by David Drake
All that mattered to Ilna was the killing. When she’d killed all the cat men in this world, she didn’t know what she’d do. Die, she hoped, because her life would no longer have purpose.
Asion joined them, holding the staff of his sling in his right hand and cupping the pocket and bullet in his left. “Have you guys noticed the pond?” he said with a frown in his voice. “Why did they do that, d’ye think? Throw the plants in?”
The little temple was set up three steps from the ground. Forsythias grew around both it and the small, round pool in front of the building. Several bushes had been pulled up by the roots and thrown into the water. The men who’d done that had mortal wounds, clearly. One of them lay on the curb with a yellow-flowered branch clutched in a death grip.
“Why do they have a pond there anyway?” said Karpos. “Are they raising fish? It’s too small.”
“I don’t know,” Ilna said. She didn’t add to the statement, because there was nothing to add and she saw no point in wasting her breath. “Let’s go on, then.”
The pool surprised her as well, though she didn’t bother saying so. Ilna hadn’t seen a temple till she left Barca’s Hamlet some two years—or a lifetime—before, but there’d been plenty of them in the cities she’d passed through since then. Ilna didn’t pay particular attention to buildings, but she had an eye for patterns. She’d certainly have made note of a temple facing a pool if she’d seen one. This was the first.
Karpos knelt and placed his right index and middle fingers to the throat of the first corpse, a man lying on his back. The fellow’s hair was white, as much of it as was left; his forehead rose to the peak of his scalp. His face was as calm as if he’d been praying, though the wounds that’d killed him—three deep stabs in the lower body and a slash that’d broken the bone of his upper right arm—must’ve been extremely painful.
“Dead since daybreak,” Karpos said, rising and touching the bowstring again. “Maybe a little longer, but not much.”
Ilna looked into the pool, her face frozen into a deliberate lack of expression in place of her usual guarded silence. The water was clear and so shallow that she could see the narrow crevices between the stone blocks paving the bottom. Forsythia stems cast jagged shadows, and there were smears where mud’d washed from the roots of the plants.
“He was a tough bastard, I give him that,” Asion said, his voice oddly gentle. He nodded to the corpse on the coping of the pool. “He had to crawl most a the way. Look at the trail.”
“Yes,” said Ilna. “I noticed.”
All the corpses were at least middle-aged; this fellow was older yet. To look at, he seemed soft if not precisely fat; the sort of man who did no more work than he had to and was readier to lift a tankard than a hoe.
Perhaps that had been true. The man’s last living act, however, had been to pull a full-sized bush out of the ground and drag it ten double paces to the pool while his intestines spilled out in coils behind him. He’d been laid open as if by a cleaver, but he hadn’t quit until he was dead.
“Mistress?” Karpos said. He sounded puzzled and therefore worried; people who accept great danger as a fact of life become concerned when faced with things they don’t understand; they knew all too well what might be hiding within the unknown. “The cat didn’t kill this fellow. It was a blade did this.”
“The Coerli had weapons,” Ilna said harshly. She turned from the body and the pool. “The survivors took them away. There’s nothing amazing about that!”
“Then who was this cat chewing on?” the hunter said, pointing to the dead Corl. “Look at his muzzle, the blood and—”
He saw Ilna’s face and swallowed. “Sorry, mistress,” he mumbled in a small voice. “I guess it was the cats.”
“Mistress, who’s this fellow?” said Asion from the steps up the front of the temple. Most of the bodies were there in a ragged pile. “What is he, I mean?”
Asion had stuck his sling beneath his belt to get it out of the way, drawing instead his long steel knife; that was a better weapon for a close-in tangle with anything that pounced on him from the temple. With his free hand he dragged a corpse out by the ankle.
The corpse of a man, Ilna assumed; but its chest was abnormally deep, its belly smaller and flatter than a corseted woman’s, and its skin had the smooth black gleam of polished coal. Its genitals were very small.
The corpse was nude except for the round metal shield hanging from a neck strap; its right hand death-gripped the hilt of a sword that looked serviceable for either slashing or stabbing. It could easily have been the weapon which’d killed both the white-robed humans and the Coerli … and the fellow’s throat had been worried through by what were almost certainly a cat man’s long jaws.
“There’s more blacks under here,” Asion said. “Three or four, I’d guess.”
“I don’t know who they are,” Ilna said coldly. She was angry at the hunter for asking a question that she couldn’t answer, and even more angry with herself for not having said so at once instead of forcing her companions to wait.
She walked toward the temple entrance, skirting the corpses. “And it appears that the weapons were in the hands of the blacks, whoever they are,” she added, though by this point she did so merely as a public admission of her mistake; the hunters already knew she’d been wrong. “Not the Coerli.”
Ilna disliked stone. The rational part of her mind knew she was being silly to think that stone disliked her as well; but not all of her mind was rational and she did think that, feel it deep in her bones. She walked up the leveling courses and onto the porch, smiling at the cool gray slabs beneath her feet.
I’m walking on you, she thought. And I’m fool enough to think you know that.
Despite being stone, it was a very attractive building. The porch extended on all four sides, supported on fluted columns. The temple proper had solid sidewalls but only two more columns at the front. Ilna walked between them and into the main room. There were hints of intricate carvings just under the roof, but the only light came through the entrance behind her.
At the far end were two statues on square stone bases: an inhumanly serene woman and a female Corl. The round base between them was empty; the statue, a nude man, had fallen forward onto the floor.
“Hey, why’re they praying to a cat man?” said Karpos. His voice startled her; her attention had been so focused on the statues that she hadn’t heard the whisper of his deerskin-clad feet entering the temple behind her.
“It’s probably the Sister,” Ilna said. “The Lady and the Sister, the Queen of Heaven and the Queen of the Dead.”
She looked at the image of the Corl again. “Or perhaps a demon. If there’re any of these people left alive, we can ask them.”
“Not a soul,” Karpos said. “Asion’s looking around more, but we’d’ve heard something by now besides the goats if there was anybody.”
He didn’t sound concerned. The hunters weren’t cruel men, but they were hard and even in life the folk of this community had meant nothing to them.
“Why’d they make the Sister a Corl?” Karpos added, scratching his left eyebrow with the tip of his bow. “I never seen that.”
“Do I look like a priest?” Ilna snapped. “Anyway, I said it might be a demon.”
She knelt, peering at the base supporting the Lady’s statue. Her eyes had adapted to the dimness well enough to see that carved on it was an image of the Shepherd, the Lady’s consort. He held his staff ready to repel the hulking, long-armed ogres attacking from both sides. The base beneath the female Corl had a similar scene, a Corl chieftain with a flaring mane who raised his knob-headed cudgel as winged, serpent-bodied creatures threatened him.
The base from which the male statue’d fallen was plain. Ilna rose to her feet, frowning. “There’s nothing here,” she said. “We’ll check the living quarters before we decide what to do next. There’s huts on the other slope.”
Someone groaned at Ilna’s feet. She jumped back.
“Sister take me, mistress!” Karpos said, pointing his drawn bow at the figure on the floor. “That’s not a statue! It’s a man!”
GARRIC, RULER OF the Isles, faced the largest city of the Coerli. The cat men called it simply the Place, because its ten thousand residents made it unique among a race which generally grouped itself into hunting bands of a dozen or two. When the Change merged eras, it’d wrenched the Place to within twenty miles of Valles, the capital of the Isles.
“Coerli, send out your champion!” Garric shouted. He was the only human who was fluent in the cat men’s language, though he’d set scores of clerks and army officers to learning the patterns of clicks and hisses. “Send him to fight me, or send your Council of Elders to surrender!”
“Or we could simply deal with the cat beasts the way I would’ve in my time, lad,” said the ghost sharing Garric’s mind: King Carus, his ancestor and advisor. “Burn the city down and slaughter any of the animals who live through the fire. And go on to the next city and do the same.”
Tenoctris says we need them, Garric thought. And if she’d said we needed to ally with apes in the trees on Shengy, I’d be down there in the jungle waving bananas and chittering.
The image of the tall, tanned king in Garric’s mind threw back his head and laughed. “Aye, lad,” Carus said. “And you’d be right to, of course. But sooner monkeys than cats who’d eat men if we let them.”
If, Garric repeated with emphasis. His smile and the king’s both widened grimly.
Ornifal and the other isles of the kingdom were now a chain of highlands surrounding a great continent. The land hadn’t risen in the sense that earthquakes and volcanoes sometimes lifted an island out of the sea—or sank one to the depths with the cities upon it, leaving their doomed, screaming residents to thrash in the boiling waves. The Change had welded the Isles of Garric’s day in a ring which clamped together periods in which the Inner Sea was dry land.
A better term would be fragments of periods. Tenoctris, the wizard whose arrival in the surf off Barca’s Hamlet had been the first of the events rushing Garric’s quiet world toward catastrophe, said she thought at least twenty eras had been thrown together, spanning at least that many thousands of years.
Tenoctris insisted she wasn’t a powerful wizard, but her care and impeccable judgment had saved the kingdom repeatedly where someone with greater strength and less wisdom would’ve added to the looming disaster. Garric had more confidence in a guess by Tenoctris than he did in tomorrow’s sunrise. There’d been times in the past two years that the sun wouldn’t have risen the next day, for Garric or the kingdom or for all mankind, if it hadn’t been for the old wizard’s skill.
Coerli warriors shrieked from the walls of the Place as the gates shuddered outward. The trumpeters and cornicenes of the royal army brayed a brassy response, and the massed ranks of soldiers shouted and clashed spears against their shields.
“We could cut right through the beasts,” Carus mused regretfully. “Cut and burn and wipe them off the face of the world. But we’ll do as Tenoctris says.”
And we’ll kill this Corl, Garric thought. So that the rest believe me when I tell them they have no choice but to obey the laws we humans set them.
Human slaves finished pushing the gate open; they scuttled back within the walls.
The Coerli used men the way men used oxen. Garric’s eyes narrowed, but six naked slaves forced to shove on gate leaves wasn’t the worst injustice taking place in the world. Worse things were happening a thousand times every day in human cities and on human estates.
But the Coerli ate men, just as surely as men ate beef. That would’ve been sufficient reason to handle the problem in the fashion Carus wanted, if the cat men had balked at Garric’s offer of trial by battle.
The Coerli shrieked louder. A Corl chieftain, the biggest cat man Garric had thus far seen, swaggered out of the city. He paused just beyond the open gate leaves and, raising his maned head, bugled a menacing challenge of coughs and screams.
“I am Klagan!” the cat man cried. Garric could hear the Corl even through the brazen cacophony of the royal army. “No one can stand against me!”
“Wait and see, beast,” said Carus with murderous relish. “You and your Council of Elders don’t know what you’re in for!”
Carus’d been the ruler of the Old Kingdom when it crashed into anarchy a thousand years before his distant descendant Garric was born. There’d never been a warrior the equal of Carus. If generalship and a strong sword arm could’ve preserved civilization, then the Old Kingdom would still be standing.
Kingship requires more than military might, though. The anger and furious drive that’d made Carus unstoppable on the battlefield were as much the cause of his kingdom’s collapse as the rebels and usurpers springing up whenever the royal army was at a distance. Eventually a wizard had sucked Carus and his fleet to their doom in the depths of the Inner Sea; and because the wizard’s trust in his power had been as deceiving as Carus’ own, they’d drowned together in the cataclysm.
The wizard’s death hadn’t saved the kingdom, though. When death loosed the king’s hand, chaos, blood, and burning had followed for all the islands. It’d taken a thousand years for civilization to return—and now the Change threatened to bring chaos in a different form.
The Elders know what’s going to happen, Garric said silently as he stretched, feeling his mail shirt ripple like water over the suede jerkin cushioning it. I offered them an excuse to permit them to surrender, and they snapped it up. Otherwise every Corl in the Place will die, and they know that too.
He chuckled aloud, then added, Klagan may not know, of course.
“He will,” said Carus. “Very soon he will.”
Garric stood ahead of the front ranks of his army by a double pace, the distance from the toe of a marching soldier’s right foot to where that toe came down again—five feet by civilian measurement. The timber walls of the Place were only a hundred double paces away, suicidally close if they’d have been defended by humans with bows and catapults.
The Coerli were quick enough to dodge thrown spears and even arrows, so they’d never developed missile weapons for warfare. They didn’t use them in hunting either; they ran down their prey, tangled it with weighted lines, and either slaughtered it immediately or drove it back to their keeps to keep it fresh for their females and kits.
The Coerli’s preferred prey had been human beings until the Change. That wouldn’t be the case for the cat men whom Garric and his government permitted to live in this new world.
“I am Klagan!” the Corl repeated. “Who dares to challenge me?”
“I am Garric, King of Men and Coerli!” Garric shouted. “Bow to me or die, Klagan!”
The chiefs of the Coerli were half again as heavy as the sexually immature warriors who made up the bulk of the male population. Even the chieftains were usually no more than the size of an average human male.
Klagan was an exception; but then, so was Garric. He’d been the tallest man in Barca’s Hamlet by a hand’s breadth and, though rangy, would’ve been the strongest as well were it not for his friend Cashel. Cashel was tall by normal standards, but he was so broad that he looked squat from any distance; and even for as big as he was, Cashel was disproportionately strong.
The Corl champion raised his mace and screamed. He started toward Garric with a springy step, which for a Corl showed unusual caution. Normally a cat man would charge headlong, even though in this case it meant he’d be rushing into ten thousand human soldiers.
“I do not fear your weapons, beast!” Klagan shouted; which meant he did. He had reason to.
The Coerli didn’t use fire and therefore didn’t have metal. The stone head of Klagan’s mace was the size of Garric’s fist, and the warrior’s leather harness, the only garment he wore, held a pair of poniards. One was hard wood, while the other’d been ground from a human thighbone. They were needle sharp, but they didn’t have edges and they’d splinter on armor. In Klagan’s
left hand was a thirty-foot coil of tough vegetable fiber, weighted with a ball of sun-dried clay in which hooked thorns were set to snatch and tear.
“And his teeth, lad,” Carus noted with the calm assurance of a warrior who never underestimated a foe, and who’d never failed to win his fight regardless. “We’ll not forget his teeth.”
“I don’t need steel to kill you, Klagan!” Garric said. He lifted off his helmet, a work of art whose gilt wings flared widely to either side. He brandished it in the air, then set it on one of the pair of posts which a squad of his troops had hammered into the soil while the Coerli Elders deliberated on Garric’s ultimatum. “You’ll surrender or you’ll die! Those are the only choices Coerli have in this world that humans rule!”
Garric unbuckled his heavy waist belt. The dagger sheathed on his right side partially balanced the sword on his left, but a thinner strap over his right shoulder supported the rest of the sword’s weight. Keeping his eyes on the Corl, Garric pulled the harness over his head and hung it on the crossbar of the post already holding his helmet.
“What are you doing, beast?” Klagan called. “Have you come to fight me or not? I am Klagan! I fear no one!”
“I’ll fight you, Klagan,” Garric said. He gripped his mail shirt and lifted it off as well. He was tense, knowing he was blind during the moment that the fine links curtained his head. “And when I’ve killed you with my bare hands—”
He draped his mail over the other post. The links were alternately silvered and parcel gilt. Sunlight danced from them and from the polished highlights of his helmet, drawing the eyes of the watching cat men. Metal fascinated them beyond its practical uses; it cut deeper still into their souls.
“—then the Elders who sent you will see that no Corl can match a human warrior!”
“That’d depend on the warrior, lad,” said the ghost in Garric’s mind. “But match you and me together—no, not a one of the beasts!”