The Demon Lord (14 page)

Aldric knew now what he had detected in her voice— the vocal equivalent of that hate he had seen so briefly on her face. Its venom forced him to repress a shiver: a low, ugly snarl, there was yet no way he could condemn it or its sentiments. He had felt the same way, done the same things, directed the same long-brooded hate at Duergar and Kalarr. Indeed, the loathing which had festered inside him for four years had been so powerful that the talisman Ykraith had focused it, directed it as a pulse of fiery energy and used it to roast Duergar Vathach where he stood. And Gueynor had been anticipating vengeance for ten years…

Her mood was past now, but he knew that he would never look at this girl in quite the same way again.

“I wonder if Geruath suspects something?” she muttered to herself, ignoring the Alban as if he was not there, “He hasn’t come out of the citadel in months. Except that time they dug up the old mound—and then he and Crisen were surrounded by soldiers. Mercenaries. Why mercenaries… ? Don’t they trust—”

“What about mercenaries?” Aldric had a certain interest in hired troops after his encounter the previous night.

“There are few Jouvaines in the garrison at Seghar now. Most of them are just retainers—servants and the like—while the rest are Drusalan or Tergovan. Filth! A troop came here four months ago, just at the end of winter. They were riding through to Seghar, nothing more—they hadn’t even been taken on by the Overlord when it happened. Which was just as well.”

“When
what
happened?” It was apparently Aldric’s expected role to utter link questions which would bridge Gueynor’s thoughtful pauses; he felt like an unimportant actor in a stage play, one of Osmar’s complicated dramas with a deal of talk but little action.

“One of them was a man who called himself Keel.” She missed the expression which flicked like the shadow of a bird’s wing across Aldric’s face. “He offered me silver if I would… would go with him into the woods. What he asked… He wanted me to… It wasn’t just soldier’s talk, Kourgath—not ordinary lewdness. What he suggested was foul… Beastly. My uncle Evthan heard him say it and spilled him from his horse into the mud; he would have done much more if they hadn’t both been held.

“Keel wasn’t a lord’s-man, not yet, so he could do nothing himself. But he took my uncle with him to Seghar and reported what had happened. Not to Geruath, but to Crisen. I don’t know why. Crisen ruled that it would be unjust to kill a man of proven loyalty for being as loyal to his own family, and he let my uncle live. But he said that he would not tolerate such disrespect towards his intended retainers, and commanded that it be punished. I don’t know what else they did to him, but I do know that they beat my uncle—with riding-quirts and stock-whips from the cattle yard. They beat him and beat him until there was no skin left on his back, and then they rubbed him with salt and flung him into an ox-cart to come home as best he could. He couldn’t stand when he came to Valden, he could only crawl on his knees and elbows like an animal.

“And he had barely left his bed when the Beast came…” Gueynor stared blankly at the ceiling, remembering. “Kourgath,” she said, “my uncle Evthan isn’t the man I thought I knew. Not now. Not any more. Maybe it was the beating—or fretting about the Beast, or… what happened to his wife and daughter. She was four— did you know that? Four years old… I don’t know…” At last her voice began to tremble. “I don’t want to know…”

Aldric’s mouth quirked, as if some unpleasant taste had flooded it: the rank, bitter flavour of petty oppressions, of casual cruelties. This was a dirty business, and it was growing dirtier by the minute. Inexorably he was becoming involved in more than just the hunting of the Beast. Or King Rynert’s murderous political necessities. At least now he had a reason for involvement, regardless of how petty that reason might appear. But was it reason enough to kill… ?

No longer restrained by pride and a need to speak, Gueynor was crying openly now: deep, racking sobs that shook her whole body as she lay curled up tightly in the bed like a hurt child, and though Aldric could not begin to guess for whom or what she wept—there were so very many reasons—he was glad to see the tears. She had held back far too much emotion this past while, and such a release could do nothing but good. Words from his past came to him, in a woman’s voice accented by the cold and distant north. “Nobody should laugh if they don’t know how to cry. Think about that.” He had done, and often. Now he put his arms around the girl and held her close until the fit of weeping spent itself.

Then he kissed her tenderly and held her closer still. The embrace changed from comforting to loving as naturally—it seemed to him both then and later—as the rising of the sun outside their window; as if, after the experience of blood and death which they had shared in memory and reality, they needed to share something of life. The two bodies moved together underneath the furs and covers of the big old bed with a slow passion that was less than love and yet much more than merely urgent lust. For the duration of a single heartbeat in that half-lit shuttered room, another face impinged on Aldric’s vision. Kyrin…

And then was gone.

Only afterwards, when they lay quietly in a warm knot of entwined limbs and soft, quick breathing did the Alban become stingingly aware that Gueynor’s nails had drawn blood from his back—not with the clawing of eagerness, but more in reluctance to ever let him go and thus return to the real world outside the house, the room, the bed, where men hurt one another to prove who was superior and a wolf ran in the woods.

His head was cradled in the angle of her neck and shoulder, his left arm curled around her waist below the ribs; dark, tousled hair tickled Gueynor’s nose until she shifted slightly, and that small movement was enough to send him sliding face-foremost into the pillows. “I wanted to be the one who paid you for the killing of the Beast,” she whispered, almost to herself.

“Nobody had to pay me.” The voice was slightly, comically muffled and despite the implied mild criticism in his words, Gueynor found that she was smiling. “Because…” he rolled lazily into a more audible position, “I’m doing this for my own reasons now. Because I want to.”

The Jouvaine girl traced patterns on his chest with one long finger. “So did I,” she said.

“But it isn’t dead yet,” Aldric reminded her.

“Yet,” she repeated. “It will be, soon.” Her finger moved up to his throat and touched the silver torque encircling it. The contact was not a caress, not quite. “And then… ?”

“Afterwards is afterwards,” he murmured enigmatically, his face schooled to neutral wariness. “And it’s like another place. Best wait until we get there.”

Gueynor nodded as though she understood his meaning, although she was none too sure that she did. Kissing the palm of her own right hand, she pressed it lightly once against his forehead and once against his mouth,

echoing the blessing she had seen him use. “Avert all evil, amen,” the girl said in a hasty voice which did not trust itself to lengthy speeches; and slipping out of the bed, she gathered up her clothing and hurried from the room.

Aldric glanced up towards the sky; it was a clear clean blue flecked with long white clouds very high up, and the sun’s disc was barely two handspans over the horizon. It would be a long day; longer still when what he awaited was the night—and the rising of the moon. He had dressed carefully in the clothes and equipment from the previous day, some of it still slightly damp from washing: a clean white shirt from his pack; combat leathers and jerkin with the rips of injury closed with tiny, careful stitches by some woman of the village—or maybe Gueynor herself; the armoured sleeves, concealed still although they were an open secret now;
telek
, short-bow,
tsepan
on his belt. But no poison on the weapons. Not this time. If death was waiting in the forest, it would be the clean death of steel.

Or of silver.

When he left the house that morning, Aldric had deliberately sought out Laine in order to borrow his dogs, remembering how Evthan had put less effort into his own attempt than he might have done. He found a paunchy, fat-faced man whose attitude and air of self-satisfaction angered him at once. After five minutes’ venomously whispered conversation he left, knowing there would no longer be objections voiced about his use of the hounds—or indeed about anything he might have demanded from Laine’s house. Aldric seldom troubled to make threats, but when he did they were extremely effective…

He felt prepared for anything—apart from his first sight of the two beasts he had taken so much trouble to acquire. They were not hunting-dogs at all, but leggy, leering black-and-tan Drusalan guard hounds, creatures with an evil reputation. Aldric’s recent acquaintance with them went beyond mere reputation, and he suspected that these brutes were easily as dangerous as anything they might be used to hunt.

Perspiring at the safe end of the leashes, Laine suggested that he give the hounds his scent. Stiff-legged with appre-hension and in a mood that was more inclined to give them an arrow apiece—or maybe two—he approached gingerly and held out one hand for the dogs to sniff. Though from their expressions neither would have wagged a tail even had they possessed such an ornament, the animals stopped growling and left the hand still on his wrist. That, he guessed uneasily, would have to be presumed a sign of friendship.

As Evthan wrapped both leashes around his fist, Aldric glanced up and saw Gueynor. Hovering on the edge of the small crowd which had gathered to see them off, she was staring at her uncle most intently as if to fix his features in her mind. There were too many people about for the private words he might have said to her, so instead he made a small half-bow in her direction and hoped that she would understand… something at least. An odd expression crossed her face before she turned and walked away.

Evthan touched him lightly on the shoulder and led the way towards the woods. The Alban glanced after him but stood a moment, undecided, confused by the emotion he had seen; then followed slowly, frowning as he tried to identify it. He realised only some hours later that what he had seen was pity.

But by then it was too late.

They walked all day. Walked and stopped: to look for tracks; to listen for faint, furtive movement in the underbrush; to allow the dogs to cast about for scent. And all day they saw, heard and smelled nothing. The refreshing clarity of early morning was quite gone now, if it had ever penetrated this far amongst the trees. The air was warm and close, sticky with the threat of rain… Breathless. It sucked the moisture out of Aldric’s skin to soak into his clothing, and left his mouth tasting dry and acrid; he took frequent gulps from the flask slung at his hip even though every mouthful of its contents—a sour, milky stuff—twisted his face in disgust. All that could be said for the liquid was that it was fairly cool—and even that halfhearted approbation had ceased to apply by noon.

As he had done before, Aldric set an arrow to his bow. More than once he found himself toying with the goose-feather fletching, or hooking the thumb of his shooting-glove over the string in preparation for nothing at all… Each time he jerked one shoulder in an artificial shrug or compressed his lips in a false smile, and returned the missile to bow-case or quiver. Only to do much the same thing all over again within a quarter-hour or so.

As afternoon crawled towards evening the scraps of sky which they could see beyond the tree-tops clouded over until no blue was left: only a featureless expanse of grey sliding from one horizon to the other, tugged and driven by a distant wind that neither man could feel or hear. What light there was became dull, with a smoky, dirty-yellowness about it that seemed to stain whatever it touched.

“We may as well turn back,” Evthan observed, stabbing his toe at the ground. “There’s nothing for the dogs to work on here, and if it starts to rain there’ll be no scent anywhere at all.”

Aldric nodded in agreement. He had been waiting to hear something of the sort for almost an hour now. “As you wish.” His head jerked towards the panting hounds. “But let me get a step or so ahead of that pair—I don’t think they like me, and I know I don’t like them.”

As Evthan stepped aside to let him through, the Alban noticed again—though he had known it since they left Valden—that the hunter was no longer wearing his customary buckskins. Instead he was clad in close-fitting garments of so dark a grey that they were almost black, and a sleeveless vest, a
coyac
, made entirely of black fur of such thickness that it caused the lanky Jouvaine to seem stooped and hunch-shouldered. Wolf-fur, Aldric guessed, and wondered not for the first time what significance the jacket had apart from being a good-luck token.

Once again he slid out an arrow, twisting it around and around between his fingers before nocking it to the shortbow’s string. He looked down introspectively at the bright steel barb and wondered, glancing backwards, whether he should…

Then in one blurred fluid motion he swung around and drew and loosed—at Evthan’s head. The shaft slashed past so closely that it scored the hunter’s jaw, but the incoherent curses spilling from his mouth were drowned out by a yelp of pain.

And Evthan found the Beast behind him.

It was huge and grey, its pelt blotched with blood around the arrow driven deep into its shoulder. Ivory glistened in a wet pink maw and its eyes were embers burning through his own. Then it was gone and the dogs were after it.

“
I—I
had to take the chance!” Aldric’s voice was taut, stammering with shock. “It just… appeared. Out of nowhere, right at your back. And it had you, but—”

“But?” Evthan touched the oozing graze across his face and winced.

“But it hesitated! It
waited
. Why… ?”

“Indecision,” declared the hunter firmly. “If I had been alone, or you…” He left the thought unfinished. “But I wasn’t, which was why it paused. Then you shot it. With… with silver?” His fingers stroked the graze again.

“No. Just steel. Come on and—”

The harsh girning of a fight rang through the woods and scared birds clattered skyward. The frenzied snarling reached a crescendo, changed abruptly to a frantic screech, shot up to a squeal which did not finish and left only echoes hanging on the air. Both men exchanged grim glances and began to run, each hoping to be the first to see the mangled carcass of the Beast—for, outweighed and outnumbered, there could only be one outcome.