The Demon Lord

by Peter Morwood

  Or digesting.

  Now it dropped, not as a stone falls but like a cat, unfolding crooked joints to land spider-light for all its spiked and jagged bulk. The air grew colder and frost formed on Tolnar’s helmet. That cold air stank of blood and death. Triple-taloned feet grated down through mud on to the stone beneath as Ythek Shri took a single precise, raking step forward.

  The lamp fell with a clatter and in that distorted light the demon’s bulk loomed larger still as it leaned down, head opening like a grotesque blossom in a fanged, horrific yawn…

  *

  Aldric wasn’t the only one to hear the low cry, more of disbelief than anything else, which reverberated hollowly along the tunnels and faded into disturbing echoes before anyone could do more than guess at its source. But he was the only one apart from Marek to be sure about its cause, and despite his sardonic view of honour versus courage when demons were loose, he was the only one at all to make a move towards it.

  He had taken just six strides down the passageway when a shriek of pure animal terror cut through the darkness before him, trailing away to silence like the wavering wolf-song which had mourned Evthan’s funeral. Again the wail throbbed in his ears, more piercing now, impossibly high for any masculine throat, a sound that was fear and agony given voice.

  It stopped incomplete with shocking abruptness and he started running. Even with the stone of Echainon to explain his foolhardy confidence, it was Widowmaker that filled his hand when he slithered to a halt, nostrils filled with a warm slaughterhouse reek and the incongruous faint scent of roses. He pivoted on one heel to sweep the lowering tunnel with lamp and eyes, taiken poised to strike at anything that moved. There was nothing but the distant firefly dance of approaching torches. Nothing living.

  Aldric braced himself, then turned the light and his accompanying gaze downward to the slimed and stinking floor.

  Marek had done well for a fat old man, outrunning all but the few troopers who fidgeted in the background. They were staring at Aldric, who was staring in his turn at nothing. His face was pallid, its skin drawn taut over clamped jaws, and when Marek met his shock-dilated eyes the demon-queller looked away from the horror there. Instead, and most unwisely, he glanced down.

  “Oh merciful…” he said then faltered, knowing even as he said it that there had been no mercy here. When Geruath strode up, Marek seized the Overlord by one elbow regardless of the armed retainers flanking him and dragged him towards the pulped obscenity sprawling at their feet. “That, my lord,” his voice dripped contempt, “is what your demon does. Do you still want it controlled?”

  Geruath licked his lips, an unconscious aid to thought but in the circumstances hideously inappropriate. Then he shrugged, undisturbed by the atrocity, and even smiled.

  Aldric’s own lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl which would have done credit to the kourgath-cat on his collar. He knew the Overlord’s son could see him, and that his expression could be read by a half-blind man, but he was past caring, past diplomacy, past dissembling. All the Talvalins hated well, but the last clan-lord of all had more practice than most. Something would die for this.

  “When I’m done here,” he said, “I will arm myself properly. Then I will obliterate this demon.” Isileth Widowmaker flashed in the lamplight as she poised at her scabbard’s mouth. “And anyone who tries to hinder me.” The blade hissed out of sight.

  “When you’re done with what?” said Crisen. Aldric ignored him.

  “Someone give me a helmet,” he said. “Now leave me. Leave me alone.” It wasn’t a request but an order and it was obeyed at once, even by Marek.

  Once they had gone Aldric took out the Echainon spellstone again. He knew this was wrong. He had seen one long-buried body in the ancient mound, had watched another lowered into its grave. Jouvaines gave their dead to earth, not fire, but enough foulness had been visited on this poor corpse already. Aldric had the power to make his funeral clean. When he removed the stone’s buckskin covering there was no billow of blue fire, only a soft shimmer like a luminescent fog that drove back no shadows, yet was somehow comforting. There was no dishonour or impropriety in its use. Not for this purpose.

  “Abath arhan.” He whispered the brief invocation like a prayer and as the Echainon stone responded, misty swirls of light coiled around his hand. Once those swirls had blazed with the heat of hatred, now their ultramarine translucence was warm with pity and compassion. The spellstone’s power were his now, pulsing with the blood-flow in his veins, concentrated by the wishes of his mind.

  Behind him, a vast stooping shape moved in ponderous silence from the shadows, and a crooked three-clawed talon reached out.

  “Alh’noen ecchaur i aiyya,” Aldric said, and all was sudden brilliance as clean hot flame poured from the crystal’s heart, engulfing, consuming, purifying in a single instant. Had he looked back he would have seen the demon clearly, revealed in the glare of his own making. But he saw nothing as it fled with long heron-strides back into the friendly darkness.

  Aldric dropped to one knee as the expected weariness flooded over him, but it was less than before. The Echainon stone had used his emotion, not his energy, and that emotion was directed out, not in.

  “An-diu k’noeth-ei,” he said, and traced the blessing of farewell above the still-warm remnants on the tunnel floor. Gathering them together, just dust and ashes now, he poured them into the helmet and inclined his head a little for respect. The spellstone’s fires had died to a slow sapphire writhing in the centre of the crystal, and with the helmet set aside he returned it to its leather bag. Before it went back inside his jerkin he hesitated and glanced sharply down the passage in response to a faint tingling of unease. There was nothing to see, or hear, or smell. That didn’t mean nothing was there.

  Aldric knotted the several ends of its broken leather braiding together again and hung the bag around his neck. But this time he didn’t put it inside his shirt, out of sight. Leaving it in the open felt more comfortable.

  And more comforting.

  *

  Back among the Overlord’s retainers, Aldric approached one man and gave him the ash-filled helmet. The soldier saluted and took the makeshift urn with infinite gentleness, speaking rapidly in the dialect Aldric had heard so often here but still couldn’t understand.

  “He thanks you,” Marek Endain translated. “For the way you acted towards one who was a lord’s-man and a stranger.” Aldric bowed in response.

  “Thank him for his courtesy,” he said, “and apologise that I can’t do so myself.” Marek did so, and as he turned back, he caught a certain look in Aldric’s eye. An instant later he was clutching the younger man’s sword-arm in case that threat of violence turned real. Aldric stared at Overlord Geruath and his son for a few seconds more, a cat watching an out-of-reach mouse, then glanced at Marek. His mirthless grin was cruel in the lamplight as he peeled the demon-queller’s grip from his sleeve one finger at a time.

  “No,” he said quietly. “Not yet. Not in the midst of their retainers. But soon. I don’t have to look for any more reasons.”

  He had enough and more than enough. And they were no longer the intangibles of a king’s command, or a promise made in bed to a capricious woman. They were the same dark, personal justifications which had brought fire and death to the fortress of Dunrath. Revenge for self, revenge for the dead, hatred, loathing, and knowledge that some men were born to die just as he was born to kill them. All he needed now was opportunity.

  Once through the secret doorway, Aldric waited until two soldiers heaved it shut, then rose from the corner where he had crouched on heels, watching with lantern in hand.

  “That door was open the whole time we were under the citadel. The demon could have been out and away long before we caught up with it.” He watched Marek realise how open and exposed the cellars were by comparison with the low, cramped tunnels. Yet the thing had eluded them even there.

  “Do you think—?”

  “I don’t know wh
at to think, and it’s not as if I even know what to look for. So I will ask you about it again.” Aldric flashed the lantern’s beam about to push the shadows back, though never far enough. “But not now – and definitely not here.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “The demon-queller is right. This abomination must be destroyed.”

  Lord Geruath was talking mostly to himself while his son kept out of the way, watching him stride about but saying nothing. They were alone in the Overlord’s private chambers, and Crisen had just watched his father drain half a flask of fortified wine without perceptible effect. Even the tremor in Geruath’s voice came only from restrained fury.

  “Do you always accept what a hired servant tells you?” Crisen ventured at last.

  “When they’re hired to talk sense, yes, I do. When it concerns me, yes, I do. Whether it’s an unnatural infestation released by my fool of a son—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “—Or that same son’s convoluted plotting for the future of Seghar.” Crisen’s eyes widened, his mouth opened but no sound came out, and he looked sick. “Oh yes, I’ve heard about your plans. Kortagor Jervan mentioned it some time ago, as was only right and proper. He’s responsible for keeping me safe, and that means more than just commanding the garrison and watching the gates. A neutral city-state free of all allegiance, was it not? But arranged in such a way that both the Warlord and the Emperor accept it? Most intriguing. We must discuss the matter at a later time.”

  “You know nothing about it!” Crisen burst out.

  “Nothing?” the Overlord echoed. “On the contrary, my secretive son, I know a great deal. Give me results I can see, can touch, can profit by, and I promise to ask no questions about how you achieved them. Fail, and I won’t lift a hand, not a finger, to save either you or that reptile Voord you call friend.”

  “You’re mad.” It wasn’t an explosive protest but a disbelieving little whimper as the preconceptions of years were overturned. “You are. Everybody knows it…” Geruath’s chuckle was soft, urbane and very sane indeed.

  “Lordly is the current euphemism,” he said. “You’ll learn, Crisen, you’ll learn. Things can often be different to what they seem.” Lord Geruath looked his son up and down and favoured him with a sly smile. “You of all people should know that.”

  “Then why did you do it, father? In the name of the Fire, why?”

  “Your lamented mother didn’t ask such foolish questions. She accepted what I did as right, and saw the profitable proof. One of the wisest things a man can do is to appear a fool. Fools aren’t trusted, but they’re not distrusted either, just ignored as harmless.”

  “They’re laughed at.”

  “And tolerated and humoured in ways a clever man can never hope to match.” Geruath took another, more controlled sip of wine, then hunted about until he found a cup to drink from. “We could have been in this citadel ten years ago,” he said as he played with the silver goblet, turning it over and over in his hands. “Your mother could have died an Overlord’s lady. But she understood my caution, because your dreams of an independent seat at the Imperial Council are mine as well. Just not as crudely executed.”

  The revelation startled Crisen. Voord had suggested it a year ago, with Geruath as Overlord of Seghar, Crisen the true power behind him and Voord as their personal representative in Drakkesborg. Now it looked as if the plan had been pre-empted by a full decade. A headache started pounding through his temples.

  “What about the armour, the tower, the weapons…?”

  “Visible signs of harmless eccentricity. Who worries about the doings of an old fool exiled to the edge of an unimportant province? It might offend a few of the shallower minds at court, but I still have friends there. More powerful and better placed than yours.” Geruath’s smile turned cold. “Remember that, my son. If you or Voord try to discredit or replace me in any way, I’ll see you both trodden out like grapes.”

  The words hung heavy in the air while Lord Geruath drank more wine. Crisen didn’t question them. They weren’t a threat. Ever since he was a child he had learned his father never made threats. He made promises.

  “I knew Seghar was well placed as a hub for trade,” the Overlord was saying “And where trade goes, diplomacy can follow. All they thought was of somewhere to put the crazy man and his whelp where it would look like a reward for service, and where his ravings and chasings after swords couldn’t do any harm. Then the Albans cultivated me, I accepted them, and for once in my life I had enough gold with nobody the wiser. But listen to the wise words of a madman, Crisen. If your fellow-conspirator, confidant and friend Lord-Commander Voord believes he can do this all alone, he’ll make sure you follow the Vreijek woman Sedna down something’s throat.”

  “Sedna?”

  “Play the fool all you like, my son, but don’t start now, and don’t start with me. Of course Sedna! You were besotted with her—”

  “I loved her, father!”

  “You were besotted, like a drunkard with his bottle, and it affected your efficiency. The Drusalans are most insistent on efficiency. Voord killed her to remove your distraction, and so it would appear an accident he used sorcery. He used spells from the books you bought to have her torn apart.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I have eyes, and I have wits, and I can use them both. You saw, in the library, yet you chose not to see. And now, to vindicate yourself in the eyes of your Imperial friend, to prove what he thought of you was wrong, you hope to use this obscenity again. Yet you still claim you loved her.” Lord Geruath’s mouth curved in a sneer. “If that’s love, give me honest hatred. Voord left with unusual haste and without farewells, didn’t he? Either he knows what he summoned up, or he doesn’t know and has no wish to find out. It’s certainly beyond your small competence. This is no shape-shifted wolf.”

  “You know about…?” Crisen didn’t finish. The expression on Geruath’s face gave him his answer. “But – but why not use this opportunity anyway, father? Listen to me! The empire’s tearing itself apart. Ioen and Etzel are so busy trying to avoid an outright war that nobody will notice an ambitious man using the chaos to further his own ends. Especially you.” Lord Geruath raised his eyebrows. “It’s well know you detest sorcery more than anyone still at court, so who would suspect you of all people of being the man who controls a demon?”

  “They would more likely suspect you!” snapped Geruath, but his criticism didn’t halt Crisen’s flow of words even for an instant.

  “Kill three other Overlords along the frontier,” he suggested half a dozen in as many breaths, “then wait a while before you move as you did with Seghar, and you wouldn’t be a usurper but the man who saved their domains from anarchy. With that new revenue it would be easy to bribe someone in Drakkesborg to confirm possession, and it would convince the Albans that their money isn’t being wasted.”

  “No! I should never have listened to you in the first place. When I saw the remains of that lord’s-man my stomach almost shamed me before the two hlensyarlen.”

  “Did it really? You weren’t so squeamish about Sedna, or Erwan Evenou ten years past. People always die to further great schemes, father, so why worry? This demon is no more deadly than a sharp dagger or a poisoned cup of— What was that?”

  Crisen’s head snapped round and cocked on one side to catch whatever faint sound which had attracted his attention; but to no avail. He strode to the chamber door with hand on sword-hilt and paused there an instant before reaching out to wrench it open. There was nothing outside save an empty corridor.

  “What’s the matter with you?” demanded his father. Crisen looked uncertainly over his shoulder towards the door and rubbed fingertips to forehead. “Nothing… I think.”

  “And if it was something, what would you think?”

  “Music. One note.”

  “A bell? A gong? A flute?”

  “A voice. Many voices, singing.” Crisen listened a little more, then shook his
head and shrugged. “No. It really was nothing.”

  “That’s an extravagant description of ‘nothing’.” Geruath’s voice was different now, and a sneer twisted what might have been mere bantering. “Forget it! And forget your plans for Seghar – at least, these plans. Using sorcery gives potential opponents too much leverage, and without support to offset that leverage, Ioen or Etzel may well spare time from their own squabbles to snuff us out.”

  “But the demon could give us so much power—”

  “I said forget it. If I’m dealing with Rynert of Alba, I must have a little honour left.”

  “Honour is a word that weaklings hide behind.” It came out without thought and Crisen bit his tongue too late. Lord Geruath stared for a long second at his son’s face, then smashed the back of his hand across it with all his strength.

  “Never speak to me like that again! Never! You’ll rule here only after I’m dead and I assure you, my health is excellent. Remember, I am Overlord of Seghar! I should have known you had no honour in you when you broke into the Kingsmound—”

  “You weren’t backward about plundering it for weapons!”

  “I didn’t enter like a thief!”

  “No, you stood by and let me do that for you.”

  “And why did your friend Voord go creeping to it in the dead of night, eh? Answer me that!” Crisen shook his pounding head and winced as he rubbed his throbbing jaw. The old man was talking nonsense now, because Voord had never gone near the opened tomb. “Why did he decide to clean it, eh?” Lord Geruath demanded. “You haven’t got an answer to that, have you?”