Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  “What demon?” John asked softly. “What was his name?”

  “Folcalor,” the old man whispered, then burst into tears.

  “Should we call enforcement?” Clea paused in the corridor as the digitalized numbers above the elevator doors phased into one another. She’d wrapped herself in her plex poncho again and coiled up her long gray hair under a cap. The bright lights of Poot’s building were disorienting; if it weren’t for the afternoon sunlight that bathed the illusory landscape outside—inside?—Poot’s window, John would have had no idea whether it was day or night. All he knew was that he was exhausted and not likely to have pleasant dreams.

  “You mean the chaps with the little cubicles, and they hand you a number and you wait in a line?”

  She looked confused. Long used to being the law in the stead of an absent King, John was already sorting through various plans for dealing with the problem himself. Expecting help from that lot in the cubicles was akin to expecting help from Ector of Sindestray.

  “Besides,” he added gently, “I’ll not send men against demons, and them not believing in ’em. Would you?”

  Clea shook her head. Bort and Shamble, who’d clearly thought that their part in any rough-and-tumble had been fulfilled, traded uneasy glances.

  “It’s one of the problems in havin’ power, see,” John explained. “It’s yours for a reason. And that reason involves helpin’ those who don’t have it, whatever the cost. That’s what makes us different from the demons.”

  He kept a sharp eye on the crowds as he walked the White Black Birds across to their platforms. “You call Poot the minute you’re home,” he said. “Don’t get out of sight of help, and lock yourselves in, and for God’s sake watch your backs.” And he remained on the platform until the subway whisked them away to sleep among the families that did not understand them and to work at jobs to which they could never accustom themselves.

  Then he returned to Poot’s apartment and called in his resignation to the House of Two Fragrances, knowing that, fascinating as it had been, its purpose was fulfilled. He slept a little after that but didn’t rest easy until the league reassembled slightly more than twenty-four hours later for coffee—which Garrypoot sent down to Food Central for and which was dreadful—and pizza, a food John had every intention of attempting to make when he got home.

  If, he reminded himself, he got home.

  “Why gold?” Bort asked. “Most of ThirtyoneFour-Four’s correspondence concerns acquisition of gold from estate sales and attempts to sell it on the Op-Link nodes. He uses about ten different avatars and a whole flak-field of financial screens, but I think we’ve traced most of them.” His lumpy, saturnine face was haggard, and he couldn’t have had more than five hours’ sleep before going to work in the anonymous bureau that paid his rent, minimum food, and Priority Three meds. He had a class to teach, too, at one of the local rec schools: Literature of Mysticism. According to Tisa, he had exactly two students.

  “Now, I know all sorcery requires gold and silver, in pure quantities,” Bort continued. “Synthetics don’t seem to do, any more than synthetic jewels do. The black nodes—the Link nodes devoted to occult studies— routinely advertise it to buy and sell, in far greater quantities than have ever been on the market. But why? What is it about gold?”

  John shook his head. “You’re askin’ the wrong person,” he said. “I’m just a demon hunter. I know it has properties other metals don’t, but what those might be you might as well ask the bugs in Poot’s kitchen.”

  Poot swung indignantly around from his keyboard, mouth open to protest, and the others laughed.

  “Accordin’ to Jenny—me wife…” If she is still me wife, he thought, with a stab of the old pain, the old love, the old rage in his heart.

  As his voice faltered he felt Clea’s questioning, gentle gaze touch him.

  “Accordin’ to Jenny, gold holds certain kinds of magic, or can be made to transmit certain kinds. She says it sends wizards daft when somebody pays ’em off and cheats with an alloy, ’cause then they’ve got to work around it for as long as they’ve got that metal, or go through the nuisance of assayin’ it clear.”

  “It says that in ThirtynineThreeSeven’s Occult Encyclopedia.” Old Docket fumbled eagerly in his pockets for the book chips he routinely carried with him and sighed with frustration. The other prisoners in the holding cell had relieved him even of those. After a night’s sleep, the bookseller had only vague recollections of what had happened to him after Wan ThirtyoneFour-Four and his two private enforcers entered his store, though he remembered ThirtyoneFourFour holding a gun to his head—grinning and laughing—and putting a purple jewel into his mouth. He had been, he said, imprisoned in a place made of purple crystal. There a demon had spoken to him, though he could not now remember what the demon said.

  “Well, anyway, it says in the encyclopedia,” the old man went on, fluffing his white hair with a thin hand, “that powers sourced from the sun, the earth, or fire can be stored indefinitely in gold, and that those sourced from the moon, the stars, or water can be stored in silver.”

  “That’s in the Elucidus Lapidaris, too,” John agreed. “Gantering Pellus says you can source what he calls cold magic from the silver…”

  “NineSeventy talks of warm and cold magic!” Docket cried excitedly. “Do you have this Gantering Pellus on you?” John’s eyes widened in astonishment until he realized that book chips of all twelve volumes probably would fit in a pocket. “Or would you be willing to record what you remember … Oh, all right,” he added as Clea yanked the sleeve of his borrowed pajamas. “Gold is superior because magic contained in gold can be retrieved more strongly and more completely, whereas sourcing magic through silver is more complicated and less sure. The noble metals store and transmit powers, and crystalline formations store information and patterns of energy. And, in fact, crystalline energy alignment is critical to the sourcing and transmission of common plasmic ether.”

  “So what do the demons want with it?”

  “Don’t know.” John chewed his pizza thoughtfully and nudged his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose with the back of his wrist. “Could be near any-thin’, and the Demon Queen sent me here with a great bloody stack of the stuff, bad cess to it. And given that Wan’s collectin’ it, too, my guess is she planned I should use it as bait to catch me man, same as Wan is. Because any bets the man I’m lookin’ for’s a mage.”

  Their eyes devoured him. They were scared and fascinated, all their dreamings coming true in forms that horrified them—as frequently happens, John reflected, with dreams.

  “Then why would ThirtyoneFourFour be trying to sell?” Garrypoot asked. He had deeply grudged putting up Old Docket for the night and had been even more upset by the amount of water Clea had used to clean the old man up—“I ration that water very carefully!” he’d said. But the prospect of using his skills on the Op-Link to track actual demons seemed to have mollified him.

  “Most of these transmissions are about trying to sell over the Link or to find information about other buyers, who of course are hiding their real identities behind avatars as well.”

  “Is that usual?” John had a momentary, appalling vision of networks of demons all tapping away on terminals. Let’s not tell Aohila about the Op-Link…

  “On the occult nodes it is,” Bort said. “You can’t imagine some of the crazies out there. People who want … who want some kind of power. Any kind.”

  He fell silent, as if hearing in his own words an echo of self. For a time he gazed at the window, which had been switched to show the entrance to the elevator in the subway station below. Behind the faceted band of his spectacles his blue eyes looked weary, battered by the fight against the realization that he was exactly what Tisa had called him: a loser. Crowded and cramped in a world of tiny apartments, endless noise, employments that had no meaning; unfit for the tasks that made one rich, unfit as well for the simple solutions demanded by the frustrated and the drugged. Neve
r married, never destined to be anything but what he was: a dreamer of dreams that could never come true.

  “Why won’t magic work here?” John asked quietly. “Did it used to?”

  Bort opened his mouth to give the usual swift replies about modern civilization and ancient truths, then closed it again. He tugged on his unkempt beard, considering the seethe of humankind in the window for another few moments, then shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked at John with tired eyes. “It’s so difficult to tell, from the books. Because of course all those books were written by people who … who wanted very badly that it should. I think magic did work at one time here, yes, thousands and thousands of years ago. But that’s very difficult to prove. So many records have been lost, and those that remain aren’t easy to interpret, particularly now. Funds are shorter and shorter for anything that doesn’t immediately pertain to energy management and public health. At least three of the major document repositories were in what is now the deep zone. The buildings were abandoned after the ’ninety-seven quake, and what with so much other damage, document retrieval was classified Priority Five. Which means they were simply left there to rot. The fact is, simply, that nobody really cares.”

  He folded his hands and looked down at them for a time while beyond the window, only a few yards down it seemed, salarypersons on their way back from dinner to voluntary overtime jostled among the kiosks and snack carts, the ad screens and holos and whores, each surrounded in a tight little cloud of private music and prefab dreams. A couple of gang boys crossed the platform and climbed onto a subway car, the more respectable citizens giving them wide berth; they openly wore assault weapons holstered at their belts and slung around their crimson-jacketed backs on bandoliers. The building enforcers watched them warily but didn’t challenge them.

  Not a thing of building enforcers. John recalled the voice of the dragon Morkeleb in his mind and grinned.

  There were demons out there, he thought. He saw Shamble step from a subway car and make his way toward the elevator, shabby jacket pulled close around him and a new holo-hat—this one displaying a clip from a popular holovid play—glowing and posturing above his head.

  Demons, and a fugitive mage.

  Aohila’s lover? Or had that, like the purpose of the water from the enchanted spring, been a lie? The man knew something, or had something, that the Demon Queen could use—of that John was certain.

  A gate into his own world?

  Abilities she needed to obtain some further goal?

  Did he dare turn the man over to her before he learned the truth?

  He wished he could ask Jenny what she thought was going on.

  He wondered where Jenny was, and if the pain lodged in her like a poisoned arrowhead was growing less. He wondered if Ian was recovering from the grief that had been eating him alive, and if Adric was looking after his brother and his mother. What a hell of a thing for a child of nine to have to do.

  I’m only doing the best I can, Son.

  He wanted suddenly, desperately and with all his heart, to go home.

  The door chime sounded. Old Docket got up to get it and admitted Shamble. In spite of the jewels safely in his pocket John felt a stab of uneasiness whenever any of the league went out of his sight.

  In this world Folcalor’s demons could have no use for mages’ bodies, which could not be utilized to do or channel magic. Yet he wanted their souls.

  Souls imprisoned in jewels.

  As Ian’s had been imprisoned, and Jenny’s.

  As the unknown mage’s would be, if the demons learned where he hid. Was that what Aohila wanted?

  “Any of you seen the news?” The welder leaned to the screen, touched in a corner menu. The teeming confusion below flicked away, replaced by a scene of gray rain, afternoon light, and chaos.

  Smoke half-obscured the vision, but John realized he had to be looking at a picture of the deep zone. Monstrous buildings; blocks of darkness; the rain-flecked glint of foully iridescent water; square, collapsed shells or monolithic islands defining street upon half-drowned street. Like islands, the roofs of some of those blocks bore trees, the first Aversin had seen in the city. Sickly vines trailed from windows, from holes blown in the walls. In the distance more buildings yet, more walls; iron-hued streets disappearing into infinity with the glare of neon and ad screens and ether light illuminating ash-colored clouds. Mists floated above some parts of the screen. The view drew in, as if descending over one huge block.

  It took him a moment to realize those were bodies lined up on the roof, or parts of bodies. Smoke still rose from the piled debris that had been used for a pyre, but it didn’t obscure the ropes and manacles that bound the bodies together nor that the postures were not those of people who had been dead when the fire began.

  “The enforcers say it’s a gang war,” Shamble said. He folded his skinny arms, eyes somber with shock. “This footage was shot by an independent. Far as I’ve heard the enforcers aren’t going to investigate.”

  “Gang war?” Clea came out of the kitchen alcove, coffee filter in hand. “Those are women and children. The gangs don’t kill each others’ families.” She dried her hands on her tunic, sat on the back of the couch. “The enforcers know that. Where is that? If that block there—” She pointed at the pyramidal mass of pillared ruins. “—is the old central records office, then that must be…”

  “Ninety-fourth Street and Thirtieth Avenue,” John said softly. “Just at a guess.”

  The others looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you knew the city,” Clea said.

  “I don’t. But that’s where ThirtyoneFourFour was yesterday. And what happened there,” John went on quietly, aware that his breath was coming shallow and fast, remembering the bloody walls and straps, the gold hair clip with the blue butterfly, “is exactly what’s in Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia, and in the fragments of the Liever Abominator, and in every other old tome that ever speaks of what happens when demons start wars in our worlds.”

  Jenny and Morkeleb left Adric and Ian at Alyn Hold and flew south the following night.

  “What about Balgodorus?” Ian had asked during the council they held in the kitchen of the Hold: she and her sons, with Muffle and Morkeleb. In his dark rough robe the dragon appeared human enough unless looked at closely. But the bones in his face were odd, the suggestion of bird remaining in the jut of the nose and the narrow lines of the forehead framed in silky gray. His eyes were a dragon’s eyes, and he smelled like a dragon and not a man.

  “After the fright Jen put into him,” Muffle said, “he’s likely running yet. It’s winter, lad,” he added, seeing his elder nephew’s doubtful expression. “Yes, they attacked the Hold. But they can’t mount a winter siege. They’ll freeze.”

  “If they were still bandits, they would,” Jenny remarked. “But I suspect Balgodorus is a mercenary now, working for Folcalor. In whatever guise the demon now wears; a gnome, I think. I dreamed…” She frowned, struggling to catch back the elusive dragon memories.

  “If it’s a gnome, it has to be the one who’s behind their buying of human slaves,” she said at last. “Whether Black-Knife knows his master is a demon or not, his resources are greater than they were when he had to live off the land.”

  “Remember, too,” Morkeleb said in his soft human voice, “that demons can bend human thought and human will through dreams, whether or not they have human magic at their beck.”

  Muffle had nothing to reply to that and only scratched at his unshaved chin.

  Jenny had been a little surprised, upon their return to Alyn Hold, that Morkeleb had remained visible to all. She had half expected him to retreat into the defenses of illusion, as she had seen him do at other times when he walked in human form among humankind. But he had spoken even to Aunt Jane, listening with a kind of hesitant interest to her diatribe upon the shortcomings of her sisters, her nephews, and the castle maids. He made few comments and showed little expression, but in the tilt of his head and the wordless
watchfulness of his diamond eyes, Jenny saw an unfolding curiosity, a striving to understand from within that which he had previously only observed.

  It is not enough, she thought, a little wonderingly, that he surrender the easy comfort of gold’s music and lay aside the magic that makes events bend to the will rather than the currents of chance and time. He has taken a step beyond his pride and treads new territory, perhaps for the first time in his life.

  “I can’t take on a demon,” Ian said. He would rather not have raised his eyes to meet those around the table, so he forced himself to look first at his uncle, then at his mother. “When I … when first I met Caradoc— Folcalor—he played a trick on me, getting me to touch the demon. When I tried to use magic against it, it burned my hand. It … it came up the magic, as if I’d thrown it a rope. It came into me through the magic. Even when I tried to defend against it, it used the spells of defense. I don’t know how it did that.”

  “For me it was the same.” Jenny pulled the white wool robe she wore more closely around her shoulders, feeling a chill even in the warmth of the kitchen.

  On the other side of the big room Aunt Jane said to Sally the cook, her voice loud in the silence, “You add a little honey to those apples and they’ll be fine. My mother used to mix in cardamom, but I say those new-fashioned spices only spoil what the Green God gave…”

  “What do we do if they come back?”

  “What you can,” Jenny replied. “The important thing to remember is that what they want is you, Ian. Not in a thousand years have demons shown such strength. We don’t know if there’s some other method by which they could enter your flesh against your will and drive you out yet again. You should never have come looking for me as you did.”

  Ian colored and looked away.

  “You should never have come alone.” Jenny reached across the table and took his hand.

  “Oh, and what am I?” Adric demanded indignantly. “A little brown dog?”

  “Yes,” Jenny said, ruffling his hair, at which he pulled away, striving for a man’s dignity.