Thicker Than Water

I watched him and I put out a warning hand to tell Trudie to keep out of this. She was here because Gwillam wouldn’t have let me take Bic without her, but that was as far as it went - and it didn’t give her a voice in the negotiations.

I lowered the whistle. ‘Go on,’ I said.

The demon bared his teeth in what could equally well have been a grin or a threat display. ‘I have to admit,’ he said, ‘that my indifference was feigned. I want this. It’s been a while since I tasted another demon’s substance. A pleasure too long denied. So I’m inclined to . . . unbend a little to make it happen.’

He paused, staring at me through narrowed eyes. I waited him out.

‘Your circle,’ he said, ‘already binds me in certain ways. If I add the sigils of my own name - my true name - to those already present, then your hold on me is that much stronger. You could cripple me if I broke my word to you. If you’re strong enough, you’d even have a shot at destroying me.’

‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Except that I’ve only got your word for it what your true name is, and I can’t read your symbols. You could write George W. Bush down there and I wouldn’t know any better, would I?’

‘The law of analogues—’ Trudie Pax began.

‘Trudie,’ I snapped, ‘I swear if you open your mouth again I’ll put you outside the door until we’re finished.’

She gave me a long, narrow-eyed stare, but she fell silent.

‘The lady is, however, entirely right,’ Asmodeus said. ‘A false name would make your circle convulse and the space within it rupture. We’d all suffer - and I, being inside it, would suffer most of all. You’d know whatever I wrote was truth because I wouldn’t be screaming.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not into all this black-magic gubbins,’ I said, ‘and I’m not taking your word for anything. Try again.’

We locked stares for a moment longer.

‘I’ll set it to music for you,’ Asmodeus snarled.

‘Done,’ I said at once. Because that was what I’d been hoping for all along.

‘Close your eyes,’ Asmodeus instructed me. ‘And cover your ears. They may bleed slightly, but that can’t be helped.’

I put my hands to my ears but kept my eyes open: you can say what you like about my table manners and my love of my fellow man, but Mrs Castor didn’t raise any stupid children."

"Asmodeus gestured, and a complicated sequence of notes came into my mind from nowhere. I knew, without needing to be told, what it was: it was a portion of his essence - the part of him that could be broken down into sound, and made accessible to my death-sense. He was giving me the wherewithal to destroy him: the magic bullet. A dizzy sense of triumph filled me, and I found it hard to keep my poker face intact. When this was over, I would have most of what I needed to set Rafi free from the burden he’d been carrying for the past three years. I could finally nail Asmodeus to the wall and let my friend walk away clean.

I lowered my hands. My ears were filled with clamour and roaring as though someone had just used my brain as the clapper of a bell. ‘Okay,’ I said, unable to hear the sound of my own voice, ‘this is how it plays. Anything inside that boy that isn’t boy, you can feed on. Whatever piece of the demon is gripping his soul. Take it out of him, and do whatever the hell you like with it. So long as no harm comes to him in the process, and nothing is left inside of him at the end that isn’t human. Nothing of you, and nothing of this other entity. Give me a yes or a no, Asmodeus. Not an inch or an ounce of this is negotiable.’

The demon’s lips moved - or rather the man’s lips moved and the demon spoke through them. I couldn’t hear the word, but I could read it: and a nod is a nod in any language.

Asmodeus crawled spider-like to the southern tip of the pentagram, where he stared down at Bic with feral delight. Slowly he leaned forward as far as he could, lowering his upper body on jackknifed arms and craning his neck back until the point of his jaw touched the ground a scant inch from Bic’s face. The boy seemed asleep, his eyes closed, his body absolutely still and his face perfectly inexpressive.

Asmodeus spoke another syllable - again, I could only see his lips move, not hear the sound - and something rose up from Bic’s slumped form like steam from a kettle.

You must have seen a cat with a mouse. Well, if the cat and the mouse were both nine-tenths invisible, and if they didn’t move, then that was a little like what we saw: the thing that rose from Bic met another thing that was exhaled in a malevolent hiss from between Asmodeus’s clenched teeth, and the air roiled and rocked at their inter-penetration. But it wasn’t a battle, because there was no point at which Asmodeus was moved to more than token effort.