by David Drake
“Silence!” Ilna said. Her voice was more of a whiplash than Temple’s thunder, but she was pleased to note that the villagers quieted down. That was good, and good for them as well; her fingers had already begun knotting a pattern to use if the word alone hadn’t been sufficient.
“Temple,” she said in the calm. “You recognize these demons?”
“They’re wyverns, Ilna,” he replied with a nod. “Creatures from the far past of the Coerli. They aren’t demons, just dangerous predators; though indeed the Coerli remember them as demons.”
Ilna’d never had much concern with the natural world: all manner of things hopping and chirping in hedgerows were to her “little gray birds” and of no more interest than so many clods of earth. Images, though, even images carved in stone, were another matter.
“The base of the statue where we found you,” she said. “There were that kind of monsters on it, wasn’t there?”
Temple nodded with pleased agreement. “That’s right,” he said. “Demons attacking the sky-god Huill. But really wyverns. If they’re full-grown, they’re probably three double paces long and as high at the hips as I can reach stretching my arm up.”
“They do as Bistona says,” Breccon said softly, looking into his hands. The old man was beyond posturing. He seemed to have sunk into the past, grasping feebly at thoughts that floated past him. “She marched up to the shrine with them. Redmin was the priest of the Lady’s Oracle there. The two boys who helped him, they skinned over the back wall and kept running, I guess. Anyhow they’ve not come back. Redmin stood in the gateway and told Bistona she couldn’t enter the sacred enclosure because she was unclean.”
“I never gave Redmin credit for guts,” a man said.
Graia sniffed. “I figure he was blind drunk,” she said, “seeings as he generally was.”
“Regardless,” muttered Breccon, “the demons kilt him, tore him to bits and ate him. It was like two terriers on a vole. And they’ve lived in the shrine since then, a moon and more.”
Ilna frowned. “What do they eat?” she said. If they weren’t really demons then they had to eat, didn’t they?
“They hunt at night,” said Breccon. “Not people, I’ll say that for Bistona, not if we stay on this side of the valley. But we can’t keep goats anymore, and the people who used to come for the oracle, well, all that money’s gone, you can guess that.”
“She let us get our goods out of our houses the first day,” the man with missing fingers said. “If anybody goes up there now, the demons come out. They don’t chase you if you run, and nobody tried it who didn’t run.”
“The Lady knows I ran,” muttered a young fellow whose legs were nearly as long as Karpos’. “I must’ve been crazy t’ think of going back for a stupid bracelet!”
He glared at the girl beside him. Her face sharpened; for a moment it looked as though she was about to say something, but she noticed Ilna’s eyes on her and subsided.
“We kept hoping Bistona’d take the demons away,” said Breccon, “or anyway, that they’d wander off themselves. But all this time and they stay in the Lady’s shrine.”
He cleared his throat and said with the cracked brightness of a certain lie, “I don’t guess it’d be hard for three soldiers to drive the demons out, would it? And we’d pay!”
“We’d all help you, you know,” said the man with missing fingers. “All the men of an age to help. But we don’t have swords or strong bows like you real soldiers do.”
“Mistress, we need help,” said Graia. “There’s more coined money here than you might guess, from the shrine being an oracle, you see. But if you won’t help us, then we’ll have to move, sure as sure. One of these days the demons won’t find a goat or a deer, and then they’ll come for whoever’s nearest. We’ll have to move.”
“Be silent for a moment,” Ilna said. Her tone was sharp, not because of anything the villagers were doing but because they might do something. She’d learned over the years that if she didn’t tell people to shut up, they’d yammer at her while she was thinking. Given that as best she could tell most people didn’t spend any time at all thinking themselves, she supposed the mistake was a natural one.
Ilna didn’t have any interest in killing demons—or wyverns, or men, or anything else except cat men. The oracle she wove each morning to give them direction had brought them here, though. That didn’t mean they couldn’t go on tomorrow, traveling to the southwest as she’d been doing since she left First Atara immediately after the Change, but perhaps.
And besides, walking away from a problem had never been her way.
She looked at her three companions. “I won’t order you to get involved in this,” she said. “If they’re as big as you say, Temple, it may be more than we can manage even with the villagers’ help.”
“Keep that lot out of the way,” Asion said, looking over his shoulder in obvious disgust. “Farmers aren’t good for squat on a hunt. They just stir up trouble and leave you in the bag onct they stirred it.”
“I don’t mind taking care of this, mistress,” Karpos said quietly. “It’ll be a little different, I guess. But closer to what me’n Asion did before we met you.”
“Temple?” Ilna said. He was smiling at her again!
“I don’t need to be ordered to rid the world of monsters, Ilna,” he said. “I can occupy one of the wyverns while you and our companions kill the other. Then you can give me such help as I require.”
“Alone?” Ilna said, feeling the start of a frown. “If they’re as big as you say?”
“I have some experience with the work,” Temple said, as calm as if he’d said something about the clouds overhead. “And you’ll be free to help me shortly.”
Movement across the valley drew Ilna’s attention. From the shrine’s entrance stalked a wyvern, then the second. On the shadowed eastern slope the colors were indistinct, but Ilna had an eye for such things: the creatures were a light blue-gray and darker gray with brighter blue mottlings. They were so tall that they’d have scraped the building’s transom if they’d stretched their legs to full height.
A woman came out of the priest’s dwelling and stood between the monsters. They were staring toward the new village of shanties. Their stubby wings were scaly instead of being feathered.
“Are they looking at us, d’ye think?” said Karpos carefully.
One wyvern, then both, raised their beaked jaws and shrieked. They were as raucous and shrill as marsh hawks, but very much louder.
“They will be in the morning,” said Ilna, rising to her feet. “When we go across the valley and kill them.”
THE TWO TRACKS in the road might look like wheel ruts to city folk, but Garric was a peasant: they were the cuts made by packhorses passing in opposite directions. If it’d been raining today as it would be in fall, his gelding would’ve sunk in to its belly; now it just clopped up dust to coat his breeches to mid-thigh.
“Before the Change, this all was swamp,” Garric said. Since there wasn’t much traffic, Shin walked alongside, easily matching the horse’s measured pace. “The folk in these farms—”
The hedges to either side of the road and between the long, narrow fields were boxwood, so ancient that the lower stems were the size of a woman’s calf. On horseback Garric could look over them to stone houses in the distance; the roofs were turf, speckled white with daisies.
“—lived at the very beginning of the Old Kingdom, Liane says. Before Ornifal was part of the kingdom, in fact.”
“How do they take to you becoming their ruler, Prince?” the aegipan asked. “They’re prosperous folk and you’ll probably expect them to pay taxes.”
“The Coerli helped with that,” Garric said with a wry smile. These were prosperous farms, growing wheat on rich black soil, but he wondered how Shin came to know that. The hedges were opaque, and they had solid wickets instead of barred stiles between them and the road. “They raided several times after the Change; that stopped when we burned the keeps the raiders
came from, with the raiders inside.”
In his mind, King Carus laughed. He said, “I never met anybody who liked to pay taxes. Given the choice, though, they’d rather fund the royal army than feed the cat beasts.”
An old woman came toward them, holding a little girl by the hand. When the pair got close enough to see what the aegipan was—or at any rate to see that it wasn’t any of the normal things it might’ve been, a pony or a bent old man in brown homespun—they froze and flattened against the hedge. From the look on their faces, they were about to run back down the road till they dropped from exhaustion.
Garric swept off his broad-brimmed leather hat and bowed low in the saddle. “Greetings, good ladies,” he called. “You brighten our journey early on a long day.”
Shin hopped in front of the horse and began walking on his hands, waggling his hooves in the air as he did so. The little girl stared with fascination, while the expression of the older woman—her grandmother?—at least faded from panic to neutral interest. They didn’t speak, but when Garric was well past he glanced over his shoulder and saw they were still watching.
Shin backflipped onto his feet again and grinned sardonically at Garric; he’d had no difficulty keeping up with the horse while walking on his hands. Apparently to underscore his abilities, the aegipan did a series of handsprings before settling back to walk beside Garric again.
“I practice arts of meditation which require perfect mastery of my body,” he said. “Fortunately, I’ve found that people will accept me as a mountebank when they wouldn’t as a philosopher.”
Is he serious? Garric thought. He burst out laughing.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re serious or not,” he said aloud, though he knew he could’ve saved his breath: Shin and Carus, his only companions, could hear his thoughts. “I’m glad you’re so agile, Master Shin. I needn’t worry about you if something comes up on the way.”
“Don’t think I’ll fight for you, champion,” Shin said. It was hard to judge the aegipan’s expression, but Garric thought it was more serious than perhaps it’d been a moment before. “You’ll survive or fail on your own abilities. You’ll live or die, that is.”
“I don’t recall ever asking someone to do my fighting for me, sir,” Garric said quietly. “But I’m armed, so I have a responsibility for your safety as long as you’re guiding me.”
His fingers toyed with the hilt of his sword. He’d picked up the habit from the ghost of the warrior in his mind, but by now it was natural to him as well. He was a warrior, after all … though he’d been seventeen before he’d ever touched a sword. Indeed, he’d seen such weapons only during the Sheep Fairs. They hung from the belts of guards some of the wealthy drovers brought with them when they came to Barca’s Hamlet to chaffer for wool and sheep.
Shin gave his gobbling laugh. “Oh, don’t worry about my safety, Prince,” he said. “Though the concern does you credit. No doubt you’re a paragon among rulers, but you’d best put that aside for the present time.”
“I have put it aside,” Garric said. “There’s things I’ll miss about leaving the kingdom this way—”
Carus grinned broadly, but he knew that the emptiness his descendant felt was for the company of his friends—certainly including Liane, but not Liane alone.
“—but I don’t miss being ruler. Because I’m not such a paragon as I’d like to be.”
Clearing his throat and staring until the aegipan cocked his head up to meet his eyes, Garric continued, “And inasmuch as I’m not a prince anymore, Master Shin, and that I like to be friends with whoever I’m around, I’d prefer that you call me Garric. And I’ll call you Shin, if that’s agreeable.”
Shin laughed again. “As you wish, Garric,” he said. “Though I don’t see what you expect to gain from friendship.”
“A more pleasant journey, Shin,” Garric said. “Even if things turn out badly, I’d regret it if my last days alive were awkward ones.”
The road had been rising gently for the past several miles. Garric couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were probably beyond what’d been the coast of Ornifal in his own day. Ahead to the south, wooded hills stretched into the far distance. The path continued, but it shrank to a trail not unlike the one leading west from Barca’s Hamlet.
When he was a boy Garric had occasionally dreamed of going to Carcosa, the ancient capital on the far coast of Haft; he’d dreamed, but he’d never really expected it to happen. He’d been to Carcosa after all, and then he’d gone much farther before returning to Carcosa as ruler of the whole kingdom, the Lord of the Isles.
But now the Isles themselves were as much in the past as Garric or-Reise, the innkeeper’s son, was. Garric was riding into the heart of a continent that should’ve been the sea, in order to pass a test that hadn’t been described to him and thereby to save mankind from a doom that wasn’t rightly part of the world.
He was lost and alone and afraid, all those things to a degree that he couldn’t have imagined when he was a boy. But he was going on. That was all he understood: that it was his duty to go on.
Laughing, Garric turned to look at the world he was leaving. The road wound back between the hedgerows and the bright green of sprouted wheat.
His eyes narrowed at the other thing he noticed. “Whoa,” he muttered to the gelding, lifting back on the reins to pause before riding down into the forest.
On the northern horizon, probably a good ten miles behind them, was a cloud with a faint golden brightness. Early in the morning he’d have guessed it was mist rising from a pond, but the sun was too high in the sky for that to be the case.
“Shin?” he said. “Do you know what the fog back there is? I don’t recall ever seeing something like it before.”
“Do you know the story of King Kalendar, Garric?” the aegipan said. He was standing on one leg with the other crossed on it; his hands were on his jutting hips.
“The myth?” Garric said. “Well, I’ve read Pendill’s Books of Changes. King Kalendar swore he’d wed Merui, the virgin priestess of the Lady, even though the goddess forbade the match. He marched on Merui’s temple with his whole army, but the goddess trapped them in a maze of fog in which they marched until they all became spruce trees.”
He frowned, trying to get the details right. He liked Pendill, but an awful lot of people seemed to have become trees or birds or springs when they got on the wrong side of the Great Gods.
“After it was too late, Merui regretted refusing Kalendar and searched the forest for him,” he continued. “Eventually she became an owl and now flies among the trees, calling out in mourning.”
“Merui was indeed a myth,” said Shin, “and King Kalendar was actually a mercenary leader named Lorun who swore he’d sack the palace of a wizard.”
He gobbled laughter.
“A great wizard, I will say. But the fog was completely true. Captain Lorun and his men walk in it to this day.”
Garric stared at the aegipan, trying to make sense of what he’d just been told. “Do you mean,” he said, “that the cloud I’m seeing behind us is Lorun and his soldiers?”
“No, Garric,” Shin said calmly. “Lord Attaper decided to follow you with a troop of Blood Eagles, ignoring my direction and your command. They now march in a maze which will hold them until they’re released or the world ends.”
Garric went cold. His knuckles were mottled on the hilt of his sword, and his face was as tight as that of the ghost in his mind.
“Release them, Shin,” he said. His voice was so thick and harsh that he wasn’t sure he could’ve recognized the words himself.
“In good time, Garric,” the aegipan said.
“Now, by the Shepherd!”
“No, Garric,” the aegipan said, “but when we’re another day or two days gone and beyond any chance of them following us. Then they will be released, perhaps wiser.”
Garric lifted his hand from the sword hilt and massaged it with the other. It’d been on the verge of cramping. He didn
’t speak, and he continued to look toward the glowing cloud.
“It’s that, or you may return to Valles now and preside over the doom of your world,” Shin said. “The test is for the champion alone.”
Garric cleared his throat. “We’d best be riding on,” he said. By the end of the sentence, he’d gotten his voice back to where it should’ve been. He faced around and clucked the gelding into motion.
When they were below the brow of the hill and could no longer see the glowing cloud, Garric said, “Shin? If I hadn’t noticed the fog and made a point of it, when would you have released Attaper and his men?”
“You did notice, Garric,” the aegipan said. “I cannot predict the future based on a past that did not happen.”
“That’s the sort of question you don’t want to ask, lad,” said King Carus. “You might’ve gotten the wrong answer. It’d be bloody difficult to reach the Yellow King if you’d just chopped your guide in half the way you’d need to then.”
The ghost paused, then added judiciously, “Mind, it’d feel good at the time.”
Chapter
6
IT SURPRISED GARRIC that the group of buildings in the clearing was an inn, because for over an hour he’d been smelling bacon curing. He’d been right about the bacon, of course—it wasn’t the sort of thing you could mistake. Gray smoke blurred out of the last ground-floor window of the right wing and spread slowly through the forest.
There were outbuildings of notched logs, but the timbers of the main structure had been squared with a saw. It bothered Garric to see such a waste of wood when clapboards would’ve sealed the interior as well, but he’d grown up in Barca’s Hamlet, which had been settled for thousands of years. There was no need to be miserly with wood in this dark wasteland of trees.
The central part of the main building had a second story with a gallery. Three men sat on a puncheon bench there, looking down at Garric and Shin approaching; they didn’t speak. The skull of a great-tusked boar was nailed over the door transom.
A boy squatted on an upended section of tree trunk in front, cleaning a pair of knee boots with a brush of twigs. He watched them for a moment, then slipped inside through the open door taking the boots with him.