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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Cashel grunted. He didn't much like the airs Tayuta was giving herself. Also he couldn't help wondering who Aria's father was—and where he'd been when wizards were walking into the palace.
“So, you're a wizard?” he said to Tayuta with no more expression than a stone wall has.
Tayuta's lips tightened. She clasped her hands at her waist. “No,” she said in a steady voice, “I'm not. I've studied the art, but my only ability is to divine the future. I foretold your arrival, Master Cashel, but I can be of no direct help to the Successor.”
Cashel scowled at his own behavior. He hadn't any business getting his back up just because Tayuta had a good opinion of herself. “Look, I'm just Cashel,” he said. “I herd sheep.”
A pair of servants entered the room with trays of fruit and drinks. Zahag bounced toward them by leaping through his long arms. He reached up and began cramming his mouth with refreshments from both trays simultaneously.
The servants goggled. One of the handmaids cried “Stop that!” and stepped toward the ape.
“That's quite all right, Ivris!” Sosia said. “I'll tell you when I need someone to decide how food should be served in my presence.”
The handmaid looked stricken. She ran out of the room, blubbering into her hands.
Cashel stood a little straighter. The girl had been wasting time when there wasn't much to waste, but Cashel didn't like to see one person treat another like a fool even though it was deserved. He knew folks would do that to him if it wasn't that he was so big.
“Ilmed said he'd decided my daughter was to be his bride,” Sosia continued as though nothing had happened. “They'd be betrothed at once, but the marriage wouldn't be performed until Aria became eighteen. He was a powerful wizard, so we should feel honored—
he
said.”
She smiled coldly at the memory. “I was in a bad temper from the pain,” she said—and Cashel could imagine she had been, three days after giving birth. “I told the servants to flog limed within an inch of his life and throw him into the harbor. Instead he disappeared. Into thin air.”
Zahag shambled between Cashel and the women, slurping white fluid from a glazed cup. The contents were too thin for milk, even if it had been skimmed. Some sort of sap or juice, Cashel guessed.
“That night at full moon,” Sosia continued, “Ilmed returned. I watched him but I couldn't move. None of us could move. He had several monsters with him.”
“Scaled Men,” Tayuta said. “They're the size of normal men, but—”
“I know the scaly men,” Cashel said. “They took the baby, then?”
The diviner fell silent. For the first time her expression was tinged with surprise as well as respect for the power she hoped Cashel could wield.
“Yes,” said Sosia. “They took Aria. When we could move again, there was an island in the middle of the harbor
and a tower on it. The flames surrounding the island come out of the water, but they burn anything they touch—wood, metal; stone even. And flesh. We've tried everything over the years, but we can't pass through the flames to rescue Aria.”
“As the child grew older,” Tayuta said, “we saw her sometimes on top of the tower. At first with one of the Scaled Men, but more recently alone.”
“Nowadays she comes out very rarely,” Sosia said. “I saw her today, but only for a moment. I'm afraid that after today I'll never see my daughter again.”
A tremble broke through Sosia's wall of control, though she didn't let emotion wholly defeat her.
Ilna would understand this woman … .
And with that realization, Cashel understood Sosia as well.
“I'd help you if I could,” he said. “But mistress, I don't know what I can do. I'd—”
He turned up his big hands. “Mistress, if it was a demon to fight, I'd, well, I've done that. But I can't wrestle a fire.”
“You spun your wand,” Tayuta said, her eyes focused on a memory. “I saw you in the water of my bowl. Your wand carved a path through the wall of fire. It closed behind you and I could see no more.”
“A wand?” Cashel said in surprise. “Do you mean my quarterstaff? But I don't have it with me here, it's back with Sharina.”
He frowned. Had it been lost when the
Lady of Mercy
disappeared?
He was shocked to realize that he was more concerned about a piece of wood than he was for Sharina and his other friends, but he was
sure
they would be all right. The staff was a thing he'd shaped himself when he was only a boy; and in a real sense, creating that solid tool was also the creation of a
man
named Cashel or-Kenset.
Zahag fluttered his lips in mockery. “Do you think they don't have trees on Pandah big enough for you to wave?”
the ape said to Cashel. “Use the mast of a ship, then! That ought to be your size, shouldn't it?”
The women looked at one another. The handmaid who'd run out of the room had returned, her eyes dry though a little reddened.
“Oh,” said Cashel. “I didn't think of that. There'd be a flagstaff that balances right, I guess. Sure.”
He laced his fingers together and hunched his shoulders, loosening his muscles for use. “Well, mistress,” Cashel said, “I'll try what I can do.”
He wondered whether this limed would be in the tower or just the princess alone. A fellow who'd steal a little baby, well, he deserved whatever happened to him, didn't he?
Zahag scrambled back in sudden fear as he saw the expression on Cashel's face.
 
 
The guard rattled back the sliding door for Sharina, causing the two prisoners within to blink in the light of the setting sun. The prison's pair of tiny windows were in the east wall, behind the men.
“There he is, mistress,” the guard said. “The other one's old Demito. Watch out that he don't upchuck last night's wine on you. He's usually lost it by this time of the morning.”
“Mistress Sharina?” Halphemos said in surprise. “Oh, you shouldn't have come here, mistress. This is a foul place.”
And so it was, though Sharina had seen worse. A girl brought up in a country hamlet doesn't get squeamish about filth, at least not after she's helped butcher a hog for the first time. She ducked her head and stepped inside.
The prison was a brick shed whose interior had been dug down several feet to rock. A stone bench ran the length of the long side opposite the door. There were leg irons in the floor and manacles set into the wall above the bench.
“Mostly we just get sailors from the foreign ships,” the guard said apologetically. “Local people, they work off their crime to the victim. Or they're chopped, of course, if it was a man-killing and they can't pay the fine.”
The prisoners—a drunk sagging against one end wall and Halphemos on the other—sat on the bench. Their left wrists were clamped to the wall and both ankles hobbled to the floor. They could feed themselves with their free hands, but their only possible movement was to slide a few inches to one side or the other along the bench.
“Master Halphemos,” Sharina said in a cool voice, “your friend Cerix has sent you a scroll of hymns to the Lady. I suggest you use it while I share a skin of wine with your warder. He's kindly allowed you to read until sunset for your soul's sake.”
Halphemos looked dumbfounded, as well he might. In Barca's Hamlet people were conventionally religious. Folk might not put much faith in the mealtime sprinkle of cheese and beer at the household shrine, but almost everybody did it—and though people muttered about the tithe to the Great Gods, they paid that also when the priests from Carcosa came through the borough once a year.
Cerix had a fierce disbelief in the gods. It was as much a matter of faith for the crippled wizard as a hermit's simple piety had been for Nonnus—and for Sharina now, in memory of the man who had died to protect her. Cerix was the least likely of anyone on Pandah to offer Halphemos a roll of hymns.
The guard had been friendly enough—as he should be, since Sharina had handed over the skin of wine she'd brought. He nonetheless watched to make sure that Sharina didn't pass the prisoner a file or a lockpick in addition to the parchment scroll. He'd opened the scroll, not to read—though the first ten columns were hymns to the Lady, just as Sharina said—but to make sure there was nothing concealed inside the parchment.
Nodding curtly to the prisoner, Sharina squelched up the three steps to ground level. The guard slammed the door shut behind her and set the pin in the heavy bar.
She'd wash her feet in the sea when their vessel got under way with the evening tide. “Have you sampled the wine?” she asked the guard brightly.
“Not yet, mistress,” the man said. “Let's sit down and be comfortable in my hut.”
The guard didn't have the keys to the prisoners' irons. If most of those held were sailors, there was an obvious risk that crewmates would attack the guard and use any keys he held to release their fellow. The leg irons in particular were so sturdy than any attempt to smash the locks open would be likely to crush the ankle as well.
Cerix had erased the text from the inner spindle of the scroll, creating a palimpsest on which he'd written an incantation in both Old Script and the square modern forms of the letters. Halphemos couldn't read Old Script, but he could copy the symbols onto the bench's slimy surface and speak the syllables as given in their phonetic equivalent.
Cerix wrote with a clean, legible hand even when he was in haste and in pain. Sharina wondered if he'd been a copyist before he became a wizard and a drug-sodden cripple.
The guard's kiosk beside the prison shed had a stool, a table, and a small brazier for heating food or mulling wine, but no bed and very little space. Sharina supposed another man took over, possibly at nightfall, but she hadn't wanted to risk a direct question that might seem suspicious.
The guard offered Sharina the stool and unstoppered the wine. It was a strong vintage from Shengy, laced with resin for travel. Sharina had crumbled a pellet of Cerix's drug into it. “You first,” Sharina said to the unspoken question.
The guard took a long drink, his throat wobbling, then lowered the skin. “Ah!” he said with approval, handing
the wine to Sharina. He frowned and with different emphasis said, “Ah? I don't have mugs, mistress. We could maybe … ?”
He looked doubtfully down the street. The lockup was among the warehouses on the harbor south of the residential parts of the city. There were a number of laden donkeys and human bearers even this late in the evening, but Sharina hadn't seen a tavern or cookshop when she made her way here.
“No, this is fine,” she said, lifting the wooden mouthpiece to her lips. She plugged the opening with the tip of her tongue and pretended to drink as deeply as the guard had.
“What do you care about this fellow in there?” the guard asked as he gratefully retrieved the wineskin. He leaned forward and added conspiratorially, “I hear he tried to murder the king by wizardry!”
“I think it was an accident,” Sharina said calmly. A bat fluttered low around the eaves of a nearby warehouse, then vanished into the night. The sky was still bright, but she doubted that Halphemos could see to read inside the prison anymore. “Anyway, it was my companion who vanished. And I doubt he was really harmed. Just sent away until I can find him again.”
She gave the guard a false smile. In her mind she prayed,
Lady, Mistress of Heaven, be with Cashel. Shepherd, Protector of All Life, protect Cashel as he protected his flocks.
The wineskin gurgled like a hungry man's belly as the guard drank again. He belched in satisfaction before he returned the skin to Sharina.
In the stillness Sharina heard, “ …
esmigaddon maarchama kore …
” The shed's walls were thick, but Halphemos was shouting to force the words out against the inertia of the cosmos.
“Your job seems so exciting to me!” Sharina twittered in a bright voice. She hoped she wasn't overdoing it, but she had to say something quickly to conceal the young
wizard's chanting. “Do you often have traitors to watch in your jail here?”
“Traitors?” the guard repeated in puzzlement. “Oh, you mean like this one, trying to murder the king. No, we don't—I mean, not very often. But we get lots of dangerous sorts here, you're right.”
A rosy glow emanated
through
the bricks of the prison shed. Inside, the wards of the hand and leg irons clinked into alignment.
“You're very brave,” Sharina said. She tried to pass back the wineskin though she hadn't mimed another drink. “I—”
The pin locking the prison door clanged to the ground. The drunk sharing the bench with Halphemos bellowed in terror. The guard leaped to his feet, also shouting. He snatched up his weapon, a club with a spiked iron collar around the end.

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