“I should probably add that the various demons and daemons hereabouts are technically not my minions, nor are they under my control. Please do not go wandering around, for if you encounter any of them they will surely attack you out of hand.”
Balan bowed again, then put a hand on the end of the banister, spun around it, and disappeared with a rustle of his coat tails.
The party entered the rooms the devil had indicated, and though some of them may have had no intention of touching the food on the table nor of trying the waters, the temptation of it all was too much. Nesha-tari headed for a tub immediately and slammed the door shut behind her, and Zeb did not keel over after bolting several strips of salted venison. Everyone bathed and ate after that, and did what they could to beat the dust out of their clothes.
After she had washed, Tilda sat at the table with Claudja and the two hurriedly covered what had happened to them both over the last several days. Tilda said she was sorry about Sir Towsan, and assured the Duchess that the Jobians in Camp Town had taken the knight to their temple in honor.
“The men who killed him met justice,” Claudja said with her eyes hard, though she did not elaborate.
“John will no doubt be pleased,” Tilda muttered.
“Who is John?” Claudja asked, looking around the room. Zeb was trying to strike up a conversation with Shikashe, but the samurai was no less taciturn now that he could have communicated had he wanted to do so.
“Oh. That is…Dugan,” Tilda said. She looked around, but the man in question was not in sight at the moment.
“His first name is John?” Claudja blinked. “All that time on the Shugak raft, and I never knew that.”
“No, it is, but…his name…his name isn’t Dugan. He is not who I thought he was.”
“Where is John Deskata?” Nesha-tari asked from where she sat in a chair against the wall, showing little interest in the food. Tilda still heard her words as they were spoken, in Zantish, and it was a very strange feeling to be able to understand them.
“Is he not in there?” Heggenauer asked from further down the table, pointing at a closed door.
“That’s Amatesu,” Zeb said, then gave up on talking to Uriako Shikashe and knocked on the only other closed door.
“John,” he called. “The girls all want to wash your back.”
Tilda lowered her eyes and smiled, and Claudja noticed. The Duchess raised an eyebrow at her and gave Zeb a more appraising look than she had when Tilda had introduced them. Zeb Baj Nif looked scarcely less scruffy than he had before washing.
When there was no answer Zeb knocked harder, then pushed open the door.
“Empty,” he said, and Tilda felt a sudden disquiet.
Shikashe must have felt the same thing, for the samurai stood and barked Amatesu’s name at the one door that remained closed. The shukenja opened it and stepped out, looking embarrassed. Her long black hair hung straight to her waist, shining and clean, more lustrous and gorgeous than Tilda would have thought possible of the typically tangled mess.
“There were herbs and soaps,” Amatesu said, sounding more guilty than she had when talking about her past as a ninja. “I did not mean to, I meant only…”
“Is John in there with you?” Zebulon asked. Amatesu raised her eyes from the floor and frowned.
“What? Of course not.”
Tilda jumped up from the table, knocking over her chair. She called John Deskata’s name and rushed around to look in the other side rooms, but the man was nowhere to be found.
*
A short time after the Duchess Claudja had appeared in his doorway, there was a knock on Phin’s door. He stopped pacing and glared at the portal. The knock repeated.
“Enter,” he barked.
The door opened and a small devil with spikes all along its spine floated in, the same kind as those that had been coming and going all day. Phin could not tell them apart, and had no idea if he had seen this particular one before.
“Mr. Phoarty,” the devil said. “Please come with me.”
Phin stared. “You can talk? I have been asking questions all day!”
“We did not have anything to say earlier.”
“Where is the Duchess Claudja?” Phin demanded for the hundredth time.
“Downstairs, with the others. Please come this way.”
“What others?” Phin asked, as he was fairly sure the Sarge and the legionnaires had all been killed.
The devil gave no answer but only floated out through the door, then down the hall to the left.
Phin rushed to the doorway but stopped and peeked out. The spiny devil was floating away down the long passage to the left, but to the right a bearded devil in white robes stood athwart the hall, its red eyes boring into Phin’s.
“The Duchess was taken in that direction,” Phin shouted, but the devil floating away did not alter its pace.
“There is more than one way downstairs, Mr. Phoarty.”
Phin looked at the bearded devil, and the creature flexed its scaly fingers on the shaft of the pole arm it held across its body. Phin recalled two such fingers being jammed into his mouth at his capture. He turned and followed the spiny devil, hurrying to catch up as the thing bobbed through the air.
“How do you know my name?” Phin asked when he was behind the creature. The spikes on its back ran all the way down its serpentine tail. They looked something like porcupine quills, though they were thicker and set in a single, even row.
“The others have spoken your name, and we have heard them. We have heard much of what they have said since entering the city.”
“Who are the people of whom you speak, devil?”
“My name is Poltus. They are the people who entered this place in pursuit of your band. Two Far Westerners, two Miilarkians. A priest and a soldier and a Lamia.”
Phin blinked and stumbled a step on the thick carpet at the mention of Far Westerners. Poltus floated on and Phin caught up once again.
“What is a Lamia?” he asked.
Poltus glanced over its shoulder.
“You would have to ask her.”
After walking far enough that Phin thought they must surely be at the end of the long gallery as he had seen it from his window, close to the central tower where the wings of the palace met, Poltus passed through an open doorway. The devil plucked a candle from a wall mount and guided Phin down a dark circular stair, the space so tight that Phin’s shoulders brushed the walls, and he had to hunch over so as not to hit his head. The confines made it hard to judge how far they had descended, and the stair ended at a single door with no other way forward. Poltus unlocked the portal with a key Phin had not seen the devil carrying, and the creature certainly had no pockets where it might have been. The door swung open to a lighted chamber, and the devil blew out the candle as it entered. Phin crept out after Poltus, and stopped dead as soon as he looked around.
They were within the central tower of the palace, a cavernous space of black stone fully illuminated from on high. Just below the distant conical ceiling, a ball of yellow light floated like a miniature sun, though one that could be looked at directly. Phin stood on a stone catwalk that ringed the whole space some twenty feet above the floor. Looking across it he could see several sets of descending stairs, regularly spaced and each forming a horseshoe-shape that flanked enormous double-doors on the ground level. These were surely the main entrances to each branching wing of the palace, for the doors up on the catwalk were all plain and serviceable, like the one Phin had just passed through. The large doors on the ground were intricately carved, with shining metal work for hinges and handles.
Phin could not see the central space of the tower until he shuffled forward to look down from the catwalk, and when he did so he felt his heart sink. The round floor descended in consecutive rings, each forming a single step that ran all the way around the whole chamber. There were about ten such steps, then a flat circle of floor, and then ten more steps rising in turn as in the center of the vast space were circular rings of stone set one atop the other, decreasing in diameter as they rose. The topmost was about twenty feet across, forming a dais upon which were mounted two tall pillars, not straight, but bowed in the middle and with the pointed tips bending toward each other like a pair of horns or tusks. They appeared to be made entirely of metal. Platinum, if Phin was any judge.