Knight of the Demon Queen (12 page)

Not that John blamed him. He’d seen what the
Demon Queen did to those in her power. Aohila didn’t look like the kind who would forgive even the smallest of the demons who had aided in sealing her and her minions behind the mirror, and he knew from experience a little—the smallest part—of the torments meted out in Hell.

He wondered, as he made his way out of the marshes through vapor and shifting moonshine, what teind the mages of Prokeps had had to pay for the Lord of the Sea-wights’ help. He came around the shoulder of the hill and recognized the maze of gashes and gullies, of fallen pillars and half-buried statues through which he and the gnome-witch Miss Mab had ridden in the last moon of summer, seeking some way to save Jenny from enslavement to Caradoc and his demon master.

No magic of humans or gnomes, Miss Mab had said, could guard him from the spells of the Hellspawn. They were supreme in their own worlds. Such spells as could be wrought in this world could only strengthen him in the ways he was already strong.

And it was that strength, those spells, he understood now, that had saved him behind the Mirror of Isychros. That strength was why the Demon Queen had sought him out when she needed a human to do her work. The strength of his love for Jenny, and his stubborn refusal to be fooled.

But it had to be done
, he thought. A fool’s errand, yes, and a madman’s, but there had been no other way to free them. The image of Jenny rum soaked, naked, and flashing with cheap finery had tormented him for months, until he’d made Amayon’s acquaintance and heard in the demon’s voice the disdainful mockery that had come, in those days, from Jenny’s mouth. With Ian and his possessing demon it must, he knew, be the same.

Just take from them that memory
, he thought, his legs aching as he waded through flowing ground fog and ivy up the curving sandstone stair.
Just free them of that pain.

I can heal your son.

John had feared and mistrusted demons before riding with one to Hell. He hated them now, and the Queen among the rest.

The passageway into the rock, and the crypt where the mirror stood, were knee-deep in opal mist. Tendrils of it curled to the ceiling, where the light of John’s lantern flashed on the stars writ there in gold, the comet with its trailing plumes. Then the flame burned low, chill and blue within the glass chimney, and dwindled to its death while a sort of greenish light formed up within the mist itself. The mirror chamber shifted, uncomfortably like chambers in the queen’s palace, filled with vapors through which demon courtiers passed in semblance of handsome lords and ladies: heartstoppingly beautiful until you turned your head and caught a glimpse of them from the corner of your eye. John took the remaining silver bottle from his satchel and put it on the stone floor before the mirror, among the scuffed lines of summoning that remained from the last time he had stood here to pay the Demon Queen’s teind. Beside it he laid the ink bottle, and as if there were a thorn caught in his clothing somewhere the memory stabbed him of Jenny leaving him here because she could not bear to see him deliver Amayon to the punishment he deserved.

He drew a shaky breath. “Here I am, love,” he said to the covered mirror. “And here’s your present, all exactly as you asked this time and no jiggery-pokery to it. And I hope you don’t mean that I should walk home from here, for it’d be a gie shabby trick if you do.”

“As shabby as those you played me?” Hands closed
over his shoulders, death-cold hands strong as steel. He could feel the claws prick through his doublet and his shirt and dared not turn his head. Her slow evil smile was in her voice. “Something can doubtless be arranged. Pour out the water onto the floor.”

Bottle and floor were invisible under the mists. When John picked up the flask and obeyed, the vapors cleared from the spot as if blown upon, rising up and ringing them in a wall that hid even the door from sight. “Look into the water,” she said. John stepped forward, barely breathing, remembering the smoky mirror the gray-haired woman hunter had held that would reflect the true semblance of the Hellspawn.

But when he looked down he saw nothing behind him at all. His own reflection lay in the water as if in a pool miles deep, with the stars of the ceiling twinkling above his head. Though he felt the weight of the taloned hand and sensed the iciness radiating from her against his flesh, in the water it was as if he stood alone. Beneath and beyond his reflection he could see down into the stone floor and past it—past subcrypts and potsherds, past grass roots tangled in men’s bones, down and down to the heart of the earth, to a darkness where ill things lived.

The Queen’s hand moved on his shoulder, and blue lightning ran over the surface of the water then sank away, still flickering, into its depths.

John’s reflection dimmed into a wilderness of winds and howling sands. Lightning scorched across rocks more barren than a miser’s heart. Then the vision shifted to a sweet promise of birch trees in summer twilight, of butterflies, lilacs, and vines. Finally he saw black walls rise hideously tall and glaring with light, smoke-wreathed and sluiced by rain that fell endlessly from a filthy sky.

A woman. She staggered as she ran through the maze of walls, clothing torn and blood on her face, gummed in disheveled hair that was streaked lavender, after the fashion of the courtiers in the South. She ran with her arms folded before her breasts as if to protect herself. Her foot caught and she stumbled, the heel breaking off one garish pink shoe, but she picked herself up and fled on, panting with terror, feet splashing through shallow standing water, leaving trails of blood. She threw herself between two shapes—metal? rock?—where darkness pocketed. She leaned on the wall, gasping, one hand pressed to her mouth, the other wrapped around her belly, half doubled over, shaking with shock. Light fell down from somewhere near, and it showed not only cuts on her arms and face but the burned edges of those gashes, the rings and dots of branding on jaw and throat and chest. Bracelets glinted gold. Gold chains crossed the burns and scratches on her neck. Tears of pain rivered her face, but she bit her bleeding lips. John knew that she knew it would be death and worse than death for her to make a single sound.

She was listening. Listening for her life. Black streaks from tears marred her eye paint, and the distant colored lights showed her flesh glabrous with sweat.

Damn it, stay where you are
, John thought.
What-ever’s pursuin’, d’you think it doesn’t know you’re there?
In his mind he saw the line of tiny demons on the rock, drinking greedily of the horror of his dreams.

Stay where you are!

But she didn’t. She didn’t know. Like a new-foaled calf on shaky legs, she crept out of her hidey-hole—
no!
—and looked up and down the alley.

It
was
an alley. What was the matter with those who must have been in the lighted rooms so far above her, that
they didn’t come? Blackness, brightness, mold and filth growing on the walls, the gleam of water everywhere, rain beginning to fall once more. Lights visible perhaps fifty feet away, reflected on the water that stood in the alley … The illusion of safety.

She ran for them. And running, turned back at a sound John could not hear.

Mouth stretching, eyes stretching, wider and wider. The lights from above flickered on the gold of her bracelets as she raised her arms over her face.

Darkness bore her back against the wall.

If she screamed, John couldn’t hear it. But he saw the blood. It splashed the brick of the walls for yards and made lazy black spirals in the water underfoot, after her pursuer was done. He tried to turn his head away, but the Demon Queen’s hand closed over the side of his face and forced him to look again.

This time a man sat in a great chair entirely padded in green leather. John saw him in the pool: the room behind him less clearly, though he had an impression of opulence, of heavy hangings stamped with gold and statues and candlesticks wrought of the same gleaming metal. A small man, trimly handsome. A hooked thin profile and a mass of white-streaked dark hair. Like John he wore spectacles, oddly shaped, and with glass smoked dark so that his eyes were protected from even such small lights as burned in the room. He turned the woman’s gold bracelets over and over in white-gloved hands.

“Ah,” Aohila said, and there was deep satisfaction in her voice.

“Who is he?”

The clawed bone moved on his cheek. The tiny gashes its talons left bled, hot on his chilled skin. “He was my lover.” Though he knew there was no human mouth
behind him, he heard the little click of her tongue. “Faithless.”

“Now how could any man be so to you?”

The claws contracted warningly on the back of his neck. “Not like you.”

“I take it you want him.”

“Men don’t leave me, Aversin.” The grip tightened. Whatever was behind him, it was huge. The voice spoke above as well as behind his head. “Mostly they come back of their own accord. You will.”

“In time I might.” He grabbed her wrist and whirled to face her, to see her…

And behind him she was as she had always been. Tall but not quite his own height, snake-slim and beautiful as nightshade blossoms. A glitter of jewels, a suggestion of uneasy movement in her hair. The hand he held was a woman’s hand. It had always been.

“Bein’ that I don’t die of old age first, which I think is more likely. Do I get to take our boy Amayon with me for company again? Or have you got a trained scorpion you’d like to send along instead?”

Her mouth flexed with anger at this sarcasm, and something appeared on his hand: a scorpion the length of his finger, coal black with human eyes. His hand flinched to strike it, and her fingers turned in his grip and closed around his, holding them immobile. Angered, the vermin raised its tail. John stood paralyzed, not breathing, while the thing walked up his arm. It disappeared just short of his shoulder.

“Don’t jest with me,” the Demon Queen said softly.

Sweating, trembling, he only looked at her. It was probably, he realized belatedly, only an illusion. That wasn’t a theory he felt like putting to the test.

“Amayon is there to help you,” she added after a moment.
“You’ll need it. Heed his advice.” When he drew breath to speak, she added, “Did you think your errantry was done?”

From her robes she drew out a box wrought of pale brown dragonbone, mounted and clasped in silver, lidded with a baroque opal perhaps the diameter of a cut lime.

“You’ve got to show me how you do that one day,” John remarked, cocking his head and considering the naked, sinuous body so clearly visible beneath its single layer of blowing, smoke-hued gauze. “Girls’d pay a fortune to be able to carry combs and shawls and eye paint in their pockets and not have ’em make lumps. You invent that and peddle it in Belmarie, and you wouldn’t need to be Queen of Hell anymore, nor tell lies about what you want a cup of water for that has to be fetched from the ends of creation. You could marry a nice man— a tailor, he’d have to be, to get the first couple stitched up for sale—and have a house on the Street of the Sun with servants and tea parties for your friends, and be done with all this worryin’ about other demons tryin’ to push you off your throne and eat you and have you talkin’ to ’em out of their stomachs and all that.”

“You are frivolous,” the Queen said softly. When she lifted back her lip from her teeth, he saw there was blood on them. “It will be your death.”

John looked up from examining the inside of the box, an expression of surprise on his face. “Oh, it gie near was,” he said and rubbed the back of his neck. “Me dad didn’t have any more sense of humor about it than you do. Meself, I never thought he was the happier for takin’ everything in life so serious as he did. He came close to throwin’ me off the walls more than once.”

“I sympathize,” she said, her voice grim. She held out to him a flask of bronze, scarcely bigger than a Southern
double-royal coin. It tinkled softly as he shook it. “Open the box in his presence, and pour these inside. He will be drawn into it, as Amayon is drawn into the ink bottle. After that the box will not open again.” Something glinted, cold and more frightening than anything John had seen, in the alien yellow eyes. “Bring it to me. And then we are quits.”

The mist flowed down from the walls again. It covered the floor, then swirled up around her, a column of vapor through which the mirror glowed like the lightless door of an oven. She moved toward the incandescent Hell mouth, all the writhing life lifting and hissing in her hair.

“And me son?”

She stopped and faced him. “Your son will heal.” Casually, like a penny thrown to a beggar.

“And Jen?” She was already melting into darkness and fog, but her eyes remained, copper gold and narrow: jealous. Her voice came to him, it seemed, from the mists all around: an echo in the dark of his mind.

Mortals heal, John Aversin. And mortals die. Man can only do as he must.

He woke on the stone floor of the mirror chamber with his lantern burning and his bones aching with cold, the round bone box in his hand.

Ian and Jenny set forth next morning, under a thin, new-risen day moon. They rode alone, burdened as lightly as possible for travel in the bleak Winterlands. It was hard going, though they followed the old road to Eldsbouch and Ian could turn the worst of the weather aside. He cloaked them both with spells to send bandits elsewhere, too, but Jenny doubted that even such hardies as Balgodorus Black-Knife would be abroad in cold and rising wind like this.

In the days of the kings, Eldsbouch had been a walled city of many towers, spread over its four abrupt hills and along the shores of the great Migginit Bay. So rough were the riptides and currents of the bay that the ancients had built a mole to protect the deep-water harbor, which could still be seen at low tide. Rotted pillars clung to it where a colonnade had run, and when the tide was up they tusked the black foaming water like a broken comb. During the summer ships still put in at Eldsbouch, for the gnomes of Tralchet brought their trade down to the little town: silver from the mines, amber, and tin. The city wall had been rebuilt three times, each time nearer the harbor itself as the population shrank and the surrounding farmlands grew less and less able to give forth crops.