By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jame had shared much with Torisen in these latter days, but not everything. “He knows what he needs to know.”

  “Ha. Then you have lied by omission.”

  “And you, about me, on purpose.”

  His sunken eyes glittered. With anger? With amusement? “Priests trust priests.” He spread both hands. His mouth lifted in a sneer. “Behold my faithful followers.”

  Titmouse twitched.

  “Now that we are here,” said Jame, to distract the high priest, “what do you want with us?”

  “Not with him.” Ishtier indicated Loogan with a contemptuous jerk of his pointed chin. “With you. Why, as a gift for Master Gerridon, of course.”

  Sweet Trinity.

  “He’s here?”

  “Not yet, but he will come, soon, when he sees what I have to offer him.”

  Through a haze of panic, Jame began to work this out. Here, perhaps, at last were the reasons for the city’s plight that had so far eluded her.

  “You changed the flow of the temple’s power inward, rather than out. Why?”

  “This is how it always should have been, how it was on all previous worlds. An old song told me that and an old singer, when he had been induced to perform. The Priests’ College at Wilden is set up properly. Our temples here, for some reason, are not. Think about it: why should we feed power to such jokes as this amphibious godling and his pathetic priest?”

  Here he paused to strike a spark in the fire-pit. Loogan squeaked as flames rose to lick the rounded bottom of the glass. Gorgo goggled.

  “The Chain of Creation was meant to serve us, not the other way around,” said Ishtier, ignoring the growing conflagration at his elbow even though it threatened his sleeve. “We in turn were meant to do what we thought best with it. But that was before our god failed us, oh, so long ago. To whom should we turn now if not to the shadows?”

  Titmouse moved sideways, stumbling a bit over his big boots. He tapped the shoulder of a fellow priest as if to wake him from a trance. “Listen.”

  “The Arrin-ken, those filthy cats, betrayed us in disowning Gerridon and naming his kinsman Glendar as our leader when we first arrived on this world. I realized that when his descendent, Ganth Graylord, was driven into exile some thirty years ago. Surely that could not have happened to a true Highlord; therefore, he was not one.”

  “You only say that to justify abandoning him in the Haunted Lands.”

  “He was not my lord!”

  It came out almost in a shriek. More dancers faltered, as did the current in the room. Ishtier caught himself with a gasp and resumed with a sickly smile meant to show how reasonable this all was, how dimwitted—nay, insane—anyone who questioned it.

  He’s mad, thought Jame.

  “That honor belongs to Gerridon, who saw the truth about our so-called god and led the way to freedom, to immortality. Our ancestors were fools not to follow him.”

  The water in the bowl began to steam. Gorgo paddled in it anxiously. Enough of the past.

  “What are you trying to do here?”

  Ishtier snorted. A drop of snot gathered on the tip of his long nose and fell, unnoticed.

  “Trying? What can I do but succeed? Why do you think all the other worlds fell?”

  Jame felt suddenly sick. “Oh god. We drained them. They had native powers, native gods. Like Mother Ragga. Like the Falling Man and the rest of the Four, not to mention the Old Pantheon and the Ancient Ones. We bled them until they couldn’t protect themselves or their worlds, just as you’re trying to do here in Tai-tastigon, now. Wait. All of that was long before Master Gerridon betrayed us.”

  “Heh. Did I say that this was a new thing? The priests have always known that ours was the power to take, to use.”

  “But not wisely. World after world has fallen.”

  “Was that our fault? Our god betrayed us. Therefore he . . . she . . . it was never meant to win.”

  This was more than Jame had expected, more than she could accept. Tai-tastigon had tried her faith before and nearly broken her. Was it about to do so again?

  “Never meant by whom?”

  “Ah.” He threw up his hands dismissively, as if scattering birds of bone upon the air. “Questions, questions.”

  By now, Titmouse had tapped perhaps a dozen of his colleagues and they had stumbling out of step, looking dazed. Jame noted in passing that none of them belonged to the group who had taken her prisoner before. Were those Ishtier’s supporters, who had followed him on his return here, and therefore not friends of Titmouse?

  “No, no, no!” raged high priest. “Dance, damn you, dance! We are so close!”

  To what? Jame was still scrambling to make sense out of what she had already heard. “But . . . dead gods? Souls? Demons?”

  Ishtier sneered. “And some fools call you clever. That was my doing, an extension of my earlier experiments with the Lower Town Monster and the Shadow Thief, both limited, mindless creatures. Incorporating this world’s so-called dead godlings has added the power of personality. Of purpose. Besides, as former Old Pantheon gods, these demons have already shown their affinity to human sacrifice. That makes them more deadly to this world than their New Pantheon descendents, who for the most part only seek that weak thing, faith.”

  “Now I’m confused. Again. What, then, does our own god require?”

  The priest laughed, a shrill, jarring sound. “Faith, he says, but does he give us a choice?”

  “Well, yes, if you want it.”

  Ishtier waved this away. “More trickery.”

  “Loogan tells me that the real danger lies in taking human souls. He says they glue together the world.”

  Titmouse had circled closer, drawn by their debate. “If here,” he said, “what about down the Chain of Creation? Is that why the previous worlds fell?”

  A colleague drifted up to them, still mimicking the kantirs if not fully committed to them. “We’ve never understood quite what Perimal Darkling is. What if it uses the souls that it overwhelms to propel it farther down the Chain?”

  “To fresh food?” said Jame. “I can see that. Perhaps when it dissolves the bonds, it creates the energy by which it lives. It’s a predator, like the demons, who also break down barriers and feed on souls, and it’s always hungry. Like Gerridon, for that matter. Is he now also a demon? What is a demon, anyway? Dead gods needn’t be involved. They weren’t with the Lower Town Monster. What if feeding on souls is enough in itself to make one demonic?”

  Ishtier stomped his foot. “Questions, question, questions! I go by what I see. Demons please the Master. They bring Rathillien closer to the Haunted Lands, to Perimal Darkling itself. Wherever they tread, the shadows rise. Life mixes with death, animate with inanimate. What an army I bring to serve my lord! What we do in Tai-tastigon’s strongest city, we can surely accomplish anywhere on this world. What more do you need to know?”

  “Oh,” said several voices. “A lot.”

  “Shut up!”

  This all had the sickening ring of truth, as far as Ishtier understood it.

  “And these demons obey you?”

  Ishtier showed the bloodshot whites of his eyes, the yellow of his teeth. “Of course. I created them.”

  “Heliot says that he means to take over this city, this world, solely to feed his appetite. He’s come back as a demon, thanks to you. He preys on human souls. Then too, what about those of Heliot’s kind who are breeding freely?”

  “What? Impossible.”

  “I saw it happen when a dead goddess, Kalissan, absorbed a human soul. You didn’t sanction that, did you?”

  “Of course not. You lie.”

  Jame felt, at last, a rising twinge of anger. Her fists clenched, nails pricking into palms.

  “Those who know me best do not say such things.”

  He sneered, although one corner of his mouth twitched. More dancers broke stride, looking confused.

  “The Master sought immortality,” he said, his voice rising in a harangue to
reclaim his followers. “Perhaps he did not get exactly what he wanted, but why should we not? Souls are cheap. Everybody has one. Most will sell them for the right price. Look at the people who first volunteered theirs for this great experiment. City lords, hill chieftains, even some from our own temple.”

  “What?” said Titmouse.

  “Oh yes. Your so-called missing priests, from among those who came with me from the Riverland. I told them the truth. They trusted me. Who are you to say that they did not get what they wanted? Part of them will live forever, or at least until they run out of inferior souls on which to feed. What are mere bodies compared to that? The strongest survive. Gerridon taught us that. Do you think yourself wiser than he?”

  “I think that he is a selfish moron,” said Jame, “trying to bend forces beyond his control who in turn seek to make him their creature, their one voice.”

  “Blasphemy!”

  He raised his hands again and brought them sharply down. The dancing priests converged on the center, except for those who had hesitated.

  Jame pushed Loogan to the wall, out of the way.

  “But Gorgo . . . !”

  “Trust me.”

  The dancers circled Jame, trying to draw her into their pattern. Turn, cup the air with a hand to gain command of it, slide forward and back with a foot to draw in power, turn again, release . . .

  A blast of wind made Jame stagger. It stank of singed power. Oh, where was the Tishooo when she needed him? Not in this enclosed space.

  The priests were in motion again, circling, circling, and the room seemed to spin with them.

  “Dance, puppet, dance!” cried Ishtier, clapping his hands.

  He might have signaled the change in the Sene, from Senetha to Senethar, from dance to fight. An acolyte sprang at Jame—she recognized him as the one who had shoved her when last she had been here. She channeled aside his fire-leaping kick, scooped up his leg and dropped him backward on his head.

  “Next?”

  The high priest hastily clapped again.

  The Great Dance once more gripped the room, commanding body and soul. Jame felt it tug at her senses, but brushed it off with a wind-blowing shrug of the mind. Trinity, but she was tempted to use this game against them as she had once before (oh, so irresponsibly) to enthrall guests at the Res aB’tyrr.

  Turn, sway, reap their souls, as the Dream-weaver would have done, as she had been taught to do by golden-eyed wraiths under shadows’ eaves . . .

  No. That was the role for which the Master had bred her. She was not nor would she ever be his puppet.

  The swirl of dancers brought her back face to face with Titmouse.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. They mirrored each other in the Senetha that in itself mirrors the Great Dance, but on a less potent level. “Why would the Master want you, a thief, a tavern wench?”

  “Torisen Highlord is my twin brother and I am his heir.” Speak truth to this man, her instincts told her, even while caution whispered, Shanir! “Gerridon is my uncle. Own mother was Jamethiel Dream-weaver.”

  Two priests, fighting, parted them. Ishtier’s control was breaking down. Jame used water-flowing to pass between the combatants. The high priest was screaming. The room seemed to tilt.

  Here, back, was Titmouse.

  “Also, I think that I’m one of the Tyr-ridan,” she shouted at him over the uproar.

  Some of the dissident priests had formed a line, arms linked, and were dancing together. Stomp, stomp, stomp, kick; stomp, stomp, stomp, kick.

  “Which one?”

  “Regonereth. That-Which-Destroys.”

  “Oh. Who are the other two?”

  “Torisen and our first cousin Kindrie, whose father was Gerridon, but I don’t hold that against him. We three are the last pure-blooded Knorth.”

  Titmouse stopped. Priests bounced off his sudden wall of stillness.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Would you say such things to just anyone?”

  She spoke in a startled lull, louder than she had intended. Priests stared at her.

  “What?”

  Titmouse grabbed Gorgo out of his steaming bowl and stuffed him, all flailing limbs, into his pocket. “Come on,” he said, catching Jame and Loogan each by an arm and hustling them out of the hall.

  A shadowy figure leaned against the wall opposite, greeting them with a raised eyebrow.

  “Oh, go away,” Titmouse snarled at it, and swatted a clot of cobwebs out of his path.

  V

  WHEN THEY EMERGED from the temple, it was early evening. The air still hung heavy with heat and the dull, molten glow of sunset, but the clouds continued to lift and gather to the north. Distant thunder rumbled there. Pale lightning flickered above and between the mounting banks, behind which darkness reared. For the first time, Jame recognized that vague, towering shape.

  “So that’s what Ishtier is doing,” she said.

  “What?” asked Loogan, his attention divided between the cumulous mass, the Lower Town’s ominous wasteland, and Titmouse’s bulging pocket.

  “Look at it. Imagine that those peaks are gables; those holes in the clouds below, windows. There! See how the lightning peers through, as if you were looking from the outside into some vast, vacant interior? It’s becoming the Master’s House.”

  Both priests stared at her.

  “I don’t see it,” said Loogan, again watching the other’s pocket, out of which green, webbed toes cautiously crept.

  “I do,” said Titmouse grimly. “But why?”

  “The House exists mostly in Perimal Darkling, but its front projects through the Barrier into the Haunted Lands. Sometimes you could see it from the keep where I was born. Ishtier is using the Dance and the demons—in fact, all of this chaos—to bring it closer. He’s using it like a ram to batter down the Barrier between our ancient enemy and this world. But do the dancing priests realize that?”

  “I didn’t,” said Titmouse. “Ishtier told us that the power we harnessed would help us to defeat the shadows. It was up to us as priests, he said, to save our people. The Kencyrath had been weakened by internal, petty politics and the Highlord was spineless, he said. He lied?”

  Jame bypassed the issue of politics, about which she and Ishtier nearly agreed, if for different reasons.

  “His ideas about saving anyone are warped,” she said. “He thinks only of himself and his precious Master, and seems to believe that service to Gerridon will somehow redeem his own lost honor for abandoning his lord, my father. Yes, he lies, especially about my brother and me.”

  “‘What we do here,’ he said, ‘we can surely accomplish anywhere on this world.’ He was talking about the ultimate fall of Rathillien, wasn’t he? Our last bastion on the Chain of Creation. The end of everything.”

  “Yes,” said Jame. “Sorry.”

  He turned, looming over her. “You pity me?”

  “I would anyone, learning such a thing for the first time.”

  “But you suspected?”

  “If not this exactly, something like it. The Master has tried it before elsewhere, on a lesser scale. Besides, I told you: I have dire bloodlines and a potential fate that I wouldn’t wish on anybody, least of all myself.”

  “Huh. I begin to believe you. Besides, I can feel the power fluctuating around us. The dance draws it in, but the temple itself seems to radiate it outward. Back and forth. In and out.” He shivered. “It feels . . . unbalanced.”

  Jame had sensed this too, as soon as the dance had faltered. With luck, Ishtier’s plan might collapse, but Titmouse was right about the current instability. Anything might happen now.

  Here came gusts of the bustling south wind to whip up dust around them.

  Figures shambled forward through the sudden haze—foremost, two supporting a third. All three wore hieratic robes reduced to rags. Those garments that clothed the third were dripping wet and his half-seen face was grossly bloated. Bubbles burst at the corners of a slack mouth
. Dangling tentacles fringed his lips. He must be the one whose soul had been used to create the demon that the Eaten One had dragged beneath the cobblestones, now slowly disintegrating. So the link worked this way, too.

  “I know these men,” said Titmouse. “They came from the Riverland with m’lord Ishtier to join our ranks, but I deliberately never learned their names. ‘Here, you. And you. And you.’ I see now that that was my petty act of rebellion against the high priest.”

  She had been right, then, about the split within the temple. “The rest are your friends?”

  “Not all. M’lord Ishtier has seduced some even among them.”

  “How many does he need?”

  “I don’t know. Every one will count.”

  “Whoo . . . ?” said the south wind, stirring the dust, obscuring the three tragic figures and those who swayed in the murk behind them. “Wha, wha, wha, whoo . . . ?”

  “Tishooo, Falling Man, can you help us?”

  The dust swirled, almost into the semblance of a bewhiskered, disgruntled face. “Youuu . . . ?”

  “Me. I’m sorry that I sent you to the Western Lands, or what’s left of them. At least I got you out again.”

  “Huhhh!”

  “Well, yes. That was by accident, and it was nasty, but do you want to lose this part of Rathillien as well?”

  The wind buffeted her, flipping her loosened hair into her eyes so that she had to hold it down with both gloved hands. Titmouse braced himself. Loogan huddled behind him.

  “Ha . . . !”

  “Oh, stop it!” Jame shouted at the vortex of debris whirling above them, slapping her in the face. “I know that you didn’t ask for this, but this is your world too, dammit!”

  A blast of wind almost knocked her off her feet. She had forgotten that the Four regarded the Kencyrath as intruders here as much as they did the shadows. Convincing them otherwise had so far been hard but oh, so necessary to the survival of both. It didn’t help that many of her own people still saw themselves as masters of any world on which they found themselves. Hadn’t their Three-Faced God and his priests assured them of that?

  Huh, as the wind said.

  Above, the outlines of the House shivered, edges sloughing off of its eaves, windows breaching. Was that due to the Tishooo, to Ishtier’s faltering dance, or to something else? Muted thunder strummed again on high and the sky darkened with sunset. This was still a gathering storm.