by David Drake
Folquin shouted angrily. The guards relaxing against the palace wall leaped to their feet. Most ran toward Sharina, but one in flustered excitement started to string his bow.
Cashel moved without a word or wasted motion. His great hands caught Zahag's forearms, squeezing hard so that the ape couldn't tighten his own grip. Zahag released Sharina and tried to bite Cashel's hand. Cashel snapped his arms apart, still holding the ape. Zahag raked Cashel's belly with the stubby claws on his feet
The ape was frothing with rage; most of the spectators added their voices to the cacophony. Halphemos stood aside, chanting a spell with his eyes on the struggle. His athame beat the air. The wizard's mouth twisted to form ancient syllables; his face was pale.
Guards pushed through the crowd with their short, hook-bladed swords drawn. The leader's helmet had an erne-feather crest. Sharina stepped into their path, her hands raised. “Don't!” she cried. “Let Cashel handle it!”
She knew Cashel could hold Zahag until the ape's fury burned itself out. If nervous swordsmen got involved, there was no telling what would happen.
“Get out of the way!” the leader of the guards shouted, trying to thrust Sharina aside. She grappled with him, twisting his sword arm back. His brass helmet fell to the ground. The folk of Pandah were slightly built, and Sharina had fear as well as her native strength to aid her.
One guard dropped his sword and tried to pull Sharina away from his leader. The others hesitated, unwilling to act in a situation so confused.
Cashel raised Zahag overhead. He flexed to hurl the ape into the wall of the palace. Zahag was much stronger than a man of his size. He'd gotten a grip on Cashel's right wrist and wouldn't be shaken off. Cashel grunted and stepped toward the building, preparing to flail Zahag to jelly when he couldn't simply throw the ape.
“Meueripuripeganux!” Halphemos cried in the sudden stillness. His athame pointed.
The air surrounding Cashel and Zahag shimmered with a soap-bubble iridescence, then flashed red. Ape, man, and a section of the packed clay beneath Cashel's feet vanished.
Sharina and the gaping guards stepped apart. She looked at Halphemos in disbelief.
Halphemos stared horrified at the empty air. “I didn't do that!” he said. “By the Lady, I was just binding them!”
Behind Halphemos the tattooed woman stood up. The ball of her bare foot wiped out the signs she'd drawn on the ground. She walked away while everyone about her babbled in wonder.
The tenement where Ilna had a suite was so flimsily built that its foundations supported three stories rather the two to which walls of normal solidity would have limited the structure. Her rooms—one for her looms, the other for the normal business of life—were on the top floor. The roof above them didn't leak, and Ilna didn't consider that avoiding a walk up stairs was worth paying money for.
The walls and floor of Ilna's rooms were spotlessly clean for the first time in their existence: literally clean enough to eat from. The process had taken her a day and a half of scrubbing, and the odor of the lye she'd used still clung to the plaster.
Ilna thought about the past as her shuttle clattered back and forth across the double loom. She was weaving a thin fabric two ells across. It could be hung in the hall of a mansion—or over the light well of a tenement like this one. She hadn't decided which it would be: an object for sale to a noble who'd pay well for the benison the fabric brought his household, or a gift to some hundreds of people she didn't know and whose willingness to accept squalor disgusted her.
A debt was a debt, whether or not you liked or respected the creditor. The harm Ilna had done with her love charms had touched, directly or indirectly, every person in Erdin. The only present question was whether money or a gift in kind was a better means of repayment.
Ilna didn't think about the future. The past and the sores on her heart were bad enough.
Her instinct pressed the treadle to lift this or that grouping of warp threads into a shed for each pass of the shuttle. Because her mind was on the ship carrying Garric away from her, it was some moments before the subtle details of the pattern she wove reached her consciousness.
Ilna stopped, then ran her fingers over the closely woven cloth. The past, present, and future of the cosmos were a single fabric; and since Ilna os-Kenset came back from Hell, there was no pattern whose knots were hidden from her.
She snorted. During, the days she'd been living in the Crescent, she'd managed to convince herself that people were better than she knew full well they were in reality. She'd still taken precautions, of course.
Ilna got up from the loom and put on a cape of dull blue wool. She'd woven the fabric herself; it had the consistency of warm milk. She took the noose made of the fine silk from its peg and concealed it under the cape. In a sense using silk for the purpose was a luxury, but Ilna had never been one to skimp on tools.
The windows were simply openings in the wall. Ilna didn't close and bar the shutters before she went out. The only reason she bothered to lock the door with its two-pin key was that it would seem suspicious if she didn't.
The tenement covered a square block with a light well in the center. There was a staircase in each corner, though the landings were usually choked with refuse.
A boy of ten or twelve loitered in the grubby hallway as Ilna locked her door. The rag wrapped over the boil on his left elbow had been filthy to begin with; now it was a mass of yellowish crystallized pus.
Ilna pretended to ignore the lookout as she strode to the nearer of the two stairwells. She was barely out of sight before she heard him give a piercing whistle.
The staircase was dank and stinking. Children played on it, shrieking excitedly as they jumped up and down over the gap where a tread was missing. They seemed happy enough, though Ilna couldn't imagine why.
Instead of going down to street level, Ilna got out on the second floor and walked to the stairs at the opposite end of the corridor. The passage had no windows of its own and most of the doors to either side were closed. It was like walking through a tunnel, lighted only by the glimmers around warped panels.
A couple were fondling on the landing. The man cursed as Ilna pushed by, climbing back to her own floor. She ignored them the way she ignored the excrement dried on the walls.
Ilna could change the world; she was doing so to the best of her considerable ability. But she couldn't change it all, and she couldn't change it all at once.
She stepped out into the corridor. Her door had been smashed open. The boy with the running sore stood beside the doorway, staring intently toward the stairwell by which Ilna had left. All the other doors on the hallway were shut: her neighbors were making sure that they saw nothing.
Ilna walked softly down the hall. The boy must still have heard the whisper of her bare foot on the boards, because he started to turn as her noose settled around his neck.
Ilna jerked the boy to her, choking the shout in his throat. With the free end of the rope she lashed his wrists and ankles together as though she were trussing a rabbit for market. The boy's eyes were terrified. His face was turning red, but he could still breathe if he pulled his head back to get a little slack in the noose.
Ilna touched an index finger to her lips in warning. Then she stepped to the door of her room.
One of the two husky men inside had his arms full of Ilna’s yarn, two wicker hampers with loose-fitting tops. The other stood at the head of the double loom and said, “No, we'll get a lot more for this but we gotta get it apart—”
He saw Ilna in the doorway. “Sister take that useless kid!” he snarled. He pulled a cudgel from beneath his broad leather belt and started for her.
Ilna tugged the cord on the doorjamb, releasing the net of fine silk she'd fastened to the ceiling. It drifted over the thieves like mist on a meadow. Ilna stepped back.
“Sister bite your heart out!” cried the man as he swung his cudgel. The weapon tangled in the meshes, drawing other parts of the net closer about his head and shoulders.
A sword would have done much the same: only the very keenest of blades could have cut the elastic fabric instead of being cocooned by it.
The men struggled like locusts caught in a spider's web. After a few moments, both of them fell over.
Ilna reached in carefully and drew out the cudgel which the owner had dropped when he tried to pull the net apart with both hands. He might as profitably have attempted to lift the building. Indeed, he was more likely to pick up this shoddy structure than he was to tear a net Ilna had woven...
“You came for my property,” Ilna said, looking down on her captives in cold amusement. “And you're going to leave with some of it: the net. I want you to crawl to the window together and jump out.”
“You stupid bitch!” snarled one of the men. “You'd better let us go or—”
Ilna rapped him on the forehead with his own cudgel. The seasoned oak toonked like a maul driving a wedge.
The man's eyes rolled up in their sockets. His body went as limp as an empty sack.
The blow had opened a pressure cut in the man's forehead. Ilna glanced with distaste at the blood on the cudgel, then said to the remaining thief, “All right, you'll carry your friend to the window and jump out with him. If you're skillful, you may be able to cushion your own fall. Understood?”
“Shepherd guard me!” the man whispered with his eyes shut. “Shepherd guard me!”
He maneuvered carefully onto his knees and managed to lift his companion. Ilna judiciously plucked individual meshes away from where they were tangled, choosing each time the point that would have held the thief as he shuffled to the window.
He balanced his companion on the narrow ledge and looked back. “Up and over,” Ilna said pleasantly.
It was the expression on her face rather than the waggling cudgel which broke the would-be thief. He lurched forward and disappeared with a despairing cry. Ilna tossed the cudgel after him.
She walked to the doorway, straightening items disarranged by the thieves or their capture. If she'd given them a few minutes more, they'd probably have managed to break the frame of the big loom. Well, it could have been repaired.
Several of the doors on the hallway were open. Heads ducked back when Ilna stepped out, but one frumpish woman continued working at the knots which held the lookout.
“Get away before you manage to strangle him,” Ilna snapped. The boy's face was close to purple now.
The woman looked up. “You can't do this to Maidus!” she said. “He's my nephew!”
“Get back into your filthy sty or I'll do a great deal worse to you,” Ilna said with a smile as cold as a winter gale.
The woman flinched. She didn't move when Ilna lifted the boy to her shoulder like a sack of grain and carried him, head hanging down behind her to lessen the noose's tension, to her own room.
Ilna loosed the knots as swiftly as she'd tied them, then slipped the noose and coiled the rope in readiness for any further use. The boy, Maidus, lay sobbing on her floor, massaging his throat with his right hand.
A slotted wooden box in the other room kept flies from Ilna’s food. She took out the flask of cheap wine she used for sauces and the bone-hilted knife she used for household tasks. With them she returned to the boy.
Maidus squealed in terror as Ilna put a swatch of coarse fabric under his left elbow for a pad. “This is going to hurt,” she said as she cut away the foul bandage. She flipped it out the window on the knife point. “Hold still or it'll hurt more.”
“What're you—” the boy said. Ilna gripped his arm above and below the elbow, then squeezed the boil empty with the even pressure of both thumbs.
Maidus gaped at her. He didn't scream though, rather to her surprise. She mopped the skin around the boil with a clean corner of the pad. The mass of congealed pus had left a flat-bottomed pit as wide as a fingernail and deep in the boy's flesh.
“This will hurt too,” Ilna said. She dribbled acid wine into the wound. Maidus began to whimper. He patted at his tears with his free hand.
Working methodically, Ilna packed the boil with a roll of thin fabric. She left a tag hanging out, then bandaged the work with a ribbon she'd woven in a pattern that would speed healing. She had to search for it; the thieves had jumbled her belongings in a fashion that would take her an hour to reorganize.
Ilna stepped away. “You can get up now, Maidus,” she said. “Go home, I suppose. Come back in three days and I'll jerk the tape out.”
She smiled at the look in the boy's eyes. “Yes, that'll hurt too,” she said “But it'll keep the boil from returning. This is one of those times when the hard way is really best.”
Maidus stood up cautiously. There were voices in the hallway, neighbors speaking to one another in frightened whispers. “We didn't know you were a wizard, mistress,” he said to Ilna.
“You don't know it now!” she replied. “But I hope your friends and all their friends realize Ilna os-Kenset isn't to be trifled with.”
She sniffed. “And I suggest in the future you keep away from those two louts,” she added. “Their incompetence should bother you even if their dishonesty doesn't.”
Maidus nodded. He glanced toward the door. “I can...?” he said.
“Yes, you can go,” Ilna snapped. “But I could use someone to run errands occasionally. If you'd care to do that, come see me in the morning.”
“Yes, mistress!” the boy said as he sprinted into the hallway.
“It won't pay very much!” Ilna called after him.
She picked up her door panel, considering the best way to hang it for the time being until she could get a carpenter to replace the hinges.
Not the whole world, and not all at once; but she was making changes.
The 11th of Heron
The moon should've been in its third quarter, not full as Cashel saw it above him when he opened his eyes. It shouldn't have been night anyway, though from the way Cashel felt he was willing to believe he'd been unconscious for a dozen hours.
He got carefully to his feet. Toads shrilled merrily. He grinned. They couldn't carry a tune any better than he could: toads, seagulls, and Cashel or-Kenset. Toads were a familiar sound, and in the near distance he heard the rattling grunt of a pig frog just like the ones in the marshes south of Barca's Hamlet.
Cashel looked at the night sky. The stars weren't quite right either. It was still spring—a thousand things told him that, from insect sounds to the feel of the wind—but the Tongs were already above the southern horizon.
If Cashel'd had his quarterstaff, he'd have rubbed the hickory just for the feel of it. He didn't, and he didn't guess it really mattered.
Something moved nearby among the low trees. Cashel turned to face the sound, hunching forward slightly. His arms were spread. “Whoever's there better greet me like a man, or I'll think I've got vermin to deal with,” he rumbled.
“I was checking you were all right,” Zahag's guttural voice claimed. “You've come around, then?”
“Come out where I can see you,” Cashel ordered, relaxing somewhat as he straightened. He didn't have much reason to like the talking ape, but Zahag wasn't anything for Cashel to fear. He'd be a familiar face, though an ugly one.
“She nearly tore my arms and legs off, whirling us here,” Zahag complained as he sidled into full view. He was on all fours and obviously ready to bolt for the trees if Cashel wanted to renew the fight.
“You don't have to worry,” Cashel said with a degree of scorn. “It wasn't me started things in the first place. But my oath on the Shepherd, ape: you throw one of your hissies again and I won't half hurt you.”
“'You don't need to show your teeth,” Zahag said gloomily. “I'd been around humans too long and I forgot how to behave with real people.”
He scratched himself in the middle of the back. Cashel blinked; it wasn't just the length of Zahag's arms but also the extra range of motion in the joints that made the maneuver possible.
“I wish I were back on Sirimat,” the ape said. “I wish I w
ere back the way I was before Halphemos made me talk.”
Cashel worked his shoulders to loosen them. He felt as though all his limbs had been stretched. “Do you know where we are?” he asked quietly.
“Oh, this is still Pandah,” Zahag said, squatting at Cashel's feet. “The shoreline's the same and the crayfish taste the same. The city's moved to the other side of the harbor, though, and the stars aren't right.”
He put his long, unexpectedly soft hand on the inside of Cashel's knee. In a human, it would have been a gesture of pleading. Very likely it was the same in an ape. “I didn't want to let the people here see me till you'd come around,” Zahag said. “See, I've brought you food already.”
He swept up the handful of fruit and crayfish which had been left on a flat rock nearby. Cashel hadn't paid them any attention when he surveyed his surroundings. The crustaceans still twitched their tails, but they couldn't escape because the ape had plucked their legs off.
“Please,” Zahag said. “Can I join your band?”
“It's a pretty small band,” Cashel said. He wondered how he was going to find Sharina. He didn't doubt he would, he just wasn't sure how. “Sure, I'd be glad of your company. If you behave yourself.”
The ape made a hollow hoop! hoop! deep in his throat. He pointed toward the opposite jaw of the land, outlined by the moonlit froth of waves. “That's where the city is now,” he said.
“We'll wait till morning,” Cashel said. “It's not polite to call on people at this time of night.”
He thought back to one of the first things Zahag had said. “What did you mean about her 'whirling us here'?” he asked. “Do you know how this happened to us?”
“Oh, that was Silya,” Zahag said. He twisted a sapling until the fibers tore between his hands with a loud crackle. Cashel could have done the same, but it was a reminder of how strong the ape was. “She's the wizard from Dalopo who's been hanging around the palace the past ten days.”