Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  The trireme's mast was stepped, though the spar and sail had been left on shore. The lookout at the masthead shouted down, "Master Darrin! All the slips are full and there's ships tied to the ones already moored. We'll have to go upriver!"

  The sailing master stepped onto the pivot of the steering oar, gripping the railing with his left hand. "Hanging on like that looks very dangerous," Tenoctris said in a tone of mild disapproval. "Though I suppose he knows what he's doing."

  Sharina opened her mouth to reply. The ridiculousness of the statement—here, from Tenoctris to her—struck her. She giggled. Tenoctris looked at her in surprise, then started to chuckle also.

  Sharina's giggle became laughter that was barely on the right side of hysteria. She leaned over the railing to take the pressure off her chest.

  "No, we'll berth alongside the Sword of Ornifal here in the harbor," the sailing master decided aloud. He didn't seem to be speaking to anybody in particular, but he spoke loudly enough that everybody on deck from the mast sternward could hear. "The passengers can cross the other ships to the quay. If we go up the river, the Shepherd knows what we'll find."

  Turning to the helmsman he added, "Two points to starboard, Henga. Master Estin, prepare to back water."

  Pont cocked an eye at the sailing master. "That all right with you and your friend, Princess?" he asked.

  "I won't be able to carry Tenoctris from ship to ship by myself," Sharina said. "But he's probably right—the river will be choked. Warships are too long to turn in the channel, and...."

  "Oh, that's no problem, Princess," Prester said. He turned to survey the soldiers nearest to him on deck. "Mallus and Jodea, you're carrying the old lady here, got it? Unter and Borcas, you two take their spears and be ready to grab if something goes wrong. You got that?"

  A soldier blinked. His fluffy blond moustache flared into sideburns and disappeared under his helmet. "How far do we carry her, Marshal?" he asked doubtfully.

  "Until I bloody tell you to bloody put her down, you bloody fool!" Prester replied like a thunderclap.

  "Back 'em, back 'em!" the sailing master shouted, still clinging to the oar block. "Four, three, two, one—ship oars! Ship oars, or you'll pay for the broken shafts, I swear it!"

  The trireme wobbled as it slowed, pummeled by the wake of its forward passage and the stroke of its reversed oars rebounding from the vessel it slid toward. That one, the outermost of three triremes already moored, held several score civilians but none of the regular crew. A few refugees seemed to be trying to get the vessel under way, but the others were simply huddling on deck. This was as far as they'd been able to run from the destruction occurring in their city.

  The ships scrunched together, rocking violently. The passengers hindered the deck crew, but there were hawsers across to the inner vessel before they drifted apart again. Soldiers had started leaping over before the ships were lashed together firmly.

  "Make way for the Princess and the old lady!" Prester bellowed. He glared at the men he'd detailed to carry Tenoctris and added in a scarcely quieter voice, "Mallus and Jodea, hop to it!"

  The troops crashed and slid their way across the ships till they'd reached the stone quay. A couple of them managed to fall into the water, but they were able to rescue themselves because cut rigging already hung from the vessels' sides. Troops must've fallen previously, and soldiers had no compunction about destroying a ship—or most anything else—to save a buddy's life.

  The men holding Tenoctris negotiated the route without difficulty; they must've been either sailors or mountaineers at an earlier point in their lives. It struck Sharina that Prester and Pont might be simple men in many respects, but their knowledge of troops and the things required to keep troops alive was of a very sophisticated order.

  The trireme had carried at least two hundred soldiers besides the oarsmen. No wonder it'd ridden low in the water! The men first across to the quay were starting up the boulevard which led to the harbor.

  "Halt and form ranks of twelve, you miserable disgraces!" Pont cried, moving in a rolling trot to the front of his men. "Are you the Prince's Royal Army, or are you a herd of bloody cats, eh?"

  Men crunched and clattered into place. Though they must be a mixture of several or many different units, they fell into formation as easily as grain fills a sack. The only problem seemed to be the length of the front rank, and Pont quickly trimmed that back to the twelve he'd demanded.

  "Do we fall in, Marshal?" one of the soldiers carrying Tenoctris asked plaintively.

  "You bloody well do not," Prester snarled, his eye restraining as well the pair of soldiers holding the bearers' javelins. "You stay back with me and the Princess, you got it?"

  All four men nodded. Prester's tone was so commanding that Sharina, half-numbed by all that had happened, almost nodded also.

  "Forward...," Pont called from the left front of the formation. "March! Hup! Hup! Hup!"

  Hobnails on stone, the studded aprons of the soldiers, and pieces of their equipment jouncing together, combined deafeningly. It sounded like wagons full of scrap metal driving over the edge of a quarry.

  "Double...," Pont called. "Time!"

  Prester glanced at Sharina as they kept pace with the rear of the formation—him trotting, her in what was more a leggy walk than running. "This all right with you, Princess?" he asked.

  "Yes, of course," said Sharina. "But can troopers Mallus and Jodea keep up?"

  "They can if they know what's good for them," Prester said with baleful significance. "We don't have packs, you see. And it's just up to the palace the messenger said where we meet his princeship."

  The air was chilly. Fires were burning at half a dozen places in the city, adding their smoke to the unnatural overcast, but in addition the atmosphere had the cutting, choking stench of sulfur.

  The ground continued to jump the way a dead frog does, a spastic trembling unlike the two real earthquakes Sharina had experienced. Many buildings had collapsed. Sometimes the lower stories of brick and stone remained, but the lath and plaster construction above them had shaken into the street. A few corpses lay on the pavement, but the people who could flee were already gone.

  Wizardlight continued to tear the overcast. The bolts were searingly bright, but they didn't leave afterimages on Sharina's eyeballs the way direct sunlight would've done.

  The boulevard bent to the right between a pair of government office buildings, still standing while lesser structures had fallen. Men were fighting monsters at the head of the street, but the Earl's palace had vanished into a cauldron of black vapors and grubs trying to be men.

  Garric and Liane were at the left end of the line where a street leading toward the river joined. Fallen buildings half-choked the cross-street, but troops were using the rubble as artificial hills to defend against the creatures attacking.

  The battle was ending as Sharina and the reinforcements double-timed up. The monsters didn't retreat: they died, throwing themselves forward like rabid dogs and sometimes drawing blood before they were butchered.

  "Detachment...," Pont said as his troops neared the present defenders. He paused for three more crashing double-paces, then cried, "Halt!"

  "Bring Tenoctris!" Sharina said as she ran to her brother.

  Garric turned slowly but didn't seem to recognize her. He was breathing through his mouth, and his eyes were focused in another time. His sword was so bloody that only in streaks and patches could Sharina see that the blade was patterned in gray waves.

  Liane began moving down the line of soldiers, offering them drinks from a helmet filled with water. She lifted the improvised bucket to each man's lips; for the most part they were too exhausted to raise it themselves.

  "Garric, you're in danger!" Sharina said. His arms hung at his sides, weighed down by his equipment. His shield'd been hacked to half its original dimensions. What was left of its leather facing held together the wooden core.

  "I'd noticed," Garric said. He started to laugh, but the flash o
f humor turned into a cough. He went down on one knee.

  "A wizard on Ornifal planned something against you," Sharina said. Mallus and Jodea set Tenoctris beside her, then stood beaming as they waited for further orders. The stench of inhuman corpses was nauseating, even beyond the other reeks.

  Tenoctris seated herself in the littered roadway and opened the satchel she'd carried in her lap from Valles. "Now that I'm here, I hope I can learn just what the danger is. I'm afraid I couldn't tell when I was in Valles,"she said. She started drawing a figure by pouring powdered sulfur from a flask.

  "Whatever it is," Garric said wearily, "it'll have to wait its turn."

  He looked at the reinforcements and suddenly smiled. He lurched upright again. "Pont, you're a warrant officer, now?" he said.

  "Yes, Prince," Prester said. "Me and Pont are camp marshals. Ah—this is pretty much the tailings from Volita, I'm afraid. Where do you want us?"

  Garric looked over his shoulder. A mass of white creatures with weapons as distorted as their bodies rose from the cauldron. Garric's face lost the moment's happiness Sharina had seen there.

  "It's like the surf hitting a cliff," Garric whispered. "Not all at once, but again and again. Until it stops or the cliff goes down, and I don't guess this surf is going to stop."

  "There's troops coming up from the river too, your princeship," Pont said. "Dunno how many, but some."

  As Pont spoke, he nodded toward the handful of soldiers coming up the street from the left. All were line infantry. Lord Attaper was on the other side of this boulevard and a few more guards remained in the line, but the pavement back to the cauldron had many more bodies in black armor.

  "Marshal Pont," Garric said, drawing himself straight. "Leave ten men here with me. Take the rest widdershins around the perimeter, leaving detachments where in your judgment they're most needed."

  He drew a shuddering breath, no longer Sharina's brother but a tortured soul whose determination burned through the wasted flesh. "Which is everywhere, as I well know, but do your best. Do your best, all of you."

  "Aye aye, sir," Pont said, clashing down his right foot and turning on his heel. He tapped the man who'd been next to him with his spear-butt and said, "Rastin, you're sticking with me. Rest of you beggars in the front rank, you stay here with the Prince."

  Prester eyed the men falling out of the detachment. He said, "And don't let me hear you embarrassed me or I'll come back and piss on your worthless corpses, you hear?"

  "From the left by ranks...," said Pont, who'd looked at the debris-choked street they'd be following as they went off to the right. "Form column of fours! Detachment, march!"

  Liane jogged toward the courtyard of a mews just down the street, carrying the helmet which was now empty. She wasn't fleeing: Sharina could see a well-curb in the court yard of the mews.

  The creatures from the cauldron were within twenty double-paces of the human line. They didn't approach any faster than a man could walk, but they gave the impression of disgusting unity. They resembled less a formation of soldiers than the blotches on a slug's slimy body.

  "You want these boys, Princess?" Prester asked in a low tone as the detachment marched off under Pont. He nodded to the four men who'd accompanied Tenoctris, still standing close by. "They're not half bad, if I do say myself who trained 'em."

  Sharina shivered. Garric was spreading the reinforcements along the thin existing line. Yes, she did want Mallus and the others by her very much, but it wasn't her decision to make.

  "No," she said. "Thank you for your help, Marshal Prester, but you have your duties to carry out. And may the Lady guard you!"

  Prester and the four troopers followed their fellows at a thudding run. Sharina grimaced, then glanced down at Tenoctris. The wizard was chanting words of power softly over the six-pointed star she'd drawn in yellow sulfur. She's too close to the fighting here!

  Sharina drew the Pewle knife which Lires had handed her on Ornifal. They could use Lires and his fellow guards here. They could use all Waldron's five regiments, as a matter of fact, though it probably wouldn't make any difference in the long run....

  The battle of wizards, bolts of light against jets of blackness, continued. The sky was becoming more open, but though sunlight seemed to hurt the white creatures it didn't keep them from coming on.

  There was a windrow of bodies where the most recent fighting had occurred, most of them monsters but with a leavening of men. Garric had pulled his remaining troops slightly back to keep his enemies from leaping straight down on them from the pile. This next wave crawled up the corpses of their fellows, then slithered toward the humans with the mindless determination of leeches scenting blood.

  A blue thread lifted from the center of Tenoctris' pattern. She continued to chant. The line of light rose arm's length from the ground, then twisted to the left and continued to grow longer.

  The creatures met the line of soldiers. Garric stabbed, then struck overhand. His blows were quick as a snake's tongue; it was hard to believe that moments ago he'd seemed so weary.

  A thing with a bronze mace swung at Garric from the side. He caught the blow on his shield but went down on one knee. A soldier coming from the river threw his javelin, skewering the fat, multi-legged body of the creature with the mace. It curled in on itself like a broiled spider; Garric regained his feet.

  Most of the reinforcements from the river joined the fighting as the monsters forced the line of defenders back. One of them strode stolidly toward Garric. He didn't have a javelin, but he'd drawn his sword. The thread of wizardlight from Tenoctris' hexagram extended till it touched the center of the soldier's breastplate and followed his progress.

  Sharina looked sharply. The man was Memet, who'd brought her news of Cashel's disappearance. Or at least he wore Memet's face, as the creature forming in Hani's tank on the island had done.

  "Garric!" she shouted. "Watch—"

  A pair of monsters with three legs and three heads between them closed with Garric. He knocked one back with his shield as his blade blocked the other's axe. Memet raised his sword.

  Sharina grabbed Memet's wrist with her left hand and stabbed the Pewle knife into the pit of the man's stomach. The keen steel point belled on the bronze cuirass, punching through to the depth of hand's-breadth.

  Memet struck. Sharina's weight on his sword wrist couldn't prevent the blow but she slowed it. Garric was dodging back after slashing through one throat of the creature attacking from his right. Memet's swordhilt rang on his helmet instead of the blade cutting his spine as it was intended to do.

  The false soldier shook Sharina loose and raised his sword for another stroke. She fell back, dragging her knife from the wound. A gout of black decay squirted through the cuirass as the blade came free. The semblance of life washed from Memet's face, leaving behind a skull half-covered with rotten flesh. Memet had said his father'd died on Ornifal a few years previous....

  Sharina got back to her feet. The latest attack was over, though new regiments of monsters were rising from the cauldron.

  She looked around. Tenoctris swayed, apparently bewildered by the fact her spell had ended unexpectedly.

  Sharina squatted and hugged the old woman, careful not to touch her with the Pewle knife. "It's all right, Tenoctris," she said. "You've ended the danger."

  The ground shook violently. Sharina looked seaward. Something terrible was happening across the strait on Volita.

  * * *

  Davus stood on a wisp of crystal which stuck out from the Citadel's crown. His right foot was in front of his left because the slender beam wasn't wide enough for them side by side. The wind's whimsy snapped his tunic to and fro.

  Ilna, on the crown also but well back from the edge, watched without emotion. Davus had known what he was doing throughout their past acquaintance, so she supposed he still did now that he was King again. And if Davus fell, well, he was an adult. She had enough difficulty living her own life to want to get into the business of deciding what ot
her people should so.

  "Ilna, what if he falls?" Merota said. She didn't whine, but she was holding Ilna's right hand and Chalcus' left tight as oysters grip the rocks.

  Chalcus chuckled with his usual cheerful ease. "Well, then, my dear girl," he said, "the three of us will have to find our own way back to our friends. Which no doubt we'll do, though I'll admit at the moment I haven't decided how."

  He glanced at Ilna over the child's head. "Eh, love of my life?" he added.

  Ilna sniffed. "I doubt most things, as you well know," she said. She felt her tight, disapproving lips loosen into a smile. "But I don't doubt that the three of us would try to find passage home, until we succeeded or we... couldn't try any more."

  Davus turned with a laugh of pure joy. He walked toward the three outlanders, as sprightly as a dancer at the Harvest Fest. "Oh, my friends," he said, "I can't tell you how good it feels to be back in my land at last."

  "You've been back, I'd have judged," Chalcus said, "for the week and more that it's taken us to walk from there—"

  He pointed to the south, where the cliffs of their arrival were a purple-brown line on the horizon.

  "—to here." His foot tapped the crystal, a sheet as smooth and broad as an iced-over pond. "Not so?"

  "Indeed, not so," said Davus. His smile was good-natured but as hard and certain as Ilna's own when she told people truths that didn't fit their understandings. "I was in this land, but it wasn't mine until Mistress Ilna made it mine. A deed I couldn't have accomplished myself, and one which puts me in her debt for so long as I live. A good long while, I would expect that to be."

  He threw his head back and laughed again, a man satisfied with the world and his place in it. The jewel hovered just above his scalp, softly scintillant despite the rainbow blaze from the mass of crystal on which he stood.

  "Sir?" said Merota. "I'd really like to go home now."

  "Yes," said Ilna, more tersely than she'd really intended. She understood Davus being pleased to recover the throne he'd been ousted from a thousand years before, but they too had been gone from their world longer than she cared to be. "I don't consider you to be in my debt, Master Davus; but as a matter of courtesy, I'd appreciate you sending us home as you said you would."