by David Drake
“And why wouldn't I be willing?” Ilna snapped. “I'm not too good for any honest work!”
She heard the outrage in her voice, paused, and gave Chalcus a wry smile. “Sorry,” she said. “With so much in the world to be upset over, that was a foolish concern. Even for me on what seems to be a foolish day. And if you'd asked me were I willing to have a servant, then you'd have gotten a different answer.”
She stood. “I'll see to packing,” she said. “My own clothing won't take long, but Lady Merota bos-Roriman will no doubt have greater requirements.”
“Dear one?” Chalcus said, saw her face harden, and went on, "Mistress Ilna, then. A question before we part, if you please: why did you agree so easily?”
Ilna quirked a smile. “Why am I not worried about the danger to Merota?” she asked. “I am, Master Chalcus; I'm very much afraid.”
The smile faded. “But I saw a thing in a dead man's eyes just now, and I'm more afraid of that.” She stretched out an arm in summons. Merota, bubbling with excitement, came racing toward her two protectors. “Because if that vision comes to pass,” Ilna said quietly, “there'll be no safety, for a child or for anyone, in all this world.”
Sharina heard a shout from the king sleeping in the inner room of the suite. She got to her feet without stumbling and took the lighted candle from the alcove which shaded its gleam to a soft glow fanning across the floor. She was still half-asleep, but an innkeeper's daughter learns to cope with crises in the darkness.
She pushed through the curtain of carved wooden beads across the doorway connecting to the master bedroom. Garric—Carus—thrashed on the bed, wrestling with the feather-stuffed mattress. His face was contorted. As Sharina entered he shouted again in wordless fury.
“Carus!” Sharina said, wondering if the guards could overhear them. There were Blood Eagles in the corridor and in the grounds below Garric's second-story living quarters, she didn't want them bursting in. She couldn't guess what Carus might say in his nightmare. “Your majesty!”
The wall above the cherrywood wainscoting was frescoed with images showing the march of the seasons in the countryside. It was part of the room's original decorations, though workmen had repaired the fallen plaster when Prince Garric chose the suite for himself.
Ordinarily the scenes were cheerful if a little idealized to someone who knew the realities of peasant life. The painted snow lay on the ground at the turn of the year; real snow drove down, with intervals of sleet which locked the stubble beneath a coat of ice that hooves couldn't chip away. The painted dancers at the harvest festival were bright-eyed instead of logy with fatigue and beer. And in the painted world, the animals were clean, even the oxen who'd just come in from the field. Regardless, Garric and Sharina both had found them a pleasant reminder of a world they'd never be a part of again.
The candle had sunk to a blue glow about the wick as Sharina moved. Now it flared and guttered, distorting the frieze into presences worse than shadow. Almost Sharina could feel tendrils reaching for her from the spaces beyond the plastered wall.
Almost, or possibly ...
“Carus!” she said. She dropped the candle onto the brass bedside tale and grasped the king's wrist with her strong right hand. “Wake up!”
Carus lunged upward like a dolphin jumping, awake and seated upright in bed in the same instant. He gripped Sharina as though she were a spar he'd caught while drowning. His eyes were wide, and his jaws were set in a rictus of fury.
His breath slowed. “Thank you, milady,” he said in a husky whisper. His arms released her; his fingers had bruised her forearm when he'd twisted in her grasp.
He grinned faintly. “Call Tenoctris in while I get some clothes on, will you? Or I can—”
“No,” said Sharina, leaving the candle as she padded back through the anteroom where she'd been sleeping. She picked up a light cape and draped it over her tunic before she opened the door to the corridor.
The Blood Eagles on guard had heard, all right; several had drawn their swords. All looked tense, though two kept their eyes on the corridor in either direction while the others waited for Sharina to explain the reason for the cries.
“The prince had a bad dream,” Sharina said curtly. “One of you bring Tenoctris to us, please. She's in the—”
“Chaigon, go get her,” said the officer in a breastplate with silvered engravings. A rangy swordsman padded off at a quick pace toward the adjacent suite where Tenoctris slept tonight. In deference to the sleep of those they protected, the Blood Eagles on interior guard wore soft-soled sandals rather than hobnailed boots.
“We know where the wizard is, princess,” the officer said, polite but not afraid for doing a thing quickly instead of waiting for needless elaboration.
“Yes, I see,” Sharina agreed. She turned back into the suite, saying over her shoulder, “Send her through immediately when she arrives. If you please.”
Carus had pulled on an outer tunic and the high boots he'd added to Garric's wardrobe. As Sharina entered, the king was wrapping the double tongue of his sword belt around the belt proper. He saw her eye it.
“No, I don't think I'll be using a sword tonight,” he said with a smile of embarrassment. “But I decided that I liked the weight of it to...”
He shrugged.
Instead of finishing that thought, Carus looked at a corner of the room, and said in a quiet, rigidly controlled voice, “I knew I was dreaming, Sharina, but I wasn't able to wake up. Until you pulled me up out of the dream. And even then I wasn't sure I was going to reach the surface until I was there.”
“The room felt... I guess cold when I came in,” Sharina said. The temperature was normal now, and the frieze had returned to being flat and inoffensive. The young mother was fluffing the covers around her baby, not smothering it with a pillow as a trick of the light had made it seem a moment before... .
The anteroom where Sharina'd slept was meant for a servant. Normally Liane would have been there while Sharina had her own separate bungalow, but for the time being the two of them had exchanged accommodation.
The change was at Carus' suggestion, but Liane had leaped at it with an audible gasp of relief.
There was a bustle in the corridor. “Go on through, Lady Tenoctris,” the officer called in a loud voice. “We'll close the door behind you.”
Carus stepped into the anteroom with his hands outstretched to greet the wizard and support her if she needed it. Sharina grinned at the care the soldiers took to communicate their intentions without giving offense. She sobered when she thought of the danger-filled void that those men—she didn't know a single one by name—faced. The soldiers didn't know whether indigestion or a monster from the deepest pit of Hell had caused the man they guarded to cry out.
Neither did Sharina, of course, but she and her friends at least had the chance to learn. The soldiers would remain in ignorance, most likely forever—but possibly until only an instant before some hellspawn struck them down.
Tenoctris, looking as sprightly as a sparrow, came in. She didn't need the support of Carus' arm, though he carried her satchel of paraphernalia. Behind them the outer door closed with heavy finality; the guards were putting a material barrier between themselves and the wizardry they expected—feared—would take place within.
“You said you had a nightmare,” Tenoctris said, surveying the room with quick jerks of her head instead of a sweeping glance. “What exactly did you see?”
She sat on the floor abruptly; Sharina caught and helped her the last of the way as the older woman paused in mid-motion. Carus passed the satchel to Sharina, who placed it before Tenoctris.
“I didn't really see anything,” Carus said. He had control of himself again; he spoke reflectively, casting his mind back to retrieve the details of the experience. “I felt as if I was deep underwater. Something held me, pulled me down, but I couldn't touch it when I tried to.”
He cleared his throat. “I was drowning,” he said. To Sharina's amazement, there was r
eal humor in the king's smile. “Drowning again, I mean. Only this time I don't think I'd have seen daylight again. Not even in a thousand years, through another man's eyes.”
The floor was a woodland mosaic. In the slight present illumination the trees and creatures were shadows on shadow, with the only real contrast the splotches of white plaster: temporary patches filling places where the tesserae had fallen out.
Tenoctris took a writing brush and a pot of cinnabar from her satchel, then outlined a simple triangle over a stag with unlikely antlers. “Could you see anything?” she asked as she began writing words of power in the Old Script along the sides of the figure. “Or was it just blackness?”
“I couldn't see anything,” said Carus. He scowled reflexively at what the wizard was doing, then caught Sharina's glance and smiled in wry self-deprecation. “But it wasn't black, it was gray.”
Tenoctris tapped the three sides of her figure with her bamboo sliver, then began to intone the words under her breath. Air within the triangle blurred the way it might over a field on a summer day.
“Gray like what Hordred saw,” Sharina said. “Didn't see.”
“Yeah, that's what I was thinking about while I was down there,” Carus agreed. “Wherever 'there' was. And after watching what happened to him, I can't doubt that something really was after Hordred in that grayness.”
Tenoctris flung her wand aside and sagged. Sharina caught her before her head hit the floor.
“Wait,” Tenoctris said. She straightened, then deliberately smudged the symbols with the sleeve of her robe. Red pigment smeared into the fine silk brocade.
Sharina winced, wondering what Ilna would say if she'd seen that. Perhaps nothing: Ilna was ruthlessly pragmatic herself, and Tenoctris would have a good reason for whatever she did.
“I didn't want to leave that where someone might accidentally pronounce it,” the wizard said, now allowing the younger woman to help her up. “It was a simple location spell, but it started to go deeper than I thought was safe.”
“Deeper?” said Carus.
“Spells have a weight of their own,” Tenoctris said, settling herself onto an ivory chair. Its legs crossed in an X before curving upward to form the arms. All the surfaces had been chased with a pattern of vines and snakes. “I thought it would point me to a place in the present, Laut, perhaps, or Tisamur. Instead it began racing toward an end so distant that I was afraid it might carry me with it.”
She quirked a smile, but the slight trembling of her hands was not merely from physical reaction. Carus squatted beside her, cocking his sword with one hand so that the scabbard's chape didn't rap on the floor. His other hand closed gently over those of Tenoctris.
“Carry you far in time?” Sharina asked. She thought of the cataclysm that had flung the old wizard a thousand years to this age.
“Carry me to the Underworld,” Tenoctris said. For a moment she didn't move or even blink. “Carry me to Hell, Sharina.”
Carus rose, patting the old woman's shoulder. “We can't have that,” he said, his tone quietly cheerful. “If I need to sleep only in daylight, well—
“Hordred was asleep in daylight,” Sharina said sharply. “The last time.”
“Then—” said Carus, louder yet and grasping his sword hilt.
“There's another way,” said Tenoctris. The others looked at her.
“Go on,” said Carus, opening his right hand. Sharina felt a surge of relief; she hadn't seen any good result coming from the desperation she knew the ancient king felt even more strongly than she did.
“If Ilna is amenable,” Tenoctris said, “I can put her in a trance and send her soul to follow the visitation back to its source. I don't think it would even be difficult for her. Though of course there's some danger.”
Sharina shrugged. “Ilna would do anything to help,” she said. “Any of us will.”
“Send me,” said Carus. His smile had a tinge of ruthlessness—if the expression wasn't simple cruelty instead. “This is my fight, after all.”
“It's all our fight!” Tenoctris said with unusual force. “It's the fight of everyone alive and everyone who hopes to be born.”
Her expression softened. “Of course you'd all go,” she added, "but you'd never find the way. It's not what you would do but what you can. Ilna can follow the pattern to its source, I'm sure.”
“And I'm sure,” said King Carus, “that I'll know what to do when somebody shows me where to strike.”
He laughed in fierce anticipation, his right hand on his sword. The candleflame guttered at the violence of his joy.
Chapter Eight
The guards accompanying Sharina and Ilna couldn't help marching in step. The clash of their boots on the flagstone walkway leading to Garric's apartments sounded like construction work on a large scale. It was a harsh sound, and maybe for that reason Sharina felt nervous.
She took her friend's hand, and said, “I wish Cashel were here.”
Ilna looked at her with her usual lack of expression. “I do too,” she said, “but I've never known my brother to start a job he didn't finish. I expect he'll do the same this time, whatever the job is.”
She squeezed Sharina's hand firmly, then released it. Barely audible over the hobnails' ringing hammer strokes she added, “Does Tenoctris think the same thing that made Cashel disappear is attacking Garric also?”
Does she know Garric is gone? Sharina wondered. She opened her mouth to explain, then choked off the words. That was for Carus to say if Chalcus hadn't.
“I don't know,” Sharina said. “I don't think she does, but we don't know very much at all.”
Then, because of the previous realization, she went on, “Does your friend Chalcus stay within the palace?”
The building Garric had chosen for his apartments was larger than most of the residences within the compound, though still smaller than the town houses of the city's wealthy merchants. By now Valles had grown up to the south and southeast walls of the palace, but the two were still separate communities.
When the Dukes of Ornifal took the title of Kings of the Isles four hundred years ago, they sequestered a huge tract north of the city proper. They walled it and built therein scores of separate structures, ranging from open gazebos to barracks for the clerks, guards, and domestics of the palace staff.
“Generally he does, I believe,” Ilna said, her eyes straight ahead. The muscles were tight over her cheekbones, but you didn't have to be a childhood friend like Sharina to know that Ilna was tense most of the time. “I don't know precisely where, but I believe he's found himself accommodations with the unmarried guards.”
She cleared her throat, and added, “Tonight, last night—”
Dawn was turning the east-facing upper façade of Garric's residence pink.
“—he said he'd be going down to the port to find passage to Tisamur for the three of us.”
Turning to meet Sharina's eyes, Ilna said, “I keep house for Merota and my brother. But not for Master Chalcus.”
Knee-high cypresses lined the walk to either side. During a generation of neglect the original plantings had evolved into a tangle of undergrowth. When Garric revived the monarchy, the newly enlarged staff of groundskeepers had cleared away the mass as their first priority, but it would be years before these replacements grew into landscaping fit for the majesty of the Kingdom of the Isles.
Sharina smiled wanly.
It would also be years before the Kingdom of the Isles grew back into something truly majestic.
The officer of their guard exchanged passwords with the colleague who commanded the detachment at the entrance to the residence. Sharina saw her friend's lips tighten in something just short of a sneer for the workings of bureaucracy, whether military or civilian.
Ilna caught Sharina's glance and met it with a wry smile. “I'm not very good at getting along with other people,” she said. “As you know. Fortunately, there are tasks that a person can do alone.”
Ilna smile hardened into
something an enemy would find frightening. “And some that have to be done alone, I gather,” she said. Then, turning her face forward again, she asked, “Will the prince be here? When I go off to where Tenoctris sends me?”
Sharina licked her lips before answering, also looking toward the building. “I think it'll be just you and me with Tenoctris,” she said, “but I really don't know.”
She didn't understand—had never understood—the way her friend's mind worked, but she knew Ilna was in pain. She reached out to link hands again, briefly.
A palace servant could've brought Ilna to the prince's residence, but it was more than for courtesy that Sharina had gone herself. Tenoctris didn't need help with her preparations, and besides—Sharina had wanted to get out of the building for a time. Even after Carus woke and the chill dissipated, a feeling, a touch of something slimy, had seemed to remain.
After Sharina left to fetch her friend, someone had opened the mullioned windows of the upper story. Carus looked out, waved a formal salute, and then went back inside. Quite aside from how the king felt about a woman who'd looked like, been like Ilna, Sharina supposed his distaste for wizardry would keep him from joining the three women during the planned incantation.
“I believe they'll let us in now,” Ilna said as though she hadn't noticed the man at the window above them. “Back in, so far as you're concerned.”
“I was daydreaming,” Sharina apologized as she started forward. But what had happened to Hordred wasn't a dream.
The porch was a semicircle whose tiled roof was supported by four simple pillars. The double doors were wood. Royhas had wanted to replace them with bronze. Garric had refused, but the chancellor had gotten his way in part by attaching a bronze applique of linked rings, the symbol of the royal house of Haft during the Old Kingdom, in the center of both leaves.
And now King Carus, the last member of that house, ruled here in fact... . Aloud, more to herself than to her friend, Sharina said, “I'm going to have to watch myself. Everything seems like an omen to me now!”
“That must be very uncomfortable,” Ilna said with a minuscule smile. “I've found the present to provide more than enough difficulty by itself.”