By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  Table of Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Characters

  By Demons Possessed

  P.C. Hodgell

  New Entry in the Kencyrath Series.

  SOMETHING IS PREYING ON THE GODS OF TAI-TASTIGON

  A crucial moment draws nigh leading to the ultimate showdown between Jame Knorth and Perimal Darkling, the supernatural entity that has pursued Jame’s people, the Kencyr, across multiple universes, destroying all in its wake. Can the Kencyr finally make an effective stand, or will another world fall into shadow?

  But now news arrives from Tai-tastigon, the vast city that formed Jame into the master thief, wily fighter, and godling-in-the-making that she has become.

  It seems something is preying on the gods of Tai-tastigon. The new Pantheon is falling, and the ancient city is in turmoil. The self-serving, beguiling demi-god leader of the Thieves Guild has coerced Jame into finding the soul of his missing brother by holding hostage people she loves. Jame She reluctantly returns to find a Tai-tastigon in turmoil, with citizen pitted against citizen, and day and night-time folk at one another’s throats. It seems many in the vast Lower Town have lost their shadows—not so funny when you realize that a shadow is cast by a soul.

  DISAPPEARING SOULS

  Some of the affected have gone mad. Some wander like ravening wraiths, attacking even family members by tooth and nail. Which means something is taking—or destroying—souls in the city.

  What’s more, in the city’s Temple District fearful gods are finding their very beings drained. Some have become so diminished they hide in the robes of their priests like mewling babes. Across the city, murder and mayhem have erupted. But whatever demon-wrought madness is afoot in Tai-tastigon will have to face the ultimate avatar of god That-Which-Destroys Itself. That would be one Jame Knorth.

  WHERE JAME KNORTH GOES, CHAOS WILL FOLLOW!

  BAEN BOOKS

  By P.C. Hodgell

  The Kencyrath Series

  Seeker’s Bane

  Bound in Blood

  Honor’s Paradox

  The Sea of Time

  The Gates of Tagmeth

  By Demons Possessed

  The Godstalker Chronicles (omnibus)

  By Demons Possessed

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by P.C. Hodgell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8398-8

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-716-2

  Cover art by Eric Williams

  Map by P.C. Hodgell

  First Baen printing, May 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hodgell, P. C. (Patricia C.) author.

  Title: By demons possessed / by P.C. Hodgell.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books ; Distributed by Simon & Schuster,

  [2019] | Series: The Kencyrath series | "A Baen books original." |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019000059 | ISBN 9781481483988 (trade pb : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3558.O3424 B9 2019 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000059

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Dedication

  For Mike, again

  Scholar, gentleman, friend

  A return to Tai-tastigon

  Chapter I

  Out of the Past

  Tagmeth: Spring 60

  I

  THE HILLS ROLLED AWAY forever and ever. In their hollows, shadows lay tangled. On their crests, thin gray grass wove together in a restless wind that blew this way and that, that way and this.

  Ah, it said. A-ha-ha-ha . . . and its breath stank like something long dead.

  Overhead, a leprous moon tumbled out of tattered clouds, seeming to shred them as they careened past. It was huge, and felt close enough to smell.

  Shadows swept past below over the undulating hills. Up and down. Down and up.

  Everything was in fretful motion—hills, grass, wind, moon—but without meaning. On and on it all went, on and on. Oh, so weary, the aching muscles that climbed and descended over and over, these never ending nights . . .

  Then, suddenly, there was the House.

  Jame paused on a hilltop, staring down at it.

  I’ve come the wrong way, she thought, panic catching in her throat. Tai-tastigon lay in the opposite direction, toward the future, toward life. The past was the past, survived, thankfully forsaken, and yet her feet refused to turn away from it.

  Child, you were gone so long, whispered the dead, or was that only the grass twisting about her knees? Remember those whom you left behind.

  What debts had she failed to pay?

  Think.

  Oh, so many. The inmates of the Haunted Lands keep that she had fled; the few worthy in the House’s dark halls like Bender and Tirandys who had tried to help her; her friends in Tai-tastigon left to cope with the mess that she had in part created—in short, all of those, alive and dead, upon whose shoulders she had clambered into the light. Ah, how distant those memories were now, but would she ever outpace them?

  “I was only a child!” she cried to the keening wind, to the tumbling moon. “What did I know of consequences, of right and wrong?”

  Enough, even then, to know better.

  Silent lightning flickered behind the crumbling façade of the House, answered by a witch-glow within its many windows like so many cataract-dimmed eyes glimmering in the night. A grinding sound as if of teeth came from it as, slowly, it dragged itself out of Perimal Darkling into the Haunted Lands. Stones juddered. Mortar rattled down. The dead move, now slow, now fast.

  Another verdigris flash.

  A skeletal figure stood silhouetted at an upper window. Why did she feel that it was looking out at her?

  Another flash.

  It huddled in the doorway.

  Another.

  It stood on a nearby hilltop. Its form, now bulky, seemed surreptitiously to seethe.

  He is coming, said a bell-like voice in her memory. At long last, he will arrive, and soon. Wait.

  Jame woke with a gasp.

  The fire had died to embers. The bristling blanket scratched her bare skin and tangled about her legs. Jorin’s nut-hard head butted her under her chin as he snuggled against her on this chilly late spring night. She gathered up the hunting ounce and held him close, surprising a grunt out of him and a long, sleepy stretch reaching from above her head to her knees.

  It seemed a lifetime since she had fled the Master’s House in Perimal Darkling although, ancestors preserve her, it had only been some five years ago. So much had happened since then. Tai-
tastigon, Gothregor, Tentir, Kothifir, Tagmeth. . . . So many places. Surely she had left the shadows behind forever. Even the keep in the Haunted Lands where she and Tori had been born had been breached at last on the level of the soulscape, their dead father driven out or, rather, released . . .

  “My son, my child, set me free.”

  . . . and Tori had done so, in the process finally accepting that he was Shanir, of the hated Old Blood. Not that he liked it much. That had become very clear as he had regained his strength after nearly dying of neglected lung-rot. Their quarrels over the past half-season had been legendary. She was here now, at Tagmeth, keeping out of his way, until duty called her back to Gothregor for the Randons’ judgment on Summer’s Day.

  Much, in some ways, was finally going well.

  Yet, there was that figure crawling toward her over the dead hills, as it had been since the previous Winter’s Eve.

  Remember those whom you left behind.

  Who?

  G’ah. Sometimes dreams were only dreams, even if they came over and over again, drawing ever closer.

  Jame fought free of the blanket despite Jorin’s grumbled protest, rose, and dressed. Now what? This must still be the middle watch of the night, toward its end. It would be dark outside for hours yet. No one else was up except the guards and the bakers, the day’s work barely begun.

  How this waiting fretted her. All spring, Summer’s Day had hovered like a mountain on the horizon. Now it loomed, only seven days away, but that still felt more like seven years, each longer than the last. She had to do something to fill the endless time. What? Think.

  On her desk lay scraps of parchment, a block of ink, and quills. She could write another letter to Tori. He had even answered the last one, after a fashion.

  Hello. How are you? I am fine.

  Bullshit, as Char would say.

  Of course her brother was upset—how not when he had just discovered that he was the very thing their father had taught them both to hate and fear? And he was coming into his powers as That-Which-Creates too fast for anyone’s comfort, least of all his own. The last message from his steward Rowan had mentioned prickly weeds erupting from every nook of the keep including the privies, the latter at inopportune times.

  She could write to their cousin Kindrie at Mount Alban to ask for his advice. Again.

  “Let him sort himself out,” Kindrie had said.

  That hadn’t been very helpful.

  Then, too, trouble was brewing in the Kencyrath, started by Lord Caineron’s decision to send troops to the Seven Kings of the Central Lands. It was rumored that so far he had dispatched only a token force. The main body would go if the randon allowed her, Jame, to pass the final muster to join their ranks. That seemed like a lot to balance on her shoulders. However, Caldane’s obsession with her had only deepened since his defenestration from the Council Chamber, even if was actually Tori who had shouted “Boo!” in his face and sent him bobbing out the window.

  If the Caineron did jump back into the mercenary market, boots and all, the other lords would surely follow. Ancestors knew, they needed the money.

  The chief danger was that they might lease their Kendar fighters to different masters without safeguarding that they didn’t meet each other on the battleground, and the Kings were notoriously free with blood not their own. No one, ever, would forget the White Hills.

  The Randon Council liked to say that their warriors’ bond transcended that to their lords. That, at least, had been the creed at Tentir, although not always observed. A course on house politics might have been more practical than vague idealism, given what the cadets might face beyond the college doors. However, no one wanted to talk about that. Certainly, the last thing they needed now was Jame under their feet with all of the tangles she had caused. Hence, another reason for her to stay here, out of their way.

  In the meantime, though, she fretted at the lack of news. Her spymaster Graykin was on the way north from Kothifir, but he hadn’t arrived yet. Even then, it would take him time to establish new contacts, if he even could: this, after all, was the Riverland. Jame worried about her half-breed servant. He was the first after Jorin whom she had bound, if inadvertently, and she had come to owe him so much; but would he ever fit in among the more traditional Kencyr, as he yearned to do? She knew how that need felt. All Kencyr did. That bond was their strength and their curse. Her own place in the Kencyrath was both hard-won and tenuous. What if, at the last moment, the randon deemed her unworthy? What would she do then? Where could she go? What would happen to those who had come to depend on her?

  Beyond that, Jame itched to take a hand in events herself. While not yet the Nemesis, third face of the Kencyrath’s hated god, she was still a nemesis and, somewhere, something needed to be broken.

  Too restless to settle, she descended from her tower apartment with a bleary ounce trotting at her heels.

  A waning gibbous moon hung overhead, casting dark shadows around the edges of the circular courtyard. A solitary candle showed in the bakery, where someone was kneading the morning bread. Slap, punch, slap, punch. The oven would be warming for the first rise. Outside, one’s breath smoked on the still air. Spring had been unseasonably cold this year, making Jame wonder if the hill-dwelling Merikit had yet managed to ignite the ironwood sapling that their chief Chingetai had substituted for the usual midwinter log. Without that rite, they said, the season couldn’t turn. Wonderful. More problems with the Riverland’s scanty crops, more pressure on the lords to feed their people and, incidentally, themselves.

  With a cough and a rattle of gear, a cadet emerged from the barracks. It must be the turn of the watch, from middle to last, ending at a still-distant sunrise. Jame remembered that Dar’s ten-command was on duty this week.

  That was something else she could do: start working out the next ten-day rotation, even if it would be disrupted by cadets leaving for Gothregor a few days from now. However, such planning would require rousing Brier Iron-thorn and, just now, Jame wanted nothing to do with her second-in-command. They had clashed over what the big Kendar saw as the unnecessary risks that Jame took and Jame had flared at her, to the shock of the garrison at large. Dammit, there were some things that only she could do. Well, Marc had warned them that she was (on top of everything else) a Shanir berserker, if of an unusually cold nature. That had set things straight—for a while.

  It was natural, Jame supposed, that the Kendar were obsessed with the well-being of their lord or, in this case, their lady. Thanks to their god, they didn’t feel whole without a Highborn bond. Tori considered that obscene. So did Jame. But there it was. Of course, only Brier was sworn to her here at Tagmeth (another largely accidental coupling), but Tori had promised that she could bind more once she was established as a randon officer. Were her Kendar thinking about that now? It might come to nothing, of course: Who would want to trade secure service to the Highlord of the Kencyrath for that to his unpredictable, possibly mad sister? But Brier was hers, and the big Kendar had shown herself unnervingly sensitive to her lady’s restless mood.

  I won’t be spied on or coddled, Jame thought mulishly. I won’t.

  Another thing she could do: tell Marc about her dream of the Haunted Lands. She had mentioned them to him before, hoping that his common sense would disperse her dread. Instead, he had taken her seriously.

  “You’ve had dreams before that came true, lass,” he had said. “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss one that comes again and again, much less that progresses.”

  The cadet met her counterpart by the gate leading into the outer ward. While they stood for a moment, quietly talking, something slipped past them into the shadows of the courtyard.

  Jame straightened. Like most Kencyr, her night vision was excellent, but the vivid moonlight made her blink. She could just make out a black-clad figure standing motionless near the southern-most Builders’ Gate. The cadets hadn’t noticed anything.

  Well. After that dream, despite her desire to dismiss it, she had
half expected a visitor, but not one who could move with such stealth.

  The guards parted, one trudging toward the barracks for a few hours’ sleep before dawn, the other bound for the keep’s outer perimeter.

  The figure by the wall hesitated. Then Jorin sneezed. Jame felt quick eyes pick her out in the gloom of the doorway. Which way would he go, surrounded by doors, and on what mission bent? Hinges creaked. Open. Shut. Damn. He had slipped through the gate immediately behind him.

  The cadet had disappeared, and a good thing, too: Jame didn’t want it known that the keep’s commander was up and wandering about in search of trouble. She crossed the courtyard. There had been a trick stone wall here when the garrison had first arrived, but they had since replaced it and several others with doors of stout, iron-bound wood, usually kept locked. Not so this one tonight. Someone was going to catch hell in the morning. She waited a moment, then entered.

  Beyond was a short tunnel that should have led into the body of the shell keep. Instead, a walled garden opened out before her, lush with dwarf fruit trees and date palms. The same swollen moon cast its shadows here, but the stars visible outside its halo were different, and the air was warm.

  Jorin’s ears pricked. Through them, Jame heard the faint rustle of someone unfamiliar with undergrowth trying to move quietly through it. Then silence. He, too, was listening.

  Jame moved closer, flitting from tree to tree. It helped that she knew this landscape very well.