“What are you going to do with that?” she asked. “Are you trying to threaten me?”
“No. If I wanted to harm you, I wouldn’t use this. And I don’t want to harm you anyway. But I’m very curious about what this thing can do. I’m thinking that since it’s a magic weapon, I should try to channel some Death magic through it and see what happens. I’ve done it successfully with other gods’ weapons before, so why not with this one? How about we give that a shot, huh?”
Panic flashed across her eyes, as I’d suspected it would. She tried to disguise it with a look of disdain.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s your life; do what you want with it.” Her eyes were locked on the dagger, and the look of fear that had finally taken the upper hand was unmistakable.
“Okay,” I said coolly. I was bluffing, of course, and she was trying to call my bluff. The only thing left to do was to ramp this up, strike some real fear in her. Truthfully, I was a little nervous about it too, but Isu needed to be put in her place.
“Okay what?” she asked, trying to keep up her nonchalant act.
“I’m going to channel Death magic through this dagger.”
I reached down and gripped the hilt with my bare hand—and Isu’s eyes all but popped out of their sockets.
“No, no,” she gasped, staring at me as if she was expecting me to burst into flames at any moment. “Put it down, you crazy fool, put it down, stop touching it!”
“Why? I’m a god. I can do what I want. And what I want to do right now is channel Death magic through this weapon.”
“Don’t even think of doing something so idiotic!” she shrieked, her composure shattered. “Drop the dagger before you kill us all!”
“Well, if you told me why you’re so worried, I might be inclined to listen to you. I mean, it’s just channeling some Death magic through another weapon. Nothing I haven’t done—”
She lunged for my wrist with wild desperation and uncut fear in her eyes.
“Drop it, you idiot!” she hissed. “You have no idea what you’re about to unleash!”
“Damn right I don’t,” I said calmly, “because you refuse to tell me.”
“I’ll tell you! Just put it down, wrap the vile thing up again, and bury it deep below the earth!”
“I want your word that you’ll tell me everything you know, Isu.”
“On my honor,” she muttered reluctantly. “I’ll tell you all I know about Blood Demons. Now put that thing away!”
I smiled, dropped the dagger back into the rags, and bundled it up again. I quietly slipped in the little section of leather I’d secretly lined my palm with too. My assassin’s training had developed my sleight of hand to an advanced level, and this little trick had paid off. I’d never intended to touch the dagger with my bare skin before I knew what I was dealing with.
“Tell me what you know,” I said. “All of it.”
“The thing you just killed, the Blood Demon, was not simply a creature of the Blood God. It was a limb of the Blood God himself.”
“A limb?”
“Think of a squid’s legs. Have you ever seen a squid using their many limbs? The limbs are part of the creature, but it is almost as if they each have a mind of their own, as well. They are directed by one greater mind, yes, but they are also capable of some independence. Nonetheless, the fact remains that they are part of the beast, and the body of the beast is what gives them their strength. If you cut one off, well, the creature is barely damaged, really, and it can quite easily grow another one. Unlike human beings, of course, who may well die if one of their limbs is removed.”
“So, how do we kill the Blood God?”
“With more difficulty than can ever be imagined. You saw how powerful the Blood God’s limb was. It used to be a man, yes, a small, weak man who would have been very easy to kill. But that thing you fought was not a man by any stretch of the imagination. It was not like the undead either, not simply a reanimated corpse. You saw when your foolish cleric first brought the wretch out of the woods; he looked exactly like a living, breathing human—something you cannot say about your zombies.”
“I could tell that he was lying when he spoke, though.”
“As could I, but you could only tell that he was not telling the truth, not that he was not actually human.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I said.
“You tried to use Grave Oath on him, didn’t you?”
“I did—and it did nothing. I might as well have stabbed him with a fucking toothpick for all the good it did.”
“That’s because Blood Demons do not have souls. Nor are they alive. They are not even ‘alive’ in the sense that your undead are. There is no reanimation present at all. What you were doing when you beat the creature with the Death-magic-enhanced mace was essentially beating the Blood God’s hand out of the puppet it was controlling. Eventually, your Death magic overcame the power of the Blood God to keep his ‘hand’ in the empty corpse he had taken possession of.”
“So, I basically just smacked that motherfucker’s hand out of a glove.”
Isu chuckled darkly. “If you want to put it like that, yes, that’s what you did. If the demon had even nicked you with that blade, you would have likely fallen deathly ill over a few days.”
“I can handle illness,” I said.
“Not this kind. It always ends in death. Then, your empty corpse would have been filled with the power of the Blood God. You would have become a Blood Demon yourself, just like that fool of a peasant. Well, perhaps, being a god with some measure of power, you would have been able to
