Whatever he was doing, the demon thought, it wouldn’t save him from his fate. In the end, he was just another sacrifice waiting to be led to the altar and butchered.

The demon sat off to one side, away from the mangled corpses and the stench of death, consciously separating himself from these creatures he despised so thoroughly. Even dead, they were an abomination. But he suffered them because they were the food on which he feasted and, in this instance, the lure that would bring to him the bearer of the black staff. The demon would suffer anything to get his hands on the bearer’s magic, and he would suffer it for as long as was necessary. The entire focus of his life, for the moment at least, was on waiting for that to happen.

It won’t take long. The bearer will hear of this. He will hear of it and he will come. And I will be waiting to put an end to him and to take from his lifeless hands the black staff he carries. And then the magic will be mine.

He believed himself a simple creature with simple needs. There was nothing complicated about him. He was single-minded, and he was driven. He craved power and immortality—insofar as such things might be attained—and dominance over all living things. He understood this about himself, and he believed that what he craved was only what he deserved. He had made the pact required long ago so that this could come about when he shed his human skin. He thought nothing of the exchange in retrospect; he barely remembered making it. Travel down that road far enough and you forget entirely where you came from. The journey becomes the destination in a twisted sort of way. The need to acquire more of everything, to possess as much as there was to possess, was insatiable.

He watched the Drouj some more, moving through the dead, gathering their precious trophies. Stupid creatures. Beasts of low cunning. Some were bleeding from wounds they had not even bothered to tend, so eager were they to gain possession of something they could point to as a remembrance of this day.

Arik Siq walked over to him, the flat, featureless face in sharp contrast with his own disgust-etched countenance. He saw the Troll hesitate and quickly smoothed away the offending wrinkles. Even so, he gave the other a cold, impatient look. “What is it?”

“We are done here,” the other said. “We should go, my Drouj and I. We’re too few to hold the pass, too few to do anything that matters. We need my father’s help.”

The demon brushed the demand aside with a wave of his hand. “You need nothing you don’t already have. You need only me.”

“But what is there to be accomplished …?”