Knight of the Demon Queen (38 page)

And other things as well
, he thought, thinking of Clea’s hands holding his outside her mother’s door.
Other things as well.

But you couldn’t be two people.

The same way Jenny could not be both a dragon and his wife.

The passageway broadened around him. The white ether glow glistened on wet tiles and filth, on the concrete arches of ceiling, on the red eyes of rats. Out of habit—for he wasn’t sure if it would work in this world—John drew a circle around himself in felt-tip pen on the concrete and opened the onyx ink bottle.

“How
dare
you?” Amayon’s voice shook, his mulberry-blue eyes blazing with rage. “How
dare
you treat me like a … a common servant? A broom to be put in the cupboard until the floor wants sweeping? You could have gotten yourself killed—”

“And let you fall into the hands of Corvin’s enforcers?” John tilted his head a little, the ether light making flashing circles of his spectacles. He was aware of how tired he was, and that he ached all over— bruised, weary, thin with the thinness of one who dares not eat or sleep. And aching in soul worse than in body. “Or maybe of whichever bunch of demons isn’t on the side you’ve chosen?”

Amayon spat, and the spittle smoked where it struck the pavement.

“I didn’t do so ill.” John touched the pocket where the dragon-bone box lay hidden. “I found our boy. The Queen’ll be pleased.”

“She is never pleased.” Amayon’s rosebud mouth twisted with emotions impossible to describe. “Don’t you realize that yet, you puling twit? She is
never
pleased, and nothing that you do is
ever
enough. Do you think your service to her is done?”

John was silent.

“Do you think she hasn’t been playing you like a puppet? Do you think she’s telling you the truth about who
and what this Corvin is, and why she wants him in her power? Are you as crassly stupid as that? Cast the box away! Throw it into the water. You have no concept of the ill that you do, Aversin…”

“No,” he said softly. “No, I haven’t. But nor am I like to learn it from you, or from any demon—particularly not those who’d be in that water waitin’ to nip up that box and pass it along to Folcalor if I did as you say. So maybe it’s best I just give her what she wants, and see where we are from there.”

Amayon studied him for a moment, blue eyes icy with rage. By the demon light that played around them John could see the Demon Queen’s marks on the boyish face, as if a finger dipped in silvery fire had traced whorls and signs on his flesh.

“Yes,” the demon said at last. “It is best to give her what she wants.” He turned and led the way down the platform, to where a metal door had been let into a niche in the wall. When the demon’s hand touched the latch John saw—though he couldn’t tell whether it had flickered into life then or had always been there—the sigil of the gate.

John drew his sword.

It was as well that he did, for the men who seized him from both sides as he stepped through did it so quickly that he probably couldn’t have defended himself at all had he not been ready. The place into which the door opened was dark—a cellar or crypt, by the low vaulting overhead—but John’s eyes were adjusted already to the dark of the subway tunnel. He slashed one man across the face and turned to kick his attackers on the other side, opening a gap in the group. Boxes, barrels, the smell of coals—his mind registered them, and the more familiar stinks of mildew and potatoes. A voice shouted,
“Get the bottle!” As a hand ripped the ink bottle free of the cord around his neck, he knew the voice.

Ector of Sindestray. Treasurer of the Council to the Regent Gareth of Bel.

He was in Bel.

Probably
, he thought as he dodged behind a pillar, shoved a pile of boxes over onto his pursuers,
in the vaults under Ector’s own town house.
That would be the logical place for Amayon to betray him.

All this went through his mind in instants as he ran, not toward the stairs, which would be guarded, but toward the chute he knew all town houses had, to let barrels and provisions and coal slide straight into the cellars—the equivalent, he reflected wryly, of the Circle’s goods trains. He thrust the trapdoor aside and scrambled up and through, blinking in the bright cool light of the cobbled street, disoriented and shaken.

Bel
, he thought. His own world. His own home.

Gareth.

The Regent was his friend. In the summer, when the old King had condemned him as a demon trafficker, it was Gareth who’d secretly engineered his escape. At a guess, Ector of Sindestray wouldn’t even mention to Gareth,
Oh, yes, he did happen to come into my cellar one day and my men finished him off…

Ector’s town house stood in the fashionable quarter of town, eastward toward the hills and not far from the palace. John dodged down the first narrow street he saw before the councilor’s men could emerge from the house, then ducked around a cart carrying boxes—coffins?— and dodged into an alleyway between the tall houses. Voices shouted in the street behind him. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before they got on his track.

At a corner near a market square a niche in a moldering wall housed a statue—old and disgraced by a million pigeons—of the forgotten Lord of Time. John worked his boot toe into a crack in the brickwork and thrust himself up to the level of the niche—it was some five feet from the ground—and wedged the silver bottle of water from the spring and the Demon Queen’s box of silver and dragonbone among the dirty rummage of guttered votive candles and rats’ mess around the old god’s feet.

He hesitated, Shamble’s duplicate box in one hand and the little bone gate sigil in the other, hearing the shouting come nearer and remembering…

The plague spots on Ian’s face.

The winds and illusions of Hell.

The dead on the roof of a deep-zone ruin, slaughtered for no better reason than because demons were at large in their world.

I can’t
, he thought.

He raised the cover of Shamble’s box and dropped the sigil inside.

He shoved the box into hiding, dropped to the pavement, and ducked into the marketplace, sword sheathed and walking fast. He felt glaringly conspicuous in jeans and Corvin’s too-small shirt. The day was cold but bright, clouds scudding over the houses of stone and timber and plastered brick that looked so small after the terrifying megablocks of the city. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d missed the air and sky and the mere absence of rain. As he jogged down an alleyway, frozen and half choked with dirty snow, his mind identified the smell of smoke, of pyres, a charnel stink.

Plague? In winter?

A small and twisting street. That congeries of red and blue roofs ahead should be the palace.
Let’s hope our
boy Gar is at home and not on some country estate or off at Halnath lookin’ up ballads about Dragonsbanes. If worse comes to worst, the Lady Trey’ll stand up for me till he gets…

“There he is!”

John yanked on the trap of a cellar cover and found it locked. An arrow struck the trapdoor; he sprang back, ducked, turned … And saw that the alley dead-ended in an eight-foot wall. Trees on the other side—a garden—

“Don’t try it.”

John stood still.

“Turn around,” the same voice said. It was a man’s, and deep, not like the Earl of Sindestray’s light tenor yap. John turned and faced the men. They wore the red livery of the royal House of Uwanë. It was their commander who had spoken.

“Shoot him.” Lord Ector came panting around the corner a moment later, Amayon jogging unruffled at his side. “He has trafficked with demons.”

“Take me to see Lord Gareth,” John said quietly. Enough of them had bows that at this short range it was a choice between surrender and a brief career as a pincushion. “I’m his servant and the Thane of the Winterlands still.”

“Not since you sold yourself to the Hellspawn!”

“That doesn’t give us the right to kill a man,” the red-clad commander said. John recognized him as Torneval, a senior captain of the King’s guard, a thin dark warrior from the marshes beyond Halnath. The guards all looked exhausted and grim, with the unshaven appearance of men pulling too many shifts. The smell of burning, the emptiness of the marketplace as he’d passed through, the cart bearing coffins…

“Put down your sword, Lord John.”

They searched him, roughly, for weapons. “What did you do with the box?” Amayon demanded.

Torneval frowned at him, and Ector said, “My nephew.” His brow puckered a little as he said it, as if some anomaly crossed his mind, but he quickly put it aside with a little shake of his head. “It was he who warned me Aversin would be using the vaults beneath my house to meet with demons.”

A dream, John thought, looking into those puzzled eyes. Bort and the gangboys evidently weren’t the only ones who had had strange dreams.

Amayon even wore the blue-and-white livery of Ector’s house, his dark curls hanging to his shoulders. Goodness knew what he looked like to the Earl of Sindestray, or to the men of the guard. He held the ink bottle, stoppered tight, in his blue-gloved hands.

“He had a box wrought of brownish bone, about so large, strapped with silver and lidded with a single opal,” he said. “This was a … treasure … he stole from our house.”

Torneval glanced back at one of his men and said, “Follow where he ran and fetch it.”

“He’s lying to you.” John lunged despairingly against the men who bound his wrists. “He’s a demon, he’s trying to trick you—”

Ector struck him hard across the face. “Be silent or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

“That’s the peril of demons, Lord Torneval,” Amayon sighed sententiously. “Once a man sells his heart to them, no one is ever sure of him, or of anyone who comes near him. I’m told that in times past such mistrust brought kingdoms to ruin.”

“I want to see Lord Gareth,” John repeated grimly as
they led him from the alley and toward the palace. “I’ve that right.”

“Oh, my dear Captain, you’d be a fool to let him! His influence over the boy is such…”

“Give our lord Regent credit for knowing a dangerous man when he sees one.” Torneval’s voice was dry. By the sound of it he had as little use for the treasurer as John did. To John, he said, “It may be a little time before he can speak with you, Lord John. His lady is sick unto death; he has watched by her side now for three days. Yes, Marc?”

The young guardsman returned with the dragonbone box in his hand. “I found this, Lord.”

Aohila’s
, John thought, recognizing the finer workmanship and the solid opal lid. He gritted his teeth.
So much for a month’s quest through the marches of Hell.

“That’s it.” Amayon held out his hand for it. Torneval shot him a wary glance and gave it to Ector, but as the men started off again the treasurer passed it to the demon—almost, John thought, without being aware of what he was doing.

“I’ll tell Aohila that you were delayed, shall I?” Amayon fell gaily into step at John’s side. “Or shall I ask her to visit you in your cell and preserve your soul alive even if she can’t do anything about keeping your body from being broken and burned?” His voice was too soft to be heard even by those men who walked on either side, but he laughed at John’s stony face. “Or would you like to send her a message, begging her help? I’ll even promise to deliver it. It will give me great pleasure, in fact.”

“Fuck yourself,” John said quietly. “I assume that’s what you spent your time in the bottle doing anyway.”

Amayon laughed again and halted in the thin winter
sunlight of the market. None of the guards, nor Lord Ector himself, seemed to notice that he’d stopped. John pulled against the grip on his arms, twisting to look back, and saw the demon standing, arms upraised in triumph and delight. Then Amayon laughed again and waved farewell, and skipped away, twirling his ink-bottle prison around and around on its scarlet ribbon over his head like a child playing with a toy.

    For three days they starved him. This was customary in the South for those condemned to burning alive.

Thus it is that the prisoner’s spirit may be rendered docile—
Polyborus again—
and he give those in authority little trouble in leading him to the ground of execution.
John could read the words in his mind every time he shut his eyes.

Gareth came on the second night, a beaten and exhausted Gareth who seemed to have aged ten years. “Forgive me.” The Regent glanced up as the guards in the corridor above the cells pulled away the ladder and closed the grilled trapdoor that was the tiny pit’s only source of light. “Lord John, I…”

John shook his head. “You’ve grief enough by the sound of it,” he said. “I’m gie sorry about Trey. The guards say there’s a plague.” He’d overheard them speak of it through the long day just past.
The Demon Queen?
he wondered.
Folcalor?
He saw Ian again, tossing in fever, tongue swollen, face flushed. The descriptions of the current plague were much the same. How after a thousand years had they gained this power? And what could be done about it?

He didn’t even have Corvin to bargain with now. And Amayon was gone, the Old God only knew where, to make his own treaty with the Demon Queen.

With unsteady hands the young man took off his spectacles, rubbed eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. When John had seen him at the burned-out camp on the banks of the Wildspae, after the battle at Cor’s Bridge against Rocklys, Gareth had been exhausted, sickened by the violence of combat and the shock of his cousin’s betrayal, but he’d had the look of a man who would recover, given rest and food and time.

Though the cell was ill lit—torchlight fell through the grillwork from the corridor overhead—and the guards had taken John’s spectacles, still he could see that Gareth was thin now, not with a boy’s weediness such as he’d had when first John had met him, but with the unhealthy thinness of a man whose body has given way under too great a sorrow. His face was haggard and lined. His hair hung lank, unkempt, and the mousy brown was streaked with gray. There were bruises under his eyes.

“Trey—” He stopped himself. Then, “Trey died.” And seeing John open his mouth to speak comfort he added quickly, “She’s all right now, though. There’s a man in the city, a healer. A very great healer. She died the day before yesterday, and he … he brought her back.” He raised his eyes, and John tried not to look as if he’d been struck in the heart with an arrow of ice. Gareth’s voice shook with emotion, gratitude, awe. “He brought her back.”