Free A Long Spoon by Jonathan L. Howard Page B

Look, you want a guarantee? A devil’s word is her bond, just as much as it for demons. We’re far more reliable that way than humans, yet we’re the evil ones?” She spread her hands at such injustice.
    Cabal found his interest piqued. “You mean negotiation?”
    â€œExactly that.” Zarenyia smiled pleasantly. “Give me what I want and you can have what you want, which includes my promise that I shall not hurt you, enchant you, or otherwise ruin your day.”
    Cabal rose and walked to the edge of the circle. “And what would you want?”
    The devil looked off into the middle distance in deep thought, her expression that of a child formulating a letter to Father Christmas. “Well,” she said after some moments of consideration, “I haven’t been summoned in a very long time, and I’m bored. Whatever you want me to do, it had better be interesting. Also, it would be lovely to kill a few people. So … yes, those are my demands: murder and fun.”
    Cabal looked up at the spider devil Zarenyia and crossed his arms. “Madam,” he said slowly, “I believe we may have a deal.”
    *   *   *
    It all began, as so many everyday tales do, with the quest for immortality. Cabal’s own interest was largely academic; life was offered impetus by its very brevity in his opinion. To take away the briefness of life was to rob it of necessity, and so immortality was simply a breathing death. On the other hand, immortality necessarily depended on the manipulation of vital forces, and the manipulation of vital forces was a subject close to the fist of flint he called a heart.
    While those who historically claimed to have happened upon the secret of eternal life had usually let themselves down badly by subsequently dying, there were certain cases that the fine-toothed comb of Cabal’s researches had turned up that deserved further investigation.
    One such (Cabal informed Zerenyia, who—upon a nest of folded legs—listened with gratifying attention) was the Chinese sorcerer, Luan Da, who lived in the time of the Han Dynasty. Luan Da has not weathered the waves of history well; since his life in the second century before Christ, he has been lucky to escape a sentence that did not also contain the word “charlatan” or “fraud.” He was attached to the court of Emperor Wu for the express purpose of making contact with supernatural entities that would furnish him—and thence the Emperor—with the secret of living forever. During a retreat in which he was to make such contact, he was shadowed by a spy of the Emperor who observed the great sage walking alone at a time when he would later claim to have been conferring with the spirits.
    Wu was profoundly unamused on hearing this, and Luan Da was executed horribly for his perfidy by being sawn in two at the waist.
    This, the history books tell us and, as far as they go, they are correct. The unspoken assumption, however, is that Luan Da must have been a charlatan, because clearly there is no such thing as magical immortality. To the mind of Johannes Cabal, such a conclusion was fallacious. There was only one way to be sure, and that was to ask Luan Da.
    Twelve weeks beforehand, Cabal had organised a little séance, having first polished his Hokkien and Tang dialects so he would have a fighting chance of speaking with the dead man’s spirit. These preliminaries had proved unnecessary; he could not find Luan Da’s spirit to converse with it.
    This in itself was not unusual; most dead people enjoy the taciturnity of eternity and don’t care to chat. At first he assumed this was the case, but subsequent ventures with lot and circle confused him. To borrow a modern analogy, calling Luan Da did not result in a ringing tone via the celestial switchboard that went unanswered, but instead admitted to nothing more than a dead line.
    It is possible for the dead