The Gods Return

by David Drake

  NOT EVEN CHALCUS could climb a smooth rock wall and shove that roller out of the way, thought Ilna as she looked at the roof of the cave. It was solid black; only memory told her where the opening might be. But I wish he was here.

  She lowered her eyes to where Usun probably was, though she couldn’t see him either. “My name is Ilna os-Kenset,” she said. “A wizard named Brincisa lowered me into this cave to fetch the box you were in. She left me here when I wouldn’t send the box up ahead of me.”

  She sniffed and added, “She’d have left me anyway, obviously. Well, this way I have company. Besides the ghoul.”

  The wizened little man laughed like an angry squirrel. “Oh, you have much more than mere company, Ilna!” he said. “You have Usun! And as for that Brincisa—”

  He snapped his fingers.

  “—she fancies herself a wizard, true, but Hutton could stand her on her head when he wanted to. He did that! Hutton had me, you see.”

  Ilna thought of the last time she’d seen Hutton; probably the last time anybody would see Hutton. Smiling faintly she said, “It doesn’t seem to have done him a great deal of good. Unless his final wish was to become dinner for a ghoul.”

  As Ilna’s eyes adapted, she became aware of a faint blue glow in the direction the ghoul had disappeared. She heard or at least felt a low hum. She couldn’t tell where it came from or even be sure it really existed.

  Usun cackled again. “Oh, no, Hutton had great plans!” he said in his harsh, high-pitched voice. “He didn’t really die, you know.”

  “He certainly seemed to be dead, Master Usun,” Ilna said tartly. “Even before the ghoul began to eat him.”

  “Ilna, I’ll burst with laughing!” Usun said, chortling loudly enough to make it seem a possibility. “You’re right, you’re right, but Hutton didn’t imagine you. Well, who could, eh?”

  He paused. Ilna could now see a hint of the little man, squatting on his haunches at her feet. He was doing something with his hands—coiling the thin filament that’d bound the box to Hutton’s corpse, she suddenly realized.

  “He really did stand his wife on her head, you know,” Usun said confidentially. “Stood her there, dropped her, and warned her that he’d do it again if she annoyed him. But maybe Brincisa wasn’t so very thick, eh? She was sharp enough to fetch you and turn the tables on Hutton once and for all. He thought he was so clever, but now where is he?”

  “He was dead when I met him,” Ilna said irritably. “When I first saw him, that is. The ghoul started eating the corpse, but it didn’t kill him.”

  Usun looked up. “Not really dead, no,” he said. Familiarity didn’t make his voice more attractive. “Hutton froze time in all this cavern. He sent his soul into the Underworld to gain knowledge that he called wisdom.”

  He laughed again. “Wisdom!” he said. “But Hutton knows better now, eh? He thought he’d return to his body in three days. He’d rule the waking world, he thought. Rule the waking world indeed! But you broke the spell and freed the ghoul when you cut Hutton’s soul away from his body.”

  Ilna held strands of yarn in her left hand. She could plait a pattern that would direct her next action. She wouldn’t be able to see it, but she didn’t need to see fabric to understand it more clearly than an educated person like Garric would gain from a long written description.

  On the other hand, there was another way which might provide more information still. “Master Usun,” she said, “I want to get out of this cave before the ghoul or something worse comes back.”

  She coughed. “And if there’s water that’s safe to drink here,” she added, “I’d like to find that even sooner.”

  “We’ll have to dispose of the ghoul in order to get out, but we’d want to do that anyway,” said the little man with an enthusiasm Ilna didn’t share. “The first thing we’ll do is scout the territory. You say that he carried off Hutton’s body?”

  “Yes,” said Ilna, frowning as she considered the matter. “I don’t think the light here is good enough for him to see my patterns clearly. If we can build a fire, though, I can hold him while you hamstring him with a dagger or whatever from the floor here.”

  “A bold plan and a clever one, Ilna,” Usun said, “but you’re wrong about being able to hold the ghoul. You think he’s a beast, do you not?”

  “Of course he’s a beast,” Ilna snapped. “I just watched him bite a man’s face off. The fellow deserved to have his face eaten, but that doesn’t make the thing that did it any less of an animal. And I’ve held other creatures, bigger ones, while Ch-Ch . . . while my companions killed them.”

  “The ghoul, as he now is . . . ,” Usun said quietly. He was standing upright with the long filament a shimmering coil in his right hand. “Was a wizard in a former age, Ilna. A very powerful wizard, and that age was longer ago than even I can count. He tried to defeat death through his art and thought he had, but . . .”

  He laughed. His glee had a cruel undertone, though Ilna didn’t suppose she was one to complain about someone taking pleasure in the ill fortune of an enemy. And the ghoul was certainly no friend of hers.

  “By trying to cheat death, he made himself a thing of death,” Usun went on. “I wonder if he still thinks he won, eh? For thousands of years he’s eaten the dead that are given to him, so that he won’t come to the surface to hunt the living. He’s not to be held by wizardry, Ilna. Not even by such great wizards as ourselves.”

  Ilna scowled in disgust. “He’s human, then?” she said, just to be sure. Usun hadn’t said that in so many words, and it might make a difference.

  “He’s as human as I am,” Usun replied. He cackled again. “Oh, that’s a fine joke, eh? But—”

  He looked up at Ilna. She didn’t need to see his expression to be able to imagine it clearly.

  “The past doesn’t matter, eh?” he said. “What matters is now, and we’re going to hunt him down and end his little games, yes? Because he’s in our way, and because we’re great hunters, you and me.”

  Ilna sniffed. She looked upward again. Though her eyes were adapting to the blue glow, she still couldn’t see the roof of the cave. Nor would it have helped if she could.

  “Well, Ilna?” the little man said. “There are swords here. You can take one.”

  “I don’t have any use for a sword,” Ilna said. She reached into the darkness and found the loose tangle of the rope she’d been lowered by. She coiled it in quick loops, each one precisely the size of all the others.

  “All right,” she said. “I don’t think we’d gain by waiting here and hoping that the stone rolls itself back, so we may as well hunt this ghoul.”

  “Oh, yes, the greatest hunters!” said Usun. He trotted toward the source of the glow. Ilna followed taking one stride for three of his.

  CASHEL BLINKED. THEY’D stepped from Dariada into a rocky canyon suffused with smoky yellow light. The air was hotter than what they’d left in the sunlit square, and sulfur bit the back of Cashel’s throat with each breath.

  He stepped clear of the two women and spun the quarterstaff as he checked all directions. His butt caps trailed blue wizardlight, piercingly bright in this yellow dusk. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck were already prickling at the presence of wizardry.

  There were goats, which didn’t matter. They were herded by things that weren’t goats and sure weren’t human.

  “Are those demons, Rasile?” Liane asked calmly. She’d slung her satchel behind her and held the knife ready in her hand.

  Cashel hawked up phlegm and spat toward a bristly growth that might be grass. Anything wet must be welcome in this place. Besides the maybe-grass, there were bushes that looked a little like the century plants he’d seen on Pandah before the Change, and there were full-sized trees farther up the cliffs. Those last were tall but spindly, and instead of leaves they had clumps of spines.

  “They think of themselves as human beings, Liane,” the wizard said. “They would be as bad as demons if we could not protect ou
rselves, but the same is true of many of those you consider human beings. Or I do.”

  The creatures had four legs with sharp hoofs, and the hands on their two arms had as many fingers as a sea anemone. Their bodies seemed to be covered with hornlike insects, but when Cashel stared at the nearest one, it flattened against the rock wall. It was light gray when he first saw it, but squeezed onto the rock it took on a mottled yellowish pattern that made it hard to see even though he knew it was there.

  Hooting in high-pitched voices, a handful of the creatures came toward Cashel and his friends. They leaped over the rocks and bobbed their necks up and down. Each of them probably weighed as much as Liane, but their heads were small for the bodies and sort of wedge-shaped the way a possum’s is.

  They didn’t seem to have weapons; but there was a lot of them, if they knew what they were doing.

  “Tell me if something comes from the back!” he shouted to the women as he stepped between them and the little demons.

  Funny. The goats seemed normal enough, but Cashel had never seen anything that looked like the creatures tending them.

  He kept the quarterstaff spinning, but he was picking which of the creatures to strike first and who to pop next and next. You didn’t go into a fight swinging wildly, and not expect to win; and Cashel always expected to win.

  The demons clacked to a halt well out of the quarterstaff’s reach; their hooves on the rocks sounded like gravel spilling down the sloping face of the seawall at Barca’s Hamlet. They even stopped hooting, though they whispered to each other and sometimes waved their hands. Had they just been bluffing when the charged?

  “We come as friends, People of the Valley,” Rasile called. “We come as allies.”

  “You come to prey on us!” shrilled the midmost of the group that’d rushed Cashel a moment ago.

  “The Lord preys on us daily!” another demon said. “You will join him and eat us all up!”

  Cashel could hear the words clear enough, though it sounded like the demons were whistling instead of speaking. They didn’t have lips that he could see.

  The goats, white-faced with dirty gray hides from the neck back, went on with their business of scraping a meal from this rocky waste. Cashel didn’t like goats, but they seemed to make a living here and he’d never known a sheep that’d could’ve done it.

  He hacked again, though he didn’t spit; he might need the moisture soon. The back of his throat felt like somebody’d taken a wood rasp to it.

  “We’ve come to free you from the Lord,” Rasile said. “In exchange you will guide us to the tomb of the hero Gorand.”

  Cashel took a quick glance and saw that Liane was keeping an eye on what was happening behind them. Nothing was, but he was glad for her doing that. He really wanted to keep his eyes on the nearest group.

  “You are lying to us, demon,” the leader of the, well, demons said.

  “They are lying,” said the other four in chorus. “They come to prey on us, like the Lord does.”

  “Our race is at an end,” the leader said. “No one can defeat the Lord.”

  A descant of high voices keened, echoing faintly. All of the demons in the valley were howling like their children had died. There were more of them than Cashel had imagined at first; it was only when they moved that he could tell them from the rocks.

  “No one can defeat the Lord!” the leader repeated. “We will all be eaten by the Lord and these new demons come to plague us.”

  “No one can defeat the Lord!” said his companions.

  “And yet,” said Rasile, “we shall.”

  She turned to smile at Cashel. “Are you ready, Warrior Cashel?” she asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” Cashel said. “Where do we find this Lord, please?”

  “I think he’s found us,” Liane said, pointing with her left hand toward a blotch of light the color of rust. It was half a furlong distant, near a pair of the little demons flattened against the wall of the canyon.

  “Yes,” agreed Rasile. Cashel nodded and started toward the light as it flickered, swelling rapidly.

  SHARINA WORE A pair of simple tunics and a nondescript gray cloak—borrowed from Diora—over them to conceal not only the Pewle knife but Burne. The rat rode in a fold of her outer tunic, his little nose wrinkling excitedly at smells that passed Sharina unremarked.

  “Oh, my!” he’d murmur, and, “Now, who’d have imagined that?” Sharina thought of asking the rat what was of such interest in this grubby city, but she figured he’d tell her if there were something he thought she should know. She had enough on her mind already.

  Sharina was in the middle of a group of twenty men, all of them soldiers except for Dysart and three attendants. She’d been wrong to expect that at least a few of the troops would still be wearing the hobnailed sandals which on these stone pavers would send a ringing warning several blocks ahead: they’d donned either soft boots or clogs. Prester and Pont, the regiment’s camp marshals, weren’t with this detachment, but Sharina suspected the way the troops were prepared for their assignment had a lot to do with those old veterans.

  The clop of wooden soles—Sharina wore clogs herself—could be heard at a distance also, but noise alone wasn’t a problem. The clang of many hobnails together cried “Army!” to everyone in earshot.

  Captain Ascor was at her side. He wore a grim expression and she didn’t need to be a soothsayer to know that the hand he kept under his cloak was clutching a bare sword.

  Ascor had winced, but he hadn’t argued when Sharina told him what she was going to do. She’d offered him a plan which, though he probably thought was insanely dangerous for Princess Sharina, showed a willing to compromise with a bodyguard’s sensibilities. The Blood Eagles had learned that guarding Garric and his sister was a different business from the days when Valence III hunched in his room and drank morosely with friends.

  Dysart glanced over his shoulder to check where Sharina was, then paused for a moment so that she came alongside him. “The graveyard where they’re meeting is to our right at the next intersection,” he said. “Less than a half block. There are three other teams approaching at the same time.”

  Or so we hope, Sharina thought. They weren’t concerned with the individual worshippers, who had nothing to tell. She was hoping to catch the man preaching, though. According to Dysart, he was a former priest of the Shepherd named Platt. Where Dysart or Tadai could identify particular leaders, they’d been priests of the Shepherd before being won over to the new heresy.

  Aloud she said, “I’m surprised that there’s a graveyard within the city. They’ve been outside the walls everywhere I’ve been in the past. I guess the pirates who ruled here weren’t so superstitious.”

  “They were more superstitious than honest folk,” Burne said unexpectedly. “Well, what passes for honest folk. This graveyard’s newer than the rest of Pandah.”

  “Master Burne,” Dysart said quietly. If he felt any emotion about what he was saying, he certainly kept it concealed. “The Sultans of Pandah back for seven generations are buried on this particular site.”

  “Yes, but it had been outside the walls before the Change, when the sultans of your age ruled a sleepy trading port,” Burne said sharply. “You know how graveyards concentrate power, though. This burial ground and several others ripped through the fabric of the past. That’s why they’re in the middle of an ancient pirate fortress now.”

  The rat laughed. “If you found human teeth in a hog’s stomach, Master Dysart,” he said, “would you claim that they’d grown there?”

  “That’s enough,” Sharina said as the party reached an irregularly shaped plaza with a dry fountain in the middle. She spoke to end the squabble, but as soon as she did she heard the preacher they were hoping to arrest.

  “Brothers and sisters in the one God, in the true Lord of Existence,” Platt whined in a nasal voice. “The gods of the past are dead. The future is Lord Scorpion’s!”

  There must be a hundred or more listeners crowded
close to the preacher. Low altars were built out from the fronts of the large tombs in the middle of the graveyard. The family of each deceased was expected to use them for offerings of wine and on the anniversary of his death. Platt stood on one of them, wearing a bleached wool robe that seemed to glow in the moonlight.

  The soldiers carried truncheons for this raid, though they wore their short infantry swords as well. From all reports, the Scorpion worshippers were planning the violent overthrow of the kingdom. Sharina wasn’t going to order a massacre of frightened, deluded people—but neither was she going to disarm soldiers who might be facing deadly weapons themselves on the kingdom’s behalf.

  “Only those who serve Lord Scorpion will be spared agonizing stings in this world and eternal torment in the world to come,” Platt cried. He seemed to be looking upward, not toward the crowd beneath him. “You are the chosen, brothers and sisters! You are the wise ones who see the truth already.”

  The ashes of the common people of Pandah—those wealthy enough to have memorials at all—were buried in loculi, stone boxes three feet long and a foot in width and depth. They were clustered as near as possible to the row of sultans’ tombs, but after generations they covered most of the field set off for burial.

  The boxes were carved from Pandah’s soft yellow limestone and weathered quickly. Within a few generations most had crumbled to shards and loose gravel that Sharina couldn’t tell in the moonlight from the calcined bones of those interred.

  Burne leaped from the fold in Sharina’s tunic. She caught a flash of him darting among the boxes; then he vanished among the legs of the crowd. She grimaced in surprise, then drew the Pewle knife. She probably should have done that sooner.

  “Sons and daughters of Lord Scorpion!” Platt called in a cracked, wavering voice. He sounded insane . . . and perhaps he was, but his shrill periods cut through the normal layers of doubt and common sense. “Our Lord’s day is coming. On that day we will rise to glory with our God!”