Книга - Knight of the Demon Queen

Knight of the Demon Queen
Barbara Hambly


The second follow-up to Barbara Hambly’s enormously successful Dragonsbane.John Aversin and Jenny have returned to the Winterlands, where Jenny’s depression has deepened. Unable to help their son, Ian, through his own grief over separation from his demon, she returns alone to Frost Fell. Then, together with the great Black Dragon Morkeleb, they journey south to investigate rumours that someone has been raising the dead.Meanwhile, John is drawn into a dangerous bargain with the Demon Queen, whose formidable powers force John to begin a journey that will take him through a series of magical and terrifying Hells.Soon, John finds himself embroiled in worlds where he is clearly out of his depth, worlds inhabited by malevolent demons whose dark agenda sees them imprisoning the souls of the innocent in a bid for complete domination of both Man and Dragon.








BARBARA HAMBLY




Knight of the Demon Queen










Contents


Cover (#ub7801f43-f155-5f32-8cab-3ddc56dea76b)

Title Page (#u9bf87f02-e513-5309-80d5-7ea8e4ac0f8f)

Chapter 1 (#ufd40c664-2d3d-58c1-9968-2c91b0eda06b)

Chapter 2 (#u6c1a9236-d407-5200-8e04-2a06986f7335)

Chapter 3 (#u5eab3f1b-910e-5273-8695-50c757a3cd0f)

Chapter 4 (#u150174df-e2bc-596a-8961-e3db4ce3a238)

Chapter 5 (#ue54b1637-a096-58aa-9c12-b777cf4a05ed)

Chapter 6 (#ua71a7b7f-d46a-56d8-8579-a04c2ce09a9f)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Chapter 1 (#ulink_770c951f-f976-5128-beb5-327e3273b063)


Jenny Waynest’s son Ian took poison on the night of winter’s first snowfall. He was thirteen.

She was dreaming about the demon when it happened. The demon was called Amayon, beautiful as the night and the morning, and she had dreamed of him every night since fall, when his possession of her had ended. While her soul was imprisoned in a pale green crystal, he had inhabited her flesh and done such things as still made her wake weeping, or screaming, or speaking his name out of a longing so desperate she thought she would die of it.

In daylight the grief of his loss, and her shame at that grief, occupied her mind against her will, to the exclusion of all other things. Otherwise she would have seen—she hoped she would have seen—the pain and horror growing in her son’s eyes.

This night there was a part of her that knew where Ian was. In her dream she saw him in the small stone house on Frost Fell—the house that had been her master Caerdinn’s up to the old man’s death. Later Jenny had lived there, until she had gone with Lord John Aversin, Thane of the Winterlands and her lover of ten years, to live at Alyn Hold. Asleep in their bed at the Hold now, she saw their son in the old stone house, saw him descend the stair from the loft and with a glance, as wizards could, kindle the wood on the hearth.

He shouldn’t be there, she thought. It was past midnight and the snow had been falling since just before dark. He shouldn’t be there.

Rest, Amayon’s voice whispered. Sleepy dreams are better than plans and schemes.

Her consciousness drifted away.

Ever since the magics of the Demon Queen Aohila had taken Amayon from her, Jenny had tried to decide whether the pain she felt was a memory that Amayon had left or whether he spoke to her still. Sometimes she thought that she could hear his voice, gentle and trusting as a child’s, though he was Aohila’s prisoner behind the Mirror of Isychros. At other times she guessed that the coaxing sweetness, the hurtful mocking, were only a poison he’d left to make her suffer. How like him, she thought, and she did not know if she thought it fondly or with hatred.

Maybe both.

People who survived possession weren’t the same afterward.

Her mind returned to her son. He sat beside the hearth, his head bowed, thin fingers twisting at his dark hair.

She remembered her own pain when the demon who’d possessed her had been driven out.

At least he still has magic.

The loss of Jenny’s magic, as a result of the final battle with the demons, had been the worst of all.

You saved them, the sweet soft voice whispered in her mind: like Amayon’s voice, though sometimes it sounded like her own. You fought the demons for your son, and for Lord John, and for the Regent of the Realm. You did just as you ought. Yet you lost everything. How fair is that?

The image came to her of Ian casually brushing aside her spells of ward, running his hands over the terra-cotta pots of her poisons in the brassy dull firelight, but the vision melted with her resentment and her grief. Sleepy dreams, the voice coaxed. Lovely sleepy dreams. Of Amayon. Of magic.

She saw Ian open a pot that she knew contained monkshood. Saw him dip his fingers into the coarse powder.

Perhaps you’ll find the magic again within your beautiful heart.

The sweet voice lured her back to her dream, where she lay in the great bed in the Hold with John breathing soft beside her. His beaky face was turned away; he was clerkish and shortsighted and middle-aged, and nothing like the great thanes who had ruled the Winterlands before him, save for his scars.

Dreaming, she broke open her own ribs and tore her chest apart, as the demon had suggested. She saw her heart, which in her dream was wrought of a thousand crystals, scarlet and crimson and pink. Dreaming, she lifted it out. Blood gummed her fingers together as she fumbled for its catch, as if her heart were a box. The catch was a diamond, like a single poisoned tear.

Fascinated, she watched her heart unfurl in all directions, as if in opening the box she had somehow folded herself inside it. Within it she was, curiously, once again in the curtained bed with John, in a warm frowst of worn quilts and moth-holed furs. Like mirrors within mirrors she saw the scarred husk of her own body, burned in the final battle when she had pinned the demon-ridden renegade mage Cara-doc with a harpoon beneath the sea: hair burned away, eyelashes burned away—magic burned away.

John lay beside her, twined in the arms of the Demon Queen.

“Don’t wake her,” the Queen whispered, and giggled like a schoolgirl. She was beautiful, as Jenny had never been beautiful: tall and slim, with breasts like ripe melons and coal-black jeweled hair. She traced on John’s bare flesh the silvery marks it had borne when he’d returned from the Hell behind the mirror, marks that could occasionally be seen in the light of the earthly moon. Then she pressed her lips to the pit of his throat, where a small fresh scar lay like a burn.

She laughed huskily when John cupped her breasts in his hands.

“Let him be!”

Jenny’s cry waked her. Like falling through a chain of mirrors, she fell from the imagined tower and imagined bed to the real ones and sat bolt upright, the air icy in her lungs. Beside her, John slept still.

He dreams of her. Rage washed from Jenny all thought of that other dream, the dream of Ian hunting among the ensorceled poison pots at Frost Fell. Laughs at me with her while I sleep.

Her cry had not waked him, and that made her angry, too. Hating him, she rolled from the bed and through the heavy curtains. The tower chamber was cramped and fusty: table and chest and large areas of the floor littered with John’s books. He had a formidable library, laboriously collected from the ruins of crumbling towns, copied, collated, begged, and borrowed. Since summer’s end, when they had returned from the South, John had been reading everything he could get his hands on concerning demons and melancholy and the silent sicknesses of the heart.

As if, Jenny thought angrily, he can cure Ian by reading!

But that was always John’s answer.

His armor lay among the books: a battered doublet of black leather, spiked and plated with iron and chain; dented pauldrons and a close-fitting helm; longsword and shortsword and a couple of fine Southern cavalry blades; spectacles with bent silver-wire frames; and a pair of muddy boots. Rocklys of Galyon, whose machinations to rule the Realm had set in motion last summer’s terrible events, had stripped the Winterlands of its garrisons: John was back riding patrol, as he had done most of his adult life.

He had little time these days to give his son.

And less, Jenny thought, to give to her.

Fingers stiff with scars, she shoved up the latch of the heavy shutters and stood gazing into darkness only a degree less heavy than that in the room. Snow covered the bare fields, the bare moor beyond. The smell of the sky calmed her, dispelled the envenomed miasma of her dreams.

Ian. The dream of him stirred at the edge of her thoughts.

Sleepy dreams. The sweet voice whispered and pulled at her heart. Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes. Somehow it sounded rational, true in its simplicity, like a nursery song.

When she’d left the bed, the burning heat of the change of life had been warming her flesh, but that fled away now and her limbs were cold. Better to return to bed and the comfort of her dreams.

“Jen?”

The cold from the window must have waked John. Anger and resentment burned her. She wanted to be alone with her wretchedness and her grief.

“You were dreaming of her, weren’t you?” Her voice snapped in her own ears, black ice breaking underfoot and miles of freezing water beneath. She spat the words back at him over her shoulder. She knew that he stood next to the bed, wrapped in one of its shabby furs, long hair hanging to his shoulders as he blinked in her direction, seeing nothing.

And just as well, she thought bitterly. Face and scalp and body scarred by demon fire and poisoned steam, and scarred within by the heats and migraines and malaises of the change of a woman’s life. Better he be half blind and in darkness than see me as I am.

“I can’t help me dreams, Jen.” He sounded tired. They’d fought before going to bed. And yesterday, and the day before.

“Then don’t deny me mine.”

“I wouldn’t,” John retorted, “if dreams was all they were. But you had a demon within you …”

“And you believe them, don’t you?” Jenny swung around, trembling. “Believe those people who say that anyone who has been taken by a demon should be killed? That’s what all those books of yours say, isn’t it?”

“Not all.” There was a warrant out in the South for his life for trafficking with the Demon Queen. Had Rocklys of Galyon not taken the Kong’s troops from the North to fuel her demon-inspired rebellion, he might already have been executed.

“Is that what you want?” She struck at him with her words as if it were he, and not the archdemon Folcalor’s final outpouring of magic, that had robbed her of her power. “To kill me, as the books say? To kill Ian, for something neither of us wanted, for something that happened against our wills?”

He was a man who had grown up keeping his thoughts to himself, and he said nothing now.

“I was taken trying to save him!” she cried into his silence. She had a sweet small voice: gravel veined with silver. It sounded brittle to her now, and shrill. “For trying to save him, for trying to save you, and all these precious people of yours around here! This is what came of it! I hated the demon!”

“Yet you did every damn thing you could to keep me from sending it away behind the mirror.” There was an edge of anger to his quiet words. “And you’ve been mourning it since.”

“You don’t understand.” Jenny had learned that it was possible to hate and love the same thing at the same time.

“I understand that neither you nor my son has eaten nor slept well for months, and that as far as I’ve been able to see you haven’t done a hand’s turn to help him.”

You don’t understand, she wanted to say again. To scream the words at him until he knew what she felt. But instead she lashed at him, “Your son?” How dare he?

And at the same time she thought, Ian, and her mind snatched at shredded images of a boy sitting in despair beside a hearth. She remembered stick-thin white hands tracing away wards from jars on a shelf.

“Well, you never did want him, did you?” The resentment, the buried rage, of all those years of her uncertainty spurted up in his voice. “And if you’d been here in the first place when Caradoc showed up—”

“If you wanted a woman here during the years I was seeking my own magic, John,” Jenny said with harsh and deadly sarcasm, “I can only say you should have convinced one of your regiment of village lightskirts to bear you a child. Any one of them would have.”

“Papa?” The door hinge creaked. A yellow thread of candlelight fluttered, illumined the sturdy eight-year-old in the doorway: face, hands, rufous hair, and bright sharp brown eyes all the mimic of John’s burly father. He’d girded his small sword over his nightshirt: A man must go armed, he liked to say. “Ian’s gone.”

Jenny led them to Frost Fell. The moment her second son, her little ruffian Adric, had spoken, her dream rushed back to her and she knew where Ian was and what he sought. Snow fell steadily as they saddled the horses, Jenny’s scarred fingers fumbling half frozen with buckles and reins until she wanted to scream and strike everyone around her for being so slow. The air was filled with drifting white as they crossed over Toadback Hill, and the horses skidded on the ice of the cranberry bog.

They found Ian outside the little house, unconscious. By the tracks, he’d crawled there in delirium, but the snow already lay over him like a shroud. John and Sergeant Muffle, John’s bailiff and blacksmith and bastard older brother, fed the dying fire in the hearth and dragged the bed over beside it while Jenny worked desperately to mix an antidote, to force saline water down her son’s throat, to induce vomiting and keep him warm. All the while she cursed, for the one thing that would surely drag him back from the shadowlands where he now walked—the magic of her healing—was gone.

Looking up, she saw this, too, in John’s eyes.

“You knew he was here.” He sounded numb, like he couldn’t believe any of this was taking place.

“I saw him in a dream.” Between them the boy’s white face was slack, shut eyes sunk in bistered hollows of pain.

And you didn’t think to mention it to me. She could all but hear his thought. But he only looked away and brought more water to bathe his son’s face. Frantic, Jenny traced the marks of healing, the runes of life, on her son’s forehead and chest and hands. In her mind she drew first the limitations and the power lines, then the summoning of power, the calling of the magic from her bones and her heart, from the stars above the sullen cloud and the water beneath the earth, as she had done all her life.

But it was only words. The sparkly slips of fire that she’d felt in her days of small power and small learning, the great golden river of fire that had been hers when the dragon whose life she had saved had given her the gift of dragon magic, the gorgeous envenomed rainbow of demon power—all these were gone. She was just a middle-aged woman repeating nonsense words in her mind, hoping that her son would not die.

And thinking, in spite of all she could do, of the demon she had lost.

In the black cold before dawn, when John went out to fetch more wood and Sergeant Muffle dozed by the blood-colored pulse of the hearth, Jenny stretched across the furs and wept, whispering a prayer to the God of Women: Do not let him die. Do not let him die.

The hollow within her yawned to a chasm that would swallow the world, her soul, and John, Ian, and Jenny together, leaving nothing. Do not let him die.

Like the touch of an insect’s feelers on her scarred scalp, she felt the brush of her son’s finger. Ian whispered—or perhaps only thought—“Folcalor.” And then, “I will not go.”

Even in her extremity, before she passed over into sleep, Jenny thought it curious. Folcalor was not the demon who had possessed Ian’s body and imprisoned Ian’s soul.

Folcalor was the archdemon who had whispered to the mage Caradoc in dreams. Once in possession of Caradoc’s flesh, he’d had the magic to open the doors to Hell, to bring through the other Sea-wights—wights who in turn had enslaved dragons and wizards alike.

When Jenny dreamed of that time, she dreamed of Amayon. She assumed Ian dreamed of his own jailer, lover, rapist, master: a minor gyre called Gothpys.

But it was Folcalor she saw now in dreams.

The wizard Caradoc’s body was gone. She had slain him beneath the sea, and fish had devoured his flesh. Dreaming, she saw Folcalor as she’d always known he looked: a bloated soft thing of quicksilver and green fire in which the half-digested glowing remains of other Hellspawn fitfully moved. His eyes were like fire seen through colored glass: cold and intelligent, as a pig’s are intelligent, or a rat’s: uncaring. Her flesh crept, as it had during the days of her imprisonment, seeing him for what he was.

Intelligence and patience and power. Power beyond any demon she’d encountered or heard of, even in John’s ancient lore; power not only to shove aside the spells and exorcisms of a trained mage, but to devour that mage through the magic itself. Not in a thousand years, according to the lore, had demons of such power existed.

A thousand years ago they had been vanquished, but no one knew how.

Now they had returned. No one knew why.

In his hands-hands of human flesh, she saw, small and stubby and crusted thick with rings-he held the sapphire in which Ian’s soul had been imprisoned, the sapphire Jenny had herself cast into the River Wildspae when she’d returned her son’s soul to his flesh.

The demon looked at her and smiled.

In the morning John’s aunts arrived. His father’s bossy brood of sisters-Jane and Rowan and Umetty—and Rowan’s daughters Dilly and Rowanberry, and Muffle’s mother Holly, who had been old Lord Aver’s mistress for years, lived at the Hold in their assorted states of spinsterhood and widowhood, running the Winterlands as they had run it in John’s father’s time. Aunt Jane brought eggs and a milk pudding, and brandy to bathe her great-nephew’s hands and feet; Rowan and Dilly brought clean sheets and pillows. They wrapped the boy and put hot bricks about him to warm him, pushing Jenny aside as if she were a scullery maid. Though it was quite clear that he heard nothing, Aunt Umetty told the boy endless stories that she generally told to her dogs, and she sang him the little songs she sang to them.

Jenny retreated to a corner of the hearth, willing herself not to be seen. She understood why Ian had taken the poison, and she thought about taking it herself. They all seemed very distant from her. Certainly they seemed less real than her memories of what it had been like to be beautiful and powerful and able to do exactly as she pleased. She knew that this was not right, yet she could not do anything about this part of her thoughts.

Snow fell again in the afternoon and drifted high against the stone walls. The grooms who’d come with the aunts brought shovels from the stable and labored to keep the yard clear. Jenny wondered once or twice, Why Folcalor? Then the darkness that pressed her heart overcame her again, and she retreated to sleepy dreams.

The following day Ian opened his eyes. He said, “Yes,” and, “No,” in a blistered whisper when John spoke to him, no more inflection in his voice than it had had since the demon had been driven out of him. Then the wind came up in the afternoon, flaying the land and driving the snow into drifts. It was best, John said, propping his spectacles more firmly on his long nose, that they go soon, for he knew bandits were abroad even in the bitter world of winter.

While the grooms brought out the other horses, with the wind tearing manes and plaids and blankets, Jenny took her mare Moon Horse from the stable and saddled her. There was a great boiling of people in the yard just then, and John was entirely occupied with making sure Ian was wrapped warm. Jenny had no magic anymore, but long years of living in the Winterlands with only slight powers had taught her to see when people turned their heads. As aunts and grooms and John and Muffle rode out of the yard, she led Moon Horse back into the stable and unsaddled her, and from the little attic window she watched them ride away across the moor. Snow filled their tracks before they were even out of sight.

In the ballads of the great heroes, she thought, watching them go-Alkmar the Godborn or Selkythar Dragonsbane or Öontes of the Golden Harp-the heroes frequently sustained injuries in slaying the dragon or overcoming the cave monsters or outwitting the evil mage. So they must, for there is no sacrifice unless blood is shed. But they survived and came home, and everything was as it was before, only happier.

No desolation. No regret. No wounds that cannot heal.

Part of her thought, Oh, John.

And another whispered Amayon’s name.

She went down the ladder and built up the fire in the hearth again and found food the aunts had left. She made herself a little soup but didn’t eat it. She only sat, wrapped in a quilt, watching the fire and seeing nothing in it but flame and memory.

Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes.

She slept and dreamed of the demon still.




Chapter 2 (#ulink_191ada39-9d70-5c19-aaed-f40e00d19aed)


“Lord Aversin.”

John woke with a start. His son’s hand was cold in his. The fire in the tower bedroom had almost died. The Hold was silent below.

The Demon Queen was in the room.

She looked the way she’d looked when he’d gone into the Hell that lay behind the burning mirror, away in the South in what had been the city of Ernine: a slim long-legged woman with a face that combined a girl’s fresh beauty with the wise sardonic wit of thirty. Her black hair was an asymmetrical coiled universe of braids and ringlets and rolls strung with pearls and jewel-headed pins. Things lived in it. He sometimes saw them move.

Her eyes were gold and had squarish, horizontal pupils like a goat’s. She had a magic that she used to keep him from noticing this—magic and the fact that her peach-perfect breasts were defended by a silk drape no thicker than a breath of smoke. He was further aware that her whole appearance was a sham, a spell, a garment that she wore. Without knowing quite how he knew, he knew what she really looked like, and this turned him sick with terror.

Her name was Aohila.

She smiled with her red lips and said, “John.”

“Better stand on the rug.” With one foot he scooted it toward her, a much-mangled sheepskin that the cats hid twigs and bird feet under when they weren’t concealing them among the quilts on the bed. “Me Aunt Jane’ll be up in a minute and make you wear slippers. She don’t hold with bare feet even in summer.” He fumbled on his spectacles, feeling better for being able to see her clearly. “Sorry about the star you sent me for, and the dragon’s tears, and all that.”

He saw her face change, anger like a holocaust of summer lightning in those yellow eyes at the reminder of how he’d tricked her when he paid the tithe he owed her for the spells she’d given to save Ian and Jenny. The snakes—or whatever they were—stirred eyelessly in her hair and opened their small toothed mouths.

“You’re a clever man, Lord John.” The seductive note vanished from her voice. She ignored the sheepskin; instead she came to stand by the bed before him, close enough that she could put her hands on either side of his face. His grip tightened on Ian’s fingers. Not, he thought, that he could do a single thing to stop her from hurting his son, but he felt better with his body between her and Ian. “I appreciate cleverness.”

“You’re one of damn few, then.” He kept his voice steady and his eyes looking up into hers. “Me dad didn’t. ‘Don’t you be clever with me,’ he’d say, and I’d get the buckle end of his belt; he’d only get wilder if I asked, ‘Do you want me to be stupid?’ But of course I did ask, so maybe I wasn’t so gie clever after all.” As with her appearance, her smell was sometimes human and seductive, and sometimes something else.

She got out from behind the mirror somehow, he thought, blind with panic. And then, No. This is a dream.

Like all those other dreams.

He couldn’t breathe.

“I can heal your son,” she said.

She spoke offhandedly, not even looking at Ian, as if she offered to use her influence with a friend to secure the pick of a skilled herd dog’s litter.

“Me Aunt Jane says he’ll live.” Demons always wanted something from you. That was what the ancient lore said, and he had found it to be so. Wanted something from you and would promise something in return.

“I can cure his heart,” she said. “Close up the wound the demon Gothpys left in him. It isn’t much. Gothpys is my prisoner—” And she smiled with evil reminiscence, “—but I know his voice still whispers in your son’s dreams.”

He took her wrists and pushed her from him. Still, he did not rise from the stool on which he sat, or dreamed that he sat, beside the bed. Fat Kitty and Skinny Kitty, who had been sleeping on the coverlet when the Demon Queen entered, peered now from the bedchamber’s darkest corner, mashed together into a single silent terrified ball.

“That makes about as much sense as tryin’ to drink yourself sober,” he said quietly. “Hell heal when he learns how to heal from the hurt the demon laid on him. Not before.” It was hard to speak the words, for he knew that Gothpys and Amayon and all the other demons who’d possessed Folcalor’s slave mages were this creature’s prisoners now He didn’t clearly understand the machinations within and between Hell and Hell, Demon Lord and Demon Lord, but he’d heard how the Sea-wights had screamed when they’d been taken into the Hell behind the mirror.

“Your touch will only put him in greater danger. I may be no more than a soldier and not such a very clever one at that, but I know there’s things that bring naught but grief, and makin’ bargains with demons, even in me dreams, is one of ’em. Now get out.”

Her voice was broken glass. “You owe me.”

“I paid you.”

“With gifts that melted into smoke or were only tricks of words.”

“You asked for a piece of a star, and I gave you some of what a star is truly made of: light. You asked for a dragon’s tears, and you didn’t say I shouldn’t put ’em in a bottle that would evaporate and consume them before you could use ’em to make a gate into this world for your wights to come through. You asked for a gift from one who hated me, thinkin’ I’d fail to get one and become your servant here, so you could feed on the souls of men and women like Southern gourmets feedin’ on baby ducks.”

He tried to shut from his mind the demon light he’d seen in Jenny’s eyes and the obscene evil he’d watched her do. But he knew the demon saw it in his face. “And with what I’ve seen of the way you get into the heart and the skin and the brains of those you deal with, I don’t blame those who’ve a warrant for me for traffickin’ with your lot. I’d turn meself in if it wasn’t me.”

She stepped back from him while he spoke, but still she could have put out her hand and touched him, or he her; she stood with her garments—if they were garments—lifting and floating about her as if on the breath of some hot exhalation that he himself could not feel. Her spells of lust, of wanting, stroked him, clouding his mind like a perfume.

“Well, I won’t be your lover, and I won’t be your slave. Not in the world, not in me dreams—nothing. So you might as well go home and torture the other little demons in Hell, and let me take care of my son.”

“I can bring Jenny back to you.”

It was like an incautious step on a broken foot—he didn’t think her words concerning Jenny would hurt that much. He saw Jenny’s eyes again, across Ian’s waxy face; saw the set of her shoulders, braced against whatever he should say or think. Saw himself, blind with grief and rage and anxiety, not thinking that she would feel all those things, too.

“If she didn’t come back on her own, it wouldn’t be Jenny.”

The Demon Queen said nothing. On the hearth John saw how the flames had turned low and blue, as if the very nature of air were changed. The shadows of the chest, the table, and the heaped books and tumbled scrolls and note tablets dimmed and loomed and ran together, and he could hear his own breath, and Ian’s: a slow desperate drag as if the boy struggled with horrors in his sleep. He wondered—as he always wondered—if the Demon Queen wore her own form when he wasn’t looking at her.

“John,” she said, and he looked back at her quickly. Almost it seemed he caught her shape changing just enough to know that she had.

“Look at your son.”

Ian’s hand burned in his. As the fire licked up brighter again, unnaturally brighter, he saw the boy’s swollen tongue protruding from lips gone purple with blood. Even as he looked, brown spots formed under the clear thin skin, as if the blood vessels were dissolving in the flesh. Blisters bulged taut and yellow around the mouth and on the neck. Ian cried out in his sleep, weeping in pain, and kicked and clawed at the blankets.

“Stop it,” John said softly. “This is only a dream, but stop it.”

“You think I’m powerless in this world, Aversin,” the Demon Queen said, “because I and my kind cannot cross through the gate without being summoned from this side. But there are little gates everywhere that open now and now, and the season of demons is on the world. My hand is long and it is stronger than you think.”

He stood and, catching her by the arms, thrust her back from the bed. Her body was light, as Jenny’s was, but there was something about the weight of it, and its relationship to the softness of her flesh, that was wrong. He felt it as he shook her, and the things in her hair put forth their heads and hissed at him from among the darkness and the jewels.

“Get out of here.”

She only looked at him full with those terrible eyes.

“Get out of here!”

He hurled her from him, then turned and pressed his forehead to the carved bedpost until the graven leaves and flowers dug into his flesh. He could hear Ian crying moaning as the fever consumed him, but he kept his eyes shut tight, willing himself not to see either his son or the Demon Queen. This is a dream. A dream. A dream.

He woke trembling on his feet, holding the bedpost, weak with shock and bathed in sweat. The flames had sunk low in the hearth, but only because the log was nearly consumed. The warm amber light was normal after the glare and blackness of his dream. Ian slept, and the hand that lay outside the shadows of the bed-curtain relaxed, its skin unmarred. Skinny Kitty raised her little triangular head to regard John in sleepy inquiry; Fat Kitty dozed, a mammoth lump of ruffled gray somnolence.

John looked back at the hearth. The sheepskin rug had been moved, and lay where he’d kicked it toward the Demon Queen’s bare alabaster feet.

The next day John sent out a five-man troop of militia under the command of Ams Puggle, whose turn it was to ride patrol with him, without too much misgiving: Puggle was a stolid young man who didn’t think quickly in emergencies, but this was ordinarily a quiet time of year.

Still, this was not an ordinary year, and guilt tormented him—guilt at sending his men out while he stayed behind, and guilt at not doing more for his son.

He brought an armload of books down and sat by Ian while the boy slept, waking him twice from dreams that left him shaking with terror but about which he could not be brought to speak. After a time Ian lay quiet, smiling if required to do so and thanking him, but terrifyingly distant, as if the words were spoken through a small window by someone prisoned in an unimaginable room.

Throughout that day John combed his books for mention of demons and how he might keep his son safe.

What he found was not encouraging. According to Garnering Pellus’ Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World, demons could take the form of mice and rats and slip into the beds of their victims while they slept, although it was not clear how the ancient scholar knew this. Polyborus’ Jurisprudence said that demons could take on the seeming of household members and kill children or betray husbands with nobody the wiser, at least not at the time. An old ballad the Regent Gareth had played for him detailed how demons disguised themselves as candies, cakes, and tarts, so the king of an ancient land ate them and became possessed, and perversely this tune jingled in his head for the rest of the afternoon.

Peaches and prunes,

Sugarplum moons,

And mountains of glorious cheese.

Polyborus listed eight ways of killing those who had dealings with the Hellspawn, depending on whether they were still possessed, had been possessed, or had merely made bargains with wights. Demons could enter a corpse and do terrible mischief between the time life was extinct and the body destroyed, he said, so it was important that the culprit be burned or dismembered alive.

John recalled clearly the smell of the oil on the pyre they’d prepared for him, and the way Ector of Sindestray, treasurer of the Southern Council, had smiled when the old King had ordered John put to death.

Demons destroyed trust. You never knew, afterward, where you were with one who had dealings with them. You never knew to whom you were speaking.

Jenny. The ache in his heart overwhelmed him as he looked out across the moor from the tower window and saw the thin gray smudge of smoke rising above Frost Fell. Jenny.

Despite the snow, and the days growing cold and darkness, he thought of going there. But though Ian seemed a little better, still he felt uneasy at leaving him. Nor could he put from his mind Jenny’s desperate and dreadful silence, silence from which, apparently, she could not even reach to help her son. Nor could he forget his love. There was a time when he would have gone on harrowing himself, forcing meetings with her, trying stubbornly to cut through the wall around her, but he saw with strange clarity that there was nothing he could do.

He could only trust that wherever she had gone, she would come back.

Puggle and his men returned the following forenoon, frosted to the eyebrows and grumbling. No sign of bandits or wolves, nor of the Iceriders who raided two winters out of three from the lands beyond the mountains. They’d checked with the depleted garrison at Skep Dhû, and the commander-a corporal promoted when all the troops had been drawn off to join Rocklys of Galyon’s attempt to conquer the South—said the same. Corporal Avalloch also reported that yet another message had come from the King’s councilor Ector of Sindestray, ordering him to arrest John Aversin on charges of trafficking with demons and put him to death.

“You think Avalloch’d agree to send a message to this Ector bloke telling him that’s what he’d done?” Muffle inquired from his seat on the big table in the kitchen where the patrol had come to drink hot ale and report.

“I asked him already,” John said, breathing on his spectacles and rubbing them on a towel, for the kitchen was far warmer than any other room in the Hold. “I even pointed out as how it’d be a savin’ of money for the council, in that they wouldn’t always be sendin’ messengers. Avalloch just gave me those fishy eyes and said, ‘I could not do that, Lord Aversin.’

“Anythin’ else?” he added, turning back to Puggle.

“Only sickness,” the corporal said, “over at Werehove Farm.”

Warm as the kitchen was, John felt suddenly cold.

I can heal your son. And, My hand is long.

“Ema Werehove was near frantic when she spoke to us. She said it was nothin’ she’d ever seen nor heard of: fever, and sores on his lips—Druff it is who’s sick—and brown spots that spread if you touch them. Should we ride out to the Fell and fetch Mistress Jenny, d’you think? Your Aunt Jane was tellin’ me all’s not right with her either …”

Puggle’s words washed over him, barely heard.

“Did she say when Druff had been took sick?” John’s voice sounded odd in his own ears, as if it belonged to someone else.

“Night before last, she said. Close to dawn.”

Within hours of his dream of the Demon Queen.

“Where you goin’?” Puggle asked as his thane paused in the doorway only long enough to gather up his winter plaids and his heaviest sheepskin jacket.

“Get Bill to saddle Battlehammer.”

“You’re mad, Johnny,” Muffle protested. “It’s comin’ on to storm before midnight!”

“I’ll ride fast.”

Werehove Farm lay in a tiny pocket of arable land, under the backbone of the Wolf Hills, close by the spreading desolation of Wraith-mire Marsh. Aversin shivered as he rode past the marsh, for even in the cloud-thinned sunlight it had a dreary look. No sign now of the fey lights that jigged across the brown pools and root-clotted black streamlets once the sun was down. Nothing but silence, though on five or six occasions John had heard the whisperers calling to him from the marshes, at evening in Jenny’s voice, or Ian’s—once in his father’s.

They live on pain, Garnering Pellus said in his Encyclopedia, and John knew how true this was. Pain and terror and rage, lust and guilt and shame. They drank those emotions like dark nutty Winterlands beer. Cut your wrist in the Wraithmire, and the glowing little whisperers—the stoats and foxes of the Hellspawn, compared to the tigers like the Queen—would come round to drink the blood. Weep there, and you would see them seeping out of the ground to lap your tears.

And they’d tease and twist and lure to increase those intoxicating delights. If humans were not available, they would torment cats or pigs or anything whose blood and fear would warm their coldness, feed their hunger for life.

Maybe the Demon Queen had offered to heal Ian only to sup on the surge of hope and grief and pain her words had brought.

“Cannot Mistress Jenny come?” Ema, matriarch of the Werehove clan, asked, meeting him in the stable yard wrapped in sheepskins and scarves. The light had sickened, and harsh wind yanked at John’s hair and plaids, tore at the woman’s gray braids as she led him toward the thick-walled stone house. “I’d heard she was hurt and not able to do magic as she used. But she’ve still the knowledge of herbs, and sickness, and worse things belike. This is an ill such as we’ve never seen, and it’s eating Druff up alive.”

Druff Werehove, Ema’s oldest son, lay in the loft, his bed set against the chimney. A few candles burned around him, and Winna, his wife, knelt by him bathing his face. As he climbed the loft stairs, John smelled stale blood and sickness. He stopped, looking down at the man—one of his militia, and with his brothers the core of the little farmstead—and felt sickness clutch his own breast. For he was as Puggle had described him: His face was blistered around the mouth and across the nose and forehead, and his arms and breast were spotted with brown. His swollen tongue filled his mouth so that he could barely breathe, and his thick gasping was dreadful to hear.

“He’s burnin’ up.” Winna raised frantic eyes to her mother-in-law. Her hand trembled as she sponged her husband’s face again. “Burnin’ up. And Metty from over Fell Farm, she tells me her girl’s down with this here, too. Cannot Mistress Jenny come?”

“I’ll tell her.” John’s heart shrank up to a coal inside him, a black nubbin of dread. “As soon as I return to the Hold.”

But it was night, and storm was coming on hard when he crossed the drawbridge again. And in any case he knew whence the sickness came, and how it could be ended.

Muffle met him in the courtyard, wrapped to the eyes in plaids and leaning against the beating wind. “There’s fever in the village,” he said, “two cases of it. Blisters on the face, and brown spots. We sent for Mistress Jenny, but by that time the snow was too bad to get near the Fell.”

“Anyone here down with it?” In John’s mind he saw Ian, writhing and sobbing. Everything seemed to have gone blank within him, beyond thought or reasoning. Only, he thought, I’ll kill her if she’s harmed him. Demon or not I’ll destroy her somehow, though it cost my life.

“Not yet.” The smith led the horse back to the stable, John stumbling behind. They stripped Battlehammer of his saddle by the light of a wavering flare, then John went up the tower stairs two at a time, shedding his wet plaids and sheepskin coat as he went. There was a part of him that did not want to reach the door of his room.

But Ian lay propped in the shadows of the bed, and something altered in the blank blue gaze as John came through the door. “Papa?”

“You all right, Son?” And he cursed himself for the offhand tone in his voice-offhand, as he’d had to be about everything when he was a child Ian’s age and younger, fighting not to let his own father crush him inside.

Ian nodded and let himself be embraced. He started to speak, as if to remark on the cold that still clung to the metal plates of John’s rough leather doublet and to his snow-flecked hair, but then did not. John didn’t know whether this was something the demon had done to him—this trick of reconsideration, of backing down from any speech, as if fearing it would reveal or disarm or obligate him—or whether it was a thing of his years, or perhaps only of his self. Still Ian held onto his arm for a moment, the first reassurance he had sought, his face pressed to the grubby sleeve.

And John fought not to say, Why did you take the poison? Why didn’t you speak to me?

Uncharacteristically it was Ian who broke the silence. He coughed, his voice still barely a thread. “I heard Muffle talking about fever …”

Of course he would. He had a mage’s senses, which could pick up the murmur of voices in the kitchen three floors below.

“Should I get up and go down to the village?”

“In a while.” John sat on the edge of the bed. A protesting meep sounded beneath the quilts, and one of the humped covers moved. John wanted to say, Your mother can handle it, but he let the words go. He suspected Jenny would be helpless against this illness, and Ian also.

In any event this was the first interest Ian had shown in anything since his return to the North.

“It doesn’t sound like any of the fevers I’ve read about in Mother’s books.” Ian sank against the pillows, exhausted by the effort of sitting up, and Skinny Kitty emerged from beneath the comforters to sit on his chest. “Tonight could you bring down from the library what you have about diseases? There has to be some cause.”

“Aye,” John said softly, knowing the cause. “Aye, son. I’ll do that.”

He remained until Ian slept again. It wasn’t long. Even after the boy’s eyes slipped closed John stayed seated beside the bed, holding his hand. Watching the too-thin face in its tangled frame of black hair, the wasted fingers twined with his own. Remembering the child Jenny had borne but had not wanted to raise—the child she had left at the Hold for him when she returned to Frost Fell to meditate, to concentrate, to patiently strive at increasing her small abilities in magic to the level of true power. He saw again the demon fire in the boy’s eyes as Ian was drawn toward the dragon Centhwevir, already under the wizard Caradoc’s control.

Where had these demons been for a thousand years? ‘he wondered, riffling Skinny Kitty’s gray fur. It had been that long since spawn from the Hell behind the burning mirror had destroyed Ernine, that long since the mages of the forgotten city of Prokeps had summoned Sea-wights to aid them in what human magic couldn’t do alone. Fighting wars among themselves and leaving humankind at the mercy of the smaller pooks and gyres, which could be cast out or guarded against with a spell?

Why a thousand years ago?

Why now?

Gently he disengaged his hand from Ian’s and peered into the boy’s face. His son slept calmly, something he had seldom done since he was a child. Skinny Kitty purred drowsily and kneaded with her paws.

I can cure your son.

John blew out the candles by the bed and by the fire’s dim glow crossed the room to seek the steps that led to his library.

Asleep before the hearth, Jenny dreamed of Amayon. Dreams of him—of his love and of the power he’d given her—were so much easier than waking now.

She dreamed of the mirror chamber in the ruins of Ernine in the South, of John standing before the blacked-over doorway of the glass with the seven spikes of crystal and quicksilver that Caradoc had used to dominate and control the dragons. With the spikes lay seven vessels—seashells, snuff bottles, hollowed-out stones—containing the Hellspawned spirits that had possessed the mages: old Bliaud, Ian, the two Icerider children Summer and Werecat, the witch girl Yseult, little Miss Enk the gnomewife … And herself.

She could have sketched from memory every bump and spike and curve of the seashell that prisoned Amayon. It was the only one that she had truly seen. The only thing that she truly thought about.

It, and Amayon’s screams when Aohila had taken those fourteen spirits behind the mirror, to torture them for eternity.

In her mind she heard again Amayon’s desperate pleading, telling her how the mirror demons hated the Sea-wights, how they could never die, could never be free of pain. She had hated John then for giving them over, and the hatred stirred anew, drawing her mind back to its old circular paths.

Drawing it aside from the fact that there should have been eight vessels there, not seven.

Folcalor, Ian had said.

And, I will not go.

In the first second of waking, Jenny thought, Folcalor wasn’t taken. Folcalor wasn’t sent behind the mirror. He was the demon who possessed Caradoc, the rebel demon who started this whole affair …

And then a voice whispered in her mind, Sleepy dreams, Jenny. Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes. It’s all over now.

She saw John’s eyes looking at her across Ian’s body and wanted only to sleep again.

Snow had piled thick before the house door. She made herself get up and slipped through a tiny passway from the kitchen that let her into the stable. There she fed Moon Horse and mucked out her stall, her numb hands crooked as bird claws around rake and hay fork. The effort exhausted her, and without eating or washing-it seemed too much effort even to boil water for gruel—she returned to her quilts and the comfort of her dreams.

All care for her life seemed to have dried with her menses. The symptoms she had once kept at bay with her spells returned to tear at her, so she could not rest. Blind with migraine, she crept about her few tasks like an old woman, feeding the fire and boiling a little snow water to drink.

In her memories Amayon was still with her. Magic flowed in her veins.

Let your magic go, Morkeleb had said to her, Morkeleb the Black, the dragon of Nast Wall.

Let your magic go.

She hadn’t known then that it would not come back.

In her dreams she saw him, beautiful beyond beauty: the black glittering specter in the darkness of the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun, the cold voice like the echo of far-off singing that spoke in the hollows of her mind. Know you not your own power. Wizard-woman? he had asked her once. Know you not what you could be?

And later, when he had begun to change, to become a dragon-shadow of smoke and starlight: I would that I could heal you, my friend, but this is not possible: I, who destroyed the Elder Droon and brought down the gnomes of Ylferdun to ruin, I cannot make so much as a single flower prosper when frost has set its touch upon it.

She saw him again, as she had seen him last: near invisible, beautiful, a ghost of peace and stillness, flying away to the North. Not sleepy dreams, she thought, but clarity, an acceptance of time and change.

Waking she felt still the deep peace of his presence. Wind screamed around the walls and in the thatch, and the cold draft streaming from the attic reminded her that in summer she’d gathered herbs and dried them on the rafters, herbs to ease the ill of other women’s change: primrose and pennyroyal and slippery elm.

She worked the door open enough to scrape some snow into a pan, which she put on the hearth to boil. She wedged herself through the cranny to the stable and pitched fodder for Moon Horse again and cleaned her stall, shivering in the colder atmosphere of the stable but glad to have the care of another creature to occupy her thoughts. Returning to the kitchen, she checked the water, touched a candle to the flame, and dragged herself up the attic stair.

It was cold up there. The window through which she’d watched John depart three days ago was unshuttered, cold seeping through the glass as if there were nothing in the space at all. No light trickled in with the cold—Jenny had no idea what time it was. With the wind rising and dense cloud covering the stormy sky, it could have been dawn or twilight or midnight. Her candle glow touched the herbs, homey comforting bundles, like an upended forest over her head.

Yet there was something wrong. Jenny stood, candle in hand, listening trying to sense what exactly it was.

Her dream? she thought. Folcalor?

She had the sense of having had another dream, or some other awareness while she dreamed—eternally and repetitively—of Aohila, of Amayon, of John’s betrayal. Closing her eyes, she walked back in her mind to the mirror chamber, as she’d seen it in her dream, and it seemed to her for a little time that she could hear something else, some voice whispering …

It seemed that as she stood in the mirror chamber, looking at John in his flame-scarred and grubby doublet with the fourteen prisoned Sea-wights around his feet, someone or something was standing behind her. Someone that she knew with a hideous intimacy.

Someone who had hurt her and had laughed at her while she wept.

She knew if she turned around she would see him—it. And the sight would destroy her, because the horrible thing she would see would be herself: a woman capable of causing her own child’s suicide, a woman who had betrayed the man she loved a thousand times.

Go downstairs and dream again by the fire.

You do need to rest.

In that mirror chamber in her heart she turned around. And of course there was nothing there but shadows.

She opened her eyes. Her single candle flame bent and flickered in the draft, the heavy rafters she had known since girlhood taking on sinister weight and darkness overhead. There was a bundle of candles under the spare bed, candles she’d made five summers ago, and she took half a dozen and lit them, looking carefully around her for any sign of the wrongness she felt.

But the light seemed to dispel whatever it was that had troubled her. The room was as it had always been: a big open space beneath the tall slant of the thatch. Spare bed, bundles of candles, bags of dried corn and barley spelled a year ago against mice. Blankets and quilts and old coats, snowshoes and boots. The sense she had had, of wrongness and evil, seemed to have folded itself away into a shadow.

And maybe a shadow was all it had been.

Storm winds smote the house, and all the candle flames bent and jittered with it. More snow, Jenny thought.

But the thought didn’t bring with it the urge to sleep again, merely a reflection that with her hands twisted as they were, it would take longer to wield the shovel to dig herself clear. She opened the window long enough to pull the shutters closed and bar them, then made her choices among the dried herbs, gathering the little bundles and holding them in her skirt. As an afterthought she looked for a clean skirt, a clean shift, a clean bodice from the chest of spare clothes, then went downstairs to tidy the kitchen.

Behind her she thought the shadows whispered, but she did not look back.




Chapter 3 (#ulink_fc082891-dd45-5e0c-9b33-1f4a6a5c2905)


John’s study was a round chamber at the top of the tower that in his father’s time had doubled as a depot for emergency food stores and a lookout post in bad weather. Wide windows faced the cardinal points and made the place almost impossible to heat As a child, John had fallen into the habit of studying there, away from his father’s eye, and hiding his books among the grain sacks.

Now a lifetime’s plunder of learning stacked desk, worktable, and the plank shelves that filled every available inch of wall space. Candles-or the slumped, exhausted remains of them-sprouted like fungi among the dilapidated volumes, stalagmites of tallow bearding every shelf, corner, and lamp stand. Scrolls, parchment, piles of papyrus drifted every horizontal surface like dried leaves. The rafters were a spiderweb of experimental hoists and pulleys, the shelves a ramshackle graveyard of disemboweled clocks. A telescope, built by John according to accounts he’d found in a volume of Heronax, stood before the eastern window, the gnome-wrought crystal lenses pointed at the quadrant of the sky where six hundred years ago Dotys had predicted the rising of a comet at last summer’s end.

Unerringly John picked from the disarray an onyx bottle that had once contained silver ink. Terens had described such a thing in Deeds of Ancient Heroes in writing of the villainous Greeth Demon-caller, who had been dismembered alive on orders of Agravaine III. John tied a red ribbon around it-why red? he wondered-and put it in his pocket. From a cupboard he took five new candles—marveling a little that he could find five unburned-and Volume VII of Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia and finally from the litter of the desk, a piece of black chalk.

Gantering Pellus strongly recommended that experiments concerning demons not be conducted under roofs that would ever again shelter humans. In fact, he’d strongly recommended that such experiments not be conducted at all. For whoso speaketh with the Spawn of Hell, even in their dreams, the encyclopediast wrote, is never after to be trusted in any congress with men. It is the whole art and pleasure of such wights to cause suffering. They are cunning beyond human imagining and, being deathless, will stay at nothing to avail themselves of access to the affairs of men.

All of this, John reflected as he climbed from the tower, was true.

As true as fever, and love, and duty, and death.

He fought his way through the snow to his work shed. His hands would barely work the catch on the door. Drafts tore at the flame as he hung his lantern on a low rafter, shadows jittering among the bones and sinews of his larger experiments: the clockwork engine of his flying machine, the webby drape of the parachute that had cost him a week in bed with a broken collarbone the summer before last. Trying not to think of anything beyond the moment, he cleared the wheels and gears of the dragon-slaying machine away from the center of the room and with the black chalk drew a pentagram on the dirt floor.

Let the flame be virgin as the waxe, the encyclopediast said of the candles. Their wobbly light threw his shape huge on the rough-cast walls. He placed the ink bottle beside him and settled himself cross-legged in the pentagram’s center, breathing deep.

He had none of his son’s magic, none of the power Jenny had lost. By all rights, he thought, as the fivefold candleflame bent and shivered, the world should have no more to fear from what I am doing than from a child’s game.

But his heart felt as if it would break in his ribs with pounding and his whole body was cold.

“All right,” he said into the silence. “You win. What do you want?”

Once on a time, staring into the fire, Jenny could have seen them.

Seen Ian sleeping-in the room he shared with Adric? In the great bed she’d shared with John? Did Aversin sit beside his son, awake or asleep?

Jenny closed her eyes, the ardent changefulness of the flame a color visible yet. But the images she saw in the dark of her mind were only those created by her thoughts.

Ian sleeping as she’d seen him sleep a thousand times.

Low red firelight playing over the strings of her harp in its corner. Her hands were too stiff with scars now to coax music from its strings.

John …

Where would he be? And what would he be doing in the wake of his son’s attempt to take his own life?

She shivered, remembering him clinging to the spikes and horns and hammering wings of two dragons as they fought hundreds of feet above the ground, trying to reach his son with the talismans he’d bartered his soul to get. She remembered herself riding the black dragon Morkeleb down into the sea in pursuit of Caradoc as he fled, and she saw again the distorted demon fish circling and attacking in the blue-black water as she and the dragon drove Caradoc back among the coral and rock. She saw the devil light streaming from the old mage’s open mouth, his open eyes, the smooth white moonstone in his staff’s head.

The water had burned her as she pinned the renegade wizard’s body to the rocks with a harpoon. She had pulled the crystal spike from the dragon Centhwevir’s skull, freeing Centhwevir of the demon. She’d torn away from Caradoc’s neck the silver bottle containing the jewels that imprisoned the captive wizards’ souls. But Folcalor had rushed forth out of Caradoc’s body, leaving the wizard’s emptied corpse to be devoured by fish.

Later, when they’d returned the souls of the wizards to their bodies again, they’d found among the jewels in the bottle a topaz that they’d assumed contained Caradoc’s soul. This they had smashed-as they’d smashed that of the Icerider boy Summer, whose body had been killed in the fighting-to release the soul into the next world.

Now, as she tried vainly to call John’s image in the fire, all she saw was that underwater darkness, that blue-black world near the Sea-wights’ abyss. The whalemages had closed the demon gate by piling rocks before it. Closing her eyes and letting her mind drift, Jenny did not know whether what she saw was in truth a scrying or only the pictures in her imagination.

But she smelled the cold salt strangeness of the deep sea and heard the movements of the water around the black columns of rock where Caradoc had been pinned. Like vast moving shadows she saw the whalemages above her, and far below, silver stealthy shapes whose eyes flared with green light.

“A knight went out on errantry,

Sing the wind and the rain…”

The song seemed to come from a great way off. Children singing he thought, as Ian had sung to Adric when they were small. Thin frail voices down a long corridor of darkness.

“A knight went out on errantry

In shining silver panoply,

And none could match his gallantry,

Sing the wind and the rain…”

The air in the room changed. He smelled sulfur and scalded blood.

“Sing the wind and the rain”

She was there, in the shadows near the western wall.

John drew breath, queasy with fear.

He knew he was asleep. The quality of the candlelight and the way the darkness in the work shed vibrated with colors unknown to waking sight told him this, along with the fact that he felt only vaguely cold although he could see his breath. Looking hard at the shadows he couldn’t see her. Things that appeared one moment to be her turned out the next to be only pale shapes in the plaster, or shadows thrown by an engine’s pulleyed wheel. It was worse than seeing her, because he couldn’t imagine what form she wore.

“You said you wanted aught done, an’ all.” It took him everything he could muster to speak. “What is it you want, that you’ll kill half me people to get?”

Her chuckle was like a torturer’s little silver hook slipped down a victim’s throat. “My darling, I’d kill half your people for the amusement of hearing you weep for them. You know that.”

He made no answer. Droplets of blood began to ooze from the coarse plaster wall, glistening in the five candles’ light. The smell of it went through his head like a copper knife.

“It isn’t much that I want,” she purred in time. “I’m not an ogre.” She spoke, he saw now, out of a running wound that opened in the wall. The voice came out with a clotted trickle of blood, nearly black in the flickering shadows. He wanted to look away but couldn’t.

“But there are things a man can do, and places a man can ride, that the Hellspawned cannot. The world is differently constituted than you think, Aversin.”

Still he said nothing. Storm wind had been howling around the Hold walls, and he could not imagine that it had ceased to do so, but the work shed was silent as if it had been plunged to the center of the earth.

“When you passed through the burning mirror this summer past, you entered Hell.” Like a dragon she spoke into his mind, placing images there. He saw himself pasting the gnomewitch Mab’s sigil on the enamel that covered the mirror’s unholy glass, felt the cold, burning touch of the Demon Queen’s mouth on his. The horrors of illusory death, illusory pain, as if he were dreaming within a dream about being tortured and killed, without the ability to wake up.

“But there are other Hells,” she went on. “The Hell of the Sea-wights, whence the Archwight Adromelech sent Folcalor to trap the mages and the star-drakes, is not the Hell of my Realm. All Hells are not alike. Nor are all demons, and in some Hells it is deadly for the demonkind to tread.” These images passed beyond his ability to picture them: only suffocation, dread, and the promise of horrible pain.

“You’re goin’ to give me a couple of coins, then, and a little basket and send me to market?” His mouth was dry. He couldn’t imagine a place where the thing he spoke to would fear to enter. “For what?”

“Only water.” Her voice was as casual as a child pretending disinterest in a coveted toy. He saw it in his mind even as she spoke of it, if she did speak. “There’s a spring in the mountains there, where the rocks are silver and red.” It felt as if he were recalling something once visited, or known long ago and forgotten. “Its water has a virtue against the demons who dwell behind the mirror. It is a grievous life, to be Queen of Hell.” Her lovely voice grew sad.

“Demonkind are fractious and divisive, ignorant of their own best good. There have been attempts to unseat me, to devour me, by those who should thank me for the steady strength and kindness of my rule.” He remembered her tearing the head off a small wight and throwing it aside, then continue speaking to him with gore dripping from her chin.

“The Hell to which I will send you is inimical in many ways to us and our kind. Some of our spells continue to work there, but many do not. This water is a weapon I need to maintain my power. But you understand that I cannot fetch it myself. Nor can any of those loyal to me go there.”

“Yet you trust me.”

She smiled. He could not see her—could see nothing but the stream of black-red running down the wall—yet he could feel her smile. “John.” Almost he could feel the touch of her cold hand on his hair. “You know what I can do.”

She had tried to trick him once into paying for the spells against Folcalor’s Sea-wights with a thunderstone, meteor iron whose origin-being extraterrestrial—was not affected by the magics of the world because those magics knew nothing of its origins. At least that was what Jenny and Morkeleb had said. Rightly, the gnomes had refused to part with one. With the thunderstone she could have wrought a gate into the world of humankind that could not be closed by human magics and probably, like the burning mirror that was framed in meteor iron, couldn’t be destroyed.

Was the water the same? If she’d ruled the spawn of the Hell behind the mirror for countless thousands of years, it was likely she was perfectly capable of carrying on for another few millennia, water or no water. Or were these new and stronger demons a threat to her as well?

His hands felt cold, and he stared at the flowing wound in the shadows, wondering how to get himself out of this alive. He was far beyond anything he had ever read in Dotys or Gantering Pellus or Polyborus, far beyond the craziest hints of dreams or magic or madness.

And if he guessed wrong, he knew, people would die. Muffle or Aunt Rowe or any of a hundred others whose lives had all his days been his charge. Ian or little Maggie, his and Jenny’s youngest child. Adric or Jen herself.

“And I can just sashay on into this Hell with me little bottle and fetch you this water, then?” He pushed up his spectacles again and scratched the side of his nose. “Nobody’s goin’ to ask me what I’m doin’ there?”

“Naturally,” she crooned, “I will not send you on your errantry naked. You will know the way from the place where the gate is to the spring in the mountains. And you will have a helper to advise you.”

“I can hardly wait,” he said.

And a wind blew the candles out.

Dreams opened, windows into windows in his mind. In his dream he had been walking for hours and days, weeks maybe, in a bleak stony country where nothing grew but tufts of herbage in crevices. The rock was carved and twisted into waves, caverns, combers, dragons, and razor-edged ridges as if by violent winds, but he felt no wind. Sun hammered on its silver-threaded rusty glassiness. In pools he saw asphalt bubble and drip, but he felt no heat, nor did the steam that rose from the deep clefts have any smell. He came down out of the rock mountains to a maze of dry gullies, sandy flats, and knots of black, wasted trees among gouged walls of rock and earth. He saw the dust scamper, the black trees bend and shake.

He was a naturalist and a tracker. He could call to mind every foot of the Winterlands, every root and rock and trail. That was what it took to stay alive in his land. Looking around him now he made note of the shape of the land-the notches and ridges that would let him climb to the higher red-and-silver peaks where, he knew, the spring would lie.

Later still he was beside water and made note there, too, of the windings and changes of the riverbed. Lake flats lay near, speckled with humped gray silent plants barely poking their heads above the surface.

In this place he saw no life, but something told him that life was there.

In one hand he held the onyx ink bottle on its long red ribbon. In the other, three flax seeds, like little black beads in his ink-stained palm. The ink bottle was unstoppered and empty, though he had the stopper with him, too. Holding both was awkward, so he put the flax seeds in the bottle.

At once smoke began to coalesce from the dry air around him. He heard a voice cursing him, foul and furious. The smoke poured into the bottle, and he felt the onyx turn hot in his hand. He stoppered the bottle. The cursing stopped—or, in the ensuing silence, could still be heard muffled and tiny from within the bottle—but the bottle itself was warm, like bread new-taken from the oven.

You will have a helper to advise you, he heard the Demon Queen’s voice say again. Looking down, he saw a little puddle of blood on the dark rock at his feet. The words came out of that. He shivered, knowing what kind of a helper it would be.

Let him who has trafficked with demons, and bought and sold whatever of money or goods to them, for any reason whatever, be burned alive on a pyre of dry wood soaked with oil, and all those goods with them, Polyborus had said.

Let him who has summoned demons through a gate into this world be cut into pieces alive, and those pieces afterward burnt, not leaving so much as a finger unconsumed by the fire.

Let him who has willingly taken a demon into his body be cut to pieces and burnt, and the ashes mixed with salt and silver and cast into the sea, that nothing of his substance may afterward be used by the Hellspawnedkind.

Let him who has gone through the gates into Hell be burned, upon dry wood and a hot fire, and bound with chains rune-warded to hold demonkind, for it must be assumed that any man who goes into Hell comes back changed in his body and his soul, if indeed it is the same man, and not merely a semblance of him, who emerges.

For there is no lawful reason for humankind to touch, or speak to, or have traffic with the Hellspawnedkind. Rather should that man perish, and suffer his wife, or his son, or his goods all to perish utterly, than that demons be given a gate into this world.

John knew the words. He’d read them a dozen times over fifteen howling winters, back when he’d only sought knowledge for knowledge’s own sake. He’d read them a hundred times since his return with Jenny from the South, seeking desperately for an answer to Jenny’s terrible silences, to Ian’s debilitating grief.

He woke suddenly, lying on the dirt floor with the late winter dawn oozing leaden through the cracks in the shutters, the stink of burned tallow heavy on the air. Of the five candles only long winding sheets of brown wax remained. The pentagram could still be seen, scratched into the floor. The air smelled faintly of blood, though no trace of it showed on the walls or the floor. John found he could not look at the place on the plaster where the wound had been.

He sat up shivering, aching in his bones and in his heart. Outside he could hear Bill the stablehand talking to Aunt Umetty, with the scrape of a shovel on the ground.

“… broke around midnight,” Bill was saying, “and she’s been sleepin’ natural ever since.” Snow scrunched, fell. The air was iron cold. “They tell me Genny Hopper’s boy’s better, too, though they sure thought he was a goner; even them spots are fadin’ off him. I thought sure, it has to be either Master Ian or Mistress Jenny, and not meanin’ to slight the boy I hoped it was Miss Jenny, since I hear she’s been unable to do spells as she used …”

John put his fingers to the pit of his throat. A small oval scar marked the place where the Demon Queen had pressed an ensorceled jewel when he had first gone to beg her help in Hell.

And there was no getting past the fact that she had helped. She had given them spells to protect the dragon-slaying machines so they could defeat Caradoc’s-Folcalor’s-enslaved star-drakes and free them of their demon possessors. She had given them spells to free the wizards in Folcalor’s thrall. And she had given them a spell of healing, without which Ian might now be in even worse shape.

Now she asked his help.

She was lying, he was almost certain—he wondered what that water actually did. But she was asking his help.

As he climbed stiffly to his feet something dropped from his plaids, rolled to the earthen floor. He picked it up. It was the onyx ink bottle, stopper still tightly in place. When he touched it it was warm, like bread new-brought from the oven. Putting his ear to it, it seemed to him that he could hear a whispering inside.




Chapter 4 (#ulink_41dd8f12-2cb8-5317-aee9-cdb0b4ac9ef6)


“Don’t do it, Johnny.” Once Muffle would have growled the words in exasperation, or shouted them in rage. But his voice was now very quiet, and the light from the burning work shed showed the profoundest fear on his face.

“You don’t even know what I’m at.” Aversin didn’t look at him, only stood gazing into the flames where half a lifetime’s work slowly crumbled in red heat and smoke. The wicker gondola and silken air bags of the Milkweed, which had borne him north to the isles of the dragons, the Skerries of light. The jointed frame and waxed canopy of his infamous parachute. Pieces of five or six early versions of his dragon-slaying contrivances.

Gone.

Against his overwhelming regret he had only to place the mental image of Mag or Adric entering the building or touching any single thing that had been in it during last night’s manifestations.

He drew a deep breath and turned to regard his brother. “It’s only demons can undo the magic of demons,” he said.

The heat of the fire made the snow on Muffle’s plaids steam and glitter in the red-gray stubble on his cheeks. The older man’s small bright brown eyes searched John’s but met only the reflection of flame, mirrored in the rounds of spectacle glass.

“And Ian’s like a visitor that’s got his coat on to leave,” John added. “What would you have me do?”

“Take Jen with you.”

“No.” John pitched his torch into the flaring ruin, trying not to remember the demon in Jenny’s eyes, or Amayon’s name whispered in her sleep. When the shed roof fell in, he picked up his loaded saddlebags, made sure the little bag of flax seeds was in his pocket, and ascended to the stable court. Gantering Pellus alleged that demons were obliged to count seeds, though he’d claimed it was millet seeds, not flax. Muffle climbed behind John, water skins slung over his shoulder, slipping a little in the snow that heaped the steps. The lower court was sheltered. Once they came up the wind hit them, cold as a flint knife and stinging with sleet.

“Ian, then. He’ll be on his feet in a day or two …”

“No.” John ducked through the low stable door, where Battle-hammer stood saddled and waiting. He pulled off the rug Bill had laid over the big liver-bay warhorse and fastened on saddlebags and water skins. It wasn’t a day on which he would turn a stable rat out-of-doors, and by the smell of the wind he’d be lucky if he reached the Wraithmire before more snow hit. But the fever wouldn’t wait.

Snow lay drifted in the gateway. Peg the gatekeeper and Bill the yardman straightened from their shoveling. “If I was you, I’d think again—” Peg began.

“If I was you, I would, too,” John reassured her. He wrapped his brown-and-white winter plaid tighter around his lower face. His very teeth hurt with the cold.

“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 anythin’. 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, Battlehammer’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 Wraith-mire. 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 Battlehammer 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 Hellspawn 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 Battlehammer to the nearest farm, which was old Dan Darrow’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 Cara-doc 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. “Browson, 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 5 (#ulink_e01d6504-14c1-55f0-a678-9020af079e4b)


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.

It was Kahiera that Jenny saw now in Jane’s eyes, as they stood together in the doorway of Ian’s room.

Icewitch and sorceress, an outcast of her own people and a battle captive of Lord Aver, Nightraven had been Jenny’s first teacher in the arts of magic when Jenny was a child; she had been the only one in the world who understood. Jenny had been five when that tall cold beautiful woman had been brought to the Hold, and for six years she had tagged at her sable skirts. Every word and spell and fragment of lore that came from those pale lips she had memorized, and she had seen how the witch used her magic, and her wits, to ensnare her captor. Leaving him at last-leaving their son-she had laid on Lord Aver spells such that he had never loved another woman.

And all this was still in Jane’s resentful eyes.

Ian looked peaceful, curled on his side in the bed that the boys shared, its curtains drawn against the chilly forenoon light. He was terribly thin, Jenny saw, guilt prodding and twisting at her heart, but he did not seem to be tormented by the dreams that had tortured her.

Was that why he had tried to take his own life?

She shrank from the thought, guessing it to be true. Her own pain had blinded her. Her self-absorption in the loss of Amayon had kept her from even asking whether he suffered as badly …

What made her think her own agony was the worst possible?

Did Gothpys croon little rhymes to Ian still, in dreams? Did Ian hate his father for having taken the demon from him?

But even had Jane not been there, she would not have broken his healing sleep to inquire.

“Where’s Adric?” she asked as she turned from the door and descended the stairs to the kitchen again.

“He and Sergeant Muffle went hunting.” Jane’s voice was frosty. “You’re welcome to wait.”

Since this was patently untrue, Jenny thanked her and took her leave, staying only long enough to play a little with Mag by the warmth of the kitchen hearth. Pursuant to her decision to be a spider when she grew up, Mag was currently practicing weaving webs with Aunt Rowe’s yarns; she accepted her mother’s presence as peacefully as she had accepted her various absences, evidently considering this merely another journey. From Sparrow and Bill, Jenny had already heard of the mysterious fever, though there were no further cases of it and those who had been like to die were already on their feet. Curious, she thought, disquieted. On her way back to Frost Fell she resolved to return on the morrow, later in the day when Ian would be awake, though it meant walking home in the dark.

But as she trudged homeward, the flinty dazzle of the snow resolved itself into the wavering firefalls of migraine, and through the following day Jenny was barely able to do more than make sure Moon Horse was watered and fed and stagger back to bed. She dreamed again of the sea bottom and the great weightless graceful shadows of the whalemages passing like dancers overhead. The migraine seemed to have gotten into her dreams as well: fire shimmering in the water among the great columns of rock where Caradoc had died and things appearing and disappearing on the current-sculpted sand of the seafloor below.

The next day she felt better, though lightheaded. She trekked the woods in early morning digging herbs patiently out from beneath the drifted snow. She could put no magic into them as she’d used to do, but they would have virtue nonetheless. There was peace, too, to be found in the secret tales told her by fox track and rabbit scat in the snow. She returned home and made herself a tisane against the migraine’s return. Lying in bed she heard the shutters rattle with new-risen wind. She stepped to the door and smelled the wind: It would be worse long before nightfall.

So she performed her chores and baked bread and carried in wood to last the afternoon and the night. The small tasks brought peace to her, and she tried to put from her mind what Jane would be saying of her—probably had been saying about her for years—behind her back. In the afternoon she climbed the attic steps with a broom and dust rags, to sweep and cleanse it and make it sweet for the drying of herbs. She relit the candles she’d set up four nights ago and, finding that light insufficient, untied the bundle and set another dozen in place: The darkness in the attic had disquieted her.

She no longer had a wizard’s skills, but, she found, something of a wizard’s awareness remained. And there was something about the attic that made her scalp prickle.

She opened another bundle of candles and saw that five were missing from it. The number skittered in the back of her mind with a sensation like the scratching of rats, catching at her breath. She lit all that remained of the candles and moved the spare bed out of the way; shifting boxes and sacks, her tiredness dissolved and even the ache in her crooked hands retreated before the dread in her heart. The dust on the trunks and bundles had been disturbed already. Thrusting aside two sacks of barley, she found the ghost of a mark on the floor, rubbed out with rags but not rubbed out enough.

It was a single curving line, ending in a sigil she recognized—a sigil she had never before seen in any of John’s books or the books left her by old Caerdinn. But she recognized it still.

She stood, candle in hand, looking down at it, wondering why she knew it, why the sight of it turned her sick.

Then she understood.

The memory of it was not her own. It had been left in her mind by Amayon when he had inhabited her body and her brain. It was one of dozens-ugly and dirty and disquieting like fruit parings cached in corners by an unwelcome and uncouth guest.

The line was part of a complex power circle designed for the calling of a demon.

Ian.

The thought smote her like the toll of an iron bell.

Folcalor.

I will not go.

Nausea twisted her-nausea and pity and horror-and she scraped and hurled and tore at the boxes, the firkins, the bundles that had been stacked over the place.

Ian, no! Oh, my son …

She found the fragments of a china bowl, not merely broken but stamped and smashed until the clay was powder, ground into the scratched planking of the floor. Powdered, too, were bits of black chalk, as if they’d been crushed and ground under a young boy’s boots … I will not. I will not. I will not. In the darkest corner she found the five candles.

They were unlit.

He had not completed the rite.

Jenny knelt, holding her hands over her mouth, her breath glittering in the soft amber light that filled the attic.

He had not completed the summons of the demon.

Instead, he had gone downstairs and drunk poison in an effort to silence those demands.

Oh, Ian.

She closed her eyes.

Oh, my son.

The Winterlands’ wind screamed across the thatch.

When morning came, Jenny patiently dug the snow from the doors of the kitchen and the stable, wrapped herself in a sheepskin coat and her thick winter plaids, tied her sheepskin cap over her bald scalp, and set out for Alyn Hold. It has to be Folcalor, she thought, as she waded through the drifts on the downhill road through the bog. Gothpys-the demon who had inhabited Ian’s body and heart as Amayon had inhabited hers-was a prisoner behind the Mirror of Isychros. He would not be able to benefit from being summoned even had he had the power to invade Ian’s dreams with the demand.

Folcalor had seduced Caradoc, imprisoned his soul in a jewel, and inhabited his body. He had used the enslaved mage’s powers to capture and imprison other wizards.

Why?

And he was seeking to do it again.

Why?

At the Hold, Peg told her Ian and Muffle had ridden out that morning to deal with sickness in the village of Great Toby. “They hadn’t heard over there yet that you wasn’t at the Hold,” the gatekeeper explained apologetically. “The sickness isn’t much-Granny Brown’s rheumatism—so Master Ian said not to trouble you with it.”

“Thank you,” Jenny said, tucking her halberd against her shoulder and blowing on her hands. Even if Ian and Muffle were a few hours ahead of her, she’d encounter them in Great Toby. It would be near dark by the time she reached the village, and almost certainly snowing again.

“Would you do me a favor and ask Sparrow to send one of her girls up to the Fell to look after Moon Horse, if I’m not back tonight?” Jenny asked. Diffidently, she added, “John hasn’t returned yet, has he?” For through the gate arch she saw Bill lead Battlehammer across the yard.

Peg shook her head. “Dan Darrow brought the old boy back yesterday,” she said, turning to follow Jenny’s eyes. “He says His Lordship was there at the half moon; left the horse and went on into the Wraithmire alone. Old Dan said he thought as how John might be tracking something by the weapons he bore.”

“The half moon?” Jenny said, and glanced at the sickle of the day moon just visible among the slow-gathering clouds.

“I don’t like it.” Peg hunched her shoulders in her mountain of wolf hides, plaids, and bright-colored knitwork scarves. “Muffle don’t like it, neither. He’s been pacing over the place at night as if he’d left something somewhere, looking in all the same places.”

The half moon, Jenny thought, quickening her stride as she passed through the village and over the barren fields. The road to Great Toby was laid out to avoid a slough, and Jenny knew she could cut nearly an hour off her walk by going through the woods. She moved with instinctive caution, seeking out deadfalls and places where the snow had been rucked and trampled by wild pigs or scoured by last night’s winds. It wasn’t unheard-of for bandits to come this close to the Hold walls, or even for them to raid one of the few isolated farms hereabouts, and she was acutely aware that she no longer had spells of “look over there” to keep her from their sight.

Even in the days of the kings, gangs of bullies and outlaws had preyed on the farms, hiding in the woods to steal cattle or pigs or to capture the occasional villager to sell as a slave to the gnomes of the mountains. With the return of the King’s troops and the King’s law three years ago, John had for the first time in anyone’s memory been able to make headway against them.

But with law, the King’s troops had brought more men, insubordinates and hard cases both in the legions and among the serfs of the manors established to feed the garrisons. In the past year, John had been certain that the bandits had entered the slave business in earnest, systematically kidnapping serfs who for the most part had been forcibly relocated to the North anyway.

Thus when Jenny saw the quick darting of half a dozen foxes away to her left in the white woods and found they’d been feeding on a dead sheep at the end of a long blood trail, the first thing she thought was, Bandits. When she followed the trail back to Rushmeath Farm, she knew it.

House and barn stood open and empty. By the trampled tracks and the blood on the snow Jenny read the tale of the attack: read, too, that it had taken place just after dawn. Heartsick with dread she searched for Dal and Lyra’s children, knowing that the gnomes had no use for anything but healthy adults in the deep tunnels of their endless mines.

But she found no trace of the youngsters, queer-no blood, no torn clothing, no sign of wolf tracks hauling a tiny corpse back to a lair. And in the mucked stew of tracks she picked out those of Gerty and Young Dal, as well as those of their parents, heading south and east, deeper into the Wyrwoods.

Jenny glanced around her as if taking counsel from the zebra-striped silence of the winter woods. It was two hours’ walk back to the Hold, nearly three to Great Toby. According to Peg, the Alyn militia was out on patrol and might not return until dark. It would be snowing by then, and these tracks would be covered. And the half dozen bandits who’d raided the farm would have rendezvoused with either the gnomes or with the main body of their own gang. In either case someone would have pointed out that the gnomes wouldn’t buy the children.

As she set out after the tracks, she identified in her mind the three possible camping places they’d make for. Almost due south was a hollow with a spring, thickly covered by trees, that would provide protection against the snow. More easterly lay a cave in the bank where the Queen’s Beck cut under the hills on the edge of the bleak fell country, and north and east of that was a deeper cut protected on three sides by the fells.

It quickly became clear they weren’t moving south. As she followed the tracks through the quick-falling darkness, Jenny counted footprints and estimated the strength of the party: seven men, two of whom scouted ahead and to the sides in a businesslike fashion. They’d taken Dal’s two cows, his horse, and to judge by the depth of the tracks, a good deal of food. They were pitifully easy to follow. If they were heading east, Jenny thought, they’d be making for the old Brighthelm Tower in the hills. If northeast, they’d be meeting in either Shern Hollow or the big caves under Wild Man Fell, all customary haunts of bandits. She could overtake them there …

And what?

Even as a witch-wife of small powers, before dragon magic had entered her flesh, Jenny had never truly thought she could be enslaved. Killed, possibly. But never carried off like a common woman: raped, sold to the gnomes. She was a solitary woman, alone in the woods with her knife, her halberd …

… and forty-three years’ knowledge and experience of tracking, of watching, of silence.

When it became obvious that the bandits were headed due east, Jenny veered away and sought the low ground of a frozen pond deeper in the woods, where nightshade grew in the summer. She found thickets of it buried under the snow, and as darkness gathered and snow began to fall, she harvested handfuls of the dried leaves. In the shelter of an oak tree she made a small fire, and in her drinking cup, the only open vessel she had with her, boiled snow water and the crushed leaves, over and over, until she’d made up a tincture. This she stored in her water bottle, wrapped herself in plaids and coat and cloak beside the fire, and fell to sleep hungry.

Mother Mag, she prayed to the One who watched over children, don’t let them kill them before I get there …

Look after Ian. Look after John.

Next morning she found where they’d camped, in the cave by the Queen’s Beck, where she couldn’t have got to them anyway. By now they’d be on their way to Brighthelm Tower. With five prisoners and livestock, the bandits wouldn’t be moving fast. Jenny swung wide to avoid their scouts and eventually reached the tower: a couple of stories of the keep, a broad ring of crumbled stone that had been a court, and a clutch of pine trees that John would never have suffered to grow anywhere close to any defensive position of his.

Jenny climbed a pine tree and stayed there. The tower would be the first place the scouts would search, and there was no other place close where her tracks would not show in the new-fallen snow. Though she swept behind her with a pine bough and leaped from occasional bare rock to bare rock beneath the trees, she wasn’t sure the deception would pass by daylight.

But the bandits didn’t arrive until dusk, as the last thin nail paring of the old moon set. Cramped, frozen, and aching with hunger, Jenny heard their voices and the squeak of booted feet in the snow, far off. She found herself holding her breath until they came into sight among the twisted trees of the dale below: The boy and girl were still alive, and little Sunny was a tiny bundle clinging to her father’s bent back.

Even as she breathed a prayer of thanks Jenny wondered, Why keep children alive? They couldn’t have been easy to travel with. Young Dal was eight and barely keeping up; the rope that circled his wrists was being dragged on by a thickset oaf with a beard like a dead dog. Lyra, too, was staggering, her bloodied skirts and her husband’s averted eyes speaking clearly of how the bandits had used her. Jenny shivered with anger, and her hunger and fatigue dissolved.

“They festerin’ better be here soon,” the bandit leader grumbled, making a careful check of the encircling wall while Dead Dog Beard scouted inside the tower. “You, Hero—” He motioned to Dal. “You clear the snow off there.” He pointed to the half-covered remains of the hall at the tower’s foot. “We’re too festerin’ close to Alyn for me.”

“We can see the track from the top of the tower,” a blond-bearded man pointed out soothingly. “We’ll have plenty of time to see a patrol.”

“Well, I didn’t know you could witchfesterin’ motherless see in the dark, Crake. But since you can, you can be the one who keeps witchfesterin’ watch tonight if they don’t show up.”

“Just send me up a bottle of that wine and I’ll watch all you can ask for,” Crake responded.

“Mother Hare’s tits, I’m thirsty.”

“You leave that wine alone,” the leader snarled.

“What, the gnomes ain’t gonna bring their own wine?”

From her post in the pine Jenny listened, coldly calculating what had to be done. She recognized two of the bandits from Balgodorus Black-Knife’s band, whom she’d helped Baron Pellanor of Palmorgin fight last summer. When they finished checking the tower, they sent up a watchman to its top, then proceeded to make themselves comfortable around a fire in the semiopen hall ruins; it was a fairly easy matter for Jenny to creep along a branch to one of the broken-out windows of the tower and down to where the packs—and the wine bottles-were stowed in the jumble of broken rafters and fallen tiles that was the tower’s lowest room. As she poured the nightshade into the bottles, she could hear the bandits outside.

“Can we have the skirt again ‘fore the gnomes take her away?”

“You keep your mind on your business and your cod in your britches.”

“You, junior—you’re ten, remember? You think they’ll take that little ‘un anyway? They said from ten up.”

“Let’s see. They may want ’em younger. If not, no problem.”

Just after dark the man on watch called out, “Company coming!” and Jenny heard a man’s voice speak out of the darkness, “In whose name are you here?”

“In the name of the King beneath the Sea,” the bandit leader called out. The King beneath the Sea was Giton, boy-husband of the Yellow-Haired Goddess Balyna in Southern legend, but the name could as easily be applied to Adromelech, the Archdemon Lord of the Sea-wights, or his servant Folcalor.

Jenny, crouched in the darkness, held her breath. Having inspected the tower ruin once, the bandits were not disposed to do it again, and any chance sound she might have made was amply covered by the cows and horse they’d penned there. Still her heart pounded as the bandit leader came in and took the wine bottles.

They drank to one another, and to their bargain, the deep, oddly timbred voices of the gnomes bickering over prices and deferring to their human leader about the little girl Sunny. “Well, we can certainly try—” that voice said, and Jenny felt a queer cold stirring of recognition. She knew it, or one like it “—so long as she gives no trouble.”

“You hear that, Sweetlips? You keep your brat quiet and don’t lag behind …”

The wine bottle clinked on a cup.

“Cragget’s balls!” A man staggered through the black doorway and tried to fumble his britches down, then fell to his knees and vomited. Jenny slid her knife from its sheath, took a better grip on her halberd, and settled herself deeper into the dark corner to wait. The man Crake came down the dark stair from his watchpost above when he heard the other men cursing and puking; Jenny took him from behind, half severing his head before he could reach the door. She listened for a little time more, until all was silence outside, then crept to the door to look.

Dal, Lyra, and their children were clustered in a corner of the firelit shelter, their hands bound behind them to the wrecked beams, staring at the dead men and gnomes strewed between the shelter and the far wall of the open court. Lyra’s face wore a strange, hard, bitter smile. They turned sharply as Jenny appeared in the doorway. “Mistress Waynest!” Dal cried. “Thank God!”

“Did you use magic?” Gerty whispered as Jenny cut their bonds. Her eyes were huge with shock and wonder. “Cousin Ryllis told me you couldn’t use magic anymore.”

“Just because you can’t use magic, you aren’t helpless,” Jenny said softly. “Could I have used magic I would have spared these men. Now quickly, gather up what provision we can and let’s be away from here. They may have been part of a greater band. We must tell Lord John to bring out the militia …”

Lyra, who had gone over to gather up the little sack of money from the hand of a dead gnome, screamed.

The human leader of the gnomes, a man in a long green cloak, sprang from the ground and snatched at her wrist.

Jenny leaped toward her, halberd raised to strike, then halted in her tracks in shock. Lyra had darted clear of the man’s lunge and stood back, gasping and trembling, as he fell, clutching his belly, his whole body convulsing again with the effects of the nightshade. He should be dead, Jenny thought blindly, blankly. He should be dead …

Her mouth was dry and her breathing fast as she stared at that cropped gray head, the beaky nose, the patch over the eye.

Foolish, she thought. He is dead.

The man was crawling toward them, muttering curses and vomiting again though there was nothing in him to bring up. Clinging together, Jenny and Lyra backed away before him, while Dal and the children brought the stock out of the tower, making a wide circuit around the crawling body.

I saw him die in the infirmary tent after the battle at Cor’s Bridge, at summer’s end. The eye now covered with a patch had been pierced by an arrow …

And in the other eye, as Pellanor of Palmorgin raised his head, glared the greenish light of a demon.

Jenny stepped forward with her halberd and struck off his head.

The body continued to crawl toward them.

Jenny and the little family fled into the snow-blanketed night.




Chapter 6 (#ulink_4195beb0-51f3-55f1-915e-eaab93691a99)


There was Hell, reflected John, and there was Hell.

This was something no one-not Gantering Pellus, not Juronal, not the author of the mysterious Elucidus Lapidarus- had known: that not all Hells were the same.

He had passed beyond any information or assistance from the writings of anyone he had ever read, and he supposed this was why the Demon Queen had wanted him as her agent. Having survived the Hell behind the mirror—as he had survived one dragon slaying, with the assistance of a certain amount of magic-he had learned just enough to survive the next.

He supposed, too, that the Demon Queen had given him Amayon as a servant because he was the one demon she knew John would hate the most: the demon who had hurt Jenny. The one demon to whose charm John would be almost guaranteed not to yield.

Not that Amayon didn’t try.

“That’s very good,” the demon said softly, looking over his shoulder during one of their rests, in the dense shelter of a thorny watercourse between two walls of striated black rock. John sketched the thorns and the shape of the barren upland that stretched beyond; sketched the carry beast, whom he’d named Dobbin, bending its long neck down to the pool to drink, and the shape of the herds of such creatures that could be distantly seen on the top of the opposite cliff. “You’ve captured the look of it well.”

Amayon now wore the form of a girl, dark curls framing a nymph’s triangular face, fragile hands resting on John’s shoulder as she stood behind him to look at the sketch. She glanced around her nervously at a quick soft scraping sound from the rocks and pressed a little closer to him. Genuine fear? John wondered. Or the imitation of it, to coax him into protectiveness?

He didn’t know. The landscape in his dream had been without life, but he sensed there was life here.

Waiting in the shadows. Watching.

“It’d help if I knew if it was real,” he remarked, sketching the long necks of the herd beasts with a charcoal stub. “I mean, the Queen’s palace behind the mirror was whatever she fancied it to be: We’d pass one window where it was rainin’ outside, and the next there’d be a sandstorm, and the next it’d be a sweet summer night. So maybe the next chap who rides through here isn’t goin’ to see these things at all.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?” Amayon regarded him through lowered lashes. “To help another who may ride after you?”

“I’d like to say yes.” John grinned and shoved the parchments into his satchel. “That’d sound a bit noble, wouldn’t it? But it’s just I can’t pass up the chance to make notes of all this, to remember it by.”

He stepped over the watercourse, holding out his hand in automatic assistance to the delicate girl who followed, though he knew Amayon needed no such assistance. She stumbled a little on the rocks and clung to his arm. There’s a small favor to be thankful for, he thought: The Queen had said that the spells of one Hell’s demons might work in another Hell, and might not. Evidently Amayon’s spells of lust didn’t work, which was a relief.

“There’s no need for us to be enemies, you know.” Amayon stroked his arm as they came up on Dobbin, who made a noise at them like an angry goose and lashed his heavy tail. “We’re going to be traveling together for quite some time. We need one another, you know.”

“And you need me for exactly what?” John half turned in the saddle as Amayon arranged her gauzy skirts. Her eyes met his, haunted and beautiful and filled with tears.

“To help me,” she whispered. “I know I was wrong to hurt your lady Jenny. You were justified in sending me behind the mirror, to be slave and captive of the Demon Queen. I know that now. But oh, John, she is monstrous, terrible! Nothing nothing that I ever did merits the things …” She dropped her voice, her eyes, turned her head slightly aside and caught her red underlip between delicate white teeth with the memory of pain. “The things she has done to me.”

“And you hope I’ll forgive you?” John asked, keeping his voice uninflected. “And help you escape her?”

Her hand slid over his thigh. “I would do anything to escape her, my lord I would be your servant for life, your slave. Demons are very-loyal to those who treat them kindly. If you knew what she is …”

John knew what she was. But before he could reply a thin shriek rent the sullen air, and a hairy insectile thing the size of a dog bounded down the watercourse, fleeing in desperate terror from seven or eight greater creatures, now running now flying—demons or animals, John didn’t know, until the larger beasts caught the small. Instead of eating it they played with it: torturing it, tearing it to pieces while the victim shrieked on and on in undying agony as nerves and flesh and entrails were shredded.

And Amayon watched, rapt. Drinking in what she saw with trembling nostrils and ecstatic eyes, as if savoring the most exquisite of meals.

Disgusted, John pushed her hand aside and yanked Dobbin’s reins.

There was neither night nor day in Hell. The light came from nowhere, without shadow—or maybe the Demon Queen had put on him a magic that enabled him to see in the dark. Dry heat seemed to radiate from the ground and varied from place to place: It was colder, John had noticed, when the/d crossed a limb of the black stone uplands, where bands of Dobbin’s brethren strode with their gangling, purposeful strides. Observing them, he saw they avoided the watercourses for as long as they could: They’d descend, drink quickly, and depart.

No wonder, he thought, considering the slumped squeaking wights that rustled and darted in the black leathery vegetation that grew along die water. Twice, also, during that first long ride he glimpsed signs of human hunters, or humaniform creatures anyway: things diat walked upright and bore crude weapons. When, in exhaustion, John had just begun to argue with Amayon that they stop and rest—Dobbin was stumbling, too-he heard a stealthy rustling in the thorn along the bank tops that had not the sound of demons and looked up to see a dozen men and women, dirty and clothed in skins.

“Skin and ream the lot of them,” Amayon muttered, sliding down from Dobbin’s cantle. “Wait here.” She climbed the bank toward them, holding out her hands and speaking in a sweet musical language that John heard as his own in his mind: “Please let us pass, dear friends. My brother and I mean no harm to you or to any in this place.”

“You have food,” the leader said, the tallest and strongest of the men. Looking up, John saw a face bearded and brutish, and eyes that were filled with suspicion, fear, and rage, but without the curious glitter of a demon’s. These were indeed men and women. Native to Hell? he wondered. Had they been born here? Trapped here while passing through by eating food and drinking water of this place? Had some demon who ruled the place enslaved them, as Aohila had sought to enslave him and trap him forever behind the Mirror of Isychros?

“We can spare neither food nor drink,” Amayon said, “for our road is long and we cannot tarry to hunt. But another gift I will give you, to show our love for you.” From the tight-laced gauzy bodice of her dress she drew two coins, one gold and one silver. Cupping the silver in her palm, she struck it gently with the gold three times. On the third strike sparks leaped forth. Bending down, she showed how by holding a little of the dry vegetation of the uplands near to the coins, fire could be produced.

“Only don’t do it too often,” she cautioned as the leader performed the same feat and kindled a little scrap of brush held close. “The fire takes the virtue of the coins away for a little time, and they need to rest. But they will always return to their power.”

“I take it spells of fire are easier to work than spells of lust?” John remarked as Dobbin bore them away down the gully with his jogging, bone-jarring stride. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw the snaggle-haired warriors crowding around, saw the leader gesture them away from the precious coins in his hand. “Or will fire spells work just about anywhere?”

“They’re very simple.” Amayon shrugged.

“Are you speakin’ of the fire spells or those folks you just cheated?”

The demon regarded him from beneath long black lashes. “The way you cheated Aohila, with the phial of dragon tears that evaporated from her hand, and the gnomish hothwais crystal charged with starlight in place of the metal of a falling star? She was furious, by the way, just livid. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such cursing.” The pale rosebud mouth curved in a spiteful grin. “Aren’t you going to ask me who those people are?” she went on after a moment, when John relapsed into silence, thinking of what she had said.

“I’m a bit interested in the kind of tale you’d tell me,” John replied evenly. “But I’d be a fool if I thought it the truth.”

She put her arms around his waist and leaned her cheek on his shoulder. “It might be.”

Dobbin was stumbling, and Aversin drew rein. “Don’t,” Amayon protested, glancing over her shoulder at the cliff tops that hemmed in the gorge. Hot winds lifted the fragile layers of her dress, her dark hair; she looked wild and young and scared.

“It won’t do us a bit of good to ride the poor thing to death.” John swung down and neatly avoided the beast’s kick.

“You worry too much. They’re very tough.”

“Well, I’m not.” He unhooked the water skin from the saddlebow, took a cautious drink. He’d rolled his doublet and his plaids into one of the saddlebags, but the heat in the gorge was dry and suffocating. Sweat soaked his shirt and made long wet strings of his hair. “And I’m not ettlin’ to get meself killed because I’m too tired to react to danger.”

“Oh, surely not,” she protested. “I think you’re very tough, too.” He took her by the waist and lifted her down, and she slid into his arms, holding him tight as if she feared she would fall, her face raised expectantly to his. “Well,” she agreed softly, “maybe we can rest here a little.”

“Aye.” John fished in his satchel and found the bag of flax seed and, disengaging his other arm from Amayon’s pressing hands, opened the ink bottle. “But tough or not I think I’d rest a bit quieter without you wrapped round me neck.”

“Don’t!” The demon started back, genuine panic in her eyes. “Don’t—”

John dropped in three seeds and stoppered the ink bottle, then went over and kicked Dobbin several times to wake him-it was like kicking a stack of cowhides-and led the beast up out of the smothering bottomlands and a few hundred yards out onto the rocky plateau. In his dream-and in the endless, aching ride-he’d seen how the upland rock flawed and faulted into smaller gorges and overhangs. Had seen, too, that the pooks and wights that infested the streambeds were far fewer on the higher ground. In a dip in the stone like the trough beneath a wave the carry beast hunkered down, tucked its head under one thigh, and wrapped its tail around tight until it was an impenetrable bulb of dappled pinkish leather. John leaned his back against it as if it had been a bedstead, forced himself to remain awake long enough to jot a few notes about the hunter folk who’d barred their way, then slept.

He discovered why it is not recommended to put oneself in the position of dreaming dreams in Hell.

Foulness, pain, blackness leading down into blackness-

Ylferdun Deep, he thought. He had battled the dragon Morkeleb and was wounded unto death. He and Jenny and Prince Gareth had taken refuge in the darkness of the gnomes’ deserted Deep while the witch Zyerne’s followers besieged the gates. And in the heart of the Deep he’d heard whispering, the whispering of the thing that the gnomes worshiped: Crypt below crypt, vaults beneath subvaults, and in the dark at the bottom of the mountain it dwelled—the Stone within the Deep.

The Stone that drank souls.

It was before him now. Emerging from the coarse black basalt of the ground as a whale slowly rises from the sea, smooth and bluish and without mark. A Drinking Stone, the gnomes called such a thing. Drinking life. Drinking souls.

Dobbin was dead. John could see the consciousness of the animal trapped already in the Stone, alive and completely present, along with the half-deteriorated spirits of dozens of his kind and broken fragments of demons, beasts, men, and women …

He could see them clearly, even as he felt his own spirit, his own life, being drawn by the thing.

Damn it, no! he thought, and tried to drag his mind away.

And could not.

Damn it, he screamed against that slow-growing warmth, I will not!

But it was like sleep too long denied, or a slow-tilting floor when it has gone too far to be climbed. His hand jerking as if with palsy he fumbled the ink bottle from his shirt, dragged loose the stopper, wondered if the Stone would trap Amayon as well.

Evidently it didn’t, for he could hear the demon shrieking curses at him, as if from some great distance away. Then the curses stopped, and there was only a slow-growing weariness, like weight too heavy to be borne or fought. A sinew-cracking drag that could not be resisted …

He felt the Stone’s hold break and shift, diverted to something else, and in that momentary relaxation of its power he rolled, scrambled, dragged himself across the rock and away from the thing. Small hands grabbed his wrists and pulled him farther away, and he heard Amayon call his name. “Wake up! Wake up, damn you!”

“I’m all right.” Gasping, John looked back past the fragile, half-bared shoulder. Dobbin lay uncurled in death. A young hunter of the savages sprawled just where the Drinking Stone had been. John couldn’t make out his face—even at two feet it would have been a blur to him-but his body lay disposed calmly, without sign of struggle, his spear still grasped in his hand. Of the Stone itself there was no sign.

“You blundering, imbecelic fool …” Amayon’s hands were as cold as marble. Odd, thought John, after the warmth of the ink bottle. Must make a note of that.

“Would it have got you, too, then?” He scratched his hair and squinted hard at Dobbin’s carcass, beside which, if he recalled, he’d left his spectacles. He couldn’t see them-he was lucky, he reflected, that he could see the carcass—and got up to make a move in that direction, then stopped and glanced inquiringly at the demon.

“It’s gone.” Amayon still sounded shaken to pieces. “And no, it wouldn’t have ‘got’ me, too. I just don’t fancy remaining trapped in an onyx bottle for eternity because of some bumpkin’s prudishness.”

John edged cautiously nearer and found the light frame of wire and glass where he’d left it, unbroken in all the ruckus—the spell Jenny had long ago put on them seemed to be still in force. He put them on, then knelt beside the young hunter. At his touch the man opened his eyes, but they were blank, empty. A trickle of drool ran down through the fair beard.

“The Stone has drunk him.”

John looked up quickly at the voice. The tall hunter leader stood nearby, spear in hand. A woman whom John had not seen before was with him, gray haired and tough, with bitter eyes.

“He left us with a cry and ran toward this place,” the hunter woman said, her words speaking in John’s mind, though he understood that they used another language than his own. “That girl of yours called to him.” From around her neck she took a fragment of smoky glass tied on a piece of braided sinew. This she held up, and like a mirror John saw reflected in it his own face. The woman regarded the reflection, then walked to Amayon and did the same.

Whatever she saw in the glass caused her to say “Faugh!” and step back in loathing.

“Take her,” she said. “Take your demon whore and go from here. She has saved your life by bringing Lug here to the Stone. Now Lug must die, that the spirits by the river will not enter into his body, for the Stone has drunk away his mind.”

John stood back while the woman and the hunter got Lug to his feet. The young hunter seemed dazed, his eyes empty and dead. From the corner of his eye John could see the flickering movement of the small glowing wights of the riverbed, moving cautiously out over the rock toward them. When Amayon came near to him, he said, “You brought him here for the Stone to take, instead of me.” He felt shocked and empty, glad to be living still but hating the demon.

“Well, I couldn’t very well get him to continue the Queen’s stinking quest.” Amayon swished her skirts and stepped across to Dobbin’s side. “Drat,” she added. “I was afraid it would come to this in the end. I will truly see to it that that bitch Aohila gets trussed and left for a satyr of iron.”

She pressed her hands to the dead beast’s outstretched head. Her body melted to smoke, and the smoke then flowed into Dobbin’s nostrils and slack mouth. A moment later the beast rolled lightly to its feet, shook itself, and strode to John with the same swagger that characterized Amayon’s walk.

The hunter and the woman watched all of this, stone faced, and made no move while John saddled and bridled the demon beast. Looking back as he rode away, John saw the young hunter stretched on the ground again, the two elders walking off in the other direction. Demons were already chittering around the new corpse, fighting one another over its blood.





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