Page 129 of Time's Fool

They’d kept horrors down here before, it seemed.

But Mircea didn’t use it. Instead, he crouched in front of the demon and tilted his head to the side. “Talk.”

And to my surprise, the creature did.

“It was the witch’s fault,” it mewled pathetically. “I was already unfortunate enough ere I met her, but once she found me, it became infinitely worse.”

“Found you where?” Louis-Cesare demanded.

The creature’s ‘eyes’ slid toward him, but didn’t stick. The slightly darker areas under the lava flow of a face came to rest on me instead. I didn’t like it.

And neither did Louis-Cesare, who stepped in between us. “Stop looking at her!”

“I—my apologies,” the creature said, and then did it again.

The Frenchman gave what could only be described as a growl, and the demon decided to stare at a patch of floor instead.

“I am an ifrit,” it said. “One of the species known as djinn. I was captured by a mage and forced to do his bidding. He promised to release me in time, but was killed before he did so. And since he had been very careful that no one should know about me, wanting his successes to be attributed only to his own power, his death deprived me of any chance at freedom.

“I was left in the trap he had devised for centuries, slowly cannibalizing my own energy to survive. The trap was a talisman; it drew its power from the natural world, and thus the mage’s passing did not affect it. Although I raged and clawed and screamed, nobody heard, and nobody came.

“Eventually, I came to accept that nobody would, and that I would remain where he had left me. I think I went mad for a time, waiting for death—”

“Get to the point,” Louis-Cesare snapped, and this time, the creature turned those non-eyes on him.

“I am. I merely wanted you to understand the state I was in when the witch found me. The jewel casket that the mage had locked me in had been stolen from the family who ended up with it, but the thieves were themselves plundered on their way back from the East by privateers, who were in turn burgled by a group led by the witch.

“Thieves upon thieves upon thieves—what has the world come to?”

“Says the demon,” Louis-Cesare commented flatly.

He really did not seem to like the creature.

Neither did I. It was trying to lay the blame for its crimes on the witch, but there had been anger in the voice that had spoken to me in London, just before I was taken here, which had not been in her tone. But despite me telling Mircea that, and warning that the current show of submission was likely a ruse to get away from the soldiers, he wanted to talk.

And so did the creature, it seemed.

“Demon is what I am,” it told Louis-Cesare. “Thieving is what they do. It is a choice, not an equivalence.”

But Louis-Cesare was not interested in the finer points of its philosophy. “Get on with it!”

The creature sighed and looked away again. “It is simple enough: the witch’s coven was pursued by a group of war mages who had a quarrel with them. They caught them a few days after the robbery, using tracking spells they had placed on some of the items that her group had stolen. They slaughtered them all.”

“And you did nothing to save them?” Mircea asked, which I thought odd.

Why should the demon care about the latest group to steal his prison? And how could he help them, even if he did? He’d just said that he was near death.

The question reminded me of the way Mircea had talked to the witches in the cell in Lancashire. Prattling on about nothing, because what he was really trying to do was get inside their heads. But I didn’t think that trick would work here.

Even a master’s abilities had limits, and reading a demon’s mind was likely beyond them.

But the creature answered, nonetheless.

“I couldn’t even save myself. I was barely conscious, and remained so for years, until the witch made me a bargain.”

“What witch?” I asked sharply. “You just said they were all slaughtered.”

Those strange eyes found mine again. “And I spoke truly. She died defending her coven, but afterward . . . well. You know better than most that death is not always the end of the story, do you not?”

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