The Demon Lord (32 page)

The hanging boulder, he thought frantically. If he could make it fall, complete the cave-in, it might bring down enough rubble to block the passageway completely. Or make a barricade to hide behind. Or something…

As his lamplight swayed across the rock it seemed to move and shudder, but became comfortingly huge and stable when he stopped beside it. It would be big enough to shelter him easily if only he could knock it free. The man swung his crossbow like a hammer, felt the impact slamming up his arms and heard the wooden stock cracking in protest. Part of the weapon’s mechanism gave way, but the boulder shifted slightly. Ever so slightly.. He hit it again, then a final time with all his strength and jumped sideways out of its path.

Nothing happened.

His lantern showed him: the rock had merely settled a little against its metal props like someone shifting in bed. A trickle of fragments pattered against the ground, but stopped before more than a handful had fallen. The soldier cursed savagely, rage swamping his terror for an instant, and stepped forward with his makeshift bludgeon hefted in both hands.

It was then that he saw the fragments more closely and his gorge rose. They were soft, some pallid and others a rich, sticky crimson like things he might see on a butcher’s slab. Except that these chunks of meat were far far fresher than any butcher’s cuts—so fresh and warm that they steamed slightly in the trembling light of his lamp. To recognise the rest of his squad—or what was left of them—had taken two beats of his frantically pumping heart. The wavering lantern slashed shadows and moist reflections from the curving, claustrophobic walls until at last its light reluctantly stroked the curves and angles of the boulder suspended at his shoulder.

Except that it was not a boulder, but something— some
thing
—that had been curled up asleep, or dormant, or… digesting… cradled in its own long limbs. And he had wakened it! Until then the illusions had been complete. “Shape-shifter,” the soldier whimpered with useless understanding, and the creature dropped, falling not as a stone falls but like a cat, unfolding crooked joints and landing lightly for all its spiked and jagged bulk.

The air grew colder and frost formed on the soldier’s helmet. That cold air stank of blood and death. Triple-taloned feet grated down through mud on to the stone beneath as Ythek Shri took a single precise, raking step forward. It gurgled softly: a thick, indescribable sound. The soldier’s lamp fell with a clatter and in that distorted light the demon’s bulk loomed larger still as it leaned gracefully down, head opening like a grotesque blossom in a fanged, horrific yawn…

Aldric was not the only one to hear it: a low cry more of disbelief than anything else, which reverberated hollowly along the tunnels and faded into disturbing echoes before anyone could do more than guess at its source. But he was the only one apart from Marek to be absolutely sure about its cause, and despite his privately held sardonic view he was the only one at all to make a move towards it.

He had taken barely six jog-trotting strides down the passageway before a shriek of pure animal terror cut through the darkness before him, trailing away to silence like the wavering wolf-song which had mourned at Ev-than’s funeral. Again the wail throbbed in his ears, more piercing now, impossibly high for any masculine throat— a sound that was fear and agony given voice.

It stopped incomplete with a shocking abruptness and the Alban began to run. Even though there was the stone of Echainon to explain his foolhardy confidence, he was still gripping Widowmaker when he slithered to a halt, his flaring nostrils filled with a warm slaughterous reek and the incongruous faint scent of roses… Pivoting slowly on one heel, he swept the lowering tunnel with lamp and eyes,
taiken
poised to strike at anything that moved. There was nothing but the distant firefly dance of approaching torches. Nothing living.

Aldric braced himself, then turned the light and his accompanying gaze downward to the slimed and stinking floor.

Marek had done well for a fat old man, outrunning all but the few troopers who fidgeted nervously in the background. They were staring at Aldric, who was staring in his turn apparently at nothing. His face was pallid, its skin drawn taut over tightly clamped jaws, and when Marek met his shock-dark agate eyes the demon queller quickly looked away from the horror there. Instead, and most unwisely he glanced down.

“Oh, merciful…” he faltered, knowing even as he said it that there had been no mercy here. Marek felt sick—he who was supposedly inured to horrors— because what he was looking at confirmed everything. Even the rose perfume merely underlined it… Issaqua. The Bale Flower. But where? And when… ?

When Geruath strode up, regardless of the armed retainers flanking him Marek seized the Overlord by one elbow and dragged him towards the pulped obscenity sprawling at their feet. “That, my lord,” he hissed in a voice which dripped contempt, “is what your demon does. Will I destroy it—or do you still want it controlled? Well… my lord?”

Geruath licked his lips, merely an unconscious aid to thought but in the circumstances hideously inappropriate. Then he shrugged, apparently undisturbed by the atrocity, and even smiled. Staring at him, Aldric’s own lips stretched in a snarl of hatred. All the Talvalins hated well, but the last clan-lord of all had had a deal of practice at it. Though he knew that the Overlord’s son could see him plainly—and the expression on his face could have been read by a half-blind man—Aldric was past caring. Past diplomacy, past dissembling; something would have to die for this. Then he fought down his revulsion sufficiently to bend over the corpse’s shattered head and very gently close what remained of its eyes.

“I am,” he said, straightening up, “going to arm myself. Properly. Then I shall obliterate this demon.” Isileth Widowmaker poised significantly at her scabbard’s mouth while he swept them all with a cold glare. “And anyone—anyone at all—who tries to hinder me…” The blade hissed slowly out of sight.

“What about… ?” Crisen nodded towards the remains.

“Someone give me a helmet,” Aldric demanded, ignoring the question. “Now leave me alone.” It was not a request, it certainly was not polite—but it was obeyed at once by all, even Marek. Only when the others had gone did Aldric draw out the spellstone. He knew that this was wrong; he had seen one long-buried body in the ancient mound, had watched another lowered into the earth. Jouvaines put their dead into the dirt… But enough foulness had been visited on this poor man already, and Aldric at least had the power to make his funeral clean.

When he removed its buckskin covering there was no billowing of blue fire—only a soft shimmer like a luminescent fog, that cast no light, drove back no shadows and yet was somehow comforting. There was no dishonour and no impropriety in its use. Not for this purpose. “
Abath arhan
.” The invocation was a whimper, like prayer and the Echainon stone responded. Pale translucent tongues of lapis lazuli licked at the Alban’s hand, warmed by pity and compassion as once it had blazed with the white heat of hate. The spellstone’s powers were his now, pulsing with the blood-flow in his veins, concentrated by the wishes of his mind.

A vast and stooping shape oozed in ponderous silence from the shadows at his back, and a crooked three-clawed talon reached smoothly out…

“
Alh’noen ecchaur i aiyya
,” Aldric murmured, and all was sudden brilliance as a clean hot flame poured from the crystal’s heart: engulfing, consuming, purifying in a single instant. Had the Alban glanced behind him then he would have seen the demon clearly, revealed by the incandescence of his own making. But he saw nothing, and heard nothing as it fled with long heron-strides back into the friendly darkness.

Aldric knelt, feeling the expected weariness flood over him as he moved, but knowing at the same time that it was less than before. The Echainon stone had taken his emotion, not his energy, and that emotion by its very nature had been directed outward and not in. “
An-diu k’noeth-ei
,” he said, and traced the blessing of farewell above the still-warm ashes on the tunnel floor. Gathering them together—just dust and ashes now, without a trace of moisture—he poured them respectfully into the helmet and inclined his head a little. The spellstone’s fires had died to a slow sapphire writhing in the centre of the crystal, and setting the helmet carefully aside he made to take the talisman from his wrist… and then hesitated, glancing sharply down the passage in response to a faint tingling in his brain. The sensation was so faint that it was scarcely there at all, and yet…

Aldric left the stone where it was, hidden by a glove. That was more comfortable—and more comforting.

Back among the Overlord’s retainers, Aldric sought out one man and gave him the ash-filled helmet. Taking the makeshift urn with infinite gentleness, the soldier saluted with his free hand and spoke rapidly in that dialect which the Alban had heard so frequently here, but still could not understand.

“He thanks you,” Marek Endain translated. “For the way you acted towards one who was a lord’s-man and a stranger.”

Aldric bowed in response, his face sombre. “Thank him for his courtesy,” he said, “and apologise that I do not do so myself.” Marek did as he was asked, and as he turned back caught a certain look in Aldric’s eye; an instant later he had caught the man’s arm for fear that look foreshadowed violence.

Aldric tore his baleful stare—the stare of a cat at an out-of-reach mouse—from the Overlord and his son and glanced instead at Marek, guessing the demon queller’s concern. His slow, mirthless grin was cruel in the lamp-

light as he peeled the other’s fingers from his sleeve. “No,” he said softly. “Not yet. Not in the midst of their retainers. But soon. I don’t have to look for any more reasons…”

He had enough and more than enough. And they were no longer the intangibles of a king’s command, or a promise made in bed to a faithless woman. They were the same dark, personal justifications which had brought fire and death into the fortress of Dunrath. Revenge for self, revenge for the dead, hatred, loathing, and a knowledge that some men were born to die. Just as he was born to kill them. All he needed now was opportunity…

Once through the secret doorway, Aldric waited until two soldiers heaved it shut, then as they left he uncoiled like a sleek black cat from the corner where he had crouched on heels, watching. His lantern was in one hand, the gloved sword-hand, but in the other and almost growing from its surface was a closely fitting thing of steel and silver.

Marek looked at it and then at Aldric’s face, unable to decide which he disliked more: the glinting object or the cool familiarity with which the Alban handled it…

“Do you realise,” Aldric murmured confidentially, “that this door was open?” His voice dropped to hiss of barely-audible impatient menace. “And that the demon— which I will not ask you about again, save once—could have been in front of us… ?”

Shadows piled thickly beyond the pool of lamplight and Marek realised with a shiver just how exposed were the cellars after the low, snug tunnels. And even then the monstrosity had killed one man and evaded all the others…

Aldric looked at the Cernuan with grim wisdom in his eyes, knowing the demon queller’s thoughts because they so closely matched his own. He took a glove from where it had been tucked into his belt and worked the thin leather on to his left hand until the spellband was hidden once more, then looked around him.

“Though I have seen nothing,” he conceded without any comfort. “Yet…”

“I regret to say,” Lord Geruath muttered half to himself, “that the warlock is correct. This abomination
must
be destroyed…” His son watched him stride about, but prudently said nothing. They were alone in the Overlord’s private chambers, and Crisen had just watched his father raise a flask of fortified wine and drain it without perceptible effect; even the tremor in Geruath’s voice came only from leashed-in fury.

“But surely you must have guessed?” Crisen ventured at last.

“I do not guess!” his father snapped. “Least of all where your convoluted plotting is concerned.” Crisen shot a glance from the corner of one eye and felt his stomach lurch. “Oh yes, dear boy. I know all about your plans for Seghar. A city-state independent of all allegiances, was it not… ? We must discuss the matter at some time.”

“But you know…” Crisen burst out, catching himself just in time.

“Nothing?” the Overlord finished, raising his eyebrows. “On the contrary, my secretive son, I know everything. Give me results that I can see, that I can touch, that I can profit by—and I promise you no questions will be asked about how you achieved them. But fail and I will not lift a hand, not a finger to save either you or that reptile you call friend.”

“You’re mad…” It was not an explosive protest but a disbelieving little whimper as the preconceptions of years were overturned. “You
are
... Everybody knows it…”

Geruath’s chuckle was soft, urbane and very sane in-

deed. “
Lordly
is the current euphemism,” he said. “You will learn, Crisen, you will learn. Indeed, you above all should know that things may be other than they appear. Mm?”

“Why, father? In the name of the Fire, why?”

“Your lamented mother did not ask such foolish questions. She accepted that what I did was right—and accepted, too, the profitable proof that it was so. One of the wisest things a man can do is to appear a fool. Fools are not trusted, but neither are they distrusted. They are ignored as harmless. They are tolerated. They are humoured in ways a clever man can never hope to match.”

Geruath took another and more controlled sip of wine, then hunted about until he found a cup to drink from. “We could have been in this citadel ten years ago,” he said as he played with the silver goblet, turning it over and over in his hands. “Your mother at least could have died an Overlord’s lady. But she understood my caution—because your dreams of independence are also mine!”

Crisen started at the revelation. Voord had suggested it to him a year ago, and now it seemed their plan had been pre-empted by a decade—unless Voord had found out about it in Drakkesborg… His brain began to spin and a headache started pounding in his temples.