Knight of the Demon Queen (37 page)

I would really, really rather not have to do that.

“Clea?” John whispered. “You think you can find your way back to the pod stage and get out of here?”

“I don’t know.” Her hand tightened unconsciously on his arm, a reflex of terror at the thought of having to go back through this horror by herself. “I’ll try if I have to.”

“Right. Stay up here till I yell. And if I don’t yell…”

Clea looked at him, scared—desperately scared.

And no matter who won the fight below, John thought, she was right to be scared. If he had any sense, he’d be scared, too.

Demons on both sides. And the gods only knew what defenses Corvin had. Bort dead.

He guessed that sight was in Clea’s mind as well.

“If I don’t yell,” he said quietly, “forgive me, if you can.”

She said, just as softly, “I’ve got a gun. I’ll use it.”

“Gaw,” John said. “I’m gie sorry.”

He heard the crash of the door breaking in below him.
Turning, he aimed one of the submachine guns at the floor just above those sounds and opened fire.

There were howls, shouts, the wild pinging rattle of bullets bouncing everywhere, and without stopping to think or give the defenders time to think, John kicked his way down through the weakened boards and dropped into the lab itself.

He had only the dimmest vision of a long chamber, gray with sicklied light through a broken window whose sill was spattered with blood. There was an impression of machinery such as he’d seen in the cinema show Tisa had taken him to: oscilloscopes, etheric relays, splitters, readers, screens—all veiled in smoke that burned his eyes and seared his throat. Dead bluecoats on the floor, bodies knotted with their last agonies. And clearer than all else, the slender little man he’d glimpsed in the GeoCorp lobby, pressed against a wall staring about him in horror and despair.

Corvin NinetyfiveFifty. Mage and scientist and lover of the Demon Queen. And the gods knew what besides.

The window at the room’s far end smashed open, and one of the gangboys leaped through, gutted and shattered by bullets and still grinning, ready to fight. John emptied a clip at him, the impact of the bullets knocking him back through the window, then swung around to fire another weapon at two of Wan’s enforcers coming through the broken door.

“Storeroom?” John yelled. “You got one?” There were literally hundreds of ether crystals in the room— big masthead-size jewels, not just the little relay gems— and the searing howl of them went through his skull like a revelation of the gods.

“I … through there.”

John grabbed the thin arm under its expensive dark
suiting, thrust Corvin ahead of him through the door he’d indicated. A narrow chamber and a narrower door, lined with metal. Perfect.

He whipped his sword from its sheath, braced himself back in a corner near the door, weapon in hand.

“Who are you?” Corvin gasped. “Who …?”

“Friend of yours sent me.” John stepped in fast, cut the hand and arm from the first gangboy through the door, then kicked the gun in one direction and the limb in the other as the gangboy plunged through, spitting blood and grinning, dragging out a knife with his other hand…

Which John promptly severed, followed by the head. Eyeless, the torso flopped and kicked. John took a moment from dealing with the next gangboy through the door to cut the hamstrings on the first. No sense taking chances. The second gangboy was only massively high, not possessed of a demon that would keep dead flesh alive; he died and John caught up the weapons of both, emptied them into the dark-clothed enforcers who followed them through the door.

Silence outside. The stink of burning plex, blood, cordite. Corvin leaned against the wall, gasping with shock. His dark spectacles had jolted loose, and he tremblingly shoved them back into place, face half turned aside. “I … thank you,” he whispered. “I owe you my life. They … These…”

“Demons,” John said softly. He was panting, covered with gore and slime and dust, but he felt curiously calm now, as if he had all the seconds he needed for what he had to do. “Why’re they after you? Who are you and what are you, that they want you as they do?”

Corvin stared at him, eyes invisible again behind the dark of the glass. But Aversin sensed those eyes darting,
seeking some other way to reply than the truth. “I’m a … a scientist,” he stammered. “For years I’ve worked with etheric energy, chaneling in power from other dimensions, other worlds than our own…”

“Hells, you mean?”

Corvin only looked at him.

“Is that why they’re after you? Folcalor’s demons?”

“Folcalor?” Corvin asked. “It’s Adromelech, the Lord of the Sea-wights, who sent demons here to…”

Above their heads, above the ceiling, John heard Clea scream.

The next second bullets roared, rained through the shattering ceiling as he dragged Corvin out of the way, sheltering behind the metal cabinets, plunging for the door.

With a tearing crash Wan ThirtyoneFourFour leapt down through the ceiling, gun and sword gleaming in his hands.

John shoved the table at him, knocking him off balance; sprang across it to slash at the wrist that held the gun. Wan cut at him with his own blade and tried to bring the submachine gun around on him, but the severed tendons would not respond. The next second the crippled gangboy, still rolling and flopping about the floor, lurched against the table’s legs, knocking John sprawling. Wan leaped in, cutting and slashing, and John twisted, hacked, cutting half through the possessed creature’s neck and then slashing at the backs of the knees.

Wan went down, lurching, leaping up, and John grabbed Corvin’s arm and dragged the scientist through the door and into the lab, slamming the door behind him. “Does it lock?” he yelled as the door lurched and started under his grip. Corvin, in shock, made no reply, so John jammed
the nearest submachine gun under the latch as a temporary bar, grabbed Corvin’s arm again, and shoved him toward the door.

As they passed beneath the hole in the ceiling Clea dropped through, dust covered and bruised but unhurt. “He came up through the crawlspace—” she started.

“Taken care of. Run!”

The house below them was an inferno of smoke, heat, spreading fire. Two possessed gangboys met them on the stairs, blazing away with semiautomatic fire; Clea fired back, the weapon’s kick slamming her against the wall. The bullets went everywhere, but the attackers retreated for a moment. “Window!” John yelled, and plunged through the smoke into the nearest room.

Like the chambers downstairs it was filled with gold: vases, candlesticks, hangings that were embroidered and woven with the precious metal. Ether crystals formed a circle, mounted on small masts, in the midst of which stood a green leather chair. The vibration of the unshielded gems was blinding. John ripped aside the gold-woven curtains that covered the window. The rope by which the gangboy demons had ascended to the lab a story directly above was still attached by its throwing hook to the sill overhead. Smoke poured from every window of the house, mingling with the rain; distantly, John heard the whine of sirens, the steady terrible
whacka-whacka-whacka
of aircars nearing. The building looked odd from the outside, dirty and grim after the opulence within.

“Thank you,” Corvin gasped again when they reached the ground. A dead gangboy lay on the pavement. A dead enforcer—one of Corvin’s, and this one had been shot to death—huddled beside the wall.

You never knew, in a demon war.

“I can’t tell you how much I owe you.”

“And what d’you owe those others?” John asked. He wiped the sweat from his face, the cold rain flicking his hair. “All those the demons killed so they could take whatever gold they had, to track you, lure you out of hiding? The demons must’ve killed a dozen of ’em, not to mention your enforcers, poor saps.”

A stray bullet cracked on the pavement near them. Evidently there were gangboys still in the house, still possessed of demons and still intent on getting their quarry.

Aohila’s quarry.

The being she wanted so badly—or wanted so badly to keep from Folcalor—that she’d destroy the Winterlands.

“For the last time,” John asked again. “Who are you?”

Corvin looked at him for one long moment, then turned and tried to flee.

John took the Demon Queen’s box from his pocket, opened the bronze bottle, and removed what she had given him: six tiny beads of gold. He dropped them into the box.

Corvin screamed once—desperate and inhuman— and dissolved into smoke.

John walked Clea from the subway platform to the door of her mother’s apartment. “Will you be all right?” he asked.

Corvin’s pod, which they took using one of Clea’s keys, had been not only private but deluxe. It had included washing facilities—so they had removed all obvious signs of violence—and a spare shirt whose sleeves were two inches too short for John’s arms. But John and Clea were both still disheveled and shaken. They left the heavier armament onboard when they deserted the private line at the 65th Boulevard station and switched to the Interstice. Clea dumped in a public washroom the latex gloves she’d worn.

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

Nightmares
, John thought, looking at her eyes. What she’d seen in the lab, and the pod’s entry platform, seemed to be burned there. Bort’s face.

Nobody should have to know those things.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shook her head. They passed in silence through the terminal below her mother’s apartment building, through the swarm and clamor of the mobs, the noise, the stinks, and the etheric, whining hum that never ceased.
Ad screens and holo-hats. Pink Angel and Lovehammer. A doomed swarming world unaware of all they had lost, all they were losing every day. “You’re done here, aren’t you?” she said. “You’ll be going home?”

“Aye. I hope.” He stood a step below her as she carded the elevator door. “I owed the Demon Queen two, and by God I’ve gotten them for her.”

“And what will she do now,” Clea asked, “with what you’ll give her? Or will you give her the box?”

“Oh, I’ll give her the box, all right.” John fished the second box—Shamble’s box—from his pocket, and with it the dragonbone cube that bore the sigil of the gate. “Whether I’ll use this—whether it’ll work, once I get to me own world again…”

He shook his head. “I wanted to see him—to see who he is, and what he is. To ask why the Queen’s so ettled to have him, and never mind that abandoned-lover guff. To guess if I could what she’ll do with him, once she’s got him in her power.

“She and her people came out from behind the mirror once, a thousand years ago, and brought down a peaceful Realm into blood and chaos. The Hellspawn don’t die, and they’ve got gie long memories. They’ve waited a long time to get loose again.”

He took the round bone box, the demon’s box, from another pocket, and flipped it in the air. “This poor sod was only hidin’ out, after all, and that scared of her. No tellin’ what I’d do if I could, to keep from bein’ taken back to her. And yet he lied to me.”

“So what will you do?”

“Find Jen,” John said. “If she’ll still have anything to do with me. Or maybe old Master Bliaud, if he hasn’t gone so deep into hidin’ he can’t be found. Someone who’ll be able to use the water I fetched from another
Hell to speak to Corvin in his box here. Before I do any-thin’ I’ve got to know who Corvin is, and what he is— what power he holds. And I’ll have to be fast about it, once I get back, for the Queen’ll send plague again to my people if she thinks I’ve cheated her. It’s hard to know…”

He broke off and pushed up his spectacles to rub his tired eyes. “When you start playin’ about with demons, it’s hard to know where anybody stands.”

“Including yourself?”

“Aye,” John said, with a faint grin. “Includin’ me-self.” He took Clea’s hands and drew her down to him to kiss her gently. A gray-suited salarytech passing in the hall viewed John’s battered leathers and bruised, scabbed face, then hurried on her pharmacologically unconcerned way.

“Warn the others.” John stepped back from Clea, his hands still holding hers. “Docket and Shamble especially— I’m willin’ to bet Shamble’s a true mage, whatever might be said of the others. And take the warnin’ yourself. There are demons yet about. They’re strong—how strong I don’t know—and they want the mageborn for ends of their own. Keep a watch on one another, and stay away from all them things—Pink Sunshine and Peace and Put Your Brain in Your Pocket … Demons trapped me wife through the use of her magic. I think they’ll trap you through those artificial dreams.”

Clea nodded. Her voice was wistful. “Will your wife be all right?”

In her eyes was something he hadn’t seen before. Her fingers held his as if reluctant to release the contact. “That I don’t know,” he said softly. “And what’s
all right
, anyway? You mind how you go.”

“I will.”

For another moment their hands held. Then she turned away and went inside. He heard the lock clack behind her.

Hands deep in his pockets, sword hidden in a ratty bundle of raincoat and tubing, he ambled down the hall and took the elevator to the subway station once more.

He took the Interstice line as far as it went toward the wet zone and got out at the last station, where the water stood in dark streams between the tracks and the mosquitoes hummed louder than the failing crystals in the ceiling. A catwalk extended into the darkness. It was a half mile to the next station, with the water getting deeper over the rails. His flashlight gleamed on its solid obsidian sheet, on the swirling insects’ wings.

Somewhere far ahead of him firelight cast ruddy smears on the glistening walls, and he heard music, the blare of a PSE. A free fair somewhere. People he wanted to talk to, to ask about what had happened here and what was happening still, if they knew.

Maybe they didn’t, any more than the solitary hunters had in the Hell of the Shining Things. Maybe they just got on as best they could.

In his satchel, along with the two boxes of silver and dragonbone, he carried a wad of paper and parchment and flimsiplast, written and crossed and overwritten in a grubby palimpsest—notes to occupy a decade of winter nights, if he lived longer than the next twenty minutes. Was there any more to the world than the city? Why did it always rain? Who made the drugs, and what was ether and how did it work?