“I’m sorry,” he whispered in the demon’s ear, as he turned himself to shield against a shot from the archer on the roof. “I will save your people, but I cannot let you go unbound.”
My god broke faith with me, but I will not break faith with my god.
He waited for pain, for punishment, for agony. Through the channel came a wash of sadness instead. Sadness—but no surprise.
The Dreaming God’s paladins ran toward him. Shane eased the falling body down and looked up into their ranks. Three paladins, with faces like avenging angels. “Bind it now,” he urged them. “That
blow won’t kill it, but I can’t swear it won’t try to jump.”
For a moment, they stood frozen, and then Jorge moved. He dropped to his knees next to Shane, slapped his palm against Wisdom’s forehead…and stopped.
“What?” said Shane. “What’s wrong?”
Something was wrong. It wasn’t the Dreaming God’s people. It wasn’t the channel with Wisdom.
It was the body itself, so unnaturally still in his arms, not the stillness of a demon but a different stillness entirely.
He grabbed the tip of his glove in his teeth and yanked it loose, laying his hand alongside Jorge’s.
The other paladin didn’t flinch, merely gazed at him steadily. His skin was hot, slick with sweat, but the skin beneath both their palms was the same temperature as the surrounding air.
“It’s dead,” Shane said numbly. “It’s already dead.”
I knew you’d never actually turn on them, Wisdom whispered through the channel.
“Where is it then?” said Jorge. “Where did it jump?”
“I…” Shane shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. It said it wanted me to kill it so that it could get back to hell without being bound. But it knew I was going to betray it. It knew.”
Jorge ground his teeth together, then slumped. He leaned forward, looking deeply into Shane’s eyes for a moment, then reached out and gripped his shoulder. “You should have known better than to deal with a demon,” he said, almost gently.
“I did know,” Shane said. He could already feel its presence draining away. “It was the only way to save the others.”
“I know why you did it. The Dreaming God prevent me from ever having to make the same choice… NOW STAND. ”
Shane felt only the reflexive twitch of obedience that any ordinary human felt. He stayed on his knees. Jorge sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I can’t tell,” he muttered. “Dreaming God help me, I can’t tell. The taint is there, but I don’t see the demon in you, but it was old and subtle and we were friends…”
“We were,” said Shane, acknowledging the past tense.
“We have our orders,” said one of the other paladins. Shane didn’t recognize him. No surprise there, really, it’s been a long time and there were always far more servants of the Dreaming God than the Saint.
“Right.” Jorge took a deep breath. “The priests felt that you were too dangerous to leave alive.
Probably I should kill you now. But you’ve surrendered, and so I must give you the choice. The water or the sword.”
A clean death, or being drowned over and over until I die and the demon leaves me. But there is no demon in me. The thought of his own death no longer had much power to move him, but where had Wisdom gone?
And then, suddenly, he knew. Shane lifted his eyes, past Jorge, past the other paladins, to the
roofline, where the archer was already gone.
FIFTY-TWO
THE DEMON that called itself Wisdom hurried through the empty hallways of the keep. It was fairly certain that the paladin would keep his brethren busy for some time, whether he intended to or not.
Wisdom bore the human Shane no ill will. Indeed, it had rather liked him. He was so desperately confused, and yet so doggedly persistent that every time he did manage to work something out, it wanted to cheer. He reminded Wisdom of the demon’s own early, faltering steps in the world, when everything was new and terrible and strange, when every feeling registered with blinding intensity.
Well, it had done the best it could. It rather hoped that Shane would survive. Humans did such terrible things to each other, and it regretted having to leave him to his brethren’s mercies. But that was nothing compared to what they did to demons, and Wisdom would not allow itself to be bound to hell forever.
It was just congratulating itself on its escape when something came out of nowhere and sliced through the tendons in the back of its host’s legs. Pain flared through its consciousness, pain so intense that it felt like another sense had opened up and drunk in a thousand shades of agony. Wisdom wrenched itself back from the pain, shutting down its host’s senses as fast as it could. No more pleasant for her than me, it thought. It was currently ascendant in the body, of necessity, but it would have been cruel to let its host feel pain that Wisdom itself could shut out.
When the pain was shut down, the demon became aware of the next sense, which was cold stone against the host’s cheek. It rolled and sat up gingerly. Its host’s head did not feel right. We slammed into the floor very hard. The skull has moved in ways it should not.
It knew already that it could not run. Its attacker had cut vital tendons. Many injuries could simply be ignored once you knew how, but this was not one of them. The legs no longer worked right. It would have to crawl.
Damnation, it might even have to kill its host and go back to hell after all. What a miserable thought.
Its vision was not working well, but it managed to focus its host’s eyes on its attacker, which loomed over it like an avenging angel.
The human was female, taller than its current host, with hair that tinted red-brown in the light. Her
soul was strange. It did not extend far enough past her skin. Wisdom’s experience with humans was that their souls surrounded them like the corona of a star. Shane’s, for example, had blazed out in a halo of silver and violet, a good six inches from his body.
This human’s was tightly compressed inside herself, barely a glow along her own skin. When Wisdom reached out, she felt… dense. As if there was too much soul clamped in too tightly. How very odd.
Still, humans were odd and Wisdom knew it had not encountered even a tenth of the variations among them. This was just another kind, it seemed. Wisdom ran its senses over the strange new human and saw something unexpected. A channel, just above her heart, as scarred and closed as Shane’s had been. Another paladin? You do find them flocking together, like sheep or sparrows.
“Listen to me,” said the new paladin, her voice flat and cold. “You are going to do what I say.”
“Am I?” asked Wisdom. “You seem very sure of that.”
“You will,” said the paladin, “because if you do not, I will sever your spine here.” A cold kiss of blade against the skin that covered its host’s upper vertebrae. The body wanted to shudder and Wisdom allowed it. “Then I will summon the Dreaming God’s people, while you remain trapped, and they will bind you.”
Wisdom considered this. It was a fine threat, but it failed to account for one particular possibility.
It wondered if it should bother pointing this out to the human. Wise or unwise? Was the human being foolish or did she have some other plan? Did she think that she could prevent herself from becoming possessed? Perhaps against one of my lesser brethren your will would be enough, but I am something else entirely, human.