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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“Master Cashel,” Halphemos said earnestly, “I'm not very learned in the art myself, but my friend Cerix understands everything there is about wizardry. Could I ask you to join us at our lodgings, perhaps tonight? He's been injured, so it's hard for him to get around.”
The ape noticed them and came bounding over. He bumped Folquin's stool, drawing a black look from the king.
“Sharina!” Zahag said. “It's your move! Come!”
Cashel said, “Well, I don't mind meeting your Cerix, but what we really need is to find the friends who were on the ship with—”
The ape reached imperiously for Sharina's hand. Cashel stepped sideways to block him. Zahag hopped backward; a man would have collided with Cashel's massive form and recoiled.
Sharina glanced at the king. Folquin caught her eye and grimaced. He seemed determined to hear out this pair of complainants rather than start the whole business over again from the beginning.
“I'll finish the game,” Sharina said with an apologetic moue to Cashel. “It shouldn't take long.”
Sharina smiled as she trailed after the chortling Zahag. The ape was acting like an ill-tempered child, but he
couldn't help it any more than the child could. A man—a man like Cashel, at any rate—was apt to react to bullying from someone of Zahag's size as if the ape were an adult who could control what he was doing. That wouldn't be appropriate.
Well, Sharina didn't think it would be appropriate. On the other hand, Cashel might be right in believing that if he once threw the ape over the roof of the palace, Zahag
would
find the ability to control his future behavior.
“That's part of the reason I'd like you to meet Cerix,” Halphemos continued. “With his knowledge and your, well, our, strength, perhaps we can find your friends.”
Sharina squatted before the low table. Pandah's court etiquette was fairly informal, but it forbade anyone to sit on a chair or stool while the king heard petitions. Squatting was no hardship to a girl from Barca's Hamlet.
She studied the board. Chess was a noble game which no one in the borough but Sharina and her parents, Lora and Reise, played. Lora had seen to it that Sharina learned chess as well as every other aspect of court procedure which could be taught in a rural inn.
Lora and Reise had been palace servants the night rioters killed the Count and Countess of Haft. Sharina grew into a willowy blonde who looked nothing like the solid, dark-haired natives of Haft, but was the very image of an Ornifal noble like Count Niard, ruler of Haft through his marriage. His wife, Countess Tera, sprung from the old line of Kings of the Isles. Lora had always been sure of what Sharina was told by the royal emissaries: Sharina was Tera's daughter, born the same night as Garric and fostered by Lora and Reise with their own son.
Lora was a bitter, sharp-tongued woman. All that sustained her was the hope that someday the child she raised would sit on a throne while Lora beamed from a seat one step below her. But when King Valence's emissaries took Sharina with them to what they claimed was her destiny, they left Lora behind—of no value to the king's plans, of no value to Sharina either. Sharina felt sorry for Lora, but
she couldn't find any love in her heart for the woman she still thought of as mother.
Still, chess playing did seem to be a useful social skill here in King Folquin's court.
Sharina assessed the board's layout, then moved her gryphon out of the home row. Her pieces were carved from a deep red wood; Zahag's had been made from wood so pale that only by holding pieces at an angle could Sharina see the grain.
Pandah was the only major island in the heart of the shallow Inner Sea. There were many islets where a ship could be beached for the night, but few offered anything beyond a landing place. Food, good water, and all the entertainments of civilization were available on Pandah.
From being a general port of call, Pandah had grown into a major trading center where goods from all over the Isles were bought or bartered for transshipment. This chess set could have come from anywhere, though the grotesque carving made Sharina suspect the source was Dalopo.
Sharina eyed the crowd. The woman she'd noticed before was staring at Cashel again. Natives of Dalopo were supposed to tattoo themselves … .
Zahag cawed with glee. He slid his remaining wizard diagonally to take Sharina's tortoise. “There!” he cried. “You didn't see that!”
Sharina had indeed seen the move. She'd played several games with Zahag, and she'd correctly judged from past experience that the ape would be too hasty to see anything else.
Beside her, Folquin had adjudged a goat to one of the parties and a money fine for damage the goat did to the other. Both women wailed in shrill disbelief. Cashel and Halphemos continued to talk. The young wizard was showing Cashel his athame, a blade of yellow walrus ivory.
Sharina hopped her gryphon forward again. “Check,” she said. “And mate.”
“Ah, Mistress Sharina!” King Folquin said. “Would you introduce me to your protector, please?”
Sharina turned, starting to rise. Zahag exploded in an enraged shriek as loud as metal tearing. He flung the table to the side in a hail of chessmen and grabbed Sharina with hands strong enough to crack walnuts.
Folquin shouted angrily. The guards relaxing against the palace wall leaped to their feet. Most ran toward Sharina, but one in flustered excitement started to string his bow.
Cashel moved without a word or wasted motion. His great hands caught Zahag's forearms, squeezing hard so that the ape couldn't tighten his own grip. Zahag released Sharina and tried to bite Cashel's hand. Cashel snapped his arms apart, still holding the ape. Zahag raked Cashel's belly with the stubby claws on his feet.
The ape was frothing with rage; most of the spectators added their voices to the cacophony. Halphemos stood aside, chanting a spell with his eyes on the struggle. His athame beat the air. The wizard's mouth twisted to form ancient syllables; his face was pale.
Guards pushed through the crowd with their short, hook-bladed swords drawn. The leader's helmet had an erne-feather crest. Sharina stepped into their path, her hands raised. “Don't!” she cried. “Let Cashel handle it!”
She knew Cashel could hold Zahag until the ape's fury burned itself out. If nervous swordsmen got involved, there was no telling what would happen.
“Get out of the way!” the leader of the guards shouted, trying to thrust Sharina aside. She grappled with him, twisting his sword arm back. His brass helmet fell to the ground. The folk of Pandah were slightly built, and Sharina had fear as well as her native strength to aid her.
One guard dropped his sword and tried to pull Sharina away from his leader. The others hesitated, unwilling to act in a situation so confused.
Cashel raised Zahag overhead. He flexed to hurl the ape into the wall of the palace. Zahag was much stronger
than a man of his size. He'd gotten a grip on Cashel's right wrist and wouldn't be shaken off. Cashel grunted and stepped toward the building, preparing to flail Zahag to jelly when he couldn't simply throw the ape.
“Meueri puripeganux!”
Halphemos cried in the sudden stillness. His athame pointed.
The air surrounding Cashel and Zahag shimmered with a soap-bubble iridescence, then flashed red. Ape, man, and a section of the packed clay beneath Cashel's feet vanished.
Sharina and the gaping guards stepped apart. She looked at Halphemos in disbelief.
Halphemos stared horrified at the empty air. “I didn't do that!” he said. “By the Lady, I was just binding them!”
Behind Halphemos the tattooed woman stood up. The ball of her bare foot wiped out the signs she'd drawn on the ground. She walked away while everyone about her babbled in wonder.
 
 
The tenement where Ilna had a suite was so flimsily built that its foundations supported three stories rather the two to which walls of normal solidity would have limited the structure. Her rooms—one for her looms, the other for the normal business of life—were on the top floor. The roof above them didn't leak, and Ilna didn't consider that avoiding a walk up stairs was worth paying money for.
The walls and floor of Ilna's rooms were spotlessly clean for the first time in their existence: literally clean enough to eat from. The process had taken her a day and a half of scrubbing, and the odor of the lye she'd used still clung to the plaster.
Ilna thought about the past as her shuttle clattered back and forth across the double loom. She was weaving a thin fabric two ells across. It could be hung in the hall of a mansion—or over the light well of a tenement like this one. She hadn't decided which it would be: an object for
sale to a noble who'd pay well for the benison the fabric brought his household, or a gift to some hundreds of people she didn't know and whose willingness to accept squalor disgusted her.
A debt was a debt, whether or not you liked or respected the creditor. The harm llna had done with her love charms had touched, directly or indirectly, every person in Erdin. The only present question was whether money or a gift in kind was a better means of repayment.
Ilna didn't think about the future. The past and the sores on her heart were bad enough.
Her instinct pressed the treadle to lift this or that grouping of warp threads into a shed for each pass of the shuttle. Because her mind was on the ship carrying Garric away from her, it was some moments before the subtle details of the pattern she wove reached her consciousness.
Ilna stopped, then ran her fingers over the closely woven cloth. The past, present, and future of the cosmos were a single fabric; and since Ilna os-Kenset came back from Hell, there was no pattern whose knots were hidden from her.
She snorted. During the days she'd been living in the Crescent, she'd managed to convince herself that people were better than she knew full well they were in reality. She'd still taken precautions, of course.
Ilna got up from the loom and put on a cape of dull blue wool. She'd woven the fabric herself; it had the consistency of warm milk. She took the noose made of the fine silk from its peg and concealed it under the cape. In a sense using silk for the purpose was a luxury, but Ilna had never been one to skimp on tools.
The windows were simply openings in the wall. Ilna didn't close and bar the shutters before she went out. The only reason she bothered to lock the door with its twopin key was that it would seem suspicious if she didn't.
The tenement covered a square block with a light well in the center. There was a staircase in each corner, though the landings were usually choked with refuse.
A boy of ten or twelve loitered in the grubby hallway as Ilna locked her door. The rag wrapped over the boil on his left elbow had been filthy to begin with; now it was a mass of yellowish crystallized pus.
Ilna pretended to ignore the lookout as she strode to the nearer of the two stairwells. She was barely out of sight before she heard him give a piercing whistle.
The staircase was dank and stinking. Children played on it, shrieking excitedly as they jumped up and down over the gap where a tread was missing. They seemed happy enough, though Ilna couldn't imagine why.
Instead of going down to street level, Ilna got out on the second floor and walked to the stairs at the opposite end of the corridor. The passage had no windows of its own and most of the doors to either side were closed. It was like walking through a tunnel, lighted only by the glimmers around warped panels.
A couple were fondling on the landing. The man cursed as Ilna pushed by, climbing back to her own floor. She ignored them the way she ignored the excrement dried on the walls.
Ilna
could
change the world; she was doing so to the best of her considerable ability. But she couldn't change it all, and she couldn't change it all at once.
She stepped out into the corridor. Her door had been smashed open. The boy with the running sore stood beside the doorway, staring intently toward the stairwell by which Ilna had left. All the other doors on the hallway were shut: her neighbors were making sure that they saw nothing.
Ilna walked softly down the hall. The boy must still have heard the whisper of her bare foot on the boards, because he started to turn as her noose settled around his neck.
. Ilna jerked the boy to her, choking the shout in his throat. With the free end of the rope she lashed his wrists and ankles together as though she were trussing a rabbit for market. The boy's eyes were terrified. His face was
turning red, but he could still breathe if he pulled his head back to get a little slack in the noose.
Ilna touched an index finger to her lips in warning. Then she stepped to the door of her room.
One of the two husky men inside had his arms full of Ilna's yarn, two wicker hampers with loose-fitting tops. The other stood at the head of the double loom and said, “No, we'll get a lot more for this but we gotta get it apart—”

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