Queen of Demons (42 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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The laces resisted him. The right side of his chest was still numb from the kick.
Garric backed away. He couldn't turn and run, because then he wouldn't be able to see if the cyclops threw its spear. Even facing the monster, Garric wasn't sure he'd be able to dodge the huge missile.
He was going up the gentle slope. When he reached the mansion, the cyclops would crush him like a bug against the pilastered stone wall.
Because Garric was concentrating on the monster's eye, a truer predictor of its intentions than the point of its weapon, he didn't see Liane until the girl grasped the sword projecting from the cyclops' ankle. Holding the hilt in both hands, she pulled back with all the considerable strength of her small body. The blade rotated through the joint like a knife slicing into a head of cabbage.
The cyclops shrieked. It turned, poising its spear. Liane tumbled backward, still holding the sword hilt. Blood gushed from the wound.
“Here!” Garric shouted, running toward the monster and waving his arms to distract it. The cyclops couldn't have heard him over the sound of its own cry. Shreds of red velvet fluttered from the spearpoint. “Look at me!”
The monster lunged forward. Its left foot twisted out from under it, still attached to the leg by glistening tendons that stretched under the creature's weight.
The cyclops fell, missing Liane by so little that Garric's heart stopped till he saw the girl still scrambling away. She held the sword. She stabbed inexpertly with it at the gauntleted hand as the creature flailed in her direction. The iron spear was rammed two yards deep in the soil.
The cyclops was howling. Blood fountained over the foot that stuck sideways from its leg. On the other side of the creature from Garric, Tenoctris mouthed an incantation.
Liane stumbled uphill, holding the sword in both hands. Her face was white except where blood spattered it; her arms were drenched in the creature's gore.
Garric turned. The mansion doors were open. A sparkle of purest blue dusted the gap between the leaves, though the air within was orange flame.
“The gate!” Liane gasped as she pushed the sword hilt into Garric's hand. “Tenoctris says take iron through the gateway!”
Garric strode toward the curtain of fire. The basalt threshold was hot to step on, even with his thick boots. He thrust his sword as if stabbing for the eyes of an enemy he could not see.
He felt a tingle, no more. In place of the flame was a brooding entry hall lighted by windows on the upper level. It was empty save for suits of armor that hadn't been designed for humans.
Garric looked over his shoulder. The cyclops' huge skeleton lay in a pool of its liquescent flesh, and the mob, thousands of Valles' citizens, ran across the cobblestones shrieking for the queen's blood.
Garric tried to stand aside. He wanted to make sure Tenoctris was safe, but first he had to get his breath. He saw everything as a blur of color and motion.
A man clasped Garric's free hand and slapped the backplate of his cuirass enthusiastically. “King Carus!” he cried. “Hail Carus!”
A woman old enough to be Garric's mother threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. She wore a perfume of heliotrope and her layered garments were silken.
“Please!” Garric said. Most of the crowd was pouring into the mansion, but an increasing number of people pressed about him. He tried to move away. Liane had squeezed to his side. She stood with her fists raised to either side of her jaw.
Two of Royhas' guards forced their way through the crowd. The nobleman himself and Tenoctris joined a moment later, protected by the other four guards. The armored spearmen forced citizens away from Garric and Liane the way a froe splits shakes from a cedar log.
“The other members of our group will be with us shortly,” Royhas said. His mouth quirked in a wry smile. “Here at the mansion, I told them. They weren't very pleased, but they didn't have a great deal of choice, did they?”
Shouts echoed inside the mansion. From the brief glimpse Garric had gotten of the interior, the mansion was constructed around a courtyard. The style was familiar to King Carus, but it hadn't been used in Valles either in the present day or during the Old Kingdom.
Liane held Tenoctris' hands and talked, her face close to that of the older woman. Tenoctris looked tired, but she smiled warmly when she felt Garric's gaze on her.
Royhas noted the exchange of glances. His smile tightened and he went on, “I should have offered my congratulations first, Master Garric. No one who watched you—and that's much of the populace of Valles—could doubt that you're a returned hero of former times.”
“The heroes of former times failed,” Garric heard his lips say. “We—you and I and all the rest—need to do better, Royhas. And so we shall.”
Smoke belched from a mansion window. It was the natural gray-white billowing of wood and cloth because some
idiot
had set furnishings alight.
“Can you stop that?” Garric said to Royhas. “Do you have enough men that we can restore order?”
The nobleman shrugged. “We can try,” he said.
“Where's the queen?” Liane demanded. “Is she—”
Screams of terror came from within the mansion, though it wasn't until the many thousands of citizens outside joined that the sound reached Garric's awareness.
The sun darkened. He looked up.
The thing lifting from the mansion roof had translucent gray vans that spread to the size of small clouds. The body, relatively small, was soot-colored and shaggy. It reminded him of cobwebs hanging in the common room of an ill-kept inn.
On the creature's back was a woman of coldly perfect
beauty. She looked at Garric without expression as she swept no more than fifty paces overhead.
“If I had my bow …” he muttered.
All around the mansion, people fell to their knees. One of Royhas' guards chanted a hymn to the Lady in a childish singsong, a vestige of the last time he'd prayed.
“It would take much more than an arrow,” Tenoctris said quietly. “But now that we've driven her from her lair, we may have time to find a permanent solution.”
The winged creature rose gradually as it flew out over the sea. Its wings rippled like those of a stingray, not a bird. It was visible for miles as it continued on toward the southeast.
 
 
Sharina felt the strangers' presence before she heard them. She held still, wondering if her heartbeat echoed as loudly as it seemed to her to do.
The acoustics within the great tree were remarkable. The narrow, twisting passage through the trunk led sound in the way a human ear does; she feared it might also, like a human throat, amplify any noises she made.
“She's in there,” a voice whispered. It was the false Nonnus.
The baobab's interior was faintly lighted when Sharina first entered. The cavity opened to the sky somewhere high in the canopy, though the amount of illumination even at midday was less than that of the stars on an open meadow. It had been enough for Sharina to get a sense of her surroundings.
The cavity was twenty feet in diameter and unfurnished except for the sleeping bench Unarc had hacked into the spongy wood of one side. Since there was ventilation, Sharina had been surprised not to see a flat rock for a cooking fire.
A moment's reflection reminded her that this was a refuge, not a home. The hunter wouldn't have risked giving away his location by even a hidden fire.
Besides, the wooden interior with its narrow crack for ingress and egress made Sharina's stomach tighten as she thought of being trapped by a blaze; though she didn't imagine the real danger was as great as that of a wattle-and-daub hut in Barca's Hamlet. There'd been disastrous fires during several winters within Sharina's memory. Families had died before they could escape.
“Sharina?” said the false Nonnus. He'd raised his voice and was probably standing near the entrance. “I've come to rescue you, child. You can come out now.”
“She's not coming,” another man muttered. Sharina thought she recognized the voice as one of the dispatch vessel's crew, but she couldn't put a name or face to the speaker. “If she's even there.”
In all likelihood, the false Nonnus and his fellows didn't realize how well the girl within could hear them, but that was no help to her. There was only one way out of the baobab: into the arms of her pursuers. The upper opening was probably too small for even a supple human to squirm through, and it was completely inaccessible besides. Sharina guessed she could climb ten or a dozen feet using main strength and splits in the wood, but the cavity's inward slope would prevent even a monkey from reaching the peak hundreds of feet above.
“Come out, child,” the false Nonnus said in a cozening voice that made Sharina's skin crawl. “The wild man who captured you won't return till tomorrow night, if then.”
Sharina squeezed her hands against the hilt of the Pewle knife. “Lady, cast your cloak about me,” she whispered. “Lady—”
She realized that she was calling on the Lady of Peace while she gripped a weapon. She snatched her hands away, then froze.
With a tiny smile, Sharina drew the big knife and held it ready. She'd pray later, if she was able to.
“She's not coming out!” the second voice repeated. “I say we go in and get her if she's there.”
“I
say, Crattus,” said the false Nonnus in a tone of
menace the hermit had never
ever
used, “that'll you'll obey me or regret that you did not.”
The voice became bantering as the impostor continued, “But if you want to enter, go ahead. It'll be pitch dark unless you hold a torch in one hand, and the girl had a knife the last time I saw her.”
“What do you want to do, then?” a third man asked. He sounded tired and vaguely angry. Sharina wondered how many men altogether were in the band.
“We'll camp here and wait for daylight,” the false Nonnus said easily. “At dawn, I'll be able to illuminate the interior through my art. You shouldn't have much difficulty subduing our runaway safely.”
“That's easy to say for somebody who won't be in there facing the knife,” a man rumbled.
“Yes, Osan,” the impostor hissed, false again to the mind of the man whose face he wore. “And easy for you to accomplish, or you shouldn't have taken the queen's gold. Do you want to explain to her that you were less afraid of her wrath than you were of a peasant girl?”
“I'll do my job,” Osan said. “I always have, haven't I?”
“We'll camp here,” the false Nonnus said briskly. “Crattus, make sure two men guard the opening at all times. In the morning we'll take care of the matter and get off this foul island.”
A hand rasped the outer lip of the opening. “We can block this hole with a couple spears rammed into the sides,” Crattus said. “Even if she's got the strength to pull them out, they'll squeal loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Yes, a good idea,” the false Nonnus agreed. “Do that as well.”
A spear thunked into the wood. Echoes shivered about Sharina. Moments later a second spear struck and a human grunted loudly.
“That'll hold her!” said a voice Sharina hadn't heard before.
“What about the big guy she was with?” the third man asked.
“I told you, we'll be long gone before he returns,” the impostor said. “I'm a wizard, remember?”
“I'm not bloody likely to forget that,” Osan muttered. Sharina suspected he was facing the opening into the tree and that she heard more than his companions did. “I'm not bloody likely to work for another wizard, neither!”
“Osan, you and Denalt watch until moonrise,” Crattus ordered. “Bies and Seno, you take over till the moon's a quarter up, and then Bayen and I take the last watch.”
“Say, what if I can't see the moon?” Osan demanded. “It's as dark as a yard up a pig's backside here!”
“Then watch till dawn!” Crattus said. “The rest of you, get as much sleep as you can.”
The men bedded down with only a scatter of further mutterings. They were obviously professionals, though this jungle seemed as foreign to them as it was to Sharina. The false Nonnus said nothing; perhaps he'd gone off to work his wizardry alone.
Sharina didn't know what to do. The tree soughed with the breath of the forest, moist and faintly tinged with decay. She walked across the cavity in darkness and lay down in the alcove.
She considered the possibility that Hanno would return during the night, then rejected it. If the false Nonnus was wizard enough to track Sharina down in this jungle, he was also wizard enough to determine the hunter's whereabouts.

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