Queen of Demons (64 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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The cave kept going down. Ilna wondered how those bearing the Elder Romi's coffin had managed to keep their footing. It wasn't a difficult path apart from the steepness, though.
Ilna was starting to see things in the walls, as though creatures had been entombed in the flow rock. That was nonsense, she knew: discolorations in the underlying rock were further distorted by the lantern light passing through the glistening surfaces of water and translucent stone. She glared at the shapes because she thought that keeping her eyes down on the path might suggest she was afraid.
Ilna laughed. Suggest to who? To the soldiers waiting a lifetime away in the sunlight, perhaps? She patted what would have been the snout of a gaping monster if the shadows hinted the truth.
It felt so cold that the slime on the walls of the cave would have frozen had the sensation been real. Something was toying with Ilna's mind, threatening her with illusions. Her fury when she realized she was being played with warmed her. Prayer might have done the same for
someone who had more belief in the Great Gods than Ilna os-Kenset did.
The lantern was growing dimmer. Ilna stopped and examined it. She could feel a sufficiency of oil sloshing in the reservoir. She tried adjusting the wick, first up and then down. She tilted the lantern slightly in case there wasn't a proper length of wick within the tank.
The flame sank to a faint blue glow. Ilna set the lantern near the side of the cave, where a knob would keep it from skidding down on its own. She proceeded without it, touching the left wall with her fingertips.
It grew colder. Ilna's lips pursed in a moue of anger.
Ilna would be the last to deny her responsibility for the two wizards who'd followed her from the Garden, but she knew now that she wasn't doing this for Halphemos or Cerix. She was doing it because Baron Robilard was a boy with more power than judgment. He wasn't evil at heart, but he squeezed his subjects and browbeat his associates because there was no one to stop him from doing it and no desire to stop himself.
He'd just tried to do the same thing to Ilna os-Kenset. When this business was over, Baron Robilard would have learned something. Granted, he might not have long to profit from his lesson.
Ilna heard water plashing ahead of her. She supposed it was a persistent drip from the cave roof, amplified by echoes. She continued downward at a measured pace, guiding herself by the touch of her hand.
She was beginning to see again. The cave walls glowed a blue as pale as starlight. Perhaps the light had always been there and it had taken her eyes this long to adapt to it.
The floor of the cave leveled out. Ahead of her was a pool. Water patted the margins, making the sound Ilna had taken for dripping.
There was no question of going on: the cave ended at the pool.
Ilna walked to the edge and knelt. She was trembling
uncontrollably. The
feeling
of cold was real, though her breath didn't hang in the air before her as it would on a winter morning in Barca's Hamlet.
Ilna bowed as she would have done on being presented to any person of age and respectability. Gazing into the pool, she said, “Master Romi, I am Ilna os-Kenset.”
The water was as clear as a diamond. It had the same vague glow as the walls of the cave. Bubbles rose trembling through it and burst with plops when they reached the surface.
“Baron Robilard, who now rules this island,” Ilna continued, “has sent me to invite you to dinner tonight in his palace. He claims you as his ancestor.”
Laughter filled the domed chamber. Ilna looked up. She couldn't see a source for the sound. A bass voice said, “Ilna os-Kenset, are you afraid?”
Ilna rose to her feet. “I'm afraid of my own will, master,” she said truthfully. The chill was passing; her muscles no longer trembled. “I'm afraid of the evil I can do when I'm angry.”
“Is there nothing else you fear, woman?” the disembodied voice demanded. It rose to a thunder that echoed and re-echoed within the hollow walls.
Shapes began to form in the air around Ilna. Some were terrible, and some were far worse than that. The light congealed into dead flesh and flesh that had never been alive.
“Nothing else, Master Romi,” Ilna said to the lowering darkness. “My own evil is quite enough for anyone to face.”
The voice burst into rolling laughter that filled all the world around it. The water in the pool shivered at the spasms of fearful joy.
“Go back to the palace of the man who calls himself my descendant, Mistress Ilna,” the voice said. “Tell him that the Elder Romi, who had no descendants of the flesh, will grace his banquet tonight. I look forward to the entertainment.”
Ilna bowed again. “I will give him your message, master,” she said.
She turned and started up the cave again. Before she reached the point where the floor slanted steeply the voice added, “Tell Baron Robilard that I will come when the moon sets, Ilna. I hope he will be ready for me.”
Ilna trudged upward. The return wasn't as difficult as she'd thought during her descent that it might be.
The rippling laughter followed Ilna to the cave entrance. She too smiled, every step of the way.
 
 
The slit in the rock wall to Sharina's right showed the white room and the game board, nothing else. The other five windows visible from her frozen vantage displayed the sea. Sunset painted the clouds with rosy light. It reflected like blood onto the water beneath.
The aspects were distant from one another by miles, judging from the swatches of sky overhead. The raft covered with Hairy Men filled all five scenes. In the distance beyond, an island humped in silhouette against the sun.
A fleet of fifty warships was attacking the raft. The vessels were under oars, their sails and mainmasts landed onshore to lighten them for action before they set out. From the ships' jibs floated banners bearing the eagle symbol of the royal house of Ornifal, but crossed with a bend of red fabric.
When Sharina saw the floating forest for the first time from her prison, the Hairy Men had wandered it as they chose. Now phantasms prowled the timber mat and drove the brutish humans with gestures and eyes which smoldered like live coals. Instead of running forward to gibber at the warships or fleeing back in wild panic, a phalanx of Hairy Men hunched with crude weapons just beyond the outer barrier of interlaced branches.
On the narrow decks of the ships, archers stood with nocked arrows. They didn't have any better targets than vague movement that might have been the breeze wobbling
shrunken leaves. Some of them loosed anyway. The arrows clipped branches, thudded into tree boles, and occasionally struck one of the Hairy Men. For all the real difference the rare success made, the archers could have emptied their quivers into the sea.
Many of them aimed at the phantasms stalking over the timber in plain sight. The missiles that intersected those demonic figures snapped on through as they would the empty air. If anything, the fiery eyes burned brighter.
The flagship was a massive quinquereme that wobbled because its hull had to be high enough to carry five banks of oars. Signalers around the brazier on its stern platform sent up a plume of purple smoke that all the fleet could see. The triremes that made up the rest of the fleet carried catapults on their bow platforms. Catapult arms slammed forward, sending firepots deep into the mass of floating timber.
Here and there, a splotch of burning oil spread on a tree trunk and struggled to ignite the thick, wet bark. More often the pots splashed into open water and either sank unnoticed or formed a patch of harmless iridescence.
The artillery crews began cranking their lever arms back with small capstans, readying their weapons for another volley. The fleet commander and probably every man abovedecks realized that it would be vain effort. A second smoke plume, this one reddish white, billowed from the signal brazier.
The strokes of a few oarsmen aboard each vessel had enabled the ships to hold their distance from the margins of the raft. At the red signal the vessels began to move forward, their rams toward the mat. Beyond the fringe of branches and yellowing foliage, Hairy Men crouched and phantasms laughed silently.
The fleet could have avoided the raft's slow progress forever, but the island behind them could not. Sharina didn't recognize the dim outline, now hidden in the greater mass of the sea as the sun dropped below the horizon. All that mattered to the entity which commanded
the Hairy Men was that the raft would ground on that shore sometime during the night, nothing else appearing; and that the sailors, for their own reasons, didn't dare let that happen.
One after another the warships made contact with the raft. A few approached at ramming speed, a fast walk, and tried to punch their way through the tangled barrier. That was like trying to row through an island.
Most were caught in branches that gave the way a noose flexes when a rabbit runs full-tilt into it. A few were still less fortunate: these collided with the axe-severed trunks of trees that were often thicker than a man was tall. Even bow timbers reinforced for ramming splintered at the impact, crushing enormous holes in the hulls. The sea rushed in, engulfing the oar benches.
The other captains approached with the same caution as they would have done if docking. Their vessels nuzzled the edges of the raft while petty officers shouted nervous commands to the oarsmen. Marine spearmen and archers scrambled onto the floating mass; behind them followed sailors carrying axes and saws.
While the marines faced the bobbing maze of trunks and branches, the sailors tried to cut the raft apart. From Sharina's viewpoint, looking down on an expanse of floating timber miles across, the hopelessness of the attempt was obvious. Even the men working at sea level, unable to judge the full extent of their task, must have doubted they could ever succeed.
Phantasms all across the forward edge of the raft pointed their smoky arms forward. The Hairy Men obeyed, tens of thousands of them scrambling up from cover and falling on the clumps of civilized humans. To Sharina, it was like watching the surf boil over a gravel strand.
Archers loosed one or sometimes two arrows before being crushed down by a club or a stone wielded by a long hairy arm. Spearmen thrust home, then watched their victims crawl up spearshafts to tear their killers' throats
out before dying themselves. Often the soldiers toppled from wet trunks into a sea that drank them down, burdened as they were by the weight of armor.
The sailors either tried to defend themselves with their tools or, throwing the equipment aside, to scramble back aboard their vessels. The Hairy Men had three or four gripping hands apiece and in their native jungles had become far more familiar with moving across tangles like this one. They leaped open water and nets of branches, sometimes covering twenty feet in a single bound.
Screaming sailors were borne down by savage enemies. Sometimes they lived long enough to feel two or three of the Hairy Men chewing into their bodies in search of kidneys or other particular delicacies.
Catapults fired into the mass, with no more effect than a few score raindrops would have in extinguishing a grass fire. Captains and petty officers stricken by the suddenness of the disaster shouted conflicting orders to the oarsmen still aboard.
A few of the triremes started to back away, but only a few. Fewer still got far enough clear of the raft that the Hairy Men leaping under the phantasms' command didn't catch railings or the extended oars.
When the Hairy Men swarmed aboard a warship, all was chaos and butchery. The rowers were free men, but they had no weapons except the belt knives every sailor—or rural laborer—carried. They were packed too tightly to fight, and too demoralized by the completeness of the catastrophe even to organize under the command of their officers.
Knives and the officers' swords killed, but stones, clubs, and inch-long canine teeth killed faster and more horribly. Triremes wallowed as slaughter washed across them, filling the bilges with steaming blood.
Sharina felt nothing but mild curiosity as she viewed the slaughter. In her present state she understood everything but cared as little as if she were watching the wind pluck white foam from the tips of rising waves.
Surviving Hairy Men squatted on oarbenches meant for the longer, straighter limbs of civilized humans and grasped the oarlooms. Directed by the phantasms, the new rowers brought those ships that had drifted a distance from the raft back against its ragged margins.
More Hairy Men, young and old of either sex, leaped aboard. The warships had been crowded under their own crews, but this influx of half-men squeezed the narrow hulls the way a sheepfold fills in winter. A phantasm in the stern of each vessel gestured the stroke. Despite the crush, the oars now moved with the precision of wooden cogs engaging to drive a mill wheel.
The captured triremes—forty or so from a fleet of fifty—backed, then swung as one and made for the island lowering in what was now near-total darkness. The raft holding more tens of thousands of Hairy Men drifted along the same course but at the speed that wind and current drove it.

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