by David Drake
Thoughtfully she took one of the round loaves of bread which the baker's boy had just delivered. Ilna had been snacking throughout the day's labor, but she didn't know how Alecto was making out in the stables.
Besides, the loaf would be a handy thing to have if she and the wild girl needed to flee.
The cook opened her mouth to snarl but thought better of it. Normally she'd have bullied a girl like Ilna without mercy, but the slim stranger had an air about her that the cook didn't care to push. Instead she said, “If you see Arris, tell him to get his lazy butt in here.”
The kitchen was a separate structure at the back of the inn yard, built of stone with a tile roof. The main building, two full stories and a dormer, was half-timbered under shingles, because there wasn't as much risk of fire. Ilna and Alecto were to lodge in the stable loft in return for their labor, though the cook had seemed willing enough to keep Ilna at work till daybreak.
The inn yard was full of coaches, their tongues lifted against the walls to make as much room as possible. The drivers and some of the passengers slept in the vehicles, but all ate food prepared in the inn's kitchen.
The cook's cousin, the ostler, had been glad to hire Alecto. Space for animals in Donelle was as tight as that for humans: a touch and a murmur from the wild girl had calmed a pair of horses restive at being squeezed into the same stall. One beast knowing another, Ilna had thought; but whatever the reason, Alecto's skill with animals was remarkable.
“Hey, girl, have a drink with us?” a man called from the group clustered against the oven in the yard for warmth on a cool evening.
Ilna ignored the comment, picking her way between wagons parked so that the wheels nearly interlocked. The man let it drop. Despite Donelle's crowded conditions, there was very little disorder—and less fun. The men packing the inn yard acted like castaways from a shipwreck, not the boisterous, cheerful strangers who filled Barca's Hamlet during the Sheep Fair.
Though the stable door was open, an overflow of horses kept the interior much warmer than the night outside. The animals whickered and occasionally made timbers creak by leaning against the sides of their stalls, but overall Ilna got a feeling of peace when she entered.
The door of the small office and tack room was closed. Snores through the panel proved the ostler was present and undisturbed. Unexpectedly, the light of an oil lamp wavered from the half-loft where Ilna and Alecto were to sleep.
“Alecto?” Ilna called. She didn't speak loudly, afraid to rouse either the horses or the ostler. He wouldn't be pleased to see an open flame in his hayloft; Ilna wasn't happy with her companion's idiocy either. Didn't the folk of Hartrag's village know that dried grass burns?
There wasn't an answer, but Ilna heard the rhythms of a voice chanting. Face set, she took the cords out of her sleeve and began knotting them as she climbed the simple ladder pegged to the stable wall.
The lamp hung from a truss in a loose web made from a bridle and a cord twisted from rye straw. Alecto had placed it so that it gave her the angle she wanted both on the figure she'd scribed on the wooden floor and the blade of the athame she used to reflect the gleam into the eyes of the man clumsily undressing before her.
Alecto was nude. Sweat from wizardry and the stables' warmth dripped down the valley between her breasts. She continued to chant, giving no sign that she saw or cared about Ilna's presence.
She'll run to fat in a few years! Ilna thought. And perhaps she would, but for the time being Alecto's body had a muscular lushness that Ilna could only envy.
The man was Lord Congin, the fellow they'd stopped on his way into the city. He'd given Alecto a look of disgust when he came out from under the spell she'd cast on him. Apparently she'd taken that as a challenge.
Ilna understood the wild girl's reaction. She'd have felt the same way under similar circumstances, not that the circumstances could possibly ever be similar.
“Let him go!” Ilna said. Seeing Alecto do this brought back memory of the lives Ilna os-Kenset had destroyed in Erdin in that way, using the skill a demon had taught her in Hell.
The lithe, sweating wild woman stopped chanting and looked at Ilna past Lord Congin's arm. She smiled, breathing hard. “Get your own, girl!" she said. “Or wait till I'm done with this one.”
“No,” said Ilna. She stepped forward, her hands forming a hollow before her. “Take however many men you want, but I won't let you use your art to do it.”
Alecto laughed like a cat wailing. “Fool!” she said. “How will you stop me?” She shifted the athame, sending the lamp's reflection across Ilna's face.
Bronze walls clanged around Ilna's mind. Every surface mirrored Alecto's cruelly laughing face. The walls slid closer, squeezing down on Ilna's selfhood.
She'd expected that from the wild girl, that or worse. Ilna no longer had conscious control of her actions, but her fingers were free. They opened, displaying to Alecto the pattern they'd knotted as Ilna climbed the stairs.
Ilna heard the scream. She tried to open her eyes and found they were already open, peering through a dissolving bronze haze.
Alecto's dagger clattered to the loft's plank floor. She pawed at her groin with both hands, shrieking, “What did you do? I've grown shut! I'm not a woman!”
“What?” bellowed Lord Congin. “Where am—what's going on here?”
He tried to walk and tripped over the linen breeches he'd been taking off when the power of the spell left him. His arms flailed. Only Ilna's quick grab kept Congin from knocking the lamp into the hay still baled around them.
“You—” Alecto cried.
Ilna slapped her, and said, “Be silent!”
Alecto flopped back. Her eyes were open, but she said nothing. She seemed stunned; not so much by the blow as by realizing that Ilna's power had easily overmastered hers.
“Get your clothes on and get out,” Ilna to Lord Congin. “No, on second thought, get out and take your clothes with you. Now!”
The half-dressed noble gaped at her, then stumbled to the ladder with his breeches and outer tunic dragging behind him. Ilna thought he was going to plunge headfirst to the stable floor, but he managed to get his feet under him after all. Small loss if he had broken his neck, of course.
“As for you,” she said to Alecto, “you'll be all right. Listen to what I say next time.”
“You said you weren't a wizard,” the wild girl whispered. She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek where Ilna had slapped her.
“I said you're not to use your art for that purpose,” Ilna snapped.
She was breathing hard and her right hand stung. Her fingers picked apart the knots of the pattern she held in her left hand. Her eyes held Alecto's; neither spoke.
“The moon'll be up soon,” Ilna said at last. “We'll watch where the leaders, the priests, go when they leave the temple tonight.”
“You said you weren't a wizard...” Alecto repeated, but her whisper was little more than the movement of her swollen lips.
* * *
Garric waited, smiling faintly and controlling his breathing in order to keep the other bandits calm. A cousin of Hame's was a watchman for this district of Durassa. He'd provided a key to this vacant shop and made sure he was nowhere around when the gang arrived after dark.
A single lamp wick burned in the side room where Metron made his final preparations and Vascay waited. The litter of flaking plaster, packing materials, and unglazed potsherds here in the front of the shop gave no hint of the business which had once been carried on in it.
“The Protectors're probably waiting for us to come out to grab us all,” Ademos said, glaring around the circle of his fellows. “If they could wait for us when we didn't know where we were going to land the boat, they'll sure know we're sitting here beside the Spike!”
“Metron said he was going to hide us from the Intercessor,” Hame said. He held four equal-sized lengths of bamboo, the ends coned male and female to lock into a continuous rod twenty feet long. He'd loosened the cor
d binding them so that his fingers could shift one rod over another repeatedly, as though he were plaiting cords into a rope.
Hame was as brave as the next man even in this company, but he knew his cropped ears marked him for execution if he were caught for a second time. That fear was working on him, though he'd volunteered to be one of the pair who waited at the base of the wall for Garric and his companions to return “Metron said,” Ademos sneered. “Metron! You trust him?”
Garric reached out. Ademos tried to jerk back but wasn't quick enough: Garric grabbed him by the throat.
“It could be that the world will end in the next moment, Ademos,” Garric said pleasantly. At his side Tint growled like a saw cutting stone.
Garric wasn't squeezing hard, but he knew the red-haired bandit could feel the fingers around his throat trembling with the emotions in Garric's blood. “It will surely end for you if you mouth any more silliness about what the Intercessor will do, or what Metron can do, or any other things of which you know absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”
Ademos nodded, his eyes wide. Garric released him.
“We Brethren don't fight amongst ourself,” Halophus muttered toward a wall from which the shelf pegs had been pulled.
“Shut up, Halophus,” Toster said; not angry, but not expecting an argument either.
Halophus didn't give him one. He forced an embarrassed smile and buffed the curve of his signal horn with a piece of cloth.
“By the Shepherd, I wish we was done with the business," Hakken said. As he spoke, his fingers checked the knots of the rope ladder to have something to do.
Red wizardlight bloomed, faded, then vanished in the side chamber. The flash seemed bright for the moment, but it didn't dim the vision of Garric's dark-adapted eyes. Vascay came out of the room, holding Metron's pendant by its silver chain.
“Here it is,” Vascay said. Garric couldn't see his face with the light behind him, but his voice sounded tired. “You'd better get moving.”
Garric stepped forward and took the pendant. Within the crystal was the tiny figure of Metron. He held his athame in one hand; with the thumb and forefinger of the other, he pinched what could only be the sapphire ring.
“Quickly!” squeaked a voice that Garric heard only in his mind. The image of Metron gestured with his athame.
“I can only remain conscious outside my body for a limited time!”
Garric hung the chain around his neck, his face impassive. The mount was in the shape of a spider whose legs encircled the crystal. The design repelled Garric, but he wasn't wearing it for the looks of the thing.
“Yes, let's go,” he said.
Mortised shutters gripped by interlocked iron rods closed the front of the shop. Toster at the pedestrian door put his hands to his mouth and squalled like a cat. Prada, on watch from the rooftop, squalled back a moment later.
Hame slipped out, carrying his rods in one hand and a hog's bladder of narcotic dust in the other. Garric followed with Tint pressing close to his side. In the street he glanced over his shoulder. Beyond Toster and Hakken, he saw Vascay waiting before he returned to watch over the wizard's soulless body in the other room. The chieftain bent sightly forward to massage his stump above the wooden leg.
The shop faced a well-travelled street, but only an alley separated the side from the Spike's ten-foot outer wall. The spot Garric and Vascay together had chosen looked the same in reality as it had when Metron formed the image. The stonework was still solid, but the stems of the wisteria climbing it were strong enough to allow even a clumsy man to reach the top. The vines couldn't hide a man by daylight, but at night they'd break up the outline of Hame and Toster as they waited for Garric's party to return.
Toster laced his hands into a stirrup. Garric stepped into the cup. Toster straightened like a catapult arm, lofting Garric knee high to the top of the wall. He caught himself by his hands, then curled his feet under him and waited.
Tint sprang to Garric's side with a rustle of foliage. She sniffed the garden below, and said, “Bad place, Gar. We leave now?”
Garric heard the piping voice of the wizard in his amulet, chanting words of power that rang as cold as starlight in his mind: "Dabathaa soumar soumarta max... .”
Hakken came up the wisteria, without Toster's boost but not as easily as Tint had. He looked over his shoulder, then lifted the bladder and bamboo rods by the thin cord tied to his leather belt.
The moon wouldn't rise for another quarter of the night, but stars in the clear sky gleamed from the tower and outlined the garden's varied plantings. Tint gripped Garric's shoulder with her right hand. With the other startlingly long arm she pointed into the clump of giant bromeliads directly beneath them. Her fingers gripped like a stonemason's tongs.
“Gar!” she said. “Gar! There, teeth!”
A funnel of red wizardlight formed in the air, pointing down into the bromeliads. For a moment Garric thought the light was the threat Tint warned of; then he realized it was Metron's wizardry duplicating what the beastgirl's nostrils and keen ears had already uncovered.
“A creature waits there,” Metron squeaked. “It heard you on the other side of the wall. Strike it down before you enter the garden.”
Garric reached over his shoulder and touched the hilt of his sword. He wore it across his back tonight, the scabbard's upper set of rings fastened to the top of a bandolier and the lower set lashed tightly to his belt. It was the way Carus had worn his blade on raids and in sea fights, where a scabbard hung in the ordinary fashion might have tangled with his legs... .
“Don't be a hero, Gar,” Hakken said sourly. He was fitting the bamboo rods together, balancing the whole on his knees as he squatted. “That's what we got this along for.”
“Gar go?” Tint said.
Garric lifted her fingers from his shoulder. He'd have bruises in the morning. “We're going to climb that tower, Tint,” he said. “We can't go till we've gotten Lord Thalemos out of the tower.”
He'd have bruises if he were alive in the morning. What would happen to the soul of Garric or-Reise if the body of Gar the Monkey Boy died here this night?
“Help me hold this,” Hakken directed. He'd put the four rods together and now was binding the hog's bladder onto one end with a twist of sinew. “I've never used this from up in the air like this. It's not heavy, but the length makes it seem more.”
“Where do you get the poison?” Garric said, holding his right arm out like a branch for Hakken to lay the bamboo across. The thin tube's leverage made it feel like a tree bole.
“Dust from cave mushrooms on the east of the island,” Hakken muttered as he adjusted the weapon. “Bloody rare, and bloody dangerous to gather, let me tell you. We took this bag from a District Commander of the Protectors. What he used it for I don't know, but he didn't need it after Hame cut his throat.”
“Get on with it!” Metron's attenuated voice demanded.
Hakken looked at the crystal. He raised his eyes to Garric's. “Shut him off, will you? Or by the Sister—”
Garric gestured with his free hand. “Get on with it,” he said curtly. “And Metron, don't make pointless noise.”
Hakken grimaced and sighted along the rod, bringing the free end directly under the cone of light. His eye still close to the slowly wobbling tube, he reached back with his left hand to the bladder and gave it a sharp squeeze.
Nothing seemed to happen. Garric frowned and opened his mouth to speak.
“Don't move!” Hakken snapped. “With the tube this long, it takes—”
A puff of dust, colorless in the starlight, spurted from the far end of the tube. It spread as it sank into the bromeliads.
“All right, let it go,” Hakken said, dropping his end of the bamboo. “And by the Lady's mercy, don't stir the stuff up when we get down.”
The bromeliads' sword-shaped leaves were so long the points curved back to the ground. They thrashed violently. Garric snatched at his sword hilt.
A creature lurched out. It
was the size of a man and walked on two legs, but its lizard tail balanced a head with a seawolf's long jaws. Garric felt Gar's fearful spirit cringe as the boy remembered the fangs that had pierced his brain.
The creature flopped forward. Its hind legs slashed the ground for a moment with claws like sickles; then it was still.
“Don't waste time!” Metron said. “Get me to the ground at once so that I can scry a path for you!”
In miniature, the wizard's voice had the tone and self-importance of an angry wren. Nasty little birds, wrens; egg-thieves and bullies when they could get away with it, though amusing to have around at times.
Hakken grimaced as he set the rope ladder's hooks on the face of the wall. Garric nodded and jumped to the ground without bothering to lower himself by his hands first. The turf was springy, and the modest drop wouldn't have mattered even with rock at the bottom. They didn't need the ladder to enter the garden—or for themselves, to leave it, unless one of them was badly injured—but there was no telling what condition Thalemos would be in if they freed him.
Garric grinned as Tint landed beside him, so lightly that she scarcely seemed to bend the grass. When they freed Thalemos; he'd chastened Ademos for negative speculations.
Hakken walked down the wall, gripping the ladder with his hands to fix the hooks properly. “Now what?” he whispered, looking around them.
Metron was already chanting. “We wait for him,” Garric said, curving his left index finger toward the crystal on his breast.
He drew the sword he'd sharpened carefully before the band left Thalemos' villa for the city. He'd wanted to go over it again as they waited in the shop, but he knew the blade was already as keen as he could make it. Further passes on the whetstone would only remove metal that he might need in the coming hours.
The grass curling over his bare feet had a warm, dry texture that surprised him. It didn't seem to be harmful—Tint would have reacted before now if it were—but it was an unpleasant contrast to the coolness he'd expected. Hakken didn't seem to notice, though the sailor'd worn a look of sour worry since they'd set off from the villa at dusk.