She grabbed the ropes and set the pulley back into place, satisfied that she’d done everything properly. The pulley was working smoothly. It was a good pit. Gravell had dug it over three days, making it long, thin, and deep, and last night he and Tash had poured water down the steep sides until there was two hands’ depth in the bottom, which had frozen nicely to a hard, smooth ice. It was still possible to climb out of the pit—demons were good at climbing—and Gravell had over the years tried different ways to get the walls covered with ice too, but it had never been that successful. So they would do what Gravell had always done and paint the pit walls with a mix of animal’s blood and guts. It smelled strong and disgusting and was enough to distract and confuse the demon, giving Gravell time to throw his harpoons. Gravell had five long harpoons, though it usually only took three to finish the demon off. They were specially made, each with a metal tip and teeth so they couldn’t be pulled out. The demon would scream and screech. The noise was horrible, and Tash always had to remind herself that the demon would gladly do worse to her if he—it—caught her.
Tash looked up; the sun was still high in the sky. The demon hunt happened at the end of the day. She could feel her stomach begin to tighten with nerves. She just wanted to get on with it. Gravell still had to coat the walls of the pit, then take cover in the nearby bushes and wait. Only when he saw the demon leap into the pit would he move forward, harpoons in hand. Timing was everything and they had it down to an art now, but it was Tash who risked her life, Tash who attracted the demon, Tash who had to know when to start running to draw the demon after her, Tash who had to outrun the demon, jump into the pit, and, at the last possible moment, grab the rope and be hoisted out.
True, the demon could avoid the pit and attack Gravell. This had happened only once in their four years of demon hunting together. Tash wasn’t sure what had happened that day, and Gravell didn’t talk about it. She’d leaped into the pit and waited, but the demon hadn’t followed her in. She’d heard Gravell shout; there was a high-pitched demon screech, and then silence. She hadn’t known what to do. If the demon was dead, why wasn’t Gravell shouting for her to come out? Did the screech mean the demon was wounded? Or was it the screech it made as it attacked and killed Gravell? Was the demon silent now because it was feasting on Gravell’s body? Should she run while the demon was drinking Gravell’s blood? She’d waited and looked up at the sky above the pit walls and realized she wanted a piss. She’d wanted to cry too.
She’d waited, holding on to the rope, but she was too terrified to move. Finally she’d heard something, a shuffling in the snow, and Gravell shouted down: “Are you going to come out of there this year?” And Tash had tried to release the pulley, but her hand was so cold and so shaky it took a while and Gravell was swearing at her by then. When she got out she was surprised to see that Gravell wasn’t wounded at all. He’d laughed when she’d said, “You’re not dead.” He went quiet and then said, “Fucking demons.”
“Why didn’t it come into the pit?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it saw me. Smelled me. Sensed something . . . whatever it is they do.”
The demon was lying fifty paces from the pit with just one harpoon in its body. Had Gravell run or had the demon run? She had asked and all Gravell had said was, “We were both fucking running.” The other harpoons were speared into the ground at different points around them, as if Gravell had thrown them and missed. Gravell shook his head, saying, “Like trying to harpoon an angry wasp.”
The demon wasn’t much bigger than Tash. It was very thin, all sinew and skin, no fat at all; it reminded Tash of her older brother. Its skin was more purple than the usual reds and burned oranges, the sunset colors of the bigger demons. Within a day the body would rot and melt away, the smell strong and earthy for that time, and then it would be gone, not even leaving a stain on the ground. There was no blood; demons didn’t have blood.
“Did you get the smoke?” Tash had asked.
“No. I was a bit busy.”
The smoke came out of the demon after it died. Tash wondered what Gravell had been busy doing, but she knew that he’d come close to death and saw that his hands were still trembling. She imagined that he must have killed the demon and tried to hold the bottle to catch the smoke, but his hands had been shaking too much.
“Was it beautiful?”
“Very. Purple. Some red and a bit of orange to start, but then all purple right through to the end.”
“Purple!” Tash wished she’d seen it. They had nothing to show for all their work—weeks of tracking, and then the days of digging and preparation. Nothing to show except their lives and stories of the beauty of the demon smoke.
“Tell me more about the smoke, Gravell,” Tash had said.
And Gravell told her how it had seeped out of the demon’s mouth—after the demon had stopped screeching.
“Not much smoke this time,” Gravell added. “Small demon. Young, maybe.” Tash had nodded. They’d lit a fire to get warm, and in the morning they’d watched the demon’s body shrink and disappear, and then they had set off to find another.
Today’s demon was the first of the season. They didn’t hunt in winter, as it was too harsh, the snow too deep and the cold bitter. They’d come up to the Northern Plateau as soon as the deep snows began to melt, though this year spring had arrived but then winter returned for a few weeks and so there was still deep snow in the shade and in hollows. Gravell had found the demon’s lair and worked out the best place for the pit. Now Gravell lowered the pot of blood and guts into the pit and climbed down the ladder to paint the walls. Tash didn’t have to do this; Gravell had never asked her to—it was his job and he took pride in it. He wasn’t going to mess up weeks of work by failing to do this last task properly.
Tash sat on her pack and waited. She wrapped a fur round herself and stared at the distant trees and tried not to think any more about demons and the pit, so she thought of afterward. They’d go to Dornan and sell the demon smoke there. Trade in smoke was illegal—anything to do with demons was illegal, even setting foot on demon territory was illegal—but that didn’t mean there weren’t a few people like her and Gravell who hunted them, and it certainly didn’t stop people wanting to buy the demon smoke.
And once she had her share of the money she could buy her boots. Dornan was a week’s walk away, but the journey was easy and they’d enjoy warmth, rest, and good food before returning to the plateau. Tash asked Gravell once why he didn’t collect more smoke and kill more demons, adding, “Southgate said Banyon and Yoden catch twice what we do each year.” But Gravell replied, “Demons is evil but so is greed. We’ve got enough.” And life was pretty good, as long as Tash kept running fast.
Eventually Gravell climbed back out of the pit, pulled the ladder up, and put everything out of sight. Tash moved her pack to the trees. With that done, there was nothing left to prepare. Gravell circled the pit a final time, muttering to himself, “Yep. Yep. Yep.”
He came over to Tash and said, “Right then.”
“Right then.”
“Don’t fuck up, missy.”
“Don’t you neither.”
They knocked right fists together.
The words and fist bump were a ritual they had for good luck, though Tash didn’t really believe in luck and was fairly sure Gravell didn’t either, but she wasn’t going to go through a demon hunt without all possible assistance on her side.
The sun was lower in the sky and soon would be below the level of the trees, the time when it was best to lure the demon out. Tash jogged north, through thin woodland, to the clearing that she and Gravell had found ten days earlier. Well, Gravell had found it. That was his real skill. Digging pits and lining them with guts anyone could do, his knack for killing demons with harpoons was due to his size and strength, but what made Gravell very special was his patience, his instinctive ability to find the places demons lived. Demons liked shallow hollows on flat ground, not too close to trees, where mist collected. They liked the cold. They liked snow. They didn’t like people.