Knight of the Demon Queen (18 page)

Fat lot of use I’ll be
, he thought,
when I find this chap I’m supposed to bring back to her
.

The chap who killed the girl with lavender hair in the Hell of Walls.

The thought was not enough to get him to release Amayon from the bottle.

Memories rose disturbingly to Aversin’s mind as he passed through the scented beauty of groves and streamlets, as if he had walked this way already and taken careful note of the route. He sensed there were other things in his mind as well, things he’d dreamed in the mirror chamber and wouldn’t recall until he required the knowledge.
And
you couldn’t have given me a bit of a word about butterflies?
he thought bitterly.

There were things in his satchel now, along with the bits and pieces he’d taken from Jenny’s workbox, that he’d never seen before and had no idea how to use, or why: an earthenware pot of what appeared to be ointment, a small heavy cylinder of black metal and glass.

Master Bliaud had given him things as well: thick-linked chains of silver, gold coins minted by various kings of Bel. The weight of it cut a channel of pain in his shoulder and sapped his breath, and he would rather have had the equivalent weight of water and food. Bird-song rippled from the trees as he waded through summer flowers; once he heard voices, like young maidens laughing, and he went to ground in a cave and didn’t move until that gay music faded with the fading of the afternoon.

The light departed, and the light returned; but there was neither sun nor moon, and the velvety lapis sky was without stars.

Such, he was coming to understand, was the nature of Hell.

The marks on his flesh—the traced spells of the Demon Queen—shone with a kind of pale silvery shimmer among the bruises. They were visible at all times here, not just now and then as they were in the world of humankind. He wondered again if Amayon bore such marks beneath that quilted velvet doublet and what the Demon Queen had done to him.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the demon would take vengeance where he could on the man who’d sent him behind the mirror into the Hell of his enemies.

He still didn’t open the bottle.

He reached at last a place among the trees where a
waterfall tumbled sparkling from high rocks to a moss-cushioned pool—the place where his memories ended, as if he had reached a mountain’s top and saw no further road beyond. From his pocket he took the dark fragment of beveled glass he’d found in the Hell of Winds, and using this as a mirror he searched the glen, one tiny portion at a time. It took him nearly two hours of aching concentration, but at last he found it: the sigil of the gate. He’d made a note of its shape and position on their entry into paradise, and into the Hell of Winds before that.

It was written on the waterfall itself, as if flickering light shone there from behind. Something underwater tried to take a bite out of his calf as he waded through the bright laughing pool to trace the sigil with his fingers, as he’d seen Amayon do. Later he found tooth marks on his boot from something with a mouth as large as a small wolf’s.

The waterfall turned to smoke where the sigil had been. He stepped through it into what lay beyond.

It took John almost three days to guess the secret of the Hell of Walls.

He might, he thought later, have understood it sooner had he let Amayon out of the bottle and asked his advice. But he doubted it. Amayon would have taken too much delight in confusing him, and he would not have believed anything the demon said.

It was a Hell of noise, of walls, of crowds of creatures that looked human. It was certainly the place he had seen in the puddle in the mirror chamber: the place where, somewhere, he would encounter the Demon Queen’s absconding lover in his hall of golden lamps.
Another reason to keep Amayon prisoner
, he thought,
huddling into a blind and bricked-up doorway while the featureless black sky rivered down stinging rain. The demon would almost certainly have been able to locate Aversin’s quarry more quickly; he would have captured him, bound him, taken him to Aohila in return for his own freedom and left John a prisoner in the Hell of Walls forever.

That first night, he thought death would have been preferable.

A man—or what appeared to be a man—detached itself from the endless, jostling crowd that joggled and yammered in the canyon of colored light among endless walls and crept toward the niche where Aversin sheltered from the rain. All the seeming people wore glistening caps and cloaks as they scurried on unimaginable errands in and out of buildings that lost themselves far overhead in darkness and cloud; this creature was no different. But it—he—smelled of filth, and his stubbled face was eroded with sores. He smiled a vacant smile, visible in the light that reflected down the alley from rectangular blocks of white light, like the hothwais of the gnomes, suspended above the streets.

John half drew his sword and let the blade catch the light. The shabby man halted, ankle-deep in the water that flooded every street and alley hereabouts, and for a moment his hands wavered uncertainly before his face, as if he was confused by what he saw. Then he shambled away and crawled into one of the great dark metal refuse containers that lined the alley, creeping with roaches and mold.

John did not sleep that night. At one point he wondered if in fact this place had day or night. The jostling crowds in the colored glow of the streets never seemed to lessen. Mosquitoes—actual mosquitoes, he realized
shortly—swarmed in whining clouds. Later, a small band of young men and women dodged along the alley, shabbily clothed, their skin brightly painted, smelling of dirt and bearing things they handled like weapons. He heard them speak, and the voices in his mind formed words, as had the voices of the hunters in the Hell of the Shining Things.

Demons? he wondered. Servants of the lord of this unimaginable Hell? Or prisoners as the hunters had been—as he himself was, and would be forever if he could not find the man he sought.

Day came. The rain ceased for a time, but the gray blank overhead smelled of more. The crowds increased, unbelievably. Warily, John moved out among them, and though they gave him wide berth, he wasn’t the only one he saw heavily armed. The noise was dizzying, the sides of the buildings plastered and patched with garish lights and flashing panels of color. Panels of pictures, too, that moved as if living: tiny as a thumbnail or towering a dozen stories up the side of a building whose uppermost floors were wreathed in low-hanging cloud.

These pictures spoke, and music—if it was music— rivered from them, but because the speech was artificially produced he could not understand what was being said. These moving images seemed to be a series of short plays or demonstrations. Watching them, he knew to put the ointment from the Queen’s terra-cotta pot on his face, for his skin, which had itched within hours of coming through the waterfall, was reddened as if burned, and he was nearly bitten to death by mosquitoes.

He had no time to waste, he knew. He had food and water for a week of short rations, three days of which would be needed to get him back through paradise and
the Hell of Winds. So he hunted through alleys that were only slots between the buildings.

There was no end, apparently, to the city. Certainly in all the time that he spent there he never saw anything that was not walls and pavement and pictures mouthing senseless words and noise. Sometimes he would enter the buildings—heart hammering, for he wasn’t entirely certain that they were truly buildings—but many of them seemed to have no doors. He was for a long while unwilling to descend into the tunnels from which people, if they were people, poured constantly, for he could hear roaring and clattering from below, like the passage of great beasts or machines.

On the third night he found the place where the girl had been killed. The night had turned cold and the wind came up, unfelt if one traveled the avenues but howling strong enough to knock a sick man down at the crossing of every street. Tiny waves raced across the murky water that stood in the streets, the water itself pushed by the storm far beyond its usual limitations, lapping the dark buildings, the metal bases of the grillwork walkways and duckboards built up from the older pavements, the scarified feet of the elevated trackways where dark trains roared by. Aversin was aware of the gangs that prowled the storm-blasted alleys, creeping into areas where the glaring lights failed.

He had his lantern with him, however, and by its wavering light was able to recognize the place he’d seen in his dreaming. The pattern and shapes that scribbled every foot of the walls were the same—obscene drawings, gigantic writing, simplified pictograms of things he did not understand.

It was easy to see the bloodstains.

The wind’s screaming grew louder. The water splashed
softly around John’s boots, and rats—the only animals he had seen here so far—plopped and scuttered as he neared the huge dark shapes that had flanked the woman in his vision. Rubbish bins, he knew now, the size of the poorer houses in Alyn Village. Kneeling, he fished gingerly under one of them and found the heel of the dead woman’s shoe: vivid pink with chevrons of black, unmistakable. The lantern’s light gleamed on something else under the scummy water. Taking off his iron-backed gloves he held the light down close and with his fingernails picked up a broken, flat link of an ornamental chain.

Gold. Next to it, nearly buried in nameless muck, were broken fragments of what appeared to be glass, thin and infinitely fine. It was the first glass he’d seen, for most things—furniture, dishes, clothing found in the refuse bins—all seemed to be made of the same stuff:
plex
, he had heard it called, the same word used to describe either hard stuff or soft. He probed farther and brought up the curled remains of what looked like a glass shell.

For a long time he stood with the thing cupped in his hand beneath the lantern’s shuddering light.

Sea-wights.

Maybe he should have expected it, he thought, looking around at the inky shadows, the wavery golden ghosts of the lantern’s light. God knew there was water enough. If the archwight Adromelech had sent Folcalor to enslave the mages in the world of humankind—if he’d long ago given humankind his help in sealing Aohila and her demons behind the mirror—why wouldn’t he have sent some other wight to make trouble for the inhabitants of some other Hell?

Small odds for his own survival either way. As he carefully stowed the remains of the shell in his doublet, his
fingers brushed the ink bottle, and he wondered,
Can Amayon call his brethren?

Can he touch the dreams of the humans here, as he touched the dreams of that poor lad Browson in the Darrow Bottoms?

One more thing to worry about.
He had only a day’s food if he wanted any hope of making it through the Hell of Winds, and no clue as to where to go from here. Would Amayon know of a way to contact Aohila? Was that what she was counting on him to do? To eat or drink in Hell was to put yourself in the power of its lord, and he couldn’t imagine what the lord of this place would be like.

Wind yowled around the corner, whipped his long wet hair, and put out the candle in the lantern’s horn frame.

Blackness swallowed him. Sea-wights would be watching him, he thought—plus the demons native to this Hell, servants of its lord.

Someone in a room many stories above the alley lit a candle—the shaky light was unmistakable. John wondered where they’d gotten it, for he’d seen neither sheep nor bees in Hell. The light drew his eyes, then guided them past the window itself to the black cutout of the skyline hundreds of feet overhead.

The gale had shredded the cloud cover that he had for three days mistaken for sky. Now the rags of gypsy clouds fled across the slot between building and building, harried by the remains of the storm.

And between them, beyond them, stars.

The Watcher, with his shining belt and his red-eyed dog. The Hay-wain perpetually circling the North Star.

True stars and true sky, not the strange colorless nowhere of Hell. The waning moon was just rising, as it
should have been three days after he’d seen it over the midnight ruins of Ernine.

The understanding burst upon him that the human beings who thronged this place were not akin to the lost hunters who roved the Hell of the Shining Things. The disappearance of the Demon Queen’s marks from his skin did not mean the presence of a magic greater in this place than hers.

He was not, he realized, in Hell at all, but in a mortal world like his own.

    An old man named Docket who ran a bookstore helped him find a room. “The very same thing happened to my brother’s son,” he said, shaking his snowy head as he tidied the bright-colored plex squares called chips, the finger-long ’zines—whatever ’zines were—and the ancient, fusty volumes of bound paper and plex that heaped the shelves of the farthest of his little third-floor rooms. “The big drug companies just don’t keep good enough track of their formulas. Now, my brother’s son ate candy that was mostly phrenzoicaine—which is pretty harmless as long as you go on taking it and don’t switch brands—but that reacted with some Powder Blue a friend gave him at a party, and for weeks he hadn’t the slightest idea about where he lived or who he was. He’s lucky his wife was there to get him home. He still has short-term memory problems, though I think he’d be better off if he didn’t keep eating Buddle Pies. Those things have CPN in them and that just plays hob with everything else you take. Absolute hob.”

He patted John’s arm comfortingly. “You’ll remember in time.”

“Thanks,” John said, and made a mental note to
avoid candy, Powder Blue, and Buddle Pies—whatever Powder Blue and Buddle Pies were.

“Fourteen hundred creds a month,” the landlady of the run-down building old Docket took him to said. “Thirty, if you want the screen covered.” She gestured to the enormous moving picture that dominated one of the room’s windowless walls. “That’s high, I know,” she added, as if expecting argument, “but that’s what the agencies charge for subsidy, and they won’t take a day-to-day prorate. Here’s the volume. Rent goes up fifty credits for every day the volume goes below five.”