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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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The statue caught the laughing man's wrists. He continued to struggle, but flesh was no match for stone. The arms encircled him.
The bravo's spine cracked in the embrace; his legs flailed to the sides, then hung limp as burlap sacks. Ribs splintered through his skin and tunic. The arms continued to close until the victim's torso fell in two pieces.
The smiling androgyne walked back toward its base.
“Horan,”
said Tenoctris,
“elaoth!”
The helix was faintly blue. It bent at right angles and began extending itself over the perimeter of the queen's domain.
Tenoctris set the board on the stones in front of her. When she started to rise, Garric and Liane quickly offered their arms for support. The tight coil of light continued to bore its way slowly toward the mansion.
“Now it's up to us,” Tenoctris said quietly. She gave her companions a smile.
Black petals from the cherry tree covered the man who'd thrown himself to the ground in panic. There was no sound or movement from within the somber mound.
“Right,” said Garric. He drew his sword and led the way in the direction the helix pointed.
 
 
“I need another pellet first,” Cerix said. They'd slid the table with his paraphernalia against the wall to make more room for the circle of power on the floor. He gripped his wheels to roll the chair toward it.
“Cerix?” Halphemos said. He laid his hand over the cripple's. “I think we'd better do the spell now. We need the moon at zenith, and …”
The air of the small room was gray with cloying residue from the drug the cripple had smoked while he transcribed the words from the cloth to the floor they'd whitewashed for the purpose. The container had been full when the wizards began their preparations; only half a dozen pellets remained. The older man's fragile control had broken under the weight of the spell they were attempting.
Though rural labor had given the younger man considerable wiry strength, Cerix's arms did the work of other men's legs. From the waist up, he could wrestle down youths half again his size. He batted away Halphemos' hand with childish fury and gripped his wheels again to spin himself forward.
“Cerix?” Halphemos said.
The cripple didn't move. He closed his eyes; tears crawled down his cheeks. “You don't know what it's like!” he pleaded. “I can
feel
the demons gnawing on my legs. Every day, every breath, every moment. You don't know!”
“Cerix,” Halphemos said softly. “We owe it to Ilna and her brother. We have to do this.”
Cerix gave a shuddering sigh. “So you say,” he said in a savage whisper. He shook himself, then wiped his face with his sleeve. He looked at his friend with a forced smile.
“Well, I suppose you're right,” he said. “I'll be needing something to steady me afterwards, won't I? Sure, let's get this over with.”
Halphemos clasped hands with Cerix. They took their places beside the circle of power, Halphemos squatting and the cripple beside him in the chair. The lamp hanging
from the wall bracket behind them shone on the parchment which Cerix held in his left hand.
“Can you read it?” he asked. He tapped the sheet with the length of rye straw he was using as a pointer.
“Yes,” Halphemos said. He cleaned the athame he used for private incantations by running his left thumb and forefinger over the blade of walrus ivory. As a showman he used a narwal's tusk for the broad motions of his public displays. “You've taught me well, Cerix. I won't fail you.”
The cripple grunted. “I'm not worried about you,” he said. He touched his pointer to the first of the syllables he'd written on the parchment in the blocky modern script which Halphemos could read.
The younger wizard tapped the corresponding symbol drawn on the floor in cursive Old Script.
“Phasousouel,”
he intoned, his voice strong but laboring against the power of the word he spoke.
“Eistochama, nouchaei … .”
The circle and the words around its rim were written in soot congealed with olive oil. Each time the athame touched the floor, the symbols rotated to bring the next in front of Halphemos. Cerix, his face stiff and gray, drew his straw along the parchment at the rate the chant itself set.
“
Apraphes einath adones …
” Halphemos said. He flexed his torso unconsciously as though he were shouldering a heavy weight, but his voice remained firm.
“Dechochtha iathenouion.
”
What had been a circle on the floor opened slowly into a pit with white sides whirling like a maelstrom. The syllables in Old Script stood stark and black against blurred chaos. Cerix continued to deacon out the chant, but even he could no longer be sure of the words on the parchment. Halphemos didn't miss a beat.
“Chrara!”
he shouted.
“Cherubin! Zaaraben!”
The room had vanished. A hot, violent wind roared from nowhere, and the pit was a corridor before them.
There was no floor or existence except for the shimmering
tunnel beyond their world. Against its blazing white light, objects were forming.
“Namadon!”
Halphemos shouted.
The wind was a hurricane, an unstoppable torrent. The parchment flashed from Cerix's hand, shredding into fragments as it disappeared down the tunnel.
The wind whirled the wizards after the parchment. Halphemos continued to shout the incantation.
 
 
Cashel eyed the bulge of rock above them as best he could by the light of a few stars. It didn't look very high. At least it wasn't as high as it was steep. “Zahag, you go up and I'll hand Aria to you,” he said.
Something was chuckling in the darkness to their right. It went on the way a brook runs, mindless and gurgling.
The chuckling thing had been keeping parallel with Cashel and his companions all the way up the slope. It could've been any distance away, from miles to close enough to hit if Cashel spat into the encircling night.
“Well, I don't know,” the ape said in a subdued voice. He was hunched at Cashel's feet—literally: he pressed his coarse-furred flank against Cashel's shin. “I don't think I want to lead.”
“Get up there,” Cashel said. He wasn't going to raise his voice, but his hands squeezed his quarterstaff
hard
. “Or go your own way, Zahag. And may the Shepherd forsake me if I have any more to do with you!”
Well, maybe he'd raised his voice a little after all. The chuckling stopped briefly while the echoes died away.
“Yes, chief,” the ape said. He clambered up the rock face as easily as he'd have walked the same distance on the flat. His arms covered an amazing span. With his short legs gripping also, Zahag looked like an enormous crab spider.
“Send the female up!” he called from close above. An arm reached down; the ape's hand was half again as long as Cashel's own.
“I'll show you that I'm worthy, Cashel,” the princess said in a tiny, frightened voice.
Instead of making a stirrup with both hands, Cashel put his left palm against the rock and said, “Hop onto the back of my wrist, Princess. Then grab Zahag's hand, all right?”
“Whatever you say, Cashel,” Aria piped in a desperate and completely failed attempt to sound cheerful. She stepped on his arm in a gingerly fashion and waved her right arm overhead until Zahag caught it. She must have closed her eyes.
Cashel didn't blame her for being frightened. He hadn't been willing to lean his staff against the rock so he had both hands free to lift her.
Besides, she didn't weigh anything. Purple finches sometimes landed on Cashel's shoulder while he waited to turn the oxen at the end of a furrow. Aria didn't seem much heavier.
“I can see the light!” Aria cried. “It's right ahead of us. It's coming from a cave but there's a rock in the entrance!”
The moon came out from behind the high clouds in which it'd hidden for most of the night. Cashel didn't have any great affection for the moon. When it was full, the animals got restless.
Cashel had never thought of moonlight as being hostile before, though. Maybe it was the things it shone on in this place.
The slope had been a succession of crags, each a barrier but no single one so high that Cashel couldn't climb it. Even Aria could manage with help. The path they followed was barren, but on either side scrub pines found soil enough in crevices to grow.
Among the pines below Cashel stood hulking, two-legged figures. He couldn't tell their numbers in this light; some of what he saw were probably the shadows of misshapen trees.
There were likely a dozen of them, anyhow, and any
one of them bigger than Cashel was himself. Like Zahag their legs were much shorter than their arms, but they had long skulls and were as hairless as so many eggs.
“Do you want us?” Cashel shouted. His back was to the crag; he held the quarterstaff across his body and a little advanced, ready for use. “Come and get us, then!”
One of the figures stepped into the full moonlight, half a dozen paces below. It resumed its gurgling chuckle. None of the others advanced.
“Cashel!” the princess cried. “Please come up! Please!”
Goodness, she must be scared to say please like that. And surely she had a right … .
Cashel turned to the crag. He butted his staff firmly so that it wouldn't slip, put his left foot about knee-height up the rock face, and lifted himself on the quarterstaff.
Zahag had one arm stretched back to hang on to a knob of rock. With the other he caught the crook of Cashel's left elbow. The ape's flat grip was as strong as a hook of strap iron. Cashel flung himself to the top of the outcrop, drawing his staff up after him. The cap of bronze cutwork gave him a better grip than the polished iron ferrules of the staff he'd left in Folquin's palace.
The moon went back into the clouds. The chuckling seemed louder, but that might have been Cashel's imagination.
“Quickly!” Zahag said, tugging Cashel along by the hand still holding his arm. “Maybe you can snap their chief's neck, I don't say you can't, but what if the rest of them come for us?”
Cashel shook his elbow free. “Right,” he said. “We're almost to what we were seeing.”
It was a night for first times. Zahag had just included Aria in his band, or whatever it was that apes had.
The blue light Cashel had seen the night previous was up a last slope, no more than forty paces long and gentle enough that even the princess could walk it unaided. Crawl it, maybe, but Cashel didn't intend to take a hand
away from his staff just to keep Aria from skinning her knees.
The glare was so fiercely bright that the air around it glowed. It seeped past the irregular surface of the great boulder crammed into the mouth of a cave. Cashel heard a faint whine like that of a distant mosquito. It made his skin tingle.
He looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see the huge not-men who were following, but he'd have known they were there even without the continuing chuckle. Why did only one of them make a sound?
Zahag and Aria were scrambling ahead. Cashel lengthened his stride, leaning well forward to keep his balance without having to dab a hand down. The slope's weathered surface gave his feet a firm grip.
His companions had reached the cave mouth. Aria was weeping from fear. She leaned against the boulder, trying to move it. “I'm worthy!” she said. “Oh please Mistress God, I'm worthy!”
Cashel didn't laugh. He didn't remember ever seeing anything so silly as this: the princess struggling to move a boulder that Cashel knew was beyond his own strength.
But she was trying. Cashel didn't think he'd ever come to like the princess, but it wasn't hard to respect her.
“Zahag, keep an eye behind,” Cashel said, running his left hand over the seam where the boulder was wedged against the cave wall. “Let me know if I need to …”
He didn't finish the thought. It'd have bothered Aria still worse; and truth to tell, Cashel didn't much fancy seeing a dozen or more of those brutes hoisting themselves over the lip of rock himself.
He wondered what they were called. He'd have to ask Tenoctris when next he saw her.
When
.
The boulder's fit was closer than Cashel had seen between house beams in the past. He tried the weight, pressing one palm against the boulder just in case it was balanced to shift at a touch.
Well, he hadn't figured it would be.
Cashel itched all over, he supposed from the glare. He'd felt this way when he spun his staff as he and Zahag had gone through the wall of flame to rescue the princess.

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