The Pentacle Box
an excerpt

Shayalis Soulblade felt his summoner’s death like somebody tugging sharply on his mind – just once. It was the fool’s own fault; summoning a demon to protect you and then sending him out to do something different was completely stupid in anyone’s language. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t find it regrettable. He did, but only because he was now stuck on the prime plane with nobody to send him home and no shirt.
“We are under attack,” his summoner, a tall woman with iron-grey hair and very serious eyes had told him on his arrival. “Go and defend the apprentices’ quarters. When the fight is over, you will be sent home.”
He was in no doubt, even now, that she would have kept her word; after the summoning of a demon, the summoner was the only one who could. The only trouble was that she couldn’t send him home from beyond the grave.
This fight was a mess. If this was a war between demons then it wouldn’t even be taking place; the Council of Thasamaii would have picked a side to support and then had the other side slaughtered in their beds on the night before the battle. But these attackers were just – and Shayalis shuddered with distaste at this – hacking and slashing senselessly, with no apparent battle plan other than to destroy. There were no tactics but force and surprise, and while that may have its place, that place was most often in a Thasamaiian street brawl. The humans really were all fools. He could see now why the demons liked to kill them.
Not concentrating as hard as he usually did, he sensed the attacker only a second before he should rightfully have been dead.
Instantly he spun around and flung out his arm, his palm facing his black-clad assailant. The young man – little more than a boy – cried out as Shayalis’ concentrated blast of mental force threw him back and he crashed into a tree, landing in a dazed heap among the roots.
The stupid little thing recoiled and whimpered like a baby as Shayalis, wreathed in smoke and grinning like a madman, advanced on him, knelt down and reached out, taking the shaking head in his hands and holding it still.
“Don’t worry,” he smiled, almost kindly. “You won’t feel a thing.”
And, pressing his fingers hard onto the boy’s temples, he entered his mind.
The first thing he found was fear. A thick, turbid layer of terror, coating his mind like icing on a cake. Usually, Shayalis would have delighted in smashing that layer and all the others under it methodically into little bits, and then devouring the pieces. Feeling little more than a vague sense of annoyance, however, this time Shayalis only had the heart to let himself slip through the layer and down, and down, deeper into the boy’s head.
From somewhere in reality, he thought he could hear the screams of his victim. He knew that mental invasion was not a pleasant process – not, of course, first-hand – but still, couldn’t the fool have some consideration? He was trying to concentrate! But, even though he paused in his exploration in the hope that the screaming would stop, the noise continued. By this time finding the disturbance deeply annoying, he reluctantly sent out a pulse of reassurance. I am not going to hurt you, it said. Keep calm. You will be fine.
The screaming stopped.
Finally coming to rest on one of the lowest layers, he started searching. Working very carefully, trying his hardest not to do any damage, he began to look through the memories of everything the victim wanted to hide.
The first thing Shayalis learned was that the boy was called Berny. He also found out, much to his disgust, about his clandestine childhood friendship with a stray dog, his secret use of hair-dye and his relationship troubles with his girlfriend. On and on he trawled, through these stupid, pointless fragments of a life, until he was just about ready to snap Berny’s repulsive little mind in two with frustration. But eventually, what felt like millennia later, he found something different.
A girl – a very over-made-up girl, come to that, probably an adolescent – standing in a pit, spattered liberally with dirt. She was… Shayalis looked closer… holding a box. A little wooden box, with what looked like a pentacle on the lid. A pentacle; a potent magical symbol, he knew. Whatever this girl had, it was powerful.
And Berny wanted it; he could feel the pungent aura of want coming off the memory like a stench. He wanted… no, he didn’t want it. Listening harder, Shayalis caught another name. Bradarn.
Satisfied with what he had found, he withdrew, coming back to reality to see Berny whimpering in pain and staring up at him in fright. When Shayalis released the vice-like grip on his head, he could see spectacular purple bruises where his fingers had been.
“Go home,” he spat, getting to his feet and brushing little bits of mud off his trousers. “And spend more time with your woman. It works wonders on them.”
And leaving the quivering lump behind, Shayalis stalked off in search of the mystery box – and the mystery girl who had found it.