The Purple Emperor

CHAPTER FIVE

It was bone gruel again.

Brimstone stared into the cracked bowl and felt his lips dry out. The liquid had the consistency of dishwater, a thin, greyish fluid curdled with lumps of corpse-white gristle that smelled worse than the open sewer outside his window. He looked up at the toothless old crone and scowled.

'It's good for you,' Widow Mormo cackled. 'Keeps your strength up – my late husband swore by it.' She set a dirty spoon beside the bowl and a wedge of rough brown bread beside the spoon. A cockroach scuttled across the rickety table and Brimstone squashed it with his thumb.

'Your late husband probably died from it,' he muttered sourly.

'No need to be like that,' Widow Mormo said sharply. 'I'm a poor woman and I does the best I can on the pittance you pay me.'

Brimstone was paying her a groat a day, which was indeed a pittance, but meals were extra and bone gruel gave him diarrhoea. He'd planned to lay low in these miserable lodgings for at least six months, but now he was wondering if he could survive another six days. Even the threat of a demon prince paled beside Widow Mormo's bone gruel.

The old sow muttered something he didn't catch. 'What?' Brimstone demanded crossly. 'What?' Without a spell to reinforce it, his hearing was going. But the spell he needed was one of the ones he'd been forced to leave behind and he didn't dare go out and buy another. A magical supply shop was the first place Beleth would think of looking for him. Probably had every one in the city staked out by now. A demon prince had huge resources.

The trouble was, it wouldn't end with loss of hearing. Brimstone was ninety-eight years old. Without magical reinforcement, his body would soon start to fall apart. Even with it, he knew he looked his age.

'I said there might be a way to make things a bit more comfortable for you,' Widow Mormo repeated slyly. 'Better food as well.'

'I'm not paying any more,' Brimstone told her promptly. These might be cheap lodgings, but most of his cash fortune had been stolen and all of his assets were beyond his reach. He had a substantial amount of gold about his person, but he'd no idea how long it might have to last. Demons had long memories. He might have to stay in hiding for years.

To his intense discomfort, the old bag pulled up a chair and sat beside him. He wrinkled his nose. She seemed to be wearing some hideous perfume, but she still smelled mainly of pee.

Brimstone shifted his own chair backwards. 'Widow Mormo -' he began.

'Maura,' said the old bag. 'Call me Maura.' She lowered her eyes. 'And I shall call you Silas.'

'You'll call me nothing of the sort,' Brimstone snapped. Lower classes never knew their place when you were short of cash.

'What I was thinking of, Silas,' said Widow Mormo, not at all put out, 'was a little… arrangement.'

'What sort of arrangement?' he asked suspiciously. Anything that got him better food without paying more had to be worth listening to. But she'd want something in return, of course – people always did. Probably his help with an illegal spell. He'd told her nothing, but he knew he had the scent of sulphur about him and she was as shrewd as she was hideous. Chances were she'd put him down for a sorcerer the minute he'd walked through the door. It'd be an illegal spell all right. But how bad could that be? He'd dealt with demons all his life and his last contract with Beleth had called for human sacrifice. Nothing the crone came up with was likely to be in the same league.

'I'm a widow woman, Silas,' she said softly. 'Have been since my Stanley died.'

'What's that got to do with me?' Brimstone snapped.

'Thought we might get married,' Widow Mormo told him coyly.

Brimstone stared at the old bat in astonishment. Even in her younger days she must have been the ugliest woman in the country. Now, without teeth, warty, wrinkled, rheumy, balding, smelly, dirty, badly-dressed and flatulent, she'd have been more appealing as a corpse.

'You want me to marry you?' he said.

'Get you out of here,' Widow Mormo sniffed. 'I got a place of my own in the woods – log cabin with mod cons, a full cabinet of spells and a nice comfortable double bed. Keep my money underneath the mattress.

Nobody ever goes there. Nobody even knows about it.' She smiled seductively and gummily. 'We could slip away for our honeymoon.'

Brimstone frowned. A nice isolated log cabin could be just the thing he needed. Not to mention Widow Mormo's money and the spells in her magic cabinet. He cracked a wintery smile. He could cut her throat when they got there and bury her body in the woods.

'Yes, all right,' he said brightly.