By Demons Possessed

by P. C. Hodgell

  Over and over, the House had been a dream or, more often, a nightmare.

  It had also appeared in the soulscape.

  She looked at her hand, almost under her nose, pressed against the floor. It was sheathed in bands of rathorn ivory.

  Tick, went her extended nails as she flexed them against the cold flagstones. Tick, tick, tick.

  This could still be a dream.

  More likely, though, when she had touched Bender’s shoulder, she had been sucked into the soulscape.

  “I am not who I am,” Bender had said to Graykin, who had told Brier, who had told Marc, who had told Jame. “I would never harm . . .”

  Then had come that sly smile, that shift of personality conveyed so vividly even to those who had not seen it: “Jamethiel. Child, I wait.”

  In Graykin’s judgment, this was a trap set in the guise of a friend.

  He had been right.

  Cautiously, she raised herself onto an elbow. Yes, she was indeed wearing rathorn ivory, at least on the front, with a decided draft up the bare backside. Was she never to outgrow that embarrassing vulnerability? In its prime, though, no rathorn bore armor down its spine. A stallion risked having his primary horn curve around to split open his skull from behind. As a mare aged, though, the body ivory grew to encase her in a living tomb. So it had almost done with Death’s-head’s dam before Jame’s mercy-stroke had freed her. Otherwise, she might truly have proved immortal, but at what a terrible price?

  If this was the soulscape, though, this was a soul-image. Whose could it be?

  Once she had thought that was her own, that she was the monster which it contained and embodied. Kindrie had unmasked that deception.

  “Listen!” he had cried to her. “These banners aren’t part of you! Perhaps none of this hall is. It’s a trap, to make you think that the shadows still own you, but here you are, in armor against them. Fight, d’you hear me? Fight!”

  And she had. And she did.

  How strange that she had never before thought that the House might also be Gerridon’s soul-image, assuming that he still had a soul. Yes, of course he did: that was what the Shadows wanted and would have if he grew desperate enough to become the One, their Voice. So far, others had paid for his extended life. Someday, though, perhaps soon, he would have to foot his own bill. Everyone did, in the end.

  But how decrepit everything here was. The roof had never been repaired. The walls ran with liquid rot. Luminous mold veined the floor. A soul-image reflected the essence of its source, not how one saw oneself, but how one truly was. Most people never consciously visited it except, perhaps, in nightmares. This place was not loved. Did the Master cherish anything except his own image of himself, and then without understanding what such self-love had cost him? How little she really knew about him, despite years spent under his roof. Trinity, she had never even seen his face.

  A whine came from the hearth. Jame rose and went to investigate, already suspecting what she would find. Graykin crouched in the tangle of chains that bound him to the cold fireplace. Arrin-ken pelts lay scattered beneath his feet where he had scrabbled at them trying in vain to escape. His form was that of a scruffy, starveling dog, but his eyes, terrified and pleading, were human.

  Jame patted his head. He twisted, trying to lick her hand, and whined again when he could not.

  “So you touched him too, did you? Now here we both are.”

  “A-ha-ha-ha . . .”

  Banners shivered against the walls. Graykin cringed.

  “Child, I have you at last.”

  She might not know his face, but she knew that voice, soft and caressing, now underlain with a self-satisfied smirk. No need to see the lips that formed those words; she knew that they curved in a smile. So they had many nights in the dark rooms of her childhood, breathing out of the very walls.

  “Oh, I have waited so long. So have you. Welcome home, Jamethiel.”

  For a moment, she was back in the tower at Tagmeth, anxious faces leaning over her, Marc picking her up. Such a gentle touch for one so strong . . .

  Oh, let this wretched hall be only a dream after all. Let me wake up.

  Even so, she couldn’t leave Graykin behind, and where was Bender?

  “Soon you will see your purpose clearly,” murmured the edges of the hall, the corners and dim recesses.

  I am in his soul. I am swallowed by it.

  He laughed again, as if he had read her thoughts.

  “That primitive keep with chickens running about the courtyard, those ungrateful people who have turned on you after so few days . . . you call that home? What, did you think that you could abandon it and them without cost? I see a room torn from top to bottom, strewn with your pitiful possessions. Why so few? I will give you much finer. I see a dark woman, so angry, so betrayed. Do you blame her? But you never need see her again, nor face her reproach. Who is she, after all, to question you? All of your life, you have questioned good and evil. Here you will know peace at last, and fulfillment, and love. Have I not loved you all of this time, despite what you did to me?”

  A shadow moved across the wall, attempting to caress banners that flinched away from its touch. In truth, it was only the hint of an empty glove, flaccid, powerless. Yes, she had hacked off that hand when it had reached out for her through the tumbling red ribbons of a bridal bed. He could be hurt. She would remember that.

  “You belong with me. You belong to me. Ever and forever. Oh, I will cherish you as your father never could. He did not understand what he had thrown away. You are my treasure, my weaver of dreams.”

  “Don’t call me that! I was only a child. What did I know of consequences, of right and wrong?”

  Enough, even then, to know better.

  “You lied to me, night after night after night!”

  She stopped herself, hearing the note of panic in her voice. Once again, forbidden memories had stirred behind the veil in her mind. What crooning lies had he told her? Had there ever been a time in her desolation when she had welcomed them?

  Remember Tirandys, she thought. Remember his brother Terribend.

  Flawed they might have been, the former fallen through love for the Dream-weaver, the latter through some weakness not yet explained, but they had stood by her. Their care, not Gerridon’s, had sustained her.

  His answer came lightly, almost with a note of flippancy. “Ah, child, you call me a liar. For shame. What, after all, is the truth? Have you not yet learned that each of us creates his own? You think yourself a fierce warrior, no doubt. Behold your armor. But can you truly defend yourself? Shall I run my fingertip down your spine and count the bones? You deem friendship strength, but can you save your friends? Come. For once, be true to yourself. Dance for me.”

  Jame shivered—oh, this was such a cold place!—but clung to her anger as if that would warm her against the draft of mortality creeping up her back. Was this the time for a berserker flare? No. She had to think before she acted, to consider all she had learned, most recently in that city of gods, Tai-tastigon. There would be no second chance.

  “Free my friends and I will dance.”

  “For so small a price?” He chuckled, pleased to find her still such a child, so gullible. “Done.”

  Graykin’s chains fell away. He slunk to her side and nuzzled her hand. Yes, she could feel that through the ivory that covered it. It was real.

  Lightning flickered. Among the faces pallid against the opposite wall was Bender’s and there he stood, staring at her. He had been a young man, she realized, when the Master had taken his soul captive. Rain coursed down his shrunken cheeks like tears.

  “Jamie, don’t . . .”

  “You taught me how to read the master runes,” she said. Oh, how it hurt to see him like this. “They are neither light nor dark but pure. Truth has no hue. Tirandys, Senethari, wherever you are, you taught me how to fight. Since then, I have learned so much more.”

  Taking a deep breath, she began to dance. It was stiff work at first in her
cold armor, with joints cracking as they stirred into life. And she was scared. Yes, that too. Her entire life, she had been preparing for such a moment, against her people’s greatest traitor, against the monster of her childhood. Perhaps Ganth had hurt her more—after all, he was her father—but he had proved to be such a little man. Gerridon . . . well, how to deal with someone who had dared to bargain with Perimal Darkling itself?

  But this perverted version of the dance had its own power. This was its home, as the Dream-weaver had first performed it. The air warmed, a patch here, a patch there. Drizzle condensed. A glimmer kindled in the corner of her eye, lit by the silent play of lightning. Someone moved with her.

  Bender stumbled away from the wall. “Oh,” she heard him say in wonder. “My lady.”

  That was why he had weakened and fallen prey to the Master. He, like his brother Tirandys, had loved the Dream-weaver. Poor Bender.

  But that first Jamethiel couldn’t be here. She was dead. Jame had seen her fall into the abyss rather than doom her children to a similar fate. Love, after all, had conquered weakness. However, this was the soulscape and the Master’s soul-image. Could it still be haunted by his sister-consort, his darling? Perhaps. Jame couldn’t bring herself to believe, though, that he had ever truly loved anyone but himself. He had used her mother as he meant to use her. That was all. Something else danced behind her, just out of sight over her shoulder. She would not turn to look, however much she wanted to.

  “Dear child,” the air breathed in her ear, with a low, seductive chuckle. “Dance with me. Dance for me.”

  She almost turned. “Mother . . .”

  No.

  That was also his voice framed by smiling lips, mocking in that he did not believe anyone could be as clever as he.

  “You know Bender’s true name. Say it. Reap his soul for me. Then you will indeed be mine, forever and ever.”

  The dance tried to twist in her mind, to move her limbs in accordance with his wishes.

  “Love. Acceptance. Certainty. Everything you have ever wanted, bought with a mere moment’s surrender . . .”

  Think.

  “You let Bender go,” she said, trying not to pant with the effort of speaking back.

  “I let him think so, certainly. The fool. As if I would ever simply release him.”

  “But he did flee, and he took the Serpent-Skin Cloak with him.”

  Pique disturbed his concentration, and with it his hold on her. “The damned thing never did me any good anyway. All relics of our failed god will be of no use in the glorious world that is to come.”

  “You lost control of it, didn’t you? The ancient objects of power find their own way. The Book certainly did. So did the Knife. One by one, they have slipped through your fingers as if you were never meant to have them at all. You lost control of Bender too, until he got to Tagmeth. Before that, you let him think that he had won free, but in doing so, you also fooled yourself.”

  The banners stirred against the wall, at least those with weft enough remaining to respond. The dance drew them. Rather, it drew what was left of their blood, bound in the weave of their deaths. This was not only Gerridon’s soul-image but his larder, stocked with the last vestiges of the souls that the Dream-weaver had reaped for him.

  The effort to resist made her stagger. Never before had the dance been so exhausting, but then it also fed upon her. He would drain her will and strength if she let him.

  Think.

  The demons of Tai-tastigon lived on human souls. So did the Master. She had asked herself before if he had become another kind of demon. More to the point, did the tactics she had so recently learned apply here? True, Gerridon still had his core soul, but if she were to strip away those others that fed him . . .

  She reached out to that wall of yearning faces and cried, “Tell me your names!”

  Lorien, breathed one, and disintegrated.

  Trinity. Glendar’s mother?

  Daron, another whispered, falling in flakes that were gone, swirling in the dank air, before they touched the floor.

  The father of Tirandys, Terribend, and Keral.

  Periel . . .

  Mother of Jame’s two doomed Senethari.

  And on and on. The Master’s generation named themselves one by one and escaped. Free, free, free.

  A terrible cry rose from the corners of the hall, from its recessed arches and hollow cavities, from the emptiness that was most truly the Master’s essence. “What are you doing? Stop it, stop!”

  Jame found herself dancing with Bender. He blinked at her and terrible loss clouded his eyes.

  “It wasn’t the Dream-weaver,” she told him. “I am as sorry as you are. What is your name?”

  “Terribend,” he groaned, and collapsed into her arms.

  The walls were cracking. Clots of warp thread tumbled, unable to hold them up. The floor pulsed along widening green fissures. Charred rafters fell.

  “Noooo . . . !” wailed the jagged sky.

  Jame looked down into frightened eyes set wide in the furry face of her servant. Lyra had scornfully named him “Gricki” after a mongrel dog in an old song. She, Jame, had called him “Graykin,” which hadn’t been much better. Neither was his true name.

  “Woof,” he said, and rose unsteadily to his feet, shedding his pelt down to the pink silk of skin. Good enough.

  The three of them staggered out of the hall into the rank hills. On these rolled, ever and forever, under a tumbling leprous moon. Everything was in motion but fretfully, with no more meaning than a dream, or perhaps no less. Green light flared behind them out of the House’s gaping windows, and the light was also a silent scream. On it went, and on and on, in rage and horror. The hills crested and toppled at its blast. The moon plummeted out of the sky. The whole world around them fell, and fell, and fell.

  IV

  JAME WOKE WITH A START on a scratchy bracken pallet—her bed, she realized, in her room at Tagmeth, before a roaring fire. She had been so very cold. Now a wave of heat rolled over her, breaking out sweat, and she struggled under a stifling pile of blankets.

  Voices spoke. Faces appeared. Rue’s. Marc’s, furrowed with concern. Jorin jumped up onto her stomach, driving out her breath with a whoof.

  “Here,” said Marc, lifting her to a cup of cool water.

  She drank, inhaled wrong, and sputtered fully awake. Because of Jorin, though, she still couldn’t breathe properly.

  “What . . . where . . . how . . .”

  “You know that better than I do.”

  Beyond him, she saw her quarters, or what remained of them. Everything had been ripped apart—the meager bits of furniture smashed, the shutters shattered, holes punched in the walls, torn streamers of her already paltry clothing strewn everywhere.

  “What . . . ?”

  “You already asked that,” said Rue, frowning, as if concerned for her wits.

  “We found it this way,” Marc added apologetically.

  “A room torn from top to bottom,” the Master had said, laughing. “Ï see a dark woman, so angry, so betrayed.”

  “Is Brier very upset with me?”

  Marc drew a hand over his beard, considering. “Well, now, you must admit that she had some cause. Oh.” He looked around him, seeming to take in the full range of destruction for the first time and, worse, its implications. “Surely you don’t think . . . she would never . . . but then odd events have happened here recently. The strain, your disappearance, our guests . . . People have walked in their sleep and done things they would never do when awake. Cadet Wort even cut off her braid.”

  “She did? Poor Wort. Maybe I should knit her a hat, but it would probably turn into something else.”

  Just the same, she suspected that Marc wasn’t telling her the worst of it.

  The Master couldn’t visit the Riverland in person without attracting the attention of the Dark Judge. Clearly, he had used Bender as his stalking horse to get within her defenses. Oh, irony: at the same time Gerridon had lurk
ed here through Bender and played his nasty games with the garrison, that dire Arrin-ken had been drawn to Tai-tastigon by the Burnt Man, who in turn had been drawn by Ishtier’s attempt to attract the Master’s attention. One’s full consciousness, as Bane had pointed out, could only be one place at a time.

  “My head is spinning,” she said. Marc offered the cup of water again. She shoved off a protesting ounce and drank.

  Feet clattered up the stair. Graykin burst into the room trailing the fetters that had bound him to the bed below. Hurrah, someone had had the sense set him free. He choked, then impatiently fished the cloth gag out of his mouth.

  “Well? Did you kill him?”

  No question who “he” was, or that Graykin had come back in full possession of his wits. Was the Cloak to thank for that?

  “I don’t think so,” said Jame, answering his second question. “The Master won’t just crumple up and die while he still has his own soul to feed on, or to barter. On the contrary, I may just have made things a lot worse.”

  Someone below gave a shout of horror. While rain had previously dripped through the floorboards below, now smoke rose.

  Jame fought her way out off the bed and pitched into Marc’s arms. He set her on her feet. She scrambled down the stairs to Bender’s room. He still sat in his chair, but his wet clothes roiled with steam.

  He smiled at her out of rising wreaths of smoke. “Free,” he said. “Finally. Thank you.”

  Flames crawled down his arms under his robes and ignited his fingertips, which burned like candles. Fire crept up his neck out of a damp collar. His white hair kindled. Flesh smoked and blackened. He seemed to shrink within it, his eyes and lips receding over clenched teeth. Bone showed, then it too charred. Inch by inch, he crumbled within his sodden vestments until they too collapsed but did not burn. Neither did the chair.