Kyembe the Spirit Killer jolted awake.

The stench of unwashed bodies, blighted wounds and filth struck his nose, carried by a damp wind that goose pimpled his burnt umber skin. The Sengezian’s crimson eyes opened painfully, squinting into the gloom, his vision swimming. The creak of rope and wood met his pointed ears. His mouth felt drier than the Ahari Desert when the fire-winds roared and his belly churned ominously, the stale remnants of the previous night of drink lurking on his tongue. Such was the ruin of spirits, yet he never seemed to learn. Groaning like a dying man, he tried to reach for his waterskin.

Creak.

Bindings bit into his wrists.

“What?” he murmured. Propped against a wooden pole, his hands were lashed behind his back and rope knotted about his ankles.

Something stirred behind him.

“You’re finally awake, you drooling, liquor-swilling lecher!” a familiar voice hissed in Makkadian. “I should gut you! Gut you!”

Wurhi the Rat, who had joined him during wild adventure in Zabyalla, must have been very close; her whisper felt like a club driving into his skull. A club that had been set aflame. And full of enraged bees.

While waiting for the throbbing to stop, Kyembe looked about. The crescent moon provided meagre illumination, but eyes inherited from his dark elf mother cut through the black. A sea of erected poles stretched in every direction, surrounded by recumbent figures bound to their bases. The stink of sweat, defecation and death lay in all directions. Snores, groans of pain and ailing whimpers formed a sickening melody beneath a despairing voice that wailed for aid from their ancestors in the Garric tongue.

A small fire spat smoke and murky light nearby, revealing a pair of fur-clad warriors sharing a wineskin while seated cross legged in the dirt, their tall bronze tipped spears pointing skyward. Kyembe’s eyes followed the wan column of smoke, and froze.

Titanic trees loomed silently to the west, nearly consuming the sky. He needed to crane his neck to merely see the canopy. It could only be the Forest of Giants. He’d heard tell of it from Garumnan mercenaries trying to frighten their comrades.

“Wurhi,” Kyembe’s deep voice croaked. “Why are we here?”

“These bastards have taken us! And robbed us!”

Alarmed, the Sengezian looked down to find near all his worldly possessions gone. He wore his white tunic and loincloth, but the star patterned over-robe he’d taken from the late Merchant Prince Cas - a favourite garment he’d fastidiously cared for - was missing. The rest of his share of plunder from that venture was gone as well, along with his ivory hilted sword and…

He wiggled a finger, noticing a weightless absence.

…someone had removed his ring: his object of power and oldest companion.

His lips tightened. This somewhat offended him. In truth, much more than somewhat. “How did this happen?” he growled.

The Zabyallan had been bound to the same pole, but facing the opposite direction. Her beady green eyes glared at him over her shoulder. “Think! Think, you drunken fool!” Cracked lips snarled back over her teeth, revealing a slight overbite.

“My skull aches too much to think.”

“It’ll ache a lot more when I smash it open!”

Groaning, Kyembe strained his mind.

They had stopped at a bustling alehouse by the River Obelax near the Great Western Road that lead to Laexondael. They’d drank there, and Kyembe had met Ku-Hassandra, a wizard of the City of Glass in mid-journey to Laexondael’s markets for cast off Cymorillian dragon scales.

Accompanying her had been two red-eyed Vestulai bodyguards, whose names eluded him at the moment. Wurhi had tricked them into a game of ‘Tooth’ with a pair of drunk trappers, a portly Laexondaelic merchant and a rangy mercenary woman the little Zabyallan had taken a liking to. He and Ku-Hassandra had bartered spells while Wurhi had taken most of her opponents’ electrum, silver and pride. Kyembe himself had gambled but once with the little thief during their crossing of the Sea of Gods. He had sworn to never do so again.

While waiting for the game to end, he and the wizard had ordered more ale and discussed the finer pronunciations of the thousand dialects of demons. They’d continued drinking as the conversation grew more lively, but ran out of ale long before they’d run out of words. She had invited him back to her river ship for a cup of arrack, and Kyembe of Sengezi was not the sort to pass a drink with a beautiful, quick-witted woman.

But one cup had turned to two. Then to three. All wits - quick or slow - had deserted them by and by. The last he remembered, they were arm in arm, belting out a bawdy song of a foolish fisherman, an ugly mermaid and a conniving lobster. Then the cabin door had been kicked in. And…and nothing.

He told Wurhi most of what he recalled.

“That’s right! That’s right, fool!” she snapped. “If you had your wits, you could’ve blown these bastards to ash and we’d be halfway to Laexondael! But you had to go off with that magus and have…have weird wizard writhings!”

He gave her a puzzled look. “Nothing so vigorous. We merely shared arrack and conversa-”

“I don’t care what you-Wait.” She blinked. “She had arrack? Real arrack? Here?”

“I had three cups of it.” He grimaced. “To my regret.”

“And you didn’t steal any for me?” she whispered as though she’d just found her father’s murderer.

“Steal from a host?” he hissed incredulously. “And have Kyembe of Sengezi known as an honourless, gutless bastard? Are you mad?”

Wurhi stared at him for several heartbeats, before sealing her mouth lest her scream alert the entire encampment. “Now you’re awake,” she said after she’d steadied her breath. “Time to leave.” She began to squirm in her bonds, her hands bending upward at an astounding angle to reach the knots. Kyembe tried as well, but even his flexible wrists could not bend that far. He made a noise of disgust. “I am useless. Can you free yourself?”

“Please,” she scoffed. “It’d take these sausage-fingered filth-lickers a hundred years to tie a knot that’d hold me. Almost out; then we can find which of these bastards took our things. If there’s any god or demon that favours us, they won’t be far.” She glanced to the east. “I want Cas’ treasure back, but I won’t be dying for it.”

Kyembe’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Wurhi, if they robbed us already then why do we still live? What is their purpose for us? Did you see anything while I slept?”

Wurhi gestured ahead of herself with her chin. “You see that?”

Kyembe craned his neck and spied a pole rising ten paces to the north, seemingly swaying and dancing in the firelight. A figure slumped at its base in the stillness of death, and a torrent of black ash had run from slackened maw down their breast.

“Before you woke-” She continued to squirm in her bonds. “-an old man came, and I think he’s got pull over these barbarians. He had four warriors with him that must’ve had bulls for fathers, but they followed him around like kittens.”

“What did this old man look like?”

“Foul. Like a slithery, corpse-eating vulture playing at being a man: he had a fortune of jewels tied in his hair, I-”

“Wait,” Kyembe said sharply. “Were they braided to the ends? Like flowers at the end of the stalk?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Just everywhere. Why?”

Kyembe sighed in relief. “Never mind. What did these men do?”

Wurhi eyed him suspiciously. “They looked at a bunch of the prisoners and were just getting to us when the old man saw a boy and man tied to the pole there. He pointed at the boy and those two-legged oxen cut him loose, grabbed him up and started to drag him off. The man tied to the pole started shouting hard, but the old man took something out of a pouch that glowed orange and waved it.” She shuddered. “The glow was so low you’d nearly miss it and it didn’t make a sound, but the poor bastard started choking and writhing around like a speared fish. Threw up ash and flopped over dead.”

“Pyromancy.” Kyembe glowered at the corpse. “He burnt his lungs from the inside.’

The tiny Zabyallan froze in her struggles. “He can do that? Can you do that?’

“It is strenuous enough to merely direct hellfire; I do not have such precision.” He glanced backward again toward his naked hand. “And without my ring I do not have much of anything.”

“What?!” Her eyes grew very wide. “You mean we might run into that soot-spewing, innard-frying wizard with no way to defend ourselves?!”

“We will have our wits.”

“And he’ll have our insides!”

“Shhhh!” Kyembe hissed, glancing toward the nearest guards. The two warriors quaffed their ale and lounged as though the surrounding poles were date-palms in the oasis-gardens of Saba-Aful. “Not so loud,” he warned. “What happened to the child they took?”

Wurhi shuddered. “Dragged him that way.” She jerked her chin to the east. “Then I saw a big fire rise up. That’s when the screaming started. Never heard anything like it, not even when The Maw worked over someone’s bones with their saw-knives. It was like it was right beside m-Aha! Yes!” Her bonds finally fell and she whipped her hands forth, rotating her wrists, which popped in their sockets. She began to free her ankles while Kyembe mulled over her story.

“A sacrifice,” he concluded. “These filth would have us fatten their demons.”

“Demons? Like Cas’? More than one?” she whispered incredulously.

“Not at all like his: A Lord of Nightmares was what boiled from his sceptre, and their ilk are mercifully rare, ancient, and gluttonous; one boy’s life to them would be a grain of millet to us.” His countenance turned dark. “The boy’s loved ones’ nightmares would give them far more interest. Also, to make use of their power, they would have to be close; Cas had his bound by his sceptre’s baleful magics, anchoring it onto this plane.”

“Where…where do they come from? So I can never go there.”

He chuckled darkly. “You need not worry on that. Such abominations hail from planes remote even by demon reckoning, only called by the mightiest spells and vilest sacrifices. Cas’ sceptre was one of those strange things one can find in the dusty places of the world, with fell servants still bound.” He shook his head. “The demons that watch over this band are likely lesser things. Vile and formidable, but lesser.”

“They can be ‘vile and formidable’ somewhere where we’re not.” She finished freeing her ankles then undid his bonds in a matter of heartbeats. He rose, still half-numb from stillness and the aftermath of drink. With a furtive look to the guards, they slipped into the darkness. “Let’s find our things.” Wurhi pointed north into the gloom. “Folk keep walking this way. Must’ve seen five groups since sunset.”

“Then we shall follow them.”