The Measure of the Magic (23 page)

Pan guessed he would. He guessed there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do if he had arranged and carried out a murder of this sort.

“What about us?” Prue asked him. “Why do you keep saying we’re not safe, either?”

“The Queen will take no chances. Once she discovers it was you who brought me back, she will wonder how much you know. She will not want to take the risk that I told you anything.”

He paused, letting the words sink in. Panterra and Prue looked at each other. Though neither spoke, they were both thinking the same thing.

Bonnasaint said it aloud. “She will have you killed, too.”

A
FTER LOSING THE GIRL HE HAD PURSUED THROUGH
the fortress ruins, the demon disguised as a ragpicker had reemerged and turned east toward the mountains from which the now deceased Grosha claimed she had come. He had dismissed the Trolls he’d pressed into his service, sending them back to wherever it was they had come from, bearing the corpse of their unfortunate leader. The demon felt no regrets about killing the latter; in fact, he imagined he had done any number of other humans a great favor. Other than his father, who was undoubtedly blinded by paternal love or perhaps something less noble, there were few who would miss such a creature. A few weeks’ time, and hardly anyone would even remember who he was.

But the girl—now, there was someone who deserved further consideration.

The demon was still trying to decide what had occurred at the fortress when he had chased her down and brought her to bay. There shouldn’t have been any escape for her; she should have been his to do
with as he wanted. Yet someone or something more powerful than he had come to her assistance and spirited her away. Why? Why would anyone bother with this girl? What did she have to offer that mattered so much?

Of course, there was her relationship with the man who bore the black staff. She was important to him, even if she claimed otherwise. Nor was he dead, as she also claimed. That was just a ploy to throw him off, and a bad one at that. He would have known if the bearer of the staff were dead; he would have sensed it in the same way he had sensed the other’s presence all those weeks ago when he had first come looking for him. No, the bearer was alive, and the girl knew where he was.

But he didn’t think it was the bearer who had saved her. Possession of one of the Word’s talismans created a formidable opponent, but it did not invest the user with magic capable of transporting another human from one place to another. No human whom he had ever encountered or even heard about possessed magic that strong. Not even the legends told of anyone with that sort of power. This was something else, he believed. This was a Faerie creature, an ancient one in service to the Word.

Yet why had it bothered with this girl?

He thought about it at length as he walked away from the fortress toward the mountains, climbed the foothills to the lower slopes and then the slopes toward places where he would likely find passage through to whatever valleys lay beyond. He considered the possibilities, but nothing helpful suggested itself. The problem was that he didn’t know enough to make an educated guess. There was a background to all of this to which he was not privy. Not yet, anyway. That would change once he found the girl again.

And he
would
find her. He would find her as surely as the sun rose at the beginning and set at the end of the day. He would find her as surely as he would find the bearer of the black staff. However long it took, whatever he had to do to make it happen, he would find them both.

So he walked for several days, taking his time, singing his songs and humming his tunes, at peace with the wasteland around him. He passed through stretches of ruined earth, decimated forests, blackened
hills, and scorched grasslands, and he was pleased. This was what he had worked so hard for, what all those who had shed their humanity had sought—a landscape devoid of living things, barren and blasted, empty of nature’s troublesome creatures. He could control this sort of world, and control was paramount to his reworked personality. Control was power, and power was sustenance. All the things he had once thought so important—things he could no longer even remember in the specific, but only in the general—had been left by the wayside in favor of the one absolute—power over life and death.

Had he stopped to think it through, he might have asked himself what his world would be like if he and those like him were the only creatures living in it. But such speculations seemed counterproductive to his purpose.

The words to a new tune came unbidden:

He frowned. It wasn’t very good, really. Children were of no interest to him. To other demons, yes, those whose lives were dedicated to making human children into a more interesting species. But those demons were gone, swept away in the apocalypse of five centuries earlier. So much had been lost in that time. Demons of all forms, their followers and armies, everything they had been on the verge of achieving. Still, it was never too late to start anew. That was what he told himself every day, and every day he found reason to believe it. Humans were still possessed of the same weaknesses that had brought about their destruction in the old days. Theirs was a race destined to be short-lived. They would find new ways to destroy themselves or to enable the demons and their servants to destroy them. It was inevitable. They just didn’t know it.

He wondered how many were living in the valley the girl had come from. He wondered how many more valleys hid similar enclaves. He hoped there were more than a few. He didn’t want to end this hunt until his appetite was sated. Surely, there were more bearers of the
black staff. Surely there were other talismans and forms of magic to be found and claimed. It was a big world, and you couldn’t expect to find everything right away. Not even he could do that.

It took him three days to locate the nearest pass after climbing into the mountains, an undertaking at which he did not work overly hard, acknowledging the limitations of his human body, the ragpicker’s body of which he had grown quite fond. He still bore his bundle of rags on his back, a burden he was happy to carry. His trophies, the reminders of his conquests, still meant something to him. He liked to take them out at night when he was alone and look through them, matching each to his memory of its previous owner, remembering who that owner had been and how he or she had died.
At my hands
, the demon always added silently.
All of them, at my hands. Isn’t that marvelous?

Once, during his ascent, he encountered one of the agenahls, a huge tank of a beast lumbering along just above him in the rocks. It spied him quickly enough and swung toward him, sensing the possibility of a quick meal. But then it caught his scent, identified what he was, and backed away quickly. The demon let it go. He appreciated the fact that animals were often much smarter than humans, and he thought that one day they might fill in the gap that would be left when the last of the humans were gone.

He reached the pass leading into the valley shortly before sunset on the third day of searching, when night’s gloom was settling in and its shadows were lengthening. He saw the remains of Trolls scattered about outside the pass and then again in the pass itself, the latter mixed with the bodies of humans. The scavengers had gotten to some of them, but not all. Four-footed scavengers were wary of confined spaces like this one, and preferred to do their hunting elsewhere. Mostly, it was the predatory birds that had begun to pick the bodies apart, and these were already gone for the day when he arrived.

A battle of some sort had been fought here, probably by Trolls from the same tribe as those he had encountered at the ruins and residents of the valley into which he was heading. Their numbers were small, but the fighting had been intense. It didn’t appear that much of anyone had survived. He wondered if the girl knew about it. He wondered if the bearer of the black staff had been involved.

He threaded the narrow defile, a twisting passageway that widened
and narrowed by turns, its walls rising well over two hundred feet. The sky was a narrow strip of gray turning darker as sunset approached. He took note of the numbers of the dead, idly pausing to reconstruct what he thought might have happened and to admire the carnage. Already, he was thinking of what he would do once he was within the valley and had taken the measure of its people. Already, he was considering ways of flushing out of hiding the one who carried the black staff so that he could dispose of him quickly and claim his talisman.

At the far end of the pass, he came upon the abandoned defenses and the larger numbers of dead from both camps. He climbed a ladder to gain the far side, still counting bodies, feeling better now about his prospects. Finding the bearer of the staff could not be all that difficult given the obvious conflict taking place between humans and Trolls. Wherever the fighting was thickest, that was where the bearer would be. The ragpicker needed only to generate the sort of conflict that would bring the bearer out of hiding—something at which he was very good.

“I shall create a little confusion,” he said aloud. “I shall cause disturbances great and small. I shall sow dissension and unrest and create mayhem and murder. I shall give the human inhabitants cause for fear and turn them against one another. I shall release the beast that each of them thinks is safely locked within.”

It was his intent to decimate the population, and he was already considering how to make this happen. The most obvious way was to bring the Trolls who had already attacked the valley into fresh conflict with the humans who were seeking to keep them out. He did not know the history of these peoples, but history of this sort was pretty much always the same. One side had something that the other wanted. One side sought to take that something away and the other sought to keep it. Both were willing to kill to have their way.

How hard could it be to give them their chance?

He stood amid corpses piled up one upon another and surveyed the killing ground. These few were only the first of those destined to cross over to the land of the dead. These few were just the tip of the iceberg. The demon walked forward until he was at the apex of the descent into the valley. It was just light enough that he could see some of
what lay beyond. Far away to the south and east, the lights of a village were barely visible through a thick screen of brume. He would start there, he decided.

Humming to himself, he began his descent.

I
T WAS ALMOST DAWN
by the time the ragpicker arrived at the outskirts of Glensk Wood, his feet sore and his body weary, but his spirits high. So much to be done, so much to be accomplished. But the rewards were worth the effort, and he felt eager to begin his work.

He walked through the village—strolled, really—greeting people as he passed with a word or a simple nod, an itinerant seller of goods, a harmless old man. Everyone seemed eager to acknowledge him. One or two even offered him food and drink or asked his destination and if they could help him in any way. They saw he was a traveler and might have come far. They extended their kindness without having the slightest clue whom they were extending it to.

It made him laugh inside. It put a smile on his face and a dark satisfaction in his heart.

He found his way to the village council chambers, walked up the steps to the veranda and through the open front door. The cavernous room inside, where the town meetings were clearly held, was empty, and he stood there for a moment imagining what it would look like if it were set afire. He made a promise to himself to find out.

“Help you?” a voice behind him asked.

He turned, smiling. “Perhaps.”

He was facing a young man with sandy hair and freckles and an eager face. The young man was wearing working clothes and carrying a wooden box of tools.

“Just happened to be passing by and saw the open door. You looking for Pogue?”