Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  During the months Ilna and Sharina had gone their separate ways, Sharina had faced death and a demon. From the story Ilna's eyes told, she had seen far worse—and been worse as well.

  “Ilna,” said Liane, the girl Sharina had met at Garric's side here in Erdin three days before. “My father traveled the world. He brought Mother and me gifts when he returned. I've seen cloth from all over the Isles and beyond, but I've never seen workmanship to equal yours.”

  She called herself Liane os-Benlo, but Garric had told Sharina in a private moment that Liane was born to the noble house of bos-Benliman. Her father, a wizard, had died in a fashion that Garric didn't choose to discuss.

  Liane's hair was as black as Ilna's, but she had the pale complexion of the Sandrakkan nobility whereas Ilna—like Garric—was tanned to the color of walnut heartwood. Either girl would pass as beautiful, but Liane was doll-like and delicate to look at, while Ilna...No one would ever call Ilna plain, but “severe” would be the first word a stranger used to describe her.

  “Yes, well,” Ilna said. “Perhaps it's compensation for my not being able to read books the way you and Garric do, do you think?”

  Liane blushed.

  “I'll teach you to read, Ilna,” Sharina said sharply. “You know how many times I've offered before. You always said you didn't have enough time.”

  She didn't know Liane, but she knew Garric liked the girl and had gone through a lot with her. Sharina knew Ilna very well. She wasn't about to let her friend begin working on an undeserving Liane with a tongue as sharp as the bone-handled knife Ilna used for household tasks.

  Thought of knives drew Sharina's mind to the weapon that was now hers, hanging behind her from a wall hook meant for cloaks in colder weather. The scales of the hilt were black horn riveted to a full tang, and the heavy single-edged blade was as long as her forearm.

  It was a sealhunter's knife from Pewle Island in the Outer Sea, well north of the main circuit of the Isles. The man who'd carried it, Nonnus, had come to live as a hermit in the woods outside Barca's Hamlet before Sharina was born.

  Nonnus ate the game he killed with wooden javelins and the crops he planted with a pointed stick. He set the bones of folk who injured themselves and could bring down a fever or soothe a cough with simples made from the herbs he grew. Beyond such help he'd had little to do with the community.

  “Oh, I don't think I'd have the talent for reading,” Ilna said, more with resignation than sadness. Her fingers worked as she talked, never hurrying but never putting a thread out of place. “And it's not a skill that a peasant needs, after all. Or a weaver either, so far as I've noticed.”

  Sharina got up for her frame loom. She'd go back to her design in a moment, but she wanted to stretch her muscles. She'd been raised as an innkeeper's daughter. Her duties had involved more moving and carrying than sitting in one place with her fingers doing most of the work.

  They were staying in one of the buildings of Master Latias' walled compound. It was a single room divided by folding paper screens with brush drawings of fanciful landscapes. The occupants had greater privacy than any peasant in a hut in Barca's Hamlet did.

  Master Latias had provided the looms and thread also. Cashel had done the Serian merchant a service, and in return Latias treated Cashel and his companions as his own close kin. He'd offered silk, but Ilna said for her purpose wool would do as well. Whatever that purpose was. Sharina had agreed when Ilna asked her and Liane to spend the afternoon weaving. She didn't understand the request, but Ilna asked very little—and never without an implicit promise to repay any favor many times over.

  “Reading's a way to meet people of distant times and places,” Liane said. She wasn't arguing, exactly, but she had her own opinions and she wasn't about to listen without response as things she cared about were disparaged. “And when a work has survived the collapse of the Old Kingdom, it must have something special to it. Celondre said, 'My verses are a monument that will last longer than bronze,' and he was right.”

  “There're plenty of people in this time and place that I haven't met yet,” Ilna said. She gave a half-chuckle, half-sniff. “And no few that I have met and sooner wouldn't have. My uncle Katchin, for example.”

  Ilna sobered, though there'd been little enough humor in her tone before. She added, “Well, there's some who'd say the same about having met me. They'd have good cause to feel that way too, I'm afraid.”

  Sharina touched the hilt of the Pewle knife in its sheath of black leather waterproofed with seal fat. She hadn't intended to walk here. She'd just gotten up to stretch...

  But it wasn't in her muscles alone that Sharina felt an ache.

  Pewlemen were a hardy lot, well used to weapons and brutal conditions. Generals hired them as irregular troops to accompany the main body of cavalry and armored infantry.

  Nonnus had served as a mercenary soldier. While serving he'd done things that sent him to a forest on Haft, praying for the rest of his life to the Lady for forgiveness.

  Nonnus had been closer to Sharina than to any of the other folk in Barca's Hamlet. He'd left the island with her when she needed a companion she could trust completely, and in the end he'd died for her in a mound of her enemies.

  He'd done that because she was blond and beautiful; and because he couldn't do anything for the blond, beautiful child whose throat he'd laughingly cut one terrible afternoon when a king fought for his crown and nothing mattered but victory.

  Sharina would have given all she possessed to bring Nonnus back, but she knew in her heart that death was the thing the hermit had wanted most after forgiveness. She could only pray, as Nonnus himself had prayed, that the Lady would show mercy to humans with human failings.

  Sharina turned. The other women were staring at her, though Ilna’s fingers continued to work across the loom frame.

  “What is it that you're weaving, Sharina?” Liane said in a bright, false voice. She looked quickly down to her own project.

  “A collar edging in red yarn,” Sharina said, her lips smiling faintly. Her fingertips still rested on the hilt of the big knife. “A small thing, but one I could do well enough to pass. I could weave a whole lifetime and never be competition for Ilna.”

  Sharina looked at her friend. “Ilna,” she said, “I don't know what you've done or think you've done, and I don't want to know. But you've got to remember that it doesn't matter, it doesn't make you bad.”

  She paused, swallowed, and blurted, “Nonnus did worse things than you ever could have, and there was never a better person in the world than him. Never!”

  Sharina hadn't expected to start crying. Liane was a sensitive girl, brought up in a household where there was enough wealth to allow the luxury of sentiment. It wasn't surprising that she got up from her stool and squeezed Sharina's hand.

  But it was a great surprise that Ilna held Sharina's other hand, the one that gripped the hilt of the Pewle knife.

  The merchant turned from the cask swinging down to his wagon when he noticed Garric and Cashel walking toward him. His surprise quickly became concern as he realized just how big the two strangers were. “Hey, who do you think you are?” he cried.

  The ship's captain took a mallet from a rack at the base of the mast. To Garric's surprise the six common sailors went on with their work as stolidly as so many plow oxen. He'd have expected more reaction from them if only because the strangers were more interesting than lifting barrels from the hold.

  “We're friends,” Garric said easily to the merchant. He nodded toward the vessel. “Your friends at least, sir; I don't know if the shipper there is going to like what I have to say.”

  “What do you mean by that?” the captain roared. He hopped down to the quay. That was a mistake, because it made obvious how much smaller he was than the two youths. The oak mallet he brandished was no threat compared with the quarterstaff Cashel balanced easily in one hand.

  “I'm an innkeeper's son, sir,” Garric continued, ignoring the captain. “Garric or-Reise fr
om Haft. Are you paying for full casks here?”

  “Of course I'm paying for full casks,” the merchant said. “What sort of question is that?”

  He was wary but no longer frightened, and the angry edge had left his voice. The carters driving his half-dozen wagons had gotten down from their seats, holding their whips, but they kept a respectful distance from the discussion.

  “See the bead on this barrel stave?” Garric asked. “It's not bilgewater, you know.”

  The cask had settled onto the bed of the wagon, resting on end. Garric wiped a finger across the wet patch he'd seen while the cask was still in the air. The sailors were loosing the sling as though nothing untoward was taking place on the dock.

  Garric sniffed, noted the sharp tang of alcohol as he'd expected, and offered his finger to the merchant to make his own examination. It was cider royal—cider which had been left out in the winter. By skimming the ice that formed, a skilled man could create a drink much stronger than ordinary applejack. It was a drunkard's beverage, and one that Reise rarely stocked for his inn.

  “Somebody's drilled this cask for a length of reed, I shouldn't wonder,” Garric said, smiling nonchalantly at the furious captain. “The hole's plugged with wax, but if I were you I'd see how much was really left before I paid for the cargo.”

  “May the Sister drag you down to Hell for a liar!” the captain shouted. His beard bristled out like a bright flame. “These casks are just the way I loaded them at Valles!”

  Men who've done heavy labor together learn to anticipate one another; otherwise a load slips and crushes the hand or leg of the fellow on the low side. Cashel and Garric had spent a decade shifting tree trunks and boulders. Neither needed to tell the other, what to do now.

  Cashel tapped the cask with the ferrule of his staff. It boomed, obviously empty or nearly so.

  “Right!” said the merchant. “My name's Opsos, lads. Let's get this open right now!”

  “By the Lady!” the captain said. “If you're going to start a cask, you're going to pay me for it first. You'll spill half of it over the docks, you will!”

  Despite the captain's vehemence, he was by now only going through the motions of protest. The black scowl he threw in the direction of his crewmen showed who he thought was responsible. They were lowering the sling into the hold for another cask.

  Cashel stepped onto the wagon bed, using his staff as a pole to thrust himself the last of the way. The axle groaned a complaint as though a second barrel had been set on it.

  “Sister take me!” the captain said, throwing the mallet to the ground in disgust. He looked furtively at the hull of his ship, perhaps considering now many more of the barrels his men might have tapped during the voyage.

  Cashel raised his staff like a flagpole, then brought the ferrule straight down on the cask. One of the top's three boards flew into the air with the crossbraces still pegged to it, but there was no splash as there would have been if the barrel were full.

  Opsos clambered onto the wagon with the driver's aid. Garric stayed on the ground where he could shelter Tenoctris against the press of spectators strolling over to see the show.

  Cashel shouted. He tossed his staff down; Garric caught it without thinking. Hands freed, Cashel tilted the cask with one hand so that he could get his other under the lower rim. He lifted it overhead, an impossible task even for him if it had been filled with a hundred gallons of cider royal, and dumped the remaining contents onto the quay. Garric jumped back.

  Only enough cider to darken the bricks remained Doubled over, packed for preservation in the liquor the sailors had sucked out unknowing, was a corpse.

  The corpse wasn't that of a human, or at any rate not wholly that of a human. It had two arms and two legs, but the skin was gray and had a pebbled texture between the scales.

  The creature was hairless. Its head was the size of a man's but flattened and wedge-shaped, like that of a gigantic serpent.

  “A Scaled Man,” Tenoctris said as the bellowing crowd stampeded away from the scene. “Indeed, there's a great risk to the world if the Scaled Men have entered it again.”

  “I'm all right now,” Sharina said. She snuffled deeply Ilna nodded and stepped away. Liane offered the handkerchief she'd had ready since she jumped from her stool.

  Sharina didn't notice the square of lace-fringed silk. She pulled a sturdier handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes before blowing her nose.

  Ilna sniffed with amusement at Liane's quickly hidden discomfiture. The rich girl had yet to learn that other people usually didn't need help, or want it. Some other people, anyway.

  “I'll tie off my collar band now,” Sharina said, her voice under control again. She glanced over at Ilna. “Or would you like me to make it wider?”

  “It's your design,” Ilna said. She examined her friend's work.

  The strip of red fabric would add color to the tunic a farmwife wore when she made her Tenth Night sacrifice: the splash of beer and pinch of ground meal sprinkled before the household altar with miniatures of the Lady and Her Consort the Shepherd. For major occasions—a wedding or the annual Tithe Procession, when priests came to the borough from Carcosa with mule carts bearing life-sized images of the Deities—the same woman would wear ribbons and garments of patterned fabric bought from a peddler. If she could afford purchased finery, that was; but Barca's Hamlet was a prosperous community in which anyone who was willing to work made out reasonably well.

  “It's a nice piece,” Ilna said. Sharina nodded, gratified by the praise.

  As everybody in the borough knew, Ilna didn't lie about craftsmanship. The closest she came was silence.

  Even then—and that slight kindness was the exception rather than the rule—anyone who pressed Ilna got the truth as Ilna saw it, with no more embellishment or delicacy than millstones show for the grain between them.

  Ilna ran her fingers slowly across the collar band. Cloth spoke to her, telling her things which the folk who wove or wore the fabric often didn't know about themselves. She'd always had the ability, just as she'd always been aware of patterns where others saw only a loom frame and a mass of yarn waiting to be strung on it.

  She'd never discussed her talent with anyone; not her brother Cashel, not Garric, whom she'd loved all her conscious life without giving the least overt sign of her feelings. Especially not Garric. If others thought at all about Ilna os-Kenset, it was merely that she wove well and that her assessments of other people were rarely charitable but were almost always accurate.

  Sharina's fabric gave Ilna the feel of Barca's Hamlet, the simple houses and the warm tranquillity of a place where events had the virtue of being predictable even when they weren't desirable in themselves. Neither that nor the underlying strength and decency permeating the work were surprising to Ilna, who'd known Sharina since infancy.

  The deep sadness was new, but Ilna had seen her friend cry as she remembered the protector who had died for her. Sharina's feelings toward Cashel were new also; Ilna jerked her fingers back from the fabric as though from boiling water. The truth can be an awkward thing.

  “There,” Liane said as she wrapped the selvage of the work she'd finished. Liane stood and swung the stool out of the way so that Ilna could get as close as she wanted to the frame.

  After Ilna left the borough, her arrogant determination had brought her to a place she'd thought was gray Limbo but which she later realized was Hell. Ilna had come back from that place as a minion of Hell with skills no human was fit to wield.

  The skills remained. She'd been rescued from the Thing that had possessed her, but nothing could ever rescue Ilna from the evil she'd done while the Thing used her the way her own fingers used a loom.

  Liane stood as straight as a shed stick, waiting for Ilna to examine her work and pronounce on it. She met Ilna’s eyes without flinching. She knew Ilna too well to expect mercy, but pride kept her even from wanting that.

  Ilna smiled with a vague humor directed primarily at herself. She un
derstood pride at least as well as the rich girl did.

  She bent to examine the work without touching it. Instead of weaving a narrow band the height of the frame the way Sharina had, Liane had strung warp threads only in the center. She'd filled a square no bigger than her palm with an intricate zigzag design in rust-red and butternut yellow. The workmanship was painstaking and excellent. The cloth buyers who'd carried Ilna's fabrics away for sale to wealthy folk all over the Isles made sure that she knew the fashions of Erdin and Valles, but this was like nothing she'd ever seen before. She looked at Liane and asked, “Is this a Sandrakkan pattern? Or did you see it when you were in Valles?”

  “Neither,” Liane said. “A panel like this hung over my crib when I was a baby. It's something my father brought back, I don't know from where. As I told you, he traveled widely.”

  Ilna's lips curved in what was for her a broad smile. “And the work itself? Did they teach you to weave when you were at your school for girls?”

  “No,” Liane said crisply. “Of course Mistress Gudea taught weaving in her academy along with all the other accomplishments proper to a young lady, but my mother had already taught me to weave. She was wonderfully talented, but she wasn't as skilled as you are.”

  Ilna sniffed. “Neither are you, Liane,” she said. “But you're better than anyone else you're likely to meet. You missed a wonderful career.”

  And, as the other girls digested what they'd just heard her say, Ilna touched the square of fabric for the first time.

  The hard thread and tight weave made the woven plaque feel slick. Ilna let her mind slip deeper into the fabric, merging with it.

  Goats nipped the leaves from bushes as they wandered on rolling, rocky hills. In the distance lay the ruin of a castle built with Cyclopean blocks. Ilna was seeing the source of the pattern, though she had no more idea than the goats themselves did of where that source might have been.