Queen of Demons (37 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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The crossbowman capered in a clumsy circle, his weapon lifted as he tried to find his target against the stars. The others waved cutlasses and a spear, shouting in guttural panic.
The flyer had looked like a man to Ilna. A man with bat wings.
The sail blocked much of the view from the deck. The sailor with the striped headband started to climb the rigging; there was a bucket fixed to the masthead for a lookout to stand in. He paused midway in an agony of indecision, looking over first one shoulder, then the other.
The flyer swooped up from sea level to skim the starboard railing. Clawed fingers sprouted from the joint at each midwing. They clutched at the man on the rigging. He gave a hoarse cry and slashed with his cutlass.
The flyer lurched away and down. The broad wings were of membrane so thin that Ilna could see the moon's face through it.
The crossbowman leaned over the railing and squeezed his trigger. The bowcord cracked loudly as it released. Scaled Men hooted in delight, hugging one another and stamping their feet on the deck.
The sailor who'd started toward the masthead jumped down. He was holding his right shoulder with his left hand. Across his back were three long slashes that looked black in the unnatural moonlight. He called out to his fellows.
Two of the others put down their weapons and examined him, clicking and muttering. The shoulder wound was a deep one. When the sailor took his hand away, blood quickly spread down his arm. If the wound wasn't closed quickly, the victim would die as surely as sunrise.
In this place, perhaps more surely yet.
A Scaled Man gave a cry like that of an ox dying. He pointed his cutlass upward. The towering island to port now overhung the vessel. From rookeries in the pitted rock, winged men like the first were launching themselves into the air.
There were scores of them. Ilna thought of mayflies swarming in the moonlight.
The sailor at the steering oar shouted to his fellows. One leaped toward Ilna with his cutlass raised. He chopped, severing the rope that bound her to the stanchion.
For a moment Ilna thought the Scaled Men were about to free her. Two more sailors were unlacing the canvas cover that held the hatch grating in place. They lifted it; the sailor who'd cut Ilna loose dragged her toward the opening like a sack of millet.
She smiled faintly. It would have complicated her future actions if she felt her captors had begun to behave decently.
A flyer dived, showing a birdlike mastery of the air. It slid between the mast and the forestay, its right wing up and the tip of the left pointing almost straight down toward the deck.
The thing's mouth was open. Its face was human—handsome, even, in a high-boned hollow-cheeked fashion—but the teeth were pointed and unnaturally long. The moonlight stained them red.
The flyer bit at the Scaled Man pulling llna. The fellow screamed and threw himself across her. His right ear was missing and there two long gouges across his scalp.
As the flyer banked away, the sailor with the spear thrust upward. The rusty point missed the torso, as thin and muscular as that of a skinned squirrel, but it pierced the fabric of the creature's wing and tore a four-pointed star. The material was as tough as fine parchment. The flyer flapped free, climbing with labored strokes.
The sailor who'd lost his ear rose, holding his scalp with one hand and waving his cutlass with the other. The pair crouching for safety behind the grating took Ilna by her bound ankles and neck of her tunic, then dropped her unceremoniously through the opening.
She hit hard. For a moment all she was aware of was numbing pain and the sight of a man silhouetted as he
tried to squirm up through the open hatch without using his arms. A Scaled Man kicked him in the face. He fell back into the hold with Ilna; the grating slammed above them.
Through the ventilation slots, Ilna saw the red moon. Across its face more and more winged humanoids flew.
Like
mayflies swarming
…
Ilna began working on her remaining bonds. The man with her in the hold shuffled over on his knees. His arms were tied behind his back and there wasn't height enough below the grating for him to stand.
“Sister take me!” he said. “It's a girl!”
“It's a woman,” Ilna said. “And if I were you, whoever you are, I'd be careful what names I was speaking right now. It may be soon enough that you'll be answering to the Sister herself for them.”
She had a hand loose. She'd kept her frustration buried as long as she was bound, but with freedom all the emotions welled up and a wave of fierce triumph shook her.
“Well, you're better than nothing,” the man said. “Can you maybe chew my knots loose with your teeth? If my hands were free, I'll bet I could figure a way to get the cover off. They didn't lace it down proper after they threw you down here.”
He turned awkwardly as he spoke. The hold was half-filled with what felt to Ilna like sacks of gravel. The moonlight coming through the grating wasn't bright enough for her to see details, even if she'd cared.
“Get back and I'll untie you after I've gotten myself free,” she said. “Who are you?”
llna twisted onto her other side to get a better purchase on the remaining wrist. The Scaled Men had tied her limbs individually and then together. Their knots were hard and expert, as was to be expected from sailors. The knots weren't of types that she had come across before, though; and knots were to Ilna as weather was to a husbandman.
“Captain of this ship, that's who
I
am,” the man said.
“Cozro or-Laylin of Valles on Ornifal. I'm to have an eighth share of her as my pay for this voyage—or I was.”
He spat in disgust. “The scum above are my crew, at least before they got the plague or whatever happened.”
The grating crashed with the weight of a winged man landing on it. The creature's big toes hooked back to grip against the other four on each foot. The claws tore splinters out of the hardwood grating as the flyer struggled with someone on the deck. Its flapping vans concealed all details of the battle.
Cozro bellowed in surprise and flung himself prone. “Sister drag me to her cave! What's going on up there?”
Ilna had her left wrist free, though a tag of rope still dangled from it. The ship's cordage was woven from spar grass, but to bind her the Scaled Men had used a well-carded flax. She supposed she should be thankful, but the coarser, stiffer rope would have been easier to untie.
She sat up. “Your ship is being attacked by bats with the bodies of men,” she said succinctly. “We aren't in the world we were born in, though I have no idea where we are.”
She smiled coldly as her fingers worked on the knots binding her ankles. “Your suggestion that we're in the Underworld is as likely as any other. Certainly I've seen nothing to disprove that.”
The flyer lifted, then slammed chest-down onto the grating. The spear and at least one cutlass blade hacked through its wings, slicing great gares out of them.
The creature's teeth gnashed wildly, tearing fingersized bits from the wood. In a final dying convulsion it writhed off the hatch cover and mostly out of sight. One foot continued to clamp and release with the regularity of the surf coming in.
“Lady preserve Your servant Cozro,” the captain muttered with breathy sincerity. “Also preserve the
Bird of the Waves
, and cause Mistress Arona to deed over the eighth share of the vessel as she agreed—the skinflint!”
Ilna loosed her ankles. She scissored her legs sideways
and back, luxuriating in the pain of stretching her cramped thigh muscles.
“The
Bird of the Waves?”
she said. “You're the ship that brought the Scaled Man to Erdin. I suppose that explains it. Your crew drank the liquor that the body had soaked in.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” said Cozro, suddenly defensive. “I didn't put a body in the cask, and I don't know that there was any cider in with it from the first.”
“Turn around and hold your hands out as much as you can,” Ilna ordered. The binding ropes would make a satisfactory weapon once she'd spliced the pieces into a single noose, the work of only minutes for her skilled fingers.
The crossbow released again on the deck above. There was a high-pitched cry like steam lifting a tight lid. She didn't know whether it came from one of the Scaled Men or their winged attackers. She'd never heard its like from the throat of a living creature.
“Sister take me, that might be how it happened, though,” Cozro said. He gave a low growl at the memory. “I told Mistress Arona that carrying cider royal was more trouble than it was worth, but would she listen? What do you expect sailors to do? Do you think saints crew a vessel that pays no better wages than Arona does?”
“Hold still,” Ilna snapped. “I wouldn't need your help even if you were capable of helping.”
“We were on the way back to Valles with a cargo of oil nuts,” Cozro mused. “I could tell there was something wrong with the crew. Oh, the first day out they were still hungover from port leave, I could understand that. But they kept getting quieter. Wouldn't say a word to me, and when they talked to each other I couldn't figure out what they were saying.”
There seemed to be a lull in the fighting on deck. Ilna heard the sailors' grunted speech. One of them sobbed with pain or desperation. The Scaled Men's stiff, froglike features didn't fit with openly expressed emotion.
“Every night when we anchored,” Cozro said, “they'd
go off together. Sometimes we tied up to a spit of land so small I could watch them. They'd all kneel facing toward Valles. I thought they was praying, but I don't know. I swear, it was like they was listening to something. Every night.”
“There,” said Ilna, coiling the rope into a neat hank like the others and placing it in her tunic sleeve. “Now turn your feet toward me and I'll free them.”
Cozro clapped his hands with delight. Ignoring Ilna's direction, he hunched forward to work on his ankle ties himself.
“If you like, I'll have you loose in a few minutes,” Ilna said, each syllable as edged as a shard of broken glass. “Otherwise you can continue what you're doing—and keep wasting your time like a fool until the ship sinks or you die of old age, whichever comes first.”
Cozro jerked his head around. “What did you say?” he demanded.
“If you were capable of untying these knots by moonlight, you'd have done so days ago,” Ilna said. “But it's your choice.”
She took a length of cord from her sleeve. The Scaled Men had taken her knife when they captured her, but her fingers alone easily spread the rope-end for plaiting.
“All right, you do it,” Cozro said in a sulky voice. He rotated and leaned backward so that Ilna could reach the knot.
The flyer's foot clenched on the grating for a final time. The claw on the big toe was by itself as long as a man's thumb.
Ilna bent to work. She didn't need even the light that penetrated to the hold; the pattern and its solution were in her fingertips.
“They did their work,” Cozro said. “I can't say they were taking orders, but they were sailors all of them. They didn't need me to tell them how to trim the sail. Their skin got rough and the color, well … Sister, they were
turning blue! I knew it though I pretended I didn't. I was afraid of catching it myself, you know.”
Scaled Men croaked in fear. The crossbow whacked. Something struck the ship.
“Hold
still,”
Ilna said as the captain twisted to look at the other corner of the grating.
The ship rocked the way a pond stirs when the first heavy drops of a thunderstorm hit and call down thousands more. Dozens, scores of the flyers were landing, on the deck and in the rigging. Their thumping impacts drowned the sailors' cries.
“Three days out from Valles,” Cozro said, his face tight with fear, “they lined up in the bow to pray like before. I didn't say anything. I'd pretty well stopped talking to them anyhow. Then they turned around and came for me.”
There was a choked shriek above; a sailor fell spread-eagled across the grating on his back. Winged men covered him, their bodies writhing like grubs in a week-dead rabbit. The killers blocked the light as their jaws crunched on and through bone. Blood dripped into the hold, and there was a charnel stench.
“There wasn't a thing I could do,” Cozro said. He was shouting as much to conceal the sounds from above as so that Ilna could hear him. “I thought they were going to kill me. They argued and I think that's what it was about. Finally they tied me and threw enough oil nuts out of the hold so there was room for me.”
The deckhouse door slammed. The flyers shifted away from the sailor's body, permitting a little moonlight to enter the hold. Only disarticulated bones and tags of cartilage remained of the corpse; that, and the fluids still dripping through the grate.

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