Queen of Demons (67 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Hosten started to speak. Ilna stepped in front of him and crossed her arms.
“Lord Hosten carried out your orders, my lord,” she said. Her voice rang like cymbals from the high marble walls. “It took longer than I'd expected, but I've carried out your orders too. The Elder Romi informed me that he
would come to your dinner when the moon sets.”
Robilard lurched upright and tried to stand. He fell back into his seat at the first attempt. He flung his silver cup to the table and stood with a nervous footman supporting him by either elbow.
Robilard pointed his finger at Ilna. “You're a fool!” he shouted. “And you're a liar!”
“I've often been a fool,” Ilna said, each word a whipcrack. “I've never seen the point of lying, though. And I warn you, Baron, I very much doubt that the Elder Romi lies either.”
“Put her in the cage with the other one!” Robilard said. “In the morning take them both out and dump them. Let them try their lies on the fish!”
“My lord?” Hosten said desperately. “I really think—”
“Be silent!” Robilard screamed. “Do you want to join them?”
The baron wavered and almost fell on his face. The footmen managed to catch him so that he flopped back on his chair instead.
Ilna turned to Hosten. “Yes, be quiet or I'll silence you myself,” she said. She half-smiled. “Besides, I think it's time for you to go.”
Hosten shook his head. “I pledged my honor,” he said in a stony voice. He led Ilna to the cage and slid the bolt to open it. Ilna curtsied to him, then ducked to enter the tight confines. The door clanged shut behind her.
Conversation resumed but the harper stood uncertain. He played with the tuning pegs, glancing frequently at the back of Robilard's head. The baron's last command had been for silence. He might or might not want the declamation to continue, but the harper wasn't alone in thinking it wasn't a good time to call oneself to Robilard's attention in the absence of a specific command.
Lord Hosten sat in the chair left vacant beside Lady Cotolina. A servant offered a cup of wine. Hosten accepted it, but he didn't drink.
“You shouldn't have come back,” Halphemos said in a wretched whisper.
“I don't expect to be here long,” Ilna said. “The moon has probably set by now.”
The atmosphere of the hall grew colder. Ilna puffed from her open mouth; she couldn't see her breath. “Not very long at all,” she said.
The lamps were fading also. Talk stilled; everyone turned toward the doorway. Lady Regowara, able to see down the hall from her position near the center of the cross-table, suddenly screamed and tried to get up.
A figure of blue ice entered the banquet hall. It walked like a man, but it had only a featureless lump for a head. It proceeded around the side of the hall. Behind the first came a line of identical figures, each turning right or left like a parade of footmen taking their places behind the diners.
The harper flung down his instrument and stumbled toward the exit behind him. He snatched the curtain aside, then staggered back bawling in terror. Another of the ice men already stood in the doorway.
Robilard's servants stood transfixed. The intruders directed them toward the main door with deliberate gestures. The servants edged slowly toward the doorway, then broke into a stumbling stampede. Only when they reached the hallway did their terror break in cries of babbling relief.
The ice figure which had blocked the harper's escape stepped aside, then beckoned the man with his finger. The harper stood where he was, gasping like a freshly caught fish.
The ice man gestured again. The harper bolted past him. His screaming terror echoed up the service corridor.
Ilna thought of Garric reading out passages of epic whose majesty escaped her. All Ilna heard was a pattern of words—many of which she didn't know. Even a sniveling coward like the harper shared things with Garric that Ilna, who'd known him all her life, did not.
Ilna's hand touched the loose end of her sash, the pair of the one she'd woven for Liane. Threads go where the weaver places them; and Ilna's life wasn't a pattern of her own weaving.
Across the banquet table, Hosten noticed Ilna and tried to stand. The ice man standing behind him in place of a human servitor put his hand on Hosten's shoulder. The noble shouted, “Let go of me! I'm going to release her!”
For a moment they struggled, the man to rise and the not-man to hold him in his seat. Hosten, gasping and suddenly older than he had seemed before, gave up the attempt.
Halphemos' fingertip drew a circle on the rusty floor of the cage. Though freehand, it was as regular as another person could have managed with a compass. He began to sketch symbols around its margin.
“Cerix taught me to open doors,” he whispered to Ilna. “This is iron, but there's so much power around us that I think I can …”
An ice figure walked to the cradle beside which the nurse cowered. The creature's limbs moved in fluid curves instead of bending at the joints like a human's. It gestured the nurse toward the doorway, then reached into the cradle.
Cotolina cried out and would have risen. Another ice figure held her in place. The first lifted out the twins. Their shrieks sounded thinner, more distant, than was right for such agony of soul.
The ice man, moving with the deliberation of a storm cloud, handed the infants to their mother. Cotolina hugged them to her flat bosom. She whispered words of empty comfort while her tears dripped on their crying faces.
Halphemos had stripped curling leaves from a bracken stem. Using it as a wand he began to tap the symbols he'd drawn from memory on the iron. With his eyes closed to bring Cerix's training closer in his mind, he said,
“Aeo io ioaeoeu, eeouoai … .”
The tax gatherer squeezed his cup in both hands. Twice
he tried to lift the wine to his lips, but his muscles trembled so badly that the contents spilled as soon as he lifted the base from the table.
An ice man tapped the tax gatherer on the shoulder. The man kept his eyes shut and pretended to be unaware.
The creature lifted him by the shoulder with one coldfingered hand. The movement was as gently inexorable as that of a mother cat moving her kittens. The other hand plucked the chair away and set it to the side.
The tax gatherer still wouldn't open his eyes. With trembling lips he murmured the same prayer over and over. Everyone in the room but Halphemos was watching the tableau.
The ice figure released the tax gatherer and gave him a little push toward the door. The fellow stumbled, then at last looked around before breaking into a run. Twice his sandals skidded on the bracken; he caught himself on the doorpost, then vanished down the hallway bellowing hoarsely.
“Ouo ehe damnameneus,”
Halphemos said. Rosy tendrils quivered around the lock. A simple bolt closed the cage but the iron plate and narrow bars prevented a prisoner from reaching the fastener.
Everything else within the huge room glowed blue or was in darkness. The lighted wicks were mere points on the lobes of the lamps, but the ice figures themselves gave off a cold radiance.
Footsteps came up the hallway. They didn't appear heavy, but the echoes persisted as though in a long tunnel.
The Elder Romi, a tall man holding a staff of some pale wood in his right hand, entered the banquet hall.
His robe was black with gold embroidery around the neck, hem, and cuffs. His face was lean though not cadaverous, and his hair the purple-tinged black of a grackle's wing. If Ilna had met him as a stranger, she would have guessed his age at thirty or a trifle less.
Romi's eyes were ancient and ageless.
He glanced at Ilna, gave her a nod and a sardonic smile.
He transferred his attention to Baron Robilard, sitting upright at the head of the table. Lady Regowara had stuffed the knuckles of both hands against her mouth. She was biting so hard that a drop of blood ran down the back of her white wrist.
Cotolina murmured to her infants. Apart from her voice and their wailing, the only one in the hall to speak was Halphemos. The youth was going on with his incantation as if unaware of the ancient wizard's presence.
“I've come at your invitation, Baron,” Romi said. “Where shall I be seated?”
The voice was the one Ilna had heard in the cave. It still reverberated, though Ilna had noticed that the acoustics of this great square room were wretchedly bad.
Robilard opened his mouth. He made gagging sounds, then vomited onto the table and his own right arm.
Romi smiled. “I'll just take the empty seat, then,” he said pleasantly. He walked over to where the tax gatherer had been. One of the ice men moved the chair into place. Romi sat, still holding the staff upright.
“Io churbureth,”
Halphemos muttered.
“Beroch tiamos!”
Spikes of rosy light played across the lock plate the way ghost flames sometimes wrapped tree limbs and the eaves of houses in Barca's Hamlet during cold winter nights. The bolt rasped back. The three staples fixing it to the plate cracked one after the other. With the last, the bolt as well fell clanging to the stone floor.
Halphemos reached for the door. Weakness overcame him. He slumped forward, unable even to sit straight after the exertion of the spell he'd cast. Ilna held the youth, supporting his head with her shoulder. The cage was a good enough place to stay for now.
Ice men silently filled the banqueters' cups. Several of the courtiers drank great slurping drafts; others wept or sat as though nailed to their chairs. Lord Hosten deliberately turned and shook his head at the creature miming an offer to top off a cup already full.
Lady Tamana stared at the wizard beside her. One of her hands was on the table; the other touched the breast of her silken dining chemise. Only the rapid flutter of a vein in her throat proved that Tamana was alive and not a statue like those placed in niches around the hall.
An inhuman servitor mopped the vomit from Baron Robilard's hand and sleeve with a napkin from the neat pile on a serving table. Solicitously, the creature then dabbed the baron's lips and mustache with the cloth. Robilard trembled but did not otherwise move.
The cup at the Elder Romi's place was pewter and without ornamentation. To Ilna's taste it was more attractive than the jewels and florid chasing that decorated the cups the courtiers had been given. Romi lifted the vessel; the wine bubbled into vapor, sizzling more like bacon frying than liquid coming to a boil.
Romi turned the cup over so that all could see it was empty. He set it back on the table. “Is this your hospitality, cousin?” he said in his rolling, laughing voice. “We are cousins, didn't you say?”
“Please,” Robilard said, his first words since the beginning of the visitation. “Please, I didn't know.”
Romi stood with a terrible grace. An ice man removed the chair more smoothly than a human footman could have managed. All eyes were on the wizard.
“I've accepted your invitation, cousin,” Romi said. “Now you and your guests will accept mine.”
Around the table, creatures of glowing ice withdrew the chairs of Robilard and the others. Some of the courtiers would have fallen except for the ice men's inexorable support.
Romi pointed his staff to the doorway. His narrow mouth smiled with the detached interest of an adult watching the antics of a group of children. The banqueters walked toward the door like a procession of the dead. Their legs moved stiffly; a few were being carried by the ice men on either side. Lord Hosten kept his back straight,
but his eyes stared at the neck of the woman ahead of him.
Lady Cotolina hugged the infants to her. She stumbled because she was blind with tears. Every time an ice man touched her to offer help, she shied away with a cry of despair.
The line of figures, human and inhuman, passed out of the banquet hall. The Elder Romi nodded again to Ilna, then turned and followed the others.
Halphemos had recovered enough to raise his head. Ilna shook his hand out of hers and pushed the cage door open. “Stay here,” she said, though it probably didn't matter what the boy did.
She stepped out and stretched her limbs. The cage had been tight, but the tension of what she must do next was worse than stiff muscles. Ilna had acted in anger when she carried out Robilard's bidding; a chasm loomed before her if she failed now to correct her actions.
The lamps in the banquet hall had begun to burn normally again. They illuminated the debris—tableware, spilled wine; bits of clothing dropped and forgotten in the exodus.
Ilna glanced behind her. Halphemos was trying to get out of the cage, though his eyes didn't seem to focus yet. She strode out of the hall and up the empty corridor, walking quickly because Romi and his prisoners had moved faster than she had expected.
The procession had already exited the palace. Romi was walking down the last step from the platform. Ilna, standing on the unfinished porch, called, “Elder Romi! I have a question for you.”

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