Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  She'd have run across knife blades if that was what it took to escape from the monster wearing her friend's face.

  The dispatch boat was a dark mass between two lines of oar-foam. It had turned in its own length and was putting in to shore. The false Nonnus was ordering the crew to fan out across the island as soon as they grounded.

  When Sharina saw open water to the north she realized that the island was a narrow spine rather than the quarter-mile circle she'd hoped for. The twenty oarsmen could form a sufficiently tight cordon to find her by sweeping from one narrow end to the other.

  They'd have to get organized first, of course, but the false Nonnus had shown he was capable of intelligent planning. And he was a wizard as well...

  The dispatch vessel grated onto the island. They must have touched parallel to the steep shore instead of driving straight in. For the sake of speed, the vessel's hull and frames were as thin as possible. Sharina had hoped they might break the ship's back when they landed, but she knew better than to expect that from a trained crew.

  “Brace her to starboard!” the coxswain cried. “Use your oars!”

  What Sharina expected was that she'd be recaptured. They'd carry her bound in the bottom of the vessel the rest of the way to wherever they were going.

  The only chance she saw now was to get away from the island. Swimming outward would probably be suicide, but if she had a float of some sort for support there was at least a chance that she could reach another miniature landfall unseen in the gathering darkness. By now only the stars distinguished the sky from the sea below.

  As the shouting sailors formed a line on the other side of the island, Sharina began to comb the northern shore for driftwood. The groundsels grew within a few feet of the water, though the lobelias seemed to be less resistant to salt. Fleshy leaves brushed her like dead men's fingers. She jogged through them, bent over to scan the ground more closely.

  A figure stood in front of her. Her first thought was that a basalt outcrop had gotten to its feet, but it was a man—a huge man, holding vertically a spear whose blade was a hand's breadth wide. A weapon like that would let a victim's life out as swiftly as the heart pumped.

  Sharina had the Pewle knife in her hand. She slashed upward. The big man's right foot moved in a smooth arc to meet her wrist, spinning Sharina away. Her forearm was numb, but she didn't drop the knife.

  Sharina hit on her right side, half-cushioned by a giant groundsel. She twisted to get her feet under her as she tried to take the knife in her left hand.

  The man planted the steel-capped butt of his spear in Sharina's solar plexus, paralyzing her diaphragm. She doubled up, unable to breathe.

  She tried to hold the knife, but the man knelt beside her and plucked it from her fingers. He wore garments of leather with an unfamiliar, reptilian smell.

  “Where'd you come by a Pewle knife, missie?” the man asked as he examined the weapon. His tone was conversational, but he pitched his voice too low to be heard more than a few feet away.

  Sharina still struggled to breathe. “From a man who'd have you for supper if he were still alive!” she gasped.

  The big man chuckled. “Then he was a right good man,” he said without rancor. He handed the knife back to her, hilt first.

  “My name's Hanno,” he went on. “Now, it doesn't seem to me that the folks on the other side here are any friends to you. Is that so?”

  “I'll die before I let them take me again,” Sharina whispered. She put the Pewle knife back in its sheath, though she had to use both hands to do so. She trembled from exertion and the shocking blow to her abdomen.

  “Now, missie,” the stranger said. “I'm on my way back to Bight from Valles where I sold my horn. If you don't choose to stay here, you can come with me—but I warn you, you'll be living in a hunting cabin and I won't make another trip to Valles for six months or better.”

  “Let's go,” Sharina said as she tried to stand. “One of the men's a wizard.”

  Hanno picked Sharina up in the crook of his left arm and strode down the shore. A twenty-foot dory, slimmer but otherwise similar to the two-man fishing boats that put out from Barca's Hamlet, was drawn into a notch in the basalt. Hanno set Sharina aboard, laid his long spear beside the crossed oars amidships, and shoved the vessel out to sea with a lurch and a grunt.

  Hanno was carrying six months of supplies with him. The dory's hull fore and aft was packed with parcels wrapped in oilcloth and fastened securely with a web of horsehair ropes. Sharina could only guess at the weight the big man had just shifted into the water, but it must be on the order of three or four tons.

  Hanno splashed after the boat for several paces, then climbed in over the upswept stern when they were out far enough that his weight didn't ground the keel. Sharina had her breath back. She squeezed aside as Hanno walked over the cargo and dropped onto one of the two thwarts amidships. The dory continued to bob away from the shore.

  Hanno was an agile man—not just agile for his size.” Sharina didn't remember ever having met a man bigger than this hunter: He was taller than Garric and almost as massively built as Cashel.

  He set the oars in the rowlocks. Sharina pinned them before Hanno could do so himself. He nodded in approval and perhaps surprise, then stroked outward.

  “They have a twenty-oared ship,” Sharina said in a low voice. She could hear sailors calling to one another and the false Nonnus trying to shout orders to all of them.

  “They do for now,” Hanno said. He sounded amused rather than concerned. He turned the dory parallel to the shore. His oarstrokes were powerful, but they made no more sound than the ordinary slap of water against itself.

  They were far enough out that Sharina saw the island as a black mass rather than a place. Lights began to bloom on the other side of the spine. The false Nonnus was passing out rushlights, pithy reed stems soaked in wax and ignited. They gave a pale, flaring illumination.

  Sharina hunched instinctively. Hanno chuckled and said, “That's just made us safer. Them lights won't show anything beyond arm's length and it'll waste the fools' night vision besides. If they knew what they were doing, they'd spread out and hunker down to listen for you moving.”

  He chuckled again. “Of course, that wouldn't help them now neither,” he added.

  Hanno turned the dory. They'd rounded the tip of the little island and were headed back up the south side, staying about a bowshot from the shore. Sharina could tell land from sea only by the faint margin of foam where the two met.

  Hanno rowed effortlessly, maneuvering by backing water with the one oar while the other took a full sweep. The dory didn't have a mast or even a mast partner on the false keel. He must row all the way from Bight to Ornifal and back... Perhaps he set a triangular boat sail in the bow to run when the wind was dead astern.

  A line of rushlights winked across the spine and over it. The lights began to move together toward the east end of the island, leaving the west for a second pass if necessary.

  The crew had lit a small bonfire on the beach, just inshore of the dispatch vessel. Sharina saw one man or perhaps two tending the fire before the vessel's long hull blocked her vision.

  Hanno grunted and pulled the dory's bow toward the island again. Sharina watched the hull of the silhouetted dispatch vessel loom past the oarsman. She could hear the voices of the men ashore, but only rarely was a word intelligible.

  Sharina rubbed her aching abdominal muscles, then rested her fingers on the hilt of the Pewle knife. Starlight gleamed faintly on Hanno's teeth as he grinned at her.

  Only at the last moment did Hanno glance over his shoulder. He backed water with one oar, then both, and brought the dory alongside the stern of the grounded dispatch vessel. He shipped his oars and touched a finger to his lips for silence. Sharina nodded curtly.

  The false Nonnus' ship was tilted with the keel in the water and the port side lying along the shore. Because the ground sloped upward, any kind of a breeze could have flopped the vessel to starboard an
d possibly capsized it, but the air of the Inner Sea was normally dead still at sunset and sunrise.

  The anchor hung from a rope stopper in the dispatch vessel's stern. The stock was iron, but the shank and arms were cypress wood bound with lead hoops for weight.

  Hanno stood. The dory quivered, but the big man kept his weight centered. He gripped the anchor with one hand and severed the salt-encrusted stopper with a thrust of his spear.

  The anchor's weight—as much as Sharina or perhaps even a man of middling size—dropped into Hanno's hand. The dory bobbed furiously, banging its starboard gunwale against the larger vessel's hull. Sharina held steady, knowing that if she tried to damp the oscillations she'd interfere with Hanno's own adjustments. The big man knew what he was doing.

  A sailor on the other side shouted. “I'll take the spear!” Sharina cried.

  Hanno slammed the anchor's lead-wrapped crown through the dispatch vessel just above the keel. The planks were pine and thin for a seagoing ship but were still two fingers' breadth thick. They splintered like glass hitting stone.

  Hanno tossed the spear sidearm to Sharina. She was braced for the weight, but it still felt like she'd caught a falling tree. The seven-foot shaft was oak, and a long steel butt-cap balanced the weight of the broad head.

  A sailor carrying a rushlight came around the stern of the dispatch vessel and gaped at them. “What are you doing?” he shouted. He wasn't armed.

  Sharina waggled the spear, holding it with both hands. “Get back!” she said. She had no quarrel with the sailors; they were obviously hirelings, not enemies for their own sakes. If the false Nonnus had stepped toward her...

  Hanno dragged the anchor out of the hull, then swung it again into the siding like a mace. Frames as well as planking broke at the impact. The dory splashed like a whale broaching, but her beam and the weight of cargo kept her from going over.

  The steersman stepped around the dispatch vessel. He carried a short, stiff bow with an arrow already nocked. “Hold the light up!” he ordered the other sailor.

  Hanno threw the anchor at him. There was a wet crunch. Man and missile tumbled out of sight. The cable reeved through the anchor ring followed like the body of a striking snake.

  Hanno took the oars, facing now toward what had been the stern. Sharina anticipated him, clambering out of the way without losing the big spear. The dory was double-ended and had neither rudder nor sail to impose a direction of movement.

  They got under way gradually, the way a rock begins to fall. The weight of cargo made the vessel too massive for even Hanno's strength to accelerate quickly, though fewer than a dozen paired strokes were enough to get them out of sight of the shore.

  Rushlights clustered around the dark line of the ship. Sailors shouted. Once Sharina thought she heard the voice of the false Nonnus. She smiled grimly. If he repaired the dispatch vessel's damage in less than a day, he was a wizard indeed.

  “I don't much like to travel at night,” Hanno said as he rowed, now without the devouring effort that had taken them offshore, “but this time it's the choice. At least I'd had my supper before that lot landed on the other side.”

  “Thank you,” Sharina said. She wasn't ready to explain what had happened—she wasn't really sure what had happened, what was happening—but Hanno didn't seem the sort of man who required explanations.

  The moon had just come out of the sea over the big man's shoulder. Sharina felt the smile that she couldn't really see because of the darkness. He said, “You'll do, missie. You'll surely do.”

  “A forest!” Zahag cried enthusiastically. It was the first emotion besides peevish anger that Cashel had heard in the ape's voice since they'd escaped from the dissolving tower. “A forest at last!”

  Zahag charged toward the dank, moss-draped trunks at a hobbling gallop. He looked remarkably clumsy because his forelimbs were so much longer than the back ones. He still covered ground pretty well.

  Come to think, peevish anger had been the ape's usual attitude everywhere else Cashel had known him too.

  “Have we come home?” Aria said as she twisted against Cashel's chest. Even she sounded hopeful for once. He'd been carrying her in the crook of one arm or the other since midday. It was that or drag her, and it was obvious the girl had been doing her pitiful best to keep up.

  “Ooh!” Aria said in disgust as she took in the landscape ahead of them. “Oh, how could you bring me here?”

  She started to cry.

  “Well, it makes a change from the desert,” Cashel said uneasily. The trouble was, he couldn't convince himself it was a change for the better.

  “Oh, what a change from the rocks that were wearing my knuckles bloody!” Zahag called as he followed the trail out of sight. “And say, that's a lizard! That'll make a change from berries and more berries!”

  “Can you walk now?” Cashel said, setting Aria back on her feet. “The going ought to be a little easier, and we'll be out of the sun.”

  The sun had been an unpleasant factor every day since they arrived in this place, but Cashel wasn't sure he wouldn't miss the glare before long. The light seemed hostile, but it didn't hide anything. This forest had a greasy, behind-your-back look to it, much like Cashel's uncle Katchin in Barca's Hamlet.

  He grinned. The forest didn't have Katchin's windy pride, though. Maybe things were getting better after all.

  “I wish I could die,” Aria muttered, but she followed under her own power when Cashel started down the trail.

  The trees weren't giants. They ran to ten or a dozen paces—double paces from left heel to left heel—in height, about as tall as you could expect for anything growing in boggy ground.

  Cashel couldn't understand why the soil was so wet. They'd gone from grit and spiky bushes to trees draped in moss that dripped on the sopping ground. His footsteps squelched and the line of prints gleamed behind him like so many little ponds.

  He tossed his straw umbrella away. It clung to a branch, wrapped in tendrils of moss. The dry grass began to soak through.

  Cashel felt obscurely bothered. He tugged the umbrella out of the soggy veil and carried it back to the edge of the forest, where he threw it onto dry sand. If a breeze returned it to the bog, that was none of his doing.

  “What on earth did you just do?” Aria said.

  “Well, the umbrella did a pretty good job for me the past few days,” Cashel said. “I didn't figure it deserved me to leave it here.”

  He resumed walking down the trail at his easy, shepherd's pace. He carried his staff at a slant across his chest, one hand above and the other below the balance.

  He could feel the girl staring at him in amazement. Well, let her. Nothing Cashel had seen in his life had caused him to lose his belief in justice. Deep in his heart was the thought that a fellow who treated things badly was likely to be treated as a thing himself one day; and treated badly.

  “Zahag, are you up there?” he called.

  “What are you waiting for?” the ape replied. His voice sounded faint. The chirrups of unseen frogs and insects smothered ordinary speech over even modest distances.

  The desert had been deathly still, except once and a while during the night when something howled in the distance. That sound had been pretty deathly too.

  Branches twisted and forked. It was hard to tell which leaves belonged to a tree and which were on a vine or some lesser plant growing in a crotch.

  The moss covered everything. Cashel used the staff to push through it, but even so dank strands brushed his shoulders.

  “I don't like this place,” Aria said in a small voice. It was an honest statement for a change, not an accusation. She must be really scared.

  “Just stay close and you'll be fine,” Cashel said.

  Saying that made him feel so much better that he started to grin. “You'll be all right, Princess,” he said. “This is what I do, you see. I'm a shepherd.”

  There was a plop! back the way they'd come. It sounded too loud to have been a drip hitting the
ground, but who knew? Maybe a broad leaf had turned inside out and spilled a firkin of water all at once.

  Zahag shrieked. Something crashed and splashed through the forest toward Cashel and the girl. Cashel slid his hands a span outward and lowered the staff slightly to a guard position.

  Zahag threw himself at Cashel's feet and cried, “I didn't see anything! I didn't see anything!” Aria screamed too as she hugged Cashel from behind. Duzi! Didn't either of them have any sense?

  The forest had grown silent. The normal volume of squeaks and chirping resumed. Nothing had pursued the ape.

  “I think we better go on,” Cashel said. Aria had already taken her hands away; Zahag twisted his head to look back the way he'd come. “I'd sooner be someplace else before we lose the last of the light.”

  They started on. It had been dark enough when they entered the forest. Cashel figured when the sun went down they'd might as well be deep in a cave. Aria walked right behind him, and Zahag stayed awkwardly close to his left side.

  Cashel didn't suppose it was worth asking the ape what had frightened him. Out of sight, out of mind was pretty much Zahag's whole life. Whatever he'd seen or thought he saw in the dripping moss was nothing he'd be willing to call back to memory.

  “I see things glowing,” Aria said. “Out—there.”

  “Right,” said Cashel, trying to sound hearty. Duzi knew he'd spent enough nights out in thunderstorms talking to sheep. Otherwise they might panic and smother themselves by piling up in a corner of the fold. “Foxfire, just like at home. I think we can keep on going a ways by it lighting the trail.”

  They were going to walk until Cashel dropped under the weight of both his companions if it came to that. There was no way he was going to suggest they bed down anywhere he'd seen since they entered the forest.

  The path had a gray sheen. Tree trunks stood as greenish or yellowish ghosts across which other almost-colors wound themselves. It was hard to judge distances with nothing but fuzzy glows to go by. The moss was the only thing in this place that didn't seem to have its own light. Cashel couldn't keep it from dragging across him now.