by David Drake
“Aye,” said Chalcus with an appraising glance at her. “She has a Pewle knife, that's so.”
“Which she would use again at need,” said Carus. “Shall I send her out on purpose to give hard strokes, then, sailor? I have Attaper and his hounds for that, do I not? And perhaps I have you.”
He smiled; Chalcus smiled back. Neither man spoke for a moment.
“There's hard wizard strokes to be given on Tisamur, sailor," Carus said softly, almost whispering. “Who better should I send? Who better is there?”
Chalcus laughed cheerfully. He poured himself more wine; this time he chose to cut it. As he lifted the ladle a second time from the water vat he said banteringly, “Prince Garric is a bold young man and a clever one besides...”
He straightened, holding the goblet in his left hand. Instead of drinking, he fixed his eyes on Carus. His lips smiled, but his eyes did not.
“Prince Garric is all those things,” Chalcus continued, "but he'd not be making a plan so heedless of the lives of a young child and a childhood friend. Who made this plan ... soldier?”
Carus crossed his arms before him. “I'm not heedless, sailor..." he said. The emotion wasn't on the surface of his words, but Sharina heard it bubbling beneath them. “But a general who won't risk his troops when needful will lose them all when there was no need. And as for who made the plan—I did. My name's Carus. I'm not here by my own will; but seeing that I am here, I won't sit on my hands and let the kingdom go smash for want of a ruler.”
“Are you indeed?” said Chalcus, and he sipped his wine. “Are you indeed.”
He set down the goblet. “May I tell her?” he said, nodding toward the door.
“Yes,” said Carus. “Or I will, if you prefer.”
Chalcus shrugged. “I'll take care of it,” he said with a wry smile.
The smile broadened into a bark of laughter. “Well, soldier," Chalcus continued, “I'm not one to sit on my hands either. If Mistress Ilna chooses to go to Tisamur, why, I wouldn't mind going back. I was only a lad the last time I was there.”
“And you think the survivors have forgotten by now?” Carus said, strait-faced.
“Who says there were survivors, soldier boy?” Chalcus replied.
Sharina watched as the men clasped arms, laughing like demons. They understood one another, those two.
And might the Lady protect her—Sharina understood them also.
Chapter Six
Garric's skin burned. He was bathed in white light and it burned. Consciousness returned with the suddenness of a casement closing; with it came pain.
That was all right. Garric had hurt before, and this time the anger coursing through him burned all other feelings to cinders. He opened his eyes.
The foliage of the palms from which Ceto appeared were still quivering; the bandit must just have brushed his way through on his way back to the camp. Garric was far too coldly angry to rush off after him; he needed to get control of himself first. Then he'd take care of Ceto.
Tint was jumping frantically, making clicking sounds with her teeth. She saw Garric move and started to lift him.
“Hey!” Garric gasped. “Don't do that!”
“Gar!” Tint cried, the first actual word that'd come from her mouth since he awakened. She sprang into a clump of hibiscus. Voice fading with the distance, she called, “Tint fix ear!”
Garric could breathe again, though the pit of his stomach was numb with a jagged circle of pain around it. Ceto's punch might have cracked a rib.
He dabbed his ear; his fingers came away bloody. The hobnails had caught the tip, though the damage didn't seem to be serious.
Garric knelt, then rose to his feet as the beastgirl reappeared with a wad of... of spiderweb! “Tint fix ear,” she repeated, motioning him to bend down.
He obeyed, feeling a moment of vertigo that cleared at once. Instead of wiping his ear, Tint licked him with a tongue that seemed almost prehensile. Garric didn't jump away because the beastgirl was holding him by the shoulders. Only when the wound was clean did she press the spider silk over the wound.
“Tint fix!” she repeated. The silk stayed where she'd placed it, glued by its own adhesive.
Garric took a deep breath. His ribs still hurt, but nothing was broken.
He grinned at his companion. “All right, Tint,” he said. “Now take me back to the camp. So that I can fix Ceto.”
Sharina watched Chalcus leave the conference room; he moved with the grace of a dancer—which he might be—or a swordsman, which she knew he was. Captain Deghan relaxed visibly to see Carus standing in the doorway unharmed.
Carus glanced back at Sharina. “Shall we—” he said.
“Shut the door please,” Sharina said. Her stomach was tight; mention of the Pewle knife and her memory of Nonnus made her able to ask a question when ingrained courtesy would have kept her silent. “For a moment.”
Carus turned, nodded to Deghan, and closed the door again. When he faced Sharina he was expressionless, watchful. “All right,” he said.
“Why won't you see Ilna?” she said.
“I told—”
“I heard what you told Chalcus!” Sharina said. “I can see the logic; so could Garric, and I think he'd have done the same—for all a sailor's doubts. People in Barca's Hamlet have to make hard choices every fall if they expect to survive the Hungry Time the next spring. But you haven't answered my question.”
Carus' grin was brief and false. He walked to the sideboard and poured himself wine, using the carafe of red and the goblet closest to him—the one Chalcus had left behind. He didn't mix water with the wine.
“When I was...” he said to the far wall. “In the flesh, say; alive, I don't care what you call it.”
He set the goblet down untasted and met Sharina's eyes. “When I was a man, Sharina, I knew a lot of women,” he said. “I liked them well enough, and some I liked a good deal. But there was one...”
Carus reached for the wine, then snatched his hand back and snarled, "Sister take it! And may the Sister take me if I'm so great a coward that I won't talk about her!”
“Carus...?” Sharina said. She didn't know what she wanted to say next, except that she wished she hadn't spoken before. “I don't need... You don't have to tell me anything.”
The king's passing reference to the knife had opened an old wound, but he'd had a reason. Sharina no longer believed she'd had a reason for her question, at least not one that was worth the pain it gave her companion.
“Don't I, girl?” Carus said. He managed a gust of his usual laughter. “Perhaps not, but I'll tell you anyway. There was a girl, a woman, named Brichese bos-Brediman; from Cordin, noble of course but from a family no wealthier than yours in Barca's Hamlet despite the title.”
He shrugged. “I loved her,” he said. “And she died, because I didn't save her... or couldn't save her... . Or perhaps you could say because I didn't choose to save her. And that was all a thousand years ago. She'd be dead now in any case and none of that would matter. Except—”
Carus grinned. “You know,” he said, “I sometimes think that the Lady... or Fate, if the philosophers are right when they say the Great Gods don't exist... that whoever rules men has a sense of humor. Your friend Ilna is as close to being my Brichese as ever twins were born. In body, but in spirit as well.”
Sharina's face went blank. “Ah,” she said. “I see now.”
“It was hard enough when I watched through your brother's eyes and heard through his ears,” the king said. He sipped the wine, drinking without the desperation that had driven his urge a few moments before. “Now that I'm wearing this body instead of being a guest in it, I thought...”
He laughed and finished the wine. “I thought it'd be best for everybody,” he said, “if I put temptation out of the way.”
“Yes,” said Sharina. She breathed a sigh of relief. If Carus had been a different man, Ilna and the kingdom both would face a future that would be even more dangerous than what loomed t
oday.
“Let's go out to the others,” she said, crooking her arm to be taken by the man wearing her brother's body. “I want to see what Tenoctris has learned about Garric.”
Fear twisted her gut. She immediately hid it beneath a smile.
“And Cashel,” Sharina added; and then lied. “Though I'm sure Cashel will never meet any danger that he can't manage.”
Tenoctris had decided to use the marble bench on one side of the artificial grotto as a table. Ilna watched while the wizard adjusted the strips of parchment that she'd written on and placed around the edges of two smoldering braziers. Along the grotto's back wall water trickled from lead pipes into a channel leading out into the garden, past the squad of Blood Eagles facing stolidly away from the wizard.
Beards of moss grew on the wall beneath the pipes. A similar dark smudge spread down the front of the bench. Echeus' severed head sat upright between the braziers. Blood still leaked from its neck.
Tenoctris stepped back, breathing quickly. “There,” she said. “That should be all right. Now where did I put—”
“I have your wand,” Ilna said, holding out the split of bamboo the wizard had chosen for this incantation. “And your stool is set up right here.”
“Ah,” said Tenoctris. “Yes, of course.”
She sat carefully, gathering the hem of her robe so that it didn't collapse the folding ivory stool Ilna had placed facing Echeus. She glanced up at Ilna. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm nervous because of what I'm about to do.”
Ilna shrugged. “But you'll do it anyway,” she said. “That's all that matters, not what it costs.”
She smiled wryly at the older woman. “That's what I tell myself, anyway,” she added.
Tenoctris grinned. “Yes, of course,” she said. “And I'm sure you're right.”
She faced forward, focusing on a point in eternity rather than on the head in front of her. Echeus had died with his eyes open and a look of surprise on his face. The eyes had glazed and the stiffness of death was sharpening the expression into a demonic grimace.
The parchment crinkled in the slow fire; by becoming black ash, the words of power executed themselves in coils of smoke. Tenoctris tapped the air silently for a moment, then said in rhythm with her wand, “Oh maosaio naraeeaeaa... .”
With every syllable Tenoctris spoke, the rising smoke quivered. Ilna saw hints of glowing color in the thin columns. There was a pattern to them, something her brain couldn't grasp but her soul almost could.
“Arubibao thumo imsiu...” the wizard said. “Oulatsila moula imsiu... .”
Ilna, Tenoctris, and the severed head were alone in a grotto carved out of the cosmos, not just a man-made hill. The entrance and the guards outside had vanished. The only light was from glowing smoke that wove new patterns in the fabric of space and time.
“Ae eiouo soumarta max akarba... ." No longer words spoken by a human but rather the thunder of the cosmos.
Echeus' eyes were expanding, or else Ilna was looking into another world which those eyes had seen. Gray, softly gleaming... utterly evil.
“Chraie zozan ekmet prhe satra!”
A world: a world draped in gray silk, webs swathing rocks and trees—and everywhere those who had woven the webs, watching through jewel-hard unwinking multiple eyes. A world of spiders the size of dogs, the size of sheep. Spiders waiting: expressionless, emotionless; as cold as the void between worlds.
Spiders who had woven patterns of inhuman perfection, and who were weaving one further pattern that Ilna could almost understand. Indeed, she could under—
The gray hellworld shrank into itself, vanishing like a snowflake caught in an open hand. Ilna staggered, but the instinct of duty caused her to grab Tenoctris and hold the old wizard firmly before she could slip off her stool. She seemed skeletally frail within her silken robe.
The grotto stank of charred flesh: parchment was no more than sheep gut, after all. The strips had burned to ash and Echeus' head was only a body part, already flushing with the purple tinge of decay.
A haze of gray smoke filtered the sunlight entering through the entrance, but it still made a bright contrast to the place Ilna's mind had just visited. She lifted Tenoctris as she'd carry an injured child and stepped outside.
“Ma'am?” said the leader of the guards. “Is she—”
“She's all right,” Ilna said.
“I'm all right,” Tenoctris echoed weakly, “I'm just tired.”
The Blood Eagles shifted their stance, uncertain whether they ought to be helping the women or simply preventing the approach of intruders. There was no one within fifty paces of the grotto except for the larger detachment of guards around the conference room where Garric and Chalcus spoke.
Ilna felt the older woman gather her strength, then straighten her legs. When Ilna was sure, she let go except to keep one arm crooked where Tenoctris could hold on to it.
“Tenoctris, did you see it?” Ilna whispered. “That place. Garric...” Ilna remembered she'd felt murderous passion when Garric turned his back on her less than an hour before. She was purged of that now. Nothing humans did was worth anger, not when one had seen Hell wrapped in webs of finest silk.
“Yes, I saw it,” Tenoctris said. “I don't know what it means, but now that I have a starting place I think I can learn.”
“That was what Echeus was trying to bring about?” Ilna said. She'd meant to whisper, but for once control failed her. She let her loathing loose in her rising tone. “That was why he attacked Garric?”
Tenoctris took a deep breath. Now at last she appeared to have recovered from the ordeal of her art—and perhaps from the shock of what her art had shown her.
She stepped back and managed a wan smile for Ilna. “No,” she said. “Echeus wasn't trying to create that... world, that path for the future to follow.”
Tenoctris drew in another breath; her smile failed her.
“What we saw was a vision of what Echeus feared most,” the old wizard explained. “Echeus attacked Garric to prevent that future from occurring.”
Cashel sat with his back to a coral head thrusting up from the beach. He made no more sound or movement than the rock behind him, but he was fully alert.
The sailors' several driftwood campfires had burned down to coals. Occasionally a salt crystal spluttered into transparent pastel flame, but for the most part the fireglow sank slowly toward the darkness of the surrounding night.
Cashel waited the way he'd watched over flocks when he knew danger threatened. Captain Mounix had set guards, but Cashel didn't believe anybody had relieved the first watch. The shipwreck had disturbed the crew's structure, and the terrible slayings had put paid to what discipline remained.
There would be no more slayings. Cashel smiled. Not unless the killer got through him first, anyway.
The surf rumbled on the reef, drowning with its low note the many lesser night sounds. When Cashel took his place the tide had been going out; now it was returning. Occasionally waves splashed against the base of the coral head. Most of the survivors were sprawled on the sand up at the tide line. Cashel had chosen this location because he wanted to cover as much of the encampment as possible, though in darkness he couldn't see his companions.
Just inland of Cashel's position, Lady Tilphosa slept under a sailcloth shelter for privacy. Metra lay nearby but outside the shelter. Cashel hadn't asked them to stay close, though he would've done so if Tilphosa hadn't volunteered that she wanted to sleep nearby for protection.
Another wave hit the coral, spraying high enough that drops spattered Cashel. Arms of water reached around from both sides, hissing and foaming; one wet Cashel's tunic before sinking into the sand.
It'd be dawn soon. He'd move when the sky brightened, maybe even get some sleep of his own. Until then, well, he'd been wet before.
Cashel felt a presence in the night; he tensed.
It wasn't anything he could've described to another person, unless they were folks who'd felt this sort of thing t
hemselves. Something was threatening his flock... .
There was movement though not a shape against the palmettos and screw pines. It was at the head of the trail Cashel had broken, going uphill to the spring. That was what he'd expected, though he hadn't been conscious of his belief until the event confirmed it.
He rose in one silent, fluid motion. Cashel was deliberate in all things, but no one who'd seen him act during a crisis thought he was clumsy. He started toward the shadow. It was now drifting in the direction of a campfire which had settled to a shimmer of heat.
Cashel moved in a near shuffle, his feet lifting barely above the surface of the sand. He angled his approach to put himself between the intruder and the gap in the vegetation from which it had come.
It was very near to dawn, though the constellations were distorted enough that Cashel couldn't say if the sky would begin to lighten in one handful of minutes or two handsful. Certainly no more than two.
One of the sailors lay a little farther from the dead fire than his companions did. The intruder sprang the remaining distance to him while Cashel was just beyond his staff's reach.
“Hi!” Cashel shouted, and jumped himself, whirling the quarterstaff in a full-armed slash.
Quick as Cashel was, the intruder proved quicker. It had snatched its chosen victim from the sand in the eyeblink before Cashel moved. Now it hurled the sailor away and ducked beneath the whistling blow.
The sailor was screaming. His companions sat up, shouting in fear; men at the other fires cried out also. Cashel skidded on the sand, recovering his staff with both hands at the balance to defend himself from the intruder's counterstroke.
Instead the shadow—it was still no more than a shadow, though Cashel was nearly on top of it—bounded for the jungle in a graceless, low-slung motion. It covered ground like a scorpion jumping. Cashel couldn't cut it off before it vanished into the vegetation.
That was all right. Cashel knew where it was going, or anyway thought he did.
A bow twanged from the direction of the southernmost campfire. Cashel didn't hear the whistle of an arrow, so maybe the archer wasn't aiming toward him after all.