The Usurper's Crown (53 page)

She made herself swallow and say, “Do you know where they are?”

“All too well.” He tightened his sinews and stood, and Ingrid stood with him.

This coast was as different from the place they had first come ashore in Isavalta as it was possible to be. That place had been all gray stones and gray cliffs. Here, there rose a thick forest beyond the stretch of sand. Salt wind twisted the trees, making them stooped and kinked like arthritic old men. From inside the forest, she could hear the demons, their thrashing and their shrieking like the sound of tortured metal. Beads of sweat stood out on Avanasy’s forehead as they entered the wood, but he walked with determination.

The farther they ventured from the shore, the straighter the trees became, and sand gave way to loam, dead leaves, ferns and rich moss. The noise did not pause or abate. If anything it grew more riotous. Avanasy staggered, and Ingrid caught him by the arm, lending what little strength she had to his support. He squeezed her hand, and they went on through the green dimness toward the unearthly clamor.

“You will be bound,” said Avanasy through his clenched teeth. “I will it so, you will be bound.”

At last, the trees pulled away from a stony clearing. The last two demons waited there, shaking their weapons and straining their wings at the sky. Their leader, or so Ingrid thought of him, had rings of gold in his ears. He beat the ground with his spear as if he could force it to let them go.

“Be still!” ordered Avanasy.

And they were still, but even so, Ingrid could see them quivering as they strained against the order. Even restrained as they were, they were terrifying. Fangs curled from their mouths and talons from their hands and feet. The constant wind rattled the scales of their armor like the leaves of the trees. Their yellow eyes were the size of saucers, and a rotted, burning smell clung to them that went straight to the back of Ingrid’s throat and choked off her breath.

The chief of the monsters snarled at Avanasy. “You transgress, man. We may not be twice bound.”

“You may be bound until the end of time if I so declare it,” answered Avanasy. “The roots in the earth beneath us can be called on to bind you tightly. The air can weave a net to hold you close.”

“Such boasts, such brags. You have not the strength.”

“You are bound to me with bloodshed between us. If I transfer that bond, what can you do?” Avanasy’s voice turned dangerous. “You are creatures of fire, air and metal. I will bind you here with earth and water, by earth and water, under earth and water, between earth and water, I will bind, and my binding will be as firm as my word, as strong as my blood …”

Beneath the demons, the earth began to move. Runnels of dirt ran up their legs like reaching fingers, swaddling their skin and exposing the bare tree roots. The roots themselves writhed and parted, revealing dark holes beneath the trees. Ingrid smelled a sudden gust of sea wind from the opened hole. Avanasy had gone freshly white with effort, but his voice did not falter. The demons screamed, their cries of pain shuddering the wood and filling the air with heat and the scent of burning. It did them no good, and terror joined pain in their screams. Avanasy put out one hand to steady himself against a tree, but he grimly worked on, his spell never faltering, although his voice began to soften. The demons looked like living statues of sand now, and the weight of the earth heaping itself over them began to bear them down, into the opening caves and the scent of the sea.

“No!” cried one of the demons. “Please, master, no!”

“Mercy!” cried the leader, and its cry now was as heartbreaking as it had been horrible before.

Only then did Avanasy cease his slow chant, and for a moment, all the world held still.

“Mercy?” said Avanasy, softly, dangerously. “Why should I show mercy to the ones who sought my blood and the blood of my wife?”

“We were ordered, master,” wailed the leader of them all. “We bear you no ill. Set us free, bind us no more, and we will leave you and yours in peace.”

“Ordered by who?”

“We know no name.”

“Do not lie to me. What is his name?”

“Yamuna, Yamuna, master, now let us go! Let us leave each other in peace!”

Slowly, Avanasy shook his head. “It is not enough. Not for the hurt you would have dealt us.” He began his chant again, and, relentlessly, the weight of the earth pressed the demons to the ground.

“Please!” gasped the leader, forced to his knees. “Master, please. What is your price?”

Again, Avanasy halted the spell, and the whole world was still for a single moment. “You will never again plague any under my protection, and you will carry us safely to the Heart of the World.”

“We cannot, we cannot.”

“Then be you buried,” said Avanasy implacably. “For I cannot leave you free.”

The demon nearest the pit began to howl, struggling against the earth that bound him like a shroud, to no avail. The hole simply widened, yawning like a mouth to receive a morsel.

“Mercy, mercy!” cried the chief demon. “It shall be as you say!”

“Swear it,” said Avanasy.

“I swear, I swear!” gibbered the demon. “Spare us the earth!”

“By what do you swear?”

“By my own eyes, by the fire that birthed me!” screamed the demon.

At that, Avanasy nodded. “It is enough.” He knelt, laying his bloodstained hands flat upon the ground. He murmured something Ingrid could not hear, and all at once the earthen shrouds fell from the demons, the grains scattering like the dust they were. The ground heaved once more, and the tree roots closed over the pit again, lacing themselves into a tight, natural net.

Avanasy did not get to his feet. Rather than have to look at the creatures that faced her, with their fangs and their wild yellow eyes, Ingrid crouched beside him. “Are you all right?”

“No,” he answered flatly. “But it does not matter. Help me up.”

Ingrid tightened her jaw around all her questions and helped Avanasy to stand. The chief of the demons did not seem able to look him in the eyes. It bowed its head and its great wings slumped until they dragged the ground.

“You have doomed us, man,” he growled. “When would you have us fulfill our bond?”

“Now,” said Avanasy. He looked toward Ingrid, and Ingrid could not keep her trepidation from her eyes.

“How can we do this? How can we trust them?”

“They are bound to me now. They cannot harm or disobey,” he said with utter conviction. Avanasy moved close to her and gripped Ingrid’s forearms. “Hold tight to me, Ingrid, and do not be afraid.”

“Come now, master,” growled the chief.

Freed from Avanasy’s spell, the demons showed no further sign of weakness. In a single moment, they embraced Ingrid and Avanasy, and their wings raised up until the sun was blocked by the bloodred feathers. Ingrid bit her tongue to keep silent. Then there came a great rush of air, and the ground fell away from underneath her feet.

Ingrid had little time to imagine what such a flight would be like, but if she had a thousand years, she never would have anticipated the reality of it. She could not see anything. The world was the rushing of wind, red, gold and black shadows, the stench of burning and Avanasy’s hands gripping her arms. The heat was stifling. Her feet dangled loosely, and she had to fight to keep from kicking out in a vain attempt to find some footing.

Then, it was over, and it was only she and Avanasy, their backs against a sandstone wall, and busy river docks spreading out before them. It was only then that Ingrid realized she was soaked with sweat and stench and her hands had gone completely numb. Avanasy looked like death itself, but at the same time, his limbs seemed steady while Ingrid’s felt weak as water.

“Come,” his voice rasped in his throat. “Let us sit for a moment, here.”

Still holding tightly to each other, they settled themselves stiffly at the base of the wall. Avanasy gently extricated himself from Ingrid’s grip and laid her hands in her own lap. For a while, she was content just to sit, and feel the warmth that was no more than sunlight touch her skin, and draw some sensibility back into her hands, even if it was only pins and needles. Indeed, it seemed as if she might never will herself to movement again. But, gradually, as the world stayed steady and the familiar sensation of wind in her hair and on her face proved it would not change suddenly into the breath of a demon in black-and-gold armor, Ingrid found thoughts once again beginning to coalesce inside her battered mind.

“Where are the … demons?” she asked.

Avanasy let his head fall back to rest against the wall so that he stared up at the summer blue sky with its drifting clouds.

“Perhaps back in their home in the Silent Lands. But, more likely, they have fled to try to avoid the summons from their other master, which will surely come.” He watched the clouds slowly shifting their shapes overhead. “I cannot imagine Yamuna will be pleased.”

“Who is Yamuna?”

“Each member of the royal family in Hastinapura is assigned a sorcerer as a protector and advisor. Yamuna serves Chandra, who is father to Kacha, the one who was married to the empress of Isavalta.”

“They know you have returned then.”

Avanasy bowed his head and ran his hand through his hair. “So it would seem. I have not been as subtle as I thought.”

“But these will not come again.”

“Not these. They are bound by their oaths to me now.”

“Can’t they break those oaths?”

Avanasy shook his head. “They cannot. It would put them in my power again.”

“How so?”

Avanasy’s smile was thin. “It is one of the mysteries between this world and the Land of Death and Spirit. An oath between a mortal and a spirit or a power is not as an oath between mortal and mortal. Words between us have powers of their own. They can wound, they can tie, they can break. The arguments about why this is so are extensive. They fill books and scrolls of great antiquity. The only point which cannot be argued is that this is the truth.”

Ingrid stared out across the docks. She had not imagined a river could be so broad. It must be to rivers as Superior was to lesser lakes. The ships waiting at the piers came in all sizes. There were huge galleons with four masts and three tiers of portholes. There were lean three-masted cutters with knife-sharp prows for slicing through the waves with all speed. Sloops and smacks and dories of all descriptions crowded in the shadows of the larger vessels. Bare-chested men in broad, peaked hats worked in and around their vessels, singing, swearing and shouting by turns. These were surely the common sailors, decided Ingrid. They carried huge bundles on their backs, or tightly packed baskets on shoulder yokes. The air was full of the smells of tar, sweat and spices. Despite the strangeness of dress and the sight of so many sails, the place felt strangely familiar to Ingrid. It reminded her sharply of the port at Bayfield.

Between the shirtless men worked men in short coats and wide trousers, mostly white or unbleached cloth with colored bands around the cuffs and hems for trimming, but here and there was one dressed in solid black or bright green or sapphire blue. These men stood in groups, talking, or supervised the unloading of ships and the loading of carts, or sat at trestle tables beside ships’ gangways weighing samples of goods or reviewing what Ingrid supposed were bills of goods.

But all these sights and sounds were not enough to drive the question that had formed inside her out of her mind. “So, if I had promised that … Baba Yaga that I would carry out the task she gave me …”

“You would have been bound to her by that promise until the task had been completed, yes. If you had tried to break that promise, your life itself could have been forfeit to her.”

“Oh.”

Ingrid was silent for a time, breathing in air that smelt of spices, fish and garbage. Then, another thought occurred to her. “But surely those demons were sent to murder us.”

“They were.”

“Did they not break a promise then by failing to do so?”

“They did. Which is why they have fled. At the time, they feared me more than they feared Yamuna.” He rubbed his forehead. “I was gambling, I confess, that they were of those breeds not noted for their courage, and that they might indeed have been coerced.” He lifted his eyes again. “If they had given their oaths freely, there would have been nothing short of their annihilation that would have saved us.”

To that, Ingrid made no reply. At her silence, Avanasy’s face fell. “It is a dangerous place I have brought you to, Ingrid. But these are dangers beyond what I anticipated. I am sorry.”

She shook her head. “It was my decision.” She tried to smooth down her filthy dress. “Now, where are we and how are we to make ourselves decent enough to be seen here?”

He smiled at her sudden turn to practicality. The expression brought a more healthy color to his cheeks, which her heart lifted to see.

“I have some gold,” he said. “Not much, but some. We can change it for local coin easily enough, which in turn will buy us a bath and whatever else is needful. As for where we are …” With a grunt, Avanasy got himself to his feet, and extended his hand to Ingrid to help her do the same. “We are in T’ien, the city that holds the Heart of the World.”

Together they waded into the busy crowd surrounding the river docks. The warm damp air was only made heavier by the presence of so many bodies surrounding them. Although Avanasy said he had only been to Hung Tse three times in his life on errands for the emperor of Isavalta, he spoke the language well. So too, apparently, did Ingrid, for he had imparted that understanding to her through his enchantment. She could understand the language of the sailors and the wharfmen in all its rough color as they worked their way down past the piers and the warehouses.

Finally, Avanasy found what he was looking for. He touched Ingrid’s forearm and gestured for her to wait by the seawall. She nodded and backed away while he strolled onto the docks toward a man in a white coat with narrow green lapels and deep cuffs who sat behind his table weighing out what looked from Ingrid’s vantage point like thimbles of tarnished silver. He looked up at the sound of Avanasy’s voice, and from the men’s expressions, Ingrid became confident that a period of pleasantries and bargaining was about to begin.