by David Drake
"But...," Katchin said. He was crying.
"Get away from here," Liane said in a vibrant contralto. Her tone gave Garric the mental image of a cultured lady removing a dead rat from her best parlor. "You don't belong, and besides it's dangerous. Go away or I'll call the soldiers to remove you."
Katchin turned and blundered off. He walked like a drunkard.
Garric put his fingertips on his brows and kneaded his cheeks hard with his palms. He felt queasy. "Tenoctris," he said with his eyes still closed, "can you start now? Maybe I'll feel better if I can get away from this place."
"Yes, of course," the old wizard said.
Tenoctris put her left hand on Garric's wrist to steady herself, then settled to the pavement by crossing her legs beneath her. Liane held the small cushion which she'd taken from the satchel. Waiting till she was sure where the old woman would light, she slid it beneath her thin buttocks.
Tenoctris sighed and let go of Garric. "You might keep a hand on my shoulder, though," she said apologetically to him. "In case I get dizzy and fall over."
"Sure," said Garric. He rested his fingertips on Tenoctris' collarbone.
Sometimes Garric wondered if the work of reuniting the Isles might be easier if Tenoctris were younger and healthier, but... Tenoctris' mind, not her body, was the important factor.
If Tenoctris' flesh had been stronger, perhaps her preternatural awareness of how cosmic forces interplayed would have been less acute. Others could help the wizard with physical strength, as Garric was doing now. No one but Tenoctris--no one Garric or King Carus before him had met--could thread through the maze of power and chaos to reach the world's survival on the other side.
"Are we to call out the spell with you?" Liane asked softly. She stood across the seven-pointed star from Garric; her hands were tented before her breasts.
"No, I'll speak this myself," Tenoctris said. She gave a wry smile and added, "Since we're so close to the bridge, I think one iteration will be enough. I hope so, at least.'
Garric looked along the span of light dwindling into the distance. It looked real, as though formed of sunlit blue stone. The shimmer of its surface was no more than a normal roadway might show at noon in summer.
"Pan," murmured Tenoctris. Her lead wand dipped and rose. "Paipan, epaipan...."
The waning moon was low over the west bank of the Beltis. Its silver crescent glowed red, then blue and back again to red, alternating with each syllable from the wizard's mouth. Garric swallowed.
"Kore bazagra oreochore...." Tenoctris said. Garric felt her heart beating faster and her body tremble. A vortex of blue wizardlight spun from the center of the star, expanding to envelope the three of them. Its touch was like the edge of an ice sword, slicing through Garric's flesh and soul together.
"Iphibe," Tenoctris said. She breathed explosively between words now. "Amphibe, erode, antheme...."
The vortex froze, encircling Garric and his friends like a cone of blazing sapphire. The world outside, the bridge and the buildings of Valles in Garric's own day, began to spin widdershins. The motion was slow at first. It built to the speed of a pirouetting dancer, then that of a top.
"Kolasseis!" Tenoctris cried. "Poine! Rheneia!"
The world swelled around them. The tenements rose into vast monoliths, taller than the cliffs of dream, and the soldiers standing at the next intersection with their shields advanced were giants painted in quick flickering sheets of red and blue wizardlight.
Garric fell out of the waking world. His right hand gripped Tenoctris by the shoulder, his left linked with Liane's hand. Her fingers were the only warmth in a cold as penetrating as that of the sunless depths of the sea.
Beyond the blazing wall around them Garric saw vortices of light spin sunwise into the night. Cobblestones writhed and lifted beneath them. Besimon must have shouted an order, because the troops cocked their spears ready to throw.
The universe sucked in on itself. The wall of wizardlight vanished, though the memory of its glare danced orange and purple at the back of Garric's eyeballs.
The world changed. Garric's feet had never left the ground, but instead of cobblestones there was sand beneath his boots. He staggered with an impact that was not of his weight shifting. Liane cried out and sank to her knees.
Garric caught Tenoctris in both arms to keep her from sprawling. Her face was pale and her pulse fluttered like a bird's.
They were in a desert creeping over the ruins of a once-great city. The skeletons of mighty buildings stood around them, some of them half-buried by pale dunes.
The air seemed thin and the stars were holes in the black sky. Coarse shrubs wriggled in the cold breeze.
Tenoctris raised her head. Garric kept an arm around her, for support and because this was no place to be without the touch of another human being. Liane's fingers linked with his again.
"I'd say that getting here was harder than I'd expected," Tenoctris said, managing a smile, "but in truth I wasn't sure that I was strong enough to bring us here at all. Now we need to find Alman."
"Someone lives here?" Liane said. The only movement about them was that caused by the wind.
"Alman didn't want to be disturbed," Tenoctris said softly. "He came to a place where no one else would choose to come."
"But we did," said Garric.
The wizard's smile transfigured her face the way sunrise brightens the gray sea. "I wouldn't say that we chose to come here," she said. "We didn't have a choice--if we want to preserve civilization."
Using Garric and Liane as braces, Tenoctris rose to her feet. She still held the stick of lead. She pointed it toward the largest of the buildings on the horizon. "We'll try that, I think," she said. "If Alman isn't there, I'll have to speak another incantation."
"Will you be able to do that?" Garric asked. Tenoctris was panting just to stand in the thin air.
"If I have to," the old wizard said. She tried to smile. "If I have to."
She didn't object when Garric put his arm around her. They set off across the vast ruin, letting Tenoctris' small steps govern their pace.
The wind made a sound like steel rubbing steel, and the stars never blinked.
"Oh, sure," Krias shrilled from the ring. "Wander in here like one of your sheep, kill my master the first thing you do, and then you expect me to help you! That's just like your type."
Cashel wondered what his type was. It probably didn't matter. It was the sort of thing people said when they were mad and it wasn't enough to blame a man for what he'd done: you told him he was a type of fellow who did things, and that made it worse.
Apparently ring demons did that just like people did.
"Well, I haven't been long enough in this place to know what to expect," Cashel said calmly. "Where I come from, folks would give directions to a stranger who asked them politely, that's true."
Of course there was Aron or-Raddid with the rocky farm north of Barca's Hamlet. Sour Aron and this ring ought to get along pretty well together. They'd make a pair in harness, at any rate.
"Most folks would, anyhow," Cashel added to be completely accurate.
The ring was heavy gold, but its surface was covered with chains of tiny beads fixed on in some fashion that didn't mar their perfect roundness. Cashel had never seen anything made that way before. It wasn't much to his taste, but he could appreciate the craftsmanship of whoever the goldsmith was.
He cleared his throat. "And I'm sorry about your master," he added. "I came here to see him, but things didn't work out the way either of us would've wanted."
"I told him a hundred times if I told him once," Krias said. His tone was still waspish but not quite as he'd used a moment before. "'Landure, calm down or one day you'll meet somebody just as stupid as you are and stronger besides!' But would he listen? No, no, he kept on the same way until you showed up, sheep-boy. And now who's to keep all the slime from the Underworld from oozing across the cosmos, hey?"
Cashel looked down at the figure quivering in the he
art of the stone. He didn't speak for a moment. Krias knew without being told that Cashel was a shepherd. Did the ring maybe know the route that would take Cashel...?
He was starting to feel more hopeful than he had been since the moment he realized he'd bashed out the brains of the fellow he was supposed to ask for help, but it wasn't time yet to ask about Sharina. He cleared his throat again and said, "About Master Landure. I was wondering where to bury him, here or at his house. Or, well, where? Can you tell me?"
"Bury him?" Krias snapped. "Bury his meat, you mean, and a silly waste of time that would be. Not that your time is of much value, is it?"
Cashel started to put the ring down. Put it back on Landure's finger, he supposed, and carry the body to the mansion as he'd started to do. There was a nice spot in front of the door where the morning sun would fall on the grave, and--
"Landure has any number of bodies, sheep-boy," Krias said. "It's his life that's important, and that he keeps under his tongue. Bodies, indeed! Some of us get along perfectly well without any body at all."
Cashel paused. "Ah," he said. He laid his staff crossways on his knees while still holding the ring. With his free hand he opened Landure's jaws by squeezing at the back of the hinge. The dead wizard had good teeth, white and strong.
Cashel lifted the tongue and took out the wafer beneath it. Blood had dried on the teeth but didn't stick to this thing.
The wafer was a little smaller than the circle Cashel could span between his thumb and index finger. It was as thin as the touch-piece some folk carried for luck, but its edges had a rounded feel instead of being sharper than a knife the way something so thin ought to be.
It was crystalline and clear, but it had color. The hue changed when Cashel moved the wafer and even when he didn't.
"How is this Landure's life?" he asked.
"How is dirt dirt?" Krias said. "How are sheep stupid? It just is. Put it under the tongue of another of Landure's bodies and there he is again--just as full of himself as he was before you knocked his fool head in."
"Oh," said Cashel. He continued to squat as he considered what Krias had said, and what the ring demon had told him beyond the words he'd used. Cashel often wished people--and rings--would just say what they meant instead of playing games with words and not-words. Life would be simpler.
Though come to think, that was pretty much the way his sister Ilna acted--say whatever it was she thought and say it in words that nobody could mistake. You could argue that Ilna did have a simpler time than most people, but you could also look at her and see why other folks chose to do things in a different way.
"Well?" Krias demanded. "Are you just going to sit there like a bump on a log? You're good at it, though, I'll admit. Maybe you can be reincarnated as a lichen!"
Cashel looked down at his bare, tanned arm. "I'm the wrong color for a lichen," he said. "But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Where does--"
"Are you really that stupid?" the ring shrilled. "You couldn't be, not and remember to breathe!"
"That's not what I want to talk about either," Cashel said calmly. He'd learned a long time ago that if he let other people wander all over the field instead of answering his questions, he'd never get answers. "Where does Landure keep his extra bodies?"
He held the crystal in his callused palm, letting light tremble across its face. Sometimes he thought he saw something moving in its depths... but it really didn't have depth, being so thin.
"He doesn't keep anything now, does he?" Krias said with a sniff. "Except I suppose he'll soon be keeping worms for a while. If you mean where are the bodies, they're in Landure's other mansion--the one at the bottom of the Underworld, three levels down."
"Ah," Cashel repeated. "And I just put this--"
He tossed the disk in his palm. He wasn't sure that Krias saw things, saw them with eyes, anyway; but it was the way Cashel would've called attention to the crystal if he'd been talking to another person.
"--under his tongue, like it was on the body here when I took it out?"
The birds had started to sing again, and Cashel thought he heard a squirrel chatter. He didn't have strong feelings about birdsong and a squirrel's own mother wouldn't be able to find anything good to say about its voice, but they were normal sounds for a woodland. Cashel liked that better than the grim silence he'd waked up to.
"Are you deaf, sheep-boy?" Krias said. "I said the palace is in the Underworld. Through those bronze doors there and past all the frights and monsters that were locked away from the waking world--till you came and killed the guardian!"
"I heard you," Cashel said calmly. "Is it far to this other mansion?"
He thought of adding that he was trying to bring Landure back to life--back to body?--now that it turned out he could, but Krias already knew that. The ring was just being difficult, and there wasn't any point in Cashel letting it upset him.
Cashel could imagine burying the ring with this Landure and getting on about the job of reviving the wizard in a new body, though. If Krias didn't squeak some useful information pretty quick--
"Far?" the ring said. "It's farther than you're likely to get in a lifetime. Only a great wizard like Landure the Guardian could expect to survive any length of time in the Underworld!"
Cashel snorted, but thought of Sharina kept from stomping the ring into the ground right now and being done with its noise. The best way to Sharina was through Landure's help, and the best way to Landure--alive and able to help--was through Krias.
Besides, Cashel sort of owed Landure for, well, killing the wizard when he was just trying to lock up a monster. Listening to Krias yammer like a squirrel was a better thing to do than choking the ring under a foot of dirt and maybe make a second mistake as bad as killing Landure in the first place.
Rather than say anything for a moment, Cashel set the ring on the dead man's palm. He scraped up a wad of moss, wrapped it around the crystal disk, put it all in his belt wallet.
The squirrel chattered. Cashel looked up over his shoulder and went, "Tsk-tsk-tsk!" with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The squirrel froze on its branch, then resumed scolding at twice the rate.
Grinning, his normal good humor restored, Cashel picked up the ring again and stood. "The other thing I need to know," he said, "is is there food down in the Underworld or should I bring some from the house up here? And I'd appreciate if you'd tell me how many days distant the place I'm going is likely to be.
"If I get there alive, I mean," he added to keep the ring from bursting like a long-dead woodchuck, but he couldn't help but let his grin grow broader.
"Do you think you can just bash your way through the Underworld with that quarterstaff?" Krias demanded. Cashel was starting to get used to the demon's voice; but by Duzi, the little God of shepherds, Krias made the squirrel sound like Garric calming the sheep with his pipes.
Cashel balanced the staff in his right palm. "Well," he said, trying not to sound too boastful, "I bashed it through Landure the Guardian, that great wizard, didn't I? But I do need to eat."
"There's food in the Underworld," Krias said. That was about the first time he'd just answered a question, wasn't it? Though Cashel'd had to ask twice. "There's food if you're strong enough to take it."
"Right," said Cashel. He bent and slipped the ring back on Landure's middle finger. The corpse had been dead long enough that the flesh was as supple as soft wax.
After thinking about it, Cashel had decided that this clearing was a better place for the grave than up by Landure's house would be. It was here, trying to defend the world, that he'd been killed.
"I'll be back with a shovel," Cashel called over his shoulder as he started up the path. "I know you don't think the body matters, but the animals didn't feel that way; and I don't either."
"Sheep-boy!" Krias called. Cashel walked on through the galax.
"Master Cashel or-Kenset!" Krias said. "Listen to me!"
Cashel turned, his hand resting on the rough bark of the nearby dogwo
od. "Master Krias?" he said.
"You should take me with you," Krias said. Loud as the demon's piping voice seemed close by, it faded quick as the whine of a mosquito once you got a few paces away.
Cashel rubbed his chin with his knuckles. He wasn't happy to be alone, that was the truth. Cashel hadn't spent as much time around other people as the innkeeper's children did, that was true, but sheep had personality as sure as humans did. There wasn't a lot to choose between people and sheep for being contrary, either.
That didn't mean being alone wouldn't be better than having Krias for company, though.
"Well, after all, he's going to want me when he's alive again, isn't he?" the ring said; and by Duzi! it was sounding a little desperate through the usual peevishness. "It stands to reason!"
"I guess you're right," Cashel said. He walked back to the corpse and removed the ring. It fit perfectly on his left little finger.
After staying silent half the way back to the house, Krias said, "You know, at the rate you're going, you may die of old age before you even enter the Underworld."
Cashel smiled. He walked at his own pace instead of trotting along like a dog in a hurry, so he'd heard that before plenty of times. It didn't bother him now either.
"Any notion where Landure keeps his shovels?" he asked.
"By the black heart of the cosmos!" the ring spluttered. "You lower the intellectual standard of any flock you're herding!"
Cashel chuckled. It was good to have company.
Ilna and Merota sat side by side against the bow railing. They held hands: left in left, right in right, their arms plaited before them. Without the contact Merota trembled like a rag in a breeze, though she didn't complain or ask for consideration.
The flautist piped the stroke with his usual two notes, a slower pace than that at which the trireme had cruised earlier in the voyage. Even so an oarsman shouted, "Hoist the sail, Vonculo! Or at least rig the jib!"