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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“Why?” said Ilna. “Why me?”
Her eyes were red and the sockets glistened with the ointment, but she could see again. Garric wouldn't have wanted Ilna looking at him the way she did the admiral; but then, Garric's own expression was much the same.
Halphemos and the crippled Cerix entered the conference room. The courier Garric had sent for them at Ilna's direction bowed himself out and closed the door.
“I don't know,” Nitker said, huddling with his hands clasped in his lap. “And I don't know where the vault was. I'm not a wizard!”
He isn't a man, either,
Garric thought with a cold bitterness. Though Nitker must have had courage at one time, or he'd not have claimed the throne when Valence had virtually abdicated.
The door opened for Royhas. To Garric's surprise, King Valence was with the chancellor. The king walked with the small steps of man twice his real age. Two worried-looking attendants followed, ready to catch him if he fell.
“I thought His Majesty should be present,” Royhas said. “He's … for the most part, he's himself again.”
“The Beast is coming,” Valence said quietly. Everyone in the room was watching him. “It'll be over soon.”
“One way or another, it may,” Garric said softly. “Your Majesty, do you know where Silyon would have gone with—”
His tongue wanted to choke on the words, but he forced them out without a pause.
“—the sacrifice?”
“To an underground chamber in the palace of the Tyrants
of Valles,” Valence said. “Attaper knows the place; most of the Blood Eagles do, I suppose. I took them there often enough.”
The king wore a tunic decorated only by simple embroidery at the sleeves and neckline. There were neither food stains nor other signs of his recent degradation. “That's where the Beast will enter our world, Silyon told me.”
“Right,” said Garric, rising from the seat he'd forced himself to take. He drew his sword a finger's breadth, then let it slide back; just making sure it was free in its sheath. “I'll take a few Blood Eagles and be back as soon as I can.”
“He'll already have lowered her to the Beast, Prince Garric,” Valence said with the simple clarity of a man who has accepted his end and no longer feels the concerns that rack the living. “Once in the vault, she won't be able to return. Nothing can leave that prison until the Beast itself breaks through the walls that hold it.”
Garric clasped his hands. He'd sent for Tenoctris, but he knew it would be at least an hour before she could arrive from the queen's mansion. As great as Garric's need for advice from a wizard he could trust, he knew also that Tenoctris had chosen to deal with the queen first and only then to face the Beast.
Ilna had unbound her sash. She threw it on the floor in the middle of the gathering. To Garric's surprise, the fabric began to unravel. The twisting fibers looked almost like—
“Those are words in the Old Script!” Garric said.
“Cerix,” Ilna said in the cold calm of her anger. “Does this mean anything to you?”
The cripple bent closer in his chair. He licked his lips and said, “Mistress, I believe it's the first phrase of the Yellow King's Key, a spell of opening. But …”
Ilna balled the fabric in her hands and flung it down again. “And this?” she said as the wool writhed into a different pattern.
“Yes, the next phrase,” Cerix said. The pain that twisted his face now was not that of physical agony from his missing legs. “Those two portions are all that remains of the Key. But mistress, even if you can form the whole sequence, there's no wizard alive who can chant it out.”
Cerix slammed his fists on the stumps of his legs. He was crying. “I'll fail!” he said. “I'll fail, no matter how much I want to help!”
“If you can write the words for me, Cerix,” Halphemos said quietly, “I'll speak them. As we've always done.”
“Alos, even for you!” Cerix said in a tone of desperate grief. “No one since the Yellow King could chant this spell, and he was a myth!”
The younger wizard looked at Ilna. “This is what you want, mistress?” he said.
“Yes,” Ilna said. “It is.”
Halphemos nodded. To Garric he said, “We'll need a carriage for Cerix. I have my athame.”
He gestured with the knife of ivory he held in his hand. “Cerix, will I need anything else?”
“More strength than I believe you have, Alos,” the cripple said. “I wish I could believe in the Gods.”
“Right,” said Garric. “Let's—”
“Garric,” Royhas said. He didn't raise his voice. “Prince. You have an army to command and a country to rule. Leave this business for others.”
“I didn't stop being a man when you made me a prince!” Garric said.
Royhas didn't flinch. “You know that I'm right,” he said. He stood in front of the door. Garric could push past him—or cut him down!—but the chancellor wasn't going to move of his own volition.
And Garric knew that he wouldn't be so angry if he didn't in his heart agree with Royhas.
“You think I'm letting everything else go because I care about Liane,” he said. “All right, I do care about her! But you're all looking at what the queen may do, and
I'll tell you, the Beast Silyon called up is as great a danger. You know
that
, Royhas!”
No one spoke. The image of King Carus, grim as a granite crag, watched from the edges of Garric's mind. This time Carus offered no advice. There were some decisions a king—
With a leap of understanding in his heart, Garric turned to Valence. “Your Majesty,” he said, “your people face a great danger. Go out and lead them. You'll have the best of generals and advisors, but they can't be king.”
Valence looked at Garric with eyes that were a century old. “Me?” he said musingly. “I've never been king, not really.”
“I don't believe that's true,” Garric said, hearing his tone grow hard though not harsh. “And even if it were, Your Majesty—this would be a good time to start. Your people
need
you.”
Valence turned to the man at his side. “Royhas, you'll help me?” he said. “I always trusted you, you know.”
“You can still trust me, Your Majesty,” the chancellor said quietly. “We'll get you into your regalia. Having you to encourage the troops is better than another ten thousand men on the walls!”
They started from the audience room arm in arm; as friends rather than sick man and attendant. Royhas turned his head and gave Garric a quick nod of appreciation.
He really was the king's friend, Garric realized. A better friend than any toady could have been. Even though at the end Royhas had been willing to replace Valence in order to preserve the kingdom.
Garric looked at the others who waited for him to act. His mouth quirked in a smile. “Let's go, then,” he said. “The sooner we start, the sooner we'll—”
He laughed, checking his sword again by a reflex not originally his own.
“—finish, whatever that means, right?” Garric said, completing the thought.
In his mind, King Carus joined in Garric's laughter.
 
 
“Allasan,”
Sharina said. It was the third time she'd spoken the words of the incantation; each iteration grew harder. She felt as though her mouth were full of dry pebbles.
“Eomaltha beth iopa kerbeth … .”
She noticed that the fierce chill was gone and her skin felt warm again. The light changed, shifting from red to blue as though a gossamer screen had dropped and been replaced by one of a different color.
Sharina and the queen watched a moonlit garden, facing the front of a free-standing loggia. At either end of the structure, stone nymphs played in a fountain whose waters spilled into channels among the beds of azaleas.
On the loggia's bench a richly dressed couple made love.
The shadowed figures were anonymous. Cut in the roof molding was a ring on a shield, the coats of arms of the ancient royal line of Haft. Beside it, easily distinguishable because the carving was fresh in decorations otherwise softened by lichen, was the narwhal of the bor-Nallials, an Ornifal noble house.
The couple gasped and moved apart. Both were fully clothed. The woman smoothed the front of her gown while the man laced up the fly of the horseman's breeches he wore with a short jerkin. Embroidery and appliques of metallic fabrics ornamented the garments of both.
Night-flying insects buzzed among the plantings. Occasionally a bat swooped through them, its staggering flight obviously different from a bird's.
The man turned, looked around cautiously, and walked from the loggia. Sharina recognized him from the miniature portrait she'd long ago found among her mother's belongings: he was Niard bor-Nallial, Count of Haft by his marriage to the Countess Tera. He had been killed eighteen years before in the riots during which Sharina's parents had fled Carcosa.
Niard strode away without looking back. For some time
only the insects and the breeze-ruffled blossoms moved in the night. After a safe interval the woman stepped out of the loggia and walked in the opposite direction.
Sharina's breath caught. The woman was a maid from Countess Tera's household, not the countess herself.
The woman with Count Niard was Sharina's mother, Lora.
The queen was apparently ignorant of the real meaning of what she had just displayed. She smiled at Sharina and flicked her crystal staff, melting the idyllic scene into one of chaos. Sharina's heart was cold.
A midwife wearing the black apron of her profession attended Lora on piled straw in the stableyard of a palace. Men armed with a mixture of weapons and household implements—knives, turning spits, and table legs broken off for clubs—streamed past the open gate. Some carried torches; flames gleamed already in many of the palace windows.
Lora thrust with a great cry. The midwife eased the child halfway through the birth canal. Lora gave a final contraction and slumped back in the straw, gasping as the midwife cut and knotted the umbilical cord.
A mule waited, its eyes bandaged. The animal was harnessed to a two-wheeled cart like those couriers used on the western side of Haft where the roads were better than anything near Barca's Hamlet. Shouting and the smell of smoke made the mule restive despite being blindfolded.
A man came from the palace carrying a bundle wrapped in silk brocade. The midwife bleated in fear, then relaxed when light from the burning building fell across his face.
Sharina recognized the man also, though not so quickly as she had Lora. The intervening years had worn hard on the visage of Reise or-Laver, the man Sharina had always thought was her father.
The midwife had wrapped Lora's child in fine wool. Reise handed the woman his bundle, another newborn infant. He bent and helped the barely conscious Lora first to her feet, then into the cart.
The vehicle had a narrow bench and, behind it, a basket for the courier to place letters and parcels. Now it was filled with straw. Reise took the infants from the midwife and tucked them into the basket one at a time. Lora moaned and clutched herself, swaying on the seat.
Reise handed the midwife a coin; moonlight winked on gold. He walked to the front and tugged awkwardly on the reins to guide the blindfolded mule. It obeyed, though nervously. As the cart passed into the riot-torn street, the infant swaddled in rich damask kicked away its coverings.
The queen's art provided diamond-sharp observation. In the firelight there could be no doubt at all that the child Reise had brought from within the palace was male.
The vision faded into mist. Sharina faced the queen. For a moment the wizard's visage was one of human rage; then it changed and the queen's whole form changed, becoming a demon consumed by demonic fury.
“You're not of the royal line!” the demon cried in a voice like grease burning. “Your brother is the descendant of King Lorcan, not you!”
It was like staring into a lightning bolt. Sharina said nothing, waiting for the anger to blast her to dust.
The queen and the red sphere vanished. Sharina stood in the chamber where she had first been imprisoned. Now she was able to move. Beyond the slitted windows was a landscape of smooth, featureless red.
Sharina tried to squeeze through a window. Her slender body fit between the edges of stone, but a barrier as hard as polished ruby stopped her there. She pushed until her muscles trembled and spots danced in front of her eyes; then she sank back on the floor of her cell.
Somewhere Sharina heard chanting.
B
esimon, the officer in charge of the guard detachment and Garric's guide to the entrance of the Beast's lair, reined up his horse beside the one remaining pillar of a decorative arch and looked angrily to right and left. “We didn't come in the daylight,” he explained apologetically. “I need to …”
Two Blood Eagles rode with Garric and Besimon; two more accompanied the carriage thundering close behind with the rest of the party. Garric had decided he neither needed nor wanted more guards.
“
This
way,” Besimon decided, pointing his bare blade to the right. He wheeled his horse down a tree-grown avenue. On either side were fallen columns and architraves whose carvings were too weathered for Garric to be quite sure of their subject.
They came out in a court originally surrounded by a circular portico which had collapsed to a line of column bases and fluted stone barrels nestled into the undergrowth. Silyon knelt beside a well curb more ancient than the neighboring ruins. The sailors who'd helped him had fled, perhaps even before they heard horsemen approaching.
A teardrop of green volcanic glass hung from a silver tripod. Silyon wailed to it, “Great Beast, master of this world and all worlds, accept the offering we made you. Strike the queen your enemy—”
Laughter, three-voiced and so loud it seemed to fill the sky, rocked the clearing. The obsidian bead danced to the hellish merriment.
“—and her bestial minions!” Silyon shrieked. He didn't notice the horsemen's arrival.
Garric slipped from his saddle. The small buckler strapped to his back bounced against his kidneys; he should have cinched it tighter. He let his nervous mount scamper off because there was no time to tether it.
Garric grasped Silyon by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet. The tripod fell over on the grass.
“Where's Liane?” Garric shouted, though he already knew. A rope attached to a fallen cornice led to the well curb, where it had been freshly severed.
“Accept our offering!” Silyon cried. Cackling, he toppled backward on the ground. “Accept—”
Besimon ran his sword through Silyon's upper chest, then slashed the wizard's throat to the spine for good measure. “I should have done that a year ago,” he muttered as he wiped his blade on Silyon's tunic.
Garric looked over the well curb. He didn't know what he expected to see: rough stonework and darkness, he supposed.
Liane was fifty feet below. At her side was the sash Ilna had woven her, now a tangle of threads. Marks on the well curb showed where ropes had rubbed in the past, but there was no sign below of the burdens they had lowered.
Liane and the stone floor on which she stood were illuminated by pulsing orange-red light. She turned her head as though trying to catch the source of a sound or to focus on motion caught in the corner of her eyes.
“Liane!” Garric called. She didn't look up. Liane's fingers were tented together before her so that she at least appeared composed.
The carriage swung to a crashing stop behind Garric. The iron tire of its right front wheel had powdered a weathered marble transom. Garric turned. Ilna jumped off the vehicle as quickly as the two Blood Eagles. The younger wizard was helping his crippled fellow out of the box while the driver fought the reins of his four horses.
The team was trained for roads rather than overgrown tracks through the forest, but more than that made them nervous. A lowering evil hung over this place.
“Bring the line,” Garric said to Besimon. He checked the laces attaching his scabbard to the sword belt, then pulled the end of the shield strap so that the round of iron-bound birch wouldn't flop no matter how he twisted in his descent. “Liane's there, and I'm going down.”
A soldier tossed his officer the coil of rope from the carriage. Besimon belayed the free end to a column barrel, then carried the coil to the well. “I'll lead, Your Majesty,” he said.
“No,” Garric said, “you won't. I'll go down alone while you and your men guard the rope and my friends here while they chant their spell.”
He took the line from Besimon and dropped it over the curb. It writhed as though alive, trailing its way down.
“The three of us have to be inside the chamber if we're to open it for you to get out,” Cerix said. “Alos, Mistress Ilna, and I.”
Halphemos supported Cerix's right arm, a soldier the other. They'd walked Cerix forward with his stumps dangling in the air. The chair's small wheels would have been useless on this overgrown terrain.
“All of you?” Garric said, looking at the assortment doubtfully. “I thought you could—”
He shrugged. “Work out here, the way Silyon did.”
Cerix smiled grimly as the men carrying him set him down. “I wonder precisely what we
would
open if we spoke the Yellow King's Key here?” he said musingly. “Not the vault of the Beast, I'm sure; though very likely the result for the world would be equally bad.”
A spasm of pain racked Cerix's visage. Garric's eyes narrowed as he considered the cripple's state.
“There's nothing wrong with my arms!” Cerix said sharply.
Ilna toed the dead wizard's face so that she could look at him squarely. She sniffed. “I wonder how many
women made this trip before me?” she asked. “Well, perhaps I'll be the last.”
“Right,” Garric said. He raised the line and looped it around his left boot, holding it in place with the toe of the other foot. The leather of his instep would take most of the friction of the descent.
He swung his legs over the well curb and started down. It didn't surprise him that Ilna insisted on coming next.
Garric's sword swung. The shield, though it was now firm against his rib cage, changed Garric's center of balance so that he hung in an almost horizontal posture. Garric's helmet was a simple cup with a camail of iron rings to cover the back of his neck. Halfway down it fell off.
Garric's first thought was a surge of relief that he was rid of the uncomfortable burden; and after he thought about it, he couldn't see much to quarrel with his first reaction. He grinned. King Carus, bare-headed in Garric's mind save for the golden diadem, laughed.
“Sometimes things work out better than common sense'd let them, lad”
, the king from long ago said.
Though Garric didn't hear a clang, the helmet must have hit near Liane. She was staring upward when the sway of Garric's body next let him look toward her. She'd shaded her eyes with a hand but she didn't appear to see him, even though he was no more than twenty feet above her by that time.
The rope didn't reach quite to the floor of the cavern. Garric dangled at arm's length. If escape were merely a matter of climbing a rope, he could toss Liane high enough to grab the dangling end.
He smiled. Yes, and then perhaps the queen would appear and beg forgiveness of her husband King Valence. That would certainly simplify matters, wouldn't it?
Garric let himself drop the last few feet. His boots hit the stone floor. Liane turned with a gasp, seeing Garric for the first time.
And Garric saw their prison.
They were in a domed cavern vaster than anything that
could exist so near to Valles. The walls were of dense igneous rock, not the limestone of surface outcrops in the grounds of the ruined palace. A fiery glow blasted up from a sunken moat here only a few paces from Garric and Liane. In the opposite direction the band of light followed the curve of the walls into the unguessable distance.
Liane threw herself into Garric's arms. “You shouldn't have come!” she said as she hugged him fiercely. Before he could respond, she'd stepped back. “But how … ?” she asked, looking beyond Garric.
He raised his eyes, expecting to see the dangling rope. There was nothing but the smooth stone vault, colored by the sullen light from the moat. The air was dry and very hot.
Ilna dropped from nowhere to the floor beside them. In her hands was the noose, her weapon of choice. She gasped from the impact, then stepped aside. “You'll have to catch Cerix,” she said. “He's next.”
“Right,” said Garric. He positioned himself where Ilna had just landed, leaning backward with his arms cupped before him. He couldn't see Cerix or the rope, but presumably the wizard could—
Cerix dropped into his arms. Garric's knees flexed; he stepped back and set Cerix on the ground. Because the legless man was as short as a small child, Garric had subconsciously expected the weight of a small child. Cerix was a solidly muscular fellow, fully as heavy as most men even now.
Halphemos appeared from nowhere. He put a hand down to catch himself safely, but the impact slid the athame from his belt to rattle on the stone. He picked it up, held it to the light, and nodded with satisfaction.
Ilna looped her noose around her waist and took the unraveling sash from her sleeve. She walked toward the moat, stopping a pace from the edge and looking down. Garric uncinched his buckler and, holding it in his left hand, went to Ilna's side.
Orange lava flowed a man's height below the rim of a
channel thirty feet broad. Even at this distance the glowing rock shriveled the fine hairs on Garric's cheeks and right forearm. He touched Ilna's arm and drew her back.
“Let's get on with it,” Cerix said in a hoarse voice. He spoke with the resignation of a man who either believes he's already dead or who wishes he were. He'd taken a leaden rod as thick as his little finger from the pouch on his belt.
“Don't we need a circle?” Halphemos said in surprise.
“The Key opens barriers, boy!” the cripple said harshly. He drew the lead across the floor. The metal made a silvery smear, visible as a sheen rather than a color against the black stone. Cerix looked at Ilna and said, “Get on with it!”
Ilna glanced down at him; Garric wouldn't have believed Ilna had the capacity for pity if he hadn't been watching her face at that moment. “Yes, of course,” she said mildly and threw the sash on the ground.
The fabric crawled into syllables expressed in the Old Script. Cerix eyed them, then with his lead stylus drew the words in square modern characters.
“Rouche,”
Halphemos said. “
Dropide tarta iao
.”
Ilna scooped up the sash and threw it again. Her face was expressionless. The wool fell in a different pattern, equally legible. Cerix wrote quickly, sliding his body back with his left hand so that he had bare stone to write on.
Garric tried to read the Old Script aloud as Halphemos poised to speak his mentor's transliteration. The act was unconscious on Garric's part, though on reflection he knew part of it was juvenile bragging:
“I'm better schooled than you are!”
And so he was, for Reise had given his children an education that compared favorably to the best available in the academies of Valles and Erdin. But there was more to wizardry than the ability to read the Old Script: Garric's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth before he could finish pronouncing the initial syllable.
Garric had been involved in wizardry before, aiding
Tenoctris with incantations which required more than one speaker. This was something at another level, as far beyond Garric's strength as it would have been to smash the vault's dense walls with his hand.
Garric felt new respect for Halphemos, and for the first time he had some understanding of the plight in which Cerix found himself. It wasn't just a matter of the cripple needing to get a grip on himself, the way Garric had thought in the arrogance of his own good health. Cerix had lost his legs, and the ability to speak
these
words was as surely a matter of strength as running nonstop from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa.
“Abouas sioun serou … ,”
Halphemos chanted. Ilna picked up the fabric and cast it; Cerix drew the words out, and Halphemos poised to speak them.
Liane stood close to Garric, looking into the distance. Garric checked that his sword was free in its scabbard—again. He was tense, and there was nothing useful to occupy either his mind or his muscles for the moment. It was entirely up to the wizards, the wizards and Ilna.
“Katebrimo piste agaleision … ,”
Halphemos said. His face looked fine-etched; sweat beaded his forehead despite the arid atmosphere. His voice didn't falter.
Ilna threw the sash with a sweeping motion of her hand as though she were spreading a cleaned garment on bushes to dry. What did this cost
her
? To look at Ilna's face, the only effort she expended was the slight one of lifting a rag … and perhaps that's all it was.
But neither of the wizards could do the thing Ilna os-Kenset was doing; and with Ilna you were never going to learn the real cost. Perhaps the only virtues Ilna had were the virtues of strength; but no one ever could doubt her strength.
Garric took his right hand from the pommel of his sword and rested it lightly on Liane's shoulder.

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