“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.
Chapter 5
“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.