The Gods Return

by David Drake

  To one of the spearmen he said, “Obert, I’m leaving you in charge while I take Lady Liane to the Priests’ Office. I’ll be back promptly.”

  He bowed to Liane. “Milady, if you’ll come with me, I’ll take you to the Enclosure. I believe only Amineus, the high priest, will be there at the moment, but he can make such further arrangements as are required.”

  “Yessir, we’ll handle things,” said the soldier, obviously relieved that the problem was going away.

  Bessus strode down the street, with Liane beside him. He was talking to her. Cashel would’ve liked to be close enough to hear—he wouldn’t have said anything, of course—but he figured it was best he follow at the back behind Rasile.

  The streets of Dariada were mostly narrow and always crooked as a sheep track. In lots of places, the street vendors and people walking the other way couldn’t have kept clear if they’d wanted to.

  Some of the men seemed to think they ought to grab Liane as she walked past them. Cashel held his staff by one end and kept the length of it stretched out alongside Liane like a railing. If somebody didn’t take the hint, they learned that Cashel was strong enough to slam them back against the wall despite the awkward way he had to hold the staff.

  Rasile made everybody stop and stare—that, or sometimes run the other way. Nobody did anything really hostile, though, not even spit. Maybe they just didn’t have time to react. Because of the way the old wizard walked with two people in front and Cashel behind, people generally didn’t see her until they were right alongside.

  Bessus led them out into a plaza, sort of, though it straggled along a curving wall more than being square or any real shape. In Carcosa it wouldn’t be much more than a wide street, but there hadn’t been anything close to it in Dariada. It was the town market, with people selling ordinary goods and produce to either side. In the middle where Bessus took them, folks hawked souvenirs made of everything from pottery and embroidered cloth to silver and gold.

  Dariada’s houses had mostly three floors—stone on the bottom course, concrete mixed with broken chunks of brick to make it lighter as you went up. The walls were painted, but patches had flaked bare lots of places. Occasionally there was a top floor of plastered canes too. There were so few windows that Cashel thought they must have courtyards or most rooms wouldn’t have any light at all.

  The building Bessus was heading toward across the plaza was round and covered with a tall copper dome; it didn’t look anything like others in the town. The tile-roofed porch on all sides was held up by pillars; the web between them at the tops curved and stepped like the battlements of the city wall.

  It wasn’t the building that really caught Cashel’s attention, though. It was set in a old brick wall just a trifle too high for a man to reach with his arm stretched up and standing on tiptoes. That wasn’t new to him either: it was a lot like the wall around the royal palace in Valles, only that one was half again as high.

  The tree spreading over the wall in all directions, though, that was nothing Cashel had seen before. At first he thought it was a whole grove of trees, but occasionally the branches—and some of them were as thick as his waist—joined a different bole from the one they sprouted from.

  Tiny little leaves sprouted from long tendrils that dangled over the plaza in a ragged curtain. Some branches—never ones with leaves—had what looked like pea pods hanging from them instead. A few pods were as long and thick as Cashel’s forearm; those were beginning to turn from green to brown.

  Broad as the tree was—and if it filled the enclosure the way it seemed to, it was at least a furlong across—it wasn’t especially tall. Cashel eyed it critically, the way he’d have judged if he’d been hired to fell it and needed to know what it would cover when he laid it down. None of the tree’s joined trunks would run to half the height of a big white oak.

  Bessus pushed his way through the hucksters and their customers, a wide assortment of folk with the dress and manners of every part of the Isles and beyond. A servant—he wasn’t a guard; he wore a bleached tunic and a red vest with gold embroidery, but he didn’t have a weapon—stood in the doorway of the round building. “Yes?” he called.

  “Go fetch your master,” Bessus ordered, skipping up the three steps of the temple’s base. Liane and Rasile followed just below him, but Cashel stayed down on the ground for now. He turned sideways so that he could keep the building’s doorway in the corner of his eye but still watch what was going on in the plaza. “Is Amineus on duty today? Fetch—ah, there you are, Master Amineus!”

  A very large man—he was certainly fat, but he was so tall that he seemed more massive than plump—stepped onto the porch. He’d probably have cleared the transom, but he ducked as he passed under it nonetheless. He was holding a cylindrical loaf of bread in his right hand and a serrated knife in his right.

  “What is it, Bessus?” he said. “And couldn’t it wait till I’ve had my lunch?”

  With Cashel in front of the round building was a slab of granite about as tall as he was. It was gray, though flecks of white sprinkled the darker crystals. The surface was as uniformly rough as that of a weathered boulder despite obviously being a worked stone.

  “Amineus, I’ve brought you Lady Liane bos-Benliman, the envoy of Prince Garric,” Bessus said, showing that he’d been paying more attention than Cashel’d thought when Liane introduced them. “She says her business is with you, so I’ll leave her in your capable hands. I’m getting back to my duties, now.”

  The slab’s edges on the side toward Cashel had been rounded over, but on the back they were sharp: it must’ve stood in a sandy place once, where the wind had worn off whatever’d been on the side toward it. He thought about the desert they’d crossed to get here. Had Dariada been there before the Change—or maybe been there much, much longer ago than that?

  “Say there, what is this?” boomed the big priest. His voice had the rumble of a bull calling a challenge. “Bessus, if she’s an envoy, then she needs to go before the assembly, not come to me!”

  People in the plaza were listening to the argument, but that wasn’t any danger. The same folk would gawk and laugh if an old woman slipped in sheep droppings. They wouldn’t mean any harm by it. Cashel moved around to the sheltered side of the slab to see what was there.

  “Master Amineus, my business is with you and your colleagues as priests of the Tree,” Liane said crisply. “I believe we can take care of it without difficulty. However I strongly suggest that we go into your dwelling—”

  She nodded to the doorway.

  “—and discuss it there.”

  The other side of the slab showed a giant with a walled city between his spread legs. He was holding a snake by the neck with both hands; strangling it, like enough. The snake’s coils writhed over the stone’s curved upper edge. Around the bottom of the picture were the little spikes that stonecutters used to mean waves. Cashel wondered if the city was supposed to be Dariada, back before the Change when it was a port.

  Amineus looked from his bread to the knife, then scrunched his face up in frustration. “All right, come in, milady,” he said.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Bessus said, turning and striding back through the crowd.

  “Bessus, you come back here!” the priest said, but he didn’t sound like he thought the guard captain was going to pay any attention. He was right about that.

  Amineus shook his head in disgust. “Come in to the Priests’ House, milady,” he repeated. “You’d best bring your servant and the animal with you or there might be trouble.”

  The priest gestured them to go ahead of him. Rasile dipped her head politely as she stepped into the building after Liane. Cashel had thought of saying something about how the fellow ought to talk to respectable old folk like Rasile, but that wasn’t what they were here for.

  He thought, I wonder if Rasile could turn him into a pig? And because that was a funny image, he was chuckling as he entered.

  SHARINA REALIZED SHE was holding the
Pewle knife bare in her hand. She slid it back in its sealskin sheath.

  “Thank you,” said the rat. “I thought that it was a little excessive. Though flattering, I suppose, to be considered so dangerous.”

  “It wasn’t for you,” Sharina muttered in embarrassment. “I was having a bad dream. Though—”

  She grinned at the rat. He seemed quite ordinary, save for the little vest and pantaloons.

  “—I don’t suppose it was going to help much with a dream either. Ah—thank you for waking me up, Master Burne.”

  “Don’t mention it, Princess,” the rat said. “Now if you’ll pardon me, I’ll take off this absurd clothing. Nothing against clothing of course, but for human beings. And—”

  He pulled off the vest and dangled it critically from the, well, toes of his left forepaw.

  “Well, I must say, I can’t imagine wearing something like that even when I was human. Could you?”

  Sharina swung her legs over the side of the bed and tucked her feet into the sandals waiting there. She didn’t stand because she was already looking down at the rat—at Burne. “You haven’t always been a rat, then?” she said.

  “No, no,” said the rat, tossing the pantaloons on top of the vest and then beginning to groom himself. Between licks he said, “This was my mother’s idea, I’m afraid. She thought it was time I took a wife. I wasn’t interested in any wife, and as for the woman Mother had picked, well, I absolutely would not have anything to do with her. So Mother lost her temper and cursed me.”

  Sharina wondered if she was dreaming. The knife she still held had real weight, and out in the street she heard cartwheels clattering on the stone. The royal palace in Valles constructed of many small buildings within a walled compound; it was well insulated from the great city beyond. The houses of the pirate lords of Pandah, though certainly luxurious, were built around courtyards with their outer walls on the public streets.

  “Ah,” she said. “Your mother is a wizard, then?”

  “Oh, something like that,” said Burne. He eyed his tail critically, straightening it and then curling it closely around him again. “Anyway, being a rat isn’t such a bad life. Certainly it’s better than being married to the very strong-willed lady Mother picked for me. A harridan in training, I called her.”

  He looked up at Sharina and chuckled. His eyes twinkled in the moonlight streaming through the jalousies.

  “I’m afraid I have something of a temper too, you know,” he said. “Maybe if I’d been a little more diplomatic, Mother wouldn’t have become quite as angry. Still, what’s done is done. And as I said, it isn’t so bad. I quite like my fur, don’t you?”

  “It’s, ah, very smooth,” Sharina said. She wondered if she ought to pet him—and recoiled at the thought. Not because he was a rat, but because he wasn’t a rat.

  “I joined that family of mountebanks as a more comfortable environment than living with rats,” Burne said. “Not that I couldn’t have done so, but quite frankly the norms of rat society aren’t much to my liking. And then there’s the matter of the females. I’d have been the leading male, I assure you, but that entails duties which I would have found quite unpleasant. Even more unpleasant than my mother’s blond termagant.”

  He wiped his whiskers in front of his muzzle and licked them also, right half and then left. “No,” he said, “I preferred a cage and rather better food than the mountebanks themselves were eating. They valued me, you see. They’ll be quite distraught to learn that I’ve escaped, as they’ll view it.”

  “Ah,” said Sharina. She seemed to be saying that a lot tonight. “You’re leaving them? Leaving the show?”

  “Now don’t you go thinking that I’m treating them unfairly!” Burne squeaked sharply, sitting up straight on the pillow. “They didn’t capture me, of course, and the fact they believe they did is an amazing insult. Surely it would be obvious to the meanest intellect that no lock a human could open would be beyond my—”

  He raised a forepaw and spread the toes with their tiny claws.

  “—delicacy and intelligence to open also.”

  “I think . . .

  ,” said Sharina, answering the implied question instead of treating it as a rhetorical device. It settled her mind to deal with the business on an intellectual level. “That they weren’t able to think of you as other than an animal. Even when you spoke and practiced the tumbling routines with them. They didn’t let themselves believe what they really knew.”

  She pursed her lips. “I guess you practiced, I mean.”

  “Of course we practiced,” Burne said waspishly. “No matter how skilled one might be—and I’ll admit that the Serulli family was skilled; it wasn’t by chance I picked them for my purposes, you know. But despite that, the timing can only come from practice.”

  He settled himself onto his belly, his limbs drawn up under him. “They treated me well—except for the lack of intellectual companionship, of course. But they more than got value from my association with them. I owe them nothing, Princess, so you needn’t feel that you’ve harmed them because I’ve decided to associate with you instead.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Sharina said sharply. She got up, rocking the bed on its rope suspension.

  Burne waited till the bed had stilled before sitting up on his haunches. “Yes, I’m joining you now,” he said. “I won’t pretend that I don’t have my own reasons for doing so, just as I preferred the mountebanks to living with rats. Other rats. There’s a difficult time coming for this world, and I suspect that there’ll be more safety with you than there will be anywhere else.”

  He groomed his right whiskers again and added, “In the long run, of course. The immediate future is likely to become unpleasantly exciting.”

  On a silver tray by the bedside was an earthenware jar with a tumbler upended over its neck. Though the tumbler was glazed, the jar itself was not; water wept through the sides, cooling the remaining contents. Sharina filled the tumbler and drank.

  “I’m rather thirsty myself,” the rat said pointedly.

  Sharina paused. If I were home in Barca’s Hamlet and found a rat in my bedroom, I’d have—

  But Barca’s Hamlet wasn’t home anymore, and even when Sharina was an inn-servant she’d probably have hesitated before trying to crush a talking rat. She grinned. I hope I’d have had that much sense, she thought.

  She poured a little water into the tray. It wasn’t perfectly flat, so a shallow pool formed along one raised edge. “All right,” she said.

  Burne hopped from the pillow to the table. He bent, his tongue lapping quickly but his bright black eyes still focused on Sharina.

  “You’ll find me good company,” he said, raising his head again, “as well as being useful. For example—”

  Burne shot up from the bedside table, rattling the tray with the suddenness of his leap. Sharina jerked back instinctively, but the rat struck the wall more than arm’s length from her and dropped to the floor. Gripped in its forepaws was a finger-long scorpion.

  The chisel teeth made a quick snap, shearing off the sting. His paws shifted their grip; the teeth clicked twice more, nipping the scorpion’s pincers.

  “One this size isn’t really dangerous,” Burne said conversationally, “but it can send information to places we’d prefer should remain ignorant.”

  He began eating the scorpion, starting at the head; bits of black chitin sprinkled the marble floor around him. He paused, cleaning his muzzle with his long tongue. “Useful, as I told you,” he said.

  Sharina giggled. She supposed it was reaction. She sheathed the big knife for the second time tonight.

  “All right, Master Burne,” she said. “Though I will make a payment to your former, well, associates. A considerable payment.”

  She giggled again. The scorpion’s tail fell from the rat’s jaws. It was still twitching.

  “I can see,” Sharina said, “that you’re not going to be expensive to feed.”

  Chapter

  8


  BARAK KNEPHI . . . ,” SAID Brincisa, kneeling before a basalt nodule originally the size of a child’s skull but now split in half. The hollow interior was lined with amethyst crystals. She used it instead of drawing a figure like most of the wizards that Ilna had watched. “Baricha!”

  Instead of a flash of wizardlight, a bluish haze spread from the nodule in all directions. It was as faint as the sheen of moonlight on nacre; Ilna saw only the boundary between light and nonlight, moving outward at the speed of a man running. It vanished through the walls of the workroom.

  She felt only a faint tingle when the light passed through her body, and even that might have been the expectation that she ought to feel something. Ingens stood facing an alcove so that he wouldn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of what Brincisa was doing. He didn’t react at all to the haze; he probably didn’t see it.

  The wizard rose to her feet, then paused with her eyes closed and swayed. “No no,” she said sharply when Ilna reached out to support her. “I’m all right. Come, the effect should last till dawn, but we don’t know how long our business with the tomb will take. Master Ingens, bring the rope.”

  Ilna nodded curtly. She found Brincisa’s manner brusque and unpleasant, which would amuse her former neighbors in Barca’s Hamlet. On the other hand, Brincisa was commendably businesslike and obviously skilled in her arts. Perhaps Ilna’s distaste was simply a matter of like being repelled by like. Though—

  Ilna had eventually broken the link to the powers of Hell from which she’d gained her skills. Brincisa may well have had the same teachers; but if so, Ilna doubted that she’d turned her back on them.

  Brincisa led the way down the stairs. Until she got to the first landing the wizard used the railing for half her support, but she had full control of her balance from then on.

  A dark-clad servant waited in the entranceway. Ilna expected him to open the street door for them, but instead the man remained where he was. As they passed, she realized that the servant’s eyes were open and staring: he’d been paralyzed by the incantation.