The man leaned over the table, uncomfortably close. “You look at me like I’m familiar, but this is, what, your seventeenth summer?”
Pantros nodded, resisting the urge to back away from the man’s face as the man continued, “We’ve never met, but, how should I put this. You don’t know me because I’m far older than you, of a far different generation. But, trust me, we are kin. We are both Phyreshades. I’m family. I won’t kill you.”
Pantros said, “You just said you would.”
“If you took the gem now, I wouldn’t have a choice, but I won’t because you won’t.” There was confidence in the man’s voice.
“If we are kin, tell me your name,” Pantros said. His mother and father were both Phyrshades, though of different grandparents. His parents were the last living Phyreshades before Tara was born, or so they’d told him.
“My name wouldn’t help. The one I use is not the one I was born with, but I will give you neither. You don’t need them and you don’t really want them. I’m almost sixteen hundred years old. I know it doesn’t look it, but I have some Abvi blood in me. My mother was from Melnith.” The man tightened his lips and sat back in his chair. “Ah, now you’ve got me telling you more than you need to know.”
Abvi didn’t frequent the city, but Pantros had seen several. They looked a little different than humans, but the man across the table had none of the Abvian traits such as pointed ears or glimmering eyes. Supposedly, they lived for thousands of years.
“Enough about me, and enough about you, Pantros. Time is growing short and I have a man to meet about a gem.” He folded the gem back into the black leather and tucked it into his shirt. “So do you.” The black haired man stood up and walked out the front door of the tavern, leaving Pantros with a chest of gold.
There was something guarded about the way the black haired man talked. Pantros could tell there were things about Darien and about the gem the man wasn’t telling him, and wouldn’t tell him. Still, Pantros was going to take the money and at least contemplate the job. If it would be easy, if he could do it without his sister finding out, he’d do it. He might not trust the black haired man, but the black haired man trusted him.
Carrying so much gold even the few blocks back to his sister’s inn exhausted Pantros. The lockbox was conspicuous, forcing him to take a longer route down alleys and through a rope weaver's storehouse, but he made it home to his sister’s inn unseen.
He entered through the cellar door and set the lockbox on the floor. He then moved two barrels away from the wall. Half way up the wall was a stone the size of a man’s torso. Only it was thinner than a man’s finger. Pantros removed that stone and set it gently on the floor. His new chest barely fit inside his stash with six other chests of similar size. He replaced the stone and the barrels and exited the way he came in.
He wondered if he had enough gold to build his castle. He didn’t know much about buying or building castles, but he knew he wanted one. He was pretty sure, with three other stashes in the inn and another few scattered around the city, that he had more gold than any other man in Ignea.
Walking around the block, Pantros returned to his sister’s inn from the front. The sign above the door was brightly painted and showed a porcupine standing on its hind legs wearing a fancy doublet and drinking from a mug. It seemed like it had been years since he had seen the front of the Inn in daylight.
§
The taproom of the Haughty Hedgehog was packed with people. Pantros only saw the inn so full when a particular bard passed through town. Sure enough, the crowd hushed and he heard the strum of fingers across a lute. He had to stand on his tip-toes to see over the crowd, but Sheillene was sitting on the Hedgehog’s tiny stage playing a song. Pantros looked for the large guards Darien had with him and spotted them standing around the corner booth. Darien and the black haired man sat at the table. Pantros wiggled through the crowd to get a closer look and barely managed to catch a glimpse of the folded black leather being passed across the table.
The next booth over was occupied by four women who came to the taproom often. They were friends of the cook. Pantros invited himself to sit with them. They were intently focused on the bard and barely glanced at Pantros.
Darien opened the leather briefly and glanced inside. A smile came to the gem merchant’s lips as he folded the leather again and placed it into crude but heavy iron chest on the seat beside him. Pantros sighed when he noticed the lock, or lack thereof. A sigil crossed the lid and the chest. The lock would be magical. That was something Pantros was unprepared to deal with. Who would put expensive magic on such a crudely welded chest? Possibly the magician who’d enchanted it had built it himself. Certainly no craftsman’s hand was involved. Even the hinge pins showed slipped hammer strikes in their dimpled iron heads. Seeing his plan become possibility, Pantros simply waited.
CHAPTER 4: DARIEN
Darien, ecstatic at having the Key in his possession patronizingly thanked Julivel for the service. But he didn’t trust the man not to wait in ambush, so Darien left the table first. The largest of his guards carried the chest. As they pushed their way through the crowd, some idiot dropped a purse of coins. The chaos of people diving to the floor in hopes for a spare silver did not hamper his guards; they simply shoved everyone in their path aside. The doorman threatened them as they stepped into the street, but Darien just laughed at the mortal. He led his guards around the corner into the alley.
He pulled the portal parchment from his shirt and unrolled it, revealing complex sigils around a large black circle. He set the box containing the gem into the circle. Once the box was safely back in Demia, Darien burned the scroll.
He and his guards then ceased their projection into the mortal realms. The clothing the demons been wearing fell to the street as the demons faded out of the world. In the blink of an eye Darien was standing beside the box in his chambers in Demia. He donned his best robes then gestured for one of his guards to pick the box up and headed out into the hallway.
Arriving in his lord’s throne room, Darien and his cohorts shifted back into their natural forms. For his guards, it meant their horns, tails and wings appeared. For Darien his skin color shifted to the color of damp coal. He turned and bowed before the demon on the throne, his master, Lord Murdread.
With a deep resonant growl, Lord Murdread asked, “You brought the Key?”
“I did.” Darien gestured for the guard carrying the chest to step forward. Darien approached and touched the symbols on the lock, releasing the latch. When he lifted the lid, it fell to the floor; the hinge pins had been removed. Panic overcame him as he realized the chest was empty. Darien dared not turn and face his Lord with the bad news.
“I sense failure,” Murdread said, standing from his throne. “Where is the Key?” He took a great flaming sword from behind the throne and strode slowly towards Darien. “Shall I send you back to the spawning pits so you can spend the next dozen centuries regaining your rank?”
Darien fell to the floor and groveled. “I made the mistake of entrusting a lesser demon to bear the stone. I deserve any punishment my lord would inflict upon me.”
Murdread raised his fiery blade and cut, not at Darien, but at the guard holding the box. The guard managed to raise the iron chest to meet Lord Murdread’s assault, but the blade passed through the chest as if it were made of paper and continued straight through the guard, cutting it from shoulder to hip. The guard would respawn as a rankless demon in the pits, but it would no longer be part of Murdread's household.
Darien cowered, “Please, my lord, I had an alternate plan in case this one failed.”
Resting his sword on his shoulder, Murdread simply looked at Darien.
Quickly inventing a plan, Darien sputtered words, hoping to pull a remnant of a plan from them, “The Vulak, we can get to them, use them. We can steer the gem into the hands of one of our powerful mortal followers.”
“You cannot project yourself to that mortal realm again for two of three parts of a millennia.” Murdread stepped back towards his throne and fell into it, shaking the hall. “How will you communicate to the Vulak? I only trusted you to project because you are my most intelligent underling. I know of none else who can deal with mortals effectively.”
