After the little devils had snatched Claudja’s clothes and stranded her in the tub, the Duchess had fashioned a sort of poncho from bed sheets. She was sitting huddled in them on the bed an hour later when there was another knock on the door, but Claudja had decided she was through with crouching behind the tub and brandishing a silver butter knife.
“What?” she called irritably, and the door opened. A little devil flew in and returned her clothes in a neatly folded pile, washed, mended, and still warm as though they had been dried before a fire. Claudja redressed and went on plotting her escape, though she had not gotten very far in that direction all day.
The room’s single window gave a view of packed dirt and the side of a long building made of black stone, standing five stories tall and with rows and rows of arched windows covered by shutters. Claudja could lean out her window far enough to see that her room was in the top story of an identical building, laid out at an angle to the first rather than in parallel. The two wings came together at a central tower to her right, while out at their far ends to the left both ended at towers extending another three or four stories up into the gray sky. A slice of Vod’Adia’s monochromatic streets was visible beyond the towers, past the surrounding area of bare dirt and sifting gray dust.
The window was wide enough to jump through, but the fall was certainly enough to kill her. Claudja had enough sheets and towels to knot together a rope that might get her halfway down. A fall from there would probably break both her legs, but might leave her alive. For a while. Claudja made that her backup plan.
She thought she could brain a little devil with a chair the next time one hovered in, but that would only be of use if a dozen of them did not enter together. She also knew from the glimpse of a voluminous white sleeve in the hallway the first time her door had been opened that there was a bigger devil out there, probably the same sort of bearded creature that had carried her to this place. Claudja tried to listen for it through the slight crack under her door, but heard nothing in the hall, not even breathing. The thought that devils might not have to breath gave her a chill.
Claudja still had no good ideas by the time the sky grew dark outside, the mist-dulled shadows from behind her building letting her know that she was facing east. Dinner was brought to her, the same as lunch, and Claudja ate again without drinking the wine this time.
Though she was exhausted Claudja stayed off the bed and sat in a chair in the corner, after deciding not to bother wedging it under the doorknob. She sat with her arms crossed, biting her lip, mind running down intricate scenarios that had yet to lead anywhere good. Her eyes grew progressively heavier, and each time she started to nod-off the light from the hanging glow stones started to fail. At one point when they had gone almost completely to darkness, the door banged open with a crash.
Claudja jerked in her chair as a tall figure breezed into the room. Claudja recognized her as the creature who had killed the legionnaires, though she had replaced her tight black leathers with a long gown flowing to the floor, colored a deep burgundy and moving like silk. Her green and blonde hair was pinned up and neatly arranged to frame her face which was pale as alabaster, or a corpse. Her red eyes, fangs, and folded bat wings topped with hooks made her rather hard to mistake for a human woman.
“Hi there,” the creature grinned at Claudja. “We were not introduced. You may call me Uella.”
It was the first time all day a devil had spoken to Claudja. She got to her feet with her hands in fists at her sides, which Uella seemed to find funny.
“Where is Phinneas?” Claudja demanded in the most regal tone she could summon.
Uella beckoned with a finger, the nail a dark red that matched her dress.
“Come this way, and I will show you.”
“I am not going anywhere with you, Devil Woman,” Claudja said. Uella frowned.
“First off, I am a demon, not a devil. No tail, as you can see. Second…what do I call you?”
Claudja was not about to go on casual terms with a demon.
“I am the Duchess of Chengdea.”
“Good for you. Second, Duchess, you absolutely are coming with me. But I leave it to you if you wish to walk, or would prefer being bound and dragged.”
Claudja’s heart was racing and the palms of her clenched hands were clammy.
“Shall I get a rope?” Uella grinned, but Claudja stepped away from the wall. The demoness gave a disappointed cluck and a shrug, then turned to lead the way out into the hall, turning to the right. Her gown was open in the back from neck to her slim waist, allowing her wings plenty of room.
There was indeed a bearded devil in the hall, standing just to the left of the door and holding a pole arm with a cluster of sharp blades and twisting hooks at the top. Claudja shied away from the creature and followed Uella, who was skipping away down a wide passage lined with doors on both sides, illuminated by candles in ornate candelabras. The demoness was whistling an unfamiliar tune. Claudja looked back over her shoulder and saw that the bearded devil was following them, albeit it at a polite distance behind.
Uella skipped along gaily for quite a while before halting before another door where a bearded devil stood guard, and Claudja hurried forward hopefully. As she arrived the demoness pulled open the door and Claudja looked into a room very much like her own. Phinneas Phoarty was just sitting up in the bed, where he had been lying atop the covers. His face looked freshly scrubbed though his eyes were sunken and exhausted, and his gray wizard robes were clean. They actually looked like they had been pressed.
Claudja and Phin shouted each others names, but Uella slammed the door and shot the bolt.
“Everyone brushed and watered, as you can see,” the demoness beamed.
The door shook as Phin put a shoulder against it and he continued to shout, asking Claudja if she was all right.
“I’m fine,” she said back through the door, though she had no idea if she was or not.
Phin hammered with his hands, echoing loudly in the long hall. Uella frowned.
“Phin, calm down,” Claudja called, but he was still shouting rather than listening. A deep snarl rumbled from Uella’s throat and she bawled, “THAT’S ENOUGH, MAGGOT!” in a booming voice.
Phin’s room must have had a similar table and chair situation as Claudja’s, for it sounded as though the Wizard reeled back into them, knocking furniture to the floor and falling himself with a grunt.
“Ahem,” Uella said. “This way now, Duchess.”
The demoness pranced on, whistling again, and Claudja took a last look at Phin’s door before following. One bearded devil still followed her, while the second remained at its post.
The hall ended at an open doorway beyond which a wide staircase with multiple landings descended along the outer wall of an open square shaft. Everything was of stone, presumably the same black material as the rest of Vod’Adia, but here all was painted in a soft brown tone that looked warm in the flickering light of more candles. The stairs were carpeted and the stone banisters were intricately carved with whirling designs. Claudja could see down the middle of the shaft all five stories to the ground, to a floor that looked like white marble.
Uella led the way down by the expedient of hiking her gown up over her boots and sliding sidesaddle down each banister, crying “ Weeeee !” every time, and waiting giggling at each landing for Claudja to walk down the steps behind her. Claudja started to wonder if insanity was typical to all demons, or if Uella was peculiar even for her kind.
The landing of the second floor had no wall on the outside of the shaft, leaving a balcony with a banister across the open space. Uella sat on the banister, swinging her feet over the side, and Claudja gasped as she looked out past the demon‘s furled wings. They had reached the outward end of the long gallery, and Claudja saw with some surprise that the adjoining tower was hollow within, just an enormous space like the interior of a silo with windowless black walls and a floor of naked white stone. Several torches burned on stands down on the floor beyond the banister, and their light did not reach all the way up the round walls to the ceiling high above. It did illuminate a great pair of doors at ground level, across from the balcony where Claudja stood and Uella sat. Even as the Duchess looked at them, the two wooden portals were swinging open.
“Such timing,” Uella said happily.
The doors swung wide and a single figure stepped into the torchlight from the night beyond, a male devil with a tail and a single hoof that struck up a spark each time it touched the floor. It walked in past the torches, turned around and gave a deep bow, moving its arms in a sharp gray jacket as though bidding others to enter. Two more figures did so slowly, creeping into the cavernous space and looking all around. On the left was a man in ragged armor carrying a crossbow pointed at the floor, and on the right with a short bow at a half-pull, familiar in her triangular half-cloak now coated a dusty gray, was Matilda Lanai.
*
The party had all understood the devil Balan’s voice as he promised them safe passage, and vowed that neither he nor his minions would do them any harm. Tilda did not believe the creature for a moment, and when Zeb relayed Nesha-tari’s assurances that the devil must adhere to the letter of all promises it made, she did not believe the Zant sorceress either.
Nesha-tari was determined to go to the palace with the creature, and the Westerners would of course go with her. John Deskata said nothing, but plainly meant to go along as well. After exchanging several skeptical glances, Tilda, Zeb, and Brother Heggenauer joined the others rather than remain behind in the house.
The party lit torches and followed Balan’s sparking hoof across the open ground around the palace, crossing an arching footbridge over a dry ditch along the way. As they approached the tall doors to the northernmost of the nine towers ringing the place, everyone but Nesha-tari readied their weapons. Tilda and Zeb moved to the front with their bows.
The doors opened just as Balan approached them and the devil walked through to stand in the middle of a large open area, turning and beckoning to the party. Tilda glanced at Zeb, who met her eyes.
“If this goes horribly wrong, will you do me a favor?” he whispered.
“What?”
“Shoot me first. Plumb in the head.”
A single bark of laughter that sounded slightly hysterical snuck out of Tilda’s mouth before she pressed her lips together tightly.
She and Zeb crept in, scanning the vast space all around which was mostly lost in shadows that reeked of ambush. Balan waited for them with a wide smile, and when they neared the edge of illumination from the torches on iron stands set around him, someone shouted Tilda’s name from across the room.
Tilda drew her bow fully and sighted down the shaft on Balan’s forehead, as he was still the only target she could see. From the easy way the devil smiled back at Tilda she was sure a non-magical arrow would bounce off his head without leaving a scratch. Running footsteps against stone sounded from across the tower and behind the devil for the entire structure was hollow inside, and suddenly the Duchess Claudja Perforce of Chengdea was running past the torches, looking fresher and cleaner than she had any right to, and with her gray eyes open wide.
Tilda could not bring herself to turn her bow on the Duchess, but Claudja must have seen the look of alarm in her eyes. The Duchess slid to a halt on the smooth flagstones while she was still several strides away.
“Is this a trick?” Tilda barked. Claudja stared at her.
“If it was, would I say so?”
“Duchess Perforce,” Heggenauer said, his shield clanging against the back of his breastplate as he hurried forward, carrying a torch along with his mace.
“Brother Heggenauer?” Claudja’s stunned eyes snapped between Tilda and the priest. “What are the two of you doing here?”
“Um. It’s sort of a rescue,” Tilda said.
Claudja kept staring at the two of them, and her narrow shoulders trembled one time.
“That is the stupidest, kindest thing I’ve ever heard,” the Duchess said, then swept forward and hugged both Tilda and Heggenauer soundly. Tilda relaxed her drawn bow and Heggenauer held his torch away in time to avoid shooting the Duchess, or setting her on fire.
“No trick,” Balan called from the center of the round chamber. “Consider it a gesture of good faith. Are anyone else’s eyes feeling misty?”
“Where is the Wizard, Balan?” Nesha-tari demanded, and Tilda turned to look at her over Claudja’s arm.
“Nesha-tari?” she asked.
“What?” Nesha-tari said, still glaring at Balan.
“I understand you.”
Nesha-tari’s blue eyes turned to Tilda, and her fine brown eyebrows raised.
“I understand you as well.”
“That would also be my doing,” Balan called. “A simple enough spell, but one that greatly eases communication. In answer to your question, Madame Nesha-tari, the Circle Wizard is here. In my custody.”
Claudja released Tilda and Heggenauer and spun on the devil, her clothes and face now dusty again from the hug.
“He is upstairs, in this building. A room on the fifth floor.”
“There you have it,” Balan held out a hand. “Your friend has seen him only moments ago, alive and well.”
“Why do I doubt you will simply permit us to retrieve him, fiendish one?” Uriako Shikashe said grimly, causing everyone to stare at him.
Balan nodded. “You are catching on, noble swordsman. First things first, we need to talk.”
“What if we just want to go up and get him ourselves?” Deskata asked.
“You won’t make it. Safe passage does not hold if you people attack us first.”
“Tilda, what is going on? Who are these people?” Claudja asked. Tilda sighed.
“Claudja…it’s such a long story. I don’t even know where to start.”
They had spoken quietly, but Balan plainly heard them.
“Take a minute and work it out. In fact, I think you all could use a little time before we get down to brass tacks.”
The devil waved a hand and across the tower a smaller pair of double doors opened beneath a balcony, revealing a brightly-lit room with a table and chairs in the center. Several open doors lined the walls.
“There are drawn baths waiting in the side rooms, enough for everyone unless you feel like doubling-up with a buddy. Help yourselves to the beverages and nibbles. Your friend can assure you that all of it is safe, as of course do I.”
“I do not need a bath, Balan,” Nesha-tari sneered. The devil clutched its lapels and looked solemn.
“Madame Nesha-tari, you know that I am unable to speak an untrue word. That being said, you do need a bath, Madame. The whole lot of you smell like a fire in a junkyard. No offense.”
The party glanced around at each other, but no one raised a word of denial.
“So there it is,” Balan clapped his hands. “Make use of our hospitality, or do not. I will leave you to your own devices for the time being, and return in an hour or so.”
The devil turned and strode for the stairs. Tilda did not know if she should try to stop him, and looking around it did not appear anyone else did either. Balan halted himself at the foot of the stairs.
“I should probably add that the various demons and daemons hereabouts are technically not my minions, nor are they under my control. Please do not go wandering around, for if you encounter any of them they will surely attack you out of hand.”
Balan bowed again, then put a hand on the end of the banister, spun around it, and disappeared with a rustle of his coat tails.
The party entered the rooms the devil had indicated, and though some of them may have had no intention of touching the food on the table nor of trying the waters, the temptation of it all was too much. Nesha-tari headed for a tub immediately and slammed the door shut behind her, and Zeb did not keel over after bolting several strips of salted venison. Everyone bathed and ate after that, and did what they could to beat the dust out of their clothes.
After she had washed, Tilda sat at the table with Claudja and the two hurriedly covered what had happened to them both over the last several days. Tilda said she was sorry about Sir Towsan, and assured the Duchess that the Jobians in Camp Town had taken the knight to their temple in honor.
“The men who killed him met justice,” Claudja said with her eyes hard, though she did not elaborate.
“John will no doubt be pleased,” Tilda muttered.
“Who is John?” Claudja asked, looking around the room. Zeb was trying to strike up a conversation with Shikashe, but the samurai was no less taciturn now that he could have communicated had he wanted to do so.
“Oh. That is…Dugan,” Tilda said. She looked around, but the man in question was not in sight at the moment.
“His first name is John?” Claudja blinked. “All that time on the Shugak raft, and I never knew that.”
“No, it is, but…his name…his name isn’t Dugan. He is not who I thought he was.”
“Where is John Deskata?” Nesha-tari asked from where she sat in a chair against the wall, showing little interest in the food. Tilda still heard her words as they were spoken, in Zantish, and it was a very strange feeling to be able to understand them.
“Is he not in there?” Heggenauer asked from further down the table, pointing at a closed door.
“That’s Amatesu,” Zeb said, then gave up on talking to Uriako Shikashe and knocked on the only other closed door.
“John,” he called. “The girls all want to wash your back.”
Tilda lowered her eyes and smiled, and Claudja noticed. The Duchess raised an eyebrow at her and gave Zeb a more appraising look than she had when Tilda had introduced them. Zeb Baj Nif looked scarcely less scruffy than he had before washing.
When there was no answer Zeb knocked harder, then pushed open the door.
“Empty,” he said, and Tilda felt a sudden disquiet.
Shikashe must have felt the same thing, for the samurai stood and barked Amatesu’s name at the one door that remained closed. The shukenja opened it and stepped out, looking embarrassed. Her long black hair hung straight to her waist, shining and clean, more lustrous and gorgeous than Tilda would have thought possible of the typically tangled mess.
“There were herbs and soaps,” Amatesu said, sounding more guilty than she had when talking about her past as a ninja. “I did not mean to, I meant only…”
“Is John in there with you?” Zebulon asked. Amatesu raised her eyes from the floor and frowned.
“What? Of course not.”
Tilda jumped up from the table, knocking over her chair. She called John Deskata’s name and rushed around to look in the other side rooms, but the man was nowhere to be found.
*
A short time after the Duchess Claudja had appeared in his doorway, there was a knock on Phin’s door. He stopped pacing and glared at the portal. The knock repeated.
“Enter,” he barked.
The door opened and a small devil with spikes all along its spine floated in, the same kind as those that had been coming and going all day. Phin could not tell them apart, and had no idea if he had seen this particular one before.
“Mr. Phoarty,” the devil said. “Please come with me.”
Phin stared. “You can talk? I have been asking questions all day!”
“We did not have anything to say earlier.”
“Where is the Duchess Claudja?” Phin demanded for the hundredth time.
“Downstairs, with the others. Please come this way.”
“What others?” Phin asked, as he was fairly sure the Sarge and the legionnaires had all been killed.
The devil gave no answer but only floated out through the door, then down the hall to the left.
Phin rushed to the doorway but stopped and peeked out. The spiny devil was floating away down the long passage to the left, but to the right a bearded devil in white robes stood athwart the hall, its red eyes boring into Phin’s.
“The Duchess was taken in that direction,” Phin shouted, but the devil floating away did not alter its pace.
“There is more than one way downstairs, Mr. Phoarty.”
Phin looked at the bearded devil, and the creature flexed its scaly fingers on the shaft of the pole arm it held across its body. Phin recalled two such fingers being jammed into his mouth at his capture. He turned and followed the spiny devil, hurrying to catch up as the thing bobbed through the air.
“How do you know my name?” Phin asked when he was behind the creature. The spikes on its back ran all the way down its serpentine tail. They looked something like porcupine quills, though they were thicker and set in a single, even row.
“The others have spoken your name, and we have heard them. We have heard much of what they have said since entering the city.”
“Who are the people of whom you speak, devil?”
“My name is Poltus. They are the people who entered this place in pursuit of your band. Two Far Westerners, two Miilarkians. A priest and a soldier and a Lamia.”
Phin blinked and stumbled a step on the thick carpet at the mention of Far Westerners. Poltus floated on and Phin caught up once again.
“What is a Lamia?” he asked.
Poltus glanced over its shoulder.
“You would have to ask her.”
After walking far enough that Phin thought they must surely be at the end of the long gallery as he had seen it from his window, close to the central tower where the wings of the palace met, Poltus passed through an open doorway. The devil plucked a candle from a wall mount and guided Phin down a dark circular stair, the space so tight that Phin’s shoulders brushed the walls, and he had to hunch over so as not to hit his head. The confines made it hard to judge how far they had descended, and the stair ended at a single door with no other way forward. Poltus unlocked the portal with a key Phin had not seen the devil carrying, and the creature certainly had no pockets where it might have been. The door swung open to a lighted chamber, and the devil blew out the candle as it entered. Phin crept out after Poltus, and stopped dead as soon as he looked around.
They were within the central tower of the palace, a cavernous space of black stone fully illuminated from on high. Just below the distant conical ceiling, a ball of yellow light floated like a miniature sun, though one that could be looked at directly. Phin stood on a stone catwalk that ringed the whole space some twenty feet above the floor. Looking across it he could see several sets of descending stairs, regularly spaced and each forming a horseshoe-shape that flanked enormous double-doors on the ground level. These were surely the main entrances to each branching wing of the palace, for the doors up on the catwalk were all plain and serviceable, like the one Phin had just passed through. The large doors on the ground were intricately carved, with shining metal work for hinges and handles.
Phin could not see the central space of the tower until he shuffled forward to look down from the catwalk, and when he did so he felt his heart sink. The round floor descended in consecutive rings, each forming a single step that ran all the way around the whole chamber. There were about ten such steps, then a flat circle of floor, and then ten more steps rising in turn as in the center of the vast space were circular rings of stone set one atop the other, decreasing in diameter as they rose. The topmost was about twenty feet across, forming a dais upon which were mounted two tall pillars, not straight, but bowed in the middle and with the pointed tips bending toward each other like a pair of horns or tusks. They appeared to be made entirely of metal. Platinum, if Phin was any judge.
“Oh…crap,” Phin muttered. “This is the Node, isn’t it?”
Poltus looked at him, and gave a small smile displaying teeth that looked like they were filed to points.
“I gather you have read the book already. Good.”
Poltus’s wings moved a little and the devil floated down to the level of the main floor. Phin stayed where he was on the catwalk, leaning on his hands on the black balustrade. The little devil turned to look back up at him.
“Come, Mr. Phoarty. Someone who needs to speak with you will be along shortly.”
Phin stared, at the devil, at the Node, at the great featureless walls of the tower, and at the false sun floating high above. The silence in the place was eerie and though brightly lit all seemed pregnant with unseen menace. The devil waited, bobbing gently in the still air, and Phin slowly took the nearest horseshoe stair to the floor. He approached Poltus in front of one of the nine sets of wooden portals leading to the gallery wings. The designs on the heavy doors were so intricate they looked like formulae.
“You…you’ve read the book, too?” Phin asked.
“As much of it as I could.”
“Well, did you get enough to know that I can not do anything here?”
The devil frowned, and Phin jerked as the double doors behind him split in the middle. One swung open.
A grinning figure with green and blonde hair stepped out, wearing a deeply red gown. Phin took her as a woman for all of a second before noticing the wings, and the glassy red eyes. And the fangs. She stepped to the side, and a man came out behind her. Phin blinked at the filthy fellow, as he carried the familiar tower shield of the Legions.
He was unknown to Phin though he wore a legionnaire breastplate as well, and had an Imperial short sword on his hip. His helmet was an old battered thing of leather and iron. His dark hair and short beard were unkempt and matted with the gray dust of Vod’Adia’s streets, and his brown eyes were shadowed and sunken from lack of sleep. Phin did recognize the leather satchel hanging from a strap over the man’s shoulder, for he had been wearing it himself that way for the previous two days. Judging by the weight hanging in it, it still contained the Sarge’s book.
“Phinneas Phoarty?” the man asked, his voice soft but with a sharp edge on his words. There was something familiar about him.
“Y-yes?” Phin said, for there seemed little point in denying it, and he had the sense he did not want to make this man angry.
The man looked at him, then out at the Node. Poltus slipped innocuously out through the door, and the winged woman winked at Phin before she followed the spiny devil, pulling the door shut behind them.
“This is the Node,” the man said. He brought one hand to the satchel. “And this is the book.”
He turned to Phin. “And you are the Wizard.”
“I know you,” Phin said, staring. “You were at the Dead Possum. You cut the Sarge’s fingers off.”
“Yes I was. Yes I did.”
“What do you want from me?” Phin asked.
The man raised a hand and Phin flinched, but the fellow only set it on Phin’s shoulder. Phin was the taller of the two but the man the Sarge had called Centurion Deskata was built like a bull.
“I just want to go home, Phinneas.”
The Node and the book and the Wizard. This man wanted the same thing as the other legionnaires. Phin started to feel queasy.
“I can’t help you,” he said.
The man looked Phin in the eye, and for Phin it was like meeting the gaze of a dangerous animal.
“You may wish to reconsider,” Deskata said. He grabbed a handful of Phin’s robes and dragged the wizard down the stone stairs toward the center of the chamber.