City of Demons (14 page)

The slow, steady progress of the cart was a relief to Garet. After so many new experiences, painful, frightening, or merely confusing, finally he had a chance to digest it all. The cart soon left the cobbled lanes of the mining villages and now travelled on the great paved road that Dorict told him stretched from the Falls, past Shirath, to the great sea itself.

The road was a marvel to Garet. Used to hill paths and mud tracks, he had never imagined as great a construction as this. Three carts wide, it sloped from a slightly raised centre to gravel-filled drainage gutters at the edges. Every foot was paved with squared and smoothed stones, though it was rutted in some spots from centuries of use. The first Overking of Solantor had commanded each city to contribute to its construction. Every city of the South was either on it or only a ferry boat ride away from it. For six hundred years, the goods of the cities and the mines had passed from the falls to the ocean on this highway.

“Why not use another boat?” Garet asked Salick.

“There are some stretches of shallows and rapids that would stop us or turn us over,” she replied. “And there are rare cases of water demons this far up the river. Believe me, Garet, you do not want to try and fight a demon from a rocking boat!”

Dorict curled up and dozed against the luggage. Marick sat in the driver's box and honed his wits by pestering Salick. Mandarack sat stiffly across from Garet. The old man's eyes were closed, but Garet felt sure that he was not asleep. As the wheels turned, the harvest sun beat down on the cart's canvas, the grain-drying sun to the people of the Plains. But here there were no homesteads or farming villages. Save for swatches burned bare by lightning strike, the land nearest the road most resembled the prairie in its tall grass and late summer flowers. Farther back, groves of ancient apple trees endured the birch and aspen growing in their midst. Those ghostly orchards and the hedges that marched single-mindedly straight across the fields were the only clues that this land had once been farmed. Now the road cut through a wilderness that only half-remembered its civilized past. Wild rose and poplar trees grew in the ancient furrows. Behind it all, green mountains flanked the broad river valley.

Twisting to get the sun off his face, Garet opened his pack and, after gently moving Dorict's elbow, took out the Demonary. The cover was of blackened leather, tooled and pressed to form the symbols of the title. Although the edges were frayed and the spine shiny with bending, each page was complete and unstained as he fanned the pages. He held it reverently and promised himself to keep it just as well as its previous owner. He opened the book.

Laying the Demonary carefully open in his lap, Garet began to read. The symbols were not as graceful as his mother's or even his own, and the lines sometimes wandered from straight to slanted. With a twinge of disappointment, Garet realized that the book was probably the copy work of a young Bane, not the work of a true book maker. The illustrations were another matter, though. Each one had been drawn in a confident hand and with much detail. They were not on the paper of the book itself but had been pasted on the back of various pages throughout the Demonary. Each drawing showed a demon. The variety was bewildering. At least twelve different types were shown, maybe more, as some illustrations were collections of different parts of demon bodies and must have represented more than one demon.

As the sun cut across the heavens, Garet read through the book as a traveller in the desert takes a long drink from an oasis pool. A thirst for something greater than his own poor life had been building in him for years. In the kindness of his mother's eyes, in the brief protection given him by his eldest brother, and even in his sister, Allia's, careless courage, he had seen a nobility in the world that spoke against everything his father cultivated on that drab prison of a farm. And he wanted that nobility—to serve it, or if he was worthy, to live it. In teaching him to read, his mother had fed that hunger, and now he devoured each symbol and illustration. He heard no sound or voice and even Marick gave up trying to bother him. At last, as the shadows lengthened across the road, he closed the worn cover and looked up. Mandarack's eyes were upon him, grey and calm.

“I hope it was what you were seeking, Garet,” the Banemaster said.

Garet saw that everyone else's eyes were on him. Dorict's were as calm as his Master's. Marick's blue eyes were full of lively anticipation. And Salick's? To Garet's surprise, they seemed to show concern, as if she feared he might be disappointed. He took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts.

“It is, Master,” he replied, looking up to meet that calm regard. “I just don't know how to take it all in.” He felt as if he had eaten past full or taken in too much air at a single breath and now struggled to hold it.

“We have all felt some of that,” Mandarack said, leaning forward to emphasize his words. “In the Hall we call it our second birth—into a very strange life, I suppose. Most find it as difficult as their first birth.” He leaned back again. “But we all grow into it.” A short yelp told Garet that Salick had forestalled Marick's attempt to enter the conversation.

“You have come farther than most to this new life. We have never had a Bane from the North.”

“I was born on the Plains, Master,” Garet replied in a soft voice.

The grey eyes closed again. “Yes, Garet, but only for your first life.”

His voice had the hush of evening in it, and Salick soon found a beaten down patch of earth beside the road to stop at for the night. The ground was a maze of ruts and well-used fire pits. Wood had been stacked near the central pit, and the young Banes quickly set up camp. As true night fell, they ate well of the supplies Boronict had placed in the cart and then laid their blankets down beside the dying fire. Dorict had dragged Marick off to help with the washing of pots. Mandarack, as was his habit, had walked beyond the circle of light and was looking up at the stars, his good arm clasping the withered one behind his back.

Garet took this opportunity to ask Salick some questions he would have been embarrassed to ask Mandarack.

“Salick?”

She looked up from the fire to regard him, the light chasing shadows across her face.

He swallowed and pressed on. “Salick, there seems to be something wrong with the Demonary.” He paused, waiting for an explosion of passionate defense, but the Bane only raised her left eyebrow.

“Some of the symbols were strange, though my mother swore she had taught them all to me.” Salick nodded at him, and he continued. “And the drawings do not match the text.” His frustration boiled up and into words. “There is no order to it! Moret starts talking about a “Glider Demon” and drops it in mid-sentence to describe a Basher, while the drawing is of something called a “Squeezer,” which is never described in the book!” He thumped the ground with his fist, raising a little cloud of angry dust. “It's like sitting in the tavern at Three Roads and listening to six conversations at once. You can't make sense of it.” He looked warily at Salick, but to his surprise, she was smiling.

“I believe you, Garet. That book was probably the copy work of a Blue or Green and was made from a copy by another Blue or Green. And so on, back a hundred years! Each student's mistakes were lovingly preserved, or added to!” She stretched out on her blanket and said sleepily, “Honestly, I think a Bane learns nothing until they become a Green and apprentice to a Master. Master Mandarack has taught me more in one year than I learned in six years from those musty books!”

“But they should be useful!” Garet protested. “What is written in a book should be true!” He had no other way of expressing his deep sense of betrayal, something that he had not dared express to Mandarack. “Don't you see, Salick? Writing is rare. It takes so long to learn it, and so few people ever do. Whatever is written must be...beautiful!” He blushed at his own passion, and Salick shook her head.

“Garet, there is no use getting upset. I sympathize! I cursed the Demonary myself when I was a Black, but you will have to puzzle it out for yourself the way we all did.” She rolled over, her back a definite sign that the conversation was over.

Garet could not resist one more comment. “Well, at least this copy should be fixed. It's a disgrace!”

“A good idea.” Mandarack had come back unnoticed to the fire while Garet had been complaining to Salick. “You should practice your writing as well as your reading. Salick has some writing materials. You may start tomorrow.” The dry voice had no hint of irony.

A clanging of pots signalled the return of Dorict and Marick. The smaller Bane laughed. “Never complain yourself into more work, Garet!” He set the pots by the fire and climbed into his blanket, but stopped his movements, openmouthed at Garet's reply to Mandarack: “Thank you, Master. I look forward to beginning.” Marick sadly shook his head and, looking over at his fellow Blue, said, “He'll never make it in the Hall, Dorict. The first rule is to never volunteer for extra work!” Dorict shook his head as well, although it was perhaps as much at Marick as at Garet.

The next morning Garet sat cross-legged on the floor of the cart, using his seat as a writing table. The Demonary was open on the bench and an ink pot held down a sheaf of papers. With a short brush, of a size to fit in a traveller's writing case, Garet carefully soaked it in the ink according to Salick's instructions. His first attempts at writing symbols were marred by the way the brush fanned out and smudged the word if he used too much pressure. This had not been a problem for him before. No matter how hard you pressed with a wet finger, it still made a finger-shaped mark, not a black blot the size of his knuckle.

When his practice characters finally became readable, he inked in the title of the book on the top of the first page. Then he paused. For all his complaints, he was unsure about how to fix the book. A thought scratched at him like a claw: maybe he was unworthy to fix it. Maybe the problem was in him and not in the Demonary. Why should he think that he knew better than the Banehalls? But he pushed that thought down deep and remembered that Salick had agreed with him, and Mandarack had approved of his plan. It was shoddy work, and that had never been tolerated on the farm, even by his mother. Garet remembered her gentle scoldings, “Now Garet, if you write in such a sloppy hand, no one will think you educated, and they will blame your teacher, and that's me!” Nothing, not even his father's beatings, could have made him work harder to perfect his writing skills. At least in that, he could improve this book. The title page he had written was already an improvement over the blocky, childlike writing of the unknown copyist.

But what about the mangled information? If he just copied it again, albeit in a better hand, his main complaint would go unanswered. Mandarack's order had made it clear; it was his own business and no one else's. If he wanted it fixed, he had to figure out a way of fixing it himself. He sighed and wished the Demonary were like one of the ballads he had learned as a child. They told a story that made sense. The hero, his companions, the dragon they were to kill, each was introduced in verse after verse of poetic description. By the end of the song, you could see it all so clearly in your head. There was a definite beginning, middle, and end. To hear one of those songs was to live it like a second life!

He paused, the brush still in his hand, poised above the ink bottle. Well, why not like a song? Each demon could be like a dragon in a ballad, given its description and strengths and evil deeds all in one place, not scattered throughout the book. He could make a page for each one, and try to copy the illustrations on the back, each picture with its rightful description.

He dipped the brush and wiped the excess ink off the tip as Salick had shown him. At the top of a blank page, he wrote “Basher.” Picking up the Demonary, he leafed through the pages for the six different references to this particular demon he had seen. At each page, he wrote down the information on his copy, being careful not to repeat the original's mistakes in writing and grammar. He did not try to give his own descriptions the chanting rhythm of a heroic ballad, but instead tried to write as if he were explaining the creature to someone else. He asked Dorict and sometimes Salick about words he could not read, and once had to nervously ask Mandarack about a confused reference to poison in a passage about a “Crawler Demon.” Before he knew it, the morning had passed, and they were stopping to take their lunch.

The road had wandered closer to the river here. Dorict and Garet beat a path through the tall grass and filled buckets for the horses and bottles for themselves. The water ran fast, and they could hear the hiss and clatter of a set of rapids downstream.

Returning to the cart, they sat with their backs against the stones of a long-tumbled wall and ate leisurely. Garet's mind was still dizzy with the countless facts about demons he had been hunting out of the book, so to distract himself, he asked Salick about a minor matter that had been puzzling him since they left the falls.

“Salick, why are there no cities in this valley? It looks like many people lived here once, and the soil is good.” He picked up a handful of the dark earth and compressed it into a loose ball. The shape held until he dropped it back onto the ground: a sure sign that it would grow a good crop.

Salick paused before answering. “We don't learn anything about this part of the valley in the Halls, Garet.” She looked over at Mandarack. “Master, did many people live here before the demons came?”

The old man nodded. “Six hundred years ago, the upper valley was as rich and populous as the Midlands. The farms in this area looked to the Lords of a large town we will stop near tonight.” He answered Salick's look of surprise. “There is, of course, no town there now. Only the Temple remains, and the town's name, Terrich. The rest of the town, all the buildings and walls, went to make part of the road we travel on.” Garet looked at the grey, square blocks surfacing the road and tried to imagine them upright, in a high wall.