They need us. They need us. We are coming.
The tide swept up Jame’s small party and carried it across the city as if on invisible wings.
Bloop, said something as they hurried across the bridge.
Wha . . . ? asked the wind, but it already knew.
Over the city loomed that monstrous House, building and collapsing and building again out of clouds and ash driven south from the Haunted Lands, from Perimal Darkling itself. Pallid lightning fretted its gables and outlined from inside the vacant eyes of its windows. Muffled thunder growled. Trinity, that smell . . .
Is the Master really coming? Jame wondered as she ran, and her heart pounded at the thought. Sweet Trinity, what then?
Her hand was under Loogan’s left elbow to help him keep up. On the other side, Titmouse gripping his right arm. As he was borne along between them, the little priest’s sandals barely touched the ground. Gorgo surged ahead of them. His size and the distance of each leap varied as the power ebbed and flowed, now feeding the city’s gods, now draining them. Everything was in flux.
“Awk!” said Loogan as his god shrank almost under his feet. For a moment, the three of them tottered on the brink of theocide. Then Gorgo was off again, and so were they.
The Eaten One was in the River Tone. The Falling Man was overhead. Where was the Earth Wife? Where (Ancestors preserve them) was the Burnt Man? With whom did their sympathies lie, if anywhere, and what had drawn them here? Tai-tastigon was important. If it could fall to the shadows, so could Rathillien. So, who stood by the gods of the city on this fateful night?
They need us. We are coming.
Others followed. All of the bereft from the Lower Town seemed to be shambling after them, drawn by the congregated demons that possessed their souls. Foremost among them came the three Kencyr priests, the two supporting the stumbling third as if in horrible mockery of those whom they trailed.
“Look out!” shouted someone to the rear.
Stinking bundles of rags coursed through the crowd, snapping right and left to clear the way. Haunts. After them, as if behind a leashed brace of hounds, came something large, heavy, and speckled with luminous warts, so intent on its course that it ignored those upon whom it trod and flattened.
A smaller, single-souled demon with entirely too many legs wheezed past on its heels, its smell making Jame sneeze. What Old Pantheon dead god could possibly have been based on a centipede?
One of the three Kencyr priests dropped the arm of his brother and stumbled after this second demon, his arms and legs in an uncouth windmill that mirrored what scurried before him.
“My name . . . my name . . .” he sobbed as he ran, soon to be lost in the crowd.
Ahead lay the Temple District, fire showing through the angles of its improbable roofline. Booms, crashes, and wails echoed within. Even at this distance, the earth shook.
Once within its gates, Gorgo lurched purposefully toward his temple with Loogan puffing after him. Worshippers milled around before it. On the steps were the dead novices and the former priests, urging them to seek sanctuary within. Both groups scattered as Gorgo scrambled up the stair and hopped inside.
“Come, come!” Loogan cried, drawing them all in.
The living and the dead came, although still hesitant to mix, the former drawing back in fastidious horror, the latter, fragile, wary of jostling elbows.
“You, too,” Loogan called to Jame and Titmouse, who had both hung back.
“I don’t think this is right for us,” said Titmouse, scowling. He gave a clumsy bob of acknowledgement. “Thank you for your invitation, nonetheless, m’lord.”
“Then keep safe. Who knows what will happen next?”
“Not I,” muttered Jame, turning away from the closing door.
“Huh,” said Titmouse, without looking at her.
Jame hesitated, unsure what to do next. Events were spinning out of control around her like a series of muffled explosions, of which there were also many. If nothing else, it was up to her now to make what sense she could of this mayhem, to deduce what she could.
There, a troupe of the faithful spun in place to evoke their absent god through ecstasy.
There, worshippers of chance cast the bones against a wall, over and over again in desperate search of a winning combination.
Here, at a curtained corner stall, puppets bashed each other with stocking-clad hands to represent the triumph of good over evil.
The latter display, even in this chaos, had attracted a small, rapt audience. Most were dead gods, dumbly staring. Among them was one still alive, if barely, a huddled, cowled figure holding the hand of her last true believer, a small child.
Bop, bop, bop, went a priest’s hidden hands within the socks, belaboring each other with fratricidal fury.
The child crowed as the one in red flopped over, its ribbon of a tongue spilling out down the front of the stall.
“See, lady? The bad people can’t win! Or . . . or was Mister Poke supposed to be the hero?”
Here came another god—a belligerent little fellow sacred to a Skyrr hill tribe that had, somehow, wrangled him temple rights in the city. He wore leather armor sown thickly with plaques of silver and gold. His long hair was braided with black and white feathers that fluttered in his self-important wake. One of those who followed him held high a banner depicting a piebald horse running under the stars. That flag-bearer—surely it was Harr sen Tenko’s son, Harri.
The current in the street seemed to change, tugging at one’s very guts. The Kencyr temple had been radiating force to the city’s gods. Now Ishtier had apparently regained control of it, and it was sucking power in.
The sen Tenko deity faltered. With a whine as if of expelled breath, he shrank within his armor. Dislodged plaques rattled on the cobbles like fallen scales. Feathers flew. His followers stumbled, including Harri, who nearly dropped the banner.
Jame felt the others coming up behind her before she saw them and hustled Titmouse back against a wall.
It was a hunting pack of haunts.
The god uttered a shrill squeal, turned, and fled, shedding armor down to bare skin. His people wavered, then plunged after him in a rout. Harri hesitated.
“Go!” Jame hissed at him.
He gave her a wild-eyed stare, then turned and ran, his banner held like a lance before him, charging at nothing.
One of the followers tripped and fell. Judging by her clothes, she was a wealthy matron from the hills on pilgrimage to the house of her displaced god. Others tried to help her but panting, she waved them on. Then she turned with blanched features and trembling lips to await her fate.
The haunts swarmed around her, snarling. Perhaps she recognized some of them, for she cried out with horror. Then again, they were horrifying. But they didn’t savage her. Rather, they milled about as if kept on an invisible leash even as they slavered against its restraint.
Snap, snap, hiss.
“Grandma,” lisped one, a small girl, smiling through a mouth full of spittle and loose baby teeth.
The woman cried out again and stumbled to her feet. They drove her back the way they had come. Jame and Titmouse followed.
Here was a courtyard and a collapsed temple. On its ruins, as if on a throne, lounged Heliot. The seams in his armor appeared to have widened so that red light glared down on the wet, steaming cobbles at his feet like spilt blood.
The pack played the matron back and forth before him until she stumbled, sobbing, and fell. Her gray-streaked hair had broken loose from its net and tumbled about her face. She pushed it aside with a shaking hand, as if trying to reestablish order in the sudden maelstrom of her life.
Heliot had appeared to ignore the antics of such a trivial offering, but now he deigned to stoop. His clawed fingertips snagged the woman’s shadow, ripping it off. She fell. He raised her soul to his lips and licked it as if to determine its taste.
“Ah,” he said. “One of the righteous.” And he swallowed it.
The cracks in
his armor narrowed, slightly, but more opened like bleeding wounds.
“More,” he said, leaning forward, radiating hunger. “Bring me more.”
The haunts coursed off, baying after fresh prey. Too impatient to wait, Heliot rose and followed them.
“Is she dead?” Titmouse asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Not yet. He will feed on her soul until it is eaten away, which may take a while. Then she will die and come back as a haunt.”
“Harsh.”
“True. Ancestors preserve us.”
That was another question: What happened to a feeder soul if the demon possessing it died? Maybe it escaped. Maybe that depended on how much of it had already been consumed, say, too much for it to survive. G’ah. There were too many variables here.
After a moment, the woman rose. She stood, swaying, blank-eyed, then tottered off after the pack, leaving her shadow behind. Somewhere in the district, her god howled at her loss and subsequently at his own. What, after all, was a god without his followers?
That forlorn cry seemed to call forth another presence. Smoking puddles quivered like gelid blood where Heliot had been. Out of one, a huge, bloated . . . something . . . scrabbled at the edge. It was the whumping demon. The sodden priest gasped and fell to his knees, his remaining brother leaning over him. Water leaked around both of them. The thing tried to pull itself up onto solid ground. Were those translucent tentacles clutching at the stones’ margin? If so, they oozed and stank and some of them sloughed off. The priest gasped again, clutched his chest, and collapsed. In death, he seemed to melt within his tattered vestments, leaving them vacant and slimy on the ground. The demon sank, wailing, likewise dissolving.
The demon’s dire straits had clearly affected the priest whose soul had been his core. The priest’s death, conversely, had doomed the demon. It seemed to go both ways.
The remaining priest rose, his brother’s empty robes in his hands. He dropped them and looked to Jame as if to ask, what next?
Me, she thought bitterly. Always me.
“This is ridiculous,” said Titmouse. “These people will all die if they don’t pull themselves together.”
“I think,” Jame said, “that I know someone they might follow, also someone you should meet.”
II
SHE LED THE WAY deeper into the district, dodging demons and gods alike while the followers of both clashed on street corners. Yes, some mortals supported these abominations, as Heliot had foretold. “Greed, vengeance, grievance, these are the levers that move mere mortals,” he had said, and so here they were. “To please us will become their pleasure. They will come to see sacrifice to us for the honor that it is.”
Some people, Jame thought, were stupid.
The remaining Kencyr priest followed them mutely, but died at a crossroads when the demon possessing his soul as its core burst out of a side street and accidentally trampled him. The demon floundered to a stop in chagrin. He appeared to have devolved from an Old Pantheon god of the fields. Numerous festering lilies sprouted from his muddy flesh, their stench appalling. Brown blossoms rained down, melting into slime as they reached the ground, even as he clutched after them.
Perhaps those were the souls he had harvested to feed upon, Jame thought, pressing back into a doorway with a hand to her nose. If he had caught one, could it have become a new core to sustain him? Probably not, given the shape they were in. With a moan, he sank to the pavement, on top of the priest’s broken body. Both dissolved into a filthy puddle.
Here at last was Dalis-sar’s street and his temple.
A priest caught her by the arm as she entered. “Oh come!” he cried, drawing her inside. “Oh come!”
She could see that he was blind, as were many of Dalis-sar’s servants after years of gazing with open-eyed adoration into his radiance.
The temple was sunk in gloom now except for the glow of candles on the altar. Against this flickering light reared the bulk of Dalis-sar, sitting on the steps, holding his head in enormous hands. It was so like her first glimpse of him on the curb that Jame blinked. At least he hadn’t shrunken in the continual flux of power. Perhaps he had the faith of his followers to thank for that. Why, though, had he gone dark?
“She is dead, isn’t she?” he said, without raising his head, as Jame cautiously approached. His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a very deep well.
Who . . . oh. Aden. Of course. “Not as far as I know.”
His eyes lifted, a spark kindling in their depths. “I felt her soul pass. Are you saying . . .”
Trinity. He was a god now, and could blast her where she stood. Moreover, he was essentially an innocent. Such people, when imbued with power, could be very dangerous.
“Kalissan reaped her soul, at Heliot’s behest,” Jame said carefully. “She was the demon’s first victim and now, as far as I know, is the core of that creature’s being.”
Dalis-sar rose, trailing fire.
“Are you telling me,” he boomed, “that she still lives? Then I must rescue her!”
His priests cowered away from him. Jame, with an effort, stood her ground.
“Sar Dalis,” she said, swallowing hard. “You also owe a debt to your people, perhaps to all of those who risk their lives tonight for their gods. Think what we have sacrificed over the millennia to our own deity, with precious little return. These gods, at least, give their followers something. Very well. Let them stand or fall according to the faith of their worshippers. I didn’t believe, when I first came here, that they were real at all. What happened to you is . . . strange, but not out of keeping with the properties of this city or this world. Please, take control of this battle. You’re the only one who can.”
Dalis-sar paced back and forth in front of the altar, shaking his head. Sparks snapped at the end of his long braid as if it were a fiery whip. He was rousing, at least, but what next?
“Aden, my friends, you.” His lambent gaze fell on Titmouse. “Are you a Kencyr priest?”
Titmouse stepped around Jame, his jaw jutting with defiance, although his eyes were confused. “Yes, I am. What are you?”
Dalis-sar fell to one knee. The temple shook. “A loyal soldier of our god. I am lost here. Tell me what to do.”
Titmouse seemed taken aback by this—how not?—and glanced involuntarily toward his fellow priests. They were urging him forward.
“Er . . . do these people have reason to depend on you? If so, as the Talisman says, you have a responsibility to them.”
“I have served, oh, so long. When am I entitled to anything for myself?”
“Others come first.” Titmouse cleared his throat. “I know that that is hard to hear. I, also, have sacrificed, and asked questions, in the dark, at night. Where does duty lie? As a child, I would have said to our god. Now, I think, to each other.”
Dalis-sar seemed to swell like a forge before the bellows.
“You.” He loomed over Jame, all but blasting her with his fiery breath. “Do you swear that she still lives?”
Jame flinched, trying not to inhale. “I . . . can’t.”
“Pray to our god that she does.”
His smoldering gaze swept over her, alighting on his priests. They, being blind, only felt the heat, which seemed to brace them.
“I need to know what is going on,” he said, a natural commander thinking out loud. “Also, I need links to the other priests and gods in the district. We must act together.”
His own high priest stepped forward, a wizened little man with sunken eye sockets beneath lids sewn shut. “We can reach out to our fellow clerics and they will listen to us, such being the respect with which they regard you. Leave that to us. As for being scouts, though . . .”
He tapped regretfully on the dried seal of his lids. Tick, tick, tick.
Dalis-sar’s face creased with sudden chagrin. “I spoke without thinking. You know how much I regret that.”
The priest fumbled forward and, having found it, patted his god’s knee as if to say,
“There, there . . .”
“At your request, your novices and acolytes serve you blindfolded, only beholding your full glory when they take their final vows. As with our fathers and grandfathers before us, we elders are proud to do so every day until sight fails. By then, we count it no loss.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Shhh. Plan.”
Dalis-sar straightened. “Very well, then. Keep the lesser orders in, except for a few of the oldest. We will make do.”
“Am I going mad?” Titmouse muttered in Jame’s ear. “That’s both a Kencyr and a god. But how?”
“I’ll explain later, to the extent that I can.”
Dalis-sar had swung to face her, the whole room shifting with him. She staggered, blinking, in the full glare of his attention.
“This is all moot without one essential fact,” he said. “How do we kill these demons?”
In the old days, water, fire, and their true names would have done the trick. Like the Lower Town Monster, those demons had depended on a core human soul and had fed on others (in the case of the Monster, children), but the dead gods hadn’t been a component.
From what she had seen so far of this new breed of demons, their existence was linked partly to dead gods, partly to the fluctuating power of her own temple, and partly to the human souls upon whom they preyed. The loss of feeder souls weakened them, as with the bog monster of the festering lilies. The loss, however, of that special core soul that supported their being could kill them. Witness again the bog monster accidentally stomping his host, also the death by heart attack of the priest who had unwillingly supported the whumping monster.
Was it possible, though, to kill a demon without destroying its core human soul? Therein lay Aden’s fate, and perhaps her own if Dalis-sar held her responsible.
“I’ll find out,” she said, with a gulp, praying that she would.
“You had better.”
By Demons Possessed Page 21