Demon Knight by Dave Duncan

Author:Dave Duncan [Duncan, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2014-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

Even before the horrors of Trent, Toby Longdirk had seen more manifestations of gramarye than most men, but not all of it had been violent and destructive. In the days before he learned to suppress its antics, the hob had often played tricks around him—often embarrassing, as when he found pretty things collecting in his pockets, sometimes deadly, but once in a while very convenient, almost as if it could think and were trying to please. So he knew gramarye, and yet Sorghaghtani’s séance that evening was unlike anything he had ever witnessed before. It was subtle and stunningly effective, and the hob never stirred.

The courtyard was deeply shadowed, lit by a willowy moon in the pink dusk and the gleam of a few candles inside the villa itself. After the long-awaited payday, not all the officers of the Company were available to attend a council or competent to understand what was happening if they did, but the don had collected at least a score of them, perhaps thirty. They stood in small groups around the edges, under the trellises, staying well back, as if frightened the new hexer would turn them into goats to demonstrate her skills.

Toby presented Sorghaghtani, personal shaman to His Highness Prince Sartaq. He mentioned how honored and fortunate the Don Ramon Company was to have acquired such a hexer. The resulting silence might have come straight out of one of the age-old Etruscan tombs that were being excavated around Tuscany. Unless these men could be convinced, they would not persuade the rank and file.

“Are you always so mud-headed?” Sorghaghtani demanded shrilly. “What must I show you? Will you give me your hand, Little One, and stand at my back lest I fall off?”

Clutching his fingers in a powerful grip, she scrambled up on a stool and then the stone table itself. Evidently she could move as nimbly as a child when she wanted to, and his estimate of her age plummeted. She sat down cross-legged, gave the owl a wrist to step onto, and raised it overhead. Chabi spread her wings and floated away into the night. Sorghaghtani squirmed a few times as if to make herself comfortable on the hard tabletop, then settled the drum on her lap. “Do they understand that they must not speak, lest they anger the spirits?”

Of course they did not, so Toby passed the word. He stood ready behind the shaman and waited to see what she could do to convince this case-hardened crew of mercenaries.

For a long time she just drummed, but no one protested or made jokes or tried to leave. The rhythms were hypnotic and also restless, seeming to sing back and forth to their own echoes, although normally there were no echoes in the courtyard. To and fro, in and out, the sound went, surging and falling, then stopped abruptly, leaving a silence taut enough to raise the hair on a man’s neck. The shaman sat hunched over her drum, motionless. When she spoke, the voice that rang out was female, but not hers.

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