Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver (6 page)

The cyclops reluctantly reached into the linen sack and withdrew a sturdy platinum tiara bejeweled with a rainbow of scintillating colors. A fine silver necklace chased with glittering rubies looped around the apex of the delicate crown and curled over Aebos’s massive thumb to dangle invitingly.

Juval cackled, the snap of its derisive laughter sharper for the chorus of hissing snakes that accompanied it. When finally the demon’s pleasure subsided into a fit of rough chuckles, it spoke, shaking its head. “You are a fool. What good does a pretty bracelet or a handful of coins do me here? I am trapped forever in this Hell of my creation, never to visit a market or fancy ball. Wealth as you understand it means absolutely nothing to me.”

“I’m certain that we can come to some accommodation,” replied Korm.

“As am I,” Juval replied. “Creeg spoke true. My accordance with his mistress calls for the delivery of a new, interesting form once every decade. I inhabit that form until I tire of it, at which point I demand a new one.” Juval turned briefly toward the murdered satyr atop the garden’s central dais. “The last three deliveries Iranez has made have not been sufficiently interesting, and so I have stilled the waters of her beloved homeland until the quality of her offering equals the value of my service.”

Aebos began carefully returning his treasures to the linen bag. The corner of Korm’s mouth twitched. Things were about to go to hell, he thought, but at least if they managed to get out of here that bag of treasure would accompany them to Quantium.

Korm’s mind raced to concoct a way to defeat the demon. If he stalled the creature, perhaps Creeg could rouse himself and come to their aid. Even the thought of pinning their hopes on Epostian Creeg—who had already proven himself their enemy—made Korm’s stomach turn. He brought his left hand to rest on the grip of his saber, unsure what to do next. Juval seemed to read his thoughts.

“There is nothing you can do to win the day. The cyclops is already mine. I control every aspect of the world within the lens. I control every aspect of the Relentless itself, down to the finest detail. And now, thanks to eons of effort, I extend my control even to the waters surrounding the ship. And through those waters I control the fate of a nation. You should have known better than attempt to bargain with a demon, Korm Calladan. We are not limited by human frailties, weaknesses, or desires.”

There it was again. The demon controlled every aspect not just of this gloomy underworld, but of the ship that surrounded it. Korm smiled. His sword might not be up to the challenge of killing a demon, but perhaps another avenue presented itself.

“Who was Durvin Gest?” asked Korm.

“No one of consequence,” snapped Juval, in a manner that suggested otherwise. After a moment’s consideration, it continued. “You remind me of him. Lean like a predator. Sword on the right hip, though Gest’s was a true blade and not a needle like yours. He was a stronger man than you, from a better era, but the prototype is the same.

“You even have his eyes. Sharp as a forest drake. Gray as a wolf.”

“You sound very familiar with those eyes,” said Korm. Juval’s own eyes flared, but the demon kept its face placid, as if it had barely noticed the comment. The calm extended only as far as its brow, where its serpentine hair writhed in disdain, each tiny ophidian face registering its personal disgust at his impudence. Behind Juval, on the small rise at the center of the valley, the burning manor house flared mightily. Korm felt its warmth on his cheeks.

“I knew him well. In the fifty centuries since a wizard’s treachery left me formless and bound eternally within the lens, hundreds of visitors have ventured here—many of them human like you. Pathetic creatures. Frail. Singularly obsessed with protecting their lives yet incapable of doing anything meaningful with them. A human will always, always sell out its principles to preserve its life, but so few manage to think beyond petty concerns like family and community.

“But Durvin Gest was unfettered from sentimentality. He sought to use his ephemeral human life exploring the world, taking in its marvels, and leaving his mark in the form of deeds and tales that would long outlive him.

“A quest of limitless scope requires a vessel of limitless capability, and so Durvin Gest claimed the Relentless by virtue of sword and guile. And in time…” Juval turned to glance at the burning home behind it, “In time, he even conquered me.”

Korm raised an eyebrow.

“I led the conquering hero all over the world. Around the Horn of Garund, through the straits of lost Azlant, and to the far shores of Arcadia. After every stop, Gest returned here to our home together. He told me of the people he had defeated and the mysteries he had solved. He brought me funerary masks and axeblades and bones and books, eagerly sharing the panorama of a larger world beyond the Relentless. A world I would never truly see. His triumphs became my triumphs. As his image of the world exploded with mystery and wonder, so did mine extend beyond the confines of my eternal prison. Our lives became linked.”

Aebos snapped his fingers, finally understanding what Korm was driving at. “The symbol on the dining room wall! That’s your doing! You and Durvin Gest had a partnership!”

“We had a bond. I knew that the captain of the Relentless was a truly exceptional human, and so I took on more than just a human form. I attempted to think like a human thinks. To aspire as the greatest of humans might aspire. To be the companion that this exceptional human desired. To be exceptional together.”

“Plenty of exceptional humans are trapped on Nex’s seas,” said Korm. “Because of you I even ate a couple of them. Many more exceptional humans will starve when ships can’t reach port. You’ve got to put an end to this.” Slowly, deliberately, Korm withdrew his slender blade from its scabbard. “And if you don’t, we’re going to have to kill you.”

Juval threw back its medusa head in a wicked laugh. “You do remind me of him, Korm Calladan. Curious and confident to the point of recklessness. You came here, to a world I command to face off with a creature older than your race’s eldest empire. And you come in the company of a lout and an addict, wielding nothing but an unmagicked blade.”

“I object!” said Korm. “Aebos is far from a lout.”

“Even in the face of certain death you remain jovial. Just like him. But Durvin Gest never returned from his final adventure. By now he must be centuries dead.”

Behind Juval, the burning manor exploded in a bright conflagration. As the fire cloud lifted, it left behind no sign that the home had ever been there at all. Korm suspected a similar transformation was now taking place in the ship’s dining room on the other side of the lens.

“I no longer believe in exceptional humans,” said Juval. “The age of the human is over. The form has expired its appeal. I thought a shapechanger would cure the ennui of my imprisonment, and in truth I will miss it. But I find myself limited to only forms I have inhabited before. A shapechanger will come again. In ten years’ time I can even demand one from Iranez, or again Nex’s waters will fall still.

“But I may never get another chance at a cyclops.”

The medusa fell slack and slumped to the ground, its cheek slamming into the edge of a step with a dull thud. While the body itself remained motionless, the details of its appearance undulated and rippled. The brown linen garment lost definition and melded with the body beneath, which grew increasingly gaunt and malnourished. Its serpentine scales smoothed even as the tendrils of its hair withdrew into the skull. The feminine face sagged until it resembled the early outlines of a hollow-eyed bust. Its vacuous mouth hung crooked and low. It was no longer a medusa.

“I think I understand now why Durvin Gest might have chosen Juval as a companion.”

It was no longer Juval. Korm turned to Aebos to shout a warning, only to realize that he was too late. His friend was down on one knee, bent over and struggling to steel himself against some unseen assault. As the swordsman rushed to his side, Aebos slackened his shoulders and sighed. Korm placed his hand upon his companion’s arm. Aebos turned to him.

“They say that the cyclopes can see the future,” the demon said in Aebos’s voice. An unseen chorus echoed the words. “I wonder if your cyclops ever saw himself with his hands around the throat of his most trusted ally?”

Juval grabbed for Korm, a wicked smile upon its face, murder in its single eye. Korm rolled along the outside of Juval’s attack in a move that always confounded Aebos in their many sparring sessions. But the cyclops was no longer Aebos, and Juval seemed prepared for his dodge. It spun to meet Korm’s movement, swinging its forearm in a clothesline strike that swept Korm off his feet and put him on his back upon the ground.

Juval looked down at the swordsman and opened its mouth for some further insult, only to double over at the waist, clutching its arms to its stomach. Korm saw anger and confusion on his friend’s face. “The form of the cyclops,” Juval muttered with difficulty, “it burns! The pain is intolerable!”

Juval fell to both knees and moaned. Korm scrambled away from the demon and got to his feet. It crushed him to see Aebos in so much pain, but he reminded himself that the demon was not Aebos at all. Creeg had said that Juval pushed aside the spirits of the forms it inhabited, so the best he could hope for at the moment was that whatever plagued Juval so terribly had no effect upon his friend. Juval clawed at its stomach, trying to tear a hole in Aebos’s leather armor to get at the source of the pain within. From between the demon’s outstretched fingers Korm saw a flash of golden radiance that seemed to come from within the cyclops’s body.

Juval turned its baleful eye upon Korm, and the swordsman recognized determination on the face of his friend. He immediately felt a blasphemous presence slice its way into his psyche, slashing the bindings between his body and mind and thrusting his consciousness aside. He no longer controlled the movements of his form, but as he sensed his hand reach for the grip of his saber he felt the familiar softness of the supple leather handle and realized that if he could feel texture through his alien hands, Aebos must surely have experienced the horrific pain that had forced Juval to flee. Sword fully drawn now, Juval turned Korm’s head to regard the stricken Aebos, pitched over on one side upon the ground. He took a step toward the cyclops and raised the sword for a mighty blow.

Korm felt a sharp scratch in the pit of his stomach. Juval brought his hand to the point of pain, and at the touch a hundred daggers exploded within him. Juval threw back Korm’s shoulders and screamed in anguish, his puppetry of Korm’s form finally matching exactly the intentions of its owner. Korm felt as if a swarm of insects was tearing him apart from within.

Although Juval seemed reluctant to look directly at it, from his peripheral vision Korm beheld a corona of crackling golden light shining from his abdomen, and he instantly realized what had happened. Creeg had poisoned them both—and himself—from the moment he first had met them, no doubt hoping for exactly this result. Each point where golden fire seemed to scorch his innards away must have been some remnant from one of Epostian Creeg’s flakes of golden seasoning. But understanding the source of the pain gave Korm no control over it, and hope vanished within seconds of the excruciating onslaught. Korm realized that the pain that wracked both puppet and master would soon kill them both. Epostian Creeg had won.

Korm was willing to die, if that meant Aebos would live. He had no control over his own body anymore, but perhaps he could extend his mind to touch that of Juval’s, find some kernel of goodness that would confound it into remaining in his body long enough for Creeg’s golden flakes to do their fatal work on them both. He did his best to push the pain to the back of his mind and opened himself to the imposter dwelling within him. He managed to contact only a tiny sliver of the demon’s mind, a thundering abyss of resentment, hatred, arrogance, and anger. Such a mind offered little for him to work with.

Before Korm could formulate a plan, however, the demon slipped away, leaving him in control of his faculties once more. The pain left immediately upon Juval’s withdrawal, though Korm felt a warm glow in his stomach that convinced him that Creeg’s poison still provided a defense against another possession attempt. His heart jumped as he looked to Aebos, fearing that Juval would make another play for his promised tribute. But Aebos lay gathering his senses on the ground, free of demonic inhabitation.

A flurry of movement on the steps drew Korm’s attention to the squirming shapechanger, who writhed in pain on the ground, stomach glowing with a golden radiance. Somehow Creeg’s golden flakes had transferred back with it so that even the shapechanger’s body had been infected. Not all of the flakes, of course, but enough to constrict Juval in paroxysms of pain. As if summoned by his triumph, Epostian Creeg stepped past Korm to approach Juval.

“You are all fools,” he said, dabbing his bloody mouth on the back of his hand. Already an angry bruise marred the side of the face where Aebos had struck him. “Iranez of the Orb has more pressing matters to attend to than placating her demon. You have outlived your usefulness, Juval. We knew that a cyclops would be too tempting a morsel for you, so the Orb found us one. Then it was only a matter of fattening it up with a substance anathema to you, and we knew you would undo yourself. And you did.

“But poison has no command over demons!” cried Juval.

“Indeed it does not,” replied Creeg. “But what you have ingested—what’s now become a part of you—is not poison at all, but a violation of multiversal law. You act as if you are poisoned because it is a biological process that is killing you. Or killing your mortal form, but that is good enough for our purposes, as your formless soul will die just as surely.”

“I—I do not understand,” Juval said through gritted teeth.

“When you started causing us trouble, the Lady Iranez ordered me to learn what I could about demons, in particular how to combat their ability to possess victims and steal their bodies. This led me to discover an order of celestial azatas known as the Golden Host, who made war against demons countless aeons ago. They had no natural protections against possession, so they bathed their skin in eldritch extracts anathema to demonkind. When a demon possessed the azata, its soul and the azata’s became the same being, trapped within the imprisoning golden skin.”