“How very gauche,” Margali complained. Somehow, she’d expected better of Umar than demon guards playing cards in the barracks, although she wasn’t exactly sure why. She’d seen the portraits the goddess had had commissioned of herself, after all. She might be nigh omnipotent, but Umar the Unrelenting was sorely lacking in taste.
“This could get noisy,” Elizabeth said, as three overlarge demons stood and began stalking their way. They reminded Margali of Haus from the circus Freak Show – too big, and hopefully not too bright. One broke the chair it had been sitting on to use its frame as a misshapen club. Another grabbed a torch out of a wall sconce. The third didn’t bother with a weapon. As it approached and Margali got a good look at its long, serrated claws, she realized it didn’t need one.
“Well, we can’t have that,” Margali muttered, and slammed the butt of her staff into the stone floor, the impact ringing through the long room, which earned her a sidelong look from Elizabeth. It had been a bit louder than intended.
Banishment would be unlikely to work; there were as many different spells for doing that as there were types of demons to dispel. And if the demon was already in its home dimension, the question became where to banish it to? Too many uncontrollable variables for Margali’s taste.
She preferred to just turn them into jelly.
“O Mighty Oshtur, Tower of Towers,
Without limit are thy powers!
To these fiends, now reveal them,
And as one mass, now congeal them!”
Elizabeth wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“That is just gross. Both the spell and the rhyme.”
Margali ignored her, instead focusing on sending out a triple beam from her staff, one prong to gelatinize each demon.
Only a single beam shot out from the staff’s gem, striking the clawed demon and reducing it instantly into quivering goo. The other two just waded through the pulp of their former companion, their progress not impeded in the slightest.
Margali quickly schooled her features to betray no alarm, but her pulse began pounding in her ears. What she had thought she’d sensed earlier before the Dreamqueen’s mental assault was now beginning in truth.
The gifts of the Winding Way were failing, its pendulum swinging back from the pinnacles of power to the depths of impotence.
She couldn’t let the others know.
“I guess the next one’s mine, then,” Elizabeth said, seeming not to have noticed that Margali’s spell had been far less puissant than she’d intended it to be.
The Talisman’s eyes began to glow, and a knot of electric blue vipers suddenly appeared around the torch-wielder’s ankles, wrists, and neck. They appeared to be disintegrating whatever they slithered over.
The vipers that had materialized at the demon’s neck were propagating quickly, and one of the first ones had gone for the guard’s mouth, so he, like the demon Margali had congealed, had no opportunity to sound an alarm. It was difficult to cry out for aid when your vocal cords ceased to exist.
The other snakes completed their tasks just as quickly, disappearing when they had consumed all there was to consume, and soon all that was left of the demon was his torch, guttering on the floor.
“Guess you should have folded, ‘boys’,” Elizabeth said, smirking.
The third demon, a squat thing with fangs like a sabertooth and mottled brown and black fur, was no fool. Seeming to understand that discretion was the better part of valor, he dropped his makeshift club and held up his hands, hairy palms outward.
“I got no beef with you,” the creature said. “You just handed me the pot.”
Margali frowned, not following him. Elizabeth, seeing her expression, clarified.
“We got rid of the other card players, so this one wins the game, by default. And all the money.”
“Ah,” Margali replied. Money was often an excellent incentive to ensure someone’s silence.
As if reading her mind, the demon said, “Let me go with the winnings, and as far as I’m concerned, those two went AWOL and you were never here.”
The idea possessed some merit. With her power waning, Margali needed to preserve it as much as possible. But they were dealing with a demon here. Trustworthiness wasn’t in their DNA.
“A tempting offer,” Margali said. “Unfortunately, you won’t be walking away a winner today.”
“Margali–” Elizabeth began warningly, but Margali cut her off with another tap of her staff on the flagstone floor.
“Demon of darkness, in the name of Satannish,
By the Flames of the Faltine, your mind shall now vanish!”
The demon’s face went slack, arms dropping to land limply at his sides.
“What have you done?” Elizabeth asked. She looked appalled, which Margali thought was a bit hypocritical, considering the Talisman had just dissolved a demon using flashy neon blue serpents. Pot, meet kettle.
“Relax. It’s only temporary,” Margali replied shortly as she strode past the inert demon. “He’ll wake up in an hour or two with a massive headache and no memory of what happened here.” She refrained from mentioning that he likely wouldn’t remember anything from the past few days, possibly weeks. Maybe more. Margali wasn’t actually sure. The last person she had cast this spell on was still comatose, but she had been at the peak of her abilities then. With her power waning, it was hard to say how lasting the effects of the spell would be.
But surely a bit of memory loss was preferable to nonexistence? Of course, depending on the memories lost, it might wind up being essentially the same thing, but there was nothing she could do about that.
“What are you doing now?” Elizabeth asked from behind her as Margali made her way to the back of the room and the table where the demons had been playing cards.
“Placing the poppet,” she replied, setting the doll on the scarred wooden surface, then quietly scooping up the coins the demons had been using for stakes and depositing them in a pouch inside her dress. No sense letting it go to waste. The exchange rate for gold back on Earth was on the rise, after all.
She returned to Elizabeth’s side. The other woman was, unsurprisingly, frowning.
“We’re just going to leave him standing there?”
Margali shrugged. “You can move him if it matters that much to you. I personally think it’s a waste of energy.”
Elizabeth harrumphed, but didn’t make any effort to rectify the situation.
“If that’s all, we should move on. There’s no telling when the guards change shifts. When they do, it’s probably better if we aren’t still in the vicinity.”
“Well, that at least I can’t argue with,” Elizabeth muttered, her tone best described as petulant. Margali just smiled serenely in reply.
A smile that turned to a look of horror when her trusty staff suddenly shuddered in her grasp and then broke in two.
Margali could only stare at the pieces in her hands, aghast. The staff was only a focus, but it was still a vital tool in her magical arsenal, and its ruin would make some spells harder to direct. It was just one more sign that her power was failing.
One that everyone could see.
“What the–?” Elizabeth began, her eyes widening to Holly proportions. But before she could finish, as if to add insult to injury, somewhere deep within the palace, a claxon began to blare. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“Would that it were so,” Margali murmured, still looking at her broken staff in disbelief. She wondered idly if it had been Clea and Holly who had alerted the guards, or if the card-playing trio had been overdue for a shift change after all. Or it might have been something completely unrelated to either of their situations, though that seemed unlikely. In the end, the who and why were irrelevant. Now all that mattered was the where.
Then she tossed her dark green hair, squared her shoulders, and took one piece of her staff in each hand. She looked over at Elizabeth, her smile returning, a bit forced this time, but still determined.
“I believe that’s our cue.”