by David Drake
Scoggin had an ordinary peasant's knife in his belt and a spear made by binding a similar knifeblade onto a short shaft. His eyes kept flicking to the axe; he carefully stayed beyond its reach.
He grimaced. "Mistress?" he blurted. "Are you human?"
"Of course I'm human!" Sharina said. Franca had returned from the woods and was sidling toward them, keeping Sharina between him and the stranger. "What did you think I was?"
Scoggin gestured toward the dead bear. "Mistress," he said, "I didn't know."
Sharina smiled despite herself. "Well, I am," she said. "I'm Sharina os-Reise. I was lucky and I've got a very sharp axe."
Franca crept close to Sharina's side, silent and shivering. How many people had the youth spoken to in the past nine years? Perhaps only his mother and Sharina herself.
She waggled Beard. The inlaid steel head was as bright as though she'd just polished it, though blood and brains smeared the helve-as they did her own forearms.
" I wouldn't say," she added coldly, remembering how Beard had tricked her into fighting the bear, "that owning this axe was necessarily part of my good luck."
"Mistress, it'll never happen again," the axe chirped. "Beard knows you'll feed him. He trusts you, mistress."
Scoggin stared at the axe in open amazement. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "It talks?" he said.
"Among other things," Sharina replied crisply. "Now, who else is living in Barca's Hamlet? If you're not sure, I want to search the town before we make further plans."
At the back of her mind she realized she was taking charge. Would she have done that six months ago, before she became 'Princess Sharina of Haft?'
She smiled. There was no way of telling, of course, but if she'd changed it was for the better. Given the shape this world was in, the people who'd been making decisions up till now could use some help.
Instead of answering, Scoggin stared in dawning horror and even backed a step. "Pardon, mistress," he said in a trembling voice, "but you're Sharina os-Reise? That would be the innkeeper's daughter?"
"Yes," Sharina said. Unexpected hope dawned. "You know my father? Is he-"
"Mistress, he'sdead," Scoggin said. "You'redead, everybody's dead who was in Barca's Hamlet the day She came! Mistress, who are you? Do you come from Her?"
Sharina sagged. Franca started to whimper and stroked her arm like a frightened kitten cuddling closer to its mother.
A fragment of memory returned to her. She looked at Scoggin and said, "You have a farm in the north of the borough, don't you? On Eiler's Creek?"
Scoggin frowned, but the homely question seemed to relax him. "Aye, I did," he said. "There's no farms now, just scrape for a meal and hope something bigger doesn't find you first; but that was my farm."
"Well," said Sharina, "I'm not the woman you're thinking of; but in another-place, I suppose, or maybe time. Anyway, I was somebody very like the person you mean. I'm not a ghost or a demon, either one."
She took a deep breath and managed a tremulous smile. "What I particularlyam now," she said, "is hungry. I suppose we could cut chunks off this bear, but if you've got something else, Master Scoggin, I'd prefer to leave the bear until I'm a little more distant from awareness of just whathe ate."
Scoggin smiled also. "I've a line of snares," he said. "I make a circuit of the borough from here to my old farm in the course of a year, so I don't hunt anyplace out. I just shifted here last night, so there should be plenty for three."
He turned and started toward the ruined inn. "I never saw anything like that bear before," he muttered. "If there's more of them, I don't know what I'll do. Unless you…?"
He looked at Sharina in sudden speculation.
"I don't know what my plans will be until I learn more about this world," Sharina said in a mixture of amusement and irritation. "I don't think it will involve creeping about eating rabbits and watching the ice grow thicker, though."
Scoggin looked away in embarrassment and cleared his throat. A man who'd stayed alive for the past decade by dealing with short term problems couldn't be blamed for continuing to think that way, Sharina realized. Aloud she said, "Were you in Barca's Hamlet when She came, Scoggin? If you don't mind telling me."
"I don't mind," he said. "You saved my life." But he didn't answer for several long moments.
The brick wall and gateposts on the south side of the innyard had fallen inward, but the culvert under the entrance lane remained. Scoggin knelt beside it and fished out a line of willowbark. The rabbit he'd noosed there had already strangled; he popped it into his game pouch and reset the snare.
"I was coming into town that day," Scoggin said at last. "From midnight on there'd been lightning, I thought it was, and my sheep wouldn't settle down."
He looked at her. "It wasn't lightning," he said. "I know that now. It's in the sky all the time now."
"Yes," said Sharina. "But of course you wouldn't have known that. Go on."
"I set off before dawn," Scoggin said, squatting at a snare across the mouth of a run through brambles along the fallen wall. This one was empty. "I left the sheep with my cousin and his wife; he owned the farm with me and his wife kept house for both of us. I was going to pick up some ale, that was all; for the house and for me."
Scoggin moved to the next snare, at the mouth of what had been a window of the inn's foundation course. Though the building had collapsed into a mound of rubble, the opening was still a trackway for small animals.
The set-a noose of twine with willow springs to snatch it tight when tripped-was obviously empty, but Scoggin knelt by it anyway. He was operating by rote while his conscious mind tried to deal with things he'd kept buried during the past long years.
Still kneeling, he turned his face to Sharina and went on in a stronger voice, "I heard the noise when I got to the big sheepfold. You know where that is?"
"Yes," Sharina said, nodding. The broad stone enclosure on high ground north of the hamlet's first buildings was used to count flocks for drovers taking them out of the borough. It was normally empty.
"I waited there," Scoggin said. "I didn't know what was happening. It sounded like screams and crashing… which I guess it was, but I couldn't believe it then. I waited at the sheepfold, just notcomfortable, you know?"
"Yes," said Sharina. She knew very well.
"I couldn't see the houses because the track curves," Scoggin went on, "but something lifted high enough I could see it. It looked like a beetle grub, only it had a man in its jaws. It was huge, just huge."
He grimaced and stared at the ground. "I don't know who he was, that man," he said. "It didn't matter, it was all of them before it was over. It was near over then, I guess, because a pack of things came up the track heading north. I heard them coming and hid in the brush, so they went past. Some were giants and some looked more like men; but they weren't."
Franca was crying openly now, his head in his hands. Scoggin's description must have been much like what happened in Penninvale a year later. Given the sort of destruction Sharina had seen in Carcosa, events there had followed the same pattern if on a larger scale.
"I started back," Scoggin said. He licked his lips. "Keeping in the woods. I'd seen the, them, going north. I didn't know what to do. They'd been to the farm and gone on by the time I got there. It was-"
He turned his hands up helplessly. "Everything was dead. Everybody was dead."
Scoggin rose and walked to where the curb in the center of the innyard had been knocked into the well it was meant to protect. The snare he'd set there had caught another rabbit; it was still struggling.
"Mine!" Beard called, but Scoggin snapped the animal's neck obliviously and bagged it. He was still operating by reflex, though he seemed calmer now than he had when he began speaking.
"I've been hiding in the woods ever since," Scoggin said. He was limping slightly; perhaps from the bear's swipe, perhaps from older injuries; now that Sharina had been with him for a time, she saw that Scoggin's left arm was croo
ked where a broken bone had been ill set. "The big packs have gone away-"
His face stiffened. "I thought they had, anyway, because there was nobody left to hunt. The bear, though-that was new. I don't know what it means."
"How did the Hunters arrive here, do you know?" Sharina asked. Her eyes instinctively searched the rubble for bones. There wouldn't be any, of course; the voles would've gnawed them all away in a single winter, let alone a decade. What her mind knew was one thing; what her heart feared was another.
"Oh, yes," Scoggin said. "It was on the shore, a tunnel of light. It was purple but solid. It was there for years after, but it finally faded away."
"Show me," said Sharina, walking toward the Old Kingdom seawall that protected the east side of Barca's Hamlet from the winter storms that wracked the Inner Sea. She looked out, expecting the view she'd seen every morning when she awakened in her garret bedroom.
The sea had vanished.
She must have gasped. Scoggin looked at her, misunderstanding the surprise, and said, "Yeah, that was Cranmer; he must've touched the side of the tunnel. He froze so solid that he didn't even start to thaw for years, and there's still his hand and some of his arm left."
Scoggin meant the pice of debris on the foreshore. Sharina had taken it for the driftwood and dismissed it from consideration.
"But thesea," she said; and then she found it, a glittering line on the horizon. It had drawn back miles from the familiar shore, leaving a waste of shingle which brush and coarse grasses were beginning to colonize.
"Oh, that," Scoggin said. "Yeah, it's been drying up ever since She came."
He shivered. "That's all right with me," he added. "There were things out in the water the first year or two, huge snakes. The farther away they keep from the land, the better I like it."
"It's the ice," said Beard. "It has to come from somewhere, you know. The sea becomes ice and the ice covers the land… but first there'll be more blood for Beard to drink, much more blood."
"What's that?" said Sharina, pointing south toward the glitter just visible beyond the curve of the seawall. She started in that direction, clambering over the rubble of what had been the stables at the back of the innyard.
"What?" said Scoggin. He leaned outward, learning as Sharina had already realized that he couldn't see much from where they stood. "It was never here before. It might be danger…"
He let his voice trail off and followed. To Sharina it didn't look any more or less hostile than the rest of this horrible place, and it was at least a change from stark ruins.
The seawall sloped back a foot for each of the twelve feet it rose from what had been sea level at a spring tide. At its base, drawn up on the rocky beach, was a framework of crystal rods which gleamed with more light than that of the hazy sun.
"It's a ship!" Sharina said. Though it couldn't be an ordinary ship: the rods outlined a vessel but didn't form solid ribs and bulwarks. The lines were too clear for her to doubt her instinct, though.
"But it's up on land," said Scoggin. "And I would've seen it if it's been here even last night!"
Sharina side-stepped down the seawall, touching the stone with her left hand in case she slipped. Beard, chuckling merrily to himself, was in her right. Franca crawled down the slope behind her, but Scoggin stayed at the top wearing a worried frown.
Sharina touched a crystal with the butt of the axe. It made a fainttick, more like stone than metal. A shimmer of light, too faint to have color, connected the rods like the skin of a soap bubble.
Scoggin cried out. He jumped down the slope, then turned to face upward with his spear raised.
"Mistress!" Beard shouted. "Mistress! We're-"
A line of men appeared on the seawall, looking down at Sharina and her companions. There were some twenty of them. Most carried bows with nocked arrows; several were already half-drawn.
"-attacked!"
"Good day, sirs!" Sharina called, holding the axe crosswise at waist level. Beard was no threat to the archers above them. "I'm Sharina os-Reise and these are my friends. May I ask who you are?"
Another man hobbled into sight, leaning on a staff of carved whalebone. He wore a short black cape and a peaked cap, both made of what looked like lustrous velvet. He gave Sharina a look of satisfaction; his staff sizzled against the ground with scarlet wizardlight.
"Ask or not," said the fellow, "I will tell you: I'm Alfdan the Great. Now, set the axe down and move away from it. Otherwise I'll have my men shoot you down and take it from your body."
Alfdan gave a cackle of triumph. "I've been waiting under my Cape of Shadows for almost a day but it's worth the effort-now that I have the axe!"
"Shall we attack, mistress?" Beard whispered. "Mistress, what shall we do?"
The archers began drawing their bows.
***
"Sail!" called the lookout at theDefender 's masthead. "She's a big one, she is!"
"Hey Lusius!" Rincip shouted from the stern. "The timing's right for the Valles ship that turned us down on Pandah. What d'ye want to do?"
"Bring us alongside so I can speak to her captain," Lusius said. His glance fell on Chalcus. With a nod and a half smile, he went on, "No, by the Sister, I'll go aboard and see if I can talk sense into him. And perhaps-"
His smile broadened.
"-our guests would care to board with me?"
"Yes," said Ilna before Chalcus could speak. Lusius was playing with them, pretending to conceal nothing about what was going on in the Strait. All Ilna was sure of was that the Commander was lying. She wasn't about to make the mistake of thinking he had nothing to hide in what he offered freely to show.
Petty officers relayed Rincip's shouted orders to the crew. The Sea Guards were manning both benches again, though their wicker shields cluttered the central aisle. You couldn't get between bow and stern except by walking on the rail itself-easy for Chalcus but probably beyond what most of this crew could manage. After watching the winged men attack, the ability to move around the vessel was less important to them-and their officers-than having protection immediately available.
"'Turned you down at Pandah', Master Rincip said?" Chalcus said with an eyebrow raised in question.
"That's right," Lusius said with the falsely open expression Ilna had come to recognize. "I keep a detachment on Pandah so that the ships stopping there to buy supplies can take on Sea Guards as well if they're heading for the Strait. I have a boat meet them to take my men off when they're past the Calves and out of danger."
TheDefender was closing rapidly with the sailing vessel coming from the northeast. It wasn't as big as the hulks Sidras used as warehouses, but it was an impressively large ship nonetheless; it moved with the wallowing heaviness of a horse swimming. The men who lined the forward railing wore helmets and held spears.
"Lay to!" Lusius bellowed through his cupped hands. "The Commander of the Strait is coming aboard!"
"Will they obey?" Ilna asked.
"They'd best!" Lusius snarled. He must have thought his tone had been too open; he flashed his false smile again and added, "Not that any honest captain would refuse, you see?"
As he spoke, the freighter's huge square sail flapped loose, then began to flutter up to the spar. Horizontal wooden rods-battens-stiffened the fabric. The ship continued to slosh through the swell; it was far too heavy to do anything quickly.
"Why wouldn't a captain choose to have Sea Guards on board when he runs the Strait, Commander?" Chalcus said mildly. "If you don't mind my asking, of course."
Lusius made a sound that was half grunt, half throat-clearing. "There's some that claim the charges are high," he said while keeping his face toward the freighter so he didn't have to look at his guests. "They don't appreciate how much it costs to maintain the patrols."
Suddenly belligerent, he glared at Chalcus. "I have to fund it all myself, you know!" he said. "Not a stiver comes from the Count's treasury. That is, from the Prince, as I now serve him directly."
"Everything has a c
ost," said Chalcus, nodding as though in agreement. "That's the way of the world, Commander."
"You're bloody well right it is!" Lusius said. "And I'll tell you something else-not one ship with my men aboard has been taken by the Rua! If they want to risk the run themselves, well, it's no fault of mine if they all get their throats slit by demons, is it?"
"None whatever," Chalcus said. He laughed, a cheerful sound to someone who didn't know him as well as Ilna did; and cheerful to her as well, because it didn't bother her to learn that Chalcus viewed the Commander as prey.
TheDefender turned to starboard, doubling back to match speed with the larger ship as they came alongside. One of the freighter's crewmen tossed down a ladder of rope with wooden rungs; Chalcus caught it and used his foot to lock the lowest rung to theDefender 's railing. The freighter's deck was at least twice a man's height above the patrol vessel's, so boarding her without the crew's help-let alone against their resistance-would be extremely difficult.
"After you, Commander," Chalcus said politely. Lusius grunted and scrambled up. He'd eaten and drunk too much for too long to be fit, but he remained a strong man despite his dissipation.
Ilna followed, knowing that Chalcus wouldn't release the bottom of the ladder until she was safely on deck. The side-ropes were made of some coarse fiber, unfamiliar to her. As she climbed, gripping the ropes, she felt images of sun-blasted badlands where the dust blew about plants whose leaves were clumps of daggers.
She clambered over the railing to find herself midway along the big vessel's deck. A forest of heavy ropes slanted upward to brace the single mast, and the boat in the chocks forward was larger than the vessels in the Terness fishing fleet.
Chalcus sprang to the deck beside her. He landed on the balls of his feet, then touched Ilna's elbow to warn of his presence.
Lusius was facing a middle-aged man in a serviceable tunic of blue wool and a younger, softer fellow wearing silk and a thick gold seal ring. The spearmen stood to either side of them, Blaise armsmen with hooked swords in belt scabbards and tattoos on their right forearms.