The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  Whispers in the darkness came to her like smoke and spoke at her in Plainari, a language so common it subordinated mundanity. “Pretty little girl,” they said, slithering past and through her. “Come a moment to play.”

  Kendra incanted, and motes, corporeal bits of Ley energy, gathered and lit under her command, their vibrations a humble refrain against the darkness. The whisperer spoke against her in a language of their own, and though Kendra couldn’t understand the words, the tongue lusted over and derided her, painted her body in the color of its speech before it trailed away when her bundle formed fully.

  Trees cast shadows in every direction. Looking around one made another shift as they tilted to see her or hide. She raised the light to her face and asked a question in the way magic understood—a series of nuanced sounds varied on ‘m’ and ‘n.’ “I’m searching for something. Do you know what I seek?”

  “Perhaps,” the motes said. “Though we must warn: dark visitors abide.”

  “Does a demon slumber here?” Kendra asked, though she got stuck on a syllable whose pitch, she had convinced herself, no one could hit right.

  The motes took longer to form a response, but they answered: “Yes.”

  “Show me.” Kendra blew, and her breath’s breeze carried the bundle toward a tree, which they rounded, and they ducked away. Their light drew new shadows that reached toward her like knobby feelers, and farther on, the Ley poked around a bough. “I’m coming,” Kendra said, passing over root and leaf.

  The scent of damp dirt and day-old bread—what magic smelled like to Kendra—filled the air, and it thickened as the vastness of the wood closed around her. She drew her thumb across one face of the crystal to edge her sight around wooden fingers, expecting anything to glint back. Silence crept around her. Colder became the air.

  Her motes meandered around a tree and stopped, then turned and hurried through a small bunch of sprigs to Kendra’s left. They looked from the ground to the branches above them and shook. “Mazes,” they said, dissatisfied, and ducked in a new direction, one that passed in front of Kendra and led off to her right. Her bearings told her the bundle headed back toward the forest’s edge, but the motes changed their way so many times thereafter that she felt led in circles.

  When they finally stopped, their light flooded a glade that surprised even them.

  Kendra leaned and caught up. She surveyed not a clearing made by the grace of the forest, but of felled trees that lay discant—splintered, cracked, dead—their pulp exposed, their magic gone. Some had risen wholly from the ground; their roots protruded from the soil like clots of blood.

  “Destruction,” the motes said, almost a note to themselves. “Demise.” They headed for a path through the felled growth.

  Dragons, Kendra thought. Her sight listed over the decaying thicket while she looked around. Above her, branches met, as though the forest’s overgrowth missioned to guard its fallen children from the open sky. The Beast. Yet that startled her more. It didn’t have that kind of power, surely. She followed her bundle over the forests’ limbs.

  With her left hand, Kendra flipped through a book and traced through her notes. Few of the townspeople had spoken of the Beast, but those who had said it, ‘Killed Cate Reinold, sight unseen,’ ‘Howled for three nights past. Terrified me kids,’ and, ‘Looked right at me from across a dock channel. I thought I was dead.’

  Cate Reinold had died of natural causes. She’d complained of pain in her throat to the apothecary, who told her she just needed rest, then she snapped her own neck the next day while hanging her laundry. “Complications from a tumor,” the coroner had told Kendra. The Nazyels lived over a bordello. Ghosts endure as the manifestation of scared children who couldn’t reconcile the sounds of their parents making love during the night—Kendra had deduced a similar explanation solved the mystery of what the Nazyel children had heard. And the River Niniphen, though out of season for them, served as a breeding ground for crocodiles. The older ones didn’t always make the journey south during migration, and the Reeds often became pools of sucking muck during the heat of summer. ‘Scales, and teeth as long as kitchen knives,’ Kendra read from her second-hand account of Miss Handso’s happenstance.

  “The Tower doesn’t check these things,” Handso had said, standing just outside the door to her shack. She’d crossed her arms over her chest, pulled her bed robe tighter against the cold. “Don’t care much for us common folk. Too concerned about the Lowdowns and whatever else.”

  Miss Handso’s suspicions proved right about one thing: Leynars don’t investigate ‘these things,’ which meant they hadn’t studied the inconspicuous tale as told by seventeen-year-old Penelope Qutts, whose paranormal encounter constituted reproachful banality.

  ‘Walking home from the game house on Third Avenue, once removed from Tersington Street,’ Kendra read. ‘Qutts took a back-alley to get to Third Proper. The demon stood in front of her, she said, and it smiled and cooed—didn’t scream, nor did it howl—before it clapped its paws together and disappeared. Swears it ran toward Second’s second removal, but when she looked back, it had vanished.’

  “She’s young,” a Leynar had told Kendra when she followed up with them on Qutts’s story, “and gods know how inebriated she was.” He’d tapped a stack of papers on his desk in his cramped office, the door of which Kendra had barely been able to close behind her. “We’ve got enough to be going on otherwise”—he’d raised his index finger to make a point—“with proof.”

  Miss Qutts had drawn a depiction of the Beast, and though no artist, hers matched that of others: muscly, wolf-like, and terrifying to behold. “Everything but the eyes,” Qutts had said as she handed over her drawing with the other that Kendra had borrowed from the youngest Nayzel, Willem. “Gray eyes. Could see ‘em a mile away without trying, I’d guess.”

  “Vibrant imagination,” Willem’s mother had said, patting the boy across his forehead when he’d shown Kendra his collection. “I dunno where he comes up with most o’ this stuff. Think it’s the city lights at night, if ya ask me. Make people a little loopy, know what I mean?”

  Kendra had heard the opinion before. She’d given the boy’s room a look-over before she left. He’d plastered his walls with charcoal art and littered his desk with stacks of the same.

  She’d thought nothing of it until two days later, when a townsperson in the Upper City had mentioned: “A woman, fucking creep walking in here, giggling.” The distributor spoke while she loaded fresh vegetables into Kendra’s cart behind a high-churn bar. Her dirty-blonde hair had frayed from low buns on the back of her head, and she wore a leather apron over a button-down and pressed jeans. The babel of those inside fluttered to them through the cracked-open back door. “Smelled awful. Told her to leave. All she did was laugh on her way out.”

  “When was this?” Kendra had said, making conversation. She didn’t connect what she did until a few hours later.

  “Dunno.” The blonde stopped and looked toward a high part of the alley’s wall. “Week, week-and-a-half ago. Just after your last shipment.”

  That night, Kendra had mindsighted into Willem’s bedroom to see his drawings again. There, still atop one pile on the back corner of his desk, he’d depicted the likeness of a woman, dark and ghostly, fully shaded to look nothing more than a shadow. Black tentacles waved from her head, and she faced the viewer, her face obscured by a veil of hair.

  When she’d finished making a copy in her study, Kendra had leaned back, remembering the words of an old friend: “The demons are too many to ever hunt down and eradicate. I know that now. All we can do is hope nothing ever takes control of them again. But if something does”—he’d stopped, but she discerned the rest.

  “People are missing,” she’d said a few days ago to an investigator, who had met with her at a dive in the Lower City during his off-hours.

  “They go missin all the time,” he said, peeling a piece off an onion loaf. He still wore his Leynar robes, colored light cream. “If w
e went lookin for every person who disappears, we’d have the man-power to do naught else.”

  “But these disappearances have happened in the north part of the city—where people have seen it. You don’t think that’s more than coincidence?”

  “More of this Beast, huh—ya not gonna let this go?” He rolled his eyes when Kendra didn’t respond. “I’ll tell you just like I’ve told everyone else who’s come by the Tower: there’s no proof for anything like a demon mucking about the streets. For gods’ sakes, we’ve got reports of it up in the Hills-over. People’ll believe anything if it scares ‘em enough, and I, for one, am fresh out of fucks to give.” He’d gestured to the onion loaf. “Sure you don’t want some?”

  Kendra had shaken her head and left shortly thereafter.

  Proof they asked for, and proof she chased.

  Her hand slipped off the page. She looked to her bundle of Ley. Its light had become framed by another. Kendra leaned either way in turn, her eyes unable to focus on what she saw. The motes came at her hushed call.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  They turned, and before they answered, the Ley shivered, unwrapped itself, and dispersed into a mist. The trees pulled in around her. In renewed darkness, Kendra watched the unfamiliar light. She blinked hard, but the spot wouldn’t resolve, looked within her grasp and far away at once. Whoever hid in the darkness wished to remain that way. She would need a spell—a devocation, to be precise—to find them on the other side.

  She flipped through another book she’d laid out and traced her fingers over its text. Q, R, S… W. Her mouth formed around the word ‘widdercant’ as she raced to find it. She found ‘Whzerot,’ a transliteration from New Magornian about spoiled magic; then ‘Wiamonish,’ the idea of non-diametrical opposition according to gender, scripted in Plainari; she lifted her hand across the page to the book’s other side, and there: ‘Widdercant.’ Her fingers marked out the spell, and she moved her lips through its liaise in time with her hand. Again. And twice again while she observed the point of light. A Warlock would be on the other side—his demon had led her to him.

  To her right she felt its gaze. She turned. Nothing. Then claws dragged over blanching wood, and she spun the other way, where a shadow gloomed darker than the forest’s shade.

  “We know you’re there.” The voice sounded abused, raw from screaming, and its eyes glowed gray, pale against the night.

  Kendra drew a rune on her crystal to magnify the shadow. Black hair draped over its dirty face.

  The shade didn’t move. “How are you here?” she asked.

  Dull panic tightened Kendra’s throat while the woman watched her. “Who are you?”

  The shadow’s gaze raked over her, invaded her magic, prodded at it like an insect. Her right shoulder tilted forward, and she whimpered. “You followed us. Foolish.”

  Kendra’s breath caught in her chest. “You.”

  The woman cackled, and the whisper from before returned and formed words in the common tongue: “Wants it.” Behind her: “No she doesn’t.” To her left: “Thinks she does.” Against her neck: “Doesn’t know.” Against her lips: “Can’t know.”

  The demon’s face appeared in front of hers. “Please help us,” she said, desperate. “Release us. Please. Can you be the one?”

  Kendra recoiled from them, both in the wood and in her study, where she shifted in her chair. She invoked and grabbed the demon with her sight. A tattoo on Kendra’s left arm grew cold, and she faltered. “Look—look at me.”

  The shade stayed in place. “Please don’t. Just leave.”

  “You will tell me who you are,” Kendra said, enchanting her speech, doubling her grip against the demon’s wriggling. She could so easily pull herself out, leave this behind like a bad dream. But she’d gotten this far, and it seemed this mystery proved as simple as a Warlock.

  The woman moaned. “We exist”—her voice caught in her throat, and she wept—“to serve our master, not you.”

  “And they are?” Kendra said. Her eyes flicked toward a piece of shiny white skin on the demon’s face that showed itself when the woman shook her head. Adrenaline dripped through her. She saw it a second time: a rune in the shape of a Demonic ‘M’ on the woman’s cheek. “That’s a M’kethian mark. Who in the hells gave it to you?”

  The demon said nothing. Her body shook as she sobbed. But a few seconds later, her bawling morphed to quiet laughter. She looked at Kendra from under her brow, and her lit eyes pierced the blackness. “Pieces tumble and they fall”—her mirth wouldn’t let her finish the rhyme, but Kendra remembered the rest: We all serve our master’s call.

  It didn’t have to scare her—Karlians found strength in it—but right now, it only filled her with anguish. “Who is your master? Show me.”

  “Oh, please. Please let us use her. So beautiful.” The woman inhaled a rattling breath. “Ah, and strong. She could be the one, we know it. Close enough to him”—

  “Tell me!” Kendra yelled.

  The shade panted for a few breaths. “All right. You’re right.” Her excitement abated as quickly as it had come. “We’ll send her.” She raised her head, and her gaze locked onto Kendra’s. “Look. Look!”

  The demon’s eyes transmuted into ink-black, and Kendra’s vision stretched like taffy as the power behind this woman pulled and hurtled Kendra farther north through hundreds of miles of forest. Branch and bough blurred, and the entire wood became a single piece that tunneled toward the mouth of cave. The tattoo on her arm became ice as she circled its entrance. Smoke and sulfur washed over her each time the great maw exhaled.

  Her crystal burned in her hand. She raced her thumb across its surface, but something held her there and wouldn’t let her unleash her sight. A voice, one that slithered into her ears and around her neck, deeper in pitch than the last, spoke to her in the Sable tongue, an ancient and derelict dialect of Demonic. Such speech said nothing in words, but his meant one thing: despair. The demon’s master plunged her into the cave’s mouth.

  The crystal shattered and sliced Kendra’s hand, and next she drew breath, she sat at the desk in her study, coughing. Her eyes had watered enough to blur her vision. She pawed at her right palm to rid it of melted glass and nearly jolted off her chair for a knock at the door.

  “Everything all right, ma’am?”

  “Fine.” Her throat felt like she’d been screaming, sore as she shuddered breath. Beads of sweat ran down her temples and over her neck, and her shirt clung to her back. She squared herself in the chair and held her scalded hand in her lap, thinking of what she’d seen. The gods couldn’t breach the world into another War so soon. Yet—“Reight.”

  The door to her study opened, and an urlan stepped a pace inside.

  Kendra considered again and decided. “Find Hollowman.”

  2

  Trent’s fingers grazed a scar across a pumpkin’s rind.

  Sieku waited. “That one as well?”

  “No point in not.” Trent tossed the pumpkin to the urlan, who stood at the end of a trailer almost loaded with harvest. “Grenn told me the Karlians and Leynars started practicing a form of ecumenism when I asked him about it.” Air crisped in his chest as he continued through the patch, surveying and marking most pumpkins for pulling. The trailer followed, suspended a few inches above the ground. “Started”—he batted his left hand back and forth—“five or six years ago. They call themselves Priests, whatever that means.”

  He broke another from its vine and brushed soil off its face. Marks flawed most of the pumpkins in this sector, as though they’d grown too fast in too short a time. “It’s hard to imagine somethin before it happens.” Trent shrugged one shoulder to sign indifference. “The world just gets on, ya know?” He looked toward the end of the row, fifty feet away. Already the soil toiled to reclaim its fruit. “The rest need pulled before much longer.”

  “I’ll tend to them during the night,” Sieku said.

  “Sure. Fill the trailer with a few dozen more. W
e’ll take the rest to market day-after-next.”

  Sieku hung over the trailer’s side. He looked humanoid—two arms, two legs, a head. All his processing equipment wired into a cavity in his chest, which connected to his pelvis and legs by a thick facsimile of a spinal column. His makers had formed and colored his body into likenesses of clothes that hung from his shoulders and hips, and a metal-mesh hood draped behind his shoulders. His eyes and several nodes central to his body and the front of his spine glowed green, illuminant in the dusking day.

  The urlan broke pumpkins from their vines in turn as he spoke. “The Urlanmeister says recombination is for the best. A world past the War should strive for unitary progress, especially since that matches the will of his Majesty.”

  Trent tsked. “I think that’s bullshit. During the War, Leynars did what they were good at, Karlians took care of the rest, and people were grateful for both. The strongest made everyone else stronger.” He stared at the ground, unimpressed with himself. “But I guess everyone was stronger then.” As he had recently, he tired of the worn tread of their conversation.

  “Strength comes in many forms, sir.” A pile settled behind the urlan when he set a pumpkin on top of it. “Like picking pumpkins by hand when you have perfectly good equipment for it.”

  Trent huffed. “Only so I don’t have to lie to Brech when I tell him I picked ‘em myself.” He broke another off its vine and tossed it to Sieku. “Royals love the personal touch.”

  “People are so—charming.”

  “Yeah? Did you see the lot of ‘em passin by on the road?” Trent nodded toward the thoroughfare a few miles north. “Busses full. Didn’t stop in town, o’ course.”

  “Probably”—

  A terminal on Trent’s belt vibrated against his thigh.

  Sieku looked toward a patch south of them. “It’s proximity.”