Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  It was drizzling outside, so the servants'd had an excuse to raise the hoods of their short gray capes. The guards had still checked them when they came down the hall with clean bedding—but they wouldn't, Garric hoped, bother to do that again when the servants left.

  Garric pulled the door to behind him as he followed Liane out. A three-wick lamp hung over the doorway. It was placed to illuminate the faces of people coming from either direction down the hallway, while those beneath it remained in shadow.

  The guards were discussing the upcoming wrestling match between a Blood Eagle file closer and a Blaise armsman from Lord Rosen's regiment. They didn't pay any attention to the servants leaving the royal apartments and shuffling down the hall.

  "What they oughta do," one of the Blood Eagles said as Garric and Liane rounded the corner at the slow pace of tired servants, "is let us fight the local talent with training swords. That'd show'em what's what!"

  "That'd be the quickest way to start a for-real war, at any rate," said the ghost of King Carus, shaking his head with a rueful smile. "And I wouldn't be surprised if Gyganes—"

  Carus knew all the Blood Eagles by name, as well as virtually every other soldier in the royal army whose name Garric had heard even once. It was an ability Garric doubted he'd have been able to equal if he'd made it his life's work.

  "—knew that just as well as I do. Of course, we can't have common soldiers deciding policy for the kingdom, and it's nice that the ruler isn't spoiling for a fight either. The way I was when I was king."

  Grinning along with his ancestor, Garric said to Liane in a low voice, "It's a pretty pass when the fellow who's supposed to be running the kingdom has to sneak out of his room or he wouldn't be allowed to go."

  They walked more briskly now that they were out of sight of the guards. These corridors made do with a lamp at each corner, and those would burn down by morning.

  "I'm not sure you should go," said Liane. "My agent certainly thinks the business is dangerous, and he's not easily alarmed."

  "If there's wizardry involved...," Garric said. "And there is, Dipsas is a wizard and what else'd she be doing in the vaults under the palace? If there's wizardry, then nobody's more fit than you and me to judge what's going on. Except for Tenoctris, of course, and if she were here I'd insist on going with her or sending Cashel."

  "I'm not disagreeing," Liane said, looking over her shoulder to smile at him. "I'm just saying that I understand why others might."

  She paused by a door covered by a swatch of age-rotted tapestry nailed to the jamb and transom. "This is the room," she said, then tapped twice on the wood—with the ivory hilt of the little dagger Garric had seen her kill with, he realized.

  The door swung outward, frame and all. There was no light inside. "Watch the hole!" an unfamiliar male voice whispered. "Half the floor's gone in here, that's why they closed it."

  Liane slipped in, elbowing the door wider: they couldn't leave the load of washing out in the hall without attracting attention. Garric followed, closing the panel behind him. The shutter of a dark-lantern scraped open. The light of the single candle behind a lens of thin horn blazed like a burst of sunlight.

  "Who's he?" the voice demanded; a sharp-featured youth in the bleached-white tunic of Earl Wildulf's palace servants, Garric saw. "You weren't supposed to bring anybody. Anybody!"

  "You know who I am," Garric said. "Now tell us where Dipsas and the Countess go at night."

  The room contained a broken bedframe and a litter of smaller objects, but it wasn't completely filled with junk the way the suite turned over to Garric had been. The floor, concrete poured over a lattice of withies, had sagged when a supporting beam gave way; half the slab had then collapsed into the darkness beneath. The response of whoever was in charge of palace maintenance at the time had been to close the room instead of trying to repair it.

  When Garric glanced into the hole, he could understand why nobody'd wanted to work down there. He grinned. He wasn't looking forward to it himself.

  "You weren't supposed to tell anybody who I am!" the youth said peevishly to Liane. "My life's in danger, you know that!"

  "All our lives are in danger," Liane said calmly. "Yours will be in less danger if you stop angering me when time is so short. Where does the wizard go?"

  The spy twisted his mouth as if for another complaint, then caught himself with a shrug. "Right," he said. "Right, and anyway, what's done is done."

  He pointed his thumb toward the hole where the floor had been. "I've left markers on the walls with mushroom spores. When your eyes adjust, you'll see them. It's not the same path Dipsas takes at the start—it's a rabbit warren down there, there's tunnels off every direction and I don't know where half of 'em go. Anyway, you'll join her route about two levels down."

  "Won't Dipsas see the markings and know someone has followed her?" Liane said with a frown.

  "No, they take lamps, her and the Countess," the spy explained. "If there's any light at all, you can't see my marks. And even if they did—"

  He shrugged again. "Chances are they'd figure it was natural, it seems to me. You get that sort of glow in caves. That's where I gather the mushrooms."

  "Then you'd better close your lantern," Garric said, "so our eyes can adapt. They're there tonight, Dipsas and Balila?"

  "Right," the spy said, sliding the cover over the lens. The smell of hot iron and candlesmoke was suddenly more noticeable, though that was probably because Garric's eyes no longer distracted him from the odors. "They started down at their usual time, an hour ago. I've followed them three times when I wasn't on duty, and they always go the same place."

  The spy made a sound with his cheek as though he'd tasted something sour. "The bird and that jabbering little moron the Countess keeps with her, they went too," he said. "They always do. I don't understand why. I don't."

  He's frightened, Garric realized. But not, I think, by anything he could put a name to.

  "He seems a sensible fellow," Carus remarked with his usual grin. It was always daylight at the place where he stood in Garric's mind. "So perhaps he just doesn't like wizards."

  "I see a glow down there," Liane said, her voice calm but perhaps too calm.

  "There's a ladder here to take you down the first part," the spy said, sounding embarrassed. "Look, I can't go with you tonight, I'm on duty in the message room. I ought to be there now."

  "No one's asking you to come," Garric said. He shifted the belt holding his dagger so that it was over the borrowed tunic instead of under it. His sword was too long to conceal from the guards, and in the close confines of the tunnels a dagger might be more useful anyway. "You've done your job, and more."

  "It's really pretty clear," the spy said. The door opened. As his silhouette slipped into the hallway he added, "You shouldn't have trouble."

  "I'll lead," said Liane. Garric heard the tick of the long reed she'd concealed on the handbarrow, then the creak of the ladder as it settled under the girl's slight weight.

  Garric followed, smiling as he thought of the way he had to sneak around in order to carry out a task he really was the best available person for. He hadn't seriously thought of forbidding Liane to come, though he was frightened at the risk to her. She'd been in worse places than this was likely to be, and she'd likely put herself in worse ones yet as long as she survived: for the kingdom's sake, and Mankind's sake.

  A life spent hiding until Evil triumphed wasn't a life of safety in any real sense. Garric wouldn't order Liane to waste her abilities in that fashion, any more than he was going to allow his well-meaning guards and advisors to force him to twiddle his thumbs.

  He could see the markings clearly now, irregular bars of yellow-green that didn't illuminate any more than themselves. The floor at the base of the ladder was firm but scattered with bits of something that scrunched beneath his feet—fallen plaster, perhaps, or tesserae loosened from an ancient mosaic.

  Liane handed him one end of her sash, several times normal length but
hidden till now beneath the tunic she'd gathered above it. "Ready?" she asked.

  "Ready," said Garric and drew the dagger. He might have done better to keep his hand free, but for now the hilt gave him a little extra confidence as they started into the near darkness.

  When Garric got used to it, he did find it surprisingly easy to navigate through the cellars. The phosphorescent markings were adequate, each within sight of the ones before and after it. Even more important, the path itself was clear. The spy must've spent considerable effort preparing the route instead of simply scouting and marking it.

  "He's a good man," Garric said aloud.

  "All Liane's people are," said Carus, grinning like a bear in a honey tree. "Between her and Tenoctris, I've had to change my opinion of wizards and spymasters both!"

  "He had reason to be angry," Liane said, her reed brushing across the ground ahead of her with a tick-tick-tick. "But I couldn't warn him that you'd be with me. Just in case he were caught, you know."

  Garric hadn't known. He'd never really thought about the problems of not knowing who to trust. Now that he did think about it, he realized that meant you could never trust anyone. How could Liane live in that world, at least part of the time?

  They reached a blank wall where a glow faintly arrowed towards stairs to the left. They were brick and solid despite a crack splitting them in the middle. Their thin marble veneer had flaked away dangerously, but somebody—presumably the spy—had swept the broken slabs to either side.

  "Did he say how far it is?" Garric asked, more for companionship than a need for an answer. The spy'd laid out the route while Dipsas and Balila were above ground, so he could use a lantern without risk of being seen. Garric and Liane couldn't take that chance, so the fact they needed total darkness to see the markings wasn't a handicap.

  "He said it took him half an hour," Liane said. "I don't know the distance—it doesn't really matter, I suppose. Of course it'll take us longer."

  But not a lot longer, Garric suspected. Liane was walking with a confidence he wouldn't have been able to equal if he'd been in front. She showed no more hesitation than if she were stepping across a drawing room at midday. Either Liane was certain of her agent and that the reed she tapped ahead of her would give sufficient warning, or she acted as though she were certain.

  The latter was more likely, and it showed quite amazing courage. Little things like risking a bad fall in the dark were harder to achieve than great flashy ones like charging a dangerous enemy. The big ones you did with a kind of madness seething in your blood to overcome normal concerns, but Liane's steady courage was the sort you had to find on your own.

  The sound of their feet and breathing changed. The walls had closed in, and the markers were painted on living rock. Garric touched the wall. They were in a tunnel bored with crude tools, hammers and drills made by grinding sand into the softer limestone.

  The atmosphere shifted again; echoes became a distant whisper. The markings were on glass-smooth flow rock, the pearly deposit that formed stalactites when it dripped from the cave roof instead of in sheets over the walls. Besides the echoes, Garric heard another thing, or thought he did.

  "Pause a moment," he said. He bent and laid his left palm on the cave floor, finding it faintly warm. Through the rock shivered a slow rumble that was neither his imagination nor the sound of blood in his own ears.

  "All right," he said, straightening and gripping Liane's sash firmly again.

  "It's real, then?" she asked as she strode ahead again. They were clearly going down, but Garric couldn't be sure how steep the slope was.

  "I think so," Garric said. "But I don't know what it is."

  Liane gave a laugh that didn't seem forced. "Well, perhaps we'll learn," she said. "That's what we're here for, after all."

  The cave narrowed; the right side had been improved by tools but the left was natural. Garric touched a few threads, remains of fabric caught where tools had left a sharp fracture in the rock.

  "There's light ahead," Liane whispered. Garric could see it too, though the glow was so faint that it turned Liane's form into a wraith instead of a silhouette. They continued on, down a short flight of steps broken into the stone with hammers and levers. The tip of a deer-antler pick remained in the crack where it'd broken off unguessibly far in the past.

  "And voices," Garric whispered back. He looped the sash over Liane's shoulder so that it wouldn't drag on the ground and trip one of them, then let go of it. She'd shifted the reed to her left hand, holding it at the balance.

  The words were more distinct than they ought to be. A trick of the echoes? Garric could make out syllables and sometimes whole snatches of the chant; enough to know he was listening to Words of Power, not the speech of human beings.

  The light came through a natural crack widened into an egg-shaped opening large enough for a human. Even Liane would have to hunch to enter, though. They crept close on either side and peered into a large natural cavern.

  The lamp must've been in a niche in the limestone wall, but it was out of sight from where Garric knelt. Countess Balila sat with the light over her shoulder, writing with quick, firm strokes on a tablet. As Garric watched, she flipped over one of the several waxed leaves and started on the next.

  "Ouer sechan libara," thundered a voice. It must be shockingly loud in the cavern because the flame of the unseen lamp shivered in time with the syllables, but Garric heard the word only as a faint, "Amounabreo."

  The bodiless voice stilled. Dipsas sat before a figure drawn in the center of the plug of black volcanic rock which formed the floor of the cavern. She chanted an invocation, her athame dipping and rising like a drinking bird. The wizard's voice seemed as loud as that which had spoken the response, but Garric couldn't make out the words.

  The little cherub was playing with his toes near the Countess; his wings of stiffened and gilded linen wobbled in the lamplight. He suddenly lost interest in his game and tugged at the hem of his mistress' outer tunic. She twitched it away from him, continuing to watch the wizard with the focus of a kestrel hovering above movement in the grass.

  Dipsas swayed and would've fallen if she hadn't slapped both hands down on the figure. The athame lay before her; lamplight gave its polished, carven surface the look of rippling blackness, unformed evil.

  "Chauboe!" said the voice with the power of a distant avalanche. The cherub threw himself on his belly and squirmed over the rock, his eyes shut and his mouth twisted into a squall of terror lost in the response.

  "Adeta mesou!" said the voice. The light dimmed as though the first gust of a storm had struck the lamp.

  Balila's great bird had been pacing on the other side of the cavern, visible to Garric except when it was at the end of its circuit. It stopped and backed against the rock, flaring its crest and wings. It raised its hooked beak toward the roof and shrieked, its black tongue quivering but the sound inaudible.

  The thundering response cut off. Echoes of the bird's cry and the child's terror rang about Garric and Liane.

  The lamplight slowly steadied. The wizard remained as she'd been, sagging onto her hands. The Countess let her stylus drop. The open leaves of her notebook swung lazily on the leather hinges.

  Garric took a deep breath. Closing his eyes, he whispered to Liane, "We'd better leave now. They'll have the lamp."

  "Yes," she said. "But I don't think Dipsas will be moving very quickly."

  "I don't know that I will either," Garric said as he rose to his feet. "Even though I was just listening, and that to the last part of it."

  He thought of Carus' loathing for wizards. That opinion wasn't justified in the case of Tenoctris—but for the most part, Garric was inclined to agree.

  * * *

  Ilna set down the bowl which she'd polished with a piece of wheat bread, getting the last of the stew of lentils and barley in chicken broth. Glancing to either side where Chalcus and Davus were finishing their meals, she chewed the bread. So far as she was concerned, it was even t
astier than the meat stew.

  Ilna had kept poultry at home in Barca's Hamlet, pigeons and occasionally chickens, and Cashel not infrequently knocked over a squirrel or rabbit with a rock. Meat was a luxury, but not an unthinkable one.

  Nobody in the borough raised wheat, though, so not even the wealthiest of her neighbors had bread like this unless they travelled. Ilna disliked most of the things she'd found in the world beyond Barca's Hamlet, but wheat bread was an exception.

  She grinned at herself: she'd disliked most of the things she'd grown up with also. Occasionally she tried to convince herself that perhaps she was wrong about the world or at least needlessly uncharitable. She could never sustain the notion for long, though.

  "Well, you've eaten now," Lord Ramelus said, standing across the table from her and glaring with his fists on his hips. "How much longer will it take you to finish the pattern?"

  "Not long," said Ilna calmly. Ramelus reminded her of the fable of the frog who tried to make himself bigger than the ox by puffing himself up—till he burst. "When my companions have eaten their fill—"

  "As indeed I have, your lordship," Chalcus said, rising to his feet with his usual ease. "And a fine meal it was, I must say."

  The three of them ate at a trestle table on the porch of the western side-building. Chalcus had chosen the spot. Behind them was a storage shed, closed and locked; most of the side-buildings was open sheds. While Ilna didn't imagine they'd been in any real danger of being attacked from behind, it obviously affected how comfortable Chalcus felt when he was among people who weren't his friends.

  "And I as well," said Davus, getting up also. The three fist-sized rocks that he'd been juggling before the meal was served were lined up on the table beside his empty bowl and beer mug. "Your lordship is extremely generous to wayfaring strangers. The Old King would've approved."

  Ramelus scowled. Seifert sniggered. The landowner turned in barely contained fury which the guard defused by twisting his grin into an expression of funereal sadness.

  Ilna had declared that Ramelus must provide a meal—with meat and wheat bread, though the demand for meat was more to irritate their host than because she needed it—before she gave the fabric its finishing touches. He'd obeyed—with extremely bad grace, but obeyed—because the partial pattern he'd seen over Ilna's shoulder had given him an inkling of how effective the finished design might be.