The War Hound and the World's Pain (22 page)

“I do not know,” said I, “but I would cheerfully feed it yours, Sedenko.” I was not yet prepared to forgive him for his foolishness concerning the stolen jar. He, for his part, was absolutely unrepentant. He took my remark, as he had taken others, as a joke, craning his head to look again at the sphere as we were marched up stone steps and through the portal of what was evidently some important public building.

We were taken into a room lined on both sides with pews. Not one of the pews, however, was occupied. At the far end of the room was a lectern and behind the lectern, where a priest might stand, was a tall, thin man with a bright red wig, dressed in a gown of black and gold.

Said he in the Latin language: “Speak you Latin, men?”

“I speak a little,” I told him. “Why have we been brought here so roughly, Your Honour? We are honest travelers.”

“Not so honest. You seek to avoid the tolls. You have ridden through our sacred Burning Grounds and desecrated them. You have entered Bakinax by the East Gate and placed no gold in the plate. And those are only your main crimes. Do not offer me your hypocrisy, sir, as well as your offences! I am the Great Magistrate of Bakinax and it was I who ordered you arrested. Will you speak?”

“We cannot know your laws,” I said, “for we are strangers here. If we had been aware that your Burning Grounds were sacred we should have ridden clear of them, I assure you. As for the gold which must be placed in the plate, we will willingly pay it now. None challenged us as we entered.”

“Too late to pay in gold,” said the Great Magistrate. He cleared his nose and glared at us. “You cannot claim that nobody told you of Bakinax as you journeyed here, for it is a famous place, this City of the Plague. Did no one mention our demon?”

“A demon was mentioned, aye.” I shrugged. “But nothing was said of tolls, Your Honour.”

“Why come here?”

“For fresh supplies.”

“To the City of the Plague?” He sneered. “To this awful City of the Demon? No! You came to cause us distress!”

“But, sir, how can we two cause a whole city distress?” I asked. The man was mad. I believed, reluctantly, that probably all Bakinax was mad. I regretted my decision to come here and felt in agreement with the Great Magistrate when he suggested that only a fool would seek out Bakinax.

“By being what you are. By seeing what you see!” replied the Magistrate. “We shall not be mocked, travelers! We shall not be mocked.”

“We do not mock,” I told him. “We promise that we shall not ever mention Bakinax again. Only, good sir, let us continue on our way, for we have a holy mission to perform.”

“Aye, indeed you have,” said the old man with some relish. “You must pay for your stupidity and your contempt for us with your souls. You will be given to our demon. Two of us shall thus be saved for a little longer and you will receive fitting punishment for your crimes. Your souls will go to Hell.”

At this I laughed. Sedenko had no idea what had passed between us. I told him roughly what had been said.

He was not as amused as I. Perhaps he did not really believe that his soul was already destined for Lucifer’s Realm.

“YOU, SIR,” SAID the Great Magistrate, addressing me, “shall be the first to fight our demon. None has ever beaten him. Should you, however, manage to kill him, the door of the sphere shall be released and you will be free. If you have not emerged in an hour, your friend will be sent to join you.”

“I am to be allowed to carry my sword?” said I.

“All you possess you may take with you,” he told me.

“Then I am ready,” I said.

The Great Magistrate spoke to his soldiers in their own tongue. One stood guard over Sedenko, while the rest escorted me from the Court and back into the square where the rain had again begun to fall.

We mounted steps onto the platform. The sphere had set in it a small round door which one of the guards approached. He was nervous. He put his palm against the handle and hesitated.

I saw a figure enter the square.

If anything, Klosterheim was even more gaunt than when last I saw him. He was grinning at me now. He was almost trembling with pleasurable anticipation. His black garments were stained and neglected; the purple feathers in his hat were matted and stringy and he had developed a peculiar, almost undetectable stoop. His eyes had that same in-turned insanity. He removed his hat in a mock salute as the door groaned open and the soldiers pushed me forward.

“Was this your doing, Klosterheim?” I asked.

The witch-seeker shrugged. “I am a friend,” he said, “to Bakinax.”

“Is this demon your gift to the city?”

He ignored me, signing casually to the guards.

With a wave to him I bent and entered the foul-smelling darkness, salty and damp, of the sphere. Crouching there, I blinked, peered, but saw nothing. The round door clanked shut behind me. Gradually I began to see. The light came from a peculiar substance washing the floor of the sphere. It was white and it was viscous and it was obviously, too, the source of the smell. Something emerged from it at the farthest point from me. The fluid at the bottom of the sphere made sucking sounds. There was no colour here. All seemed grey, black and white. The thing which moved through the liquid was larger than I. It had scales. It had a great, sad, misshapen head which had fallen to one side and almost rested on its left shoulder. Its long teeth were broken and its lips were ragged, as if they had been chewed to destruction. From one large nostril came a little vapour. The monster squeaked at me, almost a question.

“Art thou the Demon of the Sphere?” I asked him.

The head lifted a fraction. Then, after some while, a voice came from the back of its throat.

“I am.”

“Thou must know,” said I, “that my soul is not for eating. It already belongs to our Master, Lucifer.”

“Lucifer.” The word was distorted. “Lucifer?”

“He owns it. I can offer you no sustenance, therefore, Sir Demon. I can only offer you death.”

“Death?” It licked its torn lips with a ruined tongue. A smile seemed to appear on its features. “Lucifer? I wish to be free. I want to eat nothing more. Why do they feed me so much? All they have to do is release me from the pact and I will fly straight back to Hell.”

“You do not want to be here?”

“I have never wanted to be here. I was tricked. Through my own greed I was tricked. I know your soul is not for me, mortal. I could smell it if it were mine. I cannot smell your soul.”

“Yet you will still kill me, eh?”

The demon sat down in the fluid. He splashed at it with his taloned fingers. “Children and youths. This stuff is all that remains. There is not one soul in Bakinax—not one adult soul, that is—which is not already claimed. I will not kill you, mortal, unless you grow bored and want to fight. You are one of the few who has wished to talk. Most of them scream. The children, the youths and the maidens, I eat. It silences them. It entertains me. It feeds me for a little while. But I have more than enough. More than enough.”

“But you will not release me from your lair?”

“How can I? I am trapped here myself. A pact. It seemed worthwhile all that time ago.”

“Who was the magus who trapped you?”

“He was called Philander Groot. A cunning man. I roamed free before, across this whole kingdom. Now I am limited to Bakinax and this cage. Oh, I am so tired of the flavourless souls of the young.” He took some of the fluid up on his finger and sucked. He sighed.

“But they fear you,” I said. “It is why they keep you here. They believe you will escape if they do not placate you.”

The demon said: “Is that not always the way with Men? What must I represent to them, I wonder?”

I leaned, as best I could, against the wall of the sphere. I was growing used to the smell. “Well, they will not release you and they will not release me unless I kill you. You have food. I have not. I must starve to death, it seems, or destroy you.”

The demon looked up at me. “I have no desire to kill you, mortal. It would give offence to our Master, would it not? Your time is not yet arrived.”

“I believe that,” I said. “For I am upon a mission directly instructed by Lucifer.”

“Then we have a dilemma,” said the demon.

I thought for a moment. “I could attempt to exorcise you,” I told him. “That would at least release you from the sphere. Where would you go?”

“Directly back to Hell.”

“Where you would wish to be.”

“I never want to leave Hell again,” said the demon feelingly.

“I am no expert at exorcism.”

“They have attempted to exorcise me, but those already pledged to Hell, whether they know it or not, cannot bid me leave.”

“Therefore I cannot exorcise you either.”

“It would seem so.”

“We have reached impasse again,” I said.

The demon lowered its head and sighed a deeper sigh than the first. “Aye.”

“What if I killed you?” I said. “Where would your own soul go?”

“Oblivion. I would rather not die, Sir Knight.”

“Yet I was told the door will open only after I have slain you. “

“Since nobody has slain me, how are they to know that?”

“Perhaps Philander Groot told them.”

I brooded on the problem for a while. “The door must be opened eventually, to admit my companion, who is to be your next victim. Why cannot we escape when his turn comes?”

“It might be possible for you to escape,” said the demon. ”But I am trapped by more than metal. There is the pact, you see, with the magus. Were I to break it, I would be destroyed instantly.”

“Therefore only Philander Groot can release you.”

“That is so.”

“And Philander Groot has become a hermit, dwelling in a far kingdom.”

“I have heard as much.”

“Inevitably I am led to the logic,” I said, “that my only means of escape is by killing you. And I know that my chances of doing so are virtually nothing.”

“I am very strong,” said the demon, by way of confirmation, “and also extremely fierce.”

“I think that my only hope,” I told him, “is to wait until the hour is up and, when my friend is sent to join us, attempt to leave by the door.”

“It would seem so,” agreed the demon. “But they would kill you anyway, would they not?”

“That is a strong likelihood.”

The demon brooded for a moment. “I am trying to think of another solution, one which would benefit us both.”

“Not to mention the remaining children and virgins of Bakinax,” I said.

“Of course,” said the demon. He became nostalgic. “Are there any Tatars left, do you know?”

“A few. They are protected against you by a Genie they have.”

“The one in the jar?”

“That’s the one.”

“Aha.” He frowned. “I was fond of Tatars.”

It was beginning to seem to me that the supernatural creatures of this land were somewhat ineffectual beings. I wondered if not only the Mittelmarch but the whole of Hell was in decline. Or perhaps the powers had been marshalled to cope with the Civil War which Klosterheim had said was raging between Lucifer and His Dukes.

I thought I detected a movement overhead. I stretched out my hand to the demon. He placed his own scaly fingers in mine. “Would you oblige me,” I asked him, “by allowing me to stand upon your shoulders so that when the door is opened I will be able to escape?”

“By all means,” said the demon, “if you will agree one thing: should you escape and find Philander Groot again, tell him that I guarantee that if he will break the bond I will go home immediately and never venture into the regions of the Earth again.”

“The likelihood,” I said honestly, “of my seeing Groot is slender. However, I give my word that if I should meet him again, or be in a position to get a message to him, I will tell him what you have told me.”

“Then I wish you Lucifer’s luck,” said the demon, bending so that I might climb upon his back. “And I hope that you kill that Great Magistrate who has caused me so much boredom.”

The door was opening. I heard guards laughing. I heard Sedenko cursing.

His face appeared above me. I put my finger to my lips. His eyes widened in amazement. I whispered: “Draw your sword now. We are going to try to fight our way clear …”

“But—” began Sedenko.

“Do not question me,” I said.

The Kazak shrugged and called back. “Wait, fellows, while I free my blade!”

The sabre was in his hand. I drew my own sword as the demon began to lift me higher towards the door. I took hold of the sill and jumped through, past Sedenko, lunging at the nearest guard and taking him in the heart. Two more fell to me before they realised what had happened. The remaining three set upon me and Sedenko and would have been finished easily, had I not been distracted by Sedenko’s agitated gesturing. I turned to glance in the direction he pointed.

Klosterheim was there, mounted on a heavy black charger. At his back were twenty mounted suits of armour, glowing with eery black fire. Here were the demons-at-arms of Arioch, Duke of Hell.

For a moment I was tempted to scramble back into the sphere.

Klosterheim was laughing at me as he waited for the fight to end.

I killed one more guard and Sedenko sliced apart the other two.

Behind us, out of the open sphere, came the stench of rotting souls. Before us was the face of a triumphant Klosterheim and his impassive minions.

“We are certainly doomed,” murmured Sedenko.

I had by now memorised the spell which held back these riders. I dismissed Sedenko’s fears. I raised my hand:

“
Rehoim Farach Nyadah!
”

Klosterheim continued to laugh. Then he stopped and raised his own hand: “
Niever Oahr Shuk Arnjoija!
” His expression was challenging. “I have neutralized your spell, von Bek. Do you think I have wasted the past year in wondering how you stopped my men the last time?”

“So you have us,” I said.

“I have you. I knew your destination. I knew you must come through this land, for you are seeking the Holy Grail in the Forest at the Edge of Heaven. You will never see that forest now, von Bek.”

“How goes the War in Hell?” I said.