David Chandler - Den of thieves

Malden’s blood curdled in his veins. He knew he’d never been closer to death than this exact moment. His brains turned over in his head, desperately trying to imagine what to do next. He could think of only one thing: obfuscate. Stall for time. “I beg to disagree,” he said. His mouth was so dry he had trouble forming the words. Hazoth had not given him leave to speak, but he knew it no longer mattered. Silence at that moment would have been his death warrant.

“What’s that, rodent?”

“You suggest that my logic was faulty in some way. That I made an irrational decision by attacking you. I would say instead that my information was merely incomplete. I did not try to stab you before, when you caught me. I did not try to do so when your back was turned. I waited until your magic had drained you and distracted your attention to the point where an attack might logically succeed. You see, I thought very carefully before I struck that blow.”

Hazoth looked upward, as if consulting a higher power. “Almost clever,” he said. “There is one flaw, however. One place where your logic falls apart.”

“Yes?” Malden asked, in the tone of a scholar asking for a gloss on a particularly thorny text.

“You,” Hazoth said, “are the human equivalent of a cockroach. I am a being of extraordinary power. You should have recognized that someone like you could never, under any circumstances, harm me. The intelligent thing to do in this situation would have been to curl up and die. It would at least have saved you from what comes next.”

Hazoth walked a few yards away from Malden and looked up again.

For the first time, Malden saw what had changed. When the sorcerer had cast his spell, Malden did not know what effect it might have. Now he understood. He had been transported from one place to another, without traversing the intervening distance. He was no longer in the sanctum.

Hazoth had delivered the three of them to his grand hall. They stood in the shadow of the iron egg.

“Now, I’ll ask again. Who sent you here?”

Malden looked away. “I came on my own-this was all my plan,” he insisted. Why implicate Cutbill? It wouldn’t save his own life, and it would only make trouble for the guildmaster of thieves. If he could spare Cutbill that, then perhaps he could earn a little something with his death. “I need the crown or Anselm Vry is going to kill me.”

Magic buzzed through the air toward Malden like an angry insect. An invisible stinger jabbed him in the chest, causing a bright blossom of pain to stretch its petals all the way around his rib cage.

“Impossible,” Hazoth said. “You lack the will for something like this.”

“I… swear,” Malden said as the pain radiated outward, toward his extremities. Red blood stained his vision. “It was wholly… my own… notion… I-”

“It was Croy!” Cythera shouted. “Croy paid him to help me!”

The pain left Malden as quickly as it had come. He dropped to the marble floor, still writhing with the memory of it.

Hazoth turned to face Cythera. “Truly? I suppose I can believe that.” Hazoth looked almost disappointed. “I had thought I might discover the name of my fellow schemer. Hmm. But yes-yes, Croy would be foolish enough. Very well.”

He shrugged and came over to where Malden had curled up on the floor.

“So. We have reached the end of our experiment. The subject has failed to justify the hypothesis. There remains nothing to say,” Hazoth said. “And there are other matters that require my attention. There is a knight errant on my lawn, brawling with the hired help. I think I need to go boil him in his own blood.”

“Croy,” Cythera said, one hand to her mouth. “No-you can’t…”

Hazoth looked over at her. “You know perfectly well that I can,” he said. “And now, by telling me he was behind this intrusion, you’ve given me every reason to do so immediately.”

She went pale beneath her tattoos. “I meant-I meant to say-you may not,” she said. “I won’t allow it, Father.”

Malden’s eyes went wide.

“Father?” he said aloud. “He’s your-”

“I did not say you could speak!” Hazoth screamed, and Malden’s voice was lost.

It didn’t matter. His own thoughts were louder than anything he might have said.

The demon is his child, she had said. It is not his first.

He had assumed she meant he’d sired other demons.

Not all of his protections are magical, she had said.

He’d assumed that meant the very human retainers he kept to guard his gate. But perhaps she’d meant, instead, that he had a hold on her that was more complex than a mere contract of employment. She had betrayed him, Malden, and now he knew why.

In truth, he had never trusted her completely. Even when he’d kissed her, he half expected her to destroy him with her stockpile of curses. He had made sure she only knew half of his scheme. Now he understood that he could not expect her aid any longer. That she was not going to rescue him at the last minute.

He had, in a way, expected this.

It still hurt. It still cut him to the core.

“I will do as I please,” Hazoth said, as cool as an autumn day. “As for you, rodent, I’m afraid you have to die. I know your simple brain will have trouble accepting this fact. You’ll think there must be some way you can defeat me, no matter how desperate it may seem. I can assure you you’re wrong. Please try to think of it philosophically. You had, what, a few decades left to live anyway? Eyeblinks, compared to my life span. The tragedy of your death will last as long as it takes a single tear to roll down Cythera’s cheek.”

“Very well,” Malden said, thinking, Not quite yet. “And how shall I die? Are you going to curse me to death, or open up a crack in the earth and send me down to the pit?”

“Wasteful, and quite beneath me,” Hazoth said. “I’m going to give your existence a purpose, albeit a small one. I’m going to feed you to my son.” He reached up and slapped the iron egg with the flat of his palm. It rang like a bell.

And then it began to crack.

“Glorious! When it is finally born, there will be no power in this world that can stand against me,” Hazoth said.

Red lines of infernal fire appeared on the surface of the iron sphere as a cascade of rust fell to the floor. The egg rocked slightly on its stand as the demon inside hammered again and again at its shell, trying to break out.

“The Ancient Blades will stop you,” Malden insisted, more for his own benefit than to intimidate Hazoth. “They know how to slay demons.”

“Luckily for me I have one of their number on my side,” Hazoth pointed out. “Bikker will gladly slay all his old comrades, if I pay him well enough. It’s important, rodent, to consider every angle of a problem. That’s where you failed. You made a clever try of things, but you just didn’t think them through deeply enough.”

“And you have? This is madness,” Malden said. “To release a demon on the world…” He thought of the beast that nearly killed him in the palace tower. Unless it was kept wet it grew at a furious rate and would never stop. “It is a creature not natural to this world,” Malden said. “What will it do, once released? Will it eat every man and woman in the city? Or will it burn us all with hellfire?”

“Nothing so dramatic,” Hazoth said. “Perhaps, when he is fully grown, he will have the power to do as you say. But my son is not ready to be born. When he emerges he will know nothing but pain-and there is only one way to quench that agony. He must devour the first living thing he encounters. Please, don’t get any foolish notions. Cythera and I will be perfectly safe, as the demon will know his own blood. But he will swallow you whole, and that will give him strength to return to his egg and resume his gestation.”