Queen of Demons (76 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Cashel dropped his quarterstaff, judging the distance. He moved a step to the side and a step out from the shaft. There was a risk to this, but not as great a risk as waking up in the middle of the night and remembering that he hadn't tried to save a friend.
The staff's ferrules spat blue sparks when they hit the ground. Cashel raised his arms, watching between his spread hands. At least in this place he didn't have to worry about the sun blinding him … .
Cashel's feet were close under him, but his knees and
the elbows too were bent. He needed to take the shock with his muscles, not his locked joints.
That
would serve to drive him into the ground like a tent peg, and it'd smash the ape up about as bad as if nobody'd caught him.
Zahag bawled, “Ahhhh!” and hit. Cashel's arms gave. He clutched the ape to his chest, rotating away from the shaft. He went down on one knee for an instant before toppling sideways and skidding on the smooth ground.
They fetched up several paces from the shaft. Cashel was still holding the ape. From the way Zahag gibbered in relief, there wasn't anything wrong with him worse than the whack Cashel had taken when the weight of the falling ape drove his own elbows into his stomach.
Cashel got up and walked back to where his quarterstaff lay. The rumble of chanting was louder now. It wasn't coming from anywhere that Cashel could point to; and anyway, he had his own business to tend to. Now he understood what to do.
“Is that the queen?” Zahag asked. He was hopping up and down in sheer joy of being alive, Cashel guessed. “Is it the queen up there, chief, and you're going to get her out?”
“I don't think it's the queen,” Cashel said, checking first one, then the other end cap of the quarterstaff. “I'm going to break something now, Zahag. I can't be sure what, so maybe you ought to head for the tunnel to get clear.”
Cashel traced his hands over the hickory, making sure there were no cracks that'd appeared since he tossed the staff down in haste. There weren't. It hadn't been likely, but Cashel liked to be sure of things.
He spun the quarterstaff over his head. He kept the revolutions slow as he warmed up, crossing his wrists one over the other at the staff's balance; and again, and again.
Blue fire popped and crackled. It formed rings that hung in the air even after Cashel changed the staff's angle. The sizzle sounded like the laughter of an old man.
Cashel laughed too; and, laughing, stabbed the butt of
the quarterstaff like a battering ram against the column of light. The blow had all the strength of both arms and the weight of his torso behind it.
The universe went white and silent. Even the chanting stopped for several heartbeats.
Roaring blue fire ripped the blankness like a lightning bolt. Cashel fell on his back. He couldn't rise, couldn't even blink for the moment, so great was his exhaustion.
Cracks spread across the shaft of red light. The surface dulled, losing the perfect sheen. A piece the size of a man's fingernail fell off, dissolving like a burned-out spark before it hit the ground.
Everything crumbled. Zahag's mouth opened and closed, but his shouts were lost in the crash of a universe breaking apart.
As the red light of the column rotted away, it left rough stone in its place. Instead of a narrow shaft and a larger sphere atop it, Cashel lay on rock and coarse grass at the base of a plug of volcanic rock that had been fashioned into a rough figure.
Angle and the crude workmanship kept Cashel from telling more about the statue than that it was one. Its hand clutched a ball of living rock into which windows had been cut.
Two men ran across the rough ground toward where Cashel lay. One was a huge, rawboned fellow with a big spear; the other was of more ordinary size, holding in his good hand a long knife hooked like a hawk's bill.
The change from ruby wizard-light to natural landscape spread like fire in a dry meadow, not especially fast but as certain as fate. Here and there cracks were appearing in the bowl's sheer walls.
A girl with streaming blond hair leaned from one of the windows in the stone ball the statue held. She climbed out, finding niches for her fingers and bare toes in weathered stone.
“Sharina!” Cashel whispered. His lips formed the
name, but his voice was too weak to be heard even in a quiet room.
A crack ran across the soil. Pieces shook from the carven outcrop, and the ground bucked violently.
In the pause before the next shock, Cashel heard Zahag's voice. “The volcano!” the ape shrieked. “The volcano's about to erupt!”
C
racks shivered across the wizard-light. For the first time since Sharina's capture, she could see objects in their own colors instead of through a filter of sullen red.
She crawled through the slot in the rock. It was a tight fit, even for her, but she would have squeezed out even if it meant flaying herself on the way.
Sharina understood now what it meant to be free. She'd never imagined restraint as complete as the queen's imprisonment. She'd rather die than undergo that again.
She swung out, clinging to the sides with both hands as her right foot felt for a ledge. She was on the carved outcrop in the center of the crater. A lifetime ago she'd seen it with Hanno and Unarc.
The two hunters were running toward her now. They must have waited on the crater rim instead of looking to their own safety after she was captured. Seeing them, Sharina wondered that she'd ever thought they
might
flee.
Cashel lay on his back at the base of the outcrop; an ape was capering about him. He wasn't moving. “If he's dead …” Sharina whispered as her hand tried a knob of rock; it broke off under her weight.
The outcrop was porous and well weathered. Sharina's
toes found a crack that supported her body long enough for her to get her fingers into it as well. She let herself down her body's length, fumbling for another grip.
Sharina laughed. Cashel wasn't dead. He wouldn't leave her that way.
The outcrop shook violently. Sharina flattened herself against the rock face by instinct. Chunks from higher up bounced past her.
The floor of the crater split across. The ground on one side lifted while that on the other sank; the portions twitched at different rhythms. Magma winked in the depths of the crack.
A ledge jutted out a dozen feet beneath her: the knee of the squatting statue. It was a long drop to a hard surface, but there wasn't much time.
Sharina jumped, landing safely on flexed knees. The crater shook again. The ledge slid away, carrying Sharina down with it in a rush and a roar.
She kept her feet, spreading her arms for balance. Dust and pebbles cascaded ahead of her. Hanno and Unarc had lifted Cashel between them. They—a big man and two huge men—lurched farther from the path of the landslide. The ape followed on its hind legs, carrying Cashel's staff in its hands.
The slab finished its thunderous skid to the ground. The choking cloud of the rock's destruction rose over Sharina; fragments from higher up were still falling. Sharina ran out of the snarling chaos, using the rush of her descent to speed her feet.
Chips pelted her. Sharina knew that if she tripped, the scree of sliding rock would bury her at least until the eruption turned the crater into a sea of fire.
She didn't trip. Her face emerged into sunlight before her screaming lungs forced her to breathe dust thicker than a sandstorm.
“Lady, I bless You for Your mercy!” Sharina cried. “Oh, Cashel, I knew you'd come!”
And as she heard herself say the words, Sharina knew that they were true.
Cashel couldn't have stood without Unarc's help, but his eyes were open and he held his head up. Hanno had started back toward the shattered outcrop, but he stopped when he saw Sharina already free.
“This way!” screamed the ape, gesturing toward the crater wall with the quarterstaff. “We can get to the passage before—”
A shock fiercer than those before shook the crater. It threw them all to the ground, even Sharina, who'd ridden a landslide without falling. More cracks ran across the bowl; throbbing, yellow-white lava began to ooze up from below. The queen's wizardry had checked the volcano's anger. Now that wizardry had failed, nature was reasserting itself with a vengeance.
“Let's go!” Hanno said. Unarc sheathed his hooked knife. Hanno tossed his spear to the bald hunter and took over supporting Cashel.
The ape loped toward a ring of ruby light at the base of the crater's wall. He was using three limbs now, dragging the bouncing staff behind him with the remaining hand.
Hanno pulled Cashel's left arm over his shoulders and gripped Cashel's wrist with his own right hand. Linked, the two big men broke into a lumbering trot. Even somebody as strong as Hanno couldn't have carried Cashel for any distance unaided, but Cashel was able to stumble along with the other man's help.
Cashel looked dazed. He smiled when his eyes met Sharina's, though.
She paced the three men. She could have outdistanced them easily, but the last thing she wanted was to be alone. Safety wasn't a place. Safety was friends.
“Is this your friend Nonnus you talked about, missie?” Hanno shouted. His face was set, but he looked as though he could keep running at his present pace until the sun froze.
Sharina's left hand rested on the hilt of the Pewle knife, though the wide belt gripped the sheath tightly enough that it didn't flop when she ran. “No,” she said. “He's my friend Cashel.”
“You got some right impressive friends, girl!” Hanno said. He bellowed with laughter.
The shimmering ruby had dissolved starting at its center, so now only the top of the crater's rim still shone with unnatural red purity. Even that vestige vanished as the group neared the rock walls. The tunnel mouth was the only remnant of wizardry in the volcano's sunlit bowl.
Instead of simply trembling, the ground rippled like a blanket being shaken out. Hanno stumbled; Cashel touched a hand down to keep them both upright. Cashel and the hunter still clung to each other, but they were more like oxen in yoke than an invalid and a nurse.
The ape reached the mouth of the passage and turned. His eyes looked up and he opened his mouth to shout. An enormous, wet
plopping
noise overwhelmed all other sound. The ground billowed and the crater wall itself split to the sky.
Sharina looked over her shoulder. The central outcrop which the Hairy Men had carved into their own likeness sank into a bubbling pool of lava. Blazing rock spewed high in the air.
Within what had been the idol's head, now bobbling on the lava like a bladder in a millrace, was a sphere of ruby light. There was a figure within.
Sharina saw the queen raise her staff in a desperate attempt to stay the inevitable. Rock fountaining from the depths of the earth flung the ball of wizard-light in a wild career. No one could stand, let alone chant in such a dance.
“Sharina, come!” Cashel cried. He stood at the mouth of the tunnel, holding his free hand toward her. Hanno looked back from his other side with a worried expression.
The ruby sphere sank into the sea of lava. Sharina expected it to bob up again. Instead livid rock sprayed outward
in all directions, the way the water of a swamp does when a bubble bursts.
Sharina plunged into the tunnel with her friends.
Cashel and Hanno were directly ahead of her, filling the passage. They clumped forward in a way that transcended human effort.
Sharina had thought the tunnel led down—there was no other way to go from the point in the crater wall where it opened, after all. But the tunnel, like the bowl of light where the queen had made her lair, was separate from the geography of the waking world. She and her companions were climbing, or at any rate they expended the effort they would to climb.
Sharina felt the air compress with a dull thump. She glanced back. The lava that had followed them into the passage blazed behind her. For the moment they were staying well ahead of it.
She didn't say anything to her companions. There was nothing to do except what they were doing, after all.
Anyway, she'd outlived the queen.
Something changed ahead of her. Sharina had glimpsed Unarc and the ape occasionally between the legs of Cashel and Hanno. They disappeared. Hanno shouted; then he and Cashel too were gone, and Sharina sprang out into cool air and lamplight.
Tenoctris was kneeling before a pentacle on a dank stone floor. She swayed, dropping the sliver of wood she'd been using in her art. Sharina caught the old woman before she could hit the stone.
For a moment Sharina saw the end of the tunnel from which she'd just emerged. It glowed, as real as the basalt walls which it interpenetrated but did not touch. The light dissolved into sparkles, then nothing at all.
“I couldn't hold it open any longer,” Tenoctris whispered. “Was it long enough? Cashel, is the queen … ?”
“No,” said Sharina in a tone too grim to be triumphant. “The queen isn't anywhere, Tenoctris. The queen is gone.”
“Begging your pardon, missie,” Hanno said, “but there was lava coming after us a few steps back. I
don't
think I want to wait here to see if it still is.”
Tenoctris smiled, though her eyes were shut and she didn't open them for the moment. “This passage is closed,” she said, cradled in Sharina's arms. “If there was anything in it when it closed, well, it won't vanish—it'll find another place to exit. But it won't come out here.”
She opened her eyes and glanced with a bemused expression at those with her in the cellars. Sharina grinned back; they were an assorted lot, certainly.
“We should get back to the surface, though,” Tenoctris said. “There's still the Beast to deal with.”
A low tremor shook the building. Tenoctris started to rise; Cashel and Hanno together lifted the old wizard from Sharina's lap.
“If it isn't too late,” Tenoctris said, though her face was calm.
 
 
A serpent head on a neck thirty feet long bent toward Garric from his left side. Compared with the creature's huge body, the head looked oddly small—not much larger than that of a horse.
Of course the Beast had three heads to feed with.
The Beast's movement was a feint. Garric turned toward it as if completely fooled, his sword lifted and his buckler out as though to fend off the hissing maw.
The Beast struck very quickly from the other side. Garric jumped back and slashed at the ridged yellow throat scales as the serpent jaws clopped shut on the air where he'd stood a moment before.
The snake heads jerked away, hissing like a pair of mill races. The dog head roared, losing the rhythm of the incantation. Purple blood leaked from the long gash. It looked black in the rock's ruddy glow.
Garric laughed, but he held where he was for the moment. The Beast's necks couldn't be as flexible as the
snakes they resembled. They had to hold their own considerable weight and that of the head in the air, while a snake has the ground to support it. Nevertheless the heads could strike from both sides together. Garric didn't want to get so close to the Beast's gigantic body that he couldn't keep all the heads in his vision at the same time.
“If I were that big,”
thought one—it could have been either—of the personalities in Garric's body,
“I'd stamp a man into the stone instead of worrying about his little sword, but this one isn't me.”
“Bow to me, human!” the dog head said. “I am your god! I am immortal! Look at the way this wound heals!”
The purple blood vanished like water sinking into the sand. The severed scales had bent upward on either side of the wound, drawn by their own resilience. Now they flattened again like lips of heat-softened wax, reforming with only a seam to show the injury—and that smoothed as well.
Immortal the Beast might be, but it wasn't invulnerable and it felt pain. More important, the Beast
feared
pain. By twisting its nose ring, a man can master a vicious boar hog three times his size, though its tusks could tear him in half if they ever closed on his body.
“Come then!” Garric shouted. “If you like the experience so much, let's do it again!”
The serpent heads swayed. It was like watching trees topple. Neither was a serious attack. Garric didn't bother to react.
Laughing he cried, “It doesn't matter if you're a god. To get past me you'll have to prove you're a man!”
“We've crossed the bridge, Garric,” Liane called in the clear, dispassionate voice of a noblewoman summoning her carriage across a crowded courtyard.
The head on Garric's left struck hard and fast. He stepped into the attack, slashing. His blade crunched through scales and light bones, cutting half again its own depth in the serpent snout.
That was almost too deep. The shock of the blow
numbed Garric's hand. The Beast snatched back its wounded head with such screaming violence that it nearly pulled the sword from his grip.
The other snake head struck, more in reaction to pain than from calculation. Garric ducked under the blow, swinging his buckler instead of risking a cut before his hand had stopped tingling.
The shield was small but as sturdy as three birch crossplies and iron reinforcements could make it. The spiked boss bonged against the fanged lower jaw. It felt to Garric as though he'd batted an oak tree, but he heard bones in the snake head break.

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