In the aftermath of the carnage from which he’d rescued the little scientist, he’d opened the dragonbone box and dropped into it the demon’s golden beads. Corvin had screamed once, and whirled into the tiny container like smoke. Later, John had stepped through a door in the flooded subway tunnels—a door marked with a demon rune—and had been in the King’s city of Bel again.
And in the hands of those who knew only that he’d worked at the behest of the Demon Queen.
Only the hunter’s instinct that had kept him alive for thirty-nine years in the Winterlands let him focus his mind on details now: how close together the guards walked, how many doors were on each side of the stone-flagged passageway, and whether the men holding the wrist-chains did so attentively or not. His dizziness lent a dreamlike quality to the walk, and for an awful moment, as the leader of the squad opened the door into the watchroom, John expected the Demon Queen to be waiting for him there, smiling.…
She wasn’t. Instead, the demon Amayon sat there in the watch captain’s big chair, and beside him stood Lord Ector of Sindestray.
How John knew this was Amayon he wasn’t entirely sure, especially without his spectacles. But he knew. The demon had been his guide through the doors of three Hells, and he’d seen him in several different guises. Most of the time there he’d worn the shape of a beautiful girl—he’d never given up his efforts to seduce John. But on occasion he’d occupied the body of the beast John had ridden through the red and black horror of the Hell of the Shining Things.
At the moment, Amayon was wearing the body of the dead Lady Trey.
It was the closest John came to being sick with sheer shock.
The blue eyes met his, unmistakably the demon’s eyes. The red lips of the thoughtful, rather shy girl John had known curled in a lazy smile, daring him to speak.
“I’m told you refused to drink the water that was given to you this morning,” said the King’s Treasurer, folding his chubby arms. Ector of Sindestray was built along the lines of a tree stump, clothed in the blue and white velvet of his House and made more square yet by an enormous set of Court mantlings that draped around him like an embroidered curtain. His gray curls were worn long, after the fashion of the oldest Houses in the Realm, and dressed as if for a State occasion. He smelled of scorched hair and pomade.
“I wasn’t sleepy,” said John. There was no point now in husbanding his strength or reckoning chances for an escape in the light of the terrifying enlightenment about just which demon had taken over the body of the dead Lady Trey. He guessed what was coming, and despaired
Ector glanced across at Amayon, who was stroking the round belly of her pregnancy. When she had died, Trey had been carrying Gareth’s second child. When the demon guide had betrayed John to Ector, he had worn the form of a slim, curly-haired boy of fifteen or sixteen—Ector had seemed at the time to believe the boy was his nephew, an illusion John guessed the demon had planted in the older man’s dreams. Amayon caught John’s eye and winked at him, then turned back to Ector and nodded. Ector gestured to the squad captain, and though John knew perfectly well that the outer door of the watchroom was barred, he hooked his bare foot around the booted one of the man behind him, tripped him, elbowed the next man holding the chains that bound him, and made a run for the door, all while the other members of the squad were picking up the clubs that lay on the watchroom table. There was nowhere to run and pretty much no hope of getting out of it at this point, but he couldn’t go without a fight.
As the blows hammered him and his consciousness fractured away, he heard Amayon laugh.
The Demon Queen waited for him in that clouded gray borderland on the other side of the pain: Don’t be a fool, she said.
I’m doin’ me damndest not to be, he replied, and her pale mouth tightened. He had a dim awareness of being roped to something—a ladder?—and carried shoulder high, but it was all hazy now, and all he saw was her face.
You’ll let others die, because of your stubbornness?
Lapsing entirely into dream he found himself momentarily in Gareth’s room, windows opening onto the terrace of the Long Garden to admit the smoke of plague-pyres still burning beyond the palace walls. Gareth slept, a heavy and unnatural sleep, his graying, thinning hair scattered on the linen of the pillows and his face furrowed with concern even in sleep. Trey sat beside him, the demon-Trey, Amayon-Trey, robed in royal red and white with her small jeweled hands resting on her swollen belly. Another man was in the room, and John felt again that cold, sick jolt of shock, for he recognized Gareth’s father, the old King Uriens. The King’s mind and consciousness had been eroded, stripped away, reduced to childhood five years ago by the spells of the witch Zyerne, but now he moved briskly. The blue eyes that had seemed so puzzled during last summer’s rebellion were bright, sparkling with demon fire. His lips curved under the fleecy amber curls of his beard. “Do you think he’ll be surprised?” The King nodded down at his sleeping son. Trey’s evil grin echoed his own.
“Why should he be? If old Bliaud the Wizard can wake a girl from the dead—not to speak of her sweet little son”—she patted her belly complacently—“why shouldn’t he be able to wake old Grandpa from mere imbecility?” And she reached up to tweak the King’s gold beard. “The people will be delighted. I’m sure after the rebellion of his cousin, and plague, and his precious Dragonsbane turning out to be in league with demons, Gareth will leap at the chance to step down from the throne and out of the council-chamber, and go back to collecting ballads.”
They both laughed, the ribald gloating mirth of demons, and John tried to cry out, as if under the muffling weight of sleep.
“They are my enemies, too, my love,” whispered the Demon Queen. She stretched out beside him on the ladder that the guards bore through the barred and guarded gate of the Old Palace, down the cobbled slope of the Queen’s Lane, where the crowds trampled last week’s snow to thin mush. The air was bitter on his flesh under the thin linen of the shift, and through it he could feel the heat of her flesh. “Folcalor and the one he feigns to serve, the Hell-Lord Adromelech, imprisoned me and mine in the Hell behind the Mirror a thousand years ago. What makes you think I would not do all in my power to avenge myself on them for that defeat? What makes you think I would not help you against them, if you will help me?”
Her fingers stroked his cheek, touched the silvery runes she’d written on his flesh when first he’d sought her help behind the Burning Mirror. The vision changed, and he saw his sons.
They stood on the wall of Alyn Hold in the Winterlands of the North, the place that was his fortress and his home. His heart leaped at the sight of Ian, whom he had last seen fragile and wasted, battered by the aftermath of demonic possession as Jenny had been battered. Ian was on his feet, and though thin and too serious for a thirteen-year-old, he looked well. Adric stood beside him, sword in hand—a boy’s sword, but though only nine he handled it like a man—and they were looking down over the battlement. Behind them the roof of the kitchens had been burned, and marks of fire scored the stone walls. Men moved about outside the walls, bandits, besieging the Hold as it had been besieged many times since the power of the Kings had waned in the North. But there was something else in the smoke that wreathed the burning village of Alyn, something fearful that scuttled like a huge rat among the smoldering houses. Something that defied all John’s efforts to watch.