Knight of the Demon Queen (39 page)

He’s the first man to come back from the dead.

Go ahead
, John thought.
Tell him.

Tell him the woman he adores is a demon.

Tell him to kill her, to burn up her body alive, so she won’t end up like Wan ThirtyoneFourFour.
So your people won’t end up like Tisa Three, or those poor deep-zone families on the news.

In the silence the creak of a guard’s boot leather in the corridor sounded loud.

“This … this was last night. I think last night.” Gareth swallowed again, fighting to keep his voice steady. “Trey, I mean. I don’t really remember. I’ve been so tired, I slept the clock around, they tell me. When I woke, Captain Torneval told me you were here. But Trey … last night she sat up, weak, but … but well. She smiled at me, so…” He shook his head furiously, thrusting away memory, thought, pain, joy. Tears of thankfulness crept again from his eyes. “I’m sorry, John, so sorry. Ector claims he told me the day you were taken, I just … I just don’t remember.” His hand clenched convulsively. “Please, please, forgive…”

“Gar, no,” John said quickly. “Gaw, you did what you could…”

The young man shook his head. When he touched John’s arm, John saw how the rings had turned on his fingers, so thin the fingers had grown. “Ector announced your arrest to the council this afternoon, while I was sleeping,” he said. “He saw to it Father was there, though Father barely knows who he’s with these days. And with the plague, and the rumors that have been going around…”

“About what?”

Gareth ducked his head a little, looked aside in embarrassment. “About demons,” he said, after a long time. “About … about you trafficking with demons, to bring about the plague.”

John was silent, cold, furious, shaking inside.
Amayon
, he thought.
That filthy little bugger was thinking about this, all that time in the bottle. Sending dreams to Ector, who of course was willing to believe anything. Setting this up. Setting
me
up.

“I’ll get you out.” Gareth’s voice was unsteady. “I swear I’ll get you out. Midnight, tonight…”

“Well, if it’s midnight tomorrow,” John remarked, rubbing the side of his nose, “I’ll be a good deal slower on me feet. What about Jenny?”

The young Regent startled, as if at something forgotten and suddenly recalled. “Jenny…”

“Have you heard aught of her?” Without John’s spectacles Gareth’s face was little more than a blur, but the way he said her name told John that he had heard something.

“She was … she came here. To the palace. Yesterday … the day before…” He shook his head, brow folding, struggling to think past the haze of exhaustion and grief. “It was three days ago. She was with Trey when Trey … She was with Trey.” He couldn’t even speak the words again. “I didn’t … I don’t remember…” He passed a hand across his face, panic in his tone at so hideous a mental lapse.

Trust a demon to blur that recollection from your mind
, John thought.

“Find her,” he said. “Tell her I’m here. Tell her…”

Tell her what? That now I’m in trouble I’m sorry about all I said?

His heart pounded at the thought of her. Had Amayon betrayed her, too? Was she locked up here somewhere as well?

“Polycarp,” Gareth said, struggling to recall. “Poly-carp said he saw her. He said something…”

“Just find her. Promise me. And tell none others of this, not even Trey.” Seeing Gareth stiffen indignantly, he added quickly, “For her own good, not that I don’t trust her. After you find Jen, one of you needs to go to the marketplace at the foot of the hill, near Ector’s
house. There’s a statue of the Lord of Time in a wall niche down one of the streets near there. There’s a silver bottle, and a box made of bone and silver, shoved in behind the statue and the candles and all. I need ’em, but it must be only you or she who gets ’em.”

Gareth nodded. “I’ll get them myself. And I’ll find her, I swear it. I haven’t been myself. I know she’s somewhere in the palace; Badegamus would have told me if anything had happened to her.”

If Badegamus knew.

“And send me down some food,” he added, trying to calm the hammering of his heart as Gareth signed the guards to lower the ladder again. A prosaic enough request, when Jenny could be locked in some hole in greater danger than he, but when he stood to bid his liege lord good-bye—he’d had to sit down halfway through the interview from sheer lightheadedness—the floor seemed to rock under his feet. Even with the Regent assisting him, an escape from Bel wasn’t going to be easy, and he might end up having to run or swim or climb. “Anythin’ at all—potato skins, bread crusts, whole roast oxen…”

“Torneval will bring it.” Gareth had to whisper the words; the guards stood above them, framed against the torchlight at the ladder’s top. He visibly restrained himself from clasping John’s hands and said in a firm voice for their benefit, “I will see you ere the sentence is carried out.”

Equally for the benefit of the guards—who would undoubtedly be quizzed by Ector, worms rot him—John sank to one knee and bowed his head and stayed that way as Gareth climbed the ladder and the grill was replaced.

Midnight. And by the best of his calculations, it was an hour or so after sunset now.

He sank back, leaned his head against the damp stone.
So much
, he reflected bitterly,
for preventing demon war.
Within weeks, if not days, Trey would have a little room in the palace like Wan ThirtyoneFourFour’s, with blood-soaked chair straps and swarming insects. Would that be enough to convince Gareth of her possession? Or would he not learn of it until too late?

And Jenny … His flesh went cold at the thought of her here. Three days! Had she had the sense to get out? To go into hiding? Had she figured out that Trey was no longer the girl she’d known?

He closed his eyes and saw Tisa Three leaning gaily against the corner of the alley, waving a jaunty good-bye. Saw Old Docket brought out mindless and stumbling from the District cells; saw what was left of Bort on the blood-pooled floor. It would only be carnage from here, and he could think of no way to stop it, no way to turn the rising scarlet tide.

Would Corvin NinetyfiveFifty know? He’d been Aohila’s lover—or something. What had he learned from her, aside from the secret of immortality, that could possibly defeat the demons now that they had human rulers and human mages in their thrall? Now that they had reattained powers that had not been theirs in a thousand years?

If we can speak to him, within the dragonbone box. If human magic—or, the Old God help us, the abilities of a human who had once had magic—could use the scrying water as a demon could. If Corvin would speak at all to the man who’d captured him…

It’s got to work.
John watched the blurry squares of torchlight on the floor move, brighten, fade with the passage of the guards’ feet and shadows and torches.
Folcalor and Adromelech turning this world into a battlefield and a playground…

He felt sick at the thought.

Get me out of here. Torneval, wherever you are, lad…

Is it midnight yet?

More guards passing. Different voices, asking news of this prisoner and that. He heard his own name, and caught the words, “No trouble.”

You want to see trouble, lad, you just come down here and I’ll show you trouble.

In another cell a man coughed, desperate and hacking. John huddled grimly in his corner, trying not to think about how hungry he was, or how cold.

Surely midnight had to be near?

After a long time, the guards changed again.

It was close to dawn before he realized the truth.

Torneval wasn’t coming.

Trey.
Fear—and absolute certainty—settled in him with the finality of a stone sinking into a quicksand bog.

Lie down with me, love.
He could almost hear her voice speaking to her husband, a man desperately weary, torn to pieces by what he’d passed through.
Lie down with me and have a glass of wine.

Gar, no
, he thought, with what little energy was left in him to think anything.
Gar, no.

And then she’d say to the guards,
Oh, my lord is resting…

Of course, my lady. We’ll see to it, my lady.

A shudder went through him at the thought of the fire.

They came for him just before noon.