Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  “I’ll ride fast.”

  Werehove Farm lay in a tiny pocket of arable land, under the backbone of the Wolf Hills, close by the spreading desolation of Wraithmire Marsh. Aversin shivered as he rode past the marsh, for even in the cloud-thinned sunlight it had a dreary look. No sign now of the fey lights that jigged across the brown pools and root-clotted black streamlets once the sun was down. Nothing but silence, though on five or six occasions John had heard the whisperers calling to him from the marshes at evening, in Jenny’s voice, or Ian’s—once in his father’s.

  They live on pain, Gantering Pellus said in his Encyclopedia, and John knew how true this was. Pain and terror and rage, lust and guilt and shame. They drank those emotions like dark nutty Winterlands beer. Cut your wrist in the Wraithmire, and the glowing little whisperers—the stoats and foxes of the Hellspawn, compared to the tigers like the Queen—would come round to drink the blood. Weep there, and you would see them seeping out of the ground to lap your tears.

  And they’d tease and twist and lure to increase those intoxicating delights. If humans were not available, they would torment cats or pigs or anything whose blood and fear would warm their coldness, feed their hunger for life.

  Maybe the Demon Queen had offered to heal Ian only to sup on the surge of hope and grief and pain her words had brought.

  “Cannot Mistress Jenny come?” Ema, matriarch of the Werehove clan, asked, meeting him in the stable yard wrapped in sheepskins and scarves. The light had sickened, and harsh wind yanked at John’s hair and plaids, tore at the woman’s gray braids as she led him toward the thick-walled stone house. “I’d heard she was hurt and not able to do magic as she used. But she’ve still the knowledge of herbs, and sickness, and worse things belike. This is an ill such as we’ve never seen, and it’s eating Druff up alive.”

  Druff Werehove, Ema’s oldest son, lay in the loft, his bed set against the chimney. A few candles burned around him, and Winna, his wife, knelt by him bathing his face. As he climbed the loft stairs, John smelled stale blood and sickness. He stopped, looking down at the man—one of his militia, and with his brothers the core of the little farmstead—and felt sickness clutch his own breast. For he was as Puggle had described him: His face was blistered around the mouth and across the nose and forehead, and his arms and breast were spotted with brown. His swollen tongue filled his mouth so that he could barely breathe, and his thick gasping was dreadful to hear.

  “He’s burnin’ up.” Winna raised frantic eyes to her mother-in-law. Her hand trembled as she sponged her husband’s face again. “Burnin’ up. And Metty from over Fell Farm, she tells me her girl’s down with this here, too. Cannot Mistress Jenny come?”

  “I’ll tell her.” John’s heart shrank up to a coal inside him, a black nubbin of dread. “As soon as I return to the Hold.”

  But it was night, and the storm was coming on hard when he crossed the drawbridge again. And in any case he knew whence the sickness came, and how it could be ended.

  Muffle met him in the courtyard, wrapped to the eyes in plaids and leaning against the beating wind. “There’s fever in the village,” he said, “two cases of it. Blisters on the face, and brown spots. We sent for Mistress Jenny, but by that time the snow was too bad to get near the Fell.”

  “Anyone here down with it?” In John’s mind he saw Ian, writhing and sobbing. Everything seemed to have gone blank within him, beyond thought or reasoning. Only, he thought, I’ll kill her if she’s harmed him. Demon or not I’ll destroy her somehow, though it cost my life.

  “Not yet.” The smith led the horse back to the stable, John stumbling behind. They stripped Battlehammer of his saddle by the light of a wavering flare, then John went up the tower stairs two at a time, shedding his wet plaids and sheepskin coat as he went. There was a part of him that did not want to reach the door of his room.

  But Ian lay propped in the shadows of the bed, and something altered in the blank blue gaze as John came through the door. “Papa?”

  “You all right, Son?” And he cursed himself for the offhand tone in his voice—offhand, as he’d had to be about everything when he was a child Ian’s age and younger, fighting not to let his own father crush him inside.

  Ian nodded and let himself be embraced. He started to speak, as if to remark on the cold that still clung to the metal plates of John’s rough leather doublet and to his snow-flecked hair, but then did not. John didn’t know whether this was something the demon had done to him— this trick of reconsideration, of backing down from any speech, as if fearing it would reveal or disarm or obligate him—or whether it was a thing of his years, or perhaps only of his self. Still Ian held onto his arm for a moment, the first reassurance he had sought, his face pressed to the grubby sleeve.

  And John fought not to say, Why did you take the poison? Why didn’t you speak to me?

  Uncharacteristically it was Ian who broke the silence. He coughed, his voice still barely a thread. “I heard Muffle talking about fever…”

  Of course he would. He had a mage’s senses, which could pick up the murmur of voices in the kitchen three floors below.

  “Should I get up and go down to the village?”

  “In a while.” John sat on the edge of the bed. A protesting meep sounded beneath the quilts, and one of the humped covers moved. John wanted to say, Your mother can handle it, but he let the words go. He suspected Jenny would be helpless against this illness, and Ian also.

  In any event this was the first interest Ian had shown in anything since his return to the North.

  “It doesn’t sound like any of the fevers I’ve read about in Mother’s books.” Ian sank against the pillows, exhausted by the effort of sitting up, and Skinny Kitty emerged from beneath the comforters to sit on his chest.

  “Tonight could you bring down from the library what you have about diseases? There has to be some cause.”

  “Aye,” John said softly, knowing the cause. “Aye, son. I’ll do that.”

  He remained until Ian slept again. It wasn’t long. Even after the boy’s eyes slipped closed John stayed seated beside the bed, holding his hand. Watching the too-thin face in its tangled frame of black hair, the wasted fingers twined with his own. Remembering the child Jenny had borne but had not wanted to raise—the child she had left at the Hold for him when she returned to Frost Fell to meditate, to concentrate, to patiently strive at increasing her small abilities in magic to the level of true power. He saw again the demon fire in the boy’s eyes as Ian was drawn toward the dragon Centhwevir, already under the wizard Caradoc’s control.

  Where had these demons been for a thousand years? he wondered, riffling Skinny Kitty’s gray fur. It had been that long since spawn from the Hell behind the burning mirror had destroyed Ernine, that long since the mages of the forgotten city of Prokeps had summoned Sea-wights to aid them in what human magic couldn’t do alone. Fighting wars among themselves and leaving humankind at the mercy of the smaller pooks and gyres, which could be cast out or guarded against with a spell?

  Why a thousand years ago?

  Why now?

  Gently he disengaged his hand from Ian’s and peered into the boy’s face. His son slept calmly, something he had seldom done since he was a child. Skinny Kitty purred drowsily and kneaded with her paws.

  I can cure your son.

  John blew out the candles by the bed and by the fire’s dim glow crossed the room to seek the steps that led to his library.

  Asleep before the hearth, Jenny dreamed of Amayon. Dreams of him—of his love and of the power he’d given her—were so much easier than waking now.

  She dreamed of the mirror chamber in the ruins of Ernine in the South, of John standing before the blacked-over doorway of the glass with the seven spikes of crystal and quicksilver that Caradoc had used to dominate and control the dragons. With the spikes lay seven vessels—seashells, snuff bottles, hollowed-out stones— containing the Hellspawned spirits that had possessed the mages: old Bliaud, Ian, the two Icerider c
hildren Summer and Werecat, the witch girl Yseult, little Miss Enk the gnomewife … And herself.

  She could have sketched from memory every bump and spike and curve of the seashell that prisoned Amayon. It was the only one that she had truly seen. The only thing that she truly thought about.

  It, and Amayon’s screams when Aohila had taken those fourteen spirits behind the mirror, to torture them for eternity.

  In her mind she heard again Amayon’s desperate pleading, telling her how the mirror demons hated the Sea-wights, how they could never die, could never be free of pain. She had hated John then for giving them over, and the hatred stirred anew, drawing her mind back to its old circular paths.

  Drawing it aside from the fact that there should have been eight vessels there, not seven.

  Folcalor, Ian had said.

  And, I will not go.

  In the first second of waking, Jenny thought, Folcalor wasn’t taken. Folcalor wasn’t sent behind the mirror. He was the demon who possessed Caradoc, the rebel demon who started this whole affair…

  And then a voice whispered in her mind, Sleepy dreams, Jenny. Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes. It’s all over now.

  She saw John’s eyes looking at her across Ian’s body and wanted only to sleep again.

  Snow had piled thick before the house door. She made herself get up and slipped through a tiny passway from the kitchen that let her into the stable. There she fed Moon Horse and mucked out her stall, her numb hands crooked as bird claws around rake and hay fork. The effort exhausted her, and without eating or washing—it seemed too much effort even to boil water for gruel— she returned to her quilts and the comfort of her dreams.

  All care for her life seemed to have dried with her menses. The symptoms she had once kept at bay with her spells returned to tear at her, so she could not rest. Blind with migraine, she crept about her few tasks like an old woman, feeding the fire and boiling a little snow water to drink.

  In her memories Amayon was still with her. Magic flowed in her veins.

  Let your magic go, Morkeleb had said to her, Morkeleb the Black, the dragon of Nast Wall.

  Let your magic go.

  She hadn’t known then that it would not come back.

  In her dreams she saw him, beautiful beyond beauty: the black glittering specter in the darkness of the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun, the cold voice like the echo of far-off singing that spoke in the hollows of her mind. Know you not your own power, Wizard-woman? he had asked her once. Know you not what you could be?

  And later, when he had begun to change, to become a dragonshadow of smoke and starlight: I would that I could heal you, my friend, but this is not possible: I, who destroyed the Elder Droon and brought down the gnomes of Ylferdun to ruin, I cannot make so much as a single flower prosper when frost has set its touch upon it.

  She saw him again, as she had seen him last: near invisible, beautiful, a ghost of peace and stillness, flying away to the North. Not sleepy dreams, she thought, but clarity, an acceptance of time and change.

  Waking, she felt still the deep peace of his presence. Wind screamed around the walls and in the thatch, and the cold draft streaming from the attic reminded her that in summer she’d gathered herbs and dried them on the rafters, herbs to ease the ill of other women’s change: primrose and pennyroyal and slippery elm.

  She worked the door open enough to scrape some snow into a pan, which she put on the hearth to boil. She wedged herself through the cranny to the stable and pitched fodder for Moon Horse again and cleaned her stall, shivering in the colder atmosphere of the stable but glad to have the care of another creature to occupy her thoughts. Returning to the kitchen, she checked the water, touched a candle to the flame, and dragged herself up the attic stair.

  It was cold up there. The window through which she’d watched John depart three days ago was unshuttered, cold seeping through the glass as if there were nothing in the space at all. No light trickled in with the cold—Jenny had no idea what time it was. With the wind rising and dense cloud covering the stormy sky, it could have been dawn or twilight or midnight. Her candle glow touched the herbs, homey comforting bundles, like an upended forest over her head.

  Yet there was something wrong. Jenny stood, candle in hand, listening, trying to sense what exactly it was.

  Her dream? she thought. Folcalor?

  She had the sense of having had another dream, or some other awareness while she dreamed—eternally and repetitively—of Aohila, of Amayon, of John’s betrayal. Closing her eyes, she walked back in her mind to the mirror chamber, as she’d seen it in her dream, and it seemed to her for a little time that she could hear something else, some voice whispering…

  It seemed that as she stood in the mirror chamber, looking at John in his flame-scarred and grubby doublet with the fourteen prisoned Sea-wights around his feet, someone or something was standing behind her. Someone that she knew with a hideous intimacy.

  Someone who had hurt her and had laughed at her while she wept.

  She knew if she turned around she would see him—it. And the sight would destroy her, because the horrible thing she would see would be herself: a woman capable of causing her own child’s suicide, a woman who had betrayed the man she loved a thousand times.

  Go downstairs and dream again by the fire.

  You do need to rest.

  In that mirror chamber in her heart she turned around. And of course there was nothing there but shadows.

  She opened her eyes. Her single candle flame bent and flickered in the draft, the heavy rafters she had known since girlhood taking on sinister weight and darkness overhead. There was a bundle of candles under the spare bed, candles she’d made five summers ago, and she took half a dozen and lit them, looking carefully around her for any sign of the wrongness she felt.

  But the light seemed to dispel whatever it was that had troubled her. The room was as it had always been: a big open space beneath the tall slant of the thatch. Spare bed, bundles of candles, bags of dried corn and barley spelled a year ago against mice. Blankets and quilts and old coats, snowshoes and boots. The sense she had had, of wrongness and evil, seemed to have folded itself away into a shadow.

  And maybe a shadow was all it had been.

  Storm winds smote the house, and all the candle flames bent and jittered with it. More snow, Jenny thought.

  But the thought didn’t bring with it the urge to sleep again, merely a reflection that with her hands twisted as they were, it would take longer to wield the shovel to dig herself clear. She opened the window long enough to pull the shutters closed and bar them, then made her choices among the dried herbs, gathering the little bundles and holding them in her skirt. As an afterthought she looked for a clean skirt, a clean shift, a clean bodice from the chest of spare clothes, then went downstairs to tidy the kitchen.

  Behind her she thought the shadows whispered, but she did not look back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  John’s study was a round chamber at the top of the tower that in his father’s time had doubled as a depot for emergency food stores and a lookout post in bad weather. Wide windows faced the cardinal points and made the place almost impossible to heat. As a child, John had fallen into the habit of studying there, away from his father’s eye, and hiding his books among the grain sacks.

  Now a lifetime’s plunder of learning stacked desk, worktable, and the plank shelves that filled every available inch of wall space. Candles—or the slumped, exhausted remains of them—sprouted like fungi among the dilapidated volumes, stalagmites of tallow bearding every shelf, corner, and lamp stand. Scrolls, parchment, piles of papyrus drifted every horizontal surface like dried leaves. The rafters were a spiderweb of experimental hoists and pulleys, the shelves a ramshackle graveyard of disemboweled clocks. A telescope, built by John according to accounts he’d found in a volume of Heronax, stood before the eastern window, the gnome-wrought crystal lenses pointed at the quadrant of the sky where six hundred years ago Dotys had predicted the
rising of a comet at last summer’s end.

  Unerringly John picked from the disarray an onyx bottle that had once contained silver ink. Terens had described such a thing in Deeds of Ancient Heroes in writing of the villainous Greeth Demoncaller, who had been dismembered alive on orders of Agravaine III. John tied a red ribbon around it—why red? he wondered—and put it in his pocket. From a cupboard he took five new candles— marveling a little that he could find five unburned—and Volume VII of Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia and finally, from the litter of the desk, a piece of black chalk.

  Gantering Pellus strongly recommended that experiments concerning demons not be conducted under roofs that would ever again shelter humans. In fact, he’d strongly recommended that such experiments not be conducted at all. For whoso speaketh with the Spawn of Hell, even in their dreams, the encyclopediast wrote, is never after to be trusted in any congress with men. It is the whole art and pleasure of such wights to cause suffering. They are cunning beyond human imagining and, being deathless, will stay at nothing to avail themselves of access to the affairs of men.

  All of this, John reflected as he climbed from the tower, was true.

  As true as fever, and love, and duty, and death.

  He fought his way through the snow to his work shed. His hands could barely work the catch on the door. Drafts tore at the flame as he hung his lantern on a low rafter, shadows jittering among the bones and sinews of his larger experiments: the clockwork engine of his flying machine, the webby drape of the parachute that had cost him a week in bed with a broken collarbone the summer before last. Trying not to think of anything beyond the moment, he cleared the wheels and gears of the dragon-slaying machine away from the center of the room and with the black chalk drew a pentagram on the dirt floor.

  Let the flame be virgin as the waxe, the encyclopediast said of the candles. Their wobbly light threw his shape huge on the rough-cast walls. He placed the ink bottle beside him and settled himself cross-legged in the pentagram’s center, breathing deep.