The Gods Return

by David Drake

  They leaned back and parted hands. “Warrior Gorand,” said Rasile. “Take us with you, if you will.”

  Cashel looked at her. He’d been expecting they’d be taking Gorand back, not the other way around. Though how, he now realized, was a good question what with the door and the castle not being there anymore.

  “Yes, wizard,” said Gorand; he bowed to her. He hadn’t been told Rasile was a wizard, but it seemed like he could see as far through a stone wall as the next fellow.

  Gorand strode out from the cabin and raised his arms. His hands were clenched, and the coin was in the left one. He seemed to swell, and as he did Cashel felt something scoop him up and rush him forward.

  There was a roaring sound in the sudden blackness.

  I’D BE BETTER with a short sword! Garric thought, holding the scabbard of the long horse man’s weapon. The long blade would beat him black and blue if he let it flop as he ran along with the infantry regiment.

  “Not when it came time to use it, lad,” Carus said. The ancient king watched through his descendant’s eyes with the smiling anticipation of a cat with prey in sight. “Though we’d make do with a butter knife if we had to, I suppose.”

  Well, I’d be better off with sandals than with these boots! thought Garric, and that at least was inarguable. He’d become used to wearing riding boots, so he hadn’t bothered to change back to sandals when they left the horses behind.

  It hadn’t occurred to him how awkward they were to run in until whim sent him trotting off with a thousand men from the phalanx to escort in a supply convoy which had fought off a band of Palomir raiders. Lower heels would’ve been much less uncomfortable.

  He heard a horn blat in the near distance—a shepherd’s wooden trumpet, he was sure, not a brass or silver military instrument. Rear Admiral—the phalanx was organized in naval ranks because the pikemen had doubled as oarsmen—Ditter called, “Your Highness, the wagons are in sight!”

  There was no longer a royal navy, because the Inner Sea had vanished at the Change. Pikes were useless too, against the agile rats. The men of the phalanx had leather cuirasses, short stiff swords, and wicker shields that were longer and stouter than those carried by skirmishers, however. These—and the troops’ exceptional discipline—were the perfect combination for fighting the new enemy.

  Attaper pounded along beside Garric, looking as grim as if he were presiding over an execution. Though fit, he was older than his prince by twenty years, had shorter legs, and hadn’t grown up tramping the length and breadth of his home borough on foot. He held the pace only by the dint of iron determination.

  Carus chuckled with a combination of affection and exasperation, his usual mix of feelings toward the commander of the Blood Ea gles. He respected Attaper as a soldier, but the ancient warrior wasn’t the sort to react well to a bodyguard’s niggling concern for safety.

  “At least he doesn’t have breath to tell you that you shouldn’t be doing this,” Carus said. The ghost pursed his lips and with unusual seriousness—Carus was often angry but very rarely thoughtful—went on, “A king who only does what other people think he ought to do isn’t much of a king, it seems to me. And he’s going to lose a lot of battles too, or at least lose one battle for good and all.”

  Because Garric was in the middle of the regiment, it wasn’t until the relief column was almost on top of the supply train that he got a good look at it. All twenty wagons were intact, but some of the oxen had been lost and half the surviving animals bore cuts that’d been stanched with mud for the time being.

  “It’s the prince!” a wagoneer shouted. Garric wasn’t wearing his gilt-winged helmet, but his features had been spread across the kingdom on any number of paintings, statues, plates, napkins, and so forth. Most of the likenesses were crude or worse, but this supply train was from eastern Haft where both interest and the opportunity for an accurate portrayal were greater than the usual.

  “Hail Prince Garric!” rattled out with, “Haft and the Isles!”

  The Coerli trumped that with a screaming battle chorus that brought nervous bawling from the oxen. If the teams hadn’t been so exhausted and frightened by the Palomir attack they’d just survived, some of the teams would’ve tried to bolt.

  A heavyset man was trying to climb down from the seat of the lead wagon with the help of a guard. His head, right arm, and right thigh were bandaged. He wore a tabard embroidered with the Ornifal ea gle; the front panel was ripped and bloody.

  Garric reached him at a run, no longer aching from his five-mile jog. He shouldered the guard out of the way.

  “Sir, stay where you are!” he said, catching the wounded man by the hip and under his left arm to lift him forcibly back onto the seat. “You’re the wagon marshal?”

  “Sister take you, you bloody rogue!” the marshal shouted. He was older than Garric had thought, closer to sixty than fifty. “The prince is coming! I have to get down!”

  “You have to do what your prince tells you, sir!” Garric said. “And right now I’m telling you to stay where you are.”

  “It is the prince, Marshal Kucros!” said the guard. He was probably a former shepherd. He wore a fleece jerkin skin-side out and carried a short wooden bow; his belt quiver was empty, as was the scabbard which should’ve held a utility knife. The bowstaff would make a decent club.

  “Your Highness?” Kucros said in amazement. Seated again, he could see Garric instead of staring at the wagon as he tried to lower himself with as little additional pain as possible. “What are you doing with the likes of us, Your Highness?”

  “When I heard that a supply train had fought off an attack by raiders close to the camp . . . ,” said Garric. “I thought I’d join the regiment that was going to escort you the rest of the way in. You men are heroes.”

  The chieftain of the Corl hunting band came up, accompanied by two of his warriors. They’d led the reaction force patrolling the supply route. All three had fresh rat tails dangling from their leather harness. The maned chief was the size of an average man, while his companions had the willowy slimness of twelve-year-old girls.

  There was nothing girlish about their fanged smiles and bloody weapons, though. Now that they were allied with humans, they carried steel in preference to their native wood and stone.

  “And you Coerli are heroes as well,” Garric said, giving the cat men a deep nod. “You were outnumbered, but you attacked and saved the supplies.”

  The chieftain fluffed his mane in pride. There was a matted cut on the right side of his head; not all the blood spattering him had come from the rat men.

  “We are the True Men!” he said with a boastfulness that would’ve irritated Garric under other circumstances. “Shall we run from rats?”

  “I’d had my doubts about the cats, I don’t mind telling you,” said the guard who’d been helping Kucros. Ditter was organizing a review of the wagoneers and guards, but nobody was going to intrude on Prince Garric’s informal discussion. “I wasn’t sure which side they’d take if push came to shove, you know what I mean. But by the Lady, it was like a fox in a hen coop what they did to them rats.”

  “I thought the rats was quick,” agreed Kucros, nodding three times at the end of each phrase. “It could’ve gone hard with us, I’ll tell you. Even with the wagons circled like we had them. But then the cats come in and the rats, they didn’t have time to run, a lot of them.”

  “Your monkey folk were holding,” the Corl chief said. “I thought monkeys would be no more than the cattle we ate in the old days, fit only to tend fields and muck out our huts. That was not so: they are warriors. I, Raelert, chief of chiefs, say so!”

  “It looks like this Palomir business is going to be really good for getting people and cats to work together,” said the ghost in Garric’s mind with a broad smile. “Which isn’t something I care much about, but you do; and you’re generally right about things, lad.”

  It’ll help if we survive, Garric agreed silently.

  “But Your Highness
. . . ,” Kucros said, scowling as he wrestled with a thought that was too big for him. “You shouldn’t . . . I mean—”

  He straightened, as much as sitting down and the pain of his wounds would allow. “Your Highness, I was with your father—”

  Which meant Valence III, Garric’s father by adoption and officially still king.

  “—at the Stone Wall when we beat the Sandrakkan rebels back into their kennel. But I was just a file closer, never got higher than that, and I only been called back to the colors now to put a little discipline in shepherds and wagon drivers. You’ve got no business wasting time on us!”

  “I’ve driven oxen,” Garric said, smiling but feeling the sadness of the youth and innocence he’d lost, “though they were yoked to plows rather than wagons. I’ve watched my share of sheep as well. Also I’ve fought rats, like you men—”

  He turned and nodded, to include the Coerli in the word “men.”

  “—just did. When I decide that I’m too good for any job the kingdom requires, then I’ll have stopped being the prince that the kingdom needs.”

  Garric turned and cleared his throat. His eyes fell on the guard who’d been helping Kucros. The fellow straightened in a parody of a soldier coming to attention.

  “A good bow,” Garric said. He’d carried one like it in the pastures south of Barca’s Hamlet. The short, stiff yew staff was a useful prod and lever, and strung it would see off wildcats or even the sea wolves which sometimes rushed out of the surf to claim a sheep.

  “Your Highness, I didn’t, I mean I couldn’t take time to look for my arrows,” the fellow blurted nervously. He wasn’t someone Garric knew, but he knew the sort of man he was. Garric had been, or thought he’d been, one of them. “We had to get going. And we’re short-teamed now, from the rats.”

  “There’re additional oxen on the way from camp,” Garric said. “They won’t be long coming even at the pace an ox moves, since you’re so close.”

  They were using the heavy infantry to guard the transport and food animals in stockaded camps. Their equipment wasn’t suited for fighting rat men, but they had a great deal of experience in building and holding fortified positions. The noblemen commanding what had been the elite infantry regiments hadn’t liked what they saw as a demotion, but Lord Waldron—a cavalryman now on foot because of the nature of the new enemy—had even less sympathy for their complaints than Garric did.

  “There’s somebody coming now,” said Kucros, looking to the east. “Is that them?”

  He rose on the wagon seat, forgetting his wounds until the pain jabbed him—and then standing nonetheless. King Carus nodded grim approval: Kucros was an old soldier. He wasn’t especially bright or talented, but he was a man you could count on to hold firm no matter what it cost. An army needs those men, almost as much as an army needs commanders who won’t throw these men away.

  “It can’t be,” Garric said, hopping onto the wagon step to get a little additional height. “No, that’s a battalion of scouts.”

  He frowned as he stepped down. “And Lord Zettin himself is with them. Attaper, something’s happened.”

  The scouts, two or three hundred of them, loped toward the halted supply train. They were spread to sweep half a mile or more and to reduce the chance of an ambushed enemy catching the whole unit. Garric knew that some scouting formations segregated humans from Coerli, but in this battalion javelin-carrying woods rangers alternated man for man with the cat men. Lord Zettin was in the center, running easily beside a chieftain with a brindled hide.

  “What happened to Zettin?” said Lord Attaper. Then, in fury and amazement, “Sister take me, what does Zettin think he’s playing at?”

  Carus chuckled. “Attaper hadn’t seen his boy in field uniform, I guess,” he said. “Yeah, that might be a bit of a surprise.”

  Zettin was a former Blood Ea gle and Attaper’s protégé. He’d done a very professional job as commander of the royal fleet, and he’d obviously thrown himself into his new duties as commander of the scouts. Instead of a gilt breastplate and a glittering helmet, Zettin wore an iron-studded leather cuirass and a leather hat. In the loops of his cross-belts were two throwing axes and several knives; but he didn’t carry a sword, and the salt-cured tails of five rat men dangled from epaulets sewn for the purpose onto the shoulders of his jerkin.

  “Your Highness?” Zettin said. He wasn’t breathing hard. “The rats are moving faster than we expected. Their main body is fifteen miles to the south.”

  “How far away are the additional draft animals?” Garric asked, letting the king in his mind sort the priorities with the ease of long experience.

  “The oxen?” Zettin said in surprise. “Half an hour, I suppose. But Lord Waldron hopes you’ll return at once, with my men as escort.”

  “First things first, milord,” Garric said. “Admiral Ditter, hand over escort duties to the heavy infantry when they arrive with the oxen, then return to the camp as quickly as possible. Not until you’ve been relieved, though. We’re not leaving Marshal Kucros and his men without an escort.”

  “Yes, Your Highness!” Ditter said. “But we’ll be back in time for the real action?”

  “Have no doubt of that, sir,” said Garric. “Lord Attaper, are you ready for another run?”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” Attaper said curtly. He didn’t say, “or I’ll die trying,” because death would be failure and he didn’t intend to fail. Anger at the situation burst out, though, when he snarled, “Zettin, who told you to dress like that? A jester?”

  “You have your uniform, milord,” said the younger officer. “So do we in the scouts.”

  Holding Attaper’s eyes, he flicked the dried rat-tails with his thumbs. “And I lead my men from the front,” he added, “as you taught me to do.”

  “Let’s go, gentlemen,” Garric said, his grin a mirror of the ghost in his mind’s. “With luck and the help of the Gods, we’re going to make these rat men extinct before sunset!”

  INVISIBLE BRIGHTNESS PRESSED Sharina from all directions. Her skin prickled and her mind, not her eyes, felt squeezed. Then—

  She stood in the temple precinct of her nightmares. Her feet were firmly planted on the pavers of black granite, and Burne balanced on her shoulder. She couldn’t move her limbs, and the rat was as still as a furry statue.

  Before them stood Black, hooded and ten feet tall. He held a codex in his left hand and an athame of black crystal in his right. On his shoulder, its hooked stinger raised, was a scorpion; its body alone was longer and broader than a man’s hand and extended fingers.

  At one end of the colonnaded plaza beyond the tall wizard was the temple on whose triangular pediment a figure robed like Black strangled a bull, while a great scorpion drove off a horde of tiny humans.

  To Sharina’s right—she could turn her head, though her arms were petrified like her legs—she could see above the portico that a series of mansions with gilded entablature climbed the natural slope. To her left, past Burne, was a multistory building with ranks of glass windows in bronze casements on the upper levels. Sharina had looked at the design of a similar central records building with Lord Tadai and a trio of architects, though the one they planned would’ve been in white marble.

  In the sky roiled a figure molded from storm clouds, a scorpion which stood upright instead of sprawling. Lightning flashed behind its many eyes and dripped like poison from the tip of its stinger.

  Black laughed in the same thunderous rumble as he had in her dreams. “You’ve caused me difficulties, Princess,” he said. “That’s ended, now. Nothing can prevent the rise of Lord Scorpion, the only true God.”

  The scorpion on the wizard’s shoulder drew a complex pattern with its pincers; the figure of cloud lowering over the black city mimicked—mirrored?—the same gestures. Sharina tried to grasp the hilt of her Pewle knife. Black was too far to stab from where she was frozen, but she could throw the weapon.

  Her arms didn’t move any better than her legs did. She straine
d anyway. She had to do something.

  “Lord Scorpion will appear in the sky of Pandah, your Pandah, as soon as I speak the final incantation,” said Black, “and the city will worship Him. When Lord Scorpion becomes manifest, you and I will return to the waking world as His high priests. We will live and reign forever in Lord Scorpion’s black radiance!”

  “I’ll never join you,” Sharina said. “I’ll fight you until I win or I die. Never!”

  “You won’t have a choice,” said the wizard said with another boom of laughter. “Your mind and soul belong to Lord Scorpion, Princess, and your body is mine!”

  Holding the book out, Black chanted, “Skirtho athea darbo. . . .” Instead of dipping and rising over words written around a symbol, the athame in his right hand drew a pattern in the air. It wasn’t identical to the movements of the scorpion on his shoulder, but at the fuzzy edges of her mind Sharina realized the figures complemented one another.

  “Milio mili . . . ,” said the wizard.

  “Mother?” chirped Burne. “I know we’ve had our differences, and I’m no more ready to concede than you are. But if you’ll still admit that you have a son, this would be a good time for you to show it.”

  Sharina turned her head toward the rat, her mouth open to speak. Her arms and legs tingled.

  Burne leaped to the codex in Black’s left hand and with that as a platform sprang upward. He arched down with the wizard’s scorpion in his forepaws.

  Sharina’s fingers closed on the horn grip of the Pewle knife. She stepped forward, watching for her opening. She didn’t need to hurry. Black had long legs, but he moved awkwardly; she could catch him easily.

  “Lady, aid me in your service,” she whispered.

  “What are you doing?” Black said. “What are you doing?”

  Sharina stepped close. The shell of the big scorpion crunched like eggshell in the rat’s jaws.

  Black threw the codex at Sharina; she blocked it with her left elbow. It was a small volume but leather-bound, with iron corners and a hasp. It would have stung if she’d had time to think about it.