“He was working on a replicating splitter when he was at Acu with me. It made them a fortune, of which he kept a solid percentage. A replicating splitter divides the etheric stream without weakening the energy, something you can’t do with electricity. It made for a staggering increase in power output from a single generator, you understand. How it operates I’m still not entirely certain—I’m a dead loss below submeson level. Will you have a drink?”
John shook his head. He severely missed Aunt Hol’s barley beer and the sweet, musky southern wine, but he’d seen too many of his erstwhile neighbors at Twelve-Ninetyseven’s lodging house indulging in the local alcohol to have the slightest inclination to trust the stuff. Most everything here—alcohol, some coffees, most foods, all drugs, and even certain vid shows—as far as he could tell, was designed by its makers to be addictive in a fashion he did not understand. Docket had warned him of this. He wondered if Amayon would have, or would simply have laughed in delight at John’s belly cramps, seizures, and depression of withdrawal as he’d laughed at his agonies in paradise.
John sipped his tea, eyes following the people who emerged from the lifts, wondering who they were when they went home and what they did. Men and women both seemed to follow the pattern of every salaryperson he’d seen in dyeing their hair quiet shades of dark brown or black. They all looked young and they all looked like they’d “had work done.” Most of them crossed at once to the smoked-glass doors at the far side of the lobby, where they slipped cards into a slot then went to join friends at one or another table. In time the small green lights in the tables’ centers would brighten when their private pods were ready at the doors. Each table also had a com, a terminal, and a pop-up screen, and even during conversation, everyone continued to make calls or tap keys until the moment the light went on, in case their supervisors chanced by. As he and SevenNinetynine passed between the tables he caught whiffs of personal music, but there was none in this corner but that of his companion, who toggled it down a little to permit speech.
“They have the same set-ups in their pods, too, you know.” SevenNinetynine tasted half a rice pat and set it back down on its fragile ceramic plate. Like most wealthy women she was thin—only the poor, evidently, were fat here. Clea had explained that most of the toppings on rice pats were made with half-and-half molyose and scrunnin, substances that were at once addictive and repellent, so those who did not wish to put on flesh continued to buy food that they then had no desire to eat. “Half the executives at this level are still in their offices, you know, and will remain there until nearly midnight so their security codes will register the fact on the mainframe. Which is something, I’ll grant him, NinetyfiveFifty never did.”
She tilted her head inquiringly, regarding John with brilliant and rather dilated blue eyes. “You never did say what you want him for. He must be ancient these days, you know.”
“A woman he once loved sent me to find him,” John said, reflecting that this was more or less the truth, all but the woman part. “That’s all.” He touched the dragonbone box in his pocket; felt, too, the heat of Amayon’s prison glowing against his skin beneath his shirt. He’d feared to bring the demon along but feared still more letting the bottle from his sight. “I mean him no harm.”
“Just as well.” SevenNinetynine clicked her tongue a little in disapproval of a passing executive with dark purple hair and a suit to match. “Because even when he worked for Acu—and goodness knows that was when dinosaurs walked the earth!—he had the most astonishing security systems around his office, his private lab, everyplace he was likely to be. He came up with good reasons for it, of course, reasons that the corporation believed anyway—every sort of tale about industrial spying and concept theft—and he was such a genius at subatomics they’d do anything to keep him, including putting in electro-fused silicate door frames and taser emplacements. He was certainly worried about something. I can’t believe it was just the likes of you.”
“It isn’t,” John murmured. “Though meself, I’d not want to get on the bad side of the lady he loved and left.”
“Good heavens!” SevenNinetynine turned her face quickly aside and moved a little so that a gilt nude concealed her from the main expanse of the lobby. “If he’s had work done, it’s the best I’ve ever seen! He doesn’t look a day past thirty-two!”
Turning in his chair with the air of a man watching a pretty waitress cross the room, John observed the man who had just stepped from the elevator. SevenNinetynine’s estimate was generous. In fact Corvin NinetyfiveFifty looked about Jenny’s age—forty-five—with dark hair just beginning to streak silver at the temples and lines just beginning to settle into his pale, somewhat mottled skin. Under the silver-gray perfection of expensive suiting his thin, stoop-shouldered body was beginning to acquire a little paunch, but he did not move like a man who was elderly fifty years ago. Even those executives who had had their jowls tightened and crepy necks smoothed, their wrinkles excised and their bodies carefully massaged and exercised and electro-toned to the illusion of youth—even these moved, in time, like the old men and women they were.
It wasn’t just the illusion of healthy middle age. It was reality.
No magic I have heard of, John thought, will do that.
He glanced back at SevenNinetynine and saw fury at her mortality in her despairing eyes.
It lasted only a moment. NinetyfiveFifty slipped his card into the slot by the door, then went to a nearby table to order a drink. John was interested in the placement of the table: close to the bank of doors that led into the pod trains, tucked into a corner so anyone who came near him would come from one direction only.
It was the table John would have chosen had he been expecting trouble.
He slipped his hand into his doublet, palmed the dragonbone box, and caught the tiny neck of the bronze flask with a finger. Now? he wondered. Did his prey have to see him plunk the seeds or whatever they were into the trap for the magic to work? A lunatic vision drifted through his mind of himself performing this rite before a thoroughly unimpressed and unaltered NinetyfiveFifty: I beg your pardon, young man, but aren’t you aware that magic doesn’t work in the city?
How would he explain that to the Demon Queen?
Well, let’s give it a try anyway.
He was starting to get to his feet when NinetyfiveFifty raised his head, the dim lamps flashing on the dark glass that hid his eyes. John froze in his tracks, knowing suddenly and without question that behind that darkness lay something inhuman, something that could not be concealed as age could be. For a heartstopping instant he thought the scientist was looking at him. Then he heard the elevator doors open behind him.
Wan ThirtyoneFourFour stepped into the lobby, two handsomely suited and extremely large men in tow.
Bugger. With great presence of mind John sat at the nearest vacant table and pretended to look through his pockets for a key.
The onyx bottle burned against his skin.
His eyes the lunatic eyes of a demon, ThirtyoneFour-Four strode across the lobby. His grin was a demon’s grin. His hand went into the front of his jacket, and John remembered the dead girl in the alley, blood splashing in the scummy water. Remembered the gold in white foam-plex cartons in the dim-lit chamber in the Universe Towers. NinetyfiveFifty was rising from his seat.
Don’t give yourself away till you have to, John thought.
The next instant four men seemed to melt out of the crowd in the lobby, men who, John realized later, had all entered within the five minutes preceding NinetyfiveFifty’s arrival.
Like those with ThirtyoneFourFour, they were neatly dressed in standard business attire, though in dark blue instead of black, and they were all very large.
Wan ThirtyoneFourFour palmed a gun. John was already ducking when one of ThirtyoneFourFour’s enforcers yelled, “What the…” in anger.
And all hell broke loose. Each of the scientist’s men produced a weapon, and techs and executives of both sexes looked up startled and a li
ttle puzzled, then belatedly flung themselves out of their chairs as thin cold fire flashed. Bullets or lines of ruby light tore smoking holes in tables, walls, human flesh. Wan staggered, and two of NinetyfiveFifty’s men tackled him. John saw blood pour down the side of Wan’s head, but the demon kept lunging against the grip of the enforcers, kept firing at NinetyfiveFifty with wild, raking shots, regardless of where they went.
NinetyfiveFifty darted like a lizard for the pod doors the moment the shooting began. Alarms shrilled, lights exploded, men scattered like scared bugs; John looked around for SevenNinetynine and saw her duck a line of laser light and reach a gilded statue in two quick steps. Cover? There seemed to be better cover available, but she was pretty drugged up.
The pod door flipped open. Two more enforcers emerged from it to open fire on Wan and his surviving henchman the moment their own employer was inside. Building enforcers slammed into the room, assault weapons ablaze. The pod door snipped shut, and an instant later the light above it turned from red to green, indicating the pod was gone. Beside John a waitress had fallen, clutching her belly, weeping over the blood welling between her fingers; the handsome young man who’d brought SevenNinetynine her Golden Glimmer five minutes before lay dead just beyond, a green plex barb buried in his eye.
Enforcers were rounding up everyone in sight. John made a dash for the statue, caught SevenNinetynine by the wrist; she already had her key in her hand and man-aged to summon the elevator and slip in before anyone got to them.
“You all right?” he panted as the glass floor sank away under them, plunging to the subway station below. He was trembling, the waitress’ spattered blood sticky on his hand. He saw Amayon’s face in his mind, dreamily sighing in the azure twilight of paradise.
“Just fine.” SevenNinetynine took another sniff from her vaporator and smiled as if nothing had happened. A tiny logo on the cylinder identified it as Midnight Dew-drops: No matter how trying your day has been, Old Docket had translated the ad screens for him. She held out the drug to John; he shook his head. “Are you sure, dear? You look pale.”
A dozen people had just died in the room above them. A score or more injured, some of them desperately. He’d seen worse after bandit raids, but in those cases it had made a kind of sense. John understood bandits. He looked down into SevenNinetynine’s eyes and saw only the drug.
She smiled. “Optiflash Yellow,” she said. “Special house line Twelve-twelve.”
“What?”
An impatient little frown creased the flawless brow, “Optiflash Yellow,” she repeated. “Twelve-twelve. The pod line he took. It goes straight to the Yellow Circles.” Her manicured fingers fumbled with the vaporator, and she took another whiff of it, and another, before shoving it back into her handbag with a curse.
“They never make those things strong enough anymore,” she said. “The Yellow Circles are one of the elite complexes, guaranteed trouble-free—which means everyone and everything going in is screened. They put in a separate food-shipments line after one of the gangs staged a raid on the Red Circles through a food train. You’ll have your work cut out for you, it looks like.”
She stepped out of the elevator and made a beeline for the nearest kiosk, which bore a holo of a dancing vial scattering glittering lines of pale blue powder that dissolved into stars. John followed more slowly, still seeing Wan ThirtyoneFourFour, who’d only wanted to live a little longer, handsome as a god, a hole through his head and a grin on his very expensive face. Still fighting.
Like poor old Dobbin, he thought. Ridden to death and beyond.
Coincidence, that the demon attacked Corvin NinetyfiveFifty just ahead of my finding him?
Amayon, me pretty lad, remind me to dump something gie unpleasant into your little bottle with you.
It meant he had to act fast, for by the sound of it Corvin NinetyfiveFifty was rich enough to change his hiding place easily.
And it meant as well, of course, that now Corvin NinetyfiveFifty would be expecting company.
“I can’t do it.” Jenny looked down at the blistered, pain-taut face of the woman on the bed. Her voice trembled, seeing in Trey Clerlock’s face the horrible mirror of her own: aged, hair shorn with the fever, scarred from the malady’s sores. Seeing, too, the young woman’s belly swollen with child, the child whose life sapped the strength of its mother, robbed her of the strength to resist.
Her eyes blurred with tears as she looked up at Gareth, towering awkwardly beside her. “I can’t do it anymore.” She stammered, the full horror of her impotence coming to her: that she could not save the life of this sweet young woman, her friend’s wife; could not save her friend’s child. Her hand pressed quickly to her mouth for a moment, then she took it away. “I’m not a healer anymore, Gareth. My magic…”
“Try,” he whispered.
She tried.
Through the forenoon she sat by Trey’s bed, bathing the girl’s forehead and cleansing her sores with tinctures she’d wrought last year, before her magic had failed. The fever herbs—willow bark and slippery elm that the healers had already administered—she boiled and cooled and gave her again. As she worked, she drew the signs and sigils of healing on the girl’s lips and eyelids and belly; made the passes and whispered the words of power, of healing, of balance. But she felt them sterile, no more than the mumbled hocus-pocus of her days of impotence as a young girl, after Nightraven had left her and before Caerdinn had begun to teach her the true words of power. In those days she’d pretended, making up spells from remembered fragments and omens seen in dreams and had wept when nothing came of them. Sitting beside Trey’s bed, she wept now.
She cried for the dying girl, and for the man who sat beside her, watching with despairing intensity. For the child that would never be born. Wept for herself as well, watching herself as if she saw that little northlands girl again, like a child at a mud-pie party, pretending stones are cakes and miming the presence of cloaks and tablecloths and feathered hats when there is only air in her hands.
The baby was dead in Trey’s womb. She did not need to be a magewife to know this. Pressing her hands to the thin milky skin she felt only stillness and knew that the young woman would survive neither a purging of the fetus nor the sepsis of its decay. The fever had killed it, as it was killing the mother long before the child’s death would have its inevitable effect.
Rain swept the terrace outside, and the great dark curtains that cloaked the windows stirred and bellied with restless, gusty life. Once Jenny sat back, blind with exhaustion, and said, “Everything that healers could do has been done.”
“Please,” Gareth said. Just, “Please.” Behind the glass of his spectacles his eyes begged her to make things other than as they were.
At about the hour of noon, Trey of Belmarie died.
For a long time Jenny sat, holding the girl’s thin hand and remembering the shy sixteen-year-old who’d risked the mockery of her brother and her friends and lent Jenny a dress so the older woman wouldn’t be embarrassed before the malice of the Southern court. She remembered Trey’s love for Gareth and her gentle dignity as the Regent’s wife when Jenny had seen her two years ago; her instinctive kindness in dealing with the mind-broken old King.
Where was Trey’s daughter Millença, she wondered, to whose naming day she and John had come? Taken sick also?
But she could not ask. Gareth lay stretched across his wife’s body, silent and shuddering with shock and pain. She could only stroke the trembling shoulders, touch the wisps of barley-colored, dye-streaked hair. She said nothing, for there was nothing to say. After his sobbing ceased, Gareth lay for a long time, face turned away from her and toward the face of his wife. He did not speak, though twice or three times he drew a long deep breath and let it out in a sigh.
At last he stood up and raised Jenny to her feet. “You did what you could.” His words came out small, like a message from a stranger written and memorized years ago. “You have to be weary. I’ll have Badegamus get you a room.”
“I’ll stay here with you, if you don’t object.”
The Regent shook his head. “You need sleep.” To the scratching at the door he added, “Come.” It opened to admit a servant with a pot of coffee and another of tea, and a plate of honey and rolls. The chamberlain followed, face still the careful mask of one trained not to burden others with his griefs. He glanced toward the bed, eyes asking what it would not be good manners to speak, and Gareth said, still in that small careful voice, “She lives.”
Jenny glanced quickly up at Gareth, but he averted his face.
“Lady Jenny has done all she can and advises that … that my wife be left utterly undisturbed. There is … there is an herbalist in town I’ve sent for, who may be able to refresh her.” Gareth had resumed his spectacles to speak to Badegamus, and behind them his eyes were a stranger’s. His hand, when he took Jenny’s arm, was alien, stiff, and halting as he propelled her across to where chamberlain and servant stood. “Please take Lady Jenny to her room, and send Captain Torneval and twenty men here to me.”
He has lost his wife, Jenny thought, and his child. It is not for me to speak up and say to another person, “He’s lying; his wife is dead.” So she let herself be led away through the bedroom’s small airy antechamber and the suite beyond, then along a terrace shuttered against the hammering rain and toward the wing and the room where she and John had stayed two years ago as the Regent’s guests. Looking back through the long corridor of rooms she glimpsed Gareth still standing at Trey’s bedside looking down at her, and though she could not read his face, his whole body seemed braced as if for a whipping.
In her room she ate and bathed and put on the sleeping robe the servants had left for her. The gold-stamped crimson curtain was caught back, and through the window’s small round panes she made out the distorted shape of the terrace outside the royal chamber. Two guards flanked the door that led into Trey’s room, indistinct blobs of red.
Knight of the Demon Queen Page 24