by David Drake
The demon's eyes glowed a red brighter than any other light in the jungle's gloom. It shifted its grip on its victim. From a groin which until then had been as sexless as the crotch of a tree the demon's penis extended and entered the female.
She stopped struggling. The rape had frozen her the way a wasp's sting paralyzes the spiders on which her offspring will feed.
The demon stepped back from its huddled victim. Its—his—member withdrew completely within the snake-thin abdomen. The demon's jaws opened and loosed another fiery lance of triumph, this time immolating a branch thirty feet in the air. Mosses and epiphytes rooted on the bark blazed in red horror, scattering carbonized leaves and tiny animals killed with painless abruptness.
At no time did the demon make a sound of its own, though its flame roared deafeningly. Life in the forest went silent, then chittered and squeaked at redoubled volume when the first wisps of smoke rose to the higher levels.
The demon's skin grew dull. The creature began to dissolve: no part clearly before the next, yet not all at once. For a moment the demon's eyes blazed from what might have been the rippling of heated air; then they too had vanished.
The victim lifted herself from the wet soil. Welts were rising on her forearms, and the fur on her haunches still smoldered.
Sharina felt sick. She said nothing, nor did she look toward the queen gloating triumphantly outside the circle.
Limping, the victim turned back the way from which she'd come. Another Hairy Man, then several, entered the clearing. They clucked questioningly at the female but jumped angrily away when she tried to embrace them.
The scene faded slowly.
Instead of resuming her chant or telling Sharina to begin the second portion of the incantation, the queen tapped her staff. From the mist congealed the interior of a spacious room.
Sharina and her captor hung in midair. The room had no windows but both end walls were open, looking out over a city where the eaves swept up like ships' prows. The moonlit roofs were made of palm fronds instead of the grass thatching common on houses in Barca's Hamlet.
Fixed to the walls were long, saw-toothed swords and shields with gold blazons worked into snarling beast heads. Twenty feet above the floor a small windmill bracketed to the central beam turned in the breeze through the long room. On each vane was writing that Sharina recognized as the script local to Sirimat, though she couldn't translate or even pronounce the words.
In a miniature hammock draped with purple silk hung an infant. A nurse, the room's only other occupant, sat cross-legged beside the hammock, swinging it gently by a short cord gripped in the toes of her left foot. She hummed a repetitive tune, pausing frequently to take another bite of leaf-wrapped nut or to spit red juice into the street below.
She turned toward the opening, her lips pursed. The air between her and the sleeping city coalesced like ice forming on the surface of a pond. A demon with a bundle in its arms hunched forward.
The nurse cried out, dropping the remainder of her narcotic. She jumped up. The hammock flailed, rousing shrieks from the baby.
The demon extended its right leg the way a scorpion probes with its pincers. Its hooked hind toe opposed the other three like the talons of a bird. The foot closed over the nurse and squeezed shut. Her scream ended in a startled hiccup of sound as the claws cut her in half at the midriff.
The demon stepped to the hammock with the delicacy of a spider approaching something trapped in its web. It lifted out the infant with one clawed hand, carefully shaking the swaddling clothes from the tiny form. The rich fabrics were soaked with the nurse's blood.
The demon set the child-thing it had brought into the hammock. The human infant in its other hand continued to squeal. The demon's mouth opened. It thrust the infant into its great gape, then closed the jagged teeth around it. The cries stopped.
Men carrying bamboo bows and swords like the ones on the walls ran into the room from the balconies along both sides. The demon grinned at them, then dissolved as it had in the forest of Bight. Sword strokes and black-tipped arrows slashed the air where the creature had been.
The tiny changeling's face was first a demon's, then that of a Hairy Man. When terrified guards bent over the hammock, though, and a man dressed in the feathers of exotic birds rushed in with his aides to see what had happened, the face that looked up at them was that of a perfectly formed human child.
The baby cried for a moment more, then smiled at the men who thought they had rescued her. She was very beautiful.
“My father,” the queen said. “The demon Xochial.” She tapped her staff. The scene melted into shadows and swirling mist. “Now, girl,” she said, fixing Sharina with her. cold eyes. “It's your turn.”
Tenoctris finished chanting. She wavered sideways but caught herself before Cashel could. The corkscrew of blue light at the center of the small circle she'd scribed here deep in the cellars of the queen's palace shrank to a point. It vanished, leaving only a memory behind.
“ 'Is the sun proud or the moon?' “ Zahag muttered. “ 'Even a poor man's hut is better than living among the ragged clouds.' ”
Cashel's lips tightened. Tenoctris had said the ape was quoting poetry he'd heard in Pandah. It wasn't much for poetry, Cashel thought; and it kept reminding him that the ape was on the edge of breaking down completely. Cashel didn't blame Zahag for being afraid, but he wished the ape had stayed back with Garric if he was going to mumble nonsense.
“Do we move again?” Cashel asked, mostly to make sure that Tenoctris was really awake. She leaned on her outstretched hands, gasping quick, shallow breaths.
“ 'Rise early, work hard, and think often of your soul...' ” Zahag said. Cashel's jaw clenched again.
“No, no,” the old wizard said. Her smile warmed and brightened both Cashel's mood and the black walls of the cellars. “We're in the right place, and I think I've even found the key. I apologize for wasting so much of my time and yours, though.”
“Huh!” Cashel said. “I don't have a better place to be than with you, mistress. And I'm not one myself to rush around doing things fast instead of doing them right!”
He cleared his throat. “What is it you need me to do?” he asked. His duties thus far through the night and morning had been a lot like herding sheep: keeping an eye out while his charges went about their business slowly.
Cashel didn't know what he should be looking out for, but he knew there was something close by. His skin prickled, and the unseen eyes watching were hostile beyond reason; hostile to all life, not just to Cashel or-Kenset and his companions.
“ 'If you can snatch a jewel from the seawolf's teeth,' ” Zahag said. “ 'If you can swim the Outer Sea in a tempest—' ”
Cashel reached out. The ape cringed, expecting a blow. Cashel rubbed the beast's scalp instead. “It's all right to be scared, Zahag,” he said. “But Tenoctris knows what she's doing.”
The old wizard grinned. She was so worn that Cashel marveled that the lamplight didn't stream through her like a patch of fog.
“I think I do, yes,” she said. “It remains to be seen whether I have the strength to do it, but—”
Her smile broadened. “I have to, don't I?”
Cashel smiled back at her. He liked people who didn't quit. Tenoctris, well; Tenoctris wouldn't quit till she was dead.
Tenoctris took a deep breath and settled herself straighten “There's a path that leads to the queen,” she said. “If the queen can be—dealt with, distracted even, she'll lose control over the Hairy Men. They'll no longer be a threat, even if they do reach Ornifal.”
Tenoctris' tone was calm though not nonchalant: she spoke as a master craftsman explaining an apprentice's duties in a fashion that he could understand. “I'll open the path and I hope to keep it open, but you'll have to walk it alone, Cashel.”
“Not alone!” Zahag shrieked. “Not alone! Not alone! I'll not be alone in this place!”
Cashel looked at Tenoctris. She nodded. “If Zahag wants to accompan
y you,” she said, “there's no reason he shouldn't. But I don't think he understands—”
“I understand that I'm not going to be alone!” the ape said. “Not in this hellpit, not anywhere on this island. Can't you feel it? Don't you know what's waiting out there?”
“Yes,” said Tenoctris quietly. “I do.”
Cashel shrugged. “I'd like to get on with it, then,” he said. He tried not to sound impatient, but when you knew a fight was coming it was the hardest thing in the world to wait for. He hefted his quarterstaff, giving it a final critical examination by lamplight.
“The caps are iron, aren't they?” Tenoctris said with a frown. “That may be useful, if you're strong enough.”
Cashel looked at her. “Guess we'll learn, won't we?” he said. His voice was a low growl. “Let's get on with it!”
“Yes,” the old wizard said. She took a fresh bamboo skewer from the bundle in her satchel and settled herself before the circle she'd drawn in the dust. “I will.”
“ 'You still can't change the mind of a born fool,' ” the ape quoted, squeezing tightly against Cashel's bare calf. He was shivering. Cashel rubbed his scalp again.
Poor little monkey... But he wasn't giving up either.
“Ochusoioio nuchie name, eaeaa...”Tenoctris said, touching her bamboo wand to a different character with every syllable. Her voice was as calm as a deep pond, but her face writhed with the effort of pronouncing the words of power. “Aritho skirbeu!”
The basalt walls dimmed. Cashel could still see them as shadows at the corners of his eyes, but a bright web of forces filled the vision of his mind. The pattern spread without boundaries. Lines of red and blue light met, sometimes joining but often filling the same apparent space without contact..
Tenoctris continued to chant. The pattern throbbed in unison with the words of power.
What Cashel saw was as beautiful and as terrible as the constellations of the night sky. He stood in awe, but even in his wonder he wished that Ilna could watch it also. What would she make of this pattern that was so far beyond her brother's grasp?
In front of Cashel was a tube of red light, one strand of the infinite web. At a distance the lines of power seemed as thin as spider silk,, but the opening here in the palace cellars was the size of the inlet to the ancient tide-powered mill owned now by Cashel's uncle. A man could walk upright into it—if he was a man.
Cashel stepped forward. His hair stood on end and blue fire crackled as his foot touched the insubstantial surface. He laughed deep in his throat and walked on. Zahag, gibbering in terror and refusing to look into the shrinking distance before them, scampered at his side.
From outside the tube had seemed to rise into the distance, but once within Cashel felt only the pressure of the light on him. It was like wading through deep water.
He grinned. He'd done that, carrying a flood-snatched ewe on his back besides.
Cashel couldn't see any end to the passage ahead of them. When curiosity drove him to glance over his shoulder, he couldn't make out Tenoctris stolidly chanting in the cellars either.
“We can't go back now,” Zahag muttered in resignation. “It's too late for that.”
“I just wondered what it looked like,” Cashel said. “I didn't want to go back.”
The ape wrinkled his long, solemn-looking face. “No, you wouldn't,” he said. “That's why you're the chief. And anyway, we have to go on or there won't be anything left.”
Cashel looked at him, but Zahag apparently had nothing to add as he ambled along on all four limbs, looking at the smooth floor of light. Occasionally his lips moved, but he was only mumbling another snatch of verse.
Cashel stretched his arms out to his sides, then bent them back to work other muscles as well. He wondered what they'd find at the end of the passage.
“I guess we'll know soon enough,” he repeated aloud. “Sooner than that, chief,” Zahag said, lucid again. “Much too soon for my taste.”
Ilna supposed you could say that there were more important things for her to be doing than cleaning the rooms the steward had assigned her, but nobody thus far had told her what those things were. She didn't intend to spend another night in a pigsty unless she heard a very good reason for it.
The royal palace was a sprawl of individual buildings, more all told as there were houses in Barca's Hamlet. The women's quarters were in the eastern corner of the compound, separated from the remainder by a wall faced with tiles glazed in a garden scene. For all practical purposes this section had been unoccupied in the years since the queen built her own mansion in the center of Valles.
It irritated Ilna that the steward automatically chose to put her, Liane, and she supposed Tenoctris here simply because of the words “the Women's Quarters.” She didn't suppose buildings elsewhere within the palace walls were in better condition than this one, though. The attendant who'd led Ilna to this three-room cottage was a member of Chancellor Royhas' personal household. She'd been drafted to help out because virtually all the royal servants had deserted Valence during the lowering threats of the past year.
Ilna swept briskly, sending the last of the dust and cobwebs out the cottage's open door. It was a good rye-straw broom, not a twig besom like those some folks in Barca's Hamlet used because they were sturdier and lasted longer. Not Ilna, of course.
She'd kept the broom and sent the servant girl on her way. Ilna had never found a servant who worked to Ilna os-Kenset's standards; and besides, she didn't like the feeling of someone else doing her work.
She gave the outer room, a combination of anteroom and reception area, a final inspection. She'd swept it, beaten dust out of the cushions, and removed the moth-tattered hangings from the walls.
It was a crime what people allowed to happen to skillful craftsmanship! One of the tapestries, an ancient hero setting out from the harbor of Valles, was work that Ilna would have been proud to have woven herself.
Well, it could be repaired. Ilna walked into the bedroom. Moths had been at the cover of the feather bed as well, but that didn't disturb Ilna particularly. The loose feathers would take some hunting down, but for sleeping she much preferred a mattress of woven straw or simply the bare wooden floor where she'd spent the past night.
There was a sound from outside. Ilna turned. Admiral Nitker and half a dozen other men entered through the open front door.
“Yes?” Ilna said, leaning her broom against the wall. A full-length mirror of silvered bronze stood between piers to the side of the door. In it she looked coldly furious.
That was true enough. Ilna didn't know what Nitker thought his business was, but in Barca's Hamlet you' didn't enter someone else's dwelling uninvited.
The admiral had changed clothes since Ilna saw him the night before. He no longer wore armor, but there was a sword of simple pattern in his scabbard. Five of the men with him were obvious sailors—tattooed, weather-beaten, and in two cases missing fingers. They also were armed.
That didn't concern Ilna. She wasn't afraid of the weapons or of anything else about the intruders.
The seventh man was a Dalopan: small, swarthy—darker even than Ilna’s own Haft complexion—and wearing sheaves of carefully splintered bones through his ear-lobes. If he'd been an insect, Ilna would have crushed him without a moment's thought.
She reached into the sleeve of her tunic and brought out several short cords. Her fingers began to knot them while her eyes glared at her visitors.
“Mistress Ilna,” Nitker said, bowing to her “Master Silyon—”
He gestured to the Dalopan. The five common sailors had spread out to either side of the doorway, though they weren't for the moment moving toward Ilna.
“—believes you can help us. He was King Valence's wizard until the current troubles transpired and the king turned against him. Silyon came to me because I understood how serious the danger was. Silyon's found the power which alone can defeat the queen. Material weapons are useless, useless.”
One of the sailors began to s
hiver. He nodded fiercely when the admiral repeated “useless.”
“That's nothing to me,” Ilna said in the tone she'd have used to a man propositioning her for sex. “Talk to Garric—Prince Garric, that is, to you. And if Valence turned against the dirt that's standing beside you leering, then he wasn't quite the despicable wretch I'd heard he'd become. I've seen wizards' games, and I have no desire to see more.”
Silyon cackled merrily. Ilna doubted that the fellow was sane, though she didn't suppose it mattered now. Her fingers wove the cords.
“You don't understand, mistress,” Nitker said. His tongue licked his dry lips. The admiral was if anything more frightened than he'd been when Ilna saw him arrive the night before, though at present he held a civilized veneer over the fear. “Prince Garric still thinks swords can—”
“I've never met a man that a sword couldn't kill,” Ilna said sharply. “Or a monkey either, I daresay. So long as there's a man wielding the sword, that is. Which may be why you failed so miserably.”
“Get her,” Nitker ordered in a grim voice. The sailors started forward. Ilna threw the knotted cords in the air before them.
The men screamed and fell back, trying to draw the swords they hadn't thought they needed. Ilna stepped to the wall peg where she'd hung her silken noose. She took it down, watching the scene with a bleak smile.
The cords fell to the floor. In the mirror Ilna saw what the men saw: an ammonite whose coiled shell filled the room. Its tentacles writhed about Nitker and his sailors, threatening to draw them into its gaping beak.
Silyon alone ignored the illusion. He edged into a corner to keep from being trampled by the screaming sailors. He was no more willing to close with Ilna herself than the men who'd accompanied him could face the monster they imagined.
“Turn around!” Silyon cried in a high-pitched voice. “Don't look at her!”
Liane walked in the front door. “Ilna?” she said. “Are you—”
“Run, Liane!” Ilna said. In the same shard of time Silyon shrieked, “Take that woman instead. Quickly! The Beast—”