Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  “Gaw.” John pulled on his breeches, then his boots, shivering where the cold winds breathed through the heat spells. “If that’s what’s bein’ noised about me, I’m lucky the Regent’s never sent troops back north, ain’t I?”

  “Is it true?”

  He stamped his boots into place and got into the clean shirt and his doublet, tucking the ink bottle and the bag of flax seeds out of sight. He looked back up to meet the old man’s desperate eyes.

  “Master Bliaud,” he said, more gently than he’d thought he would speak to one of Aohila’s servants. “A month ago me son Ian tried to kill himself because of a demon whisperin’ to him in his dreams. The demon that was in my Jen won’t let her rest—not that it’s truly there, or able to speak out of the Hell to which I sent him when they left you, no more than that’s really me dad shoutin’ at me in me dreams.”

  Bliaud looked quickly away.

  “If you called ’em back,” John went on, buckling the straps of his doublet, flexing his arm in a jangle of chain and spikes, “it wouldn’t heal the pain you’re feelin’ now. It’d only let ’em drink that pain and laugh at you when the Regent had you killed for the Realm’s sake. You know that.”

  The little man nodded. A wealthy gentleman of good family in Greenhythe, he’d lived most of his life, John recalled, in genteel retirement, keeping his talents discreetly concealed so as not to bring upon his family the stigma of being mageborn in the South.

  He’d only ridden north the previous summer at the behest of the Regent, who’d said the Realm needed mages to survive. And the very tutor to whom he’d entrusted himself had raped him of mind and will, imprisoned his self in a sapphire’s heart, and put a demon into his body.

  He had asked for none of this: pain, shame, memories more foul than the worst of nightmares, and emptiness— that awful sense that without the demon, there could be no more joy in life.

  He’d only wanted to help.

  It was all in his eyes.

  Then he wet his lips with a hesitant pale tongue and asked, “Did you … Do you have a demon helper, a demon guide? May I see it?”

  Were I king, John thought as he later saw Bliaud ride away with his unloaded packhorse, his shimmer of snowy mist and illusion, I’d have him killed tonight.

  For the good of the Realm.

  And maybe meself as well.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The gates of paradise lay beyond the Hell of Winds.

  Aversin was never sure whether the Hell of Winds was actually as he saw it or merely an illusion of some demon intent on trapping him and Amayon in howling lightless mazes forever. Or intent on something, anyway.

  It was hard to tell about Hells.

  The place didn’t even make the marginal sense of the Realm behind the Mirror of Isychros or the wastelands roved by the Shining Things. Bridges spanned gaping, endless abysses, and broken railless stairways climbed the wet black cliffs, but they seemed built for no purpose. “Are they just for decoration, like?” he inquired when, hammered by exhaustion, he insisted they stop in a circular stone pit like a dry well that offered some shelter from the winds. “Or is this a regular route from Ernine to that place I saw in the pool?”

  The pit was floored in thin flat slabs of crystal that cut his leather sleeves like razors. Holding a piece of it up to the weak greenish light Amayon had called into being, he saw that one edge was beveled; it was the same kind of dark-hued glass that the hunter woman in the Hell of the Shining Things had carried about her neck to identify demons with.

  “You don’t understand.” Amayon looked annoyed, as at a child’s questions regarding the color of the sky. He was trim and clean, not even wet from the spray flying down out of the darkness. With two days’ growth of beard, and mud and rain slicking his clothes and hair and spectacles, John wanted to slap him.

  “Well, it’d be a waste of both our time to ask if I did understand, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “Every Hell has a secret.” Amayon gave him a sly red-lipped smile. “And every Hell has a lord. Mostly you never see the lord, but guessing the secret can be the difference between…”

  “Life and death?”

  The demon laughed; a thin bright tinkling sound. “Silly. What are those? Guessing the secret can be the difference between getting out and not getting out.”

  Even had the demon guide not been with him, John would have known enough not to follow the lights he sometimes half glimpsed—cold and green, or warm doorways of inviting amber—at the ends of mysterious stairs and causeways. In a gully filled with fire he saw a chained man who looked like his father, weeping and dragging at the bonds that held him to the rocks. There were other people there as well, half glimpsed through the smoke. “It’s illusion,” John said, “isn’t it? Like the whisperers in the Mire?”

  And the demon smiled sidelong at him and said, “Human souls have to go someplace when they die. Go down and speak to him.”

  The man looked up with heat-demolished eyes and shouted something to them, where they stood on the bridge above. John couldn’t hear above the roaring and crackle of the blaze. He could have been crying, Help. He could have shouted, John.

  “It’s like the whisperers.” John held up the dark fragment of glass he’d found, catching the reflection in it as the hunter woman had done. The fire was gone— illusion—but there was something in the pit, something cloaked in shadow and impossible to see clearly. It might still have been his father.

  “Whatever it comforts you to believe,” Amayon said. And the demon purred almost audibly at the taste of doubt and guilt and pain as John walked across the bridge and away. Nevertheless, though John saw no other evidence of other demons—if in fact the illusion was that of a demon—he noticed that Amayon kept close to his side and didn’t attempt any little tricks.

  Unless of course opening the gates of paradise was a trick.

  If it was, it worked.

  That first day in the green warm sweetness of meadow and woodland, all John did was sleep. He stoppered Amayon in the ink bottle and set snares and warning traps all around the thicket of laurel and wild roses where he lay down, though he’d seen no sign of any creature larger or fiercer than a roe deer. His sleep was like drowning in tepid water. He dreamed of Jenny, healed, brushing her long hair again—it had grown in gray, like fog in moonlight—and of Ian and Adric as young men, talking in the sunset of a rich autumn with promise of a plentiful harvest to come. The light was waning as he woke, but it seemed to be summer here, the woods fragrant with briar and honeysuckle. He spent an hour in the fading light scribbling on his scraps of parchment: the apparent route through the stone mazes, the fiery sigils that had marked the gate to paradise, the broken glass in the pit.

  How had the glass come to the hunter woman, who looked as if she had been born and raised in the Hell where she was trapped?

  All Hells have a secret, Amayon had said.

  If he wasn’t lying, of course.

  Then he ate some of the bread and fruit Bliaud had brought him—for he wasn’t sure whether tasting the fruits of paradise would have the same consequences as those of Hell, and he wasn’t ready to risk delay—and lay down and slept again.

  Fairy lights wakened him, and fairy music.

  They circled him like butterflies, bobbing spots of luminosity in the cobalt velvet of the night. All the meadow before him was starred and frosted with the light of similar rings, and in the trees where the ground was lower he saw a young stag browsing, fey lights wreathed and sparkling on its horns. Only when he reached out his hand to those gently glittering powder puffs of light did their true nature become obvious.

  Pain lanced his palm where they bit. Shoots of cold pierced his arm, taking his breath. He tried to shake them off and couldn’t. He whipped his knife from its sheath and sliced them away, but their stings remained in his flesh, he felt them bore deeper, each twisting and hooking with a separate, greedy life. He dug at them, the blood trickling down, and the pink and blue lights settled on t
he dripped gore. They reflected sickly greenish in the fragment of beveled glass, he noticed before dizziness swamped him and he dropped to his knees.

  Then more lights drew near. They fastened on his wrists and face and dug through the sleeves of his shirt, staining the linen with blood. The stag walked nearer, tilting its head, and squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits soft as baby’s breath emerged from the thicket’s shadow, fairy light glowing green from their greedy eyes.

  John managed to yank the stopper from the ink bottle as his fingers got cold and numb. Amayon cursed, kicked the nearest demon bunny aside, and snatched up another one, biting through the soft fur of its neck. Blood squirted horribly; the demon sucked up blood and life while the rabbit bit, screamed, and manifested claws and mouths and tentacles to rip at him. The other creatures retreated, and grinning like a mad dog Amayon pursued them, catching the little pink stinger feys and popping them into his mouth.

  He came back, smiling, to where John lay among the ferns with sweat streaming from his face as the pain went deeper and deeper still. “I think it’s been five hundred years since a human got into this Hell,” the demon boy said conversationally, seating himself among the ferns beside John’s shoulder. He plucked a violet, savoring its scent, and tucked the blossom behind his ear. “I gather he didn’t last long. Well, longer than he wanted to, anyway.”

  John tried to speak and couldn’t, jaws aching from the effort not to scream. He knew that would come, too, and soon. He managed to say, “Aohila.”

  Men don’t leave me, she had said. It was a good bet demons didn’t, either, and he saw the change in Amayon’s face at the mention of her name.

  The anger at being reminded that he, too, was a servant vanished at once. “Wonderful how a little sting will make anyone hide behind a woman’s skirts,” the demon mocked. “But don’t worry.” He leaned over John and stroked his face with a grass blade, the mere touch engendering a wave of nauseating agony where the things the stingers had turned into wriggled and dug through muscle and nerve and flesh. “I won’t let you die.”

  Then, with the air of a connoisseur settling himself to sweetmeats and wine, the demon lay back on the ferns to enjoy an extended feast of pain.

  There is slavery and slavery, Caradoc had said.

  And, Did you think you were his slave?

  Jenny pondered those words as they passed under the gatehouse of Eldsbouch and took once more the overgrown trail south.

  “Obviously, our bodies were slaves,” Ian said, pulling his plaids more closely around his face as ice-laden winds ripped through the sparse trees. Returning to the inn after his near drowning, he had slept almost twelve hours. Waking, he’d wrought weather spells against the coming storm but Jenny wouldn’t have laid money on how long they’d hold.

  At least until we reach Alyn Hold, she prayed to Ankithis, father of storms. Once again, she felt naked, unable to protect herself with anything other than hope and trust in the gods. She had no idea whether this would be enough.

  “Somehow,” Ian went on, “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

  “Nor do I.” Jenny glanced back over her shoulder for a glimpse of King Mick and his sons dragging their net one last time through the violent waters of Migginit Bay. There was still no sign of the animate corpse. She tried to hope that the worms and the fish had completed their interrupted repast, but her dreams would not permit her this comfort. “I was Folcalor’s prisoner in the crystal. I—the real part of me—was never his slave.”

  “Would we have been later?”

  Jenny shivered in the plaids the whales had retrieved for her from the sea. “I thought that being his prisoner was the worst that could happen,” she said at last. “Seeing what Amayon did—feeling what he did—to and with my body. Not being able to do anything about it.”

  Ian looked away.

  She leaned from Moon Horse’s saddle to touch Ian’s wrist, letting him know that she understood. “Now I wonder if your father didn’t get us out before the worst.”

  “It will be all right with him, won’t it?” Ian glanced back at her, eyes dark and shy under the shadows of his curiously jutting brows. “You going away—going back to Frost Fell …?”

  Jenny sighed. Even on the road, dreams of Amayon still came to her: dreams of his passion for her, of the passion for life, of the brilliance of magic and power that she had felt when he had inhabited her flesh. Possession by a demon was not a simple matter, not merely alienation from one’s own body while another personality ruled it. Since true death had not severed soul from flesh, the bonds of feeling were strong—strong enough, in most cases, that if exorcism was performed within the first few days, the displaced soul would return. The soul retained the shape of the flesh, as Jenny had found out in the crystal. Hold the hand of her body toward fire, and Jenny, in her crystal, would feel the warmth.

  That had been one of the horrors of her imprisonment. It was one of the worst parts of the dreams.

  And, it seemed, it had been one of Caradoc’s consolations.

  “We come together and we move apart,” she said in time. “It happens all through life. I was hurt—I was badly hurt—in that final battle, and I’m still hurting and angry. And I was taking my anger out on your father for things that probably aren’t his fault.” Like lying with the Demon Queen? the anger in her soul whispered. Like going to her instead of coming to me, in the plague? “I will always be a part of his life. A part of yours.”

  He looked down at his hands for a moment, clumsy in their worn gloves on his mare’s reins. “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “It does,” Jenny agreed gravely, and he glanced up quickly and laughed.

  They camped that night in the ruins of what had been first a fortified manor house, then an inn. The walls had been rebuilt a little, and it was a favorite camping place for the few merchant pack trains that wound their way between Alyn Hold and the sea. The old kitchen still had most of a roof on it, and it was here that they bedded down, kindling a small fire in the brick hearth and tying their horses near. Ian’s drained powers had recovered enough to let him set a ring of ward signs around the outbuilding walls, but Jenny and he both agreed that sitting awake in shifts that night wouldn’t be a waste of their time.

  She dreamed of Amayon again that night, and of Folcalor, crouched somewhere in darkness. Somewhere close, she thought. Caradoc had spoken of a wizard whose body the demon now rode—if he’d been telling the truth. But her magic was gone, and she could not search her dreams as she used to. She dreamed, too, of John, lying asleep in a hollow place of bare red-black rock, his drawn sword under one bandaged hand and his spectacles clutched protectively in the other. She thought he looked exhausted—thin and haggard and filthy—and where his sleeves were pushed up over his forearms and his torn shirt hung open to show his chest, she could see the marks drawn on his flesh by the Demon Queen.

  When she woke, consumed with the heat of her changing body, she knew she would sleep no more that night and told Ian to rest. The boy sorely needed it; he was unconscious in moments and muttered in his sleep words she could not understand. Whether he spoke of his own demon Gothpys or of Folcalor she could not tell, nor did she ask him in the morning. Again and again she tried to conjure recollection of her dreams of Folcalor: where he had been and what things had surrounded him that might lead her to his hiding place or give her a clue as to the body he now wore.

  But beyond the fact that he was in a place of darkness, she could see nothing. There were jewels there, she thought: enormous jewels on his many rings, but jewels also like the sapphire and peridot and smoky quartz in which she and the other mages had been imprisoned. But there were so many of them in the hammered silver dish at his side—handfuls—that they could not be prisons for the souls of mages. There were not that many mages in the world.

  In the morning Ian was able to scry the territory for signs of bandits or Iceriders and to see in his crystal that all was well at the Hold.

  Why cripples? Jenny
wondered as she saddled Moon Horse again and helped Ian strap up the packs. Why the old as well as the young?

  They planned to lie that night at the Dancing Cow in Far West Riding, from which spot—weather permitting— they should be able to reach the Hold by the following night. But when they stopped at sunset, still an hour or two from the small isolated settlement, for Ian to scout the country ahead of them in the scrying stone that had been Jenny’s, the boy’s eyes widened sharply. “There’s trouble,” he said.

  “Where?” Jenny leaned forward instinctively then sat back, furious and hurt, remembering that she could call nothing in the crystal’s heart. “What?”

  Ian looked up. “Far West Riding,” he said. “Bandits. They’re attacking the main gate. I guess Grynne hadn’t gotten it shut for the night yet; it looks like the gate’s still open. And they’re trying to get over the wall in that place where the mortar’s no good.”

  “John told them to fix it last spring,” Jenny moaned.

  “But why would bandits attack Far West Riding?” He stared down at the crystal again, angling it to the sliver of witchlight he’d called in the fading dusk. They’d stopped just below the crest of Whitelady Hill, in the bare miles of what had been farmland, and the snow that stretched behind them was broken here and there by blue-brown ridges of half-ruined stone walls and lines of long-dead trees. “There’s nothing there except the inn and Father Drob’s temple and a couple of farms.”

  “Look at the Hold.” Jenny glanced beyond him to the thick yellow-gray sky above the hill. No smoke yet.

  “I can’t see it.” The blue feather of light brightened, shining coldly in the eyes of their horses. Moon Horse turned her long ears inquiringly, sensing the trouble in Ian’s voice. Ian’s horse was the one John called “the Stupider Roan,” to distinguish it from its marginally less blockheaded brother, and would not have sensed trouble had a regiment of goblins danced around it in a circle. “Nothing.” Ian looked apologetic. “I’m tired, Mother. It could be only that. I didn’t do well yesterday, either. I kept losing the images…”