The Gods Return

by David Drake

  CASHEL HAD NOTICED long since that the actual words a wizard chanted didn’t seem to matter. It was the rhythms they got into that told you what they were doing.

  Rasile had laid a pattern of yarrow stalks around the floor of the tower. She sat in the center of it, making sounds that were nothing like the words of power Tenoctris used. They weren’t anything like the cat men’s ordinary speech, either. Even so, Cashel would’ve known what was going on even if he hadn’t been able to watch her.

  The air flickered. It looked a bit like heat lightning, but the only clouds today were horsetails in the high heavens. It must’ve been the sky itself, twisted by Rasile’s power so that sunlight didn’t slip through it the way it ought to.

  A deafening crackle spread outward from the star pattern. Cashel wasn’t sure it was really a sound. It wasn’t his ears or even the soles of his feet that noticed; it was more something that prickled inside his head. The whole world’s breaking apart around us! Spreading his legs a little wider on the tower’s floor and gripping his staff midway to either side of the balance, he waited to deal with whatever happened next.

  Cashel’s feet didn’t move. The air cleared. He hadn’t known that he and the wizard were in a smoky gleam until it was gone again. They were right where they had been, but the tower was gone and the city was gone. He and Rasile were in the midst of armed civilians and a few soldiers, looking from stone battlements toward a ragtag army on the plains below.

  “Begone, you thieves and vagabonds!” cried a man not far from Cashel. He was using a megaphone. The three fellows next to him were older, fatter, and wore gold chains for ornament, so the herald was probably speaking their words. “If you’re not gone in three minutes by the sand glass, we’ll shoot you all down like the dogs you are!”

  They were on top of a gate house. There was a socket where a catapult was probably meant to pivot, but there wasn’t one in place now. Several soldiers had bows, though, and the folks below were only a furlong away. That was in range of a good bowman.

  Rasile was getting to her feet. Cashel put out his arm for her to grab. A man wearing a molded breastplate meant for somebody much thinner strode through them on his way to the group around the herald. Cashel didn’t feel the contact, and it didn’t seem like the local fellow had either.

  “I think we’re seeing something that occurred recently,” Rasile said. Her tongue clucked against the side of her long jaw in a Corl equivalent of a grin. “Or perhaps something that will occur shortly. I do not know where it is, however.”

  Cashel thought about the way the people around couldn’t see or touch him and Rasile, but there wasn’t any point in talking about something that the wizard knew a lot better than he did. He said, “We’re on Ombis on Telut, I think. I’ve never been here, but the colors the servants of the envoys from there wore in Valles are the same as—”

  He pointed to the cloth hanging down from the herald’s megaphone. It was orange around the edges and slashed green on black inside the border.

  “—that is.”

  Cashel noticed shapes and patterns without having to think about them. Sheep might all look alike to city folk, but a shepherd knows each of his flock by name even if he can’t count above ten without a tally stick. Heraldry was nothing at all to somebody tuned to little differences in the brown/black/gray/white markings of Haft sheep.

  “The fellow in the green robe there,” he said as the tallest of the three men in fancy dress turned so Cashel could see his face, “he’s the one who was the envoy himself last spring.”

  There were folks on the wall as far around as Cashel could see from the gate tower. The city wall was only twice his height—the tower was half that again—but that was still a huge advantage.

  The defenders weren’t well armed. Besides the soldiers, some of the better-dressed civilians had swords and maybe even metal armor, but the rest carried spears of a simple pattern that’d probably come from the city armory. They were in leather caps and breastplates.

  That was probably good enough, though, because the attackers outside the walls were just what the herald had called them: vagabonds and thieves. Some were armed with swords as good as those of Ornifal nobles. The gold inlays and ivory hilts didn’t mean much in a fight, but Cashel knew that fancy touches like those were often put on the best steel by the best craftsmen.

  But there weren’t many with swords, and even those few didn’t go in much for armor. Some carried boat pikes, long-shafted weapons with a hook below the point to catch rigging or the rail of a ship trying to keep clear. Cashel guessed they were pirates. Even without better weapons, it would’ve looked hard for the city if the whole army had been that sort.

  But all beyond a couple double handsful of pirates were escaped slaves, farm laborers, and the sort of thing you’d find if you emptied out prisons. Some had been branded or were missing hands. They had clubs, pitchforks, and poles with a knife tied to the end.

  And there were women. Cashel knew women could fight: he’d seen Sharina joint enemies with her Pewle knife, and even Garric’s delicate Lady Liane carried a blade that could—and had—cut deep enough to open the big blood vessels. Some of the slatterns below would be dangerous in an alley or a crowded taproom.

  But they weren’t going to batter through stone walls. There were plenty of women on the walls too, ready to throw cobblestones and pour down boiling water. Ombis shouldn’t have had anything to fear from its attackers—

  But Cashel knew that Rasile wouldn’t be here unless there was more going on than they’d seen thus far. His hands polished his quarterstaff. He guessed that if the city folk passed through him without touching, so would a pirate sword; but just in case.

  “That’s funny,” Cashel said to Rasile. He pointed. “Those people down there don’t have any more ranks than a flock of sheep would, but they’re making sure to leave a big space back from the chief.”

  The leader of the pirates was a tall man who’d braided scraps of cloth-of-gold into his blond beard. He was husky too, though not as big as Cashel; there weren’t many people who were as big as Cashel. He had two long swords and many daggers dangling from his crossbelts, but they were all in their scabbards while he lifted something small and shiny in his left hand.

  A city elder turned to a soldier with a bow. When he moved, his gold chains clanked. “Shoot him!” he ordered imperiously.

  “I’d waste an arrow from here,” the soldier said. He was frowning toward the pirates instead of meeting the eyes of the elder.

  “I’m ordering you to shoot, Sister take you!” the elder shouted. “I want him to stop what he’s doing!”

  “I got twelve arrows,” the soldier said. “I’m going to keep them for better targets than that. It’s our asses too, remember.”

  Another soldier turned and said loudly, “If you want to cashier us now because we don’t jump through silly hoops for you, Master Comian, you do that and we’ll be out the back gate before you finish the words. Otherwise, pipe down and let us get on with the business of keeping these pirates on the other side of the walls.”

  The pirate chief was talking, or anyway his lips were moving. He wasn’t shouting to the city, though. It didn’t seem to Cashel that the fellow was talking loud enough that anybody at all could hear him. His men gave him a wide berth; maybe they had more confidence in the defenders’ archery than the soldiers themselves did.

  “There!” said Rasile. Disconcertingly, she balanced on her right foot and scratched herself in the middle of the back with her left; she’d become a great deal more limber than she’d been when Sharina brought her to her first council meeting. “That must be why I was drawn here.”

  “That” was the shimmer of light beside the pirate chief. It reminded Cashel of the way the sun glanced off the face of an iceberg, bright and cold and as thin as the surface of a mirror.

  A curved hugeness the color of layered shale squirmed out of the air. “A Worm,” Rasile said. Her nose wrinkled. “Perhaps the Worm whic
h devoured all its siblings after they had scoured clean their world.”

  Sometimes Cashel could see beyond the creature to a waste of shingle and sluggish gray water. Violet cracklings in that background suggested momentary shapes, but they were the shapes of nightmare. The Worm shifted forward.

  Cashel pursed his lips. He had trouble at first figuring how big the creature was; it was out of scale with everything. Its gray body was banded the way an earthworm is, but the mouth was nothing like. It didn’t squirm like a snake. The front of the body stretched forward, stopped, and then the back hitched up to join it.

  The creature loomed higher in the air than Cashel could’ve reached with his staff from where he stood on top of the gate house. He couldn’t guess how long it was; the second time it hunched forward brought its head to spitting distance of the wall, but the body still trailed back to the window in the air beside where the pirate chief was standing.

  Cashel stepped in front of the wizard by reflex: there was danger, so he put himself between it and who he was looking out for. Normally he’d have started his quarterstaff spinning but there was too many people around, he didn’t have space. He said, “Rasile, ought we to—”

  Rasile squalled something, a word rather than a full incantation. It was enough to shift her and Cashel up to the height of a tall tree in a dazzle of scarlet wizardlight. Most of the civilians were scattering from the walls and the gate house in front of the creature, but the soldiers didn’t run and the city elders didn’t either.

  The fellow in the too-small breastplate drew a sword from which rust had recently been polished. He screamed, “Shoot it! Shoot it!” to the soldiers. That wasn’t very useful, Cashel guessed, but neither would anything else have been.

  The archers were already shooting as fast as they could. The arrows were too small to do real harm to something the size of the Worm, and they sparkled off the sides anyway. The creature might’ve been a gray granite tower sliding toward Ombis on its side.

  Was it really alive? It moved, but so would a flow of lava.

  The Worm’s mouth opened in a circle rimmed with teeth all around. The man in the undersized breastplate slashed toward it, though the tip of his sword passed through empty air. Cashel wondered if the fellow had his eyes closed.

  Black smoke belched from the Worm’s throat, coating men and stones alike. The elder’s flesh shriveled and he dropped his sword. The silvered quillons had turned black and the blade glowed cherry red.

  The Worm extended a long, ivory tusk and shoved forward the way water fills a millrace. The gate house burst inward. The jaws folded closed, swallowing masonry and the doors of iron-bound oak alike. Powdered rock puffed skyward.

  The citizens of Ombis ran in shrieking terror, all but a few who stood transfixed on the battlements. The Worm hunched again, but this time its foreparts lifted high enough that Cashel brought his staff into a posture of defense again. The creature twisted and slammed down, flattening a section of the wall.

  The Worm writhed sideways, grinding a swath of buildings into dust and splinters. Cashel thought he heard screams, but his mind might’ve been inventing them. People had run into those doorways when the Worm lurched toward the walls, some of them women clutching infants, but he doubted he could really hear their despair over the crashing ruin of the houses where they’d tried to shelter.

  The Worm gathered itself to drive deeper into the city. Ombis had no citadel; it had trusted to the strength of its outer walls. Because the city was built up to three and four stories rather than sprawling, the circuit was modest in comparison with the population available to defend it. All order and discipline had vanished when the Worm engulfed the gateway, and with them was gone any hope of defense.

  The pirate chief lowered the object in his hand; he shouted something also. Cashel couldn’t hear sound, let alone the word itself, over the ripping destruction.

  The creature’s massive curves froze. Purple radiance gathered over its body, covering it the way fungus might cocoon a dead caterpillar. The Worm twitched once more and, twitching, vanished.

  Only rubble remained of half a furlong of the walls, and not much of that. The creature’s weight and iron-hard hide had crushed to powder ashlars which would’ve resisted battering rams for a week.

  Shrieking in savage triumph, the pirates swept toward the breach in the walls. The Worm’s progress had plowed a trench in the soil. Looking down, Cashel saw that the city walls had extended some distance beneath the surface, but the massive foundation courses had gone down the creature’s maw as surely as the lighter masonry of the visible portion.

  A soldier lay in the street where the Worm’s impact had flung him. He’d been killed by the black smoke; his clothes were rotting and his upturned face had been eaten away to the bone.

  Female pirates were entering with the men. A bare-breasted redhead knelt to lift the hand of a citizen whose lower legs had been trapped by the collapse of a building. For a moment Cashel thought she was helping the fellow; then light flashed on her knife as she cut off his fingers to get the rings.

  Instead of rushing into the city immediately, the pirate chief stood with his head bowed, then put his talisman away in a silk neck pouch. Finally he drew his swords and went through the breach. Even now he was sauntering instead of running.

  Cashel looked at Rasile. He didn’t say anything. The wizard yowled a phrase and swept her right hand like she was wiping something out of the air. She and Cashel were back in brilliant sunlight on top of the watchtower in Pandah.

  The yarrow stalks were scattered where Rasile’s gesture had flung them. The cat woman sprawled on the flagstones. She’d been keenly alert while they stood where she’d transported them, but now her body demanded to be paid for that effort.

  Cashel didn’t have a pillow or a rolled cloak to put down, so he cradled her head with his left hand. She shuddered, then opened her eyes and looked at him. She didn’t try to get up yet.

  “I’ve seen that sort of thing happen to cities before,” Cashel said. “I’ll watch it again if I have to, but only if I have to. And I figured we’d pretty much seen all we needed to see this time.”

  “Yes, we’ve seen enough,” Rasile said, rubbing her ear against Cashel’s palm. “We’ve seen things I never imagined to see, though he seems to have the Worm under control. He’s not a wizard, you know, but he has a wizard aiding him. A wizard or worse.”

  “Master Cashel?” called an unfamiliar voice from the stairwell. Cashel hadn’t barred the trapdoor giving onto the parapet, but the person speaking from the stairs didn’t presume to lift the panel. “Prince Garric sends you his compliments and hopes you and Lady Rasile can join him for a council meeting at your earliest convenience.”

  Rasile gathered her limbs under her with a smooth motion, but she didn’t try to stand. Cashel glanced at her, then shifted to open the door with the left hand which the wizard no longer needed. The quarterstaff was in his right, and he wasn’t in any mood to put it down after the scene he’d just watched.

  “We’ll come as quick as we can,” he said to the messenger.

  “Cashel, I will not be able to walk for a time, I’m afraid,” Rasile said; she gave a little growl of frustration deep in her throat. She still hadn’t tried to get up.

  “Shall I call for a carriage, master?” the messenger said. He was one of the fellows Liane kept around her, not exactly palace staff.

  “It wouldn’t do any good, but thanks,” Cashel said. “Horses don’t, ah, like the smell of cat men. I’ll carry her myself when she’s ready to go.”

  Rasile started to rise. Cashel had been squatting. He set his left arm under her thighs and scooped her up instead of simply helping her.

  “Can you do that, master?” the messenger said. “It’s a mile to the palace, you know.”

  “It’s no trouble,” said Cashel, grinning in a mixture of confidence and quiet pride.

  It wouldn’t be hard at all. The Coerli were lighter built than people, and Rasil
e was frail even of her own kind.

  Besides, it made him feel good. Cashel or-Kenset didn’t have any proper place in the council of smart, educated people, but he could look out for things. Since there weren’t any sheep around, he’d look out for a Corl wizard.

  SHARINA HEARD A clash of hobnails. The guards lounging outside the door to Tenoctris’ burrow were bringing themselves upright to receive visitors. She was already turning when Captain Ascor called, “All right, Colemno, what’s your hurry this time? The princess or Lady Tenoctris?”

  Blood Eagle officers were generally recruited from the minor nobility, so they were capable of ceremonial formality when they thought it was necessary. On the other hand, even the officers—the enlisted men entered the regiment solely because of proven skill and courage in battle; they were not going to use proper forms of address—were likely to be informal on most occasions. Ascor obviously knew the courier.

  “Both, Ascor,” Colemno said. Sharina, stepping out the door, recognized the fellow as a member of Liane’s staff. Seeing her, he bowed and continued, “Your Highness, Prince Garric has requested that you and Lady Tenoctris—”

  Sharina felt the wizard beside her now in the doorway. “

  —join him in his suite for an emergency council meeting.”

  “What’s the emergency, Master Colemno?” Tenoctris said. She wasn’t unpleasant about it, but she didn’t sugarcoat the demand with flourishes like “if you please” or “if I may ask.”

  The courier glanced at Ascor and his squad, but that was reflex. Like the Blood Eagles, Liane’s entourage took official rules as things you obeyed if they didn’t get in the way of doing your job.

  “Milady,” Colemno said, “all I know is there’s something happening in Palomir, the Empire of Palomir. One of the outside men named Aberus came in cut up pretty bad. I don’t know what he said, but the prince heard it and didn’t waste any time sending us to find you all.”

  “We’re close to the palace here,” Tenoctris said, to Sharina but without trying to prevent Colemno and the guards from overhearing. “Let me take a moment to learn more now. I think that’ll be more useful than waiting for others to arrive from the ends of the city.”