Knight of the Demon Queen. Barbara Hambly

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СКАЧАТЬ struck at him with her words as if it were he, and not the archdemon Folcalor’s final outpouring of magic, that had robbed her of her power. “To kill me, as the books say? To kill Ian, for something neither of us wanted, for something that happened against our wills?”

      He was a man who had grown up keeping his thoughts to himself, and he said nothing now.

      “I was taken trying to save him!” she cried into his silence. She had a sweet small voice: gravel veined with silver. It sounded brittle to her now, and shrill. “For trying to save him, for trying to save you, and all these precious people of yours around here! This is what came of it! I hated the demon!”

      “Yet you did every damn thing you could to keep me from sending it away behind the mirror.” There was an edge of anger to his quiet words. “And you’ve been mourning it since.”

      “You don’t understand.” Jenny had learned that it was possible to hate and love the same thing at the same time.

      “I understand that neither you nor my son has eaten nor slept well for months, and that as far as I’ve been able to see you haven’t done a hand’s turn to help him.”

      You don’t understand, she wanted to say again. To scream the words at him until he knew what she felt. But instead she lashed at him, “Your son?” How dare he?

      And at the same time she thought, Ian, and her mind snatched at shredded images of a boy sitting in despair beside a hearth. She remembered stick-thin white hands tracing away wards from jars on a shelf.

      “Well, you never did want him, did you?” The resentment, the buried rage, of all those years of her uncertainty spurted up in his voice. “And if you’d been here in the first place when Caradoc showed up—”

      “If you wanted a woman here during the years I was seeking my own magic, John,” Jenny said with harsh and deadly sarcasm, “I can only say you should have convinced one of your regiment of village lightskirts to bear you a child. Any one of them would have.”

      “Papa?” The door hinge creaked. A yellow thread of candlelight fluttered, illumined the sturdy eight-year-old in the doorway: face, hands, rufous hair, and bright sharp brown eyes all the mimic of John’s burly father. He’d girded his small sword over his nightshirt: A man must go armed, he liked to say. “Ian’s gone.”

      Jenny led them to Frost Fell. The moment her second son, her little ruffian Adric, had spoken, her dream rushed back to her and she knew where Ian was and what he sought. Snow fell steadily as they saddled the horses, Jenny’s scarred fingers fumbling half frozen with buckles and reins until she wanted to scream and strike everyone around her for being so slow. The air was filled with drifting white as they crossed over Toadback Hill, and the horses skidded on the ice of the cranberry bog.

      They found Ian outside the little house, unconscious. By the tracks, he’d crawled there in delirium, but the snow already lay over him like a shroud. John and Sergeant Muffle, John’s bailiff and blacksmith and bastard older brother, fed the dying fire in the hearth and dragged the bed over beside it while Jenny worked desperately to mix an antidote, to force saline water down her son’s throat, to induce vomiting and keep him warm. All the while she cursed, for the one thing that would surely drag him back from the shadowlands where he now walked—the magic of her healing—was gone.

      Looking up, she saw this, too, in John’s eyes.

      “You knew he was here.” He sounded numb, like he couldn’t believe any of this was taking place.

      “I saw him in a dream.” Between them the boy’s white face was slack, shut eyes sunk in bistered hollows of pain.

      And you didn’t think to mention it to me. She could all but hear his thought. But he only looked away and brought more water to bathe his son’s face. Frantic, Jenny traced the marks of healing, the runes of life, on her son’s forehead and chest and hands. In her mind she drew first the limitations and the power lines, then the summoning of power, the calling of the magic from her bones and her heart, from the stars above the sullen cloud and the water beneath the earth, as she had done all her life.

      But it was only words. The sparkly slips of fire that she’d felt in her days of small power and small learning, the great golden river of fire that had been hers when the dragon whose life she had saved had given her the gift of dragon magic, the gorgeous envenomed rainbow of demon power—all these were gone. She was just a middle-aged woman repeating nonsense words in her mind, hoping that her son would not die.

      And thinking, in spite of all she could do, of the demon she had lost.

      In the black cold before dawn, when John went out to fetch more wood and Sergeant Muffle dozed by the blood-colored pulse of the hearth, Jenny stretched across the furs and wept, whispering a prayer to the God of Women: Do not let him die. Do not let him die.

      The hollow within her yawned to a chasm that would swallow the world, her soul, and John, Ian, and Jenny together, leaving nothing. Do not let him die.

      Like the touch of an insect’s feelers on her scarred scalp, she felt the brush of her son’s finger. Ian whispered—or perhaps only thought—“Folcalor.” And then, “I will not go.”

      Even in her extremity, before she passed over into sleep, Jenny thought it curious. Folcalor was not the demon who had possessed Ian’s body and imprisoned Ian’s soul.

      Folcalor was the archdemon who had whispered to the mage Caradoc in dreams. Once in possession of Caradoc’s flesh, he’d had the magic to open the doors to Hell, to bring through the other Sea-wights—wights who in turn had enslaved dragons and wizards alike.

      When Jenny dreamed of that time, she dreamed of Amayon. She assumed Ian dreamed of his own jailer, lover, rapist, master: a minor gyre called Gothpys.

      But it was Folcalor she saw now in dreams.

      The wizard Caradoc’s body was gone. She had slain him beneath the sea, and fish had devoured his flesh. Dreaming, she saw Folcalor as she’d always known he looked: a bloated soft thing of quicksilver and green fire in which the half-digested glowing remains of other Hellspawn fitfully moved. His eyes were like fire seen through colored glass: cold and intelligent, as a pig’s are intelligent, or a rat’s: uncaring. Her flesh crept, as it had during the days of her imprisonment, seeing him for what he was.

      Intelligence and patience and power. Power beyond any demon she’d encountered or heard of, even in John’s ancient lore; power not only to shove aside the spells and exorcisms of a trained mage, but to devour that mage through the magic itself. Not in a thousand years, according to the lore, had demons of such power existed.

      A thousand years ago they had been vanquished, but no one knew how.

      Now they had returned. No one knew why.

      In his hands—hands of human flesh, she saw, small and stubby and crusted thick with rings—he held the sapphire in which Ian’s soul had been imprisoned, the sapphire Jenny had herself cast into the River Wildspae when she’d returned her son’s soul to his flesh.

      The demon looked at her and smiled.

      In the morning John’s aunts arrived. His father’s bossy brood of sisters—Jane and Rowan and Umetty—and Rowan’s daughters Dilly and Rowanberry, and Muffle’s mother Holly, who had been old Lord Aver’s mistress for years, lived at the Hold in their assorted states of spinsterhood СКАЧАТЬ