I was clinging to the very top of the mast. We didn’t have crow’s nests in those days. We barely had sails. Just pieces of silk we threw up on the odd chance the wind was going the same way we were. Usually, we rowed. Consequently, if he were patient enough, I’d eventually fall because it’s not easy to hold that position. But demons are not known for their patience. Makes them great for storming sieges.
“How’s that worked out for you?” he asked, as regards my immortality. It looked as if he’d decided how to approach this problem.
“Not bad so far,” I said.
“What happens if you fall from, say, the top of a tall mast onto a hard wooden deck?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Never tried it. Hey, can I ask you something? Before you kill me?”
“Sure.”
“How come there aren’t more of you?”
“What, you mean in Carthage?”
“I mean in general. Since you’re so hard to kill and all.”
“It’s a secret,” he said, honestly sounding like nobody had ever asked him that before, which was possible.
“Yeah, but you’re gonna kill me anyway,” I pointed out.
“That’s right.”
He reared back to take a swing at the base of the mast.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I shouted.
“The answer is, I don’t know,” he said. Then he punched the mast.
The whole thing wobbled mightily, especially at the top. It was all I could do to hang on. I fortunately had plenty of tree-climbing experience to draw from.
“Hmm,” he muttered. He stepped back to try again, but before he could, a loud CRACK sounded out from the center of the mast.
“Uh-oh.” He’d hit a weak point in the wood grain. The whole thing was splitting up the middle and coming down like the felled tree it once was.
I swung around to one side and, with my hands gripping the top of the mast and my feet touching just below my hands, tried to offer some guidance to the chosen direction of the mast’s descent. A few seconds later the mast sounded out another loud CRACK and down it went, pretty much falling the way I’d hoped it would. I landed not on the deck but in the water, a little stunned, but otherwise none the worse.
The top fourth of the mast had snapped off after impacting with the side of the ship. I found it floating beside me in the water.
“You lucky devil,” Whomp declared, on verifying my continued good health. I grabbed onto the mast tip.
Something occurred to me. “Hey,” I shouted. “Can demons swim?”
“No,” he admitted. “But you can’t stay in the water forever.”
“I don’t have to. I can swim to the city from here.” I used the mast like a kick board just to illustrate my point.
This was not an outcome that pleased Whomp. “I’ll destroy your ship and your house, kill all your slaves and everyone else who gets in my way if you don’t get out of the water and let me kill you!” Not the most convincing argument.
“Go ahead,” I said. “The boat’s already half-destroyed anyway.”
He picked up the heavy base of the mast and hurled it into the water. He missed me, but I gave him points for effort.
“You’re not nearly as charming when you’re not about to kill somebody,” I pointed out.
“Get back here!” he raged.
“Can’t,” I said. “Gotta go. But it was nice meeting you.”
Swimming off, I could hear him tearing apart my vessel piece by piece, his roaring growing more distant with each stroke.
It took me the rest of the night and part of the next morning to reach the city’s inner harbor. By then Whomp had destroyed most of the homes on the pier and killed dozens of people, many of whom didn’t even work for me. Midday, around the time I reached my main house in Carthage, the sufets had figured out that something horrible was happening outside the city walls and a garrison of soldiers was sent to deal with the problem. It took a couple of days, and there were a tremendous number of human casualties, but they did eventually take care of Whomp for me.
The subsequent inquiry uncovered the name of the merchant who was foolish enough to hire a demon. Guy had been a guest in my home dozens of times, which explained how he knew so much about my ledgers. He was sentenced to death.
And I got a good discount on two of his ships. So, like any good businessman, I came out ahead in the end.
But I never did learn why there are so few demons in the world.
Chapter 13
I looked again at the frozen image of Gary’s crushed face. What idiot set a demon on me? It seemed unlikely that a bounty was put on my head at the same time a demon was sent to hunt me down, so the most apparent conclusion was that the demon was another bounty hunter. Or at least he was hired by the same person. This is as stupid in modern times as it had been in ancient Carthage. Demons don’t do subtle. They may be motivated by money, but they’re also motivated by bloodlust, and usually the bloodlust wins. Possibly, the person who was behind all of this knew perfectly well that sending a demon would result in some collateral damage, and possibly he or she considered that acceptable. This did not compel me to surrender.
“Do you have any more?” I asked Tchekhy, waving the empty bottle at him.
He looked at me for the first time in two hours. “You need more?”
“I do,” I said. “Turns out there’s a demon chasing me.”
“There is a demon chasing all of us, my friend.”
“I mean literally. You find anything?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Feel like telling me what?”
He lit another cigarette and paused dramatically. Tchekhy can be very theatrical. “Come,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
I got up and half-staggered across the room as the vodka said hello to my motor skills. Perhaps another bottle wouldn’t be a good idea.
Tchekhy pointed to one of the monitors. “You are familiar with the Internet?”
