When Demons Walk (27 page)

But there was no question who was hurt worse. The demon screamed, an unearthly trill that covered the spectrum of sound, as a blue-green light flashed from the rune to its tail. When it was through, the demon crouched in the center of the rune, swaying back and forth.

“Halvok?” called Sham.

“Fine,” he said, though he sounded hoarse. “The rune will hold her.”

“Three times bound was I,” said the creature using Lady Sky's voice. “Three dead wizards litter the cold earth. Your binding too, I shall come through in better condition than you, wizard. Get what power you can while you may, you will be dead soon enough.”

“I will die,” Sham agreed readily, “as all mortal things do. But before then I will see you home again. Talbot, what's the tide like?”

“If you destroy me,” continued the demon, “I will haunt you and your children until there is one born I might use, witch. I will take that one's body and hunt until your descendants walk not upon this earth.”

“Not yet,” answered Elsic, listening to the sea as he fingered the flute, “but soon.”

Talbot gave the blind boy a sharp-eyed look. “It's still out.”

“Jetsam,” purred the demon, shifting its graceful neck so it was peering at Elsic, “—cast-off selkie garbage. If you aid in my binding, I will seek you out when I am free, and throw you back to the sea where your own people will rend you and feed you to the fish as tribute.”

Elsic smiled sweetly. “I aid in no binding.”

The demon paced sinuously within the outer bonds of the hold-rune. It was careful not to touch the edges.

“Now,” said Elsic.

Dimly Sham heard the muted roar of the returning waves begin. Elsic put the flute to his lips and blew a single pure note that pierced the night as cleanly as a fair-spent arrow. After a few experimental scales, he slipped into an unfamiliar song in a minor key.

Sham felt the magic begin to gather. She took a deep
breath, and silently reminded herself that most of the magic she would work were spells she already knew. She'd spent half the night memorizing the only one that was new until she could recite the steps backwards in her sleep. If her concentration or confidence faltered, it would release all the power of the Spirit Tide into flames that would swallow them and Purgatory as well—inspiration for the poorest of students, and she had never been that.

In the original version the death of the sacrifice gave power to the spell. The sympathetic magic of death sent the demon to where it belonged as the soul of the sacrifice traveled home. She intended to replace both functions with the Spirit Tide as it came home to the cliffs.

The magic that the tide generated was formed by the sea, and humans worked only with unformed magic. Like limestone and marble, the two kinds of magic were formed by the same materials with tremendously different results.

Elsic gathered the green magic of the sea, and the flute transformed it into its raw form. Sham had to hold the gathering forces until the last moment before she worked the final spell. There would be no second chances.

Sweat ran off her forehead and she swayed with the effort as the magic grew exponentially with the progress of the monumental wave of water that had begun to swallow the sand. Someone gripped her shoulders briefly and steadied her.

Still the magic grew. The first two spells were easy, nothing that she hadn't cast a hundred times before. She began to draw on the magic.

First to set the subject.

The demon screamed as she worked the spell, weaving it around the creature.

Second to name its true name.

Demon, Chen Laut, bringer of death, stealthy breaker of bonding spells laid upon it by greedy men. Avenger, killer, lonely exile. Sham understood the demon, and wove her knowledge into the spell. It was enough—she knew it. She could feel the demon trying to break the naming, but it was futile.

“Southwood lord,” called the demon, “Bind me to you and I will help you drive the Easterners from Purgatory. If you allow her to destroy me, they will never go.”

Halvok stiffened, like a hound scenting fox.

“If she chooses to bind rather than destroy, Shamera will not drive them away,” continued the demon persuasively. Sky's voice rang clear through the growing roar of sea and wind. “She's in love with the Reeve. She's too young to really remember how it was, what it felt like to hold your loved ones as they die. But you do, don't you? You remember your wife. She wasn't beautiful, was she? Not until she smiled. She was wonderfully kind. Do you remember how much she loved your children? Then the Easterners came, while you were fighting elsewhere. You returned home and found only what the soldiers had left. She fought to protect the children, your wife, even after what they had done to her.”

“Halvok,” said Sham, her voice trembling with the effort of speaking while she tried to hold both the magic and the demon. If Halvok dropped the rune at the wrong time, it could spell disaster. “Halvok, that world is gone. Driving the Easterners out of Southwood will not set time back. It won't restore your wife, nor even the person you were before they came.”

She had told Kerim that what the demon wanted most was to go home—she knew how the creature felt. As she exacted vengeance from those men who had crippled Maur, she had known that it was only a substitute for what she really wanted: to return to what once was, to go home. “Only death will come from seeking it, Halvok. Not just nameless Easterners will die—but your friends and colleagues. People you've come to know and care for. And once the killing starts, it won't be Eastern blood alone that feeds the soil. Hasn't there been enough death?”

“Yes,” said Halvok. “I am sick of—”

The demon struck the rune.

Halvok fell limply to the sand and the steady glow the rune had been emitting flickered wildly.

No time to question. Running to the place where Halvok
lay, Sham drew her knife, nicked her palms, and placed both hands on the gold thread. Power surged through her from that contact and she cried out. The magic from the waves buckled and the skin of her hands turned red and blistered from the wild magic that seeped out of her control, but the blood made the difference as she had known it would. It made the rune hers again, no matter how the magic surged and fought it.

She couldn't let the rune fail until just before the wave hit the cliff, or she wouldn't be able to open the gateway to the demon's realm no matter how much power she had. She would have to break it, symbolizing the breakage of the bonds that held the demon to this world. It shouldn't have been difficult. Halvok could have done it by dropping the two ends of the wire separately, but Sham was tied to the rune by blood.

She needed Halvok, but he lay silently on the ground, Talbot kneeling at his side. She hoped he was alive.

Still the magic grew. She couldn't see the Spirit Tide, but the sound of the water rushing over the sand had become deafening. Ignoring the smell of singed flesh she continued to gather the magic.

“Now,” shouted Kerim and Talbot together.

She broke the rune. Bound to her by blood, the rune's death hurt her, making her hands cramp until she had to force herself to her feet so that the tension of the wire would pull it from her grasp. Pain wasn't the real problem, or rather not the whole of the problem: It was what the pain did to her concentration that mattered.

It took a long moment for her to regain control of the forces she held.

Just as she began the final spell, before the demon realized that it was no longer held by the rune, the great wave struck and the cliffs shook. Water coated everything, spraying in great heavy sheets. Elsic faltered and the magic flared wildly until she couldn't tell hers from the magic that sang in the waves. Sham knew Elsic had resumed playing only from the feel of the magic flowing into her; she couldn't hear the music over the pounding water.

Crying out in a voice that was nothing against the roar that shook Purgatory, she continued working the last spell.

The first of her spells gave her an awareness of the demon, so she knew when it sprang. She spoke faster, finishing as the demon's hot, sharp tail raked her side.

Something
rippled
in the night and the demon stilled as the rift grew. In that bare instant Sham realized the place she was sending the demon didn't exist, not as she understood the term. For a brief moment that might have been an eternity, she stood at the gate and understood things about magic she'd never realized before, small things . . .

A second wave hit. Smaller than the first, bringing with it more water, more noise, and more flute-born magic.

Buffeted by pain, awe, and a new surge of magic, Sham lost control, consumed by the torment of the demon's touch and the fire of wild magic. The gate flickered, then steadied, held by someone else.

Give me the power, witch,
said Sky's voice, slipping beneath and between the waves of pain as Sham regained a tenuous hold on the magic.
You have my name, give me the power. If you do not, it will kill you and all those here this night.

Sham struggled to think. With the power she held, the demon could destroy Landsend. She didn't think even the ae'Magi would be able to stop it. Now that Sham had shown it how, it could go home any time it wanted to. Demons were creatures of magic; they were not bound to use unformed magic as she was.

Elsic played, and the magic continued to grow as a third wave hit. Sham couldn't even divert enough attention from her tasks to tell him to stop.

Silly witch, hatred of your kind does not mean so much to me that I would stay here another moment. Give me the magic and let me go home.

“Take it,” said Shamera, knowing that she could not hold it for much longer.

Power flowed out of her faster than it had come, and the demon accepted it with a capacity that seemed limitless. When it held all she could give, Sham collapsed on the
sandy cliff top curling around the pain in her side. She watched the demon as it steadied the gate to its home.

The demon turned toward the rift Sham had opened, then hesitated.

Sham had a moment to wonder what she was going to do if the pox-ridden thing decided it didn't want to go back when, feather-light, its tail brushed her side again. The pain that had resided there was replaced by cool numbness.

Sorry
, said the demon in a voice as soft as the wind.

Then it was gone.

The gate hung open above the broken bits of golden thread. Sham struggled to her knees. She had given all her magic to the demon; there was nothing left. If it didn't close . . .

It snapped shut with a cracking sound that rose above the thunder of yet another wave of water. For a moment the night was still—then the fires began.

They lit up the night like a thousand candles, burning the saltgrass where the gate had been first, then spreading faster than even a natural wildfire through the damp foliage. When the next wave hit the cliff and sent fine spray high into the air, flame touched the algae that lived in the water, making the droplets of spray spark gold and orange in the night.

“Back,” yelled Shamera, stumbling to her feet as best she could. “Damn it, get back.”

The magic that she'd given the demon was from this world. What the demon hadn't used had returned when the gate closed. A clump of driftwood burst into ashes as the magic passed near.

“Shamera, get away from there.” She thought it was Kerim who called, but she was too busy drawing upon what little magic she had left to be certain.

Cold hands closed on her shoulders. “What can I do?” asked Dickon.

“Support me,” she said, her voice thin even to her ears. “Release your magic to me.”

Like his magelight, the power he fed to her flickered randomly, but it helped. The old bell tower went up in a
blaze of glory, but Sham managed to keep the wild magic from raging where it would. Like a sheepdog, the threads of her mastery nipped here and there, cornering the worst of it against the cliff where the water would control the damage.

Kerim stood back with the rest, wishing futilely for the means to help. The Shark stood on his right, looking much like Kerim felt. Talbot knelt on the ground with the unconscious Halvok's head resting on his knee. The sailor's eyes were focused on Shamera and Dickon. Elsic sat beside them, his lips tight with anxiety—Kerim thought perhaps that Elsic, blind as he was, had a better idea of the struggle than any of the rest of the audience.

Shamera was lit by an eerie brilliance like the phosphorescent plankton that floated on the sea, only many times brighter. Foxfire flitted here and there in Dickon's hair and on his back, dripping from his fingers to the ground where it shimmered at his feet. The air carried a scorched scent and a feeling of energy like it had just before lightning struck.

Another wave hit the cliff, but this one was only dimly lit by the odd little flickers that had covered the ones before. When the water ran back to the sea it left only darkness behind it. Dickon swayed where he stood, as if it took all of his strength to remain on his feet. Sham fell into an untidy heap on the ground.

The Shark beat Kerim there only because his crutches hindered his movement. Kerim hesitated by Dickon's side, touching him lightly on the shoulder.

“I'm all right, sir,” said Dickon, “just tired.”

Kerim nodded, dropping his crutches. He fell to his knees next to Sham where she lay face down in the wet sand. The Shark, kneeling on the far side, held his hand against her neck.

“She's alive,” he said.

Remembering the fires that had flickered over her, Kerim reached out carefully, and with the Shark's help, turned her face out of the sand. Elsic and Talbot joined the quiet gathering with Halvok braced between them.

Halvok made a gesture and a dim circle of light appeared in his hand. The Southwood noble looked tired, and he moved with the painful slowness of an old, old man.