Mister B. Gone

to entangle me further.

Meanwhile, my wordless throat gave out ever more outlandish sounds; the beast I had been unleashing mere moments before sounding like a domesticated animal by contrast with the raw and unruly noise that came up out of my entrails now. Apparently my captors were not intimidated by my din.

'Get the hood on him, Shamit!' Cawley said. 'What in the name of God are you waiting for?'

'What if he bites me?' Shamit moaned.

'Then you'll die a horrible death, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog,' Cawley replied. 'So put the blasted hood on him and be quick about it!'

There was a flurry of activity as everybody got about their business. The priest instructed the fumbling Nycross in the business of preparing the shackles for my wrists and ankles, while Cawley gave orders from the little distance he had retreated to.

'Hood first! Watch for his hands, O'Brien! He'll reach through the net! This is a wily one, no doubt of that!'

As soon as Shamit and Hacker put the hood over my head Cawley came back at me and struck it sharply with the bar he carried, iron to iron. The noise made the dome of my skull reverberate and shook my thoughts to mush.

'Now, Pox!' I heard Cawley yelling through his confused thoughts. 'Get him out of the net while he's still reeling.' And just for good measure he struck the iron hood a second time, so that the new echoes through iron and bone caught up with the remnants of the first.

Did I howl, or only imagine that I did? The noise in my head was so stupefying I wasn't certain of anything, except my own helplessness. When the reverberations of Cawley's strikes finally started to die away and some sense of my condition returned, they had me out of the net, and Cawley was giving more orders.

'Shackles go on the feet first, Pox! You hear me? Feet!'

My feet, I thought. He's afraid I'm going to run.

I didn't analyze the matter more than that. I simply struck out to the left and right of me, my gaze too restricted by the hood to be sure of who I had struck, but pleased to feel the greasy hands that had been holding me lose their grip. Then I did precisely as Cawley had prompted me to do. I ran.

I put perhaps ten strides between myself and my assailants. Only then did I panic. The reason? The night sky.

In the short time since Cawley had hauled me up out of the fissure the day had started to die, bleeding stars. And above me, for the first time in my life, was the fathomless immensity of the heaven. The threat Cawley and his thugs presented seemed inconsequential beside the terror of that great expanse of darkness overhead, which the stars, however numerous, could not hope to illuminate. Indeed, there had been nothing that the torturer of Hell had invented that was as terrifying as this: space.

Cawley's voice stirred me from my awe. 'Get after him, you idiots! He's just one little demon. What harm can he do?'

It wasn't a happy truth, but the truth it was. If they caught up with me again I would be lost. They wouldn't make the mistake of letting me slip a second time. I leaned forwards, and the let the weight of the iron hood allow it to slide off my head. It hit the ground between my feet. Then I stood up and assessed my situation more clearly.

To my left was a steep slope, with a spill of firelight illuminating the smoky air at its rim. To my right, and spreading in front of me, were the fringes of a forest, its trees silhouetted against another source of firelight, somewhere within.

Behind me, close behind me, were Cawley and his men.

I ran for the trees, fearing that if I attempted the slope one of my tormentors could be quicker and catch up with me before I reached the ridge. Within a few strides I had reached the slim young trees that bordered the forest and began to weave between them, my tails lashing furiously left and right as I ran.

I had the satisfaction of hearing a note of disbelief in Cawley's voice as he yelled:

'No, no! I can't lose him now! I won't! I won't! Move your bones, you imbeciles, or I'll crack open somebody's skull!'

By now I had passed through the young growth and was running between far older trees, their immense girth and the knotty thicket that grew between them concealing me ever more thoroughly. Soon, if I was cautious, I'd lose Cawley and his cohort, if I hadn't already done so.

I found a tree of immense girth, its branches so weighed down by the summer's bounty of leaves and blossoms that they drooped to meet the bushes that grew all around it. I took shelter behind the tree, and listened. My pursuers were suddenly silent, which was discomforting. I held my breath, listening for even the slightest sound that would give me a clue to their whereabouts. I didn't like what I heard: voices whispering from at least two directions. Cawley had divided up his gang it seemed, so as to come at me from several directions at once. I took a breath, and set off again, pausing every few steps to listen for my pursuers. They weren't gaining on me, nor was I losing them. Confident that I was not going to escape him, Cawley began to call out to me.

'Where'd you think you're running to, you piece of filth? You're not getting away from me. I can smell your demon dung stench a mile away. You hear me? There's no place you can go where I won't come after you, treading on your two tails, you little freak. I've got buyers who'll pay good coins for your whole skeleton with those tails of yours, all wired up so they stand proud. You are going to make me a nice fine profit, when I catch up with you.'

The fact that I could hear Cawley's voice so close, and imagined that I knew his whereabouts, made me careless. In listening to him so intently I lost my grasp of where I'd heard the others coming from, and suddenly the Pox lunged out of the shadows. Had he not made the error of announcing that he had me captured before his huge hands had actually caught hold of me, I would have been his captive. But his boast came a few precious seconds too early, and I had time to duck beneath his plagued hand, stumbling back through the thicket as he came in blundering pursuit.

I had only one direction in which to move away from the Pox, but being smaller and nimbler than he I was able to dart back and forth between the trees, squeezing through narrow places where the diseased titan could not follow.

My headlong plunge into the undergrowth was far from silent, however, and very soon I heard the voice of the priest and Cawley, of course, giving orders for Hacker and Shamit to:

'Close in! Close in! Have you got the hood, Shamit?'

'Yes sir, Mr. Cawley, I got it right here in my hand.'

'And the face piece?'

'I got that too. Mister Cawley. And a hammer to slam in those rivets.'

'So let's get this done! Close in on him!'

I gave a quick thought to the notion of scrambling up one of the low-hanging boughs and hiding high up, where they wouldn't look. But they were so close, to judge by the sounds of shrubbery being hacked away, that I was afraid I'd be seen making my ascent, and then they'd have me cornered in the tree with nowhere to escape to.

* * *

Are you wondering as you read this why I didn't use some demonic wile of mine, some unholy power inherited from Lucifer, to either kill my enemies or make myself invisible? Easy answer. I have no such powers. I have a bastard for a father and a sometime whore for a mother. Such creatures as I are not granted supernatural forces. We are barely given the power to evacuate. But most of the time I am cleverer than the enemy, and I can do more harm with my wits and imagination than would be possible with fists or tails. That still left me weaker, however, than I wanted to feel. It was time, I thought, that I learned the magical deceits that my betters wielded so effortlessly.

If I escaped these pursuers, I swore to myself, I would make it my business to learn magic. The blacker the better.

But that was for another day. Right now, I was a naked, wingless demon, doing my best to keep Cawley's mob from catching up with me.

* * *

I saw now a glimpse of firelight between the trees ahead, and my heart sank. They had driven me back to