Queen of Demons (73 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Cashel stepped forward. His hair stood on end and blue fire crackled as his foot touched the insubstantial surface. He laughed deep in his throat and walked on. Zahag, gibbering in terror and refusing to look into the shrinking distance before them, scampered at his side.
From outside the tube had seemed to rise into the distance, but once within Cashel felt only the pressure of the light on him. It was like wading through deep water.
He grinned. He'd done that, carrying a flood-snatched ewe on his back besides.
Cashel couldn't see any end to the passage ahead of them. When curiosity drove him to glance over his shoulder, he couldn't make out Tenoctris stolidly chanting in the cellars either.
“We can't go back now,” Zahag muttered in resignation. “It's too late for that.”
“I just wondered what it looked like,” Cashel said. “I didn't want to go back.”
The ape wrinkled his long, solemn-looking face. “No, you wouldn't,” he said. “That's why you're the chief. And anyway, we have to go on or there won't be anything left.”
Cashel looked at him, but Zahag apparently had nothing to add as he ambled along on all four limbs, looking at the smooth floor of light. Occasionally his lips moved, but he was only mumbling another snatch of verse.
Cashel stretched his arms out to his sides, then bent them back to work other muscles as well. He wondered what they'd find at the end of the passage.
“I guess we'll know soon enough,” he repeated aloud.
“Sooner than that, chief,” Zahag said, lucid again. “Much too soon for
my
taste.”
 
 
Ilna supposed you could say that there were more important things for her to be doing than cleaning the rooms the steward had assigned her, but nobody thus far had told her what those things were. She didn't intend to spend another night in a pigsty unless she heard a very good reason for it.
The royal palace was a sprawl of individual buildings, more all told as there were houses in Barca's Hamlet. The women's quarters were in the eastern corner of the compound, separated from the remainder by a wall faced with tiles glazed in a garden scene. For all practical purposes this section had been unoccupied in the years since the queen built her own mansion in the center of Valles.
It irritated Ilna that the steward automatically chose to put her, Liane, and she supposed Tenoctris here simply because of the words “the Women's Quarters.” She didn't suppose buildings elsewhere within the palace walls were in better condition than this one, though. The attendant who'd led Ilna to this three-room cottage was a member of Chancellor Royhas' personal household. She'd been drafted to help out because virtually all the royal servants had deserted Valence during the lowering threats of the past year. llna swept briskly, sending the last of the dust and cobwebs out the cottage's open door. It was a good rye-straw broom, not a twig besom like those some folks in Barca's Hamlet used because they were sturdier and lasted longer. Not Ilna, of course.
She'd kept the broom and sent the servant girl on her way. Ilna had never found a servant who worked to Ilna os-Kenset's standards; and besides, she didn't like the feeling of someone else doing her work.
She gave the outer room, a combination of anteroom
and reception area, a final inspection. She'd swept it, beaten dust out of the cushions, and removed the mothtattered hangings from the walls.
It was a crime what people allowed to happen to skillful craftsmanship! One of the tapestries, an ancient hero setting out from the harbor of Valles, was work that Ilna would have been proud to have woven herself.
Well, it could be repaired. Ilna walked into the bedroom. Moths had been at the cover of the feather bed as well, but that didn't disturb Ilna particularly. The loose feathers would take some hunting down, but for sleeping she much preferred a mattress of woven straw or simply the bare wooden floor where she'd spent the past night.
There was a sound from outside. Ilna turned. Admiral Nitker and half a dozen other men entered through the open front door.
“Yes?” Ilna said, leaning her broom against the wall. A full-length mirror of silvered bronze stood between piers to the side of the door. In it she looked coldly furious.
That was true enough. Ilna didn't know what Nitker thought his business was, but in Barca's Hamlet you didn't enter someone else's dwelling uninvited.
The admiral had changed clothes since Ilna saw him the night before. He no longer wore armor, but there was a sword of simple pattern in his scabbard. Five of the men with him were obvious sailors—tattooed, weather-beaten, and in two cases missing fingers. They also were armed.
That didn't concern Ilna. She wasn't afraid of the weapons or of anything else about the intruders.
The seventh man was a Dalopan: small, swarthy—darker even than Ilna's own Haft complexion—and wearing sheaves of carefully splintered bones through his earlobes. If he'd been an insect, Ilna would have crushed him without a moment's thought.
She reached into the sleeve of her tunic and brought out several short cords. Her fingers began to knot them while her eyes glared at her visitors.
“Mistress Ilna,” Nitker said, bowing to her. “Master Silyon—”
He gestured to the Dalopan. The five common sailors had spread out to either side of the doorway, though they weren't for the moment moving toward Ilna.
“—believes you can help us. He was King Valence's wizard until the current troubles transpired and the king turned against him. Silyon came to me because I understood how serious the danger was. Silyon's found the power which alone can defeat the queen. Material weapons are useless,
useless.”
One of the sailors began to shiver. He nodded fiercely when the admiral repeated “useless.”
“That's nothing to me,” Ilna said in the tone she'd have used to a man propositioning her for sex. “Talk to Garric—
Prince
Garric, that is, to you. And if Valence turned against the dirt that's standing beside you leering, then he wasn't quite the despicable wretch I'd heard he'd become. I've seen wizards' games, and I have no desire to see more.”
Silyon cackled merrily. Ilna doubted that the fellow was sane, though she didn't suppose it mattered now. Her fingers wove the cords.
“You don't understand, mistress,” Nitker said. His tongue licked his dry lips. The admiral was if anything more frightened than he'd been when Ilna saw him arrive the night before, though at present he held a civilized veneer over the fear. “Prince Garric still thinks swords can—”
“I've never met a man that a sword
couldn't
kill,” Ilna said sharply. “Or a monkey either, I daresay. So long as there's a man wielding the sword, that is. Which may be why you failed so miserably.”
“Get her,” Nitker ordered in a grim voice. The sailors started forward. Ilna threw the knotted cords in the air before them.
The men screamed and fell back, trying to draw the swords they hadn't thought they needed. Ilna stepped to
the wall peg where she'd hung her silken noose. She took it down, watching the scene with a bleak smile.
The cords fell to the floor. In the mirror Ilna saw what the men saw: an ammonite whose coiled shell filled the room. Its tentacles writhed about Nitker and his sailors, threatening to draw them into its gaping beak.
Silyon alone ignored the illusion. He edged into a corner to keep from being trampled by the screaming sailors. He was no more willing to close with Ilna herself than the men who'd accompanied him could face the monster they imagined.
“Turn around!” Silyon cried in a high-pitched voice. “Don't look at her!”
Liane walked in the front door. “Ilna?” she said. “Are you—”
“Run, Liane!” Ilna said. In the same shard of time Silyon shrieked, “Take that woman instead. Quickly! The Beast—”
A sailor, already turning to flee the ammonite of his fancy, grabbed Liane by the shoulders. He gasped and doubled up, but two more sailors and the admiral himself had Liane's arms before she could break free.
A sailor twisted the bloody stiletto out of Liane's hand. The girl bit him. Another sailor clouted her across the forehead with the hilt of his cutlass.
Ilna settled her noose over Nitker's neck and pulled hard. The admiral flopped backward, clutching the rope. Ilna braced a foot on Nitker's chest. Her victim's face turned purple.
Four sailors were bundling Liane out the door, wrapped in a long shawl they must have brought for the purpose. The last man was on his knees, weeping in terror as he tried to stuff coils of intestine back through the slit in his belly. The engraved blade of Liane's dagger was no longer than a girl's finger—but that was long enough, and it was as sharp as remorse.
Ilna eyed Silyon, weighing her options. The Dalopan wizard threw a pinch of dust toward the mirror. The metal
surface flashed with the silent brilliance of the sun, blinding Ilna.
She lurched backward into a wall; she'd lost her sense of balance with her sight. She closed her eyes—too late! She hadn't expected that attack. Orange and purple blotches danced in her mind.
Ilna heard Silyon and the sailors escaping through the overgrown gardens that separated the structures within the palace compound. The man Liane knifed had collapsed and was wheezing bubbles in his pooling blood. Nitker had ceased to struggle.
Ilna slipped the noose free and stepped forward. She could make out shapes again, though their outlines flipflopped orange to purple and back every time her heart beat.
“Guards!” she shouted from the doorway. “Guards!”
Figures were running toward her. She ran the noose through her fingers, making sure that neither blood nor vomit had gummed its easy action.
“Mistress?” said a young male voice she didn't recognize. “What's the matter?”
There were three of them, carrying spears. Most of the troops who'd ordinarily be guarding the palace were off training and stiffening the city militias against the threat drifting down on the currents of the Inner Sea.
“Did you see five men run away carrying a woman in a cloth?” Ilna said, furious at her inability to see clearly. She didn't even know which direction the wizard and his minions had gone.
“Mistress?” the guard repeated. The men were still only forms, though Ilna was beginning to contrast the gleam of armor from the duller blur of their faces.
“Take me to Garric at once!” Ilna said. “I can't see, so you'll have to guide me.”
A gasp from the cottage reminded her of Nitker. She supposed it was a good thing that he'd survived to explain the attack, though for her own part Ilna wouldn't have
lost any sleep if she'd killed the admiral as she'd intended to do.
She gestured behind her. “Take that one, too. Garric will want to question him. And
don't
let him get away!”
Two soldiers entered the cottage while the third took Ilna's hand.
Garric wasn't going to like what Ilna had to tell him. She touched her waist. The sash she'd woven as a twin to Liane's was still in place. Ilna guessed that she'd shortly be able to make up for the unjust hostility she'd shown toward Liane from the beginning.
She smiled. She'd either help Liane escape from the present danger, or she'd die. Either result would cancel the debt Ilna felt she owed the girl.
 
 
Garric rested his hand on Ilna's shoulder. He'd put it there to support his friend while a healer applied ointment to her eyes, but now it was Garric himself who needed the contact.
“The Beast is the only one who can defeat the queen's forces,” Admiral Nitker said in a rasping whisper. “Silyon said he could raise the Beast through his mirror of art, but the Beast won't help unless …”
Nitker subsided, coughing. Ilna's noose had left a bleeding purple welt the full circuit of his neck. The healer had given Nitker a draft of effervescent salts in wine to gargle before the man could speak, but the swelling flesh still threatened to finish the job that the silk had begun.
The healer held a ceramic bowl in which he'd mixed more of his potion. He looked at Garric. Garric shook his head curtly.
“Talk,” Garric said, “or there's no reason for you to live further. If you pretend again that you can't go on, I'll kill you with my own hand.”
The voice and words were his. King Carus nodded
grimly at the edges of Garric's awareness, but the cold anger Garric felt was a thing of his own.
“The Beast must be fed,” Nitker whispered. “Silyon said we should bring the woman Ilna to the Beast's vault, but she raised a monster against us. When the other girl came to the door, I suppose Silyon decided she'd be better than nothing.”

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