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The ‘Lady’ that the pooka mentioned before his escape, the mystery person capable of making such a creature her underling, remained a worrisome unknown, but by Fourthday our encounter with him was more than a hundred miles behind us. At least among the mortals, the theory was that she wisely chose to let us pass without bothering us after he reported the size and strength of our company.
Both Sen and the fairies thought that this wouldn’t be a very fairy-like response. Trusting their wisdom, the mission stayed on alert, but we only encountered a variety of monsters as we navigated the narrow valleys of the Kasarene Highlands. Pixies and other minor magical creatures revealed themselves fleetingly, especially near our campsites at night, sometimes attempting to play tricks on the mortals, but otherwise the fairy presence was completely absent.
<It’s unnatural,> Sen declared as I thought about this oddity again, while ‘patrolling the outer perimeter’, meaning I was orbiting far outside the military’s defenses, while planning to rendezvous with Shindzha.
On previous nights, I had been practicing the forest skills that Fan Li and Sen had taught me in the Spirit Core, which meant staying on the ground and using my [Spirit Sense] to guide my feet and body through the undergrowth in the most silent manner possible. But Lady Tiana’s lessons to control her blood core were beginning to bear fruit, and Gaia had advised us to make her work harder. So, for the first time, I was using [Water Step] to pass through the woods above the plant life.
<Couldn’t the mortals be right?> I wondered as I glided along.
<Even if they were, we would have encountered more fairies and higher monsters than we have,> she affirmed.
<But, including the non-combatants, we number forty two individuals and sixty one animals.>
In addition to the forty one riding beasts, we had twenty pack beasts along, carrying tents and supplies. The pack animals were scary beasts, since they all had monstrous beast blood in them that gave them extra strength and survivability. Most such animals can’t be ridden, but they can carry amazing loads.
<Why would our numbers matter?>
<Well, the local fairies might challenge a mortal group of our size,> I conceded, <but our company includes eight fairies. On top of that, the pooka’s rough encounter with Lady Serera would encourage them to avoid a conflict. With her backing up such a large group, we must be quite intimidating, right?>
<You clearly don’t know how to think like a fairy, Lhan,> Sen teased. <You just described a more interesting challenge for them, not a greater threat. Trust me, this situation won’t continue.>
Well, she was correct that I didn’t understand. But I knew she would be correct, regardless. I didn’t have anything like her intellect or her military knowledge. What little I did have was stolen from her, frankly. So, I didn’t reply. I just concentrated on finding the hellspawn.
<Well, it’s true that the large group will cause them to change their approach,> she admitted after a bit. <Although, in this situation, I’m not entirely certain in what way. But I am confident we are too tempting a target for the local fairies. They will not ignore us.>
The “situation’ meant the deep green labyrinth of trees and mana, which in the moonless twilight wore a dreamlike blanket of enchanted mist, glowing here and there with magic illumination from the magic plant life. [Spirit Sense] had to work hard to sense things through it, which meant it was challenging the fairy senses of my fellow company members as well.
<It is,> Sen answered my thoughts, <but it is also the fact that one hundred twenty miles of Kasarene Highlands now lie behind us. The question has become whether she let us pass through to let someone else play with us, or she slipped in behind us with a plan in mind?>
I didn’t have a reply to that, but it didn’t matter, with Shindzha in the clearing ahead. I slowed and dropped to the ground a few paces away from her, to avoid alarming her.
She had picked a spot with some convenient rounded boulders, nicely sized for sitting.
<A stone circle,> Sen observed, sounding intrigued. I wasn’t sure about the images that came to her mind, but I had the sense they were from a different world than this.
Shindzha had been seated on one until she saw me and jumped down.
“Mistress!” she called as soon as I landed. Looks like I wasn’t going to alarm her anyway.
Her pale yellow-green skin was somehow colored over with an Old Dorian brown complexion, and her eyes were darkened as well. It didn’t look completely human, since the spell she was using didn’t fully imitate human eyes. Her eyes lack the whites around the irises to begin with, and her simple magic could only darken the hellspawn colors to something less inhuman. It probably wasn’t possible to do better with the crude spell she was using.
It didn’t matter much, since she was still wearing her hooded cloak over her adventurer garb. But if anyone did get a look at her from a close range, it would prevent them from recognizing a hellspawn as long as her hood was over her horns.
“Call me Hiléa, Shindzha,” I corrected. “How’s it gone today?”
“I had a bit of trouble finding dinner,” she confessed, looking sheepish. She was supposed to be hunting and gathering what she could while she roamed the woods as an advance scout, but this occurred sometimes. I reached into my ‘belt-wallet’ mustard seed pouch and withdrew some of the field ration biscuits the SAS boys keep pushing on me and handed them over, then perched myself on the next boulder.
She gave them a wry smirk as she took them and tucked all but one into her belt-wallet. Her look said everything the soldiers said about the things, although the ones who cook breakfast manage to make some interesting things by crushing them up and combining them with bacon or jerky in a campfire pot.
“Sit,” I told her, and she got back on her boulder.
It was the second time I gave her the biscuits, so I wondered as she took a bite of the hard bread, “Can you get by on this stuff? I can get some other things for you. It’s all army rations, but…”
I waited for her to chew, swallow and take a swig from her canteen.
“This will satisfy my hunger, Mistress,” she told me with a smile. “You mustn’t waste meat and such on me. I have to kill it myself or it doesn’t nourish me well. If I don’t take its life, I might as well just eat these.”
I gulped upon hearing that. “Do you… eat it alive or something?”
She giggled. “I drink their blood, Mistress. Just like a vampire. I do cook and eat the meat later, but without the living blood, I’ll starve eventually.”
After a stunned moment, I checked, “It’s… animals, right?”
My question puzzled her for a moment, then her smile spread wide.
“It’s animals, Mistress” she assured me, her eyes twinkling. “Even when I was with the demons, it was only ever animals. Intelligent prey are reserved for the true demons. They only permit the hellspawn to feed on livestock and game animals.”
I wondered. “If you had been permitted, would you have eaten mortals?”
She bristled for a moment, then softened. After twisting her lips, she admitted, “I’m sure, when I was young, I might have done that if I could.”
Her bristle back, she stated. “Not now. Not after watching my mother die.”
Everything I could understand from that sentence hit me all at once, like a gut punch. I rushed to apologize. “Oh no! I’m so sorry…”
She gasped and ducked her head. “My apologies, Mistress! I did not mean to distress you!”
“Shindzha…?” I asked, baffled as I looked helplessly at the shaking woman. Why was she suddenly acting so strangely?
<Hmm,> Sen mused. <The feedback between Mistress and Servant seems a little strange in her case. Either something to do with hellspawn physiology or something to do with her previous servant relationship with her ‘lord’?>
I remained clueless as to what to do with the terrified girl, so Sen took over for me.
<Shindzha, be at ease. Lhan only felt anguish for you.>
She looked up, uncertainty in her eyes instead of the fear that I had last seen there.
<She has done nothing to punish you, right?>
The hellspawn gave a tentative nod, staring at me with wary eyes.
<It’s normal for people to feel empathy for someone suffering. I’m not sure why you felt whatever it was that frightened you so much, but she was neither upset nor angry with you. She was sorry for your loss.>
“Mistress?” She asked, hesitation still in her voice. A request for reassurance.
I smiled at her and nodded. “We aren’t angry. What did you feel that made you think we were?”
<She felt the resurgent hatred of someone who bitterly hated demons in her own world> came another voice, which sounded a little contrite <This one apologizes for failing to control her anger. This one had just deduced the particulars of the Servant’s mother’s death, and they were quite ugly. It seems demons in our two worlds have quite a lot in common.>
“It came across our link?” I asked, baffled.
<Shindzha’s connection to the princess is particularly strong,> Fan Li assessed. <To the point that she could probably communicate in Spiritual Voice with the princess if she felt the need. Possibly even through her to us in the Spirit Core. This is indeed a matter of her hellspawn physiology. Remember that, demon-bred child. Call out to us in emergencies.>
Shindzha nodded, mute and respectful at first, and then troubled. She finally asked, “All of you are the Mistress, right? I can feel that you are all the same, even though you sound like different people. I don’t understand it.”
<In the sense that you mean, we are all of those things,> Sen confirmed. <Really though, your Mistress is our member who lives in this world, Princess Tiana. It is she through whom your connection is made.>
She licked her lips, then stated, “You are so strong, and you know so much, even knowing how my mother died. Is it possible that you come from the false gods?”
I frowned and chided, “Shindzha, I don’t think you should use that term anymore.”
Demons call the gods of the mortals the ‘false gods’ and Astaroth the ‘true god’.
Shindzha shrank again, but at least she didn’t duck her head. “I’m sorry, Mistress. What should I call them?”
They aren’t exactly wrong about ‘false gods’, of course. The Immortals are the first to say they are not gods, in the sense that I believed in gods when I was alive, or the way Robert believed in his god. They are merely beings of a higher realm, who in turn live below beings from the realms above them, in an ever-upward ascent to unknown heights, perhaps until one reaches a lofty being like Robert’s God, capable of comprehending and reigning over all the eight-billion-fold universes, although nobody down in the lower levels can say for certain.
If that being exists somewhere, he certainly isn’t Astaroth, the ‘true god’ of the demons.
I told her, “You should call them Immortals. That’s what they call themselves. Among the mortals of this world, you should just call them ‘the gods’. The Demon God was never ‘the true god’, but he was an Immortal until he broke Heaven’s Law and became an outcast. We call him Astaroth, or just the Demon God. I understand this was not what you learned, growing up, but he is not the god you have believed in.”
She didn’t seem ready to disagree like I feared. She actually nodded. “My mother told me the same thing. She warned me he was not what they say.”
“We are not Immortals, but we have a strong connection to them,” I said. “And your Mistress is one of us. She’s our presence on Huade.”
She drew in a deep breath as she considered my words, then nodded. “This is the thing Sirth tried to explain, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” I nodded. Then I wondered, “Shindzha, does this forest feel a bit empty to you, too?”
She stared at the biscuit she had yet to finish for several seconds, then looked up at me with her eyes grown sharp.
“It seems that way to you, too, Mistress?”
