Queen of Demons (39 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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A squad of the City Guard with polished brass helmets and gorgets trotted from a side street into the triangular plaza twenty paces ahead. The leader carried a spontoon with a broad, filigreed blade as a rank insignia. He called an order. Four of his men spread to the sides, raising their long, knob-headed staves to receive the mob, while the cornicene raised his coiled horn to summon support.
“Down with the queen!” the nomenclator shouted. Garric swept his sword in an arc, pointing to the street branching toward the Customs House.
The squad leader grabbed the cornicene before the man could blow; the staff-bearers looked uncertainly at one another and their commander. Garric, seeing the hesitation, waved his sword in a broad flourish as though he had a signal flag in his hand.
“Down with the queen's lackeys!” he cried, and rode past the Guards. They didn't try to stop him.
“Down with the queen!” the squad leader said as he and his men joined the mob.
The Customs House was a monumental gateway standing where the main north-south road entered the esplanade around the harbor's margin. The structure was a square of red sandstone with a twenty-foot arch on each side. For the most part the inspectors worked on the surrounding pavement, but for paperwork and storage there was a second story served by inside staircases. Swags and pillars of colored marble decorated the walls, and on the crenellated roof stood a gilded bronze statue with a scepter in
one hand and a stalk of rice in the other, symbolizing Valles.
The customs officials wore linen tabards over their tunics. Instead of red and black, the royal colors, these were in shades of orange—as close as dyes made from pollen and red earth could come to the hue of fire.
A grotesquely fat man on top of the gateway shouted an order as he saw Garric approach at the head of the mob. There were a dozen officials on the pavement. They drew the swords they carried but wavered back into the shelter of the building when they appreciated the numbers they were facing. A second mob spilled into the plaza from the slums to the south.
The air before Garric congealed into a gray shape with glowing eyes. The gelding shied with a scream of terror. Garric swung his leg over the saddle and pushed himself away from the animal. He hit the cobblestones hard and might have fallen if Royhas hadn't supported him. He was glad for once that he was wearing boots.
The phantasm drifted forward. Its face was a demon's, and its clawed hands reached toward Garric's eyes.
Garric had seen the phantasms in Tenoctris' scrying mirror, but this was his first direct experience of them. He walked forward with his sword raised.
“It's an illusion!” he said. His voice was a frightened squeal in his own ears—but he kept walking.
The phantasm's jaws opened; its very silence made it the more frightening. From the corner of his eye Garric could see that the other mob had halted before a similar creature.
“It's an illusion!” Liane said in a clear, melodious voice as she advanced at his side.
Even so, Garric couldn't force himself to walk straight through the phantasm. He reached out with his left hand instead.
His skin tingled. For an instant he stood on a barren plain. All around him were the bodies of his friends and
kin, impaled on stakes of rough-hewn cedar. Their dead eyes cursed him.
“Illusion!” Garric shouted. He stumbled forward. He could see again. The phantasm had vanished. Garric ran across the cobblestones with a thousand screaming citizens at his back. The queen's officials threw down their weapons; some knelt begging for mercy, others fled northward up the plaza.
Royhas' guards cut a pair of the queen's men down with quick sword strokes. Stones dropped those running; citizens, some of them wearing expensive clothing, pounded the fallen to death with clubs and their feet.
“We don't have to kill them!” Garric shouted, but he knew no one would listen. The slaughter made him sick to watch, but he'd known when he agreed to the plan that a mob is a beast with an appetite for blood.
He ran under the gateway. “To the queen's house!” he called. The plan was for the mobs to converge on the queen's mansion, but only after they'd swept her minions out of every district of the city. King Carus had recommended that course, so that those involved would be flushed with victory before they reached the place where resistance would be more than will-o'-the-wisps and a handful of thugs.
Garric was hot and already panting. Sweat soaked his armor's padding, and he felt the impact of each stride over the cobblestones. He wondered what the horse was doing—and laughed at the thought, because the muscles of his inner thighs ached from even the short ride he'd had.
There was a scream from above, then an enormous wet impact like nothing Garric had ever heard. He turned. People who'd passed under the monumental gateway looked up, waving their fists and shouting curses.
Garric lifted his helmet with his left hand so that the silvered brim didn't get in his way when he looked up. Men—and a few women—leaned over the ornamental battlements, laughing at those below.
Because the crowd had scattered, Garric could see what
had happened when he lowered his eyes again. Citizens had climbed to the top of the gateway and flung the queen's customs chief to the pavement forty feet below. The impact had crushed the fat man so completely that his clothes were sopping red with blood.
Liane looked at the garbage which had recently been human. Her face had no expression. “To the queen's house!” she cried, trotting up what was now Monument Avenue. Royhas and his guards fell in alongside.
Garric and his fellows were no longer leading the mob. The citizens who'd chased the fleeing officials were well ahead, and another limb of the insurrection had joined three blocks up the broad expanse.
A large crowd had broken into an imposing residence with lions carved in low relief to either side of the front door. Garric glanced at what was going on. A bed burst through a third-floor window casement from the inside, fell, and shattered into splinters of ivory and exotic woods when it hit the stone planter below.
Garric supposed the house was owned by one of the queen's officials. Before long, though, there'd be looting and death without any political excuse, let alone reason. There was nothing to be done about it—except to finish the queen as quickly as possible so that order could be restored.
“Worse things happen in wartime, lad,”
the king's voice murmured; but there was no joy in the words, only grim acceptance of what couldn't be changed.
Statues of statesmen of former days stood on plinths to either side of the avenue. Some were so old that verdigris had eaten holes in the bronze.
Garric remembered scenes his own eyes had never beheld in the Voting Field in the center of Carcosa. Since the day when Comus had imposed a monarchy on the oligarches of ancient Haft, statues and other monuments had filled the plaza. Now it was weeds and rubble. Modern Carcosa hadn't rebuilt the area after pirates and dynasts
sacked the city repeatedly when the Old Kingdom fell.
The queen's mansion was directly ahead. A mob already surrounded it, though the black walls and flame-wrapped windows were unharmed.
Garric looked behind him; he had to turn his whole body, because the cuirass prevented him from twisting to glance over his shoulder the way he normally would have done. Tenoctris looked composed as she sat in her sedan chair. The four bearers moved at a sliding trot that made the vehicle sway but didn't jounce the passenger significantly.
Garric and Liane reached the back of the crowd around the mansion. At a command from Royhas, the guards jogged ahead of Garric with their spears reversed.
“Make way for King Carus!” the nomenclator shouted. His lungs were so powerful that he could actually be heard over the mob's noise. Spearbutts or an armored shoulder moved folk out of the way if they didn't take the hint.
The guards halted just short of the queen's perimeter. Their commander, a stolid veteran named Enger whose short beard was the same iron gray as his eyes, nodded Garric and Liane forward. Tenoctris dismounted to join them a moment later, but Royhas remained with his guards in an armored semicircle behind the three.
The ground cover across the sharp demarcator was the pale yellow of light-starved grass, but the hairlike leaves weren't flattened into blades. The cherry tree nearby was in bloom; the petals were black. A twisted branch beckoned to Garric like a diseased whore.
Tenoctris seated herself on the cushion a bearer slid between her lanky buttocks and the pavement. Another bearer handed Tenoctris the length of pine board they'd carried lashed to the chair's back. She'd already scribed it with a circle inside a six-pointed star.
Thirty feet to their right, a muscular young man who'd shaved the back of his scalp bare stepped across the margin between cobblestones and wizardry. He waved a staff
taken from a City Guard and shouted, “Come on, anybody who's a man!”
Several other fellows with their hair cut like his followed him. After a moment's pause twenty-odd men and a few women plunged after the leaders crying, “Death to the queen!” in loud, drunken voices.
Tenoctris took a bronze stylus from her sleeve. With the pointed end, she began to scratch words in the Old Script around the edge of the circle she'd prepared. The stylus marked the soft wood easily, but it was intended for wax tablets: the other end flared like a fishtail for smoothing over mistakes.
She seemed oblivious of the people running toward the mansion. Everyone else outside the perimeter, Garric and Liane included, watched them in fearful anticipation.
The half-shorn men were members of a street gang. Very possibly they'd worn the queen's colors in the past, but the lure of disorder had caused them to revert to their old ways this morning—and thereby saved their lives, because it was very unlikely that anyone caught wearing orange in public had fared better than had the customs officials.
Their lives were forfeit now, along with those of the ordinary citizens the gang members had drawn across the perimeter with them.
They intruders had lost their way already. From drunken bravado, their demeanor had changed to confusion and fear. They stopped running. Their voices grew thinner, as though they were at a great distance, and they obviously couldn't hear the directions shouted by friends outside the zone of wizardry.
“Can't we … ?” Liane said, looking down at Tenoctris. She caught herself before Garric could hush her.
No, they couldn't disturb Tenoctris in order save a score of people guided by wine rather than sense. Garric and Liane knew the only hope for the insurrection was that it succeed before the queen could marshal her enormous, scattered powers to deal with them, the three of
them.
He, Liane, and Tenoctris were the only present opponents with knowledge enough to be dangerous to the queen's power.
Those who'd entered the garden had drawn into a tight group. A statue that was half-man, half-woman stepped from its base. Its face was perfect but inhumanly cold. It walked toward the interlopers at the measured pace of an officiating priest.
A man flung down his stoneware bottle and threw himself on the ground beside it, kicking like a child having a tantrum. He covered his head with his hands. The remainder of the interlopers bolted away from the androgyne as a group—
With one exception. The husky fellow who'd led the others into the garden now swaggered toward the oncoming statue.
“Kaias,”
Tenoctris murmured.
“Saseri tayam … .”
The bravo's staff had a fist-sized knob on the end of a six-foot shaft, a murderous weapon if used with that intent. He swung it into the androgyne's head with a sharp whock.
The dense wood cracked and a few chips flew away. The staff rebounded, quivering like a lute string. The bravo screamed curses but kept his grip despite the numbing vibration.
The statue came on. Its expression, a faint smile, did not change.
“Daya quayamta alista … ,”
said Tenoctris. A wisp of light spiraled slowly from the center of her circle. It looked like the shaving that rises when an auger bores soft wood.
The group trying to flee the garden was twenty yards from the man they'd left crying behind them. The ground gaped beneath them.
Victims screamed. Those closest to the collapsing edges tried to climb to safety, but the turf crumbled like wet sand when their hands clutched it.
An athletic youth took a running leap. His fringed tunic,
popular among the fashionable elite, fluttered behind him. He'd have cleared the trap except that a cedar tree's root squirmed from the soil to grip his ankle. It flipped him into the cavity with a motion much like that of a man tossing tidbits to his dog.
The earth closed. There was no sign that it ever had opened, nor of the score of humans it had swallowed down.
The bravo with the staff stood his ground, laughing in a cracked, high-pitched voice. He swung again. The knob shattered. He flailed at the androgyne with the shaft, splitting it the long way.

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