Knight of the Demon Queen Read online

  “Jen’s taught Ian how to use the ward wyrds that’ll tell if Iceriders are on their way,” he said, swinging up into the saddle. He felt bad about taking Battlehammer into peril that would almost certainly get him killed— poor payment for a beast of whom he was dearly fond— but he knew he would need a trained mount, and a fast one. “But if that happens, for God’s sake, don’t forget to send someone out to the Fell to fetch Jen in, whether she wants to come or not. Tell her I’m on patrol.”

  “Since when have you taken water on patrol?” Muffle demanded. “Or your harpoons?” He slapped the backs of his fingers to the heavy iron weapons slung behind Battlehammer’s saddle, three of the eight that John had made to use against dragons. Even without the poisons and death spells Jenny—and later Ian—had put on them, they were formidable, and something about the empty lands he’d seen in his dream last night had warned him that there were things about which the Demon Queen had lied.

  “Keep watch.” John bent from the saddle to lay a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “There’s aught afoot, Muffle, and I don’t know what it is or how it’s to be fought.” I’m not a mage! he wanted to shout, I shouldn’t even be doing this! But he’d never considered himself a warrior, either. “Keep watch for anythin’. Not only outside the bounds, outside the walls, but inside as well. Stay here at the Hold tonight, if you would, and until I return. Bring Blossom and the children—tell ’em it’s because I don’t know how long I’ll be away. Tell ’em any-thin’. But every night, walk about the place. Down the cellars, along the walls, go in the crypt underneath the main hall. Just look.”

  “For what?”

  Peg was lowering the drawbridge, working the crank to raise the portcullis. Wind slammed through the gate with renewed viciousness, slicing John’s sheepskin coat and winter plaids, the mailed leather beneath.

  John shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “And who do I tell,” the blacksmith asked, “if I find what I shouldn’t?”

  Ian. John felt a pang, less of fear than of grief, thinking of what his son might have to face.

  He’s too young, he’s been hurt too bad…

  But he had grown up in a land that did not make allowances, not for youth, not for innocence, not for the wounded.

  “Jen,” he said. “Ian, if Jen’s not to be reached.”

  Sergeant Muffle nodded, silenced by whatever it was that he saw in John’s eyes. “How long will you be gone?”

  “That I don’t know.” He gathered the reins, Battle-hammer’s breath a white mist like a monster of legend. Beyond the gate the world was marble and ash, treeless to the horizon.

  He turned back. “Pray for me.”

  “Every day, Johnny,” Muffle said quietly. “Every day.”

  Aversin turned his back on the Hold and rode for the Wraithmire. The smoke of the burning work shed made a hard white column in the gray air, and the hot onyx of the ink bottle burned against his flesh like a second heart.

  In summer or fall he could reach those dreary marshes in a matter of hours. Riding against the wind, with Battle-hammer foundering in the drifts, the day was dying when he came to the edge of the slick flats of brown ice, the snow-covered humps of bramble and hackweed that filled the sheltered ground. No one could tell him now whether the flooding had come first and the infestations of whisperers later, or whether the lands had been abandoned to the water when those glowing, giggling things had begun to haunt the nights.

  In either case it hadn’t surprised him to learn that a gate of Hell was located there.

  A man named Morne had had a house hereabouts— before the marshes had spread this far—and had farmed a little. One afternoon Nuncle Darrow came to the Hold saying that Morne’s wife had cut her husband and then their four children to pieces with a carving knife. Old Caerdinn and Jenny had exorcised the woman, but they didn’t know whether they’d succeeded, for after they were done with their spells the woman turned the knife on herself.

  The house still stood. John could distinguish its pale shape among the half-dead trees in the gloom. None of the neighbors had torn it down, not even for the bricks and the dressed stone.

  He dismounted cautiously and led Battlehammer into the labyrinth of hummocks and ice. In the graying twilight he found where animal tracks turned aside in fear of the whisperers but saw no mark, no sign of the Hell-spawn themselves.

  He made sure Battlehammer was stoutly tied to a sapling before reaching into his coat for the ink bottle. It felt heavy in his hand, and for a time he stood, wondering if there were any way whatsoever he could accomplish the bidding of the Demon Queen without the help of the thing inside.

  But he couldn’t. He simply didn’t know enough. So he pulled off his glove, took three flax seeds from the pouch at his waist, and held them ready between thumb and forefinger. Only then did he pull the stopper from the bottle.

  A momentary silvery glitter played above the hole, like a very tiny flame.

  And Jenny stood before him.

  Jenny beautiful, as she had been when first he’d seen her at Frost Fell: black hair like night on the ocean, blue eyes like summer noon. Smiling and relaxed and filled with the joy of living, with daffodils in her hands.

  John held the flax seeds above the bottle’s mouth and said, “You take that form ever again, and I swear to you I’ll seal this thing with you in it and bury it in the deepest part of the sea.”

  “Darling, how serious you’re being!” It wasn’t Jenny anymore; it never had been, in the way faces and identities shift and merge in dreams. A slim boy stood before John, fourteen or fifteen years old. Like Jenny he was black haired and blue eyed, with long lashes and red pouty lips in an alabaster face. He wore plain black hose and a coat of quilted black velvet, just as if the world were not frozen all around them; his little round cap was sewn with garnets. “Could it be you’re jealous? Do you suspect those legions of men she had weren’t entirely because she was allegedly possessed? We can’t force anyone to do anything that’s truly against their secret natures in the first place, you know.”

  “No,” John returned mildly. “I don’t know that. In fact, what I do know is that the lot of you are liars who couldn’t ask straight-out for water if you were dyin’.”

  The boy shrugged. “Well, I’m sure you’ll go on believing whatever makes you comfortable.” He held out his exquisitely kid-gloved hand. “I’m Amayon.” And, when John did not react, he added, “Jenny’s Amayon.”

  “And my servant,” John pointed out maliciously and for a fleeting instant saw the flare of rage and piqued pride in those cobalt eyes. “I trust Her Majesty told you your duties an’ all.”

  “Tedious bitch.” Amayon yawned elaborately, though John had already seen that the demon did not breathe. “I suppose you know she uses the mucus of donkeys as a complexion cream? You haven’t, I hope, been taken in by that antiquated lust spell she throws over everyone she encounters.”

  “Like the one you used on Rocklys’ cavalry corps?” John returned, refusing to be goaded.

  “Oh, darling, did Jenny tell you that was me?” The demon simpered, but he was watching John’s eyes. “How very simple of her.”

  Not for nothing, however, had John grown up his father’s son, his heart and his face a fist closed in defense. He merely regarded Amayon without expression, and the demon shrugged and smiled.

  “Well, I’m sure if it makes you feel better to believe that … The gate’s this way, Lordship.” He threw a mocking flex into the title. “Generally only the small fry can leak through, but Her Reechiness has given me a word.”

  “Do you hate that animal?” he added, raising delicate brows at Battlehammer, who stood, ears flat to his neck and muscles bunched, regarding him as he would have a snake.

  “Should I?”

  “It’s up to you, of course, Lordship. But unless there’s some reason you’d like to see him die, I suggest you don’t bring him with us. Your mistress has made arrangements.”

  “Ah,” John
said. “Thinks of everythin’, she does.” And he dropped the seeds into the bottle.

  It was Aversin’s intention simply to keep the demon where he couldn’t do mischief while he took Battle-hammer to the nearest farm, which was old Dan Dar-row’s walled enclave in the bottomlands adjacent to the Mire. But with the snow and the wind, and his exhaustion from a sleepless night, it took him nearly two hours to reach the place.

  “’Twill be black as pitch by the time you get back to the Mire,” the farmer protested when John explained that he wanted the loan of a donkey and a boy to lead it back to the farm again.

  A little uneasily, he acceded to the patriarch’s invitation to spend the night. He was conscious of the demon bottle around his neck as he sat at supper with the Darrow clan and their hired men and women, watching the old man’s fair-haired grandchildren tumble and play before the hearth. He guessed that Amayon was perfectly aware of his surroundings; he had no business, he thought, bringing even a bottled demon into a house where there were children.

  When he slept, he dreamed again and again of a rat, or some huge insect, creeping up the frame of each child’s bed, demon light glittering in its berry-blue eyes. Reaching toward them…

  He woke at the touch of a hand on his neck.

  The Darrow farm was a big place, but simple and rustic. John had bedded down among the men of the household in the loft, on blankets and straw tickings spread around where the chimney came through from the floor below. They’d have put the King himself there, had he come calling. Remembering that demons had spoken to Caradoc in his dreams, offering him greater power and wider wisdom if he would but open a gate for them, he’d tied the red ribbon that held the ink bottle in a knot up close to his throat so it couldn’t be slipped off over his head while he slept.

  Sure enough, as he opened his eyes he felt a man’s hands fumbling with the ribbon and heard the slow thick breathing of a sleeper near his face, not the short breaths of a man nervous about robbing a guest. John caught the sleepwalker by wrist and shoulder and flung him bodily onto as many men as he could; there were shouts and curses, and by the thread of dim hearthlight that leaked up through the ladder hole at the far end of the loft he saw his attacker bound to his feet, eyes blank, knife in hand.

  The attacker—a huge stablehand named Browson who’d helped unsaddle Battlehammer—lunged at him, but men were scrambling up, grabbing, clutching. Shouts of “Murder!” and “Bandits!” barked through the dark. Another of the hired men grabbed Browson and threw him down, and then Dan Darrow and his two sons-in-law swarmed up the ladder in their nightshirts. “Brow-son, what in Cragget’s name are you at?”

  Browson was blinking, stupid with sleep and scared. He saw the knife in his own hand and dropped it in terror.

  John fumbled his spectacles on as one of the men said, “He pulled steel on His Lordship here, sir!”

  “I didn’t! I didn’t do nuthin’, sir!” Browson gasped. Darrow’s eyes grew flinty, for it wasn’t an unheard-of thing for bandit gangs to buy the loyalty of hired men to slit the throats of as many potential defenders as they could in the vanguard of an attack. “I swear it, sir! I didn’t mean no harm! I had this dream…”

  “I thought so,” John said briskly and gestured stillness to those who’d pulled their weapons from beneath their blankets. “Somnambulistis truncularis, that’s what it is.”

  “Somna-what?” They regarded him with respect, for he had a wide reputation as a scholar. Only old Dan glanced sidelong, suspicion in his dark eyes as he stroked the huge white fangs of his mustache back into something that resembled their daytime order.

  “Somnambulistis truncularis. Polyborus describes it in his Materia Medica,” John went on, inventing freely, “and Heronax says it’s caused by conjunctions of Saturn and Mars at the midwinter solstice, though meself, I agree with Juronal that it’s caused by the bite of the brown hay toad, which is near extinct here in the North.”

  He shoved the ink bottle back under his shirt and checked that the sack of flax seeds was still safe in his pocket. “In places in the South, though, people regularly put pots and pans round their beds in case the servants come sneakin’ in like this, for it gives ’em dreams about killin’. What’d you dream, son?”

  “A voice.” The farmhand looked tremblingly from John to his master. “It was a King, like, all in a golden crown, tellin’ me to get this bottle away from … from His Lordship here. He said as how His Lordship had stole the bottle, and I was to take and open it. Take and open it, he said, and there’d be treasure for me inside as well.”

  John nodded wisely. “Way common in these cases,” he said. “In Greenhythe only last year there was a quadruple case of it, when four village women all dreamt they had to bathe the mayor and converged on his house in the middle of the night with soap and towels, and not one of ’em remembered in the mornin’ why it was so twilkin’ important that he be clean. So I’m just grateful the case is no worse.”

  That got a laugh, as he’d hoped it would, and those men who’d had their swords in hands stashed them beneath their blankets again. Even Darrow, who wasn’t one to endanger his family by leaving a suspected traitor unhanged, relaxed.

  But John spent the remainder of the long night awake, pinching himself when he felt in danger of falling asleep. Twice or thrice, when he did drift off, he dreamed again about the blue-eyed rat that sniffed and scrabbled about the beds where Dan Darrow’s little grandchildren slept.

  “And that was your idea of a joke?” he asked when Darrow—who had himself accompanied him to the edge of the Wraithmire with a donkey laden with supplies— disappeared between the snowy deadfall hummocks, leaving Aversin alone.

  Amayon flickered into view out of the smoke from the newly opened ink bottle. “Oh, don’t be squeamish.” He pouted. “I wouldn’t have harmed the little bastards. You’ve said yourself a thousand times that that youngest boy needs to be thrashed more often.”

  John studied the elfin face, the innocent eyes in their dark fringes of lash. Just enough like Ian, he realized, to twist at the grief he felt about his son. The voice melodious, sweet and childlike. But he knew that Amayon no more looked like this than the Demon Queen looked like the woman he saw in his dreams.

  He slipped the straps of food sacks and water satchels over his shoulders, flexing his knees to test the balance of the load. One sack contained other things: bits of silver and dragonbone, whatever he could find in Jenny’s workbox that wouldn’t add too much weight. “And I suppose Browson needs to be hanged, for attackin’ a guest?”

  “They wouldn’t have hanged him.” Amayon gestured airily. “Now come along. Her Poxship went to a great deal of trouble to get you a beast worthy of you, so we’d better get through the gate before it wanders away.”

  He set off through the snow-choked thickets, John at his heels. Every tree they passed, every frozen pond they skirted, John noted, remembering the way so he could come back and do something—he wasn’t sure what— about the demon gate. He had packed also as much clean parchment and paper as he could, had drawn from memory what he remembered of the route Aohila had shown him in dreaming, and had made note of Amayon’s remark last night about gates that would admit only tiny spawn, not great ones.

  He didn’t know what any of it meant or might mean, but someone, sometime, would.

  The mists that always hung over the Wraithmire thickened, making it hard for him to get his bearings; Amayon stopped twice and waited for him, knee-deep in swirling white vapor. John followed carefully, reflecting that it would be exactly like the demon to lead him thus onto thin ice, for the amusement of watching him lose toes to frostbite when his boots got soaked. Then through the fog a warm wind breathed, alien and frightening, and on it drifted a smell John knew he’d scented before hereabouts: sand and sourness, and something like burning metal.

  The light altered.

  The squeak of the snow turned to the crunch of pebbles underfoot.

  And a thing rose up before them in the
mists, with a blunt stupid head on a long neck balanced by a blunt heavy tail. Between tail and head were tall haunches and two long legs, like a sort of flabby featherless hairless bird, saddled and bridled like a horse.

  A creature of Hell, regarding him with a black dead porcelain-shiny eye.

  The hot wind breathed the mists away. Dust stung Aversin’s nostrils, burned his eyes.

  Black harsh mountains stained with rust scraped a colorless sky. Something like a cloud moved across it, curling and uncurling with a floppy, obscene motion, running against the wind.

  Amayon smiled, and John knew it was because the demon tasted his fear.

  “Welcome to Hell,” the demon said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It took Jenny most of the day following the storm to dig out. In this she was helped by her sister Sparrow and Sparrow’s husband and Bill, the yardman from the Hold, who came up with milk, cheese, and dried apples and to make sure she was well. “Aunt Umetty seems to think as you’d laid in the corner all this time and would need feedin’ with a spoon,” the sallow, lanky little servant said with a grin.

  Jenny, who had convinced herself that everyone in the Hold and the villages round about would stone her on sight, returned the smile shakily and said, “I hope you brought a spoon.”

  After days of sleep, of migraines and troubled dreams, the company made her feel better, more alive. Ian was better, Bill reported, though he slept a good deal, which wasn’t to be marveled at, poor lad. Bill hoped as Mistress Jenny wouldn’t be moved to do herself a harm, having had traffic with demons same as her boy. He said that John had ridden out by himself this very morning, as his father had used to do sometimes, then asked what Jenny thought of prospects for spring.

  Though Jenny quivered a little at the thought, she walked over to the Hold the following morning, a tiny brown-and-white figure in the bleak vastness of the snow-choked cranberry bog. As Bill had predicted, she found Ian asleep.

  “And I’ll not have you wake him,” Aunt Jane, who had insisted on walking up to the boy’s room with her, said. A big woman with thick dark hair slashed now with gray, Aunt Jane had never liked Jenny, though for years the two women had existed in a state of truce. Jane had said many times—as reported to Jenny over the years by various people whose business it wasn’t—that no good ever came of mixing with witchery, meaning that she had passionately loved her brother Lord Aver and had hated Kahiera Nightraven.