Knight of the Demon Queen (21 page)

Bort drew back, startled. “I—What? Why?” He had clearly not realized that Docket’s disappearance might have anything to do with him.

John sighed. After a lifetime in the Winterlands it was
difficult to remember sometimes that there were people who didn’t look through doors before stepping out. “Listen. Last summer I was twilkin’ near killed because a demon lord set about collectin’ mages. He combed the Realm for ’em, tricked ’em out of hiding. His demons took over their bodies, and he kept their souls. Now you tell me the likes of you are spreadin’ word about how you’re wizards all over the public computer lines, and you don’t think…”

“I’ve found the book titles.” Garrypoot’s voice broke across John’s words. The youth looked back over his shoulder, the pale glow of the screen playing across his rat-like face. “Moondog was right, Bort. Both the Bransle and the
Companion
were mentioned in the same correspondence, two days ago, asking Docket to wait after closing. The message was signed Wan ThirtyoneFourFour.”

“ThirtyoneFourFour?” Bort’s heavy shoulders dropped, and for an instant he resembled the fat comic actor hovering faintly above Shamble’s yellow cap. “
ThirtyoneFour-Four?
Are you sure?”

“I traced the log-on code,” Garrypoot said. He looked scared. “It was a genuine transmission.”

Bort and Garrypoot looked at one another disbelievingly, then at Clea, at Shamble, at John.

“All right,” John said after a moment. “So who’s this Wan when he’s at home? D’you know him?”

Clea laughed, as at an absurdity. Bort only shook his head. “Not being millionaires, of course we’ve never met. But we’ve heard of him on the news. Everyone has.”

“Wan ThirtyoneFourFour is the first man to come back from the dead,” Clea said.

“Mother.”

She heard their voices, far-off and clear. The dragon dreams in which she slept were like sleeping in a world wrought all of brown topaz that refracted every separate sound and scent and vibration to crystal distinctness. She could hear snow falling in the Gray Mountains, moles whispering as they turned in their sleep.

But the voices caught at her mind. She didn’t know why.

“You’re stupid,” the younger boy said. “Of course she’ll know who we are. Dragons know everything.”

Indeed we do
, she thought.
Indeed we do.

She knew they were two boys moving on foot northeast through the thick woods five miles to the south of her. She knew that though the younger bore a little sword they were no threat.

They had lost their mother, by the sound of it, though the elder—she turned her mind upon them, seeing within as dragons can—was old enough to take care of both himself and the younger.

The older boy was a wizard, as humans reckoned wizardry. The nimbus of power shone dim around his head and shoulders. Adolescent humans were seldom strong in their powers until the flesh from which they sourced their magic ceased its changes from child to adult. She
didn’t know why she knew this, or why the children looked familiar to her.

Heretofore her dreams had been dragon dreams: sailing on the wind above ice fields and rocks; absorbing the magics of sun and air as if she’d long been starved; dreaming of the other star-drakes, wherever they were, in the mountains or the ocean’s heart, or among the Skerries of Light.

Why did she dream of lost children?

“Dragons may know everything,” the older boy, the wizard-boy, said, “but she may not remember who she is. She may not remember she’s our mother. She may not be able to turn back.”

“That’s stupid,” the younger declared. He was stocky and red haired. “
You’re
stupid.”

The young of any species generally smite those younger still who treat them with disrespect—it is a way of making oneself safe—but this older boy only sighed and said, “Yes. Yes, I am.”

The white dragon considered the boys for a time in her sleep.

She had laired in the crypt of an old temple that had been built to some human god and was now overgrown with dead briars under an eiderdown of last night’s snow. There was some gold there, though robbers had been at the place, long ago. Still, there was gold enough for her to sing to, gold into which to pour the music of her mind and heart and have it reflect back a thousand-fold the heart-shaking beauties of the everlasting world.

She felt the goodheartedness of the old temple’s priests, who’d stayed to keep their god’s honor fresh in the minds of the local people; felt the grief and terror and tragedy of their death at the hands of bandits; the peace and wonder of each slow-passing season, each nesting
bird, each fox kit raised and taught to hunt and to go forth to meet the winter moon.

All these things, and a thousand sad shining sweetnesses more, resonated from the gold, soothing and healing her heart.

The children were seeking their mother.

In her dream the white dragon blew on the gold again. It seemed so long since she’d basked in the glory that dragon magic calls from gold. Every joy, every hour of content she had ever felt, every beauty she had ever been aware of, came back to her from it, easing a hurt deep in her heart for which she had neither memory nor words. The children presented no threat to her, no more than the hungry deer that scraped the snow in quest of brown ferns. There were bandits in the woods, a small group of them, following the boys’ tracks.
Slave traders
, she thought, and recognized two or three as being among the men she’d driven from the walls of the citadel.

Now why, she wondered, had she done that?

She remembered doing it, but could not remember why.

The wizard-boy should be aware of them, but watching through her dreams she did not think he was.

It was often so, with adolescent mages.

“Maybe she’s gone off to be a dragon forever,” the younger boy said. “I think that’s great. Papa says the dragons live on islands way out in the ocean, and hunt and fish and sing songs. That’s what I’d do if I could.”

She saw the boy’s grief like blood drops shed in silence in the snow.

“If she wants to do that, yes,” the black-haired elder boy said. “But we have to ask her at least to come back till Father returns. Because of the demons.”

Demons.

The white dragon dreamed of demons.

Those memories, too, the gold refracted: a kaleidoscope of rage and pain and horror, of slavery and rape. Because she was a dragon she saw all these visions dispassionately, understanding them for experiences, for things that she now knew.

She had demon memories as well, clarified and magnified through the gold.

She was in Hell, watching Adromelech the arch-demon torture Folcalor. She saw them clearly—Amayon saw them clearly, Amayon whose memory this was. Amayon sat on the steps of Adromelech’s dais and clung to the blaze of the archdemon’s power. He absorbed and warmed himself in the howling, obscene agonies of Folcalor’s humiliation and pain. He absorbed, too, like the crumbs and leavings of a feast, some of the arch-demon’s sensual delight.

This was what it was to be a demon, the dragon understood. This was what it was. When Adromelech withdrew Folcalor from the fire, on the point of dissolution, he took the victim in his arms and breathed into him all the pleasure he’d taken from Folcalor’s pain and made Folcalor love him.

Ah, my little wight. Ah, my little treasure.

And Folcalor said,
I will serve you as you served me
. For Folcalor was the most intelligent of the Sea-wights, coldness and patience added to their will and their greed and their vast malicious anger.
I will devour you, piece by piece, as you daily devour me.

Of course you will, my child
, Adromelech chuckled indulgently,
of course you will
. And with his clawed forefinger he put out Folcalor’s eyes and let him creep around the room blind, burning him as he crept, with Amayon giggling, lapping up the pain, behind.

They all love one another, and hate one another, and
feed on one another to some degree
, a man had said to her once on some sea rocks, waves smashing high over their heads.
They cannot die, and do not forgive.

What does he want?
she had asked the worm-riddled dead man, with his blue decomposing eyes. She was aware of him, too, shambling and stumbling through the freezing wastes of the fells, lying down in the snowdrifts to keep the rot from overtaking his corpse, hearing the Demon Lord’s sweet singing in his crumbling dreams.
What does he want?

In the gold’s shimmering reflections she saw Folcalor clothed in the body of a gnome. White hair tinged faintly with pink flowed down over his brocaded shoulders. His hands she knew already, thick and heavy and ringed with the faceted gems of the gnomes. And she knew his greenish, watchful eyes.

The chamber where he was had a pool in its center, six or seven feet broad and brimming with water through which leafy beryl light flickered up. Folcalor’s jeweled hand passed over the water, and in it the dragon saw the image of an old man weeping.
Bliaud
, she thought.
His name is Bliaud…
And he wept as if he had lost the last and dearest thing that had made his life worth living. In some part of her heart the white dragon knew what that thing was.

Folcalor leaned over the pool and whispered,
“Blood in the bowl, peace in your soul. All will be whole.”

The dragon’s opal eyes opened, and she knew there was something she had forgotten—something about the demon.

And the lost boys knew what it was.

Waking, she heard their voices crying out. The bandits had reached them, had fired a poison arrow that struck the wizard-boy’s leg. Even at this distance she
smelled the blood and smelled in it the poisons that would tangle his magic and keep him from using it against those who attacked. She smelled, too, the flesh of the man who’d shot the arrow, smelled decay and death.

The white dragon whipped among the pillars of the hidden crypt like a snake. She crashed forth in an explosion of dazzle and circled once above the snow-covered woods to get her bearings, silken wings spread. Gray clouds lay low over the white-choked vales, the wind-scoured fells. There had been snow last night, and more was coming. She rose into those silent vapors, blending with them, white as the mists and snow. She knew the land’s shape, and the way the hills wore their garment of heather, knew their stilled streams and ponds. Ears and heart and the memory of older dreams took her to the bare black trees where the bandits had laid hands on the boys.

The younger boy had cut a man with his child’s sword, and the blood lay glaring on the snow. The man he’d hurt was holding his bleeding thigh and cursing while the others held the boy and beat him. His brother, disarmed and weak from the poison, struggled against a dark-bearded bandit who bound his wrists with a thong. This bandit was saying to their leader, a stocky dead man with demon eyes, “Better be worth it is all I got to say.” Then as the white dragon dropped down out of the mists overhead, the dark-bearded man looked up and screamed.

The white dragon ripped with her claws at the bare treetops that prevented her from tearing straight down on them. One of the bandits grabbed the smaller boy and tried to run with him; the boy shoved his boot between the man’s legs, tripping him, and the man got up
and ran without him. The demon leader, the stocky man once called Dogface, started toward the boy, but the white dragon ripped another tree and flung it between him and his prey. “Mother!” the older boy cried.

The bandits were gone. Their leader, after a moment’s hesitation, followed, though slower and looking back. The white dragon spat fire after them but did not pursue. She hung soundless above the trees, her opal gaze that could triangulate on a rabbit from five hundred feet fixing on the boys. Sinuous as a water snake, long tail swaying back and forth for balance, she cleared herself a place to pass through the interwoven branches of bare oak and bare elm, then raised her great wings and settled through the hole.

“Mother!” the older boy said again, and the younger, who’d gone to fetch his small sword where the men had thrown it aside, came limping up, his face mottled crimson from blows, holding his side. He looked up at the dragon in silence. Neither, it appeared, had ever heard that one should not look into a dragon’s eyes.

“Mother?” the boy said a third time.

“Are you really our mother?” the younger boy asked.

Absurd. Human infants.

Yet she knew them.

Ian, the wizard-boy was called. The warrior-child was Adric.

A third child. Surely there was a third?

Gently she extended her long neck toward the wizard-boy, who shrank back from her in fear a little. But because the bandits had bound his wrists and ankles, even had he not been weak from the poison, he could not run. He shivered, staring at her in wonderment and shock: staring at her narrow birdlike head framed in its mane of fur and ribbons, horns and whiskers; at the glittering
razors that guarded every joint and spike and spine.

These boys seemed so fragile to her, and suddenly, curiously precious. She saw this boy not only as he was— weedy and thin with a nose too big for his face—but as a red-faced infant sleeping after the exhaustion of birth, as a toddler staggering across a flagstoned floor—
where?
— as a child huddled with his brother in the quilts and furs they shared in a tower room at night, telling stories about the exploits of a hero called Lord John.

As an old man, healing those who came to seek his help, blue eyes undimmed, with a mane of milk-white hair.

She reached her mind into his mind and body and wrapped his self in her power. With a touch, a whisper of her mind, she blew away the poisons from his organs and brain and blood, as she would have healed another of her own kind.

As she
had
healed another, she remembered, once upon a time.

She drew back her head and considered the boys again.

Human children. Not a thing of dragons.

I will trust the Lord of Time
, she had once said,
as humans must, who cannot will pain away by magic.