Page 40 of Queen Demon
Ziede continued, “Bashasa is a master at talking people into things they probably shouldn’t do. If he wasn’t, we’d all be stuck in the Summer Halls, dead or wishing we were dead.”
“Are you arguing for or against what we’re doing right now?” Tahren asked, sounding honestly curious.
Ziede’s mouth twisted in a rueful grimace. “I don’t know anymore.” She had said she was conflicted about the idea of trying to ally with the dustwitches. Kai thought Hawkmoth’s disdain for everything that the Khalin Islands had stood for, let alone the Saredi treaty with the underearth, had shaken and hurt her more than she wanted to show anyone, or maybe even admit to herself.
Which made it odd when she had refused to participate in Kai’s attempt to mock the whole idea of getting the dustwitches to join his cadre. Ziede had said, “Why do you think the borderlander Witches answered the Saredi’s call to unite against the Hierarchs? They followed the demon blood.”
Kai had never thought of it that way, and wanted to argue. But he remembered the war captain that Kentdessa had chosen, and the signs of her demon ancestry in her eyes.
They were about forty paces away from the dustwitch when a voice called out in Imperial, “I will only speak to the demon.”
Kai recognized that voice. It was the dustwitch who hadspoken to him after he had trapped Hawkmoth. Maybe that wasn’t a surprise, that she was the one to come to the meeting. She had tried to bargain with him even then.
Kai let his breath out in resignation. “Wait here.”
“Kai…” Ziede hesitated, either having too much to say, or not enough. “If one of these idiots hurts you, I will remove their liver with my bare hand and shove it down their throat.”
“We’re doing this after I cut their head off?” Tahren asked, her voice dry.
“How would that make any sense?” Ziede said witheringly.
Tahren countered, “I didn’t say I didn’t want you to do it.”
Kai felt a lump rise in his throat and bit his lip to control the abrupt rush of emotion. It struck him that he had somehow not expected anyone to care about him like this again, that it was something he had accepted as lost the day he had seen the smoke rising from the burning Saredi tents.
Going into a negotiation with a powerful and deceptive enemy would not be helped by tears in his eyes. Much as it might confuse the dustwitches. His voice was still rough as he said, “I’ll be careful,” and started forward.
The dustwitch didn’t move as he crossed the field toward her. Kai stopped about five paces away, and said, “Are you the Doyen?”
“I am her… officer, called Nightjar.” She used the Arike word for officer, perhaps because she didn’t know the Imperial word. At least it was confirmation that they had been right about the dustwitches embracing a hierarchy. She wore Arike women’s dress, pants and a long shirt in faded blue-gray, under a gray veil that went nearly to her knees. It was an ostentatious size, for a veil that was so transparent that Kai could see her features, her lighter skin and long straight nose. Was the Doyen’s veil even longer? It was such a funny image that he almost laughed. Something in his expression must have given that away, because her voice hardened as she asked, “What are you called, demon?”
“Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth.” Kaikept his voice even, though in the western grasslands—and the Arik, for that matter—that wasn’t exactly a polite way to ask for someone’s name. He already had the feeling that this wasn’t going to go the way Bashasa hoped. “Why did you attack us?”
Nightjar’s smile was a faint movement of her lips, barely visible past the veil. “And who is your master?”
Kai quelled his first and second impulse, and said only, “Why do you think I’ll answer your questions if you won’t answer mine?” Then he felt the rise of power under his feet.
Kai had taken the precaution of stabbing himself before he had left the encampment. He had done it low in his right side where it wouldn’t interfere with his ability to walk. The wound had already closed but he was getting better at holding the power it gave him in reserve, like the lives of the expositors he ate. He started to reach for one of the intentions on his coat, but nothing happened. His arms had gone rigid, his muscles frozen.
Whatever was coming out of the ground at him, there was nothing in it to grasp, nothing to use the pain on. It wasn’t a cantrip or an intention, there was no design to pick apart, no shape to pluck whole out of his body, if he could have managed to move a hand to do it. He had a moment of wry despair; Tahren would get to see Ziede rip out someone’s liver after all.
A tendril coiled around his wrist. He thought it must be trying to wrap around him, shatter his bones. He peered down at it, but could still see nothing like the mark that gave away the presence of an active design. It felt like water on the bare skin of his wrist, a little dank and cool and gritty from passing over the ground. He squinted hard and thought he saw a shadow, hard to make out in the twilight. A tangible darkness, curling up around his legs, tangled around his other arm. The scent was rich loam and decay and death and the potentiality of life about to sprout in the spring.
Ziede had said the dustwitches’ power was different, it came from the earth, not like the animate spirits that other Witchescould interact with, but from the earth itself, from rockfalls… From decay? What was dust but dirt, and every living thing that had died in it, ground to a fine powder? Dust was transformation. And demons were born of transformation.
Kai took a little of his stored pain and imagined pulling at the cloud of darkness like it was a shroud.
A tug of resistance, and it came free of the ground, spread and resolved into a fine mist of dust. Like the cloud Hawkmoth had surrounded him with last night.
It explained why the dustwitches hadn’t been able to clog his throat and lungs, the way they had the mortals. Stealing life was just drawing energy out of one place and putting it somewhere else until it was used and transformed again. Dust was the final form of that process.
Kai took a breath, inhaled swirling dust, and blew it out again. His hands pricked and his muscles warmed and he could move. He lifted his hands and the dust cloud lifted. He guided it up into a spreading canopy, thinner and more diffuse. The mild evening breeze caught it and scattered it away.
He looked back to Nightjar. The light was failing slowly but he could still see her expression. It was dismayed. Her lips curled in frustration and she said, “How did you do that?”
Kai laughed aloud this time. “I’m beginning to think you don’t know what a demon is.” The trick now was to continue to seem confident. Nightjar should have brought a few companions with her and tried cantrips; the one he had been hit with in the dark last night would have killed this body and left Kai drifting in the ether with nowhere to go, if he hadn’t stopped it. A dozen at once would work too quickly for him to pluck out.
But maybe they didn’t realize that. If the dustwitch who had cast that cantrip had survived, all she would know was that it hadn’t worked, that he had turned it back on her. If she hadn’t survived, all the others would know was that one of their number cast a cantrip on him and died.
