Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  Garric touched the medallion on his chest. The words “King Garric” echoed through his mind. With them came the boisterous laughter of the last and greatest King of the Isles.

  “Not the last, King Garric,” Carus' voice whispered. “And as for greatest, well, we'll see, you and I!”

  Hanno paused among the palms growing from the base of the cliff, leaning on the shaft of his spear. He looked so much like Cashel, watching the flock from a vantage point in the meadows south of Barca's Hamlet, that Sharina's throat swelled with longing.

  She missed Cashel and she missed her home. She missed having a home.

  “Well, I'll be,” Hanno said in a tone of mild surprise. He scratched his neck idly with a fingertip.

  Sharina stepped to the side of the big man to see what he'd been looking at. Because the context was unfamiliar, it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.

  A shipwreck, she thought. Storms threw debris onto the steep gravel shore of Barca's Hamlet: driftwood but also ships' timbers and sometimes deck cargo washed or cast from a vessel as the waves broke over it.

  Once at dawn Reise had found a body oh the black shingle. They'd buried it in the community graveyard. Every year at the Solstice Ceremony they'd fed meal and beer to the sailor's spirit along with the borough's dead. Perhaps other communities cared in the same fashion for fishermen who'd never returned to Barca's Hamlet.

  “Them little beggars,” Hanno said wonderingly. “If I didn't know better, I'd say they'd got brains. There's never been a Monkey with brains!”

  “Oh,” Sharina said, feeling her stomach congeal into a lump of cold lard. She was looking at the wreckage of the dory. The Hairy Men had dragged it onto the comiche and methodically smashed to bits. At first she hadn't associated the fragments with the dory because there wasn't a piece remaining as long as her forearm.

  For hammers they'd used head-sized lumps of rock, which now lay among the wood and scattered supplies. Hanno touched one of the rocks with his spearbutt; Sharina had already noticed that the hunter used his weapon the way a mouse tests the shape of the world with its whiskers.

  “They're strong little beggars when they get worked up,” he said musingly. “They sure did a job here, didn't they?”

  Sharina squatted to examine the end of a shattered thwart. The dory had been built of oak. As the hunter implied, destroying the vessel so thoroughly with crude tools had required enormous strength.

  “The phantasm leading them probably told them what to do,” she said. By focusing her mind on little questions, she was able to avoid the huge doubt from which she shied away trembling.

  Could they get off Bight, now? Would bands of Hairy Men and the accompanying creatures of wizardry hunt them to eventual death through these wilds?

  “Well, I figure there's two ways for you, missie,” Hanno said as he turned to face her. He was calm, nonchalant even. “First choice is I build you a raft and you float to Ornifal, because that's how the currents trend. Now—”

  He raised a hand the size of a bear's paw to forestall the protest she'd had no intention of making. Hanno had peeled off the blistered skin; the layer beneath looked healthy though tender. His ointment smelled like tar rather than the lanolin Sharina was familiar with from the borough, but it seemed to work.

  “—I know that don't sound like much, but I know for a fact it'll work if there's not a storm. We can salvage enough food so you can eat, and there's fish to catch besides.”

  He shrugged. “I can't tell you it won't storm, but a bad storm here in spring would be the first one since I been on Bight, and that's past eighteen years.”

  The hunter smiled. His remaining teeth—one of his upper canines was missing—were yellowish and as strong as a mule's. “Of course,” he added, “the Monkeys getting together this way, that's a first too. So you have to decide for yourself.”

  “What are you going to be doing?” Sharina said. Hanno had offered only one option, but she thought she could guess what the other was.

  “Well, I figure if the Monkeys are so fond of me they'd bust up my boat to keep me here,” he said with a grin as hard as the blade of his great spear, “I'd give'em reason to know I'm here. Beside that, Bald Unarc had his territory a couple days north of here. Unarc's boat is cypress and he sinks it in a creek's mouth to keep it safe between times he needs to use it.”

  Hanno prodded a fragment of gunwale with his spear-butt, then flipped it high enough in the air for him to catch it with his free hand. The hunter moved with remarkable economy, just enough to accomplish the task he set himself.

  “I always thought Unarc was a donkey who wouldn't trust the sun was going to rise in the east,” he said, shaking his head in wonder at the plank. Not only were the ends splintered, the whole length of the piece was dented and cracked from additional blows. “Just goes to show, don't it?”

  He grinned again. “Mind, I don't figure Unarc was so careful that he's going to be around for me to ask his permissien formal-like.”

  Sharina wasn't afraid of the sea. This jungle's sounds and smells were as alien to her as the world beyond the sky, while in the past she'd spent weeks adrift in a dugout almost as crude as the raft Hanno said he'd build.

  If Nonnus were here, he'd be searching for the answer to the puzzle of what was happening on Bight. Unless Sharina misread the man's character, the hunter was doing the same thing.

  And for Sharina to drift away seemed—

  “Cowardly” might not be quite the word, but it was close enough to stand until she could convince herself there was a better one.

  “I'll go with you,” Sharina said, her voice steady. “If you'll have me.”

  Hanno chuckled. “I'd move faster if it was me by myself, that's true,” he said. “But I wouldn't be moving much at all if you hadn't fixed that fire-thing. I'll tell the world! So I'd admire to have you along.”

  “I'm glad you feel that way,” Sharina said. She felt better for the decision even though it was against her own deep wishes.

  And she knew that so long as she survived, a part of Nonnus was present in her.

  Ilna had been dozing. When her eyes snapped open, she saw that the full moon had risen. The cratered face was much the same as hung over Barca's Hamlet, but it was three times as large and as red as the coals of a dying fire.

  The vessel was sailing between towers of rock. The islands were little more than bowshot to either side, closer than Ilna had seen them by what passed for daylight in this place. Pits and crevices marked the shafts. She didn't see how rock so soft could support the mushroom tops that swelled hundreds of feet above. They should have crumbled under their own weight.

  The Scaled Men grunted in fear-muted voices. They were armed again. The ship drove on, the sail still filled by a wind Ilna could not feel. One of the sailors crouched at the steering oar, but the others scanned the sky instead of paying attention to the vessel or its course.

  Something flew past the moon.

  The crossbowman capered in a clumsy circle, his weapon lifted as he tried to find his target against the stars. The others waved cutlasses and a spear, shouting in guttural panic.

  The flyer had looked like a man to Ilna. A man with bat wings.

  The sail blocked much of the view from the deck. The sailor with the striped headband started to climb the rigging; there was a bucket fixed to the masthead for a lookout to stand in. He paused midway in an agony of indecision, looking over first one shoulder, then the other.

  The flyer swooped up from sea level to skim the starboard railing. Clawed fingers sprouted from the joint at each midwing. They clutched at the man on the rigging. He gave a hoarse cry and slashed with his cutlass.

  The flyer lurched away and down. The broad wings were of membrane so thin that Ilna could see the moon's face through it.

  The crossbowman leaned over the railing and squeezed his trigger. The bowcord cracked loudly as it released. Scaled Men hooted in delight, hugging one another and stamping their feet on the
deck.

  The sailor who'd started toward the masthead jumped down. He was holding his right shoulder with his left hand. Across his back were three long slashes that looked black in the unnatural moonlight. He called out to his fellows.

  Two of the others put down their weapons and examined him, clicking and muttering. The shoulder wound was a deep one. When the sailor took his hand away, blood quickly spread down his arm. If the wound wasn't closed quickly, the victim would die as surely as sunrise.

  In this place, perhaps more surely yet.

  A Scaled Man gave a cry like that of an ox dying. He pointed his cutlass upward. The towering island to port now overhung the vessel. From rookeries in the pitted rock, winged men like the first were launching themselves into the air.

  There were scores of them. Ilna thought of mayflies swarming in the moonlight.

  The sailor at the steering oar shouted to his fellows. One leaped toward Ilna with his cutlass raised. He chopped, severing the rope that bound her to the stanchion.

  For a moment Ilna thought the Scaled Men were about to free her. Two more sailors were unlacing the canvas cover that held the hatch grating in place. They lifted it; the sailor who'd cut Ilna loose dragged her toward the opening like a sack of millet.

  She smiled faintly. It would have complicated her future actions if she felt her captors had begun to behave decently.

  A flyer dived, showing a birdlike mastery of the air. It slid between the mast and the forestay, its right wing up and the tip of the left pointing almost straight down toward the deck.

  The thing's mouth was open. Its face was human—handsome, even, in a high-boned hollow-cheeked fashion—but the teeth were pointed and unnaturally long. The moonlight stained them red.

  The flyer bit at the Scaled Man pulling Ilna. The fellow screamed and threw himself across her. His right ear was missing and there two long gouges across his scalp.

  As the flyer banked away, the sailor with the spear thrust upward. The rusty point missed the torso, as thin and muscular as that of a skinned squirrel, but it pierced the fabric of the creature's wing and tore a four-pointed star. The material was as tough as fine parchment. The flyer flapped free, climbing with labored strokes.

  The sailor who'd lost his ear rose, holding his scalp with one hand and waving his cutlass with the other. The pair crouching for safety behind the grating took Ilna by her bound ankles and neck of her tunic, then dropped her unceremoniously through the opening.

  She hit hard. For a moment all she was aware of was numbing pain and the sight of a man silhouetted as he tried to squirm up through the open hatch without using his arms. A Scaled Man kicked him in the face. He fell back into the hold with Ilna; the grating slammed above them.

  Through, the ventilation slots, Ilna saw the red moon. Across its face more and more winged humanoids flew.

  Like mayflies swarming...

  Ilna began working on her remaining bonds. The man with her in the hold shuffled over on his knees. His arms were tied behind his back and there wasn't height enough below the grating for him to stand.

  “Sister take me!” he said. “It's a girl!”

  “It's a woman,” Ilna said. “And if I were you, whoever you are, I'd be careful what names I was speaking right now. It may be soon enough that you'll be answering to the Sister herself for them.”

  She had a hand loose. She'd kept her frustration buried as long as she was bound, but with freedom all the emotions welled up and a wave of fierce triumph shook her.

  “Well, you're better than nothing,” the man said. “Can you maybe chew my knots loose with your teeth? If my hands were free, I'll bet I could figure a way to get the cover off. They didn't lace it down proper after they threw you down here.”

  He turned awkwardly as he spoke. The hold was half-filled with what felt to Ilna like sacks of gravel. The moonlight coming through the grating wasn't bright enough for her to see details, even if she'd cared.

  “Get back and I'll untie you after I've gotten myself free,” she said. “Who are you?”

  Ilna twisted onto her other side to get a better purchase on the remaining wrist. The Scaled Men had tied her limbs individually and then together. Their knots were hard and expert, as was to be expected from sailors. The knots weren't of types that she had come across before, though; and knots were to Ilna as weather was to a husbandman.

  “Captain of this ship, that's who I am,” the man said.

  “Cozro or-Laylin of Valles on Ornifal. I'm to have an eighth share of her as my pay for this voyage—or I was.”

  He spat in disgust. “The scum above are my crew, at least before they got the plague or whatever happened.”

  The grating crashed with the weight of a winged man landing on it. The creature's big toes hooked back to grip against the other four on each foot. The claws tore splinters out of the hardwood grating as the flyer struggled with someone on the deck. Its flapping vans concealed all details of the battle.

  Cozro bellowed in surprise and flung himself prone. “Sister drag me to her cave! What's going on up there?”

  Ilna had her left wrist free, though a tag of rope still dangled from it. The ship's cordage was woven from spar grass, but to bind her the Scaled Men had used a well-carded flax. She supposed she should be thankful, but the coarser, stiffer rope would have been easier to untie.

  She sat up. “Your ship is being attacked by bats with the bodies of men,” she said succinctly. “We aren't in the world we were born in, though I have no idea where we are.”

  She smiled coldly as her fingers worked on the knots binding her ankles. “Your suggestion that we're in the Underworld is as likely as any other. Certainly I've seen nothing to disprove that.”

  The flyer lifted, then slammed chest-down onto the grating. The spear and at least one cutlass blade hacked through its wings, slicing great gares out of them.

  The creature's teeth gnashed wildly, tearing finger-sized bits from the wood. In a final dying convulsion it writhed off the hatch cover and mostly out of sight. One foot continued to clamp and release with the regularity of the surf coming in.

  “Lady preserve Your servant Cozro,” the captain muttered with breathy sincerity. “Also preserve the Bird of the Waves, and cause Mistress Arona to deed over the eighth share of the vessel as she agreed—the skinflint!”

  Ilna loosed her ankles. She scissored her legs sideways and back, luxuriating in the pain of stretching her cramped thigh muscles.

  “The Bird of the Waves!” she said. “You're the ship that brought the Scaled Man to Erdin. I suppose that explains it. Your crew drank the liquor that the body had soaked in.”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” said Cozro, suddenly defensive. “I didn't put a body in the cask, and I don't know that there was any cider in with it from the first.”

  “Turn around and hold your hands out as much as you can,” Ilna ordered. The binding ropes would make a satisfactory weapon once she'd spliced the pieces into a single noose, the work of only minutes for her skilled fingers.

  The crossbow released again on the deck above. There was a high-pitched cry like steam lifting a tight lid. She didn't know whether it came from one of the Scaled Men or their winged attackers. She'd never heard its like from the throat of a living creature.

  “Sister take me, that might be how it happened, though,” Cozro said. He gave a low growl at the memory. “I told Mistress Arona that carrying cider royal was more trouble than it was worth, but would she listen? What do you expect sailors to do? Do you think saints crew a vessel that pays no better wages than Arona does?”

  “Hold still,” Ilna snapped. “I wouldn't need your help even if you were capable of helping.”

  “We were on the way back to Valles with a cargo of oil nuts,” Cozro mused. “I could tell there was something wrong with the crew. Oh, the first day out they were still hungoyer from port leave, I could understand that. But they kept getting quieter. Wouldn't say a word to me, and when they talked to each other I
couldn't figure out what they were saying.”

  There seemed to be a lull in the fighting on deck. Ilna heard the sailors' grunted speech. One of them sobbed with pain or desperation. The Scaled Men's stiff, froglike features didn't fit with openly expressed emotion.

  “Every night when we anchored,” Cozro said, “they'd go off together. Sometimes we tied up to a spit of land so small I could watch them. They'd all kneel facing toward Valles. I thought they was praying, but I don't know. I swear, it was like they was listening to something. Every night.”

  “There,” said Ilna, coiling the rope into a neat hank like the others and placing it in her tunic sleeve. “Now turn your feet toward me and I'll free them.”

  Cozro clapped his hands with delight. Ignoring Ilna’s direction, he hunched forward to work on his ankle ties himself.

  “If you like, I'll have you loose in a few minutes,” Ilna said, each syllable as edged as a shard of broken glass. “Otherwise you can continue what you're doing—and keep wasting your time like a fool until the ship sinks or you die of old age, whichever comes first.”

  Cozro jerked his head around. “What did you say?” he demanded.

  “If you were capable of untying these knots by moonlight, you'd have done so days ago,” Ilna said. “But it's your choice.”

  She took a length of cord from her sleeve. The Scaled Men had taken her knife when they captured her, but her fingers alone easily spread the rope-end for plaiting.

  “All right, you do it,” Cozro said in a sulky voice. He rotated and leaned backward so that Ilna could reach the knot.

  The flyer's foot clenched on the grating for a final time. The claw on the big toe was by itself as long as a man's thumb.

  Ilna bent to work. She didn't need even the light that penetrated to the hold; the pattern and its solution were in her fingertips.

  “They did their work,” Cozro said. “I can't say they were taking orders, but they were sailors all of them. They didn't need me to tell them how to trim the sail. Their skin got rough and the color, well...Sister, they were turning blue! I knew it though I pretended I didn't. I was afraid of catching it myself, you know.”