Knight of the Demon Queen (34 page)

“You don’t have to do that.” Shamble touched the worn hilt, the stained grip, his fingers reverent and awe in his face. “I mean, it’s yours. It was your father’s.”

John shrugged. “It’s just a sword.”

Sheathing the new weapon, he turned in time to catch Bort’s eye. Bort had been thumbing through his pile of looted files, and his face now wore, for an unguarded second, the expression of weariness, of defeat, he’d had a day or two ago in Garrypoot’s flat.

He’s a mage
, Bort had said of the man they hunted, and John saw those words reflected now in the discontented pain in Bort’s eyes.

He’s a mage.

John went to stand before him. It was a moment before the inputter looked up. “If he’d the slightest intent to help you,” John said quietly, “the smallest interest in other mages in this world, you don’t think he could have found you? He’s been all over Docket’s node on the Op-Link. He’s known how to get hold of you for twenty years and more. He’s hidin’, Bort. He wouldn’t thank you for comin’ to him, and he’s gie for certain not going to help you.”

Bort looked away. “No,” he said, in a low voice. “No, of course not. Of course not.”

*  *  *

Lying on Garrypoot’s couch that night—if Amayon was the one giving away his position, his own room in the wet zone too easy a target—John dreamed of Bort.

It was Bort’s dream, actually, he thought. Bort’s dream because what he saw was Bort’s apartment, cramped and even tinier than Shamble’s but filled, like Shamble’s, with books and readers and terminals, with bottles and pots and baskets of the things by which wizards of old had worked magic, or had thought they worked magic. There were crystals and crystal spheres, mirrors of obsidian and quicksilver, phials of amber floating in brandy. There were skulls and teeth of small animals and birds, carefully preserved and written over with runes. A circle had been drawn on the floor, and the charred pottery bowl in its center still smoked. Heat-cracked fragments of bone dotted the circle’s marked-out quadrants, and John guessed Bort had spent the evening, after they’d parted at Shamble’s, engaged in divination, trying to make up his mind.

As he watched, the smoke in the bowl slowly formed up a shape, like a ghost drifting in darkness. He recognized Amayon’s face. When the eyes opened, they were Amayon’s blue brilliant eyes.

“Of course he’d tell you Corvin will refuse to help,” the demon said in a voice, John thought, that Bort half remembered—a familiar quiet alto like someone Bort had once known. “He won’t be able to trap this mage, deliver him up to the whore of Hell, if Corvin has warning that someone other than a demon is on his trail.”

Bort turned on his narrow bed and emitted a fat man’s glottal snore. The weak green glow of the smoke illumined the dirty dishes and finger-smudged books. The ad screen’s cold reflection flickered and danced, damped
down quiet and further buried by muted music. In the artificial deeps of the small quasi-window, stars that hadn’t been visible for decades burned too brightly, and the comet combed her shining hair.

It was like his own study in Alyn Hold, John thought: books and implements and trappings of the person he had all his life wanted to be, the person forever denied.
At least
, John thought,
I could hate me dad—poor, driven sod—for burnin’ the books and demandin’ I be what he was: killer and warrior and protector of me people.

Who can Bort hate for takin’ his dream from him?

“All these years Corvin has hidden,” Amayon whispered, and the scene began to blend and shift into the images of another dream. “All these years he’s thought himself safe.”

And John saw what Bort saw: ancient stone walls and smoke-discolored rafters. A frail, genial-looking old man sat at his desk among scrolls and cats and dappled sunlight. The exile mage of legend rose with a sigh of longing, going to the window.

“All these years,” Amayon murmured, “looking for— waiting for—someone he can trust.”

“Fools.” The old man sighed and stroked his silver beard. “Fools, who say there is no such thing as magic.” John thought his face vaguely familiar from dozens of ad-screen playlets. “Everywhere around them it lies, and yet they cannot see.” He stretched his hand toward the leaves that grew thick around the window, and as his fingers touched them, light flickered between the fingers and the tender young growth.

“There must be someone out there,” the old man said. “Someone able to learn, someone strong hearted enough
to bear the knowledge, wise enough to see beyond demon lies and demon pawns. Ah! I cannot bear it, that I might take the knowledge of where to find magic with me to my grave! The answer is so simple.”

Within the dream the images faded, collapsing on themselves. The last thing John saw before he woke— the thing he thought about for a long time, lying in the pale light of the artificial stars, the artificial moon—was Bort TenEighty, last mage in the Hell of Walls, sitting in his undershorts on crumb-imbued carpet, staring at the diagram of divination and the burnt bones scattered across it like errant constellations of unreadable stars.

In time John got quietly to his feet and touched the activation key of Garrypoot’s computer. Poot was working a late shift; he wouldn’t be home for an hour or more. John flipped to the opening screen with its simple, bright-colored icons. After a moment’s thought, calling back what Bort and Garrypoot had earlier done to obtain a second copy of the Optiflash specs, he opened the list of marked files, counted back in his mind, and flagged three files to print.

He hoped he’d counted right. Folding the flimsiplast small, he stashed it in his doublet with the Demon Queen’s dragonbone box and the ink bottle containing the whispering soul of a demon. As he was pulling on his boots, belting his new sword around his hips, the orange light flashed once more on the printer, and one more sheet spooled out.

John dropped the sheet as if it had turned to a live spider in his hand. He watched it as it crumpled, then melted itself into a ball, a puddle, a smudge of fireless ash.

    “Someone’s watching Bort?” Clea stepped aside from the doorway of the flat and signed him to silence with a glance at the door behind which her mother still slept. “Who is? How do you know?” She wore a faded caftan, and her wet gray hair was dressed in a shabby knot. She smelled of soap, incense, and coffee: the scents of early waking, early meditation in the stillness. The apartment was in an older building and had a wall of windows that opened onto a narrow terrace, but ten feet beyond, another building loomed, cutting off the light. The terrace was littered with trash, stacked with boxes of old clothes and packaged foods, draped in plastic sheets against the weather. On the ad screen a pair of grotesquely elderly people copulated to soft rhythms barely heard, huge smiles on their toothless mouths.

“Demons.” John held out to her the handful of flimsiplast. “We can’t have him help us for fear of them knowin’ now, see? We’ve got to move, and we’ve got to move now.”

They took the Universe Rail: coal-sack darkness, flickering lights, men and women jostling for seats or clinging to handles from the car’s low ceiling. There were children onboard, too, though they were children with the faces of tired adults, slack eyes dim with Let’s-Be-Good and Happy Time. A mother handed her five-year-old daughter a little sniffer of Peace to keep her from fidgeting. They carried their drugs in big gaudy plastic bottles shaped like weapons or the semihuman characters of cartoons, clipped to their belts or knapsack straps in imitation of gangboy bandoliers. John couldn’t look at them. He kept seeing Adric’s face.

“We get off here,” Clea said. “Bet said she’d meet us at the Free Market in the Ninety-seventh Avenue station. Bet Phenomenal,” she added, as they stepped onto the broken concrete platform of the old 211th Avenue station. “The gangfolk don’t like to come up top.”

The 211th had been constructed before it became customary to route the subway directly into the mega-blocks. It had been looted even of its benches, and old bones mixed with the garbage heaped along the tiled and gang-scribbled walls. After the train pulled out, Clea led the way, rather gingerly, to the end of the platform and jumped down into the track bed itself; she
flicked on her flashlight and walked with her shoulder to the wall, hurrying because there was no catwalk here and the next train might catch them before they reached it. Water stood in puddles in the track bed, and mosquitoes roared in frustration around their faces and hands, nearly blinding them. John guessed it wouldn’t be long before this part of the line was abandoned.

Their footfalls whispered in the dark. Enormous rats scurried a little distance from the light, then turned and regarded the intruders speculatively. John unlimbered his sword from the foamplex tube in which he carried it and held it ready. The vermin weren’t any larger than the rats in the lower levels of gnome delvings, but he hadn’t particularly liked fighting those, either.

But the rats kept their distance. Now and then the darkness throbbed with the passage of distant trains in other tunnels, or the floor vibrated where another rail ran above or below. Gradually the headache that had become part of his life faded a little as they got farther from the ether relays, and looking up, he saw that the crystals along the tunnel ceiling had been looted as well.

“We’re below the Crenfields,” Clea whispered. Echoes carried her voice away into the dark. She said the name as if John should know it, and when he looked blankly at her, she added, “This part of the city’s dead above our heads.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Long story,” she said and did not tell it. When she turned her head he saw a glint of tears in her eyes.

They came to an empty station, boarded up, its platforms littered with bones knee-deep: human, rodent, the withered carcasses of roaches as big as John’s hand. Clea scrambled awkwardly onto the platform and guided John to a stairway descending four levels that John could
see, though they only went down one. The bottom of the stairwell was drowned in dark foul liquid. Roaches swarmed the walls, and the mosquitoes were like carnivorous dust motes in the glints of Clea’s flashlight. There were bones on the landings, on the steps. Something moved in the water, and John thought he saw a flash of quicksilver two levels below. The cold air brought him the smell of sulfur and blood.

They followed another line, this one flooded to the edge of its catwalk. John strained his senses for the stealthy spatter of droplets from some wet silvery back, for the smell of demons, but the stench of rats and human waste and chemicals was overwhelming—the flashlight gleamed on huge slicks of them, orange and green and black. Could demons inhabit the bodies of rats? Of mosquitoes? Now there was an unpleasant thought.

There was light ahead—not the white glare of ether but the dirty yellow warmth of torchlight. He heard the scrape and jangle of music—actual music, not the product of PSEs. The reek of garbage and excrement grew overwhelming, and smoke blurred the light. “Ninety-seventh Avenue?” he asked, and Clea nodded.

“Bet says it’s bad manners to walk around with a weapon in your hand,” she warned him. “And some of the folks there are pretty paranoid from too much Brain-hammer. But keep it ready.”

John wasn’t sure what to expect, but the Free Market wasn’t so very different from the market at Great Toby: Coarse vegetables, packages of food ranging from the cheapest Soyovite to the most delicate pinkfish and sauce merveil, pots, clothing new and old, PSEs, and weapons were offered for sale, mostly on blankets spread on the concrete but sometimes arranged on planks and trestles.
Two metal garbage cans had been converted to barbecues, burning wood that looked like chopped-up furniture, and women cooked sausages and chunks of what could have been either pigeons or rats. A young girl with astonishingly checkered hair danced on a blanket to the music of a long-necked three-stringed psaltery and a hand drum, the first instruments John had seen in the city.

Everyone was stoned. Everything from Peace on up to Flying Dreams was being sold, cut-rate: “Fell off the back of the train, man; I found it on the tracks.” John turned from purchasing a large slingshot from amid an assortment of submachine guns—he’d been searching for days to find a tree to provide a forked branch for one, and this one was metal—and nearly tripped over a lanky gangboy with white and purple stripes on his face, sitting on the edge of the platform staring blankly into the tunnel’s flooded darkness.

“Probably Lovehammer cut with Purple Delight and Rust-Begone,” Bet Phenomenal remarked; she was short and swarthy and had most of her hair shaved, after the fashion of the gangs. Under a layer of red-and-yellow mask she was pretty, though the colored ointment covered a scar on her chin and another beside her left eye. “That’s the big kick these days. I found somebody who can take you into the Circles.” She nodded toward a stout gray woman by the nearest drug emporium, haggling over a coffee mug full of Pink Sunshine with Peace-induced calm persistence. “EleventySeven’s got deals with most of the gangs to let her through, and there’s darn few who’re willing to go near the Yellow Circle or Red since they’ve started contracting enforcement there to World Peace.”

“World Peace?” Clea’s eyes widened. “Yipe. They’re heavy-duty enforcement,” she explained to John. “Mostly they don’t even report intruders to District,” she said. “The intruders just disappear.”

She spoke in an awed voice and looked disconcerted when John just nodded. But it was only the Winterlands all over again.

“A couple of our friends tried to get in on the goods train last year,” Bet corroborated.
Our friends
, John had been told by Old Docket, was the way the gangfolk referred to themselves. “Nothing was heard from them again. Not even bodies. These are not folks you want to mess around with.” She glanced up at Clea. “The thing is, the old Celestial line runs clear under the deep area between here and there—it’s flooded, I mean, but there’s clearance for EleventySeven’s boat.”