The Demon Lord (23 page)

“Valden, yes.” Aldric could not understand why his voice was steady and not a tremulous croak. “Gossip or not, tell him about the Vreijek woman.”

“Lord Crisen’s mistress—he calls her a consort!—is supposedly a witch. They say she makes all manner of spells to entertain him. Or rather, they said, to give him… pleasure.”

“They say… Who are ‘they’?”

“Oh, everybody.” Gueynor was adopting a brightness that grew more artificial with every second. “Absolutely all the people—”

Don’t overdo it
... “Are in terror of their opinions being overheard,” Aldric interrupted crisply. “It’s the sort of thing they would love to talk about, but dare not. Only the women—” he shot a warning glare at Gueynor—”can’t keep from prattling to save their lives. Or anybody else’s. There was a merchant who—”

“I heard about him.” Marek’s tone was disinterested now; he would hear nothing new from this pair. In which he was wrong, for had he not looked away from Aldric he might have seen the Alban’s solitary pupil contract as it stared at him.

“Then,” he purred silkily, “if you knew about him you must know why it happened.” He knelt, settling his heels beneath him. “May I share your wine?” he asked.

Marek nodded hospitably, leaned forward and filled another bowl. It was casually lifted, apparently sipped, and just as casually set down again. Untasted. Aldric did not drink with those he distrusted.

Gold blazed briefly in the afternoon sunshine as his left hand came up to rub wearily at the back of his neck. “And if you know why it happened,” he continued, “you must also know already what Gueynor had just told you.” His gloved right hand made an elegant, eyecatching gesture towards the girl, and Marek’s eyes were caught for maybe half a heartbeat, following it. “So why ask again?”

Abruptly there was steel jutting like a serpent’s tongue from between the fingers of Aldric’s clenched left fist, its glint a brutal contrast to the soft golden glow of the signet ring beside it as the small blade licked towards Marek’s face.

“Aldric,
No!
” Gueynor’s gasp was not loud, but it was sibilant with shock and carried all too well.

The punch-dirk stopped just underneath the Cernu-an’s chin and made a warning upward jerk that stung him and drew blood. “Fool!” said Aldric. His voice, his face, his whole being had gone cold, bleak, deadly… and no one could be sure to whom he spoke. To Marek, for asking too much; to Gueynor, for saying too much; even to himself, for thinking too much and letting matters run out of control until they came to this… For he would have to kill now, in cold blood, like it or loathe it. The demon queller knew his name. Not the full name, but enough of it to betray him. Too much of it. His fingers tightened sweatily around the tiny dagger’s hilt as he steeled himself to push it home.

Marek saw death looking at him; but he saw more now than a one-eyed mercenary. He saw Deathbringer. “Aldric… ?” He had to force the words past palsied lips, out of a mouth restricted in its movement by the blade beneath it. But he had to say something— anything—and quickly… “Aldric-erhan… ?
You
... ?”

The Alban flinched, not as if he had heard a familiar name but as if he had been struck in the face. A muscle twitched, once, at the corner of his mouth. “Silence,” he grated… Must have time to think, to understand… “Another word without permission and I cut your throat.”

The demon-queller’s mouth pressed shut, a bloodless slit in a face the colour of old cream.

“Gueynor, sit
down
!” Aldric’s one-eyed gaze had not moved away from Marek and the girl was on his blind side anyway, but— She sat. “Better.” The knife stung again, a reminder, before drawing back in a leisurely fashion. Like the paw of a cat. “Now, Marek Endain, demon queller… talk.”

“Ar Korentin sent me. He told me where to find you. Your foster-father showed me how.”

“Ar Korentin,” Aldric breathed softly, plainly stunned by the news. “And Gemmel-altrou…” He seemed to gather himself together, as any man will when coming to terms with an unexpected shock. “So. Easy to say.” His attention settled back on to Marek, intense as the grip of a falcon’s talons. “Proof. And quickly!”

Heedless of the demand for speed, the demon quell-er’s hand moved with the sluggishness of spilled honey as it reached inside his robe, and both eyes remained fixed apprehensively on the still-bared blade. The tiny strip of parchment he withdrew looked absurd in his big hand, and would have been less out of place around a pigeon’s leg. There were minute words written on it in black ink. “Will this do?” he asked.

Aldric scanned it, brow drawn downwards in a frown; the characters were in cipher, formed with a brush—but it was a cipher that he knew. “You could have killed the real courier and stolen this,” the Alban murmured, intentionally loud enough for Marek to hear him.

“I could have—but I did not.” The demon queller glared, and his voice grew harsher: knife or no knife, threat or no threat, his patience was running out. “Nor could I have stolen knowledge from within a man’s head—for now I say to you the word
suharr’n
, and the word
hlaichad
, and I make in your sight the pattern called
Kuhr-ijn
—thus! And what do you say now, Aldric
-eir
Talvalin?”

Aldric said nothing whatever. His backbone stiffened and his eye glazed, his grey-green iris becoming as lifeless as a sliver of unpolished jade. Gueynor gasped and pushed the knuckles of one hand against her teeth.

“What have you done to him?” she whispered, not knowing whether to be frightened of losing her protector or relieved that the poised violence of the past moments had abated somewhat.

“I? Nothing at all. This was done to him before he left…” Marek paused and looked narrowly at the girl. “It was done with his full consent, anyway. I have merely closed the circle slightly before its proper time. And I should have done so at once, rather than”—he gingerly touched the still-oozing nick in this throat—”taking any risks. I knew what he was and should have expected such a reaction. He is very frightened…”

“Aldric is… ?”

“Terrified. But more terrified of showing it.
Kailinin
are all alike that way, I think. A little crazy.” The Alban had not moved, had not blinked, had barely breathed; certainly he could hear nothing of what was being said less than an arm’s length away from him. “We’ll take this foolish patch off first, so that I can be absolutely sure… Yes! That scar. Not much, but distinctive enough to the right—or wrong—people.”

Gueynor sensed that the Cernuan was talking as much to himself as for her benefit, but did not interrupt him by so much as a sudden move. She guessed that he trusted her—otherwise she too would have been struck still as stone. The girl didn’t like to look at Aldric; it was somehow shocking that one so active could be immobilised by two words and a gesture. Despite Marek’s reassurance she doubted that Aldric would have submitted to whatever spell was on him now, no matter who had placed it there.

Marek shaped another complex, writhing symbol in front of the Alban’s unseeing face, and this time it was not invisible. A faint tracery of blue fire, almost transparent in the sunlight, hung a moment before dissipating like woodsmoke.

The ugly, mindless glaze drained out of Aldric’s eyes and an intelligence returned; but it was not the same intelligence that Gueynor knew, with which she had shared her bed and body. Except for their unaltered colour, these were the eyes of a stranger. Thoughts seemed to swim in them like tiny, wise fish.

Quite suddenly he spoke, forming each word carefully as if considering it before allowing it to become audible. “By this man, my honoured lord and trusted messenger, I do send greetings unto the most high and worthy Goth, Lord Gener—”

“My lord, be still!” said Marek, and though he was both loud and hasty he was also courteous, his tone that of request rather than command. The Alban closed his mouth and his unTalvalin eyes, seeming to fall into a natural sleep. Marek watched him for a moment, then passed the back of one hand across his own forehead, smiling sourly. “I doubt I should have heard that, my lord,” he muttered, “so the words are forgotten already.” His head turned a fraction towards Gueynor. “By both of us.”

She nodded dully in agreement, not wanting to remember either the words or the voice which had spoken them. For it had not been Aldric’s voice at all…

“Know me, Aldric-eir,” the demon queller said. “I am a friend, sent by friends to help you.” He spoke in a slow, hypnotic monotone, so that Gueynor could not be sure if he uttered persuasive lies or stated truth. She was almost past caring. “
Sachaur arrhathak eban, Aldric. Yman Gemmel; yman Dewan; yman Rynert-mathern aiy’yel echin arhlathall’n
.”

Aldric’s eyelids snapped back so abruptly that the demon queller started; he knew that the younger man should have been incapable of movement. But he too grew motionless when the Alban’s own voice whispered, “I am lost…” before trailing into silence.

“Where—” The word cracked in his gullet and Marek coughed to clear his throat of the fear-born constriction blocking it. Fear not this time for himself but for Aldric, that in his attempt to reach whatever secrets lay buried in the younger man’s subconscious memory he had severed that most delicate and vulnerable of connections, the binding of soul to body. He had read of such a thing and long ago had witnessed it: only once, but the image had so seared itself into the demon queller’s brain that he shuddered at the thought that he himself might cause it. Not death, not undeath… unlife. Existence. As mud exists…

“There are no stars…” again that almost inaudible cobweb-fragile thread of sound. “Night surrounds… no stars… devoured. None can help me now…”

The blood in Marek’s veins turned to ice-water. He had heard something akin to this said before, read it often, but had never believed it any more than other overly dramatic metaphors. Until now. Nothing else could explain why his limbs trembled and his hands grew pallid and clammy cold. The loss of one man’s soul dwindled into insignificance compared with the potential enormity at which Aldric’s dreary words were hinting. If they were only hints… Marek dared not leap ahead beyond what he had listened to already, for that way lay unspeakable things. He could only wait…

He waited—but not long. Aldric’s voice was already losing its coherence; his words faltered more often now, stumbling over one another and no longer making sense. The name “Kyrin” meant nothing to the Cernuan, seen though at the sound of it Gueynor turned her head away. Deep, regular breathing, that of heavy slumber, was increasingly replacing the disturbing broken phrases and at last Marek was able to relax. He was overwrought, that was all. Too many things had happened to him in too short a time, without sufficient rest in compensation. There was a small thud as the push-knife fell from relaxing fingers on to the grass at Aldric’s side, and his spine lost its rigidity so that his head lolled heavily forward.

“Waken him… please!” No matter what he had said, or how much the words had hurt her, it hurt Gueynor more to see him like this. It was wrong for him to be reeling like the lowest drunkard—lacking any quality of dignity.

“A moment more,” said Marek. “His mind is still disordered; I rummaged through it somewhat thoroughly, I fear.”

The Alban seemed to crumple in on himself, falling limply forward so that the side of his face struck against a tree root with an unpleasant, solid impact. “You bastard!” Gueynor hissed. Before Marek had begun to move—if indeed he intended to do so, or was merely gratified to see a tree do what he would like to have done in recompense for the dagger-notch beneath his chin—the girl was on her knees by Aldric’s side, rolling him carefully on to his back so that she could cradle the lividly bruised head in her lap. Blood welled from broken skin in a line from eyesocket to ear, staining her riding-coat and trousers.

Aldric’s eyes were almost shut, but not quite. Had she looked down, rather than glowering towards Marek, Gueynor might have seen a faint glitter half-shrouded by his lashes. Whether he was stunned, or spell-dazed still, or feigning either of the two, not even Aldric knew for certain; the only certainty at present was a rush of hot, loud pain which ebbed and flowed inside his ringing skull. He could smell roses… great, dark, fanged roses armed with jagged thorns. One still rested in his saddlebag. Dead now, crushed and bruised as his face…

“Honour,” he said thickly, “is satisfied.”

“How so?” Marek leaned forward, curious now.

“Your neck—my face.” Gueynor blinked, wondering how he had known so clearly what she was thinking, but Marek’s expression did not change.

“I beg pardon,” the Alban said. “Both for what I did and… And almost did.”

Marek Endain laughed at that. Dryly, from a throat disinclined to humour but amused nonetheless. “Beg no forgiveness of me, Aldric-eir,” he replied. “Dewan ar Korentin should beg forgiveness of us both; his mind engineered this confusion.” The demon queller reached down, plucked grass blades and twisted them between his fingers. “Do you… After all this, do you still want my company? Or my help?”

Gueynor’s fingertips prodded Aldric’s shoulder blade: trying to attract his attention, trying to will him to refuse. Politely, angrily, rudely—any way at all. Just so long as he said “No.”

The Alban ignored her as best he could. He thought about Sedna, and guessed that Marek’s knowledge would prove useful when he was speaking to the Vreijek sorceress. “Do you still offer them?” he asked, propping himself on one elbow to read what he could from the Cernuan’s face. It was little enough…

Marek’s mind was turning over what he had heard by accident; not King Rynert’s message to Lord General Goth, for politics held no interest at all, but the words which had followed—and which had so horrified him. They could not have been spoken by accident. No delirium, no dream whether born of drink or drugs or sorcery could create those phrases out of nothing. Marek recognised them as disjointed fragments of a warning, and the very recollection chilled him. He knew too what they warned against. He was a demon queller…

“I do offer them.” Perhaps there was too much force in the way he spoke, but it was of no account. “Without reservation.”