Immortal (16 page)

Demons are not—as has been so often assumed—supernatural minions of some higher (or lower) evil deity. They are not supernatural at all, any more than pixies, iffrits, or vampires. Or me. They’re just another race—or underspecies, as my unnamed nemesis called them.

   
This is not to say demons are in any way capable of being nice. Not at all. Demons are the worst combination of big, strong, and nasty on the planet. Worse even than dragons, because dragons were just animals and animals don’t have enough self-awareness to be evil. Demons do. They understand money and they understand violence and they don’t care about much else. Also, unlike dragons, they managed to avoid extinction, possibly because something deep in the cavernous recesses of most demon brains is the understanding that survival and secretiveness go hand in hand.

But keeping a low profile is only one reason demons still walk the Earth. Another is usefulness. They’re the ultimate mercenaries and really come in handy during wartime. Alexander the Great had ten demons on retainer when he conquered most of the known world. Hammurabi had twenty-five. Genghis Khan had thirty, and rumor had it he was one himself. (I don’t believe the rumor—a demon would make a lousy general—but I never met Genghis Khan, so I could be wrong.) The biblical Goliath was also a demon, which should tell you plenty about the accuracy of that little story, because it’d take a hell of a lot more than a stupid slingshot to take out a demon. (David actually lured Goliath under a cliff face and had some friends drop a big rock on him.) I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a few of today’s governments had one or two demons on the payroll, although with modern weaponry their talents are more useful to drug cartels and the like.

It is notoriously difficult to kill a demon. Their skin is much thicker than human skin (but not as hard as dragon hide), they don’t burn easily, and if they have a heart, nobody has been able to figure out exactly where it is. At the Battle of Troy, I saw a demon run through with a pike three times in three different places and keep on coming. It took twenty men to hold him down and two working with heavy battle axes to cleave his head from his shoulders.

You’ve probably seen one. I don’t know how they move about in today’s world because I haven’t laid eyes on one for over a century, but I know they usually favor baggy clothes and hats to obscure their obviously non-human features. You might be thinking professional American football would be a good place to find a few, but I don’t think it’s violent enough for them.

The extraordinary thing about demons is that they don’t rule the world. They reproduce normally—I’ve never seen a female demon, but I know they exist—and they were around back when it really wasn’t all that hard to take over the world. Pretty much everyone took over the world at least once back in the day. I even thought about it a couple of times. For some reason, it just never seemed like there was enough of them to truly dominate.

Why there are so few demons in the world was one of the questions I posed to the only demon I ever had a face-to-face conversation with. Unfortunately, he was not all that forthcoming.

I was living in Carthage at the time, in one of my occasional incarnations as a wealthy man. By modern reckoning this was around the third century BC, and I was making a fine living as a merchant, shipping goods—mainly ivory, but also a little gold and silver—mined or hunted in the more savage sections of middle Africa. I had customers from Tyre to Corsica, three boats to move product, a couple hundred employees, a few dozen slaves, and one of the largest houses in Carthage. (Don’t get on me about the slaves. It was expected. Besides, I’ve been a slave myself, on four different occasions.)

Business was pretty cutthroat back then, as things always are when money is involved. (As a side note: I thought money was a bad idea way back when it was first invented. I remember the moment very clearly. This guy owed me a sheep, but instead of giving me an actual sheep he gave me five coins he said were worth the same as a sheep. “But I can’t eat round pieces of metal, asshole,” were my exact words.) I always had somebody trying to edge in on my business, much as I had done to others when I first built my little empire. My trump card was always time, especially in an era when the life expectancy was somewhere in the mid-forties. Most of the town thought I’d made some sort of pact with a deity—a few thought I
was
a deity—but nobody ever organized a lynch mob over it. Carthage was nice like that.

What was not nice was the two harbor problem. Carthage had two harbors, but only one of them was within the city walls. That was where they put all the war vessels. Important when you’re one of the first empires in the Western world and therefore spend a good amount of time defending said empire (and the first of the Punic Wars was only thirty years away), but annoying when you want to do business. I had to operate my ships out of the second harbor. Every time cargo was loaded or unloaded—and I always oversaw these things personally, because nobody trusts a Carthaginian—I ended up spending the day beyond the protection of the city walls. This was my biggest business advantage because I wasn’t robbed blind by my captains—others were—but also my biggest disadvantage. Cities in those days were built to keep the rabble out, you see. Not at all like today’s cities, which are clearly designed to keep the rabble in. Every night I spent beyond the walls of Carthage was a night I took my life into my hands.

Not to say I didn’t have protection. I employed private guards who followed me around everywhere and did a very effective job of scaring away the standard blackguards. And because I wasn’t about to sleep on the dock, I kept a modest home a short walk from the pier.

On this one particular evening, after a long day helping unload a shipment of silver from southern Spain, I retired to my modest home and immediately sought refuge in my personal bath.

A lot of people are under the impression that it was the Romans who invented the concept of the bath. Those people don’t know what they’re talking about, because I was using baths before there were Romans. Trust me, it’s one thing to deal with a lifetime of dirt and grime when that lifetime is thirty years. It’s quite another when that lifetime is counted out in millennia.

Anyway, so I took a bath. And after a very relaxing hour or so I emerged into the atrium to find a demon sitting on my couch.

“Hello,” I greeted amicably. One must always be amicable when faced with a demon. Not that it helps any.

“Hello,” he grunted back. The demon was as ugly as the rest—protruding jawbone with a double row of jagged teeth, a pug nose, and a small set of horns, all covered in a dark brown skin. “Are you Amilcar?”

“I am. I see you’ve gone and slain my guards.”

He had. My very expensive bodyguards were lying in a heap in the corner. I imagined he’d frightened off my slaves. Nice of them to warn me.

“They were not interested in letting me in,” he said, matter-of-factly, referring to the bodyguard stew. “I’m afraid I broke them.”

“They at least tried to earn their money, didn’t they?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he disagreed. “Didn’t put up much of a fight. And that one there started crying when I tore his leg off. Very unprofessional. Why don’t you sit down?”

I did. No use arguing, even when one is in the midst of a blind panic. I was nearly naked and completely defenseless, having left my sword outside near the tub.

This would never have happened in the city, where demons are stopped at the gate. Somebody knew enough about me to know when I was vulnerable.

“I have to tell you,” I began, “you’re very eloquent. I didn’t know your kind could speak in sentences.”

“Don’t like to,” he said. “It’s easier to kill a guy than it is to talk to him, you know?”

“Actually, I’m really fond of talking.”

“I can tell.”

Already this much conversation had exceeded this demon’s comfort level. He kept fidgeting and his eyes darted around the room as if maybe hoping another guard would pop up so he’d have someone to kill. Why he wasn’t killing me was the question of the day.

“So, what do I call you?” I asked.

“Whomp.”

“Whomp? Your given name?”

“It’s the sound people make when I hit them in the chest.”

How charming. “What can I do for you, Whomp?”

“My employer is interested in your shipping routes.”

“Oh? Which ones?”

“All of ‘em, I guess. He wasn’t real specific. Lemme see if I can remember this . . . he said he wants, um . . . maps, names of buyers, names of sellers . . . oh yeah, and whoever gets your ivory for you? He wants his name, too.”

“I could just give you my ledgers,” I suggested.

“You know, I asked him that. ‘Why don’t you just steal the guy’s scrolls,’ I said. He said that won’t work. Says they’re unreadable.”

Which meant whoever hired the demon had already seen my ledgers, which were written in a pre-Phoenician language using alphanumeric symbols I’d invented myself. (It’s the same code I use in my Swiss bank book.) The code was nothing a good linguist couldn’t have deciphered eventually, but we didn’t have linguists back then. We barely had languages.

“So, you want me to translate all of them?” I asked.

“You could just tell me.”

“Last count I had a hundred and seventeen buyers, Whomp.”

“Okay, then translate.”

“That’d take days. Plus none of the scrolls are here. I could head back to Carthage in the morning, get started right away and let you know when I’m all finished. How’s that?”

“I’m thinking maybe my employer didn’t think this through real well.”

“I have to agree.”

“Enh. It was worth a try.” He stood up. He was more than two heads taller than me.

“So, that’s it?”

“Yeah. Now I gotta go to the other plan.”

“Um, is that good?”

“Good for me, sure. Maybe not so good for you, just cuz I gotta kill you now.”

“Is that really the backup plan?” I asked.

“He said if you don’t cooperate I’m supposed to kill you.”

“But I am cooperating.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that and I get paid either way.”

“How about if I give you something now? Like the name of the ivory dealer?” Useless information, because anybody who approached my contact other than me would be killed in about a second and a half. I like to go directly to tribal leaders for my ivory.

“I don’t think that’ll make a difference,” he said.

“I should start running, then.”

“If it’ll make you feel any better.”

So, I ran. Whomp unfortunately was standing closer to the entrance than I was and, not knowing how quick he might be—despite their size, demons have very good reflexes—I didn’t want to risk going that way. Instead I headed back toward the bath, which was outdoors. The demon was right behind me, proving that he was indeed very quick for his size.

When I reached the edge of the stone bath, I vaulted it, landing safely on the other side next to my clothes and more importantly my sword.

Yes, I carried a sword. As a wealthy man, I never had much need for it, but my reasoning was better to be too well armed than not armed at all. I knew how to use it, too. I was even foolish enough to think my skill might be sufficient to defeat a demon, even without a couple of friends, a big boulder, and a cliff face. I’ve gotten wiser with age.

Whomp came barreling out of the house just as I reached my sword. Focusing all his attention on me and not expecting a spa to be in his way, he fell in.

“What the hell is this?” he asked, splashing around. He was about waist deep.

“I call it a bath. Do you like it?”

“Don’t usually like water,” he admitted. “But this is nice. Heated?”

“There’s an oven underneath.”

“No kidding.”

“Really,” I said.

“After you’re dead, you think I could have it?”

“I don’t see why not.”

He climbed out, and I foolishly stood my ground on the cool grass beyond the bath. We were on the crest of a small treeless hill, with Mount Byrsa in the distance on one side and the shore on the other. And with no other houses anywhere close by (I was easily the wealthiest landowner in this little area) we were utterly and completely alone.

“Nice sword,” he said. “Thought you was gonna run.”

“I decided to give this a try first.”

He shrugged. “Okay.”

Whomp swung his right fist at my head, a hypothetically lethal blow that caused the air itself to whistle in protest and surely would have proven disastrous for me had I not ducked. My response was a comparatively feeble counter-swing with the short sword aimed at his exposed right side. The blade dug into his skin, but barely penetrated more than a thumb’s-width and drew no blood. If he were a man he would be wondering where the bottom half of him had gone off to.

His response was to swat at me with his left arm, much the way one might attack a harassing bug. The shot hit me in the shoulder. I tumbled over and away from him, finding my feet quickly and luckily hanging onto my sword.

“You’re pretty quick for your age.”

“I keep in shape,” I answered, rotating my shoulder to see if there was any permanent damage. “Why, how old do I look?”