By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jame regarded the stranger with a sense that she knew him. Her second intuition was one of dislike. Who . . . ah. Men-dalis.

  The Sirdan rose and shook out his robes. There was little glamour in them tonight. His face, even, wavered between the semi-divine and the thoroughly mundane.

  “This is you, incognito?” Jame asked.

  “May not a king go masked among his humble subjects?”

  No one seemed to be with him, although shadows lurked in nearby doorways. One, closer, smiled at her over the Sirdan’s shoulder. Dally. She had thought on Ship Island that he had been literally in the mirror. Perhaps, though, he had only been reflected there, standing behind his brother who had cast no reflection himself. Neither had she, for that matter. Men-dalis’ glamour did seem to be turning on him.

  For a moment, the coat that he wore took on the lopsided dimensions of a d’hen, impossible to tell in this faint light of what color. He turned quickly, but not fast enough to catch that fleeting image. The illusion faded.

  “Sneaky little brat,” he muttered. “I’ll get the best of him yet, you wait and see. Ahem.” He cocked his head at Jame with a winsome smile. “Shouldn’t you be doing something?”

  “What?”

  “You were summoned, you know. I did that because, because . . .”

  “Why?”

  She wanted him to confess—to what, she wasn’t entirely sure and almost feared to know. He had drawn her all the way from the Riverland, at a perilous time, with a threat against her friends. What could justify that?

  “I know that my . . . er . . . guest, the innkeeper’s wife, has been removed. Such a gross betrayal of my hospitality. Darinby should not have helped you there.”

  “He didn’t, deliberately.” Sudden apprehension struck her. “Is he all right?”

  “I spoke to him. He admitted his lapse in loyalty. Is he ‘all right’? Well, he drooled for a while but that, I think, cleansed his spirit. Sometimes one needs to be reminded whom one’s master is. As for you, if you will not do this little thing for me, what good are you?”

  “What ‘little thing’?”

  “Ah, you know.” His voice sank momentarily to a rapid whisper, as if he was afraid of being overheard. “You have seen it. The dead have returned, but I will not have it so. It’s so unfair! This regards that which stands behind me and will not go away. Hush. Do not name it.”

  Then his voice rose again and his smile returned.

  “Abbotir would like to see you dead, to pay for the death of his precious Theocandi. I tell him that I am his Sirdan now. He needs no other. But he will not listen, nor will certain others. Perhaps, instead, I should listen to them.”

  “Dead, how can I serve your purpose?”

  He laughed lightly. “Oh, you will serve me, one way or the other. Everyone does, eventually. They should know that by now, yet I am not always given the love and respect that I deserve. If I were to avenge my predecessor, though . . . Now there is a thought.”

  With that, he turned and drifted away, drawing shadows after him. One stayed. Small, dark, crooked . . . Men-dalis’ spymaster, the Creeper, lurked on the edge of the town’s desolation. Faint moonlight glimmered on pale eyes within the recess of a hood, on the slight, mocking curve of a smile. Then he turned and fled.

  Jame ran after him, hardly knowing why. His master wouldn’t answer questions. Maybe he would, if caught.

  Did someone chase after her? Her instinct said yes, but she shrugged it off even as she heard a familiar voice call out for her to stop. First things first.

  They were out of the Lower Town into the south bank districts when Jame realized that the Creeper paused at each crossroad, deliberately remaining in sight. Had it been wise after all to follow? She slowed just in time to avoid running into a figure that stepped out of an alley to block her path. Others emerged to surround her.

  This is ridiculous, she thought, backing up. Twice in one night . . . ?

  Before she could turn, she was grabbed from behind and her arm jerked up behind her, throwing her off-balance with a jolt of pain. Her cap was snatched off, her head jerked back by its loosened hair. Moonlight shone on the blade held under her chin, on the keen edge. She recognized by the other’s full, reinforced sleeve across her throat that one at least of her assailants was a thief, dressed to commit a flash-blade’s violence. In the dim light, however, it was hard to distinguish the color of his d’hen—royal blue for Men-dalis, black for dead Theocandi, or something else altogether.

  The Creeper crouched in a doorway, watching. “Cut her throat,” he said in a hoarse whisper, and licked his lips with the pale worm of a tongue.

  “Wait.”

  Darinby stepped out of the shadows, hands raised in protest. He was breathing fast, as if from hard pursuit. Patches’ goblin face, twisted with alarm, peered out behind him, then ducked back out of sight. They must be the ones that she had heard following her.

  “Our master forbids it.”

  “Men-dalis does not know, nor will he ever.”

  “Then I will tell his advisor, Abbotir. You and he are rivals for the Sirdan’s favor. Everyone knows that.”

  The Creeper hissed and jerked his head. Darinby was also seized, also threatened with steel. The blade nicked him through his d’hen and he bled.

  The goblin spy sneered. “Pretty boy, I do for my master what he cannot do for himself, no, nor yet his precious lord of the Gold Court. Abbotir is dying, and he has made a fool’s desperate bargain with death. Ask him if you dare: where is his shadow? As for this girl, do you think that she can save Men-dalis? If so, you and he are greatly mistaken.”

  “Darinby, I’m about to be decapitated. Do something.”

  “This one’s blade is a bit lower.”

  He held very still, with only a hint of tremor in his voice.

  “Creeper, why are you doing this? The Sirdan’s brother has come back to haunt him. Only he, or perhaps you, know if that is justified. But this was Dally’s friend. He loved her. Surely he will listen.”

  “What will she tell him?”

  “The truth!”

  “What good has that ever done anybody? My lord only needs one agent. Do you plot to take my place? Damn Abbotir. Damn that pampered brat Dallen. Damn you. I.” He thumped his shallow chest with a scraggly fist. “Me. Mine. Daughter, show yourself.”

  Patches edged out of the alley, looking wary. “Don’t call me that,” she said.

  “My name holds power. So should yours. What are we, if not the shadows of greatness?”

  Patches drew herself up with a jerk. “I’m the Talisman’s Trinket, I am, and proud to be so. That’s honor enough for me.”

  “Foolish girl, to settle for so trifling a thing. If not you, then one of your siblings. The baby, perhaps? Oh, I could raise him to suit me, if you should fail.”

  Jame felt the knife’s edge under her chin and held her breath. Then she felt something else through the soles of her feet: the cobbles had just lurched.

  Whump . . . whump . . . whump . . .

  Something very large was approaching, or at least something very heavy. Stone juddered again. The thieves holding Jame and Darinby released them and backed away, looking frightened.

  “No, no, no!” hissed the Creeper. “Kill them! Kill them all!”

  Instead, his minions ran.

  The thing, whatever it was, was coming down the street. Moonlight traced a dim, gigantic, lurching form, defined mostly by the dust that it raised even on a street still wet from the day’s rain. Broad, circular depressions marked its advance. Fissures radiated out from these to zigzag up the neighboring walls. Furniture crashed over within darkened rooms. People screamed.

  The thing seemed to hear. It reared up and slammed against the nearest second-story window, which exploded inward. A confusion of near-invisible tentacles—or were those proboscides?—fumbled through the opening, drew out a shrieking woman, and dropped her on the street.

  Whump.

  In the center of
a new depression, her body flattened and spread in a jumble of flesh and blood and broken bone. The monstrous head bowed. Blood briefly traced a round mouth set with a ring of teeth.

  Jame and Darinby had backed up against a wall. Across the street, they saw the Creeper hesitate a moment, then bolt.

  The head turned. A foot came down again.

  Patches grabbed the fleeing figure and swung it out of the way, nearly getting crushed herself in the process. She tried to hang on, but the master spy twisted out of her grip and darted away.

  The apparition stomped past through puddles, leaving rubble in its wake.

  “What the high, holy hell was that?” asked Darinby as he and Jame joined Patches in the middle of the ruined street, staring down the path of destruction.

  “Once a dead god, now a demon,” said Jame. “It took that poor woman’s soul through her blood, and no doubt walks all the more heavily as a result. Oh, schist. Here it comes again.”

  Perhaps it had heard them. The gigantic footsteps were coming back, picking up speed.

  Whump! Whump! Whump! Splash!

  They had come down in a broad puddle. The demon sank into it amidst a seethe of thick limbs. It head reared up, appendages flailing, and it clawed at the rim, but something gripped its nether limbs and jerked it down. For a moment, ripples slapped the edges. Then something rose. Eyes the size of bucklers, fiddling whiskers . . .

  Bloop, it said, and submerged.

  Water drained out of the puddle through the surrounding cracks. The bottom was barely an inch down.

  “Really?” said Jame, staring after it. “Again?”

  “What?” demanded Patches, clinging to her sleeve.

  “An old friend, I think, although I never expected to see her here.”

  “Her?”

  That was a good question. Did one differentiate between the inner and outer fish? Then there was the question of Drie. Maybe she should have said “them.” Time to change the subject.

  “By the way, what did you do with Rue?”

  Patches let go of her, glowering. She knew when she was being put off.

  “Took her to the Res aB’tyrr, of course.”

  That would have been the safest place for her, once, but now?

  They were walking now as they talked, none quite sure where they were going, but with an unspoken consensus that it would be best to leave this particular part of town.

  Perhaps because she was on the ground, Jame saw more than she had the previous night. On one street, phantom flames licked houses, kindling any wood that they touched, especially around window frames. Glass fell in molten drops. On another road, ladies in white swirled past, whispering “Dance with me, dance with me,” all in the same plaintive tone. On a third, long tresses of hair floated out of alley mouths.

  “We offer you wealth, fame, love,” breathed seductive voices in the shadows, and the hair became clutching brambles that scrabbled after them as they passed.

  Dead gods, all.

  “Patches,” said Jame, picking burrs off her sleeve despite piping protests, “why did you risk your life to prevent the Creeper from getting squashed? I would have said, ‘Good riddance.’”

  “Would you?” the little thief replied vaguely, refusing to meet her eyes. “Doesn’t the Talisman usually save her enemies?”

  “Not all the time. Not that one. I would like to ask him some questions, though.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Not so well. You’re hiding something from me.”

  The girl wriggled as if to free herself, then gave in with a sigh.

  “It’s a long story, and you’re partly to blame.”

  “Me?”

  Patches scowled at her. “You left, didn’t you? You don’t know what that last night was like and I don’t know for sure what your part in it was, but I bet it was plenty. Anyway . . .” Here she gulped. Jame felt sure that she bridged a gap in the story. “Most people survived. I did. Then I went home to see if anyone else had.”

  All three ducked as a swarm of rats burst out of a side street and took flight over them in a whir of leathery wings. Dead gods come in many strange shapes. These, at least, didn’t appear to be demons.

  When Jame glanced at Darinby, once so elegant, now so disheveled, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Perhaps he was again wrestling with his faith in the Sirdan. How strong was the grip of Men-dalis’ glamour on him?

  . . . enough to make him drool . . .

  “Go on,” she said to Patches.

  “Oh. Well, that involves guesswork, and I don’t like what I’m guessing. The night you left, after all the rest, Men-dalis sent his thugs to our house in the Lower Town, to hold my family hostage, to make me tell them where you had gone. I didn’t know, of course, not until later. The Creeper scared them away before they could hurt anyone. I was mad at him, though, for using Dally’s death to start the guild war that put Men-dalis in the Sirdan’s seat. ‘All wars have casualties,’ he says. Just like that, as if it didn’t matter. I tried to punch him in the nose. When my fist got tangled up in his hood, I sort of groped around inside and pulled out this.”

  Looking defiantly, she stripped off a glove and presented a plain, silver wedding ring, loose on her knobby finger.

  “Mother wears one just like it.”

  “Are you saying that the Creeper is her husband, your father?”

  Patches’ expression crumpled. “He even called me ‘daughter.’ You heard him again, just now.”

  Jame had to admit that there was a family resemblance, not just with Patches but with all her siblings, so preternaturally alike.

  “You’ve never met your father?”

  “Some nights we sleep so deep we might as well have been drugged. Some nine months later, usually less, there’s another of us—one since you left, as you may have noticed. Oh, you don’t know what it’s like to have a monster for a father!”

  “I thought I did,” said Jame. Her new experience of Ganth was still sinking in. She wondered how Tori was coping. After all, he had harbored that malignant shard of their father in his soul-image most of his life. They still had so much to discuss.

  But Patches, the Creeper’s daughter? Sweet Trinity, what did that mean, and who or what was the Creeper himself, come to that?

  Ahead, the street curved. Light and shadows moved, gigantic, against the opposite wall. Voices murmured.

  Patches caught Jame’s arm. “Now what?” she hissed.

  A small group of people came into sight, their leader carrying a candle hooded in a lantern. In his other hand was a ball of twine that he wound up with deft flicks of his wrist as he advanced. Although he was coming straight toward her, Jame saw no sign of the extended string beyond the flickering halo of light.

  He stopped. “Who calls?”

  “Two who wander,” Jame answered. She thought that she recognized this pudgy, strangely dignified figure in his loose white robe. His shock of hair was also white and his blind eyes, without pupils.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  Jame glanced around. She hadn’t been paying attention, but she recognized this crossroads from her training, also by the banners of an obscure lay brotherhood that hung from balconies above, notable for their priapic designs.

  “This is the corner of Leek Lane and Oyster Street. We’re three blocks from the River Tone and the Moon in Splendor.”

  “I thought so. See?” He turned to his clustered followers. “The way is clear.”

  “Pardon me,” said Jame, approaching him, “but aren’t you Pathfinder, sometimes called the God of the Lost?”

  He smiled. “I was. Now I merely wander. These are my friends, who wander with me.”

  A dozen pairs of anxious eyes regarded her. These must be the loyal remains of his congregation. She remembered Loogan saying that some gods had come untempled and fled the district to start a new life among mortals. This would appear to be one of them. What better home for him than the labyrinth, given his nature? Among other things, she
remembered, he was patron of the Guides’ Guild, so vital to strangers and even to many residents seeking to navigate the city’s maze district by district. Nonetheless . . .

  “These streets aren’t safe,” she said. “Especially at night. You should find shelter.”

  “My house is close by,” said one of his followers, a prosperous but nervous-looking man. “With room for us all.”

  “You are generous, Nathe.”

  “I have cause to be. When my wife died, I was truly lost—until you showed me the way.”

  “Listen,” said a woman, catching Nathe’s sleeve.

  Little huffs of air disturbed grit in the gutters. Forward it rattled, then back. Above first one banner stirred, then another and another, swaying back and forth. The sound came again like a monstrous snuffling, in and out, out and in.

  Something big and dark came prowling down the street, a black node from which shadows writhed.

  Sniff, sniff . . . ah, it went, and settled on its haunches with a satisfied grunt, obscuring several houses.

  “I won’t be lost again,” cried the woman, on the edge of panic. “I won’t!”

  “Then stand behind me,” said Pathfinder.

  Patches nudged Jame. “Maybe we should too.”

  But Jame stood rooted, continuing to stare at the approaching shadows. When they fell over walls or cobblestones, they seemed to be totally opaque, and they writhed as if trying to escape. Whatever cast them now crouched in the middle of the street, somehow even denser than they. Huge yellow eyes opened level with the balconies. The gash of a mouth gaped, fringed with a double row of white teeth. A red tongue lolled out over them, licking chops.

  “So, Pathfinder,” it growled, a cavernous, hungry sound hoarse with echoes. “I have tracked you down at last.”

  “So, Pathless, you old black dog. Come back from the dead, have you, and in what form this time? No matter. Those who worshipped you are long since gone.”

  The other snarled. Paint peeled off windowsills at the sound. Ice spread around the shadows’ edges in torturous forms. “As if I ever really needed them. Now, as in olden days, I hunt and feast on souls. One was even given freely to me, to wake me to this new life. Besides, my old followers left me for you—me, who gave them the freedom of the night!”