by David Drake
* * *
Rainwater had pooled in a stone paver hollowed by the feet of men long dead. Garric used the natural mirror to examine the face he now wore. It was more familiar than not—the features he'd grown used to from birth, though framed with shaggy hair. The dark brunet locks had grown in white where the seawolf's fangs had punched dimples in his skull.
“Gar, we hunt lizards?” Tint asked. The beastgirl dabbed her hand out and back, clearly wishing to groom Garric but afraid to touch him in what she thought was his present strange mood. “Lizards in stones here.”
Garric looked at his companion. “Tint, do you understand what I say?” he said. “When I talk like this?”
The beastgirl spoke in clicks and grunts. Though Garric—Gar—heard the sounds as speech, his tongue and palate could no more reproduce them than Tint's long, narrow jaw could form normal human words.
Tint shrugged and scratched the back of her scalp. “Tint hear," she said, sounding a little bored. “Tint hear other men too, but they not hear Tint.”
Scowling, she added, “Tint not like other men!”
Garric stood, looking around him again. Not only were these ruins old, they'd been long in use before the forest re-covered them. There was nothing remarkable about the architecture to connect the ruins with any description he'd read in an ancient author. He could be on Ornifal, though he doubted it; or even somewhere on Haft.
“Gar, we hunt lizards?” Tint repeated, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Only—snakes in stones too.”
She shuddered. “Snake Island!” she said. She hugged herself and looked longingly at Garric. “We go away! We take ring to other men and go away, Gar?”
Garric looked at her sharply. “What other men?” he asked. “How did we come here, Tint?”
She shrugged again. “Vascay's tribe,” she said. “Our tribe. They take us on hollow log to Snake Island, hunt for ring for wizard. Other men not smell ring and not hear Tint.”
She dropped to all fours again and turned her head quickly from side to side, taking in her surroundings. “Bad place,” she said. “Many snakes!”
Garric thought about Tint's words as he listened to the forest. Besides the chirps and trilling that would've passed unnoticed in the borough's common woodland, something shrieked every few minutes like a cat in a bonfire. Garric supposed it was a bird, but it'd get on his nerves if he had to listen to it for long.
He could guess from Gar's hazy memories what the beastgirl meant by "Vascay's tribe": a band of twenty or more men, all armed beyond what was normal for honest folk. Some had eye patches and several were missing limbs.
Most of the gang had cuffed or kicked Gar in the past. A few of them seemed to have done so every time the half-witted youth came within reach.
“Tint,” he said, “can you show me where the ring is? If we find the ring, maybe we'll be able to leave this island.”
At the moment the only thing Garric was sure of was that his relationship with the tribe—the gang of bandits, he supposed—was going to be different from the one that they'd had with Gar. Bringing in the object the gang was searching for would be at least a good start toward that change.
“Tint show,” the beastgirl said with another shrug. “Stone wears ring. Tint smell stone.”
Tint set off through the forest, moving roughly parallel to the watercourse. Garric started after her. He caught at once in a kind of bamboo with back-curved hooks on the edges of the leaves.
“Gar come?” Tint called, already hidden by the foliage. “Come, Gar!”
“Wait!” Garric snapped. The leaves' grip left dotted rows of blood, on his forearms and along his ribs. He had to get down onto all fours to pass the bamboo; he didn't dare try circling the stand because it seemed to cover the whole area of a courtyard building which had collapsed into a mound of brick and stone in past ages.
He sighed. He'd wondered what the calluses on Gar's knuckles came from. Now he knew.
Most of Gar's fuzzy memories were of fears and beatings, not the ordinary business of his days. As best Garric could determine, Tint and the half-wit served Vascay's band as something between unpaid servants and ill-treated pets. They carried water, fed the fire, and were allowed to eat scraps from the gang's own meals as well as scavenge for themselves.
It wasn't a bad life, really—for an animal. Garric's face hardened at the thought.
Tint came back to Garric before he reached where she'd been waiting. The beastgirl's irritation had become renewed solicitousness: she couldn't imagine what had caused the change in her friend.
Garric smiled with a touch of humor. He couldn't imagine either, though he guessed that the Intercessor of Laut could explain it.
When at Echeus' direction Garric had looked into the pool, he'd seen something in the instant before Gar's reflection appeared in place of his own. A pattern had formed in bits of glittering flotsam carried down on the stream from where Echeus had knelt. Tint's calling this place Snake Island had helped Garric identify the remembered objects: they'd been snake scales.
The ruins, though extensive, appeared to be of a palace complex rather than a city. The buildings had ornamental façades, and the walls were sheathed with marble over brick cores. Much of the damage was deliberate: time and the forest had only buried the ruin brought by human assault.
Tint brought Garric to ruins that were both cruder and more recent. Blocks and column barrels from the original palace had been piled into a wall which had enclosed a dozen huts or so.
Fire had swept this later hamlet as well, blackening the stones before they fell again to rubble. The mound was now covered by moss and a fungus that sent up small orange balls, ready to puff out their spores if touched.
There'd only been the one patch of bamboo, but pine trees of some sort branched frequently into hedges of spikes hidden in the softer-leafed vegetation. The soil around this later settlement was too soggy to support brush above knee height, let alone trees. Garric straightened from the crouch he'd been in most of the way through the forest and strode toward the jumbled ruin.
Tint shrieked and bounded in front of him, baring her teeth in terror. “No, Gar!” she said, hopping up and down on all fours. “Gar die! Gar die!”
Garric froze, splaying his hands at his side to calm his companion. “I'm not moving, Tint,” he said quietly. “Tell me what the danger is.”
“Mushroom kill!” Tint said. She pawed at Garric, not really trying to move him back but miming a further signal of danger. “Gar touch mushroom, Gar die!”
The beastgirl made a theatrical sweep of her hand, indicating the puffballs' bright nodules. Her arm, covered in coarse reddish-gold hair, was as long as Garric's own.
Garric nodded his understanding. Even in the borough there were poison mushrooms. This was the first time he'd run into a species whose spores were dangerous, but already he trusted the beastgirl's woodcraft as implicitly as he did Tenoctris' judgment on wizardry.
“How do we—” he said.
Beneath Tint's pointing hand was a vine with leaves as broad as a watermelon's. A stem suddenly rustled. The beastgirl glanced at the ground, then froze.
“Tint?” said Garric. He touched her shoulder. She was trembling like a tuft of goosedown. He looked past her, bending forward to bring his eyes to the angle of hers.
A snake coiled beneath the vine. Its head was a wedge as broad as Garric's fist, its mottled body as thick as his forearm. He couldn't tell how long the serpent was: ten feet, twelve feet, perhaps even longer. Certainly it was long enough to strike Tint where she stood in frozen panic.
The snake's tail quivered, making a dry rustle against the leaves. Its head rose minusculely, weaving slightly with the tension of muscles compressing. The beastgirl whimpered, “Hoo ... hoo ... hoo... .”
“Jump back, Tint,” Garric whispered. He'd seen her spring fifteen feet from a standing start; that would carry her clear of the snake before it could strike.
But not this time: Tint was
too frightened to move. Garric wasn't sure she even heard his voice. His right hand, concealed behind the beastgirl's body, tugged loose the knot of his breechclout.
The snake's tail blurred again. Most serpents slither away if given the opportunity; not this one. Its ridged underside was the color of hot sulfur. As its fangs unfolded, a drop of venom glinted on the tip of each.
Garric leaped past Tint's left side, carrying the fluttering length of his breechclout with him. If he'd had time to tie a stone in the cloth for weight, he'd have thrown it instead; there wasn't any time.
The snake struck. It was quicker even than Garric had feared, sinking its long fangs in the wool with an audible clop of air. Garric twisted, catching the snake beneath the head with both hands. He'd rather have run, but he couldn't have gotten up from his sprawl before the snake struck again, this time into his thigh or torso.
Now Tint jumped, first away and then back like a toad bouncing between the walls of a ditch as it tries to flee a sudden motion. She screamed.
The snake's body writhed about Garric's right arm. The creature was strong, probably stronger than he was, but it couldn't get a fulcrum that would allow it to wrench itself out of his grasp. He could feel the scales' keel ridges cutting into his callused palms.
“Tint!” Garric shouted. He'd come down hard, slamming his left side on a chunk of rubble that bruised him badly if it hadn't broken a rib. Pain crackled through him like lightning hitting the sea. “Help me!”
The beastgirl capered and squealed. The snake was trying to stab its fangs down into Garric's forearm. Its long tail curled, slapping Garric across the eyes.
“Duzi!” he shouted, lashing hysterically. The snake's back popped. Garric flung the creature from him, horrified by the memory of his fear of a moment before.
The snake continued to twist, but now spasmodically. Its jaws opened and closed without force; its eyes were glazing.
Garric stood up slowly, rubbing his side. He'd have a bruise; nothing worse than that. He saw his breechclout among the vines where the struggle had flung it. Venom had soaked through a patch the size of his palm. He left the coarse woolen where it was; it hadn't been much of a garment to begin with.
“Gar good?” Tint said, creeping to his side and stroking him. “Gar good!”
Garric brushed the beastgirl's hand away. She couldn't overcome a fear like that any better than an effort of will would enable her to breathe water; but Garric remembered with revulsion how nearly the serpent had come to squirming its dry suppleness from his unaided grip... .
“Show me where the ring is, Tint,” Garric said in a husky voice. “That's all I want from you. Find me the ring.”
Sharina followed as Garric entered the meeting room; he moved like a caged cat, still holding the sword bare in his hand.
She'd been concerned since he fell into the pool. Now she was beginning to feel a sick horror.
Garric paced to the other side of the round table, only then turning to face the three women he'd summoned. Liane was helping Tenoctris; Sharina met his eyes directly.
Garric swiped the wad of silk again over the tip of his blade; the steel was already spotless. In an odd tone he said, “The way he jumped, I was afraid I'd caught him in the jaw. Nothing bites a sword edge as bad as hacking at a fellow's teeth.”
“Garric,” said Sharina. “What's wrong?”
Garric shot the sword home into its scabbard without looking at what he was doing. That smooth, ringing motion took as much skill as threading a needle in the dark.
“What's wrong?” he said. “I'm not Garric, milady—that's what's wrong! That wizard—”
His face contorted; he snarled out the word as though it were "father-slayer" or a worse term yet.
“—snatched away your brother's mind and replaced it with the mind of some drooling moron from the Sister knows where!”
The man who looked like the brother Sharina had known for nineteen years glared at the birds frescoed in a band between the ceiling moldings and the lowered casements, then met her eyes. Again Sharina had the feeling she watched a trapped animal.
Tenoctris slid from her backless ivory chair and settled onto the terrazzo floor. With the writing brush and a small inkhorn she'd taken from her sleeve, she was drawing a six-sided figure.
“This so-clever Intercessor thought he'd leave the Isles leaderless because the prince's body was barely able to feed itself,” the man said, grinning at Sharina in a way that could've been Garric after all. “What he didn't know...”
He reached under his tunics and came out with his fist around the medallion hanging there from a neck thong. He went on, “... is that Garric hadn't been alone in his skull. There's a half-wit boy whimpering in here with me, wondering what's going on; but I'm the one wearing Garric's body, not him.”
Smiling still broader, he opened his hand to display his own image on the worn gold disk. “My name is Carus,” he said. “A thousand years ago, I was King of the Isles.”
A spark of blue light, vivid but minute, glittered in the center of the figure Tenoctris had drawn over the irregular pattern of the stone chips. It snapped with the quick certainty of a gadfly toward the man speaking, but vanished before it touched him—and before his hand had more than gripped the sword again.
Tenoctris swayed. Liane was closer; she reached out to steady the old woman before Sharina could bend to do the same. Wizardry was hard work, especially for someone whose knowledge was much greater than her power.
“Yes,” Tenoctris said as she rose with Liane's help. She smiled faintly. “You are Carus.”
The man—Carus—let out a long, shuddering breath. “Lady Tenoctris ..." he said. He paused, averting his eyes for a moment. He squeezed the pommel of his great sword so fiercely that his knuckles mottled white and red.
“Lady Tenoctris,” Carus resumed, looking down at her with an utterly humorless smile, “I would do, will do, everything I can to preserve the kingdom until my descendent Garric returns to his rightful place. I will even take a wizard as my advisor and confidant, though I'd prefer to thrust my hand in the fire.”
He released his sword hilt and worked the incipient cramp out of it, his grin this time an honest one if wry.
“But milady?” he resumed with an undertone of earnestness beneath the banter. “Please don't strain my determination again. I'd regret the reflex that took the head off your shoulders if you sent another of your spells at me when I wasn't expecting it.”
To Sharina's surprise, Tenoctris offered a curtsy. “Your majesty,” she said, “I'm an old woman who's spent much time with books and none until recently with men of war. I treated you as a question to be answered, not a person; I apologize for the disrespect. If it happens again, you have my leave to behead me.”
Carus bellowed with laughter and stepped around the small table. Liane jumped, but not quickly enough; Carus caught her by the shoulders and lifted her out of the way with a cheerful lack of ceremony.
He offered Tenoctris his hands, palms up. “I watched through Garric's eyes ever since you came ashore in this age,” he said. “I saw you”—he glanced around, including Liane and Sharina in his statement—“all of you save the kingdom when it would otherwise have gone down to a worse smash than in my day, for all Garric and I alone could have done to save it. I know your goodness; and more, I know you're necessary. But... by the Shepherd, milady, please don't startle me if you can avoid it. Eh?”
Tenoctris laid her delicate hands on those Carus now wore: large and long-fingered, with calluses on the right palm from Garric's sword practice. “Done,” she said.
“Your highness?” said Liane, her voice calm but her expression wholly unreadable. “Why would the Intercessor of Laut have wished to remove Garric? Sandrakkan and Blaise might think they could rival Ornifal for the kingship, but surely not Laut.”
Carus shrugged, then grinned broadly as he stepped away from Tenoctris. “He had some wizard reason, I'd suppose,” he said. “Nothing that a man like m
e could fathom. But Liane, all of you: in the past you said, 'Garric' when you spoke to the fellow wearing this flesh, and 'your highness' only on formal occasions. When we're alone together, I'm just Carus. And you're Liane, Tenoctris, and Sharina. All right?”
“All right, Carus,” Sharina said, and Tenoctris echoed, "Yes, yes, of course.”
Liane nodded instead of speaking. Her expression remained guarded for a moment. At last she forced a smile, and said, “Yes, of course. I'm sorry, this has been a...”
Liane's mood broke in a trill of laughter. “I was going to say it was a shock to me,” she said. “But not so great as it was to you, I realize. I'll be all right.”
“Right, then, right,” Carus said. He'd become less tense after blurting his real identity, but this was a man who preferred the open air to the inside of a building. “To business, then.”
He looked at the women, grinning. He wasn't her brother, but Sharina found him as easy to trust as she did Garric and Cashel.
“The business is,” Carus said, “that the kingdom needs Garric to hold it together. The Ornifal nobles will follow him—and the common people, they'd walk over a cliff if he told them to, the most of them.”
“Ornifal isn't the Isles,” Liane said, quietly, but speaking to hear the king's response.
“No, and it never will be,” Carus said with enough edge to his tone to show that he knew he was being tested. “King Garric will rule the united—the reunited—kingdom, though—on my honor!”
He paused, relaxing his face into the smile of moments before. Nobody looking at Carus could doubt that this was an older man than the youth who'd worn the flesh only minutes before. “The rulers of the other islands won't bow to Garric yet, but even now they respect him enough to be careful. The way Lerdoc's using the Confederacy of the West for a stalking horse proves that. Not so, milady?”
Carus leaned across the small table. He'd have chucked Liane under the chin if she hadn't jerked back in amazement. Tenoctris watched the byplay with the mild interest she might have shown for finches fluttering about a sunflower.