“We’ve heard of it in passing.”
“Give me a hand in dealing with this thing, any tips, trinkets, knowledge, it means I’m in better shape for dealing with the Lord of Toronto.”
“You’ll need a small army,” Shotgun said.
“I’m going in alone.”
“Then you’re probably going to die. Too many nasty, angry things in those woods, I’d give you low odds even if the Hyena wasn’t there, if you just had to go in and out, dealing with the flora and fauna in there.”
“And the Hyena?” I asked.
“The Hyena caught and mutilated each and every one of them. Think about that. Think about how long it’s been around, the number of fights it’s been in.”
“It’s a fighter, then?”
“It’s a goblin, so yeah.”
“Then why name it after a scavenger?”
Shotgun shrugged. “Wasn’t us that named it. Might be the association with death and carrion, might be the fact that it’s closer to being a beast than a man.”
“Quadruped, then?” I asked.
“Yep. Fast, big, strong, and about as mean as you get.”
“Don’t suppose I could borrow one of those weapons you were talking about?”
“If you get into a fight in there, chances are pretty good that whatever you’re fighting is going to make noise. Noise brings other ones down on your head. After that, it’s a matter of time before you’re dealing with a crowd. I don’t imagine there’s any weapon I could give you that would let you do that. If you were good enough at fighting, I think you’d have a proper weapon already.”
I nodded slowly. “So fighting isn’t really an option.”
“It’s an option. It’s just a damn shitty option.”
“Stealth, then,” I said. “More my style, maybe.”
“You do know that a lot of Others have different senses than we do?” Shotgun’s son said. “Not just sight and hearing and smell, but other ways of detecting people?”
“I assume so,” I replied.
The son shook his head a little. “You’re just… what, you’re going to sneak in and do what?”
“Try to bind the Hyena,” I said, “or die in the process.”
“You know what happens when he kills you, right?”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t think your chances would be that much worse going up against the Lord of Toronto on your own,” the son said.
“They’d be a great deal worse,” the fat guy by the window said. “The Lord is an Incarnation, and the goblin is still a mid-tier goblin. Mid-tier or not, it’s still a bad idea to go up against the Hyena.”
“Yeah,” Shotgun said. “I’m thinking the same thing.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Run. Whatever the Lord sends after you, I can’t imagine it’ll be as bad,” the son said.
“I’ve got someone who I can’t leave behind,” I said. “Conquest shackled her, and… yeah.”
“How attached are you to her?” the son asked me. “Do you love her?”
That was a good question. Did I love Rose? Was it borderline narcissism if I did? Familial love?
“I don’t have a lot of experience with love,” I said. “There are people I think I love, who I owe for what they’ve done on my behalf, the support they’ve given me, and maybe she fits in that same category, kind of, but…”
I trailed off. I couldn’t put words to the thoughts.
“If you have to think about it, maybe it’s best to just walk away,” the son said.
“Can’t,” I said.
“You swore an oath?” Shotgun asked.
It hadn’t even crossed my mind. But it was an easy answer to give. “Yeah, well, I made promises to her that I can’t fulfill unless she’s free.”
“Fair. We all do stupid things from time to time,” Shotgun said. “What do you need?”
“Chain,” I said.
“How much chain?”
“How much chain do I want to bring, or how much chain do I need for this situation?” I asked. “Two different things.”
“There you go again, with your distinctions.”
“I want miles of chain,” I said. “But I can probably only bring a few loops, before it slows me down too much.”
“Twenty feet?”
“Should work,” I said.
Shotgun glanced at his fat friend by the window.
“We have more than twenty feet there,” the guy said.
“Use the bolt cutters, trim it down to size. But leave the lock connected to the end.”
“Sure,” the guy said. He heaved himself out of the chair. His gait was funny, not quite a limp so much as stumping.
I realized he had only half a foot.
Shotgun looked at his son. “Go find the bolt cutters and help out.”
His son left. No injuries there.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You don’t seem like a bad sort, whatever you’re doing with the demons.”
“Like I said, it’s not by choice. I inherited the title, entirely against my will, and the Lord of Toronto wants to use me for access to my family’s reputation and power.”
“Then, given the chance, you’re not going to touch the things?”
“I can’t promise that,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I read some propaganda, just yesterday. Justifying what diabolists do. It wasn’t… completely wrong.”
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“You have to ask, if the diabolists don’t bind the demons, who will?” I asked.
“The powers that be band together to deal with them.”
“Do they? Look at what’s happening here. Three minor threats, too much trouble to deal with. They get ignored until they can’t be ignored. Then what happens? Yeah, maybe the local powers do gather together. And all of them suffer like your Knights did? Lots of damage? Powerful figures brought low or infected with taint?”
“What’s the alternative?”
“I’m not sure it is an alternative, but maybe people like me and my grandmother deal with them. Shouldering the cost ourselves. Dealing with the karmic burden, the more abstract costs, too.”
“So nobody else has to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how much of it was legit or not. Maybe it means taking on a burden that sinks us, and we inevitably take other people down with us. That it’s too messy for anything else to be possible.”
“If that’s true,” the woman who now sat alone by the window spoke, “Then I worry about us being involved.”
“I wouldn’t blame you. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s possible to shoulder the cost and live an otherwise good life that makes up for it, and leave the world better in the end… if our children don’t get greedy and try to use it or take on more debt for short term gains, leaving certain grandchildren with catastrophic amounts of debt.”
“You’re talking about your family, I take it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe it’s all just a lie, and there’s no way out from under this.”