Demon King Read online

  I’d wondered, long ago when I’d first seen a painting of Irrigon in a museum, how many people were required for the lord and lady of the manor to be properly cosseted. Now I knew too well: 347, from gardeners, to kitchen sweeps, to guards, to musicians, to the girl whose sole duty was cutting and arranging the flowers for the castle, to the pair of silent men who moved from room to room replenishing the fires, with never a nod given to their presence. I knew well, because I paid them twice a year. Marán and I had the services of four bankers, working full-time handling our money. Once I thought I’d inquire just how much money we spent each time, but realized my heart might not handle the strain. Besides, as Marán said, there was no way anyone, no matter how profligate, could dent the Agramónte fortunes, so why concern myself?

  My thoughts were drifting thus as we rode toward Irrigon. There were twenty-four of us: myself, the Seer Sinait, and twenty-one members of my hastily reformed Red Lancers, under the command of Legate Segalle. Captain Lasta, who would normally ride beside me, was in Nicias bringing the Red Lancers back to full strength. There was also Karjan. I’d decided to attempt a new tactic, and so he glowered at the slashes of a troop guide now, and I had every intention of making him a regimental guide in a time or so. I was determined to win this battle of wills that had lasted over nine years. Secretly I feared I was no more likely to win this round than any of the others.

  Behind the quarter hundred of us were the three document-carrying carriages. I shuddered thinking how little I liked books and studying. But things might be different this time, for I’d tried magic. I’d had Seer Sinait prepare a spell, using bits and pieces of the material I was to study. The conjuration was an extended version of our standard Spell of Understanding. Now I could read any of the six Maisirian languages, and more importantly speak nineteen of the forty-odd dialects used in the vast kingdom. I’d need no interpreter if the emperor’s fears of war came true.

  My wandering mind snapped back to the present as we reached the long, sweeping drive that led to the castle, and I saw, at the foot of the steps, someone waiting, a cloaked someone who could only be my darling Marán.

  • • •

  Slowly, very slowly, I returned from the stars.

  “Great gods of Numantia with a dildo,” I managed. “Where did you learn that?”

  Marán looked back at me over her shoulder. Both of us were sweat-soaked, in spite of the winter winds outside our tower.

  “I’ll never say,” she whispered. “Let’s just say that you learned to exercise certain muscles while I was away — and I did the same.”

  “You’d better tell. Or I’ll become insanely jealous.”

  “Oh, all right. Amiel, last time she was here, brought some … devices with her. One was a bladder you inflate, and put where you are right now, and try to pump the air out of it with your muscles. She said you’re supposed to do that twenty times a day. There wasn’t anything else to do after she left. So I practiced … Did you like it?”

  “Mmm,” I said nuzzling the back of her neck, and biting her gently. “I definitely think Countess Kalvedon is a wonderfully bad influence.”

  “Oh she is, she is,” Marán whispered.

  • • •

  The next day I sought our chief bailiff to see who the leather-capped men might have been. He was a scarred villain named Vacomagi, one of the few overseers left from Marán’s father’s time. It wasn’t that he was any less brutal than the others we’d dismissed. But Marán noted he was scrupulously fair in his brutality, and that he worked at least as hard as any of the men and women he drove, particularly during harvest and haying times. She suggested we keep him on, and I agreed.

  I’d privately had a rather nasty thought of my own: It’s not bad to have a convenient culprit around, someone whom everyone blames for any necessary evils, instead of the kindly, benevolent lord. After that thought, I wondered if I were changing, if I were starting to think like the callously bestial autocrats I so despised.

  I asked Vacomagi who the men in the bush were.

  “We calls ‘em th’ Broken Men,” he said. “Though there’s women, an’ younguns as well out there. Mayhap half a hunnerd, mayhap more.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Some are ones we drove off from th’ estates. Others’re wanderin’ outlaws. Some of ‘em are just th’ landless, th’ ones who’ll wander th’ roads, al’as hopin’ somehow somebody’ll give ‘em a real job, other’n some quick fill labor at harvest or such. I’ve even heard …” Vacomagi let his voice trail away as he glanced about.

  “Go ahead.”

  He was still hesitant, until I pressed him.

  “Some could be Tovieti,” he said, in a low voice. “Or so I’ve heard. Like th’ ones you an’ the emperor put down.”

  “Here? On the Agramónte lands?”

  “That’s th’ talk,” Vacomagi went on. “Course, nobody’ll talk straight about ‘em. Not round me, anyways.”

  “Have they killed anyone?”

  “You mean strang’lated? Like I heard they do with those cords they got? Nossir. Not yet, anyway. But there’s been some disappear on th’ roads. Nobody proper, yet. Nobody what counts. Just some peddlers who never come around anymore, or folks who were dumb ‘nough t’ go about th’ roads wi’out bein’ armed or wi’out an escort. But there’s nothin’ for you t’ worry about. Th’ Broken Men’re too far down for even th’ Tovieti.”

  He spat. “Seems like there’s more ‘n’ more of ‘em, every year. One of these days we’ll have t’ run ‘em down, like we do foxes an’ badgers. Sweep th’ country, an’ put those to the sword or torch that don’t have the sense t’ flee. Not t’worry, Lord. Th’ Agramóntes know how to deal with such as them. Like the name says, they’re broke, twisted, like a stook a’ grain that’s been blown over int’ th’ muck. All the soul’s been beat, or feared, out of ‘em.” That was the end of the matter for Vacomagi.

  But not for me. I’d seen too many “broken” men rise up to strike hard with swords, knives, clubs, or cobblestones to dismiss these outcasts from my mind.

  I wondered why there were more of them each year, as Vacomagi had said. Times were far better for everyone under the emperor than they’d been under the Rule of Ten, weren’t they? And the Tovieti were, or so Kutulu had told me, less an influence than before.

  Broken Men here and there, and in other places in the kingdom I’d had to stamp out different rebellions. What was going on in Numantia?

  I had no answers, not even questions, and so put the matter away.

  • • •

  I began my studies, hoping I’d never have to apply them.

  Maisir was an ancient monarchy, its symbol a twin-lion-headed dragon, black on yellow. Its population was, and this was estimated, for the kingdom was not fully explored even by its rulers, 150 million. That was 25 million more than Numantia, but my land was more densely populated. Maisir covered more, or so the estimates have it, than 6 million square miles; Numantia, which I’d previously thought unimaginably huge, was no more than a million square miles.

  Numantia stretched from just below the equator into temperate regions, and Maisir reached from the southern temperate region into the arctic. Its most prominent features were the vast deserts they called the suebi, wastelands whose terrain changed seasonally from ice to mud to dust to mud once more.

  The land, I read, was truly vast, so large one traveler said it hurt his eyes to try to pierce the horizon, and made him want to cower like a tiny mouse hunted by an eagle. There were mountains far higher than anything in Kait, lakes one would think seas, rivers whose far bank could not be seen, farming districts as big as some of our states.

  Travel was a nightmare. Outside the largest cities, roads were either dirt or nonexistent. During bad weather, they became impossible morasses. The great rivers wouldn’t help our army, since the navigable ones ran west to east, across the country.

  Maisir’s capital was Jarrah, three hundred leagues south of the border, hi
dden in the depths of the Belaya Forest, protected to its west by suebi, to its north by the huge Kiot Marshes. There were some other cities, not all known to us, but none as big as Jarrah.

  The enormity of Maisir also made communication between our two capitals difficult. Coded messages could be sent by heliograph south to Renan on our border. Then messages would go by heavily escorted courier into Sulem Pass and through Kait. On the Kait-Maisir border, the messages would be given to the Maisirian border guards, the Negaret, and ridden through the Wild Country until they could be passed to normal couriers, who took them on to Jarrah.

  Maisir’s king was named Bairan, and he was considered a good ruler, at least by the standards of the Maisirians. One report on the thousand-year history of his family was as fascinating as any salacious broadsheet.

  “The only choice to give a Maisirian,” one family proverb went, “is between the noose and the knout.” It was a proverb they obeyed exactly. Some of Bairan’s ancestors were as bloody-handed a set of demoniacs as any in legend. One, offended when a certain province didn’t offer sufficient obeisance when he journeyed through it, had his sorcerers rouse demons, and ordered them to kill every man they encountered. Not content with that, he sent a second set of nightmares against the women of the area. The children, those who hadn’t starved, were treated more kindly. The army was given a special mission: round them up for the slave markets. Finally, the province was given another name and repopulated by peasants forcibly uprooted from another province.

  Another tale, and this one I had some trouble believing, was of a queen who was insatiable in her lust. She went to a great deal of trouble to select a hundred men, the handsomest and best-built of the entire army. She had them lie with her continuously for one week, and at the end of that time ordered them all returned to the Wheel, for “no one who’s experienced joy such as they must have would wish to continue on in the world.”

  Bairan, in contrast, ruled well and thoughtfully, if harshly. I read of no horrors he’d yet committed, at any rate. The nobility around the throne was no better than could be expected, but Bairan seemed to have selected his advisers and cronies more for capabilities than corruption, unlike his father.

  I wondered how Maisir could have existed for so long with such villains on its throne. One philosopher, who’d spent ten years in Maisir as a tutor to the royal children, offered an explanation I’m not sure I understood or understand now: “There are, for the most part, only two classes of people in Maisir,” he wrote. “There are the rulers, and there are the ruled. Those who are ruled have no rights whatsoever, and even the aristocracy, in their various stations, have no more rights than the king might temporarily grant. No man is permitted to rise above the station he has at birth. Thus life is nothing more than a struggle for power, for only with power can life continue. All power belongs to, hence may be granted by, the king. No one would ever dream of blaming the king himself for society’s injustices, since it’s obvious to them he speaks with the gods’ approval.

  In another place, the man wrote: “While it appears both countries have the same religion, that commonality is purely a masquerade. It’s said we Numantians are too stoic, too accepting, feeling that our unnoticed benevolences, like our sins, will be rewarded or punished when we return to the Wheel. If this is a belief in Numantia, it is a fixation in Maisir. Their only rewards come after death, when one is judged by Saionji. Any other pleasures must be seized quickly and guiltily. Therefore, it is right to flog a peasant, for his or her sins were undoubtedly terrible in his previous life, or else he would have been born to a higher station. A nobleman, on the other hand, is not only permitted but encouraged every indulgence as a reward for a pious prior life. If he sins, that is the way of the world, and he will be punished in his next life.

  “Not only do the Maisirians worship more fervently than the most wild-eyed Numantian monk, but they also build great temples and have a vast host of manifestations unknown to us. Their magic, like their worship, is dark and death-worshiping, and I avoided their sorcerers as much as I could.”

  Sorcery was considered one of the state’s main supports. Young men and women who showed signs of the talent were noted early and trained in secluded institutions. Then they’d chose, or have chosen for them — no one seemed to quite know — specific assignments. It sounded as if Maisir’s magicians were as organized as soldiers. The closest thing we had, really no more than a mutual protective society, was the Chare Brethren. The Maisirians’ master magician was a shadowy figure ironically known as the azaz, or master of ceremonies. Who he was, even his name, let alone his powers, was unknown.

  As for the army itself, reports were quite contradictory. Their army was double the size of ours. However, this was a false cause for worry. Most units couldn’t be assigned to new locales, since they were required to keep the peace in their garrison areas or to defend the frontiers. There were legends Maisir had been conquered in the dim past by lands to the west and east, countries yet unknown to Numantia, and the Maisirians were deathly afraid of further invasions.

  The cavalry and guard regiments were elite and officered by noblemen, but these were in the minority and generally used as parade formations in the cities. The infantry was considered to be poorly led, and their badly and brutally treated soldiery thought not much more than rabble. Their officers were poorly educated, capable of little better strategy than attacking frontally, in mass. In battle the Maisirians might fight bravely, or as easily flee or surrender.

  I puzzled over that one.

  Their battle magic was another cipher. Maisir hadn’t fought a major war in decades, so most information was legendary. But these stories were of the most awful sort, and suggested their mages could call up dark forces at least as powerful as those the Emperor Tenedos could summon.

  There was one large difference between Maisir and Numantia. We recruited our soldiers with cash, with promises of gold, loot, glory. The Maisirians used the age system. Each man owed his king ten full years of service, and might or might not be called to the colors, along with everyone else his age, depending on the king’s needs. Sometimes he served a full term, sometimes he was hastily trained and released from service. This wasn’t dealt with very thoroughly, since analysts felt it was an impossible system, given the enormity of the country, the slow communication, the weather, the probability of corruption and evading such an onerous duty, and so forth. Again I wondered.

  I read on, about the country’s cities, built of stone and wood, wildly colored; their spicy food; their wild music; even a bit of their poetry and tales.

  I wanted to go there, to learn more about this fascinating land — but not as a warrior, for as I read I felt a crawl in my guts. Maisir could be the final doom of Numantia.

  • • •

  Another reason I fled to my books and reports was Marán. Something was dreadfully wrong. Wrong with me, wrong with her, wrong with our marriage — I didn’t know. I didn’t even know how to ask the questions, or how to ask them the right way. I asked her several times if she was happy, if everything was all right. She said she was as happy as she could be expected to be.

  We slept in the same bed, and we still loved, our bodies twining frantically as if they as well were in search of something lost.

  I noticed the way she looked at me, particularly when she didn’t think I was paying attention. There was no softness, no gentleness, but rather a cold intensity, as if she were studying someone she’d only just met and was deciding if that person was a friend or enemy.

  I felt there was a sheet of glass between me and the woman I loved. I looked desperately for an answer, but found none.

  • • •

  The winter was waning, and the last time of the year, the time of Dews, was almost upon us when the riders trotted up to Irrigon. There were ten of them, remounts tied to each rider’s saddle, wearing the dark earth-brown and subdued green caps and cloaks of Yonge’s skirmishers. Their officer, a young man whose dark complexion and hawk
face suggested he might have been born somewhere not distant from the Border Lands, saluted, introduced himself as Captain Sendraka, and handed me a trebly sealed envelope. I invited him and his men inside, and he shook his head.

  “No, Tribune. We’re under orders. And I was told to have you open that packet immediately.”

  It could only have come from one man. I tore the envelope open, and the drizzle misted the single sheet inside. It was handwritten:

  Come at once.

  T

  As I read it, the paper curled and smoked, and I dropped it into the mud as it flamed into nothingness.

  “We dropped off relays of horses as we came, sir. For the return. You’ll be ready — ”

  “We’ll be ready in an hour,” Marán’s voice interrupted. “For Nicias?”

  “Yes, lady, I mean Baroness, but there was no mention …”

  “Is there any reason for a tribune’s wife not to attend her husband?”

  Captain Sendraka wilted at the stare I knew he was getting. “No, Baroness. At least … but we’ll be riding hard. And, well, I don’t know if a woman …” His voice trailed off.

  I almost laughed. The good captain was about to have his opinion of women’s stamina changed. I turned. Marán’s eyes held mine. For an instant, they had that cold, assessing look I hated, then they softened.

  “May I come with you, Damastes? Please?”

  “Of course.”

  Thirty minutes later, we rode out of Irrigon on the emperor’s command.

  NINE

  SHADOWS IN THE PALACE

  Captain Sendraka had said we’d ride hard for the capital, and he wasn’t exaggerating. I thought I was in decent physical shape, but relearned the lesson that nothing prepares you for hard living except hard living. My ass was sore within half a day, and got sorer.

  At the first stop, an inn just at the edge of Agramónte property, one man was left behind, and Marán took his waiting remount.

  The skirmishers noted Marán with admiration. She never complained, and when anyone looked at her, no matter how mud-spattered, how weary she was, she forced a smile.