by David Drake
“Achrammachamarei!”Nimet cried. He staggered up from his seated position. The sympathetic illusion, in all ways an image of the sky above the jungle, trembled through the slot into the baobab. It illuminated the wood as it passed.
“Time to earn our pay,” Crattus said, nodding to Denalt. The leading soldier eased into the tree, holding his buckler sideways until the opening widened sufficiently for him to straighten it before him.
“You mean we haven't been already?” Bies said with a morose grimace. He followed Denalt. Osan, then Seno, slipped through behind them. Each waited just long enough that he didn't tread on the heels of the man preceding.
The illusion hung in the center of the cavity, casting its soft radiance on the living wood. A lump covered by a blue cloak lay in the sleeping notch on the far side. A sturdy javelin leaned against the wall beside it.
“Is she dead?” Denalt said. He took a careful step toward the cloak, his buckler well advanced.
“Watch—” Bies screamed.
Nonnus leaped down from where he clung to the wall above the entrance. He landed between Osan, just squirming through the opening, and the soldiers already inside. The Pewle knife severed Osan's throat.
Nonnus turned on the balls of his feet. Bies was trying to face around and reverse his spear for use. The Pewle knife, sharp and as heavy as an axeblade entered beneath the lower edge of Bies' short cuirass and continued through the way a scythe cuts wheat. The same stroke severed the tendons and arteries at the back of Denalt's knees before the man had fully realized the debris rolled in Sharina's cloak wasn't his real enemy.
Osan bolted into the cavity, spewing blood like a headless chicken. He tripped on a coil of Bies' intestines; both men fell, tangled with the screaming Denalt.
“What?” cried Seno, pushing ahead to see why Osan had jumped forward that way. His head was slightly lowered. Nonnus chopped through his spine from behind and slipped into the opening like a gory shadow.
“Get back!” Crattus said. The shouts within the cavity were meaningless, but he could smell fresh blood.
Bayen stepped sideways to let Seno through the narrow slot. He'd opened his mouth to say something to Crattus. Nonnus gripped Bayen's spear just behind the head and jerked the soldier to the side. Bayen dropped the spear, but he was still off-balance for the instant it took the Pewle knife to stab up through his throat. His severed tongue flew out in a red spray.
Crattus thrust over the body of his toppling comrade. Nonnus had gone under Bayen instead.
Crattus shouted a curse and jumped backward. The slashing Pewle knife opened the side of his left thigh, nicking the bone. Severed muscles shrank back to their attachments, leaving the ends of the femoral artery writhing unsupported. The lower portion oozed; the upper end spurted, draining the soldier's blood in powerful gouts.
Crattus fell on his back. He was a good man; he managed to throw his spear in Nonnus' direction, though he can't have imagined he had any chance of success.
Instead of ducking, Nonnus ticked the point aside with the back of his knife. He'd have liked to finish Crattus quickly for mercy's sake, but the old veteran drew his sword while his left hand tried to clamp his wound closed.
It wouldn't do him any good, but Nonnus respected his willingness to try. Crattus wasn't a man to take chances with.
Nimet had run away blindly when he saw a bloody demon spring from the opening into the tree. Nonnus bent and wiped the Pewle knife on the hem of Bayen's tunic before he sheathed the weapon again. He followed the wizard at an easy pace. The jungle wasn't a familiar environment to him, but the laws of every place were the same: stay aware of your surroundings, and don't do anything hastily.
He found Nimet fifty paces away. The wizard had run into a stand of bamboo. Nonnus grinned faintly. He'd have had as much luck pushing his way through a granite boulder as he did with a grove of thumb-thick bamboo.
Nimet had penetrated several feet into the wiry mass; now he was clawing his way back and finding the springy stems just as determined a barrier in this direction as the other. He saw Nonnus waiting under the broad leaves of an elephant-ear plant
Nimet screamed and tried to draw his sword. His arm was tangled with the bamboo stems. The leaves, tiny but saw-edged, had covered his bare skin with a tracery of cuts.
“Do you recognize me, Nimet?” Nonnus asked. His left hand reached into the bamboo, caught the wizard by the neck, and jerked him out. They stood nose to nose; Nimet's fingers clutched at the hand choking him but without loosening its grip.
The men's features were identical, but blood from the hermit's victims had bathed his skin and clothes. His free hand touched the knife hilt but did not draw it. Nimet's mouth blew bubbles as he tried to speak.
“You'd foul my steel!” Nonnus said. He twisted, flinging the wizard facedown on the leaf litter. Before Nimet could rise, Nonnus had stepped on the back of his neck.
“I'll—” Nimet screamed.
Nonnus caught a handful of the wizard's hair and jerked upward. The neck broke with a sharp crack.
The hermit stepped back, breathing hard. His job was done.
He looked upward, toward a star-shaped patch of clear sky. He smiled faintly. The change came with the suddenness of a tropic sunset. Flesh and bone flowed back to their original semblance.
Where a man in his forties had stood, a tall, willowy young woman sank to the ground unconscious. Her arms and clothing were red with the blood of her enemies.
Cashel couldn't breathe. Spiders were crawling on his face. He moved a leaden arm to brush them away.
He was facedown in saltwater, drowning. Aria screamed in his ear as she tried to tug his nostrils to the surface. He turned, blowing like a whale, and went under again. He didn't have any strength and he couldn't remember how he came to be in the sea.
“Zahag! Help me!” the princess cried. She was pulling on the neck of Cashel's tunic now.
Cashel tried to breathe, sucked water, and thrashed his arms in frustrated anger. This time his head and shoulders came up. He saw a dinghy bobbing a dozen paces away. The man in it—
The man in it was Cozro, the master of the ship that brought the corpse of the scaly man to Erdin. What was he doing here?
Cozro sat in the dinghy's stern, paddling clumsily with both hands. He rigidly ignored Cashel and the girl. She was screaming like she hoped to be heard back on Pandah.
Zahag swarmed over the dinghy's gunwale. Cozro stopped splashing and raised a rusty cutlass. The ape hopped backward into the bow, swinging his body between his long arms. His shrieks rose into an insectile chirping.
Cashel swam toward the dinghy in a walloping breast-stroke. He was so tired that he heard but did not feel the sea he splashed through.
Cozro saw him coming and settled back in the stern of the rocking dinghy. “Who are you?” he shouted.
Cashel caught the gunwale. He wasn't sure he could lift himself into the boat. He'd only been able to swim this far because he was worried about Zahag. “Put that sword down!” he shouted to Cozro.
Aria grabbed the side also. “Zahag!” she shouted. “Help Cashel get in!”
The princess floated like thistledown, buoyed up by her gauzy garments. If they became saturated they'd take her to the bottom like an anchor, but so long as air was trapped between the layers they were a benefit.
“How did I know you were human?” Cozro said. He lowered the cutlass though he didn't put it away. “I thought you were more, were more...”
Zahag grasped Cashel by the arm with one inhumanly strong hand and started to drag him upward. Though the ape also held the opposite gunwale, the dinghy still threatened to turn turtle. Cozro shouted in fear and threw his considerable weight to the other side. Cashel, finding the strength after all, rolled into the belly of the boat.
No one spoke for a moment. The dinghy rocked as Aria crawled in with assistance from Zahag.
“Who are you?” Cozro repeated. He'd put the cutlass down and seemed afraid to pick it up ag
ain. That showed he had an idea of how Cashel felt about the captain's apparent intention of leaving them to sink or swim as he paddled to the island alone.
Cashel was breathing hard. He wasn't quite ready to sit on a thwart instead of sprawling across it, but the abnormal exhaustion was draining away.
He raised his head from the hollow of the dinghy and looked at Cozro. In a voice that grated with controlled anger, Cashel said, “You were headed for the island. You go ahead and paddle there now. My friends and I will watch.”
Cozro nodded, swallowed, and began lashing the water with his hands. He probably thought that if Cashel got angry enough, he'd find the strength for anything he chose to do. Cashel thought he was right.
The 27th of Heron
Garric rested his head on his hands, feeling as tired as he'd ever been. Rural labor was sometimes back-breaking and often brutally long—harvesting went on from dawn to the dusk of long summer days, because the next morning might bring rain.
What he felt now was a sort of mental exhaustion, though, that was completely different but no less punishing. For the past ten hours, he hadn't been out of his chair.
He smiled faintly. That wasn't quite true. He'd used the close chest in an alcove off this room, the queen's former reception hall and now his office. Liane had suggested it was more politic for Garric to make his headquarters in the queen's mansion rather than Royhas' town house.
“The next petitioner is Nimir bor-Nummennan, a landholder from the Routan Peninsula, that's on the west of the island,” Liane said, holding the wax tablet on which she'd jotted notes at a slant to the three-wick oil lamp. “He told me he was here simply to offer loyalty on behalf of his district, but Tadai says that he's in an inheritance struggle with his two half-brothers.”
“We may still want to support him,” Garric muttered into his hands. “His brothers could have gotten the inheritance through the queen. May the Lady guide my steps!”
Garric hadn't thought so often about the Great Gods since he was a little boy watching the Tithe Procession.
Priests from Carcosa drew carts with giant statues of the Lady and the Shepherd around the borough annually, collecting the temples' due. Garric knew now that the images were only painted wood, but their colored silk robes and gilt accoutrements looked dazzlingly divine to eyes that hadn't seen much of the world.
Now he thought about the Gods because he needed to believe there were powers who understood the things that he did not.
“Shall I send him in?” Liane said. Royhas—any of the conspirators—would have provided Garric with an experienced secretary who already knew the ins and outs of Ornifal politics. Liane was a better choice. Garric could trust her to have her first loyalty to the same things he was loyal to, fuzzy though the concepts were.
Garric rubbed his temples. “Liane,” he said, “I don't think I can talk to anybody else today.”
He took a swig of water laced with citrus juice from a jug decorated with a pair of heroes fighting winged demons. It was Sandrakkan ware, red figures on a black background rather than black on cream as was the convention here on Ornifal.
He looked up and smiled at Liane. She'd bought all the office furnishings the day before. “Has the shipper you found to take the letter arrived yet?”
“His name's Ansulf,” she said, rising. “I don't think so but I'll check the waiting room. Shall I tell the others you won't see anyone else today?”
“Would you?” Garric said. Of course, the petitioners would be back tomorrow, along with hundreds of other people who thought they had something to gain from Garric or-Reise. “I haven't written the letter yet. I...”
“I'll leave you alone,” Liane said, responding to the request he hadn't voiced. He needed some time to himself; to himself and Carus. “When Ansulf arrives, I'll knock on the door. All right?”
Garric nodded. Prince Garric, he supposed he was. It made his stomach knot to think of that. Lady, please guide my steps, he whispered as the door closed softly behind Liane.
He walked to the window. The street beyond had been dark for hours. The other conspirators were busy in the work of government—Royhas, Tadai, and Waldron were, at any rate. Pitre should be contacting the king to arrange a meeting, and Sourous was supposedly arranging an assembly of the city's trade guilds. His family controlled the Ornifal cloth trade. Royhas said that whatever one thought of Sourous himself, his staff was excellent.
No matter how good an underling was, and even if the underling was a noble who traced his lineage back two thousand years, there were going to be people who insisted on dealing with the man in charge. Garric groaned. Things were going to be awful when he really was in charge.
He leaned on the window ledge and grinned tiredly. He let his mind go blank, then slipped into the reverie that brought him to the side of King Carus.
Below them was a crowded plaza bordered by monumental buildings. Garric thought he recognized the temple in front of him, though only three of the six high columns still stood in the Carcosa of the present day.
“The temple of the Shepherd Who Guards the Kingdom?” he said.
Carus nodded.
“That's my adoption ceremony,”Carus said. “King Carilan adopted me as his son and heir presumptive. I was only a second cousin. He had closer kin, but he and his advisors thought I'd provide the strong hand necessary to hold the kingdom together in a time of rising stresses.”
Smoke rose from the altar built on a low platform midway up the temple steps. Priests and courtiers in gold and varicolored robes of state stood to either side. Carilan and the teenaged Carus, kneeling before him, wore the bleached white wool of ancient formality.
“How do you like being king, lad?”Carus asked with a grin.
“I hate it,” Garric said flatly. “The people I'm dealing with now are the ones who're so desperate that they're coming to me because they couldn't get redress from Valence.”
He laughed without humor and added, “Or much of anything else from Valence, apparently. Royhas says the king hadn't been seen in public for six months, though occasionally he'll call in somebody to assign a special task. The way he told Royhas to murder me, for example.”
Carus nodded, his face no longer smiling. “You say you hate it, lad,” he said bitterly. “I hated all the business of governing so much that I looked for excuses not to do it. Any excuse would do, but going on campaign was the best one. That's what I'd been made king for, wasn't it? To be a strong hand!”
Carilan was a slender man who looked seventy years old, though Garric knew from Adiler's History that the king was barely fifty though in bad health. In the vision below, Carilan took a massive gold ring from the middle finger of his left hand and placed it on Carus' finger while the youth continued to kneel.
“The ring weighed half a pound,”Carus said, shaking his head in bemused memory. “It was only worn at these ceremonies. It disappeared when Dalopan pirates sacked Carcosa after my fleet and I sank. I suppose some slave hammered the ring into foil to cover the throne of a king with bones through his nose.”
“But you were crowned to be a strong hand, weren't you?” Garric asked, troubled by the anger he'd heard in the voice of a king who laughed even in situations where others ran screaming. “You had to be.”
“I had to be,”Carus said, “but I had to be more than that. And I wasn't. If the only tool you have is an axe, then you turn all your problems into trees to be chopped.”
He shook his head, wistful but no longer angry. “I told the lords of Ornifal that I'd harry their island from one end to the other if they didn't stop bribing my enemies to spare Ornifal's trade. What was I thinking of? Why couldn't I see what would happen, the way I understand it now?”
“They stopped sending taxes to Carcosa?” Garric guessed. “Because they thought they'd just be braiding a rope for you to hang them with?”
“And they doubled the subsidies they were paying under the table to the Earls of Cordin and Blaise,”Carus agreed ruefully. “Fi
guring if they were ready to revolt, I wouldn't dare take my fleet across the Inner Sea to Valles.”
“But you did,” Garric said. On the temple steps, Carilan raised Carus by the hand. They stood, their arms lifted together. Underpriests came carefully up the steps leading a garlanded bullock with gilt horns. “You crossed the sea to crush the Duke of Yole.”
“I wasn't the only one who could miscalculate,”Carus said, grim again. “I figured it could smash Yole with a surprise attack, hang a dozen nobles in Valles on my way back, and then deal with Blaise and Cordin. It might have worked. Moving faster than the other man expects wins campaigns as surely as it does duels, lad.”
“Only the Duke of Yole had a wizard,” Garric said. He thought of the Hooded One, standing in black majesty as the world crumbled about him. “Or the other way around, perhaps.”
“Either way, they put paid to me and my fleet,”Carus said. “And the kingdom, and all society higher than three huts together and an ox to plow with. If it hadn't been Yole, it would have been another place I overreached, using my sword when I should have used my tongue.”
A priest brought a spike-headed hammer down on the bullock's forehead. The animal kicked out in a death spasm, then collapsed on the platform. An underpriest drew a gilded knife across the beast's throat while another priest caught the blood in a flat bowl.
Blood sacrifice had disappeared in the poverty following the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Garric was just as glad it hadn't returned as wealth increased during the ensuing millennium. Pans of hot, fresh blood had nothing to do with the Lady he envisioned, and wanton slaughter was even more alien to a Shepherd's duties.
“I made enemies of the Ornifal nobles,”Carus said softly, “when all they'd been before were fools. Though not so great a fool as I, to think my sword could solve all my problems. You'll do better, lad. You're doing better already.”
The scene below them was dissolving. From far away Garric heard the sharp tap of Liane's bronze stylus on the door. “Master Ansulf is here,” her voice whispered.