Her eyes darted toward the tower they were slowly approaching then back to him, voice low. “Not well? You mean like you might kill me a little sooner than you planned?”
Damien snorted. “No, but I will kill both of those good, gods-fearing men. And maybe maim Kaz a bit too, just for fun.”
This made her sit straighter, mouth drawn down, eyes focused on the way ahead. If she acted up, he could send a shadow into the tower to knock the man there out of it, the fall enough to incapacitate him if not kill, and the guard on the ground could be dispatched with arcana or with bare hands if he really needed to—Damien was larger than him, he could see at the shorter distance, and his sword hung at an improper angle, easy to be missed or even snatched away.
But none of that was necessary. Amma kept her mouth shut, and Damien traded polite, short words with the guard, handed off a silver to cross the bridge, and the man so proudly boasting the symbol of some holy god never even noticed he’d allowed the spawn of a demon into his town. It was no wonder Elderpass was supposedly already plagued by the infernal.
But, most importantly, the talisman was completely undetected by virtue of Amma.
Once they crossed the water, however, there was an unease on the air. They dismounted, the streets too busy to stay astride the knoggelvi. Damien expected more suspicious, frightened looks from villagers, but many kept their heads down, traveling quickly in small packs.
Amma seemed to pick up on none of this though, her eyes lighting up as she walked on ahead of the knoggelvi. Elderpass rose up from the bank of the river at a gentle incline, its main road cobbled and meandering. The crossroad to the east and west ran along the river, and then the small city grew upward beyond it, built into stepped ledges in either direction and edged by stone fences that zigzagged along ascending walkways. It was like crossing through the mountain pass out of Aszath Koth if there had been shops and homes built into the stone.
Damien watched Amma, so different from the rest of the crowd with her chin up and shoulders back, but he was keenly aware of the disquiet hemming in around them. He let his vision soften as they continued on along the road, feeling for the familiar thrum of discord with a whisper of Chthonic. With so many bodies packed into the city, he struggled for a moment, his feelers distracted by so much of the same blood, human, human, human, and then a pop of something slightly different, a bit of elven blood, a particularly strong elemental mage, a cat, and then he found it.
It was an almost friendly feeling, discovering other infernal arcana that sliced so brutally through the ordinariness of the rest of the world. Prickling somewhere up ahead was a chaotic magic that danced on the edges of the comfortable, and as they moved deeper into Elderpass, it pulsed stronger. They were wandering right toward it.
And then a different aura hit Damien, the total converse of the discord and evil hiding in the city, slamming into his spell and knocking him back a step before he dropped the enchantment completely.
“Can I make a quick stop, please?” Amma was standing right in front of him, tapping his arm with a fast-paced intensity, breaking through the spell he’d been concentrating on.
Damien shook his head. “Did we not just make our hundredth stop of the day in the bushes outside of town? You haven’t even had anything more to drink.”
“Not that.” She pointed to a shop across the way with a rack out front filled with skeins of yarn. “I just need a moment, I know exactly what I want, so I’ll be fast.”
Damien considered her, the way the tip of her tongue poked out from between her teeth and how her freckles bunched up as she grinned, and there was a moment, however brief and absolutely mad, he would have given her anything she asked for then.
Well, that’s bloody dangerous, he thought, but realized their small caravan had already come to a stop under the eaves of an out-of-the-way building, and she had, in fact, behaved at the city’s entrance. What was the harm in allowing her this small freedom? She would either continue to be obedient or give him a reason to threaten and manhandle her again, and he wasn’t entirely sure which one he preferred.
When he waved her on, she darted between a cart carrying gourds and a man with bags of flour on both shoulders to slip into the shop. She was small and swift, the villagers barely noticing her, and she almost completely evaded his own gaze in the shadows of the place. He realized his mistake immediately—she was a thief, and he’d just set her loose in a place of goods.
But Amma did not disappear, she did not grab and flee, she did not even skulk about. Through the grimy window, he could see her go directly to the young woman at the shop’s counter. Amma looked to be speaking with her, and then he saw her exchange actual coin—and where in the bloody realm did she get that, he wondered, patting his own pockets—for a small bundle of fabric. She came running back out, skillfully evaded a donkey, and skipped back over to him.
Amma held up her purchase, a tunic stitched of a thick yarn, but very, very small. As much as he would have enjoyed watching her try to squeeze into such a thing, he knew she was too clever to believe it would fit. “What is that for?”
“A baby,” she said with a delighted grin.
Damien’s eyes jumped down to her completely flat stomach then back up to her face which revealed nothing but adoration for the tiny tunic. It was knitted with an emerald green yarn and buttery yellow flowers stitched along the trim.
Amma tipped her head. “But I’m certain it will fit anyway.” She squinted at Damien’s feet where Kaz had planted himself, rat-like tail wrapped around his haunches, shivering.
Big, black, bulbous eyes rolled from one of them to the other, the tongue that was constantly hanging out zipping into the dart of a mouth. The imp growled.
“Let me help you put it on.” Amma was already kneeling, holding the tunic out, and Kaz backed right up into Damien’s boots, his growl intensifying, and then he snapped.
Amma pulled back with a sharp inhale. Damien could see that same fear she’d had when the imp chased her, yet she held still.
“Let her,” Damien commanded, voice heavy as he stared down at the disguised imp.
Amma was quick then, popping the tunic over his head with her nimble hands as he was distracted. Kaz made all sorts of grunty, pained noises, but went floppy and didn’t help at all as Amma wrestled his scrawny front legs through the arms, her own tongue sticking out between her teeth as she worked. When she was done, she sat back, clapped once, and in a total surprise to both Damien and Kaz, grabbed him under the arms and lifted him up.
Kaz held aloft, the tunic dwarfed his tiny body, falling over his hind end as he hung from Amma’s hands, back legs dangling out like sticks for kindling. He glared at her, and she beamed back. “Kaz, you look adorable!”
“This is degrading,” he grumbled.
“But aren’t you warmer?”
Kaz scrunched up his snout, bottom teeth shifting around in the grimace, and Damien couldn’t hold back the grin cracking up the side of his own face.
