Knight of the Demon Queen. Barbara Hambly

Hare’s tits, I’m thirsty.”

      “You leave that wine alone,” the leader snarled.

      “What, the gnomes ain’t gonna bring their own wine?”

      From her post in the pine Jenny listened, coldly calculating what had to be done. She recognized two of the bandits from Balgodorus Black-Knife’s band, whom she’d helped Baron Pellanor of Palmorgin fight last summer. When they finished checking the tower, they sent up a watchman to its top, then proceeded to make themselves comfortable around a fire in the semiopen hall ruins; it was a fairly easy matter for Jenny to creep along a branch to one of the broken-out windows of the tower and down to where the packs—and the wine bottles—were stowed in the jumble of broken rafters and fallen tiles that was the tower’s lowest room. As she poured the nightshade into the bottles, she could hear the bandits outside.

      “Can we have the skirt again ’fore the gnomes take her away?”

      “You keep your mind on your business and your cod in your britches.”

      “You, junior—you’re ten, remember? You think they’ll take that little ’un anyway? They said from ten up.”

      “Let’s see. They may want ’em younger. If not, no problem.”

      Just after dark the man on watch called out, “Company coming!” and Jenny heard a man’s voice speak out of the darkness, “In whose name are you here?”

      “In the name of the King beneath the Sea,” the bandit leader called out. The King beneath the Sea was Giton, boy-husband of the Yellow-Haired Goddess Balyna in Southern legend, but the name could as easily be applied to Adromelech, the Archdemon Lord of the Sea-wights, or his servant Folcalor.

      Jenny, crouched in the darkness, held her breath. Having inspected the tower ruin once, the bandits were not disposed to do it again, and any chance sound she might have made was amply covered by the cows and horse they’d penned there. Still her heart pounded as the bandit leader came in and took the wine bottles.

      They drank to one another, and to their bargain, the deep, oddly timbred voices of the gnomes bickering over prices and deferring to their human leader about the little girl Sunny. “Well, we can certainly try—” that voice said, and Jenny felt a queer cold stirring of recognition. She knew it, or one like it “—so long as she gives no trouble.”

      “You hear that, Sweetlips? You keep your brat quiet and don’t lag behind …”

      The wine bottle clinked on a cup.

      “Cragget’s balls!” A man staggered through the black doorway and tried to fumble his britches down, then fell to his knees and vomited. Jenny slid her knife from its sheath, took a better grip on her halberd, and settled herself deeper into the dark corner to wait. The man Crake came down the dark stairs from his watchpost above when he heard the other men cursing and puking; Jenny took him from behind, half severing his head before he could reach the door. She listened for a little time more, until all was silence outside, then crept to the door to look.

      Dal, Lyra, and their children were clustered in a corner of the firelit shelter, their hands bound behind them to the wrecked beams, staring at the dead men and gnomes strewed between the shelter and the far wall of the open court. Lyra’s face wore a strange, hard, bitter smile. They turned sharply as Jenny appeared in the doorway. “Mistress Waynest!” Dal cried. “Thank God!”

      “Did you use magic?” Gerty whispered as Jenny cut their bonds. Her eyes were huge with shock and wonder. “Cousin Ryllis told me you couldn’t use magic anymore.”

      “Just because you can’t use magic, you aren’t helpless,” Jenny said softly. “Could I have used magic I would have spared these men. Now quickly, gather up what provision we can and let’s be away from here. They may have been part of a greater band. We must tell Lord John to bring out the militia …”

      Lyra, who had gone over to gather up the little sack of money from the hand of a dead gnome, screamed.

      The human leader of the gnomes, a man in a long green cloak, sprang from the ground and snatched at her wrist.

      Jenny leaped toward her, halberd raised to strike, then halted in her tracks in shock. Lyra had darted clear of the man’s lunge and stood back, gasping and trembling, as he fell, clutching his belly, his whole body convulsing again with the effects of the nightshade. He should be dead, Jenny thought blindly, blankly. He should be dead …

      Her mouth was dry and her breathing fast as she stared at that cropped gray head, the beaky nose, the patch over the eye.

      Foolish, she thought. He is dead.

      The man was crawling toward them, muttering curses and vomiting again though there was nothing in him to bring up. Clinging together, Jenny and Lyra backed away before him, while Dal and the children brought the stock out of the tower, making a wide circuit around the crawling body.

      I saw him die in the infirmary tent after the battle at Cor’s Bridge, at summer’s end. The eye now covered with a patch had been pierced by an arrow …

      And in the other eye, as Pellanor of Palmorgin raised his head, glared the greenish light of a demon.

      Jenny stepped forward with her halberd and struck off his head.

      The body continued to crawl toward them.

      Jenny and the little family fled into the snow-blanketed night.

       SIX

      THERE WAS HELL, reflected John, and there was Hell.

      This was something no one—not Gantering Pellus, not Juronal, not the author of the mysterious Elucidus Lapidarus—had known: that not all Hells were the same.

      He had passed beyond any information or assistance from the writings of anyone he had ever read, and he supposed this was why the Demon Queen had wanted him as her agent. Having survived the Hell behind the mirror—as he had survived one dragon slaying, with the assistance of a certain amount of magic—he had learned just enough to survive the next.

      He supposed, too, that the Demon Queen had given him Amayon as a servant because he was the one demon she knew John would hate the most: the demon who had hurt Jenny. The one demon to whose charm John would be almost guaranteed not to yield.

      Not that Amayon didn’t try.

      “That’s very good,” the demon said softly, looking over his shoulder during one of their rests, in the dense shelter of a thorny watercourse between two walls of striated black rock. John sketched the thorns and the shape of the barren upland that stretched beyond; sketched the carry beast, whom he’d named Dobbin, bending its long neck down to the pool to drink, and the shape of the herds of such creatures that could be distantly seen on the top of the opposite cliff. “You’ve captured the look of it well.”

      Amayon now wore the form of a girl, dark curls framing a nymph’s triangular face, fragile hands resting on John’s shoulder as she stood behind him to look at the sketch. She glanced around her nervously at a quick soft scraping sound from the rocks and pressed a little closer to him. Genuine fear? John wondered. Or the imitation of it, to coax him into protectiveness?

      He didn’t know. The landscape in his dream had been without life, but he sensed there was life here.

      Waiting in the shadows. Watching.

      “It’d help if I knew if it was real,” he remarked, sketching the long necks of the herd beasts with a charcoal stub. “I mean, the Queen’s palace behind the mirror was whatever she fancied it to be: we’d pass one window where it was rainin’ outside, and the next there’d be a sandstorm, and the next it’d be a sweet summer night. So maybe the next chap who