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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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He saw Ilna in the doorway. “Sister take that useless kid!” he snarled. He pulled a cudgel from beneath his broad leather belt and started for her.
Ilna tugged the cord on the doorjamb, releasing the net of fine silk she'd fastened to the ceiling. It drifted over the thieves like mist on a meadow. llna stepped back.
“Sister bite your heart out!” cried the man as he swung his cudgel. The weapon tangled in the meshes, drawing other parts of the net closer about his head and shoulders. A sword would have done much the same: only the very keenest of blades could have cut the elastic fabric instead of being cocooned by it.
The men struggled like locusts caught in a spider's web. After a few moments, both of them fell over. llna reached in carefully and drew out the cudgel which the owner had dropped when he tried to pull the net apart with both hands. He might as profitably have attempted to lift the building. Indeed, he was more likely to pick up this shoddy structure than he was to tear a net llna had woven … .
“You came for my property,” Ilna said, looking down on her captives in cold amusement. “And you're going to leave with some of it: the net. I want you to crawl to the window together and jump out.”
“You stupid bitch!” snarled one of the men. “You'd better let us go or—”
Ilna rapped him on the forehead with his own cudgel. The seasoned oak
toonked
like a maul driving a wedge.
The man's eyes rolled up in their sockets. His body went as limp as an empty sack.
The blow had opened a pressure cut in the man's forehead. Ilna glanced with distaste at the blood on the cudgel, then said to the remaining thief, “All right, you'll carry your friend to the window and jump out with him. If you're skillful, you may be able to cushion your own fall. Understood?”
“Shepherd guard me!” the man whispered with his eyes shut. “Shepherd guard me!”
He maneuvered carefully onto his knees and managed to lift his companion. llna judiciously plucked individual meshes away from where they were tangled, choosing each time the point that would have held the thief as he shuffled to the window.
He balanced his companion on the narrow ledge and looked back. “Up and over,” Ilna said pleasantly.
It was the expression on her face rather than the waggling cudgel which broke the would-be thief. He lurched forward and disappeared with a despairing cry. llna tossed the cudgel after him.
She walked to the doorway, straightening items disarranged by the thieves or their capture. If she'd given them a few minutes more, they'd probably have managed to break the frame of the big loom. Well, it could have been repaired.
Several of the doors on the hallway were open. Heads ducked back when Ilna stepped out, but one frumpish woman continued working at the knots which held the lookout.
“Get away before you manage to strangle him,” Ilna snapped. The boy's face was close to purple now.
The woman looked up. “You can't do this to Maidus!” she said. “He's my nephew!”
“Get back into your filthy sty or I'll do a great deal worse to
you
,” Ilna said with a smile as cold as a winter gale.
The woman flinched. She didn't move when Ilna lifted
the boy to her shoulder like a sack of grain and carried him, head hanging down behind her to lessen the noose's tension, to her own room.
Ilna loosed the knots as swiftly as she'd tied them, then slipped the noose and coiled the rope in readiness for any further use. The boy, Maidus, lay sobbing on her floor, massaging his throat with his right hand.
A slotted wooden box in the other room kept flies from Ilna's food. She took out the flask of cheap wine she used for sauces and the bone-hilted knife she used for household tasks. With them she returned to the boy.
Maidus squealed in terror as Ilna put a swatch of coarse fabric under his left elbow for a pad. “This is going to hurt,” she said as she cut away the foul bandage. She flipped it out the window on the knife point. “Hold still or it'll hurt more.”
“What're you—,” the boy said. Ilna gripped his arm above and below the elbow, then squeezed the boil empty with the even pressure of both thumbs.
Maidus gaped at her. He didn't scream though, rather to her surprise. She mopped the skin around the boil with a clean corner of the pad. The mass of congealed pus had left a flat-bottomed pit as wide as a fingernail and deep in the boy's flesh.
“This will hurt too,” Ilna said. She dribbled acid wine into the wound. Maidus began to whimper. He patted at his tears with his free hand.
Working methodically, Ilna packed the boil with a roll of thin fabric. She left a tag hanging out, then bandaged the work with a ribbon she'd woven in a pattern that would speed healing. She had to search for it; the thieves had jumbled her belongings in a fashion that would take her an hour to reorganize.
Ilna stepped away. “You can get up now, Maidus,” she said. “Go home, I suppose. Come back in three days and I'll jerk the tape out.”
She smiled at the look in the boy's eyes. “Yes, that'll hurt too,” she said. “But it'll keep the boil from returning.
This is one of those times when the hard way is really best.”
Maidus stood up cautiously. There were voices in the hallway, neighbors speaking to one another in frightened whispers. “We didn't know you were a wizard, mistress,” he said to Ilna.
“You don't know it now!” she replied. “But I hope your friends and all
their
friends realize Ilna os-Kenset isn't to be trifled with.”
She sniffed. “And I suggest in the future you keep away from those two louts,” she added. “Their incompetence should bother you even if their dishonesty doesn't.”
Maidus nodded. He glanced toward the door. “I can … ?” he said.
“Yes, you can go,” Ilna snapped. “But I could use someone to run errands occasionally. If you'd care to do that, come see me in the morning.”
“Yes, mistress!” the boy said as he sprinted into the hallway.
“It won't pay very much!” Ilna called after him.
She picked up her door panel, considering the best way to hang it for the time being until she could get a carpenter to replace the hinges.
Not the whole world, and not all at once; but she was making changes.
T
he moon should've been in its third quarter, not full as Cashel saw it above him when he opened his eyes. It shouldn't have been night anyway, though from the way Cashel felt he was willing to believe he'd been unconscious for a dozen hours.
He got carefully to his feet. Toads shrilled merrily. He grinned. They couldn't carry a tune any better than he could: toads, seagulls, and Cashel or-Kenset. Toads were a familiar sound, and in the near distance he heard the rattling grunt of a pig frog just like the ones in the marshes south of Barca's Hamlet.
Cashel looked at the night sky. The stars weren't quite right either. It was still spring—a thousand things told him that, from insect sounds to the feel of the wind—but the Tongs were already above the southern horizon.
If Cashel'd had his quarterstaff, he'd have rubbed the hickory just for the feel of it. He didn't, and he didn't guess it really mattered.
Something moved nearby among the low trees. Cashel turned to face the sound, hunching forward slightly. His arms were spread. “Whoever's there better greet me like a man, or I'll think I've got vermin to deal with,” he rumbled.
“I was checking you were all right,” Zahag's guttural voice claimed. “You've come around, then?”
“Come out where I can see you,” Cashel ordered, relaxing somewhat as he straightened. He didn't have much reason to like the talking ape, but Zahag wasn't anything for Cashel to fear. He'd be a familiar face, though an ugly one.
“She nearly tore my arms and legs off, whirling us here,” Zahag complained as he sidled into full view. He was on all fours and obviously ready to bolt for the trees if Cashel wanted to renew the fight.
“You don't have to worry,” Cashel said with a degree of scorn. “It wasn't me started things in the first place. But my oath on the Shepherd, ape: you throw one of your hissies again and I
won't
half hurt you.”
“You don't need to show your teeth,” Zahag said gloomily. “I'd been around humans too long and I forgot how to behave with real people.”
He scratched himself in the middle of the back. Cashel
blinked; it wasn't just the length of Zahag's arms but also the extra range of motion in the joints that made the maneuver possible.
“I wish I were back on Sirimat,” the ape said. “I wish I were back the way I was before Halphemos made me talk.”
Cashel worked his shoulders to loosen them. He felt as though all his limbs had been stretched. “Do you know where we are?” he asked quietly.
“Oh, this is still Pandah,” Zahag said, squatting at Cashel's feet. “The shoreline's the same and the crayfish taste the same. The city's moved to the other side of the harbor, though, and the stars aren't right.”
He put his long, unexpectedly soft hand on the inside of Cashel's knee. In a human, it would have been a gesture of pleading. Very likely it was the same in an ape. “I didn't want to let the people here see me till you'd come around,” Zahag said. “See, I've brought you food already.”
He swept up the handful of fruit and crayfish which had been left on a flat rock nearby. Cashel hadn't paid them any attention when he surveyed his surroundings. The crustaceans still twitched their tails, but they couldn't escape because the ape had plucked their legs off.
“Please,” Zahag said. “Can I join your band?”
“It's a pretty small band,” Cashel said. He wondered how he was going to find Sharina. He didn't doubt he would, he just wasn't sure how. “Sure, I'd be glad of your company. If you behave yourself.”
The ape made a hollow
hoop! hoop!
deep in his throat. He pointed toward the opposite jaw of the land, outlined by the moonlit froth of waves. “That's where the city is now,” he said.
“We'll wait till morning,” Cashel said. “It's not polite to call on people at this time of night.”
He thought back to one of the first things Zahag had said. “What did you mean about her ‘whirling us here'?”
he asked. “Do you know how this happened to us?”
“Oh, that was Silya,” Zahag said. He twisted a sapling until the fibers tore between his hands with a loud crackle. Cashel could have done the same, but it was a reminder of how strong the ape was. “She's the wizard from Dalopo who's been hanging around the palace the past ten days.”
He broke another sapling. He was weaving them into a sleeping nest, since Cashel had said they'd be spending the night here.
“I figured she was after Halphemos' job,” the ape continued. “He didn't even know she was a wizard.”
“Why didn't you tell him?” Cashel said. His voice had a slight rumble that suggested thunder over the horizon. In Barca's Hamlet, people looked out for their neighbors.
Zahag stopped what he was doing and looked up at the human. He said, “Halphemos made me what I am, chief. I'd have torn his throat out if I dared.”
“Oh,” Cashel said. He thought about how it felt when you didn't fit in anywhere. He'd been that way when Sharina left the borough and took all his unspoken hopes with her. “Well, that's between you and him, I guess.”
Zahag went back to weaving saplings, using his feet as well as his hands for the task. “I guess Silya figured she'd get rid of you first because you're a wizard too,” he said.
“I'm not …” Cashel muttered, but he couldn't put any strength in the denial. He didn't know what the truth was anymore. Truth wasn't as simple as it had seemed when he tended sheep in Barca's Hamlet.
“And I guess King Folquin'll blame all the trouble on Halphemos,” Zahag continued, “so Silya may get rid of you both.”
He gave a soft, hooting laugh. “Folquin's going to be angry enough to chew rocks, you know,” the ape concluded.
 
 
“Folquin was wrong to arrest Halphemos,” Cerix muttered angrily to Sharina. He paused to suck in more vapor from the pellet of black gum he was heating in a closed pot. “If the boy said he didn't do it, he didn't. Maybe there's more powerful wizards than Halphemos around, though by the Lady,
I
never met them. But Halphemos never put a foot wrong and got some effect that he wasn't expecting. Not once.”
Cerix was a middle-aged man with a fringe of dark hair around a spreading bald spot. He had a paunch, but his powerful arms and shoulders would have been the envy of any hardworking farmer in Barca's Hamlet.
Cerix sat on a rolling chair with larger wheels in back than front so that he could grip them by the rims and propel himself when there was no one to push him. His legs had been cut off at mid-thigh; the drug he smoked might dull but could not eliminate the constant pain.
“I'm the one who made the mistake,” Cerix said bitterly. He gestured toward where his knees should have been. “The boy never would have done this.”
Cerix and Halphemos lived in a courtyard house with rooms on three sides and a wall across the other—much like the palace in miniature. Sharina would have expected the court wizard to live in the palace rather than nearby, but she'd realized immediately that Cerix was poisonously ashamed of being crippled.
He'd opened the door himself when she found the place, well after midnight. There weren't any servants, though a dwelling this size might have had several.
“Wizards who had very little power in past years are able to do great things now,” Sharina said. “Could Halphemos have miscalculated?”
Cerix looked at her sharply. “You don't know anything about the art yourself, do you?” he said.
“No,” said Sharina, meeting his glare with a steady gaze. She'd come to Cerix with the news—and to ask for help—as soon as she could after Folquin ended the uproar
in his courtyard by having Halphemos imprisoned as the culprit. “But I have friends who do.”
“You're right about the way things have changed recently,” Cerix said. “You weren't listening to what I said about the boy, though. He had an instinct. Half a dozen times I taught him an incantation but he wouldn't use it, said it wasn't right. What did this hick kid know, I thought? So one day when I'd had most of a bottle of wine, I showed him.”
The crippled man laughed, but the sound trailed off into a cackle of madness. He lifted the nosepiece of his inhaler and breathed deeply again.
The narcotic smoke scraped the back of Sharina's throat. She walked to the water jar and dipped herself a drink with one of the cups hanging from the rim. The attractively shaped jar was of low-fired clay. Water sweating through the porous container kept the remaining contents noticeably cooler than the air.
“How did you meet Halphemos?” she asked.
“I was the Great Cerix, whose key unlocks the wonders of the cosmos,” Cerix said, lowering his inhaler. “I was giving a show on Sandrakkan. No place you've ever heard of, just a cluster of houses in the back of beyond.”
Much the way Cerix would've described Barca's Hamlet
, Sharina thought. She didn't speak aloud.
“A boy came up to me after the show,” Cerix continued. “Alos or-Noman—Alos nobody's son. He said he wanted to join me, to learn wizardry from me.”
He snorted. “I already had a boy to work the crowds for me—my sister's son, and a worthless little scut he was. But I didn't need a second brat. I told Alos that.”
Cerix rolled his chair to the water jar. Sharina leaned forward to offer help but caught herself before she spoke. Even so, the cripple glared at her as he dipped his own water. He drank.
“One of the images I'd done during the show was the royal palace in Valles,” Cerix said, shaking his head in marvel at the memory. “I'd got a bit of tile broken off
the palace roof in a windstorm. From that I made the whole building appear. I was proud of that effect. Each time I did it was like pulling a plow through hard ground.”
Sharina nodded. In the borough, folk with plow oxen helped neighbors without; it's the way people were. But she understood the image very well, the wife on the plow handles as the husband pulled it; or worse, the little child guiding the sharpened stake that the widowed mother tried to drag forward.
“So this
boy
does the effect in front of me, parroting the words he heard me use during the show,” Cerix said. “There's the palace, hanging in the air, only when he does it you can see people walking in the courtyard and he's not raised a sweat. Alos the Bastard, twelve years old, taught himself to read but not the Old Script, of course. And he's a hundred times the wizard I ever thought of being. Funny, isn't it?”
Cerix started to cry. He mopped at his eyes with his free hand, then flung the mug against the well curb in the courtyard where it shattered.
“I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't,” Cerix said. “He'd dragged himself up from even less than I'd had, and all he wanted was me to teach him to use his talent. I just wish the Lady'd given me sense enough to listen to him instead of trying to prove I was just as great a wizard as he was—when I knew I wasn't, not even close!”
Sharina turned away. She cleared her throat and said, “Halphemos thought that you could help me and Cashel find our friends who disappeared with the ship we all were on. Can you help me find Cashel first?”
Cerix had a napkin on his lap. He blew his nose fiercely on it, then rolled his chair out into the courtyard. He threw the wadded cloth accurately into a hamper by the open doorway of the adjacent room.
“Halphemos knew I couldn't work the spell myself,” Cerix said in a tired voice as he returned with swift, powerful thrusts of his arms to where Sharina stood. He
dipped water with another cup. “He said he'd find your friends when I taught him the incantation, didn't he? He still can't read the Old Script.”
Sharina thought back to the young wizard's actual words in the moments before the royal court turned into a melee. “I guess that's what he must have meant,” she said. “But you're a wizard too, aren't you?”
“Not anymore,” Cerix said in a bleak voice. His inhaler was on the floor beside the charcoal brazier on which he heated it. He spun his wheeled chair back to it. “You won't understand, I suppose. The words of an incantation resist you. The greater the effect, the greater the resistance. That's why everybody isn't a wizard.”
Cerix unscrewed the top of the inhaler and set it aside. The device was of fine porcelain decorated in green slip with a serpent coiling about the pot to swallow its own tail. Cerix turned up the container and scraped the crusted remnants of the pellet onto the floor with a wooden spatula.
“But you are a wizard,” Sharina said evenly. She needed Cerix's help, and his drug-sodden weakness disgusted her. She touched the hilt of the Pewle knife. Nonnus had known nothing about wizardry except to avoid it, but Sharina would have given anything for the hermit's calm presence beside her now.

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