by David Drake
Tenoctris had knelt and was drawing in the mud with her left index finger. She held a pulpy twig for a wand.
Liane stood between Tenoctris and the crowd. Her arms were crossed before her, the hands within the opposite sleeves. Three of Rodoard's henchmen were almost—but not quite—so close they touched her.
“So,” said Rodoard. His voice was high-pitched for so big a man. He sounded peevish. Unlike Garric, he hadn't called sheep across the rolling dales and learned the trick of projecting his words. “Othelm, are you in a hurry to go back to Erdin? And Bassis? Do you suppose they've forgotten about you in Valles? Not to mention what you've done here!”
Fishermen whom the gong had called from the lagoon poled their floats up on the muddy shore. In some of the wicker creels flopped bottom-dwelling fish with armored heads. The men used wooden gigs with springy jaws that clamped to either side of their target rather than spitting it. With little metal and no stone to work with, these were better tools than true spears would be.
“How about the rest of you?” Rodoard cried. He'd regained his good humor, but there was a layer of enormous menace beneath his shouted banter. “Josfred, do you want to go to a place where the sun will burn the hide off you and you'll freeze in the winter—if you live that long?”
Tenoctris whispered as her wand flickered over the circle of power she'd drawn. To anyone else, even those who, like Garric and Liane, could read the Old Script, the symbols were no more than wormtracks in the mud.
“I've made you kings of the Ersa who enslaved you!” Rodoard said. “I've put your feet on their beast necks! Do you want—”
A child screamed inside the compound, a knife of sound that cut through his harangue. Rodoard didn't look around, though his face set in a scowl of anger at the interruption.
“Do you want—” he repeated.
The gate behind Rodoard was still open. A child of three or four years ran out, streaming blood from wounds in throat and abdomen. The child collided with Rodoard's legs and flopped onto the ground, thrashing as its heart pumped its body completely dry. Lunifra stood in the doorway, bathed in dark blood that had spurted from the child's carotid arteries.
Lunifra was naked. She held a knife of volcanic glass, and her smile was the gate to the Underworld. Because of the way the child had been mutilated, Garric couldn't tell which sex it had been.
Garric cut at Rodoard's ankles. The king leapt back as he tried to clear his demi-guisarme, but his feet tangled with the child's corpse. His mouth opened in a shout of disbelief as Garric's blade crunched through with the sureness of a hand used to jointing roasts for the inn's kitchen.
The cold fury that strengthened Garric's stroke would have taken the edge through Rodoard's thighbone as certainly as it cut the ankles' cartilage. This pair would kill no more children for their blood magic!
Othelm squealed, clasping both hands over the wound beneath his ribs. Liane flicked her bloody dagger toward the face of the other thug trying to grapple with her. He dodged the jab. Garric's blade lifted the thug's scalp and a disk of his skull beside.
The palisade sank into a mass of writhing fibers. The wood formed into a serpent three feet in diameter and as long as the stockade had been. Lunifra laughed hysterically. The wooden tail to Garric's left squirmed. The other end rose from the ground, gaping like a lamprey's circular mouth.
The crowd, Rodoard's henchmen as well as the Gulf-born folk, scrambled back in horror. Garric raised his sword, using the extra length of his hilt to add the strength of both arms to a cut that he knew would be useless.
The jaws of splintered wood engulfed Lunifra, then flexed closed. Because the jagged teeth were rotating, they flung her right and left feet in opposite directions. She screamed briefly.
Tenoctris collapsed from the effort of her incantation. Garric scooped her up in his left hand, in his haste holding Tenoctris more like a swatch of wet drapery than a cherished friend. All the community's residents were running. The thing of wood and wizardry writhed like an earthworm on hot stone.
“This way!” Liane said, pointing toward the lagoon. A coil of the wooden serpent swept toward her mindlessly. She leaped it with no more hesitation than a child playing a game.
Garric followed Liane, holding his sword high so that he didn't accidentally stab himself. He thought of his father shouting the day he'd seen Garric run with a sickle in his hands. This was far more dangerous, but there wasn't time to wipe and sheathe the bloody weapon.
The snake of animate wood clamped its jaws on its tail and began to swallow itself. Brown and yellow shreds spun from the mouth's rim. A network of strengthening fibers wove through the pulp of vegetation here in the Gulf, very different from the division of heart and sap-wood Garric was used to.
Liane climbed aboard the largest of the fishing floats, three long bundles of reeds bent up at the ends and lashed together. She lifted the pole that propelled the vessel.
Garric dropped Tenoctris in the hollow of the float, checked to make sure no one was immediately behind him, and thrust his sword through the side of the outer bundle to keep it from slashing anybody. As soon as he had a moment he'd clean and dry the blade, then use the whetstone in the scabbard to bring the tip back to a working edge. Rodoard's ankles wouldn't have dulled the good steel, but the bone of the other thug's skull was another matter...
Garric leaned his weight against the stern of the float.
His feet slipped in the mud; he dug his toes in and lifted, then pushed again. The float slid into the lagoon, bobbing much lower in the water than it ought to do. It was made for a single slight-bodied resident of the Gulf. Liane and Tenoctris together were more than its safe capacity.
Garric waded out, pushing the float, until his feet came off the slimy bottom. He began to kick, pushing the tiny vessel as Liane thrust with her pole over the stern past him.
“Make for the other side!” he said. He paused to spew out the muddy water he'd splashed into his own mouth, then added, “We've got to reach the Ersa before these humans get organized!”
One of the king's henchmen waded a few steps into the lagoon and threw his spear. It splashed within arm's reach of Garric. He continued to kick, ignoring everything but the need to cross the lagoon to temporary safety.
Tenoctris spoke to Liane. Garric heard her voice but his thrashing feet overwhelmed the words. The wizard was coming around again, thank the Shepherd. Garric knew that Tenoctris could never have raised a monster like the one devouring itself on the shore, but even the effort of redirecting Lunifra's powerful incantation must have brought the old woman to the boundaries of her strength.
When Garric raised his head he could see that Ersa on triangular floats were putting out from the other shore. The figures aboard them carried spears that he didn't think were fishing implements.
The Ersa were taking precautions, but nothing they could do would be sufficient if the human settlement got organized enough to attack. Garric could only hope that it would be days or at least hours for that to—
“Go wipe out the beasts now!” Rodoard screamed, his voice piping even higher with the pain of his amputated feet. A cut with a sharp edge, especially at a joint, was likely to clamp shut instead of bleeding the victim's life quickly on the ground. Garric realized he should have—
A murderously rational mind at the back of Garric's own slammed silence on that train of thought. “There wasn't time to do anything but what was necessary—and you did that, no one better.”
“Kill them all!” Rodoard keened. “Kill them all before they work their wizardry against us!”
Garric kicked, concentrating on only what was necessary. And as soon as he reached shore he'd do the next necessary thing: he'd clean and sharpen his sword.
The 12th of Heron (Later)
The flame-bordered island was twenty feet from Cashel in the skiff. The captain of the Successor's barge stood in the bow. He halted the paddlers with a hand signal, then bowed to Sosia and said, “It's not safe for you to go
any nearer, Your Highness. The wizard and his companion should go the rest of the way themselves.”
The barge had a tasseled canopy made from cream satin. Sosia leaned out from beneath it to embrace Cashel in the skiff alongside. “Save my daughter,” she said. “Whatever else happens, don't let Ilmed have her.”
To Cashel's enormous embarrassment, she kissed him on the forehead. He kept his face rigid, but he felt the blush warming his skin anyway.
The red-orange flames rising from the waters ahead were as silent as swordblades, but their radiance already made Cashel's skin prickle. “Time we go, then,” he muttered, refusing to meet Sosia's eyes. He turned his head over his right shoulder and said, “Are you ready, Zahag?”
The ape in the back of the skiff stared at his fingers. His lips moved as he muttered scraps of verse. Between Zahag and Cashel was a coil of rope plaited from the attachment threads of giant barnacles. It was finer than bowcord, but Cashel had put his full strength against a loop of it as a test—and the rope had held.
“Zahag, answer me!” Cashel said. “Or I'll leave you. If you want to stay, stay.”
Zahag flailed the water angrily with both hands. Sosia jerked back as harbor filth soaked the pastel silk of her dress. An attendant raised his baton, but Sosia prevented the blow with a curt gesture.
“I'll stay with you!” the ape said. “You're a fool and you'll get us both killed, but I'm afraid to be alone.”
Cashel turned to his left and caught the eye of the barge's anxious officer. “Push us off,” he said. He thrust one end of his staff against the side of the barge to bring the skiff's bow in line with the wall of fire.
Sosia and her diviner sat side by side on gilt seats in the center of the barge. The crew, a dozen men of matched physique, ordinarily stood facing forward in the bow and stern to work long paddles. Now a pair of them shoved the skiff toward the soundless flames.
Cashel rose to his feet. The skiff wobbled only minusculely; Cashel had a countryman's poise, practiced by a life in which every day meant walking the top of a wall or a path in which rocks were as apt to turn as not.
“Keep us going, Zahag,” he ordered, sliding the pole between his hands to find the balance that would have been instinctive with the hickory staff it replaced. “We've said we'll do this, so we can't back out.”
“Humans!” the ape said. “Sheep-stupid humans! Of course we could back out!”
Zahag dabbed the water, then splashed hard. His arms were so long that he could stroke with both paddle-broad hands at the same time.
The skiff slid toward the waiting flames. Zahag grumbled, but he continued to drive them over the still water.
A crowd stood on the shore of the harbor, to watch the event. Many waved scarves or their broad straw hats when they saw Cashel turn to glance in their direction.
“They must like her,” Cashel said. People in Barca's Hamlet didn't give any thought to Count Lascarg in Carcosa, let alone to the King of the Isles across the sea in Valles.
“Fagh!” the ape said. “They're watching to see us burn. How many did Tayuta say the flames have killed before us? Wasn't it twenty-three?”
“Do you apes live forever, then, if you don't burn?” Cashel said. He adjusted his grip on the staff by an amount too slight for anyone else to notice.
The flames were hammering him, now; he could feel the fuzz on his upper cheeks curl tightly and his eyes were dry. He began to rotate the staff .which palace artisans had hastily made to his directions.
The wood was fir, not hickory or another of the hardwoods. Some folk set store by the dense strength of cornelwood, but Cashel had always found that the springiness of his hickory staff made his blows easier on his palms without robbing them of their effect on his target. Nobody took a stroke from Cashel or-Kenset and stayed standing for another.
He grinned. He'd never fought a fire with a staff before. Maybe firwood was the best choice for the job.
The staff was eight feet long and as thick as Cashel's wrists. It spun easily, making a blurred circle in front of the skiff's prow. The workmen had rubbed and waxed the wood, but craftsmanship alone could never give it a polish like that which came from years of friction from Cashel's palms.
The new staff would serve, he guessed. Cashel had never been one to refuse a task because he lacked this tool or that.
The flames shot straight up from the water. There was no steam or bubbles, but Sosia had said that attempts to swim under the barrier were as certainly fatal as trying to penetrate it in a ship armored with vinegar-soaked bull-hides.
A fish flopped to the surface and twisted under again. One side was silvery; the other was bright red, parboiled by contact with the wizard fire.
“Twenty-four stupid humans,” Zahag muttered, “and an ape who's stupider yet because he knows better!”
The staff spun. Cashel no longer felt the heat. He'd found the rhythm, now, the same way he'd have judged the leverage in a weight he was bracing to lift. He wasn't sure how, but how didn't matter.
Faster, increasingly faster. Blue fire shot from the staff's ferrules, blending into first a ring and then a tunnel of light through which the skiff slowly moved.
The artisans who'd made the staff for Cashel had capped the ends as he'd asked—but instead of the simple iron cups he'd expected, they'd created bands of brass cutwork. One cap had a scene of whales battling, the other of eagles mating among the clouds. There wasn't a home in Barca's Hamlet with art as fine as what a trio of Sosia's workmen had created for an object as practical as a wagon wheel.
Hand over hand, wrists crossing and recrossing, letting the staff's inertia carry it around.A man, even a man as big as Cashel, could leap off the ground in a fight and the spinning quarterstaff would carry him around to face in the opposite direction.
Sparkling blue fire met orange flame. The flames roared now, but Cashel's staff bored through them like an auger into a plank. Hand over hand, neither faster nor slower, despite the drag of the snarling flames.
The work had its own rhythm. Just as seasons came and went, just as clouds spread across the sky and currents changed the color of the sea, so Cashel spun his staff in the pattern that was right for these conditions, for this need.
Zahag gibbered in the skiff's stern. Sometimes the ape shouted blasphemies in the name of the Sister and other human Gods, but mostly he squealed in bestial terror. Cashel ignored his companion and the bright spears of fire that stabbed against his spinning staff and splashed away.
They were wrong to call Cashel a wizard. He was a part of the cosmos, neither more nor less. Any task is a matter of leverage as well as strength; Cashel saw the point of balance and where to exert the necessary force.
The wall of lapping red fire surged behind him. The skiff had passed the barrier and scraped on rock at the base of the prison tower. Cashel staggered as he stepped to dry ground. Zahag, capering and crowing in triumph, supported him with one long arm while the ape's other hand waved the coil of rope.
Cashel raised his staff overhead and shouted, “Through! By the Shepherd's aid, through!”
The Gods had aided; but the strength that was the borough's wonder, that had been part of the victory also.
And if Cashel was proud to prove that he could do something that no one else could do, well then, he had a right to be proud!
Garric's chest touched mud an instant before the float grounded on the lagoon's far side. He rose to his knees, then retrieved his sword as he stood. Ersa on floats landed to his right and left. Graz waited onshore with an armed party. The Ersa were silent, but their mobile ears flared and waggled.
Tenoctris got out unaided before Liane could help her. She bowed to Graz with perfunctory politeness and said, “The humans have decided to stay in the Gulf rather than go to our world. Most of them were born here, of course. They'll kill you all if they can. Garric can better judge if that's possible, but Rodoard believes it is.”
Garric realized that all the Ersa present were suddenly staring
at him. It was a disconcerting awareness, because the humanoids' broader field of vision meant their heads didn't have to move.
“How many of you are there?” Garric asked. “Warriors, I mean.”
Male Ersa were physically equal at least to the Gulf-born humans. If Ersa numbers were sufficient, then they might be able to withstand a hasty attack despite the greater strength and better weapons of the recent human arrivals.
“Two hundred and thirty-two,” Graz said flatly. “And yourself, if you will fight.”
“Oh, I'll fight,” Garric said. He felt the cold death of hope. At the back of his mind, King Carus had analyzed the situation with the necessary dispassion of a herdsman deciding which animals to slaughter in the fall so that the remainder would have fodder through the Hungry Time in Heron before new growth came in. “But it won't do any good. They'll kill us all, I'm afraid.”
Garric looked at his sword. He wanted to wipe the blade, but he didn't have any dry cloth for the purpose. Liane saw the glance and offered a handkerchief from her sleeve. An Ersa child darted past the warriors and gave Garric a wad of fruit rind. It was dried and as coarsely absorbent as the loofa gourds folk in Barca's Hamlet used for washing.
Graz nodded; a human gesture, just as he used human speech to Garric and his companions. His ears fluttered at the same time, however, and four Ersa warriors ran off along separate paths in the adjacent forest. Couriers, Garric supposed, warning the race of its certain doom. The Ersa females and children nearby left together by the broadest of the routes.
“If you let me use what you called the Hand,” Tenoctris said, “then I can open a gate for your folk as well as ourselves. It isn't what I wanted to do, but it's all the hope I see now.”
“Yes,” Graz said. “I told my people to gather at the First Place anyway. Our ancestors entered the Gulf through that grove. It's fitting that our existence should end there as well.”