Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  Cashel grabbed Enfero by the back of the collar, lifting him and shoving him forward. "Get on!" he said. "Keep walking! It's not time for us to die yet!"

  At another time the words would've bothered Cashel to hear from anybody's mouth, let alone his own. Now it was the only truth in the world: they had to go on till they died and the world died and the sun grew cold. Cashel didn't know why that was, but he generally couldn't answer questions starting with "Why?" He just did the thing that'd been set him.

  Stasslin hacked at the wall beside him. His sword made a nasty clang.

  "It won't spark!" Stasslin cried. "It won't spark!"

  Nor did it, maybe because of the slime that covered the stone. Stasslin struck three times more; then his sword broke just above the guard. The blade flew off, and Stasslin flung his hilt after it.

  Enfero was marching forward again. He'd lost his sword too, either back where he'd knelt or maybe earlier that that. That didn't matter: the swords weren't good for anything. Nothing was, not even Cashel's quarterstaff.

  Furious at the hopelessness of it all, Cashel whirled his staff before him. It moved sluggishly, like he was trying to spin it underwater. Something ripped sizzlingly; a brilliant azure flash lit the crevice. Momentarily, just for a heartbeat, the feeling of despair lifted.

  Cashel spun the staff again. This time it moved the way it usually did, sliding through the air in an arc as pointless as the one the sun made every day: rising and setting, looking down on lands which slowly crumbled; sinking into a sea of cold gray slime that rose till the sun itself drowned in darkness.

  The Sons stopped where they were, whining like a litter of puppies. Cashel set his staff crossways and shouted, "Go on!"

  He shoved them forward. Altogether they weighed much more than he did, but that didn't matter in Cashel's current temper. It was like dragging a bullock—and he'd done that, more by determination than by main force, hauling against the rope and, every time the beast relaxed, jerking it a further hand's-breadth on.

  "Go on, you puppies!" Cashel said. "We've got to keep going till we die. Walk on!"

  The Sons gave before him, stumbling on again. They didn't have the will to resist. There was no will that could've resisted Cashel's now. He'd go on and go on driving them with him till they all died.

  They came out from the crevice between the down-tapering walls. They were now in a natural cave, a huge bubble in the rock. There were no crystal windows from here to the surface, not even those smeared over with algae. The glow shimmering from between Mab's hands was the only light in these depths, and that was as faint as the sky an hour before winter dawn.

  The walls had the layering of natural rock; stalactites pointed the distant roof. Across the great opening was a bronze door, impressive but smaller than those of some temples Cashel had by now seen in the waking world.

  "Come!" said Mab, her voice shrill. She hobbled toward the doorway, taking full steps with her right leg but only half steps with her left. At some time during the journey she'd become an ancient harridan, toothless and hunching under the weight of years.

  What was the truth of her? Cashel wondered, but the answer didn't matter because nothing mattered in a world that was merely a prelude to the end.

  The Sons hesitated, their heads bent. "Get moving, you!" Cashel said. "Soon we can die, but not yet!" The boys obeyed because they didn't have the strength to do anything else.

  Mab reached the bronze door. Close up it was larger than Cashel'd thought from across the cave. The metal was perfectly smooth except for the line down the center where the panels joined.

  She raised her hands. The light she'd projected to that moment vanished; the dark closed in, complete. Now we can die, Cashel thought in a great wave of relief.

  "Cashel, keep them off me," said a voice from the blackness. It must be Mab, but it sounded like a little girl. A frightened little girl.

  "There's nothing I can do," Cashel said, too bleak to be angry, but he turned his back to the door and gave his staff a trial spin. First he rotated it widdershins, but that wasn't right, didn't feel right. He reversed the spin, turning the shaft sunwise, a little quicker each time and with all the power of his thick wrists behind it.

  The touch of the hickory, smooth and familiar, reminded Cashel of times that things did matter. Things like the sun and the way clouds piled up before a storm; and love, his for Sharina and the heartstopping wonder of hers for Cashel or-Kenset. He didn't feel those things, but he viewed them in memory as if in a mirror of black glass.

  The quarterstaff spun. He brought it overhead, then shifted it before him again because that was what felt right. He couldn't see anything and there was nothing in the darkness to touch, but the spinning wood calmed him and the thrum of the staff as it sliced arcs from the air quieted the Sons' whimpers.

  Mab spoke in an undertone. Hissing wizardlight, red weaving with blue, glanced from the bronze and threw back the endless night for a few moments more.

  Cashel had his rhythm now. He kept the staff spinning, feeling the weight of what he couldn't see and knowing he was pressing back on it. He gasped with laughter. It was a fight after all, even though he didn't know what he was fighting. That didn't matter: a fight was a fight, and he'd win it or die.

  "Brimaio thiahiao...," Mab said. Cashel didn't look behind him, but he heard metal squeal on metal and the bronze valves begin to rumble open. "Chermari!"

  "Get in there, you Sons of Heroes!" Cashel said. The pressure was driving him backward and the quarterstaff turned in treacle, not air; but it turned. "Get in while I hold them!"

  There was a shuffle behind him. He kept the staff spinning though it felt as though he was turning millstones against all the force of the flume.

  "Cashel, now!" Mab cried. But he couldn't take another step back. They had him in their power, the things he'd been fighting. They hemmed him before and behind and there was no way—

  Brilliant bolts of wizardlight, blue and then red, flashed before him. The concussions threw him backward, face-up on a stone pavement. For a moment there was darkness again, but this time it was filled with the savage leering faces of white things that weren't men.

  Then the bronze doors slammed shut, and Cashel's mind surrendered him to sleep.

  * * *

  Garric looked at the reading room's painted ceiling. On it a gorgeous fresco showed the Shepherd in a wolf-skin cape standing against the lightning-shot storm clouds in one corner. He carried a crook to help him lift bogged animals, rather than the simple staff that shepherds used on Haft. The rest of the painting was of vineyards and merchant ships, shops and a procession of city officials: all under the Shepherd's shielding presence.

  "There's not a soldier in the whole picture," Carus observed from Garric's mind with a grin. "It must've been painted by a priest. Or a woman."

  That depends on the woman, Garric thought, glancing at Liane as she turned pages quickly. Liane never hesitated to deal with reality. The realities of today, when the powers on which the cosmos turned were rising to their thousand-year peak, certainly included soldiers.

  The stresses twisting the world affected ordinary people as well as wizards. Lust and greed and anger were never far beneath the surface of human interactions, but the membrane between those emotions and civilization was thinner now.

  "The painting must've been cleaned recently," Garric said to Attaper, standing at his side. "The paint's very bright, though I'd imagine it dates from hundreds of years ago."

  Attaper glanced up and grunted. He returned to glowering at the priests entering and leaving the room.

  Garric smiled faintly. The Blood Eagle commander wasn't an art lover, and he'd been understandably nervous ever since Garric announced he was crossing to Erdin with limited forces. This trip added another level to Attaper's concern. The Temple of the Shielding Shepherd was a mile from the palace.

  Attaper and Garric stood near the eastern reading table where Liane turned the pages of a vellum-bound codex. Across th
e room a squad of Blood Eagles guarded the trio of priest/librarians—two old men and an eager young woman with very short hair. They were fetching books Liane had asked for, either by name or more often by subject.

  Some of the works were in the reading room's ceiling-high wall cases, but for the most part the priests had to go through the gilt-arched doorway to other portions of the library past more Blood Eagles. When they returned they set their finds on the west table, from which soldiers carried them to Liane.

  The process seemed cumbersome and silly to Garric, but it didn't slow Liane's search and it made Attaper happy. Well, a little less unhappy. Besides, deep in a corner of Garric's mind was the recollection of the things in the semblance of men which'd attacked him and Liane in the night. Attaper was here to vouch for the identity of his troops, but who would know if a seeming librarian was human?

  Liane read swiftly, a page half-lifted to turn against the moment she finished the one she was scanning. "No," she muttered. "No, not that—"

  She flipped the page. Her face was set in stern lines. She didn't look so much angry as like a judge preparing to deliver deservedly harsh punishment. Even so it was disconcertingly different from any of Liane's normal expressions. Garric kept his eyes on other things instead of making himself uncomfortable by watching her.

  "—either!"

  Instead of glazed casements, the windows across the room's southern and northern walls were covered with vertical strips of bleached parchment sewn together at the edges. They lit the reading tables well but the illumination was softer than what glass would've provided.

  Liane closed the book she'd been using. Though frustrated, she treated the volume with the respect due its age instead of banging it shut. She opened a waiting scroll. The temple librarians had already untied its cords of gold-colored silk for her.

  Attaper cleared his throat. "Ah...," he said. "You're something of a scholar yourself, aren't you, your highness?"

  Meaning, "Why are you standing here with your thumb up your ass instead of helping her?" Garric translated mentally. Aloud he said, "Yes, I am, but in this kind of research two people would just get in each other's way. Much of it's a matter of remembering what one writer said and connecting it with an item from somewhere else. All the information has to be in the same place."

  He tapped his temple, smiling. "In the same mind, that is."

  The image of King Carus chuckled at him. "Don't expect me to help you there," he said. "The best use I found for a book in my own day was to prop up a wobbly table leg."

  "Ah!" Liane said. "Garric, read this."

  She thrust the scroll she'd been reading toward Garric in her left hand while with her right index finger she worked down through the stack of codexes which she'd reviewed earlier in the morning. When Garric was hesitated a moment, Liane waggled the scroll impatiently. He took it, freeing her hands to lift the top three books off her pile and retrieve the second from the bottom.

  Garric cleared his throat. Attaper was looking toward the door with the forced nonchalance of a man who was determined not to have seen or heard something that would otherwise be embarrassing.

  "It's from the annals of a temple or possibly a city," Garric said to Attaper, holding the document by both winding sticks. A full two columns were open between them. "It's headed Sixteen, that'd be Year Sixteen of someone's reign—"

  "Aguar the Fourth, Earl of Sandrakkan," Liane said as with forceful impatience she turned the pages of the book she'd chosen. "He acceded at about the time Carus became King of the Isles. And the document is the Chronicle of Sandrakkan compiled at Kremsa, sixty miles east of Erdin. I'm looking for something I found in the Chronicle compiled at Erdin during Aguar's reign."

  Garric waited a moment to make sure Liane wasn't going to interject something more. She continued to page through the codex in silence. Catching Attaper's eye, Garric read, "'In this year a great pirate host came from the Outer Sea and took Erdin. They dwelt in the city for eleven months, and in the twelfth month Earl Aguar attacked them from the Island, that'd be Volita, with a great....'"

  He paused, changing the angle of the document to the light. The ink was sepia and the parchment had yellowed over the centuries, making the contrast less than ideal. "'A great band of warriors,' I think this must be," Garric resumed, "'whom his advisor Dromillac had brought to him with his, that is, its leader, the band's leader, a man of great power. The band of warriors, the army, split the earth and cast the pirates into the Underworld.'"

  "The priest who wrote the Kremsa Chronicle...," Liane said, relaxed again now that she'd found the place she was looking for and was marking it with her finger. "Was afraid to use the word 'wizard'. 'A man of great power,' is his code for wizard, I believe. Now here's a passage from the Erdin Chronicle, 'And Earl Afrase died and his son Aguar succeeded. Aguar was a great warrior but an unlucky ruler, and he was too beholden to the wizard Dromillac who came to him out of Dalopo—or some said out of the Underworld, for they thought him a demon.'"

  "What does that book say about the pirates, milady?" Attaper said, frowning as he considered what he'd just heard.

  "Nothing, because there's a five year gap starting in the fifteenth year of Aguar's reign and continuing through the second year of his successor Afrase the Third," said Liane with a smile of triumph. "Which is exactly what you'd expect if the Kremsa account is true, because the priests of the Erdin temple would've had to flee if pirates captured the city. If they even survived."

  "Liane," Garric said, frowning at the passage he'd just read to Attaper. "I understood this as 'large band of warriors,' but what it actually says is 'a large warrior'. If Dromillac was a wizard, is it possible that he brought a giant to help Aguar? And what I read as 'the leader of the band' could be another wizard, a wizard who controlled a giant."

  "Yes," Liane said, nodding three times quickly to emphasize her agreement. "That'd explain why Tenoctris said Volita is a focus of power still, even after a thousand years. But Garric—I read the passage the same way you did at first, 'cast the pirates into the Underworld,' as meaning 'killed them.' But what if... Garric, Dromillac was a wizard and probably so was the ally he brought to Volita to help him. What if they cast the pirates under ground, literally? Under where the palace now is built."

  "And they're coming back up," Garric said, speaking the words to see how they sounded. "The pirates are coming back from underground after a thousand years. I don't see how men could live... but there would've been a wizard with the pirates too, wouldn't there? Even so, how could they live underground?"

  The two male librarians came through the cordon of guards carrying a roll of oxhide which was almost too heavy for them. The female librarian following saw Garric's frown of puzzlement. She said, "It's a map of Sandrakkan, your highness. It was copied from a marble original that was destroyed in the palace at the end of the Old Kingdom."

  Attaper glared at the priests, then looked from Liane to Garric and said, "Your highness, were these pirates like the People who attacked Ornifal from the sea in Stronghand's time? Because those were led by a wizard and they weren't, well, ordinary men."

  He cleared his throat and added, "Of course, I don't mean they could live in caves underground. But nobody was sure where they really came from, because there isn't any island where they said it was."

  "It's...," Garric said. He meant to go on, "... a thousand years so there can't be a connection," and of course it was a thousand years. But that was true whether you connected the pirates who attacked Sandrakkan here in the West at the end of the Old Kingdom with the People who'd fallen on Ornifal in the past generation, or if you were suggesting that those pirates might still be alive in the caverns beneath Erdin.

  Which he and Liane had both thought of as soon as they read the passages in the Chronicles. And both might be true.

  "I don't know, milord," Garric said instead. "It's at least possible. As possible as anything else I can come up with now."

  "Garric," said Liane. She pause
d and dabbed her tongue to her lips, less to wet them than to give herself time to order her words. "If it required a wizard to defeat the pirates the first time... a pair of wizards, if we understand the Chronicles correctly. Should you recall Tenoctris from Ornifal, do you think?"

  Garric looked at her as he thought. Then he grinned. There were side-effects that he couldn't possibly guess no matter which choice or what choice he made. Liane was trying to follow every thread back to what would be the right answer, the perfect answer. She had a splendid mind, but no human being was capable of carrying out the task she'd set herself. There wasn't a perfect answer, period.

  "No, love," he said. "I shouldn't."

  Attaper's eyes flicked between them as if he were watching a handball match, while the ancient king in Garric's mind grinned. "We had good reason to send Tenoctris with Lord Waldron," Garric continued. "Nothing we've learned or guessed here changes that. While I'd very much like to have Tenoctris' advice right now, she'd be the first to say that summoning warrior giants is beyond her. If they're what's required, I'm afraid we'll have to find them on our own."

  There was a jangle in the hallway; the guards stiffened. Garric found his hand going to his sword pommel by reflex.

  He and Carus grinned together. The reflex was that of the king, but there'd been times Garric had found it the difference between life and death.

  "Between your death and somebody else's, I'd put it," Carus said, laughing with his usual good humor. "And I'll always pick somebody else for the job of dying, having done it once myself."

  The noise was one of the soldiers who'd been stationed outside the temple double-timing down the hall, his equipment and studded apron clattering. Priests peering in at the visiting prince jumped out of the way. The Blood Eagle's shield banged clear one who didn't jump fast enough.

  Attaper placed himself slightly forward of Garric. "What's the trouble, Muns?" he said, louder than a normal speaking voice.

  "Sir, there's people gathering down the streets outside," Muns said, halting in the archway with the troops on guard there instead of coming through. "It's not a mob yet, not exactly, but I think we'd best get back to the palace."