Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  He broke another sapling. He was weaving them into a sleeping nest, since Cashel had said they'd be spending the night here.

  “I figured she was after Halphemos' job,” the ape continued. “He didn't even know she was a wizard.”

  “Why didn't you tell him?” Cashel said. His voice had a slight rumble that suggested thunder over the horizon. In Barca's Hamlet, people looked out for their neighbors.

  Zahag stopped what he was doing and looked up at the human. He said, “Halphemos made me what I am, chief. I'd have torn his throat out if I dared.”

  “Oh,” Cashel said. He thought about how it felt when you didn't fit in anywhere. He'd been that way when Sharina left the borough and took all his unspoken hopes with her. “Well, that's between you and him, I guess.”

  Zahag went back to weaving saplings, using his feet as well as his hands for the task. “I guess Silya figured she'd get rid of you first because you're a wizard too,” he said.

  “I'm not...” Cashel muttered, but he couldn't put any strength in the denial. He didn't know what the truth was anymore. Truth wasn't as simple as it had seemed when he tended sheep in Barca's Hamlet.

  “And I guess King Folquin'll blame all the trouble on Halphemos,” Zahag continued, “so Silya may get rid of you both.”

  He gave a soft, hooting laugh. “Folquin's going to be angry enough to chew rocks, you know,” the ape concluded.

  “Folquin was wrong to arrest Halphemos,” Cerix muttered angrily to Sharina. He paused to suck in more vapor from the pellet of black gum he was heating in a closed pot. “If the boy said he didn't do it, he didn't. Maybe there's more powerful wizards than Halphemos around, though by the Lady, I never met them. But Halphemos never put a foot wrong and got some effect that he wasn't expecting. Not once.”

  Cerix was a middle-aged man with a fringe of dark hair around a spreading bald spot. He had a paunch, but his powerful arms and shoulders would have been the envy of any hardworking farmer in Barca's Hamlet.

  Cerix sat on a rolling chair with larger wheels in back than front so that he could grip them by the rims and propel himself when there was no one to push him. His legs had been cut off at mid-thigh; the drug he smoked might dull but could not eliminate the constant pain.

  “I'm the one who made the mistake,” Cerix said bitterly. He gestured toward where his knees should have been. “The boy never would have done this.”

  Cerix and Halphemos lived in a courtyard house with rooms on three sides and a wall across the other—much like the palace in miniature. Sharina would have expected the court wizard to live in the palace rather than nearby, but she'd realized immediately that Cerix was poisonously ashamed of being crippled.

  He'd opened the door himself when she found the place, well after midnight. There weren't any servants, though a dwelling this size might have had several.

  “Wizards who had very little power in past years are able to do great things now,” Sharina said. “Could Halphemos have miscalculated?”

  Cerix looked at her sharply. “You don't know anything about the art yourself, do you?” he said.

  “No,” said Sharina, meeting his glare with a steady gaze. She'd come to Cerix with the news—and to ask for help—as soon as she could after Folquin ended the uproar in his courtyard by having Halphemos imprisoned as the culprit. “But I have friends who do.”

  “You're right about the way things have changed recently,” Cerix said. “You weren't listening to what I said about the boy, though. He had an instinct. Half a dozen times I taught him an incantation but he wouldn't use it, said it wasn't right. What did this hick kid know, I thought? So one day when I'd had most of a bottle of wine, I showed him.”

  The crippled man laughed, but the sound trailed off into a cackle of madness. He lifted the nosepiece of his inhaler and breathed deeply again.

  The narcotic smoke scraped the back of Sharina's throat. She walked to the water jar and dipped herself a drink with one of the cups hanging from the rim. The attractively shaped jar was of low-fired clay. Water sweating through the porous container kept the remaining contents noticeably cooler than the air.

  “How did you meet Halphemos?” she asked.

  “I was the Great Cerix, whose key unlocks the wonders of the cosmos,” Cerix said, lowering his inhaler. “I was giving a show on Sandrakkan. No place you've ever heard of, just a cluster of houses in the back of beyond.”

  Much the way Cerix would've described Barca's Hamlet,Sharina thought. She didn't speak aloud.

  “A boy came up to me after the show,” Cerix continued. “Alos or-Noman—Alos nobody's son. He said he wanted to join me, to learn wizardry from me.”

  He snorted. “I already had a boy to work the crowds for me—my sister's son, and a worthless little scut he was. But I didn't need a second brat. I told Alos that.”

  Cerix rolled his chair to the water jar. Sharina leaned forward to offer help but caught herself before she spoke. Even so, the cripple glared at her as he dipped his own water. He drank.

  “One of the images I'd done during the show was the royal palace in Valles,” Cerix said, shaking his head in marvel at the memory. “I'd got a bit of tile broken off the palace roof in a windstorm. From that I made the whole building appear. I was proud of that effect. Each time I did it was like pulling a plow through hard ground.”

  Sharina nodded. In the borough, folk with plow oxen helped neighbors without; it's the way people were. But she understood the image very well, the wife on the plow handles as the husband pulled it; or worse, the little child guiding the sharpened stake that the widowed mother tried to drag forward.

  “So this boy does the effect in front of me, parroting the words he heard me use during the show,” Cerix said. “There's the palace, hanging in the air, only when he does it you can see people walking in the courtyard and he's not raised a sweat. Alos the Bastard, twelve years old, taught himself to read but not the Old Script, of course. And he's a hundred times the wizard I ever thought of being. Funny, isn't it?”

  Cerix started to cry. He mopped at his eyes with his free hand, then flung the mug against the well curb in the courtyard where it shattered.

  “I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't,” Cerix said. “He'd dragged himself up from even less than I'd had, and all he wanted was me to teach him to use his talent. I just wish the Lady'd given me sense enough to listen to him instead of trying to prove I was just as great a wizard as he was—when I knew I wasn't, not even close!”

  Sharina turned away. She cleared her throat and said, “Halphemos thought that you could help me and Cashel find our friends who disappeared with the ship we all were on. Can you help me find Cashel first?”

  Cerix had a napkin on his lap. He blew his nose fiercely on it, then rolled his chair out into the courtyard. He threw the wadded cloth accurately into a hamper by the open doorway of the adjacent room.

  “Halphemos knew I couldn't work the spell myself,” Cerix said in a tired voice as he returned with swift, powerful thrusts of his arms to where Sharina stood. He dipped water with another cup. “He said he'd find your friends when I taught him the incantation, didn't he? He still can't read the Old Script.”

  Sharina thought back to the young wizard's actual words in the moments before the royal court turned into a melee. “I guess that's what he must have meant,” she said. “But you're a wizard too, aren't you?”

  “Not anymore,” Cerix said in a bleak voice. His inhaler was on the floor beside the charcoal brazier on which he heated it. He spun his wheeled chair back to it. “You won't understand, I suppose. The words of an incantation resist you. The greater the effect, the greater the resistance. That's why everybody isn't a wizard.”

  Cerix unscrewed the top of the inhaler and set it aside. The device was of fine porcelain decorated in green slip with a serpent coiling about the pot to swallow its own tail. Cerix turned up the container and scraped the crusted remnants of the pellet onto the floor with a wooden spatula.

  “B
ut you are a wizard,” Sharina said evenly. She needed Cerix's help, and his drug-sodden weakness disgusted her. She touched the hilt of the Pewle knife. Nonnus had known nothing about wizardry except to avoid it, but Sharina would have given anything for the hermit's calm presence beside her now.

  “I was a wizard,” Cerix said sharply. He reached for the little box holding his pellets of black gum, then set it down and met Sharina's eyes again.

  “I studied the art,” he said fiercely. “I copied.incantations from the works of ancient scholars, wizards of the Old Kingdom and before. I had everything I needed to be a great wizard—except the power to use my knowledge. Still, I was gaining power because the forces around me waxed.”

  He smiled in cold recollection. “Just as your friends told you. I knew Halphemos had the power I lacked, but I didn't understand that he had judgment I lacked as well. Good judgment mattered more than power.”

  Cerix shrugged his muscular shoulders. “I'd found an incantation that would open a window on another plane,” he said. “Halphemos refused to speak it. This was two years ago, when we were giving performances in Erdin and I dreamed of becoming court wizard to the Earl of Sandrakkan. While Halphemos was gone from our lodgings, I worked the spell myself.”

  Tears began to drip from Cerix's eyes. Voice trembling, he continued, “It wasn't a window, it was a door. I started to slip through. Weakness was all that saved me—I couldn't finish the incantation, so the door closed before I was wholly inside.”

  Cerix picked up the box of narcotics. His hands were trembling so badly that he couldn't slide the top open. Sharina took it from him, opened it, and placed a gum pellet carefully in the center of the ceramic pot.

  “My legs are still on the other plane,” Cerix said more calmly. He screwed the top back on the inhaler and set the device on the brazier to heat. “Demons tear them. Every moment of every day, demons are ripping at my legs. And when I try to speak an incantation now, the words stick in my throat.”

  “I see,” Sharina said. “I'm very sorry.”

  There'd been folk in the borough who'd lost fingers or whole limbs. Some of them complained of pain in the missing part for the rest of their lives. It had nothing to do with demons, but it was as real to the victims as any other pain.

  Sharina frowned. She'd never thought that demons had anything to do with old Jael complaining about the foot she'd lost as a girl when a wagon rolled over her. Sharina had assumed Cerix had to be wrong when he told her something she hadn't known before. That was as foolish as accepting any “new fact” uncritically as the truth.

  Cerix breathed vapor and set his inhaler down with a calm expression. “Halphemos brought me to Pandah,” he said. “I taught him how to make a monkey talk like a man, and that caught the king's eye.”

  He shrugged. “King Folquin's been a good master until now. We have money saved, enough to buy passage to another island. For you as well.”

  The crippled wizard smiled at Sharina. “Get Halphemos out of prison,” he went on. “It's just a cage for drunken sailors. Pandah is an easygoing place.”

  He lifted the inhaler again. “Free my boy,” he said, “and between us we'll do whatever we can to find all of your friends.”

  “All right,” Sharina said “I'll be back when I've made plans.”

  She walked to the outside door, fingering the hilt of the Pewle knife. Behind her, Cerix sighed as he drew in another breath of anodyne.

  “I never trusted wizards,” King Carus said, watching with Garric as Tenoctris spoke an incantation in the glade beneath them. “I was afraid of them, though I'd never have admitted it.”

  Smoke from the punk of a soft-bodied tree mounted toward the sky's sunless illumination. Tenoctris had drawn a circle of words around the tiny fireset. The smoke staggered at each stroke of the twig the old wizard used as a wand.

  “Most wizards didn't know what they were doing, and now they had more power than they'd ever dreamed of,” Carus went on. “They were like so many blind men running around swinging meat cleavers.”

  Tenoctris, Liane, and Garric's physical body sat on a knoll some distance beyond where they'd met the Ersa the previous day. The trees ringing them were tall and branched in jointed sections instead of twisted curves like most of the native vegetation.

  Carus shook his head in frustration at mistakes he'd made a millennium before Garric was born; the circlet of gold binding his thick, black hair winked. “I should've gotten a wizard to advise me on things I didn't understand,” he said, “not just ignored them. Ignoring wizardry let a wizard sink me and my fleet in the sea—and sink the kingdom, too. For a thousand years.”

  The knoll was only ten or a dozen feet higher than the surrounding terrain, but even that eminence was unusual here in the Gulf. In the field below, a party of Ersa nicked the trunks of saplings with sharp-edged shells and harvested the inner bark with wooden spatulas.

  “The wizards I've seen...” Garric said. His dream self smiled at the life he'd led since leaving Barca's Hamlet. In the glade below, Garric's body sat with the sword across its knees; his eyes blinked, and his chest slowly rose and fell.

  “The wizards I've seen,” he said, “would mostly have done you more harm than good. They strain to move things they don't really see, and they have a thousand times the power to move things than they did a few years ago. It was the same in your age, because the forces were peaking then too.”

  The smoke from Tenoctris' fire crooked in the air as though a breeze had caught it. The Gulf was windless, and the smoke itself was a white unstained by the greenish sky.

  “Tenoctris was around in my time,” Carus said, nodding toward her. “I didn't find her, lad; but you did.”

  “She found me,” Garric protested. “She washed up on the shore of Barca's Hamlet. All I did was carry her up to the inn.”

  “You found her, lad,” the king said with a broad, satisfied smile. “You found her, and you found me; and by the Lady! We're not going to let the kingdom fall again.”

  Carus and the balcony on which he stood shimmered as though they were smoke, swelling and losing definition. They vanished into the ring of jointed trees.

  Garric blinked, shocked at the sudden heaviness of his flesh. He clutched the medallion of King Carus with his left hand, then rose to his feet in a graceful motion. The Ersa continued their labors, but their ears fluttered and their eyes tracked the humans.

  Liane touched Garric's hand, glad that he'd mentally rejoined. She'd become familiar with his reveries. She didn't break into them and she'd never asked him what was going on.

  Garric knew he ought to tell Liane what was happening, but he wasn't sure how to explain. He knew Carus was a real person rather than just a buried facet of his own mind—but he couldn't prove that, and it embarrassed him to claim that he spoke to somebody who'd drowned a thousand years ago.

  Tenoctris smiled wearily. Garric and Liane together helped the old woman rise. She felt shockingly frail, her frame as delicate as a bird's.

  “I've found the core around which this place formed,” Tenoctris said. “I was a little afraid that the wizard who created the Gulf would have destroyed his source of power when he was finished.”

  Tenoctris continued to hold on to her companions, perhaps for the warmth as much as the support. Her hand in Garric's was cold. Wizardry must be as draining as digging a ditch—or fighting a battle.

  “If he had,” Tenoctris continued, smiling now with the self-deprecating humor that was so much a part of her character, “then there wouldn't have been any way out. I didn't mention that before. As it is, I can reopen the Gulf by speaking an incantation over the object.”

  “It's in the direction the smoke indicated?” Liane said. She nodded rather than pointing, a gesture the Ersa working in that direction might have misunderstood. A dozen more of the creatures, all males, had drifted out of the forest. They stood with weapons in their hands, silently watching the humans.

  “That's right,” Tenoctris said. �
�So we'll need Ersa permission to proceed.”

  Unless we wait for Rodoard to massacre all the Ersa,Garric thought. The thought made his lip curl in disgust.

  “Then let's go ask now,” Garric said. “Unless...?”

  “Now is fine with me,” Tenoctris said. She straightened, her voice growing stronger with each syllable. Her wry grin flickered. “Though I'll need some rest before I carry out the incantation. The only reason someone of my slight power can even think of opening the passage is that the forces involved are in balance instead of being at rest.”

  “Like pulling a keystone from an arch instead of trying to lift the whole building,” Garric said in understanding. “Well, let's go see if the Ersa will let us close to the arch, shall we?”

  Garric began to whistle a love song as he led his companions toward the waiting Ersa. “Her hair was like the thundercloud, before the rains come down...”

  The sheep had liked the tune when he played it to them on his pipes in Barca's Hamlet. It reminded him of when he was a boy and life—looking back on it—was so simple.

  The tall Ersa who'd spoken the previous day now led the group of armed males who'd joined the field workers. Garric walked toward him.

  Tenoctris was on Garric's right. He put his sword arm around her shoulders, making explicit the fact that his weapon wasn't a threat to the Ersa. He wasn't going to leave the sword behind on the knoll where it might entice the Ersa or a human spy.

  “I'm Garric or-Reise,” he said to the tall Ersa. “Will you tell me your name, sir?”

  The humanoids' ears fluttered like clothes hanging to dry in the wind. “You may call me Graz,” the leader said. He lowered his spear so that the slender point aligned with Garric's chest. “Why do you come here? You must go!”

  “We want to leave the Gulf,” Tenoctris said. She touched Garric 's hand on her shoulder. “We want to go home. To do that, I need to see and use an object that's within your territory.”

  She lifted her chin, a quick gesture in the direction the smoke had pointed. “I think you know where it is yourselves, but I can find it if you don't. I'll do no harm to it or you. It will open a door through which my friends and I can leave.”