The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  A woman, who sat at the back on the right side of the aisle, had taken it upon herself to serve as Mourner. She wore a gauche dress, complete with a veil and long sleeves that extended past her hands if she let them. The pews remained mostly bare otherwise, and at the front, on a small stage that raised six inches from the floor, thirty-seven bodies waited, each covered by a white sheet, gilded with a ‘K.’ Despite being perfumed by the urlans who’d serviced them, a subtle Taint soured the air.

  Trent never thought he’d perform a convocation, not after he left. The gathered watched him with expectant spirit, and he centered himself against the notion that when he tried, nothing would happen. Like a son who learns how to pray from his father, Trent remembered the words Jeom used on so many nights during the War, and he raised his hands and spoke to the fractured silence.

  “Karli, we come before You this night, gathered at a fount of Your power, to raze these bodies from the prisons that now hold them, to free the gods’ materials so They might use them again. Those who inhabited them did as the gods saw fit, and so they have left them the same. It is not for us to commiserate at death, but to find meaning in our brief circumstance at life and our eventual return to the Unmake.”

  The first line of Light beamed through a window above them and burned the body it touched. Fel and flesh together disintegrated and climbed and left nothing behind as the Light cleansed.

  Markil came down the stairs from the foyer and stood at the back of the altar room while Trent spoke his next words, which came easier in relief of the Light’s response.

  “Life is Light, and Light is life. We come of it and live in it and borrow from it, and all must return to it. What is old becomes new again, and what is new passes in the same. That which remains is our Path. In life they fought, and now they rest.”

  Countless strands descended to the covered bodies, and the Mourner cried such that all could hear while the energy performed its work. Whispers manifested as the Light carried the Fel away. Their speakers talked in tongues too old or removed from this world for Trent to make sense of them—their words would only fill the air with empty promises of the afterlife anyway, trying to take advantage of the aggrieved.

  When the Light finished its work, anxiety Trent didn’t know he carried left with the last strand, and now, with the last of his fortitude gone, exhaustion slumped his body against the surety of his hammer’s weight. Nobody moved, except for the man Grenn had called Karl, who climbed the stairs as soon as the show finished.

  The Mourner drooped in her chair and wept quietly into her hands. Trent had never served in that capacity, and though he didn’t know if she exaggerated her duty, he at least felt glad that someone had served when needed. He hated how that idea conflated with his view of Karhaal’s leadership.

  “Karli’i narthe,” the Grand Master said. Light illuminate.

  The gathered intoned the proper response: “Regix pas roxe,” May our path remain.

  Trent bowed, grabbed his hammer, and headed the way he’d come.

  Markil walked with him as they climbed to the exit. “That was incredible,” he said in a whisper.

  Trent puffed. “I did what I could.”

  “Goddess.” The young man’s words misted into the night. “I just—wow.”

  Despite himself, Trent smiled. This young man seemed impressed by the macabre. “I need rest. Unless the Chamberlain will see me tonight”—

  “I’ve not heard anything about that, but don’t let anyone bother you. You’ve got a quest we can’t even imagine, I bet.”

  The lights of the guest house’s marquis had succumbed to the haze that blanketed the holy capitol. Trent walked inside and handed his tablet to the urlan who worked the check-in kiosk. “Top floor if you can.”

  He climbed the stairs to the second-highest floor and entered his room, where he slid open the door to a balcony that overlooked a square three rings out from the Spoke. The room’s ambience pushed outward into the cold night, where fog estranged the strung lights and made them float as disembodied moons that couldn’t substitute for the one that soared above the haze.

  Nothing had come through on his communication device. Still, as he stepped out of his armor for the night, he wrote a message to Sieku that outlined the day’s events. From his pouch, he pulled a stick of incense—mint from home—and set it in a bowl on his bedside table. The soul stone Lillie had given him found its way to his right hand, and he sat just inside the room on a cushion he pulled from the couch.

  A statue of Leoldin, Grand Master during the War of the Bridges, stood fifty feet high, carved from a single piece of stone by the people in Befienne’s mountain region millennia ago. The old Master’s head bowed toward the ground, his eyes closed.

  Trent followed Leoldin’s example, and his mind set to work on its chaff. His body relaxed, and as he breathed, the quiet in the courtyard became noise in the night, skitters and whispers going their own way. He waited and observed, nothing more.

  The noise became a theme. Each person who passed had their own gait, their own way that breath whistled past their teeth when they spoke. Doors opened and closed across different streets that all fed into the small square Trent watched over. A couple stopped at the statue, their conversation mainly the prospect of another War. They quickly moved on, and further down the way, they went inside an apartment, the entrance to which slid open and closed a half-dozen times over the next few minutes.

  Grenn walked below, his footsteps scuffing in his right-foot-heavy pattern. Xenia tittered to him. The young Karlian whispered for her to quiet. He walked with an odd heel-toe gait to quiet his footsteps, and a half-minute later, he entered the same building as the others.

  A familiar presence joined Trent on the balcony, and he opened his eyes. Jeom faced away from him, his hands on the balcony’s railing.

  “You’ve joined me again,” said Trent. “I didn’t realize this situation was dire.”

  “You also didn’t seek my counsel. I just happen to like you.”

  “Huh.”

  “Does that surprise you, too? Saw the convocation. How was that?”

  “Thought it would be more—momentous, I guess. Mighta been too tired for it to affect me much right now.”

  Jeom chuckled. “We always imagine these great things will be so important when we do them. Then we find out there’s nothing special about them at all. Just more day-to-day responsibilities that someone didn’t feel ready for, then they passed them on to someone who feels even less so.”

  A small smile stretched across Trent’s lips. “Like them. I hear ‘em down there—they pretend they’re bein so secretive.”

  “Like you were when you were their age?” Jeom watched the statue of Leoldin as though he spoke to the stone instead. “I remember you sneaking into Vqenna all those nights after you met Lillie. Gods, you found such purpose with her; it amazed me. You would just walk right out a gate or pop up somewhere from the Chantry. You didn’t have many friends, I know, but your peers respected the hell out of you, kept your secrets well enough.” He laughed. “Nothing could have kept you from her anyway.”

  “Except the whole damn world,” said Trent. “My rune burned when we were apart, I know I told you before. I had to get to her.” He pictured a day twenty years earlier. “The day the War ended, though, it stopped. Suspected at first it had to do with the demons, like a desensitization or something. But then she stopped messaging me shortly after I told her I was headin home—before the whole Grand Master thing. Something had happened. I didn’t think it was demons, so maybe she had moved on, had given her heart to someone else, and she just couldn’t tell me. All these years, I couldn’t let myself think it was because she’d died. And I couldn’t let myself stop until I found out. Kendra said I was in denial.”

  “Kendra,” Jeom said. Distaste colored her name. “Any idea what you’re gonna say to her?”

  “No. Goddess alive, I hardly know what to say to anyone anymore.”

  “What wou
ld you say to the secret meeting going on in the apartment down the street?”

  “That I’m glad younger people can do something other than fuck and drink.”

  Jeom laughed. “It’s what happens. You think we wanted to leave the Order to your guard? Eh, but at least the War tempered your lot. This one, not used to doing their duty without permission first. They’re gonna have a harder time, especially being trained for the Peace. You helped make sure of that.”

  “Yeah,” Trent said, and he felt himself slip from his pense. He breathed, centering himself against his mind’s trouble. “If you could not bring that up just now”—

  “I don’t mean to be an asshole. Just happens”—

  “When you tell the truth to someone who doesn’t like how it sounds. Ya drilled that one into us enough to not forget it, trust me.”

  The night’s sounds filled their silence.

  “That was a good story you told back at the house, by the way, whether it’s true or not.”

  “It is. Took the secret with me to my grave. Figured it was past time to let it go. You think Lillie would have liked it?”

  “Your story?”

  Jeom nodded.

  “She’d have loved it. She came to think of you as a father, ya know. Or a god-father, maybe—someone to keep me safe. One winter—remember when we’d stationed at the Devise Basin for the season?—she came out to the camp, and she couldn’t get enough of you. Made me a bit envious how easily you could make her laugh.”

  “Neither of you had anything to worry about,” Jeom said, smiling. “Any idea what you’d say to her?”

  Trent’s countenance remained plain. “Won’t need to say a damn thing. Never had to.”

  “Mm.”

  Jeom and Trent said nothing else for the rest of the night. The presence that watched Trent gained shape and impressed upon him one importance: of its existence. It drew his concentration toward a point far away, to which Trent didn’t know the path. Patters and forest-sounds came to him: random crackling, branches and leaves moaning against the midwinter chill, small paws and wings moving unseen, indistinguishable from those of the street below. The ghost almost formed words, inhaled in preparation to speak, but it remained quiet for Trent’s pense and left when morning’s twilight pushed against the night’s haze.

  2

  Trent pulled himself from his meditation the next morning when the first sliver of sunlight pierced through the morning fog to touch Leoldin’s face. The alley-harangues of a wizarding old man and his feckless pet had come to him intermittently during the night, a premonition in its parts: of pieces coming together and of atonements and forgiveness. Yet like trying to remember fragments of a dream, they escaped him, and by the time he left his room, he thought nothing of them.

  He didn’t go with Grenn to get the younger man’s breastplate that morning, but Trent found him waiting in the courtyard below his room. Xenia bounced to Grenn’s left elbow and landed on the freshly gleaming metal. The armor’s folding parts pulled away from his arm in thin blades.

  “Woah,” Grenn said. He appraised his left arm, turning it to catch the light. “How’d you do that?”

  Xenia beeped.

  “Upgrades?”

  She nodded, whistling.

  “Goddess,” said Grenn, marveling at his arm. He copied the sound that meant ‘upgrades,’ though off-pitch.

  “Got your helm workin again?” Trent asked.

  Grenn nodded, and his helm folded over his head. “That and more.” His helmet retracted. Dark half-circles painted his face under each eye.

  “Didn’t see ya at the convocation.”

  “You know how it is.” Grenn stood. “Got held up, and then you told me I needed rest, so”—he shrugged—“that’s what I did.”

  “Ya look like shit.”

  Xenia chirped.

  “Shut it,” Grenn said to her in mock-warning.

  The little mech beeped and whistled, and Trent got her meaning of admonishment.

  “Karli’s Light will sustain me.” Grenn tossed his right hand from his face to gesture indifference.

  Xenia whistled.

  “Okay, okay.” Grenn pursed his lips, tuning a whistle that undulated in pitch. He held his right hand near his face and tapped on nothing in time with the beeps he made. They sounded kind of like Xenia’s. “That good?”

  The mech shrugged, then intoned a response.

  “I assume you didn’t get that from a girl in the Order,” Trent said as Grenn shouldered his hammer. They headed away from Leoldin’s statue, toward the Spoke.

  “Vqenna’s a big place,” said Grenn.

  “Too big. You wanna get breakfast before we’re called in?”

  “You think that’s happening still?”

  “It better. We’re leaving if it doesn’t.”

  Grenn stopped. “What?”

  Trent walked a few steps before he double-took Grenn’s absence and half-turned. “That’s what I told ‘em by proxy.”

  “Come on, man, you heard ‘em. They’re convening a session. If not this morning, if not today, sometime soon. If we’re not here for it”—

  “They’re not gonna have a session while I’m here.” Trent didn’t wait for Grenn to answer. “For one, there’s no quorum—there won’t be. Even if there were, they’ll decide what to do with me, send me on my way, and tell everyone else afterward. Manifeld wants me outta here before the old guard shows up, and I gotta say, I do too.”

  Grenn exhaled. “Even if that’s the case, I’ve got to stay here until I’m reassigned.”

  “What if I told you you’re assigned to Tanvarn?”

  “Is that where you’re heading?”

  Trent nodded. “Whoever was lookin for me is there. Good a place as any to start.”

  “Even still.” Grenn set his hammer on the ground with a thund. His hands found their place on his hips while his gaze traced the brick underfoot. “It’s complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  “I can’t let the Order and you pull me between you. For now, at least, I’ve got to just go along.”

  “Goddess alive,” Trent said. He continued toward the Spoke. Bureaucracy.

  “It’ll probably all work out anyway,” Grenn said, catching up to him.

  Trent headed for a diner he’d eaten at during his time as a recruit. An old woman named Gearm had worked there before the War and had stayed during. She’d been a plump woman, on in years when even Jeom had been young. “My lot in life is feeding you people,” she’d told them, flashing her teeth that had dyed blue from her girlhood in L’quc. She often wore a floral button-up with un-pressed slacks under a dirty apron. “It’d be hard to fail at it, so I sure as hell ain’t gonna.”

  “No churretos,” Grenn said, reading the single-page menu.

  “Perhaps blessings do exist,” said Trent. “It’ll give you a chance to eat something real. Promise it won’t kill you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Why does everything here have brackenberries in it?”

  Where the country’s coastline met the Swoen Sea, L’qucian farmers grew the largest share of brackenberries in the world. Gearm had shipped them in and baked them into pies and cobblers, served up fresh-made brackenberry jam with flaky all-butter biscuits, and even infused milk with their nectar. “Tart without being sour,” she’d tell anyone, “and just sweet enough to leave you wanting another bite.”

  They ordered, and the waiter mentioned the restaurant having just gotten “… punkin in from Keep. Ya know if you’re around later, we’ll have pies. And I think Ralen’s doing somethin with the seeds, too.” She spoke with a lazing drawl and had tucked her hair into two buns on the back of her head under a billed hat.

  “It’s winter,” Trent said. “Those pies’ll be savory, yeah?”

  The waiter had only shrugged. “It’s whatever they cook up in back.”

  Two minutes after their food arrived, a harried Priest with light pink hair walked inside, holding her palm-sized tablet up to h
er face. Trent rolled his eyes when she looked their way and gasped. She quickly tapped on her screen with both thumbs.

  “Excuse me,” Grenn said. He raised his hand and caught the waiter’s attention. “The cook has, unfortunately, undercooked my bacon.”

  “Really?” She picked up a piece. It held its form between her thumb and forefinger. “I told him to crisp it up for ya. We can take it back and char it if ya like, but apart from that, I don’t think it can get any more done.”

  “That’d be great,” Grenn said, an easy smile on his lips. “Thanks.”

  The waiter grabbed the bacon off his plate and headed back to the kitchen. Grenn apparently missed or didn’t care about the glare under her brow. While Grenn cut up his sausage patties, the Priest pocketed her tablet and approached their table.

  “Grand Master,” she said, bowing her head. Then she scowled at Grenn. “Grenn. The Chamberlain requests your presence.” She spoke with a delicate accent that sounded almost affected and had styled her hair in a high ponytail. Her cardinal armor bared her right oblique and hip.

  “Seriously, Ruby?” Grenn said. “We just got our meal.”

  “I’m sure you can eat later.”

  “Grenn,” Trent said. “This is good. Means they listened.” He stood and picked up his hammer. He didn’t mind abandoning his meal—hardly as good as he remembered it, the eggs chalky and the grits crunchy. He’d eaten the few cubes of pumpkin the restaurant called a side.

  Grenn sighed and looked at Xenia. “What do ya think? Get something later?”

  “Of course you get somethin late”—

  Grenn raised his hand. Xenia’s gaze passed between Trent and the Priest. She chirped a response and nodded. “Kay,” Grenn said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and tossed it onto his plate. “Never liked this place anyway.”

  Ruby followed them out of Gearm’s. Grenn noticed her keeping up with them. “Are you—accompanying us—all the way there?” he asked. “We know the way.”

  “Madam Undertaker herself told me to escort you so you don’t get sidetracked, Grenn.” Again, she said his name like a curse. “And the Chamberlain agreed.”