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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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The Beast recoiled. If a thunderstorm could be angry, it would sound like the hissing roars of the creature's three heads.
Garric glanced over his shoulder, then skipped backward to the middle of the span. “Chant your spell!” he shouted to the wizards. “Break the bridge!”
“Betput,”
Halphemos called in a clear voice,
“baiai borbar …”
Heat hammered Garric's body. The bridge had been wider than Garric could reach with outstretched arms when he first glimpsed it. It shrank into itself, narrowing and providing less of a shield against the lava blazing below.
“Barphor kolchoi tontonon …
,” Halphemos said. He knelt beside Cerix at the far side of the bridge. It must be very nearly as hot for the wizards as it was for Garric at midspan.
Ilna stood with help from the wizards, throwing and retrieving the sash. Liane was beside her, touching the other girl's shoulder with her fingertips. Liane had no need to stay here. Lava lighted a tunnel rising behind her. She might as well have run up it.
“Phriou rigche alcheine … ,”
Halphemos said.
Garric felt his skin crack. His tunic must be singeing; would it burst into flame?
He laughed, both halves of his person again. If only that were all he had to worry about!
“Rouche!”
shrilled the serpent heads.
“Dropide tarta iao!”
The bridge had shrunk to little more than the width of the felled tulip poplar that crossed the gully north of Barca's Hamlet. As the Beast spoke, the span widened again by a finger's breadth.
That was on the track to Seckler the Butcher's yard … .
“Before I kill you,” boomed the dog head, “I will tear your females apart piece by piece. I will lick up their blood, I will grind their bones between my teeth!”
If the Beast could speak the Yellow King's Key unaided, it wouldn't need to face Garric's sword now. But—
The Beast strode forward thunderously, keeping its three heads high. The attack didn't completely surprise the part of Garric which had survived a hundred battlefields, but the Beast's enormous bulk was as hard to stop as an avalanche.
“
Apomche moz
—,” Halphemos began. One of the serpent heads swung over Garric. The jaws slammed closed on Halphemos.
The Beast's right foreleg swung toward Garric. The foot was a broad pad with five blunt toes, each the size of a human torso. Garric stabbed between two claws, driving the blade into the flesh above the pad of cartilage which supported the monster's weight.
The Beast's cry of triumph changed into a deafening scream. It lurched back on its haunches, jerking Garric forward because he wouldn't release the sword hilt. No human strength could snatch the weapon free when the Beast's injured muscles had spasmed tight on the steel.
Garric held for a moment. Halphemos dangled from the jaws that had struck him; long teeth driven through his skull from both sides had done instantly fatal damage. The other snake head twisted toward the corpse and tore off a mouthful of flesh for itself.
The Beast kicked its injured foot. The weapon remained imbedded in the sensitive flesh, but Garric flew clear. He dropped the buckler and grabbed for the bridge with both hands.
He almost caught himself, but “almost” was the difference between life and death. Garric's fingers brushed the stone but couldn't grip it.
Ilna's noose settled over his outstretched arms and jerked tight. Instead of plunging straight into the blazing lava, his body swung like a pendulum against the far side of the chasm. The shock and the heat knocked him into openmouthed collapse. All Garric saw was concentric circles of red and white glare, expanding to fill the universe.
Garric couldn't use his arms. He felt his torso scrape over the lip of the fiery moat, then hands rolled him away. Merely being sheltered from the lava's radiant heat felt like a plunge into a spring-fed pool. He could see again.
The noose slipped off. Both women bent over him, Ilna with the noose wrapped around her waist to help anchor Garric's weight. She and Liane must still have surprised themselves to have been able to lift him clear.
“Sothaoth agog katochoi!”
Cerix shouted. He wept as he spoke the phrases he'd transcribed for his dead friend.
“Kleidia phuschi choroi!”
A lot of people were surprising themselves this day.
Across the chasm, the Beast started forward again. When the huge right foot touched the bridge, it drove Garric's sword deeper. Screaming from all three mouths, the Beast flinched back.
“Tharona perpo zoile!”
the cripple cried.
The span dissolved like dew in the sunlight, leaving the moat clear. Lava slapped and gurgled; droplets of white-hot rock spattered over the edges of the trough. One splashed a finger's length from Garric and quivered as it cooled, giving off a sulphurous stench. The liquid rock was about to overflow its channel.
“Run,” Garric said, barely whispering. He tried to
stand; Liane's hands gripped his upper arms. “We've got to get higher.”
Cerix weighed more than Ilna did. She lifted him anyway and staggered up the passage. Garric could move his legs, but without Liane he wouldn't even have been able to crawl.
He glanced over his shoulder. Lava flooded from the moat for as far into the distance as Garric could see. The Beast howled words of power as it retreated, but the river of glowing rock continued to widen.
Garric and his companions were out of sight of the domed chamber when the screams began. They were inhuman, penetrating Garric's brain as no sound alone could have done. They went on until the flow of rising lava had filled the passage behind the escaping humans—
And even then, Garric thought he heard the wails of a thing that could not die though all its substance had burned away.
 
 
“I'm too heavy for you to carry,” Cerix muttered. Ilna wouldn't have heard him except that his lips were so close to her ear. “You can leave me here.”
“No,” said Ilna, “I can't. Not if I want to sleep nights, at any rate. If you want to do something useful instead of whining, you might clasp your hands around my neck and take some weight off my arms.”
The wizard obeyed immediately. That helped, though not as much as Ilna would have liked. Her thigh muscles quivered with the strain and her forearms—her hands were locked under Cerix's buttocks—had gone numb. A pity that Cerix wasn't a midget instead of merely a cripple.
The passage seemed interminable. Since there was no light, Ilna kept her course straight by touching the stone wall occasionally with her elbow. There were no seams. Either the tunnel was lined with enormous slabs, or it had been cut from the living rock.
“Alos did it,” Cerix said in a weak whisper. “He killed the Beast.”
“He was a brave man,” Ilna said. She didn't want to talk about Halphemos, but other people had different ways of dealing with unpleasant situations. “We couldn't have succeeded without him.”
Garric stumbled along close behind; on Liane's arm, Ilna supposed. His burns were terrible. Ilna had blisters on the backs of her hands just from leaning over to pull Garric out of the flaming chasm.
“Alos did it!” Cerix said, as close as he could come to shouting. “
He
did it!”
Ilna trudged onward. The wizard began to cry again.
Ilna had started to say, “No, Master Cerix. If there was any one person who killed the Beast,
you
were that person when you closed the bridge over the moat.”
But Cerix didn't want praise: he wanted to be forgiven for living when his friend had died. Ilna could understand the feeling very well.
It was odd that people thought it mattered what things cost. A perfectly woven panel was no better or worse whether you bought it for a few coppers or spent a purse of minted gold. Halphemos had done certain things. The things were of the same importance whether they were easy or if they cost him his life.
As they had.
And perhaps there were worse things than lies. “Yes,” Ilna said aloud. “Halphemos did kill the Beast.”
“Ilna?” Liane called. “There's something ahead of us. I see light.”
“Light” was too strong a word, but a square of the blackness in front of them was less absolute than the neighboring portions.
“I see it,” said Ilna; and because she
was
Ilna, she added, “Now that you've pointed it out.”
“I'll go see what it is,” Garric said. His voice rasped like that of a mummy dug from the ancient sands.
“Yes, and maybe Cerix will run alongside to give you
company!” Ilna snapped; and immediately regretted it. Garric wasn't posturing. There was almost nothing left of him but his duty, so duty had spoken.
There wasn't much left of Ilna either, she supposed. In a mild voice she added, “I'd rather we stayed together, Garric.”
“I hear voices,” Liane said quietly.
They were no longer in a tunnel through rock. A forest of pillars supported arches overhead. Ilna had thought the sounds she heard were echoes of their own voices, their own footsteps, but Liane was right.
Ilna smiled tightly. Liane was right again.
A group of people came toward them from the side. Sharina was in the lead, holding a lantern. Behind her were three men—one of them Cashel and another as big as Cashel, which was something Ilna hadn't seen very often.
And the ape Zahag; and Tenoctris.
Somebody else could carry Cerix now. Ilna knelt and lowered her burden carefully to the stone floor. Physical relief washed over her, though the immediate result was that she felt so wrung out that she almost fell over.
Garric supported Ilna's shoulder with the hand that wasn't around Liane. “Sharina,” he called, “I couldn't be happier to see you—all of you. Tenoctris, we've—the Beast is gone.”
Cashel, looking wobbly but not weak—never weak, not him—walked to Ilna, lifted her, and gave her a hug. “What are you doing in the queen's mansion, Ilna?” he asked.
“Thinking that we need to get Garric to a healer,” she said, squeezing her brother hard before she broke away. The parched skin of her face pinched when she smiled. “And the rest of us too, perhaps.”
“Are we in the queen's mansion?” said Garric, looking back from where he stood with Tenoctris. Liane was close by, ready to catch him if he fell. “I've got to join Attaper and Waldron before the Hairy Men attack.”
Tenoctris looked worn, but hearing that the Beast was dead made the old wizard beam like the sun. “The Hairy Men aren't a danger without the queen,” she said. “Without her art to rule them, they're just a herd of poor, terrified creatures. They'll starve or drown.”
Ilna supposed “dead” was the word for the Beast.
Tenoctris shook her head sadly. “I regret that,” she added, “because they were really quite innocent.”
“As were the many young girls fed to the Beast over the years,” said Garric. “We can't change what's happened; but we can rule the Isles in a fashion that prevents it from happening again.”
“Does anybody else want to get out of here?” asked the big man wearing leather. “Because I surely do!”
“Yes,” said the youth who was clearly
Prince
Garric. “Tenoctris, will you lead us? Because I'm going to do well if I manage the three flights of stairs by myself, let alone remembering directions. I'm not in good shape.”
Cashel lifted Cerix. The wizard was crooning a song of parting, but he'd ceased to blubber.
“Fortunately for me and the Isles,” Garric added as they started in the direction Tenoctris indicated, “I don't have to do things by myself.”
G
arric, smelling of Mistress Ladra's lanolin ointment and walking stiffly in bandages that made him look as though he had elephantiasis, entered the reception hall that served as headquarters for the defense of Ornifal. There were at least three hundred people present now, twice as many as there'd been when he'd last been here two days past.
“All rise for His Majesty Prince Garric!” bellowed the nomenclator.
An attendant had run ahead to warn Royhas. The chancellor had already gotten out of his chair in the center of a long table and was hobbling to the door as quickly as he could. Garric guessed that Royhas' foot had gone to sleep, though he might just be generally stiff from hours seated during tense discussions.
“It seemed to me,”
King Carus murmured with his usual chuckle,
“that the only times I wasn't wearing calluses on my butt listening to boring, crucial talk were the times I was in the field. Then I was mostly trying to sleep wrapped in my cloak and not let the rain rust my sword.”
“Your Majesty?” said Royhas over the scrape and murmur of hundreds of people getting to their feet. “Should you be up?”
“Yes,” Garric said forcefully. He glared at Liane beside him. She covered a giggle with her hand. “Though I'll admit I seem to be the only one who thinks that.”
The reception hall was the largest building in the palace compound. A line of slender pillars down the center of the main room supported a vaulted roof. Clerestory windows lighted the open area, while a portico to either side set off smaller rooms which could be used by officials or for private conferences.
The public entrance on the south side boasted an imposing porch whose pediment displayed the Lady's descent into the Underworld. The private entrance on the north was connected to the royal apartments by a closed passageway. Garric felt a little odd about using the royal suite, but Valence chose to stay in the secluded bungalow to which he'd retired before the crisis.
Besides, though Valence had recovered enough to become a figurehead—Garric
was
King of the Isles, in all but name.
Waldron and Attaper had come out of one of the conference rooms to the side and were walking toward Garric. The commanders themselves were professionally polite,
but the dozen aides in either man's train glared at their rivals in a rage just short of blows.
Garric knew from the visits he'd gotten as he convalesced that there were arguments over how the royal army should be reorganized. He hadn't realized until now quite how serious those arguments were.
“They don't have a million Monkeys from Bight sweeping down on them,”
murmured Carus in a grimly sympathetic tone.
“So they'll fight each other instead of looking a half-step ahead at the next real problem the kingdom will have to face.”
A moment later—with the usual laughter back—the voice in Garric's mind added,
“Or they would if it weren't for you in charge, lad; but you are.”
Ilna and the baron from Third Atara had been in the group talking to Royhas at the chancellor's table. They'd moved close to Garric, waiting for an opportunity to speak.
What
was the baron's name?
“Baron Robilard,” Liane whispered in Garric's ear. Garric almost squeezed her hand in thanks for avoiding the embarrassment.
“Ilna,” Garric said, “I haven't seen you since—”
He didn't know how to describe it. The night as a whole was a blur, though he had clear memories of individual moments:
The Beast waddling toward them, huge even while still distant.
The coarse hairs around the monster's claws and the way its skin dimpled as Garric's sword penetrated.
“I haven't seen you since the other night,” Garric concluded awkwardly. Ilna's crooked smile showed that she understood him perfectly. “And Baron Robilard, I still haven't received you as you deserve. I hope the staff has made you comfortable during the past few days?”
“The baron has been scouting the Monkeys with his warship
Erne,”
Ilna said. “He was hoping he might be
able to report his findings to you, Prince Garric, though Lord Waldron—”
She turned, transfixing the oncoming noble with eyes as sharp as swordpoints.
“—has made it quite clear that he's in charge of naval matters as well as the army.”
Waldron flushed. He'd been treating Robilard as young, foolish, and the ruler of one of the lesser islands. All of that was true, but Waldron might also have remembered that the baron was under the protection of Ilna os-Kenset.
She, never one to neglect kicking an enemy while he was down, added, “Even though as I understand it, the only warship in the Royal Fleet at the moment is the one Baron Robilard commands.”
Attaper was far too professional to smirk. In a bland voice he said, “The Military Council thought it was best to integrate the rowers who escaped with the late Admiral Nitker into the city defenses. Though of course you'll want to review that decision and all the other ones we made, now that you're back on your feet, Your Majesty.”
What had happened to Admiral Nitker? Not that Garric regretted the swine's passing, but blood feuds and lynch law were no way to run a kingdom.
Garric remembered Liane, standing alone in a flame-lit chamber. His teeth clenched and his hand reached reflexively for the hilt of his sword. The new sword; it should prove thoroughly satisfactory as soon as Garric was healthy enough to put its pattern-welded blade through its paces, but the balance wasn't quite that of the weapon he'd become used to … .
Garric laughed, surprising those around him even more than had his stark expression of a moment before. It bothered him that people were always watching him now. He didn't think he'd ever get used to that.
“Nor did I, lad,”
Carus whispered.
“But thank the Gods, I never came to like the attention either.”
“Blood feud is particularly a bad practice for a king to
indulge in,” Garric said aloud. He tried to keep his tone cheerful. “Or even a prince.”
He cleared his throat and went on, “I'm going to assume that Lord Nitker died of injuries received when he attacked the palace with a gang of kidnappers … but I don't want any more unexplained deaths. Do you all, my friends, understand?”
“Actually, he hanged himself because he was afraid of the queen's victory,” Ilna said with a faint smile. She knew that she was the only person in the big room who could say that and be wholeheartedly believed. “Nitker seems to have made a career out of backing losers, himself included.”
Garric and the king in his mind bellowed their laughter. Courtiers watched in amazement. This wasn't the sort of decorum expected in the royal court.
“They'll get used to it,
” Carus chuckled.
“Just as they'll get used to having a real king.”
Garric stepped to Robilard and took his hands. He tried not to wince openly as movement reminded him of his burns.
“Baron,” Garric said, “the kingdom is in your debt for providing a naval force at a time we need one badly. Please, tell me the results of your scouting. I've heard only that the Hairy Men were no longer a threat. I'd appreciate the details.”
That was true, but there was more in the statement than the words. Robilard swelled with pride, and Ilna's smile of satisfaction was for her a shower of thanks.
In Barca's Hamlet you helped your friends—in small things as well as large ones—because your friends were the ones who would help you. That was a good way to live, for a peasant or a king.
“Let's sit down,
please,”
Liane said. “Mistress Ladra and Tenoctris both said you should keep your legs raised as much as possible.”
“If you want privacy, one of the side rooms can be emptied for you at once, Your Majesty,” Royhas said.
“In fact—the Military Council was meeting in Room Seven until a few minutes ago, but I see that they've adjourned—”
The chancellor nodded to Attaper, Waldron, and their aides. He smiled innocently. It wasn't only minions of evil like the queen and the Beast who fought among themselves.
But that was going to stop.
“If you don't mind, Lord Royhas,” Garric said, “I'll use your table here in the middle of things. I've been cooped up in bed for a day and a half now, and I'd like to have some space.”
He gave Royhas precisely the sort of smile the chancellor had offered the soldiers. At the back of Garric's mind, King Carus clapped his hands together in delight.
Garric led the baron toward the table with painful caution. “The Monkeys had captured most of the royal fleet,” Robilard said. “They'd apparently been towing the raft—parts of it—with the ships because the currents wouldn't actually push them to harbor, of course … .”
Courtiers elbowed servants aside to offer Garric and the baron seats. Garric's face stiffened, though he hoped those watching didn't realize the disgust he felt. “Please!” he called. “I can get my own chair!”
There was nothing wrong with service. Garric's family was among the most prosperous in Barca's Hamlet, and they all had served their neighbors at the inn. Anyone who entered the taproom with a copper in his hand had the right to tell Garric to draw him a jack of ale.
What offended Garric was the way rich folk were using the opportunity to serve Garric as a way of abasing themselves. A freeborn citizen didn't
do
that.
And if these courtiers didn't know what was obvious to any Haft peasant, then by the Lady! that was another thing they were going to learn.
“I thought we'd capture one of the ships and tow it back to Valles,” Robilard was saying. “We shot some of the Monkeys aboard one—it was easy, they don't even
know how to swim, it seems. But to tell the truth, we didn't have the stomach to finish the job. They just whimpered, and …”
Garric nodded as pulled out a chair for himself. It struck him as he sat that Baron Robilard might have more in his favor than had initially been obvious. From the appraising look the image of Carus wore as he listened through Garric's ears, Garric wasn't alone in reassessing his judgment.
 
 
Roses of a peach color like none Sharina had seen before covered the pergola. She touched one without plucking it, embarrassed that she and Cashel hadn't thought to step into the open air when the hunters and Zahag came to talk with them. Hanno had to squat in the archway because he was too tall to walk in without stooping.
“Seems like things are pretty well taken care of here, missie,” Hanno said. “That's right, ain't it?”
He wasn't carrying his spear here in the palace nor did Unarc have his hooked fighting knife, though both men had their usual assortment of butchering blades thrust under their belts. They probably didn't regard the butcher knives as weapons, and—perhaps because of who the hunters' friends were—Garric's guards hadn't chosen to make a point of it.
Sharina carried the Pewle knife. Nobody said anything about that, either.
“That's right,” she agreed. “The problem you and I knew about, the queen, is dead; and so is the other one, Tenoctris says.”
Cashel watched Hanno with a respect that the big hunter reciprocated fully. They weren't afraid of each other; Sharina doubted that either man was afraid of anything he could fight. It made Sharina nervous to see them exchanging glances and wondering, even though she
knew
neither man would ever show the other anything but perfect courtesy.
Workmen—gardeners, stonemasons, carpenters, and a dozen other guild specialties—were busy all over the palace compound. Such bustling activity in what had been a wasteland amazed Sharina.
The daughter of Reise the Innkeeper was pleased to see run-down, overgrown structures being cleaned and made right. The innkeeper's daughter also found herself totting up what the work must be costing—at Valles wage-scales, too!
Still, even more than the crowds cheering in the streets, these repairs meant that people believed in the new government.
Sharina remembered where she was. The men and even Zahag were staring at her, though the ape did it while upside down. He hung from a nearby archway commemorating a ruler who'd been lost at sea three centuries past. Unarc saw Sharina look at him directly. He immediately went back to what he'd been doing before: staring fiercely at a stone planter as his big toe probed the acanthus vines carved on the side.
“I was just thinking,” Sharina explained in embarrassment. “That people believe in Prince Garric of Haft.”
“Huh!” Cashel said. “They'd be fools not to.”
He gave her a slow smile, an expression that Hanno echoed unconsciously. “They'd be worse fools,” he added, “to let me hear that they didn't.”

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