by David Drake
“As the child grew older,” Tayuta said, “we saw her sometimes on top of the tower. At first with one of the Scaled Men, but more recently alone.”
“Nowadays she comes out very rarely,” Sosia said. “I saw her today, but only for a moment. I'm afraid that after today I'll never see my daughter again.”
A tremble broke through Sosia's wall of control, though she didn't let emotion wholly defeat her. Ilna would understand this woman...
And with that realization, Cashel understood Sosia as well.
“I'd help you if I could,” he said. “But mistress, I don't know what I can do. I'd—”
He turned up his big hands. “Mistress, if it was a demon to fight, I'd, well, I've done that. But I can't wrestle a fire.”
“You spun your wand,” Tayuta said, her eyes focused on a memory. “I saw you in the water of my bowl. Your wand carved a path through the wall of fire. It closed behind you and I could see no more.”
“A wand?” Cashel said in surprise. “Do you mean my quarterstaff? But I don't have it with me here, it's back with Sharina.”
He frowned. Had it been lost when the Lady of Mercy disappeared?
He was shocked to realize that he was more concerned about a piece of wood than he was for Sharina and his other friends, but he was sure they would be all right. The staff was a thing he'd shaped himself when he was only a boy; and in a real sense, creating that solid tool was also the creation of a man named Cashel or-Kenset.
Zahag fluttered his lips in mockery. “Do you think they don't have trees on Pandah big enough for you to wave?” the ape said to Cashel. “Use the mast of a ship, then! That ought to be your size, shouldn't it?”
The women looked at one another. The handmaid who'd run out of the room had returned, her eyes dry though a little reddened.
“Oh,” said Cashel. “I didn't think of that. There'd be a flagstaff that balances right, I guess. Sure.”
He laced his fingers together and hunched his shoulders, loosening his muscles for use. “Well, mistress,” Cashel said, “I'll try what I can do.”
He wondered whether this Ilmed would be in the tower or just the princess alone. A fellow who'd steal a little baby, well, he deserved whatever happened to him, didn't he?
Zahag scrambled back in sudden fear as he saw the expression on Cashel's face.
The guard rattled back the sliding door for Sharina, causing the two prisoners within to blink in the light of the setting sun. The prison's pair of tiny windows were in the east wall, behind the men.
“There he is, mistress,” the guard said. “The other one's old Demito. Watch out that he don't upchuck last night's wine on you. He's usually lost it by this time of the morning.”
“Mistress Sharina?” Halphemos said in surprise. “Oh, you shouldn't have come here, mistress. This is a foul place.”
And so it was, though Sharina had seen worse. A girl brought up in a country hamlet doesn't get squeamish about filth, at least not after she's helped butcher a hog for the first time. She ducked her head and stepped inside.
The prison was a brick shed whose interior had been dug down several feet to rock. A stone bench ran the length of the long side opposite me door. There were leg irons in the floor and manacles set into the wall above the bench.
“Mostly we just get sailors from the foreign ships,” the guard said apologetically. “Local people, they work off their crime to the victim. Or they're chopped, of course, if it was a man-killing and they can't pay the fine.”
The prisoners—a drunk sagging against one end wall and Halphemos on the other—sat on the bench. Their left wrists were clamped to the wall and both ankles hobbled to the floor. They could feed themselves with their free hands, but their only possible movement was to slide a few inches to one side or the other along the bench.
“Master Halphemos,” Sharina said in a cool voice, “your friend Cerix has sent you a scroll of hymns to the Lady. I suggest you use it while I share a skin of wine with your warder. He's kindly allowed you to read until sunset for your soul's sake.”
Halphemos looked dumbfounded, as well he might. In Barca's Hamlet people were conventionally religious. Folk might not put much faith in the mealtime sprinkle of cheese and beer at the household shrine, but almost everybody did it—and though people muttered about the tithe to the Great Gods, they paid that also when the priests from Carcosa came through the borough once a year.
Cerix had a fierce disbelief in the gods. It was as much a matter of faith for the crippled wizard as a hermit's simple piety had been for Nonnus—and for Sharina now, in memory of the man who had died to protect her. Cerix was the least likely of anyone on Pandah to offer Halphemos a roll of hymns.
The guard had been friendly enough—as he should be, since Sharina had handed over the skin of wine she'd brought. He nonetheless watched to make sure that Sharina didn't pass the prisoner a file or a lockpick in addition to the parchment scroll. He'd opened the scroll, not to read—though the first ten columns were hymns to the Lady, just as Sharina said—but to make sure there was nothing concealed inside the parchment.
Nodding curtly to the prisoner, Sharina squelched up the three steps to ground level. The guard slammed the door shut behind her and set the pin in the heavy bar.
She'd wash her feet in the sea when their vessel got under way with the evening tide. “Have you sampled the wine?” she asked the guard brightly.
“Not yet, mistress,” the man said. “Let's sit down and be comfortable in my hut.”
The guard didn't have the keys to the prisoners' irons. If most of those held were sailors, there was an obvious risk that crewmates would attack the guard and use any keys he held to release their fellow. The leg irons in particular were so sturdy than any attempt to smash the locks open would be likely to crush the ankle as well.
Cerix had erased the text from the inner spindle of the scroll, creating a palimpsest on which he'd written an incantation in both Old Script and the square modern forms of the letters. Halphemos couldn't read Old Script, but he could copy the symbols onto the bench's slimy surface and speak the syllables as given in their phonetic equivalent.
Cerix wrote with a clean, legible hand even when he was in haste and in pain. Sharina wondered if he'd been a copyist before he became a wizard and a drug-sodden cripple.
The guard's kiosk beside the prison shed had a stool, a table, and a small brazier for heating food or mulling wine, but no bed and very little space. Sharina supposed another man took over, possibly at nightfall, but she hadn't wanted to risk a direct question that might seem suspicious.
The guard offered Sharina the stool and unstoppered the wine. It was a strong vintage from Shengy, laced with resin for travel. Sharina had crumbled a pellet of Cerix's drug into it. “You first,” Sharina said to the unspoken question.
The guard took a long drink, his throat wobbling, then lowered the skin. “Ah!” he said with approval, handing the wine to Sharina. He frowned and with different emphasis said, “Ah? I don't have mugs, mistress. We could maybe...?”
He looked doubtfully down the street. The lockup was among the warehouses on the harbor south of the residential parts of the city. There were a number of laden donkeys and human bearers even this late in the evening, but Sharina hadn't seen a tavern or cookshop when she made her way here.
“No, this is fine,” she said, lifting the wooden mouthpiece to her lips. She plugged the opening with the tip of her tongue and pretended to drink as deeply as the guard had.
“What do you care about this fellow in there?” the guard asked as he gratefully retrieved the wineskin. He leaned forward and added conspiratorially, “I hear he tried to murder the king by wizardry!”
“I think it was an accident,” Sharina said calmly. A bat fluttered low around the eaves of a nearby warehouse, then vanished into the night. The sky was still bright, but she doubted that Halphemos could see to read inside the prison anymore. “Anyway, it was my companion who vanished. And I doubt he was real
ly harmed. Just sent away until I can find him again.”
She gave the guard a false smile. In her mind she prayed, Lady, Mistress of Heaven, be with Cashel. Shepherd, Protector of All Life, protect Cashel as he protected his flocks.
The wineskin gurgled like a hungry man's belly as the guard drank again. He belched in satisfaction before he returned the skin to Sharina.
In the stillness Sharina heard, “...esmigaddon maar-chama kore...” The shed's walls were thick, but Halphemos was shouting to force the words out against the inertia of the cosmos.
“Your job seems so exciting to me!” Sharina twittered in a bright voice. She hoped she wasn't overdoing it, but she had to say something quickly to conceal the young wizard's chanting. “Do you often have traitors to watch in your jail here?”
“Traitors?” the guard repeated in puzzlement. “Oh, you mean like this one, trying to murder the king. No, we don't—I mean, not very often. But we get lots of dangerous sorts here, you're right.”
A rosy glow emanated through the bricks of the prison shed. Inside, the wards of the hand and leg irons clinked into alignment.
“You're very brave,” Sharina said. She tried to pass back the wineskin though she hadn't mimed another drink. “I—”
The pin locking the prison door clanged to the ground. The drunk sharing the bench with Halphemos bellowed in terror. The guard leaped to his feet, also shouting. He snatched up his weapon, a club with a spiked iron collar around the end.
The crossbar crawled sideways. Nothing touched it except a tremble of magenta light. It slipped out of its staples and fell.
The door panel began to open. The guard raised his club and faced the door, though his face was twisted in a rictus of fear. Sharina picked up the stool by one leg and stepped behind the man, ready to club him senseless before he could strike Halphemos.
A figure of red light shambled up from the cell. It had the shape of the ape Zahag, but it was as large as an ox. Through the glowing semblance Sharina could see the jail and Halphemos himself. The wizard chanted, gesturing with the closed scroll in place of a proper wand.
The guard gave a great bawl of fear. He tried to run but his feet tangled and he toppled backward, losing his club.
The figure of light expanded like a smoke ring thrown out when a knot cracks in a fire. Sharina stood for an instant in a rosy ambience which then vanished.
Halphemos climbed the steps, wobbling with exertion. He tried to slide the scroll within the neckline of his tunic but be missed his intent; Sharina snatched the falling parchment with one hand and supported Halphemos with the other. It was reflex: a book was too valuable a thing to lose, even though as a tool it had already fulfilled its purpose.
“Quickly!” she said; half-guiding, half-pulling the exhausted wizard in the direction of Dock Street. Cerix had booked passage on a ship leaving for Erdin. There was nothing important about the destination, only that the vessel was leaving on the evening tide.
Sharina glanced over her shoulder as they turned the corner. The guard still lay on the ground, supporting his torso with his arms. He stared at the open prison door and bleated wordlessly.
The mist over the lagoon reminded Garric of those he'd seen rise on a thousand still mornings from swales in the meadows of the borough; but this was changeless. The sun would never brighten to burn off the haze, nor would a breeze come in from the sea to tear it to rags and wisps.
Wraithlike figures stood on floats made of bundled reeds to fish in the lagoon. Even Garric's keen eyes found it hard to tell whether individuals were human or Ersa if they were more than a hundred yards away. The Gulf had fixed limits, but at least for now there was room for both races to live without conflict.
“Maybe it's this place,” Liane said quietly. Either she'd understood the thought behind Garric's glance and grim expression, or the same thing had occurred to her. “This green light makes me feel cold all the way to my bones. When we get people back to the real world, then they'll be...”
Garric .looked at her, wondering what word Liane would settle on. Better? Happier? Decent?
Instead she grinned sadly. “Well, we can hope they will,” she said, unable to complete the thought any better than Garric could have.
“The Gulf was created for a group of Ersa by one of their own kind,” Tenoctris said. She looked at the roofless shanties of the human community with the same dispassionate interest that she showed for the forest's unique vegetation. “It should suit them better than it does humans, but I'm not sure it suits them perfectly either. The older I get—and at this point that's over a thousand years—”
She grinned. Liane hugged her.
“The older I get,” Tenoctris resumed, “the more convinced I become that no wizard who had understanding equal to his power would do anything through wizardry. That was probably true of the Ersa who created this place, too.”
Folk sitting in front of their shelters turned their faces away as Garric walked by with his companions, but they watched covertly from behind. Garric waved to a pair of women crushing roots in a mortar cut from a large tree trunk. They bent their heads and pounded faster, losing their previous rhythm and fouling each other's pestle strokes.
“How about yourself?” Garric asked. “You haven't made things worse. Not that I've seen.”
Tenoctris laughed. “While I don't claim complete understanding,” she said, “my powers as a wizard are so trivial by comparison to what I know that I suppose I'm a special case. I hope I am, at any rate.”
They were nearing Rodoard's compound. The gate was closed, but a messenger had run ahead when Garric and his companions came in sight of the community.
The dwellings to either side of Rodoard's own belonged to his henchmen, toughs who'd arrived recently and had been allowed to live. They were alert, standing in their doorways with their weapons in hand. They met Garric's eyes but glared back in stony silence to his smiles.
Infants who'd earlier been playing in the mud peered now through the interstices of their woven shelters. Their mothers watched also, occasionally shadowing the palings as they moved.
When Garric's hand closed on his sword hilt, be felt King Carus swell in his mind until there were two of them, Garric and his ancestor, filling the same skin. He drew the blade with the liquid sring! of good steel flexing minutely. Othelm, the former sailor who'd have tried to take the sword on the beach if he dared, raised his huge club but jumped back.
Garric struck the gong with his pommel. The bronze bonged a deep bass note about which the swordblade whispered a descant
“I have good news, Rodoard!” Garric called to the king's closed gate. “We can escape from here after all!”
He turned and waved to the community at large. The signal was bringing folk from their shelters and the nearby forest. Those born in the Gulf wouldn't look directly at the three newcomers, but they moved closer in a process as gradual as that of syrup soaking into coarse cloth.
Garric struck the gong a second time. “Come on out!” he said, knowing that his voice could be no more than a modulation of the metallic clangor.
One leaf of the gate jerked inward. Rodoard stood in the opening wearing helmet, breastplate, and his sword. He held the demi-guisarme at the butt and balance of its short shaft.
Rodoard's face was bleak with fury.
Garric stepped back. Rodoard swung his weapon in a high arc, past Garric rather than at him. The heavy blade sheared the crossbar as well as the cords holding the gong to it. The disk spun away and splashed to the ground. Mud quickly choked the quivering bronze to silence.
“I let you live, boy,” the king said in an expressionless voice, “because I thought you might be useful. Maybe I was wrong, do you think?”
Colored smoke began to rise from the compound. Lunifra hadn't appeared, but Garric heard her voice from behind the palings as a chanting rhythm. At each syllable the smoke swelled, then compressed, as though it were the membrane of a beaten drum.
“This is good news,
Your Majesty,” Garric said. “My friend Tenoctris has found the key that opens the door out of the Gulf. The Ersa will let us use it to return to the waking world. All of us!”
Garric had known there was risk in taking a strong line with Rodoard, but the depth of the king's anger was unexpected. Still, if he'd gone to Rodoard pleadingly, Rodoard would have bullied him instead of listening to his proposal. By arriving with a sword in his hand, Garric forced Rodoard to treat him as an equal.
“So,” said Rodoard, so close to Garric that either of them could reach out and pull the other's nose. “You've been dealing with the Ersa, have you? What did you offer the animals, Garric or-Reise?”
People were easing closer. The Gulf-born folk kept to the back so that they could scamper away if fighting started. Rodoard's henchmen were uncomfortably near. A part of Garric's mind remembered whirling, slashing melees in which the King of the Isles had cut his way out of similar presses, but the King of the Isles had never had to guard a girl and an old woman...
Garric threw his head back and laughed. He couldn't save Liane and Tenoctris from so large a crowd of enemies. Therefore he wouldn't try: he'd strike off Rodoard's head and then hew his way into the mob of brutes and thugs until they brought him down.
You did what you could. Leaving fewer of such folk in the world was a benefit to everyone else.
Garric lowered his sword crosswise and pinched the tip of the blade between his left thumb and forefinger in order to look a little less threatening—without sheathing the weapon. His laughter had surprised Rodoard.
“All I offered the Ersa was the chance to be shut of us,” Garric said, pitching his voice to be heard to the back of the crowd. “What I offer you—”
He turned to sweep the folk behind him with his eyes.
“All of you!” he cried. “All of us! Is the chance to see the sun again, the chance to feel a breeze and to be free! As nobody in this green underworld can ever be free.”