Queen of Demons (79 page)

Read Queen of Demons Online

Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
13.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Garric is going to give thanks at the temple just down the road,” Cashel said. “I know you don't …”
He turned his head. He liked Tenoctris a lot, so he didn't want to say anything that he'd been raised to think was an insult.
“You don't talk much about the Gods,” Cashel mumbled. “But I thought maybe you'd like to come. I know Garric would like you there.”
Tenoctris got up from her stool and winced. “I've been sitting too long, that's clear,” she said.
A ceramic mug and a wide-mouthed jar sat on the table beside her. After draining the mug, Tenoctris dipped a second draft and emptied it almost as greedily.
“I should at least remember to drink when I'm working,” she said as she set the mug down.
Her face sobered. She walked around the table to put her hand on Cashel's. “I've seen various powers, Cashel,” she said. “I've never seen the Gods. But neither have I ever believed that because I don't see something, it doesn't exist.”
“Well, I'm not a priest,” Cashel said, still looking at the ground.
“We have a great deal to be thankful for, and I'd regret not showing my appreciation to any power which had helped,” the old wizard said decisively. “I'll get ready at once.”
Tenoctris grinned. “That is, if I can find my maid. I chose the woman because she doesn't seem disturbed by my work.”
She nodded to the game board. Cashel had carried it with great care from the queen's mansion, but the pieces showed no inclination to slide on the slick tourmaline surface. He wondered if they'd have fallen off even if he'd turned the board upside down.
“That seems to be the woman's only virtue, however,” Tenoctris went on. “Fortunately I don't put many demands on her.”
Birds scratched and chattered on the shelter's roof. Reconstruction plans hadn't gotten to this part of the compound yet. That was another of the reasons Tenoctris had picked it to live in.
Cashel was more comfortable here too. Flowers were all well and good; he
liked
them. But it didn't seem right to grow flowers on a scale larger than any barley field in the borough.
Tenoctris was still staring at the game board. It had caught her again when she glanced in its direction.
“The queen used the board for prediction,” Tenoctris said. “I've tried to count the number of pieces, but I can't. The alignments seem to change every time I blink or look away. Several hundred, certainly.”
Her index finger dipped toward a counter with a bubbled surface. It had melted onto the square where it rested. “I wonder if the queen realized that she too was a pawn?”
Cashel shrugged. The board had appeared in the queen's private quarters at some time after he and Tenoctris first explored the mansion. Somebody could have
evaded the handful of guards to slip the object into the empty room, but Cashel couldn't imagine why anyone would have wanted to do that.
“I think we ought to get moving, Tenoctris,” Cashel said apologetically. He should, at least. He wanted to listen to people shout the praises of Garric and Sharina, his friends.
“Yes, of course,” Tenoctris said. She pinched a bit of her sleeve and looked at it critically. “Perhaps just a dress tunic over this one rather than a complete ensem—”
She stopped speaking and locked her attention back on the board. Cashel had seen it too, in the corner of his eye: not movement, because none of the counters had moved, but
change
.
Cashel had a good eye for physical relationships. He'd often scanned a woodline or a pasture full of sheep, noticing at once if something wasn't in the place where he expected to find it.
“That piece wasn't there before,” he said, extending his finger to point.
“Don't touch it, Cashel!” Tenoctris said.
“No ma'am,” he replied. “I wasn't going to.”
The counter was a bead of black glass, maybe obsidian. It seemed to shimmer. Cashel cocked his head to look at it from the side. At one angle, the smooth surface flared into dazzling iridescence.
Cashel stepped back, putting both hands on his quarterstaff. “What's it mean, Tenoctris?” he asked.
“I don't know,” she said. “This board is a work of great power, but I'm not sure that it's really as informative as the queen probably thought it was. Certainly it didn't help her very much in the end.”
The grin she gave Cashel looked a little forced. “Come, help me rummage through the clothespresses that Liane has kindly showered me with and see if we can find something suitable to wear.”
She stepped briskly toward her living quarters. Cashel
glanced again at the wickedly gleaming counter. He shrugged, smiled, and followed Tenoctris.
 
 
The drums at the head of the procession beat a tattoo, setting the pace for the company of the royal army marching directly behind the band. At every tenth step the trumpets blared as well. The sound never failed to startle Garric but his mount, a big roan gelding, merely flicked its ears at the brassy din.
“A proper warhorse you've got here, lad,”
whispered King Carus.
“We'll have other use for him shortly, if I'm any judge.”
Gripping a horse with blistered legs was savagely uncomfortable. He tried not to wince at each measured step.
“King Garric!” cried the crowd lining both sides of the street and looking down from the roofs of buildings on the route. “Long live King Garric!”
The highest officials of the government walked before him. The former conspirators, now the chiefs of the Prince's Council, wore their court robes. As a mark of respect they were on foot rather than mounted or in litters.
Garric's friends walked with them. Tenoctris had a robe of splendid silk brocade. She seemed cheerfully able to keep the slow pace, but Cashel was on one side of her and Sharina on the other. They'd make sure Tenoctris was all right, though Garric hated to see her walking.
“It isn't right for any of them to have to walk!” he muttered.
Carus' memories of other processions in a score of other cities cascaded through his mind. Twice Garric recognized a building: a ruin from the Carcosa of his day, and a block of Valles where the present structures rose from the massive foundations of the Old Kingdom.
The cheering crowds were interchangeable.
“King Garric! Long live King Garric!”
“It's part of your duty,”
whispered King Carus. His visage, a shadow in his descendant's mind, was grim in
a way that it never was during battle and slashing danger.
“Do it for the same reason you sleep in the rain and listen to arguments in inheritance cases that are so complicated your friend Ilna couldn't find the truth in them. Do it because it's your duty.”
Attaper shouted an order. The detachment of Blood Eagles marching at the end of the procession clashed their spears against their shield bosses and bellowed, “Hail Garric! Hail Garric!”
“But never,”
the ancient king added in a tone as harsh as an eagle's scream,
“let yourself start to like it!”
T
he storm had passed, but the gray sea still churned and a stiff breeze lifted streamers of froth. Gulls riding the waves had their heads tucked tight against their breasts.
A wizard stood in the air, rising and falling with the surge but never touched by the water. He chanted with his arms extended before him. At each syllable, purple lightning crackled from the fingers of one hand to the other.
The sea beneath the wizard humped as though with a slow swell. Instead of settling again, it continued to rise. Gulls lifted in squawking terror, their wings beating heavily for altitude.
An ammonite the size of a small island rose to the surface, its scores of tentacles spreading before it in a vast carpet. From most angles the coiled shell was black, but the touch of the setting sun licked an unearthly radiance from the wet nacre.
The wizard stood on the back of the monster he had called to him. He raised his head, and the heavens echoed with his laughter.
The readers who identify Celondre with Horace are correct; the translation is my own. My Aldebrand is not Macrobius but rather a less-able analogue of him. Macrobius'
Saturnalia
has given me many hours of pleasure and puzzlement. I was trained in history but my temperament is that of an antiquarian, a very different thing. Fiction is a better world for me than the snake pits of Academe could ever be.
As before, the general religion of the Isles is based on that of Sumer.
The words of power,
voces mysticae
, used by wizards in this volume are from binding spells of classical times. They are not part of my religion, but they
were
an aspect of the religious belief of millions of people who were just as intelligent as you and I are. Personally, I didn't care to pronounce the
voces mysticae
when I was working on the book.
The Dragon Lord
Time Safari
From the Heart of Darkness
Skyripper
The Forlorn Hope
Birds of Prey
Cross the Stars
Killer
(with Karl Edward Wagner)
Fortress
Bridgehead
The Jungle
The Square Deal
The Voyage
Tyrannosaur
Patriots
 
LORD OF THE ISLES
Lord of the Isles
Queen of Demons
Servant of the Dragon
Mistress of the Catacombs
Goddess of the Ice Realm
Master of the Cauldron
The Fortress of Glass
The Mirror of Worlds
“The heroes are exceptionally well written, especially the strong-willed Ilna and the unflinching Cashel—either one of these characters could stand alone to support a book. The secondary characters also grow and change, unusual in fantasy literature. The plot moves forward at a deliberate pace, gradually exploring the people and their land … . A solid sequel.”
—
Starlog
 
“From the start, Drake's characters took on a life of their own, and the magic system and culture are interestingly different, drawn from the religion of Sumer and other aspects of the classical world. The series' distinctive qualities are even more apparent in this second volume … . The strong color and characters keep this consistently entertaining.”
—
Locus
 
“The sequel to
Lord of the Isles
showcases Drake's talent for epic fantasy. Imaginative world building and attention to magical details make this a good choice.”
—
Library Journal
 
Praise for
Lord of the Isles
 
“A good read, with some excellent details of daily life … and a strong sense of place, history, and destiny.”
—
Locus
 
“The epic has everything that serious fantasy readers demand—heroic action, mysterious magical forces, strange beasts, ghosts, sorcerers, and good writing.”
—
Tampa Tribune & Times
 
“True brilliance is as rare as a perfect diamond or a supernova.
Lord of the Isles
is truly brilliant. We are in at the birth of a classic. One of those exceptional books you will want to have bound in leather and pass on to your grandchildren. There is a lot of fantasy out there, but there is only one
Lord of the Isles.”
—Morgan Llywelyn
Available now …
the third book in the epic saga of
The Lord of the Isles
T
he deeps trembled, shaking a belfry which hadn't moved for a thousand years. Eels with glassy flesh and huge, staring eyes twisted, touched by fear of the power focused on the sunken island. Cold light pulsed across their slender bodies.
A bell rang, sending its note over the sunken city. It had been cast from the bronze rams of warships captured by the first Duke of Yole. A tripod fish lifted its long pelvic fins from the bottom and swam off with stiff sweeps of its tail.
Ammonites, the Great Ones of the Deep, swam slowly toward the sound. They had tentacles like cuttlefish and shells coiled like rams' horns. The largest of them were the size of a ship.
The powers supporting the cosmos shifted, sending shudders through a city which nothing had touched for a millennium. The bell rang a furious tocsin over Yole.
The island was rising.
The Great Ones' tentacles waved like forests of serpents in time with words agitating the sea. In daylight their curled shells would shimmer with all the colors of the sun. Here the only light was the distant shimmer of a viperfish flashing in terror as it fled.
The dead lay in the streets, sprawled as they had fallen. Over them were scattered roof tiles and the rubble of walls which collapsed as the city sank. Onrushing water had choked their screams, and their outstretched arms clutched for a salvation which had eluded them.
The bodies had not decayed: these cold depths were as hostile to the minute agents of corruption as they were to
humans. Some corpses had been savaged by great-fanged seawolves which had swept into the city on the crest of the engulfing wave; other victims had been pulled into the beaks of the Great Ones and there devoured. For the most part, though, the corpses were whole except where sluggish, long-legged crabs had picked at them.
Tides of light touched the drowned buildings and gave them color. Faint tinges of blue brightened as the island rose. At last even the rooftiles regained their ruddy tinge.
The Great Ones swam slowly upward, accompanying Yole on its return. The movements of their tentacles twisted the cosmos.
The belfry of the Duke's palace, the highest edifice in Yole, broke surface. Water cascaded from stones darkened by the slime which crawled along the sea's deepest trenches.
Moments later the Great Ones surfaced, their shells a shimmering iridescence in the dawnlight. They swam slowly outward so as not to be trapped by the rising land. The S-shaped pupils of their eyes stared unwinking at the circle of wizards who stood in the air above the rising city.
Three of the wizards wore black robes with high-peaked cowls over their heads. Their faces and bare hands were blackened with a pigment of soot and tallow. Only their teeth showed white as they chanted words of power:
“Lemos agrule euros …”
Three wizards were in robes of bleached wool, white in shadow and a mixture of rose-pink and magenta where the low sun colored the fabric. They had smeared their skin with white lead so that their eyes were dark pits in the ghastly pallor of their faces.
“Ptolos xenos gaiea
…” the wizards chanted.
The earth rumbled. Torrents thundered from doorways and windows of Yole, spilling in echoing gouts along the broad steets that led to the harbor. Corpses flopped and twisted in the foaming water. Each syllable could be heard
over the chaos, though the words came from human throats.
The wizards' leader was black on his left side, white on the right. He chanted the words of power which his fellows echoed, syllable by syllable. From the brazier standing before him, strands of black smoke and white smoke rose, interweaving but remaining discrete.
“Kata pheinra thenai …”
Facing the leader was a mummified figure whose head the wizards had unbandaged. The mummy's sere brown skin bore the pattern of tiny scales, and the dried lips were thin and reptilian. Its tongue, shrunken to a forked string, flickered as the figure chanted. Words of power came from its dead throat.
The belfry continued to shudder, but the bell's voice was lost in the greater cataclysm. Sea birds wheeled in the air, summoned from afar as the sea thundered away from the newly risen land.
“Kata, cheiro, iofide …
” chanted the wizards.
The ghost of a pierced screen hung in the air beyond the wizards, a filigree of stone that wavered in and out of focus. The screen's reality was that of another time and place, but the incantation had drawn it partway with the wizards.
The soil of Yole touched the wizards' feet. The island gave a further convulsive shudder, then ceased to rise. Waves, shaken away by Yole's reappearance, returned to slap its shore in a fury that slowly beat itself quiescent.
In the harbor the Great Ones floated. Their tentacles waved in a ghastly parody of a dance.
Gulls and frigate birds dived and rose again in shrieking delight. Yole's rise had swept creatures of the deep to the surface faster than their bodies could respond to the changes in pressure. Birds carried away the ruptured carcasses in their beaks.
The six lesser wizards collapsed on the dripping cobblestones of a plaza, gasping in exhaustion from the weight of the spell they had executed. Their leader raised
his arms high and shouted,
“Theeto worshe acheleou!”
Momentary silence smothered the world, stilling the waves and even the screams of the gulls. Sunlight winked on the armor of soldiers and the jewelry of ladies who had arrayed themselves in their finest, not knowing that they were dressing for their own deaths. A child's hand still clutched an ivory rattle; it too gleamed in the sun.
The leading wizard remained standing. His mad peals of laughter rang across the dead city.
The mummy stood also, motionless now and silent. Its sunken eyes were on the wizard, and its reptilian features were twisted into a mask of fury.
 
 
Garric's body continued sleeping on the couch in the conference room. His mind got up from it and strolled out of the building. He didn't have any control over his movements, though that didn't concern him at the moment. He supposed he was dreaming.
Garric's legs swung in their usual long stride, but he was moving faster than a walking man and not travelling through space alone. He recognized all the places he passed, but many were in Barca's Hamlet, not Valles, and some were from out of the waking world.
The people Garric met were shadows, but sometimes they spoke to him and he replied. He couldn't hear the exchanges, even the words that came from his own lips.
He was alone for the first time since his father had given him a coronation medal of King Carus. When Garric hung that ancient gold disk against his chest, he and Carus had begun to share an existence closer than twins, closer than spouses. But now—
Garric felt for the medallion. It lay back with his sleeping self. He straightened his shoulders and let the dream carry him where it would.
He reached a bridge and started across. Behind him was Valles; beyond … he couldn't be sure. Sometimes Garric saw shining walls; other glimpses were of ruins which
might once have been the same buildings. The structure underfoot felt more solid than stone, though to Garric's eyes he was walking on a tracery of blue light, a fairy glow without substance.
Garric reached the far end of the bridge. It was daylight here, though it had been early dusk in Valles when he left his couch. Before him was a city which at the time of its glory must have been magnificent; it was breathtaking even now. He strode toward it.
Modern Valles might be larger; Carcosa in the days of King Carus and the Old Kingdom was far greater yet. In the richness of its fittings, though, nothing Garric knew from his own day or the past could compare with what this place must once have been.
He was walking up an esplanade paved with slabs of red granite, each as wide as Garric was tall and twice as long. The labor of cutting and smoothing such hard stone made him blink.
The blocks were cocked and broken, by time and the roots of trees crawling from the median plantings. The surface should have been as hard to walk on as a seascape frozen in the middle of a lashing storm. In this dream existence, the footing didn't hinder Garric.
Pedestrian porticos flanked the roadway. Some of the arches had collapsed. The core was fitted stones rather than the concrete and rubble of similar constructions in ancient Carcosa.
The buildings to either side were stone also, but originally metal had covered them. Some had worn tin, decayed now to powdery tendrils trailing from the cracks between close-fitting blocks. Others had been clad in sheets of copper and bronze whose blue-green revenants still stained the walls.
Garric frowned. He'd heard of this place, but as a myth of the final days before the fall of the Old Kingdom, a fragment from a discourse of the philosopher Andron, captured in a quirky anonymous compendium entitled
The Dress of All Peoples in All Times.
He couldn't remember
the exact words or the claimed location, but he recalled the description of residents wearing striped clothing which reflected variously according to the color of the mirroring walls they passed beside.
A dream of a myth?
These
ruins had a solid reality.
He walked toward the vast building at the end of the esplanade. The three stages of its façade were supported by pillars of equal height, but those of the middle level were more slender than the massive columns beneath them, while delicate pairs of banded travertine chosen for appearance rather than strength formed the uppermost range. The wooden casements and shutters of the upper-story windows had rotted to dust.
The ground-floor entrance was recessed deeply within a pointed arch, but the door itself was small and so strongly made that it yet survived. Flanking the porch were fountains. Rains had left a stagnant scum in the orichalc basins, but the bronze statues from which water had once played were twists of verdigris which gave no hint of their former shapes.
The city was silent save for the wind soughing through the walls.
A broad helical staircase twisted from the ground to the building's roof. The pillared tower was styled to match the main structure, but the two were only connected at the top.
Garric climbed the stairs. Their pitch was shallow, too shallow for his long legs, and should have been uncomfortable. In his present dream state he only noticed what he had no muscles to feel.
He wondered if King Carus missed Garric's presence as much as Garric did his. Did Carus even realize that Garric was gone?
As Garric mounted the stairs, his view of the city through the columns broadened. The streets were laid out in concentric circles centered on this building, though the docks of what had been a thriving seaport ate an arc out of one edge. The ships were gone, but the quays and stone
bollards remained. The port didn't have sloping ramps up which oar-driven warships could be drawn to prevent their light hulls from decaying while not in use.
At the very edge of his vision Garric thought he saw a wall of shimmering light like that which formed the bridge. It was too faint for him to be sure. Though daylight suffused the sky, there was no sun.
Garric stepped onto the roof. It was covered with granite like the boulevard and esplanade, but these slabs were as nearly level as the common table in Reise's inn. The foundations must sink down to the bowels of the earth.
The roof was a vast plaza decorated by a score of stone planters like buttons tucking the horsehair of an upholstered seat. Grass and weeds grew in them now, and from one sprouted a twisted appletree—the progeny many times removed of the tree placed there when the building was new. Roots had burst out the sides of other planters in the distant past, spilling the soil for rains to wash into a film of mud; only the lone apple had been able to reseed itself.
The roof was an audience ground. At the end opposite the staircase was a chamber with a screen of pierced alabaster for its outward-curving front wall. Garric walked toward it, his feet taking him where he would have gone of his own volition.
The translucent alabaster was no more than a finger's thickness. Light both reflected from and refracted through the milky stone, giving the air a soap-bubble sheen. The piercings were not simple holes or even a repetitive pattern. As Garric stepped close he saw a tracery of images, each as subtle and unique as the starlings of a flock wheeling in autumn.
The cut-out shapes had meaning—of that Garric was sure. His conscious mind couldn't grasp what the meaning was, however. Would Tenoctris understand?
The screen permitted citizens to see and hear their ruler close at hand, while still preventing them from touching him—or her, Garric supposed. It was carved from a seamless
sheet of alabaster and had no door. A twig with a few dried leaves was caught in one of the small holes.

Other books

The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal
Election by Tom Perrotta
Cartilage and Skin by Michael James Rizza
La muerte de la hierba by John Christopherson
The Valley of Dry Bones by Jerry B. Jenkins
Mr. Personality by Carol Rose
One Penny: A Marked Heart Novel by M. Sembera, Margaret Civella
Stone Cold Lover by Christine Warren