Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  “You’re a little brown dog who could be used as a hostage,” Muffle put in grimly. “I told the pair of you your mother’d be back.”

  “I’m not sure that I would have, though.” Jenny looked around at the smith. “I might have—I’m not sure. But I had forgotten who and what I was. I think in another few days I would even have forgotten why I was lairing up near Frost Fell and would simply have taken wing for the Skerries of Light. And you wouldn’t have inquired why I was there,” she added, turning to Morkeleb, “would you?”

  I would not have wished to, the dragon replied in her mind. But he said, for the benefit of those around the table, “Perhaps not. Or not soon enough. We perceive not time as you do. It is true that the murmur of the demon has troubled my dreams, but it is true also that it is one rumor among many, and I had no reason to pursue it with my thoughts or seek for it in my dreaming. Having known the demon’s mind, Jenny, you perceive his calling as others do not.”

  “You did well,” Jenny said, touching again her son’s hand, “to seek me. And you, Muffle, did well to try to keep him from doing so.”

  “We were afraid you’d fly off,” Adric said. “It’s like when a falcon breaks her jesses and gets away. You’ve got to have Mim go after her alone—the falcon, I mean— because she knows and trusts him. Mim’s Papa’s falconer,” he added for Morkeleb’s benefit. “If everybody in the hunt goes chasing a falcon, she’ll be gone. We thought—I thought—you might be scared or something.”

  “As I was,” Jenny said. “In any case we won’t be gone long. But Prince Gareth must be warned that there is danger of demons still in the land. Almost certainly Folcalor will make another attempt to gain control of the Realm, to further his rebellion against his lord Adromelech. There’s a connection there, too, I think, with the slaves they’re buying. In spite of all Ector of Sindestray’s efforts, there is no law against being possessed by a demon, only against trafficking with them; but I suspect Master Bliaud has gone into hiding nevertheless. Gareth will surely know where he is. The old man has to be warned not only to look out for himself but to guard his sons, who might be used as hostages for his compliance.”

  “Demons,” Aunt Jane sniffed, fishing salt pork from the brine barrel in a great greasy whiff of salt. “As if we haven’t troubles enough. I told that nephew of mine…”

  Following the conference in the kitchen, Sergeant Muffle clanged the meeting bell above the Hold gate, summoning the folk of the Hold and of Alyn Village to assemble in the hall. Farmers and brew wives and laborers for hire, the baker and the priest—men and women she’d known all her life—greeted Jenny as they came in, as did their children. “Dearest, you’ve got to put some flesh on your bones,” Sparrow said, hugging her— Sparrow, who was even shorter than Jenny and weighed barely more than a good-sized dog—and Peg the gatekeeper kissed her on her bald head and said, “Things’ll look better come spring, you’ll see.”

  All of these Morkeleb greeted with quiet courtesy, introducing himself as a friend of Jenny’s from the North. When the conference started he settled himself among the grandmothers and the children, in the shadows behind the pillars where the hall’s stonework ran into the living rock of the hill on which it was built.

  “We ran off the bandits,” Muffle told everyone when they’d made themselves more or less comfortable on trestle benches, on the hearth bricks, or on the bases of the pillars that ran down the center of the big chamber in a double line. “But from what Jen tells me they’ll be back. And from what Jen tells me, there’s magic afoot and a-brewing, and foul things abroad. Some of you may get dreams about how you should kill this person or that person—maybe me, maybe somebody else…”

  “I get dreams like that all the time, Sergeant,” his wife, Blossom, joked and got a general laugh. “I thought everybody did.”

  “Well, don’t pay ’em any heed, woman,” he retorted with a grin. “These folk that’re using magic of one kind or another will be trying to get hold of Master Ian.” He nodded toward the boy sitting uncomfortably on a stool at Jenny’s side. In the crowd Jenny picked out the boys Ian had played with less than a year ago: Muffle’s son Rok and her own cousins from the Darrow Bottoms, boys growing into the farmers and hunters of the Winter-lands, having no other choice of what they would be. No more than John had had, she thought, when he’d wanted to be a scholar and was told he was the lord’s son and therefore must become a warrior whether he liked it or not.

  “So you may get dreams about doing something with Master Ian,” Muffle went on, his voice grave. “Killing him, maybe. Maybe taking him out into the woods with you, or giving someone a way into the Hold, or luring out Master Adric into a trap. These people who’ll bait their traps through dreams,” the blacksmith said, looking around him now at the quiet faces, still bruised or scabbed from the attack three days ago, “they’ll seem to you more powerful than they are. Well, maybe they are powerful. And they may promise you all sorts of things, good or maybe bad. But I think you’ll know if your dreams aren’t what they ought to be, for such dreams don’t usually have the taste of real dreams,” he said. “And if that happens, come and tell me.

  “Because those who’ll send you the dreams will lie. Whatever they tell you they’ll reward or punish, it’s a lie. And all that will happen is doom for us all. Do you understand?”

  There was silence. Looking out over the faces—the scared, uncertain eyes—Jenny wondered suddenly which of those people—Muggy Dim the baker or Mol Bucket the cow maid—might already have dreamed a poisoned dream and heard Folcalor whispering seductive little rhymes to them in their sleep.

  “Any questions?” Muffle asked.

  Adric, of course, piped up with, “Why is the sky blue?”

  “Any questions about this?”

  There was a hush in which the wind that had begun to blow from the north whined and sang around the walls of the Hold and drove smoke down the chimney to make Granny Ivers cough. Then Granny Brown—an old stringy woman who had been midwife for many years on the outlying farms, who was eccentric and weather-beaten and now sinking into an unaccustomed sweetness in her old age—spoke up.

  “When will Lord John be back?” she asked.

  And Muffle looked aside without replying while Jenny thought of that question, which she herself would have asked of the God of Women had she believed in any power or justice in the world.

  Would he believe her, she wondered, when she told him she was sorry for what she had said? For her rage at his dreaming of the Demon Queen? She wanted at least to have that chance.

  She glanced at Morkeleb, seated next to the old midwife, but he was listening to something four-year-old Ammi Dim was telling him about her kitten.

  At length Muffle said, “I don’t know, Granny. I don’t know.”

  The day was failing when the meeting broke up, and as usual half the village stayed for dinner. Jenny extricated Mag from the weaving room—“Magic,” the child explained, holding up a horrifying knot of Aunt Umetty’s wool—and then found a thick skirt and sheepskin boots for herself, and a leather bodice with silver clasps. Over this she put on her heaviest plaids and the sheepskin coat she’d worn to Eldsbouch.

  “Now I know why you lived all those years at the Fell,” Ian said, coming out into the cold blue snowlight of the court. Jenny laughed. It was the first laughter to pass her lips in months, and it surprised her, almost hurting her throat. It came to her that it was not a thing of dragons to laugh. “I guess Father has his own Frost Fell up in his study. I never thought of it before.”

  Ian tucked his hands under his plaids, his breath golden smoke in the lantern light from the doors. The warmth of that glow colored his cheekbones and caught threads of carnelian in his hair. Through the door they watched Adric speaking to this crofter or that yeoman, small square hands shoved behind the buckle of his sword belt, Mag listening, silent, at his heels. The bruises on the boy’s face were swollen and black; Jenny saw Peg the gatekeeper reach out, concerned, to look, and saw
how her son pulled back. Another child might have made a show of the wounds, seeking praise or pity. Adric’s gesture was impatient: Good grief, that was yesterday.

  He will be a lord, she thought. Thane of the Winter-lands, body and bones, with none of the doubts and division of soul that tormented John.

  Lord Aver, she thought, remembering that big red angry man, rest easy in your grave. You have your heir.

  As, she supposed looking at Ian, Kahiera Nightraven has hers.

  And whose heir, she wondered, would silent Maggie turn out to be?

  “You’ll be back soon?” Ian asked.

  Jenny nodded. She picked up the bundle Cousin Dilly had brought for her: food and a little money, medicinal herbs and a blanket, a bottle of water and a couple of clean shifts. Morkeleb stood in the kitchen doorway, shaking his head and softly thanking Aunt Jane and Cousin Dilly for their offer of hospitality for supper. Not human, Jenny thought—wearing his human form like a colorless garment. Darkness within dark, with a diamond glimmer of eyes.

  Morkeleb the Black, dragon of Nast Wall.

  Star-drake and dragonshadow, treader of the farther dark.

  Seeking the knowledge of new things as the ancient king of legend was supposed to have learned them: by being transformed by a wizardly tutor into beasts or fish or birds, to walk among the humble of the earth.

  It was time to go. The last of those leaving had taken their departure, and through the hall’s open door she heard those who were staying to supper setting up tables and moving benches about amid banter and laughter. There’d be dancing later, she thought. Her stiff hands flexed at the recollection of the music of her harp.

  It had been months since those songs had even flickered in her mind.

  “Take care,” she said, and Ian hugged her close. “If your father returns…”

  What?

  “Tell him I love him,” she said. “And that I’m sorry for the darkness that fell between us. That I’ll do whatever I can to make amends, if amends are possible.”

  Ian glanced at the beetling shadow of the wall, where last they’d seen Morkeleb standing—Jenny felt rather than saw the stir of wings and spikes and snow-flecked mane—and then at his mother again, asking if she truly meant what she said. Then he smiled and said, “I’ll tell him.”

  Peg had closed the gates of the Hold and run the portcullis down nearly to the ground. She waited in the dark of the gatehouse now, sitting on the drawbridge’s wheel. She gave Jenny a quick grin—they’d played together as girls—and opened the postern; Jenny kissed Ian again and ducked under the portcullis’ spikes.

  Morkeleb had risen like a bat from the courtyard shadows and circled now in the moonlight above the wall, small enough that Jenny could have taken him like a falcon on her wrist.

  But instead it was he who took her up. Growing in size as he descended, the full moon’s light blazed through him as if he were smoke and dreams. His shadow where it passed over Ian’s face was a mottle of silver and ash; his wings did not obscure the stars. Jenny lifted her arms to the descending claws. Ian raised a hand in farewell.

  The world fell away, amber flowers shrinking in cobalt dark and snow. Wind smote Jenny’s face like frozen razors. Together they passed over the village and into the bitter lapis night.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It is the whole art and pleasure of wights to cause suffering.

  John Aversin stared for a long time at the slow pull of waves on the silent beach.

  Gantering Pellus, he automatically identified the words that rose to his mind. The Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World, Volume III. He could call to mind the merchant he’d bought the decaying volume from and smell again the snow that had fallen on the winter night he’d copied out that passage.

  An ordinary drunkard demons seldom possess, unless they beguile him into welcoming them. Yet those under the influence of certain drugs, which render the mind as if dead, demons may enter, either thrusting forth the souls of their victims or prisoning them in their own bodies. In villages near the places where demons dwell, the inhabitants are known to bind the bodies of the dead before burning them, that demons not enter into the corpses.

  That was from Cerduces Scrinus, though the volume he had was fragmentary. Every time he shut his eyes he could see the newsvid and the smoking, twisted bodies on the roof, the red-dripping walls and the ants creeping over the straps on the chair.

  He could hear Tisa’s laughter as she waved good-bye to him at the corner of Economy Square.

  Once entered into the world of men, demons have two goals: to cause pain and death for sport, and to open gates to others of their kind.

  Open his eyes, and he saw the peace and beauty of that artificial world, wherever it was. Close them, and he saw the charred dead or a gold-and-blue hairclip lying on a table. Or else Jenny, with the demon fire in her eyes, raising her head from the wine-soaked and bloodied pillows of her bed in Rocklys’ camp, smiling at him.

  Take care of yourself, love. Take care of our son, if you’re able.

  Behind him the voices of Bort and Garrypoot yammered on over the noise of Garrypoot’s PSE, which favored discords, screams, and random thumps without rhythm: Rhythm is so obvious, man.

  “Names of people who inquired about gold…” Garrypoot was saying now. “Cross-referenced … files in the black nodes…”

  “What about people who wrote to Old Docket about books?”

  Please enter information … Signal when you’re ready…

  God of the Earth, no wonder these people all take drugs.

  The smell of coffee. The rustle of clumsy skirts. Clea settled cross-legged beside him and held out a cup. “Unless working for H2F has made you so sick of it you’d rather have something else.”

  He shook his head but didn’t touch the inky brew. “I take it the enforcers didn’t look for the killer of any of the murdered girls.”

  “They say they did. On the news, I mean. I don’t think anyone has been detained for it. I’ve been watching—we all have—since Bort came up with this theory that these killings were caused by a demon. To tell you the truth I don’t think anyone really cares.”

  “And that?” He tapped the button that cut in the news footage again. Why footage? he thought. Feet of what? Around the edges of the main image one or two small boats flicked through the rank dark waters of the streets. Toward the mist-thick horizon the suggestion of movement stirred beneath the fouled surface of the water. The buildings marched on, deeper and deeper submerged, until only the cornices of some showed above the flood. How far?

  “Our stuff, is how the gangs speak of what goes on in the deep zone.” The woman’s lank gray hair brushed John’s shoulder as she leaned to touch the buttons below the screen again. It was a wider vista of the city than any he yet had seen, and still it had no end. Black monoliths marched to a sour blurred horizon, a lunatic blaze of neon and ad screens, as if the streets were all in candy-colored flame. The ubiquitous glitter of ether masts shawled the whole. The deep zone snaked through the left-hand half of the screen, vast patches dark where the power had failed, the water orange in places with chemical ruptures or haphazard attempts at mosquito abatement. In the deep zone, spots of light burned here and there among the ruins, red, like the campfires of shepherds on the hills.

  Over all, black clouds reflected the city’s rancid glare.

  “If a gangboy rapes your sister or your wife or your daughter, you speak to the gang council about it, not to the enforcers,” Clea went on. She sounded shocked, as if unaware that this was how bandit gangs operated. As if she thought the city wasn’t the Winterlands in other guise. “If it was one of the council that did it, you bite your tongue and hope the council doesn’t start thinking that your loyalty may be at question because of it.”

  She touched another button. Evidently there was no more “footage” of the old portion of the city, the portion built before the waters began to rise. The angle of the image shifted a trifle, but against the gri
my sky the broken buildings still loomed, poisonous water deep around their walls.

  “Bet TwentyTwelve—she’s one of us, one of the league—lives in the zone. She says in the deep zone it’s worse. People live there, die there, nobody knows how many or how they do it. They creep out to the dole stations for food and drugs, then slide back in their paddle-boats and turn half of it over to the presidents and leaders and champs and generals and whatever the heads of their gangs call themselves. Sometimes whole families just die of disease—cholera or the fever or IDS—overnight. Sometimes the deep-zone boys hire themselves out as enforcers. But even Bet doesn’t really know what goes on out there. It could be anything.”

  Silver salamanders crawling along those mold-eaten buildings, wise with the wisdom of Hell in their eyes. Or maybe, John thought, some poor lost soul of a champion’s son sells his wit and his sword to buy the books he was never allowed to read as a child: to buy, maybe, a deal with the King to return law to the abandoned lands?

  Give it over, Son, he reflected with a sigh. It’ll never work. They’ll do for you every time.

  Demon war.

  “Now, here we have something.”

  John opened his eyes at the glee in Bort’s voice. The image on the window had returned to the starlit beach, the slow-rolling breakers. The constellation of the Watcher had risen a little to show the passage of time.

  “We matched ThirtyoneFourFour’s lists with those who visited Old Docket’s node and cross-referenced through the commercial sites of gold purchase on the Link,” Bort explained as Clea rose and went to look over their shoulders at the terminal screen. “I expect this Corvin NinetyfiveFifty person, whoever he is, bought magic documents from Docket under other avatars, but this was the first contact. It must be twenty-five years ago.”

  “He has,” crowed Garrypoot. “Look. See? The same number comes up when I run a trace…”

  “Can you find out who he is?” John asked. “And where?”