Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  It was several times as far to the princess around the curving shoreline as it was across the water. Cashel started running.

  Cozro shook his head to clear it. Blood dripped from the pressure cut over his left temple. If he'd heard Cashel, he'd ignored the threat. He started after Aria again, his arms spread wide.

  Because Cashel intended to go out clamming in the inlet later, he hadn't dragged the dinghy up the beach after he and Aria returned from rowing practice. Instead of running as Cashel expected her to do, or fighting as a man might have done, Aria leaped into the little boat and flipped away the mooring line.

  Cashel saw at once that she was right. Cozro wasn't fast, but he was a lot stronger than the princess. If she ran inland, the island's vegetation would tangle her before she'd gotten twenty steps. Cozro was between her and Cashel, and running the other way down the beach would take Aria to the giant nest at the tip of the cape with nowhere to go but into the water.

  Cozro roared angrily and stumped into the sea after the dinghy. Aria teetered in the stern as she pushed the boat deeper into the inlet, using the oar like a barge pole, Cozro could swim: his third splashing breaststroke brought him almost close enough to grab the gunwale.

  Aria whacked his head again with the oar. Cashel, using the staff for balance as he ran—he ran better than he swam, but it still wasn't a talent he was known for—shouted in triumph.

  If the princess had known to use the oar's edge like a wooden sword, she might have put Cozro down for good. As it was, a swat with the flat didn't do the captain serious damage but it did convince him there was no future in trying to climb aboard the dinghy. Cozro scrambled out of the water again.

  “I'm coming, Princess!” Cashel cried with what breath he had left over from running through soft sand. He really hoped Cozro would try to fight him. Otherwise Cashel was going to have a moral problem about what to do with a man who'd proved he was too dangerous to live with on the same small island.

  Cashel's first guess was that the captain was going back to shore to get a pole to fend off Aria's swipes. Aria must have thought the same thing, because she settled both oars in the rowlocks and clumsily stroked farther out. If she got beyond the jaws of the inlet, she might not be strong enough to get back...

  Cozro continued to run up the beach. Cashel wondered if there wasn't something in the captain's punch that ate his brain away. Cozro might be able to finish his business with Aria before Cashel caught him, but he couldn't expect to escape except possibly by rowing an empty dinghy out into an empty sea. That was an end as final as facing Cashel, and a good deal more unpleasantly slow.

  Cashel had his stride, now. He wasn’t fast, but he could keep going as long as he had to. Aria had found her rhythm too and was pulling with both arms together. Cashel tried to imagine what the princess would be like if she'd been born a fisherman's daughter in Barca's Hamlet. He couldn't get his mind around the thought. It was too much like imagining the sun rising in the west.

  Zahag chattered enthusiastically, watching events from high in the strangler fig. Cashel knew the ape couldn't either swim or run well enough to reach Cozro before Cashel did, but it gnawed him that it wouldn't even have occurred to Zahag to try. Zahag would probably say that the tribe's females were the chief ape's business, not his.

  Cozro ran off the tip of land into the sea. Well, if the captain wanted to drown himself that was just fine with—

  The dinghy grounded. The shock tipped Aria backward into the bow. Her legs waved in the air for a moment before she could clamber onto the thwart again. Cozro shouted in triumph. He was well out from the shore, but the water was only ankle-deep.

  Cashel stopped. Pounding over the sand didn't help him think, and he knew he had to grasp what was going on before he could do anything about it.

  Though it was simple enough, really. Aria got out of the boat and tugged at it without success. She was standing on a firm surface just beneath the water. Cozro was certainly drunk and possibly mad, but he was a sailor. He'd noticed, as Cashel had not, that there was a bar between the jaws of the inlet. Even the shallow dinghy would ground on it when the tide was low.

  The princess turned and splashed toward the shore where Cashel had been working. Cozro was gaining on her. Cashel had gotten almost to the base of the inlet, about as far away as he could be. If he'd just stayed where he was...

  Cashel didn't even sigh as he started back. He'd made a mistake and not for the first time. He'd do what he could, even though he could see that he wouldn't get to Aria in time for anything but revenge.

  Which he would take.

  Zahag started to shriek pulsingly like a wagon wheel spinning on its hub while a smith tries to balance it. The ape clung to the fig's woody stems with both hands and thumped his feet up and down on lower strands, setting the whole tall lattice to vibrate. He was staring out to sea.

  “Help Aria!” Cashel bawled. If Zahag put himself between Cozro and the girl, he could hold the captain off until Cashel arrived to finish matters.

  If, but Zahag wasn't human and he surely didn't think like Cashel. He continued to call, letting go with one long arm so that he could point out to sea.

  The princess was fifty feet from shore; Cozro was twenty feet behind her and gaining. She looked over her shoulder and froze where she was. Cozro shouted, “Now you'll learn, you little tease!”

  Cashel thought Aria had panicked when she saw how close her pursuer was. He shouted, “What are you—”

  His attention was so wholly focused on Cozro and the princess that he didn't see the long toothed heads coming in from the sea until the captain did. Cozro turned screaming. He splashed three steps back toward the dinghy before the monsters reached him.

  Only when they slid onto the bar did Cashel realize that the creatures were birds—or their forefathers had been birds, at any rate. Their belly feathers were creamy, while those of their upper surfaces were slate gray speckled with white. The only traces of wings were tiny stubs that stuck out as the birds reared upward.

  Tip to tail, the creatures were twenty feet long, and each toothy orange beak measured a yard by itself.

  Cozro bawled in terror and raised his arms to cover his face. The Sister only knew what he thought that would accomplish. The birds struck simultaneously. They grabbed Cozro at the knees and shoulders, then jerked apart, shaking their heads like a pair of hens struggling over a worm. Blood splattered the foam.

  After a time, Cozro stopped screaming.

  Cashel continued to run along the shore. He understood now why Aria had stopped where she was. She stayed still and the captain was moving: the birds landed on Cozro like black on coal.

  A smart girl, smart and quick-witted besides. Nobody was going to call Cashel either of those things, but he knew his job didn't mean hiding in the bushes while the princess was stuck out there in the water, as plain as a boil on your bum.

  Cashel reached the strangler fig, twenty paces or so from where Aria would come to dry land when she next could move. Zahag had dropped to the ground and was hunching like a fur-covered rock. His bulging eyes stared at what was happening in the inlet. Cashel paused also, beaming through his open mouth and leaning forward slightly so that his diaphragm could expand his chest more easily.

  The birds had just about finished with Cozro. They rose, chest to chest, hissing like water on hot rocks as they both tried to gobble down the last tit-bit. Their feet were huge and orange. Scales projected from both sides of their toes in place of the skin webs that helped the geese of Barca's Hamlet swim.

  One of the great birds overbalanced the other with a sly twist of the neck, a maneuver that Cashel, a wrestler, could well appreciate. Both birds slipped sideways with a great splash, but the one who'd thrown the other swallowed Cozro's leg as they fell. Fragments of the shattered dinghy flew out from under the squirming bodies.

  Simultaneously and in apparent good humor, the birds flopped into the deeper water of the inlet and swam to the opposite shore where their nes
t stood. They slid along with their heads and long necks raised, making contented hissing sounds.

  Aria began to crawl toward land. Behind her, the wreckage of the boat floated in water whose bloodstains were being quickly diluted. A small fish leaped with a bit of something in its mouth.

  Cashel started toward the point where she'd arrive, moving stealthily so he wouldn't draw the birds' attention to this side of the inlet. Zahag mewled as he crept along at Cashel's side, more afraid to be alone than he was afraid to move.

  The birds slid up on the beach beside their looted nest. Their cries of rage were like nothing Cashel had ever heard: high-pitched, penetrating, and louder than should come from anything alive. They dipped their heads into the pillaged mass of leaves and seaweed, lifting out each remaining egg for examination. The beaks that had ripped Cozro to bloody fragments were mother-gentle with the softly gleaming ovoids.

  Aria reached the shore. Her mouth was open and her eyes stared. She was terrified, but not too terrified to think and even act. Cashel felt a surge of warmth toward a girl he hadn't imagined he'd ever like, let alone respect.

  Cashel held out his free hand to her. Tags of skin dangled from her oar-scraped palms, though the saltwater had sluiced away the blood.

  A bird hooted. Aria turned her head and screamed. Both the huge creatures dived into the water with sinuous grace.

  Cashel swung the princess behind him; there wasn't time to be dainty about it. “Stay close but don't get in my way!” he said. “Zahag, you too!”

  His wrists set the quarterstaff spinning. The brass end-wraps blurred into a gleaming, golden circle as the staff speeded up with each twist.

  If there'd been one bird, and if Aria and Zahag stayed squarely behind him, Cashel thought there might have been a chance. He'd seen what the beaks could do. The teeth were like a seawolf's and the very length of the gape meant it clopped shut like the door of a fortress slamming.

  One bird alone, though, would have run into a barrier of spinning firwood every time it tried to peck through to the delectable flesh beyond. The birds each weighed as much as a dozen plow oxen. One could squirm on through despite Cashel's defense—but there'd have been pain for it on the way, and maybe a broken beak besides. They would have had a chance, Cashel and those he defended.

  Two birds working together as this pair had proved they could, well, it would be over in moments. Aria and the ape would be gone in two snaps, and the birds would quarrel over Cashel's fragments at only slightly greater length.

  Blue light crackled in the circle of spinning brass. Cashel felt the world around him starting to fade. He thought Aria was saying something, but he couldn't be sure.

  The birds had crossed the inlet beneath the surface. Now they lurched up from the water. Their beaks were open and their pink tongues vibrated, but Cashel didn't hear their hissing cries. His quarterstaff was a disk of sizzling blue fire, roaring and popping and filling the world. He could see figures on the other side of it, but the giant birds thinned into shadows.

  The disk was an open pit before Cashel. He fell through it; Zahag and the princess were tumbling after him.

  Cashel lay in the dust of King Folquin's palace on Pandah. “Guards! Guards!” someone screamed. Cashel felt his vision blurring.

  Zahag was gibbering, Aria wailing for the Mistress God, and King Folquin kept shouting for his guards. A woman with Dalopan tattoos bent and stared into Cashel's face. He recognized her from the crowd of petitioners the morning he and Zahag had been flung out of this world into the first of the places they'd trudged through before this return. Now the Dalopan was wearing a robe of silk brocade embroidered in silver thread with astrological symbols.

  The woman straightened. “Stand back!” she said. “I have need of this one for my art!”

  The blackness of utter exhaustion spread over Cashel like the surface of the sea.

  Something in the forest canopy went ka-ka-ka-ka as Sharina and Unarc passed below. She didn't bother to look up. She knew by now that she wouldn't be able to see anything; and anyway, she didn't have the energy to spare for sightseeing.

  Sharina had been following the wounded hunter for... she couldn't be sure. It probably hadn't been many miles, but it had been longer, harder work than she was used to.

  Unarc moved like a ghost. Only occasionally did the hunter remember to look back to see that the girl was keeping up with him. It was a matter of fierce pride to Sharina that she always was there when Unarc checked.

  She hadn't seen Hanno since the three of them set off this morning. She hadn't expected to. Unarc could guide the girl, while the big hunter scouted unseen for anything that lay in wait or followed them. Nonnus would have done the same.

  Sharina smiled. Indeed, perhaps Nonnus was doing the same.

  Unarc paused in a grove of elephant-ear plants and raised his knife in warning. The wicked hook caught enough light to wink like a snake's eye.

  Sharina stopped in place. She opened her mouth to breathe silently, then turned her head to watch their back-trail.

  Nothing. She felt no hint of danger. Thanks to Nonnus, she was sure she could trust her instincts—not that she wouldn't continue to use her conscious senses the best ways she could.

  Sharina looked at Unarc, then crept to his side when he nodded her forward. The knife gestured into the tangle of mangrove roots growing out into a great river. They'd been paralleling the water for most of the day, but this was the first time Sharina had seen rather than merely heard it.

  A strikingly ugly animal waddled into sight through the mangroves. It was probably the weight of an ox but it was built more along the lines of a giant hedgehog, broad and low to the ground. Horny spikes stuck out along both sides of the creature, with particularly long ones projecting from the shoulders; It was munching the last of a cycad frond as it ambled along, drawing in more of the tough vegetation with each front-to-back motion of its broad jaws.

  “That's where we get the horn,” Unarc whispered. Once the bald hunter came to believe that the slaughter at the baobab tree was Sharina's doing, he'd treated her with respect—but no longer as a source of the crippling embarrassment with which he viewed women. “And you might know, we'd run across one as fine as I've seen in seven years on Bight right now when I'm outa the horn business.”

  The browser vanished into foliage on the other side of the root maze. It amazed Sharina that something so large and apparently clumsy could move unhindered through the dense mass.

  She whispered, “Its armor looks—”

  Ugly as tree bark was the phraseher tongue started to form.

  “—dull.”

  Unarc nodded. “Likewise tortoiseshell,” he said. “You take the outer rind off and polish her up and in the sunlight you never seen anything so pretty. Which we don't do, since it'd get scratched to hell in the shipping, like enough, but you take it from me that was a first-quality critter.”

  Sharina jerked around, grasping the Pewle knife's hilt. Hanno, emerging from between a pair of ginger bushes without disturbing any of the dew-dripping pink flowers, grinned in wry approval. “Good thing you got her along, Unarc,” he said. “If I'd been a Monkey, I guess you'd be dinner now unless they decided to cook you first.”

  “Sister take you, Hanno!” the bald man said. “I knowed it was you all the time!”

  Sharina took her hand away from the knife. She didn't know if Unarc's statement was true. Anyway, she was glad to see the big hunter again.

  “There's no Monkeys up or down the river,” Hanno said, setting aside his humor. “I figure we can get to the top while there's still daylight. Sister take me if I don't think every Monkey on the island's walked this way in the past month! And no tracks going back.”

  Unarc shook his bald head. “Well, something had to be happening or—”

  His knife waggled in the direction of his strapped arm.

  “—I wouldn't be sporting this. Let's go see what it is.”

  “The top of what?” Sharina said. She d
idn't need her hand held, but the two hunters were so used to acting alone and with similar uncommunicative men that they didn't tell her things that she might need to know for all their sakes. The men were apt to speak in a monosyllabic code that an outsider lacked the background to break.

  Hanno nodded to indicate he understood and approved of the question. Under other circumstances Sharina would have liked to throttle the hunter—but she was here by his sufferance and free because of the risks Hanno had taken in the same unthinking way that he sometimes treated her as a dim-witted girl-child.

  “This whole north end of the island is volcanoes,” he said aloud. “The bay where it seems the Monkeys're headed, that's one too, only the north wall's been eat away by the sea. We're going up a cone on the side of that one, and we're going up in style where the critters won't see us coming.”

  Unarc nodded solemnly and said, “The lava came up the top and made a tube when it ran down the side. The outside froze to rock and the inside run on till it hit the river and the water carried it away. I seen it happen—not here, I mean, this is old, but the other side of the island the first summer I come to Bight.”

  It struck Sharina forcibly that though she thought of the hunters as unsophisticated—even by her own rural standards—they'd seen things with their own eyes that the scholars of this and former times had never dreamed of. They were savage—she'd seen proof enough of that in Hanno's collection of teeth—but they weren't savages, and they were neither of them stupid. Even before this change in the Hairy Men's conduct, the forests of Bight would have shown little mercy for fools.

  “We go into the river,” Hanno said, “duck underwater to get into the tube, and then we just climb. Hope you don't mind getting a little wet.”

  He grinned at the joke. A bath in the river wouldn't make Sharina any wetter than the daily rainstorms did.

  Sharina grinned back. “Looks like there's enough mud in the current,” she said, “that I won't get nearly as wet as when it rains. My friend Cashel would want to plow it.”