Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  Shamble’s apartment was hot, and it stank. It was the size of Garrypoot’s bedroom and was situated in the very center of an enormous megablock in the Seventy-ninth District; the heat came partly from the portable forge that took up whatever floor space wasn’t already occupied by the table and the bed. John couldn’t imagine what the neighbors said about it, if they noticed; evidently the heating and cooling systems in the megablocks never worked very well. Neither did the shielding on the ether relays: His skull felt as if it were filled with rattling steel balls. An enormous ad screen was turned up full volume, and another dominated the little toilet cubicle; floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves jammed the remaining wall space, overflowing with books, both paper and chip; readers; half-disassembled terminals and at least three working ones; bales of wire; boxes of coal and wood for the forge; packets of herbs and powders; crystals; and dust. The place reminded John rather of Jenny’s house at Frost Fell, though it smelled like Sergeant Muffle’s forge in spite of the triple-strength air-suck installed over the usual kitchen vent and powered by an eight-way etheric splitter rigged in the power outlet.

  Other splitters dangled from the wiring all over the room. The kitchen niche was written over with what John guessed were antiroach wards, though they looked nothing like the wards Jenny wrote against mice and insects; in any case they worked not at all.

  “Ether is a natural force,” Bort went on, “a little like electricity or gravity. It exists everywhere and is the result of interaction between molecules. Magic is the operation of the will, without physical instrumentality. There’s no reason—” He touched the dragonbone box John had laid on the corner of the table. “—for this to be anything other than its component elements. Certainly no reason for a man’s spirit, his soul, to … to be absorbed into it and trapped, while his body … What? Dies? Dissolves? What will happen to him when you put whatever it is…

  “What is it that you’re going to put into the box to activate the spell?”

  John scratched the side of his long nose. “I dunno. She said, ‘Bring him,’ and then, ‘Here’s this box, Son.’ I assume if I open it in his presence and drop these little oojahs in—” He shook the bronze bottle, which tinkled musically. “—there’ll be a connection, but I’m buggered if I know what.” Yet as he spoke the words he felt a shiver in the dark of his mind, where dreams begin, and he knew perfectly well what would happen.

  “What worries me, after what Clea’s mum said and that ballyhoo at GeoCorp this afternoon, is gettin’ to this Circle place and gettin’ in.”

  “I think this should take care of that little problem.” Bort smugly tapped the plast. “Garrypoot cut into the Optiflash and Circle records for the security codes on both the passenger line and the supply train. We have maps, plans, schematics … The house registered to Corvin was a private dwelling that was turned over to its present owner by deed of gift in the year Sixty-four of the current administration—that is, close to eighty years ago. The Circle was built around it.”

  “Was it, now?” John said softly. “He looked gie spry for his age.”

  “He’s a mage.” Passion and grief and devouring envy echoed in Bort’s distorted blue gaze.

  “Finished.” Shamble put down his soldering iron and pushed up the guards from his eyes, revealing the slightly yellowish corneas of a cheap government transplant. He was a thin man, tall and stooped and unclean, who spent every spare credit he had on the materials required for the working of magic as described in his ancient texts. He eked an existence by cooking for himself, rather than buying at the building’s Food Central, and by spending water-ration credits on high-quality fuels rather than baths. His obsession, John gathered, had cost him a wife and a child at some point.

  Perched on the back of the room’s single chair with his feet on the book-cluttered seat, John thought of Jenny in her house on Frost Fell, pursuing her solitary dreams of power. And now with no more to show for it than this poor man had.

  No wonder she had turned inward, to despair and hate of all things.

  “This should do what you’ve described,” the metalworker went on. He held up the small cube of dark brown bone that John had given him, one of the few fragments of claw and tail left when the flesh of the golden dragon of Wyr had dissolved into dust. He’d carried it in his satchel, with flax seed and silver and whatever else magical he could find, through paradise and Hell. “I’ve laid spells of the unity of essence on both this and the box you asked me to make.”

  With the smallest of his graving tools he touched the box, a careful copy of the one Aohila had given John before the Mirror of Isychros: dragonbone, silver, and opal, though the opal was far smaller. “Thaumaturgically they should be the same thing, both as one another and as the original box.”

  John picked up the two boxes, turned them in his hands. The workmanship of the one Aohila had given him was infinitely finer, of course. Demons presumably had centuries to perfect their arts. Inside it was finished smooth: He flipped the lid open, and shut, and open again, knowing he might have very little time, when he finally came face-to-face with Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, to make up his mind about what he should do.

  The thought of rescuing from her clutches the man who’d bought the dead girls’ gold bracelets from the demons wasn’t one he relished. His every instinct told him there was something uncanny and deadly about the mage he’d come so close to in the lobby of GeoCorp, something that Aohila might turn to terrible use if she had it in her power.

  Or something that might continue to do evil in this world—or another—if permitted to walk free.

  On the original box’s inner surface Shamble had etched one of the gate sigils copied from John’s notes, a sigil that was reproduced on the small square of dragon-bone and silver now lying in the metalworker’s callused hand.

  “Of course,” Shamble said with sudden shyness, “there’s no way of telling whether the wards I’ve worked are as strong as those of the demon. In fact, I’m sure mine aren’t—wouldn’t be, that is, if magic worked at all here.” He handed John the little graven bone square and the bronze bottle, then took a sip of his coffee, now bitter from sitting too long.

  “It might be it does, you know.” John closed both boxes and bestowed them, the bottle, and the dragon-bone sigil in separate pockets of his doublet. “It may be things have changed so much you’re not sourcin’ the magic properly anymore—at least that’s what Jen says is usually the problem when magic that used to work quits workin’. Though you’d know more about it than I do.”

  “No,” the smith said simply. “And that’s the … the sorrow of it. We don’t.”

  There was a deep sadness in his discolored eyes, and John remembered Jenny standing in the winter moonlight, scarred hands folded and slick scarred pate bowed, tears like diamonds on the shiny burned patches of her cheeks, mourning what had been hers, the only thing in the world that she had truly loved.

  Loved more than him, for all his hopes that it would be different. Loved more than her children. Maybe more than her life. He felt no anger at her, nor pity—only a deep sadness and a wanting to speak to her again.

  “We’ve tried everything, over the years,” Shamble went on softly. He scratched absently with his dirty nails at the small round scars left by the removal of cancers from his chin. “We’ve gotten in touch with everyone we think is like us, everyone who has an interest in these matters. Everyone who has had these … these dreams of power, these dreams that cannot be explained. From all we can tell, people used to be able to draw power from their own bodies, and from the stars, the earth, the sea. Used to be able to do the things we dream of doing.

  “They could heal others of malaria and tuberculosis and cancer just by laying their hands on them and drawing circles in the dirt with silver and blood. They could see what was taking place miles away, or across centuries— see it accurately, and every time they tried. But something’s changed, and we don’t know what. Maybe some combination of stars and planets has shifted
, but if so we can’t find it in all Garrypoot’s astrological projections. But we just don’t know. My old master…”

  He paused and grinned a little self-consciously. “You’d like this,” he said.

  “Oh, Shamble,” Bort sighed, “now really isn’t the time to play show-and-tell.”

  But Shamble had turned away.

  “There was this book, you see,” the smith said. “I got it from the man who taught me to work in metal— another welder, but one of us: one who would have been a mage. He taught me to make knives and blades.”

  From beneath his bed he brought a box and took out a sword. “How about this, hunh?”

  Bort sighed heavily and rolled his eyes. But John hefted the weapon, gauging its weight and balance. It was two or three inches shorter than his own blade and handled differently, but it balanced well. The steel was fine grained and beautifully wrought, the grip wrapped in silver wire braided with red cording. Runes were etched over hilt, guards, pommel, and spine.

  “It was the sixth or seventh sword I made,” Shamble said. “I wove into it all the demon-killing spells I could find in Docket’s books. I made one or two after this one, but they just didn’t turn out as well.”

  “It’s good,” John said, and the smith flushed with pleasure. “It’s gie good. I don’t know if it’ll slay demons, but it’s a fine blade.” He stepped clear of the other men as much as was possible in the confines of the tiny apartment and swung the weapon carefully, cross-cut and then down.

  “You can have it,” Shamble said shyly, “if you want.”

  “I’ll take it.” John stepped back to grip the smith’s hand. “Thank you.” From the small bundle he’d fetched from his own room he brought his own sword and laid it on the table. “You can take this if you’d care to. It’s not magic or anythin’, but I’ve slain a dragon with it— well, cut him up a bit and finished him with an ax—and chopped up cave grues and weird critters in Hell and any number of bandits.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” Shamble touched the worn hilt, the stained grip, his fingers reverent and awe in his face. “I mean, it’s yours. It was your father’s.”

  John shrugged. “It’s just a sword.”

  Sheathing the new weapon, he turned in time to catch Bort’s eye. Bort had been thumbing through his pile of looted files, and his face now wore, for an unguarded second, the expression of weariness, of defeat, he’d had a day or two ago in Garrypoot’s flat.

  He’s a mage, Bort had said of the man they hunted, and John saw those words reflected now in the discontented pain in Bort’s eyes.

  He’s a mage.

  John went to stand before him. It was a moment before the inputter looked up. “If he’d the slightest intent to help you,” John said quietly, “the smallest interest in other mages in this world, you don’t think he could have found you? He’s been all over Docket’s node on the Op-Link. He’s known how to get hold of you for twenty years and more. He’s hidin’, Bort. He wouldn’t thank you for comin’ to him, and he’s gie for certain not going to help you.”

  Bort looked away. “No,” he said, in a low voice. “No, of course not. Of course not.”

  * * *

  Lying on Garrypoot’s couch that night—if Amayon was the one giving away his position, his own room in the wet zone too easy a target—John dreamed of Bort.

  It was Bort’s dream, actually, he thought. Bort’s dream because what he saw was Bort’s apartment, cramped and even tinier than Shamble’s but filled, like Shamble’s, with books and readers and terminals, with bottles and pots and baskets of the things by which wizards of old had worked magic, or had thought they worked magic. There were crystals and crystal spheres, mirrors of obsidian and quicksilver, phials of amber floating in brandy. There were skulls and teeth of small animals and birds, carefully preserved and written over with runes. A circle had been drawn on the floor, and the charred pottery bowl in its center still smoked. Heat-cracked fragments of bone dotted the circle’s marked-out quadrants, and John guessed Bort had spent the evening, after they’d parted at Shamble’s, engaged in divination, trying to make up his mind.

  As he watched, the smoke in the bowl slowly formed up a shape, like a ghost drifting in darkness. He recognized Amayon’s face. When the eyes opened, they were Amayon’s blue brilliant eyes.

  “Of course he’d tell you Corvin will refuse to help,” the demon said in a voice, John thought, that Bort half remembered—a familiar quiet alto like someone Bort had once known. “He won’t be able to trap this mage, deliver him up to the whore of Hell, if Corvin has warning that someone other than a demon is on his trail.”

  Bort turned on his narrow bed and emitted a fat man’s glottal snore. The weak green glow of the smoke illumined the dirty dishes and finger-smudged books. The ad screen’s cold reflection flickered and danced, damped down quiet and further buried by muted music. In the artificial deeps of the small quasi-window, stars that hadn’t been visible for decades burned too brightly, and the comet combed her shining hair.

  It was like his own study in Alyn Hold, John thought: books and implements and trappings of the person he had all his life wanted to be, the person forever denied. At least, John thought, I could hate me dad—poor, driven sod—for burnin’ the books and demandin’ I be what he was: killer and warrior and protector of me people.

  Who can Bort hate for takin’ his dream from him?

  “All these years Corvin has hidden,” Amayon whispered, and the scene began to blend and shift into the images of another dream. “All these years he’s thought himself safe.”

  And John saw what Bort saw: ancient stone walls and smoke-discolored rafters. A frail, genial-looking old man sat at his desk among scrolls and cats and dappled sunlight. The exile mage of legend rose with a sigh of longing, going to the window.

  “All these years,” Amayon murmured, “looking for— waiting for—someone he can trust.”

  “Fools.” The old man sighed and stroked his silver beard. “Fools, who say there is no such thing as magic.” John thought his face vaguely familiar from dozens of ad-screen playlets. “Everywhere around them it lies, and yet they cannot see.” He stretched his hand toward the leaves that grew thick around the window, and as his fingers touched them, light flickered between the fingers and the tender young growth.

  “There must be someone out there,” the old man said. “Someone able to learn, someone strong hearted enough to bear the knowledge, wise enough to see beyond demon lies and demon pawns. Ah! I cannot bear it, that I might take the knowledge of where to find magic with me to my grave! The answer is so simple.”

  Within the dream the images faded, collapsing on themselves. The last thing John saw before he woke— the thing he thought about for a long time, lying in the pale light of the artificial stars, the artificial moon—was Bort TenEighty, last mage in the Hell of Walls, sitting in his undershorts on crumb-imbued carpet, staring at the diagram of divination and the burnt bones scattered across it like errant constellations of unreadable stars.

  In time John got quietly to his feet and touched the activation key of Garrypoot’s computer. Poot was working a late shift; he wouldn’t be home for an hour or more. John flipped to the opening screen with its simple, bright-colored icons. After a moment’s thought, calling back what Bort and Garrypoot had earlier done to obtain a second copy of the Optiflash specs, he opened the list of marked files, counted back in his mind, and flagged three files to print.

  He hoped he’d counted right. Folding the flimsiplast small, he stashed it in his doublet with the Demon Queen’s dragonbone box and the ink bottle containing the whispering soul of a demon. As he was pulling on his boots, belting his new sword around his hips, the orange light flashed once more on the printer, and one more sheet spooled out.

  AVERSIN

  DON’T BE A FOOL. YOU’LL NEVER MAKE IT

  INTO CORVIN’S STRONGHOLD WITHOUT ME.

  AMAYON

  John dropped the sheet as if it had turned to a live sp
ider in his hand. He watched it as it crumpled, then melted itself into a ball, a puddle, a smudge of fireless ash.

  “Someone’s watching Bort?” Clea stepped aside from the doorway of the flat and signed him to silence with a glance at the door behind which her mother still slept. “Who is? How do you know?” She wore a faded caftan, and her wet gray hair was dressed in a shabby knot. She smelled of soap, incense, and coffee: the scents of early waking, early meditation in the stillness. The apartment was in an older building and had a wall of windows that opened onto a narrow terrace, but ten feet beyond, another building loomed, cutting off the light. The terrace was littered with trash, stacked with boxes of old clothes and packaged foods, draped in plastic sheets against the weather. On the ad screen a pair of grotesquely elderly people copulated to soft rhythms barely heard, huge smiles on their toothless mouths.

  “Demons.” John held out to her the handful of flimsiplast. “We can’t have him help us for fear of them knowin’ now, see? We’ve got to move, and we’ve got to move now.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They took the Universe Rail: coal-sack darkness, flickering lights, men and women jostling for seats or clinging to handles from the car’s low ceiling. There were children onboard, too, though they were children with the faces of tired adults, slack eyes dim with Let’s-Be-Good and Happy Time. A mother handed her five-year-old daughter a little sniffer of Peace to keep her from fidgeting. They carried their drugs in big gaudy plastic bottles shaped like weapons or the semihuman characters of cartoons, clipped to their belts or knapsack straps in imitation of gangboy bandoliers. John couldn’t look at them. He kept seeing Adric’s face.

  “We get off here,” Clea said. “Bet said she’d meet us at the Free Market in the Ninety-seventh Avenue station. Bet Phenomenal,” she added, as they stepped onto the broken concrete platform of the old 211th Avenue station. “The gangfolk don’t like to come up top.”