The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  Yet the temple at Karhaal didn’t stand as he remembered it; a crumbled piece had toppled from the obelisk and desecrated Karhaal’s northern side. It further laid a dozen miles into Vqenna, where its great stones cut deep in the ground. White smoke clung to the air over spent fires, and from where the ground had rent open, a bewildering murk snaked like veins from the wounds.

  Lying next to a piece of rubble in an unknown alley, removed from the mass of destruction, Trent found what he sought: his hammer, Uniquity, given its name by the quartermaster who’d forged it thousands of years ago to await its Master. Its Light beckoned to him, and Trent landed in its crater, throwing dust and stone into the air for his impact.

  He stood where he had before and looked back. Grenn had frozen at the alley’s mouth, and Trent almost took a step toward him before a whisper, a smallest voice within him said, Don’t. The background blurred beyond his friend, and Trent knew—knew—he couldn’t go back, not that way, at least. He grabbed his hammer and ducked under the joint of two buildings, blinking as the scene cleared.

  Fen spoke to him. “I don’t know where everything leads, other than they all lead back here.”

  Trent tried to remember where he’d gone, where he’d come from. The street at the other end of the square looked familiar, and he tilted his head while his brain raked through a hasty tangle of unguided sojourns. Maybe he’d been that way. He would check again to be sure.

  “I’ve tried making maps, but this puzzle is by far the most sinister the gods have ever put me in. Worry not, though. Nobody ever gets trapped here long. Except me.”

  Trent turned.

  “Don’t!” Fen warned. “You can’t go back. Have another way ‘round, anywhere else. Come back here, then head that way”—he pointed to where Trent had come from—“but you must never retrace your steps.”

  “Why?” Trent said. He’d finally asked it: a proper question. And even though he asked honestly, his mind untangled a single strand that would lead him to an answer, something freshly locked away that bumped inside its box and wanted free. He didn’t bother with it.

  A distrusting expression cast over Fen’s face, and he glared at Trent from under his brow. “Something watches you, even now, and to go backward is to face that beast, that marauder in the maze. Heed my wisdom and pray you never find it—and it never finds you. I had to learn the hard way, gods know how many times.”

  “What did it do to you?”

  “I wasn’t always old, and that bastard will hunt you for years, just fall into its trap, where a shadow lurks around every corner at the edges of your sight and makes mockery of your efforts to escape it. Shows you visions, untruths that will make you question things that were and everything that could be. If you ever find him, trust nothing he shows you.”

  Trent swallowed hard against Fen’s words. “What happened to your maps?”

  “Huh?” Fen said. He looked at Mildred. “What did he say?”

  Mildred shrugged.

  Trent raised his voice. “You said you made maps. Where are they?”

  “There’s no need to shout. I’m not that old yet.” Fen waved his hand. “And you know, the wind.”

  “Then how do I leave? My friend, he’s—he’s hurt.” But what would have hurt him? “I need to get back to him. We were going to get help.”

  “You’re asking the wrong man,” said Fen, “and I’m sure your friend’s fine. People get on without you. Don’t have a choice, do they?”

  “No.” Trent shook his head, his brow pinched with worry. “Getting on and moving on—they’re two different things.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” asked Fen. His voice had dropped into a reproachful growl. Then his expression fell, and he lost his gaze in his lap. “I’m just lost. So lost. Been everywhere around here at least—at least twice, and still I convince myself there’s a way out, around the next corner, through the next bend. I one time found an orgy”—he turned to his left and yelped; his right hand shot to his back, and he leaned into his chair, defeated—“somewhere around here. I should have stayed there.”

  The old man’s body shook, and his face twisted, like his mind struggled to comprehend something. Then his gaze found Trent, and recognition refolded his countenance. “Wait, I know you. Yes, I recall now. Another of your kind came through here, his armor even fancier than yours. Seemed fond of you. I’ve forgotten when, but I remember remembering what they said. Just—just”—he exhaled—“he told me something.” Tears leaked from his eyes. “Ah, but I can’t bethink what.” He shifted his weight.

  A loud crack filled the small street-courtyard, and a dazed expression spread over Fen’s face. The ancient man’s back bent at an odd angle, and his knuckles quickly turned white from gripping his chair’s armrests. Mildred cawed and jumped to Fen’s shoulder, combing his oily hair out of his face with her paws, chittering in his ear. Fen didn’t answer, only waved her away. She hopped back to the table. Her ears draped down her back, and she watched Fen with redolent concern.

  “It’s you?” Fen said, and the way he laughed spoke of a man manic in purpose and relief. “The gods gave me a message for you?” He looked to the sky, and his face lit with a childlike smile. “Ah, yes Al, I see it. It’s glorious.” His gaze darted back and forth across the blue. “It can’t be worse than this. Show me no more—let me know it when I arrive.”

  “Worse than what?” Trent said. “What’s happening to you?”

  “My back is breaking. I guess I’m dying. Finally! And I get to tell you the secret I’ve been keeping all this time. I tried to find it, and in the end, it found me. You found me. Oh, it’s so simple now.”

  Fen whooped, then his voice descended into a harking, uncontrolled laugh. Trent lips spread in an uneasy smile, and he huffed without a response. Then he chuckled along, and soon the two of them filled the square with cachinnation. For that short time, nothing seemed wrong, even when Fen’s back cracked again, louder, and threw his body toward the left arm rest. When his back broke the third time, he jolted enough to tip the chair over.

  He rolled on the ground, his hilarity tinged suddenly with urgency, and he gasped, twisting to see Trent. The air filled with gunshot when his back buckled, enough to throw his head against the brick with a dull thoink. He coughed a vapor of blood and spit that flung toward Mildred, who cradled Fen’s head with her feet. She screamed against his body’s spasms.

  “Mark the words,” Fen said through gasping breaths he failed to fully draw. The man’s distant eyes beheld more than Trent pretended. “The master plays the game while the pieces perform their bids.” He screamed and wrenched his eyes shut. Even though his words fogged in the street’s still air, sweat beaded on his brow and ran down his face.

  Mildred tittered at him, her own face damp with tears. Snot bubbled from her nose, which she wiped with a paw and on her shoulders. She didn’t—couldn’t—lose focus on her friend.

  “But you only hold one end,” Fen said. His jaw had soldered shut, and he looked now to the sky. “Should the pieces come together again, the atonement made, the time—ah!—forfeit will be forgiv’n.” His gaze bulleted to Trent. “But remember, nothing lasts, and if too good it was made, that does not mean useless it will be”—he smiled before he said the last words—“when gone.”

  Trent didn’t move. Fen’s body shuddered, and he breathed the last breaths of this existence. Levity daubed his face in his final moments. Mildred whined as he sputtered, then his body exhaled a final wheeze, and he died.

  The serren slapped her master’s face, her eyes pools of boundless anguish, and when Fen didn’t respond after a few more pats, she wailed over his corpse. Tears hopped from her face in the quiet aftermath.

  Trent tried to think, but an aura obscured his vision, pushed his eyes into his skull. A specter touched his right shoulder. The Light answered him, and he turned, his right hand burning against the waning day. He blinked, and the scene reformed.

  “Trent,” Grenn said, his righ
t arm raised in a defensive posture. The Light from Trent’s hand lit the young man’s face from below. “What in the hells are you doing, man?”

  “What?” said Trent. Shadows pushed toward them at the alley’s dead end. He let the Light go and touched the wall, corporeal and whole under his gauntlet, and his thoughts fled away. “There was a shortcut.”

  “Nothing here.” Grenn’s gaze traced over the brick, then returned to Trent. “Just some rats fuckin in a trashcan.”

  Trent couldn’t hear them for his heartbeat in his ears. “Right.” He breathed. “Guess I got turned around.”

  They exited the short alley. Trent looked to the temple, where the obelisk disappeared into the low clouds, obscured from his sight.

  6

  “This one of those Leynar things?” Trent asked. He’d asked that recently, though when or to whom escaped him. “The apothecary wasn’t here before.” A host of darkened shop fronts gawked at him—so familiar yet foreign.

  “The old guy left,” Grenn said.

  “When?”

  “My second year. Made everyone sad to see him go, but”—he joined his hands, then moved them in a diagonal line away from each other to gesture ‘such is life.’

  Only one store front had signage or lights on. ‘Luffy’s Lineage of the Latest and Latent,’ one read. Trent looked to another: ‘I Cannot Help You If You Are Dead.’ A man moved in and out of its frame. He had a pointed chin and wiry, graying hair that stretched to his neck, and he would stop in front of the words, cross his arms, and wag his finger at the viewer before he shook his head and walked off, chuckling.

  “Before you die,” Trent said, reading another aloud, “come see me first.”

  A bell tinked inside when Grenn opened the door, an old hinged one that swung outward, and he gestured, ‘as I said,’ with a tick of his eyebrows. Trent gave the façade a final look before he walked inside.

  Tapestries covered most of the apothecary’s walls, save for a group of shelves behind a counter at the back of the store, where the shop’s lord worked his medicinal practice. ‘Made at a moment’s notice for the notice’s moment,’ a sign read that hung on the inside of the front window. Grenn headed down a front aisle off to their right.

  Faulted stitches and uneven lines sullied most of the art when Trent got a better view of it. Depicted on one against the western wall, a pair of warthogs made love in stitched revelry. The one performing wiped froth from its mouth on the other’s back. Beneath it, the apothecary displayed disparate viscera: swarms of beetles, colonies of ants, hives of bees, a coiled snake, a puppy with curly hair, a frog with long claws, all of which hung in high-density resin and filled jars and vases and many-manner of glassware—flasks, beakers, mason jars, and thin tubes, one barely wide enough to hold its cockroach. Meatloaf sat in a baking dish; the apothecary had even caught its steam in its embalming fluid. Intestinal worms floated inside a dissected length of intestine, and a school of fish hung suspended in a ten-foot aquarium behind everything else.

  A man with graying brown hair and numb eyes of the same color appeared next to Trent, suddenly there when he hadn’t been a second before. “Admiring the handywork, Master Russell?” He spoke with an accent that rounded his ‘R’s and made lazy work of his hard consonants.

  “Made these yourself?”

  “In a way.” The apothecary hearkened a laugh. “Who else’s art would I hang in my store? Not as elegant as nature’s bounty, but not all are blessed with the green technique as you were.”

  “They’re the lucky ones, then.”

  “A good answer.” Luffy stood straight with his hands held behind his back. He looked over the tapestry next to the one of the mating warthogs, where four mallards stood over another—three drakes impatiently waited their turn with the hen. A pair of lenses rested on the end of Luffy’s nose, held by nothing other than the glass’s feet. He scratched at a stitch the maker had missed. “Wonderful,” he said, without a trace of irony or sarcasm.

  “Not bad for an apothecary,” said Trent.

  Luffy sighed and headed toward the back counter. He sported a robe of boring brown that dragged the floor and kicked out in front of him as he walked; under it, he wore a black satin vest that missed its fourth button, a wrinkled white button-down with full-length sleeves, and a pair of slacks that lacked the care of a pressed crease. “I am not an apothecary—not just an apothecary, I mean. Life’s experience is too rich, too”—he searched for a word, waving his right hand over itself, and ported behind the divider that allowed him to his work station—“vast to relegate yourself to one pursuit, one identity, for even a moment. For life is too short to allow yourself to toil.”

  “I’ve found it easier to not even try to be what you want.” Trent followed Luffy to the counter. “The gods have a way of foisting their purpose on you no matter how much you try to buck ‘em.”

  The apothecary laughed. “She told me you were funny, Master Russell, but so self-assured?” He stared down his nose at Trent, and his eyes crossed through his lenses. “Yes. The surety that comes with purpose’s purity.” A notebook flew to his hand from across the booth when he reached for it. His pen strokes flourished off the page, yet their craft hung in the air as they did on the earlier sheets.

  The apothecary scribbled for three minutes. In the interim, he spoke in whispers Trent either couldn’t hear or couldn’t understand, occasionally letting go of the pen to reach under the counter or check a certain bottle behind him. His pen flipped between pages, confirming whether they had more of a certain item in back. When they didn’t, Luffy said, “Add it to the list,” or something thereof. He laughed at one point, as if the pen had told him a joke, then he corrected one item: “Seven, not seventy, but that is a good one.”

  Grenn joined them at the counter, holding two bottles by their nozzles.

  “Sir Grenn,” the apothecary said. He snapped the notebook shut with a pop, which pulled Trent from the pense he’d fallen into watching the master and apprentice work hand-to-hand. “Wonderful to see you again, but so soon?” He checked his watch. “I hope you did not let the demons pull you away from your passions.”

  “Had to, Luff. The recall and all.”

  “A shame, too. Just in time to fuck everything up.” Distress muddied the apothecary’s face. He sighed, and for a fraction of a second, his form phased before reconstituting itself. “So, gentleman, Grand Master, I am at your service this afternoon. For what divine purpose have you called upon me?”

  Grenn gestured to the covered wound under his right eye. It had seeped blood onto the bandage. “Need help with this.”

  “Salve for demon wounds.” Luff picked through the items on the shelf behind him. “Oh, yes.” He lifted a flask, the cork of which had dried and allowed the liquid inside to evaporate, and blew on it, then he coughed when he breathed in the dust. “Still powerful,” he said, his voice strained, and he set the flask on the counter. “Just one moment.”

  He headed to the back of his store. “The more potent stuff, I’ve got to keep away from the idiots who pretend to run this place.” Heavy boxes tumbled and crashed out of sight. “Everything is fine, I swear it to you.” When he stepped back into his workspace, Luffy carried a screwed-shut box under each arm. “Just got this stuff in, right in time, too.” He set them on the counter behind him, and the screws undid themselves when he tapped each in turn. “I normally catch them myself, but”—he patted his right shoulder with his left hand to sign that he left something obvious unsaid.

  Trent couldn’t discern what he should have understood.

  “Let us start on the base,” Luffy said. “Did you pick out your preferred flavor?”

  “I did,” said Grenn. He set the two bottles on the counter.

  “Excellent, my boy.” Luff took a bottle and popped off its cap with his thumb. “Good to see you haven’t forgotten the basics.”

  “Peanut?” Trent said, whispering to Grenn. The young man didn’t respond.

  The base fizze
d over the bottle’s lip. Luff caught it between two fingers and pulled it, like he had hold of a chain’s end, into a beaker he grabbed from the farrago of paraphernalia behind him. Evaporating carbonation hissed through the room.

  “Now for all of the nasty stuff.” Luffy reached for Grenn’s face and ripped the bandage off in a quick snap of his wrist.

  Grenn reacted a second later in a drawn-out whinge: “Ow.” Caked blood flaked off his face and floated to the counter. From the wound seeped a trickle of milky blood, which Grenn caught with a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket.

  Luff dabbed a fallen flake onto his finger and sniffed it. “Excellent.” The cruor crumbled between his thumb and middle finger. “Augh, nasty beast”—he raised the same hand’s index finger—“but good to know.”

  Trent winced when Luffy licked the scab. He sidled toward Grenn. “What is this? Like am I”—

  “Just,” Grenn said, stretching out the word, “give him time, that right, Luff?”

  “Correct, sir Grenn.” Luffy dropped Grenn’s blood into the half-filled flask, where it bubbled in the peanut mixture before it broke apart and dissolved. “Though time, we are short on now, aren’t we?” He picked a flask from under the counter and added it to the pile of miscellany behind him. “So how is it we stand in your presence, Master Russell? You did finally tire of your vacation?”

  “No,” said Trent, “but somethin came up.”

  “I always knew you would come back,” the apothecary said, hefting a tome onto the counter. It flipped itself to a page near its back cover, and Luffy flipped the pages twice more before he grabbed a rune and chanted under his breath in an antiquated language to pull a jar from within. Inside, beetles crawled over each other, shining blue and black, their little legs tinking against the glass. Luffy twirled the lid, and a dozen of them spilled onto the counter top. “Come now. You do this every time.” He picked up those that had toppled out and dropped them into the jar, only for more to crawl over them and the container’s sides. “I just need a shell.”