by David Drake
“I’ll bet he thinks you just walked into the tent, though,” said Carus, grimly uncomfortable with wizardry even now.
“Garric!” Sharina said, whirling and jostling the table as she tried to get up.
Liane simply kicked her stool over and threw herself into Carrie’s arms. She wouldn’t have done that if she hadn’t been very much afraid….
“And she had reason,” Carus said. “Though it worked out pretty well. There’s not much a good sword can’t take care of when a man swings it.”
Spoken like a common trooper, Garric thought, but he was too happy to be tart. Carus was being ironic, after all. He did feel that way—but he knew he’d brought his kingdom down when he’d behaved that way as king.
They were all babbling greetings and congratulations. Garric let it go on for a time because he was drained by the sudden relief from stress. Holding Liane was all he wanted to do, and letting other people talk permitted him to do that.
But I’ve got a kingdom to run….
Garric gave Liane a final squeeze and broke away. She righted the stool and seated herself primly. Sharina offered a chair—made here in the camp from stakes and wicker like the fascines, though covered with red baize—but Garric didn’t want to sit just yet.
“You’ve marched to Pandah to put down the renegades?” he said, remembering the reports about the island from before he went off with Shin. He hoped he’d kept disapproval out of his tone, but this wouldn’t have been the way he’d have used such a large proportion of the kingdom’s resources.
“To put down a bridgehead of the Last, Your Highness,” Lord Waldron said, forcefully enough to show that he’d understood the implied criticism. “We were meeting on how to deal with Pandah itself now that Princess Sharina has destroyed the Last.”
“Rasile destroyed the Last,” said Sharina. There was something odd in the way she said it, though. Garric didn’t know who Rasile was, but he was sure he’d learn soon enough.
“And Tenoctris,” said Cashel from beside Garric. “She just brought us back.”
Garric turned fast. His ancestor’s reflex took his hand to his sword, though he didn’t draw the blade. His friend stood with a pert young woman whom Garric didn’t recognize.
This time it was Sharina knocking her chair over as she leaped up to hug Cashel. Garric moved aside, smiling and glad something’d happened to take folks’ minds off the way he’d gone for a weapon when his best friend appeared.
“My way you can apologize if you’re wrong,” Carus said, this time in dead earnest. “If something takes your head off because you thought it was harmless, you don’t get a second chance.”
“Garric was as responsible for success as any of us,” said the woman who’d arrived with Cashel. When he heard the voice, Garric recognized Tenoctris—but much younger. “The kingdom’s very fortunate in its ruler.”
“Your Highness,” said Admiral Zettin. “I was just pointing out that we have an opportunity to make an example of Pandah by hanging everyone we find there.”
Despite Zettin’s brashness he must’ve seen something in Carrie’s expression, because he quickly added, “Or all the males, of course, pirates and Coerli both.”
“Milord,” said Garric. Since Carus took residence in his mind, he’d learned that he didn’t have to raise his voice to make it clear when he was angry. “I think we’ll make a different sort of example of Pandah. We’ll spare everybody, but we’ll distribute the males among existing regiments with orders to the non-coms to watch them. And we’ll hang the ones who don’t take the warning.”
“We’ll hang a great many of them, I shouldn’t wonder,” Lord Waldron said, but he wasn’t arguing with the plan. He smiled as he glanced at Zettin, a protégé of Attaper’s and no friend of the army commander.
“I shouldn’t wonder either, milord,” said Garric, “but it’s important to give them a chance. You have Coerli units with you?”
“We’ve got cat men,” Waldron said, frowning. “I wouldn’t call them units, but it seems to work all right for them to swan about in little mobs. They’re under the sailor, there.”
He jerked his chin in the direction of Zettin.
“Milord?” prodded Garric, because the admiral clearly wasn’t going to speak—again—without being asked to.
“Your Highness, the Coerli make excellent scouts and foragers, especially at night,” Zettin said, looking at some point beyond Garric’s right shoulder. “Their discipline is improving rapidly since we started attaching petty officers, lead oarsmen or the like, to each, ah, war band.”
“Not a stupid man,” Carus said with a chuckle. “For all he gets above himself.”
Garric smiled. He stretched, though not as high as he’d like to’ve done because there wasn’t enough room under the tarpaulin.
“Very good, then,” he said. “Unless there’s something critical for my eyes…?”
No one spoke, though several councillors might’ve done so if he hadn’t stepped on Lord Zettin so thoroughly. “Lady Liane, do you have anything?”
“Nothing vital, Your Highness,” the kingdom’s spy master said politely. “Our surveyors have reported an Empire of Palomir to the south.”
Garric frowned. “Palomir that the Scribe of Breen talks about?” he said, trying to recall just what he’d read in the chronicler from Cordin after the fall of the Old Kingdom. The—nameless—scribe had mixed real millennia-old information with a great deal of myth.
“Yes, I think so,” said Liane, pleased that he’d caught the reference. “Palomir appears to be little more than a name in its present form, though. It can wait.”
“Then, honored councillors,” said Garric, smiling around the group, “I’ll retire to my quarters. I’m sure you’ve all been busy, but I don’t mind telling you that I’m about at the end of my resources right now.”
A thought struck him. “Ah,” he said. “Do I have quarters? I know you weren’t expecting—”
“Yes, of course,” said Liane, rising gracefully this time. “If I may, I’ll guide Your Highness.”
Garric bowed and stepped out of the shelter. Blood Eagles fell in around him as smoothly as if they’d escorted him to the meeting.
Coming toward Garric with a pair of hard-looking men was a trim woman he’d been afraid he’d never see again. “Ilna!” he called in delight.
Of all things, Ilna was carrying a mewling Corl kitten in her arms.
THOUGH THE LAST had long been reduced to sparkling coruscance, water continued to boil from the mountain crater. There was a sulfurous tang in the air: the volcano had awakened. Figures slowly melted from the ice which had encased them for uncounted ages.
The giant on the left shook out his long golden hair, laughed, and drew his sword. He was a beardless youth in all but size, lithe and heart-stoppingly handsome. His eyes were as cold as a viper’s.
The female on the right could’ve been his sister, save that her hair was a deep blue-black and she held a trident. Her laughter echoed the youth’s; her voice had the timbre of a hunting cat’s.
The figure in the center roused last. He wore a horned helmet, and his white beard spread over a scaled cuirass. He opened his gray eyes and paused for long moments before he raised his double-bitted axe.
“We are free!” he shouted. Thunder echoed the words.
The giant forms swelled and vanished into the storm clouds which rushed from all directions to fill the sky. “We are free!”
The Gods of Palomir had returned.
Turn the page for a preview of
The Gods
Return
DAVID DRAKE
Available now from Tor Books
A TOR HARDCOVER
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1261-1 ISBN-10: 0-7653-1261-7
Copyright © 2008 by David Drake
Chapter
1
CASHEL CARRIED RASILE in the crook of his arm up the last few tens of steps to the top of the fire tower, the highest point in Pandah. The old wizar
d’s people, the Coerli—the cat men—held the physically weak and aged in contempt even if they happened to be wizards.
Since the Change, Rasile had been helping the humans who’d conquered the Coerli; her life and health had improved a great deal. Still, the fire tower was a hollow pillar with many tens of steps shaped like wedges of pie on the inside. Lots of younger people, cat men and humans both, would’ve had trouble climbing it.
Cashel didn’t mind. Rasile scarcely weighed anything to begin with, and besides, it made him feel useful.
Cashel’s friends were all smart and educated. Nobody’d thought that Garric would get to be king while he and Cashel were growing up together in Barca’s Hamlet, but he’d gotten as good an education from his father, Reise the Innkeeper, as any nobleman’s son in Valles got. Likewise Garric’s sister Sharina.
Cashel smiled at the thought of Sharina. She was so smart and so lovely. If there was wizardry in the world—and there was; Cashel had seen it often—then the greatest proof of it was the fact that Sharina loved him, as he’d loved her from childhood.
Cashel’s sister Ilna couldn’t read or write any better than he could, and like Cashel she used pebbles or beans as tellers if she needed to count above the number of her fingers. But there was more to being smart than book learning, and nobody had ever doubted that Ilna was smart. She’d been the best weaver in Barca’s Hamlet since she’d grown tall enough to work a loom, and the things she’d learned on her travels had made her better than any other soul.
None of that had made her happy. Her travels had been to far places, some of them very bad places. She’d come back maybe missing parts that would’ve let her be happy. Still, Ilna was much of the reason that the kingdom had survived these past years; why the kingdom survived and, in surviving, had allowed Mankind to survive.
Cashel, well, he was just Cashel. He’d been a good shepherd, but nobody needed him to tend sheep anymore. He was strong, though; stronger than any man he’d met this far. If he could use that strength to help people like Rasile who the kingdom depended on, then he was glad to have something to do.
“I’m setting you down,” he said, just as he’d have done if he’d been carrying a bogged sheep up to drier ground. The sheep couldn’t understand him and the Corl wizard didn’t need to be told. Still, a few calm words and a little explanation never hurt. “It’s supposed to be the highest place in Pandah and—”
He looked around. The top of the tower flared a little, but it was still only two double-paces in diameter.
“—I guess the folks who said that were right.”
Rasile stepped to the railing. From a distance the cat men didn’t look much different from humans, but close up you saw that their hands and feet didn’t use the same bones. As for their faces, well, they were cats. Rasile was covered with light gray fur which had a nice sheen since she’d started eating properly again.
Cashel grinned. If Rasile was a ewe, he’d have said she was healthy. Of course back in the borough she’d have been butchered years ago; there was only fodder enough to get the best and strongest through the winter before the spring crops came in.
“I’ll never get used to the cities you beast-men live in,” Rasile said. She flicked the back of her right hand with the left, a gesture Cashel had learned was the same as a human being shaking her head. “All those houses together, and so many of them stone. None of the True People ever built with stone.”
“Well, you don’t use fire, so you can’t smelt metal,” Cashel pointed out. “That makes it hard to cut stone.”
He didn’t add, “And you cat men aren’t much interested in hard work, either,” though it’d have been true enough. The Coerli were predators. All you had to do was own a house cat to know that most of the time it’ll be sleeping; and when it isn’t, it’s likely eating or licking itself.
“Anyway…,” Cashel continued diplomatically. Rasile didn’t mean anything by “beast-men” and “True People;” it was just the way the Coerli language worked. “I don’t guess I’ll ever get used to cities either. I was eighteen before I left Barca’s Hamlet, and it wasn’t but three or four tens of houses.”
Pandah had been a good-sized place when the royal army captured it back in the summer, but that was nothing to what it’d become now. All around the stone-built citadel, houses were going up the way mushrooms pop out of the ground after the spring rains. There were wood-sheathed buildings, wattle-and-daub huts, and on the outskirts any number of tents made of canvas or leather.
Before the Change, travel for any distance meant travel by ship. The Isles were now the Land, a continent instead of a ring of islands about the Inner Sea, and Pandah was pretty nearly the center. It’d gotten to be an important place instead of a sleepy little island where ships put in to buy fruit and fill their water casks.
The Corl wizard cleared her throat with a growl that had sounded threatening before Cashel got used to it. She paced slowly sideways around the tower, seeming to look out over Pandah.
Cashel had spent his life watching animals and figuring out what was going on in their minds before they went and did something stupid. He knew Rasile hadn’t asked to come up here just to view a city she disliked even more than he did. That was why he’d asked Lord Waldron, the commander of the royal army, to put a couple soldiers down at the base of the stairs to keep idlers out of the tower while Cashel and the wizard were in it.
“Warrior Cashel,” Rasile said with careful formality, though she still didn’t meet his eyes. “You are a friend of Chief Garric. As you know, the wizard Tenoctris summoned me to help your spouse Sharina while Tenoctris herself was occupied with other business.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cashel said. “I know that.”
“There is no wizard as powerful as Tenoctris,” Rasile said, this time speaking forcefully.
Cashel smiled. It was a good feeling to remember a success.
“Ma’am, I believe that’s so,” he said. He could’ve added that it hadn’t been true before Tenoctris took an ancient demon into her while Cashel watched. Risky as that was, it’d worked; and because it’d worked, the kingdom had a defender like no wizard before her. “Even she says that, and Tenoctris isn’t one to brag.”
“And now she has accomplished her other tasks,” Rasile continued, turning at last to look at Cashel. “It may be that with a wizard of his own race present—and so powerful a wizard besides—Chief Garric may no longer wish to keep me in his council. Do you believe that is so, Warrior Cashel?”
Cashel chuckled, glad to know what was bothering the old wizard. “No ma’am, it’s not so,” he said, making sure he really sounded like he meant it. He did mean it, of course, but with people—and sheep—lots of times it wasn’t the words they heard but the way you said them. “Look, Garric’s job is fighting against, well, evil. Right? The sort of evil that’ll wipe out everybody, your folk and mine both. And the fight isn’t over.”
The sound Rasile made in her throat this time really was a growl, though it wasn’t a threat to him. “No, Warrior Cashel,” she said, “the fight is not over.”
She gestured toward the eastern horizon. “A very great fight is coming, I believe. But—you have Tenoctris again.”
“Ma’am,” Cashel said, hearing his voice drop lower because of the subject, “what with one thing and another, I’ve been in a lot of fights. I’ve never been in one where I wouldn’t have welcomed help, though. I figure Garric feels the same way.”
Rasile gave a throaty laugh. “I am relieved to hear that,” she said. “During the time I accompanied your spouse Sharina, Warrior Cashel, I became accustomed to not being relegated to filth and garbage. While I could return to my former life with the True People, I don’t feel the need to reinforce my sense of humility to that degree. Wholesome though no doubt it would be to do so.”
They laughed together. Cashel looked down at the city, holding his quarterstaff in his left hand. There were all sorts of people below, walking and working and just idling along. Th
ey made him think of summer days in the south pasture, sitting beneath the ilex tree on the hilltop and watching his sheep go about their business.
In the past couple years Cashel had gone a lot of places and done a lot of things, but he was still a shepherd at heart. He’d learned there were worse things than sea wolves twisting out of the surf to snatch ewes—but he’d learned also that his hickory staff would put paid to a wizard as quickly as it would to the sort of threats his sheep had faced.
He tapped the staff lightly, clicking its iron butt cap on the tower’s stone floor. To his surprise, a sizzle of blue wizard-light spat away from the contact.
Rasile noticed the spark also. Her grin bared a jawful of teeth that were noticeably sharper than those of a human being.
“I told you the fight was not over, Warrior Cashel,” she said. “I felt but I did not say that Chief Garric would be wise to keep me by him. I cannot do as much as his Tenoctris does, but I can do some things; and he will need many things done if he and his kingdom, our kingdom, are to survive the coming struggle.”
Cashel nodded without speaking. From this vantage he could see birds fishing the pools that now dotted the plains where the Inner Sea had rippled before the Change. Most were the white or gray of seagulls, but there were darker shapes which flashed blue when they caught the sun right: kingfishers, he was sure.
“Would you mind staying here a little longer, Warrior Cashel?” the Corl wizard said. “I would like to work a small spell. Both our height above the ground and your presence will aid me, I believe.”
“Whatever you want, ma’am,” Cashel said. “And I’d appreciate you just call me Cashel. I’m not a warrior, you know. I’m just a shepherd.”
Rasile snorted mild laughter as she squatted on her haunches. She took a handful of yarrow stalks out of a bag woven from willow withies, so fine and dense that Cashel thought it would shed water. The catmen were good at weaving; even Ilna said so.