Barbara Hambly - Knight of the Demon Queen

And maybe a shadow was all it had been.

Storm winds smote the house, and all the candle flames bent and jittered with it. More snow, Jenny thought.

But the thought didn’t bring with it the urge to sleep again, merely a reflection that with her hands twisted as they were, it would take longer to wield the shovel to dig herself clear. She opened the window long enough to pull the shutters closed and bar them, then made her choices among the dried herbs, gathering the little bundles and holding them in her skirt. As an afterthought she looked for a clean skirt, a clean shift, a clean bodice from the chest of spare clothes, then went downstairs to tidy the kitchen.

Behind her she thought the shadows whispered, but she did not look back.

JOHN’S STUDY WAS a round chamber at the top of the tower that in his father’s time had doubled as a depot for emergency food stores and a lookout post in bad weather. Wide windows faced the cardinal points and made the place almost impossible to heat. As a child, John had fallen into the habit of studying there, away from his father’s eye, and hiding his books among the grain sacks.

Now a lifetime’s plunder of learning stacked desk, worktable, and the plank shelves that filled every available inch of wall space. Candles—or the slumped, exhausted remains of them—sprouted like fungi among the dilapidated volumes, stalagmites of tallow bearding every shelf, corner, and lamp stand. Scrolls, parchment, piles of papyrus drifted every horizontal surface like dried leaves. The rafters were a spiderweb of experimental hoists and pulleys, the shelves a ramshackle graveyard of disemboweled clocks. A telescope, built by John according to accounts he’d found in a volume of Heronax, stood before the eastern window, the gnome-wrought crystal lenses pointed at the quadrant of the sky where six hundred years ago Dotys had predicted the rising of a comet at last summer’s end.

Unerringly John picked from the disarray an onyx bottle that had once contained silver ink. Terens had described such a thing in Deeds of Ancient Heroes in writing of the villainous Greeth Demoncaller, who had been dismembered alive on orders of Agravaine III. John tied a red ribbon around it— why red? he wondered—and put it in his pocket. From a cupboard he took five new candles—marveling a little that he could find five unburned—and Volume VII of Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia and finally, from the litter of the desk, a piece of black chalk.

Gantering Pellus strongly recommended that experiments concerning demons not be conducted under roofs that would ever again shelter humans. In fact, he’d strongly recommended that such experiments not be conducted at all. For whoso speaketh with the Spawn of Hell, even in their dreams, the encyclopediast wrote, is never after to be trusted in any congress with men. It is the whole art and pleasure of such wights to cause suffering. They are cunning beyond human imagining and, being deathless, will stay at nothing to avail themselves of access to the affairs of men.

All of this, John reflected as he climbed from the tower, was true.

As true as fever, and love, and duty, and death.

He fought his way through the snow to his work shed. His hands could barely work the catch on the door. Drafts tore at the flame as he hung his lantern on a low rafter, shadows jittering among the bones and sinews of his larger experiments: the clockwork engine of his flying machine, the webby drape of the parachute that had cost him a week in bed with a broken collarbone the summer before last. Trying not to think of anything beyond the moment, he cleared the wheels and gears of the dragon-slaying machine away from the center of the room and with the black chalk drew a pentagram on the dirt floor.

Let the flame be virgin as the waxe, the encyclopediast said of the candles. Their wobbly light threw his shape huge on the rough-cast walls. He placed the ink bottle beside him and settled himself cross-legged in the pentagram’s center, breathing deep.

He had none of his son’s magic, none of the power Jenny had lost. By all rights, he thought, as the fivefold candleflame bent and shivered, the world should have no more to fear from what I am doing than from a child’s game.

But his heart felt as if it would break in his ribs with pounding, and his whole body was cold.

“All right,” he said into the silence. “You win. What do you want?”

Once on a time, staring into the fire, Jenny could have seen them.

Seen Ian sleeping—in the room he shared with Adric? In the great bed she’d shared with John? Did Aversin sit beside his son, awake or asleep?

Jenny closed her eyes, the ardent changefulness of the flame a color visible yet. But the images she saw in the dark of her mind were only those created by her thoughts.

Ian sleeping, as she’d seen him sleep a thousand times.

Low red firelight playing over the strings of her harp in its corner. Her hands were too stiff with scars now to coax music from its strings.

John …

Where would he be? And what would he be doing, in the wake of his son’s attempt to take his own life?

She shivered, remembering him clinging to the spikes and horns and hammering wings of two dragons as they fought hundreds of feet above the ground, trying to reach his son with the talismans he’d bartered his soul to get. She remembered herself riding the black dragon Morkeleb down into the sea in pursuit of Caradoc as he fled, and she saw again the distorted demon fish circling and attacking in the blue-black water as she and the dragon drove Caradoc back among the coral and rock. She saw the devil light streaming from the old mage’s open mouth, his open eyes, the smooth white moonstone in his staff’s head.

The water had burned her as she pinned the renegade wizard’s body to the rocks with a harpoon. She had pulled the crystal spike from the dragon Centhwevir’s skull, freeing Centhwevir of the demon. She’d torn away from Caradoc’s neck the silver bottle containing the jewels that imprisoned the captive wizards’ souls. But Folcalor had rushed forth out of Caradoc’s body, leaving the wizard’s emptied corpse to be devoured by fish.

Later, when they’d returned the souls of the wizards to their bodies again, they’d found among the jewels in the bottle a topaz that they’d assumed contained Caradoc’s soul. This they had smashed—as they’d smashed that of the Icerider boy Summer, whose body had been killed in the fighting—to release the soul into the next world.

Now, as she tried vainly to call John’s image in the fire, all she saw was that underwater darkness, that blue-black world near the Sea-wights’ abyss. The whalemages had closed the demon gate by piling rocks before it. Closing her eyes and letting her mind drift, Jenny did not know whether what she saw was in truth a scrying or only the pictures in her imagination.

But she smelled the cold salt strangeness of the deep sea and heard the movements of the water around the black columns of rock where Caradoc had been pinned. Like vast moving shadows she saw the whalemages above her, and far below, silver stealthy shapes whose eyes flared with green light.