Dragonstar

11

The chamber had been a bedroom once. There was still an old bedstead there, a canopy-ring depending from the faded red-and-blue stampwork of the ceiling. Gareth lay on the bare ropes, his hands and feet manacled to the wooden bedframe. Jenny heard his breathing change as they came into the room, and the thin, desperate sound that came from his throat. He twisted his head around, as if he could see them through the blindfold that covered his eyes. He was gagged, too, but he struggled to pull away from them as he heard their footsteps approach. Jenny knelt beside him, pushed the blindfold up as John bent to examine the chains.

“Bugger it, we’ll have to cut your hands and feet off, lad.”

Gareth gasped, “Do it if you have to,” though he’d heard the jest in John’s voice. His shortsighted gray eyes were wide with terror and shock. “Millença—”

“Is safe.” John was already looking around the room for something to pry the chain links with. “How’s your lockfoxin’, love?”

Jenny ran her fingers over the wristlets. “I can try. These aren’t spell-warded.”

“Gie sloppy of somebody.”

“John, there’s a lot I can’t …” She raised her head sharply at the far-off closing of a door. Voices …

“… Sindestray will preside. But I’ll give a lot to be there when our boy here confirms the sentence.”

Jenny’s eyes cut to John, saw his face blank, uncomprehending. Demon voices, speaking demon speech. Gareth gasped, “Don’t leave me!” frantic as John caught Jenny’s wrist and pulled her to her feet. The feet were near, and the guttural foulness of a demon’s gloating laugh nearer still. John dragged Jenny behind the great cascade of rotting silk that dangled from the canopy ring to the floor behind the bed, instants before the door opened and the wizard Bliaud entered, followed by a hard-faced, pink-haired gnome.

Jenny recognized the gnome at once, though she had never seen him before. In a way even the seamed face was familiar. A vision, she thought, a dream she had had while in her dragon form. She remembered the twist of his heavy lips, the thick-jeweled rings that studded his fingers. Fingers she’d seen turning over and over the blue jewel in her dream, the jewel in which Ian’s soul had been imprisoned.

Folcalor. She knew it. As she had known John, with his dyed hair and scruffy beard in the inn-yard. There was no chance of mistake.

“Well, it’s a clever boy, is it?” Bliaud had dropped all the fussy mannerisms he’d imitated to fool those who’d known him as a diffident little gentleman whose only use for magic was to keep his gray hair from thinning, and to chase the aphids from his roses. There was no one present but Folcalor to see them, Folcalor who had known this demon—whoever he was—from eternity. His eyes glittered with the horrible demon-light as he prodded the gag and the blindfold with the tip of his knife, then jestingly poked it at Gareth’s eyes.

“And did anyone come? No? Oh, too bad … I hoped they would. Is that a little teardrop?” He scraped at the tear, of fright and shock, with the tip of the knife. “Your precious confidant Danae, maybe, to sing you a song while you waited here for us? To listen to your troubles, like she’s been doing—” he added another crude suggestion, then laughed derisively—“or pretty Milla, to give her daddy kisses … like she gives the guards in the barracks at night—”

“That isn’t true!” screamed Gareth, and Bliaud roared with laughter.

“Oh, I promise you she does it well! As you’ll find out, once we’ve taken care of you … what do you think, m’lord?” he called to the gnome Folcalor—Goffyer, John had said, and Jenny hoped desperately Miss Mab was keeping on her guard—as the gnome passed into the workroom beyond. “You think the poor sods in those crystals know what’s happening?”

“Of course they do.” Folcalor reappeared in the doorway, flipping a chunk of pale blue topaz in his hand. In the shadows of the storm-dark morning the jewel flickered palely, like his burning eyes. “They even feel it when we ride a whore in their bodies, or get that nice warm thrill from blood on our hands.” He met Gareth’s eyes and smiled nastily, and Jenny felt rage wash over her, remembering that smile on Caradoc’s face. “I like to put my ear to the stone, and hear them scream. Or sigh,” he added with a grin, “as the case may be. As you’ll see, when we get your daughter here, and that fat-titted nurse—”

“It isn’t true!” shouted Gareth again. Tears were running down his haggard face and he lunged against the manacles. “You’re lying! Devils—monsters—”

Folcalor came out of the workshop, one hand red to the elbow with sticky blood from the basin. With his stubby fingers he was wiping the blood off something—a delicate glass shell, Jenny saw, such as the Sea-wights wore to travel through the lesser gates they convinced human wizards to make. It gleamed through the blood, and she could see something silver shift viscously inside.

“They’re putting your cousin to the question today,” he said. “Quietly, of course. It would never do for the King to admit that he had the Master of Halnath put in the Boot or the Rack like a common felon. But Ector of Sindestray insisted. Nothing’s too much, he said, for a man who’s sold himself to demons. Think how your cousin Polycarp will appreciate seeing you there; maybe even you holding some of the irons.”

His fist crunched on the glass thing within it. Through his fingers the silver demon oozed, and fell to the floor with a sticky plop. Gareth shrank back on the bare ropes of the bed, thrashing and bucking. The silver thing whipped along the floor tiles like a gleaming snake, slithered up onto the bedstead, while Bliaud stepped forward with the knife in one hand, the blue topaz in the other. “Now, open your mouth,” he said, holding up the jewel, and the silvery demon crawled up onto Gareth’s thigh, looked at him with tiny, black, jetbead eyes.

John stabbed, straight through the curtain and up under Bliaud’s ribs. The demon wizard spun, eyes bulging, and screamed, a sound Jenny had never heard from human or Hellspawn before. And fell forward across the bed.

The silver demon darted off the bed, flicked across the floor, at the same moment Folcalor whipped from his side one of the short jeweled swords of the gnomes. He sprang at John as a blinding dazzle of light exploded in the air between them—John was expecting it, and fell back, parrying and lashing out with one foot to trip the gnome, on whom he had a good half-yard of reach. Folcalor fell, rolled, sprang back. Jenny, tearing the keys from Bliaud’s belt, saw John wince and stagger, as if blinding pain had struck him somewhere, but he caught the demon’s next strike handily on the knife he’d scooped from Bliaud’s nerveless hand, driving in with his greater height.

Boots thundered in the hallway. Jenny twisted the keys in the manacle locks, dragged Gareth to his feet, and was turning to look for a chair to smash over Folcalor’s head when three of the gnome guards entered, halberds in hand. They saw John and Folcalor but didn’t see Jenny, who struck with the chair and snatched the halberd from the nearest gnome’s grip. The gnome dragged out his sword and lunged at her, but the halberd was Jenny’s favored weapon, suited to a woman’s smaller stature. She slashed her attacker across the chest and sprang back from the explosion of blood. The gnome grinned at her, a horrible demon grin, and came on, the body dying but the demon driving it forward nonetheless. Gareth seized the chair and bashed another of the gnome guards away from John, who was being driven into a corner. Folcalor had darted back to where Bliaud still lay beside the bed, thrashing and gasping with blood streaming from his mouth.

Jenny heard Folcalor shout, “Belior!” which must have been the name of Bliaud’s demon. “Belior, damn you …!”

“I don’t …,” choked the demon, and Jenny heard in the demon speech the gasp of utter uncomprehending terror. She hacked again at the gnome who was slashing at her, the longer reach of the halberd keeping his sword at a distance, but he came in on her, taking the cuts, caring nothing. She severed one of his arms, and he only bent to pick up the sword with the other, driving her to the wall. And still she heard Folcalor cry, “Belior!” in a strange voice, disbelieving and horrified.

John turned and took Jenny’s gnome in the back with his sword. The gnome cried out, fell to his knees. Past John’s shoulder Jenny saw another of the demon gnomes on the floor, bleeding, unmoving, head half-severed. John’s clothes were splashed with blood. He sprang over the downed gnome, driving at Folcalor, and the demon sprang to his feet and bolted through the workshop door. He slammed it in John’s face, and Jenny heard the bolt shoot. John lunged to the outside door into the garden, then turned back: “He’s gone.”

He walked to the gnome guards, all three of them sprawled on the floor.

Gareth said, in a strange voice, “They’re dead.”

By the way they were lying they had clearly been demons. Had clearly driven in on taller opponents, secure in the knowledge that killing the bodies they rode would not stop them.

Bliaud’s eyes were jammed wide open, staring at the ceiling as if viewing some unsuspected ghastliness descending suddenly on him from the dense shadows beneath the plasterwork ceiling. John turned his sword over in his hand, studying it: Jenny saw that the blade and hilt both were written over with runes in a kind of spidery blue light, runes that faded even as she watched. She wondered if these were even visible to John.

“I’ll be buggered.” He knelt to clean the blade on Bliaud’s clothing. “Either the blade drove them straight out of the bodies they’d taken … or it killed them. I think it killed them.”

Jenny said, with a kind of rich and bitter satisfaction in her voice, “They must have been surprised.”

“Near as surprised as I am,” said John. “The man who forged this sword is a mage, livin’ in a world where magic doesn’t exist, God bless him. I only wish there were a way I could thank him, and tell him that the spells of ruin he laid on demons there work here like bloody heroes.”

“He’ll go to the palace.” Gareth straightened up—he’d gathered every weapon he could lay hands on and looked like a second-rate squire. “Goffyer, I mean. My father … my father and Trey …” His voice faltered, and the muscles of his jaw stood out tight in his silence.

“Is Ector a demon?” John pulled down a handful of bed curtain to wipe the blood off his boots. His trousers and the red doublet—palace livery, Jenny saw—were splashed with it, his own blood as well as that of his attackers. Jenny ripped Bliaud’s shirt for a bandage, to tie up the thin slash on John’s arm.

Gareth swallowed, thought a moment, and shook his head. “That’s Ector’s strength,” he said. “He really believes what he’s doing is right, and that carries the Council. Most of its members are—are still themselves. And they’re meeting at the fourth hour.…”

“And it’s gie near the second now, and winter at that. I’m well, love, we haven’t time,” John added, to Jenny, who was trying to get him to hold still long enough for her to bandage his bleeding arm. “Look through the workroom, would you, Gar, and see if you can find a jewel in a box. I couldn’t.”

“It won’t be here.” Jenny thrust John down onto the edge of the bedstead. “You stay there,” she added, and followed Gareth into the workroom, John at her heels. As she’d suspected, when the demon Belior had taken over Bliaud’s body he hadn’t troubled himself with the healing powders the old wizard had stored in the cabinet. They were still there in their porcelain pots, neatly labeled and smelling sweetly wholesome when Jenny stirred them. John’s arm was cut in two places, and he’d taken a shallow slash across the chest. None of the wounds were deep, but they bled freely. Jenny could detect no poison in the wounds, nor smell of demon curses, but the general filthiness in which demons lived and operated made alcohol and slippery elm a must.

“Folcalor wouldn’t let another demon have charge of a weapon as powerful as a wizard’s soul,” she added. “Will you sit down? He’s a traitor himself.” She poured some of the drinking water from the workroom pitcher into a dish taken from an upper shelf, mixed in astringents and salts. “Is there brandy in that…? Yes, thank you, Gar.…” John jerked and flinched at the sting of the healing poultice.

“Honestly, it doesn’t hurt that much.… Some dragonsbane you are. Folcalor would know how tempting it is to a demon who possesses such a tool to focus and extend his own magic—especially to a demon inhabiting the body of a mage to begin with. He kept the talisman jewels with him last time. It’s on him, believe me, if it still exists at all.”

“It certainly isn’t here.” Gareth came back to the bench where John sat. All around them the big house was silent. If the Otherworld swordblade could indeed kill demons, thought Jenny, it was no wonder they fled. She wondered where they went. “What Bliaud said about … about Millença …”

“Is a lie, pure and simple,” said John. “I left her and Danae and Branwen—who’s a pert little minx and needs a good spankin’, by the way—at your mother’s old huntin’ lodge in the woods. She waited for you last night … ow! That bloody stings, woman!”

“It stings because the infection is leaving it.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“I always say it because it’s always true. It would sting a lot more if it turned purple and fell off.”

“I … I couldn’t leave without being sure,” Gareth said, and ran an awkward-jointed hand over his face. “I knew Bliaud was coming to the palace last night. I thought, while he was gone, I could have a look around here. If he was a demon, there was bound to be something. Mages—wizards—we do need them, need them against the plague. I’ve been keeping Ector off of him for weeks. I had to be sure.” He shook his head, and put a gingerly hand to the back of his skull. “I don’t remember.…” He looked around him vaguely—Jenny finished tying the last bandage and got up to fetch the spectacles lying under the workbench. The gold frame was bent, the right lens cracked. Gareth winced as he carefully replaced them on his head.

“Where’ll they have Polycarp?” John asked, pulling his slashed and bloody jacket back on and looking around for his cloak. “If we can get him away to Halnath and get a stronghold for ourselves, we might have a chance of driving the demons out of Bel. As it is, God knows how we’re to do it. We can’t even get into the palace, and the Captain of the Guards is a demon as well, and who knows how many others.”

“They’ll have Polycarp in the old Tower prison where they held you.” Gareth pulled a hooded cloak from a hook behind the door, threw it to John to cover his bloodstained clothing. “The Chamber of the Question is there, too, on the other side of the watchroom.”

Jenny slung her plaids around herself and followed the two men down the broken brick pathway through the orchard, and across the kitchen garden. Still, not a guardsman, not a servant did any of them see, and listening around her Jenny heard no sound in the empty kitchen buildings, and only the painful nickerings of thirsty horses in the stables.

“Even if we get him away—even if we get to Halnath,” Gareth continued, “what can we do about the demons then? They’ve taken root here, they can’t be exorcised—”

“They can’t be exorcised now,” said Jenny. She strode fast, keeping up with the Prince’s longer legs, the cold wind billowing in her plaids. “After the Moon of Winds, their power will lessen. Spells of exorcism will work again.…”

“There won’t be a Realm left by the Moon of Winds!” said Gareth desperately. “My father … there’s trouble with the Prince of Imperteng again, and if Polycarp is killed, the whole March is going to split away. People are beginning to flee the city, even at this season. There was a riot yesterday in Deeping, and if the gnomes turn against us—”

“I’ve a theory about how the demons here can be dealt with.” John glanced right and left as they crossed the square, then headed for the quiet back-streets that led around toward the palace. “It isn’t only to cause pain and grief that demons take on human bodies—they need ’em for protection in certain places as well, an’ I think Prokep is one of ’em. If that’s the case, just count up who goes missin’ at the Moon of Winds.”

“And I tell you we may not have until then,” the Prince said grimly. “And if the Realm holds together through that, what happens after Folcalor frees Adromelech from his prison? You say their power will be weaker, but they’ll be everywhere, fighting one another, if what you’ve told me is true. And you know as well as I do that there will always be men who’ll ally with demons, out of greed or malice. What then?”

Gareth and Jenny both halted in the quiet back-lane to look at John, who pushed up his spectacles with one bloodstained grubby finger and scratched his nose. “Aye, well,” he agreed. “I’ll have to give that part of me plan a bit more work.”

There were guards stationed all around the Palace Hill. Had the market square been crowded, as it customarily was at this time of the morning, the men stationed in the arcade might have been inconspicuous enough, but in the stormy weather their crimson cloaks stood out even in the shadows, like splashes of blood.

“I count twelve,” John whispered, drawing back into the shelter of Wellspring Lane and peering around the corner of a house painted with mermaids and flowers.

“There’s another one at the end of this lane,” whispered Jenny. She pulled Thane and Prince by their cloaks into the nearest turning. Eyes half-closed, she listened for the creak of swordbelts, for the faint squeak of armor-buckles and the clink of metal on the plaster of house walls.

The neighborhood between market and palace was deathly quiet. It wasn’t only the sneer of the wind around turnings and over the moss-greened tiles of the roofs that kept people indoors, or the flecks of sleet in the air. Like the zone of stillness in the Winterlands woods, which hinted to Jenny of the presence of bandits hiding in the thickets, she could hear in the silence the fear that emanated from the waiting guards.

“For a short little gnome, Goffyer made gie good time to the palace,” murmured John as they stepped back into the tightly shuttered doorway of one of the district’s numerous chocolate shops to reconnoiter. “Think you can get us past, love?”

“They’re my father’s guards,” Gareth protested, indignant. “I can order them—”

“I wouldn’t try it, me hero.”

A small squad of soldiers in the blue and white livery of Lord Ector of Sindestray’s private company strode past the end of the street, heading for the fashionable district where Bliaud’s house lay. Jenny said, “Who do you think will speak for you if both Trey and your father claim that you’ve been ‘acting queerly’? If in your absence a bowl of blood, or a mirror painted with demon signs, were found in your chamber?”

The Prince opened his mouth in shock, and closed it again, and a look of gray weariness passed across his face. He had, thought Jenny, lost his wife, and his unborn child, less than a fortnight ago; had undergone not only that grief, but the added agony of renewed hope, eaten away by the acid of doubt and still more dreadful grief. He had been Regent, virtually King of Bel, and had fought for his father’s realm against betrayal by a cousin he had trusted. Then the Realm, too, had been taken from him, and the father he had cared for and loved, while at his feet opened the dark threat of still more terrible days to come.

He was fighting still, as wounded men will when their blood is up. But his heart and his soul had been hurt, perhaps mortally. Jenny could see it in his eyes. She touched his arm again, and he made a smile, and covered her hand briefly with his bare, cold-reddened fingers, then dug out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Badegamus will let us in,” he said, his voice steadier than Jenny had thought it might be. “He can still be trusted. Or he could as of last night, anyway. We can send him a message.…”

“They’ll be watchin’ for that lad,” said John. “Let’s see what things look like round the kitchen quarters.”

The whole of the palace district was alive with guards, moving among the tall gray-stone houses like red-shelled ants. Jenny wrought a cautious glamour about herself, John, and Gareth, but she had little confidence as yet in these new abilities, and did not know their strength or their extent. It was even possible that this faint whisper of magic would draw the attention of demons. The stakes were far too high to risk capture.

“One thing I don’t understand,” Gareth whispered, once when they stopped in a gateway, to let the swift clump of booted feet stride by in the turning ahead of them. “Why did Polycarp come back? They said they had him.… Or was Goffyer only saying that to hurt me? Like Bliaud talking about Milla and … and Danae. Polycarp left Bel the day after Trey … Trey died. Went back to the Citadel at my command. I can’t imagine why he’d have returned.…”

“He returned to warn you, son,” John murmured, and glanced back over his shoulder at the younger man. “He sent you word asking you to meet him in the wood-court that opens onto the Cooksway, and of course Trey intercepted the message. He was taken yesterday, just after I talked to you.”

Like hunters in the Winterlands, they probed down the narrow streets behind the palace, made cautious expeditions along mews. They followed the distant line, glimpsed beyond turnings, of the old palace’s tall, moss-smeared wall. Intermittent flurries of sleet kept them from meeting anyone, but at the same time made them conspicuous to whatever guards might glance their way. Jenny’s hip ached, from the night’s long walk, and sleepiness chewed at her bones. She wondered where Morkeleb might be, and what was happening to Ian and Adric in the north. Fleeting thoughts, fleetingly put aside.

Then she would look ahead of her at John’s familiar wide shoulders and the way he turned his cropped bristly head, and her heart would turn over in her breast.

In Bliaud’s workshop she could have kissed the flesh of his arm, when she bared it to daub on the poultice, and the memory of his kiss in the alley behind the Silver Cricket’s stable-yard was a sunrise, through all the morning’s blustery, brutal cold.

Whatever happens, she thought, I have that kiss. And I was able to tell him I love him. That even at my worst, I was doing the best that I could.

They were in the slightly shabby district behind the old palace, with its little shops and ateliers, its lines of laundry hung between the projecting fronts of those splendid decrepit town houses. All around them lay that silence still. Sometimes a woman would pass them on her way to a fountain, or a man carrying a delivery would go by in the lane. But no vendors’ cries sounded in the street, no singsong wails of Applepie, penny a pie, sweet as summer honey …

“There’s a man watching the end of the lane.” She touched John’s shoulder, halting him. “Not a guard.” She listened, getting her bearings: The palace wall lay past a line of houses to their left, and she knew there were guards at the petitioners’ gate, about a hundred feet down the Queen’s Lane from where they stood. The Cooksway cornered around a tower to join the Queen’s Lane, and as far as she could tell there was no one near the wood-yard gate, save for that single man standing just out of sight where the cramped lane turned into the wider way. The Cooksway was, of course, the main one into the kitchen quarters. She could smell the dung churned into the snow, and over the gray wall the warm scents of baking and brewing.

“Bugger.” John slipped the sword from its sheath beneath his cloak. “Whereabouts …? I see him.” He nodded toward the end of the lane, where a cart had been unharnessed and left to stand by the corner of the wall. “Can I circle back and around?”

“Yes—no.” Jenny listened hard. Her concentration wasn’t what it had been twelve hours ago, but still she was able to sift out the muted babble of servants’ voices—scullery maids, wood-haulers, watermen—from the palace itself. She heard the wind groan around the corner of the alleyway a few yards behind them, heard a woman in one of the houses say to her child, “All the little birds will be back in the spring.…”

“Someone’s just past the turning behind us,” she breathed. “Two of them …” A boot crunched in the frozen muck as someone shifted his weight.

“Not a guard, either. At least he’s not wearing a guard’s armor or harness.” She half-shut her eyes, breathing deep. The last time she had slept, she realized with a kind of wonderment, had been in the snow-cave in Ernine, with Morkeleb crouching outside the door. She had dreamed of the mirror chamber. Dreamed of Amayon crying to her from his prison.

And the time before that, she had slept in the Deep, to be waked by demon voices whispering of slaves.

“I’m sorry. I can’t …”

“It’s all right, love, you’re doing champion.” John touched a hand to her shoulder, then slipped away. She wondered where and when he’d last rested. The man behind the cart in the lane continued to watch the gate. Somewhere in the Dockmarket a clock struck the hour, answered by the bronze chime of the palace carillon, and Gareth’s breath hissed. The fourth hour of the morning.

“All Ector will need is someone accusing Polycarp of collusion with demons,” the young man whispered desperately. “His father was a traitor—he was brought up a hostage in the palace, with me and Rocklys. All winter there’s been unrest in the Citadel, and in the Marches it rules. We can’t let them kill him—put him to the Question …”

Jenny lifted her hand for silence, hearing John’s feet stop. There was a quick scrunch—feet moving in snow?—and John said, “Don’t try it. Put that down where I can see it.”

And a deep voice said, “Lord Aversin?”