In its cupped hands was a scroll, one of the elder archive concealed beneath the temple’s courtyard, brought up for resanctification. That was another story. Connected to it, however, were the figures in shabby, funereal finery now dismantling the plumbing in search of their god.
They had apparently burst forth from their burial slots when the temple above was threatened: the novices who had moved the archive to beneath Gorgo’s temple for safekeeping; the hierarchs who had ordered them to do so, and then had given each a fine funeral as a reward.
Bilgore himself was among the latter, noticeable by virtue of his ornate if tattered robes and his manner. He kept stomping back and forth, haranguing anyone he could catch, although the ruin of his face turned his words into gibberish. Things had plainly not gone as he had intended. Sorrow was no longer enshrined instead of life-giving hope, tears instead of rain. He tugged irritably at fellow high priests and at novices, breaking brittle limbs off from some of them. To one side, novices fumbled after a fellow’s eyeball dislodged by his superior’s impatient poke.
Cry, damn you, Bilgore might well have been demanding. Here: I give you cause.
“He went too far,” said Loogan, sadly regarding his agitated predecessor. “First changing his god so drastically, then trying to offer him sacrifices literally drowned in their own tears. Think how long it must have taken to collect them! Now, there’s dedicated grief. But Gorgo wouldn’t accept. A lot of the old gods did, you know. Not so many in the New Pantheon.”
“I wondered if our current crop of demons might once have had that habit.”
Loogan shrugged. “Likely enough, for accustomed predators. It’s a nasty practice, but at least only fatal to its victims. When you start taking souls, now, that’s serious.”
“Why?”
“They say in the Priests’ Guild that souls hold together the world. To tamper with them is . . . obscene. Unnatural. The forms of worship in Tai-tastigon are very diverse. I can’t think of many taboos. This is definitely one of them, though, and the main reason why we see demons as abominations in a way that mere dead gods never have been.”
Tick, tick, tick went the novices’ overgrown nails against the floor, against the pipes.
“Nah,” said another one across the room, turning to Loogan and shaking a deformed head at him.
“Good chaps at heart,” Loogan had remarked earlier. “They were a bit much for the regular congregants, though. I sent those folk home. Anyway, it’s too dangerous to be abroad these nights if you aren’t already dead. Well, maybe even if you are.”
The deceased novices at least seemed respectful, the former high priests less so. Everyone had an opinion, however unclearly expressed.
“I suppose,” said Jame, fending off a particularly insistent tiny elder driveling dirt and mutilated words, “that you could call these holy haunts. They still seem to have their souls, though.”
To her, that was a horrifying thought. Who would choose to spend eternity in a crumbling body? Still, they had apparently sacrificed themselves willingly, assuming that they had known what lay in store.
“I never noticed if the haunts that I met in the wastes had shadows or not. Some were more aware than others.” Ashe. Winter. The thought of the beloved dead, especially the latter, threatened to choke her. She swallowed. “Then too, they contracted the disease from the land itself or from the bite of someone already infected. Things seem a bit different here. Except for your initiates, most of these haunts have had their souls reaped by demons and then have died bereft, if you can call it truly being dead.”
On the other hand, in regard to demons, Theocandi hadn’t been able to die at all until his soul had returned to him in the form of the Shadow Thief. She had assumed much the same about Bane and the Lower Town Monster, but without Bane’s true name, that hadn’t been put to the test. He and Theocandi had been different from this new demonic breed, however, in that no dead gods had been involved.
“Maybe the living can still be saved.” Aden, she thought. Those whose souls now enabled Heliot, Pathless, the Kencyr priests, and so many others.
“If Gorgo’s people can also come back, though, why not all of Tai-tastigon’s dead?”
“Perhaps because the city requires cremation,” said Loogan.
The persistent haunt was now tugging at his sleeve and standing on tiptoe, trying to mumble in his ear. Jame didn’t envy him the stink of his dead colleague’s breath.
Loogan shrugged, attempting to free himself without being impolite. “Can you imagine burial grounds within such tightly packed quarters? You may have seen the smoke rising from pyres outside the walls. These were buried below on the sly—another reason for not telling the Five.”
“You know,” said Jame, regarding the tiny priest, “I think he’s trying to tell us something.”
The haunt nodded as vigorously as his desiccated muscles allowed, and his jaw fell off. Loogan handed it back to him. He tried to reattach it, failed, and threw it aside in frustration. Then he pointed at the image towering over them.
“Statue?” asked Jame. “Idol?”
“No,” said Loogan, beginning to look excited. “He means Gorgo.”
The little haunt nodded again. Dust rattled out of his ears. He lowered himself stiffly and tried to hop toward the outer door. His knees exploded. Between them, Jame and Loogan picked him up and seated him on a nearby bench. He was as light as a dead bird. His friends flocked around him, fussing.
“That’s clear enough, anyway,” said Jame. “Gorgo has left the temple.”
Loogan was horrified. “He’s outside?”
He made a rush to the outer door. When he jerked it open, a folded paper fell from its crack.
“That wasn’t there before,” Jame said. “Someone has been watching the building.”
Loogan picked up the note with shaking hands. “I’ve thought before now that we were a target of the Thieves’ Guild,” he said, distracted, fumbling with the paper’s folds. “Scrolls have gone missing from the idol’s hands—the strangest things: a collection of very bad poetry, an old innkeepers’ manual, someone’s laundry list. It’s as if some thief thought that anything that old must be valuable.”
The folds yielded. Loogan stared at the contents, then, speechless, handed the paper to Jame.
“If you want to see your false god again,” she read, “come to the one true temple.”
It was written in Kens.
II
BY NOW, IT WAS NOON, hot and hazy even in the shaded Temple District. More rain had fallen. Roofs dripped. Walls sweated. In some places, whole facades had collapsed. This seemed most prevalent where the demons had swarmed the night before. The steps where Jame had seen the spider woman had completely disintegrated, and the street where the giant saurians had fought was pitted with water-filled holes into which Jame dared not step. It reminded her of the damage in the Maze. How much worse might things be there today, and how was Penari faring? She couldn’t stop to examine the destruction, though, not with an anxious Loogan urging her to hurry, hurry, hurry.
Out of the district, streets steamed and puddles smoked. By contrast, shadowed side alleys exhaled cool air to form miniature fog banks at crossroads. The sky was overcast, with a sulfurous tinge. One felt, instinctively, that something vast was happening out of sight, above the clouds. An intermittent hollow grumble came from above like muted thunder or the grinding of teeth. There was also a smell, stronger than the day before.
Fewer citizens were out than usual for a working midday. They scuttled about their errands or collected in huddles on street corners, flinching whenever the sky growled. More than one fell silent and shot an angry glance at Jame and Loogan as they passed. Well, Jame thought, it was uncommon to see a thief and a priest in company by daylight, or any other time, for that matter. One consolation was that Abbotir’s hunters were unlikely also to be abroad.
They crossed the Tone but couldn’t see it due to the mist rising off its surface. No one said Bloop
, but Jame had the sense of being watched.
Whoo? breathed a stray gust of the south wind, as if in confusion, rattling papers at their feet. Wha, wha, whoo?
Jame picked up one of the scattered notes. “Beware . . .” it said, as if on the Feast of Dead Gods, but then it trailed off. “Beware . . .”
On the south bank, somewhere to the left, someone was shouting. The words were unclear, but the tone was angry. Curious, Jame steered Loogan that way, without telling him that they had gone off the direct path to the Lower Town. Here was the residential district that she had visited with Rue and Darinby on her first night in the city. Here was the street where they had met the whumping demon.
A crowd had gathered, more people than she had seen together before, listening to a speaker. Jame recognized the vendor who had spurned her coin and called her a filthy nightie.
“What’s going on, hey?” he shouted to his audience. “This is our city! Who’s trying to take it away from us? The poor woman who lived here, d’you think she deserved what she got?” He gestured wildly upward, then, with a plunge of his hand, down. The shattered second-story window above him gaped inward as it had before, its interior a deserted void. Below, in a circle of crushed cobbles, was a red puddle.
“Who’s going to be next?” he howled.
The listeners muttered and shifted.
His voice dropped to a wheedling note. “I’m telling you, friends, dear friends, night is on the rise. We’ve put up with it all of these years. Thieves, prostitutes, deviants, the unnatural of every stripe, now dead gods gone rogue! Once a year for the Feast was all right. We stuffed the cracks and waited that out. Families got together. Many a noggin I’ve drunk while the dark crawled outside, but in the morning, it was gone. Now where is it? Among us! You, thief, what have you to say for your master, night?”
Angry faces turned toward Jame. Hands twitched.
What was day without night, light without dark, she wanted to ask, but that wasn’t a true analogy. What had come upon these people had little to do with their fellow citizens, however nocturnal. Heliot had spoken of day paying tribute to night, of sacrifices voluntary and not. This merchant had caught the scent, if not the essence, of oncoming nightmare.
Grit rattled down the wall. Cracks spread. Part of the structure, where the demon had reared up against it, was giving way.
“Look out!” she cried.
The vendor sneered at her, until he heard the grind of stone above him. Blocks shifted, spitting mortar, and fell. The street shook with their impact. People lurched backward, some stepping into the puddle where the Eaten One had surfaced and there they sank. Jame pulled Loogan clear. Dank, choking dirt clotted the air.
Amid the coughing and sobs of the stricken, she edged forward. Nothing could be done for the vendor, smashed and running red between blocks. The stones themselves, though . . .
In the filtered sunlight, they appeared mere rubble. Where the shadows fell, however, they teemed. Tiny bodies burrowed through them like maggots but were made themselves of stone like tiny gargoyles. They spat acid and chewed the damaged rock. Their excrement fractured passageways behind them. More blocks crumbled. Above, the roofline sagged.
“Ugh,” said Loogan, looking over Jame’s shoulder. “Stone-mites. I haven’t seen them since that bad storm out of the north when I was a child. The damage there was awful.”
Stone-mites, petrified woodlice, hearts out of the body that wouldn’t stop beating, haunts, the living that died and then came back . . .
Jame didn’t like the way this was shaping up.
People in the street were sorting themselves out, and realizing that many of them were missing.
“Demon!” one shrieked. “What have you done with my sister?”
“My aunt?”
“My second cousin?”
“Run,” Jame said to Loogan.
They ran. The mob followed.
Here was the dead-end of an alley out of which Jame could easily have clambered, but Loogan was wheezing and clutching his side, already all but spent. He could run no farther, much less climb.
Voices cried behind them: “This way! This way! Here!”
People emerged from the haze, panting, carrying stones. Jame thrust the little priest behind her. She didn’t want to hurt anyone; much less, though, did she want Loogan injured, or herself. The townfolk advanced cautiously. Similar thoughts were no doubt occurring to them.
“Boo!” said Jame.
They jumped backward, then edged forward again.
“We need fire,” said one nervously. Jame recognized the pudgy brother of the haunt girl.
“In this weather?” someone else asked. “Good luck with that. I heard that not even the pyres are catching properly.”
A broad figure loomed behind them at the alley’s mouth.
“Here, now. What’s all this?” asked a familiar voice, suffused with genial cheer.
Rocks dropped from suddenly shy hands. “Her, her, her!” voices clamored as the bloodthirsty pack turned into a parcel of self-righteous accusers. “It’s all her fault!”
“What is?”
“Everything!”
“Be that as it may—and I’ve no doubt that it is—go home, the lot of you. I’ll see to this.”
They slunk around him, out of the alley, into the mist, gone.
“Sart Nine-toes,” said Jame, advancing on the big city guard. “I’m very glad to see you.”
“Huh. I thought it was you, girl. Who else attracts lynch mobs as honey does flies?”
He emerged from the haze, nearly as large as Marc but broader, with a wide mouth upturned in a grin.
“How is the Res aB’tyrr?” Jame demanded.
The corners of his smile turned down like those of a dolorous clown. “Well you might ask. How else in these times? We had no customers last night, even with a new dancer as a draw—not that she was very good. She blames the B’tyrr for that, by the way. Seems that you set an unfair standard. Then too, more and more of the Sirdan’s hired brigands are hanging around the square, day and night. I hear that we have you to thank for that too.”
“Sart, you know that I would never wittingly harm the House of Luck-bringers.”
He looked at her sideways. “I’ve noticed that what you mean and what happens are often very different things. You’re a perilous friend, you are.”
“Er . . . yes. What does the Widow Cleppetania say?”
He snorted. “I’ve been that good woman’s husband for nearly five years now, off and on. You’d think that some people would remember by now.”
“Sorry. But still . . .”
“Does she blame you? I won’t say yes or no. Should any of us? But Master Tubain won’t come out of his quarters until his wife returns home. We miss him. He’s our luck-bringer, and well you know it.”
Yes, Jame supposed that she did.
They were walking now, with Loogan tagging diffidently along behind. The streets were empty, the sky louring. Grumble, rumble, growl. If that was thunder, it was closer than before, as if it had run aground on top of the clouds. Jame wondered what was going on.
“I stand guard when I can,” Sart continued, “and try to get my mates to spell me when I’m on duty, but the word is out that the inn is off-bounds. Some business with the Five, the Skyrr Archiem versus Abbotir of the Gold Court. Politics, damn it. It’s like a siege. Your cub Rue helps. So does little Miss Patches, now that you’ve sent her back to us, although her ideas are more fanciful.”
“Is it serious?”
“Only once, so far. Four of the Bortis boys caught the cat Boo on his way out for a prowl last night. They were pulling one each at his legs, laughing, as if they meant to tear him apart. He certainly screamed as if they were. Rue was out the door in a flash. They just stared, as if they couldn’t believe their eyes, until she hit them. I’ve seen you fight. She isn’t as good, but by the gods she tore into them while their mouths were still hanging open, and she left her mark. At least one of
those lads will be walking at a crouch for the foreseeable future. Walked right up him, she did, stomping all the way, then whoop, a flip over his head, and down the other side. I don’t think he’ll be sitting much either.”
Sart laughed, half appreciative, half condescending. Oh, the ladies, bless their little boots. Then he sobered.
“Boo huffed for an hour after that, but he wasn’t badly hurt. So now you ask, is it serious yet? My sense is that they want to know where you and Mistress Abernia are before they make their move. Master Men-dalis has put himself in a tricky situation there. Guild lords do not abduct merchant’s wives without even holding them for ransom. Sanctioned—that is, taxable—civil wars are not conducted on those terms. The fines would be ruinous. The Archiem would see to that, given how he feels about Abbotir. Dammed if I can see, though, what Men-dalis is up to.”
“You make me very nervous.”
He regarded her askance. “Glad to see that something does.”
“You have no idea.”
She noticed that they were moving northeast, back toward the Tone. Loogan apparently hadn’t realized this, but then he rarely left the Temple District. “Where are we going?”
The river came into view, smoking in its bed. Rising out of the mist was the mansion where Jame had almost had breakfast.
“Oh no,” she said, stopping. “Abbotir.”
Sart took her arm in a light but firm grip.
“The word was out for your apprehension. Sorry, Talisman.”
III
THE MANSION seemed at first to be deserted. At least, no servant met them at the door, which proved to be unlocked.
By Demons Possessed Page 16