Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  Her mouth flexed with anger at this sarcasm, and something appeared on his hand: a scorpion the length of his finger, coal black with human eyes. His hand flinched to strike it, and her fingers turned in his grip and closed around his, holding them immobile. Angered, the vermin raised its tail. John stood paralyzed, not breathing, while the thing walked up his arm. It disappeared just short of his shoulder.

  “Don’t jest with me,” the Demon Queen said softly.

  Sweating, trembling, he only looked at her. It was probably, he realized belatedly, only an illusion. That wasn’t a theory he felt like putting to the test.

  “Amayon is there to help you,” she added after a moment. “You’ll need it. Heed his advice.” When he drew breath to speak, she added, “Did you think your errantry was done?”

  From her robes she drew out a box wrought of pale brown dragonbone, mounted and clasped in silver, lidded with a baroque opal perhaps the diameter of a cut lime.

  “You’ve got to show me how you do that one day,” John remarked, cocking his head and considering the naked, sinuous body so clearly visible beneath its single layer of blowing, smoke-hued gauze. “Girls’d pay a fortune to be able to carry combs and shawls and eye paint in their pockets and not have ’em make lumps. You invent that and peddle it in Belmarie, and you wouldn’t need to be Queen of Hell anymore, nor tell lies about what you want a cup of water for that has to be fetched from the ends of creation. You could marry a nice man— a tailor, he’d have to be, to get the first couple stitched up for sale—and have a house on the Street of the Sun with servants and tea parties for your friends, and be done with all this worryin’ about other demons tryin’ to push you off your throne and eat you and have you talkin’ to ’em out of their stomachs and all that.”

  “You are frivolous,” the Queen said softly. When she lifted back her lip from her teeth, he saw there was blood on them. “It will be your death.”

  John looked up from examining the inside of the box, an expression of surprise on his face. “Oh, it gie near was,” he said and rubbed the back of his neck. “Me dad didn’t have any more sense of humor about it than you do. Meself, I never thought he was the happier for takin’ everything in life so serious as he did. He came close to throwin’ me off the walls more than once.”

  “I sympathize,” she said, her voice grim. She held out to him a flask of bronze, scarcely bigger than a Southern double-royal coin. It tinkled softly as he shook it. “Open the box in his presence, and pour these inside. He will be drawn into it, as Amayon is drawn into the ink bottle. After that the box will not open again.” Something glinted, cold and more frightening than anything John had seen, in the alien yellow eyes. “Bring it to me. And then we are quits.”

  The mist flowed down from the walls again. It covered the floor, then swirled up around her, a column of vapor through which the mirror glowed like the lightless door of an oven. She moved toward the incandescent Hell mouth, all the writhing life lifting and hissing in her hair.

  “And me son?”

  She stopped and faced him. “Your son will heal.” Casually, like a penny thrown to a beggar.

  “And Jen?” She was already melting into darkness and fog, but her eyes remained, copper gold and narrow: jealous. Her voice came to him, it seemed, from the mists all around: an echo in the dark of his mind.

  Mortals heal, John Aversin. And mortals die. Man can only do as he must.

  He woke on the stone floor of the mirror chamber with his lantern burning and his bones aching with cold, the round bone box in his hand.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ian and Jenny set forth next morning, under a thin, new-risen day moon. They rode alone, burdened as lightly as possible for travel in the bleak Winterlands. It was hard going, though they followed the old road to Eldsbouch and Ian could turn the worst of the weather aside. He cloaked them both with spells to send bandits elsewhere, too, but Jenny doubted that even such hardies as Balgodorus Black-Knife would be abroad in cold and rising wind like this.

  In the days of the kings, Eldsbouch had been a walled city of many towers, spread over its four abrupt hills and along the shores of the great Migginit Bay. So rough were the riptides and currents of the bay that the ancients had built a mole to protect the deep-water harbor, which could still be seen at low tide. Rotted pillars clung to it where a colonnade had run, and when the tide was up they tusked the black foaming water like a broken comb. During the summer ships still put in at Eldsbouch, for the gnomes of Tralchet brought their trade down to the little town: silver from the mines, amber, and tin. The city wall had been rebuilt three times, each time nearer the harbor itself as the population shrank and the surrounding farmlands grew less and less able to give forth crops.

  Still there was an inn there, called the King’s Great House, and everyone in the Winterlands called its landlord His Majesty King Mick the Fourth, his father and great-grandfather having been, respectively, Kings Mick the Third and Second. He was a small dark cheerful man who made the travelers welcome when they reached the place in the sleety darkness of the forenoon, and he asked after John and Muffle and the folk of the Hold. Asked, too, if they’d heard whether the King would be sending garrisons back any time soon.

  “I hear the gnomes have put word out they’re buying slaves,” he said to Jenny as he guided her and Ian to rooms above the kitchen, the best in the house in weather like this. “And not just among the bandits as they used to. Word is they’ve let it be known here in the town that any who wish to rid themselves of old folks, or cripples, or the simpleminded can earn good silver by giving them over to the brother kings. Have you heard this?”

  “Old folks?” Ian unslung his pack and dropped it on the bed. “Cripples? Why would Lord Ringchin and Lord Ragskar buy those?”

  His Majesty shook his head. “That I don’t know.” Outside, the winds that had whipped the travelers for two days had risen to a scream, and even through the thick rock walls they could hear the pounding of the waves against the seawall. “But Prowser Gorge, that fishes out beyond the mole, was putting it about last week that the lung fever carried off his crippled sister and that poor daughter of his, her that was so fragile and not able to do any work or find a husband. His sons have been more than usually shut-mouthed, and all of them spending gnomes’ silver that they didn’t get for their fish.”

  He turned his head as a particularly violent gust shook the building, and he made the trident sign of propitiation against that most capricious of Goddesses, Yellow-Haired Balyna of the Sea. “I think you should let Lord John know of this.” He made as if to go, then turned back.

  “Not meaning to trouble you, my lady, nor your son, but if you could see your way clear to putting a bit of a word on the storm … There’s three or four of the boats that were out beyond the breakwater when the wind grew bad. A trading vessel was wrecked there a week ago, and I’ve heard as how in times past you’ve witched the weather.”

  “There isn’t much that can be done,” Jenny said gently, “with a storm like this, nor once the storm is upon us. But we’ll do what we can.”

  After the man had left, Jenny said, “I haven’t the smallest trouble believing old Gorge would sell his sister to the gnomes, or his daughter Ana either.” She’d met the disagreeable fisherman on a number of occasions and had heard stories about him all her life. “But who in their right head would buy a cripple for a slave? Or a girl who’s always ailing and in bed?”

  As she helped Ian lay out a circle of power to slack the winds and try to make a break in the storm, she saw Pellanor again in her mind, crawling toward her in the firelight, with his dead demon eye.

  She had lived cheek-by-jowl with the gray-haired baron under siege conditions for nearly a month, had fought beside him in battle. She knew absolutely that the man had had no flicker of magic in his blood.

  So why had the demons taken over his body once life was gone?

  Because the men in the Northern garrisons wouldn’t have heard he was dead? Was it o
nly her experience that had let her see the demon light in his eye?

  After Ian had finished his spells to work the wind— which did slacken a little for an hour or so—Jenny opened the satchels that contained substances she’d thought to put away forever: silver dust and powders compounded of herbs and ash, tiny crystals ensorceled long ago to hold certain powers, candles of virgin wax. Under her instruction, as he had done nightly since setting forth from Alyn, Ian ceremonially cleansed the bigger of their two rooms, set limitations at the cardinal points, and traced out circles of power on the foot-smoothed plank floor. From her long studies and meditations in her days of small power, before the dragon’s magic and the dragon’s touch, Jenny knew the disciplines of sourcing power and took her son through them, calling on the name that the moon bore when it was five days old and on the tide as it came in over the breakwater. Assembling, too, the fragmentary magics to be gleaned from trines and quarts of position: a wyrd that had strength when drawn between running water and oaks on a hill, a sigil that drew power when made equidistant from silver, which could be found in the Tralchet Hills, and coal, which her dragon senses had detected years ago under the Snake-water Marshes.

  Small magics, yes, but collected together, like a slave’s two-penny tips and peddled handcrafts, they could build up and buy freedom.

  Thus Ian called power, enough to source the summoning Jenny had described to him as well as she could. Through the howling of the storm Ian cast that summoning once more out into the ocean, and sleeping that night Jenny dreamed of those vast dark gliding shapes swimming northward, deep in the still safety beneath the waves.

  In the morning the storm had abated, though the wind still shrieked and small flotillas of cloud raced before it. The cold was bone breaking. As she and Ian walked down to the harbor together they could see where two fishing boats lay tied up at the old wharves with broken masts and torn sails, exhausted men telling their families how only the unexpected slacking of the wind for an hour in the night had let them make land. A third boat lay wrecked on the breakwater, its splintered masts and shattered timbers floating and crashing with the surge of the waves.

  The gray heaving waters of the gulf stretched away to the west, bordered on the south by low shores dense with pine and spruce, uncut and unbroken since time’s roots. North, the glacier-shawled rock of the Tralchet Hills gouged the blue air.

  And beyond the gulf to the west, nothing. Only, far off, invisible and beyond the flight of all but the strongest birds, the Skerries of Light, where the dragons dwelled.

  Ian found a plank from the wrecked fishing boat to lay from the shore to the first of the mole’s great founding stones, for the massive piers had been plundered by villagers over generations for cut stone for houses and defensive walls. Water slopped constantly over their boots as Jenny led the way along the line of the old masonry; spray soaked their plaids and their sheepskin coats and now and then a great wave would douse them, like a child playing a prank. If any dead had remained in the wrecked boat when it had been driven on the mole, their families had come for them already. But as they edged past the broken body of the vessel, Jenny found herself thinking of the lightless deeps below the wall, of the cold violence of the storm that could drown men as casually as if they had been newborn kittens.

  At the far end of the mole, wet and shivering, Ian raised his arms. Jenny heard nothing of the call he sent forth again, but she remembered how the dragon Morkeleb had called, extending his thought through the green deeps and the blue deeps, down to the lightless abysses below the sunken isle of Urrate in the South.

  She remembered the dark forms rising from blackness, weightless and beautiful as they crossed into the violet zones where the sunlight touched. Remembered the deep slow hooning of their songs.

  Those songs reached now into her mind and touched her as the singers of the deep, the Calves of the Abyss, rose up to answer Ian’s summons. In the notes were endless tales of the deeds of ancestors. Songs of lost ships and lost treasure, love and gems alike drowned in the sea. Mudflat and trenches, warm currents and cold: the curious worlds and creatures hidden and unimagined beyond where the sunlight failed.

  Hesitant, fumbling, she formed the thought, Squid-slayer! as if she were trying to pronounce his name through mutilated lips and tongue. He will not even hear, now that magic is gone.

  But his reply came to her, music from the gulfs of the sea. Dragonfriend.

  They breached, curved slate-dark backs breaking the water in great smooth shining islands, and the steam of their spouts whipped away white on the wind. Tails waved, massive as trees, then slid soundless back into the waves. Ian’s eyes widened with awed delight. The water thinned and rolled glossy over the rising backs once more, and they breathed again, little puffs this time, not long held. Then they were lying on the surface, a hundred feet from the breakwater, minds and thoughts surrounding the two humans like a slow deep echoing song.

  Dragonfriend, slayer of demons, long-long tales of sorrow hurting the soul, and this thy calf?

  Calf, Jenny agreed, groping and fumbling to reach to them with her crippled mind.

  Motherfriend battleinjured. She heard Ian’s voice shaping words clumsily, in imitation of what she’d taught him. Lying in the deep trench resting, healing with time.

  Time, time. The whales passed assent and agreement among them, the music of their thoughts blending with those soft leathery hoons and drones. Healing time. Good good good good good.

  Their word for time—their concept of it—differed utterly from the cluster of meanings humans used; though it was not, she realized, as alien as the way dragons thought of time. She was surprised, too, at Ian’s perception of her winter’s progress and pain.

  Caradoc.

  The image shaped in Ian’s mind of the gray-haired, square-jawed face of the man who had done this thing to them, strong fingers holding up the jewels into which Ian’s and Jenny’s souls had been sent while demons inhabited their bodies. The big man was sitting by the hearth of Jenny’s cottage on Frost Fell, waiting for Ian to arrive, his goblin-headed staff upon his knees. There was a glass shell on the doorstep, and a little slip of quicksilver. Caradoc said, Bring it to me… And Ian reached out with his hand. There was a memory of unbearable pain.

  It was hard to remember, through all that had happened after, that it was not Caradoc who had done those things, but Folcalor. Folcalor had seduced Caradoc years ago in dreams, coaxing him to open a demon gate. And after that he had been a prisoner, as Jenny and Ian and the other mages had been, while the demons used their bodies and their magic to enslave the dragons and attempt to conquer the Realm of Belmarie.

  Nevertheless she felt hatred in her heart as she thought of him. Were it not for Caradoc’s stupidity and greed, she would have the dragon power that she had attained from Morkeleb; she would have even the original small powers with which she was born. She would not now be standing—a skinny, scarred, brown, little middle-aged woman—here on the edge of the world, watching her son perform those things which once she herself could have done.

  Green light pouring from the wizard’s eyes, fire from his mouth.

  Seven jewels in a silver bottle.

  A goblin-headed staff, with a moonstone set in the goblin’s mouth.

  Squidslayer drifted nearer to the wall. Jenny saw in the thick dark hide the bright eye, like a little star. The whalemage opened his mouth and let something float out into the choppy waters: a broken stick, gnawed by sea worms until almost no wood remained. It had on it a goblin’s face, eaten away like a leper’s, with a white jewel still in its grinning mouth.

  Many times during her term in the green prison of a jewel, Jenny had wondered about Caradoc. She remembered Gareth—or was it the old King?—saying that Caradoc had been a merchant prince of Somanthus Isle. He’d been a haughty man who’d once courted Rocklys of Galyon, warrior-maiden and cousin of the Regent. It might be she’d loved him, in her way. At least she’d trusted him—or trusted the one she thought had
been him—when he came to her saying, I can get you the regency of the South, in place of your incompetent cousin.

  I can make you ruler, so you can rule everything right.

  You poor fool, she thought wearily. You poor vain fool.

  She saw again the vision she’d had then: a man walking along the seashore, exhausted and frustrated after a night of trying to conjure power. Like hers, she understood, his powers had been slight. And he had been unable to find a teacher. Over many decades, laws against wizardry in the South had kept those born with its power from getting the teaching they needed. Foolish laws, she thought, for they simply prevented the mage-born from learning the things that would keep them out of trouble, for those born with power always knew ways to get into it.

  So it had been with Caradoc. She wasn’t certain that at one time she wouldn’t have made a foolish, dangerous bargain in order to have power.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d do now, if offered the chance to have her power again.

  Most mages were warned by their masters—she had certainly been warned by hers—to beware such dreams.

  She knelt on the stones, reached out, and took the drifting staff in her hand. He at least had the sense, she thought, to remain silent while Folcalor sang love songs to him, calling to him to lift his own voice in answering music. His body was gone, devoured by fish; it only remained for his soul to join it in death.

  Great ocean of darkness, Squidslayer’s voice hooned in her mind. Music warm singing. Leaping happy forever. Jenny knew that this was what the whales saw when they thought of death. She understood also that the whales were not capable of smashing so small an object as a jewel. She felt sorry, holding the staff, knowing that Caradoc had never stood a chance. But as long as the stone existed, there existed also the possibility that Folcalor would find it and put it to use. That there was a power in it she did not doubt; nor that what Folcalor sought involved mages imprisoned in this fashion.