Queen of Demons (46 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“Oh, look at the fountains playing!” Cerix said. “Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as the way the water sparkles in the light? We've found paradise, Halphemos! The Lady took flesh and rescued us!”
Ilna thought of gagging the cripple with a strip of his tunic. She wondered if she still had enough strength to tear cloth. Strangling Cerix would be even more satisfying than simply stopping his mouth.
“So graceful!” Cerix said. “All golden and so beautiful!”
Halphemos was beginning to weave from side to side. His tug on the sash threw Ilna off her line. “Wake up!” she said. “Watch what you're doing.”
She wasn't sure the words came out of her mouth. Her lips were as dry as the dust that caked them.
A circular trapdoor opened in the surface ahead of them, spilling radiance the color of a winter dawn. Humans climbed out and walked toward the trio. They were golden, beautiful; glowing with their own internal light.
Halphemos stumbled and fell as though heart-stabbed. He didn't throw out his hands to catch himself. Ilna dragged the cart a pace onward without noticing. When it jammed against the youth's feet, it jerked her to her knees.
She fumbled, trying to lift Halphemos' face. The dust would suffocate him as surely as the ocean Cerix kept maundering about. She finally laced the fingers of both hands in his hair and tugged his mouth and nose clear.
The golden folk of Ilna's hallucination gently lifted the youth. Other hands helped her rise. Her body felt as light as dandelion fluff.
“Relax, just let us carry you,” said a melodious voice. Ilna drifted across the landscape toward the trapdoor and its spire of light. She couldn't see her companions. She supposed she was dead.
A sponge soaked in sweet wine bathed her lips. The alcohol bit where the dry skin had cracked.
The pain seemed real. Her eyes focused again. A male figure, tall and slender, passed her through the trapdoor to a statuesque female. Similar figures carried Halphemos and Cerix down a curving ramp ahead of her.
Beyond, all was light and vegetation and architecture
as delicate as sugar sculptures. Water danced in scores of streams and fountains among the greenery. The illumination soaked through Ilna's being. She could hear singing voices more pure and rapturous than those of cardinals in springtime.
Her consciousness sank into the pool of golden radiance and vanished beneath its warm surface.
 
 
The wizard Nimet, who called himself Nonnus the Hermit when he wore his present guise, had scribed his circle of power on a roof slate from the ruins of Unarc's hut. He tapped his athame of fossil bone as he intoned,
“Barbliois eipsatha athariath … .”
Nimet's six soldiers waited at the entrance to the baobab's interior. Osan pretended to be studying the rim of his round buckler, unaware of the wizardry going on a few paces away. None of the others looked uncomfortable, though their expressions ranged from boredom to the concern of Crattus, their commander. The girl was active and resourceful, and a Pewle knife wasn't a joke no matter who wielded it.
“Pelchaphiaon barbathieaoth io,
” Nimet said. The sun had risen a few minutes before, though no light had as yet penetrated to the forest floor. A spherical effigy of the dawn sky formed above the circle of power, complete with clouds and a line of fruit bats straggling home. The great bats were tiny as dust motes in the illusion.
The soldiers held small shields in their left hands. They had simple bronze helmets and cuirasses of stiffened linen, already soaked with their sweat. Denalt and Bies held their spears reversed to use as clubs since they'd be the first into the cavity. Osan and Seno had their swords drawn; they would follow.
“Marmarauoth ieaoth,”
the wizard said. As he spoke the illusion of sunlit sky rose to the height of a man's head. It began to drift toward the opening into the baobab.
Its cold illumination, faint in absolute terms, was as bright as a torch in the gloom beneath the canopy.
Crattus and Bayen were veterans of thirty years' experience. They'd pin the girl's shoulders to the wall with their spears if they had to, trusting the Goddess Fortune to keep them from fatally nicking an artery. Nimet wanted the girl captured alive, but he'd made it clear that he was even more concerned to stay alive himself.
Crattus didn't quarrel with an employer's priorities. Besides, his own were similar.
“Achrammachamarei!”
Nimet cried. He staggered up from his seated position. The sympathetic illusion, in all ways an image of the sky above the jungle, trembled through the slot into the baobab. It illuminated the wood as it passed.
“Time to earn our pay,” Crattus said, nodding to Denalt. The leading soldier eased into the tree, holding his buckler sideways until the opening widened sufficiently for him to straighten it before him.
“You mean we haven't been already?” Bies said with a morose grimace. He followed Denalt. Osan, then Seno, slipped through behind them. Each waited just long enough that he didn't tread on the heels of the man preceding.
The illusion hung in the center of the cavity, casting its soft radiance on the living wood. A lump covered by a blue cloak lay in the sleeping notch on the far side. A sturdy javelin leaned against the wall beside it.
“Is she dead?” Denalt said. He took a careful step toward the cloak, his buckler well advanced.
“
Watch
—,” Bies screamed.
Nonnus leaped down from where he clung to the wall above the entrance. He landed between Osan, just squirming through the opening, and the soldiers already inside. The Pewle knife severed Osan's throat.
Nonnus turned on the balls of his feet. Bies was trying to face around and reverse his spear for use. The Pewle knife, sharp and as heavy as an axeblade, entered beneath
the lower edge of Bies' short cuirass and continued through the way a scythe cuts wheat. The same stroke severed the tendons and arteries at the back of Denalt's knees before the man had fully realized the debris rolled in Sharina's cloak wasn't his real enemy.
Osan bolted into the cavity, spewing blood like a headless chicken. He tripped on a coil of Bies' intestines; both men fell, tangled with the screaming Denalt.
“What?” cried Seno, pushing ahead to see why Osan had jumped forward that way. His head was slightly lowered. Nonnus chopped through his spine from behind and slipped into the opening like a gory shadow.
“Get back!” Crattus said. The shouts within the cavity were meaningless, but he could smell fresh blood.
Bayen stepped sideways to let Seno through the narrow slot. He'd opened his mouth to say something to Crattus. Nonnus gripped Bayen's spear just behind the head and jerked the soldier to the side. Bayen dropped the spear, but he was still off-balance for the instant it took the Pewle knife to stab up through his throat. His severed tongue flew out in a red spray.
Crattus thrust over the body of his toppling comrade. Nonnus had gone under Bayen instead.
Crattus shouted a curse and jumped backward. The slashing Pewle knife opened the side of his left thigh, nicking the bone. Severed muscles shrank back to their attachments, leaving the ends of the femoral artery writhing unsupported. The lower portion oozed; the upper end spurted, draining the soldier's blood in powerful gouts.
Crattus fell on his back. He was a good man; he managed to throw his spear in Nonnus' direction, though he can't have imagined he had any chance of success.
Instead of ducking, Nonnus ticked the point aside with the back of his knife. He'd have liked to finish Crattus quickly for mercy's sake, but the old veteran drew his sword while his left hand tried to clamp his wound closed.
It wouldn't do him any good, but Nonnus respected his
willingness to try. Crattus wasn't a man to take chances with.
Nimet had run away blindly when he saw a bloody demon spring from the opening into the tree. Nonnus bent and wiped the Pewle knife on the hem of Bayen's tunic before he sheathed the weapon again. He followed the wizard at an easy pace. The jungle wasn't a familiar environment to him, but the laws of every place were the same: stay aware of your surroundings, and don't do anything hastily.
He found Nimet fifty paces away. The wizard had run into a stand of bamboo. Nonnus grinned faintly. He'd have had as much luck pushing his way through a granite boulder as he did with a grove of thumb-thick bamboo.
Nimet had penetrated several feet into the wiry mass; now he was clawing his way back and finding the springy stems just as determined a barrier in this direction as the other. He saw Nonnus waiting under the broad leaves of an elephant-ear plant.
Nimet screamed and tried to draw his sword. His arm was tangled with the bamboo stems. The leaves, tiny but saw-edged, had covered his bare skin with a tracery of cuts.
“Do you recognize me, Nimet?” Nonnus asked. His left hand reached into the bamboo, caught the wizard by the neck, and jerked him out. They stood nose to nose; Nimet's fingers clutched at the hand choking him but without loosening its grip.
The men's features were identical, but blood from the hermit's victims had bathed his skin and clothes. His free hand touched the knife hilt but did not draw it. Nimet's mouth blew bubbles as he tried to speak.
“You'd foul my steel!” Nonnus said. He twisted, flinging the wizard facedown on the leaf litter. Before Nimet could rise, Nonnus had stepped on the back of his neck.
“I'll—” Nimet screamed.
Nonnus caught a handful of the wizard's hair and jerked upward. The neck broke with a sharp crack.
The hermit stepped back, breathing hard. His job was done.
He looked upward, toward a star-shaped patch of clear sky. He smiled faintly. The change came with the suddenness of a tropic sunset. Flesh and bone flowed back to their original semblance.
Where a man in his forties had stood, a tall, willowy young woman sank to the ground unconscious. Her arms and clothing were red with the blood of her enemies.
 
 
Cashel couldn't breathe. Spiders were crawling on his face. He moved a leaden arm to brush them away.
He was facedown in saltwater, drowning. Aria screamed in his ear as she tried to tug his nostrils to the surface. He turned, blowing like a whale, and went under again. He didn't have any strength and he couldn't remember how he came to be in the sea.
“Zahag! Help me!” the princess cried. She was pulling on the neck of Cashel's tunic now.
Cashel tried to breathe, sucked water, and thrashed his arms in frustrated anger. This time his head and shoulders came up. He saw a dinghy bobbing a dozen paces away. The man in it—
The man in it was Cozro, the master of the ship that brought the corpse of the scaly man to Erdin. What was he doing here?
Cozro sat in the dinghy's stern, paddling clumsily with both hands. He rigidly ignored Cashel and the girl. She was screaming like she hoped to be heard back on Pandah.
Zahag swarmed over the dinghy's gunwale. Cozro stopped splashing and raised a rusty cutlass. The ape hopped backward into the bow, swinging his body between his long arms. His shrieks rose into an insectile chirping.
Cashel swam toward the dinghy in a walloping breast-stroke. He was so tired that he heard but did not feel the sea he splashed through.
Cozro saw him coming and settled back in the stern of the rocking dinghy. “Who are you?” he shouted.
Cashel caught the gunwale. He wasn't sure he could lift himself into the boat. He'd only been able to swim this far because he was worried about Zahag. “Put that sword down!” he shouted to Cozro.
Aria grabbed the side also. “Zahag!” she shouted. “Help Cashel get in!”
The princess floated like thistledown, buoyed up by her gauzy garments. If they became saturated they'd take her to the bottom like an anchor, but so long as air was trapped between the layers they were a benefit.
“How did I know you were human?” Cozro said. He lowered the cutlass though he didn't put it away. “I thought you were more, were more …”
Zahag grasped Cashel by the arm with one inhumanly strong hand and started to drag him upward. Though the ape also held the opposite gunwale, the dinghy still threatened to turn turtle. Cozro shouted in fear and threw his considerable weight to the other side. Cashel, finding the strength after all, rolled into the belly of the boat.
No one spoke for a moment. The dinghy rocked as Aria crawled in with assistance from Zahag.
“Who are you?” Cozro repeated. He'd put the cutlass down and seemed afraid to pick it up again. That showed he had an idea of how Cashel felt about the captain's apparent intention of leaving them to sink or swim as he paddled to the island alone.
Cashel was breathing hard. He wasn't quite ready to sit on a thwart instead of sprawling across it, but the abnormal exhaustion was draining away.

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