Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  To your voice also will I listen in my sleep, Jenny, while you walk among men and speak to your little King.

  She straightened her plaids and her sheepskin coat and felt a flash of gladness that she didn’t have to worry about rebraiding her hair. It was far less cold here in the South than it had been in the Winterlands—she sometimes thought it would be less cold in Hell than there— and snow only sprinkled the high foothills of Nast Wall, where the black watchtowers of the gnomes loomed above the Ylferdun gate. Looking up into the white endless crystalline eyes, she asked, How far can you hear, in the deeps of your dreams?

  Through her mind flashed the images of her children: Ian wrapped in his plaids by the reflected glow of torches in the hall, smiling a little at his aunts’ bustling hospitality; Adric chatting with grown men about cattle and fortifications and horse doctoring as if he were already the Winterlands’ lord; and little Maggie, silent, watching, with who knew what intricate knots of awareness behind her mouse-black eyes.

  I know not, Jenny. His voice was gentle, a touch of peace. As the pool deepens, it widens. Did I sleep a thousand years, I could perhaps hear the voices of every child born to women on this earth, and the names they called their cats. He blinked at her; she seemed to see points of fire glimmer as he settled himself and tucked his wings, and all the spikes and spines and ridges of his armor for an instant caught the starlight, then vanished, as he was more and more apt to do.

  It is hard, she said, not to know. Not to be able to see.

  There is always something, he said, that one cannot see, or do, or have.

  But she had seen him speaking with the old women at the Hold who had lived a lifetime of happiness and grief without ever going farther than Great Toby; had seen him with the children there. For the first time she felt that he understood.

  From the air she had seen that Bel’s landward gate stood open so the dead-carts could come out. Pyre light glared ahead of her in the mists as she walked toward the walls, using her halberd as a staff. Once when she turned back, she thought she saw a shimmer of ghostly light rise on silk wings from the hill above the road and circle toward the mountains with the first dawn staining the cloud-bolstered winter sky. She walked on.

  Around the gates all was madness. Torchlight fluttered on either side of the great triple archway, and in the fields carters threw down the bodies of the dead from their wagons. Wood was heaped everywhere, and grimy men stumbled with weariness as they built pyres. Jenny saw that some of the bodies, laid out waiting to be burned, were wrapped in cheap rags and old sheets, and others in costly white wool embroidered in bright colors. She did not have to be told that the contagion was claiming rich and poor alike.

  She passed among them like a ghost and entered the city with the late winter dawn.

  Once she was within the walls, it was clear to her that the healers had no more notion of where to look for the plague’s source than she had. Smudges of herbs and sulfur burned before some mansions, and through the gates of others, even at this hour, Jenny saw women swabbing down the house fronts and dooryards with vinegar the smell of which cut the air like a knife. Incense and the halitus of burning meat breathed upon her from the gates of every temple and chapel she passed.

  Bel stood upon five hills, the tallest being given to the gods. But its companion hill, broader and fairer, bore the gilded turrets and many-hued roof tiles of the House of Uwanë among a lacing of bare-branched trees. Around the King’s house the wealthy, as the wealthy do, had built their pillared dwellings, and as she made her way through the streets, Jenny saw how many gateways bore the yellow sigils of contagion, how many glass windows flickered with lamplight where physicians sat with the sick.

  In one flower-carved arch a man in robes of cut velvet pleaded with a little band of the King’s guards. “It’s too soon to say he’s dead. Far too soon. The sickness debilitated him, of course it did, but his fever’s abating.” He beckoned, his hand laid on the forehead of the child on the bier, a boy of about fifteen years old.

  “The sickness has taken turns like this before,” the father went on, in the faltering voice of one who chatters to save himself from doom. “He’ll be … still … like this. You’d be ready to swear he’s gone, and then his eyes will open.”

  The chief of the guards did not come near, nor extend his hand to feel the child’s face. Rather he signaled his men to take up the bier and carry it away.

  “At least give me an hour!” the father pleaded, his voice breaking. “The healers will be back then and—”

  “The King’s law is clear,” the chief of the guards said. His face was like stone, but Jenny heard in his voice a note that made her wonder whether he, too, had lost a child. “The dead must be taken out of the city and burned lest the contagion spread.”

  “But it wasn’t the contagion that killed him.” The man spoke too quickly, his eyes darting from face to face. “That … that he’s sick with, I mean. You can see there’s no sores…”

  “I’m sorry, Lord Walfrith,” the chief said more gently. “The healers say that your son had all the marks of the sickness. They bade us fetch his body away. We can’t risk the disease spreading further.”

  “At least let him lie in the family vaults!” The father clung to his son’s hand.

  “I’m sorry, my lord.” A priest, clothed in the gray of the God of Healing, gently disengaged Lord Walfrith’s grip. “It cannot be.”

  The father began to weep, and Jenny moved on through the half-light of the cold streets. She remembered Ian and Sparrow and others, speaking of the strange sickness that had seized Druff Werehove and Genny Hopper’s child. Nothing in the old books Caerdinn had preserved of ancient times, nothing in John’s vast collection of learning and nonsense at the Hold, had spoken of this kind of power in demons—at least not for the past thousand years.

  The gates of the palace stood open. But the outer court, where vendors and petitioners and sightseers usually milled, was empty. Generally petitioners got no farther than this—certainly not those who made their appearance dressed in a peasant’s leather bodice and sheepskin boots—but Jenny had been made welcome in the palace before and knew to go to the guardhouse and ask the man there if he would send a page to Lord Badegamus, the Regent’s chamberlain, telling him of her arrival.

  “Tell him it’s the Lady Jenny Waynest,” she said, making her voice as impressive as she could and wishing absurdly that she were half a foot taller. “It is a matter of importance touching Lord Gareth.”

  “I don’t doubt as he’ll see you, m’lady,” the captain of the men at the gate said as one of their number crossed the deserted flagstones, his boot heels clacking, toward the palace hall. “Even after all that’s passed I’ve heard him speak well of you.” He offered the words to her like a gift, as if in comfort, but Jenny was aware of the way other guards jostled discreetly to get a look at her from the shadows of the watchroom. “Bedded how many of the rebel cavalry in one night?” she heard one man whisper in awe. She was glad she stood in shadow that hid the dull blaze of color she felt rise through her neck and face.

  She could not even turn to these men and say, It was the demon that took over my body, that did those things! If John did not believe her, why should they?

  Instead she asked the captain, who seemed to be a kind man, about the plague. “As I came through the Snakewaters, I saw whole villages stricken with it and pyres burning in the Hythe,” she said. “What have the healers made of it, or the scholars at the university in Halnath?”

  “They’ve made nothing, m’lady.” The captain’s lean dark face hardened. “Nor can they cure it, four cases in five—and that fifth case I think is mostly chance. It’s a fever that won’t be brought down by all their herbs and purges. Five days now it’s been in the city, and less time than that, from the first outbreak in the Hythe till it reached us.”

  Another man, a thin discontented-looking lancer, added, “For once the rich, who leave the city when the summer fevers come, have
to suffer with the poor.”

  “Shut up, fool!” the captain snapped. Jenny saw real and immediate rage in his eyes and remembered the dead boy in the gateway and the father’s weeping as the guards and the priest tried to take the youth’s body away. Turning back to Jenny, the captain said, “My lord Regent’s nearly distracted, my lady. People are saying— if you’ll excuse me saying it—that it was the wizards that joined with Lady Rocklys, when she rebelled in the summer, that planted the seeds of this in vengeance for her defeat. Though myself, I served under Rocklys, five years ago, and she wasn’t a woman to—”

  He turned quickly and saluted. Jenny saw the guardsman who’d gone to deliver a message to Gareth’s chamberlain. To her surprise the chamberlain himself bustled at the man’s mailed heels. Badegamus, gray and stout and resembling nothing so much as a rosebush in bloom in his fluttering array of archaic mantlings, executed a proper and lengthy salaam, just as if, thought Jenny, she wasn’t a skinny, scarred, hairless woman about whom guardsmen sniggered in corners. “Please come with me, my lady,” he said.

  A lone petitioner sprinted from the gate to catch the chamberlain on the way across the court. Badegamus deftly fended him into the arms of the guard. “It’s imperative that I speak with Lord Gareth soon,” Jenny said, her voice echoing a little in the damp arched passageway that ran beneath the hall. “Please ask him…”

  “My lord requested that I take you straight to him,” the chamberlain said. “It is I who must beg forgiveness of you, madam, for not allowing you time to bathe and change your raiment. But my lord Regent was most insistent.” His voice was trained and melodious, like a deep-toned woodwind skillfully played, but Jenny heard the flaw within it and looked up quickly. Under the heavy cosmetics, his face had creases of exhaustion and grief and the pallor of a man who has not slept.

  She was taken up a back stair and down a dreary servants’ hall illumined by a single window high in a gable. With one gold-painted fingernail the chamberlain scratched at a small door, the other side of which Jenny guessed would be hidden by paneling and paintwork. “Come,” a muffled voice said.

  A smell of sickness and lamp oil, of clothing days unwashed.

  Prince Gareth stood up from beside a carved bed, its curtains looped back to show the wasted, fragile shape of the girl within.

  “A god sent you.” He’d been weeping. He fumbled to put on his thick spectacles, then gave it up and simply crossed the room to take Jenny in his arms. His stubbled face was so haggard with grief, so changed by weariness and by eyes swollen with tears, that for an instant Jenny did not recognize the boy who had come to Frost Fell five years ago begging for help against the Dragon of Nast Wall. She felt him tremble as he clung to her, a six-foot child begging for a mother’s comfort. Badegamus tactfully disappeared through the door in the paneling and pulled it silently closed behind him.

  “The doctors say she’s dying.” Desperation cracked Gareth’s voice as he led Jenny across to the bed. Skeletal, blue lipped, and blotched with red blisters, Gareth’s wife, Trey, lay on the bed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  GeoCorp Offices had an entire district named for them, an endless subway ride on the Eternity line and virtually identical to every other portion of the city John had seen. A major subway station serviced the complex’s lowest levels, larger even than that below the Universe Towers. Every niche and wall and angle of its ceiling blazed with crystalvision ad screens and shrieking neon: Gorgeous women applied Cover-Blaze and godlike men sipped or sniffed or shunted Brain Candy or Blue Heaven. Spiked and shaven-headed gangboys jostled along the platforms in groups, glaring warily to the right and the left with drug-burned cinder eyes; enforcers glanced at them and looked the other way. A dole office occupied one level of the station, and beggars shuffled restlessly in the line, thin and hungry-looking but smiling contentedly as they received their handouts of proto-chow and Peace. They smiled at the enforcers who chased them onto the trains or up the stairs to the rainstorm above, smiled at the rich who pushed them aside.

  Music hammered the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Mosquitoes whined above the puddles. Everything stank of piss, chemicals, and smoke.

  “There’s supposed to be a truly excellent theatrical bar on Six-oh-seventh Street just off the square,” Seven-Ninetynine, Clea’s tiny crimson-haired mother, remarked. She minced along at John’s side in her high-soled red shoes and bright red-and-white dress with the air of a dowager promenading her gigolo, her lacquered coiffure dancing with gold clips. More gold—thin chains such as Tisa’s lovers had given her—flickered on the schoolgirl-smooth flesh of her throat. No wrinkles marred her plump lips, no crow’s-feet desecrated the corners of her sapphire eyes. Only the eyes themselves were old: hardened, cynical, and weary to death of struggling. They, and the oddly silky texture of her skin, were the only things that spoke of true age: two bitter truths in the gorgeous lie of her face.

  This must be what Clea meant, John thought, when she said, “My mother’s had a lot of work done.” He was coming to know the look of “a lot of work.” He only wondered what that “work” consisted of: something to think about, next time he heard a ballad hymning eternal youth.

  “I almost never come here,” she added, pausing beside a vendor’s barrow to look at more hair clips. “All the good dance clubs are down in the Seventieth District. Isn’t this darling?” It contained a holo chip—which John only knew as the thing that made the annoying animated images dance and posture on holo-hats—that created a very tiny animated couple who appeared to be making love in the wearer’s hair.

  “Has eight color settings,” the vendor pointed out eagerly. “And a sound chip. You can pipe in an audie from your own system as well, so they can say any names you like.”

  John thought about the eyeless creatures that lived in Aohila’s hair and wondered if she’d like one of these for her birthday, if demon queens had birthdays.

  “Shouldn’t we watch the platforms down here as well?” Bort glanced nervously at the slow-churning sea of humanity clustered around the incoming trains. He had to shout over the vendor’s thundering PSE, and SevenNinetynine’s, which she’d raised in volume to compete.

  “Oh, NinetyfiveFifty would never take a subway, I don’t care who’s after him.” SevenNinetynine paid for the hair toy, produced a key card from her handbag, and minced toward the bank of elevators that ascended to the building above. “I know there are analysts and engineers who live downtown and take the regular trains, but NinetyfiveFifty was an absolute recluse. Even in those days he had his own pod and hired an enforcer to follow him to work. Well, with those spectacles he isn’t exactly unobtrusive, now, is he?” She almost had to shout over her own music but didn’t particularly seem to notice.

  “Specs?” John said curiously. “Dark ones, that hid his eyes?”

  “Yes, darling. Do you know him?” She smiled up at John and melted a little against his side, like colorful ice cream. “But of course you’re right, dearest,” she added, turning her head to study Bort and Clea. “Why don’t the two of you keep an eye on the corporation elevators over there? He should be out soon. He never cared about impressing management with extra shifts. Goodness knows he didn’t have to.

  “She does stand out so,” she added to John, in as much of an undervoice as was possible with a PSE blaring earsplitting harp adagios all around her, as her daughter and Bort obediently headed toward the other bank of elevators and she insinuated her arm into the crook of John’s elbow and led him into a softly lighted glass bubble for the ascent to the building above.

  “And of course those friends of hers are completely hopeless. I trust you’re not a magus of exalted lineage cast by some sad twist of fate into a world unworthy of your talents? Bort’s a perfectly sweet boy—” Bort was forty-five. “—but one can have enough of the cruelty of fate.” She withdrew a tiny enameled vaporator from her handbag and took a revivifying sniff. “Now, look as if you wrestle wealthy old hags for a living, darling.” She offered him
the vaporator with a flirtatious wink; John grinned and shook his head.

  “They goin’ to give us a problem if we just hang about in the executive lobby and all?”

  “Oh, my dear boy.” She smiled languishingly up at him. “You obviously haven’t had enough experience with the way executives conduct their lives.”

  Obsidian mirrors dominated the walls of the executive lobby, gilt pillars and statues breaking up the lush expanses of gloom. What seemed to be acres of empty space was dotted with small tables at which men and women in sharply tailored, quiet-hued clothing sat while beautiful girls and handsome boys ran and fetched chilled drinks, tiny trays of rice crackers and fish roe, and exquisitely wrought porcelain thimble cups of pink, blue, and yellow powders and pills. “They never mix them strong enough in places like this,” SevenNinetynine commented, flagging down the handsomest boy, tapping her credit into the tray holder, and taking a sniff of Golden Glimmer. “I’ve had stronger at a church luncheon. Why are you looking for NinetyfiveFifty? What’s he done?”

  Her eyes glinted, suddenly avid behind her screen of sweet vivacity, and John remembered Clea saying her mother regularly searched her room, though she was nearly fifty and her mother seventy-five. “Whatever it was, it must have been just decades ago. So far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, he’s done nothing for the past fifty years but invent more and more efficient relays and processors.”

  Would a mage know how to do that? John wondered. If he’s got spells on him to keep age and death at bay, he’d have time to learn.