The Demon Lord (37 page)

Crisen released her, half turned and held out his right hand palm uppermost and empty. “Knife,” he said. The chequered wooden hilt of a military dagger was put into his grasp, and he looked down at its chisel point and single razor edge as if he had not seen such a weapon in his life before. One finger stroked the blade, and he gazed incuriously at where it had sliced skin and meat until the ruby beads of blood welled out. Only then did he complete the turn and consider Jervan once again, breathing deeply, drawing a sourceless scent of roses down into his lungs, hearing a soft choral humming in his ears. His eyes were unfocused, seeing nothing—or seeing things denied to other men. Again he smiled.

“Now hold him,” Crisen sighed, a disgusting noise. “Hold him firm…”

Aldric was very different from the elegant figure Marek had last seen, the saturnine and deadly swordsman whose appearance and—increasingly—opinions gave the lie to everything he claimed to be. He was still entirely dressed in black, but where before the sober colour had been contrasted and relieved by polished metals, dazzling white silk and clean skin, here all was the one dingy russet brown. Until he emerged from the darkness of the cell he was one with its shadows, and only the glitter of eyes betrayed that anything beyond the light had any life at all. When he saw Marek—and more importantly, when he saw the slumped unconscious bodies on the floor—his face cracked into a kind of smile. Cracked quite literally, so that a fine web of fractures ran crisscross through the crust of blood which masked his features. Lord Geruath’s blood, mostly; but not all. The treatment meted out by Crisen’s retainers had not been gentle…

“I didn’t do it,” he said softly after a moment’s silence.

“I know,” said Marek with equal gentleness. The young man had not expected to see any face again except that of the soldier sent to finish him, and though he had not intended to be slaughtered like a sheep—the metal dish sunk half its diameter in the panelling bore witness to that fact, for its rim had been ground viciously sharp against the stone cell floor—he had certainly resigned himself to dying in one way or another. Marek had given back his life.

“If you had killed the old lord,” the demon queller continued, “and God and King Rynert both know that you’re capable of doing so, you wouldn’t have made such a slaughter-house of it. I saw the body… And you would never have dishonoured your
tsepan
like that.”

Aldric acknowledged the words with a slight inclination of his head, then eyed the corridor and the two men sprawling in it. He toed one of the retainers on to his back, where the man lay breathing stertorously. There was a little blood around his nostrils, and the unmistakable print of a human hand driven into his armour as if set mere as a decoration. “A form of the High Accelerator,” observed Aldric knowledgably, lifting an eyebrow in Marek’s direction.

The demon queller gave him a long, hard stare. “When this is over,” he said severely, “you and I must have a little talk.”

“When this is over,” the Alban echoed. “Which it isn’t yet. My gear is in one of these other rooms—all of it.” Marek knew what that meant. Both of Aldric’s hands were bare: without gloves or any other ornament… “I heard them carrying it past,” Aldric continued “but I don’t know which room”—the long corridor was lined with maybe a score of bronze-faced doors—”and I haven’t time to search them all.”

“No need.” Marek Endain grinned a hard, toothy grin that was reminiscent of Aldric’s foster-father Gemmel, and gestured with one hand in the air. “
Acchai an-tsalaer h’loeth
!” he said, then clenched his fist and opened it. There was a low droning noise which shot up briefly beyond hearing, and Aldric winced as it stung his ears. One of the many doors burst outward off its hinges and clanged on to the floor. “There you are!”

Armour and weapons had been laid out in orderly fashion, just as they had been lifted from the floor of Aldric’s room, and a hasty inspection proved to his own satisfaction that nothing was missing. With the speed born of long practice he scrambled into his battle armour, carefully checking straps and laces as he drew each one tight. Marek watched uncertainly as the young man he thought he now knew by acquaintance as well as by reputation built himself, piece by black steel piece, into an image of war formed of lacquerwork and polished metal. There was a subtle scent which always clung to
an-moyya-tsalaer
, the Great Harness: a harsh odour of metal and oil and leather which was masculine and not unpleasant.

But to the demon queller’s sensitive nostrils it reeked of sudden, violent death.

Aldric looped Widowmaker’s crossbelt over his shoulder and made her scabbard secure on the weapon-belt about his waist, and then with studied arrogance fitted the steel and silver of the Echainon spellstone around his armoured wrist. Yes indeed, Marek told himself, I look forward to hearing you explain that thing away. If you can. Then he looked at Aldric’s face and doubted that such questions would be wise.

“Aldric,” he said. The name sounded very loud above the muted scrape of armour being donned and the Alban glanced at him, saying nothing but with curiosity quite clear in his eyes. “Aldric, when you left the library I… I went back to the cellar. The room where Sedna died.”

“I had not thought you prey to morbid curiosity,” Aldric returned, careful that what he said could not be wrongly taken as an insult.

“Not curiosity. Necessity. Once I was certain what…”

“Enough ambiguity, Marek. When you found out that this thing was the Devourer… !” Aldric ended on a prompting uptone.

“When I knew that it—It was Ythek Shri, I knew what I had to find. And I found them.”

“What?” The younger man was plainly becoming impatient.

“Bones.” Aldric stared at him so intently that Marek hesitated only briefly before elaborating. “The bones are what anchor the soul to fragile flesh,” he intoned as if quoting from a book. The Alban might have questioned that had he been in a pedantic mood, but for now he was content to hear out the demon queller. “So the bones of someone slain by unexpected violence—”

“Violence usually is unexpected,” interposed Aldric drily.

“An executioner’s sword, after due process of law… ?” queried Marek. “No. I think we both understand my precise meaning. And understand that these will have some power.”

The small pieces of bone which Marek drew out of his belt-pouch looked insignificant, but he held them with such care—almost reverence—that Aldric moved close enough to have a better look. “Knucklebones,” he said. “You’ve cleaned them.” There was a pause while he recalled the other human wreckage on the cellar floor, and despite his carapace of armour Marek saw him shudder. “That’s just as well…”

“The knucklebones of Sedna. They might be of some use.” Marek looked down at the small, ivory-pale fragments and his face clouded with pity. “Some of the people in the fortress told me about her, about how pretty she was. As dainty as a doll…”

“But now she’s dust,” said Aldric, and the words were harsher than intended. “Bones and dry dust. Like my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters . . : We are all dust, Marek. Soon or late, we return to it.”

He had put on silken head-wrap, mesh-mail coif and peaked, flaring Alban helmet, but it was only when he laced his war-mask into place that the last vestige of humanity was extinguished. Marek looked at him and remembered his first words to this strange old-young man:
At least you’re no demon
...Now he wondered, recalling what he knew of Aldric-eir Talvalin. There were more demons than those described in the books of Sedna’s library…

His thoughts were interrupted by a steely singing as Isileth Widowmaker glided from her scabbard. The
taiken’s
perfect edges caught and trapped a glitter of reflected lamplight as Aldric strode past him to the door.

“Come on,” the Alban said. “We have business with Lord Crisen.”

Marek stared apprehensively; he was quite sure that “we” had not included him…

The most likely place to find any Overlord, even one so… unconventional… as Crisen Geruath, was the great presence chamber at the heart of the inner citadel. And yet there were none of the guards, none of the retainers—none of the servants that such an important hall should have required/There was no movement at all, and the fortress seemed empty from top to bottom.

“What’s the hour?” breathed Aldric. The place was like a holy house: it discouraged loud voices by its very atmosphere.

After a heartbeat’s pause Marek realised that the question was genuine and not merely noise for its own sake. Aldric had been locked in that lightless cell for long enough to confuse him—as if the beating whose marks showed on his face had not been disturbing enough…

“After midnight,” the Cernuan returned, honestly regretting he could not be more precise. But he, too, had had more to contend with than simply keeping track of time. “I think, after one in the morning.”

“You think…” Even so, that would explain the lack of people. Servants had to sleep sometime…

Neither man had noticed the stealthy movement of a shadow across the distant corridor junction. It was too dark. Otherwise they might have wondered how so dense a shadow could be cast with no light and only total blackness behind it. For it was blacker even than the darkest darkness… But the question went unasked. And consequently unanswered.

Marek turned the next corner a few steps ahead of Aldric—and collided with three lord’s-men armed with the inevitable gisarms. They had been moving so furtively that he had not heard them, whether by accident or through fear of what else might be roaming the gloomy corridors of Seghar. Whatever the reason, there was no room on either side for retreat and for an instant no one moved.

That instant was enough for Aldric. In answer to the unexpected, half-heard clattering of armour—and the warning which was screaming in his brain—he darted after Marek, took in the situation at a glance and charged all three men at once. The demon queller flattened himself against a wall and watched with awe that swiftly turned to queasy fascination.

The Alban’s wildcat recklessness took the lord’s-men totally off guard—after all, it was they who were superior in numbers—and when at last they reacted he was already far too close…

Gemmel Errekren had trained his foster-son for four long years; and yet he had been shocked when he had witnessed the training put to use. Marek had not even been warned what to expect, and when the first hot splattering of someone else’s blood slapped wetly across his face, his stomach almost turned inside out.
Taiken
drawn and balanced in both hands, Aldric slid between two intersecting spears and ripped a single stroke through the men on either side
Tarannin-kai
, twin thunderbolts: two-sides-at-once. If the Cernuan’s stomach was almost everted with nausea, two stomachs were literally everted by sharp steel…

Sidestepping the eviscerated bodies as they began to fall, Aldric took an incoming spear-point across the curved peak of his helmet in a burst of vivid yellow sparks, then sliced along the thrust’s line and lopped off the spearman’s hands above the wrists.

He was armoured, they were not; they hesitated, he did not. That made all the difference and in twelve seconds it was over. Hesitation had already cost him far too much, and at some stage in the darkness of his solitary confinement Aldric had decided he would hesitate, consider, even think no more. He would
act
. The consequences of his darkness-born decision flowed thickly across the floor of Seghar citadel… There was no hatred in his mind for any of these men; they were simply doing what they had to do. Dying, mainly, he observed with icy cynicism. But not all of them. One man huddled by the wall, hugging himself with the stumps of bloody arms. Aldric leaned over him, lazily wiping Widowmaker’s blade clean with a shred of unsoiled cloth.

“You, man… where is your Overlord?” he demanded. Deep in shock, the retainer made no sound. “You still live, after a fashion,” Aldric stated bleakly, touching his
taiken’s
point to the man’s throat. “That can change. I can change it. So answer me!”

“Aldric! Have you no pity, man?” Dazed by what he had seen, Marek was still unwilling to tolerate the
eijo’s
behaviour. “Remember what you are and not what you pretend to be… !”

Aldric straightened, Widowmaker sweeping up to rest against his shoulder, and if he was shamefaced it was lost amid the shadows of his mask and helmet. Nonetheless he bowed and left the soldier in some sort of painful peace. “My conscience,” he drawled coldly, and Marek scowled at his tone. “Pity, did you say… ?” he continued in the same soft voice. “Of course I have pity.”

Then ail the softness vanished. “But not here. Not now.”

The Overlord’s apartments were beyond the presence chamber. Aldric knew that much without needing to carve the information out of anyone. Unlatching one side of the great hall’s double doors, he swung it open silently and peered inside. A few stubborn sparks glowed and spat in one of the hearths, scenting the air with the resin of burnt pinewood; nothing else moved in the darkness. But there was another smell than that of wood. It was the same sweet tang of incense which had clogged the air in the cellar. Except that this smelled fresh…

Sword in hand, Aldric strode towards the dimly outlined door at the far end of the hall, determined to kick it open. Halfway there his feet skidded beneath him, slipping on a wet film which covered the floor and at the same time kicking into lumps of something soft. Beneath the black armour he felt the hair rise on his forearms. “Marek?” His voice was almost inaudible. “Marek—give me some light… quickly… !” Even as he made the request, and it was a request rather than an order, Aldric was doubting any need for urgency… or indeed any need for light.

All that he could recognise was the bearded head. Everything else was simply meat—and meat butchered with more force than skill. “Jervan.” The slimy mass might once have been Jervan; might once have been human. Now it was a coagulation of chunks and gobbets glued together by congealing blood.

Aldric stared at it and came very close to retching; not because of what he saw but because of what passed through his mind. Jervan had died like this for a reason—and the only reason which he knew involved Gueynor as well. A concern that came very close to fear uncoiled inside him like a cold black snake, the kind of concern which he had doubted he would ever feel again for Evthan’s niece. What in hell would Crisen do to her, if he could do this to his garrison commander? Then the thought solidified and his oath became reality.