By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  “You gave them terror and confusion. Their worship was appeasement and blood sacrifice.”

  Listening, Jame experienced a creeping horror. She no longer knew where she was. The street names hovered, meaningless, in her mind. The city dissolved around her, all of its ways swirling into chaos as if she had never known them. Worse, she felt empty at the core. Why had she thought that she mattered in this world where demons lurked?

  I am nothing. I am nobody. I am alone.

  The fiend crouched and licked its lips. “All ways are futile,” it crooned through ropes of steaming slobber. “All ends are meaningless. What is life but a mindless scramble in the dark? But I can be kind. One snap of these jaws and all is settled. You curs who follow this old man. Give me your failed god.”

  Patches’ nails dug into Jame’s arm. “Do something!” the Townie hissed.

  Jame shook herself. Dammit, she hadn’t come this far to fail now. But it still took all of her willpower to step between the demon and the god.

  “It can’t take you against your will,” she said to Pathfinder, hoping that she spoke true. “Only your followers can betray you.”

  “I don’t want to die!” screamed the woman, and fled.

  Shadows lashed out after her, cast like a net. They entangled her. She fell. The web cut into her flesh like string through moldy cheese. As the shades withdrew, darker than before, it was unnerving how inert her body lay, as if it had never lived at all. Then it sank into the cracks of the road.

  “This is obscene,” said Jame. “Your pardon.”

  She took the lantern from the god’s hand and threw it into the crouching presence. Glass shattered. A single flame spread with a whoosh, kindling invisible veins. The creature lurched away. Shadows burned back to the body in a rush and freed souls fled, gibbering. The black dog’s body writhed and shrank with the heat. Now it was a cruelly misshapen canine, now a hunched man with wild eyes and frantically moving lips.

  Save me! he mouthed, without sound.

  Jame went forward a step. She almost knew that face. “Who are you?”

  But he was gone. On cobblestones a-drip with stinking ichor, the demon Pathless huddled and slavered.

  “Go,” said Pathfinder.

  It went, whining.

  The light remained, emanating even more brightly than before from the god’s body through the white folds of his robe.

  “I’m sorry that I put out your candle,” said Jame.

  He smiled at her, or rather in her general direction. “That was only a prop. Look. I still have my ball of twine.”

  IV

  HIS LIGHT DWINDLED DOWN THE ROAD as he and his followers withdrew. As many as could clutched his robe. Jame wished, briefly, that she could join them. Pathfinder seemed so clear, so benevolent, so reassuring. It must be wonderful to have such certainty, but dangerous too, if one stopped asking questions.

  “Psst.”

  Jame looked up. A gable moved, resolving itself into Sparrow, hunched far out over the eaves with unnerving insouciance.

  “You took some finding,” the Cloudie said. “Cavorting all over town, aren’t you?”

  “Why were you looking?”

  “Well, I have a cousin, name of Robin, who likes to hang out around the Temple District. No accounting for taste. The roofline there is a nightmare, which may be the attraction for a daredevil like him. Anyway, he says that there’s trouble. All else aside, your friend Loogan is frantic. He sees Robin and shouts up at him to find you. ‘Come,’ he says. ‘Come quick.’”

  “Why?”

  “My daft cousin didn’t wait to hear. To be fair, the roof he was on had started to crumble. Woodlice and stone-mites are getting to be something fierce. I’m for home before this roof collapses too. Bye.”

  “You aren’t going there,” said Patches as the Cloudie vanished.

  “Loogan needs me.”

  “Huh. Everyone needs you, or haven’t you noticed? What about me?”

  Jame considered. By now, Men-dalis would have a new target: the Res aB’tyrr. Did he know yet that Tubain, or rather Abernia, had returned home? He saw the latter as his hold on her, not that she had done much for him yet even under that threat. When in doubt, he would think, apply force. Could he attack without the surety that Abernia was there? Anyway, what were the rules about abducting an innkeeper’s wife? Such things in Tai-tastigon were complicated, hinging on the judgment of the Five, but they were currently preoccupied. She should have spoken to the Archiem about this situation. After all, he owed his edge over his rival Harr sen Tenko to the destruction of the Skyrrman that she, in part, had caused.

  “You drove him to desperation,” Harri had said of his father. “He was ready to try anything, to break your hold.”

  Save me!

  G’ah, everyone wanted help.

  “I need you to check on the Res aB’tyrr,” she said to Patches. “I value those people above my life, above my honor. It shames me that so far I’ve only put them in more danger. Patches, please. Who else can I trust?”

  The Townie squinted at her sideways, jealousy and pride in the balance. “Well, if you put it like that . . .”

  Jame watched her go, a slight, crooked form twitching patchwork d’hen and shoulders nearly straight as she went. Should Jame have gone herself? If the Sirdan moved against the inn tonight, what good could the little thief do, and at what risk of getting herself killed? However, some instinct warned Jame to keep her distance until she had achieved some results. Her role was still out in the city.

  Follow the smell of trouble, she told herself. Sooner or later, the pieces will fall into place.

  When she at length approached it, the Temple District was dark, but with light blooming in bursts through the cracks of its improbable roofline. Yells and shrieks echoed within, also booms that shook the ground. Jame entered cautiously.

  The first street she came to, two monstrous half-seen figures thrashed back and forth across it. Walls fell as tails lashed. Jaws yawned silently and tore. The apparitions seemed mostly saurian. Intermittently, as if lit by strokes of lightning, two bewildered men fumbled at each other. One, glimpsing her, mouthed, “Help us!” and then was gone.

  Jame edged past.

  The district seethed with scrambling, indistinct forms. Here a figure with the head of a bull rutted around the door of a New Pantheon god dedicated to masculinity. Here something crawled, snuffling, before a temple to avarice. Here a filmy woman murmured seduction on the threshold of yet another sanctuary.

  That door cracked open. A man leaned out, glassy-eyed. Hairy black legs emerged from under the woman’s skirts and snatched him. As the spinneret between her nether limbs began to wrap him in silk and she eagerly locked him lip to lip, hidden hands stealthily closed the door in his wake.

  Packs of other dead gods roamed the streets, except that by the behavior of most, they had been transformed by human souls into demons. The air throbbed with raw hunger. Jame remembered Heliot’s consort, Kalissan, who had needed to hunt to gain strength even after her transformation. These creatures appeared to be only single-souled. Thus they were much weaker than the more successful hunters of their kind, and more desperate.

  She saw that they were attracted in particular to the temples of the New Pantheon rivals who had supplanted them. Some of the latter stood defended by their worshippers, the diminished gods themselves presumably huddling inside. Others were abandoned. When the demons found such a temple, they swarmed into it in a froth of phantom limbs until its very emptiness drove them out again. There were no souls to prey on here.

  Other ragged figures hunted in their wake, avid for scraps. These looked like townfolk except for their tattered clothes and scuttling, disjointed movements. No demon bothered them, because they cast no shadows.

  One paused, sniffing with what was left of its nose. Jame saw that it was a haunt. And it had caught her scent. The whole pack swarmed after her. She fled.

  Turn one corner, skid around another . . . where
could she find shelter?

  Ahead was a temple that Jame remembered well, a boxlike affair in the section dedicated to those of the Old Pantheon who had survived the change to newer times, if just barely. The one who had dwelt here five years ago had been all but dead. As she approached, a clot of demons was expelled from the temple’s door and bolted, silently shrieking into the night.

  The haunts were right behind her. She ducked inside.

  Snuffle. Scrape. Whine.

  They were on the threshold, but none dared to enter. Hunger soon drew them back into the night, onto their never-ending hunt. It wouldn’t have helped them if they had caught her, Jame thought, leaning back against a wall to catch her breath. Like the demons, these haunts craved the souls that they had lost and now smelled through the flesh of the living. Unlike the demons, they could never reach that deep, gnaw as they might.

  Now, what had made them flee this place?

  The structure had grown several times since its founding, each shell encasing its predecessor. All of them seemed to be abandoned, until she came to their heart. This should have been dominated by the looming statue of an Old Pantheon fertility goddess named Abarraden, she whose eyes Penari had stolen. The last time Jame had been here, with her old master, the inner sanctum had consisted of said statue on a small island, enclosed by a moat, and nothing else.

  It was dark within, the only light coming from the embers of an enormous fireplace set against the far wall. That hadn’t been here before. Neither had the figure silhouetted by its glow.

  “I said,” boomed a familiar voice across the room, “GO AWAY.”

  Jame fell back a step, then checked herself. Cautiously, she advanced. Underfoot was an earthen floor. The ceiling loomed as high as she remembered, but now it was crossed with blackened rafters from which hung many bundles of leather and fur.

  “Quip?” said a sleepy voice, and wings stirred.

  The figure before the fire seemed to grow as she approached until it might have been the missing statue of Abarraden itself, stepped down from its plinth. Its back was turned to her, she saw, nearly as broad as it was high. She touched it gingerly at the level of its hip, shoulder height for her.

  “I said . . . oh. It’s you.”

  “Mother Ragga? What are you doing here?”

  “Where is ‘here’?”

  “Rathillien. Tai-tastigon. The Old Pantheon District. Abarraden’s temple. You really don’t know?”

  “Huh. I might have guessed. This must be my punishment.”

  Jame settled cross-legged beside her and glanced up. The fire’s glow touched the Earth Wife’s dumpy, mashed together features—dough-like cheeks, pursed mouth turned downward in a frown, furrowed brow . . . but what was wrong with her eyes?

  “Why should you be punished?”

  “I worshipped the old biddy, didn’t I? Long, long ago. She was comfortable, and good for getting babies. Farmers were in and out all day long, come about their herds, bringing offerings. Only grain, vegetables, and fruit, mind you. No blood for her, not that farm wives don’t know the taste of sausage. That made me wonder, early on. The Old Pantheon liked their sacrifices, though. Not so much these new folk. Abarraden was before her time there. Thin blooded, I call her, and them. Still, they prevailed. Abarraden was one of the few to span both orders, Gorgo another. But I was a child of the old order. Maybe I never believed as much as I should have. In those days, you did as you were taught and didn’t ask questions. I prayed for a son. Abarraden gave me one.”

  “‘There was an old woman,’” murmured Jame, “‘who dug her son’s grave. And when it was done, he buried her in it.’”

  “My mother’s goddess didn’t save me then, oh no. I did that myself. Afterward, things were different.”

  They would be, Jame thought, when Mother Ragga found herself apotheosized into one of the Four. It had occurred to her before that not only had Rathillien’s elementals once been mortal, but that they had probably been raised to believe in their people’s gods among the Old Pantheon.

  “You think that she’s punishing you for being an apostate?”

  The Earth Wife snorted, a volcanic sound that shook the floor and caused logs to topple in the fireplace. A spurt of flame revealed her feet—cloven, like Abarraden’s. “A fancy word for a child’s fault. That’s all I was then, compared to what I am now.”

  Jame shuddered, remembering her own cry: “I was only a child! What did I know of consequences, of right and wrong?”

  Enough, sense had told her, to know better.

  Mother Ragga subsided, rumbling morosely, gumming jaws large enough to munch a full-grown pig whole.

  “You grew up here?” Jame asked, to keep her talking.

  “It was a big city even then, although less complicated. The change was yet to come, from old to new. These days, I stay away. Too many of these newfangled gods running around. Too much noise. Too much . . . guilt. She’s dead, you know. Poor old Abarraden. Ran out of worshippers. Lost her eyes. Look.”

  She twisted about and bent over Jame. Her sockets were pits, crossed with scars in their depths. Whole galaxies could have fallen into them and disappeared without a trace. Solar wind keened silently between dead stars. She turned back to the fire, grumbling.

  “I don’t know what happened to the second eye. The first . . . ah, that was a long time ago. I loved a boy, you see, much younger than I was then, but the father of my only son. Doted on him, like a fool. Then one night I caught him stealing the orb, a gift for that nasty goddess he worshipped. Now, what was her name? Kal-something. He sweet-talked me into keeping quiet. Many a time I’ve regretted that.”

  Jame remembered asking Penari how Abarraden had come to have the glass eye that he had stolen on a dare. He had guessed that a rogue priest had made off with the real one, just as he had with its mate some fifty years ago.

  “It doesn’t look as if the sect survived losing them both,” he had said.

  There, he had been right.

  How odd that Mother Ragga had also played a part in this old tragedy. As to more recent events . . .

  “So you were drawn back to Tai-tastigon,” Jame said, thinking out-loud. “Curiously enough, the Eaten One is here too. I’ve encountered him—her? them?—twice since my arrival, once in the Tone, once in a puddle.”

  Enormous shoulders stirred up near the ceiling. Jame was uncomfortably aware of the other’s attention shifting from its own misery to focus on her.

  “I think the Tishooo, the Falling Man, is also here,” she continued, now with the sense of reporting unwelcome but important news. “At least people keep mentioning the south wind as opposed to the north, which they fear. The Cloudies even worship it. I’ve felt it hunting around the rooftops, as if it doesn’t quite know what it’s doing here.”

  “Nor, perhaps, does it. Do I, for that matter? And the Burnt Man?”

  Ah, there was another fraught point.

  “Nothing. Yet. What is he likely to do?”

  “Whatever is least obliging. You know Burny. He doesn’t think with that cinder of a brain. He feels. Anger, mostly. Blind, insane rage. That’s what drew him to that precious cat you call the Dark Judge. Of course, it also counts that they both have had a taste of fire.”

  “It sounds to me,” said Jame, “that whatever is going on here is more important than I thought. This city isn’t just a mess; it’s on the edge of a catastrophe big enough to have drawn you four. But what is it?”

  “Huh. You find out, you tell me.”

  There was nothing more to say, and it was time that Jame found Loogan. She rose and slipped out of the room, out of the temple, leaving Mother Ragga to glower blindly at the fire.

  Remember those whom you left behind, the dead had said in her dream. It appeared that Mother Ragga was haunted as well.

  By now, it was nearly dawn and the streets of the district had emptied. Most demons, it seemed, didn’t like daylight.

  Doors cautiously opened as she passed.

 
“Is it clear?” ran murmurs from threshold to threshold, from priest to priest. “Are we safe?”

  For the moment.

  Or maybe not.

  Here was Loogan’s temple and here came the little priest himself, tumbling down its steps in his haste to meet her.

  “He’s gone!” he babbled, seizing her. “Gorgo has disappeared!”

  Chapter X

  Haunts by Daylight

  Spring 57

  I

  “IT’S ALL MY FAULT,” Loogan wailed, pacing the inner chamber of his god’s temple, tearing at his scanty hair. “I knew he was afraid. I tried to protect him but I failed—again!—and now he’s g-g-gone!”

  “When did you last see him?” Jame asked.

  Loogan clutched the bag hanging from his neck as if even now hoping to find a small, green lump in it. “He was here—safe, I thought—but then things got . . . confusing. This was last night. There were demons at the door. I put the pouch in the hands of the idol, thinking his own image might protect him better than I could if they broke in. Then these people came swarming up out of the ground and drove the demons away. When I retrieved the pouch, I didn’t think at first to make sure he was still inside. When I did, he wasn’t!”

  “Stop that,” said Jame, and captured his hands before they could inflict further damage on his beleaguered, rapidly balding head.

  The room in which they stood was dark, dank, and high, dominated by the statue of the god, or rather of the grotesque thing that Loogan’s many-times-great grandfather Bilgore had made of him by turning a simple rain deity named Gorgiryl into Gorgo the Lugubrious, Lord of Tears. The god was represented as an obese, crouching figure, with a sorrow-stricken face and unusually long legs, the bent knees of which rose a good two feet above its head. Its green glass eyes had been smashed, then fitted back together with love, but little skill, into an even more bulging configuration. Lachrymose water trickled through the cracks, channeled into the statue from a reservoir on the roof. No wonder, when Jame had taunted Loogan into causing Gorgo to manifest and he had appeared half this image, half that of a clumsily bedizened priest, the mirror of Loogan as he had then been, Loogan had suffered a cataclysmic loss of faith that effectively killed his god. Between them, with the help of his congregation, they had resurrected Gorgo in his older form, green and froglike. It would have been better, Jame now thought, if Loogan had also changed the statue.