I can’t, he thought.
He raised the cover of Shamble’s box and dropped the sigil inside.
He shoved the box into hiding, dropped to the pavement, and ducked into the marketplace, sword sheathed and walking fast. He felt glaringly conspicuous in jeans and Corvin’s too-small shirt. The day was cold but bright, clouds scudding over the houses of stone and timber and plastered brick that looked so small after the terrifying megablocks of the city. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d missed the air and sky and the mere absence of rain. As he jogged down an alleyway, frozen and half choked with dirty snow, his mind identified the smell of smoke, of pyres, a charnel stink.
Plague? In winter?
A small and twisting street. That congeries of red and blue roofs ahead should be the palace. Let’s hope our boy Gar is at home and not on some country estate or off at Halnath lookin’ up ballads about Dragonsbanes. If worse comes to worst, the Lady Trey’ll stand up for me till he gets…
“There he is!”
John yanked on the trap of a cellar cover and found it locked. An arrow struck the trapdoor; he sprang back, ducked, turned … And saw that the alley dead-ended in an eight-foot wall. Trees on the other side—a garden—
“Don’t try it.”
John stood still.
“Turn around,” the same voice said. It was a man’s, and deep, not like the Earl of Sindestray’s light tenor yap. John turned and faced the men. They wore the red livery of the royal House of Uwanë. It was their commander who had spoken.
“Shoot him.” Lord Ector came panting around the corner a moment later, Amayon jogging unruffled at his side. “He has trafficked with demons.”
“Take me to see Lord Gareth,” John said quietly. Enough of them had bows that at this short range it was a choice between surrender and a brief career as a pincushion. “I’m his servant and the Thane of the Winterlands still.”
“Not since you sold yourself to the Hellspawn!”
“That doesn’t give us the right to kill a man,” the red-clad commander said. John recognized him as Torneval, a senior captain of the King’s guard, a thin dark warrior from the marshes beyond Halnath. The guards all looked exhausted and grim, with the unshaven appearance of men pulling too many shifts. The smell of burning, the emptiness of the marketplace as he’d passed through, the cart bearing coffins…
“Put down your sword, Lord John.”
They searched him, roughly, for weapons. “What did you do with the box?” Amayon demanded.
Torneval frowned at him, and Ector said, “My nephew.” His brow puckered a little as he said it, as if some anomaly crossed his mind, but he quickly put it aside with a little shake of his head. “It was he who warned me Aversin would be using the vaults beneath my house to meet with demons.”
A dream, John thought, looking into those puzzled eyes. Bort and the gangboys evidently weren’t the only ones who had had strange dreams.
Amayon even wore the blue-and-white livery of Ector’s house, his dark curls hanging to his shoulders. Goodness knew what he looked like to the Earl of Sindestray, or to the men of the guard. He held the ink bottle, stoppered tight, in his blue-gloved hands.
“He had a box wrought of brownish bone, about so large, strapped with silver and lidded with a single opal,” he said. “This was a … treasure … he stole from our house.”
Torneval glanced back at one of his men and said, “Follow where he ran and fetch it.”
“He’s lying to you.” John lunged despairingly against the men who bound his wrists. “He’s a demon, he’s trying to trick you—”
Ector struck him hard across the face. “Be silent or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“That’s the peril of demons, Lord Torneval,” Amayon sighed sententiously. “Once a man sells his heart to them, no one is ever sure of him, or of anyone who comes near him. I’m told that in times past such mistrust brought kingdoms to ruin.”
“I want to see Lord Gareth,” John repeated grimly as they led him from the alley and toward the palace. “I’ve that right.”
“Oh, my dear Captain, you’d be a fool to let him! His influence over the boy is such…”
“Give our lord Regent credit for knowing a dangerous man when he sees one.” Torneval’s voice was dry. By the sound of it he had as little use for the treasurer as John did. To John, he said, “It may be a little time before he can speak with you, Lord John. His lady is sick unto death; he has watched by her side now for three days. Yes, Marc?”
The young guardsman returned with the dragonbone box in his hand. “I found this, Lord.”
Aohila’s, John thought, recognizing the finer workmanship and the solid opal lid. He gritted his teeth. So much for a month’s quest through the marches of Hell.
“That’s it.” Amayon held out his hand for it. Torneval shot him a wary glance and gave it to Ector, but as the men started off again the treasurer passed it to the demon—almost, John thought, without being aware of what he was doing.
“I’ll tell Aohila that you were delayed, shall I?” Amayon fell gaily into step at John’s side. “Or shall I ask her to visit you in your cell and preserve your soul alive even if she can’t do anything about keeping your body from being broken and burned?” His voice was too soft to be heard even by those men who walked on either side, but he laughed at John’s stony face. “Or would you like to send her a message, begging her help? I’ll even promise to deliver it. It will give me great pleasure, in fact.”
“Fuck yourself,” John said quietly. “I assume that’s what you spent your time in the bottle doing anyway.”
Amayon laughed again and halted in the thin winter sunlight of the market. None of the guards, nor Lord Ector himself, seemed to notice that he’d stopped. John pulled against the grip on his arms, twisting to look back, and saw the demon standing, arms upraised in triumph and delight. Then Amayon laughed again and waved farewell, and skipped away, twirling his ink-bottle prison around and around on its scarlet ribbon over his head like a child playing with a toy.
For three days they starved him. This was customary in the South for those condemned to burning alive.
Thus it is that the prisoner’s spirit may be rendered docile—Polyborus again—and he give those in authority little trouble in leading him to the ground of execution. John could read the words in his mind every time he shut his eyes.
Gareth came on the second night, a beaten and exhausted Gareth who seemed to have aged ten years. “Forgive me.” The Regent glanced up as the guards in the corridor above the cells pulled away the ladder and closed the grilled trapdoor that was the tiny pit’s only source of light. “Lord John, I…”
John shook his head. “You’ve grief enough by the sound of it,” he said. “I’m gie sorry about Trey. The guards say there’s a plague.” He’d overheard them speak of it through the long day just past. The Demon Queen? he wondered. Folcalor? He saw Ian again, tossing in fever, tongue swollen, face flushed. The descriptions of the current plague were much the same. How after a thousand years had they gained this power? And what could be done about it?
He didn’t even have Corvin to bargain with now. And Amayon was gone, the Old God only knew where, to make his own treaty with the Demon Queen.
With unsteady hands the young man took off his spectacles, rubbed eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. When John had seen him at the burned-out camp on the banks of the Wildspae, after the battle at Cor’s Bridge against Rocklys, Gareth had been exhausted, sickened by the violence of combat and the shock of his cousin’s betrayal, but he’d had the look of a man who would recover, given rest and food and time.
Though the cell was ill lit—torchlight fell through the grillwork from the corridor overhead—and the guards had taken John’s spectacles, still he could see that Gareth was thin now, not with a boy’s weediness such as he’d had when first John had met him, but with the unhealthy thinness of a man whose body has given way under too great a sorrow. His face was haggard and lined. His hair
hung lank, unkempt, and the mousy brown was streaked with gray. There were bruises under his eyes.
“Trey—” He stopped himself. Then, “Trey died.” And seeing John open his mouth to speak comfort he added quickly, “She’s all right now, though. There’s a man in the city, a healer. A very great healer. She died the day before yesterday, and he … he brought her back.” He raised his eyes, and John tried not to look as if he’d been struck in the heart with an arrow of ice. Gareth’s voice shook with emotion, gratitude, awe. “He brought her back.”
He’s the first man to come back from the dead.
Go ahead, John thought. Tell him.
Tell him the woman he adores is a demon.
Tell him to kill her, to burn up her body alive, so she won’t end up like Wan ThirtyoneFourFour. So your people won’t end up like Tisa Three, or those poor deep-zone families on the news.
In the silence the creak of a guard’s boot leather in the corridor sounded loud.
“This … this was last night. I think last night.” Gareth swallowed again, fighting to keep his voice steady. “Trey, I mean. I don’t really remember. I’ve been so tired, I slept the clock around, they tell me. When I woke, Captain Torneval told me you were here. But Trey … last night she sat up, weak, but … but well. She smiled at me, so…” He shook his head furiously, thrusting away memory, thought, pain, joy. Tears of thankfulness crept again from his eyes. “I’m sorry, John, so sorry. Ector claims he told me the day you were taken, I just … I just don’t remember.” His hand clenched convulsively. “Please, please, forgive…”
“Gar, no,” John said quickly. “Gaw, you did what you could…”
The young man shook his head. When he touched John’s arm, John saw how the rings had turned on his fingers, so thin the fingers had grown. “Ector announced your arrest to the council this afternoon, while I was sleeping,” he said. “He saw to it Father was there, though Father barely knows who he’s with these days. And with the plague, and the rumors that have been going around…”
“About what?”
Gareth ducked his head a little, looked aside in embarrassment. “About demons,” he said, after a long time. “About … about you trafficking with demons, to bring about the plague.”
John was silent, cold, furious, shaking inside. Amayon, he thought. That filthy little bugger was thinking about this, all that time in the bottle. Sending dreams to Ector, who of course was willing to believe anything. Setting this up. Setting me up.
“I’ll get you out.” Gareth’s voice was unsteady. “I swear I’ll get you out. Midnight, tonight…”
“Well, if it’s midnight tomorrow,” John remarked, rubbing the side of his nose, “I’ll be a good deal slower on me feet. What about Jenny?”
The young Regent startled, as if at something forgotten and suddenly recalled. “Jenny…”
“Have you heard aught of her?” Without John’s spectacles Gareth’s face was little more than a blur, but the way he said her name told John that he had heard something.
“She was … she came here. To the palace. Yesterday … the day before…” He shook his head, brow folding, struggling to think past the haze of exhaustion and grief. “It was three days ago. She was with Trey when Trey … She was with Trey.” He couldn’t even speak the words again. “I didn’t … I don’t remember…” He passed a hand across his face, panic in his tone at so hideous a mental lapse.
Trust a demon to blur that recollection from your mind, John thought.
“Find her,” he said. “Tell her I’m here. Tell her…”
Tell her what? That now I’m in trouble I’m sorry about all I said?
His heart pounded at the thought of her. Had Amayon betrayed her, too? Was she locked up here somewhere as well?
“Polycarp,” Gareth said, struggling to recall. “Poly-carp said he saw her. He said something…”
“Just find her. Promise me. And tell none others of this, not even Trey.” Seeing Gareth stiffen indignantly, he added quickly, “For her own good, not that I don’t trust her. After you find Jen, one of you needs to go to the marketplace at the foot of the hill, near Ector’s house. There’s a statue of the Lord of Time in a wall niche down one of the streets near there. There’s a silver bottle, and a box made of bone and silver, shoved in behind the statue and the candles and all. I need ’em, but it must be only you or she who gets ’em.”
Gareth nodded. “I’ll get them myself. And I’ll find her, I swear it. I haven’t been myself. I know she’s somewhere in the palace; Badegamus would have told me if anything had happened to her.”
If Badegamus knew.
“And send me down some food,” he added, trying to calm the hammering of his heart as Gareth signed the guards to lower the ladder again. A prosaic enough request, when Jenny could be locked in some hole in greater danger than he, but when he stood to bid his liege lord good-bye—he’d had to sit down halfway through the interview from sheer lightheadedness—the floor seemed to rock under his feet. Even with the Regent assisting him, an escape from Bel wasn’t going to be easy, and he might end up having to run or swim or climb. “Anythin’ at all—potato skins, bread crusts, whole roast oxen…”
“Torneval will bring it.” Gareth had to whisper the words; the guards stood above them, framed against the torchlight at the ladder’s top. He visibly restrained himself from clasping John’s hands and said in a firm voice for their benefit, “I will see you ere the sentence is carried out.”
Equally for the benefit of the guards—who would undoubtedly be quizzed by Ector, worms rot him—John sank to one knee and bowed his head and stayed that way as Gareth climbed the ladder and the grill was replaced.
Midnight. And by the best of his calculations, it was an hour or so after sunset now.
He sank back, leaned his head against the damp stone. So much, he reflected bitterly, for preventing demon war. Within weeks, if not days, Trey would have a little room in the palace like Wan ThirtyoneFourFour’s, with blood-soaked chair straps and swarming insects. Would that be enough to convince Gareth of her possession? Or would he not learn of it until too late?
And Jenny … His flesh went cold at the thought of her here. Three days! Had she had the sense to get out? To go into hiding? Had she figured out that Trey was no longer the girl she’d known?
He closed his eyes and saw Tisa Three leaning gaily against the corner of the alley, waving a jaunty good-bye. Saw Old Docket brought out mindless and stumbling from the District cells; saw what was left of Bort on the blood-pooled floor. It would only be carnage from here, and he could think of no way to stop it, no way to turn the rising scarlet tide.
Would Corvin NinetyfiveFifty know? He’d been Aohila’s lover—or something. What had he learned from her, aside from the secret of immortality, that could possibly defeat the demons now that they had human rulers and human mages in their thrall? Now that they had reattained powers that had not been theirs in a thousand years?
If we can speak to him, within the dragonbone box. If human magic—or, the Old God help us, the abilities of a human who had once had magic—could use the scrying water as a demon could. If Corvin would speak at all to the man who’d captured him…
It’s got to work. John watched the blurry squares of torchlight on the floor move, brighten, fade with the passage of the guards’ feet and shadows and torches. Folcalor and Adromelech turning this world into a battlefield and a playground…
He felt sick at the thought.
Get me out of here. Torneval, wherever you are, lad…
Is it midnight yet?
More guards passing. Different voices, asking news of this prisoner and that. He heard his own name, and caught the words, “No trouble.”
You want to see trouble, lad, you just come down here and I’ll show you trouble.
In another cell a man coughed, desperate and hacking. John huddled grimly in his corner, trying not to think about how hungry he was, or how cold.
Surely midnight had to be n
ear?
After a long time, the guards changed again.
It was close to dawn before he realized the truth.
Torneval wasn’t coming.
Trey. Fear—and absolute certainty—settled in him with the finality of a stone sinking into a quicksand bog.
Lie down with me, love. He could almost hear her voice speaking to her husband, a man desperately weary, torn to pieces by what he’d passed through. Lie down with me and have a glass of wine.
Gar, no, he thought, with what little energy was left in him to think anything. Gar, no.
And then she’d say to the guards, Oh, my lord is resting…
Of course, my lady. We’ll see to it, my lady.
A shudder went through him at the thought of the fire.
They came for him just before noon.
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