“You’re not going to invite your friend to join us?” the demon asked as soon as Simon turned around. “I don’t generally prefer my meals well done, but I could make an exception.”
He was dressed the same as he was all the times before, but he’d gotten a table from somewhere and was enjoying a nice meal of roasted pheasant on fine china. Simon noted that the silverware was made of gold and wondered if that was the demon being gaudy or if they had some aversion to silver that didn’t exist in his mythology.
“How did you know I lit him on fire?” Simon asked.
“Know? I didn’t,” the demon confessed. “Not until you told me, but in my experiences, there are few reasons for a man, or was it an orc, to scream like that.”
“Troll, actually,” Simon said, noting the misstep and trying to decide if it was an actual mistake or a subtle manipulation.
“Ah, troll,” the demon said, slicing off a small chunk of meat and dipping it in the cream sauce before chewing it thoughtfully as Simon approached the gateway to hell. “That would explain the fire.”
This church level had always been one of the strangest ones he’d seen in The Pit, but it was made stranger by the casual way that this demonic dandy was sitting there enjoying dinner. The vast space and high ceiling were made somehow smaller by the mundanity of the small table in front of the curtain of fire. As Simon walked toward him, he tried not to gawk at the surrounding.
“If you’ve met lots of heroes that are stuck in the pit,” Simon said finally, not entirely sure if he was right, as he put together all the facts, “then you knew perfectly well there was a troll outside. There’s always a troll outside here between the bridge and the church.”
“Is there now? You’re sure that’s how it works?” The demon asked in a tone dripping with sarcasm. “Well - you’re the expert, I’m sure.”
“I don’t ever quit a game,” Simon said, sounding both more serious and less clever than he meant to. In all this time in The Pit, he’d gotten much better with the sword, but he still couldn’t wield a phrase for shit. It was something he’d have to work on one day.
“Ah, a game, very droll,” the demon smiled. “I love games personally. We could play one sometime if you like. Perhaps we could make a little wager for sport. Maybe we could bet your soul against the secret way out of your goddess’s death trap. What do you say?”
“I don’t think so,” Simon said a bit too quickly, making the demon’s smile a touch wider.
“Another time then,” the demon smiled, “but I think you’re engaged in something much too serious for that title. Life and death as it were.”
“Saving a world is pretty serious,” Simon agreed, in a tone that made sure the other man knew just how obvious he thought it was.
Simon carefully approached the broken ground at the edge of the circle, where spacetime started to do weird things and warp around the edges as hell did its very best to find a loophole in whoever had drawn this chalk outline and the solid stone of the church floor transformed into a series of broken islands.
It was a disconcerting view. The unreality of it made Simon feel like the rest of the floor might give way at any moment, but he pushed that down and pretended this wasn’t the scariest floor in the whole Pit so far and knelt close to the edge of the circle to investigate. While he did this, he was careful to stay several inches outside the edge lest the demon get the chance to grab him.
He could read some of the words that had been inscribed around the rim and all the points of the giant heptagram that was inscribed within it, but most of the symbols that were present were unreadable, which meant that they weren’t a language. What would that make them? he wondered? Numbers? Seals? It was possible that they were some kind of hell language he couldn’t understand even with Helades’s magic, but the mirror had said it was every language he’d need while he was in The Pit, so he found that unlikely.
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“Saving the world?” the demon laughed long and loud this time. “No, that’s a pipe dream. Pure fantasy. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men and all that. I meant saving yourself. Your body may be immortal, but your mind can only take so much, and from the looks of you, I’d say you’re already halfway gone. Yes. You’re looking very fragile now. So much pain, I’m sure I could find a way to help with that.”
The demon’s words shook him, but he tried not to let it show. Was it possible he could see invisible things about him just as the old woman had? Was he just trying to make Simon worry, or was there actually some sort of growing problem with his soul?
As those thoughts and fears began to spiral out of control, Simon did his very best to ignore them. Then he forced himself to stand confidently and faced the effete red-skinned man.
Standing less than a foot away from him, Simon got the distinct feeling that he was back at the zoo, and there was a six hundred-pound Bengal tiger separated from him by only a few inches of nearly invisible plexiglass. The thing on the other side of the line might be pretending to be a bored nobleman, but it had the eyes of a predator.
He didn’t have a lot of experience with that kind of fear. It was mostly in the scary movies he didn’t really watch much, and his usual coping strategy would be to pause the video and turn on the lights or shut it off altogether. Neither of those were options here, though, and he knew that this demon was waiting for him to show weakness.
Simon was also painfully aware that he had no idea how to fight the bastard. There was probably some way hidden in the language of the summoning circle, but he lacked the knowledge to decode it, and he was certain if he just started screwing around with it, he would unleash hell on accident.
“I’m a different kind of hero,” Simon said, doing his best to sound confident, bordering on arrogant. “I’m a completionist.”
“A completionist?” the demon asked. “I’ve never heard of such a discipline. What technique do you use?.”
“That’s my secret but your problem,” Simon answered dismissively as he turned and started carefully picking his way toward the portal. “I’m sure they have dictionaries in hell. You can look it up.”
As Simon spoke, he took his first step over the abyss and onto the first treacherous island. The pieces of stone didn’t actually move, and he reminded himself it was just a distortion, and they were all still somehow connected together, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying, and he thought for sure the floating stone would give way beneath him.
“Oh, we have a great many things down there,” the demon bragged. “One little slip, and you’ll find that out very quickly.”
The demon timed his words for the moment Simon was stepping over one of the largest gaps into the fiery nether world like he’d slip and fall like some kind of cartoon character. Simon ignored the sudden spike in his heart rate though and continued further down the fractured stairway until he walked through the darkened portal that led to the haunted mansion.
He thought about doing some more exploring here, but all it took was peeking through three doors and finding one hallway of paintings that looked at him as he walked, and he changed his mind about that. He wasn’t about to fuck around with the place either. He just walked twenty feet down the hall, grabbing the longest tapestries he could, and once he had enough, he threw them down in a pile and began to cut them into long thin strips that he tied together to create a particularly knotty and garish multicolored rope. Then he threw a small cabinet through the closest window and tied his rope to the massive handle of a nearby door, and tossed the rope over the side.
Once Simon had determined it would be long enough, he decided to do one more thing before he left. He used his flint and steel to light the shredded bits of fabric and yarn that were left over from his arts and crafts project, and once he had them going, he used that slender flame to light other flammable objects on fire. First was a rug and then some curtains, but once he had the end table going, he opened up a nearby door and tossed it onto a canopy bed.
“That should do it,” he told himself as he grabbed the knotted rope and started to rappel down the side of the building. The sandstone walls weren’t hard to find traction on, but he did have to be careful to work his way slowly around the windows on the lower floors.
By the time he reached the bottom, he could smell smoke, and as he reached the hedge maze, he could see the fire visibly spreading. It wasn’t moving as he would have expected to, though. In a house fire, the flames would spread from room to adjacent room, here though a room on the fourth floor seemed to catch a room on the first floor on fire, which in turn caught a room down the hall on fire before the flames jumped back up to the third floor. It was pretty random, and it confirmed Simon’s suspicions about the first time he’d been here. Then he’d been wandering for hours and never seemed to find an end.
At the time, he’d thought he was going crazy, but it turned out he’d been entirely right. The house really was broken on the inside in some fundamental way. It didn’t matter, though. By the time he’d finally arrived at the entrance, the whole thing was going up in smoke. Simon wondered briefly if that level of destruction would be enough to damage the portal, but it was right where it was supposed to be, and it led down into the same cave it had last time.
“Now I just have to figure out how to steal that book without getting pasted,” he said to himself as he walked inside and made his way through the growing dark as he drew his long bow and tried to be as quiet as a mouse.