Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (15 page)

Jenny did what John would have done in the circumstances. She said, “Bugger.”

And looked at the bottle in her hands.

“You will have to let me out, you know.” Aohila's voice came, not from the bottle in Jenny's hands, but from overhead, from the window/neck of the bottle in which she was imprisoned. She recognized the voice, too, from her dreams. The Demon Queen spoke softly, but her voice echoed in the dim quicksilver sphere, and Jenny saw in her mind the image of that dark-haired beautiful woman holding the bottle in her hands, bending red lips to the red-stoppered neck, to speak to Jenny, trapped inside. “I certainly won't release you until you do.”

“Can you release me?” Jenny didn't know whether to address the ceiling or the neck of the bottle in her own hands. Sometimes the Queen's voice seemed to be coming out of it, sometimes from above her.

“Of course.”

Demons lie.

“The moment you release me.”

“Never.” But Jenny's heart went absolutely cold as she said it. When you deal with demons, the word never takes on a terrifyingly literal meaning. Jenny recalled vividly her recent imprisonment in the green demon-crystal. She had felt no hunger there nor thirst, no weariness beyond that horrifying exhaustion of the spirit. No physical sensation or discomfort at all. She wondered if her physical body was imprisoned here or merely her spirit—Caerdinn had spoken of devices that worked either way—and pinched the back of her hand. It definitely hurt. But what did that mean?

Can you really stay here FOREVER, with no one to speak to but the Demon Queen?

Do not treat with demons. There wasn't a book in John's library on the subject that did not begin and end with that admonition, and all spoke with absolute truth. First, last, and eternally—DO NOT treat with demons.

Dread was a lump of ice in her belly.

“Never? And never get word to Gareth, that his wife is not his wife?”

Don't answer her, thought Jenny grimly. Don't reply. They take you, not through your magic, but through your speaking with them. They draw you closer, coax you into a net of lies. “Morkeleb will tell him.”

“You think so, dearest?” Her voice was that of a stylish woman confronted with a blond friend's determination to wear purple. “He may be interested in humankind these days—which quite frankly surprises me—but I think you know he's far more interested in you. I consider it likelier by far that he'll spend days—or weeks—tearing what's left of Ernine to pieces searching for you, or for some trace of this bottle, then fly east after Folcalor and his wights. As far as Morkeleb is concerned, Gareth is only slightly less worthy of notice than a squeaking wormling just out of the egg.”

The only thing worse than a demon telling you lies, reflected Jenny, is a demon telling you the truth.

“I will not let you out into the world of men.”

“Oh, Jenny,” sighed the Queen patiently. “Listen to me. A thousand years ago, when the Star-Juggler made this trap, it made sense for him to be imprisoned here with me for eternity. He understood the principle on which the trap works, he had fitted his mind for the task, and there were other Masters in Prokep who would carry on the fight against Isychros. At the time, I was the most deadly threat against the world they wished to save. But that is not the case now. Folcalor is your enemy, as he is mine.”

“The fact that you and I share an enemy,” replied Jenny, “does not make us friends.”

And if she says that an enemy is not all that we share …

But the Demon Queen said nothing. And Jenny thought again, Those were MY dreams. Not John's.

What does John dream when he hears the sound of Morke-leb's wings?

She drew a deep breath and let it out, trying to expel her jealousy with it. Trying to master her fear.

“Where is John?”

“My darling, would you believe anything that I told you?”

“Is he behind the mirror?”

“If I told you he was not, you would think, The hag lies, as all demons lie. And if I say, Yes, he is, you will think, She only says that so I will let her go, to keep him from being skinned alive in her absence by the demons that remain in her realm. For were he there I would be his only protection, you know.”

“Is he there?” demanded Jenny, her voice trembling.

“No.”

“Then where is he?”

“My dear Jenny, let's not start that again. In this bottle how would I know anyway? He may be Folcalor's prisoner by this time.”

“And naturally you'll help me rescue him, if I let you out?”

“Naturally.”

Jenny was silent, shaking with anger. Anger at the Demon Queen, and anger at herself for entering speech with her at all. She found herself again that awkward, half-magic witchchild in a village of children who taunted her, who told her tales about sprites they'd seen in the woods only to follow her as she rushed to those places, grinning behind their hands.

In time she drew another deep breath to steady herself. “And where has Folcalor gone?”

“To Prokep,” Aohila answered promptly. “Where the gate into Adromelech's Hell of the Sea-wights stands, prisoned in a Maze of magic and a Henge of ensorcelled stones. It is why Folcalor has been gathering the souls of dead humans, you know—to source enough power to break the Henge. Such death-spells work best in the full of the moon, and the next full moon—the Moon of Winds—will be the last in which the Dragonstar will be in the sky. If Folcalor does not break the Henge then—and devour Adromelech's power, and mine if he can get it—the final setting of the Dragonstar will reduce him to being a minor wight of little power, hiding in swamps and puddles for another thousand years.”

Her rich voice was almost gossipy, as if she were about to pass a plate of cream cakes. “Of course, Adromelech has agents in this world gathering soul-gems, too—I think you encountered some of them in the North. They'll be on hand in Prokep, too, at the full of the moon. Whether Folcalor wins that fight, or Adromelech swallows him, from what little I understand of human needs and human hearts and human flesh, I don't think any of your race is going to like what happens next.”

Jenny was silent, seeing again the slow-spinning column of blackness and flame moving away over the lands, and the ground behind it strewn with cracked lifeless crystals.

“Not that anything I'm telling you will do anyone the slightest bit of good,” added the Queen, “if you choose to spend the rest of conscious eternity here with me in boredom. Do you like games?”

Games about where John might be, and what would be happening to him? Games about Amayon?

Other games Jenny couldn't for the moment imagine, with Aohila placidly drinking in every flash of rage or grief or panic that kindled in her heart? Forever? “And if you're lying?”

“Of course I'm lying, dearest—I'm a demon, aren't I? But only about some things. And you'll never know which, will you, if you stay here, grimly keeping an eye on me. So it scarcely matters, does it?”

Jenny lay down on the curved bowl of the floor, and wrapped her plaid about her. She felt sick with exhaustion and dread. Could the Demon Queen see her, in this hollow sphere where there wasn't even a wall against which to prop her back? The Star-Juggler of ancient times, whoever he had been—the Arch-Seer the demons had spoken of—had been ready to spend the rest of an undying eternity here, rather than let Aohila roam at large in the realms of mortalkind.

Can I be less willing than that?

No one lasted long in the Winterlands who did not have a fairly good sense of direction. John knew which way he had to turn to get to the discreet passage that serviced the royal rooms. Gareth's chambers lay farther along the wing than Trey's, and his one fear as he slipped through the narrow doorway and up the short flight of dim-lit steps was that he'd open the wrong door and walk slap into Trey herself. Amayon would see straight through his simple disguise, and then the game would be over indeed.

Because Corvin was absolutely right, reflected John, putting his makeshift spectacles on again to count chamber doors. I am a fool.

The dragon had called him one again—with multiple variations of metaphor and emphasis—when he'd left him, at sunrise yesterday, in the Magloshaldon woods, where the River Clae ran down out of the foothills and turned toward the city walls. John had subsequently had a long, cold walk into Bel, but not a difficult one. The road wound through the woods that fringed the riverbank, ice-locked and silent at this season of the year. Through the trees John had occasionally glimpsed the rustically elegant hunting lodges built by the great families, and with winter and plague both gripping the land, the few caretakers came out no more than they had to. It had been a pleasure only to see trees again, and to read the signs of familiar beasts, deer and foxes and hares, in the snow. After a week in the desert's terrible silence even the winter-hushed woods had seemed lively.

Toward sunset he'd reached the shabby cluster of inns, orchards, vegetable farms, and laborers' cottages that clumped like colonies of barnacles around the city's eastern gate. It had been good beyond speaking to sleep in a real bed again. People were still talking about his rescue by the black and silver dragon—not that they recognized in the ragged stranger the Demon Queen's knight who had supposedly been so instrumental in the Realm's recent woes—and John had experienced considerable qualms about passing through the city gate again that morning.

But I can't leave Gar, if there's a hope of gettin' him clear.

I can't leave his daughter, who'll be the next target of these things if they haven't got her already.

And the part of him that was his father's son, the part of him that for twenty-three years had been Thane of the Winterlands dispensing the justice of an absent King, added: I can't leave the Realm.

The passage by which footmen brought breakfast, washwater, and the day's wardrobe selection—and carried away night soil—for their betters was barely a yard wide and illuminated only through an occasional window high in the lefthand wall. These were of oiled linen, not glass, and the light they admitted was dingy at best. Without the plaster or paneling that finished the bedchambers and sitting rooms, the narrow space picked up sounds like a cave. John heard the steady scrape of a broom in Trey's quarters—Good, she's out and like to stay that way—and a woman say, “It isn't the poetry I mind so much, but he gave her the same poem with her name written in.…”

Then, from somewhere far off, he heard a cry, a sharp sob of exhaustion mingled with agony, desperately protesting and fading suddenly in despair. He stopped in his tracks, listening, trying to trace the direction of the sound, but only knew that it came from somewhere ahead of him rather than somewhere behind. When he listened again, it was gone.

But he knew what it was, and the shorn hair on his nape prickled with rage and fear.

Trey, he thought. Or another demon. Amayon and whatever Hellspawn it was that now inhabited the body of the poor old King likely weren't the only ones in the palace.

Like the demon who'd taken over the body—and the for-tune—of the Otherworld millionaire Wan ThirtyoneFourty-Four, Amayon would have a secret room, where she could feast and drink the pain of human prisoners uninterrupted. In that endless city where John had found Corvin, he'd seen how demons amused themselves: seen over and over in nightmares the bloodied walls, the crawling lines of ants, the crusted straps and fragments of skin and hair. Wan ThirtyoneFourty-Four, the first man to come back from the dead, had been wealthy enough to hire men who didn't care what he did so long as he paid them well. Presumably such men existed in this world, too. Though, at a guess, given the smaller community and chattier servants of Bel, John suspected Amayon's henchmen would be demons like herself.

Any one of whom might easily recognize him.

Cautiously he moved on, barely able to breathe with anger.

Behind a door a girl was singing. A tiny girl, probably no older than his daughter, Maggie. He set down his chamber pots and his basket, and pushed on the panel such as all rooms had, doors concealed, not for any nefarious purpose but simply so that a servant could come and go without any chance of forcing a guest—or a member of the family—to confront the realities of the lower classes having access to their dirty underclothes and breakfast-leavings.

Through the crack in the panel he saw a child who had to be Gareth's daughter, a solemn toddler of three, seated on a footstool singing to her doll. Millença was small and dark, as Trey had been, but with the gray eyes characteristic of the House of Uwanë. She, like the King, her grandfather, wore the somber purples and blacks of half-mourning, in sorrow for the griefs of the city. John had not seen her since he and Jenny had come south for her naming-feast, but her resemblance to Trey was striking, and he recognized the nurse who sat nearby on a low chair. Danis, or Danae, her name was … the widowed daughter of one of the great noble houses, with a round, cheerful face and eyes creased about with smiling.

She was not smiling now, but had set down the smock she was making to watch the child with an expression of mingled grief and love. A girl who was almost certainly her daughter sat on the floor beside Millença's footstool—same pug nose, same sturdy build, the long braid hanging beneath her embroidered cap of the same strawberry-blond hue as the wisps visible beneath the nurse's starched linen coif. That child stated matter-of-factly, “That's enough. If Dolly had the plague she's dead by now.”

“She's not.” Millença drew herself up with dignity. “Dolly was dead and then came back to life.”

“Don't have it be that,” objected the child-in-waiting. “If she came back to life—”

“Branwen,” said the nurse warningly, and her daughter turned her head protestingly.

“But when people come back to life they're mean. Struval came back to life and he killed Bria's kitten.”

“Dolly won't be mean when she comes back,” Millença said, and hugged her bisque-headed rag-baby close.

“Yes, she will. And if you die, and come back, you'll be—”

“Branwen!”

John eased the panel shut. Voices sounded in the next chamber, Gareth's bedchamber, if John remembered how the royal rooms were disposed. “Is there no hope for her?” Gareth asked, and a gentle, rather prissy tenor replied.