The Demon Lord (35 page)

“
Ythek’ter auythyu an-shri,”
Marek said. “The Devourer in the Dark.”

Ythek Shri… Five days ago, he would have laughed. The Devourer was a childhood bogy, the sort of harmless horror that lurked in the shadows cast by bedroom furniture or hid behind sleep-heavy eyelids. It was a dream. A nightmare… But too many nightmares had become reality for Aldric Talvalin. He no longer laughed. Perhaps… Perhaps that too was a form of madness: to know that one’s most secret terrors walked beyond the light and waited patiently for evening.

The melancholy whining of the rebec faltered into silence as something moved. Behind him. In the dark…

“Is the demon queller with you?” asked Crisen Geruath.

It was several seconds before Aldric’s heart slid back from his throat and down to his chest where it belonged, and several more before he trusted himself to speak. “He is not.” The reply was calm, controlled, remote as if the mind behind the voice was far away; as if he was still deep in meditation. His brain was jangling with alarm both from the fright he had received and from an ominous sense of warning, but only a slight movement of one hand which loosened Widowmaker in her scabbard betrayed that he was aware of anything at all.

With a snap of his fingers to dismiss the musician— who scuttled gratefully from the room as if he too felt something wrong—Crisen sat down on the balcony and tried again. “Will he come here later?”

“I doubt it.” As he spoke Aldric’s hooded eyes opened, staring at the Overlord’s son. Their pupils had expanded hugely in the dim light of moon and stars until mere outlines of greenish iris remained around a dark, infinite depth; and they regarded Crisen with a predatory consideration which would have made him nervous even had his purpose been completely innocent. He shivered violently and began to sweat.

“What do you want?” The Alban’s tone was flat and disinterested; when no answer was forthcoming he yawned with the luxurious, studied insolence of a cat. “Then send the player back as you go out.” His eyelids drooped once more, declaring the brief conversation to be at an end. It was not.

“Would you kill a man?”

Aldric’s black-gloved sword-hand flexed and his eyes snapped wide open. “Who—and why?”

“A-a man whose death would benefit—”

“I want a name and a reason, my Lord Crisen Ger-uath Segharlin.” Although his voice was deceptively gentle Crisen caught his breath at the venom in it. He glanced towards the door as though seized by second thoughts; then back at Aldric as his own words tumbled over one another in their breathless haste to leave his mouth.

“And I want you to kill my father for me…” There was a pause while one might count three. “Because I hate him—and I want to see him dead!”

A time for wolves
... said Aldric’s memory. Mastering his facial muscles with an effort, he set Widowmaker carefully aside and got to his feet, walking indoors with no sound but the faint creak of his arming-leathers. “There is the door.” The leathers creaked again as he pointed. “I suggest you leave.”

“What?”

“Get out!”

“But you are
eijo
,” Crisen protested to his disapproving back. “I saw the way you looked at him. You will kill—”

“I am
eijo
,” conceded Aldric flatly. “Not a murderer. I am—” He hesitated, knowing the irrevocable weight of what he was about to say. “I am no man’s hired assassin.”

And with those words he knew once and for all that everything had been in vain. All the striving and suffering, the blood and fire and pain; all the deaths that could be made worthwhile by one more death—and that so very well-deserved—were wasted by his admission. From where he stood Aldric could see the pulse of life in Cri-sen’s neck; the fragility of eyes and temples; the rise and fall of an unarmoured chest.

Only reach out,
ilauem-arluth;
reach out and snuff out and you are clan-lord indeed. He will not even feel it… The melodious enticement of the Song of Desolation whispered in his ears—promising, cajoling, reminding him of other times and other sensations: impact, and the brief jarring resistance as steel entered flesh; the hard crisp noise as bone gave way beneath a perfect stroke; and that breathless moment afterwards when limbs trembled whole and unhurt with the awareness of survival, and the knowledge of another day of life was like rebirth…

The
eijo
—for he was truly
eijo
now, landless, lordless, exiled by his own choice—bowed his head in resignation. “Forgive me, father,” he murmured. “Once again I break my Word. But I cannot do this thing…” Aldric stepped aside to let the Jouvaine go.

Crisen made no excuses, nor attempted any of the suicidal things with which he might have hoped to hide his indiscretion, for though the Alban’s longsword lay out on the balcony there was still that ever-present dirk pushed through his belt. But he looked back in desperation with the beginnings of real fear scored into his face. “Please… don’t tell my father—”

The door opened. “Don’t tell me what?” demanded Geruath the Overlord.

Aldric glanced at Crisen and then smiled viciously. “Ask your son!” he snapped. “You will find the answer interesting…”

Waving back the guards who would have followed him into the room, Geruath shut and locked the door. He kept the key in his left hand. “Well, Crisen? Interest me.”

His son wiped dry lips with the back of one hand and retreated two steps, blanching with terror. “It isn’t important, father, I promise you…”

“Let me be the judge of that. Tell me—
at once!”

“A—a task for me—nothing more, I swear… !”

“What task?” Geruath moved forward, hunch-shouldered, violence brooding in him like the threat of thunder in still air. “What task, my son… answer me before I—”

“No!
I—I
mean I can’t…”

“Tell me, Crisen…” The words were thick with suspicion, and Aldric could hear the malevolence in them through the half-heard eldritch moaning of a single chord as it awaited… something.

The Alban’s senses were spinning. A heavy scent of roses swamped his brain with reeling perfume richer than the fumes of wine, sweet and sickly as no natural flower should be. But a Bale Flower… ! Dear Light of Heaven, can they not smell it too… ! His gaze flicked from son to father and back to son, knowing that something frightful was about to happen. He backed away…

And that slight movement registered on Crisen’s bulging, panic-stricken eyes. He turned, his arms flung wide as if in supplication, and one hand gripped the
tsepan-
hilt at Aldric’s waist. The dirk fitted snugly in its lacquered sheath and always,
always
needed a slight twist to free it—except that this time of all times it drew out eagerly and swiftly. Almost before the Jouvaine’s fingers closed…

Lord Geruath’s expression changed from rage to disbelief the instant a blade gleamed in his son’s hand. He began to speak—but the words were lost in a choked gargling as the dirk jabbed underneath his chin to open veins and windpipe. It wrenched free, and a long spurt of vivid crimson followed in its wake. Geruath’s head lolled forward, no longer supported by his neck, and he turned slightly to stare at Aldric with a quizzical expression. His mouth opened and a wide ribbon of blood flowed out over its lower lip like a bright red beard; but his question became a surprised cough which misted the air with a fine spray of scarlet and freckled Aldric’s face with minute warm droplets.

Then Crisen stabbed him again. In the belly. And ripped the blade out sideways.

Stench… There was no smell of roses now. The Overlord staggered, then collapsed, and Aldric felt the dead-weight’s sodden heat as his arms supported it a moment before it slithered to the floor in a tangle of slack limbs and open torso. The fingers of one hand clawed at the floor, nails scratching more loudly than the Alban would have believed possible, then trembled once and did not move again. There was blood all over him: on his hands, on his face, smeared vividly across the soft black of his leathers. And Crisen was watching him intently through eyes which seemed far too bright…

Horror froze him to the spot for just too long. Not horror at the violence, for he had seen—and done— much worse, but because a father had been knowingly cut down by the hand of his own son. That crime above all others was anathema to Albans. It was unthinkable… and beyond belief that he had witnessed it and yet done nothing…

Crisen saw the expressions chase each other across a face too deeply shocked to hide them, and drew breath. “It seems,” he said, with only the faintest quiver in his voice, “that the task which I required of you is done.” The
tsepan
touched his left palm, slicing across it in a dramatically bloody superficial cut before he clutched its blade in sticky fingers—for all the world as if he had just snatched it from Aldric’s hand at great risk to himself.

Far too late now, realisation flared within the Alban’s shocked and sickened eyes. “So…” Crisen whispered, “I no longer need you.” He laughed hoarsely; and then screamed: “
Guards
!” until the door burst in.

The soldiers outside had been expecting trouble of some kind since Geruath had first summoned them to attend him; prepared for a disturbance, therefore, they acted instantly on what they saw without waiting for reasons or excuses. The butt of a gisarm slammed into Aldric’s stomach, punching the air from his lungs and folding him over the impact; another swept his legs from under him so that he fell with a wet slap into the glistening, still warm morass which once had been Geruath the Overlord.

And yet he made no attempt to resist: that would only compound his apparent guilt. Seghar’s magistrate would surely know that an
eijo
would need only that single, obviously mortal thrust to the throat—and any wit at all would tell him that no Alban with a shred of decency would use his
tsepan
to do murder.

Aldric coughed carefully, wincing at the pain thus dealt to his bruised stomach muscles, and raised a head that by now was quite plastered both in blood and the foulness of evisceration. He tried to ignore the stink. But a cold fear began to churn inside him as he saw the soldiers bowing deeply. In respect to their new Overlord, came the tiny rational explanation; the magistrate…

Crisen Geruath, Overlord of Seghar, Executor of High and Common Justice, reached out his injured hand with a lordly air and permitted a retainer to bandage it; over the man’s shoulder he smiled coldly down at where Aldric crouched in the mire of a dead man’s bowels. Any who saw that smile considered it a brave display of stiff-necked courage in the face of pain and grief.

Any except Aldric—but who now would listen to what he might say… ? As the Alban was marched out, arms wrenched high up between his shoulder blades by makeshift bonds, Crisen stopped the escort and waved them to one side. Aldric stared dispassionately at him, guessing that this new lord shared the old lord’s penchant for a parting shot. And he was right.

Although his voice was already too soft for anyone else to hear, Crisen leaned so intimately close that Aldric swayed back in disgust. “When I see an opportunity,” the Jouvaine purred, with thick self-satisfaction lacing every word, “I take it. With both hands.”

“I know the man—and I find what you tell me a hard thing to believe of him.” Marek’s tone was insistent, and though the opinion he put forward was dangerous, it had to be said aloud before witnesses. Even such unlikely ones as the mailed retainers on either side of the Overlord’s great carved chair. Mailed—Marek noted that change. Crested coats had been enough before tonight.

Crisen Geruath gazed at the demon queller and cleared his throat, serene and confident in his own power. “I have a title now,
hlensyarl”
he reminded.

“My Lord,” responded Marek, after a pause which was more than long enough to make clear his disapproval,

“Hard to believe or otherwise, Marek Endain,” he continued in the same placid voice, “it is true. Your Alban friend slew my poor father with that black knife he carries always.”

Had the new Overlord been watching more closely he would have seen real suspicion appear for the first time on Marek’s bearded features. As he had said in all honesty, he knew the man—indeed, had experienced unpleasantly close encounters with the blades which Aldric bore concealed about his person—and though a Cernuan who even now had no love for the Horse Lords, he knew that this
Margh-Arluth
above all would not dishonour his
tsepan
, Marek knew of only one use for the black dirk: the death of its owner, either to end the agony of a mortal wound or in
tsepanak’ulleth
, the ritual of formal suicide. It was never, ever used for simple killing. He knew now what he had only suspected before: the Overlord was lying.

“My lord,” he asked, respectfully for once, “may I see Kourgath? Before this murder he was my friend…”

Crisen nodded and waved dismissal both to Marek and the two soldiers standing with ostentatious nonchalance beside the door. The demon queller glanced at them and kept a frown from his face with difficulty, for he would have much preferred to forego the “honour” of an armed and armoured escort. In Seghar a guard could also be an executioner…

As he left the presence chamber with the evidence of Crisen’s doubtful courtesy behind him, he heard the Overlord’s voice ring out behind him and absently he wondered why it seemed so irritable:

“Bring
Kortagor
Jervan in here at once… !”

Until they reached a heavily barred door, the two soldiers made no attempt at conversation; and when one, after fumbling with locks and plainly mismatched keys, looked up and asked for Marek’s help, the Cernuan came close to outright laughter at such studied clumsiness. Instead, containing himself, he pretended ignorance until the second trooper made his move.

Which took the unsubtle form of a spearpoint lunging at his chest…

Marek twisted from the weapon’s path, brushing its point aside with one arm and slapped the other open hand against the soldier’s chest. It was a heavy blow— yet not heavy enough to explain why the armoured man was flung bodily across the corridor with a hand-print indented deeply in the metal of his breastplate…