1. EXCISION #2
Brother Taoro set a heavy, reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. “Demons can be adept at hiding, and this is why our order exists. Have no fear—we will excise this one, too.”
Natok nodded meekly. He wouldn’t look Taoro in the eye, but that was to be expected. A telepathic priest’s white irises, long since drained of natural color as their extradimensional senses developed, tended to unsettle most people.
“You said he started a fire?” said Hesaya, as she examined the boy. “How?”
The question seemed to confuse Natok. “I did not see.”
Hesaya checked the boy’s pulse, then his pupils. She stood back. To an untrained observer, she would not appear to be doing anything at all, but Jacen quietly prompted Nines, “What is the first stage of exorcism?”
“Assessment,” said the girl. “She’s examining his mind. Searching for the demon.” Her dark grey eyes, still barely flecked with white, narrowed on the boy. “I don’t sense anything.”
“Your sight is only a tool,” said Jacen. “If you’re going to use it, don’t squint. Don’t strain. Look through the world, not at it, and see what the Source has touched.”
The Source was the dimension from which demons came. Its energy tainted all living creatures, made them vulnerable to demonic influences. With the proper talents, one could detect that energy. With the proper training, they could even manipulate it.
Every telepath was different. Some sensed it as a subtle hum, others a scent.
To Jacen, extradimensional energy had a pulse.
He had distant memories of what it had been like when he was first learning, struggling to hold it in focus.
Now . . . drink dulled his senses, but still he felt it: a strange and constant alien heartbeat, whether he searched for it or not.
He kept his distance so as not to distract Hesaya but performed his own rudimentary assessment. It took Nines a moment longer. Jacen suppressed a grin when he heard her grunt of satisfaction. The girl was quick.
The possessed boy thrashed in his restraints and made a noise like nothing human. His mouth moved, and the pulsing web of his mind stuttered. Shifted. Hesaya blinked, flinching backward a step.
“Oh.” Nines clamped a hand to her forehead. They all felt it, even the boy’s family—as though suddenly, the air in the room had grown too crowded. “That was manifestation, wasn’t it?”
The boy sat bolt upright, regarding them with a flat, ancient stare. A grey-blue shimmer slid over his irises like flies floating on water.
“The demon reveals itself,” Jacen affirmed. “It’s so small,” Nines said.
That it was. Simple to assess, driven by little more than survival instinct, and less intelligent than the pigeons that delivered Jacen’s reports each morning.
“Very old, though,” he said. “And still quite dangerous.”
“It’s only vermin,” Hesaya said to Natok, who translated for his family. “A nameless creature. It used a candle to start the fire; it has no power of its own.”
A touch of disappointment tinged her psyche. Odd. But before
Jacen could be certain about it, the feeling was gone. He shook himself, blaming the hangover and his general unease.
“Now we coax it out and trap it,” Hesaya was saying. “Keep your distance.”
As she spoke, Taoro sprinkled holy oils along the windows and doorframe.
This, of course, was all for show. Some exorcists used incense or talismans, other hymns and verses from the White Codex, but this battle was all in the mind.
Hesaya took her place at the foot of the cot, Taoro on the left, Jacen and Nines on the right, like three points of a triangle.
“Undying gods above, creators of the world, builders of our great city!” Taoro intoned, with unnecessary drama. “Divine lords of suffering! We implore you spare this child. Grant him your mercies and deliver his body and soul.”
“Sister Jinaan is a master at extradimensional communion,” Jacen said to Nines. “Pay close attention. Do you remember the third stage?” “Interrogation—” Nines started to say, but Ciro thrashed against his restraints with another inhuman scream.
“Help me hold him down,” Taoro ordered, and Nines quickly complied.
Jacen turned to the family. “This part can be uncomfortable.” Extradimensional communion was the language of demons. One felt the disturbance it caused in their bones; it echoed in the mind and branded itself there. “Try to remain calm. Emotion makes you vulnerable.”
Ciro’s mother muttered to herself in Zal, fidgeting with her necklace of obsidian beads and dyed-red cactus fibers. It sounded like a prayer, to a god far older than Zivora’s, and it made Natok say something curt and urgent to her.
“No.” Jacen waved a hand, though the couple regarded him with renewed suspicion.
“Use whatever focus tool serves you best.” His fellow priests often disagreed—indeed, Taoro was glowering at him—but Jacen had always opined it was the purpose, not the minutiae, of the religious practice that mattered.
Hesaya pressed two fingers of her left hand to her temple and raised her right as if parting a curtain, parsing the invisible tapestry of Ciro’s mind.
“In the name of the Six,” she pronounced, “I command you to depart this vessel.”
Ciro’s limbs jerked and twitched as the demon’s control slipped. It tried and failed to respond to Hesaya, appropriating the boy’s vocal cords for a dissonant attempt at speech.
Anguish emanated from the family, throbbing against the inside of Jacen’s skull.
The parents remained rooted in place—there was fear there, too.
The sister, a girl of no more than six with a large birthmark on her cheek, tried to run to Ciro.
Jacen knelt and caught her before she could reach him.
As she struggled against Jacen’s hands, tears streamed down her face.
“It’s almost over,” he told her. She didn’t understand.
He looked to Natok for help, but the man’s haggard gaze was fixed on his son.
Jacen lowered his voice and switched to Zal.
Unlike Hesaya, he’d been forbidden from learning it.
But it had come to him as easily as a mother tongue.
It was his earliest shame, the first secret he’d kept from the Church. “Ciro is safe. Look—”
Hesaya had transitioned to the next phase—excision. The separation of demon from host. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her lids fluttered, as what transpired in her mind commanded all her focus. Her fingers worked furiously, like a weaver at a loom.
Still holding the child, Jacen joined Taoro in linking their minds with Hesaya’s, waiting on the periphery of her consciousness in case she needed assistance. She rarely did, but an exorcist could never be too careful.
Hesaya attempted to trick the demon, finding its shape, teasing it out—a risky, time-consuming strategy, and not one Jacen would have chosen.
He trusted Hesaya not to cause brain damage; she was a strong Fifth Tier telepath, but this demon was too primitive to call a bluff.
Jacen would have simply scared it out by clamping off the boy’s vital functions.
Jacen, however, was Sixth Tier, one of only a handful in their order.
Gods, but he missed this work.
Ciro’s left hand spasmed. The flesh of his palm bubbled and bulged.
A pale, wormlike creature slithered upward as though tethered to an invisible thread.
Hesaya coaxed it out, excruciatingly slowly.
Blood trickled down Ciro’s hand, streams twining around his wrist as he whimpered in pain.
Demons usually entered through a facial orifice while the host slept, and could emerge from anywhere the exorcist found convenient.
The hand was not what Jacen would have chosen, either—perhaps the shoulder, or the thigh, somewhere with a large muscle and fewer moving parts, so as to minimize internal damage.
He made a mental note to explain this to Nines later.
From inside his robes Taoro produced a special container: a tube of strange, pale material, provided by the gods themselves to contain a demon until it could be delivered to them and destroyed. He positioned it over Ciro’s hand.
The rope around the boy’s left ankle snapped.
He flailed, confusion and pain roiling around him.
His foot connected with Taoro’s face. Taoro dropped the container, swearing in a most un-priestlike manner, and the demon fell from the boy’s hand to the floor.
It twitched there, dazed, then wriggled under the cot.
It took Jacen, Hesaya, and Taoro half an instant to realize none of them would fit down there.
Nines glanced between them, seized the container, and dove.
There was a clang of metal against clay.
She emerged seconds later, twisting on the lid with trembling hands. The extra presence in the room faded.
“I got it,” Nines exclaimed.
Hesaya gave her an approving nod and beckoned the parents forward. Gently, Jacen urged Ciro’s sister to follow.
Hesaya held up Ciro’s bloody hand, showing the family the ridged, coiled pattern not unlike the scars of a rootworm infection.
“This is the final stage: reemergence. Treat this as you would any wound, be gentle with him, and give him water and rest. Lord of Sickness willing, he’ll be past this in a few days. ”
Ciro’s mother knelt beside the cot, embracing her son and murmuring to him in Zal. Natok faced Hesaya, tears lining his eyes. “Thank you, Sister.” He clasped his hands together and bowed low. “Brothers. Thank you for saving him.”
Hesaya pointed heavenward. “All glory belongs to the gods.”