Demon (GAIA) Read Online Free Page A

almost inaudible. Then he was vomiting, and nearly choked on it.
    He was bound in so much rope he might have been wrapped by a spider. The only part of his body with any freedom was his neck, and it hurt to move that, but he did, looking wildly around.
    He was strapped to the back of a Titanide with his head on the monster’s huge hindquarters. The Titanide was somehow climbing a vertical rock face. When he leaned his head all the way back he could see the thing’s rear hooves scrabbling on ledges two inches wide. He watched in horrified fascination as one ledge broke away and a shower of stones fell up and up and up until he lost sight of them.
    “The bastard threw up on my tail,” the Titanide said.
    “Yeah?” came another voice, which he recognized as Cirocco Jones’s.
    So the Demon was somewhere near his feet.
    He thought he would go mad. He screamed, he pleaded with them, but they said nothing. It was impossible that the thing could climb such a slope by itself, and yet it was doing it with both Conal and Cirocco on its back, and doing it about as fast as Conal could have walked on level ground.
    Just what sort of animal
was
this Titanide?
    ***
    They brought him to a cavern midway up the cliff. It was just a hole in the rock, ten feet high and about as wide, forty feet deep. There was no path of any kind leading to it.
    He was dumped, still in his cocoon of rope. Cirocco wrestled him into a sitting position.
    “In a little while, you’re going to answer some questions,” she said.
    “I’ll tell you anything.”
    “You’re damn right you will.” She grinned at him again, then hit him across the face with the barrel of his own gun. He was about to protest when she hit him again.
    ***
    Cirocco had to hit him four times before she was sure he was out. She would have hit him with the gun butt, except that would have pointed the barrel at her, and she hadn’t lived to be one hundred and twenty-three by doing stupid things like that.
    “He shouldn’t have called me a witch,” she said.
    “Don’t look at me,” Hornpipe said. “I would have killed him back at
La Gata
.”
    “Yeah.” She sat back on her heels and let her shoulders sag. “You know, sometimes I wonder what’s so great about reaching one hundred twenty-four.”
    The Titanide said nothing. He was loosening Conal’s bonds and stripping him. He had been with the Wizard for many years, and knew her moods.
    The back of the cavern was ice. On a hot day like this one, a trickle of water flowed over the rock floor. Cirocco knelt beside a pool. She splashed water on her face, then took a drink. It was icy cold.
    Cirocco had spent many nights here when things got uncomfortable down at the rim. There was a stack of blankets as well as several bales of straw. There were two wooden pails: one for use as a latrine, and the other to catch drinking water. A hammock was suspended between two pitons driven into the rock. An old tin washboard provided the only other amenity. When she had to stay for a long time, Cirocco would string a clothesline across the mouth of the cavern to catch the dry updrafts.
    “Hey, we missed one,” Hornpipe said.
    “One what?”
    The Titanide tossed her a comic book which had been stuffed into Conal’s back pocket. She caughtit, and watched the Titanide work for a moment.
    There was a heavy stake embedded in the floor of the cave. The naked bodybuilder had been tied to it, sitting down, and his ankles fastened to stakes about three feet apart. It was a totally defenseless posture. Hornpipe was tying Conal’s head to the post by wrapping a wide leather strap around his forehead.
    The man’s face was a wreck. It was crusted with dried blood. His nose was broken, and his cheekbones, but Cirocco thought his jaw was okay. His mouth was swollen and his eyes were tiny slits.
    She sighed, and looked at the crumpled comic book. The cover said “The Wizard of Gaea,” and showed her old ship, the
Ringmaster
, in its death throes.