Queen of Demons (75 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“Aelgoso bitto aikisos!”
Halphemos said, his white face painted by the glow of lava.
Garric stiffened. Liane glanced at him. He pointed his
index finger. The chasm nearest the party had narrowed. The solid floor on either side was beginning to arch over the glowing rock.
Liane clutched Garric's wrist. For the first time since she'd been lowered into this vault, she could allow herself to believe in the possibility of escape.
Ilna threw the sash, still-faced. Did she know? Did she even care, so long as
her
task was completed correctly?
“Opelion ophelime uriskos … ,”
the young wizard said.
Garric felt the laughter before he heard it, and even what he heard was in his mind rather than through his ears. He'd been watching stone extending like tendrils of waves combing toward one another on a beach. He turned. From the other direction, a thing walked toward them.
Garric shook Liane away without thinking about what he was doing. He drew his sword without haste, just getting ready. The chine of the blade whispered against the scabbard's iron lip, but the keen edges swept clear without rubbing.
King Carus was with Garric, shivering in and out as though the flesh were a garment and the king's spirit a debutante uncertain of her choice of garb. This was Garric's fight; he no longer became the slave of his ancient ancestor when his hand touched a sword hilt or anger rose in him like a hot, crushing tide.
The thing walked on all fours, though occasionally it lifted onto its hind legs like a bear. Not like a man. Not anything like a man.
It had three heads on snaky necks. The heads to either side were reptilian, wedge-shaped like a viper's instead of the narrow, high-combed skulls of the seawolves which occasionally came from the surf to prey on the flocks of Barca's Hamlet. Forked tongues flickered in and out of forests of cone-shaped, finger-long teeth.
The central head might have been a dog's or a baboon's, if ever those beasts had reached the size of this
Beast. It was thirty feet high at the shoulder, and its heads laughed as it came toward the humans.
“I appreciate your efforts on my behalf, Garric or-Reise,” the dog-head said. Flaming rock surged in the moat to the rhythm of the words. “You brought me the one who could open my prison.”
Over the hissing, barking laughter, Garric heard the timbre of his companions' speech change. He couldn't spare the attention to learn why.
“For your help …” the central head said. The snakes continued to laugh like fire in dry leaves. “I will eat you and your friends last of all. Am I not kind, Garric or-Reise?”
“If you come closer,” Garric said, “I'll kill you.”
“When the Yellow King trapped me here, I was the size of this whole enclosure,” the Beast said. Its voice shook the stone, but no real sound came from the dogfanged maw. “I starved here and shrank … but I do not think you will stop me, Garric or-Reise.”
“Garric!” Liane called behind him. “The bridge is open! Come back so that Halphemos can close it behind us!”
The Beast laughed thunderously as it came on. Its steps seemed mincing, but each pace covered as much ground as the legs of a cantering horse.
Garric shuffled a half step back, then another. The Beast was close enough that its serpent heads could strike. He felt the lava's heat on the calves of his legs. A hand, Liane's hand, pressed his shoulder lightly to guide him.
“Rouche,”
said the Beast's central head.
“Dropide tarta iao!”
Cerix wailed as he understood the Beast's plan. “Write the words!” Ilna shouted. “Your job is to write the words!”
Garric stepped forward, swinging his sword.
 
 
“I see the end!” Zahag said. “We're free now. Come
on
, chief!”
The ape reached for Cashel's wrist to tug him along faster, then changed his mind and scampered ahead by himself. Cashel kept going at his own pace, as he would have done in any event.
“Slow down and we'll get there,” Cashel said, loudly enough to be heard over the throb of the air around them. “If there's any
there
to begin with.”
Zahag had saved himself the swat he'd likely have gotten if he'd grabbed the youth. Cashel knew his temper was frayed, and he didn't know what was going to happen next. He didn't like uncertainty.
Zahag crouched, then hopped back to Cashel's side. “Don't you see it?” he said. “Just up ahead there?”
He put a long hand on Cashel's waist. The contact was the ape reassuring himself that he wasn't alone rather than him trying to drag Cashel into something Cashel didn't want to do. Cashel didn't object. He had a lot of experience with soothing frightened animals. Zahag had more reason for fear right now than ever a ewe had in a thunderstorm.
“I see something,” Cashel said. “When we get there, we'll know better what it is.”
The texture of the light farther up the passage had changed, though its dull garnet color had not. Was it brighter?
Cashel shook his head in frustration. He didn't like puzzles. What he wanted was somebody to tell him what to do.
If that involved a fight, so much the better. Cashel didn't fight often, but it was something he understood just fine.
Cashel already knew that he couldn't judge distances within the passage Tenoctris had opened for him. Even so it was a surprise when he and Zahag stepped out onto a vast, bowl-shaped plain before he was aware of it.
Cashel stopped. Zahag, turning his head in nervous
amazement, said, “But where's this? This is as bad as the other!”
“Well, it's different,” Cashel said. The first thing he'd checked was that the passage remained open behind them. It did. He examined their new surroundings, shifting the quarterstaff crosswise now that there was room for it.
“It's not
very
different,” Zahag muttered in a subdued voice, and Cashel had to admit the ape wasn't far wrong.
The ground, the crater walls, and the spike in the center that was the plain's only feature were all of the same red light as the passage that brought them here. The surface was solid and as smooth as ice, but it wasn't real the way rock is, or a tree.
“It's pretty enough in its way,” Cashel said. He shrugged. “I'd like it better if there was a mud wallow or something natural on it. What do you think, Zahag?”
“I think I'd like to be back on Sirimat with the band I was captured from,” Zahag said. “None of them were crazy. They were a lot smarter than present company too.”
Cashel laughed. “I guess we're in one of those knots we saw in the cellars, where the lines come together,” he said. “Let's go see what the thing in the center is.”
It wasn't hard to walk. The red light was smooth, all right, but your foot didn't pressure-melt a film of water like when you stepped down on glare ice. All you had to do here was keep your balance. It wasn't any worse than the wet stepping stones when Pattern Creek was in spate.
Zahag had an even easier time: he went down on all fours. Cashel guessed the ape was mumbling tags of poetry again, but it wasn't loud enough for him to tell for sure.
“I didn't like being squeezed in the way that tunnel did,” Cashel said. He thought he saw clouds blowing above a layer of red haze, and he was pretty sure he could see real rocks and maybe grass under the surface of stony light on which he walked. “This is a lot better, don't you think?”
Zahag didn't reply. It hadn't really been a question anyway.
He didn't see the queen or anything else alive. Well, maybe in that spike in the center … .
Cashel didn't lengthen his stride, but he twirled the quarterstaff just to loosen his shoulder muscles. Lines of blue fire trailed from the iron caps. That surprised him, but not very much. He already knew this was an uncanny place.
“Remember how we got Princess Aria out of the tower?” he said to Zahag.
“I remember,” the ape said. He couldn't have sounded more glum if he'd just heard his sister had died.
Cashel thought there was a sun overhead, but its light only marked a spot on the red sky. All the light here came from the shimmering surfaces, just as it had in the tunnel leading to this plain. You couldn't judge distance in the usual way, because there weren't any shadows.
Cashel didn't quite run into the base of the tower of light—but almost. “Whoa!” he said, chuckling at himself.
He'd been in a better mood since they came out of the passage. He was sure he was getting close to a result. A chance to do something, anyhow.
Cashel prodded the column with his left hand. It was straight up and as smooth as the staff in his other hand. The bottom part wasn't any thicker than many of the trees Cashel had felled over the years, but the top spread out into a ball. That was easier to see here, looking up against the paler sky, than it had been when the bowl's glowing wall was the background.
Even Zahag looked interested. He sniffed at the base of the column, running his left fingertips over the surface a little higher as he walked around the curve.
Cashel felt a rhythm. Chanting, he thought. Maybe Tenoctris, keeping the passage open behind them for as long as she could.
Maybe not Tenoctris at all.
“Well, do you think you can climb it?” Cashel said, hefting his staff in both hands. He looked over his shoulder, but he and Zahag were still alone in the bowl of light.
“It's fifty feet,” the ape said, looking upward. He saw Cashel glance at his fingers in reflex. “That's ten of your paces, chief, left foot to left foot. Both of your hands in paces.”
“Ah,” said Cashel. Zahag hadn't sounded peevish or even sneering when he put the distance in terms Cashel could understand. Better than any words could have, that proved how nervous the ape was.
“I can't get onto the top,” Zahag said, considering the problem again. “Not the way it flares out. But I could maybe get up the shaft, sure.”
“I'd be beholden if you did that,” Cashel said, running the hickory staff through his hands. “It looks like there's windows at the top, and maybe inside … .”
Of course, even if the queen
was
inside, that didn't bring Cashel any closer to scotching her. He didn't have any better ideas, though; and if Zahag did, he sure wasn't offering them.
A pattern was coming together. Cashel figured it'd be time for him to fit his piece in pretty soon.
The ape hopped upward, grasping the column at Cashel's height above the ground. Cashel could have lifted him higher, using the quarterstaff as a prop, but if Zahag couldn't grip it was better to learn that before he was dangerously high off the ground.
Zahag did grip, though. His arms and his shorter legs spread to their full span, so that the ape looked like a crab spider waiting for prey in a flower's heart. His hands could squeeze against each other on opposite sides of the shaft, and even his hind paws stretched far enough to anchor him for the instant it took to slide his hands higher.
Hunching his body and sliding his limbs, the ape proceeded up the column not much slower than he'd accompanied Cashel across the plain of light. He looked about the same as he had rolling forward on all fours, too.
Cashel could hear him muttering verse again, but he was getting the job done.
“Duzi, help Zahag if you can,” Cashel whispered. He eyed the horizon to make sure that nothing was advancing on them unseen. “He's only here to help me, and he doesn't have Gods of his own to pray to.”
“I'm there, chief!” Zahag called. “I've gotten there!”
The ape lifted his torso to where the column widened like the sconce on a firedog that takes sticks of lightwood for illumination. In a shriller voice he said, “I see—”
Zahag did something Cashel hadn't thought was possible: holding on to the column with his hind legs alone, he threw his hands up to grip the part of the tower that swelled like an onion about to blossom. To Cashel it was like watching a fly walk on the ceiling.
Zahag weighed about as much as a man did. If he fell that distance—
“I see a woman!” Zahag cried excitedly. “She's a girl! She's blond and she's waving to—”
He went over backward and his hands shot out. The ape's timing was marvelous, so good that if there'd been any kind of a handhold on the shaft for him to grab he would have caught himself.
There wasn't anything, just a smooth surface that not even an ape could cling to when it wasn't just his weight but the speed of his fall he had to overcome. Zahag's hands slapped the column and held just long enough that his body was tumbling when it broke free.

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