Shallow steps led him down. Under faded and fallen plaster, blacker shadows seemed to take the shapes of great-horned gazelles, and beyond an archway that had once been filled in with layer on layer of brick and mortar the witchlight showed him a rock-cut corridor whose ceiling still bore constellations of stars and a comet with trailing hair.
The door at the corridor’s end had been closed with bricks also. But shifting in the earth had cracked them, and water and age had done the rest. The Lord of Time strikes again, thought John, regarding the crevice.
The witchlight flowed through ahead of him. He saw something silver in the dark.
He found the circular room Jenny had described. The witch-light shone on the mirror’s tall frame, cold and strange in the light. Thunderstone, he thought, and written with runes against the mirror’s breaking, for instead of destroying the thing, someone had covered over the glass with what appeared to be black enamel, hard and shiny as Morkeleb’s scales. Steam rose off it, drifting in the light.
From the breast of his doublet John took the square of parchment Mab had given him, written with a sigil that could have been either an eye or a door. His mouth felt dry and his hands icy. He remembered again how Jenny had waked in the night, crying and clinging to him. But that memory brought him another, her eyes in the lamplight of her tent in Rocklys’ camp, her hair pointed and sticky with blood and wine. She had told him not to look for Ian, not knowing he had already seen his son—or the demon that lived in his son’s flesh.
I’d sooner be dead than live without her, he had said to Mab. But it wasn’t the whole truth. If the recollection of what he had seen in the camp—of Jenny a vicious whore, and Ian … He shook away the thought. If that memory was going to be part of his life, together with the knowledge that they were possessed, forever subject to the demons that made them do those things, death looked good.
Only, he thought, as he spit on the back of the parchment and stuck it to the mirror’s enameled face, it might not be death.
That was the tricky part.
He didn’t know how the tiny sigil was big enough to admit his body, but it was.
He closed his eyes, said a prayer to the Old God, and stepped through.
CHAPTER TWENTY
They were waiting for him, right behind the glass.
Well, there’s a brave one, said the Demon Queen, and took his face between her hands. Her hands were cold as marble in winter. Her lips, when they forced his open—tonguing, nipping, tasting—were icy, too. A dead woman’s lips. Her tongue a serpent’s probing tongue.
But heat burned under the chill. Heat flowed into his palms, though he felt how cold her flesh was under the clinging silk—if it was silk. The dark of the place was the purple dark of nightmares, where flesh glowed strangely and all things were outlined in fire. Scents and noises hammered and whispered in his brain, as if sound and odor were in fact designed for other organs of sensation than those he possessed. For a time he struggled only to adjust his awareness, and it came to him that the Demon Queen’s blinding, blood-pounding kiss was a way of making sure he didn’t adjust.
He caught her wrists, pushed her back, though she was tremendously strong. “Say, you aren’t married, are you, love?” he asked her, and it took her by surprise. He fished through his pockets. “I had a ring … Here it is.” He produced a cheap bronze bearing that had gone into the Urchin’s engines and caught the Demon Queen’s hand. “You’d have to talk to me man of business about the dowry—we’re that set on dowries where I come from—but you and me together, we’ll talk him down to not more than half a dozen feather beds and a set of pots. Can you make lamb and prune pie? The last lady I thought to marry was a tall bonny girl like yourself, only couldn’t find her way about the kitchen with a map of the place and one of the scullery boys for a guide. She ended up cookin’ a horse-head in mistake for a turkey-poult, stuffed with oats, for a Yule feast, and I had to call off the match …”
You’re a fool! The Demon Queen stepped back from him and pulled her hand from his attempt to slip the bronze ring onto her finger.
“That’s what they all said,” agreed John, “when I spoke of coming here.” He was careful to put the ring back in his pocket.
She looked like a woman to him, a tall woman, slim as a catkin but for the lush upstanding heaviness of her breasts. Luminous white skin seemed to shine through the garment she wore, smoke-blue shot through with fire when she moved; winds that he could not feel rippled and lifted and turned the fabric, as it rippled her hair. Black hair drawn up and back, strands and braids and swags of it falling around her face, down her back, glittering with gems as the manes of the dragons glittered. Her eyes were a goat’s eyes.
And why did you come here?
He’d made her angry, breaking the falseness of her welcome; he saw that falseness return as she took him by the hands. He saw now they were in an enormous chamber: smokes, and lights, and portions of the floor that flowed like glimmering water. He could not tell whether he was hot or cold—both together, it seemed, and both unbearable—and it was difficult to breathe. Difficult, too, to decide whether the smells that freighted the air were sweet or nauseating. The Queen’s courtiers who ringed in behind him had the appearance of men and women until he took his eyes off them. He knew they changed then and almost saw them at it.
He sensed them following as the Queen led him down corridors and stairs, through arcaded terraces where it was sometimes day and sometimes night, past windows where snow fell, or rain, or slow flakes of fire.
“Gie nice furniture,” he remarked and paused to trace a line of porcelain flowers set in the C-curved ebony of a chair-leg. “I saw stuff like this in the palace at Bel two years ago, though how they got the wood to bend like this was more than I could learn. Still it’s all the newest fashion, they say. How’d you come by it, if you’ve been locked up behind a covered mirror for the past thousand years?”
You are a fool, she said again, but this time there were a thousand undertones of other things in her voice. Her hand on his arm was the stroking of feathers on bare flesh, and he had to look aside from her lips and her breasts. The room was filled with pale mist and scented with applewood and burnt sugar. Oddly, through the mists, he could still see Miss Mab’s sigil, burning like a distant lamp.
Lamps surrounded a divan, haloing it and seeming to hold the mists at bay. The floor was green marble, scattered with almond flowers.
“Why did you come?” She spoke as humans speak, through those blood-ruby lips, and her long ivory-pale face was sad. “To ask your help, love.”
“Alas.” She drew him onto the divan beside her. Her voice was deep, and the note of it was like a warm hand curled around his manhood. “Would that we could offer it. But as you see, we cannot help even ourselves. That I, Aohila, should have been betrayed and imprisoned so, for things that were none of our doing.”
A grave-faced child emerged from the fog, wearing nothing more than a garland of roses and bearing an enameled tray. Glass vessels on it held wine, clear as the last slant of afternoon light, dates, figs, cherries, and a pomegranate.
“You’re hungry,” said Aohila. “You’ve ridden a long way.”
John shook his head. Mab had warned him about this, if he hadn’t already encountered it in a hundred legends and songs. On that, at least, they all agreed, if on little else. “Narh. I had a meat-pie in me saddlebags, and the last time I took wine I made a fair disgrace of meself, dancin’ on the table at me aunt Tillie’s wedding and making that free with the bridesmaids. Aunt Tillie was like to die of mortification.” He took the cup that she raised to his lips and emptied it out onto the floor. “But thank you all the same, love. And you really ought to get some socks on that page. She’ll catch her death, runnin’ about on the stone floor. Who was it covered your mirror over in black like that?”
Her eyes changed, losing the faint illusion of humanity, and green flame wickered and threaded through her hair. She said nothing.
“Not
humans?” he asked.
The red lip lifted a little from her teeth, and he felt the blood start, where her nails cut into the flesh of his arm.
“These wizards of the desert are supposed to have done it, but it was other demons, wasn’t it?”
It was like entering the cave of a poisonous serpent, naked and with bound hands. Hearing the movement of dry silken coils in the dark.
What do you know of it?
“Not much.” His heart pounded. The fog behind him stirred, but he dared not turn his head; he caught the movement of light, and shapes within the light, from the corner of his eye. “I think I know which of the Nightspawned Kin it was, though.”
She pressed him back on the cushions of the divan, and her fingers closed around the back of his neck, strong and cold, like a metal garrote. He realized she was strong far beyond the strength of the strongest of men. Why are you here?
“Because the sea-wights from the foundations of the Seven Isles are doin’ exactly what you tried to do here, a thousand years ago,” said John. “They’ve tempted a mage to his fall and are using him to manipulate a pretender to the local throne. They’ve got up a corps of dragons and mages, the same way you did for Isychros. Only instead of tryin’ to set themselves up, they’ve got some poor sap of a human to rule for them, while they hang back and kill and fornicate and torture. I think that’s been in their minds for a thousand years, since they helped the Lords of Syn to close you off in here.”
What do you know, whispered her sulfurous voice in the hollows of his mind, of the minds of the seaspawn? Her nails dug into his flesh and he could feel the others behind him, a wall of slow-burning bones. Coming closer, smelling his blood. And how do you know it was they who closed our door into the world of men?
“It’s not somethin’ I can discuss.”
Her body stretched out on top of his, fingers cold through his hair. Her lips were cold, too, brushing his, but they kindled a fire in him, like a drug. What had been fog seemed now to be enclosing walls, bright with frescoes and the light of a few candles, and she drew the jeweled pins from her hair, and from the knots of silk that held her robe. What is your business, then?
Her breasts were round as melons where they pressed his flesh, silk-soft and heavy, and again he was conscious of the underlying warmth, not of her flesh, but of some core of flame deep within. The scent of her intoxicated him. His hands closed hard over hers, stopping their caress. “To do a bargain with you, Lady,” he said, his voice husky and dry. “Nothing more. I’m an old married man with children.”
If he took her, he knew, it would give her power over him, as surely as if he had eaten or drunk in the realm of the demons. But it was hard to speak, difficult even to think, with his need for her blinding and burning and hammering in his blood.
“I came to ask help of you against the seaspawn, lest they do to you what they do to us.”
She twisted her wrists from his grasp—it was like trying to hold on to the foreleg of a maddened horse—and reared above him, black hair swirling around her and the gold and crimson silk of her dress falling around her hips.
Bargain? BARGAIN? With US?
He saw when the red lips lifted back from her mouth that her teeth were fangs; and in any case he knew she didn’t look like a woman when he closed his eyes. Still the desire to seize her, to crush her beneath him, to force her mouth and her thighs apart, overwhelmed him, so that he rolled swiftly off the divan and stood, shaking, behind its head.
“It’s a fair bargain,” he said. “Bein’ your servant isn’t in it.”
Their eyes met and locked, and he saw that he’d guessed truly: that it was less the blow to her pride that a man would bargain with her than that he acted as a free agent, unswayed by her will. Her mouth pulled back in a snarl again, and for a moment he saw her as she was.
Then the demons seized him from behind: pain, and cold, and the breath ripped from his lungs. Black blindness, and the roaring agony of fire.
If I die in this realm, thought John, it’s here I’ll remain, forever.
Mab’s spells had strengthened his flesh, but according to Gantering Pellus, demons seldom or never killed those who went to their realms, though how the encyclopedist had obtained that information wasn’t mentioned. Chained naked between pillars of red-hot iron, his flesh being cut slowly to pieces by the whips of the demons, John didn’t take much comfort in the Encyclopedia’s, assertion even if it was true. If he couldn’t die, he couldn’t faint either, and the servants of the Demon Queen were ingenious in how they used the razor-edged whalebone and leather. Dotys, or was it Heronax of Ernine?—he forced his mind to pursue the reference—wrote that sages of the old Kingdom of Choray had used certain incantations to keep pain at bay, but John was forced to conclude that this was probably a lie.
All you need to do is ask, whispered the Queen in the screaming core of his mind. All you need to do is ask.
Ask my mercy. Ask my favor. Ask my love.
He was lying, it seemed, in the open, under a white dimpled horror of sky. Chains held his wrists and ankles to what felt, under his bare back, like a circle of stone, though beyond his outstretched fingers he saw thin gray grasses moving in windless alien wind.
Silk blew over his face. He turned his head back, squinted up—he could not remember what had become of his spectacles— and saw Aohila standing just behind his head. He knew that what was going to happen next would be worse than the previous illusion. He said, “You know they’d never have sent me to bargain if there’d been any question of opening the mirror again. There isn’t. It can’t be done.”
She was holding a golden cup. She dipped her fingers into it, brought them out wet. “Why then should we help you?”
She dripped the liquid from her fingers onto his body. Where it struck it was deathly cold, then at once began to itch, and slowly, to smoke and to burn.
“Because what you’re doing to me, the seaspawn can do to you, and for the same reasons. Maybe the pain of demons is tastier than the pain of men. I’ll look it up when I get back—it’s probably in Gantering Pellus, or maybe Curillius, though Curillius isn’t even accurate about how many horses you need to go on a quest across the Marches. But if they take over the southern kingdom, they’ll be able to get at your mirror, you know.”
She dipped out a handful of liquid from the cup and dribbled it down over his face. He jerked his head aside and got the splash of it down his cheek and neck, burning away the flesh, eating deeper and deeper.
“You don’t think we can take care of ourselves?”
“I think you can.” He had to fight to keep his voice steady, to keep the terror of more pain from dissolving his thoughts. “But I think there’ll be evil and horror if a demon war is fought in the lands of men. I’m bargaining not so that you can get out, but so that you’ll at least be left in peace.”
“It isn’t peace that we want, man.” She squatted behind his head and, reaching over, pulled his chin back, setting the rim of the cup to his lips. “It’s revenge on those who imprisoned us here.” She pinched his nostrils shut, forced his mouth open and poured the poison in, so that he choked, gagged, swallowed. “All we need is one servant in the realm of humankind to start with. And it need not be unpleasant.” She smiled and dipped her finger into the cup. Slowly, sensuously, she drew spells on his body, lines of fire and pain that ate into the flesh until his mind blotted with agony that never quite swallowed up his ability to feel. Then she emptied the remainder of the cup on the stone beside him, and rising, walked leisurely away across the endless gray grass.
He came to lying on her divan again. Raw inside and out, as if all that illusion had been done to him in fact. With his eyes closed he was aware of the other demons crowding around, whispering, but when he heard the dry friction of her silks and her hair beside him, and opened his eyes, it was only she. The mists were gone and the room had frescoes of deer and fishes on the walls; its windows opened into a darkness of jasmine and orange-trees.
<
br /> She asked him again, “What do you want?”
What he wanted most was a drink of water, but he stopped himself from saying so. Not having drunk the poison willingly he supposed it didn’t count, if it hadn’t in fact been illusion. He sat up and coughed, the pain of just that was excruciating, as if he were all scar tissue inside.
“I want a spell that will defend machines against the magic of the sea-wights,” he said. He rubbed his wrists, felt the raw galls of shackles, though the skin was unmarked. “We’ve built a number of ’em—machines, that is—and we need to protect ’em all.”
“Done.” From the folds of her gown she produced a vial of red-black glass, like something carved out of ancient blood.
John grinned shakily, “Surely you don’t have pockets in that frock, now, do you, love?” and was rewarded with a stab of pain, as if she’d driven a sword into his belly and twisted it.
No sense of humor, he thought, sweating, as soon as he could breathe again. It’d never work out between us.
He blinked up at her nearsightedly and almost asked for his spectacles back. She’d probably count that as one of the traditional three requests—why was it always three?—and anyway, oddly enough, he could still see Mab’s sigil shining somewhere beyond the wall. Maybe the wall didn’t really exist. “I want a spell that will free both mages and dragons from the thrall of the sea-wights and restore their own minds and wills to them again.”
The goatish eyes narrowed, under the jeweled swanks of hair. But she said, “Done.” She produced a seal cut of crystal, cold and tiny and greenish-white, and laid it beside the vial on the cushions.
A wight the size of a chicken ran up to the divan and leaping up, caught John’s wrist and drove its proboscis into the flesh. With a curse he shook it off, feeling the blood hot on his arm, but not daring to take his eyes from the Queen’s. The wight lunged at him again; the Queen caught it by the neck, casually, and bringing it to her mouth bit through its throat, her head jerking aside and back like a dog’s, to rip and kill.
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