Long Live the Queen (Book 5 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Thirty Two: Much Sullied, but Still True

His voice was crisp and tinkly and musical – the sort of voice you'd imagine an icicle would have if it could talk.

"What is your name?" the demon added, as he slowly lowered Jack to the ground. It didn't seem to cost him any effort.

"Jack Cade."

"Seere," said the demon, extending a hand to him, for all the world as if they were in a boardroom and not a subterranean snowfield.

He saw Jack looking at his hand – making no move to take it – and his frosty brows contracted. "Is this no longer the way your people greet each other? In the above-world? It has been a long time. I imagine."

Jack felt a wrench of hunger in his stomach. He had already reached out to shake the demon's hand – with some misgivings – but now his own hand tightened on it, and he pulled the creature towards him with all the strength he could muster. "Can you get me back there? To the above-world?"

There was some kind of correlation between warmth and wanting. He had always thought so. There was just more mental room to spare when you weren't struggling to keep yourself alive with every chattering breath.

Now, as the cold left him, he remembered his desperation to get back to Oxford. He remembered Ellini, and his fervent hope that they could spend two solid weeks in bed together once this was all over. He remembered that he hadn't eaten anything since breakfast – which was perhaps weeks ago, in above-ground time.

"You may come with us if you choose," said the demon, extending one of his long, angular fingers and pointing across the plain. "We go to the Goddess. She has called us at last."

Jack turned, trying to shield his eyes from the wild, whirling snowflakes, to see what the demon was pointing at.

It was not a goddess. He had previously thought it a long ridge of black rock poking out of the snow, but now he saw that it bristled with spears and glowed with the light of lanterns and cooking fires. It wound through the snow for a mile or more – an endless queue of black-armoured soldiers, walled-up with shields, draped here and there with furs. Straw, which had presumably been packed in for warmth, was poking through the joints in their armour.

There were banners and pennants waving in the storm – and baggage-carts being drawn by huge, shaggy beasts with clumps of snow matted in their fur. There were even siege engines on trundling wheels, and demons with shovels and pickaxes clearing a way through the snow before them.

And there were dragons. Not the lithe, silver things from Faustus's cave, but big, barrel-chested, lumbering creatures with spiny black wings, padding through the snow on their back legs. They didn't look particularly aerodynamic, but they looked strong – as if they could get airborne just by pushing the ground away from them.

And it was all winding up to an opening on the far horizon – almost obscured by snowflakes and distance but unmistakably the colour of sunlight. Jack felt a wrench of homesickness in his chest the moment he looked at it.

The demons were coming to make war on the above-world. That meant, presumably, that Elsie was in trouble. Which might mean that the people who usually stood in front of her – Danvers and Ellini, Sergei and Manda and Sam – were gone.

But Ellini couldn't be gone, could she? Not if Elsie was still alive. If their pain and injuries were reciprocal, then surely their lives would be too.

It wasn't really a comforting thought – not down here, in front of a mile of demon soldiers. It made him stagger with the immensity of the task. How did you keep alive someone who could call an army like this, someone who could cause this much trouble? Everyone on the earth would want her dead, even the new-breeds.