The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  “Your highness!” said Lord Martous, bustling toward her—and stopping at the line of guards. “Lady Merota and her caretakers were nowhere in the palace, nowhere at all! One of the servants thought they’d gone down to the harbor so I’ve sent for them, but they’re not here yet!”

  “I’m sure they’re coming,” Sharina said. “When they arrive, direct them to my suite. Double—”

  She used the simulacrum’s name for itself. It was accurately descriptive, and they had to call the creature something.

  “—will be in the adjacent workroom.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to think I’d disobeyed your request to summon the parties!” the chamberlain said. He put enough high-pitched anxiety in his voice to make it sound as though he were reporting a disaster. Just as well he wasn’t delivering dispatches from Calf’s Head Bay. “As soon as your note arrived, I—oh! Here they come!”

  “Yes, thank you, milord,” Sharina said, turning to smile at her friends as they approached the paved walkway beside the palace. Chalcus smiled back and gave Merota, hanging from his arm, a delighted twirl. Ilna’s lips curved slightly, which was quite cheerful for her.

  “We’re loyal citizens of the kingdom here on First Atara!” Martous said determinedly. “You have but to request—”

  By the Lady’s mercy, will the man never shut up? Sharina thought. Aloud she said sharply, “Milord, speaking of requests—I requested that the remains of the pyre be cleared off the plaza here. The work doesn’t appear to have been started.”

  When the pyre collapsed, some of the hurdles had fallen clear of the flames and broken open when they hit the ground. That was merely messy, but the ashes swirling from the great pile in the center smutted everything. If it rained, they’d mix with the dirt in a gray, clinging mass.

  “Ah,” said the chamberlain in a muted voice. “Ah, the truth is, your highness, that since King Cervoran, ah, regained consciousness on the pyre, the common people have tended to keep their distance. I’m afraid they’re a superstitious lot, you know. Perhaps your soldiers could take a hand?”

  “I’m afraid the kingdom has better use for the royal army just now,” Sharina said, feeling a sudden chill as she heard her own words. It put Double’s equation too clearly into focus: the kingdom would run out of soldiers before the sea ran out of weed.

  Chalcus shifted Merota to his left hand, putting her between him and Ilna at the same time he made sure Double would have to go through him to get to the women. The sailor was still smiling, but he’s survived by being a careful man.

  “The Heron’s been repaired, your highness,” he said with a sweeping bow that kept his eyes on Double, hitching his way toward them from the other gig. “Just a matter of replacing some scantlings and cleaning her, you see. Would you have called us to take her off somewhere?”

  “I have need of you,” Double said. His swollen lips were formed in a smirk, though that might’ve been a chance of his condition like the unpleasant voice he shared with Cervoran. “Ilna, you will come with me onto the roof of the palace and view the sea.”

  “We’ll all view the sea, then,” said Chalcus heartily. He set his knuckles on his hipbones and stood arms akimbo, grinning falsely. “I dare say I’ve more experience of looking at the sea than any two other folk within bowshot, not so?”

  Double looked at him. “I have other uses for you and the child Merota,” he said. “There is a tapestry in my Chamber of Art. There are animals woven into the pattern of the maze. You must count those animals, both of you, and come to me on the roof when you are sure of their number.”

  “That’ll be easy!” Merota cried, looking up at Chalcus in delight. He was exchanging glances with Ilna; both of them showed hints of concern under studiously blank expressions.

  “I don’t need a chaperone to look at waves,” Ilna said with sudden brusqueness. “Tenoctris, will you be with us, or…?”

  “I was planning to examine Lord Cervoran’s library again,” the old woman said. “Though I could join you if—”

  “No,” said Ilna. “I’d rather you were with Merota and Master Chalcus. I haven’t had time to look over that tapestry properly, but it does more than just keep drafts from coming through the walls. I’m not sure…”

  “Count your waves, dear one,” said Chalcus. He leaned forward, miming an attempt to kiss Ilna’s cheek. She jerked back in scandalized surprise as he must’ve known she would; that broke the tension in general smiles. “Lady Merota and I will count woven beasts the while. We’ll see who has the more fun, will we not?”

  Quite a number of clerks, aides, and couriers were gathering just beyond the line of guards, waiting to talk with Sharina. The number was growing the way a lake swells behind a dammed stream. Lord Tadai was keeping the civilians in his department under tight control, but a number of the military personnel—particularly the younger nobles—would start raising their voices for attention shortly.

  “Lord Tadai,” Sharina said. “I’ll begin seeing petitioners in my suite as soon as I get up there. Please determine the order of audience among civilians at your best discretion. And who’s the ranking military officer present?”

  Three men—a cousin of Lord Waldron, a regimental commander, and the deputy quartermaster—all spoke at once, then stared at one another in confusion. “Very well,” Sharina went on, jumping in before the soldiers could sort matters out, “Lord Tadai, take charge of the ordering all the petitioners.”

  She grinned at Tenoctris and said, “Let me give you my arm. I’m going to be regent for the next I-don’t-know-how-long, so I’d like to be Tenoctris’ friend Sharina till we get up to the second floor.”

  Tenoctris laughed as they walked along in a cocoon of Blood Eagles. The petitioners—the smarter ones, anyway—had turned their attention to Lord Tadai so the guards didn’t even have to shove their way through a crowd.

  Sharina grinned at human nature: some of the black-armored soldiers probably regretted not having the chance to knock civilians down. That didn’t make them bad men, exactly, but it was fortunate for the kingdom that they’d been smart enough to find duties where external discipline controlled their aggressiveness.

  On this side of the palace a broad staircase led to the royal suites. Sharina helped Tenoctris up the left-hand flight to the king’s apartments and into the Chamber of Art, then walked through to the suite she was using. Tenoctris glanced at the tapestry on the shaded wall before going to the bookcase. Her steps were as purposeful as those of a robin hunting worms in the grass.

  Several of Lord Tadai’s ushers were already in the Queen’s Suite, arranging tables and notebooks for the influx of petitioners who’d be coming up the interior stairs. They nodded respectfully to Sharina but went on with their work. Tadai had sent them ahead with his usual efficiency. He and Waldron were as different as two rich male aristocrats could be—save in their ability and their sense of honor.

  “Shall I close this, your highness?” said a Blood Eagle officer at the door to the Chamber of Art.

  Sharina opened her mouth to agree, then heard Chalcus and Merota calling back to Ilna as they entered the chamber. A recent brick extension continued the outside stairs to the roof. The palace didn’t have a roof garden but Cervoran must’ve found the tiled surface useful, perhaps for viewing the stars.

  “Leave it open,” Sharina said. “In case I need to say something to my friends.”

  “Your highness?” Tadai announced from the door to the foyer. “If you’re ready?”

  “Yes,” said Sharina, settling on a backless stool in front of a table arranged as a barrier between her and the enthusiasm of those who wanted, needed, something from the regent. “Send them in.”

  Three clerks took seats to the right and slightly behind her, ready to write or locate information as needed. All together they probably weren’t the equal of Liane, but Liane was better placed with the army.

  Sharina felt a sudden twist of longing. She hoped Cashel was where the kingdom most needed
him to be also, but she desperately missed his solid presence. Lady, she prayed silently, let my Cashel serve the kingdom as he best can; and let him come back safe to me.

  The first petitioner was a middle-aged female clerk, part of the financial establishment under Tadai. She had a series of cost estimates for damage done in the course of Liane’s lime-burning operation. The figure was astoundingly high—fees for stone, transport, and particularly the fuel which Liane had ordered to be gathered with minimum delay. That meant tearing apart buildings for the roof beams in some cases, and cutting down orchards that would take over a decade to grow back to profitable size.

  Sharina suspected Tadai wanted her to rescind some of Liane’s more drastic measures. Instead she signed off on them. The cost was very high, but the cost of failure would be the lives of every soul in the kingdom. Liane thought speed was of the first importance, and nothing Sharina’d seen made her disagree.

  “Oh, look at this one, Chalcus!” Merota called happily. “It’s a unicorn!”

  Her voice was as high-pitched as Cervoran’s, but Sharina found it as cheerful as birdsong. It wasn’t a surprise to realize that timbre wasn’t why she found the wizard—and his double—unpleasant.

  The second petitioner, an officer with the blue naval crest on the helmet he held under his arm, opened his mouth to speak. In the next room Merota screamed, “Chalcus, I’m—”

  “What’re ye—” the sailor cried. His voice cut off also.

  Sharina was on her feet and through the connecting door, slipping by the guard who’d turned at the shouts. The table she’d bumped with her thigh toppled over behind her.

  Chalcus was a flicker of movement, reaching for something with his left hand and the curved sword raised in his right. She didn’t see Merota, and as Chalcus lunged his body blurred into the tapestry on the wall. Then he was gone also.

  “Ilna!” Sharina shouted, running toward the tapestry. “Ilna, come here!”

  Double stood on the parapet chanting words of power, his face to the sea and his pudgy arms spread out to the sides. He’d thrust an athame from Cervoran’s collection under his sash, an age-blackened blade carved from a tree root, but he wasn’t using it for the spell.

  If there really was a spell. Ilna, standing to the side as Double had ordered her, felt if anything angrier than usual. She couldn’t understand the words the wizard was using—of course—but she did understand patterns. Double’s chant was as purposeless as a snake swallowing its own tail.

  She grinned slightly. Double reminded her of a snake in more ways than that. But if the fact she disliked a person doomed him, the world would have many fewer people in it. It wouldn’t necessarily be a better place, but it’d be quieter.

  From here Ilna could see the waves beyond the harbor mouth. Double’d said they were coming to the roof to do that, to watch the waves, but she suspected that was a lie. Certainly his incantation wasn’t affecting the sunlit water, and yet…

  And yet there was a pattern in the waves. Ilna couldn’t grasp the whole. It was far too complex, for her and perhaps any human being, but it was there. Perhaps she was seeing the work of the Green Woman spreading from the shining fortress on the horizon, but Ilna thought it was greater even than that.

  Ilna’s smile spread a little wider; someone who knew her well might’ve seen the triumph in it. She was glimpsing the fabric of the cosmos in the tops of those few waves. She saw only the hint of the whole, but no one she’d met except her brother Cashel could’ve seen even that. That didn’t make life easier or better or even different, but she granted herself the right to be proud that she almost understood.

  She felt herself sliding deeper into contemplation of the waves, following strands of the cosmos itself. Things became obvious as she viewed them from nearer the source. Double had brought her here: not to work a spell but to trap her the way a clover-filled meadow traps a ewe. The sheep could leave, but the pleasure of her surroundings holds her for a bite, and another bite, and just another—Merota screamed.

  Ilna’s concentration was a knife blade, smooth and clean and sharp. The pattern of the waves and the cosmos was for another time or another person. She jumped from the parapet to the stairs directly below her, though that meant dropping her own height to the bricks. To start down the stairs where they opened onto the roof, she’d have had to go past Double… He stopped chanting, but he didn’t try to restrain her.

  Chalcus called something, his voice blurring with its own echo. He sounded as if he’d stepped into a vast chamber.

  Ilna reached the marble landing and the entrance to the king’s suite; the guards there jumped back to let her by. Her hands were empty. If she needed knife or noose or the cords whose knotted patterns could wrench any animate mind to her will, she would take that weapon out. First she had to learn what the threat was.

  “Ilna!” shouted Sharina. “Ilna, come here!”

  The entrance to the room where Cervoran did his wizardry was by a full-length window. The casement was open. Ilna stepped through, looking not at Sharina but to the tapestry on which Sharina’s eyes were focused.

  It was a panel as tall as she was and half again as long. Warp and weft both were silk; they’d been woven with a sort of soulless perfection.

  Normally a room’s rugs or hangings would’ve been the first thing Ilna examined, but this piece had been an exception. Bad workmanship merely made her angry, but the coldness of this undoubtedly artful tapestry had caused her to avoid it the way she would’ve stepped around the silvery pustulence of a long-dead fish.

  If she’d looked at the panel carefully, Chalcus and Merota might be at her side right now. If.

  Sharina and some soldiers were speaking, explaining that the child and Chalcus had vanished into the tapestry. Ilna ignored them, concentrating instead on the fabric itself.

  The design was of a garden maze seen from three-quarters above. Greens and black shaded almost imperceptibly into one another, just as foliage and stems do in a real hedge. There were fanciful animals: here a cat with a hawk’s head, there a serpentine creature covered in glittering blue scales, many others. They were what Double had sent Chalcus and Merota to count, but Ilna realized that they didn’t really matter. What mattered was—The maze had no exit: the outer wall formed a solid cartouche around the whole. The inner hedges twisted and bent, creating junctions and dead ends which seemed to blur from one state to the other as Ilna shifted her attention. In the center was a lake fed by tiny streams that zigzagged from the corners of the fabric; in the lake was an island, reached by a fog-shrouded bridge; and on the island was a circular temple whose roof was a golden dome with a hole in the middle.

  But the temple was only the end. Ilna needed the beginning, and she found it in the shape of the hedges. Their twists gripped the mind and souls of those who looked hard at the tapestry, making them part of its fabric. Ilna could’ve stepped back, but she knew now what had happened to her family, her real family, and she had no choice but to join them.

  “Double, what do you know about this?” Sharina shouted in the near distance. “Chalcus and Lady Merota walked into the wall! I saw it happen!”

  “Why do you ask me?” said the wizard’s double, a wizard itself.

  Ilna had no time for Double at the moment. He’d laid a clever snare. He’d known he couldn’t catch her in it, but he’d known also that she’d follow those she loved. Loved more than life, some would say, but Ilna’d never loved life for its own sake.

  She saw the pattern. She took a step forward, not in the flesh but between worlds that touched at a level beyond sight.

  “Ilna!” Sharina said.

  As Ilna’s fingers brushed the prickly branches of densely-woven yew, she heard the wizard pipe from a great distance, “I was Double. Now I am Cervoran.”

  And then very faintly, “I will be God!”

  Garric remembered how depressing he’d found this land when he first arrived in the rain. It was raining again, generally a drizzle but off and on
big drops slashed across the marsh. Nonetheless his spirits were as high as he ever remembered them being.

  He laughed and said, “Donria, we’re free. That’s better than being an animal on somebody’s farm in sunlight, even if we’re kept as pets rather than future dinners.”

  Donria gave him a doubtful smile, then looked at the Bird fluttering from stump to branch ahead of them as a bright moving road sign. “Where are we going, Garric?” she asked.

  “We are returning to Wandalo’s village where Garric has friends,” the Bird said in its dry mental voice. “The Coerli will track us, but not soon. Smoke blunts their sense of smell and anyway, fire disconcerts them. It will be days before they pursue.”

  And what next? Garric thought, suddenly feeling the weight of the future again. It’d felt so good to escape that he hadn’t been thinking ahead.

  A tree had fallen beside the route the Bird was choosing. A dozen spiky knee-high saplings sprang from its trunk. As Garric trotted past, he became less sure that it wasn’t simply a tree which grew on the ground and sent its branches upward. Several blobs—frogs? Insects?—slid from the bole into the water. If they hadn’t moved, Garric would’ve thought they were bumps on the bark.

  “Bird?” Garric said aloud. “Where do you come from?”

  “I come from here, Garric,” the Bird said. “My people are coeval with the land itself, created when the rocks crystallized from magma. We lived in a bubble in the rock, all of us together. When the rock split after more ages than you can imagine, we continued to live in what was now a cave. We could have spread out but we did not, because that would have meant being separated from our fellows.”

  He laughed, the audible clucking sound Garric had heard before. It sounded like a death rattle in this misty wilderness.

  “Was the cave near here?” asked Garric. He didn’t care about the answer; he’d spoken instinctively because of the sudden rise in emotional temperature. He was asking what he hoped was a neutral question to give the Bird the opportunity to change the subject. Garric would’ve done the same out of politeness if he were speaking to a human being he didn’t know well.