15
Everyone but Cashel and Mellie had left the room. The doors were closed and men waited outside with weapons Latias said were useless against the demon. Cashel set his staff against the wall regretfully. He believed Mellie when she said it was his bare hands or nothing, but the smooth, familiar hickory would feel good right now.
The sprite sat on the wooden chest next to the enameled iron one which held the images. Her legs dangled over the edge.
The iron chest was two feet long and a foot wide and deep. Cashel didn't see how a demon hiding in a space so small could be dangerous. Was Derg poisonous like some snakes?
"What do I do?" he asked.
"You just raise the lid," Mellie said. "And after that, well, it depends, doesn't it?"
She lifted her body off the wood with her hands and rotated her torso upward into an absolutely amazing handstand on the edge of the chest. "Or we could go out and see the rest of Erdin instead," she added from an inverted position. "Though it seems what I thought it would be. Just another city."
The hasp wasn't padlocked. Cashel flipped up the latch.
There was no point in waiting; like Mellie said, this was entirely his own decision. He threw back the heavy lid and straightened, expecting a demon to billow up at him like smoke from a chimney.
A cover of green silk brocade lay over the images within the chest; threads of gold, scarlet, and blue shot through the heavy fabric. A bright red, dog-headed demon no taller than Mellie stood in the center of the cloth looking up at Cashel.
Mellie swung her body in a graceful arc, clearing the iron edge of the chest and landing feet-first on the brocade. "Here or there, Derg?" she demanded.
The demon opened his jaws. The roar wasn't from Derg's throat, though, but from the whole cosmos. The room blurred white, gray, and finally bright flaming red.
Cashel fell. The only point that held firm in the flux was Derg's bestial face, swelling out of the fiery background.
Cashel's feet hit the ground. The soil was thin over a base of dense clay. Ferns and the leaves of pale saplings decorated the bases of giant trees. The air was hot and still.
Mellie was a full-sized woman. She stood with her hands on her hips, her pelvis thrust forward. Derg, as tall as Cashel and so bright that he seemed to vibrate in this waste of green/black/brown, leaped for Cashel's throat.
Cashel was big but not slow. He caught Derg by one outstretched wrist and forearm, then slammed the demon to the ground like a giant flail.
Derg bounced hard, spraying water from the saturated soil. Cashel stepped back. He'd expected Derg to close with him in a wrestling contest. Depending on how strong the demon really was, the fight might have lasted some time, but Cashel hadn't really considered that he might lose. He knew that Garric was smarter than most people; and he knew that Cashel or-Kenset was stronger than anybody he was likely to meet.
Derg rolled over and got to his feet. The demon's legs were relatively shorter than a man's; his torso and arms were longer. The dent in the ground where he'd hit was filling with water.
Derg laughed. In a low, gravelly voice he said, "That was very good, human. Shall I throw you, now?"
"You can try," said Cashel. He and the demon stepped together with their arms outstretched. They struck chest to chest and their hands locked. It was like walking into an oak tree but Cashel didn't give way.
Derg growled a laugh and twisted to set his long jaws in Cashel's throat. Cashel head-butted the doglike muzzle. Fangs gashed his forehead, but the demon yelped and jerked his head away. Cashel turned, using his body as a fulcrum, and hurled Derg over his back.
The demon hit the ground just as hard as before, losing his grip on Cashel's hands. Cashel straightened, sucking huge breaths in through his open mouth.
This time he wasn't surprised when Derg rolled over and got slowly to his feet. The impact would have broken every bone in a human's body.
"You're very strong, human," Derg said with obvious respect. "I'll be sorry to tear your head from your body and devour your entrails."
Cashel was too involved with breathing to speak, and there wasn't much to say anyhow. He didn't have a lot of use for men who talked about the things they were going to do instead of going out to do them.
A flock of robin-sized green-and-yellow parrots flew into the clearing, noticed Cashel and the demon, and swirled away squawking. Cashel started for his opponent again.
"Cashel," Mellie said from the side of the clearing. "He takes his strength from the earth. Don't let him touch the ground."
Derg snarled and charged him. They slammed together. Like hitting an oak tree, like hitting a boulder the size of an ox...
Cashel might have been wrestling one of the marble statues guarding the entrance to Latias' compound. There was no give in the demon's muscles. But Cashel had lifted boulders, and he'd once pulled a hickory sapling from the ground to brandish overhead roaring. No other man in the borough could have done that, but Cashel had; and he would do this thing.
He leaned backward, twisting at the waist, and dragged Derg with him despite the demon's attempt to pull in the opposite direction. Derg's legs were shorter than Cashel's. When both of them bent at the axis of the youth's hipbone, the demon's feet came off the ground.
Mellie laughed from the sidelines and turned a somersault in the air. Derg's teeth gnashed a whisker's width from Cashel's throat, but he couldn't force his jaws that slight degree closer.
Cashel started to laugh, a hacking, gasping sound of triumph. Holding Derg in the air was the hardest thing he'd ever done, but he could feel the demon weaken in his grip.
Cashel bent the demon's left arm inexorably back. He didn't have any margin to relax, but he knew now that he was stronger than Derg by a measurable degree.
When the leverage was right, Cashel caught the demon's right ankle. He turned Derg and brought him down across his left knee, ignoring the way the demon's freed right arm clawed him. The claws were short like a dog's, not a cat's rending talons; and not even that would have saved Derg now.
Mellie pranced closer and looked down into the demon's inverted face. "He'll kill you, Derg," she said. "Cashel isn't one of us, you know. He kills things when they get in his way."
The demon sprayed spittle in wordless desperation. He tried to roll sideways, but Cashel's strength prevented him.
Sweat plastered Cashel's hair to his scalp and ran down his chest. The top half of his tunic hung in rags; shredded by Derg's claws or burst from within by the flexing of his own massive torso—he didn't know the cause and it didn't matter. He continued to force the demon's shoulders and legs down on opposite sides of the blade of his knee.
"It's not going to be long now, Derg," Mellie said cheerfully. She gave the demon's nose a little tweak. "Cashel doesn't stop when he gets started, you know. I wonder how loud it'll be when your spine—"
"I yield!" the demon croaked.
Cashel barely heard the sound over the thunder of blood in his ears. He flung Derg away and started to rise.
All color left the cosmos in a white roar. The clearing dissolved. Cashel felt the ground receive him; then he felt nothing.