“If not,” said Rothan, with a glare at his unusually subdued wife, “the Skyrrman can make up the lack. Mistress Abernia may even join us.”
“Go with them,” Jame said to Rue. “Get something to eat. Some rest too, if there’s time.”
Rue looked stubborn. “And when did you last eat or sleep?”
Jame sighed. “I can’t remember. We’ll be leaving soon afterward, though. First, I have some unfinished business here.”
As the inn party withdrew, Patches sidled up to Jame, looking apprehensive.
“You’re off again? What about me?”
“You did well enough the last time. In fact, very well. I’m proud of you.”
“Yes, but . . . but you saw what happened to the Creeper. Gone. Poof. What’s to stop that from happening to me too?”
“Your mother, I should think. You’re half human, after all. The other half, well, consider this: there may be some unexplored advantages that the Trinket can use, now that she knows where to look and what to fear.”
“Well, maybe.” Then Patches gave her a shrewd look in return. “You’re upset about something too.”
“Not so much that as puzzled. All right, upset too. I was thinking about Dally, or whatever it was that came back wearing his face. It wasn’t a dead god, or a demon, or a haunt. I thought at first that it might be a projection of the Sirdan’s guilt, given shape by Dally’s jacket and his brother’s glamour.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because it forgave Men-dalis. He didn’t see the need for that, although it saved his life. Was he even aware that he was wearing Dally’s d’hen? I wasn’t sure about that myself until just now. Could guilt have been buried that deep?”
“You’re saying that Dally really came back.”
“His blood on his coat as a makeshift death banner, perhaps? A trapped soul? He was the foster-son of a Kencyr god even if he wasn’t Kencyr himself. Perhaps that was enough. Maybe that doesn’t matter, though. He and the d’hen are gone now. There’s only the button.”
Patches drew it out. “No blood on this that I can see,” she said, flipping it over on her fingertips as one might a trick coin. “I’d like to keep it as . . . as my talisman, if I can’t have you.”
That seemed fair, as long as Dally was truly free.
“If anything happens,” Jame urged, “think again. It occurs to me that I don’t know everything about the dead after all. Or gods. Or demons. About anything, really. But then, when did I ever?”
II
IT WAS NEAR DAWN on the 58th of Spring, the eastern sky already dimly alight.
Tai-tastigon had almost settled down, except for the remnant of drunken revelers who continued to stagger through the streets looking for their homes. Some would never find them. The labyrinth had swallowed many such before to add to its wandering tribes of the lost. Pathfinder was likely to find himself much in demand yet again.
However, only two walked in the Lower Town. One was a shadow that slid along the ground as if in mindless search of something. It poked tenebrous fingers into cracks. It fumbled at doorways as if cold for the huddled life within. It paused with what, for another, would have been sigh. Then a traveler came along, and it followed her.
Jame noticed the darkness on her heels. It trailed after her over trash heaps, between shattered walls, through canyons of ruin, to the threshold of the Kencyr temple where it pooled, shadowy fingers searching after her but stopping short of the portal.
The temple door stood ajar. Inside, the halls were tenantless. Power whispered past Jame as she entered, flowing outward as it had done before—bound, presumably, for the Temple District. Ishtier had said that this was an unnatural configuration, but for whom?
“Hello,” said Titmouse beside her, making her jump.
For a big, clumsy man, he could move very quietly, or perhaps that was only due to her distraction. She had left him in the Temple District among the exulting New Pantheon gods. Their exuberance had apparently worn upon him.
“They were too noisy,” he said as if, not for the first time, reading her thoughts. “This silence, though . . .”
“Where is everybody?”
“I think most of the priests have retreated to their quarters and locked themselves in. Confusion, dismay, fear, take your pick. Even those who don’t support the high priest didn’t reckon on this.”
“And Ishtier himself?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“Or . . . anyone else?”
He looked at her. “Whom did you expect?”
They had reached the temple’s central room in which of late the community of priests had danced. How calm it seemed now. How exhausted.
“You know,” said Jame with a touch of impatience. After all, her time here was short. “You’ve seen him about, or at least signs of him. The shadows? The cobwebs? The black beetles? Even bloody footsteps, you said, leading from one blank wall to another. Like those.”
She pointed.
The prints started where she had once danced, where power had swirled the mosaic pattern of the floor. Lesser disturbances followed the steps’ unsteady tread toward the center of the room and the black granite statue of her god that loomed there. Jame was obscurely relieved that boots, not bare feet, had made the marks. However, each print was rimmed with blood, connected to the next by more gory drops.
A dark figure stood in the statue’s shadow, leaning against the black flank of Regonereth, That-Which-Destroys. Eyes gleamed silver in the gloom, teeth white in a sardonic smile.
“Hello,” said Bane.
His clothes were cruelly slashed, held together with cobwebs and clotted blood. His thin face was ashen under a tangle of dark, dusty hair. Blood continued to trickle down his side to pool at his feet.
Everything Jame had thought she would say to him at this moment vanished. “You look awful,” she heard herself blurt out instead. “What happened to you?”
He laughed. “Have you noticed that every time we meet . . .”
“. . . someone ends up bleeding.”
“This time,” he said, “it happens to be me. What occurred? That is a very good question. I remember clearly, up to a point. So, no doubt, do you. They came for me in the Sirdan’s palace. I was stabbed, oh, so many times.” He surveyed himself with wonder and fastidious distain. “Any one of these wounds might have proved fatal but then, of course, I didn’t have access to my soul. As it is, they don’t even seem to have closed. Then my dear guild brothers took me to the Mercy Seat. I was to be flayed alive, I believe. Instead, the earth opened up and swallowed the Seat, with me still on it. Was that your doing?”
Jame uttered a shaky laugh. “You give me too much credit. And then?”
“I crawled here.”
He frowned, as if trying to remember. “After that, things are vague. I couldn’t die. I couldn’t live. I . . . existed.”
“What, for five years, bleeding?”
“Has it been that long? Yes, one would think that I would have run dry at least after two or three. Once, I thought I heard you call. You seemed to be in some difficulty, as when are you not? Then there are . . . images. A stone place with things coming up through cracks in the pavement. A man, invisible until I opened him up. A room carved into a cliff face containing a book and a knife. Many swarming insects. Have I missed anything?”
“A campfire,” said Jame, her throat tightening, “with the Burnt Man’s hand reaching up through it to grip my wrist.”
He looked at her, suddenly intent. “You said, ‘Your choice, brother.’”
“And you said, ‘No blood-price, sister,’ although it seems that I didn’t kill you after all.”
Titmouse had been standing very still, listening. Now he stirred.
“I told you that I came from a strange family,” Jame said to him.
Bane gave her a quizzical look. “You explained it to this man, but not to me?”
“Sorry. There wasn’t time. We share a highborn father—in fact,
a Highlord. Your mother was Kendar.”
“Well,” he said, bemused, “that’s nice to know.” His gaze, shifting to Titmouse, became shrewd. “I have watched you in your sleep, priest. Your soul is well guarded. I have also watched you watch over your precious novices. Some nights, I have been very hungry.”
Titmouse glared at him, his jaw pugnaciously outthrust. “Why do you prey on children?”
Bane shrugged, “Not so much, anymore. I seem to have lost my taste for them.”
“So you were also here in the temple,” said Jame, trying to work all of this out. “And, I think, in the Lower Town, wandering, even tonight.”
“If I concentrate, I can see the outside of the outer door. I am, apparently, waiting, but can’t enter. Could it be that I don’t know how? How long have you been back?”
“This is the dawn of the third day.”
“So short a time. In that space, I have been . . . er . . . pulling myself together. Consciousness, it seems, can only stretch so far, to so many aspects of the splintered being that I appear to have become. Pray that no one enters your mountain cave in the interim. Why, I wonder, am I here now?”
Somewhere, a door slammed. Hurrying sandaled feet slapped the floor. The next moment, Ishtier burst into the room in a storm of black robes.
“You,” he said, baring yellow teeth at Jame. Titmouse, he ignored. Bane, he apparently didn’t see at all.
Jame gave him a wary half salute, remembering all the times that they had clashed, all the harm he had tried to do to her. Now he tried again. His claw of a hand rose, clutched at the power in the room, and attempted to draw it down. The light flickered, but remained dim. In a corner, a candle fell over.
Ishtier snarled. “Somehow, this is all your fault.”
“What, that your rift between the worlds closed prematurely? That Gerridon didn’t come after all? Maybe you forgot to tell him about your plan. Maybe he just ignored you.”
This wasn’t entirely a goad. She was puzzled, also a bit apprehensive that the Master might somehow put in a late appearance after all.
The high priest rushed at her, fists raised, but she evaded him with a wind-blowing move. It occurred to her that he hadn’t danced with the rest of his community. Perhaps . . . oh, happy thought . . . he no longer could.
“Old man, old man. Your priests know now what you attempted to do. Titmouse, here, knows. What will you do next?”
He swung at her again, beginning to pant, and missed. Both instinctively avoided the whorled nexus of power in the middle of the floor, although Ishtier had smeared the bloody footprints and once nearly slipped on them.
“The Priests’ College will honor me, or at least the ones with any brains will. Titmouse is an idiot. You!”
He glared up at the statue of his god.
“Most of all, I blame you. You fraud, you coward, you deceiver! I would have followed you to end of my days, a man of honor, but you used, and abused, and abandoned us all. Damn you!”
He struck the rough granite, gashing open his bony knuckles. Mere feet away, unseen, Bane’s watchful eyes glowed and his nostrils flared at the scent of blood. Was that the demon within him, or was he remembering how this priest had taken the soul of a trusting boy and betrayed it to serve his own ends? Perhaps both. What had happened tonight was yet another act in that chain of betrayals, yet he did not move.
A thought: was he waiting for Jame to decide? That had happened before, however often she had tried to force responsibility back on him.
“Your choice, brother.”
“Your choice, sister.”
Face it, she thought ruefully. Neither one of us trusts our moral compass.
Ishtier backed away from the statue, glaring up at it.
“At last, I ask . . . no, demand . . . as once your loyal priest: here and now, pass a judgment, my precious lord god, against you yourself!”
“Don’t!” cried Jame, but it was too late.
A thrum of power that had not been there before suffused the temple. Triangles of green serpentine, lapis-lazuli, and ivory shifted underfoot. Ishtier gasped, tottering. New patterns swirled around his feet. Horrified, he fumbled at his mouth with bloody fingers, but the words burst through them like scathing vomit.
“TRUST NOT IN PRIESTS, NOR IN ORACLES. WHO ARE YOU, TO CONDEMN YOUR GOD?”
Titmouse had come up to stand by Jame. “The God-Voice,” he said, in an awed whisper. “It makes my head ring and my teeth ache. Is that an Arrin-ken?”
“Don’t you smell the breath of the mountains? Listen to the dry crunch of snow, the tread of enormous paws. That’s Immalai of the Ebonbane, speaking from the fastness of his domain.”
“Nonetheless,” croaked Ishtier, drawing himself up. “Judgment!”
“WERE YOU THERE WHEN PERIMAL DARKLING BROKE THE CHAIN OF CREATION, WHEN OUR GOD BOUND TOGETHER THE THREE PEOPLE TO FIGHT BACK AS ONE? WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE DREAM-WEAVER DANCED AND GERRIDON FELL, WHEN WE BROKE THROUGH TO THIS WORLD AND RAISED THE BARRIERS BEHIND US? DARKNESS LIES WITHOUT, ANCIENT OF ENEMIES. WITHIN, WHO KEEPS THE FAITH? PRIEST, DO YOU?”
“You left us none!” It came out in a shriek, in a spatter of sprayed blood from a bitten tongue. “You abandoned us, oh, so many worlds ago! You let evil prosper and good perish. Gerridon rebelled against you, the first with the courage to do so. We would have followed him, yes, even into the shadows. Where else was there the possibility of truth, of honor? Instead you put the false Highlord Glendar over us. I come here into your shameful story, I, and this chit’s cursed father Ganth, who led us to ruin in the White Hills, in the Haunted Lands. Dishonor. Misery. Madness. Through all of that, I should still follow you?”
“YOU LACKED FAITH. GANTH LACKED SANITY. WHO IS THE MOST AT FAULT?”
Ishtier lurched, as if violently jerked. His mutilated mouth grinned and stretched over bloodstained teeth.
“ARGH,” said a new voice through his unwilling lips, fighting its way out. Teeth splintered before it. “COME TO JUDGMENT, COME!”
Titmouse’s nose wrinkled. “That stench . . . singed hair?”
Jame tugged at his sleeve to draw him back a pace, out of the spreading ring of carnage. “That’s the Dark Judge of the Riverland,” she whispered. “Yes, another Arrin-ken.”
“I DID NOT SUMMON YOU, BROTHER.”
“WHAT, AM I NOT TO ANSWER A CALL FOR JUDGMENT?”
“THIS IS MY TERRITORY, WHICH YOU MAY ONLY ENTER WITH MY PERMISSION. I DO NOT WELCOME YOU HERE.”
“WHY? WHAT HAVE YOU TO FEAR?”
The voices yanked Ishtier back and forth, staggering across the floor. First one side of his mouth spoke, then the other, the corners of both tearing more with each utterance back toward the ears. Blood streamed down his chin. His eyes bulged and also began to bleed.
“Who are you?” he cried, choking, aghast. “What demon speaks through me?”
They ignored him.
Burnt fur, the arid voice of hatred and despair: “WOULD YOU DENY ME MY VENGEANCE?”
“AGAINST WHOM, OUR GOD OR OUR EMENY?”
“IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?”
“ARE LIGHT AND DARK NO DIFFERENT TO YOU NOW?”
“YOU KNOW WHAT WAS DONE TO ME. IN THE MASTER’S HALLS. WITH LIVE COALS. THEN HE LAUGHED. ‘BLIND CAT, I LET YOU GO. FIND YOUR OWN WAY OUT, IF YOU CAN.’ YOU LEFT ME THERE, TO THAT.”
“THE LINK TO THE LOST WORLD HAD BROKEN. WE THOUGHT THAT YOU WERE DEAD, LIKE SO MANY OF OUR KIN UPON THAT COLD HEARTH.”
“WAS I NOT? AM I NOT NOW? ARROO, IS THIS TRULY LIFE THAT I TOOK FROM THE HANDS OF THAT MOCKING APOSTATE?”
“ANSWER THAT YOURSELF.”
Ishtier crumpled to the floor and beat it with bloody fists. “Stop it, stop it, oh please stop it . . .”
Bane watched from the shadows, fascinated, Titmouse also, from the light. Jame, no less, wondered where this would end. She had never, ever, thought that she might feel sorry for Ishtier. The room was dim, but two shadows still circled the fallen priest, whose own shade sprawl
ed as supine as his body on the floor. While the cats speaking out of his mouth bordered on civility, their souls spat and struck at each other, in the process tearing clots off the shadow of their unwilling host from either side. His flesh withered. His eyes grew bright with terror.
“IF YOU STILL BELIEVE,” the Dark Judge howled, “FOR WHAT DO YOU WAIT? WE SHOULD STORM PERIMAL DARKLING, NOW!”
“WE CANNOT, AND WELL YOU KNOW IT. NONE OF US CAN ENTERED THOSE LOST REALMS UNTIL THE COMING OF OUR GOD, OF THE TYR-RIDAN.”
“DO YOU STILL EXPECT THAT, AFTER WHAT YOU DID?”
“What?” said Jame, staring.
Both massive, shadowy heads swung toward her, driving her back a step. “BE QUIET,” snarled both voices.
“WE HAD NO CHOICE,” Immalai growled at the Dark Judge over Ishtier’s prone body. “GERRIDON WOULD HAVE DESTROYED US. GLENDAR WAS OUR ONLY HOPE.”
“IT WAS NOT WITHIN YOUR POWER TO MAKE HIM HIGHLORD. THE PRIESTS HAD THAT CORRECT.”
Both Ishtier and Titmouse gasped. “We did?”
The Dark Judge bared his teeth, white in a charred mask. He was becoming more of a presence in the room. The mere hint of his claws gouged the floor.
“CAN YOU STILL SAY THAT THESE REMAINING THREE KNORTH ARE LEGITIMATE?”
“YES! THEY ARE OF THE PURE BLOOD, HOWEVER IT HAS DESCENDED. ONE OF THEM HAS TO BE HIGHLORD. WE ARE JUDGES. WE JUDGED THAT GERRIDON WAS NO LONGER FIT. IF WE WERE WRONG, BE IT ON OUR HEADS, NOT THEIRS.”
“BUT WHAT IS THE TRUTH? ARE WE TO JUDGE THAT TOO?”
“IN THE ABSENCE OF OUR GOD, YES.”
“IN THE MEANTIME, WE EXILE OURSELVES.” The dark Arrin-ken threw back his head and wailed. Walls cracked. “YOU WILL DRIVE ME MAD!”
“TOO LATE FOR THAT.”
They went at each other, snarling and snapping. Ishtier thrashed in their grip, tearing himself apart with his own hands. Robes ripped. Skin split. Here was his scrawny chest, laid bare. Blood welled. Chunks of flesh disappeared into gaping, shadowy maws. They were ripping him apart to get at each other.
“YOUR PARDON,” said one, for a moment drawing back.
“AFTER YOU,” said the other.
By Demons Possessed Page 28