“I hadn’t thought you were prone to morbid curiosity.”
“Not curiosity. Necessity. Once I was certain what…”
“Enough ambiguity, Marek. That ended when you found out this thing was the Devourer.”
“When I knew it was Ythek Shri, I knew what I had to find. And I found them.”
“What?” Aldric was getting impatient again.
“Bones. The bones are what anchor the soul to fragile flesh, so the bones of someone slain by unexpected violence—”
“Violence is usually unexpected.”
“From an executioner’s sword, after due process of law? No. We both understand my meaning, Aldric. These have power.” The small pieces of bone which Marek took from his belt-pouch looked insignificant, but he held them with such care, almost reverence, that Aldric moved close enough to have a better look.
“Knucklebones,” he said. “You’ve cleaned them.” He recalled the other human wreckage on the cellar floor, and despite the carapace of armour Marek saw him shudder.
“The knucklebones of Sedna. They might be of use. A dead sorcerer can still have influence against the one who killed them.” Marek looked down at the small, ivory-pale fragments. “Several people in the fortress told me about her, about how pretty she was. As dainty as a doll.”
“But now she’s dust. Bones, and dry dust. Like my father and my mother and my brothers. We’re all dust, Marek, and soon or late we return to it.” Aldric pulled on his mail coif and buckled his helmet on top, but it was only when he locked his war-mask into place that the last vestige of humanity disappeared.
Marek remembered the first words he had spoken to Aldric Talvalin: At least you’re no demon. Now he wasn’t so sure. There were more demons than those in the books of Sedna’s library. A faint sound like a metallic intake of breath reinforced his thought as Isileth Widowmaker glided from her scabbard, and a flicker of reflected lamplight ran along the taiken’s edges.
“We have overdue business with Lord Crisen,” said Aldric.
Marek was sure that ‘we’ hadn’t included him.
*
The most likely place to find any Overlord, even one as unconventional as Crisen Geruath, was the great audience chamber at the heart of the inner citadel. And yet there were none of the guards, none of the retainers, none of the servants such an important hall should have required. There was no movement at all, and the fortress seemed empty from top to bottom.
“What’s the hour?” Aldric spoke quietly, and not because he was trying to pass unnoticed. This place felt like a holy house, with an atmosphere that discouraged loud voices. After a heartbeat’s pause, Marek realised the question wasn’t merely noise for its own sake to break the eerie silence. Aldric had been locked in that lightless cell long enough to confuse him, as if the beating whose marks showed on his face hadn’t caused confusion enough.
“After midnight,” he said. “No, after one in the morning. I think.”
“You think. Well, that explains the lack of people. Even servants have to sleep sometime.” Neither man noticed a shadow moving across the distant corridor junction, or they might have wondered how one so dense could be cast with no light behind it. That shadow was blacker than the darkest darkness, it moved without a sound and by the time Aldric looked around mere seconds later, it was gone.
Marek was already an incautious few steps ahead, and as he turned the next corner he collided with a group of lord’s-men moving so cautiously that he hadn’t heard them. Their caution might have been natural in this part of the fortress, or from fear of what else might be roaming the gloomy corridors; but whatever the reason, there was no room for retreat on either side. For an instant, no one moved.
That instant was enough.
The clatter of impact and outburst of startled swearing brought Aldric round the corner at a run. With surprise on his side the odds mattered far less than they should, and this was a chance to release his pent-up anger at Seghar, its crazed lords and even its soldiers. They were only doing what the Overlord commanded them to do, but too many showed excessive brutal relish in the way they did it. Then he saw what this group were carrying. Four held their usual gisarm cutting-spears, but the fifth had a two-handed sword whose long, wide blade ended in a squared-off tip. Aldric knew what such swords were for, and in this place, at this time, he knew who it was for. There was no more thought of restraint.
Gemmel Errekren had trained his foster-son in taiken-play for four long years, and trained him well, yet when he saw the training put to use it had shocked him. Marek hadn’t heard about that. He knew Aldric Talvalin was a skilled swordsman and had been warned he was dangerous. He had even been threatened by hidden daggers drawn almost too fast to see. But none of it prepared him for what happened next.
Marek had seen horrors enough in his career as demon-queller; they were part of his chosen life. This was not. He remembered Aldric as a young man who appreciated the good things in life, who could make entertaining conversation, who had enough artistic talent to draw a portrait. Cynical, and with good reason, but urbane and self-possessed despite that.
Now something else possessed him, a demon that scythed men like wheat. Marek kept thinking of all he had heard and read about gortaikenin. The hungry swords were things from Alban legend, but a demon-queller was the last person to dismiss their existence because of that. He flattened himself against a wall and almost threw up when a warm spatter of someone else’s blood hit him in the face.
Widowmaker cut right then left in an unbroken sweep of destruction, the Boar’s Strike low to high then the Eagle’s Strike high to low. On one side a torso split from crotch to breastbone and spilled entrails across the floor. On the other side a ribcage came apart like a wicker basket and the sheared lungs it contained exhaled bloody foam.
Neither man had even readied his own weapon.
The taiken flicked out in the Cat’s Strike and this time missed its intended target by inches as the soldier ducked. It did him little good. Instead of taking the point through his throat, he took it through his eye socket instead. Widowmaker wrenched free and whipped sideways to send the next man down with his gullet sliced to the backbone.
That left the last one, with the heading-sword, and he was already swinging it. But such blades were balanced only for the horizontal cut used on a scaffold, with no need for swift recovery into block or ward. Aldric dodged the stroke with an ease that bordered on contempt and sent the execution sword flying down the corridor.
Both the would-be executioner’s hands went with it, still tightly clamped around its hilt.
He was armoured, they were not. They hesitated, he did not. That made all the difference. Hesitation had already cost him far too much, and at some stage in the darkness of his solitary confinement Aldric had decided he would hesitate no more. He would act. Now the consequences of his darkness-born decision flowed across the floor of Seghar citadel and dripped from walls and ceiling. Though they were his enemies and he despised them, Aldric held no deep burning for any of these men, nothing as intense as the destruction wrought on Duergar Vathach. They were like him, both doing what they had to do.
He was killing, and they were dying.
But not all of them. One huddled by the wall, hugging himself with the stumps of bloody arms. Aldric wiped Widowmaker’s blade clean with a rag of unsoiled cloth and stared down at him.
“Where’s your Overlord?” he demanded. Deep in shock, the retainer made no sound. “You still live. That can change. I can change it in ways you won’t like. Where is Lord Crisen Geruath?”
“Aldric! Have you no pity, man?” Though still horrified by what the eijo could do, Marek was unwilling to tolerate this. “Remember what you are, not what you pretend to be!”
“Hark to my conscience.” Aldric straightened, leaving the soldier in painful peace to live or die at his own speed, and if he was shamefaced it was lost within the steel-cast shadows of mask and helmet. “Of course I have pity. But not here. Not now.”
*
The Overlord’s apartments were beyond the audience chamber. Aldric knew that much with no need to carve the information out of anyone. He unlatched one side of the great hall’s double doors, swung it open and peered inside. A few stubborn sparks glowed and crawled in one of the hearths, scenting the air with pine resin, but nothing else moved in the darkness. There was another smell besides burnt wood; it was the same tang of incense which had tainted the air in Sedna’s ruined cellar. And an all too familiar metallic stink of blood.
Sword in hand, Aldric strode towards the dimly outlined door at the far end of the hall, ready to kick it open. Halfway there his feet kicked something else, lumps of something soft, then skidded beneath him on a slick film covering the floor. Under his black armour the hair rose on his forearms and the nape of his neck.
“Marek? Marek – give me a light!” But even as he made the request, and it was a request rather than an order, Aldric knew there was no need. The things scattered across the floor were better without it. All he could recognise was the head with its jutting beard. Everything else was only meat, butchered with more force than skill. The slimy mass had once been Jervan, had once been human, but now it was a mass of chunks and gobbets glued together by congealing blood.
Aldric stared at it and felt his stomach heave, not because of what was just an elaboration of something he had already done four times over, but because of what it implied. Jervan had died like this for a reason, and the only reason he could think of was one involving Gueynor. A concern close to fear uncoiled inside him like a cold black snake, concern he had doubted ever feeling for her again. If Crisen could do this to his loyal garrison commander, then what in hell might he do to her?
What from Hell might he do to her?
Aldric’s boot smashed against the door alongside its lock and he felt timber give beneath the impact. A grey haze of smoke billowed out at him, and he coughed as it stung the back of his throat. The light within came from half a dozen fat black candles, each one taller than himself.
Crisen Geruath knelt on the bare floor of the room with an open book before him, mumbling to himself and tracing the words he spoke with a golden reading-wand. It scraped loudly as it moved back and forth across the roughness of the page’s vellum surface, keeping time with the cadences of his voice. Head bowed forward, intent on what he read, he gave no sign of knowing death stood in the doorway.
Gueynor lay before him, spread-eagled on her back.
Her outstretched limbs were secured at wrists and ankles to four heavy ring-bolts, so recently sunk into the wooden floorboards that their tops still showed bright dents from the hammer which had driven them home. A chalk-drawn pattern writhed around her body, and yet more marked the white silk smock which covered her. Lines of Jervan’s drying blood crisscrossed skin and silk alike, used instead of ink or paint to write the words of consecration on Crisen’s offering. The blood had smeared, the chalk-marks had scuffed, yet Marek could read the wards clearly enough to see their effectiveness was unchanged.
They were, and always had been, useless.
Between Gueynor’s fingers were two bloated black-red roses, their rich fragrance threading through the sweet smokiness of incense and the faint slaughterhouse smell from outside. A third lay between her breasts, its great thorns made more vicious by their contrast with her fragile flesh. The sombre blossom was as brilliant and baleful against pale skin and white silk as heart’s-blood spilled on snow, and it moved with her breathing, petals trembling as she trembled.
As if they too had life.
“Gueynor,” said Aldric, purposefully loud. She had turned away when the door burst open, not wanting to see the form her death would take, not wanting to watch it stalk across the threshold, unable to even to scream around the cloth stuffed into her mouth and tied there. But when she realised his voice wasn’t a trick played by Crisen’s hellborn monstrosity the look she gave him wasn’t fear or even relief, but simple gratitude. A single crystal tear ran down her face, and for Aldric it was as if all the hard words between them were never said.
‘You’re a romantic.’ That was what Kyrin had told him. It was better than most of the other things he had been called and doubtless would be called again. But it didn’t make him kind or careless. Not any more. He took a wary step forward with his attention focused on the Overlord, but Crisen paid no heed. Rings flashed as the man’s hands made elaborate gestures in the bitter air, and their hard, gemmed sparkle reflected in the gleam of Aldric’s eyes.
There were things he could have said about treachery, about tyranny, about blaming the innocent. Or about the dead, so many dead. Youenn, Evthan, Geruath and now Jervan. Light of Heaven, those were only the ones he had met! What about Gueynor’s parents Erwan and Sula, or the thirty devoured by the Beast? Even Sedna, for if Crisen hadn’t arranged her killing personally he had connived at it.
“Crisen of Seghar, your life is forfeit to me and I will…” Aldric began the formal announcement spoken by generations of Alban kailinin as they confronted their enemies for the last time, then stopped with a shrug. Why waste time and breath? Just do it.
Even when Widowmaker’s point reached out to touch the mad lord’s face there was no reaction, for he was mad indeed. Marek, kneeling knife in hand to cut Gueynor free, had no more doubts. Only a madman would sit there with Enciervanul Doamnisoar at his knees and mouth the phrases of a major Summoning in a room bare of protective wards. The demon-queller saw Aldric’s longsword stroke along the Overlord’s jaw, moving for the great vein underneath his ear. It was the right thing to do, but he didn’t want to witness yet another death, especially one so coldly delivered as this.
“Aldric, for the love of—”
Aldric turned slightly and stared without saying a word, but the candlelight reached inside his war-mask and what little it revealed of his expression was enough. Marek shut his mouth at once and kept it shut, even after the taiken slithered into her scabbard.
“For the love of what? Honour? Because of Isileth’s honour I won’t foul her with this man’s blood. Because of my own honour I won’t let him live. He wanted sorcery. He can have it.”
He spoke the words which brought life to the Echainon spellstone in his left hand, and its piercing whine reached into whatever otherworld Lord Crisen’s mind was wandering. The sound dragged him back to a semblance of sanity, and awareness that after so many deaths he too could die. His glazed eyes flickered, then went wide as they focused on the hot blue haze of leashed force dancing like a marsh-light around Aldric’s mailed fist. The Overlord’s slack-lipped mouth hung open and a thread of saliva drooled unnoticed into his lap.
Aldric’s own mouth twisted with distaste and he wished Rynert the King was here to see this. He would gain nothing by obliterating such vermin; nothing political, nothing personal, nothing honourable. But likewise he would lose nothing. Aldric raised his arm and tendrils of flame swirled along its steel-sheathed surface.
Then something rattled at the door.
He spun around, clawing Widowmaker out again with his free hand. Nothing burst into the room, but the heavy door swung slowly open on well-greased hinges. Outside, silhouetted against the darkness of the audience chamber, was a lord’s-man in a crested coat standing with both hands clasped behind his back. The retainer looked familiar, and his affected nonchalance was too suspicious, too obviously false. It screamed warning of a trap. Yet the man was alone, watching him through dull eyes, his breathing jerky and shallow. Then one arm swung round—
And was only an arm, with its hand missing. Aldric had sheared away that hand bare minutes earlier, and now alarm tocsins shrilled in his mind as he threw himself clear of the doorway with the speed of the fear of death. In that same instant the lord’s-man exploded from neck to crotch, his body ripped asunder by what came slashing through it.
An enormous talon at the end of an impossibly long, sinewy limb blurred with pile-driver force into the space Aldric had occupied a bare heartbeat ear
lier, and its three claws snapped shut on nothing. As the mangled decoy flew aside in a flailing tangle of arms and legs and entrails, a glistening black bulk beyond it filled the doorway.
Aldric rolled and rose to one knee as Ythek Shri tried to force a way inside. Wood cracked and plaster crumbled as its massive form squeezed across the threshold into the place from which its Summons had come. Most of the candles had gone out, choked by dust or toppled by falling debris, but there was still enough light for him to see the Warden of Gateways. Even in pitch darkness he could have seen too much for peace of mind or dreamless sleep until this thing was dead and he had seen it so.
Ythek was vaguely insectile, slightly reptilian, and totally hideous. Slimed and shiny surfaces glistened as the being moved. In a room where the stench of burst intestines had replaced that of scented smoke, it was repulsively at home. And it had laid a trap for him.
Why? Why?
As the Echainon spellstone throbbed and burned against his hand, Aldric realised the answer. Light and darkness, heat and cold, spellstone and demon; all were ancient adversaries, and when he carried one he became an enemy of the other.
As Ythek advanced through a cloud of dust and fragments its head swung from Aldric on one side to Marek on the other, sizing them up, considering which one was the more immediate threat. And there was also the gift so carefully prepared to welcome it. Gueynor didn’t scream when the demon looked at her, if a being without visible eyes could look at anything. She didn’t faint and didn’t even turn away. Instead she stared at the Devourer with awestruck horror, like a doomed rabbit watching the final dance of an approaching stoat.
But when its attention turned to the one who had Summoned it, Crisen Geruath cringed beneath the weight of icy malice brought to bear on his cowering frame. With a repellent shearing noise the demon’s maw gaped wide in, what on something more remotely human might have been a grin of satisfaction. It would have accepted the offering for lack of better, but those who made such offers were always more appealing. That was why sorcerers took such care with their protective wards, and why mistakes were fatal. It ignored the others and took a long stride forward to the one who would most please its Master.
The Demon Lord Page 29