oversized humanoid mouth, from which the angry buzzing emerged. It had six limbs, the lower pair bug-like legs, but the other four were brawny arms ending in clawed hands. It stood about eight-feet tall at the shoulder. Danavod had plucked off its wings and was batting it around the courtyard like a cat torturing a mouse.
“Did you just clamber over my tail, Balan?” the Dragon asked. Though her fearsome jaws did not move, Balan heard her voice as richly sonorous, with the consistency of honey. Her face, and whole vast body for that matter, were pitch black. Yet her eyes seemed darker still. They were set further forward on her head than a true reptile’s, and the scaly ridges sweeping back from her snout flared over the first joint of her long neck like a mane of bony armor, giving her whole face a vaguely leonine appearance. A single horn crowned her head and a large barb jutted forward like a leveled lance from either side of her sword-filled mouth. Balan had seen many beings of great power in worlds beyond this one, but nowhere had he seen anything to equal the sheer physical presence of a Great Dragon.
“Forgive me, your Majesty,” Balan bowed deeply. “I did not realize the area was sensitive.”
“A lady is always sensitive about her hindquarters,” Danavod said with a sniff. A puff of poison smoke emerged from her nostril.
The Chasme demon had noticed its tormentor’s distraction, and with a hornet buzz it charged, scuttling out from between Danavod’s front claws and racing across the courtyard at her body. Wing-stumps twitched and loathsome digestive juices burbled from its mouth. Where the drops spattered the ground they pitted the flagstones with smoking holes.
Before Balan could offer a polite warning the Dragon moved, and if at rest her appearance was magnificent, in motion she was as a force of nature.
Danavod got effortlessly to her feet, her whole vast body moving, impossibly, with the speed of a small darting animal. She rose and blotted out the sky as she shifted, allowing the charging Chasme to rush under her. Supporting part of her weight on her tail, Danavod swept a hind leg beneath her and impaled the demon on five claws each longer than a giant’s sword, like a soft piece of fruit on the tines of a fork. The acidic fluids within the Chasme spewed from its wounds and made the stone ground smoke, but they spattered off the Dragon’s claws leaving no more mark than would a summer rain.
Danavod pivoted in the courtyard, giving the impression that the whole world was spinning out of control. Her tail scraped along the walls with a sound like a wagon train rolling down a mountainside. She settled on her haunches, stretched her neck to look high over the courtyard wall, and with an indifferent flick of her hind leg sent the Chasme’s body tumbling through the sky to crash down on Vod’Adia’s streets blocks away from the palace. Danavod settled down, cleaned her claws by shredding flagstones like tissue paper, and from a great height turned her head to look steeply down at Balan. Her movement had kicked up a swirling wind in the courtyard, and she waited for it to subside before speaking.
“Have you found the Wizard and the book?”
“I have not,” Balan said truthfully. It was not possible for any devil to tell a lie. Not a literal one, anyway.
“And your servants?”
“I have no word of such a discovery from them, your Immensity.”
Danavod lowered her great maw, stopping close enough above Balan that he could feel the inferno heat deep within her, oozing out of her noxious snout and from between her shark-tooth fangs.
“I do not again need to explain the importance of this task, do I?”
“Not at all, your Enormity. The Wizard of the Circle must in no way come near to the nodal port, lest he work some magic that might undo what the Witch King Kanderamath did here long ago. I assure you, your Greatness, such a thing is quite impossible without my knowledge.”
Something rumbled deep within the Dragon’s belly.
“Divest yourself of any diabolic scheming, Balan. You will recall that I know ways to kill you that will destroy you utterly, not merely banish you back to your own domains.”
“How could I forget, your Hugeness?”
Noxious tendrils of thick smoke, green in hue, drifted up from Danavod’s nostrils.
“What of the servant of my brother of the Blue Sky?”
“Found her, your Tremendousness. I personally gave her your message, explaining that her presence here is unnecessary, and bade her leave in peace.”
“So she has gone?”
“She has not gone,” Balan said. “Her party is a couple days deep into the city already. It is a long walk back to the gate.”
That was literally true, as was the fact Nesha-tari had told Balan she would leave only when she was ready. But Danavod had not asked Balan directly what was said.
Danavod gave a dismissive toss of her great head, and with another flurry of bows Balan left the courtyard by another long hall. He stepped well along it before allowing himself a broad smile.
The Great Dragon was afraid, and the fear of such a powerful being was intoxicating to the Devil Lord. The cyclical Openings of the Sable City had proven to be a great boon to the coffers of Danavod’s Shugak, and thus to her own hoard. Her agreement with Balan and his ilk had been of benefit to both sides, but it was ultimately of more value to the Dragon. There were plenty of ways for the devils to stake claims on the souls of those departing this world, and from many other worlds beyond this one. There were always more worlds, though there remained but one Hell.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The party slew more than a dozen demons in the tower before they reached the top and found a trapdoor out to the flat roof. Actually, Shikashe and Deskata had done most of the slaying, while Tilda, Zeb, and Heggenauer handled the leftovers.
Tilda herself had picked off two, one clawed thing with a beak on the third floor, then on the fifth her arrows had found the heart of a four-legged, dog-like creature with a disturbingly human head, though it had barked plenty. The party cleared each floor before ascending to the next and while the others were busy Tilda had managed to slip a jeweled collar off one of the slain creatures and secret it in a pouch. She was not quite sure why she had done so, but for a moment some Miilarkian part of her had taken over. She had determined that whatever else happened, she should at least give herself some chance to profit monetarily from this whole awful mess.
Since the fight with the bearded devils the day before, Tilda had felt a coldness growing in her stomach as gray and cloudy as the sky above the Sable City. Before that encounter she had told herself that the legionnaires who had abducted Claudja had a good chance of staying alive in Vod’Adia, so long as they stayed on the streets during daylight hours and found safe havens at night. But the attack in the open had given the lie to Tilda’s hopes. While her own party had dispatched the half-dozen devils without much trouble, they had a samurai with fearsome magic swords, a Dragon Cultist throwing lightning, and a Jobian cleric to bless weapons so that they told against the beasts. Claudja was the prisoner of three legionnaires with no magic, and a Wizard who Zeb had insisted was not a bad fellow, but who was also far from an archmage.
Claudja’s odds were that of a misag uyak as they called it at the Island Stakes in Miilark. The Fool’s Bet. The Duchess was almost certainly dead already.
Tilda was aware that the likelihood of Claudja’s demise should not have weighed on her nearly as much as it did. She had only known the Duchess for a matter of weeks, and though they had talked at length over the long days on the bullywug Gorpal’s slow-moving raft, they were really little more than acquaintances. Furthermore, Tilda had plenty of reason to believe that the determined little Duchess had paid Gorpal’s crew to cut the throats of six Daulmen while they slept. An efficient decision, but hardly endearing.
Yet Tilda had chosen to come into this dark city in order to help the Duchess if she could, and when Brother Heggenauer had asked her why she had said it was because Claudja was a friend. She had meant it too, but now Tilda had the feeling that she should not have trusted her own judgment. She had entered the city because it was her own choice to make, not John Deskata’s, not Captain Block’s, not the great House back in Miilark. The reason
