by David Drake
Even Ilna grinned. Her face sobered when her gaze shifted to Liane and Garric together on the stone bench, though. Aloud she said, "Cashel's right, of course. The pattern is so vast that if you try to understand it completely you won't be able to do anything. And some things are worth doing."
She smiled without humor. "In human terms at least," she added. "For my own part, I'm going to complete a tapestry and then leave for Erdin. I have unfinished business there."
Garric grimaced, but he didn't protest. He knew as well as Cashel did that you'd have as much chance of teaching a tree to dance as you would of changing Ilna's mind once she'd decided what she ought to do.
"Lord Tadai is going to Erdin shortly as well," Garric said, "though he doesn't know that yet. He keeps late hours, so I suppose I'll see him tonight."
He gave Cashel a wry smile. "It's always best to do an unpleasant job first," he said, "so you don't have it hanging over you. Though Duzi knows, there's enough unpleasant jobs in being king that I don't think I'm going to run out of them any time soon."
Ilna stood and looked around the group, giving anyone time to ask for her help if they thought they needed it. Ilna didn't volunteer, but Cashel had never seen his sister turn down a request anybody made her. Mind, her tongue might flay the hide off the person asking, telling him why he was such an idiot to need the help--but he'd get the help regardless. It was a matter of what was important to you.
Nobody spoke now, though Garric and Liane rose to their feet. Ilna nodded to Cashel, to Garric, to Tenoctris--and then gave Liane a quick hug. Cashel blinked. That was the biggest surprise of the night, though it was a lot more pleasant than to see that huge bird coming out of nowhere to snatch Sharina. Ilna's set expression was the one Cashel had seen her wear while she cleaned the mill's dovecote, but she was really trying to be friendly.
Ilna started out of the pavilion. Cashel touched her shoulder as she went by and said, "Hey? Take care of yourself, all right?"
"And you too, Cashel," she said. She smiled, but there was a tear glittering at the corner of her eye as she walked swiftly toward the dwelling she and Cashel shared.
Garric and Liane were ready to leave also. Cashel gave his friend a quick signal and said to Tenoctris, "Mistress? Can I see you to your house? Ah--I could carry you if you liked."
"And not for the first time," Tenoctris said as she rose. "But I'm well enough tonight to walk home with your company."
Cashel gave the old wizard his right arm; the quarterstaff leaned against one of the entrance pillars and he took it in his left. A pair of servants waited with lanterns, ready to light the couple to where they were going. There was a first-quarter moon, plenty to see by.
"No, we don't need you," Cashel said gruffly. He hadn't meant to sound so unfriendly, but he didn't want ears around when he asked for help.
"I can't come with you to find Sharina, Cashel," Tenoctris said, answering a question that he wouldn't have dreamed of asking. "I wish I could, but the need here is too great."
"Oh, I knew that!" Cashel said. "I was hoping maybe you could get me pointed in the right direction, though. But if you can't, I'll understand."
They walked through an arbor overgrown by honeysuckle. The vines were a terrible pest; they'd choke even a tree if there was sunlight enough for them to grow the way they liked. But Cashel loved the smell of honeysuckle in early summer, so he was glad the gardeners hadn't gotten around to clearing this away.
"I guess you think I'm doing the wrong thing," he added quietly. He hated to disappoint his friends.
Tenoctris chuckled. "I don't think you're capable of doing the wrong thing, Cashel," she said. "The choices you make are always going to be the right ones for you."
Cashel cleared his throat. A fountain plashed behind a boxwood hedge. He liked the waterworks here in the palace grounds. It reminded him of the way Pattern Creek rippled through the pasture south of Barca's Hamlet.
"Well," he said aloud. "There's a lot of things I don't understand."
"There are things you don't consciously understand," Tenoctris said. "I haven't seen you deal with anything important that you didn't understand at a basic level, though. I wish I could say as much about myself."
After a pause she added, "Cashel, if you feel that you need to leave us now, you're almost certainly right. I don't know why, but whatever you decide will be what we--what Good, if you will--need."
"You think the Shepherd's guiding me?" Cashel said bluntly.
"No," said Tenoctris. "But if I believed in the Great Gods, I might think that."
A handcart loaded with gravel lay across the walkway where workmen had left it when they quit work at sundown. Cashel lifted the old woman in the crook of his arm and carried her around the obstruction. There was no need for her to ask or him to offer his help: they'd worked together in the past. Cashel was used to being Tenoctris' legs and strong right arm.
Tenoctris had deliberately chosen a bungalow at a distance from the busy quarters of the palace. The workmen repairing decades of neglect hadn't gotten this far, and the overgrown surroundings meant she had greater privacy. Wizardry made normal people uncomfortable, even if they worked in a palace and thought they were sophisticated.
Cashel put Tenoctris down on the other side of the obstruction. They resumed walking side by side. "I think the best help I can give you...," she said. "Is to send you to someone who's probably better suited to what you need than I would be even if the bridge didn't require my presence here. His name is Landure."
"All right," Cashel said. "How do I find him?"
They were nearing the three-room bungalow Tenoctris had chosen for herself. Half the roof tiles had needed to be replaced, but it didn't matter to Tenoctris that water damage had cracked most of the plaster off the inside walls.
There should have been a lamp burning on the porch, but Rimara, Tenoctris' maid, had no virtue beyond staying calm at the thought of serving a wizard. Since Rimara was generally asleep, Cashel wasn't sure she even knew Tenoctris was a wizard.
"I'll have to send you to him," Tenoctris said. "He's not on this plane, but neither is Sharina herself, I'm sure. Landure is...."
As Tenoctris paused, searching for the right word, Cashel stepped ahead of her and opened the door. The porch overhang put the step in shadow. As weary as Tenoctris was, she could easily stumble.
"I've never met Landure," Tenoctris continued. "I know him only by reputation. He's a haughty and imperious man by all accounts, but he's also a fierce opponent of chaos and evil. And he's a very powerful wizard."
Cashel lifted her through the doorway. "Tsk!" she said. "I can still walk."
"Hoy!" Cashel said as he set the old woman on the bench he knew was just inside the door. "Rimara! Fetch a light!"
"Do you have to shout like that?" a sleepy voice protested from the side room. Iron clicked querulously against a flint.
"I think Landure will be willing to help you," Tenoctris said. For all her protest at being carried up the two entrance steps, she sounded as faint as the tinge of moonlight leaking around the window shutters. "And I'm afraid I don't have a better answer just now."
Wavering yellow light bloomed in the side room. Rimara came out wearing a dirty smock. She carried a tallow-soaked rushlight in one hand and rubbed her eyes with the other.
"That's all right," said Cashel, running his right palm along the quarterstaff. He was checking for cracks in the polished hickory, a familiar gesture and one that always calmed him. "I don't need a lot of help. Just someone to show me where Sharina is. I guess I can take care of the rest."
Just show me where Sharina is, he repeated silently. The maid saw his face and, mistaking the reason for the grimness, began to gabble empty apologies.
The great bird stroked out of gray limbo. Sharina's nose wrinkled at the stench of sulphur. She sneezed, bruising her ribs against the inexorable grip of the talons. They sailed over a darkness lit by volcanoes on the horizon and lines of bright lava seeping across the plain
below where armies battled.
Swordsmen wearing horned helmets and carrying iron shields fought giants with writhing snake-like legs and four arms, each bearing a club. Club-strokes rang on shields like a raucous knell.
Occasionally a monster went down, shrieking and squalling. Men stood about the victim, hacking with the fury of automatons. Sometimes their swords fouled one another, throwing red sparks into the night.
Men fell too, their brains dashed out or their torsos crushed when a club battered through their defenses. They made no sound either in triumph or agony.
The lava continued to spread, forcing the combatants inward from the cracks that fractured the plain. When molten rock lapped over the fallen, hair burned sullenly and the flesh popped and sizzled. In a few days all the plain from horizon to horizon would be a sea of bright lava, but those fighting seemed to have no thought for the future.
Sharina closed her eyes. She felt the wings of the great bird rise and stroke downward with the majesty of a celestial event. This time the transition from reality to a place beyond reality was a blessing. She closed her eyes until dry air bathed her skin.
The terrain over which the bird flew was arid and stony. There was no sign of the sea in any direction, but Sharina saw the glitter of ice cliffs across the whole northern horizon.
Winds and freshets had carved the landscape into knobs. On the flanks of the buttes, bands of yellow, magenta and even purple soil set off the brown and dun Sharina found more familiar.
Though dry, this world was no desert. The north slope of each hillock was terraced with the retaining walls raised high enough to protect the narrow fields from wind. Any rain that fell would seep down three levels or four, watering a separate crop at each terrace. That and the dew squeezed from the air each morning was enough to support barley and several types of bean.
There were no houses or other buildings. A nude woman carrying a woven satchel turned when the bird's great shadow fell across her. She gave a piercing call, somewhere between a whistle and a trumpet blast, and hurled herself head-first into the hole beside her.
Warning cries echoed from every hilltop across the barrens. The human forms--they were human, beyond question--blended so well with the landscape that Sharina hadn't seen them as figures, only as motion as they vanished into the ground.
The bird's wings lifted, unconcerned with the panic it had sown on the world beneath. It cared as little for its route through the cosmos as a sandal does for the stones over which it treads. A gray that was neither light nor lightless replaced the badlands and their scurrying human dwellers.
How far could the bird carry her? Would she starve in limbo interspersed with scenes from worlds not her own?
Sharina started to laugh. She knew as much about her own future as anyone else did about theirs: nothing at all. She'd go on, doing her best and knowing that her friends were doing the same. If the Gods were with them, that would be enough; and if not, well, nobody would say that they hadn't tried.
The room which Lord Tadai had taken for his office in the palace had been intended as the bedroom of a richly-appointed suite. From it a pillared loggia looked out over a pond which, now that gardeners had thinned the mimosa and removed the choking weeds, was quite lovely by daylight.
The pond still made its presence known in darkness by the croaks and piping of frogs in and around it. Garric smiled faintly. To him that was at least as good as a glimpse of pink flowers lifting in the sun above the lotus pads. There hadn't been lotuses back home, but there had been frogs.
Being king, well, prince, meant Garric had to do a lot of things that he didn't like; but it also meant he didn't have to live in multi-story buildings standing side by side the way most people in Valles did. It wasn't exactly compensation: Garric wouldn't have been here at all if he hadn't been told the Isles needed him--
"And I'll tell you again if you don't choose to believe what you've seen yourself!" interjected Carus in a tart whisper.
"I believe it," Garric said, smiling faintly. And he did. What he didn't really believe was that Garric or-Reise was the person whose life he seemed to have been living since he left Barca's Hamlet.
"What's that, your majesty?" said Tadai, who'd risen from a desk lighted by multi-branched oil lamps when his pair of guards ushered Garric into the office.
"I was thinking that having trees and frogs around me keeps me sane," Garric said, letting his smile widen slightly and feeling the king within him do the same. "More or less sane, I suppose."
"I'm a city man myself," Lord Tadai said. He was as slick and soft to look at as if molded of butter. Even now, well past midnight on a day he'd been working since dawn, Tadai was perfectly attired in a blue silk robe and gilt sandals whose straps were picked out in enamel that matched the cloth. "I've thought of ordering wagons to drive around the building while I'm working here, but I suppose that won't be necessary."
He looked at the two aides present: one young and of noble birth, the other much older and probably not. "Aradoc and Murein, you can go home now. Tell the guards to turn away any further visitors."
Smiling with a bitterness Garric had never seen on his face before, Tadai added, "Any visitors for me, that is."
The younger aide stared at Garric transfixed. Garric was pretty sure he'd seen the fellow before, waiting against the wall behind Tadai during meetings of the council, though he couldn't have put a name to the face with better than an even chance of being correct.
The older man jerked the youth's elbow, keeping his own eyes averted. They scurried together out the door by which Garric had entered. The guards closed the panel--from the outside.
"I was expecting you, of course," Tadai said, standing as straight as a rabbit lured by a lamp. He looked a little silly; and in this as in many things about Lord Tadai, looks were deceiving. "You or a detachment of Blood Eagles."
Tadai's chairs were of ivory cut in sweeping curves and fretted into traceries that looked as delicate as spiderweb. Spiderwebs trapped remarkably large prey on occasion, and Garric knew his about-to-be-former treasurer didn't let his love of artistry completely stifle his pragmatic core.
Garric lifted a chair from against the wall, set it in the center of the room facing Tadai, and sat down... carefully. He pointed to the silver urn resting in a ceramic bowl filled with damp moss or, just possibly, moss over a bed of ice preserved at great expense from last winter. "I'd take a glass of wine, if it were offered," he said, crossing his ankle over his knee.
Tadai gave an embarrassed cough. "It's sherbet, actually," he said as he turned and dipped one, then two, of the tiny matching silver goblets into the urn. "If I drank wine while I was working, I'd have much shorter days. The parts I'd remember, at any rate."
Garric took the goblet and sipped while Tadai turned around the chair at his desk and reseated himself. The sherbet was tart and cool, an unfamiliar flavor but one Garric could come to like. He didn't think he'd ever get used to tasting metal while he was drinking, though, no matter how skilfully the artist had etched a scene from the life of the wine-god Fis on the silver.
"And you didn't really imagine I was fool enough to send troops instead of coming myself," Garric said as he lowered the goblet. "Besides, you'd have had more than two guards here if you thought that might happen."
Tadai sneered. "Would more guards have made any difference?" he said.
"If you'd misread the situation that badly," Garric said, letting an edge of anger show in his voice for the first time, "you'd have been stupid enough to think your men could fight the Blood Eagles, yes! Now, let's act like two of the men on whom the safety of the Isles depends, shall we?"
Tadai stiffened. He gave Garric a tiny nod. "I apologize, your majesty," he said quietly. "I've been under a good deal of strain recently."
"I prefer 'Garric,'" Garric said, mildly again. He met Lord Tadai's eyes over the edge of the cup he was lifting. "When I stop feeling that way, it'll be time for me to muck out stables for a while to remind mys
elf of who I am."
Tadai laughed. "No one else in this room is in doubt as to who you are, Garric," he said. "Though I have no doubt that you're quite capable of cleaning stables as well. You have the advantage of me on both ends of the range of endeavor."
"I want you go to Earl Wildulf," Garric said, "and bring Sandrakkan back into the kingdom on the terms you think best. We can break him, but I would prefer any other reasonable choice. I will be bound by your decision."
Garric set the cup down beside his chair. It was a tiny little thing, emptied in two sips. He gestured. "I'll give you documents saying that to show the earl, with seals and ribbons all over them. But I'm giving you my word, now."
"Ah," said Tadai, without inflection. His own goblet remained poised in his hand, midway to his lips.
"I planned for my sister to go to Blaise on a similar mission," Garric continued. "A bird took her away tonight, a bird or a monster. I'd welcome your recommendation of a replacement to send as envoy to Count Lerdoc."
He was using what happened to Sharina--whatever had happened to Sharina, capture or death or just possibly worse--as a tool to get Tadai's sympathy. The part of Garric that had been raised in Barca's Hamlet hated the words his tongue was speaking; but the king within him, and the king Garric had to be if the Isles were to survive, knew that kings did many worse things out of duty.
"The lady Sharina?" Tadai said. A series of emotions crossed his face, disbelief followed by anger at being duped--and then as quickly, real affection and concern. "A monster has taken Lady Sharina?"
Everybody liked Sharina. She was polite, beautiful, and smart. And perhaps most important, Sharina never had to give orders that other people didn't want to hear.
"Yes, and that's something I'll have to deal with later," Garric said; not angrily, but with a crispness that had a lot to do with the number of things he was going to have to deal with, and Duzi help him if he knew how. "But it's not why I'm here, Lord Tadai."
"Yes, I see," Tadai said musingly. "Waldron has a younger brother, a half-brother, actually: Warroc bor-Warriman. He's at least as intelligent as Waldron, and he's far more clever in political terms. Rather too clever, in fact. He'd make an excellent envoy."