The Demon Lord

by Peter Morwood

  “Eldheisart Voord did not—”

  “He did!” Geruath lashed out again and Crisen flinched to avoid the bony knuckles. They missed, but a gemstone-heavy ring struck home and split his lower lip wide open. Ignoring a bloody shred of his own son’s flesh clinging to the jewel on his hand, the Overlord kept on shouting. “I know, because I had him followed! I had him watched! He sent a file of my best mercenaries there on one of his cursed errands, and not a man of them came back! More sorcery, may the Father of Fires burn him black! Eternal shame on House Segharlin that my son calls him friend!”

  Geruath’s face was white with fury now, the rouge on his cheekbones a blazing contrast to the ivory skin beneath it, and the saliva clinging to his teeth was growing frothy with the frenzied movements of his mouth.

  “Get out of my sight!” he shrieked. “Get out and take your filthy plots away with you! I order the demon destroyed, and I-will-be-obeyed! Then I’ll attend to that insolent Alban bastard.” His voice dropped to a slavering whisper thick with anticipated atrocities. “Have it done. No. You’re my son. You do it. Now!”

  Blood trickled from Crisen’s slack-lipped mouth and dripped unheeded from his chin as he gaped in shock and hate and horror at the slavering, screeching thing which was his father. Geruath had played the madman’s part so well and for so long that role and reason and reality had jumbled past the point where they were separate. Crisen reached the decision he had toyed with for far too long, and left the room without another word.

  *

  The lord’s-men were long gone, and with their departure a great stillness filled the empty courtyard below the citadel of Seghar. It remained unbroken until at last Marek moved to follow the vanished soldiers.

  “Where are you going?” Aldric Talvalin’s voice was very quiet, barely carrying to the demon-queller’s ears, but something about its tone stopped Marek in his tracks.

  “Out of here,” he said without turning round.

  “Away from here, but not out of it. Not until you’ve told me what’s going on. You were never in the Jevaiden just because of a rumoured werewolf, were you?” Marek turned his head a little, just enough to see Aldric’s face out of the corner of one eye.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Not in this place.”

  “Yes, in this place. Because men were killed in this place. Men who might still be alive if you weren’t so evasive. Did you sacrifice their lives to make a point? Or were you curious to see what the demon could do?”

  “No!” Outraged by such a suggestion, the Cernuan swung around to face his accuser. He might have expected to see anger and maybe a trace of contempt. Instead he saw regret.

  “So you say. I hope it’s the truth.”

  “It is the truth.” Aldric stared at him, and Marek had the uneasy feeling he was being weighed in the balance. Weighed against what, he didn’t dare ask.

  “You wanted inside Sedna’s library, didn’t you? Where is it?”

  “I told you, they refused to let me see it! The place is locked and guarded—”

  “Lead the way.”

  “We won’t get in!” Aldric glanced at him and smiled, a twitch of muscles that drew his lips taut for an instant.

  “Marek Endain, you’re a wise, wise man, but you’ve still got much to learn about me. Walk on. You can tell me all about demons as you go.”

  “But what about the Overlord?”

  “What about the Overlord?” Aldric repeated in a flat voice. Marek looked, and listened, and shrugged expressively. What indeed?

  “I know – augmented by guesswork – what happened here,” he said, then flushed as Aldric clapped his hands together in soft, ironic applause. “If you’re going to mock me…” the Cernuan started to say, then shrugged. “Why bother? You… You’re what ar Korentin told me to expect. And you’re not a religious man.” Though it wasn’t a question, it needed a reply.

  “I respect the Father of Fires and the Light of Heaven, of course,” Aldric said cautiously. “But I don’t think you could call me holy.”

  “I wouldn’t. Not for a minute. But your education is second to none.”

  Aldric grimaced at the back-handed compliment, for it was a part of that education which had sent him here. Rynert had said it plainly enough: “You are a wizard’s fosterling, my lord, and his over-apt pupil. You have few compunctions about using the Art Magic. You must prove you are bound by the Honour-Codes if you are to be trusted. The task I set you now will make plain if you are worthy of the title ilauem-arluth Talvalin…”

  Task. A small, neat word for what the king required. Murder was more accurate. Murder in cold blood. He had killed before, but never like that, and Aldric doubted he could do it even to Crisen Geruath.

  “I’m not an executioner…” he muttered, repeating the old litany, then realised Marek was staring at him.

  “I thought,” said the demon-queller with over-heavy dignity, “you wanted me to tell you what I know of demons?”

  “I do.”

  “Then grant me the courtesy of listening.”

  “I’ve been listening all along.” Aldric wasn’t in the mood for an argument. “And you mentioned my education.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Marek, slightly appeased. His voice dropped to a whisper, even though Aldric was the only one listening, to keep the things he said from being overheard. “If you heeded what Gemmel taught you, then you should already know how the gods of one religion become the demons of the next. It’s their first step from faith through myth into oblivion. Once men ceased worshipping them, the old gods that are not our Gods—” Aldric jerked his head round at that, unsettled at dead Evthan’s words repeated by someone who had never heard them, “—were cast down, and their shrines destroyed. It’s far easier to attract the notice of a demon than a god. One hears constant prayer, the other must be grateful for any small attention that staves off descent into the forgotten dark. But they have no love for the men whose ancestors put them aside in favour of another. If even ordinary mortals brood over a rejection, how much more—”

  “Are you making game of me?” The sudden rasp in Aldric’s voice was like nothing Marek had ever encountered before. It wasn’t provoked by memories of the Jouvaine girl Gueynor, for what had happened then had just turned him harsh and irritable. Now he sounded deadly. Almost too late, Marek recalled the young man’s first lover Tehal Kyrin of Valhol, who had left him in circumstances never explained. Gemmel Errekren and Dewan ar Korentin had warned him to avoid that topic at all costs, yet when Marek mentioned her once by accident it earned him just a warning glare. Now for the sake of effect he had done so on purpose, and from the look on Aldric’s face he wouldn’t get away unscathed a third time.

  “The page you found,” Marek said hurriedly, “was a warning—”

  “As is this. Never play with my past again. Ever.” Aldric had one hand on his longsword’s hilt, but even now it wasn’t a threat, more a reaching-out for something familiar, something – if the word applied to a taiken – comforting. Then he let out a long sigh of breath and his anger went with it. “So what did the page warn against?”

  There was another moment’s hesitation while Marek set his jumbled thoughts in order. He had thought he knew Aldric by now, though the young eijo was still full of disturbing surprises, and thought too that such knowledge might make his companion easier to understand and less dangerous. It worried him to discover just how wrong he had been.

  “It’s a chant, a song without music, which has been part of demon-lore for centuries. Issaqua,” Marek blessed himself, “was one of the discarded gods. Joybringer, Summerlight, was a bright being of flowers and growing things…”

  “Flowers?” echoed Aldric, and though there was only cool dryness in the air of the corridor, a faint thread of rose-scented perfume seemed to touch his face with the gossamer but flinch-provoking contact of a cobweb.

  “Now it has degenerated to Issaqua the Bale Flower, Dweller in Shadow, He who sings the Song of Desolation. There a
re many formal epithets for him. Or it.” Marek thought a moment and amended his pronunciation slightly. “I mean Him, or It. Deity or demon, such things deserve respect if only for safety’s sake.”

  “The Song of Desolation?” I know that I am lost, whispered a voice in Aldric’s mind. “Then it was Issaqua who tore apart the soldier…?”

  “No. Understand me about this, and you should do so more readily than any other man in this citadel. Issaqua is a demon lord. It won’t answer a direct summons any more than a clan-lord would. The entity which did the killing is an intermediary, a herald, one with power to pass beyond the Void. It bears messages of reverence and worship. It bears invitations to the Ancient Ones. And it bears sacrifices. Six men went down that tunnel, one came out alive, and yet you found just one corpse! Five soldiers died to prove that accepting this invitation is worthwhile.”

  “They were bait?”

  “They were appetisers.” Marek’s voice was bleak. “A foretaste of the banquet.” Aldric’s mind veered in revulsion from the images conjured by those words.

  “What is this herald?” he demanded. “What does it look like?”

  “I don’t know. But get me inside Sedna’s library and I might—”

  “Quiet!” Between one step and the next Aldric snapped to a halt, his head tilting backwards and his eyes narrowed with concentration. Marek knew a listening posture when he saw it and mouthed What can you hear? with enough clarity for Aldric to read each word as it was shaped.

  Then Marek no longer needed an answer, for he heard it too.

  The sound was almost inaudible. There was a high, sweet purity in the upper register and a rolling bass sonority in the lower, but both sounds were almost beyond the limits of human hearing. Yet they harmonised, as the howling of wolves will harmonise in still winter dusk across a field of virgin snow, and it was that choral harmony which sent a tingling shudder through every fibre of Aldric’s body. Not fear, not cold, but exaltation that was almost sexual in its intensity. The sensation faded as the note which had brought it into being died away, dwindling to a caressing vibrato and then to a forlorn and yearning silence.

  Aldric drew in a tremulous breath and wondered if that was how Evthan had felt when, transformed to a wolf, he flung back his head and wailed at the silver full-moon sky. He turned to see if Marek felt as he did. The demon-queller looked as if he felt sick. That look washed Aldric’s reeling euphoria clear away on a rip-tide of ice-water, and there was no real need for either man to speak. It was Marek who did.

  “Issaqua sings the song of desolation…” he quoted.

  “And fills the world with Darkness…” Aldric finished. “Where’s the library?”

  Marek was already running.

  *

  There was one sentry on guard outside the door, armed with the inevitable gisarm, and he stiffened apprehensively when the two hlensyarlen approached him along the gallery. Their smiles did nothing to reassure him, for both men were breathing hard as if they had stopped a headlong dash just out of his sight and the smiles clashed with ill-disguised concern on both their faces. In any case he wasn’t disposed to be friendly towards anyone right now. The strange atmosphere inside Seghar citadel was making his head ache, his relief hadn’t arrived to take over, and he was hungry, so there was little courtesy in the way he brought the polearm round and down, and even less in his bark of challenge.

  “What do you want?”

  “We want into that room!” Aldric snapped. He used Drusalan, but if he had hoped an officious voice and commanding attitude would do the trick, he was disappointed. The gisarm shifted from a posture of vague warning to levelled at his chest.

  “That’s forbidden. By the Overlord’s command!”

  “But it’s by the Overlord’s command that we go inside,” Marek protested, and the sentry’s attention shifted to him. “He wants me to examine several books. Lord Crisen himself gave me confirmation for the order.”

  “Show me.” Now the gisarm wasn’t pointing straight at anyone but wavering a little, as its owner tried to make up his mind between acceptance of new orders and unquestioning obedience to old ones.

  “I think you have it,” said Aldric to Marek, and as the man’s eyes shifted to see what the Cernuan’s reply might be he took one step forward and another sideways. Instantly the gisarm’s blade snapped towards him again. “Haven’t you?”

  “I thought you had it.” Marek copied the two steps. Now they were that much closer to the sentry while widening the field of view he had to cover. “Wait, though.” He thrust his right hand inside his robe, reaching for a document or perhaps a hidden dagger, and the gisarm jerked round to counter the potential threat. “No, not here.” Marek’s hand withdrew, empty, with fingers spread. “Give it to him.”

  As the gisarm slashed back, far too late, Aldric’s armoured left forearm blocked the haft below the blade. His right hand moved too, a sweep across the sentry’s midriff that would have been insignificant – if the hand hadn’t held a knife. The man dropped his gisarm and doubled over, but was slammed upright again then back against the wall with the knife-blade gleaming in front of his eyes.

  “Not Lord Crisen’s confirmation,” said Aldric, “just mine, but effective all the same. Now you have a choice.” The knife dropped again, back into the long clean cut which had laid the man’s crest-coat open from one hip to the other without even breaking the skin beneath. Yet. “You open the door, or I open your belly.” The man cringed back as far as the wall would allow. The blade followed, pressed harder and drew blood for the first time. “Have you ever wondered what your own liver looks like?”

  It might have been no more than a bluff, but it was convincing. With a hand that trembled the sentry pulled a heavy, complicated key from the pouch at his belt.

  “Wise man,” said Marek, with an uncertain sidelong glance at his companion. Aldric probably wouldn’t have carried out such a brutal threat, but the demon-queller was no longer willing to stake his life on it. Or anyone else’s. The key fitted and turned in silence, and the door swung back to reveal the darkness of the unlit room beyond. As Marek stepped inside there was a meaty thud behind him, and he whirled around with horror on his face.

  The soldier was sliding down the wall towards the floor, but there was no blood either on the floor, his clothes or the knife. Instead the only sign of damage was a livid bruise beneath one ear, where the edge of a plated gauntlet had chopped him senseless. Aldric dragged the loose-limbed body past Marek and heeled the door shut behind them.

  “You said you wanted inside Sedna’s library,” he said. “So here you are. Now do what you have to do and let’s get out again. What we’ve just done will need elaborate excuses, and right now I can’t think of any.”

  *

  “Do you really want to see him again?” asked Jervan. “It will only bring more grief.”

  “I told you, Commander, it was my fault,” Gueynor insisted yet again. “I was in the wrong and gave him no chance to hear my explanation. I’ve been a peasant these ten years past, and when I played the high-born lady I tried too hard!”

  The two sat on opposite sides of a table in the Garrison Commander’s quarters. Jervan had insisted on it after Kourgath’s storm-enhanced departure from the summer-house in the ruined gardens. He had felt a pang of jealousy at the way Gueynor had stared after the young mercenary, then reminded himself severely of his own wife and the daughters who were both no older than this Jouvaine girl. His interest was material and political, not physical. There was too much else to lose for that.

  “It doesn’t matter if you stay on friendly terms with this hlensyarl. What he intends to do won’t be because you want it, but because he wants it. All you need is to be close enough to take the first advantage.”

  “Like a buzzard waiting for something to die.”

  “If you like.” Jervan wasn’t ruffled by the comparison. “Eager or not, impatient or not, everyone expecting an inheritance fits that description. And you should be
very eager, lady. Crisen Geruath owes you many lives.”

  “Not me. My uncle. And through him, the Alban.” She raised the blonde head from which Jervan had persuaded her to wash the dye. “I want to leave Seghar, Commander. I want to go home again. I don’t want to be a lady any more.”

  “No!” Jervan’s hand thumped the table-top and he half-rose from his chair, then produced an apologetic smile and subsided again. Softly, you fool… “I mean, why not wait a while and see what happens?”

  “Are you afraid of losing the privileges you haven’t yet received, Kortagor?” There was no scorn in Gueynor’s voice, none of the mockery justified by his own eagerness. Just regret. “If that’s so, then I’m sorry.” She seemed to mean it, but right now sincerity had no value for Jervan.

  “Damn your sorrow. You, my lady,” the title was a sneer now, “are my means of gaining respect for myself, for my position here, for my family. And I won’t stand aside and watch while your… Your finer feelings rob me of it.” Jervan paused, pushing the heel of one hand into an eye-socket as if that pressure would relieve the headache which had filled his skull with pain for the past ten minutes. He could feel the blood pounding in his temples, and the faint high noise of the headache ringing deep inside like the cry of innumerable bats.

  “Understand this. I won’t harm you, but I won’t let you go. Not until matters are settled to my satisfaction.” As he spoke Jervan backed from the table to the door, taking its key from his tunic pocket. There was only one window to this room, the outermost of his tower apartments, and it opened on an eighty-five-foot drop to the fortress courtyard.

  “Don’t try to get out. You’ll be quite comfortable, I assure you…”

  Jervan stepped out and snatched the door shut behind him as if he feared the slender girl might leap at his throat as her uncle Evthan would have done. As he twisted the key and shot the deadbolt across she was shouting something, but the sense was muffled by two thick layers of oak planks set cross-grained to frustrate assault by axe. Otherwise her words might have caused him some concern.