Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  “I wondered if you were coming!” Zahag said angrily when Cashel and Aria appeared. The ape stood on a six-foot mound of seaweed just above the tideline. He'd tossed away the top layer and was grubbing down into the ulterior with both hands. “If you think I'm going to do all the work, you'd better think again!”

  “I didn't think that,” Cashel said dryly. He'd gotten used to the ape. Zahag and Aria both did about the best they could. A lot of times that wasn't very good, but the contrast with Cozro made Cashel appreciate his longtime companions better. “You've found eggs, you say?”

  For answer, Zahag raised in both hands a pale cream egg the size of a watermelon. “What kind of bird laid this, do you suppose?” he asked. With the question, he looked skyward in sudden concern.

  Cozro strode out of the foliage toward the interior of the island. “Say!” he said. “But that's not a bird egg, it's a turtle. A bird that big couldn't fly.”

  The captain was drinking his punch from a scooped-out coconut shell. He had a line of similar containers fermenting in the sun near where Cashel had dragged the dinghy up the beach. Preparing the coconut shells and filling them with fruit pulp was the only work Cozro had done since they landed.

  Zahag set the egg on the mass of vegetation which had been keeping it warm. It didn't look like any bird's nest Cashel had seen either, but—

  “It's got a hard shell,” he said. “Turtle eggs are leathery. Besides, it'd be a real big turtle.”

  Cozro snorted. “There's plenty of things in the sea bigger'n what laid that,” he said, slurping a draft of his punch. “You won't see a bird bigger'n an albatross, though, and for all their wingspread they don't weigh much more'n a chicken. Turtle eggs are fine eating, though.”

  He finished his cup of punch, belched, and walked away without taking further notice of his companions. Off to get the next shell in the line, and perhaps to refill the empty.

  Cashel had tried the punch. He knew his tastes were pretty narrow compared to those of people who'd lived in bigger places and traveled more, so he tried to make allowances.

  The beer Reise brewed for his inn was bound with germander from the woodlands of the borough, not hops imported from Sandrakkan. Germander made beer dark and bitter, but it was the taste Cashel had grown to expect.

  Wine was rare and expensive in Barca's Hamlet. He'd had sips and didn't much care for it, though cider mulled with spices could be a pleasure on winter nights.

  Making allowances didn't help. Cozro's punch tasted like rotten fruit, it was that simple. Cashel would've drunk seawater before he'd suck down more of that oily, sticky liquid.

  “Are there many of them?” Aria asked, stepping closer to Zahag but unwilling to climb onto the mass of decaying vegetation. “Can we really eat them?”

  The princess could be peevish with Cashel and the ape, but she didn't seem to recognize that the captain even existed. So far as helping was concerned, he didn't; but Cashel figured Cozro would be quick enough to claim a share of the egg after Cashel had lit a fire with the firebow he'd made as his first project after landing.

  “They're four to a layer,” Zahag said. “I'd say three layers,”

  He hopped down from the mound with the egg in his arms. “As for eating it,” he went on, “I don't see—”

  “Don't smash it!” Cashel shouted. He was too late. Zahag dropped the egg; it crunched but didn't smash. The ape quickly rolled the dished-in portion uppermost.

  “What's the matter?” the ape said in puzzlement. He thrust his hand through the broken shell and drew it up. dripping with both white and yolk. “I didn't lose any in the sand; and anyway, there's plenty more.”

  “Ugh,” Aria said as Zahag started to lick the egg's contents off his hairy hand with a tongue like a blanket. She turned her back.

  “Yeah, but I wanted to save the shell,” Cashel said. “To hold water when we get away from here.”

  “Well, there's plenty more,” the ape repeated with his usual unconcern. He climbed the mound, sucking at his fingers.

  “No, they can stay in the nest for now,” Cashel said, organizing their escape in his mind. Maybe he could build a raft to hold the supplies. He'd been wondering what to do for water butts, so the giant eggs looked like a gift from the Gods.

  Cashel couldn't understand the ape. Though he could read and talk as well as Garric, Zahag just didn't see why you planned for the future.

  “I'm getting hungry,” Aria said, looking over her shoulder toward the egg. “But all runny like that...?”

  Cashel scooped the egg up in both hands; he could carry it in one, but he was afraid the crack Zahag started in opening the shell would spread and spill the contents on the ground.

  “I'll put it on a slow fire,” he said to Aria. They didn't have a pot to boil it in. Even back in Barca's Hamlet, the only containers big enough would be the laundry cauldrons that several of the wealthier households had. “And maybe we can fry some if we can find a rock flat enough.”

  They trudged back toward the fireset and the upturned dinghy. Cashel could hear Cozro swearing as he pricked himself while gathering more fruit for his punch.

  Three would be easier to plan for than four were, but Cashel knew in his heart he wouldn't make that decision. Once in a while, though, he wished he was the sort of man who could leave the captain behind—and sleep nights afterward.

  Ilna was drowning. She reached up a hand with glacial slowness. It broke surface. She thrashed violently, awakening as her head thrust upward. Sputtering and suddenly conscious that she was nude, she looked around her.

  Several willowy, perfect humans stepped back with grave smiles as liquid splashed from the trough Ilna was lying in. It wasn't water but something thicker. It was as viscous as olive oil to the touch, but it vanished into miniature rainbows when it dripped from Ilna’s body. She hadn't been drowning, either, though all but her nose and lips must have been under the surface until she awakened.

  “Where am I?” Ilna demanded. “Who are you?”

  The bearded man holding a cup and ewer opened his mouth to reply. Before he could get a word out, Ilna added, “And where are my clothes? I want my clothes!”

  She was even more determined about that because none of the strangers around her were clothed. The air was balmy and breathed perfumes like those of flowers at evening. Her skin tingled with a healthy feeling when she stepped from the trough.

  “Of course, we'll bring your clothes as soon as they're ready,” the bearded man said. “They're being cleaned now. But you're welcome to fresh garments if you'd like, though we ourselves don't see the need.”

  “This is the Garden, mistress,” a girl of about Ilna’s age said. “I'm Cory. This is Wim—”

  The bearded man nodded.

  “And I'm Bram,” said a youth who might have been Cory's twin brother. “Ah...we call ourselves the People of Beauty, but that sounds pretty boastful, I guess. You don't have to call us anything.”

  “Except friends,” Cory said with a bright smile. She stepped close and hugged Ilna. She looked so perfect that Ilna expected her flesh to be as cool as beeswax, but in fact Cory felt completely normal.

  Another slender woman walked toward them, carrying Ilna’s tunics draped over one arm. She wasn't running but her clean strides covered ground swiftly. A herd of deer with long, backward-sloping fangs in their upper jaws ran across the meadow behind her.

  “The Garden” seemed as good a name for this place as Ilna could have come up with, not that it told her anything she wanted to know, fruit trees grew, separately and in small groves. Goats and miniature deer browsed beneath them but didn't seem to strip the bark as Ilna would have expected from her own experience.

  Water ran in profusion. From the large pond in the near distance sprang a fairylike pink fountain that was all spines and curlicues. Birds rested on it and occasionally dived into the water. When they rose again, they carried fish or frogs in their bills. The Garden wasn't entirely a place of peace.

  Thoug
h it seemed very close to that. A giraffe, a creature Ilna recognized as a motif on fabrics from Cordin but which she'd never before seen living, walked to the pond in stately fashion and splayed its forelegs out to drink. A pair of scimitar-horned antelopes moved aside but continued drinking.

  Ilna looked up. The sky burgeoned into rich color in the west, while the eastern horizon sparkled with what looked like stars.

  “Where are we?” she demanded. The woman had come up with her tunics; Ilna took them, but it was somehow more embarrassing to dress in front of these strangers than to stand here nude as a plucked chicken. “I thought I was being taken underground.”

  “That's right,” said Wim. “That's the cavern roof above us. It's covered with flow rock that glows according to the time of day it would have been in the upper world, back in the days before we had to come here to the Garden to survive.”

  He poured fluid from the ewer into the goblet of chased metal and offered it to Ilna. “This is wine,” he explained. “It will help your throat and lips. They're terribly dry.”

  “That's why we put you in the bath when we brought you down,” Bram said. “Your poor skin had been scoured, just scoured, by being on the surface unprotected for so very long.”

  Ilna grimaced. She lifted the inner tunic over her head and wriggled into it quickly.

  With the cloth covering her eyes, she could think. This whole place was wrong. Not hostile, not dangerous, but Wrong—it shouldn't be here. It didn't fit the pattern of the world across which she and the wizards had been walking.

  Ilna’s head reappeared from the neck of the tunic. The fabric had been cleaned perfectly—better than Ilna herself could have done. The tunic was cleaner than when the wool first came from the bleaching vat, she would have said.

  “Where are my friends?” she asked, suspicious again. “Halphemos and Cerix?”

  Bram offered Ilna his hand. “We'll take you to them,” he said. The four People of Beauty—the woman who'd brought the garments was tagging along—set out toward another pond a quarter mile distant.

  A group of young men and women passed in the opposite direction riding bareback on a variety of animals, none of which were horses. A deer with Y-shaped horns branching from its nose, and a griffin with a beak and bird's legs in front and the hindquarters of a dog, were among the stranger mounts. The large billy goat wasn't unusual in itself, but the fact that a laughing girl controlled it by ribbons was more amazing than the griffin.

  The second pond was fed by a pair of streams running from pink tracery fountains which poured water out of dozens of holes. Ilna could follow the pattern which the pink strands wove among themselves, but she doubted, that anyone else in Barca's Hamlet—and perhaps anyone else in the world—could have done so.

  She smiled grimly. Wherever “the world” she meant by the term was, it wasn't here. And she very much doubted that the Garden was really a part of any world, even the one into which the wizards had flung her and themselves.

  At the pond's edge grew a wrist-thick vine which sprouted translucent growths like pea pods the size of human beings. Several of the People of Beauty stood nude near one of the pods; with them but clothed in a red silk robe was another man.

  “Halphemos!” Ilna called, louder than she'd meant to. Ever since she awakened she'd been suppressing the fear that she was alone in this place.

  The youth stood and turned with a beatific smile. “Ilna!” he called. “Come and look what they're doing for Cerix!”

  Ilna lengthened her stride. Her companions kept up with her effortlessly. It was worse than when Ilna walked with long-limbed, free-striding Sharina on the beach at Barca's Hamlet. These really were the People of Beauty—and of grace, and of kindness, and apparently of all manner of other desirable attributes that Ilna was too honest to claim for herself.

  Halphemos gestured toward the pod. The People of Beauty with him moved aside to afford Ilna a clear view. Though the sky was growing darker, the structures from which the water poured were suffused with a soft pink glow that lighted the meadow around them.

  Ilna bent to look into the pod. A man floated inside with his eyes closed. For a moment Ilna didn't recognize him, though Cerix's face should have been familiar enough.

  Cerix didn't have legs, though. This man did: hairless and the same color as the light itself, but unquestionably legs.

  Without speaking, Ilna looked up at Halphemos.

  “Isn't it wonderful?” Halphemos cried while the People of Beauty looked on with indulgent smiles. “They're giving him back his legs! He'll be normal again!”

  Ilna nodded to show that she was listening. She was trying to organize her thoughts, trying to find the pattern; and the pattern wasn't there.

  In the pond, a gloriously blond mermaid cavorted with another creature that was half-fish. The upper parts of the second form were insectile, a chitinous carapace and a head with great multifaceted eyes.

  “Yes,” Ilna said at last. “Our hosts appear to be very skillful. They cleaned my garments better than I could have done myself.”

  Her comment probably sounded inane to anyone who didn't know her well. Anyone who did know Ilna’s fierce pride in her own skills would see how deep was her praise.

  She gestured Halphemos to follow, wondering if the People of Beauty would fall into step. They, as tactful as they were lovely, turned their backs and murmured among themselves in soft, cultured voices. The youth, puzzled but too cheerful to object, walked along the margin of the pond with her.

  “I came around sooner than you did, mistress,” Halphemos said apologetically. “I'm afraid you must have been doing most of the work during the last hour or more, even though you're... I mean, I'm bigger than you.”

  Ilna waved her hand in disinterest. Lights glimmered in the depths of the pond. Tiny human forms rode fish that looked like swollen bladders. They glowed in a variety of pastel colors.

  “I don't think this garden is real,” she said bluntly. “Or the people who live here.”

  “But... ?” Halphemos said. He pinched the flesh of his arm, then offered his hand to Ilna. “Touch me,” he said. “I'm real and you are too.”

  Ilna squeezed the youth's hand perfunctorily and released it. “I dare say we are,” she said. “But what we see around us...”

  Above them a creature like a vast winged fish floated across the starlit sky. Trills of laughter drifted down from the riders on its back.

  “Halphemos,” she said, “I think we're in a hallucination. Your friend's hallucination. His delirium is so strong that he's woven a dream of paradise around all three of us. It's almost the only thing that could fit the pattern.”

  “But...” Halphemos said. They were nearing one of the streams which fed the pond. They slowed slightly. “What do you think should we do, mistress?”

  Ilna shrugged. “We set out to find my brother,” she said. “I can't tell you what to do, but I intend to keep looking until I find him; or I die. And I won't find Cashel here.”

  “Yes, I see that,” Halphemos said. A lizard with three heads swam down the stream into the pond, singing multipart harmony as its tail oared from side to side.

  Halphemos straightened with a firmer expression. He turned on his heel, forcing Ilna to turn with him. “You said that us living in Cerix's hallucinations was almost the only explanation,” he said. “What are the other possibilities?”

  “There's one,” Ilna said. She smiled faintly. “That we're dead. That my brain is drying out on the bottom of a sea older than time, and this place is the last thought that goes through it.”

  Black and white swallows in equal numbers traced a curving line across the sky. They cluttered merrily. Halphemos looked up at them as he walked.

  “I see,” he said at last. The pod had opened and Cerix, waving enthusiastically, was getting out.

  The 28th of Heron

  The banners of the two heralds riding at the head of the procession bore the black eagle of Ornifal, but against a blue ground inst
ead of the red of the present royal line. The soldiers, a mixture of armed retainers provided by all five conspirators, wore tabards with the same device.

  “King Carus!” the crowds cheered as they saw Garric. “Long live Carus!”

  At the back of Garric's mind, a normally cheerful presence glowered at the flags. Garric turned to Liane, being carried in a sedan chair which put her head almost level with him on horseback, and said, “We ought to use the Gold Ring of the Old Kingdom. It symbolized both the diadem of kingship and the whole circuit of the Isles, not just one island.”

  Liane looked at him. “Did it?” she said. “I didn't know that. Where did you learn it?”

  Garric coughed. “I think it's in Aldebrand's Dinner Party,” he muttered.

  It probably was somewhere in Aldebrand's massive collection of bits and pieces of information from the literature of the Old Kingdom—which had fallen four hundred years before Aldebrand compiled it in the form of conversation at a dinner party of savants of the former age. Because Aldebrand had the run of the vast temple library at Wist on Cordin, long-since burned and dispersed, he provided information which had survived nowhere else. Unfortunately Aldebrand was also a superstitious fool and a careless copyist, so his information was as likely as not to be wrong.

  In truth, Garric had learned about the Gold Ring while watching a priestess of the Lady instruct Carus in the spiritual underpinnings of kingship a decade before Carus donned the diadem. Had anybody tried to teach Valence about kingship? If all being King of the Isles meant was privileges and politics, alliances and bribes... who could expect anything better than the upheaval and injustice of the present day?

  “But you know better,”a voice whispered through the ages.

  The crowd had been cheering all the way from the queen's mansion in the center of the city. Many of the people who'd seen the procession passing had fallen in behind it; as many more were already gathered here at Garric's destination. Their shouts and the morning sunlight were dazzling.