by David Drake
Garric turned and started forward. His sword was still in his hand.
“Bring them here!” Metron shouted hoarsely. “I've opened the way, but we've got to leave quickly.”
Garric looked over his shoulder. The wizard was trying to get to his feet, still holding up the ring so the candle-flame fell on it. The sapphire's facets scattered light in an oval of bright points against the plaster wall. For a moment Garric thought he was looking at the starry sky; then the pattern blurred into an outrushing void.
“I'll get them!” he said. He stepped into the main room.
The bandits hunched, facing the front wall of the shop. Echeon's men had battered through the center of the shutter, and the dovetailed vertical slats to either side slanted loose. Lanternlight from the street silhouetted the bandits and the men trying to fight their way in.
The Protectors were in half-armor, but the shop's lintel had tripped several of them. Their bodies lay in the opening, a fresh barrier for their fellows, and Mersrig had snatched up one of the fallen shields.
“Metron's got the way open!” Garric shouted.
A Protector gave wordless cry and rushed the opening, his shield held before him at arm's length. Toster met the charge, swinging his axe sideways to clear the low ceiling. The edge split the round of laminated wood with a crash, staggering the Protector. Two spearpoints and Hame's sword bit the man's knee and lower legs, bringing him down in screaming agony. His helmet rolled off; Ademos stabbed him through the back of his neck. None of his fellows had followed.
“The way's open!” Garric repeated. “Head for the back room! I'll hold them off!”
He didn't know why he'd said that, not consciously at any rate; it just didn't cross his mind that he wouldn't be the rear guard in this situation. The bandits were all familiar with weapons, but these tight quarters were sword territory. Garric was the only trained swordsmen among the Brethren... and besides, he was Prince Garric of Haft, descendent of Carus, the greatest ruler and man-of-war in the Old Kingdom.
A dozen Brethren looked at Garric, then scrambled toward Metron in the other chamber. They were the men on the fringes of the fight. There hadn't been room enough for the whole band in the opening. The Brethren had sorted themselves into those who wanted to face the first rush of Echeon's minions, and those who preferred someone else take that duty.
The others didn't retreat. Their blood was up, and they knew well that turning their backs now was likely to signal their own slaughter. The Protectors were massing in the street, in great numbers and under the control of officers who'd had time to assess the situation. Overhead, swords hacked at the roofing. Prada had barred the trapdoor when he came back down, but the tiles wouldn't last long under determined assault.
One-handed, Garric tugged the shield from a dead Protector's grip, tossed it up, and caught it by the paired handles in the center. It was a buckler, not a target that would've been strapped to the man's arm.
“Get into the back room!” Garric shouted. “Quickly, for the Lady's sake!”
“Stand clear!” said Vascay. “I'm going to throw out the last of the cave dust! That'll kill everybody in the street, and we can get away!”
“What!” shrieked Halophus. “Are you crazy?”
Vascay flung a bag overarm. The Brethren who faced the opening now scrambled back in panic. They knew how indiscriminately dangerous the spores were.
The Protectors stood in a double rank, their small shields held forward. As an officer shouted an order, the bag caught the upper edge of a shield and burst in a spray of dust. The men pushed away, screaming in fearful agony. Their serried order disintegrated as though a volcano had just erupted in their midst.
“Go, boy!” Vascay said, clapping Garric on the shoulder. “They'll figure out it was plaster fallen from the ceiling soon enough, and I don't want to be around when they do!”
Only three of the Brethren remained in the side chamber with Thalemos and Metron when Garric followed Vascay through the doorway. Toster stood beside the roiling blur where the wall had been, his face screwed up in terror. He started toward the vortex, then flinched back. His axe trembled; the head and upper helve were slick with Protectors' brains.
“Get through or get out of the way!” Metron screamed. “How long do you think I can hold this?”
Garric tossed down the shield he'd appropriated and sheathed his sword without difficulty. He stepped in front of Toster and backed the big man away, keeping his own body between Toster and the wizard-door.
With a hand behind his back, Garric gestured the other bandits to go. To Toster he said, “You saved my life when I came back over the wall, Toster. I was done up from what happened inside. Without you to take care of Thalemos for me, they'd have had me there in the street.”
Prada and Mersrig passed through the vortex, each pausing for a moment before jumping in. The void flashed with rose, then azure, wizardlight as the men vanished.
“Lord Thalemos!” Vascay said. “You're next! Except for you we could've stayed where we belonged.”
“I'm afraid,” Toster whimpered. “I won't do it! I won't do it!”
Thalemos shot Garric a look of uncertainty. Garric waved him fiercely on, afraid to turn away from Toster. Vascay grasped Thalemos by the waistband and the nape of the neck. He half walked, half threw the youth into the vortex ahead of his own entry.
Metron stood and stumbled toward the wall. When the sapphire no longer winked in the candlelight, the portal began to shrink. The wizard disappeared into it with the usual double flash. It continued shrinking.
Toster wore a short cape. Garric twisted the garment, then raised its cowl to blind the big man the way he'd have concealed fire from a terrified horse.
“Come on, Toster!” he shouted, holding the man by the left wrist and shoulder. “Run! With me!”
They lumbered forward, Toster sobbing like a child behind the thick wool. There was still a chance... .
“Now duck!” Garric cried, forcing down the big man's head at the same time he lowered his own. “And jump!”
It was like diving through a skin of ice over the mill-pond, hard and cutting and colder than life could bear. Garric tried to scream, but his flesh was a mist of atoms exploding across time and space. He had no being—
With a shuddering haste Garric was back in his body: gasping, lying on soft dirt in a forest like none he'd ever seen. He still held Toster. Around them were the other members of the band. Some—those who'd passed through early in the process—stood and looked nervously to their weapons.
Metron lay on his back. His expression was agonized, his eyes screwed shut. The ring was on his left middle finger. Without opening his eyes, he raised his hand so that the sapphire lay against the middle of his forehead. His right hand groped on his chest, then closed on the crystal amulet.
Vascay untangled himself from Lord Thalemos. Both men appeared to be all right, at least as much so as Garric himself was.
Sighing, Garric shoved himself onto his knees, then hunched upright. He could feel every part of himself; not just a finger, say, but every atom of skin and flesh and bone that formed each finger.
The pieces had been separate. Now they were joined again, were him again; but in the future Garric would never be able to forget their individual existences.
He looked around. The ground was mostly bare, but arching upward around him were clumps of flat-trunked green vegetation that hid most of the sky.
Something croaked. It sounded like a frog the size of an ox.
“You all right, Gar?” Vascay said. He still had one of his javelins. He used it butt-down as a cane as he got to his feet.
“Yeah,” Garric said. He gestured at the forest. “Vascay, these aren't trees. It's grass. We're in a field of grass.”
Vascay nodded agreeably, eyeing the landscape as he wiped loam from his javelin's butt spike. “Could be,” he said. “Could be. What I'm happiest to see now is that it's not grass full of Protectors, eh?”
Thalemos walked toward Garric and stopped a polite double pace away with his hands crossed behind him, waiting to be acknowledged. Vascay had turned his attention to the long cut along Hame's side.
“Lord Thalemos?” Garric said. “You want something of me?”
All the bandits were up, apparently unharmed by their passage to this place. Toster was using the edge of a giant grassblade to clean his axe. He saw Garric and gave him a shamefaced grin.
Toster had nothing to be ashamed of. Telling him so would only make his embarrassment worse, though.
“Yes, I'm Thalemos bor-Laminol,” the youth said. “Actually, what I wanted to do, sir, is introduce myself. And thank you for saving my life.”
He smiled shyly, and added, “Saving my life several times that I know of.”
“I'm Garric or-Reise,” Garric said. “Or you can call me Gar, as the Brethren do.”
He looked away as though to survey their surroundings. Thalemos as a person made quite a decent impression. The trouble was that when Garric looked closely at the youth, he saw instead Tint's terror-contorted face as she leaped toward the snake that would kill her.
“I, ah...” Thalemos said. “Master Garric, I won't keep you from your duties but, ah, I'm very grateful.”
In a rush, he added, “Metron wanted me to go through the portal immediately. I refused to go until you were ready, sir.”
Garric met the youth's eyes and managed to smile. “Because you thought Metron might not bother waiting for the rest of us if you were clear?” he said. “I'm glad that possibility occurred to you, milord. And that you chose to act on it.”
The strange forest was alive with sounds, none of which proceeded from an obvious source. Most of the notes were very low, more in the order of trembles felt through the ground than ordinary noises.
Vascay came over to Garric and Thalemos. He nodded toward Metron, the only member of the group still on the ground, and said to both men, “Is he all right?”
With a quirked smile he added to Thalemos, “And if he's not, do you know what we do next?”
“He'll come around, I guess,” Garric said. Metron hadn't moved from where he lay initially, but he'd clearly relaxed. “The art—wizardry—takes a lot out of people.”
He stretched mightily, noticing kinks in muscles where he hadn't expected them. He added, “So do other things, of course. I'll be feeling this day's work tomorrow.”
Garric grinned and—as King Carus would have—added, “Assuming I'm feeling anything tomorrow, of course.”
A sound like that of a cicada, immensely magnified, came from the side where the giant grass gave over to oak-thick briars reaching immeasurably skyward. Metron rose to one elbow, looking in that direction. Garric touched the hilt of his sword, remembering that he hadn't sharpened the blade after the hard service it'd seen carving through the serpent's scales and spine.
The call sounded again, measurably closer. The bandits bunched instinctively, readying their weapons. “Chief, something's coming!" Ademos said.
“Form a line between me and Gar,” Vascay said calmly. “Stay close but don't get in each other's way. Hame, you watch our back. This may all be a trick.”
He walked to the side, placing himself on the projected left end. Garric drew his sword and strode to a spot ten or a dozen double paces to the chief's right. One of the grass-blades, so large that Garric's spread arms would barely span it, rose behind him. He supposed it'd protect his back, though if the animals living in this place were on a scale with the vegetation ...
The call sounded a third time. A creature holding a tube with a plunger like an elongated butter churn stepped into sight twenty feet from Garric. It was six-limbed and chitinous, but it stood upright like a short man. It stopped when it saw the humans. Toster raised his axe in both hands and stepped forward.
“No!” cried Metron. “These are our allies. They'll guide and protect us for the rest of the way.”
Two more of the creatures minced out of the forest to join the first. These wore gorgets of beaten gold. They didn't speak. Could they speak?
“Wizard, what are you playing at?” Vascay shouted.
“Do you think I don't recognize them? They're the Archai! They're the monsters that brought down the New Kingdom after Prince Garric died on Tisamur!”
“Yes, they're the Archai,” Metron said, walking forward shakily. “But that's all in the past, Master Vascay. They're with us against the Intercessor, now. We can't succeed without their help.”
Garric looked from the wizard to the gang's chieftain. For the moment he felt nothing, nothing.
He couldn't have died on Tisamur: he'd never been on Tisamur in his life. But...
“Against the Intercessor?” Vascay said, stalking toward the wizard in the center of the line. His peg dug into the soft ground, causing him to limp. “Of course they're against the Intercessor, you fool! It was the Intercessor that kept the Archai from sweeping over Laut as they did all other islands of the kingdom! What are you thinking of?”
“That was a thousand years ago,” Metron said, facing Vascay but not raising his voice. “That was a different age, Master Vascay. We have the future of Laut and of the Isles to consider now. And our own future as well.”
He made a spreading gesture. The sapphire winked on his middle finger. “How do you propose to get out of this place? For myself, I know of no way save through the Archai's help ... and even then it will be hard, and very dangerous.”
The Archa with the tube held it high with one of his middle arms, balancing the upper portion between the saw-edged top limbs. The creatures didn't carry weapons, but their limbs alone were designed to kill.
He—She? It?—jerked down on the plunger. The tube vibrated another raucous shriek. Prada cocked a javelin, in reflex rather than as a conscious threat. Vascay touched the man to calm him.
“Well, Master Vascay?” Metron said, letting a sneer of superiority creep into his tone. “What shall it be?”
“Chief?” said Hame. Vascay looked at him.
“It wasn't these bugs as killed my wife,” Hame said. “It was Protectors did that.”
Vascay swore into the empty forest, quietly but with a tone and viciousness that Garric hadn't expected to hear from that man's lips. He looked at Metron again.
“All right,” Vascay said resignedly. “They're our allies. Now what?”
“It's already in hand, dear man,” the wizard said unctuously. “Our transportation is coming now.”
“Chief?” Halophus called. “The ground's shaking!”
“It's all right!” Metron said. “This is all planned!”
“By the Lady!” said Thalemos, standing near Garric but a comfortable distance behind and to the left. Since the youth didn't have a weapon, he properly kept back from the line of armed men. “What is that monster?”
It was twenty feet high and walked on more many-jointed legs than Garric could see or imagine. Most of the creature's squirming body was still hidden in the forest when the blunt head halted behind the trio of Archai; it must be hundreds of yards long. Two immense, multifaceted eyes covered most of the front; the mouth parts seemed small for the great body. A net of gold chain gleamed like a saddle blanket on the upper surface.
“It's a millipede,” Garric said. He was glad to have Thalemos to answer; otherwise, he'd have been talking to himself, because he needed to get the words out. “That's all it is, a big millipede. They don't bite or sting, they're harmless.”
The bandits edged closer together in the giant creature's presence. They weren't seeking so much protection as feeling the need of companionship in the face of the unimaginable. Mersrig had one of the Protectors' sturdy spears. He clutched it in both hands and seemed to be steeling himself for a rush.
Garric strode forward, putting himself in front of the party. He could smell the millipede, now; the millipede or the Archai themselves. There was a slight astringency, an acid odor similar to that of sour wine.
“It won't hurt us!
” Garric said to the Brethren. “They eat compost, that's all!”
It could step on them, of course; that would be as lethal as being in a collapsing building. But there were many ways a man could die... .
There were more Archai on the millipede's back, looking down over the smooth black curve of the armored segments. Their heads were triangular and expressionless.
Garric turned to the wizard. “What do we do now, Master Metron?” he asked.
“Do?” said Metron. “Why, mount our steed, of course, my boy. Under my guidance and protection, it will carry us to our destination.”
One of the Archai on the millipede's back let down a ladder with center-hung wooden rungs on a chain of gold links. It clanged and clattered against the calcified segments of the creature's shell.
Toster grabbed a rung, then looked back at Vascay. “Yes, go on!” the chief said. “What choice do we have?”
Toster started climbing. Another man took the ladder behind him; the whole band drifted into line to follow. The wizard smirked.
“Master Metron?” Garric said, smiling and speaking in a voice that only Thalemos was close enough to overhear.
“Yes, my boy?” Metron said.
“I'm not your boy, Master Metron,” Garric said, still wearing the deceptive smile. “I may be your ally, but I'm not your friend. And I'd like you to keep one thing in mind as we proceed.”
The wizard's expression hardened. “Yes?” he said.
“People have died tonight over this business,” Garric said. “Some of them were people I liked a lot more than I do you. And if I ever decide that you're sneering at my friends, either the dead ones or the living—I'll kill you. Whatever that does to anybody's plans. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Metron curtly.
“That's good...” said Garric with a smile. His body was trembling with emotions and memories. “Because part of me would really regret it afterward. But it would be afterward, you see.”
He gestured to the ladder. Vascay, the last of the Brethren, was climbing it. “Go on up, Master Metron. Thalemos and I will follow.”