Knight of the Demon Queen. Barbara Hambly
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the work shed was silent as if it had been plunged to the center of the earth.
“When you passed through the burning mirror this summer past, you entered Hell.” Like a dragon she spoke into his mind, placing images there. He saw himself pasting the gnomewitch Mab’s sigil on the enamel that covered the mirror’s unholy glass, felt the cold, burning touch of the Demon Queen’s mouth on his. The horrors of illusory death, illusory pain, as if he were dreaming within a dream about being tortured and killed, without the ability to wake up.
“But there are other Hells,” she went on. “The Hell of the Sea-wights, whence the Archwight Adromelech sent Folcalor to trap the mages and the star-drakes, is not the Hell of my Realm. All Hells are not alike. Nor are all demons, and in some Hells it is deadly for the demonkind to tread.” These images passed beyond his ability to picture them: only suffocation, dread, and the promise of horrible pain.
“You’re goin’ to give me a couple of coins, then, and a little basket and send me to market?” His mouth was dry. He couldn’t imagine a place where the thing he spoke to would fear to enter. “For what?”
“Only water.” Her voice was as casual as a child pretending disinterest in a coveted toy. He saw it in his mind even as she spoke of it, if she did speak. “There’s a spring in the mountains there, where the rocks are silver and red.” It felt as if he were recalling something once visited, or known long ago and forgotten. “Its water has a virtue against the demons who dwell behind the mirror. It is a grievous life, to be Queen of Hell.” Her lovely voice grew sad.
“Demonkind are fractious and divisive, ignorant of their own best good. There have been attempts to unseat me, to devour me, by those who should thank me for the steady strength and kindness of my rule.” He remembered her tearing the head off a small wight and throwing it aside, then continue speaking to him with gore dripping from her chin.
“The Hell to which I will send you is inimical in many ways to us and our kind. Some of our spells continue to work there, but many do not. This water is a weapon I need to maintain my power. But you understand that I cannot fetch it myself. Nor can any of those loyal to me go there.”
“Yet you trust me.”
She smiled. He could not see her—could see nothing but the stream of black-red running down the wall—yet he could feel her smile. “John.” Almost he could feel the touch of her cold hand on his hair. “You know what I can do.”
She had tried to trick him once into paying for the spells against Folcalor’s Sea-wights with a thunderstone, meteor iron whose origin—being extraterrestrial—was not affected by the magics of the world because those magics knew nothing of its origins. At least that was what Jenny and Morkeleb had said. Rightly, the gnomes had refused to part with one. With the thunderstone she could have wrought a gate into the world of humankind that could not be closed by human magics and probably, like the burning mirror that was framed in meteor iron, couldn’t be destroyed.
Was the water the same? If she’d ruled the spawn of the Hell behind the mirror for countless thousands of years, it was likely she was perfectly capable of carrying on for another few millennia, water or no water. Or were these new and stronger demons a threat to her as well?
His hands felt cold, and he stared at the flowing wound in the shadows, wondering how to get himself out of this alive. He was far beyond anything he had ever read in Dotys or Gantering Pellus or Polyborus, far beyond the craziest hints of dreams or magic or madness.
And if he guessed wrong, he knew, people would die. Muffle or Aunt Rowe or any of a hundred others whose lives had all his days been his charge. Ian or little Maggie, his and Jenny’s youngest child. Adric or Jen herself.
“And I can just sashay on into this Hell with me little bottle and fetch you this water, then?” He pushed up his spectacles again and scratched the side of his nose. “Nobody’s goin’ to ask me what I’m doin’ there?”
“Naturally,” she crooned, “I will not send you on your errantry naked. You will know the way from the place where the gate is to the spring in the mountains. And you will have a helper to advise you.”
“I can hardly wait,” he said.
And a wind blew the candles out.
Dreams opened, windows into windows in his mind. In his dream he had been walking for hours and days, weeks maybe, in a bleak stony country where nothing grew but tufts of herbage in crevices. The rock was carved and twisted into waves, caverns, combers, dragons, and razor-edged ridges as if by violent winds, but he felt no wind. Sun hammered on its silver-threaded rusty glassiness. In pools he saw asphalt bubble and drip, but he felt no heat, nor did the steam that rose from the deep clefts have any smell. He came down out of the rock mountains to a maze of dry gullies, sandy flats, and knots of black, wasted trees among gouged walls of rock and earth. He saw the dust scamper, the black trees bend and shake.
He was a naturalist and a tracker. He could call to mind every foot of the Winterlands, every root and rock and trail. That was what it took to stay alive in his land. Looking around him now he made note of the shape of the land—the notches and ridges that would let him climb to the higher red-and-silver peaks where, he knew, the spring would lie.
Later still he was beside water and made note there, too, of the windings and changes of the riverbed. Lake flats lay near, speckled with humped gray silent plants barely poking their heads above the surface.
In this place he saw no life, but something told him that life was there.
In one hand he held the onyx ink bottle on its long red ribbon. In the other, three flax seeds, like little black beads in his ink-stained palm. The ink bottle was unstoppered and empty, though he had the stopper with him, too. Holding both was awkward, so he put the flax seeds in the bottle.
At once smoke began to coalesce from the dry air around him. He heard a voice cursing him, foul and furious. The smoke poured into the bottle, and he felt the onyx turn hot in his hand. He stoppered the bottle. The cursing stopped—or, in the ensuing silence, could still be heard muffled and tiny from within the bottle—but the bottle itself was warm, like bread new-taken from the oven.
You will have a helper to advise you, he heard the Demon Queen’s voice say again. Looking down, he saw a little puddle of blood on the dark rock at his feet. The words came out of that. He shivered, knowing what kind of a helper it would be.
Let him who has trafficked with demons, and bought and sold whatever of money or goods to them, for any reason whatever, be burned alive on a pyre of dry wood soaked with oil, and all those goods with them, Polyborus had said.
Let him who has summoned demons through a gate into this world be cut into pieces alive, and those pieces afterward burnt, not leaving so much as a finger unconsumed by the fire.
Let him who has willingly taken a demon into his body be cut to pieces and burnt, and the ashes mixed with salt and silver and cast into the sea, that nothing of his substance may afterward be used by the Hellspawnedkind.
Let him who has gone through the gates into Hell be burned, upon dry wood and a hot fire, and bound with chains rune-warded to hold demonkind, for it must be assumed that any man who goes into Hell comes back changed in his body and his soul, if indeed it is the same man, and not merely a semblance of him, who emerges.
For there is no lawful reason for humankind to touch, or speak to, or have traffic with the Hellspawnedkind. Rather should that man perish, and suffer his wife, or his son, or his goods all to perish utterly, than that demons be given a gate into this world.
John knew the words. He’d read them a dozen times over fifteen howling winters, back when he’d only sought knowledge for knowledge’s own sake. He’d read them a hundred times since his return with Jenny from the South, seeking desperately for an answer to Jenny’s terrible silences, to Ian’s debilitating grief.
He woke suddenly, lying on the dirt floor with the late winter dawn oozing leaden through the cracks in the shutters, the stink of burned tallow