The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  “I’ll feel bad about it later,” he muttered.

  “Whatever you feel later is between you and the toilet,” Mocca said.

  “My apologies.” Lenk glanced up to see Sheffu walking toward the table. “I employ only Khaliv and Eili to do my cooking and cleaning.” He eased himself into a chair, creaking with the effort. “You may take the state of my home as proof that their talents lie elsewhere.”

  “So, you do this sort of thing often?” Lenk asked, glaring sidelong at Khaliv. “Kidnapping people, poisoning them, and pulling… some kind of—”

  “Demon.”

  Lenk stopped at that word. Speaking. Chewing. Breathing.

  “That was a demon.”

  It was just one word, an unimpressive five letters, spoken very shortly and simply. But short words were not always simple words. Some words should never be spoken simply. Because some words should never be heard, for the creatures that understood them were far from simple.

  The silence that hung between the two men in the aftermath of its utterance told Lenk that Sheffu understood this. And the long breath he took as he began to speak again told Lenk that Sheffu was about to say something he dearly did not want to hear.

  “They were called ‘Khamut,’ once. ‘Undying.’” Sheffu raised his left hand and waved at Khaliv, who brought the copper urn over and placed it upon the table. “That was long ago. They have a new name, one they much prefer…”

  Sheffu took the pair of iron calipers, clenched them tightly, and held the thing aloft. The demon, dark as the word itself, hung like a moonless night.

  “Disciple,” Sheffu said. “Followers of His will.”

  The demon wriggled in the tongs, alive and hissing. It jerked about with such violence that Sheffu visibly strained to keep hold of it. Lenk winced at the sight of it, but could not look away. The thing’s grub-like body was composed mostly of fatty, sagging flesh, drawn tightly back at its head to expose a pair of scribble-black eyes and teeth bared to the gum.

  It was an old man’s face. A face he knew.

  And his face was one the demon knew. It whirled on him with a shriek, gnashing its teeth at him, cursing him in some squealing black tongue.

  “This one remembers you,” Sheffu said. “Not so surprising. It was only two days ago that you killed it.”

  Lenk’s eyes asked the question his mouth could not. That thing? That was the demon he had slain in the Souk?

  “The Khamut’s death does not mean it ends,” Sheffu said, returning the creature to the urn. “They become as dust and are lost upon the wind. They are breathed in through the nose and mouth, they settle in the belly of those who are nearby.”

  The fasha waved Khaliv over.

  “They feed upon the darkness within a man or woman,” he continued. “And there is much to eat there. They grow strong on hatred, fat on fear. And when they are ready to emerge, they…”

  Sheffu’s eyes spoke the threat that his mouth could not. Lenk didn’t need reminding. He remembered well the man with the swollen belly, shed like a serpent’s skin.

  Khaliv set beside Sheffu a jar of salt. The fasha uncorked it, took it up in his left hand, and held it over the urn.

  “Memory is all that kills a demon,” he said. “They do not fear steel, for they have never feared steel. But that which reminds them of what they once were, before they fell, is that which kills them. Before the Khamut became what they are, they were made to suffer. When they were brought low by mortals, they were bound tightly and buried alive.”

  He tilted the jar over the urn.

  “In coffins packed with salt.”

  No sooner had the first white grains fallen than the demon’s shrieking filled the night sky. Its howls were too great for such a tiny thing, its agony too vast for something so twisted. It writhed in pain, curling up into a tight ball, withering with a hiss of steam as the salt buried it.

  “But of course,” Sheffu whispered, “you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  When Lenk looked away from the horror in the urn, he found the fasha’s gaze locked intently on him, his eyes sharpened to thin blades.

  “This is not the first demon you have seen. Nor the first you have slain.”

  Lenk was hesitant to answer. To speak of demons was to acknowledge their existence. And as deluded a power as denial was, to relinquish it was still heavy. Sheffu must have known this.

  But there was no fear in the fasha’s eyes. There was only scrutiny, the kind of piercing appraisal that one usually reserves for a well-made blade. It was the kind of look that should never be fixed upon a human being.

  “They were different when I fought them,” Lenk said softly. “We called them Abysmyths. I’ve never seen things like these… Disciples before. And I had hoped to forget everything I ever knew about demons.”

  He leaned upon the table, looking across at Sheffu, matching the intensity of his gaze.

  “You know things that mortals shouldn’t know. And before you tell me what you want with me”—Lenk hesitated, for the eager scrutiny in Sheffu’s gaze already told him that—“I want to understand what kind of mortal you are to know this.”

  “I am many things,” Sheffu said. “To Cier’Djaal, I am a senile old fasha, content to let his fortunes dwindle to a decrepit estate, two servants and a single, hairy spider that does not spin silk anymore. But to the saccarii and the world, I am something far greater.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “He’s a yenthu!”

  The bright, chirping voice came from Eili. The little urchin came trundling up, ponderously carrying a thick book, easily as tall as she was, in her arms. With considerable effort, she hefted the book upon the table, letting it fall before Sheffu with a weighty thud.

  “A storyteller!” she said, excitedly.

  “Storytellers shouldn’t be concerned with demons past using them to scare children,” Lenk said.

  “The word ‘yenthu’ has many meanings,” Sheffu said. “Storyteller is but one of them. Yenthu are concerned with history. And where history and demons are concerned, so are the yenthu.”

  The book seated before him was old, incredibly so, wearing a skin of dust that lingered on wrinkled leather even after Sheffu tried to brush it away. And yet, for all the age it exuded, there was something off about it.

  Where’s the damage? Where are the scars? Why does the leather still look so new?

  Sheffu had just begun to thumb it open when he became aware of Eili standing nearby, staring intently at the pages. He lofted a brow at the urchin.

  “Have you finished your studies?” he asked.

  “They can wait,” she replied casually.

  “The ignorant wait, the intelligent act. Go now.”

  “But—”

  “Must I send Khaliv to help you?”

  Eili scowled at him a moment before she skulked away, muttering curses through her veil. Lenk watched her briefly.

  “She has no parents?” he asked.

  “Killed,” Sheffu replied, thumbing through the book.

  “How?”

  “Same way all saccarii are killed. They had the audacity to be born. Khaliv was the same when I found him. I help how I can.”

  “You could help more than two if you used your money better,” Lenk said.

  “The day I discovered this book was the day I stopped being concerned with money,” Sheffu said without looking up. “It is impossible to see value in gold when you are made aware of just how many things out there want you dead…”

  Lenk turned the book toward Lenk and pushed it across the table. Mocca leaned over, quirking a brow curiously.

  “And how close they’ve come to succeeding.”

  He had seen this before. Not this book, but this writing: symbols that hurt to read, images that looked as though they had been painted in painstaking detail from the most intimate of fluids. He remembered this, and the memory hurt.

  “Where did you get this?” he muttered.

  “It came to m
e. It was shuffled between collectors who could not bear its presence. They claimed it stared at them, spoke to them, and so they got rid of it. It stared at me, as well.” His eyes lit up. “But I stared back. And when it spoke, I listened. It cost an immense amount, for there are only as many like it as can be counted on one hand. The Book of the Dead, the Deineireal Libram, the Tome of the Undergates…”

  The realization burned at the back of Lenk’s mind. He knew what Sheffu was about to tell him.

  “This one,” Sheffu said, “is His Word. It is the detailed history of the Vhehanna Desert in the times before the fall, when Gods were not so distant and men were not so deaf. There were servants in that age, those who lingered between heaven and earth to impart the will of the Gods and deliver the pleas of mortals. One day, they would be called ‘demon.’ Before that, they were—”

  “Aeon.”

  Lenk knew the word. He knew the legends that mortals had forgotten. He knew the names that mortals should not know. He had heard them from mouths that should not have spoken them—most recently, Miron’s.

  And the priest’s tale was one of a heaven stained red with blood.

  The Aeons, the legends said, were the messengers of creation. Too godly to be all-knowing, too human to be all-powerful, they were blessed—or cursed—to linger trapped between two worlds, short of heaven and far beyond earth.

  That, Lenk always supposed, would explain why they grew to hate both.

  It was their own mortal emotions that proved their undoing, so it was said. It was their envy of the Gods’ power, their resentment of man’s mortality, their utter hatred for their lot in life that changed them. Like mortals, they could be twisted. But far different from mortals, what twisted an Aeon twisted them inside and out.

  They fell and that name was lost to them. When they rose again, they were called demon.

  They subjugated mortality in short order, assuming rule over what they saw as a world theirs by right. But, as all things must, this world, too, ended in blood.

  The Gods sent forth their armies to strike back. The wars that followed, as mortalkind rose up, raged across the face of the world; and before the demons were cast into hell, their conflict had left scars seen and unseen. The most grievous of which sat before Lenk, in this book and many like it, this record of horrors that time had mercifully tried to bury.

  It wounded Lenk to look at it. Not because he knew of the tragedies of which it spoke. Nor even because he knew what such books could be used for.

  It hurt because he knew why Sheffu had chosen to show it to him.

  “His Word is not so broad a history as other records of the demons,” Sheffu said softly. “It reads more like poetry. It sings the praises of the Aeon who stood over this part of the world in ancient times. It gushes at length of His power at chasing away superstition and belief and replacing them with reason and logic as the basis of society.”

  “What a tyrant,” Mocca said, stifling a yawn.

  “But it goes on, in frightening detail,” Sheffu continued, heedless, “as to how He accomplished this. His subjects were assessed in worth and either elevated or enslaved based on how He saw them. He became the first and last word in law and life. He learned the intricacies of the human body by cutting them open as they still drew breath and studying them.”

  He flipped through the pages, showing Lenk diagrams, paintings, charts, each one proving what Sheffu had just said. Here, a detailed drawing of a man in agony, each organ marked and labeled. There, an intricate essay on how to judge the quality of human stock.

  “It goes on like this,” Sheffu said. “The author falls over himself to paint him, this demon king, as the harbinger of utopia, despite his endless sins. I thought it odd until I reached the end.”

  He flipped to the final few pages. The script here made little sense to Lenk, even by the standards of the rest of the text. There were no elaborate drawings, no sprawling charts. Only a handful of notes, hastily scrawled, as if in passing thought.

  At this, Mocca appeared to take an interest, leaning over to see. Lenk thought to ask if he knew what was written here, but Sheffu spoke first.

  “These are reminders,” the fasha said. “Small, detailed instructions as to how He did it and how He would do it again. He foresaw His own fall and He wrote contingencies, should He return from hell. They begin with creating a cult, a base of fanatics who are consumed by his visions and sworn to spread His name. They end with His name on the lips of everyone the world over.”

  “And what was that name?”

  “You already know,” Sheffu said. “All of Cier’Djaal already knows. They hear it every day spoken from the lips of fanatics and murderers. And they know it well, for they have seen it.”

  Sheffu leaned forward intently.

  “He speaks to them through visions. And the faithful know He is watching.”

  He tapped the book’s pages.

  “The return of the Disciples—His Disciples—the utterance of His name, the sudden appearance of the Khovura cult; it cannot be coincidence. The God-King, the Shaper of Flesh…”

  Sheffu’s voice grew dark. His eyes grew hard.

  “Khoth-Kapira is returning.”

  At these words, Lenk felt his heart sink.

  Not for their dire meaning. Rather, it was the fasha’s eyes, rather than his words, that made the young man tense. Even as Sheffu’s voice softened, his eyes grew harder, his scrutiny sharpening itself upon Lenk as the fasha studied him with stark appraisal.

  And here it comes.

  “But you,” Sheffu said, “you can stop them. You have done so before.”

  He flipped to a page and pointed to some drawings of men and women with pale hair and empty eyes. They marched against twisted demonic shapes scrawled upon the parchment, swords in hands and fire at their backs. Surrounding them was written all manner of what Lenk assumed to be vulgar curses, if the harsh penmanship was any indication.

  “They have no names,” the fasha said. “Or perhaps Khoth-Kapira never wrote them down. But He describes them at great length. People whose hair is the color of an old man’s, no matter their age. Weapons made to fight the demons, the only ones who can. They have no families, they have no Gods, they have no home; all three must be lost before they can be what they were made to be.”

  Sheffu’s eyes lit up in a way that made Lenk shudder.

  “They brought His Disciples low once,” he said. “And they can do so again.”

  Lenk was already shaking his head. Sheffu was thrusting the book at him as if it was a weapon.

  “Khaliv has seen you fight; he told me and I knew I must meet you. These warriors the book speaks of, they are you. And with you, we can preserve this world; we can save it.”

  And you can get what you want, Lenk thought. And you can be whatever hero you thought you would be when you first found this book.

  “The book speaks of a city,” Sheffu said, flipping to another page. “Far away to the Forbidden East, where the seat of Khoth-Kapira’s empire once stood before your people brought it low. We can head there and—”

  “Khaliv saw me fight?”

  Sheffu paused, glaring at the interruption. “He did. He saw you dispatch the beast quite handily.”

  “Is that true, Khaliv?” Lenk turned to a nearby tree, where the saccarii bound in rags was standing. “Did you see me dispatch it handily?” At the saccarii’s silence, he pressed. “Did you see what it did to my friends? Did you see what we had to do to kill it?”

  “I saw.”

  Lenk nodded. “And did you hear it?”

  “I heard.”

  “And what did it sound like?”

  Khaliv fell silent for a moment. His stare softened and when he spoke, it was but a whisper.

  “Like a child.”

  “Like a child,” Lenk repeated. “Demons are ruled by memory, it’s true. And maybe they remember me, or what I was. I don’t know. But they don’t remember what pain is like. So when they get hurt, it’s like w
atching a child skin his knee for the first time. He has no idea what he’s feeling, but he knows it hurts and he wants it to stop. So he screams out to his parents’ Gods, if they taught him. But if they didn’t, he screams out to his mother, his father. He begs them to make it stop.”

  “They infest humans like disease,” Sheffu said sternly. “You saw the hell they wrought upon the Souk. You saw what the Khovura did. They are one and the same, thralls of Khoth-Kapira. He is no child and neither are they.”

  “I’m not saying they didn’t need to be stopped,” Lenk said. “And I’m not saying I regret killing them. I’m saying that this isn’t a great, glorious cause just because demons are involved. And just because they don’t always feel pain doesn’t mean it’s any less messy.”

  He looked down at the drawing of his “people,” settled upon an illustration of a man that looked a little like him: the same tired face, the same empty eyes, the same scars and sword.

  “What you want me to be is a blade,” Lenk said, “something that cuts cleanly through a demon and comes out shiny and polished. But what I would be is a man fighting a war, as ugly, as bloody, and as dirty as any other.”

  “There would be blood,” Sheffu said. “There would be loss. Look at what I have already given up to take steps to secure a future for this city.” He swept his hands around the desolate courtyard. “Money I have spent, time I have given poring over this book, learning everything I could so I could be prepared when the time came. And now, it is upon us and you express doubt because it will be difficult?”

  “All wars are,” Lenk replied. “And for as much money as you may have and as much knowledge as you may possess, you’re still asking me to do all the killing. You’re looking at me like I’m a weapon. I’m not. I don’t kill and feel nothing. I feel…”

  Complete.

  Whole.

  Good.

  Lenk buried his head in his hands and sighed.

  “It takes a lot to kill anyone,” he settled on saying, “let alone demons. And go back to all that killing, all that blood…” He shook his head. “I came here to get away from that. I’ve given up…” He caught himself and sighed. “All that I lost will mean nothing if I pick up my sword again and go back to it like nothing’s changed.”