Dragonstar

12

“You won’t recognize me.” The voice at the end of the lane was so soft, Jenny could tell, glancing sidelong at Gareth, that he heard nothing but a murmur. But to her ears, the accent of the South was strong.

“I do, though,” said John’s voice, and Jenny heard the metallic hiss of his sword being sheathed. “You’ll be Brâk, won’t you? You didn’t ever walk all the way from the mountains of Tralchet here by yourself?”

There was the whisper of a deep bass laugh. “We cannot all ride flying machines, lord.”

Brâk, thought Jenny. Chief of the escaped slaves in the Tralchet mines, to whom John had given poppy powder from Jenny’s medicine bag to knock out the guards at the outer gates. Later John had left maps of the territory between the Tralchet mines and the northernmost of the King’s small Winterlands garrisons, so that the southerner could lead the escaped slaves to safety.

They had never seen one another’s faces, but knew one another’s voices, from the speech they had exchanged in the dark.

John stepped briefly from the shadow to snap his fingers twice, signaling Gareth and Jenny to come. Behind them, Jenny heard boots in the mud and turned to see the other watcher emerge into the lane as well. His drab clothing caught in the wind to reveal a flash of exquisite lace at sleeves and throat. Even as he came near she recognized Bliaud’s younger son, Abellus, no demon glint in his somewhat mild brown eyes but a grimness to his mouth that hadn’t been there when he and his older brother, Tundal, had parted company from their father at the fortress of Caer Corflyn in the summer.

“My family is a powerful one among the merchant guilds of the South,” Brâk was saying as Jenny, Gareth, and Abellus came close. In the shadowy slot between the buildings the dark lines of his facial tattoos formed a mask through which his eyes glinted like a beast’s in darkness. “I was all the summer making my way south to them again. Then this winter I heard rumor concerning you, Lord Aversin, and concerning the gnomes buying or stealing human slaves, even from the Far South where they no longer dwell. I came to Bel with my uncle’s next shipment of coffee and silk, and since I have been here I have seen evil things.”

“What, evil things comin’ in an’ out of the kitchen gate of the palace?” John gestured down the Cooksway, to where the gate of the wood-court could be just seen, in a sort of turret in the palace wall. “Don’t tell me their cook is possessed as well.”

Brâk chuckled again, the unvoiced breath of one who has lived for years in fear of making a sound. Jenny guessed he was in his forties, with the first brush of frost on the long black braids, and beneath the line of the tattoos, a mouth both sensual and firm. He was well dressed against the cold, in quilted wool, and his boots were unobtrusively expensive.

“This is me lady Jenny Waynest,” John said, taking her hand and presenting her to the merchant, who salaamed deeply and made a motion as if to lift and kiss the hem of a nonexistent skirt. “And this’s me lord Gareth, Prince of Bel, who was Regent for the old King.”

“My lord.” The merchant bowed again, though not so deeply, and pressed his fist to his brow. “We heard you had gone to the mage Bliaud’s house—”

“Who’s ‘we’?” asked John, and Gareth said, “What’s happening? They’re trying the Master of Halnath this morning.…”

“It is why we’re here.” Brâk glanced up the lane as Abellus salaamed first to Jenny, then, deeply, to the Prince.

“Everyone’s always complaining how servants gossip,” said the wizard’s son. “Well, they might be servants, but they ain’t stupid—fact is, my valet’s a dashed sight more brainy than I am, not that that’s praising him to the stars.… Never was one of the clever sorts, you know.” He tapped his temple and shook his head. Like Gareth, he dyed his curled love-locks—the two that escaped his velvet hood were a lively green. “The aunts always said I was the fool of the family—well, me and Papa, anyway. But nobody ever said you had to be able to run up double-column accounts to see when someone you know isn’t someone you know anymore. ’Specially now. Papa”—he paused—“where was I? Oh, the servants.”

“There are those—in the palace and out,” said Brâk, “who, if you will forgive my saying so, my lord prince, never trusted this ‘recovery’ of your father’s. Or that of your poor lady wife. And the things that have been rumored about her, and about what servants have witnessed in the palace and especially in this private quarter she has lately had set aside for her, sound too much like other rumors concerning those who, like her, suffered death from the plague, and later … came back.” His dark eyes met Gareth’s. “She died,” he asked softly, “did she not?”

Gareth looked aside. Then, after a moment’s silence, he drew a deep breath and returned the merchant’s compassionate gaze. “Yes. I … did a foolish thing. I should have known better.”

Brâk held up his hand, and shook his head. “There are many in the city,” he said, “who could not accept, and who made the choice you made. Who among us who loves would not do the same? Many in the city have come to the conclusion that you did since then. And many still fight that conclusion with all that is in them, not wanting to understand what they know in their hearts to be true.”

“That my wife is a demon?”

“That all those who return are demons. I don’t know how many I’ve spoken to in the streets who say, ‘It may be true that some are, but my beloved is one of the true resurrections.…’ And there have been no true resurrections. Only more careful demons.”

He glanced across the lane at the gate to the wood-court. It opened a crack, and a white cloth waved twice, as if a servant shook out a rag. Then it closed, but Jenny could see that it did not close all the way.

“So.” Brâk touched the short-sword he wore beneath his quilted cloak. “Where can we find you, my lord, after we come out—if we come out?”

“You can find me in my father’s hall,” Gareth said quietly, and fell into step with Brâk as he moved down the lane toward the little door. “Or my father’s prison.”

“She said her illness had made her think about how she had used her life, and what she owed to the gods,” recounted Gareth as Brâk closed the postern behind them. They were a goodly company by that time, for while Brâk spoke nearly a dozen men and women had melted like ghosts from the surrounding lanes, grim-faced and quiet and armed with the weapons of their trades, butcher knives and hammers and knots of lead. There were hasty introductions, clumsy salaams among the wood-piles, the whispered names of husbands or children or wives vanished or killed. Gareth’s hands were kissed and John’s shoulders slapped encouragingly.

“We were in the market square, lord, a fortnight ago, but there were too many guards for us to rush the stake.…”

“Just as well, as it turned out,” said John. “Though I didn’t think so at the time.” Inside the court another dozen servants waited, and nearly a score of the Palace Guard, led by the dark-browed Captain Tourneval who’d arrested John on his return to Bel, and whom later Gareth had spoken of as a loyal man. He bowed to John—Jenny saw no trace of the demon in his eyes.

Only a man doing as he was ordered, she thought, and loyal to his King.

Gareth led the way, up an enclosed stair and then right, through a pillared gallery beneath a hall and thence into a cloistered garden, snow glimmering wanly among uneven mats of neglected hedge and mounds of overgrown vine. “She asked for the whole of the old Queen’s tower, the keys to all its doors and rooms, because it was closed off from the storerooms. Even the servants never come.” There was a gateway of wrought-iron openwork, locked, leading into a second, smaller garden. One of the town conspirators was a blacksmith who’d brought tools.

“She didn’t know much about the ways of servants, then,” Brâk remarked dryly as the blacksmith forced open the gate. “Nor did the demon who took her know a great deal of how humans will take advantage of any place where they can meet their lovers, or hide stolen tablecloths, or take a few minutes to rest between scouring pans and carrying wood.” A couple of the red-liveried servants traded glances and embarrassed grins.

“I’m sorry no one came to you before this, m’lord,” added a man in the rough garb of a stable-hand, speaking to Gareth. “Seems like everybody whispered about the sounds we’d hear, coming from the old Queen’s chapel, but nobody’d talk about it out loud. Nobody’d admit of being there, for fear she’d hear—”

“She showed you a gentle face, lord,” Tourneval said, striding beside Gareth, his sword drawn.

“She was gentle,” Gareth said softly. His voice cracked a little, then steadied. “Gentle and loving and kind. And kindness … isn’t something that can be counterfeited. Not even when the one you’re deceiving desperately wants to see it.”

“We only feared that in your indignation, you’d speak of it to her. Or to one who might get word back to her.”

They crossed the second garden, still more overgrown. The day’s intermittent flurries of sleet had blurred away any tracks from the unkempt mounds and hummocks of snow in its center, but where the surrounding colonnade sheltered a long crescent of old snow Jenny saw a woman’s tracks, small feet in the tall-soled shoes fashionable at Court, and mingled with them the heavier tracks of a man. Man and woman had come and gone this way many times since the snow first fell, tracks over one another, and always those same two. In one place the snow was rucked up and stained brownish with old blood, as if someone had knelt there and used it to wash her hands.

Gareth halted, looking down at the scraped muck. From the door opposite, decorated with exquisite carvings of the Twelve Gods, came the foetor of old blood, the lingering pungence of charred meat. Jenny, standing among the group of servants and guards, met John’s eyes. All her own horrendous memories passed in a nightmare stream through her mind. She tried the door, and it was locked. John would have drawn Gareth away, but the young man said, “No. I need to see.” The blacksmith—his name was Dor—came forward again with his tools.

The Chapel of the Twelve was dark, and not very large. Pendant vaulting, delicate as lace, lost itself in blackness overhead. Only the extreme cold kept the air even remotely breathable. In summer, the place would have been a hell of flies. Jenny looked at the chains, and the bloodstains, and the things all laid out on what had been the altar-table of the Twelve, implements uncleaned after their last use and ready for their next. There were a few crystals left, flawed topazes, and a number of low-grade opals in a dish. Jenny’s own eyes were mageborn, and she hoped the dense shadows hid at least some of this from Gareth, but looking up into his face she couldn’t tell, in the sickened light, what he felt or thought. There was a smell, too, of turned earth, coming from a small door half-hidden behind the altar: turned earth and rot. Behind her, one of the guards flinched aside, gagging.

Before she could stop him, Gareth walked past her into the desecrated chamber, and Jenny hurried at his heels. “You don’t need to see that.”

“I need to see all,” he said, his voice quite calm. “I’ll need to charge her with it.” But she sensed that what he sought was enough anger to turn him against one who looked so much like Trey.

From that half-open door by the altar a stair no wider than a man’s shoulders led down to what had been a crypt. Tourneval and Brâk had lanterns. The grubby light showed a floor dug up, tiles thrown carelessly in heaps along the walls, with no attempt at tidiness or thought to replace them. Mixed with the tiles were clots of dirt, smelling of mold and worms and worse things. Whatever was buried there hadn’t been buried deep. From the wet black earth hands stuck out, and here and there parts of skulls. One of them still trailed long black goreclotted hair.

Behind her on the stair Jenny heard the shocked whispers as guards and servants passed word back of what they saw, or struggled to come forward to see, or back to seek the outer air.

“So this is how they make the crystals you spoke of?” Gareth asked her, still in that voice of unnatural calm. “With magic raised from deaths like these?”

“I think so, yes,” said Jenny. “But were there no need for them to raise such power, I think they would still kill thus, for sport.”

When they came up the crypt steps and out of the chapel into the raw cold of the garden, Gareth said to Brâk, “Of the others in the city, the other women who were resurrected by demons, were any with child? Have any given birth, since their resurrection?”

And Brâk shook his head. “None that I’ve heard of, Prince.” He looked around him, at the servants, and the rabble of artisans and laborers and merchants whose beloveds had died and returned. But they all shook their heads, men and women both.

The young dandy Abellus said, “M’father went to see women who were with child, I know that, but none so far advanced as … as your lady was.”

Gareth pushed up his spectacles and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. “Come, then,” he said. “I’ve seen what I needed to see. They’ll have Polycarp in the council chamber. We can charge them with this there.”

When they reached the King’s council chamber, however, they found the room empty, and not even pages in the antechamber to tell them what was happening. “That doesn’t look good,” John remarked, ambling into the vaulted and tapestried round room with his air of deceptive laziness, his hands tucked into his belt. “When the servants are keepin’ their distance you know there’s trouble. They expected to try him here this mornin’, though—” and he nodded at the logs and kindling laid ready in the clean-swept fireplace, the long-legged silver braziers standing behind the chairs and the cloths laid over the tables. “Which means Goffyer reached ’em with word—”

“Guards,” Jenny interrupted, hearing the swift tramp of boots in the stair behind them. John and Brâk and Tourneval’s guardsmen all drew their swords, but Gareth held up his hand and stepped into the council room’s antechamber as a small squad came in from the corridor, some clothed in the crimson tunics of the royal house, others in Sindestray blue. The captain was the big fair freckled man who’d taken Polycarp yesterday, a demon glitter in his eye.

“Captain Leodograce.” Gareth stepped forward even as the man began to speak, cutting off whatever it was he would have said. “Where is my father, and where have they taken the council meeting concerning my cousin Polycarp?”

“Polycarp, m’lord?” The captain shook his head. “I’ve heard nothing of the Master of Halnath—this is the first I’ve heard he’s still in the city. And your father is hunting today. But before he left he heard rumors—lies, I’m sure—about some that say you’ve had traffic with demons, and with those that caused the plague. For that reason you’re to come with us, to wait on his pleasure—”

“You’ve a gie short memory,” remarked John, emerging from the crowd at Gareth’s side. “Seein’ as how it was you who took Polycarp yesterday, an’ killed two of his men. Their blood’s still on the snow of the wood-court.”

Leodograce’s lip went up to show his teeth like a dog’s. “You believe this man …?” He turned to his squad. “Take them.” His gesture took in servants, artisans, guards. “Bring the Prince. Kill the rest.”

John strode toward the red-cloaked captain, raising his sword, and Jenny saw the captain and one other guardsman flinch back as if they’d been burned. Leodograce cried, “You! Take him, men!” and backed away fast as his soldiers came forward, and Gareth said, “Touch me on pain of treason.”

The soldiers hesitated, looking at one another and at Tourneval, all except for the one other demon soldier, who had retreated to the back of the group. Gareth, tall and stooped and surprisingly kingly despite the rumpled clothing and broken spectacles, looked at one of the crimson guardsmen and said, “Where is my father?”

The man hesitated, then said, “He’s gone to the prison tower, lord.”

“Dog!” Leodograce whipped his sword from its sheath and lunged at Gareth. But when confronted with actual fear of death, the demon had no courage, and would not step near. When John lunged at him, only brandishing his sword, the captain broke and fled from the room, the other demon soldier at his heels. There was clamor in the hallway, the crash of a man being thrown against the wall, and footfalls retreating; the men of the squad stared at the door in astonishment and considerable confusion.

“Who among you is for the Prince?” demanded Tourneval of Leodograce’s confused squadron.

One of the blue-clothed Sindestray guards ventured, “Those who traffic with demons—”

“… lie about those who do not,” Tourneval replied, and stepped aside to let Gareth stride ahead of them out of the anteroom and down the hall.

So it was at the head of a good fifty armed men and women—some of whom didn’t look any too sure about whether they wanted to be allies or jailers—that Gareth entered the prison tower. The original guards, both Tourneval’s squadron and Leodograce’s, had been joined by others still as they passed swiftly down the great staircase of the new palace and along the galleries leading to the prison tower in the old. More servants joined the company, too, some bearing kitchen knives and others clubs or rakes. Even the fat, elderly Badegamus appeared, toddling anxiously at Gareth’s side and saying, “Please don’t hurt him, Prince. I mean, please make very, very sure of what you’re doing.…”

But Jenny noticed that he carried his beribboned staff of office like a war-hammer rather than a cane.

The gate that led from the gardens of the new palace into the great central courtyard of the old was barred. An ancient portcullis, amber with rust, had been let down in what had been the original stronghold’s main gatehouse: “Oh, for pity’s sake,” snapped Tourneval. “Do they think we can’t get through the Long Gallery upstairs? Everybody—”

“Don’t do that, guv’nor,” said a groom. “That’s the way everybody goes. They’ll be up there with bows in the minstrel gallery, sure as check. But the wine cellars connect up, too, and the backstairs passages. You will go easy on my lord, won’t you?” he added, to Gareth. “I mean, he may just not be in his right mind.…”

Jenny scouted ahead listening, when the servants led them down through the wine vaults, but evidently the demons had had little use for servants, and had possessed none who could have told them of this way through. “Leave ’em guarding the Long Gallery, if that’s what they want to do,” remarked John as they all edged between the massive kegs of Somanthus vintage and southern sherry wine. And Jenny held up her hand for silence, listening.

Far ahead, echoing in the stone vaults of the prison tower, she heard a confusion of voices cursing, and the splintery crunch of axes on wood. Someone shouted, “Bring him out!” and another, “Got him, my lord!” “Are you satisfied, my little traitor?” asked the King’s voice, more softly. “Barricading oneself into one’s cell isn’t exactly the act of an innocent man.”

Jenny said, “Hurry,” and began to run, up the stair from the cellar into a deserted watchroom that had been the old kitchen, John and Gareth like hounds upon her heels.

“That way.” Gareth pointed down a stair, and ahead of her Jenny saw in the torchlit corridor at its base the blue-clothed soldiers of Ector of Sindestray’s private guard crowded together, a wall of azure backs.

“It’s the act of a man who knows he’ll get no justice from demons,” retorted Polycarp’s voice, and there was the meaty thwack of a blow, and the jangle of chains.

“Bring him to the watchroom.” Trey’s voice was cold as silver, and at the same moment that Gareth checked his stride, face gray with shock and grief, Jenny felt the piercing knife of recognition.

John had told her already that it was Amayon who had taken over Trey’s body.

Her own words came back to her: I can’t be absolutely positive I’d turn Amayon away.…

Words spoken so casually, in the certainty that she would, in fact, not react to the sound of his voice.

She was aware of John watching her, not warily, but with compassion in his eyes. “You want to wait back in the wine cellar?” he asked, under cover of curses and blows farther along the corridor. “Some of the lads’ll stay with you.…”

Jenny shook her head.

“It could be dangerous,” he said. “Now your magic’s comin’ back, an’ all.”

“No,” she replied. “I’m in no danger from that.” At the same time, unexpected and unbidden and against her own will and better sense, she felt screaming anger at Amayon, as if he’d betrayed her by taking on another woman’s body—Mine wasn’t good enough, with my magic gone? Or is it just because I’m old.…

What on EARTH are you thinking? her saner mind demanded instants later. But the anger remained, bitter as gall.

And under it, disgusting her, still lay that unbidden yearning for the demon who had whispered to her how she was the only human he had ever truly loved.

The others meanwhile surged past them, streaming along the cramped corridor. Jenny shook her head, appalled at her own thoughts, and, shifting her grip on her halberd, hurried on their heels. John strode at her side, sword in hand. “You leave if you need to,” he said. “And only you know if and how that’ll be.”

“I’ll be all right.” But she didn’t know if she would be. The thoughts demons put in human minds are not rational thoughts, and she knew their strength.

Shouting ahead of them, and the clash of chains as Polycarp was thrown against the wall or to the floor: “I think the actions of your coconspirators this morning have abrogated your right to a hearing,” said the King. Through the watchroom doorway as she reached it, Jenny glimpsed his golden hair in the light of the two torches, above a crowd of backs. “The murder of Lord Bliaud—”

Then shouting, as the first of Gareth’s insurgents bulled into the watchroom before her.

Steel clanged; the stink of blood lashed hot into the damp, cold air. Trey screamed, a theatrical shriek of feigned terror, and Ector’s rather high voice yapped, “How DARE you draw steel against your King?” John released Jenny’s arm and surged forward into the maelstrom as the guards and servants clashed and locked in struggle.

“Kill him!” the King shouted to the men who held Polycarp against the far wall. The Master of Halnath tripped one of them and smote the other with the hank of chain that joined his wrists, flattened back against the wall and scooped up a wooden bench to shield himself. By the bruises on his temples and mouth and hands, Jenny could see that in the day of his imprisonment he had been subjected already to what was euphemistically referred to as “the Question.” One of the palace cooks stepped in with an iron skillet and smote the guard who would have stabbed Polycarp through the cracks in the bench; then the melee closed around them again.

Jenny slashed with her halberd, trying to stop Lord Ector from fleeing, but one of his guards struck at her and the councilor slipped by, shouting for more guards. The torchlit watchroom was a cul-de-sac. If Ector was clean of possession, at least some of the men he would fetch would not be. Tourneval shouted, led four or five guards and servants back into the passageway to intercept the attack that would come. The King had scooped up a fallen guard’s halberd and was striking out all around him, crying, “Traitors! Traitors!” while Trey, at his side, wailed, “Oh, dear gods, save me! My husband has gone mad!”

Guards ranged before them; at Gareth’s shout, his insurgent force fell back.

“Those of you who think I’ve gone mad,” the Prince panted, “go out to the old Queen’s garden in the East Tower. Look in the chapel there—the door’s unlocked. Ask anyone, who it was who had me give her the key to that wing of the palace. Ask who has gone to ‘meditate’ in that place every night since her so-called resurrection.…”

And Trey stared at him, with terrified wild doe eyes. “Oh, my lord,” she whispered, her little white hand stealing to her lips. “Oh, my lord, how can you? I begged you—how many times I begged you!—not to do those things in that place.” She pressed her hands on the swelling of her belly, beneath her gown of yellow velvet and sable fur. “That you would choose my own rooms, my own chapel, for your terrible rites.…”

The guards around the King looked at one another, uncertain in the flaring orange glare.

“Yes, go,” snapped the King to them, with a bark of laughter. “Go all the way to the other end of the palace, like he says—I’ll be fine here with his armed troops and his demon-possessed friends till you get back.” He turned a scornful seablue eye on his son, and added, “Why don’t you tell them their boots are untied and be done with it, boy? You can’t even lay a ruse properly.” Even in his illness, after the witch Zyerne had drained away his mind and his personality, he had been a kingly figure, as tall as his son and broader, stronger, far more handsome, with hair still thick and golden as Gareth’s had prematurely faded and thinned. How easy, thought Jenny as she glanced from father to son, for men to trust that strong bluff competence above a gawky, stoop-shouldered young man who would throw up for hours after a battle.

And Polycarp, lowering the bench that shielded him, said reasonably, “Send one man, then, one whom you all trust. Send Lord Ector. And bid him look whose footprints he sees on the snow in the garden.”

Trey struck like a cat—Amayon struck like a cat—whipping a dagger from her belt and lunging at the Master. He caught her wrist, but Jenny could see he would not strike a pregnant woman as he would strike a man, even a woman whom he knew to be a demon: It was not in him. She saw in his face, too, the love he had borne for Trey.

Trey slashed Polycarp’s hand open and bolted for the doorway, but John stepped in front of her, sword held ready, and she stopped, staring, dark eyes huge.

And in that frozen second Jenny sprang forward and caught her arm and twisted it behind her.

Trey screamed, fought, breaking the arm—she didn’t care and pain was nothing to a demon—but years in the Winterlands, cutting her own wood and carrying water daily to her own kitchen, had given Jenny a grip like a blacksmith’s. Trey was taller and younger, and with the strength that the possessed have, and had she fought as a demon she would have overpowered Jenny easily. But instead she appealed to the men, screaming, “Oh, my lords, she will kill me!”

And Gareth looked straight at John and said, “Do it.”

John met Trey’s eye and smiled, and then lunged in with his sword.

Trey’s eyes rolled back in her head and her mouth opened, and instead of a scream, there issued from it the silvery gleaming whipsnake of the demon. It rolled down Trey’s breast like spilling vomit and whipped across the floor, the shocked men leaping aside lest it touch them. Before John could turn to cut at it a second demon poured itself out of Trey’s mouth, fell to the floor with a wet little slap, and bolted like a fleeing roach to the door, and Trey’s body collapsed, limp, unbloodied—untouched by the blade—dead in Jenny’s arms.

John was already turning toward the door after the two demons, the men around him—the King’s and Gareth’s—dumb with shock and confusion. Jenny saw Gareth lurch away, hand over his mouth and eyes shut, as she lowered Trey’s body to the flagstoned floor. Even as she did so four men burst into the room, Ector’s guards in blue, and Ector shouted from the passageway outside, “Don’t let him speak! Don’t let any of them speak!” and John sprang back, barely parrying a halberd and taking a cut from another across his shoulder.

Gareth cried, “No!” and his voice was drowned out. The King bellowed, “They have murdered the Lady Trey! The Prince is mad!” and catching up his own halberd, lunged from his guards straight at John. John parried, driven back by the longer weapon and the King’s greater height and unexhausted strength. The King continued to shout, “Murderers! Hellspawn!” and someone in the corridor screamed.

And screamed again.

Ector of Sindestray fell into the watchroom, collapsed on his knees, eyes jammed open with purest terror. There was a stench, a horror of grave-stink and corpse-stink and the reek of blood-soaked earth, and then the Thing burst into the watchroom, a reeling monstrosity of bones and worms and graveyard mold, animate with malice that burned from the holes in the black-tressed skull that was its head.

John fell back, turned to meet it, and the King cut at his back with the halberd, the blade opening a glancing gash across his scalp where the back of his neck had been a moment before. The graveyard thing—the corpse-wight, the horror, whatever it was—smashed John aside with a force that hurled him into the stone wall like a rag doll, and fell upon the King, razoring him open, flinging him down in a fountain of gore before a man in the room could move.

John sprang at it, stumbling as he got to his feet—he had walked all through the night that Jenny knew of and fought once already at Bliaud’s, and goodness knew what else before they’d met in the inn-yard—and Jenny caught up her halberd and leaped at the corpse-wight from the other side. Men were shouting around her; she struck fast, and the monster swatted at her with the arms of the corpses dragged up out of Trey’s burial vault. The heads of corpses embedded in the monster’s body shrieked lungless, throatless strangled gasps at her, and in the long black hair of its topmost head, the red worms stood up and hissed. The halberd blade bit into the dead flesh and the dead hands seized the shaft, wrenched and twisted it from Jenny’s grip, and spun to strike John with the handle across the body.

He caught the handle, wrenched it down and aside, parried the knives the thing had in its hands, the knives that had been on the chapel table—torture-knives, skinning-knives. He lunged in again among the blades, the thing caught him by arms and throat and shoulders. John wrenched at its grip, trying to bring up the demon-killer blade in time, and there was a blazing flash of light, a billow of unspeakable stench, and a scream such as no one in that room had ever heard. Every torch in the watchroom dimmed and belched smoke, and Jenny saw something like a dark cloud, or a winged limber shade flopping in the light.…

Then her eyes cleared and the torchlight returned, and she saw the monster collapsed in a heap on the ground, the size of a small horse, dead and spewing filth and fluids onto the flagstones of the watchroom floor. John was on his knees between it and the dead King’s sprawled body, slime and blood dripping from his clothing and hair.

It was Ector of Sindestray who first moved. He stumbled to John’s side, gray brows and gray beard standing out almost black against a face pale with shock. He held out his hand. “My lord,” he whispered. “Oh, my lord …”

John raised his head and brought up his free hand to wipe some of the goo off his spectacle lenses. “I am definitely,” he said, “gettin’ too bloody old for this kind of thing.”