Knight of the Demon Queen (9 page)

Lyra, who had gone over to gather up the little sack of money from the hand of a dead gnome, screamed.

The human leader of the gnomes, a man in a long green cloak, sprang from the ground and snatched at her wrist.

Jenny leaped toward her, halberd raised to strike, then halted in her tracks in shock. Lyra had darted clear of the man’s lunge and stood back, gasping and trembling, as he fell, clutching his belly, his whole body convulsing
again with the effects of the nightshade.
He should be dead
, Jenny thought blindly, blankly.
He should be dead…

Her mouth was dry and her breathing fast as she stared at that cropped gray head, the beaky nose, the patch over the eye.

Foolish
, she thought.
He
is
dead
.

The man was crawling toward them, muttering curses and vomiting again though there was nothing in him to bring up. Clinging together, Jenny and Lyra backed away before him, while Dal and the children brought the stock out of the tower, making a wide circuit around the crawling body.

I saw him die in the infirmary tent after the battle at Cor’s Bridge, at summer’s end.
The eye now covered with a patch had been pierced by an arrow…

And in the other eye, as Pellanor of Palmorgin raised his head, glared the greenish light of a demon.

Jenny stepped forward with her halberd and struck off his head.

The body continued to crawl toward them.

Jenny and the little family fled into the snow-blanketed night.

There was Hell, reflected John, and there was Hell.

This was something no one—not Gantering Pellus, not Juronal, not the author of the mysterious
Elucidus Lapidarus
—had known: that not all Hells were the same.

He had passed beyond any information or assistance from the writings of anyone he had ever read, and he supposed this was why the Demon Queen had wanted him as her agent. Having survived the Hell behind the mirror—as he had survived one dragon slaying, with the assistance of a certain amount of magic—he had learned just enough to survive the next.

He supposed, too, that the Demon Queen had given him Amayon as a servant because he was the one demon she knew John would hate the most: the demon who had hurt Jenny. The one demon to whose charm John would be almost guaranteed not to yield.

Not that Amayon didn’t try.

“That’s very good,” the demon said softly, looking over his shoulder during one of their rests, in the dense shelter of a thorny watercourse between two walls of striated black rock. John sketched the thorns and the shape of the barren upland that stretched beyond; sketched the carry beast, whom he’d named Dobbin, bending its long neck
down to the pool to drink, and the shape of the herds of such creatures that could be distantly seen on the top of the opposite cliff. “You’ve captured the look of it well.”

Amayon now wore the form of a girl, dark curls framing a nymph’s triangular face, fragile hands resting on John’s shoulder as she stood behind him to look at the sketch. She glanced around her nervously at a quick soft scraping sound from the rocks and pressed a little closer to him. Genuine fear? John wondered. Or the imitation of it, to coax him into protectiveness?

He didn’t know. The landscape in his dream had been without life, but he sensed there was life here.

Waiting in the shadows. Watching.

“It’d help if I knew if it was real,” he remarked, sketching the long necks of the herd beasts with a charcoal stub. “I mean, the Queen’s palace behind the mirror was whatever she fancied it to be: We’d pass one window where it was rainin’ outside, and the next there’d be a sandstorm, and the next it’d be a sweet summer night. So maybe the next chap who rides through here isn’t goin’ to see these things at all.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?” Amayon regarded him through lowered lashes. “To help another who may ride after you?”

“I’d like to say yes.” John grinned and shoved the parchments into his satchel. “That’d sound a bit noble, wouldn’t it? But it’s just I can’t pass up the chance to make notes of all this, to remember it by.”

He stepped over the watercourse, holding out his hand in automatic assistance to the delicate girl who followed, though he knew Amayon needed no such assistance. She stumbled a little on the rocks and clung to his arm.
There’s a small favor to be thankful for
, he thought: The Queen had said that the spells of one Hell’s demons
might work in another Hell, and might not. Evidently Amayon’s spells of lust didn’t work, which was a relief.

“There’s no need for us to be enemies, you know.” Amayon stroked his arm as they came up on Dobbin, who made a noise at them like an angry goose and lashed his heavy tail. “We’re going to be traveling together for quite some time. We need one another, you know.”

“And you need me for exactly what?” John half turned in the saddle as Amayon arranged her gauzy skirts. Her eyes met his, haunted and beautiful and filled with tears.

“To help me,” she whispered. “I know I was wrong, to hurt your lady Jenny. You were justified in sending me behind the mirror, to be slave and captive of the Demon Queen. I know that now. But oh, John, she is monstrous, terrible! Nothing,
nothing
that I ever did merits the things…” She dropped her voice, her eyes, turned her head slightly aside and caught her red underlip between delicate white teeth with the memory of pain. “The things she has done to me.”

“And you hope I’ll forgive you?” John asked, keeping his voice uninflected. “And help you escape her?”

Her hand slid over his thigh. “I would do anything to escape her, my lord. I would be your servant for life, your slave. Demons are very loyal to those who treat them kindly. If you knew what she is…”

John knew what she was. But before he could reply a thin shriek rent the sullen air, and a hairy insectile thing the size of a dog bounded down the watercourse, fleeing in desperate terror from seven or eight greater creatures, now running, now flying—demons or animals, John didn’t know, until the larger beasts caught the small. Instead of eating it they played with it: torturing
it, tearing it to pieces while the victim shrieked on and on in undying agony as nerves and flesh and entrails were shredded.

And Amayon watched, rapt. Drinking in what she saw with trembling nostrils and ecstatic eyes, as if savoring the most exquisite of meals.

Disgusted, John pushed her hand aside and yanked Dobbin’s reins.

There was neither night nor day in Hell. The light came from nowhere, without shadow—or maybe the Demon Queen had put on him a magic that enabled him to see in the dark. Dry heat seemed to radiate from the ground and varied from place to place: It was colder, John had noticed, when they’d crossed a limb of the black stone uplands, where bands of Dobbin’s brethren strode with their gangling, purposeful strides. Observing them, he saw they avoided the watercourses for as long as they could: They’d descend, drink quickly, and depart.

No wonder, he thought, considering the slumped squeaking wights that rustled and darted in the black leathery vegetation that grew along the water. Twice, also, during that first long ride, he glimpsed signs of human hunters, or humaniform creatures anyway: things that walked upright and bore crude weapons. When, in exhaustion, John had just begun to argue with Amayon that they stop and rest—Dobbin was stumbling, too—he heard a stealthy rustling in the thorn along the bank tops that had not the sound of demons and looked up to see a dozen men and women, dirty and clothed in skins.

“Skin and ream the lot of them,” Amayon muttered, sliding down from Dobbin’s cantle. “Wait here.” She climbed the bank toward them, holding out her hands and speaking in a sweet musical language that John heard as his own in his mind: “Please let us pass, dear
friends. My brother and I mean no harm to you or to any in this place.”

“You have food,” the leader said, the tallest and strongest of the men. Looking up, John saw a face bearded and brutish, and eyes that were filled with suspicion, fear, and rage, but without the curious glitter of a demon’s. These were indeed men and women. Native to Hell? he wondered. Had they been born here? Trapped here while passing through by eating food and drinking water of this place? Had some demon who ruled the place enslaved them, as Aohila had sought to enslave him and trap him forever behind the Mirror of Isychros?

“We can spare neither food nor drink,” Amayon said, “for our road is long and we cannot tarry to hunt. But another gift I will give you, to show our love for you.” From the tight-laced gauzy bodice of her dress she drew two coins, one gold and one silver. Cupping the silver in her palm, she struck it gently with the gold three times. On the third strike sparks leaped forth. Bending down, she showed how by holding a little of the dry vegetation of the uplands near to the coins, fire could be produced.

“Only don’t do it too often,” she cautioned as the leader performed the same feat and kindled a little scrap of brush held close. “The fire takes the virtue of the coins away for a little time, and they need to rest. But they will always return to their power.”

“I take it spells of fire are easier to work than spells of lust?” John remarked as Dobbin bore them away down the gully with his jogging, bone-jarring stride. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw the snaggle-haired warriors crowding around, saw the leader gesture them away from the precious coins in his hand. “Or will fire spells work just about anywhere?”

“They’re very simple.” Amayon shrugged.

“Are you speakin’ of the fire spells or those folks you just cheated?”

The demon regarded him from beneath long black lashes. “The way you cheated Aohila, with the phial of dragon tears that evaporated from her hand, and the gnomish hothwais crystal charged with starlight in place of the metal of a falling star? She was furious, by the way, just livid. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such cursing.” The pale rosebud mouth curved in a spiteful grin. “Aren’t you going to ask me who those people are?” she went on after a moment, when John relapsed into silence, thinking of what she had said.

“I’m a bit interested in the kind of tale you’d tell me,” John replied evenly. “But I’d be a fool if I thought it the truth.”

She put her arms around his waist and leaned her cheek on his shoulder. “It might be.”

Dobbin was stumbling, and Aversin drew rein. “Don’t,” Amayon protested, glancing over her shoulder at the cliff tops that hemmed in the gorge. Hot winds lifted the fragile layers of her dress, her dark hair; she looked wild and young and scared.

“It won’t do us a bit of good to ride the poor thing to death.” John swung down and neatly avoided the beast’s kick.

“You worry too much. They’re very tough.”

“Well, I’m not.” He unhooked the water skin from the saddlebow, took a cautious drink. He’d rolled his doublet and his plaids into one of the saddlebags, but the heat in the gorge was dry and suffocating. Sweat soaked his shirt and made long wet strings of his hair. “And I’m not ettlin’ to get meself killed because I’m too tired to react to danger.”

“Oh, surely not,” she protested. “I think you’re very
tough, too.” He took her by the waist and lifted her down, and she slid into his arms, holding him tight as if she feared she would fall, her face raised expectantly to his. “Well,” she agreed softly, “maybe we can rest here a little.”

“Aye.” John fished in his satchel and found the bag of flax seed and, disengaging his other arm from Amayon’s pressing hands, opened the ink bottle. “But tough or not I think I’d rest a bit quieter without you wrapped round me neck.”

“Don’t!” The demon started back, genuine panic in her eyes. “Don’t—”

John dropped in three seeds and stoppered the ink bottle, then went over and kicked Dobbin several times to wake him—it was like kicking a stack of cowhides— and led the beast up out of the smothering bottomlands and a few hundred yards out onto the rocky plateau. In his dream—and in the endless, aching ride—he’d seen how the upland rock flawed and faulted into smaller gorges and overhangs. Had seen, too, that the pooks and wights that infested the streambeds were far fewer on the higher ground. In a dip in the stone like the trough beneath a wave the carry beast hunkered down, tucked its head under one thigh, and wrapped its tail around tight until it was an impenetrable bulb of dappled pinkish leather. John leaned his back against it as if it had been a bedstead, forced himself to remain awake long enough to jot a few notes about the hunter folk who’d barred their way, then slept.

He discovered why it is not recommended to put oneself in the position of dreaming dreams in Hell.

Foulness, pain, blackness leading down into blackness—

Ylferdun Deep
, he thought. He had battled the dragon
Morkeleb and was wounded unto death. He and Jenny and Prince Gareth had taken refuge in the darkness of the gnomes’ deserted Deep while the witch Zyerne’s followers besieged the gates. And in the heart of the Deep he’d heard whispering, the whispering of the thing that the gnomes worshiped: Crypt below crypt, vaults beneath subvaults, and in the dark at the bottom of the mountain it dwelled—the Stone within the Deep.

The Stone that drank souls.

It was before him now. Emerging from the coarse black basalt of the ground as a whale slowly rises from the sea, smooth and bluish and without mark. A Drinking Stone, the gnomes called such a thing. Drinking life. Drinking souls.

Dobbin was dead. John could see the consciousness of the animal trapped already in the Stone, alive and completely present, along with the half-deteriorated spirits of dozens of his kind and broken fragments of demons, beasts, men, and women…

He could see them clearly, even as he felt his own spirit, his own life, being drawn by the thing.

Damn it, no!
he thought, and tried to drag his mind away.

And could not.

Damn it
, he screamed against that slow-growing warmth,
I will not!

But it was like sleep too long denied, or a slow-tilting floor when it has gone too far to be climbed. His hand jerking as if with palsy he fumbled the ink bottle from his shirt, dragged loose the stopper, wondered if the Stone would trap Amayon as well.