When Demons Walk (16 page)

Sham nodded gracefully, “I have found timing to be an extremely useful skill in my work.”

His mouth quirked upward in something not quite a smile, “I expect you have.”

The time for personal conversation ended as Lady Tirra took up her post on Kerim's other side. Her skin was too dark to be truly pale, and her features were composed—but she looked ten years older. Sham sat quietly in her seat, feeling no desire to antagonize the matriarch in her grief.
Around the room the buzz of gossip was loud enough to be deafening, but at the high table silence reigned.

At last, the High Priest stood before Kerim's table, facing the rest of the room. When the roar died to a sullen murmur, he began to speak.

“High Ones, we come here to mourn the passing of a bright star. He leaves us one less light to steer by, and we are bereaved by his falling. Tonight we will witness the last, faint reflection of his light as his mortal form is reduced to ashes. Let us remember the illumination he brought to our dark world. Let us remember the untimely method by which he was stolen.”

Beside her, Kerim stiffened and muttered something nasty. Sham touched her rouged lips lightly in thought—this was not the speech he and his counselors had prepared.

“This is a dark and troubled time,” continued the High Priest, playing the crowd. “Lord Ven's life is not the first of our brethren to be so rudely extinguished, yet they go unavenged and the killer still stalks among us.”

In tones that carried no further than Shamera's ear, Kerim muttered, “If he keeps this up, we'll have a riot, and my brother's will not be the only body on the pyre.”

It was his grim tone that made Sham glance around the room and see the emotions that were rapidly increasing: flames of terror and outrage, fanned by the High Priest's speech.

Sham did the first thing that came to mind. Though never formally taught, there were a few cantrips that every apprentice learned from an older one: simple tricks like making milk go sour—they didn't require much magic, which was good as she was still tired from her earlier battles.

“. . . someone or something killing—” the High Priest's eyes began to water and the beautifully trained voice faltered as Sham's cantrip took effect.

He cleared his throat and began again. “Killing . . .”

She added more power to the spell.

The High Priest began to cough. A brown robbed man ran up to him with a goblet of water. It seemed to help until the High Priest attempted to speak again.

Kerim frowned and glanced at Sham. Whatever he saw in her face made him relax slightly; he folded his hands loosely and rested them on the table.

When it was apparent the High Priest would not be able to complete his speech, the High Priest's slender assistant, Fykall, took his place, head bowed as if with heavy mourning.

“High ones,” he began, “—we share our sorrow, and yet we must glory for him who has gone before us as so many others have done. It is the best part of being mortal that we may throw off the robes of this life for the next.” He too, diverted from the approved text, but even Sham, inexperienced as she was with demagoguery, saw it was necessary to control the people first.

The little priest raised his head and surveyed the crowd. Shamera could almost hear the High Priest grit his teeth as the Fykall continued. “This night we must put our fears aside; only by doing so can we properly mourn and celebrate the passing of Lord Ven. We are aided by the trust we hold for the wisdom of a man who has served Altis so well in the past. As the Prophet has spoken:
What need we fear when the Leopard is on the field? Altis calls, and Lord Kerim answers with a roar to snatch victory out of the gaping maw of defeat. Let the murdering jackals howl as they will, when the battle is over, the Leopard of Altis will stand alone on the field of his enemies!
”

Right now the Leopard of Altis was muttering under his breath about firepits and cooking pots, noted Sham with well-hidden amusement. He straightened, though, when the priest's words were met with a roar of approval. As the people quieted the priest took a step back and to the side, clearly leaving the floor to Kerim.

The Reeve rolled his chair back slightly and used the table to lever himself to his feet; at this there was a second cheer.

“My brother has been taken from me,” he said, when the noise had quieted in a voice as carrying as the priests' had been. He spoke slowly, so he could be heard by every person in the room. “I will find the one who has done this
and force them to suffer justice if I must take him to the very throne of Altis myself to see it done.” He could not have said another word if he had wanted to, such was the response he won.

The priest's blessing on the food was decidedly anticlimactic.

 

S
HAM WAITED UNTIL
most of the room had turned their attention from the Reeve to their plates before saying softly, “Fykall did a good job of calming the waves.”

Kerim growled, but when he spoke it was equally soft. “I have worked to pull away from Altis's priests since I became Reeve; some of the people have embraced Him, but none of the Southwood nobles. If they think I've become a puppet of the priests, they'll run back to their estates and stay there until they rot. In one speech, Fykall ruined a decade's work. I'll be lucky if a third of the Southwood nobles I've managed to coax into Court are here tomorrow.”

“I wouldn't be too sure of that,” replied Sham, remembering Lord Halvok's pleasure at discovering that the Reeve's mistress was a Southwood native. “I suspect the need to believe you can help them will outweigh their distrust. You bring them hope: it will take more than a single speech to destroy it.”

He didn't look reassured.

“In any case—” she said, taking a bite of fish, “—that boat has left the docks, and the tides will see its journey's end.”

 

A
T DUSK
, L
ORD
Ven's body was lifted to the pyre and his soul given to Altis in an elaborate ceremony presided over by the High Priest. Kerim touched a torch to the base of the pyre, stepping back as the oil-soaked wood began eagerly to burn.

Long before the flames died down, most of the court retired, to leave only Lord Ven's family to mourn him. Lady Sky would have been there, but she had taken the news of her betrothed's death badly. The castle healer had
confined her to bed for fear that she would lose her child. Sham waited until everyone else was gone before leaving the Reeve and his mother staring silently at the orange flames.

 

E
ARLY THE NEXT
morning, Sham opened her trunk and took out her dagger. It was a moment's work to pull the itching stitches out of her wounds and toss the pieces of thread into the fire.

She put her second-best working clothes on again. The baggy breeches and the black cotton shirt, patched roughly on the left sleeve where she had once caught her arm on a wooden casement, would serve her better than any of her dresses and she wouldn't have to keep the illusion over the cut on her arm.

She caught up a candle and lit it with a breath of magic before pulling the tapestry aside and peering into Kerim's room. With no reason to maintain the fire or to light candles and the sun on the wrong side of the sky to light Kerim's windows, the room was hidden in shadows. Sham's instincts told her there was no one in the room.

With a gesture, Sham lit every candle in the chamber as well as the wood laid in the fireplace. Setting her candlestick on a convenient table, she contemplated the wardrobe. It seemed a fit place to start looking for more of the demon's runes.

 

W
HEN
D
ICKON AND
the Reeve entered the room some time later, the fire was roaring merrily as it consumed the majority of the Reeve's clothing, and Sham was tugging one of the large woven rugs across the floor with the obvious intention of sending it to join the clothing.

Dickon cleared his throat and spoke quickly, “Sir, that is a three-hundred-year-old rug, a bridal gift from the King of Reth to his sister on her wedding to the King of Southwood.”

Sham straightened and gave both men an annoyed look as she wiped the sweat off the back of her neck. “It also contains one of the demon's runes—I don't have the
strength to remove them all. If the Reeve would like to stay in that chair for the rest of his shortened lifespan, I'll be glad to leave it here.”

“Sir,” Dickon's voice was almost a moan. “. . .
demon runes
 . . . that rug is irreplaceable. There are ways of making one man look like another. To destroy such a rug on mere superstition . . .”

“We could put the rug in a store room somewhere, if you like,” offered Sham. “If we get rid of the demon there's no need to destroy it and until then it will do no harm in storage.”

“But that has to go in the fire.” She nodded at a large, ornate bench sitting against one wall. “There's more than one rune on it, and two of them I haven't seen before.” They looked to her like the strange bits and pieces that had been on the binding rune she'd taken off Kerim. “—I'm not certain how to deal with it—it won't fit in the hearth. You must be very important to this demon, Kerim. It has expended a tremendous amount of energy to ensure that you were vulnerable to it. I've found its runes on your shoes, your clothes, your armor—”

“What!” exclaimed Kerim, noticing the heavy war hauberk crumpled into a pile on the floor for the first time. It had taken a master armorer nearly a year to complete the shirt and ten years of battle to make it fit like a second skin.

Sham shook her head, “The metal is fine, it was on the leather padding. For some reason, none of the marks are on metal—maybe the nature of the demon's magic.”

Dickon shook his head and muttered softly.

“Over a lifetime of dealing with difficult women, I have learned it is often better to give into their demands immediately,” said Kerim approaching the bench Sham had condemned. “See if you can find my axe somewhere in this mess, Dickon, and I'll follow my orders and reduce this defenseless work of art to kindling. Then track down a couple of strong men to cart the more valuable pieces to the nearest storeroom.”

Once Sham knew what she was looking for, she couldn't believe that she hadn't seen the magic that touched almost
everything in the chamber. The fire roared higher and higher and the room began to look as if a mischievous giant had decided to toss furniture around.

At some point in time, Talbot entered the room to join the effort, and his help was invaluable as they moved several especially heavy items. Shamera suspected that the wardrobe in particular hadn't been moved in several hundred years: judging by the effort required to shift the thing it wouldn't be moved again for another hundred.

Once he'd resigned himself to the destruction, Kerim seemed surprisingly lighthearted. It struck Shamera he'd lost the air of quiet acceptance that had formerly characterized him. Not even the death of his half-brother tempered the energy with which he attacked the room.

He chopped not only the bench, but a room divider of six panels into pieces small enough to fit in the fire—as the divider bore one of the strange runes as well. He insisted on helping when Shamera directed the complete disassembly of the large state bed, the last place left untouched in the room. It was there she found the second of the demon's focus runes.

The hall door opened quietly.

Sham, whose black trousers and shirt were the same grey as the dust that had been stirred up by the tumult, crouched where the center of the bed had been, muttering hoarsely in a long-dead language. Kerim watched her intently, immobilized because the various pieces of the bed were scattered helter-skelter around his chair. Talbot leaned with half-assumed weariness against one of the imposing bedposts that leaned in its turn against the wall. Dickon had left to see what could be done to replace the furnishings and rugs Sham relegated to storage. It wasn't until the intruder spoke that anyone looked toward the door.

“It seems meet that, after ruining your brother's funeral with political theatrics, you would spend the next day rearranging your room,” Lady Tirra's tones could have frozen molten rock.

Although Sham registered the sound of Lady Tirra's voice, she didn't pause in her chanting. The mark she'd
found on the floor under Kerim's bed was older than the rest, and the demon had spent time since reinforcing the spell. As the option of burning the stone floor seemed as doubtful as removing it to storage, Sham had to unwork the spell. This was the third time she'd tried and it finally looked as if she might succeed—if she could concentrate on her work.

Tracing the rune backwards (or so she hoped, since like several others the demon used, this rune was somewhat different from the one she knew) and calling upon parts of several spells, Sham felt the rune fade, but not completely. As long as a portion remained, it could be reinvoked. She tried again, varying the pattern of the spells and feeling them begin to unravel the rune at last.

When she finally looked up from her task, the first thing she noticed was Talbot attempting to be invisible. For a man without the ability to call upon magic, he was doing a fair job at it.

“. . . could expect little more than that from you.”

“Mother, I am sorry that Lady Sky lost her child, but I don't know how my actions could have altered that one way or the other.” Kerim faced his mother across the pile of boards and leather straps that had been his bed, his voice dangerously soft.

Lady Tirra ignored the warning tone and continued to attack him, “You could have broken the news more gently to her—a note delivered in the middle of the night is hardly considerate. If you had even arranged a proper laying out . . . instead you had him burned with less dignity accorded the son of a gutter-thug.”