“Gods, this is so much easier than Arabesk, I can’t believe it,” Arne exclaimed despite himself. For once, things were turning out to be easier than expected and he was going to actually enjoy that. The Night Market, as it was termed, was in full flower despite it being just midday and getting access hadn’t even been difficult. The entry fee into the underground system of cellars under the northern part of the city was downright cheap and the wares on display were exotic and often magical.
They stopped for a moment at a stall draped in dark green cloth which sold …sticks. Dia had paused there and turned one of the sticks over disdainfully, ignoring the stall owner.
“Wands are for powerless arsebadgers…” she stated casually and walked off down the row of stalls. Arne shrugged and followed her.
“The mages for hire should be over in that direction,” Toog said, gesturing in the crowd. “Good thing I’m a people person.”
“Yes, imagine if we had to rely on charm,” Dia stated loudly, not turning.
“So we can just saunter down here and buy magical goods and services…” Arne said, still a bit overwhelmed. “No guilds, no registration, no purchase tripwires set up to regulate the use of magic…”
“Is Arabesk like that?” Toog asked.
Arne nodded. “Highly regulated. And training as a mage costs a fortune which means the magical items are ridiculously overpriced. Each of the academies have magic guilds associated with them.”
“Shouldn’t that drive the prices down?” Toog asked.
“Not if they compete on being the most expensive and unattainable one.”
“Mages shouldn’t be paid,” Dia interjected, having slowed down in the busy market to walk next to Arne.
“Really? But you're a mage.”
She looked at him, rolling her eyes. “Mages should just take what they want. This is all ri-diculous! It’s offensive and weak!”
Arne looked around at all the nearby people who had heard and took offence, hoping the situation wouldn’t get out of hand, since he would be hard pressed to escape Dia’s blast radius efficiently in the crowd. “Well, if they didn’t make their services available, we wouldn’t have a chance to pay a summoner,” he commented evenly.
“That looks promising,” Toog said, pointing to a stall with a large sign featuring a picture of a strange horned creature in a complicated circle.
“Sure, let’s just get this over with,” Dia said and stomped over to the stall where a middle-aged woman in a colourful dress with strange symbols embroidered everywhere was sitting behind the unadorned counter, having a cup of something acrid-smelling while reading a book. “We need a demon!” Dia snapped.
“I only do devils,” the woman stated in a disinterested voice, not looking up.
“Oh, what’s the difference?” Toog asked conversationally. “I am generally a bit unimpressed by magic, so I’m not fully caught up on the details.”
The woman looked up and sighed. “What do you need to speak to an other-realms personality for?”
“Other-realms personality?” Arne asked.
The woman looked even more tired. “Devils keep to the words of the contract to fuck you over. Demons fuck you over impolitely. So, what do you need it for?”
“That’s a really private question,” Toog stated.
“In general!” the woman sighed. “Are you looking to barter away a soul, get in touch with a loved one, gain a favour, get rich in a hurry…” she counted the options off on her fingers tiredly.
“We just sort of need general information on something… esoteric?” Arne suggested. “I think that sums it up, right?”
Dia rolled her eyes, Toog nodded, smiling.
“Fine, I can set you up with an imp, then. That will be twelve min, paid in advance, no refunds in case it’s a no-show, no specific names called or bound, no do-overs. Deal?”
“It’s fine. He’s paying,” Dia stated, nodding to Arne who crossed his arms.
“Do you know how much that is?” Arne asked.
“No, because I ‘don’t understand money’, do I, Arne? Just pay the woman, will you?”
“You are planning and organising,” Toog added sensibly. “You should have planned for this. You made us sit around at breakfast writing a list with one question on it.”
Arne sighed and paid the woman who pocketed the coins and stepped out of the stall, flipping the sign over to read ‘summoning in progress’. Then she gestured for them to go behind the stall. A simple circle within a circle was painted on the ground in the relative privacy behind the stall, bordering on other stalls nearby and the summoner began drawing symbols with a piece of chalk tied to a long stick. She muttered words under her breath as she walked around the circle, filling the sign in. Then she stopped and held out a small bowl and a pen-knife, jiggling them expectantly.
Arne took a step back, clueless as to what was expected but definitely not participating.
Dia rolled her eyes again. “Spell ingredients. This is weak!” she spat and then grabbed the knife, unhesitatingly made a small incision on her middle finger and let a few drops of blood drip into the bowl.
“Intention needs proof,” the summoner just shrugged and let a drop of Dia’s blood drip onto some of the symbols on the floor.
Then the summoning began. Arne stood back as far as he could get, Dia tapped her foot impatiently and Toog found a small notebook and began transcribing the words being said, attention rapt on the woman as she worked. Then the summoner stepped aside, and a darkness came into existence within the circle. A bad egg smell spread, and the darkness began to condense into a small being, only about half a meter in height. The face was flat, comprised of a long, grinning slit for a mouth and two glinting eyes the same green as rust on copper.
Two curved reddish horns shaped themselves atop the head and the minute creature suddenly shook off the smoke, revealing spotted pinkish-purple skin. It looked around while scratching its rather tiny male genitals pensively with a clawed, three-fingered hand.
“Summoning, huh? Well, you got me, what’s the fuss?” the creature asked in a voice that seemed too deep for its minute frame.
“You have ten minutes. The circle will send the creature back when the time is up. Don’t cross the circle, don’t break the circle, don’t let it out, don’t try to pet it, kick it or shake its hand.” The summoner looked pointedly at each of them and then went back to her stall.
Arne could barely twist his attention away from the strange being. He had seen magic in action on occasion, even owned a few magical items like the lightstone and his small arsenal back in Arabesk, but this actual personality from a different realm, reality, state of existence… it was close to being overwhelming. An actual, intelligent being from another reality, who could answer questions about …life, circumstances, other versions of normal in other realities.
“Fine, if you two are too slow to do this…” Dia scoffed. “Creature! We seek the Primordial Powers and want to know what their tether is!” she snapped.
“Hello, crazy,” the creature said. “You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific than that. There’s about a million bars and brothels across the realities called the Primordial Powers, and what part of your anatomy do you want tethered?”
“Gods damn you, you little shit!” Dia snapped.
The imp grinned, showing a long row of triangular teeth.
“We want to know what tethers the race of beings that has an ambassador in my head!” Dia barked.
The imp’s eyes glinted. “You know what, you have to stick that pretty head of yours closer so I can see or…”
“Or? Because that is not happening. What kind of an amateur do you take me for!” Dia snapped.
Arne and Toog exchanged glances and shrugged. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” Toog stage whispered.
“Oh, let's not get into that nitty gritty,” the circle-bound creature dismissed. “I got this great idea that’ll solve all your problems. You want info, I got you covered. You are clearly a mage of some power. Have you considered an imp familiar? Take me on, and I tell you, hot stuff, you can get all the info on tethers that you need. Do we have a deal?” the small being asked, holding out a hand to shake.
“Ehm, I think that lady said not to break the circle…” Arne interjected.
“What do I get out of it?” Dia asked, crossing her arms.
“What does it get out of it?” Toog added, pointing to the small, grinning imp.
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“Alright, alright, let’s just be grownup about this,” the imp held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I get to not be in the Hells and start working the Material in my spare time. You get unlimited access to all this,” he indicated his in every way small body, “and my vast library of knowledge of the realms and network of contacts that is basically limitless. Let me just say, I’m just three shakes of a tail from basically any Hellduchess or duke. You can’t lose, taking me on.”
Dia shook her head. “Just tell me what I want to know, how about that!”
“Nah, sorry lady, I don’t really see the value in that. You can’t harm me, so you got nothing on me. Oh, and your time will be up in about four minutes. How about it? Take me on as a familiar, then we’ll both be golden.”
“How about you answer the question and I think about it?” Dia argued.
“How about you make a blood oath to take me on as a familiar and I go prove I can get the information you seek?”
“What! You don’t even have it?” Dia exploded. “Ri-diculous!”
“‘Course not, that’s specialised knowledge, sweetheart. Very few can just pull that kind of knowhow out their ass but give me an hour on this realm …it’s the Second Material Realm, right?” the imp interrupted himself, looking around quizzically.
“You don’t even know that?” Dia asked.
“Just making conversation, toots. Anyhow, gimme an hour on this realm and I’ll be back with the answer, and you take me on as a familiar for at least a year on this plane, four hundred and twenty-seven days, start and end day included in their entirety of twenty-six hours, and after that time, we extend our compact in case we are mutually inclined. Waddaya say?” the imp asked, smiling broadly.
“Fine. I will call you up in an hour and you better have a good answer for me!” Dia shrugged.
“Just a couple seconds left, sweetheart. Bleed a bit, spit it at me and we have a deal!”
Rolling her eyes, Dia sucked her finger where she had cut herself earlier and spat at the imp.
“You won’t regret this, honey cakes!” the imp grinned as the darkness began blossoming into the circle anew, washing out the outline of the small body before dissipating and leaving them alone behind the stalls.
o-0-o
The hour went quickly since Arne had to go steal additional cash and didn’t think it wise to do so at the Night Market. He considered making the others go procure funds, but Dia would end up murdering a lot of people and Toog… he didn’t know how Toog would approach it and it frankly wasn’t something he wanted to know either.
He had expected to have to pay to get back into the Night Market, but the guards recognised him as having paid when he returned with additional funds, and since being recognised was rarely a good thing, he was getting a little suspicious about his fortune. When he got back and discovered that Toog had spent time haggling with the summoner to lower the price since they were return customers, Arne was pretty certain there would be some sort of backlash that would hit him later in the day to make up for the ease and speed of the entire summoning adventure.
When the small creature appeared in the circle, it winked at Dia who sighed.
“Oh, do I have great news for you!” the imp stated, excitedly. “I got you exactly the thing you needed although it took a year of service to a new Hellduke and a bit of backstabbing to get there.”
“A year…” Arne said.
“That is literally a creature from another reality, and you are boggled that time works differently there?” Dia asked, clearly rhetorically, and rolled her eyes.
Arne took a deep, calming breath, filling his lungs with the muggy smell of underground, sulphur and all the sweaty bodies crowding around down here and didn’t respond.
“Cute. Good group,” the imp commented. “So, we got a real personal deal to make, sugar-mage. In the interest of fairness…” the pinkish creature paused for effect and then burst out laughing.
“Get the fuck on with it,” Dia snarled. “We are on a ten-minute clock.”
“Fairness… I will tell you the first bit of the whole. The tether is real, and it is in Uldran Underwaves. There! As soon as you take me on as a familiar, I’ll give you the rest.”
“Fine. How do we do this?” Dia asked.
“Yes! We just shake on it, gorgeous, and give each other a solemn promise!” the minute fiend stuck its hand out. “Go on, it’s like a marriage with a deadline, but nobody needs to murder each other in the end. I, Imp, swear to be the familiar of…” Imp looked expectantly up.
“Dia.”
“Of Dia and serve her faithfully to the best of my not inconsiderable abilities until a year has passed in this realm of existence, four hundred and twenty-seven days, start and end day included in their entirety of twenty-six hours, and after that time, we extend our compact in case we are mutually inclined.”
“Fine, I, Dia, swear to take on Imp as a familiar and have him do my bidding for a year,” Dia said, clearly annoyed, and stuck her hand out.
Imp did the same and the moment their hands met, the symbols in the double circle flared in vivid green and burned out in a flash, Imp unfolded a pair of tiny wings that should not be big enough to actually carry him, and flew quickly into the air, as Dia pulled him out of the circle.
“Trust me, kid, you are not going to regret this!” Imp stated with an enormous, disturbing grin on his face.
“Tell me about the damned tether and maybe I agree,” Dia stated testily.
“What, here? Right in the middle of Mageland where everyone and their sick grandmother can listen in on you?”
“If they give me trouble I will just ki–“
“The imp is right, come on, let’s go,” Arne quickly interjected and was disturbed when the small creature slowly faded out of sight.
“I’ll just be invisi-Imp until we get there, how about that?” came Imp’s voice from the air just above Dia’s head.
“Inter-realm bodies…” Toog mused as they left. “What are my chances of getting to dissect something from other realms?”
o-0-o
“So, I had to do some pretty nasty things for this information, and when I say nasty, please remember that I was literally in the Hells.”
“Are you going to be this talkative for a whole year?” Dia asked, pre-emptively annoyed.
“Nah, nah, you just tell me to go sign some souls up or something, I can go be busy otherwheres if you don’t need me, don’t worry,” Imp consoled casually.
“Sign some souls up for what?” Toog asked curiously.
“Oh, you know, a thousand years, Hells years of course, of torture and rebirth as an Imp followed by what will almost certainly be a great career as you work your way downwards, mercilessly striving to serve the Hellduchesses and dukes until you become strong enough to shank their sorry asses, lob their corpses in the Styx and take over their sweet digs.”
“Ah, right,” Toog said, nodding wisely.
Arne pushed off from the locked door of Dia’s room he had been leaning against, watching the others pay attention to the new pet. “So, the tether?” he asked.
Imp looked at Dia for confirmation.
Arne rolled his eyes.
Dia nodded.
“So the tether, according to the Hellduke I had an audience with, is an object in Uldran, as I stated. There’s just a tiny little catch…”
“Aha! There it is!” Arne exclaimed, almost relieved to be back to normal disaster management.
“Well,” Imp said apologetically, “as you can probably imagine, Hellrulers are pretty busy people and they need compensation for their time, right? So, I can tell you what the tether is if you agree to build and maintain a cult to the Hellduke Bel-Ospeches, also named The Graceful Slayer, Infant-Monger, Jomalval-Arzis, Usurper of the Ashen Wastelands, Gargoth-Banisher, Prison Ruler, Lord of Tauthlin, Supre–“
“Shut up!” Dia barked. “It’s fine. Arne will do it. He is good with both charm and money,” she stated, waving a hand in Arne’s direction.
“Ehh, well, no. I most certainly will not do that. I’m not signing my soul over to anybody for any reason,” Arne stated firmly. “You can be a soul-slut all you want, though. Don’t hold back.”
“He didn’t actually say to sign your soul over,” Toog interjected. “The Hellduke what’s-his-face just wants a cult in his name.”
“Fine. Understandable. So, you do it. You have death cult experience,” Arne stated.
“Hmm, I guess I could,” Toog nodded. “But as we talked about, a whole smattering of cults fail in the first year. You need a lot of money and logistics kind of expertise to run a cult, it’s not a thing you just do.”
“And there we have it. I’m afraid I’m too busy being menaced to go finance and run a cult with money and time I don’t have. Besides, we don’t even know that we are going to live through this whole tether business, so we can’t really promise to do anything on the other side of it,” Arne said calmly. “Sorry,” he shrugged. “You will probably have to send the creature back.”
“Ah, don’t be so literal minded,” Imp said. “You people have never actually dealt with Hellpowers before, have you?”
Arne looked sceptically at the Imp. “So what are you saying? We use a loophole?”
“Of course!” Imp grinned. “If you noticed it, I said ‘if you agree to build and maintain a cult to the Hellduke Bel-Ospeches, also named The Graceful Slayer, Infant-Monger and so on’. Nobody said anything about the time frame, and it just has to be done by one or all of you, the Hellduke probably doesn’t give the faintest shit. Honestly, with the level of power he’s lugging around, a cult more or less is small change, he’s literally ruling a chunk of the Hells, you know? And to him, knowledge of the tether is pretty mundane information since he was there when the whole thing went down. Don’t sweat it. I mean, some people are going to have to go give their souls to him, but that’s kinda exactly what the cult is for. You don’t have to do anything else than get the ball rolling when convenient.”
Arne crossed his arms. “But you said build and maintain,” he stated. “Define maintaining a cult to a Hellduke.”
“Keep them sacrificing people to their Hellduke master in exchange for infernal blessings,” Imp shrugged, clearly feeling this to be obvious information.
“That makes sense, of course,” Arne said. “But then what happens to this deal if we go and keel over before we get around to doing this?”
“Well, let me just make this abundantly clear,” Imp stated. “If you go and die before you make a cult in the Hellduke’s name, you go straight to one of the Hells. But let me tell you, kids, you for sure will anyway. You three are absolutely delightfully filthy murderers, thieves and remorseless makers of misery. And once you hit the Hells, it just is what it is, there aint no special treatment, it’s all an equal opportunity backstab-fest where you work your way down over the eons, as I said. So you really, truly lose nothing.”
Arne sighed. “People keep calling me evil. It’s completely absurd…”
“Sure, kid. Whatever you say,” Imp shrugged and winked at Dia.
Arne ran some calculations and probabilities through his mind. A cult would need some worldly things like a place to meet, a way to get rid of the bodies perhaps through cannibalism and a charity soup kitchen for the bones, a …ritual knife budget and some robes, he assumed. There would need to be recruiters, a priesthood… actually, exactly like the Family, now that he mulled it over. If the Family was stopped, the cult vacuum they left behind would be less hard to do a power grab over than to build the whole thing from the ground up…
“I am not going to worship any Hells-thing, just so we are clear on this. I’m not going to be part of the cult myself,” Arne said.
“No problem! Nobody asked you to.”
“So I can literally just hire someone to do the cult leadering?” Arne asked for clarification.
“Of course. Nobody ever cares about the how,” Imp grinned. “The followers and victims will provide the fuel. Priesthood usually don’t believe in anything much anyway. No point having faith when the object of your prayers actually answers you on a daily basis, is there?”
“Good point… In that case, as soon as I have the required funds and additional means to do so, I will hire someone to build a cult in honour of the Hellduke …Bel-Ospeches?” Arne looked questioningly at the small fiend.
Imp nodded in confirmation.
“And at no point will I myself be required to involve my soul or the soul of anyone I happen to care about or strategically choose to not involve. Nor will I be required to give, pay or donate any objects or sums of valuables of any kind that are in addition to the normal running of the cult, which will be largely independent financially once it is up and running after about a year, or however long it may take.”
Imp applauded him. “Excellent. That’s a deal. Job done. The tether is a big old statue inside the main Temple of Hilden Lyshammer, the leader of the Uldra pantheon. It depicts Hilden herself banishing the Primeval Powers to their prison. As I was told it, you can’t really miss the thing. How to get into the temple, though, that’s a you-problem. I’m guessing they aint gonna be happy with outsiders. Dwarves are retardedly righteous on the best of days, and downright speciesist on the worst.”
“Oh, great,” Arne commented casually. “A stealth job…” He looked around at Dia and Toog and the addition of the chatty fiend and knew in his heart that he would have to be the one to take care of this when they got as far.
Arne sighed.