The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  Ilna glanced at the sun. At this season—late summer, judging by what was in flower—it should be about the second hour of the afternoon.

  It’d been about the second hour of the afternoon when the three of them arrived in the garden, quite a while ago. She glanced at Chalcus.

  “Aye,” he said. “Not a bad time of day as such things go, though I might’ve chosen a later hour if I’d been asked. At least—”

  He smiled to make the bald truth sound like a jest.

  “—we needn’t worry about things creeping up on us in the darkness, eh?”

  He turned and jabbed his left hand into the hedge behind him with the speed of a striking cat. Quick as the sailor was—and Ilna had never seen a man quicker—his fist closed on air; the slender brown figure melted like liquid through the holly branches.

  Chalcus sighed and drew back his hand. The spiky leaf-tips had clawed narrow trails the length of his forearm, but he hadn’t jabbed the end of a twig through himself.

  “Master Chalcus, what would you have done with it if you had caught it?” Ilna asked tartly. “I’m certainly not that hungry.”

  “Asked the little fellow some questions, is all, dear heart,” Chalcus said. He gave her a broad grin and added, “And to be truthful as behooves the honest sailor that I am today, it gripes my soul that the little demons think they can snoop and scamper and spy on us and we can do nothing to let or hinder them.”

  “Can they really do that, Chalcus?” Merota said doubtfully.

  “They can indeed, my darling girl,” said the sailor. “Did I not just prove it?”

  Ilna took a few steps out into the narrow meadow, looking about her. The vegetation was soft enough to make a good couch, but her bare toes squished water up from the soil. They’d best find a drier spot to rest.

  “There’s one!” called Merota, pointing with her right forefinger. A brown figure quivered from the east side of the meadow to the shaded hedge on the west, merging the holly as easily as the breeze that faintly ruffled the garden.

  Ilna made a sour face. The little people were harmless, but so were the midges fluttering around her face and landing at the edges of her eyes. The insects tickled and distracted her. If there’d been a way to make them all vanish, she’d have—The little brown man screamed like a leg-snared rabbit. He tried to leap back into the meadow, but the shadowed interior of the hedge closed about him. He screamed again, but faintly. His body was becoming misty. He turned his large eyes on Ilna in a look of desperate entreaty—What does he think that I can do to help?”

  —and faded completely away. For a moment Ilna thought she saw the little man’s bones, as delicate as those of a dead goat picked clean by ants; then the skeleton too vanished. The knotted stems of the holly remained unchanged.

  A cat the size of a horse stalked into the meadow from the aisle at the other end. Gossamer wings were folded tightly on its back; they were marked like oil-patterned paper and gave the impression of being feathered.

  Growing from the cat’s neck were a pair of viper heads on an arm’s length of serpent body. They looked small compared to the cat, but Ilna didn’t recall ever seeing another snake as big as these were.

  Her fingers were knotting a pattern that instinct told her would be effective. She brought her hands up. The great cat spread a wing before its eyes. Soft pastel smudges distorted the creature’s appearance to Ilna’s eyes, and and they would also distort the effect of Ilna’s pattern of mastery.

  “Wait!” the cat said in a deep rumble. “I have no quarrel with Princes! If you wish to hunt in this meadow, you’re welcome to it. Though—”

  It sounded not so much hostile as aggrieved.

  “—it’s been part of my territory since the One brought me here.”

  “It’s not hunting we’re after doing, friend cat,” said Chalcus in a lilting challenge. The dagger in his left hand drew fanciful little curlicues in the air. The glitter of the point drew an opponent’s eye away from the sword in his right, rock steady and ready to thrust. “But it’s not prey that we are either, do you see?”

  “I think he’s a chimaera, Chalcus,” Merota said in a tiny schoolgirl voice. She was terrified and therefore going back to the routines of normalcy, of tutors and knowledge from books. “Only not exactly.”

  “I know you’re not Prey,” the cat—the chimaera?—said with a touch of irritation. “I’ll back away and leave the meadow to you, if you like. What could be clearer than that?”

  “Wait,” said Ilna, folding the knotted fabric into her left hand. She walked forward, past where Chalcus had stationed himself. He frowned but wisely held his tongue. “If you’ve lived here for a time, then you can answer a question.”

  For an instant she’d been considering ways to modify her fabric so that the effect would pass the creature’s veiling wing. That was merely a competitive reflex, a desire to prove to the chimaera that it couldn’t escape Ilna os-Kenset by a trick like that.

  And perhaps it couldn’t, but life had brought Ilna enough real enemies that she didn’t need to fight something which didn’t want to fight her. The chimaera was ugly and probably dangerous if it wanted to be, but if it didn’t threaten her or hers, then it could live or die without Ilna’s involvement.

  “Perhaps,” the chimaera said. “We Princes owe one another courtesy. For the sake of quiet lives, if nothing else.”

  It partially folded its wing. Ilna wondered if the creature could really fly. Was it possible to fly out of the tapestry?

  “One of the little people just ran into the hedge there,” she said, gesturing—not quite pointing—with her left hand. She kept her eyes on the great beast.

  “Yes, the Prey,” the chimaera said. “Are you having trouble catching them? I’ll willingly help fellow Princes, of course.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Ilna said. Her voice sounded grim in her own ears; but then, it generally did. “What concerns me is that the little man vanished. Seemed to dissolve. There was nothing there that I could see, but…” She shrugged.

  “Ah!” said the chimaera. Its head jerked toward where Ilna indicated, and it started sideways into the opposite hedge. “Ah. You saw that, did you? Well, it’s safe enough now. It doesn’t stay around after it’s fed… or it doesn’t seem to, anyway.”

  “Yes, but what was it?” Ilna said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice but not succeeding especially well. “I didn’t see anything, just the man disappearing.”

  “We call it the Shadow,” said the chimaera, “but…”

  The big creature made a rumbling sound deep in its chest, apparently the equivalent of a man clearing his throat before he was ready to speak.

  “It never comes for Princes,” the chimaera went on, “or almost never. But most of us, certainly myself… we prefer not to use the name. Sometimes you call something to yourself by naming it, you know. Or they say so.”

  “They say a lot of things,” said Ilna tartly, but her irritation was more at the situation than this great cat’s fearful mumbling. “Is the—”

  She waved her left hand in a quick circle. Using the word ‘Shadow’ wasn’t going to help in getting information from the cat; and anyway, the concern might be correct. She knew very little about this place, and she knew nothing about the Shadow save that she didn’t want to meet it. There was no point in using a name that could be harmful to herself and her friends.

  “—darkness, whatever, it is—is it a wizard, then? Did it make this place?”

  “It?” the chimaera said. “Oh, certainly not. The One created the Garden and placed us in it. The other that you refer is a resident like the rest of us Princes. Like yourselves, that is.”

  “Not, I think,” said Chalcus, “like ourselves; but we’ll let that pass. Is there a way out of this garden, friend cat?”

  “Out?” the chimaera repeated in a puzzled tone. “Why, no. The One sealed the Garden for his perfect pleasure, or so they say. Anyway, why would you want to leave it? The weathe
r is perfect and there’s plenty of Prey. It’s a paradise.”

  “Chalcus?” Merota said primly, her hands folded before her. “Ilna? I don’t like the way he talks.”

  Then the child cried, “They aren’t Prey, they’re people! Real little people!”

  “Yes,” said Ilna. “I think they are too. Master Chimaera, you said you were leaving when I called you back. I won’t trouble you further.”

  “Well, you know that I have just as much right to—” the creature said.

  Chalcus stepped in front of Ilna, his blades out. Her fingers were knotting yarn, visualizing the shimmer of the wing in her mind’s eye and shifting the sequence of her fabric in ways that only she could understand. Even her understanding was at the muscle level, not in her conscious mind.

  “All right!” cried the chimaera. Its hind legs hunched as it turned, then launched itself into the air. Its gossamer vans spread and stroked, driving a gust backward. The great creature vanished over the tops of the hedges.

  “This garden isn’t so bad a place,” said Chalcus judiciously. “But barring present company, I don’t much care for the neighbors I’m sharing it with. I’ll be glad when you find us a way out, dear heart.”

  “Yes,” said Ilna. “So will I.”

  Her nostrils flared as she breathed out. “So will I!” she repeated.

  Cashel held Protas and his quarterstaff firmly as the void coalesced into a world beneath their feet again. He looked around quickly. Midges rose in a cloud from black water. They’d come from an upland forest to a swamp.

  Cashel sniffed: a tidal swamp. The air had a salty sharpness in addition to the usual smell of decay.

  The air was also full of the midges. He’d breathed in a flock of them, and he’d doubtless breathe more before he was gone from this place. They tickled the back of his throat but at least they didn’t seem to be the biting kind.

  “There isn’t anywhere we can go, Cashel,” Protas said, taking his hand down from the topaz crown. “It’s all mud and water. Do you think a boat will come for us?”

  A boat couldn’t through this, Cashel thought. Cattails grew all about, but he could see the roots spreading over the surface of the mud. There’s not a hand’s breadth of water in any direction from us.

  Aloud he said, “We may have to get muddy, Protas. You’d best take your slippers off now, because—”

  A figure came through the cattails toward them. Rose up from the cattails, it seemed to Cashel, though the fellow was hunched and maybe could’ve walked this close unnoticed. Not really—but Cashel could tell himself it might’ve happened.

  “You’re the ones with the gem,” the fellow said. He raised a lens of rock crystal in a gold frame and through it studied first Cashel, then Protas and the topaz. “I’m to guide you to the next stage. Yes, I am…”

  He was a little fellow with no hat and a head that’d been shaved bald except for a thin circle of fine brown hair just above his ears. He carried a heavy book in his left hand; it had a medallion on the spine and iron clasps to lock the covers closed. His jaw was long, too long for a man’s, and the nostrils in his little flat nose were perfectly round.

  Cashel cleared his throat. “Ah,” he said, “we’re pleased to meet you. I’m Cashel and that’s Prince Protas.”

  “Yes,” said their guide. He wore a fine red robe with sleeves, though the hem was muddy as any garment must get in this place. Over it was a cape of gray satin covered with sequins. “Protas. And the gem.”

  His eye, swollen through the crystal lens, focused again on the boy. “So, Prince,” he said softly, drawing out the ess sounds in a way Cashel didn’t like. “You have the gem; do you know how to use it?”

  “I’m not here to use it, sir,” Protas said. He spoke calmly but he stood very straight at Cashel’s side. “Master Cashel and I are carrying the amulet to where we’re going, and I don’t believe we’ve yet reached that place.”

  “Believe what you want, boy!” their guide said with a nervous titter. “Things are or they aren’t regardless of what you believe; and sometimes they are and they aren’t.‘

  “Time to be going, I’d judge,” Cashel said. He didn’t say how he judged that: it was by deciding that every heartbeat of time he spent in this place was one longer than he’d have been here if he’d had his choice. The sky was blue and clear, but thick fog had wrapped his mind ever since he and Protas arrived.

  “Do you think you can give me orders because you’re a big man?” their rat-faced guide said, slipping into anger with the suddenness of an icicle cracking off the slates in winter.

  “You’re here to guide us,” said Cashel, adjusting his hands slightly. “If you’re not willing to do your job, then just say so and point us the direction we’re to go. But you’re not much of a man if you do that.”

  “Not a man?” said their guide. He gave out a screeching sound. Cashel recognized it as laughter, but not until his hands had tightened on the staff. “Not a man, do you think? Well, perhaps so, but I’ll guide you nonetheless.”

  He walked past them, splashing in the muddy water. From behind Cashel saw that the fellow’s back had been cut open, likely with an axe. The ends of the ribs stuck out the gash. Inside, the organs pulsed in a general red mess, but a loop of sliced intestine oozed black liquid in a smear down the lower part of the cloak.

  Protas walked straight off after their guide. His eyes were glazed in the short glimpse Cashel got of the boy’s face, but he didn’t hesitate. Two steps into the swamp, he’d lost both of his fine slippers with the toes curled up in tassels.

  Cashel reached down and retrieved them even before Protas realized the mud had pulled them off. He sloshed them through a tongue of deeper water that reached up toward the ankle-deep path they were following, then handed them back to the boy.

  “Oh!” said Protas when he realized what Cashel was reaching over his shoulder to give him. He took the slippers and said in embarrassment, “I’m sorry, Cashel. I forgot what you said.”

  “Keep them for later,” Cashel said. “I don’t think they’d do much good in this mud anyway.”

  “Cashel?” said the boy without turning around again. “Did we die? Is this the Underworld where we’re being punished for our sins?”

  “I don’t think so, Protas,” Cashel said. “But I’ll be glad to be another place too.”

  “So you say!” said their guide, turning his narrow rat face to look back over his shoulder at them. “So you say, as though you knew already where you were going.”

  He laughed, not in a nice way. “But maybe you’re right at that,” he added. “No matter what place it is you’re going to!”

  The cattails to the left of the path shuddered. Cashel eyed them as he strode past. Something smooth and rounded rose through the black water. A bubble, he thought; the mud belching out decay.

  It continued to rise, gray and gleaming above the surface: a huge fish, its head alone the size of a brood sow. The bulging eyes stared at Cashel with a malevolence that he thought was more than his imagination. He shifted his staff slightly as he passed, but the fish remained where it was: half out of the mere, but only half.

  “Follow me and you won’t be harmed,” the guide said. “Unless I’ve made a mistake, of course.”

  It sounded to Cashel like the fellow was taunting them instead of being reassuring. This wasn’t a place for a decent man to be. Whatever their guide had started as, living here for a long time would make the best man peevish.

  “Carry out your duties, Master Guide,” said Protas in the haughty tone Cashel’d heard from him before when he was afraid. “We understood there’d be risk in our undertakings.”

  The cattails were behind them. Nearabout in all directions were sloughs of dark water and mudflats mottled with slimy green algae. The only other plants were ferns whose fronds curled to knee height like feathers. Many of them were a deep maroon. On the horizon were mountains, but in this steam-hazed air Cashel couldn’t guess how far away they were.r />
  He looked behind. On bare ground their footprints were filling with water and smudging away even as he watched. When they’d stepped in the black water, they’d swirled the mud beneath, but that was settling as quickly.

  Eyes watched them. Sometimes Cashel could see the head and back of the fish also, sometimes not.

  He turned and cleared his throat. “Protas?” he said. “I have some bread and cheese in my wallet, and there’s a bottle of ale besides. Would you like something to eat?”

  This wasn’t a good place for it, but none of the places they’d been were any better. They’d been a long time since standing in the room with Cervoran, and Cashel didn’t know when the boy’d last eaten anyway.

  “I’m not hungry, Cashel,” Protas said carefully. “But, ah, thank you.”

  He’s scared to death but too much a man to say so, Cashel thought, smiling inside. Aloud he said, “Well, maybe later then, after we’ve gotten where we’re going.”

  Then because it was his nature, he added, “Ah, Master Guide? Would you care for something yourself? It’s coarse fare, but it keeps me going on the road, I’ve found.”

  “Eat your food?” the fellow said, turning his long face with a sneer. “No, not that. But perhaps you’d like to share my meals? Shall I offer you that? That would be in keeping with my obligation as your fellow man, wouldn’t it? Shall I offer you food?”

  “Carry out your duties, sirrah!” Protas said sharply. “We want no more of you than that!”

  There was a deep rumble through the ground, then in the air as well. The surface of the water ahead of them puckered. Their guide stopped, his face frozen into a half-snarl.

  “Come along!” he said, splashing onward at a quicker pace than before. His feet left narrower tracks than those of Protas following behind him, though the mud was so soft that Cashel couldn’t be sure of the details.

  “What’s that sound?” said Protas. “Is it thunder?”

  A second shock trembled across the landscape ahead of them. This time the ground lifted ankle high, whipping the ferns violently. A line of shattered white foam burst over the water.