Valence III, crowned King of the Isles, shivered in the unseasonably warm night as the wizard Silyon scribed the words of his incantation on the transom of an age-crumbled gateway. The moon was two days past new and would be scarcely a ghost of itself when it finally rose. The only light came from the lantern whose wick gleamed through panels cut from sheets of mica so thin they were almost perfectly clear.
Nearby the sacrifice sighed in her drugged sleep. A silken bag hid the girl's outlines from a distance, but Attaper and the other Blood Eagles of the escort must have known what the king and his wizard brought with them whenever they visited the ancient ruins.
The Blood Eagles would be as silent as they were loyal: to the death. Even so, Valence had seen disgust in Attaper's eyes as the Blood Eagles' commander watched him and Silyon carrying their burden the last of the way alone.
Valence snorted with anger as he remembered that look. How dare Attaper judge him? A soldier's duties were simple: to kill or to die, but never to question. A king had to wrestle with more difficult situations, where right was never very different from wrong.
But for all that, Valence shivered again.
Silyon finished the incantation, a circle of words in the Old Script. His body was tattooed, and he wore slivers of bone through his earlobes. He set the small tripod within the circle, then pulled on gloves embroidered with silver thread. He smiled at Valence.
Valence suspected that the symbols picked out on the back of the gloves had no meaning beyond decoration, despite the wizard's hints that they held dark truths. "Get on with it!" he snarled. He resented the fact that this ugly little man from Dalopo could treat him as an equal on the strength of the acts they performed together.
"As you wish, sire," Silyon said, still smirking. He removed the mirror, a fist-sized teardrop of greenish obsidian, from its wash-leather sack and fitted it carefully onto the silver hook hanging on a swivel from the tripod. Valence couldn't imagine how a hole had been drilled through the delicate tail of the volcanic glass without shattering it to dust, but that was the least of the object's wonders.
Silyon began to chant, touching an athame of black wood from his native Dalopo to each of the ancient words as he pronounced it: "Hayad pikir tasimir..."
A whippoorwill had been calling at a distance. It fell silent, but another took up the rhythm closer by.
"Wakuiem gabiyeh worsiyeh," the wizard said, twisting his lips around syllables with no human meaning. They were intended to be heard not by men but by the powers on which the cosmos turned. These forces were neither gods nor demons. They caused the stars to make their ceaseless circles, the seasons to change on Earth, and all things seen and unseen to move.
The Sun, the symbol of light and life, and Malkar, the symbol of dark and death, controlled all things. But how could a mere human being know which was which?
"Archedama phochense pseusa rerta..."
The ruined palace in which Valence and the wizard knelt was that of the Tyrants of Valles, a father, son, and grandson all named Eldradus. Through wizardry the trio had ruled the island of Ornifal for seventy years after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, then had fallen in turn to a revolt of the island's nobles. After the Tyrants, Ornifal had begun the rise from barbarism that now made the Dukes of Ornifal at least in name the Kings of the Isles.
The first Eldradus had built his palace a few miles outside the existing port of Valles. Those who overthrew the line had returned the seat of power to the city itself, so for nine hundred years the tyrant's construction had decayed without repair. Roots forced apart the stones of walls; roofs fell in when the beams supporting them rotted.
Nine hundred years....But the underground vault at the center of the palace complex was older by ages beyond counting.
"Threkisithphe amracharara ephoiskere..." Silyon chanted. Shadows moved on the polished surface of volcanic glass, but it didn't reflect the legs of the tripod from which it hung.
The Tyrants of Valles had built their palace on the site of ruins buried deep in the loam of an ancient forest. Until Eldradus had the trees cut and the soil planed flat, no one -- no one but the wizard himself -- knew that below were foundations of black basalt laid on a Cyclopean scale.
At the center of the new palace the tyrants had raised a four-sided monumental arch over an ancient circular curb. The opening was the oculus, the eye, in the ceiling of a vast domed room buried underground.
That chamber could have been a tomb or a storage room or even part of a sewer system from the dim past. It was none of those things; or perhaps, now that Valence forced himself to think about it, all of them together.
"Thoumison kat plauton!" Silyon concluded, shouting out the final syllables. The cosmos itself tried to choke a wizard's voice when he spoke an incantation of this magnitude, thickening his tongue and rasping her throat to the texture of dry sand.
The obsidian mirror trembled with the sound of the Beast's laughter. "Greetings, humans," said the deep voice in Valence's skull. "Have you brought my meal?"
The Beast laughed again. Silyon's smile froze into a rictus; the king's visage had no more expression than a roughly sawn board. Valence hated himself for what he was doing, but the queen had left him no choice.
The green glass depths of the mirror were alive with bright mist, but thus far tonight Valence didn't see a specific image in them. Not long after the Dalopan came to the king with his mirror and his wizardry, Valence had dropped a blazing torch through the eye of the dome. The flaring light showed only stone blocks mottled by patches of lichen, exactly what one would expect in a chamber sealed for the better part of a millennium.
But halfway to the floor fifty feet below the surface, the torch had disappeared as suddenly as if it had never been. Valence assumed that the sacrifices he and Silyon lowered through the oculus vanished the same way, but he'd never had the desire -- or the courage -- to watch.
"The four whom the queen pursued have eluded her," the Beast said with no transition. "The two humans and two Halflings who come from Haft. I will draw them to me here."
Valence was kneeling, because his legs trembled uncontrollably if he tried to stand while conversing with the creature whom Silyon had summoned. "What are their names?" he asked.
"What do I care for the names of humans?" the Beast said. The king's ears heard nothing; the terrible voice thundered in his mind. "They all taste the same, whatever they call themselves!"
The mists within the obsidian parted. A wedge-shaped head like that of a serpent lashed out. Valence flinched even though his conscious mind knew the shape was only an image reflected in stone. Sometimes he saw this reptile head within the mirror; sometimes a creature equally monstrous but mammalian, a dog or a bear or perhaps a dog-headed ape.
And sometimes what Valence saw was a bulk whose vastness was only an impression. There was nothing in the mirror's vision to provide scale.
The Beast gave its grating laugh; the snake's head blurred back into the mist. Valence's fear had amused the thing.
"They are Garric or-Reise and Sharina os-Reise," the Beast said. Humor still tinged the soundless voice. "The male is descended from King Lorcan, who hid the Throne of Malkar, which the queen thinks will bring her power over the cosmos. The Halflings are Cashel or-Kenset and Ilna os-Kenset. Their father was human and their mother a sprite. I will bring the ones I need here, and they will release me."
"I'll direct that they be arrested as soon as they --" Valence said. He paused. "As soon as possible."
He would have continued, "-- come within my domains," but what did Valence III rule nowadays?
Certainly not the Isles as a whole; no one had truly been King of the Isles since the fall of the Old Kingdom a thousand years before. Twenty years in the past, when Valence took the throne on the death of his uncle, he could at least claim to rule Ornifal. Now, with the minions of the queen using wizardry to replace his officials in one post after another, Valence's will was obeyed without question only within the walls of his palace. He might not long be safe even there.
The queen left him no choice. For his own sake and that of the kingdom, he had to ally himself with the Beast.
"As you please," said the voice, echoing as if the Beast stood in the domed chamber below. "The male has a better right to the throne than you do. But all you must do is to feed me; I will do the rest."
Across the hanging mirror from Valence, the wizard's face spasmed in an involuntary grimace. Did he too regret the cost of this alliance...?
A rope was fixed to a harness around the sacrifice. The two men lowered the girl hand over hand, feeling the unseen body swing gently below them. The coil of rope was only half used when the weight came off it; the sacrifice had reached the floor of the chamber.
The men looked at each other. Valence nodded and stepped back. Silyon dropped the rest of the coil through the oculus and quickly packed his apparatus.
They walked as quickly as possible to where the guards waited with the horses. The lantern swinging in the king's hand threw distorted shadows across the ruins; the forest had long since recovered the site the Tyrants had cleared.
The Blood Eagles straightened to attention. The men's faces were as cold and still as the metal of their spotless black armor.
"Your Majesty," Attaper said, swinging the head of the king's horse around so that the beast was ready to mount.
A terrible scream reverberated from the ruins behind them. None of the men moved or spoke for the long seconds that it echoed in the night.
When the girl's cry had echoed to a halt, the commander of the Blood Eagles turned his head deliberately to the side and spat. Then he faced his king again.
There was no expression at all on Attaper's face.
Copyright © 1998 by David Drake
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Queen of Demons follows the travels and adventures of memorable characters: Garric, his sister Sharina, their friend Cashel and Cashel's sister Ilna, and Tenoctris. Their journey takes them across the world of the Isles toward a confrontation with contending forces of evil, as the confluence of magic is reaching a millennial peak. The thousand-year-old sorcerer, The Hooded One, has been defeated after a great supernatural battle, but there remain a living king and queen in power--both bent on seizing control of the known world. Queen of Demons reveals some of the dark powers of the evil queen of the Isles, and includes enough powerful magical conflict to satisfy even the most jaded fantasy reader.
