The Demon's Apprentice (13 page)

“What do you need?” he asked in his best business tone.

I ignored the anger for the moment, and tried to remember that aside from using a sex slave, Billy was a pretty decent guy. He probably hadn't even hit her.

“How much is left in the account?” I shot back.

“Quite a bit. Without consulting the books, my best guess would be about twelve thousand six hundred ninety five trade points: mostly in gems, gold and silver ounces, and some in trade bars. Roughly.” For Billy, “roughly” meant he didn’t get into fractions of grams.

I stifled a gasp of surprise at the number he rattled off. I knew I’d been working hard for Dulka, but I had never dreamed I’d earned him that much in trade. It was enough to buy everything I needed, and outfit my own lab if I had the space.

“He needs about…” I stopped, and put on my best thoughtful look, “half of that. Six thousand five hundred trade points’ worth. In as small a package as you can manage.”

“So, this wouldn’t have anything to do with you busting your master’s chops the other night, would it?” Billy asked as he dug his books out from under the makeshift desk. He sounded just too casual to be serious, but I was more concerned that he already knew.

“Technically, let’s just say I’m still making a legit claim to an open account,” I answered him, hoping he’d take that.

“Hey, I got no beef with that,” he smiled, hands up. “Seems to me you did most of the work there anyway, so half is the least you deserve. I haven’t heard anything official yet, so for all I know, you still work for the Count. And it ain't like he's ever gonna see the inside of this place, is it?”

“Or any other place with a ward or a threshold,” I agreed. Like most summoned beings, demons weren't really welcome on the physical plane. A simple threshold would hold them out of a personal home, at least in most places, or a well-constructed ward.

As we were talking, he had been scratching away in his thick ledger with a pen, and I saw a flutter of movement from inside his squat. Black-within-black eyes stared out at me from inside the folds of cloth for a moment before the woman slid the fabric aside and strode out into full view: six and a half feet of red skin and black leather. If she had been dangerously built when she was mostly covered with loose, baggy furs, she was damn near lethal when she was dressed. A black corset hugged her figure into a serious hourglass shape, while black leather gloves covered her from upper arm to her knuckles. She barely wore a black leather mini-skirt, but what it didn’t cover of her thighs, it left to a pair of boots that came up to a few of inches from the bottom of the skirt’s hem. I stared. I think I drooled. Until I looked at her eyes, and saw the black iron collar around her throat.

While I was ogling the demoness, Billy got up from his stool and went back into the depths of his squat. A few moments later, he came back out, a leather satchel in his right hand, and a canvas sack in his left. “Without sending a runner, I can only give you part of it in actual hard currency, mostly in gems, with a little gold and silver thrown in. There’s a hundred and fifty in here,” he told me, holding up the bag. “The rest is in here, in bearer chits from Bjerning Depository,” he held up the satchel to make his point.

“Bjerning?” I asked, incredulous. “Billy, they’re dwarves! The only thing greedier than a dwarf is a demon!” The demoness snickered at the comment, but I knew better than to try to apologize. To most demons, an apology was a sign of weakness. No self-respecting demon could let a weakness go unexploited.

“They may love their gold, kid, but they’re also the most honorable folk you could hope to deal with. A dwarf might squeeze you for every last penny he can get, but you’ll get what you bargained for. No better folk to watch your money than the dwarves. If you want my advice, and trust me, kid, you
do,
you’ll head over there right now, and open up a strong room of your own with what you got. They won’t deal with
any
demon, much less the Count. The fact that you escaped from him will sit pretty with them, too. Especially now.”

“I don’t have time to go to the Underground today, Billy. I just need some stuff for some charms, and maybe a wand blank. Besides, the Conclave pretty much runs that place. I’ve broken about a thousand of their stupid Laws of Magick.”

“Believe me kid, now is the time to go. Somethin's brewing out there, and the Sentinels are thin on the ground right about now. You do what you gotta do today, and you get to Bjerning's as soon as you can.”

As Billy was talking, the half-demon hooker sashayed up to me on improbably high boot heels, laid one hand on my shoulder, and moved around behind me, so that her arm ended up draped over my shoulder, and some of her softer curves were pressed up against me. From up close, I could see that she was making the corset work overtime to keep her breasts covered, and as tall as she was, they were pretty much at eye level for me. But none of that was as hard to resist as her voice.

“I suggest you make time, young mage,” she said softly in my ear, her voice like a touch by itself, “as soon as you may. You will want to be prepared for the times that are to come.” Her full, black lips brushed my hair as she bent down over me, and I shivered at how good it felt. “Biladon does not give advice lightly, and never for free.”

“Even Synreah knows I'm right,” Billy said as he backed toward his squat. “But you better get outta here. No one knows you're here, and right about now, you got a rep about as big as a dragon's ego. Oh, and I'd take it as a favor if you wouldn't mention the free advice thing,” he said from the flap to his squat. “If word of that gets out, people will think I’ve gone soft. Then
everybody
will start asking for a handout.”

“If it helps, I’ll complain about how much you charged me, and bitch about your fees,” I said with a smile.

“Your kindness is killing me,” he groused. “But seriously, you need to get the hell out of here, before it gets too crowded.” With that, he slipped back into his squat and closed the flap, and I felt the static in my head a few seconds later as his wards came back up.

“Movement is the best camouflage,” Synreah purred from beside me. “For both of us. If time is an issue, I can guide you to the places you need, for a fee. And, if you've the time afterward, and the currency, we can add to your list of sins.”

“Yes to the guide services, but no to the other,” I told her as I pulled a pair of topazes out of the bag. Her eyes gleamed at sight of the yellow gems, and I held the smaller one up in my fingers. “This one now, and the other if you can get me where I need to go, with everything I came for, before an hour and a half passes. Have we an accord between us?”

She smiled as she reached for the gem. “Between us? Aye,” she said, and tucked the gem down the front of her corset. “I trust your discretion is assured?”

“It is,” I said. My assurance of discretion meant that she wouldn't have to tell her owner about our deal, because he hadn't brokered it. Slaves could sometimes buy their way out of their contract, and deals like this helped them pay it off sooner because their owners didn’t take the dragon’s share of the profits. I shouldered the satchel and tucked the bag of hard currency inside, then headed for the mouth of the little side alley.

“How close are you to meeting your owner's price?” I asked as we stepped back out into the busier throughway.

“He hasn't set one,” she said with a grim smile. It was hard to suppress a shudder at the sudden cold tone in her voice. Without a price set for her freedom in her contract, my guess was that she was saving up to purchase the kind of contract that her owner wouldn't survive.

“So, where do you need to go?” Her voice shifted back to a sultry purr without a breath of hesitation, and I reminded myself that for all that she was enslaved, she was still half-demon. I took it as a warning not to underestimate her, and told her the name of the place I had in mind.

Shopping with six and a half feet of Infernal wet dream at my side was a new experience. I tried not to stare but I’m a guy, and Synreah was all kinds of woman. She bounced, she jiggled, and she shimmied in all the right places as she took me to the first place I asked about. The wizened little geomancer I was hoping to barter an amethyst from could barely keep his eyes out of her cleavage when she knelt at the edge of his blanket and cooed over his selection of gems. When I squatted down beside her, she reached for an oval piece of onyx and placed it over her bosom.

“What do you think, baby? Wouldn't that look nice?” she simpered.

“It already does,” I said. “How much for the onyx, Mr. Krishnamurti?” He looked at me for all of a microsecond before muttering something that sounded like fifteen sterling. Then his eyes went back to Synreah's body as she leaned forward and reached for a rough point of amethyst about an inch around. Leather creaked as her top strained to contain ample curves, and her cleavage deepened to the point where I was pretty sure it had its own gravity. She laid it in the same spot and gave Krishnamurti a broad smile, and I knew he was pretty much lost.

“Twenty sterling for both pieces,” he said in his clipped accent. “No less.”

“Is that a
firm
price?” Synreah asked. Her mouth quirked up a little on one side, and she tilted her head a little like she was sharing a subtle joke with him.

“Very,” he said with a little squeak.

I laid the twenty silver ounces down, and reached for a bowl full of crushed quartz pieces. “I need three ounces of these, too,” I added.

After he poured a pile of them onto his scale, carefully measuring out the three ounces, he added another two sterling ounces to the price, but threw in a silver chain. A quartz generator crystal and a half dozen pieces of magnetite only added another ounce sterling to the price. We walked away from the blanket, out only twenty-four sterling, when I had expected my pouch to be lighter by thirty or more. Well, I walked, what Synreah did was more of a strut.

“Are you sure you want to be dealing with Ashkhabad?” she asked me softly as we waited in a side alley for a gang of redcaps to stalk past us with their iron pikes carried against their shoulders. While they didn't look like they were on the hunt, their caps were still glistening wet with blood, and I didn't want to get their attention if I could avoid it.

“Not really, but I can afford his stuff,” I told her, once the sound of their iron-clad boots started to fade away around the corner.

She muttered something as we stepped into the larger alley, and Ashkhabad's latest squat came into view. It looked like he'd taken over the front room of a burnt-out building. Boards were nailed across the two doorways on either side of the front room, and a canvas tarp served as his roof, with a pole in the center giving it a broad point at the top. Most of the front wall was missing above waist height, and the doorway was just an empty rectangle, with no actual door to fill it.

Synreah led the way inside, where a pair of gossamer-winged fairies were fluttering over a pair of four inch wands on the makeshift counter, and a man in brown robes with a girl in off-white robes were sorting through cubit-long pieces of plain wood. Both of them had their hoods up, so that only the lower halves of their faces were visible. A blue-green rune glowed into existence in the air at the back of the shop as Synreah stepped across the shop's threshold, and a red one flared to life beside it as my feet crossed the invisible line across the shop's doorway. Heads turned my way, and I heard footsteps from the back of the shop. A second later, a dark-haired, olive-skinned man in baggy black pants, long-sleeved white shirt, and a patched brown vest came out of the doorway to the back of the shop with a wooden crate in his hands. He took a look at the runes as he came out, then turned to face us with narrowed eyes.

“You…leave my shop this instant!” he hissed as he hurried to set the box down on the cloth covered counter. “I'll have nothing to do with you!”

“Huh? Hey, I just wanted to buy stuff for a rod, that's all, dude,” I raised my hands to show open palms.

He pulled a black wand out of his vest and pointed it at me, and I could feel the soft static against my aura as the spell focused on me. Red runes blazed along its surface, and the soft static turned into a cold buzz.

“You can't fool me, boy. You're the apprentice Count Dulka cast out. You cast your lot when you took up service with the powers of Hell, and you'll get no sympathy from me.”

“He didn't cast me out, I kicked his ass and left on my own!” I said hotly. “I'm trying to…”

Whatever I intended to tell Ashkhabad, it went away when the spell hit me in the center of the chest and threw me over the wall and across the alleyway. I came up hard against the wall on the far side and shook my head. My vision cleared to the sight of him manhandling Synreah out the door with his hand wrapped in the hair at the nape of her neck, and I scrambled to my feet with an Infernal oath on my lips. Tossing me around was one thing, but getting physical with a girl, even a half-demon prostitute, pushed the wrong damn buttons with me. He shoved her to her knees outside his shop, and backhanded her across the face when she protested.

“Silence, whore!” he snarled and drew his hand back again.

“Back off, asshole,” I said as I came across the alley at him.

He recoiled as he saw me, and I saw the glimmer of black flames reflected in his eyes. I raised my left fist to find it engulfed in Hellfire. Somewhere along the way, I must have uttered the activation words for the spell. Just using it tainted my soul, but at the moment, it was worth it to see the look on Ashkhabad's face as I drew up in front of Synreah.