by David Drake
Cashel's name gave her a pang. She'd let a wizard's false semblance lead her away from searching for her friend. What had happened to Nimet later didn't change the fact of Sharina's own faithlessness.
“You hold on to my spear while I find the entrance underwater,” Hanno said. “It's black as a yard up a pig's—”
He caught himself and cleared his throat. “Well, you can't see a thing in the water. Though come to think, why don't you hold on to my belt instead. And Unarc'll follow us.”
The bald man nodded agreement. “You can't see nothing when you're inside neither,” he said. “Not till you get most of the way up where there's holes. But it's not like you can lose your way once you get started.”
Sharina wondered what sort of creatures might lair in the utter darkness of the lava tube. She smiled faintly. Nothing nearly as terrible as Hanno and his great spear, of that she was certain.
“I'm ready,” she said aloud. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the hunter's lizardskin belt.
They stepped into the river. The unexpectedly fierce current pushed Sharina's stiffened left arm against Hanno until she could catch herself and lean backward against the flow. The hunter didn't seem to notice.
They walked twenty yards downstream at a deliberate pace. The water rose to Sharina's mid-chest and once—briefly—to her neck, but she was never in danger of going under. They passed the intruding mangroves. If Sharina had been alone she'd have picked her way hand over hand, clinging to the roots in the same fashion she'd have used a similar web on a vertical climb if it were available.
Beyond was a mass of palms whose trunks sprang three and four together from a common center, but between the mangroves and the palms was a hump of black rock to which only ferns and lesser growth clung. It climbed the slope to vanish in the taller vegetation.
“Here we go, missie,” Hanno warned. He walked deeper into the stream, then—as Sharina's head started to go under—deliberately ducked. She followed, trying to keep her feet on a slick clay bottom scoured by the current's rush.
The water seeping between Sharina's tight lips had a brackish tang. She closed her eyes, gripped the hunter's belt, and kept her other hand on the pommel of the Pewle knife for the comfort the contact gave her.
She couldn't be sure, but she thought Hanno had changed direction. The current lessened. The bottom became rock and rougher, a good surface for the feet of a girl from Barca's Hamlet.
Sharina's head broke surface again. “Lady, I thank you for Your blessings!” she said. Her shout echoed as a trembling chorus up the lava pipe in darkness.
She let go of Hanno's belt and walked up the slanting path. The slap of the tiny waves her motion stirred grew into the mutterings of a crowd. Even Sharina's breath and that of her companions swelled like the winter wind.
“Nothing keeping us here,” Hanno said. His soft leather boots squelched as he began walking. Sharina followed, and behind she heard Unarc.
The roof of the lava tube was too high for Sharina to reach with her fingers outstretched; the floor was a boulevard on which the three of them could have walked abreast if they'd chosen to do so. Sharina kept track of her companions by cues she couldn't have put precise names to. Sound was one of them, of course, though the echoes and counter-echoes of her own feet would have made that alone a treacherous guide. Sometimes she thought she could feel the warmth of the hunters' bodies; and sometimes she just knew.
She smiled. Nonnus would have understood. She could feel his nearness in this physical darkness as she had in the spiritual darkness when she waited for death in the baobab's heart.
The way upward was no steeper than the meadows where the sheep of the borough grazed. The companions didn't speak to one another, but Sharina became aware of both the soughing of wind that blew across the open mouth of the tube and the subtle changes in pressure on her eardrums as the river swelled and sank below them.
It didn't matter that they couldn't see. “Up” was a direction as good as any their eyes could have given them. Occasionally there was a pothole where a deep-rooted tree had survived long enough that, burned to carbon and powdered by the following ages, it left its mark in the rock. Sharina learned to avoid those also, though she couldn't have told how.
She became aware of light. At first she thought it was a trick like the flashes that traced sometimes across her closed eyes. This was a gray paleness, though. Hanno's body was a powerful silhouette against it. They were hearing openings into an outer world that she'd almost forgotten.
Early in its course down the mountainside the lava had splashed over the roots of a pine. When the organic remains decayed, they left holes through the tube. Sharina might have been able to stick her arm through a hole and waggle her fingers in the outer air, but neither of the men could do even that.
Hanno got down on his belly to look through a hole just above ground level. Unarc squatted and peered through another. “As I hope for the Lady's grace!” he said. “Hanno, what're them crazy Monkeys doing down there?”
“I know what it looks like,” the other hunter muttered. Without speaking further, he got to his knees and edged sideways, gesturing Sharina to the viewport.
She rotated her belt so that the sheathed knife wasn't between her and the rough lava surface. She was looking down on a bay some five hundred feet below. Felled timber of all sizes and descriptions covered the water's surface. Vast numbers of Hairy Men clambered over the floating debris, guided or directed by phantasms like the one leading the Hairy Men who'd attacked her and Hanno.
She couldn't guess how many of the brute men she saw. Their squirming reminded her of the day early each Heron when the termites came out of the ground in swarming profusion, preparing to fly to new homes while the crows and jays gorged themselves on the sudden bounty.
“Has there been a storm?” Sharina asked, lifting her face from the opening to meet Hanno's eyes. “To wash all those trees into the bay?”
“That's not storm-swash, missie,” Unarc said as he also straightened. “They've been felled. All of them. You see the branches but there's no root balls like a storm would've done. Besides, there's been no storm.”
Hanno nodded. “The Monkeys did it,” he said. “They—”'
“Monkeys couldn't do that!” Unarc said. “They don't have the brains!”
“They had the brains to cut you good and mash both our boats!” Hanno said. “Things ain't the same, Unarc. The fuzzy ghosts down there talk to them. Put fear of the Gods in them, from what it seemed when they came after me!”
He grinned reminiscently. “Though not so bad as me and missie there put the fear to them later on. Such as were left.”
“There are thousands of Hairy Men down there,” Sharina said. “Tens of thousands.”
She looked again down into the natural harbor. A mass of timber was sliding toward the mouth of the bay. The trees must have been tied together as well as bound by their entangled branches.
“They must've cleaned both banks of the East River for leagues to get all that wood,” Unarc said. “I noticed some trees down when we followed the West River too—”
Sharina hadn't noticed any cut trees. The river itself was merely a thrum in her consciousness for most of the day's journey.
“—but I didn't think much about it.”
Over the raft swarmed many hundreds of Hairy Men. They were—
“They've built rafts,” Sharina said as she rose again to a squat. “They're pulling themselves out to sea by ropes or something. More Hairy Men at the jaws of the bay are holding the other ends of the ropes. I think there's more rafts in the open sea already.”
Hanno dropped so suddenly that Sharina almost fell as she squirmed clear. “Well I will be fricasseed in a pot!” the big hunter said. “That's what they're doing, missie. That sure is.”
Unarc's brow wrinkled. “They're drowning them-selfs?” he said.
“Hanno?” said Sharina. “You said the current carried west all the way to Ornifal. Cou
ld they...?”
“There goes another lot,” Unarc said from his viewport. “May the Shepherd shear my bum if they don't!”
“Yeah, it might be that,” Hanno said as he got to his feet. “I don't know what they'd figure to do on Ornifal.”
“There's a powerful lot of them,” the bald man said reflectively. He rose to a kneeling position, but he checked the edge of his hooked knife in the light before he stood completely.
Hanno nodded. Both hunters resumed climbing the steep slope. Sharina, caught by surprise, took long strides to fall in between them again before the light faded.
Breathing was easier now. A breeze past the tube's unseen mouth higher up the mountain drew air in through the root holes. Sharina recognized the mustiness of the tube's stagnant lower level only now that she was past it. Any air after being submerged in the mud-black water had left her lungs too grateful to complain about the quality of what was available.
At first Sharina thought the sound she heard, felt, was the crosswind reverberating in the depths of the tube. Garric played a shepherd's pipe of reeds stoppered at the bottom with wax so that each different length vibrated at a graduated note.
Sharina climbed higher. She began to hear unintelligible words in the pulses of sound. Light seeped from above. The rush of molten rock had drawn striations down the lava tube while the walls were still plastic. Hanno held his spear crossways. His right hand was at the balance and his left just below the broad head, prepared to thrust or throw.
Sharina could see the opening above them. The lava had poured from a notch in the lip of the volcano, cooling as it plunged downward. The eruption that formed the tube must have been a later one since it had engulfed full-sized trees that grew from the existing cone. The walls were thinner at the top of the tube than they became by the time they reached the river. They'd crumbled away for a distance of twenty feet below the lip, but the notch had weathered deeper also.
Sharina drew the Pewle knife. Without looking around, Hanno gestured her and Unarc to wait.
The big hunter crept to the tunnel mouth. His limbs didn't seem to move at all; it was like watching a snake climb a tree. He glanced around, then slithered fully into the open to peer over the edge of the notch.
He signaled the others forward. The air throbbed with the sound of the huge voice chanting, but Sharina still couldn't understand the words.
She stepped out of the sheltering lava, bending low but not attempting to crawl because the porous surface would scrape her to the bone. Hanno must have some technique that even Unarc lacked, because the bald hunter hunched out just as Sharina did. Though they were at the top of the volcano, part of the cone now blocked their view of the harbor.
Sharina looked over the lip of rock, expecting to see a hollow filled with bubbling magma. Instead, the volcano had been dormant so long that grass covered the bottom of the crater. The walls were weathered to the color of rust.
“Oh...” Sharina whispered. She squeezed her knife hilt for the comfort it gave her.
A fifty-foot outcrop had remained in the center of the basin when the surface around it slumped back into the earth. Someone had shaped it into the form of a Hairy Man with a ball in his right hand.
“It wasn't like that six months past,” Unarc whispered. “Hanno, what are the Monkeys up to?”
Sharina swallowed. The idol's eyes and mouth were carved deep. Wisps of colored smoke drifted from the openings to form a cloud like faded rags above the brutish head.
The sound of chanting came from the huge effigy. Though the words were still meaningless, Sharina now recognized the rhythms of wizardry.
“There's no Monkeys down there now,” Hanno said. “Except for whoever's inside the statue making that noise. I guess they're all gone to the harbor.”
“The cloud,” Sharina whispered. “It's shaped like a demon.”
She should have recognized the smoke image immediately: the cadaverous body; the limbs like wires knotted at the joints; the long skull and undershot jaw. The phantasms directing the Hairy Men were in the same mold and of similarly insubstantial fabric, but the scale of this semblance had deceived her.
“I don't see any point in—” Unarc said as he started to back toward the concealing tube.
The smoke-demon moved. Drifting in the breeze, Sharina thought, but there suddenly was no breeze.
The smoke stared at them with yellow eyes.
“Run!” Hanno shouted as he jumped to his feet. When Sharina paused to let him lead as before, the big hunter grabbed her and half-shoved, half-flung her toward the mouth of the tube.
Sharina ran through the darkness in exaltation. The crisis had so taken her out of herself that she wasn't aware of her footing, let alone concerned. In Sharina's present state she was as much a part of her world as a fish swimming; and as with the fish, she instinctively knew the environment through which she moved.
She'd sheathed the knife. The sturdy blade would be useless against the present dangers and she didn't need the feel of the grip to remind her of Nonnus.
She reached the light diffusing from root holes across the passage and leaped it in the same gazelle-like bounds that she'd been making in the pitch blackness above. The two hunters padded along at their own best speed, but for once they seemed noisy and slow compared to the girl they'd sent ahead of them.
Sharina wasn't thinking about what she would do when she reached the river. Did religious folk ever reach the sort of closeness to Godhead that she felt now? All existence was one, and she was one with all existence!
The lava walls began to glow with red light as though she were running through a cloud lit by sunset. She heard Hanno and Unarc shout in surprise from far away. They must see the light also.
Sharina took another leap. Ahead of her the walls of light bulged inward. A huge clawed hand, smoky but still more substantial than the rock it penetrated, reached through and began to close.
Hanno shouted again. Sharina would have liked to stop, but the momentum of her spirit no less than her body carried her forward.
She was trying to draw the Pewle knife when the demon hand clamped shut, squeezing Sharina into darkness again as it drew her back the way it had come.
2nd Day of the Fifth Month (Partridge)
Ah, there's the baron's brontothere coming!” said Ascelei, letting out anger as well as informing Ilna and Cerix, “You could buy every house on this street for what that animal cost, and out of our taxes!”
Cerix squirmed to get a better look at the great beast pacing slowly around the angle of the street. Ascelei's house stood on the Parade, the broadest thoroughfare in Divers, but even the Parade bent and wriggled on its course from Baron Robilard's palace to the harbor.
Ascelei the Mercer, Ilna’s host and employer for the past four days, was one of the most prosperous men in Divers. He'd added an ornate railing to what had probably been an open balcony when the house was built a century or more in the past. The flat, pear-shaped banisters were attractive and made the balcony safer for people who needed mechanical help to avoid falling into the street. Cerix in his cart could see more through the slats than if he'd been at street level behind the legs of the other spectators, but only a little more.
“Do you want me to lift you?” Ilna said. She kept her eyes on the procession so that the cripple could avoid embarrassment by pretending she hadn't spoken if he wanted to.
The brontothere resembled a horse more than it did any other animal Ilna had seen, but it weighed several tons and its head looked like a gigantic saddle. A broad, side-forked horn stuck up from the nose like a pommel, and the forehead was dished in to curve upward to the thick neck. Despite the beast's great size, the skull didn't have much room for a brain.
“No, I can see,” Cerix muttered, drawing himself up to look over the railing. He had to use the strength of his upper body to keep his weight off his stumps, but he clearly preferred that to accepting help from somebody else.
Ilna smiled wryly. She didn't have a l
ot in common with the cripple and she despised the weakness that caused him to drug himself for the pain; but she could at least applaud his desire to do without the help of others.
The crowd cheered to see the brontothere, though there was less enthusiasm than Ilna would have expected for a spectacular parade. There'd already been a troop of cavalry in polished armor—only twenty of them, but Third Atara was a small island which had to import the grain that horses needed to stay healthy. Then came a band with horns, cymbals, and even a copper kettledrum carried in a frame between two men and beaten by two more who walked to either side. Next were nearly two hundred sailors keeping step as they marched in tight companies.
The sailors surprised Ilna till Ascelei mentioned that they were from the baron's war galleys. The fixed rhythms of rowing made them better able to keep pace than most folk.
And now the brontothere, a striking sight even had it been alone. The only folk in the street who seemed to be cheering unreservedly, though, were ragged fellows who probably had nothing to be taxed on. Very possibly it wasn't just wealthy merchants like Ascelei who felt the burden of Robilard's shows.
“He claims to be descended from the Elder Romi,” Ascelei said bitterly. “Him! His grandfather was a bodyguard for my grandfather when he was trading to Sandrakkan. If Robilard's a real noble, then I'm the Lady! And everybody knows Romi was celibate anyway.”
Cerix cocked his head to look up at Ilna. “Romi was the wizard who ruled Third Atara after King Carus drowned,” he explained. “During the hundred years Romi lived, he kept Third Atara peaceful while the rest of the Isles fell apart.”
“You know about the Elder Romi, Master Cerix?” Ascelei said with for the first time a degree of respect for the cripple. He'd allowed Cerix to view the procession from the second story—the sleeping loft—of his shop only because Ilna had insisted and Ascelei was afraid to lose her services.