The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  “That’s—that’s markedly stretched,” Manifeld said. “I’m not the one under scrutiny here.” Again, he pointed at Trent. “He is.”

  “You’ve gotten off point,” said Georina, her voice strained. “Never mind who he says he is. Trent Geno. Russell Hollowman. Neither of them matters if we end up dead.”

  “Then what would you have me do?” The Chamberlain’s tone had become stone.

  “Assert Hollowman’s death and hold session to elect a new Grand Master—as you should have done years ago.”

  Manifeld threw out his arms. “You can’t expect me to prove a negative. If Karli wanted us to choose a new one, She would have sent a sign.”

  “Um,” Grenn said, gesturing to Trent.

  Manifeld went on: “If this man is Russell Hollowman, the Goddess could show him for what he is, but She chooses not to. Now I think—I think that says about all it needs to.”

  “I’m not saying prove it,” Georina said. “Just have the gumption to assert it. That’s all it”—

  “Or perhaps prove something else,” said Trent. “Prove the scepter is under my control, or anyone’s other than his Majesty’s, and you can have your way. Denounce them and pull the Order away from the kingdom as a sovereign capitol.” He waited, and the Chamberlain did nothing. “But you’re full of shit. I know you won’t do it, and until then, we have to move forward from this. All of us.”

  He raised his voice and addressed the crowd. “I’m not here to retake my Seat. None of you have to believe what I say. But the nether’s threat has returned—that much is clear, and anyone can see it, so long as they don’t close their eyes. To say otherwise is to be complicit in our downfall.” Trent shrugged. “That’s how War is. I recalled the Order for this singular purpose: Our powers, given to us through divinity, are ours to wield, to protect this world against the jeopardy of the nether where others can’t. We must stand as one. That doesn’t mean you have to stand behind me.” His gaze returned to Manifeld. “Just that you don’t stand with someone who would watch this world fall into its own shadow.”

  No one responded immediately, but a Karlian nudged his Priest friend and muttered to her. Others did the same, and those mutterings turned to a hum, which turned to a buzz, and then the courtyard filled with arguing voices.

  “If those things can get through our protections,” a Karlian said, “we’re not safe outside them, either. No one is. Are they going to pop up everywhere?” He looked to the Chamberlain for an answer.

  “I don’t know,” said Manifeld. “How could I?”

  Their bickering became cacophonous. Some sided with the Chamberlain, that until they had more information, waiting would prove the best course; others demanded action now, no matter the decision.

  “We’re not even safe within Karhaal’s walls!” yelled a Priest.

  “Why aren’t we prepared to handle this?” another said, her voice strained with emotion. “That thing slaughtered us, and we couldn’t do a damned thing to stop it!”

  Trent closed his eyes to gain a semblance of concentration, trying to think how best he could convince them, if he even could, of the imminent danger. But he couldn’t; no one wanted to believe him.

  “Quiet!” he shouted. His voice echoed through the courtyard and flurried the Fel and snow. Quiet returned. “You have lost the trust of those who appointed you to govern, Chamberlain. Make your decision.”

  The Priest with purple hair spoke from behind them. “Madam Undertaker.” She climbed the stairs toward the pair of leadership. Trent couldn’t hear what she said. The Undertaker looked between the Priest and him, keeping her face markedly plain, then she whispered to Manifeld.

  The Chamberlain considered the Undertaker’s words, then marshaled his next thoughts and looked as though he risked being sick for having them. “Madam Undertaker and I will discuss this”—

  The gathered erupted in dissension.

  Manifeld spoke over them: “In private. And when we’ve decided, we will convene a session. Until then”—the first real emotion Trent had seen out of him came forth, and the Chamberlain’s voice caught in his throat. “Until then, pray for those who have fallen. And for yourselves. Try not to fall to madness.”

  Those gathered kept shouting questions as the leadership turned. “What do we do now?” “What if another attacks?”

  “Manifeld,” Trent said.

  The Chamberlain glared at him.

  “My trinket.”

  Manifeld cast the monocle toward the temple steps, where it tinked and skidded across the snow. He, the Undertaker, and the cat-eared Priest entered the temple, and the doors closed behind them.

  A trickle of conversation stuttered through the crowd. Those who’d agreed with the Chamberlain cast mistrustful gazes at Trent, those who’d demanded action looked unsure, and an unsound chorus grained into the fractious silence. Their faces became masks while they waited for answers to questions they didn’t ask. Trent remained silent—he couldn’t truly affect the situation, not with just his words.

  Ache already set into the muscles down his back. That he could remember, the War hadn’t drained him as the world now did, and a weary burden set upon him, not just from the toll of his self-banishment, but from the constant caution his life now required. Any promise of his return now carried reality’s bitter accents; perhaps this world and he had parted ways too long ago to come together again, and approach toward old normality would only exhaust both.

  In whispered silence, the crowd dispersed. Georina returned to the collapsed girl, who still sat on her knees, her fair face vacant. Color had returned to it—no longer white, at least—but her shock hadn’t passed, not in such a short time. She let Georina help her to her feet, then they turned onto the street that led away from the courtyard without even a glance toward Trent.

  The man who’d offered to look through Trent’s monocle knelt to pick it up and joined them at the courtyard’s center. “Be silly of me to say I don’t need to look through this to believe you.” His voice ground through his throat with a twisted accent. “Just figure I’d ask ‘fore I did.”

  Trent masked his face as mildly as he could. “Sure.”

  The young Karlian raised the monocle to his eye while Trent went to retrieve his hammer, and just like everyone else who had peered through it, he didn’t react at first. But as he lowered the glass, his thrill got the better of him: he giggled. “Holy shit, it’s you.”

  “Sure as serrens,” Trent said. He lost his balance and swayed to the left. His armor, again, recovered for him.

  “Didn’t know what to expect, I guess.” The man handed the monocle back to Trent, who pocketed it. “Grew up me whole life hearing me mum talk about Russell Hollowman and how the Karlians had scared away the bogeymen—that’s what she called them when she’d tuck me and me sis into bed. I was too young when Master Jeom did what he did to really know about it, ya know? But when we learnt about it in school, I can still remember: a chill ran down the left side of me back, and I knew if I got the Call, there’s nothing anyone coulda done to stop me from gettin here.” The young man looked around the square, at the red that daubed the granite and snow, at the bodies that laid motionless. “Don’t know what I’da done now, though, knowin ‘bout all this.”

  “About all what?” Grenn said. He grimaced when he spoke. “The danger?”

  Alarm plagued the young man’s face at the insinuation. “No, no I didn’t mean it like”—

  “There’s nothin to defend yourself about,” said Trent. “Questioning your decision is part of it. Nobody warns you about all the regrets and”—he scratched his chin—“wouldas and couldas. It is what it is. More of my generation went home to be with their families than stayed at the height. Didn’t matter. It all came down to one man anyway.”

  “I wish it had been that way here,” the Karlian said. “So senseless.”

  “Senseless,” Trent said. He stomped down the idea that his presence had caused the deaths of all who laid dead. “Don�
�t say that. In the least, they deserve a convocation. I’ll hold one tonight at the Chantry. If you’d let the urlans know, that’d be helpful. And tell others that if they want, they can come.”

  “I will,” said the young Karlian, excited. “I want to help any way I can. Master Russell, if you need anything, just let me know and I’ll be there.”

  “You can tell me one thing,” said Trent, trying to sound offhand.

  “Anything.”

  “Where’s your weapon?”

  Melancholy spread across the young man’s face, and his body sagged. He kicked a pebble of granite away from him. “It’s in me quarters.”

  “Keep it on you from now on. At all times.” Trent didn’t think he could overstate the importance of doing so, but he didn’t want to admonish, not now. “Tell others that, too. What’s your name?”

  “Markil, sir.”

  “Markil.” Trent briefly squeezed the young Karlian’s left shoulder. “Steady caution.”

  “Thank you.” Markil stood in place a few seconds, long enough to make his presence awkward. “Right,” he said to himself and walked away.

  Grenn watched him go. “What now?” They stood alone.

  “We wait,” said Trent. He grabbed Grenn’s jaw and pulled his face to the side. Blood still flowed on his cheek. Some dripped to the ruined ground from his jaw. “You need that looked at.”

  Grenn pulled his head away from Trent’s hand and rubbed at the wound, wincing. “Goddess. Fuck, that hurts.” Blood had coated his gauntlet, and still more ran up his arm in crimson rills. The veins under his eye already traced black. “I needed to make a stop at the healers’ hovel anyway.”

  “Gonna need the apothecary. The healers might get it to clot, but it’s tricky, especially if they haven’t dealt with Fel wounds before.”

  “I don’t how you can get any better than our healers”—Grenn signed indifference—“but Luff’s good, too.” He cast his gaze at the ground.

  A dull wind poured past them and flaked apart Fel as the gray overhead closed in on the city. The cold pricked at Trent’s face. He’d become used to the tepid winters of Keep, where frost had been the season’s worst symptom at its depth. Here, with the clouds becoming fog as the meek day gave to night—Well, at least it won’t snow tonight. Grenn followed him when he turned away from the temple.

  Trent’s boots caught intermittently on the exposed brick of the herringbone streets. A Karlian further on stood from where he’d sat on the curb and knelt next to a body. The sledge of a sword on his back angled behind him and skidded the ground as he picked up his limp charge. He carried the Priest against his torso, her frame so small against him that her feet didn’t even drag the ground. Trent saw no distinguishable wounds on her body, save for the Fel’s touch that blackened her right calf.

  “You should wait for the urlans to handle her,” Trent said. The man turned at his voice. “Shouldn’t handle the dead. Fel infests these bodies, and the souls that inhabited them are no longer part of this world.”

  “They don’t know any better,” Grenn said, quiet.

  When the man saw who spoke to him, he said, “Sorry,” and set the girl’s body on the ground, cradling her head to lay it carefully on the brick. “She—she was special.” His lower eyelids brimmed with tears. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “That’s old as anything,” said Trent as they closed the distance. “I don’t tell you that to make you feel bad for feeling. Just that it’s gonna be there, and while it’s fresh, you’re gonna need somethin the world can’t give ya.”

  The man looked like Trent had slapped him, and he tried to hide the tears that fell from his face with a gauntleted hand. “I should have been there.” He sobbed. “Here.”

  “Yeah. That won’t go away, either.”

  The Karlian put his hands on his hips and stared at the sky, then shook his head and turned. “Fuck you, man.”

  “Sure,” Trent said.

  “Karl,” said Grenn, calling after him, but Karl turned onto a side street and disappeared as soon as he crossed its boundary. “Is that how you guys were?” Grenn waited for Trent to look at him before he finished his question. “So hard?”

  “It’s the only way you could be. Karlians and Leynars died by the thousands back then. Nothin to do but move on, or else our emotions woulda consumed us.”

  Until the night, that was, Trent thought, when the women and men would commiserate in their night-songs of no words, when they’d weep and try to figure out how to go on with the guilt they had of surviving, when their aches and the prospects of losing more and of how much longer the War might go on became too much. It got easier, never easy.

  “Goddess,” said Grenn. “Maybe we have gotten weak.”

  Grenn wouldn’t have thought to share stuff like this with him—just a farmer-friend who wouldn’t have appreciated corruption or attenuation even at these hallowed grounds. How everything had become so political escaped him, and Trent cast a troubled look at the street where Karl had disappeared. Even then, Grenn might not have noticed anything amiss, apart from what he could detect with his own moral compass. That Grenn might be the best of them caused his throat to tighten.

  To their left, an urlan climbed a flight of stairs that led underground. “Mother Karli, what happened here?” She knelt next to the girl’s body and grabbed her wrist, then her neck. “Time of death, based on ambient temperature and body rigor”—

  Grenn pulled his communicator off his belt and typed while they walked. They headed to the healers’ hovel on the east side of Karhaal, near a square that exited to Vqenna.

  A healer, who Grenn knew, helped him as soon as they arrived. “Not many injured, at least,” he said.

  “Because they’re all dead,” said Trent. He took a seat in the reception area. “Demons don’t take prisoners.” The healer didn’t responded before he took Grenn back.

  Trent closed his eyes. The call of his dreams allured him, clawed at him much unlike they had for most of the last twenty years. He hadn’t minded not dreaming—before he figured out the meditations, his nightmares had plagued him, robbed him of as much sleep as he’d gotten after the War ended.

  Through the dream-want, his mind raced toward what he needed: the Tomb. As before, it clouded in obfuscation in his mind’s eye, and his thoughts surged to where he might find his secret-keeper.

  Nothing in his life, Trent had convinced himself long ago, happened by chance or coincidence, despite what D’niqa had told him. He’d spent much of his exile trying to understand his wife’s disappearance, and as the last few days had unfolded, he’d not only vindicated his suspicion of her being alive, but also gained a sliver of insight into the Goddess’s intentions. Even when he thought he’d messed up, it still folded into Her plan. And now, he knew what awaited him past Karhaal in Tanvarn, where the story of the Fleecer intertwined with his need a little too neatly. Especially after Sieku’s message last night.

  Grenn came from the back ten minutes later. A couple adhesive strips pulled together the chasm of his wound, and his helmet still hung disheveled around his neck. “Just like you said, need the apothecary for a real fix.”

  The man who accompanied him intoned advice: “Be careful of your eyesight. If you see any auras, even think you do, get back here at once.”

  “Really? Nothing about hearing voices or feeling the compulsion to tear someone limb-from-limb?”

  “Nothin like that, Grenn,” the man said, but in a moment’s pause, concern etched his face. “Just—anything weird, quick as you can.”

  Grenn laughed. “It’s a Fel wound. What’s it gonna do? Kill me?”

  The healer looked at Trent, who shook his head. Though relief shaded his face, trouble still tinted his poise.

  “Hope ya didn’t catch it,” said Grenn. The healer and he laughed, but Grenn’s joviality left him as soon as he and Trent turned onto the street.

  A man walked his dog on the avenue’s other side, where they passed a storefront that rai
sed cats, who yipped at the dog and her master with a detached familiarity. Fences ran the sidewalk’s length in front of other stores that kept livestock, from pigs and honey badgers and hamsters to chickens and ducks and swans and geese. Their storefronts stood open-air behind them.

  A woman beat a massive rug with a wooden paddle. She stopped to leer at Trent and Grenn when they walked by and continued paddling after they passed, throwing dust into the air and dirtying the sidewalk.

  Non-Karlians—anyone who couldn’t call upon the Light—couldn’t vendor within the hallowed walls before, and Trent wondered when Manifeld had allowed the trespass.

  The clouds continued their plunge, and an intermittent wind kicked up fallen powder in flurries. Heat lamps kept the storefronts warm enough for their living merchandise, but frost crept up the windows and froze sheets of sleet that groundskeepers hadn’t cleared away.

  They neared the Spoke, and their conversation turned toward the Priest from the courtyard.

  “… the power that coursed through her,” Trent said. “Did you feel it?”

  Grenn shook his head. “I caught yours. I’m sure everyone there did.”

  “Felt nothing like it before. Not even outta Jeom. The man could channel Light like no one else, but the power she used, pushing the Light and Ley into a singular force”—he shook his head. “I wonder why we never tried before. Goddess alive, it was enough to stop a greater demon that I couldn’t even touch.”

  “Leynars and Karlians might not have been able to. Priests are new, and their powers are uncodified, from what I understand. If it’s a new escalation, we might know why the demons gained in power so fast. ‘Cause we did, too.”

  “Not all of us.” Trent tried to decide if the escalation happened because of or caused the manifestation of the Priests’ power, which itself stuck in a beginnings-end cycle. “Who is she?”

  Grenn looked around. “Who?”

  “The Priest.”

  “Oh.” The younger Karlian returned his attention to his tablet. “As far I know, she’s the Undertaker’s pet.”