Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

Ian held his hands out over the water to sing his thanks to the whalemages as Jenny turned toward the shore.

  And in that moment, the wet wood of the goblin-headed staff burst into flame in her hand.

  Jenny dropped the burning staff with a cry, sprang back and slipped on the wet stone, fell—and lunged forward on bleeding palms, bleeding knees, trying to grab the brand as it bounced once on the rock and fell into the sea. Behind her Ian said a word she didn’t think he knew and flung himself down by the place, grabbing in the water. “Where is it? Can you see?”

  A wave smashed on the rocks, soaking them both. Jenny said the same word Ian had and stripped off her plaids, her coat—

  “Don’t be an idiot, Mother! You’ll never find it!”

  “If I don’t find it, I’m sure we’ll learn what became of it in short order.” Jenny pulled off her heavy skirt, shuddering in the icy wind, and started to yank off her boots. “Folcalor is a Sea-wight. He has power through water, and he’s been searching for this jewel for weeks, maybe months.” Squidslayer swept so close to the breakwater that Jenny could have put out her hand and touched his side, then he upended and dove down close to the massive stones of the wall. Jenny had a confused mental image of huge square blocks of granite, weed-grown and dark, of broken pillars and tumbled masonry all tangled together with the cold red kelps of the northern seas, the broken skeletons of ships, and the brown skulls of long-drowned mariners. It lasted only a moment in her mind, then vanished, and the waves crashed again, soaking her.

  “Along there,” Ian said, wrapping her in her plaid. Another whale showed close to the wall some thirty feet back, then dove. Jenny and Ian hastened along the uneven stones, catching their balance, Jenny shuddering in the flaying wind. She’d have to dive in eventually, she knew. The whales weren’t capable of reaching into a crevice as small as some of those among the broken pillars. She only hoped Folcalor hadn’t summoned some of the strange creatures she’d seen hovering around the demon gate below the ruin of Somanthus Isle.

  Ian cried out.

  Turning, Jenny saw a man climb out of the sea.

  He had been a young man, fair haired and handsome, with a gold ring in one ear. One eye was intact and the other nearly so.

  The eyes had been blue.

  She didn’t think he was one of the fishermen who’d drowned last night, but he hadn’t been dead long. The rocks at Eldsbouch were ship eaters, and His Majesty had spoken of a Southern vessel that had been driven against them a week ago.

  “Jenny.” The seawater—or maybe worms—had done something to the vocal cords. “And Ian.” He coughed and spit seawater tinged with rotted black blood. “So this is your idea of rescue? Smash the final refuge of my soul and ‘release’ me to a ‘better world’? I’d have thought better of you, Jenny, after all that was between us.”

  The swollen eyelid winked. A few brown teeth showed in a grin. “Not to mention you, my dear boy.”

  Ian’s cold-reddened face flushed with rage. He started to speak, but Jenny raised a hand to touch his shoulder.

  “It was the demons,” she said softly. “The demon in him, and the demons in us.”

  But she understood now that even as the physical bond between her imprisoned soul and her demon-ridden body had let her feel every sensation of those endless, savage ruttings during the days of her possession, so had Caradoc been aware of what his body—with Folcalor in possession—had done to and with hers. And she understood, too, that the Southern wizard had come to an accommodation with his imprisonment and had enjoyed at least some of what it brought him.

  Something moved in the young sailor’s soaked clothing. Drawing his shirt aside, Caradoc pulled a long pinkish worm from his flesh and dropped it into the water off the rocks. “I knew if I waited long enough I’d outsmart them,” he said. “Old Folcalor—and fate. But I need your help, my dear.”

  “Outsmart them?” Jenny asked, shocked. “Folcalor will be on you like a hawk on a…”

  “On a piece of carrion?” The dead face grinned. “He thinks. He thought he had me when he sent his little silver devils poking around the rocks for me. He even tried to seduce old Squidslayer, though what you could offer those things except bales of oysters I can’t imagine…” He waved a flaccid and crab-nibbled hand at the blue-black shapes lying a few yards off, washed by the waves. The jewel must, Jenny thought, have settled on the mouth of the corpse, lodged deep in some niche in the rock wall; she remembered how Caradoc had forced the Icerider children to put jewels in their mouths so their souls would be imprisoned in the crystals’ hearts.

  “I will say they kept the demons from finding me until your boy told the whales what to look for. I don’t suppose it even occurred to you to save me, while you were saving all the rest of that gullible rabble.”

  “You should be the last one,” Jenny said thinly, “to scorn the gullible.”

  “I was not gullible,” Caradoc snapped. “Had I not been exhausted—and had my concentration not been broken at a critical moment—I would have been able to keep my wards of protection strong the first time I summoned Folcalor. I’ll certainly be better prepared next time. But as I said, I’ll need your help. This thing certainly isn’t going to last me.” He slapped his chest, which gave squishily beneath the sodden shirt. “I haven’t the demons’ ability to keep a corpse going for weeks, but I learned a few things, living side by side with Folcalor six years. This poor sod didn’t have much magic in him, that’s for certain. You and your boy can help me get a nice bandit, or some stupid brute of a fisherman whom nobody will miss…”

  He broke off when he saw Jenny’s look of horrified shock. “Oh, don’t stand there with your mouth open, my dear, as if I’d asked you to tup sailors at a penny a time. Though considering all that Amayon had you do…”

  “I was Amayon’s prisoner and his puppet.”

  “And you didn’t enjoy it? All those tears and screams were genuine?” He must have read the truth in Jenny’s disgusted eyes, for he shrugged, and said, “Well, some people don’t know how to make the most of their opportunities, I must say.” He looked from woman to boy in silence for a time, studying them as he must have studied buyers in the corn markets of Bel, gauging them. He seemed to be seeking some clue in their faces, in what he knew of them, for a way to gain their complicity and assent.

  “So what can I offer you, then?” he asked at last. He put his hand to his chin in a gesture Jenny had seen him make when he spoke with Rocklys of Galyon, so the commander wouldn’t realize that the man who had courted her, the man she knew and trusted, was no longer looking at her from those pale brown eyes. “What coin will buy the help I need? This corpse stinks even to me, and I can feel the worms creeping around in my guts this minute, and the crabs burrowing along my backbone. Would you help me for the sake of the memories I have, that Folcalor left in my mind? Images, recollections, spells? The instructions that were given him by Adromelech, his master, the Lord of the Hell of the Sea-wights? The name of the wizard whose body he’s taken on now?”

  “Do you know it?” When Caradoc spoke the arch-demon’s name the ghostly form of him rose in Jenny’s memories, the being Amayon knew as lord. A figure loved and hated, feared and obsessively adored. Intelligent, like Folcalor, but without Folcalor’s sly grossness, without Folcalor’s greed for pleasure. Cold, wise, hungry beyond human conception for those things that would feed him or satisfy his pride.

  “I might,” the wizard said.

  “Why is it Folcalor who is seeking you—seeking all the wizards—and not Adromelech?” Jenny asked. “Is he in rebellion? Seeking to rule this world in Adromelech’s stead?”

  “Jenny, Jenny,” Caradoc sighed. “After running in tandem with Amayon, you still don’t understand? It’s all swallowing and being swallowed to them, you know, torturing and being tortured.” Some of the angry pride went out of his voice, and condescension tinged it—the condescension of a man who has always considered himself smarter than others and seeks to instruct, not for the s
ake of the pupil but to hear himself called wise. “They want power, want to absorb and control. They need that dominance, even as they’re being eaten themselves.”

  Jenny shivered, remembering what Amayon remembered: feeling, for a moment, what the demon felt. The unslakable, inflammable hunger to prove himself stronger than others. To have dissolving souls weep in his belly, to play the game of bargaining with them. It was a desire that satisfaction never slaked, only irritated to a craving still more urgent.

  “Adromelech tortured Folcalor in ways we cannot even conceive. Tortured him and fed off his pain. He does that with all the demons, of course, but Folcalor more than the others because Folcalor was his lover and his deputy. They all love one another, and hate one another, and feed on one another to some degree. They cannot die, and do not forgive. If he could do it, Folcalor would devour the lady of the burning mirror, to use the power he would gain from her against his lord. It’s all revenge.”

  He shrugged again. Clouds were moving in to cover the sun, and waves broke heavily on the rocks, stinging Jenny’s face with icy spray. Jenny had brought her halberd with her but didn’t think she could cover the dozen feet between herself and Caradoc quickly enough to surprise him, for the rocks were uneven and slippery.

  “Is that what Folcalor wants, then?” she asked. “Revenge? How would conquering the South have given him that? Why did he take the souls of wizards and prison them in crystals? Why make us his slaves?”

  “Ah, Jenny.” The living dead man smiled patronizingly. “There is slavery and slavery. Did you think you were his slave?”

  And she heard in his voice the voice of a merchant who always had some other plan up his sleeve, some information with which to negotiate. She raised her head, alarmed. “You don’t plan still to bargain with him?”

  “Me?” He made his face look indignant. “After all he did to me? How could you think so? Look over there.” His gesture was so natural, his voice so convincing, that she did in fact turn her head, following the direction of his hand, and so was unprepared when he bounded across the distance to her and struck her full-strength on the side of the head with the hammer of his fist, hurling her into the choppy sea. Weighted down with plaids, Jenny was pulled under, coughing and fighting. She heard Ian cry out, and beyond that only the thud and roar of the ocean on the rocks. Desperate, she slithered free of the heavy cloth and scrambled onto the rocks in time to see the big man pinning Ian facedown on the other side of the seawall, holding his head underwater.

  With a shrill scream of rage Jenny was on him with the knife she wore always at her belt, but Caradoc twisted out of the way, shoving her back. Ian crawled to his hands and knees, gasping, and Caradoc flung himself off the seawall and into the harbor’s calmer waters, vanishing into the bay like a chunk of iron.

  Jenny and Ian knelt for a long time on the breakwater’s uneven stones, dripping and shivering and clinging together, but they saw no sign of the blond head breaking the waves. Squidslayer and two other whale-mages glided through the channel into the harbor, to the awe and horror of the folk onshore, and searched there. King Mick broke one of old man Gorge’s teeth keeping the fisherman from putting out at once with his son and a boat full of harpoons. Later Mick and his own sons went out, with their boat and nets, dragging for the body until darkness and rising wind drove them in.

  “I doubt it had the strength to get ashore, you know,” the innkeeper said comfortingly that night as he brought hot wine to Jenny and Ian by the Great House fire. “It could stand, and talk, as you say, but if it was one of those Southern sailors … Well, it’d been in the sea for over a week. My boys and I will search the country round about and destroy the thing, however much of it we find. How long could it last?”

  Caradoc might have been lying about the recollections he’d gleaned from close contact with Folcalor’s mind; about the memories that had been left in him, as the memories of how to fashion a demon gate had been left in Ian’s and Jenny’s. Jenny tried to hope so, for the sake of the Winterlands—and for the sake of the world.

  A man was waiting for John Aversin at the foot of the shallow steps. “Lord Aversin, no!” he called, rising as John’s hand went to his sword hilt. John felt the stab of cramp in his right arm and stepped back to get the broken pillar of the crypt door at his back.

  Right, he thought a moment later. Let ’em take you in the passageway that leads to the burning mirror. That’ll make a good impression on the inquisitors.

  Or was this man someone Amayon had spoken to in a dream?

  A second cramp bit his thigh, pain stealing his breath. On one knee he forced his numb fingers to close on the sword hilt, swinging to his right to meet an attack.

  But there was none. Only the diminutive gray-haired mage hurrying toward him through the tangle of brown vines and snow, fur-lined coat skirts flapping, gloved hands fumbling with his scrying crystal. “That is Lord John Aversin, is it not? Of all the people in the world…”

  John swung back from a fast check of the landscape— frost-white morning, what remained of last night’s powder snow broken only by the tracks of the two horses now tied in the ruined garden above them, no advancing guards of the Regent’s council in sight—and held his sword at the ready. Master Bliaud, who like Jenny and Ian had been possessed by Caradoc’s demons, halted uncertainly, and John felt the shimmer of further magics in the air like the threat of rain.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you didn’t go shoutin’ it to the landscape.”

  “Eh? Oh.” Bliaud looked worriedly over his shoulder. “Oh, you needn’t worry. I wasn’t followed. Or accompanied.” He dropped his scrying stone, bent awkwardly to pick it up, and dusted snow from the back of his fur-trimmed robes where he’d sat on the steps. “I was particularly careful about that. The voices warned me…” He hesitated, hand at mouth as if he’d said too much.

  Gingerly, John sheathed his blade and climbed to his feet. He flinched back a pace when the Southern mage would have come closer, and Bliaud, finally getting the hint, retreated, leaving a distance of about twenty feet between them.

  Not, John reflected, that twenty feet or a hundred and twenty feet would do a bloody bit of good if the wizard wanted to lay him out with wringing pain or stop his breathing, for that matter. He’d fought the man—and others of the short-lived Dragonmage Corps—and had come to understand why men feared and hated mages and had passed a thousand years of laws to limit their power and influence.

  Still, he felt better with twenty feet between them.

  “And what voices are these?”

  Bliaud let out a nervous bleat and looked around him again. “In … in dreams. They told me my house was being watched, which is absurd. Completely absurd. Prince Gareth promised me—promised us all—that no one on the council blamed us—well, hardly anyone—for being overpowered and possessed…”

  “But you still hear ’em whisperin’,” John said quietly, and saw Bliaud’s eyes shift.

  Like Ian, the elderly sorcerer looked as if he hadn’t slept since the last full moon of summer.

  Jen and Ian have one another, he thought. Neither of ’em can speak of it—all Jen can do is sit in pain so deep she can’t even help her own son—but each knows the other went through it, too.

  Bliaud, despite his two well-meaning sons—And the Old God knows what they thought of their dad’s behavior—was alone.

  “I don’t…” Bliaud wet his lips. “I don’t ever listen.” He drew a deep breath, and John knew he lied.

  Every night, he thought. And every night remembering, as Jenny remembered, the evil he had done in those days when the world was one vast joyous holocaust of colored fire. Knowing he’d done those things and knowing the pain the demon had put him through and knowing, too, the penalties—fire and the wheel and the executioner’s knife—and wanting it anyway. Wanting the demon back.

  Bliaud’s eyes met John’s squarely for one moment, naked and begging.

  He was not begging to hear hi
m say I understand— he could see, John guessed, that he understood. He was begging to hear, It’s all right. No one will blame you. Go back.

  The old man turned his eyes aside. In a quiet voice he said, “They told me to bring things here: clothing, and food, and silver, and gold as well. They said I should lay wyrds of disguise about myself and my horse, that none might see where I went.” His glance shifted past John’s shoulder to the archway of what had been the crypt door, visible now in winter with the dying of the vines. Something altered in his eyes: curiosity, realization, hunger.

  To break that longing gaze, John said briskly, “Well, let’s have ’em, then. I’m clemmed.”

  Bliaud looked back twice over his shoulder as they climbed the steps to the old garden. If I was on Gar’s council, John thought, I’d have this one’s head, no error. He felt the heat of the ink bottle against his flesh, under his doublet, and wondered if Bliaud knew it was there.

  And he wondered what he could do about it if the mage decided to take it from him.

  But Bliaud offered him no threat, merely sat on a fallen pillar, keeping wards of concealment and misdirection— probably utterly unnecessary in the emptiness of the Bel Marches—in place while John shaved, even weaving spells of heat to warm the air around them and the water in the old marble pool, so John could bathe before he changed his clothes. “You have no horse?” Bliaud remarked at one point. “Did you journey far?”

  His eyes were on the cuts John had taken from the shining things—and, John was aware, on the pile of his clothes.

  “Farther than you’ll know.” John dried himself roughly and fast and collected the ink bottle first thing. It had been a toss-up whether to keep it thonged about his neck or to leave it concealed in his clothes while he washed.

  “Did you … I mean, were you working for … That is…” Bliaud waved his hands uncertainly, the gold stampwork on his blue leather gloves glinting in the rising sun, and his glance shifted to the vine-draped hillside below them, to the dark eye of the crypt. “I understand from my sons that you were in debt to the demons—that you owed them a teind and were doing their bidding.”