By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  “I’ll stay here,” said Titmouse as she turned to leave. “Maybe I can help. At least, I can learn.”

  On the doorstep, Jame was hit on the shoulder by a shard of slate.

  “Psst!” said someone above her. “Up here!”

  A Cloudie leaned over the temple’s gutter, precariously far out.

  “I’m Robin. Sparrow said to watch for you as you were bound to land here sooner or later. Always in the thick of things, he said. What’s up?”

  This, Jame remembered, was Sparrow’s cousin, he who found the Temple District’s perilous roofline an agreeable challenge.

  “Blood, thunder, and general mayhem,” she said.

  “Oh, good! How can I help?”

  What, in stirring up more?

  “We’ve got a host of demons here, gods galore, and a lot of people running every which way in danger of getting themselves killed. Can you keep track of movement on the streets and report back to this temple?”

  “With pleasure! What’s more”—here, heads popped up behind him, avid with interest—“my roof-mates want to help.”

  One toward the rear presented a fluff of fair hair and an enormous grin.

  “That’s our mate Dandy,” said Sparrow, with a negligent wave. “Just one of us, you understand.”

  “No one lets me do anything,” Dandello had said. Now he was back in the thick of things, to his evident delight and the potential cost of everyone else.

  Still, good enough, as far as it went, thought Jame as she took again to the district’s streaming cobblestones. Now, if she could just figure out how to slay a demon without destroying its stolen soul . . .

  III

  THE PATTERNS in the street continued to shift.

  Followers still crowded in from the greater city, urgent but unsure what to do. Some priests continued to hustle them into the presumed safety of those temples where their gods cowered. Of those gods who ventured out, their people huddled around them, but it was unclear who protected whom. Perhaps it went both ways.

  There again, creeping by a wall, was the goddess with her sole childish adherent. Had she already lost her temple? Probably, along with her congregation. Gods, priests, and laity alike tried to call her in to sanctuary but she crept on, one hand holding her cowl over her face, the other clutched by small fingers.

  Haunts still hunted in packs for their masters. The lost and the solitary were their prey, or larger groups when they dared to attack them. When they came across one of the wandering bereft, however, they escorted him or her back to the demon that held their soul. The demons, it seemed, also protected their own, if only for their own sake.

  “Preserve the larder,” could have been their rallying cry.

  Some temples had idols of stone or wood or plaster on either side of their steps. These began to stir. Dust or splinters or mortar rattled down from their plinths. A lion roared soundlessly. Many-headed figures yawned and stretched in a wave of gaping mouths. Which side were they on? In Perimal Darkling, the animate and inanimate overlapped. On the other hand, these statues appeared to have been brought to life by faith and a desire to protect. Jame edged by a pair of manticores whose heads turned, creaking, to watch her pass. Their flexing claws crumbled stone.

  “Friend,” she murmured to them. “Friend.”

  From ahead came Loogan’s voice, raised in exhortation. He stood on the steps of his temple, addressing a tremulous, half-seen crowd of dead gods. Here was a slim woman with the head of a cat; there, a man wreathed with horns; here, a swarm of locusts hopping in agitated unison; there, fluttering fetuses with gossamer wings, younger siblings of the fat urchins who graced the façade of the Res aB’tyrr.

  “My lords and ladies,” said Loogan, clearing his voice, with a respectful if shy bob in their direction. “This was once your home. Now you return once a year on your feast. You have outlived your worshippers. Your time has passed.”

  Wings stirred uneasily. The cat-woman made as if to wash her face but paused, hand in the air, the tip of her tongue extended. Horns wove and hooves stomped in hesitation.

  “Think who you were, though, and what you did for your people. They served you. You loved them. These are their children.”

  Back behind them, something huge stirred in the mouth of an alley. A monstrous cloven hoof scraped into the torch light of the street as its owner shifted position.

  “Do you really want to prey upon them as demons?”

  “Noooo!” came a hollow lowing from the dark of the alley.

  “No,” murmured the crowd as if in echo. “Not our children’s children.”

  “Well, then,” said Loogan as his shoulders sagged with relief. “Go in peace.”

  They faded away, except for the cloven foot that only withdrew, again clumsily rasping on stone, into the shadows.

  Loogan smiled at Jame, looking tired.

  An uproar broke out within the temple behind him. Shouts, screams, crashes. Loogan took a step as if to enter, but was thrown back as the door was flung open in his face. He tumbled down the steps. Jame ran to him where he sprawled, half-stunned, on the cobbles. Nothing, at least, appeared to be broken. What was this, though, emerging from the doorway at the top of the stairs in a gray sprawl of limbs? At first, it made no sense to her. A round body, ridiculously long legs, a face with bulging green eyes, contorted as if with unspeakable grief . . .

  “Woe!” burbled the image of Gorgo. Water leaked from its eyes, from the down-turned corners of its mouth. Stone limbs grated in stone sockets. Stone teeth gnashed. “Wooooah!”

  Dusty figures clung to it, trying to stop its progress. The idol slammed against the doorposts to dislodge first one, then another. Both fragile bodies shattered. Loogan groaned as the fragments of long-dead novices bounced down the steps, here an arm, there a head, still blinking in confusion.

  “. . . quonk . . .”

  The idol’s throat sack tried to expand, but was constricted by bonds of stone. It gulped with frowning irritation and scuttled stiffly down the stair, its knobby knees bobbing above its head. Loogan drew back, horrified. Jame could feel the waves of despair that the idol projected. This, truly, was Bilgore’s creation, his god of lamentations. Loogan must have suffered such attacks most of his life as the servant of this morbid monstrosity. Trinity, how had he survived?

  What use is life? rolled out the gloom, corroding the will of all within its reach. You will never accomplish anything. You will never be anybody. Abandon hope, therefore, and die.

  A shape lurked halfway down the street, licking its chops—the demon Pathless, a kindred spirit drawn to misery. It seemed to lap up the idol’s emanations, waxing and waning according to its source, panting for more. Its outline wavered like a cloak in a high wind. Now it showed the black dog despair, now a cowering man, his much-decayed core soul. Who? Thanks to Pathfinder, he had been stripped of all others. Oh, where was that sage now?

  On the threshold behind the idol capered the former high priest Bilgore, urging it on with gleeful, gibbering cries. Was it now a demon? Jame didn’t think so, any more than the other temple idols now craning up and down the street to watch the show. It might be Bilgore’s creation, but for all of his current animation, the priest was dead.

  She drew Loogan back toward the shadow of the alley, feeling oddly protected there.

  “Moooo,” breathed the shadows as if in reassurance. A soothing, milky odor wafted out of the darkness.

  Jame searched desperately for a lost name and found one.

  “Abarraden!”

  No, that wasn’t right, or only half so. Try again.

  “Er . . . Gorgiryl?”

  Something big and green loomed behind Bilgore. Its wide mouth gaped open. “Quonkkk!” it bellowed over the swell of a full, snowy neck pouch.

  Gorgo crouched and leaped, knocking Bilgore over as he did so. The former high priest tumbled down the stairs, wailing, clutching after limbs as they snapped off like so much dry kindling.

  The idol turned sti
ffly. It and Gorgo slammed into each other at the foot of the stair and grappled chest to chest, webbed hands scrabbling. Hieratic remains rolled under their feet, tripping them. They wobbled on the edge of a puddle and fell into it with a mighty splash. It swallowed them both whole.

  “What . . .” said Loogan, staring.

  “Wait,” said Jame.

  The water seethed. Gorgo rose out of it, perched atop a broad piscine forehead between two enormous, unblinking eyes. The Eaten One’s catfish whiskers fiddled at the puddle’s edge.

  B-lo-o-o-p, said the hidden mouth, in a frothy welter of bubbles.

  Gorgo hopped to dry ground and turned. The monstrous head sank. In its wake, in a flounder of limbs, the idol surfaced. Its weight would surely have dragged it down again, but Gorgo’s tongue shot out, wrapped around its neck, and wrenched it to shore. Then he bit down and shook it. Stone became rotting plaster over broken lath. Green glass eyes popped out, followed by jets of salt water. As more bits broke off, more water bled out of the hollow cavity within.

  “. . . quonnn . . .” it whined, and fell apart. Its remains mixed with those of its master, whose detached head continued to make grotesque faces of frustration.

  Jame helped Loogan to his feet.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” asked the priest, looking anxiously up at her. “His real name, I mean.”

  “Well, I knew it before. Do I still call him Gorgo?”

  “In public. True names are sacred. They hold power and reflect the soul. Surely even you Kencyr know that.”

  He straightened, brushing down his crumpled robes with an air of decision. “And I can tell you this: the novices, yes, we will gather them up.” Indeed, living worshippers were already on the steps, gingerly collecting relics in wicker baskets meant to receive offerings. “My many times great-grandfather, though, isn’t going back to his comfortable burial slot in the archives. The pyre for him, and his damned idol for kindling.”

  “I don’t think anyone will blame you. I have to go.”

  IV

  JAME HAD SEEN Pathless slink away and followed him . . . exactly why, she wasn’t sure, only that this entire situation enraged her. She loved Tai-tastigon—its complexity, its vitality, its people—and now it seemed to be possessed by demons. Given their way, Heliot and his kind would devour or pervert all that made not only this city but this world so precious. Well, not if Jame could help it.

  What she came across first, however, was another of Pathless’s victims, if an unlikely one. The centipede demon writhed at a crossroads, its front half all flailing legs and booted, misshapen feet. Its rear segments flopped bonelessly, spraying ichor. It had been bitten nearly in two.

  The third Kencyr priest crouched over it.

  “My name!” he cried, looking as if he wanted to shake it but not quite daring to lest it fall apart. “My name!”

  Jame came up behind him. The sharp smell of the demon’s blood made her sneeze again and again. “What is your name?” she blurted out between seizures, wiping her nose.

  The priest stilled at her touch, as if in sudden concentration. “It . . . I . . . was . . . Utain. Yes. That is who I was. Am.”

  The centipede shivered. Its forelimbs stretched out, shuddered again, and went limp. In death, it dwindled and faded.

  Utain fell back into Jame’s arms. She resisted the impulse to drop him. The flesh withered on his skull, eyes sinking, cheekbones protruding, lips shriveling against bared teeth.

  “Free,” he panted. “Free.” And, exhaling with a rattle, he died.

  Jame lowered his remains to the cobbles, into the pool of their own returning shadow. How light they were, like a cricket’s shell, as if all but consumed from the inside out. He might have been the demon’s core, but it seemed that ravening hunger had driven the latter to feed upon the very thing that supported it. Perhaps, otherwise, the priest might have survived with his soul intact. That, at last, might be the clue she was seeking. As Loogan said, names had power.

  So. Next Pathless, then Kalissan, then maybe Heliot himself, if Dalis-sar didn’t get to him first. Her claws were out. She was in the mood for blood.

  V

  SHADOWY FIGURES scuttled from door to door, admitted by a special knock. Dalis-sar’s priests were abroad. On rooftops, beneath overhangs, heads popped up, then down—the Cloudies, spying. So far, though, Jame hadn’t seen overall signs of resistance. The gods themselves didn’t yet appear to be working together—not that they usually did at the best of times. Too many had overlapping attributes. Who was the true patron of merchants, or healers, or horse-thieves? Who could promise the best lovers? Whose storm was the most powerful? Competition was sometimes fierce. Then too, what could they accomplish while Ishtier and the Kencyr temple continued intermittently to drain them?

  A wheedling voice came to her without intelligible words, only with the tone of sly, malicious hunger. She turned another corner, and there was Pathless, confronting Harri sen Tenko.

  “Come,” the demon crooned, crouching low, a black mass that smiled as a dog does, all quivering lips and bared teeth. “Only you can save him. Don’t you want to?”

  His form blurred again, like a wavering cloak. A man was revealed, on hands and knees, shaking. He lifted a stricken face and mouthed, “. . . Harri, don’t . . .”

  Jame had thought once that the demon’s soul was Abbotir’s because she had seen them both in the Gold Ringing mansion. Now she realized that it had been Harr sen Tenko’s all along. So this was the desperate fate to which the Skyrr noble had been driven.

  Pathless could pounce, couldn’t he? Perhaps, though, in doing so he could only take the boy’s life, not his soul. Then too, Heliot had spoken of willing sacrifices being the sweetest. Perhaps they were also the most potent. The demon looked tattered in flesh and spirit, his core soul hardly less so. The street showed through rends in both of them. Was this another case of one feeding on the other?

  Harr sen Tenko reared back on his heels, face contorted, his hands scrabbling to hold himself together against the demon’s claws.

  “No!” cried his son.

  “Ah-ha-ha-ha. You can save him, boy, as I said. All you have to do is take his place. What true son would refuse to do that?”

  Abruptly, Jame was reminded of her own father, begging Torisen for release: “My son, my child, set me free.” She thought of Ganth these days more often then she had in years, and the sense of loss always surprised her. He had been the monster of her childhood and of Tori’s, but neither of them had understood. Fathers, after all, were only people, not gods, not that even gods were perfect. Now she watched Harri struggling with Harr’s frailty, with his own possible debt to a man whom he had clearly idolized.

  “How could you have come to this pass if the Archiem had not betrayed you?” Harri cried, falling to his knees. “This is all his fault, or . . . or is it mine?”

  “No!” cried sen Tenko. “I was wrong! I see that now. Son, save yourself!”

  Pathless choked Harr back down like a dog swallowing his own vomit. Then he crept toward the boy. “Come,” he murmured, licking his lips. “Sweet, juicy morsel, come to me.”

  Jame edged forward. “Harr, name yourself!”

  “I . . . I . . .” the man stammered, clutching his throat, looking stricken.

  “Ah-ha-ha-ha. His name is known, but what is mine? Never mind this diminished manifestation. I am older than any of these newborn demons, even than Heliot, older than the petty pantheon of dead gods from which they have sprung. From the beginning, I have gnawed at man’s heart, letting darkness in. Granny Sits-by-the-fire has seen the gleam of my eyes. Her stories have kept me at bay, but not always. I bring death, but myself can never truly die. What am I?”

  From their first meeting, Jame had sensed that there was something ancient about this creature. The original identities of the whumping demon and the bog creature and the centipede hadn’t mattered, only those of their victims. “Pathless” was just a nickname, a mask worn in pa
ssing by something much older. Now, faced with this primordial horror, her mind went blank, as it had on their first encounter. Again the city swirled around her, the maze of its streets unmoored and she lost among them.

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

  “All ends are meaningless,” this demon had crooned through ropes of steaming slaver. “What is life but a mindless scramble in the dark?”

  Now he grinned and dragged his claws across Harr’s chest, disfiguring them both. The demon didn’t care. The man writhed.

  Jame swallowed against a parched throat. “Pathfinder!” she cried to the midnight street. “We need you!”

  At first she thought that the sage wasn’t listening. Then the mouth of an alley quivered and opened into a room. People seated at a fire there sprang to their feet, horrified. One of them was Nathe.

  “Don’t go!” he cried, clutching the sleeve of a white-clad, chubby figure.

  Pathfinder gently freed himself and stepped forward into the street. The whites of his blind eyes gleamed.

  “Who calls? Are you lost?”

  “Yes. Very. This boy is about to sacrifice himself for his father, who doesn’t wish it. A nameless demon is involved.”

  Pathfinder shuddered. “Demons. Not good.”

  “Shut up,” snarled Pathless, crouching. “You have the faith of your followers. Leave us with their flesh.”

  “Should I, though? You clutch at their souls. Are people flesh or spirit? Admit: they are both.”

  “So?” Pathless barked. “All are food. Do you not hunger?”

  “In my own way. Not like this.”

  The demon sneered, but also nervously licked his lips. His voice sank to a cajoling whine. “Would you destroy me, little god? Think. What are you without me?”

  Pathfinder looked sad. “It is true that I can never ultimately conquer despair, but I can refuse to be conquered by it. Black dog, be gone.”

  The demon scuttled backward, leaving the rags of Harr sen Tenko on the ground. His son gathered them up. Harr smiled through the ruins of his face and fell apart. Pathless howled. Backing up, he slunk into the shadows, down to a pair of gleaming yellow eyes, gone.