He shuddered and averted his face again, and Jenny caught his hands. The fingers were chill as frozen sticks.
“I didn’t want to go back. I knew what he’d do to me if he came through the gate, and I didn’t want to go back to being what I was.”
“No.” Jenny put up her hand, stroked his hair, as black and coarse as hers had been. “Ian, I think I would have done the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Ian said. “Because you’d have been stronger. You could have gotten rid of him.”
And she laughed, bitterly, remembering her own desolation of sleep and despair. “Thank you for the compliment, but believe me, I don’t deserve it. I don’t.”
Their eyes met again and held.
At length she said, “So you rubbed out all the marks?”
He nodded. “I couldn’t … I was just afraid the next time he’d get me all the way through the rite. I hadn’t been sleeping … I was so tired.” His mouth tightened. “You don’t think it was—was Folcalor that Father tried to contact? Because I’d hear him whispering to others sometimes—Folcalor, I mean. Reaching out to others. And Father…”
He held his thin hands out toward the heat of the forge. Outside in the yard Aunt Jane had joined the group around Dal and was giving them the benefit of her advice. Adric, sword at belt, was there, too, clearly trying to talk the men into letting him ride patrol with them.
“I went into his study, on the night of the storm, and found his books all spread out over the study table. Everything he had about the Hellspawn: how to summon them, how to speak to them, how to protect himself from them when they’d been summoned. I went to the window and looked out, and I could see candlelight through the cracks around the work shed door.”
“Folcalor wouldn’t have any use for your father,” Jenny said. “I’m fairly sure the demon he called was Aohila, the Queen behind the Mirror.” And she kept her voice level with an effort, against the hot spurt of jealousy that flared through her. And hard on the heels of her jealous anger, she thought, He has no magic. The ward lines he drew wouldn’t protect him.
“Who else was Folcalor summoning, do you know?” Jenny asked after a time. “Who else was he trying to speak to?”
Ian shook his head. “If he’s tried to reach me, he must be trying to reach Master Bliaud as well.”
She recalled the little gray-haired wizard from the South fussing ineffectually around the mule train in the courtyard at Corflyn Hold. Already the demon had been in him, imitating the old man’s mannerisms so his sons would not suspect. Later, after the demons had been driven out, Jenny had worked with the old man to restore and heal the other mages. He’d drawn sigils of healing on her forehead, lips, and eyelids in the thin blue-white powder John had obtained from the Demon Queen.
But there had been no healing.
“And I heard him…” Ian said slowly. “I heard him calling Master Caradoc’s name. I thought I had to be mistaken, because Master Caradoc is dead. But…”
“Calling him?” An icicle seemed to have formed somewhere behind her heart. “Calling him how?”
“Differently,” Ian said. “Singing to him. Loved you so long, raise your voice in a song… Something like that. It was a love song, like—” He stammered and left the words unsaid, so Jenny finished for him.
“Like Amayon used to sing to me.”
Ian nodded, the sudden woodenness of his face telling her that Gothpys had sung such songs to him. They were beautiful beyond mortal music and erotic past the ability of mortal flesh to withstand.
“‘Sing to me, love,’ he keeps saying. ‘Sing to me.’ But I know Master Caradoc is dead. You killed him beneath the sea, and the crystal that—that held his soul.”
“We smashed a crystal,” Jenny said quietly, all her dreams of the dark seafloor returning: the weightless beauty of the whalemages drifting among the columns of rock, the silver flicker of demons down below…
Searching for something.
Closing her eyes, she could see Caradoc’s face again, framed in the floating curtain of his silver hair, green demon light streaming from his eyes, fire pouring from his mouth. He raised his hand, and in his hand was the staff of his power, with its carven goblin head that held a moonstone in its mouth.
Then from the court a voice cried “Mama!” And Adric and Mag pelted over the snow-grimed cobbles and threw themselves into Jenny’s welcoming arms.
Standing just clear of the trees, the moon was a segment of a silver orange, so bright that a frail wedding ring of light limned the whole of its velvet disc. John drew his decayed plaid close around him and shivered, but only thin snow dusted the ground, and there was no wind.
The stars were yet the stars before midwinter, even to the Wanderers where they camped among the Watcher’s jeweled belt loops, and the White Dog’s rough wet fur.
“Don’t you yet know how it is with the Hellspawn and time?” Amayon’s jeer held its usual edge of impatient contempt. He had resumed the shape of a pretty youth, though the blue eyes were the same, and the black grapevine curls. “We’ll still be beautiful—not to mention continent and in possession of all our wits— when you’re lying crippled with arthritis in bed wondering if anyone will come in time to get you to the chamber pot. The God of Time has no authority over us.”
“Well, you don’t know that yet, now do you?” Hands stuck behind the buckle of his sword belt, John gazed at the marshes around him. Not the Wraithmire—he’d never seen willows like these growing anywhere north of the Black River. “That’s the tricky thing about the God of Time.” Though the mountain wall to west and south was cloaked to its toes in snow, the ice that scummed the edges of the pools thinned over the centers, where a little open water gleamed black, like the pupil of a cataract-dimmed eye.
What had been a chapel surrounded them. The roofless, isolated pillars and the bone-white glimmer of shattered statuary in elongated arches told John clearly enough that they were no longer in the Winterlands, even had it not been obvious from the stars. “You want to think about goin’ into the fancy fish business, bringin’ things down from the Winterlands to Ernine like this—I take it we are in Ernine?—without the moon a day older on the way? I have it that you pay as much for a salmon in Greenhythe—half spoiled and poor to begin with—as you’d pay for a trained huntin’ dog up north, where we get so sick of salmon we use ’em for pig food…” He forced his voice to show nothing but a Northman’s bland practicality, unwilling to give Amayon the satisfaction of knowing his shock and wonderment, the shaken disorientation that came in the aftermath of stepping from the demon mist to find himself in his own world again and not a day later than he’d walked out of it.
He certainly felt as if he’d tramped and done battle for the best part of ten days, the last two virtually without water or food. The shining things, the rock slugs and once, terrifyingly, a many-legged creature of wings and mouths and spines … Had those fights been like the tortures he’d undergone in the Hell behind the mirror, illusion only, for the amusement of the Demon Queen? Gingerly he parted the ripped and blood-crusted linen of his sleeve to see the rough bandage still on his arm, a souvenir of that final attack. The flesh was sore underneath, but not until he nudged the dressing aside and looked at the scabbing wound did he understand that the things that had happened to him in Hell had actually taken place.
Amayon snickered and mimicked the movement with an exaggerated mime of fear, concentration, bumpkin astonishment. “I wish you could see your face,” he jeered.
John scratched the graying auburn stubble on his jaw. “Just as well I can’t,” he agreed mildly and, kneeling, scrubbed the filth from his hands in one patch of snow and scooped up the cold white crystals from another to eat. “And to spare you further sight of it, I think it’s the inkwell for you, me bonny boy, and I’ll find me own way into town.”
“No!” the demon cried. “Stop it!” But John dropped the flax seeds into the bottle.
Better to be safe than sorry, he though
t, unshipping from his shoulder the goatskin bag that contained his own silver vessel of the enchanted water and hanging it from the high limb of an oak. Despite whatever spells Aohila had placed on Amayon to make him serve John, he wouldn’t put it past the demon to betray him and take the vessel of water for himself, to trade to the Queen for his freedom.
Not that John blamed him. He’d seen what the Demon Queen did to those in her power. Aohila didn’t look like the kind who would forgive even the smallest of the demons who had aided in sealing her and her minions behind the mirror, and he knew from experience a little—the smallest part—of the torments meted out in Hell.
He wondered, as he made his way out of the marshes through vapor and shifting moonshine, what teind the mages of Prokeps had had to pay for the Lord of the Sea-wights’ help. He came around the shoulder of the hill and recognized the maze of gashes and gullies, of fallen pillars and half-buried statues through which he and the gnome-witch Miss Mab had ridden in the last moon of summer, seeking some way to save Jenny from enslavement to Caradoc and his demon master.
No magic of humans or gnomes, Miss Mab had said, could guard him from the spells of the Hellspawn. They were supreme in their own worlds. Such spells as could be wrought in this world could only strengthen him in the ways he was already strong.
And it was that strength, those spells, he understood now, that had saved him behind the Mirror of Isychros. That strength was why the Demon Queen had sought him out when she needed a human to do her work. The strength of his love for Jenny, and his stubborn refusal to be fooled.
But it had to be done, he thought. A fool’s errand, yes, and a madman’s, but there had been no other way to free them. The image of Jenny rum soaked, naked, and flashing with cheap finery had tormented him for months, until he’d made Amayon’s acquaintance and heard in the demon’s voice the disdainful mockery that had come, in those days, from Jenny’s mouth. With Ian and his possessing demon it must, he knew, be the same.
Just take from them that memory, he thought, his legs aching as he waded through flowing ground fog and ivy up the curving sandstone stair. Just free them of that pain.
I can heal your son.
John had feared and mistrusted demons before riding with one to Hell. He hated them now, and the Queen among the rest.
The passageway into the rock, and the crypt where the mirror stood, were knee-deep in opal mist. Tendrils of it curled to the ceiling, where the light of John’s lantern flashed on the stars writ there in gold, the comet with its trailing plumes. Then the flame burned low, chill and blue within the glass chimney, and dwindled to its death while a sort of greenish light formed up within the mist itself. The mirror chamber shifted, uncomfortably like chambers in the queen’s palace, filled with vapors through which demon courtiers passed in semblance of handsome lords and ladies: heartstoppingly beautiful until you turned your head and caught a glimpse of them from the corner of your eye. John took the remaining silver bottle from his satchel and put it on the stone floor before the mirror, among the scuffed lines of summoning that remained from the last time he had stood here to pay the Demon Queen’s teind. Beside it he laid the ink bottle, and as if there were a thorn caught in his clothing somewhere the memory stabbed him of Jenny leaving him here because she could not bear to see him deliver Amayon to the punishment he deserved.
He drew a shaky breath. “Here I am, love,” he said to the covered mirror. “And here’s your present, all exactly as you asked this time and no jiggery-pokery to it. And I hope you don’t mean that I should walk home from here, for it’d be a gie shabby trick if you do.”
“As shabby as those you played me?” Hands closed over his shoulders, death-cold hands strong as steel. He could feel the claws prick through his doublet and his shirt and dared not turn his head. Her slow evil smile was in her voice. “Something can doubtless be arranged. Pour out the water onto the floor.”
Bottle and floor were invisible under the mists. When John picked up the flask and obeyed, the vapors cleared from the spot as if blown upon, rising up and ringing them in a wall that hid even the door from sight. “Look into the water,” she said. John stepped forward, barely breathing, remembering the smoky mirror the gray-haired woman hunter had held that would reflect the true semblance of the Hellspawn.
But when he looked down he saw nothing behind him at all. His own reflection lay in the water as if in a pool miles deep, with the stars of the ceiling twinkling above his head. Though he felt the weight of the taloned hand and sensed the iciness radiating from her against his flesh, in the water it was as if he stood alone. Beneath and beyond his reflection he could see down into the stone floor and past it—past subcrypts and potsherds, past grass roots tangled in men’s bones, down and down to the heart of the earth, to a darkness where ill things lived.
The Queen’s hand moved on his shoulder, and blue lightning ran over the surface of the water then sank away, still flickering, into its depths.
John’s reflection dimmed into a wilderness of winds and howling sands. Lightning scorched across rocks more barren than a miser’s heart. Then the vision shifted to a sweet promise of birch trees in summer twilight, of butterflies, lilacs, and vines. Finally he saw black walls rise hideously tall and glaring with light, smoke-wreathed and sluiced by rain that fell endlessly from a filthy sky.
A woman. She staggered as she ran through the maze of walls, clothing torn and blood on her face, gummed in disheveled hair that was streaked lavender, after the fashion of the courtiers in the South. She ran with her arms folded before her breasts as if to protect herself. Her foot caught and she stumbled, the heel breaking off one garish pink shoe, but she picked herself up and fled on, panting with terror, feet splashing through shallow standing water, leaving trails of blood. She threw herself between two shapes—metal? rock?—where darkness pocketed. She leaned on the wall, gasping, one hand pressed to her mouth, the other wrapped around her belly, half doubled over, shaking with shock. Light fell down from somewhere near, and it showed not only cuts on her arms and face but the burned edges of those gashes, the rings and dots of branding on jaw and throat and chest. Bracelets glinted gold. Gold chains crossed the burns and scratches on her neck. Tears of pain rivered her face, but she bit her bleeding lips. John knew that she knew it would be death and worse than death for her to make a single sound.
She was listening. Listening for her life. Black streaks from tears marred her eye paint, and the distant colored lights showed her flesh glabrous with sweat.
Damn it, stay where you are, John thought. What-ever’s pursuin’, d’you think it doesn’t know you’re there? In his mind he saw the line of tiny demons on the rock, drinking greedily of the horror of his dreams.
Stay where you are!
But she didn’t. She didn’t know. Like a new-foaled calf on shaky legs, she crept out of her hidey-hole— no!—and looked up and down the alley.
It was an alley. What was the matter with those who must have been in the lighted rooms so far above her, that they didn’t come? Blackness, brightness, mold and filth growing on the walls, the gleam of water everywhere, rain beginning to fall once more. Lights visible perhaps fifty feet away, reflected on the water that stood in the alley … The illusion of safety.
She ran for them. And running, turned back at a sound John could not hear.
Mouth stretching, eyes stretching, wider and wider. The lights from above flickered on the gold of her bracelets as she raised her arms over her face.
Darkness bore her back against the wall.
If she screamed, John couldn’t hear it. But he saw the blood. It splashed the brick of the walls for yards and made lazy black spirals in the water underfoot, after her pursuer was done. He tried to turn his head away, but the Demon Queen’s hand closed over the side of his face and forced him to look again.
This time a man sat in a great chair entirely padded in green leather. John saw him in the pool: the room behind him less clearly, though he had an impression of opulence,
of heavy hangings stamped with gold and statues and candlesticks wrought of the same gleaming metal. A small man, trimly handsome. A hooked thin profile and a mass of white-streaked dark hair. Like John he wore spectacles, oddly shaped, and with glass smoked dark so that his eyes were protected from even such small lights as burned in the room. He turned the woman’s gold bracelets over and over in white-gloved hands.
“Ah,” Aohila said, and there was deep satisfaction in her voice.
“Who is he?”
The clawed bone moved on his cheek. The tiny gashes its talons left bled, hot on his chilled skin. “He was my lover.” Though he knew there was no human mouth behind him, he heard the little click of her tongue. “Faithless.”
“Now how could any man be so to you?”
The claws contracted warningly on the back of his neck. “Not like you.”
“I take it you want him.”
“Men don’t leave me, Aversin.” The grip tightened. Whatever was behind him, it was huge. The voice spoke above as well as behind his head. “Mostly they come back of their own accord. You will.”
“In time I might.” He grabbed her wrist and whirled to face her, to see her…
And behind him she was as she had always been. Tall but not quite his own height, snake-slim and beautiful as nightshade blossoms. A glitter of jewels, a suggestion of uneasy movement in her hair. The hand he held was a woman’s hand. It had always been.
“Bein’ that I don’t die of old age first, which I think is more likely. Do I get to take our boy Amayon with me for company again? Or have you got a trained scorpion you’d like to send along instead?”
Knight of the Demon Queen Page 9