Knight of the Demon Queen (25 page)

John nodded, barely hearing. Gold rings and gold
chains and neat bundles of gold wire evidently unraveled from some kind of ethertonic equipment were heaped in another of those little boxes. A little scale sat nearby, for weighing the gold.

“I always wondered if that was one reason magic quit working.” Shamble extended a reverent finger to touch the gems. “All the books talk of using jewels, but of course most jewels now are synthetics. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that truly came out of the ground.”

John picked up the thing that lay next to the scale—a gold hair clip decorated with a blue enameled butterfly. Stuck in the dried blood on it was a single long snow-white hair.

“What’s this one?” Garrypoot took an extremely dark amethyst from the box where it had been set apart alone.

I should have guessed. I should have seen it coming.
A lifetime of protecting those who could not protect themselves coalesced into a terrible regret.

Oh, Tisa.

He set the hair clip down and gently removed the gem from Poot’s hand.

“This one,” he said, “is what we’ve come to get.” His hand shook a little as he wrapped the gem in his handkerchief and tucked it in his pocket.

Tisa leaning against the corner of a building, waiting for her mysterious Lots of Zeroes to come take her to dinner.
The one who’s picking me up tonight has
really
got money…

Her elfin grin as she’d waved good-bye.

Against his chest, he felt the onyx ink bottle warm and knew that Amayon fed on his horror and his guilt.

His fear, too, maybe. The rising uneasiness, the sense of time running out. Wan ThirtyoneFourFour was rich.

He’d have a fast boat and a crew of private-sector enforcers capable of dealing with any deep-zone gang that got in his way—if the gangs weren’t already in his pay or thrall.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Now let’s get out. First we’ve got to find…”

“Moondog—”

John crossed the room, though he guessed by Bort’s tone what was behind the door that Bort had opened, the doorway into the inner chamber. He guessed it would be bad. No attempt at cleanup had been made, neither after the latest splashes and stains and puddles had been laid down last night, nor on numerous occasions before. Roaches swarmed, fled as the ether panel on the ceiling lit up. The ants just went about their business, as ants will.

“What in the name of Hell …?” Shamble and Garrypoot trailed at his heels, stared in shock through the door.

“Aye,” John said softly. “In the name of Hell.” Some of the hair stuck in the blood here, too, was white. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you lot what demons do?”

They gazed at him, sickened, would-be mages who had talked casually of demons and magic and spells.
Children
, John thought, switching off the light. Shamble was probably his own age and Bort a good seven years his senior, but children nevertheless. Like young Prince Gareth, who’d sought him in the Winterlands thinking heroes and dragons resembled those in the ballads.

“Pain is what they do.” He walked back to the table and pocketed the five natural jewels. Not, he thought, that a rich man like Wan ThirtyoneFourFour would have a lot of trouble finding others, but at least this would buy the next-targeted victims some time. “Chaos is what they do. I don’t know how he keeps it from the
servants, but maybe in this world, too, it’s possible to find people who don’t care what their masters do, so long as the pay’s good—and anyway I’m sure there’s a drug for that. There seems to be for everythin’ else.”

He picked up also the golden hair clip, the rage in him rising with the smell of the blood from the other room, the stink of roasted flesh. The hair clip, he realized, had the only depiction he’d seen of insect, animal, or bird since he’d come to the city.

His hand was shaking.

“I came to this world to find someone,” he said softly. “Someone who collects gold. Poot, why don’t you download everythin’ off that terminal, and then we get the hell out of here.”

They passed Wan ThirtyoneFourFour in Universe Station. The private Redstreak line had a terminal there, on the level above the public lines. John glimpsed him through the triple-thick glass that enclosed the exclusive precinct, recognized the fair hair and impossible cheekbones as he and the White Black Birds descended the crowded stairway to the jumble of home-going salary-persons below. ThirtyoneFourFour, clothed in neat and very expensive black, was—as John had known he would be—accompanied by two very large shaven-headed men who looked like enforcers, men with the bleak, glazed look of strong drugs in their eyes.

Heat flared in the onyx bottle against John’s chest. ThirtyoneFourFour turned his head as if at a cry.

“Not that way! What are you doing, Moondog?” Bort pounded after John as he slipped and dodged through the crowd. The barriers designed to protect the private lines’ customers from the common horde was all that saved them, slowing the thugs, but Aversin heard the whining report of a handgun as he plunged down the escalator, ducked around a corner. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard another soft, snarling shot and a struck man’s cry.

Of course. They’re all drugged. They won’t dodge.
He
flung himself onto the nearest train. “It’s the wrong line, you fool! You’ll end up on Nine-seventy-fifth Avenue!” Bort wailed from halfway down the platform. The doors hissed.

Aversin didn’t stop trembling until he reached Garrypoot’s apartment, where Clea was trying to get Docket to drink a little milk. “I gave him the widest-spectrum antibodies I could get.” She looked up despairingly; milk was dribbled everywhere. “He isn’t running a fever, but he won’t eat or drink. He could have caught anything—he wasn’t wearing mask, and the mosquitoes carry IADS and AOAD…”

“Lay him on the floor.” The old man had been good to him, chatting for hours about gangs and computers and how to survive in the city: all those things that Amayon would have lied to him about. He fished in his pocket for the amethyst. Master Bliaud had worked spells, he recalled, to return the imprisoned mages to their proper bodies, but such spells had no meaning in this world.

Gently John opened Old Docket’s mouth and placed the gem inside. He watched the bookseller’s eyes, but they remained blank. Mageborn, the old man still had no idea how to come out of the jewel in which he’d been imprisoned, and there was no wizardry, no adeptness, in his flesh itself.

“Bugger all.” He removed the jewel and wiped the spittle off it on the hem of his shirt. “We’ll have to do this the hard way. Poot wouldn’t have such a thing as a hammer about, would he, love?” He could only hope that if he released it, the old man’s soul would find its way back to its body. Did they
have
hammers here?

It turned out they did, a little to John’s surprise. He hunted around the apartment until he found a small tray
of high-impact plex, which he set on the floor as close as he dared beside the old man’s head, then wrapped Clea’s scarf over Docket’s eyes for protection. “Hold his nose and mouth,” he instructed. “When I say
now
, let him breathe. On the count of three. One, two—” He set the jewel on the tray, raised the hammer high. “Now.”

The door opened. “What—?” Bort cried as the hammer smashed down, shattering the amethyst inches from Docket’s lips. Clea snatched her hand clear as the old man gasped, coughed, flailed with one hand.

“Where—?” Docket choked as John whipped the handkerchief from his eyes. “What—?”

“You all right?” John looked into the terrified gray eyes.

“What happened to me?” The old man caught at his hands and stared in shock at Bort, Garrypoot, and Shamble as they entered the apartment, shaking rain from their ponchos and caps.

“Really, Moondog,” Garrypoot fussed, “we’ve been on the subways for hours trying to find you and now you just…”

“The demon,” Docket gasped, and the others fell silent. “The demon … spoke to me…”

“What demon?” John asked softly. “What was his name?”

“Folcalor,” the old man whispered, then burst into tears.

    “Should we call enforcement?” Clea paused in the corridor as the digitalized numbers above the elevator doors phased into one another. She’d wrapped herself in her plex poncho again and coiled up her long gray hair under a cap. The bright lights of Poot’s building were disorienting; if it weren’t for the afternoon sunlight that bathed the illusory landscape outside—inside?—Poot’s
window, John would have had no idea whether it was day or night. All he knew was that he was exhausted and not likely to have pleasant dreams.

“You mean the chaps with the little cubicles, and they hand you a number and you wait in a line?”

She looked confused. Long used to being the law in the stead of an absent King, John was already sorting through various plans for dealing with the problem himself. Expecting help from that lot in the cubicles was akin to expecting help from Ector of Sindestray.

“Besides,” he added gently, “I’ll not send men against demons, and them not believing in ’em. Would you?”

Clea shook her head. Bort and Shamble, who’d clearly thought that their part in any rough-and-tumble had been fulfilled, traded uneasy glances.

“It’s one of the problems in havin’ power, see,” John explained. “It’s yours for a reason. And that reason involves helpin’ those who don’t have it, whatever the cost. That’s what makes us different from the demons.”

He kept a sharp eye on the crowds as he walked the White Black Birds across to their platforms. “You call Poot the minute you’re home,” he said. “Don’t get out of sight of help, and lock yourselves in, and for God’s sake watch your backs.” And he remained on the platform until the subway whisked them away to sleep among the families that did not understand them and to work at jobs to which they could never accustom themselves.

Then he returned to Poot’s apartment and called in his resignation to the House of Two Fragrances, knowing that, fascinating as it had been, its purpose was fulfilled. He slept a little after that but didn’t rest easy until the league reassembled slightly more than twenty-four hours later for coffee—which Garrypoot sent down to Food Central for and which was dreadful—and pizza, a food
John had every intention of attempting to make when he got home.

If, he reminded himself, he got home.

“Why gold?” Bort asked. “Most of ThirtyoneFour-Four’s correspondence concerns acquisition of gold from estate sales and attempts to sell it on the Op-Link nodes. He uses about ten different avatars and a whole flak-field of financial screens, but I think we’ve traced most of them.” His lumpy, saturnine face was haggard, and he couldn’t have had more than five hours’ sleep before going to work in the anonymous bureau that paid his rent, minimum food, and Priority Three meds. He had a class to teach, too, at one of the local rec schools: Literature of Mysticism. According to Tisa, he had exactly two students.

“Now, I know all sorcery requires gold and silver, in pure quantities,” Bort continued. “Synthetics don’t seem to do, any more than synthetic jewels do. The black nodes—the Link nodes devoted to occult studies— routinely advertise it to buy and sell, in far greater quantities than have ever been on the market. But why? What is it about gold?”

John shook his head. “You’re askin’ the wrong person,” he said. “I’m just a demon hunter. I know it has properties other metals don’t, but what those might be you might as well ask the bugs in Poot’s kitchen.”

Poot swung indignantly around from his keyboard, mouth open to protest, and the others laughed.

“Accordin’ to Jenny—me wife…”
If she is still me wife
, he thought, with a stab of the old pain, the old love, the old rage in his heart.

As his voice faltered he felt Clea’s questioning, gentle gaze touch him.

“Accordin’ to Jenny, gold holds certain kinds of
magic, or can be made to transmit certain kinds. She says it sends wizards daft when somebody pays ’em off and cheats with an alloy, ’cause then they’ve got to work around it for as long as they’ve got that metal, or go through the nuisance of assayin’ it clear.”

“It says that in ThirtynineThreeSeven’s
Occult Encyclopedia
.” Old Docket fumbled eagerly in his pockets for the book chips he routinely carried with him and sighed with frustration. The other prisoners in the holding cell had relieved him even of those. After a night’s sleep, the bookseller had only vague recollections of what had happened to him after Wan ThirtyoneFour-Four and his two private enforcers entered his store, though he remembered ThirtyoneFourFour holding a gun to his head—grinning and laughing—and putting a purple jewel into his mouth. He had been, he said, imprisoned in a place made of purple crystal. There a demon had spoken to him, though he could not now remember what the demon said.

“Well, anyway, it says in the encyclopedia,” the old man went on, fluffing his white hair with a thin hand, “that powers sourced from the sun, the earth, or fire can be stored indefinitely in gold, and that those sourced from the moon, the stars, or water can be stored in silver.”

“That’s in the
Elucidus Lapidaris
, too,” John agreed. “Gantering Pellus says you can source what he calls cold magic from the silver…”

“NineSeventy talks of warm and cold magic!” Docket cried excitedly. “Do you have this Gantering Pellus on you?” John’s eyes widened in astonishment until he realized that book chips of all twelve volumes probably
would
fit in a pocket. “Or would you be willing to record what you remember … Oh, all right,” he added
as Clea yanked the sleeve of his borrowed pajamas. “Gold is superior because magic contained in gold can be retrieved more strongly and more completely, whereas sourcing magic through silver is more complicated and less sure. The noble metals store and transmit powers, and crystalline formations store information and patterns of energy. And, in fact, crystalline energy alignment is critical to the sourcing and transmission of common plasmic ether.”

“So what do the demons want with it?”

“Don’t know.” John chewed his pizza thoughtfully and nudged his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose with the back of his wrist. “Could be near any-thin’, and the Demon Queen sent me here with a great bloody stack of the stuff, bad cess to it. And given that Wan’s collectin’ it, too, my guess is she planned I should use it as bait to catch me man, same as Wan is. Because any bets the man I’m lookin’ for’s a mage.”