Knight of the Demon Queen (24 page)

Thus she saw him sometimes, in the timeless vagueness that followed, sitting beside her bed and holding her hands. At other times he appeared to be a dragon, his narrow birdlike head maned in ribbons, but the hand she held, save for its claws, was a human hand. His eyes were always the same, and sometimes it was only the eyes that she saw, and all the rest invisible as smoke.

She saw the eyes and heard the voice speaking in her mind.

You said that you would remain among the living, and be my friend.

I did not know then how bad it would be
, she said.

She felt as if something had been cut out of her bones when she had given up dragon flesh and dragon power a third time. The strength to finish the transformation had had to come from somewhere, and there had been nowhere for it to take root. She closed her eyes.

For a long while she was aware of him silent and unmoving beside her, only breathing and at rest. For
herself, Jenny felt as if she looked out over the gray peaceful silvery nothingness of death as if overlooking the ocean from a high cliff. It was restful to know only that the choice was there. Then she heard Adric say softly, “Are you really a dragon, sir?” She opened her eyes to see the boy standing next to Morkeleb, hands clasped behind his back, studying him intently.

He wasn’t, Jenny noticed, wearing his sword. He’d left it wrapped in its belt on the hearth, beside which Ian slumbered in fitful dreams.

“I am,” Morkeleb replied gravely. “Are you really a human being?”

The boy drew himself up. “I am Adric Aversin, son of the Thane.” He hadn’t combed his hair, and both his eyes were blacked from the bandits’ blows. He looked at Jenny and said more quietly, “Will Mama be all right? Can you save her with magic? Mama says dragons are magic.”

“I know not whether your mother will live.” Mor-keleb tilted his head a little to one side, a gesture wholly reminiscent of his dragon form; the white crystal gaze rested on the boy, as if, Jenny thought, for the first time he was trying to understand without anger or envy these things that had drawn her from him. It seemed he wanted to understand what it was about them that had made her forsake immortality and dragonhood only to be with them, to see them every day. “And I have surrendered my magic, lest the use of it blind me to an understanding of what the universe truly is.”

Ian, who had waked at the sound of their voices, raised his head and regarded the dragon with sudden thoughtfulness in his eyes.

“Can’t you take it back,” Adric asked, “long enough to help Mother, and then quit again?”

“Adric,” Ian said, shocked, “stop being a toad.” He got to his feet and crossed the small room, his face haggard, old beyond his years in the firelight. Standing before the dragon, he asked quietly, “Are you saying that even death—even the death of someone you love—will teach you something about the nature of the universe?” He did not meet the dragon’s eyes as he spoke, looking down instead at the long white hands with their black claws, still holding Jenny’s; but he did not flinch.

“That’s stupid,” Adric said. Ian shoved him to silence him.

“It is what I am saying,” Morkeleb replied. “Yet I think, too, that she is beyond my healing. I have done what I can. But dragons heal one another, and she is not of dragonkind anymore. It is up to her.” Turning back to her, he touched her face and said, “Do not leave me, my friend.”

Through his fingers she felt the heat of the dragon fire, like the core of the sun.

It is not a thing of dragons
, Jenny said,
to pick out quarrels with death and time.

Nor is it
, Morkeleb replied.

She understood then that it was no longer of concern to him what was a thing of dragons and what was not. He had become what he was, dragonshadow or something else. The pride in him was gone, even the pride that would have held him aloof from these two children of humankind. The power that she felt within him was no longer magic as she had known it, but something else.

As she—she understood now and suddenly—was something other than what she had been or thought herself to be.

My friend
, she said, and opened her heart and her life.

She let him breathe his warmth into her, accepting life back within her flesh—accepting all that life might bring.

With life came grief: for John’s anger over their son, for his absence, for her lost magic.

And then, cold and terrible, came the recollection of the dreams of Folcalor. The hand with its gold rings passing across the well, calling image after image. A gnome in the North. A mage in the South.

Demons under the sea, clustered, green and shining, around the gate that the whalemages had closed. Waiting to enter this world, to make it their battleground in their wars against one another, for vengeance and pain. Their hunting ground. Their orchestra for the arts of terror and pain, and their gateway to every world and Hell beyond.

There is slavery and slavery
, the dead sailor had grinned.
Did you think you were his slave?

“Morkeleb,” she said, “can you take me to the South, to the court of the King?”

“It is what I came here to do,” he replied.

    Since all of them had been awake for close to twenty-four hours, Bort voted for dinner and a night’s sleep before undertaking an invasion of the Universe Towers.

“If they took him sometime after he closed up last night,” John pointed out, “he’s been like this for the best part of a day, and in my world at least, it gets harder to bring ’em back the longer they’re out of their bodies.” So they rode the subway back to Garrypoot’s apartment, which was not only the closest to District Two Hundred but also the most secure and the best equipped. The young tech looked decidedly squeamish at the suggestion that a mindless and incontinent old man be confined there but, after one glare from Clea, didn’t say so.

“If a victim of possession can be exorcised within two or three days, he’ll usually recover. After that it’s pretty chancy.”

“You mean Docket’s—” Garrypoot looked hastily around him at the other occupants of the subway car, who were in any case staying as far away from Docket as possible, and lowered his voice. “—possessed?” He seemed caught between horror at the implications of the situation and awe that at last he was given an opportunity to deal with true magic. “You mean there’s a demon inside him?” He dropped to a whisper, and he leaned around Shamble to look into the old man’s blank, staring eyes.

“Not exactly. His mind and his soul—his self—were stripped out of him, but no demon went in in its place.” John edged aside as a couple of neatly dressed inputters got on, bound no doubt for a late shift at one of the city bureaus, and gave them a friendly smile. They took one look at Docket and shoehorned themselves into the already-packed rear half of the car. It was fortunately not rush hour. “Didn’t think it worth the trouble, probably, there bein’ no magic here. I wish I could talk to Jen about this one—Jen’s me wife—but I think it’d stump her as well. I’ve got a guess at what’s goin’ on,” he added, as the train slowed and there was a hissing crackle, the lights dimming. There must be water in the tunnels—the stench was a giveaway. Now and again the trains had to turn back, crackling and hissing, for miles. “But there’s no way of tellin’ till we get into ThirtyoneFourFour’s flat.”

Back at his apartment, Garrypoot hooked his com through the terminal and put in a call to ThirtyoneFour-Four, making note of the system relays it passed through: “He’s in the wet zone,” he said. “Clear out where it’s
deep, it looks like: Ninety-fourth and Old Thirtieth Boulevard.”

“ThirtyoneFourFour?” Clea said disbelievingly, looking from the bathroom door where she was gently sponging Docket in the shower stall. “The deep gangs will kill him out there!”

“That’s where the relays feed.” The boy cut the signal before ThirtyoneFourFour could respond. “He’s been back from the dead once. Maybe it makes him immortal?” He glanced inquiringly, hungrily, at John.

“He
is
immortal,” John said shortly. Dobbin the carry beast came to his mind, bleeding legs rotting beneath him as he staggered up the black rocks of the Hell of the Shining Things. “He doesn’t care whether Thirtyone-FourFour dies or not.” And, seeing Garrypoot’s puzzlement, he explained patiently, “He’s a demon, Poot. He quit being ThirtyoneFourFour back at Econo Health Emergency. The demon’s just riding the body like a horse. The main question is, how long will it take him to get back?”

“Oh, I have the security codes,” Garrypoot said reassuringly. “We should have all the time we need.”

Aversin said nothing. But he wondered how much Amayon could hear in his onyx bottle. Could he see, as Jenny had spoken of seeing in dreams? And how long would it take him to contact his fellow wights with the news,
Get back at once, they’re raiding your flat?

Shamble came in with black maintenance coveralls labeled UNIVERSE TOWERS in white. Nobody in the city ever asked why you wanted to rent whatever you wanted to rent, be it plex earrings or assault weapons. It was enough trouble just to keep a roof over your head—literally, for those who slept outdoors in the chemical rain started to deteriorate very quickly after a night or two—and your
meds paid up. John had never particularly liked the grinding cold and hunger of living in the Winterlands, to say nothing of the possibility of being killed or enslaved by bandits, but he was beginning to understand that there were worse places.

The Celestial, Infinity, and Presidential lines all had stops under the Universe Towers. Shamble, a welder and a worker in metals, had done repairs at Universe Station, and he led them unerringly through the half dozen levels of walkways and overpasses and branching tunnels all clogged with ’zine kiosks and vendors of drugs and sausages. John glanced over his shoulder and around him at the crowds and shadow all the way. The door to the maintenance stair opened readily to one of Garrypoot’s bootlegged key cards. After a long climb up sagging plex steps through darkness that hummed with mosquitoes and reeked of rats and sewage, another key card admitted them to the ether feed-control room. The shielding there was a thousand times better than at District, but nevertheless the vibrations were blinding.

Garrypoot jacked his hand-terminal into one of the dozen black boxes ranged along the wall and quickly fed in a series of commands. “Done,” he said. “Auto-security on floors seventy through seventy-three is going to think everything is just fine for the rest of the cycle, which should be the next”—he checked his watch— “hour and forty minutes. By that time we should be out of there and gone.”

And none of Garrypoot’s machinations would gain them a damn thing, John thought—fighting the chill of panic—if Amayon had already summoned reinforcements.

They took a maintenance elevator to the sixty-ninth floor. John half expected it to be incomprehensibly dizzying, but it was no different from being in a room built on
the side of a high mountain. It was only a room, in what was clearly a servants’ area. From there another stair led up, starting and ending in small maintenance chambers hidden behind discreet doors.

“If the Towers are for the rich,” he whispered as they mounted the stairs, “why do they have ad screens in the servants’ section? They can’t need the rent knock-off, surely?” Those they’d passed on the floor below had been huge, numerous, and prominently placed.

“Are you kidding?” Garrypoot replied. “The servants would quit if they didn’t have screens.”

Baffled, John shook his head. In many ways the Hell of Winds was easier to understand.

He had thought—had hoped—that Wan Thirtyone-FourFour might be the man he sought, the face he’d seen in the water before the Mirror of Isychros: that his quest might end here and soon. But the photographs that dotted the walls of the nearly bare study, the huge gray living room, were of a younger man, fair and blue eyed and so perfect of feature John wondered aloud if the pictures were some sort of idealized animation.

“Well, in a way they are,” Bort said. He kept his voice low as they prowled to the uppermost level of the three, testing doors as they went. “He’s had a lot of work done. You can tell by the cheekbones.” He chuckled a little at John’s naïveté. “You don’t think any of the rich are born that beautiful, do you?”

Even so, as they passed swiftly through the ample halls, through rooms sparsely scattered with comfortable furniture and tastefully shuttered screens, John looked for the chamber he’d seen in the water: the heavy curtains stamped with gold, the candlesticks and statues and bowls of bright-gleaming metal.

But there was none of that here. The walls were plastered and painted light cool hues. Wide electronic windows displayed mountains and sunset clouds, so exquisitely coordinated with one another that had he not known better John would have thought the flat truly was a house set on a mountaintop in some beautiful fastness. Even in these rooms, the roaches endemic to the city flicked away under baseboards and behind expensive curtains as they approached, and something about their presence made John’s hackles prick. When they ascended the stair to the upper levels of the apartment, the insects grew more numerous still. The air-conditioning was powerful, but every now and then he caught, as they passed shut doors, the fugitive reek of blood.

In a double-locked chamber on the third level of the apartment they found what Aversin expected. The room was set up as a sort of workroom, with terminal, multiple screens, and a small table brightly bathed in light. A stream of ants crept from a ceiling vent, across wall and floor, to disappear beneath a second shut door leading to an inner room. On the lighted table lay the things John sought, in foamplex boxes such as takeout food came in.

One box contained five jewels: three sapphires, an amethyst, and a ruby, all good quality and all cut in facets after the fashion of the gnomes, a method apparently common in this world. “Naturals!” Bort held the ruby up to the light, awe in his voice. “Not synthetics, I mean. Ether crystals are technically diamonds, in that they’re crystallized carbon charged to align polarities, but they don’t bring the price a natural diamond would. These were probably bought at estate auctions. You don’t get naturals of any kind on the market, seldom even see them at gem and metals nodes on the Link.”