Word & Void 02 - A Knight of the Word (16 page)

They were approaching a small, concrete, triangular park with benches and shade trees fronting a series of buildings that included one advertising Seattle’s Underground Tour when the screams began.

They were so faint that at first Nest couldn’t believe she was hearing them. She slowed and looked around doubtfully. She was all alone on the streets. There was no one else in sight. But the screams continued, harsh and terrible in the blackness and mist.

“Something hunts,” Arid hissed as she shimmered brightly, darting left and right.

Nest wheeled around, looking everywhere at once.

“Where are they coming from?” she demanded, frantic now.

“Beneath us,” Ariel said.

Nest looked down at the concrete sidewalk in disbelief. “From the sewers?”

Ariel moved close, her childlike face smooth and expressionless, but her eyes filled with terror. “There is an old city beneath the new. The screams are coming from there!”

The demon worked its way ahead slowly through the blackness of the underground city, following the scent of the humans and the sound of their voices. It wound through narrow streets and alleyways and in and out of doors and gaps in crumbling walls. It was filled with hunger and flushed with a need to kill. It was driven.

Scores of feeders trailed after it, lantern eyes glowing in the musky gloom.

After a time, the demon saw the first flicker of light. The voices of the humans were clear now; it could hear their words distinctly. There were three of them, not yet grown to adulthood, a girl and two boys. The demon crept forward, eyes narrowing, pulse racing.

“What’s that?” one of them said suddenly as stone and earth scraped softly under the demon’s paw.

The demon could see them now, huddled about a pair of candles set into broken pieces of old china placed on a wooden crate. They were in a room in which the doors and windows had long since fallen away and the walls had begun to collapse. The ceiling was ribbed with pipes and conduits from the streets and buildings above, and the air was damp and smelled of rotting wood and earth.

The boys and the girl had made a home of sorts in the open space, furnishing it with several wooden crates, a couple of old mattresses and sleeping bags, several plastic sacks filled with stuff they had scavenged, and a few books. Where they had come from was anybody’s guess. They must have found their way down from the streets where they spent their days, taking shelter each night as so many did in the abandoned labyrinth of the older city.

The demon rounded the corner of a building across from them and paused. Feeders crowded forward and hovered close. The older of the two boys came to his feet and stood looking out into the dark. The other two crouched guardedly to either side. There was only one way in or out of their shelter. The demon had them trapped.

It advanced slowly into the light, showing itself gradually, letting them see what it was. Fear showed on their faces and in their eyes. Frantic exclamations escaped their lips—low, muttered curses that sounded like prayers. The demon was filled with joy.

The older boy produced a long-bladed knife. “Get away!” he warned, and swore violently at the demon. The demon came forward anyway, the feeders trailing in its wake. The girl and the younger boy shrank from it in terror. The girl was already crying. Neither would challenge it; the demon could tell from what it saw in their eyes. Only the older boy would make a stand. The demon’s tongue licked out across its hooked teeth, and its jaws snapped hungrily at the air.

The demon crept through the doorway in a crouch, eyes fixed on the knife All three of its intended victims retreated toward the back wall of the room. Foolish choice, the demon thought. They had let it inside, let it block their only escape.

Then the younger boy wheeled away in a flurry of arms and legs and threw himself toward one of the broken windows, intent on breaking free that way. But the demon was too quick. It lunged sideways and caught the unfortunate boy in a single bound. It dragged him to the earthen floor, closed its massive jaws on his neck as he screamed and thrashed frantically, and crushed the life from him with a single snap.

The boy fell back lifelessly. Feeders piled onto the body, tearing at it. The demon swung its bloodied muzzle toward the other two, showing all its teeth. The girl was screaming now, and the older boy was cursing and shouting and brandishing the knife more as a talisman than as a weapon. They might have made a run for the open doorway while the demon was engaged in killing their companion, but they had failed to do so. Or even to try. The girl was on her knees with her arms about her head, keening. The older boy was standing his ground, but it seemed to the demon that he was doing so because he could not bring himself to move.

The demon advanced on the older boy, stiff-legged, alert. When it was close enough, it waited until the boy lunged with the knife, then hurled itself under the gleaming blade, jaws closing on the hand that wielded it. Bones crunched and muscles tore, and the boy screamed in pain. The demon knocked the boy backward against the wall and tore out his throat while he was still staring at his ruined hand.

Feeders sprang out of the darkness in knots of black shadow, falling on the dying boy, lapping up the life that drained away from him, feeding on the raw feelings of terror and despair and pain.

The girl had begun to crawl toward the open door, a futile attempt to get free. The demon moved quickly to intercept her. She crouched before it in a shivering heap, her arms clasped over her head, her eyes closed. She was crying and screaming and begging—
Don’t, please, don’t, please, don’t
—over and over again. The demon studied her for a moment, intrigued by the way the madness had enveloped her. It was no longer in a hurry, its hunger appeased with the killing of the boys. It felt languorous and sleepy. It watched the girl through lidded eyes. There were feeders crawling all over her, savoring the emotions she expended, licking them up anxiously. Perhaps she could feel them, perhaps even see them by now, with death so close. Perhaps she sensed what death held in store for her. The demon wondered.

Then it closed its jaws almost tenderly about the hack of the girl’s exposed white neck and crushed the slender stalk to pulp.

Abruptly, the screams faded to silence. Nest froze, staring into the mist and gloom, into the faint pools of streetlight, listening. She couldn’t hear a thing.

Ariel drifted close. The tatterdemalion hung suspended on the air, spectral, barely a presence at all. “It is over.”

Nest blinked. Over. So quickly. Her mind spun. “What was it?” she asked quietly.

“A creature of the Void.”

Nest stared into the tatterdemalion’s eyes and knew exactly which creature. She felt a chill sweep through her body and settle in her throat. “A demon,” she whispered. “Its stink is in the air,” Ariel said.

“What was it hunting?”

“The humans who live under the streets.”

Homeless people. Nest closed her eyes in despair. Could she have helped them, if she had been quicker, if she had known where to go, if she had summoned her magic? If, if, if. She took a deep breath. She wondered suddenly if these killings were connected in some way with John Ross. Was this monster hunting for him, as well? Mustn’t it be, if it was here, so close to where he was working?

“We have to go,” said Ariel. Her childlike voice was a ripple of breeze in the silence. “It isn’t safe for us to remain here.”

Because it might come for us next, Nest thought. She stood her ground a moment longer, tempted to invite it to try, riddled with anger and disgust. But staying would be foolish. Demons were too strong for her. She had learned that lesson from her father five years earlier.

She began to walk, Ariel skimming the air beside her, moving toward the hotel once more. She had been searching the shadows for feeders the entire time they had walked, a habit she would never break, but she hadn’t seen any. Now she understood why. They were all underground with the demon, drinking in the detritus of its kills.

She stared off into the night, down the darkened corridors of side streets and alleyways, into blackened doorways and landings, and along shadowy eaves and overhangs. It isn’t safe for us to remain here, Ariel had said, urging her to move quickly away, to flee.

Maybe so, she thought. Not with a demon present. But demons seemed to be everywhere in her life. Demons and dark magic, the workings of the Void.

It isn’t safe for us here.

But maybe it was no longer safe anywhere.

W
hen Nest Freemark awoke the following morning, the sun was streaming so brightly through her window that she thought she must have overslept. The clock radio she had set the night before was playing softly, which meant that the alarm had gone off, and she leaned over quickly to check the time. But it was only nine o’clock, the hour she had chosen for her wake-up, so she was right on schedule. She glanced over at the window, and she realized that the reason it was so bright was that she had forgotten to draw the blinds.

She laid her head back on her pillow sleepily for a moment, still disoriented from her sudden awakening. She could hear the sounds of traffic on the street below, brash and jarring, but her room was a bright cocoon of silence and warmth. She had read somewhere that it rained a lot in Seattle, but apparently that wasn’t going to be the case today.

She closed her eyes and then opened them again, searching her mind. Last night’s memories of her walk into Pioneer Square seemed distant and vague, almost as if they were part of a dream. She stared at the ceiling and forced herself to remember. Walking alone with Ariel. Hearing the screams. Feeling frightened and helpless. Hearing Ariel’s words.

Something hunts
.

A demon, she had replied.

She rose and walked to the window and looked down at the street. Same street as last night, only brighter and more populated in the daylight. She watched the people and cars for a few minutes, organizing her scattered thoughts and gathering up the shards of confusion and uncertainty that littered her mind. Then she went into the bathroom and showered. She stood beneath the hot stream of water for a long time, eyes closed, thinking. She was a long way from home, and she was still uncertain of her purpose in coming to find John Ross. She wished she had a better idea of what she was going to do when she found him. She wished she knew what she was going to say. She wished she were better prepared.

She toweled dry and dressed, thinking once again of the demon. She would tell Ross of last night; she knew that much, at least. She would tell him of the Lady’s concern, of her warning to him. She would try to convince him of his danger. But what else could she do? What did she really know about all this, after all? She knew what Ariel had told her, but she couldn’t say for certain that it was the truth. If Pick’s response was any measure of things, it probably wasn’t. The truth wasn’t something you got whole cloth from the Word anyway; it came in bits and pieces, riddles and questions, and self-examination and deductive reasoning that, if you were lucky, eventually led to some sort of revelation. She had learned that much from her father. The truth wasn’t simple; it was complex. Worse, it wasn’t easily decipherable, and it was often difficult to accept.

She sighed, looking about the room, as if the answer to her dilemma might be hidden there. It wasn’t, of course. There were no answers here; the answers all lay with John Ross.

She went down to the lobby for her breakfast, pausing to stare out through large plate-glass doors at the busy city streets. Although the day was bright and sunny, people out walking were bundled up in coats and scarves, so she knew it must be cold. She continued on to the dining room and ate alone at a table near the back, sipping at her coffee and nibbling on her toast and scrambled eggs as she formulated her plan for the day.

She would have preferred to talk things over with Ariel, but there was no sign of the tatterdemalion. Nor was there likely to be. She remembered Ariel saying to her last night, just before she went back into the hotel, “Don’t worry. I’ll be close to you. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there when you need me.”

Reassuring, but not particularly satisfactory. It made her wish Pick was with her. Pick would have appeared whether she needed him or not. Pick would have talked everything over with her. She still missed him. She found herself comparing the sylvan and the tatterdemalion and decided that, given the choice, she still preferred Pick’s incessant chatter to Ariel’s wraithlike presence.

She tried to remember the rest of what Pick had told her about tatterdemalions. It wasn’t much. Like sylvans they were born fully formed, but unlike sylvans they lived only a short time and didn’t age. Both were forest creatures, but sylvans never went beyond the territory for which they were given responsibility, while tatterdemalions rode everywhere on the back of the wind and went all over the world. Sylvans worked at managing the magic, at its practical application, at keeping the balance in check. Tatterdemalions did none of that, cared nothing for the magic, were as insubstantial in their work as they were in their forms. They served the Word, but their service was less carefully defined and more subject to change than that of sylvans. Tatterdemalions were like ghosts.

Nest finished the last of her orange juice and stood up. Tatterdemalions were strange, even as fairy creatures went. She tried to imagine what it must be like to be Ariel, to have lived without experiencing a childhood and with no expectation of ever becoming an adult, to know you would be alive only a short time and then be gone again. She supposed the concept of time was a relative one, and some creatures had no concept of time at all. Maybe that was the way it was with tatterdemalions. But what would it be like to live your entire life with the memories of dead children, of lives come and gone before your own, to have only their memories and none of your own?

She gave it up. She would never be able to put herself in Ariel’s place, not even in the most abstract sense, because she had no reference point to help her gain any real insight. They were as different as night and day. And yet they both served the Word, and they were both, in some sense, creatures of magic.