by David Drake
“Yes, ma’am, I am,” Cashel said. “When will you want me?”
He took the horse’s reins in his left hand and gripped the frame of the light vehicle in his right so that it wouldn’t skitter forward while Tenoctris climbed aboard. She didn’t need his help for that, though.
Tenoctris took the reins. “Around midday, I’d judge,” she said as he walked around the back of the gig to get in on the other side. “There are a number of things I’ll need, and they aren’t all in my apartments. We’ll be going to the old tombs in the palace grounds.”
“I didn’t think people were buried inside Valles, ma’am,” Cashel said, mounting with the care his weight required. He was a good load for one horse to pull, though the roads back to the palace were smooth enough and flat so he wouldn’t have to get out and walk.
“The palace wasn’t part of the city when the tombs were built,” Tenoctris said. “The family, the bor-Torials, weren’t even Dukes of Ornifal at the time.”
She clucked to the horse and twitched the reins; he clopped forward immediately. It looked simple. Cashel was pretty sure if he tried it, the horse would either look at him or run off in some other direction.
“Well, I’ll help however I can, Tenoctris,” Cashel said. He’d have said the same thing regardless, but maybe listening to the girl made him put a little more force into the words.
THE CAT MEN had been sheltering from daylight in a ravine between two knobs of limestone that’d been a little harder than the surrounding rock. They’d built a low dome of boughs broken from the neighboring pines.
“There’s caves all over here,” Asion said in a tone of mild reproach. “Why d’they want to take the trouble to build a hut, d’ye suppose?”
“Maybe they don’t like rock,” Ilna said, speaking more harshly than the question required. She looked down at the shelter while lying on a slab of cracked, gray stone. Sun and frost had broken the surface into rough pebbles that anybody’d find uncomfortable, but no Corl could possibly dislike rock more than Ilna herself did. “How many are inside, do you know?”
Karpos looked at Asion. The smaller man shrugged. “There’s one,” he said, “but I don’t think more than that. And he’s got to be hurt or he would’ve gone after you with the others, right?”
He and Karpos exchanged glances over Ilna’s head. “I figure,” said Karpos carefully, “that with just one there and laid up, we don’t need to be fancy. Besides, it’s broad daylight and they don’t like that. I’ll go down and finish him off, right?”
“No,” said Ilna. “I’ll stand in front of the entrance. Asion, start a fire and get a torch going. When I’m in place, throw it onto the hut and I’ll stop the beast when it tries to get out.”
While they waited, Ilna’d knotted a pattern. It seemed right to use yarn from the disemboweled woman’s tunic to dispose of the beasts who’d killed her. It shouldn’t have mattered, but there are more patterns than those woven in cloth.
She looked past Asion to Temple. “Do you have an opinion?” she demanded.
“It’s a good plan, Ilna,” the big man said. He stretched. His sword was sheathed, but she’d seen how quickly he could draw it. “I’ll stand with you in case the Corl is feverish and doesn’t see as he ought to.”
Ilna grimaced, but Temple hadn’t said anything she could object to. There was no excuse for her mood. The rock bothered her, she supposed, and being awake all night; but there was something irritating in Temple’s attitude. He seemed to be judging her as dispassionately as she’d eye a hen while planning dinner.
Ilna stood and walked half a furlong to the right so that she was at the head of the ravine, facing the hut’s entrance. The door was merely a juniper bush pulled into the opening, but it was where the cat man would come out.
It was important to stop him in his tracks. If he headed up the far slope instead of attacking directly, there was no certain safety. Even injured, a Corl was dangerous if you let him pick his time.
Temple paced her, keeping to the right so that he didn’t block her view of the shelter. His sword was out and he’d released the strap so that the buckler was free in his left hand. His expression was one of mild interest, as though he was contemplating an attractive landscape.
Karpos stood beside Asion with an arrow nocked. Ordinarily that would’ve been pointless: the cat men reacted so quickly that arrows were no more likely to hit them than a human soldier’d be knocked down by a flung bale of hay. Sick or wounded, the beast might be more vulnerable, though. Besides, it gave the hunter a way to feel useful.
Smoke trailed up between Asion’s hands; he rose and whipped his torch to full life. He’d bound branches to a limb wind’d broken from a scrub chestnut a year or more before.
Ilna met the hunter’s eyes but started down the ravine instead of giving the signal immediately. She held the knotted pattern before her, where the Corl couldn’t avoid seeing it if he looked at her at all. Only when she’d covered half the distance did she call, “All right, now!”
She expected the cat man to charge out of the dome when she spoke. Indeed, it should’ve been aware of the humans even earlier, from the sounds they’d made if not their scent as well. The beasts’ hearing and sense of smell were sharper than those of any human being.
The shelter remained silent. Asion sent his torch spinning end over end into the woven branches. They’d been drying in the sun for several days, long enough to become tinder. The torch bounced off the dome, but the sparks sprayed from the contact. Pitchy needles started burning.
Still nothing from inside. Ilna walked forward, her face set in angry puzzlement. Brush threatened to trip her at every step, but she kept her eyes fixed on the opening. Her feet could take care of themselves.
Had the beast died, or was Asion wrong about one of the pack staying behind? Or—and this was a real concern—had the cat man tricked them? It could’ve left the bush in place over the entrance but hidden in the hills above, waiting to strike from behind when the humans were concentrating on the empty shelter.
As fire crowned the dome, the bush flew back from the entrance. “It’s coming!” Ilna cried, but for the hunters—and Temple as well, she was sure—that was like someone telling her a warp thread was broken.
A cat man came out of the shelter in a crouch, rose with a snarl, and froze in its tracks as Ilna’d intended that it should. It was two double paces away. A part of Ilna’s mind that was never completely absent considered the cat’s russet fur and rejected it as too coarse for most weaving. As well use the long strands of aloe leaves.
The beast was female. A kit, probably less than a week old, nestled against her chest.
Karpos’ arrow entered through the beast’s right collarbone; the flared bronze point punched out below the ribs on the left side. The beast sprang wildly into the air. The shock had broken the pattern’s effect, but that didn’t matter now. It thrashed, spraying blood from its mouth onto the clumps of wormwood and broom, but it’d been dead from the instant the arrow hit.
Karpos came down the side of the ravine with the quick ease of a chamois. He stepped from one outcrop to another his own height below, instead of skidding and scrabbling the way most people would’ve done. Ilna smiled coldly: she certainly would’ve skidded and scrabbled.
“The kit is still alive,” Temple said.
“I see that,” Ilna said. She put the yarn she’d picked out of the pattern in her left sleeve.
The female gave a convulsive shudder and now lay as still as a pricked bladder. The infant continued to suckle, its forepaws—its hands, they really were hands—gripping the long hair of its mother’s chest.
Ilna bent forward. The burning shelter was too close for comfort, but she wouldn’t be here long. She caught the infant by the ankles. It mewled angrily and twisted to bite her. Even so young that its eyes were still closed, it had the instincts of its breed. Ilna couldn’t grab it by the head the way she would’ve done a chicken.
She rose, jerking the infan
t away from its mother, and dashed its brains out on a rock. She dropped the little body, backed a step, and scrubbed her hands with grit from the floor of the ravine.
Karpos dragged the female’s body back from the fire, then knelt to cut from the base of the neck up to the top of the skull, then back down in a single motion. He slid the point of his knife under the strip and trimmed the scalp lock free of the flesh while he pulled up on it.
Temple was looking at Ilna. She glared at him and snarled, “Do you have anything to say?”
Temple sheathed his sword. “No, Ilna,” he said. “The kit was too young to live without its mother.”
Karpos set the scalp down and began working his arrow out point-first. He’d have to refletch it, Ilna supposed, but that was the easy part of making an arrow. There was no lack of birds to provide feathers. This far from towns a metal point couldn’t be replaced and a straight, properly seasoned shaft was the work of more than a year.
“Do you think that mattered to me?” she said. “I’m going to kill all the beasts if I can. I don’t care how old or young they are, all of them!”
“It’s possible for humans and Coerli to coexist,” Temple said, strapping his buckler over his shoulder again. He looked up and met her eyes.
“I don’t believe that,” Ilna said, “and anyway, I don’t care. All of them!”
Temple said nothing. “Aren’t you going to lecture me?” she demanded.
“Not now, Ilna,” he said with a friendly smile. “Perhaps another time.”
“Perhaps never!” she said.
He shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Ilna picked up the dead kit by the scruff of its neck and tossed it into the fire. “Karpos,” she snapped. “We’ll burn the female too when you’ve gotten your arrow out. Asion!”
“Mistress?” the smaller hunter said. He remained where he’d been, watching while the others were in the ravine.
“Cut some more brush,” she called. “We’re going to burn the beasts before we leave here.”
“I brought the adze along,” Temple said quietly. “It’ll cut brush.”
He started up the side of the ravine, moving almost as easily as he walked on the level. Ilna followed, though with more difficulty. She was angry at the big man, though she was too logical to imagine she had any reason to be.
And she was angrier still at herself.
THE LINKBOY SKIPPED backward, holding out his short staff so that the pool of light from the lamp wobbling from the end of it fell on the ground where Sharina’d next step. The occasional glances he cast over his shoulder couldn’t have done any more than make sure nobody was coming from the other direction. He must’ve memorized all the paths through the palace grounds, or at least all those on which Prince Garric and his close associates were likely to be walking at night.
“Make way for the princess!” the boy cried. He was just showing off. Three men, probably treasury clerks going home after working very late, had already crossed the path on their way to the gate of the compound; there wasn’t any chance they’d obstruct Sharina.
The clerks didn’t have a lantern, and with the moon as bright as it was tonight Sharina didn’t need one either. Protocol demanded it, though, as protocol demanded the squad of Blood Eagles accompanying her. She might not like either thing—and she didn’t, any more than she liked the court robes or for that matter her just-completed meeting with Lady Faries, the commissioner of sewers—but they were part of the job of being Princess of Haft.
“All rise for the princess!” the linkboy said as he hopped up the three steps to the porch of Sharina’s bungalow. Lamps hung to either side of the door, and the pair of Blood Eagles waiting there were—of course!—already on their feet.
“I guess we can handle it from here, boy,” the senior guard said.
“I have my duties!” the boy said.
“Right, and they’re going to include getting a clout over the ear if you don’t take yourself off, sonny,” said the other guard. He wasn’t being particularly unkind, but he sounded like he meant it.
Sharina grinned wryly as she climbed the steps. She too found the boy irritating at the end of a long day. It wasn’t completely beyond possibility that she’d have clouted him herself if she had to listen to much more of his piercing self-importance.
Diora, her maid, opened the door holding a candle lantern; there were several lamps burning inside as well. A princess didn’t have to skimp on lamp oil the way servants in a rural inn did; or at any rate, a princess’s servants were of that opinion.
Diora made a deep curtsy. The formality was for the soldiers; she knew Sharina didn’t care for it, but they were both actors for so long as there was an audience. “Master Cashel isn’t back yet, Your Highness,” she said.
Sharina felt her heart fall; she hadn’t realized till Diora spoke how much she’d been counting on hugging Cashel and feeling his calm strength. Cashel made people feel safe. It was more than the reality of what his muscles and other powers could accomplish: his very presence seemed to drive back Evil better than walls of stone or any other device could do. He was a good man, good to the core, and around him you couldn’t help but believe Good would triumph.
Diora closed the door. Sharina spread her arms to allow the maid to begin undoing the tucks and ties that bound Princess Sharina into her robes. “Would you like something to eat, Your Highness?” she asked as she worked.
Diora’d been Sharina’s maid for as long as she’d been princess. They weren’t precisely friends, less because of social status than differing interests, but they got along well with each other. Sharina had other people to discuss Old Kingdom literature with, and Diora no doubt knew folks who shared her passion for association horse racing; but the maid didn’t mind doing all the jobs for which another noblewoman would expect a whole phalanx of specialists, and Sharina didn’t scream curses or slash her maid across the face with a hairpin because she’d tugged a curl a little too hard.
“No, no,” Sharina said. “There’s a pitcher and mug on the washstand, isn’t there? I just want sleep.”
I just want Cashel to hold me, but she wouldn’t put that in words to anyone but Cashel himself.
“Oh, yes, Your Highness,” Diora said, sounding—probably feeling—shocked at the question. That was like asking the maid if she thought Sharina should wear clothing when she went out in the morning.
Sharina chuckled. So that Diora wouldn’t think she was being mocked, she said aloud, “The Pool below the city’s turning into a large lake now that the Beltis doesn’t have the Inner Sea to drain into. That means the sewers will shortly begin to back up every time it rains.”
“Really?” the maid said. “I never imagined that!”
Neither had Sharina, but now the government was in her hands. The best solution to the problem was probably to abandon Valles; the site wasn’t suitable for a large city since the Change.
They couldn’t do that now, however. The Change had already worked too much disruption. To tear up the capital and displace the government on top of it would probably bring the kingdom down. In the short term, Commissioner Faries and a pair of army engineers seconded to her department said that the Beltis River could be diverted upstream of the city, though that would require many men—perhaps the former oarsmen of the fleet?—and also a rerouting of supplies to the city. Lord Hauk, Lord Royhas, and both Waldron and Zettin would have to be involved.
But that was for another day.
“Now, arms straight up, Your Highness,” Diora said. Sharina obediently raised her arms; the maid swept the heavy robes up and off her with a single motion. So neat a job took considerable strength as well as skill. Sharina was very well served, and she knew it.
“What now, Your Highness?” Diora asked as she hung the garment on its wicker form. “Shall I wait till Master Cashel arrives?”
“No, no,” said Sharina. “Just go home, Diora. You can take a lamp with you.”
The maid laughed. “You think I can’t f
ind my way to the barracks with the moon so near full?” she said. “Well, have a good night, Your Highness. I’ll be back in the morning.”
Ordinarily at least one servant would sleep in the anteroom of a bungalow occupied by members of the royal entourage. Sharina didn’t need or want that, and Diora had an arrangement with a pleasant young under-captain of the Blood Eagles. The guard officers slept with their men, but they had separate apartments in the barracks blocks. The situation benefited both mistress and maid.
Sharina left the lamp burning in the anteroom but she snuffed the lantern’s wick between her thumb and forefinger before walking through the drawing room to the bedroom beyond. She didn’t know when Cashel would be coming in; clouds might’ve covered the moon by then.
She’d have liked to go with him and Tenoctris, both because they were her friends and because she would so much rather be helping the wizard than making decisions about sewers—which she knew nothing about, but which would affect the health and comfort of tens of thousands of people.
What Tenoctris did affected all mankind, today and forever, but it was Tenoctris rather than Sharina who made those decisions. No matter how much the older woman denigrated her abilities, Sharina and everyone else trusted her completely.
A set of hair implements was neatly arranged on the dressing table against the outside wall. Sharina took a coarse comb and worked it slowly through her hair. There was a silver mirror, its back embossed in the same pattern as the brushes and other combs, but she left it where it was. Combing her hair was just a way to settle her mind; she wasn’t tired after all, now that she was truly alone for the first time all day.
She stepped to the side and looked up at the huge moon. Diora had slid the upper halves of the casements down, leaving the windows open down to the height of Sharina’s chin.
She pulled at the comb, working it back and forth on snarls, as she thought about the life she was living now. Wealth and power hadn’t made her happier; but Cashel made her happy. If they’d all stayed in Barca’s Hamlet, the innkeeper’s daughter wouldn’t have been allowed to wed the poor orphan boy. Cashel wouldn’t have asked her! Sometimes the things you gain from your choices aren’t the obvious ones.