Queen of Demons (71 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“I'll go with Tenoctris,” Cashel said. He caught himself in sudden embarrassment. “Unless it's something that, you know, somebody has to read. If it's just carrying the bag, though, I can do that.”
Tenoctris looked from Garric to Cashel. “It's more than just carrying my materials,” she said with a growing smile, “but it's nothing you can't do for me, Cashel. If things go in the particular fashion I think they might, I would be very glad of your strength beside me.”
Everyone looked at Garric. He blushed, though his deep tan would have made that hard to tell in this light for anybody who didn't know him well. “I don't give orders to Cashel,” he said. “I don't give orders to any of you. You're—”
Garric turned his face toward Halphemos. “You're my friends,” he said. “All of you, I hope. This is a time that the kingdom needs friends, and I need friends especially.”
Halphemos looked at the ground in embarrassment. He nodded fierce agreement.
“We can go now if you like, Tenoctris,” Cashel said. He checked the satchel's buckles, then lifted it to his shoulder. It was pretty heavy; too heavy for Tenoctris, certainly.
Zahag dropped to the ground. He didn't speak but he bared his teeth slightly as he looked around, obviously daring anyone to tell him that he couldn't come too. Cashel rubbed the ape's bristly scalp with a knuckle to reassure him.
Liane had been writing with a brush on a thin beech-wood board. “I'll tell Maurunus to prepare rooms for our new arrivals,” she explained as she stepped to the door.
Liane thrust the door open, her mouth open to call for a runner to take the chit she'd just composed. A group of agitated men led by Royhas stood just outside. The chancellor had already raised his baton of gold-capped ivory to rap on the door panel.
“Your Majesty?” said Royhas, looking past Liane to Garric. “I've summoned Attaper and Waldron, but I'm afraid I have to interrupt you as well.”
The group with Royhas included civilians in court robes and four Blood Eagles. The soldiers guarded not the chancellor but a man wearing an ornate jeweled cuirass over a tunic of gold-embroidered silk. His scabbard was decorated like his armor, but the sword had been removed before the guards brought him into Garric's presence.
“Admiral Nitker has arrived with the three surviving ships of the Royal Fleet,” Royhas continued. He spoke with a stony lack of inflexion to cover what Cashel suspected was disgust. “The crews are understrength, the officer of the harbor watch informs me. The good admiral appears to have lost half the men on the few ships he saved.”
“Do you think you could have done better?” Nitker snarled. He was nearer forty than thirty, though it was hard to tell with nobles. Besides, the terror on his face had aged him considerably. “You couldn't, and you'll learn that quick enough if you try to make a stand here!
The only reason I came to Valles was to give you a chance to get out in the next few hours.”
“If that's the only reason you came here, the oarsmen on your ships don't need to eat or sleep,” said the sternfaced man in gilded armor who'd just arrived from deeper within the palace compound. The newcomer gave Cashel a look that stiffened the youth slightly; not precisely hostile, but appraising in a fashion that Cashel understood very well. “It's surprising that such paragons didn't sweep all opposition before them.”
Nitker flushed and groped at his empty scabbard as he turned. Two of the guards grabbed his elbows and bent his arms back.
“Enough!” Garric said in a crackling voice. “Lord Attaper, I didn't want to fight the admiral before, and I certainly don't think it's a useful occupation now. Can we agree on that?”
The hard-bitten soldier lost all expression for an instant. He bowed. “I apologize, Your Majesty. I've gotten … lax in the past few years.” He straightened and went on, “And I apologize to you also, Lord Nitker. We need your information about the threat and your strength to help us meet it.”
Cashel eyed Garric with new interest. He'd always respected his friend, but he'd never guessed Garric could snap a fellow like this Attaper to attention with a command. Break Attaper's head with a quarterstaff, maybe, though that wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world either. Cashel smiled and slid his hand down his own polished hickory.
“You can't meet it, I tell you!” the admiral blurted. Cashel judged him to be somewhere between tears and a tantrum, utterly undone. “There's hundreds of thousands of them, all the monkey men on the island of Bight, and they're floating down on Ornifal on a raft. They'll kill everybody in Valles. They'll
eat
everybody in Valles, I tell you!”
“They're not monkeys!” Zahag said. “And they're not
apes either,
if
any of you know what either one is.”
Cashel tapped his shoulder, not hard but enough to remind the ape of his manners. “Ah,” Zahag said. “Sorry.”
Garric glanced at Tenoctris and raised an eyebrow. The old wizard nodded. “That could be,” she said.
“The Hairy Men of Bight … ,” she went on, focusing for a moment on her memories. “They've been used for wizardry often enough because they
are
men, but there isn't so much concern about what happens to them as there is when children start disappearing from the neighboring villages.”
She smiled without humor. “Wizardry of a sort I don't practice, obviously,” she said. “To direct large numbers of Hairy Men would require a great deal of power. Even more than raising an army from the undead or the neverliving.”
“Power which the queen has?” Garric said. He sounded interested but not concerned; the tip of his index finger traced the three rounded tiers of his sword's pommel.
“Yes,” Tenoctris said. “It appears that she does.”
Garric shrugged. “Well, we knew we'd have a fight,” he said. “Lord Attaper, get all the details you can from the admiral here. Weapons, numbers—”
He grinned bleakly.
“Which are considerable, I gather. Tactics, command, supplies, the usual things. I'll direct Waldron to put the city militia on alert. Right now, I think, I'd best visit the Arsenal and tell Pior that the Duke of Eshkol—”
He smiled again. The smile came from the Garric Cashel had grown up with, but this talk of armies and tactics was as unlikely as it would be if Garric floated off the ground.
“—has returned with his fleet to the royal service, so it's time for the regular army to do the same.”
Cashel glanced at his friend's feet. They were solidly planted—and his sandals were the sturdy, simple affairs
that a youth from Barca's Hamlet wore in the winter or on a long journey. Cashel grinned.
“You're not listening to me!” Nitker said. “You can't fight these beasts! In a few hours or a day at most they'll be landing on the shore of Ornifal and killing everyone they meet. All you can do is run!”
“I've listened to you, Lord Nitker,” Garric said in a voice that could have come from the outer dark. “I just don't agree.”
He smiled and went on, “We couldn't get all the people of so large a city out in time, and we have the walls and some organization here. That might help.”
“You can't run from evil,” Ilna said without emotion. She was knotting and unknotting the length of cord, but her eyes rested most often on Liane. “You can't run from yourself.”
“Attaper, Admiral?” Garric said. “I think we'd better go to the Arsenal together.”
He frowned. “Do you suppose I ought to throw on something that glitters more, or will Pior listen to sense from a brown cloak?”
“If he listens to sense at all, we're luckier than I expect,” Attaper said in a grim tone. “I'll rouse a couple regiments of Waldron's men while you change, Your Majesty. It's worth adding a threat to the scales at this point. Since the fool may not believe in the
real
threat.”
“Tenoctris?” Cashel said. “Do you still … ?”
“More than ever,” Tenoctris said, rising from the couch where she'd been sitting during the discussions. “There's so dazzlingly much power layered over the queen's mansion that I'm having difficulty finding the stratum that I need.”
Her smile was bright, though her eyes were pinched with concern. “And there's very little time, Cashel. For us, and for the Isles.”
 
 
The queen raised her staff of clear crystal. She smiled at Sharina, then said
“Eidoneia neoieka!”
and struck it on the floor. Red fire pulsed through the staff. Something unseen shattered.
Sharina stood in a ruby sphere. Beyond the walls was mist in which only her fancy formed images. The queen stood beside her.
The concave surface of the floor tilted them toward each other. Sharina tried to move aside, up the wall's curve.
“Don't move!” the queen said. She touched the floor again. There was a crackling sound. She walked around Sharina, drawing a circle less than four feet in diameter. The staff's tip left a line across the ruby the way a knife scribes cheese. The wizard was on the other side of the line.
The queen began writing characters in the Old Script around the inner margin of the circle. “Where are we now?” Sharina asked.
“Don't speak until I tell you to,” the queen said coldly.
Sharina laughed. She wasn't so much resigned to what was happening as detached from it. Though her fingers touched the Pewle knife, she knew that she couldn't harm the queen. If the angry queen killed
her
, then Sharina didn't have to worry whether or not helping the wizard was the right decision.
She looked around her but found little of interest. The sphere in which they stood was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, though it was hard to be sure. The luster of the polished ruby walls reflected the figures within it as a myriad of diminishing images.
“Where does the light come from?” Sharina said. If the ruby itself glowed, there shouldn't be reflections on the walls … or so she thought. There was no source of light within the sphere, of that she was sure.
The queen looked at her. Sharina said, “I told you I'd help. I didn't say I'd be your dog.”
The queen resumed marking the ruby. The rise of the
walls made her movements awkward but she didn't slip on the smooth surface. Sharina couldn't see the queen's feet because the flowing robe concealed them.
Some of the reflected images were of Sharina and a figure that could not have been human, no matter how distorted. Sharina's lips tightened.
The queen had finished writing around the inner circle. Now she resumed the circuit, this time writing outside the line. Each time the staff touched, flashes subtly different in hue from the ruby walls spat within the crystal.
Sharina started to mouth one of the syllables. The queen flicked the staff upward and tapped the girl's chin. A chill greater than what lay at the heart of the Ice Capes froze Sharina's lips and tongue.
“Don't,” the queen said. “Not because I care what might happen to you, but because I want to avoid the effort of reanimating your corpse to speak my incantation. But I will do that if I must, girl. Believe me!”
She lowered the staff. Feeling returned to Sharina's mouth. The underside of her chin prickled as though from frostbite.
The queen completed the words of power in the second ring. She looked at Sharina with lips quivering in the semblance of a smile.
Sharina faced the wizard expressionlessly, as Nonnus would have done—had done—in similar crises. The queen could kill her and perhaps could do worse things, unguessibly worse things; but she couldn't make Sharina show fear.
“I will read the words of the outer circuit,” the queen said. A catch in her honeyed voice suggested that Sharina's refusal to quail irritated her. “I may have to read them a number of times to reach the result I desire. When I finish, you will read the words within. The scene beyond us will become a vision of an ancestor of yours—”
The queen's smile was terrible, even to Sharina in her present detached state.
“—or mine, at the moment of conception.”
The staff in the queen's hand tilted as if moving of its own volition. The tip rapped the wall at eye height. There was no spark within the crystal, nor did the contact mark the ruby surface.
“We will repeat this until we have reached the time of King Lorcan, who founded your line and the Kingdom of the Isles,” the queen said. “As though human reigns could matter! Then your task will be complete.”
Her cold smile became mincing. “I may well spare you.”
“King Lorcan and his wizard ally hid the Throne of Malkar,” Sharina said calmly. “You think you'll gain the throne through me.”
It was a joy in Sharina's heart to see a flash of bestial fury replace the wizard's sneering smile. “Don't speak of things you don't understand, girl!” the queen said. “Or I'll cut your belly open and force your dead lips to speak the words I desire!”

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