Slaying Monsters for the Feeble - Annette Marie Page 0,49
you would not have thought about it, na?”
Rolling my eyes, I returned my attention to the book. Each spell had a short description of what the resultant artifact would do, and I skimmed through them, searching for something good. Zylas wandered to the room’s other end. Sniffing at the air, he opened a drawer, peered inside, then shut it. Opened the next one, checked its contents, closed it. Opened the next.
Exploring the drawers and cabinets kept him busy for almost ten minutes. I flipped back through the pages and reread a spell description. Defensive, reasonably powerful, and not too difficult to engineer. This was the artifact I was going to make.
The back of my neck prickled and I looked up.
Zylas stood beside me, studying the page. “What is this?”
“This,” I replied, sliding off the stool, “is a set of instructions for creating magic. I’m going to make a spell.”
“You are going to cast vīsh?”
“Well … more like build magic than cast it.” I opened the cabinets in search of the tools I needed. “Mages and psychics can use their magic instantly, like you do, but that’s not how sorcery works. Aside from cantrips, my magic involves putting spells into an object. We call those artifacts. Some can be used over and over, while others can only be used once.”
Zylas followed, watching curiously. “We have vīsh like that too. That we put into objects.”
“You do?” I turned excitedly toward him, my arms full of rulers of different shapes and angles. “Like what?”
He tapped the armor plate over his heart. “This is magic so it does not break.”
“Did you make it yourself?” I asked as I piled the rulers beside the circle on the floor.
“Who else would make it?”
“I don’t know.” Returning to the cabinets, I searched around until I found drawing utensils—odd markers that smelled like candy canes, and a spray bottle I assumed was for cleanup. “Do demons trade or barter for things they can’t make?”
“Sometimes. Or we kill and take what we want.”
“How are there any demons left?” I muttered, placing the textbook beside the circle for easy reference. “I’m surprised you haven’t wiped your whole species out of existence.”
“We used to be many more.” He crouched beside me as I flipped to a step-by-step diagram that illustrated how to draw the spell array. “The oldest demons say we did not always kill so much.”
As I laid the longest ruler across the circle, I looked up. “You didn’t?”
“They say that long ago, Dīnen were powerful and wise. They commanded my kind to be more …” He canted his head. “To hunt each other less.”
“What changed?”
“The powerful Dīnen were summoned and never returned. The next Dīnen were summoned away, and the next. The new Dīnen were younger and more zh’ūltis.”
An uncomfortable chill ran through me. “Zylas …” Bits and pieces of comments he’d made spun through my head. “How often are Dīnen summoned?”
He gazed at me, somber, almost sad, as though pitying my lack of understanding. “Only Dīnen are summoned, drādah.”
The chill in my blood deepened with disbelief. “What do you mean? How can only demon kings be summoned? That would mean all the demons here in my world are Dīnen.”
“Yes. We are all oldest of our Houses, given the power of Dīnen when the one before us dies or disappears.”
“But … but there are only twelve Houses.” Shaking my head, I tried to make the math work. “And—and—how many demons are summoned each year? I don’t even know—”
“Hundreds and hundreds,” he answered. “Most from the third rank. Their Dīnen do not rule. They disappear before any of their House know who was next.”
Horror muted my voice.
“Dīnen were wise in the old times, but now they only think about the short future, because they will not live to see the long future. There is no one to tell us to stop killing.”
Demon summoning was, more often than not, a death sentence for the demons called into our world, but I’d never considered that summoning might have a larger effect on demonkind—that we were destabilizing their society. That we were stealing their leaders, the oldest and wisest males of their species, and making them our slaves.
Did summoners know they were calling the demons’ kings away, one after another, so swiftly that some Houses had lost all structure? But how could they know? What demon, trapped in a circle and forced to give up his autonomy for a slim chance to return home, would reveal that?