by David Drake
“The gate!” Liane gasped as she pushed the sword hilt into Garric's hand. “Tenoctris says take iron through the gateway!”
Garric strode toward the curtain of fire. The basalt threshold was hot to step on, even with his thick boots. He thrust his sword as if stabbing for the eyes of an enemy he could not see.
He felt a tingle, no more. In place of the flame was a brooding entry hall lighted by windows on the upper level. It was empty save for suits of armor that hadn't been designed for humans.
Garric looked over his shoulder. The cyclops' huge skeleton lay in a pool of its liquescent flesh, and the mob, thousands of Valles' citizens, ran across the cobblestones shrieking for the queen's blood.
Garric tried to stand aside. He wanted to make sure Tenoctris was safe, but first he had to get his breath. He saw everything as a blur of color and motion.
A man clasped Garric's free hand and slapped the back-plate of his cuirass enthusiastically. “King Carus!” he cried. “Hail Carus!”
A woman old enough to be Garric's mother threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. She wore a perfume of heliotrope and her layered garments were silken.
“Please!” Garric said. Most of the crowd was pouring into the mansion, but an increasing number of people pressed about him. He tried to move away. Liane had squeezed to his side. She stood with her fists raised to either side of her jaw.
Two of Royhas' guards forced their way through the crowd. The nobleman himself and Tenoctris joined a moment later, protected by the other four guards. The armored spearmen forced citizens away from Garric and Liane the way a froe splits shakes from a cedar log.
“The other members of our group will be with us shortly,” Royhas said. His mouth quirked in a wry smile. “Here at the mansion, I told them. They weren't very pleased, but they didn't have a great deal of choice, did they?”
Shouts echoed inside the mansion. From the brief glimpse Garric had gotten of the interior, the mansion was constructed around a courtyard. The style was familiar to King Carus, but it hadn't been used in Valles either in the present day or during the Old Kingdom.
Liane held Tenoctris' hands and talked, her face close to that of the older woman. Tenoctris looked tired, but she smiled warmly when she felt Garric's gaze on her.
Royhas noted the exchange of glances. His smile tightened and he went on, “I should have offered my congratulations first, Master Garric. No one who watched you—and that's much of the populace of Valles—could doubt that you're a returned hero of former times.”
“The heroes of former times failed,” Garric heard his lips say. “We—you and I and all the rest—need to do better, Royhas. And so we shall.”
Smoke belched from a mansion window. It was the natural gray-white billowing of wood and cloth because some idiot had set furnishings alight.
“Can you stop that?” Garric said to Royhas. “Do you have enough men that we can restore order?”
The nobleman shrugged. “We can try,” he said.
“Where's the queen?” Liane demanded. “Is she—”
Screams of terror came from within the mansion, though it wasn't until the many thousands of citizens outside joined that the sound reached Garric's awareness.
The sun darkened. He looked up.
The thing lifting from the mansion roof had translucent gray vans that spread to the size of small clouds. The body, relatively small, was soot-colored and shaggy. It reminded him of cobwebs hanging in the common room of an ill-kept inn.
On the creature's back was a woman of coldly perfect beauty. She looked at Garric without expression, as she swept no more than fifty paces overhead.
“If I had my bow...” he muttered.
All around the mansion, people fell to their knees. One of Royhas' guards chanted a hymn to the Lady in a childish singsong, a vestige of the last time he'd prayed.
“It would take much more than an arrow,” Tenoctris said quietly. “But now that we've driven her from her lair, we may have time to find a permanent solution.”
The winged creature rose gradually as it flew out over the sea. Its wings rippled like those of a stingray, not a bird. It was visible for miles as it continued on toward the southeast.
Sharina felt the strangers' presence before she heard them. She held still, wondering if her heartbeat echoed as loudly as it seemed to her to do.
The acoustics within the great tree were remarkable. The narrow, twisting passage through the trunk led sound in the way a human ear does; she feared it might also, like a human throat, amplify any noises she made.
“She's in there,” a voice whispered. It was the false Nonnus.
The baobab's interior was faintly lighted when Sharina first entered. The cavity opened to the sky somewhere high in the canopy, though the amount of illumination even at midday was less than that of the stars on an open meadow. It had been enough for Sharina to get a sense of her surroundings.
The cavity was twenty feet in diameter and unfurnished except for the sleeping bench Unarc had hacked into the spongy wood of one side. Since there was ventilation, Sharina had been surprised not to see a flat rock for a cooking fire.
A moment's reflection reminded her that this was a refuge, not a home. The hunter wouldn't have risked giving away his location by even a hidden fire.
Besides, the wooden interior with its narrow crack for ingress and egress made Sharina's stomach tighten as she thought of being trapped by a blaze; though she didn't imagine the real danger was as great as that of a wattle-and-daub hut in Barca's Hamlet. There'd been disastrous fires during several winters within Sharina's memory. Families had died before they could escape.
“Sharina?” said the false Nonnus. He'd raised his voice and was probably standing near the entrance. “I've come to rescue you, child. You. can come out now.”
“She's not coming,” another man muttered. Sharina thought she recognized the voice as one of the dispatch vessel's crew, but she couldn't put a name or face to the speaker. “If she's even there.”
In all likelihood, the false Nonnus and his fellows didn't realize how well the girl within could hear them, but that was no help to her. There was only one way out of the baobab: into the arms of her pursuers. The upper opening was probably too small for even a supple human to squirm through, and it was completely inaccessible besides. Sharina guessed she could climb ten or a dozen feet using main strength and splits in the wood, but the cavity's inward slope would prevent even a monkey from reaching the peak hundreds of feet above.
“Come out, child,” the false Nonnus said in a cozening voice that made Sharina's skin crawl. “The wild man who captured you won't return till tomorrow night, if then.”
Sharina squeezed her hands against the hilt of the Pewle knife. “Lady, cast your cloak about me,” she whispered. “Lady—”
She realized that she was calling on the Lady of Peace while she gripped a weapon. She snatched her hands away, then froze.
With a tiny smile, Sharina drew the big knife and held it ready. She'd pray later, if she was able to.
“She's not coming out!” the second voice repeated. “I say we go in and get her if she's there.”
“I say, Crattus,” said the false Nonnus in a tone of menace the hermit had never ever used, “that'll you'll obey me or regret that you did not.”
The voice became bantering as the impostor continued, “But if you want to enter, go ahead. It'll be pitch dark unless you hold a torch in one hand, and the girl had a knife the last time I saw her.”
“What do you want to do, then?” a third man asked. He sounded tired and vaguely angry. Sharina wondered how many men altogether were in the band.
“We'll camp here and wait for daylight,” the false Nonnus said easily. “At dawn, I'll be able to illuminate the interior through my art. You shouldn't have much difficulty subduing our runaway safely.”
“That's easy to say for somebody who won't be in there facing the knife,” a man rumbled.
“Ye
s, Osan,” the impostor hissed, false again to the mind of the man whose face he wore. “And easy for you to accomplish, or you shouldn't have taken the queen's gold. Do you want to explain to her that you were less afraid of her wrath than you were of a peasant girl?”
“I'll do my job,” Osan said. “I always have, haven't I?”
“We'll camp here,” the false Nonnus said briskly. “Crattus, make sure two men guard the opening at all times. In the morning we'll take care of the matter and get off this foul island.”
A hand rasped the outer lip of the opening. “We can block this hole with a couple spears rammed into the sides,” Crattus said. “Even if she's got the strength to pull them out, they'll squeal loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Yes, a good idea,” the false Nonnus agreed. “Do that as well.”
A spear thunked into the wood. Echoes shivered about Sharina. Moments later a second spear struck and a human grunted loudly.
“That'll hold her!” said a voice Sharina hadn't heard before.
“What about the big guy she was with?” the third man asked.
“I told you, we'll be long gone before he returns,” the impostor said. “I'm a wizard, remember?”
“I'm not bloody likely to forget that,” Osan muttered. Sharina suspected he was facing the opening into the tree and that she heard more than his companions did. “I'm not bloody likely to work for another wizard, neither!”
“Osan, you and Denalt watch until moonrise,” Crattus ordered. “Bies and Seno, you take over till the moon's a quarter up, and then Bayen and I take the last watch.”
“Say, what if I can't see the moon?” Osan demanded. “It's as dark as a yard up a pig's backside here!”
“Then watch till dawn!” Crattus said. “The rest of you, get as much sleep as you can.”
The men bedded down with only a scatter of further mutterings. They were obviously professionals, though this jungle seemed as foreign to them as it was to Sharina. The false Nonnus said nothing; perhaps he'd gone off to work his wizardry alone.
Sharina didn't know what to do. The tree soughed with the breath of the forest, moist and faintly tinged with decay. She walked across the cavity in darkness and lay down in the alcove.
She considered the possibility that Hanno would return during the night, then rejected it. If the false Nonnus was wizard enough to track Sharina down in this jungle, he was also wizard enough to determine the hunter's whereabouts.
She was physically and emotionally exhausted, as much from the preceding weeks as from the events of the day just ending. Morning would come. Her only choices then would be capture or suicide.
The Lady turned her face from those who took their own lives. And yet...
Sharina began to doze. The blade of the Pewle knife was beneath her cheek like a steel pillow. In a dream she saw herself stand and walk through the door that opened for her into a woodland like that of home.
A hut stood by a stream whose bed had been scooped deeper to create a basin for filling pots and washing. The man who'd been planting in the garden knocked dirt from the tip of his dibble and walked toward her.
“Nonnus?” Sharina said.
“Such of me as there is since I died, child,” the stocky, smiling man said. “Sit down, please. It's all the hospitality I can offer you here. That and my company.”
Sharina squatted on her haunches as she'd done hundreds of times beside the hermit's hut. Nonnus sat across from her.
“I watch you always, child,” he said. “I hope you know that even when you can't see me.”
On the ground beside them, colored pebbles from the creek picked out the Lady's image. In the woods near Barca's Hamlet Nonnus had carved the Lady on the trunk of a great tree. Though he wore his familiar black goat-hair tunic, the Pewle knife Nonnus had taken off only while praying was nowhere to be seen.
Sharina looked at the knife she held, then met the hermit's eyes again. He smiled again. “I don't have any need for it here,” he said. “Besides, it's in good hands.”
Sharina slid the blade back into its sealskin sheath. “There's a man outside who...,” she said. She swallowed. “Who claims to be you. He's a wizard.”
Nonnus nodded. “He's Nimet or-Konya,” he said. “And for perhaps the first time in my life I'm thankful for a wizard's work, child. I doubt we'd have been able to visit if it weren't for the magic Nimet and his mistress used to borrow my semblance. They made the barrier thinner than I suspect they knew.”
He chuckled with grim humor. “Wizards aren't the only ones to neglect the side effects of their actions, of course,” he added. “If I'd understood that when I was younger, I might have less to beg forgiveness for now.”
Sharina leaned forward and caught the hermit's powerful, sinewy hands. She was crying. “Nonnus,” she said, “can I stay here with you? Please!”
He held her with the delicacy of a mother with her infant. “This isn't your place, Sharina,” he said softly. “When the time comes, and I pray to the Lady that it will be a long time, you'll have another home.”
“Nonnus, what shall I do?” she cried. She squeezed his hands, knowing she could no more hurt this man than she could a hickory tree. “I'll fight them, but I don't think I can...”
“Kill six soldiers and Nimet himself as well?” Nonnus said. He detached one hand and put it on top of the other, sandwiching Sharina between. “No, I don't suppose you could. Which I think may be why you're here.”
Sharina mopped her face on her tunic sleeve. She met the hermit's eyes and smiled. Trying to control her tremble of relief, she said, “Will you come back and help me, Nonnus? Can you?”
“I don't have flesh, child,” Nonnus said. “But you do. If you permit me, I can use your flesh in ways you yourself could not.”
He gave her a smile as hard as the crags that broke the seas off Pewle Island. He said, “I've repented of many of the things I did when I was young. But I haven't forgotten how to do them.”
They stood, still holding hands and laughing at the pleasure of each other's company. “I knew you'd help me, Nonnus,” Sharina said. She didn't know why she'd ever felt alone.
The hermit sobered and withdrew his hands. “This isn't a small thing for you to do, child,” he said. “This is a violation like no other you'll ever feel. You might be better off to go with Nimet to his mistress, the queen.”
“Nonnus,” she said. “I need your help. Do whatever your conscience permits you to do. I'll do the same. And may the Lady shelter us.”
Nonnus smiled; this time the expression was as gentle as a snowflake's touch. “For the last eighteen years of my life, Sharina,” he said, “the only thing besides mercy that I wanted was to be able to help you. I think the Lady has just granted me both.”
He touched the girl's cheek with the fingers of his right hand. “Go and sleep, child,” he said. “And we'll see what happens when the dawn comes.”
The Scaled Men's chanting rose to a grunted crescendo; Ilna felt a ripple shiver through not the ship alone but also the world it rode in. Cozro shouted and the flyer which gnawed the grating inches from Ilna’s face turned with an angry snarl to look over its shoulder.
The Bird of the Waves fell out of the twilit world and splashed jarringly as it landed. The hatch cover broke loose from the quick-and-dirty lashings the crew had applied after they flung Ilna into the hold. Sunlight lanced through the grate and around the frame lying askew on the coaming.
The winged creatures twisted upward like seared leaves. Their flesh turned black and sloughed away. The cartilage that articulated their bones shrank, knotting the skeletons into tight masses like the indigestible casts vomited beneath an owl's perch.
Ilna put her hands and right shoulder to the grating to shove sideways. Cozro simply flung it up, though without Ilna’s direction the heavy cover might have toppled back again: the captain hadn't allowed for the weakness of muscles bound for days.
Ilna stepped out of the hold with the noose loosely coiled in her
hands. The brazier, still dribbling the last of its varicolored smoke, sat in front of the deckhouse. The Scaled Men had set their fire and left it before they retreated to the poorly ventilated deckhouse. The flyers, beasts for all the humanity of their features, hadn't known or cared to quench the brazier as they swarmed over the craft.
The creatures in desiccated profusion hung from the rigging and littered the deck. Like mayflies, Ilna thought again, smiling grimly. The corpse of the sailor she'd seen devoured lay beside the hatch where it slid when Cozro raised the grating. It had been chewed to red bones. The skull was very broad and flat, and the remainder of the skeleton differed more from that of a normal man than the Scaled Man had when alive.
The door to the deckhouse rattled as the crossbar was withdrawn inside. Cozro freed a cutlass that a desperate blow had driven into the mast.
The sky was a pale, cloudless blue. The sun was near the western horizon, but it still hammered the sea and the ship rocking on it.
The sail hung limp, its deep belly empty of the wizard-wind that had filled the linen across the sea of that other world. An island, small but heavily overgrown, broke the surface half a mile to starboard. A flock of seabirds startled by the vessel's splashing entrance rose into the air above.
The Scaled Men had to force the door open against the flyers piled before it. The shrunken corpses stuck to the decking as though melted into the wood. Cozro snatched up the brazier in his left hand.
Ilna had been ready to noose the first of the sailors while the captain dealt with the next. “Take the one on the right!” she said. She was furious that she'd so nearly committed herself by assuming that other people thought the same way she did in a crisis.
The first two Scaled Men out of the deckhouse had cutlasses. They were bleeding from deep bites but both looked well able to fight. Behind them came a third sailor with the spear; last was a heavily bandaged fellow struggling to cock his crossbow.
“None of this scum could swim when they were men!” Cozro shouted. “We'll hope they haven't learned since they changed. The dinghy's still astern. Swim to it and we'll paddle to that island with our hands.”