Read Online City of Hawks by Gary Gygax - Free Book Online

Poxpanus set about cloaking this innermost cell of the temple. With drawn glyphs and murmured chants, the nether-being began to build layer upon layer of wardings. First was the shield against the mind, then the prying forces of magic, and finally came the guards that prevented priestly scrutiny of any sort-even that assisted by beings of other sort than humans.
    When the triple protections were set, Poxpanus added to each, strengthening here, tightening there, until he was satisfied that each was sufficient to withstand even a major assault for the time he needed to do his work. To be even more sure, however, the daemon then wove the three wards together, meshing them so that each supported the other, and over all three he built a screen of such stuff as to make the whole invisible and undetectable except to the most exacting scrutiny. No sweeping search would discover his carefully built fortress of energies. To have it otherwise would invite the attention of all sorts of unwanted intruders, evil as well as those who fought against it. None could be trusted, none could know. The axiom of Hades, perhaps of all the lower planes, was a simple one: Strength is mastery: the weak are ruled.
    In the web of energies, the complex tapestry of magic, and planar powers, there was yet an opening. The mesh allowed Poxpanus a place where his own particular psyche, those vibrations that were uniquely his own, could pass into and move out of the confinement of the fortress. It was but a small opening, a tiny weakness in the structure. In time a being of might would find and exploit such a tiny flaw, but time was not a factor. Poxpanus would use the protection for but a short duration-a few minutes, a few hours, a day at most. After that, It would be finished. With success, the daemon lord would return to the nether planes. Then there would be a reordering of the ranks, and only Infestix would be greater than he. Long had he contested with Anthraxus and the rest to assume the second position in Hades, Viceroy of Glooms as it were. Soon that struggle would come to an end.
    “Rheachan!”
    “I watch, and I wait, as you instruct”
    The reply was crystal clear. Poxpanus sent his force out along the channel. “Good,” he thought, as he saw In his mind what the daemon-hound saw with its eyes.
    “It is pleasurable to me that you find me suitable, Paterfamilias.” There was no lie in that, no deception. Rheachan was unsatisfied and incomplete without contact with Poxpanus.
    That was true to a lesser extent for the daemon as well. When he brought his force into attunement with the force of the nether-hound, Poxpanus was not only whole but more than he had been without the procreation, his hound, Rheachan. “The one we will devour-where?”
    “Not yet come. But now that we are conjoined I can sense that it will happen soon, soon…”
    “Yes, that is so. The humans who are assigned to the one?”
    “But two weak females, Paterfamilias. Even now the second has entered.”
    “Wait! Something comes from another place.” Poxpanus felt the waves washing outward into the material plane as some force from elsewhere made its way through planes and dimensions. That force bore with it the unmistakable emanations of humanity, small but strong. The infant was being brought from its otherworldly hidey-hole to where the stupid mortals imagined it would be safe and secure. “Upward, hound-child. You must be ready.”
    Of course Rheachan had anticipated the command. Even as the thought formed, the thing was well above the cobbled lane and heading toward the shuttered window that was its objective. “The two assassins charged with securing the escape way are arrived. Paterfamilias.”
    “Unneeded, now!” The daemon was exhilarated by the prospect of the conclusion of his hunt, the kill and the feeding. The ether was torn just at that moment by the arrival of the force. “Now, my dear hound! Into that place, and we will have our sport!”
    With the