The Demon Lord (17 page)

“Damn her!” the
eldheisart
spat softly. “Damn him! Damn them all to the black Pit!” He was not a man given to profanity, for he seldom needed it; but he often made promises and his voice had a horrid edging of sincerity about it now. Not a threat; rather an intimation of things to come.

Four of Crisen Geruath’s retainers, acting on his orders, had gone into the Deepwood on a certain errand late last night. Three of the horses had returned so far, but not a man of the four. Nor the item whose retrieval he had specifically entrusted to their ferret-featured leader, Keel. He should have given early consideration to his own words about the poor quality of the Overlord’s hired troops, and instead sent a squad of his own guards. Hindsight, thought Voord with the bitterness experienced by many in such circumstances, was a truly remarkable thing.

“Damned Jouvaines,” he said aloud with the beginnings of fury, aware that his oaths were becoming as repetitive as those of any common soldier. “Damn Crisen!”

There was an air of gloomy self-satisfaction in the knowledge that the underlord was going to do that to himself quite literally, sooner or later. Few men meddled with sorcery in the slapdash manner that Crisen did, and lived long to talk about it. Madness… Which was a Geruath family trait, evidently, for the old man was hardly what Voord considered sane. Such insanity in the Overlord did not concern him overmuch—a man could be stark raving mad and rule the Empire like that without creating comment; indeed it had already happened once or twice—but when that same madness impinged on Lord-Commander Voord’s precisely set-out schemes, then somebody would suffer. And his name would not be Voord…

If Crisen had not been so clumsy about the completion of his peculiar experiments with that huntsman, the Vlechan felt sure that his own more esoteric researches in the small, select part of Sedna’s library would have gone unnoticed long enough for discovery to be unimportant. He did not, of course, blame himself for matching clumsiness with carelessness. That was not Voord’s way.

At least the Jouvaine had possessed sufficient wit to waken him when Sedna transformed her suspicions into action. The woman knew something of what had been going on behind her back—behind the backs of everyone in Seghar—of that Voord was certain. He had known it for at least three days now; had been more certain of a wrongness in her attitude than even the witch herself. A man grew knowledgeable after supervising lengthy interrogations, learning to spot the signs of deception and concealment. She had spoken barely at all that whole day, and what little she had said had been bright with a false, brittle gaiety which betrayed her as surely as a signed and witnessed confession.

He and Crisen had watched her through the concealed peepholes which he had personally made not long after effecting Sedna’s introduction to the underlord and thence to the citadel That match-making had been a masterful stroke, he congratulated himself again. A pity that, having brought such a loving—and useful—couple together, he would now have to be the agent of their parting. Permanently. “Ah well, the sages say that nothing lasts forever.” The echoes of his own brief, ugly chuckle startled him in the quiet, moonlit corridors and he fell silent reflecting uneasily on what he was about to do.

Voord reached the door of Sedna’s library all too quickly. Anticipation was sending shudders down his limbs and the anticipation was not of pleasure. Without pausing he bent down and, after two mistakes, found the tile beneath which Sedna hid her key. He had observed her opening the door just once, but once had been enough. Since then, the
eldheisart
had entered when it pleased him, and so far had escaped detection. After tonight, it would no longer matter…

The library was pitch-black inside, darker even than the incense-and-manfat-reeking cellar where he had left the Vreijek witch. Voord fumbled for his tinderbox, not wishing to enter that black embrace unprepared. He struck flint and steel together, and despite his vaunted self-control drew an apprehensive breath as the swift flash of sparks was caught and returned to his dilated eyes by polished metal, glass and fine gold leaf. To his guilty, nervous mind each small reflection seemed to be the accusing, unwinking gaze of creatures waiting in the shadows. He laughed once, harshly, to show them how little he was afraid, and heard instead the dry cough of an ancient, dying man. After that, Voord did not laugh again.

Like Sedna before ham, he only felt at ease once every lamp and candle had been lit. If he left any dark places the tiny bright-eyed things would surely hide there, watching him—and Voord wanted no witnesses at all. There was another, more practical reason for him to flood the room with light: its presence, he had read, would serve as an additional protection against… It. As Voord touched fire to the last lamp he wished that there were more.

He dragged rugs and furniture aside to make a clear space on the floor, and with a chunk of natural chalk from his belt-pouch—itself painted with words of ritual significance— began to draw a complicated series of linked symbols. They meshed together, one into another, forming a protective pattern as close-knit as any coat of mail: not a summoning, but a guarding circle, intended to keep him safe. Any sorcerer looking at its interwoven curves and angles would have known at once what entity it was meant to guard against; and having recognised, would then have prudently fled…

Only when the circle was complete did Voord cross to the locked steel cabinet. He withdrew a slender metal probe from a hidden pocket—hidden because the probe’s shape broadcast its function to any world-wise eyes that might see it—and with a twist used it to operate the lock’s tumblers. It had taken him almost half an hour and three different lockpicks, the first time. Now… it was as if he owned a key.

Voord’s nostrils twitched; he had smelled old books before and knew their distinctive mingling of leather, dust and age, but there was a different tang in the odour which billowed out of the casket at him—a musky, sour-sweet acid sharpness that reminded him of… Heat rose in his face as he blushed scarlet. “It isn’t possible…” the
eldheisart
breathed, knowing even as he uttered the denial that it was possible, for the scent was unmistakable now. Lust; arousal; passion… Sex.

When he laid hands to the cover of
Enciervanul Doom-nisoar
he discovered—though he had already half-guessed it—where that scent originated; but the shocking revelation which accompanied the discovery was enough for him almost to drop the book.

For it was warm!

The grimoire pulsed, as vibrant with obscene eagerness as any bitch in heat. Voord’s courage almost failed him, and he had to make an effort of will before his fingers would close with sufficient pressure to lift the ghastly volume from its shelf. As he took its weight the book seemed to squirm fractionally, rubbing its leather-bound spine against the soft skin of his palms in a mock-erotic travesty of the way a woman he remembered fondly had moved beneath his touch. He knew, without requiring any proof,

that all the stories he had heard about the making of this vile thing’s cover were nothing but the truth, and felt the burning bile in his throat as his stomach turned over. Irrationally, the Vlechan wondered if he would ever feel completely clean again…

Had it continued to throb and writhe when he stepped inside the boundaries of his spell-circle, Lord-Commander Voord might well have flung down the volume and abandoned his purpose. But it stopped, as he had hoped it might—suddenly and with finality, lying inert on his cringing skin as any ordinary book might do. Voord’s wavering determination returned with a rush of relief which seemed to him almost as audible as the gasp of pent-up breath released from between his clenched teeth.

Setting down the grimoire on a complex triple whorl of thin chalk lines which acted as a focus for the circle’s power, he straightened up and squared his shoulders as he had not done since the last time he was on parade in Drakkesborg. With brisk parade-ground strides he walked to the end wall of the library and threw back the curtain which shrouded it from floor to ceiling. There was more force in the sideways jerk of his left arm than he had perhaps intended, and certainly more weight in the thick velvet than he recalled—both factors combined to send folds of the heavy fabric careering along their rail with a hiss and a staccato clash of bronze rings. Voord started at the unexpected burst of noise above his head and then took a rapid pace back—but his backward step had less to do with any noise than with his reaction to what the curtain had concealed.

He had seen it before, of course: when he had first invaded Sedna’s private domain, he had explored each nook and cranny with the care and thoroughness born of long training in such matters, and had guessed the function of the thing behind the curtain directly he discovered it. “A mirror of seeing,” he had heard it called in another place and another time, but the one referred to then was nothing like this.

On that first occasion the entire wall-space behind the curtain had been composed of a single monstrous sheet of some dark, shining substance—black mica, perhaps, or quartz, or obsidian sheared so thin that its pigmentation merely tinted the reflected image of whoever looked into its surface.

Except that there had been no reflection whatsoever… And there was no reflection now, despite the fact that the mirror’s surface was no longer dark but as polished, smooth and flawless as a bowl of quicksilver. It should have reflected something, logic dictated that much at least, but instead it merely stood there and defied all logic by its refusal to flow in a liquid stream across the library floor. Voord stared at it, and as he stared a series of slow, concentric ripples began to spread out from the centre of the mirror, as if it was a glassy, undisturbed pond and his intent gaze the stone carelessly dropped into it.

With the hackles rising on his close-cropped neck,
Eld-heisart
Voord stalked rapidly to the insubstantial security of his spell-circle, and only when he stood once more within its boundaries did he dare to breathe a little easier. With great care that the chalk-marks were not disturbed or, infinitely worse, erased, he sank down crosslegged and shifted his weight until he was as comfortable as he could expect to be on the hard floor. Such a desire for comfort was more important than it seemed; from previous experience the Vlechan knew that he had to attain a degree of physical ease if he was to enter the light trance through which his barely-trained mind could summon the intensity of purpose which sorcery required of him.

Gathering that concentration as a man might form a snowball, Voord projected a pulse of mental force at the huge mirror. For an instant nothing happened—and then more ripples raced across its surface, faster now and much more violent, strange in their utter silence. He could hear only the muffled drumbeat that was his own heart; all other sounds were muted. It was as if he had breathed warm air on an opaque, frost-sheathed window so that he could peer inside; as they crossed the mirror’s once-glistening surface, the ripples drew a swirling greyness in their wake, each one less dense than its predecessor until at last the wall appeared transparent. A window into nowhere.

An image formed, condensing from nothingness as clouds are born from unseen vapours, and it was an image Voord knew well for it had been the focus of his thoughts these many minutes past. Sedna’s chamber of enchantments…

Initially a miniature scene viewed from far away, it grew and expanded as the sourceless rippling had done until it filled the mirror, filled the wall, filled Voord’s vision with a shifting, living picture. As he had hoped but never dared believe aloud, the mirror of seeing gave him disembodied access to a place that was not only many paces distant but enshrouded by many thicknesses of stone. And it was not a picture from the past, drawn from the Vlechan’s memories, but from the present; yet more eerie even than the successful magic was his awareness that his viewpoint was exactly that which he had occupied a quarter-hour before. Sedna padded to and fro, drawing, checking, chanting; she had almost completed her work of preparation, and soon would go to the door that he had locked… Despite the trance which dulled his outer senses, a great shudder racked his limbs and Voord knew that he was still afraid. But not remorseful. A thin, cruel smile twisted at the corners of his mouth— afraid he might be, but not so afraid as the witch would be…

Voord withdrew further into himself and it was with the fumbling movements of a sleepwalker that he reached down to the book laid on the floor before him. His heavy-lidded eyes had rolled back in their sockets until only two moist crescents of veined white remained, and it was impossible that he could see to read; yet he opened the grimoire and leafed through its pages with a swiftness and a surety which belied his self-imposed blindness. He did not know, as Sedna had discovered, that a book whose very name was
On the Summoning of Demons
might not need the aid of human hands to find its proper place…

The rustling of pages ceased and Voord put down the volume. “Hearken unto me, all ye who dwell beyond the portals of the world,” he intoned in a flat, dead voice totally unlike his own. “I would name those that have no name. I would look upon those that have no form known unto men. In token of good faith and as a sign of my most earnest wishes, I make now this blood-offering to thee.”

Reaching to his pouch once more, Voord withdrew a leaf-shaped sliver of flint; its blue and cream edges were scalloped and serrated, flaked until they were as thin and sharp as any razor. He knew well that the ancient powers on which he called would not look kindly on an offering made to them with cold iron. Setting the stone knife to his left hand, he drew a diagonal line across the palm. Nothing happened. Sharp though it was—and Voord had tested it that very evening on a piece of leather—the flint skidded across his skin and left only a faint indentation to mark its passage. His eyes opened, stared at the pink groove which faded even as he watched and dulled with the nauseous anticipation of agony. Pain suffered suddenly in the heat of combat was one thing, but this brutal premeditation was quite another. It was not beyond the powers of the Void to blunt his blade as a test of his strength of purpose, and if they had taken sufficient notice of him to create such a test, then it was already too late to refuse.