The Demon Lord (31 page)

The room had been completely wrecked. What little furniture it had contained was reduced to rags and tatters, and their torchlight revealed any parallel triple gouges in floor, in walls—and even in the ceiling almost twenty feet above their heads. And the floor was covered with half-erased magical scribbling which Marek knelt to inspect. Aldric, from where he stood, could see how the larger of the two circles had been broken by ashes and a heavy book, and moved a little closer; then flinched as his eye picked out a scattering of blackish-crimson shreds strewn across the floor. It looked like dried meat. It
was
dried meat… of a sort.

Geruath, moving to the demon queller’s side, paid it little heed. “Does this tell you more than the last time you looked at it?” he demanded brusquely, speaking in Jouvaine now as though he no longer cared whether or not Aldric could understand.

“No,” the Cernuan replied. “Yonder circle”—heads turned to look at it—”was drawn in a hurry. The woman wasn’t expecting that what appeared would be quite so dangerous. If she was expecting anything at all on that particular night. I told you why I doubt—”

“What was it?” The Overlord’s voice was irritable. Impatient. As if he no longer had time for theories. As if he had other things to do before the night was out… “I said, what was it? Can’t you tell?”

“No, I can’t. My lord.” Aldric could hear that the Cernuan was trying to be patient. “And I refuse to guess. But I ask again, won’t you allow me—”

Geruath barked a refusal and turned away.

Aldric saw his face and knew why Marek had not tried to argue. “As I said, quite mad,” he muttered when the others had moved out of earshot.

Marek looked round, wishing that he had more evidence to study, anything at all which might give him a clue to what was lurking somewhere in the darkness. “Not only mad, but a fool,” he said grimly. “The witch had a library somewhere, but he—or Crisen—won’t let me into it. If I could see what books she had, I might at least be able to—”

“Guess? You refuse to, surely… ?”

“Don’t, Aldric. That isn’t funny. Not now. But…” His voice changed strangely and he stared at the Alban. “But you said something when we first met. When I encharmed you to save my own neck. Say it again.”

“I…” Now that he had been asked, Aldric felt an overwhelming reluctance to speak the words which had tormented him for so long. As if something was impeding his tongue—something which had no desire to be betrayed. His face went red with effort and Marek could see sweat begin to bead on the younger man’s forehead, trickling like great tears across the frown-lines creased into his temples. “No… !” he whispered, and there was dread in his voice, “I can’t… Not here… !”

“You
must
!” the demon queller insisted. “Otherwise more people are going to die! Say it, Aldric! You have to say it… !”

The Alban’s face was like that of a man on the rack: agonised and silent. His lips moved, forming words that Marek could not hear, could not read, could not recognise. There was blood running from between the fingers of Aldric’s clenched left hand, where his nails had driven through the skin of his palm. It was as well no one was near, for it seemed to Marek as it would seem to any other observer that his companion was in the throes of a fit.

And then the fit was past. Aldric’s eyes, which had squeezed tightly shut, reopened and incredibly he summoned up a smile from somewhere, “M-my mind is my-my own,” he faltered. “S-so is my m-mouth.” The smile widened fractionally as he took a deep breath. “And no bloody… intruder is going to interfere with either.”

“Do you know what you have just done?”

“Given myself a headache…”

“I told you, don’t joke! But you’ve just thrown off a Binding.”

“A what?”

“Binding. Our uninvited guest does not want to be talked about. Your foster-father must have mentioned the charm.” If Gemmel had, Aldric could not remember when, but he nodded cautious agreement all the same. “You broke it!”

Aldric could guess how. He still carried the Echainon spellstone inside his jerkin, and was only surprised that its augmenting of his own meagre will had not left him as weak and shaky as it had before… “Does this Binding tell you anything about what set it in place?” he asked hopefully.

Two soldiers stalked past, torches raised. They glanced dubiously at the
hlensyarlen
but neither did nor said anything to interfere. Marek watched them a moment before shaking his head, and Aldric’s heart sank. “The only thing that will tell me is—”

“What I couldn’t tell you. Until now. So… I found writing in a burial chamber in the Deep wood. A mound. It had been broken, violated… but it was clean inside and there were roses… Such roses, Marek. Huge!” The dream that was a nightmare awoke and coiled itself about the inside of his skull like a black viper, but Aldric fought it back to quiescence and continued without even a tremor in his voice. “It— and they—must both have been brought there by someone from Seghar, because I was attacked by lord’s-men sent to retrieve it.”

Marek thought it prudent not to make inquiries about the fate of the lord’s-men. He knew Aldric by reputation and he could guess. Hearing about an opened mound-grave was bad enough; such places had an evil name in the lore that he had learned. But roses… ?

“Writing!” the Cernuan prompted. “As in pages from a book?”

“One page.” Still unwilling to let his conscious mind dwell on them too much, Aldric nipped his lower lip between his teeth until it hurt, then cleared his throat and let the phrases that had haunted him go free…

“It was a rhyme,” he said. “A poem, or a prophecy maybe. But it went something like this:

” ‘The setting sun grows dim …’ ”

As Marek listened, he felt the hackles slowly rising on the nape of his neck as they had not done in many a long day. The significance of the roses was clear now. All too clear. He wished only that this had not come in his time.

” ‘... Despair and death to all,’ ”

the Alban finished. He was shivering imperceptibly, as if he was very cold. “Marek, I read that only once, but the memory of it has been with me ever since. I don’t know why—I never could remember poetry when I was young. Marek…” there was a note of pleading in his voice, “please, what does it
mean
... ?”

For the sake of the young
eijo’s
peace of mind, Marek truly did not want to tell him. To put off the inevitable he changed the subject slightly, knowing even as he did so that it would grant him a bare moment’s grace. “It has been two nights from full moon,” the Cernuan said somberly, as if the thought had just occurred to him. “Two nights since Sedna was…”

Aldric stared at the floor. “Eaten,” he completed.

“Eaten,” Marek echoed. “So although I have no idea of what this… thing looks like, I can guess what it is.”

So could Aldric. His mind had leapfrogged Marek’s along that particular unpleasant alleyway and reached the same conclusion before him. “It’s hungry. And yet Geruath’s soldiers are… He’s bringing unarmoured men against it!” He hesitated, for the next step was so ugly that he was reluctant to voice it aloud. Then he did: “Or should that be…
for
it… ?”

When they caught up with the Overlord and his retainers, several troopers were beating at the end wall of the corridor while the rest stood back—well back—and watched. A blow rang hollow, the concentration of impact altered slightly and within a minute the outline of a doorway had been forced into the stones. As it moved jerkily backwards, Aldric nudged Marek and both men retired a judicious distance down the corridor. The Alban’s right hand was inside his jerkin, gloved fingers tight around the spellband hidden there.

With shocking suddenness the door burst open and gulped three soldiers into the blackness beyond. Aldric’s muscles spasmed and the sorcerous weapon sprang free, its spiral-patterned loops of silver and etched steel snug around his wrist and only the thin covering of buckskin preventing an eldritch glow of power from illuminating the corridor from end to end. Then the men reappeared, dusting themselves down and grinning sheepishly. Aldric relaxed, tucked his lethal handful out of sight and bared his teeth a fraction. It was not a smile.

“Why should we be looking here?” he asked the demon queller. “If this thing’s a true dem—... thing, then it won’t need tunnels. Will it?”

“It’s become flesh of a sort. It must move as fleshly beings move.”

“And can this flesh-of-a-sort be cut?”

“I doubt it.”

“So. We’ll see…”

Once through the hidden doorway, Aldric found himself in a passage. No doubt it was a sound piece of work, but its design gave him the shudders. Unlike some men, even Dewan ar Korentin whom nobody could call a coward, Aldric was quite comfortable below ground. After Gemmel’s home beneath the Blue Mountains, after the Lair of Ykraith and the Dunrath catacombs, he should have been well-used to the subterranean. But all of those places had been well-lit, or familiar, or vaulted and spacious.

This tunnel crouched around him, only an arm’s length overhead at the very most. Its walls were neither vertical nor reassuringly pillared, but curved, and their metal supporting props curved with them—giving the whole place an unwholesome air of being halfway through some gross peristaltic closure. Over many years, outlines once hard and artificial had blended with red clay and pallid fungoid growths until the glistening passage resembled something organic. A colossal gullet. It was a fancy given sinister weight by the Alban’s recently-voiced suspicions…

Geruath had moved his soldiers further down the tunnel and Marek had followed, leaving Aldric alone with his lamp and his imagination. One formed glutinous images just beyond the defined edges of the other’s light, furtive half-seen movements that ceased just before his eyes could reach and focus on them. Moisture gathered on a squashy growth above him, then drooled with salivary stealth towards his face.

Aldric was not actually running when he caught up with the others. Not quite…

The tunnel had divided. After brief, muttered discussion between the Overlord and his son in which advice was neither asked nor offered, Geruath and Crisen went one way and a six-strong squad was despatched along the other fork. Aldric stayed with the Overlord; in sight or out of it, he distrusted Geruath and he intended keeping a close eye on Crisen. Besides, the Alban thought sourly, hating himself, wherever those two went was probably the safest route. Damn honour for the time being! He wondered if the same notion had prompted Marek, but on reconsideration doubted it. The Cernuan was that rare and often dangerous thing: a truly brave and dedicated man. Dedicated, however, to what… ? Duty? Honour? Principle? Or just—cynically—self-preservation like the rest…

The kneeling trooper gave his boot-straps a final tug, wriggled his toes inside the leather and straightened to find himself alone. His comrades had warned him that they would not wait, but he had thought that they were joking. Until now.

Another division in the passageway told him why the others had disappeared so quickly, and he opened his mouth to call them. Then shut it again for fear of what else might be listening. There were many rumours current in the barracks, all of them different—and all of them variations on a single nasty theme… But there were footprints in the russet muck which coated the runnel floor; they at least were more tangible than rumours.

After a moment’s hesitation the soldier followed them. And the clinging velvet shadows swallowed him.

A bare ten paces further on he stopped, beginning to shiver with more than the dank cold. He was vulnerable; the whole situation reeked of it. His solitary walk had a horrid inevitability about it, like the fifteen steps from cell to scaffold he had watched other men and women take. It was as if he knew that if he walked on he would die… It was also the kind of cheap dramatic cliche that even Imperial playwrights no longer dared to use, the predictable offering-up of a character as a sacrifice on the altar of excitement… His vulnerability was like that: so grossly overstated that it was self-defeating. The shivers died away as he was warmed by the new assurance of his own reality: he was a man, he existed, he was not a puppet dancing when another hand tugged strings in a preordained pattern. And he was armed.

The soldier groped at his back for the slung crossbow, taking comfort from the cool weight of its iron-shod stock, and slid it around into the cradle of his left arm. The weapon had a spring-steel prod thicker than his thumb; it would project missiles to and through a target with appalling force. To and through any target, even armoured in proof metal. Any target at all…

There was something hanging from the ceiling just ahead of him and he froze in his tracks, all the old fears rushing back. Then breathed a sigh of relief as he played the yellow light of his lantern across its surface. Cave-in, he thought. A rock had slipped free of the all-embracing clay and its enormous weight had buckled the props around itself without being quite heavy enough to break through them and fall onto the ground. He sidestepped the massive boulder warily, staring at it; what he could see of the surface was rounded, smooth and glossy as enamel with the moisture filming it. A thing like that dropping on a man’s head would end all his worries… The soldier breathed a soft oath and strode on, his curse becoming pale-grey fog as it whispered from his lips into the cold air of the tunnel.

Then he jerked to a halt with sweat popping out all over him. Something just out of his lantern’s range had moved. “Bloody wet fungus!” he muttered. “Scared of a bloody reflection!” The words did not reassure him, and the hands which spanned and loaded the heavy crossbow were shaking as he lined the weapon on the lantern’s crossbow were shaking as he lined the weapon on the lantern’s pool of light.

Whether it was his imagination or a real movement, he saw it again and jerked the trigger. A bolt ripped sparks from stone and sang noisily down the tunnel’s oozing throat—loudly enough to drown out any other more furtive movements.

The soldier turned and ran back the way he had come, not daring to reload or even look behind. Not wanting to know what might be at his heels…