by David Drake
Cashel grabbed the top rung and pushed outward. The ladder already shook with the tread of creatures mounting it. He could move it despite its weight, but his arms weren't long enough to fling it over on those climbing. A brick grazed his head as he struggled.
He dropped the ladder and stepped back. His head rang. The crossbowman was cranking furiously on his bulky weapon; the defender to Cashel's other side hacked at the stringers with a blade the shape and weight of a butcher's cleaver. It sparked but didn't cut.
Cashel set one ferrule of his staff on the ladder's top rung. He leaned into the shaft, feeding it outward hand over hand.
A creature with four arms and the head of a viper scrambled to the top of the ladder. Its scythe slashed toward Cashel's face. He didn't flinch. The blade missed him by a hand's breadth.
The ladder toppled backward in a hailstorm of shrieking. One of the stringers snapped, flinging rungs into the air like a juggler's batons.
The strange lightning flared through the stones of the tower. Cashel thought he saw the bones of his own arm against it. He touched his head and felt the tackiness of blood. Bleed like a pig, a scalp wound does...
Steel, stone, and wood clashed together on the other side of the tower. The attackers must have thrown up a ladder there too. Cashel thought of going to help, but monsters were climbing the tower itself. In the latest flash he'd seen a thing with the tentacles of an octopus below the torso of a four-breasted woman. She had axes in her hands and her fangs were as slender as a cat's.
A rock bounced high from the battlements, then fell onto the floor within. Zahag grabbed it and hopped screaming to an arrow notch. He hung down, gripping the sides of the notch with his feet, and hurled the missile with both hands.
Before Cashel could reach over to steady him, Zahag twisted himself back into the interior of the open space beside Aria. He continued to gibber.
Cashel couldn't tell anymore which shouts were the defenders and which came from the throats of the monsters climbing the walls. Some of them were perfectly human—in part.
A headless thing with arms like a spider came over the battlements. The crossbowman shot it through the middle of the dog-shaped torso. The creature probed the hole in its chest with delicate, pincerlike hands. Cashel struck the monster with the butt of his staff as though he were trying to batter in a door; it flew back from the wall. More pink lightning rippled through the forest floor.
A bow twanged at the base of the tower. The soldier beside Cashel swore and stepped back. An arrow dangled loosely from his wrist. The shaft was a length of blackberry cane with grooves rather than proper fletching to make it fly straight.
The soldier tugged it out. The point, a dog's tooth, fell onto the floor. He broke the shaft against the battlements, then tossed the pieces over the side.
The forest stilled except for occasional whoops. The trees were dark, but sometimes there was a quiver like heat lightning in the far distance. The eastern horizon seemed brighter, though the fight hadn't gone on near long enough for that to be dawn coming. Had it?
“Well done, men!” Captain Koras said. He sounded weary. Weapons scraped as they were sheathed.
Cashel heard the princess weeping. He knelt by her and said, “It's all right now, Princess. We're safe.”
He hoped he was right. It was the right thing to say to Aria, anyhow.
Zahag squatted beside Cashel and said, “We showed them! They'll know better than to mess with our territory again, won't they, chief!”
Cashel blinked at the smell. The ape must have been flinging his own excrement at the monsters when he had no better missiles. Well, Zahag had done what he could. Nobody could fault that.
Aria opened her eyes doubtfully. When she saw for sure that nothing was coming over the battlements with a knife, she looked at Cashel. “Oh!” she cried. “You've been killed! You're all over blood!”
“What?” said Cashel. He remembered the brick that had grazed him; he patted his head gingerly. It was still oozing some. He hated to get cuts on his scalp, though on the good side they healed pretty quick.
“Let me bandage that for you, young man,” said Captain Koras as he stepped close with a wooden bucket of water. In his other hand was the pulp of a large mushroom, dried and turned inside out, in place of a sponge. “Would your lady care to rinse you off first?”
“Mistress God!” said Aria, covering her face in disgust.
Koras cleared his throat in embarrassment. He began daubing away the blood. The water had a slight sharpness to it, as though there was vinegar mixed in.
“If you died,” Aria said without looking at Cashel, “then what would I do? Oh Mistress God, how could you be so cruel?”
“What is it that you're doing here, sir?” Cashel asked. He kept his hands in his lap and his eyes on the horizon as the captain worked. “In the tower, I mean.”
“Griet, you've got the packet of thorns, don't you?” Koras said. “Bring them here to our wounded comrade.”
In a milder tone he went on to Cashel, “We're defending against the monsters, good sir. I should have thought that was obvious.”
The sky really was getting brighter. Rosy light gleamed on the crests of the defenders' helmets, those who wore helmets.
“But why are you defending here?” Aria demanded. She didn't usually seem aware of her surroundings—beyond the injustice of her being among them.
“Well, this is where we are,” Koras said. He seemed puzzled by the question, but there was a tinge of embarrassment in his tone as well.
He pinched the sides of Cashel's pressure cut together between his thumbs and forefingers. A soldier with oddly round eyes poked thorns through the paired edges of the skin. Each jab was a hot spark that festered, then slowly cooled. Cashel had never seen a wound closed this way before, but it seemed to work.
Dawn was certainly breaking. As it did, leaves swelled from the twigs about which they'd curled themselves during the hours of darkness. Though—was it really hours?
“Ooh,” said Aria. Cashel glanced to his left, following the line of her eyes. She was staring at a stocky fellow with a spear and a breastplate of iron hoops.
He had the face of a cat, complete to the whiskers.
When he saw the princess looking at him, he ducked away. The soldier with hairy arms who'd been using the crossbow had hairy legs as well. They ended in the hooves of a goat, and the two bumps on his helmet were placed just right to cover stubby horns.
“Dulle, get the ladder down and start gathering breakfast,” Captain Koras ordered. “Meg, you go too.”
He stepped sideways so that he blocked Cashel's view of the cat-faced soldier. In a falsely hearty tone he continued, “We eat a shelf fungus that grows here in the forest, good sir. It's quite delicious. Our service is arduous, but we eat better than kings!”
The cat-faced soldier and his goat-footed fellow scuttled down the rope ladder. The rest of the defenders milled in front of them until they were over the side. Now that Cashel was looking more closely, he could see things about most of the soldiers that would have surprised him back in Barca's Hamlet. Even the captain had a faint pattern of scales on the backs of his hands and his throat above the line of his cuirass.
“I was impressed by your manly courage, young man,” Koras said. “Would you and your companions care to join our band? You'd be among brave fellows, and you'd know you were doing the most important work there is: standing as a firm bulwark against monsters and the night.”
Aria stared at the captain in mesmerized horror. She looked like a rabbit toward whom a viper slithers with slow inevitability.
Cashel cleared his throat. He didn't want to embarrass Koras and his, well, men. But—
“Ah, sir,” he said, rising to his feet. “I thank you for your offer, but I think we'll take ourselves off now that it's daylight. I, ah, promised to return the princess here to her mother.”
The thorns in his scalp held, though they twisted a little. He didn't feel pain from th
e wound, just a dull ache and the sharper throb from the blow itself.
“Didn't, didn't, didn't promise that!” Zahag muttered. “But I'm ready to go, you see if I'm not!”
“Well,” said the captain, “I understand that such a duty takes precedence. We'll see you off, then. And you can be sure that the good wishes of humanity's defenders go with you.”
The rope ladder was fastened to a pair of thick iron eyebolts on the inner face of the wall. Cashel motioned Aria to it; she moved faster than he'd ever seen when he wasn't slinging her around himself. Zahag was already over the battlements, ignoring the ladder in his haste.
“I've been, well, honored to meet you, sir,” Cashel said. “I, ah, hope your fight goes well.”
He hoped it wasn't obvious that he was guarding the ladder so that the soldiers wouldn't cut the ropes while Aria was still on them. Not that they'd been anything but friendly, but...
A soldier reached from behind Koras with a wedge of saffron-colored mushroom. It smelled like fresh bread. Cashel's stomach quivered in delight.
“To eat on your way, good sir,” Koras said, passing the offer to Cashel. The first soldier's hand had long, very hairy fingers. It would have been hard to tell them from Zahag's, as a matter of fact.
“Thank you,” Cashel said. He tucked the mushroom into the front of his tunic. Aria would complain, but she'd complain anyhow. He bowed.
His companions were safe on the ground. Cashel tossed his quarterstaff over the side to thump down at a safe distance from them.
“The Shepherd guard you, sirs,” he said. He climbed over the side and lurched to the ground as swiftly as even a pretense of safety permitted.
Cashel waved over his shoulder as he and his companions started off in the direction they'd been going all along—eastward along the trail. Aria tugged his arm to speed him until they were out of sight of the tower.
“When Silya sent us out of King Folquin's court...” Zahag said. There was an emotion in his voice that Cashel hadn't heard before, though he couldn't have said exactly what the emotion was. “It was night, and it was nowhere I'd ever been. You remember that?”
“I remember waking up there,” Cashel said.
“I was glad you woke up, chief,” Zahag said. “And I guess those folks in the tower woke up somewhere strange too. It's good not to be alone at night in a strange place.”
Cashel cleared his throat, but there wasn't a lot to say. They kept walking, the three of them.
Together.
The 19th of Ikon
Garric sat on a fluted stone barrel, a piece of the little chapel's front colonnade. The pillars had fallen, carrying the pediment and the roof of the porch with them. Garric was breathing heavily and the big muscles of his thighs trembled.
He hadn't had a chance to relax since they'd entered the fane in the other place, a lifetime ago. Liane walked over to him from the temple's interior.
She seemed a trifle wobbly but nonetheless in better condition than Garric was.
His nerves were on the edge of failing him. Every time he looked into the undergrowth, he saw a figure striding toward him with a smile straight out of Hell on her shimmering face.
“Tenoctris is all right,” Liane said. “She wanted to check on something.”
Garric gave her a quick look. Liane nodded. “An incantation,” she said softly. “I didn't want to listen quite yet.”
She sat beside Garric. He shifted, though the round of stone was still close quarters. “Garric?” she said. “There was something with us, wasn't there? When we were coming here.”
“She couldn't get to us as long as we stayed on the path,” Garric said without meeting the girl's eyes. It wasn't a direct answer, and he couldn't even be sure it was true. He prayed it was true, though.
“And as long as Tenoctris could keep speaking,” Liane said. She looked at the partial moon. It had the same luster as the nude woman who'd followed Garric with cold, silvery laughter...
“These must have fallen recently,” Garric said brightly. He patted the section of pillar next to the one on which they sat. “The honeysuckle's grown around them, but there're no pine seedlings taller than my knee.”
Liane grinned wanly at his change of subject. She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
“That was in the earthquake two years ago, I suppose,” she said. “I was still at Mistress Gudea's Academy. There wasn't much damage in Valles, but the site of the old palace was badly shaken.”
“Two years?” Tenoctris said from the doorway. The younger people jumped up, surprised. Garric jerked his hand out of Liane's.
“I would have guessed a little longer than that,” Tenoctris went on, “but the force may have been obtruding for months or longer before it began to have an effect in the physical world.”
“Effect?” Garric said.
Tenoctris smiled. She looked as though she'd been dragged a mile behind a wagon, but she was standing on her own legs. She held the willow whip Garric had cut into a wand for her.
Tenoctris let Liane take her hand, but the old woman walked to an adjacent fragment of column and sat as though she didn't need the help. “Something's come here,” she said. She patted the stone with a hand which showed the delicate veins. “I mean this very place, not just our world. But I don't know what it is.”
Garric and Liane faced the old wizard. Garric stretched his arms. Tenoctris didn't weigh very much, but he'd been carrying her for an unguessably long distance along the silver path.
“The thing that brought us here?” Liane asked.
Garric straightened. “Nothing could have brought us here!” he said.
Even he was surprised by his vehemence. Coughing, he went on, “I mean, it was all random that we came here. We were on the way to Valles, sure. But the Gulf, and then Liane happening to recognize the chapel in the other place where we were—that was just chance.”
Tenoctris smiled vaguely. “As you know,” she said, “I don't believe in the Great Gods—”
“I do,” Liane said forcefully. “Tenoctrist this can't be just luck making these things happen. Luck doesn't work that way!”
Tenoctris shrugged. “Nor do I believe in fate,” she continued in her usual calm tone. “But if I thought all these events were being manipulated by an enemy, the queen or some other person trying to work his ends through Malkar, the best advice I could give us is that we should surrender. An entity which can move us with such precision through such complex gyrations isn't going to be defeated by anything we or any other humans can do.”
Garric smiled. The women looked at him with determinedly blank expressions.
Garric's smile grew slowly until it was as broad as it'd been the afternoon he'd won a bout at the Sheep Fair against a merchant's guard. The fellow fancied himself with quarterstaves—and fancied his chances with Sharina, for all she'd made it clear she didn't want him to bother her further.
“Well, that makes it easy,” Garric said. “I mean, we're not going to quit, are we?”
“No,” Liane whispered. Tenoctris merely began smiling herself.
“So we may as well believe the Great Gods are on our side,” he explained: “Or fate, or we've got some—”
Garric lifted his hands palms-up in a gesture of doubt.
“—some friend, some player, who's smart enough to make all this happen. We're going to go on, so we may as well believe we're going to win eventually.”
He'd always been conventionally religious, like everybody else in the borough. Atheism and free-thinking were for wealthy cities, not for hamlets where a hard winter or a bad storm could mean starvation for whole households.
Real belief was something different, though. The Lady and the Shepherd were far too fine for a little place like Barca's Hamlet.
As for Duzi, well, it did Garric good to believe there was someone with him when he watched sheep grazing the borough's meadows. Maybe the someone was named Duzi, and he—He—really appreciated the garlands and nibbles of cheese Garri
c and other shepherds offered to the stone carved with His rough image. A bit of cheese or a garland was no great expense, even for a shepherd.
Garric hadn't changed his beliefs, but he felt the same as he had about Duzi back home. If you're responsible for things that are too complicated to really control, no matter how hard you try, then it's good to feel that there's somebody watching alongside you who knows a little more.
“I'd offer a bite of cheese,” he said, letting his smile return as a wry quirk of his lips. “A whole round of cheese, even. I just don't know where to leave it.”
Liane stared at him with the expression of someone who's afraid her companion has gone mad. Tenoctris continued to smile; and somewhere in Garric's mind, the tall, tanned figure of King Carus was laughing.
“Will you need to carry out more, ah, researches here, Tenoctris?” Liane said stiffly. She thought she was being laughed at, which she certainly wasn't. Garric squeezed her hand again.
“I'm looking forward to researching a bed,” the old woman said. “I've learned something by arriving in this place, but there's nothing more that I need do.”
She half-smiled. Tenoctris wasn't a jolly person, but for the most part she seemed to Garric to be both contented and happy. That was a remarkable tribute, given the chaos and danger he'd seen threaten her many times.
She stood up carefully. “Everything seems to work,” she said. “As well as it did before, that is. Though I wasn't an acrobat even when I was the age you two are now.”
Garric frowned. “We're a mile from Valles proper?” he asked Liane.
She nodded, seeing at once what he was thinking. “At least,” she agreed. “Half again as far from the harbor, where most of the inns are. I'll go hire a chair—a carriage, do you think?—while you watch Tenoctris.”
She patted her waistline, hearing a softly reassuring clink. Liane carried the remnants of her father's wealth in gold, rolled within a sash beneath her tunic. There were enough Sandrakkan Riders in the silk to buy a ship, let alone rent a sedan chair and four bearers.
“I'll go,” Garric said. “You'll be safe here till I get back. Unless Valles is a paradise compared to Carcosa and Erdin, it's not safe for a lone girl with a beltful of money to hire a chair at a drover's tavern.”