Chapter 60

  It was hard to believe that the powerful demons in my company were so scared of a cat. But I was glad to see that as spooked as he was, Rathar kept his psychic skills going with the proficiency I had expected from him — or any member of his hive mind, really — and we were making our way along the gap between the two enemy camps without any of the loitering minotaurs or growling werewolves ever knowing we were there. Some of the caver demons, the slick, eyeless, oily black-skinned creatures were the only ones that occasionally stopped to sniff the air, if we got too close to them, but luckily Rathar’s masking effect extended to not just eyesight and hearing, but suppressed their sense of smell as well, so we managed to avoid detection even by those horrid looking bastards. Those sneaking skills of his were the full package, weren’t they?

  The tension in our group — which had doubled during our encounter with the cat — finally eased as we left Camp Rubicon behind. Even I found myself smiling as I looked at almost 400 metres of open ground separating us from the walls of Orroth. Our objective was right before us, and we marched ahead to take it.

  By the time we reached the vicinity of the walls, slaloming between dead and decayed minotaurs and charred remnants of ladders and other siege equipment, Rathar had told me everything he knew about Miekdizraath-Jegronnod, the Dimensional Devourer of Dreaded Duality and Decimating Dismay — a name and title I neither could nor wanted to attempt to say out loud or even commit to memory. Because who even had come up with such a long and stupid name? This must have been a case of “The Genius Strikes Again”. So, the purring calamity currently lounging and munching in my dimensional storage was to be henceforth known as Mickey.

  If I could believe the Kralsenite — which I could, as Burning Darkness was corroborating his story for the most part — Mickey was a creature from the deepest, darkest recesses of the Fifth Ring, places even the most vicious and insane denizens of the realm avoided like the plague. The cat was believed to be a demonic entity, but wasn’t a demon like Rathar or my squad members, and it wasn’t a monster either, not in the way the creatures spawning in the Wilds were. It was a mystery that evaded the full understanding of the demons of the Fifth Ring. They weren’t even sure if the cat was a unique entity or if there were more of them. Another mystery that had baffled Rathar was how and why the cat was in the Fourth Ring. As far as he knew, it had been prowling the Fifth for the past thousand years or more, eating souls and space here and there, and shouldn’t have been able to make his way here.

  It kind of started to make sense why even Burning Darkness feared the creature; he was a weapon forged with some unknown metal alloy, and if I wanted to kill or destroy him, I wouldn’t know how to. But he had a soul — or a proto-soul — which was something Mickey could directly attack, and I didn’t think the sword had any way to defend against it. I suspected Rathar feared it for a similar reason, seeing how even his psychic tricks didn’t work on the cat. And how did the Kralsenite, being stuck in the Fourth Ring, know all this? Well, an extra revelation I had received was that strong psychic connections worked even across rings, and the local representatives of the Kralsen Hive Mind had been in touch sporadically with their brethren in the Fifth, which meant the rumour mill between rings was up and running. This worried me more than the large, space-eating ghost-cat in my storage, but there was precious little I could do about it, so I let it go.

  A few leading questions to my squad members revealed that they had never seen or heard of anything like a cat, so it was safe to assume that the information available about the creatures was limited to Fifth Ringers. Of which I had three now: my sword, the Kralsen Hive Mind, and now a stowaway passenger in my dimensional storage. Was I some sort of a magnet for Fifth Ring creatures? Or had this just come with the territory after becoming a demon lord? I wasn’t sure. And to think that they were all scared to death of a cat. Ah, demons.

  ‘How are you doing in there?’ I whispered, trying to send my voice through my soul and into the dimensional storage.

  I didn’t really know how it worked; I was simply willing my voice and my thoughts to go a certain way, guiding the words using nothing but instincts and gut feelings — not unlike when I was using the RMS to communicate with Reinos and Tarashak. I was rather surprised when the answer reverberated in my soul and in my mind.

  ‘Meow.’

  Yep, Mickey was without a doubt a cat. And I had to leave it at that, for we reached the wall, and Rathar quickly found the small, hidden gate that was to be our entrance to the city, and he knocked on it with the kind of secret knock kids normally used for fun.

  ***

  The door opened, and on the other side of it a tall, scrawny, dark hive mind demon awaited us, almost indistinguishable from Rathar, at least in my eyes. Which made me wonder why the hell had he needed to do a secret knock in the first place. Weren’t these guys all connected to each other? Ah, maybe even Fifth Ring demons had a sense of fun after all, who could say? The important thing was that we were in the city, trudging after the Kralsenite twins in a narrow passageway under the wall, minutes away from our current objective: Riaret the Severing Strike.

  Over the past few days, I had prepared and discarded dozens of greetings and speeches for the general, taking into account everything I had learned about her from Tarashak and Reinos. But if I was perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure if any of them had the potential to get the reportedly impulsive and gleefully violent general to just say “yeah, sure, here’s my army, we’ll follow your orders, no problem.” In the end, I knew I was going to have to improvise once I’ve seen her for myself. As the old saying went: “you never get a second chance to make a first impression,” and I was racking my brain how to approach negotiations and make a good impression as the ruling demon lord of the Fourth Ring.

  We reached the end of the tunnel under the wall, and I took my first look at the city as we filed out into the open. As it was the case in Garoshek, a thirty or so metres wide empty buffer zone separated the walls from the first buildings of the city, something like a series of squares or plazas. Plenty of demons — both of the fire and ice variety — stood atop the battlements, on the stairways going up, or walking about in the square, but no-one came to greet us; no welcoming committee, no city overseer, not a single one of Riaret’s captains. It was almost as if we were still …

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  ‘Rathar, are you still hiding us?’ I asked our dark guide.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Better this way.’

  ‘So … are we just going to pop into existence in Riaret’s office right in front of her?’

  ‘I don’t know what an “office” is, but yes.’ The answer came.

  ‘Why?’ I asked again.

  ‘Better this way.’

  I was not convinced that scaring the living daylight out of a volatile demon general was the first impression I wanted to make. Unfortunately, Rathar and his dark comrade — whom he hadn’t introduced yet — were already walking ahead with purpose; it was clear they knew exactly where to find Riaret, and I had perhaps just minutes either to get the Kralsenites to stop this nonsense and do things my way, or to come up with a way to mitigate the damage our sudden appearance might cause. Rathar, instead of listening to a word I was saying, kept on walking, urging me and the squad to follow them with haste. I had no idea what the rush was for. We trudged through the first streets between the type of utilitarian houses I knew from Scaragar and from Garoshek, trying to keep pace with our guides, and soon we were approaching the centre of town with its tall towers, imposing pillars and ridiculously spiky pyramid type structures. And of course, none of the numerous demons going about their day in the city had the slightest of inklings that their new lord was in their midst, thanks to the stubborn refusal of the hive mind to oblige my wish to do this properly and behave like normal, visible people.

  The dark duo led us to a tall building, behind which I could see the edge of the city’s central park: the familiar black trees with their glowing, lava-veins, and the faint shrieks of the monsters populating the urban forest. The building itself looked like it had been made to resemble a wide-bladed sword sticking out of the ground — I wasn’t sure if it had been the intention of the demonic architects who had designed it, but that’s what it looked like to me, and it was impressive as hell. And this was where Riaret the Severing Strike was waiting for us. The two Kralsenites entered the building — at this point I wasn’t even sure which of the pitch-black figures was Rathar — and led us past a few heavily armoured fire-demons in the anteroom, presumably Riaret’s guards.

  The general’s room was on the fourth floor, roughly halfway up in the building I guessed to be around eight or maybe nine storeys tall. Once we made our way up to her room, Rathar — or perhaps the other guy — pushed the door open and entered ahead of us, beckoning to follow. I took a deep breath, and I followed the hive mind demon inside with only a few and feeble ideas as to what to say to her. As my squad came in behind me, the other Fifth Ringer also entered and pulled the door shut behind him.

  What I saw was not at all what I had expected. The room was quite normal by Fourth Ring standards, not unlike the one I had used in Garoshek. I knew I wasn’t going to find an office with filing cabinets, holographic map or star-chart displays and dozens of desks for a general’s aides and secretaries. But I would have expected the only occupant of the room to be awake. Which she wasn’t.

  Riaret the Severing Strike was asleep, sprawled out on her back, pieces of her armour resting on the floor next to her bed in neat piles. Her horns, jutting out from under her long, messy, black hair, were poking the wooden headboard, and drool was dripping from her open mouth as she snored loudly. Her companion in bed was an enormous weapon, some sort of halberd with a vicious looking axe-blade and deadly spikes, and she was hugging it like a mother would her child. The leather clothes she wore were of a familiar design — I’d seen many warrior type demons wearing the same kind of garments under their armour. Riaret the Severing Strike, asleep and snoring as she was, looked every bit the warrior I’d been told she was. I found myself staring at her face, which could have passed for a human woman’s if not for the red skin, the sharper teeth, and of course the horns. I almost didn’t want to admit it, but she was …rather appealing even to my human sensibilities.

  ‘Hellfire Lord!’ Rathar addressed me with his deep, reverberating voice, one that would have woken anyone up.

  But Riaret the Severing Strike remained asleep, blissfully unaware that while she was dreaming, her body was surrounded by a worrying collection of demons and a human. And Riaret was dreaming indeed — my Master of Nightmares and Dreamscape Architect skills were tugging on my soul, demanding that I let them loose on the dreamer in front of me.

  ‘What now?’ I asked Rathar.

  The two Kralsenites walked over to the other side of the bed and stood over Riaret like a pair of scarecrows made of the night itself, towering over her with their long arms spread as if presenting her as a sacrifice to a highly questionable deity.

  ‘Take her, Hellfire Lord!’ one of them said, I wasn’t sure which. ‘Her dream is waiting. You have the skills, do you not? Enter and break her mind, and she will obey. Her army will be yours.’

  For the first time it occurred to me that Fifth Ring hive mind demons might actually be evil. They really were offering her as some sort of sacrifice. Enter her dream and break her mind? Come on! I wasn’t going to do something like that. I had been extremely careful when I had entered Lanny’s dream, and that had been just to test my new skills with no harm intended or done.

  ‘Why?’ I asked the pair.

  ‘Better this way,’ they answered.

  It seemed I needed to be a bit more specific.

  ‘Why is it better this way?’

  ‘Faster,’ one of them said.

  ‘Faster … as in … the faster I get her army, the faster I get the job done, the faster you and your brethren get to go home?’ I asked, hazarding a guess as to why they were in a rush.

  ‘Yes.’ They both nodded.

  Indeed. I’d had a feeling. The Kralsen Hive Mind was … well, maybe not impatient, but after a thousand years of waiting and with their opportunity finally here, they were perhaps a little overenthusiastic about getting home, and they were keen to help me get things done as fast as possible. In an evil, uncaring way. Ah, demons. I supposed I was getting used to it.

  ‘I don’t want to break her. I need her intact. I need her to be able to command her army and make decisions,’ I explained to the dark demons. ‘And what’s the rush for? I know you want to get home as soon as possible, but come on, we made a deal. A covenant. I will hold up my end of the bargain, you know that. So, a little patience please, and let me do this my way.’

  The two demons looked at each other, sort of, it was hard to tell. Then, after five seconds, they both nodded.

  ‘Have it your way, Hellfire Lord,’ they announced.

  ‘Good stuff,’ I said, and I felt a smile forming on my face.

  But the smile died before it could fully appear: have it my way? What was my way? I had literally no idea how to deal with a sleeping demon general. How would she react if she found me and my squad in her bedroom? Should I leave, make an appointment and come back later? Or should I just wake her up and tell her that I was her boss now?

  As I contemplated my options, I felt a sudden jolt in my soul. Oh no! I knew this jolt. I had just felt it less than an hour ago, when a certain ghostly feline had decided to make himself home in my storage. And now he was coming out. Even if I could have done something, it was too late: the translucent form of Mickey burst out of my chest, flying in a straight line to the sleeping form of Riaret the Severing Strike, landing on her chest in a sitting position and with his tail flicking left and right. The cat began to change as he stared into the sleeping demon’s pretty face, and with a single “meow” he reverted to his material self, becoming a part of physical reality once again.

  ‘We disapprove of you harbouring this creature,’ the two Kralsenites said as they took a step back from the bed, but they were the least of my worries now.

  Riaret the Severing Strike stopped snoring and opened her eyes. I couldn’t imagine what might have been going through her mind as she found the creature sitting on her chest and staring at her from mere inches away, but if I had to guess, it wasn’t good.