Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Augustin Arcosa thrust his hand toward the demon encampment, a harsh wind howling from his back. Around them, metal clanked as the hovering messengers bumped into each other.
“Release your prisoner,” the wizard boomed, “or suffer the consequences.”
Braiden shifted from one foot to the other and wrung his hands, struck by the wizard’s rare display of dominance. He tugged on his collar, embarrassed to ever admit that he would have done anything Augustin wanted, if only he’d use that tone of voice.
Never mind that their party was still surrounded by a ring of trigger-happy messengers, and never mind that they were now confronted with the problem of dealing with two extra demons.
As the wind died down, the messengers clink-clanked back into formation, muttering and cursing among themselves.
“You can take him,” Valefour shouted back.
From my cold, dead hands, Braiden had expected the demon to add, except that his sentence actually ended there. Valefour actually meant it.
“Excuse me?” Braiden asked. “Really? You lure us all the way down here and now it’s that easy?”
“Sorry?” Valefour answered, pulling something out of his ear. Bones rattled and squirmed in his arms, kicking at the air. “Could you repeat that?”
Was that a wadded-up ball of wax? The other two demons — one a shapely woman with deep red skin, the other no taller than a child — pulled similar objects from out of their pointed ears.
A twisted bit of cloth and what appeared to be a carved piece of cork. Those were makeshift earplugs. They’d guessed right all along. Bones had resisted the demons the only way he knew how: with the torturous sound of his own voice.
“Never mind,” Braiden said. “Just hand him over, already.”
“And give back my cloak while you’re at it,” Elyssandra shouted.
“You can take him,” Valefour replied. “He’s so very annoying. We couldn’t stop him from screaming, and he keeps chewing through his restraints.”
Bones suddenly went quiet and meek, as if making a belated, far-too-late effort to show that he was on his best behavior.
“The absolute nerve of you,” Elyssandra added, “thinking I would be any easier to abduct.”
The demon woman gave a harsh, bitter laugh. “We would’ve taken you over the skeleton any day, little princess. Don’t take it so personal. You’re worth more, and that’s all there is to it.”
Elyssandra appeared to be on the very knife’s edge of being offended, but seemed mollified by the knowledge that Valefour hadn’t actually underestimated her ability to defend herself.
“I was a perfect angel,” Bones said.
Valefour rolled his eyes. “I’ve never met anything more horrible in all the several hells. Throw me in the Thicket of Perpetual Itching instead. I’d rather be burned alive in the Very Lowest Furnace.”
“I knew he would give them hell,” Warren said proudly, sniffling as he dabbed at the corner of his eye.
The demon vanished in a puff of smoke and reappeared mere feet away from the party. He unceremoniously dropped the bundle in his arms onto the ground, then teleported away again, appearing in a fiery column between his compatriots.
“Ow!” Bones shouted. “My patella!”
Again Valefour rolled his eyes. He beckoned with a curl of his fingers and the ring of messengers disengaged, flying over to hover in a circle around the encampment’s bonfire.
Elyssandra knelt to check on Bones, quietly collecting her cloak when she found that the skeleton had been returned to them all in one piece. Well, figuratively speaking, that is.
Bones leapt to his feet, creaking as he pointed his finger at the demons with all the aggression of someone hurling an accusation. Which was the very thing he did next, of course.
“Now you’re going to get it.” Bones turned to the rest of the party, still pointing at the demons. “They hurt me!”
“Did not,” the smaller demon protested.
“Did too!”
Warren cleared his throat, speaking in a low voice. “Er, Bones? In all my time with you, I’m reasonably certain I have observed that you cannot actually feel physical pain.”
“Oh yeah? Well, my feelings were hurt.”
Augustin coughed into his fist, carefully pacing ahead of the party as if attempting to block Bones and his needling from view.
“Now that we’ve established that we’ve been led on a wild goose chase, perhaps it’s time we find out exactly why we’ve been lured here.”
The demon woman laughed again. “Oh, so now the wizard who is inexplicably bare-chested wants to talk shop before apologizing for loosing a banshee on us. We get it, you work out.”
“It was very, very hot back there,” Augustin sputtered, his cheeks reddening. “And anyway, you stole our friend from us first!”
Braiden sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “If we could please just get the nonsense out of the way? Let’s start with introductions and move on to explanations. Quickly. I’m Braiden Beadle.”
To Braiden’s surprise, Valefour’s snarky companions were quick to drop the sarcasm, introducing themselves in turn.
“Ophidia,” the demon woman said. “Valefour is my life partner.”
Braiden raised his eyebrows, but knew better than to comment. So demons took spouses, too? That was new to him.
He held his expression as his eyes turned toward the smaller demon. It would be easy to assume that this was their progeny, except for how even Braiden could tell that this was in no way a demon child. His proportions more closely resembled those of an adult dwarf or gnome.
“Newt,” the little demon said. “Imp private of the Vermilion Legion.”
Elyssandra narrowed her eyes. “I read some books on demonology back in my father’s library. You seem exceptionally large for an imp. Tall, that is. I mean no offense.”
The imp drew himself up proudly, somehow standing a few inches taller. “I’m the biggest in my litter. Mother raised me right.”
One of the brass messengers snickered. “Raised him right in her laboratory. They ran out of test tubes, so she used a pickle jar.”
All seven messengers laughed. Newt threw them a dirty look. Valefour sighed.
“We crossed over to this side with just the one messenger,” Valefour explained. “Somehow that one figured out how to replicate itself, and here we are. They won’t shut up, but seven of these chatterboxes are still better than a single skeleton.”
Bones crossed his arms and stamped his foot. “So rude,” he muttered.
Braiden held up his hand. “Wait. Crossed over, you said? What does that even mean?”
“Follow us deeper underground,” Ophidia said, “and you’ll see for yourself.”
“And so you keep telling us,” Braiden said. “Haven’t you noticed by now that this cryptic nonsense isn’t leading us anywhere?”
Ophidia shrugged. “Seems to be the only way to get you to listen. Adventurers like this ‘cryptic nonsense,’ as you say.”
“And that’s where you have me wrong. I’m a middling mage at best, barely an adventurer. Tell me why we shouldn’t just walk away, now that we have our friend back? And don’t pretend you can take all six of us in a fight.”
Truly only five, with Bones still shivering in his cloak, and four, depending on Elder Bahul’s mood and possibly the phases of the moon, for all Braiden knew.
The elder was already dozing by the fire, his body comfortably arranged along the top of his treasure chest. He hardly seemed prepared for either fight or flight.
“Isn’t that why you have one of your elders with you?” Valefour asked. “The whole point is to go deeper. Wouldn’t you like to see what awaits beneath?”
The demon seemed to know more about Weathervale and the world above than he was letting on. Braiden cocked an eyebrow.
“And I suppose you’re just going to point us toward the treasure and precious mineral veins out of the goodness of your hearts.”
“Consider it a gesture of goodwill. You did come all this way, after all. Maybe leave the skeleton behind, though. My ears need a break from all the shrieking.”
Bones snapped back with something whiny and indistinct. Augustin took Braiden by the hand.
“Then it’s time for us to go. In the other direction, up to the surface.”
Braiden flinched. Wouldn’t the wizard want to explore deeper? Was he only doing this for Braiden?
But Valefour chuckled. “If you leave now, then you’ll never know the true purpose of the Heirloom.”
That stopped everyone in their tracks. Braiden’s jaw dropped. “How do you know about the Heirloom?”
But he already knew, didn’t he? The answer was Granny Bethilda. It always was.
“I suppose you’ve already guessed. It was decades ago when I met your grandmother. And it was decades longer when we first stepped through the portal to this place you now call your dungeon.”
Everyone held their breath. In the great burning meadow, the only sound was the flickering of little flames in the grass.
“There is a portal not far from here, a doorway we used to access your side of the world. We thought it would hold for as much time as we took to explore the place you call Aidun. We never would have guessed that the door would snap shut behind us.”
Ophidia sighed. “And that’s where your lineage comes in.
Bethilda Beadle was a good soul who never judged us for the twist of our horns or the red of our skin.
And just as well, because we needed to find a magic-user who knew how to work with the fabric of reality — someone who could repair the threads that frayed around the rip between your world and ours. ”
A weaver, Braiden thought, a shiver of excitement running down his back.
“So we designed this device for her to assemble,” Valefour said. “And we would have helped build the Heirloom, too, but we cannot travel far from the portal for too long, broken as it may be. We found out the hard way.”
He gestured around the fiery cavern. This must have been the fruit of the portal’s influence, its terrain encroaching on Aidun’s ground. Valefour’s home hell might have been lovelier than anything Braiden had imagined.