by David Drake
Something approached slowly, walking rather than sliding through the fog. It was still too distant for Sharina to make out its details.
"Are they ghosts?" she asked. Her voice was higher pitched than she'd intended. She cleared her throat. "Rasile, what good are they to us?"
"Those were only hunger," the Corl said. "But there are others, and they will come." The walking shape approached, becoming a man who carried a long spear and a tall, curved shield made from the hide of a brindled bull. He stared at Sharina with vacant eyes. "Sir?" Sharina called. She desperately wanted to hear a voice other than hers or the wizard's. "Who are you? I'm Sharina os-Reise." The soldier walked past silently, though his head turned to watch her. He continued to look back until he was out of sight. The wizard resumed her chanting, though this time the rhythm was subtly different. The fog coalesced into a blob which in turn slowly split into three figures which became increasingly distinct. They were old men, staring sullenly at the Corl. "Why do you summon me?" one asked in a querulous voice. "They are alive," said another. "They have no business with us, nor we with them." "I command you to tell me of the creatures who killed you, the Last," said Rasile. "Your own kind and all life in the world depend on your help. Where is the most immediate danger from the Last to your race and mine?" "We have no business with the living," a spirit wailed. "Icommand you!" said Rasile. She began to chant, but the spirits screamed before she'd called out the third syllable. "Speak!"
Rasile said. "Pandah!" said the middle figure. "The Last will destroy Pandah," said the one on the right, "and from Pandah they will spread to conquer the world." "The Last will conquer the world!" cried the third. "If not from Pandah, then from the great ice lens on Shengy.
The Last cannot be halted!" All three began to howl horribly. Their shapes blurred and became elongated; their mouths swelled into fanged caverns. "Begone!" Rasile shouted. "I release you!" As the three old men dissipated into the fog, the wizard began chanting again. Her harsh voice started weak but seemed to grow stronger. Sharina squeezed her hands together, her lips moving in a silent prayer: "Lady, protect me if it is Your will. Lady, do not let me perish in this place far from those I love." Lights glowed in the fog. With a rush of thankful delight, Sharina realized that the mist around them had risen from the marsh and that the lights were the soldiers' lanterns and campfire.
Rasile slumped, but Sharina caught her before she hit the ground. The Corl was very light, as light as Tenoctris. "All praise the Lady!"
Sharina shouted. "Praise the Lady Who brings us from darkness!" *** The sun was still beneath the eastern horizon, but the sky was light enough to show that the peel tower's great double doors were open. Garric didn't see anyone nearby. "Go!" Carus shouted in Garric's mind. "Don't waste the chance! Go! Go!" "Go on!" Garric said, restraining his impulse to kick his mount in the ribs. That wasn't necessary with Kore. Besides, he wasn't sure the ogre's willingness to act like a horse extended to beingtreated like a horse. "Up to the door!" He spoke urgently but he didn't shout. He had no desire to warn the people living in the tower until they'd noticed him on their own.
"I have it on good authority that there are horses who buck, master,"
Kore muttered, but she lengthened her stride from a jog to a jolting gallop. "Though most of those I've seen had an ogre rushing them." The footing was uncertain. Kore slipped, spurning a flake of rock hard against an outcrop behind them; it cracked like a ball from a catapult. Her left arm went out while she tucked her right into her ribs, keeping her balance without slowing. Garric had wondered whether to draw his sword-Carus' reflex and firm belief-or to leave it sheathed in case there was no need for it after all. He'd been reaching for the hilt as he spoke, figuring that a charging ogre would be viewed as an attack whether or not the man on her back waved a sword. The first slamming impact of Kore's foot against the path changed his mind; he grabbed the flailing straps. Even Carus could see that they werecertainly coming off their mount if Garric didn't concentrate on riding rather than what might happen after they reached the tower. Where the track was narrow Shin followed them; he paced just to the ogre's left in the wider stretches. The aegipan's twelve-foot leaps easily matched Kore's strides. "The tower's empty!" he called. "They're behind it, all of them!" Garric heard the muffled whinny of a horse. He wouldn't have been able to tell for sure over the crash of the ogre's clawed feet, but it certainly could have come from the bog beyond the tower. "Go around the building!" he ordered.
Kore left the main track, leaning to the side as she angled toward the peel tower. On the second stride her foot splashed ankle deep in wet soil. She staggered and Garric threw his left arm around her neck. The aegipan had dropped behind. "The ground's soft!" the ogre said. Her feet splashed geysers of mud at every step. "It'll be softer yet behind the tower!" "They got a horse back there, didn't they?" Garric shouted. Carus was a flaming presence in his mind, silent but pulsing with eagerness for battle. "Go around! Beyond the doorway, the tower's interior was a dark void smelling of blood and fear. The air oozing from it was noticeably warmer than the dawn breeze following Garric down from the ridge. Kore swung to the right, the direction Garric was leaning. Her right leg plunged to the knee in muck; she threw her arms back to keep from overbalancing. Her left leg, kicked far forward to brace her, sank to the crotch. She belly flopped, lifting sedges in a ripple of mud. Garric flew clear and landed at the base of the tower.
He'd tightened his rib muscles when he realized what was happening, so though hitting the soft ground was a shock it didn't knock his breath out. He got up, drawing his sword as he started around the tower. At each step he sloshed to mid-calf. He couldn't imagine how the inhabitants'd gotten a horse over soil like this; it should've sunk to its belly. "There are three men," said Shin, clicking along at his left side. The base of the tower flared outward in a skirt to deter battering rams. The aegipan's hooves sparkled as he ran on the stone, his inner leg tucked high to keep his slight body upright. "And the horse they are leading." Garric came around the curve of the building.
Two men in drab clothing drove a white horse like the one on which Orra had left the Boar's Skull. One hauled on the reins while the other followed behind, cracking a quirt viciously into the beast's hindquarters. The white horse pitched and whinnied, but the band tightly around its muzzle smothered the sound into a desperate whimper. The third figure was taller and thin; his garments shimmered in the first light of dawn. He stood at the edge of the sinkhole Garric had noticed when they passed the tower on the previous afternoon. When the tall figure saw Garric, he shouted to his servants in a language that sounded like birds calling. They turned, drawing curved swords from under their robes. Freed, the horse bolted to its left and immediately mired itself. There was a firm path beneath the surface, though only mud with a sheen of algae showed to a stranger's eye. Garric found the path, a causeway of stone barely below the mud.
It was as slick as wet ice, but he still felt a jolt of triumph. He drew his dagger with his left hand and started forward. He'd have rushed the trio just the same if he'd had to swim. After all, the servants didn't have any better footing than he did. "You've decided they're enemies without parley, Garric?" Shin said judiciously. "Well, I think you are right in that." The figure in gleaming robes held a silver athame in his left hand. He pointed it at Garric and chanted,
"Churbu bureth baroch!" The hair on the back of Garric's neck tingled, but to survive he had to concentrate on one thing at a time…
The servant who'd been behind the horse made a series of wide, curling cuts in the air. "A farmer with a sickle could do better!" Carus sneered as Garric stepped in. Garric held his sword low and the dagger advanced in his left hand. He had to finish the first servant before the other joined the fight. The hidden causeway was narrow, but the other fellow might be smart enough to splash through the muck and trap him between them. Don't underestimate your oppo- The servant slashed.
Garric blocked the cut with his dagger, his muscles poised to thrust the fellow through the body, toppl
e him dying into the mire, and rush the remaining man before he was prepared for the attack. Blade met blade with a squealing crash. Garric felt the shock to his shoulder and his left hand went numb. His body twisted with the blow, fouling the neat training-ground thrust he'd been ready to make. He'd underestimated his opponent. Whatever the thing was, it wasn't human-or anyway was inhumanly strong. Garric stumbled forward with the blades locked, shouldering the servant in the chest. He thought there was something harder than bone beneath the robes, but he didn't have time or need to worry about it. He punched the sword upward, in through the belly and out through the spine between the servant's shoulder blades. The fellow spasmed but didn't let go of his curved sword. His tongue protruded from his pale lips and he began to grunt like a farrowing sow. Garric pushed hard with his left hand-the feeling was beginning to come back-and jerked down on his hilt to clear the sword. His cross-guard was against the servant's ribs. If the blade hadn't been uniquely sharp, he might not have been able to withdraw it from so deep a thrust. As it was, it cut bone as easily coming out as it had going in. The dead servant flopped on the causeway. The living one recoiled slightly to avoid tripping. Garric lunged, thrusting. His driving foot slipped on wet stone and he dropped to his left knee. His point didn't go home, but neither did the servant's roundhouse slash. Carus-it was his reflex, not Garric's-flicked his blade up instead of recovering the way a swordmaster would've directed after a failed thrust. The sword's tip touched the servant's wrist and sheared muscle, sinew and bone. The servant's curved blade spun into the sedges and sank. His hand dangled at right angles to his forearm. He turned to run, his robes flapping, but his foot skidded just as Garric's had a moment before. He fell off the causeway with another hoglike grunt. Carus would've stabbed the floundering servant just in case, but Garric didn't have his ancestor's ruthlessness. He stepped past the man, his eyes on the wizard who stood chanting and pointing the athame at him. "Artaie thaimam thar!" the wizard called. Garric froze where he stood. The mare had been trying to regain the causeway since bolting off it the moment she'd been released. She put her forehooves in the middle of the servant's chest and tried to lift herself upward; instead she drove the man into the bog with a final despairing grunt. Slime bubbled. "Arbitha rathrathax!" said Shin in a musical voice. Shards of red wizardlight, invisible till that moment, flaked away from Garric.
They splashed on the wet earth and vanished hissing. He was free again. The aegipan stood on the causeway, grinning his goat's grin.
The wizard beside the sinkhole shouted in disbelief. Garric started forward. Though momentary, the pause had robbed him of his momentum.
His muscles ached from the ride and the fight. But he could still kill a wizard. There was no question about that. The wizard must've realized that too. He pointed his athame at the bog and mumbled words that Garric couldn't hear over the roar of blood in his ears. Garric took another step, a careful one because he didn't need to hurry: the wizard had nowhere to go but into the bog or the sinkhole. The wizard stepped off the causeway and strode through the sedges. He wore slippers of gilt leather. They sparkled with scarlet wizardlight every time they touched the surface, but they didn't sink into the mud. The wizard had a thin, imperious face. He glared with contempt as he passed safely beyond the reach of Garric's arm and sword, but he watched the aegipan with a combination of hatred and fear; he raised the silver athame as if to bar an attack. Shin merely laughed and lolled his tongue. Garric started back down the causeway. "Don't bother," said Shin. Garric stopped. He couldn't get past the aegipan without stepping into the bog. He didn't trust Shin's judgment, but he was too tired to argue about it. The wizard reached the base of his tower and started around it, keeping his face toward Garric and Shin the whole time. When the curving stone wall half-shielded him, he pointed the athame again and said, "Thora amaim-" Kore reached down with a long arm and gripped the wizard's ankles. "Urk!" the wizard shrieked as Kore jerked him in the air. She dashed his brains out against the side of the tower. His athame clinked from the stone, then splashed into the bog. Kore continued to hold the corpse upside down.
With his robes hanging from his shoulders, the wizard looked like a chicken plucked for boiling. His skin was hairless and a waxen white.
"I did this on my own, master," she said. The stone causeway must continue around the tower on this side, because she was standing in only a thin layer of mud. "Since I'm not satisfied with the quality of the food you offer me, I thought I'd kill a man to eat. You can't object, since he was clearly your enemy." "I do object," Garric said.
At first he thought the ogre was joking, but the realization dawned that she very well might be serious. "I certainly object! You're not to, ah, to eat men!" He'd started to say, "You're not to kill men."
Under the circumstances that would've been not only foolish but churlishly ungrateful. "Would you stop your horse from eating oats from a dead enemy's storehouse?" Kore demanded. "I wouldn't let my horse eat men," Garric said, "and I won't let you either!" A sucking roar came from the sinkhole. Garric turned, wondering if the edges were collapsing and about to pull him in with them. A pincer with blades as long as Garric was tall reached up from the sinkhole. It groped, then squelched down in the muck like a paddle. A thing with one eye in the middle of its headplate and a nest of tentacles around its gaping mouth lurched into sight, followed by another pincer. The creature's body was the diameter of the peel tower. Duzi-or the Sister-knew how deep its body reached back into the sinkhole. Shin laughed. "I don't think it's what your mount wants to eat that should be concerning you at the moment, Garric," the aegipan said.
Chapter 10 Garric felt Carus place a cold overlay on the image of the monster before them. He was a warrior, a man of war first and foremost. Dangers-the huge pincers, the tentacles that writhed five or six feet out from the lamprey-like mouth-and weaknesses-joints and the great central eye-were highlighted, while the rest of the creature remained a shadowed bulk. Garric knelt and wiped his sword on tunic of the corpse lying across the causeway. He looked at his dagger. The servant's blow had notched the steel a finger's breadth deep; it'd been sheer luck that the blade hadn't snapped instead of blocking an otherwise fatal stroke. He threw the dagger down and wrenched the curved sword from the dead man's grip. The servant's hand was slender but ridged with sinew; the skin had a grayish cast. There was a nick just below the fat part of the blade, but nothing that seriously impaired its usefulness. "Or you could run," Shin said. "Many people would think that was the only sane course, Prince Garric." "I don't think I will," Garric said, turning to face the monster. That was the choice with evil, after all: you faced it, or you fed other people to it in hopes that it'd eat you last. Running away was just a way of feeding others to it. King Carus laughed with harsh good-nature. "Run, lad?" he cried. "There's one of him and one of us. Easy odds!" The monster had a dome-shaped body that moved on four broad paddles. The causeway supported it as it splashed forward, but Garric suspected it'd do well in the mire or even the open sea. The creature probably wouldn't move as well on the rocky hills in the direction of the Notch House, but there wouldn't be any way for Garric to learn that. It'd get to Notch House over his dead body. "Or more likely after swallowing you, I think," Shin said in a conversational tone. He'd retreated to where he could lean against the tower; his right leg was cocked back against the flared base. "I suppose that would be entertaining to watch." The monster swam closer. Though its carapace didn't flex as it moved, neither did it give the impression of being either slow of clumsy the way a tortoise did. Carus judged the strength of the peel tower, then said, "The stonework might hold but I wouldn't count on it. Regardless, we couldn't fight a thing like this through a few arrow slits. Go for the eye, lad, and we'll hope for the best." "Shin, can you help?" Garric called without looking over his shoulder again. "A champion can't be expected to defeat wizards, Garric," the aegipan said. "This isn't a wizard, though; and it remains to be seen whether you're the champion the Yellow King requires." Garric laughed. Nobody
'd ordered him to do this thing, so he didn't have any right to complain if nobody volunteered to help him either. The mare, her white coat slick with mud and algae, managed to get one, then both of her forelegs onto the causeway. Garric wondered whether she'd consciously swum toward the hidden surface or whether chance had led her to the nearest solid support. Nothing he'd seen of horses made him think they were any smarter than sheep, and sheep were on the intellectual level of rabbits. The mare's shoulders bunched.
The monster lunged forward like a snake striking, sending up a huge gout of mud and sedges. One pincer closed on the horse's neck and jerked the beast out of the mire. Blood spouted and the muzzle band finally tore loose. The horse managed a blat of terror before the pincers crushed her windpipe. The other pincer gripped the mare's left ham and pulled, stretching her out. The monster slammed her down on the causeway, shattering her spine and ribs, and started to tear her apart. Garric rushed while the monster was occupied. Normally he'd have slipped and skidded all over the slimy stones, but now his balance was perfect. He jumped onto the dead horse. The monster had turned its prey sideways and continued to pull until her hide split; its tentacles were at work in the body cavity, scooping the organs and ropes of intestine into its pulsing mouth. A tentacle wrapped Garric's right thigh. Instead of suckers for gripping, these arms had tiny teeth covering the paler inner surface. Stabbing through Garric's breeches, they began to shred cloth and skin as they twisted. Garric slashed with his straight sword, severing the tentacle holding him and cutting off the tip of his boot. He missed his big toe by little enough that he felt the chill touch of the cold metal. There wasn't time to be cautious. He jumped to the monster's face, his right foot on the muscular lip from which the tentacles sprouted. He couldn't quite reach the eye, but if he raised his left foot onto one of the bony bosses protruding from the carapace he could- Tentacles gripped both his ankles and tugged. He struck with the curved sword, cutting deep into the muscular tentacle but not severing it. The monster's grip tightened instead of releasing. Garric hacked with the straight sword. Though the edge was impossibly keen, he couldn't free his right leg either. The angle was too awkward. Both pincers were bending toward him. Because of the creature's thick armor, the arms weren't quite flexible enough to reach even with three joints. When Garric fell backward, though, they'd pick him to pieces-if the monster didn't instead stuff him whole into its mouth. The stench from its gullet was worse than that of a week-dead mule. Garric dropped the curved sword and grabbed the boss he'd hoped to stand on. His fingers slipped: the chitin was waxy and still covered with muck. He was going over. The tentacle on his left ankle stopped pulling, though it didn't release.