by David Drake
“We drove her out of Valles,” Garric continued, “but we expect her to come back. And there's another...”
He looked at Tenoctris. “Is he a wizard?” Garric asked. “The Beast, I mean.”
“No,” said Tenoctris. “The Beast is...” She too paused. Very carefully she went on, “The Beast was worshipped as a god in another time and place.”
Garric nodded. “Valence—or anyway, the wizard Silyon, who served Valence—summoned the Beast. Tenoctris is trying to find a way to send him, it, back. Before that we have to deal with the queen. She and I were going to the queen's mansion tonight to see if we could get closer to that.”
“I know about the Beast,” Cashel said. He did, but it still surprised him to be talking about something of that sort here in Valles when he'd just arrived. “I even know about Silyon, I think. At least I met his sister Silya.”
“And she's not going to be tricking anybody else the way she tried with the chief,” Zahag said from the roof.
The ape squatted over the tile pipe that led down into a ceramic pond. Little fish glittered in the lamplight.
“That's right,” said Cashel, trying to remember exactly what Silya had said about her brother. “He's got a stone that he stole from her to talk with the Beast.”
Tenoctris looked at Cashel sharply. “Does he indeed?” she said. “Is it—”
She turned to Garric with another quick motion. When they'd entered this miniature courtyard, Tenoctris took the satchel of scale-patterned leather that Garric had been carrying, apparently for her. Now it lay on her lap. “Garric?” she said. “Can I talk with Cashel aside? There are things he may know that could help me, but I don't want to take over the discussion when there's so much else to explain.”
Garric grimaced. “There's too many things to say and do,” he said, “and all at the same time. I don't want to keep you from searching the queen's mansion, but I don't see how I can go with you tonight.”
“I'll go with Tenoctris,” Cashel said. He caught himself in sudden embarrassment. “Unless it's something that, you know, somebody has to read. If it's just carrying the bag, though, I can do that.”
Tenoctris looked from Garric to Cashel. “It's more than just carrying my materials,” she said with a growing smile, “but it's nothing you can't do for me, Cashel. If things go in the particular fashion I think they might, I would be very glad of your strength beside me.”
Everyone looked at Garric. He blushed, though his deep tan would have made that hard to tell in this light for anybody who didn't know him well. “I don't give orders to Cashel,” he said. “I don't give orders to any of you. You're—”
Garric turned his face toward Halphemos. “You're my friends,” he said. “All of you, I hope. This is a time that the kingdom needs friends, and I need friends especially.”
Halphemos looked at the ground in embarrassment, he nodded fierce agreement.
“We can go now if you like, Tenoctris,” Cashel said. He checked the satchel's buckles, then lifted it to his shoulder. It was pretty heavy; too heavy for Tenoctris, certainly.
Zahag dropped to the ground. He didn't speak but he bared his teeth slightly as he looked, around, obviously daring anyone to tell him that he couldn't come too. Cashel rubbed the ape's bristly scalp with a knuckle to reassure him.
Liane had been writing with a brush on a thin beech-wood board. “I'll tell Maurunus to prepare rooms for our new arrivals,” she explained as she stepped to the door.
Liane thrust the door open, her mouth open to call for a runner to take the chit she'd just composed. A group of agitated men led by Royhas stood just outside. The chancellor had already raised his baton of gold-capped ivory to rap on the door panel.
“Your Majesty?” said Royhas, looking past Liane to Garric. “I've summoned Attaper and Waldron, but I'm afraid I have to interrupt you as well.”
The group with Royhas included civilians in court robes and four Blood Eagles. The soldiers guarded not the chancellor but a man wearing an ornate jeweled cuirass over a tunic of gold-embroidered silk. His scabbard was decorated like his armor, but the sword had been removed before the guards brought him into Garric's presence.
“Admiral Nitker has arrived with the three surviving ships of the Royal Fleet,” Royhas continued. He spoke with a stony lack of inflexion to cover what Cashel suspected was disgust. “The crews are understrength, the officer of the harbor watch informs me. The good admiral appears to have lost half the men on the few ships he saved.”
“Do you think you could have done better?” Nitker snarled. He was nearer forty than thirty, though it was hard to tell with nobles. Besides, the terror on his face had aged him considerably. “You couldn't, and you'll learn that quick enough if you try to make a stand here! The only reason I came to Valles was to give you a chance to get out in the next few hours.”
“If that's the only reason you came here, the oarsmen on your ships don't need to eat or sleep,” said the stern-faced man in gilded armor who'd just arrived from deeper within the palace compound. The newcomer gave Cashel a look that stiffened the youth slightly; not precisely hostile, but appraising in a fashion that Cashel understood very well. “It's surprising that such paragons didn't sweep all opposition before them.”
Nitker flushed and groped at his empty scabbard as he turned. Two of the guards grabbed his elbows and bent his arms back.
“Enough!” Garric said in a crackling voice. “Lord Attaper, I didn't want to fight the admiral before, and I certainly don't think it's a useful occupation now. Can we agree on that?”
The hard-bitten soldier lost all expression for an instant He bowed. “I apologize, Your Majesty. I've gotten... lax in the past few years.” He straightened and went on, “And I apologize to you also, Lord Nitker. We need your information about the threat and your strength to help us meet it.”
Cashel eyed Garric with new interest. He'd always respected his friend, but he'd never guessed Garric could snap a fellow like this Attaper to attention with a command. Break Attaper's head with a quarterstaff, maybe, though that wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world either. Cashel smiled and slid his hand down his own polished hickory.
“You can't meet it, I tell you!” the admiral blurted. Cashel judged him to be somewhere between tears and a tantrum, utterly undone. “There's hundreds of thousands of them, all the monkey men on the island of Bight, and they're floating down on Ornifal on a raft. They'll kill everybody in Valles. They'll eat everybody in Valles, I tell you!”
“They're not monkeys!” Zahag said. “And they're not apes either; if any of you know what either one is.”
Cashel tapped his shoulder, not hard but enough to remind the ape of his manners.
“Ah,” Zahag said. “Sorry.”
Garric glanced at Tenoctris and raised an eyebrow. The old wizard nodded. “That could be,” she said.
“The Hairy Men of Bight...” she went on, focusing for a moment on her memories. “They've been used for wizardry often enough because they are men, but there isn't so much concern about what happens to them as there is when children start disappearing from the neighboring villages.”
She smiled without humor. “Wizardry of a sort I don't practice, obviously,” she said. “To direct large numbers of Hairy Men would require a great deal of power. Even more than raising an army from the undead or the never-living.”
“Power which the queen has?” Garric said. He sounded interested but not concerned; the tip of his index finger traced the three rounded tiers of his sword's pommel.
“Yes,” Tenoctris said. “It appears that she does.”
Garric shrugged. “Well, we knew we'd have a fight,” he said. “Lord Attaper, get all the details you can from the admiral here. Weapons, numbers—”
He grinned bleakly.
“Which are considerable, I gather. Tactics, command, supplies, the usual things. I'll direct Waldron to put the city militia on alert. Right now, I think, I'd best visit the Arsenal and tell Pior that
the Duke of Eshkol—”
He smiled again. The smile came from the Garric Cashel had grown up with, but this talk of armies and tactics was as unlikely as it would be if Garric floated off the ground.
“—has returned with his fleet to the royal service, so it's time for the regular army to do the same.”
Cashel glanced at his friend's feet. They were solidly planted—and his sandals were the sturdy, simple affairs that a youth from Barca's Hamlet wore in the winter or on a long journey. Cashel grinned.
“You're not listening to me!” Nitker said. “You can't fight these beasts! In a few hours or a day at most they'll be landing on the shore of Ornifal and killing everyone they meet. All you can do is run!”
“I've listened to you, Lord Nitker,” Garric said in a voice that could have come from the outer dark. “I just don't agree.”
He smiled and went on, “We couldn't get all the people of so large a city out in time, and we have the walls and some organization here. That might help.”
“You can't run from evil,” Ilna said without emotion. She was knotting and unknotting the length of cord, but her eyes rested most often on Liane. “You can't run from yourself.”
“Attaper, Admiral?” Garric said. “I think we'd better go to the Arsenal together.”
He frowned. “Do you suppose I ought to throw on something that glitters more, or will Pior listen to sense from a brown cloak?”
“If he listens to sense at all, we're luckier than I expect,” Attaper said in a grim tone. “I'll rouse a couple regiments of Waldron's men while you change, Your Majesty. It's worth adding a threat to the scales at this point. Since the fool may not believe in the real threat.”
“Tenoctris?” Cashel said. “Do you still...?”
“More than ever,” Tenoctris said, rising from the couch where she'd been sitting during the discussions. “There's so dazzlingly much power layered over the queen's mansion that I'm having difficulty finding the stratum that I need.”
Her smile was bright, though her eyes were pinched with concern. “And there's very little time, Cashel. For us, and for the Isles.”
* * *
The queen raised her staff of clear crystal. She smiled at Sharina, then said “Eidoneia neoieka!” and struck it on the floor. Red fire pulsed through the staff. Something unseen shattered.
Sharina stood in a ruby sphere. Beyond the walls was mist in which only her fancy formed images. The queen stood beside her.
The concave surface of the floor tilted them toward each other. Sharina tried to move aside, up the wall's curve.
“Don't move!” the queen said. She touched the floor again. There was a crackling sound. She walked around Sharina, drawing a circle less than four feet in diameter. The staff's tip left a line across the ruby the way a knife scribes cheese. The wizard was on the other side of the line.
The queen began writing characters in the Old Script around the inner margin of the circle. “Where are we now?” Sharina asked.
“Don't speak until I tell you to,” the queen said coldly.
Sharina laughed. She wasn't so much resigned to what was happening as detached from it. Though her fingers touched the Pewle knife, she knew that she couldn't harm the queen. If the angry queen killed her, then Sharina didn't have to worry whether or not helping the wizard was the right decision.
She looked around her but found little of interest. The sphere in which they stood was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, though it was hard to be sure. The luster of the polished ruby walls reflected the figures within it as a myriad of diminishing images.
“Where does the light come from?” Sharina said. If the ruby itself glowed, there shouldn't be reflections on the walls... or so she thought. There was no source of light within the sphere, of that she was sure.
The queen looked at her. Sharina said, “I told you I'd help. I didn't say I'd be your dog.”
The queen resumed marking the ruby. The rise of the walls made her movements awkward but she didn't slip on the smooth surface. Sharina couldn't see the queen's feet because the flowing robe concealed them.
Some of the reflected images were of Sharina and a figure that could not have been human, no matter how distorted. Sharina's lips tightened.
The queen had finished writing around the inner circle. Now she resumed the circuit, this time writing outside the line. Each time the staff touched, flashes subtly different in hue from the ruby walls spat within the crystal.
Sharina started to mouth one of the syllables. The queen flicked the staff upward and tapped the girl's chin. A chill greater than what lay at the heart of the Ice Capes froze Sharina's lips and tongue.
“Don't,” the queen said. “Not because I care what might happen to you, but because I want to avoid the effort of reanimating your corpse to speak my incantation. But I will do that if I must, girl. Believe me!”
She lowered the staff. Feeling returned to Sharina's mouth. The underside of her chin prickled as though from frostbite.
The queen completed the words of power in the second ring. She looked at Sharina with lips quivering in the semblance of a smile.
Sharina faced the wizard expressionlessly, as Nonnus would have done—had done—in similar crises. The queen could kill her and perhaps could do worse things, unguessibly worse things; but she couldn't make Sharina show fear.
“I will read the words of the outer circuit,” the queen said. A catch in her honeyed voice suggested that Sharina's refusal to quail irritated her. “I may have to read them a number of times to reach the result I desire. When I finish, you will read the words within. The scene beyond us will become a vision of an ancestor of yours—”
The queen's smile was terrible, even to Sharina in her present detached state.
“—or mine, at the moment of conception.”
The staff in the queen's hand tilted as if moving of its own volition. The tip rapped the wall at eye height. There was no spark within the crystal, nor did the contact mark the ruby surface.
“We will repeat this until we have reached the time of King Lorcan, who founded your line and the Kingdom of the Isles,” the queen said. “As though human reigns could matter! Then your task will be complete.”
Her cold smile became mincing. “I may well spare you.”
“King Lorcan and his wizard ally hid the Throne of Malkar,” Sharina said calmly. “You think you'll gain the throne through me.”
It was a joy in Sharina's heart to see a flash of bestial fury replace the wizard's sneering smile. “Don't speak of things you don't understand, girl!” the queen said. “Or I'll cut your belly open and force your dead lips to speak the words I desire!”
Sharina crossed her arms as if facing a child. She was fearful, about what the queen might do to Cashel and about what she herself was doing to prevent harm to her friend. Her face was as cold and unmoved as the sharp steel blade of her Pewle knife.
How much did the queen understand? Not as much as she thought she did, of that Sharina was certain. Because the queen had great power, she thought she had great wisdom. The wisdom Sharina had learned from Tenoctris was that there are powers so great that to use them is to destroy oneself. If the queen did reach the Throne of Malkar, the focus of all evil, she doomed herself.
“Ousiri aphi mene phri,”the queen said. She paced slowly around the circle, her steps sure despite the slanting, slippery surface. “Katoi house...”
Nothing but brief shapes of mist appeared beyond the ruby walls. Sharina looked at her own feet and the words of power she would read when the time came.
“Bachuch bachachuch bazachuch,” the queen said, though the sound seemed to come from the walls themselves. “Bachazachuch bachaxichuch...”
Sharina tried to think of the Lady, but the rippling tentacles of a great ammonite filled her mind instead. She stood, silent and stern. The fear that filled her heart had no echo on her face.
The 5th of Partridge
Sharina didn't know how much time had passed. Her
mental numbness was not far removed from the stasis which had held her after the demon snatched her into the queen's power. The wizard's voice droned like water plashing over black stones. Perhaps it was hypnotizing her.
Because of Sharina's state, her mind didn't process the gradual change in the world outside the ruby walls until well after her eyes had registered the differences. She snapped alert; her skin flickered hot, then cold, and seemed to crawl as though she'd just awakened from a faint.
The walls had vanished, but a red cast like the light thrown off by the queen's staff infused the world on which Sharina looked. Leaves trembled around a clearing in the jungles of Bight. Branches had begun to rise after the heavy rainstorm which had beaten them down.
A figure leaped into sight: a Hairy Man, an adult female whose pelt gleamed with the sheen of good health. She shrieked in mindless terror as she poised to fling herself into the foliage on the other side of the clearing. Startled flies whirled upward from the fruit rotting beneath a giant durian tree.
Her pursuer caught her with the sudden finality of a praying mantis snatching its victim. The motion was so quick that Sharina saw the hunter only at the instant it struck.
The pursuer was a demon: roughly human in shape, but taller than the tallest man and as thin as the wire armature on which the sculptor shapes the clay of his mold. Steam spouted where the demon's taloned feet stood straddled on the damp soil; hair singed from the victim's arms where fingers like knives gripped them. The female cried out with the despair of one to whom death would be a release from corroding terror.
The demon's lower jaw dropped on a double joint instead of hinging open at the back the way a human's would have. Its teeth were like chipped flint; they slid past one another like shears.
A stream of blue-white flame spewed from the demon's mouth, booming like a waterfall against the base of a dawn redwood. The tree's spongy bark exploded in steam and charred fragments. The victim's cries were lost in the thunder of destruction. The hose of fire ceased when the demon's mouth clamped shut, but the tree continued to crackle and hiss.