by David Drake
“I don't know much about Sirimat,” she said. A week ago she hadn't known much about Bight. “Rigal—the poet—says trees walk and the people there don't worship the Lady, but he wrote two thousand years ago.”
Spiky roots like the teeth of a snake faced her from both sides of the trail. She shoved her way through, wondering how the hunter had managed not to disturb them.
“On Sirimat there's trees with jewels at the heart,” Hanno said, “or so I hear. Well, I'll see what I can learn in Valles. There's always somebody along the Valles waterfront who's been any place you please, though the trick is staying sober enough to remember what they tell you.”
They were on an upward slope distinct enough that Sharina's feet twice slipped on matted leaves. The soil beneath was bright red. High on the branches Sharina caught glimpses of flowering air plants and the occasional brilliant flutter of birds, but color, other than shades of green, was the exception in this portion of the forest.
Hanno halted and stepped aside for Sharina to join him. He was looking into the clearing before them. “Well, that's where Unarc's cabin was,” he said. “I'd have bet we'd find him under that slate roof he always strutted when he talked about, but I'd have lost my money.”
A few charred logs stuck out from the pile of rock slabs at the edge of a spring. Lowering trees, one of them a baobab that must have been twenty paces in circumference, bounded the clearing.
Hanno glanced at Sharina. He grinned and added, “We'd still smell him if he was under that. It takes a good month, even in this climate, before you can't smell a dead man.”
“Oh,” Sharina said quietly. She walked into the clearing.
Underfoot was a shale outcrop unusual in a landscape which was mostly forms of coarse limestone. Apparently the local vegetation found the surface uncongenial: the leaf canopy hundreds of feet in the air was at least as thick as that anywhere in the forest, but the saplings and lesser plants that elsewhere created a second and third layer beneath the main blanket were absent. Sharina felt as though she were in a room of enormous height.
“It's very peaceful,” she said.
Hanno nodded. “Unarc felt that way about it,” he said. “Me, I like hearing the water when I'm lying there at night.”
He chuckled. “I guess Unarc's finding it pretty peaceful wherever it is he's at now.”
Hanno glanced upward. There wasn't enough sky visible at any point through the leaves that a fingernail wouldn't have blocked it, but darkness was already leaching the hues from the trees.
“Unarc's hideout was in that baobab,” he said, pointing the spearbutt. “There's a crack in the trunk you can slide through, and inside it's a regular cave. I'll leave you with the pack.”
“You're not coming in with me?” Sharina said, careful not to put any particular weight in the question.
The hunter slipped off his pack and held it by the straps in one hand as he strode across the clearing. “I'm going to check on Unarc's boat,” he said. “I know the way well enough to go there now, though I'll lay up there till the morning.”
He stopped at the side of the baobab where the pale bark gaped in a seam. Sharina would have assumed the scar closed deeper in the trunk had she not been told otherwise.
“You going to be all right?” Hanno said.
“Yes,” said Sharina, holding her spear point-forward so that she could enter the narrow gap. “Of course.”
25th of Heron (later)
“Garric?” Royhas called, his voice already attenuated. Garric looked over his shoulder. The crowd seemed half a mile distant, though Garric knew he'd only taken two steps into the garden. The air was warm and still, with an odor like that of overripe fruit.
“I'll send the men with you,” the nobleman said. His face was distorted with the effort of shouting. “I'll lead them if you like!”
Tenoctris shook her head minusculely. “I couldn't protect them,” she said. “My powers won't cover more than three people at once. That is, I very much .hope...”
The three of them grinned at one another. They all knew what Tenoctris meant, though it was Liane who actually finished the thought aloud: “We'll all hope that three people aren't more than you can protect. Anyway, we're with friends.”
“I'll keep that in mind when the stone tiger swallows me,” Garric said. He cupped his left hand and his right fist around the sword hilt to his mouth for a crude trumpet. “Wait as we agreed!” he called. “Nobody enters until we've made it safe!”
They walked on, side by side. Their glowing guide, a helix outside the perimeter, was a dot of blue light here. It bumbled through the air with the aimlessness of a crane fly in the twilight, passing between a pair of planters in the shape of dragon heads. Hostas grew out of the stone mouths, looking like green flames.
“That way?” Garric said. He felt his helmet wiggle as he frowned. He'd have given the planters a wide berth if the decision were his.
“Yes,” Tenoctris said crisply. “Ilna could pick a pathway through these illusions better than my wizardry can, but I think my abilities are sufficient.”
Garric strode ahead, resisting his instinct to slash at the hostas as he passed them. He'd been raised not to trouble those who didn't trouble him. That was a good plan for life. Striking out because he was scared—which he surely was, scared even by the plants in this terrible place—was a bad one. He wasn't going to let fear drive him.
Garric couldn't see the queen's mansion. He turned to look for the spectators he knew were watching the scene, but they were gone too. Shrubs whose stems twisted in groups of six or seven from a common base waved tiny leaves at him. He didn't remember having seen them as he entered the garden with his companions.
“We'll bear to the left here,” Tenoctris said in gentle reproof. She gestured. Garric noticed that she still held the stylus in her right hand.
“Sorry,” Garric said contritely. “I won't let my attention wander again.”
The dot of light had curved to avoid a bed of purple daffodils at the foot of a small magnolia and a boulder. The tree was in flower; its perfume had a heady attraction that made Garric think of women wearing brass spangles and little else.
He obediently followed the guide through sedums whose flowered heads humped like giant toadstools in his path. The outcrop lifted itself onto short forelegs. Knobs opened into eyes which watched with toadlike malevolence as the human intruders kept beyond its reach.
Liane still carried the pail of water. Her eyes darted about their surroundings, but her face showed only aristocratic unconcern.
“Pretending you're not afraid is a good way to keep going on, lad,” murmured King Carus. Ever since Garric entered the garden, the king's tall, sturdy form had been with him. “But if she's really that brave, she's more of a man than I ever was.”
Garric smiled. He wouldn't bet against Liane being truly fearless, but neither did it matter. Garric knew that Liane would go on no matter how frightened she was.
And so would he.
The guiding light drifted past the statue of a three-headed ogre. The creature moved on its plinth, making a grating sound. “Wait,” Tenoctris said. She knelt and plucked a fern crosier which sprang from the crack between two skull-shaped rocks.
The ogre's three single eyes glared at the humans. It began to step down, lifting the saw-bladed sword in one hand and the axe in the other.
“Thesta,” Tenoctris said. “Eibradibas!”
She struck the crosier's stem sharply with her bronze stylus. The fern broke.
The ankle still supporting the ogre on its base snapped loudly. The statue toppled forward and hit the ground, shattering into a dozen major pieces and a pile of gravel. Garric wouldn't have expected so much damage from stone hitting soft turf.
The old woman wiped fern juice from her stylus with a satisfied smile. Liane helped her rise.
“Quite a simple effect,” Tenoctris said. “All the queen's effects are, really. But what amazing power she has to project so many presences
at once, and over such distances!”
Garric's boots crunched on bits of the broken statue. One of the heads was upturned. He saw the stone eye swivel to follow him. His mouth twitched in an involuntary grimace.
The bead of light turned at right angles from what looked like a smooth, stone-bordered path and crossed instead a stream gurgling noisomely through reeds. Garric didn't ask this time, but his stomach tightened as he followed. He remembered very clearly what had happened to Gothelm at a watercourse that might well be this one.
Garric splashed through the creek. Water soaked through the uppers of his boots almost instantly. It felt clammy and his feet squished for the next few steps, but none of the horrors he'd imagined—none of the horrors he'd watched—occurred.
The light skirted a pair of weeping cherry trees, neither of them twenty feet high. Their flowing blossoms weren't the usual white or magenta but rather a red as bright as arterial blood.
Trailing branches shivered as the humans passed just beyond their reach. Garric felt a wave of dry, bloodless hatred directed at him.
“Ah...” Liane whispered.
Garric had been watching the light. He raised his eyes slightly, following Liane's line of sight. On the slight rise ahead of them, he could see the queen's mansion. Its windows fluttered baleful flames.
“We're there,” Garric said. He restrained his instinct to run forward. The king in his mind feared covered pitfalls, sharp stakes hidden in the ground, iron caltrops forged so that one of the four spikes was up no matter how the object fell—all the material traps that a wily general strews in front of a hostile army.
But the queen wasn't a general and didn't fight on a material battlefield. Besides, the guide would warn them of—
The light vanished. It was gone with none of the lingering glow that a candle wick offers as it smokes itself cold. Tenoctris whispered what Garric thought was an incantation; he couldn't be sure.
“The door is opening,” Liane said. Her voice had the emotionless timbre of rigid control.
The high door leaves creaked inward; the iron hinges sounded like the souls of the damned. Garric expected a gush of flame-colored light as the windows above showed, but for the moment there was only darkness.
“We've penetrated the queen's illusions, so she'll send her living gatekeeper,” Tenoctris said. She seated herself on the pale-leafed grass. “This won't be an illusion.”
“I didn't think it would be,” Garric said quietly. He was two persons now, a peasant and an ancient king. Carus no longer displaced Garric from his own body at times of violent crisis, but the king's knowledge and reflexes were intertwined with the youth's own. As with a rope, the whole was far stronger than the separate strands.
With his left hand Garric unclasped his red velvet cape and snapped it twice around his forearm. The cloth would be some protection; slight, perhaps, but sometimes the difference between life and death is no wider than the thickness of the stabbing blade. He moved forward on the balls of his feet, waiting for the thing that would come through the doorway.
Tenoctris' lips were moving; Liane stood beside her, holding a bucket of water in one hand and a dagger with a blade as sharp as a snake's fang in the other.
The queen's gatekeeper hunched to pass beneath the twenty-foot archway. When it straightened it was manlike save for its size and its single eye.
The cyclops wore a corselet and greaves of black iron. The armor was molded with images of demons rending human victims. The shield on the cyclops' left arm had a dragon-head boss; its eyes gleamed. A crested helmet added to the height of a monster already thirty feet high.
Garric laughed with a glee that was just this side of hysteria. He'd seen a cyclops before, that one a prehuman corpse which a wizard had reanimated for his protection on a beach beyond the waking world.
That wizard was dead, and the queen would die also.
The cyclops came toward him, striding with the heavy inevitability of a river flooding. Its legs were relatively thicker than a man's, vast pillars that made the giant appear pyramidal despite the breadth of its chest and shoulders. It held a spear all of iron over its right shoulder, poised to stab down; the scabbard of a sword half again as long as a man clanged at its side.
“Haft and the Isles!” Garric cried as he broke into a run. That war cry from a former time was drowned in the monster's hooting bellow, louder than that of the long trumpets coastwatchers in Carcosa blew to guide mariners in time of fog.
“Haft and the Isles!”
Garric unrolled his cloak again for a better use. A man couldn't carry armor that would be proof against the thrust of the cyclops' spear, but the brain within the thick bones of the creature's skull should be no bigger than a lemon. It was a beast, not a warrior.
Garric fluttered the cloak through the air to his left. His body shifted right. The iron spear, flashing like a thunderbolt, spiked the velvet to the ground; Garric, slashing right and left, drove between the massive legs.
His sword hit bone with the forestroke, cartilage with the back. A huge foot kicked out, catching Garric in the ribs as he tried to slide clear. He flew twenty feet from where he'd intended to land. He'd lost his helmet. Half the studs holding the right seam of his cuirass together were broken as well.
A creature so large hadn't a right to be quick besides...
Garric rolled to his feet. There was blood on his sword-blade and more blood gushing from the cyclops' right ankle. The blow had severed a small artery; what Garric wanted, needed, was to cut the Achilles tendon.
In time the monster would bleed out. Garric, already gasping with effort, didn't believe he had the time.
The cyclops stabbed the cloak repeatedly with the single-minded determination of a mother smashing the viper she'd spilled out of the cradle. Garric took two deep breaths, glad the cuirass had loosened and wishing he could fling the useless burden away. He took a step toward the monster. It turned to face him, pivoting on its left heel.
Garric paused. The cyclops turned, bent, and stabbed down at him. Garric stepped sideways. The point of his long sword clashed against the monster's right gauntlet as the spear plunged deep in the soil.
The monster's index finger spun away in a dance of sparks. The gauntlets had to be thinner metal so that the sections could slide over one another at the joints. The good steel of Garric's blade had sheared like a cold chisel to the spearshaft beneath.
The cyclops hooted on a sustained note that made Garric's bowels quiver. It came toward him with its shield advanced and the spear rising again to thrust.
Garric backed quickly. The monster was deceptively fast because the strides, though taken with deliberation, were each as long as several paces by a human being.
“Garric!” Liane cried. “Your helmet!”
Garric hopped back, past rather than onto the headpiece of silvered bronze. He hooked the tip of his long sword between the neck flare and earpiece, then flipped it in a glittering curve over the cyclops' head.
The creature shied like a man attacked by a hornet. The spear licked out but missed the tumbling helmet. Garric rushed in, using his left fiand on the pommel this time to add force as he chopped the outside of the advanced right leg. The blade crunched, sinking its own width in the cyclops' ankle.
The cyclops roared. It swung its shield downward as a weapon. Garric dived under the blow instead of trying to back away from it. He'd cleared his sword with a jerk; bits of cartilage and vascular bone clung to the edge, as sometimes happened when he jointed a roast with a cleaver in his father's inn.
He was between the monster's legs. It raised its right foot to stamp him into the ground. He stabbed deep into the left ankle as he twisted his body back.
The hobnailed boot slammed down. It missed Garric, but he had to leave his sword behind as he scrambled free. The cyclops paced toward Garric, step by titanic step. Garric was gasping, his lungs a furnace. His hands were free because he'd lost his sword. He clutched at the half-opened seam of his cuirass, t
rying to wrench the armor completely loose.
The laces resisted him. The right side of his chest was still numb from the kick.
Garric backed away. He couldn't turn and run, because then he wouldn't be able to see if the cyclops threw its spear. Even facing the monster, Garric wasn't sure he'd be able to dodge the huge missile.
He was going up the gentle slope. When he reached the mansion, the cyclops would crush him like a bug against the pilastered stone wall.
Because Garric was concentrating on the monster's eye, a truer predictor of its intentions than the point of its weapon, he didn't see Liane until the girl grasped the sword projecting from the cyclops' ankle. Holding the hilt in both hands, she pulled back with all the considerable strength of her small body. The blade rotated through the joint like a knife slicing into a head of cabbage.
The cyclops shrieked. It turned, poising its spear. Liane tumbled backward, still holding the sword hilt. Blood gushed from the wound.
“Here!” Garric shouted, running toward the monster and waving his arms to distract it. The cyclops couldn't have heard him over the sound of its own cry. Shreds of red velvet fluttered from the spearpoint. “Look at me!”
The monster lunged forward. Its left foot twisted out from under it, still attached to the leg by glistening tendons that stretched under the creature's weight.
The cyclops fell, missing Liane by so little that Garric's heart stopped till he saw the girl still scrambling away. She held the sword. She stabbed inexpertly with it at the gauntleted hand as the creature flailed in her direction. The iron spear was rammed two yards deep in the soil.
The cyclops was howling. Blood fountained over the foot that stuck sideways from its leg. On the other side of the creature from Garric, Tenoctris mouthed an incantation.
Liane stumbled uphill, holding the sword in both hands. Her face was white except where blood spattered it; her arms were drenched in the creature's gore.
Garric turned. The mansion doors were open. A sparkle of purest blue dusted the gap between the leaves, though the air within was orange flame.