by David Drake
The stairs ended on the next level. Again it was a single room, this time a kitchen with a table and chair as delicate as all the tower's other furnishings.
The girl—she had to be Aria; there was nobody else here—had been eating when the voices of Cashel and Zahag brought her up to the library. On the table was a watercress mushroom salad and tiny somethings fricasseed in a brown sauce. Chickadee bosoms, Cashel thought, though of course they could have been the breasts of any small bird.
Aria cowered beside a bronze door set into the curvature of the wall. Cashel was sure there'd been no opening to the outer wall of the tower.
The door opened toward him.
“Save me from the monsters!” Aria repeated.
A scaly man like the one Cashel had found in the barrel stood in the doorway carrying a curved sword. He rushed Cashel, raising the weapon for an overhand cut. Two more scaly men followed the first.
She called me a monster! Cashel thought. Even Zahag's a lot more human than a scaly—
He thrust his staff one-handed like a spear, crushing the creature's chest and flinging him back into his fellows. The sword, a wicked weapon meant for nothing but murder, bounced from the ceiling and back wall, then fell to the floor, where it quivered. The metal had the ring of bronze, not steel, but it had cut a nick from the hard substance of the wall.
The corpse bowled over another of the scaly men. The third dodged his fellows—her fellows; the scaly men wore studded leather crossbelts and armlets, but no real clothing—and came on with a murderous leer.
Cashel recovered his staff to the balance. He brought the other end around in a horizontal blow that spun the sword away an instant before dashing the creature's brains out.
His motions in a fight were as smooth and instinctive as those he'd have made while lifting a heavy weight. There wasn't time to think about what you were going to do; and for Cashel, there wasn't need either. It was just as natural as breathing.
The surviving scaly man disentangled himself from the first corpse. Blood and bits of other matter spattered the big circular room. The chair was untouched, but the table had smashed to tiny glittering splinters against the wall. Princess Aria stood with her eyes wide open, making gulping sounds.
“Look, we can—” Cashel said to the scaly man. It gave a guttural scream, the first sound he'd heard from any of the trio, and launched itself at him with its sword straight out at arm's length.
Cashel swept the creature's feet out from under it with another horizontal blow, this time widdershins. The scaly man hit on his back; Cashel finished it with a quick vertical chop to the head, just as he'd have used on a viper in a beanfield.
The new staff worked fine. It wasn't as heavy as what he was used to and maybe it wasn't quite as strong, but it had been strong enough for this job.
Cashel didn't take any particular pleasure in killing, but there were vermin and that was how you dealt with them. From their behavior, these scaly men were as mindlessly malevolent as so many horseflies, and they were a far sight bigger besides.
“Prin—” Cashel said. His mouth and throat were dry; he worked his cheeks against his tongue, wishing he'd brought an apple down from the bedroom, and resumed, “Princess Aria, your mother sent me to take you—”
Aria gave a despairing wail and tried to throw herself through the bronze doorway. Cashel grabbed her before she made it. All he could see beyond was swirling mist.
“Zahag!” he called. The ape seemed to have fled up the stairs when the scaly men appeared. That didn't surprise Cashel, but right now—with the princess shrieking and trying to bite his wrist—he could use some help.
Turning so that his body was between Aria and the door which he didn't have a hand free to close, he said, “We're saving you, Princess. There's a wizard—”
Zahag bounced down the stairs with screeches that weren't even close to being human words. He stopped beside the door, pointing back the way he'd come with one hand and covering his eyes with the other.
Cashel tossed the girl aside. If she wanted to run away, well, that might be a better idea than facing what had chased Zahag down the stairs.
A man with flowing white hair and a silver robe drifted down the stair shaft. His arms were folded across his breast, and his slippers of gilt leather floated above the treads.
“Ilmed!” Aria cried in delight. “You've come to rescue me!”
Ilmed's features were as perfect and hard as a marble statue of the Shepherd. He extended his right arm toward Cashel. His fist was clenched so that the great balas sapphire of his ring glinted at the youth.
Cashel held the staff before him in both hands. He began to rotate it before him sunwise. Instinct told him not to strike at the floating wizard.
“Prokunete nuktodroma biasandra!” Ilmed said.
Cashel spun his shaft faster. From the ferrules trailed light of the same trembling blue as a robin's egg. The streamers built into a hazy disk before him.
Cashel began to smile with the satisfaction of a workman who knew he was in command of his task. When you've got your grip right and you feel the load start to come off the ground, then it's—
“Kalisandra katanikandra!” Ilmed said. His cheeks were mottled with his effort; drops of spittle came off his tongue.
—just a matter of—
“Laki!” Ilmed shrieked. A bolt of blue fire shot from the wizard's carven jewel.
—time!
Ilmed's bolt struck Cashel's shield of purer blue light and rebounded. The blast shattered the stairs.
Cashel staggered back from the shock. His hands and wrists were numb, but he didn't drop his staff.
Ilmed screamed and fell to the floor. His robe was in tatters, and his hair and beard were burning.
Aria stood horrified, bending forward with both fists pressed against her mouth. Zahag peeped out from between his knobbly fingers, then rolled to his feet with a broad smile. “Hoo!” he cried as he began to caper. “Great chief! The chief triumphs!”
A pattern of crazing dulled the walls' smooth pink surface. A crack shivered across the ceiling, spreading and branching like the top of an oak. A fist-sized chunk fell and shattered into sand on the floor.
Ilmed clucked, then stiffened. The wizard's breath no longer fluttered the stinking red flames that devoured his beard. His eyes were open, though the lashes had been singed off. Aria was bawling with her hand over her eyes.
Zahag hooted with sudden surmise. He sprang upward, catching the hole in the ceiling from which the staircase had hung. The material went to powder in the ape's grip, spilling him back to the floor with a despairing wail. Except for the bronze doorway, the whole tower was collapsing.
“Come on!” Cashel said. He grabbed Aria with his free hand and ducked through the doorway. “This way, Zahag!”
On the other side was a barren plain. The recently risen sun was the same sickly orange as the flames of burning hair. A trail wandered eastward through a landscape of rocks, boulders, and occasional spiky vegetation.
“Fagh!” said the ape, who'd followed Cashel out. “Where's this place, then?”
“Nowhere I've ever seen,” Cashel said. The air was chilly, though from the look of the landscape the sun would heat it up very shortly. There wasn't any obvious shade.
He looked over his shoulder. From this side the doorway was a rectangle of twisted light: the ghost of a door rather than a real opening.
Cashel had released Aria's shoulder—he wasn't trying to hold the girl, just to get her out of a collapsing building faster than she'd have been able to manage on her own.
She gave a choked cry and leaped through the shimmering portal.
“Hoo!” cried Zahag, excited without being in the least dismayed by what the girl was doing.
Cashel threw himself after her, grabbing with his free hand. It wasn't so much a conscious decision on his part as the instinct of an animal to snap at movement. He caught Aria's ankle as his own head and shoulders passed through the frame of l
ight.
He jerked back instantly. The girl came with him, though right now he didn't care about her.
Cashel was shivering. “Shepherd, guide my feet from danger,” he whispered. “Lady, wrap me in Your cloak.”
Aria whimpered. Her eyes were open, but they didn't seem to focus on anything.
“So what did you see there?” Zahag said, interested but as before unconcerned about the humans. “Isn't the wizard dead after all?”
“There's nothing there,” Cashel said. “It's purple and it moves, but it isn't really there. There isn't even air to breathe.”
The girl started to cry. Her dress, previously torn and spattered with the scaly men's dark blood, was now smeared with the gritty soil from this side of the doorway.
Cashel stood, smoothing the shaft of his quarterstaff clean with gauze he'd snatched from Aria's dress when he grabbed her. As his hands worked, his eyes surveyed the terrain.
The trail wasn't deliberately made. It was just a place where traffic had worn away the light soil and polished the rocks beneath. Still, it was the best choice they were offered.
“I guess we better get going,” Cashel said. “The sun's going to make it too hot to travel soon.”
He half-lifted, half-helped the girl to her feet. She continued sobbing but at least she didn't fight him.
And she didn't ask Cashel where they were traveling to; which was good, because Cashel himself didn't have the faintest notion.
Garric stepped out of darkness, stumbled, and fell-flat on a grassy hill slope. He'd never lost consciousness and he held his sword, though his right arm prickled all the way to the elbow.
Tenoctris sprawled beside him. Liane was nearby, already sitting up. She massaged her throat with one hand, but she could still give Garric a smile of pleasure and relief.
Garric smiled also, but he was pretty sure it looked shaky. He felt shaky, by the Lady he did!
They were in a meadow. Trees formed groves on the tops of the rolling hills. The landscape was a little more rugged than that of the borough; the trees were larger and more luxuriant also. Wood was a valuable resource in Barca's Hamlet. The right to take dead limbs in the common forest west of the community was valuable, prized as greatly as the freehold of a house and plowland.
The trees included oaks and beeches. There were dogwoods on the margins of the glades, though they were larger than Garric had ever seen on Haft and the leaves were notched rather than smooth-edged. Still, the tree was familiar even if the particular variety wasn't. The vegetation of the Gulf had been as alien to Garric as the changeless green sky.
As alien as the Ersa themselves.
The Ersa were walking in small parties. Scouting the new land, Garric supposed. Graz and a handful of the better-armed warriors stood at the edge of a glade fifty feet away. The Ersa leader bowed formally when he saw Garric glance toward him.
Within the stand of trees was a marble building; fluted columns supported a domed roof. Garric caught only a glimpse of it between the trunks. Having noticed one structure, though, his eyes picked out others: a sculpted niche from which a spring bubbled down a hillside; a grotto with an entrance of wedge-shaped blocks; on a distant hill, columns that he'd mistaken for dead pines. The entablature had fallen around the base like a tumble of boulders.
Garric bent and plucked a stalk of little bluestem. The seed head had tufted; it must be early fall here. He wondered what kept the meadow from growing into brush and being taken over by trees in a few decades. There was no sign of sheep droppings or those of natural grazers which might keep a meadow from becoming forest. People who thought the natural world was static had never lived in the natural world.
Which meant this place, wherever it was, was unnatural.
Sure at last that there was no immediate danger, Garric transferred his sword to his left hand. He flexed the right to return it to full feeling.
“What happened in the First Place?” Tenoctris asked. She was alert again despite the numbing effort of her incantation. She was sitting up, at least, cross-legged according to her custom The pose still looked strange to Garric, raised in Barca's Hamlet, where people squatted instead.
Liane was coming back from the clear rivulet at the base of the hill, carrying water in a cupped sweetgum leaf. Garric could see bruises from the ghost's fingers beginning to appear on her throat.
“There was a woman in the pit with us,” he said, speaking loud enough for both his companions to hear. “I guess...”
He didn't know quite how to phrase it. He wasn't a wizard.
“Nobody else seemed to see her,” Garric resumed. “She, ah, waved at me. Then she started to choke Liane. And I thought because I couldn't touch her, that if I broke the Hand...”
Liane held the cupped leaf for Tenoctris to drink. It wasn't much water, but it would moisten lips and a throat rubbed raw by syllables which were tools—and which, like tools, acted on the user as well as the work.
“I thought it was the air,” Liane said. “I thought I'd breathed poison and it was going to kill me.”
Garric shrugged uncomfortably. “I don't know why I cut the Hand,” he said. “I guess because I'd never seen anything like the, well, ghost or the Hand either one. I smashed the one because I couldn't stop the other.”
It had been his own decision, not that of King Carus. A peasant learns as surely as a king that the worst thing to do in a crisis is to do nothing at all; but the action Garric took could have meant—
“I could've trapped us all in the Gulf, couldn't I?” Garric said miserably. “Or between there and here, in the darkness.”
“Garric,” Liane said. She rose and put her arms around him, leaving the emptied leaf with Tenoctris. “It was killing me. I would have died if you hadn't smashed that evil thing.”
“Yes,” said Tenoctris, struggling for a moment before both young people helped her to her feet. “Though I suspect that would have been less unpleasant than what the creature had in store for Garric himself.”
“You know who she was?” Garric asked.
Tenoctris shook her head. “No,” she said, “but I think I know what she was.”
The old woman grinned with a wry enthusiasm that meant she really had recovered. “It's all a myth, of course,” she said, “and if I'm going to believe in demigods like the Temptress sent to lure the Shepherd from his duties, then I'd have to believe in the Great Gods themselves, wouldn't I? Where does my rational belief system go then, if you please?”
Garric examined his sword. Just below the tip, where the taper of the point merged into the straight blade's full width, something had eaten a piece out of the edge. The steel wasn't chipped or notched. Rather, a raised lip showed that metal had flowed under enormous heat It looked as though Garric had tried to cut a lightning bolt instead of pearl and ancient bone.
“The Ersa who created the Gulf was more powerful than any human wizard,” Tenoctris said musingly. “He or she was perhaps more foolish than any human would have been also. Though I've certainly seen my share of humans with more power than sense, we all have.”
Her face hardened into an expression as implacable as that of Justice. “But to have used something as evil as that thing in order to create a sanctuary—that's utter madness!”
Garric thought about Rodoard and his henchmen; about the men, and particularly about Lunifra. They couldn't any of them have been saints before the Gulf swallowed them; but for that many people to have sunk to beasts so quickly—perhaps the cause was in part external.
“Maybe I did Rodoard an injustice,” he said softly. “And Lunifra.”
“No,” said Liane, “you didn't. He was a monster and she was a worse one. However they got that way.”
Graz started toward the humans. He walked with a stiff-legged gait that would mark him as alien at distances far greater than the Ersa features were visible.
“Tenoctris?” Garric said. “Do you know where we are?”
“Yes,” the old wizard said. “The sort of pl
ace it is, at any rate; a bridge, I suppose you could call it. And I think we can return to our world from here. I'll have to study matters and choose the correct location from which to take the next step.”
“What will happen to the people in the Gulf?” Liane asked quietly. She was tense, but Garric couldn't tell from Liane's tone whether she was afraid for the humans living in that green twilight or simply concerned that they would follow the escapees here.
“Nothing will happen to them,” Tenoctris said. “Nothing that they don't do to themselves, I mean. That may be bad enough.”
“They chose,” Garric said. He thought of Josfred, dreaming of the day humans would slaughter the Ersa. “All of them chose, not just Rodoard.”
“Yes,” said Tenoctris. She shrugged. “When you destroyed the Hand, you sealed the Gulf forever, from both sides. The Gulf will no longer suck in people from our world, and those living in it can never leave. Not even if a wizard far greater than I am is born to them.”
“I thank the Lady for Her mercy,” Liane said as Graz joined the three humans.
The 16th of Heron
Sharina awakened in darkness, choking the scream in her throat. She didn't remember what she'd been dreaming, but she held the Pewle knife in a grip that threatened to numb her fingers.
She waited, taking slow, deep breaths until her heart stopped pounding, then crawled out of her tent. She still held the big knife, though no longer in a death grip.
“Mistress?” said the sailor outside the flap of her shelter.
“It's all right!” Sharina said, angry again that Nonnus kept a guard near her at all times, even the most private.
She glanced at the sky. The Oxen were above the eastern horizon, but only the great blue star of the Plowman's head had risen. At this time of year it meant that dawn was still an hour away, though the sky would brighten enough to tell dark from light well before then.
They'd landed on this nameless islet after sunset. The little vessel lay tipped sideways on the shore, resting on its port gunwale and a fence of oars thrust blade-down into the sand on the starboard side. Most of the crew slept under the sheltering hull, but Sharina had a cover of canvas hung on a brushwood frame.