Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  “Who he is,” Clea said, folding her arms beneath her shawl, “is the foremost researcher into etheric transfer theory in the world.”

  Bort and Poot turned from the terminal to regard her in surprise.

  “If he’s the same Corvin NinetyfiveFifty my mother worked with in the nineties. He may not be. Mother says he was elderly then.”

  “It’s 9550-73421-93.” Garrypoot read the sequence off the screen.

  “I don’t remember the whole designation, but Mom’ll have it.” She walked to a corner of the tiny living room and flipped open her com, blocking her other ear with a finger while Bort paged through half a dozen screens.

  “Whoever he is, he shows up a lot on the nodes specializing in precious metals and gems,” the fat man reported. “He uses a dozen avatars…”

  While Bort reeled off incomprehensible details, John settled back to gaze at the velvet night, the too-large, too-beautiful stars.

  Odd, to see them all like this, almost exactly as he saw them through his telescope on the tower roof at Alyn Hold. Old friends. He picked out Belida’s Mice and the Hay-Wain and Old Master Greenstaff with his lantern. The full moon, ripe and huge as yellow fruit—even the dark plains, the pale rings, were the same, preternaturally clear. Three weeks, he saw, since he’d emerged from the crypt of Ernine to find Master Bliaud waiting for him. When he returned, would it be to find the moon thus? Or would it be that dwindling half circle, or somewhere in-between?

  “Is that accurate?” he asked Bort, pointing, when the inputter came over to the couch beside him.

  “If it isn’t, Garrypoot’s paying an obscene percentage of his salary for a counterfeit.” The not-quite-wizard studied the sky critically, and John recalled that even when it was cloudy, Jenny could tell him where any star lay in the heavens. Thus it was to be a mage, to source one’s power from the light and the true name of each of those distant fires. “But a counterfeit would have to be awfully good to get by him. Astronomy’s a special hobby of his. And that looks right. Look, there’s even old Doomsday Two.”

  He pointed a chubby finger where the fringe of trees blurred the dark line of the cliff. A spot of brightness trailed a thin, pronged ravel of light. “Nice animation,” he added. “They run in satellite projections.”

  The last statement meant absolutely nothing to John, who only said, “And about bloody time.”

  Bort raised his brows.

  “Well, it’s months late.” John folded his arms around his drawn-up knees. “I mean, if that’s the mate of the one that showed up last summer. Accordin’ to Juronal the thing was a double, with the mate turnin’ up seventy-five days after its elder sister. Cerduces Scrinus says they were in the sky at the same time, but he was writin’ a hundred and ninety years after. It’s been damn near seven months.”

  “The news mentioned that.” Bort slid to the carpet beside John and toggled buttons with a practiced finger. Small cut-outs appeared over the larger window, like bright colored squares of paper pasted on the false window: diagrams of spheres and rings and balls of fire. “At the comet’s first appearance during the Dua Dynasty the interval between the two heads was thirty days.” He fed in a command, and the explanatory diagrams— whatever it was they explained—wiped themselves neatly away, taking with them cliffs, ocean, and trees. Only a stylized black waviness remained at the bottom to indicate hills. The stars stood untwinkling in the cobalt sky. Even after three weeks of marvels, John was stunned by the simplicity and beauty of the construct.

  “This is what the sky looked like back then,” Bort said. “You see the first head of the comet was still in the sky at the time of the second head’s appearance. The second appearance, during the Interregnum, was, as you say—” Another block of graphics flashed into being in a corner. “—seventy-five days after the first. One point for your Master Scrinus. As you see—” Nothing if not pedantic, Bort tapped the quasi-window, leaving a faint greasy smudge. “—there’s a gravitational lag building up with the widening of the comet’s ellipse. They can tell it’s the same comet by the iron content, which is very high for cometary spectra, and by the multiple tails. The Astronomical Institute predicted this appearance to the day.”

  He tapped in another string of instructions, leaving John with a window full of stars—and what was presumably the animated image of the comet’s slowpoke mate as it had looked a thousand years ago—as he turned to Clea. “Is it the same NinetyfiveFifty?”

  “Apparently.” She gestured with her com. “But according to Mother, Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, toward the end of his employment with AcuPro, was altering his appearance like an actor, trying to look older.”

  “Older?” Garrypoot swiveled on his chair. “Every executive at my job spends thousands getting gray erased from their hair and wrinkles lifted so they can look ‘contemporary,’ as I think they say. You’re dead if your boss thinks you’re going to pull experience on him.”

  “Older,” Clea affirmed. She picked up her coffee cup—John was still trying to figure out why the stuff never got cold—and carried it back to the couch. “She caught him at it one afternoon at lunch. Said once or twice she saw where his white hair was growing in black.”

  Bort looked baffled. John only said, “Was he, now?” The face in the water had been curiously ageless, like a statue’s. Soft immobile lips just barely beginning to wrinkle above the delicate chin, the white cheeks free of spots of age. He wondered what the flesh around the eyes looked like, behind the mask of black glass. Or was that why the man wore the dark spectacles? “How old did he look to be, and how long did he work with your mum?”

  “Well, Mother worked as a tech for about twelve years with AcuPro. NinetyfiveFifty was senior systems analyst. When Mother came to the company, NinetyfiveFifty had been there about seven years, but most of the people who’d been there when he started were fired on one pretext or another—and some of them pretty obviously pretexts, Mother says—within five years.”

  Clea settled on the couch where Bort had been, turning the iridescent plex of the mug in her big, clumsy hands. “Mother says he’d start with complaints and disciplinary actions, some of them for things that didn’t happen: relays being left open or foci left on when she knew they’d been turned off. Files were altered. In one case—an old man only a few years from retirement—a vid loop was altered to show him copying secured data. So she said she knew when she got her first d.a., she’d better start looking, because there was no fighting NinetyfiveFifty when he made up his mind that someone had been there too long.”

  “What a son of a bitch,” Bort remarked, annoyed. “I’ve heard of that kind of thing being done by bureaucrats who don’t want to pay an advanced salary, but—”

  “According to Mother, the teams at AcuPro were allotted extra for experienced personnel. She said the pattern was clear after a few years, but she had no idea what was behind it.” Clea sipped her coffee, made a face, and set the cup on the floor. “But, as she said, the handwriting was on the wall. And it’s better to get out with a good report than a file full of d.a.’s and complaints. And, she said, she wasn’t getting any younger.”

  “No,” John said softly. “And that’s the awkward bit when your boss has been around as long as you and isn’t gettin’ any older. Starts to look bad. How long was he with the company altogether?”

  Clea shook her head. “That’d be easy enough to find out through the Link,” Bort said.

  “Just as a guess,” John said, “I’d say he was there long enough that he couldn’t cover up the fact anymore that he wasn’t an old man—and long enough to find another job where he could darken up his hair a little and start claimin’ forty again. Which I’ll bet,” he added, “is round about the age he gave for the next place he worked. If he’s the feller I’m lookin’ for, that is.”

  Bort and Clea regarded him very oddly. Magic of some kind, John thought, in a world where human magic didn’t exist … Yet if he has magic, why use makeup and dye to look older? Why not an illusion of
age, as other mages he’d known had used illusions of youth? It was something else … Something stolen from the Demon Queen?

  Was that why she sought him?

  Bort retreated to Garrypoot’s computer again, and Clea leaned back against the round, black, too-hard cushions, staring at the artificial night with its artificial stars.

  “What’re they called?” John asked in time. “The stars? What’re their names?” There were things about this world he had no idea how he’d ever explain, when he finally had time to write of what he’d seen—slugmuffling parlors, for instance, or the Doop—but the stars were a comfort to him, old and faithful friends. Besides, Jenny would thank him for telling her whatever he could about their nature and behavior: The more a mage knew of any source of power, the clearer and stronger that power would be.

  “Now?” Clea made a soft sad whisper of laughter.

  “Three-nine-fifty. Three-eleven-thirty-five.” She put a twist of romantic mockery into her voice. “Oh, now that’s a mellifluous one: two-three-eighty-five. Doesn’t it just have a song to it like the chiming of bells?”

  “And what were they called,” John asked, “by all those people who should have been wizards?”

  A ghost of a smile brushed her lips. Like Jenny, a woman of no great beauty and, like Jenny, growing old. She had the prim mouth and awkward body of the perpetual virgin, too odd to have been wanted or wed by those raised to regard only the stunning beauties portrayed by advertising. Maybe it was simply because she had been caring for her mother all these years.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Are you a mage, in the world from which you come?”

  “Gaw, no.” John shivered at the memory of how the demons had trapped Jenny through her magic, of half-recollected tales concerning his mother and the things she had done. Pain went through him, and a longing to be with the people he knew, away from these stunted children, this wretched flooded city where nothing had room to flower but mildew and despair.

  “But he is,” she said. “NinetyfiveFifty. The one you seek.”

  Was he? John wondered. A mage who had conquered death and time?

  “Your mum didn’t happen to say,” John said, “where this Corvin’s workin’ these days? If he went to the trouble of dyein’ his hair and gettin’ a lot of innocent people fired, it’s got to have been so he could get another job.”

  “True, your lordship.”

  John grinned, conscious of his coffee-stained shirt and holed boots.

  “And if we can find where he works all day, we can sure as check see where he goes to take his shoes off at night.”

  South of Cair Corflyn, where the King’s governor tried to protect too much territory with the attenuated tatters of a garrison, the Snake River lost its way in the woods of Wyr, sinking into marshes and bogs amid the ruins of farms. The lands had been the breadbasket of the Realm before plague had followed hard on the heels of years of floods.

  They are like tales, each inscribed upon a grass blade, your people, Morkeleb said as Jenny scanned the coarse sable woods below in search of the firefly clusters of village lights. And the image rather than the words entered her mind. For the first time there was no anger at her or at them, that this was so. Is it truly what you wish?

  Each blade is a world. She gave words for the first time to what was in her heart concerning even such people as Aunt Jane—or Balgodorus Black-Knife, for that matter. You see the spot of sunlight on the ocean’s surface, and yet the ocean beneath it is miles deep. This is what I am, Star-Treader.

  You are more.

  No, she corrected him. Being human is more than you think it to be.

  To that he had no reply, but she could feel the music of his thoughts, like the silence between stars.

  As they flew over the Snakewater country Jenny strained her eyes for the villages she knew: tiny knots of houses set on stilts above the marshes, ruled by their little wild kings. There was one above a pond called Cantle Weck where she knew she would be welcome, but when they drew near it she could find no points of brightness there. Ice flashed in the glimmer of the setting moon as the dragon circled down upon the place, and Jenny smelled old ash long cold and the stench of decay.

  “Bandits as a rule don’t come into the Snakewaters,” she said worriedly, peering through the skeletal blue light. “There don’t seem to be any houses burned, either.”

  There is the smell of sickness in the town, the dragon replied. A smell of death. And he put the smell in her mind as he smelled it: the stench of wrongness, a swift series of images of fever, delirium, purging, running sores. And beneath this miasmatic awareness, other images still: images of those who survived the sickness lying in their little round huts, too weak to seek food or to build up fires in the hearth, watching the snow fall outside with despairing eyes.

  Each blade of grass dying, and dying with it all the stories, all the recollections, all the invisible treasures of the heart.

  Would you descend, Dragonfriend? I sense no one alive.

  She forced her lips tight shut and covered her eyes with her arm, trying not to think of the children she had helped birth in that village, who’d run to her giggling when she walked down the shore. Morkeleb circled her with his thoughts, saying nothing, and when they went to ground on an islet in the marsh near Cantle Weck he did not immediately leave to hunt but remained beside her while she wept. At the tail end of the night, she dreamed for a time of the infants of dragons swooping through weightless blackness, playing with weightless balls of opal fire.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  She was sleeping when Morkeleb left her, in dawn mist thick and hued like iron, to hunt for a cow he heard wandering thin and starving among the bare black reeds and snowy stillness. It was uncared for, he told her later, returning, and none searched for it; I hear nothing and no one living in all these marshes. Jenny thought again of Sparrow’s account of the sickness in Alyn Village and cursed that she had not the ability, as dragons had, to stretch out her senses over the lands. She huddled her plaids around her, then kicked them irritably away as a raging wave of heat surged from her protesting flesh and migraine stabbed her vision with momentary, swirling fire. You’ll only go mad with grief and rage, she thought, if you start wishing for all the things you once had.

  Sleeping again, she dreamed of John, saw him inconspicuous amid more people than she had ever seen packed tight into a vast dirty dreary room. Dreamed of him sitting at a table gazing into a strange-shaped glass box, bluish lights and strange patterns of colors reflected back from his spectacles.

  Folcalor’s voice whispered soft and childlike in the deep hollows of her mind. “Blood in the bowl, make sick men whole.” And a man’s thin, age-spotted hand dipped into a gold basin filled with blood and came forth clasping a fragile glass shell.

  “Blood in the bowl, peace in the soul.”

  Her eyes opened to the fading of the chilly winter daylight. Morkeleb lay near her, and in his proximity she felt none of the cold that transformed the waters of the marsh to hard greenish ice; the dragon was little more than a ghost, his shadow barely to be seen in the increasing shadows of night. He listened, and the pale lamps of his antennae glimmered with a queer foxfire light as they moved.

  Under white jeweled stars they crossed the sleepy provincial fields and meadows of the Farhythe and the Nearhythe, and the bony back of the Collywilds between them. They saw the lights of little villages whose bells carried to them through the deepening night. The moon’s brilliance let Jenny make out every wall and fence and hayrick, but no one below sounded alarms. Even in full daylight it was difficult to see Morkeleb, and he extended his aura of shadow to cloak her as well. As they passed over the town of Queen’s Graythe—the principal trading center of Greenhythe—and later over Yamstrand, where the white phosphorus turned the ocean’s brim to luminous ruffles, Jenny smelled pyres again. In her mind she had the image of a chain of such conflagrations, like watchfires relaying warning of danger, stretched from the Snakewaters south.r />
  Smoke rises from the walls of Bel, the star-drake said as the white teeth of Nast Wall clove the sky. In the silver-spangled sea the Seven Isles shouldered, dark patches trimmed and dotted with lights: Somanthus and the Silver Isle, Zoalfa and Ebsoon, the wide pastures and rich farmlands of Sarmaynde and the bright falling springs of Glaye. Of Urrate only a black small spike remained, the highest peak, where the temple of the Green God had stood before the island’s destruction by the demons under the sea.

  Jenny shivered as Morkeleb circled along the arc of the island chain.

  Between Somanthus and Urrate the abyss lay where she had fought Folcalor while the whalemages held the other demons at bay. Among those rocks Caradoc’s staff had lain hidden. She seemed to hear the crooning songs of the Sea-wights as they waited for the gate to be opened. As they waited to pour into the world again.

  Pyres burned in the fields outside Bel. Coming in over the water with moonset, Jenny saw slanted columns of smoke and heard the tolling of the bells.

  I like this not. Morkeleb crouched, no more than elf light and bones, among the trees just above the great landward road that ran from Bel to the little town of Deeping, which nestled around the gates of the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun. The dragon had destroyed Deeping five years ago. Jenny could feel his recognition, his memory of the place in flames. There is the smell of plague upon the land, and voices crying out in the city. But in the Snakewaters I dreamed of demons, and I hear them whispering still.

  He settled on his narrow haunches and then lay cat-wise again, all his spikes and scales glittering and the bobs of light that tipped his whiskers sparkling like un-seasonal fireflies in the dark.

  When the star-drakes journeyed from world to world, we would hide ourselves and listen, some of us sleeping and dreaming, others mounting watch over those who slept. These images Jenny saw in her mind, wordless marvels: Centhwevir blue and golden, Hagginarshildim pink and green, others of the dragon-kin she had met and known all sleeping in the strange light of alien moons. Dreams would pass back and forth among our minds and those of the shadow drakes, the dragonshadows, who partake both of waking and sleeping; the dreams, also, of those who walked in those unknown realms. There is an ice floe on the backbone of Nast Wall, where the waters divide. From there I can listen to the city lands of Bel, and deep into the caverns of the gnomes, and even across the marches eastward to Prokeps and the lands of Too Many Gods.