Pauz found another host.
Who would Pauz pick?
Someone vulnerable. Someone weak.
I’d already fallen prey to magical influences with very little warning, not to mention how being forsworn was technically losing the rights to defend oneself against spirits. Pauz could probably take advantage of a small falsehood or karmic foothold, much as the Sphinx could leverage a false answer to justify murdering someone.
It would be very easy to slip up and give ground to Pauz. Ground I couldn’t afford to give him.
Easier still when Rose wasn’t here to back me up, and I didn’t have a contract in hand for him to look at.
“Have you come to a decision?” I asked. Questions were safe. It was very hard to frame a question in such a way that it could entrap me.
“I have,” he said. His eyes were on the tome beside me.
“And?”
“And your companion was supposed to be here to discuss it with me,” he said. He didn’t look away from the book.
“Are you refusing the offer we suggested?” I asked.
“What happens if I do?” Pauz asked, as he used all four limbs to move along the chair back, before moving forward, onto Dowght’s shoulders. Dowght winced as the claws pricked his skin, but did nothing. “Wild animals kill you and rip you apart.”
Fuck. If I screwed up here, I was dead. I had only the protective diagrams I’d worked into my clothes, but that didn’t include my head, hands, or feet. If I offended him, or if I let him start to think the deal wasn’t worth it on his end, he could easily sic the various rodents and animals on me.
“You would miss an opportunity,” I said. Safe assertion.
“I can hold on to this opportunity,” he said. He stroked Dowght’s face with the back of one clawed hand. Dowght closed his eyes.
“A dying man? Until he dies or gets devoured. Then what? You start over?”
“Stronger each time, I’m patient,” he said. He poked Dowght with a claw. “I find stronger people, find a crack and worm my way into it, climb the ladder.”
“Can you afford to be that patient?” I asked.
“Immortality has a way of allowing it,” Pauz said.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said. Be firm. “I’m asking if you can stick to the path you’re on. You won’t ever succeed, if you keep going down this road. You might make a dent in the grand scheme of things, do some damage, but I have trouble believing you’ll survive. If you get to the point of being a meaningful threat, powerful people and entities are going to stamp you out.”
There were so many distractions. Noise, smells, movements in the corner of my vision…
I could only keep my eyes forward.
“Stamp me out?” he asked. “They can try.”
“They can succeed,” I said, knowing I was taking a risk with a brazen statement, “Could be Conquest, could be someone from out of town, or it could be all of them. They could kill your corrupted animals, invest time, money, energy and other resources into containing or cleaning up this area, and you’re done. You’ve missed a chance.”
“Mm,” he said, “But I’ve done damage. Diminished mankind and the world, hm? That’s all my kind seeks.”
All that his kind sought. Maybe that was true, maybe it was only true when his kind were described in abstract.
He was different from the commonplace demon, on a level.
He was an imp, a parasite, occupying people and then moving on to others. A mote, a spark looking to ignite a blaze.
What sort of person lived in this upscale sort of suburb where all the cars were nice? Not lowlifes. Successful or successful-ish people. These were his victims.
Pauz took a bit of each person. Those pieces, as I understood it, formed the sum of his human side. He took pieces of lawyers, doctors, computer people, businessmen, bankers and whoever else.
He seemed to be enjoying the silence that had followed his statement, letting it sit. Watching me squirm.
I wasn’t squirming, though. I was thinking. Pauz took over the weak, people who gave him an in. They might be successful people who were down on their luck, or people with a vice that made them weak. Or they could be people with enough of a problem, karmically, that he could make a bid to get a hold on them, even when they weren’t practitioners.
“Is that really all you want?” I asked, emphasizing the ‘you’. “A dent in reality and an ignoble death? Let’s not pretend you’re uninterested in the possibility of what we’re offering. Don’t you upset the natural order of things? You could theoretically have access to an Incarnation. To something fundamental. You could upset something monumental.”
I studied him, looking for a tell, but I was getting distracted by the subtle ugliness, the way his entire body looked like worn callous, stained gray-black, the teeth, the eyes, the glare…
I continued, “You’ve had time to consider the option. If you have doubts, we can talk about those doubts.”
“Hmm. Discuss and compromise?” he asked.
The word ‘compromise’ sounded very strange coming out of the imp’s shark-toothed mouth.
That made me think for a second about what he meant.
Compromise… both sides giving ground? If I agreed to discuss and compromise, he could be unreasonable, and still demand concessions.
“We’re capable of discussing, certainly,” I said. “Compromise… naturally depends on how this goes.”
“Mm hmm,” he said.
“Let’s start from the initial deal my partner proposed. You would be bound until… shall we say five minutes after midnight, two nights from now, as a starting point?”
“Hm. I haven’t accepted.”
So little time.
“Then let’s talk in terms of the hypothetical, and discuss when we’re done. We could say that no term or written word shall be considered binding until both of us agree and sign.”
“Outside of the inviolable rules,” Pauz said. He hopped down onto the table, picking something out of a piece of raw meat. He opened his mouth, let it dangle and wriggle for a second, then dropped it into his mouth.
“Which rules?” I asked. “The rules of binding oaths?”
“Those laws, which were established in the emergence from void and chaos, and the fundamental structures and forces of existence your practice, my power, or practice and power combined can’t alter,” Pauz said, chewing far too much, considering the small size of the thing he’d popped into his mouth.
If we’re talking about rules my practice or your existence can’t alter, why even mention them?
I thought about it for a minute, turning the words over in my head.
Trap?
No. Couldn’t see a trap.
Not unless the trap was to throw so many terms and ideas at me that I’d stop being careful.
“I could accept that,” I said, finally. “With further consideration.”
“Then we agree to talk about terms,” he said. “With nothing binding until we sign and verbally agree.”
More words, more terms and ideas to complicate matters.
I was making the wish to the genie that was hellbent on twisting the terms of the wish to screw me over. More than that, I was dealing with something very inhuman, in a context I didn’t fully understand.