by David Drake
“Waldron bor-Warriman...” Garric said. His hands were spread open at his sides. “I see three choices for you. You can accept me as your leader by birth, because I'm directly descended from King Carus.”
“You say!” Waldron said. His guard commander's posture was very like Garric's own, open-handed but tense as a drawn bowcord.
“Second,” Garric continued, his voice rising in volume but remaining a thunderous tenor with no touch of shrillness, “you can decide to turn your hereditary lands over to the folk tilling them, because you have no title on the basis of heredity if you refuse to accept my rule.”
“If I bowed to every madman who called himself king, I'd never be able to straighten up!” Waldron said.
“As for your third choice, Lord Waldron...” Garric said. He was trembling. The body he wore was no longer his alone. The muscles quivered with the fierce, channeled bloodlust of King-Carus.
“If you think I'm a lying Haft shepherd rather than the King of the Isles,” Garric/Carus said, “try to prove those lies on my body. We'll duel in front of the mansion, by torchlight or we'll wait till dawn. And no one who watches will doubt that every word I've said since I came to Ornifal is the truth!”
“We'll do it now,” Waldron said in a grating voice. He seized his sword hilt and had half-drawn the weapon when his guard commander stepped in front of him and grasped the noble by both elbows.
“Let go of me, you fool!” Waldron said. “Do you think I'm afraid of a shepherd?”
“Sir, look at the way he moves!” the guard cried. “If he's a shepherd, then I'm a gravedigger. And I'd be your gravedigger if I let you fight him, I swear by my soul in the Lady's arms!”
Waldron tried to shove the man away. The guard, blocky where his master was tall, and very, very strong, kept his grip. He pushed Waldron toward the wall. The other men wearing the Warriman cat's-head crest on their tabards stepped between Waldron and Garric, though they were unwilling to put hands on their master as the guard commander had.
For a moment, the only sounds were wheezing breaths and the scrape of boot soles on the granite floor. Waldron let go of his sword and lowered his arms; his retainer released him.
“Lord Waldron,” Garric said quietly, “I need you and I'll hold you in the highest honor; but I am your king.”
Waldron continued to gasp for breath; his face looked gray. The nobleman was more than three times Garric's age. Waldron knew—as Carus did—that courage and skill counted for more than youth on a battlefield; but the old man had seen enough battles in his years to be able to size up Garric as surely as his guard commander had done. A fight between the two of them would no more be a duel than a hog duels the butcher who holds its nose in a hooked clamp as his knife slices the beast's throat.
Garric knelt and righted Waldron's fallen chair. “Please, Lord Waldron,” he said.
Without waiting to see what the nobleman decided, Garric walked to his own seat at the end of the table.
Liane gave him a tiny nod. When Garric turned and sat down, Waldron was seating himself also. His guard commander held the chair for him.
“We'll need to discuss the situation with Valence as soon as possible,” Royhas said, continuing the previous conversation. “Pitre, you're probably the person to make the arrangements, don't you think?”
“I wonder what it's going to be like living under a real king,” Tadai said. His laugh held a strain of hysteria.
The powdery soil broke Ilna’s fall instead of her bones, but it rose in a plume that threatened to choke her. She clawed her way up, swimming as much as climbing. When she finally burst clear of the pit her impact had dug, she found it was still desperately hard to breathe.
She was on a barren plain which stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sun shone with bitter intensity, but the sky was black and the atmosphere so thin that she could see the stars. None of them looked familiar.
Halphemos, coughing and wheezing, dragged the cart with Cerix on it from another soft-rimmed crater nearby. Ilna strode over to them, trailing her toes at each step as she would have done were she walking in mud. The dust neither clung to her feet nor hung in choking clouds—the latter a small benefit from the thin air.
“Where are we, Halphemos?” Ilna said. Her voice was a bat squeak. She smiled faintly. “I'm not complaining. It isn't on fire, so it's a better place than I was standing a moment ago.”
“I don't know,” Halphemos mumbled. He looked numb and exhausted. He'd been working his wizard arts; he must have been, to have saved Ilna this way. “I don't... Cerix, do you know?”
Ilna helped pull the wheeled chair up from the hole it had splashed when it landed. The wheels were too narrow for this dust: they sank to the hubs, like those of farm carts after the spring thaw. A sledge would be better, but there was no wood in this wasteland from which to fashion one.
Cerix spat out a gobbet of phlegm and the dust he'd swallowed when impact flung him out of the cart. This landscape's harsh light drew the lines of the cripple's face deeper, but Ilna judged he'd have looked terrible under any illumination.
“The boy didn't bring us here,” Cerix said. He shook his head, either to clear it or from anger; Ilna couldn't be sure which. “We were opening a passage to you through a circle of power, but before we arrived you entered the circle. And brought us here.”
“I saw you in the air,” Ilna said. She kept her tone even. She'd heard rebuke in the cripple's tone, but she'd lived in her own head long enough to know that she sometimes heard rebuke where none was intended. “I went to you because the choices were to burn or to drown.”
“She entered the circle after we formed it?” Halphemos said to his mentor. “That isn't possible, is it?”
He wiped his face with the sleeve of his robe. The cloth was dark, with rich gray silt because the boy had caught himself on his arms when he landed. Halphemos looked like a mummer in blackface playing a minion of the Sister.
“It wouldn't be possible for me or even you, boy,” Cerix said, “but it's what she did, clearly enough.”
He looked up at Ilna. “Who are you, mistress? And don't tell me you're a weaver from some village in the back of beyond. We have to know where we are if we're ever to get out!”
Ilna’s nose wrinkled. Breathing this thin air was like being half-smothered by a pillow. No matter how Ilna’s lungs strained, she couldn't draw in a satisfying breath. It made her irritable and she supposed she should make allowances for her companions being irritable for the same reason.
She'd never been good at excusing bad behavior in herself or other people.
“If you think I'd bother to lie to you,” she snapped, “then you've lost more than your legs. If you didn't rescue me from the ship as I'd thought you did, then neither of us owe the other anything. I'll see if I can find more congenial company.”
Ilna turned to walk away. One direction was as good as another—and all of them bad. The rolling terrain was completely barren. The landscape could stand as a symbol for life; at least life for such folk as Ilna os-Kenset. She smiled like a razor at the thought.
There was something in the middle distance. The odd sharpness of the light here made it hard to identify shapes with those they had normally, but she thought she was seeing the bones of some vast creature.
“Mistress, please!” Halphemos said. “Cerix didn't mean to accuse you of anything. We were trying to go to you. If instead we came here, it must have been a mistake of mine. Like the one where I made your brother vanish.”
Ilna looked over her shoulder. She was letting anger rule her. That was worse than anything Cerix thought—or believed.
“Mistress,” the cripple said. “I'm afraid. I don't know where we are, but I don't think we can live here. I think, I pray, you have the power to get us out of this place but I don't know how. I misspoke because I was a fool.”
He touched his stumps with a bitter smile. “As these legs already prove,” he added.
“Yes, well,” said Il
na. “I've acted the fool myself often enough that I should have greater charity for others, I suppose.”
She didn't think anything of the sort, but Cerix had apologized and it behooved her to do the same. She grimaced. “I know nothing about how we got here or how we can get out. If no one has a better idea, I suggest we walk in that direction—”
She indicated north with a tic of her chin.
“—because that puts the sun at our back. My skin is prickling already. The light scarcely seems bright enough for sunburn, but that's what it feels like.”
“We may as well,” Halphemos said doubtfully, squinting toward the northern horizon. It was just possible that there were hills in that direction, but they were probably an illusion.
“If she says we go north,” Cerix said, “that's where we go.”
He scowled and admitted, “I can't move myself. I can turn the wheels, but they won't bite in this dust. If you want to leave me...”
“Don't talk nonsense,” Ilna said. “Halphemos, we'll use your sash as towline. It's silk and long enough, I'd judge.”
As the youth unwrapped the garment, Ilna continued to the cripple, “As for who I am—my father drank himself to death after he brought my brother and me home to Barca's Hamlet as infants. I never knew my mother. I ask only the respect due a decent woman who pays her debts. That's all the discussion I intend to have about my private business. Do you understand?”
Cerix burst into hacking laughter. Halphemos rose from tying the end of his sash to the chair's front axle. He watched his mentor in concern.
The fit ended when Cerix brought up another mass of filth from his lungs. He wiped his mouth and looked at Ilna with a smile of self-mockery. “I don't understand anything at all about you, mistress,” he said. “But as for my respect—on that score you need have no doubts.”
Ilna nodded curtly. To Halphemos she said, “The sooner we get moving, the better our chance of finding water while there's still daylight. Not that I see the chance as very good.”
The youth gave her a hopeful smile and leaned into the makeshift towline. Ilna gripped the silk from the other side and fell into step.
The cart cut a wide furrow. Halphemos had rigged the sash to lift the front edge when they pulled, so at least they weren't digging deeper with every step.
It was still hard work. Carrying water from the well to the laundry cauldron, two buckets at a time on a yoke, was punishing for a lightly built woman; but the task ended when the cauldron was sufficiently full. This trek wouldn't end until the three of them died.
She smiled to think of the well back home. Her thoughts and those of her companions were the only place there was going to be water in this desolation. Occasionally they trudged across bands of discoloration around a central hub. Perhaps lichen had grown there once, but the stain and a slight firmness to the soil were all that remained.
They walked. Ilna didn't know how long. The sun moved more slowly here than it did in the waking world. Sometimes they rested, but there was little rest to be had in this wasteland.
“We're on the bottom of the Outer Sea,” Cerix said. “It's like this all the way from the Ice Capes to the southern lands where men have their faces on their bellies.”
Ilna risked a look over her shoulder; “risked,” because she knew that when she was so tired any change of routine meant that she might stumble. Getting to her feet again would be as difficult as climbing a mountain in her normal state of health.
Cerix was grinning as his chair rocked over the rolling landscape. He made swimming motions with his arms and his eyes watched stars move in the black sky.
Ilna faced forward again. Delirium wasn't a bad response to their situation. It was a form of weakness, of course; the drug in which the cripple saturated himself and whose stench clung to his clothing like the dye itself had obviously sapped his will.
Strength wasn't going to save Ilna, but weakness wasn't an option for her either. She walked, setting the pace now. The soil dragged like the surf, retarding each step without gripping.
For all the cripple's madness, this plain did look much as Ilna supposed a sea bottom would. Twice in her lifetime a neap tide had drawn the water back half a mile from the gravel strand at the eastern margin of Barca's Hamlet.
There was no wind. The chill air was so thin that the sweat of effort didn't evaporate quickly. A drop trickled like the touch of a cold knife down Ilna’s backbone. She breathed only through her nostrils though each inhalation seared like the fumes of a bonfire; gasping with her mouth open would dry her body even faster than was happening already.
“What's that?” Halphemos croaked. He nodded toward the scatter of objects a few hundred paces to the right of their aimless course.
Metal ribs similar to those of a wooden ship stuck out of the silt. A few scraps of hull sheathing clung to the uprights, but not enough to give more than a hint of the vessel's original size. The panels were still bright despite their advanced decay; the sun and stars glinted from them.
“Nothing that helps us,” Ilna said. Her voice rasped worse than the youth's did. It would be a relief to die.
“We're sailing through the air,” Cerix caroled in cracked cheerfulness. “See how we dance in the clouds, Halphemos? Oh, I've never been so free!”
The youth winced. He looked at the ground before him and paced onward as if oblivious of his friend's raving.
Ilna kept going because that was what she'd always done. Her lungs burned, her shoulders felt as though the strain of pulling would dislocate them, and the throbbing pain of her headache put a halo around anything she tried to focus her eyes on.
There was no purpose in going on, but there was no purpose in life either, not that Ilna had found. She went on anyway.
“Oh, look at the fountains playing!” Cerix said. “Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as the way the water sparkles in the light? We've found paradise, Halphemos! The Lady took flesh and rescued us!”
Ilna thought of gagging the cripple with a strip of his tunic. She wondered if she still had enough strength to tear cloth. Strangling Cerix would be even more satisfying than simply stopping his mouth.
“So graceful!” Cerix said. “All golden and so beautiful!”
Halphemos was beginning to weave from side to side. His tug on the sash threw Ilna off her line. “Wake up!” she said. “Watch what you're doing.”
She wasn't sure the words came out of her mouth. Her lips were as dry as the dust that caked them.
A circular trapdoor opened in the surface ahead of them, spilling radiance the color of a winter dawn. Humans climbed out and walked toward the trio. They were golden, beautiful; glowing with their own internal light.
Halphemos stumbled and fell as though heart-stabbed. He didn't throw out his hands to catch himself. Ilna dragged the cart a pace onward without noticing. When it jammed against the youth's feet, it jerked her to her knees.
She fumbled, trying to lift Halphemos' face. The dust would suffocate him as surely as the ocean Cerix kept maundering about. She finally laced the fingers of both hands in his hair and tugged his mouth and nose clear.
The golden folk of Ilna’s hallucination gently lifted the youth. Other hands helped her rise. Her body felt as light as dandelion fluff.
“Relax, just let us carry you,” said a melodious voice. Ilna drifted across the landscape toward the trapdoor and its spire of light. She couldn't see her companions. She supposed she was dead.
A sponge soaked in sweet wine bathed her lips. The alcohol bit where the dry skin had cracked.
The pain seemed real. Her eyes focused again. A male figure, tall and slender, passed her through the trapdoor to a statuesque female. Similar figures carried Halphemos and Cerix down a curving ramp ahead of her.
Beyond, all was light and vegetation and architecture as delicate as sugar sculptures. Water danced in scores of streams and fountains among the greenery. The illumination soaked through Ilna’s being. She could hear singing voices more pure
and rapturous than those of cardinals in springtime.
Her consciousness sank into the pool of golden radiance and vanished beneath its warm surface.
The wizard Nimet, who called himself Nonnus the Hermit when he wore his present guise, had scribed his circle of power on a roof slate from the ruins of Unarc's hut. He tapped his athame of fossil bone as he intoned, “Barbliois eipsatha athariath...”
Nimet's six soldiers waited at the entrance to the baobab's interior. Osan pretended to be studying the rim of his round buckler, unaware of the wizardry going on a few paces away. None of the others looked uncomfortable, though their expressions ranged from boredom to the concern of Crattus, their commander. The girl was active and resourceful, and a Pewle knife wasn't a joke no matter who wielded it.
“Pelchaphiaon barbathieaoth io,”Nimet said. The sun had risen a few minutes before, though no light had as yet penetrated to the forest floor. A spherical effigy of the dawn sky formed above the circle of power, complete with clouds and a line of fruit bats straggling home. The great bats were tiny as dust motes in the illusion.
The soldiers held small shields in their left hands. They had simple bronze helmets and cuirasses of stiffened linen, already soaked with their sweat. Denalt and Bies held their spears reversed to use as clubs since they'd be the first into the cavity. Osan and Seno had their swords drawn; they would follow.
“Marmarauoth ieaoth,”the wizard said. As he spoke the illusion of sunlit sky rose to the height of a man's head. It began to drift toward the opening into the baobab.
Its cold illumination, faint in absolute terms, was as bright as a torch in the gloom beneath the canopy.
Crattus and Bayen were veterans of thirty years' experience. They'd pin the girl's shoulders to the wall with their spears if they had to, trusting the Goddess Fortune to keep them from fatally nicking an artery. Nimet wanted the girl captured alive, but he'd made it clear that he was even more concerned to stay alive himself.
Crattus didn't quarrel with an employer's priorities. Besides, his own were similar.