John edged cautiously nearer and found the light frame of wire and glass where he’d left it, unbroken in all the ruckus—the spell Jenny had long ago put on them seemed to be still in force. He put them on, then knelt beside the young hunter. At his touch the man opened his eyes, but they were blank, empty. A trickle of drool ran down through the fair beard.
“The Stone has drunk him.”
John looked up quickly at the voice. The tall hunter leader stood nearby, spear in hand. A woman whom John had not seen before was with him, gray haired and tough, with bitter eyes.
“He left us with a cry and ran toward this place,” the hunter woman said, her words speaking in John’s mind, though he understood that they used another language than his own. “That girl of yours called to him.” From around her neck she took a fragment of smoky glass tied on a piece of braided sinew. This she held up, and like a mirror John saw reflected in it his own face. The woman regarded the reflection, then walked to Amayon and did the same.
Whatever she saw in the glass caused her to say “Faugh!” and step back in loathing.
“Take her,” she said. “Take your demon whore and go from here. She has saved your life by bringing Lug here to the Stone. Now Lug must die, that the spirits by the river will not enter into his body, for the Stone has drunk away his mind.”
John stood back while the woman and the hunter got Lug to his feet. The young hunter seemed dazed, his eyes empty and dead. From the corner of his eye John could see the flickering movement of the small glowing wights of the riverbed, moving cautiously out over the rock toward them. When Amayon came near to him, he said, “You brought him here for the Stone to take, instead of me.” He felt shocked and empty, glad to be living still but hating the demon.
“Well, I couldn’t very well get him to continue the Queen’s stinking quest.” Amayon swished her skirts and stepped across to Dobbin’s side. “Drat,” she added. “I was afraid it would come to this in the end. I will truly see to it that that bitch Aohila gets trussed and left for a satyr of iron.”
She pressed her hands to the dead beast’s outstretched head. Her body melted to smoke, and the smoke then flowed into Dobbin’s nostrils and slack mouth. A moment later the beast rolled lightly to its feet, shook itself, and strode to John with the same swagger that characterized Amayon’s walk.
The hunter and the woman watched all of this, stone faced, and made no move while John saddled and bridled the demon beast. Looking back as he rode away, John saw the young hunter stretched on the ground again, the two elders walking off in the other direction. Demons were already chittering around the new corpse, fighting one another over its blood.
Amayon carried him swiftly toward the mountains, more swiftly than Dobbin would have, for Amayon did not pause to rest. John clung doggedly to the saddle while the demon drove the borrowed muscles along ground that grew ever steeper and more harsh. Ravines gaped below them, and cliffs climbed ever higher above: dark clefts of shadow where pallid lights darted, shed by creatures he could not see.
The callused pads of the beast’s feet tore open, and eventually ripped entirely away, leaving blood on the rock that drew small scavengers in their wake. In time the beast began to stink, rotting deep within, and to swell, the girths cutting its belly. Twice Aversin fell asleep, jerking to wakefulness as he began to slip from the saddle. The third time he dismounted, insisting they stop.
“What, had too much already?” Amayon swirled from the blood-slimed nostrils of the dead beast. “If you’re like this with a woman, it’s no wonder Jenny craved real men, poor thing. Get up. It isn’t far.”
John knew from his dream that there were at least two days’ travel yet to the spring. “Whatever it is you’re afraid of,” he said wearily, “I’ll be in gie better shape to deal with it if I’ve slept.”
“Who said anything about afraid?” Amayon glanced over her shoulder. “There isn’t anything…”
She broke off, staring, eyes showing white all around their rims for one second before she turned and fled, and John, turning, saw it, too.
He smelled it and felt it before he saw it, a kind of cold radiance and a scent like storm sky and lightning. It came whipping and rolling through the rocks of the rising land, concentric turning rings of light, a half-seen coruscation of wings and eyes. Amayon had wedged himself into a sort of rock chimney among the great boulders, casting rocks at the thing in desperation and sending forth small spats of fire spells that fizzled in the air around the creature.
“Kill it!” she screamed—it screamed, for so great was Amayon’s terror that all semblance of human form, male or female, melted away, leaving the demon as it truly was.
John caught up a harpoon from Dobbin’s saddle and flung it at the attacking creature as it passed him—passed him without pausing, heading straight for Amayon in the rocks. John’s second harpoon took the Shining Thing through one of its many eyes, and it wheeled like a gyroscope and shot at him in a storm of jabbing stingers and wings like slices of primal light. John struck at it with his sword, the cold of it enveloping him and the sound it made piercing his brain. If Amayon’s killed, I’m stuck here forever, he thought. And then, What if I’m killed here?
Were those things souls, that the gibbering pooks chased down among the black reed beds? Is that what he would become, if he were to die here: a soul for the pooks to chase?
The Shining Thing veered from him and went back toward Amayon, dripping ichor that smoked on the rocks. It can be cut, then. John followed it, slashing, drawing it back from the huddled, shaking demon. He sliced off one of the stingers, then one of the wings. That seemed to decide the thing, for it whipped away from him and raced up the mountainside faster than a horse could run. Reaching a cliff, it scooted up the sheer rock like a roach on a wall and was gone.
The smell of it lingered, less an odor than a wildness that lifted the hair on John’s scalp.
The harpoon he’d flung lay smoking on the ground in a puddle of glowing acid. He cleaned his sword as well as he could on one of his plaids and cut the fabric off when it began to burn. Amayon still crouched in the rocks, weeping with shock and fright. John didn’t want to touch it, but he did; and for one instant the demon looked up at him, not with gratitude but with such a fury of resentment and hate that he stepped back.
Amayon quickly resumed the shape of a girl and held out her hands to him, her face running with tears, but the illusion was too late. “Fair try.” John took her arm and held her firmly away from embracing him. “There’s more of ’em about—can you smell ’em? Let’s see if we’ll be a little safer farther on.”
They journeyed a little farther, and Aversin wrote up an account of the fight with as accurate a drawing as he could make of the shining thing that had attacked them and another sketch of Amayon, a slumped silvery-green homunculus like a skeletal salamander. When he wakened again from nightmare-riddled sleep it was to find— revoltingly—that the carcass of the carry beast had deteriorated to the point where it could no longer be made to bear weight, and they continued their quest on foot. The squeaking, gibbering demons of the bottomlands seemed to have been left behind, and the high peaks were the province of the shining things, small and large. Twice more they were attacked, once by wolf-size creatures of rings and wings and eyes, and again by a thing like a glowing slug that oozed from the gravel and seized Amayon by the foot.
Only when John had chopped the thing away from the shrieking demon and the pieces receded sullenly into the ground again did he guess the truth.
“They can kill you, can’t they?” He lowered his sword and wiped the sweat from his face. It burned in the cuts left by the earlier attackers’ stings and made tracks in the fine dust on his cheekbones and throat. “Not devour you, the way demons do in the Hell behind the mirror. Not imprison you and torture you forever. Not cut you into little bits, each bit livin’ on in pain. Kill you.”
“You know nothing of it.” Amayon staggered to its feet, slowly, shakily resuming the sh
ape of the girl, dress in rags over the tender breasts and the illusion of blood running down from a dainty cut on her leg where a swollen, ichorous sore had been.
“I do, though.” John felt something that was almost pity as he helped her up. “I grew up knowin’ I was to die, see. I was raised by those who knew they would die—would cease to be. Would have it all go away, and be nothin’. You never were.”
Amayon wrenched her arm from his grip and spat at him, poison that burned his face. “Whore’s son! Coward!” She would have run from him, but she staggered on her hurt leg. In any case he still had the ink bottle and the flax seeds. “You’re so puffed with pride about what you think you know, and you’re the most ignorant and stupid son of the children of earth, sitting on your dungheap of fragments and crowing at your learning, like an ape with half a book in its paws! And all the while you neglect those who’re stupid enough to depend on you! You can’t even keep a woman as old and homely as the bitch you got to bear your bastards, much less protect your feeble-witted son! So don’t go preaching to me about what I feel or what I think!”
But John saw the demon-girl tremble in her cloudy rags of lawn and velvet and heard the crack of terror behind the rage in her voice. He knew that he had guessed right. And Amayon would never forgive him that.
Darkness covered the mountain, as it had covered it in his dream. It might have been night at last—Morkeleb had spoken to him once of places where night lasted years, so that all things perished for want of light—or it might have been a quality peculiar to that place, as heat seemed peculiar to the lowlands. No star could be glimpsed, and the only light was a sort of glow that pulsed along the silver lines in the rocks. The silence was dreadful.
But the place was known to John through the dreams the Demon Queen had sent. A dreadful déjà vu tangled with other memories that he could not clearly identify as either true or illusory. In sleeping, other dreams had come to him, terrible dreams from which he would wake crying out or weeping and see lines of filthy little pooks perched on the rock rims above his camp, puffing and crooning with content at the pain and terror they drank.
The rivulet was exactly as he had seen it in his dream. It dribbled from a crack high in the rock face and ended in a pool perhaps the size of the communal wash fountain of Alyn village, and the air above it shone with the sickly luminosity of the shining creatures that had attacked them. In her delicate flutter of revealing rags, Amayon stared transfixed.
There have been attempts to unseat me, Aohila had said. She might even have been telling the truth. Aversin wondered what Folcalor’s summer gambit with demon-ridden wizards had to do with such matters, if anything, and what Folcalor’s lord—Amayon’s lord—the arch-demon Adromelech would give for this water.
And what would Aohila give Amayon for it, if the demon returned with it instead of John and bargained for freedom?
Deliberately Aversin unslung the satchel from his shoulder—much lighter now, for food and water were scant—produced the ink bottle, and dropped half a score of flax seeds inside.
Amayon cursed him and tried to snatch the bottle from his hand. But even as she reached, her white fingers thinned to smoke and whirled into the tiny aperture. John stoppered the bottle, stuffed it into the front of his tattered and sorry doublet, and stood for a time listening.
But the only sound was the lick and twitter of the water over the rock.
The Queen had given him nothing in which to carry the water, nor had there been any vessel save for the onyx ink bottle in his dream. Among the things he’d brought from the Hold were two small silver flasks: if spells changed from Hell to Hell, he hoped anything watertight would do. And he hoped, too, that whatever this water really did would not work to the peril of his own world. He filled both bottles, placing one in his satchel, the other in the bottom of a food bag.
“Now let’s hope she can’t see from one Hell to the next,” he muttered and slung both satchel and bag over his shoulder.
He made a careful examination—and a sketch—of the desolate fountain but saw no rune, no wyrd, no sigil; there was no indication at all that the place was anything other than what he had been told.
Aching in every limb and joint, he began his slow descent of the mountain.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“He said there was aught he had to do.” Sergeant Muffle turned back from the milky brightness of the doorway into the gloom of the smithy where Jenny had sought him out. “He wouldn’t say where he was bound. But he burned his work shed before he left.”
“John burned the work shed?” Jenny had heard from Bill, when he’d helped dig the snow from her doorway, that the shed had burned. She had grieved for John, knowing how he loved all those half-made projects, how he’d sought the length and breadth of the Winterlands for metal and springs and silken cord.
She put out her hand half blindly to touch one of the roof posts that surrounded the low brick forge, the warmth and amber light beating gently up against her face. And she saw her own shock, her own fear at the implications of such a deed, reflected in the smith’s small bright brown eyes.
“And none have seen him.” John’s brother picked up again the pot he’d been repairing when Jenny came into the forge and set it over the horn of the anvil to tap and file the patch smooth. “Not since Dan Darrow took him to the borders of the Wraithmire.”
“Wait a minute. That’s the last anyone saw of him? That was eight days ago.”
The new moon, chill and thin, stood high in the afternoon sky above the Hold.
Across the court, Bill and Ams Puggle were deep in conference with Dal. One or two others of the little Alyn garrison clustered around, gesturing and muttering. Jenny could catch an occasional oath or a question about the number of gnomes in the slave-buying band and if they’d said anything about who their master was. Dal held out something that was passed around among the men— probably one of the gold pieces with which the bandits had been paid.
Pellanor, Jenny thought. Pellanor of Palmorgin. Dead these three months…
“I put the word to old Dan to keep mum about it, and he has, pretty much. But there’s been talk nonetheless. Nobody knows what to make of it.” Muffle turned the pot to the light to see how even the join was, then went back to work with his rasp. He’d been the town bully as a child, Jenny recalled, and always Lord Aver’s favorite. “Come indoors, Jen, you look froze through. The children will delight to see you.”
Aunt Jane, too? But her heart ached at the thought of little Mag and Adric…
“And do you know what to make of it?”
Muffle’s eyes slid sideways to her, and his heavy mouth set. Then a slight shadow darkened the smithy door, and Ian said, “Mother?”
While everyone in the Hold had crowded around Lyra and Dal and the children, cold and exhausted after two nights of hiding in the woods, Jenny had hung back. She still felt stung by the chilled animosity in Aunt Jane’s eyes—and no wonder, she thought. John’s eldest aunt was ferociously protective of all three of her nephew’s children. Of course she would blame Jenny for Ian’s attempted suicide and try to keep her from him if she could.
Jenny had felt apprehensive at the idea of meeting John, and more so at the thought of speaking again to Ian.
Now all her apprehension melted as her son stepped forward and caught her in his arms.
“Don’t be angry,” he said, hugging her tight. His voice was desperate in her ear. She saw he stood an inch taller than she, and the arms that crushed her to him had the beginnings of a man’s strength. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”
“If you say that again, I’ll put you over my knee!”
He laughed, the release of it shaking his whole body. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh since the summer, and it turned his face from a ghost’s to that of a living boy again, and that boy only thirteen. She laughed, too, looking into the sea-blue eyes.
Then her laughter faded. “It was Folcalor, wasn’t it?” she asked.
His fa
ce grew still.
“In your dreams?”
His mouth flinched, and he looked away. Beside the door Muffle stood silent, watching them with wary eyes as if he had seen them suddenly transform from people he knew—his brother’s wife and son—to something uncanny, speaking a language only they fully understood.
“Yes,” Ian said. “I think so. Yes.” And he met her gaze again. “Love can’t wait, so open the gate,” he rhymed, with a faint flush of shame tinging his dead-white cheeks. “It sounds so stupid when I say it, but it comes to me just as I’m drifting off to sleep. And it sticks in my mind. Love can’t wait, so open the gate. As if by opening the demon gate, I’ll have all the love I’ll ever want. I’ll never be lonely again.”
The love I never gave him. She looked, mute, into her son’s face. But there was no blame there, or even thought about why he felt unloved. It was just a part of him that he accepted and dealt with as best he could.
“It makes a whole lot more sense when you’re asleep,” he added apologetically. “And it … it got so strong. Sometimes it’s just a whispering, and other times it seems like it’s the only thing real in the world. And it won’t leave me alone.” His voice sank to a whisper. “I was so afraid. And I felt … I felt so empty…”
“After the demon left?”
Ian nodded, his face crimson now.
Jenny touched his cheek. “Ian, I did, too. I do still, sometimes. In spite of everything.”
His eyes flicked to hers, then away—understanding and thanking her for her understanding.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked gently. “What he looks like now?”
Her son shook his head. “I see him but I can’t really see him.” He glanced at her and she nodded. “Just the whispering. It was worse before. I could see how the gate was to be made, where the power would source from. That’s when … That’s what … I woke up from a dream and found myself in the house on the Fell, up in the attic, writing things on the floor.” The words blurted from him in terror and in shame, an admission he had kept and hidden. “I swear I didn’t … I’d been dreaming about having power. About being able to do anything. And then I woke up, and I was there, with the chalk in my hand…”
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