Queen of Thorns Read online

  "I am not like Variel. I do not dispense my affections so freely."

  "Ah."

  "I mean no disrespect to you nor to him."

  "Ah."

  "I mean nothing would please me more than to plumb the mysteries of this city, but ..."

  "But?"

  "I have been long away from home, neglecting my obligations to my tenants, my peers, and my family."

  "Have you any family closer than a father?"

  "Well, no. But my obligations ..."

  "Just the winters, then. Six short months."

  "Six? There are four seasons to a year."

  "Let us say four months, then."

  "What are we negotiating?"

  "How much do you wish to serve Queen Telandia?" She gripped my hand tightly. There was no more warmth in her fingers. "How fond are you of your bodyguard? Your father?"

  Despite my befuddlement, her insinuation did not elude me. Nevertheless, I recognized that we had only begun to negotiate. "One month, perhaps, every few years as my previous obligations allow."

  "One month?"

  I bit my tongue against the temptation to reverse her earlier criticism of my vocabulary. "I welcome a counteroffer."

  She showed me her teeth, flawless pearls in a bed of pink flesh. I wondered how she would react to Radovan's big smile. She must have seen the hint of mirth upon my lips, for then she smiled. "Three months annually," she said. "And you must bring a substantial gift."

  Emboldened by her favorable humor and the thought of Radovan's unorthodox tactics, I leaned forward and said, "What gift could exceed the pleasure of my company?"

  "Something wrought of gold." Her expression hardened. "Adorned with the rarest jewels. I assume I need not mention it must contain a form of magic I have never before seen, lest I be displeased."

  I sensed we approached the limit of our negotiations. "Your terms are most generous."

  She shrugged. "I'll give the notion some consideration, when I have no more important matters to consider."

  "As you wish, Majesty."

  Her eyes flashed, and I feared I had gone too far until her lips curved in a satisfied smile.

  "Naturally, the results of the others' entreaties may interfere with my ability to visit. I will be freer to travel if you and Queen Telandia establish a mutually beneficial agreement."

  She turned her head to look askance at me. "I can't decide whether your clumsy ploys are calculated or naturally charming."

  "Can they not be both at once?"

  She thought on that. "No."

  "Then I insist my intention was charm."

  "If you intended it, then it is calculating."

  The confectionary tone of her banter caused me to smile until I saw that she was not smiling with me. "There is no point in my trying to charm you, Zuldanavox. It is possible I have seen some things that you have not, but your experience is far greater than mine, and your wits too keen for any pretense I have learned. I have told you plainly what I want, and if it pleases you that I visit you from time to time, it should be my pleasure. You have my word as a gentleman that I will obey our agreement. Yet beyond all that, I implore you, as my father asked of me, to put your faith in Queen Telandia before any other elf of Kyonin. She is the rightful ruler of her land, just as you are the rightful queen of this city."

  I stopped before my shortness of breath became obvious. While I meant every word that I had spoken, I knew I might sound too bold for the dragon's liking. Considering our relative stature, she might take umbrage at the suggestion that she should place any store in my word.

  She stood to her full—illusory, I reminded myself—height and looked down at me. I straightened my back, prepared to face her wrath as bravely as I might. If nothing else, I thought, I knew where to pull the riffle scroll that would break my fall. I could fling myself from the balcony and run for shelter, praying that her aversion to close quarters might save me if I took shelter underground.

  She settled back to lean upon the balcony railing. "You are not as much like Variel as I first thought."

  "I hope that you find me sufficiently like him that we may be friends."

  "No," she said. "But perhaps sufficiently different. You have a better understanding of the arcane, and despite your youth, perhaps a broader knowledge. Much of what Variel can tell me, I already know."

  I thought of Radovan's vocabulary lessons and felt foolish. As a cloud passed over the wreath of brambles above us, I glanced up and realized for the first time how much the dome above us appeared like a crown above the city, its points made of thorns.

  I made a ring of my thumbs and forefingers and raised my hands as if to crown her. At my gesture, Zuldanavox raised a perfect green eyebrow. "If I may be of any service to the Queen of Thorns in an embassy to Iadara, Her Majesty has but to command me."

  As I dropped my hands and stepped back into a formal bow, I realized my grandiloquent gesture was too much by half. In her presence, I was once more the callow youth who had learned the extravagance of love at the tutelage of an Ustalavic countess, or the foolish old man who had yearned after a Tian princess less than a quarter his age. This time I was a feeble man currying favor with one of the most powerful creatures on the face of Golarion.

  As I raised my head, I saw Zuldanavox smiling down at me. If nothing else, I had amused her. Her levity soon passed, and she spoke in a somber tone. "If you can make the elves of Iadara understand that this is my domain..." She turned with a gesture to encompass the entire city, but her eyes fixed on the central plaza. Her benign expression contorted into a snarl of rage. "What is this?"

  I saw immediately what had angered her: the four spires of the central plaza had disappeared.

  "You sent your henchman to deactivate them while you lured me here," she rumbled.

  "No, I swear," I turned back to face the dragon, imploring her to reason. "Besides, I followed you here."

  She pointed southeast. "What is that?"

  A mass of figures spilled out of the Calistrian temple. I drew the spyglass from my coat and focused on the site. Dozens of demons bustled and shoved against each other. At the center of the mob four massive figures held the naked Radovan by arms and legs. They peered around and shifted direction as they spied something approaching from the edge of the dome.

  I lowered the spyglass and spotted another mob of demons approaching from an open gate to the south. At their head slithered a four-armed woman on the body of an enormous centipede. She brandished four glowing swords of enigmatic shape and mouthed unholy words as she advanced on Radovan.

  "What have you done?" roared Zuldanavox. She plucked the ring from her finger and leaped onto the balcony rail. Once again I saw her lithe elven form enlarge and transform into a sinewy green dragon.

  "Nothing, I swear it!" I drew the remaining flying scroll from my bandolier and unleashed its magic, but I was too late. Even as I sprang into the air, the demon-priestess closed with Radovan and raised her weapons. Plunging the blades into his body, she tore him open in four directions.

  Radovan's scream tore through the city as I leaped off the tower, knowing I was far too late to save him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Little Hell

  Radovan

  Once, when I was kid, I stole a rope of pepper cheese as long as my arm. Grub at the Goat Pen had been scarce that fall, so I ate the whole thing before I went to hand over the day's other pickings. Zandros took one sniff of me, realized what I'd done, and ordered three of the bigger boys to beat the truth out of me. When I confessed, he laughed himself to tears. He called off the boys, saying I'd soon suffer enough for my crime.

  He wasn't wrong.

  The bellyache started that night. I didn't sleep a wink. Worst, I stayed bound up inside the whole next day and the next one after that. The peppers burned me from the inside while the cheese kept it all from passing through.

  It finally got so bad I gave every last coin of my emergency stash to my favorite hedge witch in the
Longmarket. In exchange, she gave me a potion full of floating bits and chunks. She shouted something as I ran off, chugging back the oily brew. Too late I realized she was telling me to wait until I hit the privy before drinking the stuff.

  I got off the street just in time to leave a permanent stain on the back wall of a tinsmith's shop. When all the runny cheese and chunky bits of pepper began their charge, I felt equal parts agony and relief.

  It was that kind of feeling when the demons peeled my body open to let the Abyss blow through me and into the world.

  After the centipede-woman tore me open, I felt a distant howling. It didn't come from anywhere in the dome city. It came from somewhere deep inside of me, a place farther away than anything could get. But it was coming closer.

  Some of the sounds were words I recognized. I didn't understand them, but I knew them for demonspeak. Most of the sounds were nothing intelligible. They were screams of pure hate.

  It grew louder as the fiendish voices churned into me, filling me up and burning me from the inside. When the sound grew loud enough to deafen me, I saw the first demon fly out through the hole they'd made in me. It sprang out tiny as an imp but grew large as it capered out into the daylight. It sang out a gleeful word, and somehow I knew what that one meant: Freedom!

  As it bounded away, the next one popped through. That one hadn't even hit the ground before the third one boiled up to spill on the ground like a bag full of eels.

  They didn't stop coming. As each one pushed through, all its violence snapped my body like a wet flag. My eyes flickered open and closed again. Soon the pain ate up my sight, and all I could see were pulses of red and green against the morning sky.

  Soon I couldn't even hear the screaming, the demons' or my own. I could only feel the pain slowly tipping me back. I felt like I was lying over the edge of the cliff, and someone down below was pulling on my hair, pulling me over inch by inch.

  Then I went over.

  I felt the fall, but only for an instant. But instead of plunging into the Abyss, I felt myself flip over like a mirror on a stand. Where I'd been staring at the sky, now I was looking down into an endless dark. Before I could get used to that feeling, I lost the last sense of weight. I could have been looking up, down, or sideways for all I could tell.

  I tried to open my eyes, but I didn't even feel my lids move. I had no tongue to speak, no lips to whistle. I heard a sound like a water drop, but only from my right side.

  Maybe the demons had cut off my ear.

  I listened harder. When the sound came again I heard an echo. It was like the drip of water in a cavern.

  The instant I imagined a cave, I felt a damp coolness, but not on any particular part of my body. I couldn't feel hands or legs or the hair on my neck. I couldn't feel the wounds the demons had torn into my chest, nor even the summer air. I couldn't smell anything, not even stone or water. I knew I wasn't in the dome city anymore.

  It started to dawn on me that I wasn't anywhere in the world.

  A dull orange light formed in the nowhere around me. Just like my hearing, I sensed it only on my right side.

  Maybe the demons had torn me in half.

  Weird thing was, that thought didn't fill me with horror. It was like whatever had happened to me in the dome city happened to somebody else, or maybe just to the things I'd left behind. My body was like an old set of clothes I didn't need anymore. Except maybe for the jacket I'd left in the baths.

  I was going to miss that jacket.

  Another drip struck, and all the light rippled in circles from a spot I could almost feel. The sensation was as much a thought as a feeling. Somehow I knew it hadn't hit my body. It hit something within me, some invisible part of me. I don't know what. Maybe my soul.

  The light grew brighter, and I smelled limestone and a hint of sulfur. I heard voices, again only from my right. Like the sound of dripping water, they seemed to come from deep inside a cave.

  "Too late," said two voices in unison. One sounded like a boy whose voice was just breaking. The other was a snaky whisper. "The gate is lost to us."

  "I don't accept that," said an ogre-deep voice. "The horde have never held it before. They don't know how to control it."

  "Neither do we, Fell Viridio," said a woman's voice. "Only Norge had the strength to try. In the end it killed him."

  "He isn't dead," piped a little voice. "He's only dreaming. See how his leg moves? He's like a hellhound chasing vermleks."

  The fifth voice sounded like a chain dragged over gravel. "We'll all be dreaming like Norge if the others find us here. Look at the way the gate shivers. It's going to break, and that's bound to attract attention."

  "Go then, Gharalon," said the woman. "If you are afraid of punishment, I will stand vigil."

  "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Eriakne? I won't give up my place."

  I heard the rustle of wings and wondered which voice they belonged to. The instant I had that thought, the speakers appeared in the orange haze.

  Eriakne looked like a bloodless woman with big wings of ash-colored feathers. I'd seen her kind before: dark angel.

  "It was worth a try." She shrugged and held out a bruised arm, and a little devil flew up to perch on her wrist like a falcon. "Wasn't it, Quang?"

  "Not with such a lame effort," squeaked the imp. "I don't care how tired we are, nobody's going to fall for that crap."

  Eriakne shook him off her wrist. Quang saw it coming and was already beating his wings to hover.

  Who the hell are these mooks? I wondered.

  "It speaks," rumbled Viridio. He leaned close, and I saw a face only a scorpion could love. "It has never spoken."

  "Anyway, it answered its own question." The imp cackled at its own joke.

  "'It' is Radovan Virholt," said two-voice. He looked like a young boy wreathed in purple flame. Two mouths spoke from his eye sockets. He held up a veil to conceal whatever he had in place of a mouth. "You have the honor of addressing Dokange the Flaying Tongue, seducer of your great-great-great—" He went on like that until Viridio smacked him on the back of the head. "—grandmother."

  "You surrendered yourself to the horde," said Gharalon. I couldn't see him—her, it, whatever—but I felt its presence like a grease stain on my neck. "Now you are a slave of Chaos."

  Who're you calling a slave? I didn't exactly give up without a fight.

  "Nevertheless," said Viridio, "in succumbing to the Abyss, you have betrayed the oaths of your ancestors."

  What the hell are they talking about, oaths? The instant I thought it, they heard it. I was going to have to be careful. I don't know nothing about any oaths.

  "Ignorance of the law is no excuse!" Quang cackled until his laughter turned into a coughing fit. He perched on Viridio's leathery shoulder and pounded his chest with a little fist. He wheezed, "That's always been one of my favorites."

  Dokange said, "It was my turn after Norge."

  "You won't have a turn," said Viridio. He brushed Quang off his leathery shoulder with a hand the size of a coal shovel. "The gate is lost."

  They're devils, I thought. Knowing they heard it, I rephrased the idea. You're devils. And we're in Hell.

  "He is smarter than he looks." Quang said it in a perfect imitation of the boss.

  Knock it off, you little twerp. Don't you use his voice.

  "Or what?" laughed the imp. "You can't touch me. You aren't even here incarnate. Your body is busy letting the hordes of the Abyss spill into your world."

  "Our world," said Viridio. "By law, it belongs to us."

  "Not all of it," said Eriakne. "Not yet. There are many more compacts to be made."

  "In time, though," said Dokange of the double voice. "Inch by inch and soul by soul, we shall have it all."

  "Not without the gate, we won't," said Quang.

  "Then we must win it back. Despite the interference of the horde, we are the ones who created this portal. We are the ones who will ultimately prevail."

  What you said about my gran
dmother—Dokange, right? You're the reason I was born hellspawn? We're...related?

  "'Hellspawn' is not purely accurate in your case, but yes, I am your ancestor many times removed. In fact, all of us here are your ancestors. Your great-great-great—if you touch me again, Viridio, I will flay the chitin from your face!—your many-greats-grandmother was far less human than you."

  What's that supposed to mean?

  "Many of your forefathers conjured lovers from Hell ...or the Abyss," said Eriakne. "The first were half-devils, powerful sorcerers and cultists. Later generations were diluted to what your people carelessly call 'hellspawn.' I myself knew two of your many-greats grandfathers."

  "Stop bragging!" said Quang. The imp darted away as one of her wings slashed at him.

  What do you mean by "knew" two of them?

  "You know the answer. Does it make your skin crawl to think of me as your great-granny?" she hissed. "Do you understand what an abomination you are? Twice-birthed by me alone, you are the result of centuries of degenerate fathers."

  "And mothers," said Quang. "Me, I always go for the mothers."

  "The atrocity of your existence is no accident but our patient design," said Gharalon. Hearing the devil's voice was like letting hot porridge go down the wrong pipe. It made me choke just to hear it. "For centuries we secretly interbred with the Virholt line, starting with the bastard prince. A few of his descendents resisted our desire, but far more embraced it willingly. When the lich Tar-Baphon shattered their kingdom, they looked beyond your world to regain their lost power."

  "Most looked here, to Hell," said Dokange's boy voice. The snake voice added, "Others turned to the Abyss." Together the voices said, "Their treachery was punished, but not until after we had salvaged their get and adjusted the design."

  I always knew I had devil blood, but if anybody back home suspected I had demon in me, they'd run off to report me to the Hellknights ...Not that it mattered now that I was dead.

  "Law and Chaos both flow through your veins," said Viridio. "Contained in your mortal flesh, that mingled blood makes you a child of three worlds."