The Demon Lord (27 page)

Marek Endain had said nothing during the long walk back to their apartments—his mind, guessed Aldric, was far too full for words—but Gueynor, out of the demon queller’s sight, had squeezed his hand. Whether she felt gratitude, or satisfaction, or merely the need for human contact that he sometimes experienced, Aldric neither knew nor cared. Nobody apart from another high-clan Alban could have understood the complex reasoning behind what he had done; but whatever the interpretation put on his action by these three foreigners—and in affairs of
kailin-eir
honour, Marek was as much a stranger as the two Jouvaines—it was most likely wrong. It had not been a demonstration of his independence, nor an insult to the Overlord for insult’s sake, nor a show of tacit support.

It had been because of his duty. To himself, his honour… his sword. “A man without duty, a man without honour, this is not a man.” So the old saying went. What, Aldric thought sombrely, would the writer of that rhyme have made of his own uniquely flexible form of honour, in which he had shown a steadily increasing lack of compunction about twisting to suit the needs of the moment… ?

Tense and sweaty despite his outward calm, Aldric’s present needs were less philosophical. “Some exercise and a bath,” he muttered to no one in particular. “There is a proper bath-house in this mausoleum, isn’t there?”

Marek neither knew nor cared. There were two un-broached flagons of wine on the table in his room, and after the impromptu interview with Geruath he had an overpowering desire to empty both of them. Even the way in which his door shut and locked behind him managed to sound ill-tempered.

“I shall walk in the gardens for an hour,” said Gueynor.

Aldric glanced at her. “Why? You saw what they look like.”

“But I remember what they looked like,” the girl amended quietly. “And they remind me of things.”

“And after your walk?”

“I want to talk. Privately.” She jerked her head briefly towards the demon queller’s door. “Alone.” Aldric grinned: a quick baring of teeth with much sardonic humour in it but no real amusement.

“He has two bottles in there. I doubt we shall be disturbed.”

“Good. I—” She broke off, detecting movement at the end of the corridor. Aldric twisted a little, saw the servant standing idly as if without work to do, realised that the man could have been standing there all day without his knowing it and tore off the eyepatch. Gueynor blinked. “Is that wise?”

“Wisest thing I’ve done with it so far.” He knuckled savagely at the socket, both to make the eye red and justify its being covered up, and to rub away the unfocused blur which filled his vision on that side. The retainer was still there, watching without seeming to, listening likewise. Convenient for me, thought Aldric as he signalled the man with a deliberately peremptory gesture. Yes, you bastard, I want you here… And convenient for Geruath or whoever had set him there to spy.

“Enjoy your walk, Aline,” he said for the servant’s benefit, pitching his voice low enough to sound like an exchange of confidences. Or intimacies. “If I’m bathing when you come back…” He let the words trail away throatily and stroked one open hand along Gueynor’s neck.

“If you are, Kourgath, then I’ll take another stroll.” She caught his wrist, turned over the hand and lightly kissed its palm before releasing him and walking away.

“What are you staring at?” Aldric demanded of the servant. He used Drusalan; a local retainer would probably react with blank incomprehension, whereas a mercenary—

“Nothing, lord!”

—would understand what he had said… The Alban cleared his throat but passed no comment on his discovery.

In a few minutes he had been conducted to a roofed courtyard near the fortress stables. This was an area plainly set aside for the exclusive use of deadly weapons; the targets ranged along the walls and sunk at irregular intervals into the sand-covered floor showed that much—but their number and various shapes confused Aldric a little until he recalled his impressions of the Overlord. Geruath of Seghar might well be a crazy old man, but he did not seem the kind of weapon collector whose collection was merely ornamental. Every blade and pole-arm which the Alban had seen on the presence-chamber’s display racks had been oiled and whetted ready for immediate use. Any missile weapons which the Overlord possessed would almost certainly be in the same hair-raisingly lethal condition.

Doing his best to dismiss both Geruath and his mysteriously as-yet-unseen son, Aldric entered the stable to fetch
taidyin
—wooden practice foils—from his gear and was immediately, forcefully reminded of them once more. For his saddlebags and pack had been searched— thoroughly, efficiently, so neatly that scarcely a garment had been crumpled or moved out of place. But such was the searcher’s arrogance that nothing had been closed. Rebuckling the flaps with hands that were surprisingly steady, Aldric breathed a small sigh of relief between his teeth. The intrusion, and the insolence of it, had angered him; but he had expected such an examination of his belongings sooner or later. Remembering the spellstone, he was heartily glad it had been later…

Apparently he was being taken on trust, accepted straight away as no more than he claimed to be—a not unreasonable supposition—because if there had been any doubts at all he would have been scrutinised and spied on and investigated until at last the truth emerged. No disguise could ever withstand hard suspicion; his real trick lay in not provoking it…

The stinging crack of
taidyo
against target brought more than one curious observer to the courtyard; some blinked, laughed indulgently and went away, but others stayed, watching. Aldric made no objection to their presence: whatever information they might carry to Lord Geruath would serve only as a none-too-subtle warning that at least one of his guests could take care of himself.

A muscle twinged high in his shoulder. It was stiff from lack of use and Aldric reproved himself silently. His own fault, no one else’s. Lack of practice, lack of exercise, lack of too many things. He swung the arm gently, feeling the slide and flexion of joint and sinew work away the pain, and he thought… He thought: if only everything was so simple that a sword could solve it. He thought: I hold life and death made manifest in metal, mine to grant or to withhold.

And even as the thoughts flickered through his mind like the turning pages of a book, he knew that they were only thoughts: not desires, not wishes, not even dreams. Death came far too easily already, often with a haste that was almost unseemly. No man who lay with a woman could engender life as quickly as the man who bore a blade could end it. And keeping ebbing life within a ruined body, or death from one determined to embrace it, was impossible. He knew. He had seen too many times: Haranil. . Santon… Baiart… Evthan…

Aldric’s fingers flexed around the
taidyo
, both hands on the long hilt that was chequer-cut for gripping. Its carvern patterns bit into his palms. Slowly he raised the length of polished oak above his head and poised it there, immobile in the waiting attitude of high guard left. His tensed arms, his body, his spirit quivered inwardly with passion and a craving for release. He thought, and the thought was cold: what is a sword—a symbol of honour, of rank? Of death. The past cannot be undone. The word, the blade, the arrow—none can be recalled. You can never turn back. You can never go home…

The
taidyo
moved. It blurred, a transparent arc sweeping obliquely down. It hissed, ripping through the fabric of the air. It struck—

“Hai!”

And with a crisp, harsh rending the wooden target split asunder, its fibres rupturing along a raw-edged gouge as straight as the stroke of a razor. Slivers pattered against the sand as it twisted, sagged brokenly backwards and flopped like something newly dead.

A small, remote smile crept briefly on to Aldric’s face as he heard the murmuring which his demonstration had provoked. All the fury bottled up inside him was gone now, channeled from his body through wood and into wood. And into destruction. So Duergar Vathach had died, burned and blasted by the dark forces of emotion held too long in check… “Enough,” he breathed softly and laid the notched, chipped
taidyo
aside.

She waited an arm’s length from where he stood, patient as the night awaiting dawn; resting on a simple pine rack, stark black and gleaming with lacquer and steel against the grained, blond wood. Isileth Widowmaker.

Aldric bowed fractionally before he lifted the
taiken
, respecting her twenty centuries of age and the purpose for which she had been forged all those long years ago. The killing of men… He unwrapped the scabbard’s shoulder-strap from where it coiled like a serpent below the longsword’s forked, ringed hilt, looped it oven his head and made Widowmaker secure on the weapon-belt at his left hip. The touch of his fingers when he settled her weight was a caress such as one might use to stroke a favoured hawk. A man had said once, years past, that Aldric loved his sword as he might love a woman. That had been an insult, answered as such with violence—but in the case of Widowmaker it was true. Almost… Not love, perhaps, but trust: complete and absolute, as one must inevitably trust that on which continued life depends.

Conscious of and at the same time ignoring the critical eyes which followed his every move, he drew. First form:
achran-kai
, the inverted cross. Isileth sang from her scab-

bard and made two cuts that flowed together in a single sweep. Each stroke was precise, controlled and seemingly effortless. Both had taken perhaps half a second.

Taiken-ulleth
could be as plain or as elaborate as each swordsman wished his style to be, and that chosen by Aldric—refined like an ink sketch to an elegant, absolute minimum—was perhaps the simplest of all. Which was not to say it was the easiest. Despite their ritual aspect the cuts had real force; graceful they might be, sometimes even beautiful in their austere economy. But they were also, always, deadly.

Aldric knew at once when Geruath the Overlord stepped into the practice yard. He knew before the men on the periphery of his vision stiffened to attention, before they began to bow. The strange and unreliable sixth sense of warning had alerted him before any outward sign was visible, but in this instance the Overlord’s presence and his gaze was not so much a mental shadow as a physical pressure between the shoulder-blades. He turned slowly, meeting Geruath unwinking stare for stare. It was Jouvaine who looked away first.

Then, and only then, Aldric slid Widowmaker out of sight with a thin whisper of sound. There was something almost modest in the way he sheathed her blade, as a lover might cloak his lady to preserve her from the lewd gaze of passersby. But his gloved right hand remained around her hilt and it was plain that he could draw and cut within the blinking of an eye. That was an unspoken threat of sorts, but one which Geruath unwisely chose to ignore.

“Good afternoon to you, my lord,” the Alban said— his voice a soft, accented purr and his bow, of the least degree, a studied hairsbreadth short of either insult or politeness. Insolent grey-green cat’s eyes dared the Overlord to object; even for an Alban, Aldric had no time left for the hypocrisies of false courtesy.

It seemed that Overlord Geruath realised as much, for his own bow was impeccable. Someone had perhaps advised him as to what
eijin
were: high-clan warriors who for reasons of their own had set aside their ranks and titles and with them any need to recognise law, or morality, or honour. Men careless of their own lives as much as those of others. Stories painted them in dark colours, the crimson and vermillion of blood and the black which Aldric wore, and talked of them as though they were remorseless one-man death machines. Such crude descriptions were not entirely true—but neither were they entirely false…

“Kourgath-an. I would like to speak with you.” Ger-uath spoke in Alban and his voice, suave as a courtier’s, was deeper than seemed reasonable from so narrow a chest.

“Then speak. My lord.” The honorific came as a careless afterthought, but Geruath ignored its rudeness.

“In private.”

“This is private enough for me, my lord. What word in particular had you in mind?”

“
Taiken
,” Geruath said at last. He had more sense than to reach out for the object of his desire, even though the longsword’s pommel was close enough to touch. Aldric watched him, deciding how many severed fingers would constitute a reasonable reaction. “That
taiken
.” The finger which he used for pointing was not one of those at risk. Yet. “I offer you a thousand Imperial crowns for it.”

Aldric blinked balefully.
How much do you know? he
thought. “The Empire’s currency,” he said, picking his words with care, “does not have my confidence. It has become a trifle debased of late.”
Evthan
... “No crowns, my lord.”

“Then the same in deniers,” Geruath returned without any hesitation.

The blatancy of that admission staggered the Alban, although he concealed it well. Lord Geruath had just confessed—to a total stranger—his possession of a small fortune in Alban gold coins; granted that he might have been lying, but Aldric doubted it. The money was available—somewhere very close, or Geruath would not have mentioned it as an enticement. A thousand deniers… ! That was the hire price of a small mercenary army, near enough, and it was being offered for a sword by this petty lord of a backwoods fief. Aldric had been suspicious before, but knew now that the whole business stank of corruption like a month-dead sheep in summertime.

And where did the demon fit into it all… ? First a werewolf, now this thing. Another eater of women. Aldric did not like the images which were begining to take shape within his mind, and liked still less the carefully forgotten words accompanying them…

Issaqua sings the song of desolation And I know that I am lost And none can help me now
...

What, he wondered, would Geruath’s reaction be to hearing those words spoken? Or would Crisen understand their meaning better… ? The Alban shook his head, as if dislodging stubborn dreams, and the Overlord took his gesture for refusal.