Page 49 of Demon Bound

“Praise her,”echoed some other cultists nearby.

Gereg bowed again as she left, and then they were finally alone—except for the dozen or so people still watching them from around the cavernous room.

Azreth was bemusedly studying the display at the front of the room: a stone altar, a basin, and a lot of decorative skulls that appeared to have come from real people. For a moment, Raiyawas afraid the liquid in the basin might be blood, but upon closer inspection, it appeared to be mere water.

“Is Moratha really the mother of demons?” she asked Azreth, keeping her voice down.

He shrugged.

“What do your people believe?” she asked.

“Our eldresses say nothing of gods. They kneel to the universe itself, to the forces of chaos, creation, and destruction.”

“You worship the universe?”

“We don’t worship anything.”

“I see. Perhaps you should keep that to yourself for now. The acolytes will be sorely disappointed.”

“I agree.”

She was glad they had come to the same conclusion. It appeared that their welcome here was conditional upon their support of Moratha’s goals. If they wanted the cultists’ help, it would be best to play along for a while.

He rested a hand between her shoulder blades, grazing upward to the base of her neck. Her skin tingled at the touch.

“I am hungry,” he said quietly.

“So am I,” Raiya said, giving him a sly look. His eyebrows lifted slightly. She realized it was the first time she’d admitted she freely wanted him, and apparently he realized it, too. She cleared her throat. “Later. We should take care of some things first.”

Nirlanand his retinue of Paladins had the audacity to approach the temple and demand entrance, but were turned away by several cultist mages. Raiya watched the exchange frombehind the curtains of a window upstairs. She didn’t relax until long after he’d left. It appeared they were safe, for now.

That evening, Azreth sat stiffly in a chair that was far too small for him while a few of the cultists studied his hand. To Raiya’s disappointment, even the mages seemed to know little more about the binding enchantment than she did.

“A pity Brother Eunaios isn’t here,” one of the cultists said. “He’s been missing for some time. He was the most knowledgeable about summoning and binding of us all”

Raiya carefully didn’t reply.

Predictably, Azreth drew a crowd of onlookers as he sat for the mages. The more people gathered around him, the more irritated he looked. Some of them began asking him questions about his purposes on the mortal plane and about the hells, which he answered mostly with noncommittal grunts.

Then people began making requests. Someone asked him to bless their ceremonial knife, a task which he surely wasn’t qualified for, but merely being a demon seemed to be qualification enough to satisfy the cultists. Another cultist asked him to relay a request to the dark goddess.

When it got to be too much, Azreth got up and stormed out of the room, knocking over several cultists in the process.

“I dislike these people,” he said to her later. “And this place is not safe. I can sense it. We should leave.”

“I know. But they might be our best chance at fixing this.”

He frowned, but didn’t argue.

By the next day, she was starting to lose hope that this endeavor would yield any fruit. But then she found the temple’s library.

It was not very large, but the selection of books was ideal. The shelves were filled with an array of unusual tomes, includingEffective Methods of Murder, Sacrifice, and Embalming; The Nature of the Hells: A Noncomprehensive Study ofDemonology; Confessions of a Blood Magician;and various runic dictionaries and spell books.

Finding someone willing to help Azreth would be good, but being able to do it herself was even better.

There were no desks in the library, which struck her as odd. Perhaps, like Nirlan, the cultists were more interested in the idea of forbidden knowledge than in the actual knowing of it. So she worked directly on the floor, bent over a dusty book of demonic runes as she carefully copied them into her notebook. A small candle served as her only light, as the space lacked windows. Occasionally, one of the cultists would stop by to ask what she was doing and offer advice, most of which was unhelpful.

“Are you a mage?” one of them asked, crossing her arms as she looked down at Raiya.

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