still tightly in place. When he touched it it was warm, like bread new-brought from the oven. Putting his ear to it, it seemed to him that he could hear a whispering inside.
“Don’t do it, Johnny.” Once Muffle would have growled the words in exasperation, or shouted them in rage. But his voice was now very quiet, and the light from the burning work shed showed the profoundest fear on his face.
“You don’t even know what I’m at.” Aversin didn’t look at him, only stood gazing into the flames where half a lifetime’s work slowly crumbled in red heat and smoke. The wicker gondola and silken air bags of the Milkweed, which had borne him north to the isles of the dragons, the Skerries of light. The jointed frame and waxed canopy of his infamous parachute. Pieces of five or six early versions of his dragon-slaying contrivances.
Gone.
Against his overwhelming regret he had only to place the mental image of Mag or Adric entering the building or touching any single thing that had been in it during last night’s manifestations.
He drew a deep breath and turned to regard his brother. “It’s only demons can undo the magic of demons,” he said.
The heat of the fire made the snow on Muffle’s plaids steam and glitter in the red-gray stubble on his cheeks. The older man’s small bright brown eyes searched John’s but met only the reflection of flame, mirrored in the rounds of spectacle glass.
“And Ian’s like a visitor that’s got his coat on to leave,” John added. “What would you have me do?”
“Take Jen with you.”
“No.” John pitched his torch into the flaring ruin, trying not to remember the demon in Jenny’s eyes, or Amayon’s name whispered in her sleep. When the shed roof fell in, he picked up his loaded saddlebags, made sure the little bag of flax seeds was in his pocket, and ascended to the stable court. Gantering Pellus alleged that demons were obliged to count seeds, though he’d claimed it was millet seeds, not flax. Muffle climbed behind John, water skins slung over his shoulder, slipping a little in the snow that heaped the steps. The lower court was sheltered. Once they came up the wind hit them, cold as a flint knife and stinging with sleet.
“Ian, then. He’ll be on his feet in a day or two …”
“No.” John ducked through the low stable door, where Battle-hammer stood saddled and waiting. He pulled off the rug Bill had laid over the big liver-bay warhorse and fastened on saddlebags and water skins. It wasn’t a day on which he would turn a stable rat out-of-doors, and by the smell of the wind he’d be lucky if he reached the Wraithmire before more snow hit. But the fever wouldn’t wait.
Snow lay drifted in the gateway. Peg the gatekeeper and Bill the yardman straightened from their shoveling. “If I was you, I’d think again—” Peg began.
“If I was you, I would, too,” John reassured her. He wrapped his brown-and-white winter plaid tighter around his lower face. His very teeth hurt with the cold.
“Jen’s taught Ian how to use the ward wyrds that’ll tell if Iceriders are on their way,” he said, swinging up into the saddle. He felt bad about taking Battlehammer into peril that would almost certainly get him killed-poor payment for a beast of whom he was dearly fond—but he knew he would need a trained mount, and a fast one. “But if that happens, for God’s sake, don’t forget to send someone out to the Fell to fetch Jen in, whether she wants to come or not. Tell her I’m on patrol.”
“Since when have you taken water on patrol?” Muffle demanded. “Or your harpoons?” He slapped the backs of his fingers to the heavy iron weapons slung behind Battlehammer’s saddle, three of the eight that John had made to use against dragons. Even without the poisons and death spells Jenny—and later Ian—had put on them, they were formidable, and something about the empty lands he’d seen in his dream last night had warned him that there were things about which the Demon Queen had lied.
“Keep watch.” John bent from the saddle to lay a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “There’s aught afoot, Muffle, and I don’t know what it is or how it’s to be fought.” I’m not a mage! he wanted to shout, I shouldn’t even be doing this! But he’d never considered himself a warrior, either. “Keep watch for anythin’. Not only outside the bounds, outside the walls, but inside as well. Stay here at the Hold tonight, if you would, and until I return. Bring Blossom and the children—tell ’em it’s because I don’t know how long I’ll be away. Tell ’em anythin’. But every night, walk about the place. Down the cellars, along the walls, go in the crypt underneath the main hall. Just look.”
“For what?”
Peg was lowering the drawbridge, working the crank to raise the portcullis. Wind slammed through the gate with renewed viciousness, slicing John’s sheepskin coat and winter plaids, the mailed leather beneath.
John shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“And who do I tell,” the blacksmith asked, “if I find what I shouldn’t?”
Ian. John felt a pang, less of fear than of grief, thinking of what his son might have to face.
He’s too young, he’s been hurt too bad …
But he had grown up in a land that did not make allowances, not for youth, not for innocence, not for the wounded.
“Jen,” he said. “Ian, if Jen’s not to be reached.”
Sergeant Muffle nodded, silenced by whatever it was that he saw in John’s eyes. “How long will you be gone?”
“That I don’t know.” He gathered the reins, Battlehammer’s breath a white mist like a monster of legend. Beyond the gate the world was marble and ash, treeless to the horizon.
He turned back. “Pray for me.”
“Every day, Johnny,” Muffle said quietly. “Every day.”
Aversin turned his back on the Hold and rode for the Wraith-mire. The smoke of the burning work shed made a hard white column in the gray air, and the hot onyx of the ink bottle burned against his flesh like a second heart.
In summer or fall he could reach those dreary marshes in a matter of hours. Riding against the wind, with Battlehammer foundering in the drifts, the day was dying when he came to the edge of the slick flats of brown ice, the snow-covered humps of bramble and hackweed that filled the sheltered ground. No one could tell him now whether the flooding had come first and the infestations of whisperers later, or whether the lands had been abandoned to the water when those glowing, giggling things had begun to haunt the nights.
In either case it hadn’t surprised him to learn that a gate of Hell was located there.
A man named Morne had had a house hereabouts—before the marshes had spread this far—and had farmed a little. One afternoon Nuncle Darrow came to the Hold saying that Morne’s wife had cut her husband and then their four children to pieces with a carving knife. Old Caerdinn and Jenny had exorcised the woman, but they didn’t know whether they’d succeeded, for after they were done with their spells the woman turned the knife on herself.
The house still stood. John could distinguish its pale shape among the half-dead trees in the gloom. None of the neighbors had torn it down, not even for the bricks and the dressed stone.
He dismounted cautiously and led Battlehammer into the labyrinth of hummocks and ice. In the graying twilight he found where animal tracks turned aside in fear of the whisperers but saw no mark, no sign of the Hellspawn themselves.
He made sure Battlehammer was stoutly tied to a sapling before reaching into his coat for the ink bottle. It felt heavy in his hand, and for a time he stood, wondering if there were any way whatsoever he could accomplish the bidding of the Demon Queen without the help of the thing inside.
But