The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  One stood atop the pile of his swarming compatriots and hissed.

  “What? You speak like this to me? It’s not like you’re using them.”

  The bug flared its carapace, buzzed its wings at him.

  Luffy tutted and reached into the jar, pushing the aggrieved aside, and pulled from its depths an almost-perfect molting. “You see?” He held the shedding for the leader to examine. “Calm down. Now all of you back inside.” They followed his order for the most part, and the apothecary picked up the vessel to peer within.

  Trent watched this happen with disconnected wonder—a man speaking to beetles as though they understood him. He needed rest.

  “Is that everyone?” Luff’s neck percolated to see inside from different angles. “Is it?” The beetle on top squalled. “All right, but I’m warning you: another jailbreak and I’ll burn your damn page.” Before he put the lid back, the top beetle turned and flared its carapace again, then buried itself in the jar, unseen for all the others. Luffy twisted it tight, and the vessel sunk and returned to an unmoving ink.

  A bugger crawled over the counter’s edge and away as Luff dropped the skin into a mortar and ground it with his fingers, unceremonious but deliberate. He continued their conversation like nothing had happened. “She told me Herself, Master Russell, of your imminent return.”

  “Did She?” asked Trent.

  “Yes,” Luffy said, matter-of-fact. He twisted his forearm and got his body behind the mashing movement. “Powder—come on, old man. Otherwise, he’s just putting bug-skin on his face.”

  “He’s not going to anyway?”

  “No.” Suddenly, the apothecary held a pestle in his left hand. “You should know better than anyone: changing how a thing appears also changes it fundamentally, both in what people expect of it and what the changed expects of itself.” He checked the contents of the mortar and mashed a few more times, then poured pearlescent sand into the beaker.

  Luff flipped to a different page in the tome, where he pulled a drawing of a red-and-black leaf from its paper. On another, he did the same with a fleck of green, and a musical note hung in the air, played from the high register of a mid-sized string instrument. It faded abruptly he closed the book, which carried itself to a shelf, fell over onto its back, and huffed.

  “If I asked you”—Luff reached out and touched Grenn’s right cheek on either side of his wound—“how does that feel, you would respond?”

  “It’s all right,” said Grenn.

  “Come now, sir Grenn. There is no shame in this place.”

  Grenn sighed. “Hurts like a bitch.”

  “Good to know. Ligno will make that, eh, not go away, but it will help.”

  “Help is why we came, Luff.”

  “We?” the apothecary said, squatting to reach under his counter. “I understand your need for help, sir Grenn, but Master Russell, too?” He stood and looked to Trent. “And how could I aid the Grand Master this day?”

  “I was speaking more with the royal we,” Grenn said.

  “Ah.” The apothecary pulled a dropper from its vial and deposited an entire squeeze into Grenn’s mixture. Trent turned his head and read the name stamped across the vial’s side: ‘Basiim,’ written in thin and bunched cursive. Luff added half-a-dropper-full more and set that aside, then turned to one of the boxes he’d carried from the back room. “Master Russell has helped me this day anyway,” he said and carefully set the box’s lid on the counter next to it.

  From inside, he pulled a manicured glass bottle so pure in its craft that the amber liquid within seemed suspended in nothing, like it sloshed in the apothecary’s own hands. “The most secret ingredient, to make all the bad stuff go away.” Luffy held the vial up to his face to inspect it. Light from his eyes reflected off the fluid. “Normally I harvest it myself, but the piggies don’t like the cold so much. I almost ran out.” He smiled, seemed hardly able to contain his excitement. “The girl, she told me you brought it for me. So kind of you. It had been in Munsrow for—nearly two months.”

  A wary squint stamped under Trent’s brow. He got that funny feeling of dream-space, as though nothing seemed weird to anyone but himself. Grenn didn’t react.

  Luffy uncorked the bottle and sniffed. “Hoo. Like a fresh jar of rotten pickles.”

  Trent grimaced at that, both the description and the smell.

  “My gentlemen,” the apothecary said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He pinched a bead of liquid into the vial’s dropper, then held it over the concoction. “A soupçon of warthog’s ass-piss.”

  The mixture simmered when the drop hit its surface, and a frothy head formed across its top, from which a sweetly-sour odor punctuated the bubbling as the brew climbed the container’s sides. Trent crinkled his nose against the smell. It reminded him of the barracks during his time as a recruit—days-old body odor and people either too lazy or unable to detect they needed to clean themselves.

  “Is something wrong, Master Russell?” asked Luff. He sniffed. “The embage getting to you?”

  “No,” said Trent. “I just think your Plainari’s a little off.”

  “Concerned? This is not surprising. We used it all the time millennia ago.” He shrugged. “It went out of fashion, as all things do, but it does the job, better than many synthetic materials, I can tell you. I suppose I should have asked first, but I was so excited—and so long as sir Grenn does not object.”

  “I trust you, Luff,” Grenn said. He glanced at the counter over his comm device, then returned to whatever it showed him.

  The reaction finished when the foam had risen five inches over the edge of its vessel, held up by its own viscosity. “Ah,” said Luff. “Perfect.” He drizzled a caramel-colored liquid across the top.

  “Is it?” Trent said. A new stink like burnt marshmallows stung the back of his throat.

  “Of course, Master Russell.” The beaker sizzled at the apothecary’s touch. “Shit.” He raised his finger to his lips and waved it through the air a few times, mildly annoyed despite his enthusiasm, then pulled a glove from the counter’s other end and put it on. The streaming contents held their shape as they slid out of the overturned beaker, which Luffy gently shook over a piece of waxed parchment. He leaned over the fluff and wafted the vapor toward his face, then exhaled.

  “I think we really got it, sir Grenn.” He manifested a dull putty knife and cut into the mixture, pushed either half to the side, and set to work, smoothing it out and bunching it up again and again. After several passes, the lather began to set into an off-yellow ointment.

  “Great,” Grenn said. He latched his device onto his belt.

  “Indeed.” Luff passed the knife over the paste a dozen more times before he scooped the medicine into a plastic container in a single swipe.

  Grenn reached for the substance with his fingers.

  “No,” the apothecary said. “You do not do this that way.” From a shelf behind him, he pulled a dozen cotton swabs from a larger container and put them in a paper bag. “It will numb your fingers if you use them for that.”

  “Through the gauntlets?” Trent asked.

  Luffy nodded.

  Grenn watched himself in the mirror behind Luffy and applied the ointment properly.

  “And how is it you came upon this wound, sir Grenn?” Luffy asked, watching the young Karlian dab more of the mixture onto his face.

  Grenn didn’t look away from himself and said, “A little show at the temple courtyard. Almost died. Kinda glad I didn’t.”

  “And your armor?”

  “Got a little dinged up, same happening.”

  “During the demon show,” said the apothecary. He tapped the right side of his nose with his index and middle finger. “We shall need the workshop, then. I’ve needed an excuse to stop in.” Luff pulled a lid from the air and capped the rest of the Grenn’s medicine. “Keep applying that until you use all of it—all, you understand?”

  “Yeah, yeah. All.” Grenn waved his hand in front of his face
. The wound had already stopped leaking. “Do ya think I need a bandage?”

  “No, no,” Luffy said. He phased to the counter’s other side. “You must let it air. Good for the wound, good for your soul.” The bell above the door clinked, and the apothecary waited for them.

  “Whose workshop are we headin for?” Trent asked.

  “His,” said Grenn.

  “Why aren’t we goin to the quartermaster?”

  Grenn looked between him and Luffy. “He is the quartermaster.”

  Trent laughed for a breath. “Course he is.”

  “I may not balance the books like sir Tinaster,” said Luffy as they stepped past him, “but I assure you the coin is well used.”

  “Goddess, it’s cold,” Grenn said. He peered at the darkened shops. “I swear the world seems a little darker now.”

  “The sun has retreated, sir Grenn. Happens about this time every day right now. Besides, it always could be worse.” Luff’s gaze darted upward before he followed them outside. “As bad as things get, at least there are not spiders on the ceiling.”

  The air smelled stale as they made their way toward the Spoke.

  “… I’ve seen through the monocle Trent—Russ—has,” Grenn said. “How is it you see him without it?”

  Luffy laughed. “The Goddess saw fit to give me the gift of true-sight. How do you think I can measure things, like the specs for you armor, without a tape?”

  Grenn shrugged. “I figured you had—abilities.”

  “You were not wrong.”

  Trent waited for the apothecary to continue, but a clearer picture formed in his mind of the man who walked with him. The Goddess had taken him for Herself despite what he’d been.

  “The people,” said Luff. He gestured to a woman they passed. Her hair hung in front of her face in jet laces, and her armor shone the color of midnight. She kept to herself, scanning all she saw with a neutral uncaring. “We are all a little eccentric, sir Grenn. To see someone is to behold the person as they have cultivated themselves. Look at Master Russell. Elected and anointed Grand Master of the Karlian Order—that’s what someone would have seen before his departure. And what did he leave to do? Farm pumpkins.” He chuckled. “One small piece of proof that before we can figure out others’ motivations, we must first find and rescue ourselves in the maze of our own minds. For how can we possibly help others find their path if we cannot see our own?”

  “Can you see everyone’s path?” Trent said. “See into their hearts and know them?”

  Luffy bobbed his head for a second. “Yes, but real life is replete with intangibles and puzzlements we ourselves cannot see through. It becomes an integral part of who we are, yet like an overgrown underbrush, we or others can simply burn it away. To know someone is to see them during and after the fire, not before.”

  School-aged kids poured in groups down the next street. They paid heed only to their screens and friends. As it should be, Trent thought. “You even see your own?” he asked.

  “How can Karli expect me to peer into the hearts of others if I cannot peer into mine own?” The apothecary waited for an answer that didn’t come. “Look at you. You had to follow your own path, make your own journey, wherever that took you, whatever that meant. Take this one”—Luff pointed at a young man walking down the street with a girl who spoke a meter a second; the young man noticed the apothecary’s attention—“he wants to fuck her, she wants to fuck somebody else”—

  The young man’s eyes widened, and he shuffled past.

  “What?” the young woman said, keeping up with him. “Did I say something?”

  —“and the rest are all too busy trying to figure out how to fuck each other, in one way or another.” The apothecary ignored the younger peoples’ reactions to his words. “And then they each have their own hopes and dreams and goings-on with their families. The nonentities of their lives consume them, and they become lost in nullity’s miasma.”

  Luff turned onto a side street that Trent didn’t see until the apothecary disappeared into it. “But Master Russell, you know better than anyone that being lost is just another act in life’s play. People become lost and like it that way. Others long to lose themselves but can’t let go. Then as with you, life thrust upon you a situation so wondrous that your mortal coil couldn’t stand it, and like an oak that becomes nothing in the fire of its dispassions, you vanished. But what no one will tell you, because no one who needs to hear it wants to, is like all lost sons, you eventually found your way home. Though I suspect”—Luff’s voice echoed when he turned a corner, and he spoke over his shoulder while they walked single file down a narrow alley—“you are not here for long.”

  “What makes you think that?” Trent said, and though he’d lowered his voice, it still echoed. The cramped way caused him unfamiliar claustrophobia.

  “I will say this to you,” Luff said. “As the shepherd searches for himself, he leaves his sheep in the care of wolves. As such, either the wolves become the sheep, or the sheep become the wolves; both lose their way without the guiding principle. The wolves will hunt the sheep until they kill them all and leave only themselves, which kills them eventually anyway, or they will lose the identity that made them wolves by coopting the herd. So the question becomes: have you returned to root out the wolves and reclaim your sheep or to command the weakened wolves?” He laughed, a stark bellow from deep in his chest. “Not superb options either way, I can see.”

  They stopped in front of a bare piece of wall—just sheet metal and large rivets. Luffy leaned against it, a flash of light beamed against his left eye, and a seamless door receded away from them to reveal a brick façade. He pushed against the wall, which opened at a finger’s touch, and stepped into a dark hallway. “Gentleman.” Luff bowed and gestured into the foyer. “Grand Master, I welcome you to my Opus.” The quartermaster disappeared.

  Trent waited a couple seconds. “Do we follow him?”

  “Of course you follow,” Luffy said from inside. “Please.” He sounded far away.

  Past the threshold, the quartermaster’s workshop lit and revealed a collection of scaffoldings that climbed five stories overhead. Shelves lined one entire wall, stocked with sundry materials, from bags of Tanvarnian sand to unworked ore from the Badlands. A maze of workstations littered the ground floor, very much like a small town, each with its own project, manned by a mechanical arm or a fluttering automaton.

  Luff gestured to one that hung over a copy of itself. It wiped its tiny brow with a small piece of cloth and watched Trent as he passed, shielding the open version of itself from his view.

  “Have to let them work out their own flaws,” the quartermaster said.

  “Do you do anything here?” Trent said, watching the various laborers.

  “Of course, Master Russell, but nothing so mundane as basic-bitch work.”

  An arm overhead squealed at him.

  “And what would you call it?” Luffy asked of the drudge. “You do have a problem with the words I use or the idea that you serve a menial purpose?”

  The arm deflated and let out a melancholic hum.

  “Do not sadden, my little friend. Though your purpose may be primitive, you mean the world to me. This entire operation would fall apart without you.”

  Several other devices cocked their faces at him, peeping or creaking in admonishment or protest.

  “All of you,” he said. Luffy switched to a language Trent didn’t recognize. But swearing cadenced the same in any lexicon, and the machines winced at high points in Luffy’s short speech. “Now back to work.” He looked between Trent and Grenn and shrugged. “They need to hear shit like that sometimes.

  “But yes, Master Russell. How would I get all the work finished otherwise? That’s the secret to success”—he raised his right index finger toward the ceiling—“always do as little repetitive work for yourself as possible.” He sighed. “Everything to its purpose, and everything to its place.”

  An articulating arm stopped to have a l
ook at Luff and waved back and forth in front of his face. They had a short conversation in the foreign parlance, during which the arm gestured toward Trent or Grenn. Luffy whistled after half a dozen exchanges, and the branch turned, glowering somehow, and delivered the set of forceps it carried to a theater two stories above them.

  “Leave the calamity to insanity, as I always say.” Luff looked toward a high corner of the room. “At least I think I do. Or is the insanity left to the calamity? Does neither make sense, or do both?” He ran his fingers through his chin hair, then spoke his next words in an old language, of which Trent caught only half a word. For a quarter-minute, the quartermaster contented himself with the workshop’s whizzes and whirs and tinks and tings.

  Then he turned to Grenn. “Now, that armor, if you will.”

  Grenn pulled off his chest piece, careful to not scratch up his face on the broken pieces. “Ow,” he said as he pulled his head through the busted neckline. He lost his concern in the end and let the exposed circuitry pull out his hairs and set the chest piece on the table in front of him. “Goddess, hadn’t been looking forward to that.”

  “And now it is over,” said the quartermaster. “Amazing what you can do when you don’t have a choice.” He hardly glanced at the armor before he raised his hand. A flying servicer in the shape of a mosquito zoomed to him and perched on his finger. Luff whispered to it in a series of whistles and screening pitches that slid from one to the next. The flyer answered in kind. After a back-and-forth that lasted just over two minutes, the little guy hopped to the chest piece and heaved it to a station three stories up on the west wall, where an urlan leaned over it and consulted with the droid that brought it to her.

  Luff turned back to them. “Nothing my urlans can’t handle. You should be fine to pick it up in the morning, perhaps earlier if it suits you.”

  “I’ll be here then,” said Grenn. “I hope I can also leave my hammer.” He looked at Trent. “I—I can’t very well carry it around.”