Curse of the Daemon Beast

by Francis James Blair

  Still, no reason to make a bad situation worse. “I don’t think your da would like us talking like this.”

  “Good thing he ain’t here then. ‘Sides, nobody tells me who or what I can talk ‘bout.” Ruth puffed up as she spoke. She looked a different person from the girl who had cowered before her father at the dinner table.

  No harm in telling her the basics, I suppose, Temperance mused. Besides, after what happened earlier, I feel like I owe her something.

  “I suppose if you really want to know . . . how much did they teach you about natural physik in school?”

  “Like fixing bones and stuff?”

  “No, that’s medical physik. Natural physik has to do with how the world works.”

  Ruth frowned and shook her head. “Mister Hander never talked ‘bout nothing like that.”

  “Probably for the best. Not sure how I would explain that part anyway. My education on the subject was rather, ah, unique.”

  Just like that, Temperance was seven again, back in the training house. Her grandfather stood before a chalkboard, making her recite the basics until she committed them to memory.

  “Repeat after me,” James said. “First, transference energy, source of all movement.” He wrote the word on the board, followed by another.

  “Primordial energy, source of all heat.” His fingers moved to the next line.

  “Vital energy, source of all form.” He turned, expression stern as always. “Twelve sources of energy in all, but these are the three most important, the building blocks of everything you will ever accomplish. Learn the secrets of these three, and nothing shall ever seem impossible again.”

  Temperance leaned down and picked up a flat stone. “There’s power flowing all around us, in lots of different ways. Magick is just learning how to make the power do what you want it to.”

  Her grandfather echoed in her head again. “There is no mystery to sorcery. It is merely using the laws of nature to produce the energy that achieves your desired result.”

  “Let’s say I want to make this stone float in the air. First I need something to channel power under it.” She used her chalk to scrawl a rough rune on one side of the rock.

  “Of course, you can’t create energy, only change it. So you need a second energy source to draw from.”

  “All power has a cost, though.” Ruth let out a little gasp, and Temperance quickly waved her hands. “Not anything bad! In this case, I’ll have the spell draw heat from the stone itself in exchange for the power we need.”

  She drew a second rune on the bottom of the stone, and handed it to Ruth. The other girl stared down at her hands like she had picked up a live snake.

  “Why ain’t it doing nothing?” she asked.

  “Spell’s still not complete. All sorcery needs three parts—runes, reagents, and words of power.” Temperance patted her pockets and came back with several blades of dry prairie grass. “There, that should do for our reagent.”

  “Everything that lives and dies has affinities to different forms of energy. Some have more than one, and some affinities are stronger than others. A skilled sorcerer is recognizable not only by the spells he has memorized, but also what reagents he draws from the world.”

  She took the stone back. Pressing the grass to one side she held it before her.

  “Tavolar!” No sooner had Temperance spoken than the stone jumped from her hand, flew a yard or two into the air, then plummeted back towards the earth. She caught it with a quick snap of her wrist and handed it to Ruth again.

  Ruth took the stone and nearly dropped it in her surprise. “It’s cold as winter snow!”

  The girl’s words brought a smile to Temperance’s lips. “That’s because the spell drained the heat from the rock itself. It’s the least efficient source, so most spells don’t use it.”

  “The same spell can take almost an unlimited number of different forms, depending on the combinations of energy and reagents the caster chooses from. However, some choices are clearly superior to others. That is why you will rarely find a hexbullet with a primordial draw rune. Too much risk of freezing your gun solid.”

  Temperance shook herself free of her memories and realized that Ruth was still talking. “Sorry, what was that last part?”

  “Oh, only that it’s a neat trick, but seems like it would be easier to just throw the stone.” Ruth trailed a finger across the rune-covered surface, studying each curve in the dim light.

  Another memory bubbled to the surface before Temperance was able to stop it. “Most important of all, Temperance, never forget that any magick—sorcery, hexbullets, or anything else—is only as powerful as the one that wields it. Magick is a tool, and like any tool it can useful in the right hands—or dangerous in the wrong ones.”

  She shook her head. Why had that particular speech come back to her now? “If you can throw that rock as fast and hard as my spell, I’d like to see it. Besides, that stone didn’t have much heat to it. If you left it out in the sun all day, I bet it would have flown from one side of the town to the other. Or I could have used a more powerful reagent, if I’d had the right items on me.”

  Ruth nodded at this and slipped the stone into her pocket. They sat in silence a minute.

  As Temperance made to rise and seek her bed, the other girl spoke. “Thanks for talking with me, Miss Alba, and for earlier this afternoon. Most everybody else ‘round her still treats me like a little kid. It’s nice to meet someone that ain’t always making me feel small.”

  “Please, call me Temperance.” She didn’t bother to point out that Ruth was only a year her younger. “We should get some sleep. I’ve been up too much these last few nights as it is.”

  They slipped back inside. Far in the distance, a mournful howl echoed off the mountain cliffs. Temperance paused to stare through the half-open doorway, watching for any movement. Then she let the door swing closed. Tomorrow would be another day, and somewhere out there the daemon—and answers—were waiting for her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Five Years Earlier

  When Temperance opened her eyes, all she saw was broken timber. At first she couldn’t remember what happened. Then the events came back to her in a rush; waking up late, her grandfather’s test, hiding underneath the training house. The floor—or more accurately, the ceiling—collapsing downward, flooding the tunnel with wood and other debris.

  For a panicked moment it appeared she might be trapped. When she tried to move her legs, they didn’t respond. She forced herself to take several deep breaths look again. Several large beams had fallen across her. They pressed against her but not painfully so. With a bit of wiggling she managed to free herself.

  The portion of the tunnel connecting to the training house had collapsed enough it was no longer passable. Temperance lay in the portion that stretched beyond the building, but it must have been a close thing.

  Now the surrounding air was thick and difficult to breathe.

  Dim light came from several fires burning beyond her reach among the broken timber. As Temperance watched, a torn tapestry that her grandfather had purchased from a traveling salesman burst into flames. The oily paints across its surface caused the flames to flicker in a pantheon of colors.

  She needed to get out of here, and quick. Already the smoke was making her cough. Temperance dropped to her belly and slithered along the hard-packed floor, working towards whatever lay at the other end of the pitch-black tunnel.

  The further she crawled, the better the air got. Soon she raised up to her hands and knees, then into a stooped walk. She kept one hand to either side of the tunnel to warn her of any twists, but the path continued straight as a train trestle.

  With painful suddenness, the tunnel ended. Temperance rubbed at her head, stars flashing before her eyes. When they subsided, she felt in front of her. Fingers caressed the paneling of a rough wooden door. Temperance located the knob and slipped inside.

  There was light here, but it was distant, a mere prick somewhere
above. She could just make out a ladder in front of her, steps carved out of the rock itself. She looked up, considering the distance, and repressed a shudder. Falling here would be a very bad idea.

  Another tremor shook the ground. Temperance swallowed and pushed down her fear. She needed to know what was going on out there. Maybe she could help.

  In the wake of everything that had happened this morning, that thought felt hollow and childish. Whatever her grandfather was fighting out there was worse than anything Temperance knew about.

  She ran a finger across one of the steps. They were damp, but the stone itself had good grip. Grabbing a rung, she pulled herself upward. A tingling sensation ran down from her gut to her toes. After a moment the sensation passed, and she pulled herself up another rung.

  Slowly, one tiny ledge at a time, the light above her grew closer. Once, Temperance made the mistake of glancing back down, but already the floor was far enough that it was lost to the darkness. Only an endless void of black waited for her below.

  She didn’t look down a second time.

  Her arms ached, and just holding on to the steps became a challenge. The light seemed to hover out of reach, stretching away with each ledge she conquered. Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes, but she blinked them away, more for fear they would impede her ability to climb than anything else.

  A muscle in her wrists twinged. Fingers released of their own accord, and for a terrifying second she hung over nothing, a white-knuckled grip with her other hand the only thing that saved her. She regained hold of the steps again, and this time did not let go no matter how much her body screamed at her.

  Then the top appeared, and with one last burst of terrified energy she pulled herself onto the waiting surface. As Temperance lay panting, she noticed she was on the floor of an empty shack, a lone window in one corner providing light through its smeared glass.

  Can’t stay here. Got to know what’s going on. Even her thoughts were tinged with exhaustion.

  She forced her muscles to work and pushed off the floor. Stumbling to the door she heaved it open. It gave surprisingly quick, the well-oiled hinges at odds with the ramshackle look compared to the rest of the building.

  Outside, a dusting of white lay over the rocky ground. Temperance must have climbed further than she thought if she reached the snow line. There were clusters of knobby pines growing up here, interspersed with a stringy bush for which she couldn’t recall the name.

  On the other side of the shack, the land cut away towards the valley.

  She was only a quarter-mile from the training house, although it would likely take over an hour to reach it since there were no obvious paths down the ridgeline. However, at the moment getting down was the last thing on her mind. She stood at the cliff’s edge and watched the valley below.

  The training house was in ruins, that came as little surprise. What caught her off guard were how many other buildings had been destroyed. Over half the homes and shops in Cold Valley were collapsed in on themselves, and most of the rest were actively burning. Several fields were also afire, and Temperance could hear the panicked bellows from the orak in their pens as the flames drew closer.

  No humans ran to help the livestock, or worked to pump water to put out the flames. What few forms she could make out below lay still, draped over fence-lines or face down in the road.

  Temperance spotted her grandfather, just a ways past the ruined training house. He stood back-to-back with three or four others, likely more of his apprentices. She couldn’t tell from here if her father was among them, but she thought she glimpsed his hat as the men twisted about.

  Surrounding the men were a half-dozen shapes. Temperance blinked and rubbed her eyes, wondering if she had hit her head in the tunnel. What she saw couldn’t be right.

  The shapes threatening her grandfather looked human, but were too tall by far, half again the size of the men in the circle. Beyond that, their similarities ended. One had arms so long they dragged along the ground, another a pair of horns on his head so large she wondered how it held its head up. Another had six arms, each holding a wicked-looking blade. Across from it, two more looked made of pure shadow, and as Temperance watched they flickered out of view for a moment before reappearing again.

  It was the one in the center though that held Temperance’s attention. Where the other creatures were merely large, this one was enormous beyond measure, tall enough it could have touched the top of the chimney on Temperance’s house. Its skin was dark and leathery, more like a bull than something human. Cloven feet pawed the earth, and its hands ended in knife-like claws, which the monster flexed before itself as if testing their sharpness. Out of its back burst a pair of wings, feathers as long as Temperance was tall, their tips tapered to a point like those of a hawk. These wings, however, were dark red. They reminded her of the last rays of sunlight on an autumn day. Or blood, half-dried and blackened with age.

  Temperance had been in a daze since first waking below, but the sight of the monster towering over her grandfather finally shocked her enough to get thoughts churning again. She knew what the creatures below were, even if she had never laid eyes on them before.

  Daemons.

  The big one managed a single step before James opened fire. The exact words of the spell faded over the distance, arriving at Temperance’s ears as a garbled shout. There was no missing the result, though.

  Something that looked like a horse made of pure blue flames burst from his gun. Temperance recognized it as steelfire, one of the most powerful hexbullets she knew of. It burned hot enough to melt just about anything. Even being near to it was enough to turn skin black in seconds, as one apprentice learned to his regret several years back.

  The steelfire horse circled the daemon three times in quick succession, then struck it square in the back, right where the outstretched wings connected to its shoulder blades. The daemon ignored the horse, not even flinching as it landed.

  Temperance drew in her breath and waited for the daemon to go up in smoke.

  It didn’t.

  Instead, the image of the horse wavered and broke apart, the fire composing it fading away. A moment later it was like it was never there at all.

  No. With a feeling of unearthly terror, she realized it hadn’t just faded away. The daemon drew the fire into itself somehow. The creature inhaled deeply and snorted, a small puff of blue flames escaping its nostrils. It launched itself forward.

  A scream bubbled onto Temperance’s lips. She lunged forward, almost over the cliff’s edge, trying to hold back the daemon by sheer will alone. Below her, the daemon struck—

  Dust and rock erupted around Temperance as shockwaves of opposing magickal force reached her cliff ledge. The strength of it picked her off the ground and flung her backwards into the trees. Something hard and unforgiving struck the back of her head, and everything went black.

  * * *

  Temperance awoke surrounded by broken branches. The trees themselves were nothing more than bare poles sticking from the earth, their limbs stripped away and laid beneath her now like a blanket to cushion her fall.

  She pushed away the few branches covering her and stood up. The sun had moved halfway across the sky since she first emerged from her grandfather’s tunnel. Whatever happened with the daemons was long passed by now.

  A quick glance over the cliff edge told her little. There were several forms laying in the clearing below, but she couldn’t tell if they were the remains of her grandfather’s enemies or his apprentices. Never once did it enter her head that her grandfather himself might be among them. Such a thing just wasn’t possible.

  It took two hours to find her way down to the valley, hobbling on stiff legs and using one of the tree branches to support herself. By the time she reached the remains of the town, her hands were covered in dozens of black spots from where pitch and dirt mixed together. There were even more on her clothes. A lesson from her mother about how to remove them played in the back of her head, but it
was a soft voice and Temperance couldn’t make out the words.

  Her mother. With everything else she had slipped from Temperance’s mind. Their house was clear on the other side of the valley, so perhaps she managed to flee when the daemons appeared.

  Temperance’s first instinct was to go straight there, find her mother, and fall sobbing into her arms. However, a more powerful need than a warm embrace ruled her at the moment. The idea of approaching the corpses in the clearing left ice in her gut, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until she saw them.

  The clearing appeared, and the bodies with it. Now that she was closer, she could see them for what they were. One was the remains of a daemon, a hole in its chest still emitting the occasional green spark. She skirted a wide path around its remains. The others were human, what was left of them, anyway.

  This is bad. Very, very bad. Temperance hesitated for a moment at the edge, wanting to just turn and run. Somehow she forced herself to take a step, then another.

  The first two bodies were intact enough for her to recognize. They were a pair of siblings, brother and sister, that came recently into her grandfather’s service. Temperance tried to remember their names, but the words kept slipping away in her mind. She moved on.

  The next body was her father.

  Not that she could be certain of that. The remains were more blackened bone than they were human. If not for his intact boots, she would never have known at all. A few feet away his hat lay in the dirt, surprisingly unharmed. Temperance picked it up and clutched it between her fingers, willing the man who once wore it to rise again and reclaim it.

  The corpse remained where it lay, and Temperance sank to her knees. She reached a hand out to touch one of the scorched bones, then snatched her hand back at the last second. It felt as if someone had filled her head with cotton again, and she sat there a moment, staring at nothing.