Chapter 1

      The first time I saw the demon was in a vision, a vision brought on by chewing the drug hazia.

      But it was more than a vision.

      I was walking along a beach in cold darkness. I knew, even then, that I was in some place I should not be, and I felt the nervous tenderness between the shoulder blades that comes with such knowledge.

      It was easy to see. Cold brilliant stars spiraled slowly and hypnotically in the sky. Did they pulsate as well? Were they eyes? I don't remember now.

      The beach was not sand, but millions of tiny, fragile bones that crunched and shattered under my feet. The sea heaved silently as if exhausted. It seemed dappled with starlight. Then I saw it was covered with thousands of little faces, mouths really, which opened and closed with the long, slow roll of the waves and shrieked like seabirds as they broke against the shore. I think I stood for some time looking out across the languid expanse. Suddenly my eye was caught by a different movement, a quick movement. What I had thought to be a rock just offshore stretched in the dark light and resettled its bat wings. Some kind of creature sat on that rock.

      I suspected what it was. Desperately. I wanted desperately to see that creature closer. I paced up and down the shore in frustration.

      There was a pounding.

      The rock was so close; my desire was a torment. Recklessly I stepped into the sea and began to wade. It was not cold and wet as I'd expected, but warm and viscous, like jelly. It held me up, smoothly and firmly. The little gaping maws seemed to move aside for me. As I got deeper in, I noticed little pink tongues lashing out of them as I passed. It tickled deliciously where they touched the skin. There was a sickly scent, rotting and sweet, like nothing I had ever smelled. So strong that it was nauseating. Like roses-pustulant, rotting roses.

      By the time I had waded in up to my waist, I knew that the being on the rock was, as I'd prayed, indeed a demon. It crouched there, betoothed and beclawed, its scaly wings spread out as if to dry, its face to the swirling stars.

      A pounding on the door warned me to go no closer.

      I had never seen a real demon before, but all my waking life I had been fascinated by the chaotic, winged denizens of nightmare. Now one of these awesome and dangerous beings was before me. I did not have the sense to feel more than the tiniest delicious tingle of fear. Instead, I devoured it with my eyes. It must have felt my gaze, for slowly, like a lizard, it turned its head and looked at me.

      Someone was yelling and banging on the door.

      Its red reptile eyes were heavy-lidded. It smiled charmingly, urbanely, and held out its spiky hand in greeting. I felt an intense desire to put my tiny, shatterable hand into that hand and feel the rough, horny skin. Then, suddenly, the compulsion was terrifying. I pulled back violently, lost my footing, and fell backwards into the firm and sucking sea.

      And off the bed. I was encased in a white, sticky womb, struggling to be born, my arms pinned to my sides, my head just sticking out. There was a great crashing in my head. Or was it at the door? Suddenly the sheets ripped apart and I tumbled onto the cold floor and lay there panting and twitching, covered in blood and jelly like a newborn worm. I was on a plain covered with huge boulders as the world whirled around and was filled with the most terrible pounding. I covered my head. The pounding was like the blows of a hammer crushing down on a walnut; I had a sticky vision of my brain oozing out like grey stew.

      The room turned another circle. The vision peeled away. I broke the surface, and suddenly I was in my own familiar ordinary room, and everything was unbelievably small, quiet, and colorless.

      Someone was banging on the door.

      "Dion!" yelled an irritable voice. "Oh! By the Seven! Dion, answer the door."

      My mouth tasted of sour phlegm. My vision was blurry and seemed ready to whirl again at any moment. I opened the door slightly and saw a pimple-faced second year boy.

      "Lord of all," he said. "What took you?"

      I didn't feel up to standing on my dignity.

      "What's going on?" I croaked.

      "The Dean wants to see you."

      Oh, God and Angels! No!

      "I can't . . ."

      "He says it's urgent."

      He craned his skinny neck forward curiously and moved closer to the door. His spots were fiery red on his bluish morning skin. He smelled of body oil and grit. He suspected something. I could tell.

      "Tell him I'm sick," I said. "I'll come as soon as I can."

      I slammed the door shut. It was only then, as I stood behind it, that I realized I was covered in warm slime. Warm slime smelling of pus and roses. It had not been just a vision. Oh, God and Angels! My neck tingled as the hair on the back of it stood up. The room spun around dizzyingly, filling me with such vertigo that I sank to the floor, still clutching at the door handle.

      How could I have entered the world of demons, a plane so remote, so unreachable from our own, that only the strongest mages and the strongest magics could touch it? Was that where the beach of bones had been? Had I actually journeyed there physically? It was as if I had just peered gingerly into a magnetic abyss. I had been to an unknowable world filled with the most malevolent and destructive beings imaginable. If it hadn't been for that revolting boy, I might have touched the demon.

      That pulled me up. What the hell was I thinking of? How could I, a mere student mage, accidentally go to that impossibly dangerous place-a place which only the strongest touched, and nobody had ever entered? There had to be some other explanation for the rapidly cooling slime covering me, an explanation that I was too inexperienced to know.

      And to reach out to touch a demon! The fact that I had come into contact with such a being should have filled me with horror, not fascination. How could I be fascinated by such an evil being? How could I have even thought of touching it? That was the way into necromancy, the obscene magic of death and destruction. Was I going to add that to my other sins?

      "Demons are always watching, waiting to tempt unwary mages into necromancy."

      This was the warning my foster father, Michael, had given me when I was about fourteen. His face had taken on the rather pompous look that always made me want to hit him on the head with a pillow and say something flippant. Though, of course, I had never actually dared to do it.

      Not that there was anything wrong with his advice.

      "No self-respecting mage even thinks about demons," he told me. "They are always out there waiting, ever hungry for life, drawn especially to those of us who touch the world of magic, ever ready to tempt the unwary into magical pacts that they might be allowed to feed their hunger on the life of our plane.

      "Demons have amazing power. No one can withstand them in their own place, and, even from the misty distance of another plane, they are lethal. Irresistible. Throughout the ages evil men have sought pacts with them. Under such a pact a weak mage can bring demon power across heavy barriers, between their plane and ours, and become a mighty necromancer. But a terrible price is always exacted in return, for these demon familiars hunger always, and must be fed.

      "The hand of every sane mage, nay every sane human being, must always be turned against necromancy, for necromancers are a bane upon the land. Mysterious disappearances plague any place in their vicinity, until great tracts of land are denuded of animal life to feed the immense appetites of the demon. They flourish only in borderlands and places torn by civil strife, for no ruler can suffer his people to be used up in such a way.

      "For demon familiars, say rather demon masters.