Demontech: Gulf Run (35 page)

“There was a strong Jokapcul force on the shore. They would have attacked us if they knew we were there. And we couldn’t move inland, since there were strong bands of Desert Men along the road.”

“You were too strong, we would have let you pass our ambush unharmed, that’s why our men who you watched were relaxed instead of in position to attack the road.”

“You
saw
our scouts?”

“Your scouts are good in their own forests, but these lands are ours and we are better here. We are also better on the adjacent lands. As I said, this is
our
land. You trespassed, that’s why we attacked you this morning. But you helped us defeat the Jokapcul. For that, you may return unmolested to the road. Stay below the Low Desert and we will leave you alone.”

“Thank you. Going on the coast road will be easier for us. We will stay here for a few days and then gladly leave.”

“
No!
You will leave now!”

“But we have wounded. We must care for them, give them time to heal before they are strong enough to move.”

“You should have thought of that before you trespassed. The sun is not yet halfway up the sky. You will begin leaving by the time it reaches zenith. You will be gone from the Low Desert by the time the sun is halfway down the western sky.”

“And if we can’t start moving that soon?”

“Then three times as many Desert Men as attacked you this morning will attack, and you will all die.” He studied them for a moment, his gaze lingering on Haft’s bloody shirt.

“What your women did to the Jokapcul,” the desert chief continued, “is nothing to what
our
women will do to any of you we take alive.” He gave them a last glare, turned his comite north, and galloped off with his retinue.

“Start moving by noon?” Haft asked, astonished. “Is he insane?” He plucked at his shirt, drawing it away from his body.

“No,” said Plotniko. “I think he’s just the chief of a warrior tribe that doesn’t like strangers.”

“I think we should go like he says,” Spinner said. He shuddered in memory of what the Desert Man said about their women.

“But our casualties!”

“We’ll cope.”

Fletcher’s party brought back the rest of the bodies and a few severely wounded who had been overlooked when the soldiers withdrew from the fighting between the Jokapcul and the Desert Men. Three of the dead were women from the band Alyline had led out, as were two of the severely wounded.

Nightbird and the other healers objected to the move since there were thirty men and two women too badly wounded to travel safely.

“Use the aralez and the land trow on them!” Spinner snapped. “Have Xundoe help you, he’s got two of the aralez.”

“The demons can heal the surface wounds well enough,” said the Eikby healing magician, who had three aralez and a land trow. “But it takes time for the deeper injuries to heal. On the outside a man can look like he has nearly healed wounds, but inside he might still be severely injured.”

“If we don’t go now there will be many more people too badly wounded to move.”

The healers grumbled but agreed. They did manage to extract one concession: they and the worst wounded would be the last to leave. They set the aralez to work. The tiny doglike demons went from wound to wound, licking them, and in minutes visible signs of wounding lessened. Then a healing magician went from severe wound to severe wound, carefully watching his land trow. The demon, resembling a half-size man, lifted bandages here and there. Occasionally it poked a hand into an uncovered wound and probed about inside the injured flesh, then removed it with an ethereal glowing green something that disappeared altogether when it flicked it from its fingers.

Round and round went the five aralez and the land trow, licking and probing, and the wounds improved each time, until the healing demons had done all they could do.

By then most of the caravan was in motion and the lead wagons almost at the bowl. The healers quickly but carefully loaded the worst of the wounded onto the wagons and prepared to leave. They were able to move without a gap growing between their wagons and those in front of them. Watching from a distance, the Desert Men sat ominously on comites.

SECOND INTERLUDE

GUARD DOGS
OF HELL

University of the Great Rift

Department of Far Western Studies

The Editors,

Unnatural Skeptic

Dear Sirs or Mesdames,

Having perused several issues of your journal on the shelves of the bookstore newsstands in College Center, the town outside the campus, I have concluded that
Unnatural Skeptic
is indeed precisely the type of “popular journal” in which it would be advantageous to publish several of my papers which, for reasons of style or powerful academic disagreement, are not suitable for publication in
The Proceedings of the Association of Anthropological Scholars of Obscure Cultures
, in which scholarly journal more than three hundred of my papers have been published.

Therefore, I take pleasure in submitting for your consideration my most recent paper,
A Factual Analysis of Guardian Demons Known or Suspected to be Currently Called Upon by the Jokapcul Armies Engaged in Attempted Conquest of All the Lands of the Continent of Nunimar for the Purpose of Debunking Certain Common Misconceptions
.

As I do suspect it would be presumptuous of me to assume that you are fully aware of my identity, I offer the following
c.v.
:

I am a tenured professor of Far Western Studies, of which department I have twice had the onerous privilege of being chairman, at the University of the Great Rift, with which institution of higher learning I am quite certain you are more than familiar. Indeed, I suspect that more than one of your editors is a graduate of this esteemed University, as the brief biographies of several of the scholars whose papers you have published note that they have degrees from this University, though it appears that none are currently members of the faculty. As noted above, I am the author of more than three hundred papers published in
The Proceedings of the Association of Anthropological Scholars of Obscure Cultures
. In addition to those scholarly papers, I have in recent months had papers published in
James Military Review Quarterly
and
It’s a Geographical World!
I hesitate to add—but as I have been informed that when approaching a journal for the first time one should name all those journals in which one has previously been published—that a horribly bowdlerized version of a paper of mine was published in
Swords and Arrows Monthly
; fortunately, they misspelled my name (their typesetter left out the apostrophe in my patronymic), so the bowdlerization has to date caused me no professional embarrassment.

I look forward with near unseemly anticipation to your acceptance of my submission. Might I inquire as to the size of the honorarium you offer?

I am,

Scholar Munch Mu’sk

Professor

From the Desk of the Editor

Unnatural Skeptic

Mangle,

Hey, it’s that Mu’sk guy again! He must never read mastheads, or he’d know
UnSkep
and
James
have the same publisher and editorial staff! Guess that would explain the “Dear Sirs or Mesdames” salutation.

There’s some good crap in here, but you have to dig to find it. Give it a title that doesn’t read like an abstract and an opening ’graph that people’ll be willing to read, cut the redundancies, and knock out most of the superlatives. You’ll have to do some cut-and-paste to put it in an order somebody other than an academic can follow. I trust your judgment—but you know that.

Send him a your-firstborn-child-is-ours contract, minimum rates, he’ll be happy.

Thieph

Deadly Hauntings

By Munch Mu’sk, Professor

It was deepest night as the strongly armed, thousand-man raiding party approached the lines of the Jokapcul outpost. Not even starlight penetrated to the ground through the cloud cover. The commander stopped his force and called his officers and most senior sergeants together for a final review of the assault plan and to make sure everyone was in the proper place. When all declared their readiness, the commander dismissed them to return to their men and make ready. But before any of them made it back to their units, the night was rent with the bloodcurdling cries of men being most horrifically rent apart. The few who managed to escape, bloodied and bruised, told of being assaulted by trolls who used their inhuman strength to rip limbs and heads from bodies; huge Black Dogs with jaws able to rip flesh and bones from living bodies; mauth dhoog that lay in wait and tore feet and legs off unwary passersby; and sangmun that drifted foglike among groups of men, killing immediately each one they touched; and all the while imps sped chittering through the raiders, nipping bits of flesh from their bodies. A thousand-man raiding party was thus rent to nothing.

The astute reader will certainly have noticed that the above paragraph gives neither place nor army nor approximate date of the action; three strong clues that it is apocryphal. Indeed, although that description of an imaginary action demonstrates popular misconceptions about the named demon types, anyone familiar with the reality of said demons knows it is all wrong. To the ordinary person who goes through life without benefit of higher education, or at least wide reading or extensive travel, such descriptions seem credible because they hear the word “demon” and are ready to ascribe any manner of attribute to the creatures, no matter how unlikely or, even, absurd.

The beings collectively known as “demons” are, in fact, not supernatural but rather natural creatures of uncertain origin, though granted not native to any known land in the world. (This scholar is currently engaged in intense study with other eminent scholars to determine just where in the cosmos, known or unknown, the “demons” are actually from.)

Indeed, many of the so-called demons are quite helpful, not in any way “demonic.” The troll noted in the above description is such a case. While trolls are strong enough to tear a body to parts, they are mostly used for chores that require strength, stamina, and utter lack of imagination. The troll-generated lights that luminate certain palaces, mansions, and some of the better inns are an example. Imps make marvelous fence wardens and never—well, almost never—skitter about individually far from their houses, which are commonly mounted on fence posts for the purpose of warding the fences.

Which is not to say that
all
demons are beneficial. The sangmun in the apocryphal scenario that began this paper has no known function other than to kill trespassers, which it does through the expedient of inflicting on them a disease so severe that no medicinal demon this scholar is aware of can cure it. The mauth dhoog doesn’t lie in wait, but rather scampers about looking not at all dangerous, but rather like a friendly, albeit scruffy - in - need - of - a - bath - and - combing cocker spaniel. When the unwary traveler comes upon a mauth dhoog as it guards its road or path at night and attempts to befriend it, the mauth dhoog attacks with fang and claw, with invariably disastrous results for the traveler. The mauth dhoog’s cousin, the Black Dog, is in no way friendly looking, and one’s first sight of this demon is commonly one’s last sight of anything—the Black Dog does indeed run about chomping and rending flesh and bone.

In most places warded by such guardian demons, one finds warning signs placed for the benefit of friends of those who use those guardians, otherwise the guardians would kill friend and foe alike quite wantonly.

The most obvious warning signs are the well-known imp houses, domicile of imps warding fences. The imp house is prominently mounted on a fence post and wires trail from it to the primary strands of the fence, which in turn normally have lesser strands connecting one to another to expedite movement of the imps from one strand to another. Commonly, signs are hung to warn of the presence of guardian demons. Such signs may have painted on them a pictogram identifying the guardian demon in local residence. Illiterate persons who come upon a written sign lacking in pictograms should nonetheless take heed and assume that the sign is evidence of a nearby guardian demon. Passing such a sign is unwise. In warfare, which is where guardian demons are most likely to be used, the signs are often more subtle than painted signs. They can be a rock cairn, runelike markings on a stone, blazes on a tree, or other seemingly random, easily misunderstood signals. On occasion, parallel signs demark a safe passage through the warded area.

Some, or even many, demons are quite amenable to control by ordinary persons, but that is not true of most guardian demons. Guardian demons, as a class, are in their own way more dangerous than the demons that inhabit weapons. The weapons demons, in the normal course of events, only attack on a specific order given by the person wielding the weapon and only injure or damage that to which they are directed. Guardian demons, to the contrary, once set in place, make their own determinations as to what or whom to attack, and will generally cease only when the magician who emplaced them recalls them. There are exceptions to that rule, of course. There are documented instances in which a guardian demon simply disappeared from the area it warded. No one knows why that happens, but any demon may, upon occasion and without any obvious reason, depart from whomever it has been in service to. There are also reports of demons attacking the very magicians who emplaced them in their warding positions, but those reports currently lack confirmation from proper investigatory authorities.

There are certainly other guardian demons, including such exotica as the Green Woman and gytrash; watchers such as banshees, dryads, elves, and various sprites are not, in the sense used herein, guardians, since they do not attack, but rather merely give notice to their magicians or others. For a more exhaustive survey of guardian demons one might peruse the relevant chapters in the six volumes of Scholar M. V. H’one’s masterful
An Encyclopaedic Overview of Well-Known Demon Types
.