A demon’s stomach.
The demon was enormous, twice as tall as Kihrin himself. Along his stomach (and the demon was clearly a “he”),* the demon’s flesh was white. This turned to a sickly yellow-green along his massive bulging legs. His arms were bright red, slick and shining as if the creature had just plunged them to their pits in a vat of blood. The demon’s face featured a wide grinning mouth that stretched from ear to pointed ear. The eyes were black voids with no whites, and it lacked a nose. The creature’s hair was long, glowing white, but the ends had also turned scarlet as if they too had fallen into gore. A thick purplish-green tail, much like a crocodile’s but longer and more flexible, thumped and twitched on the cobblestones with a mind of its own.
But more importantly than any of that, Kihrin recognized him.
It was the demon from the Kazivar House burglary.
“PAPPA, RUN!” Kihrin shoved his father into an open doorway.
The demon looked down at the teenager and grinned. His white teeth were sharp and jagged and there were far too many of them: they jutted from the demon’s mouth like maggots escaping a wound.
***HAIL TO THEE, LAWBREAKER.***
“Oh Taja…” Kihrin prayed under his breath. He slid his knives into his hands even though he was certain they would be useless.? There was no question Pretty Boy had sent this demon after him, no question the demon had found him, and no question Kihrin was about to die. That thing looked big enough to bite off his head.
***HAIL TO THEE, THIEF OF SOULS.***
Kihrin decided his only chance was to run for it. He feinted right, dodged left, ran, and kept running. And for a few seconds, he thought he might make it, but then he felt a sharp slap against his ankles. He looked down to see the demon’s purple-green tail wrap around his feet and lift him into the air.
He did what anyone would do when lifted into the air by a rampaging demon about to tear them apart on a public street: Kihrin screamed his head off.
***HAIL TO THEE, PRINCE OF SWORDS.***
“Let me go! Let me go! FUCK! Let me go!” Kihrin tried cutting the tail with his knife, but as he suspected, he might as well have been trying to chip stone with a silk handkerchief.
The demon lifted his whole body as easily as Kihrin might have lifted a kitten by its scruff, and held Kihrin high in the air. This left Kihrin close to the demon’s face, and far too close to that enormous maw. It was all too similar to a pose he might have struck before popping a grape in his mouth.
Just as Kihrin decided that he had nothing to lose by sticking a shiv in the demon’s eye, the creature grabbed both his arms, holding them outstretched and helpless.
The demon laughed, a sound that would haunt Kihrin’s nightmares for months afterward. He dangled close enough to the beast’s mouth to see it was not empty, but filled with a writhing red tongue and white, crawling grubs. The stench was beyond description, a combination of blood, offal, and rotted sexual fluids that made Kihrin fight to keep from retching. The demon shook Kihrin by the feet.
Kihrin’s tsali stone slid out from under his cloak and caught on his chin. The stone felt cold.
***LONG DID I SEARCH FOR THE LION, BUT NOW I HAVE FOUND THE HAWK.***
The demon’s mouth drew close, and Kihrin closed his eyes rather than see what was about to happen. He tensed in expectation of his death.
There are some who would claim what came instead was more horrible. It was certainly more lingering.
He felt the demon’s tongue move against his face, touch his cheek, the necklace, the indigo stone. As the demon did this, thoughts flowed into Kihrin’s mind.
***I OFFER THIS TO THEE, MY KING: A SMALL TASTE OF HORROR TO WHET THY APPETITE FOR THE FEAST OF SUFFERING.****
The mental images grew more intense: Kihrin with his old teacher Mouse, with Morea, with any number of girls and boys from the Veil velvet house. Kihrin saw himself doing things to them—terrible, nonconsensual things. The demon showed Kihrin image after image of himself as a cruel, sadistic monster of a man, a demon clothed in human skin who delighted in the pain and terror of those around him. He fed on it the way crocodiles feed on anyone foolish enough to come too close to the river. The demon dove deep into Kihrin’s mind and pulled up the memories of everyone he’d ever known and loved, and then had Kihrin tear them apart—or murder, torture, or rape them. Even in the Copper Quarter, even for a boy who had grown up in Velvet Town, sins still existed beyond his experience or comprehension. The demon emptied one atrocity after another into the boy’s head until he had seen them all.
Kihrin screamed and screamed.
He had no way to gauge how long he hung there while the demon poured horrors into his mind, a seemingly unending orgy of filth and perversion.
Too long, by any account.
When Kihrin’s voice tore and collapsed into gasping sobs, the pressure on his mind vanished, and he heard footsteps running toward him. He looked down the street. Fear warred with relief as he saw the Watchmen running toward them, swords drawn.
The demon threw back his head and roared, the sound of a lion accompanied by a thousand screaming cats. The demon let go of Kihrin’s arms and let the boy dangle upside down from his tail. Then the demon picked up Surdyeh’s harp.
“No—!” Kihrin’s throat was rough and broken; the protest barely more than a whisper.
The demon grinned and swung the harp, case and all, down on the first Watchman to come within reach. Rather than braining the soldier, the man’s head broke through strings and case fabric while the wooden frame trapped his arms. Had the demon let go of the harp at that point, the man would have spent the next five minutes freeing himself from the tangle of wood and string, but the demon did not let go. Rather, in one smooth, fluid motion, the monster pulled the struggling man closer. The demon opened that impossibly wide mouth wider still.
Kihrin flinched and looked away as the demon bit off the man’s head with no more difficulty than Kihrin might bite into a mango. The dead man’s blood splashed over Kihrin even as the body fell to the city street.
“Xaltorath. Your presence here is unwelcome,” a loud voice proclaimed.
Kihrin thought that was a profoundly unnecessary statement of the obvious. He turned his head to see who would die next.
His perspective was skewed because he was upside down, but Kihrin didn’t think the man was a member of the Watch. The newcomer was older, in his forties, with peppery hair and beard. A bear of a man, he was almost as wide as he was tall—and all of that shoulder, sinew, and hard muscle. He looked none too happy to see a demon prowling the City streets.
That made two of them.