Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (14 page)

The heat that filled her was more terrible than the worst the change of her womanhood could do. She recalled the family she had rescued from slave-dealers in the woods of the North only weeks ago, Dal and Lyra from Rushmeath Farm, and their children: people she knew, children she had helped to birth. Saw the faces of the crippled Layla Gorge and her frail niece, Ana, whose family had wanted gnomes' silver more than it had wanted them.

The Demon Queen still gazed east. Only mageborn eyes could still have distinguished the red flicker of the retreating whirlwind. Her attention was focused there, and toward that diminishing light she made the gestures and passes of power, as if summoning great events infinitely far away.

She hid from Folcalor, thought Jenny, trembling still with anger. Hid and waited until he went east. Only thus could she summon power from a distance without him trapping her through her own spells. All this went through her mind in a single word, knowledge like a drop of molten glass, and she crept forward, the red wax stopper of the catch-bottle cold even through the leather of her glove. She moved silent, fearing that the Queen would hear the beating of her heart. Fearing that the waves of her rage would heat the very air around her, and warn Aohila of her presence.

But the Demon Queen only traced signs in the air, over and over, and they hung smoking in the cold for a few moments before dissolving. Like her hair, her garments drifted about her, thin veils of what sometimes appeared to be fire, sometimes smoke. But her white feet pressed the ground. They were large, the feet of a tall woman. Jenny saw the nails were curved and black like Morkeleb's claws.

She is calling all her power, Jenny thought. Calling it, and directing it on Folcalor. Like a small cat hunting she shifted herself up the hillside through the steaming puddles, the burned and perished gems. Her hand around the catch-bottle grew cramped and cold, and exhaustion gnawed at her bones. The longer she waited, the more Folcalor in his turn, wherever he was, would be weakened. Her whole being concentrated upon stillness, as she had in those days when she was only a Winterlands hedge-witch, relying on her slender powers to keep herself safe from bandits and the Iceriders who came down in bad winters from the North. She smelled rain, though there was no rain in the sky; sometimes also the burning tang of desert dust. Then these things were gone, and all she smelled was burning and death.

At last Aohila lowered her arms. She stood straight and tall, staring into the east, her dark hair floating about her like kelp. Only a rim of embers outlined the riven hill. Huge stillness covered the silent ruin of the city. Overhead the clouds broke, and stars gleamed coldly through.

Jenny brought the catch-bottle from the folds of her plaid and, as if even at that distance, Aohila had heard the rustle of her clothing, the Demon Queen turned. Her gold eyes widened, and she raised her hand, and in that instant Jenny pulled the stopper from the bottle.

“My children,” said the King, “the plague is ended.” He raised his hands, palms out, as if instead of making an announcement he was himself bestowing this healing on the shocked and ravaged city. To those who saw the tall, broadshouldered figure standing in the turret of lacework stone—the King's traditional pulpit above the market square—it was easy to believe.

Five years of rumor and speculation, of fragmentary tales handed out by palace servants concerning His Majesty's “indisposition,” five years of an inexperienced Regency, high taxes, and murmurs of revolt—all these seemed sponged away by the sight of that grave gold-bearded face, and the ringing clarity of the beautiful voice that had always been one of Uriens II's greatest gifts.

For nearly five years, since the year of the dragon, little had been seen of the King. Even when he'd been under the influence of the witch Zyerne, Uriens had made his appearances at festivals, had led the torchlight dawn processions to the Temple of the Red God of War, and had spoken to the people from this turret beside the door of the town's great indoor market. When the doctors said Zyerne's spells had affected his mind, a thousand contradictory tales had fleeted through the city's cobbled streets. The Regent Gareth was shy, and too many people had seen him hanging on the fringes of the mob of overdressed younger courtiers to take him really seriously. There had been many in the city who'd sided with the King's niece Rocklys, Commander of the Northern Garrisons, when she'd made her bid to take the throne, simply because she looked like she knew what she was doing.

So the murmur that ran through the crowd in the square was one of relief.

The King was himself again. The jaw under the golden beard jutted as of old, and the blue eyes that swept the crowd had their old hawk-bright glitter. The big hands rested firmly on the pierced stone of the turret's railing, and no longer fussed and picked like a child's. The tall, powerful body was clothed in decent mourning, for all the hundreds who had died of the mysterious fever that had swept the city, but it was a mourning of majesty, the restrained grief of a man who understands that there is work to do.

“We have found the men responsible for it, the men whose evil machinations, whose bargaining with demons, brought all this to pass. They have been punished.” His booming voice carried clearly over the heads of the crowd and rang on the tall stone houses that bordered the square, and he struck his purple-gloved fist into his palm. “It grieves me to reveal to you, my friends, that they had allies in this city, in every neighborhood. But the traitors have been induced to name those who did their bidding, those who spread the plague among their neighbors in the hopes of weakening our Realm and leaving us prey to the rebels in Imperteng and the Marches. Those men—aye, and women, too—will be sought out and taken, however cleverly they think they have covered their foul tracks. They shall not escape justice! ”

A cheer went up from the crowd standing shoulder to shoulder, where three days a week in summertime farmers set up barrows of fruit and milk and cheeses. Men and women forgot the cold slush underfoot and the colder wind, and raised their hands in salute to their reborn King. But near the corner of the market hall, where the Avenue of Kings ran back up the hill to the main palace gates, a woman covered her face with her veil and sobbed. Another, stout and tightly laced into the black of mourning, muttered under the din, “The plague may be done, but what about the killers in the streets, eh? What about those who wander in the night, without torches and seeing in the dark like cats, and kill those they meet? Yes, and climb over walls, to kill even those who think themselves safe in their own gardens! What about my daughter, then, that was found torn to pieces in her own house? Have you got the men who did that, Mr. Justice-Giving King?”

And the beggar beside her in a coat of black and white goatskins cocked his stubbled head and asked, “Have the city guards all died off, then, ma'am?”

A yard away a man in the crowd turned his head sharply: a yellow-skinned southerner in a traveler's leather tunic and hood, his face blue from hairline to lips with scrollwork tattoos. But though his eyes narrowed at the words, he said nothing, and made no approach, and the bereaved mother laughed, a barking sound like wood being chopped. “City guards! A man was killed behind my house—down in the Dockmarket we live—and half my neighbors say it was city guards who did it, and left the body bleeding in the street. Where have you been, Four-Eyes, that you don't know what's happening in this city? The plague isn't the worst of it by a long chalk.”

“Those that spread the plague are the ones that're doing the killing, Mae,” protested a prosperous-looking man standing near, his cloak pulled up tight against the cold. “You heard the King. It's the rebels from Imperteng that started it, the rebels that slew General Rocklys, when she would have come down and restored order. That's when this all began. Thank the gods the King's recovered, and in time!”

“Aye, now he'll take a hand,” agreed a fat man in a master goldsmith's apron and smock. “And not a moment too soon! We'd have had the gnomes running all of us out of business before long, friendly as the Regent got with them. Not that I've aught to say against the boy, of course, but boy is all he is—”

“And too friendly with the Master of Halnath, for my taste. The Masters were always trouble. Changing things and making machines—I wouldn't be surprised to hear the plague started with some of their meddling.… What does Master Polycarp know of the plague, eh?”

“What indeed?” John Aversin murmured, and slipped back from the crowd and along the cobbled street toward the palace gate. Behind him Uriens's voice sounded above the heads of the crowd like a gorgeous bronze bell, chiming out encouragement and hope:

“… peace shall be reestablished, and prosperity return …”

Thin sunlight gleamed through the clouds, silver on the garbage-boltered snow.

The palace of the Kings of Bel—the House of Uwanë—stood on a low hill south of the river; the Avenue of Kings led to its newer front gate, brave with banners and gilt. The former processional way, the Queen's Lane, curved around south to the older precincts dominated by the big dungeon tower, and the gate that was now used primarily by petitioners for the King's grace. There weren't many of these today, with the King clearly occupied elsewhere, and the porter who generally sat in the lodge beside the open gate had retreated, like a sensible man, to the fireside of his inner chamber: John could smell coffee beans roasting as he walked quietly past into the court.

Having seen the vision of Amayon as Trey speaking with the demon-ridden King, John hadn't been surprised to find the man back in apparent possession of his reason and command of the Realm. In fact, during Rocklys's rebellion, Uriens had led his own armies into battle and had done quite well as long as he had advisers to tell him where to dispose his troops. The erosion of mind and spirit that Zyerne had caused had not affected his courage or his sense of duty as King.

Still, it had made John's flesh creep to see him, knowing what he knew.

When John and Jenny first came south to deal with Morkeleb the Black—who had descended on the Deep of Ylferdun, driven out the gnomes, and made a lair for himself on their stolen gold—the witch Zyerne had been in power, and Uriens had refused to see them for many days. During those days of kicking his heels at Court, John had rambled a great deal about the palace, talking to servants and stable boys, insatiably curious about everything from the drainage system of the palace pig-yard to the distillation of perfumes in the stillrooms behind the kitchens.

This curiosity stood him in good stead now. He knew where the door opened from the petitioners' court into the pages' room—vacant now, like the gatekeeper's lodge, with the absence of any petitioners—and how to get from there to the servants' wing. Though not a hairy man, John had grown enough of a beard in the twelve days since his capture so that he didn't look simply unshaven: At the inn outside the city walls, where he'd spent last night, he'd dyed the stubble black and trimmed it close. He'd also dyed his hair, what there was left of it, and his eyebrows, and once he'd located the pages' storeroom and borrowed a footman's crimson hose and tunic, he pocketed his oddly particolored spectacles as well.

His own clothes he rolled in a bundle, and stowed in one of the wicker baskets that servants used to bring garments from the wardrobe stores to their masters when they dressed in the morning. There was no telling when he might have to stop looking like a footman in a hurry. Hooking one arm through the basket's handle, he listened at the storeroom door to make sure the courtyard outside was empty, then slipped out and crossed to where a line of newly cleaned chamber pots sat neatly ranged on a bench to be taken back to their respective apartments. With one in either hand, his thumbs holding the lids in place, if anyone did meet him it was unlikely they'd demand that he stop.

And in fact he encountered no one as he ascended the backstairs that he knew led to the former Regent's quarters.

People disappearing. People being slaughtered wantonly, without reason, as he had seen a young girl with pink-dyed hair slashed to pieces in that other world where he'd found Corvin hiding: slain while those who heard her cries feared too much to even open their windows to see who was dying.

The cancer of mistrust, that was one of the several horrors of demon incursion into the world of humankind.

Everyone gathered in the muddy market square to hear the King's words was desperate with hope that all would be well again, that the wounded world would heal itself. And John knew that if in fact Folcalor managed to break the Henge at Prokep, what had gone before would seem laughably mild compared to the world where demons roved at large.

Jenny didn't remember stoppering the catch-bottle. But she must have, she thought. For it was stoppered, and in her hands.

She was no longer cold.

That was the first thing she knew, through the shock of disorientation: almost before she understood that she was no longer on the hilltop in Ernine, no longer with Morkeleb. In tales and legends they spoke of someone being transported elsewhere “in the twinkling of an eye,” but she'd never had experience with such a thing, and neither, apparently, had the makers of tales and legends. None of them spoke of the breathless confusion of such a transportation, of the sinking sensation of the belly, of how the heart pounded and the brain swam with the change of light, the change of smells, the change of air.

She felt panic and sickness and giddiness and terror and not the slightest particle of surprise. She didn't think there was so much as a half-second in which she wasn't aware of where she was, or what had happened to her.

She was in the catch-bottle herself.

There was no other place that she could be. Though there was no visible source of light, still she could see the dim quicksilver curve of the walls, ascending in the shape of the bottle upward to the round shadow, like a closed circular window, of its neck, high in the domed ceiling above her head. She knelt on the concave nadir of a silvery sphere perhaps fifty feet in diameter, with the catch-bottle itself—the metal hot now, as if warmed from within—cradled in her cupped palms.