City of Demons (7 page)

The ‘jewel' was neither shiny nor particularly gem-like. To Garet, it looked like a stream-smoothed pebble. Salick handed it to him. The bottom of his stomach dropped as the jewel's surface touched his flesh. Curious, he experimented with holding it close to himself and then far away. There was a slight but noticeable difference in his queasiness. He next placed it a hundred paces from the creature and slowly backed away. The fear did decrease with distance from the stone, and no longer increased with closeness to the demon's corpse. Salick watched these activities curiously. Finally satisfied, he handed the stone back to her.

She wrapped it in the cloth Dorict had used to dry the Banes' weapons. “The strongest sensations come from touching the jewel with your bare hands.”

He had to agree. Touching the jewel made him feel as if he were falling from a great height. His stomach made desperate attempts to get past his clenched throat.

The demon's carcass still lay splayed out over the gutted cows. The clouds of the previous night had retreated again to the horizon, and it promised to be another hot, sunny day. By noon the demon would no longer need its jewel; the stench would drive away anything with a nose. But plundered of its jewel, the corpse no longer had any particular terror for Garet. One of his questions had been answered. He took the hatchet from Salick and wiped the blood from it on the grass with a grim smile. Handling demon bodies was becoming second nature.

Not as repulsed by the corpse, Garet realized that this was the first time he had seen these creatures in daylight. Leaving Salick waiting impatiently outside the corral, he examined it.

The first thing that struck him was the colour. He had never seen the Shrieker, save in the uncertain light of the winter lamp or later when it had been charred black by the fire. The ridges that swept up from the hatchet wound on the Basher's head were a startling shade of blue, but the rest of the head, along with its back and the outside of its legs were a deep, dry-blood red, fading to a light pink on the rest of the body.

Prodding the skin while Salick wrinkled her nose in distaste, he discovered it to be as tough as boiled leather. No wonder Mandarack had waited to strike a vulnerable spot. Even a sword slash would be of little use against this natural armour, for he could see that the shield had crushed the throat, not cut it. The legs, at first sight so insect-like, were actually jointed in the same fashion as his own. Although freakishly long and thin, the bunched muscles of its back and shoulders explained the incredible strength the demon had shown last night. As if to offset the length of its limbs, the demon's fingers and toes were shorter than a Shrieker's but much more heavily clawed. Garet swallowed hard as he saw the dried blood and long strands of blond hair stuck to those terrible weapons.

He straightened from his examination, expecting to find Salick fuming in her impatience. Instead, she was staring upriver, past the collapsed house. The crows that had alerted them to the demon's attack were back. They circled nervously in the air above a stand of birch some distance from the house. A crowd of them would land in the branches but then others would suddenly take flight, creating an unending chaos of broiling, noisy birds. Garet realized that they were poised between a fear of the demon's jewel and a hunger for the small mountain of carrion meat in the corral.

She turned from the crows to glance at the demon's body. “Come on, Garet. They'll eat it now.” She looked somberly at the collapsed house. “They'll eat everything.”

Salick seemed to have completely accepted Mandarack's order to tutor Garet. Although she often rolled her eyes or shook her head at the depth of his ignorance, she answered all his questions as fully as possible. In the next two days of riding, he learned more about the South than he had in all the previous years of his life. Not that it all made sense. Each piece of information, although freely given, stubbornly refused to connect with any other piece to make a sensible whole. Why did Shirath have sixteen ‘Lords' and only one ‘King,' a young man named Trax? Why were Banemasters equal to lords even though they had no section of the city, a ‘ward,' Salick had called it, to rule? Why did Salick seem to think that the Shirath Banehall was as powerful as the King if the Ward Lords were less powerful than King Trax? The more he heard riding at Salick's side, the more questions poured out of him.

Marick had soon recovered his good humour. He found Garet's endless curiosity and Salick's determined patience hilarious. From his position, perched behind Dorict on the stout mare, he would ask his much less patient companion outrageous questions. He had run out of questions about Dorict's parents, siblings, cousins of various degrees, and had just finished exploring his feelings about personal hygiene. Dorict endured the assault with mounting irritation.

“Tell me, friend Dorict, what is that thing at the end of your arm? You know, with the five fingers?” Marick spoke loudly enough for the two older apprentices riding ahead of him to hear his innocent tones. He continued his imitation, “Tell me, good sir, what is its use?”

Even Salick had to laugh when Dorict showed him one such use by reaching back and twisting his tormentor's ear. After yelping and breaking free, Marick asked, with even more innocence if possible dripping from his words, “Pray sir, and what purpose does that action serve?”

Dorict growled, driven to a rare state of exasperation, “With you, it serves no purpose at all. Fool!” He squeezed the reins in his hand and looked appealingly at Salick and Garet.

“Marick!” Salick had erased the smile from her face and spoke sternly to the irrepressible boy. “Recite the names of Banehall Lords from the Founding onward.”

Marick put on a face of pure suffering and started the list. “Shirath Banehall was founded in the First year by Banfreat the Baker. He was followed by Moret, the son of a lord, and then by...” The boy's voice droned on in the background and Dorict looked his thanks at Salick.

“How many Banehall Lords are there?” Garet asked.

Salick replied, “Seventy-four. So you can continue with your questions. I'm sure you have more,” she added dryly.

Garet reddened but pressed on. He would not waste this opportunity to prepare himself for whatever awaited him in Shirath. Behind him, Marick droned on, “...and he was replaced by Torinix, who often drank to excess, and later by Sharict, who weighed five hundred pounds...” Dorict's pained expression showed his opinion of Marick's changes to the list, but he obviously preferred the droning character assassination to another torrent of foolish questions. The mare clopped along happily, ignoring both its passengers and revelling in the absence of the weight of the demon's corpse. When they had returned from the farmstead, Salick had removed the Shrieker's jewel, larger and smoother than the one she had cut out earlier, and rolled the now harmless corpse over the lip of the embankment into the trees, covering it with loose dirt and leaves. The bag with the two jewels now jounced and skipped effortlessly at the end of the mare's rope.

“Salick,” Garet began, “you've told me about the city, and I thank you, but I think I must see it at work for it to make sense to me.” Salick considered this and nodded at the logic of it. He continued, “But there are other things I need to know. If I am to be a Demonbane,” a glance at the tall girl showed no objection, “I need to know about the Banehall.”

Although Salick rolled her eyes, she appeared to enjoy playing the expert to Garet's ignorance. She glanced up at the position of the sun and decided that there was time for a long explanation before their noon break. A glance ahead at Mandarack to make sure she was not needed was followed by a quick order directed to Marick to begin his list again, “Properly, this time!”

Satisfied, she continued, “When the demons came to the South, six hundred years ago,” her voice dropping again into the rhythm of an oft-told tale, “those men and women who could bear to face them joined together to protect their families and neighbours. We did not live in large cities in those days. Each lord lived in a high-walled keep and fought for land to give to his supporters and to house his serfs and slaves. There was no peace in those days, and any lord strong enough or arrogant enough could call himself a king. Such men use fear on others, but have little need to conquer it within themselves, so they were among the first to die or be driven from their homes.”

She paused, closing her eyes to search for the thread of the tale, and Garet imagined her sitting on the floor as a child, long arms wrapped around her knees, listening to her parents' stories as he had listened to his mother's songs. Salick opened her eyes again. “A third of the people died. A third fled to the North, preferring to fight the great dragons and suffer through the deep snows of winter.” Here she looked at Garet, studying his black hair, rare in the South, and darker skin. Garet suspected she was looking for the Northerner in him, and he refrained from telling her that most Northerners were as blond as she was.

“The last group, only a third of the people who had lived in this land before the demons came, banded around those few who could fight back. These men and women became the Demonbanes, and were honoured in the land. They hunted down the demons, following the wake of their fear.”

Garet thought of the great sweep of crows fleeing the Basher Demon the night before.

“No family was safe without a Bane nearby, so all the South—farmers with their cows, weavers with their cats, lords with their hunting falcons—gathered into five great cities: Solantor the Great, where the High King lives; high-walled Illick; Akalit, the city of music; Shirath of the two banks; and Old Torrick.” Her voice lost its cadence and she continued conversationally, “I love Shirath, but one day I hope to visit the Banehall in Solantor. They say the market is bigger than all of Shirath, and the palace walls are draped in cloth-of-gold.” She paused, perhaps embarrassed to forget her role as teacher. “Each city took only as much land as could be patrolled by its Banes. The nobles who survived were each given a section of the city to rule. The king's family was chosen from them.”

Garet considered this. “Do the lords still fight each other?” The closest thing in his experience to such a ‘Lord' was Pranix, the Three Roads tavern keeper. Such a man would never allow another to rule over him. And if all lords were like this, then only blood could set a crown on a king's head.

“No,” Salick replied, “the king prevents it.”

“There are sixteen lords and only one king,” argued Garet. “What prevents the lords from killing the king if they wish it?”

“We support the king.”

Ah,
Garet thought,
of course
. The Ward Lords might squabble and brawl like his brothers at a harvest festival, but the Demonbanes were the foundation of the city, more powerful and more necessary than either the lords or the king himself. Without considering the diplomacy of his question, he blurted out, ”Why don't the Banehalls rule the cities then?”

Salick seemed shocked by the suggestion. “We are Banes, not kings!” Seeing Garet's confusion, she relented and tried to explain, “Garet, you cannot be a Bane and any other thing. There is no time. There are no Bane-tailors or Bane-merchants. We train; we patrol; we fight. That is our life. If we stop to live any other life, people die.” She looked at her master, his horse reined in for a moment while he drank from a leather flask. “Not that there aren't some Masters who would make better kings than many whose bottoms have warmed the Shirath throne!”

Mandarack signalled a general halt, and the horses were led down to the river to drink. They had already passed several more houses this day, each abandoned but with no sign of a demon's attack.

Dorict pulled out the last of the Three Roads food and said, “I hope we get to the crossing today, or we'll have a hungry night.” Broad shouldered and stout, Dorict did not sound as if he enjoyed the prospect of a missed meal. When the horses had finished drinking, he took the reins from Garet and led both mounts back up to the prairie to graze.

“If only Dorict could eat grass, he could always be happy here.” Marick had divided the food and now stood there holding out Garet's portion.

Although still wary of Marick's knife-like jibes, Garet decided to risk asking why they couldn't cross the river now. They had passed two or three places already that the horses could have managed.

Marick surprised him with a straightforward answer. “This isn't the right river!” He waved a hand at the nearest bend. “This little thing is called the Plainscutter. It joins the North Ar at a town called Bangt. That's the only place to ferry across the North Ar for fifty miles. We don't really want to cross the river, but a barge should be waiting there to take us to Torrick.” Then the sly smile returned to his face. “Unless, of course, you have become too attached to riding.”

To his own surprise, Garet laughed and was rewarded with a friendly punch from the younger boy. Something had changed between him and his new companions. What had been, at best, a reluctant tolerance of his presence had become acceptance. Ever since he had seized the shaft of that trident, to join three other pairs of arms twisting in and around each other, his status had risen from that of a backcountry farm boy who claimed to have killed a demon, and a small one at that, to what Master Mandarack had called him as they stood beside the hulking body of the farm-destroyer, a Demonbane.