Knight of the Demon Queen (17 page)

Smoke poured in a column over the Sleeper’s backbone, the white smoke of burning roofs and burning walls. The smell of it charred the morning air.

As before, they swung wide of the road, which would be watched, and came through the cranberry bog on the far side of Toadback Hill. Jenny, Muffle, and Ian left the horses and most of the men in the ruins just past the hill-crest and made their way up on foot until they could look down on the Hold: white smoke, gray smoke, the pale silky flicker of orange flame.

“They’ve broke the gate!” Muffle made as if to run back to the horses, and Jenny caught his arm.

“Look again,” she said, though the panic that had seized him was reflected in her own heart: Maggie, Adric … maybe John, if he’d returned. Sparrow and her children. Muffle’s wife, Blossom. Gilly, Peasey, Moonbeam…

“The gate’s still closed,” she said.

The big man looked again. “That’s the kitchen burning, though,” he said. “And the blockhouses, the gatehouse roof…” Along the walls forms could be seen running, the flash of steel in the pallid morning light and the flash, too, of water thrown on flames. As they watched, two men with poles managed to heave the whole gatehouse roof down over the wall, scattering bandits away from the ram that had been set up before the gates themselves.

“Magic,” Jenny said softly. “Magic of some kind. Fire spells are the easiest of wyrds to set.”

“And the easiest to quench.” Ian’s face was set, thin and old as a skull’s, and his eyes burned a feverish blue. He was gathering himself, focusing all his magic, all his power.

He knew what Muffle knew: that even if the gate still held, if the attackers had some way of sending fire spells
within the Hold, the defenders couldn’t last long. Jenny saw a man on the walls leap back, striking at the flames that burst spontaneously on his sleeves and back. He was still slapping at them when an arrow from below the wall took him through the chest. A spot of flame appeared on the stable roof, growing rapidly to a flower and then a blaze.

“I can’t work the counterspells at this distance,” Ian said softly. “Muffle, will you ride down with me?”

“No.” Jenny’s hand closed over his wrist. “Look down there: the man with Balgodorus, the man in green with the scraggy beard.”

Ian frowned, not understanding. “That’s just Dogface the bandit,” Muffle said. “He rode with Crake and that blond fellow … What was his name? A small-time thief and a slaver. Nothing to worry about.”

“Except that he’s dead,” Jenny said. “I know. I killed him—poisoned him—at Brighthelm Tower, eight or nine days ago when I rescued those people from Rushmeath Farm. The bandits were led by a dead man then, too.”

There was silence. A sortie of bandits threw themselves from the burning ruins of Alyn Village against the Hold walls, raising siege ladders, scrambling up ropes. They were squat forms, smaller than the other bandits and armored heavily in glittering spikes. Jenny could hear their shouting: the hoarse, growling polysyllables of the gnomes.

“Dogface is dead,” Jenny said. “As poor Pellanor was. A demon inhabits his flesh, as demons can. Setting fires is probably all he can do, from the limitations of being in the flesh of a nonmage. And there may be other demons among Balgodorus’ men as well. If you use magic against them, Ian, they will take you through your spells, as they took me.”

The boy looked at her blankly. It was almost as if, having readied his mind for battle, he was shaken at being drawn back from it. Jenny was familiar with the sensation. She held his gaze with hers and in a moment or two saw his eyes change. He looked past her at the flames, and the distant shouting of men was borne to them with the smoke on the wind.

His lips parted and closed again, as if he could not even frame the words,
What then?

Jenny closed her eyes, understanding what had to be done.

She, who had no magic but who understood magic, could do it. Her flesh understood an alien flesh and an alien power.

There was a power circle that could be made to draw in the greatest of power: the harmonies of the turning stars. Long study had given Jenny an exact awareness of each planet, each star beyond the daylight sky; she knew also where the veins of gold and silver ran deep beneath the Winterlands rock and where underground rivers could be used to build trines and quarts to amplify and reflect the powers of sky and earth. Thus it was, to be a mage.

Exhausted, shaken, battered from six days’ journeying, and from summons of the whalemages, Ian had little power left of his own. But through the soul of a wizard, power could be drawn and focused, as crystal focuses light.

And Jenny’s flesh remembered. Jenny’s bones remembered. There was a part of her mind, her essence, that had never returned from the brief days when the form of a dragon had been given to her as a gift, and with it a dragon’s magic.

Morkeleb the Black had asked her, after battle with
Folcalor had burned out her own power, if she wanted to return to being a dragon again, to return with him to the Skerries of Light. What she would not do for relief, for escape from a grief she could not bear, she would do, she understood, for her children, for her sister, for her friends.

It was as if her heart remembered how to do it. Only the power was lacking.

The circle was made in what had been the temple of that nameless town on the hill; standing in its midst, Ian looked very small. Jenny mounted what had been the campanile, a ring of hollowed stones, all its floors long since burned away but still nearly sixty feet tall. The stair wound dizzily up the inner curve of the wall. From the top she could see the Hold, and the flames rising higher.

Adric was there. Maggie like a silent kitten just learning to hunt. The bandits…

She closed her mind to them, seeking the cold diamond perfection of a dragon’s mind. Below her Ian made the passes, called the white plasma of energy from earth and stars and air, and Jenny remembered what it had felt like to draw that power through her own hands. She had thought she would have felt it, but she didn’t. She only saw her son performing the gestures that focused the mind, heard now and then a snatch of the words he cried out—the names of the stars from which he sourced his power.

Will the demons feel it?
she wondered.
Feel it and come swirling down on him before he finishes, to catch him through the spells he weaves?

She couldn’t tell, couldn’t see.

She could only follow what he did, as if counting in her mind what should be going on.

Power flowing. Power surrounding her. Power filling the empty column of the tower and shining in the air.

She felt nothing. And her son looked very tiny on the hillside far below. The sky around her was cold blue patched with the scattered white of breaking cloud, wide and windy and empty as her bones. There was nothing in her heart to tell her that she was anything but a simple woman standing on the brink of emptiness, waiting to hear a sound that would never come.

But her mind rebuilt the memory of what it had been to be a dragon. Rebuilt the glitter of that alter-self: milk-white scales and diamond spines, wings like cloud and smoke.

A mind that desired but did not love. A heart like the one she had seen in her dream: a casket of jewels locked with a crystal tear.

The soul of a star-drake that had once been a woman.

If the sky spoke her name, she could no longer hear it. Nevertheless she spread her arms, took two running strides, and leaped from the top of the tower, calling out to the sky, to the power,
Now
.

The heat of transformation took her in its hand. Not piecemeal as a flower blooms, but whole and burning at once: wings and horns and maned bird-bill head, claws and tail and magic like a cascade of opals. The music of a name that was hers.

Desires that were not human desires. Awareness of things that no human would even consider.

Her wings sheared air, her will bearing her, as the wills of dragons did. Below her everything changed—not the burning wild beauty of demon perceptions, but clear, cold, crystal, and small. A little figure in a little circle on the stone pavement of a little temple, staring up in wonder and terror and delight. She knew his name was Ian,
and she knew she’d borne him nine months in her belly, and she knew she loved him—if she could remember what love was.

Not a thing of dragons.

Still there were those in the burning fortress who would die if she did not save them, and though she felt detached from them—they were after all humans, lives like short tangled ribbons that would end soon anyway—she remembered at least that she had promised someone she would keep them from being killed today.

And so she struck.

Men were running, screaming. She remembered there were demons about and so she did not use magic beyond the magic that she was, which enabled her to fly and indeed to live. But she did not need it. Wheeling in the smoky air, she plunged down over the walls, spitting the acrid burning slime that was the weapon of dragons and seeing men fall and clutch their smoking flesh, howling in pain. She recalled that as a demon she had imbibed pain, but it meant nothing to her now.

She veered close, dipped her wings, struck again. Horses flung their riders and ran away; she marked their courses with her opal eyes, remembering her hunger and thinking,
Later
. Her mind triangulated all things in the landscape: burning towers, the course of every man through the flaming shells of the village, the little cluster of men on Toadback Hill pointing and shouting. Arrows flew up from the bandits, and she sailed effortlessly over them then stooped when the shafts fell back and caught up one man in her claws, carrying him aloft and dropping him. She snatched and seized another and sent him spinning away, razored to bits.

Then there were no more men. They had fled into the woods, into the gullies, into the snowy hills beyond the
village fields. She spread her wings and circled the Hold, slow and soaring on the thermals of the fire. Someone was down there that she cared about, she thought, but she could not remember who it was. Exultation filled her, a healing glory of magic in her flesh.

Magic was in her heart, which had been starved of it since summer’s end.

Dragon music inundated her soul.

She lifted clear of the smoke and the shouting of men, away from a single shrill voice calling a name that had once been hers. Wind in her face, cutting the cold clouds, she flew away to the North.

It was evening when John came to. He didn’t know how many evenings later it was. One at least, and an endless night of sliding in and out of agony worse than the rack, worse than breaking, worse than anything he’d read about in the more appalling books that had survived the centuries.

Amayon was sitting on the fern bank beside him. A pair of long silver tweezers and what looked like a hooked needle lay blood-tipped on his knee. He was just eating the last of a clutch of wriggling, gore-clotted, finger-long things of hooks and teeth, crunching them happily, like a gourmet devouring crayfish. He was smiling.

“They’re better,” he informed John, “the bigger they get. I didn’t know that. They absorb pain, too.”

John rolled over and groped with fingers that would barely move for the ink bottle, still on its ribbon around his neck. The Demon Queen must have placed a wyrd on it, he thought, that kept Amayon from simply throwing it away.

“Oh, don’t be an ass,” the demon said as he caught a bore worm that was attempting to crawl away through the grass. He crunched it in his small white teeth. “It was only luck that you were able to get the bottle open when these things got you. Do you think you’re going to
be any nimbler the next time you blunder into something you think looks pretty and harmless? If you do think that, I wonder that you’ve lasted this long. Lady Jenny’s help, I expect.”

“That’s it,” John said, trying to breathe. “She’s been rescuin’ me every day of me life and barely has time to make bread or braid her hair, and fair fratched she’s been about it, too.” He felt nauseated, and there were small deep cuts on his arms, on his chest where his shirt had been torn open, on his belly and on the calves of his legs. He felt dried blood on his temple and assumed there were cuts on his neck and face as well. They were starting to bruise up, too. He’d look, he thought, like he’d fallen down a flight of stairs. Everything hurt.

He dumped eight flax seeds into the ink bottle and heard Amayon spit curses at him as he dropped off to exhausted sleep again.

He woke feeling a little better. Possibly the Queen had laid some magic on his flesh that would let him recover from injuries sustained in Hells; perhaps it was one of Miss Mab’s spells, written on him before he passed for the first time behind the burning mirror. He half expected to find evidence of some other devilment Amayon had performed while he was incapacitated with pain— pouring out or befouling his food or water, for instance, or smashing his spectacles—but found nothing. He wondered what inducement Aohila had extended for Amayon’s good behavior.

It would help to know
, he thought, painfully tying his shirt together and rebuckling his doublet. If magic differed from one Hell to another, there was going to be some point at which the spells she’d placed on the demon would fail, and then, John thought, he’d better watch out.

And if Amayon broke free, then what? What was freedom, to the children of Hell? Would he return to Adromelech? How much did the Lord of the Sea-wights know about Folcalor’s activities in the realm of mortal men? Perhaps he’d return to Folcalor? Whose side was Amayon on, the little weasel?

Or would he just stay on in whatever Hell he found himself, a nasty little swamp gyre who tormented humans and demons alike for the pleasure it gave him, until the lord of that particular Hell sucked him up?

He supposed Amayon was right about his needing the demon’s help to get through paradise to the place where— according to the dim dreams rising into the back of his mind—the gateway to the next Hell would lie. It was enormous labor even to walk, and when he cut a sapling in a thicket the stump of it spat smoking black ichor at him that he barely dodged. Aversin generally carried a couple of silk scarves in his pockets for use as anything from tourniquets to strainers, and one of these he wrapped around the wood to protect his hand as he limped along.