It was evening. I stood upon the balcony of my fortress gazing out across the city, when I heard the sound of sword upon halberd far below. I turned sharply, to ask one my guards to go down below and investigate, but before I could do so one of my scouts, a ferret, burst into the room, panting.
"Intruder, Mi'lord..." he wheezed. "At gates... Trying to break in through front gate..."
"Know you his name?" I asked.
"Bull... says he is Ulric the Strong..." replied the scout, slowly getting his breath back.
Ulric was an adventurer I had heard many rumours of. A 25-year old bull, he had made his name as something of a demon hunter.
Arrogant and vain, Ulric was nonetheless regarded in many circles as a true hero's hero - one who had saved a number of villages and inspired many others to follow his lead.
He was also directly responsible for an equal number of disasters and had narrowly escaped being hanged on more than one occasion for the murder of those who had been foolish enough to say so within his earshot.
In short, he was one of the few bounty hunters to have a price on his own head.
"Hmm," I mused, and smiled my wicked smile. "Switch to code 'gazelle' - Inform my captain of this at once."
The ferret sped off, shouting the word over and over, as loud as he could.
For my tactics I used different species as codenames. It helped attach a visual cue to the code making it easier to remember - so long as I chose different enough species to avoid confusion.
'Gazelle' meant that we would seal off the corridors and my guards would fall back, guiding the intruder to the throne room where I and my henchmen could safely dispose of them. Simply shooting him was an option of course, but I much preferred to give my enemies a chance to surrender first so I had devised a series of strategies to defend the fortress while still retaining this option. 'Gazelle' was one of these - a standard exercise I performed at least once a year to keep my guards upon their toes.
Likely some of my guards would think this was an exercise too, since the exact date of the drills was known only to me. Otherwise there was the possibility of an intruder coinciding their attack with our exercises if they were commonly known. But tonight was no drill.
Since the throne room had been breached by the stealth approach of a young weasel a year or so past, I had also begun to make more use of electric eyes and other such sensors.
All the corridors surrounding key areas such as my throne room and other important parts of the complex could now only be entered by those who carried inductive pass-keys - anyone else would trigger the alarms.
Like the exercises, I would test them at irregular intervals, leaving my own pass-key behind, sometimes even hiring a thief to try and break into the fortress.
Touching a wall of my throne room, I opened a secret door and entered a small chamber down a flight of steps. On one wall there was a map of the fortress. As I stared at it, a light near the entrance came on, followed instantly by the ringing of an alarm bell.
So far, so good I thought. As they came on one by one, I monitored the intruder's progress as he made his halting, confused way from room to room. Apparently he had become lost trying to accomplish the exceedingly simple task of making his way to the throne room, made even simpler by the fact that most of the ancillary corridors had been blocked off by portcullises as per my order.
Either that or he's trying to loot the place, I pondered. But even that dimwit can't be stupid enough to try plundering a castle before taking care of the owner first. Or maybe he is just raiding the place and not after me. If so, codeword 'Gazelle' was the wrong strategy.
As if on cue, the bull began to trace a more normal path towards my throne room. I stood there, focusing on the final three lights, waiting for them to illuminate as he approached the entrance.
Suddenly there was a crash. I turned around, stunned and ran up the steps back into the throne room. The crumpled figure of an armoured lynx was spreadeagled by the door of my throne room and the bull had positioned himself just outside the door, blocking my exit.
The lynx was Captain Ashley, lying in a pool of his own blood, victim of a savage thrust to the waist by Ulric's powerful arms. It had gone right through the chainmail joint. Pushing aside for now the fact that he had caught me unawares, I raced over to where my stricken captain lay.
"I'm sorry, Mi'Lord," the lynx gasped as I knelt down beside him, cradling his head in my hands. Memories of a similar moment with Page came flooding back to me, but I pushed them aside.
Touching his waist my hands glowed for a moment and the bleeding stopped, as did his breathing.
The spell wouldn't last long but it would keep him in a suspended state until I was able to heal him properly or until I joined him in death, whichever it was to be.
I turned back to the intruder, my eyes burning with hatred. "You may well have killed the captain of my guards," I said. "for that you will suffer." The warrior's mind shield was tight and I was unable to find much purchase on his thoughts.
Together we did a dance around the room, him with his sword and me with my tentacles. "Ready the battering ram," I said to my men, parrying and thrusting at my foe. He concealed his puzzlement at this illogical request - which was of course a code, like 'Gazelle'.
"You know, I was always taught to believe that life is sacred," I said, "but in your case I'd be happy to make a small exception. Unless of course we can come to some kind of gentleman's agreement."
He laughed and threw a dagger at me. I caught it in mid-air and threw it back. Demon reflexes are very handy to have.
"What foolishness," said the bull. "there is a bounty on your life that would make me a king!" so saying, he leapt forward with a sudden thrust.
"As you know I am an incubus," I said. His sword made it through to my chest, but I had hardened my skin and it glanced off.
"As such, your chances of surviving this fight are as close to zero as makes no difference. If you throw down your sword and swear never to return, I shall forget all this bounty-hunter shit and allow you to go free. If my captain lives I may only take your weapon and not your clothes too."
I was leading the dance now, and we were approaching a particular spot of the room which I had in mind.
"Do not plead with me, demon. I shall never spare your cowardly life," he replied, dodging a blow from my knife-sharp tentacles. "It is not simply the money, it is a question of honour. You are a demon and your death will be welcomed by all. Why should I back out of such a glorious challenge?"
"Now wait a minute," I said, parrying his attack again, "Demons and other Creatures make nearly half the population of this city. Everyone is welcome here so long as they live peacefully. I don't expect they will welcome my death, especially not if I was replaced by some racist bonehead like you who'd kill them as soon as look at them."
"Then after I have brought your head to my patron, I shall return to purge this city of its foul denizens. Songs shall be sung of my achievements! My name shall live on in legend forever!"
"Indeed it shall," I said and at that moment the trapdoor opened beneath him.
It was only about a foot deep, but its main purpose was to make him lose his footing. There were other, deeper trapdoors for other purposes too.
The shock took him off-guard and I broke clean through his shielding. A sudden memory of Page lying in state filled my mind, his face serene and peaceful, surrounded by flowers. Suddenly his face changed into Ashley's.
"NO!" I shouted, and in a burst of rage I focused my hatred on the erstwhile hero's mind. His body quivered, slumping limply to the ground and his eyes took on that singular, horrible expression that only comes when the soul has been eaten or cast out of a living body.
"And now there's one less hero," I said, as he became the fifth person to die by my hand.
I shunted the dead bull's soul into a specially-prepared jewel on a chain around my neck. Taking a small portion of its energy, I cancelled the spell keeping Ashley in suspension and channelled the newly-stolen power into his dying body. The bleeding stopped again but this time he was still breathing, although raggedly.
My chief healer arrived as if on cue, and a few minutes later my captain was lying peacefully on the floor almost exactly like my vision, but with one crucial difference.
"He should live, Mi'lord.", the healer announced, as we prepared to move him to the infirmary.
"Good. Unless there are more pressing needs, I request that you stay with him," I said. "If his condition worsens, inform me at once. Otherwise I shall visit him in the morning."
That night I visited my laboratory, where ancient tomes of magic and dark, forbidden lore sat alongside hand-written copies of the electronics texts which we had borrowed from Earth.
I had managed to improve on the design of our home-built electron valves, bringing them closer in line with the ones that I had imported from Earth. I should soon be able to repair the G-36 on my desk - one of the last magnetic recorders to rely entirely on valve circuitry. Once again, I felt a pang of loss for Azrael.. he had had a natural gift for the mathematics underlying these circuits, whereas I had found it much harder work.
But tonight I was not interested in electronics. I consulted some of the more esoteric works which I had learned of from the library at SAIA. Tracking down another copy had been difficult, but it was worthwhile.
In accordance with the instructions I took an empty bottle, charmed it in the same manner as the soul-trapping jewel and built a heavy lead pendulum which I suspended from a wire thread. Stopping the bottle so that the pendulum was inside it, I transferred the captured soul from the jewel into the bottle.
"Can you hear me?" I asked it, and the wire vibrated faintly in reply, a strange whispering voice made still more hollow as it resonated within the bottle.
Let me go, it said. Return my sword to me, demon! I shall kill you when I find you!
"Your body is dead," I told it. "You're just a soul in a beer bottle now."
The wire made an eerie screaming sound. "QUIET!" I snapped at it and the screaming ceased.
"You were right though," I pointed out, "your name shall live on in legend, but not in quite the way you had intended. Your name shall henceforth be a reminder of the price to be paid by those seeking to thwart Johan Cross."
As I spoke I began drafting a letter in my head to the officials of Zinvth, to claim the prodigious bounty on Ulric's head for a murder he had committed during a banquet in his honour. If I could magically preserve the corpse, I could probably claim the other bounties too.
Whistling a song by 'Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs' about a big bad wolf pretending to be a sheep, I rifled through the bull's personal effects. Amongst these was a large hemp sack, filled with loot from the lower floors of my castle. There, fallen to the bottom of the sack, was a pass-key which Ulric had taken because it looked shiny.
Roaring with laughter, I left the laboratory and headed towards the infirmary.