Master of the Cauldron loti-6

by David Drake

  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 bloodycats, 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 donot," 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 of 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, "Anddon'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 chanti
ng 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 other 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 wouldtry 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."

  "Aye," said Davus. "You'll be in time, I promise you. But we can go now, if you like."

  "In time for what, my friend?" said Chalcus, his fingers playing almost forgetfully with the hilt of his sword.

  "In time to watch, is all, my friend," Davus said. "But I'll try to give you a proper show. It's my second trip to your world, you'll recall, and the first was memorable right up to the end."

  Instead of continuing, Davus paused to rub his bare feet on the ground in obvious pleasure. Ilna turned her head, looking out over the land she hoped she was about to leave. It was much the same in all directions; some portions greener than others, some hilly. She could see the far shore of the body of water lapping the east of the Citadel, but it continued northward out of sight even from this high vantage.

  There was nothing improper in what Davus was doing, but Ilna wasn't comfortable watching somebody else so wrapped in emotion. Ilna smiled faintly. She supposed being uncomfortable with emotion was a flaw in her, but she had enough other flaws that she didn't expect to have time to fix that one no matter how long a life remained to her.

  "I'd never have built this myself," Davus mused, his mind returning to the same world as his three companions. "The crown, I mean. It's a marvelous thing, a lens to focus the powers that the jewel controls over a much wider range. Perhaps if it were finished, it'd control the whole cosmos. Well, we'll never know that for sure."

  Chalcus detached his hand from Merota's, patted her on the head, and absently reached for the dagger in his sash. He was probably
going to juggle it to settle him the way the cords Ilna plaited did her; but his conscious mind caught him.

  He opened his hands, grinning wryly. "What did your pet do with his pretty palace, then?" he asked. "Not simply turn young ladies into statues, I suppose?"

  "Not even that," said Davus. "The jewel alone suffices for such matters. From what the stone's memory tells me-"

  He grinned, pausing a moment to allow his audience to protest at the notion stone could remember. Ilna grinned back, her finger stroking the hem of her tunic. She returned in that touch to the meadow south of Barca's Hamlet where the sheep had been pastured.

  "-the poor beast did nothing whatever with his creation, just prowled about it and built it higher. The creature had purpose, you see; but not a mind as we humans talk of minds."

  "It has less than that now," said Chalcus, "for which I'm thankful. I'm not a vindictive man-"

  He too paused, smiling. All of them, even Merota, understood that in the sailor's mind the righting of wrongs wasn't vengeance but rather a necessity of life; and they all agreed with him.

  "-but if I were to stay here longer, I'd take a maul to what our Ilna turned the thing into. I wouldn't risk that on some black day it returned to life, the way I did and Lady Merota."

  "But Idon't want to stay," Merota said, hugging herself with one arm and holding Ilna even tighter with the other. "Please."

  Davus sobered. "Yes, milady," he said. "You've been ill-treated because of my errors. I'll do my best to make that up to you-"

  Ilna listened with her face stiff. There was no mockery in the King's tone; which was a good thing for all concerned.

  "-and to your world. Chalcus, Ilna-friends. Join hands in a circle with me and Lady Merota, if you will."

  Davus extended his arms, palms up. Ilna's left hand was free. She took his right without hesitation. Chalcus took his left so quickly and smoothly that only someone who knew him as well as Ilna did would've recognized that hedid hesitate. He grinned in wry apology to her over Merota's head.