Queen of Demons (27 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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A huntsman in tight-fitting jerkin and breeches came out of the woods. He held a silver-chased hunting horn in one hand and, in the other, a spear with a bar just below the head to keep a boar or other dangerous game from slipping down the shaft onto him. The hounds redoubled the raucous yapping that was driving Garric wild.
“Are these yours?” Garric said. “Get them off me, will you?”
Instead of answering, the huntsman blew a two-note signal. His horn's twisted shape wasn't that of any cow Garric had seen, and if it came from a sheep or goat it was of a much larger breed than those raised on Haft.
“I said get your dogs away!” Garric said. “Is this the way you treat travelers on Ornifal? Sister take you all if it is!”
Carus' spirit coursed close to the surface of Garric's
mind, as it always did when the youth was angry or frightened. He put his hand almost unconsciously on the hilt of his sword. The huntsman backed a step, leveling the boar spear on Garric's chest.
He shouldn't have done that. Garric imagined with perfect clarity his sword coming out of the scabbard in a quick sweep to behead the fellow. A right and left to the hounds, two of them flying sideways, their yelps silenced in gouts of blood, and a quick thrust behind Garric's back to settle the third beast, who'd be going for a hamstring …
A nobleman burst from the night. With him were six other men in helmets and mail shirts. The latter were soldiers, not huntsmen. Three held spears with slender points for piercing armor, while the others had drawn their swords.
Hand weapons were a better choice than bows with the undergrowth so thick
, noted a coldly professional mind at the back of Garric's own.
“Watch him, Lord Royhas,” the huntsman cried to the noble. “He's got a sword!”
“Whip your dogs away!” the noble said. “How can anybody hear themselves think?”
Garric was uneasily aware that his clothing, though of good quality to begin with, was very much the worse for wear. They'd been able to wash their garments in the place they'd gone when they escaped the Gulf, but the tunic had stains that wouldn't come out in plain water and they weren't able to mend tears properly.
The huntsman threw down his equipment. He caught two hounds and dragged them back by their collars. The third followed her master and companions, still whining with excitement.
“I thank you, sir,” Garric said. He reached down to tap a clink from his heavy leather belt purse. “My name's Garric or-Reise from Haft. Though I'm afraid I look a little bedraggled, I'm not a vagabond.”
He was glad to relax. The barking had gotten on his
nerves in a way that an open threat wouldn't have done. The dogs hadn't been
doing
anything, so Garric couldn't properly respond to them.
“Yes, I thought you might be,” the noble said pleasantly. “I'm Royhas bor-Bolliman, the Master of the Royal Hunt.”
The soldiers moved in from either side, acting without haste. They were already too close for Garric to draw his long sword. Two had sheathed their own weapons. The spearmen were a pace back where one or both could easily stab Garric if he tried to struggle with the other four men.
“Let us take this, sir,” a soldier said, kneeling to unwrap the sword belt's long double tongue as the first step to unbuckling it. The swordsmen put their free hands on Garric's wrists. Their blades weren't precisely threatening him, but the points were still close to his face.
“What's the meaning of this?” Garric snapped. He wasn't frightened; part of him was actually surprised at the feeling of cold analysis that drove all emotion from his mind. A year ago—a few months ago—he would have been shocked and afraid. The man he'd become since leaving home merely looked for the way out.
At this moment there was no way out.
“King Valence was informed that a pretender claiming to be a scion of the old royal line would be arriving here,” Royhas explained. He was in his thirties and moved with the ease of a man who spent more time outdoors than he did at the table. “The Master of the Hunt was the obvious person to apprehend him. These men are members of my own household, by the way—not royal troops.”
Royhas gestured to the men holding Garric. The kneeling soldier had the belt off. The swordsmen bent Garric's arms back with firm pressure but not violence; he didn't resist. The fourth man bound his wrists with a soft, strong cord. It was silk, Garric supposed.
“I'm not a pretender to anything,” Garric said. He tensed his wrists as the soldier drew the bonds tight. The men knew that trick: the pair holding Garric's arms
rapped his elbows with their sword hilts. As the youth's muscles spasmed, their fellow pulled the slack out of the knot.
How had Valence known that Garric would arrive here? And what did the king intend—
“Master Silyon, the king's wizard, apparently feels differently,” Royhas said without concern. “A nasty piece of work, that one. But he was right about you appearing, wasn't he?”
The cord binding Garric had arm's-length tags. Two soldiers looped the ends around their own belts, attaching Garric to them though he could still walk by himself.
“We'll get you into a closed carriage and then sweep the grounds for the friends you're supposed to have along,” Royhas said. He smiled. “My royal master has ordered that you all be quietly put out of the way. As though you'd never existed.”
 
 
Sharina squatted where the ground became flat enough to support a grove of giant tree ferns. Rhododendrons poked hard green leaves through the fronds. “Give me a moment,” she called ahead to Hanno.
Sharina wasn't precisely winded, but her legs hadn't gotten much exercise during long days on the ship and Hanno's boat. The terrain from the cove on the shore of Bight where the dory sheltered was more a cliff than a slope. Previous travelers had notched handholds into the particularly steep portions. That made the climb possible, but Sharina wondered how the hunter was going to carry up his tons of supplies.
“It's not far, missie,” Hanno said. “The rivers here flow north and east, but me and my partner Ansule figure it's better to climb a bit and save an extra two days of rowing to Valles. There's others that feel different, but they mostly use sails on their boats.”
Butterflies with wings the size of Sharina's hands fluttered through the grove, dabbing into the flowers of air
plants growing along the branches of the tree ferns. One of them landed on Sharina's shoulder. It felt heavy, and its spindly legs gripped with uncomfortable strength.
She sucked in her breath with surprise. The giant butterfly uncoiled its long mouth parts and prodded her skin.
“Looking for salt,” Hanno said nonchalantly. He carried only his weapons, the huge spear and the knives in his belt. “I figure if there was a way to get the wings back to Valles, I'd be a rich man. They lose their pretty color if they get knocked around, though.”
The insect on Sharina's shoulder was too close for both her eyes to focus on it. Its wings were striped black and white, and there were red dots on the bottom lobe.
Compared to many others in the grove, the butterfly was positively chaste in its patterning. The thought of it being pulled apart for a rich lady's headdress disturbed Sharina.
The butterfly stepped into the curve of Sharina's neck. “Ouch!” she said. Her index finger brushed it into the air with a determined shove. Scales like tiny feathers spun from the creature's wings, dancing in a beam of light.
Sharina grinned at herself. Aloud she said, “If I were a better person, I wouldn't let one pinch wipe away all my kindly thoughts.”
Hanno smiled, more or less. “Don't get worked up about butterflies,” he said. “They never helped a soul but themself, I figure. There's plenty of people who think it's good enough to sit around looking pretty, and I never had much use for them neither.”
He rose to his feet. “Ready to go on?” he asked. Sharina stood in response.
“Me and Ansule'll rig the cable and pulley tomorrow to haul the goods up to the cabin,” the hunter said. “No point in worrying about it so late in the day. Missing griddle cakes along with our meat for another day ain't going to kill us.”
He led Sharina into a belt of pandanus trees. A skirt of stilt roots rising as high as Sharina's waist supported each
scaly trunk. The ground was noticeably lower than at the cliff's edge, so the area probably flooded during storms.
“What about the boat?” Sharina asked. They'd left the dory tied bow and stern in a cove overlooked by giant palms. There wasn't even a hint of a shoreline. While the vessel could ride where it was during fine weather, the first storm from west or northwest would batter it to splinters against the rocky walls.
“Haul it straight up the trunk of one of them palms and lash it till we need it the next time,” the hunter said. “With the mountain so close behind, the wind don't get enough of a run to pull down trees. That's how they got so big. There's the corniche to keep the waves off, all but the spray.”
Sharina heard buzzing; she turned to look. A fungus the size of a man's head bulged from the stem of a woody vine. “What—” she began. When she spoke, a cloud of flies rose from the fungus cup with a terrible odor.
Hanno laughed. “You don't want to bump them stinkpots, missie,” he said. “Though I tell you the truth, it gets mighty ripe around the cabin sometimes when we're curing a good crop of horn.”
They crossed a slight ridge, noticeable more for the fact Sharina heard a brook purling than because the slope reversed significantly. The path Hanno followed didn't show on the ground. Thin soil and lack of light penetrating the forest canopy meant there was no ground cover to be marked by traffic.
The watercourse was a rivulet through blocks of basalt. Ferns, giant philodendrons, and knee-high curls of moss covered both shallow banks.
Sharina smelled wood smoke; she sneezed. “We must be getting—” she said.
The stench of rotting flesh hit her, shocking her mouth and nostrils closed. She thought,
Hanno warned me, I guess, but this is awful.
Barca's Hamlet was no more fastidious a place than any other rural community, but meat was a valuable commodity.
Very little offal remained after a hog or sheep had been butchered, and that was composted with vegetable waste to decompose before being spread as fertilizer on the house gardens. This was—
The hunter had disappeared. “Hanno?” Sharina called. She walked two paces upstream with her fingers resting on the butt of the Pewle knife. Her skin tingled.
She heard the flies.
The clearing lay under a beetling knob covered by bamboo and wisteria. The cabin had backed against the rock so that the brook washed one side of its foundation. The timbers of the wall on that side still smoldered, though the remainder of the building had burned out completely.
Flies rose in a dozen separate clouds. There were three complete bodies and the scattered remains of fourth.
Sharina drew the big knife and felt behind her for a tree. She backed against the trunk. Her mouth was open, but she didn't speak.
Hanno came out of the foliage on the other side of the creek. His appearance hadn't changed in any way that Sharina could describe, but his face was as bleak as a tidal surge.
“They've been and gone,” he grated softly. “Not so long ago that I can't catch up with them, I guess.”
“Who, Hanno?” Sharina said. Her voice was steady; it was like listening to somebody else speak. The Pewle knife didn't tremble in her hand.
“Monkeys,” the hunter said. He prodded with the metal-shod butt of his spear, levering one of the bodies up so that Sharina could see it clearly.
The body was more like a man than not, but it was covered with coarse russet hair. The chest was deep, the arms long, sinewy, and muscled like the forelimbs of a cat. By contrast, the bandy legs looked deformed, and the skull showed scarcely a shallow dome above the thick brow ridges.
The creature's lips were drawn back in a rictus of death. The yellowish teeth included long canines in both upper
and lower jaws, though one of the latter had been broken to a stump.
“Hairy Men,” Sharina said. “The Autochthones of Bight in Katradinus'
Cosmogeography.”
Hanno let the corpse flop down. A powerful stroke had opened its belly. Coils of intestine, purple-veined and swollen in the damp heat, spilled onto the moss beside the body.
“Monkeys,” he repeated as he walked to a lump of the corpse that had been dismembered. He lifted the severed head of a young man with a scar up the right cheek. The dead man's hair was a butternut color except where the scar tissue continued across his scalp; there it was white and exceptionally thin.
“You're looking poorly, Ansule,” Hanno said. “I guess you should've gone to Valles after all. The sea voyage would've been good for you.”

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