In the Company of Ogres (35 page)
Ned laughed: a derisive cackle at the forces of fate that seemed so damned determined to see him dead. If he wasn’t the Mad Void now, he was at least mad. But he was a madman with a purpose. He would be damned if he’d willingly slide down Kevin’s throat. He’d fight all the way down, and if possible he’d give her a good kick in the ass as she excreted him.
Gabel’s sword was lodged between two of her wicked teeth. The hilt pointed out at him, and it waggled as she snapped her jaws. Ned, heedless of any danger, reached for it. It came loose almost as soon as he touched it and seemed to fall into his hand. By some miracle he managed not to lose a limb to the crushing beak.
The blade wasn’t long enough to reach the roc’s vitals. Surprising himself most of all, Ned pounced on Kevin’s beak between snaps. He took hold of one of her nostrils with his free hand, and growling, she pulled her head out of the office.
The beast’s eyes were on the side of her face. She twisted her head side to side to get a better view of the prey stubbornly clinging to her beak. Ned raised the sword and hacked at Kevin’s face. The angle was awkward; most of his strength was invested in tight, whitened knuckles. The blows penetrated the flesh only to bounce off the monster’s thick skull. Finally through sheer luck and persistence he managed to plunge the blade into the roc’s eye. The angle was just right and the sword just long enough to pierce Kevin’s three-ounce brain.
The realization of her death took a moment to reach the rest of her body. Kevin swayed. She coughed. Her eye glazed. Her feathers ruffled, and her legs wobbled. With one last horrid gasp, the roc tumbled over and collapsed on the ruins of Gabel’s office.
Buried, barely able to draw breath in the overwhelming, sooty darkness, Ned nevertheless chuckled. He was alive. He’d cheated death. For once the icy touch of oblivion had been put off. For once Ned had won. He might suffocate in the next moment, but that seemed someone else’s problem just now.
He heard digging above him. A stone was flung aside to shine sunlight in his face.
“Is this him?” asked one of the shadows over him.
“The pendulum,” said another. “See how it burns.”
Hot stone pushed against Ned’s forehead. His skin smoldered, and he smelled smoke, but he didn’t feel any pain.
They lifted him roughly from the rubble. His eye adjusted. They weren’t soldiers, but lanky, purple-skinned, winged creatures with small horns jutting from their brows.
Demons.
Ned was too tired to struggle. He had nothing left. Whatever last portions of vigor he’d possessed were buried somewhere under Kevin’s ten-ton corpse. One of the demons tossed Ned over his shoulder. They spread their wings and took to the air.
Demons filled the sky. Dozens upon dozens of the flying monsters. He squirmed, but there could be no escape. And even if he did manage to slip free and avoid the dozens of hands that tried to catch him, he’d fall to his death. Either way, fate had beaten him. As it always did.
Ogre Company milled underneath him. Regina shouted his name, but he couldn’t pick her out of the crowd. Soon the demons had taken him beyond the walls of Copper Citadel.
The last thing he noticed was Nibbly Ned. The vulture perched atop a tower, watching Ned’s abduction with cold, black eyes and an almost clinical detachment. And Ned laughed. And he kept on laughing, though he couldn’t say why.
Twenty-seven
THE DEMONS CARRIED Ned not very far. Copper Citadel had just disappeared over the horizon as their destination appeared. It was a fortress of black stone and glittering jade. He would’ve sworn Copper Citadel was the only outpost in a hundred miles, but then he saw this new fortress had great, stony legs like those belonging to a thousand-foot elephant. Flocks of demons orbited the Iron Fortress, and Ned expected to be torn to pieces by the hungry monsters.
The demons parted. A portcullis opened, and Ned was whisked into the darkened fortress. He couldn’t see much, but he smelled a foul concoction of urine, smoke, and putrid flesh. It smelled of ugly death, an odor he knew all too well.
His captors threw him roughly to the floor. New hands seized him. Claws sank into his shoulder. Blood ran down his arm.
“Is this him?” The voice was deep and possessed a quality of diction as if the speaker had practiced the sentence a thousand times in front of a mirror to insure that every nuance of lip and tongue was absolutely flawless. The feat was all the more impressive because the monster who held him lacked anything in the way of lips.
The demon was a bulging abomination. Muscles squirmed atop its muscles, yet it was grotesquely fat at the same time. It reminded Ned of an ogre, though infinitely more repellent. It was entirely naked save for thick hair all over its body that gave it the illusion of clothing, and a black executioner’s hood draped over its relatively tiny head. There was a hole cut to show its toothy, lipless mouth, but none for its eyes. How it saw, Ned couldn’t fathom.
“Scrawny little thing, isn’t it?” asked the executioner.
“Just throw him in the cell,” said one of the purple demons.
The executioner dragged Ned into a darker part of the dungeon. Baleful green torches cast a dim light, and the flickering shadows had faces twisted in agony. There were things in the other cells. Ned heard them crying, screaming, growling, breathing. Scratching softly at their prison doors. He didn’t speculate on what they might be. They reached his cell, a long thin room littered with bones, none of which appeared human. There was another green torch set high in the wall. Its light was cold, and Ned could see the frost of his breath. The executioner locked manacles around Ned’s wrists. Ned slumped to the floor defeated. The short chains kept him from falling all the way. The demon lifted Ned’s chin. “Don’t look like much, do you?”
If the executioner’s breath was rotten, it was no more rotten than the rest of the dank, fetid air. He snorted again and spat. The saliva froze in midflight and shattered against the floor. He lumbered away without saying another word.
Ned hung in the darkness. Occasionally his bad left arm twitched. Sometimes it yanked at its bonds. The chains rattled. The other prisoners cackled and whispered.
“What’cha in for, buddy?” asked the occupant of the next cell. His voice was dry and menacing. There was a small hole in the wall that allowed him to peep through with a single, bloodshot eye.
“Destroying universes,” replied Ned. “You?”
“Littering.”
Ned raised his head skeptically.
“Littering the ground with the corpses of my enemies,” clarified the prisoner. His red eye glowed sinisterly.
“What are you?” asked Ned.
“I don’t know. I think I used to know, but I’ve been here so long I’ve forgotten. You’ll forget too. Eventually.”
Harsh, humorless laughter filled the dungeon.
“I won’t be here that long,” said Ned.
More laughter.
“That’s what I said.” Something, perhaps a sword or claws or fangs, scraped against the wall. The eye vanished from the crack. “At least I think that’s what I said.”
At some point Ned fell asleep. Or maybe he just thought he did. Something touched his wounded shoulder. He didn’t have the strength to even yelp.
“Sir, are you okay?”
Ned raised his head with considerable effort and came face-to-face with an ugly, big-nosed demon with pock-marked skin.
“Go away,” mumbled Ned. “Or kill me. I don’t care which.”
The demon whispered. “Sir, it’s me.”
Ned squinted.
“It’s me, Seamus.” The demon leaned closer. “Private Seamus.”
Ned couldn’t place the name.
Seamus glanced around to make sure the coast was clear before transforming back into his goblin self.
“That’s a neat trick,” said the prisoner in the next cell.
Ned’s addled memory worked slowly. He didn’t remember Seamus’s name, and all goblins looked alike to him. But shapeshifting was just enough of a distinction to earn some recollection.
“I saw them take you away, sir,” said Seamus, “and I decided to follow, see what I could do. I was a little worried at first that I might not be able to fool them, but nobody pays much attention to grunts. Not even in demon armies, I guess.”
He checked the chains around Ned’s wrists. “These are pretty thick. I might be able to break them if I transform into something big.”
“Don’t bother.”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“And then what? Even if you freed me, you’d never be able to get me out of here.” Ned struggled to hang his head lower. “It’s all pointless.”
“He’s right,” said the prisoner. “No one has ever escaped these dungeons. No one and no thing.”
“I could get some help,” said Seamus.
“Why bother?”
“Don’t you want to be rescued, sir?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
Ned wasn’t against it, but he didn’t see how it was possible. And he was through hoping for impossibilities, or even improbabilities.
The dungeon door rattled open. Seamus disappeared in a puff of smoke, taking on his hideous demon form just as the executioner lurched into view.
“Here now, what are you doing? Nobody’s supposed to be here.”
Though wearing the hunched form of a demon, Seamus hunched lower. “Sorry. I got lost.”
The executioner snorted, which appeared to be his favorite thing to do. He frowned, revealing rows of pointed teeth that up to now had remained hidden behind other rows of pointed teeth.
Seamus shrugged. “Uh ... I’m new.”
“You’d better come with me.”
The goblin transformed into a giant sabercat in a puff of blue smoke. Seamus pounced, sinking his fangs into the executioner’s throat. A snap of powerful jaws severed the head from the shoulders, and the incident was over before the demon could utter a cry, and where a normal sabercat would’ve howled its victory cry, Seamus was deathly quiet. He was sabercat enough to swipe a few bloody gashes across the demon’s corpse.
The prisoner chuckled. “That’s a very neat trick indeed.”
Seamus returned to his natural goblin shape and gagged, wiping the blood from his lips. “Remind me not to do that again.”
The door rattled.
“I’ll be back, sir,” said Seamus. “With help.”
Ned hadn’t even raised his head to watch the executioner’s death. “Whatever.”
Seamus disappeared into a yellow puff. When the smoke cleared, it appeared as if the goblin had vanished entirely. Only the most alert observer would’ve noticed the jet-black scorpion scampering into the darkness.
A new executioner demon, identical to the last save for boils on his belly, trudged in. “Come on now, what’s keeping you?” He stumbled over the corpse, which he puzzled over for a moment. He glanced at Ned, securely chained to the wall. Then to the body, well out of Ned’s reach.
“How did you do that?”
Ned kept staring at the floor. “Evil eye.”
The executioner turned to the other prisoner. “No, really. How did he do that?”
“Just like he said.” The prisoner’s eye squinted, turning an amused pink shade. “Evil eye. One glance is all it takes.”
“There’s no such thing,” said the executioner.
“Oh, no?” Ned raised his head a few degrees. “Look me in the eye and say that.”
The demon stepped back, slipping on the pool of his comrade’s frozen blood. The executioner, whose hood covered his own eyes completely, still shielded them with his hands.
“Hey, now, I’m just doing my job. No need to get violent.”
“I think I’ll melt your bones in your skin,” said Ned. “Painful way to die. Believe me. I know.”
The executioner, palm clasped firmly over his face, fumbled with the cell door. Once on the other side, he opened the slit to peek inside at Ned. But when Ned raised his head, the slit quickly shut.
Ned laughed. He never would’ve guessed demons to be superstitious. They already were the stuff of nightmares. But he supposed that it was hard to deny the powers of darkness when you were already in their ranks.
He had no idea how long one mysteriously executed demon would keep the others at bay. Not long, he imagined. And certainly not long enough for Seamus to get back to Copper Citadel, for Ogre Company to overcome years of lax discipline and mount a rescue effort. None of that mattered to Ned, who was beyond hope. Instead, he did what men without hope who have not quite given up yet have done since the dawn of time.
He waited.
Twenty-eight
THE GOBLINS STRUGGLED to get the roc from the pens. The giant birds were almost supernaturally stubborn. When they were supposed to be in their pens, they always wanted out. And when they were supposed to be out, that was the only time they’d stay in. One team of goblin handlers pulled on a rope around the roc’s neck, while two more teams prodded its backside with long spears.
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