by David Drake
Garric took the reins from the page who'd intended to hold the gelding's head, put his foot in the left stirrup, and swung himself into the saddle. His technique was flawless, but a twinge in his thigh muscles reminded him that riding a horse—like swordsmanship—was a matter for the body as well as for a mind that understood the process at a reflexive level.
“All right!” Garric said in a voice that rang from the walls surrounding the stableyard. “Let's go show the people in the Customs House that there's no room in Valles for anybody who serves the queen!”
A pair of guards walked the heavy gate-leaves open. Garric rode into the alley. It wasn't the most inspiring start, but it was the only practical one unless they'd wanted to prepare an insurrection in the porticoed formal entrance to Royhas' town house.
“Valence and the Isles!” Garric shouted as he led his entourage from the alley into one of Valles' major boulevards; this portion was called Harmony Street, but it became Monument Avenue half a mile west in the vicinity of the queen's mansion.
Garric drew his sword. Despite its size, the gelding was of a more phlegmatic disposition than some of the thoroughbreds Garric had cared for in his father's stables. He obeyed Garric's reins, and his hooves didn't slip as they clashed over the cobblestones.
Garric was the only one mounted. A horse for Liane or Royhas would have put them at risk without helping the endeavor. They were far better off on their own legs.
“Valence and the Isles!” Garric cried. He waved his sword toward the row of expensive houses across the street. The faces of householders as well as servants were peering from windows.
“King Carus and Freedom!” bawled the nomenclator who normally announced visitors at the levees where Royhas accepted petitions from his clients.
“King Carus and Freedom!” the rest of the entourage shouted at the tops of their lungs. Liane and Royhas marched on either side of the horse. If not as loud as the frog-voiced nomenclator, they were still clear and easily audible.
Garric walked his mount forward. People came out of houses farther down the street to see what the commotion was about. The helmet flare cut off Garric's peripheral vision, and he didn't want to turn his head to look over his shoulder. That might send the wrong signal to those watching.
“They're coming!” said Liane. “They're joining us, Garric!”
“Carus and Freedom!” Garric shouted. The noise was making the horse restive; he swayed his head and stutter-stepped. Garric jerked the reins hard to straighten the beast's line.
Emotions rushed through Garric's blood. He wanted to thud his heels into the gelding's ribs and rattle down the street at a canter. He fought that instinct and the horse as well: they had to move slowly so that enough ordinary citizens could join the mob to give it unstoppable weight.
“They're coming!” Liane repeated exultantly.
Harmony Street bent to the left at an intersection and narrowed slightly; a block of three- and four-story apartments replaced the noble residences of Royhas' immediate neighborhood. Even so these were dwellings of prosperous or at least comfortable citizens, not tenements.
People spilled out of the arched entranceways, joining the march. Some newcomers were actually ahead of Garric, though most of them swelled the crowd that followed.
“King Carus!” shouted part of the growing mob. Other throats screamed, “Death to the queen!” and “Burn her alive!” The slogans merged into a sound more like the snarl of a huge beast than anything from a human throat.
Rumor and sometimes the conspirators' paid agents had readied the ground, but universal hatred of Queen Azalais did more for the response than plotting had. Garric's presence was the spark in this district, but trumpet calls and occasionally smoke plumes from elsewhere in the city showed that riots had broken out at dozens of other points as well.
A squad of the City Guard with polished brass helmets and gorgets trotted from a side street into the triangular plaza twenty paces ahead. The leader carried a spontoon with a broad, filigreed blade as a rank insignia. He called an order. Four of his men spread to the sides, raising their long, knob-headed staves to receive the mob, while the cornicene raised his coiled horn to summon support.
“Down with the queen!” the nomenclator shouted. Garric swept his sword in an arc, pointing to the street branching toward the Customs House.
The squad leader grabbed the cornicene before the man could blow; the staff-bearers looked uncertainly at one another and their commander. Garric, seeing the hesitation, waved his sword in a broad flourish as though he had a signal flag in his hand.
“Down with the queen's lackeys!” he cried, and rode past the Guards. They didn't try to stop him.
“Down with the queen!” the squad leader said as he and his men joined the mob.
The Customs House was a monumental gateway standing where the main north-south road entered the esplanade around the harbor's margin. The structure was a square of red sandstone with a twenty-foot arch on each side. For the most part the inspectors worked on the surrounding pavement, but for paperwork and storage there was a second story served by inside staircases. Swags and pillars of colored marble decorated the walls, and on the crenellated roof stood a gilded bronze statue with a scepter in one hand and a stalk of rice in the other, symbolizing Valles.
The customs officials wore linen tabards over their tunics. Instead of red and black, the royal colors, these were in shades of orange—as close as dyes made from pollen and red earth could come to the hue of fire.
A grotesquely fat man on top of the gateway shouted an order as he saw Garric approach at the head of the mob. There were a dozen officials on the pavement. They drew the swords they carried but wavered back into the shelter of the building when they appreciated the numbers they were facing. A second mob spilled into the plaza from the slums to the south.
The air before Garric congealed into a gray shape with glowing eyes. The gelding shied with a scream of terror. Garric swung his leg over the saddle and pushed himself away from the animal. He hit the cobblestones hard and might have fallen if Royhas hadn't supported him. He was glad for once that he was wearing boots.
The phantasm drifted forward. Its face was a demon's, and its clawed hands reached toward Garric's eyes.
Garric had seen the phantasms in Tenoctris' scrying mirror, but this was his first direct experience of them. He walked forward with his sword raised.
“It's an illusion!” he said. His voice was a frightened squeal in his own ears—but he kept walking.
The phantasm's jaws opened; its very silence made it the more frightening. From the corner of his eye Garric could see that the other mob had halted before a similar creature.
“It's an illusion!” Liane said in a clear, melodious voice as she advanced at his side.
Even so, Garric couldn't force himself to walk straight through the phantasm. He reached out with his left hand instead.
His skin tingled. For an instant he stood on a barren plain. All around him were the bodies of his friends and kin, impaled on stakes of rough-hewn cedar. Their dead eyes cursed him.
“Illusion!” Garric shouted. He stumbled forward. He could see again. The phantasm had vanished. Garric ran across the cobblestones with a thousand screaming citizens at his back. The queen's officials threw down their weapons; some knelt begging for mercy, others fled northward up the plaza.
Royhas' guards cut a pair of the queen's men down with quick sword strokes. Stones dropped those running; citizens, some of them wearing expensive clothing, pounded the fallen to death with clubs and their feet.
“We don't have to kill them!” Garric shouted, but he knew no one would listen. The slaughter made him sick to watch, but he'd known when he agreed to the plan that a mob is a beast with an appetite for blood.
He ran under the gateway. “To the queen's house!” he called. The plan was for the mobs to converge on the queen's mansion, but only after they'd swept her minions out of every district of the city. King Carus had reco
mmended that course, so that those involved would be flushed with victory before they reached the place where resistance would be more than will-o'-the-wisps and a handful of thugs.
Garric was hot and already panting. Sweat soaked his armor's padding, and he felt the impact of each stride over the cobblestones. He wondered what the horse was doing—and laughed at the thought, because the muscles of his inner thighs ached from even the short ride he'd had.
There was a scream from, above, then an enormous wet impact like nothing Garric had ever heard. He turned. People who'd passed under the monumental gateway looked up, waving their fists and shouting curses.
Garric lifted his helmet with his left hand so that the silvered brim didn't get in his way when he looked up. Men—and a few women—leaned over the ornamental battlements, laughing at those below.
Because the crowd had scattered, Garric could see what had happened when he lowered his eyes again. Citizens had climbed to the top of the gateway and flung the queen's customs chief to the pavement forty feet-below. The impact had crushed the fat man so completely that his clothes were sopping red with blood.
Liane looked at the garbage which had recently been human. Her face had no expression. “To the queen's house!” she cried, trotting up what was now Monument Avenue. Royhas and his guajds fell in alongside.
Garric and his fellows were no longer leading the mob. The citizens who'd chased the fleeing officials were well ahead, and another limb of the insurrection had joined three blocks up the broad expanse.
A large crowd had broken into an imposing residence with lions carved in low relief to either side of the front door. Garric glanced at what was going on. A bed burst through a third-floor window casement from the inside, fell, and shattered into splinters of ivory and exotic woods when it hit the stone planter below.
Garric supposed the house was owned by one of the queen's officials. Before long, though, there'd be looting and death without any political excuse, let alone reason. There was nothing to be done about it—except to finish the queen as quickly as possible so that order could be restored.
“Worse things happen in wartime, lad,” the king's voice murmured; but there was no joy in the words, only grim acceptance of what couldn't be changed.
Statues of statesmen of former days stood on plinths to either side of the avenue. Some were so old that verdigris had eaten holes in the bronze.
Garric remembered scenes his own eyes had never beheld in the Voting Field in the center of Carcosa. Since the day when Comus had imposed a monarchy on the oligarchies of ancient Haft, statues and other monuments had filled the plaza. Now it was weeds and rubble. Modern Carcosa hadn't rebuilt the area after pirates and dynasts sacked the city repeatedly when the Old Kingdom fell.
The queen's mansion was directly ahead. A mob already surrounded it, though the black walls and flame-wrapped windows were unharmed.
Garric looked behind him; he had to turn his whole body, because the cuirass prevented him from twisting to glance over his shoulder the way he normally would have done. Tenoctris looked composed as she sat in her sedan chair. The four bearers moved at a sliding trot that made the vehicle sway but didn't jounce the passenger significantly.
Garric and Liane reached the back of the crowd around the mansion. At a command from Royhas, the guards jogged ahead of Garric with their spears reversed.
“Make way for King Carus!” the nomenclator shouted. His lungs were so powerful that he could actually be heard over the mob's noise. Spearbutts or an armored shoulder moved folk out of the way if they didn't take the hint.
The guards halted just short of the queen's perimeter. Their commander, a stolid veteran named Enger whose short beard was the same iron gray as his eyes, nodded Garric and Liane forward. Tenoctris dismounted to join them a moment later, but Royhas remained with his guards in an armored semicircle behind the three.
The ground cover across the sharp demarcator was the pale yellow of light-starved grass, but the hairlike leaves weren't flattened into blades. The cherry tree nearby was in bloom; the petals were black. A twisted branch beckoned to Garric like a diseased whore.
Tenoctris seated herself on the cushion a bearer slid between her lanky buttocks and the pavement. Another bearer handed Tenoctris the length of pine board they'd carried lashed to the chair's back. She'd already scribed it with a circle inside a six-pointed star.
Thirty feet to their right, a muscular young man who'd shaved the back of his scalp bare stepped across the margin between cobblestones and wizardry. He waved a staff taken from a City Guard and shouted, “Come on, anybody who's a man!”
Several other fellows with their hair cut like his followed him. After a moment's pause twenty-odd men and a few women plunged after the leaders crying, “Death to the queen!” in loud, drunken voices.
Tenoctris took a bronze stylus from her sleeve. With the pointed end, she began to scratch words in the Old Script around the edge of the circle she'd prepared. The stylus marked the soft wood easily, but it was intended for wax tablets: the other end flared like a fishtail for smoothing over mistakes.
She seemed oblivious of the people running toward the mansion. Everyone else outside the perimeter, Garric and Liane included, watched them in fearful anticipation.
The half-shorn men were members of a street gang. Very possibly they'd worn the queen's colors in the past, but the lure of disorder had caused them to revert to their old ways this morning—and thereby saved their lives, because it was very unlikely that anyone caught wearing orange in public had fared better than had the customs officials.
Their lives were forfeit now, along with those of the ordinary citizens the gang members had drawn across the perimeter with them.
The intruders had lost their way already. From drunken bravado, their demeanor had changed to confusion and fear. They stopped running. Their voices grew thinner, as though they were at a great distance, and they obviously couldn't hear the directions shouted by friends outside the zone of wizardry.
“Can't we...?” Liane said, looking down at Tenoctris. She caught herself before Garric could hush her.
No, they couldn't disturb Tenoctris in order save a score of people guided by wine rather than sense. Garric and Liane knew the only hope for the insurrection was that it succeed before the queen could marshal her enormous, scattered powers to deal with them, the three of them. He, Liane, and Tenoctris were the only present opponents with knowledge enough to be dangerous to the queen's power.
Those who'd entered the garden had drawn into a tight group. A statue that was half-man, half-woman stepped from its base. Its face was perfect but inhumanly cold. It walked toward the interlopers at the measured pace of an officiating priest.
A man flung down his stoneware bottle and threw himself on the ground beside it, kicking like a child having a tantrum. He covered his head with his hands. The remainder of the interlopers bolted away from the androgyne as a group—
With one exception. The husky fellow who'd led the others into the garden now swaggered toward the oncoming statue.
“Kaias,” Tenoctris murmured. “Saseri tayam...”
The bravo's staff had a fist-sized knob on the end of a six-foot shaft, a murderous weapon if used with that intent. He swung it into the androgyne's head with a sharp whock.
The dense wood cracked and a few chips flew away. The staff rebounded, quivering like a lute string. The bravo screamed curses but kept his grip despite the numbing vibration.
The statue came on. Its expression, a faint smile, did not change.
“Daya quayamta alista...” said Tenoctris. A wisp of light spiraled slowly from the center of her circle. It looked like the shaving, that rises when an auger bores soft wood.
The group trying to flee the garden was twenty yards from the man they'd left crying behind them. The ground gaped beneath them.
Victims screamed. Those closest to the collapsing edges tried to climb to safety, but the turf crumbled like wet sand when their hands clutch
ed it.
An athletic youth took a running leap. His fringed tunic, popular among the fashionable elite, fluttered behind him. He'd have cleared the trap except that a cedar tree's root squirmed from the soil to grip his ankle. It flipped him into the cavity with a motion much like that of a man tossing tidbits to his dog.
The earth closed. There was no sign that it ever had opened, nor of the score of humans it had swallowed down.
The bravo with the staff stood his ground, laughing in a cracked, high-pitched voice. He swung again. The knob shattered. He flailed at the androgyne with the shaft, splitting it the long way.
The statue caught the laughing man's wrists. He continued to struggle, but flesh was no match for stone. The arms encircled him.
The bravo's spine cracked in the embrace; his legs flailed to the sides, then hung limp as burlap sacks. Ribs splintered through his skin and tunic. The arms continued to close until the victim's torso fell in two pieces.
The smiling androgyne walked back toward its base.
“Horan,”said Tenoctris, “elaoth!”
The helix was faintly blue. It bent at right angles and began extending itself over the perimeter of the queen's domain.
Tenoctris set the board on the stones in front of her. When she started to rise, Garric and Liane quickly offered their arms for support. The tight coil of light continued to bore its way slowly toward the mansion.
“Now it's up to us,” Tenoctris said quietly. She gave her companions a smile.
Black petals from the cherry tree covered the man who'd thrown himself to the ground in panic. There was no sound or movement from within the somber mound.
“Right,” said Garric. He drew his sword and led the way in the direction the helix pointed.
“I need another pellet first,” Cerix said. They'd slid the table with his paraphernalia against the wall to make more room for the circle of power on the floor. He gripped his wheels to roll the chair toward it.
“Cerix?” Halphemos said. He laid his hand over the cripple's. “I think we'd better do the spell now. We need the moon at zenith, and...”