by David Drake
The warriors arrived along with their flunkies and at least a score of the settlement's women. Each warrior carried his own spear, but other men bore the helmets; they must've left the ox-hide shields by the palisade. Full battle armor was scarcely necessary for three men fighting a single woman.
The warriors donned their bronze helmets, adjusting the webs of leather straps that cushioned them on their skulls. The grizzled man rose with the pine knot he'd lighted, holding it away from his body as he eyed the opening where Sharina waited. She resisted the impulse to duck down: motion would give her away while the blur of her face would not.
The grizzled man smiled. He hadn't joined the conversation that circled among the rest of the villagers. If they came for her, that would be the man to watch out for. Though she suspected that he was far too canny a hunter to put himself at the point of the head-on assault that would certainly be the plan of his fellows.
One of the warriors strode forward. He shouted and thrust his spear through the archway, but he didn't--he carefully didn't--let his leading foot cross the line of where the gate would have been. Still blustering, the warrior backed away.
Sharina looked behind her. Her eyes had adapted enough to see that the room was empty except for a few stones fallen from the roof and a more general litter of the stucco that had once covered the interior surfaces. A crosswall with a post-and-lintel doorway separated the adjacent portion of the long structure. Presumably that was the room which the middle of the three outside doorways gave onto.
Voices rose again outside. Sharina raised her head cautiously. Villagers were trying to light crude torches from the burning pine knot which the grizzled man had butted in the ground. He seemed the only one present who was really comfortable in the woods. He watched in stony wonderment as his fellows tried to ignite fallen limbs that had decayed into soggy punk and lengths of sapling too green to burn in anything less than a roaring blaze.
The villagers started back the way they'd come. The warrior with the peacock plume shook his spear toward the ruins and bellowed in a thick accent, "Rot in Hell, dragonspawn!"
He turned and gave a curt order to the grizzled man. That fellow nodded and picked up the flaring pine knot. After a final long glance toward Sharina's hiding place, he started toward the settlement with the torch held high. He was lighting the way for the warriors, though they were going to be lucky not to fall on their faces unless they removed their helmets again.
The lights vanished quickly into the forest. Villagers complained as they stumbled into trees or thorns caught at them. Sharina was sure they'd given up, but she waited at the opening while the moon climbed higher by the width of two fingers at arm's length.
She sighed and sheathed the Pewle knife, then climbed down into the building. She was thirsty and she'd probably be very hungry in the morning, but she couldn't go exploring in the dark. At best she'd waste her time, and there was a good chance she'd manage to turn an ankle or worse.
The folk who'd settled the opposite headland feared the reptilian bird who'd carried her, they feared this place with its reptilian carvings, and they feared Sharina herself. In a more charitable mood Sharina might have said that she didn't blame them; but she did.
The interior door was a rectangle of light fainter than a will-o'-the-wisp. Sharina frowned. The glimpses of moonlight that penetrated the foliage barely outlined the opening by which she'd entered. Had the roof of one of the more distant rooms collapsed, leaving it open to the sky?
Sharina walked across gritty stucco toward the connecting door. She stepped carefully onto, then over, a stele that had tilted out of its wall niche and broken on the floor. The slab's back had been carved as well as the front.
She entered the central room. The light--and it was too faint to be called 'light' against anything but the absolute darkness framing it--came from the doorway on the other side. Against the room's back wall a statue of butter-smooth jade faced the outside doorway, now blocked by rubble. The carven figure stood twice Sharina's height: more than life sized, she supposed, but she couldn't be certain of that.
The statue was not of a man but rather of a scaly, man-shaped creature with pointed teeth in a long reptilian jaw. The eyes of rock crystal glittered at Sharina. In this light she couldn't be sure, but she suspected the rest of the figure had been shaped from a single block.
Dragonspawn, she thought. She walked past. The statue wasn't trying to kill her, and the humans out there certainly were.
Bats didn't roost in the building's dry interior the way Sharina would have expected. She'd have smelled them even if they were already out hunting. The air did have a dry odor that she couldn't place; it wasn't a vegetable smell, but it might have come from the stone itself.
One of the interior doorposts had tilted slantwise across the opening. Sharina ducked under it and entered the third room.
The roof was whole, the outer doorway a solid mass of roots and rubble. The light--blue if it had any color--came from an alcove in the end wall of the building. Shapes moved in it, or seemed to.
Sharina stepped forward. She slid the Pewle knife out without consciously meaning to do so. As she got closer, she could see courses of tight, mortarless masonry behind the light. The alcove wasn't really there.
Sharina looked back in case she was seeing the reflection of illumination behind her. There was nothing but the doorway, so blurred that she couldn't make out the post that she knew lay across it.
She turned again, more puzzled than afraid, and saw--in/on/through the solid wall--a figure seated behind a desk. It was man-sized and man-shaped, but it was reptilian and had eyes of lambent blue fire.
"Hey!" Sharina shouted, raising the knife to split the creature's skull if it leaped at her.
"I'm not your enemy, Sharina os-Kenset," the figure said. Its lipless mouth moved, but she heard the words only in her mind. They had a dry coolness that reminded her of the odor she'd noticed as she walked through the building.
The figure gestured with a three-fingered hand. A stone bench was built into the back wall of this room, kitty-corner to the insubstantial desk of glow and shadow.
"Sit down, won't you?" the cold voice said. "I have a proposition for you."
Colva hugged Cashel's left arm as they climbed out of the silent woods. "I'm so lucky that you arrived to save me," she said. "No reward could be too great for a hero like you."
Cashel held his arm as rigid as the quarterstaff in the opposite hand. He couldn't very well fling her away. Besides, he didn't want to. "I'm not a hero," he muttered.
Landure's palace was a tall, austere building built up the side of a crag which rose from a gentler, grassy slope. The facade was flat, but the sides and back forward a smooth half-circle as though a gigantic stone tree had been halved down the middle for puncheons. The upper stories stood away from the crag's slight inward slope, making them a tower of sorts, though the domed roof wasn't quite as tall as the rock behind it.
The view across the valley should have been remarkable, but Cashel didn't see any windows unless those narrow vertical slots penetrated the walls completely. Openings or not, they were the only embellishment on the severe structure.
Colva pulled away slightly. They'd both paused when they saw the tower. "He built it as a pin to fasten the structure of this plane," she said in a dispassionate voice. "My husband, Landure, did. What do you think of it, Cashel?"
Cashel cleared his throat. "Well, it's interesting," he said. He didn't see what there was to say. The building was as bluntly utilitarian as a watering trough. Cashel could feel that, though he wasn't sure why. "Ah, are we going inside?"
He could use something to drink, buttermilk for choice. A fight dried his throat even though he hadn't been shouting. He guessed he had shouted, come to think. Afterwards he could never remember all what had gone on.
"Yes, of course we will, Cashel," Colva said, squeezing his arm again. "We'll do that now."
The door set flush with the flat front of the pa
lace was a comfortable height for a tall man but not built to impress visitors. At a distance Cashel thought the panel was made of age-darkened wood, but close up he realized that it was sheathed in silver or some other metal that blackened but didn't decay on exposure. The handle, a vertical bar, gleamed where the hands of users had polished it.
"Will you open the door for me, Cashel?" Colva said. She smiled, her head cocked sideways. Her fingertips rested on his left biceps like drifting gossamer.
"What?" said Cashel. "Oh, sure. Sorry."
He shook his head, angry at himself. He wasn't thinking straight. He'd been waiting for Colva to swing back the door because it was her house, when he should have remembered that she was a little wisp of a thing.
The door was just as heavy as it looked. Cashel pulled steadily; you don't jerk at a heavy weight, not unless you want to snap something that might be your own back muscles. There was a gasp of released suction; the panel moved as smoothly as milk pouring from a pail. Cashel wondered how the door was hung to swing without any hint of a catch.
"Thank you, Cashel," Colva said as she stepped high over the threshold. The lintel, jambs and transom were the same smooth metal as the panel itself, but the door didn't have a latch.
"There's no lock," Cashel said, pausing to examine the panel. The more substantial houses in the borough had pin and tumbler locks, and even the doors of poor folks' huts had bars on the inside.
"The creatures of the Underworld couldn't open the door," Colva said, looking around the interior of the palace with an avid gleam in her eyes. "Landure doesn't fear anything else."
"But when you're alone...?" Cashel said. He entered, raising his bare foot the way Colva had so as not to brush the lintel. He guessed maybe she was protecting the tight metal-to-metal seal.
"Oh, you mean the monster chasing me?" she said with a smile. "He found me outside, you see. But you came by to save me, my hero."
She brushed him again. Cashel didn't know how to take the woman's, well, banter, he supposed. He was used to not understanding other people's jokes. The only thing was, he wasn't sure Colva was joking. Not quite sure.
He cleared his throat. "Could you get me something to drink?" he said. "Water would be fine. I'm really dry."
"Of course," the woman murmured. She surveyed the room with the bright-eyed curiosity of a mouse entering a pantry, then walked with small, quick strides to a metal hamper.
Cashel looked around also, trying not to knock something with his staff. It was hard to tell in this place what was real and what was just a, well, reflection.
The scorings on the side of the building were windows after all. Anyway, light came through them, but it didn't come in slices the way it did when the shutters were ajar on a normal casement. Streaks of pure color flooded the air. Sometimes they overlay one another to form a third hue, sometimes they stood as discrete as the squared stones of the seawall in Barca's Hamlet.
Cashel reached out, watching red, blue, and then a yellow as pale as clover honey flow across his skin. It seemed to him that he ought to be able to feel colors so intense, but they had no more weight than any other light did.
The effect made Cashel uncomfortable, but there wasn't anything wrong with it. He'd felt uncomfortable at formal banquets in Valles, too.
The interior of the palace was a single half-round room. It went all the way up to--
Cashel paused to estimate the height of the ceiling against that of the building's exterior. He couldn't use numbers the way Garric and Sharina did, but he wouldn't have been much good at felling trees if he hadn't been able to guess exactly how high a tree grew and what arc its spreading branches would sweep on their way to the ground.
This was no different. The ceiling was--Cashel splayed the fingers of his left hand, closed them, and spread the index and middle finger again--seven times his own height. From the outside the building was twice more his height to the top of the roof dome. That meant there was one more floor above this one--and maybe a sleeping loft, though he didn't guess a palace would be built that way.
A steep, narrow staircase followed the arc of the curved wall to a framed opening in the ceiling. There wasn't a railing.
"Here, Cashel," Colva said, returning to him with a decanter and a single crystal tumbler. Varying light washed across her face, turning it violet, then orange, and suddenly throwing a negative of the true colors onto her features. Colva's teeth were black, her skin a gray touched with amber, and her hair a dark forest green.
She smiled and filled the tumbler with liquid which had no more hue than the container of rock crystal did. "To your health, my hero," Colva said. She took a tiny sip from the tumbler, then held it out to Cashel.
"Is it water?" he asked; but it didn't matter, his throat was so dry that he croaked like a pig frog. The liquid was cool and washed his mouth with a prickly numbness. He swallowed, feeling warmth and well-being blossom slowly through his body.
"What is it?" he said, lowering the tumbler. Not wine, surely; he'd tasted wine and didn't care for it. This was more like water if the water was, well, alive.
"Do you like it, Cashel?" the woman said. "Have some more."
She refilled the tumbler. Cashel wanted to protest, but he did like the taste. And he was very thirsty.
Cashel drank again. He tried not to gulp this time, but when he lowered the tumbler he found half its contents gone. Colva smiled at him and poured it full.
The floor had a mosaic border as wide as a man's arm where birds and animals went about their business in a forest like the one outside. The pictures were real and alive even though the artist had been drawing with bits of stone.
Cashel felt a pang of homesickness to see a mockingbird on a branch of a dogwood scolding the squirrel midway up the trunk. His eyes told him that if he bent and touched the floor, he'd feel the tree's rough bark instead of chips of glass and colored marble.
The central image was just as vivid as the woodland border, but it showed swords of light driving monsters toward the bronze portal where Cashel had appeared in this world. The snarling creatures within the ring of fire included some beasts that seemed to have been made from parts of other animals, but others were as human as the man Cashel had killed to save Colva. A few were human-like, but too slimly lovely to be really human; and, from what looked out of the windows of their eyes, too evil to live.
Cashel swallowed. He'd emptied the tumbler again. "Who made this floor?" he said. He wondered if his tongue had slurred the words the way it seemed to.
"Landure himself," Colva said. "My husband."
She laid her fingertips on the side of Cashel's neck and guided him toward what he supposed was a couch. He could feel his pulse throbbing against the light pressure of her fingertips. "Come sit," she said.
Landure's furniture was as spare as the architecture of his palace. The couch had curved legs of bronze with a lavender undertone where a wedge of white lighted one end. The seat was of the same material, contoured but cushionless. It looked really uncomfortable and flimsy besides.
"Will it, ah, hold me?" Cashel said. He didn't want to complain, but he didn't want to smash his host's furniture either. He wondered if Landure was a wizened little fellow, a male equivalent of Tenoctris' aged frailty.
"Of course, Cashel," Colva said, drawing him down beside her. The legs of the couch scraped against the stone flooring, but they took his weight easily.
Cashel looked around to avoid focusing on the warm presence at his side. The sparse remainder of the furniture was of the same style as the couch. In the center of the room was a high desk with a spindly-legged stool for the person using it. A codex with silver clasps and a cover of scaly gray leather lay closed on the slanted writing surface.
The waist-high chest from which Colva took the liquor was one of several along the curved wall. They were made of bronze like the other furniture and chased with scenes of forest life. In the mansions of Valles Cashel had seen tapestries and wainscots carved with hunters and their
prey, but Landure's designs were of birds and animals involved with their own affairs.
The panels weren't peaceful, exactly: Cashel, like any countryman, knew there was little real peace in nature. Here a weasel leaped for a leveret's throat, there a blacksnake squirmed toward a wren's nest while the parent birds dived shrieking on the reptile. Still, it was nature's violence, not man's.
At the middle level of the high room, metal beads rotated slowly around their own axes, around other beads, and as a whole around the glowing gold ball in their center. Cashel couldn't be sure in this odd lighting just how many beads there were, but he thought at least a dozen. He couldn't see any wires to support them.
His vision blurred. He grunted and rubbed his eyes. The crystal tumbler clattered on floor. He'd forgotten he was holding it. Had it broken?
The spasm of dizziness passed. Cashel rose to his feet, bracing his quarterstaff on the floor. "I think I'm tired," he said in a thick voice. "If you've got a shed I could sleep in...?"
Colva had been leaning against him. She twisted supplely to remain upright when the support of his shoulder pulled away. Standing with the grace of mist rising, Colva said, "No, Cashel, you must have my husband's bed. He'd want that, for the hero who saved me."
"I don't need anything but the bare floor," Cashel muttered, but he was too tired to argue with the woman. She reached back with her left hand and led him to the curving staircase. Her fingertips rested on Cashel's extended wrist.
Cashel's right shoulder would be against the wall while he mounted the stairs. He switched his staff to his left hand. Colva twisted sideways so that now her right hand held Cashel's right.
They climbed with her in front of him because the stairs weren't wide enough for two to walk abreast. Cashel blinked away dizziness again. He didn't worry about falling. He'd crossed streams on rainswept logs while so fatigued he couldn't have said whether it was day or night. He could go on, putting one foot in front of the other, even when his mind had lapsed to a low hum.