Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (26 page)

Far ahead, echoing in the stone vaults of the prison tower, she heard a confusion of voices cursing, and the splintery crunch of axes on wood. Someone shouted, “Bring him out!” and another, “Got him, my lord!” “Are you satisfied, my little traitor?” asked the King's voice, more softly. “Barricading oneself into one's cell isn't exactly the act of an innocent man.”

Jenny said, “Hurry,” and began to run, up the stair from the cellar into a deserted watchroom that had been the old kitchen, John and Gareth like hounds upon her heels.

“That way.” Gareth pointed down a stair, and ahead of her Jenny saw in the torchlit corridor at its base the blue-clothed soldiers of Ector of Sindestray's private guard crowded together, a wall of azure backs.

“It's the act of a man who knows he'll get no justice from demons,” retorted Polycarp's voice, and there was the meaty thwack of a blow, and the jangle of chains.

“Bring him to the watchroom.” Trey's voice was cold as silver, and at the same moment that Gareth checked his stride, face gray with shock and grief, Jenny felt the piercing knife of recognition.

John had told her already that it was Amayon who had taken over Trey's body.

Her own words came back to her: I can't be absolutely positive I'd turn Amayon away.…

Words spoken so casually, in the certainty that she would, in fact, not react to the sound of his voice.

She was aware of John watching her, not warily, but with compassion in his eyes. “You want to wait back in the wine cellar?” he asked, under cover of curses and blows farther along the corridor. “Some of the lads'll stay with you.…”

Jenny shook her head.

“It could be dangerous,” he said. “Now your magic's comin' back, an' all.”

“No,” she replied. “I'm in no danger from that.” At the same time, unexpected and unbidden and against her own will and better sense, she felt screaming anger at Amayon, as if he'd betrayed her by taking on another woman's body—Mine wasn't good enough, with my magic gone? Or is it just because I'm old.…

What on EARTH are you thinking? her saner mind demanded instants later. But the anger remained, bitter as gall.

And under it, disgusting her, still lay that unbidden yearning for the demon who had whispered to her how she was the only human he had ever truly loved.

The others meanwhile surged past them, streaming along the cramped corridor. Jenny shook her head, appalled at her own thoughts, and, shifting her grip on her halberd, hurried on their heels. John strode at her side, sword in hand. “You leave if you need to,” he said. “And only you know if and how that'll be.”

“I'll be all right.” But she didn't know if she would be. The thoughts demons put in human minds are not rational thoughts, and she knew their strength.

Shouting ahead of them, and the clash of chains as Polycarp was thrown against the wall or to the floor: “I think the actions of your coconspirators this morning have abrogated your right to a hearing,” said the King. Through the watchroom doorway as she reached it, Jenny glimpsed his golden hair in the light of the two torches, above a crowd of backs. “The murder of Lord Bliaud—”

Then shouting, as the first of Gareth's insurgents bulled into the watchroom before her.

Steel clanged; the stink of blood lashed hot into the damp, cold air. Trey screamed, a theatrical shriek of feigned terror, and Ector's rather high voice yapped, “How DARE you draw steel against your King?” John released Jenny's arm and surged forward into the maelstrom as the guards and servants clashed and locked in struggle.

“Kill him!” the King shouted to the men who held Polycarp against the far wall. The Master of Halnath tripped one of them and smote the other with the hank of chain that joined his wrists, flattened back against the wall and scooped up a wooden bench to shield himself. By the bruises on his temples and mouth and hands, Jenny could see that in the day of his imprisonment he had been subjected already to what was euphemistically referred to as “the Question.” One of the palace cooks stepped in with an iron skillet and smote the guard who would have stabbed Polycarp through the cracks in the bench; then the melee closed around them again.

Jenny slashed with her halberd, trying to stop Lord Ector from fleeing, but one of his guards struck at her and the councilor slipped by, shouting for more guards. The torchlit watchroom was a cul-de-sac. If Ector was clean of possession, at least some of the men he would fetch would not be. Tourneval shouted, led four or five guards and servants back into the passageway to intercept the attack that would come. The King had scooped up a fallen guard's halberd and was striking out all around him, crying, “Traitors! Traitors!” while Trey, at his side, wailed, “Oh, dear gods, save me! My husband has gone mad!”

Guards ranged before them; at Gareth's shout, his insurgent force fell back.

“Those of you who think I've gone mad,” the Prince panted, “go out to the old Queen's garden in the East Tower. Look in the chapel there—the door's unlocked. Ask anyone, who it was who had me give her the key to that wing of the palace. Ask who has gone to ‘meditate’ in that place every night since her so-called resurrection.…”

And Trey stared at him, with terrified wild doe eyes. “Oh, my lord,” she whispered, her little white hand stealing to her lips. “Oh, my lord, how can you? I begged you—how many times I begged you!—not to do those things in that place.” She pressed her hands on the swelling of her belly, beneath her gown of yellow velvet and sable fur. “That you would choose my own rooms, my own chapel, for your terrible rites.…”

The guards around the King looked at one another, uncertain in the flaring orange glare.

“Yes, go,” snapped the King to them, with a bark of laughter. “Go all the way to the other end of the palace, like he says—I'll be fine here with his armed troops and his demonpossessed friends till you get back.” He turned a scornful seablue eye on his son, and added, “Why don't you tell them their boots are untied and be done with it, boy? You can't even lay a ruse properly.” Even in his illness, after the witch Zyerne had drained away his mind and his personality, he had been a kingly figure, as tall as his son and broader, stronger, far more handsome, with hair still thick and golden as Gareth's had prematurely faded and thinned. How easy, thought Jenny as she glanced from father to son, for men to trust that strong bluff competence above a gawky, stoop-shouldered young man who would throw up for hours after a battle.

And Polycarp, lowering the bench that shielded him, said reasonably, “Send one man, then, one whom you all trust. Send Lord Ector. And bid him look whose footprints he sees on the snow in the garden.”

Trey struck like a cat—Amayon struck like a cat—whipping a dagger from her belt and lunging at the Master. He caught her wrist, but Jenny could see he would not strike a pregnant woman as he would strike a man, even a woman whom he knew to be a demon: It was not in him. She saw in his face, too, the love he had borne for Trey.

Trey slashed Polycarp's hand open and bolted for the doorway, but John stepped in front of her, sword held ready, and she stopped, staring, dark eyes huge.

And in that frozen second Jenny sprang forward and caught her arm and twisted it behind her.

Trey screamed, fought, breaking the arm—she didn't care and pain was nothing to a demon—but years in the Winterlands, cutting her own wood and carrying water daily to her own kitchen, had given Jenny a grip like a blacksmith's. Trey was taller and younger, and with the strength that the possessed have, and had she fought as a demon she would have overpowered Jenny easily. But instead she appealed to the men, screaming, “Oh, my lords, she will kill me!”

And Gareth looked straight at John and said, “Do it.”

John met Trey's eye and smiled, and then lunged in with his sword.

Trey's eyes rolled back in her head and her mouth opened, and instead of a scream, there issued from it the silvery gleaming whipsnake of the demon. It rolled down Trey's breast like spilling vomit and whipped across the floor, the shocked men leaping aside lest it touch them. Before John could turn to cut at it a second demon poured itself out of Trey's mouth, fell to the floor with a wet little slap, and bolted like a fleeing roach to the door, and Trey's body collapsed, limp, unbloodied—untouched by the blade—dead in Jenny's arms.

John was already turning toward the door after the two demons, the men around him—the King's and Gareth's—dumb with shock and confusion. Jenny saw Gareth lurch away, hand over his mouth and eyes shut, as she lowered Trey's body to the flagstoned floor. Even as she did so four men burst into the room, Ector's guards in blue, and Ector shouted from the passageway outside, “Don't let him speak! Don't let any of them speak!” and John sprang back, barely parrying a halberd and taking a cut from another across his shoulder.

Gareth cried, “No!” and his voice was drowned out. The King bellowed, “They have murdered the Lady Trey! The Prince is mad!” and catching up his own halberd, lunged from his guards straight at John. John parried, driven back by the longer weapon and the King's greater height and unexhausted strength. The King continued to shout, “Murderers! Hellspawn!” and someone in the corridor screamed.

And screamed again.

Ector of Sindestray fell into the watchroom, collapsed on his knees, eyes jammed open with purest terror. There was a stench, a horror of grave-stink and corpse-stink and the reek of blood-soaked earth, and then the Thing burst into the watchroom, a reeling monstrosity of bones and worms and graveyard mold, animate with malice that burned from the holes in the black-tressed skull that was its head.

John fell back, turned to meet it, and the King cut at his back with the halberd, the blade opening a glancing gash across his scalp where the back of his neck had been a moment before. The graveyard thing—the corpse-wight, the horror, whatever it was—smashed John aside with a force that hurled him into the stone wall like a rag doll, and fell upon the King, razoring him open, flinging him down in a fountain of gore before a man in the room could move.

John sprang at it, stumbling as he got to his feet—he had walked all through the night that Jenny knew of and fought once already at Bliaud's, and goodness knew what else before they'd met in the inn-yard—and Jenny caught up her halberd and leaped at the corpse-wight from the other side. Men were shouting around her; she struck fast, and the monster swatted at her with the arms of the corpses dragged up out of Trey's burial vault. The heads of corpses embedded in the monster's body shrieked lungless, throatless strangled gasps at her, and in the long black hair of its topmost head, the red worms stood up and hissed. The halberd blade bit into the dead flesh and the dead hands seized the shaft, wrenched and twisted it from Jenny's grip, and spun to strike John with the handle across the body.

He caught the handle, wrenched it down and aside, parried the knives the thing had in its hands, the knives that had been on the chapel table—torture-knives, skinning-knives. He lunged in again among the blades, the thing caught him by arms and throat and shoulders. John wrenched at its grip, trying to bring up the demon-killer blade in time, and there was a blazing flash of light, a billow of unspeakable stench, and a scream such as no one in that room had ever heard. Every torch in the watchroom dimmed and belched smoke, and Jenny saw something like a dark cloud, or a winged limber shade flopping in the light.…

Then her eyes cleared and the torchlight returned, and she saw the monster collapsed in a heap on the ground, the size of a small horse, dead and spewing filth and fluids onto the flagstones of the watchroom floor. John was on his knees between it and the dead King's sprawled body, slime and blood dripping from his clothing and hair.

It was Ector of Sindestray who first moved. He stumbled to John's side, gray brows and gray beard standing out almost black against a face pale with shock. He held out his hand. “My lord,” he whispered. “Oh, my lord …”

John raised his head and brought up his free hand to wipe some of the goo off his spectacle lenses. “I am definitely,” he said, “gettin' too bloody old for this kind of thing.”

Uriens II was laid out in state in the great hall of the palace of Belmarie, the twelfth King of the House of Uwanë to lie thus. By sunset of the day of his death word went out to all the city of Bel that the King had been slain protecting the Lady Trey from the very demons against which he had warned the people the day before.

Even before the horrified Palace Guard brought in hurdles to carry away the corpse-wight that had slain the King, and the bier for the King himself, Gareth of Belmarie gave the order for the arrest of every man, woman, and child who had been resurrected by the mage Bliaud, or whose death had been attested by their families and who had later proved to be alive. This order given, he knelt for a long time on the watchroom floor beside his father's body, and by the lifeless, untouched corpse of his wife, Trey. While Tourneval and his guards departed to carry out this command, the southern merchant Brâk and Bliaud's son Abellus spread their cloaks over the King's body, and Jenny Waynest sent various servants running for water and dressings for the wounded.

“My lord Thane.” Ector of Sindestray stood before the bench where John sat, as Jenny washed the wounds on his back and scalp. It was the first time the white-haired treasurer had given Aversin his proper title: In his uncouth peasant breeches and dirty jacket, blood and slime and hair dye trickling through two weeks' worth of scrubby black beard, he looked like some kind of wight himself.

“Forgive me,” the councilor said. “I was deceived by the … the demons that possessed Her Ladyship.” He could barely bring out the words, but too many people had seen the demons slither out from between Trey's lips. He himself had seen them whip past him in the corridor, and slither through the cracks in the stone wall. “I did you a terrible wrong, my lord, and would have done you a greater one had you not escaped. I can only plead that you will forgive an old man for putting the safety of the Realm, as he understood it, before the rights of any single man.”