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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“I was explaining to our friend from Haft,” Royhas said, rechanneling the discussion with a skill that
Garric
could appreciate, “that the danger isn't simply from the queen's hirelings. When she wants to replace the proper officials with her own men, she sends a phantasm with them.
”
“They can't do any real harm,” Waldron said in irritation. “They're uncanny, I grant, but nothing that should make a brave man leave his place.”
“Perhaps King Valence should hire only men with the courage of a bor-Walliman to collect his port dues,” Sourous said, his face turned toward the wall. Waldron's hand twitched in the direction of his sword hilt, then checked. The motion was so slight that Garric wouldn't have noticed it without his ancestor reading the tiny cues.
“What do you mean by a phantasm?” Garric said, doing his part to keep the conspiracy from flying apart in mutual insults. If King Valence wanted his life—and there was no reason to doubt Royhas' claim—these men were the best chance Garric and his friends had of surviving for more than the next few hours. “Ghosts?”
Tadai glanced up with the first real interest he'd given anything except his perfect, almond-shaped fingernails. “Demons, I would rather say,” he said, “but only in appearance. As Waldron notes, they don't do anything except look ugly. I might say the same about my wife … and unlike my Trinka, the queen's little friends don't bring a dowry of ten thousand acres.”
“People who've faced them say the phantasms remind them of things,” Royhas said. He flashed the bitter ghost
of a smile. “They don't say what memories are involved, but one can make some assumptions from the fact the witnesses refuse to discuss them. I have more sympathy for those who don't choose to resist the queen's hirelings than Waldron does.”
“And there's the fire wraiths,” Pitre muttered. He'd taken a spherical limewood puzzle from his purse and was rotating it between his hands.
“They're
not harmless!”
“Fagh!” Waldron said. “How many times have they been seen? Four times? Five? In almost a year!”
“Once has always been enough, hasn't it?” Tadai said, looking up from his nails again with an expression of polite inquiry. “For the victim, at least; which seems to me good reason why there've been so few victims. The five of us have certainly chosen to conceal our opposition to the queen.”
Garric glanced at Royhas. Royhas nodded and said, “They—or that, there's never been more than one fire wraith seen at a time—appear near someone who's been opposing the queen in a particularly open fashion. The first was a gang boss named Erengo who was raising a mob to attack the queen's mansion. I dare say he expected to get particularly rich from the loot, once a few hundred cattle from the slums had broken down the defenses.”
Pitre tittered. “He should have hired himself to the queen instead,” he said. “His sort's where she gets most of her servants.”
“Erengo may have come to that conclusion in his last moments,” Royhas said grimly. “He hadn't made any secret about his plans, though he'd intended to be some distance from the actual event. A thing like a fiery lizard on its hind legs appeared out of the air. His bodyguards attacked it with no effect—”
“No useful effect,” Tadai said sardonically. “I gather it made quite a colorful display.”
Waldron looked down at the seated man with a cold expression and a tightness in his sword arm. Tadai folded his hands in his lap, pursing his lips slightly.
Garric guessed it would take a great deal of irritation before Waldron lost his temper enough to physically attack a coconspirator. It was a silly risk to take for no purpose, though, and this business already involved risk aplenty.
“The fire wraith put its arms around Erengo's neck,” Royhas continued. “It burned him to a blob of greasy ash. Then the wraith vanished again.”
“The common herd would follow King Valence if he'd just lead them!” Pitre said, hunched over his puzzle. His fingers were recombining the separated pieces into a sphere. “Everyone hates the queen, even the scum who work for her.”
“And Silyon could protect King Valence!” Sourous said, sounding like a child in his eagerness to believe what he hoped was true. “After all, the queen would have disposed of
him
if he weren't protected, wouldn't she?”
Tenoctris might be able to answer that question. Garric, couldn't, but he knew that there were fights that you avoided as long as possible even if you thought you could win them. That might be why the queen hadn't attacked Valence directly—and it was even more likely that Valence
feared
that was why the queen had held back.
“My colleagues and I are loyal subjects of King Valence,” Royhas said with a tinge of irony. “We've been forced to consider alternative ways to preserve the kingdom—”
Through Garric's mind ran the thought
Their part of the kingdom
. He grinned wryly.
“—and when Valence told me to dispose of the would-be usurper I'd find in the grounds of the Tyrants' palace, the possibility of a way forward occurred to us.”
“So you claim to be Countess Tera's heir, boy?” Tadai asked. He was no more supercilious to Garric than he was to his fellow nobles; but Garric
wasn't
one of Tadai's fellow nobles.
Garric placed his left hand flat on the table and leaned onto it, bringing his face closer to Tadai's. “I'm a free
citizen of Haft, fat man,” he said pleasantly. “And my lineage goes back to Carus, though the place where you'd find the proof of that isn't one you'd return from—even if you could get there.”
In Garric's memory, a black throne rose from a black plain into a black sky: the Throne of Malkar, the source of all evil and of universal power. Lorcan, the first King of the Isles, had hidden the throne where only his descendants could find it … as Garric had found it, in a nightmare whose illusions were real enough to kill the soul.
Tadai said nothing. He drew a handkerchief of green and black silk from his left sleeve and wiped his forehead. His hair was so fair that in brighter light he would seem to be bald.
Pitre flung down the bits of his puzzle. “Where did he come from?” he said to Royhas. “May the Lady shield me! This isn't the bumpkin from a sheepwalk you told us you were bringing!”
“He's the man Valence told me to watch for!” Royhas said. “The name was right, the age was right. We've never doubted Silyon was a powerful wizard, have we? He was right!”
“I think …” said Tadai. He carefully folded the handkerchief away as everyone watched him.
“I think Valence was right to fear that this youth could usurp his throne—with the right backing,” he continued. Tadai's tone was still light, but the mockery was gone. “And I think we were right, gentlemen—”
He looked around the taut faces of his fellows.
“—to believe that he could rouse the populace against the queen in a directed fashion, as Valence will not.”
Garric's legs were wobbly, but it was probably because of Carus that he chose to pull out the chair in front of him and sit. They had to break the tension. This last exchange had sent the nobles' minds spinning in more directions than there were men in the room.
“Talk to me like a peasant from Haft who doesn't
know anything about the queen and why King Valence married her,” Garric said calmly. He gestured the others to seats with an assurance that made him marvel—but they all obeyed, even Royhas, whose house it was. “But I can start by saying that I have no designs on the throne of the Isles so long as Valence is on it.”
He grinned. “I'm a loyal citizen too, albeit Valence seems to have been misinformed on the matter.”
Garric's grammar and diction were as good as those of any man in the Isles. Reise had seen to that, with a fierce determination that no paid schoolmaster could have matched. Still, his voice had a lilt that would always set him apart from the clipped accents of Ornifal or a Sandrakkan burr. That was as surely a mark of Haft today as it had been in the time of King Carus.
“The princess Azalais was the daughter of the King of Sirimat,” Pitre said. Garric had expected Tadai or Royhas to take up the story. “Valence had just fought the Earl of Sandrakkan for the throne—”
“For the title,” Waldron spat. “It could have been a real throne if he'd been a real man.”
Pitre's eyes surveyed the floor during the interruption, looking for the pieces of his puzzle. The bits of pale wood were hopelessly concealed among the black and white tesserae of the mosaic.
Waldron grimaced. “Go on,” he said to Pitre. To Garric he added, “Pitre was there.”
“Valence and I were great friends at one time,” Pitre said softly, toward the stones of the flooring. He continued, “He needed to marry because unless there was a clear succession there was a certainty of more trouble from men who were positioning themselves for the future. Rather than a wife from one of the great houses of Ornifal—”
“Which would have made all the other nobles his enemies,” Tadai said. Garric already understood that, from reading history and from Carus' own vivid recollections.
“—Valence accepted the offer from Sirimat, quite outside
the struggles for power over the past millennium,” Pitre continued. “Azalais brought an enormous dowry, and she was strikingly beautiful besides.”
A pale smile flickered over Pitre's lips. “Not that her beauty was a matter of great concern,” he said. “Nor that Valence saw much more of it than any other wedding guest did, as matters worked out. Certainly there are no offspring.”
“She was a wizard,” Waldron said. “She used wizardry to get Valence to marry her.”
Pitre shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said, “but not all bad decisions come from wizard's work. At the time some of us thought it was quite a brilliant way out of the tangle of Ornifal nobles struggling for advantage.”
“My niece—” Waldron said. He stopped when he saw the broad, hard grin Royhas was giving him. Sourous tittered nervously. Waldron slammed the edge of his fist into the wall, shaking the candle.
Garric nodded to show that he understood what he'd been told. “The first task is to remove the queen's people from the government of Valles,” he said. He smiled faintly and went on, “I don't see how that can be done without me winding up the way Erengo did, but as tired as I am I'm doing well to see the table.”
He patted it. The smooth wood felt good beneath his fingers.
“One of my friends will have some ideas,” he said. “Both of them, I shouldn't wonder.”
Liane had lived in Valles as a wealthy outsider. Her experience might provide insights that the conspirators missed simply by being too close to the problem.
“We have a plan—” Royhas said.
Garric stood, feeling his head spin at the sudden movement. He needed food, and he particularly needed sleep.
“Not now,” he said. “I want to be able to go over matters with a clear head and with my companions present to advise me. It may be that planning you've done in my
absence will have to be modified now that you've met me in person.”
Now that you know I'm not going to get burned alive by a fire wraith if there's another way to defeat evil,
he thought but did not add.
“Kings die, just as other men,”
whispered a voice in Garric's weary mind.
“And sometimes a king dies that his people may live.”
Garric smiled, though the nobles facing him wouldn't have understood the reason. Wouldn't have agreed either, he guessed.
The conspirators looked at one another. Royhas nodded curtly and said, “Yes, all right. I'll have Maurunus put you in my private suite on the top floor. And your companions, if they've turned up.”
Pitre bent and picked up a piece of his puzzle, then placed it on the black wood of the table with an unfathomable expression. “Call us when you're prepared to act,” he said to Royhas.
“With a real leader instead of Valence,” Waldron said harshly, “the Kingdom of the Isles could be very different. We could return to a Golden Age as it was during the Old Kingdom.”
He strode to the door, the first to leave as he had been the first to arrive. Garric had noticed that Waldron said “a real leader” instead of “a real king.”
Through the waves of fatigue filling Garric's mind, a voice murmured,
“The Golden Age they dream of looked a lot like this one when I was living in it; and it'll take some work to keep this age from going the same way mine did. But we'll manage.”
 
 
Ilna supposed she must have been unconscious. She came awake prickling as though someone had filled her skin with live coals. It took a moment for her to realize that the buzzing she heard wasn't the sound of blood in her ears but rather Scaled Men chanting. Their voices rasped
like those of mating toads, harsh and insistent.

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