Queen of Demons (58 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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King Folquin exchanged a glance with the captain of his guard. The soldier frowned and patted his left cheek, the gesture that meant, “No,” here on Pandah.
Half of Cashel regretted the soldier's warning, because a fight would be a lot simpler to figure out than the mess he'd somehow managed to get himself into. Why
wasn't
life simpler?
“I'd say there were plenty of females with more meat on their bones,” Zahag remarked as he continued to crack fleas. “But this one's better than I used to think. She kept the guards off me when we came back, not that I trusted them when I was out of her sight.”
Cashel looked at the ape. Zahag resolutely paid him no attention. Two servants bustled out of the passageway, carrying the hickory quarterstaff between them with as much pomp as if they were hunters with a deer instead of a bare pole.
Aria stepped back and raised her face to Cashel. It hadn't been a trick, her saying she'd go on if he told her she had to. And it hadn't been a joke, either, saying that she'd gone through more than Patient Muzira had. No, sir, it hadn't.
“Aria,” Cashel said. “Princess? Are you really sure staying here is what you want to do? Because I don't care how many there are, I won't let—”
Aria laid her finger vertically across Cashel's lips to silence him. “I know you wouldn't, Cashel,” she said. “This is where I belong. I think Folquin will make a very nice husband. Just the sort of person the Mistress God would choose for me.”
“Ah, Master Cashel?” the king said. Folquin was Cashel's senior by a little. Right now he seemed just a mite of a boy, barely old enough to wear a rag over him when he ran around in the summer. “I want you to know that you're welcome to any position you wish in my palace. Captain of the Guard, perhaps, or—”
“No, no!” Cashel said. He had to laugh at Folquin's earnestness. Why, the boy would probably buy the first
flock of sheep ever to graze on Pandah if Cashel said he wanted to be the royal shepherd! “Your, ah, Majesty, I really need to leave as quick as I can. For Valles, I guess, if that's where Sharina went.”
“You won't be staying for the wedding?” Folquin said with a suspicious enthusiasm. “Of course, the preparations for an event like that will take some time.”
Cashel caught Aria's sharp glance at her husband-to-be, so he needed to speak fast before the princess decided to speed the preparations. The only thing Cashel wanted speeded was himself getting off Pandah and then back to his friends. “If there's a ship in harbor that'll take my labor for the passage, I'll board right now,” he said.
The servants with Cashel's hickory staff were standing close, but they didn't want to interrupt the proceedings by speaking. Cashel reached out with his right hand and took it. The smooth, denser wood felt like coming home.
“Master Cashel,” Folquin said, “if you can wait till the morning, I'll put one of the royal biremes at your disposal.”
Apologetically he added, “It really will take that long to prepare the crew. But it will be a great deal faster than any sailing vessel could be.”
“Ah, well,” Cashel said. “That'd be good, I guess. I'd be beholden to you if you'd do that, ah, Your Majesty.”
Folquin turned to one of his aides. In a crisp voice, very much the king again, he said, “See to it, Mousel. At once.”
“Well, I … ,” Cashel said. He felt pretty silly holding both quarterstaves, but he wasn't sure what to do with the extra one. “If there's a place I can get something to eat, I'm famished with hunger.”
If he'd been sleeping for four days, it was that long since he'd had anything to eat. His last breakfast had been a mess of egg and fruit, tasty enough but not the sort of thing to stick to your ribs for the time it'd had to.
The king didn't even bother to speak an order this time. He gestured to a servant, who trotted off like dogs were
chewing at his heels. “Well, I'll—,” Cashel began.
“Cashel?” Aria said. “You aren't going to keep the staff you had when you rescued me, are you?”
“What?” he said. He held the fir staff out at arm's length and examined it closely. The brass end bands winked in the sunlight; they'd been polished a treat while Cashel was asleep in Silya's chamber. “Well, it's a nice piece and it's lighter than my hickory, but …”
He paused without completing the thought. “Thing is,” he said, “I'd hate for it just to prop up somebody's fishnet. I know, it's just a piece of wood, but—”
“It won't prop up a fishnet,” said the princess. “If you would give it to me, Cashel, I would be honored.”
“And of course I'll pay you—” Folquin blurted.
Aria turned to look at her husband-to-be. “Be silent,” she said without raising her voice.
Cashel couldn't help but grin. Ilna couldn't have done it better, no sir. “Sure, of course you can have it, Princess,” he said aloud. “I wish I had something better to give you for your wedding and all, but …”
He shrugged. He didn't even own the tunic he was standing in.
Servants were coming from the passage with trays of food. Cashel hadn't meant to eat here in the courtyard since it was more or less Folquin's throne room. As hungry as he was, though, it didn't seem to call for objection.
“Cashel?” Aria said. “Is your Sharina beautiful?”
Cashel paused with a ball of fried dough halfway to his mouth. “Is she ever!” he said. “And graceful? You never saw anybody so graceful!”
“She's very lucky,” the princess said as she turned away and began talking to Folquin about nothing in particular.
Cashel—with Zahag's help—was nearly done with the first tray of food in dainty bits, sitting in a corner of the courtyard, when Aria's words went through his mind again. He frowned.
“Zahag?” he said. “She must have meant
I'm
lucky, didn't she?”
“Chief,” the ape said through a mouthful of flat bread smeared with nut paste, “I told you before I've met sheep that were smarter than you are. But it doesn't seem to matter.”
 
 
Sharina stood in a red-lit chamber cut from the living rock, as motionless as an image of the Lady in its niche by the hearth. She could see and hear. The thrum of chanting voices was deeper than ears alone could sense, so perhaps ears were no part of the impression.
There were vertical slits in the walls around her. Beyond each opening was a different scene, viewed as though through a panel of flawless ruby. Of the half dozen Sharina could see from her frozen vantage point, four were or might have been of the world she knew; two were certainly not.
On Sharina's far left, a plain stretched to the horizon under a black sky. A jumble of long crystals covered the surface like straw on the threshing floor.
There was no movement anywhere in the scene. The stars remained static in their unfamiliar patterns, and their reflections along crystals lay in lines as rigid as those of door lintels. The sky was airless so that not even the light trembled.
The next opening looked down on a town of some size. Not very long ago Sharina would have thought it a metropolis as huge as Carcosa or Ragos on ancient Cordin—places Sharina had read about in the epics, but which she'd imagined in the form of Barca's Hamlet writ large because her home was the only community she then knew.
A single figure hunched his way along the moonlit streets: Cerix, rolling his wheeled cart over the gravel with thrusts of the short poles he used when outside. A dog roused by the clatter of tires lunged to the length of its
chain from a doorway, barking silently and pawing the air.
The same chill that kept Sharina motionless seemed to lie on her heart as well. She could see, but she didn't care about the events taking place beyond the ruby curtain.
The third slit showed figures carrying dirt from a pit and up the slope of a mound. It had taken Sharina hours with nothing to do but look at the scenes in front of her before she realized that this vision was not of an anthill roiled by disaster. Rather, humans were laboring under the control of demons with claws like hands full of knives.
Then, because she had visited Erdin on Sandrakkan, she recognized the ruined buildings on the far horizon. When Sharina last saw them they had been the residences of wealthy nobles fronting Palace Square. The image was an hallucination, not reality; an hallucination, or perhaps a prophecy.
Through the fourth window Sharina saw Cashel lying on boards from which he'd thrown all the bedclothes. At home in Barca's Hamlet Cashel slept on the ground or the stone floor of the rooms he shared with his sister in the ancient millhouse. The softness of feathers and finespun fabric was foreign to him, and the night must be warm besides.
At the foot of the bed, curled in a nest of the cast-off blankets, was an ape—perhaps the one Sharina had played chess with in Pandah. Sharina remembered him, just as she remembered the emotions she had felt toward Cashel after he fought a demon to save her; but she felt nothing at all in her present state.
A web of bright lines quivered about Cashel, though he was unaware of them. A tattooed woman with bones through her ears chanted and danced where the lines conjoined, at a point outside Cashel's chamber by the laws of normal space and relationships.
The naked wizard spun, shaking her bone rattle, and the net of red light tightened over the sleeping youth.
Cashel tossed fitfully but neither he nor the ape at his feet awakened.
The fifth opening showed a building of black stone which Sharina recognized, though she had never seen it in waking life. She viewed not only the exterior but also saw through the thick basalt walls. A pair of humans prowled in the vaults many levels below the ground.
The thing that watched in the darkness was not in the same plane of the cosmos as the human intruders. It interpenetrated the stones of waking reality. Its heads bobbed and its tongues tasted the edge of the insubstantial wall separating it from Tenoctris and Garric.
The old woman sat cross-legged, scribed a circle on the stone, and whispered an incantation. The watcher tensed. Its mouths opened and its claws slipped in and out of their sheaths. Barriers thinned, but never quite did they fail completely; and Garric, squatting beside the wizard in the vaults of the queen's mansion in Valles, rested his hand on his sword pommel by habit rather than concern.
Tenoctris rose. Garric replaced the stub of his candle with a fresh one and followed, holding the lantern for her. The watcher slavered; and Sharina shifted her attention to the remaining window, as unmoved as a statue of ice.
The view through the final opening had remained the same from the time Sharina had found herself frozen in this rock chamber. It was a room containing only a waist-high stand on which rested a game board. She couldn't tell for sure how many stone pieces stood on the vast expanse. They were of unfamiliar shapes, no two of them the same; but each time Sharina's attention returned to the motionless tableau, the arrangement seemed different. The question didn't concern her, because now nothing caused her concern.
Sharina looked again at Cashel, whom the tattooed wizard was binding even closer in meshes of light. Motion touched her peripheral vision. Sharina's mind—for not even the pupils of her eyes could move—focused on the sixth opening in the rock.
A woman with features as cold and perfect as the glint of a hawk's eye had entered the chamber. She wore a long-sleeved white gown, gauzy but as opaque as the granite walls of the room in which she stood. A girdle of golden silk cinched her waist, and the hem and throat of her garment were of gold lace.
She looked at Sharina and smiled. “Do you know who I am, Sharina os-Reise?” she asked. Her voice was a liquid contralto that made the very cosmos quiver to its sound.
“You are the queen,” Sharina said, but she knew her lips did not, could not, move.
“Yes, Sharina,” the queen said. “And soon you will take me to the Throne of Malkar.”
She touched one of the tourmaline game pieces. Sharina felt ice tremble through every cell of her being.
The queen laughed and lifted her finger. “But not quite yet, Sharina,” she said. “I have other business first.”
The perfect female form shriveled away like frost in the bright winter sunlight. For a moment an armature of something else, a thing only vaguely human, stood in her place; then that too was gone.
But the game board remained; and the queen's laughter hung in Sharina's mind, echoing down the chill corridors of memory, eternal and inescapable.
 
 
There were no rats here; no insects even. That surprised Garric.
“Tenoctris?” he asked, raising the lantern so that her shadow and his didn't cover any of the expanse the old wizard was viewing. Pillars supported square-sided vaults. So far as Garric could tell, each one was identical to every other vault on this level and on the two basement levels above it. “Are we looking for anything in particular, or … ?”

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