Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  The temple was less than forty feet across. An altar stood in front of a simple three-step base up to a porch supported by six unfluted pillars. Instead of a slotted screen in front of the sanctum, allowing those outside to see the God's statue, there was a two-valve wooden door.

  The painters turned to look at the commotion in the street. Together they dropped down the ropes to the temple porch instead of lowering the scaffold in normal fashion. One called a warning in language Sharina didn't recognize.

  "Hold where you are!" Ascor said. He and his men held close to the women—meaning they were moving no faster than Tenoctris could shuffle—but the troopers of the escort broke into a run.

  The temple door opened, allowing the workmen to dart inside. Another man looked out through the crack in the door. He had regular features but his skin was white. His hair an almost invisible blond, and the irises of his eyes were so pale they almost merged with his corneas.

  The temple door slammed.

  "By the Lady!" shouted the commander of the escort. "I've seen those devils before! That was one of the People, boys!"

  * * *

  "Master Cashel," Enfero whispered. He didn't point, but his eyes were on Mab as she and Herron discussed the food they'd carry. "She is the same one, isn't she? Mab, I mean?"

  Cashel followed the boy's line of sight. He frowned, because there didn't seem to be any doubt.

  "Sure," he said. "I mean, she doesn't ever look the same twice running, but the way she moves is always the same. And besides, there's her fingernails."

  They'd gathered on Ronn's highest terrace, going over their baggage. To the north were the hills, black even with the sun on them. There were citizens all around, more people maybe than had been in the Assembly Hall the night before. This whole crowd had come to see the Sons leaving, if you could really call it leaving when they were just going down to the cellars of the building they lived in.

  Granted it was a really big building.

  "Lots of women in Ronn paint their nails that way," Orly protested. The Sons carried real swords but they weren't wearing armor. Mab had said it'd just be in the way on this trip. "Most of them do, in fact."

  Orly and Stasslin had been standing close enough to overhear. From the way they'd glance at each other before Enfero spoke, the three of them had talked the question over between themselves.

  "Not like hers," Cashel said. Sometimes people played games with words, thinking they were making fun of him. Maybe that was happening here, because surely even city folk could see the difference between the enamel other women used and Mab's fingers shining like light itself.

  Right now Mab had gray hair and a slim, straight build—something like what Ilna might look like in thirty or forty years, Cashel guessed. When she pointed, her nails seemed to trail a path even through the bright sunlight.

  "Master Cashel?" Enfero said again. "We thought that maybe there were different women using the same name instead of one person with different looks. But you don't think that's what it is?"

  "No," Cashel said. "I don't."

  He cleared his throat and went on, "But if it was that way, I guess it'd be even better having that many more people on our side. Wizards, that is. We might want them."

  Orly burst into laughter. "You're a wonderful philosopher, Master Cashel," he said. "Always driving straight to the heart of the problem."

  Cashel wasn't sure whether Orly was mocking him, so he got out his pad of wool and began polishing his quarterstaff. It really didn't seem like mocking, but Cashel couldn't see what else it could be. He wasn't a scholar, that was sure; and he was pretty sure a philosopher was a scholar.

  Mab and Herron walked over. Athan and Manza, who'd been listening to their argument, followed in their wake. "I've convinced Master Herron that though he feels strong enough to carry a whole mountain of equipment now," Mab said, "this will very quickly change. You're better off with a knapsack of food and your swords. Even those will be heavy enough by the second day."

  "But how do we sleep, then?" Stasslin said in frowning surprise. "We're not going to find bedding on the way, are we?"

  "No, you're not," Mab said with a smile that reminded Cashel of his sister's expression when she was talking to a fool. "But it never gets very cold in the lower levels, quite the contrary in fact. I believe you'll find you can make do when you're tired enough. Which you will be."

  Cashel put the wool away. "How much food do you figure, ma'am?" he asked, paying attention for the first time to the pile of things Herron had been planning to take.

  He grinned too. There were cots in that pile, and more cookware than Ilna had in her whole kitchen in Barca's Hamlet. And there was heaven knows what all else.

  "Three days' supply," Mab said. "That should get us there and partway back if things go as I expect. I've prepared packs for all of you."

  She nodded toward another, smaller collection. The lined-up knapsacks were of some slick black fabric that Ilna'd like to see. Maybe he'd be able to take some back for her when all this was over. "Including you, Cashel," Mab said.

  Cashel patted the big leather wallet on his belt with a broad grin. He'd filled it with bread and cheese after the meal they'd just eaten.

  "Ma'am," he said, "I'm used to carrying my meals like this. Straps on my back might get in the way if, you know, I had to do something."

  He didn't much like the local cheese, even though he'd found it filling. It didn't have much spirit to it. Cashel had grown up on whey cheese because it was cheap. The cakes were flat and so hard that you had to moisten it to bite off a chunk. Most folks wouldn't have liked whey cheese, he supposed, but a mouthful now would've taken Cashel back to where life was simpler.

  His face'd sobered, but now he grinned again. The quarterstaff in his hand was a better memory for the purpose, he guessed. Life was always simple enough when he had a chance to use his quarterstaff.

  "Take your packs then, Sons of the Heroes," Mab said to the youths. She was smiling, but the expression was as sad as anything he'd seen on her face during their short acquaintance. "Take your packs, and may whatever Gods there are help you and help Ronn."

  Mab started toward the shaft that would take them to bedrock, as far as she'd said it was safe to descend that way. To get lower, they'd walk.

  The Sons shuffled to the knapsacks, hesitating to choose among things that Cashel was pretty sure were all the same. When they saw Mab well ahead of them, walking through the crowd that'd opened for her, the each snatched up a pack and carried it by the straps without waiting to put it on properly. Cashel followed behind. He glanced repeatedly over his shoulder though he didn't figure there was going to be any problem until anyway they'd gotten out of the shaft.

  The people of Ronn started to cheer: a few voices at first and then the whole huge crowd. They shrieked all sorts of things from, "Hurrah!" to "May the Gods bless and keep you!" It was easy to shout, of course, and it really didn't mean much; but the Sons' shoulders straightened and their strides grew quicker as they stepped onto the platform waiting to take them down.

  Cheering didn't mean much; but maybe it was the one thing the citizens of Ronn could do that would save these poor hopeful boys; and through them, the city. Cashel beamed like the sun overhead as he followed his companions on the first stage of their journey away from that sun; and perhaps back.

  * * *

  The wind was fitfully from the north. Ilna and her companions had smelled wood smoke for most of the morning as they tramped across the rolling plain, but they were nearly on the little community before Ilna realized that the smoke rose not from cookfires but from the crushed remains of the houses.

  Then she smelled death: recent, but it'd been a hot day and the slaughter was very considerable. The chest-high drystone wall about the whole community was slammed inward at the south end, overthrown with a violence that'd flung stones the size of a man's chest a double-pace from where they'd lain in the wall.

  There'd been four stone houses with thatched r
oofs, round-ended and longer than they were broad. The track of destruction which began at the outer wall continued through the houses, smashing them into total ruin. At the north end of the community the wall was opened again, this time outward. The creature had departed, leaving only death and wreckage behind.

  "I pray that the Gods are real," said Davus harshly. "So that they can build a Hell to hold the thing that now reigns as King but does not do a king's duty to the land!"

  Birds rose from their feast, mostly crows and vultures but including a few cranes whose long beaks would've found food others couldn't reach. Squawks of peevish anger replaced the muted caws and clucks Ilna'd heard as she approached. There'd been enough carrion for all in the village, so the scavengers hadn't needed to fight.

  Davus placed a stone in the pocket of his sash and prepared to sling it. Chalcus touched his arm. "Save it," he said. "We don't want to eat them, and we can't kill them all. It's better not to start."

  Davus shuddered but nodded agreement. They'd reached the hole in the wall, but none of them chose to enter.

  "It was bad luck," Davus said quietly. "It must've come in the last watch of the night. Everyone would've been asleep. There'd have been no warning."

  "What 'it?'" Ilna said. "What did this?"

  "A troll like the one we waked from the bluffs," Davus said. "Very possibly the same troll."

  He looked at the village a moment longer, then rubbed his eyes with both hands. "Trolls hate all life that isn't stone like them," he said. "They don't move very fast, as you saw, and they're stupid. The villagers could've led it away if they'd seen it coming, tricked it into following one of them who'd have hidden when he'd drawn it out of sight. It was just bad luck."

  Two houses had burned out completely when the thatch was crushed down onto remains of the hearth fires. The other two had not, but the troll's slashing stone arms had made a job of destroying them. Ilna remembered the way the creature had paused to smash to splinters the tree it'd chanced against as it staggered away from the cliff.

  Here the victims had been sheep and humans. The troll had held a man—she thought it had been a man—by the ankles and flailed him several times against the compound wall. Everything upwards from mid-chest was splashed over the stones or on the ground outside.

  Ilna thought of suggesting burying the remains, but there were scores like him in or around the other huts. They simply didn't have time.

  And anyway, it was just meat. That was the only way to think about what had happened here.

  Chalcus shrugged. "You two go on around and find a place to camp. Get a fire started."

  He nodded to the flattened hamlet, then added "I'll find us something to eat."

  "What is it that you mean to do?" Davus said. His voice was low, but it was no more calm than the growl of a dog about to lunge—and no more friendly.

  "Gently, friend," Chalcus said as if he was stroking a child. "There'll be stored grain that we can take with no harm to those who stored it, I think. No meat, not even what might've been cured beforetimes. Eh?"

  "Sorry," said Davus. "I'm on edge, and it makes me foolish. Sorry."

  Davus started off, skirting the wall to the left. A pine grew from between two exposed blocks of stone. The lower half of one slab was dark with seeping moisture.

  "Chalcus?" Ilna said. "We can do without the food, you know."

  "Aye, love, I know that," the sailor said. He gave her a lopsided smile and nodded to the ruins. The birds were settling again, having decided the humans weren't enough of a threat to interfere with a feast like the present one. "I don't mind. I've seen worse, you know."

  His mobile, laughing face was briefly that of a man dead for a month. "I've done worse, truth to tell; though those days are behind me now. Or so I hope."

  He patted her hip gently. "Go help Davus with the fire, and I'll be along in a little bit with the makings of ash cake, as we have no pot for porridge."

  Ilna touched Chalcus on the cheek, then rejoined Davus who waited a little way along. Meeting Davus' still, observant eyes she blurted, "He's a good man." She knew she sounded defensive, and she hated the weakness that had driven her to speak.

  "Yes," said Davus, seeming to transfer his attention to the three chips of quartz he was juggling. "And if the truth were known, it might be that a wrathful man like myself has more on his conscience than Master Chalcus does—"

  He met Ilna's eyes.

  "—black though the sins of his former life may have been."

  He understands, Ilna thought. And because Davus understood, it was just possible that what he said was literally true; as it might have been for Ilna herself—black though the sins of Chalcus' former life undoubtedly were.

  "What's there to be done about a creature that did this?" Ilna said, nodding toward the ruin as they passed its northern edge. "What can be done to a troll?"

  "By ordinary folk?" Davus said, quirking a smile. "By you or me? Little enough, I fear. Run away, for it's not quick. Lure it off and hide, as the folk here might've done; for trolls aren't bright either."

  The pine's branches for a man's height up the trunk were dead. Davus eyed them, then gripped one at mid-point and snapped it cleanly. He squatted and with a frost-split hammerstone began pounding the wood to kindling.

  "But the Old King...," Davus continued as Ilna examined the spring. There was a basin under the seepage, a quite adequate one as soon as she cleaned out the leaf litter. "He had a jewel over his forehead. It gave him power over stone, control of all sorts: power to direct and to loose and to bind."

  He looked up and added, "The Old King would've changed the troll back to a boulder. If it hadn't gotten far from the cliffs—and trolls generally didn't get far in his day—he'd have sent it back to those cliffs first. Letting it be with its kind, you see, so long as it couldn't harm men."

  "What happened to the jewel?" Ilna said. The slaughter that'd happened here, massacre of the village, must've bothered her more than she cared to realize. When she heard her words, she knew the answer and spoke it: "The New King has it. The creature, Nergura said it was."

  Davus struck sparks expertly into his pile of tinder, using a flint and a thumb-sized crystal of fool's gold that he must've found unnoticed along the way. He smiled in satisfaction at the smoke twisting from his fireset, then looked at Ilna and said, "Yes, the creature. In a manner of speaking I suppose it's only fair. The jewel is the creature's own egg, you see."

  "Egg?" Ilna repeated sharply. "Then it's going to hatch into more of the things?"

  Davus bent over, feeding larger fragments of the branch to the wood fibers that he'd used for tinder. He chuckled. "No," he said, "not that one, any more than the hen's egg you boil for dinner is going to start clucking. The power is there regardless, but trying to use it with the egg still alive is—"

  The chuckle returned, deeper and grim as a death-knell.

  "—a good way to guarantee that you'll not live to the end of the spell yourself. Or at least that was the story that people told in my day."

  Ilna looked over her shoulder. Chalcus was leaving the hamlet with a jaunty step and a basket balanced on his left shoulder.

  "Ah, we'll feast like lords and ladies tonight, my friends!" the sailor called when he found Ilna's eyes on him. "Wheat and beans and honey, a whole comb, wrapped in a palm frond and fit for the greatest king in all this fine world, I'm sure!"

  "Perhaps the Old King spared the mother because he'd slain her child, the egg," Davus said softly as he built up the fire. "That's the sort of thing a man might do but a king should not, allowing sentiment to affect his rule. Who knows what's in a man's heart?"

  "Who indeed," Ilna said. "He was a sentimentalist, your Old King?"

  "Him?" Davus scoffed. "Not him! He was a choleric fellow with a quick tongue and a hard hand. But justice mattered to him, and perhaps his sense of what was just led him into the error of sparing an enemy."

  "If that's what happened," said Ilna, "then his choice had a bad resul
t; but not so bad, I think, as the result of deciding to ignore justice."

  She rose to her feet smiling—broadly for her—and took the basket of scavenged foodstuffs from Chalcus. She had to believe in justice, because without a sense of justice there was no difference between the Ilna os-Kenset of today and the woman who'd come back from Hell, bringing that Hell along with her.

  If that was the case, then Ilna and all the world besides were better off dead.

  * * *

  Garric, bending over the pile of clean linens folded on the handbarrow, followed Liane along the corridor. Though it was still an hour short of dawn, most of the hall lamps had burned to glows.

  Garric was surprised to see that lamp above the door to his own suite was as dim as the others. The Blood Eagles were usually much more punctilious about their duties—and lighting the faces of those approaching Prince Garric's room was very much a part of their duties.

  "This isn't right," said Carus, quizzical and mildly irritated at a failure of discipline. Then, in a voice without any emotion at all, he said, "It's an ambush, but don't run, on your life don't run, they've got javelins and you've only got a dagger."

  But my sword's in the anteroom of the suite, Garric thought. Using the linens for cover as he continued to pace forward, he slid the dagger out from under his tunic and held it flat beneath the left pole of the barrow. Perhaps they'll wait for us to enter instead of attacking in the corridor where they might be interrupted.

  The eight guards were twenty feet away and, as Carus noted, all but the under-captain commanding the squad had javelins. If Garric and Liane turned to run, they'd be spitted like chickens for roasting before they got three steps toward safety at the turn of the hallway.

  "When you get the door unlatched," Garric muttered, hoping that Liane could make out his words, "get in and get clear."

  "All right," Liane whispered back. Her pace, a sullen shuffle, didn't change.

  The watch would've changed at midnight, so the features beneath the black helmets properly weren't those of the Blood Eagles on duty when he and Liane went out. Garric, watching as best he could with his face bent down, didn't recognize any of them.