Knight of the Demon Queen (35 page)

“No,” John said. He looked around him at the shadowy market, the figures with their shaved heads and gaudy masks. Evidently the Free Market was a place where gangfolk could mingle without violence erupting— he saw at least six different color combinations. “Can she take us over the surface?” The ink bottle was hot against his flesh, and he knew, as surely as he knew his name, that Sea-wights lurked and whispered in the waters over which they would pass.

At least on the surface there was somewhere to run.

“It’ll cost you more,” Bet warned as EleventySeven shuffled toward them, a harpoon over one shoulder and a flamethrower holstered on her back.

John produced one of the Demon Queen’s gold coins from his doublet and palmed it carefully to show the gondolier what it was. “Not a problem,” he said.

EleventySeven blinked. “Not a problem here, either,” she replied. “This way.”

Aboveground the buildings were empty. The ghastly eye pits of blown-out windows stared, and sometimes whole sections of wall gaped, to expose broken-off segments of floor, shattered stairways, and elevator shafts like bone and entrail within. From ankle-deep—as elsewhere in the wet zone—the flooding in the streets rapidly deepened, an arm of the deep zone thrusting far into the city where low ground had been, and EleventySeven kept her harpoon in hand as she guided her ether-powered scutter boat close to the mold-slimed walls.

“What are they?” John whispered as the brown water broke momentarily across the rounded back of something beneath that sank away again with a flurry of fins.

The gondolier spat. “They don’t bother me; I don’t bother them.”

Peering down, John thought he saw the flicker of something silver, or perhaps he imagined it. He might, too, he thought, only be imagining the whining hum of other engines, other boats, skimming through the hellish wet twilight behind them.

Clea had replayed yesterday’s news footage of the deep zone for him in her apartment, manipulating the images to show the Yellow Circle, which had been visible at the edge of the screen. They had been built, she said, to protect those wealthy enough to afford dwellings within their rings of protection and enforcers, but at least half the buffer zone that surrounded them now lay anywhere from six inches to four feet deep underwater, and many of the culverts leading out of the Yellow Circle were stagnant channels filled with mud and weeds.

Given a week, John thought—studying the open space of flooded concrete, the towering wall and guardhouses beyond—he might have been able to figure out some safer
way of doing this. But he didn’t have a week. He’d be lucky if Corvin hadn’t already changed identities and fled.

And the gods help me if he picks someplace worse than this to hide out in.

You can’t do this without me
, Amayon had written. John wasn’t sure that he could, but he dreaded the thought of what the demon would do once their quarry was captured, a prisoner in his little bone-and-silver box. Only one of them could bargain with Aohila.

There was movement in the water behind them again, barely seen in the gloom among the buildings.

“Those things come out into the open zone?”

EleventySeven shrugged and took a sniff from the black government-issue vaporator that hung around her neck. “Not the big ones.”

“That makes me feel
so
much better.” Clea barely glanced up from the nylon fanny pack through which she was digging for the various key cards she’d reprogrammed from Poot’s columns of numbers. She looked like a dumpy shopper digging for her cred.

“This should do it.” She extracted one of the several slips of plastic. “I hope Mother doesn’t miss her private pass to the Marvelous department stores—store keys are the easiest to reprogram because the stores do it month to month. Goodness knows how Garrypoot got the Circle codes.”

“What if he didn’t get the right ones?”

“If he didn’t get the right ones,” Clea said, with a wry glance up at the guardhouses that thrust out from the wall over the wide apron of flooded concrete, “we’re both in real trouble.”

She was trying to sound nonchalant—presumably like the tough and beautiful heroines of the cinema films Tisa Three had been so addicted to—but John could see
her hand shake a little as she strapped the black nylon bag around her waist again. “Not both, love,” he said gently. He tucked his spectacles inside his doublet, took a felt marker from his boot, and held out a hand for the key. “Just show me which end goes into the lock and give me the rest. I think our friend here’ll get you back to the station.”

“Don’t be silly.” Clea shoved her cap into her pocket, pulled on a pair of latex gloves that, she had said back at her mother’s apartment, would in some fashion keep the Circle enforcers from tracing her presence in the house should they be so lucky as to get away undetected. “If anything goes wrong, you’ll need someone who can read and use a computer.”

“If anything goes wrong, those enforcers will make pâté out of the both of us without askin’ our names.”

Before them, the water lay brown and cold and rain pocked. Sheets and patches of what looked like orange mold dotted the surface, on which bobbed unspeakable debris. In places the concrete showed dimly through.

“Here.” Clea produced a small spray can from her belt and shot a dose into each eye, then sprayed her face and neck and handed him the can. “If there are demons following us—if they were watching Bort’s apartment— do you think I’d make it back to the station without meeting them? The tide’s been coming in for about three hours now. The water’s not going to get much deeper.”

“Just as well.” John sprayed his face and his eyes, unshipped his sword from his side, and lowered himself over the gunwale. The water was warmish and oily, deeper than his head in the alley but only chest-high where the concrete apron had been put in when the Circle was built. Could Amayon communicate better with his brothers through the medium of water? he
wondered. Or were things past the point where it mattered?

As Clea slipped into the murk beside him he heard it again: the whine of a small etheric engine somewhere in the alleys. Wan ThirtyoneFourFour and his merry men? Or gangboys whose drug-addled minds the Sea-wights would presumably have little trouble ousting from their overmuscled bodies? No magic in them, of course, but command of a small army with lots of automatic firepower wouldn’t come amiss if you were after someone.

“Let’s go.” Submerging his head, he glided fast for the nearest drainage culvert in the wall.

Even had his eyesight been normal he doubted he could have seen much under the cloudy water. It stung his eyes even through the protective spray, but his sense of direction had been honed by two decades of automatic attentiveness to small cues, and his outstretched fingers touched the submerged foot of the wall only a yard from the culvert. The concrete shelved toward the wall until it was only a foot or so deep, but he sensed something brush his leg, loathsome and sleek and the size of a dog. It made no move against him, and when his head broke the surface in the concealment of the culvert, he saw nothing. Clea came up beside him, shivering a little; John sprayed his eyes again, put on his spectacles, and peered through the grill.

There was open ground there, the first he’d seen in weeks. The rough rolling terrain had once been planted with trees and dotted with what appeared to be ornamental buildings. The dead trees still stood, mummified by the chemical-imbued rain. Huddles of ruins clung to the sides of some hills, wherever they hadn’t been in the way of newer houses or the pylons that supported the three train lines that brought in servants and enforcers,
supplies, and—the uppermost of the three—the inhabitants of the Circle.

The houses were the size of most apartment blocks in the older part of the wet zone, rooflines showing over stained, ugly walls that only enforcers ever saw from the outside. Many walls bore bullet scars or the long streaks of ether probes and laser fire. Thieves before them had come to the same conclusion about accessibility through the servant or supply trains.

Clea
, John thought desperately,
forgive me
.

Then he unslung the ink bottle from around his neck, took his slingshot from his pocket, and fired Amayon’s prison through the grill and into the roughest and highest ground he could see.

“Come on.”

He pulled off his spectacles and led the way along the wall toward the next culvert, a hundred feet away underwater. By the time he and Clea came up in its shelter there were enforcers already at the first grill, and John knew he’d guessed right.

Corvin NinetyfiveFifty had some device that detected the passage of demons and had told his bodyguards to investigate any alarm.

Clea slipped the card into the lock of the culvert grill. The metal groaned as John pushed it inward, but the steady drumming of the rain would keep the enforcers from hearing. He closed it after them and, donning his cap and spectacles once more, snaked through a snaggle of ruins to a wall that would hide them, Clea following close behind. Across the hundred feet or so of open ground he could see the other culvert and hear the voices of the enforcers echoing through it, broken snatches under the sound of the rain. He heard them rattle the grill and find it firm.

With the rain coming down, they wouldn’t remain there long.

When he saw a light come on in one of the guardhouse windows, John moved. Creeping close to the earth, he retrieved the ink bottle and slung it again around his neck. “Is the demon in there?” Clea whispered, and John nodded. The tall woman looked far less ambling and clownish with her hair in a knot and mud streaking her face. She would never, John thought, survive in the Winterlands, but she was doing better than most of the rest of the league would.

Bort?

He didn’t like to think of what might happen if Amayon or one of the other Sea-wights truly got hold of Bort.

“Why don’t you leave it?” Clea ducked low, following John’s example as best she could as they zigzagged toward the first of the houses. There were random motion detectors on the grounds, but these could be shut down for ten minutes at a time from the various transmitters; Clea studied the incomprehensible figures Bort had pulled from Garrypoot’s computer and inserted one of her cards into the appropriate slot. “According to this, NinetyfiveFifty’s put these … these demon wards all over the grounds. They’re not like the regular security.”

“Aye, but if they work on an alarm system to the guardhouse, is it possible to shut down the alarms?” John touched the ink bottle. “And I’d be tickled pink to bury this and forget about it forever. Only there are at least a couple of other demons abroad in the city. Amayon would be able to bring ’em to him and get out. Completely leavin’ aside that I need him to get back to me own world—and deliver Corvin to the queen—I can’t let him go rovin’ about loose here after I’m gone.”

He blinked myopically at her through wet-beaded glass. “You saw the vids of what Wan and his boys did in the deep zone. Thank the gods you didn’t see that room in Wan’s apartment. When demons come into a world, to fight one another or to make use of humankind, they start killin’ like that for the sport of it. We have to do whatever we can to bring their defeat. It’ll be one of the gladder days of me life when I can deliver Amayon back to the Demon Queen and have done with the whole bloody business.”

“And will you then be able to live happily ever after?” Clea’s lips formed the ghost of a smile as she turned back from the disabled alarms, but there was genuine concern in her eyes.

John thought about Ian, and about Jenny. About his son drinking poison and his wife standing in the frost-hard moonlight with desolation in her face.

“I’ll give it a try,” he said.

    Jenny felt the touch of Morkeleb’s mind on hers. She saw him on the fanged black promontory that stood above the glacier, wreathed in cloud and ice, heard him speak her name. He called out to her, spread wings like a galaxy of glittering lights, and rose into the mists.

All around her in the rocks was the whisper of demons.

They were waiting for him.

They knew I’d try to find Miss Mab
, she thought, despair a cold needle in her heart.
They were waiting for me. No wonder I was able to get into the Deep so easily. And now they wait for him.

Morkeleb, no!
She tried to fling her thoughts into the dragon’s mind, as once she had been able to do. But dragged down by exhaustion, by the chill grip of the
poison that numbed her lungs and heart, she didn’t know whether he heard her. She thought not.

Whether it was in truth a vision, as she used to get in dreams, or only the delirium of the poison, she did not know. She seemed to see the Sea-wights, little shining quicksilver things that rose to the surface of a well—the shallow-curbed well she’d seen in her dragon dream—in their glass shells. Shedding the shells, they whipped like glistening vermin through the darkness and the rocks. Opening her eyes—or dreaming that she opened them— she could see them clustered on the rocks, amorphous and vile, watching her with bright black beady eyes as they drank her pain and despair.

Get away from me!
She wanted to scream, and could not.
Get away!

Jenny, Jenny
, they whispered,
surely you don’t mean it. You welcomed Amayon once upon a time. You loved him.
And they screamed with laughter at her fury and her shame.

He’s coming.
She saw him in her mind—maybe truth, maybe only the visions they sent her, as once they’d sent her the vision of Ian killing John. She saw the black glitter of wings, the dark shape descending on a little-known watch window high in the mountain above. The gnome guards fled in terror, and the dragon contracted in size to whip through the narrow tunnels, down the twisting stairs.

If he uses magic, he is theirs.
She remembered how in last summer’s battle she had tried to wrench Ian from them with magic, how the demon Amayon had caught her by the magic itself, drawing her in like a fish on the line, tangling in her flesh, flooding her with that glorious, disorienting fire.