The demon princes stood there, solid and free, in front of the altar, along with a male and female demon wearing the green cloaks. The four princes, splendid in their gold-trimmed crimson robes and capes, had in truth regal bearings and manners, and appeared at once grander than the mere lesser demons and, somehow, seemed not ugly or brutish but grand, the perfection of their species. They spoke in a tongue that was beyond any of the mortals’ ability to comprehend, and their minds were closed, but clearly all of them were being sent out to meet whatever it was the sacrifice had also freed. Then, suddenly, thoughts became all too intelligible, a gesture that had to be deliberate.
<What of all these lower orders left here, Highness?> the female demon in green asked.
<The girl who freed us comes with us, > one of the princes responded. <We have to keep our bargain. She’s not much, I admit, but she will do. The other one already has all that was promised her. The others are not to be touched for now. We will tend to each at a later time. They are hardly going anyplace. Now, go. The master awaits us, and there is so very much to do.>
<But—why leave them? Why not just let us eat them or sacrifice them to the master ?>
The tone of the response was ugly, even dangerous. <You will never question my orders again or they will still „ speak in hushed tones of your agony in the days when the last sun grows cold! We have plans for them yet.>
The lesser demon bowed humbly. <As you command, sire.>
Now all were gone outside except the one prince, who walked over to them as they stood, still within the exceptionally crude pentagram. He looked at it and them with amusement.
<You should see yourselves!> he commented dryly. <Now I think you begin to comprehend just the barest hint of the powers you have been playing with. Your pathetic
attempt to guard against us even here with this crude and meaningless bit of geometry is high comedy. >
“What do you plan to do with us?” Jimmy asked him aloud.
<You have been—unexpected. Valuable for all that. We had not expected anyone to recognize us in theological, rather than mere mythic, ways. Your knowledge, in particular, has been astonishing. That such ancient, primitive faiths built upon ancestral memory would have survived interstellar expansion and cross-racial societies intact is incredible. Our ancient enemies are far more resourceful than we believed.> He suddenly paused, and his great homed head cocked slightly, as if listening to something. Then he added, </ must go. You have free run of the city. We have locked you out of materializing anything but food and drink, but that you now know how to get. Soon this city will live again, but, by then, I or someone else will have returned to tend to you. In the end, all of you will learn to worship and to serve us. All but you, priestess. I have already made a promise to you as to your fate, to wander forever through our new empire, bound by your stupid vows, powerless to affect events. Until later, then— farewell. >
He started to walk away and Gun Roh Chin muttered, “We could still cheat him. They cannot stop us taking our own lives.”
The demon stopped and turned. <To do that, particularly here, would only deliver you to us without effort. But you—most of you—won’t. You are survivors. That is why _ you got this far. > And, with that, he was gone.
Modra Stryke shook her head in wonder. “This is impossible. Things like this just don’t happen. Not for real. Not in this day and age.”
“They are the distillation of everything that was within everyone who ever gave me orders,” Josef commented. “I always hated them, too.”
“That thing is still outside,” Modra noted with a shiver. “Still, we might as well make ourselves as comfortable as we can in here until it goes.”
“You think it’s safe to leave the protection this early?” Krisha asked, looking nervous and ashen.
Josef shrugged. “He laughed it off anyway. Pathetic, he called it.”
“I’m not sure,” McCray told them. “He never crossed it. The power of authority is great in and of itself, and they lie with total conviction. I doubt if it would even be noticed by their master, but we were irrelevant to him, if, as I doubt, he noticed us at all. But the combination of sounds, geometry, and faith, which gives us a confident power as well if true enough, can stop or at least slow the more conventional creatures. We must remember that the Quintara are but another race of beings. They eat, probably sleep, even go to the bathroom. Their power comes from two external sources—their master, and the knowledge of superior technology and their access to it. And we must never forget that they can be beaten. Even their master was imprisoned in a sense. Thousands of years ago somebody beat them and sealed them away. These are the hordes of the ancient enemy of all races, and their master was that enemy personified.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting that their master is some kind of supernatural entity?” Josef asked, skeptical.
“None other. So powerful that he could only be imprisoned, and, even from prison, could influence and shape events. All our ancestral memories of demons and devils springs from here, from this source.”
“If that is true,” Krisha responded slowly, “then where are the gods?”
“The solution to that question might well be the solution to it all,” he told her. “We still have far too many questions.”
“I agree,” Gun Roh Chin put in. “All along I have been trying to fit the pieces of this puzzle together and still I have far too many pieces that do not fit.”
“How can such as we comprehend the supernatural?” Krisha asked him.
“Because you’ve got to get out of that way of thinking. This is just another problem, the same as all the other problems in all the alien environments all of us have worked
within at one time or another. We—Mizlaplanian, Mycohlian, and Exchange combined—are a new arm, a new team, a new unit. For the first time, we are faced not with lesser races but with greater ones. All three empires now stand a good chance of being overrun and conquered just as our individual races were overrun and conquered by the empires. He called us survivors, but we’re better than that! All of us are better than that! We’re fighters’.”
“We are six helpless prisoners in an alien capital without weapons, without access, reduced to the level of our primitive ancestors,” Josef retorted. “And if we do not figure out a way out of here, we’re no more than victims.”
“I agree that finding a way out is the key, but not to the rest,” the captain replied. “Get out of this cult mentality. I have seen many a world whose culture is so primitive, so undeveloped, its people yet ignorant, who would worship us as gods for the magic our knowledge and technology and experience appears. It’s no different here, but we’re more mature than that.”
“Do you honestly believe we can stand a chance against that thing!” Modra asked him.
“Not by ourselves, no. And we are six against the Quintara hordes. We need help. We know where to go to get that help, I think. They aren’t the only ones with the keys to this knowledge. Someone—their ‘ancient enemy’ they called them—set these locks and walked away. I think we are agreed on who that has to be. But first we must get to them.”
Jimmy McCray looked around the temple. Where Kalia had gone he couldn’t guess; she hadn’t passed them, but she didn’t seem to still be in the temple, either, although it was hard to tell. The mass on the altar was nothing but charred flesh. He spotted Molly’s body, looking unconscious or dead, face down in a far corner. No—not dead. He thought he saw her move.
“They’ve gone,” Modra sighed, and they all felt it. A sudden sense of relief mixed with a flood of emptiness swept through them. Theyjtnew they were alone once more.
“I don’t understand what made her do it,” Jimmy muttered.
“The blood on the floor. It allowed one of those presences to come through to our universe and possess her,” Josef responded matter-of-factly. “There’s no mystery there.”
“No, no! McCray’s got a point!” Chin put in. “It wouldn’t do to unlock those prisons if all you needed was to get inside a body. Demonic possession tales are as ancient as legend goes. If they could just have possessed one each from our empires they could have freed themselves at almost any time. The three would have to be true representatives. Otherwise, it’s too easy—and why go through all this?”
“But Molly wouldn’t have done that freely!” Jimmy objected. “She didn’t understand any of this. To freely act you must comprehend your actions!”
Molly groaned, managed to sit up, and shook her head. She gave a sudden gasp, then put her long hands to her face, feeling its contours, going down to her breasts, where she paused, playing her fingers over the nipples for a moment and smiling, and, finally, farther down, until she had felt or explored much of her body. Then she looked over and saw them all still standing there and brightened. “Hey! Jimmy! I’m back!” she called.
It was Molly’s voice, but it wasn’t Molly.
“Who or what are you?” he called back, challenging.
“It’s me, you asshole! I made it! I got my body, and it feels tremendous]”
He frowned. “What . . . ? Who . . . ?”
“Me, you shithead! Grysta! I’m back!”
<All my life I’ve been taught, and believed on the evidence, that the soul did not exist, > Tobrush commented worriedly. <Science has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the mind and brain are really one. Even in that so-called ‘other plane’ out-of-body experience, it was easy enough to see that we were never anywhere but in our own bodies, that our minds were simply dealing with additional sensory input to which we’d been attuned but which the brain was not equipped to handle or interpolate. It is, therefore, impossible that what claims to be the mind and consciousness, even memories, of the Morgh in the syn’s body can be who it claims. The brain died. Ergo, the mind and memories died as well. That has to be someone, something else, something that lived in that other dimensional set, which telepathically captured and merged with the morgh’s mind and memories before the creature died. That begs the question of who, or what, is really controlling that body, and why. >
“But the syn wasn’t telepathic,” Jimmy reminded the Julki. “She was an empath, yes, but of strictly limited design and range. She couldn’t even get in to perceive that other dimension. You tried to read her mind—so did I. She was limited, even retarded. How could something merge with or enter her?”
<That,> responded Tobrush, <is something we very much need to know.>
“I feel like a damned specimen in a lab jar,” Grysta, or whoever it was, complained.
The “new” Grysta had all the same attributes as they had, but her blocking on all levels was superb, beyond any of their abilities. She could and did open up to them, but that didn’t solve the problem, since only she would know how open she really was and what was concealed beyond their notice.
“What happened to Molly?” Jimmy asked her.
“Oh, she’s still here, sort of. All that was Molly, such as it was, is a part of me. She didn’t mind! I don’t think she minded nothin’. What a waste this body was with her! I’ll put it to better use!” 1
McCray decided that the only way to get information was to deal with her as if she were just who she claimed to be.
“You died, Grysta. Don’t you understand that?”
“I didn’t die, Jimmy. I told you I wouldn’t. That I would make it.”
“I saw the other plane’s access to this city. The entities were crowded around it, the opening too-small to keep out of their grasp. Nobody could have made it.”
“Yeah? Well / did,” she responded smugly. “I was just goin’ too fast for ’em, and, besides, I really wanted to make it.”
Gun Roh Chin came over and joined the conversation.
He’d been deep in thought, and now the conclusions he was reaching were dependent entirely on Grysta’s credibility.
“What happened once your consciousness made it through?” he asked her.