Barbara Hambly - Knight of the Demon Queen

Not for nothing, however, had John grown up his father’s son, his heart and his face a fist closed in defense. He merely regarded Amayon without expression, and the demon shrugged and smiled.

“Well, I’m sure if it makes you feel better to believe that … The gate’s this way, Lordship.” He threw a mocking flex into the title. “Generally only the small fry can leak through, but Her Reechiness has given me a word.”

“Do you hate that animal?” he added, raising delicate brows at Battlehammer, who stood, ears flat to his neck and muscles bunched, regarding him as he would have a snake.

“Should I?”

“It’s up to you, of course, Lordship. But unless there’s some reason you’d like to see him die, I suggest you don’t bring him with us. Your mistress has made arrangements.”

“Ah,” John said. “Thinks of everythin’, she does.” And he dropped the seeds into the bottle.

It was Aversin’s intention simply to keep the demon where he couldn’t do mischief while he took Battlehammer to the nearest farm, which was old Dan Darrow’s walled enclave in the bottomlands adjacent to the Mire. But with the snow and the wind, and his exhaustion from a sleepless night, it took him nearly two hours to reach the place.

“’Twill be black as pitch by the time you get back to the Mire,” the farmer protested when John explained that he wanted the loan of a donkey and a boy to lead it back to the farm again.

A little uneasily, he acceded to the patriarch’s invitation to spend the night. He was conscious of the demon bottle around his neck as he sat at supper with the Darrow clan and their hired men and women, watching the old man’s fair-haired grandchildren tumble and play before the hearth. He guessed that Amayon was perfectly aware of his surroundings; he had no business, he thought, bringing even a bottled demon into a house where there were children.

When he slept, he dreamed again and again of a rat, or some huge insect, creeping up the frame of each child’s bed, demon light glittering in its berry-blue eyes. Reaching toward them …

He woke at the touch of a hand on his neck.

The Darrow farm was a big place, but simple and rustic. John had bedded down among the men of the household in the loft, on blankets and straw tickings spread around where the chimney came through from the floor below. They’d have put the King himself there, had he come calling. Remembering that demons had spoken to Caradoc in his dreams, offering him greater power and wider wisdom if he would but open a gate for them, he’d tied the red ribbon that held the ink bottle in a knot up close to his throat so it couldn’t be slipped off over his head while he slept.

Sure enough, as he opened his eyes he felt a man’s hands fumbling with the ribbon and heard the slow thick breathing of a sleeper near his face, not the short breaths of a man nervous about robbing a guest. John caught the sleepwalker by wrist and shoulder and flung him bodily onto as many men as he could; there were shouts and curses, and by the thread of dim hearthlight that leaked up through the ladder hole at the far end of the loft he saw his attacker bound to his feet, eyes blank, knife in hand.

The attacker—a huge stablehand named Browson who’d helped unsaddle Battlehammer—lunged at him, but men were scrambling up, grabbing, clutching. Shouts of “Murder!” and “Bandits!” barked through the dark. Another of the hired men grabbed Browson and threw him down, and then Dan Darrow and his two sons-in-law swarmed up the ladder in their nightshirts. “Browson, what in Cragget’s name are you at?”

Browson was blinking, stupid with sleep and scared. He saw the knife in his own hand and dropped it in terror.

John fumbled his spectacles on as one of the men said, “He pulled steel on His Lordship here, sir!”

“I didn’t! I didn’t do nuthin’, sir!” Browson gasped. Darrow’s eyes grew flinty, for it wasn’t an unheard-of thing for bandit gangs to buy the loyalty of hired men to slit the throats of as many potential defenders as they could in the vanguard of an attack. “I swear it, sir! I didn’t mean no harm! I had this dream …”

“I thought so,” John said briskly and gestured stillness to those who’d pulled their weapons from beneath their blankets. “ Somnambulistis truncularis, that’s what it is.”

“Somna-what?” They regarded him with respect, for he had a wide reputation as a scholar. Only old Dan glanced sidelong, suspicion in his dark eyes as he stroked the huge white fangs of his mustache back into something that resembled their daytime order.

“ Somnambulistis truncularis. Polyborus describes it in his Materia Medica ,” John went on, inventing freely, “and Heronax says it’s caused by conjunctions of Saturn and Mars at the midwinter solstice, though meself, I agree with Juronal that it’s caused by the bite of the brown hay toad, which is near extinct here in the North.”

He shoved the ink bottle back under his shirt and checked that the sack of flax seeds was still safe in his pocket. “In places in the South, though, people regularly put pots and pans round their beds in case the servants come sneakin’ in like this, for it gives ’em dreams about killin’. What’d you dream, son?”

“A voice.” The farmhand looked tremblingly from John to his master. “It was a King, like, all in a golden crown, tellin’ me to get this bottle away from … from His Lordship here. He said as how His Lordship had stole the bottle, and I was to take and open it. Take and open it, he said, and there’d be treasure for me inside as well.”

John nodded wisely. “Way common in these cases,” he said. “In Greenhythe only last year there was a quadruple case of it, when four village women all dreamt they had to bathe the mayor and converged on his house in the middle of the night with soap and towels, and not one of ’em remembered in the mornin’ why it was so twilkin’ important that he be clean. So I’m just grateful the case is no worse.”

That got a laugh, as he’d hoped it would, and those men who’d had their swords in hands stashed them beneath their blankets again. Even Darrow, who wasn’t one to endanger his family by leaving a suspected traitor unhanged, relaxed.

But John spent the remainder of the long night awake, pinching himself when he felt in danger of falling asleep. Twice or thrice, when he did drift off, he dreamed again about the blue-eyed rat that sniffed and scrabbled about the beds where Dan Darrow’s little grandchildren slept.

“And that was your idea of a joke?” he asked when Darrow—who had himself accompanied him to the edge of the Wraithmire with a donkey laden with supplies—disappeared between the snowy deadfall hummocks, leaving Aversin alone.

Amayon flickered into view out of the smoke from the newly opened ink bottle. “Oh, don’t be squeamish.” He pouted. “I wouldn’t have harmed the little bastards. You’ve said yourself a thousand times that that youngest boy needs to be thrashed more often.”

John studied the elfin face, the innocent eyes in their dark fringes of lash. Just enough like Ian, he realized, to twist at the grief he felt about his son. The voice melodious, sweet and childlike. But he knew that Amayon no more looked like this than the Demon Queen looked like the woman he saw in his dreams.

He slipped the straps of food sacks and water satchels over his shoulders, flexing his knees to test the balance of the load. One sack contained other things: bits of silver and dragonbone, whatever he could find in Jenny’s workbox that wouldn’t add too much weight. “And I suppose Browson needs to be hanged, for attackin’ a guest?”

“They wouldn’t have hanged him.” Amayon gestured airily. “Now come along. Her Poxship went to a great deal of trouble to get you a beast worthy of you, so we’d better get through the gate before it wanders away.”