Queen of Demons (12 page)

Read Queen of Demons Online

Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
7.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“I
was
a wizard,” Cerix said sharply. He reached for the little box holding his pellets of black gum, then set it down and met Sharina's eyes again.
“I studied the art,” he said fiercely. “I copied incantations from the works of ancient scholars, wizards of the Old Kingdom and before. I had everything I needed to be a great wizard—except the power to use my knowledge. Still, I was gaining power because the forces around me waxed.”
He smiled in cold recollection. “Just as your friends told you. I knew Halphemos had the power I lacked, but I didn't understand that he had judgment I lacked as well. Good judgment mattered more than power.”
Cerix shrugged his muscular shoulders. “I'd found an incantation that would open a window on another plane,” he said. “Halphemos refused to speak it. This was two years ago, when we were giving performances in Erdin and I dreamed of becoming court wizard to the Earl of Sandrakkan. While Halphemos was gone from our lodgings, I worked the spell myself.”
Tears began to drip from Cerix's eyes. Voice trembling, he continued, “It wasn't a window, it was a door. I started to slip through. Weakness was all that saved me—I couldn't finish the incantation, so the door closed before I was wholly inside.”
Cerix picked up the box of narcotics. His hands were trembling so badly that he couldn't slide the top open. Sharina took it from him, opened it, and placed a gum pellet carefully in the center of the ceramic pot.
“My legs are still on the other plane,” Cerix said more calmly. He screwed the top back on the inhaler and set the device on the brazier to heat. “Demons tear them. Every moment of every day, demons are ripping at my legs. And when I try to speak an incantation now, the words stick in my throat.”
“I see,” Sharina said. “I'm very sorry.”
There'd been folk in the borough who'd lost fingers or whole limbs. Some of them complained of pain in the missing part for the rest of their lives. It had nothing to do with demons, but it was as real to the victims as any other pain.
Sharina frowned. She'd never
thought
that demons had anything to do with old Jael complaining about the foot she'd lost as a girl when a wagon rolled over her. Sharina had assumed Cerix had to be wrong when he told her something she hadn't known before. That was as foolish as accepting any “new fact” uncritically as the truth.
Cerix breathed vapor and set his inhaler down with a calm expression. “Halphemos brought me to Pandah,” he said. “I taught him how to make a monkey talk like a man, and that caught the king's eye.”
He shrugged. “King Folquin's been a good master until now. We have money saved, enough to buy passage to another island. For you as well.”
The crippled wizard smiled at Sharina. “Get Halphemos out of prison,” he went on. “It's just a cage for drunken sailors. Pandah is an easygoing place.”
He lifted the inhaler again. “Free my boy,” he said, “and between us we'll do whatever we can to find all of your friends.”
“All right.” Sharina said. “I'll be back when I've made plans.”
She walked to the outside door, fingering the hilt of the Pewle knife. Behind her, Cerix sighed as he drew in another breath of anodyne.
 
 
“I never trusted wizards,” King Carus said, watching with Garric as Tenoctris spoke an incantation in the glade beneath them. “I was afraid of them, though I'd never have admitted it.”
Smoke from the punk of a soft-bodied tree mounted toward the sky's sunless illumination. Tenoctris had drawn a circle of words around the tiny fireset. The smoke staggered at each stroke of the twig the old wizard used as a wand.
“Most wizards didn't know what they were doing, and now they had more power than they'd ever dreamed of,” Carus went on. “They were like so many blind men running around swinging meat cleavers.”
Tenoctris, Liane, and Garric's physical body sat on a knoll some distance beyond where they'd met the Ersa the previous day. The trees ringing them were tall and branched in jointed sections instead of twisted curves like most of the native vegetation.
Carus shook his head in frustration at mistakes he'd made a millennium before Garric was born; the circlet of gold binding his thick, black hair winked. “I should've gotten a wizard to advise me on things I didn't understand,”
he said, “not just ignored them. Ignoring wizardry let a wizard sink me and my fleet in the sea—and sink the kingdom, too. For a thousand years.”
The knoll was only ten or a dozen feet higher than the surrounding terrain, but even that eminence was unusual here in the Gulf. In the field below, a party of Ersa nicked the trunks of saplings with sharp-edged shells and harvested the inner bark with wooden spatulas.
“The wizards I've seen …” Garric said. His dream self smiled at the life he'd led since leaving Barca's Hamlet. In the glade below, Garric's body sat with the sword across its knees; his eyes blinked, and his chest slowly rose and fell.
“The wizards I've seen,” he said, “would mostly have done you more harm than good. They strain to move things they don't really see, and they have a thousand times the
power
to move things than they did a few years ago. It was the same in your age, because the forces were peaking then too.”
The smoke from Tenoctris' fire crooked in the air as though a breeze had caught it. The Gulf was windless, and the smoke itself was a white unstained by the greenish sky.
“Tenoctris was around in my time,” Carus said, nodding toward her. “I didn't find her, lad; but you did.”
“She found me,” Garric protested. “She washed up on the shore of Barca's Hamlet. All I did was carry her up to the inn.”
“You found her, lad,” the king said with a broad, satisfied smile. “You found her, and you found me; and by the Lady! We're not going to let the kingdom fall again.”
Carus and the balcony on which he stood shimmered as though they were smoke, swelling and losing definition. They vanished into the ring of jointed trees.
Garric blinked, shocked at the sudden
heaviness
of his flesh. He clutched the medallion of King Carus with his left hand, then rose to his feet in a graceful motion. The
Ersa continued their labors, but their ears fluttered and their eyes tracked the humans.
Liane touched Garric's hand, glad that he'd mentally rejoined. She'd become familiar with his reveries. She didn't break into them and she'd never asked him what was going on.
Garric knew he ought to tell Liane what was happening, but he wasn't sure how to explain. He
knew
Carus was a real person rather than just a buried facet of his own mind—but he couldn't prove that, and it embarrassed him to claim that he spoke to somebody who'd drowned a thousand years ago.
Tenoctris smiled wearily. Garric and Liane together helped the old woman rise. She felt shockingly frail, her frame as delicate as a bird's.
“I've found the core around which this place formed,” Tenoctris said. “I was a little afraid that the wizard who created the Gulf would have destroyed his source of power when he was finished.”
Tenoctris continued to hold on to her companions, perhaps for the warmth as much as the support. Her hand in Garric's was cold. Wizardry must be as draining as digging a ditch—or fighting a battle.
“If he had,” Tenoctris continued, smiling now with the self-deprecating humor that was so much a part of her character, “then there wouldn't have been any way out. I didn't mention that before. As it is, I can reopen the Gulf by speaking an incantation over the object.”
“It's in the direction the smoke indicated?” Liane said. She nodded rather than pointing, a gesture the Ersa working in that direction might have misunderstood. A dozen more of the creatures, all males, had drifted out of the forest. They stood with weapons in their hands, silently watching the humans.
“That's right,” Tenoctris said. “So we'll need Ersa permission to proceed.”
Unless we wait for Rodoard to massacre all the Ersa,
Garric thought. The thought made his lip curl in disgust.
“Then let's go ask now,” Garric said. “Unless … ?”
“Now is fine with me,” Tenoctris said. She straightened, her voice growing stronger with each syllable. Her wry grin flickered. “Though I'll need some rest before I carry out the incantation. The only reason someone of my slight power can even think of opening the passage is that the forces involved are in balance instead of being at rest.”
“Like pulling a keystone from an arch instead of trying to lift the whole building,” Garric said in understanding. “Well, let's go see if the Ersa will let us close to the arch, shall we?”
Garric began to whistle a love song as he led his companions toward the waiting Ersa. “Her hair was like the thundercloud, before the rains come down … .”
The sheep had liked the tune when he played it to them on his pipes in Barca's Hamlet. It reminded him of when he was a boy and life—looking back on it—was so simple.
The tall Ersa who'd spoken the previous day now led the group of armed males who'd joined the field workers. Garric walked toward him.
Tenoctris was on Garric's right. He put his sword arm around her shoulders, making explicit the fact that his weapon wasn't a threat to the Ersa. He wasn't going to leave the sword behind on the knoll where it might entice the Ersa or a human spy.
“I'm Garric or-Reise,” he said to the tall Ersa. “Will you tell me your name, sir?”
The humanoids' ears fluttered like clothes hanging to dry in the wind. “You may call me Graz,” the leader said. He lowered his spear so that the slender point aligned with Garric's chest. “Why do you come here? You must go!”
“We want to leave the Gulf,” Tenoctris said. She touched Garric's hand on her shoulder. “We want to go home. To do that, I need to see and use an object that's within your territory.”
She lifted her chin, a quick gesture in the direction the smoke had pointed. “I think you know where it is yourselves, but I can find it if you don't. I'll do no harm to it or you. It will open a door through which my friends and I can leave.”
The Ersa twitched in great agitation. A pair of males, much shorter and perhaps younger than Graz, linked arms and began to keen wordlessly.
“Go back!” Graz shouted, jabbing his spear toward Tenoctris' eyes. “This is blasphemy! Go back now!”
Garric stepped in front of the old woman and linked his hands behind his back. “Give us access to the object,” he said quietly, ignoring the needle of iron quivering a finger's breadth from his throat, “and we'll take all the humans out of the Gulf. You'll have this world to yourselves.”
The words had fallen into a pattern in his mind even as he started to speak them. He didn't know whether the plan was his or that of King Carus.
“Yes,” said Tenoctris, moving to Garric's side again. “I'll seal the opening so that it no longer swallows down folk from the outer world to start the problem again.”
Garric knew—and perhaps the old woman did too—that if the Gulf were once emptied of humans, the next group of stragglers to arrive would be murdered at once instead of being bound into gentle slavery. Still, the Ersa had less of a bent to slaughter than men did, so a way that they could avoid the need would seem a benefit to them.
The Ersa's state changed from outraged horror to something equally tense but at the same time hopeful. The wailing pair calmed and faced the humans. The group signaled furiously with its ears; all but Graz. The Ersa leader remained as still as the trees of the windless forest.
“Can you open the way for us?” he said. “Can you send
us
home?”
“I can take you through the gate,” Tenoctris said simply, “but you can never go home. The place you came
from is nowhere I can reach. And I'm afraid you're better off in the Gulf than you'd be in a world of all humans.”
It wouldn't have occurred to the old wizard to lie. Garric wouldn't have lied either, though he didn't know whether a politic answer, an answer that offered hope, might not have been—
No. The truth was always the better choice. Evil isn't done by evil people, most of the time. Evil is done by basically decent people who decide that a little lie, a little theft, a little slide down the black slope couldn't do any harm.
Graz thumped his spear butt on the soft soil. “Yes,” he said. “You may use the Hand if you remove all humans from the Gulf.”
Garric breathed out in a great sigh. “All right,” he said. “We'll go now to explain the situation to the others.”
He didn't need Liane's worried frown to remind him that convincing the Gulf's human community was likely to be a much more difficult task than negotiating with the Ersa.

Other books

A Daughter's Dream by Shelley Shepard Gray
Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel by Ryan, Amy Kathleen
Soft touch by John D. (John Dann) MacDonald, Internet Archive
Wordless by AdriAnne Strickland
Barbary by Vonda N. McIntyre
Adam by Eve Langlais
Ghostly Liaison by Stacy McKitrick
After the Kiss by Suzanne Enoch