Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  “Wine for the two men,” Ilna said. She took a pair of coins from her purse. They were silver-washed bronze, minted in Carcosa a generation ago. Here they passed at three Sandrakkan coppers each.

  “You don't have to pay, mistress,” the tavern-keeper said.

  Ilna smiled. “On the contrary,” she said, “I do. And I wish I had nothing worse to pay for than two mugs of your wine.”

  “You're Ilna os-Kenset, aren't you?” Halphemos said, accepting the athame which Ilna handed him without comment. He'd gotten his color back; when the wine arrived, he drank normally instead of the greedy slurping Ilna'd expected.

  He didn't choke at the taste, either. Halphemos might wear silk now, but it wasn't the first time he'd drunk watered lees in a dockside tavern.

  “Yes,” Ilna said. She probably wouldn't have been any good at small talk even if she'd seen a purpose in it. “Why were you looking for me?”

  Cerix frowned slightly, considering how to respond to Ilna’s bluntness. Halphemos simply nodded toward his mug—they weren't chained here in the back, though they didn't appear to be washed any more frequently either—and said, “Mistress Sharina, that's Sharina os—”

  “I know her,” Ilna said without inflection.

  “Sharina said we should come to you,” Halphemos said. “I made your brother vanish by mistake. She thought you could—”

  “It wasn't your fault!” the cripple said furiously. “I keep telling you, you've never made a mistake like that. Look how you stopped yourself today!”

  “I spoke an incantation, and your brother Cashel vanished,” Halphemos said in a self-damning tone that Ilna had heard often enough in her own voice. “With your help Cerix thinks we can find him again. And be sure he's in a place of safety.”

  In the Crescent, taverns didn't waste money on the rushes or bracken which more pretentious inns spread on their floors. There were some strands of rye straw which had broken from the truckle beds on which Anno and his family slept, though. Ilna picked a few of them up and began plaiting them, only half conscious of what she was doing.

  “There should have been three other people with my brother and Sharina,” Ilna said. “Garric or-Reise, an old woman named Tenoctris, and... a girl my age. Quite an attractive girl.”

  “The ship Cashel and Mistress Sharina were on was swallowed by a monster,” Cerix said. “Anyone with them must be dead now.”

  Ilna looked at her sash, the twin of the one she'd given Liane. It remained precisely as she'd woven it. “I doubt that,” she said, “but it needn't concern us now. What do you want of me?”

  She looked at what her hands were doing. The straw was filthy. She slapped the pattern she'd woven down on the table, wondering if there'd be a rag here that wouldn't make her fingers dirtier than they were already.

  “If you have an object of your brother's—” Halphemos said.

  “Wait!” the cripple interrupted. He picked up the twists of straw so that he could see them squarely, then looked at Ilna in wonder and surmise. He said, “Why did you write 'Valles' this way, mistress?”

  “I didn't write anything,” Ilna said, controlling her anger with some difficulty. “I can't write. Or read either, if you think that's any of your business.”

  “You wrote the word 'Valles' mistress,” Cerix said. He held the straw pattern out to Ilna in the palm of his hand. “In the Old Script.”

  Halphemos quirked a smile toward her. “I can read,” he said—admitted? “But I still have to sound out the words, and I don't know the Old Script.”

  “I don't know anything at all,” Ilna said, glaring at it in irritation. But she had woven the straw into its present pattern.

  “Are you a wizard yourself, mistress?” the legless man said softly.

  “I never thought so,” Ilna said. She grimaced. “I don't know.”

  “Nevertheless,” Cerix said, “I think we should go to Valles. I wish the notation had been a little fuller so that we knew what we were looking for there, but perhaps it will become clear in time.”

  Halphemos nodded three times, as though he were batting his head against an invisible wall. He looked at Ilna.

  “Will you come with us, Mistress Ilna?” he asked.

  He had a pleasant smile. It seemed a natural expression for him.

  “Yes, I suppose I have to,” Ilna said as she stood. “I'll make arrangements to take care of my responsibilities here, but I should be ready to leave in a few days.”

  Cerix cleared his throat. “There's a question of finances,” he said. “The boy and I saved enough to—”

  “I can take care of our passage,” Ilna said. “He's my brother, after all.”

  She nodded a cold farewell and walked out of the tavern. She'd spent most of her life caring for Cashel, so it was easy to keep her duty to him at the front of her mind.

  And that was good, because otherwise Ilna knew she'd be thinking about Garric, in the belly of a sea monster.

  The 17th of Heron (Later)

  “Arsenoneophris miarsau,” Tenoctris said, her voice steady. This time she had written the words of power in an equilateral triangle on the temple floor. “Arsenoneophris miarsau,” Liane said, reading the phrase in turn. She and Garric both knew the Old Script, though the words of the incantation meant no more to them than did the chatter of finches fluttering among the milkweed heads in the nearby meadow.

  “Arsenoneophris miarsau,”Garric said. Even at this early stage of the process it felt as though he were trying to talk with his mouth full of stream-washed pebbles. The words were as simple as an axe helve, but turning them to human purposes was just as difficult as swinging an axe with strength and skill. This portal was of another sort than the one which had reached from the Gulf to here, though Garric and Liane understood merely that it was different. Tenoctris explained that she could open it only for herself; for her companions to enter, they must speak the words as well. Once they were inside the passage, Tenoctris would keep it from collapsing by herself—if she had the strength.

  Shepherd, shelter me with Thy staff,Garric prayed silently as he waited for the next phrase. Lady, guide my steps.

  “Barichaa kmephi,”Tenoctris said. At every syllable she dabbed her wand, this time a willow whip. Garric had trimmed it neatly with the iron knife he carried like any other peasant in Barca's Hamlet.

  “Barichaa kmephi,”Liane said.

  “Barichaa kmephi,”Garric said. The pebbles had swelled to the size of clenched fists; his throat was dry and choking.

  The triangle scribed on the floor of the temple was bright, but everything beyond it seemed dim. Garric no longer heard birds, nor could he see the walls. The stained marble should have been close enough for him to touch.

  “Abriaoth alarphotho seth!”Tenoctris cried. Garric saw the old woman start to rise. She vanished like salt in water.

  “Abriaoth alarphotho seth!”Liane said, her voice staggering between the fifth syllable and the sixth. Darkness swallowed her as it had Tenoctris before.

  Garric was alone in emptiness. A voice he almost recognized laughed at him.

  “Abriaoth alarphotho seth,”he said. He rose, straining at the words as though he were trying to push a boulder uphill. Only when his feet came down on a solid surface did Garric realize that he'd succeeded.

  The path they stood on gleamed like silver through a barren waste. Tenoctris had stumbled to her knees; Liane was helping her up. Ahead the path was fading, but its cold majesty returned as Tenoctris took up the incantation again.

  A wind blew across the waste, though Garric didn't feel the tug of the gusts that made the stunted bushes writhe in furious agony. The three of them would be separated from the landscape for so long as Tenoctris continued to speak.

  Liane tried to guide Tenoctris forward. Garric stepped past and lifted the old woman in his arms. She seemed to weigh no more than a newborn lamb.

  Garric started walking. His pace was that of a man who doesn't know the distance before him, but who's determ
ined to cover it regardless. “lao el nephtho” Tenoctris whispered against his chest.

  The path was as slick and unyielding as cobblestones. Sheep would bruise their hooves on a surface like this. A fellow could lame himself easily, even a callused peasant who wore shoes only after the ponds froze.

  Garric heard the laughter again. It was cold as the unfelt wind that whipped this wasteland. He looked over his shoulder. Liane followed close behind, her lips working. She forced a smile when she felt Garric's eyes. He wondered if she was praying.

  The woman of pearly light walked beside the path.

  The phantasm blew Garric a kiss, then mimed reaching for Liane's throat. Her laughter rang again. Each peal was a frozen knife to Garric's heart.

  Duzi who watched over me at home, help me in this place too. My need is great.

  Tenoctris' lips continued to move, but Garric could no longer hear the words even faintly. The old woman's eyes were closed. She described herself as weak. Perhaps she was—as a wizard. Garric had never met a person with greater strength of will.

  He walked on. The laughing wraith kept pace, but she never reached over the silvery path.

  Liane seemed unaware of what accompanied them, not that Liane would have showed fear in any case. With companions like these two women, how could a man do other than be brave?

  “A little farther, lad,” murmured a voice in Garric's mind. “Steady, just the way you're doing it. Never let them move you at their pace. And never, ever, run when you don't know what's over the next rise. You can be sure that the first time you do, you'll learn something the hard way.”

  Garric no longer saw the tortured bushes. They were still there and he knew the ghastly female creature still strode alongside. She laughed like light dancing from the edge of a headsman's sword.

  None of that mattered. Garric put one foot in front of the other, feeling an old woman's heart beat strongly against his own.

  The last step was one Garric didn't remember taking. His toes touched stone rather than the harder silver gleam and he sprawled forward. Liane stumbled onto him. They all three lay together, gasping wordlessly.

  Leaves and pine needles, some of them in clumps still attached to branch tips the wind had blown off, lay on the floor. They were in a miniature temple like the one where Tenoctris had drawn the triangle of power.

  An owl called, and the moon visible through the doorway had waned to a sliver.

  More time than Garric would have guessed must have passed somewhere since the Gulf swallowed the three of them. They were back now, though, back in the world into which they had been born.

  And Duzi guard me that I never leave it again!

  As Hanno prepared to pull the dory farther up the sandy beach, Sharina took the coil of mooring rope and walked ahead. A pine grew on the ridge marking the tide line; it was stunted, but to survive here it must have roots into something firmer than sand.

  “Now, don't you get in the way and get trampled, missie!” Hanno said. He set himself, gripping the forebitt with one hand and the stem low enough that he could lift as well as pull with the other. “I can shift this old girl without you helping.”

  Sharina ignored the insult to her intelligence. From working at her father's inn she'd gotten used to men thinking that because she was pretty, she didn't have the sense of a kitten. Half the merchants and drovers at the Sheep Fair, and all the badgers who actually drove live sheep for the drovers who bought them, seemed to believe that.

  For that matter, some of the men in Barca's Hamlet acted the same way when they surely ought to have known better.

  She knelt and looped the end of the rope around the base of the pine. Hanno grunted; even for him, dragging the laden dory across sand took real effort. Sharina drew in an arm's length of slack and twisted the end around itself for the first of the pair of half hitches.

  She grinned. Occasionally a man treated Ilna as if she didn't understand anything. That rarely happened twice with the same man.

  Hanno gave a final hunff!—a mixture of labor and triumph. Sharina pulled the rope taut, slid the first loop closer to the tree, and locked it with a second half hitch inside as Hanno approached. She stood, striking her palms together to brush off fibers of salty rope.

  Hanno grinned. His great spear was in his right hand. “I need to watch the way I talk to you, don't I?” he said.

  “Or not,” said Sharina. “I guess you've got as much right to make a fool of yourself as any other man.”

  The big man nodded. “And as much talent, I shouldn't wonder,” he said. “Well, I try to learn.”

  Hanno looked over his shoulder at the moonlit sea across which he'd rowed. The island where they'd left the false Nonnus was well below the western horizon. Without checking the knot in the mooring rope—as he might reasonably, Sharina thought, have done—he walked back to the dory.

  “Would you like a proper supper, missie?” he asked as he tugged out a bundle of tanned hides that had ridden amidships instead of under the rope netting. “I've got fire in a gourd and I can get a pot boiling in no time.”

  “No, the dried fish you gave me on the way was enough,” Sharina said. She felt herself beginning to tense. She deliberately kept her hand away from the Pewle knife. “All I really need now is sleep.”

  Hanno tossed one hide down, then the other at a slight distance. “You can have your choice of wrappers,” he said. “Or both of them if you like. It's so mild this time of year that I mostly sleep in my clothes unless it rains.”

  He slammed the butt of his spear into the sand between the hides. It sank deep enough to stand like a tree when he took his hand away from the shaft.

  “You won't be troubled in the night, missie,” he said.

  “I didn't think I would,” Sharina lied, looking straight into Hanno's eyes. She felt herself relax all the way to her bones. Deliberately she laced her fingers together and stretched them backward.

  She really was tired, physically and mentally both, but her mind was racing in too many directions for her to go to sleep at once. Besides, the hides—thick leather covered on one side with coarse white hair rather than fur—stank badly, though she didn't want to offend the big man by refusing his gift.

  “Hanno?” she said. “What is it you do? How do you live, I mean.”

  “I hunt hides on Bight and sell them in Valles, missie,” Hanno said. “I sell the scutes, really. The plant-eaters there have horn plates in the leather. They polish up like tortoiseshell—and prettier than that, some of them, like butterfly wings only hard. They use them for inlays, they tell me.”

  Hanno sat by crossing his ankles and lowering himself till his buttocks touched the hide blanket, then straightened his legs one at a time before him. He wore a round cap; a jerkin cinched by a broad belt from which hung tools, including a pair of butcher knives; fitted leggings; and soft slippers on his feet. All his garments were made of leather.

  “I didn't know Bight was inhabited,” Sharina said, sitting also. “By real people, I mean. I know about the Hairy Men.”

  The truth was, she didn't know much about the present-day world despite—and partly because—of the excellent education in the Old Kingdom classics that she'd gotten from her father. She'd read the Cosmogeography of Katradinus—but Katradinus had died a century before the Old Kingdom ended with King Carus' death at sea.

  “The Monkeys, we call them,” Hanno said with a nod. “They ain't people, though I guess they ain't really monkeys neither.”

  He paused, looking either toward the sea or away from his companion. “There's a market in Valles for Monkey eyeteeth, too,” he said, “for them as want to fill it. Myself, I let the Monkeys go their way so long as they give my cabin a wide berth. Though like I say—”

  Hanno turned toward her again.

  “—they ain't people.”

  Sharina unbuckled her belt and set the Pewle knife beside her. She switched it from one hip to the other on alternate mornings. The weapon was sufficiently heavy to bring twi
nges to her lower back if she kept it always on the same side.

  “My friend Nonnus told me that it was hard enough to make decisions for your own life without trying to decide how somebody else should behave,” she said. She smiled at her companion. “I'm glad you don't hunt men for their teeth, though. Even if they're Hairy Men.”

  Hanno stretched out on his back. “We folk that hunt on Bight,” he said, “there's plenty who don't think we're people any more than the Monkeys are. Myself, I come from Ornifal. My father was a cobbler. He had thirteen kids, and I didn't fit in much in the village anyhow. I went looking for another place, and I wound up on Bight nigh twenty years ago. I already knew how to work leather, you see.”

  Sharina lay on her blanket. Either she was getting used to the smell or she was too tired to care anymore.

  “Best get some sleep, missie,” Hanno said. “We'll be up at dawn.”

  If he said anything more, Sharina didn't hear it because she was already asleep.

  The soldier holding the crossbow leaned so far over the battlements that Cashel put a hand on the man's back to keep him from falling. He wondered why the square-headed arrow didn't fall out since the fellow was pointing almost straight down.

  “Kil-l-l them-m-m!”shrieked a three-headed monster. Its body was like a bladder standing on one hairy leg.

  The crossbowman squeezed his trigger lever. It released with a whang! shockingly loud. The bow hummed as the soldier straightened; the echo danced from the tower's stone wall and back from the forest.

  The arrow struck just below the midmost of the monster's three necks. The body blatted like a collapsing bladder, but no blood spurted. “Kil-11...” the mouths said, the word dying to a whisper.

  Scores of other monsters capered about the base of the tower. Another flash of pinkish lightning ran through the soil deep in the forest. Cashel saw trees and monstrous figures in silhouette; but he wasn't sure which were which, nor whether there was really any difference.

  A ladder clashed against the battlements beside him. The stringers were wood, but for an arm's length they were plated with iron.