Daemon

by Doug Dandridge

  “Take that you bastard,” yelled the necromancer, shaking a fist in the air. The bodyguards and security guards around her broke into cheers. Yvette smiled back at the grins breaking out around her. She wasn’t sure if she had actually destroyed the thing, but she had banished it from this place and time. And she and the other mages would know how to fight it in the future.

  It was only there for a moment, the feeling. A feeling that something was wrong, that she had not in fact triumphed. And then the red tendrils of energy had risen from the ground around her and coalesced into a spinning vortex. She had been fooled, and it was now too late to call the spell back into her mind. The vortex formed around her and lifted her from the ground and into its firm embrace. The world spun around her. Her vision blurred and her head spun with dizziness. She thought of her husband, hoping that he might find a way to fight this thing. She thought of her son, understanding what he must have felt at the end, the helplessness of being destroyed by something he did not understand. Then all thought left her, leaving her with only the awareness of pain as the vortex stretched her, tearing tendons and ligaments, subjecting her to horrible agony. That went on for what seemed like hours, but was really less than a minute, before the vortex pulled again and shredded her into a mist of small particles and even smaller droplets of liquid. The last thing the spirit of Yvette Daemon felt was the yawning hell that the entity sucked her soul into, and an understanding of just what had destroyed her, and why.

  Before the eyes of the horrified bodyguards and manor staff the vortex dissipated again. Red tendrils of energy went back into the earth, leaving only the destruction it had wreaked to show it had ever been.

  * * *

  “Yvette,” whispered Daemon under his breath, grasping at his head as the sense of loss hit hard.

  “Sir,” said the man who had taken the Security Chief's place. “Are you alright?”

  “It took my wife,” said Daemon in a choked voice. The hurt began to spread from his heart. He had not always been kind to his wife. He had never been faithful, just as she had never been. But he had loved her.

  “Your wife,” said the Major, his eyes wide. The rest of the staff started to murmur and whisper among themselves.

  I called this war council so we could figure out a way to strike back at this thing, thought Daemon as the tears began to flow. It was too little, too late.

  “We're sorry, sir,” said the Security Chief.

  “Bullshit,” yelled Daemon, thrusting to his feet and slamming both fists into the table. “You didn't even know her. You couldn't care less about her. Except that she had power and could do things for you. Or to you. The same as you feel about me.”

  The Security Chief looked down at the table. Everyone shut up and looked away, while Daemon sank back into his seat and stared ahead. A few sobs racked his body. He fought for control. A mage had the ability to control emotions. It was part of the training they needed in order to control forces outside themselves. He swept the emotion away under a mental carpet. He would access it later, when he had the time.

  “You,” he barked, glaring over at the Army Colonel who had been commanded to the meeting. “I want every magic user you can get your hands on. I don't care if you have to steal them from the navy. They are to be organized into battle groups, along with whatever mundane troops are necessary for their security.”

  “I will need authorization from the full Council of Mages to carry out such an order,” said the man, looking over a Daemon.

  “You will have it,” said Lucius, smacking his hand on the table. “Before the night is over.”

  “And then?” asked the Colonel, a slight smile on his face.

  Lucius recognized that smile. It was that of a man who had just been given power greater than he had ever exercised before. And was looking forward to using it.

  “And then you will find this thing and destroy it,” said Daemon in a soft voice. “While the Council members and myself track down whoever is responsible for it, and punish them to the end of their lives, and beyond.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jude woke up in the dark room with a start, wondering why they had let the lights go out, and what was clattering around in that darkness. He strained to hear if anything was moving in the darkness, if he were in the dark space with any Shadows, before he remembered where he was. He breathed out and allowed himself to calm down, then looked over at the rattling alarm clock that had woken him.

  Lighting a match and igniting the gas lamp, Jude sat up in bed and pulled off the covers. The sky was still completely dark outside the window, but he knew they would get started soon. He dressed in the clothes the Stranger’s congregation had provided for him, jeans and a long sleeved shirt and shoes, all in his size. He then hurried down the stairs to the smell of bacon and coffee.

  “Good morning,” said Gerald Stranger when Jude appeared in the kitchen. The table was set with food, and a cup of coffee sat steaming at the place they had set for their guest. “Are you ready for your journey?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to go back to that place,” said Jude, adding some cream to his coffee and stirring it in. “But I have to if I want to see an end to this thing.”

  “You could stay here, at the mission,” said Charlotte Stranger, bringing a plate of biscuits to the table and seating herself. “Nothing says you have to go back to that place.”

  “My sense of outrage says that I do,” said Jude as he scooped some eggs onto his plate, following it with some strips of bacon. “I can’t have seen what I’ve seen and do nothing about it. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”

  “Sarah found herself a good man,” said Gerald, buttering a biscuit.

  “I didn’t know that Sarah found herself a man,” said Jude with a blush. “I think of her as a friend.”

  “Then open your eyes, boy,” said Gerald, who then filled his mouth with scrambled eggs, leaving Jude to his own thoughts for a moment.

  “You need to stop using magic,” said Charlotte, looking Jude in the eyes. “Things are going to happen soon, and the mages will not like the results.”

  Jude grunted, then addressed his own meal. He didn’t want to argue with the Strangers.

  At the end of the meal Jude got ready to follow the reverend from the house. Charlotte gave him a big hug.

  “You take care of yourself,” she said, giving him a squeeze. “We would like to see you back here someday.”

  Jude nodded and smiled, but said nothing. He didn’t know what was going to happen when he got back to the city. He was going to be crossing some heavy hitters, and if they got another shot at him he was probably gone for good.

  Gerald led him out of the house and down the street, between the sparsely strewn streetlights that gave the road an unsafe appearance to a city dweller. Gerald walked along as if nothing could possibly be lurking in the dark, which according to the minister was true for this place. They came to another house and walked around the corner to where an all-terrain steamer chugged away, a pair of men standing by it. Jude recognized them from the night’s meeting, and they gave him a smile as they shook hands.

  Jude looked at the men, both wearing wide brimmed hats, with pistols holstered on their belts. Harry, the larger of the men, held a double barreled shotgun, while Chris, the smaller, had a rifle set into a boot by the driver’s side of the vehicle.

  “I thought we were safe from Shadows,” said Jude, looking over the hardware.

  “We are,” said Gerald, handing Jude a big revolver in a holster. “But we’ll be traveling in areas where it isn’t so secure.”

  Jude noted that Gerald had an automatic holstered at his side, which he hadn’t noticed on the way over.

  “You’re coming with us?”

  “I think this business in the city is as much my concern as yours,” said Gerald, walking over to the steamer and climbing into one of the back seats. Chris got into the driver’s seat, while Harry rode shotgun. The back of the steamer
was loaded with bags and boxes, like they were going on safari, and a couple of rifles were secured into racks at the back of the cab.

  Jude sat alone with his thoughts as they drove from the village and out onto the road running down the bank of the central stream. About a mile out of the town Chris turned the vehicle to the east and started across the fields to the pass that Jude had come through the day before.

  Chris stopped the vehicle at the top of the pass, its headlights shining out over the dead earth that sloped back down the mountains and out into the desert. They were high enough up that Jude could see the flat expanse of dark sand, to see the large river off in the distance as a deeper band of blackness in the night. Something scuttled along down in the pass, and a dark shape appeared in the beams of the vehicle. It shuddered and ran, escaping the light that it could not stand, and Jude felt himself shaking as he looked at the unnatural creature that was haunting the night.

  Jude noticed that the sky in the east was much lighter. Moments later the edge of the red disk of the dawn crept over the horizon, and the tops of the dark dunes began to light up. The disk rose quickly into the sky, and the landscape began to open up beneath them.

  “Watch out for anything on the way down,” said Gerald to Jude. “There might be Shadows lurking in some of the darker areas.”

  Chris put the vehicle in gear and began to accelerate down the slope of the pass. The headlights dispersed the remaining darkness, and Jude looked to the side as they took the first bend, to the shadows that were still hiding from the sun. A minute later the vehicle was into another turn, and the sun had risen high enough to illuminate the entire pass. The tension level went down considerably as they moved lower into the light.

  The vehicle churned a bit as it hit the ground at the bottom of the pass, moving out of the mountains and into the dune field that washed like a sea of sand at the base of the rocky prominences. They then turned north and followed the mountains.

  The sun rose through the morning and was about directly overhead, noon time, when they went over a large bridge that was still well maintained. The road leading from the bridge was still covered by sand, though pavement broke through every once in a while.

  “We ship produce and meat up this road,” said Gerald as Jude looked out over the barren terrain. “We have a mission house up this way where we spend the night during trips. They’ll provision us for the next part of the journey.”

  A half hour later they were seeing the edge of civilization. Scrub trees and yellow grasses took over from the desert sand. Everything looked unhealthy, even the few scraggly looking goats that cropped the grass. It looked as if this area was dying, about to revert to the lifeless desert that it took over the terrain from. The road was actually a physical presence, and there were light poles along the tarmac, and around the sheds were the grazers were quartered at night. As the miles went by the vegetation began to green and plump up, until they were driving through farmlands, lights over the fields protecting them from the Shadow insects which would ravage them otherwise.

  After seeing the mission lands this landscape still looked bleached out. Not as vibrant a green. The animals looked listless compared to those he had seen at Sutter’s Mission. Even the center of the magical world was not as strong or as alive as those lands the Church members said were sacred to their God. The first farming village came and went as the afternoon passed two o’clock. People lazed on porches, watching the steamer go by, giving slow waves to the occupants.

  This land is like something dying of cancer, thought Jude, or gangrene. It was a place that was slowly sinking into death, as the life force was leached out of it. He again compared it to the mission lands, which were so vibrant and bursting with health. Those lands were not being leached out. Their life was in the soil and was going to stay there, as long as the inhabitants stayed loyal and obedient to their God.

  The steamer rolled on, another hour, passing through a series of villages until they got to the regional capital, Williamsburg, a town of about twenty thousand, where the web of farming villages linked and produce was gathered to be sent to the larger polity up the chain. A couple of blocks into the town the car turned off, heading down a road that was fenced in on both sides. A large church sat at the end of the road, with a cluster of buildings off to either side.

  “This is Church property,” said Stranger as they rolled through a gate that a teenager closed behind them.

  Jude nodded his head as he looked at the compound with new eyes. Even here everything looked more alive than it did in the civilized world of magic. While not as vibrant as the mission lands, it still looked healthier than the vegetation outside it. A couple of dogs ran up to the car, tails wagging and happy smiles on their faces. The car pulled to a stop in a marked parking area and the men got out, hands going to the heads of the hounds to be sniffed and licked.

  “We’ll rest up here, and then head to the train station,” said Stranger, waving a greeting to someone across the compound.

  “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” said Jude, smiling at the minister and holding out his hand. “If I could borrow some clothes that will fit in where I’m going, I’ll take it from here.”

  “We’re going to get you outfitted alright,” said Gerald, waving off the goodbye handshake. “You and me both. Then I’m coming with you. I want to see this thing for myself, so that I can report to our elders.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” protested Jude, holding up a cautioning hand. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I am doing the Good God’s work, son,” said Gerald, his smile widening. “I take my chances when I do what he wants me to do. And I depend on him to cover my back. The worst happens and I die and go to heaven. And what’s so bad about that?”

  Jude couldn’t think of an answer to that one. To him death was something to be avoided at all costs. None of the places that his belief told him were destinations after death sounded all that great. In fact most of them sounded downright horrible. But this man sounded like he wanted to see what was on the other side.

  Jude was impressed by the operation that the Church ran in this compound. While most of the structures were legitimate, there was an underground infrastructure at work here, with many skilled people working behind the scenes. In less than an hour Jude was dressed in a nondescript suit that had been tailored for him. He carried a brace of revolvers that were secured in a leather harness. He felt like he would fit in when he got to the city. And he felt like he could damn well defend himself if he got made by the people he was trying to avoid.

  Gerald came and got him when he was ready. The minister was also dressed in a common business suit, and looked no different than anyone that could be seen in the city, except for the rugged features that were not common in the civilized areas.

  “Let’s go,” said the minister. “Sarah will meet us at the station in the city.”

  “But you don’t use magic,” protested Jude, not sure how such a message would have been sent.

  “There are telegraphs that still crisscross this so called civilized area. For those of us who don’t use magical transmission. I sent a wire to her. She’ll receive it in about an hour and know to meet us when the train gets in.”

  “And that will be?”

  “About eight O’clock tonight,” said the minister, “if we get to the station on time to catch the one leaving here.”

  “I almost wish we could take an airship,” said Jude, looking up at the clear sky.

  “Only people with money take those things,” said Stranger, shaking his head. “It would get us there in half the time, but we would surely be noticed when we got there.”

  It was only a short ride to the train station, which was on the south side of the town. They made it to the ticket window on time, and bought passage through to the central station in the city. The train was ready to go when they got on it, belching steam from the engine, the conductor calling the last all aboard as they ran down the siding and ju
mped on.

  The train chugged out of the station right on time. A run down the tracks and it was over the bridge that crossed the local river. Jude saw steam barges moving up and down the river, hauling goods and materials up the stream. They went through a bit more town on the other side of the river, and then were out into the countryside.

  Patches of farmland and forest went by as the train accelerated. The look of the woods gave Jude the shivers. Even in the day those regions had lots of shadows and dark spaces. To go into those woods was to put life and limb on the line.

  “You know, the woods in the mission are not like that,” said Stranger, as if he were reading Jude’s mind. “They are cool calm places with abundant life.”

  “How did we let this happen?” asked Jude, looking into the man’s eyes so he didn’t have to look at the dark woods.

  “The regular old way,” said Stranger, pulling a pipe out of his jacket, and then a pouch of tobacco. “At first the negative effects went unnoticed. As people starting using the magical system in ever increasing numbers the energy requirements increased. As did the negative effects, until it snowballed. People depended on the magic like a drug, and the human race painted itself into a corner.”

  “And how do we get out of that corner?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” answered Stranger, packing his pipe. “I don’t think it will be good when it collapses, but that may be the only way to get out of the trap.”

  Jude looked back out the window. The train was entering the industrial zone of a midsized city. Stacks were belching smoke into the sky, while foaming liquids were pouring into the river. There were pollution controls on most factories, or had been, and Jude was appalled that they were not in use here. Must have something to do with the energy crunch, he thought, feeling bad for the people living along this river. It was bad enough they had become trapped by the system they used. Now the lack of resources for that system meant they were poisoning themselves with chemicals as well.