Queen of Demons (15 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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The crossbar crawled sideways. Nothing touched it except a tremble of magenta light. It slipped out of its staples and fell.
The door panel began to open. The guard raised his club and faced the door, though his face was twisted in a rictus of fear. Sharina picked up the stool by one leg and stepped behind the man, ready to club him senseless before he could strike Halphemos.
A figure of red light shambled up from the cell. It had the shape of the ape Zahag, but it was as large as an ox. Through the glowing semblance Sharina could see the jail and Halphemos himself. The wizard chanted, gesturing with the closed scroll in place of a proper wand.
The guard gave a great bawl of fear. He tried to run but his feet tangled and he toppled backward, losing his club.
The figure of light expanded like a smoke ring thrown out when a knot cracks in a fire. Sharina stood for an instant in a rosy ambience which then vanished.
Halphemos climbed the steps, wobbling with exertion. He tried to slide the scroll within the neckline of his tunic
but he missed his intent; Sharina snatched the falling parchment with one hand and supported Halphemos with the other. It was reflex: a book was too valuable a thing to lose, even though as a tool it had already fulfilled its purpose.
“Quickly!” she said; half-guiding, half-pulling the exhausted wizard in the direction of Dock Street. Cerix had booked passage on a ship leaving for Erdin. There was nothing important about the destination, only that the vessel was leaving on the evening tide.
Sharina glanced over her shoulder as they turned the corner. The guard still lay on the ground, supporting his torso with his arms. He stared at the open prison door and bleated wordlessly.
 
 
The mist over the lagoon reminded Garric of those he'd seen rise on a thousand still mornings from swales in the meadows of the borough; but this was changeless. The sun would never brighten to burn off the haze, nor would a breeze come in from the sea to tear it to rags and wisps.
Wraithlike figures stood on floats made of bundled reeds to fish in the lagoon. Even Garric's keen eyes found it hard to tell whether individuals were human or Ersa if they were more than a hundred yards away. The Gulf had fixed limits, but at least for now there was room for both races to live without conflict.
“Maybe it's this place,” Liane said quietly. Either she'd understood the thought behind Garric's glance and grim expression, or the same thing had occurred to her. “This green light makes me feel cold all the way to my bones. When we get people back to the real world, then they'll be …”
Garric looked at her, wondering what word Liane would settle on.
Better? Happier? Decent?
Instead she grinned sadly. “Well, we can hope they will,” she said, unable to complete the thought any better than Garric could have.
“The Gulf was created for a group of Ersa by one of their own kind,” Tenoctris said. She looked at the roofless shanties of the human community with the same dispassionate interest that she showed for the forest's unique vegetation. “It should suit them better than it does humans, but I'm not sure it suits them perfectly either. The older I get—and at this point that's over a thousand years—”
She grinned. Liane hugged her.
“The older I get,” Tenoctris resumed, “the more convinced I become that no wizard who had understanding equal to his power would do anything through wizardry. That was probably true of the Ersa who created this place, too.”
Folk sitting in front of their shelters turned their faces away as Garric walked by with his companions, but they watched covertly from behind. Garric waved to a pair of women crushing roots in a mortar cut from a large tree trunk. They bent their heads and pounded faster, losing their previous rhythm and fouling each other's pestle strokes.
“How about yourself?” Garric asked. “You haven't made things worse. Not that I've seen.”
Tenoctris laughed. “While I don't claim complete understanding,” she said, “my powers as a wizard are so trivial by comparison to what I know that I suppose I'm a special case. I hope I am, at any rate.”
They were nearing Rodoard's compound. The gate was closed, but a messenger had run ahead when Garric and his companions came in sight of the community.
The dwellings to either side of Rodoard's own belonged to his henchmen, toughs who'd arrived recently and had been allowed to live. They were alert, standing in their doorways with their weapons in hand. They met Garric's eyes but glared back in stony silence to his smiles.
Infants who'd earlier been playing in the mud peered now through the interstices of their woven shelters. Their
mothers watched also, occasionally shadowing the palings as they moved.
When Garric's hand closed on his sword hilt, he felt King Carus swell in his mind until there were two of them, Garric and his ancestor, filling the same skin. He drew the blade with the liquid
sring!
of good steel flexing minutely. Othelm, the former sailor who'd have tried to take the sword on the beach if he dared, raised his huge club but jumped back.
Garric struck the gong with his pommel. The bronze bonged a deep bass note about which the swordblade whispered a descant.
“I have good news, Rodoard!” Garric called to the king's closed gate. “We can escape from here after all!”
He turned and waved to the community at large. The signal was bringing folk from their shelters and the nearby forest. Those born in the Gulf wouldn't look directly at the three newcomers, but they moved closer in a process as gradual as that of syrup soaking into coarse cloth.
Garric struck the gong a second time. “Come on out!” he said, knowing that his voice could be no more than a modulation of the metallic clangor.
One leaf of the gate jerked inward. Rodoard stood in the opening wearing helmet, breastplate, and his sword. He held the demi-guisarme at the butt and balance of its short shaft.
Rodoard's face was bleak with fury.
Garric stepped back. Rodoard swung his weapon in a high arc, past Garric rather than at him. The heavy blade sheared the crossbar as well as the cords holding the gong to it. The disk spun away and splashed to the ground. Mud quickly choked the quivering bronze to silence.
“I let you live, boy,” the king said in an expressionless voice, “because I thought you might be useful. Maybe I was wrong, do you think?”
Colored smoke began to rise from the compound. Lunifra hadn't appeared, but Garric heard her voice from behind the palings as a chanting rhythm. At each syllable
the smoke swelled, then compressed, as though it were the membrane of a beaten drum.
“This is good news, Your Majesty,” Garric said. “My friend Tenoctris has found the key that opens the door out of the Gulf. The Ersa will let us use it to return to the waking world. All of us!”
Garric had known there was risk in taking a strong line with Rodoard, but the depth of the king's anger was unexpected. Still, if he'd gone to Rodoard pleadingly, Rodoard would have bullied him instead of listening to his proposal. By arriving with a sword in his hand, Garric forced Rodoard to treat him as an equal.
“So,” said Rodoard, so close to Garric that either of them could reach out and pull the other's nose. “You've been dealing with the Ersa, have you? What did you offer the animals, Garric or-Reise?”
People were easing closer. The Gulf-born folk kept to the back so that they could scamper away if fighting started. Rodoard's henchmen were uncomfortably near. A part of Garric's mind remembered whirling, slashing melees in which the King of the Isles had cut his way out of similar presses, but the King of the Isles had never had to guard a girl and an old woman … .
Garric threw his head back and laughed. He couldn't save Liane and Tenoctris from so large a crowd of enemies. Therefore he wouldn't try: he'd strike off Rodoard's head and then hew his way into the mob of brutes and thugs until they brought him down.
You did what you could. Leaving fewer of such folk in the world was a benefit to everyone else.
Garric lowered his sword crosswise and pinched the tip of the blade between his left thumb and forefinger in order to look a little less threatening—without sheathing the weapon. His laughter had surprised Rodoard.
“All I offered the Ersa was the chance to be shut of us,” Garric said, pitching his voice to be heard to the back of the crowd. “What I offer you—”
He turned to sweep the folk behind him with his eyes.
“All of you!” he cried. “All of us! Is the chance to see the sun again, the chance to feel a breeze and to be free! As nobody in this green underworld can ever be free.”
Tenoctris had knelt and was drawing in the mud with her left index finger. She held a pulpy twig for a wand.
Liane stood between Tenoctris and the crowd. Her arms were crossed before her, the hands within the opposite sleeves. Three of Rodoard's henchmen were almost—but not quite—so close they touched her.
“So,” said Rodoard. His voice was high-pitched for so big a man. He sounded peevish. Unlike Garric, he hadn't called sheep across the rolling dales and learned the trick of projecting his words. “Othelm, are you in a hurry to go back to Erdin? And Bassis? Do you suppose they've forgotten about you in Valles? Not to mention what you've done here!”
Fishermen whom the gong had called from the lagoon poled their floats up on the muddy shore. In some of the wicker creels flopped bottom-dwelling fish with armored heads. The men used wooden gigs with springy jaws that clamped to either side of their target rather than spitting it. With little metal and no stone to work with, these were better tools than true spears would be.
“How about the rest of you?” Rodoard cried. He'd regained his good humor, but there was a layer of enormous menace beneath his shouted banter. “Josfred, do you want to go to a place where the sun will burn the hide off you and you'll freeze in the winter—if you live that long?”
Tenoctris whispered as her wand flickered over the circle of power she'd drawn. To anyone else, even those who, like Garric and Liane, could read the Old Script, the symbols were no more than wormtracks in the mud.
“I've made you kings of the Ersa who enslaved you!” Rodoard said. “I've put your feet on their beast necks! Do you want—”
A child screamed inside the compound, a knife of sound that cut through his harangue. Rodoard didn't look
around, though his face set in a scowl of anger at the interruption.
“Do you want—” he repeated.
The gate behind Rodoard was still open. A child of three or four years ran out, streaming blood from wounds in throat and abdomen. The child collided with Rodoard's legs and flopped onto the ground, thrashing as its heart pumped its body completely dry. Lunifra stood in the doorway, bathed in dark blood that had spurted from the child's carotid arteries.
Lunifra was naked. She held a knife of volcanic glass, and her smile was the gate to the Underworld. Because of the way the child had been mutilated, Garric couldn't tell which sex it had been.
Garric cut at Rodoard's ankles. The king leapt back as he tried to clear his demi-guisarme, but his feet tangled with the child's corpse. His mouth opened in a shout of disbelief as Garric's blade crunched through with the sureness of a hand used to jointing roasts for the inn's kitchen.
The cold fury that strengthened Garric's stroke would have taken the edge through Rodoard's thighbone as certainly as it cut the ankles' cartilage.
This
pair would kill no more children for their blood magic!
Othelm squealed, clasping both hands over the wound beneath his ribs. Liane flicked her bloody dagger toward the face of the other thug trying to grapple with her. He dodged the jab. Garric's blade lifted the thug's scalp and a disk of his skull beside.
The palisade sank into a mass of writhing fibers. The wood formed into a serpent three feet in diameter and as long as the stockade had been. Lunifra laughed hysterically. The wooden tail to Garric's left squirmed. The other end rose from the ground, gaping like a lamprey's circular mouth.
The crowd, Rodoard's henchmen as well as the Gulf-born folk, scrambled back in horror. Garric raised his sword, using the extra length of his hilt to add the strength of both arms to a cut that he knew would be useless.
The jaws of splintered wood engulfed Lunifra, then flexed closed. Because the jagged teeth were rotating, they flung her right and left feet in opposite directions. She screamed briefly.
Tenoctris collapsed from the effort of her incantation. Garric scooped her up in his left hand, in his haste holding Tenoctris more like a swatch of wet drapery than a cherished friend. All the community's residents were running. The thing of wood and wizardry writhed like an earthworm on hot stone.
“This way!” Liane said, pointing toward the lagoon. A coil of the wooden serpent swept toward her mindlessly. She leaped it with no more hesitation than a child playing a game.

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