by David Drake
The wizard was coming toward Ilna again: crawling, now, but crawling steadily. He continued to speak his words of power. His right cheek bled from where he'd fallen on the rocks.
Ilna raised her pattern of knots. Her vision went gray and fuzzy. She thought her fingers were twisting the cords, but she couldn't be sure....
Merota trotted across the waste, moving clumsily because she was carrying a large stone against her chest. The wizard must have heard her coming, because he turned his head toward her and raised a hand.
Ilna's awareness was crystal sharp again. She jerked her cords hard as if throttling a viper.
The wizard screamed; his arm jerked back to his side. Merota swung the rock, releasing it an instant before it thumped into the wizard's skull. The wizard went flat, his limbs splaying like a crushed spider. The child struggled to pick up the rock and repeat the blow.
The insect that still had four good legs hunched itself and started to crawl over its crippled fellow. Chalcus cocked his head upward to watch with a bemused smile. The creature he sheltered behind roared and squirmed, furious with what was happening.
The crawling insect thrust its head past the abdomen of its fellow. The chanteyman rose to his feet and stabbed upward, as smoothly as though the brief rest had refreshed him completely. The blade's slight inward bend didn't prevent it from plunging straight as an awl through the thin chitin of the creature's neck.
Chalcus withdrew his sword in a rush of ichor. The monster lurched forward. That was a convulsion rather than an attack, but the result would have been equally fatal if the chanteyman hadn't stepped aside. He was laughing.
The insect crunched down and began flailing its abdomen onto the rocks. From any angle but straight below, its armored head and thorax concealed the delicate neck joint. Had Chalcus planned this result, or had he simply let the fight develop and taken the opportunities it offered?
Perhaps both were true. Ilna got to her feet. The chanteyman was a very good man in a fight.
And in Ilna's terms, a very good man.
Merota hadn't managed to lift the rock again. She must be nearly as wrung out as Ilna herself. Ilna put a hand on the child's shoulder and said, "Never mind him, Merota. He won't bother us any more."
The top of the wizard's skull was concave. The blood pooling under his ears and nostrils made a bright contrast to his black garments.
Chalcus stood at a cautious distance from the tangle of insectoid monsters. Only one was dead, and it thrashed more violently than its two crippled fellows.
A sleeve fluttered in the mandibles of one of the insects. Chalcus judged his distance, then stepped close and flicked the cloth away on his swordpoint. He used it to wipe ichor from his blade. The rush of the two creatures together had come closer than Ilna realized from where she squatted.
Chalcus nodded toward the unhuman figures chanting at the brazier. He raised an eyebrow. Ilna nodded curtly.
"Come, child," she said as she started forward. Her fingers had picked out the previous series of knots; she'd need something quite different to bind the remaining pair. This task would be like binding the universe itself as it plunged through time. "I'd like you to stay close to me. For as long as you can."
The chanteyman was strolling toward the brazier from his own angle, still breathing through his open mouth but managing a snatch of song as he did so. Instead of smoke, shapes of light seethed in a ball above the coals.
The chanting paused. The ammonite shell turned on the human shoulders. Slit-pupiled eyes older than life on dry land glared at the humans from behind a screen of tentacles.
Merota had picked up another stone, not so big this time. Chalcus laughed gaily and stepped forward, swinging his blade. Ilna drew her first knot tight--
The air flashed red and congealed into solid ruby.
The screams that had drawn Sharina and Dalar into the palace's empty splendor were muted within the walls, but the humming was even more noticeable.
Sharina had expected a crowd inside. In Valles she'd gotten used to ordinary citizens, most of them merely spectators, thronging the public areas; ushers backed by guards to shunt minor petitioners to officials who'd at least make a pretense of listening to them; senior palace staff who oversaw magnates and important dispatches, separating out the relatively few who needed to see Prince Garric; and everywhere, so common they were generally ignored, the servants who cleaned and cooked and ran errands for the courtiers and visitors and officials.
Klestis was one city, not the capital of a kingdom, but even so there should have been at least the shadow of Valles' establishment. Instead, Ansalem's palace was an echoing tomb.
"We need to find--" Sharina said as her eyes surveyed the high entrance hall.
"Here are stairs," said Dalar, brushing aside a curtain concealed behind a pair of trefoil-section pillars. He started forward.
"I'll lead!" said Sharina. The bird's head rotated to look at her over the middle of his spine; he didn't give way.
"I'll lead," Sharina repeated, "because we'll be in a stairwell where your weights are use--"
She caught herself and continued, "Less useful than my knife."
Dalar laughed and stepped aside. "If we were going down," he said, "I would remind you that I can kick. But as we are not...."
Sharina skipped forward, taking the stairs two at a time. She had long legs and the pitch of the steps was flatter than what she was used to. The folk who used this staircase expected their physical labors to be made as easy as possible.
The hum--a presence rather than a sound--was even more penetrating in the stairwell than it had been in the entrance hall. The sky's nervous sanguine glow illuminated the stairs through slit windows, wider on the outside than the inside. Wax-soaked cressets stood in wall sconces, ready to be lighted when night fell. If....
"Dalar, do you think that night will ever fall again here?" Sharina asked as she turned on the first landing.
The bird made a sound that was neither laughter nor a moan. "I would instead ask if the sun will ever rise again, Sharina," he said. "And I fear the answer is that the sun will not rise."
They turned the second landing and continued upward. Sharina heard the screams more clearly as she climbed.
She glanced through a narrow window. The citizens of Klestis stared upward like carp gulping air on a hot day. Some had begun to cry with terror and despair.
Sharina had survived things she hadn't expected to. Tha she still lived was a gift. If the Lady wanted to reclaim that gift, then Sharina hadn't been raised to whimper.
As if sharing the thought that went through Sharina's mind, Dalar said, "For thirty days I floated on a raft, eating the fish I could catch and drinking the rain that fell on me. Every day I met Death yet again. What have I to fear in this place, when Death and I are old dinner companions?"
Dalar was a friend and a stalwart warrior. Nonetheless, Sharina wished that Cashel was at her side, because he brought a kind of solidity to everything around him. Cashel could settle even this hell of hums and screaming.
She'd reached the head of the stairs and another curtained doorway. Dalar gestured.
Sharina nodded. Instead of sliding the tapestry aside, she gripped the cloth with her left hand and ripped it from the carrier railing. Dalar sprang through with his weights spinning, ready to strike right or left if an enemy waited in ambush.
No one did. Dalar caught his weights. Sharina followed him into a shallow anteroom. The screams came from the electrum-grated view slit of the door opposite. Dalar glanced through the opening, then stepped aside for Sharina to look.
Seven wizards wearing black or white or black-and-white stood in a circle around the butchered body of a young boy. The eighth figure, placed opposite the wizards' parti-colored leader and hissing the words of power with the others, was a reptilian mummy in cerements of browning linen. Sharina had finally met the Dragon in the flesh.
Against a sidewall a tall, lean man with muscles like splits of hickory wa
tched the wizards and screamed. Serpents of red wizardlight writhed tightly about his limbs. On the stone couch beside him slept a plump man with a cherubic face and only a fringe of white hair remaining on his head.
"That's Ansalem," Sharina said. "My brother dreamed of him. We've--"
But there wasn't time for talk. Sharina stepped back, raising the Pewle knife overhead with both hands, and chopped down at where she judged the bar locking the door from the other side would be.
Her stroke split away a long splinter of wood veneer and sprang back from metal. Sharina's hands were numb and her blade still trembled. The core beneath the wood had the sheen of polished silver, but no metal Sharina knew could've taken that blow and remained completely unmarked.
"Back!" Dalar said. He spun the weight in his right hand at the gap in the veneer. It was a short stroke since the anteroom didn't give much scope for the chains, but Sharina had seen what Dalar could do with his weapon. Steel would have dented, stone would have chipped.
The weight bounced away with a crack! and wobbled limply, all its energy drained. The door didn't even ring from a blow that would've crushed a man's skull.
In the sanctum beyond, a ripple of golden light played across Ansalem. A serpent with a head on either end began shifting in and out of phase with the sleeping wizard. Ansalem's body had become as rigid as a statue.
"The wall, then!" Sharina said, but it was of dense sandstone blocks, set too tight for her knife point to enter. She looked for anything that might serve as a pick or a battering ram, but the room was as bare as a horse's stall.
They had to interrupt the spell. She knew from Garric's dream that if they didn't, they'd remain in Klestis: out of time and space, without hope or succor, until they and all the city's population died. Someone would defeat the wizards, of that Sharina was sure; but the victory would come long after she and Dalar were dust.
The bird stepped to the stairwell, searching for a tool. As he did so, the outer wall dissolved into rainbow light.
Sharina shouted and raised her knife. Dalar sprang to her side, setting his weights spinning. Something came toward them from the bright haze, gigantic and inexorable.
Cashel stepped from the light, his quarterstaff raised across his body. His face was alert but friendly; when he saw Sharina, he smiled broadly.
"Cashel!" Sharina shouted. "Dalar, a friend!"
Behind Cashel, the rainbow dissipated like quartz sand falling through sunlight. The cosmos sucked in on itself and closed, becoming a stone wall with a window looking down onto terrified citizens.
"Who...?" said Dalar. He wasn't threatening the big stranger who'd appeared out of nowhere, but his weights continued to whirl.
"Cashel, we need to get into that room!" Sharina said, gesturing toward the door whose veneer she'd scarred. "There's wizards inside, and they've murdered a boy."
"Ah!" said Cashel. His face didn't change in an identifiable fashion, but there was no longer any softness to his expression. He shifted his grip on the quarterstaff. "Stand clear," he ordered without raising his voice.
"The door is steel or harder than steel!" Dalar said. "You can't--"
Cashel brought the end of his staff forward like a battering ram. The ferrule hit the center of the door. Instead of the crash of metal against metal, there was a flash of blue light that penetrated flesh and stone alike. The universe rang. Time froze.
Sound and movement resumed. Cashel staggered back from the blow. The door tore from its hinges and sailed across the room beyond.
The wizards were gone, all but the one lying on the floor as a faceless corpse. The dead child and his pinioned father were gone as well. Ages had wracked the room, but a body lay on the bier and a band of armed men were crashing through the shattered screen that formed the far wall.
The figure on the bier tried to sit up.
"Tenoctris!" Sharina cried. Then, "Garric! It's me!"
"By the Lady!" someone was screaming. "There's a million soldiers coming at us and they're all dead!"
Garric stumbled to his knees. He dropped his sword and reached out to touch Tenoctris. Her fingers seemed as delicate as ivory wands when he clasped them in his own tanned, powerful hand.
Cashel stepped into the room, wobbly but walking on his own legs. Sharina threw her arms around him. She should have sheathed the Pewle knife first, but it was only the flat of the blade that rapped Cashel's shoulders.
From the way he lifted her and whirled her in the air, he wouldn't have cared if she'd slashed him with the edge. Attaper dodged back with a curse to avoid Sharina's feet, and Dalar twisted his head aside.
Garric fumbled for his sword. The air was choking with powdered alabaster, the fumes of the overturned brazier, and fluids leaking from the dead wizard.
What had happened to the dead man? He was evil beyond doubt, but had Garric...?
"Liane's in the plaza," Garric muttered. "I've got to get down to her and the army."
"No!" said Tenoctris. She looked barely able to sit straight without help, but her voice rang with authority. "Where did Purlio go? The chief wizard?"
Cashel set Sharina down but continued to hold her. Dalar stood with his back to the pair. His head twitched in quick half-circuits that covered the room now filling with soldiers. The bird had caught his weights, and his face had even less expression than it normally did.
"He vanished," Garric said, rising carefully to his feet. His face was drawn and gray, even taking its covering of grit into account. "He was standing there--"
He pointed to the foot of Tenoctris' bier.
"--and he vanished in a flash of red. But if armies are attacking us, I've--"
"No," Tenoctris repeated. "Purlio has all the dead of all time to send against us. We have to stop him; then his armies won't matter. Now please, don't disturb me. I hope I can open the gate he just used. This is a place of great power, so I may possibly...."
She slid off the bier. Cashel guessed what she was doing before anyone else did. He caught Tenoctris and lowered her to the floor where she sat cross-legged.
You never had to wonder who would help you if Cashel was around....
Tenoctris drew a hexagon in the dust with her index finger, then made quick notations in the Old Script outside each of the six faces. Sharina smiled wryly and handed the old woman a splinter. It had been part of the veneer from the door.
Tenoctris smiled back minusculy. "Darzah howa walab," she said, using the wood to tap the words of power as she spoke them: "Warzaho beha getayat...."
Trumpets called in the plaza below. Sharina heard shouts and the clash of equipment as troops formed ranks in the face of a new threat. All the dead of all time....
"Re sou lampse," said Tenoctris. "Lak othi kalak...."
Sharina walked into the anteroom from which she'd come in a former age, wanting to put distance between her and the partly-eaten corpse. Cashel fell into position behind her.
Dalar, demonstrating both alertness and athletic grace, leaped past to precede both the humans. Cashel grinned slightly. Sharina noticed for the first time that one ferrule of his staff had been blasted completely away from the hickory. The wood was merely scorched.
She glanced through the outside window. From this height Klestis was still a splendid metropolis, an expanse of shining buildings and luxuriant gardens. You had to look for the details which proved the beauty false: places where the cladding had slipped from many facades, and the way vegetation grew in uncontrolled masses of a single species that had destroyed those which had shared each planted bed.
Armies marched on Klestis all around the enclosing red membrane. Sharina couldn't count the banners, let alone the individual soldiers following them. Dead cavalrymen rode dead horses. Heavy infantry tramped along in mail and plate armor, but bone glinted beneath the visors of their helmets. Slingers and javelin men who were little more than armed skeletons capered on bridges that stretched as far as the eye could see.
"After they retake Klestis," Sharina said, "th
ey'll go on into Valles and all the Isles."
Cashel shrugged. "They'll try," he said. "Garric will know what to do. And Tenoctris."
Dalar looked at him. Cashel smiled.
"Nosaba!" Tenoctris cried.
Sharina felt a shudder. The red light deepened, then cleared to become a pale winter sky. Everyone who'd been with Garric was still present, but there were other figures on the transfigured landscape as well.
The roof of Ansalem's palace was a glimmer in the air. Instead of a tessellated floor, Sharina and her companions stood on a chill, rocky wasteland. The light of distant times glimmered over a brazier. In it miniature armies of the dead marched toward the end a wizard had determined for them. On the far side of the brazier was the Dragon's mummy, murmuring an enchantment.
Ilna stood close by like a grim-faced statue with cords in her hands; at her side was a young girl holding a rock. Near them a smiling man poised with his sword, curved like a scorpion's sting, in mid-stroke. Ruby light played around Ilna and her companions.
The swordstroke was aimed at a wizard whose robes were half black and half white; the marcasite fossil of an ammonite took the place of his head.
The Great One turned to stare at Sharina. The beast eyes within its mantle were yellow-green with slitted, S-curved pupils. The beak opened in a rasping cry. The human arms didn't move, but the tentacles quivered in a complex pattern. Sharina swung her knife--
Cashel thrust his staff--
Dalar's weights spun in accelerating circles--
Garric's sword cut in a long arc--
Spears, swords and hatchets struck toward a figure that had once been human but was no more. Sharina felt a freezing lethargy of red light.
Ilna, relaxed from her restraint, drew a knot tight. The swordsman with her brought his weapon down and the girl half threw, half pushed her rock toward the necromancer.
The necromancer dissolved downward, inward with a scream both soundless and more intense than a living entity could grasp. The curved sword cut only air. Instants later other weapons clashed in the same empty space, Sharina's among them.
They were back in Ansalem's palace. Everyone was shouting. Tenoctris tried to gasp an explanation that the others were too excited to hear.