Queen Of Demons Read online

  Queen Of Demons

  Lord Of The Isles

  Book II

  David Drake

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Day 2 of the Fourth Month (Heron)

  The 3rd of Heron

  The 9th of Heron

  The 9th of Heron (later)

  The 10th of Heron

  The 11th of Heron

  The 12th of Heron

  The 12th of Heron (Later)

  The 12th of Heron (Later)

  The 16th of Heron

  The 17th of Heron

  The 17th of Heron (Later)

  The 19th of Ikon

  The 20th of Heron

  The 21st of Heron

  The 22nd of Heron

  The 24th of Heron

  The 25th of Heron

  25th of Heron (later)

  The 26th of Heron

  The 27th of Heron

  The 28th of Heron

  2nd Day of the Fifth Month (Partridge)

  The 3rd of Partridge

  The 3rd of Partridge (Later)

  The 4th of Partridge

  The 4th of Partridge (Later)

  The 5th of Partridge

  The 5th of Partridge (Later)

  The 5th of Partridge (later Still)

  The 7th of Partridge

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Among the people who helped on this one were Dan Breen, who would have graced the very finest of scriptoria; Mark L. Van Name and Allyn Vogel (yes, I worked another computer to death); Sandra Miesel and John Squires, who separately provided material that made it possible for Queen of Demons to develop the way it did; and my wife, Jo, who was unfailingly supportive while under the pressure of the project I diverged further and further from what passes for my norm. I should also mention that my editor, Dave Hartwell, practiced a policy of benign neglect under circumstances where less trusting people would have worried more publicly about when they would see the book. Thank you all.

  Author's Note

  The readers who identify Celondre with Horace are correct; the translation is my own. My Aldebrand is not Macrobius but rather a less-able analogue of him. Macrobius' Saturnalia has given me many hours of pleasure and puzzlement. I was trained in history but my temperament is that of an antiquarian, a very different thing. Fiction is a better world for me than the snake pits of Academe could ever be.

  As before, the general religion of the Isles is based on that of Sumer.

  The words of power, voces mysticae, used by wizards in this volume are from binding spells of classical times. They are not part of my religion, but they were an aspect of the religious belief of millions of people who were just as intelligent as you and I are. Personally, I didn't care to pronounce the voces mysticae when I was working on the book.

  Prologue

  Valence III, crowned King of the Isles, shivered in the unseasonably warm night as the wizard Silyon scribed the words of his incantation on the transom of an age-crumbled gateway. The moon was two days past new and would be scarcely a ghost of itself when it finally rose. The only light came from the lantern whose wick gleamed through panels cut from sheets of mica so thin they were almost perfectly clear.

  Nearby the sacrifice sighed in her drugged sleep. A silken bag hid the girl's outlines from a distance, but Attaper and the other Blood Eagles of the escort must have known what the king and his wizard brought with them whenever they visited the ancient ruins.

  The Blood Eagles would be as silent as they were loyal: to the death. Even so, Valence had seen disgust in Attaper's eyes as the Blood Eagles' commander watched him and Silyon carrying their burden the last of the way alone.

  Valence snorted with anger as he remembered that look. How dare Attaper judge him? A soldier's duties were simple: to kill or to die, but never to question. A king had to wrestle with more difficult situations, where right was never very different from wrong.

  But for all that, Valence shivered again.

  Silyon finished the incantation, a circle of words in the Old Script. His body was tattooed, and he wore slivers of bone through his earlobes. He set the small tripod within the circle, then pulled on gloves embroidered with silver thread. He smiled at Valence.

  Valence suspected that the symbols picked out on the back of the gloves had no meaning beyond decoration, despite the wizard's hints that they held dark truths. “Get on with it!” he snarled. He resented the fact that this ugly little man from Dalopp could treat him as an equal on the strength of the acts they performed together.

  “As you wish, sire,” Silyon said, still smirking. He removed the mirror, a fist-sized teardrop of greenish obsidian, from its wash-leather sack and fitted it carefully onto the silver hook hanging on a swivel from the tripod. Valence couldn't imagine how a hole had been drilled through the delicate tail of the volcanic glass without shattering it to dust, but that was the least of the object's wonders.

  Silyon began to chant, touching an athame of black wood from his native Dalopo to each of the ancient words as he pronounced it: “Hayadpikir tasimir...”

  A whippoorwill had been calling at a distance. It fell silent, but another took up the rhythm closer by.

  “Wakuiem gabiyeh worsiyeh,”the wizard said, twisting his lips around syllables with no human meaning. They were intended to be heard not by men but by the powers on which the cosmos turned. These forces were neither gods nor demons. They caused the stars to make their ceaseless circles, the seasons to change on Earth, and all things seen and unseen to move.

  The Sun, the symbol of light and life, and Malkar, the symbol of dark and death, controlled all things. But how could a mere human being know which was which?

  “Archedama phochense pseusa rerta...”

  The ruined palace in which Valence and the wizard knelt was that of the Tyrants of Valles, a father, son, and grandson all named Eldradus. Through wizardry the trio had ruled the island of Ornifal for seventy years after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, then had fallen in turn to a revolt of the island's nobles. After the Tyrants, Ornifal had begun the rise from barbarism that now made the Dukes of Ornifal at least in name the Kings of the Isles.

  The first Eldradus had built his palace a few miles outside the existing port of Valles. Those who overthrew the line had returned the seat of power to the city itself, so for nine hundred years the tyrant's construction had decayed without repair. Roots forced apart the stones of walls; roofs fell in when the beams supporting them rotted.

  Nine hundred years...But the underground vault at the center of the palace complex was older by ages beyond counting.

  “Threkisithphe amracharara ephoiskere...”Silyon chanted. Shadows moved on the polished surface of volcanic glass, but it didn't reflect the legs of the tripod from which it hung.

  The Tyrants of Valles had built their palace on the site of ruins buried deep in the loam of an ancient forest. Until Eldradus had the trees cut and the soil planed flat, no one—no one but the wizard himself—knew that below were foundations of black basalt laid on a Cyclopean scale.

  At the center of the new palace the tyrants had raised a four-sided monumental arch over an ancient circular curb. The opening was the oculus, the eye, in the ceiling of a vast domed room buried underground.

  That chamber could have been a tomb or a storage room or even part of a sewer system from the dim past. It was none of those things; or perhaps, now that Valence forced himself to think about it, all of them together.

  “Thoumison kat plauton!”Silyon concluded, shouting out the final syllables. The cosmos itself tried to choke a wizard's voice when he spoke an incantation of this magnitude, thickening his tongue and rasping her throat to the texture of dry sand.


  The obsidian mirror trembled with the sound of the Beast's laughter. “Greetings, humans,” said the deep voice in Valence's skull. “Have you brought my meal?”

  The Beast laughed again. Silyon's smile froze into a rictus; the king's visage had no more expression than a roughly sawn board. Valence hated himself for what he was doing, but the queen had left him no choice.

  The green glass depths of the mirror were alive with bright mist, but thus far tonight Valence didn't see a specific image in them. Not long after the Dalopan came to the king with his mirror and his wizardry, Valence had dropped a blazing torch through the eye of the dome. The flaring light showed only stone blocks mottled by patches of lichen, exactly what one would expect in a chamber sealed for the better part of a millennium.

  But halfway to the floor fifty feet below the surface, the torch had disappeared as suddenly as if it had never been. Valence assumed that the sacrifices he and Silyon lowered through the oculus vanished the same way, but he'd never had the desire—or the courage—to watch.

  “The four whom the queen pursued have eluded her,” the Beast said with no transition. “The two humans and two Halflings who come from Haft. I will draw them to me here.”

  Valence was kneeling, because his legs trembled uncontrollably if he tried to stand while conversing with the creature whom Silyon had summoned. “What are their names?” he asked.

  “What do I care for the names of humans?” the Beast said. The king's ears heard nothing; the terrible voice thundered in his mind. “They all taste the same, whatever they call themselves!”

  The mists within the obsidian parted. A wedge-shaped head like that of a serpent lashed out. Valence flinched even though his conscious mind knew the shape was only an image reflected in stone. Sometimes he saw this reptile head within the mirror; sometimes a creature equally monstrous but mammalian, a dog or a bear or perhaps a dog-headed ape.

  And sometimes what Valence saw was a bulk whose vastness was only an impression. There was nothing in the mirror's vision to provide scale.

  The Beast gave its grating laugh; the snake's head blurred back into the mist. Valence's fear had amused the thing.

  “They are Garric or-Reise and Sharina os-Reise,” the Beast said. Humor still tinged the soundless voice. “The male is descended from King Lorcan, who hid the Throne of Malkar, which the queen thinks will bring her power over the cosmos. The Halflings are Cashel or-Kenset and Ilna os-Kenset. Their father was human and their mother a sprite. I will bring the ones I need here, and they will release me.”

  “I'll direct that they be arrested as soon as they—” Valence said. He paused. “As soon as possible.”

  He would have continued, “—come within my domains,” but what did Valence III rule nowadays?

  Certainly not the Isles as a whole; no one had truly been King of the Isles since the fall of the Old Kingdom a thousand years before. Twenty years in the past, when Valence took the throne on the death of his uncle, he could at least claim to rule Ornifal. Now, with the minions of the queen using wizardry to replace his officials in one post after another, Valence's will was obeyed without question only within the walls of his palace. He might not long be safe even there.

  The queen left him no choice. For his own sake and that of the kingdom, he had to ally himself with the Beast.

  “As you please,” said the voice, echoing as if the Beast stood in the domed chamber below. “The male has a better right to the throne than you do. But all you must do is to feed me; I will do the rest.”

  Across the hanging mirror from Valence, the wizard's face spasmed in an involuntary grimace. Did he too regret the cost of this alliance...?

  A rope was fixed to a harness around the sacrifice. The two men lowered the girl hand over hand, feeling the unseen body swing gently below them. The coil of rope was only half used when the weight came off it; the sacrifice had reached the floor of the chamber.

  The men looked at each other. Valence nodded and stepped back. Silyon dropped the rest of the coil through the oculus and quickly packed his apparatus.

  They walked as quickly as possible to where the guards waited with the horses. The lantern swinging in the king's hand threw distorted shadows across the ruins; the forest had long since recovered the site the Tyrants had cleared.

  The Blood Eagles straightened to attention. The men's faces were as cold and still as the metal of their spotless black armor.

  “Your Majesty,” Attaper said, swinging the head of the king's horse around so that the beast was ready to mount.

  A terrible scream reverberated from the ruins behind them. None of the men moved or spoke for the long seconds that it echoed in the night.

  When the girl's cry had echoed to a halt, the commander of the Blood Eagles turned his head deliberately to the side and spat. Then he faced his king again.

  There was no expression at all on Attaper's face.

  Day 2 of the Fourth Month (Heron)

  Garric or-Reise leaned on the rail of a balcony that existed only in his fancy, watching his physical body practice swordsmanship in the garden below. He wasn't asleep, but his conscious mind had become detached from the body's motions. In this reverie he met and spoke with the ghost of his ancestor who had died a thousand years before.

  Garric gestured toward where his physical self hacked at a post with his lead-weighted sword. “It's as boring as plowing a field,” he said. “And there, at least you have a furrow to show for it.”

  “You've got the build to be a swordsman, lad,”said King Carus from the railing beside Garric. He grinned engagingly. “At least they always told me I did, and my worst enemies never denied my skill with a sword. But to be really good, you have to go through the exercises till every movement is a reflex.”

  He pretended to study the clouds, picture perfect in a blue sky. “Of course,” he went on, “you can always save yourself the effort and let me take over running your body when there's need for that sort of work.”

  Roses climbed a supporting pillar and flooded their red blooms across the balcony's solid-seeming stone. When Garric was in this state he had the feeling that nothing existed beyond the corners of his vision: if he turned his head very quickly, he might see formless mist instead of the walls of the building from which the balcony jutted.

  Garric grinned at the king, pretending that he hadn't heard beneath the banter a wistful note in the voice of the man who hadn't had a physical form for a thousand years. “My father didn't raise me to shirk duties in order to save myself effort,” Garric said. “And I don't care to be beholden to another man for work that I ought to be able to do myself.”

  Carus laughed with the full-throated enthusiasm of a man to whom the strong emotions came easily, joy and love and a fiercely hot anger that slashed through any obstruction. “You could have had a worse father than Reise,” he said. “And I'm not sure that you could have had a better one.”

  He turned his attention to the figure below, Garric's body swinging the blunt practice sword. The men who guarded the compound of Master Latias, the rich merchant who was sheltering Garric and his friends here in Erdin, watched the exercises with approval and professional interest.

  “You lead with your right leg,”Carus said, gesturing. “One day a smart opponent will notice that your foot moves an eyeblink before your sword arm does. Then you'll find his point waiting for your chest just that much before your own blade gets home.”

  “I'm tired,” Garric said. “My body's tired, I mean.” Carus smiled with a glint of steel in his gray eyes.

  “You think you're tired, lad,”he said softly. “When you've been through the real thing, you'll know what tired is.”

  “Sorry,” Garric muttered. Even as the words came out of his mouth he'd been embarrassed. He'd reacted defensively instead of listening to what he was being told. He grinned. “A scythe uses a lot of the same muscles, but I never had the wheat swing back at me. I'll practice till I've got it right.”

  The king's
expression softened into bright laughter again. “Aye, you will,” he said. “Already the strength you put into your strokes makes you good enough for most work.”

  The two men on the dream balcony were so similar that were they visible no one could have doubted their relationship. Carus had been a man of forty when wizardry swallowed down his ship. He was broad-shouldered, long-limbed, and moved with a grace that gulls might envy as they slid across the winds.

  Garric would be eighteen in a month's time. He had his height and strength, but compared to the full adult growth of the king beside him he looked lanky. Both were tanned and as fit as an active life could make a man. Garric was barefoot with the wool tunic and trousers of a Haft peasant. Carus wore a blue velvet doublet and suede breeches, with high boots of leather dyed a bright red.

  On the king's head was a circlet of gold, the diadem of the Kings of the Isles. It had sunk with him a thousand years before.

  “There's more to being King of the Isles than just being able to use a sword,”Carus said. His elbows were on the railing; he rested his chin for a moment on his tented fingers, an oddly contemplative pose for a man who was usually in motion.

  He turned and looked at Garric. “Part of the reason I failed and let the kingdom go smash,” he said, “was that my sword was always the first answer I picked to solve a problem. But you'll need a sword too, lad, when you're king.”

  “I'm not a king!” Garric said, grimacing in embarrassment. “I'm just a...”

  What was he really? A youth from Haft, a backwater since the Old Kingdom fell. A peasant who'd been taught to read and appreciate the ancient poets by his father, Reise, an educated man who had once served in the royal palace in Valles and later had been secretary to the Countess of Haft in Carcosa.

  A peasant who'd faced and killed a wizard who'd come close to assembling all the power of evil. A youth who had in his head the ghost of his ancestor, the last and greatest king the Isles had ever known.

  “Well, I'm not a king,” Garric finished lamely.