Devil's Ways

Devil’s Ways

An anthology by:

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Persephone D’Shaun

Ben Loory

R.S.A.Garcia

Michael Swanwick

Andy Duncan

Curtis C. Chen

Darrell Schweitzer

Imogen Howson

Edwina Harvey

Nancy Kress

Avram Davidson

J. M. Sidorova

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Dragonwell Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2020 by Dragonwell Publishing

Edited by Anna Kashina and J. M. Sidorova

Design by Anna Kashina

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Published by Dragonwell Publishing

www.dragonwellpublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-940076-49-2

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

Preface

There is no light without dark; no highlights without shadows; no good without evil.

No God without the Devil.

The Devil takes many guises, showing their face in every culture and religion. From the sovereign of the underworld, the Death Incarnate, to minor deities too mischievous to contain themselves when messing with humans is so much fun, the Devil has been with us for as long as we remember. It seems, the more benevolent and good are the people’s gods, the more evil and depraved become their devils. And yet, even having created the Devil as the Enemy, the Destroyer, we can’t help but peek behind this fearsome facade. It seems impossible to leave it alone, resist the forbidden. So sure we are that the Devil is always deeply interested in us humans, so drawn to the mystery that shrouds the embodiment of the ultimate Evil. Perhaps it is the mystery itself that makes it so irresistible to continue looking the Devil’s way, portraying him in stories and lore—as a Destroyer, yes—but also as a trickster, a meddler, oh and a seducer, of course. Often, the Devil arises from something we did, created or awoken by our actions. As we peek long enough, we want to discern her soft and blind spots, personality quirks and personal problems—bits of humanity, in other words, that make the Devil more—relatable? Now the devil is an enemy, but a beatable one, a trickster, but semi-competent, a villain, but with a tragic back story. Sometimes the Devil is not what we expect. Every once in a blue moon the Devil even does something good.

Truth be told, the Devil is where things happen. Where stories begin.

This collection brings together stories from multiple cultures, featuring the Devil both as an abstract concept and a creature, a terror, a force of nature, an enemy, a trickster, and so many more. Step into the world of shadows, and travel through Devil’s many incarnations spanning centuries of history and myth, from the Ancient Greece, African and Caribbean folklore, dark ages in Europe, all the way to the present day.

Anna Kashina

J.M. Sidorova

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Persephone D’Shaun

Nzembe

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Last week all the nzembe-born children in town went into trances.

The week before that, leopards sat together on my grandmother’s porch for an entire day, keeping her inside. Later, many women came to her for help, insisting they had fallen into sleep in the middle of the day and been violated by evil spirits in the shape of vulgar children.

And the week before that, Henriette claimed to have seen a sharp-toothed boy peeking at her from one of the thick clusters of palm trees that grow near Little River.

I do not want to think about these things, but today memories are thick and dry like wild grass in the place between towns, tinder in my mind, needing only the smallest spark to destroy the fragile peace I have built.

Today...

The nebulous halo that is the sun, hidden by a yellow-gray expanse of clouds, is halfway into the sky as I approach the house of the biomancer. A two-story building with a slanted tin roof and a covered porch, it is the largest house in the town; once a mission hospital, it has been rebuilt piece-by-piece many time since the X-HIV plague.

Siabanda! my grandmother calls. She is the biomancer, although her proper title is Priestess. Always she uses my full name, when everyone else calls me Sia. You are late. Even though she is blind, my grandmother always knows the time of day. Did you stop by Zaria’s to remind her that her payment is due?

Zaria owns one of the bunny houses in town and leases most of her nzembe from my grandmother. It is a lucrative business. My grandmother animates nzembe and leases them to the owners of the bunny houses.

I hesitate, certain I see a child smiling at the window of my grandmother’s house. But when I take another step, there is nothing.

Siabanda?

Yes, grandmother. She will bring it by tomorrow morning. I glance at the window one more time, but there is no small face between the gauzy curtains she has hanging inside.

Good. Now come, tell me what you were doing that made you so late. Show me what you found.

The sack I carry is heavy; I am afraid the material will break, so thin from more than a decade of use. But it holds, and after I push an inanimate nzembe blocking the porch of my grandmother’s house out of the way, I carry my burden up the stairs to where she sits in a rocking chair older than she is.

She is very old.

What will you use that one for? I ask about the nzembe.

That one is empty.

Ah. They are everywhere, these empties, moving only when prompted, for some reason unable to house the demons my grandmother summons to animate them.

Now. If you are a good granddaughter, you will tell me that you were busy making a grandchild for me.

I don’t answer, because she already knows I wasn’t.

When I married my first husband, Gabriel, the idea of five or six children—preferably all girls—appealed to me; I wanted to be a mother, and oh! How powerful it would make me! And Gabriel!

Beautiful, smart Gabriel, with his wide smile and intense gaze.

I would do anything to have him back.

Siabanda, where are you right now? My grandmother breaks into my thoughts. I feel your soul wandering.

I sigh. Only further into myself. I have brought a story for the Priestess.

My grandmother straightens, but she is not surprised, motioning to me with her hand.

This is the end of the story, I say after a moment’s hesitation.

What is it?

A head.

Put it in my lap then.

No priestess is squeamish. I upend the sack into her lap, arranging the head it so it properly faces her. Running her fingers over it, she exhales softly.

I wait. The early afternoon is quiet, with fresh laundry and burnt sugar sweetening the air. Someone will be upset, sugar is hard to come by. Dusty streets are mostly deserted for the heat, the empty nzembe a familiar comfort dotting the landscape, silent, unmoving, vacant. That is why I do not like to visit Freetown. Lacking the presence of empty nzembe, the old city is eerie and unnatural.

Except.

Gabriel and I met on a salvaging trip into Freetown. His group came up from the south pulling a big flatbed, hoping to find toilets; my friends were out for copper wire and light bulbs. I was looking for inanimate nzembe on my grandmother’s orders, even though people had stripped the city of them before I was ever born, making it a ghost town.

From the first moment we met, we didn’t look away from each other, Gabriel and I, and my heart broke when he admitted after a stolen kiss that he’d promised to marry a girl from his town who was pregnant with his child.

My grandmother breaks the silence, shatters the memory. Her words have a different cadence to them, less sharp, more liquid. It is time for the beginning of this story. You need me to be grandmother as well as Priestess, Siabanda. For this, you need both.

First Husband argued with me today. It is the reason the past will not leave me alone.

Everyone in the neighborhood knows you argued with First Husband. She pats the head and waves a hand wrinkled by time, but not as wrinkled as it would be if she were not a Priestess. Every summoned demon leaves a tiny spark of itself inside a priestess when she implants it into a nzembe; it is what allows her to control them, to give them instructions to carry out whatever function the demons have agreed to, in exchange for having a body. We could all hear the shouting, if not the words. What was it about?

I am certain she can hear me rolling my eyes when I speak. "The usual. He wants to come to my bed, the sex nzembe aren’t warm enough, they aren’t tight enough, the bunny house is too far away, they don’t participate the way he wants them to, I am a terrible wife and mine are the only husbands who have never been allowed into my bed, whine, whine, whine. And he was arguing with me, grandmother, not the other way around."

She purses her lips, blows a sound of dismissal. It is nothing new.

No. I drop the old, bloody sack, kick it across the splintered wood and off the porch.

The man who became First Husband paid a bride price for me almost as soon as my Gabriel disappeared on the horizon, the day his people came and dragged him away. It was one month after my seventeenth birthday. At the time, First Husband was thirty-four, and like many older men, desirous of a wife not yet out of adolescence, something I could not, and do not, understand. What was okay between Gabriel and I, was not okay between that man and I. I have never taken him to my bed.

It is not new, I agree. But he also told me today that it was he who went to Gabriel’s town to tell them of Gabriel’s whereabouts. I do not know whether he spoke truly, for he often says cruel things to me. He said that I should be happy with him, for he and my other husbands are all I will ever have. I have four, although only Razi, my Fourth Husband, is not unwanted; he wants nothing from me physically and is my true friend.

The Priestess flattens a hand over the coarse matted hair on the head. You did not keep your temper. It is why my grandmother does not speak of Gabriel to me. She understands that I am not rational about Gabriel. I will never forget her words from that day of punishment, severe and echoing with the power of biomancy: It is a hard lesson, Siabanda. Every action is a purchase, every consequence a price that must be paid. This you have known; it is the first lesson I taught you when the demons told me you would one day be a priestess.

Of course I didn’t keep my temper! If he speaks truly, it is he who ruined my life!

You did that to yourself, Siabanda. When Gabriel came to town with three verified inhabitable nzembe and two breeding goats for a bride price, you did it to yourself. When he was here instead of there, giving himself to you instead of her, you did it to yourself. When you did not come to me for help, you did it to yourself.

I stare at the back of the head in her lap. The blood has soaked into her bright skirt, a slow, crimson spread that will dry into something dark, a permanent stain. My reply is bitter, because I know she has a point, and my heart is broken, and has been for eight years. You have always believed we were in the wrong.

He was promised. He acted dishonorably. How is that right?

It is more right than what was done, I say, clenching my fists. You ruined three lives instead of just one. I remember our wedding, how in the sweet dark night we learned each other’s bodies, and afterward I begged Gabriel to tell me his version of my favorite childhood tale.

A lot of people still believe that white people in the United States created the nzembe to kill off all the Africans, but it wasn’t true. The nzembe apocalypse hardly bothered African countries at all, not the way HIV, and later XHIV, had.

Besides, nzembe came from Africa in the first place. That is why all over the world, old African magic let us evolve into what we are today. That, the beginning of biomancy, was the tale he’d told, making me giggle. I’d never heard a funny version of how biomancy came to Sierra Leone.

It was perfect, and I loved him.

I try not to lose my temper with grandmother. I would have supported the woman and her child. Or I could have taken her as wife. It is rare, but not unheard of. Now she is married to a man who will always make sure she knows that he does not love her. She is unhappy, he is unhappy, and I am unhappy.

Are you certain? Men come to love the women they take to their beds, and forget the ones they don’t.

Maybe some men do, but Gabriel won’t. I would never lose the image of that final desperate look on his face, before his feet unwillingly carried him one step too far for me to make out his features. He looked over his shoulder until the horizon swallowed him and the men dragging him away from me and he was gone out of my life forever. Not ever, I add for emphasis, even as my control slips.

Remembering makes me furious and I and lash out, striking the head off my grandmother’s lap. It hits the floor with a solid thunk. So no, I did not keep my temper. I told First Husband I would see him dead and get Gabriel back if it was the last thing I did, and together we would piss on his grave. A useless threat, but I was very angry at the time.

My grandmother waits, slowly rocking back and forth. Are you finished?

Did you know? I challenge, although I pick up the head and she stops the movement of her chair long enough for me to put it back in her lap. I back away and take a deep breath. I am not rational when it comes to Gabriel. In a more respectful tone, I repeat, Did you know?

Continue with your story. She does not answer my question, which is in itself answer enough: First Husband had reported Gabriel after our marriage. I try not to hate her, but I always have, just a little, since that day.

There will be no persuading her, however. Well then, after First Husband went out, I went to see Nasratha. One of her kids wandered off when she sent him to the store. I found him outside of town, sitting quietly as they do, with vacant eyes and his mouth hanging open. He was all the way out near Little Hill.

They always go out into the woodland, those wandering nzembe-born. The result of nzembe copulating with one another and rescued before the demon in the maternal nzembe can force out the newborn soul and take over the body, nzembe-born are touched in the head, but human. Mostly. When we walked back, the kid spoke at great length about what he saw and did in the spirit world. I thought to bring him back by way of the brick road.

A pretty detour.

Yes. But as we went, I saw one of your enforcers off in the distance. The day Gabriel and I were punished, my grandmother called up three demons, and before she put them into the nzembe, they each licked my soul, and Gabriel’s. A more repulsive violation does not exist on all the earth. It meant they could track us forever, force us to follow the orders my grandmother gave them as part of our punishment. I could never leave the boundaries of our land, and Gabriel, although he made heated promises before they dragged him away, could never leave his. I can feel when they are close, those soul-licking nzembe, like sand in all the places you never want it. Usually I walk the other way. It marched right toward us. Nasratha’s boy became very excited, jumping up and down and laughing, and I had to hold him by the arm.

And my nzembe? The scrutiny of the Priestess is intense; she searches me with sight that does not use eyes, and sees everything.

It carried the end of the story, dropping the head at my feet before it walked off. I picked it up and took the boy home. But on the way, he kept pointing into the grasses, the trees. I would see something, but then it would be gone.

A cryptic smile crosses the soft, wrinkled features of her face. You are correct. It is not quite the end.

I cross my arms over my chest, lean against her porch railing. It shifts outward under my weight, but holds. I will replace it for her this week, I think.

She places her right palm flat atop the head. You know I must ask you, Siabanda. Did you do this thing?

This is why it is a story for the Priestess. I argued with my First Husband, threatened to kill him and piss on his grave, and now his head is in my grandmother’s lap. I am strong, almost as strong as my grandmother. People will say I animated a nzembe and had it pull off my First Husband’s head for spite. I did not. Just because I said it doesn’t mean I actually want him dead. Wanted him dead.

She thinks, and I know the flow of her mind, because it is the same as mine a few hours ago. You did not see his body?

Your nzembe was... messy. Like a devil nzembe. The nzembe that necromancers take control of using devils are the only ones that roam anymore, mindlessly eating anything they can catch. They are surprisingly fast too, so although things with wings or four legs usually escape, people are not so lucky. And because devil nzembe are mindless, their feasting is sloppy.

Nzembe animated with demons by biomancy will eat flesh only if it is pertinent to their instructions in some way: if a nzembe is set to guard a husband’s fidelity and he breaks it, the nzembe can rightfully eat him. If I go outside the boundaries of our land, the nzembe can eat me as well. There is one exception. They also eat flesh if they come across a body already dead. It is known and accepted. But demon nzembe are not mindless, and they eat neatly.

So it was that if someone found my First Husband’s body cleanly eaten, it would not be so strange. But instead I was given his head and grandmother’s nzembe looked as if it had eaten flesh in the wild way of a devil nzembe.

Do you recall Henriette’s tale of the sharp-toothed boy?

I nod.

And the vulgar children on the day of the leopards?

Another nod.

I think, Siabanda, that we are dealing with those we did not rescue.

Those we did not rescue. The Un-rescued Ones, the babes carried off by paternal nzembe, the demons housed in a new body that cannot be controlled by a Priestess, leaving the empty maternal shell behind.

As far as I know, no one has seen any of those children, but it was always only a matter of time. After all, demons are not tame. They are not grateful. And while, unlike their dead counterparts—devils—they are capable of kindness, usually they aren’t. They are leashed by the Priestess’s power, and like any wild thing, will escape whenever they can.

If they grow like normal children, the Un-rescued ones should become full adults...but do they?

The Priestess tugs on the lips of First Husband’s head in her lap. We do not know. But these sightings...my nzembe, eating like a devil, yet mindful enough to bring you a neatly severed head. It does not matter how they grow. This speaks of power unbound by any biomancer, and only the Un-rescued ones may have such power. Go fetch your remaining husbands. We will need a fourth to witness for First Husband. I will ask the demons for a vision. She levers herself out of the rocking chair, keeping hold of the head, ambling into her house.

I walk east through the town, navigating small roads and tightly packed shacks, pushing empties out of my way. I know where Razi is, and I find him first, cleaning rifles in the dusty front yard of his lover’s house—a secret Razi entrusted to me long before he was my husband—and tell them both to come. Next year I will take his lover as Fifth Husband, but until then, I only hope they do not get caught. For now, the man can witness in place of First Husband.

We split up to check the bunny houses, which is where Second Husband spends much of his time if I do not