“Storeroom?” John yelled. “You got one?” There were literally hundreds of ether crystals in the room— big masthead-size jewels, not just the little relay gems— and the searing howl of them went through his skull like a revelation of the gods.
“I … through there.”
John grabbed the thin arm under its expensive dark suiting, thrust Corvin ahead of him through the door he’d indicated. A narrow chamber and a narrower door, lined with metal. Perfect.
He whipped his sword from its sheath, braced himself back in a corner near the door, weapon in hand.
“Who are you?” Corvin gasped. “Who …?”
“Friend of yours sent me.” John stepped in fast, cut the hand and arm from the first gangboy through the door, then kicked the gun in one direction and the limb in the other as the gangboy plunged through, spitting blood and grinning, dragging out a knife with his other hand…
Which John promptly severed, followed by the head. Eyeless, the torso flopped and kicked. John took a moment from dealing with the next gangboy through the door to cut the hamstrings on the first. No sense taking chances. The second gangboy was only massively high, not possessed of a demon that would keep dead flesh alive; he died and John caught up the weapons of both, emptied them into the dark-clothed enforcers who followed them through the door.
Silence outside. The stink of burning plex, blood, cordite. Corvin leaned against the wall, gasping with shock. His dark spectacles had jolted loose, and he tremblingly shoved them back into place, face half turned aside. “I … thank you,” he whispered. “I owe you my life. They … These…”
“Demons,” John said softly. He was panting, covered with gore and slime and dust, but he felt curiously calm now, as if he had all the seconds he needed for what he had to do. “Why’re they after you? Who are you and what are you, that they want you as they do?”
Corvin stared at him, eyes invisible again behind the dark of the glass. But Aversin sensed those eyes darting, seeking some other way to reply than the truth. “I’m a … a scientist,” he stammered. “For years I’ve worked with etheric energy, chaneling in power from other dimensions, other worlds than our own…”
“Hells, you mean?”
Corvin only looked at him.
“Is that why they’re after you? Folcalor’s demons?”
“Folcalor?” Corvin asked. “It’s Adromelech, the Lord of the Sea-wights, who sent demons here to…”
Above their heads, above the ceiling, John heard Clea scream.
The next second bullets roared, rained through the shattering ceiling as he dragged Corvin out of the way, sheltering behind the metal cabinets, plunging for the door.
With a tearing crash Wan ThirtyoneFourFour leapt down through the ceiling, gun and sword gleaming in his hands.
John shoved the table at him, knocking him off balance; sprang across it to slash at the wrist that held the gun. Wan cut at him with his own blade and tried to bring the submachine gun around on him, but the severed tendons would not respond. The next second the crippled gangboy, still rolling and flopping about the floor, lurched against the table’s legs, knocking John sprawling. Wan leaped in, cutting and slashing, and John twisted, hacked, cutting half through the possessed creature’s neck and then slashing at the backs of the knees.
Wan went down, lurching, leaping up, and John grabbed Corvin’s arm and dragged the scientist through the door and into the lab, slamming the door behind him. “Does it lock?” he yelled as the door lurched and started under his grip. Corvin, in shock, made no reply, so John jammed the nearest submachine gun under the latch as a temporary bar, grabbed Corvin’s arm again, and shoved him toward the door.
As they passed beneath the hole in the ceiling Clea dropped through, dust covered and bruised but unhurt. “He came up through the crawlspace—” she started.
“Taken care of. Run!”
The house below them was an inferno of smoke, heat, spreading fire. Two possessed gangboys met them on the stairs, blazing away with semiautomatic fire; Clea fired back, the weapon’s kick slamming her against the wall. The bullets went everywhere, but the attackers retreated for a moment. “Window!” John yelled, and plunged through the smoke into the nearest room.
Like the chambers downstairs it was filled with gold: vases, candlesticks, hangings that were embroidered and woven with the precious metal. Ether crystals formed a circle, mounted on small masts, in the midst of which stood a green leather chair. The vibration of the unshielded gems was blinding. John ripped aside the gold-woven curtains that covered the window. The rope by which the gangboy demons had ascended to the lab a story directly above was still attached by its throwing hook to the sill overhead. Smoke poured from every window of the house, mingling with the rain; distantly, John heard the whine of sirens, the steady terrible whacka-whacka-whacka of aircars nearing. The building looked odd from the outside, dirty and grim after the opulence within.
“Thank you,” Corvin gasped again when they reached the ground. A dead gangboy lay on the pavement. A dead enforcer—one of Corvin’s, and this one had been shot to death—huddled beside the wall.
You never knew, in a demon war.
“I can’t tell you how much I owe you.”
“And what d’you owe those others?” John asked. He wiped the sweat from his face, the cold rain flicking his hair. “All those the demons killed so they could take whatever gold they had, to track you, lure you out of hiding? The demons must’ve killed a dozen of ’em, not to mention your enforcers, poor saps.”
A stray bullet cracked on the pavement near them. Evidently there were gangboys still in the house, still possessed of demons and still intent on getting their quarry.
Aohila’s quarry.
The being she wanted so badly—or wanted so badly to keep from Folcalor—that she’d destroy the Winterlands.
“For the last time,” John asked again. “Who are you?”
Corvin looked at him for one long moment, then turned and tried to flee.
John took the Demon Queen’s box from his pocket, opened the bronze bottle, and removed what she had given him: six tiny beads of gold. He dropped them into the box.
Corvin screamed once—desperate and inhuman— and dissolved into smoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
John walked Clea from the subway platform to the door of her mother’s apartment. “Will you be all right?” he asked.
Corvin’s pod, which they took using one of Clea’s keys, had been not only private but deluxe. It had included washing facilities—so they had removed all obvious signs of violence—and a spare shirt whose sleeves were two inches too short for John’s arms. But John and Clea were both still disheveled and shaken. They left the heavier armament onboard when they deserted the private line at the 65th Boulevard station and switched to the Interstice. Clea dumped in a public washroom the latex gloves she’d worn.
“I’ll be all right,” she said.
Nightmares, John thought, looking at her eyes. What she’d seen in the lab, and the pod’s entry platform, seemed to be burned there. Bort’s face.
Nobody should have to know those things.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She shook her head. They passed in silence through the terminal below her mother’s apartment building, through the swarm and clamor of the mobs, the noise, the stinks, and the etheric, whining hum that never ceased. Ad screens and holo-hats. Pink Angel and Lovehammer. A doomed swarming world unaware of all they had lost, all they were losing every day. “You’re done here, aren’t you?” she said. “You’ll be going home?”
“Aye. I hope.” He stood a step below her as she carded the elevator door. “I owed the Demon Queen two, and by God I’ve gotten them for her.”
“And what will she do now,” Clea asked, “with what you’ll give her? Or will you give her the box?”
“Oh, I’ll give her the box, all right.” John fished the second box—Shamble’s box—from his pocket, and with it the dragonbone cube
that bore the sigil of the gate. “Whether I’ll use this—whether it’ll work, once I get to me own world again…”
He shook his head. “I wanted to see him—to see who he is, and what he is. To ask why the Queen’s so ettled to have him, and never mind that abandoned-lover guff. To guess if I could what she’ll do with him, once she’s got him in her power.
“She and her people came out from behind the mirror once, a thousand years ago, and brought down a peaceful Realm into blood and chaos. The Hellspawn don’t die, and they’ve got gie long memories. They’ve waited a long time to get loose again.”
He took the round bone box, the demon’s box, from another pocket, and flipped it in the air. “This poor sod was only hidin’ out, after all, and that scared of her. No tellin’ what I’d do if I could, to keep from bein’ taken back to her. And yet he lied to me.”
“So what will you do?”
“Find Jen,” John said. “If she’ll still have anything to do with me. Or maybe old Master Bliaud, if he hasn’t gone so deep into hidin’ he can’t be found. Someone who’ll be able to use the water I fetched from another Hell to speak to Corvin in his box here. Before I do any-thin’ I’ve got to know who Corvin is, and what he is— what power he holds. And I’ll have to be fast about it, once I get back, for the Queen’ll send plague again to my people if she thinks I’ve cheated her. It’s hard to know…”
He broke off and pushed up his spectacles to rub his tired eyes. “When you start playin’ about with demons, it’s hard to know where anybody stands.”
“Including yourself?”
“Aye,” John said, with a faint grin. “Includin’ me-self.” He took Clea’s hands and drew her down to him to kiss her gently. A gray-suited salarytech passing in the hall viewed John’s battered leathers and bruised, scabbed face, then hurried on her pharmacologically unconcerned way.
“Warn the others.” John stepped back from Clea, his hands still holding hers. “Docket and Shamble especially— I’m willin’ to bet Shamble’s a true mage, whatever might be said of the others. And take the warnin’ yourself. There are demons yet about. They’re strong—how strong I don’t know—and they want the mageborn for ends of their own. Keep a watch on one another, and stay away from all them things—Pink Sunshine and Peace and Put Your Brain in Your Pocket … Demons trapped me wife through the use of her magic. I think they’ll trap you through those artificial dreams.”
Clea nodded. Her voice was wistful. “Will your wife be all right?”
In her eyes was something he hadn’t seen before. Her fingers held his as if reluctant to release the contact. “That I don’t know,” he said softly. “And what’s all right, anyway? You mind how you go.”
“I will.”
For another moment their hands held. Then she turned away and went inside. He heard the lock clack behind her.
Hands deep in his pockets, sword hidden in a ratty bundle of raincoat and tubing, he ambled down the hall and took the elevator to the subway station once more.
He took the Interstice line as far as it went toward the wet zone and got out at the last station, where the water stood in dark streams between the tracks and the mosquitoes hummed louder than the failing crystals in the ceiling. A catwalk extended into the darkness. It was a half mile to the next station, with the water getting deeper over the rails. His flashlight gleamed on its solid obsidian sheet, on the swirling insects’ wings.
Somewhere far ahead of him firelight cast ruddy smears on the glistening walls, and he heard music, the blare of a PSE. A free fair somewhere. People he wanted to talk to, to ask about what had happened here and what was happening still, if they knew.
Maybe they didn’t, any more than the solitary hunters had in the Hell of the Shining Things. Maybe they just got on as best they could.
In his satchel, along with the two boxes of silver and dragonbone, he carried a wad of paper and parchment and flimsiplast, written and crossed and overwritten in a grubby palimpsest—notes to occupy a decade of winter nights, if he lived longer than the next twenty minutes. Was there any more to the world than the city? Why did it always rain? Who made the drugs, and what was ether and how did it work?
And other things as well, he thought, thinking of Clea’s hands holding his outside her mother’s door. Other things as well.
But you couldn’t be two people.
The same way Jenny could not be both a dragon and his wife.
The passageway broadened around him. The white ether glow glistened on wet tiles and filth, on the concrete arches of ceiling, on the red eyes of rats. Out of habit—for he wasn’t sure if it would work in this world—John drew a circle around himself in felt-tip pen on the concrete and opened the onyx ink bottle.
“How dare you?” Amayon’s voice shook, his mulberry-blue eyes blazing with rage. “How dare you treat me like a … a common servant? A broom to be put in the cupboard until the floor wants sweeping? You could have gotten yourself killed—”
“And let you fall into the hands of Corvin’s enforcers?” John tilted his head a little, the ether light making flashing circles of his spectacles. He was aware of how tired he was, and that he ached all over— bruised, weary, thin with the thinness of one who dares not eat or sleep. And aching in soul worse than in body. “Or maybe of whichever bunch of demons isn’t on the side you’ve chosen?”
Amayon spat, and the spittle smoked where it struck the pavement.
“I didn’t do so ill.” John touched the pocket where the dragon-bone box lay hidden. “I found our boy. The Queen’ll be pleased.”
“She is never pleased.” Amayon’s rosebud mouth twisted with emotions impossible to describe. “Don’t you realize that yet, you puling twit? She is never pleased, and nothing that you do is ever enough. Do you think your service to her is done?”
John was silent.
“Do you think she hasn’t been playing you like a puppet? Do you think she’s telling you the truth about who and what this Corvin is, and why she wants him in her power? Are you as crassly stupid as that? Cast the box away! Throw it into the water. You have no concept of the ill that you do, Aversin…”
“No,” he said softly. “No, I haven’t. But nor am I like to learn it from you, or from any demon—particularly not those who’d be in that water waitin’ to nip up that box and pass it along to Folcalor if I did as you say. So maybe it’s best I just give her what she wants, and see where we are from there.”
Amayon studied him for a moment, blue eyes icy with rage. By the demon light that played around them John could see the Demon Queen’s marks on the boyish face, as if a finger dipped in silvery fire had traced whorls and signs on his flesh.
“Yes,” the demon said at last. “It is best to give her what she wants.” He turned and led the way down the platform, to where a metal door had been let into a niche in the wall. When the demon’s hand touched the latch John saw—though he couldn’t tell whether it had flickered into life then or had always been there—the sigil of the gate.
John drew his sword.
It was as well that he did, for the men who seized him from both sides as he stepped through did it so quickly that he probably couldn’t have defended himself at all had he not been ready. The place into which the door opened was dark—a cellar or crypt, by the low vaulting overhead—but John’s eyes were adjusted already to the dark of the subway tunnel. He slashed one man across the face and turned to kick his attackers on the other side, opening a gap in the group. Boxes, barrels, the smell of coals—his mind registered them, and the more familiar stinks of mildew and potatoes. A voice shouted, “Get the bottle!” As a hand ripped the ink bottle free of the cord around his neck, he knew the voice.
Ector of Sindestray. Treasurer of the Council to the Regent Gareth of Bel.
He was in Bel.
Probably, he thought as he dodged behind a pillar, shoved a pile of boxes over onto his pursuers, in the vaults under Ector’s own town house. That would be the logical place for Amayon to betr
ay him.
All this went through his mind in instants as he ran, not toward the stairs, which would be guarded, but toward the chute he knew all town houses had, to let barrels and provisions and coal slide straight into the cellars—the equivalent, he reflected wryly, of the Circle’s goods trains. He thrust the trapdoor aside and scrambled up and through, blinking in the bright cool light of the cobbled street, disoriented and shaken.
Bel, he thought. His own world. His own home.
Gareth.
The Regent was his friend. In the summer, when the old King had condemned him as a demon trafficker, it was Gareth who’d secretly engineered his escape. At a guess, Ector of Sindestray wouldn’t even mention to Gareth, Oh, yes, he did happen to come into my cellar one day and my men finished him off…
Ector’s town house stood in the fashionable quarter of town, eastward toward the hills and not far from the palace. John dodged down the first narrow street he saw before the councilor’s men could emerge from the house, then ducked around a cart carrying boxes—coffins?— and dodged into an alleyway between the tall houses. Voices shouted in the street behind him. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before they got on his track.
At a corner near a market square a niche in a moldering wall housed a statue—old and disgraced by a million pigeons—of the forgotten Lord of Time. John worked his boot toe into a crack in the brickwork and thrust himself up to the level of the niche—it was some five feet from the ground—and wedged the silver bottle of water from the spring and the Demon Queen’s box of silver and dragonbone among the dirty rummage of guttered votive candles and rats’ mess around the old god’s feet.
He hesitated, Shamble’s duplicate box in one hand and the little bone gate sigil in the other, hearing the shouting come nearer and remembering…
The plague spots on Ian’s face.
The winds and illusions of Hell.
The dead on the roof of a deep-zone ruin, slaughtered for no better reason than because demons were at large in their world.
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