Master of the Cauldron loti-6

by David Drake

  "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 roofs, 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 agood 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 andhoney, 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 result; 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 yourlifedon'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.

  "They're none of them men I've ever seen before. The uniforms are right, but they're not Blood Eagles," Carus said, seeing through Garric's eyes. That put the seal on what Garric had known in his heart-in the pit of his stomach-already.

  The guards were all watching him. That wasn't right: two men should've been looking the other way down the corridor in case the 'servants' were a deliberate distraction.

  Garric had expected to be recognized on his return tonight-well, this morning-despite the proper pass stamped with the wax bulla of his personal secretary, Liane bos-Benliman. Being identified now wouldn't have mattered much. Attaper would probably hear about it and complain in forceful terms about what Garric had done, but he couldn't stop what'd already happened. Garrichadn't expected the guards to be waiting for him, though. But of course these weren't guards.

  Liane held out the pass, a palm-sized potsherd with the information brushed in ink on the inner side. She bent her head away with the shy propriety of a modest girl meeting a group of men.

  The man wearing the white horsehair crest of an officer grunted, "Go on," He didn't touch the pass or demand that Liane and Garric look him in the eye.

  Garric caught the scent of decay. It was very faint, but he was sure of it.

  "Dead men," Carus said, his image tense and grinning. "Cattle and horses smell different, not so bad; but dead mules stink even worse."

  Liane reached for the latch lever calmly, then snatched it down and leaped inside. Laundry spilled from the handbarrow as Garric followed her, dropping the handles so that his dagger was free.

  He tried to slam the door shut behind him but a heavy body hit it from the other side before the latch clicked. An arm pushed through the gap, swinging a sword blindly.

  Garric slashed through the elbow tendons. The forearm sagged at the joint, then dropped to the floor. Th
e muscles were rotten tatters hanging from the bones, oozing putrescent fluid.

  Garric's sword dangled in its scabbard from the back of the chair in which a servant was intended to sit in case the prince needed something during the night. As Garric reached across his body to draw the longer weapon, the weight of several men crashed into the doorpanel. They threw him backwards, off-balance with the tip of the blade still caught in the sheath. Three black-armored guards shoved in, one slightly in front. His javelin was raised to thrust through Garric's chest.

  Liane hurled the bedroom lamp into the guard's face. Oil splashed as the three-headed silver dragon bounced away. The one lighted wick didn't ignite the spilled fuel, but it blinded the guard for the instant Garric needed to stab up through his throat.

  Garric's dagger-point jammed in the guard's spine at the base of the skull. He let go of the hilt and grabbed the chair with his left hand, then skipped backward into the doorway between the anteroom and the main part of the suite. He had the sword clear now.

  The guard with the dagger in his throat fell forward. The appearance of normal flesh sloughed away, leaving a corpse so decayed that both arms separated from the shoulderblades when the torso hit the floor.

  Two more guards came on, their spears raised over their shoulders. The remainder of the detachment bunched behind them. The one on the left thrust. Garric caught the javelin point on the chair seat. He twisted chair and spear to the right as he lunged low, stabbing the other guard beneath the cuirass.

  His sword grated into the hip joint. On a human enemy-and the guardsweren't human now, whatever they'd been in life-Garric's thrust would've severed the great artery in the thigh. He jerked his point free in a gush of decay, not blood, but the effect seemed to be the same: the guard's body rotated as his leg collapsed. It was a rotted corpse by the time it hit the floor.