By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  “You look a pack of perfect fools,” remarked a voice above them. They looked up to see a scrawny figure perched like a monkey on a windowsill. “There’s a way to climb, if you watch your feet and don’t mind the dirt,” it said. “There, and there, and there.”

  Jame saw that a path zigzagged up the nearest mound, strategically bolstered with planks.

  “Meet you on the other side,” said their savior, and vanished inside the building, leaving the sill to crumble silently behind her.

  “Who was that?” hissed Rue.

  “An old friend,” said Jame, with the flicker of a smile. “Let’s surprise her, shall we?”

  As promised, the other awaited them on the far side of the mound, slapping dust from her patchwork d’hen with gloved hands.

  “Now, what kind of idiot . . .”

  “Hello, Patches.”

  The girl gaped, then threw herself into Jame’s embrace where she made a meager armful.

  “Talisman! You’ve come back! We thought you were dead!”

  Just as quickly, she drew away, snuffling, scowling.

  “Why did you leave anyway? Didn’t think we would miss you, hey?”

  Jame fingered the girl’s lapel. “Nice work. Your mother’s? Remember, the Guild was after me for the Sirdan’s death. I thought you would all be safer without me. Anyway, it was time to move on.”

  “What guild?” demanded Rue.

  Patches surveyed her. “Who’s the great lunk, then?”

  The cadet looked stunned. Probably never in her life had anyone accused her of being large. While she outweighed Jame, though, so Jame did this ragged scrap of a girl.

  “Before anything else,” she said, “tell me: what’s the date?”

  Patches looked confused, then counted on her fingertips. “Fifty-three, fifty-four . . . the fifty-fifth of Spring. Why?”

  Damn, thought Jame.

  She had indeed lost time in the tunnels and the Anarchies, at least a day and a half that she couldn’t spare. She had thought that she understood how the tunnels worked, how Rathillien did. She had been wrong. How many would pay for her arrogance?

  “Here it comes,” said Darinby.

  They turned to see shadows creeping over the top of the mound. Where they went, it could follow.

  “This seems to be my night for rescuing Kencyr. First a priest and now you. You’d best shelter with us for awhile.” Patches plucked at Jame’s sleeve if still trying to convince herself that her former mentor was really there. Then she turned away, hunching her shoulders. “It will lose the scent. Maybe.”

  They followed her to a hovel somewhat more intact than the surrounding ruins. Patches fiddled with the latch. When it opened with a click, she swung wide the door, shedding the rags that had been stuffed in its cracks. They stepped through into a candlelit room. A woman rose to meet them, tall, thin, expressionless, and neat to a fault. Her hands were tightly clasped in the folds of a spotless apron. A silver wedding ring glimmered on one finger. Seven smaller, wizened faces turned toward the door, so alike that they might have been Patches at different ages, the last no more than a toddler.

  “Ma,” said Patches, introducing the former. “My sibs.” The latter. “But then you”—this, to Jame—“will have met them before.”

  Jame remembered well. She had first come here with the Peacock Gloves as a guilt offering for having indirectly caused the death of Patches’ older brother, Scramp.

  Now here was her former protégée, avid once again to link herself and her family with Jame’s perilous fate. The weight of that first obligation lingered. Patches added to it every time she gave Jame that hopeful, starveling look. What had she set in motion by returning here? Would it have been better if she had stayed away?

  Then she noticed another face, glowering at her from a corner, and remembered Patch’s reference to a Kencyr priest. Someone had given the stranger a child’s chair in which to sit so that his knobby knees rose almost to the height of his shoulders. Above them, set in a narrow face, was a beaklike nose and black eyes under a thatch of mouse-brown hair tufted with the premature white of a Shanir. He wore a long, black, belted robe and a pair of enormous boots.

  “Another stray,” said Patches, cocking a thumb at him, “caught wandering the Town by night. Some people have no sense. That goes for you too, Master Darinby.”

  “‘Master’?” Jame repeated. “You didn’t tell me that you’d been promoted.”

  “Two years ago.” Since they had reached his home city, Darinby had relaxed somewhat, even in their current surroundings. He now gave Jame the ghost of a smile. “Remember, you made journeyman yourself before your precipitous departure.”

  Patches jabbed Rue in the side with a sharp elbow. “That’s the Thieves’ Guild we’re talking about, of course,” she said helpfully to the bewildered cadet.

  Jame braced for the inevitable questions, but just then all within were struck dumb by a fumbling at the door. Something leaned against it to the groan of wooden panels. Did shadows have weight? Had Patches locked the door behind them? The latch jiggled. The little thief darted across the room and shot the inner bolt. Her siblings had pressed back against the far wall, ranged perhaps by chance according to age and height. Patches backed up to join that row, one step ahead of it, the tallest there although that wasn’t saying much. The sound trailed off. Then came a slow withdrawal that, contrary to all reason, seemed ponderous.

  “Well,” said Jame, when she could breathe again.

  It had, of course, been the Lower Town Monster, but how? She had given Dalis-sar its true name: Bane. That improbable sun god had brought fire and Gorgo the Lugubrious, rain. Between them, the demon based on Bane’s soul should have been destroyed and Bane, stabbed so many times, left on the Mercy Seat, should have been allowed, at last, to die.

  There was a chance, though, that he had accidentally bound himself to her with a farewell kiss that had nearly severed her lower lip. She could still feel the scar with the tip of her tongue.

  Worth a try, he had said with a laugh.

  The biter, bit.

  Then his soul had answered her when she had called it, expecting one brother, getting another. A thing of shadow, not unlike the Monster but with a mind, it had followed her to the Riverland. There she had given it a choice: pursue the destructive taint so intrinsic to its nature or wait for the honorable death that Bane craved. Bane had chosen the latter. To the best of her knowledge, he now sat in a pesthole behind Mount Alban guarding the Book Bound in Pale Leather and the Ivory Knife until she called for them.

  But the thing was this, and she should have thought of it before: the Kencyrath believed that one’s shadow was cast by one’s soul. It could be detached, as Bane’s had been. However, something, somewhere, continued to throw it. A single bone would be enough to trap it between life and death. That was why Kencyr sought tirelessly for their fallen dead to give them to the pyre and then spread their ashes on the wind.

  If the Lower Town Monster had survived, not to mention its dark twin in that verminous cell, then it followed that at least some fragment of Bane still existed, perhaps in endless agony.

  “Good,” croaked the figure in the corner.

  Jame blinked. He was Shanir. Had he just crossed her thoughts?

  “How d’you know what it . . . he . . . is suffering, and why does he deserve it?”

  “He’s a bloody nuisance,” said the other, with a clumsy gesture as if to thrust off the question. “And he upsets the novices.”

  She wondered what exactly they were talking about.

  “What were you doing abroad tonight?” she asked, trying a different approach.

  He glared at her under tufted brows. “It was the last place I could think of to look for them. I had to see, didn’t I?”

  “What, all of those wretched, wandering folk?”

  He hunched his shoulders nearly to his ears in what might have been either dismissal or a flinch.

  “That was something I never ex
pected. How could all of those people just give up their souls like that, or were they robbed? If so, by whom? Why? And the three missing priests . . . tonight I thought I saw them in the ruins with the others, but they stumbled away. Have they lost their souls too? How?”

  Jame struggled to get a grip on the conversation. It seemed to her that he was thoroughly upset and rattled, but she didn’t understand why.

  He abruptly rose, a younger man than she had thought, and made for the door. “That’s it. I’m off.”

  “Wait. Who are you?”

  On the threshold, he paused. “Call me Titmouse. Expect no other name.”

  That had to be a joke. Rather than a small songbird, the man resembled an overgrown gore-crow. Either he had a sense of humor or none whatsoever of irony.

  “What was that all about?” asked Rue as he blundered out, leaving the door open behind him.

  Jame realized that toward the end they had been speaking in High Kens.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “But who was he, to speak to you like that?”

  “A Kencyr priest, with questions. Shall we be on our way?”

  II

  THEY LEFT UNDER THE SWOLLEN MOON, against which stray clouds were starting to press. A breeze puffed fitfully from the north with the hint of something rotten on its breath, countered by fresher gusts from the south.

  “Whoo . . . ?” said the latter as if in plaintive query as it circled the chimney pots. “Wha, wha, wha . . . whoo?”

  Patches tagged along. So, of course, she would.

  Beyond the Lower Town, the state of the houses that they passed improved, although they still presented darkened visages to the streets. These were sparsely populated, however, which surprised Jame. At this hour of the night the denizens thereof should have been abroad, street vendors hawking crisp almond cakes and venison pastries, night markets opening off side streets, jugglers juggling, pickpockets picking, courtesans (lower class in this quarter) walking two by two in a haze of perfume.

  Now, however, there were only scuttling shadows and furtive, urgent knocks on doors as latefarers saw the approaching strangers. Were the windowsills stuffed with rags as in the Lower Town, as on the Feast of Dead Gods? Jame suspected that they were. But then, of course, she and her companions were still within the area cupped between the South Fosse and the River Tone.

  Demons can’t cross flowing water without a bridge, she thought, and wondered what had stirred that memory. But then there were scattered bridges all along the fosse and river. No place was safe.

  To the north, on the riverbank, was the inn called the Moon in Splendor where apprentice and journeyman thieves congregated, surely tonight as always, risks be damned. She had spent many nights there, drinking little, listening much. How slowly the others had come to accept her. Scramp never had. She remembered his challenge: steal the Cloud King’s britches. To be fair, she hadn’t really. Prince Dandello’s uncle had given her the article in question, with an identifying embroidered patch on the backside. In the end, she had proved her skill to them all.

  What fun it would be to burst through that door—Remember me?—but how would they receive her now?

  Closer still was the dour hulk of the Maze, Penari’s stronghold. In a way, he had thumbed his nose at the whole Thieves’ Guild as represented by his brother Theocandi who had chosen politics over skill. Had she done something similar by using the most sought-after apprenticeship in the city only to pocket its least valuable objects?

  “Steal not from your own kind,” the god-voice had said, passing judgment through Ishtier’s unwilling lips. “Do with others what you will, so that it be done with honor, until in your thoughtlessness you destroy them.”

  Poor Scramp.

  Yes, she wanted to see her old master, if only to be sure that he was all right. More than that, though, the Maze itself might have given him valuable insights into the state of Tai-tastigon’s very fabric. She felt adrift here, where she had once felt so much at home. And Penari was so close.

  “The Maze?” asked Darinby, bemused, when a few minutes later they stood before that building’s seven-story, windowless bulk.

  “I’ll have to ask you to stay outside,” said Jame, regretfully. “This isn’t a place that welcomes strangers. Patches . . .”

  “Huh.” The little Townie flipped away Jame’s concern with a snort. “D’you think I’ve learned nothing since you went away?”

  Jame stared at her. “Penari has taken you as his new apprentice?”

  “Well, no.” The girl’s expression became suddenly, comically, dolorous, and her shoulders slumped. “I can’t say that. You brought him news, a touch of the outside world. He missed that. I’m the Talisman’s Trinket, I am. I slip in where even you couldn’t. Face it: a motley scrap like me, who notices? But I listen, and I learn, and I report.”

  Jame wasn’t sure if she felt pride in her protégée’s achievement or a twinge of jealousy. That had been her job, after all. She had been good at it and proud of it.

  “Then show us the way,” she said, with a mock bow.

  “And me?” asked Rue.

  The cadet looked thoroughly apprehensive at being left behind in this strange city, and well she might. Jame smiled at her, yielding. “Come along, then, if you don’t mind tight places.”

  Close by the door, she discovered one of her old torches and was pleased that it still kindled, although the damp wood sputtered mightily. Patches seemed surprised. If not with the aid of fire, how had she mastered the labyrinth? The answer lay in a gray, almost invisible thread running at shoulder height along the wall, leading inward. Patches pretended to ignore it, but her fingers twitched toward its fragile security.

  Inside, firelight flared on dark walls of erratic heights. Blocks did service as buildings, narrow passageways as streets, barely passible slits as alleys. There were pits and water traps too, not always where one might expect them. Many thieves had tried to penetrate this labyrinth to find the reputed treasures at its heart. The lucky ones, in Jame’s days as the Talisman, had been escorted out. A breath of corruption down certain corridors suggested that others, since, had been less fortunate.

  Rue trod almost on her heels. It occurred to Jame that the cadet hadn’t much enjoyed the tunnels to and from the Anarchies either. Did Kendar experience claustrophobia as many of them did a fear of heights? Perhaps she hadn’t taken Rue’s feelings sufficiently into account. Then again, the cadet was here at her own demand, and she had been warned.

  Patches stopped. The end of the thread, snapped off, quivered between her gloved fingertips. Perhaps Penari had pulled up his drawbridges, as it were.

  Somewhere, stone fell and a shudder passed through the massive structure. Patches and Rue jumped. Jame found she was holding her breath. The close-set walls gave back muted, grumbling echoes until the darkness swallowed them.

  Tick went distant falling dust, like an after-thought. Tick, tick, tick.

  And somewhere, water dripped.

  One tended to consider the Maze as monumentally solid. For any part of it to shift, let alone collapse, was unnerving.

  “Here.” Patches thrust the broken end of the thread into Jame’s hand. “Your turn.”

  Jame had used a string when she first had attempted the Maze. Soon, however, Penari had begun to teach her how to follow the convoluted ways by memory alone. This had only made sense to her when, suddenly, she had realized that each turn and crossroad corresponded to a similar twist in the city itself. The Maze was the city, in more ways than one. What happened to one affected the other. So far, she didn’t like the signs.

  “Sometimes people get lost in here and die,” Patches said, nudging Rue, trying to sound chipper although her voice wobbled. “Talisman, tell her about the Architect of the Maze.”

  “Really?” Jame shot the little thief a look. All right, she thought. You want to scare Rue. Let’s see if I can scare you.

  “Master Rugen built the Maze,” she said, dropping the b
roken thread and starting to follow memory’s path with the other two close behind her. “Afterward, he and Penari quarreled over which could claim credit for it—who, in effect, was its mastermind, the planner or the builder. Rugen thought that he had the floor plans, but Penari picked them out of his pocket. Trying to find the way out, he became lost and sent Quezal back for help.”

  “Who?” asked Rue, trying not to sound breathless. How the walls must be pressing in on her.

  “Master Rugen’s gargoyle. All master architects have one. Quezal is small but very active, so long as you aren’t looking at him. Anyway, Penari thought that he had only come back to retrieve the diagrams, and he imprisoned him. Only later did he find Rugen’s body.”

  She coughed, also remembering.

  “I found it too, long after vhors had picked clean its bones. I used them to mark various turnings in the Maze as I learned them. Yes.” This to Rue, who looked perturbed. “It was a bad thing to do. I suppose I didn’t think of others’ remains the way I did of our own people’s, yet they do seem to have souls. All right: I was young and arrogant. Now I’m just ignorant.”

  Rue stumbled. “What in Perimal’s name is this?”

  Her feet had become entangled in a translucent coil of checkered skin. Patches grabbed her arm as she wobbled on the edge of a water trap.

  “Monster must be shedding. Tell her about Monster.”

  Jame glared at her. Very well, then.

  “Monster is Penari’s pet, a moon python. He slithers around the Maze and occasionally swings from its main chandelier.”

  “He must be big,” said Rue, trying to kick off the snake’s clinging residue without falling over.

  “About forty feet long, I think, but essentially friendly, as long as he’s been recently fed.”

  Now I’m doing it too, she thought, disgusted, as the cadet at last freed herself. How did Rue feel about overgrown reptiles lurking in the dark? She herself had gone straight up a wall the first time she had encountered Penari’s pet.