Knight of the Demon Queen (23 page)

Jenny, curled among the furs of their bed, dark hair like a sea among the pillows, all the cares she carried day to day smoothed from her face by sleep. Little Maggie, red haired and dark eyed, making spiderwebs of his aunts’ spinning wool.

Clea’s hand on his wrist made him startle. He hadn’t realized he’d shut his eyes.

Her eyes met his, troubled. “Homesick,” he said to reassure her. He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Has it been long?”

Over by the terminal Shamble was saying, “The key code for building maintenance workers at Universe is pretty easy to duplicate, and I know a guy who rents out the uniforms.”

“Even if ThirtyoneFourFour has all three floors and keeps a single entry, there’ll be vents into the other levels…”

“That’s another thing I haven’t the faintest idea about,” John said quietly. “I’ve been away for weeks. But the demon gates don’t take account of time. The snow that was fallin’ when I rode from the Hold won’t have melted yet from the ground.”

“The Hold,” said Clea softly. “Is that your home?”

He nodded. The smell of the wind when it set from the heath, of wood smoke on the air, the bark of a dog unseen across the moor on a misty night. Jenny playing the harp.

“What is it you’re looking for? And why?”

Bort’s com signal beeped, a swift flutter of sound. He unclipped it from his belt, glanced at the source code, then toggled the line open. “TenEighty,” he said.

John had watched old Docket and Bort and his landlady TwelveNinetyseven when they took coms, and generally if it was someone they knew they’d say either their nickname—like Bort—or a casual greeting like, “Yo,” or, “What’s up?”

“Yes,” Bort said. “I know him.”

A silence.
Now why couldn’t I have had a com last summer
, John wondered, putting on his specs again,
when I was that desperate to get hold of Jenny to tell her Ian had been kidnapped? Everything would have been dead easy.

It seemed very far away, and his desperation then to save his son seemed simple compared to the darkness in Ian’s soul now, to Jenny’s silent pain and his own cautious, weary loneliness.

Would ether crystals work in his own world? And how could he use them to power a com?

“Thank you,” Bort said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”

He fingernailed the toggle to close the line.

“That was the District Two Hundred enforcers,” he said. “They found Docket.”

“Alive?” Clea’s whole face brightened, then faltered at Bort’s expression.

“Not … exactly,” said Bort. “They found my number stored in his com. They say we’d better get over there.”

“He was like this when we picked him up,” the enforcer said. He snapped his fingers in front of Docket’s eyes; they did not even blink in response, though the old man was breathing through a slack, half-open mouth.

“And where was that?” Even Bort’s usual pompous bluster seemed quelled by the cold lights and hard echoes of the District Building, and John felt his hackles lift for no reason he could readily comprehend. The District Building was dirtier and more crowded than anyplace he’d encountered outside the wet zone and had a smell to it that he hated without being able to identify. Ad screens plastered the walls nearly edge-to-edge, some of them displaying the usual playlets about fashionable restaurants or apartments, some showing scenes of violence and horror: young women being beaten up, children being tormented by men in the leathers and makeup of the gang, an old man sodomized by a hulking youth in blue face paint and spikes. At the front counter a clerk in gray expressionlessly keyed in a complaint by a woman at the head of a very long line. Another clerk doled out plex cards bearing what John understood to be numbers.

After being given such a number on their arrival at District Two Hundred, he, Bort, Clea, and Garrypoot
had waited nearly two hours to be ushered into a filthy cubicle smaller than a cow stall at the Hold, where they’d waited a further hour before the enforcer arrived with Docket.

Or what had been Docket.

“We found him over on Two-oh-ninth Avenue.” The enforcer consulted the information felt-penned on the old man’s chemical burned and mosquito ravaged forehead. The bookseller made no response, simply stared ahead. By the smell of his clothes he’d wet himself during the night. A thin drip of saliva dampened the white stubble on his chin.

“He was disoriented and unable to speak or help himself. He doesn’t appear to know his name or where he is.” The enforcer spoke as if from a memorized script. His voice was soft and rather light, at grotesque odds with his shaven head and overmuscled bulk. His small fair beard was neatly clipped. “Please enter information about yourself and signal when you’re ready to sign him out.”

He swiveled the keyboard of the desk terminal around so Bort could use it, and left.

Bort sighed and began to input.

After the fifth screen John jerked his head at the doors. “Can’t we just take him and leave?” People were coming and going from the waiting area as their numbers were called. Nobody seemed to be keeping track.

“We need to sign ourselves as responsible,” Clea explained when Bort raised his head with an exasperated growl. “We’d never get him past security if we didn’t.”

“He hasn’t committed any crime, has he?” John pointed out, perched on the corner of the desk beside the old man, his boots dangling above the trash-littered floor. Old Docket was barefoot, and when John gently
searched the pockets of his trousers and shirt—he wore no jacket—they were empty. “I thought he had a com.”

“He probably did when they found him,” Shamble said. “Shoes, too.” He glanced nervously around him. The subliminal hum of ether relays was nearly audible here. Inadequate shielding, John guessed. Everyone in the huge waiting room was shouting, quarreling, or making repeated trips to the three vending machines dispensing Peace—which the Human Resources Bureau handed out free—that occupied the only wall space not filled with ad screens. “He’s been in a holding cell for a couple of hours. That means we’ll have to renumber his credit.”

“Curse,” Clea said without heat. “Like we didn’t have enough to do finding out what’s wrong with him. I’m just glad someone called. Unclaimed indigents often disappear when the enforcers pick them up,” she added, glancing over at John. “The government denies it, of course, but if you match up numbers on the Op-Link, there’s a certain amount of evidence that Metro-Sec— the firm that contracts security for about half the districts in the city—is owned by the same megacorp that owns Renewal.”

“Renewal?”

“The chief supplier of transplant organs,” Shamble said dryly. “Poot, do you want to get in line for a number for a doctor? This might just be some kind of a drug reaction, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“I have,” John said. “And getting him to see a healer probably won’t help. Where’s Two-oh-ninth Avenue? Anywhere near the Universe Towers where this Thirty-oneFourFour lives?”

Shamble and Bort traded a glance. “Universe is on
Two-oh-ninth Avenue,” Bort said. “About three-quarters of a mile from here.”

    The white dragon bore the boys to Frost Fell, one in each claw, Adric gazing down in hungry wonderment at the ground. Seeing the house made her remember still more clearly how it had felt to be a woman, and to love. It made her remember, too, with a distant dispassion, the pain and the grief of dreaming of John in the arms of the Demon Queen.

As a dragon she was free of Amayon’s calling, free of the dreams of dizzying pleasure that came from drinking others’ pain. She shivered at the thought of going back. That would, she knew, be bad.

But how bad, she had no guessing.

Ian had to rest a day, for echoes of the poison’s hurt lingered in his veins, keeping him from concentrating. The following morning he was better, and under the white dragon’s guidance he drew out a great circle of power on the hilltop behind the house, open to the silvery sky.

In this the dragon lay and opened her heart to those cold roads that led magic back to human dreams and human flesh.

The power of transformation took her: heat, cold, a hammering as if she lay naked to the buffeting of a thousand years of storms.

Distantly she heard Ian calling to her. She tried to reach out to him in reply but could not; she could only lie on the bitter ground twisting in an agony that was worse than childbearing, worse than losing her powers of magic, worse than anything she had yet endured. A hundred times she tried to reverse what she had begun and return to dragon flesh, but she had given up the dragon power and could find no way back. Yet it seemed
that she could not go forward into human form. What form her flesh and bones retained she knew not, only that her flesh burned and her bones hurt as if racked and broken and twisted to shards; her whole body was drowned in pain and heat.

She cried Ian’s name. Weeping, she cried John’s, feeling her strength ebb, like a woman who cannot bring forth her child yet whose body will not cease the pangs of birth. Again and again she thought of Amayon, but the part of her that remained a dragon and felt no love told her that Amayon, being a demon, would only laugh at her pain. She slipped back into the darkness of dreaming and sought desperately for John, but John was gone.

Dead?
she wondered.
Would I have known it if he died or went to be a servant of the Demon Queen?
Images flooded to her mind, and she could not remember whether they were things she had seen with her own eyes or merely figments Amayon had sent her in dreams to torture her: John and the Queen lying together, John letting her drink the blood from his arms and wrists.

John standing above Ian’s dead body, in the snow of Frost Fell, saying,
This was your doing. This was your doing.

That was true, she thought. She had wanted neither of the boys, had wanted no child to interrupt her meditations, her striving for power. It was hard to breathe, and it came to her how easily she could die, like a dragon releasing its hold on the earth and lifting into the sky. The thought appealed to her: a simple solution, and beautiful.

John will get along without me
, she thought. He always had. It was what she had demanded that he do, and her sons as well.

Jenny.

Like a cuckoo
, she thought,
I bore them and flew away.

Jenny, this is not true.

A voice of gentleness, speaking through the darkness of those terrible human dreams.

You left them with one who loved them. You did as you must, to become what you became.

As if she lay at the bottom of a storm-ravaged ocean, she looked up and saw another layer of dreaming, the still clarity of dragon dreams, miles above her head in the light.

Stone, sea, and sky; deep silence unbroken even by birds. Consciousness that spread and listened to the waves, to the winds, to the age-long lattices of what the rock had been and would be. A heart like a core of invisible flame.

What is truth, Jenny?

She saw truth laid out in a very simple pattern, a line leading from dragon to woman, and back.

It took all of Ian’s strength, and all of her own, to call her back from the meshes of silvery darkness where her mind had wandered. To her horror she saw how near to the dark country of no return she lay; with more horror still, she realized how much she wanted only the relief that is found in its bornes.

Cold enveloped her just before she fell asleep. She opened her eyes and saw Ian and Adric running toward her with blankets in their arms and fear on their faces. “I’m all right,” she said, and she fell a thousand miles into sleep without dreams.

Waking, she lay for a long time in her bed in the house on Frost Fell. She knew she ought to speak to the people who came and went around her—Sergeant Muffle and his mother, the stout white-haired Aunt Hol, and sturdy Cousin Dilly—but could not bring herself to do so. She
felt very cold, numb and weak as if only water remained in place of her bones.

The magic of dragonhood was gone. Dreams of the demon seethed below the level of her consciousness, whispering to her from the dark. It was hard for her to remember why she ought to live.

“Mother, we have to warn the King somehow.”

Ian’s voice, miles away. She didn’t know whether she actually opened her eyes or not. The scene in her mind was dreamlike, a boy in grimy leather and plaids sitting on the edge of a bed in which a woman lay. The woman was tiny, shriveled and brown like a mummy, with a scarred face and bald head and twisted hands.

“We have to get word to them in the South. The bandits that seized me and Adric—they said to the man with the bow,
He’s the witch boy.
It isn’t just Folcalor hunting us, Mother. He has allies, more than we knew. And he’s growing stronger.”

Not
us,
my child
, Jenny thought with weary resentment. The memory of her lost power was for a moment a handful of ashes, and she wondered again if John was dead. That would be the bitterest jest of all. As a dragon in her dreaming she had sought him all through the world and had seen nothing of him.

How could he be dead, and I not know?

“I’ve been trying to contact Master Bliaud, Mother, and I can’t. Can you hear me? Please, please answer me if you can!”

He put his hands on either side of her face, and she opened her eyes, sleepily looking up into his. She saw his features alter with consternation and grief.

Then the door behind him opened, and the dragon Morkeleb came into the room.

Dreaming? Jenny wondered absently. Or was this merely how one saw when one was dead?

She could not precisely tell whether Morkeleb walked in his human form or as a dragon: She had seen him as a dragon reduce his size to barely larger than a cat’s, perfect as those statues of coal they made in the far outer villages. In human form he had appeared to her to be a man with long gray hair, a thin pale man neither old nor young, a man with the sort of face a dragon might wear if he went masking as human. She thought this was probably how he appeared now because neither Muffle nor Aunt Hol nor the boys seemed particularly frightened, though they would not, she noticed, come too near him.