The Demon Lord (34 page)

“Appetisers,” Marek amended bleakly. “A foretaste of the banquet to come.”

Aldric’s mind veered from the images conjured by those words. “What
is
this herald?” he demanded. “What does it look like… ?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t… !”

“I don’t—but get me inside Sedna’s library and I might be able—”

“Quiet… !” Aldric had snapped to a halt between one step and the next, his head tilting fractionally backwards and his eyes narrowed with concentration. The Cernuan knew a listening posture when he saw it and mouthed
what can you hear
? with sufficient clarity for the Alban to read each word as it was shaped. Then Marek no longer required an answer: instead he heard it too…

The sound was almost inaudible: a high, sweet purity in the upper register and a rolling bass sonority in the lower, but both sounds beyond the limits of human hearing. Yet they harmonised, as the howling of wolves will harmonise in still winter dusk across a field of virgin snow, and it was that choral harmony which sent a tingling shudder through every fibre of Aldric’s body: not fear, not cold, but a feeling of exaltation that was almost sexual in its intensity. The sensation faded with the note which had brought it into being, dwindling to a caressing vibrato and thence to a forlorn and yearning silence.

Aldric drew in a tremulous breath and wondered if Evthan the wolf had felt so when he threw back his head and wailed into a full-moon-lit sky. He turned to see if Marek felt as he did…

The demon queller looked as if he felt sick.

That look washed Aldric’s reeling euphoria clear away on a rip-tide of ice-water, and there was no real need for either man to speak. It was Marek who finally said it: “
Issaqua sings the song of desolation
...” he quoted softly.

“
And fills the world with Darkness
...” Aldric finished. Then: “Where’s the library?”

But Marek was already running.

There was one soldier on guard outside the library door, armed with the inevitable gisarm, and he stiffened apprehensively when the two
hlensyarlen
approached him along the gallery. Their smiles did nothing to reassure him, for both men were breathing hard as if they had stopped a headlong dash just out of his sight and the smiles clashed with ill-disguised concern on both their faces. In any case, he was not disposed to be friendly towards anyone right now—his head ached, his relief had not arrived to take over and he was hungry. There was consequently little courtesy in the way he brought the heavy polearm round and down to guard position, and even less in his rasp of: “What do you want?”

Aldric responded in kind; the smile left his face and he jerked one arm toward the door. “We want into that room!” he snapped in Drusalan.

“That’s forbidden!” The gisarm’s point levelled at Aldric’s chest. “By the Overlord’s command!”

“But it’s by the Overlord’s command that we go inside,” Marek protested smoothly, lying not in hope of success but to attract the man’s attention.

“Where’s your confirmation?” The weapon was wavering a little now, its bearer undecided upon whom to concentrate.

“I think you have it,” Aldric said to Marek across the guardman’s front, and directly the man’s eyes shifted to see what the Cernuan’s reply might be, he took one step forward and another sideways. Instantly the gisarm’s blade snapped out towards him. “Haven’t you… ?”

“No—I thought you had it.” Marek copied the two steps—which had brought them closer to the sentry while at the same time widening the field of view he had to cover—then thrust his right hand inside his robe as a man will when reaching for a hidden dagger. The spearhead jerked round to counter this potential threat. “For a minute there…” the hand withdrew, empty, fingers spread. “No. You must have it.”

Aldric’s left forearm warded the gisarm’s haft as it slashed back—far too late, for he was already within the blade’s arc—and his right hand was moving too, a lazy sweep across the soldier’s midriff that would have been insignificant had the hand not held a knife… The guard dropped his own weapon, jerked, began to double over—,

—And was slammed back to the vertical against the wall as Aldric held the knife—a small but wickedly sharp affair that seemed almost a part of the Alban’s fist— under his nose and prodded persuasively upwards. “Confirmation,” Aldric explained. “Not the Overlord’s, but mine. Effective all the same. Now, you have a choice: either you open the door or I open your belly.” The knife withdrew its bloodied point from the sentry’s upper lip, dropped and slotted back into the long clean cut which had laid his crest-coat open from one hip to the other. It felt icy cold against his so-far-unbroken skin, and the man flinched back as far as the wall would allow. Which was not far enough, for the knife followed.

“Have you ever,” Aldric asked conversationally, “seen a man stabbed in the stomach?”

Whether the young
eijo
was bluffing, or whether he would have carried out his softly-spoken threat, Marek was not to discover. With a hand that trembled visibly— silent confirmation that he had indeed witnessed the grisly consequence of deep gut-wounds—the trooper withdrew a heavy, complicated key from the pouch at his belt. “Wise man,” said the demon queller with an uncertain sidelong glance at Aldric. The key fitted and turned in silence, and the door swung back to reveal the darkness of the unlit room beyond. In the instant of his passage across the threshold there was a meaty impact and he whirled with horror clouding his face.

The soldier was sagging in Aldric’s arms, but there was blood neither on the floor, his clothes nor the knife. Only a flaring scarlet blot the size of a silver mark beneath his left ear where the Alban had driven an extended-knuckle punch into a nervespot. With a knife, or an arrow, or a sword, that spot meant death; barehanded it brought unconsciousness and later probably a splitting headache.

This is the one they call Deathbringer
... ? Marek thought incredulously. He was certainly behaving out of character… Then Aldric dropped the loose-limbed body inside the library and back-heeled the door shut behind him.

“Do you really want to see him again?” asked Jervan quietly. “It will only bring you more grief.”

“It was my fault, Commander,” Gueynor insisted. “I was in the wrong, and I gave him no chance to hear explanations. I tried too much to play the lady; and I have been a peasant these ten years past… !”

The two sat on opposite sides of a table in the Garrison Commander’s quarters; Jervan had insisted on it after Kourgath’s—literally—stormy departure from the summer-house in the ruined gardens. He had felt, but successfully concealed, a pang of jealousy at the way Gueynor had stared after the young mercenary, then had reminded himself with some severity of his wife and daughters, both the latter being not much younger than this Jouvaine girl. His interest was material, political— not, under any circumstances, physical. There was too much to lose…

“In any event, it doesn’t matter whether you remain on friendly terms with this
hlensyarl
or not. What he intends to do will be not because you want it—but because he wants it. All you need to be is close enough to take the first advantage of it.”

“Like a buzzard—waiting for death.”

“If you like.” Jervan refused to be ruffled by Guey-nor’s melancholy. “Everyone who stands to inherit fits that description, whether they are eager or not. And you should be very eager, lady. Crisen Geruath owes you many lives.”

“Not me. My uncle. And through him, the Alban.
Kortagor”
she raised the blonde head from which Jervan had persuaded her to wash the dye, “I want to leave Seghar. I want to go home again. I don’t want to be a lady…”

That did ruffle the commander, where nothing else had done. “No!...” His hand thumped the table-top as he half-rose from his chair, then smiled weakly and subsided again.
Softly, you fool
... 7 “I mean, why not wait a while and see what happens?”

“Are you afraid of losing privileges that you haven’t yet received,
Kortagor
Jervan?” Gueynor murmured. There was no scorn in her voice, none of the mockery which his overreaction justified. Just regret. “If that’s so, then I’m sorry.” She seemed to mean it, but sincerity meant nothing to Jervan at this moment.

“Damn your sorrow,” he hissed in a voice so low that Gueynor barely heard it. “You, my lady,” and the title was a sneer now, “are my means of gaining some respect—for myself, for my position here, for my family. And I will not stand to one side and watch while your overdeveloped integrity robs me of it…”

Jervan paused, pushing the heels of one hand into an eye-socket as if that pressure would relieve the pounding headache which had filled his skull with pain within the past ten minutes. He could almost hear the blood pounding in his temples, and the faint high noise of the headache ringing deep inside his ears like the cry of innumerable bats. “Understand this: I will not harm you—but neither will I let you go. Not until I choose.”

As he spoke Jervan backed slowly from the table to the door, withdrawing its key from his tunic pocket. There was only one window to this room, the outermost of his tower apartments, and it opened on an eighty-five-foot drop to the fortress courtyard. “Don’t try to get out,” he said unnecessarily. “You will be kept quite comfortable, I assure you…”

Sidestepping through the door, Jervan snatched it shut behind him as if he feared the slender girl would leap at his throat. Memories, maybe, of her uncle Evthan… As he twisted the key and heard the deadbolt shoot across, he also heard her shouting something at him; but the sense was muffled by two thick layers of oak planks set cross-grained to foil assault by axe. Otherwise her words might have interested him considerably.

“When he hears about this, Aldric Talvalin will
kill
you… !”

Killing was very far from Aldric’s mind as he knelt motionless on the balcony outside his room and watched the round, untroubled moon through half-closed eyes. The haunting, gentle music of a rebec drifted through the darkness. Its thin, protracted chords assisted his near-trance and helped him not to think at all.

His battle armour was laid out before him, neat in its proper array, and a thousand tiny moons reflected from the surfaces of helm and war-mask, from mailed and plated sleeves and from the myriad scales of his lamellar cuirass. Except for the Talvalin blue-and-white of silken lacing cords, everything was lacquered to a hard and brilliant black which exuded a faint air of menace even in repose. With the scabbarded length of Isileth Widowmaker resting on his thighs, so did Aldric…

He could still hear the demon queller’s voice quite clearly, harsh and distinct in a mind rinsed clean by meditation: “Whatever fool performed this summoning is fortunate to be alive… !”

Marek had snarled the words as he pointed to a chalk-drawn circle on the library floor. There were things within its perimeter that he had no desire to touch, but he approached and knelt and studied them with an air of rising disbelief. A broken flint blade either newly made or a survivor from the Ancient days; spatterings of dried brown blood; and a book. “That is,” the Cernuan corrected himself, “if he
is
alive. To be so inadequately prepared, to make a blood-offering in the old way with stone—and then to use this…”

He opened his
cymar
at the neck and pulled out a medallion which he wore on a fine chain. It glittered as it turned slowly back and forth, level with his heart. Marek gripped the little metal disc between the finger and thumb of his right hand, then swept his left arm down and across between himself and the book. “I bind you, I secure you, I restrain you,” he muttered. “I hold you close with chains of power, I pen you in with bars of force. I am the master of all that you contain. Hear me and obey.”

“You are giving orders to a
book
?” Aldric was mildly incredulous, but too wise and far too experienced for blatant disbelief. He stalked warily towards the kneeling Cernuan, placing his feet with care in the uncertain light of the solitary lamp which was all that Marek had risked lighting.

The demon queller glanced up at him. “Your foster-father would do just as I have done,” he said, reaching out to lift the heavy volume. “The stories claim that this grimoire can choose what is and is not conjured through it. And I tend to believe everything I hear concerning
Enciervanul Doamnisoar
...”

“Avert!” Aldric whispered, touching his mouth and forehead. He knew the name, as Marek plainly suspected: He had heard it spoken in another time, in another place, by another voice. Gemmel-altrou Errekren had mentioned this vile text, just once and briefly; the enchanter had blessed himself as ordinary men did when he pronounced its title.
On the Summoning of Demons
— he had called it captured evil; malice trapped within the written word and wrapped in woman’s leather…

“No man in his right mind would use this foulness simply to do murder, and not even a madman would overlook Dismissal. But the man who made this pattern has done both. He knew what it was he did, but not whose will he did…

“This fortress is pervaded by the influences of Issaqua: cruelties, hatreds, fear and madness. Even you have felt it. Twice you almost killed me. That is the Bale Flower’s work: a time for wolves, a time for ravens, when friend turns on friend and the father hates his son…”

A time for wolves… ? Did Evthan kill his wife and daughter after all? Aldric’s mind flinched from the thought. And King Rynert sent me into this potential holocaust to do more killing… How much did
he
know?

Marek took in the chalked, bloodied floor with a single weary sweep of his arm. “This place is the focus of the conjuration. It drew down the Warden of Gateways and permitted It to enter. And then the Warden called upon its own Master, Issaqua… To fill the world with Darkness. And only we can stop it!”

This was what Aldric had been expecting with a kind of horrid anticipation. He did not protest, did not make excuses about his other duties. All that was past. “The Warden of Gateways?” he wondered aloud in a voice which to his own surprise was free of tremor.