City of Hawks (6 page)

The mage seemed satisfied at that, but Colvetis Pol slightly raised one of his thin, sharply arched brows. “You can predict the unpredictable, know the unknown. I am impressed, lord.” His tone was perhaps the tiniest bit sarcastic.

“You will see in a short time, priest!” Poxpanus spat the words out in his anger at being japed at by even so powerful a man as this priest, for Pol was still but a human. There could be no doubt that he was also one who was growing overly ambitious. He would be dealt with to stringent fashion, Poxpanus assured himself, soon… soon. “Now I grow weary of this puerile banter. I shall retire to my private chambers.”

“Virgin’s blood, lord-fresh and warm.” The servant set a flask on the table next to Poxpanus and backed out of the room hastily.

Now within the deep enclave that was the special guest chamber of the temple, the nether-being was preparing for what he must do next. He quaffed the satisfying refreshment quickly, for it gave him the energy and power he would need to execute the task before him.

The words of the priest had caused Poxpanus to consider. His queries were too pointed. The daemon had spoken hastily, and now it was time to make certain that what he had said was no mere boasting. First there would be a sending of sickness. Although the daemon did not know exactly those whom it would visit, their locale and general descriptions were sufficient, for he was near and full of vigor. Some of that strength, however, had to be saved for the second part of his effort.

The ritual of the sending was similar to the complex incantations and conjurations often practiced by mages. Sigildark would have seen much he recognized. So would Colvetis Pol have recognized certain ceremonial portions used by those who invoked clerical powers. Poxpanus worked with speed and deliberation, but he did not rush. Even a netherlord could make errors, and the daemon knew that well. Soon enough the sending was completed, and then he turned his attention to Rheachan.

Although that creature served as his hound, Rheachan was his own offspring, a thing sprung directly from Poxpanus. The beast was therefore controllable, loyal, and totally predictable. If it drew upon the daemon’s own strength, it also fed him when it fed. The relationship was complex, symbiotic in a sense, an unbreakable extension of the vilest portions of Poxpanus’ mind and body too. Rheachan had never failed. Still, something in the priest’s words had made the daemon uneasy. The unknown was, after all, just that Better to be too cautious now. Cautious, that is, in assuring the strength of his hound-offspring as it did its work.

There was no mystery involved in Poxpanus’ calling down sickness and disease upon an enemy. Pol and others steeped in the arcane knew well that such powers belonged to daemons of stature. Rheachan was an altogether different matter. Something that was strength could also be weakness if enemies were aware of the resource. To avoid any possible spying on what he planned next, Poxpanus set about cloaking this innermost cell of the temple. With drawn glyphs and murmured chants, the nether-being began to build layer upon layer of wardings. First was the shield against the mind, then the prying forces of magic, and finally came the guards that prevented priestly scrutiny of any sort-even that assisted by beings of other sort than humans.

When the triple protections were set, Poxpanus added to each, strengthening here, tightening there, until he was satisfied that each was sufficient to withstand even a major assault for the time he needed to do his work. To be even more sure, however, the daemon then wove the three wards together, meshing them so that each supported the other, and over all three he built a screen of such stuff as to make the whole invisible and undetectable except to the most exacting scrutiny. No sweeping search would discover his carefully built fortress of energies. To have it otherwise would invite the attention of all sorts of unwanted intruders, evil as well as those who fought against it. None could be trusted, none could know. The axiom of Hades, perhaps of all the lower planes, was a simple one: Strength is mastery: the weak are ruled.

In the web of energies, the complex tapestry of magic, and planar powers, there was yet an opening. The mesh allowed Poxpanus a place where his own particular psyche, those vibrations that were uniquely his own, could pass into and move out of the confinement of the fortress. It was but a small opening, a tiny weakness in the structure. In time a being of might would find and exploit such a tiny flaw, but time was not a factor. Poxpanus would use the protection for but a short duration-a few minutes, a few hours, a day at most. After that, It would be finished. With success, the daemon lord would return to the nether planes. Then there would be a reordering of the ranks, and only Infestix would be greater than he. Long had he contested with Anthraxus and the rest to assume the second position in Hades, Viceroy of Glooms as it were. Soon that struggle would come to an end.

“Rheachan!”

“I watch, and I wait, as you instruct”

The reply was crystal clear. Poxpanus sent his force out along the channel. “Good,” he thought, as he saw In his mind what the daemon-hound saw with its eyes.

“It is pleasurable to me that you find me suitable, Paterfamilias.” There was no lie in that, no deception. Rheachan was unsatisfied and incomplete without contact with Poxpanus.

That was true to a lesser extent for the daemon as well. When he brought his force into attunement with the force of the nether-hound, Poxpanus was not only whole but more than he had been without the procreation, his hound, Rheachan. “The one we will devour-where?”

“Not yet come. But now that we are conjoined I can sense that it will happen soon, soon…”

“Yes, that is so. The humans who are assigned to the one?”

“But two weak females, Paterfamilias. Even now the second has entered.”

“Wait! Something comes from another place.” Poxpanus felt the waves washing outward into the material plane as some force from elsewhere made its way through planes and dimensions. That force bore with it the unmistakable emanations of humanity, small but strong. The infant was being brought from its otherworldly hidey-hole to where the stupid mortals imagined it would be safe and secure. “Upward, hound-child. You must be ready.”

Of course Rheachan had anticipated the command. Even as the thought formed, the thing was well above the cobbled lane and heading toward the shuttered window that was its objective. “The two assassins charged with securing the escape way are arrived. Paterfamilias.”

“Unneeded, now!” The daemon was exhilarated by the prospect of the conclusion of his hunt, the kill and the feeding. The ether was torn just at that moment by the arrival of the force. “Now, my dear hound! Into that place, and we will have our sport!”

With the vital energy of its procreator filling its body and mind, Rheachan, hound and child, felt as if it could conquer the multiverse. How great and all-knowing the Paterfamilias was! Perhaps if it did well this night, that one would consent to mingle with Rheachan always, so that Rheachan would be as strong and smart as Poxpanus. It sent its desire to the Paterfamilias, along with its hound’s lust for savage killing and devouring of blood… and soul, too. This primordial urge swept through Rheachan and into Poxpanus, and both were one and glad.

“I have it now,” the daemon crooned mentally to its hound-child. “The life of the sprat, the vibrations of the bitch who was to care for it-so easy to read, to know, to find anywhere now.”

“No need to think of future hunts. Paterfamilias. I will rend them both for you now.”

Then the liquid stuff struck Rheachan, and the agony of its burning made Poxpanus writhe in his hidden cell as if the Netherlord himself had been subjected to the assault. In the confusion of the pain, the daemon allowed his hound free rein. The pain drove Rheachan into a murderous frenzy, of course, and the thing forgot all caution in its desire to avenge itself upon the miserable human female who had dared to so harm its corporeal form. Then the cylinder too went home, and the nether-hound and its father were suffused with even greater torment as the blessed silver struck, vaporized, and destroyed the eye of the hound.

“Revenge!” The mental scream shook Rheachan and infused it with new strength and purpose. So too the assurance that followed: “Slay, feed, and then I will bring you to me, hound-child. Your eye will grow again, your vision be better still, for I will suffuse your being with more of me!”

It was a fleeting communication, one that scarcely required any consideration. Rheachan reached forth, and the offending female human was no more. There was no reason for feeding, not on such a puny force as that one offered. Neither was the other female worthwhile… at least not immediately. A tiny human cub was there before Rheachan’s remaining eye, and its vitality belied its diminutive size. That one’s blood was ten times more desirable than the others’. The nether-hound reached greedily for the babe.

“Wait!”

The mental cry of warning reached the hound-thing too late-or perhaps Rheachan ignored the call. Rage and hunger had driven it beyond thought. This made it quite unaware of other forces that were suddenly impinging upon the space it was in. More than impinging. The forces were indeed in the room almost Instantly. They attacked Rheachan then, and it baffled the hound-thing. All it desired was to devour the infant, and there was something in its way, something that tore at the hound and prevented Rheachan from its evil desire. Then the nether-hound howled and ravened and died.

The very web that Poxpanus had woven to protect himself prevented the daemon from assisting his offspring. The netherlord could have been with Rheachan in a split-second, using his powers to prevent what occurred, but his own wards prevented that. Only the mental link was possible, and that was now unbreakable as well. When Poxpanus tried to disengage the bond he found that something interfered.

The umbilical connection between daemon and hound-child was affixed by some outside force that Poxpanus could not fight, locked just as the netherlord was kept tight within a fortress of his own construction. As Rheachan howled and ravened and was destroyed, a similar fate befell the daemon sire of the hound.

It wasn’t actually death to Poxpanus, of course. The netherlord suffered pain and loss, but at least here, on this plane, it could not be slain. Not so the hound-child. And when Rheachan shed its ichor and died, a portion of Poxpanus, progenitor of the monstrosity, was annihilated. The shock of the loss was traumatic in many ways. The daemon lord tried to see its tormentors through Rheachan’s dying eye. The glaring orb revealed nothing to him, and when it flickered into nothingness, something within the daemon snapped. Poxpanus raged round his carefully created fortress, destroying it as a maddened boar would tear the earth when wounded. With occult forces went wood and stone too, until the chamber was a gaping wreckage of rubble and slag.

Colvetis Pol’s personal servants found the place in this state the next day and reported the fact to their master. The priest pondered long on It thereafter, when servants of his master informed him that the daemon lord was now chained in Hades until his madness could work itself out and Poxpanus could assume some minor role in the hierarchy of the nether planes once again. Pol disappeared shortly after that. Some said he went to Hades to serve Nerull, but others whispered that the once-priest was now a hermit seeking holiness in the wilderness.

“Eat that gruel, you miserable little bastard, or I’ll thump your gourd!”

Leena the crone was in a fairly cheerful mood this morning, so she didn’t bother to carry out her threat. Satisfied with a sharp pinch that made the toddler yowl, she went off to see what she could discover in the refuse heaps along the Old City’s nearby wall. The day was warm, and that made her feel less irritable than usual. Cold made her old bones ache and her temper more foul than was usual even for Leena.

Why did she bother to care for the nasty little runt? The question bothered Leena, for she couldn’t honestly and fully answer it. Somehow she felt the brat had something to do with her luck, or perhaps her very existence. She wasn’t certain of that-but then again, she was not certain about a lot of important matters, including who she really was, where she came from, or why she didn’t just end her misery by ending her own life.

Leena thought she knew one important thing, though. The brat’s presence seemed to have something to do with her being able to continue to stay alive… at least, as long as she was inclined to do so. Some benefactor of the little bastard must watch over the place they lived in. Sometimes when Leena returned from one of her forays, when the hovel she and the runt shared had been empty for a while, she found evidence of that. One time a small sack of meal would appear, another time a pot of soup, and sometimes even a few small coins or a nice piece of woolen cloth.

“Stay out of here, witch-crone!” The warning came from a stick-thin drab who had taken up residence near the Slum Quarter’s refuse dump. Leena didn’t see the woman’s old man around, so instead of trying to avoid trouble, she stopped and stared at her.

“Shrivel your teats!” Leena shouted, and then she cackled loudly as she continued to glare at the drab. The whole display wasn’t much of a threat, but it did seem to have the desired effect, for the skinny woman covered her face and ducked inside the decaying old structure that housed her and the hairy old ragpicker who lived with her. A rock came sailing out of the doorway, but landed ineffectually a few feet away from where Leena stood.

Still cackling, Leena shuffled on her way. Being old and ugly had its advantages, yes indeed. When had she been young? Lovely? Leena knew that there must have been such a time. Deep inside herself she was sure of it. But she had no conscious memory of being anything other than Leena the Crone, no recollection of a time when she had done anything other than care for the skinny brat who shared her slovenly home.

The gangs of boys from the Labor Quarter and the Beggars Quarter were her worst nightmare. Sometimes Leena dreamed about them, and they took the shapes of terrible monsters as they came near. Then a noble warrior would intervene, or the brat would come into her dream and change into a giant who frightened off the dirty pack of boy-demons. Some laugh, that. Leena kept a long knife under her dirty old blanket, the same wrap that served her as a cloak when she went out. That way she was certain that she had real protection. The witch stuff, the shouting and cackling, didn’t work as well with the gangs as it did with other sorts of adversaries. But they usually only bothered her when she strayed from the area between the rubbish dump and her place in the abandoned tannery, so with care there was no problem-other than finding food and a few little things to add to her comfort.

“Glory!” The exclamation sprang unbidden to her lips. A whole bundle of wax tapers had been discarded along with someone’s garbage. The breaks in the candles weren’t too bad, and the oiled cloth they were rolled in was a minor treasure in itself. Leena bent down and began scrabbling around in earnest in that particular pile of debris. Perhaps there was more good stuff to be had.

At an earlier time inside Old City, even within the slums, and outside in the New Town as well, others conducted their own searches even more carefully than old Leena scavenged for the means to stay alive. The word had gone out, and who had put it forth mattered not a bit. Beggars and thieves were alert. Petty clerics and city guards kept a watch on all they saw. Peddlers, shopkeepers, barmen, and ostlers too knew and sought to gain from their knowledge. Merely seeing a pretty woman named Meleena, and being able to prove it, was worth one hundred gold orbs. If she was seen with an infant, then the sum would be doubled. Should both be taken by those who sought them, then the informant who enabled that to happen would have a thousand of the fat discs of gold for his trouble!

Every young woman in Greyhawk was viewed critically. Every mother with a baby was a potential fortune. A thousand eager informants turned the city inside out seeking the two, and a thousand false claims were checked and proved to be nothing more than that. The word was out for weeks before the offer was finally cancelled. By then, nobody much cared anyway, for avaricious expectations quickly turn to other and easier prospects.

Other agents, ones with non-monetary motives, also sought the woman and the baby. Men and women with position and power used magical means or discreet inquiries to try to locate them. Strange creatures roamed the city at night searching for the two.

No magic succeeded, no inquiry uncovered a clue, no occult observer saw anything of consequence. It was as if the earth had swallowed up Meleena and her charge, or the pair had been removed to some other plane. After a time the hunt was, in fact, transferred to likely places other than Oerth, places where the pair could have found refuge. Only a few of the nether plane’s operatives remained to continue the search in Greyhawk, and then only because those individuals had other duties there as well. Weeks became months, months rolled into years. By then even those agents had forgotten Meleena and her ward. Certainly, by now, both were long dead.

“No one as weak and insignificant as that one could have avoided the sending of Poxpanus,” Sigil-dark observed when the subject came up in conversation one day.

“Agreed,” said Arendil, the new Great Priest of Nerull now presiding over the Lightless Temple.

“Our lord and master placed potent curses upon both woman and babe as well, did he not?”

“Most assuredly. I assisted with minor portions of the whole complex of dooming which was cast,” the cleric said slowly.

The mage was at a loss, “Five years now, near enough, and there has been no sign, no trace, no clue anywhere. There is only one possible answer. The pair was vaporized, blasted into nothingness. That must have happened long ago; so why do we still search?”

Arendil gazed at the mage without expression. Sigildark was already above his true mark, and before long he would have to be replaced. “That is why I summoned you,” he explained. “Other, more pressing concerns now demand our attention. There is no longer to be any search for either of the two.”

Sigildark looked satisfied at this, as if he had been influential in the decision and was receiving long-overdue praise for what he had advocated. The priest didn’t inform him of the fact that the redes of both Hades and the Nine Hells were unchanged. Perhaps they bore on an altogether different individual anyway. It didn’t matter, for the spell-binder had no need to know.

“What urgent matter am I to attend to now?” Sigildark asked pompously.

“It seems, dear mage, that there are clues to the whereabouts of the… objects we seek, the portions of the ancient relic we must reunite, hidden somewhere in the grimoires to be found within the very library of the Savants of Greyhawk. You are to…” and the priest thereafter proceeded to explain to the mage his task in regard to that matter. That was the conclusion of the whole affair of Meleena in the city.

“…thump yer gourd!”

The crone was at it again, and the little boy leaped to get clear. Leena’s cackle of mirth was sufficient to send a wave of hatred through his skinny body, but he scampered even faster. “Fetch me wood, brat, and don’t come back without enough to keep old Leena warm all night, hear?”

Safely outside, beyond her reach and secure that her crooked stick couldn’t touch him, the boy turned and made a terrible face. “Go scratch, you old bag! I’ll never come back and you’ll freeze to death!”

“I’ll smash yer gourd!” Leena cried, raising her stick threateningly and advancing toward him. The small boy ran off immediately, and Leena cackled her ugly laugh once more. An empty threat from an empty little gourd. The boy was useless, but somehow she would manage to make him of some value. She’d work him to death if necessary, pound knots on his head in the process. She knew that the dirty little bastard was the cause of all her troubles, and she meant to even the score. Meanwhile, he would be made of use.

Spitting after him, Leena shuffled back into the still-standing portion of the old warehouse she called home. It was small and dirty, but rain didn’t come in and there were no other people around to threaten her. She liked this place better than the dozen or two others she had lived in since leaving the abandoned tannery. Old Leena crooned to herself as she went, smiling at her wisdom. An inner voice always told her things like that-keep moving, speak to no one unnecessarily, keep the boy alive because one day he must be made to pay. Oh, yes, indeed! Old Leena was smart and wise, and no one would ever catch on to her, never.

There was a place for a fire. It was near the rear wall, and above it was a hole in the ceiling. The hole went above to where the upper storey was collapsed. There were, in fact, floors above that one even. No rain found its way down the hole, but the smoke from the fire went up through it, drifted around above, and escaped skyward in wisps and wafts that were hardly noticeable by day, invisible after dark. “Smart,” Leena said aloud, She talked to herself, naturally. Who else was there to talk to? “Very smart, and getting younger and prettier too!”

That bit of self-delusion made her recall something she hadn’t thought of for a while. She looked around carefully to make certain the dirty little brat wasn’t spying on her, then pried up a loose flagstone beneath her pile of ragged bedding and took out a small box. She lifted the lid and looked at a scrap of parchment she had found inside the box long, long ago. “How long ago was it?” she asked absently, scratching her filthy gray locks until they became even more straggly and tangled than before.

She recalled how she had found the parchment, an event that mystified her to this day whenever she thought too hard about it. She had found the box under her bedding one day, and had no idea where it had come from-but all she really cared about was the fact that the box was hers. Then she got angry when she opened the box and found it empty-no food, no coins, nothing. Frowning at the container, she had growled, “Who would play such a bad trick on old Leena?”

Then, to her amazement, the bottom of the box seemed to disappear, revealing some items beneath it-but still inside the container! She reached in carefully and withdrew several sheets of parchment. Some of them contained writing she couldn’t read and didn’t care about anyway; on other scraps there were pictures of people, and Leena was immediately drawn to one of these portraits in particular.

It was a picture of a girl. Leena wondered if she was a princess. After all, princesses had their pictures drawn, didn’t they? “Not like this,” she said aloud. “How do you know?!” The response was cross.

The ink markings on the scrap were carefully drawn, and the detail showed a young and pretty face, a face without lines and wrinkles, framed by long, flowing hair. “I wish I were that lady!” she said, continuing to converse with herself. “You will be, silly girl, but it takes a long time to grow young and pretty…,” Tears made marks on the leathery cheeks of the crone, washing away the dust and grime of Old City’s slums.

“I didn’t wait for so long when I grew ancient and ugly!” she sobbed. Then a thick veil came over her thoughts. Leena toppled over onto her heaped rags and slept, still clutching the drawing of the beautiful girl. At the bottom was written a word, but only the first two letters-“ME”-were legible. Below that pair of letters was written the number “100”. Perhaps, the crazy old hag imagined, she would become like the drawing when she reached a hundred years old, or a hundred years from now…

Finding wood or anything else to use as fuel was no easy task. Old City was a vast place to the little boy. He didn’t dare venture very far from his home. Even though that location changed every few months, he soon exhausted all the ready sources within a quarter-mile of where he and Leena lived at the moment. This was now the case. He could find not even any dried horse-apples to use for fuel, so it was time to begin exploring some of the dark and dangerous old buildings on the fringe of his territory.

“Hey, sonny!”

The boy nearly jumped a foot at that, and he began running away from the sound immediately. A hand grabbed his garment, which was merely an old sack converted into a one-piece outfit.

“Don’t you remember me?” The voice was rough but bore no hint of menace or threat of punishment.

The urchin gathered his courage and turned his narrow face toward the voice. “Oh,” he finally managed to say.

The big, bearded face split into a friendly grin. “A clever lad like you can say more than that. I’ll give you a little something to help you speak-here,” the man said, producing an apple. “Try eating that up, and I’ll bet you’ll be able to say a whole lot more after it’s inside. It’s a magic apple, you know.”

The lad didn’t care if it was magical or otherwise. He was always, always hungry. He grabbed the little red sphere and bit into it without a word to the man. Eat it up first, then see what happens afterward. The fruit was soon gone, core and seeds included.

“Well?”

“Gotta nuther one?” the grubby boy asked seriously through the last mouthful.

The fellow took him gently by the shoulder, smiling and chuckling. “That and more, lad. My place is just there,” he informed the waif. “Let’s you and I go there for a bit. You can eat all you want, and I’ll just talk a bit-sort of fill in the gaps until you’re ready to take over. Sound all right?”