Queen Of Demons

by David Drake

  Tenoctris was kneeling before a pentacle on a dank stone floor. She swayed, dropping the sliver of wood she'd been using in her art. Sharina caught the old woman before she could hit the stone.

  For a moment Sharina saw the end of the tunnel from which she'd just emerged. It glowed, as real as the basalt walls which it interpenetrated but did not touch. The light dissolved into sparkles, then nothing at all.

  “I couldn't hold it open any longer,” Tenoctris whispered. “Was it long enough? Cashel, is the queen...?”

  “No,” said Sharina in a tone too grim to be triumphant. “The queen isn't anywhere, Tenoctris. The queen is gone.”

  “Begging your pardon, missie,” Hanno said, “but there was lava coming after us a few steps back. I don't think I want to wait here to see if it still is.”

  Tenoctris smiled, though her eyes were shut and she didn't open them for the moment. “This passage is closed,” she said, cradled in Sharina's arms. ”If there was anything in it when it closed, well, it won't vanish—it'll find another place to exit. But it won't come out here.”

  She opened her eyes and glanced with a bemused expression at those with her in the cellars. Sharina grinned back; they were an assorted lot, certainly.

  “We should get back to the surface, though,” Tenoctris said. “There's still the Beast to deal with.”

  A low tremor shook the building. Tenoctris started to rise; Cashel and Hanno together lifted the old wizard from Sharina's lap.

  “If it isn't too late,” Tenoctris said, though her face was calm.

  A serpent head on a neck thirty feet long bent toward Garric from his left side. Compared with the creature's huge body, the head looked oddly small—not much larger than that of a horse.

  Of course the Beast had three heads to feed with.

  The Beast's movement was a feint. Garric turned toward it as if completely fooled, his sword lifted and his buckler out as though to fend off the hissing maw.

  The Beast struck very quickly from the other side. Garric jumped back and slashed at the ridged yellow throat scales as the serpent jaws clopped shut on the air where he'd stood a moment before.

  The snake heads jerked away, hissing like a pair of mill races. The dog head roared, losing the rhythm of the incantation. Purple blood leaked from the long gash. It looked black in the rock's ruddy glow.

  Garric laughed, but he held where he was for the moment. The Beast's necks couldn't be as flexible as the snakes they resembled. They had to hold their own considerable weight and that of the head in the air, while a snake has the ground to support it. Nevertheless the heads could strike from both sides together. Garric didn't want to get so close to the Beast's gigantic body that he couldn't keep all the heads in his vision at the same time.

  “If I were that big,”thought one—it could have been either—of the personalities in Garric's body, “I'd stamp a man into the stone instead of worrying about his little sword, but this one isn’t me.”

  “Bow to me, human!” the dog head said. “I am your god! I am immortal! Look at the way this wound heals!”

  The purple blood vanished like water sinking into the sand. The severed scales had bent upward on either side of the wound, drawn by their own resilience. Now they flattened again like lips of heat-softened wax, reforming with only a seam to show the injury—and that smoothed as well.

  Immortal the Beast might be, but it wasn't invulnerable and it felt pain. More important, the Beast feared pain. By twisting its nose ring, a man can master a vicious boar hog three times his size, though its tusks could tear him in half if they ever closed on his body.

  “Come then!” Garric shouted. “If you like the experience so much, let's do it again!”

  The serpent heads swayed. It was like watching trees topple. Neither was a serious attack. Garric didn't bother to react.

  Laughing he cried, “It doesn't matter if you're a god. To get past me you'll have to prove you're a man!”

  “We've crossed the bridge, Garric,” Liane called in the clear, dispassionate voice of a noblewoman summoning her carriage across a crowded courtyard.

  The head on Garric's left struck hard and fast. He stepped into the attack, slashing. His blade crunched through scales and light bones, cutting half again its own depth in the serpent snout.

  That was almost too deep. The shock of the blow numbed Garric's hand. The Beast snatched back its wounded head with such screaming violence that it nearly pulled the sword from his grip.

  The other snake head struck, more in reaction to pain than from calculation. Garric ducked under the blow, swinging his buckler instead of risking a cut before his hand had stopped tingling.

  The shield was small but as sturdy as three birch cross-plies and iron reinforcements could make it. The spiked boss bonged against the fanged lower jaw. It felt to Garric as though he'd batted an oak tree, but he heard bones in the snake head break.

  The Beast recoiled. If a thunderstorm could be angry, it would sound like the hissing roars of the creature's three heads.

  Garric glanced over his shoulder, then skipped backward to the middle of the span. “Chant your spell!” he shouted to the wizards. “Break the bridge!”

  “Betput,”Halphemos called in a clear voice, “baiai borbar...”

  Heat hammered Garric's body. The bridge had been wider than Garric could reach with outstretched arms when he first glimpsed it. It shrank into itself, narrowing and providing less of a shield against the lava blazing below.

  “Barphor kolchoi tontonon....”Halphemos said. He knelt beside Cerix at the far side of the bridge. It must be very nearly as hot for the wizards as it was for Garric at midspan.

  Ilna stood with help from the wizards, throwing and retrieving the sash. Liane was beside her, touching the other girl's shoulder with her fingertips. Liane had no need to stay here. Lava lighted a tunnel rising behind her. She might as well have run up it.

  “Phriou rigche alcheine...”Halphemos said.

  Garric felt his skin crack. His tunic must be singeing; would it burst into flame?

  He laughed, both halves of his person again. If only that were all he had to worry about!

  “Rouche!”shrilled the serpent heads. “Dropide tana iao!”

  The bridge had shrunk to little more than the width of the felled tulip poplar that crossed the gully north of Barca's Hamlet. As the Beast spoke, the span widened again by a finger's breadth.

  That was on the track to Seckler the Butcher's yard...

  “Before I kill you,” boomed the dog head, “I will tear your females apart piece by piece. I will lick up their blood, I will grind their bones between my teeth!”

  If the Beast could speak the Yellow King's Key unaided, it wouldn't need to face Garric's sword now. But—

  The Beast strode forward thunderously, keeping its three heads high. The attack didn't completely surprise the part of Garric which had survived a hundred battlefields, but the Beast's enormous bulk was as hard to stop as an avalanche.

  “Apomche moz—”Halphemos began. One of the serpent heads swung over Garric. The jaws slammed closed on Halphemos.

  The Beast's right foreleg swung toward Garric. The foot was a broad pad with five blunt toes, each the size of a human torso. Garric stabbed between two claws, driving the blade into the flesh above the pad of cartilage which supported the monster's weight.

  The Beast's cry of triumph changed into a deafening scream. It lurched back on its haunches, jerking Garric forward because he wouldn't release the sword hilt. No human strength could snatch the weapon free when the Beast's injured muscles had spasmed tight on the steel.

  Garric held for a moment. Halphemos dangled from the jaws that had struck him; long teeth driven through his skull from both sides had done instantly fatal damage. The other snake head twisted toward the corpse and tore off a mouthful of flesh for itself.

  The Beast kicked its injured foot. The weapon remained imbedded in the sensitive flesh, but Garric flew clear. He dropped the buckler
and grabbed for the bridge with both hands.

  He almost caught himself, but “almost” was the difference between life and death. Garric's fingers brushed the stone but couldn't grip it.

  Ilna's noose settled over his outstretched arms and jerked tight. Instead of plunging straight into the blazing lava, his body swung like a pendulum against the far side of the chasm. The shock and the heat knocked him into open-mouthed collapse. All Garric saw was concentric circles of red and white glare, expanding to fill the universe.

  Garric couldn't use his arms. He felt his torso scrape over the lip of the fiery moat, then hands rolled him away. Merely being sheltered from the lava's radiant heat felt like a plunge into a spring-fed pool. He could see again.

  The noose slipped off. Both women bent over him, Ilna with the noose wrapped around her waist to help anchor Garric's weight. She and Liane must still have surprised themselves to have been able to lift him clear.

  “Sothaoth agog katochoi!”Cerix shouted. He wept as he spoke the phrases he'd transcribed for his dead friend. “Kleidia phuschi choroi!”

  A lot of people were surprising themselves this day.

  Across the chasm, the Beast started forward again. When the huge right foot touched the bridge, it drove Garric's sword deeper. Screaming from all three mouths, the Beast flinched back.

  “Tharona perpo wile!”the cripple cried.

  The span dissolved like dew in the sunlight, leaving the moat clear. Lava slapped and gurgled; droplets of white-hot rock spattered over the edges of the trough. One splashed a finger's length from Garric and quivered as it cooled, giving off a sulphurous stench. The liquid rock was about to overflow its channel.

  “Run,” Garric said, barely whispering. He tried to stand; Liane's hands gripped his upper arms. “We've got to get higher.”

  Cerix weighed more than Ilna did. She lifted him anyway and staggered up the passage. Garric could move his legs, but without Liane he wouldn't even have been able to crawl.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Lava flooded from the moat for as far into the distance as Garric could see. The Beast howled words of power as it retreated, but the river of glowing rock continued to widen.

  Garric and his companions were out of sight of the domed chamber when the screams began. They were inhuman, penetrating Garric's brain as no sound alone could have done. They went on until the flow of rising lava had filled the passage behind the escaping humans—

  And even then, Garric thought he heard the wails of a thing that could not die though all its substance had burned away.

  “I'm too heavy for you to carry,” Cerix muttered. Ilna wouldn't have heard him except that his lips were so close to her ear. “You can leave me here.”

  “No,” said Ilna, “I can't. Not if I want to sleep nights, at any rate. If you want to do something useful instead of whining, you might clasp your hands around my neck and take some weight off my arms.”

  The wizard obeyed immediately. That helped, though not as much as Ilna would have liked. Her thigh muscles quivered with the strain and her forearms—her hands were locked under Cerix's buttocks—had gone numb. A pity that Cerix wasn't a midget instead of merely a cripple.

  The passage seemed interminable. Since there was no light, Ilna kept her course straight by touching the stone wall occasionally with her elbow. There were no seams. Either the tunnel was lined with enormous slabs, or it had been cut from the living rock.

  “Alos did it,” Cerix said in a weak whisper. “He killed the Beast.”

  “He was a brave man,” Ilna said. She didn't want to talk about Halphemos, but other people had different ways of dealing with unpleasant situations. “We couldn't have succeeded without him.”

  Garric stumbled along close behind; on Liane's arm, Ilna supposed. His burns were terrible. Ilna had blisters on the backs of her hands just from leaning, over to pull Garric out of the flaming chasm.

  “Alos did it!” Cerix said, as close as he could come to shouting, “He did it!”

  Ilna trudged onward. The wizard began to cry again.

  Ilna had started to say, “No, Master Cerix. If there was any one person who killed the Beast, you were that person when you closed the bridge over the moat.”

  But Cerix didn't want praise: he wanted to be forgiven for living when his friend had died. Ilna could understand the feeling very well.

  It was odd that people thought it mattered what things cost. A perfectly woven panel was no better or worse whether you bought it for a few coppers or spent a purse of minted gold. Halphemos had done certain things. The things were of the same importance whether they were easy or if they cost him his life. As they had.

  And perhaps there were worse things than lies. “Yes,” Ilna said aloud. “Halphemos did kill the Beast.”

  “Ilna?” Liane called. “There's something ahead of us. I see light.”

  “Light” was too strong a word, but a square of the blackness in front of them was less absolute than the neighboring portions.

  “I see it,” said Ilna; and because she was Ilna, she added, “Now that you've pointed it out.”

  “I'll go see what it is,” Garric said. His voice rasped like that of a mummy dug from the ancient sands. “Yes, and maybe Cerix will run alongside to give you company!” Ilna snapped; and immediately regretted it. Garric wasn't posturing. There was almost nothing left of him but his duty, so duty had spoken.

  There wasn't much left of Ilna either, she supposed. In a mild voice she added, “I'd rather we stayed together, Garric.”

  “I hear voices,” Liane said quietly.

  They were no longer in a tunnel through rock. A forest of pillars supported arches overhead. Ilna had thought the sounds she heard were echoes of their own voices, their own footsteps, but Liane was right.

  Ilna smiled tightly. Liane was right again.

  A group of people came toward them from the side. Sharina was in the lead, holding a lantern. Behind her were three men—one of them Cashel and another as big as Cashel, which was something Ilna hadn't seen very often.

  And the ape Zahag; and Tenoctris.

  Somebody else could carry Cerix now. Ilna knelt and lowered her burden carefully to the stone floor. Physical relief washed over her, though the immediate result was that she felt so wrung out that she almost fell over.

  Garric supported Ilna’s shoulder with the hand that wasn't around Liane. “Sharina,” he called, “I couldn't be happier to see you—all of you. Tenoctris, we've—the Beast is gone.”

  Cashel, looking wobbly but not weak—never weak, not him—walked to Ilna, lifted her, and gave her a hug. “What are you doing in the queen's mansion, Ilna?” he asked.

  “Thinking that we need to get Garric to a healer,” she said, squeezing her brother hard before she broke away. The parched skin of her face pinched when she smiled. “And the rest of us too, perhaps.”

  “Are we in the queen's mansion?” said Garric, looking back from where he stood with Tenoctris. Liane was close by, ready to catch him if he fell. “I've got to join Attaper and Waldron before the Hairy Men attack.”

  Tenoctris looked worn, but hearing that the Beast was dead made the old wizard beam like the sun. “The Hairy Men aren't a danger without the queen,” she said. “Without her art to rule them, they're just a herd of poor, terrified creatures. They'll starve or drown.”

  Ilna supposed “dead” was the word for the Beast.

  Tenoctris shook her head sadly. “I regret that,” she added, “because they were really quite innocent.”

  “As were the many young girls fed to the Beast over the years,” said Garric. “We can't change what's happened; but we can rule the Isles in a fashion that prevents it from happening again.”

  “Does anybody else want to get out of here?” asked the big man wearing leather. “Because I surely do!”

  “Yes,” said the youth who was clearly Prince Garric. “Tenoctris, will you lead us? Because I'm going to do well if I manage the three flights of stairs by myself, l
et alone remembering directions. I'm not in good shape.”

  Cashel lifted Cerix. The wizard was crooning a song of parting, but he'd ceased to blubber.

  “Fortunately for me and the Isles,” Garric added as they started in the direction Tenoctris indicated, “I don't have to do things by myself.”

  The 7th of Partridge

  Garric, smelling of Mistress Ladra's lanolin ointment and walking stiffly in bandages that made him look as though he had elephantiasis, entered the reception hall that served as headquarters for the defense of Ornifal. There were at least three hundred people present now, twice as many as there'd been when he'd last been here two days past.

  “All rise for His Majesty Prince Garric!” bellowed the nomenclator.

  An attendant had run ahead to warn Royhas. The chancellor had already gotten out of his chair in the center of a long table and was hobbling to the door as quickly as he could. Garric guessed that Royhas' foot had gone to sleep, though he might just be generally stiff from hours seated during tense discussions.

  “It seemed to me,”King Carus murmured with his usual chuckle, “that the only times I wasn't wearing calluses on my butt listening to boring, crucial talk were the times I was in the field. Then I was mostly trying to sleep wrapped in my cloak and not let the rain rust my sword.”

  “Your Majesty?” said Royhas over the scrape and murmur of hundreds of people getting to their feet “Should you be up?”

  “Yes,” Garric said forcefully. He glared at Liane beside him. She covered a giggle with her hand. “Though I'll admit I seem to be the only one who thinks that.”

  The reception hall was the largest building in the palace compound. A line of slender pillars down the center of the main room supported a vaulted roof. Clerestory windows lighted the open area, while a portico to either side set off smaller rooms which could be used by officials or for private conferences.

  The public entrance on the south side boasted an imposing porch whose pediment displayed the Lady's descent into the Underworld. The private entrance on the north was connected to the royal apartments by a closed passageway. Garric felt a little odd about using the royal suite, but Valence chose to stay in the secluded bungalow to which he'd retired before the crisis.