The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  Trent waved his left hand to gesture ambivalence.

  “Mm, yes,” the quartermaster said, nodding. “Your shoulder might get achy. I shall consign to you a short sword for the time being. You won’t need it, of that I can assure you, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “Sounds good,” Grenn said, an easy smile across his lips.

  “Sir Luffy,” said Trent.

  “I had hoped,” Luffy said when Trent half-turned to leave, “that while I have you here, since it is customary for the quartermaster to show off a little when the leadership stops in, you would not mind seeing a few of my private and commissioned projects. After all, I technically work at your discretion.”

  “The back room?” Grenn said, excited.

  Luffy must have sensed Trent’s reluctance. “Grand Master, what are you in a hurry for? Dissolving bodies?” He laughed. “I promise you, there will be time for that in plenty afterward.”

  “Yeah,” said Grenn. “Plus, Manifeld’s not gonna call for us ‘til tomorrow, right?”

  None of that concerned Trent. Even if it had, he had no intention of leaving until the next morning, especially now with Grenn’s breastplate in repairs until then. The main lode of his mind itched for rest. Yet a disparate part hadn’t had enough of this new apothecary and quartermaster. “Show me.”

  “Excellent, Master Russell,” said Luff. He headed through the maze of work stations and theaters, the din of which became a chorus of considerable theme, almost like the robots conspired to turn their chaos into song. A back door slid into its frame just before Luff got to it. “We don’t get many visitors back here, not since the king last stopped by years ago.”

  The door shut right after Trent stepped over its threshold. Intensified beams of sunlight loomed over dozens of stations, where little robots worked on their projects.

  “Manifeld”—Luffy used the name like an expletive—“does not deign to enter my domain, even when I ask him. So I stopped.” The quartermaster whistled. “Boys.”

  A couple dozen fluttering droids came at their master’s call and hung in the air before him. Their wings rang at a glimmering frequency while they chirped, and those more affectionate rubbed against Luff’s cheeks. They reminded Trent of faeries that once inhabited Coroth, when men hadn’t yet come to Borliee, dwarves and elves still fought the Wars, and dragons had still been young. Enough land remained unclaimed that some might still exist in the wild, but Trent had never seen one. These came as close as anything to their description: small, almost like little humans, except Luffy hadn’t given them legs.

  “There now, I have not left you that long.” Luffy got the most flamboyant one’s attention, its wings a show of ruby and silver. “You have something to show me? I brought friends. One of them is the Grand Master.”

  At that, the cloud spread and looked around him. They counseled, and a few bowed, then the others took their cue and did the same.

  “Ingratiate yourselves by reverence all you like. He is not so easily impressed, this one, I think.”

  One of them wailed and flew toward Grenn, who leaned away as the mech approached. She hovered near his right hand and pulled it toward his face. Though bewildered, Grenn obliged, and the robot perched on his finger to better see the wound under his right eye. She clinked and whistled and wrung her hands as she examined him.

  “I already cared for that, Xenia. Sir Grenn, it was she who found the old archives that led me to the warthog juice. Considers herself a little healer.”

  Grenn pulled his hand from his face and looked upon the little droid. “Huh. Guess I have you thank for it.”

  Xenia hid her face behind her right wing and shook her head. Still, her left wing fluttered for the praise.

  “I assure you,” said the quartermaster, “there are more notable happenings here than ass-piss.” He conspired with the rest: “How about we impress them.”

  In a current of gold and green, the gaggle moved as one and made a circle around the room before they settled at the first station they wanted Luffy to see, buzzing and bumping in the air while they waited. The leader hung back to chirp at his master.

  “Mm hmm. And what of the rest?”

  The drone spoke. Luff nodded in time with its cadence.

  “Keep them on it. That’s one project we cannot afford to lag on.” What Luffy said next came in pitched whistles and beeps and clicks of his tongue. The leader quieted to listen—even lowered the frequency of its wings—then nodded in response. “Excellent. Now to show our friends what they came to see.”

  At the first table, a worker hung over its project. A dozen others created a screen with their bodies for him against the quartermaster’s attention.

  “Bartus-seven,” Luff said. “If you are not finished, we can come back another time.”

  Bartus squawked at his master, and Trent understood him well enough without knowing his language. Just give me a second, you old fuck.

  Luffy laughed and thrusted his hand through the cloud that tried to block him. “I know you are ready. It does not have to be perfect. Did my blood do the trick?”

  Bartus picked up a plain metal cube and dropped it onto Luffy’s hand. Light glinted off its surface. The quartermaster turned the mechanism between his fingers while the little mech spoke to him.

  “Two of you? How long?”

  The mech responded.

  “That’s barely faster than walking. We need magnitudes better than that. What about the instant transmission?”

  Bartus made two peeps.

  “I told you, it is not a gift. It is an eccentricity of my own, and we can replicate it. What of the harmonic frequencies? Did you match them when you made this new one?”

  The leader spoke for Bartus in a lengthy lecture that seemed to answer Luff’s question.

  “Then we shall have to test it.” Luffy closed his hand. When he opened it again, the cube unfastened with a windy whistle, and its innards spread over his palm and fingers. The quartermaster raised it to his ear. “Sounds in tune.” His form phased. “Just like when I do it. Maybe off by point-oh-oh-one, point-oh-oh-one-two hertz. Might make all the difference. If it does, that will be”—he waited for the fluttering droids to answer.

  They all sang a chorus of three notes.

  “Good to know. Excellent. Bartus, if you will.”

  The little drone sighed before he flew to and landed on Luffy’s hand, where he fiddled with a whirring mechanism as it moved. His arms spun at thousands of rotations per minute, then he shrugged, hopped fully onto the piece, and disappeared.

  “Ah-ha,” Luff said and turned to show his empty hand.

  “What the hells?” Grenn said. “Where’d he go?”

  “A different point in space,” the quartermaster said and checked his watch. “Now we wait, sir Grenn. If what he told me is true, it shouldn’t be long.”

  “Shouldn’t? He might not show back up?”

  Luff signaled a lack of concern. “He always has. There’s hardly anything to worry about.”

  During his early years at the Order, Trent had met a spell thief—someone who manipulated the Ley despite their lack of affinity for it—with whom he had a brief and violent love affair. Her magic, whether from her misuse of magic or the ministrations of her mind and body on another person, impressed upon him his later generalized distrust of Leynars, though she hadn’t been one.

  Still, she often spoke of the Ley’s muted possibilities, of which even those on the Ruling Council had forbidden exploration—something she told him could allow the manipulation of the energies of space and time such that someone could transport almost anything to another point in what she called a ‘holomal chromograph.’

  “That’s not the official name for it,” she said on a night while they laid in bed. Trent had rolled stands of her sable hair between his fingers while she spoke. “But it’s as real as me, and it’s as real as you. And I’ll find a way to get into it. I don’t give a shit if the Council here says we can’t fuck with it. I�
�m going to. Already have.”

  She had vanished a few weeks later, apparently off the face of Coroth, as Trent had tried to find her during his desperate years after Lillie disappeared.

  The way Luffy could teleport reminded Trent of what she did, only she had to concentrate for minutes to move even halfway across a room.

  “… Wouldn’t wanna get caught somewhere in the middle,” said Grenn. Xenia sat on his shoulder, watching the conversation between Luffy and her new friend.

  “But that is just it, sir Grenn. The agent can’t get caught in the middle. For them the trip takes however long it does—minutes, hours, days. Our matter is making the journey they take extremely short, which we have not yet cracked.”

  “Then just call it a make-shit-disappear machine, and there’s no need to keep experimenting.” Grenn and Luffy laughed.

  “A time machine,” Trent said. “A goddess in the Pantheon is lord of all that. We’ve not much command over it—at least no gift have I ever seen.”

  “Well spoken, Master Russell,” said Luff. “Though we do not seek to move through time. Our movement through that dimension is fast enough as it is, I think—too fast in many cases. We are trying to move through space only. As I can do”—he disappeared to the room’s other side and ported back to them; his magic left motes behind in his stead—“without a problem. Now, I simultaneously move through time, but I’m not in control of that. Others, I know, could do the space-thing with help. It is possible.”

  “Is it the size?” asked Grenn. “Maybe someone’s gonna need to wear something like that on either side of their chest. If it takes”—

  Bartus reappeared at his work station in flash of muted color. Small lightning bolts arced between the machine’s numbles and the droid, who blared a low pitch until the device closed and folded back into shape.

  “Ah ha!” Luffy yelled. “You have already returned to us. Cobblewell, did we get the reading on that?”

  The lead droid whooshed toward a bank of screens on the room’s other side and stopped in front of one in the upper-right corner. From him emanated a series of rings that sounded like jingling bells.

  “Slow down,” the quartermaster said. “Goddess living, you will give me an aneurism.”

  Cobblewell spoke slower, his rings lower pitched and spaced further apart. A few of the other droids gathered around Bartus and chatted with their compatriot in hushed pitches while Cobblewell and Luffy talked—until Bartus emitted a high tone. The others quieted.

  Bartus made three peeps, then the others erupted in uproar, blaring and flying in a frantic cloud over Bartus’s work station.

  “What is this?” said Luff. “Tell me, dear Bartus.”

  The mech flew to Luffy’s face and made a series of eight distinct tones, three of them in a phraseology Trent recognized from the theaters outside the lab.

  Luffy’s eyebrows raised toward his hair line. “Bartus-eight.” He nodded. “You shall need to make him, of course. To work, then.”

  Bartus returned to his cube and hauled it to a focused luster of sunlight within his theater.

  The quartermaster turned to Trent and Grenn. “You must excuse them. They are—excitable. Cobblewell”—Luffy turned to the lead mech—“Bartus-seven will become Bartus-eight under your care.” The rest of what he told him came in the mechanical language, except for a few words: “… ingress architectonics,” and, “… finally get it,” that came in the mecha-nari speak Luffy used with his ilk.

  Bartus returned with a needle and a blood bag.

  “More do you need from me?”

  Bartus responded, nodding.

  The quartermaster rolled his left sleeve up his arm. “Fine, but I’m serious, Bartus: not one drop more after this.” No smile played across his lips.

  The little droid inserted an inch of a long needle into a vein in the crook of Luffy’s arm.

  “It’s not something everyone can say, Master Russell, but I have put blood, sweat, tears, hair, and even an organ into this operation.” He raised his right hand. “Not from my body. But still, it belonged to me before I gave it to these people for science.” A wistful expression coated the quartermaster’s face. A few droids had already returned to their own projects. “Now, while we wait for my blood to flow, who is next?”

  A mech spoke from the back of the group.

  “Liri?” Luff said. “You finished your ring?”

  Liri waited three seconds before she responded, then intoned a single note.

  “Oh-ho, just in time. It’s like you were planning this for the Grand Master.” Luff and the colony buzzed toward the next work station, four down and a row over from Bartus’s, where a simple ring laid on a table. “You will love this one, Master Russell. The idea came to me when the Priests entered the Order. I thought the Leynar would not find themselves able to manipulate the Light, yet it comes to their call, and the way they manipulate it differs from our own. So the Light, regardless of its source in the Mother Karli, must be corporeal in our manifest world.” He picked up the ring and raised it to his ear for a second before he turned to face Trent and Grenn. “This works the other way. Well, another way—magic and Light do not work on a line.” He looked at Liri. “What was it that ended up working? The partial singularity?”

  Liri buzzed next to his face and spoke to him, quiet, more private than Bartus.

  Luffy turned their conversation that way and conversed with her in hushed fifes and subtle clicks. “Really?” Liri nodded, then Luffy turned to Trent. “She would like the Grand Master to test it.”

  This being the reason for his presence, Trent didn’t feel he could say no, but at that, he didn’t want to anyway. “Sure.” He already had an idea of how the ring worked. He couldn’t call upon the Ley as he could the Light, but Leynars had channeled through him before. At those times, though he couldn’t manifest it, he could control it in part. “Am I the conduit, or is the ring?” he asked as he took the piece from Luff.

  The quartermaster laughed. “Look at that Liri, he already understands it.”

  Liri chirped.

  “The ring is the conduit. Ley is inside the device, so a layman must but focus, and the ring will take care of the rest. We hope it will become an infinite feedback loop, but we are—a ways from that.”

  Trent put the ring on the middle finger of his left hand. It fit him well. “Anywhere I should aim?”

  “I made that door to withstand dragon fire,” said Luff. “Good a place as any. Let us see what your gut guides you to do with it.”

  Trent turned. Within the ring, he felt a fraction of the power he had as a conduit—many times underpowered compared to focused Ley—but when he held his hand toward the door and centered his mind on bending the potential within, the capacity multiplied magnitudes-over until it reached a criticality and burst forth from his fist in a beam of roaring bright-yellow magic. The ray focused under his will, and Trent bid even more Ley to pour out. An arc cut across the room and blitzed across an empty theater. One of the mechs at the table next to it shrieked madly.

  With a thought, he pulled the magic back and adjusted the beam into a dense rod only a few inches thick, then cut it off the same when it became an auspicious white. The room quieted, and the Ley inside called to him, a power that ruined those too insipid to ignore it.

  “That’s great.” An old awareness returned to him as he stared at the burnished platinum: the Ley used him, and he understood it implicitly, even if not academically. The magic wanted him to use it, needed—

  “My gods,” Luffy said, his unfettered arm raised. “How many motes did you implant?”

  Liri responded in a single syllable.

  The quartermaster thought while Bartus tended to the needle in his arm. “Master Russell, are you sure you are not a Leynar in disguise?”

  “Absolutely, thank Karli. But I well remember what this feels like. Goddess alive, it’s got me giddy for more.” He pulled the ring off his finger. Liri flew to him to retrieve it.

 
“Sir Grenn,” said Luffy, “would you like a go with it?”

  Grenn lifted his right hand. “No, thanks. I don’t need that.”

  The quartermaster shrugged. “As he wishes,” he said to Liri, then he spoke to her in their language while she carried the ring back to her table, where he pulled the needle from his skin and let Bartus have the bag of blood. “We probably have that right,” he said and bent his arm to staunch the needlework. “Master the focusing mechanism, and I think we will have the right combination. But we still need to find a work-around in the least for the conflux.” He pointed at Cobblewell, who had overseen the show without a word. “Half-week at the latest.”

  The little leader nodded and relayed the directive to Liri, who responded in a single squeak.

  “Now,” said Luff, “I hope our final experiment is coming along all right.”

  Cobblewell sighed, then he spoke for thirty seconds.

  Luffy listened, and at the end, he rubbed his cheek with his right hand. “Show me anyway.”

  At the back of the droids’ workshop, a curtain descended from the ceiling and partitioned a workstation from the others. Cobblewell disappeared behind the barrier, behind which something issued a quick series of hisses. He reappeared and pushed the curtain out of the way.

  “Perfect,” Luff said. His eyes lit in a different way than before. “What do you think of it, Master Russell?”

  A pair of wooden dowels stood with twine hung between them. Needles moved through a mass of fiber almost faster than Trent could see, and powering it, a bicycle chain connected the machine to a pair of pedals, between which a meter showed a number to the sixth decimal place.

  Before Trent figured it out, the quartermaster said, “One revolution of the pedals is enough to knit five feet of fabric.” He walked to the machine and turned a knob. The needles stopped their work on the length they’d been working and began another piece.

  “It’s a bike,” Trent said.

  “A bike that knits,” said Grenn, unimpressed.

  Xenia tittered.

  Luff cast a deadly expression at her, and she quieted. “Appreciate the little things, sir Grenn. You do not comprehend, perhaps, the engineering that went into making this knob work. Go from sweater, to scarf, to socks, to beanie”—each time he twisted the dial, the machine began a new project, only to abandon it with the next turn—“and the hardest part, which Alpha figured out so ingeniously, was getting the torque right for the pedals to make the needles move so damn fast.”