Queen of Demons (72 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Sharina crossed her arms as if facing a child. She was fearful, about what the queen might do to Cashel and about what she herself was doing to prevent harm to her friend. Her face was as cold and unmoved as the sharp steel blade of her Pewle knife.
How much did the queen understand? Not as much as she thought she did, of that Sharina was certain. Because the queen had great power, she thought she had great wisdom. The wisdom Sharina had learned from Tenoctris was that there are powers so great that to use them is to destroy oneself. If the queen did reach the Throne of Malkar, the focus of all evil, she doomed herself.
“Ousiri aphi mene phri,
” the queen said. She paced slowly around the circle, her steps sure despite the slanting, slippery surface.
“Katoi, house …
”
Nothing but brief shapes of mist appeared beyond the ruby walls. Sharina looked at her own feet and the words of power she would read when the time came.
“Bachuch bachachuch bazachuch,”
the queen said,
though the sound seemed to come from the walls themselves.
“Bachazachuch bachaxichuch
…”
Sharina tried to think of the Lady, but the rippling tentacles of a great ammonite filled her mind instead. She stood, silent and stern. The fear that filled her heart had no echo on her face.
S
harina didn't know how much time had passed. Her mental numbness was not far removed from the stasis which had held her after the demon snatched her into the queen's power. The wizard's voice droned like water plashing over black stones. Perhaps it was hypnotizing her.
Because of Sharina's state, her mind didn't process the gradual change in the world outside the ruby walls until well after her eyes had registered the differences. She snapped alert; her skin flickered hot, then cold, and seemed to crawl as though she'd just awakened from a faint.
The walls had vanished, but a red cast like the light thrown off by the queen's staff infused the world on which Sharina looked. Leaves trembled around a clearing in the jungles of Bight. Branches had begun to rise after the heavy rainstorm which had beaten them down.
A figure leaped into sight: a Hairy Man, an adult female whose pelt gleamed with the sheen of good health. She shrieked in mindless terror as she poised to fling herself into the foliage on the other side of the clearing. Startled flies whirled upward from the fruit rotting beneath a giant durian tree.
Her pursuer caught her with the sudden finality of a
praying mantis snatching its victim. The motion was so quick that Sharina saw the hunter only at the instant it struck.
The pursuer was a demon: roughly human in shape, but taller than the tallest man and as thin as the wire armature on which the sculptor shapes the clay of his mold. Steam spouted where the demon's taloned feet stood straddled on the damp soil; hair singed from the victim's arms where fingers like knives gripped them. The female cried out with the despair of one to whom death would be a release from corroding terror.
The demon's lower jaw dropped on a double joint instead of hinging open at the back the way a human's would have. Its teeth were like chipped flint; they slid past one another like shears.
A stream of blue-white flame spewed from the demon's mouth, booming like a waterfall against the base of a dawn redwood. The tree's spongy bark exploded in steam and charred fragments. The victim's cries were lost in the thunder of destruction. The hose of fire ceased when the demon's mouth clamped shut, but the tree continued to crackle and hiss.
The demon's eyes glowed a red brighter than any other light in the jungle's gloom. It shifted its grip on its victim. From a groin which until then had been as sexless as the crotch of a tree the demon's penis extended and entered the female.
She stopped struggling. The rape had frozen her the way a wasp's sting paralyzes the spiders on which her offspring will feed.
The demon stepped back from its huddled victim. Its—
his
—member withdrew completely within the snake-thin abdomen. The demon's jaws opened and loosed another fiery lance of triumph, this time immolating a branch thirty feet in the air. Mosses and epiphytes rooted on the bark blazed in red horror, scattering carbonized leaves and tiny animals killed with painless abruptness.
At no time did the demon make a sound of its own,
though its flame roared deafeningly. Life in the forest went silent, then chittered and squeaked at redoubled volume when the first wisps of smoke rose to the higher levels.
The demon's skin grew dull. The creature began to dissolve: no part clearly before the next, yet not all at once. For a moment the demon's eyes blazed from what might have been the rippling of heated air; then they too had vanished.
The victim lifted herself from the wet soil. Welts were rising on her forearms, and the fur on her haunches still smoldered.
Sharina felt sick. She said nothing, nor did she look toward the queen gloating triumphantly outside the circle.
Limping, the victim turned back the way from which she'd come. Another Hairy Man, then several, entered the clearing. They clucked questioningly at the female but jumped angrily away when she tried to embrace them.
The scene faded slowly.
Instead of resuming her chant or telling Sharina to begin the second portion of the incantation, the queen tapped her staff. From the mist congealed the interior of a spacious room.
Sharina and her captor hung in midair. The room had no windows but both end walls were open, looking out over a city where the eaves swept up like ships' prows. The moonlit roofs were made of palm fronds instead of the grass thatching common on houses in Barca's Hamlet.
Fixed to the walls were long, saw-toothed swords and shields with gold blazons worked into snarling beast heads. Twenty feet above the floor a small windmill bracketed to the central beam turned in the breeze through the long room. On each vane was writing that Sharina recognized as the script local to Sirimat, though she couldn't translate or even pronounce the words.
In a miniature hammock draped with purple silk hung an infant. A nurse, the room's only other occupant, sat cross-legged beside the hammock, swinging it gently by
a short cord gripped in the toes of her left foot. She hummed a repetitive tune, pausing frequently to take another bite of leaf-wrapped nut or to spit red juice into the street below.
She turned toward the opening, her lips pursed. The air between her and the sleeping city coalesced like ice forming on the surface of a pond. A demon with a bundle in its arms hunched forward.
The nurse cried out, dropping the remainder of her narcotic. She jumped up. The hammock flailed, rousing shrieks from the baby.
The demon extended its right leg the way a scorpion probes with its pincers. Its hooked hind toe opposed the other three like the talons of a bird. The foot closed over the nurse and squeezed shut. Her scream ended in a startled hiccup of sound as the claws cut her in half at the midriff.
The demon stepped to the hammock with the delicacy of a spider approaching something trapped in its web. It lifted out the infant with one clawed hand, carefully shaking the swaddling clothes from the tiny form. The rich fabrics were soaked with the nurse's blood.
The demon set the child-thing it had brought into the hammock. The human infant in its other hand continued to squeal. The demon's mouth opened. It thrust the infant into its great gape, then closed the jagged teeth around it. The cries stopped.
Men carrying bamboo bows and swords like the ones on the walls ran into the room from the balconies along both sides. The demon grinned at them, then dissolved as it had in the forest of Bight. Sword strokes and black-tipped arrows slashed the air where the creature had been.
The tiny changeling's face was first a demon's, then that of a Hairy Man. When terrified guards bent over the hammock, though, and a man dressed in the feathers of exotic birds rushed in with his aides to see what had happened, the face that looked up at them was that of a perfectly formed human child.
The baby cried for a moment more, then smiled at the men who thought they had rescued her. She was very beautiful.
“My father,” the queen said. “The demon Xochial.”
She tapped her staff. The scene melted into shadows and swirling mist. “Now, girl,” she said, fixing Sharina with her cold eyes. “It's your turn.”
 
 
Tenoctris finished chanting. She wavered sideways but caught herself before Cashel could. The corkscrew of blue light at the center of the small circle she'd scribed here deep in the cellars of the queen's palace shrank to a point. It vanished, leaving only a memory behind.
“‘Is the sun proud or the moon?'” Zahag muttered. “‘Even a poor man's hut is better than living among the ragged clouds.'”
Cashel's lips tightened. Tenoctris had said the ape was quoting poetry he'd heard in Pandah. It wasn't much for poetry, Cashel thought; and it kept reminding him that the ape was on the edge of breaking down completely. Cashel didn't blame Zahag for being afraid, but he wished the ape had stayed back with Garric if he was going to mumble nonsense.
“Do we move again?” Cashel asked, mostly to make sure that Tenoctris was really awake. She leaned on her outstretched hands, gasping quick, shallow breaths.
“‘Rise early, work hard, and think often of your soul … ,'” Zahag said. Cashel's jaw clenched again.
“No, no,” the old wizard said. Her smile warmed and brightened both Cashel's mood and the black walls of the cellars. “We're in the right place, and I think I've even found the key. I apologize for wasting so much of my time and yours, though.”
“Huh!” Cashel said. “I don't have a better place to be than with you, mistress. And I'm not one myself to rush around doing things fast instead of doing them right.”
He cleared his throat. “What is it you need me to do?”
he asked. His duties thus far through the night and morning had been a lot like herding sheep: keeping an eye out while his charges went about their business slowly.
Cashel didn't know what he should be looking out for, but he knew there was something close by. His skin prickled, and the unseen eyes watching were hostile beyond reason; hostile to all life, not just to Cashel or-Kenset and his companions.
“‘If you can snatch a jewel from the seawolf's teeth,'” Zahag said. “‘If you can swim the Outer Sea in a tempest—'”
Cashel reached out. The ape cringed, expecting a blow. Cashel rubbed the beast's scalp instead. “It's all right to be scared, Zahag,” he said. “But Tenoctris knows what she's doing.”
The old wizard grinned. She was so worn that Cashel marveled that the lamplight didn't stream through her like a patch of fog.
“I think I do, yes,” she said. “It remains to be seen whether I have the strength to do it, but—”
Her smile broadened. “I have to, don't I?”
Cashel smiled back at her. He liked people who didn't quit. Tenoctris, well; Tenoctris wouldn't quit till she was dead.
Tenoctris took a deep breath and settled herself straighter. “There's a path that leads to the queen,” she said. “If the queen can be—dealt with, distracted even, she'll lose control over the Hairy Men. They'll no longer be a threat, even if they do reach Ornifal.”
Tenoctris' tone was calm though not nonchalant: she spoke as a master craftsman explaining an apprentice's duties in a fashion that he could understand. “I'll open the path and I hope to keep it open, but you'll have to walk it alone, Cashel.”
“Not alone!” Zahag shrieked. “Not alone! Not alone! I'll not be alone in this place!”
Cashel looked at Tenoctris. She nodded. “If Zahag wants to accompany you,” she said, “there's no reason
he shouldn't. But I don't think he understands—”
“I understand that I'm not going to be alone!” the ape said. “Not in this hellpit, not anywhere on this island. Can't you feel it? Don't you know what's waiting out there?”
“Yes,” said Tenoctris quietly. “I do.”
Cashel shrugged. “I'd like to get on with it, then,” he said. He tried not to sound impatient, but when you knew a fight was coming it was the hardest thing in the world to wait for. He hefted his quarterstaff, giving it a final critical examination by lamplight.
“The caps are iron, aren't they?” Tenoctris said with a frown. “That may be useful, if you're strong enough.”
Cashel looked at her. “Guess we'll learn, won't we?” he said. His voice was a low growl. “Let's get on with it!”
“Yes,” the old wizard said. She took a fresh bamboo skewer from the bundle in her satchel and settled herself before the circle she'd drawn in the dust. “I will.”
“‘You still can't change the mind of a born fool,'” the ape quoted, squeezing tightly against Cashel's bare calf. He was shivering. Cashel rubbed his scalp again.
Poor little monkey … But he wasn't giving up either.
“Ochusoioio nuchie narae, eaeaa …”
Tenoctris said, touching her bamboo wand to a different character with every syllable. Her voice was as calm as a deep pond, but her face writhed with the effort of pronouncing the words of power.
“Aritho skirbeu!”
The basalt walls dimmed. Cashel could still see them as shadows at the corners of his eyes, but a bright web of forces filled the vision of his mind. The pattern spread without boundaries. Lines of red and blue light met, sometimes joining but often filling the same apparent space without contact.
Tenoctris continued to chant. The pattern throbbed in unison with the words of power.
What Cashel saw was as beautiful and as terrible as the constellations of the night sky. He stood in awe, but even
in his wonder he wished that Ilna could watch it also. What would she make of this pattern that was so far beyond her brother's grasp?
In front of Cashel was a tube of red light, one strand of the infinite web. At a distance the lines of power seemed as thin as spider silk, but the opening here in the palace cellars was the size of the inlet to the ancient tide-powered mill owned now by Cashel's uncle. A man could walk upright into it—if he was a man.

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