Knight of the Demon Queen (30 page)

“Shut up, fool!” the captain snapped. Jenny saw real and immediate rage in his eyes and remembered the dead boy in the gateway and the father’s weeping as the guards and the priest tried to take the youth’s body away. Turning back to Jenny, the captain said, “My lord Regent’s nearly distracted, my lady. People are saying— if you’ll excuse me saying it—that it was the wizards that joined with Lady Rocklys, when she rebelled in the summer, that planted the seeds of this in vengeance for her defeat. Though myself, I served under Rocklys, five years ago, and she wasn’t a woman to—”

He turned quickly and saluted. Jenny saw the guardsman who’d gone to deliver a message to Gareth’s chamberlain. To her surprise the chamberlain himself bustled at the man’s mailed heels. Badegamus, gray and stout and resembling nothing so much as a rosebush in bloom in his fluttering array of archaic mantlings, executed a proper and lengthy salaam, just as if, thought Jenny, she wasn’t a skinny, scarred, hairless woman about whom guardsmen sniggered in corners. “Please come with me, my lady,” he said.

A lone petitioner sprinted from the gate to catch the chamberlain on the way across the court. Badegamus deftly fended him into the arms of the guard. “It’s imperative that I speak with Lord Gareth soon,” Jenny said, her voice echoing a little in the damp arched passageway that ran beneath the hall. “Please ask him…”

“My lord requested that I take you straight to him,” the chamberlain said. “It is I who must beg forgiveness of
you
, madam, for not allowing you time to bathe and change your raiment. But my lord Regent was most insistent.” His voice was trained and melodious, like a
deep-toned woodwind skillfully played, but Jenny heard the flaw within it and looked up quickly. Under the heavy cosmetics, his face had creases of exhaustion and grief and the pallor of a man who has not slept.

She was taken up a back stair and down a dreary servants’ hall illumined by a single window high in a gable. With one gold-painted fingernail the chamberlain scratched at a small door, the other side of which Jenny guessed would be hidden by paneling and paintwork. “Come,” a muffled voice said.

A smell of sickness and lamp oil, of clothing days unwashed.

Prince Gareth stood up from beside a carved bed, its curtains looped back to show the wasted, fragile shape of the girl within.

“A god sent you.” He’d been weeping. He fumbled to put on his thick spectacles, then gave it up and simply crossed the room to take Jenny in his arms. His stubbled face was so haggard with grief, so changed by weariness and by eyes swollen with tears, that for an instant Jenny did not recognize the boy who had come to Frost Fell five years ago begging for help against the Dragon of Nast Wall. She felt him tremble as he clung to her, a six-foot child begging for a mother’s comfort. Badegamus tactfully disappeared through the door in the paneling and pulled it silently closed behind him.

“The doctors say she’s dying.” Desperation cracked Gareth’s voice as he led Jenny across to the bed. Skeletal, blue lipped, and blotched with red blisters, Gareth’s wife, Trey, lay on the bed.

GeoCorp Offices had an entire district named for them, an endless subway ride on the Eternity line and virtually identical to every other portion of the city John had seen. A major subway station serviced the complex’s lowest levels, larger even than that below the Universe Towers. Every niche and wall and angle of its ceiling blazed with crystalvision ad screens and shrieking neon: Gorgeous women applied Cover-Blaze and godlike men sipped or sniffed or shunted Brain Candy or Blue Heaven. Spiked and shaven-headed gangboys jostled along the platforms in groups, glaring warily to the right and the left with drug-burned cinder eyes; enforcers glanced at them and looked the other way. A dole office occupied one level of the station, and beggars shuffled restlessly in the line, thin and hungry-looking but smiling contentedly as they received their handouts of proto-chow and Peace. They smiled at the enforcers who chased them onto the trains or up the stairs to the rainstorm above, smiled at the rich who pushed them aside.

Music hammered the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Mosquitoes whined above the puddles. Everything stank of piss, chemicals, and smoke.

“There’s supposed to be a truly excellent theatrical
bar on Six-oh-seventh Street just off the square,” Seven-Ninetynine, Clea’s tiny crimson-haired mother, remarked. She minced along at John’s side in her high-soled red shoes and bright red-and-white dress with the air of a dowager promenading her gigolo, her lacquered coiffure dancing with gold clips. More gold—thin chains such as Tisa’s lovers had given her—flickered on the schoolgirl-smooth flesh of her throat. No wrinkles marred her plump lips, no crow’s-feet desecrated the corners of her sapphire eyes. Only the eyes themselves were old: hardened, cynical, and weary to death of struggling. They, and the oddly silky texture of her skin, were the only things that spoke of true age: two bitter truths in the gorgeous lie of her face.

This must be what Clea meant
, John thought,
when she said, “My mother’s had a lot of work done.”
He was coming to know the look of “a lot of work.” He only wondered what that “work” consisted of: something to think about, next time he heard a ballad hymning eternal youth.

“I almost never come here,” she added, pausing beside a vendor’s barrow to look at more hair clips. “All the good dance clubs are down in the Seventieth District. Isn’t this darling?” It contained a holo chip—which John only knew as the thing that made the annoying animated images dance and posture on holo-hats—that created a very tiny animated couple who appeared to be making love in the wearer’s hair.

“Has eight color settings,” the vendor pointed out eagerly. “And a sound chip. You can pipe in an audie from your own system as well, so they can say any names you like.”

John thought about the eyeless creatures that lived in
Aohila’s hair and wondered if she’d like one of these for her birthday, if demon queens had birthdays.

“Shouldn’t we watch the platforms down here as well?” Bort glanced nervously at the slow-churning sea of humanity clustered around the incoming trains. He had to shout over the vendor’s thundering PSE, and SevenNinetynine’s, which she’d raised in volume to compete.

“Oh, NinetyfiveFifty would
never
take a subway, I don’t care who’s after him.” SevenNinetynine paid for the hair toy, produced a key card from her handbag, and minced toward the bank of elevators that ascended to the building above. “I know there are analysts and engineers who live downtown and take the regular trains, but NinetyfiveFifty was an absolute recluse. Even in those days he had his own pod and hired an enforcer to follow him to work. Well, with those spectacles he isn’t exactly unobtrusive, now, is he?” She almost had to shout over her own music but didn’t particularly seem to notice.

“Specs?” John said curiously. “Dark ones, that hid his eyes?”

“Yes, darling. Do you know him?” She smiled up at John and melted a little against his side, like colorful ice cream. “But of course you’re right, dearest,” she added, turning her head to study Bort and Clea. “Why don’t the two of you keep an eye on the corporation elevators over there? He should be out soon. He never cared about impressing management with extra shifts. Goodness knows he didn’t have to.

“She does stand out so,” she added to John, in as much of an undervoice as was possible with a PSE blaring earsplitting harp adagios all around her, as her daughter and Bort obediently headed toward the other
bank of elevators and she insinuated her arm into the crook of John’s elbow and led him into a softly lighted glass bubble for the ascent to the building above.

“And of course those friends of hers are
completely
hopeless. I trust you’re not a magus of exalted lineage cast by some sad twist of fate into a world unworthy of your talents? Bort’s a perfectly sweet boy—” Bort was forty-five. “—but one
can
have enough of the cruelty of fate.” She withdrew a tiny enameled vaporator from her handbag and took a revivifying sniff. “Now, look as if you wrestle wealthy old hags for a living, darling.” She offered him the vaporator with a flirtatious wink; John grinned and shook his head.

“They goin’ to give us a problem if we just hang about in the executive lobby and all?”

“Oh, my
dear
boy.” She smiled languishingly up at him. “You obviously haven’t had enough experience with the way executives conduct their lives.”

Obsidian mirrors dominated the walls of the executive lobby, gilt pillars and statues breaking up the lush expanses of gloom. What seemed to be acres of empty space was dotted with small tables at which men and women in sharply tailored, quiet-hued clothing sat while beautiful girls and handsome boys ran and fetched chilled drinks, tiny trays of rice crackers and fish roe, and exquisitely wrought porcelain thimble cups of pink, blue, and yellow powders and pills. “They never mix them strong enough in places like this,” SevenNinetynine commented, flagging down the handsomest boy, tapping her credit into the tray holder, and taking a sniff of Golden Glimmer. “I’ve had stronger at a church luncheon. Why are you looking for NinetyfiveFifty? What’s he done?”

Her eyes glinted, suddenly avid behind her screen of sweet vivacity, and John remembered Clea saying her
mother regularly searched her room, though she was nearly fifty and her mother seventy-five. “Whatever it was, it must have been just
decades
ago. So far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, he’s done nothing for the past fifty years but invent more and more efficient relays and processors.”

Would a mage know how to do that?
John wondered.
If he’s got spells on him to keep age and death at bay, he’d have time to learn.

“He was working on a replicating splitter when he was at Acu with me. It made them a fortune, of which he kept a solid percentage. A replicating splitter divides the etheric stream without weakening the energy, something you can’t do with electricity. It made for a staggering increase in power output from a single generator, you understand. How it operates I’m still not entirely certain—I’m a dead loss below submeson level. Will you have a drink?”

John shook his head. He severely missed Aunt Hol’s barley beer and the sweet, musky southern wine, but he’d seen too many of his erstwhile neighbors at Twelve-Ninetyseven’s lodging house indulging in the local alcohol to have the slightest inclination to trust the stuff. Most everything here—alcohol, some coffees, most foods, all drugs, and even certain vid shows—as far as he could tell, was designed by its makers to be addictive in a fashion he did not understand. Docket had warned him of this. He wondered if Amayon would have, or would simply have laughed in delight at John’s belly cramps, seizures, and depression of withdrawal as he’d laughed at his agonies in paradise.

John sipped his tea, eyes following the people who emerged from the lifts, wondering who they were when they went home and what they did. Men and women both seemed to follow the pattern of every salaryperson
he’d seen in dyeing their hair quiet shades of dark brown or black. They all looked young and they all looked like they’d “had work done.” Most of them crossed at once to the smoked-glass doors at the far side of the lobby, where they slipped cards into a slot then went to join friends at one or another table. In time the small green lights in the tables’ centers would brighten when their private pods were ready at the doors. Each table also had a com, a terminal, and a pop-up screen, and even during conversation, everyone continued to make calls or tap keys until the moment the light went on, in case their supervisors chanced by. As he and SevenNinetynine passed between the tables he caught whiffs of personal music, but there was none in this corner but that of his companion, who toggled it down a little to permit speech.

“They have the same set-ups in their pods, too, you know.” SevenNinetynine tasted half a rice pat and set it back down on its fragile ceramic plate. Like most wealthy women she was thin—only the poor, evidently, were fat here. Clea had explained that most of the toppings on rice pats were made with half-and-half molyose and scrunnin, substances that were at once addictive and repellent, so those who did not wish to put on flesh continued to buy food that they then had no desire to eat. “Half the executives at this level are still in their offices, you know, and will remain there until nearly midnight so their security codes will register the fact on the mainframe. Which is something, I’ll grant him, NinetyfiveFifty never did.”

She tilted her head inquiringly, regarding John with brilliant and rather dilated blue eyes. “You never did say what you want him for. He must be
ancient
these days, you know.”

“A woman he once loved sent me to find him,” John
said, reflecting that this was more or less the truth, all but the
woman
part. “That’s all.” He touched the dragonbone box in his pocket; felt, too, the heat of Amayon’s prison glowing against his skin beneath his shirt. He’d feared to bring the demon along but feared still more letting the bottle from his sight. “I mean him no harm.”

“Just as well.” SevenNinetynine clicked her tongue a little in disapproval of a passing executive with dark purple hair and a suit to match. “Because even when he worked for Acu—and goodness knows
that
was when dinosaurs walked the earth!—he had the most astonishing security systems around his office, his private lab, everyplace he was likely to be. He came up with good reasons for it, of course, reasons that the corporation believed anyway—every sort of tale about industrial spying and concept theft—and he was such a genius at subatomics they’d do anything to keep him, including putting in electro-fused silicate door frames and taser emplacements. He was certainly worried about something. I can’t believe it was just the likes of you.”

“It isn’t,” John murmured. “Though meself, I’d not want to get on the bad side of the lady he loved and left.”

“Good heavens!” SevenNinetynine turned her face quickly aside and moved a little so that a gilt nude concealed her from the main expanse of the lobby. “If he’s had work done, it’s the best I’ve ever seen! He doesn’t look a day past thirty-two!”