by David Drake
The harbor at Terness was tight, and the passage between lava cliffs to enter had been tighter yet. The largest vessel Ilna saw was a two-deck warship like the Flying Fish; the other ships were part-decked fishing boats.
“Now it may be you’re wondering why I didn’t sail in, dear heart, rather than stretch the lads’ backs by sculling,” Chalcus said in a conversational tone as they slid slowly as cold honey toward the quay on the gentle push of Ninon at the starboard bow oar. “It’s the way the winds eddy and the entrance, you see, and me being a stranger to these waters. Our Bird is a fine, sturdy ship, but I wouldn’t care to knock her against those rock walls—”
He crooked a finger back over his left shoulder, toward the harbor narrows.
“—and think of the embarrassment I’d feel with all those folk watching us, eh?”
“Yes,” said Ilna, “I see those folk.”
The quay was crowded with as many people as it would hold, most of them either servants with scarlet sashes as livery or soldiers in bronze caps but padded jerkins instead of metal body armor. There was a party of their betters as well, folk who thought themselves better, at any rate—a double handful of men in silk and furs and gilded metalwork. In the center of these last, wearing a silvered cuirass set with red stones that might possibly be rubies rather than lesser gems, stood a tall man with black hair and a full pepper-and-salt beard.
“Commander Lusius, as I recall,” Chalcus murmured. “And there’s no greater rogue unhung, unless it be myself.”
Ilna stepped closer to him, reaching instinctively into her left sleeve for the hank of cords she carried there. “Will he recognize you, do you think?” she asked, her voice calm but her mind dancing over possible ways out of the situation if it turned bad.
“I think not,” Chalcus said. “I was only one of Captain Mall’s crew, many years ago; and when Mall’s ship and crew became mine, we did no more business in the Haft trade. But if he does—”
One of Lusius’ attendants blew his trumpet and the crowd cheered—half-heartedly, it seemed to Ilna. Hutena’d racked his pike by the mast; he dropped a leather fender stuffed with straw between stone and the hull while Kulit positioned a second fender at the bow. The Bird of the Tide thumped the quay without needing the men on shore to draw them in by the mooring ropes.
“—it’ll only mean that we each know the other man.”
“Captain Chalcus!” Lusius cried, standing arms-akimbo as he looked down into the Bird. “Welcome to Terness. I’m Lusius, and I hope you and your lovely companion will accept my hospitality while you’re here.”
The Commander gave Ilna a broad grin. She tented her fingers very carefully; if she hadn’t, they’d have knotted a pattern that—some time in the future—she’d regret having used even on this man. Her mind recalled with satisfaction the greasy snap of a chicken’s neck as she twisted.
Ilna smiled back at Lusius. The Commander’s grin melted away.
“Well now, Commander Lusius...,” said Chalcus nonchalantly as he fitted a rope loop over the tiller to keep the steering oar from flapping in a current. Shausga and Kulit handed hawsers to attendants on the quay who’d bend them around bollards. “The crew and I will spend our nights aboard the few days we’re here fitting a new mast, but I thank you for your offer.”
“But you’ll dine with me tonight, surely?” Lusius said. “We flatter ourselves that we eat well on Terness, though the food may not be up to the royal banquets you’re used to.”
He looked around the men close about him, the sneering grin back on his face. Though Terness was a small place by any standards beyond those of Barca’s Hamlet, this handful of courtiers was dressed with as much expense—if not taste—as those crowding Garric’s receptions in Valles.
“Indeed,” said Chalcus easily, standing in a relaxed posture. “I’m a student of the world, Commander; always pleased to meet new folk and sample new fare. What time would it be that you’d wish us to arrive?”
Lusius threw back his head and laughed, resting his left hand on the pommel of his short curved sword. Ilna had learned much about weapons since she left the borough; the Commander’s was a real sword with a sturdy blade, capable of lopping off limbs with a strong man swinging it. The sword and the scar trailing down Lusius’ neck proved that he hadn’t been—and probably wasn’t—a man who let others handle all his violence.
He fingered his beard and measured Chalcus with his eyes. “Well, then, shall we say at the eleventh hour, Captain?” he said. “The castle’s at the head of Cross Street, that’s the one that stretches south from Water Street here. We’re simple folk in Terness, so two named streets are all we need.”
Lusius turned on his heel and stalked off. His underlings must have been used to his abrupt habits for they instantly leaped aside to form a passage, then fell in behind him.
The Bird’s crew relaxed as the local delegation strode away. Ninon set down the short axe he’d been holding behind the mainspar. Hutena had been leaning against the mast; now he wiped on his tunic the hand that’d rested against the boarding pike he’d just racked.
Ilna began plaiting a complex pattern of cords, with no other purpose than to occupy her fingers while she thought. Lusius had a bull neck, but a noose thrown just so and twisted would snap it as surely as that of a chicken in the dooryard.
“They know who we are then, cap’n?” Hutena said. He looked uncomfortable speaking, but the eyes of the other men were on him; the bosun’s rank meant it was up to him to ask the question that worried all of them.
“Aye, but I never expected to fool Lusius,” Chalcus said, watching the last of the Commander’s entourage disappear around the corner. Ilna couldn’t see up Cross Street from where the Bird was docked, but the battlements of a structure on the hill to the south loomed over the roofs of the buildings fronting Water Street. “The only question I had was how he’d react to our arrival; and open acknowledgment of who we are isn’t a bad way to react. Not a fool, our Lusius.”
“But you’ll take him down anyway, cap’n,” Hutena said; his words neither quite a statement nor really a question.
“Oh, aye, we’ll do that thing,” Chalcus said cheerfully, dusting his palms together briskly. “I will; and you will, my fine lads....”
He turned and laid a fingertip on Ilna’s cheek. “And Mistress Ilna will with her art, which I much expect will be the greatest help of all in the business!”
Chapter 11
“Tenoctris,” Garric said, facing the old wizard beneath a wicker lattice covered with grape vines, “I had a dream. Another dream.”
He reached out and touched Liane’s hand without meeting her eyes. This was the first she’d heard about the business also.
The roof garden was the closest thing to a private park available to Garric in Carcosa. Trees and brambles covered the mounded ruins of much of the Old Kingdom city, but those tracts were pathless and far more dangerous than a rural woodland like the one which the householders of Barca’s Hamlet owned. Rats, feral dogs, and humans as degraded as those beasts lurked in holes they’d dug into ancient tombs and palaces. At night they came out to scour the streets.
Garric had always been more comfortable outside than in, whether he was doing manual labor or reading one of the Old Kingdom texts his father had taught him to love. Rather than discuss the matter in a palace room, he’d asked Tenoctris and Liane to join him in the garden. The dream had made him uncomfortable, so he was easing the process of talking about it by choosing the setting he found most congenial.
Tenoctris nodded, pursing her lips. “Did this one tell you to do something?” she asked. She opened the satchel beside her on the bench and began to finger through the books within it.
A treefrog screamed from somewhere within the grape leaves; rain had fallen just before the dawn, making the frogs active. Garric marveled once again that a gray-green lump no bigger than the first joint of his thumb could make so much noise.
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “I was standing
in a garden. There was an altar and some offerings on it. I picked up a crystal and... saw, I lived; I don’t know how to explain it. I lived a life that somebody like me might have lived if things had been different. Had been normal.”
“A nightmare?” Liane asked, folding her hands in her lap. What he’d said had worried her, so in response she was acting more than usually calm.
“No,” Garric said, shaking his head. “Normal life. Taking over the inn, marrying a perfectly nice local girl—”
He grinned wryly; Liane loosened up enough to grin back.
“—and raising a lot of children. If the dream was right, I’d have made a better innkeeper than I do a prince.”
“Then the dream was wrong,” Tenoctris said calmly, “though I’m sure you’d have been a fine innkeeper as well. Did you recognize the garden, Garric? From other dreams or in the waking world, either one?”
“It could’ve been here, it could’ve been in Valles,” he said. “Or somewhere that I’ve never seen at all. It was old and overgrown; there were bananas on an altar, and I thought that the things I saw worshiping were animals instead of men.”
He rubbed his eyes, working to recall images that his mind had tried to shut out while he was dreaming. “I’m not sure what they were. I’m not even sure there were real figures instead of just shadows.”
Tenoctris closed her satchel again. “I see,” she said, getting cautiously to her feet. “I’ll admit that this puzzles me, Garric. I’m certain that nobody is working an incantation against you now.”
Liane frowned in disbelief; Garric frowned also, but he realized he hadn’t felt threatened as he stood in the garden. It was wrong, and it’d disturbed him because he knew how wrong it was, but—
A world where he didn’t have the responsibilities of a prince was attractive, even though that world didn’t have Liane in it either. That thought was the real reason the dream made Garric so angry.
“Oh, yes,” Tenoctris repeated. “Quite certain.”
She shrugged. “I might well not be able to do anything about an attack,” she explained, “but I’d know it was happening. Nothing of the sort is, not through wizardry, that is.”
Garric stood, clearing his throat in embarrassment. “I thought I ought to tell somebody about it,” he said, “because I didn’t the other time. And that one meant something.”
“Oh, this dream means something too,” Tenoctris said with crisp assurance. “I certainly don’t think it’s a coincidence, Garric; I just don’t believe it was an attack on you or even directed at you... which is particularly puzzling.”
She smiled again, then went on, “Lord Attaper’s been kind enough to provide me with an escort to the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset. I’m told there’s an extensive library there. If it doesn’t hold the information that I’m searching for either, perhaps there’ll be something in the Temple of the Shepherd of the Rock.”
“Yes, there may be,” Garric said. Liane had risen from the bench beside him; he put his arm around her and hugged her close while still grinning at Tenoctris. “I have some business with the priests of the Shepherd today too. I do, and the army does!”
***
When Sharina was twelve, she’d seen the Northern Lights in the depths of the coldest winter in the living memory of Barca’s Hamlet. At first she’d thought that was what she was seeing now, but the sheets of azure and crimson flared too constantly across the heavens for that.
“Is it always like this at night?” she asked Franca as she added wood to the fire he’d lit with the bow drill he’d made. “The sky, I mean. There’s no moon, but it’s bright enough to read by.”
“The sky?” the youth repeated. “Yeah, it’s always like this.”
He frowned. “Maybe it wasn’t when I was younger, though. Mother used to talk about the stars. I remember seeing them, but not for a long time.”
Franca wasn’t any better clothed than she was, but he’d apparently become acclimated to the cold. Though he said it was late spring, the wind skirling through the walls of the dry-stone sheep byre seemed as bitter as anything Sharina had felt at the turn of the year at home.
“She makes it this way,” said the axe. “Her power lights the whole world, but She drains away all warmth to do it.”
He giggled; the sound was like hearing slates rub. The hairs on the back of Sharina’s neck stood up.
“One day the ice will have everything,” the axe said, “and even the sky will be cold. But until then Beard will drink, won’t he, mistress? You’ll feed Beard, and Beard will make sure that you eat too, just like today. Until the very end.”
Sharina laid another dead limb on the fire. She was afraid to go to sleep, even though she was bone tired. They were burning pieces of trees which the cold had shattered. Though the wood blazed up easily, the fuel had sunk to a pile of ash after what seemed only moments instead of forming a bed of glowing coals; freezing seemed to have robbed it of all its virtue.
They’d found food on the way: a store of hickory nuts dug from the trunk of a hollow tree, and the small animals which Beard had sensed cowering in holes. The axe could see through hard soil; with its help Sharina and Franca had blocked exits, then used rusty spearbutts from the Hunters’ hoard to dig out victims.
The war axe was a clumsy tool for dispatching a rabbit, let alone a vole, but blood was the price Beard charged for his aid. Sharina couldn’t object: without the fresh rabbit skins covering her feet, they’d have frozen before now.
“How much farther do we have to go, Sharina?” Franca asked diffidently. He was older than she was, but he gave her the feeling of being the same child he was when She arrived.
Sometimes Sharina thought her companion was stupid—a halfwit, even—but then he’d surprise her with his observations. Franca had identified the nut store and shinned up to the high entrance like a squirrel himself. Like the world he lived in, Franca had been blighted by Her coming; but there was good left in both of them.
“I’ve only made this trip once,” Sharina said. She smiled; she was very weary, but memory of those spring days with friends warmed her in this cold, friendless place. “That was in the other direction, and anyway, what was true in my world may not be in yours.”
Though it certainly seemed to be. Except for Her.
“But I think we should be very close by now, if things are the same,” she said. “I thought of going on tonight, but I decided it was better to arrive by daylight to see....”
To see what? Sharina was afraid of what she might find, but there was no better, no other, place from which to start her search for friends in this world. She expected to get bad news when she reached what had been her home, but she preferred to know the worst rather than have an unformed fear looming over her as a bleak, black weight for the rest of her life.
“We never left Penninvale,” Franca said. “Till we had to. We shouldn’t have left then.”
He seemed to have spoken without emotion, but tears began to dribble down his cheeks again. Sharina cleared her throat; she wasn’t sure whether to respond or not. At last she said, “I’m hoping that we’ll find people in Barca’s Hamlet. People I knew in my world.”
And what if one of them were Sharina os-Reise? What would that be like? Or Cashel; would he be Cashel in this world?
“There’s nobody left,” Franca said, blubbering openly now. “Nobody in all the world except us and the monsters. Mother, we should have stayed!”
“There’s a sound...,” Sharina said. It’s just the wind, she thought; but if she’d really thought that she wouldn’t have spoken.
“Oh, mother, mother—”
“Be silent!” Sharina said, rising to her feet with Beard balanced in front of her body. The walls of the byre were better shelter than she’d realized until she took the buffeting unprotected. The sound could be wind after all, or—
“It’s a man and he’s trapped!” said the axe. “Oh, he needs help, mistress! He’ll surely die if we don’t help him!”
<
br /> “Which way?” said Sharina, squinting against the east wind. She couldn’t judge the direction of the cries, let alone the distance. It they’d been blown down on the wind, the fellow might be a mile or more distant.
“The way we’ve been going!” Beard said. “Not far, mistress, and he needs us badly!”
“Come along, Franca!” Sharina called. She might need an extra pair of hands, especially if the fellow they were going to rescue had been injured in a fall. She thought of herself in the ruined palace; if the walls had collapsed while she was still inside, she might have died in a worse way even than the Hunters had intended for her.
“Don’t leave me!” Franca wailed as he staggered to his feet.
Sharina didn’t wait for him. Wizardlight pulsing across the heavens gave better illumination than a full moon, so she had no trouble following the path through the woods. It hadn’t been used recently, but the encroaching undergrowth didn’t keep Sharina from running.
She came out of the trees onto a slope that was still clear. She saw the mill, roofless now, and the inn where she’d grown up; the walls had fallen in and brambles grew from piles of fire-blackened bricks.
Sharina’d found Barca’s Hamlet. It was what she’d expected, but she’d prayed in her heart to the Lady that this time she’d be wrong.
The cries were coming from the ruined mill. A male voice cursed and begged the Shepherd’s aid, the sort of foolish mixture that desperation dragged from the throats of ordinary people. He didn’t sound as though he really expected help to come.
“He’s in that stone building!” Beard said. “But be ready, mistress, for you’ll need me to—”
The mill pond stored water from high tides and released it to drive the wheel at a measured pace. It was the oldest building in Barca’s Hamlet, built in the Old Kingdom of stones so hard and well-fitted that they’d withstood well over a thousand years of weather. During all that time it had continued to serve the surrounding borough at a handsome profit for generations of millers.
The side door, a hundred feet from Sharina, was double height and wide enough for a wagonload of grain to be driven into the milling chamber. The bear that came through that doorway wouldn’t have fit anything sized merely for humans. Franca’s scream diminished as he turned and ran.