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Chapter 1: The Vault of Hell

Tuco stepped through the glowing crack in the stone wall and immediately pitched forward. His stomach wrenched and twisted inside him, and he was plummeting through sheer darkness. He flailed frantically for the room behind him, but as he wheeled through the blinding darkness, all he could see was the lit crack of the room, far distant and dwindling rapidly. It diminished to a sliver of light and safety, a glint in the dark, and then was gone.

After a few moments, the sensation of movement drifted away from him. He hung in darkness and felt as though he was hovering. There was nothing beneath his toes to hold him up, no pressure on his body pressing in any direction, but he had lost any sense that he was moving. Not even the air rushed past him as he presumably continued to fall. If he'd had his robes, perhaps they would have fluttered around him, but they seemed not to have come with him through the crack in the world. He felt a by-now familiar flexing sensation from his eyes as his pupils contracted to the narrowest of slits in the darkness, and he saw that all around him, glittering in the distance, were stars.

But he knew that he was not in his world anymore. The stars were not simply set in the dome of the Firmament, but all around him, on every side, glittering just as brightly beneath his feet as above his horns. He struggled to understand where he was. All knew the Abyss was in vast caverns beneath the earth, and that Paradise was set beyond the stars, past the Firmament. So where was he? And where was Hob?

He couldn't answer any of these questions, and he had no way to move, so he simply hung, or perhaps fell, for a while, in contemplation. After a few minutes, the fluttery beating of little wings came from behind him, a sound like someone shaking out a washcloth, and moments later, the little imp flapped into view.

"You fall very quickly, master," he said, huffing and wheezing a little. "It took me a lot of work to catch you!"

"Are we falling?" Tuco asked in bewilderment. "I can't feel anything. Where are we?"

"Falling only feels like falling when you start," Hob said. "And we are in the Abyss now."

"But how can that be? There are stars everywhere!"

"Not true stars." For a moment a look of unbridled hatred crossed the imp's face, so twisted and venomous that for a moment, Tuco thought it wasn't Hob at all. "The One Above put them there. To taunt us. The devils, I mean. All devils were once angels, you know. And the angels were stars. Impossibly great beings of light and power blazing in... in the... Firmament. Divine fire but with a will. They were magnificent. But when they would not yield to the One Above, he tore their light from them and cast them into the Abyss. And then he set these lights throughout the Abyss to remind them what he had taken from them."

Tuco shuddered. "That's--I mean that sounds cruel, but of course He had good reasons to do so."

The imp spat, and its spittle coalesced into a liquid sphere that wobbled and slowly drifted away from it. "Everyone who is cruel says he has good reasons."

Tuco looked about uneasily. "So are we just going to float here?"

"We are not floating! It takes time to fall to the Abyss. Look there." Hob pointed ahead of them, where one star gleamed a little brighter than the others, and as Tuco gazed at it, he thought he could make out shifting colors in its light--red, blue, and green.

"A star?" he asked. "The Abyss is a star?" Even as he asked the question, he saw that it was steadily growing brighter, and that it was not a star at all, but a glowing round light, floating in the darkness. Just a pinhead of colored light, but growing larger with every breath he took, until it became an orb, drawing nearer and nearer. "It's a celestial sphere," he breathed in wonder. "Like Venus or Jupiter!"

Hob gave a nasty little giggle. "An infernal sphere, perhaps. And yes, that is the heart of the Abyss, a sphere many times larger than than the mortal world."

Tuco started to object that the world was not a sphere, but had heard from more than one traveling scholar who had stopped in his village that the Greeks and Arabs had both determined that it was so, though if such a thing were true, he pitied those who were forced to live on the sides or worse, clinging to the bottom--though he supposed at least they would never be caught in the rain. What strange houses they must have to build on the sides of the world! Perhaps they nested like cliff swallows?

The sight of the orb of the Abyss ballooning beneath him tore his mind away from such wonderings--now that it was growing in size, he really did feel as though he was falling again, and he tried to wriggle in the air. If only he had wings like Charo to slow his descent--but no, he must exercise even more caution here, in the plane of demons. Surely he would be transformed in an idle thought and an instant's notice down here, at least until they reached the safe place that Hob had mentioned.

Before him, the orb swelled larger and larger, until it filled his vision, and now he could see odd shapes and patterns mottling its surface: huge stretches of green, or yellow, or brown, and places that looked cracked, the edges glowing as though liquid fire ran across them and surrounded them. There was blue like the deepest sea and strange, milky lattices of white that seemed to cover it indiscriminately. Greater the orb swelled, until it filled all of Tuco's vision, and continued to grow, one edge burning with luminous fire, the other swathed in darkness, in which tiny stars glittered, as though the dark areas themselves were windows into the Firmament.

As the orb continued to grow, the feeling of hurtling toward it grew stronger, and sent icy fingers of terror through Tuco's gut. "We're going to hit it!" he shouted in alarm.

Hob snickered. "That is the idea. Do you want to miss it and fly forever into the darkness instead?"

"But we'll be killed! We must slow down somehow."

The little imp showed him its fangs. "Well, I have wings, master. What are you going to do?"

Tuco stared at the smirking little creature. "Hob! But you--you're loyal to me, aren't you? I order you to do something to save me!"

"But I can do nothing." The imp winked at him, fluttering back and forth. "Don't be afraid, master. You are in the Abyss. A fall will not kill you. Nothing can."

"Oh. Oh." Tuco struggled to control his breathing. "That's good."

"Oh no, master. Evil. Think of all those souls in torment, pleading for the peace of death." The imp rubbed lewdly between his legs. "Just think of them."

But all Tuco could think about was the world hurtling toward him, the largest thing he had ever seen, and now he could make out strange white-tipped shapes which might be mountains, and of course the blue must be seas and lakes, only from very high up, and there was a brown, glinting ribbon that must be a muddy river. The white he had seen were now clearly clouds, but seen from above, and he flinched, covering his eyes with both arms as he plunged toward one. Then there was only a cool wet sensation, and he discovered that what he had mistaken for a cloud was only a dense fog, and that must mean that clouds were only fogs far up in the sky.

He whipped through them within less than a minute, and now below him there was a field of dark green broken up by open patches and glinting silver rivers. His stomach lurched again as he dropped toward them like a stone, and the fields of dark green resolved into treetops. They rose up to meet him and he put out both arms and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing to hit the ground...

And simply stopped. Dizziness took a wild, drunken tour around the inside of his head and then fled. He could feel his weight again. There was grass beneath his toes. He opened his eyes.

He stood at the edge of a dense, forbidding-looking forest, its trees towering taller than any he had ever seen, their leaves broad, their branches clustered together so that beneath them was only darkness. Before him, breaking a wide clearing of grass, and apparently daylit though he could see no visible sun, was an enormous wall, built of huge, rectangular, black stones set neatly together, as in the finest cathedrals. The wall towered perhaps three times Tuco's own height, and wicked-looking spikes jutted from the top, forked like candelabra and gleaming like polished silver. From behind the wall rose the strangest and tallest building Tuco had ever seen. It looked like an enormous castle, with towers and battlements, but far too many, making no architectural sense. A battlement might lead directly into a tower with no doors, stairs might descend from one tower only to intersect with another staircase leading straight back up. Towers were clustered everywhere; not merely along the walls, but in the middle of the structure as well, some sagging with missing masonry, others cylindrical and polished as though made entirely of burnished bronze.

But none of that was what was strangest about the citadel: what was strangest was that apparently, atop the keep in the middle of that citadel, someone had placed another, with a drawbridge protruding into empty air, with even more walls and towers and minarets rising up. Many winding, precarious looking stairways connected this castle to the one below, and they kept climbing, for atop that fortification was another, and atop that another, as though someone had kept stacking fortresses and castles and palaces one on top of another, each balanced impossibly on the one below, ascending all the way up into the sky, fading into blue haze above them.

Tuco stared upward with his mouth agape, and his tongue curled in the air, catching the taste of decay, mold, and sulfur beneath those of masonry and earth and the rich, dark forest behind him. He also caught the smell of imp just before he noticed the fluttering sound of leathery wings near his ear, and turned. "You smell different," he said to Hob, but the imp ignored him.

"Impressive, isn't it?"

Tuco stared back up at the fortress jutting into the sky, having to lean back a little--the thickness of his neck didn't allow his head as easy movement as it once had. "It looks impossible."

"Nothing is impossible in the Abyss," Hob said. "It is full of worlds dreamt up by devils who have little to do but dream. They say the fortress started with but one castle, but its architect grew restless, and could not keep himself from adding more."

"Who is this architect?"

Hob grinned his little fangs. "Oh, I dare not speak his name. Come, let us find a safe place for you within."

"But how will we get inside?"

"The fortress was built to guard those seeking its protection, not to keep them out. Approach with no thought to harming or removing its denizens, and it will permit you entry."

Tuco peered at him. "You speak differently as well. Has something changed with you, Hob?"

"Perhaps, master. Imps have been known to change greatly when taking a new master. If I change, it must be that you wish it so." Hob made a little shrug with his wings and settled on Tuco's shoulder.

"I liked you just fine as you were," Tuco objected. "But very well. So I simply approach the wall? And then what--"

As he stepped up close to the black stone wall, without so much as a shudder or a groan, the stones began to shift, sliding in their spots and parting to fold open an entrance in the midst of the solid stone. The passageway through was more of a tunnel than a doorway, for the wall was far thicker than Tuco had imagined, but he could see daylight and green grass on the other side of the tunnel, perhaps twenty yards away. He took a nervous step in, and then another, trying not to imagine the tunnel suddenly unfolding again, the stones closing in around him, leaving him sealed inside a wall in the Abyss for all eternity. But no stones shifted, and the light on the other side did not diminish, so he ventured on down the tunnel.

Inside, his vision grew clearer and crisper as it did in darkness, showing him a world without shadows. Here and there along the tunnel, the stone walls were broken up by huge, glossy-looking black stones, and when he passed the first one, he started, seeing a terrifying devil creature inside it, before realizing with creeping shock that it was his reflection. The looking glasses back in the abbey were well-made, but far too small to show all of him at once, and it was the first time he had seen his changed form in its entirety.

He was a monster. Enormous, though it was impossible to tell now how much more without someone to provide comparison. He had been five feet before, and Hob had made him seven and a half which meant the old him would barely have reached up to his chest. He was a giant, now, and not just in height. Hob had grown him to grant him mobility again after the devil Belphegor had made him so overmuscled he couldn't move, but that had done little to limit the impossible thickness of his body, a half-ton of solid, bulging brawn. His shoulders looked near as wide as a normal man's height, round, swollen boulders suspended by bull-like arches of muscle that merged behind his head with his broad neck. His arms were bulging pillars of strength, so engorged with sinew that they looked impossible to bend, each easily twice the size of a man, snaked with veins that gripped the globes of muscle like eagle talons. He couldn't lower them to his sides due to the wide flare of his lats and the swell of his chest muscles, which mounded up beyond his chin, pressed against each other with a cleft deep enough to lose a hand in, blocking his view of his body beyond them. Beneath them, a row of ten fist-sized muscles rolled and stretched with his breaths, forming a powerful arrow down to his thighs, which bulged with steely lobes of power, so thick that he could not stand with them side by side, and harboring between them his sac, stuffed with twin melons that churned with incubus virility, propping up the slow, undulating, dripping python that was his devil's cock.

He should have looked repugnant, grotesque, but the powers that had formed his body had made it somehow proportionate rather than misshapen, every muscle swollen and stretching his skin but with graceful, artistic curves that conveyed raw, barely contained power and an almost feral sexuality. He stood and moved like a great beast, like a predator that knows it has caught its prey.

His shaft stiffened at the thought, the spined pillar, forearm-thick, jutting up before him, beginning to drool already. He curled his black-clawed fingers around it, the touch against each little barb on his cock sending a thrill of erotic intensity through him, and he glanced up, his eyes flashing red in the mirror. Perhaps of all of him, it was his eyes that were the strangest: blood-red, the pupils curved slits like those of a serpent, giving him the ability to see in complete darkness and to focus on any object of his attention to the point of exclusivity, showing him exactly where it was and enabling him to pounce on it; he had once snatched a gnat out of the air by its wings.

Above his eyes, four ridged, black horns jutted from his temples, two sweeping up and backward like a goat's, and two larger and thicker, curling down and around his ears like a ram's horns. He tilted back his head and stroked again, hot pre spilling down over his thick fingers as he gripped at himself, and he moaned. His voice, too, had changed, growing deeper and more resonant, more like a lion's than a man's, to match the leonine array of fangs that bared beneath his parted jaws, all of them deadly pointed, white, a little too large for his mouth, making his speech awkward.

As he bared his teeth, his tongue slid out again to taste the air of the Abyss, its forked tips curling as they picked up all the scents in the air before sliding down to lick the musky taste of him off of his own tip. His tongue was difficult to control sometimes--if he didn't keep his jaws closed, it tended to slide out and wave its twin tips, giving him information about everything around, as efficient as the nose of a bloodhound. It, however, was not as difficult to control as his tail, which seemed to respond to his desires more than his conscious will, and even now had curved around to slide its tip against the back of his sac, and up toward the cleft of his muscled rump. As long as he was tall, it could work mischief of its own even when he was asleep; more than once he had awoken to find it curled around Pike's erection, or his own.

Monster, he thought, staring at himself. Imagine how much more of a monster you could become. And then despite himself, he tugged again, and an arc of pre spat out and slid in globules down the glossy stone before him.

"Such vanity," Hob crooned into his ear. "Truly you are a Knight of the Abyss, master. If you wish more changes..."

Tuco shook himself out of the strange, alluring reverie in which he'd caught himself. He let go of his cock and absently licked his fingers clean. "No. Uh, no, of course, that's part of why we've come, yes? Inside, the devils will not be able to find and change me? But what is this strange stone?"

"Limbostone, master. An easy place to store souls you are not tormenting at the moment."

Tuco shivered. He'd been pleasuring himself while staring at his reflection in a kind of tomb. He moved on, and as he passed, he saw more of the stones embedded in the walls. He stared at the next, and saw something move in its depths, like the flutter of a book's pages blowing in an open window. Then his eyes seemed to focus, draw in, slow, and he saw through a man's eyes. He could see the faint image of his nose between them, and the puff of a black beard below, the almost invisible blur of eyelashes--all the parts of your face that your mind elects not to see when you're looking through your own eyes. And through the man's eyes, he saw the deck of a boat, and the roll of open waves. He saw a mast with another man tied to it. The man's back was torn and bleeding. From the right of his perspective, he saw an arm lash out, a flail in its hand. New welts appeared across the man's back.

"A sea captain," Hob said in his ear, drawing Tuco back to himself. "He enjoyed punishing his sailors. He tormented them. Now he is trapped in stone, and every now and then a demon brings him out to play with."

Tuco shuddered and dragged his eyes away. "Why should demons seek to punish the wicked?" he mused aloud. "Doesn't the Almighty consider them wicked as well?"

He felt Hob's little body tense on his shoulder. "Souls are power. Without them, we cannot do many of our great magics. And also, they are toys. Fun to play with. Figure out the right way to play with a soul, and they will give you even more power. We do not care about punishing them, and we do not care whether they are wicked. The only souls that come to the Abyss are those the One Above does not desire. We take his leavings, like dogs given scraps." Hob spat, a hiss and a sizzle where it landed.

"So I have a lot of souls somewhere," Tuco said, "but I don't have to torture them."

"Don't have to. But probably will want to." Hob snorted. "There are souls in our realms that have done things even a devil wouldn't do."

Tuco was silent to that, and kept his eyes focused forward the rest of the way through the tunnel, and was relieved when they stepped out into open air on the other side. Before him rose the tower of castles, stretching impossibly up to the sky, like a ladder to heaven. As he stepped out of the wall, it made a faint grinding sound and then closed up behind him, the stones sealing tightly together as though there had never been an opening.

Hob fluttered before him, in front of the drawbridge that led up to the great gate of the bottom castle, and made a little mid-air bow. "Welcome, master, to E-Temen-Anki, the Vault of the Abyss."

Tuco leaned back to peer up into the haze. "I hope my room is going to be close to the ground floor?"

The little imp snickered. "All full up, I'm afraid. I can fly up, but master must take the stairs." He pointed across the bridge to the foot of a broad but crumbling stone stairway that ascended in a zigzag pattern impossibly up into the sky, with landings at regular intervals connecting to various keeps. "All the way to the top."

Tuco swallowed. The stairway appeared to sway in the wind. "What if I fall?"

Hob gave him a disappointed look. "You already fell out of the void all the way down into the Abyss. And you are a Knight of the Abyss. If you fall, try to look like you meant to do it, dust yourself off, and climb back up again."

There seemed nothing for it. Not if he wanted to find a place where he was protected from the devils who planned to torment, transform, and enslave him. He took in a deep breath and set out across the drawbridge. The planks groaned under his monstrous weight, and he risked a look over the side to see that it spanned not water, but a chasm that bored deep into the earth. Beneath this castle was another, built upside down, and beneath that, another, and another, descending far below, the inverted torches mounted on unseen battlements twinkling in the depths.

The portcullis of the castle before him was lowered, and mounted with wicked-looking barbed spikes of wrought iron. Tuco wondered who was the first to seek sanctuary here, and if they were still sheltered within.

The stairs were broad, but still not quite enough for his oversized feet, and he had to move up carefully, his talons scoring little gashes along the front of each step. Only on the landings could he plant his soles firmly and not risk slipping or teetering off the edge. Still, he found that his body was tireless, and he didn't truly need to rest as he climbed. He passed castles, palaces, fortresses, and keeps of every country and description, some of them delicate, airy things, composed of wood and open spaces, others with tiered pagodas, others whitewashed with towers jutting out at every angle. Some were forbidding things, with liquid fire pouring out of windows into the depths below, or composed of enormous metal thorns wound into gnarled bramble. The variety seemed endless.

Soon he tired of taking the little steps one at a time, and the distance to the bottom no longer dizzied him, so he began to ascend two steps at a time, then three, and then more, enjoying the power in his legs. At a landing, he paused and looked up. What he considered seemed risky, but as Hob had said, he was a Knight of the Abyss. What, here, should he truly fear? He crouched, tensed his thighs, and then leaped to grab the landing above him, perhaps twenty-five feet above the first. He nearly shot past it, but he caught at it with both arms, the stone thumping into his chest. His claws dug into the stone as he clambered his way up onto the landing. He had done it! The next few leaps were each a little easier as he learned how to control his strength and his movement, and soon he was bounding from landing to landing like a goat leaping up a mountain, lost in the pure physicality of the exercise, athletic grace combined with an almost bestial comfort in his own movements.

He almost fell when he reached the top, as there was no additional landing to bound onto, and he found himself skidding in a circle on all fours on the top landing, claws digging in as he crouched there, panting, his chest heaving. Hob looked so startled he nearly fell out of the sky. "You arrived sooner than I expected, master!"

"It was a rather enjoyable climb," Tuco growled, his tail swaying as he stood upright and leaned to look over the edge. The world of the Abyss was far below him now, a distant map of green. Something occurred to him. "Couldn't we just have landed here when we fell from the sky, instead of climbing all the way up?"

"E-Temen-Anki can only be entered through the walls, master. Your fortress awaits."

Tuco turned to follow his gesture. The building that he saw looked in structure and size much like the hall of Lord Harvington, who owned the local village and lands where he'd grown up, except instead of brick and stone, this manor was built entirely of paper. Parchment formed the walls, bound books the pillars and framework, and scrolls hung above every window. Tuco's keen eyes could make out fine hand-lettering and illuminations; not cheap copies, these, but fine scribework and calligraphy adorned every vellum wall or parchment pilaster.

"Paper?" he asked aloud. But he was familiar enough with matters of devilry now not to assume it would be flimsy. "Is it lined with spells, or--"

"Look closer," Hob suggested.

He stepped off of the stone landing onto a white gravel path that seemed to hang in mid-air. The tiny stones crunched beneath his feet but did not fall through the invisible support that held them there. He strode down the path toward the paper manor. The walls were as thin as they looked from afar, so delicate that it looked like a casual stone's throw could tear them apart, or a spring shower collapse the whole thing into a sodden mess. Drawing nearer, many of the papers proved to be written in languages unfamiliar to him: he recognized the angular, chiseled look of Latin letters, and square, squat Hellenic characters, and the flowing calligraphic lettering of what he thought to be Arabic.

He absently tugged at his right forehorn as he struggled to decipher the words of an English page. "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an... abo-- abo--"

"Abomination," Hob supplied helpfully.

Tuco blinked. "Leviticus. Is this scripture?"

"What better to protect an innocent boy from devils of the Abyss than Holy Scripture?"

"But after what I've done... the things that I've... I'm not sure the Almighty would find me that innocent. And how was this here already?"

Hob shrugged. "The Vault builds itself to best protect its treasures. It readied itself for you as you climbed the steps. Go on. Go inside." He flapped his wings more excitedly.

Tuco stepped in. The paper floors crinkled under his weight, but did not tear. Inside were well-appointed halls and rooms, all made from paper: a winding, grand staircase; longues and comfortable-looking chairs, walls lined with paper shields and swords, and even a grand paper fireplace in which a paper fire crackled and flickered like ribbons blowing in a wind. Elegant ink lettering and illustrations covered everything, and here and there he saw phrases that, though it took a little concentration to read them, were familiar from homilies and Masses of the past. He looked back over his shoulder to Hob, hovering just outside the paper castle's entryway. "This is all from the Bible?"

The little imp shrugged. "All from Bibles. The Bible isn't a real thing. Master's keep is made up of all known translations, original texts, fragments, lost gospels, and apocrypha from many denominations and religions that worship the One Above. You want to be shielded from all devils, don't you?"

"I suppose." Tuco scratched at his head and tried to remember what apocrypha was. Something to do with the end of the world, he supposed. He looked again at Hob hovering outside. "You can't come in, can you?"

Hob took a deep breath, flew right up to the edge of the entryway, and then sighed in something like satisfaction. "I cannot. It is your personal vault, master. I cannot enter."

Tuco frowned, kneaded at the bridge of his nose for a moment, and then snapped his fingers. "I. That's what it is. You keep calling yourself 'I.' I thought something was different. When did you start doing that?"

The little imp frowned, rubbing at his chin. "Didn't I call myself that before? What was it? I was sure I had down all the... little details." He fluttered back and forth before the entrance. "Oh, certainly, I couldn't keep up the entire pretense the whole time--who could ever manage that daft, squeaky little voice and that idiotic half of a wit for that long?"

"Hob?" Tuco said. "Hob, what are you talking about?"

Hob's red eyes glinted with sudden malice. "And you call yourself a Knight of the Abyss, 'master.'" The last word oozed with sarcasm. "You deserve to lose all your souls to me. Surrendering everything you have for a little safety. You ridiculous, naïve little simpleton."

"What?" Tuco came forward. "What has gotten into you? The Hob I know would never talk to me like that." He tried to walk back out onto the drawbridge, but something invisible caught him in the air and stopped him from moving forward. It didn't hurt, at all--but it was though someone had stretched an invisible sheet of linen across the entrance to the keep. It stretched around his face, pressing his nose flat, bending a finger or two the wrong direction, and then it sent him stumbling back several steps. He would have fallen onto his backside had his tail not caught him against the floor and propped him upright again.

"Because I'm not Hob, you jobbernowl," the little imp sneered. And then the shadows around its body deepened and lengthened, and in those shadows it grew and swelled, its wings vanishing into darkness, its form stretching. Its red eyes glowed brighter and brighter until they ignited, twin fires blazing like lost suns in the void of its face. Its claws curved and stretched longer, its limbs lengthened, and a long tail whipped out behind it. The shadows brightened, and where Hob had once flitted stood a manlike leopard, its face a grotesque frozen snarl, its eyes horrible bright-hot flames that seemed to burn through holes in reality. "I am Flavros, Baron of Safety, and it is I who have done what that worm Asmodeus could not. You are mine, now. Your souls are mine. I have won."

Tuco nearly fell backward in astonishment. "You! A devil? What have you done with Hob?"

The leopard's flaming eyes blazed brighter, as if in disbelief. "That is your concern? One meaningless imp? Do you not understand that I have won? You are imprisoned, body and soul, in the Abyss, for eternity. All of E-Temen-Anki is my dominion, and all the souls imprisoned within are my captors. In my lower vaults are arch-fiends who would drive you mad to look upon them, Princes and Dukes of the First Hells, and even one or two errant angels who were careless. And you, a silly, idiotic boy who bumbled his way into power. But none of you will ever leave. You are all mine."

"But--but I don't understand," Tuco said, his thoughts reeling through his head. "You said I would be safe here. Protected. A devil cannot lie to another devil. I heard that somewhere," he added, a little awkwardly.

The baron Flavros paced back and forth before the entry to the keep, leering in malevolent glee. "Oh, you'll be safe, my dear boy. Safe from anything that might harm you. Safe even from yourself, from your own desires. Such a sweet human soul, too innocent to understand that safety is a wall we build around ourselves, that it is a prison. You'll be safe. The Vault will protect you. Nothing within it will ever harm you twice. And when you lose yourself entirely, your souls will be mine."

Tuco stared at him. Hob wasn't Hob? And he'd been deceived, somehow? Several important questions trickled through. "But the other devils won't be able to get me in here, yes? And my friends will be all right?"

The leopard stared at him with those blazing gimlet eyes. "What should I care? I have you now, and all your souls will be mine. All I need do is wait." And with that, the leopard turned, somehow folding into himself, became a plume of dark smoke, and drifted away on the wind.

For a while, Tuco watched the entrance to his castle, trying to sort out what had just happened. It seemed as though everything had worked out as he'd wished for it to, though the devil that had looked like Hob had been acting awfully triumphant. "Hob?" he called out of the entryway, just in case the real Hob was still around somewhere, but there was no answer.

All was silent. Clouds drifted by. He walked up to the entryway and tried to push his way out again, but again met that odd, stretchy resistance. He slashed at it with his claws, but just felt a light pressure and no other reaction. He found a window and tried to climb through--again, the resistance that prevented him from leaving. He bounded up the stairs, paper tearing under his claws, and searched through rooms formed of sacred texts until he found a door that led out onto the battlements. From here, he could step out into open air, walking on paper stones, and peer between crinkling crenellations at the grassy ground below, and beyond that, the endless spire of castles descending all the way back to the surface of the Abyss, and beyond.

Of course, Tuco told himself, he didn't wish to escape, because here he would be protected, and his friends would be protected from him. But if he should need to, it would be good to know that he could. He leaned over the edge of his castle and prodded at the air beyond, and met no resistance. "All right," he told himself, fighting the unease in his stomach. It wasn't that high from here to the ground. Only three times his height. He could handle that. He stepped back, got two steps running start, and leapt over the side.

Again, the sensation that he'd been caught in an enormous, stretchy piece of cloth, only this time it flung him backward. He flailed his arms and his tail as he flew back over the wall, beyond the battlement, and into the courtyard below. There was a horrible cracking sound in his tail and one arm as he landed on them, and a flash of hot pain seared into his spine and down his arm.

"I thought this place wasn't supposed to let me get hurt," he groaned through clenched fangs, but even as he said the words, the pain vanished. He felt his arm and tail shift, with a moment of discomfort deep in his bones. He rolled back onto his feet again, swayed his tail, rolled his arm at the shoulder. Everything felt fine. "Did it heal me?" he wondered aloud, and just as he did, an intense feeling flooded through all his bones. It felt like when he'd had growing pains as a teenager, but achingly pleasant, stretching up and down his legs, and arms, pulsing in his joints, sending strange ripples of pleasure up and down his spine. Even his skull felt as though it were glowing with ecstasy for a moment or two. And then the feeling faded. He looked down at his hands, at his limbs. He stretched his shoulders, rolling his arms as much as his musculature would permit. His tail curled itself around and wound about one wrist, seemingly undamaged. Nothing seemed changed.

"Well," he said, staring up from the courtyard at the walls surrounding it, "I suppose I can't leap out, then." He couldn't walk across the drawbridge, he couldn't leap over the walls. Some invisible force kept him here and would not let him leave. He was safe, perhaps. And all his friends at the abbey were safe from him. But Baronet Flavros had him a prisoner in an inescapable vault in the center of the Abyss. He'd gone to an eternal afterlife without even dying first. No way to contact his friends or Hob, no way ever to see his family again. Eternity in a paper prison yawned before him.

The devils had gotten him in the end. They'd won.