“I don’t think so. Its breast has been ripped open and apparently gnawed. Ugh.”
Woodlice spilled out of the wound.
“Heh, heh, heh . . .”
A nasty thought occurred to Jame in regard to that flicker of light.
“Chirp, I know your people can play with space—the step-ward tunnels, for one thing, and inside these buildings are rooms where walls become floors or open into other worlds. Can you also manipulate time?”
The little Builder looked abashed. “We could, yes, if all of us put our minds to it. Some parties are too good to leave. More importantly, when we finish the temples on any given world, it may be years, centuries, millennia until we are needed again.”
“What do you do?” asked Jame, fascinated despite her sudden apprehension.
“We sleep. We play. Time passes rapidly in such states. So we would have done here, but the land itself cast us out. How, I do not know. It may be that the city is responding to my impatience, making time pass more quickly than it should. One of my kind alone can not hope to control such a thing. Then again, day and night were always hard to tell apart here.”
“You knew that this would happen?”
“No, but I feared it might.”
“And didn’t tell me.” Jame’s fingers curled into fists, extended claws pricking her palms. Be calm, she told herself, but rising anger threatened to choke her and so did guilt.
A fool’s errand . . .
“Dammit, Chirp, you knew I didn’t have much time and now, perhaps, I have less of it. You asked for my help knowing that.”
He held out his hands to her, his desperation palpable. “Please. For my wife. For my mate.”
She backed away. “No. I’m leaving. Be waiting when I return, or go home. Your choice.”
She turned and stalked off, Rue and Darinby hurrying to keep up.
“He’s a Builder!” the cadet protested, trotting at her heels. “How can you talk to him that way?”
“Easily,” Jame said through her teeth, “if I get mad enough.”
“Are we going back to Tagmeth?”
That made her pause. Should she? Could she, even, without the little Builder’s help? Yes, but what if the way forward was as treacherous as the way back?
Jame thought of the Res aB’tyrr and shook herself.
“I think I can guess the right doorway to Tai-tastigon, if the nexus here is like the ring of gates at the keep. Wait a minute, though.”
Here was a threshold opening into a dimly lit interior. Jame stepped cautiously inside. A small panel of diamantine glowed next to the door, its stone frame crazed with fractures. She pried it out with her nails. The cracks spread, then the wall started to crumble. She dodged back into the street as the house’s facade disintegrated behind her in a choking cloud of dust. Echoes of its collapse hissed through the city, followed after the last rattle of debris by renewed silence.
“Light,” said Jame, holding up the stone. For something so small, barely the size of two clenched fists, it was surprisingly heavy and bright.
Here was the circle of imus and the way down. Once again in the subterranean chamber, Jame chose the door that opened almost due east.
“This one. I hope.”
Darinby wasn’t eager to enter, but what choice did he have? After a moment dithering on the threshold, he plunged into the dark to follow the diamantine glow.
Chapter III
Meanwhile
Tagmeth: Spring 54
IT TOOK BRIER IRON-THORN well into the morning to admit that her lady was missing. Rue should have alerted her, but it seemed that the cadet had also disappeared.
The Kendar marshal paused in the courtyard, surrounded by the bustle of chores. Even after all this time, it occasionally surprised her to see so many pale faces. She herself was a native Kothifiran Southron, her own features a permanent bronze and, she had been told, quite unreadable. Trinity knew, she didn’t care to betray her current feelings.
Think, she told herself. Have I forgotten some obscure Merikit ritual?
In the past, Jame had tended to vanish into the hills to conduct her odd relationship with the local tribe. Brier’s experiences during and after the yackcarn hunt outside Tagmeth the previous autumn had only made her more mistrustful of that connection. For one thing, the Merikit had driven those monstrous cattle down on Tagmeth, nearly getting Jame killed in the process. Yes, the keep’s larder had also benefitted. That wasn’t the point.
She also gathered that—somehow—her lady had a native wife up yonder, and a child that the Merikit queen Gran Cyd claimed Jame had sired, which was absurd. Logic aside, was that any role for a respectable Highborn lady?
But then Jame wasn’t respectable, and never had been. To admit that came hard, especially now, when so much was at stake.
“You have to take the lass as you find her,” said Steward Marcarn Long-shanks shortly thereafter. Everyone took their woes to him. Now Brier had, too.
He was in the kitchen, following Cook Rackny’s instructions as to the making of haslet, otherwise known as mock entrails. Pale green parsley bread for trenchers had been rising most of the morning. Now he brushed the loaves with egg whites and set them in the oven. Then he turned to a bowl of prunes, dates, figs, and almonds that he began to thread together on a coarse string. Truly, without the bounty of the gates, Tagmeth would have been on a much stricter diet. As it was, Marc could exercise his creative urge on a variety of materials.
Brier admired him. While not that way inclined herself, she saw the enthusiasm that drove him, after a lifetime relegated by his size to the role of a warrior. For a long time he had pretended to be a berserker so as not, actually, to have to fight. Foaming at the mouth and chewing one’s shield tended to discourage opponents, although he admitted that the splinters had been a nuisance. More recently, he had worked off his creative urge at Gothregor by recreating the huge stained glass window that Jame had accidentally shattered. That project had been left unfinished, for lack of new raw materials. Now more were flowing in through the gates—sand, lime, and ash, along with various trace minerals specific to each area to add color. The growing result was a map so abstract that one could barely read it. Brier could see him itch as these samples collected to meld them into glowing life. A puzzle, a creation, left unfinished . . .
But then, so was that reckless, brilliant hoyden, Jame. Ancestors only knew whose will had formed her, if any. Rather, she seemed her own creation, in defiance of every influence, of all reason. Even now, to whom did she answer? Her brother? Maybe, but Brier had her doubts. On the other hand, Brier gathered that Jame had responded more to her old friend Marc than to anyone else in her life—as far as one knew what that had been.
“It isn’t like her, though,” Marc now said, “to be so inconsiderate. She left you no word?”
“None.”
“Strange. And so badly timed.”
An awareness passed unspoken between them that each had a stake in Jame becoming a randon officer. Brier, though already bound, had a strong, instinctive urge to see her position reconfirmed by others. This was her home now. Jame’s failure to turn up for the muster could rip that away from both of them and cast Brier adrift, bound to someone who herself had no real place to go. Marc, she knew, was her lady’s oldest friend, homeless since his youth. He could have accepted the Highlord’s bond. Instead, he had chosen to wait. He could survive disappointment—he had so often before over a long lifetime—but at his age it would diminish him.
That thought distressed her. She regarded his bent head as he dipped the threads of fruit one by one into batter. His hair had once been as red as her own, if a shade lighter. Now most of it was white, forming a fringe around a bald, freckled pate. The color that remained seemed to have drained into his beard. The Kendar were matrilineal. Still, it mattered deeply to Brier that he was her great-grandfather.
And how would she feel, what would she do, if thus disappointed? She knew instinctively that Jame wouldn�
��t hold her to their bond against her will, just as she knew that she was valuable merchandise, one of the randon college’s elite. People said that, anyway. Did she believe it? Huh. Nonetheless, another lord would gladly take her in. Not that she trusted any of them, or any Highborn. The Caineron had taught her that. Still, something in this strange girl spoke to her. In some odd way beyond her experience or reckoning, against her better judgment, they belonged together.
She would ask Char, the cadet in charge of the herds and thus usually in the field. He would have noticed if the rathorn Death’s-head was nearby or if the Whinno-hir Bel-thari was missing. Jame couldn’t just have walked away . . . could she?
When Brier emerged again into the courtyard, there was her lady’s ounce curled up asleep by the eastern gate. Surely Jame couldn’t have gone far, leaving Jorin behind. That was a reassuring thought, at least.
A guard’s horn sounded, signaling a visitor, with a quaver at the end that suggested hesitancy: was this a friend or a foe? Brier waited. Through the inner gate rode a man on a dusty post horse, leading another piled high with baggage. What Brier noted first, though, was the rider’s gaudy robe, azure silk encrusted with frayed silver thread and a smatter of moonstones. It showed no travel stains, as if he had only donned it when within sight of the keep.
He dismounted, staggering a bit on saddle-sore legs, and turned up his nose at the chickens scrambling across the yard.
“You”—this, to a passing Kendar, who looked surprised to be thus addressed. “Stable my horses and be sure that they are properly rubbed down. You. Put my luggage in the guest quarters. You. Get me something to drink.”
Then he saw Brier, and flinched.
She knew that thin young face, that dark hair already going thin at the temples, those anxious eyes. Fear lurked in their depths, but also defiance. He would start as he meant to go on.
“You.” His voice wavered, but he steadied it. “Inform our lady that her servant Graykin has arrived.”
Chapter IV
Night in Tai-tastigon
Spring 55
I
THE WAY FORWARD, mercifully, was less confusing than the way back, although it also took longer than Jame had anticipated.
The tunnel’s end this time was a decaying door that opened into a cellar half-choked with debris. Jame doubted that anyone else had been here in a long, long time, which in turn suggested that the gate’s entrance had been forgotten. Was it possible that Kencyr priests only knew about the step-forward route between Kothifir and Urakarn? She had wondered at the time what that link might say about the priests and Urakarn’s false prophet who, after all, had been unmasked as Master Gerridon himself. Then too, Kencyr priests bound for Tai-tastigon had usually gone overland or, more disastrously, by a sea rotten with patches of dead water where ships sank like stones. There were many questions she would like to ask those people, things that her priestling cousin Kindrie might not know.
After hiding the diamantine panel, hoping that its light would remain banked, she followed Darinby and Rue as they cleared a path through the mess, up a treacherous flight of stairs, to a doorless frame opening into the night.
The gibbous moon shone down on a circle of desolation so complete that buildings and streets crumbled into each other. Everything had decayed—plaster, wood, even, it seemed, stone—into a choppy sea of ruin fretted by stationary waves where walls had once stood. It also stank.
“Phew.” Rue looked over Jame’s shoulder, snub nose wrinkling. “This is Tai-tastigon the Great?”
“Only the worst part of it,” Jame said, feeling oddly defensive. “This is the Lower Town, looking even more nasty than I remember. And there, see? That’s what presumably destroyed it.”
The temple reared out of the ruins, bone-white, forbidding. In one way, it didn’t seem large. In another, it loomed. One felt instinctively that it was much bigger than it appeared, and more dangerous. Jame’s senses prickled. How well she remembered her first sight of her god’s house on that night nearly five years ago, how upset she had been to feel the same power here that had also greeted her in Tai-tastigon’s Temple District. Was there only one deity, as her people believed, or many, as appeared in this teeming city? Once, she had thought she had discovered the answer to that paradox, as expressed in the Anti-God Heresy. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Whose fault was it if she had been wrong?
Yours, a breath of rancid north wind seemed to answer as it rattled dust against her boots. You were so quick, so glad, to think you knew the truth. When has the truth ever been so simple? Foolish, arrogant child.
What she did know now, as she cautiously let her senses expand, was that the temple was currently very active, but not quite in the way she had known before. The push, the pull of power . . . it was trying to draw her in, rather than to push her away. What did that mean?
A stir in the rubble caught her eye. The people there were so gray with dust that they barely seemed real. Some picked their way mindlessly through the debris by themselves. Others hobbled in small, tattered groups. A woman stooped, rummaged, and retrieved what might have been a piece of bleached wood, or a bone. Then she dropped it and scavenged on for some other worthless trifle.
A murmur rose from the dingy masses, repeating numb words as if in a litany:
“My name was . . .” “My name was . . .” “My name was . . .”
“Who are they?” Jame asked Darinby, her voice sunk to a whisper.
He shrugged. “These days, it happens. People are foolish enough to be caught out late and come back like that, as if they had lost their minds. Their families may try to harbor them, but they escape if they can, to come here. Others are thrown out, and here they drift.”
“That’s monstrous.”
He blinked, as if momentarily startled awake. “I . . . suppose that it is.”
A veiled figure wandered past, weeping for its lost children. Arms rose and fell as it beat its breasts, tore at its hair. It ripped itself apart, then came back together, still weeping.
“Ngh, ngh, ngh,” muttered another, snuffling through a pile of trash. Something like a boar’s head rose, blew its nose, and shuffled on.
A scurry of rats stopped, piling on top of each other to form a wavering column. Bright eyes blinked nervously. Whiskers and noses twitched.
Something was coming.
People had frozen, looking up, like so many startled deer. Then they fled with inarticulate cries, tripping over their own ragged clothing. No shadows kept pace with them over the desolate ground.
Jame felt the earth shudder underfoot. Debris flew up one place, then another, then another, in pursuit. Rising dust gave shape to massive, invisible legs. Something like ghostly flames wreathed them, leaped into the sky. Down came a coldly smoking hand. It snatched up a fleeing man. If he screamed, it was only a thin, hollow bleat. Then he was dropped, rejected, and crawled away dragging a broken leg. Dust-wreathed, a blind head reared up against the moon, long hair whipping the stars. Its jaws gaped in what might have been an inaudible roar of frustration.
“That’s a dead god,” breathed Jame. “So were the weeper, the boar, and the rats.”
“I told you that they had come back. Mostly, they stay around that temple of yours. Sometimes, though, they wander. We should leave.”
They slipped away, skirting the site of greatest desolation where other shapes moved, barely seen. That was another change: before, the dead gods had been repelled by the area surrounding the temple. Now they were drawn to it as if borne, mindlessly adrift, on its inward current. Some of them also seemed to be hunting. New Pantheon gods drew their essence from the faith of their worshippers and died without it. Demons, on the other hand, required human souls. Most of the dead gods, Jame suspected, were Old Pantheon, caught somewhere in between. It was all very confusing.
Rotten wood, crumbling facades, decaying plaster, the wreck of a child’s wagon, a doll with its face smashed in. . . . Not long ago, this had been a wealthy district apparently immun
e to the pernicious temple that was its neighbor. Then had come the Lower Town Monster, and children had started to sicken. As they died, more and more people moved out. Houses began to collapse. The poorest of Tai-tastigon’s citizens moved into the ruins, and in turn watched their children waste away.
One of them was nearby, crying.
Jame followed the sound, and came upon a little boy crouched in the shadow of a wall. His head was on his knees, his mop of black hair bent to hide his face. For some reason, Jame hesitated to touch him.
“Go home,” she said. “This place isn’t safe.”
He shook his head without raising it and drew a dirty hand across his nose. “My name is . . . my name is . . .” Snort, snuffle. “What is my name? Mother says that I am a prince, but Father is no king. Who—what am I?”
Rue touched Jame’s shoulder. “Look.”
Jame did, and caught her breath. A shadow was crawling down the street toward them, cast flat against the ground by no visible entity. Long fingers quested before it and seemed to pull it along. Then it paused, as if sensing their presence, and raised its head. The Lower Town’s desolation showed through its featureless mask of a face.
“Run,” Jame said to the boy, but when she turned back to glance at him, he was gone.
She, Rue, and Darinby retreated as tenebrous fingers fumbled after them. The thing moved slowly, but with a terrible persistence. Now they were among standing structures, most abandoned. Others betrayed their habitation by the rags stuffed around the edges of doors and windows. The thing that followed probed cracks as it came, here and there pausing as if to listen for the whimper of children within.
Jame had once known every street in Tai-tastigon. Nearly five years had advanced the confusion here, though, in ways that she didn’t understand. She took a wrong turn, then another, and they were lost.
“This used to be a throughway,” Jame said, regarding the dead end into which she had led them. Mounds of debris and crumbling walls rose on all sides, looking too fragile to climb. To be buried alive, in such filth . . . ugh. But here those reaching fingers came, probing out of the shadows, around the corner.
By Demons Possessed Page 4