The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  Nine minutes later, Trent unwrapped his food at a table on the vendor’s other side. Grease coated his thumb with a sticky residue. Grenn had already bitten into his first morsel, and syrup dripped down his chin, which he wiped on the left shoulder of his shirt. Trent took a bite of egg, sausage, potatoes, a brown sugar syrup, and tortilla.

  “Glad I made you get one, right?” Grenn said.

  Trent chewed. “It’s disgusting.” Yet after he swallowed, he took another bite.

  The young man laughed. “And oh my gods”—he picked out a piece of meat and popped it in his mouth—“he gets the bacon so crispy.”

  Trent took a sip of tea and cleared his throat. “Yeah. So about Tanvarn.”

  Grenn nodded and spoke through a mouthful of food. “I think I know why I’m being reassigned over there.”

  “If they need someone like you in Tanvarn”—

  “Hey kid!” a man yelled from across the street.

  Trent turned. A—gentleman—older than Grenn strutted toward them, his face beset with jowls that hung from either cheek. His gut strained against a buttoned vest and the shirt he’d tucked into his trousers. Two others came with him.

  “I should fucking wreck your face,” said the man who’d spoken. The three of them stopped behind Trent.

  “Gentlemen,” Grenn said, chewing his last bite. He held out his arms. “How can I help you?”

  “You can start by standing the fuck up.”

  Grenn chortled as he took a sip of tea. He swallowed. “No.”

  “Ye made me baby sister cry,” the bulldog said. “The gods damn you if ye don’t make things right.”

  “Are you sure she wasn’t crying about—stick with me here—having you for a brother?”

  “Ye what?”

  “Yeah.” Grenn drained the rest of his tea. “Look, you probably have me confused with someone.”

  “You listen to me”—

  “Hey dere, Pierk,” the fat one behind him said. He stood a head shorter than the lead. “I think he’s saying somethin bout your sister’s honor and whatnot.”

  “Right you are, Blad,” said the taller.

  Pierk’s face twisted, like his thoughts had caught in a funnel as he tried to keep up with his underlings. He pointed at Grenn. “You stand up, take off that fucking armor, and face me like a man.”

  “I would,” said Grenn, “but I unfortunately lost my pants this morning. Or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.”

  “Players,” Trent said, “do we have to do this right now? We’ve not even finished our break”—

  “Shut up,” said Pierk. “It won’t take long to beat his ass, and then we’ll be on our way.”

  Trent sighed. When he stood, Pierk stared up at him. A walking cliché, Trent thought. Patched-up slacks covered the man’s stubby legs. The other two looked the part: Blad in a hoodie and jeans, the tall one in a beanie and jumpsuit.

  “Come on,” Pierk said in a quiet voice. “This isn’t with you, old man.”

  “Buddy,” Grenn said as he stood. He shook out his body. “I got this.”

  Pierk smirked, kept his voice low. “Is it one or two today?”

  Trent raised his hands and backed away. “I’m just a pumpkin farmer. But my quick math says it’ll be three.”

  “Come on guys, I’ve got a kid here,” a woman at the table next to them said. She gestured to her child. Both looked fairly well dressed in their collared shirts and pressed slacks—almost like they might head to temple after their breakfast. “We’re on vacation for gods’ sakes.”

  “No need to worry, ma’am,” said Grenn. “Karhaal still trains us well.”

  Despite his assurances, the woman huffed and stood and grabbed her son by the arm. “Come,” she said when he didn’t immediately follow her.

  “But mom, he’s a real Karlian,” the boy said as they walked away.

  “That’s right, and he should know”—

  “All right boys,” Pierk said as they spread in front of Grenn. “Just aim for his chest and face.”

  Grenn slid his left foot out behind him as he watched. “So your sister. Which one was she again?”

  Pierk screamed and rushed at him.

  Guard your left, Trent thought, but Grenn absorbed the first blow against his side. He’d watched the young man “train” before. From what Trent remembered, his fighting style looked different from what Karlians used during the War—still effective, just scrappier and more reliant on strikes. Grenn kept time with all of them, shifting his weight to match their incoordination, stepping harder on his right foot than his left.

  Pierk feinted, and the tall one leapt forward. Hook his foot. Grenn, instead, leaned into a punch and blocked with his left arm. The knock sounded like a hammer on wood.

  “Shit!” the tall man yelled, cradling his right fist with the other hand. “I fink he broke me hand.”

  Blad stepped forward and grabbed the collar of Grenn’s shirt. Counter-grab and throw. The Karlian looked down at the porky underling, either of them as confused as the other, before he batted the peon’s hand and head-butted him away. A fountain of red vented onto Blad’s chin, and he fell backwards, squealing in his agony. Grenn focused on Pierk and again raised his arms in tepid defense. The young knight grinned and waved the dog toward him.

  A whistle interrupted them. Trent covered his ears as a Keep guard road up on a gravi-cycler. The newcomer hopped nimbly from his bike when he met the scene. “Looks like I ruined a bit of fun, huh?” His voice rang clear, even for his siren. Streaks of chrome threaded through his vest and button down and slacks, and his left iris shined a dazzling silver-veined-with-blue. Lines traced from the augment over his temple and under his hair.

  “Consider yourself the fun police,” Grenn said after the siren quieted.

  “I’ll add that to my resume,” said the guard. “Pierk. A disturbance in Manage, I shoulda known. Assaulting an emissary from Karhaal, no less.”

  “Us assault him?” the tall thug said. His hand had already bruised blue and swelled so he couldn’t close his fist. “The other way around, for true.”

  “You mess with the bee, you get stung don’t ya?” The guard looked to Blad, who said nothing. Blood had covered the short man’s hands.

  “If it helps,” said Trent. “I saw the whole thing. Just awful—all of it.”

  “Mr. Geno.” The guard sounded pleased. “What do you reckon?”

  “Big mess.” Trent pointed at Grenn. “He’s sleeping with about fifty girls. One of ‘em might be his”—he nodded at Pierk—“sister. It’s sordid, too much for me to keep up with. I’ve got somewhere to be this morning anyway, Jax.”

  “O’ course. You head off. Grenn, you too. I’ll handle this mess.” Jax reached for a work tablet on his belt.

  As they walked away, Pierk yelled, “Ye ain’t seen the last of me, ye twit.”

  “Oy!” Jax said. “Shut up. You think you’re a villain or something? Oh, and Trent”—

  Trent turned half way around.

  —“the wife said she’d love another dozen or so pumpkins. She’s spoilin me with those pies, ya know.”

  “I’ll be at market tomorrow. I’ve already got a few with her name on ‘em.”

  Jax waved before he turned and addressed Pierk. “You really done it”—

  “You didn’t have to fight,” Trent told Grenn on the churreto vendor’s other side.

  “I don’t mind.” Grenn stepped out of time with him, jabbing at the air. “It’s good exercise.”

  “You’re not even sweating. Must be fun showin up a few nitwits.”

  Grenn smiled as they stepped onto the trailer’s cabin. “They didn’t have to fight me, either.”

  “And you should have shown restraint.”

  “Goddess,” Grenn said, unfazed. “Is that how boring the world was? Before the War, I mean.”

  Trent powered on the trailer. “It was a different time.”

  “All things considered, sir,” Sieku said. “Th
at was no-good trouble.”

  Trent nodded toward the urlan, as though that settled the matter. Grenn made no response.

  Outside Manage, Castle Arnin’s reach came upon them with skyscraping suburbs—taller and more densely packed units of housing that sat in the Mazim Corridor, a passage of plains in which one could see Mazim Hill to the northwest all the way from the Sovereign Shore.

  “… Karhaal’s got a special investigation there in Tanvarn,” said Grenn. He bit into his second churreto. “A witch.”

  Trent scoffed.

  Grenn held up his hands. “I know. But a lot of people have reported her to the Tower there, and once again, they’re doing nothing.”

  “What’s she done?”

  “A little bit of everything. Curing colds, fixing marriages, culling blight, facilitating trade. People come from all over the city to see her. Lately, though—and this is what’s bothering people—she’s been acting ‘erratic.’”

  “Strange erratic, or”—

  “Strange, sure. The Tower wasn’t clear, but she’s charging way more for her services lately, not taking visitors when she had before. The Fleecer, the people have started calling her. At times her shop just—disappears.”

  “Like gone?”

  Grenn nodded.

  “If she’s an ex-Leynar, it sounds like an illusion. Some sort of evocation?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Grenn, his voice flat.

  “Otherwise, she’s just an opportunist. Why don’t people go the apothecary? Or a counselor for that matter.”

  “Everyone wants to pretend a miracle can retread their lives. If we have the power to fix ourselves, it also means, maybe, we got ourselves into those situations.”

  “That—sounds reasonable.” Though the idea, internally, scraped at the wrong scars.

  “Exactly,” Grenn said, like he’d proven a point. “I’ve been thinking on it since I found out about it all. Ya know, piecing it together. And I think”—he nodded, as though assuring himself—“it’s all connected.”

  “All of it? The—the Beast, and the corruption, and the witch?”

  “Yep. And now they’re sending me to sort things out. It’s not surprising.” Grenn smirked. “They need a miracle.”

  A witch, a beast, and a scandal. Tanvarn’s miracle, Trent thought. It sounded like the start of a bad story. His mind, however, turned to the conspiracy he had unraveled, the boxes in a pocket on his coat, and the inner workings of Keep’s castle.

  3

  Twenty-nine minutes past eleven, Trent stopped the trailer in a queue at the castle’s front gate and pulled an identification card from a pocket inside his coat. He lowered the cabin shield while they waited. A cold breeze crossed the stage.

  Grenn had re-equipped his breastplate and stepped off. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Trent leaned against the console. “Will I see ya at Cups tonight? Madge is playing.”

  A few paces away, Grenn turned. “Maybe. Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “I don’t know.” Grenn held out his arms. “Official Karlian business.”

  Trent leaned back and shook his head, chuckling despite himself. “Sure. See ya, Grenn.”

  “Good luck with Kingy.” Grenn turned and continued down Custom Lane. The road curved around a monument of the king’s grandmother, and Grenn disappeared for the mass of tourists gathered there.

  The bus in front of Trent passed the gate, and he pulled forward and stopped next to an attending guard, who wore a button down and pressed slacks, much the same as Jax.

  “Mr. Geno, on time arrival.” The guard took Trent’s identification and tapped it against his terminal. After a series of swipes, the gate opened, and he handed Trent his card and a ticket stub. “You’re at port ‘B’ in garage two,” he said in a spiel. “If you don’t know your way around, tune in to Locality. Please leave your shield down at all times while on castle grounds.”

  “Thanks.”

  The guard rapped on the trailer’s hull.

  Trent pulled forward and passed the threshold into Castle Arnin, Keep’s heart. He stopped at the first cross street in the shadow of a skyscraper. “Sieku, tune-in to Locality.”

  Static issued from his headrest and resolved in a woman’s smooth voice. “… ‘Castle’ doesn’t refer to an individual building, but to the collective representation of his Majesty’s electoral commonstate…”

  Before the king had moved him to Keep, Arnin hadn’t yet commissioned the building to his right. Across its side, six stories up, a colossal plaque read, ‘Toward a healed world – The Yarnle Intercontinental Cooperation Center.’ The monolith stretched to a dizzying height above him, a pillar of solid onyx. People moved from one building to another across skywalks, some miles above the ground. Vertigo turned Trent’s stomach—his gut still protested the churreto—and he turned his gaze to the king’s quarters on the next street.

  The light across the intersection turned white.

  A horn beeped behind him.

  Goddess alive, Trent thought. He turned onto Basic Avenue, a street that ran diagonally through the castle.

  The guide went on: “Perched fifty stories above the garages, which house the royal collection of artifacts and memorabilia—his Majesty’s extensive catalog of petrified dragon eggs among them—and facilitate the movement of over six-hundred million tons of goods to and from the castle daily, the Mazim Estates provide sleeping accommodations for all seven-thousand-plus castle staff and overnight guests.” The royal house flashed gold, set into Mazim Hill like a gem.

  “Because the garages are your destination, please refer to the number listed on your ticket and report to your assigned dock as soon as possible. Your swift receipt-of-service ensures ministrations at Arnin Castle remain uninterrupted and on-time. On behalf of their royal highnesses, thank you for your service to the scepter.”

  Trent pulled onto an alley lane that veered off Basic Avenue and ran along the bottom edge of Mazim Hill. The trailer coasted to a stop behind a line that marked the start of the concourse to the garages, where a stoplight burned red on a pole next to him. For half a minute, he waited.

  From around the hill, a freight trailer, pulled by two tug cars, crept into view. Its deck hung almost as high as the plaque on the Yarnle building, and Trent sized it to hold at least three-and-a-half-million tons as it crawled by. A minute-and-a-half later, the tugs cars had maneuvered the giant onto the thoroughfare that led to the heavy-tonnage exit near the castle’s northeast corner.

  The light that hung above the line turned white, and Trent set the trailer in motion. “Sieku, take us in.”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  Trent relinquished control, and Sieku maintained while the trailer pivoted on its center axis. Other cars pulled away from them before they entered a tunnel off the concourse. Their journey finished as the urlan backed toward the dock marked ‘B’ in garage two.

  The concrete felt warm through his boots when Trent stepped off the cabin. Services through the garage sounded like dozens of tiny hammers, all pounding at different frequencies, dinging at different pitches through the rough-hewn tunnels as workers loaded and unloaded freight. Precisely machined metal bit into the walls where ingresses led further into Mazim Hill.

  “Oy there, Trent.” A stout man, garbed in a white button-down, brown jeans, and a visibility vest, hopped from the dock near the back of the trailer with more grace than the gods should have afforded him. His boots looked well worn—scuffed and wrinkled.

  “Therrance,” Trent said. He shook the man’s hand. “Great seeing you again.”

  “Likewise, drifter.” Therrance knocked on the trailer’s hull. “You’re getting these here with not a moment’s haste.” The trailer raised a foot and a half to match the dock as they walked toward the tail end.

  “How are things?”

  “As planned. My son didn’t get much sleep last night and the wife is looking peaky.” Therrance hoisted himself onto the platform. “The
gods are jostling up above”—he gave Trent a hand—“but it’s all thunder.”

  A woman walked out of the garage center, her clean pantsuit as blue as the sea. Jaw-length blonde hair swirled around her bespectacled face in a straight coiffure. Another driver, a woman, stood at the foot of dock C. Her grayed hair hung thin across her scalp, and she wore a dirty white dress, a wide belt cinched around her waist. The blonde spoke with her first.

  The trailer whined as it depressurized over the next few seconds, after which its tailgate pitched open and Sieku stepped onto the dock. With him came the essence of rustic fruit.

  “Gods.” Therrance coughed. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his face. “I swear if they foist these into the workers’ kitchens again, I’ll have a fit.”

  “Don’t like pumpkin?” asked Trent.

  “Used to. The royal tot’s penchant for them took care of that. I don’t get how you do it.”

  “Smells like money to me.” Trent smirked. “Besides, I just bring what the king asks for. It’s my honor to serve.”

  Therrance huffed. “And you can take”—

  “Mr. Geno,” the blonde woman said as she joined them. “I’m Rejin, undersecretary to the superintendent of distributions. Thank you so much for your on-time delivery. Please stay with your trailer until all goods are rendered.” A pleasant smile reached her lips.

  Seven service urlans and depot workers trickled from the surrounding stages to dock B, and two more joined them with loading carriages from inside the facility.

  “My urlan will chaperone the unloading process,” Trent said. “I have a meeting scheduled with the king today.”

  “The king’s not taking non-party visitors,” said Rejin, her tone cordial. “It’s the royal son’s birthday, I’m sure you’re aware.”

  Trent nodded. “I am. And I have a meeting scheduled with his Majesty today.”

  The undersecretary looked at him. Her soft smile never left her face while her gaze darted around his head. Trent noticed her glasses had no lenses. She refocused on him and said, “That’s right, Mr. Geno. If you’d follow me, please.”

  Therrance clapped Trent on the shoulder before the latter followed Rejin into the viscera of the distributions center. Others passed them by, either talking to their partners or seemingly to themselves, their business leading them elsewhere down the main corridor to crossways that shot in either direction every fifty feet.