Chapter Three: Your Obedient Demon

+++++Ezra+++++

Ezra had known he wasn't on his Earth. That much had been obvious from the get-go. In fact, part of him kept wondering whether this was all one long, strange DMT trip, because he'd heard that your perception of time could be radically altered. But he'd assumed that he was on something like Earth.

Two steps outside shattered that notion, and he had to brace himself against the porch railing to keep himself from collapsing. They were in a teeming city, a city of many thousands, with broad stone avenues, upscale-looking boutiques and long rows of imperious townhomes… all well and good. But most of the people weren't human. Perhaps one in four were human, but the rest were generally humanoid but not human. There were hardy, green-skinned people who were obviously part-plant. Some of their servants appeared to be moving masses of vegetation that were even more plant. There were little feathered dinosaur people skittering about in small packs and occasionally taking to the air for prolonged glides. There were fur-ruffed, blue-skinned lemur people who wore sunglasses over their oversized eyes. And that pushcart over there was being pushed by two dark purple men in tattered brown trousers and the builds of silverback gorillas.

Fenrik sometimes entertained guests, but Ezra had always been confined to his room during those times. The sorcerer was embarrassed that others might see him, perhaps. He'd always assumed that those guests would be human, since everybody he'd seen to that point had been human. But this was clearly a multi-species society, and many of those species were strange, indeed.

"Is it too bright?" Anise deployed her parasol and lifted it to shield Ezra's face.

He shook his head. "No… I'm… my land is different."

That was easy enough to convey. Conventional wisdom held that demons were free-floating spirits that came from different, generally 'lower' planes of existence where magic was stronger and they could be enthralled in Median because their magic was weakened and the 'arcane residual' could be used to control them. Presumably, some of those other planes of existence had planets with civilizations and people, but demons weren't civilized folk because they didn't have bodies. Not until they were summoned and forced into one.

Despite his goggled eyes, Anise could see the fear in his expression, the way he kept glancing to the strange promenade of people along the street, and up to the great airships humming overhead with the little flocks of gliding dinosaur-people flitting between them. He watched the constables march by - two humans and two plant people in uniform followed by six of the purple gorilla-men in collars and little gray vests.

"It's illegal to kill an infernic without provocation and a property crime against their master," Anise said.

He got her general gist, but that was only a bit reassuring. Killing Ezra would be a property crime… unless he provoked a response. Given that he had no idea what the social mores of this melting pot of a dozen different strange races was, he had no idea what might be considered provocation. Would the gorilla-men attack him if he looked them in the eye? Would the plant people become incensed if he brushed by a shrubbery too quickly? He had no idea.

Anise glanced to him expectantly. "Teneze. Ipʼo bù choneqo riyùtʼe." When Ezra didn't understand, she pointed to one of the carriage-like contraptions chugging down the street and then gestured to what appeared to be a garage at the base of Fenrik's city house. This, apparently, meant: /Go on. Bring the carriage around./

As he puzzled over the garage door, Anise sighed and showed him how, unscrewing a lock from the base of the door, upon which it slowly raised. Inside, there was a horseless carriage powered by some arcane engine and with controls that Ezra couldn't guess at. Anise demonstrated the practice and then gestured to the little stoop on the back of the thing, which was apparently where servants and chauffeurs were supposed to ride. Only rich people got to ride inside the carriage. There were controls up there, but there were also controls in the passenger booth, and Anise clearly knew how to drive.

The city chugged past them - there were no street lights, but there were lane markings and a few roundabouts, and constables were posted at regular intervals. They'd shout at carriages that they thought were moving too quickly, and all of them tipped their hats when they saw Anise, and some of them glared at Ezra. They drove north for perhaps a kilometer, a great and stinking river barely visible past the increasingly-cramped buildings to their left. The sun looked the same as Earth's, and the sky was blue with wispy white clouds, but it was also festooned with at least a dozen airships, great lazy zeppelins droning above the city. And everything outside of the sorcerer's upscale neighborhood smelled of smoke and sour sewage.

Once they'd arrived at their destination - some sort of carpenter's workshop if Ezra had to guess - he hopped down and 'helped' Anise from the carriage. She didn't need his help, of course, but he assumed this would be expected, too, and he didn't want to ruffle her feathers. The girl… hell, was probably his age. Ezra's body couldn't be older than about sixteen. The young woman had been far kinder to him than her uncle, and he realized it would be foolish not to stay on her good side. If she wanted to play the a proper aristocrat in public, he would help her.

"Thank you, Ezrah," Anise said.

That was about as close as she usually got to his name's pronunciation. His body's original name had been Wuhel, but Ezra had no love for that name, inside the house Anise was eager to learn about him, and Fenrik didn't give a damn what Ezra wanted to be called, so long as he did what he was told. He followed after her, Anise in her slim green dress and white gloves, the three silver pips pinned to her lacy, broad-brimmed cap indicating that she was a 3rd elevation Adept at St. Quillia's.

She spoke with the master carpenter for a moment and, satisfied with the state of things, motioned for Ezra to hand the man his money: seventy brownbacks. It was unbecoming that a lady of means should have to touch the currency - that was one of many mores that Ezra struggled to understand. Seventy brownbacks was enough to buy them three very nice bookshelves, which the carpenter and his assistant helped to bring out to the carriage. The carpenter and his assistant each hefted one, while Ezra carried the other with Anise's help. It was unbecoming for a lady to carry anything, of course, but she helped with her magic, which lightened it to the point where Ezra could barely carry the thing.

There was barely enough space for Anise in the coach, but she wasn't about to lower herself to riding on the outside or, heavens forbid, walking non-recreationally. So she crammed herself in and drove them back to Fenrik's. Once they had the bookshelves inside, she didn't mind helping him move them the old-fashioned way - it was only her public face that she needed to maintain.

+++++Anise+++++

The boy, Ezra, was barely stronger than her. Granted, St. Quillia's had an excellent calisthenics program, but Anise wasn't exactly the most athletic person out there. She'd been a chubby little girl and still wasn't what anybody would consider svelte - she felt herself too broad, and the notion that she might actually be stronger than a servant, even a slim and young one, appalled her sensibilities. But, then again, the urmal were mostly servants and laborers and Anise was sure she was stronger than many of them. Maybe it wasn't so bad to be hearty.

Of course, the body that Ezra now inhabited had lain catatonic for something like two months. The law said the body had to be 'insensate' for over a month, and it had taken another month for Uncle Fenrik to convince the boy's parents that all hope was lost. The three thousand brownbacks probably didn't hurt.

"Okay, I think that's fine," she said. They'd managed to position the new bookshelves in Uncle Fenrik's study, both of them red and sweating. If they needed to be adjusted, Ezra might manage it by himself, or perhaps her energy would be restored. When she made the 4th elevation, she'd finally have some decent power at her beck. "That will be all. But we can practice more words this evening if you like."

Ezra nodded. "I'd like that," he said.

Uncle Fenrik was still convinced that his new thrall was a mostly-useless halfwit. He'd expanded his repertoire of permissible tasks and, thankfully, was actually letting Anise help with some things in his workshop. By the time she returned to school in another week, maybe she'd actually have learned something new from the old man. She could only hope. In the meanwhile, at least she had access to all of his books (and there were some good ones) and she was getting pretty good at teaching Ezra - and teaching was a valuable skill if she ever found work as a magistress. Though sometimes doubt crept in… was she actually a good teacher?

Anise could remember learning Unilog as a child, and it was more similar to the Westricht of her parents' homeland than whatever Ezra spoke. It had taken her three years before the other children at the boarding school stopped teasing her over her accent. Ezra still had an accent, but it was quite apparently that he was terrifyingly smart. He could read and write already. His vocabulary expanded by the day. He pretended to be slow about organizing her uncle's books so he could peruse the ones he was interested in. How her uncle thought a boy who couldn't read might organize books, Anise could only guess. She'd caught him twice with his nose in the books and thought his guilty embarrassment droll. What interest did a thrall-boy have in The Peoples and Cultures of Medias? Perhaps Ezra wasn't a lesser demon, which were (it was alleged) barely more intelligent than those purple, chest-beating prymen. Maybe he was instead something much rarer than whatever her uncle thought he'd snagged. But her uncle wouldn't listen.

"You're reading too many of those gallivanting fantasies, girl," he told her. "You should be studying your sigils."

"I would… if you'd give me anything to do with sigils…"

Uncle Fenrik had grumbled at that, but what could he say? Instead, he'd rummaged about through his storage room (which was nearly as big as his study and filled almost to bursting with years' worth of broken artifacts, half-finished projects, and once-trendy furniture gone to shabbiness). He'd returned fifteen minutes later with… a scrub-broom. A scrub-broom with a ball-joint and a series of sigils along its side. It was meant to spin about with a little push of magical energy. That gave her a great idea…

Perhaps the idea wasn't so great after all. Anise's idea was to make a new sigiled broom handle with one of her uncle's blue crystals (the cheap ones, not the nice ones) and then teach Ezra how to use it. She was so excited that she stayed up half the night working on the thing, draining a dozen of her uncle's energy crystals to focus enough energy to finish all of the sigils. Uncle Fenrik could imbue the crystals with hardly a second thought, so it wasn't like she was inconveniencing him. Then she imbued the broom's crystal with just a dash of her own energy, felt the sigils surge to life, and then watched as the brush whirred around, spinning so quickly it disturbed the loose papers that seemed to be everywhere in Uncle Fenrik's house, no matter how many times Ezra picked them up and piled them neatly at his desk.

The broom worked well, but Ezra wasn't having much luck with it. Anise could get it to work for five minutes at a go, and she could have kept on charging and recharging it all day if she'd wanted to. It took less energy than the crystalline lights in Uncle Fenrik's laboratory and a lot less than the ones they had at school. And yet, when Ezra tried, he could get the thing to spin one turn if he was lucky. Anise could remember how weak she'd been before her 1st elevation, but she was pretty sure she'd have been able to spin the thing a few times. The most maddening part of it all was that it meant Ezra had some magical potential in there. It would have been a whole lot easier if he'd just been completely useless at magic like the prymen.

"What am I doing wrong?" Ezra rubbed his chest. "Every time I… why can't I get it to work?"

Anise shrugged. She wasn't nearly enough of an expert to make an educated guess. She made one anyway: "Because you haven't got a human soul?"

Ezra frowned at the broom and then met her gaze - or at least as close as he could get with those blackened goggles. Many masters would have punished their thralls for the impertinence, but Ezra wasn't her thrall. If Uncle Fenrik had a problem with him…

"I've got a human soul," he said at last. "I used to be a human… or what we called a human in my world."

+++++Anise+++++

How had it never come up before? It didn't even seem possible. Had Anise really never asked after Ezra's past? She knew her uncle hadn't - he didn't give a damn. He was still fuming over the fact that his demonic thrall wasn't good for more than manual labor. But Anise knew that even demons had pasts - usually vague pasts as disembodied, mischievous elemental consciousnesses, but pasts nonetheless.

"You were… a writer?" she asked.

He chuckled. He wrung his hands. He was embarrassed. "I wanted to be one… I got a job as an editor and literary agent, which is usually a pretty solid start for getting your foot in the door."

"What did you write?"

Ezra shrugged. "You're living it. We called it fantasy… things about different worlds with different civilizations and races… worlds with magic like this one…"

"Your world didn't have magic?"

"Some people thought it did. I never believed them - there wasn't magic like what you can do." He nudged the broom with his foot. "Instead, we used electricity. We had it running through the walls of our houses along little metal wires…"

"That sounds like magic."

"It's not. It's science." He tapped the blue crystal at the apex of the broom handle. "The biggest believer in crystal power couldn't charge one of these. And there were no other intelligent races, except for maybe whales…"

The more he said, the more ridiculous it sounded. It didn't sound like a demon's world at all…

One time, about two years ago, right after she'd achieved the 3rd elevation and a week after Franyi had achieved hers, they'd gone to celebrate with Franyi's parents in their little vacation home out on Sidoade Island. There, they'd stayed up most of the night talking with Qinzi, who was the family's demon-thrall and a nereit, a water-spirit imprisoned in a human body. Most demon-thralls weren't too disappointed with their place on Medias… their magic was weaker, but even the life of a servant could be enjoyable and varied. They could become influential lieutenants, trusted advisors, and respected teachers, even if their status would always be linked to that of their master. And Qinzi had been happy not only with her status in Franyi's mother's service but in divulging her past.

She swept a brush across a page, the watercolors swirling and pooling through her magic. Qinzi was perhaps as powerful as a 4th elevation Adept, but her control over water was far more nuanced than anything that even Uncle Fenrik could dream of. She showed them an ocean of sparkling aquamarine, of a little boat, of a little fox-person in the boat.

"I had sisters and brothers… they preferred the deep, or else the open ocean, but I preferred the beach and the surf. Where I come from, most of the world is covered in water, even more than here…"

"Sixty percent of Medias is covered with water," Franyi had stated.

"My home was closer to ninety, I imagine. But there were land-dwellers - little fox people like my Chustus. I watched from below his boat, and when I saw what he was doing, I thought it a fun game. He was fishing, of course, and I chased the fish to him. He probably couldn't believe his luck - not until I grabbed his boat and held it be, because I didn't want him to go. Chustus was frightened, of course, but when he saw that I meant no harm, he calmed and eventually we parted ways - but he came back the next day."

"You were friends with a fox person?" Anise asked. This was very exciting. There were no fox people on Medias, nor any particular race that she would define as cute. The idea of huggable, pettable, befriend-able fox people had her swooning.

"We were friends. I loved him… we nereit have nothing like love, really. We play. We mingle. Sometimes, we bicker. But we are creatures of the water, and not too prone to deep emotion. But Chustus's boat making its way out to me became my favorite part of the day and his leaving the least favorite. And, though he liked the fish I brought him, I like to think it was more than that. I never said a word to him, for I had no mouth with which to speak, but when I formed myself into a crude little fox-woman-of-water and made my way into his boat, he would sing to me and read poetry or just talk about life in his village, and it filled my heart to bursting… not that I had a heart.

"Every day, he would come to be with me, I would help him catch the best fish for kilometers around, and before the sun set he would return back to his home. Until one day he didn't return, nor the next. And the day after that, he did make his way out to explain that he was to be married to a woman who lived inland, that he would likely never come to see me again. I couldn't bear that - I had to be with my friend, so I pulled him from his boat, pulled him into the reef, where he could see the beauty of the colors as they were, and then he died, of course…"

"Why did you drown him?" Franyi sputtered.

"How was I to know he couldn't breathe the water?" When she wept, the tears beaded off of her face and danced through the air like ducks bobbling in a choppy lake. "I thought as a child and had no understanding. But I weep for him now."

Anise knew, therefore, that demon-thralls were not the sorts of things that had cities and societies with publishing houses. They didn't live in houses with lektricity in the walls or think lifting a bookshelf with your magical energy was a miraculous achievement. Whatever Ezra was, he wasn't like one of the demon-thralls other sorcerers had. But neither was he from Medias, so he wasn't a human in the same way that she or Uncle Fenrik were… so what on Medias was he?