killing the Duarg and running back home was out of the question.
But so was killing them and stealing the ship. Again, I’d have the problem of a missing, very expensive shadowship, someone pissed off about it, and a whole bunch of Eldwyr who would know that I was probably the one who'd bound the demon in the first place. Then they'd all end up back at my apartment holding my parents hostage or torturing them for shits and giggles until I was forced to return home and face the music for what I’d done.
Neither option was very sunny, and both left me with a much worse situation than I'd started in.
“You're k
ind of an asshole, Mr. Peepers,” I said. “But thanks for pointing out the hole in my plan. And for telling me just how fucked my future is.”
The demon shrugged. “I feel the same about you, witch. But, I want to be the one who kills you. So, at least for the time being, it's in my best interest to not let you make stupid mistakes that might let someone else put a stake through your heart.”
With that cheery thought in mind, I turned my attention back to the ship's internal workings. Breaking out of the engine vault was impossible. The door was impervious to any attack I could muster, and I didn’t know the spells necessary to escape by teleporting myself out of the ship. If I was going to save myself, I had to do it with whatever I could find in the engine vault.
Two hours later, with the ship drifting through the void of space, I found what I was looking for. The mistake the Eldwyr had made was piercing the binding circle with the ship’s grounding rod.
Shadowships need grounding rods to carry excess magical energy away from the Infernal Engine. If a demon tried to use spells from inside the binding vessel, or if it drew too much hellforce, it could damage the binding vessel or the engines. The grounding rod carries away any excess power, flushing it through the shadowship’s hull and armor and into the void of space.
My blood had healed the flaw in the circle, but the grounding rod was still there and still functioning.
The rod ran through the hull, and its other tip was outside the shadowship.
“There's a third option you haven't considered, my fine infernal friend,” I told Mr. Peepers. “I'll give you three guesses what it is.”
I kneeled next to the grounding rod and pulled my toolkit off my belt. The kit itself was simple and basically useless in the hands of anyone who wasn't an occultech technician. I found the piece of copper wire I was looking for in the kit’s storage compartment and looped the thin strand twice around the nub of exposed silver grounding rod.
