My lips were blistered and searing as I said the word again. It still wasn’t right, and I felt a scalding bubble raise on my tongue as I paid the price for getting it wrong. I backpedaled as the demon imp skittered forward, its claws clacking on the stone, its filthy chuckle mocking me. It was playing with its food, determined not to waste a moment’s pleasure. It was like some perversion of a toddler; four of us had gone down in mere heartbeats, and it didn’t want playtime to be over yet.

I risked another glance at the scrap of paper in my hand. That double-loop line in the middle had to be an ‘oo’ sound, didn’t it? Nothing else made sense. I’d known as soon as I laid my eyes on the word that it meant something important, despite it being in a script I’d never seen before. I could feel it.

The demon slid aside from Tamra’s wild swing, its eyeless crescent head tracking the movement effortlessly. She might have been more successful if she hadn’t screamed at it before unleashing her unfocused destruction, but I got the sense she was a ‘kill it first, think it through later’ kind of girl. I approved of the sentiment if not the execution. She was bound by her own nature.

Bound. There was something in that thought, something vital, but then the little beast was on me. Without even thinking about it I shifted my weight to the left, caught the foul thing by its knobbly, slimy wrist and pulled it past me. I’d been paying Ganar, the burly assistant who helped Father’s in his Tower duties and was often in our home, to train with me on the sly. I’d used Father’s bedside pouch to fund the endeavor, and the man had drilled me on this throw until I could take him down every time. Ganar, though, never bit when I threw him, and my current sparring partner had no such compunctions. I felt a spike of pain in my head and clapped my hand to my right ear. The top half was gone, and hot blood slicked my fingers. “Bones of the Blessed!” I hissed, stumbling away. It was hard to think through the pain. Bound. Why had that been important? Holy Gates of Ascension, that hurt!

The little demon scampered in a gleeful circle, plucking the scrap of my ear from its teeth and waving it at me. Sett jabbed at it clumsily with the spear he’d liberated from Holry’s corpse, but the damned thing wouldn’t hold still to be skewered. Instead, it grabbed the haft of the spear, yanked it away, clobbered him over the head with it, and then bit off three of his fingers. Sett gasped and clutched at the spurting stumps, falling back. Tamra charged in with another scream, and the demonling screamed right back, dancing aside from her lunge and pelting her with Sett’s fingers.

We’d never touch it if we kept up like this; it was too cursedly fast. If only… the thought that had been bouncing loose in my head slotted home like a fence post sliding into its hole, and my eyes popped wide as I looked one last time at my scrap of paper. The double loop wasn’t a sound, it was an idea. Links in a chain! Bound! Chain in the language of the Old Tower Writ was zha, so putting that together with the other marks… my mind spun frantically.

The demon imp didn’t wait. It sprang at me. Sett threw himself in the way, weaponless, and it went up and over, tearing as it went. Sett went down in a heap, and it was on me. Distracted as I was, I barely got my hands up in time to keep it from tearing out my throat as we fell to the floor. Instead, it opened its fanged muzzle wide and bit down on my ribs, sinking its teeth deep.

It was now or never. I bit through the thick blister impeding the tip of my tongue, barely noticing the rush of bloody fluid that burst forth, focused my mind on the image of a chain binding the demon, and channeled the shock of pain from my chest into a single scream.

“Derzhat!”

The demon’s body locked up and hardened like oak, and it sat still atop my chest, a frantic whine rising from its throat. I pushed it off me, and it tipped onto one side, held up at a crazy angle by its own immobilized arm.

“A little help?” I called weakly.

“Gods above, yes,” Tamra said grimly. Her wild strength served her well now, and from where I lay bleeding on the floor I watched her cleave all the way through the demon’s head and down into its chest with her copper-edged sword. I slumped back, breathing heavily. Tamra leaned against one of the empty plinths and laughed, a ragged, desperate sound. We’d survived. Barely.

Then everyone else started breathing again, too, and the bright yellow glow of healing lit the room on all sides. It felt like being dipped into refreshingly cool waters, and the pain in my ribs and ear soothed and disappeared. The sensation left me, and I felt like a wrung-out dish rag. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep for three days. Above the weariness, I realized one piece of me still hurt. For some reason, my mouth and lips were still blistered and burnt. Did some hidden Healer miss that bit somehow? Or was it purposeful?

Letting my head flop to one side, I saw the others stirring to life. Aldric looked disgruntled and Orm ashamed, while Holry was closed off and maybe a little scared. I couldn’t blame her. This whole dying business was nobody’s idea of a good time.

“You okay?” Sett said, offering me a hand.

With a bone-deep sigh, I took it and let him haul me upright. “I should be asking you,” I replied, my burnt lips giving me a lisp. “You went down hard there at the end.”

He nodded. “We’d better get used to it. All in the service of the Everwar, right?”

I privately thought that the Everwar would be best served if I never experienced death again, but he was so earnest and serious that I just clapped him on the shoulder. He was solid, inside and out. No good with a spear, and no great shakes at sparring either, but solid. Had he not thrown himself in front of that imp, I’d never have gotten the word right, and we’d have all died. Would they have bothered to resurrect us if the whole group failed? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“What was that you said that held it still?” Tamra asked. “I heard it, but I can’t remember it.”

Eager to try it again, I picked up the fallen spear, held it parallel to the ground, and dropped it from chest height. “Derzhat,” I said, focusing on it. The spear halted in midair, arrested in its momentum two hands from the floor. When I said it right, it only burnt a little bit… which, added to the burns I still had, made my vision swim for a moment.

“Wow,” Iles said, fascinated.

Aldric rubbed his ear like he had an itch deep inside it. “What did you just say? I heard your voice, but it was like… water running, or something. How did you do that?”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“I just said the word that holds things still,” I said. “Derzhat. You can’t hear that?”

“Now I did,” Tamra said.

“Yeah. Derzhat,” Aldric agreed. “That’s not what it sounded like before. Derzhat. Why aren’t you frozen?”

I shook my head, thinking it through. “I wasn’t using the word that last time, I was just saying it. The intent matters, maybe?”

“Weird,” Holry muttered. “I don’t like it.”

I couldn’t disagree more, but the girl had just had her legs broken and then died on top of that, so I let it be.

“Now where?” Sett said, looking around. “There’s nowhere else to go; are we done?”

“I think we’d know if we were done,” Aldric said sourly. “They’d feed us lunch, maybe.”

“Well, this girl just killed a demon,” Tamra said, strutting over to the imp’s corpse and grabbing the hilt of her sword, still sunk into the demon’s core. “Don’t know about the rest of you, but I think I’ve done my bit for the day.” With an effort, she pulled the blade free, the sound of metal on metal ringing through the chamber.

Metal on metal? “Did you feel that?” I asked her.

She frowned. “Yeah, the edge was biting on something in there.”

“Cut it open,” I urged her.

“Ugh, do we have to?” Holry said, looking away. “I don’t need to see what its insides look like.”

“It’s seen ours,” Aldric said. “Only fair to return the favor.”

Probing with the tip of her sword, Tamra found the hard metal thing inside the demon’s chest cavity and then turned the blade edgewise, sawing vertically down its center to open it up. Her initial blow had cut most of the way through whatever passed for a breastbone among demonkind, but there was still a fair bit of grunting and swearing as she worked at it.

“Pull back on that side, will you?” she said, gesturing to Iles. With a horrified fascination, the wispy girl reached into the deep cut and pulled back, opening the cleft so Tamra could cut deeper. It was disgusting, slimy work – the demon’s corpse smelled like a midden full of rotten meat, and its blood was black and slick. After a moment Sett reached in on the other side, and together they hauled back, bones cracking as the chest cavity opened up like the world’s ugliest flower.

In the center of the demon’s chest, right where a heart should have been, lay a metal box as big as two fists across, wrought with arcane designs and eye-bending whorls.

A deep satisfaction rose up in me. “That’s what’s next,” I said.

“Sheol’s sweaty stones,” Tamra said, weary. “All right, let’s get this done.” She scooped the box up in one hand and shook it off, flinging midnight gore everywhere.

“Careful, please,” Orm said. “The blood could be caustic. Or make us sick.”

Tamra snorted. “I’m not dying again today, thanks.” She put an ear up to the box and shook it a little more gently. “Nothing knocking around inside. And I don’t see any latches or clasps.”

Iles had her hands clasped together as if she was keeping herself from snatching the thing out of Tamra’s hands. “It’s a puzzle. We have to figure it out.”

“Sod that,” Tamra laughed. “I’m with Aldric – it’s lunch time. I’ve got the key to this box right here.” She walked to one of the empty stone plinths and brought the metal cube down with all her force on the corner. The curious device shifted in her hands, smaller blocks of itself rearranging themselves without her moving them. We all watched, entranced, as the cube became a multi-pointed star with rays in all directions.

“See?” said said, holding it out proudly. “You want to solve a puzzle, just hit it real hard.”

A cone of snowy white something shot into her face from the star tip nearest her, and the sound in her throat died. Everyone was startled into stillness, myself included, and Tamra just stood there, the smile frozen on her face. She didn’t move at all; she just held the star exactly as she had before.

“You okay, Tam?” Aldric said hesitantly. “What was that?”

She didn’t move a muscle.

“I don’t think she can let go,” he muttered. “It’s got her stuck. Give it here, Tam.”

“Wait,” Iles said.

Aldric had already wrenched the star out of Tamra’s hands, too concerned for her to listen. With a crack, the star came free in his hands. Most of Tamra’s fingers came with it, snapping off like dry twigs. There was no blood. It was like she’d turned into glass.

“Oh,” Aldric said, sounding stupid. “Sorry.”

He tried to put the star back into what remained of her palms, and they shattered, setting off a chain reaction of breakage up her arms and across her body. She fell into crystalline bits no larger than an acorn. Her head crumbled in on itself, and within seconds all that was left of her was two leg stumps surrounded by a pile of glassy shards colored the red of blood and the white of bone.

“You can’t just break a puzzle,” Iles said, sounding offended.

“Saints, these bastards are brutal,” Aldric whispered, looking at Tamra’s remains.

“No more brutal than they have to be,” Sett murmured.

“See, but I think she had to do that,” Aldric said, turning the star over in his hands. “There’s a hole in the bottom now. Just the size of my finger. What kind of sick game is this where somebody has to die in order for us to win?” He shook his head, disgusted. “Enough of this.”

“Don’t –” Iles said desperately, reaching for him, but it was too late. He’d jammed his pointer finger into the hole at the junction of two of the star’s rays, and immediately he jerked it back out, screaming. The finger was dissolving rapidly.

He dropped it, shaking his hand like it was on fire. “Do something, do something!” he cried, panicked. He looked from one friend to the next, all of whom backed away, not wanting to touch him when something was so obviously wrong. Holry had the grace to mutter an apology as she moved away from him, but I just looked him in the eye and shook my head when he came to me. His whole arm was gone, and he was leaving goopy red piles on the floor wherever he went.

“You’re the worst!” he screamed at me, flinging some drippy bits of himself onto my face as he fell to the ground and his head disappeared into bubbling goo. I wiped the gore away in a panic, fearful that his curse would spread, but whatever was eating him was interested in him alone. All I got was the foul taste of Aldric in my mouth, and then both he and his screams were gone.

“Honestly,” Iles said, finally showing some heat. “Can none of you thickwits listen?” She scooped the object up from the floor where Aldric had dropped it. It had changed shape again while we were all staring at Aldric’s melting corpse; now it was a sphere, still the color of old brass.

“Neither of them needed to die,” Iles continued, running her hands carefully over the lines and whorls of the ball, inspecting it closely. “It was just protecting itself.”

“How do you know?” Orm asked.

She paused, looking thoughtful. “Not sure. That’s how I’d make it.” Then she smiled. “Ah. I knew it.” She stroked one long, thin finger down a long whorl on its side, tapped a divot near its top twice, and twisted the top half in one direction and the bottom half in the other. The halves separated cleanly, hinging open on one side to reveal a hollow interior full of interlocking brass gears, copper wires, and glowing crystals.

I tensed, waiting for her to die in some spectacular fashion.

Instead, the world flashed white on all sides, and I felt myself jerked away to somewhere new.