Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  Sharina grimaced and turned away. Master Rincale leaned against the railing at her side. "A strange business, isn't it, your ladyship?" he said. "Or maybe it isn't for you. I suppose you've gotten used to this sort of thing in your, well, travels, so to speak."

  "I wouldn't say I was used to it, Master Rincale," Sharina said, keeping her tone neutral. What did people think of her? She wasn't a wizard, she was the daughter of the innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet! Things had happened to her, that was all.

  Sharina's eyes turned unbidden toward the huge worm. Things are still happening to me. She giggled. She supposed she must be on the edge of hysteria, but she preferred this reaction to the tinge of nausea the sight'd induced earlier.

  Subsiding to a proper smile, Sharina said, "Your men are taking things well, I notice. I'm... well, frankly, Master Rincale, I had the impression sailors were likely to be superstitious. I thought that something like this would, well, disturb them."

  Rincale laughed. "Superstitious, lady?" he repeated. "Oh, my, yes! The sea's bigger than any man, bigger than all men. Reason's all very well for landsmen, I suppose, but a sailor knows that reason won't get him anywhere but the bottom of the sea in a freak storm or the wind dragging his anchors toward a reef. There's not a man in the crew but has an amulet or a lucky garment or maybe—"

  The sailing master slid up the puffed sleeve of the tunic he wore to mark him as an officer.

  "—a prayer tattooed on his wrist where the Gods can read it when he's too busy to pray properly himself. But why should we be afraid of the Ladies and their pets, Princess? They came to help you, didn't they?"

  "Yes, it seems so," Sharina said, though she wasn't sure that the nymphs would've appeared if she'd been a brunette like most women in Barca's Hamlet. The one shaving her said the blond hair would string the lyres they played to sailors on far rocky shores....

  "Mind," Rincale added, "we'll be telling our grandchildren about this, that you can bet your inheritance on. Anybody who's been to sea for a while has seen things, but this, well, my own wife'll think I'm lying and wonder why I didn't do a better job."

  The nymph slipped from the ear timber with the fluidity of a drop of quicksilver. She dived deep under the ship, then curved upward to join the pair of her sisters who were guiding the great worm. Tenoctris watched her go before turning her face upward toward Sharina.

  "Want to come on deck, milady?" Rincale offered cheerfully. "Blaskis and Ordos, get your asses outa the way so Lady Tenoctris has some room!"

  Without waiting for an answer, the sailing master hopped onto the frame which the nymph had just vacated. Balancing on the balls of his feet alone, he gripped Tenoctris under the arms and lifted her like a woodpecker snatching a grub from its hole. Rincale was an older man, in his mid-fifties at least, but he'd obviously kept himself fit.

  "Thank you," said Tenoctris as Sharina helped set her on the deck. She gave Sharina a wry grin that showed how startled she'd been to come up in just that fashion. "I'd been wondering how I was going to get back here."

  She tucked into her satchel the wax tablet on which she'd been taking notes during her discussion with the nymph, then resumed, "I'd been hoping to talk to you, Master Rincale. Do you know anything about the people, the People, who invaded Ornifal from the sea forty-nine years ago? You wouldn't have been present yourself, I suppose, but perhaps you've talked to some who were?"

  "Oh, I was sailing with my Da then, milady," Rincale said, smiling fondly with the memory. "Indeed I was. Had his own ship, he did, though that went to Foalz, my brother by his first wife."

  Tenoctris nodded, probably believing as Sharina did that the story would come out faster without interruptions intended to speed it along. "Yes, the People," Rincale said. "A right lot of liars they were, though—"

  He grinned broadly at Sharina.

  "—I'm with my wife on this one. I can't imagine why they didn't tell a better one. You see-"

  Rincale made a circular motion with his hand, gesturing to seaward. Well, it would've been seaward under normal conditions; and the moment it indicated a wasteland of stars.

  "—the waters east of Ornifal, the seas, I mean?"

  He paused to make sure these fine ladies understood so complicated a concept as "seas". Sharina, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice, said, "Yes, we understand."

  "Well, the People said," the sailing master explained, "the ones who weren't killed, I mean, that they live on a floating island that sometimes swings close to Ornifal and sometimes swings away. Now, that's nonsense. There's no island in the channel between Bight and Kepulacecil, there isn't and there wasn't then. East of the channel there's reefs that I wouldn't want to thread a fishing dory through, let alone an island. Wherever they come from, it wasn't from an island!"

  "Perhaps," said Tenoctris carefully, "they didn't mean the island was floating in the sea."

  "What?" Rincale said with a frown. "What else is there to float in, milady?"

  Tenoctris pursed her lips, considering what to say. Sharina gestured toward the great worm swimming ahead of them.

  "Oh...," she said with a lopsided grin. "I think we could all imagine other places if we put our minds to it, Master Rincale."

  "Ah," said the sailing master. "Ah. I hadn't thought of that."

  The worm, undulating like the sea in a gentle breeze, swam onward through the stars.

  * * *

  "The Heroes, the men our friends are trying to emulate...," Mab said as she and Cashel sat at a table on the lowest of many terraces stepped up from the surface of a crystalline lake. Her hair was now a rich chestnut color, and she was nearly as tall as Cashel. "Were the great warriors who led the citizens of Ronn when the Made Men threatened the city in past ages. The last of them, Valeri, went down to the cavern where the Heroes sleep a hundred and fifty years ago."

  The walls of Ronn slanted back on all sides like steeply sloped mountains, shading the lake's surface even though the sky above was still bright. Cashel saw brightly-colored fish, the largest of them as long as he was tall, swimming lazily through the pure water. Occasionally one rose to gulp air, sending ripples across the shimmering surface.

  "Valeri was a general?" Cashel said. Generals like Lord Waldron decided where to move troops to and how to line them up—and how to feed them, besides, all sorts of things that Cashel couldn't even imagine doing. But Garric did them too. It was wonderful the things Garric could do even though he'd been raised in Barca's Hamlet the same as Cashel.

  "Valeri was a Hero," Mab said, correcting him gently. "So far as generalship went, that was the Queen's affair. There was no subtlety in the King and the minions of his creation, only numbers and savagery. Valeri led. The citizens of Ronn had weapons and the courage to fight; but without a leader, they would have huddled within the walls of the city, more fearful of making a mistake in their ignorance of war than they were of dying."

  The water of the lake below had darkened to the point that the fish were no longer colors, merely darknesses beneath the shimmer of the reflected sky. Lights appeared in the lake or....

  Could they be under the lake? Balls of blue and red and yellow moved slowly from the edges inward in curving lines. Each was an even distance behind the one that preceded it. Occasionally a great fish swam above a light and hid it for a moment the way a trailing cloud may block the sun.

  "Young people with lanterns dance beneath the lake in the evenings," Mab said, pausing in her discussion of great issues to explain the thing that had Cashel's attention. "There's quite a lot of competition to get on the teams. The floor of the lake is diamond; the dancers are below it."

  "Ah," said Cashel, leaning forward to take in the patterns which the lights wove. He couldn't see the dancers themselves, but the colored lanterns had a stately grace.

  As he watched he realized that the movements of the fish weren't random either. Somebody who fights with a quarterstaff learns to see the rhythms of things that at first glance just seem to be happening. You learn t
hat if you're going to win, anyhow. "Ah!"

  He turned to Mab and smiled, feeling apologetic for not paying attention to what she'd been telling him. He'd listened but he couldn't pretend he'd cared much about it.

  "Mistress," he said now. "It doesn't seem from what you tell me that Ronn has much needed heroes or armies either one in the past long while. Now that you do again, maybe they'll come along. Don't you think?"

  "Ronn has had perfect peace for a hundred and fifty years," Mab said. "Ever since Valeri led her citizens to drive the Made Men back into the Great Ravine in the northern mountains. The people of Ronn didn't see the need of soldiers, and it seems the Queen must not have seen a need either. People believe what they want to believe; even people who've proved themselves in the past to be wise and very powerful. You can be born brave or at least learn to act brave quickly enough; but nobody's born skillful with weapons. Those arts take longer to learn than the Sons have, or than Ronn has before she needs a leader."

  Her smile took on a tinge of sadness; Cashel knew what she meant. Herron and his friends were puppies. Nice puppies, puppies that might grow up to be really good dogs. Trained right they'd be the kind of officials Garric wanted around him, bright active fellows with the good of the kingdom at heart.

  They wouldn't be soldiers, though, any of them except maybe Stasslin. And Cashel didn't much like Stasslin as a person.

  "The Sons would be willing to lead the people of Ronn," Mab said. "In their hearts, they really believe that's what they're going to do when the rest of the citizens realize their danger. And if that happened, they'd be killed at once and everyone who followed them would be killed. They don't have the skills."

  Cashel nodded. The Sons were young in a fashion that children brought up in the borough were never young. By the time you've survived three winters in a peasant village, you know things that the youth of Ronn had never been forced to learn.

  "Ma'am...?" Cashel said, his eyes on the dancers and the fish. The terraces were well filled with spectators, some foreign but mostly citizens of Ronn. From the talk he heard at nearby tables, the locals judged tiny variations from previous dances while Cashel himself was merely seeing the grace of the thing itself.

  "Yes, Master Cashel," Mab said, her voice prodding politely so that he'd say what he was working himself up to.

  He turned and faced her. He'd ever so much be fighting somebody, anybody, than having this conversation; but here he was, and there wasn't any choice about it.

  "Mistress," Cashel said, "if you're thinking I can lead your army, you're wrong—I can't. I wouldn't be any more use than the Sons were. I'm not afraid—and I'm not afraid to fight. But a man with a quarterstaff isn't much good against real soldiers, and I'd been no use at all with a sword."

  "No, I wasn't thinking of that," Mab said with a dismissive wave of her left hand. Cashel wasn't sure whether his eyes were tricking him or if the fingernails really did make five rosy streaks in the air as they passed. "You're a stranger, Master Cashel. No matter what your skills were, the people of Ronn wouldn't follow you; and even you couldn't fight the Made Men alone."

  Her expression changed to one that Cashel couldn't quite describe, serious and, well, affectionate at the same time. Mab touched the back of his hand and added, "Your pardon. You would fight the Made Men alone. But not even you could win."

  "I guess I said that already," Cashel said. He was feeling even more uncomfortable than he'd been when he brought the subject up. "Look, mistress—what do you see as the way out of this? Because you do see something, you're not the sort to just wallow in how bad everything is, are you?"

  Mab laughed, clapping her hands in delight at the joke. People at neighboring tables, toying with the remains of their meals or carafes of wine, glanced over in mild surprise.

  "Oh, my, no I'm not that, Master Cashel!" Mab said. "My hope, my plan if you want to put it that way—"

  She smiled in wry self-mockery.

  "—is that the Heroes will awaken in their cavern and lead the people of Ronn against the King and his minions, his monsters. That the citizens of Ronn will destroy the enemies of the city and of all men finally instead of scotching them as so often in the past."

  Cashel didn't say anything for a moment, just sat and thought about what she'd said. His staff leaned against the parapet beside him. He didn't pick it up, but he reached back with his right hand and ran his fingertips over the hickory.

  "So you figure the Heroes have been sleeping, then?" he said. "Ah, how long would that have been for, ma'am? Because you said Valeri had gone down there...."

  "Yes, Valeri whom Dasborn brought up as his son and trained," Mab said. "Valeri with blood soaking through the bandage where a sword had found the joint between the halves of his cuirass. And before Dasborn, the twins Minon and Menon, blond and handsome as the very gods till the day they went to cavern to sleep; Minon in his brother's arms, and Menon staggering despite his strength because of the shaft of the broken spear protruding from his thigh."

  The sky was almost dark, now, but lights floated through the air above the tables. They were faint and the color of old parchment, but Cashel could see his companion as clearly as he could've in a full moon.

  "They're sleeping, mistress?" Cashel said quietly. "With wounds like those?"

  "Minon and Menon were sister's sons to great Hrandis," Mab said as though she hadn't heard the question. And perhaps she hadn't: she was looking down toward the diamond lake, but Cashel had the feeling her eyes were seeing much deeper than that, back in time as well as far into the core of the world.

  "Hrandis was shorter than you," she continued, "but his shoulders were even broader. He swung an axe in either hand. When he led the citizens for the last time, he left a swath of the bodies of Made Men the width of both arms and his axe helves all the way from the walls of Ronn to where he fell at the mouth of the Great Ravine."

  "Fell?" said Cashel. "Then Hrandis is...?"

  "Minon and Menon escorted their uncle to the cavern," Mab said, "holding his arms over their shoulders and walking on flowers and the rich garments the grateful citizens threw before their feet. Hrandis and his axes sleep there still; waiting for the city's greatest need, the legend says. Waiting as Virdin waits, the Queen's first champion and Ronn's first Hero. Virdin whom the blades of the Made Men never touched, Virdin who went down to a well-earned rest in the cavern with his white beard spreading like a mountain cataract. Waiting for the city's need."

  Cashel didn't speak. His fingers had been rubbing the familiar smoothness of the wood. Now he took the quarterstaff in both hands for comfort as he thought.

  Mab gave a brittle laugh. "I think Ronn is in need now, don't you, Master Cashel?"

  Before he could answer, she rose to her feet as supple as an otter. "Come," Mab said in a cheerful tone. "The sun's down, so I can show you the way the Heroes guard the walls of the city yet today."

  She took Cashel by the hand and guided him toward one of the platforms that effortlessly lifted Ronn's citizens through the city-mountain's many levels.

  * * *

  They'd found several coarse sacks in hanging from the outer wall of the shed. Ilna had handled them; they told her of nothing worse than hot sun and the leaden exhaustion of the laborers who'd chopped the leaves from which the fibers were rotted before being woven. Now Chalcus carried the bread and cheese from Nergura's cupboard in one, leaving Davus' hands free to juggle three stones: two of them of a size to behead a pigeon if thrown accurately, the third big enough to dish in a man's skull.

  Three homunculi, carrying the vine on which their siblings grew, trotted toward the east as soon as they were out of the maze. Ilna didn't see any advantage of the terrain in that direction instead of another, but the creatures seemed in no doubt. They went over a rise bristling with clumps of silk grass and vanished from her life, except for the snatch of angry grumbling a vagrant breeze brought her a moment later.

  Davus looked at Nergura, who'd stayed at the mouth of the maze
as the three of them followed the homunculi out. He said, "You may think that you can catch them again if you hurry, wizard. If you do, I will come back for you."

  "Let's go," said Chalcus quietly. "I'd like to get some distance on before we bed down for the night."

  They started forward, walking abreast this time. Ilna was between the two men.

  "Do you think you're better than me?" the wizard shouted. "Is that what you think?"

  Ilna turned. "I know I'm not better than you," she said. "But I'd be worse yet if I said that what you were doing was no business of mine because you weren't doing it to me personally."

  She and her companions started toward the Citadel again. The lowering sun turned the crystal into an orange-red blaze.

  "From this valley they say you are leaving...," sang Chalcus in his lilting tenor. "Do not hasten to bid me adieu...."

  Davus laughed and began to juggle his stones in an intricate pattern, and before long the maze and the wizard were out of sight behind them.

  CHAPTER 7

  "There's no call for concern," said Chalcus in the same light tone with which he'd been singing I'm goin' away to Shengy, "but I believe something's following us with such care that I've caught no more than a whisker here and there."

  "I've thought there's something too," Ilna said, taking the silken lasso from around her waist. "I haven't seen anything I could point to, but the... well, I thought there was."

  She couldn't say, "because of the way the clouds stand overhead," or "because of the way the tree roots crawl across the ground," and expect it to mean anything to people who weren't already disposed to trust her instinct for patterns. Chalcus did trust her; and so, apparently did Davus. She didn't need to explain the things that shimmered on the surface of her mind.

  They'd entered this valley around mid-afternoon. It was well-watered, but the soil was a sickly yellow-gray and supported only coarse vegetation. Scrub oaks provided a welcome shade and they'd been able to drink their fill from a little creek, but an enemy would find concealment easy. Shortly the sun would go down.