The Demon Lord (7 page)

Aldric reached out warily until his outstretched fingers touched the great blocks of the dry-laid chamber wall, and only then moved cautiously forward, trusting to luck and any irregularities in the stones for a warning of the floor abruptly sloping down beneath him. Then he stopped again, muttering a soft, annoyed oath at himself, and reached into the pouch pendant from his belt. In it was a tinderbox and a thick candle of best-quality white beeswax, something he always carried but never had use for—and consequently forgot about, most of the time…

Half-closing his light-sensitive eyes to guard them from its flash of sparks, Aldric tripped the spring of the tinder box. Then
tsked
in annoyance and did it again, twice, before the fluffed linen wisps caught fire sufficiently for him to ignite the candle’s triple-thickness braided wick. Unused, it smouldered furiously for a few seconds until a blue-cored yellow bud swelled from the stem of the wick, blossoming rapidly into a tall, saffron flame-flower. Only when he was assured that it would not go out, and had fixed its brass shield-ring to catch any potential drips, did Aldric look about him. And when he did, it was enough to make him catch his breath in wonderment.

The roof of the hollow hill hung grey and huge an arm’s length above his head. He had not known what to expect, for every mound that he had seen before had been intact, the secrets of construction hidden under high-heaped soil and green grass. Aldric knew that each had at least one chamber in its heart, where the dead were laid, but how those chambers were formed had been a mystery to him until now.

That grey roof was a single colossal slab balanced with ponderous delicacy on three tapering pillars, and only the strength born of great grief or great piety could have raised such a structure. Even though it had stood thus for maybe forty centuries, its presence looming over him sent a shudder fluttering through the marrow of his bones. If something—anything at all—made the capstone fall, then he, like the owner of the tomb, would be nothing but a memory.

Shadows crawled out of the crevices between the stones as he raised the candle for a better look. There was a strangeness to the barrow, something so obvious that for a few moments it escaped him. Then awareness dawned. The place was clean… There was no earth trodden between the slabs of the floor, no trace of debris either from the breaking of the mound or from the forest outside, whose dry, dead vegetation would percolate inside with every gust of wind. Instead the cist seemed to have been swept and dusted—recently, at that. As he stalked warily towards where the old chieftain lay, Aldric wondered who in the Jevaiden could be so contemptuous of local legends as not only to enter a place commonly avoided—except by cynical, inquisitive Albans— but to tidy it besides. The original occupant could hardly be in a fit state to appreciate such a gesture. Could he… ?

Other chambers opened off the main crypt; storerooms for the possessions necessary for status and com-fort in the Afterworld, Aldric guessed. He did not trouble to investigate them, sure that his predecessors here would have cleaned them out just as thoroughly as they had the main tomb—and in the same sense of the word. Even so, it was hard to ignore the yawning entrances, for they made him uneasy. Almost as if something foul might creep from them the moment his back was turned… A foolish notion, of course—he was the only living thing in this place, and moreover he was armed.

Aldric shifted the candle from right hand to left, the better to loosen his
telek
in its holster, and found that he disliked what that shift had done to the way in which the shadows moved. Disliked it most intensely. The
telek
slipped free without a sound, his thumb releasing its safety-slide as the weapon’s weight was cradled by the heel of his hand. Nothing moved now but the play of light and darkness at the corners of his nervous eyes. But Aldric turned and kept on turning with his boot-heel as a pivot, tracking his line of sight with the spring-gun’s muzzle as he raised the candle higher.

And cast light across the lord beneath the hill.

Even though he had expected something of the kind, he found the corpse disturbing, although its appearance was not as unpleasant as he had been prepared for. The old chieftain had been too long dead for stink and putrefaction.

His very frame had crumpled underneath the weight of years, contracting in upon itself until it had become mere sticks and leather; no more frightening than firewood.

The ceremonial trappings of the aftermath of death held no terrors for an Alban
kailin-eir
of high-clan birth, because such a man was aware that he, however exalted he might be, would eventually come to this. More aware, indeed, than most; the
cseirin-born
were early introduced to what would be their ultimate destiny. Aldric could remember, when he was five years old, being taken by his father Haranil to the vaults beneath Dunrath-hold, not to see the crypt but quite specifically to be shown his own funeral column, with its vacant, patient, niche awaiting the day when an urn of ashes would be set in it. Aldric’s ashes. His name and rank and date of birth were recorded on the polished basalt in vertical lines of elegant cursive characters, but the last line ended abruptly, incomplete. It required another date to give the carved inscription perfect symmetry… Even at the age of five, the experience had been sobering.

Detecting an old smell in the air now, compounded of more than mustiness and candle-smoke, Aldric glanced sidelong at the withered corpse with one eyebrow raised, then shook his head. The thought had been an idle one, for there was nothing of decay about this odour; it was sweet, but not with the sickliness of corruption. Rather, it was more like perfume… He walked closer, then remembered his manners and inclined his head politely, the still-drawn
telek
glinting in the candle-light as his right arm made the small, graceful gesture of respect to the dead. This was someone’s ancestor, and if the dead man was held in such regard as would raise this tomb around him, then courtesy would not be misplaced.

He met the dark gaze of the skull’s empty orbits without blinking, but did not mirror its taut and mirthless grin. “Bones, and rags, and dust,” Aldric said softly. “Our way is better, lord of the mound. Fire is clean.” The skin around his mouth scored chevrons of shadow into itself as his teeth showed momentarily in the candle’s flame. Praise be to Heaven, he thought, that in wisdom death is at the end of life and not at the beginning…

Then thought stopped.

There was colour amid the ivory and brown of the thin hands, piously folded on the dead man’s breast, and that colour was the source of the elusive fragrance. Roses were twined between the bony fingers—three bloated, baleful roses that were so darkly crimson they seemed almost black, their great petals velvet and luxuriant, their scent far heavier than any he had smelt before. Rich as incense, almost overpowering; like the drug
ymeth
, the dreamsmoke of Imperial decadence, and yet somehow less wholesome still.

The dream… And within that dream, nightmare… Aldric was aware that his hands were trembling—not much, but enough to send a spiral of black smoke from the candle wick as it guttered under molten wax. He wished too late that he had told everything to Gemmel when he had the chance, and not hidden behind false, drink-born bravado; at least he might know by now what all this meant… !

Yet there was probably a reasoned and logical explanation for the presence of the flowers. Maybe Ger-uath the Overlord had discovered this dead man to be long-forgotten blood kin, and the roses were an apology of sorts for the indignities to which his tomb had been subjected. Yes… that was probably the solution. Aldric was half ashamed of his own reactions, and at the same time knew quite well that he was trying to fool himself. There was nothing reasoned or logical about what was going on in the Jevaiden, in Valden—or in this tomb.

He walked slowly around the bier, looking down at the shrivelled corpse, and wondered who this man had been… what he had been… what he had done to make his people grant him so imposing a burial; and it was at the far side of the rough catafalque that he discovered the crypt was not entirely empty after all.

His boot pressed down on something which crackled loudly in the silence, and Aldric felt his mouth go dry. The “thing” was a sheet of parchment, its edges dry and crumbling, and as he gazed at it he was overwhelmed by an ugly sense of deja-vu. Coincidence could not be strained so far… The last time he had found an object lost by others, so many, many deaths had followed. Deaths, tod horrors, and the extinction of his clan. He almost used his boot to scrape the page to tatters against the floor.

But he was Aldric Talvalin, as much prey to the vice of foolish, fatal curiosity as any proverb-maker’s cat— and he read it first, setting the candle on one corner of the dead chiefs bier and holstering his
telek
before he picked up the page in apprehensive fingers. It was a poem of some sort, written with a pen in the crabbed letters of formal Jouvaine script, and he could read that language; indeed, any lettered man could read it, for High Jouvaine was the tongue of learning, a lingua franca understood—in varying degrees—by scholars all over the world. Even the Albans conceded that. He scanned the lines twice—once for the translation and once for the sense—then abruptly ripped the brittle sheet across and across, crumpled the remnants between his palms and dropped them back onto the stones of the floor with finality.

“And what would you have done with it?” he asked the chieftain idly, with false amusement in his voice. “Kept the thing? Not knowing what I know!” The skull’s grin did not alter in response and its empty sockets continued to gaze at the entrance of the burial chamber as if watching something living eyes could not see. Talking to a corpse, Aldric thought—are you going mad? He stared down for several seconds at the pieces of parchment by his feet, unsettled by the memory of what he had read and trying to forget it. He had thought the thing was
an-pesoek
, some little charm like the two or three he knew, but
pesok’n
had not such an ominous sound to them…

   The setting sun grows dim

   And night surrounds me.

   There are no stars.

   The Darkness has devoured them

   With its black mouth.

   Issaqua sings the song of desolation

   And I know that I am lost

   And none can help me now
...

A tiny voice seemed to be whispering the words inside his head, over and over again, their rhythms weaving circles round his brain and making sense that was no sense at all. Aldric’s lips compressed to a bloodless line as he shrugged, seeming to dismiss the whole thing from his mind… except that it was not so simple as the shrug suggested.

He dusted flakes of parchment from his hands and reached out to pluck a rose from between the corpse’s claws; then gasped and jerked back his fingers. There was as much shock as pain in his small, muted cry, for although he had barely touched it the fiercely spined blossom had thrust a thorn straight through his glove and into the pad of his thumb. Almost as if it had struck at him like an adder. A single ruby bead of blood welled out of the skin-tight black leather, momentarily rivaling the colour of the flower’s petals before it became a sluggish drop which fell onto the chieftain’s brow and trickled down between his empty eyes.

Aldric teased his trophy free with much more care this time and raised it to his nostrils. There was no need to inhale; the breath of its overblown perfume flowed into his lungs like a thick stream of hot honey, making his senses swim as if with vertigo. It was not a natural scent… not here, not now—not at all. Too rich…

Then the blood so recently tapped by the rose he held froze in his veins as something moved behind him. It was only a tiny scuff of noise, but it was
here
, in a place where no such noise should be unless
he
made it. And he had not… The pounding of his heart fluttered in the Alban’s throat, constricting it, and the rose fell from his slack fingers as he became as immobile as was the dead lord—or as he had been.

Aldric did not want to turn around, but when at last he did, twisting at the waist, his right hand snapped the
telek
from its holster up into an arm-stretched formal shooting posture aimed point-blank at…

Nothing. The lord of the mound lay as he had lain through all the long years since his kinfolk built the cist around him, a solitary gleaming gem of Aldric’s blood upon his forehead like a mark of rank. There was no longer any sound, but in the entrance to the crypt there was a glitter that had not been there before. The glint that comes when flame reflects from polished steel.

“Evthan… ?” Aldric’s arid mouth had difficulty in articulating the word for his tongue clung to his palate. “Evthan—what are you doing, man? Come into the light where I can see you!”

At first there was no reply—and then with a clatter of footsteps four men burst into the burial chamber. They were dressed as soldiers, lord’s retainers, in quilted body armour and round helmets, and all four carried shortswords drawn and ready. There were no shouts of warning, no commands for him to drop his weapons— simply a concerted charge to kill. He had no sword, his cased bow was useless at such close quarters and these men—probably local peasants who wore their newly elevated status in their scabbards—appeared not to know what an Alban
telek
was, much less what it could dp. Aldric educated them.

He could not understand why his warning sixth-sense had not put him on his guard before now; it happened sometimes, that was all. There was more of a defensive reflex action than either fear or anger in the way he reacted, shooting the foremost soldier in the chest without an instant’s hesitation. A crossbow would have punched the fellow backwards off his feet, but the dart’s strike full in the solar plexus was even more dramatic for being unexpected: sudden, massive nerve-shock collapsed the man’s legs under him so totally that he went down in his tracks.