City of Masks (7 page)

That was Garet.

With no time to recover the ends of his weapon dangling in the mud, the Bane scrambled up and wrapped his arms around the Snake Demon’s long neck, just below the head, hugging it tightly so that its beak could not twist around and set its fangs in him. In snatches, he could see the Gold still pummeling its tail and back, to little effect except to make the beast angrier, it seemed. At last, unable to devour Garet, and perhaps beginning to resent the continuous attack on its rear parts, the demon slithered away, knocking aside the lantern and sliding its head into the side pipe.

“Don’t let it get in there,” the Gold yelled. “Heaven knows where that pipe goes!”

To a very large privy, Garet guessed, for he was in an excellent position to smell where it might lead. He still hung from the demon’s neck, more from desperation than strategy. Now the Snake Demon could not move forward and escape unless it dislodged him. The tail thrashed, knocking over the Gold with the club, and sending Garet swinging like one of Lord Andarack’s pendulums.

“Get down!”

Garet let go, dropping to the slimy floor. Salick’s trident pierced the Snake Demon just behind its head. This was both a demonstration of her strength, for demon hide was notoriously thick, and her cleverness, for the beast could go no farther and had not the wit to pull back.

She held it there while Garet and another Bane wrestled with its body, avoiding the small, sharp claws while the Gold with the club set himself and proceeded to kill it with blunt force.

After twenty or so blows, he stopped and wiped his brow.

“Thank you, Salick. That’s so much easier when it isn’t moving!”

Salick pulled the trident free, bracing one booted foot against the demon’s head.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, rubbing her back where she had hit the floor of the tunnel. She took her hand away and looked in dismay at the filth on it. “Yes, please don’t mention it ever again!”

Garet laughed, as did the others. It came out a bit hysterically, but that was to be expected when a demon’s jewel was so near.

He leaned against the slick wall and caught his breath while the other Banes stretched the creature out to its full length. Not for the first time he wondered why the fear cast by a jewel outlasted the demon that bore it. After six hundred years, there was still much they didn’t know about these terrors.

Another Gold and a Green stood behind the demon’s killer, a young man named Salar, if Garet remembered correctly.

“Look at that! Seven yards or I’m a Black Sash,” Salick said. “But honestly, Salar, how did you let this get by you and into the sewers?”

Salar held out a hand, just as filthy as Salick’s, Garet saw. His face was also caked with slime, as if he had fallen at least once in his pursuit of the beast. Garet’s dinner threatened to reappear.

All of us will need an hour in the washing rooms before we get any sleep tonight.

“Not our fault, really. We were coming across the Bridge to relieve the Palace Plaza patrol when we heard splashing in the river. We tied our sashes together and lowered a lantern to see the tail of this misbegotten thing disappearing into the outlet pipe. The grate was rusted—something the Palace should look to—and besides, who ever heard of a Snake Demon swimming anyway? Nobody, that’s who!”

Salick nodded. “Branet will have to hear of this right away. He’s in the Palace Plaza. Garet and I will return that way if you would take care of . . .”

She didn’t have to finish the question. Salar nodded. He would cut out the demon’s jewel from where it sat above the small black eyes and take it to the repository in the hills north of the city. There it would be cast into a deep pit, where its penetrating fear would be a danger to no one. The body would be cast there as well, unless Lord Andarack wanted it for his investigations into the nature of demons.

Salar borrowed the Green’s axe and told them to go back up the tunnel.

“Find Chetorth and bring him directly to the Physician. Tell Banerict he was cut in the sewers so he knows how dirty the wound could be.”

“Is he badly hurt?” Salick asked.

Salar laughed. “More scared than hurt. The clawed beast came out of a side tunnel where it had been waiting to ambush us. It raked Chetorth with these ridges,” he said, and tapped the saw-toothed skull protrusions with his borrowed axe. “Gave him a good cut, and a good scar to brag about when it heals, that’s all.”

Garet smiled. He had enough scars now that he had stopped bragging months ago.

Salick touched the sword scar she bore on one cheek.

“Tell him not to boast too much. It’s bad luck.”

They bid the others farewell and walked back the way they had come. The echo of axe blows followed them as Salar chopped out the demon’s jewel. This put Garet in mind of Dorict’s request that he speak to Lord Andarack, something he had failed to do as the other guests had left so quickly. He looked at Salick.

“Has Lord Andarack called for any more jewels or dead demons?” Garet asked.

Salick shrugged. “Not that I have heard. Perhaps he’s onto some other project now,” the Gold said and smiled. They both knew the Ward Lord’s scientific investigations were at times erratic.

“You sat beside him. Did he speak to you at dinner?”

Salick was busy wiping her hands over and over again on her ruined tunic.

“A few polite words,” she said. “I tried to ask him about the silkstone experiments for Dorict’s sake, but he seemed deaf to such questions.”

Why, he wondered. In Garet’s opinion, these experiments were incredibly important, not just to Dorict and the rest of the Banes, but to the entire city. So far Andarack had found that silkstone was the only substance that blocked the fear radiating from a demon’s jewel. Lord Andarack had discovered this last winter, and the suit of silkstone armour he fashioned had saved both Garet and Salick in the final battle with the Caller Demon. Unfortunately, the stone was rare in the city, and by now Garet had expected to hear of some trading mission to get more. Such stone suits might be clumsy, but they were also the first real chance to end the six-hundred year curse of the demons, not just here in Shirath, but throughout the South and the Midlands.

Branet was nowhere in sight when they came to the space below the open grate. Calling brought no answer or help, so Garet hoisted Salick onto his shoulders, staining the last clear patch of his vest. Once up, she caught one end of the rope-hammer and hauled him up after her. It took both their efforts to push the grate into place.

“Perhaps we should swim across the river rather than use the bridge,” Garet said. He stripped off his ruined sash and vest, balling them up and tucking them under one arm.

Salick shook her head. “You forget that’s where the outlet pipes are. We’d have to go upstream to get clean water.”

Garet sighed and followed her towards the bridge gates. She was right. Shirath’s drinking water came in by clean tunnels from the east. The sewers emptied here and flowed west towards the distant sea. Garet hoped that by the time the river Ar reached the cities of Solantor, Illick, and Akalit, its disgusting contents had been washed away.

At the bridge gates, the two guards stood back as they passed, both holding a hand over their noses.

“Claws, Banes,” said one, a young man in gleaming cuirass and helmet. “What have you been doing?”

“Hunting in the sewers,” Garet said. “I won’t say for what.”

The man nodded, glad the evil word had been left unsaid. His companion, a middle-aged woman, bravely lowered her hand and stepped forward to open the gate wider for the Banes.

“Thank you for your service to the city, Banes. We felt what you hunted.”

While such praise did not lessen the smell that followed them to the hall, it made the endless scrubbing and re-scrubbing easier to bear.

LONG AFTER GARET
was scrubbed and asleep, another demon came to the city. From the north it crawled, single-minded in its hunger for those within. Unlike the Snake Demon, this one went on all fours, long-limbed and muscular. Its skull ridges were not serrated, but swept back and around like many-pronged ram’s horns. At each step, hooked claws tore up the ground, laying gashes across the furrows plowed just that day. Some scent in the night made it pause and open its short beak. The split tongue tasted the air, found nothing human nearby, and withdrew into the forest of teeth. The demon rattled in its throat like a raven, snapped shut its mouth, and continued its stalking journey to the Outer Wall of the Seventh Ward.

This demon needed no hole through which to slither; it set claws in the rough stone and mortar and climbed quickly for all its bulk, gaining the top in but a few breaths. The entire Ward now lay below it. The cows and sheep in their barns began to moan in their sleep and wake in fear of what they could not see. The youths who watched the livestock shivered and began to run towards the lanes and alleys leading to their homes. The gate guards came out, dropped their spears, then fell trembling upon the ground.

The beast scraped and skittered down to its business.

Save for the demon, only one other figure in the stockyards still moved. A young cowherd sprinted towards the first of the gates separating the stockyards from the Ward proper. She was but a step ahead of the full strength of the demon’s fear, and it clutched at her heels as she sobbed and ran. Her fingers fumbled at the latch, but too late. Terror caught up with her and ran along her bones, stroking each white length and twisting the attached muscles, binding them, and dropping her to her knees.

In falling, she turned and saw the demon approach. Even her eyes would not obey her chattering mind to shut and close off the sight. The monster’s beak was painted with the blood of her friends, others of her age that worked nights in the barns this season. One thick arm dragged the body of a guard by its armor. Seeing her, the demon flung it away. The corpse crashed through a paddock fence and off the haunches of a downed horse. The stallion’s eyes rolled, but it didn’t stir from the ground.

The girl by the gate whimpered. She had run the nightmare race every child of Shirath dreaded, and she had lost. Now, her mind could not turn from this terrible image. Red claws and teeth filled her unwilling sight, and she knew the last thing she saw would be her own blood spraying out and painting them anew.

The beast came nearer, and in her locked perception, she didn’t hear the latch open behind her. A hand grabbed her collar and dragged her through the gate. Figures in black rushed by, towards the demon. Lying stricken on the ground, she had no voice to warn them. If she had, she would have screamed, “What are you doing? You’re not Banes! You’ll all be killed!”

She could only watch them die. But they didn’t.

The first thrust a spear into the demon’s reaching hand. There was a bellow of pain, and the creature swiped at its attacker, only to be cheated when the spear-wielder jumped out of range. A second dashed forward, slicing down with a broad-bladed sword on the demon’s heel. When the beast rounded on him, he leaped back as well.

“Turn, run,” whispered the girl, but the attackers, four of them in all, kept their faces towards the demon.

The spear-wielder attacked again, barely missing one of the beast’s small, black eyes. By form and size, she was a woman, while the others seemed to be men. One of them, a giant of a man, chopped down with an axe as the demon reached for the spear-woman. There was a cracking sound and a spray of blood. The fourth drew his bow and put an arrow in the creature’s back, then another in its good leg. Now they all came at it, shooting, chopping, and thrusting until the demon collapsed under their assault and howled out its pain on the stone-paved ground. The braying call was cut short by a spear that pierced its throat and an axe that split open the massive skull right between the horned ridges.

The attackers backed away. The axe man reached behind him without turning his head and took a small object from the woman. One-handed, he chopped at the massive head again, and again. Leaning his axe against the carcass, he reached into the hole he had made. The watching girl was suddenly sick, her stomach’s contents spilling out on the ground beside her head. Before she had stopped retching, she felt a blessed relief from the fear, as if the demon’s power had been shut behind a door.

The girl stood unsteadily, wiping her mouth and grabbing onto the open gate for support.

‘Thank you, thank you,” she said and reached out a hand to the four in black. At last they turned their backs on the demon to face her, and the girl dropped her hand.

“Your faces!” she said. “You’re not Banes! What are you?”

The woman shifted her bloody spear and raised a finger to stone lips. She nodded at the others and slipped away. Within ten heartbeats, all passed into the shadows of the stockyards and disappeared.

“
BETTER YOU THAN
me,” Tarix said, and grunted as Garet pushed her leg farther into the stretch. He had been telling her about the fight with the Snake Demon and the trouble he had cleaning up afterwards. He had not expected much sympathy, considering the injuries Tarix had suffered at the claws of demons.