Knight of the Demon Queen

by Barbara Hambly

  All around her in the rocks was the whisper of demons.

  They were waiting for him.

  They knew I’d try to find Miss Mab, she thought, despair a cold needle in her heart. They were waiting for me. No wonder I was able to get into the Deep so easily. And now they wait for him.

  Morkeleb, no! She tried to fling her thoughts into the dragon’s mind, as once she had been able to do. But dragged down by exhaustion, by the chill grip of the poison that numbed her lungs and heart, she didn’t know whether he heard her. She thought not.

  Whether it was in truth a vision, as she used to get in dreams, or only the delirium of the poison, she did not know. She seemed to see the Sea-wights, little shining quicksilver things that rose to the surface of a well—the shallow-curbed well she’d seen in her dragon dream—in their glass shells. Shedding the shells, they whipped like glistening vermin through the darkness and the rocks. Opening her eyes—or dreaming that she opened them— she could see them clustered on the rocks, amorphous and vile, watching her with bright black beady eyes as they drank her pain and despair.

  Get away from me! She wanted to scream, and could not. Get away!

  Jenny, Jenny, they whispered, surely you don’t mean it. You welcomed Amayon once upon a time. You loved him. And they screamed with laughter at her fury and her shame.

  He’s coming. She saw him in her mind—maybe truth, maybe only the visions they sent her, as once they’d sent her the vision of Ian killing John. She saw the black glitter of wings, the dark shape descending on a little-known watch window high in the mountain above. The gnome guards fled in terror, and the dragon contracted in size to whip through the narrow tunnels, down the twisting stairs.

  If he uses magic, he is theirs. She remembered how in last summer’s battle she had tried to wrench Ian from them with magic, how the demon Amayon had caught her by the magic itself, drawing her in like a fish on the line, tangling in her flesh, flooding her with that glorious, disorienting fire.

  Surrender your magic, Morkeleb had cried. Let go.

  And she had not let go, hoping against hope that her strength would be enough.

  She fumbled at her belt for the knife she carried, with some dim notion of opening the veins in her wrists, to be dead before he came so that he would not put forth his power to save her and not be trapped by his love for her, as John had been trapped by the Demon Queen. Then she thought, I am the only one who knows about Trey. About these resurrectors, these healers of the dead—these things that promise whatever they think you’ll believe, call to you in whatever voice your heart will heed, like the Blood-wights in the Wraithmire.

  And Morkeleb had said, Do not leave me, my friend.

  There has to be a way out. A way to intercept him. Pain seared her as she tried to draw herself forward into the lightless cavern, pain in her injured hip and a great endless weariness that encompassed her whole self. There had been other entrances, one of them with a ladder, she recalled.

  She dropped over a rift in the floor and fell again, not far, eighteen inches or so, but she landed hard on broken rock. She felt cold, as if she lay in water, but it was only the poison drinking away the last of her strength.

  A gnome in the Deep, she thought, using a well to bring the Sea-wights through. Folcalor must have seduced one of the Wise Ones of the gnomes. Was he powerful enough to get past Miss Mab’s family? To take the gnomewitch now and imprison her in a crystal?

  Why imprison?

  Why crystal?

  Did you think you were his slave?

  She sank down on the stone and thought, I can’t.

  A questing mind touched hers from out of the darkness, the peace and stillness like the flow of wind on rock and sea. Jenny…

  MORKELEB, GO BACK!

  Then the roaring crash of an explosion, somewhere very close. Echoes snatched the sound and flung it, crashing from rock to rock; the stones beneath Jenny’s body heaved and trembled, vibrated with the impact, and through it she heard the demons laughing like the crazed chittering of birds before a storm. A huge roiling cloud of dust and grit poured down on her like water.

  And after it, silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Nearly five hundred houses stood in the Yellow Circle, walled fortresses in a world no longer concerned with the way things looked out-of-doors. By this time it was raining hard enough that Clea had to wipe off Garrypoot’s map two or three times before she could read it, orienting them as they slipped among the ragged hummocks, the tumbledown kiosks, the pits where— Clea said—swimming pools had once been. Twice trains went by overhead, windowless cars rattling and shaking: old, scarred with bullet pocks, and filthy with corrosion and smog.

  “That’s the Houseboy Special,” Clea whispered. She and Aversin crouched in a smelly grotto large enough to hold a ball in. There were drains in the floor—that was the most John could figure out about its original purpose. “Security on it is unbelievable, but two or three times a year I’m told there are still attempts to get into some house or other. Bet tells me the Phenomenals don’t even try anymore.”

  I’ll bet they don’t, John thought, remembering what Shamble had told him about the enforcers’ connections with organ-supply houses. But, of course, demons wouldn’t care how many of their mounts—or their drug-addled pawns—ended up being carved into collops and parceled out to those in need of new livers.

  Whatever Corvin had—or was—Folcalor wanted him badly. Adromelech wanted him.

  And Aohila wanted him.

  And where does that leave me?

  He touched the dragonbone boxes in their separate pockets, the bronze bottle, the bone square that bore the enchanted sigil of the gate. It was worse than having magic himself, worse than being Thane of the Winter-lands: this hideous sense of responsibility, of holding catastrophe in his hands.

  And no clue—not one—as to what he should do.

  From her belt com Clea put in a call to Circle Central Security, gave a code from one of the flimsiplast schematics, and reported a repair on the pylons that supported the supply train. The supply train ran on the lowest pylons, but crossing the rail from the pylon to house 1212 was still a cautious exercise in balance, forty feet above the torn and flooded ground. Aversin had already marked out a place to cling near the sliding doorway, to wait for the doors to open with the arrival of the next train; but when they reached the place he saw that the sliding doors stood a foot or so ajar.

  Something had been scribbled on each leaf of the door, sigils that he half recognized with a cold touch of dread.

  Demon magic. Demon signs.

  “Bugger,” he whispered.

  He looked back at the woman who clung gamely to the metal struts just below him: Jenny’s age or a half decade older, graying and homely with lines of laughter and concern in her face and the pear-shaped figure of a woman who spent her days in comfortable chairs reading. Not a fighter. Not a wizard, possibly not even had there been magic in this world.

  But she was willing to help, to put her life at risk— her soul at risk, if Folcalor and his minions were collecting them in jewels—to thwart evil, in whatever form it appeared.

  All the more reason, he thought, not to be party to evil himself, unknowing.

  “Listen, love,” he breathed. “We’re behind the fair. Demons are ahead of us.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “Bort may be with ’em.”

  She put her hand to her lips quickly to hide the flinch of her mouth, as she had always hidden what was going on inside her. Bort had been her friend for twenty years and was maybe the only person who understood the needs of her mind and heart.

  Then she took her hand away. “You’ll tell me what I can do to help him?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you if I find it out,” he said grimly. “But right at the moment, just don’t help him against me. Please. No matter what he says or does.” All it would need, he thought, was to have Clea stab him in the back.

  She nodded, her teeth clenched hard. “All rig
ht.”

  He sighed, feeling as he had felt seven months ago, when he’d ridden against the blue-and-golden dragon at Cair Dhû: when everything had been simple, and his life was the only thing he had to risk. “In we go, then.” And he swung up and slipped through the broken doors.

  The alarm system had been torn out at the wall box. That was the first thing he saw in the neat small chamber filled with shelves of packets, boxes, bottles, cans. The second thing he saw was Bort.

  Demons had killed him.

  That was very, very obvious.

  Clea gasped, turned convulsively to vomit out the open doors. John strode after her and caught her, knowing that like most people she’d miscalculated the violence of the physical reaction and would probably fall. “Oh, horror—oh, horror—” she whispered, and her whole body trembled as he gripped her arms. “What …? How …?” Under protective ointment and spray her face was nearly green.

  “Love, I’d send you back but I don’t think I can,” John said grimly. “Stay with me and stay close because it’s the only way I can protect you. They got at him through dreams.” He settled Clea against the doorjamb, hurried to the nearest portions of Bort and found, under the spattered blood and scattered entrails, half a dozen keys and a crumpled sheet of flimsiplast: Garrypoot’s codes and schematics. No indication of how long ago he’d betrayed them, or what he’d told.

  They’d let him lead them in, thinking to the last he would come face-to-face with that kindly silver-haired mage of his dream. They’d deceived him by his dearest wish, as demons were wont to do.

  He wondered if they’d taken his soul from his torn body and imprisoned it in a jewel just before he died.

  “Curse it,” he whispered and checked again the dragon-bone boxes. This wasn’t just a matter of tucking something away in case of need, like that second silver flask of water from the Hell of the Shining Things. His choice might unleash destruction on his own world—or Aohila’s vengeance. He wiped Bort’s blood off his hand as best he could before taking Clea by the wrist. “Don’t look,” he whispered and led the way to the stairs.

  The door at the top stood open, propped by the body of a man. A gangboy, by his half-shaved head and gaudy green-and-orange ointment mask. His body had been half torn to pieces by bullets and laser fire, his painted face distorted by shock, horror, and pain. There was tumult in the room beyond; John pushed Clea back and peered around the doorjamb, keeping low, which was all that saved him, for a second gangboy fired at where his head would have been, had he entered standing. The young man strode forward. John drew his sword and lunged in a single movement, catching the man in the groin and ripping upward. The gangboy grinned, twisted away from the blade with his intestines dangling, brought the gun around…

  And lurched away, torn apart by the heavy-caliber bullets that spattered from within the room, allowing John to duck aside. The big man in the black clothes of one of Wan ThirtyoneFourFour’s enforcers, who had fired the rescuing shots, shoved a second clip into the weapon and let off a burst of shots at John, but John was already moving, ducking, rolling behind the gilded ruin of an upholstered couch. A beefy man in the dark blue suit of one of NinetyfiveFifty’s enforcers was already there, gasping as the last of his blood pumped from a shattered chest cavity. John’s mind registered details: three gangboys, four enforcers in black. Another dead man in blue. Wan ThirtyoneFourFour himself, armed with a short sickle-shaped sword and a submachine gun, firing into the locks of a door at the room’s far side.

  And the room itself, lush with gold and tapestries— golden candlesticks, golden vases, curtains flashing with the precious metal woven into them. John caught up the dead bluecoat’s semiauto and plunged, panting, into the shelter of a bookcase. On the blood-soaked carpet near him lay one of the twisted gold bracelets of the lavender-haired girl who’d died in the pool in the mirror chamber. Bait, for Folcalor to locate his quarry, the former owner’s death itself merely a passing game. Then a line of red laser fire ripped toward him, and he flung himself behind another couch, then sliced off the head of the enforcer who sprang over its top and down upon him.

  For a wonder the man died. Not all were demons, then, only enforcers who’d die for pay.

  One of the gangboys came around the side of the couch at him, and John opened fire with the dead enforcer’s gun. The kick nearly knocked him off his feet, but at that distance he couldn’t miss. When he scrambled up, he found the room empty, the door at the end open. The gangboys were gone, too, leaving a trail of blood down the hallway.

  There was shouting from somewhere, and the stink of burned polyester and roasted flesh.

  “You got the house plan?” John demanded as Clea darted into the room and started to help herself to fallen weapons. She pulled out the schematics. “He’ll be in the lab—it’s on the third floor. How do we get to the crawl-space under the roof?”

  It was entered through the library on the third floor. John flung the onyx ink bottle up the back stair ahead of him and set off the demon trap there: a blast of fire that belched out of nozzles set in the concrete wall, the heat suffocating. At the top and the bottom of the stair sprinklers drenched the walls—and John and Clea, waiting at the foot. When the whole show ceased, John retrieved the bottle, slinging it around his neck again as they climbed.

  Smoke filled the upper floor of the house. The sound of shots and the roar of flames told of other demon traps. You can’t kill demons, John thought. All you can do is destroy their horses—and their pawns. One of NinetyfiveFifty’s bluecoats lay in the library, dead in a ghastly pool of blood-tinged vomit.

  Of course, John thought. All it’d take is one enforcer gettin’ a little more swacked than usual on Brain Candy, one demon dream about pourin’ Roach-B-Gone into the guardroom coffee. It could all be over before Wan and his henchmen—or the green-and-orange gang, which seemed to be a separate operation—even got there.

  Demon war—Folcalor and Adromelech taking sides, though who was on what side wasn’t clear and probably didn’t matter.

  In the crawlspace the smoke was worse. John found the only way he could proceed was on his belly, where a little air remained underneath the roil of smoke. Still he was coughing, nauseated, and dizzy when he passed close over the main fight and then the area above what he guessed—from the forest of pipes rising up from floor to roof—was Corvin’s laboratory.

  That’s where his real defenses will be, John thought.

  He listened, gauging the sounds. Bullets tore through the ceiling between the century-old rafters, smoke and flamelets spitting up through the holes. He edged past the fight, leading Clea by the hand. The woman followed gamely, though her face was blanched with shock. She carried a couple of guns, but by the way she held them it was clear she probably wouldn’t be able to fire. A little way on, among the vents, the ceiling was cooler, and John could hear below the single quick scuffle of feet.

  The poison had gotten all the bluecoats, then. A mutter, stifled by the room’s insulation; a single voice’s sobbing whisper. Then he heard the sudden, terrible crash of a weight against the door. Feet fled to the farthest limit of the wall. A voice panted, a hopeless little, “Unh…” and John thought, They’re coming up the outside wall to the lab window.

  It’s what he himself would have done.

  He’s surrounded.

  Jen used magic against them, he thought, and they seized her through it. It might not work that way here, but it was clear Corvin didn’t see it as an option.

  If the demons get him, he thought, either Wan or the gangboys, I’ll have to get him away from them.

  He thought about those cold, guarded floors in the Universe Towers, and the room with the blood on the walls. About the deep zone, and the dark waters there teeming with the gods knew what.

  I would really, really rather not have to do that.

  “Clea?” John whispered. “You think you can find your way back to the pod stage and get out of here?”

  “I don’t know.” Her hand tig
htened unconsciously on his arm, a reflex of terror at the thought of having to go back through this horror by herself. “I’ll try if I have to.”

  “Right. Stay up here till I yell. And if I don’t yell…”

  Clea looked at him, scared—desperately scared.

  And no matter who won the fight below, John thought, she was right to be scared. If he had any sense, he’d be scared, too.

  Demons on both sides. And the gods only knew what defenses Corvin had. Bort dead.

  He guessed that sight was in Clea’s mind as well.

  “If I don’t yell,” he said quietly, “forgive me, if you can.”

  She said, just as softly, “I’ve got a gun. I’ll use it.”

  “Gaw,” John said. “I’m gie sorry.”

  He heard the crash of the door breaking in below him. Turning, he aimed one of the submachine guns at the floor just above those sounds and opened fire.

  There were howls, shouts, the wild pinging rattle of bullets bouncing everywhere, and without stopping to think or give the defenders time to think, John kicked his way down through the weakened boards and dropped into the lab itself.

  He had only the dimmest vision of a long chamber, gray with sicklied light through a broken window whose sill was spattered with blood. There was an impression of machinery such as he’d seen in the cinema show Tisa had taken him to: oscilloscopes, etheric relays, splitters, readers, screens—all veiled in smoke that burned his eyes and seared his throat. Dead bluecoats on the floor, bodies knotted with their last agonies. And clearer than all else, the slender little man he’d glimpsed in the GeoCorp lobby, pressed against a wall staring about him in horror and despair.

  Corvin NinetyfiveFifty. Mage and scientist and lover of the Demon Queen. And the gods knew what besides.

  The window at the room’s far end smashed open, and one of the gangboys leaped through, gutted and shattered by bullets and still grinning, ready to fight. John emptied a clip at him, the impact of the bullets knocking him back through the window, then swung around to fire another weapon at two of Wan’s enforcers coming through the broken door.