by David Drake
She smiled wanly. "In part because I'm too tired to do any more."
Sharina glanced back. Their carriage waited forlornly at the edge of the esplanade, now generally deserted. The butcher limped away, supported by the woman and a man of his own age who'd returned to help him.
Liane was speaking to Garric. Sharina looked to see if the bird had vanished the way the faun did. It was still in the sky--and huge.
"All right--" said Garric.
"What's that?" Sharina asked, pointing upward. Immediately she felt uncomfortable about the gesture, as though she'd called attention to herself when she shouldn't have.
Cashel looked up and frowned. He stepped between Sharina and the bird. Was it too large to call a bird? When Sharina first saw the creature, she'd thought of it as a gull. It was growing. Now it had a span of forty feet.
Garric had begun to sheath his long sword. He hesitated, then slammed the blade home in its scabbard after all. A naked sword was an awkward thing to hold. Garric had shown he could clear the weapon in a heartbeat if the situation required that.
The bird's wings flapped again. The slow stroke didn't bring it closer, but the thing grew enormously in size. Its pinions were scaly and a hundred feet across. The creature had a toothed beak and three clawed fingers at the elbow joint of each wing. It cocked its long head sideways, fixing Sharina with the glare of one fiery eye.
"Get down!" Garric shouted, sweeping his sword out again. "Cashel, you and me!"
Liane took Tenoctris in her arms and lay down, covering the old woman with her body. Sharina drew the Pewle knife, but she realized that Garric was right: he and Cashel needed a clear field to use their strength and weapons. She flattened on the stones, her face turned to the side so she could watch the sky. Her own knife, the sharp little blade Liane carried, and Ilna's noose were all effective enough in the right circumstances; but not against a monster like the one now filling the night sky.
Sharina doubted that Garric's sword could do much either. Cashel, though....
Cashel set his staff rotating with the deliberation of a careful craftsman. He held the hickory at either side of the balance, then crossed his wrists as the staff turned; and again, and again, and--
The spinning circle was a common technique with a quarterstaff. The stout hickory protected the staff-wielder, and he could strike out of the circuit with either end if the enemy pressed him.
In Cashel's hands, however, the staff was more than a physical object. Sparkles of blue fire, then sizzling trails of light dripped from both ferrules as the quarterstaff spun before him. His legs were set and braced, facing the threat and determined to beat it or die.
The bird banked slightly. A flash of ruby fire showed its massive reptilian form in the jeweled detail of dew on a morning spiderweb. Its beak opened to call.
It was on them. Garric's sword swung forward, Cashel's staff was a disk of solid sapphire light, and the bird--
The bird vanished as though it never was.
Sharina got to her feet. Liane covered Tenoctris, supporting her own weight on her palms. She raised her head to make sure the danger had passed, then began helping the older woman up.
Ilna stood gracefully and coiled her silken noose around her waist. She caught Sharina's eye and gave her friend a wry smile. "I didn't know what good it was going to do either," she said, "but I felt better with it in my hands."
Sharina grinned and sheathed the Pewle knife in reply.
The driver of the carriage was fighting with the reins, and the postillion clung to the off-horse's harness. The beasts were neighing in terror even now that the danger was over. Only the servants' skill--and courage--had kept the team from bolting down one of the narrow streets entering the esplanade. The carriage would inevitably have smashed on the corner of a building.
Garric was still wild-eyed. He'd spun on the balls of his feet as though he expected to find the bird behind him. It was simply gone, spit from present existence the way the faun had been. He shuddered.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to get used to that sort of thing," he said mildly. "Though I suppose it's better than trying to fight something bigger than a trireme."
Cashel gave a great sigh. He set one end of his quarterstaff on the ground and leaned against it. He looked as weary as if he'd just tried to lift the world on his shoulders.
Sharina stepped close and clasped his right arm between both of hers. Cashel's skin was hot, and she could feel the hairs on his arm raised and prickly.
"I didn't see where it went," he said. "I don't remember exactly...."
"It just disappeared," Garric said. He sheathed his sword and seemed doubtful as to whether he should offer Cashel a hand in support. "Tenoctris, do you know what it was?"
"Something else that got in through the crack the bridge is causing," Tenoctris said. "There'll be other visitors coming; and more frequently, I'm afraid, until we remove the burden from the cosmos."
"I thought it was coming for us," Liane said in a calm voice.
Ilna gave a minuscule nod. "Us, or one of us," she said. "I thought that too."
"Well, we'll get back--" Garric said.
People screamed hoarsely. Sharina looked up. The bird sailed toward them over the tenements. It had circled in whichever plane of the cosmos to which it had faded; now it was returning from behind them. A flash of scarlet wizardlight shivered over the vast, dark-hued form. Its braying call shook foam-tipped wavelets from the river.
Sharina turned, trying to put herself between the monster and Tenoctris. Cashel swayed, lifting his staff again; Garric was drawing his sword. If anything happened to the old wizard, the rest of them wouldn't know what to do, let alone be able to do it.
The sky went black. Air sliding past the monster's scaly wings whispered like a forest in springtime.
"Sharina!" Cashel cried.
Horny talons the size of human arms clenched about Sharina from behind. She tried to draw her knife, but the pressure clamped her arms to her sides. Like a vole snatched by an owl, she thought; but the claws held her instead of piercing her through the way an owl's would have done its victim.
She looked down. The ground lurched away. The Beltis was below, the bridge a shimmering mirage on its surface.
The bird's leathery wings stroked, and the whole universe vanished in a thunderclap.
Chapter Five
Sharina squirmed as gray mist swirled in the stroke of the creature's wings. The bird's talons were harder than horn; harder even than iron, perhaps. They held her as securely as millstones did a wheat kernel in the moment before they crushed it.
The haze congealed into a reality again, though not anything of the world from which Sharina had been snatched. The sea tossed close below them. The sun was low on the horizon, though Sharina couldn't be sure whether it was rising or setting.
The bird's pinions were reflected in the black water. She could see herself as a pale blur clutched close to the dark body.
Something rose slowly from the sea ahead. It had the streamlined shape of the seawolves which Sharina knew from their rare forays onto the shores of Barca's Hamlet: marine lizards with flattened tails and jaws which could crush a sheep's hips--or a man's.
A big seawolf might be twelve feet long. This creature was the size of a ship, or even bigger. Its fangs winked in the red sun.
The bird's wings stroked in their slow rhythm. The sea and the monster on it broke into scatters of rainbow light which faded to gray. Sharina was alone with the vast creature which had caught her. Its scaled, leathery skin never lost definition, though all else blurred away.
She wriggled again, but the talons meshed like the wards of a lock. They weren't so tight that they hurt her, but she couldn't even get a hand free to sweep her hair back.
The wings stroked slowly down. Sharina thought of her friends. The sting of her whipping hair was bringing tears to her eyes....
Ilna sat straight-backed and prim in a corner of the pavilion while the others react
ed in their several ways. She was still and calm; all except for her fingers, which wove and picked loose the yarn of designs which could have blasted minds if she'd chosen to display them.
"Well, we've got to rescue Sharina," Cashel said. At a casual glance he seemed calm, but his was the tense stillness of an ox when a great horsefly buzzes back and forth about it, choosing a place to land. At any moment Cashel might burst out in a fury that would tear down everything in his path.
"I don't think Sharina is in immediate danger," Tenoctris said. She didn't know Cashel as well as Garric or Ilna herself did, but she was still trying not to offend the big man. "I can't tell who sent the creature, or what his purpose in taking Sharina could be--"
Tired as she was, the old wizard had worked a spell at the riverside before she allowed them to take her back to the palace. She'd said that the bridge of wizardlight gave her incantation greater effect, though it also required even more than her usual care.
At the end of the whispered spell, Tenoctris had collapsed. Ilna and Liane had cradled her between them on the carriage seat during the trip back, trying to lessen the wheels' hammering vibration for the older woman.
"--but he has a purpose beyond simply doing her harm," Tenoctris concluded.
Cashel snorted. "It's not Sharina's purpose," he said. "And by the Shepherd! it's not mine. I'm going to bring her back, and I don't care what it takes to do it!"
Oil lamps with silver reflectors hung from each pillar of the colonnade supporting the pavilion's slate roof. Moths blundered into the reflectors and made the flames flicker with the beat of their wings. Ilna marveled to see so much light during nighttime.
"It might be best to close the hole first," Garric said. He'd been pacing but he knew how nervous that made him look. Now he sat on the stone bench running along the center of the pavilion, squeezing his fists together knuckle to knuckle. He still looked as tense as drawn bow. "Get rid of the bridge I mean. When Tenoctris recovers, we can plan what we're going to do."
Cashel looked at his friend. "I told you what I'm going to do," he said in a quiet voice blurred slightly by its growling undertone. "I'm going to find Sharina and bring her back. If I was half the man she deserves, I'd have moved fast enough to stop that bird."
He turned and slammed his fist into a pillar. It was stuccoed wood, not stone as Ilna had thought. The column shuddered violently, shedding its plaster in flakes and dust. The projecting lamp flailed wildly, showering drops of oil. There was a smudge of blood on the shaft.
Ilna stood and stepped quickly to her brother. The others remained wisely motionless. Cashel gripped the column in both hands as if the shaft was a throat he wanted to throttle. Ilna put her hands on his cheeks, turning his head toward her by touch alone. No amount of force could have diverted Cashel's anger.
"It was my fault," he said in a choked whisper.
"If the worst thing on your conscience," Ilna said in a harsh voice, "is that when you'd worn yourself out guarding your friends something managed to slip in behind you--then you're a saint, not a man! Are you a saint, Cashel or-Kenset?"
He stiffened in embarrassment. "No ma'am," he said. "No, Ilna, you know I'm not."
Ilna kept her face stern as a knife's edge, her natural expression, but a cold smile played at the back of her mind. If a saint was someone so blessed by the Great Gods that he could walk through fire and over the sea, the way the hymns to the Lady said the righteous could--no, Cashel wasn't a saint. But being righteous--as best Ilna could tell from the way the priests from Carcosa behaved when they led the images of the Lady and the Shepherd through the borough at the annual Tithe Procession--was a matter of offering the Gods more money than either of Kenset's orphan children could even imagine until they left Barca's Hamlet.
You couldn't ask for a kinder, gentler fellow than Cashel, unless you went well out of your way to make him an enemy. He and Ilna were twins. It seemed to her that they'd each gotten more than their share of emotions that other people had in moderate proportions. Different emotions, of course.
She put her hands down and stepped back. "Then stop beating on the house," she said more mildly. "That doesn't do it any good, or you either. Liane, will you look at my brother's hand, please? Or should we call a healer?"
"It's all right," Cashel muttered, his embarrassment even deeper. Ilna took his wrist in both hands and tugged it toward Liane; Cashel didn't fight her, though he was obviously unhappy to be fussed over.
Liane turned his hand palm-down. Her fingers positioned Cashel's bloodied knuckles under one of the lamps so that she could view them.
"I know she could be dead," Cashel said. He stared out through the portico. Nothing moved in the darkness except the yellow-green flicker of fireflies. "I know that Sharina could be dead."
Sharina hung in a gray haze that had no temperature. The bird's wings stroked and reality coalesced again about her. The air was cool with a hint of recent rain. They were overflying plains. The landscape spread as broadly as the sea had earlier, and it seemed to have as little in the way of distinctive elements.
The tall grasses were yellow, and auburn seedheads weighed many of the stems into arcs. The vast shadow of Sharina's captor sent waves of lesser birds fluttering from the autumn bounty with calls of peevish concern.
Grazing animals, some of them shaped like horses but only a little bigger than sheep, looked up at the giant bird. A score of mixed herds began fleeing in as many different directions. The animals called out in a chorus of blats and neighs, unpleasant individually and hideous in combination.
The great bird flew on. The landscape dissolved into colorless mist.
The wings were silent. The talons clutched Sharina so close to the leathery belly that she couldn't see the bird's head. Could the creature think? Could it even hear?
"Where are you taking me?" she shouted. Her words were flat and echoless. "Who are you?"
The sound of her voice was worse than the silence it replaced. In this gray limbo Sharina was alone in a way that no one in waking reality could be alone.
She and the bird swept into a vision of light and springtime. Spires of sunstruck crystal rose from a landscape of pools and gardens. Pavilions gleamed in the air, each dangling from a gossamer tendril so fine that only the quivering light showed how it was attached to a nearby tower.
There were people here, the first she'd seen since the bird snatched her away. They strolled through the gardens, wearing flowing robes and laughing as breezes blew spray from the fountains over them. Some reclined in the pavilions, drinking from goblets. A dozen youths danced and wound ribbons about a pole rising from a serpentine lake. Their feet were supported only by air.
"Help me!" Sharina cried. She could hear the laughter of the folk below, so she knew they must be able to hear her. "Help me get free!"
Some of the people looked up. A girl Sharina's age was standing in a crystal eyrie hundreds of feet above the ground. She waved a scarlet ribbon and smiled.
The youths continued to dance. The bird's wings beat again, lifting it and Sharina out of this reality.
"Help me!" Sharina repeated, though she alone could hear the words.
"Cashel," Garric said, "I may need your help here. The kingdom may need your help."
Cashel looked at his friend, feeling embarrassed again and frustrated. Things seemed obvious to him. He didn't know how to explain them to Garric if Garric didn't see them already.
"I have to find Sharina," he said. "I'll come back as soon as I can, but I need to find her first."
"The kingdom--" Garric said. He was frowning like he had a heavy job to do and wasn't sure how to go about it. People did that a lot when they were talking to Cashel.
"I don't know about the kingdom," Cashel said. He shrugged. "I know about sheep, that's all. And I know what my duty is. Garric, you're the king and you have to worry about everything. I'm Sharina's friend, and I guess she needs my help worse than you do."
Cashel had left his quarterstaff outside the
pavilion because he'd known he shouldn't have it in his hand when he was angry like he'd been. He'd calmed down now that he'd figured things out, and the familiar smoothness of the hickory would have felt good.
But he didn't need it. He didn't need anything but to get Sharina back.
Garric suddenly laughed and clapped Cashel on both shoulders. They were back to being friends who'd grown up together; friends who knew each other better than maybe either of them knew himself.
"If I were as sure you were wrong as I am of the sunrise," Garric said cheerfully, "then I still couldn't change your mind. And I'm not that sure."
"Sometimes I wonder about the sunrise," Liane said, sitting on the central bench with her hands folded in her lap. She gave Cashel an affectionate smile. Liane was about as nice a person as you could ask to meet.
Garric sat down again, a little closer to Liane than he'd been before he got up this last time. He gave a weary sigh, and when the laughter left his face he looked frustrated enough to chew on rocks.
Garric was really smart. Nobody here in Valles had anything on him for brains... but that wasn't always the advantage people thought it was.
Garric and the rest could see all sorts of ways and twists and questions. A lot of times they weren't sure which way to go because they knew how many different paths there were.
Cashel just went straight on ahead. Like this business of getting Sharina back from whatever the thing was that took her. What did the kingdom matter compared to that?
Cashel didn't even know what a kingdom was. Even Barca's Hamlet, small as it was compared to Valles, wasn't a thing: it was a lot of families, a lot of people, all going their own way. Garric must see something more than that, and Cashel didn't doubt that whatever his friend saw was really there--
For Garric. But it wasn't anything that was going to turn Cashel away from a friend who needed his help.
"I know you think it's important that we all fight evil," Cashel said apologetically. "But you know, I'm going to take a lot of convincing before I believe that bird and whoever sent it are good."