By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  Others also had grasped the theatrical nature of the scene.

  “A play!” someone cried, and was answered by cheers. “Summer’s Day is almost upon us and we have survived! Praised be the gods!”

  More and more people followed, thinking that this was some sort of religious street theater, with which the city was very familiar. Men-dalis went ahead of them, bowing left and right, his golden robes and face aglow. Did he relish the irony, or did he think his own apotheosis had finally arrived?

  The Creeper followed him, seeming to shift so as always to keep in his shadow.

  The Archiem walked to one side, looking mildly amused.

  If Dally was there too, Jame didn’t see him.

  The crowd ahead parted. There was the Mercy Seat in an open space at the center of Judgment Square, a granite throne of uncompromising dimensions not built for comfort. Fresh pavement surrounded it. Jame remembered that the original chair had fallen into a chasm that cataclysmic night that she had fled Tai-tastigon. Had Dally still been on it, or by then had Bane replaced him? Where was Bane now? Where was Dally?

  A group of richly clad master thieves waited beyond the seat and bowed, stiffly, to Men-dalis as he emerged from the press. He gestured Jame forward and presented her with a sweeping bow.

  “My lords, as you see. Here is Theocandi’s assassin, brought to judgment.”

  “So you had promised,” said the eldest, a wrinkled little shell of a man, largely bereft of teeth. He stalked up to Jame and spat in her face. “Did you think you could play games with us forever?”

  Jame bent her head to wipe her cheek on her shoulder. “I honored my master.” Oh, where was Penari now? Probably back in his beloved Maze, grumbling at the Architect about having lost both of Abarraden’s eyes. “I obeyed your rules. I did not kill your Sirdan.”

  “Liar.”

  Something in her eyes made him step back.

  Dalis-sar laughed. “I bring her to you bound, and yet you shrink?”

  “Honorable thief—ha!” snarled the old man. “All of our history, our traditions, our craft . . . we weren’t pure enough for you, were we? You had to set your own standards. Well, justice has come at last. We wait only for Lord Abbotir.”

  Should I speak? Jame wondered. Oh, schist. Why not?

  “Abbotir is dead, as of two nights ago.”

  The Archiem smiled. His problem with the Five had just resolved itself. However, shock rippled through the thieves.

  “I spoke to him yesterday!” one protested.

  “He gave his soul to a demon, hoping for immortality. Such deals are not wise.”

  The elder sneered. “And this you know, girl?”

  “I judge by what I see. What happened to your colleague was . . . unpleasant.”

  The little man stomped. “We are not yours to judge. Rather, the reverse.” He uncinched his robe and let it fall. Beneath, on a wiry frame, he wore tight-fitting black with an assortment of gleaning knives sheathed at his narrow waist.

  This, Jame realized, was the guild official known in the streets as “Old Man Skinner.” He and his knives had been legends long before she had been born.

  He showed his remaining teeth in a ferocious grin. “You wonder: is my hand still steady? I have done this work many times before and I can assure you: these days, it is not.”

  The crowd cheered. “A sacrifice, a sacrifice! Death and rebirth! Hurrah!”

  For the first time, Jame felt the brush of fear. They didn’t understand. They would do nothing. Was this how it had been for Dally, when the knives had finally come out?

  Canden pushed through the thieves’ ranks, Darinby on his heels.

  “This isn’t right!” he cried. His straw-colored hair stood on end as if he had just risen from bed and his robe was stained, but he seemed to have been shocked reasonably sober. “The Talisman didn’t kill my grandfather! She told me so, and I believe her!”

  “Now, now,” said the others, as if to placate a fractious, embarrassing child. “She played on your good nature. We all know that.”

  Canden stomped his foot, distraught. “She did not! Oh, you don’t understand!”

  The opposite side of the circle broke as Patches wormed her way through it, around some brigands, under others who jumped and yelped with the intrusion of her passage.

  “You should listen to him,” she said, scowling at the assembled elders. “None of you know what really happened.”

  Old Man Skinner sneered. “And you do, you sorry little imp?”

  “A hobgoblin, am I? Well then, I come by it honestly. But I’m also a thief in good standing. You just ask my master.”

  Sure enough, there was Galishan to the rear of those assembled, trying to look inconspicuous. “You have no reason not to listen to her,” he said grudgingly.

  Patches snorted. “Right. Then hear this. You’ve got the wrong end of this business. It starts with Dally’s murder.”

  Men-dalis’ shadow snarled. “Girrrrl, shut up.”

  Patches fell back a step, then glanced at Jame and held her ground. “I bloody will not! See, you all think that Bane killed Dally. Well, most of you do.”

  “Oooh, a story!” breathed the crowd, and its foremost rank settled down in rapt silence to listen. The others leaned in over them, passing details back over their shoulders to those in the rear. Beyond them huddled the staffs of the two inns. Beyond that, most of the square continued with its drunken, heedless revels.

  “Demons down, gods up!” cried a cavorting matron in flouncing shawls. “Whoop!”

  “Master Galishan,” snapped the Old Man. “Tell your prentice to be quiet.”

  Galishan edged to the front, reluctant but drawn despite himself. “Well, no. I want to hear this too. Too much has gone wrong, these past few years. I’m not religious. I won’t say that we have sinned and are cursed. But these things have causes, and what happened to your brother, Sirdan, seems to be one of them.”

  Men-dalis smiled and spread his hands as if to say, “Who, me?” Women in the audience swooned at his charm. So did some men. His expression fixed, however, on a silent figure who had stepped out of the crowd opposite and stood regarding him fixedly. At least, Jame thought that the stranger did. A hood overshadowed his face. Out of its folds, however, light seeped. Her sixth sense tingled. This story had a witness greater than the sum of its mundane parts.

  She felt a tug on the cord binding her wrists.

  “H’ist,” said Rue behind her, and continued to saw until she was free. “The inns will give you cover.”

  Jame rubbed her hands to restore circulation.

  “No,” she said under her breath. “I stay here.”

  Patches gulped, her defiance threatening to give way to nerves. So many people were looking at her, listening so avidly.

  “Well,” she said with a deep breath, stepping forward. Her attention skated from face to face, settling on Jame’s as the one to whom she most wanted to explain herself. “Think back to the night that the gods came untempled, the night that Dally died. See, Talisman, I was waiting in the Moon in Splendor to hear if you and your master had pulled off the theft of Abarraden’s second eye. Bet on you, hadn’t I, with money that I didn’t have. Then Denish barged in, blind drunk, with blood on his shirt.”

  “I remember him,” said Jame. “He was one of Men-dalis’ thugs.”

  “Please,” said the Sirdan, looking pained. “One of my most trusted servants.”

  “Right. Splashed beer on me, he did, on this very d’hen that my own dear mother made. Then word came that you’d pulled off the job, Talisman, but Denish wouldn’t pay up. So I picked his pocket. Then we heard about Dally. On the Mercy Seat. Flayed alive. Denish started shouting that Bane had done it, but I didn’t believe that. Y’see, one of the things that I got out of Denish’s pocket was this.”

  She fished a gold button out of an inner pocket and held it up to catch the firelight.

  Jame felt her stomach lurch. “That’s Dally’s monogram.”
>
  “Right. And when I get to Judgment Square, there’s his d’hen draped over the Seat with one button missing. Denish took it as a trophy, I reckon.”

  “Denish flayed him?” said Darinby. He glanced at Men-dalis, then away again, looking sick. “He can’t have, not without orders.”

  “I’ve just remembered,” said Canden suddenly. “Denish was your grandson, Old Man, wasn’t he? You were training him to become the Young Skinner, but he changed alliances from Theocandi to Men-dalis and you disowned him. The point is, he had the skill.”

  “You deem what happened here ‘skill’? Rather, butchery! You, who call yourself Sirdan, was this your doing after all? Practiced on your own brother? In all the names of god, why?”

  Men-dalis smiled like a martyred saint, but he had begun to sweat.

  “This is a poor, deluded child,” he said, spreading his hands in pity, indicating Patches. “Will you take her word over mine?”

  The listening crowd seemed divided.

  “Whom should we believe?” murmured one man.

  “Oh,” said several women, speaking in unison. “She is so young and . . . so strange. He is so noble.”

  “I tell you this,” said Patches, going red in the face and shrill with frustration. “On the night of the Thieves’ Guild election, I saw Men-dalis and the Creeper take Dally away. I thought, ‘Good. He’s going back to his brother’s fortress, to his own kind.’ I never saw him alive again.”

  Jame stared at her. “None of his friends did. You knew I was upset when he disappeared. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Everybody loved him. You loved him. I was jealous, all right?”

  Jame regarded that hobgoblin face, screwed up with apprehension, begging to be understood. Her first flush of anger faded. Could she have rescued Dally if she had known or, like Patches, would she have assumed that he was in the safest possible place? Even now, it was hard to believe that Men-dalis would do such a thing to his adoring younger brother.

  “I would like a word with your precious Denish,” she said through her teeth.

  “Well, you can’t have it. He was on Fleshshambles Street that night when your Cloudy friends dropped several tons of stone bull statuary on it. So was I, for that matter, but I survived.”

  The listening crowd murmured again.

  “It could all just be coincidence,” said some on the right hand side, speaking together like a ritual chorus.

  “D’you really think so?” others to the left asked doubtfully.

  Men-dalis spread his hands, which had begun to tremble. “I acted on what I was told—by you, Creeper.”

  The Creeper hissed and drew himself up in the Sirdan’s shadow, a crooked extension of it, with eyes agleam within its hood.

  “I only told you what you wanted to hear. He was ‘Daddy’s favorite,’ you said. You resented him. But his charm was purely his own. Yours . . .”

  Men-dalis stomped. “Be quiet!”

  They circled each other, each seeming to wax and wane by turns according to the fall of light. Steam rose from the collar of the golden robe. Above it, the Sirdan’s face glistened with sweat.

  Help him, breathed the ghost of a familiar voice in Jame’s ear. Before it’s too late.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh! Men-dalis, you’re wearing Dally’s jacket. Take it off!”

  The Sirdan gaped at her. “I . . . what?”

  Horrified realization dawned. He fumbled at the studs securing his cloth of gold coat and tore it off. Underneath was Dally’s royal blue d’hen with one missing button. This, too, he ripped off and dropped, smoldering, on the ground.

  The air above it wavered with heat.

  “Oh,” breathed the onlookers.

  A figure had materialized in the haze. Stooping, it picked up the essence of the jacket and slipped it on. Dally smiled at his brother, at Jame, then melted away.

  What was left of his d’hen burst into flames hot enough to melt the golden threads of the coat upon which it had fallen. Both fell into glowing ash. A sigh from the watching crowd hoisted aloft the embers and scattered them to the night.

  Jame realized that she was crying. Oh, Dally, lost again.

  Men-dalis gasped. “W-what just happened?”

  “He saved your life,” said Jame, angrily dashing away tears. But I never cry. . . . “Then he forgave you.”

  “I-I didn’t want that. I don’t need it.”

  There he stood, shivering in his sweat-sodden shirt, trying to muster defiance, hearing it turn into a petulant, childish whine. With the coat, with the d’hen, his glamour had also been stripped away. His once glorious hair hung in lank strands. His chest had sunken and his chin receded under buckteeth. He looked like a rabbit barely left with its skin.

  Someone snickered. Someone else tried but failed to stifle a guffaw. The sound rippled around the surrounding crowd, from right to left, from left to right. The brigands shuffled their feet, embarrassed. This was the man whom they had chosen to follow? The inn folk didn’t know where to look, as if they had surprised something naked and uncouth.

  “Don’t you dare mock me!” Men-dalis shrilled, and stomped his foot.

  Squelch, it went, in a puddle.

  The audience roared with laughter.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” That was the Creeper. Like his master, he seemed to dance with outrage, the one mirroring the other, both ridiculous. “I said that I would make you great, didn’t I? All you had to do was to leave everything to me.”

  “This is Honor’s Paradox again,” said Jame. “Dalis-sar, you recognize it, don’t you?”

  The figure opposite her pushed back its hood. Light streamed from the sun-god’s troubled face, for a moment banishing shadows. The Creeper shrieked and melted into the cracks of the pavement, his fingers the last things to go, scrabbling on lips of stone for a hold on the world of light that he had so coveted. Then he was gone.

  “Hello, father,” said Men-Dalis with a sickly, ingratiating smile. “I’m all better now. Can you really blame me for what he did?”

  “Rather, I blame myself,” said Dalis-sar heavily. “We loved your brother, Aden and I. You were . . . charmless. I gave you that gift. Now I see that it came with a shadow. Resentment. Jealousy. Ultimately, it seems, murder and guilt. The glamour and the shadow are both gone now, as is your brother. You are only yourself. Can you live with that?”

  Men-dalis turned to his followers for reassurance. The brigands slunk off. Those who had admired him among the crowd turned away. The guild members consulted.

  “We think,” said the Old Skinner, turning back to him, “that you should leave. Now.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  Implacable eyes watched him. “Exile would be best,” said Galishan, speaking for all.

  Old Man Skinner grinned through the gaps in his teeth. “I look forward to our next encounter. Say, here at the Mercy Seat? At sunrise?”

  Men-dalis opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. Reluctantly, he turned and wandered away, glancing back every few steps as if in hope of a reprieve. None came.

  When Jame looked again for Dalis-sar, he had also disappeared. They were to have no last words, then. Well, she could hardly blame him. One way or another, she had cost him both his wife and his son—no, both sons. No again. Despite great gifts, Men-dalis had made himself what he was.

  “Ahem,” said the Archiem.

  She had almost forgotten that he was there.

  “It seems that we now have vacancies within the Thieves’ Guild and the municipal Five. Might I suggest that the late Sirdan’s grandson take both posts, at least until the next round of elections?”

  Canden gaped at him. “You can’t mean . . . me? B-but I’m just a cartographer. Maybe Theocandi was my grandfather, but he never taught me anything about the craft. A-and I’m a drunk! You all know that!”

  “There, there.” The guild elders closed around him. “We have had worse—much worse—over the years.”

  “Reme
mber Sirdan Auffoclus?” said one. “He nominated his pet newt as a master thief.”

  “Then there was Nominous, who wanted us all to become eunuchs.”

  “And Sqabulous. The less said there, the better.”

  “I think the thieves will sort this out to their own satisfaction,” Jame remarked to the Archiem under cover of the guild’s urgings. “After Men-dalis, they want stability. A lot of them are going to realize, all too soon, how much they fell under Men-dalis’ spell and what it made them do. D’you think, though, that the Five will agree?”

  He smiled. “Abbotir was a menace even before he died. I, for one, will be happy to deal with someone sane.”

  “And amenable.”

  “That too, of course.”

  “If you want,” said Darinby to Canden, “I will assist you.”

  Canden turned to him like one falling on the neck of a savior. “Oh, will you?”

  “And there,” said Arribek to Jame, “we have it. I didn’t even have to unveil you as the Knorth Lordan.”

  “Cleppetty already knows. How did you find out?”

  “M’lord Harth said enough, before he went away, not that he realized what he was saying. You have some true idiots in your ranks.”

  “Yes,” said Jame. “So do you.”

  The crowd broke up and began to disperse.

  “I told you it was a sacred drama,” said one to another. “There was a god in it, after all, and a sacrifice.”

  “Two, if you count that straggly young man.”

  “Three, if you count that glowing boy who disappeared. The boggle goes without saying. Ah, modern theater.”

  The inn staffs came forward in a rush.

  “If you are quite through scaring us all half-witless,” said Cleppetty, blowing her nose, trying not to fuss, “I propose a celebratory breakfast back at the Res aB’tyrr. You too, Master Arribek, if you will break bread with us, or whatever else we can find after tonight’s depredations.”

  The Archiem bowed to her. “Madam, I would be honored.”

  Ghillie tugged anxiously at her sleeve. “Have we really got enough for everyone?”