Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  Not being able to read was a hindrance, of course. John left the book on the corner of the counter and walked down the narrow hall to the room where the actuals were kept. Its window had been bricked up as a security measure at some time, and an ad screen partly covered the spot. The amount the advertisers paid of any apartment’s rent was calculated by the number of hours the screen was left at half volume or higher. This one was turned down to a volume exquisitely calibrated to balance with the rent.

  All things considered, it was a miracle he heard anyone else enter the shop.

  “How could they have gotten in?” a voice in the front room asked, and John hit the dimmer on his flashlight and stepped back fast into the shadows between the bookshelves. With the ad screen displaying seminude girls playing doink to a bouncily brain-numbing tune— what are they advertising? sand? doink? pink shoes? the girls?—it was impossible to hear sounds in the front room, and of course now he could not turn down the sound without giving his presence away. But he felt the vibration of feet on the flooring and edged into the room where Docket kept outmoded disks and chips, staying behind the archway that led into the front room again.

  It was Bort TenEighty, Garrypoot, Clea, and another of the league—a leathery, bearded man called Shamble who wore a laborer’s cheap bright poly-knit and a holo-hat that enacted and reenacted the image of a very fat man exclaiming, bug-eyed, the once-comical punchline of some incomprehensible commercial play.

  It was Garrypoot who had spoken. “Wouldn’t there be some sign if it were demons?” the boy went on. “Smashed furniture?”

  “You think demons are the way they look in the vids, dear boy,” Bort reproved. He turned over the chips stacked along the edge of the nearest reader. “As if any creature would traipse around the city seven feet tall with special effects zapping out of its horns and eyes and tail. They wear the bodies of men—men with eyes like broken glass. How do you think they’ve been able to do the alley murders?”

  “That’s demons?” Shamble came over from turning down the front-room ad screen. The jingly doink tune behind John sounded all the louder. “The freelancers in the deep zone make crazy drugs.”

  “If it was drugs,” Garrypoot added. “It might have been some kind of initiation rite.”

  “It was demons,” Bort said somberly. Like John, Bort was nearsighted and one of the few people in the city to wear spectacles. Old Docket had told John, when he’d pointed out the various members of the league one day, that for some reason Bort was unable to undergo the procedure to correct the poor eyesight with which at least three-quarters of humanity was born. His spectacles consisted of a single strip of crystalline plex that fit his heavy, dark-browed face from temple to temple, modeled over the bridge of his lumpy nose. Its curved lens was subtly faceted, so the pale blue eyes behind it always appeared to be shifting their size and placement. “They eat pain. Live on it, as we live on food.”

  “Well, not really.” John stepped around the archway behind the fat man’s shoulder; Bort and the others nearly jumped out of their shoes. “They don’t eat pain anymore than we eat music. But they live on it and for it, the way opera geeks and rock fans live on and for what comes out of their systems.” He scratched the side of his nose. “Only of course music doesn’t destroy those who make it. Not right away, anyhow.”

  Garrypoot’s eyes bulged. “You know!” he whispered reverently, and Bort tilted his head, regarding the lithe unprepossessing form from behind his faceted band.

  “What know you of demons, Moondog?”

  “A bit.” John held out the blue-covered book. “What’s this one called?”

  “It’s Bransle’s—” Garrypoot began, and Bort laid a hand on his young friend’s shoulder to silence him.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “’Cause me guess is the demons pretended they were customers.” John crossed behind him to the counter and pointed to where he’d found the book. “There were others on the counter?”

  Bort nodded toward one of the reader tables. “Just that. SeventyfiveTwoOne’s.”

  “Any way of findin’ out who bought ’em?”

  “I could tap into the cred numbers,” Garrypoot offered. “They’d be filed in the computer, and I could trace the buyers.”

  “If the demons were fool enough to let Docket put their cred into the reader,” Bort said. “I wouldn’t, were it me.” Garrypoot, who’d come around the counter already and flipped the power toggle, looked at John inquiringly, asking what to do next.

  “I notice there are no empty spaces on the shelves,” John said. “It looks like Docket had ’em out and ready for a customer who’d queried beforehand. It’s what I’d do, if I wanted to meet him here after closing hours.”

  For a moment Bort and Garrypoot looked at one another. Then Bort said, “Check.”

  While the younger man called file name after file name to the softly glowing screen in search of recent correspondence from the Op-Link, Bort asked again, more quietly, “What do you know of demons? Don’t tell me you’re one of us?”

  “And who,” John asked, even more softly, “is this us you’re talkin’ of? Wizards?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Bort folded his arms and settled his chin in its deep scraggy beard; he was heavy and pudgy, but oddly powerful despite cheap, ill-fitting clothing and the sour air of failure. “Surely you’ve seen how now and then a black bird will be hatched that isn’t black but white? And how the other black birds peck it and drive it from the flock because they cannot endure its whiteness?”

  “Well, it ain’t so much an aesthetic choice as a defense,” John remarked, realizing as he spoke that the language used in the city had no word that distinguished raven from crow from blackbird. They were all black birds. The only other birds he’d seen were the carnivorous pigeons that infested the city as rats did, and what were called wild birds, meaning any of a dozen varieties of sparrow. “Black birds do flock, you know, and a white one’s goin’ to get ’em seen in the trees by somethin’ big and nasty and hungry, which I hope isn’t the case with you and your friends and me.”

  “Oh.” The heavy man looked momentarily nonplused. “Oh, that’s why they do it? Not the only reason, of course,” he went on, swiftly resuming his ponderous dignity. “And in any case the metaphor remains valid. We are those born misfits in this world—born with an understanding, a sensitivity to, forces and emanations beyond the comprehension of the average run of humankind. We understand that there are things—powers—beyond what human eyes can see.”

  “Magic?” John shoved his hands behind his belt buckle and leaned his back against the counter. “Or stuff like what keeps the lights goin’ and how come we can see whacko games and hockey that’re taking place a couple thousand miles from here?”

  Bort waved impatiently at the ad screen. “Plasmic ether was the refuge, the fallback, of those who craved cheap and easy solutions,” he said. “It’s a natural force, like steam or gravity or electricity. But I believe that its very pervasiveness has contributed to the downfall, the death, of true magic.”

  “Magic did exist,” Shamble added, his weak blue eyes catching a fragment of neon from outside and seeming to burn in the gloom. On his head the fat man did a thousandth bug-eyed double take and mouthed the catch phrase that had made the image famous. “We know it did. It has to have. And we who were born with it still in us, in a world where it no longer functions, are condemned to a lifetime of being misunderstood.”

  “The great mages have all been persecuted,” Bort agreed. He sounded as if persecution were at least recognition of specialness. “The knowledge has been passed down in secret, corrupted by those who do not understand. But the wise, like Old Docket, kept it safe.” He gestured toward the back room, to the stair that ascended to a further floor, where the old bookseller had had his cluttered sleeping chamber.

  “And in the past thirty years, with the Op-Link, we’ve been able to contact others like ourselves, in all parts of the world,” Cle
a added. “There are areas and nodes on the Link where the children of magic come to trade experience and advice with one another. The Link may be able to help us find Docket, or learn about demons—”

  “Or let the demons learn about you.” John had heard about the Op-Link from Old Docket, though it made as little sense to him as personal enhancement institutes or embodiment training.

  Bort drew back, startled. “I—What? Why?” He had clearly not realized that Docket’s disappearance might have anything to do with him.

  John sighed. After a lifetime in the Winterlands it was difficult to remember sometimes that there were people who didn’t look through doors before stepping out. “Listen. Last summer I was twilkin’ near killed because a demon lord set about collectin’ mages. He combed the Realm for ’em, tricked ’em out of hiding. His demons took over their bodies, and he kept their souls. Now you tell me the likes of you are spreadin’ word about how you’re wizards all over the public computer lines, and you don’t think…”

  “I’ve found the book titles.” Garrypoot’s voice broke across John’s words. The youth looked back over his shoulder, the pale glow of the screen playing across his rat-like face. “Moondog was right, Bort. Both the Bransle and the Companion were mentioned in the same correspondence, two days ago, asking Docket to wait after closing. The message was signed Wan ThirtyoneFourFour.”

  “ThirtyoneFourFour?” Bort’s heavy shoulders dropped, and for an instant he resembled the fat comic actor hovering faintly above Shamble’s yellow cap. “ThirtyoneFour-Four? Are you sure?”

  “I traced the log-on code,” Garrypoot said. He looked scared. “It was a genuine transmission.”

  Bort and Garrypoot looked at one another disbelievingly, then at Clea, at Shamble, at John.

  “All right,” John said after a moment. “So who’s this Wan when he’s at home? D’you know him?”

  Clea laughed, as at an absurdity. Bort only shook his head. “Not being millionaires, of course we’ve never met. But we’ve heard of him on the news. Everyone has.”

  “Wan ThirtyoneFourFour is the first man to come back from the dead,” Clea said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Mother.”

  She heard their voices, far-off and clear. The dragon dreams in which she slept were like sleeping in a world wrought all of brown topaz that refracted every separate sound and scent and vibration to crystal distinctness. She could hear snow falling in the Gray Mountains, moles whispering as they turned in their sleep.

  But the voices caught at her mind. She didn’t know why.

  “You’re stupid,” the younger boy said. “Of course she’ll know who we are. Dragons know everything.”

  Indeed we do, she thought. Indeed we do.

  She knew they were two boys moving on foot northeast through the thick woods five miles to the south of her. She knew that though the younger bore a little sword they were no threat.

  They had lost their mother, by the sound of it, though the elder—she turned her mind upon them, seeing within as dragons can—was old enough to take care of both himself and the younger.

  The older boy was a wizard, as humans reckoned wizardry. The nimbus of power shone dim around his head and shoulders. Adolescent humans were seldom strong in their powers until the flesh from which they sourced their magic ceased its changes from child to adult. She didn’t know why she knew this, or why the children looked familiar to her.

  Heretofore her dreams had been dragon dreams: sailing on the wind above ice fields and rocks; absorbing the magics of sun and air as if she’d long been starved; dreaming of the other star-drakes, wherever they were, in the mountains or the ocean’s heart, or among the Skerries of Light.

  Why did she dream of lost children?

  “Dragons may know everything,” the older boy, the wizard-boy, said, “but she may not remember who she is. She may not remember she’s our mother. She may not be able to turn back.”

  “That’s stupid,” the younger declared. He was stocky and red haired. “You’re stupid.”

  The young of any species generally smite those younger still who treat them with disrespect—it is a way of making oneself safe—but this older boy only sighed and said, “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  The white dragon considered the boys for a time in her sleep.

  She had laired in the crypt of an old temple that had been built to some human god and was now overgrown with dead briars under an eiderdown of last night’s snow. There was some gold there, though robbers had been at the place, long ago. Still, there was gold enough for her to sing to, gold into which to pour the music of her mind and heart and have it reflect back a thousand-fold the heart-shaking beauties of the everlasting world.

  She felt the goodheartedness of the old temple’s priests, who’d stayed to keep their god’s honor fresh in the minds of the local people; felt the grief and terror and tragedy of their death at the hands of bandits; the peace and wonder of each slow-passing season, each nesting bird, each fox kit raised and taught to hunt and to go forth to meet the winter moon.

  All these things, and a thousand sad shining sweetnesses more, resonated from the gold, soothing and healing her heart.

  The children were seeking their mother.

  In her dream the white dragon blew on the gold again. It seemed so long since she’d basked in the glory that dragon magic calls from gold. Every joy, every hour of content she had ever felt, every beauty she had ever been aware of, came back to her from it, easing a hurt deep in her heart for which she had neither memory nor words. The children presented no threat to her, no more than the hungry deer that scraped the snow in quest of brown ferns. There were bandits in the woods, a small group of them, following the boys’ tracks. Slave traders, she thought, and recognized two or three as being among the men she’d driven from the walls of the citadel.

  Now why, she wondered, had she done that?

  She remembered doing it, but could not remember why.

  The wizard-boy should be aware of them, but watching through her dreams she did not think he was.

  It was often so, with adolescent mages.

  “Maybe she’s gone off to be a dragon forever,” the younger boy said. “I think that’s great. Papa says the dragons live on islands way out in the ocean, and hunt and fish and sing songs. That’s what I’d do if I could.”

  She saw the boy’s grief like blood drops shed in silence in the snow.

  “If she wants to do that, yes,” the black-haired elder boy said. “But we have to ask her at least to come back till Father returns. Because of the demons.”

  Demons.

  The white dragon dreamed of demons.

  Those memories, too, the gold refracted: a kaleidoscope of rage and pain and horror, of slavery and rape. Because she was a dragon she saw all these visions dispassionately, understanding them for experiences, for things that she now knew.

  She had demon memories as well, clarified and magnified through the gold.

  She was in Hell, watching Adromelech the arch-demon torture Folcalor. She saw them clearly—Amayon saw them clearly, Amayon whose memory this was. Amayon sat on the steps of Adromelech’s dais and clung to the blaze of the archdemon’s power. He absorbed and warmed himself in the howling, obscene agonies of Folcalor’s humiliation and pain. He absorbed, too, like the crumbs and leavings of a feast, some of the arch-demon’s sensual delight.

  This was what it was to be a demon, the dragon understood. This was what it was. When Adromelech withdrew Folcalor from the fire, on the point of dissolution, he took the victim in his arms and breathed into him all the pleasure he’d taken from Folcalor’s pain and made Folcalor love him.

  Ah, my little wight. Ah, my little treasure.

  And Folcalor said, I will serve you as you served me. For Folcalor was the most intelligent of the Sea-wights, coldness and patience added to their will and their greed and their vast malicious anger. I will devour you, piece by piece, as you daily devour me.

  Of course you will,
my child, Adromelech chuckled indulgently, of course you will. And with his clawed forefinger he put out Folcalor’s eyes and let him creep around the room blind, burning him as he crept, with Amayon giggling, lapping up the pain, behind.

  They all love one another, and hate one another, and feed on one another to some degree, a man had said to her once on some sea rocks, waves smashing high over their heads. They cannot die, and do not forgive.

  What does he want? she had asked the worm-riddled dead man, with his blue decomposing eyes. She was aware of him, too, shambling and stumbling through the freezing wastes of the fells, lying down in the snowdrifts to keep the rot from overtaking his corpse, hearing the Demon Lord’s sweet singing in his crumbling dreams. What does he want?

  In the gold’s shimmering reflections she saw Folcalor clothed in the body of a gnome. White hair tinged faintly with pink flowed down over his brocaded shoulders. His hands she knew already, thick and heavy and ringed with the faceted gems of the gnomes. And she knew his greenish, watchful eyes.

  The chamber where he was had a pool in its center, six or seven feet broad and brimming with water through which leafy beryl light flickered up. Folcalor’s jeweled hand passed over the water, and in it the dragon saw the image of an old man weeping. Bliaud, she thought. His name is Bliaud… And he wept as if he had lost the last and dearest thing that had made his life worth living. In some part of her heart the white dragon knew what that thing was.

  Folcalor leaned over the pool and whispered, “Blood in the bowl, peace in your soul. All will be whole.”

  The dragon’s opal eyes opened, and she knew there was something she had forgotten—something about the demon.

  And the lost boys knew what it was.

  Waking, she heard their voices crying out. The bandits had reached them, had fired a poison arrow that struck the wizard-boy’s leg. Even at this distance she smelled the blood and smelled in it the poisons that would tangle his magic and keep him from using it against those who attacked. She smelled, too, the flesh of the man who’d shot the arrow, smelled decay and death.