Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  Jenny retreated to a corner of the hearth, willing herself not to be seen. She understood why Ian had taken the poison, and she thought about taking it herself. They all seemed very distant from her. Certainly they seemed less real than her memories of what it had been like to be beautiful and powerful and able to do exactly as she pleased. She knew that this was not right, yet she could not do anything about this part of her thoughts.

  Snow fell again in the afternoon and drifted high against the stone walls. The grooms who’d come with the aunts brought shovels from the stable and labored to keep the yard clear. Jenny wondered once or twice, Why Folcalor? Then the darkness that pressed her heart overcame her again, and she retreated to sleepy dreams.

  The following day Ian opened his eyes. He said, “Yes,” and, “No,” in a blistered whisper when John spoke to him, no more inflection in his voice than it had had since the demon had been driven out of him. Then the wind came up in the afternoon, flaying the land and driving the snow into drifts. It was best, John said, propping his spectacles more firmly on his long nose, that they go soon, for he knew bandits were abroad even in the bitter world of winter.

  While the grooms brought out the other horses, with the wind tearing manes and plaids and blankets, Jenny took her mare Moon Horse from the stable and saddled her. There was a great boiling of people in the yard just then, and John was entirely occupied with making sure Ian was wrapped warm. Jenny had no magic anymore, but long years of living in the Winterlands with only slight powers had taught her to see when people turned their heads. As aunts and grooms and John and Muffle rode out of the yard, she led Moon Horse back into the stable and unsaddled her, and from the little attic window she watched them ride away across the moor. Snow filled their tracks before they were even out of sight.

  In the ballads of the great heroes, she thought, watching them go—Alkmar the Godborn or Selkythar Dragons-bane or Öontes of the Golden Harp—the heroes frequently sustained injuries in slaying the dragon or overcoming the cave monsters or outwitting the evil mage. So they must, for there is no sacrifice unless blood is shed. But they survived and came home, and everything was as it was before, only happier.

  No desolation. No regret. No wounds that cannot heal.

  Part of her thought, Oh, John.

  And another whispered Amayon’s name.

  She went down the ladder and built up the fire in the hearth again and found food the aunts had left. She made herself a little soup but didn’t eat it. She only sat, wrapped in a quilt, watching the fire and seeing nothing in it but flame and memory.

  Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes.

  She slept and dreamed of the demon still.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Lord Aversin.”

  John woke with a start. His son’s hand was cold in his. The fire in the tower bedroom had almost died. The Hold was silent below.

  The Demon Queen was in the room.

  She looked the way she’d looked when he’d gone into the Hell that lay behind the burning mirror, away in the South in what had been the city of Ernine: a slim long-legged woman with a face that combined a girl’s fresh beauty with the wise sardonic wit of thirty. Her black hair was an asymmetrical coiled universe of braids and ringlets and rolls strung with pearls and jewel-headed pins. Things lived in it. He sometimes saw them move.

  Her eyes were gold and had squarish, horizontal pupils like a goat’s. She had a magic that she used to keep him from noticing this—magic and the fact that her peach-perfect breasts were defended by a silk drape no thicker than a breath of smoke. He was further aware that her whole appearance was a sham, a spell, a garment that she wore. Without knowing quite how he knew, he knew what she really looked like, and this turned him sick with terror.

  Her name was Aohila.

  She smiled with her red lips and said, “John.”

  “Better stand on the rug.” With one foot he scooted it toward her, a much-mangled sheepskin that the cats hid twigs and bird feet under when they weren’t concealing them among the quilts on the bed. “Me Aunt Jane’ll be up in a minute and make you wear slippers. She don’t hold with bare feet even in summer.” He fumbled on his spectacles, feeling better for being able to see her clearly. “Sorry about the star you sent me for, and the dragon’s tears, and all that.”

  He saw her face change, anger like a holocaust of summer lightning in those yellow eyes at the reminder of how he’d tricked her when he paid the tithe he owed her for the spells she’d given to save Ian and Jenny. The snakes—or whatever they were—stirred eyelessly in her hair and opened their small-toothed mouths.

  “You’re a clever man, Lord John.” The seductive note vanished from her voice. She ignored the sheepskin; instead she came to stand by the bed before him, close enough that she could put her hands on either side of his face. His grip tightened on Ian’s fingers. Not, he thought, that he could do a single thing to stop her from hurting his son, but he felt better with his body between her and Ian. “I appreciate cleverness.”

  “You’re one of damn few, then.” He kept his voice steady and his eyes looking up into hers. “Me dad didn’t. ‘Don’t you be clever with me,’ he’d say, and I’d get the buckle end of his belt; he’d only get wilder if I asked, ‘Do you want me to be stupid?’ But of course I did ask, so maybe I wasn’t so gie clever after all.” As with her appearance, her smell was sometimes human and seductive, and sometimes something else.

  She got out from behind the mirror somehow, he thought, blind with panic. And then, No. This is a dream.

  Like all those other dreams.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  “I can heal your son,” she said.

  She spoke offhandedly, not even looking at Ian, as if she offered to use her influence with a friend to secure the pick of a skilled herd dog’s litter.

  “Me Aunt Jane says he’ll live.” Demons always wanted something from you. That was what the ancient lore said, and he had found it to be so. Wanted something from you and would promise something in return.

  “I can cure his heart,” she said. “Close up the wound the demon Gothpys left in him. It isn’t much. Gothpys is my prisoner—” And she smiled with evil reminiscence. “—but I know his voice still whispers in your son’s dreams.”

  He took her wrists and pushed her from him. Still, he did not rise from the stool on which he sat, or dreamed that he sat, beside the bed. Fat Kitty and Skinny Kitty, who had been sleeping on the coverlet when the Demon Queen entered, peered now from the bedchamber’s darkest corner, mashed together into a single silent terrified ball.

  “That makes about as much sense as tryin’ to drink yourself sober,” he said quietly. “He’ll heal when he learns how to heal from the hurt the demon laid on him. Not before.” It was hard to speak the words, for he knew that Gothpys and Amayon and all the other demons who’d possessed Folcalor’s slave mages were this creature’s prisoners now. He didn’t clearly understand the machinations within and between Hell and Hell, Demon Lord and Demon Lord, but he’d heard how the Sea-wights had screamed when they’d been taken into the Hell behind the mirror.

  “Your touch will only put him in greater danger. I may be no more than a soldier and not such a very clever one at that, but I know there’s things that bring naught but grief, and makin’ bargains with demons, even in me dreams, is one of ’em. Now get out.”

  Her voice was broken glass. “You owe me.”

  “I paid you.”

  “With gifts that melted into smoke or were only tricks of words.”

  “You asked for a piece of a star, and I gave you some of what a star is truly made of: light. You asked for a dragon’s tears, and you didn’t say I shouldn’t put ’em in a bottle that would evaporate and consume them before you could use ’em to make a gate into this world for your wights to come through. You asked for a gift from one who hated me, thinkin’ I’d fail to get one and become your servant here, so you could feed on the souls of men and women like Southern gourmets feedin’ on
baby ducks.”

  He tried to shut from his mind the demon light he’d seen in Jenny’s eyes and the obscene evil he’d watched her do. But he knew the demon saw it in his face. “And with what I’ve seen of the way you get into the heart and the skin and the brains of those you deal with, I don’t blame those who’ve a warrant for me for traffickin’ with your lot. I’d turn meself in if it wasn’t me.”

  She stepped back from him while he spoke, but still she could have put out her hand and touched him, or he her; she stood with her garments—if they were garments— lifting and floating about her as if on the breath of some hot exhalation that he himself could not feel. Her spells of lust, of wanting, stroked him, clouding his mind like a perfume.

  “Well, I won’t be your lover, and I won’t be your slave. Not in the world, not in me dreams—nothing. So you might as well go home and torture the other little demons in Hell, and let me take care of my son.”

  “I can bring Jenny back to you.”

  It was like an incautious step on a broken foot—he didn’t think her words concerning Jenny would hurt that much. He saw Jenny’s eyes again, across Ian’s waxy face; saw the set of her shoulders, braced against whatever he should say or think. Saw himself, blind with grief and rage and anxiety, not thinking that she would feel all those things, too.

  “If she didn’t come back on her own, it wouldn’t be Jenny.”

  The Demon Queen said nothing. On the hearth John saw how the flames had turned low and blue, as if the very nature of the air were changed. The shadows of the chest, the table, and the heaped books and tumbled scrolls and note tablets dimmed and loomed and ran together, and he could hear his own breath, and Ian’s: a slow desperate drag as if the boy struggled with horrors in his sleep. He wondered—as he always wondered—if the Demon Queen wore her own form when he wasn’t looking at her.

  “John,” she said, and he looked back at her quickly. Almost it seemed he caught her shape changing, just enough to know that she had.

  “Look at your son.”

  Ian’s hand burned in his. As the fire licked up brighter again, unnaturally brighter, he saw the boy’s swollen tongue protruding from lips gone purple with blood. Even as he looked, brown spots formed under the clear thin skin, as if the blood vessels were dissolving in the flesh. Blisters bulged taut and yellow around the mouth and on the neck. Ian cried out in his sleep, weeping in pain, and kicked and clawed at the blankets.

  “Stop it,” John said softly. “This is only a dream, but stop it.”

  “You think I’m powerless in this world, Aversin,” the Demon Queen said, “because I and my kind cannot cross through the gate without being summoned from this side. But there are little gates everywhere that open now and then, and the season of demons is on the world. My hand is long, and it is stronger than you think.”

  He stood and, catching her by the arms, thrust her back from the bed. Her body was light, as Jenny’s was, but there was something about the weight of it, and its relationship to the softness of her flesh, that was wrong. He felt it as he shook her, and the things in her hair put forth their heads and hissed at him from among the darkness and the jewels.

  “Get out of here.”

  She only looked at him full with those terrible eyes.

  “Get out of here!”

  He hurled her from him, then turned and pressed his forehead to the carved bedpost until the graven leaves and flowers dug into his flesh. He could hear Ian crying, moaning as the fever consumed him, but he kept his eyes shut tight, willing himself not to see either his son or the Demon Queen. This is a dream. A dream. A dream.

  He woke trembling, on his feet, holding the bedpost, weak with shock and bathed in sweat. The flames had sunk low in the hearth, but only because the log was nearly consumed. The warm amber light was normal after the glare and blackness of his dream. Ian slept, and the hand that lay outside the shadows of the bed-curtain relaxed, its skin unmarred. Skinny Kitty raised her little triangular head to regard John in sleepy inquiry; Fat Kitty dozed, a mammoth lump of ruffled gray somnolence.

  John looked back at the hearth. The sheepskin rug had been moved, and lay where he’d kicked it toward the Demon Queen’s bare alabaster feet.

  * * *

  The next day John sent out a five-man troop of militia under the command of Ams Puggle, whose turn it was to ride patrol with him, without too much misgiving: Puggle was a stolid young man who didn’t think quickly in emergencies, but this was ordinarily a quiet time of year.

  Still, this was not an ordinary year, and guilt tormented him—guilt at sending his men out while he stayed behind, and guilt at not doing more for his son.

  He brought an armload of books down and sat by Ian while the boy slept, waking him twice from dreams that left him shaking with terror but about which he could not be brought to speak. After a time Ian lay quiet, smiling if required to do so and thanking him, but terrifyingly distant, as if the words were spoken through a small window by someone prisoned in an unimaginable room.

  Throughout that day John combed his books for mention of demons and how he might keep his son safe.

  What he found was not encouraging. According to Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World, demons could take the form of mice and rats and slip into the beds of their victims while they slept, although it was not clear how the ancient scholar knew this. Polyborus’ Jurisprudence said that demons could take on the seeming of household members and kill children or betray husbands with nobody the wiser, at least not at the time. An old ballad the Regent Gareth had played for him detailed how demons disguised themselves as candies, cakes, and tarts, so the king of an ancient land ate them and became possessed, and perversely this tune jingled in his head for the rest of the afternoon.

  Peaches and prunes,

  Sugarplum moons,

  And mountains of glorious cheese.

  Polyborus listed eight ways of killing those who had dealings with the Hellspawn, depending on whether they were still possessed, had been possessed, or had merely made bargains with wights. Demons could enter a corpse and do terrible mischief between the time life was extinct and the body destroyed, he said, so it was important that the culprit be burned or dismembered alive.

  John recalled clearly the smell of the oil on the pyre they’d prepared for him, and the way Ector of Sindestray, treasurer of the Southern Council, had smiled when the old King had ordered John put to death.

  Demons destroyed trust. You never knew, afterward, where you were with one who had dealings with them. You never knew to whom you were speaking.

  Jenny. The ache in his heart overwhelmed him as he looked out across the moor from the tower window and saw the thin gray smudge of smoke rising above Frost Fell. Jenny.

  Despite the snow, and the day’s growing cold and darkness, he thought of going there. But though Ian seemed a little better, still he felt uneasy at leaving him. Nor could he put from his mind Jenny’s desperate and dreadful silence, silence from which, apparently, she could not even reach to help her son. Nor could he forget his love. There was a time when he would have gone on harrowing himself, forcing meetings with her, trying stubbornly to cut through the wall around her, but he saw with strange clarity that there was nothing he could do.

  He could only trust that wherever she had gone, she would come back.

  Puggle and his men returned the following forenoon, frosted to the eyebrows and grumbling. No sign of bandits or wolves, nor of the Iceriders who raided two winters out of three from the lands beyond the mountains. They’d checked with the depleted garrison at Skep Dhû, and the commander—a corporal promoted when all the troops had been drawn off to join Rocklys of Galyon’s attempt to conquer the South—said the same. Corporal Avalloch also reported that yet another message had come from the King’s councilor Ector of Sindestray, ordering him to arrest John Aversin on charges of trafficking with demons and put him to death.

  “You think Avalloch’d agree to send a message to this Ec
tor bloke telling him that’s what he’d done?” Muffle inquired from his seat on the big table in the kitchen where the patrol had come to drink hot ale and report.

  “I asked him already,” John said, breathing on his spectacles and rubbing them on a towel, for the kitchen was far warmer than any other room in the Hold. “I even pointed out as how it’d be a savin’ of money for the council, in that they wouldn’t always be sendin’ messengers. Avalloch just gave me those fishy eyes and said, ‘I could not do that, Lord Aversin.’

  “Anythin’ else?” he added, turning back to Puggle.

  “Only sickness,” the corporal said, “over at Were-hove Farm.”

  Warm as the kitchen was, John felt suddenly cold.

  I can heal your son. And, My hand is long.

  “Ema Werehove was near frantic when she spoke to us. She said it was nothin’ she’d ever seen nor heard of: fever, and sores on his lips—Druff it is who’s sick—and brown spots that spread if you touch them. Should we ride out to the Fell and fetch Mistress Jenny, d’you think? Your Aunt Jane was tellin’ me all’s not right with her either…”

  Puggle’s words washed over him, barely heard.

  “Did she say when Druff had been took sick?” John’s voice sounded odd in his own ears, as if it belonged to someone else.

  “Night before last, she said. Close to dawn.”

  Within hours of his dream of the Demon Queen.

  “Where you goin’?” Puggle asked as his thane paused in the doorway only long enough to gather up his winter plaids and his heaviest sheepskin jacket.

  “Get Bill to saddle Battlehammer.”

  “You’re mad, Johnny,” Muffle protested. “It’s comin’ on to storm before midnight!”