by David Drake
“No, no!” Cashel said. He had to laugh at Folquin's earnestness. Why, the boy would probably buy the first flock of sheep ever to graze on Pandah if Cashel said he wanted to be the royal shepherd! “Your, ah, Majesty, I really need to leave as quick as I can. For Valles, I guess, if that's where Sharina went.”
“You won't be staying for the wedding?” Folquin said with a suspicious enthusiasm. “Of course, the preparations for an event like that will take some time.”
Cashel caught Aria's sharp glance at her husband-to-be, so he needed to speak fast before the princess decided to speed the preparations. The only thing Cashel wanted speeded was himself getting off Pandah and then back to his friends. “If there's a ship in harbor that'll take my labor for the passage, I'll board right now,” he said.
The servants with Cashel's hickory staff were standing close, but they didn't want to interrupt the proceedings by speaking. Cashel reached out with his right hand and took it. The smooth, denser wood felt like coming home.
“Master Cashel,” Folquin said, “if you can wait till the morning, I'll put one of the royal biremes at your disposal.”
Apologetically he added, “It really will take that long to prepare the crew. But it will be a great deal faster than any sailing vessel could be,”
“Ah, well,” Cashel said. “That'd be good, I guess. I'd be beholden to you if you'd do that, ah, Your Majesty.”
Folquin turned to one of his aides. In a crisp voice, very much the king again, he said, “See to it, Mousel. At once.”
“Well, I...” Cashel said. He felt pretty silly holding both quarterstaves, but he wasn't sure what to do with the extra one. “If there's a place I can get something to eat, I'm famished with hunger.”
If he'd been sleeping for four days, it was that long since he'd had anything to eat. His last breakfast had been a mess of egg and fruit, tasty enough but not the sort of thing to stick to your ribs for the time it'd had to.
The king didn't even bother to speak an order this time. He gestured to a servant, who trotted off like dogs were chewing at his heels. “Well, I'll—” Cashel began.
“Cashel?” Aria said. “You aren't going to keep the staff you had when you rescued me, are you?”
“What?” he said. He held the fir staff out at arm's length and examined it closely. The brass end bands winked in the sunlight; they'd been polished a treat while Cashel was asleep in Silya's chamber. “Well, it's a nice piece and it's lighter than my hickory, but...”
He paused without completing the thought. “Thing is,” he said, “I'd hate for it just to prop up somebody's fishnet. I know, it's just a piece of wood, but—”
“It won't prop up a fishnet,” said the princess. “If you would give it to me, Cashel, I would be honored.”
“And of course I'll pay you—” Folquin blurted.
Aria turned to look at her husband-to-be. “Be silent,” she said without raising her voice.
Cashel couldn't help but grin. Ilna couldn't have done it better, no sir. “Sure, of course you can have it, Princess,” he said aloud. “I wish I had something better to give you for your wedding and all, but...”
He shrugged. He didn't even own the tunic he was standing in.
Servants were coming from the passage with trays of food. Cashel hadn't meant to eat here in the courtyard since it was more or less Folquin's throne room. As hungry as he was, though, it didn't seem to call for objection.
“Cashel?” Aria said. “Is your Sharina beautiful?”
Cashel paused with a ball of fried dough halfway to his mouth. “Is she ever!” he said. “And graceful? You never saw anybody so graceful!”
“She's very lucky,” the princess said as she turned away and began talking to Folquin about nothing in particular.
Cashel—with Zahag's help—was nearly done with the first tray of food in dainty bits, sitting in a corner of the courtyard, when Aria's words went through his mind again. He frowned.
“Zahag?” he said. “She must have meant I'm lucky, didn't she?”
“Chief,” the ape said through a mouthful of flat bread smeared with nut paste, “I told you before I've met sheep that were smarter than you are. But it doesn't seem to matter.”
Sharina stood in a red-lit chamber cut from the living rock, as motionless as an image of the Lady in its niche by the hearth. She could see and hear. The thrum of chanting voices was deeper than ears alone could sense, so perhaps ears were no part of the impression.
There were vertical slits in the walls around her. Beyond each opening was a different scene, viewed as though through a panel of flawless ruby. Of the half dozen Sharina could see from her frozen vantage point, four were or might have been of the world she knew; two were certainly hot.
On Sharina's far left, a plain stretched to the horizon under a black sky. A jumble of long crystals covered the surface like straw on the threshing floor.
There was no movement anywhere in the scene. The stars remained static in their unfamiliar patterns, and their reflections along crystals lay in lines as rigid as those of door lintels. The sky was airless so that not even the light trembled.
The next opening looked down on a town of some size. Not very long ago Sharina would have thought it a metropolis as huge as Carcosa or Ragos on ancient Cordin—places Sharina had read about in the epics, but which she'd imagined in the form of Barca's Hamlet writ large because her home was the only community she then knew.
A single figure hunched his way along the moonlit streets: Cerix, rolling his wheeled cart over the gravel with thrusts of the short poles he used when outside. A dog roused by the clatter of tires lunged to the length of its chain from a doorway, barking silently and pawing the air.
The same chill that kept Sharina motionless seemed to lie on her heart as well. She could see, but she didn't care about the events taking place beyond the ruby curtain.
The third slit showed figures carrying dirt from a pit and up the slope of a mound. It had taken Sharina hours with nothing to do but look at the scenes in front of her before she realized that this vision was not of an anthill roiled by disaster. Rather, humans were laboring under the control of demons with claws like hands full of knives.
Then, because she had visited Erdin on Sandrakkan, she recognized the ruined buildings on the far horizon. When Sharina last saw them they had been the residences of wealthy nobles fronting Palace Square. The image was an hallucination, not reality; an hallucination, or perhaps a prophecy.
Through the fourth window Sharina saw Cashel lying on boards from which he'd thrown all the bedclothes. At home in Barca's Hamlet Cashel slept on the ground or the stone floor of the rooms he shared with his sister in the ancient millhouse. The softness of feathers and finespun fabric was foreign to him, and the night must be warm besides.
At the foot of the bed, curled in a nest of the cast-off blankets, was an ape—perhaps the one Sharina had played chess with in Pandah. Sharina remembered him, just as she remembered the emotions she had felt toward Cashel after he fought a demon to save her; but she felt nothing at all in her present state.
A web of bright lines quivered about Cashel,, though he was unaware of them. A tattooed woman with bones through her ears chanted and danced where the lines conjoined, at a point outside Cashel's chamber by the laws of normal space and relationships.
The naked wizard spun, shaking her bone rattle, and the net of red light tightened over the sleeping youth.
Cashel tossed fitfully but neither he nor the ape at his feet awakened.
The fifth opening showed a building of black stone which Sharina recognized, though she had never seen it in waking life. She viewed not only the exterior but also saw through the thick basalt walls. A pair of humans prowled in the vaults many levels below the ground.
The thing that watched in the darkness was not in the same plane of the cosmos as the human intruders. It interpenetrated the stones of waking reality. Its heads bobbed and its tongues tasted the edge of the insubstantial wall
separating it from Tenoctris and Garric.
The old woman sat cross-legged, scribed a circle on the stone, and whispered an incantation. The watcher tensed. Its mouths opened and its claws slipped in and out of their sheaths. Barriers thinned, but never quite did they fail completely; and Garric, squatting beside the wizard in the vaults of the queen's mansion in Valles, rested his hand on his sword pommel by habit rather than concern.
Tenoctris rose. Garric replaced the stub of his candle with a fresh one and followed, holding the lantern for her. The watcher slavered; and Sharina shifted her attention to the remaining window, as unmoved as a statue of ice.
The view through the final opening had remained the same from the time Sharina had found herself frozen in this rock chamber. It was a room containing only a waist-high stand on which rested a game board. She couldn't tell for sure how many stone pieces stood on the vast expanse. They were of unfamiliar shapes, no two of them the same; but each time Sharina's attention returned to the motionless tableau, the arrangement seemed different. The question didn't concern her, because now nothing caused her concern.
Sharina looked again at Cashel, whom the tattooed wizard was binding even closer in meshes of light. Motion touched her peripheral vision. Sharina's mind—for not even the pupils of her eyes could move—focused on the sixth opening in the rock.
A woman with features as cold and perfect as the glint of a hawk's eye had entered the chamber. She wore a long-sleeved white gown, gauzy but as opaque as the granite walls of the room in which she stood. A girdle of golden silk cinched her waist, and the hem and throat of her garment were of gold lace.
She looked at Sharina and smiled. “Do you know who I am, Sharina os-Reise?” she asked. Her voice was a liquid contralto that made the very cosmos quiver to its sound.
“You are the queen,” Sharina said, but she knew her lips did not, could not, move.
“Yes, Sharina,” the queen said. “And soon you will take me to the Throne of Malkar.”
She touched one of the tourmaline game pieces. Sharina felt ice tremble through every cell of her being.
The queen laughed and lifted her finger. “But not quite yet, Sharina,” she said. “I have other business first.”
The perfect female form shriveled away like frost in the bright winter sunlight. For a moment an armature of something else, a thing only vaguely human, stood in her place; then that too was gone.
But the game board remained; and the queen's laughter hung in Sharina's mind, echoing down the chill corridors of memory, eternal and inescapable.
There were no rats here; no insects even. That surprised Garric.
“Tenoctris?” he asked, raising the lantern so that her shadow and his didn't cover any of the expanse the old wizard was viewing. Pillars supported square-sided vaults. So far as Garric could tell, each one was identical to every other vault on this level and on the two basement levels above it. “Are we looking for anything in particular, or...?”
He didn't mind being in the cellars of the queen's mansion; in fact, it was the closest thing he'd had to relaxation since he and his friends had arrived in Valles. He could have sent an escort of soldiers with Tenoctris when she said she needed to search the building's lower levels. A prince, a king in all but name, had more important things to do than prowl through dust and darkness while creatures skittered out of sight.
But Garric had gotten used to being the physical arm on which Tenoctris' unbreakable spirit depended. It made him feel needed in a way that talk could never do. He understood the need for planning, and he accepted that “Prince Garric” was a symbol of the new government to members of the priesthoods, of the Valles guilds, and of the nobility who might be inclined to go their own way at a time of crisis if they thought they'd been relegated to an underling.
But standing with a sword on his hip, supporting and protecting a frail old woman on whose wisdom rested the fate of the Isles—that was real.
King Carus chuckled at the back of Garric’s mind. “You're not the first to feel that way, lad,” he said, whispering down the corridors of time. “And so long as you keep it under better control than I did, there's no harm done. Neither I nor the Isles would have much use for you if you thought talk was the thing that mattered most.”
Garric smiled. Besides, there were threats that might paralyze even a battle-tested veteran. Garric had faced wizardry in the past, and faced it down or cut it down.
Tenoctris settled herself on the floor of basalt hexagons. The pavers had been cut from naturally six-sided columns rather than shaped by the hand of man. “I'm looking for passages, Garric,” she said. “And I'm determining where they lead.”
She looked up with the grin that never failed to brighten the world about her. “I don't mean secret passages in the walls. I mean my kind of passages, routes through planes other than the one on which we're standing. The queen fixed her mansion in a node with several such connections and I think built more. She's very powerful.”
Tenoctris scratched a circle on the floor with one of the bundles of bamboo slivers Garric carried for the purpose. “I suppose I could use the same one for each incantation,” she muttered apologetically. “It's such a slight thing I'm doing, after all. But even a twig gathers some degree of power with each incantation, and in this place particularly I'm afraid of doing more than I intend.”
“I don't mind the load,” Garric said mildly. Each sliver was the length of a man's hand. All together the bamboo weighed about as much as the buckle of Garric's sword belt, a massive construction of iron ornamented with tin and niello. “And I surely don't mind the fact that you don't take chances you can avoid.”
Tenoctris marked a few words of power around the margin of the circle. He heard her murmur, “Asstraelos chraelos phormo...” but the rest of her chant was as lost to him as it was empty of meaning.
Faint blue glimmers formed and fled in the air around the two of them. They never lasted as long as the sparks struck off by a blacksmith's hammer, and some were so brief that Garric wasn't sure whether it was his eye or his mind that witnessed them.
Garric looked about him as he waited, though he didn't expect there to be anything visible to his eyes. According to Royhas, human laborers had built the queen's mansion; and perhaps that was true for the portions above the ground. These cellars were far too extensive to have been built by men in a few months. The volume of earth and rock excavated would have been sufficient to fill the harbor if it had been dumped there. Instead, it had simply vanished, and the very existence of the lower levels had remained unguessed until Garric led the assault that drove the queen away.
Tenoctris sighed and laid down the sliver she'd been using. She put her hands flat on the floor to help push herself to her feet. Garric quickly reached out to support her, keeping the lantern at arm's length so that the hot metal frame didn't burn either one of them.
“No luck?” he asked. He lifted slightly, but for the most part he simply provided a firm post on which the old woman could pull herself erect.
“Oh, no, my problem's the other way around,” Tenoctris said. “From what I've found thus far, the queen had at least a dozen routes to other locations in this plane and elsewhere in the cosmos. Simply tracing which entrance went where is...”
She grinned again. She always looked a generation younger when she smiled. “I was about to say that it was impossible, but I'm going to have to do it if we're to be safe. If the Isles are to be safe.”
Tenoctris nodded Garric toward the next archway. He walked alongside her, still providing support if she needed it. He wondered how many more examinations she intended to make in this cellar, and whether there was yet another level beneath them.
Their shadows trembled in a score of fanciful patterns on the stone. The pillars' contours distorted the human silhouettes. Garric was almost sure that was all he was seeing.
“Tenoctris?” he said as they passed beneath the round-topped arch into a nearly identical vault. Seepage glistened along
the junction of two hexagons in the center of the floor. “The queen meant to travel through the passages you're finding, didn't she?”
“Yes,” Tenoctris said crisply. She looked around her, analyzing aspects of a reality Garric couldn't see. She nodded him forward again instead of seating herself here. “That was certainly why she constructed her mansion at this location.”
“But that isn't what happened,” Garric said. “She flew away when we broke in. She didn't, well, go through a passage. Didn't she have time to chant the right words? Or...?”
Tenoctris paused directly beneath the next arch and settled onto the cold basalt. “I should have brought a pad,” she murmured, “or at least a thicker robe.”
She turned her face toward Garric again. “I don't think the queen's concern was time,” she said. “Opening a passage is quite a simple matter, even for a person with no more power than I have.”
She smiled; Garric tried to smile back. He failed because of the tension.
“I think the problem,” Tenoctris continued, “is that one of the passages leads by a short route to another... being. A being that even the queen was unwilling to face, and which she feared was strong enough to break through to her if she opened the passage from her side.”
“You mean the Beast,” Garric said.
Tenoctris began drawing another circle of power. The bamboo left a silvery tracing on the coarse black stone. Only the person who drew the symbols could recognize them with any certainty; that person, and the forces which the symbols commanded.
“Yes, the Beast,” Tenoctris said as she drew. “I would guess that the queen was waiting to gain some additional article of power before she attempted to return the Beast to a place that would hold it. She's a great wizard, but she wasn't sure she was powerful enough to defeat that creature alone.”
“But we have to defeat her and the Beast,” Garric said. His index finger touched the pommel of his long sword.
Tenoctris smiled at him again. “Well,” she said, “we have to try.”