Knight of the Demon Queen (29 page)

Each blade of grass dying, and dying with it all the stories, all the recollections, all the invisible treasures of the heart.

Would you descend, Dragonfriend? I sense no one alive.

She forced her lips tight shut and covered her eyes with her arm, trying not to think of the children she had helped birth in that village, who’d run to her giggling when she walked down the shore. Morkeleb circled her with his thoughts, saying nothing, and when they went to ground on an islet in the marsh near Cantle Weck he did not immediately leave to hunt but remained beside her while she wept. At the tail end of the night, she dreamed for a time of the infants of dragons swooping through weightless blackness, playing with weightless balls of opal fire.

She was sleeping when Morkeleb left her, in dawn mist thick and hued like iron, to hunt for a cow he heard wandering thin and starving among the bare black reeds and snowy stillness.
It was uncared for
, he told her later, returning,
and none searched for it; I hear nothing and no one living in all these marshes.
Jenny thought again of Sparrow’s account of the sickness in Alyn Village and cursed that she had not the ability, as dragons had, to stretch out her senses over the lands. She huddled her plaids around her, then kicked them irritably away as a raging wave of heat surged from her protesting flesh and migraine stabbed her vision with momentary, swirling fire.
You’ll only go mad with grief and rage
, she thought,
if you start wishing for all the things you once had.

Sleeping again, she dreamed of John, saw him inconspicuous amid more people than she had ever seen packed tight into a vast dirty dreary room. Dreamed of him sitting at a table gazing into a strange-shaped glass box, bluish lights and strange patterns of colors reflected back from his spectacles.

Folcalor’s voice whispered soft and childlike in the deep hollows of her mind.
“Blood in the bowl, make sick men whole.”
And a man’s thin, age-spotted hand
dipped into a gold basin filled with blood and came forth clasping a fragile glass shell.

“Blood in the bowl, peace in the soul.”

Her eyes opened to the fading of the chilly winter daylight. Morkeleb lay near her, and in his proximity she felt none of the cold that transformed the waters of the marsh to hard greenish ice; the dragon was little more than a ghost, his shadow barely to be seen in the increasing shadows of night. He listened, and the pale lamps of his antennae glimmered with a queer foxfire light as they moved.

Under white jeweled stars they crossed the sleepy provincial fields and meadows of the Farhythe and the Nearhythe, and the bony back of the Collywilds between them. They saw the lights of little villages whose bells carried to them through the deepening night. The moon’s brilliance let Jenny make out every wall and fence and hayrick, but no one below sounded alarms. Even in full daylight it was difficult to see Morkeleb, and he extended his aura of shadow to cloak her as well. As they passed over the town of Queen’s Graythe—the principal trading center of Greenhythe—and later over Yamstrand, where the white phosphorus turned the ocean’s brim to luminous ruffles, Jenny smelled pyres again. In her mind she had the image of a chain of such conflagrations, like watchfires relaying warning of danger, stretched from the Snakewaters south.

Smoke rises from the walls of Bel
, the star-drake said as the white teeth of Nast Wall clove the sky. In the silver-spangled sea the Seven Isles shouldered, dark patches trimmed and dotted with lights: Somanthus and the Silver Isle, Zoalfa and Ebsoon, the wide pastures and rich farmlands of Sarmaynde and the bright falling springs of Glaye. Of Urrate only a black small spike remained,
the highest peak, where the temple of the Green God had stood before the island’s destruction by the demons under the sea.

Jenny shivered as Morkeleb circled along the arc of the island chain.

Between Somanthus and Urrate the abyss lay where she had fought Folcalor while the whalemages held the other demons at bay. Among those rocks Caradoc’s staff had lain hidden. She seemed to hear the crooning songs of the Sea-wights as they waited for the gate to be opened. As they waited to pour into the world again.

Pyres burned in the fields outside Bel. Coming in over the water with moonset, Jenny saw slanted columns of smoke and heard the tolling of the bells.

I like this not.
Morkeleb crouched, no more than elf light and bones, among the trees just above the great landward road that ran from Bel to the little town of Deeping, which nestled around the gates of the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun. The dragon had destroyed Deeping five years ago. Jenny could feel his recognition, his memory of the place in flames.
There is the smell of plague upon the land, and voices crying out in the city. But in the Snakewaters I dreamed of demons, and I hear them whispering still.

He settled on his narrow haunches and then lay cat-wise again, all his spikes and scales glittering and the bobs of light that tipped his whiskers sparkling like un-seasonal fireflies in the dark.

When the star-drakes journeyed from world to world, we would hide ourselves and listen, some of us sleeping and dreaming, others mounting watch over those who slept.
These images Jenny saw in her mind, wordless marvels: Centhwevir blue and golden, Hagginarshildim pink and green, others of the dragon-kin she had met
and known all sleeping in the strange light of alien moons.
Dreams would pass back and forth among our minds and those of the shadow drakes, the dragonshadows, who partake both of waking and sleeping; the dreams, also, of those who walked in those unknown realms. There is an ice floe on the backbone of Nast Wall, where the waters divide. From there I can listen to the city lands of Bel, and deep into the caverns of the gnomes, and even across the marches eastward to Prokeps and the lands of Too Many Gods.

To your voice also will I listen in my sleep, Jenny, while you walk among men and speak to your little King.

She straightened her plaids and her sheepskin coat and felt a flash of gladness that she didn’t have to worry about rebraiding her hair. It was far less cold here in the South than it had been in the Winterlands—she sometimes thought it would be less cold in Hell than there— and snow only sprinkled the high foothills of Nast Wall, where the black watchtowers of the gnomes loomed above the Ylferdun gate. Looking up into the white endless crystalline eyes, she asked,
How far can you hear, in the deeps of your dreams?

Through her mind flashed the images of her children: Ian wrapped in his plaids by the reflected glow of torches in the hall, smiling a little at his aunts’ bustling hospitality; Adric chatting with grown men about cattle and fortifications and horse doctoring as if he were already the Winterlands’ lord; and little Maggie, silent, watching, with who knew what intricate knots of awareness behind her mouse-black eyes.

I know not, Jenny.
His voice was gentle, a touch of peace.
As the pool deepens, it widens. Did I sleep a thousand years, I could perhaps hear the voices of every child born to women on this earth, and the names they
called their cats.
He blinked at her; she seemed to see points of fire glimmer as he settled himself and tucked his wings, and all the spikes and spines and ridges of his armor for an instant caught the starlight, then vanished, as he was more and more apt to do.

It is hard
, she said,
not to know. Not to be able to see.

There is always something
, he said,
that one cannot see, or do, or have.

But she had seen him speaking with the old women at the Hold who had lived a lifetime of happiness and grief without ever going farther than Great Toby; had seen him with the children there. For the first time she felt that he understood.

From the air she had seen that Bel’s landward gate stood open so the dead-carts could come out. Pyre light glared ahead of her in the mists as she walked toward the walls, using her halberd as a staff. Once when she turned back, she thought she saw a shimmer of ghostly light rise on silk wings from the hill above the road and circle toward the mountains with the first dawn staining the cloud-bolstered winter sky. She walked on.

Around the gates all was madness. Torchlight fluttered on either side of the great triple archway, and in the fields carters threw down the bodies of the dead from their wagons. Wood was heaped everywhere, and grimy men stumbled with weariness as they built pyres. Jenny saw that some of the bodies, laid out waiting to be burned, were wrapped in cheap rags and old sheets, and others in costly white wool embroidered in bright colors. She did not have to be told that the contagion was claiming rich and poor alike.

She passed among them like a ghost and entered the city with the late winter dawn.

Once she was within the walls, it was clear to her that
the healers had no more notion of where to look for the plague’s source than she had. Smudges of herbs and sulfur burned before some mansions, and through the gates of others, even at this hour, Jenny saw women swabbing down the house fronts and dooryards with vinegar the smell of which cut the air like a knife. Incense and the halitus of burning meat breathed upon her from the gates of every temple and chapel she passed.

Bel stood upon five hills, the tallest being given to the gods. But its companion hill, broader and fairer, bore the gilded turrets and many-hued roof tiles of the House of Uwanë among a lacing of bare-branched trees. Around the King’s house the wealthy, as the wealthy do, had built their pillared dwellings, and as she made her way through the streets, Jenny saw how many gateways bore the yellow sigils of contagion, how many glass windows flickered with lamplight where physicians sat with the sick.

In one flower-carved arch a man in robes of cut velvet pleaded with a little band of the King’s guards. “It’s too soon to say he’s dead. Far too soon. The sickness debilitated him, of course it did, but his fever’s abating.” He beckoned, his hand laid on the forehead of the child on the bier, a boy of about fifteen years old.

“The sickness has taken turns like this before,” the father went on, in the faltering voice of one who chatters to save himself from doom. “He’ll be … still … like this. You’d be ready to swear he’s gone, and then his eyes will open.”

The chief of the guards did not come near, nor extend his hand to feel the child’s face. Rather he signaled his men to take up the bier and carry it away.

“At least give me an hour!” the father pleaded, his voice breaking. “The healers will be back then and—”

“The King’s law is clear,” the chief of the guards said.
His face was like stone, but Jenny heard in his voice a note that made her wonder whether he, too, had lost a child. “The dead must be taken out of the city and burned lest the contagion spread.”

“But it wasn’t the contagion that killed him.” The man spoke too quickly, his eyes darting from face to face. “That … that he’s sick with, I mean. You can see there’s no sores…”

“I’m sorry, Lord Walfrith,” the chief said more gently. “The healers say that your son had all the marks of the sickness. They bade us fetch his body away. We can’t risk the disease spreading further.”

“At least let him lie in the family vaults!” The father clung to his son’s hand.

“I’m sorry, my lord.” A priest, clothed in the gray of the God of Healing, gently disengaged Lord Walfrith’s grip. “It cannot be.”

The father began to weep, and Jenny moved on through the half-light of the cold streets. She remembered Ian and Sparrow and others, speaking of the strange sickness that had seized Druff Werehove and Genny Hopper’s child. Nothing in the old books Caerdinn had preserved of ancient times, nothing in John’s vast collection of learning and nonsense at the Hold, had spoken of this kind of power in demons—at least not for the past thousand years.

The gates of the palace stood open. But the outer court, where vendors and petitioners and sightseers usually milled, was empty. Generally petitioners got no farther than this—certainly not those who made their appearance dressed in a peasant’s leather bodice and sheepskin boots—but Jenny had been made welcome in the palace before and knew to go to the guardhouse and ask the
man there if he would send a page to Lord Badegamus, the Regent’s chamberlain, telling him of her arrival.

“Tell him it’s the Lady Jenny Waynest,” she said, making her voice as impressive as she could and wishing absurdly that she were half a foot taller. “It is a matter of importance touching Lord Gareth.”

“I don’t doubt as he’ll see you, m’lady,” the captain of the men at the gate said as one of their number crossed the deserted flagstones, his boot heels clacking, toward the palace hall. “Even after all that’s passed I’ve heard him speak well of you.” He offered the words to her like a gift, as if in comfort, but Jenny was aware of the way other guards jostled discreetly to get a look at her from the shadows of the watchroom. “Bedded
how
many of the rebel cavalry in one night?” she heard one man whisper in awe. She was glad she stood in shadow that hid the dull blaze of color she felt rise through her neck and face.

She could not even turn to these men and say,
It was the demon that took over my body, that did those things!
If John did not believe her, why should they?

Instead she asked the captain, who seemed to be a kind man, about the plague. “As I came through the Snakewaters, I saw whole villages stricken with it and pyres burning in the Hythe,” she said. “What have the healers made of it, or the scholars at the university in Halnath?”

“They’ve made nothing, m’lady.” The captain’s lean dark face hardened. “Nor can they cure it, four cases in five—and that fifth case I think is mostly chance. It’s a fever that won’t be brought down by all their herbs and purges. Five days now it’s been in the city, and less time than that, from the first outbreak in the Hythe till it reached us.”

Another man, a thin discontented-looking lancer,
added, “For once the rich, who leave the city when the summer fevers come, have to suffer with the poor.”