4: THE DEMON-CLAIMED CHILD
Jorat Dominion, Quuros Empire. Two days since the first day of Gadrith D’Lorus’s reign
“Falesini blood sickness? That truly exists?” Janel looked over at Brother Qown.
Behind her, tavern regulars organized an elaborate game throwing shaped rocks at a slanted clay board. A betting pool formed.
The priest coughed into his hand. “Oh yes, very much so. It’s a hemorrhagic fever contracted from a desert mouse’s dried urine. Just one reason cats are so popular in Khorvesh.” He added, “It’s never broken out in Jorat. Wrong climate.”
“Very sneaky,” Kihrin said. “But I’m not surprised, considering.”
The other two paused.
“Considering what?” Brother Qown said.
Kihrin waved a hand at Brother Qown’s robes. “You’re a priest of the Mysteries. I knew a devotee once. You lot are tricky.”
“I beg your pardon,” Brother Qown said. “I am not ‘tricky.’ I’m very dedicated to helping others find both physical and spiritual harmony.”
“Perhaps he’s a touch tricky,” Janel said, grinning.
Kihrin continued, “Wasn’t your order illegal?”
Brother Qown cleared his throat. “That was politics.1 All sorted out now. And our faith has always been accepted in Eamithon.” Then he brightened. “But you know someone who follows the Way? That’s wonderful! There aren’t many of us.”
“Sure. He fenced my spoils.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Brother Qown’s eyes widened.
Janel gave Kihrin a curious look as he chuckled. “You didn’t grow up in a palace, did you?” she remarked.
“And you did,” he pointed out. “Clearly.”
“It wasn’t a palace,” Janel said. “It was a castle.”
“Forgive me. That’s completely different. Still, I notice you’re not using the noble title anymore,” Kihrin said. “Why is that? And why call yourself count and not countess?”
“Isn’t countess a Quuros title for a male ruler’s wife?” Janel shrugged. “If so, I don’t qualify.”
“It’s also used for a female ruler,” Kihrin pointed out.
“What a strange thing to label. We don’t care if our rulers are male or female. We only insist they’re stallions.”
Behind her, a large gray-skinned man splashed with black achieved some victory at the rock-tossing game. He shouted and marched around the room, fists in the air. Cheers, claps, and a few boos heralded this win before the noise settled back down again.
“Did you know the Joratese native language, Karo, doesn’t even acknowledge gender?” Brother Qown said. “Only positions of authority or obligation. And in practice, I’ve found at least three distinct genders in use. Well, two genders and a third catch-all term, but still—”
As Kihrin looked wide-eyed, Janel put aside her bowl. “I’d better take a turn or this will transform into a lecture on Jorat social structures. He’s done it before.”
“Uh, right,” Kihrin said. “That might be for the best.”
Janel nodded. Then sat there.
Just when Kihrin assumed she’d changed her mind, she began speaking.
Janel’s Turn. Mereina Castle, Barsine Banner, Jorat, Quur.
No matter who we are or what our background, thief or noble, priest or witch, we always want to be our story’s hero.
No, that’s not right.
We don’t want to be.
We need to be our story’s hero.
We all imagine we must be. No one ever judges themselves a fool or a knave. I suppose if they do, they invent some plausible fiction to justify their deeds. We all see the world thus. We all interpret our every act as an epic tale’s culmination, centered on ourselves. Is it arrogance or our limited ability to perceive the universe through eyes other than our own? If ours is the only perception we can experience, does it not follow that ours is the only perception that matters?
The result is the same. We bend the rules, break them, and ignore them. We put our own needs before others. That’s what a hero does, is it not? Are we not entitled to be special exceptions? Just this once? And the next time too?
This time is different. This time it’s important.
I was reflecting on the bandits, of course. Not myself.
They deemed themselves heroes. And as I was raised to believe myself entrusted with protecting these lands, it followed I must judge them criminals, yes? Robbing strangers on the road doesn’t define courageous action.
And yet …
Kalazan’s words burned at my edges like a curse waiting to flare incandescent.
They were waiting for the demon-claimed child, he’d said.
Damn him.
Worse, how could I miss the way Tamin had stocked his troops? Soldiers who didn’t understand the language of firebloods. Soldiers who treated me as a mare despite my stallion attire. The joyful gleam in Tamin’s eyes when he’d ordered his men to shoot through me.
Baron Tamin’s plan to execute Kalazan proved the final point against him. One didn’t protect the herd by killing the saelen, the strays. And if Kalazan, his father, and others had conspired to assassinate the former baron, then it meant they had tried Censure. Tried and failed to remove an unworthy ruler.
I couldn’t believe the old baron so dishonorable that he wouldn’t have stepped down before the situation ever became so dire.
Tension stifled dinner. Under normal circumstances, I would have expected the castle to be packed to overflowing with friends and guests eager to partake in the feast. Instead, the main hall seemed nearly empty. While I was the only one who’d brought my own game (only proper by the requirements of idorrá), the baron had bought or hunted a great deal of his own. Unnecessarily, as it turned out. Most of the fresh meat slaughtered for the tournament celebration—prepared in any of the several proscribed tamarane styles—went uneaten.
I knew why.
The guards still hadn’t located Kalazan. Tamin was polite enough to me at dinner. After all, was I not an old friend? (Not to mention higher ranked.) But his temper encouraged most guests to avoid the dining hall.
One soldier swore he’d hit Kalazan in the back with a crossbow. They’d even found a blood trail, but no body. No clear proof the “traitor” had journeyed south to the Afterlife for Thaena’s final judgment.
Later, I watched, envious, as people drifted away from dinner in twos and threes. I had just come of age when Sir Oreth had shown up on my doorstep with his eviction orders and his threats. There’d been no time for adult celebrations and adult games.
However, this didn’t seem the time to make up for that lack.
I rehearsed my excuses in case Tamin, his other guests, or—gods help me—the odious Captain Dedreugh turned chest or hindquarters in my direction. “No, I’m sorry, it’s my red moon, but thank you for the compliment.” “I’m still in mourning for my grandfather and wouldn’t feel it proper to engage in bed sports.”
Or my favorite, the one I could never say to Tamin no matter how much I meant it: “No, and don’t ask again. I may be nice enough to look upon, but I’m a monster of the first rank. I’d rip you limb from limb—no matter how fondly I remember wintering here when we were children.”
Looking back, I don’t know why I worried so. As I was the highest-ranked titled noble in attendance, everyone would have waited on me to approach them. Technically speaking, rank and idorrá-thudajé relationships are kept separate from bed play, but I’m skeptical that’s ever true.
So no one approached me, and Tamin never asked. For all I knew, Tamin had decided he preferred to run with stallions, anyway.
Tamin assigned us a fine suite of rooms, though. They seemed less fine when I realized the truth. They must have belonged to Kalazan’s family and his father, the unnamed steward executed for his part in the late baron’s assassination.
I couldn’t help but wonder just how many people had been claimed as part of that “cabal.” The castle’s neglected air suggested more staff, more people, had once walked its halls. But who was I to judge? That was true of my home as well.
The last Hellmarch had been hard on everyone in Jorat.
“Am I making a mistake with the bandits?” I asked Dorna later as she unbraided and combed out my hair.
Dorna tsked under her breath. “We need the metal.”
“Not that,” I said. “They threw themselves under my idorrá, and I did nothing when those men came to collect them.”
“You’re young,” Dorna said, her most common excuse for many otherwise unforgivable sins. “I bet Ninavis and her people thought they’d sway you better than the son of the man they’d murdered. Nicer odds. Taja’s dirty luck for them the soldiers found us, before those bandits delivered the full pitch.”
“What if they’re right?” I asked. “Something is wrong here. And what Kalazan said about the demon-claimed child—”
Dorna grabbed me by the chin, startling me. “Offal and dung, foal! Anyone paying even half-assed attention knows what happened to you at Lonezh Canton—”
I nudged her hand away. “No, they don’t. You know that. I’m Janel Danorak. No one knows; who else survived? Without witnesses, truth twists into rumor. Rumor distorts into myth. Jorat needed a symbol—so they invented their own.”
“Always wondered why that fancy high general never set the record straight.”2
I sighed. “He told everyone Xaltorath led the Hellmarch. Which is true.” I lowered my head for a moment, closed my eyes, inhaled. “I suppose this ‘demon-claimed’ label just hits too close to home.”
“I still say it’s chance. Nothing but chance. Anyhow, we’re lucky to lose those outlaws. That lot was trouble, mark my words.”
I looked away, certain we were not even slightly rid of them. “Maybe I should have married Oreth—”
She scoffed louder. “Oh, that would have worked real well. Both of you stallions, and he’s never forgiven you for it. Sir Oreth don’t just want to ride you, he wants to break you.” She set her hands against her hips. “Can’t believe the baron didn’t ask you to stay with him tonight. That one wants for a strong rider, mark my words. You’d be perfect for each other.”
The blood flowed to my cheeks. “It’s not his place to make that suggestion, Dorna. That role is mine.”
“He still shoulda turned his quarters. Rude not to.”
“Only to hear my refusal? Much less embarrassing for him that he didn’t.”
She blushed then, her expression showing less chagrin than guilt. “Aw, foal … maybe once we’re done here. Atrine might be a better place to find someone—”
I was in no mood to discuss bedchamber politics. “Enough, Dorna.”
“Go rest, child. We’ve a big day tomorrow.”
I nodded despite how I dreaded sleep and all it brought. “Yes. Thank you, Dorna.”
Of course, I delayed slumber as long as I could.
As long as I ever could.
But Hell always claims me eventually.
I loathed sleeping. I hated it even though it came easily. I never have any trouble drifting off, sleep taking me the moment my eyes close.
Perhaps because what I do isn’t, technically, sleep.
We live in a universe divided into two worlds, Life and Death. If I spend my waking hours here among the living, my sleep belongs to the goddess Thaena.3
I die, you see.
Every night, I die.
I shut my eyes and opened them again, no longer in Mereina.
I stood in a clearing in shadowed woods under storm-red skies. My nightclothes were gone. Instead, I wore plate armor, made from metal so dark it absorbed all the light, a silhouette darker than the night.
I arrived with weapon drawn, something other than the Theranon family sword. Nor was the armor the same I had inherited from my grandfather, tucked away inside my traveling valise. In the Afterlife, I had no physical body to wear real armor or weapons. It was all in my mind—or rather, all in my souls.
A ghost village spread out before me. Not ghostlike in some poetic sense, hollow buildings left skeletal in abandonment. The village haunted the air in spectral hues, phosphorescent blues and violets lingering in transparent phantasms.
And it wasn’t abandoned.
Its residents remained, murdered right alongside their homes. All of them, village and villagers, had died together.
The village’s citizens struggled against their ties, nailed to its trellises and arbor posts, trussed up like so much livestock after the slaughter. Demonic runes painted on azhock walls with glowing human blood. I’m not sure if the people had perished from sword strike or when the cellar homes and patios had been set ablaze, but die they had, even though they screamed still. They writhed and begged for someone to cut them down, to release them from their torment.
They wouldn’t have to wait long; the demons had come to feast.
Too many demons.
I felt more than heard the first wave, a vibrato bark sending shudders of anticipation trembling over my skin. The hellhounds bayed, their pitch excited as they tracked the sacrifices left for them. They would eat most souls trapped there. They would choose a few for worse.
The demon-hound howls grew sharper as they scented me.
It’s my curse, you see. In the Afterlife, I burn hotter than everything around me. I glow from the fire I bring with me. And demons do so love heat. Few have the willpower to divert to other, easier prey once they have caught my scent.
I have wondered if I had reversed cause and effect. Was I this way because of the Hellmarch demons who found me in Lonezh? Or did those demons target Lonezh Canton because they’d been drawn to my fire?
Enough of that.
My point is they always pursue me, assuming me the hind in their hunt, a timid deer to be chased down and savaged.
I had grown content with the arrangement.
I was the trap already baited.
I smiled as I spun around, sword taking the first hellhound through the skull, splattering black ooze across the dead ground as I cleaved it in twain. The second hound leaped, bit at my armor, gnawing against the metal plate. I laughed and slammed the creature against the earth, rewarded with the sweet sound of breaking bones.
More hounds followed. And died.
These were the younglings, the newest infected, the weakest, and the least experienced. These demons were still acclimating to the torture of their new existence, cursed to hold ignoble shapes until they proved their worth. The dogs died easily.
Next came the riders.
Older and craftier, they didn’t rush to their deaths the way the hounds had. They’d developed individual personalities, a preference for their appearance. Nothing original: skulls and horns and fangs are always popular. Demons prefer forms mortals find frightening: the rotting dead, monsters from myth, god-king tales.
We find human fear delicious.
I mean, they do.
A demon with a rhinoceros’s skeletal head shook a spear at me. “Begone, whore. A feast has been readied for us.”
I laughed and bounced the gore-soaked flat of my blade against my palm. “Then come take your due, but you’ll work for this supper.”
This demon group wasn’t stupid enough to attack me one at a time. They wouldn’t have survived long in the Afterlife by being unobservant. They must have seen how well that tactic had served the dogs.
It mattered not. All demons take a savage delight in slaughter.
In this, I was no different.
I stepped to the side as a demon on a skeletal steed’s back tried to run me through, setting his twisting reptilian ride to cross my path. The lizard-mount cried out as I punched the monster between the eyes. Then I grabbed its spiked ruff and dragged it to the ground, so its rider slid within reach. A human skeleton, crafted from pale blue flame, keened in pain as I ripped through his rib cage with my sword.
His compatriots were not idle as I yanked my weapon free. I felt a searing agony where a demon’s barbed lance pierced my armor. The attacking demon bellowed in gleeful triumph, a cry cut short as I grabbed the weapon and pulled her off balance. An arrow bounced against my breastplate, but the second shot found a weak spot along my arm and hit true. Someone shouted flanking instructions from the rear.
I felt a shiver hovering between dread and desire as the battle turned against me.
I fought on. What else could I do? Surrender was impossible. These were not Joratese. They had no mercy for the defeated.
They had no mercy for anyone.
I had accounted for half their number when I heard the howls of incoming reinforcements.
I screamed in defiant response, laughed in their faces, smashed my sword through another demon. His twin responded with claw strikes, melting through my armor’s crumbling edges. I felt her blow as a white-hot blaze across my thigh.
Then the attack shifted. Paused. A gap formed. Demons who had closed all around me fled, running into the woods.
I knew why the demons ran.
Staunching phantom blood with shaking fingers, I turned to face their queen.
She was the most beautiful and horrible monster, skin pale as death, hands slick with fresh-spilled blood. Her gore-dipped hair glowed lurid white; her lips shimmered fungal green. Her breasts and hips held the promise of endless carnal delights, which more than one poor idiot had given their soul to taste.
A demon may look however she wishes, be whatever gender she wishes, but Xaltorath prefers to be female for me.
She knows it hurts me more.
***IS SOMEONE BEING TOO HARD ON HER PLAYMATES? THESE TOYS FIGHT BACK.***
“I’d say it’s nice to see you, but I hate lies.” I interposed myself between Xaltorath and the village. Its people would remain trapped in their cellar houses, nailed to their arbors, until Thaena’s servants arrived to rescue them. If the demon to whom they’d been sacrificed didn’t find them first.
Xaltorath observed my movement, knew what I meant by it.
***THOSE ARE MINE.***
I glanced behind me. “From the runes, I’d say those are Kasmodeus’s.”
***ALL THE MORE REASON I SHOULD CLAIM THEM, DON’T YOU THINK? I NEVER LIKED KASMODEUS.***
I raised my sword against her.
She smiled at me. ***ADORABLE. THIS IS WHY YOU’RE MY FAVORITE DAUGHTER.***
“I’m not your daughter,” I spat.
***NOW WHO JUST SAID THEY HATE LIES?*** The demon queen cocked her head to the side and studied me with an expression that always made my laevos stand on end. A brutal, alien look, heralding anything from a lecture on courtship rites to a lesson on torture with myself as the test subject.
She is not my mother.
She’ll never be my mother. I remember my mother, vague memories of dark hair and hearth fires. I recall her sweet apple scent, her fingers brushing my laevos, the nights spent counting stars when those distant jewels made themselves clear past Tya’s Veil.
No, Xaltorath isn’t my mother. But by her cursed race’s rules, I am her child. Her adopted child. Her claimed child.
Thus why Kalazan’s overheard prophecy bothered me so.
Xaltorath turned to face the village. ***YOU HAVE BEEN SUCH A GOOD DAUGHTER, DEAR CHILD. I WONDER: WILL YOU ALLOW COLDWATER TO HAVE DIED IN VAIN?***
My sword wavered. Coldwater village lay a short ride from Barsine’s capital, Mereina. I’d been there several times as a child, when my parents visited the baron’s family. Coldwater had prospered as a small village of skilled craftsmen. They made a watertight reed basket so fine it resembled cloth. My mother had bought a basket on a visit years before. I still owned it, left behind in Tolamer when I’d been forced to leave.
I didn’t recognize this place as Coldwater, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t.
I have no control over where I wander in my sleep, but the Afterlife mirrors the Living World. It’s not exact. The Afterlife might hold a mountain long since whittled to rolling hills in the real world, or plains and chasms now buried under dammed lakes. Cities are usually too new to have ghostly reflections, but villages are sometimes older than countries. A village razed to the ground, with all its inhabitants slaughtered, may last far longer in the Afterlife than it ever did in the Living World.
Her first words stuck in my throat. “Good daughter?” I spat at her. “I strike out at you at every turn. I slay every demon I find. I defy your every desire. I don’t want to be your ‘good’ daughter. I want to be your nemesis.”
She smiled proudly. ***AS I HAVE EVER WANTED. YOU HAVE BEEN SO DEFIANT, SO REBELLIOUS IT MAKES ME WONDER AT THESE HUMAN STORIES THAT CLAIM BEING A PARENT IS HARD.*** She put a hand to her heart. ***ALL I HAD TO DO TO RAISE A GLORIOUS CHILD WAS MAKE YOU IMAGINE I WANTED YOU TO BE MY MIRROR. I HAVE UPHELD MY BARGAIN WITH YOUR BIRTH MOTHER.***
“My mother made no bargains with you.” My rage flared as I buried my doubt. Xaltorath loved to lie and twist truth together in binding chains. I’d long since learned not to trust anything she said.
***OH, YOU’D BE SURPRISED WHAT MOTHERS DO TO PROTECT THEIR CHILDREN. SEND THEIR NEWBORN BABES AWAY WITH A HANDMAIDEN.4 MAKE BARGAINS WITH DEMONS. IT WASN’T EVEN YOUR MOTHER’S FIRST TIME. WE’RE OLD FRIENDS.*** She grinned and set a crimson tongue against her green lips. ***WILL YOU CONTINUE TO BE CONTRARY, I WONDER? KNOWING ALL YOUR BEHAVIOR IS BY MY DESIGN?***
“And how little you understand me if you think I act this way from spite. I despise you and I hate everything you represent. I won’t rest until your kind is no more.”
Xaltorath half blinked, slowly lowering her eyelids like a house cat. Her green lips curled. Then she leaned forward and uttered the single word that has haunted me for years since.
***GOOD.***