Queen of Demons (23 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“I don't much like to travel at night,” Hanno said as
he rowed, now without the devouring effort that had taken them offshore, “but this time it's the choice. At least I'd had my supper before that lot landed on the other side.”
“Thank you,” Sharina said. She wasn't ready to explain what had happened—she wasn't really sure what had happened, what was happening—but Hanno didn't seem the sort of man who required explanations.
The moon had just come out of the sea over the big man's shoulder. Sharina felt the smile that she couldn't really see because of the darkness. He said, “You'll do, missie. You'll surely do.”
 
 
“A forest!” Zahag cried enthusiastically. It was the first emotion besides peevish anger that Cashel had heard in the ape's voice since they'd escaped from the dissolving tower. “A forest at last!”
Zahag charged toward the dank, moss-draped trunks at a bobbling gallop. He looked remarkably clumsy because his forelimbs were so much longer than the back ones. He still covered ground pretty well.
Come to think, peevish anger had been the ape's usual attitude everywhere else Cashel had known him too.
“Have we come home?” Aria said as she twisted against Cashel's chest. Even she sounded hopeful for once. He'd been carrying her in the crook of one arm or the other since midday. It was that or drag her, and it was obvious the girl had been doing her pitiful best to keep up.
“Ooh!” Aria said in disgust as she took in the landscape ahead of them. “Oh, how could you bring me here?”
She started to cry.
“Well, it makes a change from the desert,” Cashel said uneasily. The trouble was, he couldn't convince himself it was a change for the better.
“Oh, what a change from the rocks that were wearing my knuckles bloody!” Zahag called as he followed the
trail out of sight. “And say, that's a lizard! That'll make a change from berries and more berries!”
“Can you walk now?” Cashel said, setting Aria back on her feet. “The going ought to be a little easier, and we'll be out of the sun.”
The sun had been an unpleasant factor every day since they arrived in this place, but Cashel wasn't sure he wouldn't miss the glare before long. The light seemed hostile, but it didn't hide anything. This forest had a greasy, behind-your-back look to it, much like Cashel's uncle Katchin in Barca's Hamlet.
He grinned. The forest didn't have Katchin's windy pride, though. Maybe things were getting better after all.
“I wish I could die,” Aria muttered, but she followed under her own power when Cashel started down the trail.
The trees weren't giants. They ran to ten or a dozen paces—double paces from left heel to left heel—in height, about as tall as you could expect for anything growing in boggy ground.
Cashel couldn't understand why the soil was so wet. They'd gone from grit and spiky bushes to trees draped in moss that dripped on the sopping ground. His footsteps squelched and the line of prints gleamed behind him like so many little ponds.
He tossed his straw umbrella away. It clung to a branch, wrapped in tendrils of moss. The dry grass began to soak through.
Cashel felt obscurely bothered. He tugged the umbrella out of the soggy veil and carried it back to the edge of the forest, where he threw it onto dry sand. If a breeze returned it to the bog, that was none of his doing.
“What on
earth
did you just do?” Aria'said.
“Well, the umbrella did a pretty good job for me the past few days,” Cashel said. “I didn't figure it deserved me to leave it here.”
He resumed walking down the trail at his easy, shepherd's pace. He carried his staff at a slant across his chest, one hand above and the other below the balance.
He could feel the girl staring at him in amazement. Well, let her. Nothing Cashel had seen in his life had caused him to lose his belief in justice. Deep in his heart was the thought that a fellow who treated
things
badly was likely to be treated as a thing himself one day; and treated badly.
“Zahag, are you up there?” he called.
“What are you waiting for?” the ape replied. His voice sounded faint. The chirrups of unseen frogs and insects smothered ordinary speech over even modest distances.
The desert had been deathly still, except once and a while during the night when something howled in the distance. That sound had been pretty deathly too.
Branches twisted and forked. It was hard to tell which leaves belonged to a tree and which were on a vine or some lesser plant growing in a crotch.
The moss covered everything. Cashel used the staff to push through it, but even so dank strands brushed his shoulders.
“I don't like this place,” Aria said in a small voice. It was an honest statement for a change, not an accusation. She must be really scared.
“Just stay close and you'll be fine,” Cashel said.
Saying that made him feel so much better that he started to grin. “You'll be all right, Princess,” he said. “This is what I do, you see. I'm a shepherd.”
There was a
plop!
back the way they'd come. It sounded too loud to have been a drip hitting the ground, but who knew? Maybe a broad leaf had turned inside out and spilled a firkin of water all at once.
Zahag shrieked. Something crashed and splashed through the forest toward Cashel and the girl. Cashel slid his hands a span outward and lowered the staff slightly to a guard position.
Zahag threw himself at Cashel's feet and cried, “I didn't see anything! I didn't see anything!” Aria screamed too as she hugged Cashel from behind. Duzi! Didn't either of them have any sense?
The forest had grown silent. The normal volume of squeaks and chirping resumed. Nothing had pursued the ape.
“I think we better go on,” Cashel said. Aria had already taken her hands away; Zahag twisted his head to look back the way he'd come. “I'd sooner be someplace else before we lose the last of the light.”
They started on. It had been dark enough when they entered the forest. Cashel figured when the sun went down they'd might as well be deep in a cave. Aria walked right behind him, and Zahag stayed awkwardly close to his left side.
Cashel didn't suppose it was worth asking the ape what had frightened him. Out of sight, out of mind was pretty much Zahag's whole life. Whatever he'd seen or thought he saw in the dripping moss was nothing he'd be willing to call back to memory.
“I see things glowing,” Aria said. “Out—there.”
“Right,” said Cashel, trying to sound hearty. Duzi knew he'd spent enough nights out in thunderstorms talking to sheep. Otherwise they might panic and smother themselves by piling up in a corner of the fold. “Foxfire, just like at home. I think we can keep on going a ways by it lighting the trail.”
They were going to walk until Cashel dropped under the weight of both his companions if it came to that. There was no way he was going to suggest they bed down anywhere he'd seen since they entered the forest.
The path had a gray sheen. Tree trunks stood as greenish or yellowish ghosts across which other almost-colors wound themselves. It was hard to judge distances with nothing but fuzzy glows to go by. The moss was the only thing in this place that didn't seem to have its own light. Cashel couldn't keep it from dragging across him now.
Aria was crying softly. Cashel couldn't blame her. At least he didn't have to look back as he'd been doing during daylight to make sure she was still with him.
Trees rustled. At first Cashel thought that something—
or perhaps many lesser somethings—was above him, but when he looked up he could watch bare branches writhe against the unfamiliar stars. During daylight he hadn't been able to see the sky through the canopy of leaves.
Aria cried louder.
“Look!” said Zahag, tugging the hem of Cashel's tunic. He spoke with a desperate need to believe, a tone far removed from that of real belief. “Up ahead there—it's a
real
light. We're safe now, we just have to get to the light!”
“Well, we'll see when we get there,” Cashel said quietly, scanning both sides of the trail as they ambled onward. He thought he'd seen the winking flames of a fire through the trees also, but there was too much strange in this forest for him to take anything for granted.
Cashel grinned. He was walking along with a talking monkey and a princess, but he wasn't sure the light he saw ahead of him was a real fire. People back in Barca's Hamlet would think he was crazy.
He didn't let the smile build to a chuckle. Aria and Zahag would think he'd gone crazy too if he started laughing now.
The branches whispered above them. A wave of undulating phosphorescence had paralleled their track almost since the sun went down. Cashel couldn't be sure how far out in the night it was, but it seemed to be drifting closer.
He was probably seeing a layer of marsh gas finding its level in the air. Nothing to worry about.
“It is a fire!” Aria said. “Oh, I can see it now!”
In a choked voice she added, “Oh, please, Mistress God, may it be a fire!”
They'd reached a clearing. Before them stood a tower of honest, lichen-stained blocks of stone—not pink confectionery that dissolved if somebody stumbled down the stairs.
And there was a fire as well, a beacon of wood burning in an iron basket lifted on a spike above the tower. Its flaring light silhouetted figures manning the battlements.
“Hello the house!” Cashel said as he stepped beyond the last clinging branches. Should he have said “tower” instead of “house”? He was so glad to see human habitation that he'd called as if he'd stumbled onto a farmhouse after being benighted.
“Go away, monsters!” a voice shrilled. “Or we'll kill you!”
The beacon dribbled a line of sparks; it sank to a throb of orange and rose. The fire had nearly consumed itself. The wood you found in this forest would be either too wet to burn or rotted into punk that didn't give a good bed of coals.
Cashel stepped forward. “We're not monsters!” he called. He held his staff upright at his side so that it didn't look threatening—not that anybody could make out details from the top of the tower. “We need a place to sleep for the night, that's all.”
And maybe an explanation of where this place was. That would be nice.
“Go away!” the voice repeated.
Cashel heard a clicking sound from the battlements. A gear, he thought.
A ratchet and pawl
—
Somebody using a windlass to crank a powerful crossbow!
“Hey!” he bellowed, striding forward. He didn't pause to think about what he was doing. “You stop these silly games or I'll pull this place down around your ears. By the
Shepherd
I will!”
He slammed the butt of his quarterstaff on the ground before him. The staff flared blue fire, bathing Cashel in a moment of cold brilliance. Hairs prickled all over his body.
“He's a man!” somebody in the tower cried hurriedly. “What's a man doing out there?”
“Let me and my friends in right now,” Cashel said, vaguely embarrassed at both his anger and the flash he'd created. The light had surprised him, but at least the folks
in the tower had seen that he wasn't any monster. “We just want a place to sleep.”
The beacon gave a last gulp and died. The bones of light that remained were scarcely enough to display the bars of the cage, let alone anyone beyond it.
“We're putting down the ladder,” the first voice called. “Don't waste any time, though. They'll attack any moment now.”
Something rustled and clacked down the wall of the tower. Cashel judged its location by starlight, then reached out. It was a ladder with rope stringers and wooden battens for steps.
“Come on!” he called over his shoulder in what he hoped was a carrying whisper. He hadn't wanted his companions close to him if somebody started shooting arrows, but he didn't want them left behind either.
He could well believe there were monsters in this forest, that was a fact.
Zahag scrambled past and grabbed the ladder; Cashel caught his hairy arm and held him back. The ape screeched with frustration but didn't quite try to bite.
“Can you make it by yourself, Princess?” Cashel asked. Instead of answering, Aria snatched the ladder and began climbing strongly. She quickly faded to a blur of pale fabric against the stone.
Cashel released the ape. “And don't try to climb over her!” he warned.
Though at the rate Aria was going up, that wasn't the danger Cashel had feared it would be. Her tower's steep steps had given her a lot of exercise. They hadn't done anything for her politeness, but that was probably true of a lot of princesses.

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