by David Drake
Lord Waldron bowed to acknowledge Garric's question and said, "Eight battalions are ready to march on four hours' warning..." his lips made a sour moue before he added, "... your majesty. That includes the phalanx. As a practical matter I can have the leading companies moving in a few minutes and the rest can join as they fall in."
The proud old nobleman glared across the table at Lord Attaper. "Does the commander of the Blood Eagles have anything to add from his years of experience?"
For all the sneering way Waldron put the question, it was an intelligent attempt to keep the emotional temperature in the room low. Waldron knew that Garric would ask for Attaper's opinion as a check--which Waldron would view as an insult. By asking himself, everybody avoided embarrassment.
"I'd take the phalanx into battle without hesitation," Attaper said. "Lord Zettin and his drillmasters from the Blood Eagles have done a splendid job... under the general direction of the commander of the Royal Army."
He made a slight bow to Waldron.
"Then tonight--" Garric began.
The door behind him opened. He turned. The others at the table looked angry--Waldron angry enough that he reached for his sword--but Garric felt hollow fear. An interruption now meant something very bad had happened.
His father stepped into the room, leading a man with a roughly bandaged head and blood down the front of his gray tunic. From the injured man's white hem and high-laced boots, he was one of the men who carried the sedan chairs and palanquins of high palace officials.
Lord Pitre opened his mouth; Reise peremptorily gestured him silent. "Tell them what you told me!" he ordered the chairman in an iron voice.
"A fat rube come to Lady Tenoctris while Hiller and me was on duty in case she needed her chair," the fellow said. He paused, wincing and squeezing the bandage; it oozed red.
Liane dropped her tablets and stepped to the wounded man, snatching up a bowl of wine and water from the serving table. "Katchin the Miller," Reise explained to his son and the others. "It's my fault. The ushers at the gate knew I'd admitted Katchin once, so they believed him when he said he had business in the private domains."
Garric waved curtly. This was no time for recriminations; and no one, not even Reise, could consider all the possibilities of who might wheedle entry to the palace.
"I heard him," the chairman said. He continued speaking though he closed his eyes as Liane dampened her sash and dabbed it at the ragged cut on his scalp. "He said you'd sent him to bring her to a place in White Street, a stables that's built on the foundations of an old temple. Right away and no bodyguards."
"No bodyguards?" Attaper said. His words clanged.
"He said, the rube did," the chairman explained, "but the guards said they were with her till their commander said so, and they didn't care if the Lady herself come down and told them different."
Attaper nodded crisply. Garric wouldn't have wanted to call the Blood Eagle's expression a smile, but it was as close to a smile as a block of granite could show.
"We went off with the rube," the chairman said. "He had his own chair, a hired one, waiting outside the gates. Lady Tenoctris had her bag of gear along. She was doing something as we run along, but I don't know what."
The man took the bowl from Liane's hand and slurped enough to fill a drinking cup. Liane winced, but the chairman didn't care that his own blood stained the contents if he even noticed.
"We get to the place and it's a stables, like the rube says," he went on. He still sounded hoarse but the edge of near hysteria in his tone had dulled. "It's closed up now and empty, but the rube goes to the trap door and unlocks it with a key. He takes Lady Tenoctris down and the guards go with her. Hiller and me, we're waiting with the chair but we can hear it all inside."
We know his partner's name, Garric thought, but not his. And under normal circumstances I'd never have been aware of him as an individual.
"Lady Tenoctris says something about the stone and what it must be," the chairman said. "And a guard says something about a statue, and somebody shouts something. And then there's a flash of red light, only...."
He raised his eyes from the floor he'd been looking at and with a grimace of confusion said, "By the Lady, sirs, it came through the stones, not just out the doorway. I swear that's what I seen."
"Go on," said Garric emotionlessly. King Carus in his mind stood like a tensed spring, but he and Garric both knew that they had to have information before they acted. Attaper and Waldron had sent aides scrambling out of the room; troops would be ready to go at once, if that was the proper response.
"Me and Hiller both run to the stairs," the chairman said. "He's right ahead of me as we go down. It's just a basement, but there's no wall on the fourth side--it's an ice field instead and there's two of the godawfulest things you ever saw standing there. They're like spiders or worse, only they stand on two legs and they're as big as oxen. They come at us, and the guards go at them."
The chairman gave a look of longing to the carafe of pure wine on the mixing table. Garric reached over and handed it to him, ignoring Reise's frown. "Protocol be hanged," King Carus muttered. "The poor devil needs a drink if ever a man did."
"Hiller came back and I froze," the man went on. Liane had finished bathing the fellow's cut. She sliced off the hem of her outer tunic with the dagger she kept in one sleeve for protection. "Hiller and me tangled and rolled down the stairs. There was a man in white come in with the monsters. Lady Tenoctris is saying something but this guy spins something in front of her. She goes stiff and the guy leads her away."
"What are the guards doing while this is going on?" Attaper said. His question was perfectly enunciated, but the words quivered like racehorses poised at the starting gate.
The chairman looked at him. "Dying, milord," he said. "I told you, these things was the size of an ox and got claws on all six legs. One knocked me down, that's how I got this--"
He pointed to his forehead, careful not to interfere with Liane binding on the fresh bandage.
"--and I was just trying to get away. At that, I was luckier than Hiller."
"By the Lady!" Lord Waldron said. "You ran? You should have--"
"He should have come here to inform us of the situation, milord," Liane said, looking over her shoulder as her fingers fastened the bandage with a gold fibula from somewhere within her garments. "As he has done."
Garric pointed to the chairman. "Can you ride a horse?" he asked.
"What?" the man said. "Me, a horse? No, milord."
Much as Garric had expected. "Then we'll all go afoot and you'll guide us," he said. Perhaps they should put the fellow in a palanquin himself? "Can you make it back on your own feet?"
"Sure, I could run unless they cut my head clean off," the man said, contemptuously boastful. "Which is what they did to Hiller, the bastards."
He raised his eyes again and added, "Let's go. I'll take you there."
Garric looked at Attaper and said, "All the on-duty Blood Eagles. The off-duty shift stands ready here at the palace for further orders."
"Done," said Attaper as another aide sprinted out the door. "I've already ordered the whole battalion to stand to."
"Lord Waldron," Garric continued, "alert the Royal Army but hold the troops in barracks until further orders."
"Yes, your majesty," Waldron said. Garric didn't know if it was the crisis or the steely certainty Carus put in Garric's voice during a crisis, but he noticed that there was nothing grudging in the honorific this time. "They're being called to arms now."
"Then let's go," Garric said, taking his swordbelt from the servant who held it while he was in conference.
Chapter Eighteen
The Blood Eagles in half-armor--shields, breastplates and helmets--rammed a path down White Street through any pedestrians who hadn't been warned clear by the mounted trumpeters at the rear of the column. They used their spear-butts, not the points, but it was still a brutal process that Garric hated to watch.
He couldn't del
ay now if they were to rescue Tenoctris. If that meant knocking a few citizens off the pavement, so be it. Without Tenoctris to guide them, the Isles would slip into chaos as surely as the sun rose.
Streets on the outskirts of the city like this one had begun as drove roads, laid out by sheep who didn't care about distance but could sense a rise in the ground that wasn't enough to make a ball roll. The chairman--his name was Maylo--pointed as Garric's company pounded around another turn and cried, "There it is!"
A squad of the city watch stood at the side entrance of a stables. None of the the watchmen looked comfortable, and one had taken off his brass helmet to vomit in the street. Civilian spectators watched from a slight distance. Hawkers with water skins and trays of food had already begun to work the crowd.
The squad leader looked relieved when he saw troops arriving. "There's been killings!" he called--to Attaper; Garric was merely a civilian, while Attaper's gold-inlaid cuirass had drawn his attention. "There's a thing down there dead and men. May the Shepherd guard me, I don't know how many men there are!"
The hundred-plus troops clashed to a halt. At least one man behind Garric skidded and fell with a crash of equipment. The soldiers' hobnailed boots weren't meant for brick pavers with the slime of garbage inevitable on a city street, and it had been a long run for troops dressed for battle.
The chairman wasn't even breathing hard. Garric was; he'd been spending too much time sitting. He trained with his sword daily, but that didn't make him as fit for running as he'd have hoped.
Garric prayed to the Shepherd daily also, something he couldn't imagine doing when he was a peasant. Becoming Prince Garic hadn't exactly made him more religious, but it certainly made him aware that he was going to need a lot of help to succeed.
He drew his sword, feeling the ghost of King Carus thrill to the sring of the blade's chine against scabbard's iron cap. The watchman started back, surprised to see a civilian with a bare sword in this company.
"Attaper," Garric ordered, his words echoing those of Carus in his mind, "ten men down with us, the rest ready to follow."
Attaper shouted a curt command as he and Garric took a squad to the rough stairs down from the slanted trap door. Attaper would have led if he'd been quick enough, but Garric was younger and didn't have the burden of armor.
The basement was an abattoir. The four Blood Eagles had been dismembered. A heavy blow had crushed one man's breastplate against the back of his cuirass, and the dead chairman's head had splashed its brains against a support pillar.
Katchin the Miller sat in a corner of the room, trying to stuff coils of his intestines through the rip in his belly. His eyes followed Garric down the stairs, but he didn't speak.
One of the killers lay dead as well; Garric heard Attaper grunt approval. Plates of slick, dirty-white chitin, hard enough to turn a blade that struck glancingly, covered the monster's body and six limbs. Hair sprouted from the joints.
Where swords had penetrated, the gashes leaked yellowish ichor. A sword was stuck through one of the compound eyes. The monster had been trying to pull the blade free when it died. The point was too firmly embedded to move, but the pincered 'hands' had twisted the good steel like a strand of taffy.
Maylo had said the creatures were as big as oxen. They were at least that large. The jawplates opened sideways and meshed like rows of broken glass.
"What happened, Katchin?" Garric asked quietly. He squatted beside the dying man, cocking up the scabbard of his long sword so that it didn't catch on the floor.
"It wasn't supposed to be this way," Katchin said. "I was supposed to bring the old woman here and put the statuette they gave me into the niche in the wall."
He spoke in a normal voice; shock had apparently kept him from feeling pain. Did he know he was as surely a dead man as any of the dismembered corpses around him?
Garric looked at the wall where Katchin's gaze had wandered. He saw the niche, carved at the junction of two of the blocks, but there was no statue in it.
"Who told you to do that, Katchin?" Garric asked. Attaper was trying the monster's chitinous armor with his dagger-point, first at a joint and then on the smooth carapace. Most of the other Blood Eagles watched with their commander, but one man held his spear leveled at Katchin's breast and another was gathering the parts of dead men into separate piles.
Katchin frowned. His fingers moved as if by their own volition; slimy coils leaked out of his body cavity again and again.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't remember. Though there was a man in white.... A wizard, perhaps? A wizard told me."
He seemed oddly detached. Katchin had never cared about much except but himself and his own dignity. Now he didn't care about anything, and that was far worse. Garric was talking to a corpse; nothing more.
"Your majesty?" a soldier said. He poked his spearpoint toward an object lying in the corner of the wall, almost covered by one of the monster's pincered legs. "Is this something? The statue?"
Garric shifted his stance to look. He still saw only the sheen of ivory.
"Pick it--" he said. He realized that the soldier was afraid to touch the object. Garric started to get up rather than order the man to do something that frightened him the way physical danger would not.
Liane had slipped down the stairs while Garric was talking to Katchin. She'd followed the soldiers in a sedan chair. Garric hadn't intended her to enter this charnel house, but he wasn't surprised--or entirely displeased--that she was here anyway, looking as calm as a statue of the Lady.
Liane stepped past the soldier's armored bulk and picked up the statuette. It was an intricate cone holding more cones, carved each within the next larger. The layers rustled softly as Liane handed the object to Garric.
Elongated female nudes formed the sides of the cone. Though distorted, their shapes had a cool beauty that made Garric think of waves on a bright winter day.
"Does the statue have to face in a particular direction, Katchin?" Garric asked. The surface of the outermost cone had turned a creamy yellow from handling, but the layers within--each increasingly delicate--were the cold white of sun on a snowfield.
Katchin smiled faintly; he didn't speak. His fingers no longer moved, though he was still breathing.
"Right," said Garric, rising to his feet with the carving in his left hand. The patterned steel of his swordblade shimmered like a crawling snake.
"Liane, stay behind the first squad," Garric said, because he wasn't going to waste breath telling her she couldn't come. He grinned at Attaper. "Let's see what happens."
He set the carving in the niche and backed a step. The ivory vanished and the ancient stones flared into a wall of crimson light beyond which shapes loomed. The stables trembled as if an earthquake had struck; dirt sifted down from the ceiling joists.
"Garric and the Isles!" Attaper shouted as he and Garric led the squad into the unknown.
Garric's skin tingled as he entered the portal. For a blind instant he thought the blast of cold wind wracking him was wizardry as well.
He stumbled on coarse gravel and his eyesight cleared. Garric and the men following through a shimmer of rosy light--much paler on this side of the portal than in the Valles basement--had entered a cold wasteland. Moss and trees no taller than his little finger grew among the stones. A wall of ice, horizon to horizon, gleamed in the near distance, lighted by a sun that barely rose over the rocky waste to the south.
"There's Tenoctris!" Liane called, pointing to the western sky. A bridge--the bridge of light--arched from the windswept plain. At its far end Garric saw the glittering buildings of Klestis.
A man in white glided rather than walked midway along the span; in front of him shambled four servants who were human but not necessarily alive, carrying the frozen figure of Tenoctris on a litter. Behind the wizard, step for step, the bridge was disintegrating into sparkles of light. He and his party were beyond even bowshot from the ground. It was impossible to reach Tenoctris from where Garric was now.
> And there were things closer to hand which needed his attention.
"Help me!" cried the nude woman staggering toward them from the direction of the ice sheet. She was clearly exhausted. Her body was scratched and bruised, and there was a more serious cut on her right thigh. "Sirs, your protection for the Lady's sake!"
A second squad of Blood Eagles plunged through the curtain of light. More would be following, which was good--because a pair of the insectoid monsters were following the woman closely. They generally ran along on the four rear legs, but sometimes one or the other would rise onto its hindmost pair alone and scream like slates rubbing.
"Ranks by squads!" Attaper ordered. "Close order! First rank receives the enemy with spearpoints, second rank will launch javelins on command before engaging with swords!"
He turned to Garric. "You and the Lady Liane--" Attaper said. The running woman stumbled, barely managing to keep her feet. She was twenty yards from the double line of soldiers, and the monsters were not much farther than that behind.
Garric sheathed his sword and sprinted toward the woman.
"Charge!" Attaper shouted.
"Garric and the Isles!" Liane cried. If either of them were thinking, "Garric is an idiot!" they kept the opinion to themselves for the time being.
Carus was shouting encouragement in his mind, but the decision to go after the woman was Garric's alone. Garric caught her around the waist and flung her over his right shoulder as part of the same motion by which he turned to run back to relative safety. He could smell old corpses on the fetid breath of the monsters pursuing; he would've been able to guess their usual diet even without the half-picked human ribcage that dangled from the foreclaws of the one on the right.
From the way they were chasing the woman, they were also willing to eat living prey if such were offered.
The gravel was too coarse to give safe footing, but the beach beneath Barca's Hamlet was shingle and Garric had often walked there. Besides, keyed up as he was now, Garric thought he could dance along a swordedge if that was what had to be done.