The Gods Return

by David Drake

  “Mistress Ilna,” said Perrin. His hands lifted slightly, but he jerked them back to his sides before she could react. “I . . . it’s painful to me that you doubt our good faith. If you would come with us, you could see that we’re innocent farmers, unarmed—”

  He gestured with both hands to the broad golden sash holding up his pantaloons. Neither sword nor dagger were thrust through its wraps.

  “—protected only by our separation from the waking world.”

  Ilna glanced at the apes seated on the ground nearby. One was combing the fur of another for fleas; a third had found hickory nuts and was cracking them at the side of his massive jaws, then spitting out the debris. As best Ilna could tell, he wasn’t swallowing the contents; ordinarily, any nut that the squirrels left was wormy. The last scratched both armpits simultaneously and hooted softly to herself.

  “All right,” she said. “We’d like to see your farm. Perhaps we’ll find some clue to Hervir’s disappearance.”

  Perrin and Perrine gabbled their pleasure. Again their hands lifted but were snatched back before they touched Ilna and Ingens. “Oh, Father will be so pleased!” the princess said.

  “Yes, come this way,” said Perrin. “It’s quite simple, really, and perfectly safe.”

  “Come along, Ingens,” Ilna said. The secretary looked less than enthusiastic until the delicate princess stood on tiptoe to whisper into his ear.

  Ilna frowned but said nothing as she followed Perrin around the big oak. Usun was a solid weight in the rolled cloak, but he remained silent and as still as a sandbag. He was a hunter, all right.

  So was Ilna, she supposed. She wasn’t sure what her prey was this time, but she expected that she’d learn before long.

  GARRIC WALKED INTO the temple, holding both fillets in his left hand. Behind him Tenoctris sat cross-legged on the ground, chanting into a circle she’d outlined in finely divided metal—silver, he thought, but he hadn’t asked. The amber athame rose and fell as she spoke the words of power.

  King Carus was poised in Garric’s mind, keyed to the edge of berserk violence. Carus had never been comfortable with wizardry, and being drowned in a wizard-raised maelstrom hadn’t made him like it better. He knew that Tenoctris was a friend and he accepted that what she was doing was necessary—

  But he still didn’t like it.

  It bothered Garric that Tenoctris used an athame now. She’d always done her incantations with slivers of bamboo which she discarded after using only once. She’d said that because athames and wands collected power with each further spell, they were likely to muddle the work of all but the greatest wizards.

  By risking her life and soul, Tenoctris had become one of the most powerful wizards of all time. Her bobbing athame reminded Garric both of the danger she’d undergone and of the danger to mankind which had driven her to take that risk.

  His boots tapped on the marble floor. The stone was highly polished, which meant it didn’t get much use—if any. Marble is soft.

  The golden nymphs watched Garric from just outside the entrance, standing beside the plinths on which they’d been set as caryatids. Were they real women who’d been turned to metal, or were they metal brought to life?

  But that didn’t matter.

  Garric looked down at the massive skeleton. The bones were completely disarticulated; not even shreds of cartilage bound the joints together. How long had Munn lain here?

  But that didn’t matter either.

  Rather than simply lift the bone of the upper arm, Garric worked one of the fillets over the fingers and wrist, then up the forearm. Only then did he slide the silver band onto what would’ve been the biceps of a living man.

  Tenoctris had told him what to say, but she hadn’t suggested how he should place the fillets. This just had seemed right to him when he faced the task. When he faced the bones of the ancient hero.

  He walked around the foot of the catafalque, holding the remaining fillet. He thought he heard the bones rattle. Perhaps there’d been an earth shock, perhaps it was just his imagination. The light which curled through the solid panel was disturbing as well as deceptive.

  Garric had thought that he’d be more comfortable facing away from the rainbow flood so it couldn’t trick him with what he almost saw in its light. Having it behind him was actually worse. Carus’ instincts kept trying to spin him around with the sword ready, certain that something hostile was poised to leap.

  “There is, lad!” the ghost said. “There’s something and it’s an enemy!”

  That may be, thought Garric. But my job is to put these arm rings on the skeleton, and I can only do that with my back to the light. I will do my job.

  King Carus laughed. “Death isn’t so bad,” he said as Garric worked the fillet up Munn’s left arm as he had the right. “Maybe running away because you’re afraid to die wouldn’t be too bad either, but people like you and me are never going to know that. Sorry, lad.”

  With the second fillet in place, Garric returned to the entrance. He stood just inside, where he could see both Munn and the panel of light without blocking the wizard’s view. She continued to chant, shifting now onto a rising note. The nymphs looked back at him with cold, sad eyes.

  “Eulamo!” Tenoctris shrieked in a near falsetto. Instead of thrusting her athame into the ground as Garric had expected, she turned the point straight up. A blast of scarlet wizardlight suffused the interior of the temple, glowing in and through the walls.

  Garric stepped back reflexively, bumping the doorpost. He blinked, though he knew it wasn’t his physical eyes that the flash had dazzled.

  Lord Munn rose from the bier, hefting his great iron sword. He wore a simple garment of green wool with a black zigzag along the hems. A carved wooden pin over the left shoulder closed it, leaving his right shoulder bare.

  The marble catafalque shivered into dust motes, dancing and settling in the illumination of the wall panel. Munn raised the sword high and boomed out laughter. His hair and beard were black and full and curling.

  He lowered the sword and let his eyes rest on Garric. “So . . . ,” he said in a voice that rasped like thunder. “You, boy? Are you the one who called me from the sleep that I have earned?”

  He was a giant, easily seven feet tall; the crude sword was in scale with him.

  Garric laughed in turn. It wasn’t an act: Carus was in his element here. They wouldn’t have needed Tenoctris’ coaching to know how to handle this.

  “Lord Munn,” said Garric, standing arms akimbo. “When you speak to me, remember not only that you speak to a king, but that you speak to your king. I am Garric, prince and ruler of this world. I have called you to do your duty.”

  “And what is my duty, then?” Munn said. There was nothing pacific in his tone, but he lowered the sword and rested its rounded tip on the floor in front of him. Even for him, it was a two-handed weapon.

  “When you speak to your king, milord,” Garric said, “do so with proper courtesy!”

  Munn bowed over his sword, then rose to meet Garric’s eyes again. “What do you say my duty is, Your Majesty?” he said.

  In Garric’s court and when he addressed the citizens of the kingdom he ruled, he kept the fiction that the king was still Valence III, who lived in a dream of the past in his quarters in Valles. Here, though, he accepted the honorific “Your Majesty” due a reigning monarch.

  “Milord,” Garric said. “The Gate of Ivory is open. The sleep of the dead is being disturbed to aid the forces of Evil against the Good. Close the gate.”

  The big man’s laughter boomed. “What do I know of good and evil?” he said.

  “You know your duty, do you not, Lord Munn?” Garric said. He didn’t try to out shout the giant, but no one could doubt either the power of his voice or the authority in it.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Munn said. “My worst enemies have never denied that.”

  He smiled, an expression that Garric had seen often on the more chiseled features of the ghost in his mind.
It had no humor, but there was a fierce, unquenchable joy.

  Lord Munn raised his sword to a slant across his chest, his right hand leading. Turning, he strode toward the flood of light. His bare feet whipped swirls from the exiguous remains of what had been a block of marble.

  Tenoctris was chanting again. Garric wasn’t sure she’d ever stopped: he’d been so focused on Lord Munn that anything less threatening—

  “I’ve seen bloody few things that were more threatening than that fellow,” Carus said.

  —might have gone on without his notice.

  Munn halted, his massive body silhouetted against the radiance, and shrugged to loosen his muscles. He hunched slightly. Then to both Garric’s surprise and his ancestor’s, Munn strode forward and vanished in the blaze of light.

  Garric opened his mouth to call, but closed it in silence. Shouting at a rainbow-lighted slab of marble seemed pointless even in his present state of surprise. He turned to speak to Tenoctris. She sat as she’d done from the start, chanting in the soft rhythm of a lullaby. He shouldn’t—and probably couldn’t—disturb her.

  I could ask the nymphs.

  “Watch the place he went through the wall,” said Carus harshly. “It may not be him that comes out. And it wouldn’t hurt to have your sword ready.”

  Garric grinned wryly. He left his sword in the sheath, knowing how swiftly his ancestor’s reflexes could clear it if need arose, but Carus was right that they weren’t here to ask questions.

  There was a change. At first Garric thought that it was his imagination or an overload on his eyes, but the stream of light through the wall really was growing fainter. He risked a glance back at Tenoctris. Her eyelids slumped and her body swayed, but she continued to chant softly.

  Lord Munn stepped out of the wall. He too swayed. Without thinking, Garric strode to the big man’s side and steadied him, a hand on his left elbow and a hand on his right hip. The play of sinews and muscles beneath Munn’s skin was more like that of a horse’s body than a man’s.

  The light stopped, leaving only its memory and darkness. The wizard’s incantation ceased as well.

  “Have I done my duty, Your Majesty?” Munn said in a voice of rusty thunder.

  “Yes, milord,” Garric’s lips said, but it was the king in his mind who was speaking. “The ones who send our sort know that we’ll always do our duty, don’t they?”

  Lord Munn laughed. “Help me outside, Your Majesty,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  He laughed again. “It’s been ages, hasn’t it?”

  They shuffled through the doorway. Garric was supporting much of the big man’s weight, but Munn still carried his sword. It had come back with a violet sparkle on both edges, but that faded by the time they were out of the temple.

  Tenoctris got carefully to her feet. Normally Garric would’ve been helping her, but his present duty was to Lord Munn.

  “I’ll sit here,” Munn said. Garric squatted, continuing to take more than his own weight on his shoulders. The big man bent with a caution that was painful to watch.

  “Milord?” Garric said. “What can I get you?”

  “You can return me to my rest, Your Majesty,” Munn whispered. He leaned back, at first on his elbows, then lowering his back to the turf. He sighed and closed his eyes.

  He said, “Take off the armlets. You have to do it yourself—I can’t.”

  “Yes, milord,” Garric said. He was whispering too. He carefully worked off one silver band; Munn took that hand from his sword hilt, then gripped the weapon again when his arm was bare.

  “Give the armlets back to the girls, though, Your Majesty,” Munn said. His voice was scarcely audible. “Because you may need me again. I will do my duty if you call me.”

  Garric pulled the second fillet clear; the muscular body fell again into a rack of bones. Garric rose to his feet.

  “Of course, milord,” he said softly. “Your worst enemies could never doubt that.”

  Garric held out the fillets to the nymphs. They giggled and traded the bands; he’d offered each the wrong one. They whispered among themselves, but Garric turned his back on them: he only wanted to get out of this place.

  “Tenoctris?” he said. “Are you ready to go?” “Yes, Garric,” she said. “Though you may have to help me.”

  “Yes,” said Garric, putting his arm around the wizard’s waist and letting her grip his shoulder. “That’s my duty, after all.”

  Together they walked through the woodland to where the boat would be waiting to return them to the waking world.

  UP CLOSE, CASHEL saw he was looking at more of a palace than a castle, though just the same it was built to make it hard for anybody to break in. The windows on the ground floor and the one above were too narrow for anything bigger than a cat to squirm through.

  Those on the top floor used to be barred with thumb-thick iron. Now several grills sagged in the moonlight, meaning the hinges had rusted through. Cashel didn’t have to worry about climbing up there and wrenching an entrance, because the front door was ajar. The edge stood a hand’s breadth out from the jamb, and blue light flickered through the crack.

  He grinned. It’d been a stout door when it was new, but age and lack of care had been hard on it too. There were statues in niches to either side of the doorway, slender stone demon-looking figures with pointy faces and nasty smiles. One was male, the other female; and while Cashel didn’t think much of them as art, either one would make a fine battering ram for a man strong enough to lift it off its base and slam it through the swollen wood and corroded iron straps.

  Cashel guessed he was that strong.

  He glanced down at Rasile. “Ma’am, are you ready?” he said. He noticed the Corl’s nose was wrinkling, so he added, “Do you smell anything?”

  “Besides the brimstone, you mean, warrior?” Rasile said. “Not to notice. Apes have been here, but your little friend had told us that.”

  “Right,” said Cashel. Instead of putting a hand to the door, he worked the end of his staff between the panel and the stone doorpost, then pulled it fully open. There was a short alcove, just wide enough for a doorman to stand. Nobody was there, and the inner door was already swung back into the vestibule beyond.

  Cashel walked in, his staff slanted and ready to strike in any direction. The wall facing the vestibule had a doorway to both the right and left; the blue light was coming through those openings.

  Between the openings was a solid wall painted to look like a view into a garden. The plants looked like they’d been shaped from human bodies, and instead of birds flitting among them, there were lizards with a lot of teeth walking on their hind legs.

  On low pillars were marble busts of a man and a woman, facing each other instead of looking toward visitors coming through the doorway. They’d been handsome people, both of them, but they had nasty expressions.

  “Ready, ma’am?” Cashel said, glancing toward his companion. Rasile held her athame in a fashion that reminded him that it really was a knife even though it’d been carved from black stone.

  She nodded curtly. Cashel strode through the right-hand door into the circular room beyond. The floor was onyx. There were several closed doors off it, framed in colored marbles. The walls were otherwise plain, and there wasn’t any furniture.

  A woman’s head was set into the center of the floor. Flames as blue as sulfur blazed from her nostrils as she breathed; that was what the light came from. She’d been the model for the marble face in the vestibule.

  Another statue. It only seemed to breathe.

  “Have you come to help me?” the head demanded, spurting blue fire with each syllable. “Help me and I will help you . . . but you must help me.”

  “We were told Milady had taken our friend Liane,” Cashel said. “We’re here to bring Liane back.”

  Milady laughed like glass breaking. “I’ll let your Liane go when I’m ready to, hero!” she said. “The woman came to me, and she’ll stay with me till you’ve done m
y bidding. Help me and I will help you!”

  Cashel looked at the head, just looked at it and thought. Rasile was standing back a little from him, but he didn’t say anything to her till he figured things out for himself.

  “Don’t think you can strike me!” Milady said. From the way her voice went up in pitch, she thought he could do that and also thought he might try. “It wouldn’t help you anyway! My servants will hurl her from the top of the tower if anything happens to me.”

  Every time Milady’s mouth opened, another gout of flame licked out and the sharpness of brimstone got thicker. It might have been a mercy to dish in her skull with the quarterstaff, but Cashel wasn’t going to do that to a woman without better reason than she’d given him so far.

  Then again, he wasn’t sure that smashing Milady’s head would kill her. More was going on here than ordinary life and death.

  “Ma’am?” Cashel said. “What is it that you want me to do for you? If I can, I’ll do it. But you have to let Liane go.”

  Milady spat half of a coin onto the floor; it chimed cheerfully on the polished stone squares. Breaking a coin in two was a common way to seal a pledge in Barca’s Hamlet, but Cashel had always seen bronze used when it was done there; this coin was silver.

  “The matching half is through the door to your right,” Milady said, turning her head and nodding. “Bring it to me and I will release your Liane.”

  Cashel picked up the coin. It was so hot that despite his calluses, he bounced it a few times in his palm. It had a man’s head on one side and a pillar with two wings sticking out of it—they looked like wings, anyhow—on the other. He didn’t say anything for the moment, but he tucked the pledge into a fold of his sash. As a boy he’d have carried something as valuable as this in his mouth, but—

  He grinned.

  —he’d seen a lot more silver now than even a rich man would in the borough. Besides, even if he cared about money, he didn’t think he’d put this coin in his mouth.