The Gods Return

by David Drake

  Cashel had his usual leather wallet, the one he’d used when he was watching sheep or doing any other job that would keep him away from the mill at lunchtime. In it was hard bread, whey cheese, a gourd of ale with a wooden stopper, and a couple onions. It would keep for a week and not be the worse for the wait. It wouldn’t be any better either, of course, but that had been what he’d eaten for most of his life. Nobody could look at Cashel or-Kenset and say simple food wasn’t enough to keep a man healthy.

  Rasile yowled her incantation. The sky looked bright when Cashel glanced at it, but it didn’t seem to throw as much light down on the roof slates as it had a moment before. The shadows of the flowerpots were blurring into general darkness.

  Rasile shrieked something that ended with a spitting sound, pft-pft-pft! The yarrow stalks burned with red wizardlight, and a razor of ice shaved Cashel’s marrow. The landscape beyond them changed.

  Tufts of grass, yellow and dry, sprouted from gritty soil. The wind was harsh and cold and terribly thin. Cashel drew a deep breath, but it felt like he was being smothered with a feather pillow. In the distance was a great mountain, its slopes glittering with ancient snow. From its peak trailed steam with a sulfurous tinge.

  Cashel had been holding the wizard’s woven satchel in his left hand and his quarterstaff in his right at the balance. Now he slipped the looped handles up over his shoulder so that he could spread both hands on the staff. He didn’t swing it horizontal, though, because the ferrules would’ve stuck out beyond the edges of the star.

  Rasile called out again, rousing another pulse of wizardlight. Liane stood with her eyes closed and her face set. Bone-chilling cold cut again.

  They were on a shore. Basalt spikes, one of them hollowed into an archway by the surf, stood up from black sand; the landscape for as far as Cashel could see had no other features. The water was bright blue where it rolled onto the beach, but in the middle distance it changed sharply to the dusty green of olive leaves.

  Something on the horizon curled up, then back into the depths. Cashel wondered how anything alive could be so big.

  Rasile called, and ice carved deep again. The sea vanished and the sand they stood on was red. The air smelled wet. Soft-bodied plants sprouted around the margins of a pond near the figure of yarrow stalks. There wasn’t any grass and the tallest plants were horsetails that Cashel could touch the tops of by stretching his arm up.

  Rasile sank onto her haunches. Cashel and Liane both reached to grab her, but she hadn’t collapsed; she was just settling.

  “Our route is over these sands, companions,” the wizard said, looking out over the waste. Sandstone ridges slanted across it; there were more plants in their lee. Cashel felt a breeze, but it didn’t smell of anything in particular.

  “Where is this place?” said Liane. Now that they’d arrived she sounded calm, the way she usually did. “That is, is it in our world?”

  “Perhaps,” said Rasile. “Not our time, though; your time or mine either one.”

  “Ma’am?” Cashel said. “Give me a moment, if you will.”

  He stepped out of the star so that he had room to limber up with his staff. He began to spin the iron-shod hickory in slow circles. Having the wizard’s satchel over his shoulder cramped him, but it was all right if he kept his arms up a little more than usual.

  He’d drop the gear if there was time, of course. But there might not be time.

  Cashel brought the staff around in a figure eight, spinning faster. He wasn’t surprised that the tips left sparkles of blue wizardlight behind them. The landscape looked simple enough, but something here was making the hair on the back of his arms and neck prickle.

  He slowed to a halt and slanted the quarterstaff in front of him with his left hand high. Looking back to the women, he said, “I guess I’m ready now, Rasile.”

  The wizard rose from her crouch. “And I am ready to lead, Cashel,” she said. “This is not a place to tarry.”

  Rasile started off to the southeast, her legs taking quick, steady strides. She seemed to have recovered from the wizardry, though she was still pretty old.

  Liane glanced at Cashel. When he nodded, she followed Rasile by a double pace behind. She wore sturdy sandals that even had cleats; they weren’t anything like her usual footgear. Cashel hoped they wouldn’t blister her feet.

  Liane usually kept an ivory-mounted case knife in her sash. The finger-long blade was etched and gold-filled, but both edges were sharp and the steel was the best Cashel had ever seen. She held it bare in her hand now.

  Cashel brought up the rear, looking in all directions. Not looking for anything in particular, just for things that might be a problem. Which was anything at all in this world, he figured, from the way his skin tingled.

  He smiled. And that was true where they were going as well. It made him feel good to know he might be useful.

  DIORA PAUSED IN the bedroom doorway and looked back at Sharina in her nightdress. “Your Highness, are you really sure you wouldn’t like me to stay tonight?” she said. “Hachon will understand.”

  The maid frowned, apparently thinking about what she’d just said. “Well, it doesn’t matter what he thinks anyway, does it?” she said. “You being the princess and him just a captain. But he would.”

  “Thank you, Diora,” said Sharina as she stepped forward to close the door herself if the maid didn’t do it. “I prefer to be alone.”

  Well, of course what she’d really prefer was for Cashel to be with her, but that wasn’t possible. The needs of the kingdom came first. Sharina was too . . . flat, she supposed. She wasn’t physically tired, not unusually so at any rate, but after watching Cashel vanish she had no mental energy left to protest.

  She’d be all right again soon. She always was.

  Sharina walked to the window looking down on the courtyard. It wasn’t a real garden, but four stubby palm trees stood in pots to punctuate benches which were empty at this hour. The quarter-moon showed everything clearly, though without color.

  She hadn’t been with Cashel when he went off this time. Rasile had said that many passages would be opening. Those protected within her seven-pointed star could choose the path they wished to take, but others who stood too close would find themselves in some uncertain elsewhere.

  There was a bird nest in the top of the palm nearest Sharina’s window. A chick peeped and a muted cooing responded; it must be a dove.

  Sharina had watched Rasile’s incantation from the fire tower, two furlongs from the roof garden but tall enough to give a good view of what was happening. She’d been alone, though her escort of Blood Eagles had been below in the tower just as they stood outside the door of her suite now. Cashel and his companions hadn’t moved, though the ruby wizardlight swelled and waned about them in response to the Corl’s chant.

  Sharina looked away from the window. The bed had curtains but it was far too warm to need them tonight. Diora had turned down the sheet before she left, but for a moment Sharina considered throwing an extra rug from the storage chest onto the floor and sleeping there.

  Well, she could do that later. She got into the bed.

  She’d expected a flood of wizardlight to blaze around her friends at the climax of the incantation. Instead, the heptagram had grown fainter and the three figures had slowly dissolved as though they’d fallen into a vat of acid. For an instant Sharina thought she could see Cashel’s skeleton holding his hickory staff upright. She knew that was an illusion, but even so she had to step away from the parapet in fear that she’d topple over in a sudden wash of blackness.

  Cashel will be coming back. I have to keep things going here so that there’ll be comfort and safety when he returns.

  Sharina was sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She knew that if she tried to work, though, she’d just stare at tasks without doing anything useful.

  She might’ve been able to accomplish something if Liane were with her. They worked well together, better than either did alone—and that was better than
most people, she’d learned by going over documents prepared by others, even experienced clerks.

  She missed Liane, but she missed Cashel more. She missed Cashel so much that her chest hurt with longing. She wouldn’t be able to sleep—

  And Sharina was asleep.

  She floated above an enormous city. She recognized it from drawings by the architects Lord Tadai had engaged to plan Pandah’s rebirth as capital of the kingdom. The old quarter remained, though the city walls had been razed to form boulevards and the tenements of the poor had been replaced by splendid public buildings.

  The greatest was a soaring black temple; the dream Sharina curved toward it. The colonnaded plaza was paved with the same polished granite as had been used for the structures. In the center of it stood a tall man in a hooded black robe.

  “Your gods are dead, Sharina!” he called. His voice came from everywhere. Storm clouds began to pile up as suddenly as foam covers a mug of ale.

  “Come to me and worship Lord Scorpion!” the man said. Sharina felt her dream self drawn toward him like a straw in a millrace; she struggled.

  “Worship the One Which rules this world and will rule it for eternity!” the man said, lifting his arms toward her. Her dream self was so close now that she could see the scorpion on the shoulder of his velvet robe, perched there like a trained magpie.

  “Worship Lord Scorpion!”

  Sharina willed her arms to drag her away, but she had no form to fight the current dragging her. Nonetheless she felt the fabric of the dream tearing about her.

  “Worship Lord Scorpion!”

  The clouds were black as starless night, twisting and shaping into a monstrous scorpion.

  “Worship!”

  Sharina lurched out of her bed. The sky had begun to hint at false dawn.

  The Pewle knife lay on the small bedside table. She gripped the sealskin sheath with her left hand and drew the long blade. There was no enemy to face with the weapon, but its presence settled her.

  Her mind still echoed with, “Worship!”

  LORD ATTAPER WAS an Ornifal noble and as good a horseman as anyone in the royal army. Places in the Blood Eagles he commanded, however, were filled by soldiers who’d proved their courage in any of the regiments, most of which were infantry. It didn’t surprise Garric when a trooper in the squad trotting ahead of him and Tenoctris wobbled, grabbed his saddle horn, and fell off anyway. He hit with more of a thud than a crash of armor, since the ground was soft.

  “Get up and rejoin us, Mitchin!” Attaper snarled, furious that one of his men had embarrassed him. “And quickly!”

  “That seems a little unjust,” said Tenoctris, riding beside Garric with ladylike grace—she was sidesaddle—and perfect skill. “This may be the first time he’s ridden a horse in his life.”

  The wizard’s family hadn’t been wealthy, but they were noble; Tenoctris had learned to ride and, for that matter, to drive a coach and four. That latter skill had proven useful in the past, because it certainly wasn’t one people raised in a peasant village were going to have.

  “I don’t think ‘justice’ is one of the concepts Attaper dwells on when he’s doing his job,” Garric said.

  “Which is every bloody minute he’s awake,” Carus said. “And I’d bet half his dreams are about guarding you, too. You don’t make his life easy, lad.”

  Then, in what was for the warrior king a reflective tone, he added, “I don’t think he’s ever been as happy before.”

  The cornicene of the cavalry troop they were riding with blew an attention note on the horn coiled about his body. The captain wigwagged his arms in a field semaphore, signaling the ten troopers of his lead section. They spread to left and right as they disappeared over the next rise.

  Lord Zettin’s scouts ranged far and wide across the continent, but the army’s own cavalry was responsible for its close-in reconnaissance. Garric needed to see the terrain himself if he were to dispose his troops properly in event of a battle, and there wasn’t likely to be margin to cover any mistakes he made.

  Trooper Mitchin thundered past on his way to rejoin his squad. His shield, a section of cylinder, banged against him every time the horse gathered its legs. The Blood Eagles were equipped as infantry. Attaper had mounted this platoon only to allow them to keep up with the prince. If they had to fight, they’d dismount.

  Lord Waldron hadn’t liked Garric riding off with a troop of cavalry and a platoon of Blood Eagles, but he understood the logic of the plan. More to the point, he understood that it was his duty to obey when his prince ordered. Attaper wasn’t nearly as clear on the latter point. He simply would have ignored Garric telling him to stay behind, so Garric hadn’t bothered.

  “Tenoctris?” Garric said. “I’m here to get a feel for the country.”

  “So that you and I get a feel for the country, lad,” Carus reminded him. The ghost smiled, but his words were true enough. Carus had been a formidable swordsman, but his armies wouldn’t have won every battle they fought if he hadn’t also been even more impressive as a tactician.

  Grinning at the silent comment, Garric continued, “But what are you here for? Are you looking for particular places to use your art?”

  Tenoctris laughed. “Not at all,” she said. “In fact, this country is very peaceful. Pleasantly bland, I feel. It’s unusual to be able to look from horizon to horizon and not see signs of mass slaughter or dreadful rites anywhere. Well, it’s been unusual for me in the past, at any rate.”

  This country in general ranged from bog to marsh, though the leading section had thus far been able to find ground firm enough for horsemen. It’d be a bad place to meet an enemy, since the soft ground would channel the fighting along a series of parallel causeways.

  “It’d be worse for the rats, though,” Carus said judiciously. “They’ve got narrow feet.”

  “No,” Tenoctris said, “I’m here because you are, Garric. I believe that whoever is ruling Palomir will sooner or later attack you personally. I want to be where the excitement is.”

  She laughed merrily, but Garric didn’t imagine her light tone took anything away from its truth.

  “I don’t think I’m that important,” he said carefully.

  Tenoctris shrugged.

  “I think you are, lad,” said the ghost in Garric’s mind. “If a sword and an army could’ve held the Isles together, I’d have done it. But that’s all I had, and it wasn’t enough. Nobody I’ve seen in this age has even that much. Nobody but you.”

  The main body—the Blood Eagles around Garric and Tenoctris, and the ten-man section with the cavalry commander—reached the crest of the ridge. Garric saw the troopers of the lead element halfway down the swale, proceeding very slowly. Two of the horses were in mud to their knees, and a third man was backtracking from a bog he’d decided was impenetrable. The troop commander was changing his advance section every few miles, because picking the trail required considerably more effort than following did.

  “The supply wagons are going to have the Sister’s own time getting through this,” Carus noted grimly.

  We’re using oxen, not draft horses, Garric reminded him silently. Their hooves are broader, and they spread with pressure so they won’t sink in as badly.

  Even as Garric’s mind formed the thought, a trio of spiral-horned antelope sprang out of a willow copse and bounded across what looked like choking swamp. They made great leaps that seemed to be higher than they were long, pausing briefly between one and the next. Their feet must be adapted to the environment, though just how Garric couldn’t imagine.

  A pity we can’t saddle them, Garric thought. That would give us an edge against the rats.

  Aloud he said, “Tenoctris, if the Gods have vanished—or anyway, if They don’t exist in this present . . . what does that mean for us? I mean, in the future?”

  Tenoctris shrugged again. “Well, possibly nothing,” she said. “After all, that’s the world I lived in all my life until very recently: a world in which the Great Go
ds didn’t exist.”

  “But you said you were wrong?” Garric said, frowning.

  “Yes, but it’s what I believed at the time,” she said with a wry smile. “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I believed it. So I have no difficultly in imagining a world in which the Gods really don’t exist, rather than them simply not existing in my mind.”

  Garric considered a world without the Great Gods. He’d never doubted Their existence—people in Barca’s Hamlet didn’t doubt the Gods—but neither had They been a major part of his life.

  Reise offered a crumb and a drop of ale to the Lady at family meals, but any true worship Garric had done was to the rough stone carving of Duzi on the hill overlooking the south pasture. The Shepherd Who protected the world was far too grand to worry about real shepherds, but little Duzi might find a lost sheep or deflect the lightning from the elm which sheltered the shepherd against the sudden thunderstorm.

  So perhaps it really wouldn’t make much difference. Garric was uncomfortable with the thought, but there was no end of more serious problems facing the kingdom.

  “The difficulty is that I’m not sure the throne, so to speak, will remain empty,” Tenoctris continued. The Blood Eagles had gone through this section single-file, but there was room for two horses abreast, or almost so. Garric nodded and Tenoctris pulled ahead; he followed closely enough that his horse nuzzled her left thigh.

  “Certainly the Gods of Palomir hope to fill the void,” she said. “And we hope, of course, to disappoint them. I rather doubt that they’re the only powers who wish to rule this age, however. And they may not be the worst of the possible choices.”

  “First things first,” Garric muttered. The leading element was signaling back to his captain with what seemed cheerful enthusiasm; perhaps they’d gotten through the boggy stretch. If so, it was time to turn back and carry the intelligence to the main body of the army.

  But there’d be another day, and another day; each with its own problems.