Knight of the Demon Queen (33 page)

A small archway let her into a narrow stair, stretching into darkness beside a stepped waterfall illuminated only by the fewest and feeblest of lamps. She descended the stair at a run, the shallow steps favored by the gnomes making her knees ache, though she was little taller than a tall gnome herself. Far above her in the dark she heard a soft alto voice say, “There she goes.”

Jenny caught up her plaids and fled. She thought there would be a door soon through which she could evade her pursuers but there wasn’t, not for many hundreds of steps. Her thighs and calves throbbed and she panted in the cold, but the footfalls drew closer. She heard the clatter of weaponry on metal buckles, the dry hollow rattle of arrows. When at last she found a door, it was on the other side of the watercourse and led into a long tunnel she did not know, the stone of its walls and floors undressed and unfinished. A great draft blew hot and steady all around her.
A ventilation corridor
, she thought,
leading into the mines.
That meant traps and pitfalls, but nevertheless she ran, her hand on the wall to guide her as they left the realm of the lights, the boots behind her running also.

One turning, two—darkness ever deeper and the clatter of feet coming closer. They could see her, she thought— gnomes’ sight in darkness being clearer than that of humankind.
They haven’t called out to me to stop
, she thought.
That must be because they know—

The floor vanished from beneath her feet. She cried out and just had time to roll herself together, protecting her head, as a jagged floor smote her and pain lanced up through her left hip and thigh, taking her breath away. She tried to rise and couldn’t; above her, the clack of boots came slower. They’d heard her fall.

They’d known the trap was there.

Dim light reflected on the tunnel ceiling. It was a hothwais—a stone or crystal charged to hold light— steady and cold. It showed her the lip of the drop over which she’d fallen, a dozen feet above her head. Not a pit as such, she saw now in the wan glow, but a small rough cavern, perhaps seventy feet at its widest. There were other tunnels, higher up the other walls; some had bones beneath them. A ladder dangled from one, but
when she tried to stand and limp toward it the pain in her leg made her nearly faint.

“There she is.”

She got a glimpse of them—three squat armored shapes—just as one loosed an arrow that took her in the shoulder with such force as to throw her down.

The other two were nocking arrows to their bows. Pain like a burning knife went through her shoulder as she rolled, then crawled into the shelter of the drop-off itself, where they would have to shoot straight down at her; the cavern even curved a little in, below the lip of the tunnel floor above. One gnome cursed, and another said, “One should do it.” He sounded like a tradesman talking about logs on a fire.

The light dimmed as they walked away. She heard the tap of arrows replaced in quivers, a voice commenting, “We’ll need to make a report to Rogmadoscibar…”

One should do it.

Sickness washed her in a terrifying wave, and she felt her breath start to slow.

They had not been trying to turn her back, she thought. Had not wanted to enslave her.

Their orders had been to kill her.

The arrow was poisoned.

    “You understand,” Shamble TenSevenTwentysix said, squinting behind smoked magnifiers at the white-hot tip of his soldering iron, “that nobody really knows what magic is, or why it worked. Or why it stopped working.”

“Come to that,” John replied cheerfully, “I don’t know what plasmic ether is either, or why it stops workin’ three or four nights a week in my apartment just when I’m on me way to the bathroom, bad cess to it.”

“Oh, that’s just the crystals going out,” Bort explained. “They don’t maintain the relays into the wet zone.” He came through the apartment door and maneuvered carefully between the plex table that took up two-thirds of the room between Shamble’s kitchen niche and the narrow bed, and looked around the cluttered surface of the table for somewhere to put down his burden: the giant bundle of pale green flimsiplast he and Garrypoot had spent most of the evening running out on Garrypoot’s printer.

Shamble’s apartment was hot, and it stank. It was the size of Garrypoot’s bedroom and was situated in the very center of an enormous megablock in the Seventy-ninth District; the heat came partly from the portable forge that took up whatever floor space wasn’t already occupied by the table and the bed. John couldn’t imagine what the neighbors said about it, if they noticed; evidently the heating and cooling systems in the megablocks never worked very well. Neither did the shielding on the ether relays: His skull felt as if it were filled with rattling steel balls. An enormous ad screen was turned up full volume, and another dominated the little toilet cubicle; floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves jammed the remaining wall space, overflowing with books, both paper and chip; readers; half-disassembled terminals and at least three working ones; bales of wire; boxes of coal and wood for the forge; packets of herbs and powders; crystals; and dust. The place reminded John rather of Jenny’s house at Frost Fell, though it smelled like Sergeant Muffle’s forge in spite of the triple-strength air-suck installed over the usual kitchen vent and powered by an eight-way etheric splitter rigged in the power outlet.

Other splitters dangled from the wiring all over the room. The kitchen niche was written over with what
John guessed were antiroach wards, though they looked nothing like the wards Jenny wrote against mice and insects; in any case they worked not at all.

“Ether is a natural force,” Bort went on, “a little like electricity or gravity. It exists everywhere and is the result of interaction between molecules. Magic is the operation of the will, without physical instrumentality. There’s no reason—” He touched the dragonbone box John had laid on the corner of the table. “—for this to be anything other than its component elements. Certainly no reason for a man’s spirit, his soul, to … to be absorbed into it and trapped, while his body … What? Dies? Dissolves? What will happen to him when you put whatever it is…

“What
is
it that you’re going to put into the box to activate the spell?”

John scratched the side of his long nose. “I dunno. She said, ‘Bring him,’ and then, ‘Here’s this box, Son.’ I assume if I open it in his presence and drop these little oojahs in—” He shook the bronze bottle, which tinkled musically. “—there’ll be a connection, but I’m buggered if I know what.” Yet as he spoke the words he felt a shiver in the dark of his mind, where dreams begin, and he knew perfectly well what would happen.

“What worries me, after what Clea’s mum said and that ballyhoo at GeoCorp this afternoon, is gettin’ to this Circle place and gettin’ in.”

“I think this should take care of that little problem.” Bort smugly tapped the plast. “Garrypoot cut into the Optiflash and Circle records for the security codes on both the passenger line and the supply train. We have maps, plans, schematics … The house registered to Corvin was a private dwelling that was turned over to its present owner by deed of gift in the year Sixty-four of the
current administration—that is, close to eighty years ago. The Circle was built around it.”

“Was it, now?” John said softly. “He looked gie spry for his age.”

“He’s a mage.” Passion and grief and devouring envy echoed in Bort’s distorted blue gaze.

“Finished.” Shamble put down his soldering iron and pushed up the guards from his eyes, revealing the slightly yellowish corneas of a cheap government transplant. He was a thin man, tall and stooped and unclean, who spent every spare credit he had on the materials required for the working of magic as described in his ancient texts. He eked an existence by cooking for himself, rather than buying at the building’s Food Central, and by spending water-ration credits on high-quality fuels rather than baths. His obsession, John gathered, had cost him a wife and a child at some point.

Perched on the back of the room’s single chair with his feet on the book-cluttered seat, John thought of Jenny in her house on Frost Fell, pursuing her solitary dreams of power. And now with no more to show for it than this poor man had.

No wonder she had turned inward, to despair and hate of all things.

“This should do what you’ve described,” the metalworker went on. He held up the small cube of dark brown bone that John had given him, one of the few fragments of claw and tail left when the flesh of the golden dragon of Wyr had dissolved into dust. He’d carried it in his satchel, with flax seed and silver and whatever else magical he could find, through paradise and Hell. “I’ve laid spells of the unity of essence on both this and the box you asked me to make.”

With the smallest of his graving tools he touched the
box, a careful copy of the one Aohila had given John before the Mirror of Isychros: dragonbone, silver, and opal, though the opal was far smaller. “Thaumaturgically they should be the same thing, both as one another and as the original box.”

John picked up the two boxes, turned them in his hands. The workmanship of the one Aohila had given him was infinitely finer, of course. Demons presumably had centuries to perfect their arts. Inside it was finished smooth: He flipped the lid open, and shut, and open again, knowing he might have very little time, when he finally came face-to-face with Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, to make up his mind about what he should do.

The thought of rescuing from her clutches the man who’d bought the dead girls’ gold bracelets from the demons wasn’t one he relished. His every instinct told him there was something uncanny and deadly about the mage he’d come so close to in the lobby of GeoCorp, something that Aohila might turn to terrible use if she had it in her power.

Or something that might continue to do evil in this world—or another—if permitted to walk free.

On the original box’s inner surface Shamble had etched one of the gate sigils copied from John’s notes, a sigil that was reproduced on the small square of dragon-bone and silver now lying in the metalworker’s callused hand.

“Of course,” Shamble said with sudden shyness, “there’s no way of telling whether the wards I’ve worked are as strong as those of the demon. In fact, I’m sure mine aren’t—wouldn’t be, that is, if magic worked at all here.” He handed John the little graven bone square and the bronze bottle, then took a sip of his coffee, now bitter from sitting too long.

“It might be it does, you know.” John closed both boxes and bestowed them, the bottle, and the dragon-bone sigil in separate pockets of his doublet. “It may be things have changed so much you’re not sourcin’ the magic properly anymore—at least that’s what Jen says is usually the problem when magic that used to work quits workin’. Though you’d know more about it than I do.”

“No,” the smith said simply. “And that’s the … the sorrow of it. We don’t.”

There was a deep sadness in his discolored eyes, and John remembered Jenny standing in the winter moonlight, scarred hands folded and slick scarred pate bowed, tears like diamonds on the shiny burned patches of her cheeks, mourning what had been hers, the only thing in the world that she had truly loved.

Loved more than him, for all his hopes that it would be different. Loved more than her children. Maybe more than her life. He felt no anger at her, nor pity—only a deep sadness and a wanting to speak to her again.

“We’ve tried everything, over the years,” Shamble went on softly. He scratched absently with his dirty nails at the small round scars left by the removal of cancers from his chin. “We’ve gotten in touch with everyone we think is like us, everyone who has an interest in these matters. Everyone who has had these … these dreams of power, these dreams that cannot be explained. From all we can tell, people used to be able to draw power from their own bodies, and from the stars, the earth, the sea. Used to be able to do the things we dream of doing.

“They could heal others of malaria and tuberculosis and cancer just by laying their hands on them and drawing circles in the dirt with silver and blood. They could see what was taking place miles away, or across centuries— see it accurately, and every time they tried. But something’s
changed, and we don’t know what. Maybe some combination of stars and planets has shifted, but if so we can’t find it in all Garrypoot’s astrological projections. But we just don’t know. My old master…”

He paused and grinned a little self-consciously. “You’d like this,” he said.

“Oh, Shamble,” Bort sighed, “now really isn’t the time to play show-and-tell.”

But Shamble had turned away.

“There was this book, you see,” the smith said. “I got it from the man who taught me to work in metal— another welder, but one of us: one who would have been a mage. He taught me to make knives and blades.”

From beneath his bed he brought a box and took out a sword. “How about this, hunh?”

Bort sighed heavily and rolled his eyes. But John hefted the weapon, gauging its weight and balance. It was two or three inches shorter than his own blade and handled differently, but it balanced well. The steel was fine grained and beautifully wrought, the grip wrapped in silver wire braided with red cording. Runes were etched over hilt, guards, pommel, and spine.

“It was the sixth or seventh sword I made,” Shamble said. “I wove into it all the demon-killing spells I could find in Docket’s books. I made one or two after this one, but they just didn’t turn out as well.”

“It’s good,” John said, and the smith flushed with pleasure. “It’s gie good. I don’t know if it’ll slay demons, but it’s a fine blade.” He stepped clear of the other men as much as was possible in the confines of the tiny apartment and swung the weapon carefully, cross-cut and then down.

“You can have it,” Shamble said shyly, “if you want.”

“I’ll take it.” John stepped back to grip the smith’s hand. “Thank you.” From the small bundle he’d fetched from his own room he brought his own sword and laid it on the table. “You can take this if you’d care to. It’s not magic or anythin’, but I’ve slain a dragon with it— well, cut him up a bit and finished him with an ax—and chopped up cave grues and weird critters in Hell and any number of bandits.”