by David Drake
Ilna looked in the direction the smoke pointed: up a rocky slope, toward a notch some considerable distance above them. Dawn was painting the trees on the upper slopes. It wasn't an impossible journey, even in the absence of a visible path; but it wouldn't be an easy one.
“Can you walk?” she said to Alecto. “If you can, we should start now.”
The track they'd slept beside wasn't wide enough for wheeled vehicles; nothing passed this way to and from Donelle except pedestrians, pack mules, and herds being driven. That didn't surprise Ilna. Ever since the fall of the Old Kingdom, the only road into Barca's Hamlet had been as slight.
Still, with daylight there was the chance of traffic. The less the two of them were seen, the better their chance of escape.
“Of course I can walk!” Alecto said. “A little direction spell like that is nothing!”
Ilna didn't know whether her companion was posturing or if the effort of the spell really had been trivial. It didn't matter, of course.
“Let's go, then,” she said. She ripped off a chunk of the loaf she'd brought from the inn's kitchen. Alecto had already finished her portion: it was wheat bread, something the wild girl had never seen before they entered the city. She'd devoured it ravenously.
Alecto rose to her feet and stretched. “I'll lead,” she said. She raised an eyebrow, and added, “Unless you think you're better at following a trail than I am? Because it's no more than that, a trail that one or two people in a year come down to the city by.”
“Go on, then,” Ilna said with a brusk gesture. She ignored the longing expression Alecto gave the bread.
The slope was covered by mountain laurels, with widely spaced hardwoods where the soil was a little deeper. The shrubs weren't thorny, but their branches interwove in a tangle. Alecto picked as good a route as Ilna could imagine, but it was still hard going.
They paused in the notch. Water dripped from between layers of exposed rock, pooling in a hollow beneath before dribbling down the other side of the ridge. Alecto drank. Ilna tore the remainder of the loaf and gave half to her companion before she knelt to drink in turn.
Alecto was looking north when Ilna straightened, wiping her mouth. The direction they'd come from was wild enough, with only the narrow track—hidden from up here—to show the hand of men. On the far side there was even less to be seen. Enormous chestnuts and pines, bigger than anything Ilna had seen in the managed woodlands of the borough, stretched to the horizon.
Alecto swore bitterly and shivered. Ilna looked at her with a frown of surprise.
“I understand you not liking the city,” she said. Indeed, Ilna hated cities almost as much as the wild girl did, and for the same reasons: too many people, too much stone. “I thought you'd be pleased to be back in the wilderness.”
“This?” Alecto said harshly. “Trees like this are as bad as buildings! Where's the pastures, where're the farms? This is...”
She didn't have a word to finish the sentence, but her tone dripped with despair. Gently, really trying to help, Ilna said, “It's all part of the pattern, Alecto. Here the forest, there the sea... and the farms and villages woven through them, every strand in its place.”
Alecto looked at her with loathing. “Your patterns!” she said. “You and those fools in the temple there! You bind people, and they bind the Pack. You're just the same as they are!”
“Do you think so?” Ilna said. Her voice was a cold whisper, completely without emotion. She put the remainder of the loaf back in the bosom of her outer tunic. “I think we'd better go on now, mistress.”
“I don't like this place,” Alecto muttered as she started down the north slope. That was her idea of an apology, Ilna supposed.
She didn't need to apologize. Alecto was part of the pattern, just as Ilna herself was. Ilna could only wonder—she didn't assume, not when it was something good—whether the Weaver of the world's pattern was as skilled as a mortal might wish.
Instead of going down into the valley, Alecto led them to the west along the slope of the hill to their left. Ilna couldn't see any sign of a trail, but the wild girl gave every evidence of knowing what she was doing. Ilna didn't like her companion, but Alecto's skills were as real as Ilna's own.
Dead leaves and pine straw covered the ground so thickly that there was almost no undergrowth except where a mighty tree had fallen. The slope was steep, often a perfect diagonal, and the patches of visible soil were rocky. Despite that, the trees were of a grandeur beyond anything Ilna had seen or imagined.
She smiled faintly. Her brother would love this forest; wood was to Cashel what fabrics were to her. Of course, Cashel would be planning the best way to begin cutting these giants down.
“They don't come this way often,” Alecto said, speaking loud enough to be heard without turning her head. “Once or twice a year is all. Like peddlers coming through Hartrag's village, but here they were going down to the city, not coming up from it.”
“Are you following the track with your eyes?” Ilna asked. “Or are you using your art?”
“It's all one,” Alecto replied. “It's just finding the path, however you do it.”
Ilna scowled, but when she thought about it she decided that Alecto wasn't refusing to give a straight answer. To her, it was all the same. Alecto was no more sure of how she found the path than Ilna would know how she recognized a neighbor at a distance too great for eyes alone to make out features.
It was that talent that had taken Alecto into the dreamworld without a wizard in the waking world to put her there. The skill the Pack used in hunting down their prey must be similar.
Ahead of them was a narrow gap; a slab of rock had split, and the halves had tilted apart. Ilna stopped. When Alecto looked back at her, Ilna pointed, and said, “It's on the other side of that. The place we're looking for.”
Alecto scowled. “How do you know?” she asked.
Ilna shrugged. “The pattern,” she said. “It all connects here.”
Alecto sniffed. She led the way between the sheer walls of rock. On the other side, straggling across the steep slope, was a village of timber houses and a temple with fluted stone pillars.
Sharina lay with her cloak as blanket and ground sheet, looking at the stars. Tenoctris slept soundly on the sand beside her, her breath whistling in an even rhythm. Sharina was too weary to sleep, but the chance to stretch out at full length was a blessing she wouldn't have appreciated even a few days before.
The royal fleet had beached on a ragged circle of coral sand. Much of the nameless atoll would be underwater at high tide, but the vast array of ships and men was only halting here for a few hours. They'd crossed half the Inner Sea; they would cross the remainder before they got a real rest.
Sharina could have slept under a sail spread on spars, but the night was mild, and she saw no need of shelter. The force carried no unnecessary baggage: King Carus alone had a small tent for privacy. The rest of the assembly thought that was because he was their leader; Sharina and Tenoctris knew it was because the king's nights were tortured. Morale might have suffered if the troops learned the truth.
Driftwood fires spluttered at a dozen points around the sand. Most of the oarsmen weren't sailors but rather laborers recruited from Valles and the countryside. Among the thousands were many to whom the warmth and sparkle of a fire was more important than sleep.
The Blood Eagles who guarded the women and Carus in the tent beside them stood quietly, leaning on their spears and watching the night. These men had replaced the detachment who'd been on duty earlier; the strain of shipboard was as great on the Blood Eagles as on anybody else, so even they needed a chance to relax before boarding the vessels for the next stage of the voyage.
Carus shouted inside the leather tent. Sharina heard the sring! of his blade clearing the scabbard. The side panel bulged as the king thrashed against it.
Sharina jumped up. The guards had heard also, whirling with their weapons ready.
“I'll handle it!” Sharina said t
o the officer who stood with his sword drawn, reaching for the tent flap with his left hand. “Tenoctris!”
The tent could have slept four if they were good friends, but the roof was too low even at the center pole for Sharina to stand upright. There wasn't much light in the open air—the waxing moon had just risen—and the tent walls were opaque. She opened her mouth to cry, “Your highness—” and Carus had her throat in his big left hand.
A speck of wizardlight glittered in the air, then burst. A faint azure haze clung to the struts that supported the corners of the roof; under the present conditions it lighted the interior as well as a lamp would have done.
Carus relaxed his grip and wiped his hand on his tunic. “Sorry,” he said with a wry smile. He shuffled back from the flap. “Come in, won't you? Tenoctris—”
The old woman peered into the tent past Sharina's shoulder.
“—you come too.”
He sheathed his sword with a movement Sharina couldn't follow even though she'd watched him do it. She wondered how the king had been able to draw the weapon in the dark confines of the tent.
The glow was fading to blackness. Sharina saw the half gourd with fire-making tools in the corner beside the oil lamp. With the last of the light she struck the steel against the flint, spraying sparks into dried milkweed fluff twisted on a twig. When the tinder blazed up, she touched it to the lamp wick.
“Thanks,” said Carus with a kind of smile. “I do better with a flame than with the other kind of light.”
The smile grew broader and real. To Tenoctris he added, “Mind, I was glad of anything at all right then, mistress. And I'd guess Sharina was even more pleased to have it.”
“Very glad,” Sharina said as she hooked the lamp onto the wire hanger attached to a roof strut. She managed to grin so that her face wouldn't give away the fact that she'd thought in the moment Carus seized her that she was about to die.
“More dreams, your highness?” Tenoctris asked. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, looking worn. The wizard had saved Sharina's life—perhaps—by lighting the tent's interior when she did, but the effort required to do that out of a sound sleep had been considerable.
“The same dream,” Carus said, quietly but with a murderous scowl. “I thought it was as bad as it could be when it started, but it wasn't.”
His smile was real while it lasted, but it slumped after a moment into a blank expression that was without hope or any other emotion.
“There isn't as much of me left as there was before the dreams started, I'm afraid. And the moon's still waxing.”
Tenoctris drew a square in the tent's sand floor with her index ringer. Sharina couldn't read the words the old woman wrote around the four sides—the white coral sand filled in the marks as she drew them—but the crescent moon in the center of the figure was unmistakable.
She looked up at Carus apologetically. “Your highness?” she said. “Would you rather I go out—”
The king swept the offer away with his left hand. “Do what you need to do here,” he said. “It'll take more than a friend's spells to bother me tonight.”
Tenoctris looked around her, realizing that her satchel of paraphernalia was outside the tent. Sharina understood her need and offered the spill she'd used to light the lamp. Tenoctris nodded gratefully. Using the burnt twig as her wand, she tapped the four directions, chanting as she did so, “Nerxiarxin morotho thoepanam iothath... .”
Stabbing the wand down into the crescent she concluded, “Loulonel!”
Nothing happened.
Carus frowned. “Did something go wrong?” he asked. He spoke calmly, but Sharina had seen the muscles of his throat and cheeks draw up as Tenoctris intoned her spell.
Tenoctris smiled wearily. “Not at all,” she said. “You can go to sleep again, your highness. Nothing more will trouble you tonight.”
“Can I?” Carus said. He chuckled. “I think I'll leave the lamp lit, though. Till this is over, I'd better sleep with the lamp lit.”
He looked at the two women. His expression was drawn and very tired.
“I wouldn't run if I could, you know,” Carus said. “I never did. When somebody made himself my enemy, it was always going to be him or me. I never tried to talk things out, I just went for his throat. And in the end, of course, I met somebody who was better at that game than I was ... and I drowned, and the kingdom died.”
Sharina touched the back of the king's left hand. “You're not going to lose this time, your highness,” she whispered.
“No, I'm not,” said the ancient king. “Because if I lose this time, dears, I'll spend all eternity in the hands of those gray things in my nightmare. I don't know that I could stand that.”
Carus laughed loudly, as though he'd made a joke. To her horror, Sharina found herself laughing also. It was funny, if you were the sort of person who found it so.
The millipede's motion was remarkably soothing. The relatively tiny legs weren't visible from the creature's back. They worked so smoothly that Garric couldn't guess what the two pairs supporting the segment he stood on were doing at any given moment.
The long body curved around obstacles, but its general course was as straight as that of a ship on the open sea. An Archa seated between the compound eyes guided the beast by touching a golden rod to the joint between the head and the first body segment. One end of the rod was spiked, while the other was a stiff fan.
Metron and Thalemos were immediately behind the driver. The wizard sat cross-legged; he'd chalked a pattern on the millipede's calcified armor, but at the moment he was reading in a palm-sized codex instead of working an incantation. Thalemos viewed the moving landscape in silence and with a noble unconcern, but even at this distance Garric could see that the boy was tense.
Vascay was with the remainder of the band several segments up the body from Garric, checking Hame's wound. Finishing there, the chieftain walked carefully back. His peg didn't have as good a grip on the smooth, sloping surface as the bare feet of his Brethren.
The score or more of Archai riding the millipede had strung a lacework of gold chains across the creature's back, pegging it at intervals to the body armor. A man could grab the chains if he started to slide, but that would be undignified. Vascay couldn't expect to lose his dignity and still retain his position as chief.
The forest wove its patterns above them. The sky was almost never visible, but the giant grasses filtered down much of the light which the leaves and needle-thick limbs of normal trees would have absorbed. Occasionally Garric saw the waggling antennae of an insect on a high stem; and once there was a spider, built on the same scale as the millipede, which watched motionless as they wound their way past.
“So,” said Vascay in a normal speaking voice. He and Garric were the only humans on this body segment, though a trio of Archai worked with some golden apparatus of uncertain purpose beside them. “What do you think, lad? Of where we are and what we're doing?”
Garric grinned. “What we're doing,” he said, “is waiting for Master Metron to tell us what the next stage is. I can't say I find that a comfortable business, but neither do I see an alternative. And as for where we are—”
He looked around. A beetle bigger than any ox in the borough stared at them through the myriad facets of its eyes.
“—I'd rather it were elsewhere. Though as you said when we arrived here, it's healthier for us than Durassa with a regiment of Protectors trying to lift our heads.”
Vascay chuckled. He turned to look toward Metron at the front of the millipede. With a smile as cheerful as if he were sharing a further joke, the chief said, “I've been wondering what we'd learn if we staked out our wizard friend and started touching him up with a hot iron. Eh?”
“We wouldn't learn anything I'd be willing to trust,” Garric said. He didn't allow his distaste for the thought of torture to creep into his tone. “And I'm pretty sure we wouldn't learn how to get out of where we are now.”
The millipede was crossing low gr
ound; standing water reflected the creature's pale belly plates and the blur of its legs. The color of the forest had become the darker green of sedges. Though the millipede was so steady that it scarcely seemed to be moving, it covered the ground quickly.
“Aye, that's probably so,” Vascay agreed. “And of course there's our hard-shelled companions to consider as well—”
He turned his bland smile on the Archai sharing the segment with him and Garric. They'd erected a machine on spiderlike golden legs. One of the creatures turned a lever with its middle pair of arms; the other two watched intently as gears whirred in apparent pointlessness.
“—but if it were no more than that, I'd be willing to take the risk.”
“What's that sound?” Ademos called. He was among the dozen or so bandits standing on the third segment forward of Garric and Vascay. Some men were looking around in obvious concern; others just seemed puzzled.
“I don't hear anything,” Vascay said to Garric in a low voice.
“I do,” said Garric. “It's very high, a squeal or... It's like metal rubbing.”
Or worse. The instrument the Archai used to announce themselves had grated on Garric's nerves, but this felt like someone drilling behind his eyeballs.
The Archai heard it also. The one cranking the machine worked faster while a companion cluttered at him. The third Archa ran toward the rear of the millipede with stiff, jerky strides as though his legs were stilts. He disappeared at last, hidden by the creature's slow curves.
Metron and three Archai at the millipede's head began to argue in the insects' high-pitched form of speech. One of them was the driver, his triangular head rotated to face back over his narrow shoulders.
“Ready your weapons, boys!” Vascay called. “It looks like we're going to have some excitement.”
He stepped closer to Garric and gestured toward the millipede's tail with his javelin. “Any more Brethren down that way, lad?” he asked.