Knight of the Demon Queen

Her eyes were gold and had squarish, horizontal pupils like a goat’s. She had a magic that she used to keep him from noticing this—magic and the fact that her peach-perfect breasts were defended by a silk drape no thicker than a breath of smoke. He was further aware that her whole appearance was a sham, a spell, a garment that she wore. Without knowing quite how he knew, he knew what she really looked like, and this turned him sick with terror.

Her name was Aohila.

She smiled with her red lips and said, “John.”

“Better stand on the rug.” With one foot he scooted it toward her, a much-mangled sheepskin that the cats hid twigs and bird feet under when they weren’t concealing them among the quilts on the bed. “Me Aunt Jane’ll be up in a minute and make you wear slippers. She don’t hold with bare feet even in summer.” He fumbled on his spectacles, feeling better for being able to see her clearly. “Sorry about the star you sent me for, and the dragon’s tears, and all that.”

He saw her face change, anger like a holocaust of summer lightning in those yellow eyes at the reminder of how he’d tricked her when he paid the tithe he owed her for the spells she’d given to save Ian and Jenny. The snakes—or whatever they were—stirred eyelessly in her hair and opened their small-toothed mouths.

“You’re a clever man, Lord John.” The seductive note vanished from her voice. She ignored the sheepskin; instead she came to stand by the bed before him, close enough that she could put her hands on either side of his face. His grip tightened on Ian’s fingers. Not, he thought, that he could do a single thing to stop her from hurting his son, but he felt better with his body between her and Ian. “I appreciate cleverness.”

“You’re one of damn few, then.” He kept his voice steady and his eyes looking up into hers. “Me dad didn’t. ‘Don’t you be clever with me,’ he’d say, and I’d get the buckle end of his belt; he’d only get wilder if I asked, ‘Do you want me to be stupid?’ But of course I did ask, so maybe I wasn’t so gie clever after all.” As with her appearance, her smell was sometimes human and seductive, and sometimes something else.

She got out from behind the mirror somehow, he thought, blind with panic. And then, No. This is a dream.

Like all those other dreams.

He couldn’t breathe.

“I can heal your son,” she said.

She spoke offhandedly, not even looking at Ian, as if she offered to use her influence with a friend to secure the pick of a skilled herd dog’s litter.

“Me Aunt Jane says he’ll live.” Demons always wanted something from you. That was what the ancient lore said, and he had found it to be so. Wanted something from you and would promise something in return.

“I can cure his heart,” she said. “Close up the wound the demon Gothpys left in him. It isn’t much. Gothpys is my prisoner—” And she smiled with evil reminiscence. “—but I know his voice still whispers in your son’s dreams.”

He took her wrists and pushed her from him. Still, he did not rise from the stool on which he sat, or dreamed that he sat, beside the bed. Fat Kitty and Skinny Kitty, who had been sleeping on the coverlet when the Demon Queen entered, peered now from the bedchamber’s darkest corner, mashed together into a single silent terrified ball.

“That makes about as much sense as tryin’ to drink yourself sober,” he said quietly. “He’ll heal when he learns how to heal from the hurt the demon laid on him. Not before.” It was hard to speak the words, for he knew that Gothpys and Amayon and all the other demons who’d possessed Folcalor’s slave mages were this creature’s prisoners now. He didn’t clearly understand the machinations within and between Hell and Hell, Demon Lord and Demon Lord, but he’d heard how the Sea-wights had screamed when they’d been taken into the Hell behind the mirror.

“Your touch will only put him in greater danger. I may be no more than a soldier and not such a very clever one at that, but I know there’s things that bring naught but grief, and makin’ bargains with demons, even in me dreams, is one of ’em. Now get out.”

Her voice was broken glass. “You owe me.”

“I paid you.”

“With gifts that melted into smoke or were only tricks of words.”

“You asked for a piece of a star, and I gave you some of what a star is truly made of: light. You asked for a dragon’s tears, and you didn’t say I shouldn’t put ’em in a bottle that would evaporate and consume them before you could use ’em to make a gate into this world for your wights to come through. You asked for a gift from one who hated me, thinkin’ I’d fail to get one and become your servant here, so you could feed on the souls of men and women like Southern gourmets feedin’ on baby ducks.”

He tried to shut from his mind the demon light he’d seen in Jenny’s eyes and the obscene evil he’d watched her do. But he knew the demon saw it in his face. “And with what I’ve seen of the way you get into the heart and the skin and the brains of those you deal with, I don’t blame those who’ve a warrant for me for traffickin’ with your lot. I’d turn meself in if it wasn’t me.”

She stepped back from him while he spoke, but still she could have put out her hand and touched him, or he her; she stood with her garments—if they were garments—lifting and floating about her as if on the breath of some hot exhalation that he himself could not feel. Her spells of lust, of wanting, stroked him, clouding his mind like a perfume.

“Well, I won’t be your lover, and I won’t be your slave. Not in the world, not in me dreams—nothing. So you might as well go home and torture the other little demons in Hell, and let me take care of my son.”

“I can bring Jenny back to you.”

It was like an incautious step on a broken foot—he didn’t think her words concerning Jenny would hurt that much. He saw Jenny’s eyes again, across Ian’s waxy face; saw the set of her shoulders, braced against whatever he should say or think. Saw himself, blind with grief and rage and anxiety, not thinking that she would feel all those things, too.

“If she didn’t come back on her own, it wouldn’t be Jenny.”

The Demon Queen said nothing. On the hearth John saw how the flames had turned low and blue, as if the very nature of the air were changed. The shadows of the chest, the table, and the heaped books and tumbled scrolls and note tablets dimmed and loomed and ran together, and he could hear his own breath, and Ian’s: a slow desperate drag as if the boy struggled with horrors in his sleep. He wondered—as he always wondered—if the Demon Queen wore her own form when he wasn’t looking at her.

“John,” she said, and he looked back at her quickly. Almost it seemed he caught her shape changing, just enough to know that she had.

“Look at your son.”

Ian’s hand burned in his. As the fire licked up brighter again, unnaturally brighter, he saw the boy’s swollen tongue protruding from lips gone purple with blood. Even as he looked, brown spots formed under the clear thin skin, as if the blood vessels were dissolving in the flesh. Blisters bulged taut and yellow around the mouth and on the neck. Ian cried out in his sleep, weeping in pain, and kicked and clawed at the blankets.

“Stop it,” John said softly. “This is only a dream, but stop it.”

“You think I’m powerless in this world, Aversin,” the Demon Queen said, “because I and my kind cannot cross through the gate without being summoned from this side. But there are little gates everywhere that open now and then, and the season of demons is on the world. My hand is long, and it is stronger than you think.”

He stood and, catching her by the arms, thrust her back from the bed. Her body was light, as Jenny’s was, but there was something about the weight of it, and its relationship to the softness of her flesh, that was wrong. He felt it as he shook her, and the things in her hair put forth their heads and hissed at him from among the darkness and the jewels.

“Get out of here.”

She only looked at him full with those terrible eyes.

“Get out of here!”

He hurled her from him, then turned and pressed his forehead to the carved bedpost until the graven leaves and flowers dug into his flesh. He could hear Ian crying, moaning as the fever consumed him, but he kept his eyes shut tight, willing himself not to see either his son or the Demon Queen. This is a dream. A dream. A dream.

He woke trembling, on his feet, holding the bedpost, weak with shock and bathed in sweat. The flames had sunk low in the hearth, but only because the log was nearly consumed. The warm amber light was normal after the glare and blackness of his dream. Ian slept, and the hand that lay outside the shadows of the bed-curtain relaxed, its skin unmarred. Skinny Kitty raised her little triangular head to regard John in sleepy inquiry; Fat Kitty dozed, a mammoth lump of ruffled gray somnolence.

John looked back at the hearth. The sheepskin rug had been moved, and lay where he’d kicked it toward the Demon Queen’s bare alabaster feet.

The next day John sent out a five-man troop of militia under the command of Ams Puggle, whose turn it was to ride patrol with him, without too much misgiving: Puggle was a stolid young man who didn’t think quickly in emergencies, but this was ordinarily a quiet time of year.

Still, this was not an ordinary year, and guilt tormented him—guilt at sending his men out while he stayed behind, and guilt at not doing more for his son.

He brought an armload of books down and sat by Ian while the boy slept, waking him twice from dreams that left him shaking with terror but about which he could not be brought to speak. After a time Ian lay quiet, smiling if required to do so and thanking him, but terrifyingly distant, as if the words were spoken through a small window by someone prisoned in an unimaginable room.

Throughout that day John combed his books for mention of demons and how he might keep his son safe.

What he found was not encouraging. According to Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World, demons could take the form of mice and rats and slip into the beds of their victims while they slept, although it was not clear how the ancient scholar knew this. Polyborus’ Jurisprudence said that demons could take on the seeming of household members and kill children or betray husbands with nobody the wiser, at least not at the time. An old ballad the Regent Gareth had played for him detailed how demons disguised themselves as candies, cakes, and tarts, so the king of an ancient land ate them and became possessed, and perversely this tune jingled in his head for the rest of the afternoon.

Peaches and prunes,

Sugarplum moons,

And mountains of glorious cheese.

Polyborus listed eight ways of killing those who had dealings with the Hellspawn, depending on whether they were still possessed, had been possessed, or had merely made bargains with wights. Demons could enter a corpse and do terrible mischief between the time life was extinct and the body destroyed, he said, so it was important that the culprit be burned or dismembered alive.

John recalled clearly the smell of the oil on the pyre they’d prepared for him, and the way Ector of Sindestray, treasurer of the Southern Council, had smiled when the old King had ordered John put to death.

Demons destroyed trust. You never knew, afterward, where you were with one who had dealings with them. You never knew to whom you were speaking.

Jenny. The ache in his heart overwhelmed him as he looked out across the moor from the tower window and saw the thin gray smudge of smoke rising above Frost Fell. Jenny.

Despite the snow, and the day’s growing cold and darkness, he thought of going there. But though Ian seemed a little better, still he felt uneasy at leaving him. Nor could he put from his mind Jenny’s desperate and dreadful silence, silence from which, apparently, she could not even reach to help her son. Nor could he forget his love. There was a time when he would have gone on harrowing himself, forcing meetings with her, trying stubbornly to cut through the wall around her, but he saw with strange clarity that there was nothing he could do.

He could only trust that wherever she had gone, she would come back.

Puggle and his men returned the following forenoon, frosted to the eyebrows and grumbling. No sign of bandits or wolves, nor of the Iceriders who raided two winters out of three from the lands beyond the mountains. They’d checked with the depleted garrison at Skep Dhû, and the commander—a corporal promoted when all the troops had been drawn off to join Rocklys of Galyon’s attempt to conquer the South—said the same. Corporal Avalloch also reported that yet another message had come from the King’s councilor Ector of Sindestray, ordering him to arrest John Aversin on charges of trafficking with demons and put him to death.

“You think Avalloch’d agree to send a message to this Ector bloke telling him that’s what he’d done?” Muffle inquired from his seat on the big table in the kitchen where the patrol had come to drink hot ale and report.

“I asked him already,” John said, breathing on his spectacles and rubbing them on a towel, for the kitchen was far warmer than any other room in the Hold. “I even pointed out as how it’d be a savin’ of money for the council, in that they wouldn’t always be sendin’ messengers. Avalloch just gave me those fishy eyes and said, ‘I could not do that, Lord Aversin.’

“Anythin’ else?” he added, turning back to Puggle.

“Only sickness,” the corporal said, “over at Werehove Farm.”

Warm as the kitchen was, John felt suddenly cold.

I can heal your son. And, My hand is long.

“Ema Werehove was near frantic when she spoke to us. She said it was nothin’ she’d ever seen nor heard of: fever, and sores on his lips—Druff it is who’s sick—and brown spots that spread if you touch them. Should we ride out to the Fell and fetch Mistress Jenny, d’you think? Your Aunt Jane was tellin’ me all’s not right with her either …”

Puggle’s words washed over him, barely heard.

“Did she say when Druff had been took sick?” John’s voice sounded odd in his own ears, as if it belonged to someone else.

“Night before last, she said. Close to dawn.”

Within hours of his dream of the Demon Queen.

“Where you goin’?” Puggle asked as his thane paused in the doorway only long enough to gather up his winter plaids and his heaviest sheepskin jacket.

“Get Bill to saddle Battlehammer.”

“You’re mad, Johnny,” Muffle protested. “It’s comin’ on to storm before midnight!”

“I’ll ride fast.”

Werehove Farm lay in a tiny pocket of arable land, under the backbone of the Wolf Hills, close by the spreading desolation of Wraithmire Marsh. Aversin shivered as he rode past the marsh, for even in the cloud-thinned sunlight it had a dreary look. No sign now of the fey lights that jigged across the brown pools and root-clotted black streamlets once the sun was down. Nothing but silence, though on five or six occasions John had heard the whisperers calling to him from the marshes at evening, in Jenny’s voice, or Ian’s—once in his father’s.

They live on pain, Gantering Pellus said in his Encyclopedia, and John knew how true this was. Pain and terror and rage, lust and guilt and shame. They drank those emotions like dark nutty Winterlands beer. Cut your wrist in the Wraithmire, and the glowing little whisperers—the stoats and foxes of the Hellspawn, compared to the tigers like the Queen—would come round to drink the blood. Weep there, and you would see them seeping out of the ground to lap your tears.

And they’d tease and twist and lure to increase those intoxicating delights. If humans were not available, they would torment cats or pigs or anything whose blood and fear would warm their coldness, feed their hunger for life.

Maybe the Demon Queen had offered to heal Ian only to sup on the surge of hope and grief and pain her words had brought.

“Cannot Mistress Jenny come?” Ema, matriarch of the Werehove clan, asked, meeting him in the stable yard wrapped in sheepskins and scarves. The light had sickened, and harsh wind yanked at John’s hair and plaids, tore at the woman’s gray braids as she led him toward the thick-walled stone house. “I’d heard she was hurt and not able to do magic as she used. But she’ve still the knowledge of herbs, and sickness, and worse things belike. This is an ill such as we’ve never seen, and it’s eating Druff up alive.”

Druff Werehove, Ema’s oldest son, lay in the loft, his bed set against the chimney. A few candles burned around him, and Winna, his wife, knelt by him bathing his face. As he climbed the loft stairs, John smelled stale blood and sickness. He stopped, looking down at the man—one of his militia, and with his brothers the core of the little farmstead—and felt sickness clutch his own breast. For he was as Puggle had described him: his face was blistered around the mouth and across the nose and forehead, and his arms and breast were spotted with brown. His swollen tongue filled his mouth so that he could barely breathe, and his thick gasping was dreadful to hear.

“He’s burnin’ up.” Winna raised frantic eyes to her mother-in-law. Her hand trembled as she sponged her husband’s face again. “Burnin’ up. And Metty from over Fell Farm, she tells me her girl’s down with this here, too. Cannot Mistress Jenny come?”

“I’ll tell her.” John’s heart shrank up to a coal inside him, a black nubbin of dread. “As soon as I return to the Hold.”

But it was night, and the storm was coming on hard when he crossed the drawbridge again. And in any case he knew whence the sickness came, and how it could be ended.

Muffle met him in the courtyard, wrapped to the eyes in plaids and leaning against the beating wind. “There’s fever in the village,” he said, “two cases of it. Blisters on the face, and brown spots. We sent for Mistress Jenny, but by that time the snow was too bad to get near the Fell.”

“Anyone here down with it?” In John’s mind he saw Ian, writhing and sobbing. Everything seemed to have gone blank within him, beyond thought or reasoning. Only, he thought, I’ll kill her if she’s harmed him. Demon or not I’ll destroy her somehow, though it cost my life.

“Not yet.” The smith led the horse back to the stable, John stumbling behind. They stripped Battlehammer of his saddle by the light of a wavering flare, then John went up the tower stairs two at a time, shedding his wet plaids and sheepskin coat as he went. There was a part of him that did not want to reach the door of his room.

But Ian lay propped in the shadows of the bed, and something altered in the blank blue gaze as John came through the door. “Papa?”

“You all right, Son?” And he cursed himself for the offhand tone in his voice—offhand, as he’d had to be about everything when he was a child Ian’s age and younger, fighting not to let his own father crush him inside.

Ian nodded and let himself be embraced. He started to speak, as if to remark on the cold that still clung to the metal plates of John’s rough leather doublet and to his snow-flecked hair, but then did not. John didn’t know whether this was something the demon had done to him—this trick of reconsideration, of backing down from any speech, as if fearing it would reveal or disarm or obligate him—or whether it was a thing of his years, or perhaps only of his self. Still Ian held onto his arm for a moment, the first reassurance he had sought, his face pressed to the grubby sleeve.

And John fought not to say, Why did you take the poison? Why didn’t you speak to me?

Uncharacteristically it was Ian who broke the silence. He coughed, his voice still barely a thread. “I heard Muffle talking about fever …”

Of course he would. He had a mage’s senses, which could pick up the murmur of voices in the kitchen three floors below.

“Should I get up and go down to the village?”

“In a while.” John sat on the edge of the bed. A protesting meep sounded beneath the quilts, and one of the humped covers moved. John wanted to say, Your mother can handle it, but he let the words go. He suspected Jenny would be helpless against this illness, and Ian also.

In any event this was the first interest Ian had shown in anything since his return to the North.

“It doesn’t sound like any of the fevers I’ve read about in Mother’s books.” Ian sank against the pillows, exhausted by the effort of sitting up, and Skinny Kitty emerged from beneath the comforters to sit on his chest. “Tonight could you bring down from the library what you have about diseases? There has to be some cause.”

“Aye,” John said softly, knowing the cause. “Aye, son. I’ll do that.”

He remained until Ian slept again. It wasn’t long. Even after the boy’s eyes slipped closed John stayed seated beside the bed, holding his hand. Watching the too-thin face in its tangled frame of black hair, the wasted fingers twined with his own. Remembering the child Jenny had borne but had not wanted to raise—the child she had left at the Hold for him when she returned to Frost Fell to meditate, to concentrate, to patiently strive at increasing her small abilities in magic to the level of true power. He saw again the demon fire in the boy’s eyes as Ian was drawn toward the dragon Centhwevir, already under the wizard Caradoc’s control.

Where had these demons been for a thousand years? he wondered, riffling Skinny Kitty’s gray fur. It had been that long since spawn from the Hell behind the burning mirror had destroyed Ernine, that long since the mages of the forgotten city of Prokeps had summoned Sea-wights to aid them in what human magic couldn’t do alone. Fighting wars among themselves and leaving humankind at the mercy of the smaller pooks and gyres, which could be cast out or guarded against with a spell?

Why a thousand years ago?

Why now?

Gently he disengaged his hand from Ian’s and peered into the boy’s face. His son slept calmly, something he had seldom done since he was a child. Skinny Kitty purred drowsily and kneaded with her paws.

I can cure your son.

John blew out the candles by the bed and by the fire’s dim glow crossed the room to seek the steps that led to his library.

Asleep before the hearth, Jenny dreamed of Amayon. Dreams of him—of his love and of the power he’d given her—were so much easier than waking now.

She dreamed of the mirror chamber in the ruins of Ernine in the South, of John standing before the blacked-over doorway of the glass with the seven spikes of crystal and quicksilver that Caradoc had used to dominate and control the dragons. With the spikes lay seven vessels—seashells, snuff bottles, hollowed-out stones—containing the Hellspawned spirits that had possessed the mages: old Bliaud, Ian, the two Icerider children Summer and Werecat, the witch girl Yseult, little Miss Enk the gnomewife … And herself.

She could have sketched from memory every bump and spike and curve of the seashell that prisoned Amayon. It was the only one that she had truly seen. The only thing that she truly thought about.

It, and Amayon’s screams when Aohila had taken those fourteen spirits behind the mirror, to torture them for eternity.

In her mind she heard again Amayon’s desperate pleading, telling her how the mirror demons hated the Sea-wights, how they could never die, could never be free of pain. She had hated John then for giving them over, and the hatred stirred anew, drawing her mind back to its old circular paths.

Drawing it aside from the fact that there should have been eight vessels there, not seven.

Folcalor, Ian had said.

And, I will not go.

In the first second of waking, Jenny thought, Folcalor wasn’t taken. Folcalor wasn’t sent behind the mirror. He was the demon who possessed Caradoc, the rebel demon who started this whole affair …

And then a voice whispered in her mind, Sleepy dreams, Jenny. Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes. It’s all over now.