Knight of the Demon Queen (6 page)

And there was no getting past the fact that she had helped. She had given them spells to protect the dragon-slaying machines so they could defeat Caradoc’s— Folcalor’s—enslaved star-drakes and free them of their demon possessors. She had given them spells to free the wizards in Folcalor’s thrall. And she had given them a spell of healing, without which Ian might now be in even worse shape.

Now she asked his help.

She was lying, he was almost certain—he wondered what that water actually did. But she was asking his help.

As he climbed stiffly to his feet something dropped from his plaids, rolled to the earthen floor. He picked it up. It was the onyx ink bottle, stopper still tightly in place. When he touched it it was warm, like bread new-brought from the oven. Putting his ear to it, it seemed to him that he could hear a whispering inside.

“Don’t do it, Johnny.” Once Muffle would have growled the words in exasperation, or shouted them in rage. But his voice was now very quiet, and the light from the burning work shed showed the profoundest fear on his face.

“You don’t even know what I’m at.” Aversin didn’t look at him, only stood gazing into the flames where half a lifetime’s work slowly crumbled in red heat and smoke. The wicker gondola and silken air bags of the
Milkweed
, which had borne him north to the isles of the dragons, the Skerries of Light. The jointed frame and waxed canopy of his infamous parachute. Pieces of five or six early versions of his dragon-slaying contrivances.

Gone.

Against his overwhelming regret he had only to place the mental image of Mag or Adric entering the building or touching any single thing that had been in it during last night’s manifestations.

He drew a deep breath and turned to regard his brother. “It’s only demons can undo the magic of demons,” he said.

The heat of the fire made the snow on Muffle’s plaids steam and glitter in the red-gray stubble on his cheeks. The older man’s small bright brown eyes searched
John’s but met only the reflection of flame, mirrored in the rounds of spectacle glass.

“And Ian’s like a visitor that’s got his coat on to leave,” John added. “What would you have me do?”

“Take Jen with you.”

“No.” John pitched his torch into the flaring ruin, trying not to remember the demon in Jenny’s eyes, or Amayon’s name whispered in her sleep. When the shed roof fell in, he picked up his loaded saddlebags, made sure the little bag of flax seeds was in his pocket, and ascended to the stable court. Gantering Pellus alleged that demons were obliged to count seeds, though he’d claimed it was millet seeds, not flax. Muffle climbed behind John, water skins slung over his shoulder, slipping a little in the snow that heaped the steps. The lower court was sheltered. Once they came up the wind hit them, cold as a flint knife and stinging with sleet.

“Ian, then. He’ll be on his feet in a day or two…”

“No.” John ducked through the low stable door, where Battlehammer stood saddled and waiting. He pulled off the rug Bill had laid over the big liver-bay warhorse and fastened on saddlebags and water skins. It wasn’t a day on which he would turn a stable rat out-of-doors, and by the smell of the wind he’d be lucky if he reached the Wraithmire before more snow hit. But the fever wouldn’t wait.

Snow lay drifted in the gateway. Peg the gatekeeper and Bill the yardman straightened from their shoveling. “If I was you, I’d think again—” Peg began.

“If I was you, I would, too,” John reassured her. He wrapped his brown-and-white winter plaid tighter around his lower face. His very teeth hurt with the cold.

“Jen’s taught Ian how to use the ward wyrds that’ll tell if Iceriders are on their way,” he said, swinging up
into the saddle. He felt bad about taking Battlehammer into peril that would almost certainly get him killed— poor payment for a beast of whom he was dearly fond— but he knew he would need a trained mount, and a fast one. “But if that happens, for God’s sake, don’t forget to send someone out to the Fell to fetch Jen in, whether she wants to come or not. Tell her I’m on patrol.”

“Since when have you taken water on patrol?” Muffle demanded. “Or your harpoons?” He slapped the backs of his fingers to the heavy iron weapons slung behind Battlehammer’s saddle, three of the eight that John had made to use against dragons. Even without the poisons and death spells Jenny—and later Ian—had put on them, they were formidable, and something about the empty lands he’d seen in his dream last night had warned him that there were things about which the Demon Queen had lied.

“Keep watch.” John bent from the saddle to lay a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “There’s aught afoot, Muffle, and I don’t know what it is or how it’s to be fought.”
I’m not a mage!
he wanted to shout,
I shouldn’t even be doing this!
But he’d never considered himself a warrior, either. “Keep watch for anythin’. Not only outside the bounds, outside the walls, but inside as well. Stay here at the Hold tonight, if you would, and until I return. Bring Blossom and the children—tell ’em it’s because I don’t know how long I’ll be away. Tell ’em any-thin’. But every night, walk about the place. Down the cellars, along the walls, go in the crypt underneath the main hall. Just look.”

“For what?”

Peg was lowering the drawbridge, working the crank to raise the portcullis. Wind slammed through the gate
with renewed viciousness, slicing John’s sheepskin coat and winter plaids, the mailed leather beneath.

John shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“And who do I tell,” the blacksmith asked, “if I find what I shouldn’t?”

Ian.
John felt a pang, less of fear than of grief, thinking of what his son might have to face.

He’s too young, he’s been hurt too bad…

But he had grown up in a land that did not make allowances, not for youth, not for innocence, not for the wounded.

“Jen,” he said. “Ian, if Jen’s not to be reached.”

Sergeant Muffle nodded, silenced by whatever it was that he saw in John’s eyes. “How long will you be gone?”

“That I don’t know.” He gathered the reins, Battle-hammer’s breath a white mist like a monster of legend. Beyond the gate the world was marble and ash, treeless to the horizon.

He turned back. “Pray for me.”

“Every day, Johnny,” Muffle said quietly. “Every day.”

Aversin turned his back on the Hold and rode for the Wraithmire. The smoke of the burning work shed made a hard white column in the gray air, and the hot onyx of the ink bottle burned against his flesh like a second heart.

In summer or fall he could reach those dreary marshes in a matter of hours. Riding against the wind, with Battle-hammer foundering in the drifts, the day was dying when he came to the edge of the slick flats of brown ice, the snow-covered humps of bramble and hackweed that filled the sheltered ground. No one could tell him now whether the flooding had come first and the infestations
of whisperers later, or whether the lands had been abandoned to the water when those glowing, giggling things had begun to haunt the nights.

In either case it hadn’t surprised him to learn that a gate of Hell was located there.

A man named Morne had had a house hereabouts— before the marshes had spread this far—and had farmed a little. One afternoon Nuncle Darrow came to the Hold saying that Morne’s wife had cut her husband and then their four children to pieces with a carving knife. Old Caerdinn and Jenny had exorcised the woman, but they didn’t know whether they’d succeeded, for after they were done with their spells the woman turned the knife on herself.

The house still stood. John could distinguish its pale shape among the half-dead trees in the gloom. None of the neighbors had torn it down, not even for the bricks and the dressed stone.

He dismounted cautiously and led Battlehammer into the labyrinth of hummocks and ice. In the graying twilight he found where animal tracks turned aside in fear of the whisperers but saw no mark, no sign of the Hell-spawn themselves.

He made sure Battlehammer was stoutly tied to a sapling before reaching into his coat for the ink bottle. It felt heavy in his hand, and for a time he stood, wondering if there were any way whatsoever he could accomplish the bidding of the Demon Queen without the help of the thing inside.

But he couldn’t. He simply didn’t know enough. So he pulled off his glove, took three flax seeds from the pouch at his waist, and held them ready between thumb and forefinger. Only then did he pull the stopper from the bottle.

A momentary silvery glitter played above the hole, like a very tiny flame.

And Jenny stood before him.

Jenny beautiful, as she had been when first he’d seen her at Frost Fell: black hair like night on the ocean, blue eyes like summer noon. Smiling and relaxed and filled with the joy of living, with daffodils in her hands.

John held the flax seeds above the bottle’s mouth and said, “You take that form ever again, and I swear to you I’ll seal this thing with you in it and bury it in the deepest part of the sea.”

“Darling, how serious you’re being!” It wasn’t Jenny anymore; it never had been, in the way faces and identities shift and merge in dreams. A slim boy stood before John, fourteen or fifteen years old. Like Jenny he was black haired and blue eyed, with long lashes and red pouty lips in an alabaster face. He wore plain black hose and a coat of quilted black velvet, just as if the world were not frozen all around them; his little round cap was sewn with garnets. “Could it be you’re jealous? Do you suspect those legions of men she had weren’t entirely because she was allegedly possessed? We can’t force anyone to do anything that’s truly against their secret natures in the first place, you know.”

“No,” John returned mildly. “I don’t know that. In fact, what I do know is that the lot of you are liars who couldn’t ask straight-out for water if you were dyin’.”

The boy shrugged. “Well, I’m sure you’ll go on believing whatever makes you comfortable.” He held out his exquisitely kid-gloved hand. “I’m Amayon.” And, when John did not react, he added, “
Jenny’s
Amayon.”

“And
my
servant,” John pointed out maliciously and for a fleeting instant saw the flare of rage and piqued
pride in those cobalt eyes. “I trust Her Majesty told you your duties an’ all.”

“Tedious bitch.” Amayon yawned elaborately, though John had already seen that the demon did not breathe. “I suppose you know she uses the mucus of donkeys as a complexion cream? You haven’t, I hope, been taken in by that antiquated lust spell she throws over everyone she encounters.”

“Like the one you used on Rocklys’ cavalry corps?” John returned, refusing to be goaded.

“Oh, darling, did Jenny tell you that was me?” The demon simpered, but he was watching John’s eyes. “How very simple of her.”

Not for nothing, however, had John grown up his father’s son, his heart and his face a fist closed in defense. He merely regarded Amayon without expression, and the demon shrugged and smiled.

“Well, I’m sure if it makes you feel better to believe that … The gate’s this way, Lordship.” He threw a mocking flex into the title. “Generally only the small fry can leak through, but Her Reechiness has given me a word.”

“Do you hate that animal?” he added, raising delicate brows at Battlehammer, who stood, ears flat to his neck and muscles bunched, regarding him as he would have a snake.

“Should I?”

“It’s up to you, of course, Lordship. But unless there’s some reason you’d like to see him die, I suggest you don’t bring him with us. Your mistress has made arrangements.”

“Ah,” John said. “Thinks of everythin’, she does.” And he dropped the seeds into the bottle.

It was Aversin’s intention simply to keep the demon
where he couldn’t do mischief while he took Battle-hammer to the nearest farm, which was old Dan Dar-row’s walled enclave in the bottomlands adjacent to the Mire. But with the snow and the wind, and his exhaustion from a sleepless night, it took him nearly two hours to reach the place.

“’Twill be black as pitch by the time you get back to the Mire,” the farmer protested when John explained that he wanted the loan of a donkey and a boy to lead it back to the farm again.

A little uneasily, he acceded to the patriarch’s invitation to spend the night. He was conscious of the demon bottle around his neck as he sat at supper with the Darrow clan and their hired men and women, watching the old man’s fair-haired grandchildren tumble and play before the hearth. He guessed that Amayon was perfectly aware of his surroundings; he had no business, he thought, bringing even a bottled demon into a house where there were children.

When he slept, he dreamed again and again of a rat, or some huge insect, creeping up the frame of each child’s bed, demon light glittering in its berry-blue eyes. Reaching toward them…

He woke at the touch of a hand on his neck.

The Darrow farm was a big place, but simple and rustic. John had bedded down among the men of the household in the loft, on blankets and straw tickings spread around where the chimney came through from the floor below. They’d have put the King himself there, had he come calling. Remembering that demons had spoken to Caradoc in his dreams, offering him greater power and wider wisdom if he would but open a gate for them, he’d tied the red ribbon that held the ink bottle in a knot up
close to his throat so it couldn’t be slipped off over his head while he slept.

Sure enough, as he opened his eyes he felt a man’s hands fumbling with the ribbon and heard the slow thick breathing of a sleeper near his face, not the short breaths of a man nervous about robbing a guest. John caught the sleepwalker by wrist and shoulder and flung him bodily onto as many men as he could; there were shouts and curses, and by the thread of dim hearthlight that leaked up through the ladder hole at the far end of the loft he saw his attacker bound to his feet, eyes blank, knife in hand.

The attacker—a huge stablehand named Browson who’d helped unsaddle Battlehammer—lunged at him, but men were scrambling up, grabbing, clutching. Shouts of “Murder!” and “Bandits!” barked through the dark. Another of the hired men grabbed Browson and threw him down, and then Dan Darrow and his two sons-in-law swarmed up the ladder in their nightshirts. “Brow-son, what in Cragget’s name are you at?”