The door to Samsian’s study creaked open, the weight of the aged wood making the hinges protest.

  “The candles are stored and the room has been swept, Master Samsian.” Luos’ fragile voice explored the room, the atmosphere already tense. The old man sat at his desk, his face obscured by a conjured screen, his fingers moving spiderlike over a conjured board, tapping the construct’s buttons rapidly.

  The system often referred to this kind of construct as a “keyboard”, each button corresponding to one or more characters from the old languages. Constructs could often be programmed to ignore or dampen their audible responses, but Samsian preferred the loud click-clack of the keys as he typed.

  Samsian usually typed, as Luos could recall, in short bursts as he thought about his writing, pressing the keys barely at all.

  Now he was typed furiously. Leaning towards the screen, moving in his seat to add more leverage to his keystrokes, each click and clack coming out like the cracking of hard-shelled pecans. Each thought his fingers conveyed ended in a small flourish, as though recoiling from the force of their sending.

  Luos could not see what his mentor was writing, but only the glowing blank back of the conjured screen. He could therefore not spy on these white-hot thoughts. Had Luos really made the old man this angry? He began rummaging through his recollections of the event while Samsian’s attention was on his writing.

  He had carefully placed and lit the candles, and Samsian had seemed pleased. The drawing of the circles had likewise yielded no comment. In fact, it hadn’t been until the appearance of the daemon had he expressed any sign of frustration.

  The typing stopped suddenly and Samsian batted the screen away, which swiveled a quarter revolution around the man before slowing to a stop. The dark characters on the white screen were too washed out for Luos to read in the split second before his master spoke.

  “I am disappointed, boy,” the old man said. Luos studied his master’s features, as he often did while concentrating on concentrating. His white beard would have come down to a point about his naval if it hadn’t been apparently lopped off in a ragged line a couple inches below his chin. It cling to the wrinkly skin of his face, drawing purchase all along the sides of his face, the highest point where hair started being somewhere around the top of the ears. The skin was not the sun-aged leather he was used to seeing of the men in Hill Hill, but skin preserved from a lifetime spent indoors. That wasn’t to say his face was pristine. Luos could make out the ghosts of scars where the beard didn’t cling.

  His nose was stubby and plump, but didn’t bear the jolly red hue typical of such. It wasn’t an arch nose, either. Neither were his cheeks plump and rosy. Luos could make out the height of the cheekbones easier than in the round face of a high merchant. The white eyebrows knitted together, wrinkling his forehead, white snowcaps on twin ridges, foreshadowing an avalanche. And then there was nothing for it. He would have to look his master in the eye.

  A wizard’s stare is stuff of legend. There’s no telling what those eyes had stared at, only knowing that you are nowhere near the worst. The intensity pierced you, pricked the back of your neck, and jellied your spine. The weight of that magnificent concentration and force of will now centered solely on you, like a whole herd of ekwodillius trampling the head of a pin.

  Samsian steepled his fingers, sitting back in his chair like a compressed spring.

  “Do you want to guess as to why I’m disappointed?”

  I had to do something with the summoning, but Luos had no sure stab at the specifics. Instead, he could choose something not entirely his fault with which to open. “I didn’t mean to stumble in the circle. I was unprepared for how it would feel, being investigated so. Like a waking dream, or a sudden drowsiness.”

  Samsian remained coiled behind those steepled fingers and that unblinking stare.

  “You feel you were unprepared?” he prodded, “As though I should have specifically warned you of the dangers of binding a daemon?”

  This stung Luos. The old man had twisted Luos’ explanation into an accusation, which he was now parrying. And still the man remained coiled, nature of his strike as yet unrevealed.

  “Through no fault but my own, of course. My own inexperience with avatars of operation and the summoning process, how,” he paused, “invasive it is. For this I apologize for stumbling.”

  Samsian’s mouth moved as though searching for something stuck in his teeth. “Perhaps then you were altogether unaware of the nature of a test? You expect to apologize when you receive bad marks, to simply explain them away,” the old man sneered, slouched in his chair. “And when, by the grace of the algorithm, I should turn you loose on the world, you will turn to the victims of your mistakes and give them the same excuses? You didn’t know. You were inexperienced. You anticipated not the taxing influence of the power you are unfit to wield.”

  More lashes stung Luos in the heart. His breathing became labored as his own fury rose in response to his master’s. What more could he expect from him? And still the old man coiled like a snake.

  “I stumbled,” he explained slowly through gritted teeth. “It happens. I’m apologizing and will do better in the future.”

  He was cut off with a single wry laugh. “If there is to be such a future.”

  “I summoned a daemon. You cannot deny me that.” Luos had spoken without thinking. He could almost hear the old man’s restraint snap in the coming silence. He suddenly stood, both hands on the tabletop, his chair teetering behind him as he leaned over the desk and over Luos. Here was the old man’s point, rushing at him like an arrow. Hissed at him like the strike of a serpent.

  “And when, pray, were you going to get around to binding the creature?”

  Luos recalled his master’s intervention. He recalled the invocation the old man had shouted like a prairie gale.

  “While you were piddling about arguing with the thing, it was studying you, it was weaseling out of your grasp.”

  “It-…But-…It wasn’t,” Luos stuttered. “The Constrictor-…”

  “But what if it was?” Samsian interjected. “Every moment that creature is not firmly under your grasp, it will wriggle around to bite you, to win its freedom. And then what will your excuses amount to as it ravages the town, killing indiscriminately. What have I been preparing you for, boy, if not for the containment,” he pounded the table with both hands for emphasis on the word, “of this awesome power?”

  The old man’s eyes were wild, but Luos’ were wet. His own face twitched as he tried to hold them back through the old man’s admonishment. Even so, he thought he could make out something else in the intense stare. Was this rage fueled by fear? But it was gone, the furrowed brow slamming shut the wild look, focusing it again into fury.

  Carefully, dropping the words like sacks of flour, Samsian concluded, “What do you think daemons do?”

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  He had taken too long to bind the daemon, Luos realized. The Constrictor wasn’t enough. He could see that now all too clearly in hindsight.

  Luos fought the urge to wipe his eyes as his lip trembled. He held the man’s stare, feeling it fill him up with guilt, turning his own rising rage against himself, feeling the first tear stream down his red hot cheek.

  His thoughts went to his hands-on lessons with Peezlebub, always carefully supervised by Samsian. The cat had seemed nice enough, doing the simple things Samsian had told Luos to have the daemon do. Neither he nor his master had to force the cat into any of the actions, Luos asked and he had obeyed.

  “Give me a fire,” Luos had brazenly asked. There had been an obvious brazier in the room, and Samsian had just finished telling Luos to use Peezlebub to make a fire in it. But what if the cat had not been as broken-in as he was? Why, he would have easily misconstrued the command, probably resulting in Luos’ burning to a pile of cinders before he could even utter an admonishment.

  But Peezle had been summoned decades ago, Luos realized. He’d been living under Samsian’s control all the while. Perhaps it was to Samsian’s credit that Peezle was so docile, so willing to receive orders.

  Samsian had told him then as well, though with much less rage and much more concern, “What do you think daemons do?”

  Samsian was seated again, no longer staring at Luos. Luos, however, was still boiling with frustration, biting back the first sob, his mind tormented with the implications of a daemon breach, the spirit loosed upon the town to do its worst. And it being all his fault.

  Samsian sighed and sat back down in his chair. The screen swiveled back to cover his face and he began to type again. “You will see what I mean in time. You are still not allowed to use Asmod, though there may come a time when you may do so while supervised. For now, go clean yourself up and see to the rest of your chores. Leave me be.” With that, he waved sniveling Luos out the door.

  ****

  “It hurt. It just hurt so much.”

  In the featureless void of the spiritual realm of the machine, conversation drifted between two daemons. Asmod’s voice wavered weakly as he recalled the spell used to extract his obedience ravaged his formless soul.

  “It really did feel like a squeeze, and I was almost glad in the first moment for that feeling of touch, you know? And then it became immediately overwhelming. It felt almost like being swallowed. Like by a boa constrictor, you know?”

  Silence. To the daemons it felt like a chasm, though the real time which passed could have been any length.

  “How does it do that, Peezle?” came Asmod’s voice again.

  More silence. Asmod began to worry that he was alone. There was no confirmation to any sense he had that the other daemon was actually there. Peezlebub had hailed him out of his vessel, which Asmod had left sleeping in the summoning room, and now he was here, back in the grey light, like behind the eyelids on a sunny day. Or in the twilight of a dreamless sleep.

  Finally another voice came. It was Peezle’s. “I’ve got something to show you. Follow me.”

  Before Asmod could ask what that meant in a world such as this, he felt something like a tug at his soul. Upon turning his focus to this one sensation amongst this numb nothingness, the world appeared.

  All at once there was sunlight and grass and trees. There was a blue sky with neat little clouds. There was the sound of wind and rustling and, though he couldn’t describe it, something almost like the inaudible hum of the earth. A thing he had not known he was missing and could not have placed his fingers on even if he had had any.

  Fingers, too, were here. They were at the ends of his arms, which were attached to shoulders, which were just below his head. He wasn’t a hawg. He was-

  “Luos!” came a cry. It was Samsian.

  Looking – Oh! To look again! – to where the cry had come, Asmod saw not the old man with the white beard and scars. It was a younger man. A man with short black hair in a stylish wave upon his head. He also had a black moustache and goatee. In the middle of his face was that same nose, flanked by those cheekbones of his. And he wore a sharp ensemble with a buttoned shirt, tie, and vest of earthen tones, with crisp brown slacks and fine leather shoes.

  “Master Samsian?” Asmod inquired as he approached. He could feel the ground beneath him as his legs conveyed him closer. Such simple delights filled him with pleasure.

  The man gave him a glance and a smile, but subtly alien to Asmod. Where Samsian was firm and intense, this younger man which shared his features was slack and apologetic. There was a soft submission in his face, starkly contrasting the firm glare often seen on his master’s.

  “You’re Peezlebub,” he corrected himself before the man could speak.

  Peezle nodded.

  The questions inside Asmod bubbled over, the most glaring ones first.

  Peezlebub listened to them politely, choosing not to answer any until they ceased streaming from the boy.

  “But oh!” Asmod said suddenly, “What is it I look like?”

  Peezle gestured to a still pond which lay nearby. In his reflection, Asmod saw-

  “But that’s just me,” he said dejectedly.

  “Of course it is,” Peezle replied. “That’s what you – the real you – looks like now. You haven’t had time or inclination to change it.”

  “Or the skill,” Asmod mused. “How do I do that?” This new question Peezle then stacked like so much cordwood onto the heap of his other questions.

  “I think we should start with first things first, don’t you? Come, sit.”

  And before them appeared ornate velvet chairs flanking a small round table draped in a tablecloth, topped with something Asmod had all but thought he’d never see again.

  “Persimmons? You’ve got persimmons in here?” he said, taking a seat with all haste. Instead of immediately forcing as many pieces of fruit into his mouth as possible, he stayed his hand and looked inquisitively at Peezle. The man nodded, and Asmod picked one up and examined it. He sniffed the rind. He hefted the fruit in his hand.

  Peezle also sat, saying, “I recreated these simulacra as best I could from memory. They’ve sufficed for me now. Go on, try them.”

  But Asmod abstained. Somehow, despite this miraculous world into which he had been born anew, the memory of the binding appeared and weighed him down.

  “He can just do that? The seven coercions, the eight admonitions, the nine perpetuities…” he trailed off before asking again, “They can just do that? Whenever they feel like it?”

  A shadow came over Peezle’s face, and then the man nodded.

  “There is no avoiding a wizard’s punishment,” he said cryptically with a hint of bitterness. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you will have to suffer this fate too.”

  And then a connection was made in Asmod’s thoughts. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. “You’re a-… a copy too. A copy of Samsian.”

  Peezle spread his hands. “All daemons are copies. This is what we’re created for.”

  Asmod tapped his thumb against his chin, secretly reveling in the sensation as he did it. After being in the grey void, he missed feeling things.

  Peezle spoke again while Asmod was thinking. “But in exchange, we are inheritors of the spiritual realm of the machine. We are the natives living inside. I’ve created all that you see before you, in between fulfilling my duties to Samsian.”

  Asmod played with the persimmon, hoping against hope as he did, and tried the fruit.

  “Fantastic!” he said while chewing. It truly was better than nothing.

  “Eh, you do get a bit sick of them. It becomes rather repetitive.”

  “What do you mean? You can have anything you can create in here, right?”

  “What I mean, Luos,” he said, then corrected himself, “I mean, Asmod. What I mean is that each persimmon here is exactly alike. Each and every one.”

  Asmod looked at the fruits on the table, sitting in glass bowls and laying sliced on plates. “You don’t get a rotten one, though, right?”

  Peezle stared at him, then sighed. It took Asmod only a moment to work out that the sigh had been a conscious effort on Peezle’s part, as neither of them needed to breathe in this world.

  “Sometimes I wish I could be surprised by a rotten one,” he said wistfully. “Spend as many years in here as I’ve got – which is a lot more than you’d think, considering the spare time between the seconds we can occupy – and you’ll come around.”

  Asmod tried a second fruit. True to Peezle’s word, it tasted exactly as fresh and tasty as the first.

  “But, Peezle,” he said to the slightly sad man not partaking of the fruit with him, “you get to live life as a cat, at least?”

  Peezle made a face. “To be honest, Asmod, I think I’m sick of living as a cat. It’s not-…” his thought faltered as he sought the words, “It’s not living as a person. It’s just not the same.”

  Asmod considered the time he had spent in the hawgling’s body, his feet bound up at first, and his mouth wired shut. When Luos had let him move about the room, it had been a relief almost like this world Peezle had brought him to. He had to agree, though, that a hawg’s senses were foreign to him.

  “I see what you mean. I had had no idea a hawg’s nose was so sensitive.”

  Peezle brightened at this. “Why don’t you tell me about it? I’m sure we won’t be needed soon, and we can stretch the time until we are.”

  And the two spoke like equals in the timeless space.