“Did it really have to be here?” great one Ed grumbled at Jori, shaking off the disorientation of being transported to another plane as he looked around at the hellfire-pitted walls and floor of the tiny cell. He nodded briefly at the others, who were crowded against the walls in anticipation of their arrival – Maladzhoth and Xoryath. She’d left most of the others outside the city. Getting a bunch of spawnlings in here would have been too much work, and it wouldn’t help them much in the coming fight.

  “Zijeregh serves Nuros here in the city when she is in the hells,” Jori explained. “Lidis says that she summoned her lieutenants here when she wanted to meet them.”

  Ed scowled. “I meant this cell!”

  Jori shrugged unapologetically. “Your cell was the safest place I could find where the guards wouldn’t look. The lock’s still broken!”

  The demons here really did not keep up with maintenance. At least they’d cleaned up the body of the hellhound and her decoy spirit. The archmage nodded reluctantly, gripping his intricately carved war staff, which he’d brought instead of his pipe. “Yeah, alright. How reliable is your new recruit’s information?”

  Jori knew what he was really asking. He wanted to know if Lidis could be trusted. Being here put him on edge, and he feared being betrayed right at the center of Varamemnon’s power.

  “I’ve bound it into service. It’s a pact! Much more reliable than a simple agreement.”

  Ed raised an eyebrow at her, but then sighed and nodded. “I see... right. Demons, hells – it’s your own damned business. Fine. We've got half an hour before Iriala summons you back to extract me, so let's get moving.”

  Jori nodded, accepting the unenthusiastic vote of confidence as the best she would get. She left the cell first, followed by the other imps and allowing the great mage to come last. She knew that mages were always more powerful if they had more time to act. Doing her best to keep quiet, she snuck down the corridor toward the nearest guard station.

  A bluish light, contrasting sharply with the orange glow of the hellfire lamps that lit the space, shot out of a narrow crack in a wall, resolving into the misty form of Lidis. It darted out ahead of them to the nearest intersection, then blinked more brightly twice before darting down toward the left.

  Ed grunted skeptically from the back and she looked back to find him scowling fiercely after it.

  “Is that a will o’ wisp? Are you sure we should be following that thing around?”

  Jori laughed quietly, showing her teeth. “Are you a lost soul in the fourth hell?” she teased. “Relax – it’s on our side! I won’t let it eat you. Besides, Xoryath confirmed its intelligence already. She got to visit the whisperer here once with Tallash.”

  “Hey, stop!” an unfamiliar voice brayed from up ahead.

  When they turned the corner, they found a horned goat-demon swatting at the air with its back to them, seemingly oblivious to their approach. Lidis was flitting back and forth in front of its face, easily dodging the attacks.

  “Let me pass!” it improvised shrilly. “I’ve been sent by the great one Zijeregh to confirm the presence of a prisoner!”

  Jori launched herself forward at the enemy, the others hot on her heels. Ed was faster. A whitish light blasted narrowly past Jori’s head and the lower half of the demon disintegrated in a shower of flesh and hellfire as its blood was exposed to the air. Hot air blew back toward them from the flames, turning the entire hallway into an oven. The wisp shot down the corridor and Jori couldn’t tell if it was being carried by the wind, or if it was running to escape the heat.

  She looked back at Ed, worried for a moment, but he was standing behind a shimmering barrier and tracing a spell in the air with a finger. A few seconds later, a soft breeze blew out ahead of him, bringing the temperature down a bit. Still, they needed to be careful. An inexplicable wind like that could alert someone.

  They had to take out two more guards, but all of them were alone and seemed not to expect any kind of attack. They were complacent. A demon king’s enemies, after all, were other demon kings – entities of enormous power and influence. Their armies didn’t skulk around, sneaking into the literal bowels of their rivals to hunt the servants of their servants. It was beneath them.

  But it wasn’t beneath Jori.

  After wending their way through the maze-like corridors of the prison, the quality of the construction began to change – roomier hallways with smoother walls and higher ceilings. The doors changed, too. Some were made of heavy iron, while others shone with an odd, opalescent shimmer as if they were made of a single massive piece of chitin. Lidis kept moving, turning another corner before pulling back around in a hurry, flashing a little brighter a few times in warning.

  Being very careful not to make any noise, Jori peeked down the next hallway. There was only a single door set into a wall, and a shade stood guard in front of it, shifting back and forth in the flickering light of the hellfire lamps.

  She pulled back, frowning. Shades were bad – even the relatively weak ones. They were incorporeal, so her claws wouldn’t work, and they couldn’t be burned with hellfire, either. If it saw them, they wouldn’t be able to stop it from bringing the whole city down on them.

  But that’s why they’d brought Ed. One of the reasons, anyway.

  She beckoned to the archmage, who came forward holding his staff up to keep it from clacking against the ground. He bent down toward her, and she leaned in to whisper in his ear.

  He nodded, moved the staff to his left hand, and began to trace a spellform in the air with his right. Jori knew that casting this spell should be more difficult for Ed than it was for Bernt – the archmage’s augmentations would interfere with magic so far outside his specialization. Despite that, the old man stepped out into plain view just a second later, casting a small but dense bolt of banefire so quickly that it was hard to follow with the naked eye. If anything, he was even faster than Bernt had been the last time she'd seen him cast it.

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  Eager to see the result, Jori rounded the corner just in time to see the shade shrivel inward toward the gray flame devouring its center with a small hissing sound. A moment later, it was just gone. Lidis came around the corner and stopped in front of the door.

  “Are you sure she’s inside?” Ed whispered to the little mist demon as Maladzhoth and Xoryath took up positions nearby to serve as lookouts.

  “It’s her interrogation chamber,” the wisp said quietly, bobbing up and down in imitation of a nod. “I saw her enter – but the guard wasn’t here, then.”

  Ed raised an eyebrow at Jori, but she just shrugged. She didn’t know if that meant anything.

  “Well, it’s too late to back out now,” he murmured, pulling a purple vial from a small pouch at his belt and popping the cork. He downed it, stowed the empty container back in the pouch and picked up his staff.

  “Just like we talked about, alright?” he said and Jori nodded. The archmages had been working on plans for each of the very few known lieutenants of Nuros since the moment they’d decided to hunt them down. While Tallash had been a relatively easy target, his mistress was something else. A demon didn’t survive climbing the hierarchy for very long if they couldn’t stand up to their rivals, and a whisperer’s mind magic only had a very limited effect on fellow demons. Its purpose was to feed on mortal souls, after all. That meant Zijeregh would be tough in other ways – fast, strong, and cunning.

  Ed waved a hand at the door, and it simply disappeared with a massive bang, blasting inward with incredible force. Jori leapt up, catching herself on the top of the doorframe and scuttling through as quickly as she could along the wall.

  The room wasn’t very large – bare with a broad stone bench set into the wall on the near side and a small holding cell in the back. The cell, more like a cage, was separated from the rest of the room by heavy metal bars.

  Inside, something large and rounded hovered in the shadows, emitting an unfamiliar, sour smell.

  On the near side stood Zijeregh – Jori had never seen her in person before, but she matched the description given by Xoryath, who had been honored with the privilege of guarding Tallash on his most recent summons to speak with his mistress.

  She was a pale, humanoid figure with a stooped posture and four arms – the upper ones slightly too long, and the lower ones too short for human. Her narrow face was expressionless except for her eyes, which were a deep black all the way through. Most unusual of all for a demon, she wore clothes, just as Jori herself did. It was a strange, complicated cloth thing, wrapped and folded in many layers.

  Josie had told her once that demons from the first hell were the least alien to mortals, but this was the first real evidence she’d seen of it.

  “Stop!” Zijeregh ordered and much to her own surprise, Jori did. She stared at her enemy in confusion. The whisperer’s eyes, which had been locked on her, swiveled to the door and Jori gritted her teeth.

  Shaking her head, she shrieked a challenge and jumped off the wall, spreading her wings and flinging hellfire down at her target.

  Quick as a snake, Zijeregh sidestepped the spell and swiped up with one of her upper arms. Pain tore through Jori’s left wing a split second before she smacked into the demon, hellfire coated claws first. She missed slightly, landing on the monster’s shoulder, but sank her claws into her neck and shoulder regardless, rending at her torso with her taloned feet. Cloth tore and Zijeregh shouted, but her claws didn’t pierce skin. They slid off uselessly, though she left small trails of hellfire behind where her claws touched.

  A moment later, Jori was flung back against the wall with incredible force, breaking bones in both wings as she hit.

  The imp hissed in pain, hellfire hissing from the open wound on her left wing. The torn skin would be repaired soon, but the bones would take longer. And it hurt. Zijeregh was almost on her, moving to pin her down and tear her apart as she collected herself and tried to scramble to the side. She was so fast. But Jori only needed to survive another moment.

  The entire exchange had taken no more than three seconds so far – but it was long enough for the archmage. One moment the whisperer was reaching out to grab her, the next she was bouncing off of the cell bars with a loud crack, spinning ass over horns before landing in a heap on the ground.

  That spell should have torn her to bits, if the guards outside were any guide, but Jori supposed it just wasn’t going to be that easy. Every demon, as they grew and evolved, developed more and more uniquely, branching away from their original calling. In some, the changes were obvious and so extreme that it was difficult to tell what they’d been before. Nobody knew what kind of demon Varamemnon had been spawned as, though with his general hellfire theme it was safe to say he was native to the third hell.

  Zijeregh looked normal enough, at least as far as Jori could guess, but she was unbelievably tough. Still, Ed’s spell had done at least some damage.

  “Calm down,” she said with surprisingly unruffled tone, rising unsteadily to her feet, her lower arms cradling her middle. Jori frowned at the creature again, confused. She didn’t want to calm down! What was going on?

  “There’s no need to fight,” she went on. “Just relax for a moment. Our friends will be here soon.”

  Jori knew that she wanted to kill this demon. She was an enemy, and they didn’t have time. But she didn’t move. She didn’t know why but she just... couldn’t. Dreamlike, she looked back toward the door, where Ed stood, frowning at her as if trying to puzzle out what exactly she was saying.

  “Good,” she said, rubbing at her neck, which had clear burn marks, even if no actual scratches showed. “Finally! I was starting to wonder if something was wrong with my vo – agh!”

  She cut off, mouth wide open and eyes bulging. She gagged, then Jori heard something pop and tear, leaving her jaw hanging crazily at an odd angle. Ed stared daggers at her, his staff raised.

  “Had a run in with some mind-type sorcerers not so long ago,” he explained helpfully as the spell pinned her mangled head back against the wall. “That was some nasty stuff, but every cloud has its silver lining – I'm not going to run out of mind fortress potions for the next decade.”

  With a flick of his wrist he cast what looked like a tiny magic missile, barely as big around as a finger but painfully bright. Zijeregh tried to jerk her head out of the way, but she couldn’t move.

  The missile struck her directly in the eye with a wet pop, leaving a neat hole behind that sent tears of black blood spilling down one cheek. The body jerked only once and went still. It didn’t fall, still propped up by the other spell.

  “So it was written by the eye who sees all.” A soft, inhuman voice sounded inside Jori’s head. She twitched and looked around in panic. She’d completely forgotten about the other occupant in the room. The enormous eldritch eye floated unnaturally just inside the bars, staring at them. “Mortals, Great K’Thanizar conveys to you a message – a gift of truth, free of obligation and an offer…”

  The eye exploded in a shower of gore, splattering back against the far wall.

  “Damned demons and their games.” Ed grumbled disgustedly. “Too damned clever for their own good.”

  Jori stared at him, shocked. They could have at least gotten the information it was offering!

  Ed blinked at her, seeing her expression. “What? Oh. No offense meant, but I’m not listening to what a godsdamned greater demon wants with us. Let’s get out of here before somebody finds us. We need to find somewhere to hide for the next ten minutes.”