By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Until next time,” breathed the void, and laughed.

  Pathfinder also retreated toward the light of his own fire and his anxiously waiting friends. With the wave of a hand, he turned and was gone, taking the light with him.

  Harri was left clutching handfuls of shredded cloth.

  The secret name of the demon, Jame realized, was Despair. The name of the god was Hope. And both transcended pantheons.

  She watched for a moment, then withdrew. Somehow, she didn’t feel bloodthirsty anymore.

  VI

  THE STREETS were more active now. Before, minor demons and packs of haunts had dominated. Now, New Pantheon gods and their followers also ventured forth to clash on this corner or that with their foes. Here, the deity and demon of earthquakes stomped their feet at each other, bringing down more temples. Here, a divine windstorm was countered by an ugly little sprite who dropped his drawers and cleared an entire street with a prodigious fart. There, two who fancied themselves clever traded riddles while their followers hung back, shouting suggestions. Both of these latter two, Jame noted, were New Pantheon gods who had apparently gotten carried away by their ancient rivalry even in the midst of this crisis.

  Jogging through the haze were squads of clerics lobbing litanies to the distress of demonic ears:

  “I will not fear, for my god protects me,” chanted one such group as it trotted past in cadence. “And my family. And my ox. And my ass. All that is mine he will protect.”

  “And if he will not,” added a little choirboy in a piping voice, “We will find a god who will. Ow!”

  The nearest priest had clouted him on the ear.

  Whole congregations were on the streets now, some in mobs, others in procession, bearing their holy icons and banners with them like battle flags. Incense and ornate vestments swirled. Chants filled the air in counterpoint.

  Minor demons retreated, no match for such concentrated devotion, but where were their leaders? Jame hadn’t seen any since her last glimpse of Heliot, and something about him had been . . . wrong. Why were his legions holding back?

  From somewhere within the maze of streets, a wail rose:

  “They have slain the child!”

  Heads lifted. Gods and demons both turned and made their way, faster and faster, toward the heart of the district, a roughly octagonal public space, open to the sky, fringed with oddly shaped temples. Over it loured the Master’s House, tilted as if about to spill its vile contents upon the city below. To look up at it was to make the whole world seem to shift on its axis. One’s head spun.

  Jame paused at the precinct’s edge. She couldn’t see past the heads and shoulders of those who had crowded there before her, but she was slight enough to weave between them and impatient enough to jab with an extended nail at any flank that didn’t get out of the way fast enough.

  Most of the gods had fetched up against her side of the octagon, demons against the other. Behind both ranks were their followers, far more supporting the gods than the demons. Between them was an open space. Within it, a frost-tipped demon stalked back and forth, flexing its claws, snarling. Ice rimed the cobbles where it moved. Its pace was a haughty strut but also self-conscious, as if it had accidentally crossed some ill-defined line. At its feet sprawled a tiny, broken figure. Jame recognized the child worshipper whom she had seen earlier at the puppet show. Over her bent the black-robed subject of her devotion. The goddess stroked the child’s pale face with a rapidly withering hand and straightened her contorted limbs. Then she folded herself over the girl’s body. What there was of her melted away, leaving only a shroud.

  A moan rose from the gods, and then a growl.

  Jame felt the paving shift under her feet, nearly pitching her forward on her face. A ripple of stones swept across the expanse, from the west where she stood to the east, from the gods to the demons, who rocked back on their heels. The tide was turning yet again. Ishtier had lost control. Both sides rushed toward each other, nearly equal.

  Overhead, the House leaned farther forward. Its door gaped. Jame stopped dead, staring up at it. If the Master should emerge . . .

  Haaaaa . . . breathed the expanse within.

  Then the wind came, shearing off cornices and gables, walls and windows. The entire dream structure was falling apart. Drifts of vapor reached the ground in a patchy, filthy fog.

  Jame let out her breath. The Master hadn’t come after all, despite Ishtier’s invitation. Then, as an anxious afterthought, she wondered, Why not?

  Indistinct figures buffeted her as they rushed past. Here was the priest from the puppet show, his fists clenched within socks. Here ran whole congregations, scrambling to keep up with their deities. Banners swayed down as their shafts were leveled like spears. Censers swung like flails, trailing incense. Chants became war cries. There went the sen Tenko godling, up in arms but still without his pants. Gargoyles belched holy water and fire down from the rooftops, creating more billows of steam. Cloudies threw slates. Packs of haunts ranged freely, pulling down any god or worshipper that they could, being stomped to pieces in their turn. Toward the edge of the octagon, a huge, dimpled arm swept out of an alley to gather in a knot of minor demons.

  “Moooo . . .” said the shadows, gently reproachful even as bones snapped within their embrace.

  Where, though, were the major demons? Ah. Here.

  Heliot loomed over the fight, in and out of the haze. Kalissan was there too, although holding back, also others whom Jame recognized from Heliot’s sweep down on Ishtier’s temple. The red cracks in the sun god’s armor defined him against the night while his beard leaped upward in tongues of fire.

  At his feet stood a gaudy figure shrunken within its rich robes. Abbotir, surely. So that was who had provided the demon with his soul, the haughty figure Jame had glimpsed before.

  But Abbotir was dead.

  What am I missing here? she thought.

  Heliot’s blood fell like rain, igniting the puddles as his feet. The cracks in his armor gaped wide. Again, there was that growing hint of mortality.

  Light burst from a side street. Dalis-sar emerged, sweeping aside rubble and shadows. He was at least as big as Heliot, towering over the conflict at his feet but careful not to tread on it. Gods and demons alike scrambled out of his way. He and Heliot met at the center of the plaza, the child’s shrouded body on the ground between them.

  “What have you done?” Dalis-sar demanded.

  “I? Nothing. This creature broke the covenant.”

  Heliot thrust forward the frost demon, who melted with chagrin into a cloud of icy drizzle.

  “No children,” said Dalis-sar. “That was the deal we stuck all those years ago on the plain when I saw mere infants among your ranks.”

  “Oh, please. Holy babes. One, in its blessed innocence, almost killed you.”

  Dalis-sar ground his teeth. Sparks snapped behind them deep in his throat. “I remember,” he said hoarsely, spitting fire. “Instead, I killed it. By reflex. By accident. I will bear that guilt forever. Hence the pact that was my price when the people brought me back to fight you. No children on the battlefield. Ever. The New Pantheon agreed to it.”

  “The Old didn’t.”

  “You forget. They wanted the deification that your victims’ faith had so nearly bought you. Remember: you were still a mortal king then, near death. Your godhood arose out of that covenant.”

  Heliot pursed his lips. They cracked and bled, unheeded. “Should that coward Death take me when I am so much stronger than he?”

  “But you aren’t,” said Jame, staring up at him. She had caught the echo of Abbotir’s defiant words earlier—their arrogance, their fierce denial of mortality. “Dalis-sar beat you. Your followers lost faith in you. You died, both as a god and as a man.”

  “Never say such things to me!”

  His gigantic face swooped down at her, buckteeth bared. His breath stank of what had killed Abbotir, what was now killing him.

  Dalis-sar scooped her out of the w
ay.

  “Nonetheless, there was an accord,” he said, straightening. “One child lies dead at your feet while another stands closer to you even than that.”

  He indicated a little girl clinging to the demon’s ankle, baring baby teeth in a rictus grin.

  “Grandma,” she had said to the hill matron who hovered near her, making erratic, futile motions and trying to speak.

  “Huh, huh, huh . . .”

  “What do they matter? You still do not think according to your station. Boy, listen to me. Grow up.”

  Dalis-sar snorted. “Should I also become a monster? My people have seen one such in Master Gerridon. We hold to what we are. Neither gods nor demons can change that without our consent. You, to convince me? Ha.”

  Heliot snarled and launched himself. They met with a concussion that shook the environs. Gods and demons alike tumbled aside. Surrounding walls fell. Fire spiraled up in a storm that licked the sky.

  Abbotir’s robes were burning. Jame threw herself at him under the flaming night. He caught her wrists and bent her backward, panting ash into her face. His grip scorched through her gloves.

  “Tell me your name!” she shouted up at him.

  His lips peeled back over red-tinged teeth. What began as a snarl turned into a grimace as flesh seared away around his mouth and nostrils. Eyebrows sizzled. Hair floated for a moment in a halo of fire, then crinkled and burned. He looked surprised. How could this be happening to him, of all people?

  Jame spat out cinders. Some crunched between her teeth. “Tell me!”

  “I am . . . no, I was Abbotir. Lord of the Gold Court. Councilor to the Sirdan. And now I am dead.”

  That was what she had missed: the soul of a dead mortal could not support a demon, at least not indefinitely. The first two Kencyr priests had shown that when one had died of a heart attack and the other of being trampled. In neither case had the demon immediately collapsed, but soon enough. Abbotir’s denial of mortality had sustained both him and Heliot beyond that for a time.

  Now, however, the guild lord crumbled in her grasp, his remains black and greasy and stinking. His jaw dropped off. Charred fingers, clutching her, snapped at the knuckles.

  Above them, Heliot staggered. Booted feet smashed cobbles. Great gouts of fire fell through the cracks in his armor. He was literally coming apart at the seams but was not yet quite finished. The secondary souls that he had reaped must still be holding him together. How to disrupt those last links?

  Jame let what was left of Abbotir fall.

  Near at hand was the matron, the last whom she knew Heliot to have taken. She grabbed the woman’s arm. Wide, shocked eyes stared back into her own—surely with something human still in their depths. After all, it had been such a short time, barely an hour, since she had been taken.

  “Remember your name!” she shouted in the woman’s face. “You are Grandma!”

  “G–-g-g . . .” She gulped, blinked, and nodded. “Grandma H-hogetty. Yes. Elen!”

  Jame let her go. She stumbled over to her granddaughter and shook her.

  “Elen, Elen!”

  The girl swayed in her embrace, looking bewildered as if just awaking from a nightmare. She shuddered.

  “G-grandma? Granny Hog? Oh, what am I doing here? Was I bad? Never, never again! Oh, please, take me home!”

  They were lucky, in their flight, to avoid Heliot’s shambling feet. Jame also dodged back and forth as he lurched above her. He bent double and retched out the feeder souls on which he had gorged, that had sustained him. Some were intact enough to stagger away, but most were half dissolved into an acid that ate at his boots.

  He turned in desperate search of his consort Kalissan. There she stood not far away, staring at him. He reached out to her.

  “Help me, my queen!”

  She drew back, hissing in distain at the weakness that he now betrayed.

  “Not yours, little man. Never again yours.”

  Heliot howled and threw himself at her. Flames enwrapped them both as if they were siege towers set ablaze. They fell, grappling with each other, and the earth shook. Incandescent fragments flew. The air was fretted with fire. Jame saw Aden, tiny among their ruins, trying to escape.

  “My name is . . . my name is . . .” she mouthed. “Aden, Aden, Aden!”

  “Dalis-sar!” Jame cried, but he had drawn back and her voice was lost in the uproar.

  Trinity, how to reach the woman? The frost demon had condensed from a cloud into a puddle of misery. Jame stripped off her d’hen and sopped up what moisture she could. With it held over her head, she plunged into the maelstrom. Fire rained down on her, sizzling as it touched wet wool. Scorching wind tried to sear her lungs. Pieces of Heliot’s armor crashed down around her. The two demons fought each other overhead, tearing, ripping. What hatred, so suddenly exposed. However, had Heliot valued Kalissan for anything but her lineage and the validation that he thought she gave him? As for Kalissan herself, had she ever really favored this upstart sun god with his human origins?

  Bones were falling now, broken, the meat on them smoking. When they hit the pavement, they sank, sizzling, into ice-rimed puddles.

  Go on, thought Jame, grimly dodging. Tear each other apart.

  She had the impression that more such carnage was taking place across the octagon among the demonic ranks. Heliot’s fiery vomit seemed to have also loosened their grip on their captive souls. Now they fought each other for the prey that was slipping away from them, taking their borrowed lives with it.

  Their dependence on humans, on Heliot himself . . . really, when it came down to it, this generation of monsters was fragile. So much for Ishtier’s mighty army.

  Aden tottered toward her, clothes steaming. Jame threw her jacket over both of their heads and began to fight her way back toward clean air. Something turned under her foot. She stumbled, losing her grip on the older woman. On her knees in soot-streaked water, she saw what had tripped her: Kalissan’s third eye, perhaps gouged out by her former mate. Seen up close, it appeared to be a large uncut diamond, only somewhat dimmed by the ichor that had spilled from the demon’s socket.

  “Aden . . .”

  Jame groped about. The glare and smoke made her eyes ache. Coughing blinded her further.

  Then arms were flung around her, trapping the d’hen over her head, pinning her hands to her sides. Someone picked her up and slung her over what could only be a shoulder. At least it punched her in the stomach with every stride very much like one.

  “Put . . . me . . . down!”

  Finally her muffled protest was obeyed, the jacket stripped off. Titmouse hunched beside her with bloodshot eyes, panting. The octagon was what remained of a battlefield. Water burned. Objects sank into it, sizzling. The stench of burnt flesh hung in smoky veils like a pall, under lit by flickers of sullen flame. On the edges stood the gods, dumb with horror. The bereft wandered among them until each in turn caught the scent of its released soul.

  “Ah . . .” they breathed in, and stood amazed as life returned to their eyes.

  Jame coughed. “Aden . . .”

  Titmouse shook his head. “I only saw you,” he said hoarsely.

  A figure moved through the haze—Dalis-sar, dwindled to near-human stature, a commander in search of the fallen. Most had been too far consumed to return. One could only hope that they had died free. Here he paused, then moved on. There he stopped and knelt. The fire had barely touched Aden although soot had tarnished her veil. He gathered her in his arms and bent over her.

  Jame got to her feet more or less by clambering up Titmouse and stumbled toward the god, even as her common sense cried, “Fool! This was his only love, and you failed her.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, halting at a wary distance.

  “Go,” he said, over his shoulder. Tears of fire ran down his cheeks. He seemed older than he had before. “Just go.”

  Jame staggered away.

  “I can’t begin to understand all of this,” said Titmouse, walking beside
her. “It seemed like a regular campaign, as far as I understand such things, and then it turned . . . strange.”

  Jame laughed, shakily. “I’m still struggling with it myself, and I’ve probably had more experience with such things than you have.”

  “Your mother being the Dream-weaver and your uncle Gerridon. Yes, I can see that.”

  Someone tapped Jame on the shoulder.

  “Eek!” she said, recoiling in shock. “Master Penari! What are you doing here?”

  Her old teacher scowled at her out of clouded eyes. “Blame Rugen the Architect. He just wouldn’t leave me alone, nor yet his gargoyle Quezal.”

  The latter perched on Penari’s shoulder, digging into it. Stone weighed down painfully on ancient flesh, on frail bone.

  “Is that Abarraden’s eye?” asked Jame, regarding the large rock that Penari cradled in his arms. A lacy shawl had been wrapped around it, but had slipped. If any thieves had chanced to encounter him tonight . . .

  “Ouch! You little monster, don’t . . . Yes, yes. The one that I stole. The Architect says that I’ve got to give it back, for his mother’s sake, and what’s more . . .”

  While Jame’s gaze had dropped to the half-shrouded treasure, Quezal had disappeared. He was back in a flicker before she could look up again, bearing its smoky mate in his claws. She relieved Penari of both before he could topple over under their combined weight. He fussed after the one that he had considered his own, but then reluctantly surrendered it, making discontented faces.

  “Well, well, let it be as it may. But what, pray tell, is that other one doing here?”

  “You told me once that someone else stole it long, long ago. That turned out to be the husband of a friend of mine.” Frowning, Penari made as if to count on his fingertips. “Yes,” said Jame hastily to forestall him. “It’s complicated. He gave it to the goddess whom he worshipped at the time, a nasty piece of work named Kalissan. She made it her third eye. I think it helped her to see the living. The dead she could already see on her own.”