Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (38 page)

“I'm gie glad she does,” replied John, trying hard not to pant, “for she always comes back to me with wonderful tales of 'em all … you, too, come to think on it, you and Folcalor—”

“Shut up!”

John didn't flatter himself that he'd annoyed the demon—he, too, saw movement among the broken pillars, men striding toward them through the dust, and the glitter of swords in the rising light.

Folcalor's men, here at last.

“Ticked at you, is he?” he inquired conversationally, seeing the fresh-faced demon's uncertainty. On the high corner of the palace foundation John glimpsed again the spark of crystal, catching the morning light with an inner fire. “Vowed to be his vassal, or somethin' of the sort?”

“You know nothing of it,” snapped Amayon.

“I know you were Folcalor's little pal over the winter,” said John. He leaned against a broken corner of a wall, thrusting up through the sand, and noted that a sigil had been recently burned into a stone. The charring was fresh; it hadn't been there three weeks ago. “Jenny's told me of the pair of you, back in the days when you were helpin' him put together the dragon corps to put Rocklys, poor fool, on the throne of Bel as his pawn. How much that means among demons I don't know, of course—”

“It means among demons what it means among men,” said the shadow's cold voice behind him. “One cannot always be watching one's back.”

“I was always Adromelech's vassal,” Amayon insisted, a trifle loudly, looking like he wanted to transform into a wisp of smoke and fly to the gate. “Can't you go faster? Or is this, too, a trick …?”

“Aye, I just can't wait to cut loose from Peek-a-Boo back there and throw meself into Folcalor's arms. Curse it, we're never gonna—”

One of the gnomes seized him, thrust him behind a pillar as an arrow sliced past, missing him by inches. The gnome's hand left a sticky brown blot on John's sleeve. Men came running at them from one of the doorways in the palace foundation, men in the garb of common ruffians in Bel, or the leathers and furs of the Winterlands bandits. John hadn't realized quite how many of them there were, resurrected to demon life.

The next instant a stab of blinding pain went through his skull, almost dropping him to his knees, overwhelming and instantly abated: spell and counterspell, he guessed, angry at having his very flesh turned into a chess-piece in the demon war. He caught at the wall for support, fighting not to vomit; a foot away one of the gnomes struck a demon-ridden bandit with an ax, splitting its skull. As it collapsed, Amayon seized it, paying no attention whatsoever to the knife it thrust into him; grotesquely, the bleeding body straightened up, struggling with the remains of the head flopping back and forth.

Amayon opened his mouth, inhumanly wide, absurdly wide, jaw disjointing, like a grotesque puppet's in a play. The demon boy inhaled, and something silvery pulled out of the bandit's face, something that whipped wildly from side to side—

Amayon caught it with his teeth, grinning horribly, then took another breath, drawing it into himself. With the screaming thing still lashing back and forth against his chin, he glanced over at John, and winked as he sucked it in.

Elsewhere one of the dead gnomes was down, sliced to pieces by the men of Bel. Two others were chopping up one of the attackers, their own brown bones sticking out of their shredding flesh. Two of the men of Bel seized on a disembodied wight, devoured it as Amayon had done; John heard it shriek as it pulled apart. Flies roared and hummed. A dustdevil laced with fire swirled toward John across the sand and he pulled out his sword, but before it reached him the whirlwind shattered, flying apart in a rain of pebbles and silvery fragments. The cold skeletal hand of the shadow took him by the arm from behind, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“The place where the gnomes fell the first day,” said the demon voice in his ear. “The place where magic will not work—”

“Good thinking,” said John. “Follow me.”

He supposed the Blind Spot had been a room in some mage's house. It seemed to have those dimensions, though its enclosing walls were long gone. The dead gnomes still lay there, alive with maggots, marking the spot—Saves me the trouble of triangulating, anyway. And incidentally would have saved Morkeleb and Jenny the trouble of searching the dust for his tracks, to figure out whether he'd gone to the Gate of Winds or not and how many demons were with him when he did. Amayon and the other demons, who whirled along beside them now in the shape of dust-devils or ghosts, dove at and struggled with the attackers, clawing and screaming. Only one gnome remained and he was clawed half to pieces, bone showing through the flesh; before they reached the Blind Spot he, too, was devoured. Talisman crystals scattered the sand, trampled into the dust.

Just as they reached the spot, two of Folcalor's men sprang from behind the red pillars with spears. John saw them coming—human bodies on the whole slowed demons down. His first slash cut halfway through one attacker's neck; as he disengaged for a sidelong chop through the body, he saw the other one turn suddenly, at no visible threat, and vanish in a flash of silver fire with a cry. Since slaying individual demons was no part of his plan with the dragons he guessed it was one of the traps set within the city—in any event, that, or the dying shriek of the attacker he'd struck, swept away further assault. He collapsed to his knees in the Blind Spot, darkness swirling into his vision:

Don't faint. Whatever you do, don't pass out now.

“Where lies the Maze?” the shadow's voice hissed in his ear. “Show me, now, in case you can't lead us later.”

You've got to be joking. John rolled over, but it was nowhere to be seen. He could only feel the chill of it, smell it just beside him, behind him.

At least most of the time Aohila looked like something, even if she did have snakes in her hair.

Snakes in her hair …

The image snagged in his mind, almost reminding him of something, but it was driven out again when the shadow urged, “If you are killed—”

“Hard cheese to you.” John shut his eyes, waves of dizziness making the desert sway around him as if he clung to a raft at sea.

The gray thing was saying something about Jenny and the children, but all John could do for a time was cling to the cold sand. Aohila, he thought, not knowing why the Demon Queen's image returned to his mind so strongly now. It's the full of the moon, the last day of the Dragonstar's influence, Folcalor and his goons are here, Adromelech is readying himself to come forth.…

So where is she?

His sight cleared. The first thing he saw was Amayon, drawing a sigil in the dust with one finger and putting talisman crystals around it, weaving a pattern of sacrificial deaths.

Noon was five hours off. Moonrise, twelve or so.

Jenny me love, he thought, I hope you're somewhere near.

The sun stood three-quarters of the way to noon. Heat rippled in waves from the sand. Dust crusted on his skin, in his mouth, in his nose, on his spectacles, John forced himself to stand. The ribs Caradoc had cracked in the gatehouse fight gouged him like knives, and he felt eighty years old.

Curiously, he noted that through everything his spectacles were intact. Whatever else could be said about Jenny's magic, he reflected, that was one spell that worked like a champion. Gingerly, clumsily, he tore strips from what was left of his shirtsleeves and bandaged a cut arm and the lacerated fingers of his right hand: Amayon jeered, “Did we get a boo-boo?” as if to a child, but a shadowy hand slipped around John's shoulder to steady the rag as he tied the knot. But for the presence of the shadow, John guessed Amayon would have taken advantage of the moment to do more than sneer.

Among the stones all around the silvery glimmer of the demons flickered in the dry glaring sunlight. Dust-devils fleeted on the Blind Spot's edge like a deadly perimeter, rising and falling, little whirlpools of sharp pebbles stirring and settling. Waiting.

This, thought John, is going to be bad.

“Follow me,” he said. “Keep them off me. The way into the Salt Garden opens only at noon, and only for a few minutes. If we miss it, we'll never hold out till evenin'.”

“Tell me where it is.”

“It's up your nose,” retorted John. “Just follow me.”

The dust-devils whirled up again, then settled—possibly at some spell of the gray thing's, though John as usual could feel nothing; in any case, the men of Bel were waiting, armed, tireless, many of them already dead. He thought there were fewer of them than even the fighting could account for, but it was still going to be a bad run to the gate.

“That bottle, now,” he said softly, speaking over his shoulder. “If Folcalor should show up—”

“Folcalor will come,” whispered the shadow, “when the way is prepared, when his power is at its height. I think not sooner. And I do not believe that his Greatness Lord Adromelech would tolerate it, should another trap the Arch-Traitor and deprive him of the pleasure.”

John didn't even phrase his first thought—Good—in his mind. If worst came to worst, he'd been prepared to spend the rest of eternity trapped in the bottle with Folcalor, though with Adromelech loose and roving around it was half the battle lost right there: Now he only muttered truculently, “Well, I ain't keen on gettin' killed so his Greatness can have the privilege of trappin' Folcalor after I'm dead,” a remark which the shadow ignored.

Jen, I hope you and Morkeleb got your spells in place while we were all hidin' out beyond the Gate of Winds.

Because if something had gone wrong, reflected John wearily, he was going to be in tremendous trouble when Adromelech pulled the stopper out of that bottle and disappeared along with his foe. They're never gonna believe me if I say, “Goodness gracious, how'd that happen?”

He wiped the dust from his spectacles, triangulated on the unmarked spot—he could see it in the distance, about half a mile to the south of the Blind Spot—and shifted the grip of his cramped and blistered hand on his sword.

The moment they stepped clear of the Blind Spot, Folca-lor's demons were around them like sharks around a foundering raft. Whirlwinds and dust blasted them: pebbles, sand, what felt like razor-edged shards of glass. Spells of dizziness, nausea, pain. Counterspells darted, flames searing up through the sand only to be smothered with dust or swept away with wind. Blindness came and went, as if someone repeatedly caught the burning glare of the sun on silvered glass and directed it into his eyes. Out of the blindness and the dust swords slashed at him, never quite coming near enough to get in a counterstroke; he felt as he had when he was a child, when his father would thrust a sword into his hand and drive him hard against the courtyard wall.…

It had taught him. But he hadn't liked it.

Damned to you lot. If you didn't get me with semiautomatic submachine guns in Corvin's laboratory, you're not going to do it with handfuls of pebbles in wind.

“Hold them off !” he yelled, barely able to see the pillar, the hill, the bulk of the palace foundation that told him where he was. He fell to his knees, dust and rock tearing him, demons shrieking.…

I'd better have this right.

The sun was overhead. On the ground he traced the sigil of the door, that Amayon had traced on every gate from the Wraithmire to Paradise and beyond. Shrieking whirlwinds tore the sign away, and he traced it again.

The demons swept past him, across the sigil.

And disappeared, leaving him alone to face blindness and dust and men slashing out of the whirling brown wall of blown sand with spears.

He killed one, two … then green fire roared up between him and them, and he dove over where the sigil had been and prayed to the Old God and the Old God's Granny that his calculations were right.

He was on his knees in the Salt Garden. Brushing the dust off his velvet doublet, Amayon sniffed, “Some warrior.”

“All I need to do is get through it alive.” John climbed stiffly to his feet. Beds of salt stretched in all directions around them, granite-bordered, like flower-beds in the Long Garden of the palace at Bel, decorated with winding paths of stepping-stones. The smell of salt burned in the air, and waves of heat breathed from the ground. It was always noon here.

Around them the silvery slumped demons were faded, ashen lizards slowly shriveling in the burning air. John couldn't see the gray thing, but guessed it was right there behind him as always.

“Let's go, you lot,” he said with a briskness he was far from feeling. “I want to get done with this as badly as you do.” Turning, he led the way into the Maze.

For days in Prokep he had studied it, trying this route or that one and making notes: Its pathways had changed their appearance from day to day, but the count of the turnings had remained ever the same. Through walls of gray rock or fognetted hedge, he led the demons swiftly, listening behind him, around him, in the curious stillness of whatever Hell or enclave or world constituted the world of the Maze. He guessed that some of Folcalor's forces at least had followed them in, and prayed again that Morkeleb and the dragons had put his plan into motion—and that his plan would work. When he was younger he'd comforted himself going into battle by saying, Well, they can't do more than kill you, but lately he'd found out this wasn't true.

He wondered where Jenny was, and if she was all right.

And smiled, only thinking about her. That lovely, strange, and solitary lady, wherever she was, whatever she did. He'd kissed her in the alleyway behind the tavern, and felt her arms around him, and she was his lady again.

Blister the lot of you, he thought, glancing back over his shoulder—of course he couldn't see the gray thing, but the rest of the demons looked paler, smaller, and even Amayon seemed to have lost a little of his glossy look. I'll survive this to have a life with her yet.

As he threaded the paths of the Maze, and watched the demons around him fade and wither, he understood the wisdom of the mages who had died in the Henge, powering this whole system of traps with their deaths. Of course they'd needed a way to reach the Henge themselves, in case of unforeseen emergencies. The Maze fed on magic, as the demons did. The longer they stayed in it, the more it leached them, their own magic going to feed the strength of the Henge. He toyed with the notion of leading them here and there until they simply disappeared, but dropped it: With the talisman jewels as a source of power, he had no idea how long they'd last, and in any case his goal was to get the catch-bottle to Adromelech. Even without the gray thing's spells, Folcalor might very well be capable of breaking the Henge from the outside anyway.