I saw one or two Satyrs step back.
“It doesn’t work quite that way, but close,” Jeremy said. “Where is this supposed demon?”
“Last I saw, it was in the house,” I said. I decided to bend the truth. “It can’t leave. I would like to keep you from leaving with it, accidentally or otherwise. That’s in my top five concerns right now.”
He didn’t take my bait and ask what the other four were. “If the demon was a concern, the occupants of the house would be a lot more afraid than they are.”
“It’s scarier than the demon in the factory,” I said. “As rankings for demons go, it’s few steps up. I don’t like Rose, but I trust her not to fuck that up. You… I’m much less inclined to trust your lot to keep from accidentally fucking up. When I killed the snake, I was protecting all of us.”
“The responsibilities of being a diabolist’s favored pet,” Jeremy said.
“Eh,” I said. “You got one of those three labels right.”
“I have my own responsibilities,” he said. “When I wield power, it isn’t with lines on the floor and carefully worded contracts. I only ask. I can change the wording, pick the phrasing, decide the poetry of it, and read old texts, from my god’s days of glory. But when I want to practice, I only speak. A single word will suffice.”
He wasn’t murdering me or getting us all killed while he talked, so there was that.
He continued, “My challenge is to show I’m worthy. In the heat of the moment, I don’t need to do anything special. Outside of those moments, I have to curry favor. There aren’t any gauges, no measurements I can take. I have to watch for signs and trust him to show me his pleasure or displeasure. If I overstep, asking too much for how little favor I have, he may punish me. If I hold his favor but do not spend it, he might revoke it.”
“Easy to get wrong,” I said.
“I don’t shape how it manifests. He does. But when he works…”
“He can knock down all the barriers in a house that’s supposed to hold up against a pair of angry chronomancers and enchantresses.”
The atmosphere here… I didn’t even have pumping blood, but my head pounded.
“Yes,” Jeremy Meath told me. “That snake was his. You killed it. You maimed his servant’s hand. For all intents and purposes, there is a gun pressed to your head as we speak. There has been since you hurt that snake.”
I shook my head a little. “Can’t be that simple. You would have said it already.”
“I need answers before I have my god smite you. Where is the Thorburn Cabal?”
You should be asking where the demon is,” I said.
“Eryalus?” he asked. “You smelled something foul when you entered the house.”
The ugly satyr spoke, “Above us.”
“Has it moved?”
“No,” the satyr said.
Jeremy looked at me, spreading his hands.
“If you upset Rose,” I warned, “there’s no guarantee she won’t give the demon a command.”
“I’m not concerned with upsetting Rose,” he said. “I want to find her and her cabal. Now, second try. Where is the Thorburn Cabal?”
“Ask your god to point you in the right direction,” I said.
“Asking him for trivial things I could earn and achieve on my own is a fast way to lose favor. For the third time, where is the cabal?”
Three times. The answer I gave here mattered.
I’d spooked his minions by mentioning the demon. Maybe I could take advantage of that.
“She’s in an area that, as I understand it, involves warped space,” I said. “One step to the side, and, how did you put it? Above us?”
Which was technically true. It was a two-floor affair.
I could see his jaw set, eyes narrowing. There was no softness in his face, however worn and rumpled he might otherwise look. How could a priest of drunken merriment and debauchery look so joyless and cold?
“If that’s the case,” he said, “We could all be dead. You’ll definitely have to tell me where she is, so I can stop her.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“What do you think I did, mirror man?” he asked. “I needed to disarm the diabolist and her cabalists of their greatest weapon, which we just talked about, and I needed access. My god granted me both with one fell stroke.”
“Jägerbomb,” a younger satyr said, snickering as if it were far funnier than it was.
Which wasn’t hard. I didn’t think it was funny in the least.
“You’re telling me you went after the one person in Jacob’s Bell who has the most dangerous knowledge around, the one person who can tap into world ending forces, who’s maybe a little hard to anticipate to begin with, and you got her drunk?”
“I’ve been led to believe my god impaired her faculties,” Jeremy Meath said. “As I said, doing what I do is far from an exact science.”
“If she calls on the wrong name,” I said, warning.
“She won’t, not anytime soon,” the priest answered me. “My god is a god of madness and drink. She’ll be insensate, for now.”
“For now?”
“I imagine there’ll be a window of time when she’s lucid enough to act, and still far enough out of her gourd to do something stupid,” the priest told me. “If circumstances were better, and she didn’t already have something summoned, this would have been perfect.”
His expression didn’t change from that stony stare, as he made that admission.
His minions looked more than a little freaked out, though.
“You leave, I find her, we mutually prevent anything stupid from happening, and Sandra gets to do whatever she’s planning to do to Mags and Molly,” I said. “You and your god win.”
“It’s not that simple. When my god created this situation, he posed a challenge to me. If he simply gave me what I needed, what would that be worth? I have to work for it a little. His era of gods are especially fond of making the little mortals dance,” Jeremy said. “If I walk away from that challenge and fail to dance, I disappoint him.”
“Seems to me,” I said, picking my words with care, not breaking eye contact with him, “Following a god like you do is very nearly as tragic an existence as being a diabolist.”
His expression changed for the first time in a good while. A light smile.
“I think you might be right, mirror man. There’s a reason I’m here. When someone like Sandra, the departed Laird Behaim, or even Conquest do battle with a diabolist, they’re busy trying to win, while the diabolist knows they can win. It’s merely a question of how little that diabolist can get away with losing in the process.”
“Rose and I have surmounted plenty of obstacles without summoning or dealing with demons,” I said.
Jeremy stroked the hair of the Maenad who hadn’t moved her head from his shoulder. She’d stopped clenching her claws, and now held her injured hand against her chest.